Tag: Buffy

FROM THE VAULT: Armin Shimerman Interview

Conducted ~5/2003

To Star Trek fans, Armin Shimerman is the actor behind one of the most memorable characters to ever inhabit that universe – Deep Space Nine‘s Ferengi extraordinaire, Quark.

To Buffy fans, he will always be the ill-tempered Principal Snyder.

He’s also a distinguished stage actor and author (check out his Merchant Prince series), and was another in the long line of my in-depth interviews done on a whim.

I do, however, recall that this whim had its origins in a DVD-fueled binge of both Buffy and Deep Space Nine. Usually these types of immersive binges would lead me to begin tracking down various creators and castmembers of said shows and flicks. That was certainly the case here – and thankfully, I found a wonderful, down-to-earth, fascinating guy, and I hope that translates to print in the interview below.

KEN PLUME: Am I correct in understanding that you’re originally from Lakewood, New Jersey?

ARMIN SHIMERMAN: Yes … a small town in the mid-section of New Jersey, Ocean County. It was a great, great childhood and it was a terrific town – probably still is. I haven’t been there for decades. I keep waiting for them to invite me back to be sort of a VIP at one of their parades, but it hasn’t happened yet.

PLUME: So now you’re dropping hints…

SHIMERMAN: I am.

PLUME: How would you describe small town life in the ’50s?

SHIMERMAN: In the ’50s, yeah. Well, we went to a very small school. The town was dominated by the lake – it froze over in the winter and you skated on it in winter and you swam in it in summer. We kept the doors wide open, everybody knew everybody else… it was a small town. It had a lot of history, so we were always discovering new things about the town. That was kind of wonderful. We were right next door to Lakehurst. Most of my youth I watched the blimps fly over, because it was one of the last dirigible naval bases in the country. So we just grew up with blimps flying over all the time. When I look back on it now, I was very blessed to have been born there and to have grown up there.

PLUME: It almost seems like a stereotypical, ’50s childhood in a small town.

SHIMERMAN: It was. We had some problems, surely. My family was not very well-to-do, and I came from a divorced family and we were always struggling to make ends meet. But my brother and I never knew about that – my mother and my grandmother took care of that, sort of kept that from us. We had good friends, and great neighborhoods, and it didn’t seem to matter. It didn’t make any difference.

PLUME: And you were the first generation American citizen in your family, right?

SHIMERMAN: My mom was first generation on her side, but on my father’s side, I was indeed the first generation.

PLUME: Was there a certain view that you attained via that, as far as a certain way of viewing the country or the way you fit in?

SHIMERMAN: It wasn’t so much viewing the country, but because my father had struggled all of his life and actually had done well in his struggles, although he was always poor, he and my mother – my mother primarily – taught me to be self-reliant, to look towards goals, to try to achieve the best I could. One of the great things about the small town I was in was it had a terrific school system and my teachers were wonderful. They taught me a great deal, and with the tools that they gave me, when I finally moved to Los Angeles in my junior year of high school, I was way ahead of the class.

PLUME: At that time, if someone would have asked you when you were 14 or 15, what would you have said that your goals were?

SHIMERMAN: I probably would have told you that I was going to grow up to be an attorney. Or possibly a writer. When I was 11 or 12, I was doing some writing and actually got published in a magazine at that time. It was never a serious thing, because the family ethic was to grow up and make money. They were very disappointed when I became an actor. But an attorney seemed like the right thing. I’m not sure why, when I look back on it. But I’m sure that at that age that is exactly what I was telling people I was going to grow up to be.

PLUME: Just because it seemed like the right thing to do?

SHIMERMAN: Yeah, because it was the right thing to do.

PLUME: It’s kind of ironic, because didn’t your mother set you on the path to acting?

SHIMERMAN: In a sense. What she did was she had a distant cousin who was a drama teacher in Los Angeles, and when my family moved to Los Angeles when I was 16, she felt that a great way for me to make friends would be through this drama club that her distant cousin was running. That was the beginning of the end.

PLUME: Moving to L.A. must have been quite a culture shock.

SHIMERMAN: It was. It was a great culture shock.

PLUME: That was height of the ’60s, right?

SHIMERMAN: Yeah, we moved in, I would say ’65, ’66… I’m not really sure. One of those two years. I know when we moved to Los Angeles, as we were coming down the freeway for the first time, we saw smoke – it was exactly the week that the Watts riots happened. We moved to LA during the riots. But it was a cultural shock. It was a big city, and my brother and I weren’t really used to that.

PLUME: Was your natural tendency to withdraw within?

SHIMERMAN: Exactly. The tendency was to withdraw, to stay to ourselves, to sort of bitch and moan about the fact that we’d lost all our friends. But my mom made a tremendous sacrifice. She moved all of us for many reasons, but one of the primary reasons was so that I would have residency requirements for UCLA, which I eventually attended.

PLUME: Was it her understanding that you were going to be going for law?

SHIMERMAN: I don’t think she was specific about what I was supposed to go for, but she knew that I had to go to college, and she knew that the UC system was a terrifically good system and that you needed to be a resident of California for two years to get the special tuition rates. So she moved us out, as I said, in my junior year so that I would make the residency requirements. I don’t think she cared whether I was an attorney or not… I think she did care when I first told her I was going to be an actor, but that wasn’t really until after I graduated. The moment after I graduated, I immediately went to work for the Globe Theater in San Diego, and that was the path that I took for the rest of my life.

PLUME: When you were first applying …

SHIMERMAN: When I first applied, I had a poly-sci major, so I assumed I was going to be a lawyer.

PLUME: How quickly did the acting bug hit you – and what exactly was the drama club?

SHIMERMAN: The drama club was a local club that was attached to a local community center in Los Angeles. I joined that when we first moved here, and then in the senior year of my high school days, I no longer belonged to that club, because in the high school years, I continually did plays in high school and was the lead in two of the three productions we did that year.

PLUME: Which productions were they?

SHIMERMAN: The first one was The Crucible, John Proctor was the character. The second one, I was not the lead, but I played Claudius in Hamlet. The third was Mr. Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth.

PLUME: Rather intense characters…

SHIMERMAN: They were. I had a wonderful drama teacher, and he taught us to love great literature – especially Shakespeare. For many years after high school and college, that is primarily what I did, was classical theater.

PLUME: Did that instantly appeal to you?

SHIMERMAN: Yes… It was the language, it was the scope of the characters, it was the puzzle. When you work with Shakespeare, it’s a puzzle, and you have to solve the puzzle. It’s the solving of the puzzle that was always enormously important to me. Even to this day when I research Shakespeare, if I come upon a puzzle that I haven’t solved before, I spend most of the day trying to work it out.

PLUME: So it’s as much an intellectual exercise as it is an emotional one…

SHIMERMAN: Exactly.

PLUME: Right off the bat that struck you in that way?

SHIMERMAN: Yeah, yeah. Because the language was really hard for a high school student to understand. It was in English – you figure you should be able to understand it. My high school teacher, he helped me with the challenge and he also nurtured my talent and kept asking me to do more and more, and it was, I guess, part of being a small town kid – being in the large city, it was a way of disappearing out of the city and going into a more familiar world… even if it wasn’t familiar, it could be familiar after several weeks of rehearsal.

PLUME: Especially after you had invested the time to, as you say, unlock the puzzle.

SHIMERMAN: Right.

PLUME: So it was almost a mastering of the domain within which you’d placed yourself…

SHIMERMAN: Exactly. Ironically enough, the local business that I own is called Mastering Shakespeare, so mastering is exactly the right word.

Continued below…
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June 30, 2013
FROM THE VAULT: Joss Whedon Interview

Conducted ~6/2003

I was a late-to-the-party fan of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, having not begun watching the series until the musical episode. With the availability of DVDs and its recent premiere in syndication, though, I was able to catch up ludicrously fast, quickly falling in love with the show and its troubled spin-off, Angel.

As is my wont, I decided to do an in-depth interview with Buffy‘s mastermind, and found him to be a fascinating guy.

You can see for yourself in the interview below, which follows the original introduction for the piece.

If you’ve been living in a cave (and you know who you are), then you’ll be completely in the dark as to who Joss Whedon is.

Otherwise, you’ll know him as the creator/producer/poobah behind one of the largest “cult classics” to grace TV screens – Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.

Add to that the Buffy spin-off Angel and the cancelled-but-not-forgotten sci-fi series Firefly, and you’ve got a bit of a cottage industry. For the longest time, though, Whedon (whose father and grandfather were both highly-respected TV writers) was best known as one of the most sought-after script doctors in Hollywood. If a script needed a fix, you called Joss Whedon – on everything from Toy Story to X-Men.

While Buffy may be over (Fox Home Video just released Season 4 on DVD, if you’re having withdrawal symptoms), Angel continues to thrive, and plans are currently afoot for a Firefly feature film.

We recently had the chance to talk rather extensively with Joss about… well… a little of everything…

KEN PLUME: In the past, you’ve described yourself as a bit of a TV snob, as a child.

JOSS WHEDON: That’s true.

PLUME: Was that a reaction against your family’s legacy, or just the environment you were in?

WHEDON: It was more the environment I was in. When my parents divorced, I lived with my mother. My mother had been with a TV writer for 30 years, with a comedy writer, and although my parents were good friends after they divorced and got along, she wasn’t exactly watching either sitcoms or football after my father left. She really was more into the Masterpiece Theater of it, and I kind of just followed in her footsteps – except for the part where she watched the news, which I didn’t. It was depressing. It was really my mother’s influence… a lot of stuff I do trace back to her. I also thought that, quite frankly, I loved when my father was working on The Electric Company when I younger … I liked the shows he did, but I never thought they were as funny as he was. In my mind, I thought that he was running them, because he’d run The Electric Company. I don’t think he was, but it felt like Alice, Benson, and even Golden Girls – which I think was hilarious and was a classic – this is the wittiest man I’d ever met, and all of his friends were extraordinary, and the sitcoms were never quite the same as my father.

PLUME: Did you blame the sitcoms as a form, for somehow watering down your father?

WHEDON: I think to an extent, yeah. And also just classic teenage rebellion. Rebellion and snobbery were both involved. But also that thing of, “I know what my father’s capable of, and I don’t think Alice is up to his level.” So there was a little bit of that, too.

PLUME: What direction did you start to go in? Did you see a direction for yourself going in a certain path?

WHEDON: Oh yes… I was going to be a brilliant, independent filmmaker who then went on to make giant, major box office summer movies.

PLUME: So, Spielberg…

WHEDON: Spielberg by way of George Romero or Wes Anderson, or a strange combination of the two …

PLUME: Commercial success with artistic integrity intact…

WHEDON: Exactly!

PLUME: So, obviously, you had these dreams of Hollywood which were completely unrealistic…

WHEDON: Well, you know, you don’t know – it could still happen. I did manage to keep my artistic integrity – I just happened to have to go to television to do it.

PLUME: Oh, bitter irony.

WHEDON: Not bitter at all, but definitely irony. The first thing I did when I came out to Los Angeles, on my way to Santa Cruz, where my brother was – where we were going to be independent filmmakers together with no money and no idea how to make a film. Then I ran out of money. Luckily, I was at my father’s house. So, after some great expunging, “I could make some money if I wrote a TV script,” thing sort of occurred to me.

PLUME: Was it a difficult wall to break down?

WHEDON: You know, I literally had left college going, “I’m not going to be a television writer.” And my friend would go, “Three-G TV!” Third generation. He’d taunt me all the time. “It’s not going to happen!” A lot of things happened when I got to LA, one of which is my father and I got a lot closer, I spent time with him – which I hadn’t really done as a kid. Which is really nice. I tried to write a TV series, and then I discovered first of all that I love writing more than anything on this earth, and that you could write exactly as well as you want to.

PLUME: What it something you had explored at Wesleyan?

WHEDON: I had written the little movies that I’d made, but production was the big part of Wesleyan back then.

PLUME: Was it more theory, or film study?

WHEDON: It was really film theory. Watching films over and over again and dissecting them, really understanding what they were trying to do, and all that good stuff. The best film theory study available. But, really, sort of crap production – as my movies evident.

PLUME: Well, you see the balance the other way in a lot of film schools, which is, “Studying the classics is all well and good, but we’re trying to push you out into production.” Do you think there’s a loss of a sense of place and understanding of the form they’re working in?

WHEDON: It’s very important to understand how to shoot a movie, if that’s what you want to do. But it’s more important at that age to be studying the meaning thing, to be studying what builds up the great movies. Where the simplicity is, where the complexity is. Anybody can tell you where to point a camera – and quite frankly, nobody can tell you how. You can either do that or you can’t. Learning what a gaffer is, or how to load your own film is great – I actually had to load my own film during my thesis film once, because my crew was too stoned. They just said, “We’re really too stoned to change it.”

PLUME: Damn those non-union crews…

WHEDON: Yeah, we were top notch. You get so many people out here with incredible technical expertise who have nothing to say, or no idea of the importance of having something to say, or the importance of understanding what they’re saying.

PLUME: Do you think, to some extent, those are the kind of filmmakers that the Hollywood executive tends to like – because they’re malleable?

WHEDON: Yeah. Well, you want somebody who can make it pretty and make it work and give the executive what the executive thinks they want, and bring something to the party. Not just translate the words. If you’re the writer, what you’re looking for is somebody who can convey the actual meaning of the script… and quite frankly, people who are just schooled in production don’t really have that. There’s a lot of people out there who make a pretty frame, that has nothing to do with what is said.

PLUME: Form over function.

WHEDON: But you know, there’s advantages to both – don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot of people teaching theory who are filling people’s heads with completely idiotic agendas and not really getting down to the basics of “This is exactly what he was doing, exactly what you think, what you feel.” It hasn’t been accomplished. You need to be looking at that stuff.

PLUME: What kind of agenda irritates you the most?

WHEDON: Any agenda. Any agenda beyond what the film itself is trying to say. My biggest concentration was gender studies and feminism. That was sort of my unofficial minor. That was what all my film work was about, but at the same time, somebody bringing the knee-jerk feminist agenda to a text can be the most aggravating thing in the world. Especially if you’re a feminist, because you’re like, “You’re the person that everybody makes fun of. You’re the reason why we’ve got no cred.”

PLUME: Planting subtext for subtext’s sake…

WHEDON: Yeah, planting subtext based on everybody brings their own experience to a film – that’s why films are popular, and that’s fine. As long as they’re working from the film outwards, towards themselves. What people with an agenda do – whether it be, like, Cartesian physics or some thing I can’t begin to understand, or feminism, or anything – they try and shove it in. “Look at this this way.” Okay, let’s look at the film as it exists, what it is, what it’s trying to do. We can judge it. But you’re talking to somebody who was raised to be a radical feminist, who thought that liberals were wishy-washy and who loves Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. So you know, this conflicts around always. Take the film at its own value, and then go to the other place.

PLUME: Was that part of your motivation for taking gender studies for a minor?

WHEDON: It’s not that I took it for a minor, it’s just like I pursued it in everything I did. It’s always what interested me. But, when you’re dealing with feminism you’re dealing with a lot of people who understand feminism better than they understand film, and again you pose something and that doesn’t just go … the point is, you can have an agenda as long as you let the film come to you and take that out of you. I know a guy who could not get through a paper without talking through Freudian theories of infantile sexuality. And his lecture on the Wild Bunch, in terms of Freudian theories of infantile sexuality, was actually fascinating. Because he loved the Wild Bunch, he understood the movie, and then he let it speak to him. He didn’t try and like shove in a theory.

PLUME: Meeting his mother would be interesting…

WHEDON: Yes…

PLUME: Going back a little bit, was it your choice to go overseas to Winchester – to what, I guess, was essentially high school?

WHEDON: Yes. My mother suggested it, because she was on sabbatical, and enjoyed England, and didn’t trust the schools in California where my father was. So I was to go for half a year, because she was taking a half a year sabbatical. I bizarrely managed to get into the single best school in the country, through no merit of my own. I really don’t know how that happened. I was lazy, I was terrible, but through osmosis, I was learning more than I ever had before. It was so extraordinary. My family went back to America, and the school asked me to stay along, and I did.

PLUME: So you got to be the standard there, as the token lazy American.

WHEDON: I was the token lazy American, except when it came to English class, where I was relentless and unstoppable.

PLUME: How palpable was the cultural difference, going to that school, compared to the American schools you’d gone to previously?

WHEDON: Well, let’s see. I went from Riverdale, a fairly progressive private school that my mother taught at, where I’d gone for 10 and a half years, since first grade – because it went all the way through, K-12. I went from that, having never been out of the country, to a 600 year-old all male boarding school where I actually listened to a lecture on why co-education will never work. The cultural difference couldn’t have been huger. The only thing that was the same was that, like at Riverdale, I had no money and was surrounded by very rich people.

PLUME: That lecture had to appeal to the radical feminist in you…

WHEDON: Yeah. Well, you know, there’s plenty of arguments that co-education is actually bad for girls in the present state of the country. But that was not his argument. Put it this way – at the end of it, I was like, “Sir, don’t you think if God had wanted man to fly he would have given us wings?” It was very, very strange.

PLUME: So, technically, you were never in a traditional public school…

WHEDON: No, I never was.

PLUME: Did you ever feel, personally, that you missed out on anything? Or do you feel that the course you took was actually a benefit?

WHEDON: Well, you know, Riverdale was a good school. Winchester was a great school. An incredible school.

PLUME: What aspects of it made it incredible?

WHEDON: It was literally rated the best education you could get in the country. I wish that I could have made some moves on a girl at some point in my high school career, but that probably wasn’t going to happen at Riverdale, either. Which is one of the reasons why I stayed at Winchester. Socially, every boy that comes out of Winchester was completely pathetic. Intellectually, it was a staggering gift to be able to be around that much intelligence.

Continued below…

June 29, 2013
A Bit Of A Chat with Ken Plume & Jane Espenson

I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.

In this episode, I have a chat with writer/producer Jane Espenson about Husbands, oil painting, Whedon & Moore, linguistics, snorkeling, fairy tales, and Here’s The Thing.

You can watch the first season of HUSBANDS at www.husbandstheseries.com

Hope you enjoy…

Download “A Bit of a Chat with Ken Plume & Jane Espenson“:

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Drop Ken a line HERE.

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You can also find more of my interviews by clicking HERE.

April 26, 2012
Weekend Shopping Guide 1/7/11: Of Schmucks & Pilkington

The weekend’s here. You’ve just been paid, and it’s burning a hole in your pocket. What’s a pop culture geek to do? In hopes of steering you in the right direction to blow some of that hard-earned cash, it’s time for the FRED Weekend Shopping Guide – your spotlight on the things you didn’t even know you wanted…

(Please support FRED by using the links below to make any impulse purchases – it helps to keep us going…)

I think it largely disappeared from theaters, which is a shame, because Dinner For Schmucks (Dreamworks, Rated PG-13, Blu-Ray-$39.99 SRP) is actually a fun little comedy in the vein of most recent pics starring Paul Rudd and/or Steve Carrell – affable, funny, and heartwarming. Rudd stars as a business exec whose attempt to get a better position are hindered only by making a good showing at the titular dinner, which requires executives to find a bizarre person to bring as a guest to be mocked by the others. Naturally, Rudd pegs onto Carell to be his guest, but things don’t go quite to plan. Bonus materials include an audio commentary, featurettes, deleted scenes, and outtakes.

Want a little bit of quick, cheap work area light with the convenience of USB? Then the USB LED Desktop Lamp ($7.99) is the convenient, bright, perfectly-named solution to your needs. Easy, right?

If you enjoyed the Ricky Gervais podcast, the animated versions made from those recordings and presented as The Ricky Gervais Show (HBO, Not Rated, DVD-$29.98 SRP) don’t really enhance the humor that much, but serves as a nice “best bits” collection that just happens to have some visuals attached. The 2-disc set contains the entire 1st season plus an episode storyboard and Comedy Gala animation.

After a smattering of single-disc releases, the long-awaited second volume of iCarly Season 2 (Nickelodeon, Not Rated, DVD-$19.99 SRP) has arrived, sporting 12 episodes plus a small clutch of behind-the-scenes extras (though it’s ridiculous there aren’t far more).

When I first saw My Dog Skip (Warner Bros., Rated PG, Blu-Ray-$19.98 SRP), I feared it would some kind of saccharine, nostalgia-fueled snoozer. To my surprise, it was actually a sweet little flick that’s largely carried on the back of the then still-lovable Frankie Muniz. Don’t believe me? Give it a spin via this new high-def edition. Bonus features include audio commentaries and additional scenes.

The fourth season of Big Love (HBO, Not Rated, DVD-$59.99 SRP) finds multiple-family man Bill Hendrickson out from under the thumb of mad “prophet” Roman Grant, but will his plans to run for the Utah State Senate tear apart his happy homes? Bonus materials include a special behind-the-scenes featurette for every episode.

Like most Ron Howard films, I found Backdraft (Universal, Rated R, Blu-Ray-$26.98 SRP) to be wholly competent, but ultimately lifeless and dull. Sure, the fire visuals remain impressive – more so now in high definition – but the story and its execution by Howard just sort of sits there. Bonus materials include an introduction, featurettes, and deleted scenes.

It’s in re-watching it that I fully understood just how mannered and poor man’s Wes Anderson (which, really, should be left up to Wes Anderson) Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation (Universal, Rated R, Blu-Ray-$26.98 SRP) is. Though, I admit, it’s always fun to see Bill Murray on autopilot. Bonus features include featurettes, deleted scenes, a music video, and more.

ABC Family’s The Secret Life Of The American Teenager (ABC Family, Not Rated, DVD-$39.99 SRP) continues to steam along, as the 5th season finds the characters facing teenage pregnancy head-on. Bonus materials include a quartet of featurettes.

Yeah, Family Guy‘s Star Wars parodies are largely inferior to Robot Chicken‘s, but that’s largely due to the former’s shoehorning of their characters into the roles, instead of being allowed to just play with the universe as it exists. Thankfully, they’ve come to an end with the 3rd and final installment, Family Guy: It’s A Trap (Fox, Not Rated, Blu-Ray-$29.99 SRP) which, as you can guess, takes on Return Of The Jedi. Bonus materials include an audio commentary, featurettes, and outtakes.

It’s a daunting proposition, revisiting a film that defined the 80’s with the simple phrase “Greed Is Good”, and I’m not entirely sure Oliver Stone succeeds with Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Fox, Rated PG-13, Blu-Ray-$39.99 SRP), which comes on the heels of the economic collapse of the past few years that itself has played like an awkward sequel to the financial whirlwind of the 80’s. Bonus materials include an audio commentary, interviews, featurettes, and more.

For fans eager for its release the wait for the complete high definition release of Battlestar Galactica: Season Four (Universal, Not Rated, Blu-Ray-$88.98 SRP) have had their prayers answered by a robot with this 6-disc set featuring audio commentaries, featurettes, deleted scenes, extended cuts, video blogs, and more.

The idea of carrying on a TV series in comic book form – written by the showe’s creator and writers – is actually a pretty good idea. Sadly, Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season 8 (Fox, Not Rated, Blu-Ray-$34.99 SRP) is a motion comic version of the comic book series that managed to maintain the same level of tragic mediocrity that marked the pitiful end of that once-proud series.

The Warner Archive Collection certainly has been going full bore when it comes to their catalogue releases, and have ramped up things considerably on the animated side. I mean, I don’t think anyone ever expected they might one day be able to purchase a complete series set of Hanna-Barbera’s short-lived Swat Kats (Warner Bros., Not Rated, DVD-$34.95). But here it is.

I thought the fine folks at Sideshow did a bang-up job with their original Indiana Jones Premium Format figure, taken from Raiders Of The Lost Ark and holding the golden fertility idol. As well done as that mixed media figure was, they’ve trumped it with the one-two punch from Temple Of Doom with Premium Format Figures of both Indiana Jones ($309.99) and Mola Ram ($294.99). Both are very limited editions, and supplies are dwindling fast. I’d recommend you pick both up before you miss out, or you’ll regret being left at the mercy of the aftermarket for these gems.

So there you have it… my humble suggestions for what to watch, listen to, play with, or waste money on this coming weekend. See ya next week…

-Ken Plume

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January 7, 2011