S3E26: Killer Klowns v Crypt Keeper

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This podcast is a collaboration between costart and Touchstone Productions and the dads from the Crypt podcast. [00:00:14] Speaker B: CCPD, this is Marlboro State Police. Dave, Kurt, are you there? Over. Jack. [00:00:19] Speaker A: Jack, we need your assistance. The town's gone crazy. [00:00:21] Speaker B: People are being killed. [00:00:22] Speaker C: Over. [00:00:23] Speaker B: What's all these reports about circus clowns? [00:00:26] Speaker C: These clowns aren't people. [00:00:27] Speaker A: They're some kind of. [00:00:28] Speaker B: They're some kind of creatures. [00:00:29] Speaker A: Things from another planet. [00:00:30] Speaker B: Look, Jack, they're killing people. [00:00:32] Speaker A: Officer Mooney is dead. I know. I saw it. He was killed by one of these things. Could you send all available units immediately, please? Over. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the how not to make a movie podcast. I'm Alan Katz. Before we start, I want to talk synergy. Synergy is a remarkable thing. It's that spark that ignites when a collaboration between two people suddenly takes wing. That spark can also ignite between lots more than just two people. And when it does and the synergy starts to flow. Oh, man, there is nothing like it. Gil and I had to find each other in order to become a creative team. Our guests for this episode, the Kyoto brothers, had an advantage because they were brothers. Now, not all family acts become the Marx brothers. Plenty turn into the Murdochs or the Redstones. But the Kyotas, Stephen, Edward and Charles. These guys had synergy from the drop. You can feel it in their puppetry and their puppet creations. Everything from Marcel the shell with shoes on, the work theyve done on the Simpsons and for Team America, among many, many others. Of course, you can witness it in all its glory in the Kyotas masterpiece, the B movie classic killer clowns from outer space, now celebrating its 35th anniversary as a thing. When Gil and I were doing crypt all those years ago, our management, ours, and the Kyotas thought thered be synergy between the five of us. The whole idea was killer clown guys, plus the cryptkeeper guys, sequels. Movie or tv series? Cold back up the brinks truck brothers. Alas, we never got that far down any creative roads together. Or should I say we haven't yet. Our chat started with just one Kyoto Stephen. [00:02:33] Speaker B: Just such cool fans. I'm so surprised that after 35 years, we have such a fan base. So I'm always happy to see whoever shows up. [00:02:45] Speaker A: Was. Was there ever now with us? What Gil and I are experiencing with tales from the crypt is a resurgence. And, you know, there was a long period when I can tell you, as someone who was looking for work, Gil was always gainfully employed. Someone who was looking for work. There was a lot of years when tales from the crypt was a fucking anvil around my neck. It's like, in what way? [00:03:10] Speaker B: That's it. Oh, that's it. [00:03:12] Speaker A: They look at me like, that was a thousand years ago. [00:03:16] Speaker B: Well, I have a similar issue. I usually say Killer Clowns is my first feature film, then I say it was my only feature film. And we trying to get a feature going since, for 35 years now. So, yeah, yeah, we all have our albatrosses, but still, you're right about the resurgence. What's interesting is at least the people I've talked to, they just really love and embrace the eighties movies. And I think it's because of the traditional hands on, tangible effects. I mean, this is a generation that's grown up on cg their whole entire lives. So now they see these eighties movies and say, what's that? Why is that different? And I think they really love it. So I think that's why we're both experiencing a resurgence, I think so. [00:03:59] Speaker D: I think you're right. You know, we've had people come up to us, young people who said that they saw it when they were kids and their parents would let them sneak into the television room and they would watch it after the parents went to sleep. And I'm sitting there looking at them like they're adults now, they're grown up. And I'm just amazed that they're still interested in wanting to hear more about the show and about what we're doing. [00:04:24] Speaker B: Absolutely. And it's multi generational, just like ours. I mean, people who loved it in the eighties got married, had kids, showed it to their kids, their kids have friends, it spreads to them. And now it's like three generations. [00:04:39] Speaker A: Everything old gets new again and here we all are. And. Man, hey, fantastic. Great. Good. [00:04:47] Speaker B: Yeah. I wish we had this success when I was younger. [00:04:53] Speaker A: Yeah. But you know what? Oh, you would have wasted it. It would have been wasted on you. Now you're older and wiser. You know what to do with it. [00:05:00] Speaker B: I'm older. Talk about our careers in between time. We've been pitching and pitching and pitching all these years. It's not like we haven't been inactive. And we've come really, really close to some things, and things just kind of fade away with that phenomenon called musical chairs in the creative development departments of every, of every studio. Yeah, but we managed, and I, you know, I think we called up, we called you guys, we were developing something at Nickelodeon. We had like a three show deal there, and we did something we called Squid Zone, which was like the little Rascals meets monsters. Modern day. And it was a team of Sci-Fi geeks. You guys. You know the term squids? That's what they call convention geeks. It was a bunch of little geeks. We were fighting monsters in their hometown, and we were developing it, Nickelodeon and, you know, Kyoto brothers. We're like kind of riders, but we're not rider riders, like showrunners. So we were always looking for somebody. And I think Edward might have talked to maybe Gil. I think it was. I don't know. Edward was here because we did kind of bump into you guys because we were always looking for a kind of like a riding. Riding team to work. [00:06:14] Speaker A: We. We did at one point. I know that our manager. I know we had a meeting with you guys at your. At your. At your facility. [00:06:21] Speaker B: Yeah. Do you remember what it was? [00:06:25] Speaker D: I don't remember what it was, but it was a long time ago. [00:06:28] Speaker A: You know, the thinking was, you know, we. We like a mixture of horror and comedy. You like a mixture of horror and comedy. Surely there's some synergy that can be made between this, you know, this guy and this guy, and you could have something miraculous. You know, it takes time to do that. We never had a chance to actually do that. You know, nothing ever came about. [00:06:50] Speaker B: No, no. It's you and a bunch of other people we've tried to collaborate with. It's just, you know, schedules and interests and what's going on in everybody's lives. It doesn't. Doesn't always connect, but you know what? You guys in mind? [00:07:03] Speaker A: But, yes, and I would say, you know what? We all still have time. None of us are dead yet. [00:07:09] Speaker B: That's right. [00:07:11] Speaker A: There you go. [00:07:12] Speaker B: Got you. We should. We should. We should run a squid zone by you guys. Or squid squad, I think it was called. And then. Oh, was it black and white, our reality cop show with monsters. This is, like, way, way back. [00:07:25] Speaker D: Yeah, that I remember, actually, I remember that. I think we act. That's the one. We came to your place. [00:07:30] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:07:31] Speaker D: To talk about. And I think your place was. [00:07:35] Speaker A: Right near. [00:07:36] Speaker D: On a ramp. The ramp went over to Burbank, and you took the street going down. [00:07:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:07:43] Speaker D: And you're right on the right side of that. Of that ramp. [00:07:46] Speaker B: Yeah, we're right. Just almost underneath the ramp of the five in Burbank. Yeah. [00:07:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:07:53] Speaker B: So many great ideas have not. Have not been produced over these years. That was a great one. Remember with the reality cop show is, like, played absolutely straight, not looking at the camera, no Ghostbusters special equipment. These were the regular cops meeting up with these, like, extraordinary things. And it was great. Oh, we love the idea. [00:08:16] Speaker A: Funny. Now that you mention it, it is flooding back to me. And suddenly I remember. Yeah, I remember you guys pitching the idea to us. I. Oh, my God, it's just beginning to. That door behind the door. Behind the door. [00:08:31] Speaker B: Suddenly, do you remember it was open? [00:08:34] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:08:36] Speaker B: Had a presentation that was like cop files. And we'd open up with the weekly world news that all this stuff was real, but nobody pays attention to it. Then I had cop files of all these, these, like, werewolf attacks and bug men and things. And we had all the files and evidence and all that. It was, I mean, we went to Comedy Central with, oh, what was her name? I'm gonna kick myself, Deborah Leibly. And we pitched like it was real. I said, look, we came, you know, we were talking to some people down at LAPD, and they said, they gave us this file, and it's like, these are things that are really happening that nobody knows about. And she was just kind of enthralled. But you know what? What kind of killed it? They wanted to make it a comedy. They wanted to put jokes, like five or six jokes on every page. And we said, no, no, to play it straight. Had to play it straight. And so creatively, we didn't see eye to eye. But it's really interesting. About six months later, they came out with that. What's that cop show that was on Comedy Central? Reno 911. [00:09:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:44] Speaker B: I wish they had done right squad. [00:09:48] Speaker A: You know, we should have taken you guys up on that. It's funny looking back at the silly things you do in a career. At one point, Gil and I had a development deal at ABC Productions, and we. It was a. It was anything we wanted to do. And we, you know, we are. The thing that everyone knew us for was horror, but we wanted to do a romantic comedy, and no one stopped us. And nobody stopped us. Oh, my God. [00:10:20] Speaker B: Oh, well stuff. We had a three picture deal. You do a first one horror, and the second one romance. [00:10:29] Speaker A: Now he tells me. [00:10:31] Speaker B: Yeah. And what was it? Actually, we had a deal with John Landis. I was working with John on the stupids. We were doing animation effects, and he saw, we had, like, our little demo for fright squad on it, and actually behind on that, he kind of sold it to Disney because he had a deal at Disney. So we were really happy. John Landis would be really great. So we had our initial negotiations, and it just didn't. Just didn't happen how we were going to do it. So a lot of missed opportunities. Here we are in LA where everybody's doing it and so much doesn't get done. [00:11:06] Speaker A: Oh yeah, it's amazing that anything does get done. [00:11:11] Speaker B: That's the unique exception. [00:11:13] Speaker A: The thing that I really like about the podcasting world, it's entirely diy and I don't have to rely, we don't have to rely on anybody to put out a piece of produced work every week. And hey, I've got a theory that Napster has come for us all. That Napster first destroyed the music business and what Napster did was it destroyed the need for a music store or even a music company because everything could go peer to peer. I could share my entire collection with you, you could share your entire collection with me. And it simply destroyed all the economics that had kept the thing afloat. You know, before Napster, music acts would tour to support their album sales and then Napster destroyed that. And so now you had to basically just give the music away to support so that hopefully they'd come and see it. They come and see your tour and. [00:12:14] Speaker B: Buy and buy t shirts. The merch is what kind of keeps the road shows going. [00:12:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, it completely screwed up the economics. At the end of the day, I think Napster came for us all and I think the, you know, the tv business certainly has felt the effects of that. Streaming is, has a kind of a peer to peer quality to it. In a strange way. At the end of the day I think the convention business is peer to peer. And that is our fans opportunity to come and really to tell us person to person what we've done and how much they've enjoyed our work in their lives. It's really, it's how a lot of the future of the business is going to be. Is that going to be, it's going to grow out of that peer to peer relationship? [00:13:15] Speaker B: I think so too. And I think what I liked about it was it democratized filmmaking. Everybody now has an iPhone which has a two K 4K quality that we have at our studio. So now everybody, and I think everybody's an artist, everybody can create. Now we're seeing a greater variety of things done by people out there and it's really exciting and it kind of cuts into all the studio stuff. But it's interesting. The streaming world right now is going to be going more towards the traditional broadcast model with commercials and shit. [00:13:47] Speaker A: Yeah, it has to. [00:13:48] Speaker B: The young people aren't going to go for that. They're going to go for the podcast, they're going to go for the homemade entertainment you guys do. And you mentioned conventions. That's going to be a way to get to them publicly. So you'll go on tour at conventions to support the stuff you do on your podcast. So I think it just puts more power. You don't have to talk to an executive. You don't have any rules or regulations. You do whatever the fuck you want. I think that's great. [00:14:11] Speaker A: There are a couple of filmmakers who were beginning to reacquire the rights to their stuff and rather than, you know, sell it, having to get pennies from the man, if you want to see their stuff, hey, you just go to their site and, you know, it's peer to peer. [00:14:28] Speaker B: People always talk about like killer clowns, we don't own it. And they go, oh, you guys must have made a bad deal. Well, you know what? There was no other deal. If you, if you wanted to keep any kind of rights, they go to the next guy who's going to give it away. So everybody in law in Hollywood has made that kind of deal. [00:14:45] Speaker C: So. [00:14:46] Speaker B: So now you don't have to. Now you can. A good example would be Marcel Lachelle with shoes on. Jenny Slade and Dean Fleischer camp. They did a funny little thing, put it on the Internet. It's like a fluke for somebody else's mother just to see what they were kind of doing. And it caught on 35 million hits. [00:15:03] Speaker A: Awesome. [00:15:03] Speaker B: Two books and a feature film and an Academy Award nomination. Guess what I wear as a hat? [00:15:09] Speaker C: What? [00:15:10] Speaker B: Lentil. One time I nibbled on a piece of cheese and my cholesterol went up to 900. Guess what I used? It's tie my skis to my cardinal hair. Guess what? My skis are toenails from a man. So there is the power. If it's good, people will grasp it. And you could, you can get the home run now. You don't have to talk about executives and what's right and wrong and all that kind of stuff and get screwed. You own it. Well, they don't own the movie. They had to get 24 does. But anyway, they made a movie. [00:15:45] Speaker A: Yeah, they, they leveraged their content really as big as they possibly could. And isn't that the point of the exercise? [00:15:52] Speaker B: Well, yeah, Wilson, to get it out. [00:15:54] Speaker C: I don't know. [00:15:55] Speaker B: It's art. I don't know why we do this, but we do it just to kind of do our stuff and, and see how people like it. And if they like it, we have a big smile on our face. I remember we had just finished the amazing light sea monkeys, and, you know, we had to go into some definite deficit funding. And we said, what's the cheapest show we could do? That we could possibly do? And I was a big fan of cops, and I said, let's do cops with monsters. It was the cheapest thing. But I'll tell you that this is before Blair witch. And everybody pitched it to, said, oh, no, no, the audience won't get it. They won't know if it's real or this or that. It can't be not. And nobody would even take a chance. Then the Blair witch came out and all of a sudden, bo reality. What a great concept that's so far behind. [00:16:40] Speaker A: It sucks to be ahead of the curve. [00:16:42] Speaker B: I. You know what? I think we were with that one. [00:16:46] Speaker A: You absolutely were. And that is the worst place to be. The guy with the great idea, who no one sees it yet, and then it's the second guy in line goes, yeah, here's that same idea. They go, you're a genius. And finally, Edward Kyoto joined us. [00:16:59] Speaker C: We took the cheapest show to produce cops and then complicate it with a monster of the week. [00:17:06] Speaker B: Well, we could have done it, though, I think. [00:17:08] Speaker C: Exactly that time for sure. [00:17:11] Speaker A: Oh, there's so many places to go. You guys originally hail from de Bronx? [00:17:19] Speaker B: Originally, actually, Charlie and I and my sister Diane, we were in the Bronx, but then our family got too big when we had Edward, so we moved out to Long island, which was the country back in 1960. So he went to the wilderness. [00:17:32] Speaker D: Wait, wait, wait. Go back? Go back where? [00:17:33] Speaker B: In the Bronx, I guess. Gun Hill road. Uh, down the street from what? [00:17:41] Speaker C: You. [00:17:41] Speaker B: Do you remember freedom land? [00:17:42] Speaker D: Yeah, I do. [00:17:44] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, we were down the block. [00:17:46] Speaker D: And where in Long island did you go? [00:17:48] Speaker C: A deer park in Suffolk county. [00:17:50] Speaker D: Sure. [00:17:51] Speaker B: Right smack in the middle of Deer park. [00:17:53] Speaker D: But it's pretty nice out there. That's really nice out there. [00:17:56] Speaker C: Yeah, it was. It was a great place to grow up. [00:17:58] Speaker B: There was more. There were more trees than houses when we moved there. [00:18:02] Speaker D: Right, right. [00:18:03] Speaker B: It was great. [00:18:03] Speaker A: Did you guys grow up as film buffs? I mean, when did movie making. Or was it. Where did it begin? Do you guys. Was it monster movies first? Do you guys even think of yourselves as horror movies? Guys, how do you think of yourselves? [00:18:20] Speaker B: There's a gap between. [00:18:21] Speaker D: This sounded like a therapy session. [00:18:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Truly, what's wrong with you? Please start explaining. [00:18:27] Speaker B: Actually, Edward has a different story than I do. It was always with me and Charlie. Pretty much like, speak for him. It's been monster movies. I think we saw King Kong, the original King Kong when we were very, very young. I was like five maybe. And it really left a big mark on us. I mean, me especially, because we had these elevated train tracks right down the block from where we lived. And when I saw King Kong rampaging through New York and tearing apart the trains, it was really surreal for me. We love dinosaurs, but seeing Kong in our neighborhood just left a big mark. Sure. So that was it for me. And it was always monsters and we would see. [00:19:06] Speaker A: How old were you at the time that you saw King Kong? [00:19:09] Speaker B: About five. [00:19:11] Speaker A: Very impression. [00:19:12] Speaker B: 54. And we moved out in 1960. So it's like three, four, five and eight somewhere around there. But Edward grew up on Long island and he had a different. [00:19:23] Speaker C: Yeah, I was certainly fascinated by the monsters. Caught the monster bug early as well. But like the. Probably, like my. My life changing incident was my dad took me to see 2001 a Space Odyssey in. In 1968. [00:19:38] Speaker A: I don't know what you're talking about, Hal. [00:19:40] Speaker B: I know that you and Frank were. [00:19:42] Speaker C: Planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen. I always loved moon movies, but that one just was different. It just impacted me, you know, and an eight year old, I was just kind of overwhelmed by the sights, the sounds, the overall experience. And it just kind of hit me that movies are just. Are more than just like little. Little romps, little fun things. I couldn't. I'm articulating it in a much more sophisticated, not really way than I did at eight years old. But it definitely impacted me that this was something that fascinated me and I wanted to do more. [00:20:20] Speaker A: You wanted to seeing it? You wanted to do it, do it, yeah. [00:20:24] Speaker C: Again. And then. And Charlie and Stephen had been active making their own movies. And then I used to help out with that. I mean, there's an eight year gap between me and Charlie. Charlie's the oldest. Stephen is two years younger than him. So, you know, different at that age. That's light years, but still, you know, I was still there. Active participant watching and learning. Just that when I went off and started doing my own stuff was a little more. Was just like slightly different take, but always fascinated by the effects, the visual effects. [00:20:57] Speaker B: Especially for us, it was a form of play. We had army men and dinosaurs and we used to go down in the woods and dirt and make little stories up. And then when we got an eight millimeter camera. [00:21:07] Speaker A: Yeah. When was the first time you picked up that eight millimeter camera? How old were you when you had that in your hands? [00:21:15] Speaker B: I was about ten. I think the first stop motion I did, I was ten years old. My parents bought it for, like, homemaking movies, you know, home movies and stuff. And actually Charlie, they got it for Christmas, and Charlie went up into the attic where my parents would hide, hide the gifts. And he saw it like, a month before we actually got it. So he and I were planning movies. We were saying, oh, let's make a movie. And we had, like, little rubber animals and army soldiers, and then we were going to pull them by strings, the anime, because he didn't even know what animation was until we got a camera. [00:21:44] Speaker C: But funny film. Film was a part of our existence, even from when we were born. Our grandfather had a 16 millimeter. We would film all the family events, anniversaries, engagement parties, baptisms, weddings, Christmas, Thanksgiving. And whenever the families got together, he would bring out the 16 millimeter movie projector, and we'd show the home movies. In fact, actually, we have our uncle Fritz, his 60 millimeter projector, which was the workhorse. That's the one we had. And he was a tinkerer. He would modify it. He had, like, a rheostat on it. So whenever you touch Uncle Fritz's projector, you would get a shock. So, yeah, so, I mean, so it was, again, there was this fascination with that technology, the moving pictures, the projector, that something magical about that. That light, that sound. [00:22:39] Speaker A: And back in the day when you had to. When it was eight millimeter or super eight millimeter film, and you were cutting it with, you know, with that little machine, the little editing thing with little pieces of scotch tape, more or less. It was a painstaking, fidgety little process, but you were in touch with it. And there was something, I don't know, elemental and organic about all of it. In the old days of editing, when you take a grease pencil and, you know, you'd mark your fade from. From one place on one part of the. [00:23:12] Speaker B: Run the film like this. [00:23:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:23:15] Speaker C: The dreaded corn sprocket holes. [00:23:18] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. But for us, for me and Charlie, Charlie was an illustrator. He could always draw, so he would do drawings and stuff and create backgrounds. And I was a sculptor, so I ended up making clay figures and animating. So we kind of complimented each other in different ways to make films. And then we invented techniques called we did force perspective. And instead of doing. We didn't know anything about movie making, but we kind of, in our own little hobby way, our do it yourself way, created matte paintings. We didn't paint on glass. We, Charlie would paint something on a mat board, and then we'd cut out the negative space, and then we'd hold it up in front of the camera so we'd have these gigantic mushrooms, and we'd walk through a mushroom forest. We didn't know that they did it with clan. We didn't know so much. And. [00:24:10] Speaker C: Oh yeah, I think you'll find that's the case with a lot of, like, especially stop motion animators, you know, you know, the Jim Danforths, the David Allens of the world, Doug Beswick's Jim appearl that back when we were growing up, there wasn't Cinefantastique, there weren't online, didn't have the Stan Winston school that showed you all these techniques and stuff. So you would, you would invent it as you went along. Maybe you'd see something in famous monsters of filmland, a grainy picture that sort of showed ray animating something on a tabletop with a piece of glass. But there was no step by step revealing on the techniques, so they're all tinkerers. We all made it up as we went along. [00:24:56] Speaker A: Indeed, indeed. And discovered and failed. And it made. Every time you failed and screwed up and spent hours doing something the wrong way was like a piece of Ikea furniture, wasn't it? And to suddenly go back and recut it the way that it had to be. But the education therein was fantastic. You learned how to tell a story with this medium in a way that you couldn't learn. It's really hard to learn digitally because. [00:25:25] Speaker C: It'S funny, without, without any influence of the industry. Why raise my arm? We grew up on, we were growing up on Long island when this was happening. And there's a film industry in New York, obviously, but that was like Manhattan, and that was like Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen movies. It was a different thing. They didn't make Sin Voyager, Sin bad Jetson and the Argonauts movies out of the New York film markets. You know, it was so there, you know, we didn't have a neighbor that was a grip or a gaffer, so it was totally foreign for us. [00:26:01] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, we used to enter film festivals too, like the Kodak Awards and all these different things. And we would always come in like second or third. [00:26:08] Speaker C: Honorable mention. [00:26:10] Speaker B: Yeah, or honorable mention because they were making movies about the ecology or the war, like, like high, high art. And we were doing. [00:26:22] Speaker A: You were like Moses staring at the promised land, thinking, how the hell do I get from here to there. [00:26:27] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:26:28] Speaker B: But we did do an ecology movie called sludge grubs. They were giant crabs that came out of garbage. So that was our ecology movie. [00:26:35] Speaker A: That's fantastic. Now, Stephen, you ended up going to Rochester, the Rochester Institute of Technology. [00:26:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I did. [00:26:44] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:26:45] Speaker A: And you were awarded best young director at the Cannes Film Festival. [00:26:50] Speaker B: Yes. That's really funny. I made, in my sophomore year, I made a little fable about a cricket that couldn't jump all stop motion with a front projected background at Slide. And I guess I entered the Golden Eagle awards, American Golden Eagles, something like that. And I didn't know it at the time, but I. They would then send winners to other countries. So one day I get a letter with this trophy that looked like it was bent, and it said, I won this thing at the Cannes Film Festival. And I said, what the hell is that? So it took me, like a year to finally figure out that it was really a prestigious award. I didn't know anything about it. I wasn't. I wasn't very educated in the world. [00:27:34] Speaker C: That's it. Part of growing up not really knowing or caring about the business of it all. [00:27:41] Speaker D: You probably thought it was a prank that Charlie was print, but it was funny. [00:27:46] Speaker B: Usually a trophy is like a perfect circle. They would have a circle, and this one was kind of bent like that. That's the french for you. And I thought, oh, it got destroyed in the shipping. I didn't know what it was. And then I went to New York when I graduated, and people started saying, oh, what's this? I had on my resume? [00:28:03] Speaker A: Oh. [00:28:03] Speaker B: And they told me what it was and it kind of. [00:28:09] Speaker A: Do you feel like Rochester contributed anything to what you became? [00:28:15] Speaker B: Nope. Our rit is a fantastic school right now. It's grown so much. I wish I was going there now. I think I went to the wrong school. I love the equipment. I felt I could make my movies there with all the equipment they had, but they didn't have an ocean picture. They didn't have a motion picture discipline and didn't have a degree. So I had to take photograph. Photo illustration was what I took a photography thing. But every class that I had, I was making a film, like the cricket film I made, I would go to my art class and I'd say, I want to make puppets for my film. And they said, okay, my photojournalism class, I'm writing a screenplay for my film. Okay. So I did independent study. So I. So I majored an independent study and just made a bunch of movies that was my education at RIt because they. [00:29:01] Speaker A: Didn'T have a film major at that, at that point. That's, that's unfortunate. It sucks to be ahead of the curve yet again. [00:29:09] Speaker B: Yeah, it was talking about 19, 72, 76. That's when I went there. But now, oh, state of the art equipment there, animation department, cg, computers. It's just a really wonderful campus and school. [00:29:23] Speaker A: Edward, where did you go? [00:29:25] Speaker C: Several places. I started out at SUNY purchase. Through high school, I became fascinated with the tech. I was always a bit of a photographer, had my own darkroom at home and stuff. But in high school, I really latched onto the theater arts department and I was a lighting designer since I was in 10th grade, I was lighting all the senior shows and productions and things. So again, I always had this. I always wanted to make movies, but again, my first and foremost thing was making, doing lighting for television, for theater stage. So I went to purchase, which is had a state of the art theater complex and things, and I went there for a year and then decided that. And it was me, I was 17 when I went away to college, and I wasn't really quite ready for the environment. And it kind of just slapped me in the face that, no, I really, I really wanted to do film. I wanted to make movies. And part of that was just the way purchase was set up. Like, especially freshmen coming in, we were kind of slave labor for the brand new theater arts complex that he had just made. Great people would have been a fast track to potential lighting designer on Broadway and top notch productions, but I just, just, my heart wasn't in it, so I left after a year. It was a great year. I learned a lot, actually, in that year about myself and just things in general. But then I went to SUNY Stony Brook on Long island for a year and a half, and I transitioned from theater into film there and then I ultimately went to Hofstra and I got my degree in communications. They had a, got a great little indie film department there. They had theater, if I wanted to put my, to put my toes back in the water, and a great television department. And, uh, yeah, and, uh, you know, that's where I met some, you know, some of my lifelong friends came from, from Hofstra. So that was a great, great experience. [00:31:34] Speaker A: So you ultimately found your place? [00:31:36] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Took, I was on the five year plan. Our parents, they didn't, they kind of didn't question it. You know, they, they would, they would help us out with financial aid and help us with inflation. You know, we got, we all had student loans. But Charlie went to Pratt, you know, Pratt institute. Stephen went to private universities. I went. I ultimately went to a private university. I think they maybe caught a break with our sister. She went to a state university for her college career. [00:32:04] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:04] Speaker B: What's interesting about my folks, they didn't really understand what we were doing. They were an artist themselves, and it was really foreign, but they saw. Maybe they saw our passion. [00:32:14] Speaker A: What did your folks do? What, what, what? [00:32:16] Speaker B: My father. My father did a bunch of things, but he ended up doing 25 years. In the penitentiary? No, no, a post office. He was in the post office. And my mother worked in a couple of. She worked in a bank. So they were pretty much blue collar workers. But they just gave us the film, they gave us a projector. They gave us the time and anything we wanted so we could follow this just dream of what we wanted to. [00:32:37] Speaker A: Do, which is a wonderful testament to just. Just their faith in your nature that, you know, you were going to go off on a route that was absolutely foreign to them. They. Hard for them to make sense of. [00:32:50] Speaker C: I look, when we're going to. When we're clearing out the house. I was looking back through some of my dad's stuff when he was younger. He definitely had an artistic side to him. We look at his, like, his school notebooks that were impeccable. The note taking, the diagrams and stuff added color here and there. So there was a. There was a presentation quality in him. You know, he worked in the shoe line before he worked for the post office. The plant he was working at, they went out of business. So then he got, you know, the civil service job. But even there, he was like, he was a cobbler. He was making shoes, you know, so it's funny, but in that generation, post depression, World War two, you know, very. [00:33:31] Speaker A: Very hard for them. Really, really hard for them to. To take a leap of faith where your job, where your work is concerned. And we all took a leap of faith. [00:33:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, we did. [00:33:42] Speaker C: And they support. They supported us. They. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think. I think till the day they left us, I don't think they really understood what we did for a living, but. [00:33:51] Speaker B: It was really great. They did. They did visit us at the set of killer clowns. We had a giant tent there. And I know my mom was just tickled pink with the actors that were there and everything. And I think they did have an opportunity to see that we actually were able to do something pretty big. [00:34:08] Speaker D: I think we may have had the same parents. I had the same thing. They had no idea what I did for a living. Friends of my parents would say to my dad, so, what's going on with your son? What's he doing? And my dad would say, eventually, he would say, well, look, he doesn't ask me for money. I don't think he's doing drugs. And he seems to be happy, so he'll grow out of it. [00:34:33] Speaker B: And where did you grow up, Gil? [00:34:36] Speaker D: Yonkers. [00:34:37] Speaker B: Oh, Yonkers. Oh, just right up the block from us. Yeah. [00:34:40] Speaker D: Like the North Bronx. Yonkers? [00:34:42] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. [00:34:43] Speaker C: We have relatives. Our aunt, my godmother, lived on in Yonkers. I try to remember the name. Olden View Avenue was the Bronx. That was grandma's house. [00:34:55] Speaker D: I'm telling you, we had the same parents. [00:34:56] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:34:58] Speaker D: My parents never knew what I did for a living. Never knew. I once sat my dad down in my apartment in New York, and I said, look, here's my diary of what I do. So just pick a page, and I'll walk you through everything I do in that day, and then you'll know. That's a good idea. So we started going, look, I get up very early because I have some investors in Europe. [00:35:18] Speaker B: I. [00:35:18] Speaker D: So I talked to them first. So I got to get up early because it's 6 hours later in Switzerland. And then I do this. Yeah, yeah. And then I do this, and then I have lunch with this writer, and then I talk about that, and I. I try to get this over with the Joe Papp, and I want to meet Bernie Gersten about and. Yeah, yeah. And I go through a whole day, and I. And after I'm exhausted explaining this to him, I go, so. So now you get it. You know what? You understand? He goes, yeah, yeah. So, uh, what do you do for a living? [00:35:49] Speaker B: Yeah, it was Laurel place. Laurel place. [00:35:51] Speaker C: Laurel place. Yeah, yeah. [00:35:52] Speaker B: Yonkers. [00:35:53] Speaker D: Oh, yeah. [00:35:55] Speaker A: My. My dad. My parents visited the set of tales from the crypt. In fact, my dad was tells from the Crips medical consultant. Whenever I needed to do an effect that was especially ookie, I'd call him up and say, if I did, if we did this to the human body or what would be a really disgusting disease that would look like. And my dad would fill in those levels. You know, some of my fondest memories were sitting with Todd Masters, our special effects guru, just with a pathology textbook. [00:36:26] Speaker D: Oh, yeah. [00:36:28] Speaker A: Looking at, you know, oh, that's really disgusting. Let's try to recreate that. My dad, in fact, in one of the cryptkeeper segments. The cryptkeeper, you know, operating or doing something to my father. My father saw every aspect of what I did for a living. In fact, one day on the set, our first assistant director, Lee Webb, gave my dad the job of, he was the remote, remote queue on a doorway. And so, you know, that's great. [00:36:55] Speaker B: That's really nice. [00:36:57] Speaker A: He saw every facet of what I do for a living and he still couldn't. He still, if people, his friends would ask him, he go, I'm not quite sure what Alan does, though. He saw what everyone else did on the set. He had no idea what I did. [00:37:09] Speaker D: Well, after he had that experience, he came to me and he actually wanted to replace Alan. [00:37:15] Speaker A: And there were some serious conversations our. [00:37:19] Speaker C: Mom would get a kick out of visiting the set. Like on clowns. She came, they came for the last week of shooting, and that's the week Royal Dano was on set with us. So that's, you know, that was a name from their era, so they got to hang with him. And she loved going down to the unseen monkeys and she got to meet Howie Mandela, you know, so she liked, she liked that aspect of it. She understood that the celebrity, I'm telling. [00:37:44] Speaker D: You, we had the same mother, my mom, we were making bordello of blood, and Whoopi Goldberg, who was a friend, said she had wanted to be in the movie. And so Alan and I wrote a scene where we put Whoopi in the, into the scene. And so Whoopi's there. My mother's outside next to me and her, the monitor. And she's looking at the monitor and she's going, what am I looking at? I said, inside to see that wall. On the other side of that wall is a set. And you're looking in there and he goes, what, what's that black girl doing there? And I said, she's, she's, she's in the show. She's in the show. I know her. I know her. That, that's, that's, that, that's that funny woman. And I said, yeah, whoopi Goldberg. Yeah, Whoopi Goldberg. What is she doing here? [00:38:32] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:38:33] Speaker D: Never quite understood. You know, she was a friend of ours and she was doing us a favor. [00:38:37] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:38:40] Speaker A: When did you ultimately, I mean, did you come out to LA one by one, dribs and drabs? Or was it a collective assault on the town? [00:38:51] Speaker B: Actually, probably me is the pioneer, going through things. When I graduated, I went to, back to Long Island. I was working in Manhattan for a little while, but I hated commercials. I had always told stories and the last thing I wanted was animate little objects on a commercial. So a good friend of mine, Chris Roth, editor on killer clowns and leprechauns, so many good, cool movies. [00:39:13] Speaker A: He just passed away. He just passed away, didn't he? [00:39:18] Speaker B: Great, great guy. And he knew me and my work. We worked together at Rita. He was in Washington, DC, and he found a company called Stoner Enterprises that was doing clay animation. And I said I should come down there. So I went down to interview, and I got the job like that. It was exactly what I've done pretty much all my life up to then. And I worked there for about four years, and we made the first clay animation feature film called I go Pogo, based on Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip back in the sixties and seventies. And after that, there was not much going on, so. Oh, yeah, and I got Charlie to come down. I was down there with a bunch of people who had not really made movies before. Not that I made movies, but doing animation and stuff. And we're doing a feature. They needed a production designer. And Charlie was working at ABC News in Manhattan. He had a really great job, union job, working on the news. And I said, charlie, why don't you come down here? Let's make this movie. So he quit that came down to Washington. So he, Charlie and I were kind of spearheading the creative on this, uh, on this feature. [00:40:21] Speaker C: And when that ended, understood that she did not want him to quit. Oh, yeah. [00:40:26] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. [00:40:28] Speaker A: Oh, I'll bet that was a loud argument. [00:40:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I wasn't there for that. Am I frozen, guys? No, no, you go, okay. Because my image here is. Well, anyway, the long story short, Charlie went down to DC, and again, Chris Roth, who was working down there, he went to California. And when Pogo stopped, there was nothing much else to do there. So we decided to go to California. And so Charlie and I went there in 1980, and then we started working for a company called Magic Lantern. Tony Dublin and some guys, they were doing the jews in space sequence in Mel Brooks, a history of the world. I got it. Charlie and I got a job there, and we started working as, Charlie was a designer, 2d guy, and a painter of prosthetics and stuff, and I was a sculptor and an animator. So we were getting a couple of jobs in LA, and all of a sudden, people started liking our work, and we kind of branched off and started Kyoto brothers productions as an effects company with the idea of making films. We were always writing and I creating stories and stuff, and we were trying to get something going. And then Edward joined us. While we were on set for Albert Peugeot and Sword in the sorcerer, we made the crypt of heads. And Edward came from the airport, went to Bronson caves, and was immediately thrust into the cave to puppeteer this giant crypt of heads. [00:41:57] Speaker C: It was August 25, 1981, my 21st birthday. Yeah. [00:42:02] Speaker B: Collaborated. And just through word of mouth, we never really advertised, but we had a style. I don't know how to describe it, but it was something about even the most realistic thing we did. Always had a character bent to it that seemed to be. [00:42:17] Speaker C: Better. [00:42:19] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a flavor of whimsy. [00:42:25] Speaker B: I don't know what it is. It's really funny. Really quick. We did a little promo for company, a little punk rock dinosaur with spray can, spray painting our name on bricks. And we won some kind of festival award. And then somebody was looking for dinosaur documentary footage. And Bill Stout said, oh, go to the Kyoto brothers. They got this dinosaur footage. And we met this guy, Richard Jones, who worked at ABC local, and, and then he said, you know what? I know these guys at ABC. They have extra money for specials. You guys have an idea. And we came up with an idea to do a half hour special at this little special for KBC I directed. It was live action and animation called Cousin Kevin, about a young boy who has a vivid imagination derived from all the books he's read. And whenever he thinks becomes real. And he subjects his older cousin to this nightmare adventure as they're camping out in their backyard. It was great. And then what was it? We worked for fairytale theater. Shelley Duvall's fairytale theater. Hello, I'm Shelley Duvall. [00:43:25] Speaker A: Welcome to Fairytale theater. Yeah, that was a cool show. [00:43:29] Speaker B: We were doing all the special props, and Fred Fuchs, the producer, said, oh, I know some guys who have some money for some films. It was direct to video days with blockbuster and all that. And we said, yeah, we have an idea. Killer class out of space. So we went there and we pitched it in the room with a maquette that I made of a clown with a puppet holding a ray gun. And Charlie did a poster, we had a treatment, and we sold it in the room. Killer clowns from outer space. [00:44:00] Speaker A: Wow. Awesome. Awesome. I mean, how can you not sell that in the room? [00:44:04] Speaker C: This is easy. We thought, this is easy. [00:44:06] Speaker B: Yeah, we could do this. We sold it. How easy to make a movie we got. [00:44:10] Speaker C: The only thing we learned, though, the only thing more difficult but selling your first movie is selling. Trying to sell a second one after the first one didn't make any money at the box office. [00:44:21] Speaker A: Ouch. Damn. Yeah. Some things take time to find their audience. [00:44:27] Speaker C: Yeah, we're still, we're still out there, though. We haven't made that second feature yet, but, you know, we've done everything else. You know, we, we've had a tv show. We've had a streaming special. We've done, yeah. [00:44:44] Speaker A: You'Ve actually, you've ended up, while you're waiting to do your second movie, you guys have done work on some amazing projects. And there's one that I just want to. Well, we'll come to that one. First of all, Marcel the shell with shoes on. [00:44:58] Speaker C: Wow. [00:44:59] Speaker A: Just to be involved with that project. Wow. It is so funny. [00:45:03] Speaker B: Guess what I use as a bean bag chair? A raisin. Guess what I do for adventure? I hang glide on a Dorito. Guess what I use as a pen? What? I use a pen, but it takes the whole family. [00:45:18] Speaker C: Well, thank you. Yeah, that's, that's the one. That's, I gotta say, it's, if it's not at the top of the list, it's really close to it in terms of, like, career fulfillment. There's a special, special project. Worked on it for seven years. [00:45:32] Speaker A: It's utterly magical in how captivating that little character is. [00:45:38] Speaker C: And that's really a testament to the director creator, Dean Fleischer camp and Jenny Slate. They just hit upon something that had this incredible heart, you know, in their original shorts and then two books and Dean was just, I don't want to say relentless because it was. But it was just this. [00:46:00] Speaker B: Passionate. [00:46:01] Speaker C: Yeah. Passionate. Yeah. Better word. Um, so just on maintaining the authenticity of it, keep this character wholesome and true to their vision. And they have partners, partnership. [00:46:13] Speaker A: She performs the voice. [00:46:15] Speaker C: Yeah. Jenny Slate's. The voice of Marcel. [00:46:17] Speaker A: Jenny Slate's, yeah. She's wonderful. That's. [00:46:20] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:46:21] Speaker A: It would be so easy to, to miss that and to hit that annoying note instead. And there's just something captivating and lovely. [00:46:32] Speaker C: And, well, their process, they worked with a writer friend of theirs, Nick Paley, and they would come up with basic little premise and then they would just go. And Dean would act as interviewer and just ask Jenny Marcel these questions. And it was stream of consciousness. Then they'd go away. They'd work it out and then figure out what the next through line is. And they came back. Then they brought Isabella Rossellini in to play Nanakani and Sinereach, the New York based company that financed it. Just let them go. We're supposed to, it was supposed to be a year project. It's funny. It was never a big budget movie. So funny. Our fee, when I put together the budget and schedule and stuff like that, I thought we could do it in a year, maybe a year and a half if the creative took a little longer. And, all right, the fee was okay. We're saying, oh, this is not. It's not a bad fee for a year worth of work. A year and a half. But that turned out to be the fee for seven years. So at a certain point, it became truly a passion project that we're in this. We're in this because we love this. And Cinereach just let them go. It took them a year to do that audio play portion. Then it took them another year to do the animatic component of it. And then our animation director, Kirsten Lepore, who's phenomenal, she went and had a baby. And then we were doing alien Christmas for Netflix at the same time. So then we went and we did. We made the movie three times the animatic. We shot a live action version of it. And then we went back and redid the movie, putting Marcel in it all. And like I said, it's really a testament to Dean and Jenny and Elizabeth Holmes, Liz Holm, she was the producer that went to them with the notion that this had feature potential. And, you know, she was the one that kind of put it all together, bro. All the pieces together. [00:48:23] Speaker A: The claymation sequences you've done on the Simpsons over the years are just fucking wonderful. [00:48:34] Speaker B: What you making there, grapes? [00:48:37] Speaker C: It's a pipe bomb. [00:48:38] Speaker B: Jorda blow up. [00:48:40] Speaker C: Planned parenthood. I don't know. Gravy. I'm sick of your lack of faith. What? Gravy. [00:48:57] Speaker A: Wonderful. [00:48:58] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [00:49:00] Speaker A: Every time. Yeah. Every time you do one of the gumby things, just doing the cloaky. [00:49:10] Speaker B: Yeah, that was it. Whenever they would do a parody of, let's say, rankin and bass holiday special or art cloaky stuff, anything like that, and we would do a simpsonized version, a Wallace and gromit parody called Willis and Crumble. [00:49:55] Speaker C: Where has that silly dog got to? Oh, my. [00:50:02] Speaker B: And even Nick park said he thought it was good, so I was really happy with that. [00:50:07] Speaker C: Yeah, it's just. It's fun working with them because they love animation. They love to stretch their legs, you know? So whenever they go off model, they give us a call and we even got to do a live action puppets with them and got to shoot Katy Perry. Someone totally needs a hug. [00:50:24] Speaker A: That's a great sequence. That whole sequence where she comes in at the end yes, that she's the girlfriend. She's Moe's girlfriend for the weekend. [00:50:34] Speaker B: And that was the first. That was the only live action clip in these 25 plus years of the Simpsons. [00:50:40] Speaker A: You also did Team America. You did a lot of work on Team America, and that is hilarious. [00:50:47] Speaker B: Terrorize this, dude. [00:50:50] Speaker A: That is one of the funniest movies ever. Just screaming, screaming out loud. Funny movie impossible. [00:50:58] Speaker B: Movie impossible. Making a. An Armageddon type action disaster movie with marionettes. [00:51:06] Speaker A: And that's the funniest thing about it. [00:51:09] Speaker C: Really, truly is puppet, once again, a testament to the creators, Matt and Trey. Just incredible, incredible, talented. Um, Trey in particular, it just like, um. He's just brilliant. And it's funny. They, uh. [00:51:26] Speaker A: We, uh. [00:51:26] Speaker C: The story, we didn't start that movie. They started with another company, and, um, they did it. They did a little test, like a two week shoot, and it didn't go well. The other company built beautiful puppets. They're actually. They're friends of ours. Beautiful puppets. But when it came to the logistics of production, mounting that production, it just. It wasn't their strength. It wasn't what they did. So they came to us because not only do we do effects, but we knew how to run a production. We knew how to work. They knew we would be sympathetic for production because we had done our own productions. [00:52:01] Speaker A: You were filmmakers in addition to being puppeteers, and that makes. That makes a huge difference. You know how to think with that hat on. [00:52:07] Speaker C: Yeah. So they gave us the script and we read the script, and it was fucking insane. Like, the climax of the movie was on the golden gate bridge with the chinese army on one side, the korean army on the other side, a school bus full of children on the bridge during an earthquake. And I said, okay, this is fun. This is going to be really hard. I said, let us do an inventory of the puppets. Let's see how much you guys built, and let's talk about the budget. And so we went down there again, beautiful, beautiful technology, beautiful puppets. And my assessment was they had done 30% of the work, but it spent 70% of the budget. And so we said, no. The good folks at Paramount wanted us to do it for the remaining money. We said, no, it can't be done. Thank you. Good luck. We walked away, and then they came back and they upped the budget. And we said, still not enough. You know, the things they're talking about are really expensive, or whether they're going to do a rewrite, they're going to change it, they're going to pull it back. And when we said, smaller bridge. Yeah, we just can't. Let's do something else. So. And so we walked away again. And then. That was funny. Then the head of production, Mark Boxych son, called us and said, look, I can't guarantee you more work, but I'm asking as a personal favor to me, do this movie. We'll work on your money, work on your fees. And he says, but I can't, I can't ever get. I'm not going to guarantee you, oh, this is going to be. Open up these, all these doors and you're going to get all this work. But he said, what I will guarantee is that we're going to respect you, we're going to listen to you and I'm going to make sure everybody on the lot knows what you did. And with that, it's kind of hard to say no. And we came up with a suitable budget stuff and we took on the job and it was nine and a half months of nonstop. The hardest, hardest we ever worked, even on our own production. [00:54:33] Speaker B: The team doing this movie is unbelievable. I mean, between the Kyoto brothers and I mean, every, every single side of. [00:54:38] Speaker A: It, it's mind boggling how many puppets are working sometimes at one time. I've seen some of the backstage, how you did it, and it's just to build the framework around the set so you could work and have you be able to work with three lines. Washington was an undertaking. [00:54:57] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. It was like mounting an army for every shot. Now you have a live action crew who's used to doing maybe, maybe 30 setups a day and doing one or two because it just took so long to get this army of puppeteers on this gantry that was 15ft tall, wiring all the puppets 15ft, getting the monitors in place, all the headphones and everything. It's like a bunch of cats in a basket. And we were going so slow. And then we started to have two, three. How many units? Five. Five? [00:55:24] Speaker C: Five at the end of the thing. And by the end of the shoot, funny bill Pope, he would knock out the New York Times crossword puppet puzzle before lunch because we were so slow. [00:55:33] Speaker B: And then we were shooting at a warehouse in Culver City. Then we shot on the fox lot. So two separate units on two separate lots. It was the most challenging thing I've ever worked on. It was really, really tough and grueling. But I think what really got us the job, too, was the performance. What Matt and Trey wanted. They didn't want these perfectly human performances that I think the first team of puppeteers was going to be giving. They wanted the puppets to be like puppets, with all the inabilities kind of built in because that's where the humor came from. You had this kick ass team of professionals, and when they bump into something, they go like this, and they bounce around and fight like this. [00:56:16] Speaker C: Hilarious. [00:56:17] Speaker A: That is funny. [00:56:19] Speaker C: We had. We had some purists that were insulted by that, thought they were making fun of the technique. Well, yeah, they were, but this is the, you know, chill. This is the best job you've ever had. You know, the most days on sex. [00:56:31] Speaker A: The sex scene is brilliant. I mean, it is hilarious that they had to cut it to get a rating. To get the rating, they had to cut. It's puppets, you idiots. It's puppets. [00:56:43] Speaker B: But they did that on purpose. Right? But, but no, no. I'll tell you, they put those scenes in there so the sensors would go, oh, take that out. So they would. [00:56:52] Speaker A: Of course they did. [00:56:53] Speaker C: Of course they would look over at some other stuff. [00:56:56] Speaker B: But then they had two releases. They had the r version and the x rated version. So those guys. [00:57:02] Speaker A: Oh, but it's genius. And it's. [00:57:07] Speaker C: A funny story. I'll see if I can tell. [00:57:08] Speaker A: Stunningly funny. Stunningly funny. [00:57:10] Speaker C: The original. The original team, they had done, the first sequence they did was Spottswood and Gary in the dressing wood dressing room. And the stories I heard, that was just a nightmare. There was one particular puppeteer on the older side, brilliant marionettas, known for his puppets and stuff. Brilliant, top notch. But he was yelling down from the bridge, the puppet bridge at Trey. You can't do that. Puppets don't do that. It's impossible. And that's one of the reasons that they didn't want to work with this company. And so it's funny, when we were starting to go to three, four, and then five units, we needed. We're in desperate need of quality puppeteers, Marion. The puppeteers, they're abundant in this town. Really great ones. Marionettes, not so much. So we were desperate to get people. So I went, I got this guy's audition. I cut it back together. And I went to and Garofino, the producer, their producer, and I said, and we're really hurting. We need puppeteers here. Take a look at his reel. Take a look at his work, because I'd really like to bring him on. And Ann just pushed the tape back and said, if Trey ever sees him again, he will kill him. [00:58:29] Speaker A: He said the wrong thing. [00:58:31] Speaker C: He really, as desperate as we were, we could not bring this gentleman back. [00:58:35] Speaker B: You know, right, Alan? We did have. [00:58:37] Speaker C: I had. [00:58:38] Speaker B: I was kind of coordinating the puppeteers, and we had 80 puppeteers under the stands during the rent musical. And the same thing in the big Kim Jong un's festival at the end, crammed together with, like, you had some rod puppets and marionettes all mixed in. But it was just. So that's why they don't make marionette movies. You won't find. And we learned why. [00:59:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Truly, I was anyone taking video of the choreography of all of you working together, because that must have been remarkable, just how you all did behind this. [00:59:14] Speaker C: Was some good behind the scenes stuff. And we have some stuff that is not on that EPK, not on the dvd stuff. I mean, just for reference, we made approximately 60 puppets that we turned into overdose. Well over 200 characters in that movie. It was. We had our basic crew of, like, anywhere from twelve to 15 people, 18 people a day working the day shift. And then we had a, like a five or six person night crew that would come in and repair and prep the puppets for the next day. [00:59:50] Speaker B: So that's just a puppet crew. That's not the puppeteers. [00:59:54] Speaker C: Yeah. And then. And then we had, you know, because we were the puppets. It was. They mounted it like a regular production. So, typically, like, when you do a special effect, you're responsible for everything of that character. You. You do the wardrobe, you deal with the props and stuff. They didn't do that on this. We were just responsible for the puppets and their performance. So we had a separate costume design, costume department, a separate prop department, and there was a whole miniature crew building the whole thing. So, it's funny, but because we were doing the puppets and everything revolved around them, we had to wait for every other department to get their shit together and get it on the puppet. So we were always the last ones holding the bag. So we were always the responsible party. Why we're late? Why are we behind? [01:00:38] Speaker B: Why? Why are we ready? [01:00:40] Speaker C: Yeah, well, you know, wardrobe, what's wrong with you? Yeah, wardrobe took an hour to dress this puppethe, you know, or props there, the. The rig, the shooting, the guns wasn't quite ready yet, so we can never, you know, we were always the last guys in the. In the chain. [01:00:57] Speaker A: And there you are, pointing the fingers at everybody else. [01:01:03] Speaker C: On the very. On the very, very first day of shooting, we had done. We'd done a test shoot of the face off sequence where they put. They make bet Gary up. And we learned a lot from that. And we. Then we went away. We adjusted the inventory of how we're going to do the puppets and stuff. But then the first day we were shooting and we all show up and none of us were ready. We weren't ready. Props wasn't ready, wardrobe wasn't ready, art department wasn't ready. And no one, everyone was afraid to go to production and tell them that they weren't ready. We needed more time. And just when it came time to, like, the shoot call, we blew the generator for the building and the power went out. [01:01:46] Speaker B: I think it was my mother. I think my mother, Evan, she said, help the boys out. [01:01:51] Speaker C: It took a half day for them to bring a plant in and get it hooked up. And by the time they got it up, they got it in. We had all caught up. [01:02:02] Speaker A: Yeah, it's funny. Gil. Gil and I can have told horror stories on our podcast about waiting for special effects guys to have their shit ready, but at the end of the day, you know, it's, the work is great, and you make us look. Look great. So inevitably, we're indebted to you. [01:02:24] Speaker C: Yeah, the reality is very. Almost all the time we're working with prototypes, something that we threw together in the shop in a six, eight week period. And, yeah, it kind of works in the shop, but you don't really know. You don't have the time to dismantle it and then rebuild it for a functioning thing, you know, only on rare occasions, you know, like the Rick Bakers, the Stan Winsons of the world got that luxury. [01:02:48] Speaker B: Yeah, they have six months to develop it, and then they. That's their prototype. Then they build the. [01:02:56] Speaker C: We're figuring out and then so much. And then if the. Unless there's a principle in our effects shot, we're always relegated to last shot on a Friday night. [01:03:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. But I do want to do a shout out to Norman Tempier and Dave Nelson. They were the designers of the original puppets that we kind of took over production. Norman worked with us as a puppeteer and a fabricator all through the production. Extremely talented guys. But I think it was the performers that they were working with that Washington. What got Matt and Trey a little. [01:03:26] Speaker C: Their work was spectacular. And Norman was a friend. We had worked with him quite a bit before. So when the production asked would we consider having him on as a puppet supervisor, we said, absolutely. We could definitely work with him. [01:03:40] Speaker B: It was necessary because he knew the ins and outs in the construction, and he's really talented. So it was always a joy to work with Norman. [01:03:47] Speaker C: He wasn't the puppeteer on the bridge. [01:03:53] Speaker A: Where did the killer clown's idea come from? [01:03:57] Speaker B: Well, I guess that was me. I was playing around with what is the most frightening thing I could imagine? What would scare the hell out of me? And I just started thinking, what could that be? And I thought, well, if I was driving down a lonely mountain road in the middle of the night and I see a car passing me, and as it passes me, I look to see who's driving and a clown goes. And it's a clown. A clown being where it shouldn't be is frightening. In fact, it was. Lon Chaney had that quote, there's nothing more frightening than the clown after midnight. Yeah. And I think I tapped into that just unconsciously. And that then we spun it into killer class matter space. [01:04:32] Speaker C: You're just adding more fanciful elements. What if the clown wasn't in a car? What if it was just floating out there? Well, that would make him otherworldly. From outer space. Well, they're from outer space. What are they doing here? Well, they're here to kill us, of course. And great title. [01:04:48] Speaker A: Oh, gosh, yes. I mean, and adding from outer space, that's how we know it's not a slasher movie. [01:04:54] Speaker B: Well, that's it exactly, Alan. In fact, when they first tried to sell a film at Filmmart, they called it killer Clowns. And we said, no, no, no, no. I mean, if you're disappointed with the film, you just gotta look at the title. It's exactly what you expect. [01:05:09] Speaker A: Indeed. You know, it's a strange thing. I know the clowns have names because you talk about them. But in the movie, they don't actually have names. There's not a Groucho, a chico, a harpo, a gum o clown. There's. There's the big one. The big clown at the end. [01:05:31] Speaker C: Reference purposes only. We needed to have call them something so we could differentiate them and get them, you know, when we wanted something out on set or we. So we could track them from a continuity standpoint. But, yeah, they know they were never intended to have names in the. In the real world. And it's funny, and some of the names kind of trickled through, but for the most part, they're all fan applications. [01:05:56] Speaker A: Why did you not give them names? [01:05:59] Speaker B: Because in the context of the story, they weren't characters that needed names. They were just this alien race of pulpy white slugs with markings that made them look like clowns. They were things. They weren't really characters. But again, this is the Kyoto brother thing. I don't know what, but they became characters like Shorty. We called him Tiny during the shoot. I mean, that's the fan favorite. Everybody loves tiny and they call him Shorty. Well, we didn't want to fight the fans when they wanted to do the Funko pops. We said, go with what the fans call them because they'd hate us if we changed it. But character because he was. [01:06:39] Speaker C: And it's not like the names he called them on set were like, innovative and, like, thing, you know, tiny, fatso, chubby, bubbles. [01:06:47] Speaker B: Bubbles, slim, killer, ozob. Ozob was bozo spelled backwards. [01:06:53] Speaker A: I mean, would you say that their personality evolved over time? [01:06:59] Speaker B: Yes, from the movie. I think people kind of get a different sense. Like a shorty. The fact that it was picked on by that bully. I mean, they love him because it feels sorry for him. Killer is the one. Is it Jumbo or killer that gets Moon? [01:07:13] Speaker C: Killer, we called Killer, and the fans call him Jumbo. That's the one that threatened, you know, taunted the little girl outside the big top burger. And the one that kills officer Mooney. [01:07:24] Speaker B: Yeah, not much thought, wouldn't it? We just called him something. [01:07:29] Speaker C: I just found out, you know, when, you know, the clown we called Ozob. We actually did kind of call him Bozo on set, but funny Fangoria came by and did an article about the making of the movie and they took a picture of it and they captioned it, oh, this, this cozy fellow is nicknamed Bozo. And Larry Harmon saw it and threatened trans World with trademark infringement. Rightfully so, I guess. [01:07:58] Speaker A: But for a clown, he had no sense of humor. [01:08:00] Speaker C: Yeah, no, exactly. Well, no, Larry Harmon, if you ever dealt with the money, so they had to pay like a go away fee and. Yeah, I just found out David Arquette has bought Bozo the clown trademark from Larry Harmon Corp. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, I just saw that the other day. They closed the deal at, at a New York comic Con. [01:08:26] Speaker B: Yeah, he likes puppets. He's a cool guy. [01:08:28] Speaker C: Yeah. So that's interesting. [01:08:29] Speaker A: So maybe a new life for Bozo the clown. That's. I don't know whether I like that or. I don't like that. [01:08:37] Speaker B: I don't. I don't get clowns. [01:08:41] Speaker C: Well, it's funny. He's gonna have. I think he's gonna have resistance. You know, I think there's this. I think we've got this from other people. It's not a thesis that I necessarily came up with that, you know, there was always kind of a. People are always kind of uncomfortable. Clowns are not everybody, but a segment of the population has a little unnerved uncomfortable by them. But our movie has brought that out in a public way that it's now it's cool to be admit you're afraid of clowns and people do nothing. Look at clowns the same way since our movie. I mean, you had Pennywise, but still the Pennywise is a different thing. It's a shapeshifter, it's a different vibe where now people don't look and trust clowns like they used to. So, yeah, I mean, so he might. [01:09:30] Speaker B: Be have a little battle unless he turns him malevolent. [01:09:35] Speaker A: How do we, how do we make a. A killer clowns from outer space to finally happen? I mean, do you, what, what does it, you would think with the resurgence. [01:09:48] Speaker C: With some hot shit writers that have done in a real renowned in the horror business. Know any? [01:09:57] Speaker A: I wish I did. [01:09:59] Speaker B: I'll tell you what it is. I think it's, it's always been kind of perceived as a cult film, and studios without box office to back it up won't finance something that was, let's say a box office nothing. But now it's interesting, I think because of social media, it has this resurgence because of the items and the merchandise I think is driving it. You got Funko spirit, Halloween, you got the album, you got a video game coming out. And I think the fans interest, if they continue to enjoy and purchase all this merchandise, it's going to show the powers that be that this is not a cult film. It's a pop culture phenomenon that they could then start to mine other things. So we think with the success of all of this merchandise, it's going to give us probably the leg up for the first time ever that there could be something going on. [01:10:49] Speaker A: Remember I said that Napster came for everybody? Well, that's kind of. It's, that's the Napster effect, because literally it is the ability of fans. You know, when, when you cast a movie now and you got to choose between two actors, you'll choose the actor with the better social media following. [01:11:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, right. [01:11:07] Speaker A: Because they're going to bring more eyeballs to the project. [01:11:10] Speaker C: Yeah. So we're hoping the video game will be kind of that, that kind of that real world barometer of what it's, uh, its reaches in popularity. You know, if it does, if it does well, like we think it's going to, then I think we, maybe we open up some eyes. [01:11:27] Speaker A: Do, do you have a script ready? Have you, you know, had. You have. If someone suddenly, if an executive suddenly had that flash of genius and suddenly went, well, you know, we don't need to spend a fortune on this, but we could make, you know, killer clowns, too, for that number there, and probably make a ton. [01:11:46] Speaker B: No, we do, we do. We do have a script. We've been developing something all along, but we decided that we don't want to do a single theatrical movie. You put all this effort into, into a film. You have one weekend to prove his box office and you don't know what you're up against. So all of that could just go down the tubes and it ends up going on cable. Anyway. We are proposing a trilogy in four parts, that is, and we've got one of the first scripts going, and it's an incredible arc, and we want to go to cable streaming. We want to have, like, an eight to ten part miniseries that we could really follow characters, a longer arc, and really open up the world of clowns, that whole universe. Because if we are merchandising it, we need to start feeding with new ideas, new characters, new weaponry, new gizmos. And I think a feature film won't do it, but I do think keeping it on cable forever is going to launch what I think they feel is going to be the big moneymaker, which is merchandising. [01:12:44] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:12:45] Speaker A: You know, considering how the world is, a streaming series paid for by subscription or ad dollars is neither here nor there. But, but this is a great, this is great content for a streaming environment. It's. You could go so many places and the audience, you know, these days. Yeah. You'd want to explore all the different ways the story could go, and you can't. Who's got the time in a feature. [01:13:09] Speaker C: And the risk in demographics. It could be promoted on a specific streamer that caters to that genre. You know, it's so much more, you know, decompart mentalized these days in terms of what's available. [01:13:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's going to be a bigger budget over the long haul, but I think that's money well spent instead of spending, let's say, the equivalent of the budget on marketing and promoting it for one week. I think to put that money into a longer arc. So it's going to be on tv longer. I think it's better value. So this is what we're trying to sell. [01:13:44] Speaker A: Yeah. Better storytelling, too. Way better storytelling. Yeah. And it's. There's a whole world that an audience would love, I think, really would love to explore. [01:13:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think young audiences, they don't go to theater that much. They watch it on cable or on tv. [01:14:01] Speaker A: So. Yeah. Really truly it's. Well, hopefully there is, there is some clever person who wears a suit to work every day who was going to hear this and claim the stroke of genius was theirs. Take it, please. Claim the stroke of genius. [01:14:22] Speaker B: Be a genius. [01:14:23] Speaker C: For the, for the first time, we're finally working with MGM Consumer products. We have an arrangement with them wherever we consult and we're contributing to the consumer products thing. And it's vast. It's everything you think about publishing down to the widgets and live entertainment like Halloween horror nights and live theater escape rooms. All these potential things that we're talking about. It's really exciting. And they're exciting and they keep asking us what's next on the creative side. Because the more stuff that they get on the creative side, the more opportunities they have to mine from licensing opportunities. [01:15:04] Speaker A: There's so much potential. Wow. It's mind blowing. Well, guys, we cannot thank you enough for spending time with us today. Hey, since Charlie didn't make it, you want to talk behind his back for a few? [01:15:20] Speaker B: I wonder what he's doing. [01:15:24] Speaker D: Well, he's the eldest one. Maybe he's taking a nap. [01:15:27] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe so. [01:15:28] Speaker C: I mean, I need to having an. [01:15:30] Speaker B: Opportunity to talk to you guys. I mean, come on. I want to thank you guys. You guys are classic O'Hara guys. And really appreciate the time. Enough. You couldn't even talking to us. Thank you so much. [01:15:40] Speaker A: Oh, no, no, no. Really, truly. We missed an opportunity a thousand years ago and I'm still kicking myself. [01:15:46] Speaker D: Yeah, it's a long overdue. I mean, it's amazing. And we haven't spoken two guys in so long and it's like, has it really been that long? And it has. [01:15:54] Speaker C: I talked to Mitch. Mitch Stein. He's still on, he still reps us. And he says, oh, he said, he said hello next time I talk to you guys. So I'll say hi back. [01:16:02] Speaker A: Wow. [01:16:03] Speaker D: He's, he's, he's still working and. [01:16:05] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. [01:16:06] Speaker D: Wow. [01:16:07] Speaker A: Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that we should continue talking, the four of us, that we ain't dead. [01:16:13] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:16:14] Speaker A: And we're still here. We're still here creating shit. And we, we have very similar sensibilities. [01:16:20] Speaker B: Well, we'll throw some stuff at you guys and you guys can throw some stuff at us and we'll see what happens. Yeah. Yeah. [01:16:26] Speaker D: And then we'll all throw it at Charlie. [01:16:28] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:16:28] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. We'll throw it at Mitch Mitchell. [01:16:32] Speaker D: Right? [01:16:32] Speaker B: That's his job. [01:16:33] Speaker A: He's a person to throw it. And indeed, thank you again, guys. And thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Well, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you all next. 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.