Episode 783 - Bill Paxton / Dylan Brody
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fuck nicks what's happening this is mark maron this is my podcast wtf i'm broadcasting now from an undisclosed location still out still out in the world far away surrounded by water surround can you hear that that's not static that's the ocean outside of my window
Marc:a double header today.
Marc:I got a shorty with Dylan Brody.
Marc:He's a comedian friend of mine.
Marc:He's got a special coming out.
Marc:Dylan Brody's driving Hollywood premiering on the streaming service next up on February 14th.
Marc:Go to next up comedy.com and also the amazing Bill Paxton.
Marc:who you all know from Aliens, from Weird Science, from Big Love he was in, Apollo 13, True Lies, Tombstone.
Marc:Great.
Marc:Bill Paxton's going to be here.
Marc:So yeah, there you go.
Marc:I've set up the show.
Marc:I also want to take a moment to say that a friend of mine,
Marc:a guy who's been on this show, a great rock journalist, Mark Spitz, has passed away at the age of 47.
Marc:I have no details.
Marc:I just found out myself, and I didn't find out in a personal way.
Marc:I don't know what happened, but it does seem to be true.
Marc:He was a very intense guy.
Marc:He was very engaged.
Marc:He led a very chaotic and crazy life.
Marc:He's a very...
Marc:Wild spirit, man, up and down.
Marc:And he's passed away.
Marc:And it's a sad thing.
Marc:And I just wanted to say rest in peace, Mark Spitz.
Marc:I also want to direct people, as we usually do in these somber situations, to the repost of the episode I did with Mark.
Marc:um a wtf episode will will now be again in the feed if you want to uh introduce yourself to mark uh now that he's gone or if you miss that it's out of respect that i do it so
Marc:So what?
Marc:I don't know if you've ever been in a relationship with a bully before, but I have.
Marc:I've been in many relationships with a bully because I'm a bully.
Marc:I understand it.
Marc:I've had to do a lot of work on myself to tone it down.
Marc:It comes from insecurity.
Marc:It comes from narcissism.
Marc:It comes from a need to be loved and an inability to love.
Marc:There's a million things that cause bulliness.
Marc:But they're never satisfied.
Marc:And I'm speaking from my own heart here as somebody who has struggled with this type of stuff.
Marc:But I'm just saying that many of us...
Marc:are in a fairly involuntary relationship with a pretty intense bully.
Marc:And they just keep coming.
Marc:They just keep coming.
Marc:They just keep trying to knock you off your grounding.
Marc:They try to knock you off your sense of self.
Marc:They try to destroy your sense of reality.
Marc:to to get you to a place where you don't know what's up or down and then they can feel you know they can feel superior they can feel like they have power they can feel like they can get something over on you but but if they're usually if they're not narcissistic they you know once they get you to that place they apologize shortly thereafter and try to take care of you i'm not sure that's in the situation we're all in but uh but i'm just saying that the only way out of that is to uh
Marc:to somehow get away from it, to find some space to get out, to pull your sense of self together, to re-engage with life, but remain vigilant and do what needs to be done for yourself and others.
Marc:So I've been out here on the island and it's been very up and down.
Marc:It's been up and down.
Marc:It is very relative to my engagement with information coming in through my phone.
Marc:And also the phone thing.
Marc:If these phones are so fucking smart, why aren't they more intuitive?
Marc:Where's the intuitive phone that you get on and you pop open your browser and it just says, hey, maybe give it an hour.
Marc:How would that be?
Marc:Or you're looking at it and it's like, you know what, you've had enough for now.
Marc:I think you've had enough.
Marc:Or maybe it just says, you know, we're all worried about you.
Marc:Take a break.
Marc:You're in over your head here.
Marc:We all have to allow ourselves to have lives.
Marc:You got to make time to connect and appreciate and spend time with others and talk to others and stay engaged.
Marc:right i mean jesus i'm hiking today and i saw a sign in front of this pond there were four ponds we're on this hike and there's a sign that just says no fishing do not introduce foreign fish and i'm thinking like well this thing has really gone too far this band this i mean this is crazy i mean it was already crazy do not introduce foreign fish
Marc:My friend Dylan Brody stopped by to talk a bit about what he's got going on.
Marc:He's got his special Dylan Brody's Driving Hollywood premieres on the streaming service next up.
Marc:But OK, so this is my conversation with with my my friend Dylan Brody.
Marc:Dylan Brody, I haven't seen you in a long time.
Guest:I think it's been three years, four years?
Marc:You seem to be putting a lot of time into your attire.
Marc:I always put a great deal of time into my attire.
Marc:I know, the last time we were here, I think we talked about you once carrying a sword.
Guest:I did, I carried a sword in college as a fashion accessory.
Guest:So you like to make a bold statement?
Guest:To say the most...
Marc:Now it's a three-piece suit, but not a dandy.
Marc:We're not a dandy.
Marc:We're sort of a mixture of Old West and professor.
Guest:British gentleman professor, the lapel jacket.
Guest:And notice that the phone is on the watch chain.
Guest:So you got a plan.
Guest:I have to always have some affectation going so that if I'm at a party or at a meeting and feel awkward,
Guest:You want to make sure you feel the most awkward possible?
Guest:No, it allows me to feel as though I have chosen who I am in this circumstance, and now if I feel awkward, that's their problem.
Marc:Interesting.
Marc:So you say, like, I'm going to trump your awkward with overdoing it.
Guest:That might be all it is.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That might be all it is.
Marc:Also, I like clothes.
Marc:Of course you feel uncomfortable because look how I'm dressed.
Guest:Yeah, that's exactly right.
Guest:Isn't it amazing?
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:I like to have everybody, regardless of where they're working, feel as though I walked in and clasped the joint up.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:For years, I was a stoned, angry, political stand-up comic.
Guest:And then I quit smoking pot and took 10 years off.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And reinvented myself as a humorist and storyteller.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And...
Guest:I had started out when I was doing that, doing it in a studio alone without an audience and was starting to take it out into the world again.
Guest:And as I took it out into the world again, I found the narcissism rising in me and began to explore that in a lot of the stories and talk about it and acknowledge it.
Guest:You felt a great deal of the rush of self-importance.
Guest:The rush of self-importance, the desire to have other people acknowledge the quality of my work.
Guest:How good you are.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I had been on the East Coast and had had a conversation with my father.
Guest:At that time, he was stepping down as associate provost for the arts at MIT, and he was going to go back to teaching theater at MIT until last year when he finally retired.
Guest:And they hired me to host the party at which he was stepping down.
Guest:So, I was going to be the MC.
Guest:I was going to bring up a lot of people who were going to speak.
Guest:I did physics jokes.
Guest:I did a bunch of stuff.
Guest:Then at the end, I closed with an improvisational thing where I take first line, last line from the audience, and then I do different playwright styles.
Guest:So, I did a monologue in the style of David Mamet, and I did a monologue in the style of William Shakespeare, and then I did a monologue in the style of my father.
Guest:And I don't usually do my father because no one's ever heard of him outside of a certain small community, but...
Guest:For this occasion, it was right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the thing went stunningly well.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:His friends appreciated it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:As did he.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He said he didn't know that he had a voice as a playwright until he heard me do the style of it.
Guest:Now he's writing a show.
Guest:So, the narcissism runs back.
Guest:He is a playwright.
Guest:Runs down the line.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's always writing a show.
Yeah.
Guest:So, the next day, I'm in the car with him and there's a long silence and he said, what are you thinking about?
Guest:And I said, well, the show went well last night.
Guest:And he said, yes.
Guest:And I said, I'm trying to figure out why I keep trying to fish for compliments.
Guest:And he said, oh, that's because as a performer, you're always experiencing the world as the object of someone else's experience, not as the subject of your own experience.
Guest:And that set my brain on fire and I started to think about that and...
Guest:There have been a lot of thoughts and stories that have come out of that one sentence that came out of his mouth for me.
Guest:You wait your whole life for your dad to say something relevant.
Guest:Oh, no, he is irritatingly relevant far too often.
Guest:Oh, it's so frustrating.
Guest:It's very hard to get ahead of him.
Guest:But it started to crack the narcissism for me and shift the way I looked at the world and how I approached my work and how I approached other people.
Guest:Threw your real bone at this juncture in your life.
Guest:Yes, but it meant that I needed to re-examine the stories I was writing because now I couldn't keep playing up narcissism which had become part of my shtick.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the last time I gave up my shtick which was I'm a liberal angry pot smoker.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It had taken me 10 years to get
Marc:a hold of my you don't have that kind of time and i was exactly i feel the the crushing presence of my own mortality at every moment it's hard to figure out once you get some resolution around your your sense of self to uh you know how do you move forward from that or or why would you why don't you just now that i know who i am who the hell am i
Marc:Well, there's that, but there's also sort of like with the political climate changing like it is, I feel that.
Guest:There's work to be done again.
Marc:I feel like there's work to be done again.
Marc:Well, of course there is, but there's also sort of like, well, you know, I just started feeling okay.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Now I can't.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Now like I can, but it's going to be relative to a reality that's not okay with me.
Marc:And, you know, yeah, there's a struggle there, but there's part of me that's sort of like, I didn't want to fight this one again.
Right.
Guest:yeah my dad uh actually uh a short i will tell you a short story because you know it's what i do for a living um when i was in high school i reagan was elected and i called my dad in a panic because i was at prep school and everyone else really loved reagan and i was like yeah no not so much and i felt all alone i called my dad and he said there's a pendulaic swing it'll be conservative for a while it'll be it's fine it goes back and forth and then uh when
Guest:When Bush II was elected, I called my dad and I said, we're back to this.
Guest:And he said, it's okay.
Guest:There's a pendulum.
Guest:We had eight years.
Guest:And I said, yeah, but it was still all the capitalist stuff going on.
Guest:It wasn't like we had a huge change.
Guest:It moved slowly.
Guest:Don't worry.
Guest:It's okay.
Guest:Relax, breathe.
Guest:And then...
Guest:in november yeah uh because you know i had been ready to celebrate what sure hillary was going to win i was going to celebrate like aids had been cured and i owned the patent you know it was like i was unprecedented third term democratic uh leadership exactly and instead i wound up spending the night disguising my attic door as a bookcase so uh i um i called your dad i called my dad the next day and i said dad i need your wisdom and your calm and your your insight into this and he said we're fucked
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:And he called me a week later and he said, you know what, I was sort of joking around last week, but I thought I was done with my days marching, but I just went out and bought new sneakers.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:He's 80 years old and he's going to be out as will I. Yeah.
Guest:On different coasts.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And yeah, I feel like there's work to be done.
Guest:But I feel as though, and my wife agrees with me on this, which might be why we're such a good pair.
Guest:I feel as though what is not normal is if you don't indulge in suicidal ideation as you go to sleep.
Guest:In terms of what's happening or in general?
Guest:No, just in general.
Marc:No, I don't have that.
Marc:That doesn't happen to you?
Marc:Okay.
Marc:I don't have suicidal ideation anymore.
Marc:Oh, congratulations.
Marc:You know, there are times where as I get older...
Marc:that i feel hopeless or that i feel um you know like i there's this element of me where i'm like i was just starting to figure things out and things were leveling off and in a good way and now like you know i'm scared so like you know things like this when you have a brain that is you know wired to uh to be uh i'm fucked
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, I overcame a lot of that in a lot of ways.
Marc:And then when there's a real reason for us to feel that, then it pollutes everything else.
Guest:Did I tell you about when I first got medicated for my depression?
Guest:No.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:I had been depressed my whole life and didn't know it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I had self-medicated for years with pot and didn't know that's what I was doing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I got on Paxil.
Guest:I'm thinking 10 years ago now, 8 years ago, they put me on Paxil and I felt the depression lift.
Guest:And it was like I was... The weight on your heart.
Guest:I was feeling very different about the world.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was odd.
Guest:And after 8 months, the doctor said, so do you want to wean off of it?
Guest:And I said, oh, okay, sure.
Guest:Is that what we do now?
Guest:And he said, yeah.
Guest:And he said, so cut back by a quarter of a pill for a week and a half.
Guest:So it can get you over the hump and reconfigure things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I cut back by a quarter of a pill.
Guest:And three days later, I'm on my way to a meeting.
Guest:And as I'm driving to the meeting, I'm figuring out all the things I can be pissed off about when I get there.
Guest:Hmm.
Guest:I'm in traffic and I can be pissed off because it took me so goddamn long to get here.
Guest:And the traffic's not that bad.
Guest:I get everywhere early.
Guest:It doesn't matter.
Guest:And they make me pay for parking.
Guest:I'm going to be sad.
Guest:I don't even have a job yet.
Guest:And I'm going to meet on here and make me pay for parking.
Guest:And I get there and there's a parking spot right out front.
Guest:And I pull into the parking spot.
Guest:And I call my shrink and I go, okay.
Guest:I cut back by a quarter of a pill for three days and I can feel all the darkness on the planet crawling up my spine and infesting the dark crevices of my brain.
Guest:Is that normal?
Guest:And he said, and this was your first depression ever that we were treating for?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said, no, I've been depressed my whole life.
Guest:Oh, stay on it.
Guest:Apparently, you are supremely attuned to this drug.
Guest:We found the right one for you.
Guest:Stay on it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I went back on and I have been virtually fine since.
Marc:In terms of chemical depression.
Marc:In terms of chemical depression.
Marc:Reason of depression you have.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I still have sadness.
Guest:I still have anger.
Guest:I still have rage.
Guest:And I often say that I'm medicated by a strict Orwellian therapist who likes to keep me sedated against political outrage.
Guest:But that's not true.
Guest:I still get politically outraged.
Guest:I know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it doesn't all feel like it's my fault and my responsibility and everyone is against me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It just feels like I got work to do.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, that's good.
Guest:That's a better way to frame it.
Guest:And I would have had no way of doing that without the chemical change.
Guest:So, well, I'm happy for you.
Guest:Well, thank you.
Guest:You look happy.
Marc:So now you seem to do some sort of special or CD or something like monthly.
Guest:I am ridiculously prolific.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You making a living?
Guest:Intermittently.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I make an intermittent living.
Guest:When I'm not making a big living, my wife supports us.
Marc:Oh, that's married the right person, I guess.
Guest:She's wonderful.
Guest:She's incredibly supportive of me and what I do.
Guest:And one of the things that happened when I quit smoking pot is that I realized I had been using it to make myself stupider.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Well, the difference between thought and action, the distance becomes very vast.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's so much easier just to have more chips.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was writing then, you know, I was writing a lot and performing all the time, but I was slowing myself down and slowing down my thought process and my creative process.
Guest:And once I was off, suddenly I wanted to get all these ideas into the world.
Guest:And it matters to me more that I get the ideas into the world than it does that I make a fortune.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I like making a living.
Guest:I'm not driven to make a killing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, I'm the same way.
Guest:So, you know, and at the same time, there's part of me that really wants the widespread recognition that would come through, you know, NPR or IFC.
Yeah.
Guest:There's the desire to be more accepted by the people who seem to have money to put into projects that I don't always have to put into projects.
Marc:Well, you'd be surprised at how much of that isn't there as much as you might assume.
Guest:I figure that to be the case because what I am learning at every step of this career is that there is far more illusion in show business than there is business or show.
Guest:Well, there's a lot of people taking meetings.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And there's a lot, you know, things get made, but you know, the, the landscape has become, you know, cluttered and fragmented to the point where, you know, you can earn an honest living.
Marc:You can't make a fortune.
Marc:That's yeah.
Marc:You know, you can, you can figure out, you know, some people make fortunes.
Marc:I'm, I'm, I don't seem to be destined for that, but, but the, you know, I make a good living.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, there's a lot of platforms, a lot of places to put things and the money keeps going away as the audience becomes more fragmented.
Marc:What are you going to do?
Marc:That's exactly right.
Guest:So, how many CDs have you put out?
Guest:I put out five CDs with stand-up records and then one over-length audio digital download with rooftop comedy.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:That one is called Dylan Goes Electric.
Guest:And those are all audio?
Guest:Those are all audio.
Guest:And now, last year, I shot three new specials in one night.
Guest:We had a full house, three shows, I catered it.
Guest:You cooked?
Guest:No, no, I had someone else do it, but I did all the performing and all the writing, so that counts for something.
Guest:Three shows, hour long?
Guest:The first one ran exactly an hour, 61 minutes.
Guest:That's the one that's coming out next month.
Guest:The second one ran about 48 minutes, and the third one I think ran 36.
Guest:I may be getting that wrong.
Guest:So you had these people sit through three?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:With breaks?
Guest:In between, they get catering, and I change my clothes, yeah.
Guest:Huh.
Guest:um and you're gonna release all of them as video as a visual they're all shot yeah multi-camera uh with a jib and a balcony and the full thing okay um because they're theatrical and spoken word storytelling as opposed to what i used to do is you know shotgun stand-up comedy sure uh it took me a little while to find the right home for any of them uh
Guest:So now, Next Up Comedy out of London is putting out the first one, Dylan Brody's Driving Hollywood.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And at the same time, Blue Panther Productions out of San Francisco is putting me together with a director.
Guest:And we're doing it as a fully staged solo show with a set and lighting cues.
Guest:When's that?
Guest:That's going to be going on tour in the spring.
Guest:And this is not the one you recorded, isn't it?
Guest:It is.
Guest:It's the same material.
Guest:It's largely the same material in Dylan Pratt's Driving Hollywood.
Guest:But it's reimagined as a fully staged production.
Guest:And this is probably the most Spalding Gray I've gotten in my work this show.
Guest:It's a little bit dark and funny and revealing and self-loathing.
Guest:I so enjoy...
Guest:Now that I've learned how to do it, having a silent audience waiting for the next thing is the most beautiful thing.
Marc:A respectful audience is the best you can ask for.
Marc:Oh, it makes me so happy.
Marc:And money.
Guest:Yeah, just enough to keep the mortgage paid.
Guest:Okay, I'm with you there.
Guest:Well, it was great talking to you, buddy.
Guest:Good seeing you.
Guest:The pleasure is mine.
Guest:Thank you so much for having me on.
Guest:I am honored and delighted to be in your garage.
Marc:Again, Dylan Brody's Driving Hollywood premieres on the streaming service.
Marc:Next up on February 14th.
Marc:Go to nextupcomedy.com.
Marc:Dylan Brody.
Marc:That was good hanging out with Dylan, but I'll tell you, man, when I got an opportunity to talk to Bill Paxton, I was pretty excited.
Marc:He's an intense, engaged, lively dude.
Marc:It was good to talk to him.
Marc:Who doesn't love Bill Paxton?
Marc:Seriously.
Marc:Who among us does not love Bill Paxton?
Marc:He's on this new CBS show, Training Day, which airs Thursday nights.
Marc:But you know him from any number of things.
Marc:Aliens, of course.
Marc:I got to get him to say that.
Marc:Well, let's find out.
Marc:This is me and the amazing Bill Paxton.
Marc:Pull the mic in a little.
Marc:Oh, there you go.
Guest:That's good.
Marc:Yeah, I know, man.
Marc:It's so funny to talk to you because back in the day when I did a radio show...
Marc:You know, you got those machines, those 360 machines with sound bites out of them.
Marc:And I had that one where you're like, it's over, man.
Guest:Game over, man.
Guest:It's game over.
Guest:God, I get requested that line a lot.
Guest:A lot.
Guest:Did you say we're fucked too?
Guest:No, I said fucking A. It's a great scene where, you know, we've had the big shot where we've just been hosed our first battle with the aliens in the ABC.
Guest:And Michael Bean is talking to Sigourney about getting off site and nuking it from outer space.
Guest:And Paul Reiser's trying to defend it for the corporation.
Guest:And I say something like, and Sigourney says something like, we'll get into orbit, we'll nuke the site from outer space, and it's the only way to be sure.
Guest:And I'm like, fucking A, man!
Guest:I hadn't seen that in a long time.
Guest:And we had a 30-year reunion, which is unbelievable.
Guest:Really?
Guest:At Comic-Con.
Marc:For just Aliens 2 or all of them?
Marc:For Aliens 2.
Guest:It kind of stands alone in a lot of ways.
Guest:I was a huge fan of Ridley's original Aliens.
Guest:oh yeah it's great but yeah the second one you know kind of built the franchise didn't it oh yeah yeah yeah but jim was smart you know you know you know the first one is kind of like a ride in a spook house yeah you don't know where the thing's gonna jump a thriller and then he thought you can't do that twice right this time i'm gonna have them literally coming out of the woodwork just as many aliens as possible yeah yeah yeah and they did what they do four
Marc:god i don't even know keep tapping that thing what's funny about sequels because you're just telling me in the kitchen that uh that the reason that they made mighty joe young was because they had such a great success with king kong huge success right and then they realized oh no he's dead we killed the goose we butchered it we barbecued it
Guest:so they thought wait a minute what do we come up with a monkey who's not so big but but still could yeah throw some shit around yeah but you've had quite a fucking career a bizarre career dude you've been in some of the best movies zigzag things up down all around but where'd you grow up i was born and raised in fort worth texas
Guest:Really?
Marc:I don't know why I say really, like you'd be lying to me.
Guest:Well, I might as well be.
Guest:The reason I was born there was because of my grandfather, who I never knew from Kansas City.
Guest:He read an article about a flamboyant Wheeler dealer, a guy who was kind of a William Randolph Hearst character, a foreword named Eamon Carter.
Guest:And he was sitting in Kansas City reading the Saturday Evening Post in 1935.
Guest:And he had a hardwood lumber distribution.
Guest:Your grandfather.
Guest:Yeah, he started this hardwood lumber thing.
Guest:So he was going to put a yard.
Guest:He wanted to expand and put a yard in Dallas.
Guest:But he read this article about this guy in Fort Worth.
Guest:So he went down there and he went, and that's why I'm from there.
Guest:My dad, after he died, my grandfather died in 1950.
Guest:Bless you.
Guest:He took on the lumber business?
Guest:Well, he joined the lumber business, but he had to kind of answer to his brother and his mother.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so he moved down to Fort Worth.
Guest:And so he was kind of in the lumber business?
Guest:He was.
Guest:This was his.
Guest:He started selling hardwood flooring for his dad when he was 16.
Guest:So you'd go down?
Guest:My dad's the reason I'm out here.
Guest:Really?
Guest:He's the reason we're talking right now.
Guest:He is?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Why?
Why?
Guest:I think he always wanted to be an actor, but he was the kind of guy who was very flamboyant, very colorful.
Marc:Yeah, big storyteller, raconteur, what kind of colorful?
Guest:A true raconteur.
Guest:And he started selling flooring for his dad when he was 16.
Guest:He was in the war.
Guest:He was stationed on the Rockefeller State outside of New York City.
Guest:He ended up in Chicago after that because there was a yard down there working there.
Guest:Then he met my mom outside of a church, which he never went to.
Guest:He said he was a pagan.
Guest:Not religious folks.
Guest:Yeah, and then my brother Bob, my older brother, was born in Skokie, and then they moved to Fort Worth.
Guest:But from an early age, my dad, ever since I can remember, he was taking me to movies and plays.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We'd come out, and he'd want to talk about these.
Guest:He'd deconstruct them.
Guest:He'd say, hey, I thought the music was great in that movie, didn't you?
Guest:And I'm like, the music?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Oh, yeah, there's music.
Marc:Oh, so you learned how to kind of.
Guest:Art direction, lighting.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:He was a real fan.
Guest:He was a real fan.
Marc:But he was sort of a film nerd, a theater nerd.
Guest:Yeah, and he loved art.
Guest:He said he had a fifth-grade teacher, which would have probably been about 1930 for him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Born in 20, that turned him on to Rubens, Peter Paul Rubens, the Renaissance painter.
Guest:Sure, yeah.
Guest:He had a great affinity and a great love of art, but he wasn't an intellectual.
Guest:He read everything.
Guest:I've been going through a lot of his stuff.
Guest:My mom passed last June at 90.
Guest:Oh, sorry.
Guest:Oh, 90.
Guest:Yeah, no.
Guest:She was ready to go.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So I've been kind of closing down the house.
Guest:They had a beautiful library of books, and they just read everything.
Marc:And they stayed in Fort Worth?
Guest:stayed in fort worth till about 1980 and then my dad decided it was just too hot down there and even though my mom and them had friends he moved out to solana beach california how far is that from here that's right next to del mar so they were close to the surf yeah so you saw him yeah i saw him a lot it was great i we were we were real pals anybody that knew me at all knew my dad we were oh yeah a package yeah you paled around a lot
Guest:And he lived to 91.
Guest:He passed in 2011.
Guest:I was in Romania doing Hatfield and McCoys when he passed.
Marc:That's a great show.
Marc:That was a great movie, dude.
Marc:I can't remember if it was a miniseries or a movie.
Guest:It was a miniseries.
Marc:I watched the whole thing.
Marc:Because that thing had been sort of dealt with before, but you guys kind of killed it.
Guest:Yeah, kind of an eastern-western.
Marc:Yeah, it was fucking great.
Guest:I wasn't sure I wanted to do it.
Guest:I'd just come out of Big Love, and I thought, you know, I'd kind of played a pretty religious guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:the way randall mccoy was written in this that he was almost kind of a zealot in some ways and yeah i called costner up they set me up so i could i'd met him in passing over the years i've kind of met everybody right sure been around so damn long but uh and he said oh man it's it's we're gonna it's gonna we're gonna be we're gonna be wearing beards and stuff it's not gonna be like that show and
Marc:Like what show?
Guest:Like Big Love.
Guest:It was completely different, but I just felt like, wow.
Guest:I played a pretty religious guy in that, and I loved that show.
Guest:I did, too.
Guest:We got to talk about that.
Guest:But I thought, you know, maybe this is going to be, you know, you want to mix it up a little bit.
Guest:Oh, you were afraid that you'd be typecast as a zealot?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So he said, oh, man, we're going to be wearing beards, and we're going to Romania.
Guest:And I went, what?
Guest:We're going where?
Marc:Romania.
Guest:He goes, yeah, I know.
Guest:You haven't heard about that?
Guest:He goes, yeah, we're going to shoot the whole thing in Romania.
Guest:We're going to use all the old sets from this movie Cold Mountain, and we're going to be in Bucharest.
Guest:And it was a great experience, except that my pop died while I was on it.
Guest:But he had done his thing.
Guest:He got out clean, I like to say.
Guest:He was 91.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Got out clean.
Marc:And he lived a good life at times.
Guest:Lived a good life, and it faltered a little bit at the end, but really didn't have a tough exit.
Marc:puts i guess it puts stuff into perspective huh i mean i you know both of my folks are still alive and like but like when they live blessed when you when you live to 90 yeah and i was god i was in my 50s when they passed so i mean that's great especially if you've had a good relationship with your parents well that's great i don't hear that too often
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:My dad used to say I wasn't weird.
Guest:I told him I wanted to be an actor at one point.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he said, you're not weird enough to be an actor.
Guest:You haven't had enough neurotic, weird stuff happen to you.
Guest:And I said, oh, dad.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I had plenty.
Marc:Someday I'll tell you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it's weird, the Hatfield McCoys, because it was one of those things that was on the History Network, right?
Yeah.
Guest:The History Channel, it kind of legitimized that network overnight because they had such phenomenal ratings.
Marc:Yeah, because I was flipping around, and I don't know how I heard of it, but I started watching, and I'm like, holy shit, this is great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:These guys are really doing it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You and Cosner were really fucking doing it.
Guest:It was crazy over there, too.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The Wranglers didn't speak English, and...
Guest:They put us on all these Romanian stallions, and God, we're trying to ride through these hardwood forests.
Guest:And I realized very early on that with a wide brim hat and a huge beard, I probably just needed to be in the medium and the close-up shots.
Guest:So I let this guy in.
Guest:He was a nice guy, but God, he'd gotten hurt doing some medieval times thing over there.
Guest:He'd gotten hit with a lance and had gone through his left eye socket and out the top of his head.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Marc:So he had the gnarliest scar you've ever seen.
Marc:And he was a stunt guy?
Marc:He was my guy.
Marc:So he was the guy in the beard on the horse?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I paid him extra, I tell you.
Guest:Take care of me here, will you?
Guest:You're not much of a horse guy?
Guest:Well...
Guest:kind of yes and no i got to go to a horseback riding camp when i was a when i was a kid and i did a lot of rodeo and back in those days i was up in wyoming real rodeo you rode the uh the well i didn't no i didn't do they didn't let you do that but a little roping a little uh yeah a little horse race had a quarter mile track and that was fun you know it was like right what i guess maybe it's not quite like riding a bike because every horse is different
Guest:You know, I tell you, there's nothing more exciting than being in a horse race.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But you want to be out front because if you're not, it's amazing how many dirt clods are hitting you in the face.
Guest:It's just you can't hardly see.
Guest:It's like being in a millstorm of dirt.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it's cool.
Guest:Nowadays, because of insurance and all, they never let your kids out there riding horses full gallop on a horse track.
Marc:They just never let you do it.
Marc:Well, I mean, unless you're growing up in that kind of life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, that's true.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:So you spent your whole childhood... I was a suburban kid from Fort Worth.
Guest:From Texas.
Guest:Yeah, I could have been from anywhere.
Guest:I was listening to Jimi Hendrix and riding motorcycles.
Marc:He came through there.
Marc:He played Texas.
Marc:I talked to Billy Gibbons about that from ZZ Top.
Marc:But you were a kid.
Marc:You've met who?
Guest:I met Billy.
Guest:And God, I remember Billy's... I remember ZZ Top when they were kind of a regional band.
Guest:Their first hit was a regional hit called Shakin' Your Tree.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And they used to play down at Panther Hall in Fort Worth.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:They used to call Fort Worth Panther City because, I guess, legendary.
Guest:They were Panthers living there at some point.
Guest:Did you go see him?
Guest:I went to see him.
Guest:I remember they opened for Edgar and Johnny Winter.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:They were amazing.
Guest:They both did their own songs?
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:They played together.
Marc:It's so weird because they're so different, man.
Marc:Like, you know, Johnny's straight up blues, hard rock, and Edgar's like, you know, this keyboard, almost prog rock shit.
Guest:They were great.
Guest:Well, they're Texan, too.
Guest:They were Texan.
Guest:They grew up playing on a local Dallas TV show where they were playing country music.
Marc:So it was ZZ Top and the Winter Brothers.
Guest:Yeah, and Blood Rock opened, too.
Guest:I don't know who Blood Rock opened.
Guest:They had one hit.
Guest:It was called DOA.
Guest:We were flying low and hit something in the air.
Guest:I remember...
Guest:that was that yeah yeah there were a lot of car accidents when growing up in texas even though you have complete wide open spaces sure there were the most horrendous fat you know fatalistic car accidents growing up i remember going to funerals of friends and stuff just because it's like everybody had those big fast cars and when you have that when you have the open highway you just want to drive fast gtx yeah yeah so you're just growing up in texas growing up in texas brother
Guest:Got an older brother, and I got a younger sister, younger brother.
Guest:It's for you?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Everybody's all right?
Guest:Yeah, everybody's hanging in there.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:You know.
Marc:And when did the interest in acting come?
Marc:Were you, like, athletic guy?
Guest:Did you... I wasn't really... You know...
Guest:One thing I like about films and television is I dig being a part of a concerted group that are trying to make something.
Guest:We're all so alienated and so isolated in modern society in so many ways.
Guest:Even though we have all this technology to supposedly connect us, we're as isolated as we've ever been.
Guest:Oh, no, it's horrible.
Guest:You know, I kind of dreamed of the Renaissance where, you know, you're born and you become an apprentice in a guild, and, you know, it takes all these different disciplines to build a cathedral.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:That's kind of what it takes to make a film.
Guest:That's true.
Guest:It's one of the last of the great guild crafts.
Marc:Yeah, there's guilds and there's unions now, but, yeah, that's true.
Guest:But you have the different departments that have to come together in concert, and it's fun.
Guest:I really... So I wasn't an athlete, but I always envied that...
Guest:team thing, you know, the team and the camaraderie.
Guest:Because, you know, when I was, you know, I went to Catholic school and then my dad got a wild hair up his ass when I was in seventh grade.
Guest:Next thing I knew, we'd moved out to the country from Fort Worth.
Guest:So I went from being basically a suburban kid from anywhere USA to this, God, I was living in the last picture show, this Baptist community about 30 miles.
Guest:How old were you?
Guest:I was 13.
Guest:But it was kind of wild because those country girls were a lot wilder than the suburban girls.
Marc:Yeah, and you were like new meat, fresh meat.
Guest:But I wasn't a football player, and it was all about playing football and stuff.
Guest:And so I felt a little isolated.
Guest:Also, when I was that age, I got a weird ailment.
Guest:woke up one night i'd been to a hockey game and i woke up in the middle of night had a lot of pain in my left wrist and i i went downstairs and knocked on my dad my mom and dad's door yeah and i said i did and he said what is it son he said i'm in a lot of pain like something wrong with this he goes oh you probably slept on it yeah and then he said you'll be okay just go back to bed
Guest:By morning, it was worse.
Guest:It was a Sunday morning.
Guest:My dad realized he took me to a friend of his who was an ortho guy, bone guy.
Guest:He kind of set it, kind of enwrapped it.
Guest:Couldn't really figure out what it was.
Guest:And so the next day, I had some tests done by the pediatrician.
Guest:And then by Tuesday night, I was in the Cooks Children's Hospital.
Guest:And they still couldn't figure out.
Guest:Finally, they thought I had something called osteomyelitis or it could be this thing, rheumatic fever.
Guest:Rheumatic fever.
Guest:And that's what it was.
Guest:Really?
Guest:So I spent a good part of the seventh grade, and this was before we moved to the country, in bed.
Guest:Now, what is rheumatic fever?
Guest:What does it affect?
Guest:Rheumatic fever comes from a streptococcus infection from a strep throat that kind of goes untreated.
Guest:I'd had kind of a bad sore throat at Christmas time.
Guest:Don't get sick during the holidays or during the weekend if you're going to help it.
Guest:A lot of guys buy the ranch because the illness hits at the wrong time.
Guest:Truly.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So I had this thing, and what it does is supposedly it's an infection, and somehow it kind of got into my wrist, but it usually damages your heart valves.
Marc:Did it?
Guest:well yeah yeah a little bit yeah yeah rheumatic fever it sounds a little but it kind of isolated me at an interesting age yeah suddenly made me uh because i you know i grew up in texas and and that sounds like you know something out in the country but like again it was suburban we lived near a golf course i spent all my time on the golf course hunting golf balls yeah yeah you know listening to the beach boys and the beetles and rolling stones and then you know getting to go to camp in the summer and all that stuff and
Guest:You know, I was a real outgoing kid.
Guest:I wasn't a jock, but I did a lot of stuff.
Guest:But suddenly I was in this kind of voyeuristic kind of world where I had a TV, but there wasn't much TV in those days.
Guest:And I read a lot.
Guest:And I just kind of looked out the window, you know, at the golf course.
Guest:And that was it?
Guest:About six months, yeah.
Marc:And just sitting in bed?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Thinking about things?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:No revelations?
Marc:Ah, you know.
Marc:So your dad was Catholic, but you're not a religious guy.
Guest:No, my dad wasn't Catholic.
Guest:My mother was Catholic.
Guest:My dad was no religion.
Marc:He called himself a pagan.
Guest:But in order to marry my mother, he met my mom in Chicago.
Guest:It's kind of a good story.
Guest:He had an apartment.
Guest:He had a great bachelor pad on Lakeshore Drive, LSD, 1400 LSD.
Guest:Sure, yeah.
Guest:And one of his buddies, this guy named Charlie Den, he was a young pilot for United.
Guest:And they were out one night, and my dad there at some place, I think it was called Dante's.
Guest:It was kind of a famous old kind of bar, restaurant near the Loop.
Guest:And he saw this gal with these other gals, and he had this buddy, Andy Muldoon.
Guest:He said, who is that?
Guest:He said, that's Mary Lou Gray.
Guest:He said, oh, God, you've got to introduce me to her.
Guest:And he said, well, come on over.
Guest:He goes, no, no, no, no, not here, not here.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So he called him the next day and said, hey, she goes to my church and she'll be there Sunday.
Guest:Why don't you go to church with me?
Guest:I think it was the only time my dad ever went into a church besides when he married her.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because my dad was kind of like, why do you got to go to a church?
Guest:Look at this beautiful tree.
Guest:Why don't you just worship under the tree in the nude?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and just give praise to whatever it is.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He's one of those guys.
Guest:While we were at church, he'd be naked on a chaise lounge in the backyard reading the latest Ian Fleming paperback.
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:Yeah, that's very true, very true.
Guest:So God, he went to the church and he met my mom.
Guest:He was with her for two weeks, and this is kind of weird.
Guest:I don't think this is weird, but again, I told you I've been going through a lot of my folk stuff.
Guest:I found a picture I'd never seen,
Guest:And I made a card of it to send out in my mom's memoriam.
Guest:Oh, look at that.
Guest:That's my mom and dad.
Guest:That's in Chicago.
Guest:That's 1950.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:And she's 25.
Guest:My dad's 30 there.
Guest:Oh, look at that.
Guest:He dated her for two weeks and proposed marriage to her.
Marc:Oh, that's beautiful.
Guest:And so in order, getting back to the Catholic thing, in order to get married in the Catholic Church, I don't know if it's still that way now, but if it was someone who wasn't a Catholic, a non-Catholic, you had to get married.
Guest:To get married in the church, you had to sign a piece of paper that said, any children born of this marriage will be raised in the Catholic Church.
Guest:And my dad said he would have signed anything.
Guest:He said, even your mother worshiped pagan idolatry.
Guest:I didn't care.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So he signed.
Guest:He signed and we were raised Catholic.
Guest:And I, you know, I went to Catholic school from the time I was in kindergarten till I was through the seventh grade.
Guest:And you'd have a lay teacher one year and then you'd have a nun, a sister.
Guest:And it was kind of a bizarre experience.
Guest:I also was an altar boy.
Guest:Me and my brother would do the Friday night Vesper service.
Guest:I love that.
Marc:But it's interesting that you're growing up in a household where your dad is a character.
Marc:He's a total character.
Marc:And your mother is a Catholic who's crossed a bear.
Guest:Oh, John.
Guest:Right.
Guest:not in front of the children it was all that all the time you know my dad was the kind of guy we'd be getting into the car he had a lot of stock kind of lines and stuff whatever stock lines was whatever he was putting the keys in the ignition of the car he'd say oh hell i couldn't find this thing if it had hair around it you know oh john the children you know and he'd go and you know we were cutting up in the back seat or something goes come on because pipe down or i'll kick a lung out of you these were these were terms of of endearment right but your mom was just like here we go yeah
Guest:It was kind of a faux thing she did, that faux shockness.
Guest:She had to do something.
Guest:She had her wild side too.
Guest:They loved to throw parties.
Guest:God, they just threw parties all the time.
Marc:Like those classic 50s and 60s parties.
Guest:Sometimes all of a sudden we'd be taken to a motel for the night.
Guest:By who?
Guest:I was raised by a woman named Clemence Jones.
Guest:I couldn't say Clemence as a kid.
Guest:I called her Monsie.
Guest:I knew Monsie her whole life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Monsi said, Bill, I knew you before you knew yourself.
Guest:And if I was cutting up, she'd say something like, if you're going to be a clown, be a first class clown and get paid for it.
Guest:And I want to say thank you, Monsi.
Guest:I took that advice to heart.
Guest:You became a first class clown.
Guest:Our parents would send us to the motel for that.
Guest:But then I remember other nights when we were at the house.
Guest:Especially this house on Indian Creek Drive that was near the golf course.
Guest:That was my parents' dream house.
Guest:My dad built it with all these great hardwoods, the flooring.
Guest:Yeah, connections for the woods.
Guest:My dad was into art, so it was great art on the walls.
Guest:And we had an upstairs section, and they could kind of close off the other side of the house.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And the parties would just be going on.
Guest:And I remember one of the best memories, you know, it's that sense memory, that smell that really takes you back to a place.
Guest:But I remember my mother coming up in that rustle of those crinoline dresses, long skirts, and just that rustle, and coming to kind of kiss me goodnight while the party's going on.
Guest:And there was this mixture of gin, perfume, and cigarettes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was just an ambrosial smell.
Guest:You know, a wonderful, wonderful smell.
Guest:And to this day, that's my mother.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:It's hard to find that smell out in the wild these days.
Guest:It really is.
Guest:It really is.
Guest:You got to go to Europe to get a hit.
Guest:Sure, yeah.
Marc:Gin's not that popular.
Marc:No one smokes anymore.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You got to go to Europe to get that hit.
Marc:Oh, that's hilarious.
Marc:So was your mother...
Marc:How far back?
Marc:You're a little older than me.
Marc:She was a Catholic.
Marc:I mean, I was reading up on you a little bit.
Marc:Was she a big Kennedy person?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:But really, it was my older brother, Bob.
Guest:Because, see, I was 11 and he was 8 when Kennedy came through Fort Worth on that fateful trip.
Guest:And we could see down from where we could see past the golf course and we could see down to Carswell Air Force Base.
Guest:And my brother had gotten a telescope.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we looked down and we saw Air Force One with the presidential seal on it.
Guest:And my dad came up.
Guest:We were just about to go to bed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was later in the night.
Guest:And we had gotten to kind of stay up.
Guest:And my dad said, we'll go watch the motorcade drive by.
Guest:So I literally had my pajamas on.
Guest:I put a robe on.
Guest:I had my slippers on.
Guest:My brother and I, we got my dad's Jetstar Osmobile.
Guest:We drove down to Roaring Springs Road and parked.
Guest:And there the whole motorcade went by.
Guest:And it was probably, it was late.
Guest:It was like 11 o'clock at night.
Marc:It was really late for me at eight years old.
Marc:Right after they landed kind of thing.
Marc:So before the day.
Guest:They'd had a long day.
Guest:I know a lot about this story.
Guest:I became obsessed with it.
Guest:Like many, many Americans, many people in the world.
Marc:With the JFK assassination?
Guest:Yeah, really.
Guest:I developed a huge project for Tom Hanks' company a few years ago about it.
Guest:But the next morning, my brother got my dad up and knocked on the door and said, you promised you'd take us to see the president.
Guest:And my dad looked out the window and it was kind of a rainy morning.
Guest:And then my dad said, and he thought, you know, I liked Kennedy, but I thought the idea of taking these kids into a crowd in the rain was going to be a complete pain in the ass.
Guest:And then my brother used the two words that kills every deal with a parent.
Guest:You promised.
Guest:So he said, get your brother dressed.
Guest:Ten minutes later, we're driving down to Dallas.
Guest:No, downtown Fort Worth.
Guest:They spent their last night in Fort Worth, the Hotel Texas.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a crowd of about 4000 people gathered in the parking lot in front of the Hotel Texas.
Guest:And there was a I found out later it was just a flatbed truck.
Guest:They put bunting on.
Guest:They put the lectern with the presidential seal.
Guest:And.
Guest:We were probably there for about 20, 30 minutes, and here comes the president.
Guest:There's Johnson, there's Connolly, there's Yarbrough.
Guest:And this is four hours before it's all going to go down.
Guest:And Kennedy was really up that morning, and it was something about seeing him in color.
Guest:He's in a blue suit, and his hair was red, and, yeah, he looked great.
Guest:and uh he was in he was very jocular he kind of kidded the crowd he said i'm sorry jack he's not down here to greet you people good people she takes a little longer to get ready tomorrow of course she looks a hell of a lot better right it was like an electricity in the crowd sure and my dad was taking turns putting me and my brother up on his shoulders and even though i wasn't
Guest:too far we weren't too far away yeah there was a little kind of an orchestra pit where they'd put the you know police block you know saw horses around for the secret service the police and the uh you know the the new the media the newsreels guys and we were not far behind the crowd and there were two there were two black guys standing next to to my dad and me my brother in the crowd and they saw my dad's dilemma he was kind of trying to put my brother up yeah my bob and me and
Guest:he said we'll take those boys so for most of the speech i was on a stranger's shoulders yeah it's kind of a great moment yeah i just remembered it and they found me in a newsreel oh really yeah a few years ago it's kind of a crazy picture and you could because i'm up up above the crowd and you know i got this you know my dad had us just get you know we had crew cuts and stuff back in those days it was easy
Guest:didn't get as much head lice at school if you had the crew cut right those deals so you went home after that and then you i went back to school but we got to go to the toddle house which was the highlight of our of our existence at the time it was one of these great waffle pancake houses yeah yeah it's kind of like a diner rockefeller's diner i guess in new york they used to have the ones called schraffs yeah sure like yeah and uh
Guest:We got to eat there, and so we got to go to school late.
Guest:And I remember going to recess, and I was really excited.
Guest:I'd seen the president.
Guest:Kennedy was the man.
Guest:I was like seeing the biggest movie star in the world.
Guest:And we came in off the recess playground.
Guest:And the radio was on, and we were in one of those single story with the central hallway, center block school houses with the fluorescent lights.
Guest:And we went in, and I was in the third grade, Sister Annette, I remember, and all the lights were off.
Guest:We were told to put our heads down on the desk.
Guest:And the radio was on, and it was announced that Kennedy had succumbed to this assassin's bullet.
Guest:And the nuns were all crying, and it was just...
Guest:unbelievable just and i couldn't believe it i was eight and a half and i was just like i just saw him that's not right that can't be and all this stuff and i remember that night my brother was so distraught my 11 year old brother he's my oldest brother and always was a sensitive guy yeah and i remember he came and and and got in my bed with me that night we had our own rooms yeah we had had our we'd shared rooms up to that point but we were living in this dream house of my parents
Guest:And I kind of experienced the grief of it through him.
Guest:He was leveled, huh?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just shattered.
Guest:I don't think he ever got over it.
Guest:It's one of those things.
Guest:If Kennedy was your man, who he was to a whole generation, the youth looked up to him.
Marc:well yeah and also it was nothing had ever happened like that in modern america no you know out in the open oh i mean the implications of it like you said like not unlike many other people became obsessed with you know the the spectacle and the tragedy of it it's like something out of a greek tragedy you
Marc:No doubt.
Marc:And then also the conspiracy growing around it.
Guest:Well, yeah, that's kind of what my project was about.
Guest:We were going to do a 10-hour miniseries for HBO because I went to Tom Hanks, who I knew from Apollo 13.
Guest:Are you guys friends?
Guest:Yeah, we're friends.
Guest:We don't see much of each other.
Guest:I gave him a People's Choice Award last week.
Guest:Oh, you did?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I did a film with him recently called The Circle, but...
Marc:But you guys are great.
Marc:Apollo 13 is great.
Guest:Yeah, it was a great experience.
Guest:I talked to Ron.
Marc:He should have won all the marbles on that one.
Marc:I'll tell you, man.
Marc:I watched it again recently.
Marc:It's really the best of the genre.
Marc:It holds up.
Marc:Totally.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:I'm so proud to have been a part of that movie.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:I can't tell you.
Guest:And Tom was great, too.
Guest:A great Jim Lovell and a great leader of the cast.
Marc:Solid.
Marc:It's like both you guys are just such grounded, natural actors.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's kind of a fascinating thing that you have this versatility.
Guest:It's really a survival skill, Mark.
Guest:You're just trying to stay employed and try to work on cool things.
Marc:Well, what was the show you pitched, the miniseries?
Guest:What were you guys... It was going to basically be... It seemed to me that all over the years, the conspiracists had all had their say.
Guest:And there was a book that came out that I got to see the galleys of, and it was Vincent Bugliosi.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Who wrote Halter Skelter.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He wrote a book called... He was a DA here, wasn't he?
Guest:He was a DA here.
Guest:Really, it's kind of amazing that he was able to put Manson behind bars for life when Manson really wasn't at the murder scene.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's kind of a unique situation.
Guest:In that case, it's an unbelievable story.
Guest:So he wrote a book on Kennedy?
Guest:It's called Reclaiming History.
Guest:It's too bad Kennedy didn't have this book behind his head because it would have stopped him.
Marc:I just watched Jackie.
Guest:Yeah, I haven't been able to bring myself to watch that because I know that story so well.
Marc:Yeah, it's really a kind of interesting poetic meditation on grief and the isolation of grief and also the weird, horrible coldness of politics sometimes, tragedy.
Guest:Well, then her trying to kind of try to solidify his legacy of Camelot and all of that.
Guest:A bit of that, but also I thought... I got a lot of Kennedy stories that nobody's ever heard because of my research.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, but basically, I'll give you a couple anecdotes, but we were going to do 10 hours, and it was going to be kind of like concentric circles on a bullseye.
Guest:One hour is going to follow what Kennedy was doing that weekend.
Guest:And each one, we're going to do one on Ruby, one on Oswald.
Guest:And finally, by kind of deconstructing it and laying it all out, it really isn't such a mystical thing that happened.
Guest:When you stand in the book depository and the window next to the one where Oswald fired from,
Guest:You think, God, I could have hit him with a BB gun.
Guest:It's not some kind of like, oh, it was a real magical shot or magic bullet.
Guest:And the one bullet that just didn't fall apart like bullets do.
Guest:It looked pristine, but if you look at the end of it, you can tell it has been fired.
Guest:And that was the one that supposedly was thrown on the gurney.
Guest:It just went through two men, and by the time it got through Connelly, it just kind of... Plopped out?
Guest:Yeah, it just kind of plopped out.
Guest:but um i got to know a guy named milton evans yeah he was a william morris agent and then he and then he but he but at the time of the kennedy thing he was running peter lawford's company he would help produce the rat pack movie and he was a kennedy and well yeah lawford was married to eunice kennedy i think it was eunice kennedy
Guest:And he told me some crazy stories.
Guest:He told me about going to the White House during the whole height of the Kennedy administration with Peter Lawford.
Guest:And yeah, Kennedy really liked to listen to the Camelot soundtrack.
Guest:Richard Harris singing Camelot.
Guest:He had it on the thing.
Guest:And he said one day, this is kind of a crazy story,
Guest:He said he went down to take a swim, and there were two Secret Service guys standing by the pool.
Guest:And I don't even know where that pool is.
Guest:I don't know where it is in the White House.
Guest:And he said, oh, maybe it's a bad time.
Guest:He said, oh, no, it's okay, Mr. Evans.
Guest:And he kind of thought, God, they know my name.
Guest:They probably had a dossier.
Guest:Go on in.
Guest:And he went into the pool, and there was Kennedy.
Guest:In the pool with these two gals, they're all naked, and he said, he called Milt, Miltie Baby.
Guest:He goes, Miltie Baby, come on, join us.
Guest:And Miltie was kind of a teetotaler and had been married for many years.
Guest:And he just said, gee, I'll see you at dinner, Mr. President, and kind of left.
Guest:And, you know, there's that side of Kennedy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then but then but then he remembered, you know, seeing him.
Guest:He remembered going to the White House with Lawford and and and Eunice on the day of the assassination.
Guest:and you know the body was held up in in dallas and then they were able to get it out of there then they got to andrews air force base where the body was immediately taken to bethesda naval where they did the the the famous autopsy yeah and the body didn't actually get back to the white house till early pre-dawn sun uh saturday morning and that's an amazing story that drive from that hospital with jackie in the car and uh
Guest:But Milt got there in the early evening with the Lawfords, and there was a famous, well, they made this movie called The Butler or something.
Guest:I'm trying to think of his name.
Guest:His name was Eugene something.
Guest:And he was Kennedy's valet.
Guest:And he had been with Kennedy that morning.
Guest:And he was running around the White House trying to accommodate all the House guests, the Kennedy family, and Peter Lawford and Milt and all these people.
Guest:And Milt said to him, he said, Eugene, I'd like to have something of the president's.
Guest:And he said, oh, I'll get you.
Guest:And he brought him back a Cartier watch.
Guest:And Milt said, I can't take that.
Guest:He said, can I have a couple of his neckties?
Guest:milt hand i i held these neckties kind of amazing but he told me this story that's never really been documented about the kennedys having a wake yeah in the dining room of the white house the family the family on the saturday night that milt was a present at yeah and there there they are uh and it was almost like he said it was almost like a cocktail party was going on an irish wake
Guest:An Irish wig everybody was getting completely hammered.
Guest:Yeah, except Rose Kennedy who sat there very stoic Yeah, a mother with a drink in her hand, but she said at one point somebody took off Milt's Took off Ethel's Kennedy's wig and put it on Milt.
Guest:No, it was balding guy now and and and everybody said look at Milt and everybody started laughing and Milt just said it was the most surreal thing he had ever witnessed and
Guest:There's another guy named Siegenthal who was a Secret Service guy who kind of substantiated the story.
Guest:And he said it was as if Jack and Jackie had retired early from the party.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Guest:The weirdest damn thing.
Marc:That sounds pretty weird.
Marc:Was that part of your show?
Marc:We had a lot of that stuff in there.
Marc:Now, why doesn't a show like that go?
Guest:Well, you know, Tom was all in.
Guest:But, you know, 2008 happened.
Guest:We started working on this in about 2006.
Guest:And 2008 happened.
Guest:And we were trying to get it ready for the 50th anniversary.
Guest:2011 would mark the 50th anniversary of the great inaugural speech.
Guest:You know, when inaugural speeches were really something to be inspired by.
Guest:And then it was going to be 2013 was going to be the 50th.
Guest:That's a significant anniversary of a historical event.
Guest:We thought, let's have something ready to go.
Guest:And Tom's company had built a reputation doing these long form dramatizations of American history.
Guest:Earth to the moon.
Guest:But the budget, it was at a time after 2008 where everybody pulled back and I think HBO was kind of getting out of the miniseries business.
Guest:Little did they know that they had started something that was about to grow with Netflix and all these 10-hour series.
Guest:And it's too bad we didn't get to do it.
Marc:We didn't get to do it.
Marc:Well, when did you come to Los Angeles?
Marc:When did you actually start acting?
Guest:I came to Los Angeles when I was 18 years old.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:What year was that?
Guest:That was January of 1974.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Marc:That's like the heyday.
Guest:I went to my dad and I said, who do you know in Hollywood?
Guest:And he said, Jesus, I should have taken you to more business meetings.
Guest:but he had taken me to movies and plays and you know art and so i was you know i gravitate this and i my dad wanted to be an actor and what's funny is he became an actor after he retired yeah he's in six movies sam raimi put him in six of his films uh really yeah actually more than that walter hill put him in last man standing he's the old undertaker in that bruce willis keeps giving him business because he keeps killing people
Guest:And he had a great kind of renaissance.
Guest:I think it kind of kept him alive to 91 because he had something to do.
Guest:How did he get this?
Guest:Most people just die off because they get retired.
Guest:They got nothing to do.
Guest:So he did this because they all knew him from you.
Guest:Yeah, kind of.
Guest:But he kind of had to get in there and take classes and stuff.
Guest:He did?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:What age?
Guest:At 70.
Guest:And all these young kids, they wanted to do scenes with him where they needed a patriarchal figure or something.
Guest:So he's at the Beverly Hills Playhouse.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:that's hilarious he calls me up one day he says you know i'm getting out of the lumber business i've been in lumber business 50 years and shit i can't sit around and play golf or you know you know you know watch the hair grow out of my nose so he goes um why don't i uh thinking about getting into your game getting into my game what the hell are you talking about he goes yeah i think about doing that acting thing
Guest:I'm like, Dad, God, you're going into the golden years.
Guest:Don't do this to yourself.
Guest:It's a tough line.
Guest:What had you done by that point?
Marc:I don't care if you're successful or not.
Marc:It's still a tough line.
Marc:You made some movies, though.
Marc:You were a guy, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:This is about 25 years ago.
Guest:I had a pretty good career going at that time.
Guest:I don't know what happened since then.
Guest:Oh, come on.
Guest:Oh, come on.
Guest:And so I said, if you're going to really do this, you've got to take classes.
Guest:He signed up at the Beverly Hills Playhouse and took classes.
Guest:But I came out here.
Guest:He had a friend.
Guest:He knew two guys in Hollywood.
Guest:He knew Hal Wallace.
Guest:He played golf with him.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Hal Wallace.
Guest:He writes Hal Wallace.
Guest:Hal Wallace writes back, says, I can't even get my own son a job.
Guest:He's not in the unions.
Guest:The unions run everything.
Guest:So thanks.
Guest:But no thanks.
Guest:He writes a guy named Milan Herzog, who made these educational films for Encyclopedia Britannica.
Marc:This is to help get you in.
Guest:Just to get me in, the guy writes back and says, tell your son to go back to school.
Guest:We get too many young people out here.
Guest:They think they've got something to say, but they need to go to school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my dad wrote him a second time and said, has he got anything for him?
Guest:He's got to come out there.
Guest:God, help me out, will you?
Yeah.
Guest:And so he gave me two weeks' work as a PA on a thing called Gateways to the Humanities.
Guest:I met a young guy, a guy there, another director who introduced me to an art director who was getting ready to art direct his first Roger Corman movie, which was called Big Bad Mama.
Guest:Angie Dickinson and William Shatner.
Guest:And so I worked on that, and that's where I really kind of got my cherry popped in many ways.
Guest:I was driving a 20-foot van full of set dressing all over Los Angeles, and it was...
Guest:Kind of blew my mind.
Marc:Were you in the movie?
Guest:No, no, no, I wasn't in the movie.
Marc:But you're working for Corman for a minute.
Marc:Working for Corman on a few films.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:So what was the first movie then?
Marc:Was it a Corman movie?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The first thing I was working on the art department on a film.
Guest:It was a thing called Crazy Mama directed by Jonathan Demme.
Guest:And I heard over the walkies, and everybody's got a walkie-talkie, I heard over the walkies said, hey, so-and-so, some guy, some day players, the deputy part didn't show up.
Guest:And I heard there was kind of a pause.
Guest:I heard Jonathan Demme on the walkie-talkie say, hey, get that kid off the art department truck, cut his hair, take him to wardrobe, and bring him to the set.
Guest:And I had really long hair.
Guest:My hair was like down to here.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:We were all hippies back then.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so I cut my hair, I put me in this thing, and I had one line, you know, and I had this thing.
Guest:But I was too stupid.
Guest:I could have probably joined the Screen Actors Guild, and I didn't.
Guest:And after that, I decided I really wanted to try.
Guest:I wanted to go to film school.
Guest:My heart was set on going to film school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My heroes were guys.
Guest:My dad had turned me on to all kinds.
Guest:He showed me foreign films.
Guest:He got me into Chaplin and Keaton.
Guest:Keaton particularly spoke to me.
Guest:I've just been a huge devotee of Keaton ever since I first laid eyes on him.
Guest:And and so but I was into this idea.
Guest:And then I, you know, we came I came up with guys like, you know, going to see movies by guys like Clint Eastwood and Warren Beatty.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:He made Bonnie and Clyde and Robert Redford was making his own movies.
Guest:Paul Newman.
Guest:When you got here, that was happening.
Guest:These guys.
Guest:Well, they had been happening.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So you came out in 74.
Guest:Yeah, but it had been happening from the late 60s.
Guest:And these guys, all these big stars had kind of empowered themselves by starting their own companies, starting to make films, the stories they wanted to tell.
Guest:And I thought, you know, it's hard trying to fit into somebody else's thing.
Guest:You know, you kind of know what you probably are good at.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or the stories you feel passionate about or you want to tell.
Guest:But, you know, you have to go through this nightmare audition process trying to build a career and stuff.
Guest:But I thought that's what I wanted to be.
Guest:And it wasn't an ego thing.
Guest:It was more I thought, you know, I'd like to tell.
Guest:These are the stories I tell.
Guest:Bonnie and Clyde is one of my all-time favorite films.
Marc:Great movie, yeah.
Guest:And that was a movie nobody wanted to make, but Warren Beatty was able to get that made.
Marc:So you wanted to be one of those people.
Marc:You wanted to be an auteur, a guy that produces his own movies and got his own shit done.
Guest:Yeah, and if I have to be in them, fine.
Guest:That's okay, but if I don't, that's okay too.
Guest:So that was the model.
Guest:And I wanted to be a part of this business.
Marc:Yeah, and that was the model.
Guest:That was it.
Guest:Did you go to film school?
Guest:I couldn't get in.
Guest:I tried to go to... I'd worked out here for two years behind the scenes.
Guest:I was making short films with different disparate groups of people.
Guest:I had a great buddy named Tom Huckabee I made a lot of films with.
Guest:Another guy named Rocky Shank I made a lot of films with.
Guest:I go to... I try to go to SC and UCLA.
Guest:I have these crappy SAT scores that are haunting me from some test I had to take at 8 o'clock in the morning on a Saturday in high school when I was completely hungover.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And it's like, guys, I've studied, I've worked in film, and I want to come and learn from you.
Guest:Couldn't get into those.
Guest:And found out about a program through NYU where you could study at a professional acting school and take academic credits at Washington Square.
Guest:And of the four disciplines, there was Circle in the Square, famous repertory company.
Guest:There was Experimental Wing Theater.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was Lee Strasberg, which the method thing seemed a little too much psychoanalysis.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, a little too neurotic for me.
Guest:But the one discipline that stood out to all those was Stella Adler.
Marc:Did you go to New York?
Guest:So I got into this program.
Guest:I went to NYU at 21, and I lived in the village, and I...
Guest:You couldn't be in a play until your junior year, and that sounded like bullshit to me.
Guest:So I ended up producing two plays my freshman year on the side, and I got a scholarship my second year.
Guest:But after two years of that, I thought I didn't see what I would do with a degree.
Guest:And I felt like as much as I loved theater and I loved being in New York, I kind of longed to get back into the movie game.
Marc:Well, what did you learn, you know, from her, you know, that enabled you to think like, all right, I can, you know, I've done a little acting.
Marc:Now I've got the tools I need.
Guest:I didn't feel that way.
Guest:I was not a star pupil.
Guest:You know, I was listening to your podcast with Jason Siegel recently.
Guest:It was a great, great interview.
Guest:And you guys seem like a great soul.
Guest:You guys got it well.
Guest:But he talked about putting on this production, his own production at 16 of The Zoo Story.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:Well, I tried to do a scene from the zoo story in front of Stella.
Guest:I didn't even get a line out.
Guest:I was so eviscerated, I didn't get out of bed for like three days.
Guest:Before you even got a line out.
Guest:I mean, she came in at me and said, how did you even get in this class?
Guest:And she said, darling, you're not ready for realism.
Guest:And she was a tough taskmaster.
Guest:And we were students at NYU, but we were thrown into these professional classes.
Guest:I remember seeing Harvey Keitel at this class and Jeff Goldblum.
Guest:And working actors.
Guest:And there was no fucking around.
Guest:And it was so fucking serious.
Guest:And God, it just crushed me.
Guest:It really crushed me.
Guest:Was that your last day?
Guest:No, I got through two years of it, but that wasn't why I dropped out at NYU.
Guest:I just felt like I got the meat and potatoes.
Guest:You know, Stella Alley would say, you're either going to learn it here or you're going to learn it out there, and it's going to take you 25 years.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So you went that route?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I took the 50-year plan.
Guest:Actually, I'm still on it.
Guest:I haven't quite paid off my student loan yet.
Guest:Oh, come on.
Guest:No, seriously.
Guest:It's a game.
Guest:You're trying to, you know, you just keep trying to do better.
Guest:No, of course.
Marc:But, like, I think that you must have learned something there.
Guest:I did.
Guest:I did.
Guest:I got a foundation there.
Guest:But I remember between my freshman and sophomore year, I needed to make some money.
Guest:I had found a loft down in Tribeca.
Guest:Nobody lived down there.
Guest:Now it's all dormant and $100 million buildings.
Guest:But I found a raw space.
Guest:It was $350.
Guest:I was going to share it with these other two gals who were students at NYU.
Guest:We were going to kind of do plays and stuff down there and use it as a rehearsal space.
Guest:But I needed to make about $10,000 fast.
Guest:And I called my dad and said, where can I make some money quick?
Guest:He said, well, the hardwood lumber business had branched into selling surveying instruments.
Guest:And there was a big mineral boom up near Casper, Wyoming.
Guest:He said, go up there.
Guest:You can probably make some money.
Guest:So I fly out to Casper, Wyoming.
Guest:I get a paper.
Guest:I interviewed by the Sweetwater Drilling Company.
Guest:We ended up calling it Sweatwater.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I got a job working on drilling portable uranium drilling rigs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we'd do these test holes, and they'd come up and drop these Geiger counter things down to see if there was plutonium down there, or uranium.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was a crazy job.
Guest:You lived in these trailers out in this thing called the Red Desert, and we had our own cook, and there was about 12 of us.
Guest:It's kind of preparing you for being on set.
Guest:It was something else.
Guest:Yeah, it was something else.
Guest:And the food was great, but we worked our asses off on that thing.
Guest:How long were you out there?
Guest:I was out there for about 12 weeks.
Guest:And in the weekend, they'd drop us off in town, and I'd stay in this old rundown hotel in downtown Casper.
Guest:This is the summer Star Wars comes out.
Guest:So I'm kind of bored now.
Guest:I brought this book with me that I bought in New York at the theater bookshop.
Guest:It was a book, a biography of Buster Keaton.
Guest:And it was called Keaton by Rudy Blesch.
Guest:It's a great, great biography.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I started reading this thing out there on the prairie, and I was just mesmerized by Keaton and his story and how he'd started out in the medicine shows with his dad and how Harry Houdini saw him fall down a flight of stairs when he was two and said, that's some buster your son just took.
Guest:And they started calling him Buster Keaton.
Guest:And I just and so that weekend I was so bored.
Guest:I went to the public library and I said and looked and they had these Super 8 Black Hawk films.
Guest:You remember those?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And they had a bunch of Keaton shorts.
Guest:And I said, is there a way I can see these?
Guest:I said, well, I have a projector.
Guest:You can go up in the in the conference room.
Guest:And I went up in the conference room and watched these these films.
Guest:And I thought, I'm going to make a film.
Guest:While I'm on the weekends.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I started making my own Buster Keaton film.
Guest:In Casper, Wyoming.
Guest:On the weekends.
Guest:And I recruited a guy, the local drunks, and the guy in the pool hall, and a gal that I met.
Guest:Oh, I was even so bored, I even had a job as a waiter at the Ramada Inn.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I met a gal there named Rebecca Schmidt, and I got her to be my friend.
Guest:my heroine and the guy in the shoe repair place.
Guest:Black and white?
Guest:No, I shot it in color, Super 8, and called it Heart Luck because there was a lost Keaton film called Hard Luck.
Guest:So really, I guess that was it.
Guest:So I went back to NYU for a year, but then I thought- What happened to that film?
Guest:It's around somewhere.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:It's in a closet somewhere.
Guest:I sent it back to all the people.
Guest:I wasn't able to go myself, but I had it copied, and they had a big... It was in the middle of winter in Casa Wyoming, and they had a get-together, and all these disparate people that I'd kind of pulled together in the town.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:They went to the screening?
Guest:They had a little screening there, and I thought that was really cool.
Guest:That's what I love about filmmaking.
Guest:Again, it goes back to that...
Guest:You know, you said something too on one of your interviews about, you know, we're all kind of in this, you got to stay out of that weird mind trap, that place where you're isolated and you're in that, it's just that, it's like a, I describe it as this void, this abyss.
Guest:And sometimes you kind of circle it, but boy, you don't want to get in there.
Guest:And you said it.
Guest:It was a beautiful line.
Guest:I wrote it down about you got to stay engaged with people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's what saves us.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Being engaged with other people.
Guest:I know.
Guest:Believe me.
Guest:I think that's a beautiful thing, Mark.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I want to say you bring that to these interviews.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And when I heard that, I go, God, that's really it.
Marc:Oh, yeah, because especially now, you know, the toppling into the pit of self is easy, you know, and I've done enough excavating.
Guest:Yeah, me too.
Guest:Too much.
Guest:The tough thing about this business, you know, people always see the success.
Guest:You had this and you had that and you had an interesting career.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I have so many stories that didn't work out.
Guest:And all the times I've been left fallow where I've had to be out there trying to hustle a project where I know I've got a good project.
Guest:I shouldn't be out there hustling.
Guest:I should be working.
Guest:But it's just not that way.
Guest:It's not because I'm special.
Guest:It's just these are my skill set.
Guest:Don't waste it.
Guest:I want to give something.
Marc:But you've been pretty fortunate in the last years anyways.
Marc:You've done some great work.
Guest:Last year, I got to a point where I was so, I don't know, confused, dismayed.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Just wondering, kind of laughing.
Guest:I've been trying to get a movie called The Bottoms Off the Ground, a great script by Joe Lansdale.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Great author, southern gothic thriller.
Guest:I got Brent Hanley to adapt it.
Guest:He had written Frailty for me.
Guest:You directed that one?
Guest:Yeah, Frailty.
Guest:And God, I spent a whole year trying to get this thing off the ground and trying to get it to actors and
Guest:If you don't have an offer with it, it's a chance to play a blue-collar Atticus Finch.
Guest:It's a movie that, if it's made well for a good price, with a good cast, it'll be a classic forever.
Guest:I don't know about a lot of things, but I know about some things in the movie business and a movie script that has a pedigree.
Guest:And I got so I, but I had to get out of the house and I was driving Louise crazy and my wife.
Guest:And, uh, so I saw, I went by a habitat for the humanity in Ventura and they were building some houses out in Santa Paul and they said, yeah, just show up and they'll give you a tool belt.
Guest:So I, I started doing that and, uh,
Guest:Building houses.
Guest:This guy's kind of looking at me as we're kind of putting in these shingles and stuff with this air gun thing.
Guest:I'm actually taking my hand off.
Guest:What the hell am I doing?
Guest:But it felt good to be just doing something.
Marc:Yeah, and helping out.
Marc:Yeah, that's true.
Marc:Because when you get stuck in a project that's kind of going nowhere or you're hitting your head against the wall for something that is so big in your mind, but you can't get it out of your mind,
Guest:yeah into reality yeah that's when you have those moments where it's sort of like you know i got to get my hands dirty somehow but i don't know anything else no i know what i do for a living takes a hundred people to make them to make the machine go around and they make the film you know so it's it's you know but uh well so i mean that happened during like downtime from acting downtime from acting i guess to tell you the truth uh
Guest:i really wanted to just be directing at this point yeah i had two great outings i've had three times in my career where i've gotten to work in my own shop and they were the happiest times most productive times and weirdly enough the most giving times because i was empowering other people yeah i produced a film that mark walberg and i and juliana margley's starred in called traveler yeah ago that was after twister i was able to get that off the ground i produced it and
Guest:I was very involved with it.
Guest:A guy named Jack Green, Clint Eastwood's cinematographer, directed it.
Guest:But I was very involved.
Guest:I didn't see it.
Guest:It's a nice little picaresque kind of film about Irish-American gypsies, travelers, flim-flam guys.
Guest:And then I got to direct Frailty, which was a great experience.
Guest:And then I got to do a Disney film.
Guest:My agent, Brian Schwarzstrom, who I've been with forever, who's really thrown stuff at me, like the series, Training Day.
Guest:I thought, I can't do that.
Guest:Yeah, you should try it.
Guest:And weirdly enough, it's been a fun experience.
Guest:Because again, I'm engaged.
Guest:God, just keep me engaged.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Places.
Guest:Yeah, places.
Guest:I did The Greatest Game Ever Played for Walt Disney.
Guest:And it's a sports film.
Guest:But Frailty and Greatest Game are kind of considered classics of their genre.
Guest:I'm very proud of those films.
Guest:I got to not just empower myself.
Guest:I got to give other people a leg up and give this actor a shot and give this guy a chance to do this.
Marc:Set deck, set design, all that.
Guest:Yeah, the composers from everybody on down.
Marc:Set deck always kills me because you walk into these things like,
Marc:This is crazy how perfect this is.
Guest:I love art.
Guest:I'm true to the art department.
Guest:I like to say I made the ultimate sacrifice.
Guest:I became part of the set as the actor.
Guest:But no, I love art direction.
Guest:My dad loved art direction.
Guest:That was one of the first things he called my attention to.
Guest:I remember coming out of Dr. No with my dad and he was like,
Guest:yeah the art direction and dr no's hideout and stuff and he was like yeah it was cool and that girl she was great too daddy oh yeah she ursula andris she's all right yeah yeah yeah that kind of stuff it's great that he gave you that you know we talked about stella adler stella adler doesn't get the credit as far as anything good that i've done but a guy named vincent chase yeah he was one of the last of the studio coaches i met him after lords of discipline which was my first gig
Guest:And there were two actors who had completely different styles.
Guest:One was very gregarious.
Guest:The other one was very cerebral.
Guest:Michael Biehn and a guy named Rick Rostovich.
Guest:And they found out their only formal training had been with this guy, Vincent Chase.
Guest:He had a studio on Sunset next to the Rock and Roll Ralphs.
Guest:I started working with him.
Guest:That's how I started getting hired.
Guest:Because I would go and work on the script with him.
Guest:He would get my subtext and give me ideas and ways to spin it in a different way.
Guest:Or come in with a different take on it.
Guest:Like a coach.
Guest:And he's a coach.
Guest:And he's been my coach to this day.
Guest:Still around?
Guest:He's 87 years old.
Marc:And you go to him with a project, you get the project, then you hash it out?
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:And I never one time, not even once did I ever leave after seeing him and talking about a project that I didn't go, God, I'm glad I took that time because I gleaned an insight.
Marc:I should do that if I go back to this show next year.
Guest:Look.
Guest:Acting is kind of like a it's kind of like boxing.
Guest:Yeah, you know, and you're going into the ring and you don't know and if you got a guy in your corner going, okay, this guy is a body puncher.
Guest:Yeah, you want to you want to you want to you want to tire him out when his dance surrounding you want to just just stick and jab or whatever that is.
Guest:I'm not a boxer.
Marc:Well, that was a funny thing.
Marc:I talked to Ethan Hawke, and he said before he did Training Day, he watched a bunch of Denzel Washington movies like you watch game films.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Well, I could see doing that.
Marc:Yeah, it's like this guy, he's big.
Guest:Well, let me tell you, that's like getting thrown into the polar bear cage.
Guest:You know, and they put raw hamburger all over you.
Guest:You know, because there's certain actors that can just play with you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like a cat and a mouse.
Guest:I mean, you know, and just maul you just constantly.
Guest:Has that happened to you?
Guest:I went toe-to-toe with Denzel.
Guest:You did?
Guest:My biggest scene in the movie, I had two guns.
Guest:I have to shoot on my first day.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, damn, I'm chugging a bottle of red wine in my trailer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or I'm going in there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it worked out okay.
Guest:I was ready.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was ready.
Marc:so when like what was your uh what was the big like because it looks like i'm looking at the filmography like you did a lot of little bits here and i know you got to ask me about one film which one the one that i to this day if i do a thousand movies will be at the top of my obituary what is it weird science
Guest:it's weird because you know you're one of these guys where you know you look at the the at the filmography like oh yeah oh shit right oh fuck that's right oh god it's a story of my life no but it's not bad your character it's not bad i never had stone was like i thought that sounds great it's a great movie i got to be with uh sam elliot and kurt russell and val yeah val kilmer's uh doc holiday was great oh
Guest:He killed it.
Guest:He's a great actor.
Marc:When you got here in the 70s, I mean, was it a party?
Marc:What was it like just going down Sunset Strip?
Marc:That's the thing about the mid-70s that always kills me.
Marc:It was such a more intimate business.
Marc:All the big stars were hanging out at Dantana's or somewhere.
Guest:Yeah, but I was on the outside looking in.
Guest:I came out here.
Guest:But it must have been a party.
Guest:Not for me.
Guest:Oh, shit.
Guest:Not for me.
Guest:All right.
Guest:I'm going down Hollywood Boulevard on a bus down to Wilcox and Fountain where I had this job on this Encyclopedia Britannica thing for two weeks.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm sitting next to a transvestite, which is kind of blowing my mind.
Guest:I'm from Texas.
Guest:Watching Deliverance completely traumatized me.
Guest:Me too.
Guest:Squeal like a pig, indeed.
Guest:Good Lord.
Marc:I didn't remember how graphic it was because my grandparents brought me by accident to that movie.
Guest:That's a real accident.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And then when I saw it recently, I'm like, holy shit, it's a lot more graphic than I thought.
Guest:It's still so disturbing.
Guest:Oh, no shit.
Guest:And Ned Beatty, talk about a brave performance.
Guest:Oh, no kidding.
Guest:And the way he's so shamed after that happens, and he can't even look at the rest of them, and they're all kind of saying, it's okay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, it's never going to be okay again.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I'm going down.
Guest:I'm going down Hollywood Boulevard on this bus, and I'm looking around.
Guest:And those days, God, Hollywood Boulevard was so run down.
Guest:They've been trying to gentrify it for years.
Guest:But 74, going down this thing, and I'm thinking, God, I missed this place by 50 years.
Guest:Because I was really into the old Hollywood.
Guest:Last night, I'm watching Turner Classic Movies.
Guest:I'm watching Miracle in the Rain, and I'm just sobbing, watching John Wyman.
Guest:And I guess I've always been more into the history of the town and the golden age and things like that.
Guest:And I always felt like I missed it.
Guest:but so weird science that was your uh you consider that your big break yeah there is a there was a couple of anecdotes i wanted to yeah i was thinking i'm on the way over here that i think you would appreciate well you know that that was a big supporting role and i had to audition my ass off mike fenton was the head of casting at universal at the time and john hughes was the man yeah i remember he had his i think he had hitchcock's old bungalow on the lot and
Guest:And they were having the auditions initially, not there.
Guest:But then as I got the callbacks, I got to go in and read.
Guest:And he sat in on the readings.
Guest:And I started throwing in stuff.
Guest:Again, my dad being the old salesman, the road guy he had been.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My dad, he would come back with all kinds of expressions and things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I thought I'd learned enough from the audition process that, you know, look, yeah, if you're doing a Tennessee Williams play, you're not going to change the wording.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or Shakespeare or Arthur Miller.
Guest:But in a screenplay, it really is a blueprint thing.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And it's malleable.
Guest:In the audition.
Guest:And you try, yeah, think.
Guest:You just want to get through.
Guest:Everybody's going to say the same lines.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Why not say it a different way or do something?
Guest:Make them look up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I built a time bomb one time.
Guest:A briefcase bomb and took it into an audition.
Guest:For what?
Guest:Just to get their attention.
Guest:For what?
Guest:Some crappy pilot I did.
Guest:What was the angle?
Guest:Like, I'm going to blow us up?
Guest:Well, the guy's supposed to be a terrorist.
Guest:He didn't have any lines, but he was always kind of making stuff.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I did the one line.
Guest:They said, thank you very much.
Guest:I said, I'm not finished yet.
Guest:Then I opened up the briefcase and just started saying, oh, you know, the military taught me everything I know about explosives.
Guest:And then I get the call from this.
Guest:I had a horrible agent at the time.
Guest:You know, just real B-grade agent.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He says, don't ever pull a stunt like that again.
Guest:And there was a pause and he went, you start work on Tuesday.
Guest:You know, you got it.
Guest:But I had all these auditions for Weird Science and I just threw all these crazy things in there.
Guest:Like some of my most famous lines from that movie are lines my dad would tell me.
Guest:Like, you know, I have this line where I see Michael Hall and Alon Mitchell Smith.
Guest:They're all drunk and I...
Guest:And I go up to him and I say to him, I said, hey, how about a nice greasy pork sandwich served in a dirty ashtray?
Guest:You know, and people love that.
Guest:And that was something my dad would say to me and my brother on Saturday morning, if he thought, or if Sunday morning we were hungover from being in high school, from being at a beer bust, you know, out near a campfire in the middle of nowhere in Aledo, Texas.
Guest:He'd like to go, God, hey, Bill, hey, man, Bill, you know, look like you're not feeling too good.
Guest:I'm kind of green.
Guest:Hey, hey, I got just the thing.
Guest:And he had this, I guess there was a sardonic nature to my father.
Guest:He loved real gallows humor.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He loved kind of a Deanna Dickensian kind of, I don't know, weirdness.
Guest:And so I threw that stuff in the audition.
Guest:I get the job.
Guest:And then I started developing the character, but a lot of this stuff came from these really weird camps that I went to with my dad.
Guest:My dad would send my brother, Bob, and I to these camps.
Guest:We went to two camps.
Guest:One was in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Guest:Started going there.
Guest:It was an eight-week camp.
Guest:I went there when I was eight years old.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:It was the summer of 63.
Marc:It's a long time to be away.
Guest:But I had my brother there, and I loved it.
Guest:I had the best time there.
Guest:But these camps all had these weird rites of passion.
Guest:They were all kind of cruel.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:The upper class, you know, the upper campers.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Sure, hazing.
Guest:Yeah, kind of a hazing thing.
Guest:We had this thing at this other camp.
Guest:It was called the rough ride.
Guest:And you had to go on the rough ride.
Guest:And it was for the younger campers.
Guest:But if it was your first year at the camp, even if you were coming in as an upper camper, or even if you were a first-year counselor, you had to go on the rough ride.
Guest:And I'd heard legendary stories about the rough ride.
Guest:And it was a ride that started at midday and then it went to the night.
Guest:And it had a legend because these guys would ride through at the camp completely covered in mud yelling.
Guest:It just looked like they'd been on a hell ride at the end of the day.
Guest:They'd ring a bell.
Guest:We'd all come up to the main lodge and they'd ride by.
Guest:So we go out on this camp.
Guest:You know, these guys would come.
Guest:These counselors, everybody was really nice.
Guest:You know, camp, the counselors were nice.
Guest:But when the rough ride, they'd read these lists at the lunch hour.
Guest:There were about five rough rides.
Guest:You didn't know which one you were going to be on.
Guest:And all of a sudden, these counselors, nice guys, they'd come in with kind of war paint on and just kind of like just kind of a pissed off expression on their face.
Guest:I think we're going to read the candidates for today's rough ride.
Guest:When you hear your name, you stand up and you say, ready to ride, sir.
Guest:So they call out your name, Mark Maron or Bill Pax.
Guest:You jump up, you go, ready to ride, sir.
Guest:And they kind of be like, yeah, yeah, we're going to see how ready you are.
Guest:You know, it's a cycle.
Guest:And we did all this stuff.
Guest:Another one we had was, which I used in Weird Science, there's a funny moment where,
Guest:I go downstairs the next morning, and there's Elon Mitchell Smith, and he's got Kelly LeBrock's panties on, but at first I don't see that, and I see that he's got a nice omelet there.
Guest:I go, hey, man, that looks pretty good.
Guest:Let me see that.
Guest:And then I throw these eggs up against the bottom of the cabinet, and I put the pan out, and they just drip down.
Guest:I go, now make yourself one, dickweed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so that came from a gag on the rough ride.
Guest:You ride everybody up to this mountain river, just rushing river, and there's this huge bluff across the river going straight up about 200 feet.
Guest:And at the top are this Indian paintbrush.
Guest:It's wildflower.
Guest:It's a state flower of Wyoming.
Guest:So you ride up against this.
Guest:It's on the rough ride where I got to be the initiator.
Guest:I went crazy.
Guest:I find one of the counselors had to say, cool it, Tex.
Guest:They used to call me Tex, little Tex.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So the guy gets across, so we tell them that they have to go across the river, go up the hill, bring the Indian paintbrush back to their horse and put it in their bridle.
Guest:So the guy goes, you see these guys go across the river, they're getting washed down the river, they're climbing up the damn hill, they get the thing, they come back down the hill, they try to come across the river, get washed down the river, then the guy comes up and you go, hey, let me see that.
Guest:Hey, that's pretty good.
Guest:You know, that's really good.
Guest:Now go get yourself one, dickweed.
Guest:And then the guy had to go back across the river and it was that kind of stuff.
Guest:So I told John Hughes these stories and he went, oh yeah, oh yeah, we gotta figure out how to do that.
Guest:And I had a great, it was the first time I was really empowered in a role where the guy on the other side, the director was just egging me on and giving me so much confidence.
Guest:And I love John for that.
Guest:And what about, what happened to Big Love?
Guest:big love we went for five seasons i think we kind of told our story yeah uh yeah there was not planned to be mark olson and will sheffer the guys who they they made the show now when you got into that they kind of felt like they told told their story i mean they had gone kind of yeah it's distance how much research how obsessed did you get with mormonism
Guest:Yeah, you know, it's great when you get a task, a specific task as an actor to learn a profession or to learn a culture or to learn a history because it's fun.
Guest:The book that kind of really was the primer for me was the book by John Krakauer called Under the Banner of Heaven.
Guest:And in that story, there's a kind of a gruesome contemporary story.
Guest:But what I do remember being completely absorbed and captivated and fascinated with was the history of Joseph Smith, how this whole thing started, how he dug up the golden tablets and how he started this religion and then how Brigham Young continued it after Joseph Smith was assassinated.
Guest:And these people wanted to do their own thing so badly, they went as far into the wilderness as they could.
Guest:So where nobody would bother them.
Guest:And, you know, polygamy was was legal in their religion till I believe 1893.
Guest:I used to know all this stuff, but it goes in and out.
Guest:But and then there were the fundamental sex that continued practicing true Mormonism, which was was about the principle.
Marc:And that's still going on.
Guest:Plural marriage.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Still going on.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Still going on.
Guest:You bet.
Yeah.
Marc:So because I thought that was the interesting part about your character is that you came from that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, it was a great character.
Guest:But the first season, we were kind of trying to really kind of define the genesis and the origin stories of these characters.
Guest:And what was interesting was by season two, Mark and Willie come up with the idea that I had been this whole idea of these lost boys.
Guest:These kids get to be, you know, they go into puberty.
Guest:They start looking at the girls and this fundamental compound sex, whatever you want to call them.
Guest:And all of a sudden, the older men are like, you know, we got to get them out of here.
Guest:They're getting a little frisky.
Guest:And that was a real thing?
Guest:Yeah, it's a real thing.
Guest:And if you get into an infraction, I think that's really how John Krakauer got involved in it through the Lost Boys.
Guest:It's sad.
Guest:These kids are thrown out of their homes.
Marc:Because they're a threat.
Marc:To pussy supply.
Guest:Damn straight.
Guest:Damn straight.
Guest:But they also have any infraction.
Guest:They get drummed out.
Guest:And so my character, they kind of built this story.
Guest:And this was something that kind of evolved through the first season.
Guest:Through my talks with Mark and Will.
Guest:And how we would get it, finding a real root to this guy.
Guest:To give him really a...
Guest:just this real weird foundation where he had his kind of foot in both camps yeah and uh and and so they they had this story and i tell this story i think it was season three or four uh where i try to run for office yeah and the guy tries to smear me because there's a there's a there's a mug shot of me at 17. yeah and he's put it all over the hall and i come out there's a hush and i bring the photo out and i say yeah i guess you guys have all seen this
Guest:He said, and I have one of the greatest speeches I had as the character where I talk about, yeah, when I was 15 years old, my dad told me to get in the truck and we drove into Salt Lake and all of a sudden he said, hey, get out of the car.
Guest:I said, what do you mean?
Guest:He said, just get out.
Guest:And I got out of the car and he left me there that first night I slept in a ditch.
Guest:I was scared.
Guest:I was cold.
Guest:I didn't know what to do.
Guest:And then I met these other kids and, yeah, I did things for cash that haunt me to this day.
Guest:And I love that, and I'm just like, whoa, that's a good spin.
Guest:Yeah, that's a good background for a character.
Guest:That's dark, you know?
Guest:We didn't explore some of that darkness, but it was there as the underpinning.
Marc:But as a political candidate, taking responsibility for it.
Guest:Yeah, really taking it to me.
Guest:Sure, but yeah, I get what you're saying.
Guest:I did things for Cash that haunt me.
Marc:Sure, we all get it.
Guest:You know, I can say that as Bill, Mark.
Guest:Can Mark say that?
Marc:No, I hosted a game show once.
Marc:That was about, in terms of business, that was about as dark as it got for me.
Marc:Oh, God.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:How did the Mormon church respond to it?
Marc:You know, I... Do you ever get Mormons coming up to you going like, you kind of hit it?
Marc:Or you didn't get it right?
Guest:No, mostly you got it right.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, the thing of it is, it's like, look...
Guest:All of us in our family trees, you know, have strange relatives, strange things that happen, good and bad.
Guest:There's histories of families, histories of cultures that you want to not talk about.
Guest:You want to make them go away.
Guest:But it's your history.
Guest:It's not you.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:Yeah, I know.
Guest:So it's a weird thing.
Guest:So I thought that we...
Guest:we kind of, through the show, put a very human face on a religion that a lot of people who aren't part of that religion always thought of as a cult.
Guest:And to me, I thought they would have maybe embraced it a little more.
Guest:I think it was a guilty pleasure, more of a secret thing.
Guest:I'm sure they watched it.
Guest:And again, Mark and Will were very responsible and did a lot of research to get it right.
Guest:But really what they were trying to do was more...
Guest:use this idea of polygamy in a modern world as taboo social making a fun family show to make a fun fan exactly exactly and kind of and use it as a prism to refract you know uh age-old yeah uh ideas and and society's taboos about religion marriage yeah all these different sex sure all these things it's great
Marc:So what have you found in the stacks of your dad's papers that have blown you away other than that picture you showed me?
Guest:I found a letter from Ben Crosby.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:I found a letter from President Johnson.
Guest:Oh, I'm always better from hearing from you, John.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Total politician.
Guest:Ben Hogan.
Guest:John, I'm going to have my annual invitation.
Guest:I'd like you to join, but try to have some fun, you know, and different things.
Guest:My dad was a great correspondent, but he didn't write long letters to people.
Guest:You don't want to bore them, but he just kind of, you know, if he'd had a nice interview, like say he'd had this interview, you'd get a letter from him.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Mark, I really enjoyed meeting you.
Guest:It's a great, great show.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It's nice.
Marc:Nice social etiquette.
Guest:Very good.
Marc:Very good.
Marc:So you're actually getting to know him even more through this stack of stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Was he a perfect man?
Guest:Was he a virtuous man?
Guest:Absolutely not.
Guest:I think my parents kind of dropped the ball by the time we all became teenagers.
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:But, oh, they just seemed like they kind of checked out.
Guest:I felt like...
Guest:I'm seeing things that I feel could have been handled a little better.
Guest:But again, your parents are kind of gods to you as a child.
Marc:I know.
Marc:And when they live a long time, eventually you get to that point where the statute of limitations on telling your kids things somehow runs out in their head, either because of age or other things.
Marc:And they tell you shit, and you're like, now you need to...
Guest:know that really i didn't need to hear that i really didn't need to know that i didn't want to know that part about you exactly yeah hey gotta give a shout out to two guys that worked with you one's an actor yeah mc gainey oh great he loved he said he loved working on the show you work with him
Marc:uh yeah we worked on a few things together he's a great guy club dread together we had a great time he's okay he was so happy to be he said something funny he's a big big admirer of yours yeah yeah like uh when he had to hold a baby he said like this is the first time in a movie i think where i've held a baby and i wasn't like gonna kill it for sorry or eat it barbecue yeah yeah and i think uh ron perlman was with him and they ran a bookstore or something yeah it was kind of the climatic episode yeah yeah
Guest:And a stand-up Dean Del Rey.
Guest:Dean Del Rey.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Dean.
Guest:Dino.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Dean Del Rey.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, he loves you, man.
Marc:Oh, great.
Marc:And I had a great time talking to you.
Marc:Was it okay for you?
Marc:Oh, buddy, it was great.
Marc:Worked out?
Marc:Really fun.
Guest:Thanks, man.
Marc:Thanks so much.
Marc:Cheers.
Marc:All right.
Marc:That was fun.
Marc:Go to WTF pod.com for all your WTF pod needs.
Marc:I'll be in Durham, North Carolina on the 17th Friday.
Marc:I'll be in Charlotte on the 18th and a lot more dates coming up.
Marc:If you go to WTF pod.com slash tour, you can find them and come see me.
Marc:We'll hang out for a little while.
Marc:Hopefully we'll have a nice time.
Marc:All right?
Marc:I don't have a guitar with me.
Guest:Boomer lives!
you