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The Cinematic Voyage of Danny Bilson: From Trancers to The Rocketeer · Cinema Yūgen

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G'day. That's right. It's that time again. Time for Cinema Yugen.
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Yes, welcome back Yugenite Cinema Yugen.
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Cantil your host. Another fan requested classic with Danny Bilson.
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Bilson worked aggressively to build a career in the movie business working as
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an extra while writing screenplay as Bilson and his writing partner Paul Demere
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produced their first script Trances Tim Thomason's Trances directed by Charles
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Benn in 1985 a noir tale of a time travelling detective from the future.
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The movie became a cult classic and the narrative was so engaging that it evolved
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into a franchise that generated five sequels,
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Bilson debuted as director with another cult classic Zone Troopers in 1985 also
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written with Demere a tale of a World War II soldiers who find an alien spacecraft.
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Bilson DeMeo also wrote the comic book adaptation for The Rocketeer.
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Here he is, ladies and gentlemen.
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Welcome, Danny Bilson.
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It's nice to be here. Awesome. Such as here he is in Pyspace.
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Awesome. Thank you, sir, for being on. And I guess before we get into the media
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things, could you give us a little bit of your origins before your career began?
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Like, you know, were you always into movies? Was movies always the goal? All that sort of thing?
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Sure. I mean, I grew up in Los Angeles. I'm a third generation film business, actually.
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My grandfather worked for Jack Warner back in the 30s, in the late 30s. Wow.
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And my father directed, won an Emmy for Get Smart.
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Okay. He was the main director on, yeah, Hogan Tiro's Get Smart, and then later on,
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He went in and did a lot of dramas. And then in the last 10 years of my dad's
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career, he did The Flash and all my shows, Human Target, Sentinel, Viper, all that stuff.
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Cool. And one of the Disney show, Dinosaurs, with the puppets. Yes, yes.
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Cool. What was that telling me? And he's 89.
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He's still around, lives about a mile away. Oh, that's incredible.
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And then, so I grew up on movie sets, really. I loved going to work with my dad. Wow.
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Playing on the back lot. the Gunsmoke set or different, you know,
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I always used to love the back lots running around.
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It was like having, you know, an empty Disneyland or something without the ride, but it was great.
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So that was a privilege. And then, you know, I loved old movies.
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Back when I was a kid, they used to show old movies from the 30s and 40s on television.
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And I would take six, stay home for a whole week and just watch black and white
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movies all week. And if anybody ever asked me where I learned anything about
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writing, probably it's from that.
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Probably from those films of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Right.
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That's awesome. Wow. And then I met Paul in college. Right. That's my high background.
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And that's when the trouble started.
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Yeah. And I met Paul in the theater
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department in college, and he had very similar background and taste.
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Right. We did a play called Sherlock Holmes by William Gillette in the theater.
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He played Sherlock Holmes. I played some egg cracker.
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And our professor at school said, if you guys write an original Sherlock Holmes
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play, we'll do it because we love Sherlock Holmes.
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And so we wrote a play about Sherlock Holmes and Houdini.
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The Houdini section that we did in school. and it almost got to a legitimate
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theatre after school, but that's another story.
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Right. Wow. Okay.
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So I've got to ask, because I've interviewed sort of, not to be disparaging
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to you, but other halves of writing teams.
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Is one of you the typist and one of you the pacer, so to speak, that paces the room?
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It used to be that way in the old days.
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Was the pacer and he was the type okay but
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we were we were very early on computer as soon as the computer existed we had
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one we used to write on like atari 400 and atari 800 and we would we would use
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two monitors so that you could see one like have one facing towards me and for
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many many many many years we wrote that way but,
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Starting around 10 years ago, we started writing separately and having quick
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meetings, and then you write this scene, I write that scene,
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and then pass it back and forth.
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And that's how we write right now. I'm still writing.
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That's how we write these, basically passing it.
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It's much faster this way, and we're incredibly fast now. Right.
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So was Paul the designated typist because he was the faster typist?
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Or no it really started with a pad and he was writing on the pad and I went
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to a typewriter and then I went to the computer I think in the old days he.
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Was better trained when we were very young at prose writing he was just in better English,
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than I was but now now I can write prose all day long and it's one day that
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we We really like to say, like, after 40 years, everything is shorthand.
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I write in a style, and he still uses too many adjectives, but I write in a style.
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It's very similar, so it's really kind of one voice after 40 years of writing together. Right.
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That's great. No, it's just when I was talking to Larry Karaszewski not that
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long ago, and I asked him a similar question, and he said, oh,
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it's because Scott types faster.
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He said if he said it was up to me to do the typing we'd still be working on the first one.
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No we're past all that we both write our own stuff and merge them cool well
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let's let's dive straight in,
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This is, you know, the beginning of some of the films where you would work with
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Richard Band and one of my, sorry,
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Charlie, sorry, that's right, sorry, Richard's the composer,
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sorry, Charlie Band, sorry about that, it's early.
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But yeah one of my all-time favorite movies
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it was released as future cop over here but it
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was known to you and was written by you as trances right so um theatrical what
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future cop here also the actual release such as it was was future cop right
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but it's trances right so how did trances came about,
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how did that come about in your relationship with Charles?
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Well, I was working as a camera assistant on Ghoulies,
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Bill of Charp, and I was standing there and his girlfriend and teacher wife
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at the time named Debbie Dion, who ran into his development,
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were standing on the set and I really, I remember thinking, you know,
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or saying, you know, Paul and I can write a lot better than this.
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And he said, really, really let me read something.
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So we gave her a script that we had actually written for Richard Pryor in 1983.
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It was a big action-adventure war film that Richard had commissioned us to write.
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And it never went anywhere, of course, but she read that and said,
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and somehow I suddenly had a deal for seven movies.
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I could direct one if I wrote seven and fortunately we were in the writers guild
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from an earlier B movie that never went anywhere.
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And so they had to pay us at least low budget minimum for those seven scripts.
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So we didn't get completely we didn't get completely ripped off. It wasn't much money.
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But we did write those seven scripts and somewhere early on probably after transfers,
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First one we wrote was Gosh, I can't remember if we wrote Eliminators or Trancers
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first right now That's weird I always knew the order But I think we wrote Eliminators first No.
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No, no, we wrote Trancers first And then Eliminators And then Zone Troopers And so,
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but Zone Troopers was made before Eliminators And Trancers was made in the summer
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of 1984 During the Olympics Here in L.A.
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And Charlie directed that film. Yes. And it was kind of a similar thing. I was like...
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It's a really great movie, and I'm really, really proud of it.
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But I thought it needed to be paced a little faster. That was just me.
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So I was really anxious to get my turn. And, of course, once I got my turn with
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Zone Troopers, somehow I forgot about pacing it faster and about the same pace it does.
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You're on. But there's a lot of stories. There's a lot of stories behind all of these films.
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And certainly my learning to direct was really hampered by the fact that After
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Zone Troopers, I wasn't allowed to edit the film.
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Charlie's dad, Albert, edited the film. And he cut out some cheap sequences
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that really just kind of broke my heart.
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And I didn't learn that you can't really cut pace in the editing room.
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You really have to do it on the set.
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So when I made my film after that that I directed called The Wrong Guy,
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I did it again, and it still didn't have the right pace.
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But after two of those, that one I got to edit. By the time I got to television
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in the past I was doing, I certainly understood more about pace.
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And I'm a really big believer in what Frank Cafford said in his book,
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that everything slows down when you're sitting in a seat watching it.
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And you can actually pace things even faster than you think.
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So from that day on, I still believe in a very tight pace. Yeah.
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Trances would go on to become a very successful series. Would they get up to six?
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I guess. I don't know. No, I've never seen any of them. Yeah,
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there's one that I think it's six.
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The very last one doesn't have, Thomasin is not in it.
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Oh and it's not francis yeah so
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he he he he is i
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don't know it's it's one of those it's it's
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one of those plots that you can imagine someone like oh how can we
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bring him back this time guys and it's one of those sort
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of last second like a guy on the toilets idea like how
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about he morphs into his own like he
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injects himself into his own daughter or something and that way
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it's his personality inside a woman and
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they're like oh fine okay good but it
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wasn't it wasn't a terribly good movie i i like even even as as the whole thing
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got sillier and went back in time to medieval times in four and five sort of
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thomason holds them together but without him in it is is kind of Yeah,
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like you said, it's not really a Trancers movie.
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I'm sure. Our last feat with Trancers was that short, the 20-minute one from
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Paul's Pounders. Oh, The City of Angels. Which they now...
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Yeah, yeah. We wrote that, but by that point, Charlie wouldn't let me direct
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another movie after Zone Troopers.
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Zone Troopers was not his kind of thing. Okay.
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So I never got to direct another movie. and part of the reason we left was because
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I never got to go back to Italy and Paul and I never got to make anything again
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and everybody else was making tons of movies.
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Right. And we got an offer to go into television at Warner Brothers.
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Right. That's where we went.
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One of my all-time favorite movies is Eliminators. I still remember to this day.
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Getting it out of the video store, the cover got me straight away and the tagline,
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you know, an android, a scientist, a ninja.
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Yeah i mean i was just like damn why
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not and no you
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know the story the way it worked there he would make the poster before there
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was a script oh we would get this poster and he would say write me a movie okay
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so like eliminators was with a poster arena was a poster well don't was our idea.
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Transfers was, there was a script by somebody else that we completely rewrote. Okay.
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I don't think we kept, we didn't keep anything from that except the concept of the Transfers.
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That's great. But yeah, that's how it works. Right. Like amazing stories in the old days.
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You get the art and then you have to create the story from the art. That's fantastic.
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So that poster image was what you got and like, hey, did it have the Eliminators
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title or did you come up with a title?
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I think it did have the title. Okay. We came up with a lot of titles.
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Interestingly enough, at one point, Charlie said, I need to finish a title...
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And I'll give you $500 for every one we use. Okay.
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And if you look at the ongoing history of Empire and the full moon and all that stuff we kept making.
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Right. There's probably movies with titles that we came up with in our whole
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office back in the old days. Wow. We never got hateful.
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They just kept using those titles. Right.
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That's fantastic. So can you tell me any, as a fan of Eliminators,
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can you tell me any stories that have not yet surfaced?
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Well, I'll tell you a story that, I mean, I don't think it's very good, to be honest with you.
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I mean, I thought it was pretty bad then, and I think it's still pretty awful.
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But it's kind of, with that, you know, it's like so cheesy that people love it.
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And I understand that. I also, one thing about Charlie's movies,
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and ours, of course, as part of that, is there was tremendous audacity in these
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concepts. And I think that's something that's really a feeling about Eliminators.
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But, you know, I didn't direct it. And we felt that it was written with a lot
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of humor intentionally.
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And I think Pete tried to play it really straight.
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And, you know, with Charlie's stuff, if you don't do it with humor,
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the props, the sets, the facts make it really rough playing something straight.
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But I will say that Paul and I were in a screening of Eliminators in a theater
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maybe in the last five or ten years. Right.
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And we were the guests, and they screened the film, and, you know,
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people laughed and the whole thing, and it was over.
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And I said at the end, I said, you know, I know you think this is like,
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it's like an 80s thing, and that's why it's so funny. I said,
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but we thought it sucked then.
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I mean, Paul and I thought it was bad when they made it, and it's still bad. But it's good, bad.
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It's fun. And it's fun that, but, you know, I don't think Transfers,
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I think Transfers is a much better film. I think Bill Troopers is a much better film.
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Arena was the best script we wrote during that era, but they did not shoot our script.
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Someone named Erwin Yablond, I think he may have passed away,
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he took it upon himself to rewrite it.
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And it was the same director from Eliminators who always wants to play things straight.
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And a lot of the magic that I thought was in that script was totally gone.
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Because we wrote Body and Soul Space which was in the 1940s movie with John Garfield.
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Right. And so we thought our script was fantastic. It was influenced by that and R.
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Crumb, the comic book, comic artist.
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And his crazy characters, crazy weird alien characters or animal characters.
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So our script is something that I love, but that movie never got made.
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They decided, again, trying to take the humorous version and try to make it straight.
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And they didn't know he took the money.
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You have to forgive me. I'm getting over a cold. That's okay.
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But, yeah, so Eliminators, I think it's great.
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I love the idea of having recently watched a documentary about Canon, the Canon film. Uh-huh.
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It seems that was the gig there, too. They would make a poster,
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and then the film would have to follow the poster, which is always interesting to me.
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Right. I mean, the movie that was made years ago that I really felt captured
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our experience in the B-movie days, and it's Redwood, the Burden film. Yeah.
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It really captures what it was like making movies like that. Yeah.
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Redwood really was working for Charlie in the 80s.
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Wow. But honestly, in retrospect, there's a documentary being made about the Empire.
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What is it? Wizards of the Video Wasteland. Yeah.
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Yeah, yeah. Daniel Griffith. I don't know what's taken him so long,
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but we contributed a lot to that, a lot of artifacts and interviews.
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And I'm looking forward to it.
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Yeah, I can't wait. You know, honestly, I agree.
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Honestly, that period in the 80s, VHS, those grinders we were making for VHS,
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I wouldn't trade that experience.
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I wouldn't trade that for the world. I wouldn't trade,
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Man, those films, great thing. That was a wonderful film. Yeah.
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No, that was just, I mean, I was talking to someone about this the other day
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because I did an anthology of fiction.
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I got a lot of the writers that I know to come up with their ultimate sort of
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80s B-movie or VHS movie.
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And i was just saying you know what what a wealth what a golden age of material,
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you know it was almost like it was almost like a rehash of the the drive-in
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days like and filmmakers had to create a lot of drive-in fodder as it were so
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too with the video exactly yeah so too the video market opened up oh we need
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product so you know everyone went to town and,
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and tried to come up with as much product as they could.
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Good, bad, or indifferent, or ugly.
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But wonderful. It was right there. Yeah.
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But that's great. I love the idea of you getting posters and like,
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hey, come up with a, we need a story for this one.
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That's fantastic.
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So anyway, yeah, like you were saying, Arena too I really enjoyed,
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you know, all of those movies around the day Arena and Robot Jocks and all those
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movies So Arena was pretty much massacred from your original script, you were saying,
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Yeah, I would say massacred is quite correct Right,
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So it's nothing like the original Vision No, no, no It was just like a,
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I mean, the, you know, people didn't understand the humor.
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They didn't want the humor. But you take the humor out of that,
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good luck on that budget.
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Yeah. So, again, you know, I don't, I maybe saw that once. You know, I can't once. Right.
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Because, again, it's a pretty, yeah.
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Again, it's a very cool concept, you know, like the people, you know.
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Oh, yeah. It was an archive. It was a poster. It was wrestling in space.
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Right. That was what we asked, wrestling. Right.
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So we went back to the well and really inspired by the Johnny Garfield movie,
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Body and Soul, which is a classic boxing movie from the early 40s. Right.
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But so in that case, you really were like Edward. You know, we've got a wrestling picture on you.
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Yeah, no, it really was. It really, really was.
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And we were young enough to sit in that little office and crank out those scripts on a printer.
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The printer with the perforated edges, you know, you'd print one page. Yeah, yeah.
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And you had to tear all the little dots off the side there.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. I gave Daniel Griffith, like, a couple of the scripts that
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were actually from that, on those printers, you know, that weird computer type.
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Yeah, the dot matrix printers, yeah.
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Yeah, dot matrix, right. but yeah
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but you know i can't wait to see that
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documentary uh myself ever since i've seen yeah
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you know he interviewed a lot of
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people he interviewed a lot of people and it
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should be a really interesting story if he ever finishes yeah it's a you know
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if if anything it'll be a great document of that uh of that era and that kind
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of filmmaking which which doesn't really exist anymore yeah i know he was having
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trouble getting clip that was one of the like You can get trailers.
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Yeah. You're having trouble getting the rice, the clips from some of the bills
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because Charlie has pulled them all off in different directions. Right.
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But that'll be really cool to check out when it comes out there.
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I agree. So then, did you do the wrong guys before you'd left Charlie or was that after?
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After. After. We went to Warner Brothers in 86 and we did the wrong guys in 87.
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Okay. so what was the story behind the wrong guys we
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thought we could do comedy that was the start of the story okay
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straight comedy like we knew we knew we had every genre adventure stuff comic
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movie stuff with comedy with humor right but we got we thought we could do anything
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right so you know it was our idea it was our idea and the idea of the cup scout
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reunion was based on my childhood being a cup scout,
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and I think Paul's as well you know
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we always wanted to move to a movie to this
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day we still haven't done it about sort of kids in the 60s but done like Little
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Razzle style called Brats it's a movie we never made but the beginning of the
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wrong time with the kids in the 60s was you know we really loved that and then
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the idea of doing it with all those stand up comics.
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Was I think was a really good idea you know But what got that made were movies
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like The Police, what are those things called?
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Police Academy. And they made that success.
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Academy, right. It was the success of those. It kind of allowed New World to agree like that.
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And it was a wild shoot because of the comics were absolutely hysterical.
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So taking them all to Wyoming for a few weeks was incredibly funny.
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And they tend to behave differently.
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Like junior high kids on the playground sort of sniping at each other,
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and the sniping was just hysterical.
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And of course, we had Thomerson with us, who was probably in almost everything
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we ever... He was in, I think he's appeared in everything we've ever made. Tim Thomerson.
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Including the last thing I did a couple years ago, which was a video game,
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18 minutes of cinematic, where Tim is a CIA boss in virtual.
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On this game called Devil's Third that was on Nintendo.
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But yeah, so Tim was in everything, so we Yes, Kim is our anchor.
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We had Richard Belzer, who was also in the old Flash show, but that came after that.
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We put him in that after that. Richard Lewis and Louis Anderson.
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And I think Louis Anderson was a lot of his comedy and his stand-up and his
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talk about family and friendship.
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Being a kid, that was a major influence on the film. So Louis was kind of at
24:13
the center of the film and Louis' humor was at the center of the film.
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I think the pacing wasn't fast enough and I think that I didn't really understand
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something about comedy in those days. I thought stupid was funny.
24:26
And it kind of gets to that movie to say, well, just because it's stupid doesn't mean it's funny.
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And I think I'm sure there's a lot of laughs in there. I haven't seen it in a long time.
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It was really a lot of fun to make. It was really a lot of fun to make.
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But it wasn't creatively wholly successful. In the end, I just felt like I was
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still doing Earn While You Learn.
24:47
Well, I still am, but I felt like my comedy timing wasn't quite good enough.
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Well, then we come to you beginning TV.
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And this is going back for listeners who probably weren't, for those listeners
25:05
who weren't born then, this whole Marvel DC cinematic universe,
25:12
it was not the be-all and end-all.
25:13
We had our smattering of Marvel and DC back in the day.
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And you were the forerunners in a wonderful series of The Flash starring Jonathan
25:27
Wesley Shimp and Amanda Payne.
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It had a marvelous string of actors throughout the series, including Thomason,
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like you said, Mark Hamill,
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Spennelly Thorson, young Brian Cranston, Denise Crosby, Angela Bassett,
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Jeffrey Coombs, Robert Zadar, M. Emmett Walsh.
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Tell us how The Flash came your way. I have to meet you.
25:56
You talk about that cast. You've got to give April Webster friends.
26:00
April Webster was a casting director. Yeah, she was the casting director on The Flash.
26:06
And she would bring all these people to us. And, you know, she's gone on to be J.J.
26:12
Abrams' casting director and still is.
26:16
But her amazing talent brought a lot of those people to our show.
26:21
And there's different stories for each one. The most famous story really is about Mark Hamill.
26:26
Yes and we were um he approached us
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right he said if you ever do a trickster i
26:32
want to play the trickster and we actually had a
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story development at that time because we
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were oh absolutely and i directed those two episodes and those are my favorite
26:44
of the collab that season yeah we also did you know we used to say it then and
26:50
i'll repeat it but you know our our sort of The strategy was make comic books film the same way,
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in the same tone that we felt about it when we were 10.
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So it's believable to us. We were in our 30s then.
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Believable in our 30s, the same way it was believable then. And then we had
27:08
a wonderful producer named John Kirsch, who was really into art direction and scenic art.
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And he hired two graffiti artists from New York, got them in the art director's
27:17
union, and they were painting these crazy murals with spray paint all over everything.
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All the time. he would hand them a piece of
27:24
art from a book and overnight it would appear on the side of
27:27
a building as well as the concept of you know the colored lights and the windows
27:32
and all those things were things that some of that I did and we did we all did
27:37
as a team to sort of realize our dream and and and that show the tragedy of
27:43
that show is that we were canceled after one year that's just.
27:46
Pretty disgusting, honestly. We were really creatively, I felt, very successful.
27:52
We had a huge fan base. I mean, compared to today, you know,
27:57
the problem was we were on CBS, and CBS was really more concerned about their older audience.
28:04
Right. And really, it's hard to believe we'd get a second season when this other
28:09
thing is going into its fourth or fifth season, The Flash, on WB. Right.
28:13
And all the people making that show were fans of our old show.
28:17
But going back in time, you know, you can't control those things.
28:21
But what I can tell you, it's one of the two greatest disappointments of our
28:24
careers was not getting another season on the fly.
28:27
We were just getting the hang of it. Yeah.
28:31
It was a real shame because it was really, really wonderful.
28:37
I used to look forward to it.
28:38
And when it stopped coming, I thought, well, that's, yeah, what's wrong with that?
28:43
It's uh right it's it's a it's a crime and then
28:46
all the other shows went years and years superman and lois whatever that thing
28:50
yeah lois and clark yeah which was a far dopier show they got five years yeah
28:55
eight years ten years and now every every time you turn around it's a superhero
29:00
show yeah um this yeah you'd be hard pressed to throw a stone and not hit one.
29:07
But well they promised us they promised us that we were going to write a flash episode but somehow,
29:13
um even with our kind of pinging and asking again it was I guess I don't know
29:18
what their reasoning is but they haven't invited us back they invited all our
29:21
actors but they haven't invited Paul and I maybe I don't know what it is on
29:25
it makes no sense to me that would be that would be really cool if you and Paul got together and did a,
29:31
well he kept Alan Price kept telling us yes you guys are going to write an episode
29:35
So I gave up writing an email asking him if it was going to happen.
29:39
It was a little humiliating.
29:41
So I'm like, I don't care. I don't watch that show anymore anyway.
29:45
You know what? I can't watch this stuff, to be honest with you.
29:49
I just started watching some superhero stuff again.
29:53
Because for me, they're all so formatted.
29:56
They're just like big, awesome delay with a boss fight at the end,
30:00
like a video game. And you know what?
30:02
They're so formatted that there's not a lot of surprise. Now,
30:07
having said that, having said that, I was delighted by the Spider-Man Homecoming film.
30:13
I really liked it, and it's definitely...
30:18
A great little movie. I thought it was fantastic. And one of my friends also
30:23
sort of said, you know, Danny, you're being crazy.
30:26
Look at Winter Soldier and Civil Wars. And I did. And those are really good.
30:31
Those movies are really good, too. I just got sick of it, honestly.
30:35
But now that I'm looking back, I'm just going, you know, they're doing some really nice stuff.
30:41
Some of it's the same garbage that I can't watch. It's all the same.
30:44
But there is some really cool stuff going on. Yeah, no, I'm right with you.
30:51
For my birthday movie this year, I went to see Spider-Man Homecoming,
30:54
and it was really good. It was the first.
30:58
I'm not to disparage any of the other Spider-Man films that have come out,
31:02
but this one kind of felt more like a Spider-Man film to me.
31:07
That's how I always saw Spider-Man. I loved it.
31:10
Yeah. That's how I always sort of saw Spider-Man in a film, how it is done this time.
31:18
Yeah it was it's really good i really like it
31:21
so so the flash was creatively really
31:24
great for us we really loved making it and we were pretty devastating when it
31:28
got canceled yeah but you know the hue i mean that was just i mean in going
31:33
back over it doing my notes just looking at the the some of the actors that
31:37
came on board i was just like wow that's you know i mean today getting getting sort of,
31:44
I suppose today getting that kind of those kind of actors involved is not as
31:49
difficult maybe as it once was because a popular show seems to draw them in
31:55
and they're like oh well I've got to get on and do an episode of that because it's popular,
32:01
yeah but aside from Mark those people weren't stars then Bryan Cranston wasn't
32:05
a big star no no you know Angela wasn't a star yet no so really really it was
32:12
you know, it was before they were big stars, except for Mark.
32:16
And Mark's a huge comic book fan, huge. He's an easy fan.
32:20
So, you know, Mark's participation was from pure passion.
32:26
But that brings me to another of my favorite all-time movies,
32:31
and in keeping in the comic book vein, The Rocketeer.
32:36
How did The Rocketeer come about?
32:39
Well, The Rocketeer was also filmed. was it was made at the same time as The
32:43
Flash. We were very busy at that time.
32:46
It came about because Paul and I, when we were working for Charlie,
32:50
we would always go down to the Golden Apple, which is a comic book store that
32:53
we could walk to, Green Mile almost walked to, I think, from the office.
32:57
And we were reading lots of books from the period, from the 80s,
33:01
because the 80s was a great renaissance in comics. It's where they got adults for the first time. Yes.
33:06
And then we're there in the bins. We found The Rocketeer. And,
33:08
of course, the art was fantastic. It also touched our love for the 1930s and 1930s movies.
33:16
And we contacted Dave Stevens, and lucky for us, another director had an option
33:22
on the film, on the film right, and it was just ending. Right.
33:26
And we were about to go to Italy to make Zone Troopers, and I remember showing
33:31
Dave a lot of our art and some of the things we were about to do,
33:36
as well as the thing that really sealed the deal between us is we had this idea
33:41
that we wanted Rondo Hatt, the creeper, to be in the Rocketeer film.
33:44
Right. And when we told Dave that, His jaw dropped, and it was like,
33:49
we had no idea that Rondo Hatton was one of his favorite actors and that the
33:53
Creeper was this character.
33:54
He was like, that way I would do that. And I think it was really the creative
33:59
synergy because we didn't have any money.
34:01
And he gave us a free option on the material.
34:05
And we set about for years, we set about to go pitch The Rocketeer,
34:10
and we pitched it everywhere.
34:11
We created a film story with Dave in the room. Larry Gordon was the producer,
34:16
and Lloyd Levin, who I'm still working with to this day, was really a champion
34:21
at Larry's place for the Rocketeer.
34:22
And we took it around, and ultimately, Disney picked it up.
34:26
And we wrote drafts for a director named Bill Deere, who was the original director.
34:33
At some point, they fired him and replaced him with Joe Johnson before the movie was made.
34:38
And some of Bill's influence was still in that script.
34:42
And then the movie, you know, we didn't spend a lot of time on the set because
34:45
we were shooting The Flash at the same time.
34:48
There are stories where we were brought in to deal with, you know,
34:52
which actor thought they were the tougher guy in the tough guy scene.
34:55
And, you know, every time we'd write a draft, one guy would say,
34:58
oh, now he's the big tough guy. I'm the big tough guy.
35:01
You know, it's like, oh, God. We just kept writing.
35:05
And there were a couple of other writers who came in in between,
35:08
but Paul and I definitely started and finished it. and there's not a lot from
35:12
other writers in there. There are a few jokes and a few things. Right.
35:15
But I'm sure, and, you know, Frank Darabont was a contributor.
35:19
Jim Kauf was the other contributor.
35:21
Yeah. It's by and large, it's our stuff. Yeah.
35:25
A little bit of Bill Deere, a little bit of Joe, but we feel like it's ours,
35:29
and I'm very, very, very proud of that film. Yeah.
35:33
But again, we got, remember, it wasn't a hit. No, no. It actually got.
35:41
Not successful when it came out, so we didn't get to do the sequel,
35:45
and we didn't get to get another movie out of it, and we didn't get the big career boost.
35:50
What's really odd and fantastic about the whole experience is that 25 years
35:56
later, it's kind of a Disney classic, and it's beloved, and they're still making
36:01
merchandise and T-shirts and things in the park show up.
36:06
And my dream was always to make a Disney movie my whole life as a kid because
36:10
I'm a huge fan of Disney. Yes.
36:14
And so everything about the Rocketeer is like probably my favorite thing of
36:19
my career except for the box office numbers.
36:22
Yeah. That was just a gross disappointment. And once again, Flash got canceled.
36:27
Boom. Rocketeer doesn't open. Boom. All that happened in about three months.
36:31
Wow. No, two months. And it was just like, really?
36:35
And what's really weird is that those are probably the things we're best known for.
36:39
So far, hopefully a movie that will be coming in the next 18 months will cliff-filled
36:44
up and then take us to the lofty hikes.
36:48
Fit a mania again. But that, up to this point, they were real bittersweet.
36:54
Because I love those things. I love those things. But I do get a lot of credit
36:59
for it, okay? I mean, I do.
37:01
People, he wrote The Rocketeer. I mean, it's kind of like that.
37:03
We're working with Guillermo del Toro and stood up in front of everybody and
37:08
saying, well, Danny, hey, come on, what do you want? He wrote The Rocketeer.
37:12
It's like a great credit and I'm very proud. We also wrote the comics, you know, with Dave.
37:18
I mean, Dave wrote two books, really.
37:21
The six episodes he wrote before us and the six episodes where Cliff Goes to
37:26
New York were written with us.
37:27
And our credit is really strange, but if you look on the inside flat,
37:31
he's just like, thanks to Danny Paul.
37:33
But we wrote that whole thing, that whole Cliff Goes to New York thing we wrote.
37:38
So, with him, I mean, with him, absolutely.
37:42
Because the Creeper was in there and then Tina, that circus midges.
37:46
That was Dave's idea. And so that was a really great collaboration.
37:51
And of course, that was a game passed away in 2008, which was really tragic.
37:56
But recently, I was in an art gallery with tribute art for The Rocketeer,
38:00
and I bought a couple. Wow.
38:02
Yeah. I mean, it's just amazing how much, how much kind of legs that that film had.
38:08
Yeah. I mean, I really, really... Yeah.
38:11
No, I loved it from the get-go. I thought But I, of course, at the time I was
38:19
not conscious of all this, you know, the politics and if a movie doesn't do
38:23
well and all this sort of stuff like that.
38:25
I just went to the movies and loved or hated them.
38:28
But it was, I thought, and what the reason, one of the reasons it holds up is
38:34
it's just such a triumphant movie.
38:38
It's got some great performances.
38:40
It's got a wonderful score. It really is and does harken back to those Disney,
38:46
the Disney type movies. It's got that Disney sort of magical sort of feel to it.
38:53
You know, like I said, you know, a great cast.
38:58
You know, Timothy Dalton's a wonderful bad guy and Paul Savino and,
39:03
you know, great actors, Jennifer Connelly, who would of course go on to win an Academy Award. Yeah.
39:09
You know, just all around, and Joe Johnston, you know, a very,
39:13
very good director, and would go on, of course, to direct, you know, other things.
39:18
But I think the problem that might have fell into at the time,
39:23
there was a lot of attempts to make superhero movies in the wake of some of
39:28
the bigger ones like Superman, like Batman.
39:30
And they seem to go after, you know, the other sort of tragic superhero folly
39:39
of the time was the Phantom, who I was a big fan of.
39:42
And I don't hate the movie, but it's, you know, it has its pros and cons.
39:48
But you know there was there was a lot of attempts to do superhero stuff that
39:54
i don't think they had either the the budget for or they didn't they didn't
39:59
really have a love for you know there was there was a spattering of of films
40:05
that happened around that time that involved.
40:08
Comic books i mean what's interesting about and last time i saw the rocketeer,
40:13
is like nobody would let us write dialogue like that now.
40:17
I mean, we were just channeling 1930s movies and we were allowed to do it because
40:22
Joe appreciated it, Dave, everybody else.
40:25
But I watch it now. Zone Troopers is really closely related to The Rocketeer,
40:28
if you check it out. I mean, because it's the same kind of dialogue, it's the same stuff.
40:33
And I don't think we could ever get away with that in any modern studio. It was never allowed.
40:39
It would make us just modernize the dialogue. Yeah.
40:43
Which is a shame but yeah I love the Rocketeer and it's been been really cool
40:48
to finally talk to you about it a little bit.
40:51
But anyway, so we go from the Rocketeer, and you really get deep into television
40:56
now with The Sentinel and a lot of shows.
40:58
And I also noticed on your credits while I was doing a bit of reading was a
41:02
lot of video game stuff there.
41:05
Oh, yeah. Well, after The Sentinel and Viper, we did 132 hours for three years.
41:12
I directed about 30 hours.
41:13
Right. After those, I love video games, and I've always done it.
41:17
It's sort of my first choice of entertainment.
41:20
And so I met the president of electronic arts, John Maverick,
41:23
at the time on an airplane lab commuting to Bank River in L.A. where we were shooting.
41:27
And he was very interested in getting some Hollywood people into games.
41:31
And I was very interested in getting into games.
41:33
And they were having trouble with a game that had been in development for a
41:37
long time. And he really wanted to get it closed up and shipped.
41:40
And it was called The Sims. And so Paul and I contributed to their initial Sims.
41:45
And it became a massive hit.
41:47
So I got hired on as a VP.
41:49
And I managed I did the first four Harry
41:52
Potter games I did about three or four Paul and I
41:55
did about three or four James Bond games but I was the executive and the title
41:59
of honor I was the tax chief but Paul and I wrote the dialogues and we wrote
42:04
stuff in the Harry Potter stuff and then some of the Bond stuff we wrote outright
42:09
like Nightfire I believe we wrote it from beginning to end the scripting and the story and stuff.
42:15
And then we were in our game Our EA life ended when we were making our own game,
42:22
which was going to be the James Bond villain game.
42:25
It was called Goldfinger versus Dr. No. And there were just too many...
42:29
Bad creative forces smashing that thing
42:32
into junk and it ultimately shipped as
42:35
golden eye rogue agent i've never looked at it i can't look back it was just
42:39
a bastardization of what we're trying to do and i quit ea over that i was too
42:44
frustrated and a couple years later i went to a company called phq where i rose
42:50
to the ranks and became executive vice president managing uh marketing.
42:55
And Paul and I have touched a lot of video games over the years.
42:59
But when that ended, about five years ago, we just really wanted to get back
43:03
to screenwriting and we've written and sold two pilots in development.
43:09
They're not on the greatest path right now but we have to keep working them.
43:14
And then probably the most exciting thing going on is we wrote a film that was
43:18
kind of a dream project, something I always wanted to do.
43:21
It's about it takes place in modern day Vietnam it's about Vietnam veterans
43:27
that go back to modern day Vietnam looking for some lost CIA payroll goals they
43:34
have lost in 1970 and it's very much inspired by Treasurer's Sierra Madre it's a very dark film,
43:40
it's very dramatic and it's currently being rewritten by Spike Lee and his partner
43:45
and Spike is going to direct it next spring that's what he says But now,
43:51
that's where we are today. It's Hollywood.
43:54
But we're on a really good path, that one.
43:57
And we believe that if Spike executes his vision on our story of veterans,
44:02
that something really wonderful is going to happen. It's going to have an all-black cast. Right.
44:07
And is this... Right, this is the big one you were talking about. This is going to...
44:12
Yeah, it's called The Last Tour. The Last Tour right now. And we've signed the deal.
44:18
And I haven't seen his draft yet, but that's kind of where we are.
44:22
And we did a round with Oliver Stone on it. We did a draft for Oliver.
44:27
And he decided he didn't want to make it.
44:30
But Ike is approaching it now with the African-American Vietnam perspective.
44:36
And we think that's pretty awesome.
44:37
That's cool. And I know this script.
44:40
This thing gets made. I mean, it'll be the best thing Paul and I have ever did. It's really great.
44:47
I mean, it's a fantastic story.
44:49
It has a great message about how we do or don't take care of our veterans over here.
44:55
But it's really an adventure story. It's an adventure story in the classic men in the jungle.
45:01
Right, right. Kind of adventure. It's really about people being where they really,
45:04
these guys have no business going into the jungles of Cambodia looking for gold
45:08
in their 60s. They really shouldn't be there.
45:10
Right. And they shouldn't have to. And that's our message in the build.
45:14
So I'm very, very excited about that. And Paul and I are currently,
45:18
you know, we teach at the University of Southern California.
45:21
Yes, I see. And we continue to write. Yeah.
45:23
What's that like, trying to teach the next band of hopefuls?
45:29
It's cool. It's hard work. It's really nice. Paul teaches screenwriting exclusively.
45:34
I teach, actually, I'm the chairman of the Interactive Media and Game Division now.
45:39
And we so I run the interactive
45:42
production and I have taught a lot of screenwriting but I
45:45
won't be teaching my screenwriting for the next couple years because I'm really
45:48
deeply interactive but Paul teaches screenwriting so we've taught a lot of writers
45:53
it's it's really good it's a really good thing at this point in our careers
45:59
to be doing and we've actually been doing it for a long time we've been teaching
46:02
for almost I've been teaching for I think I'm in my 13th year No, not exclusively.
46:07
I mean, it was more like a night job.
46:10
And even right now, I mean, we still are writing.
46:14
And if I wasn't involved in this training of these game producers this month,
46:18
I'm going to write another script.
46:20
So this year, we'll write another script. We've got to have a follow-up.
46:23
We do have a follow-up, but it's not a direct follow-up. It's more like we have
46:28
another action adventure set in the ninth century in France.
46:31
It's kind of a very interesting adventure film. we wrote a couple years we wrote
46:36
that maybe like two years ago was actually with the grad student arts who kind of helped out and uh,
46:43
Well, Paul and I will probably be writing for at least another 10 years.
46:48
I can't imagine. That's great.
46:52
And we wrote some comics, and we wrote some graphic novels.
46:56
We dabbled in 2007, which is a really unhappy, stupid experience.
47:02
But we also, at the same time, wrote an original graphic novel called Red Menace.
47:07
And I'm really proud of Jerry Ordway through the whole book.
47:10
The art is fantastic. I think it's about a black-lipped superhero in 1950s Los Angeles.
47:15
And I think that's another one of the really great pieces of work of ours that
47:21
have traveled over the years.
47:23
Well, I certainly hope you keep writing. For this fan,
47:27
from the early days, from the VHS extravaganzas to The Flash,
47:34
to the wonderful film that is The Rocketeer, it's been really cool to finally
47:39
get to talk to you, Danny.
47:40
And I wish you all the best, mate. I hope that all this stuff you've got cooking
47:44
comes to the boil and we get to see that credit written by Danny Bilson and
47:50
Paul DeMio on the screen again real soon.
47:55
I agree with you. I want to get that credit on the screen again too.
47:59
I just want to, you know, Paul and I, we're not done.
48:02
Yes, Danny Bilson, fantastic bloke.
48:06
If you haven't seen the Rocketeer, Zone Troopers, Trances, all the good stuff
48:11
eliminators it's awesome get into it get into it any way you can check the links in the description,
48:19
and as always my little Yugenites thank you for listening to us on Spotify or
48:25
wherever you choose to listen to your favourite podcasts I'm Kent Hill and until
48:29
next time you've been listening to Cinema,
48:33
Zero Game.
48:37
Music.