S3E39: "When Bad Roommates Attack"

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This podcast is a collaboration between Costard and Touchstone Productions and the dads from the Crypt podcast. [00:00:06] Speaker B: I mean, where did you get your. [00:00:07] Speaker C: Training as a physician? Oh, well, to begin with, I took four years at Vassar Vasa. But that's a girls college. I found that out the third year. I'd have been there yet, but I. [00:00:19] Speaker B: Went out for the swimming team. [00:00:38] Speaker A: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the how not to make a movie podcast. I'm Alan Katz. Gil will join us shortly. I have a confession. My freshman year of college, I was a bad. I wasn't trying to be one. I just was. My roommate. Brett Goldstein and I were both drama ramas at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Drama majors. We came from similar backgrounds, went to public high schools. We were both jewish. We had a shit ton in common. We should have been tight, but we weren't because, well, I was very social, and Brett was shy. It was the mid 1970s, before aids for a lot of things. Life really was simpler then, though I dont think we knew that. Whereas I guess I could have tried to help Brett coury shyness by including him in my social life, instead, I just went out and had a social life. Before long, it created a wall between us. Unfortunately for Brett, he could hear what was happening on the other side of that wall. Yeah, I was a crap roommate. When we first dropped this episode, I especially wanted to give Brett a chance to, well, have at it, to have at me for being such a crap roommate. Brett was far too gracious to do that. Instead, we talked about what hes been up to since we last spoke 40 years ago. Now, this Brett Goldstein isnt the act of Brett Goldstein. For one thing, this Brett is american. But this Brett Goldstein is just as accomplished, if not more. Brett has been a casting director and a talent manager. He won an Emmy award casting homicide, life on the street. He also cast feature films like Danny Brasco, Gi Jane, and Pooty Tang. The fact is, our college reunion went really well, as youll see. Thats why theres going to be a second conversation in the very near future. Until then, theres this. We jumped into things, talking about the Emmy award Brett Wonde and the ones for which he was nominated. [00:02:50] Speaker B: I won the Emmy for homicide. I had, like, three nominations for that. I managed to eke out one. [00:02:56] Speaker A: Oh, yes, yes, yes. [00:02:57] Speaker B: And then a couple years went by. I was nominated for Ed. Here's the truth. You know, I talked about those shows that weren't exactly the most amazing experiences. I didn't last very long on Ed season and a quarter. That's how hard it was to hold on to people on that show. I was simply, I guess the first season because I did my series, regulars did hard for me to keep my people yawning and, you know, looking at, like, tying their shoes or doing something other than focusing on getting the best out of people. They were just so uninterested in performers, as artists, as human beings. These were Letterman's people. They were the guys who, you know, had run Letterman. And we're now breaking off and doing a narrative show. And they were, you know, little Harvard mother when they were friends of mine were going into interview to be the third attempt at getting a casting director. One of them passed on it because she said that, uh, they described me and my successor as, like, the, the first two guys to cast the show. Uh, or, um, receptionists with contacts, I think is how they described us. And my friend Mike, he was like, okay, I don't want to work for you guys. [00:03:58] Speaker C: So what do you, what do you think they were looking for? I mean, you know, when you're replacing an actor's that you're sort of sold on? What, what do you think they were looking for that they couldn't basically either. [00:04:10] Speaker B: Articulate, extremely tight lipped. For guys who'd gone to Harvard, you'd think they would be a little more valuable, a little more Gemini articulate. Right. [00:04:17] Speaker A: They could articulate their. [00:04:19] Speaker B: It almost felt like you were being messed with. Like, you know, we're gonna be really tight lipped and make you figure it out. You know, it's your job to think of it on your own. You know, sort of sweet, generous. [00:04:29] Speaker A: That means they had that. The translation is they had no idea what they were doing, because if you know what you're doing, that's not how you lead to. You might have an idea in your head, but you always know what. We worked for that guy. His name was Bob Zemeckis, and he really was, he was amazing to work for because he knew exactly what he was doing all the time. But he really brought everyone else into the challenge. He made it a creative challenge. There are two ways to do this. [00:04:57] Speaker B: I'm always up for that, and God knows I would be up for it with somebody of the caliber of a Bob Zemeckis with that kind of talent and vision. But these guys, they were not bad writers, but they were not nearly as good as they thought they were, which is not entirely uncommon in television writing. But, you know, they were, you know, that had the same thing that brain surgeons have. They thought they were gods, and. [00:05:16] Speaker A: But the skill set required to do this particular thing, to run a show, to cast a show to this is a different bunch of skill. Hey, you can be smart as fuck. It doesn't matter if you don't have this skill set. Your smarts are worth nothing. [00:05:30] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:05:30] Speaker A: It's just how it is. [00:05:32] Speaker B: And I've seen people who, you know, didn't run any aspect of their show that well, you know, where they were indecisive or just sort of, you know, or they flip flopping decisions, or just take their sweet time and bring everybody to the point of potential catastrophe before pulling the trigger. Now, I wasn't around long enough to find out if they were like that with the location people, with the ads, with the production design people that would be, you know, pretty awful if they were, you know, once that happens, you run the risk of the most. The worst possible scenario, and you don't make your episode, which I've only heard of happening once. Not them, as far as I know, but an entirely different show. And I was just, how does anybody. How do you get back from that once you fall behind? [00:06:19] Speaker A: Fortunately, you only had to deal with them for one little. I believe you said you do this together. Young playwrights. Ukraine. [00:06:26] Speaker B: This really is my wife's baby. I'm mostly, you know, I try to be a very useful. [00:06:30] Speaker A: So we talk about the fact that Brett shares a name with not just one other famous person, the actor Brett Goldstein, who's on Ted Lasso, but there's also another casting director. [00:06:42] Speaker B: Oh, yes. Yes. [00:06:42] Speaker A: Brett. B r e T T. Goldstein. [00:06:45] Speaker B: Yes, there is. Yes, I know her. [00:06:50] Speaker A: Yikes. [00:06:51] Speaker B: Yeah. You're like, how many could there really be? Right? [00:06:54] Speaker C: Right. [00:06:55] Speaker B: God's little joke. [00:06:57] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, our parents little joke, because they pulled the same. [00:07:02] Speaker B: I'm sure my mother was really, really patting herself on the back for thinking she'd had the only Brett with that last name back in the day. Didn't work out that way, unfortunately. [00:07:14] Speaker A: The joke was on you. [00:07:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, listen, I'm proud to be in the company I'm in. [00:07:21] Speaker A: Brett and I first met each other pretty much at the transom of a room in noise house at Vassar college. Noyes was a. Vassar is a beautiful campus. Most of the building, futuristic building built in the 1960s by. [00:07:42] Speaker B: It was an era Saarinen. Yeah. [00:07:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:07:45] Speaker B: And it was the only one, the only building on campus that was remotely like that. So it really, really stood out. Yeah. [00:07:52] Speaker A: We were freshman roommates for that freshman semester, we did not last beyond that. [00:07:57] Speaker B: I think. I think just towards you might have been gone before the end of the first semester. I think you managed to, like, scam your way into a single, which I was so, so bitterly jealous of. And yet I was really impressed, though, that you pulled that off. [00:08:11] Speaker A: But on a. On a certain level, weren't you? [00:08:14] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. I don't think we wanted to live together anymore, but I was just sort of. [00:08:17] Speaker A: Well, I think you had the bigger problem than I had, I think. All right, well, we'll come to that. My first question is, do you remember, because Vassar was very reliant back in. When we. We. Back in the stone age, when you and I were applying to college, everyone had their own application. There was no common app. None of this. Nothing was that easy. [00:08:39] Speaker B: There was. [00:08:39] Speaker A: Everyone had. So you had to write. If you were going to apply to ten colleges, you were going to write ten. [00:08:43] Speaker B: Vast. And ten was a lot. That was a pretty big number in those days, 15 and 20. That seems to be the norm now. I think I applied to, like, five, six. [00:08:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But still, you had to write five or six different essays back then. [00:08:56] Speaker B: You had to write them out by hand on paper that you mailed in to. [00:08:59] Speaker A: Yes, you did. [00:09:01] Speaker B: It was really construction paper application brochures. [00:09:05] Speaker A: Indeed. Do you remember what you wrote for your application to Vassar? What was your essay? [00:09:11] Speaker B: Wouldn't begin to tell you, like, actual. Any minutiae of it. But I guess, you know, the one thing that I guess is never going to change is you just. You brag about whatever you can brag about. You know, you like what makes. What you think makes you. It would make you interesting to somebody. I relied on one thing because I wasn't incredibly interesting. I had done one thing of note in high school. I had, in a rare display of self starterism, I put together an outdoor production of a midsummer night's dream as a senior in high school. Something like. I don't even remember how it came to me. And I took, sort of stumbled my way through it. Lots of backing past all my friends in it, did it in a park. It was very, very successful. And I thought, well, you know, I'll tell them about that. You know, when I wrote this and sent it in, I was just putting it together. I couldn't say it had been successful yet because that wasn't until after I'd been already been, you know, accepted by Vassar and rejected by other places. This was just. I am going to be doing this. So now, then, in retrospect, I thought that may not have sounded incredibly impressive, because they thought, how do we know you're really going to end up doing it? You're telling us, you know, you're trying to do it. That's all I can guess at. I don't know what else I would have said. [00:10:30] Speaker A: I think I know what I wrote, I talked about, and I didn't put it this way. It was about I wanted to be someplace where women were more empowered than men. [00:10:45] Speaker B: That's quite ahead of your time to have thought, not just to say it, even just to think of saying that, that's really good. [00:10:51] Speaker A: But it was why I wanted to go to Vassar, because there were more women than menta. [00:10:57] Speaker B: There certainly were. [00:10:58] Speaker A: And when we got there, it was three to one, female to male. Vassar was founded in 1861 as Vassar Female College by a forward thinking brewer named Matthew Vassar. A year later, Vassar removed the word female from the college's name. Vassar's first faculty hire was very progressive, a woman astronomer, Maria Mitchell. Interestingly, Matthew Vassar died on June 23, 1868. Vassar was founded in 1861 as Vassar Female College by a forward thinking brewer named Matthew Vassar a year later. For a while, Vassar seemed seriously considered shuttering its poughkeepsie. Vassar's first faculty in becoming Yale female hat was Radcliffe astronomer in 1999. Interestingly, Matthew Vassar died on June 23, 1868. He was 77 and died while delivering his farewell address to the Vassar College board of trustees. Sorry, Groucho, but that went down in 1966. In time, Vassar College became part of. [00:12:35] Speaker B: The sentencing, the female equivalent of the idea of coed. [00:12:40] Speaker A: Was that true? [00:12:41] Speaker B: I believe Zig Smith. The ivies all did in the end. [00:12:44] Speaker A: Arrived in September. We graduated. They were beginning to move it closer to three, to two. The drama department was small. Instead, Vassar chose New Jersey. [00:12:56] Speaker B: Came to a lot of theater. I had actually on stage, sorry, Groucho. [00:13:01] Speaker A: Went down in 1969. [00:13:03] Speaker B: So I was aware of it was this up and coming stage actress, but I don't know if you recall this. Our speaking of remnants of the 19th century, the head of our drama department, Mister William Rothwell, the inaugural class for the drama 101. It was all of us sitting in the audience in the house at whatever it was called, avery, the big theater. And he was saying, how many of you in his stentorian voice know the name Meryl Streep? And I was like the only one who could raise this hand. But within a month, she came out in Julia in a notable supporting role in Julia. And then everything changed, and it was a real point of pride for people at Vassar, don't you think? [00:13:43] Speaker A: Oh, my God, yes. [00:13:45] Speaker B: I was proud of Vassar and talked about it, and I'd seen from, I guess, what led to the choice of do we go co ed or do we move to New Haven? Prior to going coed, Vassar was very much linked to Yale when Bob Brewstein was running the program there. And the Yale boys would play the male roles in productions at Vassar and vice versa. So there was great old black and white photos, not that old, actually, of three sisters or a cheri with Meryl Streep in it and with Robert Brewstein actually acting. So do you remember the first. [00:14:24] Speaker C: Do you remember the shows that you saw Meryl Streep in, in New York? [00:14:28] Speaker B: Oh, yes, I do, actually. [00:14:30] Speaker C: Was it at the public theater? [00:14:32] Speaker B: I didn't see her stuff at the public, because when she did this whole run of stuff at the public, it was as we were already starting college, I saw her in a production of the Cherry Orchard, Andre Sorbonne's famous sort of production of the Cherry Orchard at the Beaumont at Lincoln center. So actually, that was a production of the public theater. It was when Joe Pap and the Shakespeare Festival had control of the Beaumont. [00:14:55] Speaker C: Yeah, it took over. [00:14:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And there were like, a couple of good seasons, and I saw the Broadway transfer of the Brecht Weil musical happy end, which she was in, where she sang Surabaya Johnny, her and a very unknown actor named Christopher Lloyd, who played the male lead. Great show. Great. That was. I was getting to an age where I could really discover actors and try to start understanding how careers were built in the business by reading people's playbill bios and charting their progress from show to show. Meryl Streep. It was that, you know, like just that explosive moment where she made the leap from theater to film and kind of never looked back. [00:15:46] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:15:47] Speaker A: Among the other names that. That. Well, Francis Sternhagen was a Vassar grad. After us. Lisa Kudrow, Anne Hathaway, John Tenney. A couple. A couple years after us. [00:16:00] Speaker B: John was a freshman when we were seniors. You probably had missed when he was a freshman. He had just shown up. So we acted with him there. I lived with Johnny. [00:16:10] Speaker A: I lived with John Tenney. He was my. He was. We were. It was four senior. We were out in the. In the houses and there were four seniors. And John Tenney was very mature person. Hope Davis, the musician. Mark Ronson, Jason Blum. Blum who? [00:16:30] Speaker B: Jason Blum. And Noah Baumbach was there. Jason. [00:16:34] Speaker A: So though it's this teeny weeny little world, often Poughkeepsie, New York, it seems to have spawned an awful lot of very talented people. In our year in 1981, when we graduated, there was no one, fortunately, who overachieved. [00:16:53] Speaker B: No, not really. [00:16:55] Speaker A: They could outshine the rest of us. I'm so grateful. [00:16:59] Speaker B: I think things got really started getting good with the class, classes of 85 and on. [00:17:04] Speaker A: So, you know, the drama department there. Yes, there was smiling Bill Rothwell, who was a remarkable character, really. Stentorian was the perfect, with the jodhpurs. [00:17:16] Speaker B: And the writing crop and the deadly punch that it was a coarse requirement to drink from at his post show parties. [00:17:25] Speaker A: He was. This was a guy who. And then how they would have sat and how their thighs would have featured because they rode horses, don't you understand? And so their thigh muscles were very powerful now. [00:17:39] Speaker B: And I think he was very, very interested in male thigh muscles. I think he did deep study of the subject. [00:17:45] Speaker A: Fascinating character, fascinating man. [00:17:48] Speaker B: And, you know, he was. Well, you may have only known how to sit as a 20th century kid from Baltimore. Like, he would not have been able to direct anything that featured a character who was a 20th century kid from Baltimore. He only was interested in and could do plays that involved people who wrote, don't you know. And for instance, when he used our black box theater, the amazing powerhouse theater, first real black box theater in America. Is that true? Yeah, yeah. It was started in the thirties. Halle Flanagan Davis, you know, began that concept, but he directed it proscenium style, a theater that has 100 possible permutations for staging and where the audience could be when he. And it was clearly, you know, just scheduling. Lucky. He had to do a show. He would do, you know, some theater guild, chestnut, like the old maid by Zoe Akins, he would do it. And I could. I could be wrong, but I could swear he actually managed to rig a curtain so that it would sweep across the black box theater and just turn it into good old fashioned proscenium. The idea of doing something in the round or even thrust, was completely alien to this guy. [00:18:57] Speaker A: It was a very exciting space, creative space to work in at that. The powerhouse theater. Yes, it was the black box. It was take a shoebox, paint it black inside, turn it over, and anything can happen inside. [00:19:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I remember when we showed up there and they said, there are, we've charted 100 possible formations for the audience to be put out. Which kind of blew my mind to think that you could do that. And when you're in high school, nobody tells you that's a thing that could happen. [00:19:28] Speaker A: Liz Villard was on the faculty. She taught acting as well. A fascinating person with a long history adviser. [00:19:37] Speaker B: Her mother was the head of the board of trustees. [00:19:39] Speaker A: All right. Right. There was Tad Gesic, who taught design. And there was also a guy named Everett Springshorn. [00:19:51] Speaker B: Yeah, Mister Springshorn. [00:19:52] Speaker A: And he was my favorite faculty member of all. Everett Springshorn taught dramatic literature. [00:19:58] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:19:59] Speaker A: And he was one of the world authorities on Strindberg and Ibsen. [00:20:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, he was the translator of record for Strindberg. You know, any anthology you got then was almost certain to have been translated by him. [00:20:16] Speaker A: Sophomore year, I became a film major for a big patch of it. [00:20:21] Speaker B: I didn't know that. [00:20:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I did, because ultimately I wanted. This is the business I wanted to get into. Really? Yeah, it really was. This was. But the filmmaking department was run by a guy named Jim Stearman, who was an experimental filmmaker. He had no use for narrative filmmaking. [00:20:39] Speaker B: No, he was all about Maia Darin. That was. [00:20:41] Speaker A: Yeah. And I learned, you know, I learned what I could learn in a couple of minutes, and then I was. This just wasn't that interesting to me, watching interesting experiments, but narrative was more interesting to me. So I moved back to the drama department, but I took my junior year in Paris, so. And I wanted to direct in senior year, and I knew that not being their junior year was going to kind of make it difficult. So towards the end of sophomore year, I planted a seed. I asked Mister Springshorn, I said, you know, I'd love to direct Spinberg's dance of death. Would you consider doing a new translation? And he said, that's an interesting idea. And he did it. And because he did the translation, I got my directing slot as a senior project at Vassar, and so I directed the first ever. [00:21:40] Speaker B: How did I not see that? I never. [00:21:42] Speaker A: Performance of dance of death. [00:21:45] Speaker B: And he had not touched that play before. [00:21:47] Speaker A: He had not touched that play before. [00:21:48] Speaker B: And did you do part one and two? Like just big ass, but just part one? Just part one, which is pretty awesome, let's face it. That's. And super ambitious. I don't even remember you doing that. I know. I didn't see that. I promise you, I would remember if I had come and seen that. I bet you did a great job. [00:22:05] Speaker A: The audience, we did it in the powerhouse, and it was great. So it was kind of created like a cave, and it was a couple because it's a couple in a cage. It's the precursor to who's afraid of Virginia Woolf. Basically, he took that dynamic between this really murderously unhappy married couple and put them in a college environment somewhere, and I think he found religion or something like that. And Connie Crawford. [00:22:33] Speaker B: Yes. [00:22:34] Speaker A: Now, Connie Crawford has an interesting bit of history to do. You remember the first year we got to Vassar when we were freshmen was the fifth year that SNL had been on the air. And on their fifth season, they had a contest. Anyone can be a guest host of Saturday Night live, and, man, they must have received who knows how many. I know I sent one in. God, I wish if I could have that back, man, I would do something way better than what I sent. Among the five people from the hundred thousand or so that they got Connie Crawford one, she was one of the five finalists. And what she did was she took her Vassar student id, she stapled it to the note card, and she put freemi across her face. Yes. [00:23:30] Speaker B: Oh, it just came back to me. That was. Yes, that was. [00:23:35] Speaker A: And so, yeah, she. [00:23:36] Speaker B: How could she lose? [00:23:38] Speaker A: They took her. And so I remember watching the episode in the basement of noise. Crowded. I mean, because, you know, they're advassar. We were all there. You know, everyone knew that Connie Crawford from Vassar College was about to appear on SNL. And I know that all of us in the drama department, because a lot of us. I don't know. I don't remember you. I don't remember if you were next in that particular room, seething with jealousy on the one hand, but thrilled to pieces for her. [00:24:09] Speaker B: Oh, it was so exciting. And she got to dress as a bee, which was the ultimate SNL experience, you know, and they weren't even doing that on the show anymore, but they were smart enough to know that anybody they had chosen out of the ranks of the civilians to come and join them for one episode was going to want to have a bee costume for a minute. [00:24:30] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, it was. Yeah. It was. It was. It was part of why I cast her. It was. It was the first star casting I ever. [00:24:40] Speaker B: Right. [00:24:43] Speaker A: There you go. I was my. [00:24:44] Speaker B: That said, though, I would say, I think Connie had the stature to match up to Eric as his wife. I think it was not a bad match at all. [00:24:52] Speaker A: She could do matronly. [00:24:54] Speaker B: She could, yes. She also had a kind of a. You know, she was the. And I had this experience notable many times as a student actor, as the, you know, the guy most likely to be handed a can of gray spray paint, but she was the one who was always being cast as, you know, the grandmother, the grand dom in the children's hour or whatever, because she sort of looked older than us. She had a, you know, a matronly quality which was very, you know, useful for her, I think, career wise. [00:25:22] Speaker A: What. What was the acting that you did? Advanced, because I didn't see. [00:25:27] Speaker B: Like I said, you and I did one thing together. We did two things together. You and I were both in a production of cabaret in our senior year when I was her Schultz, you were Cliff Bradshaw. [00:25:35] Speaker A: But prior to that. Oh, my God. [00:25:36] Speaker B: That's right. We had done a production in the great lecture hall at Rockefeller. We did an as you like it for a student director. [00:25:44] Speaker A: Yes. Barbara Hodges. Barbara Hodgin. [00:25:47] Speaker B: And who did you play? I was Jake Weeze, the, you know, all the world's a stage guy. But who did we? Were you, Orlando. [00:25:53] Speaker A: I was touchstone, of course. Oh, I don't do leads. I never did a lead in my touchstone, man. I did touchdown. [00:26:03] Speaker C: Whatever happened to Connie Crawford? [00:26:05] Speaker B: She went to juilliard, I think. I believe she did work as an actress regionally, and I believe she is a college professor. And when we get to talking about our ukrainian kids, we've been sort of doing a whole lot of work in trying to help them find their way into american BFA programs. And I think I saw her name on the faculty of one of the places we were looking at. Just call offhand which one it is. [00:26:28] Speaker A: Were there any other professors and fasser. I mean, I loved Everett Springer, his lecture on ghosts, on Ibsen's ghosts. I still think about it, really. That was a seminal moment in my education, in my college education, and in my evolution as a writer. I go back to that moment. I know he set. He set off something that's, you know. [00:26:55] Speaker B: And if you just have one professor who does that, who sparks that for you, that's a triumph, you know? [00:27:02] Speaker A: Did you have anyone like that for ambassador? [00:27:04] Speaker B: No, that I did there. I actually loved the scenic guys. I loved Tad Gessick and I loved John Curtin. I was very interested in set design. I mean, completely insane to think that I could do it because I. No fine motor skills whatsoever, and I don't even have the math skills to have figured out perspective in their set design class, but I was interested in it as a subject. I loved hearing them talk about that. I don't think, you know, I. When Vassar, I spent my summers at Williamstown, at the Williamstown Theatre festival, and that, for me, knocked Vassar a little bit. [00:27:47] Speaker A: I'm suddenly remembering you doing jaquees and how perfectly cast you were. [00:27:53] Speaker B: Why would you think that? I'm just curious. Because he was, you know, Ray spray paint came out, and he's a. [00:27:59] Speaker A: He's a prickly character, and there's nothing wrong with being prickly. And you were a prickly person. [00:28:06] Speaker B: You were experiencing me. Yeah. You had seen branded as prickliest. [00:28:10] Speaker A: I think maybe you were cervic. You could sit and watch the world and absolutely rip it to pieces and be right about everything. [00:28:20] Speaker B: Whoa. Well, Jake weeze could certainly do that. I don't know if all the world's a stage. [00:28:27] Speaker A: He's got one of the best speeches in all of Shakespeare. You got to do that speech. [00:28:33] Speaker B: I did. I did. And, you know, I learned a lot that I was able to use later on from just that one speech, because I went to the woman who. I don't know if you remember her because we were all required to take the voice in speech class. I don't remember her name, but she was a lovely woman. [00:28:47] Speaker A: Was it green? I think the word green. Green. [00:28:51] Speaker B: Maybe. Maybe something. She was great, because I asked her if she would poach me on the verse and on, and she taught me how to breathe through a line of iambic pentameter. And I probably if you asked me to do not. But if you had asked me to do that speech today, I bet I could remember exactly where the breath would be placed and why and do it based on that. So that was very. Yeah, that was a real revelation to me. You know, you said, matters when you pause and take in air and how long you need to sustain a line for before you then need to breathe again and how you. You mix, you know, how you blend the mechanics of that with creative choices about what the character is trying to do. Yes. [00:29:37] Speaker C: You said a moment ago you worked at Williamstown. Did you? Yeah, I started you apprentice, or did you work there or. [00:29:43] Speaker B: I did. I started out as an apprentice. [00:29:46] Speaker C: Did you ever work with Nikos? [00:29:48] Speaker B: He was not just. He was there, you know, still running at my first three seasons there, he was my scene study teacher at Circle in the square, where I went right after college. He was, you know, kind of my hero because mine, too, I had discovered Chekhov, like, by sitting at home in Jersey, not doing my homework on a window. [00:30:06] Speaker C: Just to meet him and just to talk theater with him was just exciting. [00:30:11] Speaker B: He was. Yeah, he was a rare creature. He was a. He was a tough guy. He was a difficult person. He had, you know, his. His demons and all, but, I mean, like, I said, I met all the people who, you know, it gave me when I left college and was able moved to the city, it gave me a community that I was joining. I already knew people there, so many people. What really works against them is they show up cold and there is no network that they can fold themselves into anybody they can find information from. Even homicide happened because Tom Fontana was Nikos assistant those three seasons. [00:30:45] Speaker C: Was he really? [00:30:46] Speaker B: He started his career because Blythe Danner was married to Bruce Paltrow, who was creating St. Elsewhere, and said to him, you have to give Tom a chance to write a script. And he did. And within a season, Tom was basically the showrunner and they partners for years. [00:31:02] Speaker C: Wow, that's a great story. I mean, Nicholas was, you know, Nicholas was, for me, he was a really. He was a bit of a hero, but he was very interesting. And I remember every summer in those years, actually in the wintertime, looking through to find out who was going to be cast for that following summer, because it was going to be such an exciting event once he announced the casting. [00:31:25] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And I think I was there for the three seasons where things really started to turn over to. My third season was 1980, and it was kind of the apotheosis of this, what people then began to see as sort of very, very star driven casting. Like, we had this series this season with Chris Reeve just on the cusp of Superman, two coming out, Frank Langella as Cyrano. And then towards the end of the season, Colleen Dewhurst led a cast of the Cherry Orchard, which had Chris Reeve and Blythe Danner and Celeste Holm. And all just extraordinary people. And the non equity people are non equity actors. In and playing the small roles were Zhelko Ivanik and David Hyde Pearce, who was an undergraduate in Nikos class at Yale, Amanda Plummer. And just ridiculous amounts of, you know, John Whitesell, you know, the tv director was a non equity directing student. And I feel like Williams down launched his ability to have a career, which, when you think about it, launched the whole Patrick Whitesell era of CAA and WME, because that family became a dynasty based on John building a career as a director first. Just so much came out of it. Anyway, that's a long way of saying my eyes were on the berkshires more than they were on Poughkeepsie while I was at Vassar. I did stuff there, but I knew, like, this is where, you know, this is where my bread spotted. [00:32:56] Speaker C: Yeah, rightfully so. [00:32:58] Speaker B: Yeah. And Tenney, you know, John Tenney started out there. He apprenticed there the year after I was gone. Maybe I told him about it. I don't know. I think he may also, though he grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, as did Chris Reeve, and I think he may have had some connection with him through that and knew about it from. From that. [00:33:19] Speaker A: Did you ever do any acting between Vassar and becoming a casting? [00:33:26] Speaker B: I did. I got really. I got really weirdly lucky, because this is just, if anybody wants to know how any one person puts pieces together and builds something. My best friend from the apprentice program at Williamstown went to Yale Drama School as a dramaturg. He became the first literary manager as his sort of his day job to work his way through school of a growing off Broadway theatre called Second Stage, which is now a major, major force, venerable 45 year old force in New York theater, but was just starting out then, and weirdly, was based on the 15th floor, or the floor above my 15th floor apartment that I first moved into in New York. [00:34:07] Speaker C: That was Carol Rothman, wasn't it? [00:34:09] Speaker B: It still is Carol Rothman until she's retiring this year. And Robin Goodman, they founded it together. And so Kim was their literary manager and hired me for free to read plays for him to be a play reader. And one day I was dropping plays off at the office, and they dragged me across the hall because the person who was meant to read sides at their auditions didn't show up. And I read sides for them, and they kept calling me back. The casting directors were Meg Simon and Frank Heuman, who were sort of the rising casting stars in New York theater. Young. They didn't seem that young to me then, but I realized now they were really young because I was really, really young. And all of a sudden, they were like, we're going to see you for this new Neil Simon play that's coming to Broadway, which turned out to be Brighton beach memoirs. And I did not get that. The guy who got it was their intern, an NYU undergrad named Bernie Telsey, who is now, of course, the king of casting in America. He has a company with, like, 45 casting directors working under him, and, like me, learned all the ropes of the business from hanging around that casting office. I read sides for all these amazing people and plays for. For August Wilson and Lloyd Richards on the original production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and for this musical called rags that became a legendary Broadway bomb. But it was written by Stevens Schwartz and Charles Strauss and Joseph Stein. So all the people whose musicals I'd grown up seeing on Broadway as a kid were like, I was behind the table with these guys and reading sides with all the most amazing actors. And so I lost the. What happened behind the table was completely demystified for me. I sort of felt calmer around people who were working in the business. I thought, oh, it's not something that happens to other people. You can kind of be a part of this. That said, I was only calm when I was reading sides, not when I was on the other side auditioning. Then I would get all sweaty and clenched. But I held out just long enough to get cast in the national tour of Brighton beach memoirs. I was sent out as an understudy to the two brothers, Eugene and Stanley. I understudied a 17 year old boy from the hills of Maine named Patrick Dempsey. [00:36:18] Speaker C: Wow. [00:36:18] Speaker B: And we, you should, you know, you should hear and lost our minds. [00:36:25] Speaker C: You should really write this up. I mean, there's really some interesting stuff about, you know, the paths you cross and the paths that you sort of, you know, you got a real bio for some real powerful people. [00:36:38] Speaker A: What you're saying he's a podcast unto a himself, is what you're saying. [00:36:43] Speaker C: That's what I'm saying. [00:36:44] Speaker B: Let's stick with, like, hopefully I'll just be a good podcast. [00:36:47] Speaker A: First of all, you sought out that world and you had the skills to. To burrow into it, to find your way into it. And. Yeah, and you were at home with it. [00:36:58] Speaker B: And it all really based on, in many ways, being the worst apprentice ever. Because when I was, I got really handy. I'm good around the house because of scene shop, but a lot of the time when I was supposed to be doing that, I was hiding backstage in a little nook watching what they were doing, watching the equity actors work. I was addicted to that. I kept watching. And then Williamstown is a place that really is probably never going to come back. Last season it was all readings because they can't produce without apprentices. And forget apprenticeships. Internships are over. You know, where does one get the budget to pay people to build the sets? You need to keep Williamstown. Williamstown, you know, the main stage was based on. Since then, I mean, amazing plays, new plays have developed in the side, you know, black box that they built, the Niko stage. But back in our day, there was just the one big Williams college theater, and we. I was an extra in Kamino real by Tennessee Williams, directed by Nikos, with 70 people or more, a Peter Hunt production of Arturo Ui with at least 70 people, like the whole town on stage. And it took a town to build those sets as well. I think that's just gone. And it's probably not cool to say this these days. I just think something terrible has been lost. I understand that something new needs to be worked out so that people who are less privileged have an ability to go to visa, to be able to afford to go and work for free. But working for free allowed us to go and learn something we weren't qualified to get close to. If money was part of the equation, I only deserved to be there because I was not asking to be paid. I didn't deserve it. None of us did. But to go and just be there and work your way through it and begin a life, nothing. Nothing would have happened to me if it wasn't for that place. [00:39:05] Speaker A: Was that part of how you ended up in casting to begin with? [00:39:08] Speaker B: Well, because of the sides reading, I was very comfortable. I was learning that side of things to some extent. You know, what else did I know? I knew enough to act, enough to get that one gig. I understudied it for a little while on Broadway after the tour and got one more little pretty decent off Broadway play, and then nothing. And I think I just lost my nerve. I just thought also all my friends were the best actors. It was like Patrick Dempsey, Corey Parker, Fisher Stevens, Matthew Br. All the young guys who were playing those roles. Your problem was one of those plays, too. You know, he was part of that, that my producers, when I was on the Brighton beach tour, he was off doing the tour of Comstopper. It's the real thing. We were both produced by the same guy. I was not as good at these as these guys. [00:40:04] Speaker A: Your problem was you needed a less talented bunch of friends. [00:40:07] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe. But then you just, you know, who knows? I would have just been kidding myself. It's very exciting to, you know, to be able to recognize that, you know, you're part of a great community. But they do. They are the best there is, and you're not one of them, and you're not going to have that kind of career. So what kind of career could I have? [00:40:27] Speaker A: You still did way better than I did because I went to one audition. [00:40:30] Speaker B: Thing up shop in Washington, DC. And so you'll be on the, on the Sunday train and you'll down to DC, you'll be staying at this hotel, and Monday morning you'll be shooting. I. He gave me that role. I didn't even have to ask. I just, you know, sat next to him and played tapes for him. And he just thought I, you know. [00:40:49] Speaker A: See, that's the best way to get cast. [00:40:51] Speaker B: And I can say I beat out Paul Giamatti for a role. [00:40:56] Speaker A: Paul, are there any more film roles that came rolling in? No, no, no. [00:41:01] Speaker B: The only, like, the only two things that came to me, well, right around the time I was on the cusp of making that decision to switch over, I was still considered an actor when, again, I was sort of low ebb, very hot, humid summer day. The kind of day that made you want to move to California. Alan, I think I could be wrong, but I think I was sitting on the curb on my block, which was 73rd street between Central park and Columbus, and I was sitting on the curb on the uptown side, looking up at the back of the Dakota and the model of bogies sailboat in Lauren Bacall's apartment. And Rob Morrow, who lived in my apartment building on 73rd, was walking by, and he was like, you look pathetic. [00:41:41] Speaker C: I was like, what's wrong? [00:41:42] Speaker B: You're sitting on. And I was like, yeah, I don't know. I don't know what to do. I don't know. He's like, well, you know, a few guys are meeting at the film center cafe, which is this bar on 43rd and 9th Avenue, tomorrow afternoon, and we're talking about starting a theater company. And I knew it was basically the same guys I knew who had already convinced me I wasn't a good enough actor. A bunch of guys from the Brighton beach memoir Mars I'm not Rappaport world of young guys who were lucky enough to start working in their early twenties, that I was sort of the runt of that litter, but still. And I was like, yeah, what the. So, you know, the next day, Rob and I go down to the film center, and there's like 13 or 14 of us, a couple of girls, mostly guys, and we talk about this thing. The bartender I found out a few years later was, was Jim Gandolfini. And we brought him in a few. When we were more established as the theater company, we came, which called Naked Angels. One of our members brought him in to play like a silent bartender in a play we did set in a bar. And he was brilliant. Didn't utter a word. He actually tended bar for the audience. We gave, serve drink to the audience and was just there behaving. And he was. And we were all. We were all over him. It's like, who are you? You're so brilliant. You're so amazing. And he said, you know, I was tending bar, film center the day you guys first met. He said, and I cried. I wanted so badly to be at that table video. And then, you know, what happened, happened with him. So it all worked out. But, you know, so we thought I was still an actor when we started that company. But before we existed, more than probably three or four months, I think I was already. I'd started an internship in the casting department at the public theater. And that was, you know, me making the choice, casting my lie. [00:43:29] Speaker C: So you work with Mary Goldberg. [00:43:32] Speaker B: Mary wasn't there then. Mary was already a huge film casting director by then. It was Rosemary Tischler's office. I didn't. In fact, I don't even know if I ever knew that Mary had worked there. Maybe I did at the time. [00:43:46] Speaker C: Yeah, she worked there a long time. She started out being like very much Joe's right hand lady and grew from that and then became a big casting lady from. For the public and then left and became a big casting later lady for film. [00:44:01] Speaker B: Yeah, she was one of the a list. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, you know, I apprenticed their cast, worked on casting an Eric Spear in the park, including one directed by Mister Pap himself. And, you know, just started getting assistant work and till finally, you know, at a certain point, somebody, you know, becomes a vice president. Somebody where somewhere and gives you an actual job casting on your own. [00:44:29] Speaker A: You were a casting associate on exorcist three. [00:44:33] Speaker B: I was. [00:44:34] Speaker A: I was working for William Peter Blatty, the author himself. [00:44:40] Speaker B: It's funny, I had just come off of my first thing taping for things all on my own, even though it wasn't as an independent. I was hired by some to do it for a few days of tapings. Four roles in a William Friedkin movie called the Guardian. And I was so excited about that. Friedkin, my God, you know, it wasn't that long since the Exorcist itself. And then like two months later, I found myself working with the other exorcist guy and a wonderful man, an older producer named Carter de Haven. And it was my boss, my casting boss, Lou Degimo, who was a casting legend, was out in LA doing something else. And he just left me in his office on 54th and 10th with these two guys for seven weeks. And I just cast the Frickin movie. And I. No idea what I was doing. Minimum that with what should have been mere day players. And I said to Carter, I said, you know, I think I did this terrible thing. He said, it's all right, babe. You saved us money. In a lot of other areas, patently untrue. I saved them no money. Any. But he was such a gentleman, such an old school, decent guy that he just didn't want me to feel bad about it. They were wonderful men. Vlad, he looked like Satan. I don't know if he ever saw him. He had the most demonic eyes you've ever seen, but an absolutely wonderful guy. [00:45:46] Speaker C: I think hes living at the motion picture home in Woodland Hills now. [00:45:49] Speaker B: Hes alive. [00:45:50] Speaker C: I think he is. [00:45:51] Speaker B: Oh my gosh. Wow. Well, loved him. I just really, you know, it was like an honor to be around those guys. They really gave me a lot of confidence that I could do this. I was just sort of left to my own devices, stumbling my way through it. But, you know, thats probably a good way to learn things, you know, fucking up as you go. [00:46:11] Speaker A: Always, always. But, you know, things began to pick up. You did for tv the adventures of Pete and Pete. [00:46:19] Speaker B: Yeah, that was like just one season of like celebrity casting. I was hired to just do the, like, try to get a guest star of note, some strain, you know, BB newirth or Steve Buscemi or somebody to pop in like be, you know, fit that world, but just maybe get some viewers or just make the show look cooler. [00:46:39] Speaker A: But this still requires, but this still requires, you know, hey, we tell from the crypt we were all about stunt casting. [00:46:45] Speaker B: Oh, it's all, yeah, that's casting. [00:46:48] Speaker A: Yeah, we appreciate that, that particular skill set. We see you also casting director on backfire. [00:47:03] Speaker B: That was one of my other actors roles. I got to actually, I exchanged a line with Robert Mitchum. [00:47:10] Speaker A: Yeah, he pulled together a really interesting cast for that movie. [00:47:13] Speaker B: Mitchum. [00:47:14] Speaker A: Telly Savalas, Kathy Ireland, Shelley Winters, Mary McCormack, Edie Fox. [00:47:20] Speaker B: Mary's first Christmas. It was Mary's first movie. She was an intern at Susan Smith and Associates, at an agent for working under my friend Rhonda Price. And they sent her out and she got that role. Edie was a Suny purchase friend of the directors, Dean Bell, a wonderful guy. And it was one of, it was like a top, what was called a hot shots style spoof, but done for literally like $150 plus the money that a hedge fund guy was willing to pay if you could get a Robert Mitchum or sell. So we wanted to cast those old names and see if they could sell it in various territories based on that. And we threw some money at Robert Mitchum for two days. He said, I'm going to buy my wife a horse with this came in, Shelley Winters came in, took it very seriously, very method actor. He's like, I'm going to do research on police academies or on fire academy department academies. And I think she did. Telly Savalas came in, just wanted to shave his head for the occasion. Cut himself beyond like that beautiful bald Telly Scala said with like a deep, deep gash. Big last minute problem. They had to suddenly, I think, give him a wig or a hat. Yeah, we got like four, like sort of quasi, you know, that kind of movie names for that. I was, and we asked one guy, we were not. My producer was a great rogue movie guy who was not above flouting SAG rules. He brought in a guy he knew who was one of the many, many mook guys you saw in the long tracking shot at the bar, at the Copa, in Goodfellas. Like, hey, Henry, Henry, Henry, one of those guys was always playing those kinds of roles. He was a big, fat, hideously ugly former wrestler, you know, the fake wrestling variety El Diablo. But now he was playing bit parts and things. Had like the iq of a mushroom cap. And clearly he was a mob leg breaker, really, for a lib. So he came in and he like, did a day and wasn't reported to sag. Brought his kid. They ate craft services like, till, you know, any normal person would burst and let. And then he tried to hold, hold the guy up for like sag overages, even though he had cheated on SAg by doing this. And he came after me over months. One day he brought a little guy, Brett, I want you to meet Vito, this little guy in a suit. And they sat in my office and just sort of stared at me. And I kept saying to this, Chris, you gotta pay this guy. Finally he called me and I said, like, Mario, I was busy. I was like, I have no time for this. And he freaks out and starts screaming. He's like, oh, you know, I'll cut your dick off, you little jew mother. And there was a, my boss, Lou Degimo, had a little calabrian guy who was sort of, was a career extra who would sort of do odd jobs around the office and cook spaghetti for us sometimes. And he knew all the bit players in town and I don't know, his name was Sal. And he heard the voice. He's like, what's going on? What's going on? It's like, it's Mario. He's going to kill me, Sal. And Mario's like, sal, give me Sal. He's like, sal, you tell him. You tell him about what happened to the guy in the Gowanus. Sal. So he was giving away one of his, one of his murders and threatening to make me next. And that's when I finally called the producer. This is like a year after the movie had been shot. It said, pay him. Pay him to now. Yes, yes. And I told him. I said, he's going. He's told me about a person he's killed and where you can find the body. I was like, pay him. He's like, I got it. I will, I promise, today. And he did. And that. That was it. That's. [00:51:17] Speaker A: That's. [00:51:17] Speaker B: That was my brush with death, I guess you'd say, how do you be. [00:51:21] Speaker A: A good casting director versus a crap casting director? [00:51:24] Speaker B: Well, one thing is, you know, nobody comes out of the womb knowing how that's done. And we all had good taste. That's not unique. You know, everybody has their own, like, idea, their connection with a role, that they see a certain person a role, and it becomes an iconic performance, but everybody's capable of that. That's not enough. I think it's like with anything, Alan, I think it's just learn from the mistakes you make as you go along. And I don't mean really like, you know, really thunderheaded mistakes, like giving somebody a weekly contract when it was. They were working for one day in case it rained, which was just idiotic. It was like, I mean, the best story I could tell you that, you know, I'm guided by now is one of the original detectives was this role of John Munch. Detective John Munch. And the script called for somebody who would get the word, I believe in. Paula Adonazio's pilot script was apoplectic. Like, he would get apoplectic when brow beating a suspect, when. When interrogating him, he would, you know, bully them into submission, you know, so I was trying to direct actors to, like, I want to see a vein pop out of your head. I want to see you turn red. And I was going for that and going. I was very literally tied to that description. I was not exercising imagination. I wasn't incapable of doing that in certain cases, but I didn't there, right? And Lou was doing the meetings in LA while I was doing stuff in New York. And he was the one. I don't know what he thought of it. It was suggested by the agent he brought in, Richard Belzer. Now, who we all know is the polar opposite of apoplectic, right? He's long and thin and laconic and doesn't raise his voice. He's the cerebral comics comic, you know, too cool to get worked up over anything. This couldn't be further from what was on the page and he comes in and, of course, doesn't change a thing in his reading of the role. He just does Belzer. He wasn't going to yell at a suspect with the sides, and he books it. And this guy, who was so not what they had originally written, ended up playing the role of John Munch for longer than anybody, played a role in tv history because he played it for seven seasons of our show with, at least, I think, two crossovers, two two part crossovers with Law and Order while we were in production, came back as John Munch in an episode of Tom's follow up series, the Beat, then got bought by Dick Wolf. Dick Wolf literally bought the character and started him out in the original cast of SVU. And so he played the role from, I think he did 15 seasons of that. So probably 25, 30 years. [00:54:09] Speaker A: He was that character. John Munch. [00:54:12] Speaker B: John Munch was Belzer. They're in. You know, you can't think of one without the other. Right. [00:54:17] Speaker A: Well, let's, let's. Let's talk the notion of casting gal. I mean, Gill's cast a lot of actors. I've cast a lot of actors. I don't think when I started casting actors that I ever looked for an actor to act, not for the camera, because the camera will see them. Acting will have cut it out. So really, what you're looking on film, you're looking for actors who know how to be as nakedly honest within the context of the scene we've written for them, so that when they're playing the scene, they can. Wow, they look like they're really, whatever the scenes called for. Happy, sad, whatever. It's for them to be as honestly them as they possibly can. Now, there are a couple actors. There's Meryl, who disappears into a role. There are a couple of english actors who. Yep, they, man, they vanish. There's no trace of them, really. That's. And that's their artistry. But I'd say most actors really, I mean, they're playing themselves within. Yeah. You know, within a range. [00:55:30] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:55:31] Speaker A: But, hey, this is a. This is not an easy skill set to have. It's their ability to be so honest. [00:55:38] Speaker B: To share who you really are, that authenticity. Yeah. And it's really crucial in television. And since I, you know, I did some movies, but I think if I was thought of as anything, it was as an episodic guy, a tv guy. Guy. Film can compass, encompass that kind of transformational acting. But tv is not meant for transformational acting because saw him act and it was unmissable. Didn't make you particularly. Didn't mean I was smarter than anybody else, because it wasn't I alone. Seeing that along the way. Kevin Corriganhorn, Luis Guzman. I'd like to think Edie Falco, you know, just, you may not have been the one actually who gave them that first job, but you may have given them one of those first auditions. You know, who hires them is out of your hands. But being an early supporter of somebody is, you know, it's one of the great satisfactions of doing it. Even if you're Peter Dinklage is another one. You know, they're called bringing him in for, like, a one day role on third watch. And he was so not so. His career was so embryonic, he couldn't afford his back SAG dues. I didn't even know he'd ever worked on anything for SAG. I think Jonathan Mark Sherman and Ethan Hawke and I had to chip in to pay his SAG dues so that he could work on that episode. [00:57:02] Speaker A: I think you get paid. [00:57:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I couldn't afford to, to actually get the job he'd been hired for. But, you know, and again, when it's somebody like that, I had a casting assistant on the beat, casting associate Gail Keller, who now casts, you know, has way outstripped me, casts what we do in the shadows and everything for Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer and all these great. It does all the comedy stuff. She worked with me on Pooty Tang and then just sort of ran with that in that realm. But she turned me on to Michael K. Williams, for instance. And I had no idea who that guy was. Michael Kenneth Williams. And he was just like a bolt from the blue. It was like, how did I not know this guy? And there's people you wish you could take credit for, but you just kind of missed it by a hair. But that's the other thing, is learning as, like, some of my bosses were better when I was an assistant and associate at listening to my ideas. When I became people's boss, I tried to listen to my associates ideas, let them teach me about people they knew. But that's a big part of this, is that if I don't know them, they can't be all that good. Is the death of good casting. That attitude. [00:58:24] Speaker A: What ultimately took you from casting into talent management? [00:58:29] Speaker B: Well, a break from the business. You know, I had done one last series in LA, my first series in LA, actually. Everything had always been in New York, but I moved out there because my wife's writing career took us out there, and I did your wife, Laura Cahill. [00:58:44] Speaker A: She had done a feature for HBO called hysterical blindness. [00:58:48] Speaker B: Yes. It was based on a play she had written, you know, here in New York. And it became a very successful HBO movie. Starred Uma Thurman and Jenna Rollins and Ben Gazzara, and won a lot of awards. She got nominated for, you know, the indie spirit, WGA, Emmy, all of that stuff. Didn't win any of them. But, you know, she has. She has certificates, if not any statues. But, yeah, we were out there for her career. And funny, after all the shows I had done in New York, nobody at the studios, at Paramount or at Fox would approve me to cast a series, a pilot in LA. The assumption being, you won't know the day players, you won't know the costars, you don't know enough people to just do that rank and file work. And I thought, jeez, if that's not learnable on the go, I don't know what is. But that was. I couldn't get one. It was only on the very, very last day of that pilot season that I finally got a job. I got to meet with Thief Sutton, whose work I knew from having a very funny name and a name I saw every week on cheers. And it was sort of like Ed. It was a reshoot of a pilot that didn't work the first time, a show called Coupling. It was based on the Bridget BBC show, and it was Ben Silverman's first narrative show as part of this big deal at Universal at the time. And it was NBC's great plan to replace friends at 08:00 p.m. on Thursday night. It was going to be. It was the hope for the survival of must see TV, and I'm very grateful to must see TV because it was friends and er and west wing that kept homicide on the air for seven seasons in which nobody really watched. You know, it was Warren Littlefield loved the show, but could only afford to keep it there and have low advertising rates because he was making so much money off of all of those shows, plus Seinfeld and this and that, you know, just so many hits. Well, friends was going gone, and that was like, that slot. What do you do next? So at the time, I don't know why we were putting it together. It didn't occur to anybody that replacing a show about six friends and dating with another show about six friends and dating was probably the dumbest idea in the history of show business. It seemed really logical at the time, I guess we're all moving so fast. Was so a victim of the hype because it had that slot, it had to be great, and everybody wanted a piece of it and everybody was so excited, and yet it was, you know, it was terrible. Just nothing about it worked from the beginning. The pilot seemed to work, but once, once we hit the ground running with episodes Woo Boy and just the mortal enemy of good comedy. And I remember I was on the universal and I ran into this guy I knew from casting Cosby in New York, not the huxtable one, but the CB's sitcom in the nineties, one of the younger writers there. And he was working on some, like, CW, you know, I don't know, Jenny Garth and a bunch of teenagers sitcom. And he was so, he was like, God, everybody wants to be doing your show. I couldn't get near that. I'm doing this, you know. Meanwhile, that show was, you know, the death knell, you know, privately out and, you know, had really spoiled me. I was so used to only having to cast the guest leads and take my time doing that. I had so much support from theater people. Tom Fontana down, you know, a guy who started at Williamstown, understood there's somebody who appreciated actors, trusted actors, but when you're around people who just don't, you know, it doesn't work, or at least it's a great deal harder to make it work. And I think I was just burnt out from, you know, working so hard for so little effect. So I. I quit. You know, I sort of became my wife's writing career support system and became a guy walking up and down center, a boulevard with a stroller, because I really wasn't a driver pushing my kid around. And we moved back to the city and I taught for a few years and I coached actors for a few years that, that wasn't terribly sustainable financially. It's great if you get somebody who becomes a big, big star. I had one, but didn't bring me along on set coaching. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. I think I wanted to be. I wasn't as good as I would have liked to have been. It's sort of like in my acting days, I wish I not comfortable doing something I don't feel I excel at, and I don't think I excelled at that. There are certain things about teaching I was very good at, and I was very good at directing, like not very good student actors in plays. At the acting studio at which I was teaching, I directed a bunch of standard issue, you know, the american plays you do with students. Matchmaker, you can't take it with you. Picnic. And I did really good job for those. I was very happy, created little worlds on stage with zero budget. It's not a career. And there's a point where, like, God, college is looming. I'm gonna have to send this kid somewhere. And she's like, I've got to get a, you know, I'm too old to, to be saying the words, you've got to get serious to yourself. And then one day, a friend, a manager friend who had seen better days in her management career, took me out to lunch because she thought I might be able to recommend students who would be worthwhile clients. I said, I think you're barking up the wrong tree. I'm not running into that quality of student actor. But then after talking for a while, she's like, you know, you should, you should manage. And I was like, okay. And I just sort of, as a not very terribly spontaneous or brave person, I was spontaneous and brave, out of the blood for once in my life. And I said, yeah. And. Which meant, you know, start to do it with her, to join her in management, which only lasted a few weeks. I did not want to keep doing it with her. I wanted, you know, do it my own way. I had my ideas, she had hers, which are very entrenched. And I, I don't think it necessarily served her well over those, the past few years. I don't know if she'd exactly kind of kept up with the zeitgeist. And I thought, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm going to figure it out the way I figured out casting by screwing up the deals on exorcist three. I'm going to just do, I think I'm a little smarter now. I think I can avoid some errors. As a very successful manager friend of mine said when I made some calls to pick people's brains, like, what's your best advice? One of them, you know, said, it's like, you know, it's not brain surgery. You, you know, you have good taste from casting. You know what a good actor is. You can do that just, you know, get superb actors who you feel something, who you really, truly believe in and are inspired by, and then you will be inspired to say all of those salesman like things with, with no compunction. And it's like, and don't think it has to be an a la carte menu. It doesn't like one person of color, you know, one, one, one bike poc actor, one south asian actor. It's like if you see two south asian actors, sign them both. If you believe they're both superb and you want to work with them, don't make it like, you know, a restaurant menu or you have to have your fish and your fowl and your. [01:06:04] Speaker A: Sign the actor. [01:06:05] Speaker B: Sign. Sign the actor and sign that. What I found is sign the person who you find interest, which what we're talking about. Sign the person you can sustain a three hour conversation with and not feel bored. Click that way and you will know what to say about them. You'll know how to kind of spin a yarn about who they are and why they will be an asset to a producer or director. [01:06:28] Speaker A: You are enjoying this business very, very much. [01:06:32] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm not enjoying bouncing back from COVID and then having to figure out how to bounce back from five and a half months of strikes. But, you know, I don't love that. [01:06:41] Speaker A: Who is? Who is. [01:06:42] Speaker B: Who is right? I'm not alone, but, yeah, I really do. It is in some ways, it's taking what I did in casting and at least the way I did it and for taking the reason I left casting and flipping it on its ear. I kind of left casting because I got tired of having to advocate for the studios over actors who I cared about more. Now I get to advocate for the actors and legitimately, I'm not betraying a boss. I'm on the team. I think I was always probably meant to be on. I used to sell actors like an agent does two showrunners. Imagine trying to tell the guys from Ed why they should hire this person. They'd be lucky to have them. But to no avail. But it still can be to no avail. But I would do that. Then I would try to tell a director I was working with or a showrunner who this actor was, why they would be great, why they should take them seriously. Well, same thing with management, only I get a piece of it if it works. [01:07:43] Speaker A: And that's always nice. [01:07:44] Speaker B: And it's always nice. [01:07:47] Speaker A: Young playwrights, Ukraine. What is that? And how did you get involved with that? Because when you were telling me about that, that's. Wow. [01:07:56] Speaker B: That's just. I don't know what to call it. Is it our side hustle? Is it our hobby? Is it our charity? It's not as formal as that. It's something that we just stumbled into. And my wife has really done something amazing with. I mean, it's been mostly it's just been a blessing to us. It's been like you know, the best thing we've ever done in some ways. My wife, I had known, you know, when having friends who teach at, like, NYU, Tisch, and the MFA acting program. And I went to see a show there and was introduced to a Fulbright scholar from Ukraine who was there. She went back to Ukraine. She was teaching students there, teenagers acting in the English language with the hopes that they would have less parochial professional lives. They could end up being able to act in English. And these kids grow up speaking English. They grew up watching friends and learned English that way, as I'm sure kids all over the many places in the world do. So, long story short, my wife has been teaching writing at Gotham's tv writing at Gotham Writers workshop for a bunch of years now. And she. We got the idea that she would teach these kids a short term screenwriting class which started in, you know, late ish 2021 and ended just as the rumblings of the russian invasion were beginning. And the kids were kind of scared, but it was all going to end, and we would keep in touch. But then the tanks, you know, rolled in, and Laura, my wife, was texting with them, and they were in a group chat and finding out where they were all going. Bulgaria, Romania, all the places they were dispersing to a few weeks later, they just kind of came back together to talk. But it turned into a playwriting class that never stopped meeting. Every Saturday and Sunday morning, New York time, 7 hours later, Ukraine time, or five or 6 hours if they were further west in Europe. And they just kept coming. And it became this great support system, but it was never meant to be war therapy or anything like that. Laura's not a therapist or a war playwriting therapist. It's not about that. It was about. Well, it gave them something to do and to focus on and be hopeful about and, of course, to tell their stories through. It became a playwriting class, and she just went about kind of teaching herself how to be the best playwriting teacher she could, teaching them about all sorts of different styles of theater making. And it led to bringing in actors to do cold readings of their plays. And we did a wonderful Zoom show in 2022 with people like Anne Dowd and David Morse, came and read their first short plays and went really well. And in the audience was a swedish theater director who then arranged to have the plays translated into swedish and amazing experience for everybody. And she got to see them. They'd all become very, very tightly bonded, but they didn't know each other in person, and they all got to really come out of that caring about each other. And it was supposed to end then, but it didn't. They just kind of kept coming back and, you know. So the sound is, you know, Ukrainian is always in my living room on Zoom in some form or another every day of the week. But the class itself, we started master classes. We brought Mary Harron in to talk about moviemaking because the kids are, for some reason, ukrainian teachers love american psycho. I don't know why we brought in. I said, they learned English from friends. So we had Marta Kaufman come in and talk to them. My friend Rob Desina, who's the head of casting at CB's studios in New York, came and talked to them about that. Just introduce them to a whole lot of points of view and different fields. Who knows? As you know, everybody goes to college to act, goes to Williams, down to thinking they'll be an actor. But they all have all sorts of different kinds of careers and places in the business. We wanted them to learn what those possible places were. They wrote another bunch of plays, better, of course, than ever. But we. This time they were better, largely because. [01:12:05] Speaker A: What were they writing about? What kind of things were they writing about? [01:12:07] Speaker B: Well, you know, they were very loath to write about the war because there's a little bit of, like, a variety of, like, a little guilt of, like, who am I to serve a little survivor's guilt, like, who am I to be free to write a. About this when people are being bombed and not survive? And who am I to presume to speak for? Everybody. And some of them are just, of course, not surprisingly. It's just. It's a lot. They just. It's too much. It's more than they want to deal with. But I don't know why Laura brought me in to give the big speech one day, and I had to think about what we had to say. You have to write about war because the people we were having them start to work with on the next show, everybody expected that's. It can't be, you know, your ukrainian is important. And I talked to them about New York at the time that AIDS appeared and how the response to that in the form of plays like the normal heart and as is, was so immediate, it was so fast before half the country even knew it was called AIDS instead of the gay cancer, you know, these plays already existed. And how important it was that, you know, they write about that and they speak for all the men who couldn't write and were dying at fast. And one of my experiences as an intern in the casting office of the public was watching. The normal heart was already a long running hit at the Ansbacher Theater there. And I would sit at my desk in the front of the casting office, and Larry Kramer, who wrote normal heart, of course, started, you know, act up, was a great, you know, activist and leader, would come in and have these unbelievable, knockdown, drag out arguments with Richard Kornberg, the public's press rep, about AZT and the trial drugs, which none of which had been approved yet. Larry, of course, was like, it doesn't matter. There's something. There's a possibility you do this. Richard was far more cautious and conservative, and they would scream at each other over that. They were so impassioned. But the channel for all that was in theater making, and then how once it had been around for a while that it could sort of be less, I guess, issue y, which is in no way to diminish those plays, but you could expand on that. You could have an angels in America, which kind of came out about six, seven years after the eight crisis began, but was its climax artistically in a lot of ways. So I talked to them about that, and I said, look, it sucks to be part of history when history is going, going badly for you, but you have to do this. You have to speak for Ukrainians who don't have the talent you have and the voice you have. This is how you're going to tell the rest of the world what it was like to be crowded into those trains in the middle of fields at 03:00 a.m. stop the train. Everybody's told not to turn off their phones, do not utter sound, because there are tanks nearby. And we're just gonna be still and quiet until we know they've rolled far enough away that we can pick up this train and get you to, usually to Poland. That's the place they would go first. You know, you've got to tell all your feelings about this, about all these, your experiences. And they did in different styles and different, you know, ways that were, you know, all came from themselves, who they are as people, about their families and their dreams and, you know, brilliant stuff. So the second time around this year, we matched them with a bunch of mentors. We got a bunch of playwrights and showrunners like Peter Hedges. Will Arbery, who wrote, you know, was a Pulitzer prime finalist for heroes of the fourth turning and was a producer on succession. Daniel Goldfarb, who's the show runner of Julia Susan Heathcote, who created a killing eve. Great, great people. And assigned them each a kid. And then as we got closer to doing our second Zoom show, we hired actual directors to come in. Mark Brokaw, fresh off how I learned to drive, came and he did this play that we thought was perfect for him because it was like kind of a knock about farce. Well, how do you do that on Zoom? Mark is a great director, that sort of thing. So we tried to find the best match of play, director, mentor, you know, have their voices all kind of. And then we, you know, basically, I sort of, as a challenge to myself, I was like, let's see if I can still cast. And I went ahead and, you know, it's like a bicycle, guys. It's got right back on. We got Michael Shannon, David Harbour, Harriet Walter, Cherry Jones, Reed Bernie and Becky Baker and Tommy Sadowski. Just fantastic cast of people who were, you know, generous hearted enough to want to be part of who got it. Not everybody. Everybody does. But these people got it and wanted to be, you know, would do anything to have been there. And, and it was. That show was incredible, you know, commanded the caliber of acting, the fact that directors were and mentors were there to help shape the material. It's being published in two different volumes each. Each show was now going to be published by Smith and Krauss, the theater publishing firm. And now, you know, the kids are coming of age some. They're 17 and 18 and we're trying to, our new project, besides, you know, still working with them on writing, is helping them get into BFA programs and colleges here and. But again, trying to get the best, the best help we can. We have 117 year old girl in, she's in a boarding school in outside London on scholarship and she wants to apply to Rada Lambda but also Williams and places here. So, you know, we got Jessica Hecht and Danny Burstein to coach her on her monologues and we didn't even got Jessica, who was already involved with the group. And Danny Verstein, you know, who won a Tony from Moulin Rouge, is great, great theater actor. He just wanted to be part of it. He was like, can I, can I? Jessica said, danny asked, can he help coach? No, no. Who would want him around? So they're getting amazing help from people. From people, you know what they're talking about. [01:18:00] Speaker A: But this is all happening because you have turned into Mister Showbiz yourself. [01:18:06] Speaker B: You know, I am a receptionist with contacts after all, as it turns out. And you know what? That. Why not? [01:18:14] Speaker A: That is the perfect way to conclude this. Because on the one hand, okay, on the other, hand. You so missed the point if you think that is a receptionist with context. But I first. Well, first of all, this is not the first of many conversations. You are a podcast under yourself. I think you and Gil could have had a. When you get into the theater. [01:18:41] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:18:41] Speaker A: But the two of you. Because. Because Gil did a show called El Grande de Coca Cola. [01:18:45] Speaker B: Yes, but he told me that. I mean, I remember that was like, you know, a huge staple in New York theater. Well, our high school years, you guys. [01:18:52] Speaker A: Could talk theater forever and ever and ever. That would be a podcast unto itself. [01:18:57] Speaker C: I'm amazed that we never ran into each other along the way. [01:19:00] Speaker B: Well, for all of these years, for some reason, I told Alan, I thought you were younger than us, that you were the nephew of a guy named Tony Adler, who we went to Vassar with, who was a. I know Tony began his career. Yeah, he's an ad. Exactly. He was an ADHD. And I don't. Obviously, some little fantasy button in my head was like, I wove this narrative that, like, I'll bet he's related to Tony. And I don't know why I thought you. Well, that's what I thought until last week when I first. [01:19:26] Speaker C: Right. Well, I am related to Tony. I am related to Tony, but not that Tony, my son is named Tony. And part of what you said was true. I am younger than the both of you. And so I think we should leave. [01:19:39] Speaker B: It at that perfect place to. Yes, we should bow out. [01:19:42] Speaker A: And with that, we'll see you next time, everybody. The how not to make a movie podcast is executive produced by me, Alan Katz, by Gil Adler, and by Jason Stein. Our artwork was done by the amazing Jody Webster and Jason. Jody, along with Mando, are all the hosts of the fun and informative dads from the Crip podcast. Follow them for what my old pal the Crypt keeper would have called terrific Crypt content. 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.