Episode 1371 - Tony Gilroy
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck, buddies?
Marc:What's going on?
Marc:Today is a very exciting show, actually.
Marc:Tony Gilroy is here.
Marc:And if you don't know Tony Gilroy, he's the writer of the Jason Bourne movies.
Marc:He wrote the Star Wars movie Rogue One, and he's the showrunner on the spinoff show Andor.
Marc:But he's also the writer and director of Michael Clayton.
Marc:One of the greatest movies of all time.
Marc:And I was way ahead of the curve on this.
Marc:Way ahead.
Marc:Granted, it was nominated for a couple Oscars.
Marc:It wasn't like it was unrecognized.
Marc:But I have been carrying the Michael Clayton banner long before Joe Mandy did his funny meme.
Marc:People are fucking incomprehensible.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yes, Sidney.
Marc:Anyway, I've been talking about Michael Clayton for years on this show.
Marc:Years.
Marc:And now I'm going to talk to the guy who made it, who wrote it, who pushed it through the hole into our heads.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Good talk.
Marc:Look, I got to do this at the beginning because it's a good point.
Marc:I got to do this at the beginning because some people don't listen all the way through.
Marc:But I just want to say that I will be in Livermore, California at the Bankhead Theater this Thursday, October 6th and Carmel by the Sea.
Marc:Not Carmel, but that's a nice thing to have.
Marc:Carmel by the Sea.
Marc:Carmel anytime.
Marc:I'd be eating Carmel all day long if I could, if it wouldn't give me diabetes and make me fat.
Marc:Carmel by the Sea, California at the Sunset Center this Friday, October 7th.
Marc:I have other dates.
Marc:Bloomsbury Theater in London.
Marc:I'll be doing a live WTF with David Baddiel on Wednesday, October 19th.
Marc:Tickets are on sale for that now, wtfpod.com slash tour.
Marc:So I was in Canada for the Toronto Just for Laughs Festival.
Marc:Always a pleasure to be in Canada, and I meet it.
Marc:There's just like whatever it is up there, relaxing the people.
Marc:I like the people.
Marc:It's just there's a ceiling to the energy.
Marc:I said that on stage.
Marc:I was trying to focus in, hone in on what it was.
Marc:There's a ceiling to the energy, a cap.
Marc:It's not bad.
Marc:It sounds like it may be bad or may be a problem, but you don't walk around.
Marc:Canada going like, dude, what the fuck is up with that guy?
Marc:What is up with that guy?
Marc:Dude, let's just go another way.
Marc:Doesn't happen there.
Marc:Again, maybe I'm romanticizing it, but look, here's the deal.
Marc:So I get up there, I'm doing two shows, Friday night and Saturday night, and I'm working with the fucking, the best.
Marc:I'm working with the best comedian in the country.
Marc:We're not working together.
Marc:We're not a double bill even.
Marc:We're just in the same venue.
Marc:I'm working with Maria Bamford, who I haven't seen in years, who I love, but Jesus Christ.
Marc:You watch Maria Bamford do comedy and it's almost like, why do it?
Marc:She's doing it so it's like she's it.
Marc:She's above and beyond any standup working.
Marc:She is the best.
Marc:And I don't understand why everyone just doesn't see that.
Marc:You can't put her in a box.
Marc:You can't compartmentalize it.
Marc:You can't say it's whatever.
Marc:It doesn't matter.
Marc:There was no one better on all levels
Marc:Then Maria Bamford.
Marc:She's just the best stand-up we've got working.
Marc:And I have felt that way for years.
Marc:What a pleasure to watch her.
Marc:Great laughs.
Marc:Deep.
Marc:Moving.
Marc:And just, I love hanging out with her.
Marc:It just, you know, she's a rare, authentic, inspired artist.
Marc:in the field that i work in who i love to watch doesn't happen too often it is just great and the shows up there that i had were a great time trying to get the hour down to uh to where it needs to be trim it up but a couple of interesting things happened with other celebrities while i was um on the way to canada oddly now
Marc:Pow!
Marc:I just shit my pants.
Marc:JustCoffee.coop.
Marc:Go get yourself a bag.
Marc:We get a little back end on that.
Marc:They were one of our first sponsors.
Marc:So I'm in the lounge.
Marc:Heading to Canada on Thursday in the Air Canada Lounge at LAX.
Marc:Not great.
Marc:But you can, you know, get your own food now.
Marc:So there's a buffet there and I'm getting whatever because I'm like, I'm eating.
Marc:I don't know what I'm doing.
Marc:It's not good.
Marc:But I'm putting food on a plate and I look over at the coffee machine.
Marc:There's an old man there that I kind of recognize.
Marc:And I'm like, could that be?
Marc:And I'm like, who is that?
Marc:And I'm like, holy shit.
Marc:It's Stuart Copeland from the police.
Marc:Now, look, honestly, I'm not a huge police fan.
Marc:There's police songs that are unavoidable that are great.
Marc:There's whole police albums that are great.
Marc:But the sort of disposition of all of them is uniquely annoying.
Marc:Yeah, that was always what I got off them.
Marc:But nonetheless, great drummer.
Marc:Like all the police stuff and Rumble Fish, the soundtrack of Rumble Fish.
Marc:That's where I kind of stopped with his soundtracks and anything he's ever done.
Marc:I don't keep up, but that thing is great.
Marc:And he's a great drummer, no doubt.
Marc:Don't know anything about him.
Marc:Didn't say hi.
Marc:Didn't ask for a selfie.
Marc:No big fan.
Marc:No, I really enjoyed the Rumble Fish soundtrack.
Marc:I thought that would sound dismissive.
Marc:So I just sat and looked at him and watched him drink coffee with his face.
Marc:And then in the lounge, a woman comes over, says something to him.
Marc:He gets up, walks over to another guy who's kind of hidden by a pole-ish thing.
Marc:But it's a guy with a guitar case.
Marc:But he's, you know, he's kind of short, wearing dark clothes.
Marc:He's got a bucket hat on.
Marc:He's wearing sunglasses and a mask.
Marc:And he's got kind of a man bun coming out of the back of the bucket hat.
Marc:And I don't know.
Marc:I can't make out who it is.
Marc:But Copeland hugs him.
Marc:They do selfies with masks on.
Marc:And I'm like, who the fuck is that?
Marc:He's got a guitar with him.
Marc:And I'm thinking maybe just a studio guy.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:So I get on the plane.
Marc:Stuart left the lounge.
Marc:I think he was going somewhere else.
Marc:But I'm waiting to get on the plane with the other guy.
Marc:And I'm looking at him.
Marc:I'm right next to him.
Marc:And I'm like, holy fuck.
Marc:It's Geddy Lee from Rush.
Marc:That's who it is.
Marc:It's Geddy Lee.
Marc:And awkward, again, not a huge Rush fan.
Marc:Know a lot of their work.
Marc:Seen them in concert.
Marc:I have tremendous respect for them as artists and as people because of the documentary.
Marc:I used to be a little dismissive, a little condescending about prog rock in general, but since I've been kind of getting into Crimson lately and Rush is Rush.
Marc:I don't own any Rush records.
Marc:I own a lot of Genesis records that I don't need because I can't stand it.
Marc:I own some Yes records.
Marc:I tried.
Marc:Crimson, the Blue Crimson, I'm kind of in.
Marc:But Rush, I know the shit.
Marc:So we get on the plane and I'm like, holy shit, that's Geddy Lee because they took him on first and I'm realizing it is him.
Marc:And he's sitting down.
Marc:And when I walk on the plane, there are flight attendants trying to strap his base into a first class seat.
Marc:And it's tricky.
Marc:And it's kind of holding up things.
Marc:So he's up there in first class with the woman who he's traveling with.
Marc:I don't know who that is.
Marc:And his base is also traveling first class once they got it buckled in.
Marc:Now, again, I'm getting off of the plane, and I'm right behind Geddy Lee.
Marc:And I don't ask for a selfie.
Marc:I don't say big fan, because I'm not a huge fan.
Marc:But look, I respect the guy, and I know a lot of the songs.
Guest:Today's Tom Sawyer.
Guest:Be-do-be-do-be-do.
Guest:Be-do-be-do-be-do.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:Be-be-de-be-ba.
Guest:Be-be.
Guest:I feel like I've done this before, but I didn't want to say anything.
Marc:So I took a picture of the back of his head.
Marc:I took a picture of the back of Giddy Lee's head and I wrestled with it for like days.
Marc:Like, you know, should I post this?
Marc:Is this intrusive?
Marc:Is this wrong?
Marc:How would I feel if someone did it to me?
Marc:And I chose to do it.
Marc:You know, it took a couple of days and I posted on Instagram and I wrote, I thought long and hard about posting this.
Marc:I wouldn't ask for a selfie because I don't do that.
Marc:And it would have been disingenuous.
Marc:I was on a plane.
Marc:I've known this man's work for most of my adult life.
Marc:I'm not a huge fan, but I respect the guy.
Marc:The face on the front of this head has looked out at hundreds of thousands of fans and performed his original music with this man for decades.
Marc:A true artist, a rock star.
Marc:This is the back of Geddy Lee's head.
Marc:His base had its own seat in first class, hashtag Canada, hashtag Rush, hashtag 2112.
Marc:And...
Marc:Geddy Lee got back to me.
Marc:Oh, dude.
Marc:Kind words.
Marc:I kind of wondered if that was you behind the mask as we scampered off the plane.
Marc:Fan of your work.
Marc:So now I feel like kind of a dick.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because I said not a huge fan, but I'm not a huge fan.
Marc:But it's Geddy Lee.
Marc:All right.
Marc:OK.
Marc:I was snarky and now I got I got trumped by niceness.
Marc:We were running off the plane together and he went the wrong way and I followed him until I realized it was the right way and he followed me.
Marc:But I don't know if he's going to cop to that.
Marc:So I said, hey, man, this is in response to him saying what he said.
Marc:I worked for the caterer at your show in Albuquerque, New Mexico, probably 1978, 79, and drove all the way to my boss's house to get Alex a fan for his dressing room.
Marc:I was pissed, but great show.
Marc:Sorry I didn't say hi, though I did follow you the wrong way for a minute.
Marc:That's what I wrote.
Marc:And that happened.
Marc:Alex needed a fan, and my boss, Eddie Waxman, rest in peace, asshole, made me drive a half hour to get the fan.
Marc:Getty, in response to that, said, Seriously?
Marc:What a story.
Marc:On Alex's behalf, thanks.
Marc:Hope we meet up again sometime.
Yeah.
Marc:Oh, I think so much of my resentment of that band...
Marc:was tied into that.
Marc:I just have this vision in my head of me kind of exasperated, you know, walking into this room where Alex is sitting there with his foot on one of those classical guitar wooden things that you put your foot on, like just raises your foot, and he's got a classical guitar, and he's just sitting there all affected like, and I'm like, I got your fan, man.
Marc:And I just felt that they were, I just felt, yeah, whatever.
Marc:I was like, what did I expect?
Marc:For him to be like, oh my God, you're amazing.
Marc:You're like a genius.
Marc:Thank you for the fan.
Marc:I was in high school and I just copped an attitude.
Marc:And me and Geddy just put it to rest.
Marc:We put that shit to rest and I appreciate it.
Marc:All right, so look, you guys, Tony Gilroy.
Marc:The Star Wars series Andor is streaming now on Disney+.
Marc:Tony is the creator and showrunner.
Marc:And also, he wrote and directed Michael Clayton.
Marc:I'm going to talk to him right now.
Marc:It's going to happen now.
It's going to happen now.
Marc:Um, so I would like to conduct this interview as if Michael Clayton is being released next week.
Guest:Okay, man, let's go for it.
Guest:You're in luck.
Guest:Cause I haven't, I didn't, I didn't see it for, I don't know.
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:A dozen years.
Guest:And then, uh, about a month ago, Warner brothers is doing some, some glad hand, you know, corporate centery thing and they want to honor it.
Guest:So I,
Guest:I had to go do an interview about it.
Guest:My wife went back and watched it.
Guest:So I've just seen it recently for the first time in a long time.
Marc:Well, today, it's like this month, 15 years ago, this month, it was released.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Isn't that wild?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I watch it constantly.
Marc:I mean, I wouldn't say I'm obsessed, but I've been talking about Michael Clayton for about a decade.
Guest:I've heard you talk about it.
Guest:That's kind of my entree to the show.
Guest:People say, oh my God, go on minute nine of Nicole Kidman.
Guest:Check that out.
Marc:I refer to it to everybody.
Marc:Now what's folded into it now with my recommendations is The Verdict.
Marc:I do Michael Clayton and The Verdict as movies people should see.
Guest:Man, to be married to the verdict.
Guest:The verdict is just, it's just so perfect.
Guest:Right?
Guest:It's just, there's movies like that, and it's just like, there's not, every time you watch it, you just, how did they get this?
Guest:How did it happen?
Marc:It's so perfect.
Marc:That long shot where, you know, Jack Warden clearly tells him that Charlotte Rampling was doing him wrong, and you just see Newman, like, just slump.
Guest:It's just.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:No, it's beyond elegant.
Guest:Yep.
Marc:Because like, it seems like, you know, with Michael Clayton, I mean, my argument or my excitement is always around like, you know, where are these movies now?
Marc:And the fact is, you know, just grown up sort of, you know, with depth, you know, it's not even a thriller, but just a, you know, a movie that deals with real characters in a, you know, in a dark way, like a grown up movie.
Marc:Do you know what I'm saying?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think it's out there.
Guest:I think people are doing all this.
Guest:But do they make it to the movies?
Guest:Well, no.
Guest:I mean, that's not going to be happening.
Guest:Right?
Guest:That won't be happening.
Guest:No.
Guest:I mean, it'll be diminishing.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I mean, even absent COVID, I'm not sure that was going to continue.
Marc:Really?
Guest:I mean, the audience, the economics of releasing movies and the economics of the way it works and the ease of watching it and the size of the screen at home.
Guest:It's such a cliche.
Guest:You have a big screen at home, but that's a real thing.
Guest:Why go out?
Marc:I guess so.
Marc:Why go out unless there's a reason?
Marc:Well, there's always that defense of like, don't you want to be part of a bunch of people and the excitement?
Marc:And some people are like, nah.
Marc:Yeah, I don't think that's a question you want to ask twice.
Marc:Yeah, but that seemed to be their defense for a while.
Marc:Yeah, and so people got shittier.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:People are getting shittier.
Marc:As the trend for shittiness in people increases, do you want to go out more?
Marc:Do you want to hang out more with them?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Probably not.
Marc:So that movie, though...
Marc:And The Verdict.
Marc:That movie seems to come from that legacy of thought around films, around that type of main character, a kind of 70s sensibility to it.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I'm always fascinated by the hero that goes by the exit.
Guest:I mean, what's better than that?
Guest:Nothing.
Guest:No, I mean, at one point, what was the, I remember when we screened at Warner Brothers, because they didn't really, they didn't love us.
Guest:The movie wasn't, it wasn't.
Guest:How did the opportunity come about?
Guest:Oh, the opportunity on Clayton came about.
Guest:I worked for Castle Rock.
Guest:I was sort of house boy for a bunch of different companies.
Guest:At one point, I started at Interscope, and I was the kid writer there, and then I went to Castle Rock.
Guest:What was your primary job, though?
Marc:I was a screenwriter.
Marc:No, I know, but were you mostly writing original scripts, or were you fixing things?
Guest:No, mostly at that point, mostly writing.
Guest:I mean, my first film was made at Interscope, a skating movie.
Guest:The hockey movie?
Guest:Cutting edge, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, people like that movie.
Guest:Oh, my God, they still do.
Guest:Anyway, so I moved along, and at Castle Rock, I did Dolores Claiborne there.
Guest:Oh, yeah, that's a good one.
Guest:I did this movie, Extreme Measures, for them, and worked on some other things.
Guest:And my stock was really high there, and I went in, and they were very brave.
Guest:It was a very...
Guest:It was the last sort of, it was a very benevolent, brave company.
Guest:And I went in one day and I said, look, I said, I want to do a movie about a fixer in a law firm.
Guest:Somebody will die.
Guest:It'll have a movie star part.
Guest:I want to direct it.
Guest:That's all I got.
Guest:And they paid me handsomely to do that.
Guest:Martin Schaefer there.
Guest:They really bet on me and believed in me.
Guest:And I...
Guest:I started working.
Guest:I also got really busy then.
Guest:Born came along.
Guest:A whole bunch of things came along.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it got stalled.
Guest:And by the time I came back and started to work on it, their fortunes were not, they weren't in the position to swing, to gamble as much.
Guest:And they were so generous and amazing.
Guest:When I did finally put it together, they were like, go with God.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Keep our names on it.
Guest:Help us out.
Guest:We're not going to hold you up.
Guest:We're not going to put a turnaround fee on it.
Guest:Everybody was, I had a lot of benevolence on that.
Guest:From Castle Rock, and then I had Steven Soderbergh at one point, and I had Sidney Pollack at the other time.
Guest:It was sort of a relay race of producers trying to help me, and they didn't get along.
Guest:They didn't like each other very much.
Marc:How great is Pollack?
Marc:See, that's the kind of movie...
Marc:It reminded me of the ones that he did later, the type of movies he made, like, what was it, Forbidden Hearts?
Marc:What was the one where the couple dies in the plane crash?
Marc:That was crazy, with Harrison Ford and the Englishwoman.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like, it's in that vein of film.
Guest:But anyway, I had a bunch of people and no money.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and then so a lot of people helped me get it made.
Guest:So by the time it got made, you know, it was once I got George.
Guest:It's a long story how I get George.
Guest:I ran around for six years trying to get that movie made.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Nobody wanted to make it.
Guest:I wanted to make it.
Guest:I mean, I had an $11 million version of it with Alec Baldwin and Ben Kingsley that I wanted to do, and I couldn't get $11 million to do that.
Marc:Instead of Clooney and Wilkinson?
Guest:Yeah, this was long before that.
Guest:Yeah, no, it would have been, yeah.
Guest:It would have been a terrible movie.
Marc:oh dude no no no no alec was alec at that point was like nowhere and like i ran around for a year going like man this guy's a check waiting to be cash yeah and and what a great thing but i always think like if you when some people mention that like how because my relationship with michael clayton is george clooney so now i got to think of you know of baldwin right very because cluny plays it so vulnerable somehow
Guest:Well, Alec was really down on his luck at that point.
Marc:He was?
Guest:Yeah, man.
Guest:He was right after the cooler.
Guest:People forget.
Guest:His renaissance was after.
Guest:I was right about him.
Guest:But anyway, I ran around all kinds of things.
Guest:Denzel Washington.
Guest:I mean, all kinds of people I ran around with.
Guest:In the Clayton part?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I couldn't get the movie made for six years.
Guest:And then I finally changed agencies and had a meeting with George.
Guest:But you were committed to it?
Marc:I wanted to do it.
Marc:Yeah, I needed to do it.
Marc:So, so many things happened in the interim.
Marc:So, you're writing all these Bourne movies, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But what drives you to do like this?
Marc:Why that guy?
Marc:Why Clayton?
Marc:Why was that the guy?
Marc:Your first movie you're going to direct and this story.
Marc:Why that story?
Guest:It was...
Guest:It was very, very clean.
Guest:It was super doable.
Guest:And yet it had enough elements of visual spectacularity that I could see myself.
Guest:I knew there were things I could bring to it visually, but I knew it was manageable.
Guest:I was 50 years old by the time I directed.
Guest:I'd never directed.
Guest:By that point, I had gone to school on 20 directors I'd worked with.
Guest:I'd been on all kinds of movies.
Guest:A lot of directors, you know, never work with other directors.
Guest:They never see anybody else work, so they don't know their thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Writers and actors and sometimes editors, you know, you've worked with a lot of directors.
Guest:I got to catalog shop from directors my whole life.
Guest:Oh, don't ever do that.
Guest:That's a great idea.
Marc:Who had the most impact?
Guest:I mean, I learned the most from Taylor.
Guest:I did three movies shoulder to shoulder with Taylor Hacker.
Guest:So I learned all about how to, I mean, what I didn't learn from him.
Guest:But there's things that Taylor does that I don't like that are not my way and other things.
Guest:The one thing I knew is I could not make a first movie.
Guest:You can't make a first movie at 50.
Guest:You've got to make your sixth movie at 50.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:Pressure's on.
Guest:Yeah, so I was pretty serious about it.
Marc:But that character, so he's like this perfectly flawed guy.
Marc:It was just right from the beginning.
Guest:I like a perfectly flawed.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's the balance, right?
Marc:To keep a flawed character human enough to have empathy for him, right?
Marc:I mean, it seemed like all of them.
Guest:I have empathy for all.
Guest:I can't.
Guest:I think that's the universal truth is empathy for all the characters.
Guest:There isn't one of them I don't.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I got 200 characters in this thing now.
Guest:I mean, every single one of them, and their point of view makes sense to me.
Guest:You got to write that way.
Guest:You have to write that way.
Guest:In the Star Wars thing?
Guest:Yeah, but you have to write that way.
Guest:So, you know, and George's character was very...
Guest:When we screened the movie at Warner Brothers, Dan Feldman, I think, was the guy who was really champion at that point.
Guest:He was a distribution guy, because a lot of people there didn't really get it, and they were like, what are we doing with this thing, this George movie, what is it?
Guest:And Dan Feldman was really overwhelmed, and I go, Dan, who's the movie for?
Guest:And he goes, it's for men that know they're going to die.
Marc:I thought, well, that's a place to start.
Marc:Yeah, that's a pretty big demographic.
Marc:When you say that, I don't think of old men till later.
Marc:It seemed to be a sensitivity to it.
Marc:Dark dudes.
Guest:Yeah, you have to know you're gonna die.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And structurally, that movie, because I was just talking about this with my producer, like, did you always think to backload it?
Marc:Like, did you always think, like, when you wrote the movie in the sense that you open sort of in the middle, right?
Marc:And then you fill in the story after?
Guest:What do you mean by always?
Guest:I mean, I worked on the script.
Marc:Not always.
Marc:I'm just saying that.
Marc:When I worked on it?
Marc:No, it was written that way.
Marc:You never thought of starting it at the beginning of the problem?
Guest:I tortured myself with that script for several years.
Guest:I probably wrote 700, 800 pages of script for that thing.
Guest:There were whole other films.
Guest:There was a film about the sun and the fantasy fiction.
Guest:There was a...
Guest:There was a version of the film where the Clayton character was trying to extricate a huge corporate client from a mistress that wouldn't move out of an apartment.
Guest:I mean, I had more shit than I could possibly deal with.
Guest:And it really was terrifying.
Guest:I'd be afraid to go to work.
Guest:And I literally had like an epic...
Guest:almost writer breakdown one day it was like a Monday and I was like I can't get out of bed I can't go to work I can't think about this anymore I'm too afraid I can't write anymore and I go you have been on this thing on and off for like three years and you don't know how many you don't know the time frame like I didn't like does it take place over three months I like the fact that I had worked on it that long and didn't answer that and I said
Guest:if you do not know by Wednesday how many days this thing is or how long it is, then you have to throw it away and start over again.
Guest:And like by Wednesday, I was like, oh my God, it's only over four days or five days.
Guest:It's like five days.
Guest:And like, holy shit.
Guest:And like, I think two weeks later, I wrote the script was done because I just had everything there already.
Guest:But because- It was such a game.
Guest:So stupid.
Guest:But that was always that.
Marc:With yourself.
Guest:Yeah, you know, the games you play with yourself, yeah.
Marc:But because you did all that tangential work, you definitely knew these people, right?
Guest:Oh, I had all kinds of, there's a, you know, it's very akin to painting in a way where, you know, you're painting layers and layers and layers and scraping stuff off and what's underneath.
Guest:And things take on an impasto and they take on a...
Guest:you know, a richness that you can't get there from the beginning.
Guest:It's not the... I've worked that way a couple times.
Guest:The mistake you make is when you try to dictate the next project with the process that worked on the one before.
Guest:Every single one of them has its own way.
Guest:It wants to be birthed, and its own way it wants to be massaged, and its own tempo of coming about.
Guest:And when you try to enforce your previous or some previous...
Guest:creative method on it yeah fuck up disastrously well yeah well i mean i mean the well you wrote that other law movie which was the devil movie you know there you go well yeah i like that movie i do too because i like uh devil stuff oh man that's that movie isn't that's just devil's advocate is great it's just an opera it's fucking great i love that movie is that how you approached it you're like i'm writing an opera
Guest:Well, it was just, I mean, Dad Taylor wanted to do that movie, and he sent me that script.
Guest:I said, man, I am absolutely not doing it.
Guest:It was a terrible script.
Guest:I'd been bouncing around Warner Brothers forever.
Guest:A lot of people worked on it.
Guest:And you could see how it would be, you know, you could see all the reasons how and why it would be bad.
Guest:How even good writers would get.
Guest:Yeah, because it's like, it's easy to make it silly.
Guest:Yeah, and I was just like, Taylor, man, go look at Rosemary's Baby and pick another project, because we're never going to do anything as good as that.
Guest:We're never going to get there.
Guest:And he just kept at me, and I, um,
Guest:What did I do?
Guest:I finally... I said, look, here's what I'm going to do.
Guest:I'm going to come to L.A.
Guest:for one week.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And put me in a hotel and we'll work for a week.
Guest:But at the end of the week, if I don't have it and I don't want to do it, then I can leave and we can still be friends.
Guest:Right?
Guest:That's the deal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'll work my ass off for a week.
Guest:And in that week...
Guest:I came with the idea that there was, oh my God, it was, I said, how do I make it real for me?
Guest:Because I made it biological.
Guest:I said, oh my God.
Guest:The mother, right?
Guest:No, but he's the father.
Guest:It's in you.
Guest:And it's like, I thought, wow.
Guest:And I really like, in a Nietzschean way, there's all these things I want to do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I want to do all these things that I'm not allowed to do because every society and morality, but I have them in me.
Guest:I want to fuck that and I want to eat that and I want to do this.
Guest:And they're in there.
Guest:Well, that's in me.
Guest:So the moment I could make it biological,
Guest:I could connect to it, and that was kind of the key.
Guest:And we said, what if he's the father?
Marc:So you created the character of that poor mother, the mother who was there?
Guest:Yeah, I made it genetic.
Guest:On a field trip?
Guest:Yeah, I made it genetic.
Guest:I did all that stuff.
Guest:And then after that,
Guest:Then it was just a gas to write those, you know, all those aries.
Guest:Everybody thinks that those, you know, oh, the long monologues.
Guest:Those are the easiest things to write.
Guest:You know, I could sort of, it was a little bit scary.
Guest:It's scary you can write for Satan by the yard.
Guest:It was very easy for me to write those.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, yeah, but it's fun.
Guest:It's a release.
Guest:Yeah, you can really, yeah, and you know, he's an absentee landlord.
Marc:Yeah, and also the, like that mother, the woman who played the mother in Devil's Abbey.
Marc:Judith Ivy, right.
Marc:I mean, that grounded it so heavy, and it kind of like, she played that so fucking well.
Marc:You know, where that scene in the elevator, where it's just like, oh my God.
Guest:Oh, yeah, when he's going up with the girls.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, it's, man, what a dizzy film.
Guest:I mean, the last 18 minutes of that, I mean, I could go on and on.
Guest:There's so many stories from that show because it was such a dizzy show.
Guest:But we ended up shooting in L.A.
Guest:We moved out to L.A.
Guest:and we had this big soundstage out in some weird industrial Vernon.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Out in Vernon.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:and I'm out in Vernon with Al, Taylor, Charlize, and Keanu, and a gigantic thing, and it's all of a sudden like we're doing a play.
Guest:It's the closest thing I've ever had to the experience of what it must be like to be in the theater.
Guest:Suddenly we have a theater, and we're gonna create this whole end thing, and Taylor's a maximalist, and Al is a, you know, just a, he'll eat anything that comes his way.
Guest:He just wants more and more and more.
Guest:And that I sitting there watching that last insane 20 minutes, you know, he sings it happened in Monterey and it's just, yeah, I can't believe that.
Guest:Like it's a big budget Warner Brothers movie.
Guest:And that happened.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it's, it's, it's, it feels very, um, Oh my God.
Guest:And the Trump shit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Was he in there?
Guest:Fuck, man, that's his apartment.
Guest:Really?
Guest:The killer real estate dude, the killer real estate molester, we shot in his apartment, in Trump's apartment.
Guest:We needed the ugliest, most garish, horrifying real estate developer apartment you could possibly have, and Trump threw his apartment at us.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:That was...
Guest:And so we didn't have to do, if you look at the movie, that's his fucking shit bag apartment with all the Versailles guilt and then the high rise windows.
Guest:It's just, it's so perfect.
Guest:And he came by set every day because he was living there.
Guest:He'd come by the set and poke around.
Marc:What was your impression of him?
Marc:At that time.
Marc:I mean, obviously the apartment's the apartment.
Guest:He was just, look, he was a clown.
Guest:He was a clown in New York.
Guest:I grew up, I've been in New York since 1979.
Guest:I mean, I'm with him.
Guest:I sat at a table in the China Club with he and Bo Deedle.
Guest:Yeah, Bo Deedle, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I've been around him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just a fucking clown.
Guest:Just a, you know, just that clown.
Guest:Grifter.
Guest:Grifter, clown.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Kind of loser, outsider.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A pretend rich guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because, you know, if you live in New York and, you know, I've been there all this time and your kids go to school and you're really around titans.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:There's some really big.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:There's some really big arterial, serious power and money.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was not any part of that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they just looked at him like, look at this guy.
Marc:Oh my God, he was lint.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But so you had to deal with him on Devil's Advocate.
Guest:We would come by.
Guest:He would come by on the way down to the office or whatever, you know, peek by and try to see Charlize or whatever thing he was trying to do.
Guest:But we were just, everybody's laughing at him.
Guest:Laughing at his apartment.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's so funny that he was part of the Devil movie.
Marc:Of course he was.
Marc:I know.
Guest:Al D'Amato wanted, we had a party.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We had a party in that movie where the Satan throws a party.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:And so I said, Taylor, you get all these people, you get all these people, you're going to get all these New York people.
Guest:I go, they're not going to show up with the thing.
Guest:They're going to see it's the script.
Guest:It's Satan's party.
Guest:He goes, no, no, no, no.
Guest:They all fucking show up.
Guest:Al D'Amato is there.
Guest:I go, really?
Marc:The power of attention was greater than the... Yeah, but now you know they're all fucking craven and there was no integrity to any of it.
Marc:And if they didn't have... It was a documentary.
Marc:Yeah, if they didn't have somebody advising them, they'll fucking do anything, these guys.
Marc:For a nickel.
Guest:Yeah, they'll go to a shopping center opening in hell.
Marc:You give a fuck.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that's fucking amazing that that was Trump's apartment.
Marc:Craig T. Nelson is such an intense fucker guy.
Marc:I mean, really good.
Marc:And he was so good in the part, man.
Marc:He's so good in the part.
Marc:And he also plays a part like that.
Marc:Do you remember him in Silkwood?
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:Holy shit.
Marc:Doctoring the X-rays.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Whoa.
Marc:And he started out as a comic.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Stand-up.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Wow, I would have liked to have seen that.
Marc:He was like in a team.
Marc:He was way back in the day.
Marc:I could see him as a Smothers brother almost.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, I just remember there being a picture of him in Mitzi Shore's office at the Comedy Store, and I'm like, he was a comic.
Marc:I don't think it was for very long, but he was definitely there.
Guest:He's very funny.
Guest:Yeah, is he?
Guest:Yeah, and a dry, that really dry, yeah.
Guest:So you grew up in New York the whole time?
Guest:No, I was born in New York, and my father did exactly what I do.
Guest:My father was a writer, and then he went to L.A.
Guest:with live TV, and then he went to L.A., and he became a Hollywood writer.
Guest:So we lived out here until I was about five or six, and then he...
Guest:And then there was a strike, and he was a playwright, wanted to be a playwright.
Marc:He was a playwright.
Guest:Yeah, and he had a big play, and he moved back to New York and was a hit, and all of a sudden he was doing what he wanted to do, and so we moved back east, and I grew up about an hour and a half north of New York City in a kind of unusual place at that time.
Guest:What place?
Guest:Uh, it's Washingtonville, New York.
Guest:It's where Michael Clayton, it's, uh, when Clayton, when Michael Clayton goes back to his, uh, to his brother, the cop's house, that is, that house is 200 yards from the bedroom that I grew up in that those houses were all the, uh, uh, my whole neighborhood was, uh, the sons and daughters of cops and firemen.
Marc:I just got that wave of crisp air, the fall up in that area.
Marc:Oh, it's so fucking nice.
Marc:They were all cops and firemen, you said?
Guest:Yeah, it was a very unusual community.
Guest:It was a little sleepy town.
Guest:Could have shot it as a southern town.
Guest:You could have shot it.
Guest:Civil War Monument, Moffett Library, the whole thing.
Guest:Little, tiny, little town.
Guest:Then these two extremely eccentric things happened.
Guest:Stewart Air Force Base was there, which is Stewart Airport.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was a strategic air command base.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So those kids were all the sons and daughters of a pilot or engineer, and the mother was the cutest girl in the southern town who could get out, so they were very glamorous.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Germany, Okinawa, whatever.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The base.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then you had Washingtonville, which was this little farm town that was 30% black from before the Civil War, like conservative black, like Baptist churches and really, really conservative.
Guest:Huh.
Guest:They passed a law for Robert Moses.
Guest:New York City cops and firemen could live 60 miles outside of those city limits.
Guest:They used to have to live in the boroughs.
Marc:But didn't they do Staten Island mostly?
Guest:No, but they used to be that they always had to live in the boroughs.
Guest:Then they opened up.
Guest:It said 60 miles from Columbus Circle.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This place was like 58 miles within, and a guy named Tex Worley.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:got a cop and a fireman and made them real estate agents and built around my father's big freaking house that he had bought to hide out this gigantic community and all New York City cops and firemen.
Guest:So you have New York City cops and firemen in this massive new thing.
Guest:You have Stewart Air Force Base over here and you have this little sleepy southern town and you have drugs, Vietnam, race.
Guest:You have everything collided in absolutely no control.
Guest:It was...
Guest:Those years are absolute chaos.
Guest:How old were you?
Guest:I mean, I'm a last year lottery ticket.
Guest:I'm 66, so I graduated.
Guest:So this was the late 60s and 70s.
Guest:It was absolutely out of control.
Guest:heroin comes to Newburgh and that devastates everything.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:You know, the older brothers and sisters of the kids in my neighborhood in that area, they're all going to Vietnam.
Guest:The other kids are, you know, riding around with BB guns and bicycles.
Guest:It was mad.
Guest:It was mad.
Guest:Totally out of control.
Guest:And so your dad... They didn't know what was going on.
Marc:Parents didn't really know what kids were doing then.
Marc:But your dad, he didn't start as a playwright.
Marc:He started as a TV writer?
Guest:He started as a nobody.
Guest:He's one of those people that he's like the best argument for the draft.
Guest:He's the last 17-year-old to go to Europe for World War II.
Guest:And World War II saves his life.
Guest:How so?
Guest:He was on his way to being a degenerate gambler, junkie, God knows what, never read a book, grew up in the Bronx.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Just a complete failure.
Guest:And he goes out and he sees the world and he comes out of World War II rich.
Guest:How?
Guest:From gambling.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And money changing.
Guest:And, you know, my father said, he goes, nothing like a bunch of hillbillies with money in their pocket who think dice are magic.
Yeah.
Marc:So he's a real street guy, huh?
Marc:Totally.
Guest:And then he lied his way into Dartmouth College and became a rock star and became a playwright.
Guest:Did like six plays while he was there, ran the newspaper and just totally blew up and just became, like invented himself.
Guest:That's crazy, where's that movie?
Guest:Oh man, he's done a lot of writing about that.
Marc:It's a great story.
Marc:But from your point of view,
Guest:Yeah, no.
Guest:He actually wrote a play called Getting In.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was done at EST.
Guest:It was really when they used to do all the Wannock plays.
Guest:It's published.
Guest:It's a great play.
Guest:It's about how he lies his way into Dartmouth and cheats his way in.
Guest:And then he went from there to live TV and then live TV to Hollywood.
Guest:So he had the whole...
Guest:That's a great story.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:But he literally covered the entire breadth of post-war dramatist writing because he does live TV.
Guest:Then he comes out to the studio system and he literally worked out here and did movies and, you know, the Fastest Gun Alive he wrote.
Guest:And he worked in the bungalows, you know, where your agent would come around and give your weekend.
Guest:What studio?
Guest:Everywhere.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:He worked up the street here for Walt.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Walt Disney wanted him to stay for life, and my father broke his heart and said he wouldn't leave.
Guest:My father wrote, oh, God.
Marc:Well, now you're working for Disney, so full circle.
Guest:I know, I know.
Guest:They got their hooks back.
Guest:And then he became a playwright and then an independent movie maker and a director.
Guest:He was a super vivid, independent actor.
Guest:And a great writer and a great dramatist.
Guest:Well, didn't he win a Pulitzer?
Guest:He did win a Pulitzer.
Guest:The subject was roses, yeah.
Guest:That's a big deal.
Guest:Oh, man, he was a... Oh, my God.
Guest:When I was growing up, my dad was... At that point in time, he was the president of the Dramatist Guild, and he was... Oh, my God.
Guest:And he started out just a street kid.
Guest:Like, he could have gone either way.
Guest:Oh, he wasn't going either way.
Guest:He was going one way.
Guest:He was definitely, seriously, man, World War II, really, his draft notice is the thing that saved his ass.
Guest:Huh.
Marc:Because he was always in trouble and just, yeah.
Guest:He just, he loved to gamble.
Guest:He loved to gamble, man.
Guest:You know those guys that love to gamble.
Guest:Yeah, I never understood it.
Guest:I fucking hate it.
Marc:I can't stand it.
Marc:I mean, I think unless you, you got to win big to really get the bug.
Marc:You got to be willing to risk.
Guest:That's not my theory.
Marc:No?
Marc:No.
Marc:Because if I lose 800 hours over a course of four hours, I'm like, fuck this.
Marc:I'm done.
Marc:I'm not going to sit there all night.
Marc:I don't know.
Guest:You'd have to... I know you met my brother one time.
Guest:He said he had a long conversation.
Guest:In New Mexico.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My brother actually, he wrote a movie about Camden that Al Pacino's in.
Guest:It's not a great movie, but it is a great script.
Guest:What's it called?
Guest:It's called Two for the Money.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And there's a couple scenes in there.
Guest:There's a Gambler's Anonymous scene.
Guest:There's a couple scenes in there, but I think Danny's theory really is the one I... I think Gambler's... There's a reliability that Gambler's like.
Guest:It's like Drunks as well.
Guest:There's a reliability about it.
Marc:What, that you're going to lose?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah, I've heard that one.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I kind of... Like, it's consistent.
Marc:It's something you can count on.
Marc:Yeah, I guess that's true.
Marc:But, you know, I don't know that they admit to that.
Marc:But from an outsider's point of view, I can see it.
Marc:And as somebody who's in recovery, I understand that, that, you know, you go with what you know.
Marc:And if what you know is beating the shit out of yourself one way or the other, and that's what you call home, then that's where you're going to live.
Guest:My father always said that he made more money writing about gambling than he ever lost.
Guest:So he was ahead.
Guest:That was his theory because he made a lot of money.
Guest:He was the gambling guy in Hollywood for years.
Guest:I mean, Dick Powell gambling movie.
Guest:My father wrote a movie, wrote a play called The Only Game in Town.
Guest:It was a huge play and it was a massive movie, the disastrous movie with Elizabeth Taylor and
Guest:and Warren Beatty was completely fucked up, but he... The last thing I'll say about it is, my father would do two things.
Guest:I would come home and he'd be watching TV, he'd be watching harness racing from the Finger Lakes, when he didn't even have a bed on it, right?
Guest:And the other thing was, behind his bed, he had a book.
Guest:Somebody made it, rolled dice.
Guest:Somebody took dice and they rolled them like, you know, 40,000 times.
Guest:And they recorded every roll.
Guest:And then they just put it on a list.
Guest:So it's a book of a list of dice rolls.
Guest:So my father, when he couldn't sleep, pull out the book, open it at random, and just start shooting craps.
Guest:in his bed trying to go back to bed.
Guest:So I don't know what, I don't have that.
Guest:Good for you.
Marc:I don't have that.
Marc:But you did, like, it's funny because it is sort of a deep part of the Clayton character.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:He's a compulsive gambler.
Guest:Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.
Marc:It's got to be in there.
Marc:I understand it.
Marc:Yeah, and the other brother's a drug addict.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I understand that better.
Guest:That's more easy for me to understand.
Guest:Yeah, or what, are you sober gay?
Guest:No, I'm not.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:I'm just a continual vice guy.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Marc:You just balance it out?
Guest:I've been the lucky guy.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:I never completely... I've lost my privileges in certain areas, but not... Right, right.
Guest:But I was always... No, I was always down... No, I'm very, very, very lucky that way.
Guest:I've been able to...
Guest:Manage?
Guest:Chip since I was 13.
Guest:Well, that's good.
Marc:That's good.
Marc:Well, I mean, you know, when you have, sometimes when you have a parent that's out of control, you know, you are more controlled.
Marc:You got a little more control.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I wonder how related they really are.
Guest:I guess it is the same chemicals, but it seems that there is difference.
Marc:How many, you got the, what do you got?
Marc:I have two brothers.
Marc:Two brothers.
Marc:Two brothers, yeah.
Marc:Are they all kind of okay?
Guest:Oh, my God, they're fantastic.
Guest:Yeah, it's annoyingly idyllic, our relationship.
Guest:We all work together.
Guest:We love each other.
Guest:We take care of each other.
Guest:You're all writers, right?
Guest:My brother Dan is a writer-director.
Guest:My brother John is the editor who's just done, he's one of the greatest editors on the planet.
Guest:He's edited everything for us.
Guest:He's on this show with me now.
Guest:He's done Danny's movie, did Nightcrawler.
Guest:He did everything.
Guest:So my father was, we were very lucky.
Guest:What did your mom do?
Guest:My mom really was kind of a... She kept my father... She was kind of my father's creative partner in many ways.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And just, you know, she's a great sculptor.
Guest:You know, a post-war woman who could have done anything, who ended up, you know, helping him get his career.
Guest:Keep his shit together?
Guest:But, you know, they said we grew up in this house upstate, and our lives were...
Guest:My brothers and I, our lives were very, we kind of had a secret life.
Guest:I didn't really realize this until a couple years ago.
Guest:We really had a secret life because we grew up in this sort of big stone house surrounded by all this shit, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Our neighborhood.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, you had, and fortunately we were all big and strong and ready for it.
Guest:It would have been, but so we would go out in public in our lives at school and whatever else and our whole thing and we would, we were in it, man, all the way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:We were in it.
Guest:Yeah, man.
Guest:Whatever it was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Whatever it was.
Guest:Dirt bikes, drugs, girls, whatever it was, games, football, whatever it was, we were in the woods with everybody else.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But in the summer, you know, we'd go to Europe and on the weekends we'd go see Broadway and we would go put, you know, to restaurants and we were like hanging out here and going to Bill Goldman's Christmas party and doing these different things.
Guest:And like, so we had this, but we never talked about it.
Guest:No, it was literally, until a few years ago, I really didn't realize how bizarre that was, but I was talking to my brother Johnny, and we really realized that we just really had like, it was like a secret identity that we all three grew up with.
Guest:Which one?
Guest:What do you mean?
Marc:Which one was the secret identity?
Guest:God, there's a... I don't know.
Guest:I don't... But we... Oh, God.
Guest:And, you know, we really were plugged in up there.
Guest:I mean, we all had jobs and, you know, Mason's assistant or Palmer's apprentice and landscaping or everything.
Guest:You know, you get jobs and... Sure.
Marc:You're always working and... And that whole... And I imagine everybody that you were surrounded with would have really... Even if you told them what your dad did or... They didn't understand.
Marc:Nobody, man.
Marc:Nothing.
Guest:No, nobody.
Marc:Like, they'd be like, what?
Guest:It's a different... No, it was a really...
Guest:There were a couple, there were a couple, one or two, three, four people that, you know, but it was a very bifurcated.
Marc:Like who were your dad's peers?
Marc:Like who were you hanging around with?
Marc:Who was he?
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:I mean, you know, we were just talking to the, I mean,
Guest:I mean, all the Patti Chayefsky and Bob Fosse and Bill Goleman and John Gay and, you know, I mean, Rod Serling and, I mean, his whole, all that whole generation.
Guest:He's a player in all that stuff.
Guest:And then all the playwrights, because he was the president of the Dramatist Guild for a long time.
Yeah.
Guest:So all the playwrights of the time.
Guest:So you would come into New York and just be in that world.
Guest:The highest, the highest, you know, media elite of the late 60s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I saw, when I was a kid, I mean, I saw, I mean, I saw Carol Channing do Hello Dolly.
Guest:I saw Zero Mostel do.
Guest:Fiddler?
Guest:Yeah, man.
Guest:I saw Dick Kiley do Man of La Mancha.
Guest:I went to opening nights.
Guest:I was like 10, 11, 12 years old.
Guest:And then I'd go back and, you know, the next day I'd be back in, you know.
Marc:In it.
Guest:In it.
Marc:Guarding your territory.
Guest:We weren't faking anything.
Marc:We just didn't talk about what the other thing was.
Marc:I think that's amazing.
Marc:So it made you like a fully well-rounded person.
Marc:I mean, to take that experience into your craft, ultimately, it's got to be...
Guest:I think we were trying to look for what was the unifying reason, other than good health and good luck, that my brothers and I have managed to be able to stick around and keep going and work so hard, because we do really work hard, and kind of get the thing.
Guest:And I think...
Guest:And I think also, I think we're all three really good bosses.
Guest:I think we're not so good from above.
Guest:We don't do so well with bosses, but we're very good bosses, and I don't know.
Guest:I think some of it comes from, we had a very...
Guest:We had a very omnivorous gathering of what people are like and what it's like.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And economics as well.
Guest:You saw it all, the full arc.
Guest:Yeah, and the economics in our household were, you know, my father was, because he was a gambler, there were times where we were really...
Guest:super flush and really hitting it.
Guest:And there were times where he would, you know, my father would be gone and he'd check in in the Beverly Hills Hotel and he couldn't pay his bill and the concierge would put him on the arm for a month until he got a gig.
Marc:You know, it was that kind of shit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You really dealt with the inconsistency.
Guest:We called it luxurious insecurity, yes.
Guest:So was it always going to be writing for you?
Guest:No, I was a rock and roller, man.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:What'd you play?
Guest:I was a guitar player.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Still?
Guest:I play.
Guest:I don't play out with anybody.
Guest:I don't do what you do.
Guest:I don't go out and play with anybody.
Guest:I just started doing that in my 50s.
Guest:I was going to do it, and then I saw that Viagra commercial of the guy doing it, and I'm like, fuck.
Guest:that i don't want to be that guy no but i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it i'm gonna go back in the um my fantasy is my son's friends have a he's got some friends some really good musicians and one of them has a studio yeah i when when i get this thing under control i've been there i was doing some writing last year and when you get star wars under control yeah next next year when i get when i get this monkey off my um
Guest:Yeah, when it gets under control, I want to go back to the studio more than play out live.
Guest:No, I like building songs in the studio more than jamming.
Guest:I don't really like jamming.
Guest:I did so much jamming when I was, you know, in the first 20 years of my life.
Marc:Well, what was the intent?
Marc:What kind of band was it?
Marc:Were you doing originals?
Guest:I mean, I did everything.
Guest:I started playing out gigs at 13.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:At Stewart Air Force Base, at the NCO club.
Guest:Like doing dances and shit?
Guest:Man, that was, I played in a band.
Guest:The first gig I ever played was at the NCO club.
Guest:And when it was Stewart Air Force Base, the band was called Shades of Soul.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was the only white guy in the band.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was the bass player.
Guest:I was 13.
Guest:And I think we did, I think we knew two songs.
Guest:I think we did Slippin' Into Darkness for one set.
Guest:And then we come back and do Feeling Alright for the second set.
Guest:It was that kind of a band.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I mean, I played everything after that.
Guest:Then I, you know, and I did it really seriously.
Guest:I wanted to be a studio player and I thought I was going to be a studio musician.
Guest:And I really thought that I did it really seriously pursued it.
Guest:You had real chops, huh?
Guest:I could really play.
Guest:I could really play, but I could really play.
Guest:But I was like kind of a, you know, a presence in Boston, young.
Guest:What years?
Guest:75, 76, 77.
Marc:Who was around?
Marc:I mean, that's a big music town.
Marc:I went to college in Boston.
Marc:I went to BU.
Marc:I went to BU for two years.
Guest:I dropped out of BU to play in the clubs up there.
Guest:So I played that whole circuit.
Guest:It was a great place to be at that time because you were allowed to play in town once or twice a month.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then the rest of the time, you'd play all the colleges or ski resorts or whatever.
Guest:But you could come in and play.
Guest:That was the rule.
Guest:You could play Jack's and Oxford Alehouse or Brandy's or Bunratty's.
Guest:Was the channel around you?
Guest:That's after me.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:The channel's after me.
Guest:Bunratty's was around?
Guest:Bunratty's.
Guest:I played Bunratty's many times.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:I think it's still around.
Guest:Someone told me it might.
Guest:Brandy's, Brandy's 1, Brandy's 2.
Guest:All the clubs.
Guest:But you could come into town like once or twice a month.
Guest:And you could make a living and you could play original music.
Guest:You could, you know, you'd have three or four sets of covers and stuff, but you'd have a couple sets of, and everyone was trying, a couple sets of original music and everyone was trying to get a deal.
Guest:It was all about trying to get a deal.
Marc:Who was around the bands?
Marc:Do you remember at the time?
Guest:I mean, like, well,
Guest:Who broke out of there?
Guest:The Cars.
Guest:At one point, it was kind of like us and The Cars.
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:What was your band called?
Guest:That band was called The Night Visitors.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we came very, very, really good band, came very, very close and screwed it up royally in a great, great, useful- You did?
Guest:We did.
Guest:We put together a band.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This buddy of mine and I came back to my mother's house, spent the summer, worked on all the material, went back to Boston, and we stole the rhythm section from another band, from the Road Apples.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Good band.
Guest:We stole a great rhythm section.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we had a house, a studio in Arlington, this really sort of little famous house that had this great little four-track studio in it, and we rehearsed down there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We rehearsed up three songs.
Guest:And we got this real estate lawyer to come down to hear us.
Guest:And the guy just flipped out.
Guest:And we were really good.
Guest:And they put us in the studio and recorded these three songs.
Guest:And they were really strong.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we had every record company in New York desperate to come.
Guest:So we were like, wow, we've all played out.
Guest:We've all been playing out all over the place.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we know what we're doing.
Guest:And we're so good.
Guest:And we can stretch out a set.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But we had never played live.
Guest:We did not take that band on the road and play live.
Guest:I know this.
Guest:There was a Paradise Club that just opened up.
Marc:Up on Commonwealth?
Guest:Yeah, it just opened.
Guest:We booked a very expensive showcase for all these record companies, and they all came, and we had them spread around the room.
Marc:I know that room well.
Guest:We had them spread around the tables, and there was a whole thing.
Guest:They all ended up sitting at one table in the middle because they want to hang out with each other.
Guest:And we were just not ready to play live.
Guest:You know, we were all really good musicians, and the songs were good.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And we lost the whole thing in one night, and we kind of never... We didn't rally back from that.
Guest:But the music from that band is...
Marc:Did you record it?
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Oh, you did the three songs.
Marc:A lot of recording.
Guest:No, we recorded a lot of stuff.
Guest:You got it?
Guest:I have all that stuff, yeah.
Guest:I have all that stuff.
Guest:Have you listened to it lately?
Guest:I do.
Guest:The leader of that, the main songwriter of that just passed away a few months ago, and that reignited a whole long re-listening to a lot of stuff.
Marc:That's wild, man.
Marc:Did you ever see the Modern Lovers around?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:No.
Guest:No, I love Jonathan Richman, yeah.
Marc:I talked to Jerry Harrison a few weeks ago.
Guest:I saw that on the queue, but I didn't put it up.
Guest:He was in the band.
Marc:Yeah, no, I know.
Marc:It was great.
Marc:Because Jonathan apparently is a stonemason now.
Marc:He's up in Davis making pizza ovens.
Marc:Oh, that's good to hear.
Guest:He's happy.
Marc:It seems like he and Jerry has put out a couple records with him.
Marc:He's married to a woman who's gotten him into, I think, Spanish music.
Marc:He plays Flamenco.
Marc:He's a very interesting guy.
Guest:That's very pleasing.
Guest:I never met him, I mean, I met him, but I never, we weren't friends or anything, but I saw him play many times, and he's... Pretty sweet, right?
Guest:What a strong flavor, too, man.
Guest:Back then, when he was first happening, you know, now it has context.
Guest:It didn't have any context back then.
Guest:You watch it the first time, and you're like, what the fuck is this guy doing?
Guest:What the fuck is this?
Marc:Really, that's a, you want to have people say that.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:So when do you go all in on the writing?
Marc:How does that happen?
Marc:Was your dad supportive?
Guest:Oh, yeah, because I was making a living.
Guest:You know, I was making a living.
Guest:I didn't really...
Guest:I called him up and said, hey, man, look, I got my college schedule down to like Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, so I'm gigging all the time, but it's crazy, and I don't want to do this.
Guest:And he goes, well, if you're making a living, do it.
Guest:So I did it up there.
Guest:I had my, I sort of had, my fantasies were kind of dashed.
Guest:I came out to L.A.
Guest:when I was 19.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was a guy who cherry-picked me from a band,
Guest:that his buddy was in in Boston saw me play and said, hey man, I'm making a record in LA.
Guest:And if you come out, I won't put you on the record, but you can be in my road band.
Guest:I'm going to go on the road.
Guest:He's making this big record with Richard Perry, this half a million dollar fucking record back in 19th.
Guest:Who was this guy?
Guest:Well, that's a fucking tragic story.
Guest:His name was Bill Schwartz.
Guest:His name was Bill Black.
Guest:Bill Schwartz.
Guest:His name was Bill Black.
Guest:It was for Playboy Records, Rocket Records.
Guest:And Richard Perry's producing his album.
Guest:I come out to LA.
Guest:And I go to these sessions, and I think I'm a real hot-shit player.
Guest:And I go out, and there's Richie Zito, and there's a band from Little Feet, there's Richie Hayward, and Paul Barrere, and then one night I go, and it's Nigel Olson, and Dee Murray, and Davy Johnson backing them up.
Guest:I'm sitting in the studio.
Guest:Elton's band?
Guest:Yeah, I'm going like, oh, my God.
Guest:I didn't even, it wasn't like they put me in the game and I realized how far behind, it was just watching, I was like, that is not me, I'm not.
Guest:And so I was waiting to be in his road band, and I was gonna do that, it was gonna be fun, I was learning the songs.
Guest:Finishes his album, the day they mastered his album, he went up to the riot house and killed himself.
Guest:Jesus Christ, up to the Hyatt?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Jumped off?
Guest:No, he OD'd on purpose.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was, I mean, I was 19.
Guest:I was out here selling toner, you know, living, doing that.
Guest:I couldn't even go out and drink.
Guest:I'd already, I was a bartender when I was like 15 in New York.
Guest:I was like, I've been in clubs in LA.
Guest:I couldn't even go to a bar at that point.
Guest:I'm at 19 and I was like, really, it was very disorienting.
Guest:Uh, I had this whole master plan and I ended up going back to Boston and
Guest:Put that other band together.
Guest:We came very, very close.
Guest:I started writing songs.
Guest:I got into writing lyrics.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was doing too many drugs and didn't like that.
Guest:And I had a house that burned down.
Guest:And I ended up moving back to my parents' house
Guest:In Washington.
Guest:In Washingtonville, yeah.
Guest:And I started writing short stories, and I kind of started doing that.
Guest:And then for about four or five years, I kind of, or three or four years, I did both.
Guest:I tried to do both things, and then I really made a very brave decision.
Guest:I had a band of my own in New York.
Guest:I got moved to New York, and I had a band of my own.
Guest:It was a bad time for music.
Guest:I was starting to see the limitations of what was going to happen for me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was like, I can see how I'm like, I'm not going to be as good as I want to be.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And maybe I'm better at this other thing.
Guest:That's tough.
Guest:It was very, it's one of the bravest things I ever did.
Guest:So I stopped playing and I wouldn't pick up the phone.
Guest:I used to do singing dates.
Guest:I wouldn't do singing anymore or anything.
Guest:And I attended bar for five years.
Marc:Five, six years.
Marc:It's like managed heartbreak.
Guest:It only was when I would go to clubs.
Guest:If I would go see friends play, then it would hurt.
Marc:But you had to commit to it in order to, you know, just to, what, to honor yourself?
Guest:You know, Costello killed me, really.
Guest:I was such a huge Elvis fan at that point, and I was like, man, I'm not going to be that good.
Guest:I can't do that.
Guest:And I'm going to be like, I'll be like the great road guitar player who can sing high.
Marc:The guy who people know?
Guest:Yeah, but, you know, I'll be that guy.
Marc:Yeah, just other bands.
Marc:That guy.
Guest:Or maybe I might be...
Guest:the kind of record producer who's not a musician, like the smart guy.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:I was like, man, I don't know.
Guest:And so I just ended up attending bar for five years.
Marc:So it's that moment of realizing your limitations.
Guest:Yeah, but who, I mean, I look back now and I go like,
Guest:I don't know if I'm capable of making that kind of mature decision now, so I don't know how I did it then.
Marc:Well, I mean, because I think sometimes the fear of what you're, if you can really see that your life as it unfolds, honestly, is going to be a fucking travesty or painful.
Marc:I mean, it's a rare gift.
Marc:I mean, I saw it happen to me with this podcast.
Guest:Oh, I know.
Guest:I was going to say, there's great parallels here.
Guest:You did it a little later than I did.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But it's a gift, but it's a hard one to accept, you know, to be able to have that foresight.
Guest:Yeah, and I don't think I thought I was gonna be tending bar for that long.
Guest:I think I thought I would get over rather quickly, but it took a lot longer to figure out how to be a screenwriter than I thought.
Guest:And was your dad helpful?
Guest:In what way?
Guest:Any way.
Guest:Well, yeah, he was always, I mean, he just.
Guest:Did you show him shit?
Guest:Uh, yeah, but it was more, uh, his attitude was, his attitude was the annoying attitude, you know, this is the best, tending bar is the greatest thing that's ever going to happen to you and everything you're doing now, you're learning, everything you're learning now is going to, you know, and when you're in year five and you just, you're so disgusted with people after you've been serving 9,000, you know, you just, when you're dealing with the public that hard, that long, I was a, by the end of it, I could only work at the service bar.
Guest:It was like a machine.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And when someone's telling you, man, this is the greatest years of your life and you're learning everything.
Guest:My father was such an optimist and you're learning everything you need to know and all this stuff you're getting and all this material.
Guest:You don't even realize what you're absorbing.
Guest:It's fantastic and how to be.
Guest:And you're going like, fuck you, dude.
Guest:I just want to get out of here.
Guest:He was right, but it didn't.
Guest:It didn't go down well.
Marc:It's not great to hear that when you fucking had enough of it.
Guest:Nothing made him happier.
Guest:At one point, my brother John was attending bar at Café Yon du Trois, and I was at O'Neill's 43rd Street, and he could literally go have a drink with him.
Guest:He could go visit Manny Eisenberg, do some shit.
Guest:He could go have a drink with Johnny, walk through the parking lot, and come have a drink with me, and he was in heaven.
Guest:My boys.
Guest:I know.
Guest:We're like, there's nothing glamorous about this.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That's so funny.
Marc:I know.
Marc:So when was the big break for screenwriting?
Guest:The big break was a friend of a friend.
Guest:I wrote a bunch of scripts, and people would read them.
Guest:And I did have, I had access to have people read stuff, but it doesn't really, it didn't really, you gotta do it badly for a while.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And like everything.
Guest:And what happened, a friend of a friend knew somebody who worked at New Line.
Guest:And New Line was like nine people above the Port Authority at that point.
Guest:And this guy read this script and he's like, man, I like this script, but I'm trying to do this other thing and help me out.
Guest:And I really liked him and I liked his idea and he's been a friend forever.
Guest:And he was Sam Cohn's son.
Guest:And through him, we ended up writing, I don't remember, Canon Pictures.
Guest:Yeah, oh, sure.
Guest:Yeah, so Canon, we wrote- Globulus and Globus?
Guest:Yeah, we wrote a movie that never got made for Chuck Norris called Cupid O'Malley.
Marc:We wrote it together.
Guest:And I quit tending bar off that half a Writers Guild check.
Marc:Yeah, wow.
Marc:That was my big break.
Marc:Canon Pictures.
Marc:I had to knew a friend.
Marc:I had to, like Jim Taylor,
Marc:The guy who used to write with, you know Jim?
Marc:He used to write with Payne, Alexander Payne.
Marc:He worked at Canon, and I had another friend I grew up with who was over there, too.
Marc:I remember going over there and just being like, what are they doing over here?
Guest:Cupid O'Malley, as dead as they get.
Guest:Well, they used to take those things in Variety where they'd put all those ads.
Guest:It'd be like a thousand ads of movies that don't exist.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:It was a real racket.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So that was it.
Guest:Then I eked in from there and I just, you know, and I got a couple things.
Guest:And then finally, you know, finally I got a movie made, The Cutting Edge.
Guest:I got the skating movie made.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then it just kept going.
Guest:You just keep going.
Marc:But I guess in terms of who you are now in this world, it was sort of built on the Bourne thing, right?
Yeah.
Guest:Man, I don't know.
Guest:I don't think of it that way.
Marc:No, but I mean, in terms of like, you know, people wanting you, like you don't get to Star Wars, do you necessarily?
Guest:I mean, I was like, you know, I became, I got legit off a movie called Dolores Claiborne.
Marc:Right.
Guest:That made me legit.
Guest:And I was a woman's writer then for a couple years.
Guest:That's what everybody wanted me to do.
Guest:But I was pretty, I became a pretty, you know, a pretty reliable, uh, uh,
Guest:you know, provider of shootable scenes and fixable stories in this town for a long time before that.
Guest:But so you would, they would send you scripts?
Guest:Man, we were making, Taylor and I were making Proof of Life with, that's a huge movie, with Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan.
Guest:We were making, I mean, I only, I did, I think, six weeks on Born in the middle before I was on the road with, um,
Guest:I wrote Born in a small gap I had on a break in making Proof of Life, so I was a player at that point, at least in terms of being a screenwriter on demand, you know?
Marc:Well, I mean, none of this influenced, because it's funny to me that on some level you were kind of a fixer like Clayton, but you didn't...
Guest:Not really at that point.
Guest:I mean, I had done some rewrites at that point, but I bought a house.
Guest:We bought a house off Devil's Advocate and then we bought it and then we realized that we couldn't afford to fix it up.
Guest:So I spent one whole year, I went to work for Jerry Bruckheimer for one year and that's where I became a fixer.
Guest:So I went to work on Armageddon,
Guest:and Enemy of the State, and Bad Boys, and Coyote Ugly, and Gone in 60s.
Guest:I mean, there wasn't anything there.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:We call it the house that Jerry built, because I just worked for Jerry all year.
Marc:And as that guy, is there a general problem that always exists with screenplays that need help, or is it just one story to story?
Guest:No, it's usually pretty... I don't know if there's a universal truth.
Guest:If there's a universal truth, it's that people ignore the purity of things.
Guest:They don't get into the purity of what the story really is about.
Guest:They haven't found out what the movie really is about.
Guest:And then there's a whole bunch of tells in scripts.
Guest:If you see characters and their IQs go up and down scene to scene, and you see people...
Guest:It's a lack of reality, really.
Guest:It's always a lack of reality.
Guest:It's a lack of rigor.
Guest:Of honesty and character?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It doesn't matter if it's trolls or talking trees or if it's Ken Loach.
Guest:It doesn't matter.
Guest:It always wants to be real.
Guest:And that's the thing you try to bring.
Guest:It's credibility.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Credibility in all things.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Do you have any movie regrets of yours?
Marc:What do you mean?
Marc:Like movies that you wrote and you're like, move.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I've seen some.
Guest:And movies I didn't have.
Guest:You know, that's why I also become a director because at least once I was like, well, at least once I either want to go down in flames or I want to see one that looks exactly like I want it to look.
Marc:Yeah, right, exactly, full control.
Marc:Just one, at least one.
Marc:So now, the Rogue One story, which I had to sort of research, like I'm not a Star Wars guy particularly, but it seems like an amazing, it feels like you somehow saved the franchise.
Marc:They were gambling, right?
Marc:They couldn't fail, right?
Marc:What, on Rogue?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, it's a subject that doesn't really benefit me to do that much talking about it.
Guest:Right, sure.
Guest:I could say, well, I sort of say what I said before.
Guest:Also, just because it's just, the Star Wars community and the people that now chew up making of stuff, it's become its own industry.
Guest:It was, for me, it was an absolutely extraordinary experience.
Guest:It was something that was in trouble, and the scope of work got larger and larger as it went along.
Guest:And it took everybody that it took to get it done, and it shouldn't be good.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It shouldn't have worked.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was such an enormous gamble on the part of the studio and everybody else.
Guest:And it was a miraculous win.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And all the right things that needed to happen, happened.
Guest:And so it's kind of, it's really was super exciting to be on it.
Guest:I learned a ton on it.
Marc:What'd you learn specifically?
Marc:How to manage something that huge?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And also, oh, there's some things I, I mean, you know,
Guest:I learned how you can make things without prep.
Guest:It was a different kind of seat of the pants.
Guest:I'm very prep-oriented and like to be very organized.
Guest:This was a 10-month sprint to the top of Everest.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, it was very exciting.
Guest:But then when it was done, everybody's very excited.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And it's, you know, it's great to win.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Winning is good.
Marc:But did you, when you finished Rogue One, did you think that was going to be it?
Guest:Yeah, I didn't think I would do any more of that.
Guest:I didn't.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:No.
Marc:But you, so like in terms of that skill set, I mean, are you going, I mean, well, I guess you've got this, I mean, this thing's a big deal.
Marc:The thing you're doing now, this Andor, I mean, that's going to take up a lot of space.
Guest:It's five years of my life.
Guest:Three years tonight.
Guest:Tonight we're going to show it for the first time.
Guest:And it'd be three years I've been on this.
Marc:So when they brought it to you, I mean, how did they turn you around on doing it?
Marc:What was the original pitch?
Guest:She, Kathy Kennedy, they wanted to do a prequel of the, I don't know if you've ever seen Rogue One.
Marc:Everybody dies.
Guest:But Diego Luna is not just a great guy, he's a great actor.
Guest:And writing that part, there was some really interesting things about him, but you don't really know that much about it.
Guest:It's not a story about backstory.
Guest:They said, we want to do a prequel of him taking him up to the movie.
Guest:They said, well, you know, okay.
Guest:And when they first came,
Guest:some of my job some of my relationships are friend in court people call you up and they ask you for advice right what do you think about yeah yeah so it was kind of in that in that bit of a wardrobe and and uh they tried a couple things and she sent me these also there was no economics for streaming right at that point yeah there was no no one was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on television shows at that point you're like how you gonna do that yeah
Guest:And they had a couple things that they tried.
Guest:And along the way, one of them she sent me, and I, I don't know, in some manic morning at the computer, because I said, okay, here's what doesn't work, and here's what you should do.
Guest:And it was this crazy freaking manifesto and send it off.
Guest:And they're like, well, that's a little bit much for us.
Guest:We're going to try the other thing.
Guest:Fine, that's fantastic.
Guest:It wasn't a job application at all.
Guest:It was really like... So you just coffeeed up and focused.
Guest:Yeah, you know, I do that for people.
Guest:I do that.
Guest:Because I really love...
Guest:I mean, the way that, you know, I just really love stories and breaking them apart.
Guest:So, you know, the other one flamed out and then they came back and they were like, we found the memo and we read the memo and now we want to do that.
Guest:And now we have the money.
Guest:And then even still, it was still a long tiptoe forward into it.
Marc:But it was originally conceived as a film, right?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:It was always going to be this thing.
Guest:But now there was, you know, all of a sudden they come back and now there's money for streaming and now it's not so unfeasible that you could make something on a scale.
Guest:And I love Diego and I love this idea.
Guest:And all of a sudden, and I had a bunch of movies shot out from under me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I had a couple of, you know, because I mean, most of what I've ever written has not been made.
Guest:That's crazy.
Guest:I mean, it's the truth.
Guest:A successful screenwriter's life is most of it's not made.
Marc:And that's something you accept.
Marc:You don't have, like, are you... You have to, I guess.
Marc:Let's define accept.
Marc:How many things are you accepting right now?
Guest:I mean, really, right?
Guest:Well, you know, it's humbling, dude.
Marc:It's humbling.
Guest:We should be like Eskimos.
Guest:We should have, like, nine words for acceptance, I think.
Guest:That's true.
Guest:Or German, yeah.
Marc:But...
Marc:Except no, except yes, but.
Marc:But it's sort of that same moment of realizing you're not going to be a musician anymore.
Marc:There's a different variation of that in accepting that something.
Guest:Okay, but yes, but I had a couple very important projects for me that got shot down.
Guest:I was feeling a little bit bitter about that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I wasn't getting any younger.
Guest:And all of a sudden, they're putting this thing down, and I have a very hot idea for it.
Guest:And for me, it's like I sketch.
Guest:I'm a big sketcher.
Guest:And I go, and if something's soft and accepting, it's just every time you touch it, it gives way.
Guest:It does something that you want to do.
Guest:And you come back at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, you work for an hour off.
Guest:fuck, there's another good idea.
Guest:And it's like, sometimes you even try to push things away and you come back two days later and it's like, oh, wow, look at this.
Guest:And they just, they give.
Guest:And this thing just kept giving.
Guest:And then, man, you know,
Guest:It's just this chance of a life, this canvas.
Guest:I mean, what I'm getting to do right now, I'm not slumming, man.
Guest:I am not slumming.
Guest:I don't know if you'll ever watch my show because I know the title of the rest of it.
Guest:I'm gonna, I'm gonna.
Guest:You're gonna be proud of me.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:I'm writing as hard and as high and as hot and as complicated as anything I've ever done, but I get to use this odd, you know,
Guest:this host organism, this body.
Marc:You mean the Star Wars universe?
Guest:Yeah, the frame, and I have a canonical framework that I stick in, this five-year period that I can both use and I can pervert in a really interesting way.
Guest:But I also, it's literally like, I'm not saying I'm writing War and Peace, but I have the chance to have something of that scale.
Guest:I get to write about the five-year period where this major revolution is going to coalesce and this fascist imperial power is doing everything it can to crush it.
Guest:And I have carte blanche in that.
Guest:I have...
Guest:We did 12 hours.
Guest:I have 190 speaking parts in the 12 hours.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:We're writing for the greatest actors on the planet.
Guest:And every scene that we write, every scene that I write gets shot.
Yeah.
Guest:It's amazing.
Guest:So I'm in great, you get in great shape, you get used to, I mean, it's just, it's been, there's been many, many times, if you dropped the needle along the last three years, at the wrong time, you would have been, you know, get me the fuck out of here.
Guest:What have I done?
Guest:I ruined my life.
Guest:But in the end,
Guest:Like tonight, we're gonna show the first three episodes on a big screen, and I'm proud to show them.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:Yeah, so that's cool.
Guest:And so this five-year idea, this is a finite... They wanted to do... The original idea was to do five years, and then we had no idea what we were doing.
Guest:By the time we finished the 12 episodes, it's just... I think when people see the full 12, it'll go on through Thanksgiving.
Guest:I think when people see the scale and the abundance of what we've done, they'll be like... I mean, we were just...
Guest:our heads were exploding a year and a half ago.
Guest:Diego and I were up in Scotland.
Guest:It was like, we sat down over a drink and it's like, man, we can't do five years.
Guest:Your face won't go that long.
Guest:It'll take 60 years to do it.
Guest:We'll be dead.
Guest:What do we do?
Guest:So there was a very elegant solution.
Guest:So we're going to do 12 more.
Guest:We start shooting in November.
Guest:So the first 12 episodes take place over one year, which is sort of his taking him from being
Guest:taking this character from being a complete loser and nowhere, just an absolute nobody, and turning him into a revolutionary over 12 hours.
Guest:And then the second 12 episodes will be over the next four years walking him into the movie of the rebellion and as the revolution coalesces and all the... I mean...
Guest:I get to use everything I ever studied about every revolution I ever read about.
Guest:It's the breadth of the material that we can deal with and the amount of stories I can tell and the intricacy that I can build.
Guest:I mean, it's very exciting to work on a canvas.
Guest:It's almost like I've been a short story writer.
Marc:It's like a symphony.
Guest:Well, yeah, it's almost like you've been a short story writer your whole life long and now you're writing a novel.
Guest:It's really what it's like.
Marc:But it's also like this is stuff, this is the struggle of humanity.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And plus, you're not pinned down by the politics of the day.
Guest:Right.
Guest:No one's ever... Wait, fascism's timeless.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And fear is timeless and anxiety and betrayal is timeless.
Guest:It's also not about the royal family.
Guest:We don't have any Jedi.
Guest:We don't have any lightsabers.
Guest:It has nothing to do with any of that stuff.
Guest:It's literally a bunch of people...
Guest:who are, what's happening, it's like, it could be called the winds of war if you wanted to.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:If the title hadn't been taken, you could call it the winds of war.
Guest:It's a bunch of people as what happens when revolution comes to your town.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What happens when your neighbor does this?
Guest:What happens when they come and ruin everything?
Guest:How do you, what are the various ways that you become politicized or beaten?
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's a very.
Marc:So this has been like, this is like this, it's almost like you've worked towards this
Marc:your whole life, this exploration of humanity on so many different levels and so many different characters.
Guest:I use everything I know almost every day.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's the, that's, and that's this whole show running job and the whole thing is like, I, I. First time, right?
Guest:Show running?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:As I say, first time, last time caller.
Guest:One and done.
Guest:No, I got, no, but.
Guest:Big job.
Guest:It's, yeah, man.
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:On something like this.
Guest:Yeah, but it's, that's the.
Guest:That's great, man.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It sounds great.
Guest:Like you sold me.
Guest:No, you can, no, I, you know, it's,
Guest:I really wondered, honest to God, if it was worth it for a long time.
Guest:I don't feel that way anymore at all.
Guest:I really feel like it's really been worth it.
Marc:And are you able to think about anything else or future projects?
Guest:No, no, no, I don't do that.
Guest:No.
Guest:I mean, I know that I have excitement.
Guest:to think about other things.
Guest:Like, I look at, like, next spring.
Guest:I haven't had a... Man, it's like working on a dairy farm.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because it just never ends.
Guest:And we're selling now, but my bigger anxiety is not even the screening tonight or how we're going to be received.
Guest:My bigger anxiety is, like, I start shooting in November and I don't have all my scripts ready, you know?
Marc:Right.
Guest:That's my bigger anxiety.
Marc:Now, in some other kind of future, are there projects that you've got on the shelf that you really want to see through that, you know, in the back of your head?
Guest:um you know some of them die because they the the timing is wrong yeah that they're not past the moment or I don't know I was like I don't know what I'll do yeah I like the I'm excited about the idea that like oh next April while they're finishing shooting I'll have done that and I'll just be doing post yeah and then I can start to I can start to fall in love with some some some new thing yeah music it's music time
Guest:Maybe so, man.
Guest:Maybe so.
Guest:It's time, dude.
Guest:You got to get the band together.
Guest:Oh, God.
Guest:God.
Guest:My wife would love to hear that.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:That's where she came in.
Guest:Full circle, baby.
Marc:Baby, I'm back in the band here.
Marc:We're done.
Marc:That's it.
Marc:Good talking to you, man.
Marc:Thanks for doing it.
Marc:Yeah, what a pleasure.
Marc:There you have it.
Marc:Man, that was a lively chat.
Marc:Again, his Star Wars series and or streaming now on Disney Plus.
Marc:And if you want some more Michael Clayton talk, we've got some for you.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So hang out a minute and I will tell you about it.
Marc:I'll tell you about it.
Marc:More Michael Clayton.
Marc:Seriously.
Marc:Hang out.
Marc:Okay, so Brendan and myself, me and Brendan, we just got into it.
Marc:We got into the Michael, we went almost scene for scene in the Michael Clayton movie.
Marc:We did a total deep dive, had a big conversation,
Marc:and uh this is what that sounds like this is another thing this is the other thing that michael can't control like the the fixer can't fix this he's had experience fixing it before they've clearly have a history with this he knows this guy he loves this guy it's about you know why aren't you taking your pills you know people who have those people in their life know that thing you know he's basically this is like another
Marc:Sort of like he feels that he can fix this.
Marc:He should be able to fix this.
Marc:He should be able to talk reason to his friend.
Guest:Well, and it's because it's a person with agency, right?
Guest:That's what everything that and Clayton realizes this by the end of the movie, that every act of him intervening and fixing something is because people have surrendered to him.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's what he has to get that guy to do in his kitchen in the middle of the night.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Surrender your bullshit.
Guest:Stop trying to figure out what the fog lights were like and everything.
Guest:Just surrender and listen to what I'm doing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Tom Wilkinson will not surrender.
Guest:Arthur Edens is like the last thing you want to do is make this so that we wind up in court.
Guest:You do not want to see me in court.
Guest:That's right.
Marc:Do you think you've got the horses for that?
Guest:oh that's a great that's a great sequence yeah where he's with the first of all he's encounter encounters him on his on the street arthur has like 12 20 loaves of bread it's so good you want a piece it's such a it's such a great detail it's like something your dad would have done like oh i gotta get 20 of these yeah he's going back to a loft with no one else he's just gonna have 20 loaves of bread excited about the fresh bread it's amazing it's amazing
Guest:And yeah, he tells him, you know, in no uncertain terms, you're working for the bad guys, basically.
Guest:You know, like, you know, Michael Clayton says, I'm not your enemy.
Guest:And he says, well, who are you then?
Oh, man.
Marc:That's a fucking great line.
Marc:So there you go.
Marc:That's me and Brendan jamming mental.
Marc:We had the revelation mental jam on Michael Clayton.
Marc:That's available for all full Marin subscribers tomorrow.
Marc:Go to the link in the episode description if you're not already subscribed or go to WTF pod dot com and click on WTF plus.
Marc:On Thursday, I talked to Jan Wenner.
Marc:He's the guy who created, published Rolling Stone magazine.
Marc:And as I said earlier, I'm in Livermore, California at the Bankhead Theater on Thursday, October 6th and Carmel by the Sea, California at Sunset Center on Friday, October 7th.
Marc:In London, I'll be doing a live WTF at the Bloomsbury Theater on Wednesday, October 19th.
Marc:with comedian and writer David Baddiel.
Marc:Tickets for that are on sale now.
Marc:I've got stand-up shows at the Bloomsbury on Saturday and Sunday, October 22nd and 23rd.
Marc:I don't know what availability is for those.
Marc:Dublin, Ireland, I'm at Vicar Street on Wednesday, October 26th.
Marc:Then in November, I'm in Oklahoma City, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston.
Marc:Go try to get San Antonio tickets.
Marc:It's a small place and I added a show, so do that now.
Marc:Long Beach, California available.
Marc:Eugene, Oregon.
Marc:Bend, Oregon.
Marc:In December, I'm in Asheville, North Carolina.
Marc:Second show added there at the Orange Peel, I believe.
Marc:Get those if you want to go.
Marc:And Nashville, Tennessee.
Marc:And finally, my HBO special taping is at Town Hall in New York City on Thursday, December 8th.
Marc:Go to wtfpod.com slash tour for all dates and ticket info.
Marc:I'll play us out.
guitar solo
Thank you.
Thank you.
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey and La Fonda.
Marc:Cat angels everywhere.