Latest / Cinema Yūgen / Behind the Screen: Paul M. Sammon's Cinematic Odyssey

Transcript

Behind the Screen: Paul M. Sammon's Cinematic Odyssey · Cinema Yūgen

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  G'day. That's right, it's that time again. Time for Cinema Yugen!
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  Music.
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  Yes, another episode Cinema Yugen, the classic the fan requested.
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  Kent's classic for this month is Paul M.
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  Salmon, author, filmmaker, Hollywood insider and one of the most respected and
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  knowledgeable writers on film working in the world. He has published numerous
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  articles, short stories, and books.
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  His many film journalism pieces have seen print in the Los Angeles Times,
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  Empire Magazine, American Cinematographer, and Cinefix.
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  Salmon is also the author of books Future Noir, The Making of Blade Runner,
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  The Making of Starship Troopers, Ridley Scott Close Up.
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  Alien, the illustrated illustrated screenplay
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  aliens the illustrated screenplay conan
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  the phenomenon and he has further
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  edited groundbreaking extreme horror horror anthologies
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  splatter punks in 1990 and splatter punks 2
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  in 1995 he doesn't only write about
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  films he's also he's also worked on them as well
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  first entered the industry as a publicist
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  in the 1970s before becoming a producer director
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  and special effects coordinator computer graphics supervisor
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  and second unit director still photographer and electronic
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  press kit producer and vice president
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  of marketing for special promotions for a major studio some of the scores of
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  films which paul has worked on with include robocop platoon blue velvet conan
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  the barbarian dune return of the living dead silence of the Lambs and the Starship Troopers.
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  He was likewise among the first genre marketers to present studio film promotions
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  to the San Diego Comic-Con International.
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  Beginning in the late 70s. I was very happy to have a great enthralling conversation with Paul.
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  Here he is, my great classic conversation with the great and classic Paul M.
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  Salmon. Yeah, and you know, it's funny. It's odd because of our specialized
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  society, but I often find myself,
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  since I hop between different professions and genres, a lot of people don't
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  know that I've literally worked on over 100 films.
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  Everything from being a minor studio executive to being crew to being a producer.
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  Sometimes I've even done big parts in movies that I've been working on because the money runs up.
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  They do this all the time in Hollywood.
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  It's kind of an industry secret, but money is always, of course, the bottom line.
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  And as a film progresses in production, not always, but typically they start
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  to cut corners because something goes wrong or, you know, financing doesn't show up like it should.
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  There's a million different reasons for it. But usually, particularly if it's
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  a show that's not shooting in Los Angeles, they'll typically put crew members
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  in as like background extras or, you know, little bit parts and things like that.
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  God, I've done, I don't know, probably a dozen of those.
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  I mean, in RoboCop 2, which I was actually the computer graphics supervisor
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  on as well as the publicist.
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  I just did a commentary track for Shop Factory that's going to be putting out
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  the Robo 2 and Robo 3 DVDs and Blu-ray pretty soon, I think in March.
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  I mean, at the time, what was a $2,000 Armadi suit playing supposedly a vice
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  detective standing next to Nancy Allen in that scene where Robo is stripped
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  and he's hanging, you know. All right, yep.
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  That's me in there, you know, among like literally everyone in that group of
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  people or crew, you know.
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  So, yeah, it's funny. It depends. I mean, if you're a book person, you know me from books.
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  If you're an industry person on the inside, some people have heard of me.
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  I've been fortunate enough to work with, you know, some great directors and
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  then put on the other hat and then write about them, you know.
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  So it's just been a very, very fortunate career.
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  So I guess a good place as any to begin is, you know, you'd have to be a couple
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  of sandwiches short of a picnic to realize you don't love movies.
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  But what was it? Was it one film in particular, as is often the case,
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  or was it just film in general that lit the fire, so to speak?
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  Well, first let me ask you, are we recording this? Yes.
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  Yeah, yep. Yeah, okay. And on the site, will it be audio or transcribed it?
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  Or you'll add it, Thomas Emmey.
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  You'll get rid of all that. And the hoons and all that kind of stuff, right? Yeah.
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  And the wells and all the fuckwits that surround us here in the United States.
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  You'll get rid of all those. I will, I will.
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  I love that Australian expression, by the way. My wife and I have been in Australia. Right.
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  The fuckwit was one we brought back with us that we just really like.
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  We have a guy who's a titanic fuckwit running our country right now,
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  but that's a whole other topic.
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  Let's see. The simple answer, and it's going to sound fairly complicated,
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  but believe me, the full answer is even more complex.
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  I essentially have been movie and book mad since I was self-aware.
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  I started to read and write.
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  I don't know, four, five years old, whenever it is that most children start
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  that. I was slightly advanced. That's what they tell me.
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  Both my mother and my father were what you would call autodidacts.
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  They came from extreme poverty backgrounds, and they raised themselves by their bootstraps.
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  My dad went into the military, then was in the military for 20 years,
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  and then another 20 years working for the Navy and military intelligence.
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  So he was in government. He was traveling the world. We were traveling the world with him.
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  My mom worked for the Navy, civil servants. So I know the government,
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  civil service, the military, and raised a Roman Catholic, which I no longer am quite well.
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  So I have this fairly conservative background.
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  However, I was fortunate enough when I was raised mostly overseas in Asia.
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  For instance, my brother was born in Japan in the 50s.
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  I'm older than he is. But we were kind of in the first wave of neo-colonials
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  of America who were occupying Japan after World War II.
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  But then I essentially grew up on naval bases in the Philippines,
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  Civic Bay, Sangley Point.
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  It was a pretty exotic childhood. It seemed normal to me then,
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  but now I realize that I was exceptionally fortunate in that,
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  I was able to have a ground-level view of the third world.
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  The Philippines back then in the 50s and 60s, as now, is one of the poorest nations on Earth.
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  It's also one of the most violent. I think they have the highest murder rates
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  still per capita of any nation in Southeast Asia.
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  Having said all that, I loved the Philippines and the Filipinos.
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  I loved the culture. And because we were so isolated on these Navy bases,
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  and in fact, back then there was one television station broadcasting from Manila,
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  but we could barely get it because the mountains were in the way.
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  The Navy had all of these movie theaters, and they would show a different film every night.
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  What they did was they would get packages of, oh, I don't know,
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  seven to 20 different films, and they would rotate them throughout these different,
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  you know, screens on the base. Now, some of these were only 16-millimeter prints,
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  but some of them were 35s.
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  And what was interesting was that, in retrospect,
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  the Navy was able to have this vast library of not only contemporary movies
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  that were coming out, which for me in the 50s especially were things like,
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  you asked what some touchstones were, things like Forbidden Planet,
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  The Invisible Boy, War of the Worlds, which scared the living crap out of me.
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  I mean, now it looks like a creaky, you know, ham-fisted relic where you can
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  see the wires holding the Martian War machines and, you know,
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  Gene Barry, his usual unctuous self, and Ann Robinson trying to act.
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  But, you know, in the moment, those were real.
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  And as a child, especially a young child, I've always felt that when you watch
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  a film, it's almost like you're watching a documentary. You know,
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  you believe, and it affects you at a very primal level.
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  Long story short, my dad was someone who despised films, but he loved literature.
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  And my mom was also a constant reader.
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  But she was also a movie buff. So very early on, I used to go to the movies with her.
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  And then as I got older, you know, it was just something to do.
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  Because honestly, on these bases, you either, when you were younger,
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  you got in trouble or you ran around with proto-gangs.
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  We actually had gangs on these bases.
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  Or you went to the movies or you went to the library. If you were an athletic
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  type, you know, you played baseball, that kind of thing.
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  But I was blinded at one eye at an early age, and I was not able to participate
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  in a lot of ball-type sports.
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  I'm actually a semi-professional swimmer. and became very active in swimming
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  at an early age. And I was pretty good.
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  The bus stroker and the butterfly guy. At the age of 13, I held a state record
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  in South Carolina for 15 years and olders for 100-meter,
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  Deathstroke, and held that state record for some time. Anyway,
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  all of this feeds into the fact that because I was in an exotic country,
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  because I was attracted to literature and to films and to music,
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  there was always music in my house.
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  My dad played what was then called hillbilly music in Western,
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  but also classical, and my mom loved show tunes and pop music.
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  So I'm being inundated in this stew.
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  So there's your answer. So it comes from passion. It comes from being exposed
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  at an early age to many different types of media and something that I love and still love. Yeah.
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  Well, um, aside from the, the, the military bases and the foreign locales,
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  we have very similar upbringings.
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  Yeah. Because there was, there
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  was a lot of musicians in my family and my grandmother was the movie nut.
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  So I watched a lot of movies because of her and she was an avid reader as well.
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  So yeah, we're surrounded, like yourself, by a veritable plethora of media,
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  movies and books and music.
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  So that's... That was terrific. Well, that's great.
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  I mean, you know, I think, you know, obviously, you know, there's always this
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  sociological argument that goes on about nature versus nurture.
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  You know, are you genetically coded to be a certain way, or is it your environment, or,
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  I think it's both, obviously. It's obvious to me. But I'm Irish.
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  I'm third generation on both sides. The Irish have a tendency to be firstly
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  independent and also to really subscribe to some dark, nonchalant,
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  superstitious beliefs.
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  And I think that was part of it as well.
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  I mean, growing up as a Roman Catholic, you get that whole, you know.
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  Winged beings with celestial light around their heads nonsense.
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  And you also get, you know, a very strong ethical and moral compass.
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  And I think also when I saw films at an early age, that was kind of the last
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  gap of the studio system.
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  And the studio was very moralistic.
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  I mean, the Catholic legion of decency was still around.
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  I mean, we were told what movies we could see, and if we went to see this other
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  kind of movie we weren't supposed to, we would go right to hell.
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  So I'm sure I have a very spacious niche in hell.
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  I've always thought I was going there anyway. It's probably going to be a lot
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  more interesting than hell.
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  But it was interesting because I became so just overwhelmed and in love with what I saw.
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  And I was fortunate enough to be there at a time when not only were the studios
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  reacting to the pop culture trends in the United States,
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  which, by the way, I missed a lot of because I was isolated in these,
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  you know, foreign accounts.
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  But, you know, they were the comic books like EC Comics and DC and Marvel,
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  all those things started in the early 60s to gain a whole new life and a vitality.
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  A great comic works graciously when I could get to start to get to the Philippines,
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  They have a lot of cheap paperbacks, so I was always reading all these collections
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  of science fiction and horror stories, but they were very thin on the ground
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  back then. There weren't a lot of them.
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  And I was home-eating the libraries, trying to find stuff.
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  And they actually had old Arkham House books. I don't know if you're familiar
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  with them, but they were a limited specialty press that was run by August Dillard,
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  who was one of the guys who really saved H.P.
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  Lovecraft very early on. So I have all these numerous interests,
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  but at the same time, and again, because of the eclecticism of the venue,
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  of the films that the Navy presented,
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  I was seeing Fellini movies.
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  I was seeing Godard films. I was seeing Truffaut with a bunch of sailors who
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  were going, what the hell is this?
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  And they'd just get up and walk out and I'd sit there and go,
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  I don't know what this is but this is fascinating,
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  and so I was fortunate enough to be there at a very impressible age,
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  at the golden age of international art cinema so by the time I started,
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  when I came back to the States and went to college and managed not to be put
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  into a federal person for all the many times I protested.
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  I never knew anyone.
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  I had no connections in Hollywood, but I started to write.
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  And I was the writer and filmmaker, actually. I had a Super 8 camera,
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  and I had a 16-millimeter Bullock's windup, and I made a bunch of those,
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  just little things like that.
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  But I had no connections, and we wound up in San Diego.
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  And I slowly started to establish a name as a freelance correspondent, and a reporter.
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  And before long, I was doing things for like the Los Angeles Times,
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  the American Cinematographer, a lot of the fan magazines like Cinefine Classique
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  and Cinefix and so forth and so on.
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  And just slowly, brick by brick, built a reputation as someone who was very
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  prolific, particularly in the early to the late 70s, but also someone who is eclectic.
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  I was writing for things like Omni Magazine, Rolling Stone, Cream, the Los Angeles Times.
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  I never really tried to pin myself down into one particular channel.
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  Now, that's kind of hurt me in a way because,
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  Often, because we live in such an atomized society with such a very distinct
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  fault line, that often people who are over on one side of the divide aren't
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  aware of what the people on the other side of the divide are doing.
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  Well, I'm lucky. I have a giant pogo stick, and I can jump between those divides, and I keep doing it.
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  So I just very quickly, well, quickly is a relative term, but because my name
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  was out there, it started to be noticed.
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  And then I started to meet like-minded people who I didn't even know existed.
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  It was a very lonely existence when I was growing up overseas.
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  There were virtually no other people to talk to about my interests because these kids didn't care.
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  It was all about dating and it was all about rock, which I love by the way I
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  was a musician myself for a while I still had my old.
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  Telecaster and Yamaha amp and all that kind of stuff I was in a bunch of amps but,
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  I just essentially was pushing.
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  It was a combination of kind of a small amount of ambition, a lot of hard work,
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  and a great deal of good fortune.
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  I started to hook up with people of like minds who in turn introduced me to
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  other people, and I got a call out of the blue one day from Universal Pictures,
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  after I had worked with Walt Disney in the late 70s on a picture called The
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  Black Hole, which I wrote about in Cinefantastic, But I also was one of the
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  very first people to start bringing things down from the studios at the San
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  Diego comic book convention.
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  I mean, I started doing that in the 1970s.
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  And I was a big presence throughout the 80s. I brought down things like Conan
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  the Barbarian, Good God, Blue Velvet, all kinds of different.
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  I mean, I can't even remember. There were so many of them.
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  Return of the Living Bed, which I worked and watched Dan O'Bannon go crazy every other day.
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  You know, so, I mean, I know this is a long-winded reply, but it's such a,
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  I just feel so fortunate because I've been able to do so many things in so many different areas.
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  And Ridley Scott and I were once talking, and when we were first getting to
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  know each other, I've known Ridley for over 35 years now.
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  And he said, you're a lot like me. And I go, how can you say that?
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  I'm nothing compared to you. I mean, you're a major, you know, captain of industry.
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  I just like a drone out there. He goes, well, he says, don't sell yourself short.
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  He says, it's really hard to hit a moving target.
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  And I've always remembered those words because he was right because he skips
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  around. You know, he does television. He does features.
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  He's got like his rock video thing that he had for a while. And,
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  you know, he's got his advertising concerns.
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  And he does, you know, he's into many different areas. It's all stuff that nourishes him.
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  And so in that sense, I've just been tremendously,
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  fortunate to be able to as that tired old
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  cliche goes follow my bliss yeah but
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  i just answer 40 of your questions well
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  i'll just get rid of that sheet okay no but
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  no it's uh i guess
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  something i've always wanted to ask you i mean you
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  the the kind of meticulous detail you were
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  going into i mean and this is this was in
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  an age before we have you know dvd extras
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  and all that type of thing you were
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  i mean the i remember reading future noir
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  for the first time and it it was
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  i like to say delightfully exhaustive the
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  meticulous nature of of which you delved into that movie and and have seemed
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  to have done so on on other movies as well i guess how when you sit down to
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  do something like that and be as meticulous as you are with the subject matter.
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  You know how do you begin that type of,
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  work do you well for me and
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  i can only speak for myself it begins with
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  love that sounds like a cornball
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  cliche but it's true you know i have to have a
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  personal investment in what i'm doing i have been able to you know again be
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  fortunate enough to for the for the most part report and or analyze things projects
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  or people that i really respect admire and care deeply about,
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  On the other hand, I've had somebody who worked in the studios for many years.
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  I was a vice president of domestic publicity theatrical special projects at
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  Universal for a long time, relatively speaking, a long time.
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  And I worked on things like King Kong Lives for Dino De Laurentiis,
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  which I don't put on my resume too often.
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  But I was always lobbying to become involved in projects that I thought I was going to care about.
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  And that usually meant either a screenplay, a book, or a director, or an author.
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  And I had a prior knowledge of them.
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  So I always started with these projects, like teaching noir,
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  with a great deal of passion.
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  And having said that, I trained myself early on to be someone who is exhaustive and all-inclusive.
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  Now, there's no secret to how those things come about. It's just hard work.
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  You talk to a lot of people.
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  You interview everyone. You transcribe everything. My tool of choice for decades
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  was a handheld tape recorder or something that I could plug into a telephone.
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  Of course, now you can do it all digitally. But I would literally just do my homework.
• 21:47
  Part of that homework, particularly in the case of Future NAR,
• 21:51
  was the fact that I was there. I was there on site.
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  While I was working at Universal, I would take off my suit at Universal,
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  put on a ratty T-shirt, jeans, and an overcoat, sometimes a raincoat,
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  because I knew they were going to have the rain bars going that night.
• 22:08
  And I'd just be there. I would watch. And Michael Dealey, early on in pre-production,
• 22:15
  since we're specifically talking about Future Rock, met with me and said,
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  who are you and what do you want to do?
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  I explained, you know, and I had samples of my writings for various publications.
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  But also, you know, he just had to pick up the phone to verify that I was working at Universal.
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  And I said, look, I said, this is what I want to do. I said,
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  I know Philip K. Dick, who I had first met in 1973.
• 22:39
  And we were acquaintances slowly ripening into a friendship at this point.
• 22:45
  And I said, I have kind of a blank check from a major magazine,
• 22:51
  Omni Magazine, to do three articles on your production.
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  And also Open Door and Cinefantastique to do a major stem to stern piece.
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  He goes, well, what does that mean?
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  I said, basically, you just let me go everywhere and talk to everyone.
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  And I will run anything that's sensitive past you.
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  If it looks like it's not to be discussed, then we'll talk about it.
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  And otherwise you know that's it and he just stared at me he said come here
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  and he walked me down the hall and he introduced me to Ridley and I didn't realize
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  Ridley was in the building now this is like,
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  maybe eight months, six months before production. And Ridley and I sat down
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  and had a three-hour conversation, not an interview, a conversation.
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  We spoke about everything from fine art to cheap exploitation movies.
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  Ridley was impressive on our first meeting, but also there was a level.
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  Ridley hasn't seen any levels of many talents, but there was a certain personal connection.
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  I'm not going to say that we became best friends instantly, because that would
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  be totally not true. But we were able to speak to one another in a straightforward
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  fashion, and we just found each other really kind of interesting.
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  And I was really struck by his laser-like focus.
• 24:06
  I mean, Ridley, particularly at that point, he still has it,
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  but particularly at that point with his youthful energy, was just really an impressive guy.
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  And I thought, Jesus Christ, I love to Android Stream of Electric Sheep,
• 24:19
  the book, which I had read in 1968 when it first came out.
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  And I've read the screenplay that they've got at this point, which is really crazy.
• 24:27
  I think with Ridley at the helm, Phil Dick is the source material.
• 24:32
  And what they're trying to do with this future world, this is really going to
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  be something. So the next thing I know, I'm on this thing for almost two years.
• 24:39
  So I talked to so many people during that production, pre-production, and post-production.
• 24:45
  I went down to the effects at Maxilla.
• 24:48
  I looked at Troubles facility. My
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  wife and I, they lit up the whole Hades landscape just for us one night.
• 24:55
  The big industrial, you know, terrible, you know, wasteland of belching,
• 25:00
  you know, cracking tubes and flames and all that kind of stuff.
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  They lit up that miniature just for us one night.
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  Watch them when they would do, you know, just like just horribly grueling and
• 25:10
  time consuming and exhausting maneuvers of putting a model car on a pylon that
• 25:17
  was painted that certain kind of blue so that it wouldn't read when they did
• 25:20
  a map pass on it. I mean, so I was immersed.
• 25:25
  And I had already done that with The Black Hole and a couple of other projects
• 25:30
  that I really cared about.
• 25:31
  So when it came time to do Future Noir, I did deliver with the Cinefantastic
• 25:36
  Geek article, which you can still find out there.
• 25:39
  And I also did the Omni piece.
• 25:42
  And over the years, when I saw Blade Runner tanked, I had already seen numerous
• 25:50
  versions of it prior to the release.
• 25:53
  And I despise that the voiceover to me was just so poorly written I didn't have
• 26:00
  anything to do with Harrison's delivery,
• 26:02
  that's a myth by the way that Harrison purposely sabotaged that he's far too
• 26:07
  much of a professional to do something like that,
• 26:10
  he read what they gave to it and in the way that it was directed to be read
• 26:15
  so he did his job let's just say the writing wasn't up to snuff anyway So then
• 26:22
  you just organized, and I sat down,
• 26:24
  and this is something I haven't really spoken about much, but as a reader myself,
• 26:30
  and someone who reads fiction, nonfiction,
• 26:33
  I even read the backs of cereal boxes, you know. Right, yes.
• 26:38
  I can tell you how much of it is wheat and how much of it is polymoly, sodium glutamate.
• 26:44
  Exactly. And I decided as I started it, I said, well, I said,
• 26:49
  you know, who is writing this book?
• 26:52
  Which Paul is writing this book? Yeah.
• 26:55
  By that I mean I wanted to have a distinct authorial voice.
• 26:59
  I wanted to have a certain personality that ran through that entire project.
• 27:04
  I thought, okay, I'm going to start this with two thoughts in mind.
• 27:09
  This is the personality behind the scenes who's authoring this material.
• 27:14
  The first one is someone who has, at that point, I was, in retrospect,
• 27:19
  really just starting through a long process of becoming familiar with all the
• 27:23
  protocols and the unwritten rules and the incredibly grueling and rewarding
• 27:28
  work that is involved in making motion pictures.
• 27:31
  But I thought to myself, you know, people being a general term for those who
• 27:37
  are interested in cinema or just in like the arts in general, pop culture, whatever,
• 27:43
  really don't know what it takes to put a film together.
• 27:48
  I mean, you know, no.
• 27:50
  And so I thought, well, okay, Future in the Wall will be, in a sense,
• 27:55
  a kind of an instruction manual.
• 27:58
  This is what happens when you mount a major motion picture. Yeah.
• 28:03
  That was number one. Number two was, I continue. It's just part of my personality.
• 28:10
  I mean, I'm one of those lucky people who has been in this business for over
• 28:14
  35 years and still retains an enthusiasm for it. A lot of people get burnt out
• 28:20
  and bitter, and it can be very tough.
• 28:23
  It's a very tough, rough business.
• 28:26
  I am not going to downplay that. However, again, I've been fortunate,
• 28:30
  and a lot of the people that I've dealt with and work closely with and become
• 28:34
  friends are the good ones.
• 28:36
  I've run into the bad ones. I've had my share of backstabbing and frontstabbing
• 28:42
  and having limbs lobbed off and then stitched back with bad scars.
• 28:47
  I've got all that, but I've come out the other end, and I still love film,
• 28:51
  and I still love the process.
• 28:52
  So I thought, aha, there's the
• 28:54
  other person on it, the person who's really enthusiastic about all this.
• 28:58
  So that's what I did. that I consciously created, well, not created,
• 29:03
  I consciously channeled those two parts of my personality throughout that book.
• 29:07
  So even though it can sometimes, as you say, be an exhaustive compendium of
• 29:11
  micro-detail, I still would like to think that the love of that detail starts through.
• 29:18
  Oh, certainly. I didn't mean that to sound derogatory in any way,
• 29:22
  shape, or form. No, no, no, and I didn't take it in that. I didn't take it in that sense.
• 29:26
  Yeah, because I, too, I mean, I saw my first film very young,
• 29:33
  and that blew my mind, but what really blew the back of my head out and sprayed
• 29:39
  viscera all over the wall behind me.
• 29:43
  Was... Like, Spare the Living Dead. Yeah.
• 29:46
  By the way, I love horror movies. I mean, one of my best friends when he was
• 29:50
  still alive was Chaz Ballin.
• 29:52
  I don't know if you know him, but he's the guy that invented the term splatter films.
• 29:55
  Okay right yeah but it was it
• 29:58
  was a tv it was obviously a tv documentary in the states but it was released
• 30:03
  on video over here and it was a documentary called spfx the empire strikes back
• 30:10
  and it was a retrospective of visual effects in films up to and including the empire strikes back,
• 30:16
  Oh, okay. So that was an early one. Yeah.
• 30:19
  And so that, just seeing the, you know, the, the, I remember there was a great
• 30:26
  scene where they're in the trenches for the, the ice battle at the beginning of Empire.
• 30:32
  And there's a, a unit director in a blue cardigan with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
• 30:40
  And he's going around the members of the Norwegian army who were the extras
• 30:44
  in the, in the trenches there.
• 30:45
  And he grabs a hold of their fake rifles and he says make the bloody thing work okay right,
• 30:52
  because they have to they have to act as though it's it's a firing weapon which
• 30:56
  of course it isn't it's just a it's just a kind of mime get into it yeah and i just um yeah.
• 31:05
  That's that's right yeah and i really just from
• 31:08
  that point on i thought that's incredible and i
• 31:11
  looked at my other friends and i said to hell with being a
• 31:14
  fireman not that that's not a noble profession but
• 31:17
  i want to do that for a living and because that's that that was really so yeah
• 31:23
  so ever since then the i guess the behind the scenes the makings of movies the
• 31:29
  the the construction of how movies come together it was always been just as
• 31:33
  fascinating as the films at,
• 31:35
  Yeah, and for me as well. However, I have to say that because of circumstances
• 31:41
  and the time I was born, such things as you're talking about really did not exist.
• 31:47
  And I was in this, again, an extremely conservative environment.
• 31:53
  And I would go to the right march off as a seven-year-old, something like that, plumbed out.
• 31:59
  But the theater that was at Civic Bay, which was the largest naval,
• 32:03
  and actually the largest U.S.
• 32:05
  Military installation in Southeast Asia for many years, it was a staging point,
• 32:11
  a major staging point and resupply station for lots of stuff there in Vietnam.
• 32:17
  And the theater that I saw most of my movies in was actually a basketball court during the day.
• 32:26
  And it had no walls because the teams were so hot and so humid.
• 32:30
  If you look on a map, you'll see it's very close to the equator.
• 32:34
  And it was always raining, you know, but those monsoonal type of things.
• 32:38
  And you would sit there and they literally had guys who would drag out these
• 32:44
  benches that you watched the basketball games on were on the court but they were flat,
• 32:49
  they weren't stacked like in stadium style seating, they were flat
• 32:52
  and they would pull down this giant screen
• 32:55
  and they had a concrete box with
• 32:59
  a couple of 35 projectors in it and the world's worst
• 33:02
  sound system and there were no walls so it
• 33:06
  was like if anything they had a
• 33:10
  never forget this they had a seaplane ramp
• 33:13
  right behind the theater so you'd be watching a movie at about 9 o'clock or
• 33:18
  7 o'clock 8 o'clock at night and a damn seaplane behind the theater and you'd
• 33:24
  go you'd just kind of watch the pictures pretend that it's you know because
• 33:27
  you couldn't hear it it's just insane but.
• 33:31
  I guess what attracted me to film
• 33:35
  was not only just the wild flights of imagination that were happening.
• 33:40
  I mean, the first films I saw that I can remember, I was four years old,
• 33:46
  and I was in Yokohama, Japan.
• 33:48
  And my mom took me to see a double bill of Them, the giant anthem movie.
• 33:54
  And it was with a really Z-grade movie called Writers to the Stars,
• 34:00
  which was an early Ivan Torres production, the guy who eventually did the flicker.
• 34:05
  And the giant ants were freaky enough.
• 34:09
  Now, you have to understand, my mom and I are in a theater filled with Japanese.
• 34:13
  We're probably the only Americans in there.
• 34:15
  And right outside the theater is a busy Main Street with all these tiny little businesses.
• 34:23
  If you've been to the Japanese cities, you know that they team with small establishments
• 34:30
  that in one block there might be 30 or 50 little stores or shops or kiosks. I'm setting this up.
• 34:36
  So anyway, so the giant ants in the sewer are bad enough.
• 34:40
  I'm sitting there, and I'm thinking, again, I think I'm watching a documentary,
• 34:44
  you know, like, oh, Jesus, there's giant ants in America, you know.
• 34:48
  But then in Riders of the Stars, the plot is ridiculous. It was ridiculous back then.
• 34:54
  But the idea is that they're training these astronauts to go up into Earth orbit
• 35:00
  and grab meteorites, because meteors,
• 35:03
  apparently, since they can go through the atmosphere and hit the Earth,
• 35:07
  they must be coated with some special substance that we can coat spaceships
• 35:10
  with, and then, you know, we can come back in. It's just ridiculous science.
• 35:14
  But anyway, towards the end of it, That is one of the few films,
• 35:18
  if not the only film, but Richard Carlson, the actor-directed writer to the stars.
• 35:24
  One of the ships blows up, and the other ship has got a viewing device,
• 35:29
  which is actually a World War II submarine periscope.
• 35:34
  And there's supposed to be an out of space, and here comes this,
• 35:36
  you know, and they put their eyes to it.
• 35:38
  And this astronaut floats by who had been killed in the crash or the explosion of the ship.
• 35:43
  His helmet was shattered and there's
• 35:46
  a skull inside and there's a big
• 35:49
  close-up of this thing and i recently we saw just
• 35:51
  to see you know what that image looked like and it's really cheesy and it's
• 35:56
  really something you today you would just not even notice but back then it so
• 36:01
  horrified me that i literally started screaming and i ran out of the theater
• 36:06
  and i left my mom there and i ran outside, and I ran down the street.
• 36:11
  And of course, my mom's totally freaked out. Where's my son gone?
• 36:15
  She spends an hour talking to everyone. Have you seen the little boy? Have you seen...
• 36:21
  I'd gone half a block down, and I took you a Yocama comic family in Japanese.
• 36:27
  I didn't know English, I remember.
• 36:29
  Vaguely remember him saying come with me and
• 36:32
  since i grew up around uniforms in the navy i saw this
• 36:35
  uniform i said oh this guy must be okay he takes me
• 36:38
  into this little kiosk and he's giving me japanese ice cream
• 36:41
  i'm seeing they're having a great time eating japanese ice cream in this place
• 36:45
  while my mom's having eye detect so all of that is all wrapped up in my first
• 36:51
  film going experience so who knows if it had been a gene kelly movie i might
• 36:56
  have been completely obsessed with musicals present. Right, yeah, sure.
• 37:00
  But no, in one day, I saw science fiction, I saw mutants, and I saw horror.
• 37:08
  And all of that came together, and I think it left a permanent and very deep scar. Yeah.
• 37:14
  Well, I mean, you eventually got back to the big bugs when you,
• 37:19
  you know, with your involvement in writing about Starship Troopers.
• 37:23
  Yeah, that's another one that I was on the entire time.
• 37:28
  You know, there's an old saying in Hollywood that if you work on a film and
• 37:32
  if you have a good time making it, it's going to bomb.
• 37:35
  And if you suffer, suffer, suffer, it'll probably be a classic.
• 37:40
  I have to tell you, that's one of the exceptions. I really enjoyed working with it.
• 37:44
  I worked with Paul Rehoboven before on Robocop, because that is one of my pictures
• 37:49
  when I was a junior executive at Orion.
• 37:51
  I have a lot to do with promoting and publicizing that film.
• 37:54
  Plus I did not only I wrote for Cinefix about it but I did a couple of featurette
• 38:00
  short films that were shown in science fiction conventions and on television
• 38:04
  here nationally which I wrote produced and directed and I think that on some
• 38:09
  of the RoboCop DVDs yeah they're.
• 38:15
  I knew Paul's work from his Dutch films.
• 38:18
  I had seen things like Kitchen People and Soldier of Orange and The Fourth Man.
• 38:22
  I'd seen all those before he even worked on Robo.
• 38:24
  And he's another guy I really, really like.
• 38:31
  I mean, just personally, Paul is very focused. He's very enthusiastic.
• 38:36
  He's really direct. But that actually is something from the Netherlands.
• 38:41
  I've spent some time in Amsterdam and The Hague and Rotterdam,
• 38:46
  various recreational, but also professional jaunts.
• 38:50
  And the Dutch, so-called, by the way, they don't like to be called the Dutch,
• 38:54
  but there you go, people do that.
• 38:56
  The people from the Netherlands have, as a culture, a very straightforward, no-nonsense style.
• 39:03
  That's how they relate to each other. And as an American, Americans value courtesy
• 39:08
  and openness and friendship.
• 39:10
  As an American, when you first go there, it's kind of a culture shock,
• 39:13
  because like you think, Jesus, all these people are incredibly rude.
• 39:16
  But then you realize, no, they're not. They're just candid.
• 39:20
  They don't bullshit. And Paul is a classic example of that.
• 39:25
  He's just reflecting, to a certain extent, his cultural heritage.
• 39:29
  So Paul has the added addition of being extremely intelligent and always being a social satirist.
• 39:37
  He has satirized, first it was the Death Society, and then it was America mercilessly.
• 39:45
  But what he very cleverly does is he buries that subtext within certain,
• 39:52
  I guess you would say, genre type of tropes. You know, action films,
• 39:56
  science fiction films, mystery films, little films.
• 39:59
  But all of his pictures, particularly in America, have literally been not to
• 40:04
  disguise the tax on American values,
• 40:08
  or rather what he sees America as doing and feeling at the moment he's making that picture.
• 40:15
  Having said, watching the bugs come together, I've looked at Phil Tippett.
• 40:20
  I've known Phil Tippett for, oh, geez, 30-some years.
• 40:24
  And that's it that the stop motion animator and
• 40:27
  also of course the CG man now the
• 40:29
  guy who you know did the CG John I suppose for Jurassic Park but before that
• 40:34
  of course he did the animated game for the you know the first Star Wars film
• 40:39
  which now it's the fourth Star Wars whatever the hell and the director of Star
• 40:44
  Trek 2 that's what Lucas says it is that's fine by me.
• 40:49
  But in any event it was just fascinating to watch because although There were
• 40:54
  some full-scale mechanical.
• 40:57
  Bugs that were provided by another company. For the most part,
• 41:01
  everything was done in post.
• 41:04
  And it was fascinating to watch Will and his crew run around with like cutouts,
• 41:09
  giant life-size cardboard cutouts of, you know, where the bugs were supposed
• 41:14
  to be or do the old thing where you have a stick,
• 41:17
  a green stick with a tennis ball on top of it that's an eye point for the actors
• 41:23
  to interact with or something as complicated as an entire half-acre,
• 41:29
  acre of land studded with little devices which are simultaneously reading light
• 41:34
  values and where the light is coming from and feeding all that data into a computer
• 41:39
  and also mapping the terrain.
• 41:41
  I mean, it's just an incredibly complex operation. And then to see them come
• 41:49
  together on the screen and be three-dimensional and not two-dimensional,
• 41:53
  a lot of CG to me just looks like cartoons.
• 41:56
  I've got to tell you, it throws me right out of the film. There's bad CG and there's good CG.
• 42:01
  And I think we all know the difference.
• 42:05
  What Phil once said to me was very interesting. He said that,
• 42:08
  and he didn't say this in a self-aggrandizing way, because Phil said that it's
• 42:12
  quite the opposite. He's not like that at all.
• 42:14
  But he said, you know the difference between my company and a lot of others?
• 42:18
  And I go, what? I said, a lot of companies hire technicians and train them to be artists.
• 42:23
  We hire artists and train them to be technicians.
• 42:27
  And that's so true. You look at the bug attack on the fort.
• 42:32
  It's the end of Starship Troopers when they get overwhelmed and Michael Ironside
• 42:36
  gets his legs bitten off. Right, yeah, yeah.
• 42:39
  And dizzy glitz and bill all that kind of stuff you look
• 42:43
  at those swarms of bugs outside that port and
• 42:46
  i swear to you if you free spring on a blu-ray and expand it you can see the
• 42:50
  white glitz off of the varying carapaces and they're all different and so the
• 42:55
  thought and the care and and the craft and the artistry that's what sells them
• 43:01
  i mean you know that that is just superlative work.
• 43:05
  I can never stop talking about how good the bugs are at Starship Troop.
• 43:09
  I mean, you know, and then, of course, everyone misses the point in this country.
• 43:16
  People actually said that Paul made a fascist movie. And we're going, what?
• 43:22
  You know, because everyone who made it knew that the whole movie was a joke. It was a parody.
• 43:27
  It was a singing commentary on, you know, a proto-fascist society.
• 43:32
  And it was supposed to be a dig. It was supposed to be, you know,
• 43:36
  a completely negative, you know, condemnation of that kind of thing.
• 43:40
  But I think where people get confused is Paul has a very canny way of presenting his material.
• 43:46
  He doesn't stand in a soapbox in the corner and wave his finger. He just presents it.
• 43:52
  And he lets you take your own conclusions away.
• 43:55
  So he doesn't in a way, in a sense, that's kind of neutral.
• 43:59
  Now, if you look under the surface of it, or even on the surface,
• 44:02
  I mean, it's obvious many times
• 44:04
  that he's being, you know, he's parodying things and being satirical.
• 44:07
  But on the other hand, he's quite serious about what he is examining.
• 44:14
  So, you know, a lot of his films have got a lot of subtext, a lot of,
• 44:19
  you know, there's context, there's subtext, and then there's all these shadings
• 44:22
  around there. That's why I love Paul's films.
• 44:24
  I mean, look at El, the one he just did, you know, with Isabel Huppert.
• 44:28
  I mean, most people said, oh, I can't go see that. It's a rape revenge film.
• 44:31
  Well, that's certainly one element, and that might be the prime motivator of the plot.
• 44:37
  But what really L is, it's a condemnation of the petite bourgeois of present-day Paris.
• 44:43
  It's a satire. It's a savage social satire.
• 44:48
  And it's also a comedy. It's very funny.
• 44:53
  But you can't get people to go see it. They hear, oh, my God,
• 44:56
  there's the rape that opens it up. and, oh, it's Paul Verhoeven being,
• 44:59
  you know, aggressive and obnoxious and over-the-top again.
• 45:02
  You know, and I was being extremely serious.
• 45:06
  I came away from that film thinking, this is a cross between the discreet charm
• 45:10
  of the bourgeoisie and Jean-Marie Lange's rules of the game,
• 45:14
  with Paul Verhoeven's spin on it. That's what I saw.
• 45:17
  And, you know, I was fortunate enough to meet Isabel Huppert after a small academy
• 45:22
  screening for about 15 people, and she was delightful.
• 45:25
  Nothing like the character she played. In fact, I'd never, I'd actually met
• 45:29
  her before. We worked together when I was with D.
• 45:31
  Loanis on a movie called The Bedroom Window that was directed by Curtis Hansen. Yeah.
• 45:36
  Same guy who did L.A. Confidential.
• 45:39
  And Isabel, I said, you know, I didn't mention it had been 30 years.
• 45:43
  I'm sure she's not going to remember me. But I grabbed her hand as she walked
• 45:47
  by me. And I said, Isabel, she
• 45:48
  goes, what? I said, I have to tell you one thing. I said, well, it's good.
• 45:52
  I can't believe how much fun you had making that movie. And her face lit up.
• 45:56
  She goes, you're right. She goes, I had a great time.
• 45:59
  She goes, I had so much fun with that character. And if you see the movie,
• 46:03
  she's very duper and serious.
• 46:05
  But right below that, there's a lot of fun and a lot of comedy, you know.
• 46:10
  So that's why, anyway, so that's why I love working with Paul Verhoeven and
• 46:14
  Ben Oggs and, you know, and Robocop, of course, the whole culprit,
• 46:17
  you know, anti-corporate thing.
• 46:19
  And it's really interesting, you know, with Total Recall and Starship Troopers
• 46:23
  and Robocop, I think Paul Verhoeven was forecasting Donald Trump.
• 46:30
  I think you might be right, actually. It just dawned on me the other day.
• 46:34
  I was watching Trump and I thought, oh my God, this is like a media break from RoboCop. It is.
• 46:39
  Well, I mean, certainly his very sort of lackluster delivery.
• 46:48
  I was watching RoboCop recently again and I love the fact like people come down
• 46:54
  on the heavy coarse language.
• 46:57
  And I thought well but there's
• 47:00
  some beautiful moments in amongst that because you know
• 47:03
  I mean that's obviously they're aggressive characters but then you've got Dan
• 47:08
  O'Hurley who you know after that massive the gunning down of the executive in
• 47:14
  the you know when they're testing Ed 209 for the first time and he gets uh as
• 47:19
  Paul says he's completely exploded.
• 47:22
  You have Dan sitting there and instead of you know cursing like everyone else
• 47:27
  says he says Dick I'm very disappointed,
• 47:31
  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I know. It's just hilarious, you know.
• 47:36
  And then he goes, what is it he says? A glitch. You called us a glitch.
• 47:40
  This theater executive was wanting to, like, shop the glitch.
• 47:44
  You know, it's just a glitch. And I was like, glitch? Yeah.
• 47:47
  But, you know, interestingly, Paul once told me, he said, you know who the biggest
• 47:51
  villain in that film is? I go, who? He goes, Daniel Haley. Yeah.
• 47:54
  And he is. You know? He's the hooper mensch, you know?
• 47:58
  He's the overlord. he's the corporate overlord he's the guy that has that funkular
• 48:02
  you know song style you know of but Jesus he's the biggest bastard of all and
• 48:09
  it's even it's even more apparent in Robocop 2 his his.
• 48:13
  His demeanor it really comes through a little bit more because you know we see
• 48:18
  him you know exerting well of course that Robocop 2 again having worked on that
• 48:24
  as crew and you know actually appearing in the film and also So, you know,
• 48:29
  I actually directed and produced a RoboCop anti-drug spot, just saying no for
• 48:36
  the Drug Enforcement Administration.
• 48:38
  I did a 12-minute shirt that I directed.
• 48:41
  We went to Bushwick, Brooklyn, which at the time was really in the grip of a
• 48:45
  serious crack epidemic.
• 48:47
  And we brought the stunt guy who portrayed Robo in the film, Rusty Pusseltowery.
• 48:52
  And I shot like a 10, 12-minute thing that they showed in schools around the country.
• 48:56
  And there was like Robocop standing up and putting the stand up and saying follow
• 49:01
  me you know children I will not do drugs and all these poor kids you know there
• 49:06
  were real kids in an elementary school saying I will not do drugs and I'm sitting
• 49:11
  there thinking Jesus what a hypocrite you are but never mind that I don't go there.
• 49:16
  But it was interesting on Lobo, too, because it was a rush project that never
• 49:22
  really had a script, at least at the point when they started shooting.
• 49:26
  It went through two directors very quickly. Tim Hanna walked just before they
• 49:31
  were starting production.
• 49:33
  It just wasn't happy with the way things were going. of Kushner,
• 49:37
  who, of course, directed The Empire Strikes Back, and Wabokatsu was his last feature film.
• 49:42
  It was brought in at literally the last second, two weeks before a shooting was supposed to start.
• 49:48
  Frank Miller, and he ripped apart the script that was already there and started,
• 49:52
  Frank Miller was literally writing on the same day and running pages down to the stage floor.
• 49:58
  I watched all of this happen. So, but anything at all semi-coherent came out
• 50:03
  of that production and was really a miracle.
• 50:06
  A lot of it had to do with Ryan was in problems with, they were in financial
• 50:11
  straits, as people might remember,
• 50:13
  they went into a Chapter 11 bankruptcy towards the end of the 80s.
• 50:16
  And Robocop, there's a side funny story here.
• 50:21
  The first Robocop, I was an in-house champion for since I worked for the studio,
• 50:25
  but I was about the only person in the whole studio that believed in the film.
• 50:28
  They all thought it was just a step up from pornography, frankly.
• 50:32
  And I kept saying, no, look, this thing has got juice. It's going to be a huge hit.
• 50:38
  Like, position it for a summer release. And I kept pushing and pushing and pushing.
• 50:42
  But my voice was very small among the giant roar.
• 50:45
  But then it came out, and it made them so much money. They thought,
• 50:49
  oh, my God, you know, we can use this to help steady the studio's finances.
• 50:54
  So they pushed the RoboCop 2 through very quickly. But they didn't have enough
• 50:59
  time to get all the necessary elements together.
• 51:02
  One of which was really a viable script. So I think one of the reasons why Robo
• 51:07
  2 is so much, in a certain sense,
• 51:10
  more of a caricature and more forced and more out there in terms of being shallow
• 51:16
  is simply because of the time constraints.
• 51:19
  They had a release date.
• 51:22
  John Davison, who came back as a producer on Robo 2 after swearing,
• 51:26
  he wouldn't have said that, well,
• 51:28
  you know, wait, are you already locked in for a theatrical release
• 51:32
  and they said yes and they gave them a date and it was literally like maybe
• 51:35
  10 months to a year before they started which is insane for a picture like that
• 51:41
  it was a very complex film and so they were racing the clock to get some product
• 51:46
  into that theater you know all those theaters Orion you know would,
• 51:51
  be saved, essentially. And so the film shows that. And there are moments.
• 51:57
  You know, Robo 2 has got its moments. I love the way that whoever made the first
• 52:03
  Iron Man film must have seen RoboCop 2, because the fight between Jeff Bridges and Robert Downick Jr.
• 52:10
  At the end, when they're both in their Robo suits at the end of Iron Man,
• 52:14
  is almost shot for shot, in my opinion, a, shall we say, homage to the fight
• 52:21
  at the end between Robo and Robo 2.
• 52:23
  If you compare the two, if you look at them side by side, I mean,
• 52:26
  my jaw dropped. I saw three other setups that were the same.
• 52:29
  So I'm just going to assume that someone was in the end of Robo 2 and this was
• 52:33
  their way of letting us know.
• 52:36
  So it's significant in that respect. It's significant in the fact that it was
• 52:40
  Frank Miller's first produced screenplay and, of course, Frank went on to do the Sin City movies.
• 52:45
  I got to know Frank fairly well at that point. He was just enjoying his real
• 52:49
  first, you know, burst of success with The Dark Knight, you know,
• 52:53
  the graphic novel that he had done and all the stuff he had done with Elektra Assassin and all that.
• 53:00
  And again, being a comic book fan, I knew where he was coming from.
• 53:04
  So all that and also to work with Kirchner. Kirch was great. What a great guy.
• 53:09
  Kirch in the industry, Irving Kirchner had an incredible reputation as a consummate professional.
• 53:16
  And he everybody loved him i mean
• 53:19
  you know there were people there were no bad things that were said about
• 53:22
  kirsten he knew how to get what he wanted and he knew how to
• 53:25
  do it with a light touch but a firm touch and he was
• 53:27
  fun to be around and so i in fact after
• 53:31
  about six months after robo 2 was out in
• 53:35
  theaters i got a call out of the blue from kirsten he
• 53:38
  goes look he says i really liked how you pulled together all that computer graphic
• 53:42
  stuff at the last second for RoboCop 2 and I said thank you and he said I'm
• 53:46
  going to do a remake of Forbidden Planet and I've got the script right now I'm
• 53:50
  going to messenger it over to you would you like to do the special effects on
• 53:53
  this I went are you kidding?
• 53:57
  Forbidden Planet was one of the reasons I got
• 54:00
  into science fiction and film in the first place and
• 54:03
  then of course fortunately it never happened that
• 54:07
  was one of the many projects that people
• 54:09
  start up and then just never reached the screen but for
• 54:13
  a moment there for like a half second i was actually
• 54:16
  involved with potentially involved with the remake of
• 54:19
  forbidden plan which would have been perfect that would have been
• 54:21
  great yeah especially especially with him directing it seems like just just
• 54:28
  just on robocop too and the fact that it was frank miller it is compared to
• 54:34
  the first one it is very comic booky type you know it's a it's almost like a
• 54:39
  cartoony sort of version of,
• 54:42
  of of robocop but on the
• 54:44
  other side of that having watched i i resisted for
• 54:47
  a long time watching the current remake of
• 54:51
  robocop oh yes yeah that's kind of sad i
• 54:54
  mean they had they had some genuine talent you
• 54:57
  know and behind the camera but i think again i
• 55:00
  think for whatever reason the the story didn't hold together yeah but i mean
• 55:05
  i think what is is cheerfully missing is what you said Paul Verhoeven brought
• 55:10
  to that film and all of his films was that the fact that the first Robocop was a great satire,
• 55:19
  or subtle satire, if you will.
• 55:22
  Of its time.
• 55:24
  You know, like John Davidson says in that documentary, Flesh and Blood,
• 55:29
  the making of Robocop, he says, yeah, Robocop's a, you know.
• 55:32
  I think actually it's Flesh and Steel, isn't it? Flesh and Steel,
• 55:35
  sorry, yeah, Flesh and Steel.
• 55:37
  This is another reason I can write the books that I do. I might not have a huge
• 55:41
  penis, but I've got a great memory.
• 55:46
  I think you're Australian. I think you'd probably appreciate that.
• 55:53
  I should add, it's a perfectly adequate penis. Yes.
• 56:07
  But, yeah, I think that's what was, you know, he said all movies are a product of their time.
• 56:13
  And he said this film was a product of the Reagan era, you know.
• 56:17
  Yeah. And a parody. Also a product of the filmmakers, too. Yeah.
• 56:21
  Yeah. And I think, you know, let's face it.
• 56:25
  I mean, certainly not to downgrade Kirsch, because Kirsch did,
• 56:29
  you know, not only Empire, but he did a number of films, very worthy films over
• 56:33
  his career, like The Hood and Priest and The Flim Flam Man and Loving and Up the Sandbox.
• 56:40
  And, you know, there were just many, many good films that Chris did.
• 56:43
  But Paul Verhoeven brings a very specialized energy and mischief and social
• 56:51
  satire and intelligence to his work.
• 56:54
  And he's also an extremely dynamic filmmaker. If you watch his shots and,
• 57:01
  you know, the way he works with his DPs, It's films move, you know, they move.
• 57:09
  And so all of that came together very fortuitously with a really good script
• 57:14
  by Mike Miner and Ed Neumar.
• 57:16
  I mean, Ed Neumar, who, you know, has continued with the franchise for a long
• 57:20
  time, also deserves a great deal of, you know, kudos for RoboCop and,
• 57:26
  you know, for every other robo and Starship Troopers and all that.
• 57:29
  But also does John Davison. Now, John Davison is a hardcore science fiction fan.
• 57:34
  And he at one time was the secretary of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society when he was a teenager.
• 57:40
  Yeah. So, you know, so there's again, it gets back to this love and this passion
• 57:44
  kind of thing. And Paul brings a lot of passion to his work.
• 57:48
  Interestingly enough, Showgirls, which, of course, is his most infamous failure, I think.
• 57:54
  And I'm not being one of the people who's called on to the current bandwagon
• 57:59
  of, you know, everyone has rediscovered Showgirls and it's another cult film
• 58:03
  and the LGBT community loves it. which is great, that's fine.
• 58:08
  But as a film, I think one of the reasons why Showgirls was problematic for
• 58:14
  audiences at its time is it's probably the most focused of all Paul's American social satires.
• 58:22
  I mean, he really goes for the jugular in that one.
• 58:26
  People say, oh, it's all about, it's just about these silly sex and Elizabeth
• 58:31
  Barkley gives this bad performance.
• 58:32
  No, she doesn't. She actually gives quite an interesting performance.
• 58:35
  And it's basically about the commodity, you know, commodifying sex and,
• 58:40
  you know, using Las Vegas as the obvious locus of that and the incredible misogyny
• 58:46
  that goes on there and the incredible, you know,
• 58:49
  the incredible emphasis on, you know, money and sexual favors.
• 58:54
  And, you know, Paul really went for it in that film.
• 58:58
  And, in fact, on Star Trek Troopers one day, we're sitting around the set,
• 59:02
  and I said, you know, wow, you know, you really kind of raked over the coals
• 59:05
  on Showgirls. And he goes, yeah, yeah.
• 59:06
  And I go, well, what happened? He goes, you know what? He says,
• 59:11
  you won't believe this, probably, he said.
• 59:13
  But I was a little surprised. He said, I thought we had made a serious picture.
• 59:18
  And then he smiles. And I know, you know, he's mischievous.
• 59:22
  And I go, well, and I thought about it, and I said, you know, you're right, you did.
• 59:26
  And he goes, yeah. He says, we thought we were underneath all the exaggeration
• 59:30
  and the nudity and all that and the politics of the backstabbing and the exaggerations.
• 59:36
  We thought we were making a serious commentary about a certain sector of America.
• 59:40
  And he said, serious about that.
• 59:43
  I think that's one of the reasons why Showgirls replaced a lot of people,
• 59:48
  was that it was two points in the boat. Well, yes.
• 59:51
  On the other hand, people thought it was a cartoon. Yeah.
• 59:55
  But, I mean, no, I think you're dead on because of the films,
• 1:00:02
  that of the films he was making at the time, that is the most focused and intense
• 1:00:07
  and really unflinching, I think,
• 1:00:11
  look at the subject matter and of course he's got Joe Esterhass Oh yeah,
• 1:00:18
  which is yeah So you know So Joe's a no Joe's a no-holes-bod kind of guy,
• 1:00:26
  and if you've read if you've read any of his books you know Oh yeah,
• 1:00:31
  no, I'm very familiar with both his screenplay and fiction stuff and I mean
• 1:00:36
  his you know his his, shall we say,
• 1:00:39
  self-defensive tearing downs of Hollywood, you know.
• 1:00:43
  I mean, but on the other hand, Esterhaus, you know, it was, in my opinion, Esterhaus.
• 1:00:51
  I don't want to use the word, it was more crude and more vulgar in his approach
• 1:00:56
  to things, whereas Paul is,
• 1:01:00
  much more sophisticated, even though it appears on the surface that he can be
• 1:01:05
  just as shallow and cynical and over the top as Esther House.
• 1:01:10
  I think it was an interesting mix, the dynamic.
• 1:01:13
  I mean, there was a lot of friction between the two of them.
• 1:01:15
  On the other hand, you know, it really resulted in kind of an unusual film.
• 1:01:20
  And the lap dance that she gives early on in the picture is genuinely erotic.
• 1:01:26
  And, you know, that's hard to pull off in an American picture because America
• 1:01:31
  is still, well, you know, I mean, they're not as it has been in the past,
• 1:01:37
  but we still are essentially a Puritan country.
• 1:01:40
  And there's a lot of deeply conservative,
• 1:01:44
  anti-sexual, anti-pleasure principles at work in this society.
• 1:01:49
  And I think the fact that Paul was able to transfer some real erotic charge
• 1:01:55
  in the midst of all that cartoonishness was quite an accomplishment, you know.
• 1:02:00
  But on the other hand, you know, there were only, you know, the part where Paul
• 1:02:04
  McLaughlin and Barclay make love in the swimming pool is just so over the top. It's hilarious.
• 1:02:10
  But if you look at it, if you step back and you look at it, you realize it's
• 1:02:13
  just mechanical rutting.
• 1:02:14
  It's like, you know, it's just, it's like the Mount Everest of,
• 1:02:20
  you know, detached sex for sex sake and not for any kind of intimacy or human being.
• 1:02:27
  I mean, that's what he's saying, you know, and he just does it a way that makes you laugh.
• 1:02:33
  But at the same time, he's like, you know, delivering a serious little message.
• 1:02:37
  That's what I love about Verhoeven. But I mean, he spoke about it very briefly
• 1:02:43
  in some of the documentaries I've seen on him and read about him that he was
• 1:02:48
  too hardcore for Holland, wasn't he? Oh, yeah.
• 1:02:51
  Well, it wasn't so much hardcore as that he is fearless in confronting the status quo.
• 1:03:00
  Yeah. And, you know, he tells it like it is.
• 1:03:03
  Mm-hmm. And Spedders just caused all kinds of problems for him in Holland.
• 1:03:09
  Right. Because it was authentic. he
• 1:03:13
  actually hung out if you've ever seen Smedders it's about
• 1:03:16
  like motocross guys and their kind of grudgy
• 1:03:19
  lifestyle and there's the homosexual gang rape
• 1:03:22
  in it and there's a lot of brutality and drinking and all this and Paul said
• 1:03:27
  hey I hung out with these guys this is a documentary and it was in their face
• 1:03:33
  and you know the people in Holland didn't want to be portrayed that way they
• 1:03:37
  didn't want to see that about themselves they wanted to see themselves as more
• 1:03:40
  enlightened and more you know.
• 1:03:43
  Of accepting and all this.
• 1:03:44
  And Paul uncovered, you know, pull back a rock that they just didn't want to look at.
• 1:03:48
  And so that's always been his,
• 1:03:51
  His strength in his Achilles heel, he tells it like it is.
• 1:03:56
  And he goes, there you go. What do you think about that? And he's fearless about
• 1:04:00
  it, you know. And that is threatening.
• 1:04:04
  That threatens a lot of power structures and a lot of people who are in charge,
• 1:04:07
  you know, the so-called culture police.
• 1:04:10
  And whenever you get a provocateur, you know, they are routinely slapped and
• 1:04:16
  in many cases slapped down. And I think, really, that was the point of what Paul was doing.
• 1:04:22
  I mean, if you see The Fourth Man, The Fourth Man is one of the great attacks
• 1:04:26
  on organized religion. Everyone thinks it's this Hitchcockian murder mystery,
• 1:04:31
  but it's really about the fallacy of Christianity.
• 1:04:36
  And people go, you know, some people who get it are deeply offended by that
• 1:04:40
  film. And that's Paul. That's his point of view.
• 1:04:44
  Interestingly enough, he got started in the Royal Dutch Marines doing documentaries,
• 1:04:49
  and he was doing things with like 200, 300 Marines where he was doing documentaries
• 1:04:55
  for the Navy there showing how they did beach maneuvers and things like this.
• 1:05:01
  So he came from a hardcore, you know, military background itself.
• 1:05:05
  And then he cut his teeth on television where he created the first Dutch hit,
• 1:05:11
  which was called Floris, which is about this knight who is a cultural hero in
• 1:05:17
  Holland, a medieval good guy.
• 1:05:19
  And guess who it was? It was Richter Hauer. And they had the first huge hit
• 1:05:24
  on Dutch television. So by the time Paul moved into Petrus, he was already a
• 1:05:28
  well-known commodity there.
• 1:05:29
  And he's fearless and he has a tendency to piss people off, particularly people
• 1:05:35
  who are in power and he speaks to power, which I guess would be saying it and that can be dangerous.
• 1:05:43
  On the other hand, he's not afraid and I salute him for it. We need more people like Paul. Yeah, sure.
• 1:05:49
  Honestly. Where's our Trump movie?
• 1:05:53
  Oh, he'd be the guy that you'd want to direct that a satir, uh,
• 1:06:00
  no, sorry, a wicked, a wicked, seriously, but satirical portrait,
• 1:06:07
  of uh yeah yeah exactly
• 1:06:10
  well listen cat i gotta get going because i've
• 1:06:13
  got some other things to do if you uh have
• 1:06:15
  you got enough yeah no that's um yeah i
• 1:06:18
  sort of abandoned the question sheet a while ago because now it's probably best
• 1:06:23
  because stuff was just getting covered so yeah i just sort of is there anything
• 1:06:28
  like you know if you had one more that you felt like you really needed to get
• 1:06:32
  i mean i probably have time for one more okay well there was just one more I
• 1:06:36
  saw a great picture of you,
• 1:06:38
  while looking for pictures to include on the interview, of you with Arnold Schwarzenegger
• 1:06:43
  on the set of Conan the Barbarian.
• 1:06:45
  And of course, and of course, Conan the Destroyer. Conan the Destroyer, yeah, sorry.
• 1:06:52
  Yeah, that was one of my universal films.
• 1:06:55
  That was shot at Mexico City by the same producer, and much of the same crew
• 1:07:01
  that was simultaneously shooting Dune, Raphael and E.
• 1:07:05
  Loana actually had those things in tandem on the same sound stages.
• 1:07:10
  Like they would strike the sets from one and they'd pick up the others and get
• 1:07:13
  in there. So that was nuts. That was crazy.
• 1:07:16
  I was on Dune down there for Universal for well over a year.
• 1:07:20
  And I'm actually writing a book about that.
• 1:07:22
  It's going to come out. It'll come out when it comes out.
• 1:07:26
  But yeah, it's called Red and Sand, The Making of David Lynch's Dune.
• 1:07:30
  That was a very, very tough picture for everyone involved. for a number of reasons.
• 1:07:36
  But anyway, yeah, I'd already worked with Arnold on Conan the Barbarian in Spain
• 1:07:40
  when Melius was doing it, which was a real trip.
• 1:07:43
  That was a, that was quite a quiet experience.
• 1:07:47
  But then the Destroyer moved more towards a kind of Marvel comic type of tone. And they, they,
• 1:07:55
  you know, kind of rejiggered a lot of the base elements.
• 1:07:59
  I mean, again, Melius was coming at it from a semi-serious angle,
• 1:08:03
  historically, philosophically, putting in a lot of Japanese and references.
• 1:08:07
  And by the time the sequel came out, it was more of a product.
• 1:08:11
  And the comics, of course, had always been very popular.
• 1:08:14
  And this time, I think people who were in charge looked at it and said,
• 1:08:18
  OK, well, we've done our serious Conan. Now we need to do our comic book Conan.
• 1:08:22
  And that's why Destroyer has that sheen. But anyway, yeah, that photo,
• 1:08:27
  we're in the wizard's lair, the mirrors.
• 1:08:30
  And what's interesting about that, if you look behind, you see the mirrors,
• 1:08:34
  and you've seen the film, the set was actually built as a 360-degree mirror.
• 1:08:40
  And Jack Cardiff, who photographed that, and is just a legendary DP and also
• 1:08:46
  a legendary director, who directed some great movies himself,
• 1:08:50
  I asked him, how are you going to like this? Right.
• 1:08:54
  Because, you know, you've got to, where are you going to put your lights?
• 1:08:57
  Well, obviously, you put them up, you know, in the perms, as they're called,
• 1:09:00
  in the ceiling of a soundstage.
• 1:09:02
  But you've got to be very careful. And what was really interesting about that
• 1:09:06
  was much of it was bounce light, was like bounced off of cards.
• 1:09:10
  Okay. With very little light. And he managed, I mean, he was,
• 1:09:13
  this word gets so overused in Hollywood.
• 1:09:16
  I mean, the person who brings you your coffee, if it's the right temperature, is a genius, right?
• 1:09:24
  But Jack Cardiff literally was a genius.
• 1:09:28
  That was Freddie Francis, you know, who worked on, you know,
• 1:09:31
  Dune, who was the DP of Dune. And, you know, it directed some of my favorite Hammer movies.
• 1:09:36
  And just hanging out with these guys and hearing this.
• 1:09:40
  Oh, and Dick Fleischer, who directed, you know, Conan the Destroyer,
• 1:09:43
  who had this incredible history behind him.
• 1:09:46
  And the son of Max Fleischer, who invented Betty Boop. you know and did all
• 1:09:51
  the Popeye the Sailor Man cartoons you know back in the 30s right sure,
• 1:09:55
  And we just sat around. I would sit and talk to him for hours about everything but Conan.
• 1:10:01
  But Arnold and I wound up working in five films in succession.
• 1:10:05
  And so we were comfortable with each other. And one day I said,
• 1:10:09
  hey, I don't have a picture with you, damn it. And he goes, oh, okay.
• 1:10:13
  And he was in costume. And so we did that. But what you can't see,
• 1:10:16
  I have a smile on my face. I have the holding the sword in a funny way.
• 1:10:20
  But on my other hand, I've got his loincloth and I'm giving him a wedgie.
• 1:10:27
  Well, there's our behind-the-scenes anecdote, folks. At first,
• 1:10:31
  he was annoyed. He really started to giggle.
• 1:10:33
  It was funny because we had to do it like twice, you know, to do it.
• 1:10:37
  But, yeah, I was like, I thought there was one of these guys who,
• 1:10:42
  let's just say, he tested you.
• 1:10:44
  And if you bow down and lick the mighty Schwarzenegger heel,
• 1:10:50
  well, then that was not probably the best way to approach him.
• 1:10:54
  And when I met Arnold, I just met him as kind of,
• 1:10:58
  I'm not going to say an equal, but again, as someone who was fascinating and
• 1:11:01
  a guy who had already obviously made his mark on the world and was very focused
• 1:11:06
  and was very methodical and a great business person and you knew what he was
• 1:11:09
  up to. And so I just said, oh, okay, you're cool.
• 1:11:12
  And our very first meeting, he was in the camouflage makeup that he wore.
• 1:11:18
  They shot the Orgy Temple scenes, the Orgy Chamber scenes at Conan the Barbarian
• 1:11:23
  in Madrid very early in the production.
• 1:11:25
  That's when he and Valeria and Subutai go in to rescue the princess,
• 1:11:30
  you know, from also doom.
• 1:11:32
  And they've all got that, you know, white and black camouflage, you know, paint on them.
• 1:11:38
  And the publicist brought me in and introduced me to Arnold and he says,
• 1:11:43
  this is Paul Salmon and Arnold's got his hangers on in the trailer and he goes,
• 1:11:47
  oh, he says, what a fishy name for a guy.
• 1:11:50
  And there's all this like, you know, instant laughter. And I stared at him and
• 1:11:55
  I thought, in my mind, I thought, really?
• 1:11:58
  Do you honestly think at my age I haven't heard every possible variation and
• 1:12:04
  pun on my name? This is how you start things.
• 1:12:07
  So I just let the laughter die down and say anything. And then I said,
• 1:12:10
  well, I said, that's very funny.
• 1:12:12
  Coming from somebody who looks like a demented Austrian raccoon.
• 1:12:18
  And there was this collective gasp in the trailer because I had dared to talk back to the star, right?
• 1:12:25
  I didn't give a shit, you know?
• 1:12:28
  I didn't, you know, and he, all of a sudden he's kind of frowned and then he burst out and left.
• 1:12:34
  He goes, well, you're okay. Come sit next to me.
• 1:12:38
  And honestly, I've never, ever had a problem with that. Never.
• 1:12:43
  And, you know, so it was like, I, you know, I grew up, my, my dad,
• 1:12:49
  the stuff that I saw when I was a child, he, we routinely dealt,
• 1:12:54
  we being the family fallout from his job.
• 1:12:58
  He was dealing with homicides, child prostitution, child death,
• 1:13:02
  drug addiction, accidental death, suicides, corruption, blackmail, theft.
• 1:13:09
  That was my landry life. And so I grew up, I won't say hard,
• 1:13:14
  but I grew up around a lot of hard people and hard facts.
• 1:13:18
  It was a good, actually, in a sense, it was a good kind of prep for the film
• 1:13:25
  business. you know because by the time i got in i thought oh look there's a
• 1:13:30
  bunch of cricks around here too.
• 1:13:33
  I have i don't know certainly wasn't one of them
• 1:13:35
  arnold i always had admiration and respect for because he
• 1:13:38
  believed me was he knew what
• 1:13:41
  he wanted and he was very methodical about how he went
• 1:13:44
  about getting so in the and and simply and
• 1:13:47
  i'm not talking about him personally i'm talking about him as a
• 1:13:49
  careerist his career was very very
• 1:13:53
  well thought out and very well carried out and
• 1:13:56
  i have a lot of respect for people like that you know exactly what he
• 1:13:59
  wanted and he he step by step he got it you know but i but you know he was also
• 1:14:03
  a guy that once he committed to a picture you know he was there you know he
• 1:14:06
  didn't mess with you know no no no drama no you know he just you know he he
• 1:14:11
  he threw himself into it and he really enjoyed playing conan conan was the first lady though he almost,
• 1:14:18
  first day he got pulled off a rock by all these rock wolves,
• 1:14:22
  these dogs and he fell into all these brambles and you know he got all tore
• 1:14:25
  it up and that was the very first day, about my very first day.
• 1:14:28
  So that set the tone for Conan the Barbarian, you know.
• 1:14:32
  I mean a lot of people got injured on that film. That was a very physically
• 1:14:36
  rough film. No one died but I'm amazed no one did.
• 1:14:39
  Well you wrote that great book Conan the Phenomenon which is
• 1:14:44
  Yeah. Well, you know, again, it goes back to my love of literary pulp figures.
• 1:14:49
  I read my first Conan Robert E. Howard story in 1959. It was called Red Nails.
• 1:14:55
  And it was in, if I'm not mistaken, a known press edition called The Sword of
• 1:15:01
  Conan, one of the hardcover collections of the original Howard stories in the
• 1:15:06
  Illsprite Camp pastiches.
• 1:15:08
  And I was in the Philippines and like nine years old and in the library and
• 1:15:13
  some, some pervert had put that Conan stories in with all the children's books.
• 1:15:19
  And I remember reading about red nails and I went, Oh my God,
• 1:15:22
  I've never read anything.
• 1:15:24
  I mean, everyone else was reading, you know, Miss Pickles goes to Mars or,
• 1:15:28
  you know, you know, monkey tales or something.
• 1:15:31
  And I'm reading a story about bare-breasted women cutting other women's heads
• 1:15:35
  off while, you know, barbarians lustily drink wine and laugh,
• 1:15:39
  you know, and I'm thinking, wow.
• 1:15:41
  So I had a very early exposure to the genuine literary Conan,
• 1:15:46
  and as that morphed over the years, I was there when the Presetta paperbacks
• 1:15:50
  came out, the Lancer reprints. I got those when I was 15, 16.
• 1:15:54
  Then when Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor Smith started to do the Conan comics
• 1:16:00
  in the early 70s, I was there for those.
• 1:16:02
  So by the time I got to Hollywood and the Conan film, I mean,
• 1:16:04
  I was kind of an expert on Conan already.
• 1:16:07
  An expert insofar as that I had digested it all.
• 1:16:10
  And also had the fanzines like Amra and some of the early...
• 1:16:15
  It was just another one of my things.
• 1:16:18
  I'm all over the place. Of course, I also like fine art, and I love folk art.
• 1:16:23
  I love Mexican folk art, especially the Day of the Dead stuff.
• 1:16:27
  I've got skulls and skeletons and, you know, candy skulls all over the house, you know.
• 1:16:32
  And I also have prints from 18th century, you know, Vienna of the concert,
• 1:16:38
  you know. So I just, I have a lot of interest.
• 1:16:40
  Again, I've just been very fortunate.
• 1:16:44
  I've got one more quick. I've got one more quick. I am. One more quick question.
• 1:16:48
  We're finally getting another Blade Runner movie.
• 1:16:52
  Are you going to cover it as meticulously as the last one?
• 1:16:57
  Well, let's just put it this way. There is talk, perhaps me doing something involved with that.
• 1:17:05
  Certainly nothing is finalized yet, and that has nothing to do with me.
• 1:17:09
  It's just the situation.
• 1:17:11
  I'd love to. I don't think, given the restrictions of time at the moment,
• 1:17:18
  that it would be possible for me to do a book that took me almost three years
• 1:17:23
  to write again, this early.
• 1:17:26
  That may be down the line, who knows, right? But I will tell you that this hasn't
• 1:17:32
  been actually released yet,
• 1:17:34
  but we're very close to closing a deal to revise and expand feature noir in
• 1:17:40
  conjunction with the release of Blade Runner 2049.
• 1:17:43
  And that will include all new material, an interview with Victor Hauer,
• 1:17:48
  a long interview with Harrison Ford, all the stuff about the final cut,
• 1:17:53
  Joanna Cassidy talking about her experiences, having her head,
• 1:17:56
  you know, essentially like rewriting Future Noir.
• 1:18:00
  And that is very close to being a reality.
• 1:18:04
  So that's one thing you can bring. We don't have a title for it yet.
• 1:18:08
  Somebody wanted to call it Future Noir Redue.
• 1:18:12
  Which I thought was kind of funny but I thought we were going to publish well
• 1:18:16
  go for that I hope it eventuates I can't wait to read the Dune book sounds very interesting as well,
• 1:18:23
  yeah let me put it
• 1:18:26
  I will give you one tidbit about that watching Blade Runner being made Blade
• 1:18:31
  Runner as anyone who has read Eastern Arc will hopefully recall was a very difficult
• 1:18:38
  and life-straining experience for everyone involved in the making of that.
• 1:18:44
  It was just a tough picture to make for a lot of reasons.
• 1:18:47
  So I saw that secondhand. I was there all the time, but it didn't personally
• 1:18:52
  impact on me because I wasn't part of the crew or I hadn't written or I wasn't
• 1:18:56
  directing or producing or whatever.
• 1:18:58
  So I had to step back. However, Dune, I was working on Dune as a universal executive
• 1:19:06
  and also with someone who was writing about it and there through a lot of the production.
• 1:19:10
  So I was intimately involved this time and that was my trial by fire.
• 1:19:15
  Dune was the most personally difficult professional experience of my life.
• 1:19:21
  And I left a lot of blood on the soundstage floors.
• 1:19:24
  Now the tone of Blood and Sand is going to be slightly different from Featured
• 1:19:28
  Raw because it's more personal.
• 1:19:30
  Having said that, it's not a...
• 1:19:33
  Payback kind of book and not a fellow at all
• 1:19:36
  because that's just not my style but there
• 1:19:39
  is more of a personal angle about the difficulties that
• 1:19:43
  i suffered on it and not only myself i
• 1:19:46
  mean poor david lynch you know who i adore by the way david is another one of
• 1:19:51
  the real deals david incidentally is a is is a deeply moralistic man and that's
• 1:19:56
  i caught that right away with him i mean he's quiet about it but he is he is
• 1:20:00
  definitely you know now everybody knows him because of the transdental meditation thing.
• 1:20:04
  He was meditating, you know, like 10 years before Dune. He's not changed that.
• 1:20:09
  But he also is very spiritual and in a very quiet way.
• 1:20:12
  And his spirituality comes out in extremely dark surrealism,
• 1:20:16
  which is an interesting way of expressing it.
• 1:20:18
  But I really liked Lynch as a person.
• 1:20:21
  And to see him go through what he went through, wow.
• 1:20:25
  That was tough, you know. So, yeah, so stay tuned.
• 1:20:28
  Yeah well sir as as
• 1:20:31
  a fan of your writing as a fan of your behind the scenes
• 1:20:34
  meticulousness as a fan in general it
• 1:20:37
  has been everything i'd hoped for and more to talk
• 1:20:40
  to you this morning and it's been a real pleasure as well hey thank
• 1:20:43
  you cat yes paul and salmon i'll put a
• 1:20:46
  link to all of paul's books check
• 1:20:50
  it out you can also see him in the special features of multiple multiple
• 1:20:53
  films and documentaries about said films
• 1:20:56
  so please check out paul's work his
• 1:20:59
  books his interviews and the
• 1:21:02
  links all of the links in the description and as always my little yugenites
• 1:21:08
  thank you for listening to us on spotify or wherever you choose to listen to
• 1:21:14
  your favorite podcasts i'm ken hill and until next time you've been listening to cinema Oh,
• 1:21:19
  you can't.
• 1:21:23
  Music.