Latest / Cinema Yūgen / The September Screenwriters Series: Charlie Haas

Transcript

The September Screenwriters Series: Charlie Haas · Cinema Yūgen

0:00
G'day. That's right. It's that time again.
0:04
Time for Cinema Eugen.
0:08
Music.
0:18
Welcome back Eugenites and Cinema Eugen.
0:21
In September we're going to
0:23
do the September Screenwriters Series and the first episode of the series.
0:27
We have Charlie Haas That's screenwriter Charlie Haas, known for films Over
0:32
the Edge, Tex, Reckless Disregard, Martians Go Home, Gremlins 2, and Matinee.
0:40
As we say, an underappreciated classic.
0:43
So stay tuned now for Charlie Haas, the September screenwriter series here on
0:50
Cinema Yugin, our first episode.
0:52
Charlie Haas, ladies and gentlemen. I guess a good place to always begin,
0:56
for the uninitiated, a little bit of an origin story before you began your screenwriting career.
1:02
Well, sure. I went off to college at UC Santa Cruz around 1970.
1:10
Thinking I would take a bunch of, I went into the creative writing program thinking
1:14
I would take a bunch of fiction workshops and stuff like that.
1:18
Not really thinking about the movies at all.
1:20
I had not thought about writing for the movies. I was very interested in fiction
1:25
and I was interested in journalism.
1:27
I was reading the new journalism all through high school and a lot of novels and stuff.
1:32
But when I got to UC Santa Cruz, there was a guy teaching sort of a one-man
1:38
film history department, teaching classes in Hollywood movies named Tim Hunter.
1:43
And Tim Hunter had gone to Harvard and had gone to the AFI and had made some
1:50
very good student films and stuff.
1:52
And he was teaching classes in film noir and Alfred Hitchcock and westerns and
1:59
Howard Hawks and tearjerkers, all these genres, all this stuff, animation.
2:03
And a bunch of us just sort of fell into taking these classes and,
2:08
you know, learning to watch movies and learning how to think about movies as
2:13
opposed to just going to the movies, which is what we had been doing all along.
2:17
And Tim got the idea that he and I might do some writing together.
2:22
And I should say he was a wonderful teacher.
2:25
And I am far from the only person who took his classes and then went into the
2:31
business because Margie Simkin, who's a great casting director,
2:35
was one of Tim's students.
2:36
There were a bunch of people who became editors or documentary filmmakers or
2:41
whatever who started out in those classes.
2:44
So Tim and I started fooling around with writing together.
2:47
And I think, well, he came up with the idea for Over the Edge,
2:51
which is our first picture, which Jonathan Kaplan directed. did.
2:55
He came up with that idea in the early 70s when he was still teaching at Santa
3:00
Cruz and I was still a student there.
3:02
We started working on it then, 1974.
3:07
When I graduated, I moved down to LA.
3:11
I had a day job in the music business, in the record business, and Tim moved to LA also.
3:16
And we just kept working on the thing and finally sold that script in 1978.
3:22
That was the first thing we did together.
3:24
And, you know, and then I was, I mean, I was also writing for magazines a lot
3:30
all those years that we worked together.
3:33
But that was, you know, that was how I, that was how I got into it. Right. Very cool.
3:40
So, yeah, so Over the Edge was the first...
3:42
Was it the, obviously not the first screenplay you wrote, but certainly the
3:46
first one that broke your heart? It was. Okay. Very, well, no, it's just.
3:51
Yeah, sorry. The first one I worked on, Tim had written scripts,
3:54
you know, for his own student films at Harvard and AFI and stuff like that,
3:59
but I had not done screenwriting before.
4:01
Okay. And we wrote that together and it really was
4:04
based on stuff that was going on
4:07
at the time in foster city which is san
4:11
francisco suburb sort of all new condo community very
4:14
much like what you see in in the movie although the movie was made
4:17
outside of denver colorado it's that same kind of place the kids seemed very
4:24
similar the movie was cast with kids in the in the denver area but they reminded
4:29
us very much of the kids we interviewed and spent time with in foster city No, sorry.
4:35
No, it's just that, you know, most of the screenwriters I've spoken to,
4:40
it's usually it's their first script that gets through isn't usually the first one they wrote.
4:45
But so it gave me it gave me completely the wrong impression,
4:50
you know, at that point, I thought the business was a lot easier than it turned out to be.
4:55
But yeah, that's what happened. Yeah, well, it must be misleading.
4:59
You know, you saw what people said. This was hard.
5:03
Well it's hard it did take a year for
5:07
them for the money to come together to make that picture and
5:10
it was that happened also with matinee it is
5:13
that's really a year of going crazy because you keep thinking you have the money
5:18
or you keep thinking you have a distribution deal and then it turns out that
5:21
oh you don't and they go back to trying so you're excuse me you're just endlessly
5:27
in this state of hoping the picture's going to go and you never know if it will. Right.
5:31
Another interesting credit that I happened upon while just doing a little bit
5:35
of research into all of your credits is it says that you did unaccredited rewrites
5:42
or writing on Tron. Is that true?
5:45
Yeah, it's true. How did that happen?
5:48
I guess Tim and I were hanging around at Disney a lot in Burbank,
5:52
because we were making checks there.
5:54
And then after that, I think that's right, I think it's afterward,
5:59
we were sort of hanging around. And the studio, they were getting ready to make Tron.
6:05
The scenes were very much locked in because that very early sort of,
6:14
we would now say primitive kind of computer animation that was done for the picture,
6:18
that had all been sort of worked out.
6:21
And they, you know, the sequence of scenes was was kind of, you know,
6:25
written in stone at that point.
6:27
So they couldn't make any changes really to the story in that sense.
6:32
But they wanted a rewrite from a, you know, basically from basically a dialogue
6:38
rewrite. And it was very close to when they were shooting.
6:43
I mean, they came to me and they said, look, this picture is just about to go.
6:47
But we would really like you to come in and do something about the dialogue,
6:52
you know, do a polish on it.
6:53
So I sort of locked myself in an office at Disney, and I worked a little bit
7:01
with Steve Lisberger, who directed the picture.
7:03
But basically, I kind of went without sleep for a couple weeks and did this
7:10
dialogue polish. I mean, I've said to people it was sort of like,
7:13
you know, having having a comic book that you couldn't change the pictures,
7:17
but you could change the speech balloon.
7:18
So I I went through it and did a lot of stuff.
7:21
And I stayed on it through the early readings and rehearsals with Jeff Bridges and everyone.
7:28
And, you know, it was a short, very intense experience. Right.
7:33
So is that your line? Now, that is a big door.
7:37
Oh, you know, I think that's a Jeff Bridges ad-lib. Oh, okay,
7:40
right. Yeah, I know it was a big door. I don't know.
7:46
I think it was just taking so long for the thing to open that he said that.
7:51
You know, I'd love to take credit for it, but I think that was Jeff.
7:54
You know, it's like, we're going to need a bigger boat. Yeah, right, right, right.
8:00
So, yeah, so then, like you said, you were doing techs around that time,
8:05
and Tex, like Over the Edge, starred a young Matt Dillon in both instances.
8:13
Yeah. Where did... You know... Yeah, go on.
8:16
Oh, well, I think the genesis of that one is that Tim found out about S.E.
8:24
Hinton's book, Susie Hinton, from talking to the kids we had in the ensemble
8:30
cast on Over the Edge who were just sort of, you know, kids we had found hanging
8:34
out at their middle schools in the Denver and Boulder areas.
8:38
And, you know, he was just kind of, you know, what music do you guys listen to?
8:42
Which was, you know, which was helpful in terms of music for the picture.
8:47
And he said, you know, do you read any books? What do you read?
8:49
And there were some big fans of Susie Hinton, of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish and Tex and stuff.
8:56
And Tim just basically got the idea of adapting one of them,
9:01
which, you know, turned out to be Tex was available.
9:03
And it turned out that Matt was into it and that basically you know sold Disney
9:08
on project okay cool it's oddly enough I remember the trailer for text but not
9:13
the film because I remember seeing the the trailer on videos.
9:20
A number of times before I actually saw the film. But it's funny,
9:23
now I talk to you, all I can think of is the trailer.
9:26
Well, you know, I like the film a lot.
9:30
I think it's a very nice job by Matt, who was, you know, sort of maturing a
9:35
mile a minute as an actor at that point.
9:38
It's a very good job by Tim. And of course, you know, Tim from there goes on
9:43
to be just this wonderful director who makes,
9:46
you know, River's Edge and The Thane of Fort Washington and
9:49
the maker and then a whole bunch of very good television
9:52
and you know he's wonderful and you know
9:55
that's his first picture and it's i think it's a really good job so
9:59
anyway after that we come to tv movie
10:03
reckless disregard which starred tess harper
10:06
ronnie cox and leslie nielsen what
10:10
yeah yeah what was the uh the genesis of
10:13
that one the genesis of that one i think
10:16
there was a producer who we kept
10:19
trying to do stuff together named mark harlow from
10:22
new york and he he'd come out to california now
10:25
and then we'd have meetings and stuff and the idea was his and you know we basically
10:31
kicked it around together roughed out a story and went up to toronto and made
10:36
it right for i guess it was for
10:38
showtime is that right i think so yeah and ronnie cox who was in that one.
10:44
Also yeah yeah who also came across and then
10:47
did the next one that you wrote was Martians Go Home with
10:50
Randy Quaid oh yeah ironically enough I was looking through the cast again and
10:55
it has in it a young Dean Devlin and of course Dean Devlin went on to very big
11:01
things producing movies with Roland Emmerich and oh right yeah he was yeah it's
11:07
funny I mean and you work with people.
11:11
You sort of cross paths with people working. We have the very young Naomi Watts in matinee.
11:20
And quite good in that little part. And, you know, people didn't know who she
11:25
was yet. But, yeah, these things are funny in retrospect.
11:28
So then we come to the Joe Dante double feature, and we start with Gremlins,
11:34
the new batch. And I watched it again recently.
11:36
I hadn't seen it for a long time and was listening to the commentary track,
11:40
which you're a part of and yeah i loved
11:43
i love the idea that they they they wanted a sequel so bad that they just said
11:49
to joe make whatever movie you want and call it gremlins 2 it's pretty much
11:55
true i think they had been trying to figure out a sequel for a long time they
12:00
really wanted joe to do it.
12:03
And it was, I was, I was just so happy to get involved with that and,
12:09
and to work with those guys, Joe and his producing partner, Mike Finnell.
12:14
It was just terrific. And it was Jonathan Kaplan who directed Over the Edge.
12:20
And of course, you know, also maybe Accused and a bunch of great movies.
12:25
He was friends with Joe, I think going back at least to when they both worked
12:31
for Roger Corman, as so many people did.
12:34
And he sort of put us together on that one. He just called me up at home one
12:38
day and said, how would you like to write Gremlins 2?
12:40
And I just laughed. I thought, you know, that'd be a riot. That'd be great, you know.
12:45
So did you have any notes going in, or you just had free reign, or?
12:52
Well, I said to Charlie, sure, you know, let me talk to them.
12:57
I had briefly, I slightly knew Joe by then. I didn't know Mike Finnell, but I knew Joe.
13:03
And I think Mike and I had a phone call where he said, well,
13:06
look, you know, we want to try to do this sequel.
13:10
We're not sure how to do it. we don't want
13:13
the gremlins who we don't want to do the small town again we want to go someplace
13:17
like a city but you can't have these puppets running all over someplace like
13:22
new york because it's just going to cost all the money in the world if you do
13:26
that you can't you know really shoot them on the streets of new york but you
13:30
know so if there's some way to control it,
13:33
and i said well let me see if i can think of something and i got off the phone and i thought Well,
13:37
it could be funny if it was, you know, a big office building and it was,
13:41
you know, a so-called smart building where everything is supposed to,
13:44
you know, work automatically and, you know, cyber everything.
13:49
And, you know, you put the gremlins in there and you're keeping them off the streets of New York.
13:54
And you also have a, you know, a place for them to destroy.
14:00
So that was basically my pitch. You know, I went down and saw the guys and talked to them about it.
14:07
And, of course, the thing about working with those two that was so great is
14:12
that I always felt like, you know, if I came up with an idea,
14:16
they would come back at me with about five in return.
14:20
You know, so, you know, we just really sat and jammed on the thing.
14:24
And I would say, you know, well, it's a smart building. And they would say,
14:26
oh, great, you know, and Donald Trump owns the building.
14:29
And there's a cable TV network in the basement. and you could do this and you
14:33
could do that and I'm just, you know, jotting all this stuff down.
14:36
So it was very collaborative and I really, really think the world of those guys,
14:45
we, you know, we just had such a good time figuring it out and then,
14:49
of course, it was, you know, a huge amount of work to actually,
14:55
you know, get a functioning script and to make this movie with all the logistics
15:01
And I say we didn't go outside.
15:02
We have that one scene with the cathedral, the gargoyle gag,
15:06
which was done on the lot of Warner Brothers.
15:09
And we have some establishing stuff that was done very quickly in New York.
15:15
But basically, it's all on stages, and that was sort of the solution to it.
15:20
Yeah, like they say, I think it was Joel Silver that said, you know,
15:24
in screenwriting, it's very easily to write, you know, like,
15:27
the Indians take the fort, and it's like one eighth of a page.
15:32
Sure. You know, very easy to write, you know, the spider gremlin comes through the corridor.
15:40
You know, and does whatever. And then it's up to, like, you know,
15:44
a small army of people to make the spider gremlin walk down the hallway, you know?
15:49
Boy, you said it. I mean, I remember going down there.
15:52
You know, by then I was living up here in Oakland, so I would go to the set
15:56
occasionally, but I wasn't there the whole time.
15:59
I remember going down there when they basically spent several months just shooting
16:06
puppet stuff. The actors were not in it.
16:10
It was basically just we have to shoot all these puppet movements for weeks or months.
16:16
And I remember going down there on one of those days, and it is so slow and
16:21
difficult, Rick Baker and those people.
16:23
It is so painstaking, and it's just so hard.
16:28
And I watched it, and I thought, thank God this is not my job.
16:31
I believe how hard everyone was working.
16:34
Well because because with gremlins too you didn't just have sort of the two
16:40
kinds of gremlin i mean you have the the spider gremlin obviously gizmos back
16:45
you have the the intellectual gremlin.
16:49
Yeah you have the the tony randall was the voice yeah he's fantastic one of
16:55
my favorites like when he shoots that other one he says you know that was i
17:00
forget the line now what is it i mean like That was fun.
17:04
It wasn't civilized, but it was fun. Yeah, yeah. That wasn't civilized at all, but it was fun.
17:09
Yeah. Fun, certainly, but not civilized. That was another thing going in was
17:14
that they said to me, you know, we want to see if we can come up with some different
17:17
varieties of the little monsters.
17:21
And so the genetics Christopher Lee thing came out of that. Yeah,
17:25
and then, of course, Robert Bacardo gets stuck with that.
17:28
The only female gremlin. Yeah. Duck with her in the lift, and they end up getting
17:33
married, which was beautiful.
17:35
Yeah. That's another great thing about working with Joe, I think,
17:40
is that, you know, often as not, you get to work with Bob Picardo and Dick Miller,
17:44
and, you know, these people you keep bringing back who are wonderful.
17:47
Yeah. Well, it wouldn't be a Joe Dante movie without that guy, Dick Miller.
17:53
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That was fantastic. Fantastic.
17:58
So, I mean, when you were doing your draft, like you said, with all the different
18:03
types of gremlin, I mean, did you, how many of those did you come up with in
18:07
your own or did you, like you say,
18:09
Joe said, oh, we can have this kind of gremlin or that kind of gremlin?
18:12
Wow. You know, I did come up with a bunch of them.
18:18
I'm sure I didn't come up with all of them. And, you know, that's one of those
18:23
things that now I couldn't possibly remember who came up with what.
18:28
But I'm sure a lot of it was from the three of us sitting around. Cool.
18:33
So then we come to Matinee, a much beloved movie.
18:37
I mean, it's kind of, it doesn't get much press when they talk about Joe Dante's
18:43
movies, but it's certainly one of the classics.
18:45
Can you tell us about the origins of matinee?
18:48
Yeah, it's, we were still, we,
18:52
Working on Gremlins 2, I don't even know if we were, I guess we were in post-production
18:58
at this point, I'm not quite sure, but it was late in the game.
19:02
And we were sitting around and I said, you know, we have a project we've been trying to do here.
19:08
It's called Matinee, and do you want to take a look at it and see if you have
19:12
any ideas for, you know, taking it to the next step? And I said, sure.
19:17
And they had a script that had been worked on by Ed Naha and Jericho Stone and,
19:22
you know, had been through a different draft by the two of them.
19:26
And I read a couple of drafts. And at the point that I read it,
19:29
it was basically, it's go to a Saturday afternoon horror movie.
19:34
And, you know, so the central idea
19:37
was already there, but it was not the characters that we wound up with.
19:41
And I read it, and what I came back with was, I said, well, what if kids go
19:48
to a Saturday afternoon horror movie, but it's in Key West, it's during the Cuban Missile Crisis,
19:56
and the movie they're going to see has been made by essentially William Castle,
20:01
Russell who is doing a bunch of effects in the
20:04
theater and nobody can tell if the if
20:07
it's the effects in the theater or if the atomic war has broken out that everyone's
20:11
worrying about and they said great let's try to do that because Joe and Mike
20:18
and I had all you know we're all of a certain age and we all grew up in that
20:22
period when people really did have fallout shelters in the backyard.
20:27
This was an element that the picture had not had until then,
20:31
but we all remembered seeing fallout shelter lots.
20:37
It was like Christmas tree lots, except it was all these sort of concrete cylinders
20:42
that you were supposed to sink into a hole in your backyard when the atom bomb fell. It was crazy.
20:48
So we all thought, oh, I think Joe very quickly.
20:54
Probably more clearly than I did, said, oh, that's good because you're dealing
21:00
with the tension between the fear you want to have, which is the horror movie,
21:05
and the fear you don't want to have,
21:07
which is actually dying, you know, and you sort of have the horror movie to offset the real fear,
21:14
and when the two of them become confused, it sort of brings them into this very sharp relief.
21:19
So, you know, there is, you know, the movie does have that kind of philosophical
21:26
thing in the back of its head.
21:28
And I think, you know, as it has slowly, you know, kind of become this cult
21:34
favorite that people like now.
21:36
I think that's part of the strength of it is that, you know,
21:41
it has that little meditation about fear built into it.
21:45
Right i try sometimes to
21:48
to open up these shows of mine
21:51
to questions from fans
21:54
i have i have a few questions from my
21:58
very good friend kevin candela who is an absolute probably
22:01
certified i don't know if he's he said he has
22:04
never met a a greater fan of matinee than
22:07
himself so so we'll go
22:09
ahead we'll go ahead and and coin him as
22:12
the largest matinee fan out there and
22:15
he has given me a few he's given me three questions that
22:19
he said he said he could talk for days about it with you but he's given me three
22:22
questions that he would love that he would love to ask the first one is the
22:27
character of is the character of lawrence woolsey more than just a attribute to william castle.
22:40
The initial impulse was very
22:44
much about William Castle but there are other there are other elements because
22:49
if you think about it you know William Castle made his pictures in Hollywood
22:54
for a studio and what we were going for you know to to sort of graft onto that
23:01
Joe gave me a wonderful book,
23:03
I don't know if you know about it, called A Youth in Babylon by a guy named Dave Friedman.
23:09
And Dave Friedman was one of these
23:11
guys who ran around the country showing things like mom and dad. Right.
23:16
And these nutty...
23:19
Gorilla movie, Gorilla in the Jungle, all these crazy things.
23:23
And these were guys who had nothing to do with Hollywood.
23:26
They basically had some movie, literally, the print was in the trunk of the
23:32
car, and they would run around and go into theaters and show these things.
23:38
And in fact, when they showed Mom and Dad, you know, which has the scenes spliced
23:44
in from some medical movie of a woman giving birth,
23:48
they would sometimes go into towns and they'd be picketed, you know,
23:55
by the Knights of Columbus or somebody.
23:56
And Friedman says in the book, if we didn't get picketed by the Knights of Columbus,
24:00
I would hire a couple of guys and they would, you know, I would hire people to picket us.
24:05
And so the Dick Miller and John Sayles characters in matinee come from that.
24:11
So it's William Castle, it's Dave Friedman, it's when you talk about fourth
24:15
wall gags, Joe and Mike used to talk about Olsen and Johnson doing them,
24:19
you know, in their shows on Broadway before they made movies,
24:23
you know, they would run a train through the theater and stuff like that.
24:26
So it's heavily weighted toward William Castle, obviously, the Tingler and stuff.
24:31
But it's a bit of an amalgam of some of these other guys who were sort of outside
24:37
of Hollywood and who had come from the world of carnival as much as from show business.
24:43
Right, yeah. Great showmen, in other words.
24:46
Exactly, yeah. My number one...
24:50
They'd have searchlights, they'd have all that stuff. Yeah.
24:53
Another one of Kevin's questions is, is there a significance towards the helicopter
24:58
and its number in the final scene?
25:01
Well, yeah. I mean, it's the future. I mean, it's the idea of,
25:06
you know, most specifically Vietnam being, you know, right around the corner.
25:12
Right. And just generally, you know, that the safety is never there for long.
25:19
Right. And it's going right over these two kids' heads. And yeah,
25:23
that's what it's doing there.
25:25
And his last question is, did you have any choice as far as the songs were concerned?
25:33
Definitely The Lion Sleeps Tonight, I specified in the script.
25:37
And we had kind of a back and forth over what the song should be at the end.
25:44
I, you know, sort of voted very heavily for using it a second time,
25:49
Which which I'm glad we did.
25:51
I mean, I think it I think it works very nicely there. Well,
25:55
thank you for that Kevin will be Kevin will be over them. Then he's a huge.
25:59
Yeah, he talks about matinee a lot When I said I was going to be when I said
26:05
to him I was going to be chatting with you He said oh, I said if you got any
26:08
questions, you better You better get them out now.
26:13
But he said he had probably have a lot more but he
26:15
only got me three in time for uh for the
26:18
recording so but anyway that
26:21
was really really cool anyway so that brings us to tv series
26:24
rebel highway tell us about rebel highway rebel
26:28
highway was fun basically you know there were these aip movies in the in the
26:35
period when roger corman was there and stuff samuel arcoff's company and and
26:39
they made they they sort of made drive-in double features there was a lot of their business.
26:46
They made very cheap.
26:50
Very quickly made exploitation pictures. There were horror movies.
26:54
There were teenage juvenile delinquent movies.
26:57
I think they had a very good time making them.
27:01
You know, I was a teenage werewolf. I think it may be the most famous title,
27:05
but, you know, Bucket of Blood, the original Little Shop of Horrors, all this stuff.
27:09
And at some point, Debra Hill and these other producers had the idea of doing
27:15
a series of remakes of the AIP movies. I guess it was for Showtime.
27:21
And they got different directors to remake different movies,
27:27
I think, of their choice.
27:28
And we got Runaway Daughters.
27:30
And so Joe sent me a VHS cassette of the original Runaway Daughters.
27:36
And boy, it's really, it's a very fast feet movie.
27:41
I remember talking to him after I watched it and he said, well,
27:44
you know, did you notice that wherever the runaway daughters go and they go
27:49
from city to city and they're in this desperate, you know, scramble and they
27:53
go from one house and one apartment to another, they can never get away from that one couch.
27:58
Which is true.
28:00
True so the original i think was made in five days as
28:03
those movies were it happened that joe's assistant
28:07
for the years that i worked with
28:10
him was a woman named betty moss who had worked at aip
28:13
back in the period when they made those movies and she said
28:16
you know it was great because they made them in five days and
28:19
you had a rap rap party every friday so we
28:22
did a remake almost as fast and almost as cheap
28:25
i think i think we shot for like 12 days and
28:29
we we were sort of
28:32
loose with the with the story and the tone we took
28:34
it in a in a different direction but there's a little bit of the the heart of
28:38
the original there and and i was runaway daughters it was really it was fun
28:42
and i i like it quite a lot yeah it sounds like a great a great project all
28:48
around at the beginning you You said you were sort of disillusioned because right off the bat.
28:54
The first script that you worked on sold and subsequently discovered how the
29:00
trials and tribulations of getting films made.
29:03
Looking at the landscape today where
29:07
where it is it seems to be just as difficult if
29:09
not more difficult you know do you how do you see like the the screenwriter
29:15
of how should the screenwriter of the modern day be you know looking at with
29:21
your experience you know you know i wish i wish i could tell you you know my experience is that.
29:29
I think I was extremely lucky, which I think probably comes across in what I've said so far.
29:35
I was very lucky to just, you know, stumble into working with Tim Hunter and
29:41
Jonathan Kaplan and therefore with Joe Dante and Mike Finnell and some of these people.
29:46
You know, I was these were people who, A, are very talented and B,
29:51
really helped me with stuff like story where I was never I was never as strong
29:58
with story as I was with dialogue and stuff.
30:02
So, you know, very collaborative. And these guys were very good for me to work with.
30:07
And, you know, and I had a very good time. I got out of it around 2003.
30:11
Three i know very little about
30:15
what goes on now the people i worked with a
30:19
lot of them now work in television because there's so much more work there uh
30:23
i and i you know and my my memory of it is that the business changed all the
30:30
time when i was in it that every year it was like oh well now you get financing
30:34
from dentists well now you get financing from canada well now you get it from China,
30:39
and you have to do this, and now it's all independent producers,
30:42
and you don't care about studio.
30:44
These trends would last for a year or two, and they would affect the kind of
30:48
projects you could try to get made.
30:51
I got out of this and went into writing fiction, writing novels,
30:57
which is a very solitary kind of work.
31:02
And if you dropped me into Hollywood right now, Now, I would call up the people
31:11
I've worked with in the past, but I really would not. I really would not know the landscape.
31:16
Right. Is there a film that you always wanted to write or have written that
31:22
never got made or you never got to...
31:26
Never got to shop it around or anything like that? Or you did shop it around, but it never got made?
31:31
Oh, yeah. There are a few. There are a few scripts that I developed that I wrote
31:36
for a producer named Stuart Kornfeld, who I'm very fond of, who worked with
31:41
Barry Levinson and then with Ben Stiller.
31:44
I rather wrote a few things for those guys that it would be nice if they hadn't produced.
31:50
But you know I'm not complaining because everyone has stuff sitting around that
31:56
didn't get produced but in particular.
31:59
Joe and I worked Joe and Mike and I worked on a thing called Termite Terrace which was about the,
32:06
Warner Brothers animators making Looney Tunes in the 1930s and 40s okay well
32:12
and we worked with you know Chuck Jones was our advisor on it and he was great
32:17
and we so it was your goodbye Yeah,
32:21
well, it was kind of a biopic, but kind of imagined as well. Right.
32:28
And it had animation in it, but it was a live-action movie. And it was great
32:32
fun to work on, and we really put a lot into it.
32:36
We could not make it at Warner Brothers, and because they own the cartoon characters,
32:41
we also couldn't make it at Warner Brothers.
32:43
Yeah. So it was not a thing where you could say, okay, wow, we're going across
32:47
the street to Universal. You couldn't, you know, because it was kind of Warner Brothers or nowhere.
32:52
So we did that. And I think that's certainly the one that got away for me.
32:59
And I think it's one that got away for Joe also.
33:03
But listen, you know, that's what happened. That's, you know.
33:07
But I get, well, like you say, you're not part of the business anymore.
33:12
But are you still, the movies that are coming out today, Are you still enjoying
33:16
what Hollywood is producing?
33:19
Oh, yeah. I mean, I get screeners because I'm still in the Writers Guild,
33:23
and my wife and I sit and watch them, and there is just... I think there's terrific
33:27
work coming out, and I think it's coming out...
33:31
On every level, I think there's stuff coming out from the studios and the classics
33:35
divisions that's wonderful.
33:37
And then I see something like Tangerine that was shot on a telephone, and it's terrific.
33:43
So in that wonderful new world where you can shoot stuff with a camera from
33:51
Best Buy and edit it on a laptop and have a presentable movie, if you have the talent.
33:57
And I think that is all new since I was in, and I'm thrilled to see that happening.
34:04
So, yeah, I think there's great stuff to see.
34:07
That kind of goes back, I remember watching, I don't know if you saw it,
34:10
Hearts of Darkness. It was a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now.
34:14
Oh, sure. And it ends with Francis Coppola prognosticating, saying,
34:19
you know, he said, you know, one day, you know, a little girl who lives in some
34:23
farm will make a movie with her father's video camera and become the next Mozart.
34:29
And it really will become an art form. And I think he wasn't wrong.
34:33
I think we're there, you know, except the video camera is now like an iPhone or something like that.
34:40
Yeah, no, it is wonderful. Wonderful. And I, I mean, I, I think that's the healthiest
34:46
thing that's happening. I think it's a great thing. Yeah.
34:49
Because I mean, you know, these, these smaller, very great films, of course,
34:55
always are up against the, the tentpole movies with all the comic book movies
35:00
and, you know, big summer releases and all that sort of thing.
35:06
You know in thinking in thinking back to when
35:10
you were when you were in the business and a
35:13
movie like gremlins 2 which of
35:16
course is following a very successful you know
35:20
so you know it was it was probably i can't
35:23
remember the theatrical release at the time but it was certainly touted as like
35:26
a big a big release for warner brothers at that time you know looking at looking
35:34
at the The scale of which they promote movies today as opposed to the way they promote movies now,
35:43
do you think there's a lot, do you think it's, they push a lot harder now?
35:48
Or do you think, like for instance with Gremlins 2, do you think there was the
35:52
same amount of hype generated?
35:55
Or do they generate more today? Hype?
35:58
Good question, and I don't know the answer because, you know,
36:01
I'm sitting up here in Oakland, and, you know, I'm sitting here writing my novel.
36:09
I mean, just as far as, like, the saturation, I mean, yeah, I mean,
36:15
you know, I mean, obviously now
36:18
today they have so many other platforms which they can push a film out.
36:22
They push it out over the internet, they push it out over the,
36:25
you know, the, you know, obviously still television and bus sides and all that sort of stuff.
36:34
But, you know, I, you know, me personally, I think that the event film today,
36:42
I mean, I mean, I remember Gremlins 2 being an event film back in the day,
36:47
you know, because I mean, I mean, here,
36:50
here was the, the sequel to a
36:52
very popular film but of course there's always
36:56
that adage and i'm sure you would agree that that
36:59
they probably didn't think gremlins was going to be six
37:02
you know it's always a mystery if it's going to be successful or not oh absolutely
37:07
you know because once gremlins of course was successful then of course a sequel
37:13
would be you know a fait accompli so to speak you or at least they hope so anyway.
37:23
But listen Charlie it's been absolutely a real treat to talk to you today it's
37:27
been great to walk back down memory lane with some of the wonderful films that
37:32
you've written my thanks on behalf of Kevin for,
37:38
answering his questions I'm sure he'll be really wrapped
37:41
pleasure and I've enjoyed it and thank you The September Screenwriters Series
37:47
continues Ladies and gentlemen We hope you enjoyed this episode There is another
37:52
one hot on its heels So stay tuned
37:54
Through the month of September For the September Screenwriters Series,
38:01
And as always Thank you for listening to us Little Yugonites On Spotify or wherever
38:07
You choose to listen to your favourite podcasts,
38:10
So until next time This is Kent And saying thank you for listening and stay
38:16
tuned to the one and only cinema.
38:21
You get it.
38:23
Music.