S3E14: When Crypt Went To London

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This podcast is a collaboration between costart and Touchstone Productions and the Dads from the Crypt podcast. Welcome aboard, frightseers. Looking for a little holiday fun? You've come to the right place. We specialize in all sorts of package tours. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the how not to make movie podcast. I'm Alan Katz. Gil will join us shortly before we set sail. Please, if there's a way for you to physically like what we're doing, jumping up and down is great, but hitting a like button is even better than please do it. It makes a huge difference. Better yet, hit the subscribe button. I'm not kidding. There's stuff going on that would be criminal to let you miss it. That includes a great new tv show that Gil and I are taking out to the tv marketplace virtually as we speak. It's called are you afraid? And it's a tasty, streaming horror black comedy about flesh eating ghouls who live in an eat or be eaten world that looks suspiciously and terrifyingly like our own flesh eating ghouls. For a long time, we humans have been deeply afraid of vampires and zombies. Sin war, paramedics. Fair enough. Vampires and zombies are scary. But neither vampires nor zombies are real. Flesh eating ghouls, on the other hand, are real. They've been living in our shadow for thousands of years, hunting us, feasting on us, treating us like food. But some ghouls are tired of living in the shadow of their food. Those ghouls have decided it's time to leave the shadow and put us in our place where we belong, on the mint. It's an eat or be eaten world, flavored by fear, filled with the monster we should have been afraid of all along. Flashy and cool. Are you afraid? Better be coming soon. When we finished shooting bordello of blood, we still owed HBO one more season of tales from the crypt. And for reasons that we'll discuss in the episode, we took that season to London. Now, being in London was great fun. Traveling and living on someone else's dime is always great fun. But we were tv strangers in a strange tv land. The first lesson we learned the hard way. We both may speak the same language, but we don't necessarily mean the same things when we speak it. It wasn't a coincidence that not long after we returned from England, before Bordello of blood even came out, that everything flew to pieces. Gil and I broke up our creative partnership and friendship in utter ruins. Good thing we already know there's a happy ending to it all. So with that in mind, get ready for some great stories about our time in what my old pal the crypt keeper would have called scary old England. Our guests today, crips amazing production designer Greg Melton, who also pd the Walking Dead, and our then assistant, Ed Tapio, who these days is a phenomenal producer in his own right. At no point did anyone sit in a room and say, hey, you know, the series has gotten a little tired. How might we freshen it up? I know, let's take it out of town someplace. London, perhaps. No such conversation ever happened. That's not why we went to London. We went to London for the same reason that we went to Vancouver, to make Bordello with blood, which was to the IA. That's my memory. Do I have this right, Gil? Do you remember it that way? [00:03:49] Speaker B: Not exactly. I mean, that was one part of it. But I do remember a conversation actually with Joel where I brought it up and he was like, uk, you want to go? Get out of here. London. He blew it off. And then I said, well, but, you know, look at the talent we have access to and look at the directors we have access to. Little did I know it bite me in the butt. But we did have that conversation. And I think it was appealing on some level to HBO. [00:04:15] Speaker A: But let me, let me command it this way. Chicken egg was the motivating factor to change where we made the show or to leave LA? [00:04:27] Speaker B: I think a little of both. I think a little of both. I think the fact that the Teamsters were not being very helpful had a great deal to do with it. However, you know, it was in the air. [00:04:38] Speaker A: I mean, that idea was in the air. So if a good idea got floated, it would gain, it would get traction. And at the end of the day, hey, it's a great idea. If. If we could figure out a way to pull it off. [00:04:50] Speaker B: Well, we did figure out a way to pull it off with the gentlemen that are our guests today at tells. [00:04:56] Speaker A: Ed Tapio was Gill's assistant. In the interim, he's become a very successful tv producer himself. Greg Melton was our production designer. He's still one of the best in the business. He designed the look for Walking Dead. When you and I took over tales from the crypt, we instituted a system of how we were going to get this show done on time, on budget. The previous people who were running tales from the crypt, Bill Tytler, it was a little more loosey goosey. People seemed to have their own. If you wanted to bring in your own DP, you could bring in your own DP. There was. It was not disciplined in any way, shape, or form. And that's why they ended up a million dollars in the hole at the end of the second season. So we had a terrific system, which was, I think, your innovation, Gilheze. We had, what, two ads and two photographers. And the point of the exercise was. [00:05:54] Speaker B: Was to alternate so that we never stopped. We would continue shooting. While one group was shooting, the other group was prepping. [00:06:02] Speaker A: Right. Every director you had five days to prep and five days to shoot. And there were no exceptions. [00:06:09] Speaker B: And the only person this was inconsiderate of, besides you and me, Alan and Ed, was the production designer who's here with us today, Greg Melton, who really didn't get any days off because the world changed every five days. [00:06:24] Speaker C: Right. And I use, I use Greg's. I use Greg's experience on tails still to this day, because whenever I have showrunners that talk about, you know, we have to go to these places and these places, I say, just build me a box. Yeah, by me. Build me a 20 by 20 foot box on stage that we. That one week will be a doctor's office. Next week it'll be a hotel room. The next week it'll be a therapist's office. Next it'll be a coach's office. And that, that little model that Greg had, because I remember we were shooting in one while he had a construction and set deck team completely redoing the other stage. And we would just go back and forth between the two, between the city sets. And to this day, I'm amazed that he was able to transform sets within three or four days into something completely different. Well, you thought we were on locations. [00:07:15] Speaker D: You know, remember we were running night crews. That was. That was really the key. Greg Melton, you know, we'd finished shooting something, you know, at 01:00 a.m. and the set at 09:00 a.m. was gone, you know, and. Or it was already being turned over. So, you know, it was quite a. It was quite a run. [00:07:37] Speaker A: We had a formula. It was basically three days in, two days out, a rough formula. Not every episode went that way, but that was the general design. So that if it was five days in, five days in, five days in, you'd have no time to do anything. [00:07:53] Speaker D: There was a lot of that, though, Alan, where we stayed five days. [00:07:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:08:01] Speaker B: What I remember, that was always the genius that I never quite figured out how he pulled off was that, you know, I figured he would either redress or repaint and then we would relight. But I never really thought the geography was going to change all that much in terms of what the physical layout would be. And yet I would come in and Greg would bring me in and say, so what do you think of this? And I go, wait a minute. How did you take the hospital room and make it into the palace? [00:08:30] Speaker C: Right. [00:08:30] Speaker B: It doesn't look like a hospital room that was made into a palace. It doesn't look anything like the hospital room. In fact, if you said to me, where was the patient lying, I don't think I could tell you because it doesn't look anything like the hospital room. [00:08:44] Speaker C: Right. [00:08:44] Speaker B: I was there. [00:08:45] Speaker C: I remember there'd be new walls. Yeah. There'd be new walls or walls missing, and it'd be a completely different configuration. I remember coming in, I was like, wait a minute. Yesterday was something completely different. [00:08:54] Speaker B: Right. [00:08:57] Speaker A: I remember episodes, Greg, where situations would change on us and we would be forced to, you know, to put you in. Into a terrible bind. I remember the situation, the episode with Joan Chen. And was it Ernie Hudson? [00:09:11] Speaker B: Ernie Hudson, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:09:13] Speaker A: You know, where we. We had to fire the director. We met at Gill's house on a Sunday to talk about how the hell we were going to do it. Rodman Flender stepped in to direct, and we did a. It was a carnival. [00:09:25] Speaker D: We were, like, three days out, and you guys said, we need a 1930s rolling carnival on the stage. [00:09:33] Speaker A: Right. [00:09:34] Speaker D: That was. I remember that one really well. That was. That was one of the. [00:09:38] Speaker A: That was one of the. Okay, so that was one where. Yeah, we. Where we kind of. Yeah, but. But circumstances, you know? Circumstances. [00:09:44] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was always fun, you know, because it, you know, being that anthology. You know what, you're in the Caribbean this week, and next week you're in a Pacific logging camp. I remember that kind of stuff going on. Like, I mean, just massive turnarounds and, you know, a plantation house doesn't lend itself to anything in a Pacific logging camp, you know? So you're strangely. No, yeah, so there's some of those, you know, where sometimes you got lucky and sometimes it's like it's a strike, you know? [00:10:19] Speaker A: You know, I. I don't know that we ever looked at the scripts and thought in terms of, boy, that was going to be a hard on, Greg, let's not do that one next. Let's do this one next. I don't know that we. You know, when the scripts were ready, that that's when they went into the. Into the hopper and we didn't have. [00:10:34] Speaker B: The luxury of choosing between a, b, or C script. We were always chasing it. [00:10:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, all right. But at the end of the day, after. All right, at the end of season six, at the end of three seasons that we had done together, we had a modus operandi. We kind of knew how to do this. I don't know that we could do it in our sleep, but pretty close to it. Our intention, as we crossed the pond was to do what we did in LA, in London, as close as we possibly could. And the reason to bring Greg over was to have Greg kind of teach. We were going to get an english crew and a design team that was going to basically take over for you. Right. Wasn't that what happened? But we needed to teach them our method so that they could replicate the madness. [00:11:34] Speaker D: Yes. [00:11:37] Speaker B: They had their own madness, because they never really could replicate. [00:11:40] Speaker A: Right, well, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. All right. So we arrived with the best of. [00:11:46] Speaker C: Intentions before we get there, Alan, I remember we spent a lot of time prepping in Los Angeles before we actually got there. I remember working on the budget with Stu Burton, of all people, and Gil, trying to figure out what it would actually cost us while we were editing something. It was. We had the offices near Warner Brothers, some editing suites. [00:12:11] Speaker A: We were editing bordello of blood. [00:12:13] Speaker C: Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. [00:12:14] Speaker A: I mean, boredom. I mean, that was the other. The other gigantic complicating factor, in addition to do our show in a. In a foreign place with a little bit of misguided to a degree, but, you know, and at the same time, we were trying to cut a feature film, that it was problematic in its own way. [00:12:39] Speaker B: Right. [00:12:40] Speaker A: By the time we got to season seven, I think we had done all the good comics. You know, there were only. There were only so many comics. Our obligation, really, was to really just to use the titles. And if there's anything in the story that lent itself. Okay. But, you know, we had. We had now, God, we had, what, 50 some odd episodes under our collective belts. Yeah, about 40 episodes under our collective belts. We had done this, I think, all the different variations that you could possibly do, I think we've done them already. The comics that we had left to choose from were the ones at the bottom of the barrel. They were comics that we had avoided for seasons upon seasons because we just didn't like them. But now that's all that was left. And so we entered with one problem with, you know, the material that we were starting with was not the best we were coming into this after Bordello of Blood had beaten the shit out of us. And so I don't think we were creatively feeling. I don't think we had our a game in us after Bordello, you know, after the bordello experience, aside from Scott's episodes, I can't think of any. Nothing was, was exceptional. I'm trying to remember, did we even write an episode that season, Gill? I think we co wrote one with. With Coleman, which was basically a way to get Coleman to write, you know, the first draft so that we could just, you know, fill in because, you know, we were trying to produce a show in a strange land. You were cutting a feature film. We really didn't have time to write. [00:14:24] Speaker B: And not only were we cutting the feature film, but we were cutting the feature film in Los Angeles. We were prepping and shooting in England. [00:14:33] Speaker A: Right. [00:14:33] Speaker B: If you guys remember, I was spending three weeks in England and then three weeks in LA. [00:14:38] Speaker A: Right. [00:14:39] Speaker B: And three weeks in LA and getting more and more fatigued and. And just really exhausted. [00:14:46] Speaker A: Right. [00:14:46] Speaker B: But we kept going. [00:14:48] Speaker A: But I think as, by the time the, the show hit London, I think we were creatively fatigued on the show, which, which happens all the time. We were. We were, I think, hitting burnout creatively. I don't think we. We were giving it our. We were showing up and doing what we did every day. But I think we had spent all the creative spark. That was just my feeling. [00:15:13] Speaker B: I also think that the indian takeout food had something to do with that. Well, that's only my opinion. [00:15:20] Speaker A: But doing the show in London, that by itself was very, very exciting. The one person who I wish could be here as part of this conversation, but cannot, is Scott Nimmerfrow. [00:15:31] Speaker C: Rest in peace, Scott. [00:15:34] Speaker A: We never on from season 3456, we never had a staff. It was just me and Scott would write a bunch of episodes. And when we went to London, one of the things that we, one of the benefits that we were allowed to have, for the first time ever, a writing staff, which was Scott. And so Scott traveled with us, and Scott was responsible for rewriting a lot of the episodes and overseeing his, as he always did. And Scott's insights would have been tremendous. Scott had tremendous adventures there simply because he was so well connected. In addition to writing for Tales from the Crypt, before he became our story editor, he was the head of development for Dick Donner's company. And so he knew everybody, and he knew how to play the game. And so we send Ed on ahead to, to go looking for you. Know, we needed spaces to live in. We needed. We. We had one or two leads on studio space when you. When you left Los Angeles. Yes, Ed. [00:16:51] Speaker C: Yeah. And the young song hero for us, or at least for me, was Roy Button, who at the time was at Warner Brothers, because he was my. He was my guru. I mean, every time I had an issue, I would call Roy and he would give me three or four names and I'd follow up. And wherever he is, he made it possible. I mean, he was a great help to us. [00:17:11] Speaker B: Roy Button was a friend of the court from the get go, even before he went to England. I don't know how I met him or knew him, but anytime I had a question about something I didn't understand or know that affected UK, I would call Roy or send him an email. I get an email right back with the right answer. It was great. [00:17:29] Speaker A: Yeah, wherever. How did we know? How did you know Roy button? How does he fit into this Warner. [00:17:37] Speaker C: Brothers or an HBO executive that was his home base, was not Shepperton the other one? The big. Yes. [00:17:48] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:17:50] Speaker C: So it was part of the HBO Warner Brothers family in some way. I don't remember exactly what his title was, but I think he was. [00:17:58] Speaker B: I think he was one of the. One of the people in charge of Warner Brothers UK, right? [00:18:02] Speaker C: Yes, something like that, yeah. [00:18:04] Speaker B: And they were stationed in Pinewood and, you know, he couldn't do enough for us. I mean, anything. Any problem I had or we had, and we would call him and he had an answer. [00:18:13] Speaker C: Yeah. He opened a lot of doors for us, literally and figuratively. [00:18:18] Speaker A: Aside from Ealing, where else were we looking for studio space? [00:18:23] Speaker C: We looked at Pinewood and Roy said, nah, you don't want to come here. Too much going on, too big. You don't really need it. We were looking at a little stage space in Hammersmith, but the stages were too small and Shepperton, of course, because we had a relationship with Shepperton, but ultimately the Ealings, when they said we could take it over at that price, we were like, yeah, that's the place for us to go. [00:18:47] Speaker A: To most people, the words Ealing studios probably don't mean much, but if you love movies, if you make movies, the words Ealing studios, they're magic. Studio spaces are haunted by the creativity that happened within them. You walk onto the older sound stages at Universal or Warner Brothers or MGM, now Sony, and you can feel it. It's weird. London has been almost as important to the history of movies as LA. The studios in London are as legendary. Shepperton Twickenham, Pinewood. Ealing. Ealing is named after the part of London where it sits. The studio, or some version of it, has been in business since 1907, when amateur movie maker will Barker bought two properties facing Ealing green and started making movies there. The movie business being fickle, the studio changed hands pretty much regularly until the BBC bought it in 1955 and began leasing out the stages for 40 years. Everything imaginable got imagined there, including tales from the crypt. Like I said, a studio is kind of haunted by the creativity that goes on inside it. Ealing is haunted by the great comedies Alec Guinness made there, the lavender Hill mob, the lady killers, the man in the white suit, kind hearts and coronets. They made parts of Star wars here. They made Monty Python here. And when you're there working at Ealing studios, damned if you don't think about it a lot. It kind of haunts you. You found a great apartment for I. [00:20:19] Speaker C: Found a great apartment for all of you. Ed taping, you guys landed and you had like four or five choices. [00:20:25] Speaker D: Greg. [00:20:25] Speaker C: Greg ended up in that great muse apartment. Scott loved his place. He had a place in Chelsea. [00:20:32] Speaker A: Where were you going? [00:20:34] Speaker D: I was in Brompton there. In Chelsea? [00:20:37] Speaker C: Yeah, kill that. [00:20:38] Speaker B: I could look out my window, out down the street and actually see your apartment. [00:20:42] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:20:43] Speaker C: You guys were close. Yeah. And Scott had, Scott had a cool little, like, carriage house on a cobblestone road. And he absolutely loved his place as well. [00:20:53] Speaker A: We were in Knightsbridge, two and a half blocks from Harrods. The guy who had built this apartment was in the plumbing business. And, you know, at the time, plumbing in. Not only was food problematic in London, plumbing is weird. You know, the hot and the cold. What the. Come on, guys. What the hell is that? But this had american style plumbing and it had an incredible shower. A steam shower. It was amazing. Just amazing. And because it was near Harrods, it was little, two and a half blocks from. It was in Knightsburg, two and a half blocks from Harrods. When Helen was in country, my wife, my english wife, uh, well, Harrods became our commissary, the food halls at Harrods. [00:21:45] Speaker B: Well, you know, Alan, I lived on the other side of Harrods, and my english wife also loved the fact that we were only two blocks away from Harrods. In fact, I learned to really be happy that we were only two blocks away from Harrods as well. [00:22:00] Speaker A: Indeed. It was incredibly advantageous. It was. We all got to live in a great place. London is a wonderful place to call home. It's a wonderful place to work. It was. It was a real joy living there. [00:22:12] Speaker C: Yeah. I was the only one that didn't go into central London. I stayed kneeling. You remember, I was seven blocks from the studio, and I would joke. I would joke with lisa that I was in my flat while she was still waiting for her taxicab. I wanted to be close by, but. [00:22:29] Speaker A: You'Ve always been a very practical person. You are incredibly practical. We were there in the winter. [00:22:37] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, I got there. I got there the third week in October, and I left the first week of April. I was there six months. And the one thing I'll never forget is that the sun came out three days in January. [00:22:51] Speaker A: That was it. [00:22:55] Speaker B: Well, you know, that goes way back to ancient times when they first called it United Kingdom. Before they had that title for the country. They. They were going to call it three days in the winter. They decided not to do that. [00:23:07] Speaker C: Some of the things that I remember the most is just it would be dark when we came to work, and it'd be dark when we left. [00:23:12] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. [00:23:14] Speaker C: And the way those offices were set up at Eland, we, you know, we were below ground. We just had that little tiny window, and it felt sometimes like, you know, I only saw the sun on Saturdays and Sundays. [00:23:25] Speaker D: Right. [00:23:26] Speaker C: We had a lot of problems setting up. You know, it was just hard to understand the differences in the work ethic. And I don't mean that disrespectfully, just culturally, they look at it very differently. [00:23:38] Speaker A: Talk about that. [00:23:39] Speaker C: All right, well, I mean, for example, I remember just like, the first or second week you guys are there, we tried to order food from this one specific restaurant, and our poor pa came back and just said, sorry. They just said, none of it comes that way because we tried to order, like, you know, no lettuce on this, extra this. And they were like, no, we'd just rather not make it. We're just not going to do it. Do you remember that, Gil? They came back. Oh, yeah, we can't have lunch. We can't have lunch because they won't make it without cheese. [00:24:10] Speaker B: That's why the greasy indian takeout became very popular. [00:24:14] Speaker C: The very first. Yeah, the very first that you and Gil went out to set and saw the craft services table, and it was just like, literally tea and a couple of biscuits. [00:24:24] Speaker A: Well, we've talked about that. When we. Among the first people that we hired was Malcolm Christopher to be our production manager. Malcolm came with a pedigree. He had done an english american co production, I forget the name of it, but he had worked with us in the past and seemed to understand how to speak to us and relate to us. [00:24:50] Speaker B: And he was recommended by HBO. [00:24:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. A Covington cross was the show that Malcolm had done. All right, so Malcolm, I remember we were having. He had said, all right, so when the lads come in in the morning, we'll give them, you know, tea, of course, but with the biscuits, if you. If you put out the tins, the lads will take more than one. So he was suggesting not to hand them a biscuit when they came and leave it at that. Never put the tin out because they might eat more than one. This was a radically different way of thinking of a craft services table, for references sake. Our idea of a craft services table was not Joel's idea of a craft services table. He referred to our table as gum and water. [00:25:46] Speaker D: Do you remember the choices for breakfast on the truck? There wasn't a choice. [00:25:53] Speaker A: There wasn't a choice. [00:25:55] Speaker D: Beans, a banger and some sliced tomatoes. Yes, that was it. There was no, like, a breakfast burrito. There was. Oh, gosh, they just. Yeah, it was like. Like prison. [00:26:10] Speaker C: You know? And again, that wasn't. That wasn't unique to the show, because the very first time I went to London, we stayed at a b and b and first morning up, we go down for the breakfast and, you know, the lad says, egg and bacon. We're like, sure, sounds good. Had the egg, had the bacon. Next day he comes down, egg and bacon. I'm like, okay, yeah, sure, third day, egg and bacon. It's like, you got anything else? We got bacon and eggs. [00:26:37] Speaker A: They used to have spam on the menu, but that's gone now. [00:26:40] Speaker B: Once we went to full breakfast, we saved a lot of money on the biscuits in the tins. [00:26:46] Speaker A: Yeah, we had a strange relationship with Malcolm, and then Malcolm, as we tried to get him to understand how we were going to do the show, I don't know that Malcolm ever quite grasped it. [00:27:02] Speaker B: I don't think he ever wanted to grasp it. I think that was the problem. More so than him grasping it. I think he just washing, you know, entrenched in the way he did things and that was the way it was going to happen, period. That wasn't working for us. [00:27:15] Speaker A: Yeah, no, we bumped into another difference the first day of construction. Now, you and I, Gil, were used to walking out onto the set, whatever warehouse space that we worked in Los Angeles. Our construction crew, you know, your crews would show up in their pickup trucks, Greg, and, you know, in the back of their pickups are lots and lots of tools that we're paying box rentals for. [00:27:49] Speaker B: I think I know what's coming, Alan. [00:27:51] Speaker A: Our expectation is, since we were doing the same show, this is a different place, that the english construction crew would show up, get out of their pickup trucks, reach into the tools in the back of their pickup trucks, and head on on, head into the stage to start working. But of course, that's not what happened there. The construction crew got off the tube with nothing in their hands, and they walk onto the stage looking for, hey, we're here to work. Where are the tools? Now, the way that we suddenly grasped that this was happening, Washington, there was a lack of sound. There was. There was a sound that you were. You were. That was missing, you. [00:28:35] Speaker D: Guilt. [00:28:36] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Well, I had a conversation, I think. I think, with the production manager, with Malcolm. Malcolm? And I said, where's the first wall? Can't they put one wall up? Two walls up? And he said, well, they will. They'll get to it. And I said, well. Well, why isn't it up already? And he said, well, you know, they got to get their hammers and they got to get the penny nails, and then they got to, you know. And I said, no, no, no, don't. Where are the makitas? And he would look at me and he said, what? The makitas. You know, makita. Am I saying it wrong? I think it's, you know, it's like a staple gun. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. The wall's up. And he looked at me and he went, there. There's no such thing as bang, bang, bang. Here, we take the penny nails and we bang, bang, bang them into the wood. [00:29:24] Speaker C: When you came into my office and told Glenn and I that story, you actually. You actually drew it out. You're like, they're out there and they're doing this. [00:29:33] Speaker B: I did. I can't believe you remember that. [00:29:41] Speaker A: Oh, my God. Yeah. [00:29:43] Speaker B: When I talked to malcolm, I was going like this. A makita, you know, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. You know, it's a. It's a staple gun. Bang, bang, bang. He was looking at me like I was. I was crazy. [00:29:53] Speaker A: It was crazy for us to be building sets like that anyway. I mean, that's not how tv shows operated. In most other tv shows, they used a system called speed rail to build their sets. So we were off into some bizarre territory that was taking too long, and there was no way that we could keep to our normal pattern of construction versus locations. We were completely overtaxing our ability to build sets, weren't we? [00:30:24] Speaker D: I don't remember it being that drastic. At least when I was there, the learning curve there was that they don't throw away anything. So you end up, like, if I wanted to build. Like, I remember building the hotel room for Elizabeth McGovern. With Elizabeth McGovern episode, we had some weird. And, you know, we had to get a lot of walls that were already built. So it's a very different process where, like, if you needed, you know, an elizabethan room, you could go and rent it and they'd deliver it and they just put it up. But we never, never threw away anything. They never threw away a set like here. You know, we just fill dumpsters and take them to the thing that never happened there. They would stretch, you know, burlap. They call it hessian on the walls and plaster it, then just take it off and reuse the wall. So it was a whole new way of building sets from my end of it, what I remember. [00:31:24] Speaker B: And it didn't allow us the speed that we were normally doing in the States. Right? [00:31:29] Speaker D: No, there was not nowhere near as fast. [00:31:31] Speaker C: Right. [00:31:32] Speaker A: And we didn't have a night crew working, did we? [00:31:35] Speaker D: No, no. [00:31:37] Speaker C: The culture shock was just so different because it's. And it's not a bad thing. It's just. It's a different work ethic completely. It's about just making enough to get you to back to your family and friends and enjoying your weekend, enjoying your life, you know, spending more time with your kids. And it's not. It's not this american thing that we have where you have to work 14, 16 hours every single day. [00:32:01] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:01] Speaker C: You know, and it was. It was. In some ways, it's. It's very cool to see in other ways. It was frustrating for us because we thought there was some more efficiencies that we could take advantage of. [00:32:12] Speaker D: That's why they make so many projects. There's so many projects over there. I mean, all the big movies are over there. The big tv series are over there. [00:32:21] Speaker A: In the commissary there. Everyone had lunch. There was also a pub on site. Yeah, it was all connected, and it was what our crew expected. I think it was the same way in Canada, too, was that, hey, you could go to lunch and you'd have a beer. You go back to work. It's not a question. And of course, for us, this was completely outside of our way of thinking in every way, shape or form. And so it created a bit of a problem for us. Because Malcolm, he figured he could never hire a crew that would not be allowed to drink at lunch. But we didn't want to make. We just didn't want that. And so we cut a deal, didn't we? [00:33:04] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. We rewrote the deal memo to say where it used to say, no smoking or drinking. Sorry, no drinking or doing drugs. It's like, no doing drugs, but you can go to the canteen on the property to have one, one beer at lunch. I mean, literally, it said that. [00:33:23] Speaker A: You were not happy about that, Gila. [00:33:26] Speaker B: I was not happy about that at all. But, you know, we learned. [00:33:34] Speaker A: At the end of the day, our crew had bigger problems than just a beer at lunch. They had the food buses when we. [00:33:42] Speaker B: Were dealing with, in actual fact, thinking it through now, I think we should have had them have a minimum of three beers before they came back. [00:33:49] Speaker A: Now he says, drink more, boys. [00:33:53] Speaker C: But so much of it, Alan, was just that it was so different. I mean, just the stage itself, if you remember, the stages were built before there were big trucks, so we had that. Everything was. Remember, Greg? Everything was like a two ton or a three ton in there. [00:34:07] Speaker D: Tiny little trucks. [00:34:09] Speaker C: Yeah. And this, what they called, you know, their, their warehouses, their stores, you know, they had to be accessed by, basically minivans moving over to a larger truck. I mean, we couldn't even have a regular steak bed. They were too, those were too big. I remember they were all like mini trucks. And I remember thinking, what are they going to do? If they need, like a 20 foot ladder on location, there's no truck that can take it. [00:34:32] Speaker B: In the morning, we had to have a, I think it was a ten or a 15 minutes tea break. And then in the afternoon, it was also a ten or 15 minutes tea break where the tea cart would come out. It wasn't there all the time, but it would just come out for the break. You have a cup of tea, have a biscuit, and then we'd go back to work. [00:34:49] Speaker C: Right? Yeah. [00:34:52] Speaker B: And everything would stop. It wasn't like, okay, it's here if you have a, you know, go get your tea, but we're gonna continue shooting. No life stopped, no french hours. [00:35:01] Speaker C: And I remember we were close to the first day of shooting, and we were behind Greg, you remember? And Dominic went out and pulled the crew if they wanted to work overtime. And, you know, it had to be unanimous. [00:35:14] Speaker B: Right. And they said no. [00:35:15] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Several times they did say no. [00:35:18] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:35:19] Speaker A: It's kind of the same problem that we bumped into in Canada in a way, you know, they, they don't live to work. They, they work to live. They have, they have a healthier attitude. It turns out once we got up and running at Ealing, we, the executive offices needed to have some help. We needed an assistant and we ended up hiring this kid. He was 1718 at the time. How old was Glenn? [00:35:49] Speaker C: Just turned 18. [00:35:50] Speaker A: Glenn had just turned 18. [00:35:51] Speaker C: He was just turned 18. [00:35:53] Speaker A: He grew up in Hertsfordshire, I think. [00:35:57] Speaker C: Yep. Well, in Garden City. [00:35:59] Speaker A: His dad. Big in the printing business. [00:36:03] Speaker C: Yes. A good printing company that actually did work for both the Sultan of Brunei and the Queen. [00:36:10] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So he came from a really interesting place. He was a film fanatic and he was, he was so much. There was nothing quite like him. And so we hired Glenn to be our, our all purpose, the executive office assistant. One of the first things that we wanted to do was to get some coffee for our coffee machine. And so we sent young Glenn out into Ealing proper, down onto the Ealing high street, the main road, and there was a witards coffee shop. We said, glenn, go buy some coffee beans for us. And he looked at us like a dog that doesn't understand, like what he said, beans. We said, yeah, you're going to go and you'll, you know, different kinds of beans and you'll get. And he still was stuck in beans. Yeah, yeah, coffee beans, he said, but coffee comes from beans. And he. [00:37:17] Speaker C: Very good, Alan. That was very good. [00:37:19] Speaker A: He had grown up thinking that coffee came, it was an instant beverage that came from a jar. You put some into a cup, poured some hot water onto it, boom, there's your coffee. And so we educated Glenn. It was the first thing I think we taught him about the world outside the little Hertzfriture bubble that he'd grown up in. That coffee indeed came from beans. [00:37:42] Speaker C: I wanted to just relay one story as to how we actually ended up with Glenn because we had hired a assistant before him. And if you remember, when we got the studio, they told us there was tall Dave, Big Dave and Glynn. Those were the three that were initially presented to us. And I hired Paul Tall Dave. I remember hiring him because I couldn't meet Glenn. I had met big Dave and he already had his position at the studio, but they offered him to us as a Pa. And tall Dave was very excited and said he loved the show. He was able to list characters. But on the first day of work, tall Dave came up to me at 04:00 and said, when we finish, mate, when we finish. And I'm like, well, probably seven he goes, I got band practice at six. Wait, wait, what? I said, okay, you can go. And so he went to band practice the next day again, about 05:00. Remember this guy? He's like, what time are we getting off today? I was like, yeah, probably around 07:00. He goes, I was meeting my mates at the pub. I'm like, do you understand what the job is here? Do you understand what we do? And he's like, yeah, yeah, it's okay, you know, it's just. [00:38:48] Speaker B: Just. [00:38:48] Speaker C: I'll be fine. I'm like, okay, same thing the next day. It's like, what time we getting off today? I said, around seven. He goes, I got brand practice. Can I leave? I said, yeah, you can leave. Just don't come back tomorrow. And that's why we ended up with Glenn. And I remember when. When we actually hired him the first day. He goes, oh, I'm so glad you got rid of that wanker, tall Dave. He's a wanker. [00:39:13] Speaker A: We had access to great locations. [00:39:16] Speaker D: Oh, yeah. [00:39:17] Speaker A: I mean, that was one of the incredible advantages to being there in addition to acting. [00:39:22] Speaker D: You don't know how many times I've bragged to people. Like, I got up in the morning and we went on a tech scout to Dover Castle. [00:39:29] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:39:30] Speaker D: Stood on top of the keep and stared across the channel and saw. And France is right there. Yeah, we're scouting Dover Castle. We're shooting at Dover Castle. [00:39:40] Speaker C: And it snowed. It snowed at Dover Castle. [00:39:42] Speaker A: Yes, it was. [00:39:43] Speaker D: The whole thing was incredible. [00:39:47] Speaker A: Dover Castle rises above the white cliffs of Dover, overlooking the English Channel. Built shortly after the norman invasion of 1066, the castle is featured in lots of English. Dorney Court was another really cool location that. [00:40:08] Speaker C: Didn't we also shoot at NEb Worth? [00:40:11] Speaker D: Yes. [00:40:11] Speaker C: Yeah, we shot a kneadworth as well. [00:40:13] Speaker D: Do you remember the. The hotel and the Russell McAhee episode? The circular? [00:40:19] Speaker A: Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. [00:40:21] Speaker C: Didn't we name it the Adler Hotel? [00:40:23] Speaker D: I think so. [00:40:24] Speaker C: I think so. [00:40:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:40:25] Speaker D: Yeah. That was a fantastic location. [00:40:28] Speaker B: But all of those places had something in common. They were all damp and really cold. [00:40:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember Dorney Court. That had an amazing history. The house is still owned. The man who owns it, a blood relative of the man who basically built the house. Dorney Court in Buckinghamshire is close to Heathrow Airport. The manor house was built in 1440, but the original Dorney manor is recorded in the Domesday book. Written in 1086. The house got passed from family to family until 1542, when William Garrard, Lord Mayor of London, bought it. Garrard was an ancestor of the Palmer family that still owns Dorney Court today. Talk about an inheritance. There was. There was a secret little room inside Dorney Court. You remember that? That room, the. [00:41:26] Speaker D: I remember a few of them. [00:41:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:41:29] Speaker A: There was one where you. You opened the door and it was completely internal room. There were no windows, and the room was about 1520 degrees colder. And you got the. Man, it was the creepiest, super creepy. Oh, my God. [00:41:47] Speaker D: It was chills up your spine that. That room. I remember that. Yeah, yeah. [00:41:54] Speaker A: I'm not making it up. [00:41:55] Speaker D: The attic was unbelievable there because it used to house like Cromwell's troops used to live in the top of the attic during the Civil War. That was amazing house. [00:42:09] Speaker A: And we're making our little tv show there. Yeah, there were great locations all around London. It was just hard to get to them because moving a film unit around London was not easy and expensive and time consuming because, you know, big trucks, small streets. [00:42:27] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:42:28] Speaker B: That's why a lot of the times going to these castles made a lot of sense because we could pre do everything pre the drivers over there the day before and get everything going. So, yeah, I. A lot of times we got out of town because of that. [00:42:41] Speaker A: Yeah. That is what we figured out over the course of. After a couple of episodes, we finally got wise and we stopped building so much, and we just started just more location and a lot less building. It just. That was ultimately cheaper and faster. And that's what they do. I think. They've got every location you could possibly want. And so, yeah, why build when you can go? And so we ended up adapting to them. It's pretty much what we did. We stopped doing it our way and we ended up doing it their way. We got to a point. We realized a couple things. One, that Malcolm was. Malcolm had no idea where we were. He had no idea how to solve the problems that we were having. We literally did not know where we were in terms of the money that we had and the money that we were spending. And for us, this was incredibly foreign territory because we were always keenly aware, down to the penny, where we were, the hot cost, come in. And, man, we were really moment to moment managing the show so as to stay on time and on budget. And here we were completely at sea. We had no idea. And Malcolm couldn't do anything to fix it. We had to get someone who could, who could seize this by the. By the balls and help us. So we fired. [00:44:09] Speaker B: How did we find Dominic? [00:44:14] Speaker A: After I fired Malcolm and then his accountant, I think this was a Donner connection. And I think Donner connected us to Malcolm. He said. He suggested that we call Dominic. I. You were. You were cutting in Los Angeles at that particular point. [00:44:32] Speaker B: Right? [00:44:33] Speaker A: And so I had lunch with Dominic. Dominic was he. He was such a lovely. He was a lovely man. And you just felt immediately, he knows what he's talking about. [00:44:43] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:44:44] Speaker C: And I have a recollection, Alan, of you and I, while Gil was gone, talking to the accountant and Lisa Kim together. And they gave us a number like 110,000 pounds. We were over in prep. It was some big number for us. And we were still. We still hadn't started. Weren't close to started shooting yet. And that's when it became, oh, shit. All hands on deck. We got to make a change. I remember a number like 110,000 pounds. [00:45:11] Speaker A: And no one really could explain why or where that was. And the numbers themselves weren't believable. And so we didn't know who to trust, what to trust. And Malcolm, he would just. He couldn't answer the question. So really, he was the organizing principle. He was how we were going to get this done. And if he couldn't do it, then we were completely fucked. [00:45:35] Speaker C: One recollection of Malcolm is him always saying, don't worry, guys. It's going to be fine. Don't worry. Don't worry. It's going to be okay. Don't worry. It's going to be okay. [00:45:42] Speaker A: We're like. [00:45:42] Speaker C: We're worried. Thank you very much. We're worried. I. [00:45:45] Speaker A: In fact, we're gonna have another biscuit. We're so fucking worried. One of the advantages to shooting crypt in London was it opened the door to actors we could never have had access to before. Dirty little secret. Tales from the crypt paid for shit. No shit. We paid everyone. Guild minimum, plus 10% to cover the cost of their agents. Not a penny more. No one did crypt expecting to get rich. They did it because they would get to play parts they might not get to play otherwise. HBO was great to work for. They let us do our work with minimal interference. But like I said, they were cheap. When we were shooting in LA, HBO wouldn't fly in actors based outside of the country. But when we left the country and suddenly had access to all those great actors we couldn't get before, oh, it was wonderful. Bob Hoskins, Natasha Richards, Elizabeth McGovern, Ewan McGregor, Jane Horrocks, Steve Coogan, Imelda Stone, Eddie Izzard, and future James Bond. Daniel Craig. Like I said, wonderful. [00:46:46] Speaker B: We were sort of like the mouse that roared, you know, we came over there, this little tv show, and we just started calling everybody, you know, under the sun and just saying, hey, come on, do the show. And some people said no, but many people said yes. [00:46:58] Speaker C: And what I. One other thing I took away from all of that, Alan Gilgreg, is that I was shocked how many times we would reach out to somebody via their managers or agents or publicist even, and then the actual actor would be the one that would call us back. It wouldn't be the manager or the agent. It would be the actual actor saying, yeah, I can't do it. I'm sorry. I know the show. I like the show. They'd quote episodes to me just to say they couldn't do it, but it would be them, not any kind of intermediary, which would never happen. [00:47:30] Speaker B: That's what happened with Roger Moore. Yeah, because I didn't speak to him. I spoke to, I think, a manager and agent, and then two days later, you know, Roger Moore's on the phone for you. I'm like, what? I don't know a Roger Moore. Who's that? [00:47:44] Speaker C: Yeah. When Glenn told me that Daniel D. Lewis was on the phone for me, I hung up. I thought he was. I thought he was taking the piss, you know, I was sure he was messing with me. [00:47:54] Speaker B: We didn't realize when we went there how difficult it was for people to work in England. I remember Roger Moore having a conversation with him on the phone, and when I told him where we were, he said, oh, no, I'm in Switzerland. You should come to Switzerland and shoot an episode here. I can do that. I can't come to the UK. I can't work in the UK. And the same reaction from Louis Gilbert. [00:48:17] Speaker C: Louis Gilbert, Phil Collins. Same thing. [00:48:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:48:22] Speaker A: There were a lot of guys, a lot of talented people who couldn't work for us because of their tax situation. [00:48:28] Speaker C: Right. [00:48:29] Speaker B: Yeah. They wanted. They said, oh, if you go back to LA, I'll come to LA. I'd love to do one in LA. [00:48:34] Speaker A: So there were some. Some people that we had dreamed of getting that we could not get. A few that we came close to getting. Anyway, we. I know you were in Con. You had a conversation with Alec Guinness. With Alec Guinness or his people. We tried very hard to get. To get him for an episode, and we almost came. [00:48:52] Speaker B: We almost got there. We really almost got there. I don't really. I don't recall what the problem was ultimately. It might have been scheduled. [00:48:59] Speaker A: I vaguely remember something about his son not being well for some reason. That's. [00:49:06] Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds right. That sounds right, now that you say it. [00:49:09] Speaker C: The other one I remember we almost got was Dame Judi Dench, but she couldn't because of scheduling. [00:49:14] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:49:14] Speaker C: You remember, Gil, she contacted you and actually apologized because she was so busy. [00:49:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:49:19] Speaker A: Damn. [00:49:20] Speaker C: So lovely. She was so lovely. [00:49:22] Speaker A: We tried very hard to get Mark Knopfler to score an episode. [00:49:28] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:49:29] Speaker A: Couldn't quite get there. [00:49:31] Speaker C: We tried for Daniel Day Lewis, but he was doing a kids play in Newcastle, which blew me away. [00:49:37] Speaker A: Didn't we talk to Danny Boyle? [00:49:40] Speaker B: Yes, we did. [00:49:41] Speaker C: I still have his cell phone number in my phone. [00:49:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:49:46] Speaker B: I think he may have moved, Ed. I think he may have moved since then. [00:49:49] Speaker C: Three or four times, probably. Yeah. [00:49:51] Speaker A: We would travel back and forth, and one of the luxuries of our travel was that it was paid for by the company and it was virgin first class. And, man, that was great. Traveling up front on the virgin planes, going through the virgin's lounge at Heathrow airport was always great fun. That was a thrill. The entertainment system on Virgin had some really cool stuff, and we got turned on to a guy named Steve Coogan who did a character named Alan Partridge. And we, as we, Scott and Scott and I were just obsessed with the Alan Partridge character. And nobody back in America knew who Steve Coogan was at that point, but we insisted we had to hire Steve Coogan. And so, you know, because we were there and nobody argued with us, we got to hire Steve Coogan. You know, for us, that was exciting. Hey, I think we. We kind of anticipated Steve Coogan being as big as he. As he's gotten. We also saw, oh, who's that guy? He became the most recent James Bond. What was his name again? [00:51:00] Speaker C: Daniel Craig. [00:51:01] Speaker A: Daniel Craig, yeah, yeah, yeah. We also. We hired a young guy named Daniel Craig who did a bit part for us. Freddie Francis directed the Hammer Tales from the Crypt feature film, which is, if you've never seen it, it's funny because it's not even remotely funny, and that's why it's funny. They took the comic book so literally, they missed the humor completely. And it's kind of fun and funny to watch simply because it's so utterly humorless. But Freddie was a great classic horror director. He directed a lot of the great Hammer films. And so having Freddie Francis direct an episode of Tales from the Crypt was. [00:51:53] Speaker C: Poetic, I suppose you guys remember he came in lunch at day four saying, I'm done. And we're like, wait, we're not ready to start the other episode yet. He finished it early. [00:52:03] Speaker A: You remember I forgot that completely on day four. [00:52:08] Speaker C: He finished it at lunch. [00:52:11] Speaker A: How did he do that? Do you remember? I mean, he used to like the. [00:52:16] Speaker C: He used to have this phrase, I like the space, not the face. [00:52:19] Speaker A: And so everything. Yeah. It was kind of that flat lighting. [00:52:22] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And then, so wherever the camera went, I mean, you didn't have to relight. [00:52:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:52:28] Speaker C: Season. You can tell which episodes Chris DP'd and which ones Robin DP'd without looking at the credits because Chris's are very moody and nuanced and Robins are very flat, you know, very, very british. And both for the stories. [00:52:42] Speaker D: I remember Alan Hume, wasn't he involved? I remember being on a scout with Freddie Francis and Alan Hume. I mean, Alan Hume shot all the Star wars movies, the first three very. And I remember them having this great repartee because they're, they're very famous Academy Award winning cinematographers. Alan Hume, it says here on the IMDb, shot two episodes in England of Tales from the Crypt with us. [00:53:11] Speaker C: Wow. [00:53:12] Speaker A: All right, so you did go on a, on a recce with Freddie Francis and Alan Hume, two of the most. [00:53:19] Speaker D: Famous british cinematographers of the last 50 years in the band. It was, it was fantastic. It was a fantastic lunch and scout because Alan Hume was shooting Freddie Francis's episode and they just were bickering about lighting and how they were. But it was all done in this great fun english way of super fast. I would question for that, you know, that kind of thing. But it was. The guy did six James Bond movies. [00:53:50] Speaker A: Yeah. And tells from the crypt. Do you remember Joel's visit? [00:53:58] Speaker C: I was just talking about Joel's visit yesterday because a dear friend of mine just came back from London and they stayed at the Dorchester. They were there for a film, the film premiere of John Wake four. And I said, you know, Joel Silver came to visit us when we were in London and he stayed at the Georchester and he had a, a Bentley that drove him around. And at the very end of it, after ten days, he gave us the bill. [00:54:26] Speaker A: Of course he did. Of course he did. [00:54:28] Speaker C: And it was like, I don't know if you remember, Gil was like 6000 pounds. I mean, it was a big freaking number. [00:54:33] Speaker B: Right. [00:54:34] Speaker C: In 96 or whatever it was. [00:54:37] Speaker A: I think you were in Los Angeles while he was in London, Gil. [00:54:43] Speaker B: That's why I don't remember it. That's. [00:54:44] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. Oh, no, he came in. He came in like a. I remember, yes. Like a tasmanian devil. I mean, he came in and he had us get in that Bentley and he was trying to get Michael Douglas to do a show for him. So he said, I'll just have the Bentley for two days. I need to impress Michael Douglas. And five days later, the Bentley was still there. The company was calling us. And Joel said, it's okay. It's okay. I'll be fine. And he had the suite at the Dorchester and Karen was with him. And he rang up this massive bill. And I remember him just laying it down on the desk saying, yeah, you guys got to take care of this. [00:55:23] Speaker B: Luckily, I was in LA dealing with the movie, but at least I was with Bob Zemeckis, at least. [00:55:31] Speaker C: And Glenn spent two days looking for grape Snapple for him. Because Joel was a grape Snapple guy. [00:55:37] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:55:38] Speaker A: Where did Glenn finally find a sufficient grape? [00:55:42] Speaker C: He found it on the east side of London at a train station store. You know, like those little bodegas they have. And they asked him, how many do you want? He said, all of them. He brought back a case. [00:55:56] Speaker B: He also commented that that place knew what coffee beans were, at least among. [00:56:01] Speaker A: The things that Joel threw when he came to through London. He. He threw a party at Michael Kamen's house and he invited Scott, and Scott invited me. And what I heard was a dinner at Michael Kamen's house with Joel. And I did not have the stomach for it. And so I begged off and I said, I just don't. I just. No, thanks anyway, Scott. But I just. [00:56:30] Speaker C: No, not feeling it. [00:56:31] Speaker A: And there were three other guests that night at dinner. Annie Lennox, Kate Bush. Oh, and there was one other singer that. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. So fucking stupid. [00:56:53] Speaker B: I would have flown back from England for that. From laden. [00:56:57] Speaker A: Yeah. I turned down dinner with, with Annie Lennox and Kate Bush. [00:57:03] Speaker C: Greg, I don't remember getting invited to that. [00:57:06] Speaker D: I don't. [00:57:06] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, me neither. [00:57:10] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:57:13] Speaker B: I will say, I will comment on Cayman. Cayman was like the. The nicest, most talented musician I've ever worked with, I think. Such a sweet man and. And such a talented guy. [00:57:26] Speaker D: The other thing that was a great thing. There were. The plastering department was just a whole other level of ability. As far as I remember. We had to make some tunnels for the Dover Castle set. And we were putting it together and this guy went in and he was just a master, you know, craftsmande. I swear, like, within an hour, I had these beautiful hand done plaster tunnels that I was just like, if we were in LA, you know, I'd be like, oh, we got to get a foam company. We got a. You know, it'd be a whole lot bigger deal. [00:58:06] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:58:06] Speaker A: What was he making them out of? [00:58:08] Speaker D: He literally was just, like, taking, like, rags and, you know, it was almost like. Like a plaster of Paris sort of thing. And I throwing plaster and shaping it and just real stream of consciousness sort of artwork just going through it. And it just, you know, within an hour or so, there was, like, a 20 foot tunnel. I was just. I remember thinking how remarkable that was. That was something that was really different. And also, I thought that the. We had very good paint teams. You know, I liked the way they were, the aging and, you know, we did. We had a lot of fun with the sets. I thought. I mean, I only did the first three, and. But they are. They were all three really different. [00:58:52] Speaker C: Building on what Greg said, once we got it straightened out, once we started shooting, I remember actually being pretty impressed with the crew because you. You and Gil would sometimes leave early and leave me to close. And we didn't do a lot of late nights. There wasn't a lot of times where I had to call you and say, geez, we're going into our 13th hour, you know, can we keep going? Do you want me to pull the plug? [00:59:13] Speaker A: Very efficient. Super efficient. [00:59:14] Speaker C: You guys would finish in 8910 hours, 11 hours at the most. I don't remember us doing a lot of overtime, a lot of late nights, a lot of fraternities, anything like that. [00:59:24] Speaker B: I do remember that as we went further into it, it just. It got smoother. And in terms of just the production of it and finishing the work and getting the performances, it just. It did. It did level out a little bit. [00:59:37] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:59:38] Speaker A: Yeah. If anything, that the. Watching Bordello have more and more problems. At what point did they change our release date for Bordello? It was while we were in London, wasn't it? [00:59:51] Speaker B: I don't remember. [00:59:53] Speaker A: It was. There was a bad feeling in our stomachs coming from Bordello, because it just. I don't know, something just wasn't coming together the way that it should have. It was always fraught. I think that also. Well, I think Bordello colored a lot. How could it not? I wish the episodes themselves had been. I wish the writing had been better. And that was my. It was my department. [01:00:19] Speaker C: So, Mia, when I think back of that whole period, it's almost 50 50 with the work and the off work stuff in London, because to me, the big upside was actually being in London. I didn't know anybody. There was only six of us there from the states. [01:00:35] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [01:00:36] Speaker C: So I really took advantage of it. I mean, I remember my first six or seven weekends on Saturday, I would literally get up, take the first bus that left in front of my flat, and would just take it to wherever it ended with my little a to z guide. And then I would just jump on another one, another bus, and just follow at sea. And I got to know the city pretty darn well. And I always say that working on a tv show, anytime you go into a city, you end up kind of learning the city more than even a lot of locals, because between all the tech scouts and all the location scouts, you hit so many different neighborhoods. Obviously, in a place like London, it's much bigger. But if I go to a place like Shreveport or Austin, Texas, to work, you get to know the city so well. And I felt that way this time in London, not because of the work, but the time off I had and being in this great new city, and I really getting to explore. And so for me, you know, as much as I enjoyed working on the show, the other half of it for me was just getting to be in London every weekend. I still remember a wonderful dinner that I had with Gil and Jeanette at a restaurant called coast. And back then, it was like the only decent restaurant. Coast. Coast that was a regular for you and Jeanette. [01:01:50] Speaker B: And was that. Was that near Green park? [01:01:53] Speaker C: Yes, yes. Near the. Near the Athenaeum? Yes. Right around the corner from the Athenaeum. Absolutely. [01:02:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:02:01] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:02:01] Speaker A: Super, super restaurant. Yeah. [01:02:04] Speaker C: I don't know. I don't know if it's still there, but it wouldn't know. It wasn't there. Sorry. It's not there because I wanted to take Michelle to it when we went last time, but it wasn't there. [01:02:13] Speaker A: Not surprising. That's a tough business. [01:02:15] Speaker C: But there are some good restaurants now in. In London. Do you remember that horrific Thanksgiving dinner we all went to? [01:02:22] Speaker D: Yes. [01:02:23] Speaker B: Oh, my God. [01:02:25] Speaker C: The worst ever. I stopped at Kentucky fried chicken on the way home because I was still hungry. [01:02:33] Speaker A: Where did we go for that? [01:02:35] Speaker C: It was some place that offered an american Thanksgiving, you remember? It was like. It was expensive. It was like 80 pounds. And it was sliced, shitty turkey with, I swear to God, the stuff that. [01:02:48] Speaker B: Was made of cardboard and the potatoes were fake. They were from a powder, I think. Remember? [01:02:58] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:02:58] Speaker B: And cranberry sauce. They had no idea what cranberry sauce was. [01:03:02] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. [01:03:03] Speaker B: I just remember holding up my slice of turkey and I could see through it. [01:03:07] Speaker A: It was a deli slice. [01:03:10] Speaker C: And we were all so excited because they said american Thanksgiving dinner, and it was just horrific. And it was like, it was expensive, like 60 70 pounds, if I remember correctly. A lot of money. [01:03:22] Speaker A: And that's not a holiday there. It's not like you're going to take a dude. That's like, we did that after work. [01:03:27] Speaker C: Yeah, american suckers there. Those are the kind of things I remember sometimes even more than the work is those things that we did, you know, away from the. [01:03:38] Speaker A: We had a Super bowl party. [01:03:42] Speaker C: Yes, we did. [01:03:44] Speaker A: I think it was at my flat. [01:03:45] Speaker B: Yes, it was at your flat. And we ordered indian food. [01:03:49] Speaker A: Yes. [01:03:50] Speaker B: And unfortunately, the Super bowl, because of the time change, in the middle of the night, was in the middle of the night. So we had. We got together, I think, at 10:00 at night, all this indian food. And by 02:00 in the morning, when the game started, everybody was fast asleep. [01:04:07] Speaker A: It wasn't quite the same. [01:04:09] Speaker B: And I remember vividly waking up thinking, oh, my God, I better fake it. So that. And as people came into the room and I was up, they would say, oh, and they had just gotten up. How's the game? I would say, oh, it's great. And I had no idea what had happened. [01:04:30] Speaker C: I think the only one who stayed awake was Glenn. [01:04:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:04:35] Speaker C: If you remember, he was into things. He. He didn't want to be british. He wanted to be american. You know, he had no desire to be british. And he would say that openly and loudly in front of other Brits. That would just piss him off. [01:04:47] Speaker D: I have fond memories of the weekend that Gil gave me his driver and car because he was going back to LA early. [01:04:53] Speaker A: Paul. [01:04:54] Speaker D: Paul. [01:04:55] Speaker C: I love that man. [01:04:57] Speaker D: He's yours. So I had a driver tooling me around London for. [01:05:04] Speaker A: For the weekend and a Mercedes. [01:05:07] Speaker D: Jaguar. [01:05:08] Speaker A: Oh, he had a. Oh, he used his jag for you. Oh, I only got the Mercedes. [01:05:11] Speaker C: Yeah, I got the. I got the Benz, too. Listen, before you guys got there, I don't know if you guys remember this, but before you guys got there, I had Paul to myself for two weeks. Paul was my driver the first two weeks I was there. And he would take me wherever I wanted to go. And I loved him. And I. Jen and I ended up having dinner at this house. His wife was lovely, and I kept in touch with him until he passed away. [01:05:34] Speaker A: When did he die? [01:05:36] Speaker C: About six years ago. [01:05:39] Speaker A: Sorry. [01:05:39] Speaker B: About six years ago, after we shot Jeanne's sister passed away. And we were coming back to England, and we were figuring out how are we going to get from here to here to here. And on the plane, we ran into Paul. [01:05:54] Speaker C: On the plane. [01:05:55] Speaker B: Yeah, he was coming back from LA, and we told him and he said, well, you know, I'll drive you around. What do you think you're going to do? You're going to, I'm going to do it. And we said, really? And he said, oh, yeah. And so he, you know, he took us to the funeral. He took us back to the house and everything. And over the course, I think it was three days we were there. And at the end, he gave me a bill for 600 pounds, which I paid. But I was like, what? [01:06:24] Speaker A: Well, okay. [01:06:26] Speaker B: I didn't realize he had passed. [01:06:28] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. But he was, he was like, I said, he was such a nice guy and he treated me so well. And I have always said that if I ever had stupid, stupid money, the one thing I'd have is a driver, because that was freaking awesome. [01:06:42] Speaker D: Yeah, I enjoyed it. [01:06:43] Speaker C: I mean, just, just the, I'd get up, I'd go downstairs, the athenaeum, he'd be out there waiting for me. And there was one day where I was trying to get to Dover Castle, and I was going to take the train, and Paul drove me to the train station. Remember this? And by the London traffic was so bad that by that time I got to pancrest or whatever the train station was, it didn't make sense to go. And so I told, I told, you know, Paul had dropped me off and he had gone back to the office. I took the train back to the studio and I beat him by 40. [01:07:12] Speaker D: We were planning to go to Amsterdam one weekend, and the chunnel strike, it was a strike that went on for like six weeks. [01:07:22] Speaker C: Yes. [01:07:23] Speaker D: And there was no, like, easy. I kept thinking, well, gotta just pop to Paris or something. [01:07:28] Speaker C: Yeah. I did a couple of weekend trips. I remember I did one to, uh, well, I had to go to, I had to leave to come back for my work permit. And, um, you guys sent me to Morocco. Or I chose to go to Morocco because they said you can go anywhere you want for a weekend. Just have to come back through Heathrow to get your work permit. So I went to Morocco for the weekend. I went to Paris a different weekend. I went to Dublin for a weekend on easyJet. I remember it was nine pounds each way. [01:07:55] Speaker A: Oh, my God. [01:07:56] Speaker C: It was crazy. Between easyjet and Ryanair, you could fly almost anywhere in Europe for 30 pounds. Couldn't take a bag. It was just my backpack. But I didn't care. I was just going there for a night. [01:08:07] Speaker A: It's nice getting per diem money. I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hell, took my wife Helen, took all of my perdilla money and banked it, and she had something in mind. And when we were finished with the show, we took a couple days in Paris, and using the per diem money alone, just the cash, we booked a suite at the Hotel de Crillon at the Place de la Concorde in Paris. One of the most. An incredibly expensive room. The first night we were there, there was some noise, and we complained, and they put us in an even better room. The rest of our stay, it was just. But stuff you could do with your per diem money and proximity to other places. [01:08:57] Speaker C: I don't know if you guys remember, but I had just moved. Janet and I just moved into the house on 65, and we were redoing it. And so I literally lived on my housing money and my per diem money, and I sent my paychecks. They just went home. [01:09:10] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [01:09:11] Speaker C: It all went home. I lived on a per diem and the travel and the housing money that we're given. And because, again, because I was in ealing, I was spending a little less than you guys were on housing. [01:09:20] Speaker A: Oh. [01:09:21] Speaker C: And everything else, I'm sure, money, it was, you know, I mean, the partners or HBO or. You guys were very good to us when it came to the travel money, and that helped considerably. I also love my little flat. I mean, it was. I'd never lived in an apartment before that, so that was interesting for me. [01:09:37] Speaker A: You had never lived in an apartment before? [01:09:38] Speaker C: No, I was. I bought my first house at 19. I've always been in a house. I've always been a house. That was my first time ever actually living in an apartment. It was great. I mean, I loved it. I mean, I was. I had. I had a domino's across the street that I would order so much for them. I would just raise my window up, call them on the phone, and they would. They would see me talking to them. It's like, I want the cheese. You know? They'd be like, okay, 30 minutes. Like, yep. They'd call me when they were walking across the street. I'd meet them downstairs. But I'm a creature of habit. I do the same shit, you know? So I had my. I would eat at Nando's, you know, once or twice a week. I had my domino's pizza. I had my little pub at the Ealing common tube stop. You know, I did the same things. [01:10:24] Speaker D: You know, there's a restaurant across the park from Ealing. [01:10:29] Speaker C: Say again? [01:10:30] Speaker D: A french restaurant that was across the park? [01:10:32] Speaker C: Yes, from Ealing. [01:10:34] Speaker D: I remember eating there a lot with the art department. [01:10:38] Speaker B: I remember being introduced to scotch by Alan. Single malt scotch while at the Athenaeum because they have a great. [01:10:44] Speaker A: Oh, yes. [01:10:45] Speaker B: Used to have a single malt scotch bar. I who knew nothing about scotch. My wife loves scotch and single malt, but I knew nothing. And I had. I didn't really want to know about it, but we would go into the bar, and Alan would order. He would say, taste this, and then taste this. And I go, yeah, why don't we go for some ice cream? [01:11:05] Speaker C: We wrapped. And, like, you and Greg and Gil and Scott and Lisa were gone, like, two days later. You guys couldn't wait to get the hell out. [01:11:15] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:11:18] Speaker C: I was there for another five weeks, and I remember thinking, those motherfuckers. [01:11:24] Speaker D: I got out shortly before Christmas that year. Remember, I always stayed for the first three. [01:11:28] Speaker C: Right. [01:11:29] Speaker D: And I remember that last month, I had not seen the sun. [01:11:33] Speaker C: Right, exactly. [01:11:35] Speaker D: It was crazy. Like, I was getting pretty depressed. [01:11:39] Speaker A: And the final verdict on our time in London. [01:11:42] Speaker C: It's still one of the best professional and personal experiences of my life. I mean, I just absolutely loved it. And I would do a show there again in a heartbeat if I got ever, it was ever offered to me. [01:11:51] Speaker D: Yeah. [01:11:52] Speaker A: Hear, hear. Ed, here, here. See you next time, everyone. The how not to make a movie podcast is executive produced by me, Alan Katz, by Gil Adler, and by Jason Stein. Our artwork was done by the amazing Jody Webster and Jason. Jody, along with Mando, are all the hosts of the fun and informative dads from the Crip podcast. Follow them for what my old pal the crypt keeper would have called terrific crip content.