Oh he is boot it's shoot tied.
People say, good money to see this movie.
When they go out to a theater.
They want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the protection booth.
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring it off.
You've got one hundred dollars efforts around here trying to get a shot at me. I'm scared, I'm to shoot me. I didn't go down there to be a bafoone. I went down there for funding, and I thought I have been the white nail.
If he pulls this gun and points at me, I'm gonna shoot him.
I'll go up.
My god, he's gonna shoot him.
On television, he's coming out, He's coming out.
I charge, and they've admitted it.
He had a cable around a man's throat a task the shotgun, so there's no way to get the shotgun away from a man's head.
In nineteen seventy seven, Tony Kuritzis kidnapped a mortgage broker and held him captive for three days, so the first time ever the media was able to cover the event live. To some Tony was a hero. To others, he was a crazed thug.
I knew what a shotgun sounded like, and I knew that was a shotgun.
Dead Man's Line, the true story of Tony kurtzis.
Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of the Projection Booth. On this episode, I'm talking with Alan Berry and Mark Enox. They are the co directors of the twenty eighteen documentary dead Man's Line. It is the story of Tony Kerritzits who took a person hostage down in Indianapolis by putting a looped wire around the guy's neck which was connected
to the trigger of a shotgun. Pretty harrowing documentary. It is going to be or has been turned into a narrative film that was directed by Gus van Zandt and that is coming out in January twenty twenty six, so it might be out by the time you listen to this. But this is talking about the original story, the original documentary,
and I really enjoyed talking with Alan and Mark. I think that they did a terrific job and the movies now available for free on YouTube, so you can check it out and hole and enjoy it just the way that I did. Hope you enjoy this interview and definitely check out dead Man's line. I'll have the link to it and show notes over our projection dash booth dot com. Mark, I want to start with you. How do you and Alan know each other?
Let's see, we met in high school. I think we were in history class together and we just became friends. And it is odd, out of all the friends that I had in high school, me and Alan are the only ones I'm really still closely.
In touch with.
And how did you guys start working together?
I was changing careers. I had owned record stores for like twenty years and of course that was dying, so I had to find a new career path for me and always had an interest in video work. Matter of fact, Market helped me with some video to stuff we did with my business, so it just seemed like a nice transition. And documentaries were always an interest to both of us. So we had done a documentary with Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard called Behind the Sash and it went real well,
all the mayor liked it, et cetera. And then so we started looking at what project do we want to do next? Because we definitely wanted to do a next one, so we created this my top ten list of ideas and Mark I had the list of Tony Kurtzis. I didn't have a great remembrance of him, of the story, even though I lived through it, But Mark, I think you did.
Yeah.
I remember in the summer of seventy seven, so we were watching TV and often we would see the noon news come up, and during that summer the event happened in February, but in the summer they were going through the process of grand jury and they were evaluating Tony on whether or not he could he was mentally competent to stand trial, and so they kept showing a lot of that footage and I just you know, was burned into my brain that image of this little guy with
a shotgun wired to this taller guy's neck and just pushing him aroun and the police not able to do it. And for whatever reason, when we came to try to figure out what we want to do next, this idea came up and we actually held a vote with our family and friends around us, and this is the one that rose to the top.
What year was this that you guys did behind the sash and decided to do this other documentary twenty twelve.
It was right after the Super Bowl was here in Indianapolis, and you know, Ballard was fresh off that he did some stuff with Jimmy Fallon, and so we started, i think late twenty twelve, trying to find people to interview for the Tony Kurtzy story.
How do you guys work together, like when it comes to diving up the work and deciding like who you're going to pursue as far as interviews, do you what's that process look like?
I think it's just come kind of organically. So Mark's Moore, the historian studious person, and I've been more into the video world, but that video as my day job, so they just kind of it just kind of fell into place of what of who did what. I don't think we ever had a conversation of you doing this and I'm doing that. I think it was more of just where each person's strength lied. That's who did it.
You start with basic research, So there was a lot of time spent in the State Library looking through old Indianapolis Star articles because that was really the only record. The hard, hard part, and Alan did a lot of this was reaching out to people who were connected with it, and it started with cameraman usually from the local stations It's incredible that a lot of these stations they owned, you know, the material and the footage, but they just did not put any effort into keeping it. So some
of them threw away their files. Some of them actually threw away footage in a dumpster, and other instances they taped over tapes television stations. Right right immediately, we knew we weren't going to get anything there. They didn't have a good library system, they weren't organized. So we were able to start reaching out to actual cameraman who still in many cases had some copy of the film.
So we did get some from local stations, but Mark's wright, a lot of the tape back then seemed to be more valuable than the actual archives to them, so they would just copy over them. So a big chunk of it was from the individual actual videographers, photographers and newspeople that just kept their own reels. But we did get some from local channels as well. The story that Mark is talking about about digging out the trash can, that's
a true story from Jack Parker. Jack Parker was a local videographer and he was actually our first big interview we landed because he was very supportive of us, and he let us use his footage, and by talking to him first, he opened up the doors to like our next person, and then our next person. Because when you're reaching out trying to get people to do your to do the interviews, you have to have a little bit of well we talked to this person, when we talked
to that person. And I gotta say Jack Parker was very key into starting this whole ball rolling.
I can testify that the video cassettes were more valuable than what was on them a lot of times working at a local cable station. Obviously we had transitioned from film into video by seventy seven, But what type of video were they using with this one inch three quarter inch? Sorry to be nerdy, but I'm so curious.
No, it's fair. It's everything. So so all all different types every which way, because some of them had already been transferred. And if you're a film nerd or a video nerd, and you know what interlace footage is versus non interlas, some of the interlace, you know, is already baked in, So when you see those like lines across the video, you can't get that out once it's baked in. So it was just it was a hodgepodge of all types of media, even real real tapes, cassette, say, CDs, DVDs.
I don't know that you could name a certain type of media that we didn't have to work with. And the challenge there is is some of those things we didn't have the equipment to transfer, so that's where we'd have find a company that did it, hire it out, and then transfer it. I was always looking for the highest quality source, so sometimes we'd get a snippet here and there, but the quality would be degraded, and then two years later we'd get closer to the source from somebody else.
So are you taking all this and digitizing it and putting into onto a hard drive or what's your medium then, because obviously twenty twelve when you start this project, things have changed over the last thirteen years.
Sure, yeah, no, that's exactly right. Digitize it. So digitize it, put it on the hard drive, back it up, and then I was using a final cut as how what I was adding. But yeah, just got it all digitized, made sure it was backed up. Some of the people would give us their originals, but then when of course we have to give him back to I won't have any of the original stuff, but I have we have pristine copies of that.
You're starting to dig through the archives. How Mark you talked about going to the library and start looking through the microfeah and everything, and then you know you're getting all this footage. When do you start doing these interviews or how do you figure out who you need to talk to and how to approach them?
Well, like with Jack Parker WTTV cameraman, we just went to his house and at the time I didn't know the whole story, so I would ask him questions about all sorts of things, even even stuff that he probably wasn't even a part of, and that became the model going forward. We interviewed forty five different people, and some of them are police, some of them are media, some of them are family friends. And it was really it was a journey of discovery, like who knew what about
about what part? So often I would add them all the questions and just try to figure out where what parts could they give us information on And it was surprising. There were times somebody'd come in you think they didn't play any role at all, but they were there for one key part. They were there for Tony being arrested, or they were there on the street when Tony's marching Dick called down down the sidewalk. It was a piece here,
piece there. It was kind of interesting because a lot of times I'd go into the interview think if they probably don't know anything about this, but I'm gonna go ahead ask the question, and sometimes you're really surprised with a great nugget of historical information.
The whole five years was interviewing and finding resources. We found historical archives all the way up till the end of doing interview. So it never we had, as I think, we had to kind of decide to end right. We could have probably gone and finding more, but at some point you got to say, all right, let's let's wrap this up right. So your question about, you know, doing the interviews and finding the sources of media, it went
hand in hand. And like Mark said, neither one of us really knew the full backstory when we first started. It was really just kind of evolved. Now if you google it today, you'll find a lot about it. Because now this is going to sound egotistical, but it's because we found out a lot of this information that was
kind of locked behind people's memories of it. And the other thing that was interesting about people's memories is I don't think there was one guest that didn't have something wrong with what they remembered, because everybody's memory fails them, right. So we used to just use like a try and you know, we like, if three people agreed on it and we found a news report on it, then we said, okay,
that's probably true. But it just one person said something about it and three other people disagreed, we probably figured they were wrong. So some of the people that were the closest to us still got things wrong about the event.
The documentary being pieced together from all of these different sources kind of lends itself to that idea of what are the pieces of people's memories that are there and what could be validated.
It was incredible, Like Dick Hall wrote a book about it. He was the victim here the hostage, and a lot of what he has in there I believe zaccurate. But there are a couple of things here and there it's like, Nope, that's not what happened. And we know that because we talked to other people and we have footage of what happened.
Another thing that was interesting. It was a good thing we started in twenty twelve because a lot of these people they were getting on in years, and some of them, some key people we were able to interview, they passed away not long after that. That was another interesting thing too, There were some individuals that we couldn't talk to. Tony had already passed away.
If you look at our list of interviewees, I would say two thirds of them have already passed. A big chunk of the people that we interviewed have already gone. And just to clarify on Dick Hall's book, that wasn't until we were pretty much done with the film when his book came out, So when Mark read it, we already knew a lot of the stuff. As a matter of fact, Dick Hall, we did try to interview him too,
but he wasn't interested. I don't think. I mean, it was a little bit creepy maybe, but like I even went to his house and just knocked on his door because I was trying to I want him to be able to tell his side of the story, because by that point we had talked to Tony Kuriz as the brother I think the driving force for Mark and I both was we want this to be accurate. We want
this to be truthful. We don't really have a dog and to where the story ends up, if Tony was right or wrong, if Dick Hall was involved or whatever. We just wanted the truth. So we thought, man, we really need to have Dick Hall on this project, on the record. But it never came to be.
It's almost good that you don't, though, because you don't get his voice over Tony's or vice versa. You don't have a privileged point of view from us.
Yeah, that's a great point. Because the Dick Call had agreed to speak with us, we more than likely would have built the film around him.
So tell me more about Tony. I want to know more about this guy.
When we see him in nineteen seventy seven, a lot of things have already happened in his life. At one point in nineteen sixty his family owned a trailer park and he came on and began to be the manager of that. He's a really hard to nail down guy. You can look at the film and say he's a thug, he's just a criminal. You can look at the film and say he's a hero. He's a little guy standing up against a mortgage company. A lot of people who he lived around and took care of the property. They
loved him. He was helpful, he fixed things for him, he got groceries for them, and he did a lot of work on the property. And then something started to happen in the mid sixties with the family. Tony felt he wasn't being compensated for all that he was doing, and an argument broke out. He's got three brothers and a sister who also a part of this, mainly his sister, Effie, was the manager of the trailer park, and Tony demanded that he be paid for work that he done. They
weren't going for it. And so this is not in the film. It's this is because there's not a lot of evidence, hard evidence of what happened. But he went to Effie's house with a pistol and took her hostage inside her house, demanding he'd be paid. I believe it was fifty thousand dollars, and the whole family gets involved. Jimmy kritzis who is in the film.
He gets in there. He's friends with police.
The police know Tony because Tony was very friendly with police, especially on the west side of Indianapolis in the Speedway area.
They knew him.
They were able to get Tony to release Effie that time. This is nineteen sixty eight. He was arrested and charged, but over the course of a year that trial didn't go anywhere. There was a they eventually threw out over an affidavit that they didn't believe was acceptable. So a lot of disappointment there. The family felt he should have gone to prison for that, but instead he gets the money.
He parts ways with most of the family, though he remains in contact with his brother Jimmy and his half brother George Ergo, and he takes that money and buys a piece of land. It's kind of convoluted. We're still finding information on how that land was bought, how the
money was exchanged. But he bought this piece of land that he wanted to then develop and so by nineteen seventy three, that's when he walks into the Merdian mortgage to speak with Dick Hall's father, em Mel Hall, who was the boss of the whole operation, and he gets alone to develop that property. It doesn't work the way Tony wants. He has to end up in otiating the loan, get a little more money, and this deadline is looming
of March first, nineteen seventy seven. Tony feels that mL Hall steered people away from it, accusing mL Hall of wanting to just collect the land himself and get more money out of it. So Tony has this real I've been screwed attitude, and that's what leads him to do what he did. He was mentally declining in the months leading up. I mean he talked about he couldn't sleep, he had all sorts of physical problems, painting his leg
from walking all of a sudden. But all the while he's also methodically planning out how is he going to take mL Hall hostage and not be shot immediately by the police. That's where his contraption comes in the dead man's line. And as we know, mL Hall wasn't in the office the day that Tony went in there, but Tony didn't want to back down off his plan, and that's why he takes Dick Hall hostage. Dick Hall really
didn't have a lot to do with the loan. It was almost all Tony and mL But at that time mL had gone to Florida with his wife for vacation, and so begins the whole, the whole story of him taking Dick hostage.
He was developing the land for shopping center, and that's he thought mL Hall was was directing potential clients that would would would you know or store owners away.
From that property. I think I know the answer to this. But in your guys' opinion, was Hall doing any of these things which Hall mL or even his Sun, but especially mL.
mL Hall was into real estate, and we found lots of articles that suggested maybe he was doing some things, but that wasn't exactly right. You know, there would be people of Asian descent or African Americans that he would block from buying the houses in certain neighborhoods. There's some
evidence of that. But the really big thing that we found was in nineteen fifty seven, mL Hall was convicted of a federal crime, and that was he would overcharge people who were buying homes approved by the Veterans Administration. And the Veterans Administration sets a price for a piece of land. You cannot go above that no matter what, and in a couple of cases, mL Hall was charging them additional money six hundred dollars, you know, to fix this, twelve hundred dollars to fix that.
This happened in fifty two fifty three.
It took a few years to go to trial, but he and a couple of his compatriots were found guilty of doing that. So in the back of my head, I'm always thinking, look, if he would do that, if you would do something means the Veterans Administration. This is not local, this is like, this is national, this is big. I don't know how you think you're going to get away with that. And he didn't he would do that?
Is it really so implausible that he would jerk Tony around so that he could get this land and then sell it himself to Osco Jewel or some other you know, somebody else who wanted to put in a strip mall.
We always looked for hard evidence of did mL Hall do anything to screw over Tony. We can never find any factual evidence that he did. There was no paperwork, there's no documentation. So does that mean mL Hall didn't do anything shady? We're not for sure, but mL Hall
definitely was a shady character. I mean think, like Mark said, this is ten years after World War Two and he's he's screwing over veterans, So it's not a far leap to think that he might do something towards Tony, but we never really found that hard piece of evidence.
To Dick Hall, his involvement was he wasn't with the loan that there were a couple times when he did witness his father. One time they got Tony and EML got in a fight in the office and he witnessed his father put hands on Tony and marked him out of that office. There's also a point early on where Dick told his dad, I don't think we should loan Tony this money. He's just not a stable client. We shouldn't do this, and EML went ahead and did it anyway.
So in many ways, Dick did not do anything to deserve what happened.
I mean, ultimately, was it mL hoping that Tony could make these payments so that it can foreclose on the land exactly?
He would tell Tony, Yeah, I've got somebody going to look at it, and nothing would.
Come of that.
And you don't know what the side conversation was between mL and somebody coming in to look at the land. You really don't know, because he could have easily said you don't want to do the deal with this guy. Just give me a little bit of time. He's gonna he's not gonna be able to pay his loan back, so just give me a little bit time. Then we'll deal with it.
And in the end, Alan didn't Merity Mortgage own that land. Yeah, so after the case was all over, they basically had a tussle back and forth. So Tony kind of signed over the rights to his brothers and they tried to
keep it up. Matter fact, they even started like a nineteen seventy eight version of GoFundMe, and they tried to raise They try to raise money for it, and they didn't raise that much and they ended up ended up having to go to auction and lo and behold Mariady to Mortgage was the soul bitter, and they got the they got the property.
That's super shitty. But at the same time, putting a wire around the Sun's neck and putting a shotgun up against his head a little extreme.
And I'm not defending anybody here, but Tony did sign the loan right and it was he owed the money and if mL Hall did sway people away from them, then he needed to figure out how to do that in court or figure out something else around that if that even happened. But there's no doubt that Tony owed them that money.
So let's go back to the event and talk about how that plays out. Because that footage that you have in your documentary is spectacular. Those visuals of that little guy with that shotgun in his hand, marching that guy down the street, maction David Hall down the street. I could feel my heart in my throat the entire time.
Maybe Mark should talk about the dead Man's line a little bit just so people can understand, because that's I think where everything wraps around at the very beginning.
I think the genesis of the idea. This is speculation to some degree, but we found a episode of Hawaii Fi vo that was probably broadcast in the early seventies, and in that episode, it's inside of prison and this one guy takes another guy hostage and he has a gun and that is connected with masking tape to the guy's neck. It's the only place we've ever seen anything like that, And one of the people we interviewed did say,
I think that's where Tony got it. What he actually did was he replaced that tape with something stronger, which was a steel cable. There's a loop that he put over Dick Call's head, so now it's connected to his neck and his head. The wire then goes from Dick Hall to the shotgun. Tony had sought off the barrel so that it would he would be able to keep that barrel close to Dick Hall's head at all times.
That's key because if it was any further away, there are things the police could have done to save Dick Hall and no one would have got hurt. That wire then goes in through the trigger guard of that shotgun, and then it's connected to Tony. Sometimes it was connected to a ring he had it on his finger. Sometimes it was connected to another piece of wire around his own net, and you can see some of it in the documentary.
If that wire gets.
Pulled because police try to rush in because Dick Hall tries to escape, it's immediately going to hit that trigger and I'll fire the weapon. Tony also removed the safety from the shotgun. He actually hands that to one of the police officers when he's coming out of the building. So the whole time Tony is saying, look at my rig, look at it. Can you see how there's no way you guys can do anything. You're gonna give me what I want? And it was extremely effective. It's based on
a dead man's switch idea, except Tony flips it. Dead Man switches like in a subway, if you take pressure off a pedal, it's fail safe. That means the subway would stop, it would slow down. Tony's is failed deadly. You pull on that thing and people get hurt.
And I believe historically Tony's the one that came up with dead man's line, like that phrasing of his contraction, because there's no other historical reference of it before then. And he says it too on one of the calls too.
And that they all on the icy streets of Indianapolis.
It was the one thing that couldn't happen at no time. Convict like, he can't be far away from Tony, and he needs to walk in sync with him too, because of how short that wire is. And then they get to the street corner and Tony is back and forth, yell at the police, and all of a sudden, Dick Hall or Tony slips and Dick Hall if he had stayed standing up, he'd be dead. He instinctively bends his knees and gets low, trying to keep his head close to the gun, and it was incredible that that gun
didn't go off. Tony later says he couldn't believe it
didn't go off. That moment's crazy because Tony also when that's happening, he pulls out his pistol that he'd been keeping his in the waistban of his pants, and that creates a whole new problem for the police because the shotgun is almost always going to hit Dick Hall maybe other bystanders, but now they see Tony's also gotten this gun, and it's just a miracle that Tony didn't point it at a police officer, because at that point they would have been within their rights to shoot him.
It's such a crazy scene if you watch the documentary that somebody literally crashes because they rubbernecking looking at it, and you can see this car crash next to him. So if any of the listeners haven't seen these images, they're pretty crazy.
Ultimately, I mean, what's this guy's goal. Is it just that he's going to get back the land or get paid the money. I mean, what's he asking for? What's this demand.
That's really interesting because initially Tony's not really communicating demands of the police. He doesn't really start to get his demands across until he's back Door's apartment, which is sort of like his passole, and you know, we can talk about some of the things he did to make sure the police couldn't get in there. But somewhere in there, Tony starts to understand what does he really want? Actually,
I don't know that Tony understood it. He wanted money, he wanted the debt clean so that he didn't know anything. He wanted immunity from prosecution for what he was doing taking a man hostage. But the thing that he seemed to want most is an apology. He wanted mL Hall to say, I did you wrong and I'm sorry.
mL Hall was kind of like a father figure to Tony two, and Tony's father was a very abrasive man, So I think that somewhere in there, that's how that apology figures in. Like, he wanted an apology from mL Hall. Now this is me reading into it, but I think he also kind of want an apology from his own dad. But since this is his father figure, now he wanted an apology from him.
Yeah, I mean Tony didn't know exactly how to develop the land, so I think when he went in there and made that loan, he was looking to mL for some guidance and direction and maybe got some initially, but as it kept going, I mean, this was Tony's big treasure, This was his big nest egg. I mean, imagine how somebody you trusted all of a sudden seems to not be helping you and you're going to lose everything. It's over.
There is no recouping this.
Now, as you guys are doing the research on this, what's the most surprising thing that you find about this story?
So me, initially it was that nobody's done anything with this. Before I take that back, there was a cheesy was it called FBI Files TV series? The guy from WKRP starred as Tony Carritzis but it's horrible Gary Sanders from WKRP. But besides that, nobody had done a documentary on nobody had done really a movie on it. So at first that was the most surprising thing to me.
To me, I was super surprised about that he already taken somebody hostage before in sixty eight I had no idea about that, and then to learn that that's how he got the money and he's just going to repeat it again. There's a part where his older brother, Stephen kuritz Is, is interviewed and he says something to that effect of, like, you know, I was there every day for court in sixty eight sixty nine. I knew that when they threw this out, we're just going to have
to go through this again at some point. And he was right.
You've got these two guys that are under such tremendous stress both at the same time, between Dick Hall and Tony himself. Was it twenty four to seven news coverage like it is today or is this like you were saying, Mark, I come home at noon and then at one o'clock they start playing the cartoons again.
When it was happening, it was as twenty four to seven as TV could be at that time.
And radio radio was the bigger part.
Radio was huge because WIBC is a local AM station. They were the news outlet for anything local, So there was twenty four hour coverage on wb SEE. But one of the things that's interesting about this is that media was there for almost all of it, as it unfolded and it goes on for sixty three hours. You know, some of them had just got their first satellite cameras. A lot of it was still had to be wired up. They were getting new technology coming in and some of
that helped them also cover it longer. That was kind of amazing.
Help me what role the radio plays the story.
First of all, there's the news coverage part in WIBC had a lot of good reporters back then, but the main person there was the news director, Fred Heckman. He was the trusted voice in Indianapolis News and in Indiana sort of a Walter Cronkite type, very conservative, no nonsense. And the second day, Tony loves Fred Heckman and he wants to talk to him, and he gets this idea of Hey, I'm not going to get my story out because right now all I can talk to is the
police and they're going to control what I say. I'm going to try to get a hold of Fred, and he gets through to him. Fred's aware kind of what's going on, but not expecting this. Fred takes his call and Tony airs his grievances and Fred is very tactful in the way that he talks with Tony, he doesn't judge him or anything like that. He's just like, say what you want. And that was a big deal for Tony and for negotiators, because if Tony felt he was
getting his story out, he would be calm. If he felt he was being blocked, he would be crazy, and so obviously they were trying to keep him as calm as possible. Fred Heckman becomes one of the cheap negotiating tools. Not that they coached him on what to say or what to get him to do. It was just like, just talk to him, Just talk to him and let him know he's being heard. An FBI profile to comes in,
called by the Chief of Police, Eugene Gallagher. This FBI agent is named Patrick Mulaney, and he quickly sees how, hey, this is a good thing with him talking to Fred. Let's get Fred to do more of this. Fred becomes like a part of the story, which means he could not stay on the air anymore, and that was not something Fred wanted. Producers and some other reporters had to go in there and confront him and be like, Fred, you're in this. You're gonna have to step away from
the Mic at least until it's over. Fred didn't like that, but he was like, Okay, I'll do whatever. I'll do whatever I have to do.
So you work on this documentary for five years, and like you said, you had to kind of figure out at some point we need to cut this off. This needs to actually be put together. Ellen, Are you editing all the time while you're doing this? Are you putting everything like starting in order or like how does that process work for you?
I didn't start editing it probably until about a year and a half before it was done, just because I just felt like, you know, there's gonna I'm hoping we can find more footage. I'm hoping we can find better photos. I'm hoping that the next interview is gonna answer a question that we haven't had answer yet. And all along during this I'm still cutting my teeth as a video person.
So like, if you watch the film like a somebody that understands color grading, et cetera, I mess up on a few of those shots that now look back in cringe. So my skill set was building too. I thought it would be best just to kind of get more material in and then started to go through it all. Then and that's kind of what happened, And it takes a
lot of time to go through all those archives. But once I started in it, then that kind of became most of the job, with some interviews and hunting down footage on the side.
How do you keep all of your information straight? Do you have like the big conspiracy wall kind of thing, or are you using like Google docs or like what is that process for you to just keep all your records straight?
Now?
We would be using Google Docs. Back then, I remember, I just had a lot of word docks and I was cribbing little bits of information, trying to build a timeline myself. I mean it was I don't know, I don't remember. It was fifty pages long, not super useful in trying to get information quickly.
A lot of it was on us to try to keep it straight. Yeah, a lot of trial and error and a big jump between then and now. Right like now, there's all kinds of tools, those tools I used to prep for this interview that I wished I would have had ten years ago we were doing this and just a completely different landscape as far as tech and keeping your files straight, et cetera. So it's just a big difference.
Did you find new stuff as the editing was going in and just had to keep like updating that or did you pretty much start with everything you ended with.
Yes, there was definitely more stuff that came in as I was editing, and depending on the quality of the footage or depending on what it was, it would replace older footage that wasn't as great and or be added to the I'm lying to make it better. So yes, definitely footage came in after I started editing.
When you guys were starting this whole project, did you have an end game in mind as far as we're going to make this documentary and we're going to I don't know, sell it to PPS, or what was the end goal for you?
If I remember correctly, there really wasn't an end goal as far as distribution or where we wanted to land with it, I think and marketing correct me. I think the main focus was let's just make a great documentary first and then we'll figure out what we're going to do with it later.
We didn't have avenues that we knew for sure would work, so instead of worrying about that end goal, we just got started on the first goal, which was let's make a movie about something that nobody knows anything about.
Some once you're done with the cut, the first cut of it.
What do you do the first round of edits and stuff. It just basically Mark and I going back and forth saying, yeah, this is good here, or something needs to be done here.
But then once we got an edit that we both liked, I believe we probably shared it out to family members and friends, just because all the stuff is subjective, right, But sometimes you can get in your own little bubble and you watch something so many times and you just get kind of thinking, oh, this is really good, right, But when you sit and watch it with somebody else that knows nothing about it, you start to get this feeling of, oh, this doesn't really move along fast enough,
or this needs to be changed. So my recollection was sharing it with my wife, sharing it with my son, and I'm sure I'm guessing Marked the same thing with his family, and then coming back to the table and sprucing it up a little bit more. But my gut tells me by the time we got to the family and friends, eighty five percent of it was in place, and then we just adjusted the last fifteen percent.
One of the things that Alan was particular dearly concerned about was that we didn't want this to be just a bunch of talking heads. We had so many people talk about so many great things, but when you try to put it all in there, you need some kind of visual to go with what they're saying, and in many cases we just didn't have footage of that. And Alan was right all along about it cannot be just
a bunch of people being interviewed talking about it. So that was like a major thing I remember in the early edits of like if you had somebody say something, you could show them, give them their credentials, but then also try to make that bleed on over into the footage that we had what was going on at the time. And you know, I've watched them the film a couple times in the past few weeks, and it's.
That really works.
It's really strong that way. And credit to Alan there for being able to see that ahead of the time, because otherwise we were just had people just people on screen, same really interesting things.
But that's not compelling. That's not compelling film. And I appreciate that problem, Mark, but it was mostly just based on my own documentary film watching right throughout the years, so older documentary films are a lot of talking heads, and you just start to realize that it gets boring just watching these people talking. You have to have other things to go along with it. And something you just
mentioned there, Mark that I do remember. A pain point for us was that everybody we interviewed was great, right, we do good relationships, great people. Everybody gave great information. But at the end, especially if you've made a film, you realize you're not going to get everybody in the film. So we had to cut some people out, not because they didn't necessarily say anything worth the time of interviewing them, but it just didn't fit into what we were talking about.
And I remember a couple people in particular it was a difficult conversation because I think we bruised a little bit of their ego. But in reality, we had to be dedicated to what's going to make the most entertaining, interesting watch for the viewer that knows nothing about this. Once you get everything in lockdown, what do you do next? What's the story of the film. Once the film's lockdown, you do start to think, okay, well, what are we going to do with this?
Right?
And the typical mo for an indie film would be to start putting in the film festivals. So that was the next thing we started researching, and we would submit it to some film festivals. But there is a financial burden there because every film festival is going to be
one hundred to three hundred dollars. These are prices from twenty seventeen twenty eighteen, so I'll think gone up or what, But you know, a few hundred bucks for each festival, and you're not really guaranteed anything back, of course, because they could look at and be like, ah, this doesn't
fit our film festival. But you're spending a lot of money on this, And then the other part of that is okay, So let's say you do get accepted to the film festival, Well then you've got to pay for your travel to go out there, et cetera, et cetera. So it's just just a big expense to do that. And I kept coming back to the thought, you know, I don't know, and I'm sorry stuck step back a little bit. People put their films in film festivals for a couple different want reasons. One is ego, right, and
I don't mean that in a negative way. But you want people to see your film, and you probably want to hear that that's pretty good, right, Like it's fun to hear people say, yeah, that was a good film. But then the bigger reason is that you want to find distribution. And I think that film festivals define distribution is a good thought and theory, but most of the times, it's my belief that that doesn't happen for the indie film. The bigger film, sure, yeah it does, but the smaller films.
I don't want to sound too negative, but I kind of have a belief that a lot of the indie films are actually the ones that fund these film festivals, and they rarely get anything back out of it. So
back to our story. We've submitted to a few. We got accepted to the East Lancey, Michigan Film Festival, which was just a thrill for us, but the bumber was Indianapolis has a local film festival called the Heartland Film Festival, which is pretty big deal around here, and we thought to ourselves, man, this is this is going to be a shoe in right. This is Indianapolis based story done by two guys that have lived there their whole lives.
By this point we had shared it to some One of my friends, Mark Allen, was the Indianapolis Star Film critics, so we shared it to some film people that we knew and they thought, oh, yeah, this is really good, right, So we had the Huberts to believe, oh, this is a great film. We're going to get into the Heartland Film Festival for sure. But lo and behold, we didn't get in. And to this day we're still not really sure why we didn't get into the Heartland Film Festival.
But I know for me, and I only to speak from Mark, but I know for me that was at that point I was like, I'm done with film festivals. If we can't get into this local film festival, then why are we spending money on these other ones.
East Lansing was just amazing, you know. We got in there and then we won, and that was that was amazing. So obviously you're thinking, look, we're local. Heartland's about local, it's about Indie. We got to and when we got rejected, you don't get any kind of like why, You just get sorry, you know, we don't have room in our.
List this year for you.
So that was really puzzling and the only thing I could think of is you know, is it because it's about a guy taking another guy hostage with a gun, and that whoever was jurying was sensitive about the use of a gun with you know shootings. School shootings were huge while we were doing this because otherwise, I, we don't know what it was language. No, they have plenty of other you know documentaries in there that have you know, the F word all over the place. It couldn't have been that it was.
It was Indianapolis history.
I it was puzzling.
But he's right After that, I was like, well, what's the point. We could enter into these festivals forever and unless you place or win, you can't. It's not really valuable. East Lansing was very valuable. We can use that in our promotion and we can say here we did well here, and I agree with you.
East Lansing was a great film festival, and it is nice to say that we wanted one film festival. But it still wasn't valuable from like a distribution side. There wasn't any distributors there. I mean East Lansing. The people were great and all that, but it was still a smaller film festival. There's nobody from distribution there. So I
agree with Mark. I think that East Lansing was great, but the lack of any type of distribution options and then the Heartland Film Festival saying no thanks, we kind of dropped that idea of doing And of course the cost, the continuing just dribbling out all this money to do these film festivals that we may or may not get accepted to just made us say, you know what, let's move forward.
Well, yeah, was there an actual budget for the film other than what you guys pulled together or did you have investors of any kind or is it just you two?
Just us?
Yeah?
No, just us, No, there was no it was just us.
Yeah.
Yeah, So it's every expense was you know, all right, this this comes out of our pocket?
What's next for the doc? When you say, okay, we're not going to go to the festival route. We got this East Lansing, We've got our Laurel Leaves and everything. Where do you go from there?
We really believe in the film, so it seemed like, now, of course you can be in your own bubble, but it seemed like everybody that we showed it to it was like, man, that's a good documentary and So my thinking is is, let's just get it to the people, right, Let's get just every every day whoever to be able to see it. So how do you distribute a film on your own?
Right?
And at that time iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, and there's probably a couple of those two back then, but they all had VOD and VOD was still going somewhat strong, or it was still it was still kicking around because Netflix was on the on the field as far as streaming movies, but all the other big players still weren't. So VOD was still kind of a thing. So we figured, all right, how do we get this these films onto
these networks? So I start doing some research and come to find out none of these companies at that time would talk to you as an individual filmmaker. I mean, unless you're a big name, you can't get through the front door to say, hey, would you watch my film and see if it's worthy to putting on iTunes? With that not being the case, like all right, so there's these things called aggregators. And what these aggregators do is
they have deals already with these platforms. So aggregator A will already have a deal with iTunes, with Google Play, et cetera. And so then you've got to get into the door of the aggregators. Now, if you're able to get in through the front door, the aggregator is going to take a look at your movie and they're gonna say, yeah, you know, we like it. We can distribute this for you, but they're gonna take a big percentage of your and it varied, but they're gonna take a percentage of your sale.
So every time someboi rents it for three dollars, you may not be getting that much of that three dollars and a portion would be going to the aggregator. And then the aggregators would do this. I would think that your audience would know what Hollywood accounting is, which basically is, you know, they always make up the expenses a lot higher than probably what they really were to eat into
the profits. And these aggregators will say, well, you've got to pay for expensive that expenses that comes out of your end before any money it goes into your pocket. So they'll say, well, we need XYZ for marketing, et cetera, et cetera. So when it came to that type of aggregator, I thought, man, I just don't want to give up the mon oh, and you're signing to them for a certain amount of time. So let's say you give it to aggregator A and you signed a three year deal
with it. But then Netflix comes along and say, oh, we just saw this, we want to take your film. Well, you're tied to this aggregator. Now the aggregator gets a percentage of that going to Netflix, et cetera. I just didn't like that setup. So I was like, I kept looking, and then I found this one company that you paid them a flat fee and I think it was around three grand or so, and you keep the majority of
the profits. It might have been all of it, I can't remember, but it's pretty close to most of it. And you own your film and you can leave it anytime. And then what they would do is they would get it onto iTunes, get it on Google Play, et cetera. So you had to take care of marketing yourself. And that sounded like a the set up that we wanted to do, So that's what we did. In the beginning.
It seemed like it was pretty good. So what we did, and this is the typical way you should do it, is you want to get a great number when you first land like, you want to be in the top ten, top twenty of whatever charts it are, so other people see it. So we did do a marketing push to try to get that, and I can't remember the exact number, but it may have been around in the top ten or twelve or something like that. We landed on iTunes
Top Documentaries. That's pretty thrilling, right, So we thought this is great. But then what you're also learning is to get in the top fifteen twenty of iTunes is it's not that big of money, right, It's still not like you're making bank off of it, but at least it's out there now. So now we have the film distributed, We have it on VOD platforms, and anybody can watch it if they want to cough up the three bucks.
The thing that's kind of fighting against us is that is that VOD is starting to fade out and people aren't movies like they would back in the day at the Blockbuster or whatever. And the other part is how do you cut through the noise to even let people know that this film exists? So then I start doing Facebook marketing campaigns and Google ads, But then what I come to find out is Facebook would push back on the ads and say that we'd violated the terms because
of you know, guns or the perception of violence. And it's kind of hard to sell this documentary without having those parts in a trailer or part of the description. So long story short is that. And I don't want anybody think that we're here just you know, I'm just
saying all negative things. It was just a challenge. It was a challenge to get it in front of people, and then you had to pay a certain amount of money for the marketing, and it came down to, you know what, we're spending XYZ on marketing, and that money we're not getting a good return on that investment, meaning that we'd either break even or we'd still lose money
by promoting the film. And you know, in a way, is I kind of get it, because it's hard to break through the noise when you don't have a name, you don't have a platform, you don't have you know, like we didn't have social platforms ourselves where we had a bunch of followers already, we had nothing, so it
was just difficult. And then so I think we kind of just kind of petered out there and we just kind of let us sit on the platforms, and I think we both went back to our normal lives because at this point, you know, Tony Kurritzis was kind of like, man, I'm done with this right in a way. We're not making many We tried lots of things. Let's push forward.
Now.
The thing about the aggregator that sucked is they hold on to the money, so they would do out dividends like every quarter or something, and it wasn't a great sum of money. But the aggregator we were that we paid for went bankrupt. So that aggregator, whatever the last quarter was or whatever, had our money and we basically become another collector or debtor. So so the seggregator, the I reator thing collapses. And a surprising thing happened with
Amazon Prime. They start dealing with individual filmmakers, and it was really surprising. So I reached out. I gave them the movie or I showed them the movie. They're like, yep, you can be a part of this as an individual.
I was like great. So for it was Amazon Prime, meaning that it wasn't on vod it was if you had Amazon Prime, you could watch our documentary for free, and that Mark and I both loved because at this point the thought of making money from this was long gone, right, It was more about how do we get it in front of people, because we just want people to see it, right, And like, in the first month, it was millions of views or millions of minutes watched, and I shared it
with some other independent filmmakers and they said, man, you guys are doing them credible. Now, money wise, it's pennies on the dollar. You're not making that much from those views. But again, and at that point, we were just happy
that people were seeing it. So we're pretty happy with Amazon Prime for I don't know, maybe like three or four months it was getting out there, but then Amazon reversed its policy and they said, if you're an individual filmmaker, you're no longer going to be available for Amazon Prime. You can do VOD, but you can't do Amazon Prime. So that really took the sale out of the windo, out of the sales too. So at that point we were like, all right, well, at least we got VOD
and that's where it's been ever since. And Amazon decides the pricing too, so you can't say, well, I want to charge twelve dollars for my film to rent it. Amazon decides that price, and I think I checked it earlier today and it's sitting at two dollars and sixty nine cents to rent it, and out of that, I think we get like a buck and some change, which brings in roughly thirty anywhere from ten to thirty dollars a month. Sentence.
This is getting more and more diary as we go along here, Guys, did the film get noticed by anybody?
A lot of people have Amazon Prime, A lot of people watch the free because back it was still just Netflix, Amazon Prime. I don't remember what else it was. So all of a sudden, we started getting some calls from producers that want to talk making about this into it like a Hollywood film. The biggest name of note was one of Tina Fay's producers, and we had one or two conversations and it seemed lukewarm on their side. But the bigger one was this producing team out of California,
but this director producer team. They have both been attached to huge films like you, I mean, big, big, mega blockbuster films. So when they reached out, it was like Mark and I are thinking, man, this is you know, this is going to be good. So, and I'm not naming them because of the story that we're about ready to tell.
I mean, they were really interested in the in the story and really engaged about like what to adapt, how to change it. I mean the interest we got from them was the same interest that we had, and that was incredible. And so we're both feeling really really good about that and hoping, hey, maybe we got something or maybe this will go somewhere. But then time goes by and we're not seeing any forward movement on their end.
And the whole problem of the script too. Guy we were talking to he prefers to write his own scripts, and he also made a big deal he was like, I'm not going to do this Sun spec. At the time, Alan and I we don't know how movies are made. We're just sort of stumbling our way through this. But it became clearer over months that this guy is not going to do a script until he already has the
other finances in place. That means that's stuff that me and Alan probably won't even be a part of those conversations. We have no idea how that's going to happen. But that at first, I didn't understand what a stumbling block that could be, because the other model is you do write a script, you do it on spec, you do it without being paid, and then you start shopping that script. But the first team, that's not what they were doing.
And months turned in a year, two years. There was times where they asked to have exclusive access to the material so that we couldn't enter into deals with anybody else. So in the beginning, they optioned it, so that was the first thing that we did with them. So at that, like you said, we were blocked from doing anything else with it because they optioned it.
We talked to this production, these this director producer team. They definitely seemed like they knew the story, they got what we were saying, they saw the vision, they saw it as a big Hollywood film, and we felt really good. And the other part about it that was key was since they're a director producer of these other films, they had some access to major talent. And in the beginning, the first two names they threw out was Paul Giamani
and Sam Rockwell. I think Mark and I both were kind of salivating and thinking of Sam Rockwell, especially playing Tony Kritz's He was almost perfect. So I have no idea Paul Giamani or Sam Rockwell actually saw her documentary, but Accorns's producer director team they did see it. They did like it, but the next step was getting them to sign on as the lead character. Then they could get the money, and then the director could get paid so he could write the script. Is that how you
remember it? Tumark? So, So in the first year or so, you know, on our side of the table, we don't want to be too pushy because these guys are talking about Paul Giamani and Sam Rockwell, and again, if you see their IMDb you're like, oh damn, they have done big pictures. So we're kind of like, okay, well, these things probably take time. The one thing that should have given it away, that we should have been suspect about, was they didn't give us any money for the options.
And I know people are probably out there thinking you guys are dumbasses, but at the time, there wasn't that many people knocking at our door. There was some, but this just seemed like okay, yeah. So but after about a year and a half or so, it was pretty obvious that these guys are flaking on us.
We got a contacted by a young screenwriter out in California who initially he had found he had found some footage on YouTube of the Tony Curtzis thing, and then he went and looked for Tony Kurtzis dot com and found that we had it, and he came to us initially talking about wanting to buy the domain, but that conversation quickly turned into something else where. He was really hungry and interested in the story, and Alan and I
instantly liked him. So we had we had these long phone conversations about the inner workings of it and what would be some interesting things that the writer.
Would like to do differently to adapt it, and it was, it was. It was really collaborative and really hopeful. We also turned over our entire archive to him as well, so we have a just so people know, we have a very deep archive of stuff that isn't in the movie, isn't on the website. It's just so much stuff because you can imagine after five years of printed documents, audio video, there's just a lot there. And Mark, we should probably mention his name, right, I mean, because because we really.
Liked the guy.
Yeah, his name is Austin Kladney. You know, we'd never heard of him because he hadn't actually gotten anything done yet. He had he'd been he'd been production assistant on many movies, so he had experience. He was in California, he had written scripts that had had not gotten anywhere yet, and you know, looking through his writing, I was like, he's good. This is fantastic. Maybe this other writer producer thing doesn't
work out. Let's let's see what Austin can do. One day he contacted us and was like, check out my script, and it was incredible. He had actually written the whole thing. At a time when we were still getting promises about this other team, we're gonna do it. We're gonna do it, we'll get a table.
I think by that point the other team had pretty much the first round. They had pretty much we're done with them.
At that point, they'd ghosted us, they'd wandered away, so we were hoping, hey, let's go with this. I can't remember how long all that took, but eventually he had representation and he started to form some relationships with some movie companies in California and started to pitch the story, and we were a part of one of those pitches. It didn't go great. There were some suspicious things about the guy that we were dealing with. He didn't seem
like he was really interested and just kept talking. There was somebody that was seemed great, and there was somebody that not seemed so great. Right, the not so great guy, I believe he was day drinking.
It was like a used car salesman that had a couple too many pops at one o'clock in the afternoon. So he was selling us a bill of goods and he seemed like there was a bit of a slur there in his voice. So and Mark, we should probably clarify. By this point, the first director producer team had come back into the picture. They'd come back and said, we're still interested.
What are you doing.
Austin's working part time or he's working at a zoo while he's writing the script, like he's paying his dues, and that got a lot of respect me and Mark because it's like, oh, this dude's actually doing Meanwhile, the multi million dollar director can't pick up a pen unless he has the money in front of him. And so we felt connected to Austin because we did the same thing with our film. We weren't getting paid anything. It
was the passion of creating this project. So right before this meeting with Austin's team or Austin's possible team, the original Hollywood producer and director team comes back out of the would work. We get on a call with him and I just call him out. I'm like, you know you, guys, I don't believe anything you're saying because you already painting this picture of all these great things and then you ghosted us. Now, the one thing that they were really
great at was smoothing things over. And so we get in a conversation with them again and they're great at the talking. And I'm still not sure how Mark andized bullshit detectors didn't pick it up on it. Probably because we had Star Eiyes, because they start now mentioning that their buddies with Shilah buff and Jeremy Strong from Succession and Jeremy Strong seemed like a real possibility from them, and so again I'm thinking, man, Jeremy Strong might be
pretty good for Tony Kuritz's right. And of course when we're on the calls with this team, they go into great detail of how they're friends and how they've seen the film and they really want to do this, and so we have that conversation with them, and then we have the meeting with Austin's people with the one guy that I felt I don't want to speak for Mark,
but maybe we both felt there was something off with him. Now, to be fair to Austin's side, the team, they let that guy go a few months later, so there was something off about him. And I want to make it clear that we're not talking about the other producers. We're just talking about one particular person that's now gone. The other producers were good and fine and all that stuff. So so now we're like, okay, but we got this other director Hollywood team that wants to do it, and
got Jeremy Strong. Why don't we combine. Let's see if let's take Austin's script and do it with the Hollywood team that's already together and supposedly either has Schilada Buff or Jeremy Strong. And so he's like, Austin, would you know, would you be cool with that? And Austin's yeah, let's do it. So the Hollywood director team, we sent him over Austin's script and they come back and act like Austin just wrote the biggest piece of shit ever, And
we definitely didn't feel that way, but that's how they felt. Now, my gut tells me this director didn't read past page three and all he could think about was he wanted to write it like or he wanted to make the money from it or whatever. Now that's in hindsight, of course. Okay, So now we have this decision to make. Well, the Hollywood producer director team they don't want anything to do with the Austin script. We are an alliance with Austin.
Not only do we the guy, but we've agreed to kind of make this film together and he's wrote to script. So what are we gonna do? So we kind of have to pick a team. Which way are we gonna go? Yeah, because also the writer producer it was.
Another exclusivity timeline where we went with the writer producer team. They would be the only ones to be able to work on this for like it was a year or something like that. I think it was like another year, so we would have been tied up, and that means we couldn't been doing anything with Austin. So that was the choice we had to make. Which which way are you going to go? We have zero understanding about how movies do get made and what these models are.
But here's the thing. We didn't want to screw over Austin, Right, So he has a script, but he has his script, and we were involved, not in the writing of the script, but definitely flushing out here's ar Chibal material, here's the factual things that happened. So we were a part of the process. But Mark and I ended up foolishly thinking, let's go with the Hollywood team. Yeah, they've done stuff, They've got like, look, they've got a list of things, they've got a history.
Doesn't it make logical sense to do that? And all the while we're throwing out all of this flaky behavior we've been seeing along the way.
We put up our blinders because we wanted to believe that Jeremy Strong was going to play Tony Kritzis. And they talk about money, of course, you know, and we be EPs and all that stuff. Executive producers. Again, we like Austin, like we're friends with them, right, Like, we don't want to do anything to negate him. So we throw out the proposition to him, say, hey, look what if we just say, we cut ties, but you're free to do whatever you want with your script. You can
sell it, you can do whatever. Right, it's your script, make money from it, and you are not legally tied to us in any which way. I think Austin still wanted to hang with us, but he knew that our producer director team didn't want anything to do with the script. So he was like, okay, and that's what we agreed to do. And so we go back to our producer director team and we're like, okay, guys, we're free and clear.
Let's move forward. And of course they're like, great, this is going to be outstanding, this is you know, and just start feeding. And I'm still I'm sure people are like, you guys are dumb asses. Yes, we were dumb asses at that time, but we pushed forward with them. And then Austin pushes forward with his It didn't take but about six months till I start to get the feeling again, Oh man, we're being shafted again. These guys are goat.
Not only are the ghostness, but they now they got these issues with these other projects that they're working on, and they're gonna do it next month, and then next month.
And let's just say out those other projects, they've never seen a lot of day either.
They still not seen the Lie Day, all these other things that were important that what that never happened either. Yeah, supposedly they had a deal with Amazon too. You know we would dovetail into this Amazon deal and be part of that too. Who knows if it is true. And again I want to make it clear that I have no idea of Paul Giamadi, Sam Rockwell, Shout out the Buff or Jeremy Strong's ever heard of our film, ever saw our film, was ever even up for the role.
I have no idea. That's just what they sold us. We knew that our thing was not really working out, but you know, Mark and I were like, man, good for Austin. This dude was hustling it out, working a you know, a job at a zoo or whatever. And now it looks like maybe his stuff's coming to fruition. He put in the work, and maybe success is coming the first And I still remember when we got told this, I was like, you son of a bitch in a
good way. Werner Herzog signs on to be the director of his movie, of his script, and then Nicholas Kate is in the picture to play Tony Kurtz's. So Mark and I are just I think are pretty thrilled at that point, just for Austin that this is happening for him.
We didn't find out from Austin that this was happening. We started seeing notifications from movie online movie sites, you know, saying hey, this is now in production. We check with Austin, sure enough, it's really happening. He's meeting with Berner Hertzog and Hertzg's given him notes and wants to you know,
change things, and it's like that's incredible, that's amazing. And then hert Sock's not part of the project and Nicholas Cage is in apartment and so it's like, oh, well, I guess he's going through the he's going through the same stuff we've had to go through. And then like what was it alan It was like a month or two and we started get notifications again. No, Gus van Zant is now signed to direct, and we didn't know who was in the movie or anything at all at first,
but again got in test with Austin. He's like, yeah, it's happening. Yeah, And then we started to find out it was being shot in Louisville about a year ago, really really happening, and we're not a part of it. That was the kicker to both be like, I wish nothing but the great success for Austin, but god damn it, we made the wrong call.
It still sucks, but it did suck. And I got to get props to the people that we had a call with that we turned down. They did a phenomenal job by by you know, going out and finding the money to make the picture multiple times in the past year and a half. Mark and I are just like, man, we bet on the wrong team. And I still clarify some of this too, that you know, we're kind of speaking for Austin and the history of his how this
planned out. There may be parts to this that we were not that we're not in the know or we're not remembering of how this developed. But one thing that I'm pretty sure on is that it's Warner Herzog that came up with the title of dead Man's Wire. Tony never called it dead Man's Wife.
There is no reference to dead Man's Wire anywhere, but he did call it a dead man's line. And I can and I can kind of see like, oh, they're they're gonna switch out the one word. Okay, okay, this is the way I took it. This is my own personal opinion. It was odd that they are essentially using
the same title. Changing the one word. To me was like I thought, to adapt, you'd need to move further away or do something different, and if you you're to Austin, that was not the title he wanted, but that became it and stuck with that project.
Have you guys had a chance to see dead Man's Wire.
Yeah, I think Austin did an incredibly great job. First of all, it's based on a true story, but there are obviously lots of differences, and so you can see things in dead Man's Wire that's like, that's not what really happened. All that aside, I think Austin had some really great ideas that he was able to expand, and those stuck.
The actors.
Some of the people who were cast really interesting. Dacker Montgomery, who most people probably know is Billy from Stranger Things. I thought he was pretty great. Not somebody I ever would have thought of to play Dick Hall, but I thought he was pretty great. Bill Scarsguard interesting Joyce. He doesn't look hardly anything at all like Tony. Okay, that's fine. Coleman Domingo as Fred Temple, that was an interesting adaptation
because the real guy was Fred Heckman. He was white, he was definitely not cool the way that Coleman Domingo was portrayed. But this was Austin's vision, along with many of the songs that he uses there. I thought it was a great theaptrical adaptation of something that really happened.
When Mark and I and Austin would talk about dead Man's Line and Tony Kurizz many times, the movie Dog daypp Noon got brought up with al Pacino, and you can definitely see the similarities or the vibe or the pill, the you know, the connection there. And at the ninth hour, who do they land but al Pacino to be in dead Man's Wire And I think that was the final nail of me saying that was me again saying, oh my god, we picked the wrong team. They got al Pacino in the film.
I mean that was kind of Austin's dream, you know, at first, just to be like, I hope this gets compared to Dog Day After and I hope some of that tension. I hope people see that. But to actually get Pacino to come in at the end, and Pacino, I think is really interesting in it too. He plays mmel Hall that calls Dad and there's a couple scenes there. I think it's just incredible. Pacino's fantastic. It's a different take, but it's compelling, super compelling.
It was my favorite part of the film. It is the al Pacino part. And that's not to negate anything else. It's just that it's a very interesting play on it.
Ultimately, do you have credit dead Man's fire?
Another feather in Austin on how good of a guy he is. So we come back, you know, they're they're doing these great things and me and Mark kind of come back scrapping to the table saying, hey man, can we get can we get anything here?
You know?
And he was able to land his historical consultants for the film. So I'm I would bet that our our credit is pretty low on the credit roll, and that's okay, but yeah, we got that. We got a little historical consultant credit there. Plus we got a quote from Gus van Zandt about our documentary that was pretty thrilling. That's That's definitely a thrilling part of this too is to be able to say that, you know, have this quote from Gus talking about our doc what are the.
Plans for dead Man's Line going forward?
After post dead Man's Line, I started a new project, start a YouTube channel called The Tapes Archives, and I've done like, I have a bunch of unreleased interviews from my music critic friend Mark Allen. But then I started do like music documentaries like on Black Sabbath or Van Halen, and then even more recently, I've done some videos on
like movie on movies. And so when we know that this film's coming out, dead Man's Wire, and we need a platform to put our film on because we want to reach the biggest audience, We're like, well, why don't we just put it on YouTube? Right, Like, you're not gonna make a lot of money again, but YouTube is so huge now, right, So it's it's gonna have the
widest audience. I'm being long Win and saying we're gonna put it on YouTube, and I'm guessing by the time people hear this, it'll be out, because I'm gonna drop it tomorrow December night.
We kind of exhausted the other channels too. I mean, we've looked at everything else. This is the only thing that we have any control over in terms of like managing how it goes out, how it is promoted.
One other thing happened this year where a producer did offer us twenty grand for the movie, but then they would own it, like like full lockstock. We would get twenty grand, they would own our film. We said no way, So I don't know what we're gonna make from YouTube. But it was one of those things where it's like, dude, I'm not giving you my film for you to have
for eternity for twenty grand. So instead we would rather release it so everybody can see it and hopefully it becomes a little bit of a historical documentation of a crazy event that happened in Indy. And to accent all that, if you go to our website, you'll see a lot of archives and if this, if it does well on YouTube, Mark and I are committed to adding more stuff to the archives. But if it doesn't do well, then we've probably won't because it's a lot of work.
So you guys going to work together on another documentary anytime soon.
I think both of us would love nothing more, but at our age, you know, knocking down on being sixty years old, we just can't give up five years of our lives for basically not knowing if anything monetarily is going to come from it. I'm not really looking to it. I would love to do more documentaries. I just can't justify it to my wife and saying, hey, for the next five years, I'm not gonna be paid for this and we're gonna have to sacrifice, you know, time and
maybe something like this happens again. And the moral of that story, any young filmmakers watch it or listening to this, do it. Do it while you're young, because I think if Mark and I would have gone down this path in our twenties, we would have definitely done more stuff and been okay with it because we both probably lived cheaper lives, didn't have these expensive mortgage or kids, et cetera.
So it is and I know us sound like old man here telling the kids what to do, but do it when you're young, and that way you don't have that expectation of money, or not the expectation.
But the need to be able to pay your bills as much and the energy. I mean, you know, we worked full time jobs, so we every weekend. We were often doing this as well in the evenings, and it takes a heavy toll after a while, and I think a younger person is more fit for that kind of thing.
Mark and Allen, thank you guys so much for giving me so much of your time. I really do appreciate this.
Thank you, Mike.
I've been a big fan of your podcast, for You're like one of the ogs in the podcast world and especially in the film podcast world. So for me coming on this show is without sounding corny, it's an honor because you've had some big names on here and your work is so prolific, and so I was surprised that you even said, yeah, it'll allow us all So thank you to you, Mike.
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