Episode Transcript
[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: Because I don't think this tomb is big enough for the both of us.
[00:00:13] Speaker C: Which is why I would like to.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Propose a friendly little competition.
[00:00:19] Speaker C: Winner take all.
You're on, pal.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Hello and welcome.
[00:00:31] Speaker D: Welcome to another episode of the how not to Make a Movie podcast. I'm Alan Katz. Before we get down to it, I want to remind you, if there's some way to physically like this podcast, provided you do actually like it, of course. Please, please, please push whatever button is available to you. We're all prisoners of the algorithm out here, and it really does help. Even better if you enjoy what we're doing here. Tell the world when lots of new people listen. That really jacks up the algorithm in our favor. So if you can, or better yet, if you do.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:01:10] Speaker D: This episode is part five of the Wardello of Blood saga. The story will still make sense if you haven't heard the first four episodes.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: But you really do owe it to.
[00:01:20] Speaker D: Yourself to listen if you haven't. I'm biased, of course, but it's really good.
As the production of Bordello of Blood headed toward its climax, we knew we'd leave Vancouver with an unfinished movie in hand. Well, that was ironic, because our unfinished movie had finished one relationship between Sly Stallone and Angie Everhart and was on.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: Its way to finishing another.
[00:01:43] Speaker D: The decade long creative one between me and Gil.
Endings are never pretty. Ever, ever, ever.
In this episode, things don't go so much from bad to worse as settle into a soul sucking certainty that this project is doomed. On the bright side, if there was one, at least we weren't keeping a secret from Angie anymore. Sly unceremoniously dumped her in the middle of a working day. Ah, but things were going bad all over. Corey Feldman felt disrespected by Dennis Miller. So did Erica Aleniak and all of the day of them Canadian. There was even more tension between Dennis and our Canadian crew. The crew had soured on Dennis almost as soon as he'd arrived in Vancouver. First, because he was rude, and second, because he was rude to them for being Canadian. And that was weird because Dennis was married to a Canadian from Vancouver.
What really annoyed the crew, though, was having to switch their weekends in order to accommodate Dennis and his HBO TV shows shooting schedule. You see, Dennis rehearsed on a Thursday and shot on a Friday. So to accommodate Dennis, we switched our weekend to Thursday, Friday, Saturday, then became our crew's Monday morning. That's not the deal that they made when they signed on. Canadians, you see, they work to live, whereas Americans, we live to work. A few of the crew left because of it, but our Canadian production manager, Colleen Neistat, held on to most of. I wish we'd made that loyalty pay off for her. We absolutely did not. There were more problems, actual fisticups on the set between Dennis and Corey. The crew began to desert in droves. And then there was the moment when we realized, too late to do anything about it, why shooting our horror movie in Vancouver in July was stupid in the extreme. And indeed, we did leave Vancouver in the end with an incomplete movie and a creative team that was more broken than we realized. That would slowly reveal itself over the course of Crip's seventh and final season, which we'd end up shooting in London. That was a really good idea. We shot in some great locations, but aside from Scott Nimmerfro, Tails was running out of gas, if not entirely out of gas already.
Mea culpa. That's why Crypt Season 7 is yet another ending that wasn't pretty. Jeez, are endings ever pretty? Alas, not these kind of endings. Good thing they make great stories. And this being a Hollywood story, hey, there are even a few twists and turns along the way. And an actual Hollywood ending. I've said too much.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Alan Katz, and welcome back to the how not to Make a Movie podcast. The Making of Bordello of Blood, Episode five. Endings Are Never Pretty. This episode also could be called How Not To Release a Movie or Life Lessons from a Movie Nobody Wanted to make. As Bordello's production went on like a rowboat ride to hell, a feeling of resignation settled over us. Resignation and frustration. Ed Tapio was Gil's assistant, and so much more these days. He's an incredibly talented TV producer in his own right. As we speak, he's producing All American Homecoming for the cw.
[00:05:13] Speaker E: What I remember, Allen, is I remember Gil being so frustrated because no matter the schedule that we put together, Dennis would basically blow it up, like the first two hours of the day almost every day.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: And you say, blow it up. What do you mean he wouldn't do.
[00:05:27] Speaker E: You know, something that was supposed to happen, and you guys would have to try to work around it. He wouldn't hang on something or wouldn't walk a certain way or wouldn't go in an entrance the way Gil had blocked it out. And that Gil was constantly having to redo his shot list. I remember, you know, just being so utterly frustrated for him. Because we couldn't seem to get a day that we had planned shot as we planned it. Because Dennis, he, every time he worked, he would blow it up.
[00:05:54] Speaker A: Gil Adler.
[00:05:55] Speaker C: Well, he didn't want to be there to begin with, and he wanted to leave as quickly as possible. So. So you think he would want to shoot as quickly as possible, but just, just to the contrary, we would set up a shot, we would rehearse it once or twice. We would say, okay, now we're going to release the cast and we'll set, set cameras and lights. And at that point, way until that point, he would go, I don't think I like that. I don't. I don't want to walk there. I don't want to. And I would say, well, where do you want to walk? What do you see yourself doing? What is the character dictating to you? And he would go, oh, I don't know. That's your job. I don't know.
So he would just tell me what he didn't want, but he could never tell me what he did.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: It's quite amazing what a million dollars won't buy you.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: By now, if you recall, our schedule had flipped to accommodate Dennis's HBO show, which rehearsed in LA on Thursday and shot on Friday. That meant our work week, our Monday was everyone else's Saturday. Well, that annoyed our Canadian crew, who wanted to spend their weekends with their families and loved ones, not a bunch of mercenary American filmmakers with more money in their pockets than since the other actors in the cast also became. Became frustrated with Dennis because every day he'd ask us to shoot him out early so he could go back to the hotel and rest. That meant we'd shoot Dennis's side of every scene with the full cast. But when we turned around to film the other actors, Dennis would be gone, and they would have to act their scripted dialogue against Dennis's improvised dialogue being read by the script supervisor. Well, can I tell you, actors hate being disrespected like that. That Corey Feldman felt especially disrespected.
[00:07:28] Speaker E: Corey showed up. He knew his lines. He was professional.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: You know, he was Spencer Tracy.
[00:07:32] Speaker C: Corey was great. Corey, I mean, he was. He was right on there. He was ready to do whatever had to be done and put the time in and make direction and have conversation.
[00:07:41] Speaker E: I remember he had some good ideas, and he was constantly pitching ways to make the character more interesting.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: You remember how Corey's relationship with Dennis evolved? Because it did. I mean, I think Corey tried to, in being a professional, he tried to Have a professional working relationship with Dennis. He tried to be friendly with him.
[00:07:58] Speaker A: And I think Dennis wasn't interested.
[00:08:00] Speaker E: That's a nice way of putting it, Gil. That's a really nice way of putting it, because Dennis was just a dick to him.
[00:08:05] Speaker C: Well, from what I remember, you could say that about his relationship with almost everybody.
[00:08:08] Speaker E: I don't know if you guys even know this, but I was doing runs across the border to Blaine for Corey and Angie to get them both cigarettes and weed.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Oh, Ed, Ed, this is the whole point of the exercise. Start talking, Ed.
[00:08:26] Speaker E: No, I mean, Corey. Corey couldn't get. Couldn't get a Marlboros. And if you remember, there was no Marlboros in Vancouver. And so I went over the border one day, believe it or not, to go to Taco Bell, because there was no Taco Bell in Vancouver. And I came across the market and I came back with a carton of smokes, Marlboros. And I brought them back for Corey and he was like, oh, my God. Oh my God, thank you. Because he used to chain smoke Marlboros and he didn't like whatever he was buying in Vancouver. And so for like four straight weeks, I would hop over the border, I'd get cigarettes for him and for Angie. And twice I picked up a couple of joints for him too, from a friend of mine that I hadn't blamed.
And the weekend that I stopped doing it, they searched my car from top to bottom. I didn't have anything in the car. That's one of the reasons Corey was so, so in, you know, in such good shape, because I was supplying him with cigarettes. I was basically his prison. I was basically his prison bitch.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: The thing we were most apprehensive about as we stumbled forward was whether or not our makeup special effects would play the way we needed them to. Hiring Dennis, an actor our audience didn't really care about, forced us to cut our special effects budget, which was stupid because makeup special effects are exactly what our audience cares about. Chris Nelson and his Canadian crew were all very talented. Chris is an award winning special effects artist, but he wasn't that award winning special effects artist at the start of his career when we hired him. But then it simply isn't fair to expect expertise from people who aren't experts yet, especially when you know this about them. Not sure we could rely on our untested Canadian team. We flew Tales from the Crypts, longtime effects maven Todd Masters North.
[00:10:01] Speaker F: I think I came up twice. The first time was when you had asked me the Formula for blood. And then, like, the initial assessment, and then I came up for the ending to just kind of, you know, see, because I think at that point knew we were going to take stuff back with us and pick it up. So I came up to kind of, you know, witness the connective tissues. And actually, I remember. I don't know if it was quite pleading, but I remember going to Gil a couple of times. I remember coming to you and saying, like, let's not shoot the final stage of Angie because she looks like witchy poo. And if we shoot it, then we have to recreate it. And that's going to hurt because it's going to be the same thing, just as silly, and costing probably the same amount, if not more, to do it over again. And so I was. I was kind of like, if we just don't shoot it, then we can come up with a really cool finale. And, you know, it was just so chaos, so much chaos at the point. It was just like kind of get out of here and take it back to Van Nuys. And we kind of knew that we could. We could really get our hands on it. Chris, who supervised the makeup effects in Vancouver, ended up winning an Oscar a couple years ago for suicide.
[00:11:14] Speaker E: Well, also, to Todd's point, though, I don't know if everybody remembers, but at that point of the movie, when we were getting close to the end, we'd lost about 60% of our crew. People had started moving on, and we were dealing with different people in costumes. We were dealing with different people in the regular makeup department. We're dealing with different people in Grip and Electric. Remember how many people had started bailing, you know, about four weeks in?
[00:11:41] Speaker C: Yeah. One of the problems of shooting in Vancouver in those days was just that as you got close to the end of a show, people didn't stay as they do in Los Angeles or in the States. They didn't stay till the end and then move on. They started looking and sniffing around for other shows. And since there was so much work coming up, they would jump as soon as somebody made them an offer because we had two or three more weeks of shooting. And the new job was going to be, you know, five weeks of prep and five weeks of shooting is 10 weeks versus two or three weeks. And they would just jump the movie's.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Climax delay ahead of us. So did a scene where Dennis's character learns that Corey's character and a few other vampires are hiding out at an old abandoned power plant. In the lead up to the climax, we were now Working nights, rarely a fun experience unless you're completely adapted to it, which we weren't. As we settled in for the night's work inside the power plant, Dennis began needling Cory. Whereas Corey previously had held his fire, this time in front of the whole crew, Corey fired back and got huge laughs. Dennis didn't like it.
[00:12:41] Speaker E: I seem to remember it was Corey doing an ad lib on Dennis's riff. And we from Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live. And we are out of here. And Dennis really didn't like that and confronted him about it. And Corey was like, yeah, well, I thought it was funny. We all thought it was funny, actually. And Dennis took offense. Is my recollection who swung at whom, do you remember? My recollection is that Dennis was the one that was the instigator.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: Dennis got all up in Corey's grill and Corey responded. And suddenly. I don't know if fists are flying accurately describes what happened. I don't think Dennis has fists are flying in him. Corey, I think might.
[00:13:23] Speaker E: I think it was more like. I think it was more like pushing and shoving, like, keep me away from him.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: But it, but it escalated and.
[00:13:29] Speaker E: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. My recollection is that Dennis put hands on Corey first and then Corey reacted.
[00:13:35] Speaker B: And the strange thing was that as Corey suddenly got the upper hand, and Corey clearly had the upper hand and was quite capable of hurting Dennis, nobody leapt to Dennis's defense.
[00:13:49] Speaker E: No.
[00:13:50] Speaker C: What are you saying? There is some justice in the world.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: Yeah. My. My memory was kind of watching the crew cheering on Corey and then suddenly Lee Knipperberg suddenly realizing, oh, I can't let this happen, can I?
[00:14:08] Speaker A: Lee Knipperberg was our first assistant director, the adult on the set.
[00:14:12] Speaker B: Lee Knipperberg was the one who stepped forward and separated them.
[00:14:16] Speaker E: Yeah, that's how I remember it.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: A few days later, we took our shot at shooting the climax. The word feudal springs to mind. Imagine if this group of professional filmmakers had thought for two seconds about what the downside might be to making a horror movie. A genre that works best at night in a place as far north as Vancouver at the peak of summer, where the one thing in really short supply is night.
Did I mention the word feudal springs to mind?
[00:14:44] Speaker C: I remember, Alan, you and I were aging very rapidly. And I also remember that we were shooting in the summer and we were shooting nights. And we realized one night while we were shooting that the nighttime was only six hours of a 12 hour day. And all of a sudden.
Yeah, and all of a sudden we were shooting. You know, at 4:00 in the morning, as the light was coming into. Into the building, and I remember we, you know, we just panicked and we were just shooting fast and furiously with multiple. As many cameras as we could pull out.
[00:15:16] Speaker B: How many cameras did we run that night? In our desperate.
[00:15:20] Speaker C: I think we only had three camera.
[00:15:21] Speaker E: Three, yeah, we had three. And it got so bad that Tom Priestley was getting frustrated and he took over one of the spotlights.
[00:15:28] Speaker F: Just one department's problem. It was just the whole thing just didn't have the grace of luck to it, you know, the gods of filmmaking shining brightly on us. So we packed up our toys and went home.
[00:15:45] Speaker A: The climax was Dennis's last day.
[00:15:48] Speaker C: I remember when we had his last shot. I'll never forget this. And he was done with the movie and I just wanted to throw him under a bus by then he came over to me and gave me a big hug and said, hey, listen, you know, I forgot his wife's name. But he said, if my wife and I invite you up to Santa Barbara for dinner, you'd come, right? And I said, no.
He goes, no, no, no, I'm the funny guy. Stop being funny. I'm serious. If I invite you up for a dinner, you'll come, right? With your wife. I said, no, Dennis, I wouldn't come. I wouldn't come anywhere near you. I want nothing to do with you. And I walked away from him and he yelled after me, oh, come on, you'll come. You'll come. If I invite you up for dinner, I know you'll come.
[00:16:29] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:16:29] Speaker C: And that was the. That was the last I ever had anything to do with him.
[00:16:34] Speaker A: Gil would be done with Dennis until the reshoots anyway, and there was plenty that needed reshooting. The last day of filming came and went. We were on location, second unit having the Cypress ski area above West Van, stand in for Tierra del Fuego, where at the beginning of the movie, Phil Fonda, Caro's character digs up Angie's character. When our first ad, Lee Knipperberg, announced that we'd completed principal photography after finishing the martini, a collective shrug went up. A few of us shook hands, but none of us felt like we'd accomplished anything. Survived, maybe for now.
Normally, the producers would have sprung for a wrap party, an important part of the whole filmmaking experience. But we knew for a dead certainty that none of our Canadian crew would show up at any party that the Americans threw, not even for the free liquor. Colleen Neistat, now a Vancouver city councillor, then our production Manager, as usual, came to the rescue.
[00:17:30] Speaker C: I did have the wrap party at my house.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: I remember because I think I was the only American who showed up. I went, I went. And it was awkward.
[00:17:41] Speaker C: Well, it's just it was such a bad show and so hard on so many people.
[00:17:46] Speaker A: Bordello wasn't the first movie to finish principal photography without being finished. It just felt like we had so much further to go to actually get there. Still needing a ton more work were the water gun scene, the ballroom blitz and the torture chamber scene. The one where Dennis complained to Joel and Joel told my people skills were shit. Top of the list. Our climax in the glass church was unfinished. On the bright side, though, reshoots in LA meant we'd get to work with our Tails from the Crypt team. And at the Van Nuys airport hangars where we'd made the first Tales feature Demon Knight, Randall Throp was Tails costume supervisor. These days, he's the manager of the costume and prop archive at Paramount Pictures. His dream job. For the record, I've known Randall longer than I've known anyone else in this story over 40 years. True fact, we once threw the coolest Tupperware party the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn has ever seen.
[00:18:33] Speaker G: You guys had that office, I think it was on Cahuenga, not far from Universal. And Ed called and said, you got to get over here and look at this, what the editors are looking at. You've got to come over and see this. So I came over and the editor showed me that sequence with the vampire prostitutes being sprayed with holy water.
[00:18:52] Speaker B: And it was unbelievably bad.
[00:18:56] Speaker G: They looked like blow up sex dolls, like melting. They didn't look like human beings melting once they were sprayed with the holy water. And one of the things that we discovered that the costume department had done for those vampire prostitutes was they put them in a polyester chiffon. You cannot do a stunt with fire in polyester because it melts. It does not catch fire. You have to use natural fibers. So that's when Warden Neal and I, we had to reshop and try to match what they had done in Vancouver with silk chiffon, as opposed to polyester, which became expensive. It's not cheap and to try to match it. But Lord have mercy.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: Maybe the best part of being in LA with our team was having our American production manager, F.A. miller back.
[00:19:47] Speaker G: We were a very tight group. We all liked each other. And, you know, FA was the one. FA Miller was the one who really made sure that if you weren't there to have fun or to play and be nice. You were out. You know, all it took was one bad episode and you were out the door. And all of us always felt like we were kind of cherry picked, you know, like, because we did. We depended on each other. I depended on Todd, Todd depended on what I could do, you know, Steve Melton, Greg Melton. You know, it was always. We always worked so well together. And I think, you know, Tales from the Crypt was probably the best experience of my career because it was also fun because you were basically shooting a mini movie every week.
[00:20:25] Speaker E: I had a situation in Georgia where I did a really super low budget horror comedy called Stand Against Evil for IFC that we did very much like Tales. We did three day episodes. We blew up a demon every episode. I blew up a car. I flipped the car for $800,000 an episode, full union. And I had people turning down other work in Atlanta on the hopes that we would get picked up for another season. And then all three seasons, we had less than 10 people turn over. Because of the lessons that I learned from you guys.
[00:20:57] Speaker C: FA I can't give enough credit to FA I learned so much from FA as a.
In the business. Not just as a producer, but just in the business. I learned so much from FA And I learned each year I appreciated him more and more in his subtle sort of silent way of going about doing things. He never kept things from me. You know, when there was an issue, he would tell me the issue and then we would talk it out and figure out what to do. But. But FA was. Was such a blessing in my life in terms of my career as a crew member.
[00:21:28] Speaker G: I have to say, FA really did. The idea of the open door policy, I mean, I could go in and talk to him, and there's so many times I would go in and just say, oh, my gosh, we're worn down on this one. It's like out now, darlin, just take a break. Just breathe. You know, he would always. But he was just. He did have that open door and he would stop by, he would chat. I mean, he was. He was very, you know, tuned in to the crew completely. And like I said, and we all know this, if you didn't fit in, you were gone. And that was, you know, he could clean house really quick.
[00:22:01] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:22:02] Speaker G: But that was a good thing because then, you know, right. Things got back to normal. First was sort of fun to get back together, you know, for this short time.
But then as the night went on, it just kind of disintegrated and I remember Erica wouldn't come out of her trailer. Dennis was pouting and Chris Sarandon was very nice. I remember that. But I mean, we were all pulling our hair out. I mean, we're there until what, two or three o'clock in the morning trying to reshoot that. And that's when I decided, I'm done. I'm going back to New York. Which is what I did. That was the Bordello of Blood is the film that made me say, I'm not doing this. I'm done. It was my birthday, by the way, and I'm killing vampire prostitutes. I'm dealing with actors who are just jerks and fire stunts. And I just said, that's it. I'm not doing this anymore. Forget the Blood, Forget everything else. I left. I moved back to New York.
[00:22:57] Speaker A: In addition to reshooting and cutting Bordello, Gil and I had to get the final season of Tales ready for production. And right off the bat, there was injury.
[00:23:05] Speaker C: Do you remember, Alan? Whose idea was it to go to uk? Because it wasn't ours. Was it Joel's? Or was it Warner, bro? Was it hbo?
[00:23:12] Speaker B: There's something in my head said there was still some anger at the union and there was just one more way to.
[00:23:18] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:23:20] Speaker B: Because really, there was no reason, no real reason to do it in London. It was. It was a cool idea.
[00:23:27] Speaker A: It's London on someone else's dime, plus per diem. But if I'm honest, Tales from the Crypt had grown a little long in the tooth with a fang.
[00:23:36] Speaker B: Whatever.
[00:23:37] Speaker A: Making the show away from LA could have revived. Would it become bone weary? Alas, aside from the cool factor, the last season of Tales was a painful extension of Bordello into the Tales world. We didn't go to London because it was a cool idea. We went, as we did with Bordello, to piss off the union representing our crew.
[00:23:56] Speaker C: Alan and I were in London setting that up. And then they said, well, you need to come back. And they worked out the schedule between Universal and Warner Brothers. They worked out the schedule that I would be in London for three weeks, New York for three weeks, not near la, so I could cut the movie. And then I'd go for three weeks and come back and they would. And so we did that. I mean, Alan, we did that for a long time, right?
[00:24:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:21] Speaker B: I mean, London, what we started with the feature film. That seems to be when the wheels began to kind of come off, when suddenly some of us got excluded for one reason or another. You know, neither here nor There, but suddenly the team wasn't the team.
Bordello of Blood certainly exacerbated that feeling amongst our crew because, man, we, we left the country and then the last season of Crip comes up and we leave the whole continent.
[00:24:52] Speaker E: I don't know if you remember, but you guys entrusted me to go after everybody and we literally went after everybody. I mean, I remember Daniel Day Lewis calling and apologizing because he was doing a kids play in Newcastle. I mean, they were all so nice, you know, Ewan McGregor inviting us to the Trainspotting premiere. Jane Horrocks, you know, inviting us to filming of AB Fab. It's just so much of, you know, different than here in the States. The way the British actors approached everything. Or Oasis coming and using our stage. Remember when Oasis came and used our stage for the music video?
[00:25:27] Speaker C: Yeah. When we got there, first of all, you know, all these actors who. They said, oh, we're going to get all these English actors, which we couldn't get here because they're. We can't fly them over and they'll work for us at Ealing Studios. We found out, no, nobody wanted to work in the UK because of taxes.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: Right, right, right, yes.
[00:25:46] Speaker C: When we called Lewis Gilbert, who lived in Ealing, and I got his phone number and I called him and I said, I love your work, I want to work, I want you to do it. He goes, oh, my boy, I love Tales from the Crypto. Wonderful show. I love that show. I'd be delighted to direct one. I'm going, wow, it's going to be great. We're going to work with Lewis Gilbert. And I said, louis, I'm going to send over a car tomorrow morning, pick you up at your house and bring you over to the studio. And he goes, wait a minute, where are you? I said, I'm at Ealing Studios. And he went, oh, no, no, no, no, I can't, I can't work here. Tax situation. No, no. I thought you wanted me to come to Los Angeles. And we got the same reaction from Roger Moore. Roger Moore invited us to go to Switzerland. We had so many people say to us, oh, if you were only in LA and you wanted me to come and you'd pay for the flight, I'd be there. And we couldn't, obviously, when we were shooting in la, we didn't have money for flights like that, so we didn't use them. But when we got to London, we found out, well, we can't get these people anyway.
[00:26:37] Speaker B: Yeah, our structure, what we were three days in Two days out. That system did not work there because, I mean, you can't build as much there.
I mean, there's a reason why they use locations so much more. There are great locations or any kind of great location you want. It's tricky to get to those locations because, you know, London's a very slow city to move around. We. We bumped into all kinds of problems. Our. Our first English production manager, a nice man with some lovely credits, but he misled us repeatedly.
[00:27:09] Speaker E: I don't know if you guys remember, I was the first one there. I got there three weeks before you guys, and I was looking for apartments. And Gil, do you remember the where are the Makita? Conversations?
[00:27:19] Speaker C: Oh, yeah.
[00:27:20] Speaker E: We had Malcolm. Malcolm, our first production manager once now. Yeah, once. Well, like I said, I was the first one there. I was there three weeks before everybody and I had apartments. I had, like, five apartments for you to look at, Alan. Five for Gil. I had some for Greg. I had one for Scott. When you guys all got there, you know, Greg came up with the plans to build for the first episode. And like, three days into prep, the Dominic comes up. Sorry, Malcolm comes to me and goes, yeah, we're having a hard time with the sets. And Gil walks on the set and sees guys hammering with nails. And he looks around and goes, where are the Makitas? And the guy goes, like, what's a Makita?
[00:28:00] Speaker C: I remember looking at him, I was so outraged, I went, what's a Makita? What do you mean? You know, it's like a staple gun. You know, you put two pieces and the sets up.
I remember them looking at me like, is he out of his mind? What's he talking about? But I do remember saying, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And the sets up.
[00:28:17] Speaker A: Back in Los Angeles, we were used to our construction crew arriving at our stage with their pickup trucks loaded with tools. In London, our construction crew arrived at Elon Musk Studios having just gotten off the tube. They didn't bring any tools with them. That was our responsibility.
[00:28:32] Speaker E: I remember it was such culture shock for us when Crafty came out with, literally, tea and cookies. And that was the craft service cart. And all the English people were happy. And Gil and I and Scott are like, what the f.
What is this?
[00:28:49] Speaker A: For reference, Joel Silver used to refer to our craft services table at Tales from the Crypt as gum and water.
[00:28:57] Speaker B: I remember Malcolm having a conversation with Gil and I very round about the first day of production when the question was asked, do we put the tin, the biscuit tin down on the cart or do we hand them out? If we put the biscuit tin down, the lads will take more than one.
[00:29:14] Speaker A: You know.
[00:29:18] Speaker E: I even. How about the conversation go with Malcolm when we had our standard deal memo and he looks at us like, you can't have that. It's like, what's wrong with it? It says they can't drink on the job. They all go to the pub at lunch and have a beer. So we rewrote it to say, no drinking on the job except for a beer at lunch on the company pub.
[00:29:39] Speaker C: Yeah. And even then we didn't want to do that. I remember being very resistant to that, going, I don't like this. They're going to come back and they're going to be, you know, and you.
[00:29:46] Speaker E: Go into the canteen and our whole crew was in there having a pint. Yeah, it was such culture shock. And when we did do catering, the double decker buses, you know, for food was just so odd. It was just so odd and the food was horrible.
[00:30:01] Speaker C: Do you remember, Ed, I suspect you'll remember this because I remember rather vividly that we got a phone call, we needed to bring out another bus for lunch. What happened to the bus? We have a double decker bus for lunch. He goes, yeah, we can't use it, they threw up in it. And I was like, what? Yeah, the crew threw up and I got the crew. I mean, was it one person, two people? Well, more than two people. What happened? Well, I think the food was off and I'm like, what? I mean, do you remember that?
[00:30:32] Speaker E: I do, sadly, I do.
[00:30:33] Speaker C: When you were talking about the double decker bus, it just, that image just came back to me because I remember going out there and seeing throw up all over the bus going, holy shit, what the fuck is this all.
[00:30:44] Speaker E: It's funny, the little things that, that, that you remember, the little tiny snippets. Yeah, I remember. I remember when Bill Malone was directing and you and Alan had gone home and you had left me to close and you had told me that, you know, pull the plug at 10pm and Bill needed like two shots left. And the first ad comes up to me and says, we're probably going to go till 10:30. And I said, no, no, I'm pulling the plug at 10. He goes, no, we'll get the work, you know, but it'll take till 10:30. I said, no, we're pulling the plug at 10. And he goes, you're an assistant, you can't do that. And Bill Malone looks at him and goes, yeah, he can. Yeah, he can. He's speaking for Gil and Alan. He can do that. And Bill looks at me, Bill looks at me. It's like he goes, I'll get it. Don't worry. 10 o'clock, we're good.
[00:31:30] Speaker B: He got it, right?
[00:31:32] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:31:32] Speaker E: Oh, yeah, he got it.
[00:31:33] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:31:34] Speaker A: The last season of Crypt was subpar. Mea culpa. I took my eye off the Tales from the Crypt ball to focus on the new Tales from the Crypt like show. HBO had ordered from the Crypt partners based on all the old DC science fiction comics. I'd been pitching ideas about it with no luck. I figured we'd sort out what the show was when we got back to la. Except that's not what happened. It turned out Joel had other plans and they didn't include me.
[00:31:59] Speaker B: Alan Kassira, our manager, called me one morning while the negotiations were still ongoing. He said, I need you to come to the office, to my office. So I went to his office in Century City.
He wanted to tell me in person that Joel. He said, joel decided he doesn't want.
[00:32:15] Speaker D: You to do it.
[00:32:15] Speaker B: He's not going to negotiate with you anymore. And that was it.
I said, but Gil is still doing.
[00:32:22] Speaker A: He said, oh, yeah, he wants Gil.
[00:32:24] Speaker B: That was a really hard. That was hard.
And I took it rather personally.
There was a moment, I think it was a day or two later, I guess, and I don't know why, what precipitated this phone call. But for some reason, I was sitting in my house in Los Feliz and I get a phone call, a message being left that Joel Silver and Bob Zemecks are calling me. And for the life of me, in retrospect, I can't imagine why I didn't pick up the phone or return their call, but I did not.
Now I know why I was so angry.
I was beyond any reason. But I would be willing to bet if I. If I picked up the phone and had a. An adult conversation, I would be willing to bet that I would not have been completely cut off the way that I was. Scott Nimmerfrou told me a couple years, long after the fact, that I kind of took it the wrong way because it wasn't the intention, wasn't to cut me off, that. That there were a couple of those horror movies that you all did where Joel had been, would have been quite open to me working on them. But I never returned a call. Now, that's not what he said. That's what I'm saying. I don't know. I don't know.
[00:33:45] Speaker C: I don't know. Either, to tell you the truth.
[00:33:47] Speaker B: I don't know why suddenly I was singled out as the problem, but it must have been because I was the one who was packing. For me, it presented a problem. All my produced work, hey, everything I'd written over the, for a decade had two names on it. And going out into the marketplace, suddenly I was nobody and nothing. And the problem with having two names on a script is when you hand it to someone, the first question they're going to ask you. Perfectly good question. Well, how much of this did you write? And so I was stuck literally having to go back to square one, in a sense, because I, Alan Kassira, I think, was he tried to get me to do really the one thing that I should have done in that moment. Hey, Scott, Nimmer fro. In a moment like that, I know what Scott would have done. He'd have sat down and he'd have written a script.
You want to know who I am as a writer? I'll show you. But I was experiencing the very beginning of a writer's block, because unless I was being paid, I had no interest in writing. And I was interested in writing whatever the man wanted. Hey, what do you want me to write? So I put myself into a really dumb place. The shortest answer to solve my problem was to sit down and write a goddamn script. You know, when I approached you and I said, I need to take your name off our, of our scripts, that, that was a problem. And I, I can understand why, why that was a problem. I, I think that might have been part of why we might became acrimonious. I, I, I, I think you, you resented me asking to do that.
[00:35:34] Speaker C: I can't remember that that was what it was. I, I just disappointed and just being very like, I don't understand why, why did this happen? And if it did happen, why don't we continue on?
And to tell you the truth, you know, I wish I would have known that Bob and Joel called you, because I would have, I would have jumped in there, you know, because I had conversations with Joel which were not, you know, very nice, to the point where I was convinced, you know, he was going to throw me out of the office as well, because I said, what the fuck are you doing?
What does this got to do with you? This has nothing to do with you. Why? And he never gave me a real answer that answered the question satisfactorily or even unsatisfactorily. My relationship with Bob got stronger and stronger. I used to always say to Bob, I don't understand. I just don't understand. Steve D'Souza and Peter Iliff became really good friends of mine along the way. I used to talk to Steve more than I would Peter. You know, his story is about writing or rewriting Die Hard. Die Hard. His stories about that are just, I mean, unbelievable. And his relationship with Joel, as in that writing process and the pressure and all that, and even. Even talking to him didn't really help me any because he didn't understand it. I never quite understood what was motivation, what was the purpose. And I would often ask Bob, and Bob didn't want to deal with it, you know, because he would just blow it off and say, well, you know, Joel. It's Joel. You know, he. He likes to divide and conquer. He likes to do this, he likes to do that.
[00:37:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:37:07] Speaker C: I never really got to the bottom of it with him.
[00:37:10] Speaker B: Divide and conquer is. Is there's something to that. I. In retrospect, you know, as I look back at Joel, Joel tried repeatedly to offer me things. Joel handed me his copy of the Sandman graphic novel. He put that into my hands personally. Said, you should read this. Now when Joel Silver hands you a piece of material, he's saying, read this and get back to me. Yeah, that's what he's saying. That's.
[00:37:36] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:37:37] Speaker B: Why would you not read that and get back to me? And I did not. Now, in part I thought because, you know, why are you offering this to me? I'm. I work. You know, Gil and I are a team. And so I. I saw that as.
I know, but I. But I think that that is. There is some truth to that, that I think Joel. Joel just thought differently. And I don't. I think Joel didn't care. I don't. You guys think you're a team.
[00:38:02] Speaker C: I'm not here to.
[00:38:03] Speaker B: There to me. You know, I'll use you as I need to use you for. For my own ends. Which is perfectly understandable. I. You know, that's.
[00:38:09] Speaker G: Yeah.
[00:38:09] Speaker C: Because I don't. Because also I've seen Also after that, I would see him do stuff like you just said, offer it to one guy only to have it come back and then do it together after the fact that when he came, when they came up with an idea or pitch the story and he went, oh, that's fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:38:27] Speaker B: I heard from Nimmer Fro that Joel didn't have a particular problem with me. He disruptor by nature.
[00:38:35] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:38:35] Speaker B: And you know, he just throwing a monkey wrench. There was nothing more than that. In it. It's not like there was an idea he had that was better. He just. He's disruptive.
[00:38:45] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:38:46] Speaker B: And, hey, man, that's. That's who he is. For better and sometimes for worse.
[00:38:51] Speaker C: The thing that I sort of missed terribly was just getting together every day and doing the work. You know, that's the thing I miss the most. And a lot of it, I blame myself because, you know, why didn't I pick up that phone and call you and say, what the fuck? What's going on here? What's going on between us? Forget Joel. Forget everybody else. Who gives a shit about anybody else? And I didn't. And I don't know why I didn't, except I know I got very busy with work, and I was very worried about working.
But even. Even. Even I can't blame it on that, because I go, no, no, you're bigger than that, and you're better than that, and why didn't you. Why? And.
And I don't have an answer for that.
[00:39:38] Speaker A: And so the Crip team went one way, and I went the other.
[00:39:41] Speaker C: Joel called me one day, and he said, you got to go. You got to go have lunch with Bob. So you guys talk and come up with a show. So I called Bob, and Bob was over at Universal. I said, listen, Bob, I don't know what to tell Joel.
What are we going to do? And he said, tell you what. Just come on over. I'll get deli from Jerry's. I'll get chocolate chip cookies. We both like that. And we'll have lunch, and we'll talk, and then I'll call Joel and I'll say, we had a nice talk, but we didn't come up with anything. I said, great. That's good. Okay, let's do that. So I go over, have lunch with Bob, and while we're talking, you know, we're talking about our youth and what we liked and what we didn't like, and I was saying, like, well, you know, I kind of liked Outer Limits. Like, the gallery.
[00:40:19] Speaker A: Gallery.
[00:40:20] Speaker C: Yeah. And. And he said, yeah, yeah. And he said, I like. I like this and that. And I said, yeah, yeah. And why do. Why do we like that? Why did we like that as kids? I said, well, you know, it was. It was different. It was weird. It was quirky. It was, you know, wasn't it? It was unexpected. Yeah. Yeah. I felt the same way. And so we finish our lunch, we finish our cookies, and I go, okay, Bob, I'm going to go. Don't forget to call Joel. And he goes, no, no, I'll take care of it. I'll take care of it. So I go home, and that night, about 8:30 in the evening, the phone rings, and it's Joel. And he goes, what the fuck is the matter with you? I go, what did I do now? He goes, why don't you tell me what's going on? And I go, I don't know what you're talking about. He goes, I got off the phone with Bob, and I had to call Bob. He didn't call me. And I had to say, what happened to you and Gil? And he said, well, I want Gil to tell you, so tell me what it is. So I go, what?
What are you talking about? He goes, tell me the idea. Bob said you had a really good idea. Tell me the idea. So I go, well, Joel, we had a few of them, so let me check with Bob, and I'll call you back. Let me just call Bob. And I call Bob, and I go, bob, are you out of your mind? I got Joel calling me, asking me, what's the idea? What? We don't have an idea. There is no idea. And he starts to laugh, and he goes, well, why don't you tell him? You know, it was like what we said about our youth. We like this and we like that. It was twisted. It was this and that, and, and. And it was funny, but it was scary. And then just say, you. You will work. We're working on it. And. And then he'll leave. He'll leave us alone. So I go, bob, I thought you were going to talk to him. Just, just, just call him back. Call him back. So I call up Joel and I tell him. And there's a silence after I speak. And he goes, I love it. I love it. Let's do it. What do you mean? He goes, I'm going to call Chris Albrecht and set up a meeting for you, me and Bob and I. Joel, Joel, Joel. Click. I call Bob back. Bob goes, don't worry about it. It'll go nowhere. It'll die. Two days later, I got a call from Joel. You, Bob, and I have a meeting with Chris Albrecht at HBO to pitch this new show. And I go, bob, there's no show. You and I know there's no show. So how are we going to pitch? So he goes, chris has always been a big fan of yours. He'll understand what you're saying. He'll see that there's no show. And he'll probably say, you know, we should work on it some more. And Come back. Don't worry about it. So now we go over to Chris Albrecht's office, and it's the three of us. And, you know, Chris is waiting for someone to start the meeting, and so they go, you know, tell him. I go, tell him. Yeah, Bob, tell him. Tell him. So I go, well, you know, it's this idea, and it's. And I tell him. And Chris Albrecht gets up from his desk, and he's on the 41st floor in century City. He looks out the window towards the ocean and pauses for a minute and turns around, and he goes, let's do it. And I'm like, let's do what? And he goes, that the show you just told me. I go, well, what do you mean, let's do it? And he goes, we'll do 10. And Joel goes, yes, that's terrific. Yes. And everybody's congratulating everybody. And I'm, like. I'm, like, sweating. I have no idea we're talking about. And I take the elevator down with Bob, just the two of us. And I go, bob, what. What. What are we going to do? I mean, you know, we. You and I better get together and talk about what this is, because I. I don't know what we sold, and I don't know. I don't know what their expectation is. And Bob looks at me and he goes, gil, I'm going to be busy for a while. I'm making this movie Contact, so you're kind of on your own. And I said, but. But, Bob. But there is no show. I mean, be candid with me, Bob. You know, there is no show. And he goes, yeah, you'll figure it out. And that's how perversions happened.
[00:43:48] Speaker A: Bordello missed its Halloween 1995 opening. Instead, Universal dumped the movie the following August. The doldrums where unloved movies go to die.
[00:43:58] Speaker B: I don't know what the rest of y'all did, but I put together a little theater party. It was me, my wife, Aubrey Morris, and one or two other friends. And. And we went to the. To a movie theater in Burbank for the premiere of For Delaware Blood. And there was nobody in that movie theater.
That was so sad.
I went out to the ticket booth and I said, has it been like this all day? And she went, yup.
[00:44:28] Speaker E: Janet and I went on Sunday. And it was kind of the same thing. We saw it at the Plant in Van Nuys. It was a pretty big theater, and there was probably 10 of us in there, unfortunately.
[00:44:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I was the only wise one who didn't go to any screenings of it.
I remember saying to Jeanne, you know, we gave it the office. I. I can't give any more.
[00:44:49] Speaker A: Soon enough, Bordello appeared smaller and smaller in everyone's rear view mirror. These are talented people. They never stopped working. And Randall didn't stay in New York all that long.
[00:44:59] Speaker G: Six months later, I got a call to do the remake of the Shining. And, you know, in. In Colorado. And so I was like, okay, fine, I'll come back to L. A. I.
[00:45:08] Speaker E: Worked with Gil until. Until House on Haunted Hill. And then, you know, when. When my late wife died, I left. I actually went and lived with Glenn's family in England for four months after that. And Gil got me to come back into the business in 2004 on Starskin Hutch. He called me out of the blue and said, I got a really. I shouldn't say this. I got an assistant that I need to replace, and would you. Would you come work for me? And I wasn't doing it. They said, absolutely, Gil. I'd love to. And we did that and Constantine together. And then he went off to do Superman, and my dad was sick and I couldn't leave at the time, and my dad ended up dying, and then he went off to do Superman in Australia, and that was the last time we actually, you know, worked together side by side.
[00:45:50] Speaker A: Of everyone on the Grip team, Greg Melton came out the healthiest by a lot.
[00:45:54] Speaker H: Kind of goes back to even like, the. Almost the studio system. I think there was a lot of people making movies they didn't want to make. They were stuck in contracts, and they just. They did.
[00:46:04] Speaker G: Yes.
[00:46:04] Speaker H: I remember, like, with Dead Easy, I'm like, we're doing that easy. Oh, we're not doing that easy. We're doing Bordello Blood. I just switched over. Like, that's just where we're going. I didn't really stop and go, is this the right thing to do? It's way above me.
[00:46:17] Speaker E: This is.
[00:46:18] Speaker H: This is where the trains move and I've got to stay on the train. I'm the easiest person to replace, you know.
[00:46:24] Speaker B: Yes. And yet the hardest in so many ways.
[00:46:27] Speaker H: I look back on it all and it's all just sort of like, was wonderful. I had. I had a. I had a. I had fun up there. I was getting to build a lot of stuff. I was working with people that were very supportive and creative. We were getting things done.
[00:46:41] Speaker B: How dare you. Have a good time on that movie, Greg.
[00:46:44] Speaker C: I'm sorry.
[00:46:45] Speaker H: I'm sorry, but I'm Just saying that. I just look back on it. I obviously had a much different experience. You were really in the trenches, you know, of like, I know what goes on. I read the emails that Frank would send AMC that got him fired.
[00:47:01] Speaker A: That's Frank Darabont, another Crypt alum, getting fired from the Walking Dead, the show he developed and executive produced. Greg was Walking Dead's production designer from 2010 to 2012. He helped create the show's look. He's a real big part of its success.
[00:47:14] Speaker H: I'm so glad I don't have to deal with any of that. I'm just down. I've got my little department. We'll do this. I'll pick some colors. Everybody will be happy.
[00:47:24] Speaker B: Oh, my God. You're making me realize I've done this all wrong.
[00:47:27] Speaker A: Colleen Neistat's perspective, I had never, ever experienced.
[00:47:33] Speaker C: And I've been around, you know, extreme personalities, but Joel stands out, and I. But I live through it. I mean, this is one of the things, I think if I could live through that show, if I could survive that show, I. I can certainly survive a political campaign. You know, my perspective of Joel might be a little bit different in the sense that, you know, I spent probably 15, close to 15 years of my life working with and for him. There's a part of me that's very grateful to him for giving me the opportunity, giving us the opportunity on Tales and then going further with me on some of these other things. And then it all ended rather abruptly when he one day threatened I was coming back from Gosha in Australia. And he said, I have our next movie to do Gothica. And I said, well, no, I just got a call from Lorenzo the Bonaventura, who was running Warner Brothers at the time. And he said, look, we want. We want you to do bigger movies for us. I have three scripts I'm sending you. You can do any one of them. And I said, okay, well, I'm leaving Australia, but I'm going to Tahiti for a week, so I'll be back in 10 days. And he said, great. Read them and just tell them which one. Which one you want to do. Fifteen minutes later, I get a call from Joel, and he says to me, you know, you're doing Gothika, we're doing Gothika. And, you know, if not, you'll never work in this town again. And I'll make sure Warner Brothers, on and on and on, right out of Sunset Boulevard. And so I said to him, I'm not doing any more of these movies where I don't have a substantial ownership interest because he wouldn't give me ownership in the movies. And he totally blamed it on Bob. He said, well, the problem isn't with me. The problem is with Bob. Bob doesn't want you to have any ownership. And I said, are you kidding me? I know Bob better than I know you.
[00:49:14] Speaker B: That don't fly.
[00:49:15] Speaker C: I go up to his office at Universal because he has. He has. He gets deli sandwiches from Al's, and we have lunch and we just chat about stuff, you know, shows and what we like and what we don't like. So I said, this is not coming from Bob. This is coming from you. And then finally when I came back, I went over to his office. He was on a plane going to New York. So I said, okay, well, tell him I'm back and I want to continue the conversation we had last week. Because I said to him, joel, you know, there's no sense in arguing over the phone. I'll be back in a week and we'll sit down and we'll talk. You know, you're doing this movie. You're doing this movie. You don't. You. You call Lorenzo back and you tell him you're never. You're not doing anything for him. You do only work for me. So when I got back, he was on a plane. I went into his brand new office, which was used to be Dick Donners. And then when Dick left, they gave it to Joel. They redesigned it and remodeled it. Beautiful place.
[00:50:05] Speaker B: They turned it into a Frank Lloyd Wright palace.
[00:50:07] Speaker C: Yeah. And so they said. So I went in there, they said, oh, Joel's on a plane. I said, okay, just tell him I called. He should call me when he gets back in a week. Whenever I start walking to my car and they come running out of the office saying, come back, come back. We have Joel on the. On the phone, he's on the plane, and he just checked in. We told him he wants to talk to you right away. So I go in and they put me in his office, his brand new office. And I'm sitting at his desk talking to him on his phone, and he's screaming and yelling at me about how I don't care if you're back. I told you last week what it is you're doing, Gothica, and on and on. And I said, joel, the one thing you should know about me after 15 years is don't give me an ultimatum. If you give me an ultimatum, I'll tell you to go fuck yourself. So just don't do that. When you come back, we'll sit down and we'll talk it through. And he kept going. He kept going there and he kept saying, you have to say yes before I hang up. And finally got to the point, I said to him, I said, if you keep saying this to me, I'm going to tell you to go fuck yourself. And he did it one more time. And I just yelled into the phone, fuck you. And I smashed the phone down so hard, I broke the phone. I thought I broke my fist. And I walked out of there so heated and went to my car and just went home. That's sort of how it ended between Joel and myself. Because then thereafter, I started doing bigger pictures with Warner Brothers.
[00:51:23] Speaker A: For a run of years, Gil produced Warner Bros. Biggest tentpole movie, starsky and Hutch, 170 million at the box office. Constantine, starring Keanu Reeves and Rachel Wise, 231 million. Superman Returns, 391 million. And Valkyrie, which Gil made with Tom Cruise and Kenneth Branagh, good for another $231 million.
And then Gil stopped. We'll get to why.
Finally, there was me.
In hindsight, the Bordello experience set off something. It exacerbated a problem I didn't know I had at the time. Bipolarity and depression. As anyone who's ever experienced that darkness knows, depression robs you above all of perspective. You can be deep into one and not even know that's your problem. And if the deep down reason for the depression and everything that comes with it is, say, a. A secret you've denied, well, nothing good can come of that. For a while, I struggled. After a year of telling me to write something, for Pete's sake, and getting nothing, my manager, Alan Cassir, fired me too. I struggled some more until Scott Nimmerfro introduced me to the guy who'd be my agent for the next decade, Nick Mechanic. Nick's a podcast unto himself. But Nick believed in me. He got me onto the Outer Limits, where for two years, I thrived. Now, here's the thing. We made the Outer Limits up in Vancouver. When I returned to Vancouver in 1999 as a CO executive producer, people still remembered Bordello, and not in a nice way. I had to prove to quite a few of our crew that I wasn't then the same asshole I'd been on Bordello. The Outer Limits years were good, creatively and financially. Hell, and I started our family. Our son Tristan was born in Vancouver, and then Tristan's sister Bianca was born in Los Angeles. For a while, I contemplated getting naturalized up in Canada. That's where all the TV work was at the time. But my wife and kids weren't going to move with me to Vancouver. If I wanted a TV career, I'd have to fly to see my family on the weekends. I chose my family for almost the next 20 years. I stopped being a writer and producer and became a full time dad. Best gig I'll ever have, bar none. My son loved playing soccer and basketball, which I coached. Hell, I even started a whole club team for my son to play on. Even being a dad, I still had to do things big. Also, I coached a lot of Ultimate Frisbee, a great game that's entirely self officiating. This being Silver Lake and Highland Park. Among the players I coached in ultimate were Billie Eilish and her brother Phineas. For real, Phineas is very good. But my self loathing depression continued to feast on me. With me not working much anymore and expenses high, the money soon ran out. We lost our house, the one Tails bought for us. We went bankrupt. Three days before Christmas 2016, a month after Trump got elected, I came within literal inches of killing myself. Here's the public service part of the podcast. Immediately afterwards, I drove straight to my GP and I told him what had happened. I'd been contemplating medication, but frankly, it scared the shit out of me. I'd done some research and I'd found a mood stabilizer that I hoped would work for me. My GP whipped out his smartphone and concurred. He wrote the script. That night, I told my family what I intended to do. They were grateful I was finally doing something about it, because my self directed rage was doing everyone harm. And that's when I got really, really lucky. Within 36 hours of taking that first 25 milligram dose of lamotrigine, I leveled. I literally felt the depression lose its grip on me and I started to get healthy for the first time since. Since I was 14, it turns out. You see, I've been keeping a secret from myself that at 14 I was molested twice by the religious director at the synagogue in Northwest Baltimore where my family belonged.
Dealing with that 45 years after the fact was damned hard. But I came out the other side. Like I said, I bounced. I became born again. Not in a religious sense, in a life sense. I started to write again. Boy, did I. Suddenly my head was filled with stories. I started to tweet and blog. I started my Faithism Project podcast with my friend Randy Lovejoy. He's a Presbyterian pastor and I'm a devout Atheist. We have some really amazing conversations. You should check it out. And then one day, Ed Tapia called me. We'd been in communication all along, and Ed told me that Gil was sick. He had cancer, kidney. And so I reached for the phone.
[00:56:01] Speaker C: You know, when I was diagnosed with cancer, you called me, and that meant the world to me. I mean, you have no idea how much that meant to me. After all the time that we hadn't spoken, and out of the blue, I get you call me. And we had a nice conversation.
[00:56:19] Speaker B: We did.
[00:56:19] Speaker C: But then nothing happened after that. I sort of lost life for, like, 10 years as well, because I got involved with veterans. I got involved with this one young man who wrote a book called Fat Tuesday. And we were developing it and working on that, and then he flew to San Diego, San Antonio, and committed suicide.
So when I read in the New York Times that he had committed suicide, I just went into a tiff and just spiraled out of control.
And also questioned my interest and desire to help, or was I really helping anybody in terms of the veteran world? And so between the cancer and that, I just sort of, I guess, spiraled out of awareness of where I was for, like, many years.
[00:57:12] Speaker B: I hear you. I know how that can be. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And time suddenly gets. Gets lost when. When you're.
[00:57:20] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:57:21] Speaker B: When you're deep inside your own head, for whatever reason that you are deep inside your head. And until you resolve it, if you can resolve it one way or the other, you can. You can stay there.
[00:57:32] Speaker C: Well, I had no. I had no interest in making television or movies. I mean, I would get these calls from Warner Brothers about the tentpole pictures that I was. That I had been making for them, and I would just say, no. I mean, I wouldn't even explain. I would just say, I can't do that. I know it was. It was a very strange, you know, experience going through that.
Not. Not the same as what you went through. I think what you went through was even harder. But I didn't. I never quite understood. And years passed after that, and I. And I never, you know, understood why we didn't continue from that, why we didn't build something from that. I blame myself. You called me about the cancer.
[00:58:16] Speaker B: Well, you know, everything in its time.
[00:58:20] Speaker A: So I'm working on a bunch of film and TV projects, trying to reinvent myself. My current manager, Jeff Field, took me on as a. I kid you not, a reclamation project. I think through Twitter, I first made the acquaintance of Jason and the Dads from the Crypt podcast team. They review episodes of Tales from the Crypt and give parenting advice. It's genius. Jason wanted to interview me about a Crypt episode. I forget which. But the interview went great. And Jason said, hey, we're going to do a podcast about Bordello of Blood. Do you want to do another interview? And I said, well, Jason Bordello is more than just a. A one off interview. Bordell was more like a. A whole podcast unto itself.
And here we are getting back in touch with everyone. Gil especially, well, that produced the biggest twist of all.
[00:59:10] Speaker B: My mind is boggled by this, this podcast and how this podcast happened, the almost incidental way in which it suddenly came together and what doing this podcast has unleashed. I'm stunned, delighted. I could not be happier.
And to learn along the way that it's a story that really we all wanted to tell. Certain things have to happen for other things to happen. And I know in order for us to have to renew our relationship, I know I had to get past certain things. I couldn't start this until I was ready.
Now I'm ready, and more than ready. And look at what we're doing. As a result, we slip right back into a creative relationship. It's like we never left.
[01:00:02] Speaker C: It's true, and it's very gratifying.
[01:00:04] Speaker B: What really surprised me is when I told other people who were part of our circle that we were talking regularly. And that just thrilled people to know that we were talking again. Other people thought, well, that's good, it's about fucking time.
[01:00:19] Speaker C: We better do it now, because we don't have that much more time to.
[01:00:23] Speaker B: But at our back we always hear times Winged chariot hurrying near.
[01:00:27] Speaker A: Yes, life is so strange, so unpredictable. It's a lot like a really good movie. That's why it's worth sticking around. You just can't tell where it's going. And even when you think you've, you've got it all sussed, you don't.
[01:00:44] Speaker F: A couple of years ago, like six years ago, I called up Gil and I said, hey, you want to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Bordello Blood with me? And we had been invited by a local theater in Vancouver to screen it. It was actually the 20th anniversary and I had stayed in touch with Gil, but talking about Bordeaux Blood was kind of that subject we had never broached. You know, it was like one of those, like, let's just leave that behind us and have a new friendship, you know? And so I didn' talk to him about it. And then all of a sudden, this opportunity arose. The Rio theater in Vancouver, which is like this really amazing place that they pride themselves on. What do they call it? The experience you cannot download. And it's like, wow, they want to show the movie. And Gil lives here. We gotta do this. And so I invited Gil to come over and I believe he did a Q and A. Didn't you?
[01:01:33] Speaker C: Yeah, we. I did a Q. A little Q and A before and a big Q and A after.
[01:01:37] Speaker F: It was pretty cool. And you know, it's a fun movie with a crowd, especially if they're shit faced.
And the Rio does sell booze, so that helps.
And I think Ed snuck us some joints over the border. But anyway.
[01:01:53] Speaker A: That, believe it or not, blows our minds. Despite the soul crushing, relationship ending, career threatening process of making Bordello of Blood, the audience just doesn't care. Not one iota. Hey, you remember I mentioned coaching Ultimate Frisbee? Well, here's a funny twist that'll bring the whole concoction around. Like I said, ultimate self officiating. There are rules, but not a ton. And one day I needed to look up a rule, and so I went online to do it and I discovered something that also blew my mind. And I think it's gonna blow yours. Know who invented Ultimate Frisbee? Joel Silver. No shit. You can look it up.
There's just no escaping the guy.
On our next episode of the how not to Make a Movie podcast, the making of Bordello of Blood, the dads from the crypt finally get their turn. They have unanswered questions of their own, and they're gonna pose them to all the characters in this story. See you then.
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 from the Crypt podcast. Follow them for what my old pal the Crypt Keeper would have called terrorific crypt content.
