S4E8: Colman DeKay Knows EVERYBODY!

[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: You see, my darling, it works both ways. That's the curse. Downstairs, I'm too old and you're too young. Upstairs, I'm too young and you're too old. See? Much better. But Harlan forgot something. He forgot the people can make love on the stairs. [00:00:44] Speaker C: So are we, like, immortal? [00:00:48] Speaker B: Something like that. I thought I was gonna spend eternity alone. But now you're mine, right? On this step forever. [00:01:05] Speaker A: Where's the back door? [00:01:06] Speaker B: No, Clyde, upstairs. [00:01:10] Speaker A: This place got a fire escape? [00:01:13] Speaker B: So handsome and so dumb. [00:01:15] Speaker A: What? [00:01:16] Speaker B: Upstairs, Clyde. Nobody's looking for an old man. [00:01:22] Speaker A: Upstairs. [00:01:24] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm coming, Chef. [00:01:38] Speaker A: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the how not to Make a Movie podcast. I'm Alan Katz. Before we head off into the undiscovered country of this episode, I want to remind you that if you enjoy this podcast, whether on Spotify or Apple or any of the other podcast providers, or on our website or on our YouTube channel, it helps us reach more people. Every time you share your good feelings by hitting the like button. Algorithms, you know. And of course, you sharing us with the rest of the world, well, that's the best thing possible. Even algorithms understand what that means, and thank you in advance. So why do I say my friend Coleman Decay knows everyone? Because as you'll hear, he knows everyone. And he's so used to knowing everyone that he doesn't even realize that he knows everyone. As you'll also hear, Coleman doesn't drop names. They come up in conversation because he was just having a conversation with that person like he's having a conversation with you right now. It's been like that since Coleman was a kid. His family was involved in publishing in New York. His family's Manhattan living room was a non stop a list literary seller. Coleman became a talented writer himself. Screens small and large and of the stage. I first got to know Coleman when he wrote a handful of episodes for us. It tells from the Crypt, among Coleman's episodes, in the Groove, Fatal Caper, and an Absolute classic, Stared in Horror, which Coleman wrote with occasional writing partner Teller from Penn and Teller. It's a great episode because of the writing and because we somehow put a whole Louisiana swamp on our stage in Los Angeles. But the writing inspired us. Something about that part of the world, Southern Louisiana, the swamps around there, New Orleans especially, has a powerful hold on Coleman. He's been working out how to tell its story for a couple of years now. It's time we told his story. We've known each other quite, quite a long time. [00:03:45] Speaker C: Thirty years, I think, since Crypt. [00:03:49] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Your path to tells from the crypt. It started. Remind me if I. I think you grew up in New York City. [00:04:02] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Huh. [00:04:04] Speaker A: City kid. What part of the city did you grow up in? [00:04:06] Speaker C: Midtown Manhattan. Nintendo Manhattan. And I think the path to crypt was through Teller, because it will. [00:04:16] Speaker A: But. But we'll. We'll come to Teller, but let's. [00:04:18] Speaker C: Okay, let's. [00:04:19] Speaker A: Let's. Let's go back a little further and. Okay, into. So your dad was a book publisher. [00:04:28] Speaker C: My dad was a publisher. My mom was an English professor. [00:04:31] Speaker A: And so your dad published one particularly successful line of books. [00:04:40] Speaker C: Well, he published the Atkins Diet, which was towards the end of his life. But in the 70s and 80s, he published my favorite writer, Who's Donald Westlake. [00:04:51] Speaker A: Oh, gosh. Oh, okay. These are things I wanted to know. So. All right. I knew about the Atkins, but your. [00:04:57] Speaker C: Dad also published Donald Westlake, like, 20 of his books or something like that. And one of my greatest memories as a kid was he would come home with this, you know, ream paper box that had Don's. The carbon of Don's latest manuscript. Right. Because that was only two copies, the original and the manuscript. And we would sit on the couch next to each other. He would have the bottom of the box in his lap. I would have the. The top of the box next to me. He'd read a page, hand it to me. I turn it over, put it in the box. So we were the first people to read Don's new book. And that was just. That happened 20 times, and it was the greatest thing. And my parents used to have cocktail parties for the authors at our apartment. And there would be people like James Baldwin would be there, and Norman Mailer would be there, and Don would be there. And as a kid, I'd rush past all these really important people and. And find Don at the window and just, like, bend his ear for. Until he got sick of this little pish. So that was. That was pretty. [00:06:07] Speaker A: You grew up in. In an environment where words were really, really important. [00:06:13] Speaker C: Yeah, they were kind of the fifth member of our family. Six member of our family. Yeah. [00:06:19] Speaker A: So writing was a. Writers were. Were looked at in your house in a very particular way. [00:06:28] Speaker C: Well, we used. I used to have this deal with my parents where I always wanted to watch tv. And so we made a deal that for every page of something that I wrote, I would get a half an hour of tv. And so I'd sort Of on a rainy weekend, I'd like lock myself in the room and just write 30 pages. And I'd go like, okay, 15 hours. [00:06:52] Speaker A: But all right, right off the bat, that's quite remarkable because for the rest of us, it was pages that we had read or said we had read, which is a very easy thing to fake unless the other person has read it. So none of us were required to actually put out a page of. What were you expected to write? [00:07:14] Speaker C: Well, just whatever I wanted. You know, I would write these, like, ripping yarns, adventure stories and like ridiculous comedies and whatever. But my. The book that I revered the most was a book by Alan Sherman, if you remember him. Sure. The. The. The comic songwriter. [00:07:37] Speaker A: Hello mother. Hello, Father. [00:07:38] Speaker C: Hello, Mother. Hello, Father. And when the Painters Come Marching in, there's another one. But the reason I love that book is that I took a razor and cut out, like the interior of the book. Like 50 pages of the interior of the book. And that's where I hid my weed. Because I figured nobody would pull an Alan Sherman book off the shelf. [00:08:03] Speaker A: I'm sorry for Alan. [00:08:05] Speaker C: At the end of the day. [00:08:07] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the last book anybody would suspect of anything. Stay it on that shelf, guys. Wow. Where did you go to school? [00:08:17] Speaker C: I went to this very eccentric boarding school called St. Bernard's which I didn't realize how eccentric it was until they started sending me DVDs of, you know, the way it Is Now. And I was like, that's nuts. Where in seventh grade grade, a friend of mine and I decided we wanted to learn Greek. And so we found. We like pitched our Latin teacher and he said, yeah, I know a little Greek. And so we would stay after after school for like an hour a week to learn Greek, but it was. It was nuts. And then I went to this very hoity toity boarding school called Exeter in New Hampshire until they kick. Until they kicked me out. [00:09:09] Speaker A: What'd you do? [00:09:12] Speaker C: Nothing. I hung around. They all say I hung around with stoners. Right. And I had already. I had already stopped smoking weed by the time I was 13 because I didn't like it. But the dean called me into his office and he said, we suspect you smoke marijuana. And I said, well, actually I don't. And he goes, if you look like a duck and you act like a duck and you hang around with ducks, people are going to think you're a duck. And so I went and they didn't invite me back. So then I went to this Quaker school in Pennsylvania called George School, which was great. It was like being let out of prison. And that was where I also got a teacher to teach something that was off the curriculum, off the menu. I wanted to read Ulysses, and I went to the English department. I said, is there anybody in the English department that knows Ulysses? And they said, yeah, this. This one guy is a Joyce expert. And I said, well, would he. Would he teach me? And I said. He said, well, if you get 20 other kids. So I. I turned into Tom Sawyer, you know, whitewashing the fence. I went to all my friends, and I said, it's just one book. One book all semester, and we get a credit. And so I got them. [00:10:34] Speaker A: You. You did not give them a clue as to what that book was? [00:10:36] Speaker C: What that book was? No, I said, it's. It's. I don't know what it is. I haven't read it. So that was good. [00:10:44] Speaker A: And. Okay, so you read Ulysses. You had this terrific class on Ulysses. How. How did that go? It's a great book to have a single class on. My God. [00:10:55] Speaker C: Right, Right. And the. They weren't lying. I mean, this. This guy, Ken Keskinen, really was a Joyce expert. And. And so he. He had great insight into the book. [00:11:07] Speaker A: That must have been an awesome educational experience. I am. I'm sick with envy. [00:11:13] Speaker C: It was pretty fun, I'm sure. And we also. That year, we also had mock elections. It was a presidential year. It was 72, I guess. And there was this guy named Scoop Jackson running, and each history class got to pick a candidate, and my class picked Scoop Jackson, and we had to hire some or get somebody from the class to be that candidate to get up on stage and make a speech. And so we picked the biggest slob we could find in the class and wrote a speech saying something like, I ain't no dirty T shirt. I ain't no fat man's toy. This was, like, what his speech was. It was pretty. It was a great school. Great, wonderful school. And then I went to Colgate, upstate New York, which was very, very cold. [00:12:13] Speaker A: It's terrific that you had the experience with Ulysses, basically, as a high school. [00:12:19] Speaker C: Student at, like, what would I have been, like, 17, 18, something like that? [00:12:24] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That wasn't a college class. That was before college. [00:12:28] Speaker C: Right, right. And then. Yeah, and then I went to Colgate, where I met this guy, this very, very eccentric student who it turned out, was the world's, or at least the American authority, number one authority on Finnegan's wake, and he was a student at Colgate. [00:12:50] Speaker A: So now that's. That's an impenetrable book. I know. [00:12:56] Speaker C: I know. It's impossible. It's. If Ulysses. Ulysses is a coloring book compared to Finnegan's Wake. [00:13:03] Speaker A: I heard. I read a theory. Excuse me, A theory once. That part of the issue at hand with Finnegan's Wake was that it was all typed in Paris by French typists who were trying to read the scribble. Scrabble in the margins of the manuscript. [00:13:25] Speaker C: Right. I believe that. [00:13:27] Speaker A: And at times it was incredibly hard to read. And so some of what might be that book's impenetrability is. Is a mechanical problem. [00:13:42] Speaker C: Right, I'm sure. I'm sure. And then Joyce probably said, oh, it's fine. [00:13:46] Speaker A: You know, hey, there's that. Yeah. I remember once picking it up and. And leaving through it and just. Nah. [00:14:00] Speaker C: Right. My friend Ken Kwapus just read it recently, and he. He considers it one of the signature achievements of his life. Not. Not. Sorry, not Finnegan's Wake. Ulysses. And it took him a year to get through it. He said, I'm very proud of myself. I got maybe three pages a day, which is kind of a lot. [00:14:22] Speaker A: It is a dense read. [00:14:25] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. But funny as hell. [00:14:28] Speaker A: Yeah. I have not read much of it. I've read parts of it and, you know, all the Molly Bloom parts of the story, but whenever I've. The parts of it that I've read the detail of just that day in. [00:14:47] Speaker C: The life, one day. Oh, right. [00:14:50] Speaker A: It's just so rich. It's. Yeah, it's just a remarkable creative achievement. [00:14:58] Speaker C: And so. Well, Ken was so proud of himself when he finished it that he. He took his wife to Dublin and they did the. The Leopold Bloom tour themselves. Yeah. [00:15:13] Speaker A: How. How cool. How cool. How cool. [00:15:16] Speaker C: I know. [00:15:18] Speaker A: All right, so what got you from New York and being an east coast guy, out to the West Coast? [00:15:27] Speaker C: Well, I was in. I went to Santa Fe for what was supposed to be a week. Right. And then Gov got involved with this woman and we got engaged. [00:15:42] Speaker A: Okay, what. What year is this? [00:15:45] Speaker C: This is like 1980. [00:15:47] Speaker A: 1980. [00:15:48] Speaker C: Okay. And. But it soon became obvious that she wasn't ever going to leave Santa Fe and I wasn't ever going to stay in Santa Fe, so that wasn't going to work. So it was at this point, August, and it was blistering hot in New York. It was like 1500 miles to. To New York and only like a thousand miles to here. And there was a ride. Somebody was driving out here, so I said, okay. So I came out here knowing one person. [00:16:22] Speaker A: All right, so you you arrive in LA simply because you had a ride headed in this direction. [00:16:28] Speaker C: That's right. That's right. [00:16:29] Speaker A: All right, when you arrive, how. How do you. What did you do first? How did you set up shop? What was your. What was your. What was what? Well, how old are you at this time? [00:16:39] Speaker C: 24 something. [00:16:41] Speaker A: All right, so you're 24 and you know one person. So you're sleeping on that person's couch more. [00:16:45] Speaker C: Right. And then I joined this theater group, figuring I have to make as many friends as I can as fast as I can because I don't know how to drive. And so I'm going to need people to drive me around. Wow. [00:17:03] Speaker A: You made it so hard. And back in the. Back in the 80s, this was not the easiest town to get around without a card, if I recall. Right. That was pre Uber and Lyft, as you recall. [00:17:15] Speaker C: Right. [00:17:15] Speaker A: It was like 40 years. Yeah. [00:17:19] Speaker C: But somebody. Some. Somebody sold me his 1970 Plymouth Duster for 400 bucks. And it came with a rotisserie and a set of golf clubs in the trunk. And so I didn't. [00:17:37] Speaker A: They all. [00:17:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's. It was a standard. Was standard with it. But I parked it in my driveway where I'd have to look at it every day, and it would just shame me into learning how to drive it. And so I had some friends. [00:17:51] Speaker A: What color was. [00:17:51] Speaker C: It was white. [00:17:54] Speaker A: Okay. All right. [00:17:55] Speaker C: All right. And so I had people drive. Get me to drive around the Pacific Design center parking lot until I got it. [00:18:08] Speaker A: It's like how I taught my kids. But it wasn't there. It was at one of the cemeteries. Right. If they bumped into something, they wouldn't kill anybody. [00:18:16] Speaker C: Just knock over a tombstone. But so that I finally got so ashamed of that that I got a stick Mustang, which I also didn't know how to drive. [00:18:31] Speaker A: You just made it harder for yourself. [00:18:33] Speaker C: I was figuring my next. My next thing would be a helicopter. Right. But so what we finally did was we hauled the duster into the backyard and took a sawzall and sliced off the top. Right. So it was just engine trunk and passenger section with the roof sawed off and turned it into a planter. It stayed for like eight years. [00:19:07] Speaker A: That's hilarious. [00:19:08] Speaker C: It was. It was, well, recycling. [00:19:14] Speaker A: Okay. [00:19:15] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:19:16] Speaker A: So. All right, so now. So you decided that you liked la. [00:19:20] Speaker C: I liked la. I came as a baby actor and was hired for this show called Happy Days, as in a recurring role. But then we immediately went on strike. And so you got hired to be on Happy Days? Yeah, I Never was on it. [00:19:40] Speaker A: But oh my God, imagine if there hadn't been a strike though. Your whole career path could have been completely, completely different. [00:19:48] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:19:49] Speaker A: Oh my God, that's, that's crazy. That's nuts. [00:19:53] Speaker C: But so I, in that time I wrote a letter to the LA Times which they published as an article and somebody from California Magazine read it and brought me in to be their theater critic for some reason. And so I, that was my first journalism job and that it was, you know, the print community, which doesn't exist anymore, was, was, you know, small and especially the, the theater criticism part of the community. And so, you know, I got jobs all over town writing for the Times and the LA Weekly and the late lamented Herald Examiner. Yeah. And so that was. That sort of took over and the. [00:20:44] Speaker A: Next thing you know, you are a writer instead, apparently. [00:20:48] Speaker C: Yeah, but my, my favorite thing that I wrote for them was had. Was not a piece of Theater Cruises. I wrote for the Weekly. This. They. I had a friend who was, who worked in the prison system and he was directing a production of 12 Angry Men which in, in some juvie place in Chino, which was going to be the first prison production that was open to the public. So it was kind of a big deal. And so I went through all the auditions and the rehearsals and the performance. And I remember during the auditions, you know, all these kids would come up and do their bit and there was one guy who was pretty good and in the table meeting afterwards, they were going through the auditions and got to that kid and they went, nah, nah, nah, I don't, I don't think so. And I said, no, it was pretty good. Well, why not? And he said, my friend Peter said, because anytime he's on stage, everybody in the audience will start barking. And I said, why? And he said, because he's in for fucking all the dogs in his neighborhood. I don't know. So. [00:22:07] Speaker A: Oh gosh. Oh man. Of all the reasons not to get somebody, Right? [00:22:13] Speaker C: Exactly. I mean, these, some of these kids were murdered. [00:22:15] Speaker A: It's in your contract, man. [00:22:16] Speaker C: You can't. [00:22:17] Speaker A: All the dogs in the neighborhood. [00:22:18] Speaker C: That's right. What are you thinking? But so the article came out and I told that story in the article and about a month later I heard that the kid was suing the, the LA Weekly and the California prison system on the. His. His argument was it was just one dog. [00:22:43] Speaker A: So it's the S. Yes, it's the, it's the letter S. He was suing. [00:22:49] Speaker C: Over the letter S. So. Yeah. [00:22:53] Speaker A: Oh, that's very Funny. Now, your path to Crypt, you said earlier, Teller kind of was part of that. How did your relationship with Teller begin? [00:23:06] Speaker C: All right. I interviewed them for the Weekly when they were first arriving in la, and it was the first article about them that ever came out in California. And I remember I asked Teller, not having seen the show, I said, is your show scary? And Teller said, well, I think there are parts of Bambi that are much more terrifying than our show. And he was right. And so we just sort of became friends. And I don't know, they were. They were. They used to do this seance, which was a private thing with a maximum of eight guests, right? And I said, why? Why just eight? And he said, well, we want to keep it small, and we want to. We have to charge a lot, so we can not have to play frats. And I said, well, how much do you charge? And they said, 500 bucks. That was. That was their going rate at the time. And so a couple months later, it was my friend. My friend Amanda Plummer was doing a show at the La Jolla Playhouse, and it was her birthday coming up. And I said, I'll make you a trade. I'm not going to pay you the 500 bucks, but if you come down to La Jolla and do a seance, I'll do a piece about. About it for the Weekly and maybe you get some gigs. And so they came down and we held it in the trap Room under the stage at the Loyal Playhouse. And they were very, very stern, their. Their performance Personas, where they were very stern and very angry with each other at the beginning, right? And people came in, including John Goodman and people like that. And they. They locked the door. And I said, wait a minute. This is for Amanda, and she's not here. And Pen said, I don't care. She's late. So Amanda didn't even get to see the thing. But the whole bit was we were in this tight little space around this table, and Penn and Teller were above us doing a card trick that they. That Teller blew, right? He blew the. The punchline, and Penn started screaming at him. And the whole idea was to make us as uncomfortable as possible. And, yeah, so that was. That was part of the. Part of getting to know them. And then, as I mentioned, go Teller is. [00:25:41] Speaker A: Because I've had the pleasure of working with Teller and having meals with Teller and conversations with Teller. First of all, he can talk. [00:25:51] Speaker C: Yes, he can. [00:25:52] Speaker A: And he is an incredibly articulate man. He is. To call him. To call him bright. He is incredibly. Yeah, smart. Well read, really well thought out. He's, he's really quite a lot of. [00:26:13] Speaker C: Fun, just, and, and a gentleman. Perfect gentleman. Yeah. [00:26:16] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh, he is so well mannered. He's just, he's a lovely, lovely person. He's, he's almost angelic in the, in a way and yet, and, and yet, and yet so cruel. [00:26:31] Speaker C: Well, okay, I got two stories to tell you about my early encounters with them. One is they asked me to, they had this ABC special called Phobophilia that they were working on, which means Love of fear. And they asked me to put together a script based on a bunch of their bits. And so I did and we sent it to Standards and Practices, which is at Fox, which is like one lady, right? And she was so appalled by the script that she said there have to be like page one changes to this. And we went, why? And she said, well, look at this and pointed to a page which was a bit about the Three Stooges as carpenters with a table saw. Right? So you know that's going to be trouble when it's in Penn and Teller's hands. And of course, somebody gets his arm cut off or his hand cut off and holds it up. And as I said in the script, blood spews high and hard over the audience. [00:27:37] Speaker A: We can't do that. [00:27:39] Speaker C: And so ultimately they passed on the show, which we eventually filmed and showed in England. But after this happened, a friend of ours was at Fox and she walked by the sensor's office, right, and poked her head in just to see who this person was, right? And it turned out it was like, like this little old lady with, you know, silver hair and big glasses. And above her desk was that poster of the cat hanging by its claws from a branch. And it said, hang in there, baby. So we knew what kind of cornball person this was. [00:28:24] Speaker A: Oh, dear, oh dear. [00:28:26] Speaker C: All right. [00:28:27] Speaker A: It's like I, I grew up in Maryland, and Maryland was, I think, one of the last states to have a film board, a state board of film sensors. And the, the woman who ran it was this little, little teeny Catholic lady named Mary. [00:28:44] Speaker C: They always are. [00:28:45] Speaker A: Yeah, they, they, they, they, they seem to find that job. And, and Mary Avera was notoriously humorless and she was a, a preachy, preachy little cow. And God, of course, one of the people who, whose films did not pass muster with her was the Baltimore's John Waters. [00:29:14] Speaker C: Ah, okay. [00:29:15] Speaker A: And, oh, I, I, I, There were, there were funny pitched battles where those films. And the point was to when Pink Flamingos was put in front of her. The point was to make her uncomfortable as hell. That was the point, was not to get past because it was never going to happen. It was, it was to know how horrible an experience it was going to be for her to watch that movie through to the. When Divine picks up the dog and eats it in one shot. So, yeah, film sensors, man, they, they, they get what's coming to them. [00:29:53] Speaker C: Right? [00:29:54] Speaker A: It may be coming, they may be coming to us, but yeah, a conversation for another podcast. [00:30:01] Speaker C: Well, just the smart thing to do is to put in something that's so egregious that, you know, it's, it's going to grab their attention and it's not going to pass and then put in the thing you really want in. So they, they skip over that. Right. So you could have this big argument about something that you never intended to put in the movie. [00:30:21] Speaker A: Yeah, the guy doesn't. Dogs, he just one dog. [00:30:25] Speaker C: Right, right, exactly, exactly. [00:30:29] Speaker A: So you begin this relationship with Pen to Teller and Teller and working with them creatively, and you get it into your heads. You guys approached us to do an episode. Wasn't that how it worked? [00:30:44] Speaker C: Yes. We had a pitch for some evil Santa thing. And you and Gil said, oh, we don't really do Santa stuff. Or maybe it was a vampire thing. And they said, we don't do vampire. You said, we don't do vampire stuff. So I said, well, wait a minute, here's an idea that Mick Garris and I had sketched that teeny tiny little kernel of an idea like years before. And so Teller and I left the first meeting with you guys, which was the we don't do vampires, and went to some coffee shop in Toluca Lake and wrote a thing on his laptop. Wrote a treatment on his laptop. And this was before real Internet, but they had some kind of a modem in the back of the restaurant that we could plug into. So we, we plugged into it and sent it to you guys that afternoon. So that was good. Yeah. [00:31:45] Speaker A: And that probably evolved into the episode Stared in Horror, which was the first one that you and Teller. Right. Wrote. [00:31:53] Speaker C: Right. [00:31:54] Speaker A: Which was, which is a terrific episode. [00:31:56] Speaker C: And an amazing production. I mean, I came on the set, it's set in a. In an old southern New Orleans, Louisiana mansion plantation. In a swamp. [00:32:07] Speaker A: In a swamp. [00:32:08] Speaker C: And you guys didn't just build a facade, you built a mansion and surrounded it with an actual swamp. [00:32:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:32:17] Speaker C: I was like a two story mansion because that was important to the plot. Yeah. [00:32:22] Speaker A: And it was practical. On the other side. [00:32:25] Speaker C: Right. It was, it was unbelievable. [00:32:28] Speaker A: One of the things that, that this was a, a testament to Greg Melton's sheer genius and Stephen Hopkins, who directed the episode, his, his ability to, yeah, to think on his feet, but to understand how to, to make the audience think it's this when really you're just shooting this little teeny piece. So. [00:32:48] Speaker C: Right. [00:32:49] Speaker A: You make them feel the grandeur. But you've only shot a teeny piece. So yes, there, there, there was even a chase through the swamp. And you feel like there's a chase through the swamp. But man, we shot it in a narrow little space of studio. [00:33:07] Speaker C: Right, but. And nobody's going to realize that you're running through the same bull rushes six times. [00:33:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and then to cap it all off, when he arrives, we did a mattress painting shot. Really cool old fashioned matte painting shot. So that really the camera was set at the far edges of the, of where we could shoot on the stage. And we basically drew, you know, the black. We blocked out a lot of the exterior that we, you know, that we, you know, we didn't want the camera to see. And we just saw what we had on stage, which was this swamp, swamp and the house. And then we surrounded that black in, in the process with swamp, with more swamp. And so it looks like, yeah, we're sitting in the middle of a swamp. [00:33:56] Speaker C: Right. [00:33:56] Speaker A: When really it's, it's, it's all smoke and mirrors. [00:34:00] Speaker C: Right, of course. [00:34:02] Speaker A: But yes, so the, the episode was about a, A, a guy, he's an escape prisoner. Ends up at this old mansion in the middle of the swamp. There seems to be an old lady and a young, attractive young girl living. [00:34:20] Speaker C: Well, first he meets the old lady. [00:34:22] Speaker A: Indeed. [00:34:23] Speaker C: And he thinks I can knock, knock her over with no problem. Right. And so he's thinking about, she goes to get him a drink or a cup of tea or something like that, and, and he's plotting her demise. And all of a sudden he hears this young voice from upstairs and he goes, at the top of the stairs is a beautiful woman. And over time she explains that her husband during the civil War had caught. Come home early and caught her cheating and put a curse on her that whenever she was at the bottom of the stairs she was ancient and so could never leave the, the mansion. But when she went to the top of the stairs, she became young. Yes. And so the, the young woman at the top of the stairs, they have this seductive banter and he, he tries to run up the stairs and she stops him and says, you're gonna get old because it's a reverse thing for anybody else. So we have to meet in the middle and somehow she disappears. Meanwhile, the, The. [00:35:36] Speaker A: The sheriff, the cops are still looking for. [00:35:39] Speaker C: Right. [00:35:39] Speaker A: With. [00:35:40] Speaker C: With a. With dogs and stuff. And it's the south after all. That's right. AR Lee Ermey was the cop. [00:35:47] Speaker A: Yes, he was. [00:35:49] Speaker C: And so to escape the, The. The cop and the dogs, he runs up into the attic and the. The big blow off is that you see that he's become like 150 years old. [00:36:04] Speaker A: And it was D.B. sweeney was the. The convict and Rachel Ticketon was the. [00:36:09] Speaker C: That's right. Was the girl. [00:36:11] Speaker A: The old woman and the. And the pretty girl. [00:36:13] Speaker C: Right. And it was. For its time. It was amazing. Makeup age makeup. [00:36:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody was firing full on. On all eight cylinders for this baby. [00:36:26] Speaker C: That's great. It was really fun. It was amazing to see it because I didn't see any of it until it aired. And it was a revelation. I was like, wow. [00:36:38] Speaker A: It was one of those shows where damned if we didn't do a lot with a little. [00:36:42] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. That's right. Because your budget had been cut back a lot. Right. By. [00:36:48] Speaker A: Yes, it had been. Because we had succeeded at. At the number that we succeeded. So they figured, well, if you can succeed at that, you truly. You can succeed at this number too. [00:36:58] Speaker C: Right. [00:36:59] Speaker A: So we were punished for succeeding. [00:37:02] Speaker C: Right. [00:37:03] Speaker A: As one sometimes. As one frequently is in this fucking town. [00:37:08] Speaker C: Right. [00:37:10] Speaker A: You. The experience wasn't so well. Once you, You. You got onto our radar, we kind of used you, and I'll use the word used to. [00:37:22] Speaker C: I was happy to be used to. [00:37:24] Speaker A: Rewrite a couple of other projects that. That same season you did a. A rewrite of in the Groove, which. [00:37:31] Speaker C: Right. Which was about a Howard Stern kind of shock jock who plans a murder that goes terribly wrong. As I remember, Mel Ferrera played, Played the. Miguel. Miguel. [00:37:42] Speaker A: I'm sorry, Miguel Ferrer. Miguel Ferreria. No, Miguel Ferrer. That's his. And you also rewrote one called Surprise Party, right. [00:37:55] Speaker C: About a. A guy who kills his dad. Right. For the. [00:38:01] Speaker A: Jake Busey. Yeah. Was the character. It was an Elliot Silverstein script. [00:38:06] Speaker C: Right. Cat Ballou. I'm sorry. [00:38:11] Speaker A: Yes. Elliot got the. Yes, he. He won an Oscar for Cat Balloon. [00:38:15] Speaker C: Right. [00:38:15] Speaker A: He also directed A Man Called Horse. He directed a lot of episodes of Tales from the Crypt. But he was a very difficult director to work with only because he was very demanding about that. The script. Elliot stepped onto the set with the whole thing cut in his Head already. He knew exactly what he wanted. He didn't need anything else. And so he wanted the script to reflect what was in his head just so we weren't wasting anyone's time shooting stuff that we weren't going to ever need or use. It just wasn't going to make. He, he knew it. He knew what the cut was. [00:38:50] Speaker C: Right. [00:38:50] Speaker A: And so I don't remember if, if we put, if we, we, we attached you to Elliot's hip or was that still one of my, that was your job. [00:39:00] Speaker C: But, but I think you gave me very specific notes saying the director, the director needs it. This way, this way, this way, this way. [00:39:08] Speaker A: Yeah, Elliot was very super particular, but hey, you know, he, he won an Oscar and I didn't, so. [00:39:18] Speaker C: That's right. [00:39:19] Speaker A: Shut up. Then you were one of you, you wrote one of the episodes that we took to England of Fatal Caper, which Bob Hoskins directed. [00:39:29] Speaker C: Right. And, and starred in. [00:39:31] Speaker A: He had a small. Pardon. Natasha Richardson, a last. Yeah. Who. Man, that was an unfortunate, that was unfortunate. [00:39:41] Speaker C: Yeah. You guys must have been shocked. [00:39:44] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:39:44] Speaker C: Having worked with her heart. [00:39:47] Speaker A: Heartbreaking, crushing. Oh my God, what a terrible thing to happen to a nice person. [00:39:50] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. [00:39:53] Speaker A: But I, I think by, by that time, I, I, I think that that seventh season, I, I've never think I looked at that episode once after we, we made it, just because I, I've never watched really any of the episodes we shot in England because by then I know I was completely out of gas on that show and I felt like I just wasn't delivering, I wasn't doing my job. [00:40:19] Speaker C: Did you do the whole season in London? [00:40:21] Speaker A: Oh, God, yeah. We did the whole season in England. [00:40:23] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:40:24] Speaker A: The, the, the best part of shooting in, well, the reason that we shot that we took it to England was because after shooting Bordello of Blood in Vancouver, which was a you to the Ia, our union, we continued the you to the union by not shooting the last season of Crypt in la. Continuing to take it away from our union, our crew. [00:40:49] Speaker C: Right. [00:40:50] Speaker A: And we took it to London instead. Now, it wasn't a, it wasn't a terrible idea. Certainly shooting Crypt in London was a better idea than shooting Bordello of Blood in Vancouver. [00:40:59] Speaker C: Right. [00:41:00] Speaker A: But shooting it in London gave us the opportunity to. Hey, you want to put a show in a castle, huh? The problem that we faced was that they shoot things differently there for very specific reasons. And we came over without adjusting our production model, which was, you know, three days, two days out and three days in, because we built a lot right well, we built a lot in LA because it's cheap to build stuff. It's not so cheap to build stuff in England. You know, wood, for instance, really expensive. So you don't build a lot of things with wood. [00:41:45] Speaker C: Well, you got castles, you got castles. [00:41:47] Speaker A: So you go to locations a lot. But getting to these places, that's where you're going to be shooting all day. Don't be thinking you're going to shoot two places in one day, because you cannot get around that country with a film unit anywhere near fast enough to do such a thing. So our whole model was completely thrown on its head. And our production manager, the first one that we hired, a very nice man who had done a show, an American show about. Oh, God, like, medieval show, with it by American producers. And he had been the, you know, the. The local line guy. And he assured us that he had everything in hand and he had nothing in hand. He did not. He was so afraid of offending anybody that he led us down multiple terrible garden paths that we had no business on. At the end of the day, he was the first person I ever had to fire in my entire life. I. That was. That was not fun. But he was so happy to go. And then I had to fire the accountant who he had hired because she had no idea where we were, and that was hard because she begged to keep her job. Like, oh, my God, that was horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible. [00:43:06] Speaker C: And that. That was midstream. You had to fire them or. [00:43:10] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But then we hired a guy named Dominic Fulford and he, He. He fixed. Set us a right, and we got our asses through the rest of the season, but it was. It was. It should have been so much fun doing that, doing the Crypt there. It was. It was fun being there. It was not fun doing the show there, and that was no one's fault but our own. [00:43:37] Speaker C: Because you came in with the US Model. Right. [00:43:40] Speaker A: Because we just didn't. We didn't think about it. Be like, you just transplant it from this, from this, from there to here. [00:43:48] Speaker C: Right, right. [00:43:50] Speaker A: Stupid tourists. Dumb American tourists, you know, Anyway, but so after Tales from the Crypt, there. There was life. You. Where. Where did you go after Tales from the Crypt? Now, we worked on a series with. With Penn and Teller, but that went to nothing. So forget about that. [00:44:13] Speaker C: Right. Well, when it's cool stuff. Well, I made a movie called Bloodhounds of Broadway, which had an amazing cast at the time, including, you know, Madonna and. [00:44:24] Speaker A: Yeah, an amazing cast. Bloodhounds. I mean, good God, what a Where did that project come from? [00:44:32] Speaker C: There was this show called American Playhouse on pbs. And I met. Reconnected with a high school friend who was visiting LA to. To meet with some people. And we met at another high school friend's house. And he said. So I had this deal with. This deal that American Playhouse wants to do something with me. But I've pitched them two things that they thought were really disgusting. And what did they think was disgusting? [00:45:08] Speaker A: Why would that be the. Their response to a project that you pitched them? [00:45:11] Speaker C: Some Stephen King thing where a kid shoots up a classroom and then William Burroughs, junkie. You know, it's not really. Okay. Not really in their wheelhouse. And. And so how were you thinking his thing. He had done a. A brilliant. A documentary biography of Burroughs. Of William Burroughs. And so they were good friends. In fact, he. He scored for Burroughs a bunch of time in Alphabet City. And one time he. He was. I guess there was. They were selling smack out of this little basement room, right? In a abandoned building, right? And so he's in there with these people who are shooting up while he's there trying to get the. Trying to score. And there's about to be a raid. And so they slam down all the windows and doors and stuff, and they're stuck in there. And Howard said that all these jerkies started, like, turning their eyes to him, going, like, who's this guy who seems pretty healthy who's here just at the moment the cops jump. Jump in. Is he part of them? And so he was like, you know, they better leave. These cops had better leave soon or I'm going to die, right? And they did. And there was another time when Burroughs said. When Howard went out to score for him. And Burrow said, I'm coming with you. And Howard. Howard said, bill, no, you. You really shouldn't. He goes, I'm coming with you. And so he gets. He packs, he get. Puts on this long coat so he can look like a bandit in his mind. And puts this gun inside the coat. This is William Burrows, if you can picture. Just imagine him. And so Howard. They're eloping down the street with Burroughs on his cane and stuff, feeling like a badass. And they're about a block from the pickup joint. And Howard goes, bill, you know, why don't you wait in this drugstore here? I'll be right back. And Bill went, all right. So you didn't actually go in for the score. But anyway, so Howard said, I think I have one more good meeting with them before they decide I'm completely crazy. Do you have any ideas? And I said, well, you know, you could pick up this William Cancella book or you could do this or do that, and while you're at it, why don't you get some Damon Runyon? And he said, okay, I'll do that. And so I figured I'd get some Damon Runyon too. So I went into this local bookstore and bought the last copy of a collection of stories called Bloodhounds of Broadway. And. And Howard walked in, apparently like 15 minutes later and asked for the book. And they said, oh, we just sold the last one. And Howard said, yeah, and I know who you sold it to, but. But eventually we. We got together and we decided to. To blend four short stories and. And, you know, said it all in one night and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was a. [00:48:34] Speaker A: It may. Really amazing cast. You mentioned Madonna, but. All right. Joseph Summer, Jennifer Gray, Tony Ozito, Rutger Hauer, Matt Dillon, Anita Morris, Alan Ruck, Dina Manoff, Randy Quay, Julie Haggerday, Issei Morales, Fisher Stevens. God. Amazing. Just amazing names. And I'm leaving out a bunch, right? Steve Buscemi. [00:49:05] Speaker C: Huh? [00:49:07] Speaker A: Holy cow. Who? Everyone. Johnny Crawford. [00:49:13] Speaker C: And Burroughs played a Ruckler. [00:49:16] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, wow. Just an amazing, amazing cast. What happened? [00:49:22] Speaker C: It was made under three regiments at Columbia. [00:49:28] Speaker A: Oh, boy. [00:49:30] Speaker C: By the third one, they had no idea what it was. They cut our editing budget and it wasn't the movie that we wanted to make, and blah, blah, blah. And I could tell very ugly stories, but I won't. But, yeah, I mean, I. I remember going in for Howard at this point had passed away from aids, and so I. I went in for a marketing meeting with the Columbia execs, and they said, oh, we could run an ad or two in the Times, but, you know, TV advertising really doesn't mean anything. It doesn't bring anybody in. And I want. Oh, that's why you spend millions and billions of dollars on it. But I did get a lifelong friend out of that who was the head of publicity, whose name was Mark Gill. And I. I used to introduce him as the only person at Columbia who never lied to me. So we've been friends since then. [00:50:29] Speaker A: It's good to have a friend or two like. Like that. [00:50:32] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, he's great. He's great. [00:50:35] Speaker A: You've. You have an affinity for New Orleans. [00:50:38] Speaker C: I do, I do. [00:50:41] Speaker A: Where. Where did you. Where did your affinity for Nolan's originate? [00:50:46] Speaker C: During Bloodhounds. I remember Fisher and Matt, or Fisher said, I hear there's this jazz festival that they have in New Orleans. I'm going to go. You want to come? And so Matt and I went down. Matt and Fisher and I went down there for the New Orleans Jazz Fest, which was very, very small at the time. The next year I loved it so much that the next year I, you know, Tom Sawyered again and got like 15 or 20 friends to come by. The year following that, I had 40 people. The year following that, I started looking for housing in January for something that happened at the end of April. And I just sort of, you know, just became used to the place. And ultimately I met a lot of musician, made a lot of musician friends, and ultimately wound up writing this 40 song song cycle with my friend Paul Sanchez based on a book called Nine Lives. [00:51:51] Speaker A: And that's, that's what the musical is called, Nine Lives. [00:51:53] Speaker C: The musical is called Nine Lives. And it's, it's an oral history of New Orleans from Hurricane Betsy in 65 through Katrina in 2005, from. Through the voices of nine people of, from completely different walks of life. And we just. Well, the way it happened is I told Paul to buy the book and read it. And he said, why? And I said, because we're going to make a Broadway musical out of it. And he said, no, we're not. Then I called him a week later, said, did you get the book? And he goes, no, no, no, I haven't. And then. So I sent it to him, right? I had an Amazon send it to him. Then I called him again, said, have you read it? And he goes, no. And so I flew down to New Orleans without telling him and showed up at his door and said, okay, I'm gonna sit in this chair across the room from you. You're gonna read the book, read the first 40 pages. If you don't like it, that's it. That's the end. If you like it, keep on reading. I watched him read it and he was going like, eh, eh, right? Oh, oh, oh, okay, all right, I get it now. And he said, this is really great. The writer was Dan Baum, who was a New Yorker writer at the time. And he said, this is great. What do we do? And I said, well, it's too bad, I'm leaving tomorrow night. It would be great if we got one song in, but I'm leaving tomorrow night. And so he said, well, let's write one. So we wrote a song based on a story from, from the book. And I said, it's too bad we can't make a demo of this. And he said, what are you talking about? This is New Orleans. So within, with five phone calls, we got a band together and a recording studio and put together this demo and sent it to the author's agent who gave it to Dan. And Dan said, I have no idea who Coleman and Paul are, but how the fuck did they get John Boutet and Matt Perrine and Shemar Allen and blah blah, blah, blah. Of course they can have the rights. And so we wound up writing 39 songs, which is way too many. We got a grant from Pepsi, hired like 110 musicians and singers local and recorded the whole thing, all 39 songs. It was of course a big local sensation. There was a show called Treme, the HBO show that was shooting at the same time. And Eric Overmeyer, who's the producer, one of the producers said, I ran into him on the street and he goes, what the hell is going on? You guys are the talk of the set. Like everybody who comes in has just come from a session with you guys. It was, it was really quite good and a great, a great project. [00:55:01] Speaker A: Really. [00:55:02] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:55:03] Speaker A: Wow. You that it, that you put it together and, and where is it now? What, what is it? [00:55:11] Speaker C: Well, it had. Well, here's the thing. [00:55:13] Speaker A: It. [00:55:14] Speaker C: Our, our conceit was since it's set over a 40 year period, we wrote the songs in the musical style of each era, right? So we wrote like 60s soul for Irma Thomas and then all the way up to like hip hop and rap and rock and roll and stuff like that. We took it to the Public Theater and they commissioned. They, they. We decided to get them pregnant rather than writing the book ourselves. We would have them write some have to have them pick somebody that they liked to write it. And unfortunately they, they picked this one woman who said, who had a, like a. Was shortlisted for a Pulitzer that year and she said, yeah, I'll put together a book on the condition that I do it on my own without having any meetings with you guys. We went, that's collaboration. But we sort of went off. [00:56:18] Speaker A: Never a good sign. [00:56:19] Speaker C: No, no, no, not from the beginning. And so we. She showed up like a year and a half later with this script that one was all set in a bar, like one set thing and two, the only orchestration was a brass band. And we said, well, we were pretty specific about the styles of music and they're not all, it's not all brass band songs. And she went, well, that's what I want to do. And so we had a reading of the script without the songs and it was two and a half hours long. Without the songs. And so we sort of went. I think we have different ideas about this. [00:57:06] Speaker A: That's painful. That's what, man. What a painful process to go through and all that time and whatever the money was, and really to come out the other end with something so wrong, so disconnected from really the. The organic idea that. That motivated everybody to want to do this. [00:57:25] Speaker C: Right. But on. On the upside, it's. Well, it's. It's remains a sensation in New Orleans. There's been about a dozen different. Different performances of the full score with different scripts and different concepts, and it keeps on getting revived locally, so that's good. And. And I made 110 really good friends. [00:57:56] Speaker A: Well, hey, at the end of the day, you know what. What could be better than that? You're working on anything right now, Coleman. [00:58:06] Speaker C: Yeah, another. Well, during the strike, I figured I'd. I'd fool them by writing a Broadway musical. And so I. I started thinking about doing the Chuck Berry story, and, you know, which is great because you don't have to write any music. Right, Right. And so just. [00:58:35] Speaker A: Just lay out the songs in a particular order. [00:58:37] Speaker C: That's right. [00:58:38] Speaker A: And a little bit of linkage. There's your show. [00:58:40] Speaker C: Well, make the. Make this. The songs fit the story you're telling at that moment. Right. [00:58:45] Speaker A: Let's write the transitions, man. [00:58:47] Speaker C: Right. And so I. One point, I wanted a collaborator, and so I hooked up with this black screenwriter friend of mine from New Orleans, and we did our. All our due diligence. We read three biographies of the guy and listened to all his music like, a hundred times and started working on it. We had a great time. Then we said, okay, well, let's. Let's. Let's each write a scene. And so we came back. My scene was comic, Right. His scene was very serious and very political. And, you know, we talked it over for a couple weeks and finally I said, you know, your version of this would probably get you shortlisted for a Nobel Prize, you know, in literature. Mine might get on a good day, might get me a paragraph in Entertainment Weekly online, but we just see things differently. So I continued on my own. And then I found out that somebody very notable has bought the life rights. I'm not going to say who it is to Chuck, and it wants to make a TV movie. So I'm talking to them about, like, do you need a writer? I've done all the sweat work. All right. [01:00:20] Speaker A: Really and truly, why not? [01:00:23] Speaker C: Why not? [01:00:24] Speaker A: Well, my fingers are certainly crossed for you. [01:00:27] Speaker C: Thank you. Thank you. It's fun. It's. You know, it's a hell of a story. Oh my gosh, he wasn't a great guy. [01:00:33] Speaker A: But of course in my mind I, I have other plans for you. But, but that's a whole other conversation, Coleman. It is. This, this conversation was, is so overdue. [01:00:45] Speaker C: Yeah, I know. [01:00:46] Speaker A: And really truly you you, you know so many people and we've scratched just the surface of of it is one of the things is you're remarkable that you have a accumulated acquired this many acquaintances, friends and fellow travelers. [01:01:06] Speaker C: They're good people. [01:01:08] Speaker A: Is, is quite, it's quite remarkable that that, that that's a story, maybe a podcast unto itself. But I, I, I, I thank you so much for sitting. [01:01:16] Speaker C: Thank you today. [01:01:18] Speaker A: Oh gosh, let's do this again. [01:01:21] Speaker C: Let's do it. And maybe we'll do it earlier in the day so that we could do the backlighting that you like so much. [01:01:27] Speaker A: Well, hey, the but anyway, hey, we'll see you next time, everyone, and thank you as always. The how not to Make a Movie podcast is executive produced by me, Alan Katz, by Gil Adler, and by Jason Stein. Our artwork was done by the amazing Jody Webster. And Chase and 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 crypto content.