S3E37: Get Booped!

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This podcast is a collaboration between costart and Touchstone Productions and the Dads from the Crypt podcast. [00:00:11] Speaker B: Boop Boo Boo bew Boop Boop. [00:00:22] Speaker A: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the how not to make a movie podcast. I'm Alan Katzenhe. Gill will join us shortly. We've talked a little on this podcast about legacy families, families who've been in the film business across multiple generations. A few episodes back, we sat with our friend, director of photography and director John Leonetti, whose dad was a gaffer on classic movies like the wizard of Oz, and then opened a very successful movie equipment house that supplied the whole industry. Todays guest, Mark Fleischer, is part of an even bigger Hollywood legacy family because his family created characters known the world over, like Betty Boop. Marks grandfather, Max Fleischer, along with Marks uncle, Dave Fleischer, created Fleischer Studios in the 1930s, and forties Fleischer Studios and Walt Disney were the two big animation companies in Hollywood, and they very much competed with each other. Not only did Fleischer Studios create Betty Boot, and we'll talk about how that happened. They made Popeye a star and were the first to take Superman from the comic book page to the screen. Now, success in show business is never simple, alas, as this podcast has described on multiple occasions. And it wasn't simple for the Fleischers, either. And it didn't necessarily produce happiness all around. We'll talk about that, too. We'll also talk about Mark's father, Richard Fleischer, who was one of Hollywood's most versatile, talented, and successful directors ever. Richard Fleischer directed movies like 20,000 leagues under the sea, fantastic voyage, compulsion, narrow margin, Soylent green. Soylent Green is people. Amityville, three D, and Conan the destroyer across a very, very long career. Now, Mark and Gil have been friends for a long time. For a long time. Mark was Gil's entertainment lawyer. He was my entertainment lawyer, too, during the crypt years. We were all very successful together. These days, like I said, mark runs the family business. And what a business. Yeah, there are legacy families, and then there are the Fleischers. Boop boop it. Doop. There are legacy families, and then there are the Fleischers. And wow, what your family created. The fact that 100 years after its creation, it is still vibrant and speaks to contemporary culture. [00:03:02] Speaker B: Okay, fellas, key of g. What you're saying? Who is she? [00:03:12] Speaker C: Yes. [00:03:12] Speaker B: My cool system comes now. Here I go now. Cause the last time I look now I'm where I wanna be. Keep your hands in Miami son, I'm packing my damn knees. I'm where I wanna be. [00:03:32] Speaker A: Betty Booth is gonna be a musical on Broadway in 2025. [00:03:36] Speaker C: Yeah. Opens the grand opening. The public opening is April 5, and the preview performances start March 11 at the Broadhurst Theatre, which is right in the heart of Broadway. We've been working on this for many years. The thing that's really so extraordinary to me about this is that this will be the first time ever people will see a living Betty Boone. No one's ever seen this before. There's never been a real authorized show with Betty Boop lie. [00:04:21] Speaker A: That raises a really interesting question. How do you. Boy, how do you find an actress that fills Betty Boop's pointed, high heeled shoes? [00:04:35] Speaker C: Well, you do it by having a thunderbolt come out of heaven and strike you, which is what happened. And there was an actress who actually, we were always interested in, and we did several different type of run throughs in a year or two prior. And she actually played one of the parts in one of them, but not the Betty Boop part. And we were doing the tryouts for what we hoped would be the Broadway opening, but was actually for the Chicago previews, which ran last December, November, December. And we hadn't quite found our Betty Boop yet. And this young woman had come in a couple of times and, you know, she keep getting called back and things, you know, hadn't quite gelled. And it hadn't quite gelled, really, with anybody. And it was getting down to the wire because we needed to, you know, we were committed to the theater. We needed an actress. And I wasn't at the audition, but this young woman suddenly came alive. And more than alive, she captured the entire room. And her name is Jasmine Amy Rogers. [00:06:17] Speaker A: Jasmine Amy Rogers? [00:06:19] Speaker C: Yep. And, you know, Bill Haber and Jared Mitchell and everybody lives in the room. And David Foster, I think, might have been in LA and watched it remotely. We were just knocked out. And I got all these calls and we found her. We found our Betty boop. We found our Betty boop. And I saw the audition tape and I said, you're darn right we found her. My God, she's just fantastic. [00:06:49] Speaker A: It must have been quite a feeling, because it really. Casting can be really hard when you. Yeah, it's frequently. It's one of those things you can sort of, kind of describe it, but it's more like you'll know it when you see it and hear it. [00:07:04] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Kind of like having a medical emergency. It's hard to define, but you know it when it happens. And falling in love. Fell in love that day and never fell out. And the Chicago audiences and critics fell in love with her. Every single review that I can remember at some point said, a star is born. This is an incredible performer, and she just is absolutely wonderful. And she's a wonderful human being. She makes everyone around her feel comfortable and feel special and good. She's just a very generous person. [00:07:57] Speaker A: Say her name one more time. [00:07:59] Speaker C: It's Jasmine Amy Rogers. [00:08:03] Speaker A: And looking forward to seeing her on stage doing Betty Boop. [00:08:10] Speaker D: When do rehearsals start? Because you said the first preview is. [00:08:14] Speaker C: I haven't seen a production schedule yet, so I don't know all that. The dates. We would probably be loading in sometime. I think in January. There's a show that's where the Neil diamond show was, right? And there's a limited engagement coming in which was very critically acclaimed from Westside in London coming in. It's called the hills of California. And that's coming in for a limited engagement. And I think they'll be leaving December. So I think we'll be loading in right around shortly after that and then will be in rehearsals. And we're just now kind of putting together the production schedule and all that. [00:09:07] Speaker D: Yeah, well, you know, another benefit of being at the Broadhurst, which you didn't say, but I think requires saying, is that it's right on. Not only is it right on Schubert Alley, but it's right across from the junior's delicatessen. So the cast and crew should be. [00:09:22] Speaker A: Well fed, and that's very important. You know, armies travel on their stomachs, don't they? [00:09:28] Speaker C: That's true. But remember, they're dancers, so, you know, I don't want to gain too much weight. [00:09:34] Speaker D: No, they won't gain weight. They'll just. They'll maintain their weight. The dancing will take it all away. [00:09:41] Speaker C: That's great. No, it's such a privilege. But a very interesting, funny story, because we've been working on this for a long time, and Susan, my wife, and I had dinner the night before we left Chicago with Jasmine and Angley, who plays the male lead in the show. And Jasmine turned to me at one point and said, well, how long have you actually been working on this? And I said, well, we had our very first conversation with Bill Haber in 1999, and Jasmine said, that was the year I was born. [00:10:27] Speaker A: So you were waiting for her to come around? [00:10:29] Speaker C: Oh, man, we'd wait longer than that. [00:10:33] Speaker A: Timing is everything. Being in the right place at the right time means you were in the right place at the wrong time up until that moment. [00:10:41] Speaker C: That's true. Or at the wrong place at the right time. [00:10:44] Speaker A: Hey, there's that possibility, too. So you are now the overseer of the family's legacy, but you grew up in an interesting family before we get to the rest of them all. What about you, Mark? What about you? [00:11:05] Speaker C: What about me? [00:11:08] Speaker A: You grew up here in LA. [00:11:11] Speaker C: I was born in Los Angeles, and to the extent I ever grew up partially Los Angeles till I was about eleven years old. And then my father moved overseas as much as the movie industry did around that time, for various reasons, and brought the whole family with him, my mother and my brother and my sister. And I was in a swiss boarding school for almost a year, and then we lived in Paris for a year. The only reason I was in the swiss sporting school is there wasn't an opening for me at the american school in Paris. My parents went to great lengths to keep us within the american system of education when we were in Europe so that we could go to an american college. I, of course, fooled them and ended up going to an english college. But where'd you go? Exeter University. [00:12:16] Speaker A: A very nice place to get an education. [00:12:20] Speaker C: It was. And so we were in Paris for about a year and then we went to Rome, where my dad directed Barabbas, the Dino de Laurentiis, and then developed a whole bunch of other pictures which never got made. And we were enrolled for four years and then returned to California. Finished my last two years of high school. Thus the idea of keeping me in the american education system didn't quite work out because I spent my junior year at Beverly High and my senior year at the French Lysay here in Los Angeles, and then went to Exeter for my university. [00:13:02] Speaker A: So at that point, as you. All right, so you grow up in a legacy, showbiz family. Your family name is on product out in the marketplace, which makes it rather unusual. Your father grew up in it. And I think your dad went to Brown and Yale Drama. [00:13:31] Speaker C: That's right, I did Brown University and Yale postgraduate. [00:13:36] Speaker A: So. But Yale Drama. So obviously he was heading into the business one way or the other. [00:13:44] Speaker C: One way or the other. Though that's actually an interesting story because he always wanted to be a psychiatrist. That's what my father was so interested in. And if you look at his body of work, you see that it's a lot of. It is kind of like looks into the criminal mind. [00:14:02] Speaker A: Boston Strangler. [00:14:04] Speaker C: Boston Strangler compulsion. I mean, you know, there's. There's. There's a bunch of them even Doctor Doolittle? Yes, the criminal animals. And when he was in Brown, he did all pre med courses, but then he joined the theater groups there, and he fell in love with the theater. And when it became time for him to make a decision, he went to his father, Max, and he said, I don't know what to do, pops. You know, I don't know whether to go to medical school or whether to go to drama school. And this is interesting because, you know, Max from many different perspectives, but rarely from the perspective of parenting. And Max said to my father, I think you should go to drama school and eat, drink, sleep, and live it. Do nothing else but that for at least one year. And at the end of that, you know, whether that is for you or not. And if you don't do it, you will regret it for the rest of your life. And my father did it, and we knew it was for him, and that's where he met my mother. And they knew they were for each other. So we came out with two great destinies. [00:15:38] Speaker A: It's funny, I have the exact opposite experience. I grew up, my father was a surgeon, his father was a physician, and I broke the rule because I went outside of medicine. There was no way in hell I was going to be a physician. But my parents had no idea how to mentor me. Being a creative person, to Max's absolute credit, at a time when parenting was not nearly so aware of. Of what it could, what it could, how it could help or hinder their kids confidence by how they respond to that very question. And it is a testament to his, a certain degree. I'm going to use a yiddish word here, his Sikhel, that he said what. [00:16:33] Speaker C: He said, well, he, you know, he was very smart in many ways, very loving in every way. And he and my father had just an incredible relationship. They so adored each other, even to the point where they used to talk on the phone a whole lot when my father was in school or whatever. And at the end of the conversation, my father believed it would be completely improper for him to hang up on his phone. And my grandfather thought it was unthinkable for him to hang up on his son. So they couldn't hang up on each other. They could never end a conversation. [00:17:23] Speaker A: There's a conundrum. [00:17:25] Speaker C: I mean, they would. And my grandfather would say, okay, dicky, I'm going to go now. Father would say, okay, pops, see you later. There'd be silence, and then my grandfather would say, click. And the two of them would burst out into laughter. I don't think ever got on. They'd still be on the phone if they had their druthers. But they really were completely in love with each other. [00:17:53] Speaker A: It does certainly sound like Max was an amazing, amazing man. To have known, let alone to have come from. Just to have known, what a mind that was always at work, it seems, solving problems, creating things, inventing a whole. Not just the equipment, but to imagine the process that the equipment would solve the problem of. [00:18:22] Speaker C: Yeah. No, that he was an inventor and an artist. And he combined the two, I think, in a unique way. And he never stopped working. The one quirky thing that always captured his imagination, that he always tried to solve, was a machine that had perpetual motion. That was not basically externally. And it didn't come from external energy. [00:18:56] Speaker A: Right. A perpetual motion machine that went all by itself without any other input source. [00:19:04] Speaker C: Of energy, usually in the form of a clock. And he always tried that. But he. [00:19:11] Speaker A: How many iterations did he make over the course of his attempting to invent it? [00:19:16] Speaker C: I honestly don't know, because I value my sanity a lot more than one. A lot. My father used to just think it was great, but it was really interesting because he just. He never stopped. That was always one of his passions. [00:19:38] Speaker A: Well, in 1915, Max was the art editor for Popular Science magazine. And he was fascinated by the early animation he'd seen. And he felt certain that he could do it better. [00:19:54] Speaker C: It's interesting because he thought about it. Modern animation, in a funny kind of way, found its origins in the disastrous business concept that Max and Dave had a. They love the movies. Sometime around 1912, 1913, Max was, I think, a popular science at that point. Max and Dave decided that they would open a movie theater in Brownsville, New York. But, of course, they couldn't afford a building, so they did an outdoor movie theater. And they had very little money, but they borrowed enough money, was some money from an uncle who was a candy distributor of some sort. And they opened their movie theater. And, I mean, they came and drove to the theater. The problem is, they were mosquitoes. And it had been following one of the wettest seasons they ever experienced there. And so it failed miserably. But when they salvaged what assets they could, Max was left with this old antique moi projector that was hand cranked. And it was that that he used to create the rotoscope. Because it was a projector, right? [00:21:31] Speaker A: Yes. [00:21:32] Speaker C: He then turned into a camera where he shot today we would call a cell. [00:21:40] Speaker A: Basically, the way that rotoscope works is it is projecting a real. An image onto a background a white background, easiest to see, and then it can be traced. [00:21:53] Speaker C: He would shoot a live action. They did a test of Dave at the top of their tenement building dressed as a clown. And he turned the projector first into a camera and photographed it. Then he turned the projector back into a projector and he projected frame by frame, and they then traced over each frame. Then he turned the projector back into a camera and he photographed each of those drawings. And he had to hand exposed them. There were 2600 frames in that 2.7 minutes test. [00:22:38] Speaker A: How long did it take to make that? [00:22:41] Speaker C: Over a year. And then they turned it back into a projector. And one night in their apartment with my grandmother there, put up a sheet and they had no idea what they had after a year, and they projected this test. And modern animation was born. For the first time, human movement, the fluidity of nature was captured, which had been captured on live action film, but never in animation. [00:23:16] Speaker A: Looking at it now, today, Coco the clown is remarkable. The degree of the realism. It's computers. It's. You kind of think, did a computer do that? [00:23:31] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:23:33] Speaker A: It's so detailed and articulated exactly because it's following nature. So Max invents this, the rotoscope, which is still used today. [00:23:48] Speaker C: Yep, it is. [00:23:50] Speaker A: It is. It's so simple and so practical and so incredibly useful for, for movie makers the world over. So he. His. The first things that Max does before he's even created, really, the clown hasn't even come into its. Early into its being yet. He's created a technology that will endure. Wow. [00:24:16] Speaker C: That's exactly right. And it was basically the editor in chief of the popular science who just complained it was apropos of nothing, but just complained to Max one day that animation was so herky jerky that you couldn't watch it for very long. And he said, max, you're a good inventor and an artist, and I should be able to do something about that. And Mike said, oh, yeah, he came up with this idea and he's brotherland for so long. [00:24:54] Speaker A: What's especially? Wow. I don't know how else to put it. In order to create, in order to shoot this experimental film, he was not going to be able to see the end results. He had to imagine it in his head and then imagine the process to achieve the thing in his head. And then hopefully down the road, when it's processed, he'll see whether or not he succeeded or failed. [00:25:28] Speaker C: That's right. And he had to finance it in the meantime because there was very little money and again, it was my grandmother who had put aside a nice little sum of money for the household, and she said, okay, I'll just give you that money to finance this crazy idea that you have. And that's what made it possible. They had to do it at night because they had day job. And that was, you know, that's how the whole thing was born. So I guess a bunch of mosquitoes are responsible for modern animation. [00:26:11] Speaker A: And there I walk around thinking, mosquitoes are utterly useless. Silly, silly me. [00:26:18] Speaker C: I know we all make those mistakes. [00:26:20] Speaker A: So during World War one, Max gets hired by a guy named Jr. Bray, a pioneer of early animation. But instead of doing animation, they go to work for the government, shooting training films for the US army. [00:26:36] Speaker C: They started with animation. He went to work for Bray, and then Bray said, we'll do a bunch of cartoons with the clown. And they were just. Which became out of the inkwell. And they began that. And then I. World War one interrupted, which Max actually wanted to volunteer for. But at that point, the army wouldn't accept married men, so they didn't let him volunteer for the army. And then he had the idea, he and Bray, that they would do training films and got one of them. It's the first 1st animated training or first movie training film for the army ever. And it was. It's really quite exturaging. I think it was Fort Sill Durant in Oklahoma. Yeah. 1916 or 17. [00:27:41] Speaker A: So the war ends, and 1921, Max leaves Bray studios. Together with Dave, they launch a new company called out of the Ink well, Inc. They hire a guy named Charlie Shetler, who stayed with the studio for 20 years until it closed. And suddenly they're producing the Coco cartoons. Is that what was generating all the enthusiasm in the business? [00:28:16] Speaker C: Folks, I'm going down to St. James's. Yes, it was Coco. Coco basically was part of all the major series in one form or the other. When they came back in 1921, Max and Day started out of the Inkwell films and continued out of the Inkwell series and then introduced sound with the song cartoons. [00:28:55] Speaker A: Now we will come to that. I wanted to ask a question about a guy named, is it Dick Hamer or Heimer Humer? Yeah, he joins the team in 1924. [00:29:06] Speaker C: Right. [00:29:07] Speaker A: And he redesigned. At that point, it was the clown. He hadn't become Coco officially, had he? [00:29:16] Speaker C: I don't really remember when Coco got named Coco. It was Dick, basically. Coco was named in 1924 as Coco the Clown. [00:29:31] Speaker A: Gotcha. [00:29:32] Speaker C: And largely with Dick's influence. [00:29:35] Speaker A: And a lot of it really was just to make it more efficient. For. So that you didn't have to rotoscope what wasn't. [00:29:45] Speaker C: We had to rotoscope it. [00:29:47] Speaker A: So you still had to rotoscope it. But he was making it simpler. In what way did he make it easier for production? [00:29:56] Speaker C: I'm not exactly sure technically what happened there and where they, at what point, because I'm not a historian in that, where they developed animation enough, so they started doing key art and in betweeners and all of these things. So I'm not sure who is responsible for that. [00:30:20] Speaker A: I will point out that the documentaries you have on your YouTube channel, which we will, the Fleischer Studios website, is really. Wow, what a lovely. What a lovely asset. What a great. It is a museum all by itself, and the YouTube channel is filled with great, great content. I watched one of the documentaries, and it's filled with so much fascinating information, I'm compelled to. Yes, and that. So that's where my curiosity is coming from. It's all your fault, Mark. [00:31:01] Speaker C: Well, it's interesting because Max is another thing that Max did that people widely don't know. He invented the bouncing by the light of the silvery moon. [00:31:17] Speaker D: I want to sing. [00:31:19] Speaker C: There were a lot of sing alongs in those days where you'd have the words of a song on the screen and you'd have pianists in the live, pianist in the audience, and they would all sing along. The problem was the person who was like the master of this went to complain to Max, forgotten his name. But it was, the problem is that the audience frequently got ahead of or behind the words on the screen. So Max decided to fix that. And he had a ball that would go from word to word to word, so he would follow that. So it remained everything in sync. And at one point, actually, he started getting inventive, and actually Coco became the ball at one point. [00:32:07] Speaker A: Oh, they got very inventive once. It's like any gag, you can only play the gag once or twice. Then you got to find variations on the theme to make the gag fresh. Now, he got together in 1924 with Lee DeForest, and Lee DeForest had been working on putting sound together with film for quite a while. [00:32:30] Speaker C: Yes. [00:32:31] Speaker A: And together, Lee de Forrest and Max did the first cartoon using synchronized sound. My old Kentucky home. [00:32:41] Speaker C: That's right. [00:32:42] Speaker A: It's 1926, two years before Steamboat Willie in 1928. [00:32:51] Speaker C: And that was bouncing ball. [00:32:57] Speaker A: Exactly. So that movie did a lot of things. A lot of stuff happened inside that one movie. [00:33:04] Speaker C: Yeah, that one series is exactly right. It started out as the first sound. Cartoons plus. [00:33:10] Speaker A: Bouncing ball plus. [00:33:11] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, it didn't. It didn't start out as became the first one and then. [00:33:18] Speaker A: Yes, but still, there's all this invention inside one cartoon. [00:33:23] Speaker C: Yes. [00:33:26] Speaker A: That'S an awful lot of invention. Bang for one's buck. And it didn't even cost a buck back then. [00:33:35] Speaker C: Hardly. It really didn't. It had a whole lot of other development because Coco kept on basically becoming part of the cartoons for always. And once sound was introduced, then there were a number of cartoon series that came out. And eventually it got to the point in, I think it was 1929, that there was some sound in cartoons, but the characters couldn't talk. They made noises. Squelching. And Max decided that he would make them talk. [00:34:40] Speaker A: Sink that sound. [00:34:42] Speaker C: Yes. And at that point, we had out of the inkwell and it was. It went back and forth between different names, but it was basically Coco and his dog Fritz. And my grandfather decided, let's bring in sound, but we need to introduce a new character to basically round us out. So he basically fired Fritz and hired kind of a tough, urban, cigar chewing, half human, half dog character who were called bimbo. Bimbo is interesting because, you know, first of all, it didn't carry the connotation that it does today. [00:35:43] Speaker A: Indeed. [00:35:44] Speaker C: Secondly, it was actually named after the family dog. When my dad was growing up, they had a dog named Bimbo, which they adored. And so I guess they just called Bimbo Bimbo. And so Bimbo soon became overshadowed. Coco and Bimbo became the star of the series, but not for long because a whole new giant shadow, Mickey Mouse, as a result of that, my grandfather said, I don't think that Bimbo can carry this series in competition with Mickey Mouse. We need to bring in another character, a new character, maybe a love interest for Bingo. So in 1930, 1930, in dizzy dishes, this half human, half dog, a female performer with big saucer like eyes and puppy dog ears, took the stage in Bimbo's nightclub. [00:37:01] Speaker B: I have to have laughs and what, when I'm having my laptop, I have to have poo poo butterfly. [00:37:13] Speaker C: She became Betty Boot. She became so popular that she ended up just dominating series. [00:37:21] Speaker A: That's what I mean. She went from being Bimbo's love interest. [00:37:25] Speaker C: To love interest with the audience. Exactly. [00:37:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They. Something about Betty Boop just connected with the audience right off the bat. [00:37:35] Speaker C: And it's so interesting because if you see what she looked like in those original cartoons, it's, you know. Yeah, I guess it's Betty Boot. But it took a number of years before she developed, you know, into a fully human. She didn't get her name, Betty Boop, for about a year after that. [00:37:57] Speaker B: How am I doing? Hey, hey. Tweet, tweet, tweet, twat. Wha. Oh. [00:38:03] Speaker C: How am I doing? [00:38:04] Speaker B: Hey, hey, og baby. Oh, Shaw. Now, I'm not brave today. [00:38:10] Speaker C: When you see these big, circular signature earrings of Betty Boop. Those are the remnants of the dog ears. She became so popular that in those days, they would have a cartoon or two. Before the main movie in the movie theaters. And she became so popular that they began putting her ahead of the movie on the marquee. [00:38:40] Speaker A: Several of her early cartoons were developed as promotional vehicles for Louis Armstrong, Don Redmond, and especially Cab Calloway, including, of course, Minnie the Moocher, which. [00:39:07] Speaker C: Well, hey, well, yeah, you know, on the old man of the mountain with snowlight. There's one story that he would. Max would rotoscope. He would film. Cap Calloway would rotoscope. And that the first time Cap Calloway saw that in the editing room, sitting on the stools watching, I guess, through some sort of movie over, Cap Calloway laughed so hard, he fell off his stool. [00:39:34] Speaker A: Not hard to imagine. It must have been just staggering to see yourself transformed and transposed into this other form. [00:39:44] Speaker C: And with all the crazy things that went on in the cartoon, it just, you know, it's just unimaginable and just so much fun. [00:39:53] Speaker A: They came from such different places. And the animated worlds that they created were such different places. Walt came from where? Kansas or Indiana, someplace like that. And he certainly smacked of the heartland. And his version of Snow White was Snow White. Whereas the Fleischer world was. Well, of course, it was urban. [00:40:28] Speaker C: Urban and gritty and filled with a. [00:40:32] Speaker A: Kind of chaos that came from all over the place. [00:40:37] Speaker C: It's. Yes, but it's the chaos of surrealism. [00:40:43] Speaker A: Indeed. [00:40:46] Speaker C: Max had a saying, and that was, if you can do it in real life, why animate it? So he was not looking to do photo realistic anything or even something that was imagined in a world that was an ideal world that was based on something that was real or human. It's always had to be something you just couldn't do in real life. [00:41:20] Speaker A: I would recommend watching some of the early Fleischer cartoons slightly stoned. It's really a trip because they're incredibly fluid. And anything can become something else. [00:41:34] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, it does. And of course, the whole world reacts. The fat guy wants to walk through the door. So the door expands to a comedy. [00:41:45] Speaker A: It's a world of living metaphors. [00:41:47] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:41:48] Speaker A: And it is absolutely. And that's part of what makes it incredibly funny. It's drenched with irony. It's got a vibrancy to it that's. Yeah. It didn't have the polish of Walt Disney's product. I don't know that he could have survived the internal mental chaos that it takes to create a Fleischer world. [00:42:15] Speaker C: I would. I mean, you know, who knows? I knew Walt Disney somewhat when I was a kid. Child. And, you know, he has a genius all his own. And it's hard to say what, you know, hard to compare two unique things because they're unique. They can't be like each other. And there was a bitter, bitter competition between Max and Rob. And Max was the sweetest, most gentleman you'd ever want to meet in your life. If you said Walt Disney to him, he'd become apoplectic. And. [00:43:08] Speaker A: Why was that? [00:43:10] Speaker C: Well, I think that in those days, they were just leapfrogging each other with technique, with invention. I think the lines may have gotten a little blurred, certainly. I think Max thought they got a little blurred about, you know, adopting some of his techniques. But that's, I think, really kind of was maybe at the heart of it or not. That was, I think, my father's view of it. But, I mean, there's, I mean, a very interesting story behind that because my father, as we talked about, became a director and he started directing b level movies for RKM and directed what's thought of as one of the greatest b level film noirs made, called the narrow margin. [00:44:16] Speaker A: Yes, it is. And when we get to talking about your dad, when we go through the list of the films your dad made, it's mind boggling and the variety. But narrow margin is, yes, a great, great film noir. Holy cow. [00:44:32] Speaker C: And, well, I mean, if you'd like to wait till we get there, I certainly can. [00:44:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, you know, everything in its. Everything in its time. [00:44:43] Speaker C: Okay. [00:44:44] Speaker A: In 1934, Will Hayes arrives in Hollywood and screws up everything. And the Hays code, suddenly it really puts a crimp in a lot of people's creativity. Paramount, now Paramount had a relationship with the Fleischer brothers studio that they were backing it. [00:45:08] Speaker C: They were the money, they were the financiers and distributors. [00:45:11] Speaker A: Right in the shadow of Will Hayes, Paramount fires an awful lot of its talent roster because they appealed to mature audiences. The Marx brothers, WC fields, may west. And they. They have been, hey, nothing ever changes. How many bankruptcies did Paramount go through in the 1930s? Two, three. [00:45:35] Speaker C: Yeah, well, all right. [00:45:36] Speaker A: Nothing ever changes there. But they, then a guy named Barney Balaban takes over. They want to be MGM, but for, but for two cent. And the Fleischers are also ordered to tone down their product, too. [00:45:52] Speaker C: What happened there was that the movie industry always was looked on as seeding and is not something that, you know, really, you know, legitimate people get involved. As a matter of fact, there's a radio station here in Los Angeles called KFWB, and that station was founded by the, by Warner Brothers, the two Warner brothers, because in those days, they couldn't advertise on radio. They weren't considered decent enough. So they started their own radio station. That's why it's KF WB. That's just an example of how prevalent that thinking was. [00:46:42] Speaker A: Right. [00:46:44] Speaker C: So at one point, I think it was about in 1931 or 32, where Congress was about to act, to start passing legislation to tone down Hollywood. And so the producers got together and said, we'd better be proactive and create our own code and self governance to avoid having the government tell us what to do. And that was the motion picture code, which became known as the, quote, Hayes Commission. But it was really the producers acting out of self defense for survival that they did that. [00:47:23] Speaker A: And Will Hayes was the guy who really became their front person. [00:47:27] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. He was leading the coalition of producers. [00:47:31] Speaker A: Right. [00:47:32] Speaker C: And so they, you know, they did all of that. And Betty booped. The hems on the dresses went down, the cleavage, buttlocks went up. She got rid of a bimbo. That was a little tricky. So she had this nice, sweet little doggy pudgy. Now, she couldn't go out and do all the adventurous things she did, you know, as a hula dancer. And as you know, all of this stuff, she now was a secretary. [00:48:02] Speaker A: She had a reading list now. [00:48:04] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. [00:48:05] Speaker A: She had a book club she had to get to. [00:48:08] Speaker C: Exactly. And it was a pretty dull book. And that basically finished. [00:48:16] Speaker A: Fortunately, in 1932, they make a deal licensing Ec, seagers, Popeye, the sailor. As is pointed out in your documentary, if you market tested that, an old ugly sailor, you know, with a skinny girlfriend and a big, menacing other guy, and yet, as being able to imagine what a rotoscope could do for him, Max had a vision. [00:48:55] Speaker C: Well, it's interesting. I mean, all these things are so tied up because at some point when Betty Boot was so popular, he hired a company called Pink Features in the thirties to do the merchandising. Now, King Features was a division of the Hearst Corporation. And of course, the Hearst Corporation is synonymous with newspapers. And so they ran all of the Sunday comics. And what they generally did is when they brought in a new comic strip, an artist, they would buy the rights, and they would own the comics, the rights to the comics, the characters and everything, which was the case with Popeye, which started about a decade before all of this. And in the original Popeye cartoon strips, there was a whole family. Olive oil was part of it. And they all had these names related to food. And there was a mythical hen where if you would stroke the head of the hen, it would give you luck. And that's kind of how Popeye was born in the series, is that Olive oil and her boyfriend decided to go to a casino that was on an island, and they would take the hen and stroke the head of the pen and win a lot of money in the casino. And so they went to shore to go to the island, but they needed sailing. And that's how Popeye entered the comic strip and the news pages. And soon Popeye was so popular that when that dramatic arc ended and Popeye left the series, there was a huge outcry. And so Mister Sigar brought Popeye back, and then Popeye became the star of the series. And then at one point, I think it was king features who approached, and my grandfather said, would you like to bring Popeye to the screen? And my grandfather loved the series, and he said, I would love to. And he did a test, like, today, you have a comedy series, and you would test one of the characters to see if you could do a spin off. And he did that in a Betty Boot cartoon. Tested Popeye, who, you know, everybody loved. But my grandfather said, you know, this whole thing of stroking the head of a pen is kind of weird. And he said, you know what? Why don't we give him spinach? And then if he eats the spinach, it doesn't bring him luck, it brings him strength. So it was my grandfather who gave Popeye spinach, which is, you know, again, another unknown fact. [00:51:55] Speaker A: And his song, too, that wasn't from the comic, the Popeye the sailor man. [00:52:00] Speaker C: He couldn't have a song in a comic. And, yeah, so he had to invent the voice, the song, the sound. If you look at the original, you know, sort of quote, pilot of Popeye, he did some pretty brave things with Popeye. Suddenly in a corset. It's really funny. Just take a look at it. [00:52:27] Speaker A: The art in the Popeye comics is amazing. The backgrounds, it's really quite remarkable. Rather than doing just a very dull, repeating background, they created multiple backgrounds on glass plates to give it three dimensionality. [00:52:47] Speaker C: That's right. [00:52:48] Speaker A: And then put the animation in front of the glass plate so the glass plates could be moving. And you got the feeling of the characters moving through real space. [00:52:59] Speaker C: Yes. Called it a setback. And he did. He created that to give that sense of. [00:53:11] Speaker A: It's beautiful. And it's often really, when you just look at the backgrounds, they're quite extraordinary. [00:53:18] Speaker C: They are. And Max always thought, you know, with this technique, we could do a feature length animated movie. Lo and behold, Paramount kept saying, nah, no, you can't. No one's going to sit there for. And of course, Disney did Snow White. That's when Paramount, as my father said, paramount's crystal ball suddenly cleared and they decided that they had to do a Fleischer, had to do an animated feature length movie. [00:53:56] Speaker A: But Popeye the sailor meets Sinbad the sailor. [00:53:59] Speaker C: Well, that was a little bit later. That was kind of a test for. That was like a three reeler that wasn't feature length. I guess I got a little ahead of myself. That's how that was kind of a way for Max to try to convince Paramount that they could do a feature length movie. And it was the three popeyes of Alibaba and Sinbad. And that sort of gave them some traction. But it wasn't until Walt Disney came out of with Snow White that finally they said, okay, do it. But they couldn't. Didn't have enough room in their studio in New York. And they're at 1600 Broadway, which is, by the way, around the corner from where Betty Boop opens next year. [00:55:00] Speaker A: What's in that space now? [00:55:02] Speaker C: I'm not sure. I think it may be part of Madison Square Garden. I'm not sure. It's just as well, actually. No, I think that might still be a standalone building. So that was one of the reasons that prompted them to move to Miami. [00:55:22] Speaker A: Right. They started with, like, 19 people, and now they were at 200 plus. [00:55:30] Speaker C: Yeah, they got up to. Up to something like 700. [00:55:36] Speaker A: Wow. Never mind 200. Wow. Seven. Wow. So they became. Yeah. Needed a lot of space and cheap space. [00:55:46] Speaker C: Yeah. And that was all in that, you know, little 1600 Broadway. I think it was 1600 Broadway. [00:56:00] Speaker A: What also prompted the move was the strike. [00:56:03] Speaker C: Yes. That also was very hard on my grandfather, who kind of took it personally, I would think. [00:56:13] Speaker A: He used to be thought of as Uncle Max. [00:56:17] Speaker C: He was. Everyone called him that, and people, he insisted that everybody call him by his first name. [00:56:27] Speaker A: And it cannot feel good to be to have a labor walkout when you're that kind of person and really, look, you're trying to create a product as inexpensively as you can. But, yeah, on the other hand, you got to pay people. [00:56:41] Speaker C: Yeah, that's exactly right. [00:56:45] Speaker A: It's the nature of the world we all live in. [00:56:48] Speaker C: It is. And. [00:56:54] Speaker A: That strike was the first ever launched in the entertainment business, wasn't it? [00:56:59] Speaker C: I actually don't know. [00:57:02] Speaker A: I believe that's case. Yeah, I think that it was a test case, the first launch in the motion picture industry. And they had. People were boycotting Fleischer cartoons in theaters as well. And so it got ugly. [00:57:21] Speaker C: It did. And Max was really first and foremost, wanted to take care of his people. When Paramount said, you really got to do this feature length cartoon. My grandfather loved Miami. He had a home there. And in those days, Miami was not the Miami of today. It was a real backwater. It's like one major hotel. And the city elders were really wanting to put it on its feet. So when Max approached them, they begged him to come. And they. He got the space he needed. Paramount funded it through a loan, which was a disastrous mistake for my grandfather. [00:58:13] Speaker A: At the end of the day. [00:58:14] Speaker C: At the end of the day, it was a tragedy. And they built this huge, huge, state of the art animation studio. It was the first fully air conditioned building in the state of Florida. And he offered to bring every single family to Florida and give them housing from his studio in New York. And a lot of them went. And then he had the facility and the ability to produce what became Gulliver's travels. But my grandfather wasn't a great businessman in some respects, because in those very early days, somebody offered to sell him Miami beach for a few thousand dollars. And his response was, what would I do with all that sand? Well, if he had, we'd be having this conversation at Fleischer island. [00:59:17] Speaker A: And I bet it'd be a lovely place filled with just the coolest entertainment on earth. [00:59:21] Speaker C: Mandae. That's another surrealistic idea. [00:59:34] Speaker A: Gulliver's travels did okay. [00:59:37] Speaker C: It did okay. It did well. Followed by Mister Buddha. [00:59:54] Speaker A: Unfortunately opened on a terrible day. [00:59:57] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:59:59] Speaker A: If not for opening on December 7, 1941. I've seen bits and pieces of it. It's really awesome. [01:00:23] Speaker C: Oh, it's wonderful. It's wonderful. But, you know, that's movies. Oh. [01:00:29] Speaker A: Oh, but that hurt. That really hurts because that. [01:00:32] Speaker C: Wow. It's. [01:00:33] Speaker A: Shit like that shouldn't happen to anybody, at least of all. [01:00:36] Speaker C: Well, it says, you guys well known. [01:00:38] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:00:39] Speaker C: There's such a time lag between the time you. You make a movie and you release it. You know, you make a wonderful movie about something, turbulence in an airplane, and the day you release it, there's some tragedy in the skies. I mean, there's no way you can predict the stuff that happens. You can find so many ways of how not to make a movie. Or if you do make one, you can find a lot of ways not to not release it. [01:01:11] Speaker A: Also, in Miami, Max and Dave, really, their relationship got worse and worse and worse until at the end, Max was angry with Dave. Why? [01:01:28] Speaker C: Well, I think he, for one thing, had a flamboyant lifestyle that Max didn't approve of. [01:01:36] Speaker A: Relationships that maybe you shouldn't have been having. [01:01:39] Speaker C: Well, you know, all, I was a kid. I hear flamboyant, so, yeah, okay, I'll settle for flamboyant. Also, David wanted to write the music for their shows, and Max said, you're not a composer. You can't do that. And Louie was the composer. And that was one of the things that just really outraged Max. That was another thing that really caused the two brothers to have a terrible, terrible split. [01:02:23] Speaker A: And when they stopped communicating in 1939, they spoke only via memo. And really, they never spoke again for the rest of their lives. Is that true? [01:02:33] Speaker C: That's true. And that's probably the reason that Paramount decided to step in. You could understand if you have the people running the studio and not talking to each other. And the. [01:02:51] Speaker A: Dave gained control of the production in 1940. 41. [01:02:55] Speaker C: 41. [01:02:56] Speaker A: And then he made Max. He relegated Max to business affairs and research. [01:03:01] Speaker C: Well, yeah, and you're right. I mean, that's when his production role started. It was in 41 that Paramount took over, and Dave kind of stayed on the studio, and Max was fired. [01:03:17] Speaker A: This business can be hell on relationships. [01:03:20] Speaker C: Yes. Even brothers. [01:03:24] Speaker D: Alan and I know only too well. [01:03:29] Speaker A: We did not speak for 25 years at the end of tales from the. This whole podcast. The hell not to make a movie podcast. The first season was about the making of Bordello of Blood, which ended our relationship. And it was a movie that nobody wanted to make, especially us. But it really. [01:03:55] Speaker C: It. [01:03:56] Speaker A: But that's how this business can undermine. I mean, we were best friends for ten years and creative partners, and suddenly I remember. Yeah, I mean, my relationship with you ended as a result, because you went with the groom of the bride. Gil, I can't decide. You know, it's like the world get torn apart when this business, you know, when these business relationships fail, as the relationship did between Dave and Max, that. [01:04:30] Speaker C: Was to melt it. [01:04:31] Speaker A: Spectacular fashion. When you consider what they had done together, it's heartbreaking. Nonetheless, work went on. Superman happened. [01:04:42] Speaker C: Yeah, but did it change? It no longer had the quality. And, you know, Superman really started out as a kind of a science fiction series and it ended up becoming kind of a war propaganda. It really changed its whole character. The Popeye cartoons again lost a lot of quality and started to, you know, have violent things in them. I remember sitting with my grandfather. I was a little kid, but I remember sitting with my grandfather years after watching tv. And there was a Popeye cartoon on that was produced by famous studios, not Fleischer. And there was a scene where one of the characters, somebody, Newton Popeye, got chopped up into tiny little bits and then came back together. And my grandfather was just appalled. We would never have done something like that. Never would have done that. [01:05:45] Speaker A: It just felt violent for the sake of being violent. [01:05:49] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:05:52] Speaker A: Kind of. There was always an incredible wit to classic Fleischer Studios product. [01:06:02] Speaker C: Yes, there was. [01:06:04] Speaker A: You divorce the wit from it, it just becomes violence. [01:06:08] Speaker C: That's absolutely true. And it's funny because my grandfather used to complain that the folks who wrote the storyboards and kind of put the dramatic structure around the cartoons left it so much to the animators. He always, for instance, he always quoted this stage direction, which was, he gets on the horse in a funny way. My grandfather kept saying, well, tell us what's funny. He's up to the animators to figure that out. [01:06:50] Speaker A: You know, they'll fix it in post. [01:06:52] Speaker C: Yes, exactly. That's great. [01:06:56] Speaker A: Let's switch over to your dad now. Your grandfather's legacy. Wow. Hey, it speaks for itself. Your father was a remarkable filmmaker who, in a sense, if you read people's descriptions of your dad, the word journeyman comes up a lot. But I don't think that's either fair or accurate. That's journeyman's like a guy who's competent at everything. But your dad was actually really, really, really good at everything. And there wasn't a genre that he couldn't do. He was. He was good at everything, was both his. His superpower and his fatal flaw in. In a sense, yeah. [01:07:48] Speaker C: I mean, he could never get typecast like so many other, you know, admittedly, great directors did not to denigrate them for a second, but it's like he didn't have a signature milieu. And so he went from one to the other even though he had many commercial successes. [01:08:24] Speaker A: When we get to the list of movies, if people in our audience are not familiar with his name, suddenly you hear this list of movies, think, well, one guy did all those. How is that possible? But before he got there. His film career started in 1942 at RKO. He was doing shorts and documentaries and a compilation of forgotten silent features which he called flicker flashbacks. [01:08:48] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. That is charming. [01:08:54] Speaker A: He won an Academy Award as producer of the 1947 documentary designed for Death, co written by a guy named Ted Geisel, aka Doctor Seuss. [01:09:07] Speaker C: Yes. And my father just was in love with Ted Geyser. And he kept saying, he's a genius. He's a genius. Just loved him. And that was the first thing my father ever did when it came to Hollywood was that documentary. And it won his only Academy Award. And when he won that award, Max sent him a telegram saying, what took you so long? [01:09:41] Speaker A: Your dad worked for everybody, but in his early days, he worked for Howard Hughes. Stanley Kramer kind of took a real liking to your dad. [01:09:50] Speaker C: Well, he directed Stanley's first movie. Yeah, the first movie Stanley ever produced, which was. So this is New York. [01:09:59] Speaker A: And with this fan club because clearly they saw immediately that your dad understood how to tell stories. He became incredibly prolific in 1946. The child of divorce. In 1947, designed for death and banjo, two movies. In 1948, bodyguard. And so this is New York. In 1949, he directed trapped. Make mine laughs. Follow me quietly. And the clay pigeon. Wow, that's an awful lot of movies to me. All right, let's jump forward a bit. 1952, he makes the narrow margin and the happy time. And then in 1954, he slows down a little bit. He gets 20,000 leagues under the. Now, that's an interesting assignment because of who he's working for. [01:11:00] Speaker C: Yes. Well, that's an interesting story because my father, after the narrow margin, became kind of the hot young director in Los Angeles and he started to refuse to take certain movies that were assigned to him by RKO because he thought he's going to get typecast as a b level movie director. That happened to somebody at RKO who was known as the king of the Bees, that he would direct something like 15 a year on a budget of $100,000 in a shooting schedule, like 18 days. And he couldn't. They wouldn't let him do anything else. And he begged them to let him do a bigger movie. And finally they let him do it and they gave him a million dollars. It's $100,000 budget he owned. He gave him a million dollar budget and, like, a three month production schedule, and he delivered it in 18 days for $100,000. My father saw that as a. As a warning. So he said, I'm not going to let that happen. So he became better, better known. [01:12:38] Speaker A: That's all production muscle memory. [01:12:40] Speaker C: Yes, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. [01:12:43] Speaker A: Holy cow. Gary. [01:12:46] Speaker C: He was sitting in his office one day, got a call from his agent, said, this is odd. Walt Disney wants you to be in his office tomorrow at eight or nine or whatever. I said, okay. So we went and he went to Walt's office, and there were all these drawings and renderings of the Nautilus and things like that all over the wall. And Disney said to my father, if you ever read 20,000 leagues under the sea, known as the Nautilus. And my father said, yeah, love it. And Disney said, well, I'm going to make a movie. It'll be my first entirely live action movie movie. It'll be the most expensive movie ever made. If it isn't successful, it will bankrupt this demi, would you like to direct it? My father said, yes, of course I would. He said, but do you know who I am? And Disney said, yes, you're Max's son. And my father said, well, I have to call my father and ask his permission because I don't want to be seen as a betrayer of our family. And Disney said, that's exactly the right thing to do. So you go call your dad and tell me tomorrow whether you're going to direct my movie. So I'm like, father went home and put in a call to New York, which is what you did in those days. And my grandfather said, of course. Are you out of your mind? This is your big shot, a movie. This is wonderful. And he said, I want you to tell Walt Disney one thing. My father said, what? And he said, you tell Walt Disney that he's got great taste in directors. So my dad directed the movie, and as we know, it was a big hit. And Disney became a family friend. I grew up knowing him as Uncle Walt. Even rode in that sort of bizarre little train that he had in his backyard. And one day my father was on the phone with Walt Disney, mentioned that his father was coming into town for the, I think, golden anniversary. And Disney said to my, my grandfather's studio was long since out of business, and a bunch of my grandfather's animators were now working for Disney. And Disney said to my father, I want you to extend an invitation to your father. I'd like to host a reunion at my studio with his animators. And my grandfather accepted, and that reunion took place and the two men reconciled and became friends for the rest of their lives. [01:15:44] Speaker A: Nothing like a happy ending. [01:15:46] Speaker C: Not many Hollywood endings are like that. [01:15:51] Speaker A: Your dad went on from 20,000 leagues to. Well, he did the Vikings in 1958 working for Kirk Douglas and then compulsion, fantastic voyage, doctor Dolittle. Boston Strangler, che tora tora tora. In 1971 he did ten Rillington play, see no evil and the last run in 1972, the New Centurions. Then in 1973 he did Soylent Green and the dawn is dead. In 1974 he did Mister Majestic and the Spikes Gang. It finally slows down a little bit. There's Mandingo, the incredible Sarah Ashanti, the jazz singer, Amityville 3D, Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, and his final movie, Million Dollar mystery. That is when you look at the variety of types of movies and just to go from one to the other so quickly. Wow. Wow. It is a testament to his skills as a storyteller that he could tell so many stories. Certainly the people with the money recognized that not only did he tell the stories, he told them efficiently and on time, on budget. Tremendous professionalism. Tremendous professionalism. [01:17:23] Speaker C: Was hired a number of times to replace the director as he was on tough enough and on the jassing and almost directed Brenda star. So close, so near. [01:17:43] Speaker D: Just to show you how many movies like Brenda Starr could he have been involved with through his entire career that didn't happen. And yet he still put out an incredible amount of motion pictures. [01:17:56] Speaker C: 47. [01:17:59] Speaker A: Wow. [01:18:00] Speaker D: And we came pretty, we came pretty close with Brenda Starr. [01:18:04] Speaker C: We did. Yes, we did. We were only one indictment away. [01:18:11] Speaker D: Well, we never really got to the story of how I know Mark or how I know Dick. [01:18:18] Speaker A: Hey, we'll finish with that. Let's mop up with that. [01:18:25] Speaker D: I was brought on because of a friendship that I had with a man named Sid Finger, who had a company called Solomon and Finger CPAs. And they had a monopoly on auditing motion pictures and television for people who are participants in that, meaning they get a piece of the movie or the television show. And so he had two clients and they were at the rights to Brenda Star and they were going to make it into a movie. And they had never produced anything before. And Sid suggested that they talked to me. And so we met and we hit it off pretty well. They had produced Annie, the Broadway play. They owned the 46th Street Theater, which is now, I think it's the Schonfeld Theater. And so they were pretty well, you know, known in New York and had a big financial background. And they partnered with a man named Jake Eberts, who had a company called Goldcrest and also a guy named Joe Childs who had an SBA in New York. And things were going along smoothingly and we brought on Dick to direct. And the next thing I knew, they said, well, we need to go to Yugoslavia, you and Dick and us, and look at locations. And also we need to go to the film, the Cannes film festival to sell the movie. And so that's how I knew Dick. And while I think it was at the. I think it was at Cannes, I might have been. I might be mistaken, Mark, but maybe you'll know. It might have been in Yugoslavia, where I was having dinner with Dick one night, and Dick said, you know, I have a son, and I think the two of you would get along really well. And I said, oh, okay. And he said, so next time you're in LA, I'd like to arrange for a meeting, because I just have this feeling that you two guys might become friends forever. And I sort of took it with a grain of salt, and I said, okay, great, let's do it. And Dick, that's exactly what happened. Mark and I met, and we've been friends ever since. And that was 19, the late seventies, I think. So that's how that all came about, how I know Mark and, you know, I sort of became a family member. I was so welcomed into Dick's and Mickey's inner circle that anytime I would come out from New York, you know, they would have dinner with me, take me to dinner, make dinner at the house. And it just became. He became like a second father to me after my dad passed away. And it just was such a joy to go to Los Angeles to see Mickey and Dick and then meet Mark and then be included in those group of people. It was a very special relationship that I had with Dick Fleischer and Mickey and then with Mark. In fact, when I finally moved out to Los Angeles from New York, I was talking to Dick one day about, gee, I'm going to have to buy a car. And he said, well, you know, I have. I have a Bentley. I think it was a Bentley, right, Mark? [01:21:38] Speaker C: It was a rolls. [01:21:39] Speaker D: Rolls. I have a Rolls. [01:21:40] Speaker C: He never stooped to a Bentley, right? [01:21:42] Speaker D: It was a roll. It was a beautiful burgundy and tan, right? [01:21:46] Speaker C: Yes. [01:21:47] Speaker D: And he. But he said, but I don't drive that daily. I have a Toyota to sell that. No, isn't it? It was Toyota. Yeah, I'm thinking of selling it, so if you would like to buy it, I'll make you a good deal. And I remember leaving his house going, oh, my God, I'm going to be driving Dick Fleischer's car. This is unbelievable. And so I bought the car from Dick and I kept it forever until one of us is going to conk out. And then I changed cars. But I remember. [01:22:22] Speaker A: I remember that car. [01:22:24] Speaker D: Yeah, I always loved that car more than anything. I've never been a car person, but that car, to me, was like part of my relationship to Hollywood. [01:22:34] Speaker C: Well, to even the story out a little bit, at that time, I was working on building a producing career. And I remember my father was doing Betty boot and picking it up. And he said to me, you know this. You know, he talked about the people who were on it and all. [01:23:00] Speaker D: You mean Brenda Starr? Not Betty Boop? [01:23:02] Speaker C: I'm sorry, did I say that's on my mind right now? Yeah, it was Brenda Starr. And so he told me that one of the producers was coming to town, Gil Adler, and he said, you know, I'd like you to come onto the movie as maybe an assistant to me or something like that. And I said, no, I would love it. And he said, I want you to meet. Gilhezen said exactly to me what he said to Gil. He's only said that to me about two people in my whole life where he said, I think the two of you will become friends forever. Then Gil and I met, and of course that happened. And I was brought onto the picture and spent a lot of time in New York and doing location surveys. And then that's when Gil and I spent a lot of time together. And then they sent after that location survey that my father was on in Yugoslavia. He came back through New York and met with Jake Eberts and Goldcrest and all of that. And they asked me then to go to Yugoslavia to follow up on what Gil and my father had done with the take the american crew heads and meet with the yugoslavian crew heads. So they then made me an associate producer, which we know how prestigious that is in the movie business. And I remember landing in New York to attend that meeting. And then I was going to go on to this lobby, and that's going to be like LA. And I landed and I realized I forgot to bring a tie because we're meeting the bankers and monitoring stuff. So I got up early and I went and bought a tie. And we got to the meeting and we sat down, I looked over, and the only other person wearing a tie was my father. And he had forgotten to bring a tie, and he went out and bought one earlier. The two of us thought a lot alike. Anyway, I went over to Yugoslavia, and the producers apparently were getting into some potential legal trouble over something they had been doing here. And I had learned of it. That's a whole nother episode. I guess we'll get into it at a different time. But please. I knew about it and had some warning of it, but said, okay, it's not really my business. We'll just keep it quiet. And we're sitting in the first class lounge, and I have, I think, ten american crew members under my care waiting to get the flight out to the slide. We're watching television in the lounge, and it's a story breaks that our two producers, main producers, had just been indicted. So everyone looks to make sure they had round trip tickets. We go to Yugoslavia, and I said to everyone, I said to the crew before we left, here's what's happening. We don't really know what's going on, so there's nothing to really talk about. So we get there, and I'm with Bill Krieber, who's the production designer, and Ernie or Sada, who is the stunt coordinator. You know, two really great fun, great people. And it suddenly breaks in Yugoslavia that the producers had been indicted. And I was like the ranking member of the crew. So we were doing the production through a co production of some sort, with a semi governmental organization called Yadron. And the next thing I knew, I'd been summoned to Yadron, which was like a fortress. And I came in and they interrogated me about, why don't you tell us and this and that? And they sent me back to the hotel, but they took my passport away. And they said, you're going to stay in Yugoslavia for a while, too. For years now. [01:27:30] Speaker A: That's not comfortable. [01:27:32] Speaker D: But in the meantime, I'm in New York. My lawyer calls me one day and says, I don't know what you want to do, but in the next week or so, your partners are going to be indicted. I said, indicted for what? What the hell? And he said, well, it has nothing to do with motion pictures. It's a coal tax shelter something or other. You have nothing to do with it. But, you know, you're a young guy just starting out, and you may not want to. You may not want to be there. And I said, well, okay, let me think about it. And so I go to work. We had offices in the Seagrams building on park Avenue. And I get to the Seagrams building, and I try using my key, and I can't get into the office. And I knock on the door, and the gals who worked in there said. Came out and said, oh, they changed the locks. You've been fired. And I said, I've been fired? What do you mean I've been fired? And they said, yeah, you've been fired, because I came in earlier and I told them that I knew something was up, and I didn't know if I should stay there or not. So I didn't like that. So they changed the locks, and all my stuff was put in boxes outside the door, and I left. But in the meantime, my relationship with Mark had grown, and now we were friends, movie or no movie. He and I were like, you know, good friends. [01:28:55] Speaker C: We're brothers. [01:28:56] Speaker D: Yeah. And so I would call the office in LA, and I couldn't get through to Mark because I couldn't say it was Gil Adler because they wouldn't allow him to talk to me. And they would say, mark, you're never talked to Gil, and blah, blah, blah. And so I didn't know what to do. I couldn't reach mark. And so one day I called the office and I asked for Mark Fleischer, and they said, he's at a meeting. And I said, well, can you have him call his doctor back? I have the test results. Everything is fine, but I do need to talk to him. And they said, oh, what's the phone number? What's the name? And I said, oh, the name is Doctor Rogenbogen, and here's my number. And I gave him my cell, which I think they had cells in those days, but I don't know. Anyway, no cells, just no cells. So Mark gets the message and. Go ahead, Mark. [01:29:51] Speaker C: So I'm sitting there and we're in some sort of production meeting, and the secretary comes in and she said, there's a call for you. And I said, okay, take a message, please. He said, well, it's your doctor. And I said, my doctor? And she said, yes, Doctor Rogandeh. And I looked at her, and I immediately knew who it was. And I started laughing, and everyone was thinking, doctors calling you and you're laughing. So I excused myself and went out. And that's been ever since. It must have been like 1980. I think it's always been Doctor Ogen Rogandeh, and that's kind of been our relationship. So I did finally get out of Yugoslavia. I remember being, everyone went home. This went the whole crew home, except that Bill Krieva wouldn't leave. He wouldn't leave me there. So he stayed there. And I remember being in one of these terrible meetings with the admiralty, black suits and big dark eyes and everybody sitting there. And they bring the phone to me, and it's Ernie Orsati calling from the US. And his words to me were, how's the hostage crisis? And I started laughing. You're not supposed to laugh. In any event, it all worked out. And so Doctor Rogan Bogan has kept me in excellent health while he Suitzenhe. [01:31:32] Speaker A: Doctor Rogan. Doctor Rogan Bogan, call for you on line six. Tip of the iceberg to the stories. Of course we'd love to have you back, Mark, because like I said, we just talked about the family business, your story. You've been involved in a whole lot of fascinating things along the way yourself. So we. I just scratched the surface here and. [01:31:59] Speaker D: I think it'll be a very good idea to have you back where we talk perhaps a little bit more about the upcoming Broadway to be hit musical. [01:32:10] Speaker A: Betty Boop. [01:32:12] Speaker C: Absolutely. Would love to. [01:32:14] Speaker A: So at the very least, you know, we want to hear what is happening with that, because that just sounds like an amazing entertainment experience. [01:32:24] Speaker C: It is. You've never seen anything like it. [01:32:28] Speaker A: Well, cool. [01:32:30] Speaker D: Before we sign off the Broadhurst theater, it opens April 5. As soon as they open up that box office. [01:32:39] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:32:40] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, thank you again, Mark. We'll be talking to you shortly. I thank you, Doctor Rogan Bogan. Thanks. [01:32:49] Speaker C: To receive his bill. [01:32:52] Speaker D: Would you mind coughing one more time. [01:32:56] Speaker A: For you? Thank you everybody, and we'll see you all next time. 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 crypt podcast. Follow them for what my old pal the crypt keeper would have called terrific crypt content.