S3E45: How To Write Like A Genius

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This podcast is a collaboration between Costard and Touchstone Productions and the Dads from the Crypt podcast. [00:00:05] Speaker B: You've come to the right party. [00:00:08] Speaker A: You see, the body of a young. [00:00:10] Speaker B: Man was found floating in the pool of her mansion with two shots in his back and one in his stomach. [00:00:16] Speaker A: Nobody important, really, just a movie writer. [00:00:19] Speaker B: With a couple of B pictures to his credit. The poor dope, he always wanted a pool. [00:00:35] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to another episode of the how not to Make a Movie podcast. I'm Alan Katz. Today we're going to talk about the art of scribbling. To be honest, I think we should stop calling it writing, since really, if you're doing it right, what you're really doing all the time is rewriting. That's what all good writing is, the product of much rewriting. Maybe someday someone will figure out how to write the last draft of something first. And wouldn't that be a time saver, if problematic. But until that day, we have no choice but to do it the old hard way, by writing draft after draft until every word is just so. As if we could ever get every word just so. Our friend Charlie Fleischer, the voice of Roger Rabbit and co star of the horror classic Demon Knight among a kajillion other things, just put out a collection of short stories called out of My Mind. We're going to talk to Charlie about his new book, which is terrific, by the way. It's 11 short stories that will take you on a remarkable inner journey. They're all short stories, so for the modern reader, they're bite sized and easily digestible. Just be warned, once these stories get inside your head, you won't stop thinking about them, because that's the point. Or maybe it's driven Charlie into his mind and that's why we have these stories in front of us. First of all, let me say bravo. [00:02:07] Speaker B: Wow. Thank you very much. Did you hear that, ladies and gentlemen? Like my book? All right, you folks, it's. [00:02:15] Speaker A: It's a terrific collection. The book describes itself as 11 magical stories infused with love and mystery. Yeah, yeah, and. And a few other things too. [00:02:30] Speaker B: But that's okay. [00:02:31] Speaker A: You know, at various times I. There are so many other writers. Kind of occurred to me like this kind of feels like I found myself finding hints of Chekhov all along. [00:02:46] Speaker B: Wow, that's really interesting. [00:02:50] Speaker A: Simply because of the perspective that there was always. And Chekhov, there was always. There's always this terrific perspective in the stories. And a lot of your stories, there's this lovely sense of perspective. You are in the Hands of a storyteller and the storyteller. The story will flow at the storyteller's pace. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes we bore and sometimes great patches of time go by and. But never you mind about that. It's all. We're always in the hands of a masterful storyteller. [00:03:27] Speaker B: Well, I think. Was there one that was particularly fanciful or favor. Flavorful or. [00:03:36] Speaker A: We're going to talk about a couple. [00:03:38] Speaker B: Oh, I can. I can enjoy that. [00:03:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought your mind would be open to that. And then I want to. After we talk about the book, then I'm going to talk about the process and a few other things surrounding just the process of actually of scribbling or tap tapping this stuff out, getting from inside here to here or strange presumptuous. [00:04:05] Speaker B: Thing to do to think, well, I'm going to write some stuff down and then other people are going to read it. Like, why would they read it? You're not. You're not a famous writer, you're not Chekhov. Why would anybody. They got lots to do. There's. Netflix is streaming 15 new shows. It's. It's an odd time and people are not reading as they were. [00:04:24] Speaker A: No, but, but like I said there, it's. They're all. I'm going to say easy to read because the storytelling is so adept. [00:04:38] Speaker B: Once again, I thank you. [00:04:40] Speaker A: You know, I. A John Cheever short story is a particular thing, like a. An Edgar Allan Poe short story or a Flannery O'Connor or Raymond Carver short story. They're all a very particular thing. I wouldn't say that a Charlie Flagshire short story is a particular thing. They kind of run a surprising gamut. The first story, Sylvia, to me, the first thing that struck me was God, it was like ENS Goes bald soprano. [00:05:14] Speaker B: It's a surrealistic rock, basically. [00:05:17] Speaker A: Yeah. And as a table setter, you know, my first thought, okay, is this going to be a book of absurdity? But it's not. It's. That's just one of the many flavors in your melody in your toolkit there. I'll make some metaphors up. You know, Rubies and emeralds is quite different. It's quite lyrical. [00:05:47] Speaker B: They're all kind of different. [00:05:49] Speaker A: Yeah. In Rubies and Emeralds there were just a lovely little phrase where you describe the interdependency of wood and water is crucial to balancing the repeating cycles of nature's sacred rhythms. [00:06:03] Speaker B: That's nice. [00:06:04] Speaker A: I thought that was a particularly lovely sentence. Just the rhythms of it, the way that it flowed. [00:06:10] Speaker B: I'm really into all the things you just mentioned. Dylan Thomas, you know, under Milkwood, just the sound of the words in addition to the imagery that they create. [00:06:32] Speaker A: In Severed Soul, Thomas meets his ancestors, which brings him to tears, having been overwhelmed by emotion. You wrote, meeting his ancestors allowed Thomas to feel a love that transcended the limits of time and connected the souls of each generation. Have you ever sent your DNA into 23andMe or Ancestor? [00:07:01] Speaker B: No, I have not. [00:07:03] Speaker A: Any desire or curiosity to. [00:07:06] Speaker B: Well, I've read several things that speak to the accuracy or inaccuracy of said prosci assesses prosthetic. And I don't know how accurate that is, and I don't know if it's a good idea to submit your DNA into a public database. And I kind of. In some ways, it kind of doesn't matter because it, you know, I go back to the beginning, you know, and I go back to essentially being stardust or being the first life on earth, like in Severed Soul, the om. I mean, the og. [00:07:53] Speaker A: Do you feel any kind of connection to your. Your literal forebears, your. The generations that literally produced you? [00:08:03] Speaker B: Well, my parents certainly, and, you know, certain aspects of my grandparents, and I've seen, you know, photographs and for the school project once, I assembled a kind of genealogy situation. But I don't have any direct data other than what I am, you know, I am the living embodiment of all those connections, so I kind of rely on that. [00:08:40] Speaker A: I confess, when I told my friend's story in the Donor, it introduced me to ideas that surprised me. I. I had never thought of doing it myself either. And suddenly I did, and I discovered some surprising things. Surprising things not from the DNA, but that actually opened up. Opened the door to. I didn't know that people had composed a family tree that I was part of, but they had. [00:09:13] Speaker B: If it's something that you find useful, helpful, I'm op. I'm always open to new horizons, so that is something we can discuss. [00:09:27] Speaker A: You know, again, you're. The. What you wrote kind of got connected with. With something in me that. That connection to generations, I. I feel that, and I've always. And I can't tell you why my. My father's mother's father, so his maternal grandfather. When I heard about him and I saw a picture of him when I was young, I don't know why something in me went ding. [00:09:57] Speaker B: Well, I've always had that fascination and I've always had a fantasy, and my. My oldest daughter has kind of picked up on it as an idea for a business to record people so that their offspring of future generations can see them. And I used to fantasize about living in a world where that had been done for hundreds of years. And like. Well, I just saw the. The clip of my great great great grandfather and we were so much alike, it was unbelievable. And you know, my great great great grandmother, you know, watch hearing what she said and realizing that that connection links us all. You know, go back 30 generations, we're all related. So I've always been totally fascinated with that. [00:10:44] Speaker A: That's. That's really quite true because the further back you go, it really takes. It takes a remarkable number of people to produce each individual one of us. I mean, as you go generation to generation, generation. It's an exponential thing. [00:11:01] Speaker B: Yeah. It goes back to the beginning. [00:11:04] Speaker A: But what's also strange, one of. One of the strange takeaways that I got from the DNA. I did a DNA test. I thought, okay, I've done a story about it. Let me take a journalistic tack here and come at it from within. What it does point out is that people, things that we just know because of our mitochondrial DNA and where it originates, that we all in our various subgroups, we go back to individual. Whole groups of us go back to an individual person, a woman. Yes. [00:11:41] Speaker B: Metacritic DNA, which is. Yes, part of Severed Soul. I even did. Yes to the people that discovered it. And that was. Yes, when the story was. When it happened. It wasn't known then. It just said, it's unknown. But then I give reference to try to a story within an actual time frame. [00:12:09] Speaker A: It, like I said, I connected with it. [00:12:13] Speaker B: Well, that's. That's what I wish for, you know, anything is to. To reach people and to reach them on a level that they weren't necessarily aware of existing, that. That something. A connection could take place that would lead to other connections. [00:12:35] Speaker A: That story, again, was one of those where I just. It brought to mind a lot of different pieces. The. The scene where. Where Thomas talks to the first cell to appear on Earth reminds me of Patty Chayefsky's Altered States. [00:12:49] Speaker B: Wow. [00:12:50] Speaker A: Remember, did you ever see Altered States? [00:12:52] Speaker B: Or William Hurt, I believe. [00:12:54] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's about. I think he uses a sensory deprivation tank to go back into. As if the genes could take you back. The DNA could take you back to a memory of being this creature, this proto human. [00:13:13] Speaker B: Right. [00:13:13] Speaker A: And because of, you know, the magic of the sensory deprivation tank, he becomes the proto human. It's, you know, cool story, cool story, but it's that connection. Yeah. To. Yeah. We all kind of go back to Lucy, don't we? [00:13:28] Speaker B: Oh, sure. And even further back, we go back to Taom in reference to my story and. [00:13:40] Speaker A: Yeah. And. And that kind of feels like the star child in 2001 in Space Odyssey. [00:13:47] Speaker B: It's definitely. There's a linkage there, but it takes that and goes back another level, you know, or forward another level where that single cell got to be a spoiler. But that. That goes through a change that is totally unexpected by everyone. [00:14:16] Speaker A: There's. There were threads of string theory kind of weaving their way through it just in the way that it. I don't know, the way that it flowed. The. I love the idea in string theory that something can come from nothing. What a wonderful idea. [00:14:40] Speaker B: Well, string theory is slightly problematic because for one reason, you can't. Can't be. You can't prove it. And there's some people that have disputes about it, but anything. And there's certainly a lot of scientific aspects that I draw on that I don't know whether the average citizen will get the reference or not. You know. You know, whisper that. That's an Amalekite, Elvis, the scientist guy. He's able to create these hybrid beings, and that's. That was the key to it. [00:15:30] Speaker A: In the visit. The character of La Mazarin, I love. [00:15:42] Speaker B: I love the Mazarin, but. I'm sorry, go ahead. [00:15:44] Speaker A: Oh, well, he's fascinating. He's a cosmic version of chromatophores, but he has the cosmic version of chromatophores, the cells that allow octopuses to change color, which makes him a. [00:15:55] Speaker B: Fascinating patterns. [00:15:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:16:01] Speaker B: And the octopuses see, like anything he sees, he can make it appear on his skin. [00:16:10] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's. It's. It's an internal. It's. It's Zelig plus. [00:16:22] Speaker B: Nice. I like the reference. [00:16:25] Speaker A: The. I also. I like the character of Czar. Kind of a Beelzebub is a beta. [00:16:31] Speaker B: Creature, but with which character? I'm sorry? [00:16:34] Speaker A: Czar. [00:16:35] Speaker B: Oh, Czar. [00:16:36] Speaker A: Yeah. You're kind of. He becomes a Beelzebub as a beta creature. I thought that was very funny. [00:16:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I shortened his name. Yeah, that's. He's the kind of beastie fellow and. [00:16:51] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:16:52] Speaker B: To. You know, it's part of Thurston's plan, but then he gets changed when he finds love. [00:17:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Now changed when he finds love. All right. In the Hunger, it contains a ceremonial ritual to transmogrify the negative to positive. All Right. I. I would describe Malachite Elvis, having read it, as a journey toward perpetual bliss. [00:17:26] Speaker B: Well said. It is a place that we all wish to be and certainly are capable of approaching. [00:17:35] Speaker A: That seems to be how a lot of the stories flow from whatever negative may there may be really towards a positive, spiritual. I don't. I don't know where to call the place where exactly we land it. It's so. It's so polymorphous of. [00:18:04] Speaker B: Of harmony and resolution and balance. And that's definitely because I see that as kind of a metaphor for what life is. You know, there's conflicts and all these things, and the idea is to resolve them all and move to a place where there's some kind of a greater harmonious frequency frequencies or something to that nature. [00:18:35] Speaker A: It sounds a lot like a spiritual journey. [00:18:39] Speaker B: Unquestionably. That's always been an important part of my. My essence. This too. So we are. I mean, if nobody knows what this is like, where are we? Who did this? How is this even possible? You know, I'm making noises with my mouth and. And then you hear them. I could say a red balloon held by a green chimpanzee jumping up and down on a red Ford. You can see that in your head. And the balloon pops, and I'm just making sound. I could easily just have gone. You know, it's. It's. It's all magical. I mean, it's magical and unknowable, and we're part of it. You know, that's what I try to do, I think, is just, you know, grab as much of this stuff as I can and. And throw it down and keep scraping and pushing it. And it's like mining for. For minerals and jewels. And then you get enough of them, and you can try and craft, you know, a ring or. Or an egg, a Faberge egg or whatever magic form you wish it to become. [00:20:01] Speaker A: You've. You've always seen a certain kind of. I don't know if magic's the right word, but in the universe, you know, you're. You're writing about mole. [00:20:14] Speaker B: I mentioned mole in here, though. Do I? I think so. [00:20:17] Speaker A: No, no, no, you don't. I'm. I'm simply. I'm. [00:20:19] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [00:20:20] Speaker A: Well, you ref. [00:20:21] Speaker B: Mole. Yeah, that's. [00:20:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm. I'm taking this. You know, we're all right now. Now we're coloring outside the lines. [00:20:26] Speaker B: No, there. There are no lines there. Just. [00:20:30] Speaker A: Indeed. [00:20:32] Speaker B: Although there are subtle modi references, like the number 27 and 37, like multiples of 37, like 444, which I mentioned a lot. And I'll just give you something that most people probably don't know. The picture on the back. [00:20:53] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:20:54] Speaker B: Did you read who the photographer was? [00:20:58] Speaker A: It's very small font, very small fund. [00:21:02] Speaker B: It's Tanya Chambers is the photographer and that is the name of the woman in the visit who is a photographer. So I actually took the picture myself. But you need to put a photo, you know, give credit to the photographer. So I took a character out of my book and allowed her to be a part of the real world. Photo credit. Just fourth wall. [00:21:30] Speaker A: What fourth wall? [00:21:32] Speaker B: It's a. [00:21:32] Speaker A: What fourth wall? What fourth wall? [00:21:35] Speaker B: Yeah, there's no fourth. This is the. The fourth. The fourth front cover or the back slap. And I also tried to have links within the stories. Like in one story I have a reference to another story. Or in this. [00:21:58] Speaker A: In Zachary. Zachary Taylor's name appears a couple times. [00:22:04] Speaker B: Yeah, it does. [00:22:06] Speaker A: There's a school that appears a couple times. [00:22:09] Speaker B: There's a story where. Cygnus of the Northern Sky, I think it is. So the character in that. Here's two other people talking about someone who. Whose soul was left his body, which references severed soul. And then she's. Well, that's much different than mine. And there are other little cross references. Like Mount Hudson appears in lots of different stories. And I tried to have lots of things that link stories, but. And not necessarily in a way that would be expected. And the sculptor creates these toucans. And the Toucans also appear in another story towards the end, but they're not related. They reference the sculptor. So there are things that link stories that aren't necessarily part of the whole story, but it's just a little subtle link. [00:23:20] Speaker A: And that's reminiscent of all the characters in pulp fiction kind of crossing paths occasionally. And yes, they all take. They're all part of the same universe. Yeah. [00:23:32] Speaker B: And too many secrets. The guy collects Toucans. And they reference Adrian, who is the sculptor in the story. So it's. [00:23:49] Speaker A: And, you know, it's funny because. And that's reminiscent of Vonnegut, because Vonnegut did that a lot. You know, he would have, you know, characters would be in other books. [00:24:02] Speaker B: Yeah. And hunger. That goes. That relates to. Yeah. Anyways, I. [00:24:13] Speaker A: It is exactly as described. 11 magical stories infused with love and mystery. And it will take you on a spiritual journey, reading them. [00:24:25] Speaker B: Who could ask for much more than that? It's just a book. That's all. Ten stories in a little book. Just words. The words in a Certain order. [00:24:33] Speaker A: That's so much more what was. All right, so this is the. You've written scientific papers. You've written, of course, material for yourself. You've written various other things. Had you ever written a book before? You tried to write a book before and just never, never happened. [00:24:53] Speaker B: Complete book. I mean, I have hundreds of pages of writings from dream journals. I used to record my dream when I woke up in the morning, and just daily journals of, you know, things that happen in the day. And I wrote a patent on my golden ratio device because I'd had bad experience with a patent attorney. It was expensive because they kept, like, doing things slightly wrong. And my golden ratio device, I wrote the patent myself. And it's. It's a process. It's a laborious process, but once it's done, it's very rewarding. [00:25:49] Speaker A: The process of writing a book. Well, not so much writing a book. This was a. Did. Did each short story come at you differently? [00:26:05] Speaker B: Yeah, and they developed over time. And there were several that didn't make the final cut. You know, like, it was one that I thought was the best one of them all at one point. And then I got to another point where, nah, it's not good enough. It's not going to make it. But, you know, we get to a certain point and think it's done, and then it would continue to develop and kind of create some new ending. And I just knew that I wanted to create something that would inspire others in the way that people like Haruki Murakami affected me or, you know, any of the great writers that I have experienced and who had touched my soul. And that's what it was about. [00:27:04] Speaker A: As you were sitting down to do this, were there, you know, okay, there were a couple writers in your head. Not that. Not that anyone's ever trying to imitate, but was it Stravinsky who said, the art of genius is knowing what to steal? [00:27:22] Speaker B: Yeah, he stole that, by the way. [00:27:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, there you go. It's. Hey, genius. [00:27:30] Speaker B: It was more about an intrinsic sense of what I like to hear what we talked about previously as you read a passage that had a really nice flow and that sounds familiar and soothing and yet communicates something important and just little. To have enough little gems within the telling of the story. And then, of course, to have an ending that is surprising. I guess O. Henry is a prime example of that kind. But there was no direct kind of I wanted to this or that. But definitely it was more about the effect that other writers have had on me. [00:28:19] Speaker A: Over what period of time did these stories, have they been, have you been writing them? Like, how far back in time does the first, does the first one get written chronologically? [00:28:32] Speaker B: 20 years. [00:28:33] Speaker A: So this is 20 years of, of material that has slowly been gathering. [00:28:41] Speaker B: Well, initially it was there and it stayed on the shelf for, for quite a while, maybe 15 years or something. And then I decided I would do more with that. And like, I think there's something worthy here. And I went back. Well, that's not good. I like that part. And then, you know, I rewrote them and they became something else. So it's kind of like a wine, you know, an aged wine or an aged cheese that as time passes, it enables you to see things that you couldn't see. And even it speaks to the fact that we exist in what we call the present. And there's the past, which is the recent present, and the future. So we know that the past is continuously expanding because the database is feeding into it. So as the past expands, what do you think happens to the future? [00:29:49] Speaker A: This hypothetical database that exists really, isn't it shrinking? Aren't we sucking the life blood out of it? [00:29:58] Speaker B: I, My hypothesis is as the past expands, so does the future to create number one, a balance. And also it explains, like, when you think of something, you. How come I never thought of that before? Because the database that is the future, that thought wasn't really available. But as the past got bigger, the available future got bigger too. So you could, like, why didn't I ever think to do that before? Well, that thought wasn't really available for application. [00:30:33] Speaker A: In essence, all of it is not a straight line heading off in one direction. It's a doughnut, actually. [00:30:40] Speaker B: Autorous, perhaps, is the shape that would go beyond the confectionary choice of certain municipal law enforcement. [00:30:51] Speaker A: Yes, yes, yes. [00:30:54] Speaker B: Yes. As to the actuality of the geometry, I don't know. I just know that whatever this database is, whether it's contained or not contained, the past and future, which many philosophers have said, neither of them exist, it's only now. But the hypothetical database of those two places continues to grow, which allows for concept of new ideas. Oh, whenever that's we could do it this way. Or like, how come they didn't come out? Like when Windows first came out? How come they didn't go right to what we have now? Because, you know, I mean, well, I. [00:31:34] Speaker A: I, I would explain that away as, hey, why didn't, why doesn't anyone ever write the last draft first and save yourself all that time and trouble? [00:31:43] Speaker B: That's A brilliant idea. [00:31:45] Speaker A: Right. [00:31:45] Speaker B: I wrote that. [00:31:46] Speaker A: Stop. Just cut to the end of the chase. Write the last round first. [00:31:51] Speaker B: Well, look at evolution. Look at evolution. Look at the way the world works, you know, it's still a draft. And that speaks to the kind of. The beauty of everything that just like books or us or any entity that we know of as it moves, another day, another cycle, another period. It has the ability to take in more data. And oh, over there, there are some of the blue jumble decals. So we should have a blue jumple decal detector over here. We could build that. And then, oh, there's Yamatox over there. No one ever saw Yamatox, so there is no real final draft. Essentially. [00:32:40] Speaker A: Afraid of AI as a. As a writer? [00:32:46] Speaker B: No, I don't fear AI I love AI as an artist, as a visual artist. I think it, you know, I think politically it could be tricky when it's creating realities that don't exist and letting people think it that they do. But I'm really. I don't like the name artificial to describe it because artificial things traditionally like artificial sweeteners. No, I, I don't ever have any chemical that's artificial. I like the natural. But no, I, I don't fear it. I don't. I don't think. Of course, I don't know that AI could ever truly recapitulate what a human soul can do. It could try, maybe do a thousand different versions. It's like, you know, that old concept of thousand monkeys on typewriters and one of them is going to type Shakespeare. You know, maybe some get close, but it's not the same thing as, you know, really a shake going, you know. Therefore was Esther. That's cool. Too busy, too busy. [00:34:08] Speaker A: I, I would say if, if you are not. If you have not been born. Born from a mother, you don't know what it is to be human. While artificial intelligence can duplicate us. Because that's what it does when it learns it. It takes stuff that we've created and it just. It incorporates it into its knowledge base. But it can't originate that material because it, it. It doesn't have any kind of human perspective. It doesn't have human experience, which starts with being born from another human. And that does something to us. [00:34:55] Speaker B: I think that you up. But to be open to all possibilities, you know what another human like. Maybe we are some. We are the equivalent of a very advanced artificial intelligence. It's. And a mother. [00:35:16] Speaker A: Me. Maybe you, pal. Not me. If I'm the product of some of some Kind of artificial intelligence. Sell it for junk. Sell it for junk. It's. It's broken. You got it wrong. There are bugs in the system. You it up, my friends. [00:35:30] Speaker B: Well, what are we the product of? I mean like, how did that work? I mean, if you think about it. Okay, I'm gonna tell you what happens. Your father puts some goo from his pee hole into your mom's pee hole and those two goose go together and then they stick and make this thing and then you're born nine months later and we're gonna, we'll eat sunlight. But we can't eat that. The plants will. Well, they'll transpose that into sugars that can be eaten or an animal can eat that, change it to another file format and eat that. Come on. That's not true. Goo in a hole and we come out. I mean, come on. Nobody knows what this is. It's. As I said before, it's magic, it's a miracle, it's God, it's whatever name you give to the process. But the. This is beyond anything that we know. And I don't think anybody, I don't know if anyone will ever really know. They make, just like I said before, get one step closer to seeing the blue Jinka Linkies or the Coco Butters. But it's just be here and accept the glory of it and just relish the wonder of not knowing what the fuck this is. [00:36:49] Speaker A: We have to remind ourselves that there are all kinds of energies, forces that whiz by us and we are oblivious. We have no way to register them. We don't see them, we don't hear them, we don't smell them, nothing. [00:37:03] Speaker B: We're oblivious of the electromagnetic spectrum. Just like in Severed Soul that the little town was able to see all the forms of electromagnetic energy, not just the narrow bandwidth of visible light. [00:37:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's. There's a lot of information out there that we are simply unaware of. If we could con. If we could take it all in processes. [00:37:33] Speaker B: You couldn't handle it. You go crazy. It's like acid or something. It's just like. I mean there's neutrinos going through your body right now. You know, all the little cells, all the cells in your body, all the stuff that's going on, all the links and you know, the, how one electron and the universe is linked to another one somewhere completely in another place. That entire concept is. I mean it will always keep expanding and. But if there's the essence of it, the essence that, you know, guys 6,000 years ago, you know, before science were able to tap in to the essence of the magic. You know, you can have a scientist in a white coat researching something, and you can have some Tibetan guy on a mountaintop in a white robe researching the same something from completely different perspectives. But essentially, it's the same wonder. That's what I see, and that's the way I see it. But you never know. Sometimes a scientist can be a Tibetan monk. Sometimes a monk can just be a junkie in Bismuth. Junkie in Business will be the name of my next novel. [00:38:52] Speaker A: I'm already lining up to buy it. [00:38:54] Speaker B: You've already sold it twice. But I won't sell it a third time. [00:38:59] Speaker A: I've. I've always been fascinated by consciousness and the fact that we know so little about it. [00:39:08] Speaker B: Consciousness. [00:39:10] Speaker A: Higher consciousness and all those possibilities. [00:39:14] Speaker B: Just all the animals, you know, all the, like, little maggots. You know, you see some rotting meat or something. These little maggots are all, like, swimming around because some flies came to get the moisture off the meat, and then they put their little maggots there and they're, you know, cleaning up everything. It's all linked. It's all. There's this just magical component that links everything. You know, as our brothers have said. Hero Israel, the Lord. I got Lord is one. See what I'm saying? One. It's one. We're all. It's all one thing. Yeah. Explain that to the kids. [00:39:55] Speaker A: They've done some fascinating experiments on yellows. Excuse me. On yellow slime molds. [00:40:01] Speaker B: Oh. How to create the subway systems in Japan. [00:40:05] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:40:06] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:40:06] Speaker A: They. They have no. They have no nervous system, and yet they're capable of having memories of making. Of making not just decisions, not random decisions. Good, logical decisions. How. How are they doing this? We have no idea. We have. We have. We really have no idea how you and I are having this conversation. I don't mean the. With all the gak and the gear and the. The technology. I mean, if we were sitting in a room together and conversing back and forth, really, that still kind of defies our exploration. [00:40:48] Speaker B: Murmuration of. Of any kind of creature like you. I mean, nobody knows how that works. And, you know, there's so much we don't know. I love. I love the fact that we do know stuff. Or. Or we think we know it. I mean, they want. Thought, oh, that's this. And then somebody. Well, you thought it was that, but it's really this. And, you know, it's. [00:41:12] Speaker A: Was it the fire sign theater? Who Said everything you know is wrong. [00:41:17] Speaker B: Sure, we're all bozos on this bus. [00:41:21] Speaker A: Have ever truer words ever been spoken? [00:41:24] Speaker B: Now Phil Proctor, I'm friends with him on Facebook. Fireside theaters. Good guy, still funny. And kids today, they never heard of Fireside Theater. [00:41:34] Speaker A: I know, it's, it's hard. It's like forgetting who the Marx brothers are. [00:41:38] Speaker B: Well, there are some that I think do, but there's certainly a lot of that don't. They don't know which mars brother is which. Hey, that's a good one. Brothers walk into a bar. [00:41:50] Speaker A: Who was your. Who, who was your favorite Marx brother? Charlie. [00:41:56] Speaker B: I said John Lane, but that was just a. Oh, I'm sorry. [00:41:59] Speaker A: There was an electronic glitch right at that second. Like oh no, no, no, not who. [00:42:05] Speaker B: Is your favorite beetle but favorite Marsh. Brothers, there's Groucho. I mean of course Chico, you know, you got. Hey, Chico. Hidden or thing. Hey. Happily, you know, very few have Zeppo as they're strangely. [00:42:22] Speaker A: And nobody wants gummo for some strange reason. Although, you know, the talk always was people who, who who knew them all said that. Actually the funniest of the lot was that. [00:42:36] Speaker B: I, I dispute that. I've never met any of them. It's hard to believe anyone is funny. If any was that funny. He would had his own show like, you know. You bet your life. [00:42:50] Speaker A: He was, he was a good agent and he, he, he became their, their agent. [00:42:58] Speaker B: I just loved Groucho. [00:43:00] Speaker A: Oh. [00:43:01] Speaker B: And my act was inspired by Groucho Marx and Jonathan Winters and they both had that kind of surreal improvisation. Just the way grassroots would ask him a question and just taking something from the crowd and just turning that into exploding wit bomb. [00:43:22] Speaker A: For a man with no formal education, he had a remarkable. Well, he read a lot. And a remarkable capacity to retain what he read and to then free associate with it. [00:43:35] Speaker B: Well, formal education meaning a degree. [00:43:40] Speaker A: Groucho. What, what grade was he in when he stopped going to school and I don't played vaudeville circuits instead. [00:43:49] Speaker B: That I don't know. [00:43:50] Speaker A: Yeah, he was, I think he dropped out. He was 412 or 13 or 14 if that old. [00:43:55] Speaker B: And he read a lot. You know, reading. What do you do in college? You read books and then you talk. [00:44:01] Speaker A: About them and yay. And really anybody can pick up a bunch of books, read them and really. And become rather. [00:44:12] Speaker B: They want. [00:44:12] Speaker A: Right, yeah. And informed and educated. [00:44:18] Speaker B: Yeah, good fly. [00:44:20] Speaker A: And certainly for a guy with no formal education, he hung with some incredibly educated people who thrived on his company. Yeah. Fascinating person. He. Do you Remember the first time you ever encountered Groucho? Your, your first taste? [00:44:39] Speaker B: That's a great question. I'm not sure whether it was, but when was you bet your life on. Did that come in 60s? [00:44:49] Speaker A: Wasn't that 60 or. I, I, I don't know. [00:44:53] Speaker B: But yeah, I don't know either you bet your life or you know one of the movies. [00:45:02] Speaker A: Horse Feathers on. I grew up in Baltimore and on, on the afternoons they played before the local news. From 4 to 5:30 they would play truncated versions of comedies. WC Field, Joey Brown, WC, WC Fields, the Marx Brothers and my cousin Stephen turned me on to the marks where they said, you gotta watch, you gotta watch it. And the first one that I caught was Horse Feathers and Groucho is Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff singing. Whatever it is, I'm against it. At the age of 10, I bought in. [00:45:42] Speaker B: Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like bananas. I mean, come on, that's pretty good. [00:45:52] Speaker A: And then I think the next one I saw was Duck Soup. Over, over. Man. I mean such, such incredible. Oh, well, yes, now, now we're into the, oh, now we're into the Thalberg. [00:46:04] Speaker B: The Thalberg pictures and yeah, Day at the Races and those both became Queen albums. [00:46:14] Speaker A: Interesting. [00:46:16] Speaker B: And they visited Grouch show. [00:46:24] Speaker A: Of all the muses to have. I, I cannot think of a better. [00:46:28] Speaker B: Well, I can think of two better, but I'm not going to mention it. At least not here. [00:46:33] Speaker A: At least not here. Thank you. [00:46:35] Speaker B: I may do it later. The old, the older Groucho, he still had the width though. [00:46:43] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and yeah, yeah. He's one of those people where it just didn't seem right that, that he couldn't live forever. [00:46:59] Speaker B: Well, nobody can or nothing can. And that's alas. [00:47:04] Speaker A: But you know, I, I hope out of my mind takes a good shot at some kind of eternity. It's, it is a terrific, terrific book. A lot of Christmas presents. [00:47:19] Speaker B: My Rustica. Do you remember anything about My Rustica? [00:47:23] Speaker A: That's the. Walk us through it. I know. I've got some notes. [00:47:27] Speaker B: Fingerprints and Amusement. [00:47:29] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:47:30] Speaker B: Fingerprints. [00:47:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:47:32] Speaker B: There's a lot of actual science and. [00:47:36] Speaker A: That the hidden power of fingerprints. [00:47:40] Speaker B: Well, not only that, but the fingerprints. He used the fingerprints to create miniaturized amusement parks which then create little vibrations that would stimulate receptors that would create different serotonin and certain chemicals that would enhance people's lives. Well, are there any of these that you think would lend themselves to TV or film? As far as one Episode or many or in any form. [00:48:17] Speaker A: Well, it's funny. TV and film are so hard these days. And in a sense, yeah, I think you could, you could turn any one of these into a terrific world. You could. Until TV gets its act together and you figure you can, you could approach it with a project. It's. It is so broken right now. [00:48:52] Speaker B: TV is broken. [00:48:54] Speaker A: TV is so broken. If you try to take a. If you try to take something out. You know, Gil and I had a project with. We had Ernest Dickerson, we had two actors and attached with 6 million social media subscribers, we had everything figured out. We were doing a show, a horror show that was like Tales from the Crypt. It's not without the Crypt Keeper. It's a, you know, it's. Could not get arrested, couldn't get a meeting, not even no one remotely interested. And my manager said, don't feel bad. He said, I got packages with way bigger pieces. Nothing. And it's simply, it's the fallout from streaming. From the streaming. Everyone suddenly throwing all the money they had at streaming, created some great content, but unsupportable financially. And that's, that's what screwed. That's what killed everything. And it's one of the reasons here in Los Angeles, work is just. Man, it's, it's turned into a graveyard. Oh, Ripley. [00:49:59] Speaker B: Did you see Ripley? [00:50:01] Speaker A: Great. Oh, wow. Oh, hey, look, there's still money being spent on. On a couple of prestige. Prestige prop, you know, projects. Yeah. And I agree, that was beautiful. Every single frame was beautiful. [00:50:15] Speaker B: So I don't know how you can necessarily say it's broken if I'm simply. [00:50:21] Speaker A: Saying the development process, the process of getting an idea into production, you know, to get, to get the executives. I, like I said at the beginning, in getting an idea from here out into a TV show or a feature film, there are so many standing between it and. Com and completion. [00:50:45] Speaker B: Well, I think that initially having a book, books are always, I think, the best beginning. [00:50:54] Speaker A: Oh, yes, yes, yes. It's always about the ip. What's the ip? And then the trick is, how do you. How do you tell non reading executive. Because they don't read, of course. How do you tell a non reading executive what the magic is? How do you, how do you take the magic from this medium, put it into their head so they can appreciate how it will play in a completely different medium? [00:51:27] Speaker B: It's, I guess, yeah, it has to be read or they have to see that others have responded to it. [00:51:38] Speaker A: And. But even then, you're gonna have to walk through the, you walk them through the. And how are you going to get from here, you know, from this thing to that thing? Which, yes, that, that's part of, part of the job. I'm just saying in, in the here and now, it's, it's, it's a maze without an exit. [00:52:03] Speaker B: So to answer my question, your answer would be no, there's that. Thank you. [00:52:10] Speaker A: But I would say, but there are other ways to, to do it. And hey, podcasting, I, I think you can tell stories through podcasting. And money is pouring into podcasting because listeners are pouring into podcast because you can do, you know, a TV show or a movie you got to sit and watch. Although to be, to be fair, the way that my kids watch TV is always through, through this, you know, Sure. I don't think they ever experienced anything without this somehow being in, in their line of their field of vision. Podcast is designed that you can multitask, you can be exercising, you can be driving, you can be doing any number of other things or just listening to it for the sake of itself. [00:52:57] Speaker B: Getting a pedicure right now on my right foot and my left foot, I'm exercising. [00:53:03] Speaker A: You can even podcast while you're multitasking. And it's, gosh, the economies of it are. My manager, who is, you know, film and TV and, and podcasting, when I've started down the podcasting road, he said, well, okay, I see you. But he had a client, one of his big movie clients, they want to do an adaptation of one of his things, seven part series podcast. And my manager said, well, you know, there's, there's not much money. And I said, you know, the budget for this seems like $40 million. I said, what? Okay, maybe buy you a quarter million dollars is nothing? I said, I said, but, you know, I made the donor for like $9,000. And most of that was what it cost me to get the website built. It wasn't the creation of the actual content. It was to create the store front that I could use to sell the goddamn thing with. You know, there's. If they're pouring that kind of money into podcasting, which doesn't really cost a lot to make, it's because they recognize there's a payday, and so it must be worth that kind of money into really. And they're just hiring a lot of people. Hey, I did it all by myself. So I, I know you can, you can create the same thing with just one guy interviewing another guy and adding in a lot of sound effects and music and, and hey, it's theater. Theater of the mind. It's radio. It's radio. [00:54:44] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:54:44] Speaker A: And, oh, radio is wonderful. Hey, suddenly I'm Fred Allen. [00:54:52] Speaker B: You've always been Fred Allen. [00:54:54] Speaker A: Well, I, I wanted to be Jack Benny when I grew up, but I turned into Fred Allen instead. Which is, which is okay. [00:55:00] Speaker B: I could have been. [00:55:04] Speaker A: Rochester. Yeah. [00:55:07] Speaker B: You know, Mel Blanc. [00:55:10] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. The man of a thousand voices. Oh. Oh, I see. I grew up loving old radio shows. So to me, podcasting was like coming home. Perversely, what I think one could turn this into is an amazing podcast. You simply take this and now, all right, turn the words and all those ideas, but all that incredible spiritual journey into sound and music, it's just reimagining it in a different environment, which you would have to do to turn into a TV show or a movie anyway. You'd have to visualize these things. Well, no, the visuals let that, let the audience do that. All you gotta worry about is the sound. Charlie, if, if this, if at any point you, you want to pursue this idea to do it as a podcast, I would love to talk about it with you. And, you know, and hey, let's. If the idea suddenly takes light and you see it go, and you see it in your head and in your ears, more importantly, if you hear it, well, then I, I think that would be. All right. Here's my other argument. The problem with the film and TV business is part of what you have to do is to. Is to explain to the guy in the suit what the IP is if you do this. Now, granted, it's, it's this form of ip, but if you do it as a podcast now, it's, it's sound and light, but sound. And they can suddenly see how it becomes dramatic, you know, in, in a multi, you know, in a three dimensional way outside of a book. And hey, the IP already exists and rather than you having to go sell it, they'll come to you because it's out there and people are listening to it and advertisers are coming to it and, you know, there it's, it's monetizing in, in other ways. And yeah, then rather than you go to them, they come to you and the whole power dynamic has shifted because the content is now in charge, which is how it should be. I'm just saying. [00:57:42] Speaker B: That's very nice. [00:57:44] Speaker A: And as a fan, it would be an honor to work on it with. You should. Hey, we're having a business conversation here in the middle of the podcast. But like I said, I'm I loved working with you in the past. I think it'd be a hoot to put our creative minds together as they are today. I think we'd have, at the very least, for want of a better word, the technical term is fun. [00:58:15] Speaker B: Yeah, if you have fun, the audience has fun, usually. [00:58:19] Speaker A: And if it ain't fun to do, why the are you doing? Haven't you had enough torture in your life? But really, it's. It's the very worst. I can see a series of amazingly enjoyable conversations, not unlike this one. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna button up the podcast here because we could probably go on and on and on. But I thank you so much for, first of all, for just. For handing me this. And because you came on the podcast, I really did have to read it. Absolutely. From. And from the. From the first, really. It was like, well, this isn't like homework. This is like pure pleasure. [00:59:02] Speaker B: That's good, because I appreciate that a lot. You said some really nice things. [00:59:06] Speaker A: I meant every word. [00:59:09] Speaker B: Well, I appreciate that. And we'll continue this in other realms. [00:59:15] Speaker A: And I sure hope so. And thank you again, Charlie, and thank you, everyone, for listening. We'll see you 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 follows up for what my old pal the Crypt Keeper would have called terrorific Crypt content.