Discussing Tales From The Crypt with Alan Katz

Greetings and welcome to Stanford Cinema, the film discussion podcast where you choose it, I watch it, and we discuss it. As always, I'm your host. My name is Andrew. Thank you very much for joining us. If you are new to the channel, please do me a favor and hit the old subscribe button. Rate, review, tell your friends. Check out my website, stampercinema.com. And if you are an old friend, hello. Thank you. I hope you are well wherever you are enjoying this podcast.

I got to tell you, this podcast is going to be so much fun because not only are we talking about one of my favorite things, which I'll kind of inevitably go on a rant in just a minute. But the guest we have is. is huge. We're going to be talking to the Alan Katz. Alan is an amazing, amazing writer whose work in film and television has spawned has spawned, has spanned many, many decades. It may have spawned decades, too. I don't know. No. But Alan...

Alan's an incredible writer whose work in television has gone on for decades, right? And additionally today, you know, he has... a podcast of his own, quite frankly, one that is way better than this one. You should immediately hit the subscribe button on his, but still come back and check mine out. But yeah, he shares stories with his longtime

Writer, producer, collaborator, buddy, Gil Adler. But perhaps Alan is most, most recognized for the work on one of, you know, TV's most iconic and spine chilling shows to whoever graces screens. And that being. Tales from the Crypt. Yes, you guys, we're gonna be talking Tales from the Crypt with one of the main guys that worked on Tales from the Crypt. I... Like, y'all, I got goosebumps. Like, this is this is so exciting. I know I say I get excited about.

shows and and well that's true but it's even more so true today and this is so much fun because tales from the crypt like was one of my all-time favorite shows when i was a kid and like growing up and going through like those teenage years and even though i'm a grisly old man now at this point, you know, Tales from the Crypt still holds a very, very significant part of my I don't know, you know, my programming, if you were right. And, you know, if you are a certain age and you grew.

up watching Tales from the Crypt, I imagine you feel the same way, right? But if you don't know the show, that's okay. There's definitely a lot to get out from this episode. But if you're not familiar with the show, I guess I might as well do a little favor and introduce you to what Tales from the Crypt was. Right. So back in 1989, a little TV show on a little network called HBO, you know, began running the show Tales from the Crypt. And.

Like almost overnight, the show became an instant hit, right? Tales from the Crypt blended horror and humor and anthology soaring, quite frankly, in a way that hadn't ever been seen before. And the show is based on like a 1950s comic series also called Tales from the Crypt. And... Again, like I said, the show itself became like a cultural phenomenon. But probably the biggest reason from that, although the cast, which I'll get into in a minute, but the biggest reason was the eerie and very –

distinctly memorable host, the Crypt Keeper. The Crypt Keeper at its core was, you know, our, our... our host that would introduce that week's episode, you know, what we were about to be introduced to. And he would do it in kind of like a campy, fun, silly kind of way. But what made him step out, step up, you know, what made... him stand above.

other like kind of like TV host was the fact that the Crypt Keeper was a puppet, right? And he was a, you know, a like an old skeleton, but he was voiced by the legendary actor, John Kassir. And the Crypt Keeper itself became. kind of like a cultural legend, right? Because he had like this ghoulish laugh. He would say these, you know, very, very silly dad puns and that sense of humor that he had provided like the perfect foil.

for you know like a the gruesome and like unsettling tales that would like unfold over the half hour episode that you're about to watch you know so whether he was telling you a creepy story or cackling you know a really you know silly kind of of joke you couldn't help but be entertained by the the crit keeper right now the show itself

Each episode, as I said, was a bit of an anthology. You know, you'd feature, you know, each episode each week, there'd be something different, you know, and so it'll cover all the different facets of horror. So maybe you might see some that was supernatural or. you know, slasher or a grisly murder or, you know, maybe just kind of like a little like horror comedy, right? You get something different.

And but that was the beauty of Tales from the Crypt as well, because, you know, it would, you know, mix horror with humor and, you know, never really took itself too seriously. And although some of the stores would leave you on the edge. There was like this one about like a guy that like had a tattoo on his chest and it kind of like took hold of him. So he like carved off his chest. Really, really nasty. But, you know, it.

There'd be like gruesome elements to it, but it didn't take itself too seriously. And so, you know, there was that balance, right? You know, you get scared out in one sense, but then you'd be able to laugh. on, you know, on the other side, right? So it was able to appeal to a very, very large audience kind of all over the map. But I know I'm just ranting. As you can hear in my voice, I'm really excited about this one.

You know, from a cast perspective, I kind of tease that there was a big cast. Well, other than The Crypt Keeper, there was no regular. So there would be, you know... Hollywood Day players, sure. But, you know, there was usually some type of star studded lead that would that would kind of take the reins for that week. So I remember episodes that had like Demi Moore and Tom Hanks, Michael J. Fox, Kurt.

Russell, I'm sorry, Kirk Douglas, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was literally watching an episode the other day that Arnold Schwarzenegger had an appearance in the beginning, right? But, you know.

So you had that, you had the cinematic film quality to it, really good special effects, makeup, set design, right? Like all of it was... heightened right because it wasn't tv it was hbo and you know that's kind of where that that phrase came from because it was like you know going to the movies but at your house so tales from the crypt really was one of those shows that kind of

launched HBO to a higher level. So something that was really cool about it. And as a result, the show was, as I said, really successful. It went on for seven years, 93 episodes. And yeah. You know, it was it was a game changer. Two films came out as a result of the TV show, the first being Demon Knight, which is on my annual rotation. Even today, I love Demon Knight. And then the other film, probably not necessarily on many.

people's annual rotation and that is bordello of blood and i you know i want to talk a little demon knight but with alan i really really want to get into bordello of blood uh because there's a lot that's going on in that movie. And I know Alan has some things to say about it. So y'all, I know you've ranted, you've listened to my rant for the past, like, I don't know, five, six, 10 minutes, whatever it's been. So.

Yeah, enough of me. So let's just, you know, strap those seatbelts on because I think this journey is about to get. wild. Again, Alan, oh my God, thank you so much. What an absolute pleasure it is to chat with you. How are you doing this evening? I am doing extremely well. I'll let you in on a little secret. It's just not something I never make a big deal about it.

It's my birthday today. What? Oh, happy birthday. It is absolutely true. I am. This is shocking. I'm 66 today. 66 years young. Yeah, it's. It is weird because, yeah, that number is apparently true, but I cannot relate to that number in any way, shape, or form. I don't know what 66 is supposed to feel like. This is it. It's great. But I know a lot of other people who are this age who don't feel this way. I've got... I've got multitudes of living yet to do. So it's just a fucking number.

Well, I love to hear that gives me hope. I'm I'm 46 and I like to believe that I'm 46 years young. I don't feel old. And it's weird because, you know, I don't know when I was a kid, 46 seemed like a really, really. scary old number and here i am and you know what i i still think of myself still as this 16 or granted a little bit more learned, but I still think of myself as, oh, I'm, you know, I've got many, I've got many years.

Of trying to figure things out, because even at this stage, I don't think I've got, quite frankly, anything figured out. I know that I know nothing. And I think that is what it's really all about, is knowing that there's still so much more to learn. You know.

i and this will talk about my story my journey as a as a writer and then as a storyteller because i think they're slightly different things at least in my experience i i i was one and then i became the other we'll talk about all that uh what was the question again I don't think there was a question. I think we're just I think we're just going all over the place. Yeah, but that's OK. It's fun. Happy birthday again. Thank you so much. It's been a terrific day and this makes it even better.

Well, good. Well, thank you for sharing your birthday with us. Won't keep you too long. Just the required three hours because I believe that's how. No. So, all right. Let's just get right into it. Obviously, I've, you know, I've done my research. I know a little bit. about you but you know uh alan if you wouldn't mind just introducing yourself to our listeners a little bit about who you are and uh if you want to start talking a little bit about your podcast as well well basically why

What I've done that makes any kind of a difference whatsoever, I've been a writer and producer in movies and TV for 40 years. I wrote and produced a show for HBO called Tales from the Crypt. I actually co-created the Crypt Keeper. I wrote every single word that came out of his mouth. Well, I'll go into greater depth about what that actually means, what I mean by I co-created him. But yeah, Tales from the Crypt, you know.

I did, for 10 years, I was partnered with a guy named Gil Adler, and we did Tales from the Crypt together. We did the two Crypt feature films, Demon Knight, which was a terrific movie, and then... a thing called Bordello of Blood. And Bordello of Blood, I would describe as my own personal Waterloo.

We weren't supposed to make Bordello of Blood. We were supposed to make a whole other movie as the second Tales from the Crypt feature film. We were supposed to make a psychological thriller called Dead Easy. And we had... developed the script for about a year and a half, you know, between the two crypt movies. And in fact, this was, we were working on this one while we were doing, while we were producing Demon Knight. This was a very...

The mandate when Universal said make three Tales from the Crypt branded feature films for us was three very different movies. And everyone finally, the Crypt partners decided to make... demon knight as the first movie uh which is a monster movie gill didn't want to direct a monster movie we had our eyes on dead easy this psychological thriller that took place in the swamps around new orleans with a great This harlequin and magnificent villain. Yikes.

We spent months in New Orleans prepping the movie. We were three weeks away from the start of principal photography when Universal changed his mind. They pulled the plug on... Dead easy said, come home, come back to Los Angeles. You're going to make this thing called Bordello of Blood instead. Oh, by the way, your release date hasn't changed. You still start in three weeks. So why did we make, why, what was Bordello of Blood? Well.

And about that time, a new studio called DreamWorks had suddenly formed. And DreamWorks was Steven Spielberg leaving Universal. And Universal was terribly afraid that more talent would leave Universal to join Spielberg at DreamWorks. They were especially afraid of losing one of my executive producers, Robert Zemeckis. And so... Universal approached Bob and they said, I don't know any other part of that deal. Obviously it was good enough. Bob stayed. I know one deal point.

Universal Pictures agreed to buy the first student script that Robert Zemeckis and Robert Gale, the future Back to the Future guys, wrote as film school students at USC for half... a million bucks. It's called Bordello of Blood. And the whole point of the exercise was to put half a million bucks in Bob's pocket. z's and bob gale's pockets was to it was a gesture there was no intention to make a movie but as universal sat looking at that half a million dollars that

they had just spent. They thought, well, are we just going to eat this? Hell, Bob's about to make another horror movie, that dead easy thing where we spent $50,000 on that. Fuck that shit. Toss that. Take it out of their budget.

This has Bob Zemeckis' name on it. That's a bigger name than Al Kanske. Screw him. This guy, Bob Zemeckis' name. You're going to go make Bordello of Blood. And so we went from making... a movie that we were all really, for us, you know, for Gil and I at that particular point, you know, Gil's not a horror guy, I'm not a horror guy, but... That's where the money was. That's where the storytelling opportunities lay. And we saw Dead Easy as, well, it was a thriller more than it was a horror piece.

It had a horror villain, but it was a thriller. And we really saw, and a lot of the people that we worked with on Tales from the Crypt really saw this movie as a way to show that we were not one trick ponies. So we went from doing a project that we were all incredibly committed to for a variety of reasons to make it a fucking student movie because of a deal. And so I can tell you it's a terrible reason to make a movie. Nobody who made that movie...

wanted to make that movie. No one said, this is a great script. Someone's got to turn this into a feature film. That never happened. This was, once you make that. terrible decision to make a movie for the worst possible reason because of a deal point nothing good is going to come of it and nothing at the end of the day there's a movie and a lot of people like it i just spent three days doing a

One of my favorite fan conventions, CreepyCon, out in Ontario, at the Ontario Convention Center here in Southern California. And I love getting to meet... The fans, God, it's so, I love the one-on-one, which is kind of like why I like podcasting. There's a one-on-one intimacy to it, but it's, you know, the fans love the movie. And to them, the backstage stories are fascinating because they have no idea of the soul-crushing, Waterloo-like story behind it.

This is all a way of saying my podcast, the how not to make a movie podcast, the very first season. Well, the reason I did the podcast originally was to tell the story of the making of Bordello of Blood. Bordello of Blood ultimately destroyed my relationship and my friendship with Gil Adler. And after we stopped speaking to each other, we did not start speaking to each other again for 25 years.

It was a solid, solid break. And the only reason we started talking again was because I wanted to make this podcast. I needed to do it for the catharsis. I would have done it with or without Gil. a better story with Gil. And though Gil was reluctant at first because it was a very painful experience for him too. Well, that just made it what necessary to do, obviously, because, you know, we needed to talk this out. We both needed the catharsis, the therapy, as it were. And that is exactly.

what it was it was incredibly therapeutic it suddenly put our relationship our friendship back together again our creative relationship we began working on a project together And so doing the podcast turned out to be incredibly healing. It also suddenly made me realize that I discovered the thing I wanted to be when I grew up, which is a podcaster. well i think you're doing it you've got many episodes under your belt how long has uh your podcast been going on now

Well, that particular podcast, the How Not to Make a Movie podcast, we just started the fourth season. It's like 160 episodes. There's no particular organization to why a season ends. I decided for various reasons, about 160 episodes in, to start a new season. And I'm starting the new season with retelling the Bordello of Blood story.

Yeah, going back to the original, but with some new commentary and additional insights into some of the things that happened. Having done that podcast, I had a friend from school who approached me with a story. And he actually wanted to do his story as a screenplay. And I told him, when he told me what his story was, it was a true story, something that happened to him. When he told me what it was, I said,

No, you do not want to do it as either a screenplay or a TV series, because the first thing they will do is they will gut it. They will feel threatened by really the most simple ending part of this story. During the mid-1980s, my friend worked his way through medical school as an anonymous sperm donor. Jump forward 27 years, he joins 23andMe, curious about his health change.

It does not occur to him the ramifications of adding his DNA to a growing DNA database. He lost his donor anonymity and suddenly seven total strangers found daddy. Oh, wow. Except six of them had no idea their actual biological father was this guy, a sperm donor. The seventh. Now, keep in mind, these are all people in their late 20s. These are adults discovering.

oh my God, I'm not who I thought I was. Now, the seventh, one of the women, she had known for about a year that she was the product of a sperm donation. And she had been looking for Hal, is what I call him in the story, because it's important to protect everyone's identity for their privacy. In essence, all these seven people are related. They're half-brothers and sisters. They are siblings, but they refer to themselves as dibblings, donor-conceived siblings.

Hal had an adopted son that he raised, but he had never raised a child of his own. And suddenly there were seven children of his own that he did not raise. But he was really he was excited to have a kind of family relationship with them. He was quite open to it. And that was really what he wanted to to have a family like.

as much of a family-like relationship as they could bear now that was hard for a lot of them because it just screwed with their regular families but some of them were open to it and it all got poisoned by the seventh the the daughter who had been looking for Hal, because she brought to the table a thing called genetic sexual attraction.

And this is something that the adoption community has known about for a time where people who are genetically related to each other, they meet each other later in life as adults, and they can have very intense emotional relationships. That can cross boundaries. And they describe the feeling as more intense than anything they've ever felt. It's like meeting.

This person laughs at the same jokes. They like all the same things. They really do complete each other's sentences. There's... This... story was so jaw-dropping to me and not just Hal's story and his family's story because it just got so fucked up. It's just, I had never heard a story like it in my entire life. I had to tell from the crypt, I have a taste for weird stories. I couldn't make up something like this. And it was so insane.

And to me, I describe it as a DNA horror story. And to me, it is a horror story. There very definitely is a monster. There are maybe several monsters, but so in telling... Hal's story. It's a seven-episode limited series called The Donor, a DNA horror story. It's at thedonorpodcast.com. It was while telling Hal's story that I realized this is what I want to do.

This is how I want to tell stories. And it's a combination of interview, but there's a little recreation here and there. There's sound and music, and it's a very produced thing. You know, I took a rather journalistic approach to it. And I really enjoyed that storytelling process. And I'm quite proud of... Well, in telling Hal's story, as part of the background, I interviewed a bunch of several people from the donor-conceived community. And one of them, Donna Hall.

When she told me her story, it absolutely blew my mind because that was a podcast unto itself. And Donna grew up in a lower tier crime family outside of Philadelphia in the mid. 1980s. They weren't the Corleones from The Godfather, but they made national headlines just the same. Donna's mom, Phyllis, A very good candidate for worst mom ever. Phyllis was referred to in the newspapers as the home alone mom of Bucks County.

She spent six months in prison for child endangerment. A mom. Her stepfather, John Hall, involved the family in two of Philadelphia's most notorious unsolved murders. He was the Philadelphia Police Department's favorite snitch. He was their favorite snitch. He actually put more than 25 people behind bars for various crimes they did not commit.

Because John was a career criminal who needed to get himself out of trouble. He was known as the Monsignor in the Philadelphia Police Department and the DA's department because he was able to get so many confessions out of people. The authorities didn't seem to be able to. Well, that's because they were bullshit. Among the people that he put in prison was his own stepson, Herbert. For a murder, Herbert did not commit.

And he put a man named Walter Ogrod on death row for 24 years for a murder Walter had nothing to do with. And so Donna tells the story of what it was like growing up inside this. What we call a lower tier crime family. And. All right, I'm biased. Donna is a fucking rock star of a storyteller. She it's. Yes, it is true crime like you've never heard it before. But it's not just true crime. It really, it's not a story of how she passed to safety.

her path to empowerment. And so really, it's an incredible empowerment story. And I defy anyone listening to that story, to the Hall Closet podcast, to not fall head over heels in love with Donna. Well, first of all, she's in the old days, and I'm old. We used to refer to her as a broad. She's a powerful, dynamic woman. Bette Midler. Bette Midler is a broad. Really just a powerful, dynamic woman who really...

who can take care of herself in any number of ways. That's Donna. She is a magnificent storyteller, not an ounce of self-pity. a wonderful sense of humor and a breathtaking honesty. And she is describing things that, holy fucking cow. But the saving grace, because these are hard stories to listen to, is that there's, oh, it's about redemption. It's about empowerment. And so no matter how dark the story gets.

Every episode ends with a genuine note of, wow. It's you, you feel as empowered as she feels. And to me, this was part of the challenge of the storytelling. So just speaking of like storytelling, just even within your own origin. And by the way, thank you very much. That was a fucking story in itself. But your own storytelling, where did that start for you? What is your background in writing? Where did that begin for you? I was always a theatrical kid.

And so when I was in middle school and high school, I was one of the theater people. I've always been a writer. I've always been a movie maker. The first time I got a Super 8 camera when I was 12, I was making movies and editing movies. And when I... was 10 years old that discovered the marx brothers and that was seminal uh Storytelling, yeah, performing was what I wanted to do. I went to Vassar. I was a drama major. And I thought for a couple of seconds there that I was going to be an actor.

When I got out of Vassar, I went to one audition and I was frankly terrible at it because underprepared. And I thought to myself, stupid, arrogant, young man. What kind of an asshole makes it living like this? I'm going to go be a writer instead. A whole other kind of asshole. Yeah, another kind of asshole, exactly. I told you I was stupid. I told you, really stupid. And I swore that I would never.

Act until someone asked me nicely, which it turns out, you know, I did an episode of tells from the crypt because Mick Garris asked me nicely. I mean, it's a good guy to ask you nicely, you know, like Mick Garris is a legend.

Yes, yes, yes. Mick was aware that I was unhappy with his casting choice. And so he was trying to make it up because he didn't ask me before he did a piece of stunt casting. But that's what makes Mick interesting. He's just got a great... quirky sense of casting and uh that was not a reflection on mick or his casting was more reflection on just i had it one way in my head because i wrote the script right whirlpool there's the whirlpool episode and

I didn't write it for a female lead. I didn't write it for a Rita Rudner. If anything, I might have swapped those roles and put Richard Lewis in the Rita Rudner role. That's what I would have done. Yes, I understand why he had that idea, but that was not how I wrote it. And when they dropped, when Gil and Mick said, here's what we just did, the look on my face must have just filled the lake.

Oh boy. Oh boy. I did not, I was not delighted with it, but Rita was wonderful. Absolutely. Hey, look, once it was, that was the decision, it was the decision to make it up to me. He said, hey, you want to be the part of Iggy? Writing, yeah, writing is always what I did. I was in New York writing and producing training films, industrials.

Writing plays, trying to do stuff like that. And I had a friend from high school named Carol Junkus who'd become an agent at William Morris in Los Angeles. Like I said, I was also... The people that I was, the production company that I was working for, there was a director named Steve Yeager. And Steve and I, this was in Baltimore where I grew up. And Steve and I would talk about movies and talk about writing screenplays.

When Carol said, you know, you should try writing a screenplay. Well, Steve and I had an idea and I banged together the screenplay and I sent it to Carol and she said, this is really good. You should come out to LA and meet and greet people. Well. Okay. I thought, sure, sure, sure. This was June of 1985. Now, I was a burgeoning New Yorker. That's what I wanted to be. To me, L.A.

was the stupidest place on the planet. The land of the avocado head. I'd been there once when I was 14. Yeah, that was my... I'm a New Yorker. Of course LA is stupid. But when I got to L.A., everyone was so nice to me and they loved my screenplay. And it's a nice feeling to have that much smoke being blown up your ass. One day, Carol took me to a movie premiere, St. Elmo's Fire. That was very heady stuff, St. Elmo's Fire. Going to that screening, you're seeing the apex of the whole thing.

Like I said, with all the smoke that's been blown up my ass, the next morning I had no meetings to go to, no pitches. And so somebody suggested I take a ride through Topanga Canyon. And so I did. This was 40 years ago. Topanga Canyon was... Nowhere near as built up as it is now. It's a beautiful, wild, then a wild part of the city because it is within the city limits of Los Angeles. And as I was driving from the 101 toward the ocean.

Topeka Canyon, the drive through it is just magnificent. The mountains are just extraordinary. And by the time I got to PCH, where the mountains plunged into the Santa Monica Mountains plunged into the Pacific Ocean. I had been completely seduced. Screw New York. I wanted to move to Los Angeles. And that became, yeah, I began to work with Gil and... We did, Gil got, you know, Gil, my partner, Gil was an accountant by training.

And he understood being an accountant, the very simple principle, if you've got a dollar to spend on the production, do not spend a dollar one, you don't have it. Hey, if you can do this thing for 99 cents, make it look like a dollar. even better. Oh, wait, if you can do it for 99 cents and make it look like a dollar 15 or 98 cents, make it look like a dollar 15. You are onto something, my friend. And that was his.

producing ethic and still with, you know, it's got a, it's got a look and feel great. He did a show for HBO called the hitchhiker. And so they got, they were very confident in his abilities as a producer. They had a show called Vietnam War Stories that they were shooting in Savannah that was in a lot of trouble. And they called Gil to go in and save it. And he did. And not only did he save it, it won awards.

A couple years later, they had a problem with another show called Tales from the Crypt. It... had finished its second season. They were owed the producers a third. So there's a third season in the balance, and there were no more seasons beyond that planned. But at the end of the second season, the... Executive producers, the Crypt partners of Tales from the Crypt, were four huge movie producers, Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, Richard Donner, and Walter Hill.

Their ideas, they walked into HBO with a big idea. Now, HBO at that point had produced, I think, two TV series, First and Ten, and I think the name's The Brian Benben Show. Dream on. Dream on. Thank you. Thank you. Dream on. And, but those were basically just single camera shows with tits and the word fuck. That was the only thing that distinguished them. They made them, okay, I can see why it's on HBO. Otherwise, they were quite ordinary.

in every other way now these four big movie guys oh and i should also point out that at the time movies and tv were two very different worlds one did not cross easily between The occasional Tom Hanks or Robin Williams would go from TV into the feature films. But if you were going from features into the TV, it meant your career was dead. There was no crossover.

Here was suddenly four big movie guys going, we want to put big movie image inside little TV box. And HBO said, yeah, great, do whatever you want. And. So they went at doing the show. Joel, you know, they needed a host and Joel found Kevin Yeager. We tell that story in the Hell Not to Make Movie podcast. Joel found Kevin Yeager and there was the puppet.

And Kevin found John Kassir, and now the puppet had a voice. And they went right into production on the series. There was never any development where someone would say, OK, I see you got this puppet and see you got a voice. Who is he? Who's the character? There was never any development process of any kind on the show in any way. And whoever wrote the script would throw a couple lines at the Crypt Keeper.

And so really, so the first season was six episodes. The second season was, was 18 episodes. So through the first 24 episodes, there's a puppet named the Crypt Keeper. And he says, stop. And he introduces the episodes and okay. At the end of the second season, because they had not put the show together like a regular TV show, you know, you're, you're never going to.

pay for the cost of production on whatever that first license fee is. This is why in TV, you go find what's called a deficit part. Someone who's going to pay for... What it really costs to make the production in the old TV dynamic, the way that you would make that the deficit partner would make their money back and make profits, hopefully, was when the show got to syndication.

Which is why TV shows, when you went out pitching TV shows in the old days, the magic number was 65. You had to pitch a show that could get to 65 episodes because a TV... Ad cycle was 13 weeks times five, five, because you'd strip a show Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, five times a week times 13 weeks, 65. So you needed enough. episodes in the show to make an ad cycle. Then you could, then you hit the magic number where you could be in syndication and that's where the money was.

That's why ideas back then for TV shows, you couldn't pitch a continuous story because people weren't going to watch it in order. They were probably going to watch it like Friends or... Seinfeld or any Dick Wolf show pretty much out of sequence. And so every episode had to stand all by itself. HBO really changed that because theirs was not a syndication model. There's a subscription model. And, you know.

That's why our orders were small, but also manageable in their own way. It was from a creative standpoint. When Gil and I went aboard. Oh. At the end of season two, the night before the wrap party, the executive producers were handed a financial statement by HBO that showed they were a million dollars cash in the hole.

HBO had cash flowed everything up to that point. And they told them, get out your checkbooks or there's no season three. So the executive producers got out their checkbooks. So they have their season three and they fired everybody. They canceled the rap party and fired everybody. And they were looking for a producer to see out season three. And HBO wanted killed because they knew he was a responsible producer with the money.

I was Gil's writing partner. We had worked on a bunch of projects. We had done Freddy's Nightmares together. We had written a bunch of things together. And suddenly, lo and behold, this opportunity presented itself. And HBO wanted Gil. And Gil... insisted that I join them, that I be part of it because I was his writing partner. Now, because they had not, because the partners hadn't put it together like a normal TV show, there was no writing staff. They just like.

It was like, I don't know how they put together a season two of 18 episodes. What kind of slapdash process? Well, Dick Donner had a development department. Joel Silver had a development department, and those two development departments basically took over the job of hiring writers and giving script notes and doing all that.

But that's not how you make a TV show. And one of the things that Gil insisted was we're going to make this like a TV show, guys. And the TV show needs a story editor to oversee how we're doing this. I basically was shoved down HBO's throat in a sense. HBO did not care. And the partners didn't care because so long as they got their third season, they cut a million dollars from our budget, of course, to get their money back.

And Gil and I then set out to do the third season. The intention was that that was going to be the end of it. And the intention was that Bob Zemeckis' Yellow would be the last episode of Tales from the Crypt. But Gil and I had other plans. We reinvigorated the series itself by taking it back to its ironic roots and really just investing in the...

I was such a fan of Bill Gaines's world. And I was one of those people who read Tales from the Crypt under the covers with their flashlight. That was me. Booyah. There you go. And so... Yeah, it was easy. Yeah, it was easy to reinvigorate that part of it. What I actually did, and it's really only this past weekend that I suddenly grasped.

And what I think Gil and I did, but I think in particular, I'm going to pat myself on the back here. One of my jobs was going to be writing all the Crypt Keeper segments. Now, I don't know how you write for a cipher, because like I said, there was no development process. So the Crypt Keeper was just a talking puppet. And my assignment was going to be to write.

for the talking puppet. I got to write for a character. I don't know how else to do it. And you want it to be funny, but you definitely need to have a character because comedy has got to come out of character. We're going to do generic jokes. Why did the chicken cross the graveyard? What the fuck? And so I asked the question, it's really when I sat in a room with Barry Josephson, just before the hire was official, I said, look, here's what I want to know.

All right. The Crypt Keeper, he finishes his production day like we all do. He punches the time clock and he goes he goes home to his crypt. OK, what's he having for dinner? What are you going to watch on TV? Does he have any hobbies, likes or dislikes? Does he have any friends? And so in order for me to write him, I needed to create him. He had an appearance and he had a voice, but he didn't have a him. And so I needed to fill him with a personality, with a being, with an essence.

And the closest one at hand that I borrowed heavily from was me. And like I said, I was a Groucho Marx fan. And for me, the Crypt Keeper became my Groucho Marx. And in essence, I don't, the Crypt Keeper doesn't look like me. He doesn't sound like me. But holy shit, is he me? And that's the weird thing because, and that's, it's not because I'm a genius of any kind, it's only because no one had done it. And I was the person.

in the right place at the right time. If someone had to give him a personality, really, if that character was going to continue, someone was going to write him. And it just happened to be me. And like I said, I filled him with the closest, cheapest thing available. That was me.

Just something, I mean, obviously it's a puppet, you know, like puppet going on, but like, was a lot of that, like, was that a collaborative? Was a lot of what he said, was it actually like, boom, like written? Was there improv, like, obviously as a, as a writer, we're always very protective of our work. The process of doing the Crypt Keeper segments was very complicated because it takes six puppeteers to work the Crypt Keeper. There were three puppeteers working his animatronic face.

using servos. There was one puppeteer was devoted to his head and body motion forward, backward, left. One was right arm, one was left arm. or any practical gags of that kind. And John, we would shoot three, sometimes four segments at a time because they were such... and undertaking to get all these things together and to get the puppeteers rehearsed because once i took over writing the crib keeper we put him into different

And he had different occupations and different things. So all these massive sets and gags that had to be constructed and figured out. And the puppeteers had to be able to work around them and work with them. So these would get written well in advance, several – ideally it was months, but weeks before they were due. And then John would have to record them.

And so I'd sit in the studio with John and we'd go through them and sometimes we'd come up with better lines than we had. I was always grateful to John when suddenly a moment of inspiration would strike him because... Writing the Crypt Keeper segments was, on the one hand, yes, I loved doing it, but I would compare it creatively to being like, pulling organs through your nose or trying to pass a stone the size of a golf ball.

It was always a horribly unpleasant experience, like pounding your head into the desk simply to get the words, looking for the words. We decide, here's the environment he's in. All right, so what are all the words, the phrases he would use? Okay, how do we cryptify them? How do we cryptify them? And when his voice is inside your head, as it was,

I was able, during all the down years, I was able to expunge it for a little while. But once it crept back in, it is, I cannot get it out ever again. I think it's locked in there forever. It was an incredibly challenging experience because the only place he existed was inside my head. And so his, you know, my thoughts were going to be his thoughts. So dude, get the script for it. So we would, so we would, I'd write a bunch, we'd shoot them. We would create with John what's called a beep track.

And when we were in studio on the day of production, the director would yell action and we'd hear the beep track there. Beep, beep, beep. And John's voice would start. And the puppeteers would suddenly go to work and the cryptkeeper who had been lying prone usually would suddenly sit up into the shot and go about his being a cryptkeeper. And though.

We all knew he's a puppet. We all know he's a puppet. I know he's a puppet. I know everything about this. Something magical happened. The strangest goddamn thing. And he would... really in our heads come to life and then he'd finish and the director would yell cut and he'd sag back to the desk and you'd go oh my god that's right he's just the father Happened so many times it was freaky. He was a strange creation because it took three people to create him. Yeah. Kevin and John. But.

It wasn't until I really provided an inner life that he went from being the puppet called The Crypt Keeper to the franchise. That is Tales from the Crypt. People keep trying to remake Tales from the Crypt. This is a constant thing. A couple of years ago, M. Night Shyamalan wanted to remake... Tales from the Crypt is part of a horror wheel that TNT wanted to run on Thursday nights. Now, when he optioned the rights to the comics, M. Night Shyamalan,

The Crypt Keeper in the comic books, in the EC Comics, is an old white guy with stringy hair. It's not the Crypt Keeper. that was created for the tv show these are two separate pieces of intellectual property of ipad and One of my executives, well, owned by two different people. The EC Comics is owned by Bill Gaines's family. Bill is dead, of course. And the Crypt Keeper puppet is owned by the Crypt Partners.

The point man being Joel Silver. Now, the thing about Joel, he is notorious. And we've told many stories about the fact that he is a magnificent impresario and has been a great producer in his time. But he is a. asshole of staring proportions. And most people who work with Joel, when they come upon that fact, and it's not hard to come upon.

Very soon they begin to think, God, life is too fucking short. Never again will I work with you. And that's exactly how the Bill Gaines estate feels. They would never work with Joel. ever again and so there could never be another tales from the crypt because yeah the the crypt keeper and tells them the crypt are permanently divorced oh where will the children go for christmas uh

That's what M. Night Shyamalan bumped into. He had tales from the crypt. He did not have the Crypt Keeper. And without the Crypt Keeper, you ain't got anything. And that's the really weird thing about Tales from the Crypt. You know, the stories and everything, yeah, and all that. Really, the franchise is the Crypt Keeper.

One could remake a series, a Crypt Keeper series, just don't call it Tales in the Crypt. The Crypt Keeper could introduce... any kind of stories he wanted to it's just sitting there the alas it's the crip partners hey To their credit, I guess Walter and Bob, the two living Crip partners, were able to hold their noses long enough and cut a deal with Joel. I think Crip Tales from Crip is going to stream starting this year, which will be great because it's been...

It's not been available for streaming. People watch it on YouTube where it looks and it sounds awful. It's just, we worked so hard to make that show look and sound great that people see it that way. It's a little depressing, frankly. But hopefully Tales from the Crypt will be streaming later this year. Well, I want to backtrack because obviously we've been chatting for a while. Oh, sure, sure. Oh, we've missed so many good things in between.

And, you know, time, your time is precious and I don't want to keep you all night. We've been chatting for a little while, but I do have, I think some at least questions that the listeners would want to. And again, you've answered a lot of this just in your stories, but let's see, we've covered.

Crypt Keeper. Okay, so one of the things that I've always loved about Tales from the Crypt, and I want to get into casting in a minute, like guest stars is something that... really kind of blew up in the third season is you got to, I mean, you've already, you know, named Rob, like, you know, Bob Zemeckis, who's responsible for two of my biggest childhood, like, like memories as in the cinema, like.

you know uh who framed roger rabbit and back to the picture which are two of my all-time favorite films that are still in 46 years old in my life they're on annual rotation to the point that i still bring my my my daughter into this world watching those films and you i assume got the experience to work with michael j fox um you know like uh because he was well yeah michael there was the first thing that michael directed was an episode of the traps the episode of tales from the crypt

which is my first episode as a writer producer on the show. It was, it was again, so heady, but it was so, excuse me. It was so, it was so very much to tell us from the Crypt experience because. It was the feature people in our little TV, in the TV world. And so I, Michael was lovely. And I went to, Oh God, a, an exclusive Beverly Hills hotel at the end of the sunset strip.

where they had a bungalow. I had to go there and talk about script notes with Michael. And it was really, I'd done Freddy's Nightmares. But I didn't work with anybody like Michael J. Fox on Freddy's Nightmares. I can tell you that. And so you suddenly find yourself. I had gone from zero to 60. And suddenly I was. I was having creative meetings with A-list players. A very odd and heady experience, I must tell you. But...

The experience of working with Bob Zemeckis, it was one of the, it remains one of the best creative experiences of my life. Everything I know about the art of collaboration, I learned. At that man's feet. Bob has an amazing way of getting the very best out of everybody he works with, which is really what the job, our job should be to try to get the best out of each other. But Bob, as a creative leader, is especially good at making everyone connected to the project feel invested.

That this is not Bob's thing that we're chasing. This is our thing. He has on. In every Bob Z movie, there's a moment or two or three where if you, if you understand the filmmaking process and you're watching it. Your head tilts to one side like the RCA Victor dog. You go, okay, now that's an impossible shot. How the fuck do you get that? All right, that's not possible. An example, in Castaway.

Tom Hanks finally climbs to the top of that mountain in the middle of the island. And as he reaches the summit, the camera seems to be on his shoulder. You can see Tom. Tom is in the shot the whole time. And he gets to the top of the summit and he does a 360, seeing the reef that surrounds the entire island. 360, stops in the shot the whole time. Where's the camera crew? Where is everybody?

It's literally, when you look at, because you've seen the real estate. He climbed there. You saw it from the particular vantage. There's no place for the crew to be standing. An incredible shot. The audience is completely unaware of how impossible it is. But as a filmmaker, you go, OK. And what I'm sure happened is when they were on location.

Bob said, OK, guys, we're going to let's talk about the shot on that mountain. And they all climbed to the top of it. And Bob said, OK, guys, here's what I'm thinking. And then Tom is going to come up, climb up. The camera's going to be here. We're going to see him in the shot the whole time. He's going to turn, turn, turn, turn, turn. We're going to see the reef, reef, reef. Okay, guys, how are we going to do this? And that's the question he threw out.

And that's the question that he always posed to it. Now, Bob's not asking, hey, here's the problem. You go solve it. Bob has some ideas in his head. But he's putting it on the table in all. Yeah, truly. For us all to solve. And because we all, and look, you can put together an idea that, well, that works kind of, but not all the way. It might be something that we can borrow from it.

There are no bad ideas. There are just ideas. And so the creative environment is incredibly supportive and nurturing and inclusive. And when the first episode that I did with Bob was the yellow episode at the end of the very first season, the end of season three, which is my first season. It was supposed to be the last episode. When we got to it, it was not the last. It was a celebratory episode. So we spent a little bit more on it.

Yellow is Bob wanted to do an homage to one of his favorite movies when he was a film school student at USC, Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, starring Kirk Douglas. And he wanted he wanted Kirk Douglas for for this. The script that had been written during season two that before I got involved was written by the Thompson brothers was was not very good.

It certainly was not good enough to get Kirk Douglas, and Bob didn't want to even send it to his agent at William Morris because it was never going to get it. Bob turned to me. It was my job to rewrite all the scripts to make them work. And so Bob said, we got to get Kirk Douglas. And so I did a rewrite and we got Kirk Douglas and Bob.

Yeah, Bob became a fan. And when it was time for Bob to do his next episode, he said, you'll write it for me, yeah? Well, that's kind of heady, don't you think? So I said... Okay, Bob, since he asked me nicely. Gil and I went up to Bob's place outside of Santa Barbara fairly early on in the process. And we all had lunch and we pushed the lunch aside. And Bob said, all right, guys, here's what I'm thinking about. I want to do a completely subjective camera point of view show.

And from the point of view of a dead guy. All right. That's my idea. Oh, and I want the dead guy to be played by Humphrey Bogart. How are we going to do this, guys? And that became the challenge. And so it was always, like I said, a wonderful, creative gauntlet thrown down. damned if you didn't find your way there. And yeah, everything I know about how to collaborate with other people, hopefully how to get the best out of everybody that I work with.

Yeah, there's an awful lot of Zemeckis to it. So yeah, one of the things I learned early on, yes, it was great to work with people like Michael J. Fox. And one of the other things that Gil and I did... You know, the original mandate was feature people. And, you know, they didn't really get too many feature people the first season. And so we kind of made it our mandate to get feature people.

to go to the original mandate and get featured people, movies in little box. It's funny. It was part of what we accomplished on Tales from the Crypt. There's a story. that apparently took place at the cast and crew screening just before the first three episodes aired. And the first episode that they showed was Dick Donner's Dig This Cat, He's Real Gone. And as they're waiting for the next one to run, that's a classic. Classic Tales from the Crypt episode.

Two of the crew members, one turns to the other and says, man, that's great TV. The other one says, it's not TV, it's HBO. And the two HBO execs in the row ahead turned back and they look. They just heard not just their ad slogan, their... culture. And that is what tells from the crypt, especially I think after Gil and I got a hold of it and we, we re-energize not just the show, but we suddenly made the Crypt Keeper a franchise player.

Crypt ended up running. We got an order before the season was done for another season, so we weren't going to go away. And we were able to suddenly attract actors going into our. Second season, Gil and I, we were able to get Tom Hanks. Now, we offered him a chance to direct, but hey, we got Tom Hanks. And yeah, suddenly it went... It was never easy to get big stars, but suddenly we got feature actors to come do our little TV show. And part of it's not because we paid anybody. We didn't.

Everyone got scale plus 10. We did this with smoke and mirrors and the ingenious production design of Greg Melton. who had worked with Gil and Gil and I, back on Freddy's Nightmares. And Greg has the amazing ability, I should also point out, Greg designed, oh God, what's the zombie one, the big zombie series? recently. No, no. It's just that it ran recently. The huge zombie show that Walking Dead. Greg designed that originally, too. He was the original PD on Walking Dead.

Greg's an amazing production designer. He is, he is so, and doing an anthology was, you know, God, you're reinventing the wheel every week. How he did that. rotating sets on a regular basis. There are no standing sets. There's no standing anything. And so an awful lot of the show's visual success really had to do with Greg's ability to... I think of, God, there's the one that takes place in the swamp, Stared in Horror. Stephen Hopkins directed Rachel Tickerton. Oh, wow.

It's an amazing episode that we, it looks like it takes place in a swamp in Louisiana. We shot it on the stage. Yeah. Yeah. Entirely on the stage. And that was kind of like one of the questions, another one of the questions I had as far as like, like the bulk of this was like shot like on stage. Right. pattern on tales from the crypt was two days out three days in okay and sometimes we would shoot slightly different depending upon the episode

Uh, there were some episodes there's, uh, uh, uh, Oh God. Uh, I forget the one that takes place in the circus, uh, with Joan Chen, Joan Chen. That's shot entirely on stage and we shot. God, Gil and I were, were, were victims of our own success. All right. We produced season three for a million dollars less than, than, you know, than we were supposed to have.

And not only do we turn the series around, we get an additional order. We didn't get any more money for season two. In fact, they took more money away from us because they figured we could do it even cheaper. Yeah. So what we did was we began to take, instead of doing them, we would do everything, five days of prep and five days to shoot. We had rotating.

first assistant directors. So a director would get his own first assistant director for a whole week of prep and then shoot. And so everyone got five. There was the only person who got more was Bob Zemeckis on the on the episode. Actually, that was the story that I was heading into. The second episode that Bob Zemeckis did was You Murderer. And that's the one he asked me to write it. And yeah, that was the one where a dead...

where, yeah, it was played by Bogart. And at the end of the day, we ended, we had to get, God, there were 18 shots of Bogart. in the show, where every time the camera passes a reflective surface, you see Humphrey Bogart. And in each of those little clips, he says something. So we had to figure out a way.

to transition in and transition out without breaking the story flow. And the whole thing was told, keep in mind from the subjective camera. So there's nothing to cut to. There's nothing to cut to. Another example of Zemeckis as a collaborator on the very first day of PrEP, he got seven days of PrEP instead of five. But the first two days of prep were rehearsal, not for cast, but for the crew. Because this had to be choreographed so carefully because of the conceit driving the whole thing.

And so on the very first day, and it was a four wall set, meaning four walls, floors, but ceilings too, because the camera had to be able to see everything, had to be able to go in every conceivable direction for any possible reason. Bob said he wanted everyone on the set, and that included the craft services people. The craft services don't have anything to do with, but he wanted everyone on the set to come and...

Listen. And so now we're all sitting inside this, this lovely four wall set that Greg Melton has created. And Bob says, all right, everybody. So here's where I think the shot's going to start, like right down here. And then this is over here. Then the script. So what happens next? OK, then we're going to go over here. And then, oh, yeah, it's going to have to go over here, then over here, then over here. And then, oh, I got to go all the way over here.

And then he turned around, he looked at the crew and he said, oh, come on, you know, you know what he's going to say. How are we going to do this, guys? And in that way, the whole, our whole unit. was invested right down to craft services in solving the problem of How do we do this? This show is so much, you know, obviously a blended horror, humor, and often like satire, right? So, you know, when it comes to the writing, as far as like balancing that, right?

How what was it like being able to try to, you know, manage keeping it fun yet also scary? That's one part of it. But. When you look at so much of the story, it's also a morality tale, right? Exactly right. That's exactly what they were. Were there any specific morality stories that you yourself as a creator would be often drawn to when contributing to the series? Our mandate was we had...

216 comic book stories to play with and our obligation was we had to use a title and you know ideally we could base The story off of a comic, that was really the mission, but we had to use a title. Title was the thing we were obligated to use. And so, yeah, we really did want to adapt the comic books. That was kind of what the deal was. There were no outside stories. Everything was going to be based on a Tales from the Crypt comic. Now, of the 216 comics we had to go with, 100 were just...

useless right off the bat. They were just, they were garbage stories that just, there was no way to do anything with them. They were less than useless. Just forget about them. Forget about them. No, no, no, no. Or they took place places or there was just. Or they were so dated because of when they were written, there was just no way to bring them forward in time. So take half of them and toss them of the remaining hundred or so that we could really that we could choose from.

there were basically six or seven tropes, you know, six or seven story types and then repetitions on those six or seven themes. in various degrees of, that's a good, and by the time we got to season six and season seven, we had spent those tropes many times and it was very hard to be. creative with those tropes. At least I found it harder and harder to be creative with those tropes. Scott didn't, Scott Nimmerfro didn't find it hard as, as hard, but Scott's better than I am. Anyway. The.

The trick was in taking those various tropes and filling in all the details because those comic books are a great. My God, if you tried to film just what was there on the page, maybe you'd get three minutes, maybe. And we had a half an hour to film. So of necessity, we had to invest those worlds with everything, everything. With a lot of the comic books. there just wasn't enough world to do that with. So really the, the challenge as the show went.

deeper and deeper into its seasons was that our, our raw material was, was getting thinner and thinner and thinner and, and it was getting harder and harder to, to, to make it. what it had been season three and season four and season five. I think by season six, we were just, we were scraping stuff underneath the bottom of the barrel. My earliest member memory of the show. And I may have seen it before, but I just remember being like scarred with the episode.

where the guy had the, the tattoo on the chest and, uh, what was, it was like dead man's chest. Yeah. That's, that's the one that like, that's my early memory, but. I may have seen the show before, but that was the one I just remember really being horrified by. That one, just like, oh shit, this is my show. I'm going to watch this all the time now. It's funny because I was a kid, but...

That episode was like where I've always been like whenever I've been scared by something, there's like this fear. But I'm like, oh, I need to conquer that. But now. i'm be drawn to it i'm always going to want to find something even more unsettling what was it about the episode that they kind of Underneath your skin, I guess, if I can put it that way. I mean, just the idea of somebody carving off their entire chest because the tattoo was just really messing with him. And again, I haven't.

revisited that because you really can't find and streaming anywhere. You can see him on Netflix at very grainy versions of it. But, you know, there's a good handful of episodes that I still think of. And I... I bring up scenes from, and that's part of the reason, you know, when we, when we chatted, like I've got demon night on my annual rotation because it's really easy to find that. And I think, um, uh, William Sadler is amazing in it. And I think it's.

And Billy Zane is great. And the soundtrack is fun. I went and saw Bordello of Blood in the theater on opening night. I didn't. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. That was, you know. I went to an, by the time Ordello opened, we missed our release date. We were supposed to open on Halloween the previous year.

And of course, they didn't know it was Halloween. They opened us in August. I was going to say, it wasn't Halloween at all when I saw this movie. No, they dumped us in August. We were supposed to be Halloween and they decided not. And they held us till August and dropped us. I, we took a couple of people to a theater in Burbank. That was a third full. And I just.

That was like the 7.30 show. This should be filled with people. And I felt horrible. I went out to the box office and said, God, what's the problem? She said, it's been like this all day. And so it was quite apparent as we sat there watching the movie that we were bombing. We were bombing right there in real time. And that is, that is not a fun feeling. And making that movie was, was, was a horrible experience. So on top of it, it was humiliating. It's humiliating, you know.

The dream is you walk out of the movie and Jesus Christ, I wanted to leave at halftime. Yeah. I knew what the ending was and I knew it sucked. Well, the thing is, I didn't think it was bad. It wasn't my favorite Tales from the Crypt. You know what I mean? Like, and I feel bad because I'm talking to, you know, you and me saying, like, I didn't think it was bad. That's horrible. That's not, you know, like, listen, I appreciate everything, but it wasn't my favorite Tales from the Crypt.

but I enjoyed it. I thought it got a little, like, gratuitous. I would explain... Tales from the Crypt's sake, but it was... I don't know, like, I liked Dennis Miller, but... It almost felt like he didn't enjoy what he was doing as I was watching. And it was just kind of like the whole thing. What was the redhead actress name? Angie.

everhart yeah angie everhart right uh because she was kind of like a big name at that moment but it's just one like and again you were on the creative process but as a viewer and i'm not and i'm The whole first season of the how not to make a movie podcast. And I recommend your listeners take a listen to that because all the gory details, I'll give you the thumbnail version here.

Once we made the decision to make a movie that none of us wanted to make, all the decisions, all the creative decisions were bad. And Joel took over the casting of the three leads. We didn't want Dennis Miller. Gil and I wanted Danny Baldwin. Now, let me go back half a step. This was a student script. Okay. The lead character is a small town detective. Now think about that. How much business can a detective really do in a small town? None.

This is a character that doesn't exist in reality. And so right from the get-go, and as I told you earlier, the mandate we were given this script... When they brought us back from New Orleans, our release date hadn't changed. We still had to start in three weeks. And so my job was to rewrite my boss's student script. unfortunately bob was incredibly gracious he said guys do what did you need to do so he was great about that but

How do you write for a character that can't possibly exist? How do you justify anything he does? It was impossible. And so at least I think Danny Baldwin would have gotten underneath the character's skin. He would have. demand, he would have maybe pushed and pushed and pushed and we would have written some kind of character that made sense if we had been able to cast it. But why did we cast Dennis Miller?

For the life of me, I couldn't tell you. To this day, I don't know why Joel wanted Dennis Miller. Hey, our audience wanted special effects makeup. Dennis Miller did a political show on HBO. I...

I don't know. And you are absolutely right. Dennis did not want to do this movie. In fact, When the offer was put in front of him, he said, yeah, I'll do it for a million dollars, figuring no one in their right fucking mind would pay Dennis Miller a million dollars to be in a movie because no one had done such a thing before.

A couple of small movies before. A million dollars? We didn't have a million dollars in our budget. We were a $12 million movie. I had half a million dollars in the budget for that role. We went to Universal and we said, can we get some help, some breakage here? And they said, we don't give a fuck about Dennis Milley. It's nothing to us. And so we had to take that extra half a million.

Out of our budget. Well, we all the money was in special effects makeup. So we took money out of the thing our audience was going to come to see and we gave it to an actor. Nobody in our audience gave a fuck about. Yeah. So. And Dennis, all right. Dennis, we always started shooting on a Thursday. We shot Thursday, Friday, two of the bar scenes without Dennis. And then Dennis arrived. It was the weekend where...

where we finally got Erica to get on a fucking airplane over the weekend. She held us hostage over the weekend. Lovely Erica. Dennis arrived on Monday. We were shooting. on location at a titty bar. Vancouver's got a lot of titty bars. At a strip joint in Vancouver. And, you know, I had spent... the weekend rewriting the script to accommodate Erica. And look, Dennis Miller is a professional comedian. And I know this script is minimal.

Is it funny? I've done the best I can with a generic character. You can't write, you can't really, you can't do anything of any quality with a generic character. That's what we had. And I had had to. altered the script in a very considerable way to accommodate something that Erica demanded where she wasn't getting on an airplane. And it impacted Dennis's character in a way that just made the character that much stupider.

in my mind and that much less. So I was going to have to sell this or tell this to Dennis when he arrived on set on Monday morning. I never met Dennis and. Dennis, you know, you meet Dennis. Hey, how are you? We have some small talk. And for a couple seconds, I think I'm going to be okay with Dennis. He makes a joke about a character actor named Burt Remsen.

And I happened to have known who Burt Remsen was. And I'd laugh. I went, yeah, I knew Burt Remsen. He goes, hey, kids, he looked at you. And I think, okay, we're going to be cool in me. And so we start, I said, like the script, we did some rewriting. I said, look, here's the script. You should read through it.

And he takes it, he opens it up, goes to his first scene, he looks at his first line, he says, no, I'm not going to say that. And he closes the script and he says, you know, I'm going to improvise on my dialogue. You know, I'll talk to you about it beforehand, what I'm going to do, but I'm just going to make it whatever I say. Now, it's not like I could say to my comedian actor, no, man, this is Hamlet.

You will speak every word like it is Hamlet because, hey, these jokes are, man, trust me, you're going to kill, you're going to kill. I can't say that to him. I know this is a piece of shit. There's no way I can justify. And hey, probably whatever would come out of his mouth is better than what's on the page. But the problem was, so I had to agree to it. And so Dennis did improvise everything he did. The problem was there were.

chunks of story that never made it into his dialogue because he never said them and so we had to find ways to fix that hey ultimately the other problem with dennis was that You know, the rest of the actors didn't care for improvising all his lines because their lines weren't improvised. They were all written. And so they would have to figure out, so where do I talk? Right.

Then because Dennis was doing his HBO show, they rehearsed on Thursday, shot on Friday. Now that forced us to change our week so that our Monday became. Saturday. And so we worked an odd week, which is not the deal our Canadian crew made. You know, we were shooting in Vancouver for a whole other stupid reason. But so...

Dennis would get, he would send his assistant to me first thing in the morning. And she'd say, Dennis is really tired today. Can we shoot him out early and then go back to the hotel and sleep? And most days I'd accommodate him. I'd say, okay, sure. Uh, cause he was the big star. So we had to do what we did. And, uh, so the actors, you know, that we do, we'd shoot Dennis the side of a scene first thing in the morning and then lunch, we turn around.

and Dennis would be home in his trailer, we'd shoot everyone else's scene with the script supervisor reading Dennis's improvised dialogue in the margins of her script while the actors... did their lines with no actor opposite them. And so, as you can imagine, very quickly, the rest of the actors felt, I don't know, disrespected by Dennis and they started to hate him as well.

as the Canadian crew to whom, though Dennis's wife at the time, I don't know if they're still married, was from Vancouver. It's amazingly how quickly Dennis got the entire Canadian crew to hate his guts. why did joel want dennis miller i could not tell you uh erica i know why joel wanted erica aleniak his designs on her came to nothing. She was happily in a relationship. And that's as far as that went.

Erica decided, you know, after appearing naked in a couple of movies that she didn't want to be that kind of actress anymore. After agreeing to be in a movie called Bordello of Blood, the conversation I had on the Saturday was with her manager and she insisted. The part was originally written, it was this church secretary who had been a porn actress in her past. And she didn't want to be, her character couldn't be a porn actress in the past, is what I was told on Saturday.

We're shooting the movie already. Her manager is telling me on Saturday, she's not getting on a plane until she can't be a porn actress. Well, Dennis's whole character, that was his favorite porn actress. That's how he recognizes. Well, if I take that away, then I'm going to have to I cannot start rewriting all these things now. No, it's too fucking late. And so I'm negotiating with her manager a rewrite.

That is acceptable to everyone. And the irony is her manager at the time, it was a former male porno actor who was entirely like, yeah, I didn't know why she's being like this man, but she insists. That was Erica. As for Angie, why did we cast Angie? Well, we cast Angie because at the time that we were making Bordello, just before we started, Joel was...

executive producing another feature film, a thing called Assassins, which was shooting in Seattle with Antonio Banderas and Sylvester Stallone. Yeah. And he was engaged to Angie Everhart at the time. And he approaches. He approaches Joel one day on the set, says, hey, Joel, you're going to make a movie in Vancouver. Put my girlfriend Angie in the movie. That way we can put each other across the border. You know?

And Joel, instead of being a responsible executive producer and saying, let me talk to the guys and see what we can work out. He went, yes, I won't do it. And. It was a ludicrous ask for a thousand different reasons. First of all, it's the villain of the piece, the horror movie. It's the biggest. In Demon Knight, I think Demon Knight is served extremely well by Billy Zane, who is a magnificent villain.

Casting is so important. Hey, if you cast Pee Wee Herman as Freddy Krueger, it's just not going to work out. It's not going to work. Angie's a wonderful, she's a very lovely person and she was a great model. But look, she had no training as an actress. This was not a fair ask. This is not a reflection on Angie. That she was asked to do this role was wrong on our part to do that.

And really, Angie is just a pawn in this because it turned out, you know, we begged Joel, please don't do this. Please, please, please, please, please. We were aware that Angie had done a feature for Billy Friedkin. And you had just mentioned On a Dead Man's Chest, which was Billy Friedkin's episode.

And we'd had a great time working with Billy Friedkin. And so we called Billy and we said, hey, Billy, you know, and Joel wants to cast Angie as the villain in our horror movie. And what do you think? She said, she's great doing a small role for me. She's a really nice person. But, you know, basically he was saying, you don't want her to be, no, you don't make her the villain in your horror movie. And so we went to Joel, we said, Billy Friedkin says, look, this is, this would be a mistake.

But that was not what it was not about casting our movie. It was servicing Sylvester Stallone. And it turned out that Sly had an ulterior motive. And, you know, she would visit the first couple of weeks. as they had set it up that she would go down to Seattle and visit their set. Of course, she'd come back because Dennis was improvising her lines. And she said that to Sly, she would come back with all her lines rewritten and directed by Sly.

rewritten by sly and directed by sly and so she'd walk on the set and then gill would have to disabuse her of all the stuff that sly had put into her head of how it should be then they they're The production office in Seattle started asking our production office to hold Angie for the weekends. Could we keep her from coming to Seattle for the weekends?

Well, what are we going to do? Stay home and do your homework, Angie? We said, no, we can't do that. So we became aware of the fact that he had something on the side going down in Seattle. There's a very famous story about Sylvester Stallone. He has never denied this story. I tell this story in how not to make a movie podcast, and I ain't never gotten sued.

But like I said, it's a story that if you look around, he has never denied the story. The question has only ever been on what set did it take place? I can tell you the Assassin set, because I had never heard this story before. And the first time I heard it was from my production office, who said they heard it from the production office in Seattle. Stallone finishes the scene. He goes back to his.

Kreller, unaware of the fact that his wireless lavalier is still broadcasting back to the sound cart. A young woman is waiting for him there, and she proceeds to fillet him. He is very particular about how he likes... his fellatio and so now people are gathering around the sound card as they're hearing stallone going yeah that's right yeah stroke the chef cut the balls yeah cut the ball stroke the shaft

The next day Seattle comes, shows up on the set and the entire crew are wearing t-shirts that say stroke the shaft, cup the balls. So why did we hire Angie Everhart? Hey. He did, in fact, break up with her two thirds of the way through our movie. And so for the rest of that shoot, poor Angie was a basket case. And we all felt like shit because. We knew it was coming and couldn't say a word. Every day on that movie was stupider than the day before. You mentioned the other film that you had done.

by William Friedkin. Jade, just when you were saying that, it just reminded me, I'm like, oh my God, I know this movie. I know this movie, but I forgot. Yeah, yeah. that she had a small role in that film. And I hadn't thought about that movie in about 30 years until this time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love Freakin's work. Interesting. It was great working with Billy Freakin. That was so much, it was...

It was fun, a little torment. He's, he's, he really, he's a very intense guy, but he's really passionate about the final product. And, you know, Joel. When Gil and I, because like I said, once we took over the show and we were going for feature guys, well, how could The Exorcist, the director of The Exorcist, not do an episode of Tales from the Crypt? The director of The Omen.

Well, because he was one of the executive producers, Dick Donner did the omen. So, you know, we got to have the exorcist here. We got to have the director of the exorcist. And when we approached Joel with the idea, I said, you're crazy. smart who are we talking to here we're talking to joel silver who's out of his fucking mind well you know we had experience with difficult personalities and we weren't afraid of that and so you know gill had lunch with billy and and

Billy loved the idea of going back to his own filmmaking roots, kind of down and dirty in a way. And he, you know... The deal was five days. Everyone gets five days. You ain't going over. Don't think you are. And he said, great. I get it. And he was just great fun to work with. He was, you know, things. In all the years that I did Tales from the Crypt, of four seasons that I did, 75 or so episodes, I got three notes from HBO total. One of them was on...

on a dead man's chest. There's the sex scene between Sherry Rose and Yul Vasquez. And when we were shooting it, you know, Billy just kind of pushed those two young performers. Really, he wanted to get as raw as possible. And at one point in the dailies, there's a scene, there was a shot where Yule gets up out of the bed after he's been with Sherry and his erect penis pops up into the bottom of the shot.

And it kind of bobs through the bottom. And then as he walks out of frame, it disappears. It was in the dailies. And we got this panic call the next day from HBO. Billy freaking, Billy doesn't think he's going to put that shot in. In the show, does he? Because, you know, at that point, HBO didn't do full male frontal nudity. Right. And so they were terrified. We said, no, no, no, it's just, it's just the deal. Billy was an absolute pleasure to work with. And his advice on, on, on Angie was.

No, no, of course not. Don't, don't do this. Don't do this to yourselves. You know, the reason that we shot in Vancouver. was because Joel was always at war with the IA, the union that represented our crew. And sometimes Joel was winning that battle and sometimes the IA was winning the battle. They had just struck a TV movie that we were doing for Fox.

They'd shut our set down. And so Joel's attitude was, fuck me, fuck you. And so after they brought us back from New Orleans, we weren't going to make that easy. Well, we weren't going to make... Bordello of Blood in Los Angeles either. We went to Vancouver because it wasn't Los Angeles. It was a fuck you to the IA. It was a fuck you to our crew too, our very loyal crew.

worked with us for years and years and years. It was a terrible thing to do. Vancouver at the time was not what it is now, which is a great production city. It was on its way to becoming one, but it... It did not have anything like the depth or the experience or the expertise that it now has as part of its ordinary daily.

yeah, let's go shoot in Vancouver. I think the crews are like two, maybe three deep. And after that, you don't know what you were getting. So there was no reason to shoot in Vancouver. Keep in mind, it's July. And we bumped into a problem rather quickly. You know, we're shooting a horror movie and a horror movie stock and trade is night. When you shoot that far north in July, one thing you don't get a whole lot of is night in July.

The sky gets shootable dark. It's 1130 to midnight and by about 4, 430. Forget about it. The climax of Bordell of a Blood takes place in a glass church. It does. Yeah. We had one night to shoot that. And. absolute impossibility because one night that even under the best, even if we had had an 11 hour, 11 hours of darkness, it would have been a challenge. We had four and a half.

But we shouldn't have been in Vancouver. We should not. This was we didn't make that decision for a good reason. And so, like I said, every day literally was stupider than the day before. when you look at the if you look at all the filmmakers whose names are on the credits you think how is that possible you're all professionals surely you know not to make mistakes as stupid as these but You know, the big mistakes, yeah, I think you can lay the blame at Joel. A lot of the day-to-day shit.

I think was my fault because I was not up to the, I was not up to that particular task and my heart was not in it. My heart was in new Orleans. It was not making that movie. And so I, yeah, I, Why does that movie feel like no one gives a fuck? Well, if you look at Demon Knight, for starters, there's a great mythology. There is. There's a whole...

Yeah, there's a beginning, there's a middle, there's an end, there's a certain grandeur to it. And Ernest brought a lot of that to it, but it was there on the page. Psy and Ethan wrote a great script. It was about something. I'll remind you that Bordello of Blood was a student script written by two guys at USC with a great idea. Whores, vampire whores.

Bordello of Blood. That's it. That's the whole concept right there. There's nothing else beyond that. There is no mythology to it. That's why it's a movie. But it's not a very good movie. um the other thing that demon knight has and i i just have to just bring it up because of how much of a legend he was uh in his own right and we've been chatting for well over 90 minutes but the other thing demon knight had

going for it is a man by the name of Dick Miller. Wonderful. Although not a huge role for him, but anytime Dick Miller is on camera, he's going to have your attention. Uncle Willie. Just the best. Just the best. And I didn't want this conversation to be like, hey, what was it like working with this person? What was it like working with that person? But again, you have had the luxury of working with some of my favorite people that I've watched.

I just want to give a little special attention to Dick Miller because the man was – If there is a B-list Mount Rushmore, he's like the first head on it. You know what I mean? Like he was just an American legend. Indeed. Indeed it was. A lovely man on top of it. You know, I'd say that 99% of the people that I worked with were lovely. They're only the occasional difficult person, the Dennis Miller, who...

Yeah, my three leads on Bordello were not fun to work with, and they never became part of... like even under the worst circumstances you're still a community you still gotta figure it out you're all in this together and they never even became part of that so okay you know so that was kind of how the whole thing felt it kind of

But the rest of Tales from the Crypt was a family. And, you know, when actors would come, they'd have a great time. We cast a lot of people in parts they would never get to play otherwise. Getting to play killers and horrible, horrible people. A sound I'll never get out of my head. My first season on the show, we did a really good episode that Manny Cotto directed. wrote called morning mess it's about flesh-eating ghouls and it stars rita wilson and uh oh god uh stephen weber and

And Rita at that time, she had just gotten married to Tom. Their relationship was still young. And at the very last scene, Rita, there's a reveal, Rita is a ghoul. And so we shot that the last night. And I remember Tom came to the set that day. This was before he directed the episode. This was how we met Tom. He came to the set to watch Rita. And when Rita came out of makeup.

The first time in her full, full, cool regalia. And Tom was waiting outside the trailer. I remember the sound of the two of them whooping with laughter. It was the most wonderful sound I've ever. hurt it was you know it's always incredible fun to see stars as human beings because when you go to work with them You can't work with a star, but you can work with a human being. And so it's just a reminder that as you sit in the creative trench together...

going to war against the gods arraigned against you. It is good to know that you can trust each other creatively and as human beings. It helps. Yeah. Now, and, you know, in our discussion, we kind of we I don't want to say we pivoted. We've you know, we covered a wide array of conversations, but.

I kind of want to take a look at because I don't believe that certainly, you know, you may have covered it and in some of your these monologues, but I want to kind of look at like the impact and the legacy that Tales from the Cryptos had. Right. I mean, it was such a cold. And you were part of it, right? So now that, you know, time has gone on and you look back, like, how do you think Tales from the Crypt has maybe changed the landscape of like anthology television?

if at all we were one of the successes in a very difficult subsection of the entertainment world anthologies the the trick isn't having great stories really to become a memorable anthology. It's to have a great host. And it's... It's just the nature of the beast. What makes you memorable is Alfred Hitchcock. Alfred Hitchcock presents Rod Serling from the Twilight Zone. Great stories, but if you take Serling out of the picture as...

They did when they tried to remake The Twilight Zone a bunch of years ago with some great filmmakers, but without that central branding thing, Rod Serling. Or, or the Crypt Keeper. It, it really makes a huge difference. I think of something like Amazing Stories, which had some amazing stories, but what was the organizing principle? A really good example is the successor show to Tales from the Crypt. The one I got...

I say fired off, but they just simply stopped negotiating with me. They didn't want me to do that show. After Tells in the Crypt, after the seventh season, there was never going to be an eighth season of Crypt. Thank goodness. But the intention was to do a new anthology based on the EC science comics. And we had been developing ideas. And at the last second, Joel decided he didn't want me on it. So he stopped negotiating with me. And my whole pitch, what I was trying to get.

ad i i don't know maybe it pissed somebody off was what's the host now they went and did what they did And they created, if you've ever seen Perversions of Science, which was the show they made, Perversions of Science is exactly how to get it wrong. And they created the... The host on Perversions of Science is a sexy robot. It is a female robot with big robotic tits and robotic nipples.

And her whole thing basically is, you know, are you man enough to watch these stories? You know, I'm sexy, aren't I? Well, after you've played that one note. Three, four, five, six times. Man, it's spent. And it wasn't a terribly engaging note the first time. It's kind of tired and hacky. But that was the decision they made. And their success with the Crypt Keeper taught them nothing. You know, the Crypt Keeper didn't exist until the...

until the third season of Tales from the Crypt. He was, seasons one and season two, the first six and then the next 18 episodes, you know, the Crypt never went through a development process the way other TV shows do. And no one ever said, so all right, so what kind of episodes are we going to do? What are the comics we're going to take? And how are we going to bring the EC Comics?

brand into the shows and oh hey this Crypt Keeper character who is he exactly how are we going to characterize him it never happened going back to your original question of what it's like to have created this thing I just did a live event last weekend. I did a creepy con, a big horror convention in the Inland Empire here in Southern California.

And the thing that blows me away was as I sat there and signed a lot of autographs, met fans. Oh, it's the most wonderful experience. That is the best. But seeing, I must have seen two dozen. Crypt Keeper tattoos on people. Now, you've got to understand, yeah, it's Kevin's puppet, and perhaps they have the voice... in their head, but it's not the voice necessarily that they're capturing there in that tattoo. The light inside the Crypt Keeper's eyes in that tattoo is him.

his personality. It's the thing a lot of, for many, many people, this is also one of the wow things. It turns out that Tales from the Crypt was their introduction to horror. They either watched it with their parents or they watched it in spite of their parents. But it was the Crypt Keeper who either brought them in or from their parents' perspective, somehow...

Somehow made it OK, despite the fact that the creep people was frying brains and chopping people up and doing all hanging people and shooting people and doing all kinds of justice, awful things. And it was justifying the horrible things we did in the show. Somehow or other, the Crypt Keeper's personality, who he was, seemed to say, guys, it's a joke. We're having a laugh here. Okay, okay. Chill the fuck out. Well, that was me.

And to see something of one's essence imprinted permanently on someone else's flesh. You've made a connection with another human being. It is indescribable. It's just the abstraction of it. how an idea got from here to there and i mean it opens up and we we kind of covered it earlier in the show but you know just even the notion of dead man's chest right now you're getting quite you know like an episode about a tattoo and now

You know, that art imitating life, you know, imitating art. So just kind of one little circle. One is imitating the other. You know, we'll figure that out in time. Yeah, exactly. Just because you brought up the fans and obviously being able to go to conventions, interaction. Obviously, you know, to the point you just mentioned, there are fans out there, myself included, that are still fans of the show decades later, right? So I'm just kind of curious.

If there's any like surprising feedback that you've ever received from, you know, years and years of fans, you know, talking to you after, if there's anything that any like nuggets that just stand out like, oh, that was that was an interesting kind of feedback or thought. or story that anybody's ever shared with you that just kind of like stands out? In a sense, every fan's story when I get the chance to go face-to-face with them.

Every single one of their experiences is unique. I don't remember, nothing comes to mind because each and every time someone starts to tell me their experience of watching the thing that I, I put my heart and soul into. Yeah. It is a huge reward all by itself. It's not the smoke being blown up one's ass. It's the fact that you told a story. To someone. It's not like we're sitting around a campfire here. In this remote way. And it touched them and they came and they found you. And they. That.

human connection storytelling at a vast distance and then having the thing boomerang you catch the boomerang it doesn't hit you in the head although it can it makes the whole creative experience chef's kiss Like how many during, you know, while you were working on the show, obviously you had mentioned earlier that it took six people to make the, you know, the puppet kind of work, right? Were there multiple like.

Puppets itself, like, you know, have you ever – do you have a Crypt Keeper puppet yourself or anything like that? I did for a long time. Okay. And it – Having been a long time, those things don't last forever. The stuff, the skin and the foam texture underneath. unless kept inside a museum-like situation yeah they over time they go bad mine eventually died uh and I've got a couple things that people have given me since then. I might in storage somewhere have.

One of the little stand-up plastic crip keepers, seated crip keeper things, I might have that somewhere. But when I went through, it's funny, when I went through my long dark period. when I couldn't get hired and, you know, everyone would look at, tell us from the crypt and say, well, what have you done lately? And for a long, long, long time, that was an anvil around my neck.

It was the thing that kept me from getting hired in many, many, many situations. Nobody would look at like that. That was all I could do. Suddenly I was a one trick pony. And so it's really only recently that Tales from the Crypt went from being something I had to work against to an asset that opens doors. This one.

for instance. That's a really, really recent change. And I'm delighted, you know, that Crip lasted long enough in the public imagination that it could refine enough, a kind of critical mass of passion out there for people with a memory of it that. Well, it's about to start streaming again this year, I believe, is what I keep hearing. And that will give it a chance to really find a new audience who hopefully will see it.

in a very different way. I'd be curious to see how Gen, you know, how Gen Z would react to Something like that. Would that be an everything old is new again kind of a thing? Being little morality tales in a time utterly devoid of it. I don't know. It might have a certain kitschy appeal. I've got two Gen Z kids. I do. I've got a 26-year-old and a 23-year-old. You know, strangely, the kinds of things that I created in the world that I came from are suddenly, they're being rediscovered again.

by my kids who are who there's just the vast the vast troves of of tv shows that that i made that other people made in in in that It's turning into a golden age, it turns out. In part, that's going to be because places like Netflix and all the other streamers, they cannot keep up. You can't keep up with the demand for new content. You're going to have to rely on a catalog. And you're going to have to keep moving the catalog around to keep your subscribers from...

going somewhere else to find more interesting content. And so with the streaming, you know, it was great while it lasted the... that little burst of streaming activity when everyone was throwing incredible gobs of money to try to fill the, the streaming mall, because if you can watch a show in one sitting, that's wonderful. But then there's tomorrow. When are you going to watch that? And it's really hard to create that much content.

At the pace that the audience would want it. It was inevitable that this was going to hit a wall. And yes, it would demonstrate its utter unsupportability. as a business model and it did it did and that's one of the reasons why tv is in such a horrific state right now when you look back at the end of tales from the crypt you know um I think you probably imagine I have had some time upon reflection, but like, how do you feel about.

uh, the show's conclusion or at least, you know, like your, your, your chapter in it. Uh, did you feel that you may have some more stories that you were willing to tell? I think you had kind of alluded to the fact that like by season six, like we were kind of. kind of done. But did you feel it was maybe the right time for you, for the show to kind of pack it in when, well, when you left and then when the show ultimately concluded as well? If one had hindsight.

as one was doing things we would never have done a season seven we've moved into a science fiction show sooner and had perhaps a little more creative integrity We had a limited number of comic books to work with. The deal was everything had to be based at least on the comic book's title, if not the comic book itself. And of the various tales from the crypt, the vault of horror, the three or four different suspense stories, of all the various comics that we had that were part of our...

Our collection that we could and had to choose from, there were like 220 total comics, but cut out half of them because really the stories were just dated or just, no, no, no, no, no. So a hundred comics to work with at best. All right. And of that hundred, there really were six or seven variations on the theme in various degrees of. Yeah, that works. But also, well, that's kind of dated. And so really the number of comic books we had to work with was limited. And after every season...

It was more limited. So by the time we got to season six, we were scraping the bottom of the barrel. Season seven is what's underneath the barrel. Just in terms of the raw material to work with. And, you know, the comic book you're working from doesn't inspire you. Now you're inventing everything. And when you've told the same stories or at that point, several times over. It's. It's exhausting and exhausted. And so I think we really had spent everything that there was at that time.

in in that franchise were we to redo it there is a way to redo it there's a very simple way to redo tales from the crypt you just can't call it tales from the crypt As M. Night Shyamalan learned, you don't need the comics. You need the Crypt Keeper. Well, the Crypt Keeper could introduce any kind of stories he wanted to. Just don't call them tales from the crypt.

Well, there you go. You're off and running. Because EC Comics and Tales from the Crypt doesn't own that kind of story. It doesn't. It just owns stories. Told that way under the name Tales from the Crypt. You're right when you think of like a host, right? Because obviously Tales from the Crypt was something different, but you've had other shows that have, you know, like horror hosts, right? Whether it's Elvira or whether it's Joe Bob Briggs, right? I mean, you have...

Sven Gulli, right? I mean, you've had all these. So, yeah, there is that. And people eat that shit up like they do. Like it's, you know, some really, really good stuff. So, yeah, 100 percent. The Crypt Keeper can come back and. Just wouldn't be necessarily Tales from the Crypt. Yeah. It wouldn't be called that, but it's the Crypt Keeper. The Crypt Keeper presents to the Crypt. Yeah. Whatever, you know, or.

Ask the creep keeper to come up with something clever as a title. Are there certain legacies that you like being tied to in positive reflection? I think when we were... Firing on all cylinders, I think Tales from the Crypt was some absolutely world-class, timeless television. And I'm really, really proud of the writing. In the intervening years through my own personal journey, I think I evolved from being, pat myself on the back, a really good writer to a pretty damn good storyteller.

And it's that evolution into being a storyteller that I hope that is where my legacy really lies. Perfect. And my podcast. Where all of that rests. I think where my legacy will rest, I hope, will be in the podcast storytelling that I... I've just begun to embark upon. Wonderful. Obviously, I will share...

The the link as you find the podcast, I've subscribed myself. So I'm now part of the family. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. As you know, every little bit helps. And I will return the favor. Absolutely. What do you like to watch? Do you watch things like now? Like what type of entertainment do you like to consume? Yeah, there's some great, great content. being created right now. It's so exciting because outside the bonds of network sensors,

Really, writers go all kinds of wonderful places. I'm kind of curious to see where Yellow Jackets goes, frankly. That was such a cool series. Just went some deliciously dark... places and and that's yeah that's always exciting uh right now every every something i said somebody somewhere is it that that little show it's Everyone, every, oh, I forget. There's a little small show about a town in Kansas. The people in the town in Kansas is such a delightful, quirky, human show. Yeah, I...

Great characters. Great characters will always... Well, Alan Katz, that's all I've got for you. I just want to say thank you so much for for hanging out with me. This has been an absolute treat. Anytime you want to come and, you know, obviously you cover it on your podcast. But if you ever want to just rip on Bordello. or if you ever want to do a watch-along commentary, I could always go back and... If you would like to set that up, that would be...

That would be a hoot, because really, it's not possible for me to watch that movie. I don't see a movie. I see... Oh, that's when I got kicked in over there. That's when I, oh yeah, that's when Dennis did that. And that's when Angie pulled that shit off. Oh, fucking hell. It really is. It's a, it's a, it's. It's a legacy of it's a personal Waterloo. And so that's what you would be hearing. I love it. You know, and I mentioned it last time, but it was funny because, again, I watched.

You know, shoot, you know, certainly the first four or five seasons, you know, like when I was growing up, because that's when I was. And then my teenage years, I went and saw Demonite, you know, in the theater. And then when Bordello of Blood came in. I mentioned it last episode, but yeah, seeing that opening night and I'm like, oh, oh, this isn't one of the better ones. But I've loved and thoroughly have enjoyed.

know going on this ride and you you know just being very very candid about it it is wonderful and can i tell you it's something to be said about um You know, I don't know. I love really good art, but I also do find satisfaction in watching less than perfect things and and hearing some of the stories on to your point, you know, like how to not make a movie. I mean, there is something very, very.

strong about that. And I know you cover on the podcast, but that's, I mean, that is a lesson in itself and just, you know, learning and just from an educational perspective that, and it's, it's, it's, it's. It's a ride, that film. And can I tell you, it still hurts inside to hear someone say, well, that wasn't very good. That wasn't as good as... To know that you failed to reach the bar yourself. That is...

It's awful to hear, but one needs to hear it. It's a simple fact of life. When you let the audience down, look out below. But that's the whole thing. It's really, thank you for keeping us honest. And that's, hey, if you can't stand the heat of this kitchen, get out, man. That is part of the deal. Nor should you simply accept whatever we throw at you and go, well, I've got the name on it. I guess I got to like it. No.

No, no, no, no, no. We all have to respect equally the creators and the consumers. And the moment any of us starts not respecting it the same way, we'll go to hell. Well, I will be in touch because I do want to take a little trip down and watch this again. I think it would be really enjoyable. We would make it enjoyable.

We will. Absolutely. I can't stress enough. This has been an absolute delight. Thank you so much. And if there's anything that you want, however you want to close it on out, I'll give you the final words. But that's all I've got this time around. No, you know, this was a delightful conversation, the first of many that we're going to have. Absolutely. All right, ladies and gentlemen, Alan Katz. Thank you.

Again, oh my Lord. Thank you, Alan. What a great episode. Did I deliver on that promise in the beginning or did I deliver? Alan is an amazing guest and thank you so much for being on the show. I'm excited. You know, I you know, he kind of teased that Tales from the Crypt might might make a might make an appearance on the streaming platforms this year. If that's true, I think we're all in for a treat. Right.

But in the short term, you can definitely check out a lot of episodes on YouTube. We kind of tease that the quality isn't nearly as good. And that's true. You can still find Tales from the Crypt on DVD, my local video store. They have up here in the Atlanta area. So you can still find episodes of Tales from the Crypt, even if you don't, you know, you can't watch it directly on your own screen. But man, I know this has been a lengthy episode, so I'll keep this wrap up very short.

Again, thank you so much to the listeners for checking us out. Please, if you haven't done so, subscribe, rate, tell your friends. Check out Alan's podcast as well. I will provide a link in the show notes. But that is all I have for you this week. I will be back again

Yeah, why not? I'll be back next week. I know we've been a little all over the map, but yeah, I'll do another episode next week. And I think that one will be a good one, too. So that's all I've got. We'll see you next time on another episode of Stanford Cinema.