Episode 754 - Ron Howard
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what's happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast wtf welcome to it ron howard
Marc:The director, actor, producer, living embodiment of show business, has been in show business his entire life and has maintained his integrity as a decent and nice guy.
Marc:Ron Howard is on the show today.
Marc:So that's great.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:I'm all right.
Marc:Thanks for asking.
Marc:Things are going good.
Marc:Spread pretty thin.
Marc:I'm starting to think about things.
Marc:This last weekend, I did three big shows around the L.A.
Marc:area up in Santa Barbara on Friday night with Kevin Christie opening at the Campbell Hall.
Marc:It was amazing.
Marc:And then I did...
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:And I feel good today.
Marc:I feel confident today.
Marc:I'm a little crazy otherwise.
Marc:But the comedy felt good.
Marc:I was engaged.
Marc:I was locked in.
Marc:I was present and funny.
Marc:And it was exciting.
Marc:Largo is exciting you know when you look at your watch and you've been up there an hour and 45 minutes and you still got stuff to do that's uh I don't know that's uh you have to do something for your entire life and you work hard at it to know that it is uh that it comes to you like that and that you can sort of stay in the saddle that long that's
Marc:That means you've become a professional at something, at the very least of occupying a stage space for two hours, half improvisationally and half structured, but just having it be your home.
Marc:Having it be your home away from the horror that is ongoing in your mind.
Marc:But thank you again for coming out.
Marc:Those were fun shows.
Marc:Very self-conscious right now.
Marc:Seem to be searching for ways to kick my own ass.
Marc:I'm just a little overextended right now.
Marc:And I find that I can't quite appreciate that when you're spread thin, your emotional capacity is diminished.
Marc:And anybody's needs of any kind just seem like some sort of imposition.
Marc:I guess that's not a boundary issue.
Marc:I guess that's just a management, personal management issue.
Marc:I don't know what to do.
Marc:I don't know what to do to find the space.
Marc:I don't know about the meditating thing.
Marc:I really don't.
Marc:Maybe I'm losing my mind.
Marc:Wouldn't that be a bad thing just to get to this point and all of a sudden everything starts fragmenting.
Marc:Everything starts breaking apart.
Marc:Pow!
Marc:I just shit my pants.
Marc:Justcoffee.coop.
Marc:See that?
Marc:Comes back around.
Marc:Haven't done one of those in a while.
Marc:I watched that documentary on Glen Campbell last night about Alzheimer's and it was just devastating.
Marc:It was just devastating.
Marc:And I keep feeling like I've got this little window here now that I have, I can afford to enjoy life and
Marc:I've got this little window between now and whenever things start to go wrong.
Marc:And I'm starting to feel old a little bit.
Marc:I'm starting to feel the joints.
Marc:I'm starting to feel the anxiety of it.
Marc:And then I start thinking about my own mortality.
Marc:That's why I can't meditate.
Marc:That's why I can't meditate.
Marc:And I felt horrible for Glenn, but it was also sort of a fascinating journey and courageous thing for him to do that tour as Alzheimer's started to ravage his capacity.
Marc:And at the core of it, what was left was his ability to sing and still play guitar as his mind and memory started to dissipate.
Marc:And it was sort of fascinating to me.
Marc:the vulnerability of that and the courage of that.
Marc:I don't know how aware he was of it to perform in that state where everything is very present and then goes away as fast as it happens.
Marc:and just the vulnerability of those emotions in those moments as his condition progressed and they showed footage of him on stage sort of having immediate emotional responses to things that are happening that were frightening and it does say something about vulnerability and about the responsibility of other people to handle and to be there for people's vulnerability of any kind, whether it's helplessness or just emotional openness
Marc:It's very odd that something like vulnerability or being that present with your feelings and fears publicly is so jarring, but it really is.
Marc:It really is, even if it's relatively contextualized and controlled, that if you find an outlet for it, like if I'm on stage and things start to break down and then I explore vulnerability,
Marc:The experience of my feelings in the immediate presence to those people who are watching must be sort of like, oh no, what's gonna happen now?
Marc:I imagine on the negative spectrum of that, it's the same sort of feeling you get with someone like Donald Trump, who is impulsively just blundering through his feelings publicly.
Marc:And a lot of people like me are just, you're waiting for a train wreck.
Marc:But the people that find strength in his primarily aggravated feelings of vulnerability are just empowered at the tone of it.
Marc:Strange thing.
Marc:Scary shit.
Marc:Vulnerability is scary.
Marc:And it's scary to witness.
Marc:But in both the good and the bad ways, it can be the purest form of human interaction there is.
Marc:Not everything is scripted.
Marc:It's like when I do these sort of keynote events that there's this process, there's this program, there's this structure to people talking to other people.
Marc:Everything fits within this frequency.
Marc:It's the same with entertainment a lot of times is that you're expecting something controlled, something worked out and professional.
Marc:There's a safety to it.
Marc:This is the act.
Marc:This is the pitch.
Marc:A fully conceived event, an idea.
Marc:I imagine that's why people like sports.
Marc:And I never really got into that.
Marc:There is that outside chance that something amazing will happen.
Marc:But most of life is set up so that is avoided.
Marc:Just relegated to content.
Marc:Render it down.
Marc:I'll work this stuff out.
Marc:Did I mention Ron Howard?
Marc:Ron Howard is on the show today.
Marc:Director, actor, producer.
Marc:Ron Howard, a man who's been in show business.
Marc:For his entire life, really.
Marc:And it's interesting when I was talking to him that the sort of recollection I had about Happy Days.
Marc:Happy Days was important.
Marc:I'm a 53-year-old man.
Marc:I don't know exactly when it was on, but I do remember in... Gee, it must have been...
Marc:Fifth grade, maybe fifth grade, fifth or sixth grade.
Marc:I dressed up as Fonzie.
Marc:I dressed up as a greaser, as they called it.
Marc:I just remember it because I was really kind of upset and wanted the perfect sort of DA, kind of greased up hair, but my hair was too thin to do it.
Marc:And I was what, 10, 11 years?
Marc:My dad knew a cop who was a patient of his.
Marc:So I was able to borrow his leather jacket that was kind of undermining to the rebel spirit of the greaser archetype to have Albuquerque police force patches on the jacket.
Marc:But the effect was there.
Marc:I remember, I guess it was a sock hop situation with some sort of dance and we were supposed to dress up.
Marc:And I knew this other kid, Robert, whose hair was so thick that he couldn't grease it up properly and his mother put bobby pins in it.
Marc:Again, that sort of undermined the effect.
Marc:Two fifth grade boys, one with a leather police jacket on and the other one with bobby pins in his greased up hair, go to the sock hop.
Marc:But nonetheless, Ron Howard, an amazing career in show business, is here today.
Marc:And he directed the third installment of the Da Vinci Code Insanity called Inferno, starring Tom Hanks.
Marc:That opens tomorrow, Friday, October 28th in theaters everywhere.
Marc:But he's done a lot of other things, and he's a very decent guy, nice guy, and a guy who gets things done.
Marc:And I was thrilled to have this conversation with him.
Marc:This is me and Ron Howard.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:Ron Howard is here.
Marc:I never do that, usually, because I'm going to do the intro later.
Guest:Do you edit them?
Guest:Yeah, we'll edit a little bit.
Marc:But I don't imagine you're going to say anything that you're going to be like, oh, you've got to take that out.
Guest:No, probably not.
Guest:That's probably not me, really.
Marc:No, I don't assume that I'm going to see some version of Ron Howard that no one's ever heard before.
Marc:Nobody has anything bad to say about you.
Marc:Brian, everyone says you're the nicest guy in show business.
Guest:Yeah, well, you know, nice, nice is, I think.
Guest:Decent, how's decent?
Guest:Decent, I think mostly it's just kind of not an asshole.
Guest:I've tried to avoid being an asshole as much as possible.
Guest:Did you ever experiment with it?
Guest:I never really intentionally did, but of course inadvertently.
Guest:I'm sure there's plenty of people you could find.
Guest:There's one guy with one story about that Ron Howard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What an asshole.
Guest:What an asshole that was.
Guest:Might not characterize me as a complete asshole at all times.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But would acknowledge some asshole behavior at some point.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:I mean, who doesn't have that?
Marc:If you didn't have a little of that, what kind of weirdo would you be?
Marc:I guess so.
Marc:I guess so.
Marc:But, I mean, you've been in the business, and I know you hear this, but I've talked to people that you know, like Michael McKeon, Gary Marshall was here before he passed, and that was an amazing interview.
Marc:But there's something I get fascinated with about this town and this industry is that
Marc:When you started, when you were a kid, it was a much smaller business.
Guest:Yes, very small.
Marc:Yeah, and everyone knew each other, kind of.
Guest:In fact, my father, Rance Howard, who's still working, I think his SAG card is like 5,012 or something.
Guest:And mine's a pretty low number.
Guest:right uh and uh you know and and so it's yeah it has changed i mean he did he was acting in live tv in like the late 40s and early 50s here in in new york yeah and uh they they were they were from they were from the midwest they're from oklahoma but you don't remember oklahoma you were you were
Marc:Were you born there?
Marc:Yeah, I mean, we visited a few times.
Guest:I was born there because tragically, my mom had had, my dad was in the Air Force at the time, and she'd had a stillborn baby on the base, at the base hospital the year before.
Guest:Where was the base?
Guest:I don't remember, Mississippi or something.
Guest:And not overseas.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So she just wanted to have me in her home hospital.
Guest:So I was delivered by the same doctor who delivered her in Duncan, Oklahoma.
Marc:So that was the reason.
Marc:That's the reason I was born.
Marc:I trust and I want to be home.
Marc:Your grandparents were there probably?
Guest:Probably, yeah.
Guest:And they met at OU, at Oklahoma University.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And shortly after the war, and they were both in the drama department.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Which was kind of an unlikely thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was a really important drama department, though.
Guest:A lot of pros came out of- Like who?
Guest:Dennis Weaver, a guy named Lou Antonio was in Cool Hand Luke and became a really good TV director.
Guest:director.
Guest:I think a guy named Victor French was from there.
Guest:There were quite a few.
Guest:And even to this day, they have, I think, one of the premier theater programs and musicals for some reason.
Guest:But he was an absolute hick.
Guest:I mean, complete just a farm boy.
Marc:Well, you think about early movies.
Marc:I mean, that character, those character actors from the American Midwest were important.
Guest:Well, he really wanted to be, you know, Roy Rogers.
Guest:And that's what hooked him on the idea.
Guest:And Gene Autry, but no one... Fortunately, nobody told him he couldn't carry a tune because he wanted to be a singing cowboy.
Guest:And then... But he, you know, he had something.
Guest:And he met my mom who had a... Who, you know, was...
Guest:Didn't pursue acting professionally until much later in her life.
Guest:But everybody said she was kind of top notch there at the at the school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it wasn't until much, much later that I realized that she was the real engine in the in the relationship in terms of actually having the guts to basically be what almost like immigrants.
Guest:I mean, they didn't know anybody.
Guest:in new york and they just went to new york yeah and well yeah she was supportive and like you know probably you know kept everybody together well yeah i think at that time she still wanted to act and she just found the business so cold and miserable they acted together in fact before they got married they were they were traveling around um in this uh children's theater troupe uh-huh years later yeah
Guest:When the Andy Griffith Show was on, and they wanted me to go to New York.
Guest:Now we were living in LA.
Guest:They wanted me to go to New York and do some publicity and stuff.
Guest:For Andy Griffith.
Guest:For Andy Griffith Show.
Guest:And my mom took me.
Guest:My dad was probably working on Gentle Ben with my brother Clint at that point.
Guest:And was in Florida.
Guest:With the bear.
Guest:Dealing with the bear and the gators and the ticks and the mosquitoes.
Guest:But so we went.
Guest:And the one thing she loved New York, loved New York.
Guest:And the one thing she wanted to do was go to the automat.
Guest:And they still had these automat.
Marc:Where you get the pie in the little window.
Guest:Yeah, and the quarter into the window and get a sandwich out or a pie.
Guest:And we did that, and it was crowded.
Guest:And she said, there are only two of these left.
Guest:And Rance and I used to eat here all the time when I was a typist at CBS.
Guest:And all of a sudden, I heard this voice.
Guest:And it was kind of a low voice.
Guest:It was, Gene!
Guest:Gene Howard!
Guest:And we looked across and couldn't really see anybody.
Guest:It was really crowded.
Guest:And suddenly, this dwarf comes walking through with literally a cigar in his mouth.
Guest:And it's Gene Howard!
Guest:Gene Howard!
Guest:And she knew his name and they hugged and she said, this is your boy from the OP, from the show?
Guest:I didn't know that.
Guest:And we talked for a minute and she said, you know how I know him?
Guest:And I finally got the story.
Guest:What?
Guest:They were in this children's theater group touring around in this bus and stuff and truck and trading off doing Cinderella and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Guest:And when they did Snow White, they had four dwarfs.
Guest:And in fact, my dad would often like hide behind some bushes or a window or something and on his knees and try to be another dwarf to fake it a little bit.
Guest:But so anyway, she's told me the story.
Guest:And by now I was 12 or something.
Guest:And she said, you know, we fell in love.
Guest:And we'd met at OU, we got this job doing this, and we just fell in love on the road, and you couldn't get married because it took three days to get your license because of the blood test.
Guest:You couldn't get married on the road.
Guest:Couldn't get married on the road, but Kentucky, you could get married in one day.
Guest:And we found out, we're in Kentucky.
Guest:Let's do it.
Guest:And we did it.
Guest:And we were just going to go down to the Justice of the Peace and just do the whole thing.
Guest:And they wouldn't have it.
Guest:And they decided they took all the sequins off the Cinderella dress.
Guest:And in the hotel lobby after the show, the four dwarves were, you know, they were.
Guest:That was the wedding party?
Guest:That was the wedding party.
Guest:And they were completely drunk by then because they were drunk all the time.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But this guy was one of the witnesses to my parents' wedding.
Guest:That's a hell of a show business story.
Guest:Yeah, so I wasn't exactly born in a trunk, but the spirit was there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And your dad did theater and television and radio in New York?
Guest:He never really did much radio.
Guest:He did theater.
Guest:He was in Mr. Roberts with Henry Fonda.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, and toured the country with that.
Guest:It was a good job.
Marc:With Henry?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:And later I did a television series with Henry Fonda, and it really did me a lot of good because he was very quiet and all of it, but he really liked my dad, and he had remembered seeing my mom pregnant with me.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:it gave me a tremendous connection and he was wound up, this is really jumping ahead, but he was, he wound up being the first sort of bonafide, serious dude who said, if you love movies, you should be a director because he saw that I was making super eight movies and writing.
Guest:And he said, you know, and I know you're an actor and, and, and, and that's great.
Guest:But, but if you really love the medium of movies, it's a director's medium and started giving me film books and things like that.
Guest:Of course I lost, I lost them like anything.
Guest:But he didn't direct, did he much or at all?
Guest:I don't think he ever directed.
Guest:He produced Oxbow Incident and a couple of other movies and found that kind of unsatisfactory.
Guest:But he didn't love film.
Guest:He wanted to... He kept going back to stage.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But anyway, so my dad, he did live TV and he did theater.
Guest:And then the Korean War came along and he looked like he was going to get drafted.
Guest:So he enlisted so that he could get in the theater.
Guest:Core?
Guest:Core.
Guest:He kind of ducked that that way.
Guest:But it made him really angry because he had some heat going.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And suddenly it was disrupted for four years, and he had to kind of fight his way back into the business.
Guest:Wow.
Marc:But when you were in New York, was that where you... I mean, before you did, I imagine... How old were you when you started doing television out here?
Marc:Well... You're like... It was before Opie.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was before.
Guest:It was like... And the first jobs...
Guest:were live shows.
Guest:It was Playhouse 90.
Guest:Live television.
Guest:Live television.
Guest:In New York.
Guest:Well, that was in L.A.
Guest:We moved out to L.A.
Guest:by then.
Guest:Because when we got back, the first job I ever did was a little thing where, well, it was a movie called The Journey.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It took place in, it was shot in Vienna.
Guest:It was about the Hungarian revolution starring Newell Brenner and Deborah Carr.
Guest:and uh five four still uh and and and so my my dad was making the round see my dad directed summer stock also yeah and so one year when i was i guess about three he was doing mr roberts a show he knew real well right and he saw that i was hanging around and kind of picking up the dialogue uh-huh um and it was a great summer i kind of remember this because they let me wear a life vest and jump into the swimming pool whenever i wanted i kind of had the
Guest:the run of the joint.
Guest:It was really great.
Guest:But I also would like to watch the rehearsals.
Guest:And he saw that I was picking up on the dialogue and he thought that was kind of funny.
Guest:So we worked out a scene.
Guest:If you saw the movie, Mr. Roberts, it was Jack Lemmon and Henry Fonda again playing Mr. Roberts.
Guest:And he did a thing where he would be Henry Fonda and I would be Jack Lemmon and do this scene.
Guest:And people got a big kick out of it.
Guest:Sure, why not?
Guest:Kids are funny.
Guest:And if they can do the lines, it's kind of cute.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was wandering around making the rounds, which is a thing, that's the way actors got work in New York.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And had to just show up and say, got anything for me.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Theater, no matter what, the little role, couple lines.
Guest:Little roles, anything, and you got to know the casting directors.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you just hit the pavement day after day.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:and it would actually lead to work.
Guest:And one day he went in and there was just a swarm of kids there.
Guest:And he left a note saying, Rance Howard dropped by.
Guest:Hey, by the way, I have a kid who's a fine actor.
Guest:And so they said, bring your kid in.
Guest:So I went in and I did my scene and they said, do you think he can learn anything else?
Guest:He said, I have no idea.
Marc:What, the Jack Lemmon scene?
Guest:Yeah, we did the Jack Lemmon scene for him.
Guest:Now I don't remember any of that, but I was still three and they did a screen test.
Guest:They wanted to test me.
Guest:And I actually, here's what I remember.
Guest:I don't remember anything about the test.
Guest:But I remember my dad teaching me the lines and telling me to really look in the other actor's eyes, really pay attention, listen to what they're saying.
Guest:Don't just think about the lines.
Guest:He was teaching me good fundamentals.
Guest:And then he had a buddy of his come over and hold a tin can on a stick to be like a sound boom and kind of shake it over my head so that I wouldn't be distracted.
Guest:It's a little bit like you hear about Tiger Woods, like yelling at him in his backswing.
Guest:Tiger Woods' dad yelling at him in his backswing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, this wasn't that harsh.
Guest:It was a boom guy.
Guest:A boom guy.
Guest:Don't know.
Guest:Don't look at him.
Guest:Look at the actor right in the eyes.
Guest:And so I wound up getting that part.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my parents looked at each other and they said, we're broke.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We're never going to go to Europe.
Guest:he's never going to have any money.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Let's, you know, let's do this.
Guest:Why don't we go?
Guest:And they would give him a part also.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, he never has to act again.
Guest:I mean, we'll just put this away.
Guest:This will be at least something for him.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Good experience.
Guest:And we'll go to Europe.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so when I got back,
Marc:And they gave him a part two?
Guest:He had a part two and that enabled my mom to come over so the company was cooperating and we toured around afterwards and I went to Venice and other places.
Guest:I worked with Yul Brynner, I remember him very vividly.
Guest:You do?
Guest:Yeah.
Why?
Guest:Well, because he played this Russian colonel or something who was guarding the, you know, he's part of the Hungarian Revolution.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was guarding the border.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we were a bunch of people on a bus.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he was looking for somebody.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Kind of a Casablanca story.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's got this one thing where he's supposed to fire down some vodka.
Marc:Right.
Guest:A shot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then bite the glass.
Right.
Guest:Break it?
Marc:Break it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:With his mouth.
Marc:Oh, so as a three-year-old, that's pretty amazing.
Guest:It was pretty amazing.
Guest:But what was really amazing is he did it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he saw that I was amazed and he said, come here.
Guest:And he sat me up on his lap and he said, now this is sugar.
Guest:This is not glass.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Never bite glass.
Yeah.
Guest:But in his Yule Brenner accent.
Guest:He wanted to make sure you knew.
Guest:But man, I loved the whole thing.
Guest:I was like playing on these tanks, the Russian tanks.
Guest:I was hanging out.
Guest:I thought it was a blast.
Guest:And my dad saw that I kind of could do it.
Guest:And when he got back to New York, the business had changed that drastically.
Guest:And television had really moved to the West Coast.
Guest:And that's also where they were making a lot of Westerns, which he was well-suited for.
Guest:So we just got in this car.
Marc:So it shifted from live to tape, kind of?
Guest:Well, it just, production shifted, yeah, from sort of New York-based live stuff more to, you know, Warner Brothers became the big giant and Ziv and places like that.
Guest:And so we just, you know, we got in this 52 Plymouth and drove.
Marc:It's just you and your brother?
Guest:No, my brother wasn't alive yet.
Guest:Oh, right.
Guest:My mom and dad and me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we stopped in Duncan and stopped at his, where he grew up on his farm.
Guest:And I remember some of that.
Guest:And we went.
Guest:And as a result of that,
Guest:his agent started putting me out on some things, and I could do, I did some live stuff.
Guest:And the fact that I could survive live, and then I did some stuff where I became kind of part of Red Skelton's gang.
Guest:Whenever he would do this Freddy the Freeloader bit, he would have these kids, including Jay North, who was later Dennis the Menace, and we would do these bits.
Guest:I mean, well, we did this, you know, it weren't really bits.
Guest:Do you remember Red Skelton?
Marc:Really remember him.
Marc:Because he had a TV show, I remember when I was a kid, because you're about 10 years, nine years older than me, but I remember watching the Red Skeleton show when it was on.
Guest:It was big all the way into the 70 or 71.
Guest:So this was like 59.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:He was that popular for that long.
Guest:Oh, he was huge.
Guest:He had been huge.
Guest:Radio, movies, and all of it.
Guest:And in fact, it was a really interesting moment.
Guest:And I was always fascinated by it, and so was my dad.
Guest:The process was always interesting to me.
Marc:Of making the show?
Guest:Of being around it.
Guest:And I remember one time, he's in his Freddy the Freeloader outfit, and he's kind of got a small little dressing room, a portable room there.
Guest:And I'm hearing this tape go...
Guest:and then some lines, and then a laugh.
Guest:And then he's playing it back, and the line, and a laugh.
Guest:And a bunch of writers, well, I didn't know they were writers, guys are stuck there, kind of looking, and he's talking to them very animatedly, and I said, what's going on?
Guest:And my dad said, oh, that's from his old radio show, and he just wants them to do that bit, just like they did it before.
Guest:He's trying to show them that it got a laugh.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The process has always been really interesting to me.
Marc:Well, it's interesting that he lasted that long in the sense that a lot of those guys that came out of radio could not necessarily generate enough new material to continue moving forward in the media.
Guest:Well, it was the kind of the first sign of something that I learned growing up and later even directing people like Bette Davis.
Guest:But I acted with, you know, John Wayne and Henry Fonda and and people like that.
Guest:And Andy, I could say the same thing about Andy Griffith is and I can see it about a couple of my peers now who are enduring.
Yeah.
Guest:that in my 20s when I sort of said, well, all of these different personalities that I'm encountering, they're in their 60s, some of them in their 70s, they're still going strong, and it just occurred to me that the only thing they really had in common
Guest:was that I could witness that they outworked everybody.
Guest:Their process was more meticulous.
Guest:They kind of brought their own quality control with them.
Guest:They had taste.
Guest:And they really knew what it was all about.
Marc:and the business and the craft they did the craft the craft of making a show making a scene and they knew the the the limitations and the the qualities of their own talent and and they and how to to sort of uh exploit it for themselves and they knew what to expect of other people or demand of other people well did you raise their game right but when you were a kid you know in taking in all this i mean you're growing up on these sets i mean where where did they shoot uh andy griffith
Guest:We shot it over at a place that was then called Desilu Cahuanga, and now I think it's like the Red Studios.
Guest:And that was Desi Arnaz's studio?
Guest:Yeah, Lucy and Desi owned a bunch of studios.
Marc:And they did then when you were there.
Guest:So were they around?
Guest:They were on that lot, yeah.
Guest:In fact, my teacher, Catherine Barton, also would teach Little Ricky.
Guest:Played by Keith Thibodeau.
Guest:Your set teacher?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So they were down the hall, Lucy and Desi.
Guest:On the other stage.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So you would go over there?
Guest:I never went over there.
Guest:I did go over one time and watch Jack Benny rehearsing.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And he was on the show?
Guest:He wasn't on our show.
Guest:He had his own show.
Guest:Oh, he shot there too?
Guest:That lot was kind of amazing.
Guest:They had Van Dyke.
Guest:They had- I talked to him.
Marc:He's still real together.
Guest:Yeah, that's cool.
Guest:Lucy Show, Lucy and Desi, and then the Lucy Show.
Guest:Us, the Andy Griffith Show.
Guest:Then they had- Jack Benny.
Guest:Jack Benny was there.
Guest:That Girl, Hogan's Heroes, I Spy.
Guest:All those shows were all around.
Marc:And you were a kid watching?
Marc:Well, I mean, Hogan's Heroes must have been later, right?
Guest:Hogan's Heroes was always a little bit later, but-
Guest:But that Andy Griffith Show was on for eight years.
Guest:So I became like the mayor of the lot.
Marc:But Jack Benny, watching Jack Benny, I mean, what were you picking up?
Marc:Because did you ever take any acting classes?
Marc:No.
Marc:But my dad was a hell of a good acting teacher.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:But do you think in retrospect, because I struggle with this now, or just sort of understanding it, because I did some TV for a few years on IFC, that it seems to me that a lot of acting, there is a certain natural knack for it that has to be there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That you can't really teach.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You can kind of, you can sort of shape the process, the approach to the, to the work.
Guest:But yeah, I don't, I don't, I'm not sure, I'm not sure that creativity at that level can, can, can really be taught.
Guest:I think it can be learned, but the way it's learned is a very individual thing.
Guest:I think people don't realize how creative they are.
Guest:And I think there are a lot of people who claim they aren't and have no idea, you know, sort of what they actually have to offer.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And, you know, but I. And they might not know how to facilitate the opportunity to get that out of them.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But that's sort of elite level where people are, you know, are just somehow they connect.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, there's also something just intangible about their personality, their persona.
Guest:You know, there's something they have no control over whatsoever, except they they do learn how to harness it.
Marc:And they fit on screen.
Marc:It's a very odd thing that you look at some big actors in person and you can't really understand why the camera likes somebody or doesn't.
Marc:I get fooled by that as a director.
Marc:You do?
Guest:I mean, well, I'll cast people.
Guest:I'll know they're terrific.
Guest:I'll be working with them.
Guest:I love, you know, I'm an actor's director.
Guest:That's my very favorite thing to do is to be in the middle of that process with them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:try to create the environment where each individual can kind of do what they do their way and still serve the big picture.
Guest:But there are times when I'm watching and I think it's fine, it's solid, it's nothing special.
Guest:And then you go in and you start cutting it together and you say, look at that.
Guest:Look at that nuance.
Guest:I didn't even pick that up.
Guest:From an actor.
Guest:I'm the guy who's trying to pay attention.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But look at what they did.
Guest:That's interesting.
Guest:Oh, look what that glance down means.
Guest:I didn't even get it.
Guest:That's amazing.
Guest:These people are artists.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I don't think as an actor I was ever an artist.
Guest:I think I could do it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I think there's something intuitively that I felt I had a ceiling.
Marc:Well, do you think that had something to do with the jump or the difference between television and film at that time, or no?
Guest:No, not so much, because I think I avoided the bad habits pretty well.
Guest:TV can infuse people, especially kids.
Guest:With what, just getting stuck in a rut?
Guest:Well, especially kid actors because you... It doesn't end well sometimes.
Guest:It doesn't end a lot.
Guest:It doesn't end well a lot, which is unfortunate.
Guest:But there are a lot of reasons.
Guest:And one of them is that in order to get a performance out of a kid, it often becomes kind of like a trained animal.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:There's a look you can do.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Or that they do.
Guest:And they start to lean on these cute tricks.
Marc:Like Shirley Temple syndrome, I guess you could call it.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And then sometimes, you know, if nobody's there to help them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:they're just relying on it and it works and it works and it works and suddenly they're 14 or 15 and it looks dumb.
Guest:And in fact, when they have the adrenaline going and they're performing, they fall back on that.
Guest:On the looks or the trick.
Marc:Gimmicks.
Guest:Yes, they haven't really learned to build a character.
Guest:They haven't really learned.
Guest:And also with the pace of television, sometimes there's nobody there to teach them and they're just trying to get the shots done.
Marc:When you say build a character, how does an actor do that?
Marc:What have you witnessed for yourself?
Guest:Oh, some really remarkable examples of that.
Guest:One of the first, and I keep learning.
Guest:I mean, it's great.
Guest:It's one of the best things about my job and career.
Guest:It's not just that you go to interesting locations and solve creative problems there.
Guest:It's the people that coalesce around these things.
Guest:Well, I'll tell you an example.
Guest:So I'm still a pretty young guy.
Guest:I was doing the movie Backdraft.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I like that movie.
Guest:Oh, thank you.
Guest:With De Niro, right?
Guest:With De Niro.
Guest:And I'm going to talk about De Niro because I learned a hell of a lot from him that I have used since.
Guest:So, look, we were just thrilled to have Robert De Niro.
Guest:He was getting paid a lot a week.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in all honesty, he could just phone it in if he wanted to and we'd be delighted with the part.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was kind of a tricky part.
Guest:He was playing a fire investigator, an arson investigator.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A lot of tricky exposition and dialogue and so forth.
Guest:And he came to rehearsal.
Guest:I love to rehearse.
Guest:Always try to insist on that.
Guest:He was cooperative.
Guest:We were going through it very quietly in Robert De Niro style.
Guest:Yeah, this line, that.
Guest:And then he said, you know what?
Guest:I'd like to meet some Arsene investigators.
Guest:And we did.
Guest:We set him up with some guys.
Guest:And suddenly he was kind of hanging around with three different guys.
Guest:And then he said, I just had this guy read all my lines.
Guest:I just like his accent.
Guest:And then anyway, one thing led to another.
Guest:Then he said, oh, can we push off my shooting for a week?
Guest:because I'd like to work on it a little more.
Guest:And he had to go to New York and Mayor Dinkins was there and he was already a real estate magnet.
Guest:And I thought, oh, okay, that's a good excuse, but he's got to go get an award, give an award, buy a building or something.
Guest:Okay, but he's Robert De Niro and we're thrilled.
Guest:Sure, we can rearrange the schedule.
Yeah.
Guest:But he went to New York, he came back, and he spent the whole solid week dug in with these guys, with me coming and going.
Guest:And I saw that what he started doing for this money job was he took the posture of one guy.
Guest:He took the cadence of another guy.
Guest:He took the cocky attitude and a couple of like, you know, wise-ass kind of qualities of another guy.
Guest:And, you know, not the most memorable character in his canon.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But...
Guest:he he was reflecting he was giving back what his what he had learned and i realized that he was not a guy who invented yeah he was a guy who reflected right and that's his process yeah and later on when i began doing movies that were inspired by real events i was i really i began to understand the value of that research right and that that really thorough let's let's see what it is first
Guest:Right.
Guest:Before we start dreaming up what would be cool.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And instead of just somebody doing an interpretation of a character, why not do the research to try to absorb as much of the character as possible?
Guest:So I try not to force that on the actors, but I try to create an environment where there are opportunities for that.
Marc:And I guess the tricky thing about that is that you don't get an impression, but you get something with a little more depth in that.
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:And as I began doing movies based on real events...
Guest:it was um it surprised me i was already an established director with good credentials and i had avoided true stories because i thought in some ways they they would hamper my creativity they would be it would be limiting you know because because you had to honor something you have to honor the story you know and um but with apollo 13 i became very caught up in the minutiae tom hanks
Guest:loved all of that and was a real champion for that.
Guest:And it was remarkable.
Guest:It's great.
Marc:It's a great movie.
Marc:I watched it again recently.
Guest:Oh, thank you.
Guest:Interviewing people who'd walked on the moon, hanging around.
Guest:The whole story turned.
Guest:The whole approach to the movie turned because I went to Houston and sat in the mission control room with 13 mission controllers.
Guest:And they talked about the story.
Guest:And I began to realize, wait a minute, this is not just a survival story for these astronauts.
Guest:It's a rescue story.
Guest:And that gave it a lot more dimension and tension.
Guest:I learned a hell of a lot.
Guest:But when we started previewing the movie, the test scores were great.
Guest:And by then I even had Final Cut.
Guest:But I still like to preview.
Guest:I like to know, you know, comics do it.
Guest:They know what jokes are flying and what's not.
Guest:You know, playwrights do it.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:So one of the very first screenings, even before we had any of our visual effects finished or anything, it tested great.
Guest:I mean, it was like, wow, this is really remarkable.
Guest:And still plenty of work to do, but off to such a great start.
Guest:And there was only one person who marked it poor.
Guest:So out of 420 cards, of course, that's the one I got to find right away.
Guest:So I dig through it.
Guest:So what year was that?
Guest:95.
Guest:So it's not very much information on the card, just a lot of bold pencil strokes.
Guest:Caucasian.
Guest:Male.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:23.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Hated it.
Guest:No, wouldn't recommend it.
Guest:Poor.
Guest:Finally, I couldn't figure out what this guy had against this movie.
Guest:He flipped it.
Guest:I flipped the card over on the back.
Guest:It said, please comment on the ending.
Guest:And he said, more Hollywood bullshit.
Guest:They would never survive.
Yeah.
Guest:And I said, ah, well, of course he hasn't seen the advertising.
Guest:He doesn't know it's a true story.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I said, this is why you make true stories is in fact, you know, otherwise I get slammed for being sentimental or too humanistic or something like that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But with this story, it can, you know, you, it can be as triumphant as that movie was and you own it, man.
Guest:It happened.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so in, in the years since I've, you know, I've always, I've, I've been more, more willing.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:To make movies based on real events and TV shows and things like that.
Guest:And of course, and that was my subject in school anyway, history.
Marc:Oh, it was?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:When you went to- Well, that and journalism.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:I loved being on the school paper.
Marc:Well, it's funny, the movie The Paper, my business partner and producer who's been in journalism his whole life, he said that's what started him.
Marc:That's what got him interested.
Guest:You're kidding.
Marc:It was that movie.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Brendan McDonald said that that turned him into a life of pursuing it.
Guest:That was a blast.
Guest:I mean, that was, again, that was right before I did Apollo 13, but I was fresh off the De Niro experience, and I decided as a director to really immerse myself, and I hung out at the Daily News and The Post, and I got the cast to come and hang around, and I just wanted to, you know, it was fiction, but I wanted to infuse it with as much detail and a sense of reality as possible.
Marc:When did that sort of start happening?
Marc:Because, like, I know, like, being on movie sets, like, I have to assume that, like, with John Wayne, who directed the shoot is...
Marc:don siegel all right he also did big deal did dirty harry yeah um and so like you as a young man i mean you know before happy days and you're doing all these tv you're working you even did you worked on what with bob denver and like everybody i imagine yeah well that was delby gillis yeah and like uh like i you know it's weird because when i picture those times i can only picture them in black and white but you saw them in color these were real people they were they were actually real people with perspiration yeah it's
Guest:Smoking, hiding cigarettes, like under the table.
Marc:That's so funny when you do TV and you realize, like, where do I put these sides?
Guest:What about this coffee's going to go there?
Guest:Can you see it?
Guest:Is that in?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I was learning all those tricks, although I didn't smoke.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, you managed to avoid all of that, it seems, which probably saved you because you were, like, you weren't, I guess you were still kind of a teenager when everyone started to get fucked up on drugs.
Guest:Oh, they did.
Guest:I mean, when I, see, I would move back and forth between studio school.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:when I was doing the show.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or guest shots on other shows.
Guest:And then I would go back to public school in Burbank.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the first year I did it, I didn't like it very much because the kids were pretty tough.
Marc:How old were you?
Guest:Oh, that was like second grade.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Third grade.
Guest:And I had to fight with people.
Guest:Because you were on TV?
Guest:Opie, dopey, soapy, dopey, dopey.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Oh, all that kind of shit.
Guest:And they would get better.
Guest:And in fact, I told my parents, I don't know if I, you know, and they said, well, I don't know about this.
Guest:And they said, well, stick it out and we could try private school next year and that might be better.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But why don't you stick it out?
Guest:And by the end of the year, you know, I liked it and wanted to come back and I came back every year.
Guest:Although I'd always have to stand up for myself, deal with bullies or whatever.
Guest:It's at a certain point.
Guest:But...
Guest:When I went to junior high, that's a big deal because your elementary school that's kind of become safe and you know everybody empties out into a bigger school.
Guest:And the first day that I'm here and it was kind of a little traumatic because I was always coming back late.
Guest:And Andy Griffith Show was still on.
Guest:It was the number one show.
Guest:So everybody knew you.
Guest:Everybody knew.
Guest:And it was kind of crazy with all the halls.
Guest:And, you know, like this one girl said, sign my leg.
Guest:Miniskirts were in then.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:So, you know, I said, I can't sign your leg, you know.
Guest:But she was a dangerous ninth grader.
Guest:And...
Guest:And then stuff happened like I was trying to play basketball at the lunch break and my fly went down and everybody was like pointing at my crotch and laughing and stuff.
Guest:And I didn't know whether to zip it up or just ignore it.
Guest:I tried to play it cool.
Guest:Fortunately, I made a couple outside jumpers that helped.
Guest:With the fly open or closed?
Guest:Oh, I fly open, man.
Guest:I just went for it.
Guest:I'm not gonna acknowledge these people.
Guest:You owned it, yeah.
Guest:I owned it.
Guest:But then by the end of the day, this giant...
Guest:You know, when you're in junior high, I was tiny.
Guest:I was like, you know, not even five feet tall.
Guest:This sort of six foot tall guy, big giant belly, came over with hair hanging down.
Guest:He said, hey, Opie, you want to buy a lid?
Guest:I had no idea what he was talking about at that point.
Guest:I figured it out a day or so later.
Guest:I didn't make that acquisition.
Guest:Yeah, it's not your thing.
Guest:It wasn't my thing.
Guest:My dad, pretty clean living guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I would say, you know,
Guest:Also, kids were getting pretty fucked up.
Guest:I mean, like, reds were a big deal.
Guest:People were, like, collapsing in their desks.
Guest:Well, not so much speed.
Guest:Well, they would take some speed, but it was more the downers.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, these reds.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And they would take them and, like... I wonder what drug that was.
Marc:Phenobarbital?
Guest:Something like that, yeah.
Guest:And they would just, like, fall on the floor, and the cops would come.
Guest:I mean, it was... Scared you.
Guest:It was a little scary, but more than anything, there was a kind of a...
Guest:I mean, I'm an introvert for starters, but there was kind of an expectation that I was going to party, that I was going to have a lot of money, that when it came to buying a car, I'd get a great car.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I played against all that because I felt like that's what they- They wanted to see Opie go down.
Guest:Go up and go down.
Guest:Go up and go down.
Guest:They wanted me to play into some idea of what they thought a movie star was.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And my dad's mantra to me, when I was younger and he said, and they'd say, what's it like to be a movie star?
Guest:What's it like to be a star?
Guest:And I said to my dad, I said, they keep asking me this question.
Guest:And I was probably nine or 10 or something.
Guest:And he said, well,
Guest:you're not really a star, you're an actor on a television show.
Guest:Which is a great thing to be, but people like to simplify it and so they're gonna call you a star, but I don't think that's really the way you need to see it.
Guest:He said, but here's what you should tell them, you should ask them if they have a paper route or anything.
Guest:because most of the guys then in those days had paper routes.
Guest:Really, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, they'd fold the papers in the morning, put the rubber bands around them, deliver them, come back, get their books, and go to school.
Guest:He says, well, why don't you tell them that you have to do the same thing?
Guest:You gotta get up in the morning, but instead of folding the papers, you have to learn your lines.
Guest:Instead of putting the rubber band around, you gotta go in there and do it.
Guest:Instead of delivering,
Guest:papers to a door you have to deliver lines on a set yeah and then you get to go home and play basketball or go to school or whatever it is you're doing and you know i kind of bought that oh yeah that worked for me yeah oh it was good you have to you have to sit with andy griffith and say the same thing over and over again yeah yeah it's not all fun it's work
Marc:It's actual work.
Marc:I've started to realize that people don't really understand that.
Marc:The actual time you spend acting on anything, it's just this flash.
Marc:You get a lot of waiting around, drifting out of character, trying to remember your lines.
Marc:They're like, all right, you're up, you're coverage.
Marc:Oh shit.
Guest:Yeah, oh shit is right.
Guest:And I'll tell you, when I finally began directing professionally, I say finally because I really wanted to direct my first feature while I was still a teenager.
Guest:That was my goal.
Guest:And it wound up being right the day after my 23rd birthday was when we started shooting, which was of course fine.
Guest:But I loved it.
Guest:I absolutely loved it.
Guest:But the interesting thing was,
Guest:I had to be in that movie in order to do it, so it was exhausting.
Guest:The next movie I didn't have to be in.
Guest:It was a TV movie I directed.
Marc:What was the first movie?
Guest:It was called Grand Theft Auto.
Marc:And that was a Corman movie?
Marc:Roger Corman.
Guest:When I realized I'm just directing, it's a different energy.
Guest:You get there, you hit the ground, there's a lot of questions, you better be prepped, you start dealing with it, and your energy kind of soars, but it holds at that level.
Guest:And I found it less exhausting than a tough day of acting,
Guest:with the elevator ride all day long.
Guest:Up and down.
Guest:Yeah, because you're in it.
Guest:And the self-doubt.
Guest:They printed it, but was it really any fucking good?
Guest:I don't think so.
Guest:It felt shitty.
Guest:Every actor goes through it.
Guest:I don't care how many words they've got.
Guest:It goes with the territory.
Guest:I didn't like that too much.
Guest:I'd much rather just say, no, it went shitty.
Guest:I could see it went shitty because I'm the guy.
Guest:And I know why it went bad.
Guest:Or I think we got it.
Guest:And at least the buck stopped with me and that suited me a lot better.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, I mean, and I imagine when they printed it, like back then you didn't have, now you can shoot something a hundred times.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It doesn't matter.
Guest:Especially television was really precious, but movies were that way too.
Guest:I mean, they didn't do a lot of takes.
Marc:It's an amazing thing to think that there was a time where, you know, people who wrote on typewriters, you know, you can't just cut and paste and move things around.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:There was a narrative to things that happened in analog time.
Marc:So we only had a few takes.
Marc:How much film do we have?
Marc:How much time do we have?
Marc:And I think that changed a lot of things.
Marc:I don't know for the better.
Marc:I guess for the better.
Marc:But it's hard to know.
Marc:I like it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I like it.
Guest:Having more options.
Guest:I like digital.
Guest:I like the options.
Guest:I like shooting in that style.
Guest:I like experimenting.
Guest:It frees up more time to experiment.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Because I love having a plan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I feel like that's my job is to come with the plan that on a good day won't fail us.
Guest:But you shot some movies on film, though.
Guest:Oh, a lot.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, I've only recently gone digital.
Guest:I was kind of slow to the party.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Because of what?
Guest:Oh, just the cinematographers I was working with.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, it wasn't my own meticulous sense of film.
Guest:I'm not sure I buy that 24-frame flicker hypnosis argument that is somehow lost with digital.
Guest:I don't believe it.
Guest:When I go to a movie, if the story's working, if it's compelling and well-told, I'm into it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, of course.
Guest:I can watch it on my phone and I'm engaged.
Marc:I hate to admit it, but when it works, it works.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But when did you really start making note, like, you know, you did Andy Griffith, and then, you know, Happy Days happened, kind of, it was a fluke, right?
Guest:Well, I was already interested in being, Happy Days was a bit of a fluke.
Guest:I was interested in directing when I was a kid.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And...
Guest:So you were watching directors as a kid?
Guest:Do you know Ernest T. Bass character from The Andy Griffith Show?
Guest:He would throw rocks through the windows and played by a great guy from your show shows, Howard Morris.
Guest:And Howard Morris directed some of the episodes.
Guest:And of course, he was not a goofy guy at all.
Guest:And he was funny, but very sophisticated.
Guest:He's a professional entertainer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And one time he was lining up a shot.
Guest:And I had to be in a car and I had to keep going left, left, left.
Guest:And finally I could get in the frame.
Guest:I was now about 10 probably.
Guest:And my ribs were jammed up against the knob and it really hurt.
Guest:And I said, this really hurts.
Guest:He says, good.
Guest:In film acting, that's when you know you're in the right spot.
Guest:But he was actually the first guy who said, you know, I see you watching.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You're going to direct.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I thought that was, you know, I mean, I remember it very vividly.
Marc:And how old were you when you did the John Wayne movie?
Marc:21.
Marc:So it was right before you started.
Marc:Well, I'd been on Happy Days already.
Marc:Right, but I mean, but in terms of directing film.
Guest:Oh, in terms of directing, yes, yes.
Marc:Because, like, how much film had you done up to that point?
Guest:I know you did a lot of television.
Guest:Well, the film acting were things like Music Man when I was a kid or American Graffiti.
Guest:American Graffiti.
Guest:And that happened before Happy Days, right?
Guest:Well, Happy Days pilot actually happened before American Graffiti.
Guest:That's bizarre.
Guest:And it didn't sell.
Guest:It was a spinoff, an episode of, they buried this pilot in an episode of Love American Style.
Marc:And that was Gary Marshall, right?
Guest:Gary Marshall.
Guest:Great, late, great Gary Marshall.
Guest:I miss him so much already.
Guest:But it didn't sell.
Guest:And it was a much calmer, milder tone.
Guest:It was more like the movie Summer of 42.
Guest:It was kind of nostalgic.
Marc:The happy days.
Guest:Yes, this episode.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But then, so it didn't sell, but American Graffiti came out and was a big hit, and everybody was running to do stuff about the 50s and 60s and stuff.
Guest:And Gary said, well, you know, we have that, Joe.
Guest:In fact, you got the guy.
Guest:And I don't do a very good Gary, do I?
Guest:And they made me audition again, the bastards.
Guest:He threw it my way.
Guest:He gave me like three hours for my audition scene.
Guest:But Anson Williams and I had to audition again.
Guest:Party.
Guest:Yeah, but we got the gig.
Guest:But the American Graffiti, you were just brought in as an actor?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:In fact, one of the guys who was an executive producer and kind of a consultant on it was Francis Coppola's producing partner, a guy named Fred Roos, who's still around, dynamic guy, really one of those sort of unsung heroes who really helped shape
Guest:the the culture of the 70s yeah but he had been a casting director on the andy griffith show among a bunch of other shows sure and he used to put like unbelievably cool people like harry dean stanton and and jack nicholson was on an andy griffith show a couple of jack of of andy griffith really he was in it he knew who was happening and when he started working with coppola he was the one finding harrison ford and cindy williams really rick rick dry face and all these people you know just knew where the where
Guest:He had a sense of it.
Guest:He just knew, he had great taste and still does.
Guest:He had Jack Nicholson on the Andy Griffith Show twice.
Marc:When Jack was doing Corman movies?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Do you remember him?
Guest:Barely.
Guest:I didn't have much to do in his episode.
Guest:I don't really remember.
Guest:I just remember, I remember the show and I remember seeing him.
Guest:But, oh, we had a lot.
Guest:I love the stories of that.
Guest:He put me in, so he's the one, he didn't put me in it.
Guest:I had to audition like six times, but he put me up for graffiti.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And when you met Lucas, what kind of character was he early on?
Guest:Unbelievably quiet.
Guest:But I already knew about him because I had already been accepted to USC film school.
Guest:And he was already a kind of a god there.
Guest:For THX.
Guest:For THX 1138.
Guest:And so he was 10 years older than me.
Guest:So he was 28 at the time.
Guest:and he'd made one feature and now he's doing this and on the cover it said american graffiti a musical but or no but there was no script yet it was just kind of this call sheet you know and i went and i said now the thing about it is um i'm i i uh i know it says musical yeah i know i was in the music man in all honesty i think they thought it was it was cute that i couldn't carry a tune yeah i really can't yeah i certainly can't dance right
Guest:And he said, oh, no, no, no, it's a musical, but you don't have to sing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He never really explained it.
Guest:Well, his mind is he wrote every scene for a song, and that made it a musical in his mind.
Guest:So he's just a lateral thinker.
Guest:He's just outside the box.
Guest:He took six months to cast that movie, but he also took six months to find the cars.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:so when i made that movie with him and got that part i had i had to go through everything improv um auditions straight you know auditions really just conversations it was and you never with all the other cast members yeah mixing and matching and so forth like you and richard and you and cindy yeah you know he was concentrating on the pairs yeah and uh we auditioned together and and um
Guest:But I learned so much, and when I went to San Francisco, he still wasn't talking much, but we're making this movie, and he just would do three takes with two cameras, and then he would say, terrific, and move on.
Guest:And finally, I went up and I said, I know you're saying terrific, and I hope you mean it, but I can take direction if you have anything for me.
Guest:And he said this weird thing.
Guest:He said, I don't have time to direct right now.
Guest:He said, I'm going to direct in the editing room.
Guest:And, you know, he didn't really ever know how to talk to actors very much.
Guest:It wasn't what he did.
Guest:And he created unbelievable freedom.
Guest:Like there were no marks.
Guest:everything every rule that i understood about film acting right was shattered right and i had the i had a blast and there were also i still wasn't smoking pot but there were people smoking pot there were hippies there were women on the set and the crew who had really important jobs yeah i hadn't seen that before right it was a whole counterculture movement thing happening that was uh really you know really incredible
Marc:But you had seen the old style where there was this sort of weird hierarchy and people wore ties.
Guest:Yeah, all of that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I did have Haskell Wexler, who passed away last year, great cinematographer, was helping out with this movie and kind of guiding it.
Guest:He did come over to me and he could say, you know,
Guest:I know the way George is doing this is great and all that, but it is nice that you know your way around because you actually hit the light.
Guest:So subconsciously, I knew to find that freaking light.
Guest:That's beautiful.
Marc:But that's a big lesson to learn.
Marc:So most of that stuff, I guess, was shot in a wide.
Guest:No, a lot of coverage, but he would do two cameras and just keep moving in with sizes.
Guest:You do these long dialogue scenes and it was very stylish.
Marc:But it was scripted ultimately?
Yeah.
Guest:yeah it was scripted you had you had the freedom to improvise and like dreyfus improvised a lot paul amatt improvised a lot cindy and i were a little more we rehearsed it and drilled it right right and kind of did it you know because we liked what we liked it and it was all kind of up to us you know there was this cool guy named gino havens who was fred bruce's assistant casting director who was around as a dialogue coach and his job was just to make sure people knew their lines because they were going so fast yeah but he was also kind of
Guest:He was a pretty good support system.
Marc:And the movie was a huge hit.
Guest:When I saw it cut together, I saw just a few scenes on the day we wrapped.
Guest:And I loved film by this point.
Guest:I mean, I was making films.
Guest:And I said, wow.
Guest:Now I understand what he's doing, and it was just revelatory.
Guest:I had no idea whether people would like it or not.
Marc:Did you integrate those lessons into your own style of directing?
Marc:Did it help you provide the space for actors?
Guest:Later, I began to do it.
Guest:At first, I was a little too rigid.
Guest:because I was an actor.
Guest:And I was kind of frustrated.
Guest:Thankfully, these were short films.
Guest:But I was a little frustrated that I was getting prose to come be in my short films and the performances weren't very good.
Marc:You did like two or three of those?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I thought, I wonder what was going on.
Guest:And then I acted for another guy in a TV movie named Tom Grice.
Guest:And I loved him.
Guest:And at the end of it, I realized he'd only given me about three or four directions.
Guest:And I began to learn to trust actors and again get to this place where I realized my job was to keep them out of trouble but create an environment where they could really flourish.
Guest:And I've extended that.
Guest:I try to do that for the cinematographers.
Guest:I try to do it for the production designers.
Guest:And I love working with everybody and collaborating with everyone.
Guest:And that's really the thrill for me.
Guest:I don't give them their head exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I'm still a keeper of the story.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I understand their jobs and their problems.
Guest:And I can see when they're maybe making trying for a shortcut that they shouldn't.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And and and I and I don't I don't really go for that.
Guest:But but I really just enjoy kind of leading the expedition.
Guest:It's always it's always a bit of an adventure.
Marc:And you're so engaged with it.
Marc:It's great.
Marc:But it's interesting to me that you do Opie for half your life and then you do Richie Cunningham for another, what, eight or nine years?
Marc:Yeah, seven and a half years.
Marc:Yeah, and you're one of those guys that, in my mind, you're always going to be that guy.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Well, and then when I did Saturday Night Live, you know, Eddie Murphy improvised and called me Opie Cunningham, which wasn't ever in it.
Guest:But boy, was he ever.
Guest:I mean, that was unbelievable to see this 18 or 19 year old kid.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Who, you know.
Guest:Powerhouse.
Guest:A genius.
Guest:I mean, undeniable.
Guest:So kind of same thing as when we saw Robin Williams come on the happy set and just kind of blow us all away as Mork.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Which wasn't supposed to be a series.
Guest:It wasn't anything.
Guest:It was just this guest shot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they couldn't even cast this thing.
Guest:You know, like Jerry Paris, who was our beloved director, kind of a comedy genius, was almost like he was begging Dom DeLuise to come do it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Just to save us.
Guest:Because it was now Wednesday and we had to shoot Friday and we still couldn't cast anyone.
Marc:So Dom DeLuise almost stood in the way of Mark and Mindy.
Guest:Yeah, he wasn't available.
Guest:Oh, thank God, Dom DeLuise.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Wasn't available.
Marc:He wouldn't have had.
Marc:It's weird how history works like that.
Guest:When Robin came in with his suspenders and the whole thing, Henry Winkler and I were just, you know, just kind of, it was like, it was like a Nirvana.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Amazing to just watch it and be in scenes with this guy and he could go anywhere.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And Winkler's such a sweet guy.
Marc:He's been here.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I talked to Henry.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's a great man.
Marc:He's really a good guy.
Guest:Yeah, a man of integrity.
Marc:Yeah, I grew up with you guys.
Marc:I guess I don't remember how old I was, but I watched it.
Marc:It was important to me.
Marc:I said, eh.
Marc:And I enjoyed the show.
Marc:But it's odd to me that had you just decided to continue a career as an actor, it would have been a really tricky thing for you.
Guest:Well, if I was lucky right now, I'd be the granddad on a sitcom somewhere.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Which isn't a bad gig, by the way.
Guest:No, I know, but you don't look like it.
Guest:I didn't mean to look down my nose at granddad's on sitcoms.
Marc:But you would have had to sort of... Well, if I got a hairpiece, maybe I could still play the dad.
Marc:Yeah, I think so.
Guest:But you would have still been fighting that role.
Guest:Yeah, I think it would have been really problematic.
Guest:But I sensed all that.
Guest:But it's this other thing.
Marc:So how did you get involved with Corman?
Marc:So you're going to direct a movie.
Guest:Here's the way it went.
Guest:I was sending out, my father and I had written a script that I liked and I had raised half the money to make it.
Guest:So your old man was involved.
Guest:Yeah, not in that movie, but in another one.
Guest:We were gonna make it as an independent movie.
Guest:And that was the idea.
Guest:And it was a pretty good script.
Guest:And I had half the dough.
Guest:from Australia, I thought.
Guest:Investors?
Guest:Investor from Australia.
Guest:Just a guy?
Guest:Well, this guy named Reg Grundy who ran their version of ABC.
Guest:Supposedly, he was going to put up the money.
Guest:Happy Days was a big hit there.
Marc:You used a little bit of your traction.
Guest:I did.
Guest:I left film school to do Happy Days.
Marc:You never finished film school?
Guest:No, I never went back.
Guest:But it was still useful.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Roger sent me, so good movie roles weren't really coming my way, even with American Graffiti and things.
Guest:I was doing Happy Days.
Guest:Roger sent this movie called Eat My Dust.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I knew all about Roger Corman.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Be movie king.
Guest:I knew he had started Peter Bogdanovich and Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So we already had that behind him.
Guest:And I said, God, Eat My Dust, this script is terrible.
Yeah.
Guest:Terrible.
Guest:But I remember the movie coming out.
Guest:It made money, right?
Guest:It made money.
Guest:Well, I mean, that was key to the whole thing.
Guest:So I went in and my agent, my childhood agent was there.
Guest:Really great guy named William Shuler.
Guest:And he met me.
Guest:I said, I'm gonna meet.
Guest:I've got my script, eat my dust.
Guest:But I have a plan.
Guest:And I told Bill, who is a 60-year-old man.
Guest:I said, you can't come to the meeting with me.
Guest:So I'm this 20-year-old.
Guest:You can't come to the meeting.
Guest:I'm going to talk to him about some things.
Guest:And I just don't know that it's going to be helpful if you're there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I'm basically like, I'm not firing him, but I mean, he was really pissed.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I wouldn't let him come in.
Guest:And I knew it was probably what I was gonna pitch was gonna cost me and him money.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I went in and I said, to be honest, I don't love eat my dust.
Guest:Let me be transparent here.
Guest:But I've made some short films.
Guest:Here they are.
Guest:And here's a script my father and I wrote.
Guest:And I think I have half the money.
Guest:I got 150K.
Guest:If I could get another 150 from you in a distribution deal, I could make that.
Guest:And I would do that.
Guest:I would be and eat my dust if you'll do those things.
Guest:Nice.
Guest:So he said, okay, let me read it.
Guest:And he'll look at your short films.
Guest:And then he called me back in.
Guest:He said, all right, look, what you've made is a really interesting slice of life.
Guest:It's kind of an American art film.
Guest:That's kind of what the script is.
Guest:We don't do those.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But your shorts are good.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They cut together well.
Guest:I can understand why that you can direct.
Guest:I can see that you can direct.
Guest:So here's what I'll do.
Guest:I won't promise you another picture.
Guest:He spoke in this very erudite, deep baritone voice.
Guest:He was from MIT.
Guest:And he said, I won't guarantee you another picture, but I have second units running on most of my movies.
Guest:And if you act and eat my dust and it's successful, then I'll let you and your father write another script.
Guest:If I like the script, I'll make it and you can direct it, providing you star in it.
Guest:If none of that works,
Guest:I'll guarantee you a job directing second unit on one of my car crash movies.
Guest:Well, I wasn't exactly, you know.
Guest:I wasn't going to win any Oscars doing the car crashes.
Marc:That's funny that you went in with this very clear deal.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And all of a sudden, the best offer is you're going to be a second director.
Guest:Second unit director.
Guest:But...
Guest:I took it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I took the deal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Much to my agent's chagrin.
Guest:And I'm sure, you know, Roger killed us on the money a little bit, but I didn't care.
Guest:Did it, eat my dust.
Guest:I did eat my dust at the same time I was doing Happy Days and The Shootist.
Guest:So I kind of just wedged it in there.
Guest:On the weekends, I'd go be in this, out to, you know, the Saga Speedway or something and be in this crazy movie.
Guest:So eat my dust worked.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he said, okay, let's develop a script.
Guest:I went in and pitched all kinds of things.
Guest:arty ideas and a sci-fi thing.
Guest:And he said, Ron, those are very interesting ideas, and I really enjoy having an actor tell me the stories.
Guest:He said, however, when we were testing titles for Eat My Dust, there was a title that came in a very close second, Grand Theft Auto.
Guest:If you can fashion a car crash comedy, starring yourself, of course, that we can...
Guest:correctly entitled grand theft auto i'd probably make that picture yeah my dad and i had an outline like 24 hours later we had a script a week late it was the fastest green light i've gotten in my entire career and that got me my chance to direct for for roger and grand theft auto is still culture in a cultural well because they did the video game that had that roger kept trying to sue them for but it had nothing to do with the movie did he ever get any money for that no he never did
Guest:He never did.
Marc:But it's still in the culture.
Marc:I remember when that movie came out because I was a kid.
Marc:I learned so much.
Marc:You did?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Because you directed it.
Guest:Well, I directed it, and he was a great teacher.
Guest:How so?
Guest:Well, first, a lot of mechanical things about just managing your day.
Guest:He also forced the young directors to diagram, shot list, and really thoroughly prep.
Guest:So that was all really important.
Guest:To save money.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, to save money, to be efficient.
Guest:And he said, I'll be there the first day, and if you stay on schedule, that's the only time you'll see me.
Guest:But if you're struggling, you'll see a hell of a lot of me.
Guest:He also told me another story.
Guest:We were doing this car crash.
Guest:it wasn't a story it was a it was a an edict we're doing the this finale uh dem uh demolition derby uh scene in at the saga speedway and it's supposed to be this big riot and this kind of mad mad world kind of crazy thing and i'm only allowed 47 extras and i'm kept saying god i just don't know how to i can i can put them in a pie shape and try to stretch out the frame yeah but i don't know you know and they just kept saying go in and ask roger
Guest:Go in and ask Roger.
Guest:You can get more.
Guest:So I went in and I said, Roger, 100 would be helpful.
Guest:75 would even work.
Guest:But 47, I don't know how to make this big.
Guest:I kept arguing with him.
Guest:Arguing.
Guest:Because the movie was going pretty well.
Guest:And finally he put his hand on my shoulder and smiled.
Guest:He's a tall guy.
Guest:And he said, Ron...
Guest:Let me explain this to you.
Guest:If you do a good job for me on the rest of this picture, you'll never have to work for me again.
Guest:But you've only got 47 extras.
Guest:And I never did work for Roger again, but I gave him a cameo in Apollo 13 later, which is a lot of his directors like Jonathan Demme and others.
Marc:They did.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Put him in the movie.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that's hilarious.
Marc:And you did learn a lot.
Marc:That was hands on.
Guest:I also learned a lot in post.
Guest:We shot an added ending.
Marc:Who else was in that movie with you?
Guest:Well, my brother, Clint, was in it.
Guest:A comic named Pete Isaacson was in it.
Guest:Marion Ross played a part.
Guest:Gary Marshall played a part.
Guest:It wasn't star-studded, but it was a lot of sympathetic people.
Marc:Well, that's funny about your brother, because he had this parallel child actor career.
Guest:He did.
Guest:He did.
Marc:And you use him, and he usually shows up in a lot of your movies.
Guest:I love working with him.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:I love working with him.
Marc:And you guys are pals?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:We've, we've stayed close.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We've stayed close.
Guest:You know, he's, he's his own dude and, and, and rightfully so.
Marc:But he shows up in Apollo 13.
Marc:I think he, in Frost Nixon, he's there and like a lot of movies.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, he's good.
Guest:He's a great, he's, he's, he's one of those guys that just, he, he's, he's had so much experience and not only can he be funny, not, you know, not only is he always prepared, but like you cannot, you can't throw him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, if you say lean to your left and thing and then do the line.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it just, he's just, just do it.
Guest:Just do it and make it happen.
Marc:I remember Gentle Ben.
Guest:He's like the greatest utility player.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know?
Marc:It's good that you guys are pals still.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, because that doesn't always happen.
Guest:I know.
Guest:I know.
Marc:So, all right, so now you're on your way, and I know we can't obviously go movie to movie, but there are certain movies that were, you know, defined you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, after Grand Theft Auto, I guess the big one was Night Shift, right?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, that was huge because it also brought Brian Grazer and I together.
Guest:So it was my first studio movie.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And, you know, and it was the beginnings of this friendship that became a partnership.
Marc:Imagine Entertainment.
Marc:The huge Imagine Entertainment.
Guest:Well, it's only huge when Mitch Hurwitz puts it in Arrested Development.
Yeah.
Guest:He makes us look like we're the monolith.
Marc:Well, that's another thing that I don't think people realize is that you had the kernel, you were the guy who came up with that idea in a way.
Guest:Well, yes and no.
Guest:I came up with, I had an aesthetic in mind for sitcoms that would borrow a little bit more from what I thought was a kind of a new concept
Guest:television grammar based on reality shows, based on what I was seeing on the internet and so forth.
Guest:And I thought that you could create a sort of a density of comedy like they do on The Simpsons.
Guest:If you use that, if you had a narrator, if you did a lot of flashbacks.
Guest:So I had a style.
Guest:Mitch had the characters.
Guest:He loved the idea of applying that style to this set of characters who I think kind of sadly might have something to do with his childhood.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:He's a great guy.
Marc:I haven't interviewed him, but I know he's doing my friend Maria's show, and he's a very important comedic dude.
Marc:Brilliant guy.
Marc:And I think that what you brought to it sort of, I think, changed television a little bit, it seems.
Marc:I mean, it seems like that style.
Guest:Yeah, I think it was in the ether.
Guest:The single camera-ish.
Guest:Yeah, but they were doing a similar thing with the BBC version of The Office.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, and Larry Sanders, I guess, did some of that in a way.
Guest:Yeah, yes, yes.
Guest:So, you know, I think people who were paying attention were beginning to see a possibility.
Marc:So when you do something like Night Shift, it's your first studio movie, and Brian Grazer is a producer at that time, and that's how you met.
Marc:And you've got your friend Henry Winkler.
Guest:Yeah, Henry made that movie happen.
Guest:Well, because we couldn't cast it.
Guest:Because nobody would really, they were friendly, but they wouldn't work with us.
Guest:We tried desperately.
Guest:The green light combo was Bellucci and Aykroyd.
Guest:And we tried desperately.
Guest:And Dan was into it.
Guest:He was going to play the Henry Winkler part.
Guest:And he thought that John would be great playing the Michael Keaton part.
Guest:And we all did.
Guest:And I mean, like one, we had such adventures trying to chase down Belushi.
Guest:Didn't everybody?
Guest:Well, I guess.
Guest:I mean, one time we heard you got, he's going to, we were in Manhattan casting, Brian and I. He's going to be cross town.
Guest:He's only going to be there until 12.
Guest:Can you get there?
Guest:It was like, you know, 1135.
Guest:Yeah, we can get there.
Guest:We jumped in the cab.
Marc:And it was a club or something?
Guest:No.
Guest:No, yeah, some kind of club or something.
Guest:Yeah, there was a pool table there and stuff.
Guest:And this was during the day.
Guest:But so we jumped in the cab and it was traffic.
Guest:And Brian said to the cab driver, we'll give you a lot of money if you can get us here on time.
Guest:And he said, how much?
Guest:And he said,
Guest:$10.
Guest:We weren't thinking big in those days.
Guest:And so we had to jump out and jump in another cab.
Guest:And we got there like five minutes till.
Guest:And he was just casual, drinking beers.
Guest:And we hung around the whole time.
Guest:No real shenanigans, just fun, easy conversation.
Guest:And he said he'd read it.
Guest:We gave him the script.
Guest:He never read it.
Guest:We saw Dan.
Guest:Oh, you got to get him to read it.
Marc:That's the next step?
Guest:You got him the script, now you got to get it.
Guest:Now you got him to read it.
Guest:So now we're moving along, but we still don't have a green light.
Guest:Brian and I have this office over on the Warner's lot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we're told he's doing reshoots for a movie called Neighbors.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so he said, Ron, you got to go over there with another script and try to get to Belushi and give him the script, put it in his hands.
Guest:So I went over there.
Guest:I did.
Guest:And I'm walking along.
Guest:I kind of, I stepped on some, there's some crunchy glass under my feet.
Guest:And it turns out there were like little Coke vials that were everywhere.
Guest:And I'm kind of walking around.
Guest:Finally, I find John.
Guest:And they're doing this reshoot.
Guest:And I watch and hang out a while.
Guest:And I go in.
Guest:Punk rocker was in there with him in his bus.
Guest:And we were hanging around.
Guest:All cool.
Guest:Very good.
Guest:Very friendly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:I'm so sorry.
Guest:I forgot to read that.
Guest:I'll give it a look.
Guest:And I gave him the script.
Guest:And I headed back.
Guest:And I had to hang there like two hours.
Guest:So now I'm on my way back.
Guest:And I think, oh, Brian is kind of a nervous, anxious guy.
Guest:I wonder what he's on pins and needles.
Guest:And this is maybe where I've drifted into, as I said earlier, once in a while I could be an asshole.
Guest:So I walked in the door and he said, how'd it go?
Guest:And I said, I had to hit him.
Guest:He said, what?
Guest:He's holding his face.
Guest:I said, what was I going to do?
Guest:I'm trying to hand him the script saying, come on, John.
Guest:He's got some hot coffee.
Guest:He fucking throws the hot coffee on me.
Guest:I duck it.
Guest:And then he comes to push me.
Guest:What am I going to do?
Guest:I popped him.
Guest:I mean, I'm not just going to take it.
Guest:And then here, this is where I fell in love with Brian Grazer.
Guest:I know how ambitious he is.
Guest:This is his movie idea.
Guest:He drops to the couch.
Guest:He's holding his face.
Guest:And you know what he says?
Guest:He says, oh, I'm so sorry.
Guest:I'm so sorry I put you in that position.
Guest:That's what he says.
Guest:I couldn't take it.
Guest:I said, Brian, I gave him the script.
Guest:There's no coffee.
Guest:There's no hit.
Guest:You know, I love you, man.
Guest:And that was kind of, I think, in a lot of ways where the partnership was really born.
Marc:We didn't get Belushi.
Marc:Well, yeah, I think he died soon after.
Guest:He died while we were shooting.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And in fact, Belzer was in Night Shift, and he was shattered.
Guest:Shattered.
Guest:Because he was on the set the day we found out.
Guest:Horrible.
Guest:And I said, we tried to get John.
Guest:He said, I wish he'd said yes, because he needed to be working.
Marc:Might have saved his life.
Marc:I remember I was in college, my freshman year of college, when that happened.
Marc:It was a sad day.
Marc:But you got Keaton, and you must have.
Guest:That was a blast.
Marc:He's such an intense, interesting guy.
Guest:He really is, and he's got so much range.
Marc:Where'd you see him, though?
Marc:Did you see him as a comic?
Marc:Because I know he did comedy at the time.
Guest:No, he did comedy.
Guest:He did comedy.
Guest:I saw him because Lowell Gans, who was one of the writers, along with Babalu Mandel.
Guest:Lowell was the head writer for a long time on Happy Days.
Guest:But he had gone over and directed a show that Michael was doing.
Guest:I think it was called Working Stiffs with Jim Belushi.
Guest:And at a certain point, when Henry said...
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That he would make the movie.
Guest:What that did was that greenlit some kind of a TV sale to CBS because he was just such the biggest star in television.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I had already left the show.
Guest:I wasn't on the show anymore, but we were still close.
Marc:Before the jumping of the shark?
Guest:It was after the jumping of the shark.
Marc:That was the great contribution, I guess, of Happy Days.
Guest:I can tell you a Jumping the Shark story in a minute.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:But the, geez, I got a million of them, don't I?
Guest:Been around a while.
Guest:Got to cut some of these out.
Guest:So Henry liked the script.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And of course he knew Gans and Mandel.
Guest:And I said, either part.
Guest:The studio will make it with you with either part.
Guest:And I will too.
Guest:And you could do either part.
Guest:And he said, I'd rather play Chuck the straight guy.
Guest:And let's find a funny guy.
Guest:Because I feel like everybody's going to expect me to be the gonzo guy.
Guest:So now we had to find this guy.
Guest:But we had a green light because of Henry.
Guest:And then Lowell came in and said, if we're just casting funny,
Guest:If we just want fucking funny, this guy, Michael Keaton, is on fire.
Guest:And I just directed him on a Working Stiffs episode.
Guest:And he's a comic.
Guest:And he's all over the place.
Guest:But, I mean, this guy's great.
Guest:If they'll just go with funny.
Guest:And he auditioned, but I auditioned so many people.
Guest:So many people.
Guest:A lot of comics.
Guest:A lot of comics.
Guest:Most of them, like Howie Mandel, Jay Leno, and I think Bill Maher might have come in and auditioned.
Guest:And Michael just won it.
Guest:Then they wanted to fire him.
Guest:why they didn't like he was chewing gum he was all over the place with the takes and i kept saying look i'm gonna edit this thing let him go let him go yeah and um and the you know and and it was part improv but a lot of that was scripted that was a brilliant yeah brilliant script yeah um and uh but who wrote the script gans and mandel yeah lowell gans and mandel who also did splash yeah and uh parenthood later well that well yeah well that was the beginning of the role right you do splash that was huge
Guest:also a Brian Grazer idea, the idea for the story, and Gans Mandel rewrote it and turned it into something.
Guest:And it was very difficult to get that movie made because at that time, Warren Beatty was probably the biggest star in the world.
Guest:And he and Jessica Lange, who was the hottest leading lady, were gonna do a mermaid movie for the biggest producer in the business, a guy named Ray Stark, for an Oscar-winning director, Herb Ross.
Guest:And everyone just said, look, they've beaten you to the punch.
Guest:And finally, it landed in the laps of the people at Disney, whose previous year, kind of their only live action movie was Gus the Fieldgold Kicking Mule.
Guest:And really, I mean, I was mortified.
Guest:And they were interested in it.
Guest:And they said, what about this other movie?
Guest:And I said, well, look, I'm 27 years old.
Guest:If you guys want to make the movie and if the money's there, Herb Ross is not going to beat this movie to the market because I won't leave.
Guest:I won't leave this lot until the movie's in the theater.
Guest:And I've got the energy to do it.
Guest:I don't think they do.
Guest:And we've already got a good script.
Guest:I did really believe in the script.
Guest:And they accepted that, and then they said, but it's gotta be G. And I wanted a topless mermaid.
Guest:I mean, our comedies are what we're really in, and that's what Night Shift had been.
Guest:And I didn't wanna go that soft.
Guest:And Brian Grazer actually had to go to the board
Guest:of disney of disney and say look ron will do it he'll protect it her hair will always cover her nipples and so forth but you just can't do that he can't he won't do the debbie reynolds version of a mermaid yeah and can't be wearing a bathing suit top and uh um they they accepted it but then they called it uh touchstone so we were the first touchstone movie because it was pg really that's why yeah did they create touchstone for that
Guest:Yeah, I mean, they said we may want to make more of these.
Marc:I mean, the movie was testing very well.
Marc:They just didn't want the Disney name to be sullied.
Guest:To be sullied by the side of a breast.
Marc:Yeah, that's amazing.
Marc:And the weird thing, I just realized that it's interesting that you were fortunate, in a way, to come up as a child actor not in that studio.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:In some senses.
Guest:Yeah, well, I had done some work for them, but I wasn't one of their guys.
Marc:Right, you weren't Kurt Russell.
Marc:No.
Marc:Who ultimately became a great actor, no doubt.
Guest:Yeah, I directed him in Backdraft.
Guest:That guy is a blast.
Marc:I think he's a great actor, underrated.
Guest:Great actor.
Guest:We have a lot in common and enjoy each other's company every time we meet.
Marc:What's the jumping the shark story before I forget?
Guest:Oh, the jumping the shark story is that the year before, the Fonzie mania had gone absolutely crazy.
Guest:I mean, I did the Beatles documentary recently, and while Henry was actually brushing up against that kind of thing for a moment.
Guest:It was like that rocking cars and grabbing and tearing.
Guest:Right, right, right, right.
Guest:And handling it incredibly well, by the way.
Guest:But the Fonzie character kept getting bigger than life and growing more and more kind of superhuman in his ability to open doors with knocks and snap his fingers and people would fall down and things like that.
Guest:And Donnie Most, very cool guy, played Ralph Mouth.
Guest:He and I were really good friends and still are.
Guest:And he's a very smart guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:who's having a big renaissance right now because he's singing, he's playing a lot of clubs and doing Bobby Darin stuff in Sinatra and he's doing great with it.
Guest:But anyway, we're sitting here.
Guest:The year before we did a season opener about a demolition derby with this group called the Malachi Brothers, which was kind of a mess, but people really liked it.
Guest:It was very hard to make.
Guest:And none of us thought it was the show's greatest work.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, now we're here, the script's kind of mediocre, and we're supposed to be in Hollywood, and Fonzie's gonna do this stunt, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm driving the boat.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Donnie's reading it, and he kind of looks down.
Guest:We're eating lunch over here, trying to avoid getting sunburned, two redheads.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he looks at me, and he said...
Guest:What do you think of the script?
Guest:And I sort of shrugged.
Guest:And I said, you know, people really like the show.
Guest:It's hard to argue with being number one.
Guest:And he said, he looked down, he looked up, he said, he's jumping a shark now?
Guest:That was crazy.
Guest:It was the first time I actually saw that thing, that phrase bracketed, but it was before it was even done.
Guest:You gotta give props to Donnie Most.
Guest:Good, he gets it, finally.
Marc:He gets it, yes.
Marc:At long last, Donnie Most gets the credit he deserves.
Marc:So without getting hung up on every movie, but he did work with a lot of guys
Marc:to watch the evolution of Tom Hanks, who is an actor you work with, and talking about some of the method, that there's some, the craft of acting, what do you, because he's really.
Marc:Yeah, remarkable.
Marc:And why is that as an actor?
Guest:Well, he's incredibly intelligent.
Guest:Actors, elite actors, really have to be intelligent.
Guest:They do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think comics are the smartest people I've ever been around.
Guest:Maybe I've interviewed some astronauts and some physicists that are pretty bright people.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But in terms of what I do and what I understand.
Guest:The social realm.
Guest:In the cultural realm.
Guest:Comics are fast and brilliant.
Guest:And they're pretty stunning.
Guest:Writers can be right behind them, certain screenwriters.
Guest:But really great screen actors have to be incredibly intelligent, intuitive, and passionate, and obviously creative.
Guest:and have the great work ethic.
Guest:All those things really have to be in place to build that kind of career.
Guest:And Tom has that, he's got great taste, and he can work in any genre, which is probably why we've worked together as much as we have, because I've moved from genre to genre in the beginning rather intentionally, and now because people just know that I have that flexibility.
Guest:But he's, you know, and he's great to work with.
Guest:So in any jump ball, if you have the chance to work with Tom Hanks or maybe somebody else that is really interesting but far more complicated and perhaps, you know, likely to throw up some...
Guest:some barriers in terms of trying to get the project done.
Guest:You know, Hanks gets the nod.
Guest:And he also doesn't cling to anything.
Guest:There's not a lot of vanity there.
Guest:It's all about what's the story, what's my role in it,
Guest:and how do we deliver?
Guest:He doesn't try to steal scenes, he doesn't try to hog scenes, he tries to, so he's kind of a great teammate and natural leader.
Guest:So it's a little bit like, I always say, they always said Joe DiMaggio made it look effortless.
Guest:I never saw Joe DiMaggio play, but I'm a big baseball fan.
Guest:And I think Hanks makes it look effortless, but he works his ass off.
Marc:Well, it's the interesting thing about actors who are actual movie stars.
Marc:Outside of Forrest Gump, and I noticed this with people like Clooney, is that it's really a lot of them showing up.
Marc:There's a variation of emotion, but there's something about the nature of them as actors that is really the core of it.
Marc:It's not them transforming necessarily.
Marc:It's them bringing those qualities that they naturally have.
Guest:But Tom has kind of earned the right.
Guest:So if he needs to do an accent, people will accept it.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:If he changes his look, it's okay.
Guest:Whereas with some actors, you just kind of say, oh, come on.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:But even when you talk about De Niro, it's weird because he's a little different, but he's a movie star because I don't really feel that we really know Bob necessarily.
Guest:I think Dustin Hoffman was like that.
Guest:He created a lot of different characters, and you wanted to see that.
Marc:Yeah, and you kind of know him, though.
Marc:You feel like you know Dustin Hoffman, but you don't really feel like you know Bob De Niro.
Guest:No, that's true.
Guest:It's all right.
Guest:And you don't really feel like you know that much about Meryl Streep, really.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:When she gets up and makes a speech, it's great.
Guest:You kind of feel like she's doing her job.
Guest:She's doing her job.
Marc:Did you see that silly movie, The Intern with De Niro?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:No, I didn't.
Marc:Because like, you know, it's weird.
Marc:It was sort of like whatever it was.
Marc:I happen to be an Anne Hathaway fan, but I thought he did some of the best acting he's done in years in that movie.
Marc:Like he was a very controlled, very sweet old man, but it was thoughtful.
Guest:I got to see it now.
Marc:Now I got to see it.
Marc:I heard good things, actually.
Guest:But you work with Mel Gibson and Ransom and he's another movie star, but he's a good actor.
Guest:A really good actor and a tremendous director.
Guest:I'm dying to see this Hacksaw Ridge that he made.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's so good.
Guest:He's a character.
Guest:Sometimes he gets in his own way, doesn't he?
Guest:But I have a lot of time for him.
Guest:I have a lot of respect for him.
Guest:And I think he's an incredibly talented guy.
Guest:The year that I was directing Ransom,
Guest:he had directed Braveheart.
Guest:And Braveheart and Apollo 13 were both up for the Academy Awards that year.
Guest:And I was nominated for the Director's Guild Award and in fact won it.
Guest:Nominated for Golden Globe, didn't win.
Guest:He won that one.
Guest:But when the Oscar nominations came out,
Guest:it was pretty heartbreaking for me.
Guest:And I didn't get nominated.
Guest:And we got nominated for nine and Braveheart got nominated for 10.
Guest:And that 10th was his directing nomination.
Guest:And that day we were doing this tense,
Guest:scene that took place in the climax of the movie between Gary Sinise who was his kidnapper who was trying to get this money and control the situation from this wild man Mel Gibson and it was this cat and mouse game and it was this two person scene Richard Price the screenwriter was down there we were still rewriting it still working it
Guest:And this news comes in and, you know, Mel comes over and says, man, I mean, you deserve to win, not only be nominated.
Guest:I mean, that's you did.
Guest:That's a tremendous movie.
Guest:And this is a travesty and I don't know what to say.
Guest:And I said, well, I love your movie, too.
Guest:And, you know, and I have no gripe about your nominations.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I didn't know, and I was really just, you know, I was kind of like gut shot.
Guest:I just felt horrible about it.
Guest:And the press was coming in, and I remembered, Pat Riley's a little bit of a friend of mine, the coach, and he had said, you know, at all times, you have to feed the beast.
Guest:The media's the beast.
Guest:And if you're gonna be in the game, win or lose, you gotta feed the beast.
Guest:So I'm trying to feed the beast.
Guest:And it's tense.
Guest:And Gary Sinise,
Guest:At one point, it's all very quiet.
Guest:We're doing this scene where he's supposed to walk in the door and approach Mel.
Guest:And he says, hey, Ron, loud enough for the crew to hear.
Guest:Hey, Ron, when I come in and I see Mel, I start walking forward.
Guest:And then he said, what the hell am I talking to you for?
Guest:Mel, what do you think I should do?
Guest:It was perfect.
Guest:Everybody laughed their asses off and it broke the ice and we could do this important scene.
Marc:That's funny.
Marc:Humor is very powerful.
Marc:And then Russell Crowe with Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man.
Marc:So you love that guy.
Marc:He's a real artist.
Guest:I mean, he's a powerful artist.
Marc:He's kind of amazing, right?
Guest:Kind of amazing.
Guest:And it was, you know, a couple of times I've really been, you know, sort of awestruck watching a thing happen.
Guest:And I can't claim any credit except I was there and rolled the camera and, you know, made it possible in a way.
Guest:But especially with A Beautiful Mind, the intricacy and the detail.
Guest:And there was a tremendous amount of research that went into shaping that character that I was, you know, very, very sort of insistent upon.
Guest:But, you know, he's a very creative guy.
Guest:Mercurial.
Guest:Moody, a lot of other things, but you can't take for a minute his artistry away from him.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, that's just one of those things.
Marc:Because he, more than a lot of actors, when I watched him in Gladiator, you're like, to have that kind of power just standing there.
Marc:It's like Richard Burton or that generation of actors that can hold a screen like that and command.
Marc:Who the hell knows where that comes from?
Guest:But again, highly intelligent, a good writer in his own right.
Guest:As is Hanks.
Guest:You were asking about Hanks.
Guest:Both of those guys, I would say, they're kind of their own X factor.
Guest:Without being overpowering or overbearing particularly, they're in it and they're creative and they're making it better because their ideas are really meaningful.
Guest:yeah often often it's great and they'll also accept no yeah i mean the best the best actors really want to work that way right you know and they want the director to not just say yes right you know and and get out of the way right they actually want somebody who they respect enough and you know to to to field and filter yeah yeah it's funny because i on my show maron on ifc i use chet hanks
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Basically playing, you know, Chad Hanks.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:But he was great.
Guest:Yeah, he is great.
Guest:He's a good kid.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And Colin is, of course, a terrific actor.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I saw him in that Elvis and Nixon movie.
Marc:Well, you did that amazing Frost-Nixon movie.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Yeah, that was sort of an interesting time.
Marc:I didn't really know about it.
Marc:Well, I did.
Guest:I remembered it.
Guest:And Vietnam was important.
Guest:And by the way, Nixon, I had a really low draft number.
Guest:And part of the reason I did happy days was because I didn't know how to stay out of the draft.
Guest:And I thought if I was on a television series that the network and the corporation would figure out a way to get me a deferment or get me in the Air National Guard or something, you know, so I wouldn't be in the jungle.
Guest:And...
Guest:So when he actually did in the draft, I liked him for that.
Guest:Dickie was my man.
Marc:Personal reasons.
Guest:But I later found out that while we were staging a lot of those really funny, because Peter Morgan's a brilliant writer, and funny and intricate scenes of David Frost in the Beverly Hilton Hotel,
Guest:working with his team and i understood what date he was there i realized that the first time i was nominated for a golden globe and that golden globe show was taking place down there uh he was upstairs working with his team wow for what for happy days i was nominated for the shootest uh oh you were as a supporting actor oh yeah and then i think the next year i got nominated for happy days and michael sheen was good to work with
Guest:Great.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:They both were.
Guest:Rangel is great, right?
Guest:He's great, although he only wanted to be called the president.
Guest:He did.
Guest:When he was in makeup and in character, that was his request.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I had a hard time buckling to that one, so I used to sort of say, so the president's going to enter.
Guest:Sir, would you come over here?
Marc:Oh, right.
Guest:I couldn't quite...
Marc:Brent, bring myself.
Guest:I don't know, it just bugged me a little bit.
Marc:Out of respect for The Office?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:I just thought it was a little ludicrous and a little pretentious, but it really worked for him.
Guest:Delivered a good performance.
Guest:Oh man, did he?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was wrong, by the way.
Guest:If I was doing it again, or if I had a chance to work with Frank again,
Guest:By the way, I felt like I never really got to know him until we were doing press because he was so in character.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's a jovial, funny, fantastic guy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I didn't get much of that.
Guest:You just got Nixon.
Guest:I always got Nixon because we were on a really tight schedule.
Guest:And the only time I ever saw him, he was already in makeup and already the man.
Marc:Yeah, so in talking about presidents in America and getting back to John Wayne and what Hollywood was like and what he represented.
Guest:Complicated guy.
Guest:Real powerhouse.
Marc:As an actor or as a human?
Guest:Well, he was a much better actor than I realized.
Guest:So when I started the movie, I thought he was this great screen personality.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But, you know...
Guest:Not Gary Cooper to me or Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart.
Guest:And it was interesting because we got along really well.
Guest:Because everyone, first he liked the fact that I was coming out of television.
Guest:Because he said when he began doing the one reelers, that was the equivalent of TV.
Guest:And he liked the professionalism of that.
Guest:And I said, do you want to run lines?
Guest:We had a lot of difficult two person scenes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I like that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And everybody else was a little scared of him.
Guest:But we were running lines all the time.
Guest:And that led to playing chess.
Guest:He loved to play chess all the time.
Guest:And I can play.
Guest:He was good.
Guest:He was good.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And he played like you'd expect him to.
Guest:It was just an onslaught, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just an attack.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If I was a little more sophisticated, I'm sure you could take him right down.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But he beat the hell out of me.
Guest:And I wasn't letting him win.
Marc:And you thought he's a better actor than he gets credit for?
Guest:Well, we were rehearsing these scenes and it was very interesting because the scene was kind of awkward.
Guest:I felt, you know, it wasn't really, you know, working.
Guest:And in my opinion, I was already thinking a little bit like a director.
Guest:And all of a sudden he said, let me do that one again.
Guest:And he would stop, change the timing, and maybe even put in that little John Wayne hesitation, that little hitch where he doesn't quite finish the line until... Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He's seen the guy at the door.
Guest:And suddenly it popped.
Guest:And I said, man, this guy is 74 years old and he's working it.
Guest:He cares.
Guest:And he worked really hard on that and the scenes mattered and he was meticulous about it.
Guest:And again, it's another one of those lessons.
Guest:But he was tough.
Guest:He and Don Siegel really, really battled.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And yeah, he did not, they didn't get along.
Marc:Over what?
Over what?
Guest:like what is the battle for a director like when it when it comes to like i mean as a director and as an actor don was trying to shoot it you know he did in he did escape from alcatraz yeah he was a he was far more cinematic he was kind of uh you know of the 70s yeah and he was trying to shoot it that way and uh wayne did not like the low camera angles that he thought made him look jowly he didn't like old studio player studio player stuff yeah and he was really enforcing it and i remember siegel saying man because i
Guest:I knew I wanted to be a director.
Guest:I had this tremendous advantage of, through all of this drama, really kind of being friends with both guys and kind of hearing about it.
Guest:And he said, let me just tell you, two to three weeks in, if there's a battle between the director and the stars, the director has to go.
Guest:So I have a choice, either ride this out or not.
Guest:And I really like this script.
Guest:And I think it can be a good movie.
Guest:So this tough, tough guy.
Guest:um and you know he said but he said caustic things i mean he was like baiting wayne in the paper you know saying they say wayne eats directors for lunch well if he eats me he's going to get this you know digest indigestion right and things like that which was just kind of stupid and baiting an old man who was that his last movie uh it was his last movie yeah and he wasn't he wasn't really well he had the stomach cancer
Guest:yeah well he didn't at that point he he was uh but he got he got pneumonia at some point he had one long only had one long but uh but it was uh it was interesting and i got to talk to him a lot about john ford who was one of one of the directors that i idolized he worked with him a lot yeah stagecoach yes he'd worked as a prop guy for john ford and an extra uh you love john ford
Guest:Loved John Ford, loved Frank Capra.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But then I discovered Billy Wilder.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And Howard Hawks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And those guys had so much range.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I didn't... When I began, you know, realizing I was going to have a career as a director, I'd been doing TV series where you're sort of always doing the same thing.
Guest:And, you know, I read an article where Billy Wilder said, you know, if I'd been like Hitchcock, it just stuck with one genre, I would have made a lot more money.
Guest:But I just couldn't.
Guest:Well, I...
Guest:I related to that, and I really wanted to explore the medium, and more importantly, I suppose,
Guest:really gain the trust of the collaborators.
Guest:Because fans will come and go.
Guest:Audiences will come and go.
Guest:Critics shift.
Guest:Who knows?
Guest:But if you have the respect of peers and colleagues, then that's where the quality work is really born.
Guest:It's out of those collaborations.
Guest:And so it was important to me to have the trust of not only studios, but also writers, producers, and certainly actors.
Marc:And how does the relationship in that sense with you and Brian work?
Marc:Because, I mean, you're pretty...
Marc:Tied together both in production and creation and execution and you direct most of it, all of it, right?
Guest:He doesn't direct.
Guest:Well, he doesn't direct, but we make a lot of shows like Empire and 24 and Felicity was ours and lots and lots of movies like 8 Mile and American Gangster that Brian Bruce is.
Marc:I love American Gangster.
Marc:Isn't that a good movie?
Marc:It is a good movie.
Marc:I don't know that it got the credit it deserved.
Guest:Maybe not quite that year, but these movies take on a life.
Guest:They do.
Guest:That's one of the good things today.
Marc:You know how I know I love a movie?
Marc:Is if it just comes on in the middle and I'm just sitting at home watching, which I still do.
Marc:I'll just flip around.
Marc:I'm like, I'm gonna watch the rest of it.
Guest:That's the coolest.
Guest:Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
Guest:Well, look, there's chaos in the industry now, movies and television.
Guest:It's exciting for TV because there's just so much output.
Guest:But if you're a studio...
Guest:or a network, or a production company, you're trying to figure out what a show or a movie should cost.
Guest:It's a mind bender.
Guest:And how many movies should you make?
Guest:And where should they play?
Guest:All of that's driving them crazy.
Guest:If you're a creative person, it's the greatest time ever.
Guest:Because if you have a story that you care about, you can find the platform.
Guest:You can find the place to make it.
Guest:And I'm so thrilled by that.
Guest:And I think it came along at a...
Guest:pretty good time in my life because it's exciting to be able to stick with the main objective, which is feature films, but be able to do a Beatles documentary or be able to participate in this.
Guest:We have a project, interesting project that's half scripted and half documentary about going to Mars.
Guest:And I've really been involved in that.
Guest:It's been a lot of fun.
Guest:And those kinds of experiments.
Guest:I just directed the first hour of a 10-part scripted event series called Genius.
Guest:And the first Genius we're focusing on is Albert Einstein.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:And that was really, that's the first TV I've directed in a long time.
Guest:It was just such a great script.
Marc:And he probably learned a lot.
Guest:Yeah, it was great.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Although I'll never get E equals MC squared.
Guest:It's beyond me.
Marc:It's just beyond me.
Marc:I don't understand.
Marc:I mean, I'd like to think I could if I applied myself, but I doubt it.
Guest:I've been applying myself.
Guest:It ain't happening.
Guest:But I did better with Formula One on Rush.
Guest:I learned how that sport works.
Guest:Oh, good, good.
Guest:I finally found the racing line.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And now, you know, you've got the third part of the Da Vinci Code series.
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:The Dan Brown, Robert Langdon mysteries.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, like for me, like I don't know where you are because, you know, we're dealing.
Marc:Well, what I was getting out with John Wayne, you know, a famous conservative.
Marc:And, you know, and you've been in Hollywood a long time.
Marc:And, you know, like even, you know, we were diplomatic around Mel Gibson's politics.
Marc:You know, he has this or that.
Marc:But I mean, you know, you are a political guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it's sort of interesting to me that I'm very prone to conspiracy.
Marc:I'm not prone to conspiracy theories, but when I watch Inferno or I watch Da Vinci Code, I'm like, this shit can be real.
Marc:That's the beauty of it.
Guest:That's the beauty of it.
Guest:Well, the interesting thing about what Dan does is he actually creates these sort of fun vehicles, first as books and escapist entertainment.
Guest:And then my job is to try to find the cinematic equivalency of that.
Guest:And, but he also, you know, you have to take it seriously enough to actually sort of take the bait on the conspiracy theory or at least weigh it at some point.
Marc:Well, the Catholic Church is just like when you get to go to Italy and you get to shoot in those, like this is thousands of years of popes, man.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And like, you know, just layers and layers of who the fuck knows what.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I'm, you know, I'm a Jew, but like, I'm sort of like, I don't know, man, about Satan.
Marc:I'm in.
Marc:It's fascinating.
Marc:But I mean, but do you ever have moments where, I don't know where you are spiritually, you're obviously a pretty well-grounded guy, but you're shooting that stuff.
Marc:Were there ever moments?
Marc:No, no.
Guest:Not for me.
Guest:But I think it's, look, what I thought, what I think that Dan does is he presents the conspiracy theory
Guest:and makes just kind of a good enough case for it and then bakes it into the fun clue path and stuff that everybody likes to see Hanks do and Tom loves to do.
Guest:Tom loves playing Robert Langdon.
Guest:He does.
Guest:He loves it.
Guest:He finds it fascinating.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Because it's history.
Guest:It's ideas.
Guest:It's all buried around this entertainment.
Guest:But Dan does all of that.
Guest:And at the end of the day, it's not really about believing the conspiracy or not believing the conspiracy, but it is about thinking about it.
Guest:And so he's more provocateur than he is, but it isn't with humor.
Guest:There isn't with irony.
Guest:It's very earnest.
Guest:And so some people, I think, say, well, he's taking himself very, very seriously.
Guest:And in fact, he is only taking himself seriously so that people have to actually contemplate the notion, I think.
Marc:And the backdrop is just histories of a very cryptic and bizarre religious cult.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And now that I do believe that we have no idea who's been motivated by what.
Guest:And even this one focuses more on a contemporary issue, which is overpopulation and a terrorist trying to kill a lot of people to try to solve the problem.
Marc:And also some sort of final confrontation.
Guest:Yes, yes, yes.
Guest:And with a virus and so forth, it would really be devastating.
Guest:But the clue path is hidden in Dante.
Guest:So the idea is very modern and not religious or historical, but the clue path is buried in Dante.
Guest:and Inferno, Hell, and the Botticelli painting and so forth.
Guest:And Dante was not only really defining Hell for Western civilization, he was also inventing the contemporary horror genre.
Guest:Those punishments are like every cool thing that you've seen in a del Toro shot or something.
Guest:But he also was taking revenge.
Guest:It's all...
Guest:More than half of the characters that he writes about are people that he thinks wronged him or wronged his family or wronged his country.
Guest:In Dante's Inferno.
Guest:In Dante's Inferno.
Guest:So he's fueled by this rage and this desire to express something that's very, very personal to him.
Guest:Did he think he was redefining it for all time?
Guest:Maybe.
Guest:I think he might have been a kind of an arrogant guy.
Marc:He was fueled by rage.
Marc:He might have been a little grandiose.
Marc:And revenge.
Guest:But it was fueled by this very personal thing.
Marc:That's interesting to me.
Marc:That's very interesting.
Marc:Now, you are politically active.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And we are dealing with a spiraling, many spinning plates of conspiracy.
Marc:There's a danger to conspiracy theories.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Because you can sort of decide what history you want to put into place and how you want it to fit together.
Marc:And if people are uneducated or angry enough, they'll eat it all.
Guest:Yeah, that's right.
Guest:It's so true and so dangerous.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And look, I've been overseas a lot.
Guest:People look at us, and by the way, I know the Trump supporters don't care about this, but they look at us and they just, what the hell is going on?
Guest:And it is shocking.
Guest:I just hope, I really hope that in the rage and the anger that is fueling these folks, and you've got to take it seriously, because I've got a lot of family members who are Trump people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I mean, I understand.
Guest:It's not all knuckle draggers, like Bill Maher says.
Guest:Of course.
Marc:Then they have grievances.
Guest:They have real grievances.
Guest:And we have to make sure that in trying to find, you know, some salve, something that will soothe them of their grievances, that they don't wind up giving a very narcissistic, you know, bullying figure this opportunity to become a despot.
Guest:Because I don't, you know, I mean, that's what he'll do.
Marc:or shifted to authoritarianism yeah yeah well it's interesting to me because there's like you know i've seen you've said in you know publicly about you know this sort of toughness and and and kind of um you know stick to itness of the american spirit you know and you see that in apollo 13 and you know it's something that you're conscious of that that the weird thing is is that you know trump is some you know negative representation of that yes yes hey
Guest:uniquely american huckster absolutely and i mean although if you're in italy they'll say burlesconi sure you know it's a standard political character i can't remember his name but if you're in if you're in hungary they'll talk about the guy that who's moving everything to the far far right right uh and uh um and and cozying up to putin right um it's uh
Guest:I really just pray that people go vote, whatever they think.
Guest:Just participate.
Guest:So we have a huge, huge... Out turning out.
Guest:Out turning out.
Guest:And I certainly hope that even if they have to lie to their loved ones about who they voted for, get in the booth and make a sensible vote.
Guest:That's why it's private.
Guest:That's why it's private.
Guest:Say whatever you want to say.
Marc:You can keep a secret.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Hey, lie.
Guest:I don't mind.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:And the one other thing that, like I noticed in our conversation, that you seem to have a conscious understanding of which movies are made to make money.
Marc:Obviously, you want them all to make money.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But there's a difference between an entertainment, right, and a movie that has some teeth to it.
Guest:Well, they're all entertainments in my mind.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But different stories entertain in different ways.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I began to sort of understand that, you know, a couple of decades ago and began and partly with the power of Apollo 13, that true story, you know, and I saw the way audiences responded to it.
Guest:I think audiences are a lot smarter than me, in fact, give them credit for.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And and I think you you sort of make a promise.
Guest:with an audience about a story.
Guest:And then it's how can you deliver on that promise?
Guest:Whether it's I'm gonna laugh my ass off or it's gonna be whimsical and fantastical and I can take my kids or it's this is thought provoking and this really happened.
Guest:Some version of this really happened.
Guest:I'm gonna learn about this.
Guest:And those are all reasons to feel entertained when it's all over and feel satisfied.
Guest:And as a storyteller, your job is to sort of understand the difference.
Guest:And it's fun.
Guest:It's fun to play in the various tones and styles and then also collaborate with the people who really, really specialize in that.
Guest:One of the greatest things was directing Jim Carrey in The Grinch and watching him, a special kind of genius, create this physical comedy out of absolute nothing.
Guest:And it would be like, take 22 and you'd be exhausted and he'd just have one more.
Guest:And suddenly he's adding some body contortion or some head snap.
Guest:The timing's just a little different.
Marc:And that's it, man.
Marc:So you go all in no matter what.
Marc:That's one of the great things about how you've designed your particular careers.
Marc:You can be any genre.
Marc:It's just how you engage with the story.
Marc:It's the themes.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And for me, I need to be able to relate to it and connect with it in some level.
Guest:Either I'm curious about it, I'm intrigued, I like the world.
Guest:Something about it has to really, you know, it's going to hold my attention for a year and a half.
Guest:I better be involved.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, maybe 15 years ago, maybe, my kids were adolescents.
Guest:There was a lot of fireworks in the house.
Guest:We're sitting around with my wife, Cheryl.
Guest:We're watching.
Guest:There's kind of this argument going on in the family.
Guest:And just the TV's on.
Guest:It's just on.
Guest:I don't even remember which late 80s or early 90s ABC banal sitcom was on.
Guest:But...
Guest:Damned if they weren't dealing with the very thing we were arguing about.
Guest:Right.
Guest:With their bright colors and their punchlines and their sitcom delivery and all of it.
Guest:And we all stopped and folded our arms and sat down and watched this dumbass, broad, silly episode.
Guest:And it meant the world to us.
Guest:When that episode was over, we had laughed.
Guest:It's, you know, good is good.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it had meant something.
Guest:And that was just a reminder to me that...
Guest:Every one of these tones, every genre, there's a good and a bad version of it.
Guest:And you never know when your viewer is going to need that thing that way.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know?
Guest:And so respect it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Whether it's a kid's Saturday morning cartoon or a broad sitcom, understand it and tell the story.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because the stories are what kind of heal us, fuel us, keep us going.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In addition to entertaining.
Guest:But we got to be entertained or else it's kind of hard to get our attention.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:So that's the game.
Marc:That's the trade-off or the negotiation you have to make.
Marc:The line you ride.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, I feel that way when I sit down to watch.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Well, I think that's beautifully put.
Marc:And it's great talking to you.
Guest:Likewise.
Guest:Thanks.
Guest:Enjoyed it very much.
Marc:That was an amazing conversation.
Marc:I love guys and women who have just been working and doing things and have a history within them of entertainment.
Marc:It's daunting and awesome.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com and check out the tour.
Marc:Got dates coming up.
Marc:Carnegie Hall is about sold out.
Marc:Got Chicago, Nashville, a lot of stuff.
Marc:WTFPod.com.
Marc:Also get on the mailing list.
Marc:I churn out a very personal email blast every week.
Marc:Not prepared any guitar here, but I feel like it's something I do.
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Marc:Boomer lives!