Episode 3: “Welcome To Vancouver/Can We Go Home Yet?”

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This podcast is a collaboration between costart and Touchstone Productions and the Dads from the Crypt podcast. Hi, I'm Alan Katz. Welcome to the how not to make a movie podcast, the making of Bordello of Blood. This is episode three. Welcome to Vancouver, Yankee. [00:00:24] Speaker B: Go home. [00:00:25] Speaker A: Our story till now, the talented filmmakers behind HBO's tales from the Crypt, having successfully made the monster movie demon Knight, their first crypt branded feature film, started prepping a second crypt feature, a psychological thriller we all really wanted to make called Dead Easy, only to have it. [00:00:41] Speaker B: Pulled at the last second for a. [00:00:43] Speaker A: Movie none of us wanted to make called Bordello of Blood. Then, to compel matters, one of our executive producers, larger than life, Joel Silver, took the movie out of Los Angeles. [00:00:52] Speaker B: And sent it north to Vancouver. [00:00:54] Speaker A: Just to piss off the union representing our crew, he insisted on casting our three leads himself, Erica Oleniak, to play our female lead. Hey, that we understood. [00:01:04] Speaker B: Dennis Miller. However, to play our lead, well, that we didn't. [00:01:07] Speaker A: Still don't. Supermodel Angie Everhart to play our villain. We thought we understood. Angie was engaged to Sylvester Stallone. At the time, he was starring in assassins, a movie Joel was producing in Seattle, just across the border from Vancouver. Casting Angie, we were told, would make Sly happy. Angie could visit him in Seattle for the weekends. But Sly, alas, was being sly, and he wanted Angie to be in our movie for reasons more complicated than they appeared. One of the few things we got right was hiring Colleen Neistat as our canadian production manager, now a Vancouver city counselor. Colleen found us a huge studio space, 90,000 abandoned GM parts factory not far from downtown. And she put together a first rate crew, including a hard working, all female production staff. Our production staff were the ones who first took the calls from Seattle, asking us strange favors having to do with Angie. Production manager Colleen Neistat. [00:02:03] Speaker C: There was a lot of intrigue going on, without question, and not a lot of great communication. I remember the whole episode. I just don't recall specifically. [00:02:15] Speaker B: It was there in the air. Can we say? [00:02:18] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, without a doubt. [00:02:20] Speaker B: So the call had come in, and it wasn't like a secret that we were keeping it in the office. Pretty much everyone in the production office, once that call came in, everyone knew, and everyone was talking about it. [00:02:32] Speaker C: Yes, because if you remember, the production office was just the front office. And then we had, you know, it had been the old GMC parts building, and we had sets and stuff built in the back. So what was going on in the production office was just the front of house. It spread throughout the whole of the crew. [00:02:50] Speaker B: Before too, too long, everyone on the bordello of blood set was aware of what was happening on the assassin's set. [00:02:58] Speaker C: Certainly with respect to their relationship. Yes. [00:03:01] Speaker B: No one told Angie of our collective suspicions. [00:03:06] Speaker C: We didn't really have a close relationship with her at the. In the beginning, I think there was a bit of we're worried about getting too close because of that relationship that changed over the course of the show. I think people really warmed her to her over time. [00:03:21] Speaker B: You're a lovely person. That's what made it so hard to know something about her relationship that she didn't. [00:03:29] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:03:30] Speaker A: For the moment, Sly and Angie went back burner on the front burner, though we'd found a few great locations, including the glass church the script called for. We weren't finding much of what we needed. Our movie took place in the American south. You know, live oaks dripping with spanish moss. Something northerly. Vancouver, Canada, doesn't have much of production designer Greg Melton. [00:03:51] Speaker D: It still had a southern vibe to it. Right. Bordello blood. [00:03:55] Speaker E: Yeah. [00:03:56] Speaker D: So you're trying to, like, hold on to that stuff, and there's nothing up there like that, you know? So, you know, as I got into it, I realized that we're gonna have to build a lot more than I thought. You know, like the bar. As I recall, there was a bar that we ended up building. I remember scouting, and we kept finding, like, pubs and things with cut glass, you know, nothing that looked southern. You know? I'm like, okay, well, I guess we're building that, too. [00:04:26] Speaker B: But, you know, nothing. Nothing in the story really is southern. It was set there, but there's nothing in the story that makes any of that stuff mandatory. There's nothing organically southern about it to. [00:04:38] Speaker D: Hang our hat on. You know what I mean? Let's pick a spot and at least try to pull it off. I mean, we all knew we wanted this old southern mansion. [00:04:51] Speaker B: It's funny we're having this conversation now. I don't think we ever had this conversation then, if you ask me. Where is this taking place? Point to a spot on the map. I couldn't have done that then. [00:05:02] Speaker D: Yeah. As I recall, everything we did, we tried to make. You know, I remember we were hanging moss and trees, weren't we? I mean, we were. [00:05:10] Speaker B: You know, we were trying to make it the movie we wanted to make. [00:05:15] Speaker D: Yeah. You know, we were. We. Yeah, I. [00:05:18] Speaker B: How sad for us. [00:05:19] Speaker D: Yeah. I don't know. It's like, it's 27 years ago. [00:05:22] Speaker B: I thought, that's aside from yourself in your department, did anyone else come up or did. [00:05:28] Speaker D: No. I had to put together an entire canadian art department, and at that point, it was really. [00:05:35] Speaker B: That was still before Vancouver had become. It was. It's always been a service town. It's not where anything originates, but it was still on the way to becoming. [00:05:46] Speaker F: Yeah. There was only a couple of shows at the time that we were there, not like the 20 or 30 that are there. [00:05:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:05:52] Speaker A: Ed Tapio was Gill's assistant and so much more. These days. He's a producer in his own right. As we speak, he's producing all american. [00:06:00] Speaker B: Homecoming coming on the CW, and it wasn't deep. It was. Yeah, yeah. [00:06:05] Speaker F: If you remember, too. I don't know. I don't know what the art department was like, Greg, but we had problem holding on to people in every single department. People would come in for two weeks and leave for another show because we had five weeks left, and they had eight weeks left. [00:06:19] Speaker D: That's always constant. I haven't been up to Canada in a long time, but I remember that always being the problem on any show, whether I was in Toronto or Vancouver or whatever, that's always a problem. There is people leaving. [00:06:32] Speaker A: Of course. Loyalty is a two way street, and did we really expect our canadian crew to be more loyal to this project than we were, to be generous? Bordello wasn't a script where you could invest much in the characters. The Bob Z and Bob Gale who wrote Bordello, they weren't yet the two bobs who would write back to the future. One, two, and three. They were film students, and that's what they wrote. Like who the characters were inside their skins didn't matter, and three weeks wasn't going to give us enough time to make it matter. [00:07:00] Speaker B: Contemplated how we approached the rewriting of that script. There was really nowhere to go. Our natural inclination was to invest as deeply as we could in the characters, but there were no place to go with the characters there. There's the Ralph Goodman character, who is a small town private detective. All right, reality. We got to remember this was written by two college students with limited knowledge of reality. And so the reality is a small town detective is not going to have a ton of work to do on a regular basis. What does he do with the rest of his time? We certainly didn't invest, I don't think a thought, in wondering where he came from. I never. I don't think I ever thought for 2 seconds. All right, where was he born? [00:07:51] Speaker E: Yeah. What's his backstory? [00:07:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I know. I. The only backstory, the only backstory that we had time to worry about was the one that connected him in some fashion to Erica's character. [00:08:04] Speaker E: Right, exactly. [00:08:05] Speaker B: And. [00:08:06] Speaker E: And that was. That was a push. [00:08:09] Speaker B: Oh, a push. A push. A push of a boulder up the hill, and the boulder rolls down on your headland. [00:08:15] Speaker E: Right. You know what I've really learned over all those years since that the most enjoyable part of working on these shows was working with you and the writing. [00:08:27] Speaker B: Thank you. [00:08:27] Speaker E: And I really mean that because the truth be told, you did more of the writing than I did. But the way we did it, I thought, was very unique because it was almost like two theater guys putting on a little play for each other in the room with Sophie the dog watching. And we would act things out, and we would explore and discover stuff by acting it out. And, you know, you would say, well, what about? And I'd go, yeah, but then what happens if we did that or, you know, we did that, or. And it was just. It was a no ego involved situation between the two of us. We both wanted to make the best script we possibly could. And the process I found to be so enjoyable that I used to often leave our sessions and go back to the real world, where I have to balance my checkbook and pick up dog food and realize how much I enjoyed being in this make believe world. That it was all. Nobody knew about it except it was in your head and in my head. [00:09:28] Speaker B: Oh, it's the best high imaginable. When you do it yourself and you go off into that creative place, it's one thing, but when suddenly you're doing it with someone else, it's the oddest experience because you're both really transported to this other place that you couldn't tell you where it is, but it's as real and vital. And, hey, when it really suddenly kicks in, you don't write the characters. They speak through you, and you're just doing the typing. [00:09:59] Speaker E: So the experience for me with the writing was exceptional because I had you. I really mean that because it was just a situation where it wasn't an effort or I had to go to work every day, or I had to go meet this guy to write something. I would be jumping up and down, can't wait to get there. Even though sometimes we'd get there and we would look at each other and go, oh, do we really have to do this today? And, okay, how are we going to figure this out? It's still. At the end of the day was a place that was very unique from anything else I'd ever experienced and was just a joy. [00:10:38] Speaker B: I honestly, in my mind, we were Lenin and McCartney and the nature of that relationship. But really, truly, it wasn't like 50 50. Everyone wrote 50%, 50%. No, that wasn't the nature. Influence really was. Sometimes it was that the proximity. [00:10:57] Speaker A: In feature films, the director is God, and the writer, if they're lucky, has a chair with their name on it, maybe spelled correctly somewhere near the set. Jack Warner, one of the original Warner brothers, famously referred to all writers as schmucks with Underwoods. Underwoods were typewriters. They preceded computers. Never mind in tv, the power structure is the opposite of mood. With tv shows like tales from the crypt, the writer producer is God, and the director is more like a traffic cop. That's why, though Gill had directed plenty. [00:11:28] Speaker B: Of tv, from the feature perspective, he. [00:11:31] Speaker A: Was still a virgin. [00:11:32] Speaker E: I was on the plane coming back from New Orleans thinking, what am I going to do? You know, do I really like this movie that we never made and that we were in New Orleans with? And I don't really remember. I didn't even know the script yet of Bordello, and, you know, what was I going to do now? I turned down the first tales from the crip movie, and if I figured if I turned down the second one, there may not be a third one, and if there is a third one, they might say, you know, screw you. You turned down the first two. So the question was, do I want. Do I want to direct or not? And I thought, yeah, I'd like to give it a try. I'd like to see if I. You know, at the very least, I've always approached these things as making me a better producer. [00:12:11] Speaker B: Sure. [00:12:12] Speaker E: So I figured, okay, if I directed the movie, you know, I'll learn something from the experience that'll make me a better producer at the very least. [00:12:20] Speaker B: But you had directed three episodes of crypt up to that point. [00:12:23] Speaker E: Yeah, I had directed Freddy's nightmares, tales from the crypt. Yeah. And I. I really enjoyed the process and I really enjoyed working with the actors. [00:12:31] Speaker B: And the episodes were all right. I'm kind of biased because we wrote them, but, you know. But really and truly, death is some salesman is a great. It's a great episode. [00:12:40] Speaker E: Yeah. [00:12:41] Speaker B: That's a daring outside the box episode. [00:12:43] Speaker E: Yeah. And what's cooking, I think, was nominated for an Ace award. [00:12:47] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:12:48] Speaker E: So we did. We did well, and we thought maybe. Maybe there's something here. And so on the plane coming back, I sort of decided, through thick or through thin, I'm going to stay with this and do it. And so, and then it was just, you know, the frustrations and the angst of the reality of what we had to do to get to that point with a script that we weren't totally committed to. [00:13:13] Speaker B: How did you approach directing it? I mean, at the end of the day, there would have been a thematic way to approach dead easy because it would have demanded it. The nature of the material would have demanded a holistic approach to our creativity. I don't know if they've ever asked you this question. How the hell did you approach directing that movie? [00:13:34] Speaker E: With, I think. I think two things I always approached. Even when I did the early days in Freddy's nightmares and then ultimately in tales from the crypt, I always approached it from the point of view of first music. I always tried to figure out what's going to be the music for the piece, and that would help me with the rhythm and the tone. But when we did what's cooking? And we had this idea of early Louis Armstrong. [00:14:01] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. [00:14:02] Speaker E: And I remember I was really into early Louis Armstrong. And for some reason, I just kept hearing Louie Armstrong, as we were. [00:14:09] Speaker B: Blues. [00:14:10] Speaker E: Yeah, I just. I just kept hearing that. And it certainly worked really well for the. For that episode, I thought so. So the music. Going back to your question, the music was really the first thing that I think about or try to figure out, like, what am I. What am I hearing? What. What should it be? And then from that, that sort of establishes, okay, what's the rhythm? And then from that, you know, sort of the tone was in the script, but it's also embellished by the music. So I really look at that. That's the first thing I look at. Then from that, I look at, okay, looking at the rhythm. What scenes are important for the rhythm of the piece to maintain itself, whether it's fast or slow. It doesn't. It's not a question of, okay, I need to tell this. Fasten certain pieces, you want to embellish and you want them to grow, and you want them to an audience to enjoy more than others. There are some scenes, I think I call them connective tissue scenes, where I got to show you how he got from the car into the house. Because you got to know, I can't just cut from the car. How do you get into the house? I don't want to spend a lot of energy or time or money shooting that, but I got to have that. So I really approached it as sort of a weighted average, I would weigh my time to what's important to the storytelling and what's connect this connective tissue kind of material. And I would say, okay, the connective tissue, I have to get. I got to get it well, but I got to get it fast. And this other endemic to the storytelling or to the characters or to the relationship or to the emotion of the characters, I got to give that more time. And that was really how I approached the shooting and how much time we would give to it. [00:15:49] Speaker B: Would you describe it as a theatrical approach? [00:15:52] Speaker E: I'm not sure I know what that means. I mean, from a theater point of. [00:15:55] Speaker B: View, you were less concerned with how the scene looked than with how the scene played. [00:16:00] Speaker E: Oh, of course. Of course. To me, it's all about the emotionality of those characters and the relationship. We always tried to think of where could you put the camera that no one else has put the camera. [00:16:10] Speaker B: Sure. [00:16:10] Speaker E: And of course, you know, I would beat myself up for days. And I think you experienced some of that with me. You know, where can I put the camera? And ultimately, you put it where you think it tells the best story and reveals the most about what you're trying to depict. But that was the hardest part for me, was creating the shots, because every shot that I would think of, I would say, there must be a better. [00:16:33] Speaker A: One with the clock running. The only character not officially cast yet was Catherine, Erica Laniak's part. We still had time for our four key supporting roles. We cast four terrific actors, starting with as our televangelist, Reverend Current, Chris Sarandon. Hey, Princess Bride. Great get. Phil Fondacaro as the televangelist's henchman. [00:16:53] Speaker E: Phil, he auditioned for us, and I thought he did a great job. And we both said, let's use this guy. He's great. He's a good actor. [00:17:01] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:17:02] Speaker E: And he was. He did a great job. [00:17:04] Speaker A: We cast Corey Felden as Catherine's brother Caleb, and Aubrey Morris as the mortuary owner. For the smaller roles, we hired canadian actors. [00:17:12] Speaker B: Corey Feldman was kind of family, right? But Corey, incredibly professional. [00:17:20] Speaker E: Corey was. Corey was a real find, in my opinion, because, you know, we first heard about Corey from Dick Donner. And Dick, you know, mentioned to us that he was sort of family and we should talk to him. We should consider him. And I remember meeting with Corey in LA and having a really candid conversation with him about it and saying, look, this means a lot to me. Yeah, it's the first time I feature, and I don't want to I don't want to have problems, you know, on the screen and off the screen. I don't mind conversations. I don't mind conflict with you about character or interpretation or any of that stuff. That's all good. But I don't want to have issues with you because of outside influences. And at the time he was, I think, I wasn't sure if he was an AA or not. And he just became delightful to work with. [00:18:07] Speaker B: Agree. [00:18:08] Speaker E: Sarandon was fantastic, too. [00:18:10] Speaker B: Yeah, lovely. Lovely. [00:18:13] Speaker E: Yeah, I loved working with him. I really loved working with him. [00:18:16] Speaker B: We also brought up Aubrey Morris. [00:18:18] Speaker E: Well, I think Aubrey quite often. I mean, we became really good friends. And when he passed away, you know, it was a real downer for us, although he was pretty up there in age. But Aubrey was just one of these guys who had done a lot of stuff in England, had done a lot of horror in England. To me, he was a very recognizable face. And I just thought it was very special that he wanted to do our movie. [00:18:47] Speaker B: It's funny, I became friendly with Aubrey as well. And we used to have lunch and Aubrey told the most amazing stories. Now, I was a drama major. I studied George Bernard Shaw. And Aubrey told me a story one day when he was at the young Vic as a young actor, and he's doing arms in the man and Shaw is in the audience one night and Shaw comes backstage after the performance to tell him what a delight he was and took him out and tried to get in his pants. Well, you know, you gotta. First of all, Aubrey, before he was in our movie and he was in Clockwork Orange. [00:19:39] Speaker E: Yes. [00:19:39] Speaker B: And movie maven than I am, movie buff that I am. Clockwork Orange is just one of the huge movies now in doing tales from the crypt. We got to work with Malcolm. [00:19:51] Speaker A: Yes. [00:19:51] Speaker B: Yes. We got to work with Malcolm. And that was a pleasure. He did a great episode. Reluctant vampire. Terrific episode. It is such an incredible thrill to work with the actors who are in the movies that mean so much to you. And Aubrey also plays a very terrific part in Clockwork Orange. He's Mister deltoid. Little Alex. A parole officer. [00:20:16] Speaker E: Yeah. [00:20:16] Speaker B: And there's just a. He's got some. He's great. He's over the top. He's. When. It's funny. I met Aubrey in LA via a friend. We had a mutual friend and we went to her little memorial service together and bumped into. I met him there and we became friendly and when he was always calling me, looking for a part. And so when the opportunity to cast him in Bordello came along I was thrilled to put Auffy's name forward and say, yeah, he should be the mortuary guy. [00:20:58] Speaker E: Yeah, he was great. He was a great choice. [00:21:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, he's so creepy. [00:21:03] Speaker A: Three weeks have now sped by. We're wary of a few potential weaknesses. [00:21:07] Speaker E: Oddly enough, I wasn't worried about the relationship with the crew because I felt we had gotten some really good people to be, you know, to work with us. So it wasn't a question of, okay, well, will we be ready? Although that was. It's always a problem on a daily basis, not on an overall. Okay, we've got three weeks. Well, we used to take five days to prep a half hour of tales from the crypt. So part of me thought, well, you know, it's like three tales from the crypts. We have three weeks, then we shoot. And also, we don't have to reveal and know everything in the first day of shooting because we're continuing for the next few weeks to shoot. And we can find things along the way. Not as easy to do because you can't prep it and you can't figure out the shots as easily, but it's doable. So I was worried about just about everything. [00:21:59] Speaker B: Were you worried about special effects and makeup? [00:22:03] Speaker E: I'm always worried about special effects and makeup because, you know, if the special effects and makeup don't work really well, then people are pulled out of the movie. Once they're pulled out of the movie, in my opinion, it's over. You've lost them. So I really needed to make sure that they were done very well. And we used the guy on tell some of the crypt a lot named Todd Masters. And we used him again on this movie. [00:22:26] Speaker B: We didn't start with Todd. [00:22:29] Speaker E: No, we didn't. But we wound up with Todd. [00:22:31] Speaker B: We wound up with Todd. [00:22:32] Speaker A: I. [00:22:33] Speaker B: We gave, initially, we gave the job to a local talent. [00:22:37] Speaker E: Yes. That didn't work out so well. [00:22:40] Speaker A: Our small canadian effects team brought everything they had to the table. Problem was, we were asking for more than they could do at the time. We were setting everyone up for failure. Yet as principal photography finally began on a Thursday, we felt a kind of hopefulness, the kind one always feels at the start of something. [00:22:58] Speaker B: I don't know of anyone else who does this, but you've always liked to start shooting, whether a tv show or feature film, on a Thursday, if you. [00:23:04] Speaker E: On a Thursday, you can. [00:23:05] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:23:05] Speaker E: Yeah. And there's a reason to my madness. I mean, I thought a lot about it because most people start on Monday, and I always felt, well, you know, Monday you're sort of. You don't get till the weekend for five days to regroup. What happens if we started on a Thursday and we had the opportunity to work for two days and we could see if the crew is working out, or maybe we need to talk to somebody, or maybe we need to replace somebody, and after two days, we could get a better sense of how the shooting is going, and maybe we need to make an adjustment to the script and so you can use the weekend to make a lot of adjustments. Plus, psychologically, I've always felt that after you worked for the two days and had the two days off for that weekend, when you came back on Monday, something gelled, and the crew was your crew, and they were on this movie, and it wasn't just another, you know, whatever. Now, maybe that was a little, you know, silly of me, but on the other hand, I did feel like, you know, by Monday, we were. We were a group, and we weren't looking to find ourselves. We did that on Thursday and Friday. [00:24:12] Speaker B: In a way, it's weird. The weekend played a funny joke on one's mind. It made the relationship feel longer. [00:24:19] Speaker E: Yeah, because you. [00:24:20] Speaker B: Well, you'd already been through a weekend, so, hey, I guess we must have worked all week, didn't we? [00:24:24] Speaker E: Right. And so. And so when you come back on Monday, people know people's names. It's not the first day of shooting, so it's not like you're groping for names and you're groping for what's happening. It's sort of. For me, it always shortcut the cohesion. [00:24:40] Speaker B: Everything seemed copacetic the first two days. [00:24:43] Speaker E: Yeah, we should have stopped right then. [00:24:46] Speaker B: We were actually kind of upbeat at that point. I think we thought, oh, well, muddle through. We'll make the best of not the happiest situations. But, you know, we. All right. We didn't have Erica in hand yet, but we had Dennis and, hey, okay. We were committed to it. We had Angie and what the hell? And we were making a movie, and Vancouver was lovely. It was nice being there. And it. Yeah, we were making a movie, and so the whole world seemed to feel right. [00:25:17] Speaker E: Okay. [00:25:17] Speaker B: Yeah, right enough, anyway. And then the weekend came. There's a picture that I have. One of our wives took it. We went out on the Saturday for brunch, the four of us. You, Jeanette, me, Helen. And as soon as we sat down, your phone rang and my phone rang. You know, the big, massive cell phones up to our heads. Sure. Irradiating our brains. And I don't know what fire you were putting out? But I was putting out the. We got to get Erika Aleniak on a plane tomorrow, Sunday, to be in wardrobe Monday, to work on Tuesday. [00:25:55] Speaker E: Right. [00:25:56] Speaker B: And her manager, whose name I can't remember, I'll have to ask Victoria. Her manager was telling me that there was a problem, that Erica had big issues with the script, and she was not going to get on an airplane unless we committed to making significant changes to the script. [00:26:16] Speaker E: Correct. [00:26:17] Speaker B: She didn't want to play hookers or sexy lady. [00:26:21] Speaker E: She didn't want to be a sexy lady. [00:26:23] Speaker B: Yeah, she wanted to be more of an actress. For some reason. The title page on the script we sent her said Hamlet. I don't know why we did that. So she said yes to Hamlet, and then we said, oh, we're just kidding. It's called bordello of blood. That must be what happened. Her manager insisted that her. Her concern. Yeah. Originally, as written, this little church secretary had a secret past. She had been a porn star named Chesty O'Toole. God, it hurt. [00:27:02] Speaker E: It's kind of painful going back through this, you know? [00:27:05] Speaker B: Well, it actually hurt to say that. Oh, God, yes. And she did not want to play initially. She did not want her character to be a former porn star. Well, that was going to be a problem because the script is written. That was her connection to Dennis's character. That's how he was going to know her. If we take this away, what are we going to do to accommodate that? And, hey, we've already. We had a movie theater, an empty movie theater in the worst part of Vancouver, an empty movie theater that we were using as his office. And the whole premise, this was already happening. The whole premise was, of course, that he was. He was in the porno. And she justi O'Toole was his favorite porno actress. If you take that away, what are we. What are we going to do then? [00:27:56] Speaker E: You have Hamlet. [00:27:57] Speaker B: What does she do? What does she sell him? She sells him insurance. In the end, what she. What her manager agreed to was that she had been a large woman and she had been an overweight porn star named Chubby O'Toole. Or. [00:28:17] Speaker E: Yeah, I think it was Chubby. I think it was Chubby O'Toole. [00:28:20] Speaker B: So. But. And she, of course, now she was unrecognizable because she had slimmed down. And this is what we agreed to. Now, of course, at this point, I will agree to anything to get her on an airplane. Anything, because literally the man has us over a barrel. There's nothing we can do that is the fire that I put out. And that created a whole other set of nightmare scenarios because that can help get. The script was now going to get rewritten on Sunday with, because this was going to ripple all the way through the script. And of course, we were going to have to introduce Dennis to the idea that his character, Chubby hubby. [00:29:01] Speaker E: Now you like Chubby? [00:29:03] Speaker B: I mean, what we were going to hand the man in that script the next day was becoming ludicrous. [00:29:09] Speaker E: Well, the fire, if I recall correctly, the fire that I was putting out. [00:29:13] Speaker B: Thank you. [00:29:14] Speaker E: I was on the phone with Joel and he said to me, you got to call Dennis because Dennis needs to talk to you, and he has a lot of concerns and demands, and you need to agree to the demands. I said, what demands? He goes, well, I'll let Dennis tell you. Now, I think Joel had already heard the demands and I don't think he wanted to tell me. But be that as it may, I get on the phone with Dennis, and Dennis is saying to me stuff like, well, first of all, I only work an eight hour day. I don't work longer than 8 hours. And I said, no, no, Dennis, we're making a movie here. Everybody works at least a twelve hour job. [00:29:54] Speaker B: Paying you a million dollars. We're paying you a million dollars. Wait a minute, that was not in your contract, son, that you only have to work 8 hours a day for your million bucks. [00:30:06] Speaker E: So that was the first thing. That was the problem, and I wouldn't agree to it. Then. The second problem was he needed a private jethe to bring him back and forth because he was doing his show on HBO Friday night. So we needed to provide him with a private jet to take him. And he would only work a half a day on Friday and take him down for his show and then would bring him back, not on over the weekend or Sunday, but the jet wouldn't leave until Monday morning, so we couldn't get him on the set, which was starting at 06:00 or 07:00 in the morning. He wouldn't be able to join us till twelve or one, which I didn't agree to then he wanted his own makeup person, his own hair person, which I didn't agree to. And I mean, that was the conversation when I called Joel back saying, I don't think this is going to work. He would say stuff like, oh, no, it's got to work. We got Dennis. Dennis is doing a movie. You got to figure this out. [00:30:58] Speaker B: The weekend comes to an end, the script gets rewritten and distributed. Erica Leniak is playing chubby secretary who used to be chubby O'Toole. We're on location at the Orange, the. [00:31:09] Speaker A: Number five orange, to be exact. Still in business. [00:31:11] Speaker B: I remember sitting out in the parking lot where trapped services, and we were feeding people, and the trailers were. And Dennis arrives and we meet Dennis for the first time. What were your first impressions of Dennis? [00:31:24] Speaker E: Well, after the conversation I had with him on the weekend, I had my dukes up. I was ready to do battle. You know, I was very defensive. Nothing had been resolved except his money, and I didn't have any say in that. That was. That was fatal. [00:31:36] Speaker B: Complete. [00:31:37] Speaker E: Yeah. So I didn't. I still had no idea about the plane. I still. But more importantly, I didn't really care so much about the plane except for who's going to pay for it. But I was concerned about the amount of time that I had to work with him because he was in almost every scene. And so to say, he's going to leave half a day on Friday and leave half a day on Monday and only work an eight hour day. There was no way that I could do it. [00:32:01] Speaker B: How would you even board that? [00:32:04] Speaker E: Right. So I guess I went into that first day with Dennis very defensive and really upset and not sure how I was going to deal with it. How would it all work its way out? So it wasn't the best way to start a movie. [00:32:17] Speaker B: When you first met him face to face, was it contentious? [00:32:22] Speaker E: You know, I don't really recall all that. I just remember I was very defensive because of what happened over the weekend. [00:32:28] Speaker C: I. [00:32:28] Speaker E: And I was waiting for more battle about that. And I think he basically left that. And I don't think our initial conversations, you know, once he came to the set and once he got up to Vancouver, were about that. I think we talked a little bit about wardrobe. I think we talked about how he doesn't like makeup. He doesn't want to use makeup. And I said, I don't want you to use makeup. I want you to do some. I want you to look good on camera. So that's the kind of makeup I want for you. I don't want you to be made up in any way. And I guess he was sort of agreeable to that because he could control that once he got into the chair. [00:33:03] Speaker B: Hey, you know, Joel Gray cabaret. That's what we're thinking, dude. [00:33:07] Speaker E: Yeah. Right. [00:33:08] Speaker B: When. When I met Dennis the first time, we actually hit it off. Okay. In an interpersonal way. He made a joke. He referenced, you know, Dennis part of his comedy stylings is just obtuse, obscure reference. And he referenced a character actor named Burt Remsen. And I knew who that was. I responded as if I got his reference, and Dennis looked at me and he said, catsy. All right, Catsy. Which became my name. From then on, I was just Catsye. And I handed Dennis the script. I said, all right, cool, cool. Hey, I felt like, hey, okay. Hey, maybe this is going to work out. Maybe this relationship could go places. Hey, maybe this is going to work out after all. And I hand him the script, and he opens it, and he looks at the first line of dialogue that's written for him, and he says, I can't say that. If you look at the line, it wasn't written really for Dennis. We really didn't write it with Dennis in mind. We were just trying to write it just to make the damn story work. It was hard to fill Rafe's character with lots of pithy dialogue, because who was he as a character? He didn't make any sense. It's not like you could, you know, write his character had nothing to say. [00:34:27] Speaker E: Yeah. [00:34:28] Speaker B: And, yeah, that was kind of reflected on the page. So when. When your actor says, well, I am saying that, it's not like I'm going to go rush to the dialogue's defense and say, damn you. You've got to say every word in this script. I'm GB Shaw. Don't you understand? [00:34:41] Speaker E: Yeah. It was more like, what do you. [00:34:42] Speaker B: Have in mind when the first thing that your lead actor says is, I'm not saying a word that you've written. And I know that he looks at the script as being poorly written. And it's not like we can argue because we can't point to the script and go, it's gems, man. It's gold. Because it wasn't. [00:35:05] Speaker E: We should have introduced him to Erica, because then she could have convinced him that it was Hamlet. [00:35:09] Speaker B: Hey, there you go. And somewhere would have fallen somewhere between the two. [00:35:13] Speaker E: Right? [00:35:14] Speaker B: And so Dennis, he said, there, look, I'm going to. I'm going to improvise all my dialogue, is what he said. There was no. There was no way to say no. Right off the bat, we kind of lost Dennis. [00:35:28] Speaker E: He was only doing it for the million bucks. [00:35:30] Speaker B: Because Joel said yes to the million dollars. [00:35:32] Speaker E: Yeah. [00:35:33] Speaker B: If Joel had gone. Are you out of your mind? [00:35:35] Speaker E: Right. [00:35:36] Speaker B: No one's paying you a million dollars to do anything. We would have moved on from Dennis. But it was saying yes to that demand. And I'm sure Dennis said, give me a million dollars, figuring no one in their right mind would say yes. [00:35:49] Speaker E: Correct. [00:35:50] Speaker B: And yet there we were. [00:35:52] Speaker A: If only meeting Dennis had been the day's one challenge. As Dennis headed to the hotel, someone else was planning to visit our set. [00:36:00] Speaker B: Did you know Joel was coming that day? Let's start there. [00:36:03] Speaker E: Well, I guess the true answer is no. I had no idea that he was coming, but it was probably my own fault that he came, because I kept saying to him, Joel, I don't understand. You're in Seattle with Stallone and Dick Donner. Dick Donner is an established director. I'm not. This is my first movie. Yet you choose to be in Washington, in Seattle with Stallone. I can't believe that. And with Donner, he goes, what are you talking about? You've directed tales from the crypt, and you've directed this, and I trust you, and you know what you're doing. I know, Joel, but it would mean a lot to me if you can, you know, you come up here. Okay, I'll come up. I'll come up. I'll get there. I'll get there and I'll go. Yeah. When are you going to get there? You'll always have an excuse not to get here. I think you should come up. I think it would mean a lot to me if you came up. I think it would mean a lot to see you on the set and for the crew, for the cast and everybody. [00:36:52] Speaker B: Really? [00:36:53] Speaker E: Yeah, and I really wanted him to come up, so I could have. No, but I really wanted him to come up so I personally, I could have a conversation with him about replacing Dennis. [00:37:03] Speaker B: I did not know that I real. [00:37:05] Speaker E: That's what I really wanted. Because this was the first day. Right. [00:37:11] Speaker B: Did you have a. Did you have something in your pocket in terms of who we would now that we're shooting? [00:37:18] Speaker E: I think I did then, but I can't remember who it might have been. And it probably was somebody that it was in the family. It was either someone who did tales with us or someone that had worked with Joel, somebody that we could call him. [00:37:29] Speaker B: Yeah, there were plenty of people who certainly would have been. Could have. Not better than Dennis. [00:37:35] Speaker E: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm shooting, I'm working, and I figured it fell on deaf ears. And now we're shooting on first day, the phone rings, and they tell me it's Joel. And I go tell him I can't talk to him, I'm directing a movie. So they hang up, and five minutes later, the phone rings. Is Joel. He's got to talk to you. So I go, okay. I go, Joel, I'm directing a movie. I can't really talk to you while I'm directing a movie. Does dick. You know, you're standing there, so in between shots, he can talk to you. I'm a first time director. I don't have the time or the inclination. I got to concentrate on what I'm doing. What do you want? And he goes, I just want to tell you I'm coming to visit. When? Today. Today? What do you mean today? I'm coming up to see you today. But there's a problem. I said, what's the problem? I've left. I'm on the plane already. I don't have my passport. I go, well, Joel, turn around and come tomorrow, because you can't cross the border without a passport. You can't get into any country without a passport. He goes, no, no, no. You need to call Canada and tell them I'm coming and tell them to let me in. [00:38:38] Speaker F: I seriously remember Gil handing me the cell phone, covering it like this, and saying, joel says, we have to call Canada. Who in Canada are we supposed to call? [00:38:51] Speaker E: I mean, I was like. I mean, he said. [00:38:54] Speaker F: He said, gil, you told me, who in Canada are we supposed to call? And then you got back on the phone, right? [00:39:02] Speaker E: And so I go, Joel, there's nobody. There's no Canada to call this. There's nobody. There's no Canada. There's immigration. Immigration won't let you into the country. It's really that simple. Just go back, get your passport, and come tomorrow or in a few days. No, no, no. I'm already in the air. I'm on my way. I'll be landing in about 25 minutes. Just call Canada and tell them, let me in. I go, and again, I say the same thing, and he goes, well, if they don't let me in, I'm going to pull a movie, tell them I'm spending millions of dollars on this production, and if they don't let me in, I'm going to pull the movie out of there. And I go, Joel, they don't care about our movie. They don't care how much we're spending on how much we're not spending. They're there to protect the borders. You know, they represent the country. And I said, look, I can't take care of. I can't call anybody. I'm busy shooting. I can't do this. And I think we hung up. [00:39:48] Speaker F: Then he called me and did the same thing with me that he had just said with you. Literally the exact same stuff. [00:39:56] Speaker B: I didn't work with him. Maybe it'll work with you. [00:39:58] Speaker F: And I went back to the office, and somehow Colleen had found out. And at that point, Colleen is almost running down the hallway saying, joel Silver's coming. Joel Silver's coming. We don't have any grape snapple. [00:40:13] Speaker B: Grape snapple. [00:40:15] Speaker F: Because somebody had told her that he'd always insisted on having grape snapple. [00:40:19] Speaker E: I'm sure glad that didn't make its way to the set. [00:40:23] Speaker B: Is that true? Was Joel a grape Snapple guy? [00:40:28] Speaker F: Oh, my God. In London? You don't remember? In London? I sent Glenn out for a day and a half to find grape Snapple before Joel showed up, and he couldn't find it. He was gone a day and a half, and he finally found it, like, in east London somewhere and brought back the whole case. [00:40:42] Speaker B: I have. [00:40:43] Speaker F: Lynn loves telling that story because he finally found it at a train, one of those little bodegas they have at the train stations. And he goes, you have grape snapple? And the guy said, yeah, how much you want? And Glenn said, all of it. [00:40:59] Speaker B: When he. When he arrived at Vancouver airport without any identification, he didn't even have a driver's license. [00:41:06] Speaker E: Right? Nothing. [00:41:07] Speaker B: And the pajamas. Our first ad on Bordello was named Lee Knipperberg, and Lee's nickname for Joel was the pajamator, or because he was canadian, he said the pajamator. Just now. Joel lands at the Vancouver International Airport in a private plane because it was. He didn't. [00:41:30] Speaker C: Not the one that he was supposed to be, not the one that we had the information on the travel memo and that we'd assigned the driver to. [00:41:37] Speaker B: Okay, so he's changed. He's landing on a different plane than we expect. He lands at the airport, and when he approaches canadian customs, they say, papers, and his response is, don't you know who I am to it? [00:41:52] Speaker C: He didn't even have a driver's license. He didn't have anything. [00:41:55] Speaker B: Nothing. [00:41:56] Speaker C: And so I. Of course, I'm the product. I get the call. And because I deal with the border regularly as part of. Part of the job. And they. Anyhow, the punchline was he made their lives a living hell. And they just asked me, Colleen, will you vouch for him? And that's how we got him into the country. [00:42:16] Speaker E: Wow. I don't think I ever knew that. [00:42:18] Speaker B: Yeah, it was. It was. Colleen did that entirely on her say so, that she got Joel into the country. And so Joel gets into the van, and there was a plan. We wanted to show the boss, what we were doing. And so the first stop wasn't location. It was to show him our great production facility. And from the moment he got out of the van, he was a pit bull on a. [00:42:48] Speaker C: Nothing was good enough. He had a. Nothing was good enough. Everything was bad. He even hated the fact that, you know, my production company was called New City Productions, and it had a sign which was actually the lands. The skyline of Vancouver was the logo. And he was like, tear that down. Do this. He just walked through like a. Like a wrecking ball through the. And that was a big place. I been prepared to take him for, you know, walk around the studio. We had about 90,000 sqft, as you recall, and we had sets built all over it. And so, you know, my original plan was, when the executive producer arrives, we'll give him the tour of the facilities and. And go through the whole spiel, but he just isn't full on. You might have prepared us. [00:43:37] Speaker B: I got a call from my assistant, and she said, you better get over here right now. Everyone's quitting. And I went there, and Joel went through there like, really, like the tasmanian devil. And our entire production staff were female, and he had really. And canadian, you know, so they're really nice people on top of that. And. And Joel, literally, they were. There were some of our staff who were literally in the parking lot, about to get into their cars when I got there. And I begged them to stay. And they were crazy enough to listen to me, and they stayed. I don't know what I promised them that in no way could I deliver, but they stayed and by the hand. Then when I finally got to location, Joel was there and he was hanging with you, and it was like nothing happened. [00:44:25] Speaker E: Well, it wasn't like nothing happened. When he came onto the set, he was like, you know, he was ready to give it to me, too. Oh, sure. And he did. And we had. We had a bit of a to do, actually, in front of everybody, which I don't like doing, but I wasn't going to, you know, I wasn't going to let him roll over me. But what. [00:44:44] Speaker B: I mean, it didn't mean anything to him that he had just really. He had hurt. He had really hurt the morale of our office, our support staff went from whatever they thought of us before that moment. The whole way they thought of us changed in that moment. [00:45:03] Speaker E: Yeah. [00:45:03] Speaker B: Because of the way the. Joel blew through there. [00:45:07] Speaker E: Yeah. [00:45:08] Speaker B: And there wasn't much we could do to fix it, explain it. [00:45:12] Speaker E: Yeah. I think we just finished day one. [00:45:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it was. Yes. And it was a remarkable experience. But that was day three of our shoot, and. And we got to the end of it, and it was exhausting. And Joel had changed the whole. Really, the whole crew didn't look at us quite the same way anymore. In fact, the crew was already angry at us because Dennis. Dennis's schedule was going to make us change, flop our weekends. We were going to flip our weekends from, you know, because Dennis rehearsed on Thursday, shot on Friday. So. So that became our weekend. And our Monday was Saturday. And our canadian crew, that's not the deal they made. And it was on again. It was. Colleen went to the mattresses for. She put a reputation on the line and said, look, do this for me, because that's not the deal her crew made. Americans, we live to work. They work to live. [00:46:14] Speaker E: Yeah. Yeah. [00:46:15] Speaker B: So by the time Dennis arrived and by the time Joel arrived on our Sethe, strangely, all the good feelings from the weekend. Well, Friday. By the time I got to Saturday, it was already a mess. But the first two days seemed kind of hopeful. And by the time we got to Monday, I think we had a better sense of where this ship was headed. Well, I don't think we knew for certain where this was headed, but if only we had paid closer attention, we might have had a little more advanced warning what was coming. [00:46:56] Speaker A: Why? Something wicked, of course. It's a horror movie, isn't it? On the next episode of the how not to make a movie podcast, we settle in for the long haul. Our team gets busy while sly Stallone gets even busier. And it slowly dawns on us why making horror movies this far north this time of year is really, really stupid. The how not to make a movie podcast is executive produced by me, Alan Katz, 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 Crypt podcast. Follow them for what my old pal the crypt keeper would have called terrific crypt content.