S4E1: How NOT To Make A Movie

[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 know a place not too far. [00:00:09] Speaker C: From here where you can get the. [00:00:12] Speaker B: Best God damn piece of ass in. [00:00:16] Speaker C: The whole God damn world. Now they got girls that'll do things. [00:00:22] Speaker B: There aren't even names for. [00:00:25] Speaker C: You know, you make it sound really enticing. [00:00:29] Speaker B: 25 Beaumont. Ask for the cradle. [00:00:36] Speaker C: All right, thank you. [00:00:38] Speaker D: Enough. [00:00:39] Speaker C: You loosen that headband. Okay? [00:00:49] Speaker D: Hello and welcome to season four, episode. [00:00:53] Speaker B: One of the how not to Make a Movie podcast. And despite everything, I'm still Alan Katz. Time flies when you're having fun and it turns out, especially when you do it while podcasting. As this podcast enters its fourth season and fourth year in existence, I do it looking both forwards and backwards. The backwards part has to do with our origin story, the story we told when this podcast's first episode dropped way back in March 2022 from the fire torn vantage point of January 2025. That was many, many lifetimes ago. That story was about the making of Bordello of Blood from my point of view, the picture definition example of how never to make a movie. I didn't realize it when I first started making this podcast, but the podcasting, the medium, was setting its hooks into me. I had stumbled into and onto the very thing I always wanted to be when I grew up podcaster. I just had to wait for podcasting to get invented and to realize how very doable podcasting was and is. I did a little podcast during the pandemic. It was called the Faithism Project podcast. My co host was a social friend, the Reverend Randy Lovejoy, who was a working Presbyterian pastor. Now me. I've always said that I'm grateful to Hebrew school for making me the atheist I am today. But truth is, I dropped from the womb an atheist. My religious education just iced the cake. But Randy and I, we really hit it off. We regularly had lunch together and talked for hours, genuinely curious about how and why the other guy thought the way he did during the pandemic. Unable to lunch together, we experimented by zooming and podcasting together instead. It was a decent enough podcast for one thing. I learned a ton just from doing it. After a while, though, that podcast, as most podcasts do, it ran out of steam. Now, the reason this podcast, how not to Make a Movie podcast exists is because I a Tales from the Crypt fan group and their podcast called Dads from the Crypt. The dads, there were three of them, still are. They reviewed all 92 episodes of Tales from The Crypt and also gave parenting advice. Well, I thought that was hilarious. Of course I said yes. One day where it came up was that out of the blue, Jason Stein emailed me and asked if I'd be interested in guesting on their podcast. In particular, they wanted to interview me about writing and producing the episode that they were about to review. I said, sure, let's do it. And we did, and it went very well. A few weeks later, by then, it was very early 2022, Jason called me and asked if I wanted to join them again for another episode. But in this one, they were going to review the second Tales from the Crypt branded feature film, Bordello of Blood. Now, I had been telling Bordello of Blood stories since I made the goddamn movie. It really was a kind of personal Waterloo that marked the end of one period of my life and the beginning of another. Jason, I said, the story of Bordello is more than just a 45 minute episode. It's. And right there I had a. I had one of those clouds parting moments. It's a whole other podcast unto itself, I said. And thus it was born. Telling the Bordello story in season one of the how not to Make a Movie Podcast, it was a revelation. One of the keys to telling it was honesty. Pointing fingers was not the point. A whole heap of responsibility for what happened that belonged exclusively to me. I wanted to own it. I needed to. Telling it with brutal honesty, in fact, was part of the point and part of my own catharsis. But that honesty paid off. Entertainment Weekly called the podcast I'm about to share with you again the best movie podcast of 2022. When Clark Collis, the piece's author, interviewed Gil and me before he wrote the piece, he did it, he told us, because he wanted to know if the honesty he heard being projected in the podcast was real. Clark's very kind headline and the rest of his words reveal his verdict. Misquote. Sally Fields. We like this. Really like this. I'm biased, of course, but some stories are timeless. Put another way, some monsters just won't stay dead. Bordello of Blood is one of them. [00:06:01] Speaker A: This podcast is a collaboration between Costa RT and Touchstone Productions and the Dads from the Crypt podcast. Hi, I'm Alan Katz, and this is the how not to Make a Movie podcast, the Making of Bordello of Blood. Now, why would anyone give a crap about the making of a mediocre little horror movie that came out a thousand years ago? Well, the answer is because, strangely, that movie still makes the Rounds every Halloween like a zombie. It won't die. But then. Tales from the Crypt presents Bordello of Blood. Its full title was never even supposed to be in the first place. In a world where getting feature films made is so hard, where you have to really, really want to make a movie just to get it off the ground, we made a movie that literally nobody making it wanted to make. Not a one of us. Not for two seconds. Bordello came together perversely, like a movie monster built of spare parts. A soulless, heartless, mindless movie monster. Actually, the story of how and why Bordello got made is quite relevant to the present. It's an object lesson in what happens when you do things for all the wrong reasons. Spoiler alert. Nothing good. Just my humble opinion. I believe we're about to enter a time where doing things for the right reasons is going to become incredibly important. Here's something else I think is really important that we nail down up front. This story is going to hurt to tell. The making of Bordella was a kind of personal waterloo for me. In the 30 years since, a lot has happened. Some extraordinary highs, like my two kids, and some pretty low lows that threaten to wipe out all the highs. The good news? [00:07:50] Speaker B: Hey, I bounced. [00:07:51] Speaker A: This atheist got born again. Not in a religious sense, in a life sense. Perspective is a wonderful thing, especially where storytelling is concerned. I have zero axes to grind in telling you this story. Hey, I'm here to confess my sins. I intend to say as honestly as I can what I contributed to this fiasco. And there was plenty. I will interview everyone who'll still speak to me, production team, the actors, our crew up in Vancouver, and my old creative partner, Gil Adler, Bordello's director, its co writer and producer. Helping me tell you this story, my producing partners on this podcast is a Tales from the Crypt fan group called Dads from the Crypt. Thank you guys for your passion. By the time Bordello briefly hit theaters in 1994, Gil and I were no longer a team. That, too, is part of this story. How a dumb movie broke up a really good friendship. Look, as far as I'm concerned, no one else in this story has anything to be ashamed about. I mean, that. No one except me and Sylvester Stallone will get there. In order to understand how we got to Bordello of Blood, you have to understand how we got the Tales from the Crypto. By we, I mean my creative partner at the time, Gil Adler, and I. In addition to also producing Bordello with me, Gil Directed the movie. Since he was directing, most of the daily producing chores fell to me. Creative relationships are exactly like marriages. They can be solid, respectful and enduring, or wild, explosive and totally bonkers. My relationship with Gil was very much the first kind. Gil wasn't just my creative partner, he was my best friend. By the time he and I made Bordello, we'd been working and playing together for nine years. We'd written screenplays together, co written episodes of the Freddy's Nightmares TV series, which Gil produced and also directed. And together we'd written and produced, resurrected really, what was HBO's biggest show at the time, Tales from the Crypt. A quick side note, for perspective, I grew up a film buff. I loved movies. Loved old movies. Loved silent movies too. I loved the Marx Brothers and W.C. fields. I loved Casablanca and Gone with the Wind. I loved the whole Hollywood world. To have ended up in Hollywood getting to work with some of the very people whose movies and film work I loved. Move over, Lou Gehrig. I consider myself. [00:10:26] Speaker D: I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. [00:10:33] Speaker A: So, me in a nutshell. I grew up in an upper middle class Jewish suburb of Baltimore. I went to Vassar, where I majored in drama. A high school friend, Carol Yomkus, became an agent at William Morris in la. She suggested I write a screenplay. So I did. And in June 1985, at Carol's urging, I flew out to LA from New York for a week of meet and greet. I'd been to LA once before when I was 14. To me, a hardcore East Coaster and a burgeoning New Yorker, LA was the stupidest place on the planet. It was the land of the avocado head. But everyone in LA was so nice to me. They said lovely things about my screenplay. My agent Carol took me to a big Hollywood opening. St. Elmo's Fire. It was pretty intoxicating. Well, back in New York, it was 90 degrees in here. Humid as hell. Here in LA, there is no humidity. It was perfect. By my third day, I'd sold out completely. [00:11:31] Speaker D: Welcome to Hollywood, Gil. [00:11:32] Speaker A: The land of the avocado head was now my home. Gil was among the very first producers I met that first week in la. And it was Gil's convincing enthusiasm, plus his insistence that I'd be crazy this day in New York, that closed the deal. Now, since our estrangement all those years ago, Gil and I, we've chatted occasionally. But doing this podcast, this was the first time we've really talked about our past together. [00:12:00] Speaker D: We seem to hit it off in the room. [00:12:03] Speaker C: You think historically, if you look at it, you know, we met that day and then I think we probably met almost every day thereafter for the next, I don't know, 10 years. [00:12:14] Speaker D: Of all the things that I never expected to find in Los Angeles was a life, a career, and a best friend. [00:12:24] Speaker C: Well, thanks for saying that. I felt the same way. [00:12:27] Speaker D: The first thing that we really started working on together was Love and Linoleum was very much your personal story, fictionalized. [00:12:36] Speaker C: I enjoyed that process. I mean, it conjured up a lot of things that I hadn't thought about for years. But even so, it was. I thought it was a fun experience doing it with. You know, the only thing that I would have liked better than what's happened with it is that it got made. [00:12:56] Speaker D: You came up as an accountant and you worked for Sid Finger doing all the bond books. [00:13:00] Speaker A: Right, Right. [00:13:00] Speaker D: I'm remembering all this correctly. [00:13:02] Speaker C: Yeah. I was a junior in college, and I came at Syracuse, in Syracuse, and I came into town. I was taking education classes at nyu. I taught in a minority school where I was the smallest and whitest guy in the class, in the room. Juniors and seniors in high school. And while I was doing that, I wanted to make some money. So I go to NYU in the morning for classes, and then in the afternoon, I answered an ad in the New York Times, and it was this guy, Sid Finger. The summer before that, I answered an ad in the New York Times, and I got a job at 20th Century Fox preparing statements for participants, those people who have shared in a movie or a TV show. So it was a very narrow arena of what my knowledge was in terms of the accounting. So when I called for this job, I didn't know who Sid Finger was. [00:13:51] Speaker D: Sid Finger was a very big entertainment accountant. [00:13:53] Speaker C: Yeah, he had. He had a monopoly on everything. He said, what kind of experience have you had? And I told him, and he said, you were over 20th Century Fox preparing statements. When can you. When can you come? Can you come right now? Where are you right now? [00:14:05] Speaker A: What Gill learned at the feet of movie accounting legend Sid Finger was the most difficult, basic rule of being a movie producer. If you have a dollar to make your movie, don't go spending a dollar one. [00:14:15] Speaker B: Cause you ain't got it. [00:14:17] Speaker C: And the other axiom is you have a dollar to spend. [00:14:20] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:14:20] Speaker C: If you're a smart producer, you'll get $1.15 worth of product. [00:14:24] Speaker D: Yes. And if you can spend. If you can spend 99 cents to get that $1.15 worth of product or 98 cents right now. Prior to working for Sid Finger, had you ever thought about working in the film business? [00:14:36] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. I always wanted to be in the theater or the film business again. I answered an ad in the New York Times and I got a job. It was for the New York State Council on the Arts. And all of a sudden I interviewed and I got this job, which in those days was paying great money. And I became the director of grants for the New York State Council on the Arts. And the chairman was Kitty Carlisle Hart. [00:14:58] Speaker A: Like a blind guy figuring out an elephant, Gil found his way into the movie business. And he ended up teaching a class in moviemaking with director Brian De Palma, who at that point in his career had Phantom of the Paradise, Obsession, Carrie and the Fury under his belt. And this class that Gill and Brian ended up teaching, well, that turns into a surreptitiously made feature film called Home. [00:15:23] Speaker C: Movies, starring Kirk Douglas, Finney Gardenia, Nancy Allen, who then became Mrs. De Palma for a while, Garrett Graham and Keith Gordon. And that was my. That was. That's how I learned to make a movie. I lived in the production office in Sarah Lawrence campus. I slept on a cot, no air conditioning, which drove me crazy. But we made this movie. [00:15:43] Speaker D: What took you out to Los Angeles? [00:15:45] Speaker C: I had raised a little bit of money in Switzerland to develop screenplays. And I hired Off Broadway, who later became Broadway and well known writers, to write four screenplays, none of which were good enough for me to get made, or I wasn't good enough to get them made, but they never happened. So I lost $100,000. But while I was doing that, a friend of mine, who a guy named Mike DeLuise, who was working at an ad agency that covered. That placed our ads for Coca Cola in the New York Times and all the New York papers. [00:16:18] Speaker A: The Coca Cola that Gil referred to wasn't the soft drink. It was a show. It's 1973. One of the first theater shows that Gill produced in New York was a riotous comedy which he found at the Edinburgh Theater Festival called El Grande de Coca Cola. Among the young unknowns in Gil's cast are Ron Silver and Jeff Goldblum. Here's the interesting detail. The first show that I ever saw in New York was at the Mercer arts Center in 1973. El Grande de Coca Cola. Freaky, huh? So gil's friend Mike DeLuise hooks Gil up with a guy named Andrew Sugarman, who's written a movie that he wants Gil to produce for him called up the Pentagon. [00:17:03] Speaker C: So it was supposed to be a comedy. And it was like the Carry on movies in English. The Carry On Nurse. It was up the Pentagon, then it was going to be up the fire department. We only did up the Pentagon. And, like, within months, he called me up and I went back to New York. He called me up and he said, I want to do this other movie. It's three times the budget. It's a million and a half, and I want you to produce it. And so I came back to Vancouver and we shot this movie called Certain Fury, with Tatum O'Neill, Irene Cara and Peter Fonda. And that's how it started. [00:17:38] Speaker A: When Gil and I went aboard Crypt, it was going into its third and, for all intents and purposes, its final season. The producers had gone wildly over budget. Season two. So Joel fired everybody. But a strange thing happened over the course of season three. After Gil and I took over Tails and the Crypt Keeper, well, they came back to life. By the time Gil and I finished producing season three, HBO had ordered two more seasons. [00:18:05] Speaker C: Chris Albrecht, who I knew when he was an agent at icm, he became the head of hbo. He had a series that was being shot in Savannah, Georgia, called Vietnam War Stories. And he called me up on a Sunday, and he says to me, I thought he was inviting me out for brunch, but actually he was asking me to get on a plane to go to Savannah. I thought Savannah was a restaurant in Santa Monica. [00:18:34] Speaker D: If only. [00:18:35] Speaker C: So I went to Savannah. [00:18:37] Speaker D: Great memorial. [00:18:38] Speaker C: They didn't know I was coming. He hadn't. So when I got there, was a little awkward. Anyway, I took over the show. They had been shooting four days. They only had two days in the can. So I shot. We shot all six episodes, and I brought it in and won ACE Awards. And, you know, Chris acknowledged that I had done a good job, not only with the money, but that it looked great. And so that. That's what triggered when he got into a situation with the partners, that they had gone way over budget. He asked them to write a check, and they said they wouldn't do it. And so he said, I'm going to cancel the show. And then the only way that it sort of came about was I got a call from Chris one day, and he said to me, would you take that show over? And I said, well, I don't even know who. I don't really. I don't know these guys. I don't know the partners. I don't know. You know, I don't really know anything about it. And so he sent me over. I Think the first six episodes to look at that were pretty good. Some of them were good. And Donner's. [00:19:41] Speaker D: Donner's first episode is amazingly good. [00:19:43] Speaker C: Donner's was good. Zemeckisa's was good. Walter Hills was good. And so I was interested. You know, I really thought, wow, this is. And these were big Hollywood directors and producers. So from that, you know, Chris said to me, you got to go and meet with Joel Silver and Dick Donner. So I went, I went over. I went over to meet them and, you know, Dick stayed about 10 minutes and he said, yeah, you're okay, kid. You're okay. And he left. And I was there with Joel. And Joel, you know, I'm sitting in this chair which, in his office you would sit very, very low. He had a chair which is settled lower than any, almost on the floor. Anyway, he's pacing in front of his desk and he's telling me, you know, you got to do this. And it's got to look like a movie. It can't look like television. And, you know, you've got to shoot five pages a day every day. There's no breaking down, no days off, you know, five days a week. And I looked at him and I sort of jokingly said, what do we do after lunch? Which didn't. Wasn't a good thing to have said because he got really pissed off at me. So anyway, that's how we got. That's how, that's how we got to get tails in the crib. Because then Joel said, looked at me and he said, all right, just make sure it looks like a movie. [00:21:02] Speaker D: There was, there was one more meeting, and that was with Barry. [00:21:07] Speaker C: Barry Josephson. Yeah. [00:21:09] Speaker D: When we, when we walked into that meeting at Silver Pictures and we sat in the boardroom. Yeah, the meeting, I think was called for like 3:00 and 3:15 comes by 3:20, 3:25. And you are now, your face is glued to your watch. You are becoming. [00:21:31] Speaker C: The smoke was coming out of my ears. [00:21:33] Speaker D: Increasingly incredulous that this is how this could happen. 3:30, 3, 40, 3:45. And now you're beginning to say, all right, this is it. I'm going to get out of here. And. And you're kind of beginning to dare yourself to come on. We're going to walk out. We're just going to walk out. 3:50, 3:55. And rand, really at virtually the hour mark, literally, you've had it. This is almost an official hour of cooling your heels at Silver Pictures. [00:22:09] Speaker C: Right. [00:22:09] Speaker D: No idea that this is. Man get, this is practice. And suddenly, into the room, as we're literally about to walk out the door, literally into the room strolls Barry Josephson. [00:22:22] Speaker C: I must give you credit, however, for me making sure that we were there that long, because I think after a half hour, I was ready to just storm out of there and call HBO and say, you know, these guys treat people like garbage, and, you know, I'm not interested in this. [00:22:38] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was never going to change. [00:22:41] Speaker C: And I think you were the one who maybe, you know, injected the Kool Aid into my arm to calm down, simmer down, and let's. Let's. Let's play this one out. [00:22:48] Speaker D: Oh, well, this was. I think this was rarefied air for me. I'm. Now. I'm on the Warner Brothers lot now. I had. We had worked together on a couple of episodes of Freddy's Nightmares. [00:23:00] Speaker C: Right. [00:23:01] Speaker D: But that was not this. Now we're. We're talking about a show at hbo. [00:23:06] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:23:07] Speaker D: And. And, you know, yeah, once Barry signs off, this is. This is a happening deal. This is really the last step. [00:23:17] Speaker C: Right? [00:23:17] Speaker D: And to me, I can taste. I can taste the promise. I can see it. I'm Moses, and I'm like, oh, screw what God says. I'm. [00:23:24] Speaker C: I'm right. [00:23:25] Speaker D: I'm going there, motherfuckers. [00:23:27] Speaker C: And, well, I'm not exempt from being an asshole at times. You know, I can do that. But you were the one. You were the one who calmed me down and said, no, no, let's just. Let's just stick this out. Let's see what happens. [00:23:37] Speaker D: The saving grace, the thing that calmed me down, that kept my spirit going is they had the whole collection of all the Tales from the Crypt that. Oh, the Weird Tales. Every. Every comic in the entire EC collection was there. And. And that was what kept me, really, because I would pull down all, you know, the Tales from the Crypt, and I think, wow. I mean, to me, you know, I read those comic books when I was a kid. I loved the EC world. I loved Bill Gaines world. I. This was close to a kind of a dream. My first encounter with Tales from the Crypt was a couple years. Was a year before. Yeah, it was just after their first season. I was unemployed, as usual, and I got to be a Cable Ace judge. And we judged writing. We had. I got like, a dozen things we were going to judge for writing for the Cable ACE Awards, and it was a bunch of things that looked okay, interesting. And the first three things we were going to watch were three episodes of Tales from the Crypt. The first three episodes, Donners, Zemeckis, and Walter Hills and the dozen or so writers who. Unemployed writers who were there in the room. We all saw. We were going to be watching it. Three episodes of Talents from the Crypt. And collectively, we all said out loud, oh, there's an hour and a half of. Of time you won't get back. We all anticipated crap. And from the moment Donner's episode began rolling, it was the first one that they showed us. Dig this cat. He's real gone. You could hear every writer's mind turning over, going, get my fucking ass on this show. [00:25:13] Speaker C: Right. [00:25:13] Speaker D: This is brilliant. [00:25:15] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:25:16] Speaker D: And so to be standing in the boardroom at Silver Picture with this promised land in sight, my friend, I would have been clutched to your ankle. Really, I would have tackled you. [00:25:29] Speaker B: There was. [00:25:30] Speaker D: But that said, as the hour mark came. Yes, you had me. It looked like we were being humiliated as we walked out. Barry Josephson walked in, and the media. [00:25:40] Speaker C: If I remember correctly, you may have threatened, clutching onto something even more important than my ankle if I tried to get out of the room. [00:25:48] Speaker D: Entirely possible. Entirely possible. [00:25:50] Speaker C: But, you know, my recollection of the meeting with Barry was it lasted like five minutes, and he looked at us and he went, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Good. Okay. [00:25:59] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is why it was so ludicrous. It was so typical. It was really just. It was the pure politics of Barry having to sign off. But. But Barry is, above all, a political creature. [00:26:10] Speaker C: Yeah. And he turned out to be a really good guy for the most part, while. While we were working on that show and thereafter. [00:26:16] Speaker D: Yeah. Hey, you know, this town attracts a certain kind of person. You cannot be surprised when that kind of people are. Who really operates in this town and operates successfully. It's not a business for shy, retiring types. [00:26:32] Speaker C: Right. [00:26:33] Speaker D: It just ain't. You're not going to do well if you come, if you try to do this. It requires a certain mindset. And, hey, if Barry is kind of running Joel Silver's company, you got to figure Barry's going to have an awful lot of Joel in him. [00:26:47] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:26:48] Speaker D: And that was how you worked for Joel. [00:26:51] Speaker C: In actual fact, I found Barry really very reasonable. And as we worked more and more together, I. I quite liked him. I found him to be, you know, very helpful, you know, for getting politically what we needed to get when we needed to get a goal. Yeah. [00:27:08] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:27:08] Speaker C: So I think, you know, I. I thought he. I thought ultimately, you know, our being pissed at him for being so tardy and keeping us waiting, you know, it turned out to be. He was a good guy. [00:27:20] Speaker D: Joel was brutal to Barry. [00:27:23] Speaker C: Brutal, but he was brutal to everybody. [00:27:26] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:27:29] Speaker C: I remember going into his office occasionally and thinking, you know, okay, what's this? You know, why did he call me? Only to get, you know, creamed from him and screamed at from him for something that I didn't even know what I was. How am I related to this? What did I do on this? But that's. That was the relationship. [00:27:48] Speaker D: I was. I was the ad along that. That, you know, that nobody wanted, and rightfully so, because I had no bona fides to do the job that I did on Crypt. It was really because they wanted you. And I was. I was your writing partner. [00:28:04] Speaker C: But I had a secret weapon. That secret weapon was you. [00:28:08] Speaker D: Oh. [00:28:09] Speaker C: You know, because I felt like we could do this. You know, I don't think I could do this alone. You know, I was never good at writing alone. I would look at the computer screen and I could think of, you know, maybe I should balance my checkbook today. Just everything, you know, that. But one. But somehow working with you, it just all clicked for me. And so I really felt like we could really fix this. We could. We really know how to do this, and we can do it not only economically, but creatively. [00:28:36] Speaker D: Let's stop here a second to pat ourselves on the back. When we went aboard Tales from the Crypt, the intention was that third season was the last season they were going to do that was the end of Tales from the Crypt. [00:28:45] Speaker C: Right. [00:28:47] Speaker D: And we reinvigorated not only the franchise, but the Crypt Keeper. [00:28:52] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:28:53] Speaker D: Which reinvigorated the franchise as a whole. And the fact that there were an order for three feature films, two of which got made, was simply because of what you and I reinvented over the course of that first season that we took over Tales from the Crypt. [00:29:10] Speaker C: I think one of the highlights of our career, certainly my career was, you know, when we wrote Yellow, that Bob was going to direct and he got Kirk Douglas to do it. And, you know, meeting Kirk and being on the set every day with Bob. [00:29:24] Speaker D: The problem was he didn't. He couldn't get Kirk initially because the initial script that. That the. The Thomas brothers wrote for Yellow, you know, originally the way that I think everyone was planning it, Yellow was going to be the last episode ever of Tales from the Crypt. It was going to be the big send off. [00:29:42] Speaker C: Right, Right. [00:29:43] Speaker D: Which when in the middle of the season, suddenly it was. It was decided that, no, no, HBO is going to order a couple more seasons. It wasn't the end of the show, it was kind of a celebration because it was going to go on. The problem was Zemeckis wanted to. To. He wanted to pay homage to one of his favorite films when he was a film student, Kubrick's Paths of Glory. [00:30:06] Speaker C: Right. [00:30:06] Speaker D: That's why he wanted Kirk Douglas. It's a World War I story, and he wanted Kirk Douglas. The problem was the script that the Thomas Brothers, you know, those two feature guys wrote was just abominable. It was awful. And Zemeckis knew he could not possibly get. He couldn't even send it to agency because it would just suck so bad. So we took it under our wing, we fixed it, and one or two drafts later, suddenly we had Kirk Douglas. Bob became a fan. And then watching Bob Zemeckis create World War I in Simi Valley. And he's directing our words, right? Bob Zemeckis is directing our words. [00:30:51] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:30:52] Speaker D: We've kind of gone from one place to another in one Giant leap. [00:30:57] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:30:58] Speaker D: This is. You know, when you're on the inside, it's funny one. One tends to take certain things for granted after a while. But having spent a lot of time now on the outside of the whole thing, when I look back, I think, dude, did you not realize what. [00:31:15] Speaker C: Right. [00:31:16] Speaker D: What you were experiencing? [00:31:17] Speaker C: Yeah. No. It was special. It was special. [00:31:20] Speaker D: Oh, my God. [00:31:20] Speaker C: I think back on it often and try to remember some of the lessons I learned during that whole process, because it was a very special time. It was a very special time working, the two of us working together. But it was also a very special time how big it got and how it just kept getting bigger and bigger. Not in terms of money, not in terms of bigger budgets, but just bigger. The show became bigger. [00:31:47] Speaker D: We suddenly got. We got reviewed when. Gone after our. When we did our second season on the show, the show's fourth. I remember when we got the reviews came out and the reviews were really positive. I think that second season we had Billy Friedkin directed for us. John Frankenheimer directed for us. And working with Billy was a hoot. And that was because Billy would play a small part in the story that we were about to tell about Bordello of Blood. Billy did a terrific episode about the rock and roll world, about kind of garage bands. When we first suggested Billy, because it was our idea, and Joel went to you, he said, are you out of your fucking mind? Billy's crazy. [00:32:31] Speaker A: They're gonna fucking kill you. [00:32:32] Speaker D: Like, who am I talking to here? What? [00:32:39] Speaker C: Pretty good impression, too. It was pretty accurate. [00:32:41] Speaker D: So you know, but you, you, the first time that Billy came in, you sat him down and, and you read, you, you explained the rules that, you know, hey, this is, well, five days of prep, five days to shoot. I don't care if you're Billy Freakin. You're not getting a moment more. That's what you told him. [00:32:59] Speaker C: Yeah, well, well, people have said, you know, I think before I met him, people had said to me, you better be careful because he can be pretty hot. And you know, if you, if you, if you piss him off the wrong way, he might take a shot at you. You mean a punch? Yeah, he might just punch you in the nose. I was like, what? So I met him at Hugo's for breakfast and we sat there and I was like, I had this whole thing in my head. Look, you know, I don't care who you are. Bob Zemeckis does them in five days. Dick Donner does them in five days. We do with him in five days. Alan and I won't give you a script that's a six day script and say it's your problem, we'll fix it. Until we all agree it's five days. And we won't let you go ahead unless it's five. Unless you agree it's five days. And if you think you're going to on day three or day four, screw us for another half a day or day, I'll fire you. I'll fire you on the spot. And I'll finish it. Alan will finish it, Zemeckis, someone will finish it. And I remember as I'm sitting there at Hugo's and I'm leaning further and further over the table across to him and I'm real and I'm realizing I'm getting a little bit emotional about this and how heated, and I'm going, holy shit. He, he's going to take a shot at me. He's going to get. And he leans over, meeting me. It's almost like a Seinfeld. He leans over, almost, my head's matching, almost touching. And he goes, do you have any idea who the fuck you're talking to? And I thought, oh shit, here comes the punch right in my face. I'm gonna have a black eye. And then I pulled back because I was afraid I was gonna get hit. And then he pulled back and he, and he looks at me and he goes, I'm telling you right now, when we agree that it's five days, I will do it in five days. I will not do it any more time than that. As long as we agree up front. And I said, I wouldn't ask you to do anything other. And went back. And Joel said to me. So I had to go, billy. Billy. You got rid of him, right? And I went, no, he's doing it, you stupid motherfucker. You're an idiot. You're gonna. You're gonna pay for all the overages, because they're gonna be plenty of overages. And, you know, we became. Actually. I became really good friends with Billy thereafter. And he did it in five days, as he promised, and it was a great episode. [00:35:09] Speaker D: Suddenly our. You know, our stock went up. And among the things that happened was that we got. Universal suddenly ordered a couple of feature films. [00:35:19] Speaker C: Right. [00:35:20] Speaker D: The mandate is three different movies. Yeah. I think among the movies floating around, there was Demon Night. There was something that. Quentin Tarantino's movie was also floating around. There was the thing that ultimately became dead easy was floating around, but that was not anywhere near ready. And the next thing you know, suddenly the decision was made to do. Demon Knight is the first movie. [00:35:47] Speaker C: Right. [00:35:47] Speaker D: Ernest did a fantastic job. [00:35:50] Speaker C: I do remember. There is a funny story, though, I think we should tell. We're in. I think we're at the Van Nuys airport, and we're all in trailers, and you and I have our. Have our trailer. [00:36:02] Speaker D: I remember. [00:36:03] Speaker C: And we're having a meeting with the art department, and they look at us and they go, they're over budget. And I blew up. I smacked my hands down on the desk. I thought I broke my hand. And I just started screaming like, Joel. And I walked out. I walked out of my own trailer. I was so pissed off. And I. I think. I remember. I think it was you who came after me. And he said, you. Are you okay? Are you okay? You know, and I. And I was like. It was a few blocks away, and I said, yeah, I'm fine. Why? Because everyone. Everyone's back in your office. They can't believe you just walked out of your own meeting and you blew up like that. And they're all worried about this. [00:36:42] Speaker D: I remember this. [00:36:44] Speaker C: And I remember looking at you and saying, don't you recognize good acting or something to that effect? [00:36:49] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:36:51] Speaker C: No, we had great people on. On Tales. We had such a great crew. We had, you know, our crew. If you remember, our crew changed every year by maybe 2% or 3%, only because someone got a job on a big movie. But our crew never moved anywhere because we were very fair with them. We treated them well, and they, in turn, treated us well. They did a great job. I mean, whether it was, you know, Charlie Bartinelli or. And Bellissimo. Tommy Bellissimo on mechanical effects, or it was Kevin Yeager or Todd Masters or later KNB on makeup effects. Yeah, well, Greg Melton. I mean, Greg Melton's job was insane because the world changed every five days. [00:37:39] Speaker D: Reinvent the wheel every week. [00:37:41] Speaker C: Yeah. So we had really special people. We really had special people that were very dedicated. Our management. F.A. miller was a really special guy. I learned an awful lot from FA he's no longer with us. I mean, we really. We really had special people. [00:37:57] Speaker A: So we make Demon Knight. It gets good reviews, makes just enough money that Universal green lights crit movie number two. Now, remember, the mandate was three different movies. Demon Knight was a fun monster movie. We wanted film number two to be completely different. And had we made it dead easy, would have been a very different movie from Demon Knight. It would have been different from anything Gil and I had made before. We loved the challenge. Our whole crew did. And we were utterly convinced that not only were Gil and I and the executive producer and the creative team all on the same page, we thought our studio, Universal, was too. [00:38:30] Speaker C: Not only did we want to do it, everybody wanted us to do it. To the point where we took five, I think five people to New Orleans to scout locations with the art department, with a dp, you, me, maybe one other person after the DP and the art department. And we were looking and scouting locations when the phone call came. And the message was, stop looking at locations. Don't spend any more money. Come back home. [00:38:58] Speaker A: Some quick Hollywood history. At about this time when all this was happening, Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg formed a new company called DreamWorks. One of the first things DreamWorks did was begin making deals. Universal was terrified that another of its superstars, Bob Zemeckis, one of our executive producers, would leave universal for DreamWorks. Because Spielberg was Bob's mentor, Universal, desperate to keep Bob in their staple, asked Bob what they could do to make him happy. Bob is an amazing collaborator, maybe the best ever, and he's an incredibly loyal man. He's always been good to his first writing partner, Bob Gale. Bob Z told Universal that one way they could keep him was by buying the first student script the two Bobs wrote while at USC Festival film school. Bordello of Blood. Universal agreed. They bought that script for half a million dollars, and Bob stayed at Universal. Ah, but Universal resented spending half a million dollars on a script that was just going to go to waste. So they turned to us. [00:40:06] Speaker D: We didn't know as we flew back what the bad news was going to be. [00:40:10] Speaker C: No, it didn't look good. [00:40:12] Speaker D: Something was up in the air. We didn't realize it was going to be us. [00:40:17] Speaker A: Universal dropped the bomb. Dead Easy was dead. But hey, look on the bright side, said Universal. Sure, you won't be making the movie you all wanted to make that you've been working on for six months. Instead, you're gonna make the student movie called Bordello of Blood. Oh, and by the way, the meter hasn't stopped running. You still start formal prep in three weeks. That's formal prep for a $12 million feature film whose script we'd only just been handed. Trust me when I tell you that is how not to Make a movie. Next time, as we lick our wounds over Dead Easy, we start down the Bordello highway and it's absolutely the highway to hell. Part 2 How not to Cast a Movie Anyone know where the craft services table is around here? The how not to Make a Movie podcast is executive produced by me, Alan Katz, and by Jason Stein. Our artwork was done by the amazing Jody Webster and Jason. Jody, along with Mando, are all the hosts of the fun and informative Dads the Crypt podcast. Follow them for what my old pal the Crypt Keeper would have called terrorific crypt content.