Episode 973 - Tim Blake Nelson
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast, WTF.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Marc:Before I forget, because it is the holiday season, we've got the new limited edition oversized Phoenix tour posters up on the merch page.
Marc:They were done by the artist Gonzo, Jason Gonzalez, and
Marc:And when they're gone, they're gone.
Marc:They're large posters.
Marc:They're beautiful posters.
Marc:They're hand-screened, and they were specially made for this gig, and he did a beautiful job with that.
Marc:That's up there.
Marc:Also, I'd like to let you know that I'm on the latest episode of Alan Alda's podcast, Clear and Vivid.
Marc:Go check that out wherever you get your podcasts.
Marc:It's always nice talking to Alan.
Marc:First time I talked to him was in a hotel room, and he gave me and Sarah a cold, but I didn't tell him about it.
Marc:But it was a doozy.
Marc:It was a doozy, Alan.
Marc:Nice conversations both times, but the cold I could have done without.
Marc:Tim Blake Nilsson is on the show today.
Marc:Tim Blake Nilsson, that guy.
Marc:That guy.
Marc:That actor.
Marc:Who's that guy?
Marc:That guy.
Marc:He's in that new Coen Brothers movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which is streaming on Netflix.
Marc:He's been in another Coen Brothers movie.
Marc:He was on Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
Marc:You've seen him.
Marc:Great actor.
Marc:And I couldn't have been more off about my assumptions about him because he's an Oklahoma guy.
Marc:And I'd see him in things and you just make assumptions.
Marc:But man, what a surprising and engaged and interesting and completely out of left field, a Jew-y conversation.
Marc:So you Jews, tee up.
Marc:Jewness is coming.
Marc:Oklahoma style.
Marc:Didn't think that was around, did you?
Marc:Yep.
Marc:I saw Beautiful Boy last night.
Marc:And as somebody who is engaged in the recovery racket and part of it and attributes it to saving my life, it was hard.
Marc:It was hard to watch.
Marc:It's going to be hard for anyone to watch.
Marc:But if you are a recovery person, you've certainly heard the stories before.
Marc:To see the story is another whole other ball of wax.
Marc:It's a it's a very emotional and relentless film.
Marc:And it really fucked me up last night.
Marc:And I just I hope that everybody knows out there and I get a lot of emails about this all the time.
Marc:There's help, man.
Marc:There's help.
Marc:There's help.
Marc:Get help.
Marc:Get help if you can.
Marc:I mean, I know if you're in the grips of it, if you're being strangled from the inside by addiction and that monster inside of you is not giving you any choices, find a window.
Marc:Find a window.
Marc:Find a moment, a reprieve where you can push back and get some help.
Marc:Just call.
Marc:Just call.
Marc:Call the number.
Marc:Call the number.
Marc:A-A-N-A.
Marc:Whatever A. Call the number.
Marc:Talk to somebody.
Marc:God damn it.
Marc:It just haunted me.
Marc:It's so fucking heartbreaking and horrible.
Marc:Addiction is.
Marc:Just fucking horrible.
Marc:So I've been checking back in.
Marc:I'm not feeling squirrely, but...
Marc:I'm feeling a little dry.
Marc:I don't know if you can hear that in my voice.
Marc:Feeling a little dry.
Marc:It rained here, man.
Marc:It rained in L.A.
Marc:like torrential rain.
Marc:Fucking glorious.
Marc:I can't tell you, man.
Marc:You live out here.
Marc:Obviously, the fires are awful, did a lot of damage, and you just feel the dryness, everything.
Marc:I go on hikes a couple times a week, and I feel like I'm just...
Marc:Walking through kindling that could go up at any second.
Marc:It's just the land is so parched so deeply that nothing looks alive.
Marc:It's like an alien landscape.
Marc:It's fucking awful.
Marc:So when it rains, especially like it did the other day, just like rain so fucking hard.
Marc:It's like, yes, I can almost feel the earth.
Marc:kind of absorbing it, like just the relief of the ground.
Marc:I feel it.
Marc:And it also diminishes all that dryness in the air so I can touch my cats again.
Marc:There's so much fucking static electricity.
Marc:I'm afraid I'm going to kill Monkey or La Fonda.
Marc:They're old.
Marc:They're old.
Marc:I don't want to shock them to death with my finger just saying hi.
Marc:But but the other thing that happens out here that I can't quite ever understand is as soon as it fucking rains in Los Angeles, people become morons in their automobiles.
Marc:It's like instant stupid.
Marc:It's like as soon as the car gets wet, it's like, well, what am I?
Marc:How do I?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Oh, no.
Marc:I don't understand it.
Marc:I mean, maybe it's because I've lived in a lot of different weather, a lot of different places on the East Coast.
Marc:I've dug my car out of snow banks that were put there by the fucking snow plows.
Marc:Is that a conspiracy?
Marc:Is it?
Marc:I know the roads need to be clear, but is part of that deal to keep the roads clear, to completely put a wall of snow up next to yours?
Marc:If you park on the street, when I lived in Boston, New York,
Marc:If it snows overnight, you wake up, there's a six foot wall next to your car of snow that just becomes ice.
Marc:Is that the city's way of saying like, yeah, maybe wait till spring to pull out?
Marc:But here, with the rain, I just don't understand it.
Marc:Like, cars are stalling in the middle of the highway.
Marc:I mean, what kind of neglect, what kind of service did you neglect to when it rains hard, your car just stops working?
Marc:I mean, and people just, look, I don't want anyone to hurt themselves, and I certainly, but come on, man.
Marc:It's rain.
Marc:Pace yourselves.
Marc:Stay the proper distance behind people.
Marc:Don't don't go really fast and then slam on your brakes and wondering why you're sliding.
Marc:Maybe the roads aren't good.
Marc:I don't know what it is, but every year it's the same thing.
Marc:But, you know, you write a line, man.
Marc:It's just you write a line in the sense of like who you are as a person.
Marc:I've talked about this before.
Marc:I used to do a fucking bit about it, for God's sake.
Marc:But I took off the other day.
Marc:We're shooting on location.
Marc:It's about 45 miles away.
Marc:And I'm up at 5.15 in the morning.
Marc:I'm on the road at 6 to head out to location.
Marc:It's still dark out to shoot glow.
Marc:And I 10 minutes out on the highway on the one thirty four.
Marc:I hit just a wall of traffic, just a standstill.
Marc:I'm just 10 minutes in.
Marc:I got my tea.
Marc:I'm jacked as fuck and I'm not moving and it's raining and I'm not moving for a fucking hour.
Marc:And there's miles of traffic.
Marc:And I I took my own mind into my own hands and I disregarded the Google Maps advice and
Marc:And when Google Maps gives it to you, you know, they mean it.
Marc:You know, with Waze, you don't know where you're going.
Marc:It's a default with them.
Marc:It's sort of like, who gives a fuck?
Marc:Just get him off the highway and let's give him a tour of the industrial area that he doesn't know about near his home.
Marc:If Google Maps tells you to change, they're like, okay, we've processed this and we decided it doesn't happen that often.
Marc:But I'm like, no, fuck it.
Marc:My baseless instincts are to stay on the highway.
Marc:And I did.
Marc:And I seethed and I bucked and I thrashed.
Marc:And then I eventually gave up.
Marc:And when I realized that, fuck it, there's nothing I can do.
Marc:I'm going to be an hour and a half late to the shoot.
Marc:I hope the whole day isn't fucked, but fuck it.
Marc:I'm here.
Marc:And then as it starts moving, you're like, I don't know, you're relieved.
Marc:And then as it starts to reveal itself, what's happened, there's that moment of horror.
Marc:And then there's that moment of satisfaction that something happened.
Marc:And then the sort of gratitude, like, God damn, I'm glad I'm not that guy.
Marc:And then the sort of concern and empathy, I hope everyone's okay.
Marc:But what had happened...
Marc:was a semi, I guess, had jackknifed in the middle of the night and just laid itself down on its side across all four lanes of the highway.
Marc:And they got one lane on the side, the shoulder open finally.
Marc:And there's just a truck on its side.
Marc:Like it couldn't have been planned more perfect to fuck up traffic for two days.
Marc:And you see that truck, and it didn't look like there was fire.
Marc:Anybody was probably hurt.
Marc:But that was a rough phone call for that guy.
Marc:You know?
Marc:Call to the boss.
Marc:Maybe he's his own boss.
Marc:The call to whoever he was delivering to.
Marc:Ugh.
Marc:But, you know, the anger sort of dissipates, the relief comes, and then you got all that free highway after that, and you're sort of like, this is the way it should be.
Marc:Why does it take a semi laying itself down to make L.A.
Marc:highways drivable?
Marc:But I hope that guy's all right.
Marc:We made it.
Marc:We made our day.
Marc:Had a good time the other night, actually, shooting with Allison.
Marc:I like it when it's just the two of us and we're just in it for a whole scene.
Marc:And I feel like I'm doing something and I can integrate my new tools and focus on the job of acting.
Marc:It was fun.
Marc:It was fun.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:Is that all right to have a little fun?
Marc:Oh, so, oh yeah, I remember it was my dad's 80th birthday on the 30th.
Marc:Happy birthday, daddy.
Marc:I don't think he's ever listened to this podcast.
Marc:Never.
Marc:Seriously.
Marc:I don't think he, my father has never listened to one of my 900, almost 1000 podcasts.
Marc:But I called him up on his, you know, here's the fucking thing.
Marc:It's like, I was going to call him, you know, 80 is a big deal.
Marc:Then I wake up and he'd already called.
Marc:Hey, just saying hi.
Marc:A lot of people are calling.
Marc:So he fucked that up.
Marc:So I called him like, hey, I was going to call.
Marc:Happy birthday.
Marc:But you kind of fucked up that, you know, me.
Marc:You know, you preempted.
Marc:I don't know what you did there, but you took it away from me, old man.
Marc:I didn't say that.
Marc:I said, happy birthday.
Marc:You made it good for you.
Marc:You feeling all right.
Marc:And then he started talking about politics and.
Hmm.
Marc:Thing is, my father, you know, was a Democrat and then he's like he's he claims he switched, but he didn't really know what any of it means.
Marc:And he still doesn't really.
Marc:He's got it's weird when you realize your your parents or whoever you talk to, maybe people in your life have no real sense.
Marc:I'd be surprised if he knew all three branches of government.
Marc:But, you know, he just picks up these buttons.
Marc:You know, he's like, you know, he said he became a Republican after the Kavanaugh thing.
Marc:And it's just so clear that he he believes that Fox News is news and that the guy talking seems like he knows what he's talking about.
Marc:So he's giving me the Fox talking points.
Marc:I said, I'm not going to have this conversation with you because you have no intellectual clarity or any depth to what you're saying.
Marc:You're just saying things with no you don't have any idea what's happening.
Marc:Where'd you get your information?
Marc:He's like, I watched things.
Marc:I watched a few different.
Marc:Where'd you get it?
Marc:I watched a couple different shows.
Marc:Where'd you get it?
Marc:Well, on Fox, he's like, yeah, probably.
Marc:I'm like, all right, I just can't.
Marc:I don't think we need to do this.
Marc:You know, I don't think we need to do it.
Marc:You know, if you're just going to regurgitate what Hannity says.
Marc:He says he seems to know what he's talking about.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, a lot of wrong minded, horrible people seem to know what they're talking about.
Marc:It's not hard to seem to know what you're talking about.
Marc:But, you know, we got through it.
Marc:Anyway, let's get into this interview because I tell you, man, I thought it was great.
Marc:Tim Blake Nielsen is a very impressive actor and a very interesting guy.
Marc:One of the great character actors of our time right now.
Marc:He's in the new Coen Brothers movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
Marc:He is Buster Scruggs.
Marc:He's in that first story.
Marc:There are, I think, five or six stories.
Marc:Tom Waits is in one.
Marc:Yes, I'm trying to get... Everyone you want me to get on the show, I'm trying to get on the show.
Marc:I'm not magic.
Marc:I don't know why Albert Brooks won't come on.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Like...
Marc:Doesn't look whatever.
Marc:Tim Blake Nelson is here and I had made assumptions about him and they were all wrong.
Marc:His story about his family's how they ended up in Oklahoma.
Marc:He's full on Oklahoma.
Marc:And, you know, I'm not going to tip any of it.
Marc:I'm just going to tell you that that movie is streaming on Netflix now.
Marc:And this is me in conversation with Tim Blake Nelson.
Oh,
Marc:i just had this straight up black cowboy blue that i remember eventually just disintegrating like i wore them a lot it was a thing i had a western belt that i liked that i never took off black jeans i'm losing my sense of uh when these things happened in my life how old are you i'm 54. right i'm 55 and i you know and i've been through a lot of shoes
Marc:Yeah, I guess that's true.
Guest:But I really committed to them.
Guest:You?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I always wore cowboy boots in college.
Guest:And then I continued to wear them when I went to grad school.
Guest:And I met my wife in grad school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she's from San Antonio, Texas.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And she said, you've got to stop with the pointy boots.
Guest:No.
Guest:It's silly.
Guest:And she said, you need to wear ropers, and they need to have a round toe.
Guest:And I came around to that way of thinking, and that's what I wear now.
Guest:So that's a round toe.
Guest:That's a round toe and a roper heel.
Guest:I have a rounded toe now and some Chelseas.
Guest:Well, you should try Lucchese's because it's the most comfortable boot you'll ever put on your feet.
Guest:Do you get them custom made?
Guest:Well, no, I don't.
Guest:Lucchese's, by definition, are handmade.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:And this pair I got because I was doing...
Guest:The first costume fitting for Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Mary Zofres, the incredible costume designer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All the Coen Brothers movies said, well, what, you know, let's talk about the boots.
Guest:And I said, well, just get, you know, a pair of Lucchese ropers.
Guest:Those.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's the most accurate for this character.
Guest:Is it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So they've been around that long?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she said, all right.
Guest:And she got a pair.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Joel looked at them and said, no, those are all wrong.
Guest:They need to be white boots with a brown tip and they need to go with the white suit.
Guest:And so Mary allowed these to fall off the truck and I picked them up and now I'm wearing them.
Marc:I tell you, man, if things don't fall off the truck, I'm not sure I'd have a wardrobe.
Marc:If I had not.
Marc:I did a show, my show on IFC for four years, and I think I wore three or four shirts and maybe two pairs of pants.
Marc:That's all I wore.
Marc:And they got a sense of my style and wardrobe me, and I took all of it.
Marc:And I'm wearing, this is one of the shirts I'm wearing now.
Marc:Oh, that's fantastic.
Marc:I would not have clothes had I not had a television show.
Guest:Yeah, I did a movie years ago called Siriana.
Guest:I like that movie.
Guest:Yeah, Steve Gagin wrote and directed it.
Guest:You were a congressman.
Guest:I was a lobbyist.
Marc:A lobbyist, that's right.
Marc:Jeffrey Wright was a congressman, was he not?
Guest:He was a lobbyist as well.
Guest:Okay, right.
Guest:And he was a DA.
Guest:Okay, that's it.
Guest:Or a federal prosecutor.
Guest:And I was the fall guy, and he had a scene where he dressed me down.
Guest:And I gave a speech about capitalism to him.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:But then he just sort of took me out.
Guest:And I was given four suits.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In that movie that were and they were tailored by the guy who tailors the suits for the Senate.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Senators.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:So I walked off with more value in the suits than I was paid to do the movie.
Marc:I was allowed to.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's so nice when they let you do it, isn't it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I had suits from a show for years.
Marc:I don't really know how to shop for myself, but I get exhausted very quickly when I go shopping.
Guest:Yeah, I do too.
Guest:But eventually my wife just said, it's got to end, the being dressed.
Guest:You're not your characters.
Marc:You're you, and it has to stop.
Marc:Was that a challenge for you to identify what exactly that meant?
Marc:Do you trust your taste?
Guest:You know, I trust my wife's taste.
Guest:And so I just, you know, a lot of being a husband and trying to sustain that is about being the best version.
Guest:That she wants you to be?
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:You know, with always being true to yourself.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And so it has worked out just fine.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:And let's talk about that.
Marc:I watched Buster Scruggs a few days ago, so it's fresh in my head, as are a few of your roles.
Marc:But that one, that movie...
Marc:is stunning and relentless in the way that, like, you know, it is, what are there, five chapters or six?
Marc:Six.
Marc:Six chapters, basically existential meditations and lessons that are not bleak,
Marc:But they don't end happily.
Guest:They don't.
Guest:It definitely you definitely know that that Ethan Cohen studied philosophy and that he read a lot of Schopenhauer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And also that Joel and Ethan are steeped in the Old Testament.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And now what is Schopenhauer known for?
Guest:The shorthand of it is that life is nasty, brutish, brutish and short.
Guest:And also he had the thesis in the will to live that even the what what most recommends life stuff like happiness and particularly love.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Is all just a dupe.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:To try to get us to perpetuate the species.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Because why else, without love, why would we want to perpetuate misery?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:uh and so even love i like i like i never know which philosophers to read i was trying to plow through spinoza but maybe schopenhauer is more up my alley yeah um well yeah uh uh spinoza is a lawnsman though so yeah that's right absolutely and that's one of the reasons you gravitate towards him there he's a you know he's he's part of the tribe and he's he's got a sort of elaborate dialogue with god
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So anyway, yeah, the stories are definitely are definitely bleak.
Guest:But I think there's a tenderness.
Marc:No, no, they're beautiful.
Marc:I mean, everything is poetry with those guys, you know, and I don't know how they work.
Marc:But, you know, you open the movie.
Marc:You're you're the namesake of the film.
Yeah.
Marc:And what I liked about about your story was that you're very affable, likable, sympathetic.
Marc:You sing, you dress nice.
Marc:And then out of nowhere, you're like, holy fuck, that guy can do that.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And that's the Cohen.
Guest:I mean, I think that they they if you look across their whole.
Guest:Filmography, I think that they are always pointing out that as soon as an audience or in particular and most interestingly and intriguingly, a character feels like he or she has it all figured out, there's going to be calamity.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:They've been doing that since the beginning.
Marc:They have.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Where you're just sort of like, now what happens?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I think that that's part of their Old Testament ethos, because one of the reasons that the Jewish religion is so centered on law and ritual and tradition and the interpretation of text is
Guest:is that life is chaotic, it's completely unpredictable, it's tragic, it's futile to try and control it, but you do your best.
Marc:I used to do a joke in my act about, in Christianity, the saying is, what is it, the wages of sin is death, and in Judaism, the wages of sin are negotiable.
Marc:LAUGHTER
Marc:You know, you just have to have an active conversation with the Almighty.
Marc:It seems like there's a constant conversation going in the Old Testament.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But with not necessarily explanation, but there's a conversation.
Guest:Yes, exactly.
Guest:But he's a pretty vengeful patriarch.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Hashem.
Marc:Vengeful and also just, you know, impulsive.
Marc:I don't you know, you know, when I was just talking about Job the other day because I have a friend who is Job like is just sort of like that came out of nowhere for that guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:If my understanding of it is correct, it's just sort of like, what did I do?
Marc:Nothing.
Marc:You know, just I'm bored.
Marc:You know, God just decided.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And and and you kind of in the end get the impression just like with the Pharaoh.
Guest:It's yeah.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You want to give in.
Guest:But now I'm going to harden your heart.
Guest:So you're not going to give in.
Guest:And so there are going to be more plagues.
Guest:And I think with with Job, it's as much so that he can be an example and be written about.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:He was using him as a protagonist.
Marc:I need a story.
Marc:You're going to take the hit.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Did you did you study religion or is it a prerequisite when you do a Coen Brothers movie that you get you get up to snuff on the Old Testament philosophy?
Guest:Well, growing up, I was I was bar mitzvahed at a very conservative temple in Tulsa.
Marc:Like.
Marc:OK, so there for me, like this is all new information.
Marc:I did a little bit of research.
Marc:I don't do a lot.
Marc:And I had no idea that you were a Jew.
Marc:I had no idea that, you know, I you know, I was a Jew in Albuquerque, but I certainly thought like, well, I didn't place a Jewish community in Tulsa in my mind.
Marc:I thought that I know that we've spread out.
Marc:But I had no idea.
Marc:I knew the Jews in El Paso.
Marc:I knew the Jews in Houston.
Marc:We used to do USY together.
Marc:But I didn't know the Jews in Oklahoma.
Marc:We were there.
Marc:How many, really?
Guest:The community in Tulsa when I was growing up was about 10,000.
Guest:Now, let's go back now.
Guest:So...
Guest:How do Jews get to Tulsa?
Guest:Interestingly enough, if you've been, as I know you are, because you're who you are and do what you do, you read the news.
Guest:And so you know what HIAS is, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, of course.
Guest:And they've been in the news lately because they've been under siege by the far right.
Marc:And part of the the horrible massacre in Pittsburgh was aimed at them.
Guest:Yes, that's exactly right.
Guest:And so what highest used to be and there's something very different now, which is also quite intriguing.
Guest:But they used to help Jewish immigrants, exclusively Jewish immigrants, pretty much exclusively Jewish immigrants coming into this country, help them settle.
Guest:And one of the things that they did was when there were unaffiliated families coming in to New York City.
Guest:What's unaffiliated mean?
Guest:They had no affiliation.
Marc:Oh, in the country.
Guest:Yeah, in the country.
Guest:So they were just coming to the U.S.
Guest:with no antecedent relatives.
Guest:And they would spread them out into the country.
Guest:They would say, look, you're going to go to Cincinnati.
Guest:You're going to go to Tulsa.
Guest:You're going to go to El Paso.
Guest:And the reason for this was so that they would be less vulnerable to roundups.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because they figured if they didn't do that, the Jews would congregate in the cities.
Marc:So the idea was, look, it's going to happen again.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:It always happens.
Marc:So this is the diaspora.
Marc:Is that what you would call it?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:The American diaspora is that we're going to be logical about this if we're going to survive.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And so when my mother and her parents emigrated out of Europe, immigrated into the U.S., their sponsors had been placed in Tulsa by HIAS.
Guest:Interesting.
Marc:So were they running from where they were from now?
Marc:Or did they just decide to come here?
Guest:My mother and her parents?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Holocaust refugees.
Guest:Refugees.
Guest:Not survivors, but refugees.
Guest:Yeah, running from this place because of the Holocaust.
Guest:So they got out before?
Guest:Right before Kristallnacht.
Guest:And then they got to London.
Guest:Now, were you old enough to know your grandparents?
Guest:Very well, yeah.
Guest:My maternal grandmother and grandfather had tremendous influence over me.
Guest:And did you talk to them about leaving Germany?
Guest:Or wherever they were?
Guest:Endlessly.
Guest:Where were they?
Guest:Well, in the end, they were in Rostock.
Guest:But my grandfather, his name was Herman Kaiser.
Guest:From Kaiser Permanente?
Guest:No.
Marc:Another Kaiser?
Guest:No, another Kaiser.
Guest:And not from the Kaiser Family Foundation either.
Guest:What business was he in?
Guest:Oil business, eventually.
Marc:Oil in Oklahoma, that was a good business, I'd imagine, when he got into that business.
Marc:He did very well.
Guest:But he was a lawyer in Germany.
Guest:And actually, at the time of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, he was allowed to continue practicing, even though the Nuremberg Laws did disbar all Jewish lawyers.
Guest:And it just so happened that he was representing the German government in a case involving Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian filmmaker.
Guest:The film.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Potemkin.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so he continued to practice.
Guest:But then once that case was over, he was disbarred.
Guest:And so they moved.
Guest:He and his wife, my grandmother, moved to Rostock.
Guest:where her father had, he made orthopedic shoes and brushes in a factory called Emsaworks in Rostock, which is part of the former East Germany.
Guest:And then they got out right before Kristallnacht and went to England.
Guest:And then from England during the war, they came to the US.
Marc:When you talk to them,
Marc:Like, you know, sadly, as a Jew myself, I'm not sad to be a Jew, but but, you know, you you ask these questions and I asked them very quickly upon the incoming administration a couple of years ago.
Marc:It's like, will we know when to go?
Marc:Did you ever talk to them about that?
Guest:I did.
Guest:And my grandfather, who was politically very conservative and who was staunchly pro-American and very grateful of this country.
Guest:essentially said, I don't want to hear from anti-Semitism from you.
Guest:You have no idea.
Guest:And it's not going to happen in this country.
Guest:It doesn't happen in this country.
Guest:We're fine.
Guest:And that was that.
Guest:And I have to say that growing up in Tulsa, and I don't know what your experience was.
Guest:In New Mexico?
Guest:In New Mexico.
Guest:But I never encountered anti-Semitism in Tulsa except...
Guest:Very infrequently, if there was somebody who came in from either Chicago, there was a kid from Chicago who moved to Tulsa, or a kid from New York, but it was always somebody coming in to Tulsa who moved there, and I'd hear this and that, but nothing really that serious.
Marc:Nothing attacking.
Guest:There was no sort of, you never felt a movement there.
Guest:Not at all.
Guest:In Oklahoma, in fact, there was not only benign curiosity about what our community was up to, but I would say we were treated almost as exotic in a lovely way.
Marc:I experienced, I guess, it would be more slightly... It was a little worse than benign.
Marc:And it was oddly, I think, the first time...
Marc:That I ever experienced it was at camp, and I think it might have been a kid from Oklahoma or someplace more cowboy-ish, but he had never seen a Jew before.
Marc:So there were questions.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Like literally those horrible sort of like you don't have horns type of questions.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Oh, well, that's not good.
Marc:So, yeah.
Marc:So, like, he was brought up with something.
Marc:And I think he was pleasantly surprised that I was just an annoying kid.
Guest:There is a friend of mine who overheard this at a wedding in Texas.
Guest:There were some Jews at the end of the table at a wedding.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he overheard a woman saying...
Marc:uh who are they and then the other person said oh uh they're uh some of them that killed our lord oh yeah well yeah yeah well you know if he if he doesn't uh die they don't have much of a story see there you go back full circle yeah but but so how many siblings you got
Marc:I have a sister and two brothers.
Marc:Older?
Marc:All older, yes.
Marc:Oh, you're the youngest.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So now, okay, so your grandfather was in the oil business.
Marc:That's a pretty rough business.
Marc:So now when, like the guy, what are they called, wildcatters?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So was your old man in the oil business as well?
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What was his role?
Guest:And he got into it.
Guest:Well, he worked for my grandfather for a while.
Guest:And because my grandfather's son, blood son, my uncle was also in the company.
Guest:My father...
Guest:Thought, well, I'm never going to be able to take this company over because, of course, it's going to be passed on to his son.
Guest:And that's as it should be.
Guest:And so he learned the business from his father-in-law and then eventually split off and formed a company of his own.
Guest:Oil company.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:See, this is one of those things where, like, I remember when I was, like, there's some...
Marc:It's not romanticization, but I worked in a deli when I was younger.
Marc:I grew up in New Mexico, but my family's from Jersey, so I had a weird kind of desire to be an old Jewish man all my life.
Marc:And when I was in college one year, I worked in a Jewish deli in Boston, and I was always fascinated that I met this whole generation of older Jews who were plumbers, cops, firemen, and I was like, oh my God, Jews do these jobs?
Marc:Because there's so many stereotypes.
Marc:They're like, Jews don't know tools.
Marc:Of course they know tools.
Marc:We had to learn how to do everything just to get by, right?
Marc:Yes, exactly.
Marc:So it was always fascinating, but I've never heard of oil juice, and this is the first, so I'm excited.
Marc:You come from oil juice.
Guest:Yeah, oil and gas, I would say.
Marc:Oil and gas juice.
Guest:Natural gas.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And so did any of your siblings end up in the racket?
Guest:My brother, Randy, took over my father's company.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And are your folks still around?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:My father lives in Connecticut, and my mother is still in Tulsa.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She stayed there?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She went to school in the East and then eventually went back to Tulsa.
Guest:So she's full Oklahoman.
Guest:They both are, right?
Guest:Well, my mother was born in England, raised for the first four years of her life in Germany.
Marc:Oh, before they came over here.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So she was born in England.
Guest:Then she and my grandmother and grandfather went back to Germany.
Guest:Because they had her in England to help them get out.
Guest:My grandfather was very, very schooled in history and very schooled in politics.
Marc:The lawyer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he understood that this was not going to be a good place for Jews.
Marc:Germany.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:After 32, 33, he knew.
Marc:So he wasn't part of the crew of Jews that were like, we can work with this Hitler.
Guest:No, he wasn't.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:There were some.
Guest:Yes, I know.
Guest:So they had her and then so they had her in England.
Guest:They went back.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then my grandfather left first and my grandmother tried to stay with my mother.
Guest:And he eventually wrote a telegram that said either send the kid.
Guest:Or both of you come.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He knew.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's time to go.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so then they finally got out and then they were in England for a couple of years and then crossed the Atlantic.
Guest:So did you marry a Jew?
Guest:I married a Mexican-American Catholic.
Oh.
Marc:My dad ended up with a Mexican-American Catholic.
Marc:Interesting.
Guest:Yeah, it's great.
Guest:But she converted.
Guest:Really?
Guest:She converted and it's interesting.
Guest:And she's now, as often can be the case.
Guest:More Jewish than you are.
Guest:Yeah, she's zealous about it in a great way.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And I made this movie called The Grey Zone years ago, which really shook my faith to a pretty profound degree.
Guest:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:How so?
Guest:Well, it's a Holocaust film, and it's about the Zonderkommandos who were Jews in the camps who were forced or coerced into, depending on how you want to look at the particular situation,
Guest:into aiding in the extermination process in exchange for privileges and, most importantly, extended life in the camp.
Marc:So a light, fun film.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my research into that, which was thousands and thousands of pages, and particularly reading Primo Levi,
Marc:Oh, the Surviving in Auschwitz?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's a hell of a book.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And The Drowned and the Saved also.
Guest:And there's a chapter in there from which the movie borrows its title, The Gray Zone.
Guest:It really shook my faith.
Marc:What about it?
Marc:Like, were you, your faith in the sense that, you know, in what being Jewish meant or your personal faith in God or just in humanity?
Guest:In God, there's the classic Levi line, if there is a God, there could be no Auschwitz.
Guest:And the converse of that is the answer furnished by one's faith, which is Auschwitz is why there's a God, by way of finding some meaning for our suffering.
Guest:But I tend toward the former.
Guest:Yeah, still.
Guest:The latter.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Although I went from being an atheist to the wimpier position of being an agnostic.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You're hedging your bets.
Marc:Yeah, there was a there was a thinker.
Marc:Why draw lines when we can stay in a wiggle room of maybe?
Guest:I think, though, yes, that's probably really it.
Guest:But I think the more I learn, the more I learn what's possible.
Guest:And so how could I say that it's impossible that there be a God?
Guest:I think more the question is what would Jesus do to God?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:What would Jesus do?
Marc:It's easier path.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:No.
Guest:What would constitute God?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think that's the better question.
Guest:It's certainly not in.
Guest:He did not make man in his own image that I don't think happened.
Guest:He could.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:He could have done much better.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you were not brought up in Tulsa Orthodox, but just conservative.
Guest:Yeah, pretty serious religious education in a sense.
Guest:But I don't know what your experience was, but mostly it involved learning to read Hebrew.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:You go to Hebrew school, I think, like, you know, Wednesdays and Sundays.
Marc:And then when it came to, you know, prep time, you met with the cantor.
Marc:You know, you learned the alphabet.
Marc:You learned how to read Hebrew.
Marc:You didn't know necessarily how to translate Hebrew.
Marc:You knew some key words.
Marc:It depends, I guess, what kind of student you were.
Marc:But when it came to crunch time, you know, you sat with the cantor.
Marc:You learned your haftorah.
Marc:You learned the songs.
Marc:You did the show and then you go to confirmation.
Marc:But I bailed.
Marc:Oh, you did.
Marc:I didn't get confirmed.
Marc:I did the bar mitzvah and I was out.
Guest:We didn't have confirmation because that was construed as as being too conspicuously Catholic in the terminology.
Guest:Oh, but.
Guest:Right.
Guest:In the in the couple of years before being bar mitzvahed, we were at the synagogue six days a week.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:After school, after school, four days a week.
Guest:And then and then we would go to to Shabbos services on Saturday with with our mother.
Guest:And then we went to Sunday school.
Guest:So that was for real.
Guest:I mean, you were doing it.
Guest:You were locked in.
Guest:But I didn't understand Hebrew.
Guest:I just could read it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so subsequently, actually after college, I thought, well, this is ludicrous.
Guest:I've never read the Bible.
Guest:And so I read it.
Guest:In Hebrew.
Yeah.
Guest:So you still don't know what it meant.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Which is the way to read the Bible.
Guest:And then I've read a lot of the New Testament as well now.
Guest:So ipso post facto or post facto, I started really to learn about the faith.
Marc:Your siblings are religious?
Marc:Do they get more religious or less religious?
Marc:Or does anybody go full bore?
Guest:No, not really.
Guest:My sister would be the closest, but I think she had her kids bought and bar mitzvahed.
Marc:What were some of the, now this is like, we should get into arts in a minute, but like Tulsa, because Tulsa, that's rodeo country.
Marc:It's seriously, serious cowboy country, really, Oklahoma.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And indigenous people country in a big way.
Marc:So what what were some of the I'd like to know some some Oklahoman Jewish dishes?
Guest:Well, my my wife likes to say, yeah, Tim, you come from you come from Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Guest:You come from the Upper West Side of Tulsa.
Guest:Well, look, I have to say people think about Oklahoma as ranching and cattle country and you can get a good steak in Oklahoma.
Guest:And that's absolutely true.
Guest:But the best steakhouses in Oklahoma are Lebanese steakhouses.
Marc:Now or always?
Marc:They were when I was growing up.
Marc:But what about like Jewish food in the house?
Marc:Was there any hybrids of like sort of something unique?
Marc:Because like everyone has their own take on that stuff.
Marc:Like on holidays, was it the standard stuff?
Marc:Kugel, brisket, that kind of stuff?
Guest:No, I mean, I...
Guest:Yeah, that's that's funny.
Guest:We never had I think it was funny.
Guest:We never had turkey on Thanksgiving because my grandmother and my mother, they would serve either goose or or duck.
Guest:So it's like aristocratic German stuff.
Guest:It was aristocratic German stuff.
Guest:That's exactly right.
Guest:And it felt, again, I'll use the word, wonderfully exotic.
Guest:That is exotic.
Guest:It was great to feel different in Oklahoma.
Marc:I bet, and also different as Jews, because I had to learn, there's a whole, aristocratic German Jews are a whole other ball of wax, dude, from this sort of run-of-the-mill Ashkenazi, Russian, Polish, peasant, Jewish stock, that there was a whole class of Jews that were primarily German, aristocratic German Jews, who looked at those other Jews
Marc:You know, as sort of ghetto people.
Guest:That was that is completely accurate.
Guest:And I am I come from that half from that stock.
Guest:But my mother married a Russian Jewish.
Guest:There you go.
Guest:But the German Jews were all from the pale of settlement as well.
Marc:They're all Ashkenazi.
Marc:No, I get that.
Marc:I get that.
Marc:But something happened in Germany that elevated many of them in business and everything else.
Marc:Yeah, the assimilation.
Marc:That's why they were such a threat, I guess, to Hitler, is that they ran everything.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:Manufacturing, the legal profession, right?
Marc:They had a stronghold because...
Marc:I guess this is the other thing is getting not abstract, but, you know, relevant in that this idea of, you know, in in anti-Semitic American language now that there's some sort of entitlement that Jews get.
Marc:It's just that Jews out of necessity had to put a premium on education and figuring out how to fit into structures that were inherently against them in order to succeed.
Marc:So, you know, this idea that Jews have somehow gotten an easy ride, it drives me nuts.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or, I mean, I see Philip Roth on the shelf in back of you.
Guest:Great.
Guest:And one of my favorite writers as well.
Guest:And.
Guest:There's a beautiful monologue, it's a searing monologue in one of his books about how Jews got into the business of money.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, right, because in the Middle Ages, Renaissance or Middle Ages.
Guest:Yeah, the Christians weren't allowed to handle money, and so it was something that the Jews could do.
Marc:Yeah, their religion wouldn't let them, and yeah, it was a way to wedge their way into having a life.
Right.
Marc:Well, okay, so this is a guy.
Marc:Are you nervous?
Marc:Am I nervous as a Jew?
Guest:Right now?
Guest:No.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:No.
Guest:Well, actually, that's not true.
Guest:I think if I were to go to shul, I would be nervous.
Marc:Oh, just because of security.
Guest:Yeah, so I think places where Jews congregate.
Guest:And I also happen to live in New York City, which until very recently had more Jews than Israel.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So in that respect, I'm nervous because I do know that fanatics want to kill Jews.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But fanatics want to kill Christians, too.
Right.
Marc:Yeah, and some fanatics just want to kill anybody.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yeah, and they're not really focused in their fanaticism.
Marc:It's just a mental illness.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:So you're growing up there in the Upper West Side of Tulsa.
Marc:Did you have experience with, I don't know why, just because you're in a Western right now, but because the sort of struggle for indigenous people in Oklahoma must have been something on the radar, right?
Guest:Yes, that's manifest, yeah.
Guest:I think more manifest when I was growing up.
Guest:I see less Native Americans around Tulsa.
Guest:For some reason, I don't quite know why, but when I visit, then I used to.
Guest:But yeah, certainly one saw that.
Guest:But I think what I've experienced when I've been in New Mexico is
Guest:is actually more integration than I have experienced in Oklahoma.
Guest:With Native America?
Marc:Yes.
Guest:I see more of that really in New Mexico where the architecture, the cuisine, and the look of the people is so inflected with that combination of Mesoamerica and Spain.
Guest:Yeah, oh yeah.
Guest:than it is in Tulsa.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Because Tulsa was a place or Oklahoma was a place where Native Americans were relocated.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They were not indigenous to the place.
Guest:Oh, right.
Marc:So that was where they put them.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:As opposed to New Mexico and to a certain extent, Arizona.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Navajo Nation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And now my children have Native American blood because my wife is Mexican American and that's
Guest:Again, that exact mix of Spain and Native Indian.
Marc:This is all, I think, fascinating for me, because I had no idea anything about you, and now we have this interesting Jewish story going.
Marc:But how does it start that you become involved with acting?
Guest:Well, I enjoyed doing it in high school and particularly also in junior high.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And and then I went off to college.
Guest:Where'd you go to college?
Guest:Brown University.
Guest:Brown.
Guest:Hmm.
Guest:And I and I I was a classics major in college and I figured I was going to do do like Paul said to the Corinthians and put away childish things.
Marc:And I was going to be a professor.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Be a professor.
Marc:Brown's a good school.
Marc:I just know a lot of people.
Marc:It's sort of like of the Ivy Leagues, it's the arty one.
Marc:That's the way to describe it.
Marc:My buddy Sam Lipsight went there, a great writer.
Marc:Oh, the writer, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I just saw him in New York, and I think he's younger than us.
Marc:But yeah, he went there, and he was there with a whole crew of rock and roll children, like celebrity.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:There was a big celebrity children presence when he was there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When I was there, Amy Carter was just coming in.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:There you go.
Guest:And Walter Mondale's kid was there.
Guest:And John John Kennedy, John John John F. Kennedy's son.
Guest:May he rest in peace.
Guest:So it was a lot of political left wing politicians.
Guest:And you're doing the classic thing.
Marc:So you're are you are you reading Latin and stuff?
Marc:Latin.
Marc:Oh, no kidding.
Marc:No Greek.
Marc:Just Latin.
Marc:So how's your Latin?
Marc:Good.
Guest:It's rusty.
Guest:Better than Hebrew?
Guest:Yeah, it's much better than the Hebrew.
Guest:And then a lot of Greek philosophy also.
Guest:There was a teacher I had there named Martha Nussbaum, and she was a great influence over me.
Guest:I took a bunch of courses with her and then a lot of Latin courses, Roman history.
Guest:And I was I was my mother came to visit me during our during my freshman year in the spring.
Guest:And she said, what are you going to do this summer?
Guest:And I said, I'm going to come back to Tulsa and get a job and hang out.
Guest:And she she said, well.
Guest:OK, that's great.
Guest:I'd love to have you home.
Guest:And she had been divorced a few years before.
Guest:And so she, I think, really liked the idea.
Marc:And everyone's older than you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're the youngest.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so she said, but but what do you want to do with your life?
Guest:No.
Guest:And I said, I think I want to be a professor or maybe an archaeologist.
Guest:And she said that that would be great.
Guest:Nothing would make me happier than to have a son who's a professor or an archaeologist and devotes his life to letters.
Guest:Archaeologist.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Ancient, ancient civilization.
Marc:So you were compelled to dig up the past.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And and she said, well,
Guest:You know, I'd love for you to come home and I'd love to see you become a classicist, but you don't even have a girlfriend right now.
Guest:So you're totally unaffiliated and you have no responsibilities.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You liked acting in high school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Now is the time when you can just try anything.
Guest:Oh, that was nice.
Guest:So why don't you go get on with the summer theater this summer and see if that doesn't still interest you?
Guest:Or do something.
Guest:But why play it safe and come home?
Marc:It's so funny that playing it safe, be a classicist or an archaeologist, those are good secure positions.
Marc:You know?
Yeah.
Marc:But it was interesting.
Marc:Now, looking back on that conversation, do you think that she was just being nice about those things and she saw that your passion was elsewhere?
Guest:I think she was being wise and and and and giving me an incredible, an incredible gift, one of many incredible gifts that she gave to to my siblings and me.
Guest:So I went and was involved with the summer theater that that in Oklahoma.
Guest:No, in Pennsylvania.
Guest:Which one?
Guest:How'd that go?
Guest:It was a summer theater shared between Swarthmore, Haverford and Bryn Mawr.
Guest:And my mother had gone to Bryn Mawr, so she knew of this theater.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And so I had a great time.
Guest:What were you doing?
Guest:I did Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard.
Guest:We did Hay Fever by Noel Coward.
Guest:And we did a Lanford Wilson play called Fifth of July.
Guest:And were you like- And I was acting.
Guest:Small parts or-
Guest:No, nice parts.
Guest:And it was a sort of a collective.
Guest:It was a student-run theater.
Guest:Oh, so it was all young people.
Guest:All young people.
Guest:We lived together in a house.
Guest:I got a girlfriend that summer.
Guest:And...
Guest:Just everything about it was great.
Marc:And everybody's doing the painting and the building.
Marc:Yes, that's exactly right.
Marc:The theater community.
Marc:Hanging the lights, all of it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That's how it works.
Marc:People would seem to have that experience in theater or start acting that way, get a real appreciation.
Marc:Did you do it?
Marc:No.
Marc:But I've talked to many people, or a few certainly, that their first experience was either in a Shakespearean company or a situation where part of it was learning the community of theater.
Guest:That's exactly right.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I and and funnily enough, though, and I was listening earlier to to your your podcast with Will Ferrell.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was also starting to do stand up comedy at the time.
Guest:No.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I could see that.
Guest:I wasn't good.
Guest:Where'd you do it?
Guest:Well, I did it in Providence at Perry Winkles.
Guest:That's exactly right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:At Perry Winkles.
Guest:And one performance I remember that was just incredible was I saw Ricky.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Not Ricky Jay.
Guest:Is that right?
Guest:Not the magician.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:I know who you're talking about.
Guest:Billy Jay.
Guest:Billy Jay.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I was wondering what happened to that.
Guest:God, he was funny.
Guest:Short guy, wear a hat.
Guest:And screamed a lot.
Guest:And he had a bit about, he had a bit, why do we wear these metal bowls on our head?
Guest:It's because of the piddler, the piddler on the roof.
Marc:Anyway, but I was terrible.
Marc:I was just wondering about him the other day, because there was a period in time there where he was...
Marc:He got very bitter.
Marc:And most people don't know who Billy Jay is, but he was around New York.
Marc:But he got cast.
Marc:The thing that stuck in his craw that kind of did him in a bit, I think, was he was cast in that Dustin Hoffman movie called Billy Bathgate about the gangster movie.
Marc:And he was almost entirely cut out of it.
Marc:And he had very little in the movie.
Marc:And I think it just killed him because he used it as a credit for years.
Marc:But you go see the movie and he was just a passing presence.
Marc:And he got very, you know, he got very, he was an angry little man.
Marc:But it's so funny.
Marc:That's the guy.
Marc:I love that that's the memory.
Guest:But the anger was funny.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:No, he was.
Guest:And I think, you know, so but I and then I came out here.
Guest:But wait, let's talk about stand up.
Guest:So you're doing open mics at Perry Winkles.
Guest:No.
Guest:And then I came out here and did stand up in L.A.
Guest:for the summer.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Where do laugh factory open mics?
Guest:Open mics.
Guest:And then I got on at the Laugh Factory.
Guest:I was at the I was basically they put me on.
Guest:I could come any night and then I was just the bottom rung.
Marc:So it was just a hallway next to the old Chinese.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Jamie Masada.
Marc:Well, he still owns it.
Marc:But back then it was just like you walk in and you were in the room.
Marc:Yeah, that's right.
Marc:He would sit there on the right, and then there would be this long room that was like the size of a hallway in my recollection.
Marc:And if he had to go to the bathroom, he had to walk all the way down the side, and there was a door on the side of the stage.
Marc:It was a tiny place before he built it out.
Marc:And that old Chinese restaurant was still there, like right next door.
Marc:And Greenblatt's.
Marc:Yeah, down the street.
Guest:So the guy who, so he owned it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and the guy who um the ombudsman was uh falstaff it's this big yeah the comic yeah comic yeah i vaguely remember him and he um he would let me on but but my god jamie hated it when i would go on was fraser smith hosting
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Falstaff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And and they would put me on.
Guest:Usually I'd get there at around.
Guest:I did.
Guest:I had a day job out in this is the summer after my this was the summer after my sophomore year.
Guest:So you were going for it.
Guest:You wanted you thought it might be the thing.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And I just was derivative and not very good.
Marc:Of who?
Guest:Woody Allen?
Guest:No, Robin Williams.
Guest:Oh, you see?
Guest:Just doing characters.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:But, and I, at the end of that summer, even though I, again, I...
Guest:I would get there at around nine.
Guest:I had a day job.
Guest:I worked at the Boulangerie in this restaurant called the Boulangerie in Venice, making sandwiches during the day.
Guest:And then I would get to the Laugh Factory at about nine, and I would keep getting bumped because I wasn't very good.
Guest:Go on at about one.
Guest:Yeah, go on at about one.
Guest:For nine people.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And just wait and wait and wait.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:And I never got past that rung.
Guest:And I at the end of the summer, I said.
Guest:Acting.
Guest:So I've done I did stand up for a summer and I did theater for a summer and I'm not going to do anything to help.
Guest:I'm not doing anything new as a comedian.
Guest:I would get to watch for three hours a night.
Marc:Oh, yeah, and it'd just chip away at your confidence, and you just sit there.
Marc:You watch the audience leave.
Marc:You watch all these big acts come on.
Guest:Yeah, but they were really good, and I thought...
Guest:It chipped away at my confidence, but at least for me, that wasn't the worst thing in the world, certainly not for the art of comedy.
Guest:I wasn't going to end up developing, you know, like a Lou Black persona or something.
Guest:How do you know?
Guest:I guess I don't know, but I'm pretty confident.
Marc:Well, it's good that you understand the limitations of your talent, but most of us who get into comedy, we just plow on.
Marc:I mean, it's like in my mind, you chose the more difficult path in a way.
Guest:I think stand up comedy is the more difficult path.
Guest:I actually do.
Guest:I really I because I think that to stick with it, you you see.
Guest:I mean, there were such there was such a grim side of life that I saw during many of those hours and hanging out.
Guest:And, you know, one night.
Guest:Those are my people.
Guest:I think that's a good thing, actually.
Marc:I'm not taking it as an insult.
Marc:We're all very proud of our grim side of life.
Guest:One night I was there, and I don't remember this comic's name, but he was really, really dry and funny and cynical.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:and he was a regular at the laugh factory this would have been in 1984 84 85 yeah um Jewish guy and uh really in comedy and it's the end of the night and I don't know why he had shown up really late maybe he'd been at a couple other clubs and stopped by the laugh factory at the end and
Guest:For whatever reason, I'm not quite sure why, he was kind of still around after I did the very last five minutes.
Guest:And so I'm walking out of the club and I am walking up Laurel to my car where I parked it.
Guest:And there's this Asian woman.
Guest:who's just... She is just incapacitated by alcohol.
Guest:I mean, she's just stumbling, stumbling drunk.
Guest:Shit-faced.
Guest:Yeah, really bad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she's trying to negotiate the key into the car door.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And I think, well, this is not good.
Guest:And I said, ma'am, may I help you?
Guest:And she's sort of...
Guest:Mumbles back at me and again, clearly not a good situation.
Guest:And I thought, well, I can't let this woman drive.
Guest:I've got to wait here and just I don't know what I'm going to do.
Guest:And this is before cell phones.
Guest:So then this comic comes out.
Guest:And he stops and he's studying the situation.
Guest:He's not saying anything.
Guest:And I turn to him and I say, we can't let we can't let her drive.
Guest:And he says, well, well, what do you want to do?
Guest:You want to roll her or you want to fuck her?
Guest:And I said, neither, neither.
Guest:I want to call the police, you know, and he.
Guest:You want to help her.
Guest:Yeah, I want to help her.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he wasn't serious.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it was such grim.
Guest:It was such exquisitely grim, just the darkest of the dark humor in the context of 1.30 in the morning and this woman.
Guest:And she was actually kind of pretty, which made it even worse.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And and I thought I'm really grateful to be exposed to these people and this world.
Guest:That's what did it.
Marc:That's what simultaneously made you grateful and get out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I thought I've got to I've got I'm not going to this is not going to be good for me.
Guest:You're not going to do that to yourself.
Marc:You're not going to become a dark, cynical fucking monster.
Marc:You had too much heart, kiddo.
Marc:You realize at that moment, I'm like, oh my God, these people, there's no bottom to this.
Marc:Yeah, I don't want to hurt my heart that much.
Guest:And I think that's probably and I think that's probably true.
Guest:And that's why you guys are so damn funny.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also, but, you know, there is a line that one rides.
Marc:I mean, you know, with with comedy and with.
Marc:And certainly back then there was a kind of ethic to it that you kind of really push the envelope of what was funny and what isn't funny and how dark can you be and how dark can you get and also there's the natural kind of evolution of forcing yourself to be funny to the point where as a comic you get jaded and cynical enough that only the most dark things are funny.
Marc:And I do think that if you do not, if you're not compelled to callous your heart like that, I mean, I think all comics are sensitive, but they're certainly in a very complex way, very deeply well guarded.
Guest:I think that's absolutely true and certainly true of the best of them.
Marc:They can be vulnerable, but probably on stage, just from my own personal experience, I can be vulnerable, but in real life, the price you pay for being vulnerable to an audience in that way, your personal life doesn't necessarily reflect that all the time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You seem like a sweet guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I hope I am.
Guest:And I think that comic was a sweet guy.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I think a really, really sweet guy and also smart as all get out.
Guest:And I think it's very difficult to be smart and sweet at the same time.
Guest:And funny.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, that's what I admire.
Guest:I mean, not to I don't want to switch subjects because I love what we're talking about.
Guest:But that's that's the key to Joel and Ethan.
Guest:When people say that Joel and Ethan are cold as filmmakers, I want to set myself ablaze.
Guest:I'm so upset because I.
Guest:They're anything but.
Guest:There's such generosity and warmth in their exposure of their take on the world.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:I think that like when I've talked to people about them, it sounds my interpretation was not so much that they were cold, but they know exactly what they want.
Marc:And I think maybe to an actor that might come off as just some as confining somehow.
Guest:Well, except that they know so clearly what they want that they've prepared to an extent and they have such control that on the day when you're shooting, you actually never have more freedom as an actor than when you're on their set.
Guest:Because there's no castigation.
Guest:You can fail and they have the time for that and they have the patience for that.
Guest:And they've given you a role.
Guest:And this is whatever role you're playing in one of their movies, even if you have but a day.
Guest:Mm hmm.
Guest:They've given you a role that is such an invitation for what I like to call front footed acting, making a bold choice that you just gravitate toward that that that kind of risk taking and only on a set like theirs where everything is so under control.
Guest:and meticulously planned and so carefully written, can you have the space to be able to take those chances?
Guest:Because nobody is fretting over whether they're going to run out of time or what the next shot is going to be.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's great.
Marc:And in terms of front-footed acting and also in terms of this new movie, which is six stories,
Marc:You know, their love of people who are able to do what you're calling front-footed acting, these sort of bold character actors that are very specific, I find, they seem to have a true passion for it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, you know, I've so many of us, so many of the great character actors.
Guest:So I'll leave myself out.
Guest:But if you think about John Goodman and Turturro and Fran, Francis McDormand, Holly Hunter, Steve Buscemi, Michael Stilbarg, Stephen Root, who've.
Guest:not so much Steven root who had his own career before he met them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Uh, but the others I'm describing started with them really did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, and, and I can say for myself, who was going to put me in a lead role?
Guest:I mean, I, I was doing fine as an actor, uh, working a lot off Broadway and doing what I like to call a hallway part, uh, in a movie every year, uh, where you're,
Guest:accompany the lead down a hallway and deliver a bit of information that he needs while he's getting from point A to point B. I just did one of those.
Marc:Oh, good.
Marc:Literally, I did literally did a hallway scene with Robert De Niro.
Marc:Oh, fantastic.
Marc:Oh, in the Joker movie.
Marc:Oh, wow.
Marc:Oh, great.
Marc:But it was literally a walk and talk down backstage in a hallway situation.
Marc:Did you like it?
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:That's fantastic.
Marc:It was my first experience on a real big movie.
Marc:You'll be in a Coen Brothers movie in no time.
Marc:I would love to.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't know that I know how to do that type of character work.
Guest:Well, that's interesting.
Guest:Who knows?
Guest:I don't know enough about you.
Guest:But I do know that they...
Guest:they do gravitate toward actors who've had classical training.
Guest:Because to do their language, I think there's the need for a facility with that.
Guest:But then there are others who fit gorgeously into their world who don't.
Guest:But in the really talkative character,
Marc:But it's interesting that, you know, and what you're talking about front footed and character acting is that in the one story where James Franco plays the lead who, and he's not essentially, I mean, I think he can do anything.
Marc:I think he's a fine actor, but he's not innately the type of actor that Steven Root is, or maybe even that you are in terms of your training or in terms of having a broad spectrum of character, you know, potential.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, James is more of an autodidact.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Guest:So but he's been serious about that pursuit.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:I like him.
Marc:But it was interesting.
Marc:You can see the difference not just between him and Stephen Root, the primary other character, but even the guys that ride up on horses are so chiseled and defined.
Marc:Yeah, just in their presence of character, you know, against him.
Marc:It's very it's interesting.
Marc:I notice this a lot, you know, in doing glow to that, you know, Betty Gilpin comes from the New York School of Theater actresses.
Marc:And Alison Brie is very much a product of Los Angeles.
Marc:And I see there's different approaches.
Marc:And they fit great together sometimes, but there's a difference.
Marc:Yeah, you're completely right.
Marc:So where did you train?
Marc:I went to Juilliard.
Marc:Oh, wow, really?
Guest:The whole thing?
Guest:Yeah, four years.
Guest:I went to four years of college and then four years of acting school.
Guest:So I did not get out of school until I was 26.
Guest:Juilliard's hard, man.
Guest:Yeah, it's a pretty... I mean, they're heartless and they're cutting.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, not so much anymore.
Guest:But when we were there, my wife and I and I was in class with them.
Guest:I was in the same year as Laura Linney, wonderful actress.
Guest:Great.
Guest:And Jeannie Triplehorn.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:New York theater actor named David Aaron Baker.
Guest:Another actor named Jake Weber.
Guest:So, you know, I was in an interesting it was a good time to be there, but it was brutal.
Guest:so you did all of it you did uh you did uh sword fighting alexander technique singing dancing yeah yeah uh good speech uh uh we even had comedy class oh who taught that uh a guy named harold stone a miserable man uh no he was great but you know it's an incredible thing happened so robin williams went did you do mask work
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I loved mask work.
Guest:That was one of my favorite classes.
Guest:You know everything, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Mask work was great.
Guest:Animal work?
Guest:Yes, we did a bit of that.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:First year.
Guest:But Robin Williams went to Juilliard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so the guy who taught.
Guest:They wanted him out.
Guest:Well, it was a money issue.
Guest:And so then he formed a scholarship.
Guest:Robin did.
Guest:Robin gave a scholarship to Juilliard for anybody who couldn't afford to come back, and my wife got that scholarship.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Robin.
Guest:We did a movie together, Robin and I, and my wife came to visit, and she was able to say thank you, which was a great- He must have loved it.
Marc:He's a sweet guy, man.
Guest:He was a sweet guy.
Guest:What movie did you do with them?
Guest:It was called The Big White.
Guest:It was with Robin and Holly Hunter and Giovanni Ribisi, Alison Lohman.
Guest:And we were all up in Alaska together.
Marc:What were you going to say about them?
Guest:Oh, I was going to say that.
Guest:So there was the teacher of the comedy course.
Guest:in an admirably self-deprecating speech at the beginning of the course, said, look, I'm teaching this course, but I'm not going to claim to be funny.
Guest:I've taught a lot of people in this course, and some of them didn't end up being particularly funny.
Guest:But I did teach Robin Williams in this course.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:But I'm not going to claim that he wasn't funny beforehand.
Guest:All right.
Guest:So then Robin Williams comes to speak to us.
Guest:And this student named Peter Jacobson in my wife's class raises a hand.
Guest:And he wants to throw a softball to Robin so that Robin can praise this comedy teacher.
Guest:And he said, how did you like the comedy class?
Guest:We hear you took the comedy class.
Guest:And Robin, as only Robin could do, just went on this monologue about how ridiculous it would be to try to teach comedy and how he had never been in a comedy class.
Guest:And he just went on and on and on.
Guest:And it was so embarrassing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it was a good class.
Guest:It was a great class.
Guest:I loved the class.
Marc:Itzkoff in his Robin biography, he talked a lot about his time at Juilliard.
Marc:It was interesting.
Marc:Because he was there with Chris Reeves and I think maybe Bill Hurt.
Marc:Patti LuPone.
Marc:Was Bill Hurt there?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And just how strict it was.
Guest:It became progressively less strict.
Guest:When my wife and I were there, it was still pretty strict.
Guest:They cut a third of the class or about a fourth of the class.
Guest:They warned a third of the class.
Guest:So in your middle of the second year, you were warned.
Guest:We may cut you at the end of the year.
Marc:So when you get out of there, you're fully prepped.
Marc:You're loaded up.
Marc:You got all the tools.
Marc:And what was your dream to do?
Guest:What were you wanting to do?
Guest:Be a stage actor.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you don't have all the tools, but you have as many of the tools as a school can give you.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I don't want to I loved the school.
Guest:I would not have wanted to have gone anywhere else.
Guest:It was the perfect place for me.
Guest:It was difficult.
Guest:It was at times quite demeaning.
Guest:And at times it was also quite nurturing and fortifying.
Guest:But I think what happens after any drama school, and this is not unique to Juilliard in the least, is there's much you need to unlearn while you're internalizing it.
Guest:So a lot of what you've learned just has to become part of your intuition as an actor as opposed to a conscious application of technique.
Marc:Well, it's interesting that the idea of internalizing what you learned is also unlearning it because, I mean, ultimately, you know, when you're in a real life work situation, you're only going to use what works for you.
Marc:And that may or may not look like what you learned or didn't learn, but you assume that it's in there.
Marc:That's exactly right.
Marc:We all tailor make our strategies.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:I mean, like, you know, I talk to people about acting when I started acting more because I need to know things, you know, but, you know, so much of it, you know, depending on which level you're operating at.
Marc:And there's a lot of them.
Marc:You know, some people are just good at pretending.
Marc:Some people just have a knack for being on screen or on stage.
Marc:And then there are those people that have much more facility because of an education.
Marc:But anybody's craft is sort of up to them how they're going to get into what they do.
Guest:that is i i that's it's it's it's your own approach it's like learning how to go to school but when you say front-footed when you say bold choices when you because like you know in the coen movies you've done what have you done three two two i was supposed to do another one and then i had to back out because of a scheduling conflict which one uh no country oh what were you going to play in that
Guest:I'll just say I had a role in it.
Guest:And it was not Anton Chigurh, but it was another role.
Guest:And it wasn't Josh Brolin's role, but it was a nice role.
Guest:And yeah, I couldn't do it.
Guest:And thankfully they didn't take that.
Guest:It was a legitimate conflict.
Marc:But when you say these things, when you say these choices, like when I think about, you know, Oh Brother and the new one,
Marc:So when you talk about being in a situation where you have this room because of the control they have on the set to really take these chances with the character in the ballad of the new film, what were they?
Guest:Well, I'm going to just generalize a little bit.
Guest:So.
Guest:In American acting, we took what Stanislavski was saying in An Actor Prepares and also in the training of the Russian theater actors.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we brought it over here and we, depending on your attitude toward this, we either contorted it.
Guest:Or we evolved it into something that they call the method.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Which is the actor's studio, among other places.
Guest:Group theater, actor's studio.
Guest:And.
Guest:Meisner.
Guest:And that coupled with film acting.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:and needing to do less, for just lack of a more interesting way of putting it, because the camera is so close, began to elevate the notion of behaving over actively pursuing objectives as an actor.
Guest:So if the camera could catch you being real,
Guest:and behaving in a certain way, showing emotion in a natural way, that was suddenly venerated as great acting.
Guest:And so showing emotion, being real, not seeming to be deploying any sort of training in terms of how to do a line or...
Guest:How to play a line rhetorically.
Marc:So you get that generation after Montgomery Cliff, James Dean, Marlon Brando up through De Niro, Pacino and some other cats.
Marc:Dog Day Afternoon is a great example of what you're talking about.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And and and the ones who do it incredibly well.
Guest:I mean, it's fantastic.
Guest:You feel like you're witnessing human behavior.
Guest:But.
Guest:There's also a tendency as a result of that to lose sight of what a character actually actively wants in a scene.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because we do as human beings.
Guest:I'm doing it right now.
Guest:I'm trying to get through to you.
Guest:And we're engaged in a back and forth here.
Guest:It's working, Tim.
Guest:It's active.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so...
Guest:What I mean by front-footed acting is that there are techniques you can use, and I learned these actually after Juilliard from this wonderful director I had named Mark Wing-Davy, who now runs the graduate actor training program at NYU, where my wife now teaches, is to find an action.
Guest:This is just one example.
Guest:Find an action for every line you have.
Guest:And when you apply that action, it has to be in the form of a transitive verb.
Guest:Can you give me some examples?
Guest:Okay, so if I wanted to piss you off, I would pierce you.
Guest:So I'm going to say this line and I'm going to use it.
Guest:And so I would literally write that into my text, pierce him with this line.
Guest:And so you do that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You do that literally for every single phrase that you have in your text.
Marc:I'm actually making notes for because I'm about to start, you know, shooting again.
Marc:And I need this is the missing piece.
Marc:Keep going.
Marc:uh and so you have all that and then what you do is you forget it yeah so you just you don't take that to the you do that while you're working on a role okay so you got this with every line the transitive verb in the form of action that you sublimate uh you know under the line yeah but is there an arcing uh do you think about the arc of the character's needs
Guest:You know, when I think of the arc of a character's needs, I think there's something, you know, like if I'm in a scene and I'm playing with a woman and the character wants to have sex with her.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All right.
Guest:So, yeah, that's what I want.
Guest:But it all...
Guest:evolves and changes.
Guest:It's in constant flux.
Marc:But you know that's in place when you read the scene and you're like, okay, so this guy wants to do this to this.
Marc:And then you go line for line.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And then you've got to forget it.
Guest:Because, of course, the next and really most exciting part is that you've made all those decisions ahead of time and you've worked on that.
Guest:But then you're going to play the scene with a partner and it's all going to change.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Uh, and then it gets really, really, it gets terrifically exciting because then it's living thought.
Guest:And then right when you're completely in it, you know, cut.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Um, and so that's just, that's just an example.
Guest:And if you don't have that with Cohen acting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because there's such an active precision to what they've written.
Guest:It's not going to work because they're not interested and you're just coming on and behaving.
Guest:They write characters who have really, really strong needs and objectives.
Guest:And usually they're deploying some pretty colorful language in pursuit.
Marc:Their sort of love of the type of actor that you're talking about is so beautiful to see.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like that right away.
Marc:Right when you see the face.
Marc:They got a hell of a casting capacity.
Marc:They get it right.
Guest:They just get it right.
Guest:Every frame is a treat.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They're like cartoon cells.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Did you love working with Clooney?
Guest:Yeah, he's really, I mean, John and George were so unbelievably kind to me.
Marc:George.
Guest:George Clooney, yeah.
Guest:John Turturro.
Guest:And John Turturro on O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Guest:So...
Marc:So kind.
Marc:Isn't that fascinating, though, about him?
Marc:See, this is just me being the observer, is that he's a fucking movie star, right?
Marc:And he's a great movie star.
Marc:And there's a couple of them that can do this.
Marc:Like, you know, Turturro's, like, you know, he'll transform.
Marc:He's like you a bit in that, you know, he can take on, be front-footed, you know, really do a Coen role.
Marc:But George is interesting because, you know, with movie stars...
Marc:who just for some God-given reason just are movie stars.
Marc:They fit up there.
Marc:Who knows what that is?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But he can act, and he can make adjustments to his movie star-ness.
Marc:You always see Clooney in there, but he can make these adjustments.
Marc:He can turn a dial, and it's very effective and sort of amazing.
Guest:I couldn't agree with you more, and you've not only just defined what a movie star is because there's –
Guest:The movie star always has to have that aspect of them in the role.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they've got to be responsible and they've got to be responsible to that, which often inhibits movie stars from making the choices that they should be making as an actor.
Guest:George is never guilty of that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The descendants.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:up in the air burn after reading yeah that his performance of burn after reading is is sort of astounding that you know all these weird quirks that he decided on and the running and the you know and brad pitt's another one who can do it yeah uh that hair uh and the gum chewing all those choices yeah yeah that listening to the earphone yeah i mean it those choices those are the choices my my uh i was talking with joel about this the other day that um
Marc:cluny's uh performance in hail caesar when he's encountering jesus at the cross the outtakes oh my god so funny so funny even when he's sitting with the communist and he's finally getting it where he's sort of like no wait so
Marc:Yeah, that movie.
Marc:See, I think that's a fucking masterpiece.
Marc:No one thinks it's a bad movie, but I think it's one of their best movies.
Marc:And I seem to be in the minority.
Marc:But I think that if they had a double bill that was Barton Fink and Hail Caesar, that's it.
Marc:Those are their Hollywood movies.
Guest:Yeah, well, both of them are set at Capitol Pictures.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I know.
Guest:Where writer is king.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I worked with Lerner.
Marc:Charles Lerner?
Marc:That's his name.
Marc:Michael Lerner.
Marc:He was on my show.
Marc:He played my mother's husband.
Marc:Oh, right.
Marc:He's a piece of work, dude.
Marc:He is something else.
Marc:How about him in A Serious Man?
Great.
Marc:I auditioned for that movie.
Marc:Oh, you did?
Marc:Yeah, but I wasn't.
Marc:There was no way.
Marc:Did you go into the room and meet them?
Marc:No, I didn't.
Marc:I never met them.
Marc:I've met Francis.
Marc:I was nominated for a SAG award for GLOW.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And I'm a big fan of hers and them, and I'm standing there.
Marc:I want to interview her and stuff.
Marc:Obviously, I wasn't going to win a sag war, but it's all gravy to me.
Marc:I'm like, oh, great.
Marc:I'm very flattered.
Marc:It was a big star-studded night that I skulked away from.
Marc:I didn't say anything.
Marc:I always feel weird doing that.
Marc:Not you on a plane.
Marc:I did.
Marc:You don't remember, but I was like, I'm going to.
Guest:Well, I am so glad you did follow up on the invitation.
Guest:As I said to you, I'm my son, Henry, who's at Oberlin College.
Guest:He's at Oberlin?
Guest:Yeah, in the conservatory.
Guest:He's doing classical composition and jazz composition over five years.
Guest:He's doing two degrees.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so it's been great for my wife and me because we went to conservatory to have him in conservatory getting what we consider is a great education.
Guest:What's his instrument?
Guest:His instrument is jazz guitar.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's been playing since he was seven.
Guest:One of my great joys is on on this movie.
Guest:I had to learn the guitar from scratch to be able to play this to accompany and ride a horse and ride a horse at the same time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so my son was my teacher.
Guest:oh good story yeah and he was so um generous and kind and thoughtful yet exacting oh yeah and and and patient he wanted you to get it right yeah uh and he would just you know uh making sure that i uh uh she kind of really pressed the strings dad you know all that stuff but you know you had about three chords to earn right just three chords that's it yeah yeah
Guest:was like g a and d or something yeah uh uh g uh d and yeah i think it is a yeah yeah and if i got that wrong man am i going to hear about it from him god damn it dad one thing except now that i've been on your show there's going to be nothing i can do wrong in his in his uh eyes because he's such a huge fan of yours oh it's great maybe you can show me some licks
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I'll just go up to Ohio, knock on the door and say like, yeah, I talked to your dad.
Marc:He said, show me some licks.
Guest:Now, do you travel and do comedy?
Marc:Sure.
Guest:These days?
Marc:I do.
Marc:I do.
Marc:I was just in New York at the Beacon on Saturday.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Marc:Yeah, it was something.
Guest:Did you like playing there?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I make myself a little crazy before the big ones.
Marc:But it was beautiful.
Marc:What a great theater that is.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:I've seen Waits there.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I do a lot of music there.
Guest:And ZZ Top.
Guest:I got Fran and Joel to go with me to see ZZ Top at the Beacon.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Recently?
Guest:No, this was about 10 years ago.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And we're watching them and I'm really, really into it.
Guest:And I think I maybe even wore my open road hat.
Guest:You know, the LBJ cowboy hat.
Guest:And...
Guest:And Ethan and Trish went to Ethan and his wife, Trish.
Guest:And Fran and Joel didn't last the whole time.
Guest:And at a certain point, they were having a good time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I think they could just take so much.
Guest:Fran just looked over at me and she just said, Tim, you are such a cracker.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And I said, maybe it's great.
Marc:No, man, we grew up with it.
Marc:I mean, I grew up in New Mexico.
Marc:And then when Tejas came out, I grew up in the Southwest.
Marc:I don't know what you call Oklahoma.
Marc:Southwest.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So like, you know, you had a, I mean, I love ACDC.
Marc:I love Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Marc:I'm not necessarily talking about any sort of like local bands here.
Marc:I mean, it was mainstream rock radio, but it was rock radio.
Marc:But then there was also back then you had the FM station where, you know,
Marc:Or you kind of get hip to some stuff you didn't know about.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Well, I think we could do this for a while, but I think we're good.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Excellent.
Marc:You feel good?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Thank you so much.
Marc:Are you going to direct any movies soon?
Marc:Writing, directing?
Guest:I have.
Guest:Well, I have a play.
Guest:I wrote a play about Socrates, and that's going to be done at the public theater next year.
Guest:Oh, that's exciting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Michael Stuhlbarg is playing the lead role.
Marc:Oh, he can do anything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And and then I have a new script I've written and I've got to cast it.
Guest:And if I can get somebody to play the couple of leads, I'll be making that next year.
Guest:I'm doing this show Watchmen right now as an actor.
Guest:And that'll go right into Socrates rehearsals.
Guest:And then when I'm done with that, I might direct another movie.
Marc:I noticed you did two Franco's Faulkner movies.
Guest:I've done eight movies with James.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I love him.
Marc:He's great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I talked to him.
Marc:He's great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He's a movie star.
Marc:He's a movie star.
Marc:He is.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He can really, you know, he's got a way about him.
Marc:Well, it's great talking to you, man.
Marc:All right.
Marc:And I hope this makes your son happy.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Thank you.
Thank you.
Marc:That was a doozy, right?
Marc:Huh?
Marc:Oklahoma oil juice.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:I loved it.
Marc:Good guy.
Marc:And after the interview, he FaceTimed his son, who's a guitar player and a fan of the show.
Marc:And he introduced me to his son on FaceTime, and his son played some guitar for me, and we talked a little bit.
Marc:It was a nice little moment between the three of us.
Marc:Technology, folks.
Technology.
Guest:So, let's play some guitar.
Guest:Boomer lives!