Episode 772: V.I. Warshawski (1991)

So if we don't want anything ruined, please turn off the podcast and come back after you've seen the movie. So, Dahalia, when was the first time you saw Via Warshowski and what did you think?

I think I got really kind of turned off because of War of the Roses and just how I don't know, this sounds so weird for me to say me, of all people, just how mean spirited that movie was. It was okay for me the entire way through until there was a implication of a dog being eaten. That was a bridge too far. But pretty much everything else I mean especially, I mean I was a big fan of Kathleen Turner. I definitely went to see The Jewel of the Nile and Romancing the Stone when those were movies

were out. I saw The Man with Two Brains. I wasn't old enough to see Crimes of Passion in the movie theater, but I definitely saw that late night on cable and definitely enjoyed it. It made quite an impression to a twelve year old, So yeah, that was a

big moment for me. But this one, Yeah, I didn't see it until just a few years ago, and yeah, I was kind of underwhelmed by it, and it seemed to suffer from that thing that we get where we decide that we have to pair up somebody, especially a police person or a detective, with a little girl or a little boy, and man o man, does that usually not fly for me? And it really didn't fly for me in this movie.

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

It's like, okay, so we're saying, fuck, We've got some pretty good violence in here, not terribly, you know, not peeling back fingernails or anything like that. You know, I just watched Drive again the other night, and it's like, okay, yeah, that's uh. That's got some good violence with like hammers and things like that. But yet you've got the little kid in here, which feels like such a PG thirteen thing to do. So it just feels like this movie is like almost fighting with itself.

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

body conscious kinds of things. And this is not to say that American women are not full of contradictions, but like, in the case of this, we're trying to build a character here, and it's just conflicts from the beginning that really really don't make sense and more to the point, don't connect with who I think they're target audience should have been, which is you know me, and I'm presuming you tell ya.

they decided to dilute all this message. I mean, the kid isn't in the book either, so somehow they kind of inserted all these other messages into the movie that don't work because they aren't in the original source material.

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

the motherhood and all that. I mean, we have this whole dichotomy of her VII as the good mother and then the I keep wanting to say stepmother, even though she's actually the girl's biological mother, but the girl's mother and she's basically like the evil stepmother type of character. And meanwhile VII is like the virtuous mother. And you even have the whole thing with the egg and the little girl taking care of the egg to show like what kind of mother is she and that she keeps

making mistakes and the egg keeps breaking. It's that whole homech thing where you know, you get the egg and you have to take care of it, and it's like, of course, he just hard boiled the egg. Don't worry about it. Just hard boil the egg. Pretend that you're good, and then maybe on the last day you bring in a replacement egg. You're good. That's all you have to do.

But like they even make that very pointed shot of the broken egg on the dock after she runs away from basically learning that her father has been blown up, and it's like, Okay, yeah, I don't know what that has to do with with his death, but definitely shows how upset she is, and you know, shows that she's also still not that great of a like the girl a little girl, is not a good mother as well, and it's like, is this a journey for her to learn how to be a good mom? I don't know.

I mean, this movie just frustrates me a lot. I like certain things about it, but other things just kind of get under my skin and irk me watching.

Doing a little research, we find out that like the writer who really salvaged this ultimately doesn't even get credit on the picture, right goes through all these iterations that you know, I don't really get, and I mean I don't want to be such a second wave feminist about it, but like this really feels like some misogynist idea of what women have to put up with, you know, So the you know, being sex harassed while you're jogging, Yes,

it definitely happens. Does it happen like that? No, it's worse. Right like those of us who have been sexually harassed, especially when we're feeling like at our like grubbiest and most disgusting, which happens a lot. It's not something that you just like always brush off so easily. Right, if we've had somebody who had any kind of interiority shooting that, looking at it writing it, I think that sequence could have had a lot more. It could have been a

lot more effectiveness. It could have landed more with the audience is you know, And I feel like that that idea just infiltrates the entire entire the entire film. Going back to what you were saying about the moldy refrigerator, one of the things that's so fascinating about.

other stuff. So in that respect, it makes sense that of course, you know, her clothes are going to be on the floor, the refrigerator is going to be a disaster. But the problem is is the movie is judging that and because it's a woman, and the woman is supposed to be a good mother or a good housewife, et cetera. And so a woman isn't allowed to have a moldy refrigerator.

And so it's you know, if, as you said, like, if this was a male detective, we wouldn't bat an eye, but because it's a female, it's it's presented in this very judgmental way.

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

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

scene inside of that. And she just kind of makes a flip throwaway line later on as far as like she really needs money, but she didn't want to work for this guy, and it's like, okay, well, why even show the scene? It just seems so superfluous because it's like, and I don't know, maybe this is twenty twenty five Mike White talking versus nineteen ninety one Mike White talking. But I see Stephen Root show up in a movie and I'm just like, okay, cool, I'm here for it.

What's he going to do? This is great? I'm really looking forward to seeing. Oh he's off the screen and we'll never see him again. I kept waiting for us to come back to him, and like when Wayne Knight shows up, I'm just like, Okay, well, ma, you know these two heavy character actors. I'm like, maybe get Wayne

Knight earlier in the movie instead of this guy. I don't know what's going on, but I'm just like, I would have liked to have had him come back or have any sort of impact on the narrative at all, and since he doesn't, I'm just like, why do we even have this scene? Is it just to show her in a sausage factory, her contrapose against the background where she's got her high heels and there's like a piece of meat in front of her feet.

identified with what Chicago is. And I feel like, you know, listening to some of the commentary from the director, you know, I think that he was really looking for lots of ways to get really interesting and engaging shots, you know, much like he was able to find a location where he could see Wrigley feel from the apartment window. Right, it feels to me like maybe this was just like his attempt at like making something that feels Chicago e In a way, I feel like that's a generous reading

of it. But at the same time, like I don't understand otherwise why that scene ended up in the final cut.

And I think they even talk about that in the of this which is so completely different. And I know, I think Jeff Canoo says like we adapted one and a half books, and I don't know, there's a strong

thread of one book that goes through this. Yeah, I don't know if there's ever a book where she gets peered up with a little girl but the whole thing of the shipping factory or the shipping and all that and that again going back to that script from nineteen ninety, I think it was that really even has more of the shipping stuff, but even to the point of just to go to the mystery at the heart of this whole movie. She meets this guy in a bar. He

shows up at her house. What do we think in like an hour later or is it like the next night or something. I'm trying to even figure out the timeline of when he shows up just unannounced at her place with the little girl and he dumps her there with uh Warshowski and then he dies, and now she has to solve his murder. And she's basically solving the murder for the little girl, right, She's not solving the murder for the guy. But you go back to the book,

that's her cousin. That's her cousin that she grew up with and knew very very well and really liked this guy, her cousin Boom Boom, who worked was on the Blackhawks. So she has a real vested interest in solving his murder. And he's this outsider, he's not a brother to these

other shipping people. He's working for these shipping people, and he has stumbled onto something that he shouldn't and he's basically like the more amateur detective putting all of these things together, and that's what gets him killed, as opposed to this where it's these three brothers, and I guess fratricide is just a lot easier than killing a stranger in this world. So three brothers who by the way, looked nothing alike, including the one guy who looks like

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

the bartender's got food for her. She's like, hey, have some of this, but v I is not happy with that. She wants the box and we find out that inside of the box is this pair of red bedazzled shoes. Puts on the shoes, She's just like, oh, good shoes make everything better. As a man, I'm not sure about that. Do you guys just like love putting on new shoes? Is it? Can either of you explain this one to me?

to see more of it. It doesn't necessarily need to go into like Emmel de Marco's territory, but as somebody who's got too many shoes for my own good and you know, not always a lot of money to like justify that expense, I feel like we should have seen a little bit more of that to make it feel authentic, to just even the delivery of that line. Nothing beats some good pair of shoes, whatever that line happens to be.

the bar at all times? For me, I did to have so Yeah, and then she does use those shoes literally to pick up that guy because she sticks out her leg and hits him, hits his leg and shoe pops off, And we get that joke later on too, where she gets accosted by these two thugs, two care directors who I mostly well, I love Lee Arenberg and he was fantastic and freaked, but I love him especially and the other guy from Seinfeld. So this is like this Seinfeld is on the air at this point, I

think are just about to be on the air. So there's like between those two and then Wayne Knight. This is such a time capsule of like early nineties sitcoms like with them and then what Stephen Root was on What News Radio? At this point, I think I'm turning this in like the Root cast here, I'm just like, let's talk more about Stephen Root. She has that whole thing about you know, oh, you didn't pick up my shoe, and luckily who is it? One of her friends gives

it back to her. Because she's got this like friend group between like the older woman doctor who takes care of her. She's got Jay Saunders, who's a reporter who I guess they sleep together. Maybe they used to be a couple, but she does talk about how she catches him cheating and things, and she pretty much just knows that he's a dog and knows how to control this

dog too. The whole thing where she calls and leaves a message, you know, don't do this, don't report about this thing, this thing and this thing, and then the next morning they're in the morning paper. I mean, you would think maybe she would pretend to be mad at him at least, but yeah, this whole idea of like she knows everything about this guy, can can control him perfectly. And I love Jay Saunders by the way. Every time he shows up and stuff, he's great. I always associate

him with well another Wayne Knight film, JFK. I alwayo associate him working with Kevin Costner in that one, and to see him and Michael Rooker. I would love if they had been like detective partners in a movie at some point.

I really really come down on. I think this is this is a script problem at its root.

and a lot of those times. They blend those sequences in those shots very very well, to the point where I actually thought this whole thing had been shot in Chicago.

they're so many long shots in the movie. He's very fond of them.

somebody else's bank account information. You would think that that would not be good because they're already giving the little girl trouble depositing a check for somebody else. Which if somebody wants to deposit a check in my account, feel free, that's absolutely fine. I don't know if I can like turn off that safety feature, feel free to just deposit whatever money you want into my account. But we've got

that security. But then later on she's like, oh, hey, here's this account number, and he just pulls up and turns the thing around, is like, oh, here you go. Look at all of these stumps. Oh my little girl, you sure have a lot of withdrawn checks. And you know, however, many I think when they say like billions of dollars in death kind of thing. So it's like, wow, but

you're fine just showing that to anybody. I'm not trying to like cinema sens this movie or anything, but you know, I like a really well drawn detective story, and there are just so many little pieces in here. I'm like, oh, yeah, that could have been better, that could have been tighter. And I want to like this movie because I do like so many of the people in it. I do

find the story to be fairly interesting. I just wish the mystery had been a little bit more to it, a little bit extra than where it is, because it doesn't feel it doesn't even feel like that much of a mystery at the end, because when you see that little rooster guy and you see the mom you're like, oh, well, these people aren't very nice people at all, and then they end up basically like screening each other over and they're the bad guys. I'm like, Okay, shocker.

have a franchise like that. Nobody's ever going to want to watch a female Private Eye film franchise because this movie was you know, not you know, not what it could have been. And you know, and I think another thing that is not to be overlooked is that this film came out like the same summer that Thelman Louise did.

And this was something that was really part of my own, like my own visceral reaction to this is that I went to see Thelma and Louise and came out just riding high and ready to just to like fucking destroy everything, you know, And like, you know, I just graduated college and I was like, now what am I going to do?

is the FM fatal in body Heat. But no matter what she's doing, you know, Joan in those jewel denile and romancing the Stone movies. She's wonderful in that, and yeah, I just I really, which is funny because when I think about it, I'm like thinking of other female protagonists over the last few years, and I just popped onto that.

What was that movie with Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell where she was a mystery writer very much like Joan was in Romancing the Stone, and then she gets thrown into a real life adventure very much like Joan. It's like, I didn't realize that that movie was kind of a remake of Romancing the Stone until just right now. It was named after a cat and I can't remember what the cat's name was, our Gyle, our Gyle. But another movie that just you know, women can't open a movie,

remember where we had that whole thing going for a while. Women, you just can't have a woman led film or woman directed film. You look at the examples quote unquote examples that were given and it's like, oh, look at what a mess Chloe's ou made of the Eternals. It's like, I'm sorry, but the eternals were a fucking mess before anybody showed up to direct that thing.

to a lot more. I listened to the audiobook and the narrator of it did a fantastic job, and just yeah, Pareski's pros was really compelling. And I was like, like you were saying, this could have been a franchise. We could have had like a whole series of these, but instead, I know there's other female detectives that are out there where it's like, please, can somebody bring some of these ladies to the screen, like some of those what the Sue Grafton books, some of those things. It's like, yeah,

come on, Laura Litman. Yeah, there's tons of great female detectives and nope, they just get passed by in favor of the male ones.

to do these female private eyes. And for instance, going back to what you were saying about the shoes and the sausage factory, where you were saying, like, you know, why is she wearing those shoes? In the Catch, the female private eyes are wearing like these stilettos, and it's like, really a private eye is gonna wear stilettos, you know, as they're like supposedly tailing someone or like, you know,

running behind some bushes or whatever. But it's Yeah, for some reason, Hollywood cannot figure out how to do an effective female private eye.

introduced to Charles Derney. It's funny we're going to be talking about him again in two weeks when we talk about the film Cop. But he you know, I'm sure one thing that you talk about in your private diet class is the whole relationship between detectives and police. What's that relationship like? And sometimes it's uneasy, sometimes it's very friendly. This one, I mean, Dirning is basically her surguate father,

which I don't tend to get with most detectives. It feels more like a friendship or a rivalry, but not a father daughter relationship.

of the mold and be more antiquistic. And I want to say again, sorry to sound like a broken record, but going back to the book, I believe it is very antagonistic, and it's like, yeah, I mean so many times Private Eye and movies are former police officers that wanted to branch out on their own, that couldn't play by the rules, or you know, just somebody up and coming that cannot get along with the police and who, yeah, either there in the way or like you said, the

police are in the way. And the police are always the ones that come in and they want to make snap decisions and say this is how it happened. And the detective is always the one that wants to dig deeper, wants to find out what's really going on, and isn't happy with pat answers. A lot of times, the detective will blow up their own case if they find out that they've been wrong.

other than Jack Reacher. The guy who's playing him now on TV on Prime, he's built for the part, and he's fantastic, And I love watching that show, and I love they're using long form TV to tell us a very intricate detective story and even making nods back to the former quote unquote books, the former seasons. I really like that, And I could really see a v I

Worshowski having her whole series of adventures. Why not, you know, cast somebody really strong in that role, somebody that's very compelling, like Kathleen Turner. Let's see it today.

And in walks Pierce Brosnan and he just assumes that role as a complete con artist basically, And that's the whole show, which is just a bizarre.

this because the books are narrated by Vi Worshovski. The movie they were talking about having it narrated, and then Disney changed their mind and said no, no, no narration, And then they said, oh, you know what, let's have narration. And by that time, Kathleen Turner's like, you know what, fuck you, because she was really the force behind this, Like she's the one who put together this package. You know, It's like she interviewed Canoe. I'm sure that she had

a hand in picking the writers. She was very into this, and I really wanted her to succeed, you know, like, especially at this point in her career. I think her having a series would have just really put a fine point on just what a great actress she is. And it says she keeps ending up in shitty other stuff. You know, It's like after this movie, I don't know.

I mean, of course I love Dumb and Dumber two, but I'm trying to think of other stuff that she did after this, where she's like, oh, yeah, yeah, that was a great thing. Well, I guess serial one, serial Mom came curial mom, does it? Yes, So yeah, I think.

and Noir films have voiceovers. It's part of the whole genre style. And so the fact that they said that she couldn't have a voiceover is really like taking away her voice. It's really emasculating her. And then obviously they realized that they had messed up, but it was too late. But I was I thought it was really interesting that they had they because they didn't. They didn't explain why they didn't give her a voiceover, but they just they

didn't want to give her a voiceover. And I feel like that movie is supposed to have a voiceover, because those kinds of movies are supposed to have a voiceover.

do this, rule number two. Do this. It's like that would have worked so much better as a voiceover, And had we not had that kid there, I just really had problems with having this little girl there and just kind of glombing onto stuff and being that you know, little miss Marker type character where you're just like, okay, yeah, here she goes. She's gonna start crying. And I don't blame the actress and stuff, but there are a few times.

There's one major scene where she like kind of breaks down, father's dead, all this kind of stuff, and I just feel like, oh, this is the Oscar moment, you know, this is what they're going to play at the Academy Awards when they're just like and nominated for vi I Warshawski, this actress, and then you know, like they play this clip and she's just tearing up and stuff. It was

just a little much for me at times. And again that could just be you know, nineteen ninety one, I might have been fine with it, but in twenty twenty five and I'm just like, okay, can we end up seeing pretty soon? This is getting to be a little long in the tooth.

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

Warren Light. And we'll be back with all of that right after these brief messages.

First up, we're going to hear from the creator of vi I Warshawski, Sarah Peretsky. Can you tell me a little bit about you growing up and becoming a writer. How did you decide to endeavor in that pursuit.

She was a fantastic storyteller, and then became a children's librarian and she was just adored by every child in Lawrence, Kansas. So that's where I learned just the sheer joy of stories. But I never imagined myself as a published writer. That sort of just evolved with time.

New York writing world. And I finally ended up getting a job as a secretary, and then I came back to Chicago because it was just easier to live in Chicago than in New York. But as a person just writing for myself, writing stories, really fairy tales when I was young, and then in my teens when I really got engaged by crime novels, crime fiction. Then I started writing my own crime short stories. And then in my

twenties Bad Love Affair. I would write a story just absolutely evisceraating the disgusting human being who had abandoned me,

so revenge story. But all the time I was reading crime fiction, and especially when I started reading American noir fiction Raymond Chandler, dash Ol Hammett, the great Golden Age of noir fiction in America, and saw the way that women were depicted, and a woman was almost always going to be the main bad person in a Chandler novel, and she was going to use her body like bridget O'Shaughnessy and Hammett's Maltese Fall Country, was going to use her body to get good boys to do bad things,

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

I worked for a guy who was just a total horrible person. His only good quality was that he was as horrible to the men who worked for him as he was to the women. It was just an all round jerk. It was Chicago, it was October. The trees in Grant Park had lost their leaves. And for anyone who's watching this, who's been in Chicago at all, there's a red building across the street from the Art Institute, the CNA Insurance building. We were up on the thirty

sixth floor looking down at Grant Park. Everything was dead. My lips were saying, gosh, Fred, heck of an idea, and the over my head was saying you unspeakable, unprintable, unthinkable, turkey bird, And really literally my detective came to me in that moment. So seven or eight years of writing a few pages here and there, I thought, oh God, no, she's me and my friends. Only she says what's in the thought balloon because she doesn't care if someone fires her.

for publication in the Northwestern Night School. So every I can't remember Tuesday night, I think it doesn't matter what day of the week. I drove the twenty miles up to the Northwestern campus and Stu was just immensely supportive,

really liked the idea of the character. I was copying all these tropes from the thirties and forties because because I really didn't have confidence that I could forge my own path, and he explained how outdated they were, that it would date my work, and so he just gave me the encouragement I needed to make VII bolder, more contemporary,

and bring her to the finish line. Also, the most generous additional thing he did was to send my manuscript to his agent, Dominic Abel, who's been my agent ever since, and Dominic Dominic liked the book, but he said she needs flaws. I'd made her too perfect. So I gave her my flaws, which is a short temper, short fused temper, and a lack of interest in housekeeping. The first book, Indemnity Only, she was not as fully formed as she became with time. So other flaws have emerged as time

has passed. But man, I was so lucky to be writing when I was, back when there were a lot of publishers, because I got forty rejection letters before dial Press agreed to buy the book. And my favorite rejection letter, I think it was from Simon and Schuster. But all my papers are now at the Newberry Library. I'd have to go into their archive and look through and say,

who was it who wrote this? And they said, of a book set in Chicago had regional interest only, and not enough people read in the Upper Midwest to make it worth our while to publish a book set there.

and they'll think, Oh, we didn't get it. Now we do, and that will change.

And I don't know if you're old to remember the IBM desktop computers, but we were offering those as special deals. And then I started having more responsibility. I was on the road two weeks a month. A year went by where I didn't have time or energy to write. After three books, I thought, Okay, it's now or never, and I quit my day job. And I was just lucky in how my career evolved that and lucky that I was married to a really wonderful person who wanted me

to thrive and flourish in my creative work. The fact that the money was less did not bother him for one second, which was also a wonderful gift, one of many that I had from him over the forty seven years we were together.

I went. When we got home, I started doing the research into Great Lakes shipping and created a story that would involve blowing up a ship in the locks. And then it was clear that it would be really good if I actually had some experience with one of those freighters. So I started calling the companies in Chicago that I knew shipped on the Lakes, and they all just paid

basically hung up on me. But we were at the Sioux on vacation, and I started writing down the names of the shipping companies which are on the hull of the ship, and Canada Este the ship, which I learned later was the biggest shipper on the Great Lakes. I called them their head office in Montreal, and the guy I was transferred to this is nineteen eighty two eighty three. I had a pay phone outside the Sioux Locks a

guy who answered the phone Friday afternoon. He said, do you want to sail for a day, a week, a month or a year? And I had a week of vacation left at the insurance company, and I said a week. And he said call me back tomorrow morning, Saturday morning. And I called back and he said, be at Peer whatever number it was, in thunder Bay, which is the westernmost port on Lake Superior, at eight o'clock Monday morning, and the master of the J. W. McGiffin will be

ready to let you board and sail with them. So we drove Courtney with our golden retriever at the time, drove like maniacs the six hundred miles around to thunder Bay. Then he said goodbye to me and drove back to pick me up at Nira Falls. And I had no idea what to expect, but I was expecting because we toured these ships at the museum in sus Saint Marie. He was expecting a hammock in a dark cubbyhold.

giant boilers and pistons and everything. And then I'm thinking, the last person to be in that stateroom was the head of the Canada Green Board and basically high ranking people and shipping and green and so on. And I'm thinking, I have six hundred dollars in my bank account. Can I check long enough to I have no idea what this will cost. And finally, the last morning, when we were getting before we were docking at the Wellham Canal, which raises the ships up to the Saint Laurent seaway.

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

sat there typing away on my HP. Then you'd fill up the memory, you'd have to answer everything to a floppy pull it out, and it's just so bizarre. My husband was one of the first physicists to use computers in experimental work, and they had a machine that had seventy kilobytes of memory, and they with the whole thing was writing programs that shifted pro code in and out of the core of the machine, and of course it was the size of ten refrigerators or something. But yeah,

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

And then so I had a number of options that expired, and then suddenly Kathleen Turner wanted to play VII, so that it was I want to say, around the time I wrote my fifth book, so eighty six, eighty seven, something like that, And suddenly it had to have been later than that because the movie came out I think in ninety ninety one, so it must have been around

eighty nine. Anyway, Kathleen apparently owed Disney a movie and that was how the deal came about, and she really wanted to play the character, so that was I was very fortunate that the character spoke to her personally in such a way. Even though the movie itself ended up not being particularly well put together, but it still just expanded the number of people who knew what I was doing.

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

glad to show you around tomorrow. And he said, no, this is just a courtesy call to let you know that we're taking over the product you used to be involved in. I was like, what the product I used to be involved in? My heart, my soul, my gizzick so well, slap in the face, and a realization that I had no power in this situation. So they were going to do what they were going to do. I saw the script. There were things that I wished they weren't doing. The script that they were beyond and looked

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

and how I try to see people. There were things like that, and then they wanted an explosion, so they blew something up and they had a good time doing that. There were things that were fun that I hadn't thought about because they were good cinematically, chasing on the Chicago River that was just fun. And of course Kathleen was always a strong presence on the screen or when she was in her heyday. There were definitely pluses and so on.

The big plus wasn't actually the movie itself, but it used to be where v I lived that she overlooked Wriggley Field, and they actually rented, and they not rented an apartment, but they persuaded someone with an apartment to let them film from in the living room. They rented Wrigley Field, and I got to run the bases. Even if you go on a paid tour, you are never allowed on that sacred grass. So there I was. It was night, they were shooting at night. I was out

in the outfield. Andre Dawson, great outfielder for originally the Expos and ended his career with the Cobs. I was standing where he had been spitting only hours before. So I'd melt the cat and kissed the turf, and then I went and ran the bases. Now I am not an athlete. I did play baseball for the country school to room country school I went to, and I was terrible, but everyone had to play because that was how you

got nine people on a team. And I thought, okay, I'll slide into home and the extras are in the stands. They're cheering because they're bored. Nothing is happening or waiting for whatever scene is being set up. And I'm rounding the bases and I'm waving, and I'm thinking, oh my god, this is why athletes keep doing this even after their careers are clearly over, because the crowd, the cheering. And then I get to home plate and I thought, I have no idea how to slide, so I just fell

head first onto home plate. And sadly, in those days before cell phones, there's no footage of my career at Wrigleyfield.

but also they're interested in doing something. And then I'm very lucky right now to be represented by creative artists Bruce Naker. And you never know the future Eliza ahead, as Mortsaul always used to say, but something could happen, and that would be great. I've lived a long time with nothing happening, so I'm not hanging my hat on it. But it's nice to know that people still care about the character and think about doing something with her on screen.

Even though she's small compared to how I envisioned VII, she does have that kind of she just eat my shorts kind of Bradson's in the attitude, and at the same time that she's just irresistible. She can say stuff like that and people just take him from her because because she's Jamie Lee Curtis. Yeah, but of course when Kathleen said she wanted to do it, she was a superstar at that point, and it was quite an experience.

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

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

of chess playing brain. If this person does this, this person, I would say, I write more as an explorer, someone who I set my characters out and they're walking a trail, and then that trail leads to an impenetrable forest or a swamp or something, and I can see the book isn't working, and so I pull back and go back. Each time I do that, it comes more into focus. And I wish I wrote as many of my peers do a book two books a year, but I can't

think that way, and it's just it's frustrating. But Christmas Day I was on page two hundred and seventy, and New Year's Day I was on page ninety. But now I'm back to one seventy. Trail is going uphill, not into a small and you'd think you'd get to a point in your life where you would know ahead of time that it was that this trial was an error.

But it's not that way for me, And the word on the page really matters to me a lot, writing as carefully as I can, no sloppy grammar, No I'm gonna instead of I am going to because I think it looks bad on the page. You talk like that, but you it doesn't look good on the page when

you write like that. And the other thing, going back to the very beginning, Stuart Kaminski when he was teaching this class, he cautioned us all everyone in the class, that slang dates you more than it makes you look current and hip, and especially now with the net, slang is So that's something that I tend to shy away from.

love them. I watched every episode twice, but I did have to go look up the CPI multiplier to figure out that things in what seemed like nothing in nineteen in nineteen fifty five seemed like nothing to us was actually millions of dollars in today's dollars.

just never thought about it in that way. In a very sort of ironic twist of fate, I moved to Israel in the eighties and ended up getting work there on first like TV show that they were doing, educational television network, and then went to work for Manachem Golan, who famously had Cannon Films in the eighties, and they're the guys who made all the Chuck Norris movies, either did a breakdancing movie, Electric Boogaloo or something. Anyway, there I got a lot of experience and ended up making

my first feature in Tel Aviv. And then once I did that, I was like, I think I can do this, like we're a living So, with a lot of hubris and a lot of ignorance, moved to La saying this is what I was going to do with the wife and a one year old and not really knowing anyone. I had one college friend with Michigan and he was working as a reader for TriStar, And then he had one friend who we also sometimes read for, who was

a development guy named John Marsh. And John worked at Chestnut Hill Productions, which was the movie company owned by Jeff Lourie, the guy who owns the Philadelphia Eagles, but at the time he was more scion of a family that owed a lot of movie theaters in the East Coast, so wanted to dip his toe into the business and started Chestnut Hill. And yeah, so John actually Marsh was shout out to John Marsh because he met with me.

It was during the strike nineteen eighty eight. You couldn't meet with anyone else that we met with me, and I gave him a specscript that I had written when I was in Tel Aviv, and she really liked it and helped me rewrite it so that I could sub so he could submit it to agents that he knew, and through him, I got through that experience, I got representation, and then maybe six months later, eight months later, he was like, David, I have a thing project for you,

and this could be. It ended up being my very first getting in Hollywood, and it was to do a rewrite of the Edward Taylor I think that was the guy's name who was the original writer and v I and it was one of those situations where they were going to hire me. They were going to pay me Polish money to do a page one rewrite, which you know, and I was thrilled, of course, because I had never really made any serious money writing and that was I remember I got paid four thousand dollars to do that.

I was really happy. That's in nineteen ninety one maybe, and so I did that complete kind of re imagination of it. And I also because I'm a Chicago and that's where I grew up, it was very easy for me to do that. I also loved the whole detective genre, the noir of it, all the eyes character, and so for me, I was more inspired by China Out. It was that kind of a thing. And I read all the Sarah Peretzky books and it was kind of a mishmash of a couple of them. So yeah, so how

I got started. Actually, that ended up being my sort of start. It led to my start in all of it.

So he was like like this nerdy film school kid, and it was a story about a group of FELP students who have to make a movie based on a short story of a famously reclusive Israeli author who wrote about his experience in the war, and so they it becomes a mystery of what happened when he was out there and his commando team ran into a shepherd. We had to make this decision. Do they kill him, because otherwise they let him go, he'll reveal that they're there. Or do they let him or do they let him

go anyway? So John Savage played the author. He was actually really good. I still haven't actually opened up and watched that DVD. I'm going to. I'm planning on doing a screening with my adult children and see how bad it is when your first screenplay that you ever wrote gets turned into a movie. I would recommend.

how we met. And then he had some financing and then Golden Globus came in and put up the production services, and yeah, we shot it all in Israel, and then they got into trouble with investors and they'd suit each other and they couldn't agree on a release got released in Europe and on the US. So you know, you need to focal Hollywood story.

is that I'm doing this project. I'm developing a TV show with Blake Griffin has a new production company called Mortal Media, you know that basketball player, And he's doing it together with Ryan Khalil, who is like a former NFL player, but they're very talented, they have great taste. So we're developing this show and the guy who runs his company when we met for the first time. Now we've been working on the show now for a couple of months, but he was like, damn, I just got

to tell you. When I was like twelve years old, I got like a VHS copy of v I Wor Shawski and I used to watch that thing, and I remembered. I was like, dude, you're the only one who I've ever talked to you about it since that. So it was just funny that now that you called and was like, oh, okay, and you wait long enough and everything comes around.

course everything is just and delivered. There's no Internet and all that stuff were popping prehistoric times here, so it went out to her. In the meantime, my wife was like nine months pregnant with my second son, and because I got the job from Chestnut Hill, it made me qualify for the WGA health insurance, right, but it only kicks in after one quarter because I qualified over the

summer right. Then the insurance was going to kick in on January first, and my wife's due date was January third, and I was like, hone, you just got to keep your legs crossed until after they because otherwise we're paying for this birth because I had no health insurance.

Kathleen's on board. She wants to play the Eye, which was a great acknowledgment of the work that I did, and that we attracted the movie starring which was great. So that was that, and then what happened was Hollywood Pictures, which at the time was that the production arm of Disney they had touchdown, they had Hollywood Pictures was doing trying to create their own identity. And then that led to my first sort of studio gig doing a rewrite of my rewrite because they wanted to have their notes

and stuff like that. So I went into Disney and Burbank met with the executive his name was Charles Hirsharre, it was his name, and had a really great experience. I did a rewrite and now I actually got paid like appropriate money. That's just like being exploited money, which at the time was also twenty grand or something. Today it wouldn't pay for over months rent in venice. But anyway, so I did that and was really happy with how it came out, and John was excited and Chestnut Hill

was excited. Everybody was happy and was we were all moving towards production. So this is in May of nineteen ninety. I finished my rewrites. I remember the day that they had me because the day that I was working extra time with John and doing all the last minute revisions to send it out to the studio. So we finished, but it was a weekend, so they were like, you have to deliver the script to Jeff Katzenberg, like they were going to give it to us.

John Marshall at the time. He don't worry, it's fine, I'll see what happens. And then finally, like a whole week and another weekend goes by and then I get the call from John. And the way I describe it is that I had the complete Hollywood experience on my very first movie, right where I have the big break, I get thing, I get the movie star attached, right. But then comes the other part of it, which is

I get fired, I get rewritten. They change the movie from a drama to a comedy, like everything that could have happened, right, And so that's the beginning of what unfolded, which is Katzenberg read it and he said, I think this is too much like Chinatown. We want it to be more like paper Moon. I was gonna say something,

but Moon, Yes, paper Moon. So they wanted to have more of that quality, right that it was like a girl but because there was a character kat who was the daughter in it, and so that was the big thing. It was like, we think it's to be more more like paper Moon and not less like Chinatown. And I was cruss because I'm like, I'm a Chinatown fan, and

that's what inspired me. And I loved the darkness of the books and all that stuff, and I felt an obligation to Sarah Perevsky as well, in the sense that this is the stuff that she did, and I didn't want it to be the hollywoodization of whatever. But that's

what happened. So they hired this guy named Nick Thiel, who was like one of the studio hacks I would call him in that he did a lot of rewrites for Disney and I can't even remember what his other credits were, but they definitely weren't like things in the May of Chinatown. They were more light fair. So that's what happened. So I got let go. John thought they were hiring Nick. They kind of sort of like suffered through.

Next I would hear from John how it was going, and then he delivered a draft right maybe two months later, in July, i'd say it was, And then they were still now six weeks or seven weeks before the start of production and messing with the script. So then by that time they had hired Jeff Canoe to be the director, and I'm thinking, okay, the guy who directed Police Academy six or whatever it was, wouldn't have been my first choice for the kind of material that I was hoping

that there would be. But by this time the ship would sail. It was going to be something else. Then the word from John Marsh was Jeff Canoe was taking a crack at it now because they felt they weren't happy with nick Field's draft. And then he started like cutting and pasting between at Taylor's draft, my draft, and nick Field's draft. That was like a classic Hollywood right, great success, as a borat might say, so that was it.

By the time I got invited out to the set in Long Beach, it was like the first day of principal photography maybe, and I met Jeff Canoe and all that kind of stuff. It was like I had let go. You'd never let go because it was like my first baby in a way. So I was really upset, to be honest, But I also I knew that everyone told me, Hey, getting produced is the main thing. Don't worry about how

it turns out, just that you get a credit. Right, So the movie goes into production, right, I see all the other casting, and they had some good people in there, right. We had Charles Derning playing the Lieutenant. He was great. I thought j O. Sanders did a nice job is the put up on the boyfriend. And then we had good Girl who I don't remember. She was in Hall alone, Angela go Toles. I don't know if you made any movies after that, but anyway, Oh, and Wayne Knight would

become famous on Seinfeldt as the post bet. But yeah, whatever, it was all good. Those were the days when the studios would still do gifts to the whole cast and crew when movies would start. And I remember, right before the first day of Pennsyl Photography, I get this box from Disney and I open it up and inside is a red high heeled shoe that's also a telephone, right, the old not rotaryd other ones, the push button.

just do it because they had that power. So we won back the power to be able to determine whose names would be on a script in order to avoid that kind of corrupt practice. The Guild arbitration process is you can only have a maximum of three writers on a script. Now, when you see more than three names

on a script, they'll notice that there's writing teams. And the way you know this is that their names are separated by an amper sayand if it says David Aaron Cone and Edward Taylor A and D, you know that they wrote separately. So the arbitration process begins I get sent the script of the production draft, which is the final script, and then you also the guild sends out all of the drafts. Everyone has to submit them. So there's the Edward Taylor draft, there's the David Aaron conn draft.

I had more than one. I had re drafts. And then there's the Nick Theld draft and the Jeff Canoe draft. And then you read through them and then you write a statement claiming like why you think you deserve credit? But the stakes are really high, you know what I mean. And I was a newbie writers. I didn't really know too much about the process. Now I like advise other writers who are going into a process because I've done it so many times. I'm like, Okay, here's what you

need to know. And I remember this day very vividly. It's a week before the arbitration letters are due. Then I get a phone call. I pick up the phone. This is pre self well, so you don't know what it's calling, and Nick Thiel is on the line and he goes, David, listen to me. If we all agree on the credit right, you don't have to go to an arbitration. If the three of us agree, you don't have to get an arbitration. I'm like, I'm thinking to myself,

why would I do that? Maybe you don't deserve a credit. And then he got like really dark on me. He was like, dude, let me tell you, the middle writer always gets squeezed out, so the chances are you're not going to get a credit, so you should do this. It's very strong arming me and I'm being naive and also a little bit like that. So I was like, no, I'm not doing that. We'll just go through the process

and whatever they decided. So that was that. Yeah, And then I remember like in those days, you'd get a letter in the mail saying the determination of credits has been and there was screenplay by or I have to look it up here does it say, yeah, screen story? I think it's the three of us, Edward Taylor and d David ernthone Andy Nick Deal, so all three of us.

And for me, I was kind of like in the aftermath, I was like, maybe that's good that somebody else is name was after me, because this is not my work. It doesn't represent the best of my work. Some of my work is definitely in there in the arbitration. You have to prove that like thirty three percent of it is yours, whatever that means. Yeah, so you contributed a character or the dialogue or structure, those things all there's

different qualifications for it. So that was my experience, and to this day when I tell when I teach screenwriting, which I do sometimes or talk to mentoring young people who are entering the business, I'm like, in a way, having the full experience the first time prepared me for my career.

good time him. He's funny guy. So I don't I actually don't remember a premier party. Sorry. I do remember one thing though, the weekend that the movie opened, and this is lessons from a young screenwriter's point of view, is that I had a careery dear friend of mine, she was getting married that same weekend, and it was in Cleveland, Ohio. So I went to Cleveland and I got to the airport and I don't know if I had to take a train or elevated or whatever it was,

but I remember I'm in the train. I'm going to wherever it was you lived on in the suburbs, Jake Or Heights, and I'm going there and it stops at the stop and I see the posters on the side, and that was very exciting, and that was really exciting for me as a first time screenwriter.

because he was in charge of TO. There was someone else above like you can't remember who was, but all the big wigs were there taking notes and stuff like that. And then we got to see to let me stay in for the Q and A listen to the focus groups when they asked them questions and what they liked, what they didn't like.

the old Harry the explainer thing, right. And so what they did, in fairness to Disney, they hired all of us, all of the writers who worked on it, for one day to write potential voiceovers for the movie to be considered right. And the irony of that is that I remember my agent calling me and telling me that since

seven I said, what's the page. She goes, They're going to pay you gild minimum for a polish, which was the same four thousand dollars that I made to write the entire rewrite the entire screenplay a year and a half earlier. I was like, this feels like I could get used to this. Payday four grand a day. That's good. And then nineteen ninety one that was like a lot of money.

weight in arbitration. So for me, it was clear like a lot of the structural stuff. I could see my work in the dialogue. There were a few lines. I don't remember what they are today, but I remember going, Okay, that was great to see Kathleen Turner deliver a line.

That's always just a thrill from that standpoint. And I do remember also I did go to the set a few times, not just the first day, but they were shooting in the Culver Studios in Culver City, and I remember going and seeing because it was cool to see the house that they built, which was the ice house, and all that kind of stuff is always fun. I got to hang out there a bit as well, so when I saw it, it was like, Okay, it makes you hungry to want to have more of the same, but more control.

Maybe about six months later or maybe three months, have to move came out, I get a call to go in and meet it. Imagine in films Brian Grazier run Hours Company, and the executive there was interested in meeting with me because my agent had sent her a script that I wrote, but also because I was a credited writer,

do you know what I mean? And that put me into a different class of a different pool I shouldn't say a pool of writers, so I could be considered for other things, right, And so this is a good story in the sense that so this executive in those days when they liked your writing and they felt like you had a voice and the kind of stuff, they'd invite you in. And then you have a general meeting, right, which most of the time didn't lead to anything, but

sometimes could. So it's kind of like salesmen showing their wares, Like they ask you what you've got, and they tell you what they've got. And so she said, look the projects that we have. See if anything else would interest you, and she went down a list of projects. I said, there's this, and there's that, and there's that. I'm listening to all of them. And it's a little bit full of myself at the time because I just thought, I don't know whatever again being young and thinking that I

can do this. But she listened all that. I was like, no, you know not, none of those really or interest to me. And then she came up, here's one, but I don't think there's any way This one is one you're not going to get because Alan Pecula is attached as producer and at the time, Pakola had just finished Sophie's Choice, nominated for All the Stuff of course, All the President's Men, Clue, Parallax View, all of the great movies that Alan nade,

and so she goes, oh, yeah, that book. That book was Friday Lights, right, it was about to come out. They had Alan had a really great eye for good material, like he was a producer before he was a director. Hed he won an Oscar, his only oscar actually, for To Kill a Mockingbird, which she produced, so he had the right to Buzz's books. And she pooh pooed. She goes, I'll give you the book, but I don't think there's any way you're ever any of the meeting with Alan, right,

And so I went home read the book. I was like, oh my god, this is just perfect. I love this material. This is incredible. My agent was pushing to see it. We could get a meeting, And what happened was she sent out the writing sample, which was the same sample that I was using. It was an indie kind of film. It was called Go Down Moses, was about an Israeli limo driver who befriends this black radio dispatcher who's also

like a rapper on the side. It was like a whole indie film that you'd want to see in the eighties. But everyone liked it. Helped me get an agent. It had a distinct voice, all that kind of stuff. So she sent Alan my draft to Go Down Moses, and then she calls me up maybe three or four weeks later, and she goes, wow, I'm surprised, but cool. It was to meet with you. So that's how that happened.

get the instructions to meet him. He's coming to town to meet with writers, and he's going to meet you in his like suite at the Four Seasons right Beverly Hills. They like, okay, I've never been to the Four Seasons. The whole thing is whatever. So I dressed my sort of casual slash dress the writer artists clothes, leave my wife and two kids at home, and go step into this alternative, alternate universe of the Four Seasons. And I get up to the call and they say, yeah, come

on up and knock on the door. Alan opens the door. Alan was very urbane guy, grew up East Side to New York City. He almost had his own like accent in his English. It was like it wasn't like a New Yorker, active was something old, more refined. He's just a very cool guy anyway. But he's in socks. He's not wearing shoes, and then he tells me that that's that I learned afterwards he would direct all of his

films in his socks. He just felt comfortable. You didn't like wearing shoes, so on set he used to directing

Dustin Hoffmann, Readford, Meryl Street. He's words socks where we used to laugh out anyway, and I sit down and he starts talking to me about Go Down, Moses, and like how much he really loved it and there was just a real grittiness to it and loved the voice and love this and that was just really and we just right away got into this sort of deeper conversation about movies and about script and stuff, which was thrilling for me. And then I pitched him my take on

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

all that, and Allen responded it was great. There was a moment where he like stepped out he was the rest or whatever, and so being a little inquisitive because his seat was sitting on this chair next to me, and there was like a pad of paper with his appointments for the day, right, and so I saw the list of the writers that he was reading with, and it was like all the A writers in Hollywood at the time, like all these names that would just be like. I was like, oh my god, there's just no way

this is never going to happen. But I was still happy to be there. Came back, he finished up and then said goodbye. I walked out, and I thought, Okay, that was a great experience. I'm just happy that I got to meet Allan. And maybe a month goes by and we lived in Venice at the time, where I just moved back to and I'm out in the backyard and I had this wine barrel that was my office.

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

haven't talked to him since. Then he goes and he doesn't say no one told me that this was going to happen or that whatever. He just went, so we need to come out to New York maybe the week of the twenty first. Will that worked for you? And I'm like, wait what? And then it was came clear to me in the middle of the conversation that I had gotten the job. So that's my very long answer to did this oupen doors? Were you? Absolutely well?

you know what I mean. So really to learn how to pitch, it's not something that necessarily although some of the more well known programs now like USC and UCLA have pitching segments to them, but just breaking story, giving notes, getting notes, the things that are really the sort of bread and butter of how you have and then maintain a career. Those are things that I address in the course.

I love teaching, and that's one of those things where you don't really necessarily know how much you know until you map it.

And then so I think the big part of the course, one very big element of it is just having my students ask questions, just wide open and there's a lot of I think there's a lot to be gleaned from the answers, and also things that you can really specifically learn and work on so that you can have a better career, because access is the big issue there as well. I mean, that's the hardest thing for people to get.

Pretty much since then, you know, all the things I do, I'm the first writer, and sure I still get fired and I still get rewritten, and that's the business, I said, it's a little easier to live with all these years later, but still not. But at least I know as first writer that I have a shot of delivering the script that I feel is the best representation of that material, and whatever happens to it after that, that's speed.

They went down canyons in Peru that had never been successfully traversed before, ran into Peruvian gorillaz who almost killed them, shot at them, and took them prisoner Colombian drug dealers, And in the middle of it, they ended up having a mutiny among the crew because there was one guy who wanted to go in this direction, the other one in the other. And so Joe Kane, who wrote the book, who was coming along just to be the guy who could document the thing and make the guy who hired

him look great. The one who they mutinied against ended up being one of two of the men who finished it kayaking. You had never really kayak before, and he was trained by the other guys who was champion kayaker from Poland and they made it all the way to

the Atlantic Ocean. Yeah, it's great story doing that. And another front developing a TV series that Sony with Blake Griffin, the NBA player as a new company with Ryan Khalil x NFL player called Mortal Media, and we're developing high school show about elite athletes that takes all of the best football, basketball, tennis, golf, you name it into one high school based on the IMG Academy, which does this

in Florida. In a way, it's kind of like a superhero show in a funny way, because they're all best at what they do, but then when they're together with everyone else, they're just ordinary.

Film School. So I applied to both, got rejected by both, but luckily for me, USC was starting a brand new graduate program in professional writing where they taught everything from novel writing to advertising, everything, and they were desperate for people because they just started, so they accepted me. And I was a waiter at this there's a chain of restaurants called Hamburger Hamlet. Back then, they don't think it

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

a couple of the episode. It was so much fun to write. I learned so much about history researching each episode. It was great.

I wrote a spec movie. It got a lot of attention, never got made, but it got me a lot of work, and I got hired by Paramount to rewrite a movie, which ended up being The Experts, which is like a cult hit but not a very good movie. At the time, being a movie writer was like you were on the A team and the TV writer was on the B team. That's changed completely now, but that's what it was then. And so I just had a child and I in TV. You just don't have time to do anything but do TV.

In movies, I just wrote it home for four or five hours a day. It was great. And I did that for sixteen years after to the first one. I grew up movies for sixteen years. And then my movie career started to fade. And the producer Mark Gordon, who's done Speed and Great Anatomy and a million others. It's a big shop producer. He's a friend of Mike, called me said, don't you go to TV again. I really

want to get in and tell it. He wasn't in TV at the time, he had not had Gray's Anatomy yet, And I said, yeah, I got this kind of idea for an airport, and we pitched it, we sold it, it got made, It was on the air but failed and was over in thirteen. Big Mark had graded Enemy and Lax at the same time, and graith Anaimy it is still on twenty years later, and Lax lasted thirteen episodes. So goes that's how I go.

would be great, and I basically just adapted it. I mean that movie is about a guy, a nebushy guy who can't get ahead any invents a fictitious partner. So I wrote it exactly like that, and they all hated it. I got called into the office and it was like the worst meeting in my life. They all hated Interscope was the producer. They said, the guy such a loser. Who are we going to get to act in it? This is before Jim Carrey became a big story do

carry would have been perfect? So he's guy such a loser?

from scratch with a woman star. And the way that got made was they wanted Whoope to do a movie called Eddie, which I don't know if you're familiar with that movie where she owns a bad and here it's a basketball team or something like that. And she didn't want to do it, but she wanted to do the Associate. So she said, I'll do that movie if you make Associate.

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

said okay. So they said, okay, we want you to meet with the producers tomorrow. So I went to the producers and it was like a stone wall. They hated me from the beginning, because they thought the script was perfect. They had already gotten Kathleen Turner and they thought the script was perfect. And I said, what am I doing here? If you don't want to change it, why am I here? And they went, you're right, you shouldn't be here. So I went back to Jeffrey Katzenberg's office and I said,

they don't want me to write it. He goes, I do, that's all that matters. I want you to rewrite it. I said, but I can't work with the producers. He goes, you don't have to just work me and Ricardo.

But they were they never I've never talked to those guys since. I don't want to. I don't even know if they're still a route, but I don't want But anyway, it was not a great experience.

just a meeting to read the script out loud. We were going to get actress from Broadway to help do a table read so we can hear it. So we went to the table read and Whoopee walks in with Olympia Ducocus to play the part that Diane Least ended I'll play, And I have all respect for both of them. I think they're both terrific actors. But they came in and we had Victor Garber, who's terrific, and we had Babie Dealworth who ended up getting cash because of her reading,

and a bunch of other actors that were great. And part of one of the things that Whopy insisted on it and was in the contract that the love story could not be cut because she never gets to do love stories and there was a love supplt in there she insisted to say on her. So we do the read through and Whoopy and Lempia are reading like they've never acted a day in their life. They are sabotaging it, but everybody else is doing such a good job and

they're getting laughed. But eventually they went, I guess we better act. And it was a really good reading at the end. But when the thing was done, whoopy says, cut that fucking love story she had in her contract, and we went okay, And so we had to go and get notes from her the next morning at her suite at the Plaza at New and Beautiful, two story Sweet. It was great and Donald said listen because she was

being really a jerk to me. And Donald said, listen, don't come by twenty minutes late because I got to talk to her. She can't talk to you like that. She was really disrespectful. I have to talk to her before you get there. So I walk into the suite and it's ice station Zebra. There's like icicles hanging from the ceiling. They hate each other. They hate each other. Woopee. Gave some great notes. One of them was to Diana.

Weives note. She gave great notes about her. And every time I turned to Donald go hey, that was a good note, and Donald would just stoneface. So we walk out on Fifth Avenue and Donald said, I'm quitting I'm leaving today, so I see an animation of my script flying away, because that would be the end of the movie if we lost Donald. And I said, Donald, you can't quit, you can't quit. I beg and goes, no, no, no, I'm done. So I go to my hotel room and

the phone is ringing off the hook. Everybody's calling me from Ricardo Messrs. He had a Venerscope, Donald's lawyer because he won't answer the phone, and I said, I can't He's not going to listen to me anyway. They send everybody back except me. I got fired. I was fired off the thing, and Whoopy said, I want to hire my writer. So Whoopy hired her writer and I just I licked my wounds. About six to eight weeks past and I didn't hear from anybody. It was great, okay, fine,

maybe I'll get credit, maybe I won't. And I get a call at six o'clock in the morning from Donald pechere about six eight weeks later and says, you.

fit properly, but she wouldn't cut her hair anyway. She put she's got the mask on, and she's telling Donald all the things, she all the changes she'd make to the news script. And Donald said, we just interscope in Hollywood Pictures. We all met and we're in take. We're bringing Nick back, and she clipped her faith off it said, you're paying me a lot of money. I'll fucking say anything you want me to say, and left. So when I went to the set of New York, it was

not good. Donald and her were not talking. Donald would hide it is a trailer. It was really bad, but that's the way it goes. But it ended up getting made and it was nice. I got sole credit. It was terrific, but it was that was the one bad part of it. See it's not all great in Hollywood. Yeah, yeah, I know.

But it was the PanAm thing happened because I had done a show called The Waterfront, which he never got on the air, which was great. Jack Orman, who ran Er for a number of years, had written it and he created pan Am. So he liked me on Waterfront, and when pan Am came he asked me to come on board, and so it was just pure coincidence that it happened like that. He didn't hire me because I had done Lam.

Was weird, but she wouldn't because we did a couple of beach shots and she would not wear a bikini. She just thought her body wasn't good enough anyway. So that's how that happened. That's how PanAm happened.

but I never did it. And I thought everybody in Hollywood for geniuses, but I was never going to Then I went into grad school and I saw the other writers and I went, Holy hit, I'm as good as these people are. So you gave me a little more confidence.

I got some ideas and okay. So there's a sequence when Leslie Nielsen goes to a gym to train for the exorcism and body by Jake is there, I think. So that was something one of my scenes that I put in, and then there was a few other things, and then particularly the finale where they decided to exercise her with rock and roll and he does his impression of Elton John and Michael Jackson and all that stuff. So all that stuff was my stuff in there uncredited. I was around and it was fun.

wrong direction. Prior to that, I had taken my demos around to record companies and didn't get much activity. And I went to this one little record company and there was a guy who was there, a and R men named Jerry Landis, and he was very nice and he listened to my stuff and he said, you wrote these songs and I said yeah. He said, and that's you guys are singing. I go yeah. He said you're playing

the instruments too. This was before the Beatles, and he said yeah, So we usually use studio musicians, so we wouldn't need you to play, but we'll give you a contract as a vocal group. So that was great. I

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

So I tell Joel, and now the other two guys seem to have talked to Joel the night before, and Joel says that's not fair, and then they're behind me in the car and they go, that's not fair to Joel. You guys told me to tell him this. Anyway. My band broke up, so we forgot to do anything with the contract for Jerry Landis. Then I started a new band and the next summer we were about to audition. They had a thing called the hooton Nanny, which was

basically an audition day for the Cafe Wha. And we're online waiting with all the other bands and this guy in front of me is this little guy that looks so familiar. And he turns around and I go Jerry Landis and he goes, yeah, Hi, who are you? And I got my name is Jeff Canoe. You gave me a contract? Because he goes yeah, then your group broke up. He goes, oh, this is my buddy already. I don't use the name Jerry landis anymore. I use my real name.

What's your real name? Paul Simon? So Simon and Garfunk who were online just in front of us, and they sang some folks song about the plane that crashed in Mexico, and they didn't get the gig, but we got the gig. However, by the end of the summer, they were superstars and we were not. And this is also at the beginning of when I went started to go to college, which I wasn't interested in at all. I was interested in being a rock star. Anyway, I got suspended from I

went to Colombia. I got suspended from Columbia for cutting too many classes, and so I had a year's suspension and I didn't really care, but my mother didn't like it. I had this part time job working at a movie company because a neighbor, Oh, my father had died the year before, and this neighbor, out of pity for my mother, gave me this summer job working at United Artists as a gopher office boy, whatever you call it. And so I was working there and still thinking about my music career.

And at a certain point when I got kicked out of school, this man, who was trying to help my mother got mad at me and he said, all right, then you're losing your job here too, right, And I said, oh, that's terrible, and he goes, unless you can get back into school, then we're going to You can't work here anymore. So I went and begged the dean to let me back in, and the dean said, I can talk to your professors and finish all the work, then we won't

suspend you. So I went to the professors and yaha, yah, yaha. Anyway, they all agreed to let me do the work and take the final, and two of them failed me anyway, so I was out. And now the man United Artists felt sorry for me, so he gave me a job as the assistant to their trailer producer, the in house

trailer producer for the United Artists. I barely knew what a trailer was, although I had gone to the movies a lot, and so I became this guy's assistant, and luckily or unluckily for him, he had some kind of a muscular dystrophee and his hands didn't work too well, and so I became his hands, which meant like I could zip up his fly after he goes to the bathroom where I could hold his sandwich while he ate it. But in the meantime, I got to do a lot of his work that I never would have had a

chance to do before. And so I learned how to edit and that was pretty much fun. I still really wanted to be a rock star, but I started to learn how to make movie trailers. So now I'm out of school. I'm working as a trailer assistant to the trailer guy, and I never went to meetings or anything. I was happy to just stay back and do the work. And the other guys in the editing place were all

ex duop guys as well, so that was fine. But then I got a draft notice and I realized because this was nineteen sixty five, and it was like, I'm gonna have to go to Vietnam. And that was not a real popular activity back then, and probably in some parts of the country, everybody wanted to go, but nobody from Brooklyn wanted to go there. And so what am I going to do. All these other guys that I

was friends with were already married. They were like my age, but married, and that was why they all got married. To beat the draft because that was the law back then. So they said, so you're seeing this girl, why don't you just marry her? And I go, but I'm like twenty years old. I don't want to be married. You want to go to viet No. No, Anyway, I got

married and now I needed a raise. So I asked my boss, can I get a little raise because I was making ninety three dollars a week and the next level was one O three or something, and he said no. So he said, I, if you want to raise, go ask the head of the department. I'm not going for you. And they didn't really know what I did because I never went to the meetings. Anyway. I went to make this long story less long. I ended up losing that job, and now I'm sitting out here one a on the

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

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

was dup. So I cut a trailer to that and it was really nice, and they liked it, and they paid me like a tenth of what they pay a regular trailer maker, but I didn't care. And so I had done my first trailer and I thought that was pretty good, and so I little by little, god another one, another one. But then the client relationship part came up, and I wasn't getting enough work because there were other places where they could go and deal with grown ups,

not with me. So I wasn't getting much work. And down the hall from this place where we rented a little editing because everything was on film back then, we had a movieola and cutting on film. Down the hall. There was a guy who was making pornos and he came up and he says, you guys editing in here. I said yeah. He says, if you could cut my movies and I could go make another movie while you're editing this movie. So for five hundred bucks, we cut his movie while he was shooting his next movie. And

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

So I wrote a cheesy script called It was called Mail Order Confidential, and there's about a guy who sells porn through the mails, and of course in the end, it turns out his wife, unbeknownst to him, was his biggest customer. And so I made that movie, and I thought I liked the process of doing that, so I wrote another movie, and at the time I had done the trailer for The Good Debad and The Ugly, so I thought, how about a soft core porno based on

The Good Debed and The Ugly. So we got some guys to finance it for like thirty thousand dollars, and I got a lot of hippie friends who looked like cowboys when you put a hat on them. And we made this movie and it was called The Wicked Dies Slow, and there was almost no dialogue, and it was like a takeoff on an Italian Western. And I was kind of directing it, copying Sergio Leoni all his angles and

the close syrups. But when I cut the movie together, because of my trailer making experience, I cut it way too short. So they spent their money and they got a fifty minute movie. They said, no, this has to be like seventy five minutes. I said, well, we're gonna have to shoot more stuff. So they gave me some more money and we shot some more stuff, and now it came out to sixty minutes and they fired, so I was fired from them, but I was in the

movie anyway. I did that. I made The Wicked Diy Slow and little by little, I started getting little dribbles of trailer work at the same time. And a friend of mine who's still a friend now, but he was a young, up and coming marketing executive. He worked at Embassy Pictures and they had this movie. He called me and he said, we got this movie. It's got nobody in it, but it's got music, and it's Simon and

Garfunkel music, and maybe you should do the trailer. So I got the trailer for The Graduate and I loved the movie, and I thought this could be my big break. So I made a good trailer, was long, but a really good trailer on The Graduate, and everybody liked it, and Mike Nichols saw it and he liked it, and everything was going to be great. And then I get a call. The trailers out out in the theaters.

trailer for this movie? The graduate said yes, did it look good? It looked great. Do you feel like you saw the whole movie?

and I said, it really didn't. I made this tape of all these people coming out of the theater saying that we're dying to see it, and we don't feel like we've seen the whole movie. He said, really, yeah, I said, can I bring the tape over and play it for you? He says no. He said, no, don't you want to just listen to it? He goes, if it means that much to you, leave it alone. So he left it alone. And then the movie was a success, and that was my beginning, real beginning as a trailer guy.

And after that I started to get more work. I got Midnight Cowboy, and I got Lion in Winter and a bunch of stuff, and I did four hundred trailers Cuckoo's Nest and Rocky and all the Woody Allen moves. And I love doing it, but the business part, where you just had to suck up to clients all day long, it was exhausting, and after ten years of it, I

couldn't do it anymore. Plus, oh, I worked on the Cuckoo's Nest and I went to the Oscar party after Cuckoo's Nest won all the awards, and somebody came up to me at the party and said, so, what did you do on the movie? I said, I made the trailer. They said, what do you mean made the trailer? I said, by the trailer the coming attractions? I thought, the projectionist just shows some scenes from the upcoming movie. So I realized I'm not famous. I'm never going to be making

trailers and I want to be known. I want to be somebody. So then I decided I'm going to make a real movie. And it took me a while, but I found a book that I really liked and I adapted it and nobody else said bought the rights because they were smart and very depressing. Movie.

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

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

I going to do? But I remember that wood he Strode had been a guest at the rodeo and there was a picture of him talking to people, and I called him up and I said, would you want to be the on camera guy? And he goes, I'd love to do that, and I know all about the history of the Black West. Yeah, he had. So he flew into New York and I shot him sitting in a rocking chair in a western looking setting and the rocking chair was very squeaky and ruined it almost but he

knew everything. I had notes for him, but he didn't need him. He became the on camera sort of guide to the Old West. I thought I'd opened the movie with a sort of a dig at white cowboys, so I sang Home on the Range. I played it and sang it really bad, and showed pictures of Gene Autrey and John Wayne. It was like, white cowboys are not cool, and then we went into the of the black Rodeo song. It was good experience. It was a very wholesome thing.

Got some good reviews, but nobody at that point they'd rather pay to see Superfly than to go see some cowboys jumping up and down on horses. So it didn't do well, but it hung around for years and years, and not that long ago it got somebody put it out as a VHS or a DVD or whatever, and I was not a good businessman, so I always ended up giving away the rights for nothing.

So I took a couple of weeks and I cut the movie down. It ended up back where it was because Alan Pacula wanted it that way, but he could see that I was able to cut the movie down. And then at a certain point after I did Natural Enemies, and he knew how Hobrook. He was thinking of Hal Holbrook for the lead in Ordinary People, and he called me up and he said, can I see your movie? And I said sure, and I sent it to him and he called me back and he said, yeah, I

don't think how's going to work. But you did a really good job on the movie. It was the first nice thing anybody said about that movie. And so I said, so, where are you editing Ordinary People? LA or New York? He goes, I'd like to do it in New York.

movies have you cut? Oh? None, just a couple that I made. But he goes, we have Sam Mustin he did the graduate he did at Rosemary's Baby. What the fuck does he want you for? I said, I don't know about it. He said, okay, what's your rate? I said, oh, I don't have a rate because I never did that before. Anyway,

I got that job. My rate was twelve hundred a week, and I learned a lot and I had a great experience, and Bob found the editing process a little boring, so I got to do a lot of stuff on my own, and I got to learn watching him work with the actors, because he was great with the actors, and that was just an amazing experience. And so I got it by asking for it. He should never have hired me. That was a bad move.

and then he became my boss and bullied me the whole time making that movie. And one of the things first he calls me because that movie was about a guy with two children who wrongly goes to prison and then runs away from prison to be with his family. He calls me up one day and he goes, what you ever watch Dukes of Hazzard. I go, no, there's this guy on Dukes of Hazzard named John Schneider. I want him to play the lead. I go, but he's twenty years old. This is about a man with two children. Yeah,

well tough. He says, you're going down to Atlanta, and if John Schneider approves you, he's going to be the star and you can direct the movie. So I go down there and I get approved, and then I go back and I was thinking the cop should be the antithesis of a Southern guy, so let's try to get Peter Boyle or Gene Hackman. And he goes, you've gotten on a plane. Tomorrow you're going to see Kirk Douglas.

but I really liked it. So he agreed to do Eddie Macon's Run, and I learned a lot from him making that movie, and then we became friends and did more things together. Tough Guys get the movie together, and Peter McGregor Scott had taught me always preview the movie with audiences before you show it to the studio, and you get to tighten it up, and so I always did that, and so I had a number of good screenings with test audiences on Tough Guys. And then Michael

Eiser said I want to see the movie. So I took it over there and we had a screening with a test audience and all the Disney executors are there with their pads and their pencils, and I was like really nervous. We come out of the screen room and Michael says, let's go across the way to my office to our conference room. I go to be a favorite. I'm really I wound up from the screening and can we do this tomorrow? Oh, let's go over there right now, okay.

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

under the table. So he saved that movie that they didn't hack it up or anything. A couple of years later, via Aworshowski, we have a screening in I Forget somewhere in the Valley, north Ridge or somewhere like that. And I had some test screenings of the movie, so I knew it played pretty well for audiences. So now we have vi Awshowski. And within the first tops fifteen minutes, a guy I see a guy. The audience is listening intently. A guy gets up and starts walking up the aisle.

Big guy walks right past me. It's Michael Eisda and maybe he's just going to the bathroom. Maybe he's just going for a soda. He never comes back. The next day, the word comes down and Michael doesn't like the movie. And that was the opposite of the tough guys reaction shorter. He wants it this, he wants it that. So that's why I have this color hair.

I can hire some friends. So I'm going to send you some scripts and see if you want to do one of these movies. So he sends me Bachelor Party and another thing called Give Me An f about a cheerleader camp, all comedies, and this Revenge of the Nerds thing. So I read Bachelor Party and I thought, yeah, it's all right. The cheerleader thing was disgusting. And then I wasn't even going to read Revenge of the Nerds because it sounded so stupid, because nerds weren't a thing yet,

that word. But I read it and within three pages I thought, oh my god, that's me arriving at college feeling like I don't belong and that nobody likes me, and I could relate to that. So I said, okay, I could do this one. He goes, here's the problem. The producers don't even want to meet with you, but I'm going to force them to meet with you. So you got to fly out here. So I fly out and I do whatever homework you can do to get a job directing, and I go and meet with these

guys and takes about two hours. Would seem to hit it off, see things the same way. And then I fly back in New York and I get a call from Joe, my friend, and he says, so, what happened at the meeting? I said, it lasted a long time, and I think we really see things the same way, so I think it went well. He goes, you made one mistake.

movie are you're going to make? I go, I know what you're trying to get me to say, Joe, animal House, sir, but I'm not going to do that. He goes. I want you to make a movie. Not only will it not play at Cinema two in New York, but you'll never be allowed in there again. I go, all right, Joe, I'll tell you what. How about if I make a movie that I'm ashamed to put my name on. He goes, You got the job, That's how I got the job.

And every actor that's in the movie, none of them wanted to be in it because they all thought it was going to be stupid, and so I had to promise them, no, we're going to make them real, and we're not gonna the goofy stuff is there, but they're gonna be real characters that you can care about. And it worked out. Then, Oh, my friend Joe lost his job before the movie opened, and this guy, Norman Leevy came over from Columbia Pictures and took over a Fox.

And I in a restaurant somewhere and a guy walks up to me and goes, hey, I hear your movie's a piece of shit. I go, who'd you hear that from? He says Norman Levy, the new head of production at Fox. I go, that's great anyway. So I had to go through this whole process of proving this movie wasn't a piece of shit, which he didn't want to hear. And it was supposed to open in seven hundred theaters. He cut it down to one hundred, and he cut the

marketing budget and it was disaster. But for some reason, that movie opened and didn't die. It just went on and on and it ended up being successful. So I had gone from making the most depressing movies ever to making a hit comedy, and after that, I couldn't get a serious movie job. I was a comedy director. I was always trying to work my way back to real stories or whatever, but I don't know. So I did Gotcha, which was a comedy, but it also had reality to it.

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

the girls. It was going to be great. And I had this experience with Robin Williams, who read it and he liked it, but his manager wouldn't let him work with me for whatever reason, so he wouldn't do it no, Robin Williams. They give me the green light. We're going to shoot at Non Union in Georgia, and I start to get that. They start sending me memos, Let's change the title, let's get a bigger name. And I went

through a lot of casting things with them. Two guys came in that I would have said yes, that I did say yes to, and Disney said no. One was Liam Neeson and the other was Alec Baldwin. They wouldn't hire either of those guys. They really wanted Robin Williams, and Robin Williams didn't want to do it with me. I should have seen the writing on the wall, but I didn't have that experience. So I'm down there waiting

to shoot like Sunrising behind the school. And oh before I went down there for that trip, I thought, if I don't get them a name, I'm gonna lose this job. So I sent the script to Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, and Harrison Ford. Don't hear anything from Parrison Ford. Jack Nicholson passes, don't hear from Dustin Hoffman. So I'm down in Atlanta and I get a call from my agent and he says, Dustin Hoffman's person whoever that is, read the script and Dustin's going to read it tomorrow. They

like it. That's great. Next day comes by, I get a call from Michael Eisner, who never calls me. Jeff, Hey, Mike Eisner. What's going on, Michael? I just want to let you know Dustin Hoffman read the script. He really likes it, and he's coming to my house for dinner tonight and he's never come to my house for dinner ever. I go, oh, that's great. And then the next day they call me and they say you better fly back here because we got Dustin wants to do it, but

not with you. And this is after I did the trailer on the Graduate and Midnight Cowboy and Stroll not with me. It was must have his manager or agent must be saying, don't this guy's know? But nobody's the wrong director. Anyway. I got fired off Dead Poets after I got up, So after that I thought I got to have a hit. Obviously, because I Tough Guys wasn't a big hit. So I heard about this movie called Troop Beverly Hills, where a director named Howard Deef was

directing that movie. But he's leaving that movie to go do this other movie called dream Team, and so that job is open, so I throw my hat in the ring and I get the job of Troop Beverly Hills, even though I don't think I was the right choice for that, but I ended up doing a good job on that movie. It didn't make money, but it had a long life in video and people still liked that movie. So I did that, and then after that I wasn't

getting jobs because that wasn't successful. Whatever. And you get to a point where you have heat, you lose the heat, and now the age your agent's not that interested anymore. So I had been with William Morris. I ended up at the Grocery Agency, and the Groce agency got me the Kathleen Turner job on Virwa and I had a great experience making that movie and loved the casting and everything about it was good, except nobody went to see it. So that was it for me in Hollywood.

They couldn't figure and I will say that the title may have been a problem.

for him. They would put it in turnaround at Trystar and they moved it to Disney, and Disney, who I had now had a bad experience with because of Dead Poets Touchstone. This guy David Hoberman, who is the head of Touchstone, he didn't want any part of me. But this Hollywood Pictures was this other company that was at Disney. And because David didn't like me, ricardomestris if Hollywood Pictures did like me, And so I got to do that job.

And again I feel pretty good about the movie. And every movie is a war and every movie is an education. And that was another one. But before the movie opened, there was a thing called Premier magazine and they'd do a summer prediction, and their summer prediction was and it was always like who stands to gain? Who stands to lose? And with the Irishovski, who stands to gain? The producers, Kathleen Turner, the studio because if this movie succeeds, they'll

have it like a franchise. Like James Bond, who stands to lose. The director because if that movie doesn't succeed, it's his fall. I got all the credit for the failure.

Kathleen because if she said no, then that's it. If she want to make this change or do this scene. So she saved the movie in sense because she made good choices as far as it goes. She didn't save the movie at the box office, but she worked the movie work because they kept trying to turn it into Paper Moon, a funny relationship between this young girl and this female detective, that's all. They were trying to push

it towards comedy. But they had a mother and her husband trying to kill the daughter, and it was a serious and her dad was blown up at the beginning, so it was not a comedy, but it had comedic elements to it.

And the girl's mother was an actress named Nancy Paul, who I with the redheaded woman. I thought she was great, and the two older brothers. Everybody was really good actors, and I didn't have them in my pocket. But whoever the casting person was, I'd have to look it up again, but they presented good people.

the girl. They thought it was too small, and they had done this movie's stakeout with Dreyfus and Emilio Estevez and that ended in a big I don't even know what. It was, a factory where they were burnie or cutting wood or it was all these machines they wanted that they wanted ending, so they brought in a writer named Nick Feel. I never even met him. He worked with the studio people. He wrote them a new ending. The producers and I and Kathleen read that and said no,

So that was out. But in the meantime they made us move back from Chicago to shoot the ending. And it was too cold in Chicago now because they had stalled rewriting the ending whatever, So we shot the original ending, but we shot it in San Pedro, but it's the same ending.

was great. But it didn't And at a certain point you go, I mean, if you're if I was Franciscopola, I'd say this is who I want and that would be it. But I hadn't achieved that level of political power or whatever. Try to work with the same people if you can. I had a line producer or named Peter McGregor Scott who when I first got out to LA to prepping Nerds. Guy comes into my office one day and he goes, Hi, I'm the new line producer. I go, okay, great. He goes, Yeah, let me just

tell you this. I'm being hired as a spy. What do you mean, he goes, They, No, I did Animal House, and if I think you're not making it funny, I have to call the studio and squeal. I said, oh, that's good to know, he goes. But we'll just work together and we'll make it work. And that's what we did. We worked together and we made it work. And so then he did Gotcha with me, and then Disney wouldn't hire him on Tough Guys for some reason. But then Troop Beverly Hills I got him back again. So I

did three movies with Peter. But it's a shorthand thing. If you work with somebody and you know how each other works, it's very helpful.

many splices when it goes through the movie. Editors didn't like that. And also they would have their assistant editors and they were just like a style of thing. They would go the thing would be on the movie all and then he would hit it with the grease pencil and that was where to cut, and then he would give it to the assistant to go cut there like that. When I was cutting, I was saying, I don't know

should be here? Should it be there? And I always had too many cuts because I wanted it to be the perfect cut, and a lot of it was trial and error to me. So I worked with that guy on that movie, and I worked with a different person on Gotcha. Although I worked I had an apprentice editor on Nerds who also worked on Gotcha as an assistant, and she became a really big solid editor. She did Hangover one Hangover to Hangover. She became a really big

time editor. This girl Debbie that was the apprentice on Nerds. I worked with different editors, but I always had my own cut room, so I would just patchki around and make things the way I needed them to be.

make different kind of choice. Let's not make choices just based on story, Let's make some choices based on style. And he said absolutely. But every time I would ask him to do something like that, he would say, it's not justified.

and the ego was crushed. And so then at a certain point Kirk called me up and he was offered a touch by an Angel episode and he asked where I directed with him. I said sure, So he got me that job, and I went to Salt Lake City and we shot that and I thought, it's like making

a movie. It's fast, but I enjoyed it. So I did three episodes of that, and then Kirk got this offer to make a movie in Belarus, a Holocaust movie, and he had already had his stroke and he was not feeling well, but he got me the job as the director, and then just when it was time to go over there and shoot the movie, he said he couldn't do it. So he canceled, and I called the director, who would never talk to me because he would only fax. So he faxed me back and he said, what do

you want? And I said, I guess I'm not going to be the director. A workers Kirk's not going to do it. He goes, no, you're still the director, but we're cutting your salary in half. But I needed the job, so I flew over there and I made that movie.

After I edited the movie, he took over and he made some changes and it ended up opening in the Berlin Film Festival. And told the Berlin Film Festival that I was, in a way making a movie in the jungle, and I couldn't be reached. So I was walking down the street in Brentwood one day and a friend of mine says, hey, I hear your movies in the Berlin Film Festival. I said, what when did that happen?

of the Nerds for twenty five grand. He's only there at the beginning.

but New Line put it out as a TVD. So I did that Adam and Eve, and then still trying to get an agent and do some work, and I did a few more trailers. My son, who I had done the Adam and Eve movie, he got a job working as National Lampoons had a production for some reason, and they had a script that I had read. It was like a parody of three hundred and Troy and Gladiator. It was called The Legend of Awesomest Maximus. And my son called me and he goes, they're talking to directors.

I go, but I couldn't say no. So I looked at the footage and it wasn't That part wasn't great. But he's in it and he's great. So he became our guide through this world, and we made this documentary. No one released it, and finally this Brandeis University released it. But it's a good little documentary and Paul was great. Yippie. Now all we need is my eulogy and we're done. So that sums it all up there.

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

understand music? And there's this long pause, I'll say, I love working with the piano players and the arrangers and the compos and just trying to figure out interstitially, where to place lines, How much time do you need? It sounded like you wanted to go another chorus? Would it help to have a little more to me? It's as close as I get to being a musician, and I really enjoy one of the things I enjoy more than anything, just being in the rehearsal room with these beautiful Broadway voices.

And it begins with justin piano played these amazing piano players, and then it expands as the musical gets closer to whatever fate awaits it.

And then I started to follow baseball teams, and then the Knicks, and then I was I wanted to be a sports writer, and then for a while I wanted to be a stand up comic. I actually did stand up comedy at a club where Lou Black was the MC, and I went on and Lou Black wanted to be a playwright, and I wanted to be a stand up comic. This is the mid eighties, and life takes you where it takes you.

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

I would say yeah, I loved them. So I said yeah, I love them. And he said we may need to write a treatment. I have these Swedish investors looking to hide money for tax reasons. And I said sure, and I went to Times Square. I was not a fan of horror movies. I didn't like them at all, and I watched in those days there were all those double

features in Times Square, and I did. I probably saw eighteen horror movies in the course of a weekend in the time with the Times Square audience, which, first of all, you're taking your life in your hands in those days. Second of all, anytime there's a flaw on the script, which is often they start saying things like get in the car, bitch, get in the car, like they point out the holes. And then I had the joy of seeing my own horror movie at one of those theaters,

and it was the same. I made the same mistakes. I wrote this treatment for Charles for six hundred dollars. He had the rights to He knew he could shoot it in an abandoned summer camp in the Delaware Water Gap, so we needed the girls to go on a camping trip, and bad things happen. We had one day in the city before the Unions found us, and then we had all the time and I didn't know anything about the woods.

I'd never gone camp. I was not a I was a city kid, so I was like, what can happen to the Anyway, we filled up a treatment and he said I'll call you if they want the screenplay, and I was like, okay, there's six hundred bucks. And he called about six weeks later and he goes the Swedes like it. They're ready to go to screenplay so I sat with him in his apartment, which was nicer than mine,

but not that nice. He would lie on a couch with his head on a pillow, and I sat at the typewriter, and he would say, so what comes next? So what comes next? Which is actually great in terms of what if this happens? He sum up with sudden. They say, yeah, that works. So we wrote a screenplay and I was allowed to do anything. I had probably more autistic freedom there than I've had since. I named

the two psychopathic brothers, Ike and Adley. I said the mom was a big fan of elections, and we did all kinds of crap culture references and he said, this is gets made. I'll give you a call and I said, okay. I thought this is never going to get made. Nothing ever gets made. And they called about eight weeks later

and he said, we're going to start shooting. I want you to be on set because some of these actors may not be good at saying two sentences together, so you may have to make changes, he said, but I can't afford you to have you on set just writing, so you're going to boom the movie. I'm the rare writer. Boommn hyphen it, and I boomed Mother's Day. There's one shot in the movie where you see my fishpool fully extended and my entire body in the shot, which I

don't blame myself for. I feel like somebody should have caught that, but it's in the movie. It's become sort of this weird cult thing of late, but it's Charles got stuck because the certain international markets wanted a lot of blood in it, and blood was expensive to use in those days, so we had the PA's were below the stabbing, soaking it up with sponges and pouring it back in the buckets today really low budget. Had he not drenched it in blood, it might have been more

well received here. That was the first screenplay I think I ever wrote, and it got made and I got twelve hundred bucks. I don't mean to brag. I'm still friends with Charles to this day. In those days, I booked whatever weird jobs from whatever directors who were on a downward slide and were trying to get a screen These guys couldn't necessarily write on their own, but they knew a lot about I worked with this Italian director and I learned so much from him about structure and story.

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

And there were these like things that these guys knew, not from film courses or whatever, but from breaking hundreds of stories over the years. It were if you got past their other insensitivities. They were interesting guys. They were not world beaters, but I think it was formative for me.

a sister who had a friend from Germany come. There were like just lots of people staying in the apartment. And one morning I woke up and there was this naked German couple walking across the living room making with my with my coffee. And she was Doris Dorri, who was a German short story writer and film director. She had not yet had her big hit. She had a big German comedy hit, if He Forgives the contradiction in Terms and the years later, So I met her and

so so I liked her. We got along great, and then she was approached to adapt an Italian political didactic novel called in English Me and Him, about a guy who's packer starts to talk to him on his thirty fifth birthday. But it was really also about the battle of socialism versus communism versus class capitalist. It was and I speak Italian. It was impenetrable in either language. It was really I think it was the premise that the

guy bought and then they had nothing. So I created a thirty five year old married guy who begins to act out. There was great possibility of humor. Unfortunately, was produced by Barrent Eichinger, who is had just by chance I'd known Robin Williams through some people and he heard about the movie. He's you're the guy who wrote the Penis movie. I want to play the part of the Penis. I was like, oh, my life is about to change, and I bring a bootleg copy of Robin Williams Live

at Carnegie Hall. I guess there's something to Barrent Eichinger, who watches about five minutes if it, turns it off and goes flng. There is one thing of hits, I'm as shilling you now is funny. This man will never be so. Robin Williams as the improvisational voice of the Penis would have made that movie very different from what we ended up with. And then Doris, as often as the case, Doris's boyfriend was the DP and there was a producer. Anyway, she breaks up with the DPY and

can go. Somehow, she and her new boyfriend did a rewrite, mercilessly stomping out virtually every joke in the script, turning it more into again a European tretise about politics and economic class struggle, and which is not always the funniest stuff. I went to set a few times. They shot in New York, but in such a way that New York looked like Munich. I don't know how they pull it. It went from being this movie that was going to change my life to a movie that did very well

in Germany but died pretty much everywhere else. Eventually I got them Mark linn Baker to voice the Penis Mark perfect Strangers lin Baker, who's an old friend. But if you try to trace the after my career, it's almost none of it makes any sense at all. And a lot of it is like a naked German couple walking across my living room. And that's how I got to do Me and Him five years later. There's no planning going on.

out thirty films a year. And there was a guy at Hollywood Pictures. Again, a guy I had who was two grades above me in high school run into on fifty seven Street Ones. He'd put me up for this movie. A number of writers had been on it already and

shooting was about to begin. And my actual take on it is that the word was out in Hollywood this was a job that would be thankless impossible and horrible, and that they couldn't get a legitimate LA screenwriter to do it, and in desperation, who will take the job. I was in New York. I never spent time in LA, so I was not part of any world. I didn't know enough to notice say no to it, I think was how it happened. There was like a weekly rate that I'd never seen in my life that I think

they thought they got me cheap. There was just such a gap between my New York life. My memory is it was twenty five thousand dollars a week, which to this day seems like a lot of money, but in nineteen ninety that was two weeks, was more than I was making in a year. Most yeah, that was like are you yeah sure, I don't care. I'll say whatever it is. And as it happens, it was based on these novels, and I knew the novels, and I had been a big detective reader who hadn't gone through that

noir stage. Knew I knew a lot about that. It was not like asking me to do a show about some obscure era in British monarchy or something that I don't This was in my wheelhouse. There were a lot of meetings, and this is pre zoom, but these a lot of Hollywood. There were I would say there were more cooks on this than anything I've done other than

Network TV. There were just and I got there and the script was it was a patchwork quilt of different drafts, and people liked this piece, and this was in and it was there was no there was no flow or shape to it. And I've flown out to LA and there was a big conference table and I said, I just got a couple of questions. When everybody gets in the car at some point, they drive to a grain silo and the grain silo explodes on purpose and almost

kills them. They go, yeah, that's great, that's great, And I go, why do they get in the car and drive to the grain silo? And there's this pause and they go, we have permission to blow up a grain silo? And I go, no, I get that, that's totally clear. That that makes some sense to me. But what prompts our characters to get in the car and drive to a grain silo in the middle of nowhere late at night? And they go, it can be in the day. I go, okay,

either way, why are they going? They have permission to grow up a grain silo? So everybody just drove there. But there was no way the script was filled with things like that. It was and I don't call that out on any of the writers. I think it's what happens when I don't know what number writer I was. I know that there are more people who work down with them names on the script. There was an arbitrations are always ugly with the Writers Guild, but there was

an arbitration afterward. But I think I was the one who and I think Jeff Canoe would say this, I was probably the one who pulled it together and made it coherent, which is something I've done on a lot of projects in my life. I was raised to fix things in certain ways. I tried to pull it together. There were a lot of notes. Katzenberg was giving notes, and he was at that point the most powerful man in Hollywood, but he was micromanaging this among eighty other things.

There were some very nice people involved, but there was no I said, I don't think the grain style makes sense. So then they ended up blowing up a boat which they had for mission to blow up, and so that was exciting and it made more sense to me. At least they were in Chicago. There was a reason to

go near water in the city of Chicago. It sort of made some sense as opposed to getting in a car and driving an hour and twenty minutes to an empty Grain silo every day for the three maybe I was there from I went, I got to live in a nice hotel in Chicago. For me, it was like

being dropkicked into Hollywood. But every day there would be notes from Katzenberg, from the Hollywood Pictures team, from a variety of producers, from the director, from Kathleen Turner about the scenes that were going to shoot the next day, and and the notes nobody was coordinating them. They contradicted each other, they conflicted with each other, and I would say, here's a version of the scene the way Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted it. Here's a version of the scene the way

two execs that Hollywood Pictures wanted it. Here's a version of the scene the way that third exactly Hollywood Pictures wanted it. Here's Appling Turner version. Here's the director, not that anybody cares what he thinks. And I said, and then I tried to think, all of you guys are focusing on different things. Maybe the prescriptions are wrong, and maybe the diagnosis is probably not right, but it may

something is wrong with these scenes. So here's my attempt to just try to make the scene work with a three act structure. To the scene and with characterizations, and it's also if you'll notice much shorter than all that. Then I would say, and here's a scene that incorporates all of your notes, which like literally at the door, Kathleen Turner wanted to put your lips together and blow sort of lying like an exit line that showed she was sassy. But they all had different ideas for what

the exit line are. She actually has seven lines at the door, so we should probably choose one, and they said, du all seven, we'll edit it later. It was completely insane. I rather enjoyed it, but it was trying to get something to cohere with unbelievable amounts of incoming conflicting messages, and they were doing that. Jeff was being tortured by them. They'd look at the dailies and they'd say, tomorrow, go back and shoot Jay Saunders with this sized lens, micromanaging,

not script. But they actually this was the delusion they were under the time. They thought they were really the filmmakers and the directors of the movie and the writers of the movie, and we were sort of assembly and they could dictate. They really were under the impression of those days that they knew how they knew better how to make a movie from I guess two thousand miles away than the filmmakers, and that they could micro manage it. It was a corporate belief at the time at Disney

and Hire Pictures. Didn't last very long, but it was It's that thing of overexpanding and getting over ambitious, and you can't direct a movie from two thousand miles away, you can't write a movie from two thousand miles away. We were all aware, I think that we were on a sinking ship. That the movie came out coherent is slightly a miracle, and they just wanted options in the editing room. Options. Jay Saunders and I still run into each other in New York and he was one of

the principles in the movie. I think he was number two on the call sheet or something like that. Very good guy, really good actor, And we talk about it when I ran in him some thing in May of this year, and we still talk about it because it was like an experience to survive. We were all aware that it was insane while it was going on. No one was really acting out. Kathleen had good days and bad days, but nobody was. It was all just an attempt to shoot something that wasn't ready to shoot with

a director who's probably wasn't right for it. I remember I met him. I said, I know what everybody else wants. What do you want this film to be? What's it about to you? And said to me, Kathleen Turner, she's running around with a gun and she's got great legs. And I was like, Okay, that's the poster. He kept saying. So they knew what the poster was, and they never knew what the story was. And it wasn't based on

one Wasshovski novel. It was based on four novels. They had the rights to four novels, so instead of doing one novel at a time, they cut and pasted from three or four different I felt bad for Sarah. She

wrote some really good books. The thought of the time was this was going to be a major franchise, that it would be one Kathleen Turner Watshowskin movie after another after another, like Raiders of the Lost Ark or something, you know, except that they didn't approach it in any sensible way, And so I enjoyed it and stayed in touch with a number of people. The guy who was production manager on that. When I got my first TV job in New York. He ended up he was the first.

He was the production manager on that. I'm like, didn't you hurt Warshawski ten years ago? And he goes, oh, brother, that's a long story. John Roman was his name. He was great. I remember we were in Jeff Canoe's hotel room one Saturday night and he was getting just clobbered by the West Coast and we all knew it and we felt bad and having to reshoot things because they wanted a different Can you change the color of the wall behind Mike in this next shot in the it's like, yeah, okay.

We were in his hotel room and Jeff had been an editor more than end. You can see he has a He directs in the style of an editor who became a director. It cuts really well, and people aren't moving a lot, because that makes it harder to you know, there's a lot of a group of three and one person, but they don't change places to off, but there's not a lot of dosey doing It's it cuts easily, but there's not a lot of movement to the characters. The

characters tend to be stagnant. So we were watching Saray at Live and he'd ordered some nice wine. We were just trying to unwind after another week of just being clobbered and a sketch comes on SNL called what were you thinking? And it's Herbie Villain. Suez. Villain said, we were on the one of the most successful shows of all time and he left it to launch a movie career.

What were you if? The notion was actors who were lucky to have these great jobs, who've made horrible choices and then they go, Shelley Long, you were on Sheers, the most successful sitcom in the of the decade, and you left it to do Troop Beverly Hills. What were

you think? And of course Jeff had directed Troop Bearefully it was when it rains, it pours, and it was pouring every day on the set of Worshowski, and it was mostly I think this moment in time when Disney thought they could put out more movies by themselves than all other studios put together, and they created I think Hollywood Films was the third division that they had going

at the time, and they were micromanaging poorly. After about eleven weeks after about two hundred fifty thousand dollars, my mother took ill and there was I had an assistant for the first time in my life, and he had a like a typewriter that could he raise two lines by hisself, which was like this astounding to me. And I felt bad for this kid because I was the amount of stuff I was generating that he then had to He was working harder than I was, yes, and

it was a very nice kid, very sardonic. And my mom got diagnosed with cancer and I thought I probably said the job was going on and it was going to be four weeks in LA and I just said, guys, I think I'm done, Like what about this? I said, the kid can do it. It's just dictation at this point, but I said, just dictate to him instead of telling me you'll be And I think that's what they did. So I was replaced by like a twenty three year old kid who had good had had him. I don't

even know if it was a computer. It was like k pro. I don't know what was called, but it was it could erase two lines, which was incredible. And that was the end of my tenure there. It's not really a golden age of Hollywood story. But it was also for me a great learning experience because I'd never been on Me and Him was not a Hollywood set, that was just handmade filmmaking. And I had another flop called Deer God. I don't know which came for us, but I was not. That was another one with nine

riders and you get replaced. May come later, but it was the first time really seeing how the sausage gets made in a factory rife with health violations. And Kathleen didn't want to be there. I think she felt she signed on for something other than what she was. I think she was correct in assuming that she deserved better, and she may have gone on a slightly self destructive

way during that. No one could blame anyone for any acting out that occurred on a set like that, and it was just fascinating to me that the crew knew this was not going to be something that looks great on their resume, but that they were going to get extra weeks because of the amount of reshe said, kept coming, and the spigot, the Hollywood Pictures spigot, was open. I got a letter from one guy afterward who was high up in the ranks of Hollywood Pictures, but was always

respectful to me. Some of them were not some of them were really disdainful, but he was quite respectful. And I wrote him and he wrote back, I said, my mom took her. I said, also, you were not like some of the others, but it was the amount of abuse or disdain was a little hard to handle. And he said, Warren, and I understand. I just remember these words. Every day I eat more shit than you can imagine here and he maybe the head of Hollywood Pictures, but

it just stayed with me. He I believe he left Hollywood and became a doctor, became an emergency room doctor. I believe that's the story I heard about it.

from corporate America. I was instructed not to do anything political. You'll hear that today in any la writing job. That's my success story. I have only fond memories of ten weeks of staying in a hotel in Chicago. I went to my first Starbucks. It was very exciting. I'd never be they had one and I'd never been to one,

and I walked in. I was like, what is this? Yeah, though I think it was their second city, presumably Weirdly, Jeff Canoe now lives around the block from my office, and I have run into him on the street in recent years. Have you spoken to him?

I don't know if he directed much again after that.

That was the thing. Even while I was doing the rewrites, occasionally rewrite, other rewrites were coming in and I would then rewrite the other rewrite, and I was like, where did this come from? And nobody knew. I feel bad for Sarah Perevsky and Jeff deserved better, although at that time in his career, up until that, he was living

a good life. But occasionally, if I'm channel surfing at night, I'll see some pieces of a film and I'll know it's a canoe direction, just by the certain approach he has to fill lakers, the titles of being what could have been? Or how to destroy a franchise through hupriss death by executive Hubris.

on the street. Teresa is a wonderful writer, playwright who I think at the time was known as crime chick until I was going through a bit of a time. She said, would you ever consider TV writing? I was like, how do you do that? I wasn't really up on television at all. She said, Law and Order. I'm working on a new Law and Order. I literally I said, what channel is it on and where does it shoot? That's how much I knew about the franchise. I had

never watched one. I don't think I've watched any hour dramas. I had just always been a sitcom guy. If anything, she says, it shoots. We were on twenty second and ten. She said, it shoots two blocks from here. And this is the first year was thirteen episodes, and they started the second year. They want one more writer in New York. I didn't think I knew what a showrunner was. I said, tell the head writer, I'm a big fan of the shows. And then I did the same thing I did with

the horror movies. I went home and I watched I called William Morris, my agents and the somebohow. I got thirteen video cassettes of the first season and every script, and I watched them straight through. And I went in and I thought, okay, it seems to be a commercial. I didn't know what a teaser was, but it seemed like there was this thing at the beginning with broken point of view and then four commercial breaks. And I came in and pitched a whole story to the guy.

I think he liked me because I had a Tony Award and that looked classy to him. But I also pitched a cohering story, and I was talking to him about the background of his lead Detective Gore, and I said, to be this hyper vigilance, he must come from a home where he grew up, none of the stuff he'd ever thought about it all. I stumbled my way into TV. I called my agent and said, I think this guy wants to hire me, and they said he can't do TV or a Tony Award winning playwright. My lawyer fired me,

which was like save the bullet. I don't know it was. I mean, they were like, what are you doing? And I had been David Chase had been flirting with me for three years to go on to Sopranos, but he'd never pulled the trigger. He discovered Edie Falco in my play met with him, and I'm half Italian American, and I do understand that the world of that' show pretty

well well. Just then, after I got hired for criminal intent, he found out I was hired, and he called and said I'd like to hire I said, I just took a job, and he goes, have you signed a deal yet? I said no, but I told him I was doing it. That would be to this thing. I wonder, what would have happened if I'd gone with him. As it turns out, I became solvent in the world of law and order, and I figured out how to write it. But it was like learning how to write with my left hand

in a foreign language. I have always had to figure out how to do something if I got the job, So I just figured it out. But anyway, again TV, I ran into somebody on the street. It's a good thing I walk a lot.

figure out what would explain it and Yes. Most of the characters on Law and Order had no characters or personalities whatsoever. And I used to get yelled at for doing that. I still get yelled at at the wolf Rode first character work and until they need character work. Yeah.

hard to plot those it's only an A story. Most TV dramas have an A story, a B story, C story, and a little D runner some guy in the break room upset about a breakup or something. This was one storyline, almost no and it's forty five beats in an hour or TV commercial filled hour with all these act outs. And I didn't like the gratuitousts find a body at the end of an act act out. You rely on that a lot, But how do you make these twists that are so important for the storytelling? How do you

make them organic? And I sometimes watch those episodes now on reruns and I'm like, how did I fucking plot that? What was I on? You get into it ahead when you're doing them, and they were these master criminals. And I learned from that show runner, and no scene should anything be easy for your detectives, which was the opposite of Lawn Order, where Law and Order you go up to someone and say, Mike, did you see a bad guy running? Yeah he was? Yeah, I certainly did he did.

If I did that, the scene would come back with a big X through it. You weren't going to tell me you saw the guy because you were there to cop something that you should have been doing, and your wife doesn't know you were there, so you're gonna lie to me. But I have to figure out that you're lying. If every scene is difficult for the detectives, that makes it more interesting to watch and much harder to write. Warshowsky had very little of mess.

right into it. I didn't know there was another person with him for like the longest time until finally this guy pipes up. He again doesn't introduce himself, so had to go looking and it's Mark Edward Hook or hike h e U c K. He was the other guy. And Canue was just not happy to have this other guy with him. It was so cringey. So many times it's like, well, how about we actually talk about this movie? You're like, how about we actually talk about something important?

between the speakers. So that was perplexing and engaging. But also I think really it speaks to my feelings about the film, is that I feel like there's a lot of people with something to say about it, and they're kind of talking over each other, and this is the way that the film is out in the world. You know, like this it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. There's a lot of things that I thought were engaging and interesting, but you know, as a whole, it just doesn't in the end hold up.

I'm like, yeah, yeah, it was actually a good reading. Wasn't completely off base. And we mentioned those red shoes. I was like, yeah, he talks about how they're the ruby slippers. Okay, I could kind of see that too, and that's what, you know, leads her into this whole quote unquote adventure because that's.

was doing something unconsciously and didn't even realize it. They did choose red shoes, So maybe on a subconscious level, it was, you know, thinking of the Wizard of Oz, who knows.

of those kinds of studio pictures happening. You know, it seems like everything has to be a tent pole now in a way that it wasn't. Then. I could see him having to be kind of led along to seeing where the art themes are are showing up in a film that he probably really in the time was thinking of it as just a job.

But then yeah, it's like you think of the whole aw tour theory and it's like, well, what was everybody that self aware or were there people just taking the job doing the This is my job, I make these movies, I direct these movies. This is basically commerce to me. So yeah, it's it's always fascinating to think about like who really was being intentional about things and whose stuff

is more accidental. I mean, you even think about, like, you know, the the hair color of the characters and everything, and you have like, you know, Kathleen Turner and kat the little girl are both blonde, and then the mom's got this kind of crazy red hair and stuff. So it's like they belong together because they're both blonde, and they look more like mother and daughter than you know, page or whatever. The mother character and she dresses in black,

she looks kind of witchy and all this stuff. It's like, yeah, was that intentional or not? How far does that go?

if they aren't doing it on purpose. So I give you permission to read into things and ignore what the director says.

in Chicago, you know, in Chicago in the books. The greedy part of me is like, that'd be great to have this set in Baltimore. But the question is why, and especially you know, like imagine if that had happened, and then she still continued to do Serial Mom just a couple of years later. What would that be like, you know, what would the world be like where we've got the Warshawski franchise set in Baltimore and Serial Mom is also there.

You know, like if you talk about Mommy Dearest, for instance, you know that they originally thought this was going to be like this Oscar worthy, serious drama, and they were kind of blindsided by the fact that audiences had such a you know, camp comedic response to it, and they really thought this was going to be a successful movie, and they were already in the works planning a sequel.

And in the sequel, the concept is that she settles down to have her own child, which is like so incongruous from what v. I. Worshowsky is supposed to represent that It's just it's like, why even use the Puresky books as like your source material if you're just going to go so far, you know, off the plantation or whatever the expression is.

can picture all of this stuff in my head. So as I'm reading the book or listening to the book, I'm just like picturing all of these places that I've actually been to before, and it's just like, oh yeah, this will be great to see this on film. But of course it never leaves Chicago. It's just all in Chicago. And so like the shipping, I mean, at the end of the movie, the shipping has nothing to do with it. That's what they figure out. It's like, oh yeah, the

shipping has absolutely nothing to do with this. It's all about this beachfront property that was granted to your waterfront property I should say that was granted to the granddaughter to cat to the little girl in the movie. And so she's the key. She's basically the walking, talking mcguffin of this movie. Fuck me. Then, I guess this whole thing about shipping stuff just really doesn't matter. I'm glad that they don't go into it too much, but you

also I don't. For me, I don't really get a feel for the brothers that much, especially the one brother who's not Trumble. I guess his name is Horton. Frederick Coffin plays him, who I mostly remember as the I think famously for me, he's the cop that Wayne and Garthur are making fun of in Wayne's world. And then you get the one of the guys, the guy who was with the Arenberg who kidnaps her. I think he's

also in Wayne's world. Like, these are very Chicago actors, and I was really glad for that, and I'm glad that they embraced the Chicago News. I was actually happy this doesn't again take place in the book, but the chase on the Chicago River, I was like, Okay, well, this is nice. It's good to actually use the city because otherwise, other than like really feeled, we don't see

a whole lot of the Chicago nests of stuff. I don't think he thinks she eats a hot dog, and from wonders understand, people in Chicago just live on hot dogs. I would hot dogs and deep dish pizza.

that crazy amount of money. This isn't San Francisco either.

survive that. And that's when they really introduced that doctor character, who again is just like shows up for three scenes and she's kind of out of there, and you really get a sense of friendship of those characters. And I understand, like a book is a book and a movie's a movie, but like just the characterization of these people, it's like, yeah, give me more of their relationship or would that be too lesbian if we have two women talk on screen for more than five minutes.

And I'm surprised that there isn't more of that in the trailer, though I was surprised with the trailer of this, and I'm trying to remember, is there a moment in the movie where Charles Dirning spells her name, because that goes through the trailers him spelling her name at one point, but it sure is there in that trailer and I know Canue said that there are a few scenes that they ended up cutting out and include why j Saunders's face is all sooty because she makes him go after

her apartment gets firebombed, which seems like a really big deal after an apartment gets fire bombed. She makes him go save those goblets of her mother's because that's when we first see him. He's drinking out of one of these goblets, and she's like, oh, it's the only thing that my mother brought over from the old Country. And

apparently there was more about her father as well. I'm okay if they cut that out, they had enough about her dad in here, because I you know, it's that whole thing like a strong woman has to have a strong father who taught her right. You know, good Lord, you can't have a strong woman that didn't have a strong father. All right, We're going to take another break and play PREV for next week's show right after these brief messages.

And then at the moment these days, I am locked up in my apartment on a sabbatical working on my next book, which is called Dead Bombshells The Afterlife popular Culture's most glamorous Corpses, and it it basically looks at how we turn these sort of glamorous corpses into symbols of beauty, tragedy, desire, how they integrate politics of gender, race, and celebrity. And I look at people like the Black Dahlia, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Mansfield, Anna Nicole Smith, Princess Diana, Selena

Whitney Houston. Each person gets a chapter and I kind of look at their afterlife and what kind of collective fantasies have been spawn since their death and.

in that head space. You know, it would have been cool to have gotten this, but you know, it means that I'm going to have a little more time this winter to develop that next project. So I will just say watch this space. I'm sure I'm going to be back on the projection Booth before too much longer, and I'll tell you all about what I'm up to.

when you want it, without the scrolling. If you want to hear more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the other shows that I work on. They are all available at Weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit Patreon dot com. Slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get help some Projection Booth take over the World's.