FRED Entertainment

Tag: interview

  • FROM THE VAULT: Bryan Cranston Interview

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    Conducted ~6/2003

    cranstonLong before he became Walter White on AMC’s Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston was stealing scenes on Malcolm In The Middle after a long career as a jobbing actor.

    It was during the tail end of his Malcolm run that we had our in-depth chat. Here’s the original intro to the piece…

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    While most people will recognize Bryan Cranston as the affably befuddled father Hal on Malcolm In The Middle, more discerning viewers will remember his roles in From the Earth to the Moon, Saving Private Ryan, Babylon 5, and numerous others on TV and film.

    He’s also a writer/director/producer, having performed all three duties (plus acting) on his independent feature Last Chance, and directed an episode of Malcolm during this past season. He’s slated to directed three more episodes this coming season (including the season premiere).

    Last Chance has just been picked up by Showtime and will be making its premiere this Fall, with a DVD release planned as well.

    In addition, he’s also produced and distributed an instructional DVD for parents and their children on how to stay safe from abduction, called Kid Smartz.

    You can learn about Kid Smartz, Last Chance, Malcolm and more at Bryan’s official website, www.BryanCranston.com

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    KEN PLUME: You’re from California, originally?

    BRYAN CRANSTON: I am. I was born and raised out here. Born in Hollywood, believe it or not, and raised primarily in the San Fernando Valley, where I still live.

    PLUME: So this would be what, the ‘mid-50’s, and the ’60s were your formative years?

    CRANSTON: Yeah, well, ’60s and ’70s.

    PLUME: What was your childhood like?

    CRANSTON: It was great. My dad was a struggling actor, and my mom met my dad in acting class, with the likes of Mike Connors and Anne Bancroft – people like that, who were all young, struggling actors. Back then it was the late ’40s, I suppose, right around 1950. They met, they fell in love, they got married, and she quit so that she could raise babies. That was a pretty much expected thing back then. I do happen to know that she regrets that decision, feeling that she could have done both, and has longed to return. She’s now, God bless her, in the motion picture home, where she lives, and doing well. I recently wrote a little part for her in the next movie I plan to make, and she has one word in it. This was all by design – she would be offended by this, but her one word in it is, “Asshole.” So I’m going to get my mother to say, “Asshole.”

    PLUME: Are you working out any issues?

    CRANSTON: Yeah, I probably am. Like so many people, we don’t really know what issues we’re working on. It just made me laugh when I realized I could do this and not sacrifice anything. So I thought, “Okay.” I love to act, and I’ve been blessed with opportunity, so I’m just following it through. It’s like riding a wave. You go out and try to catch a wave, and you miss most of them. Once in a while, you catch one – and even when you catch it, you go, “Hey, this is a nice wave”… you still don’t know how long it’s going to take you. It could take you all the way into shore, which it looks like Malcolm is going to do. Then at the end of it, it takes you up, show ends… I’ll maybe sit on the beach for a little bit.

    PLUME: Or you could be caught in the riptide and never be seen again…

    CRANSTON: There you go – you could do a face plant. Exactly. I’ve been involved in those, where you think something is going to turn out good and it turns out just terrible, and all kinds of things. So it’s as fickle as anything I’ve ever been involved with. But somehow, someway, I think those who survive this business are able to find a sense of security built in this insecure world that we live in here. I’ve been doing this for 23 years, and for about 20 years exclusively as an actor. I haven’t done anything else. I find that remarkably rewarding, that that’s my chosen profession and I’m able to do it.

    PLUME: Do you think it’s just a function of coming to the realization that it is a fickle business?

    CRANSTON: There are certain factors that have helped me survive, as an actor. Because you ask any actor and they’ll be able to tell you, “My God, there was this guy in class that I worked with, I never saw him do anything professionally, but he blew me away whenever he worked.” There are people in class that are fantastic, there are people who start working that are unbelievably gifted, but don’t go the mile. The career is a marathon, it’s not a sprint, and you have to have that kind of mentality, that if your first couple miles, they’re not working out to good – just hang in there. Just keep going, if that’s what you indeed love to do. So my advice to young actors is only become an actor, professionally, if you have to. There’s probably a half a dozen people who will read that comment and go, “I know what he’s talking about. I feel that. I need to do this, I have no choice. But, to be an actor, because I’m pushed into that – it’s part of me.” Then, there will be the masses who go, “What the hell does that mean? Only become an actor if you have to? What is that? What an idiot.” And throw it away because they don’t get it. They see the external things surrounding an actor’s life, and the only actors that they see are ones that they admire or wish they could have a similar career to.

    PLUME: Which are the working ones…

    CRANSTON: Right.

    PLUME: Which is what, 5% according to the Guild?

    CRANSTON: If that much. I think it is something like under 5% make a living. Make a living – that means qualifying for your medical and dental plan – then maybe a half a percent of that make a very good living. So it’s not a business for anyone who has other desires. If you are thinking about making a killing financially, or getting in it for all the great women and this and that and the other, then you’re out of your mind. You would do much better to go to business school. Get a degree in business.

    PLUME: Why hang out at clubs when you can hang out at cattle calls?

    CRANSTON: There’s nothing more testing of your character than to endure one call after another, after another, after another where you see clones of yourself when you’re just starting, and you’re figuring out, “How do I get noticed?” You go through this whole painful retrospective, and the only way you can do it, the only way you can survive, is if you love acting. Then go act. Be in a play, do a student film, do something that allows you to act and find the joy in that.

    PLUME: I’m assuming that your parents were not exactly encouraging of you going into acting?

    CRANSTON: My dad wasn’t, because my dad was living the typical actor’s life, which was a hard struggle. I remember as a kid, back in the early ’60s, he would be in a good mood, and there were things going on and, you know, we bought a new car. And then the following year we sold that new car and got an old car. Okay, I don’t really get that, but kids are resilient. We’d have nothing to relate it to, and you don’t have a sense of underprivileged or privileged or deprived or anything. We were pretty much in a middle class society, and we’re living that life, and okay. One year we put in a pool, we had a built-in pool. Then I remember the following year my mother saying, “We can’t swim, because we can’t afford the chemicals that go in the pool.” “Oh, okay.” You have a flash of a sense that, “I guess this is what every kid goes through.” It’s only into your later teen years you realize, “Some kids don’t have that problem. Some kids kind of have it easier, have money or inherit money – Wow! What’s that like?” My whole family, like many depression era families, were raised on the ability to save a dollar – but they had no education, no background, into how to make a dollar. You got a job, get a job, hold a job – any job. Doesn’t matter, just get it. What’s a better job? A better job is one that pays more or it’s a little easier. That’s a better job.

    PLUME: So it was always thinking in the now…

    CRANSTON: Yeah, always thinking in the now, and save a buck, here’s a coupon, here’s an early bird special … here’s a garage sale, buy it there. Go to the Goodwill to buy some things. Do this, and so it was always a lower middle-class kind of mentality that I grew up with, and because of that, I went into an acting career concerned about, “Oh, I’ve got to save this, I’ve got to do this. Only drive this … I can get another couple years out of these clothes.” Thinking about that, “I need this job, because I’ve got to pay this bill, I’ve got to pay my rent.” It was nickel and diming my mind to the point where it would be intrusive to my art. I would start thinking and start obsessing about how I did. “How did I do at this audition? Did I do well? Do I think I’m going to get the job? Let me call my agent. Did you hear from them? Did they call you?” One agent one time said to me, “Bryan, listen. Believe me, they have my number. If they want you, they will call me.” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Did you get any feedback? Did they say they liked me? Am I closer?” I always just spent energy on this, until about 15 years ago, where I formulated a different point of view. That was, if I took all that energy on “Am I going to get a job? Who did they hire? Why did they hire? Why don’t they hire me? Oh my God, look who the competition is! He’s good. I’ve seen his work before. Oh God, I’ve really got to be good now, because …” and start psyching yourself out and this sort of thing. Instead of spending any amount of energy on that, I’d put the energy and the time on the work. Go back to the work. Your work starts when you get a phone call. You’ve got to read the script, because you’re going to be reading for the character of a barber and whatever… a college kid… whatever it is. You start putting together the ideas of your character, from that moment. You read the script to get a sense of the tone of the film or TV show, and you read your character to get a sense of tone of the character. Then, what I’ve always done is you start making a bouquet. I start, “What about an accent? Do I play with an accent? What about an affectation? This guy’s kind of full of himself. What about stance? Or something that he does…” And I start putting together little things like this, like gathering and making a bouquet. Perhaps now attitude, “Is he angry? Is he upset?” So I create this thing, “What does he look like? What does he dress like? How does he wear his hair? Where is he now?” I ask myself all these questions, and I would continue working on it until I felt that I would get the casting people or the producers in the room to go from having their heads rest in their hands, to picking up their head and noticing me. That I have to find something that’s that different, you know, that they would then be able to later on say, “What about that kid who did that weird thing.” Even if it was totally wrong, at least it’s something that makes a stand and says something.

    PLUME: That broke the monotony.

    CRANSTON: That breaks the monotony. You know, it had to be something that I felt no one else would do, because there are guideposts when you read a script. You go, “Okay, I know this guy. I know this guy. Okay.” Some people can then put the script down and go, “Okay, I know what to do,” and you’ll do what you expect to do. You’ll see the actors come in and do exactly what was written. I kept thinking, “I’ve got to do something more than what’s written. I have to go a step beyond that. Sometimes it would come to me right away, and sometimes it would take hours and hours and I’d still contemplate on it. But the energy was focused on the character, and building the character – as opposed to something that’s out of my control. I would then select my bouquet – throwing some flowers out and putting other flowers in, even at the last minute before you go in. I wouldn’t talk to anybody, I’d be alone and collect my thoughts and go into the room, present the bouquet to the people, leave it with them and you walk out. From that moment on, your job is done. I never thought about it. I would have a whole tray of scripts and sides that I would throw the things into. Not only would I not call the agents anymore, I wouldn’t even think of it. I would completely forget about it. I wouldn’t tell anybody about my auditions … I didn’t want to conjure up any kind of things I was up for, and “I think I’m really close to getting this.” It was just a waste of energy to me. Then, when I got callbacks – and I started getting more and more callbacks from things, because of my energy in a different place – I would have to try to recall, “Oh yeah, what was that?” And I’d go in that big box and I’d start fishing out, “Oh, there it is. Oh yeah, yeah, I remember this guy. Oh good, they want to see it again. Any notes?” “No, no, same thing.” “Okay.” Then I’d start working again, and that was my salvation. I simply took the axiom of not thinking for a moment about things that are out of my control. It’s not a part of acting, to wonder who they’re picking or why they’re picking someone is someone else’s business – it’s certainly not mine.

    PLUME: A watched pot never boils…

    CRANSTON: Exactly. I digress, but you asked about my father – he was an actor, and he started producing things and he did a series of commercials for the United Way, and PSA spots, and he put me in one. I had a great experience, and I knew from that experience that it was special. I was about 8 years old, 7 or 8, and I knew it was special. I didn’t quite know why it felt special, and I certainly didn’t say, “This is it!” at that age, but I knew something about that was special. I guess that sort of just stayed with me for many, many years. Then you go into high school, and I got into sports, and I was interested in girls, and everything’s kind of a mishmash of confusion and desires. Then I had a cognition around 21 or 22 that this is what I should do.

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  • A Bit Of A Chat with Ken Plume & Paul F. Tompkins 6

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    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 another chat with actor, stand-up, gadfly, and sartorial dandy Paul F. Tompkins, about squeaky chairs, foreign audiences, tents, Thrilling Adventures, and ascot memorials.

    Hope you enjoy…

    Download “A Bit of a Chat with Ken Plume & Paul F. Tompkins 6“:

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    SUBSCRIBE
    Subscribe to this Podcast via iTunes

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    Drop Ken a line HERE.

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

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  • FROM THE VAULT: Craig McCracken Interview

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    Conducted ~6/2002

    mccrackenHis name may not be well-known, but Craig McCracken is the creator of the massively successful Cartoon Network hits The Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends.

    It’s been 10 years since Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup first began their non-stop struggle to keep the fine citizens of Townsville safe from villains various and sundry, and even Foster’s Home has just come to an end.

    I originally spoke with Craig in the run up to the big screen release of Powerpuff Girls: The Movie. We chatted at a time when the writing was on the wall that Warner Bros. had no idea how to market the film, and Craig’s fears about the campaign were realized with a poor box office showing.

    Here’s my interview with Craig… Hope you enjoy…

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    KEN PLUME: What were the difficulties in bringing the show to the big screen – especially since, I’m assuming, it wasn’t a Disney-sized animation budget…

    CRAIG McCRACKEN: No, it wasn’t. Basically, it was just keeping the tone and the feel of the show. The shows are either 11 or 22 minutes and they move pretty quickly, and that’s part of the charm of them – so it was just trying to keep that in mind and keep the energy of the story moving, even though we were dealing with a longer format. It was a challenge to not make it feel like a totally different animal. It feels like this still is Powerpuff – just longer.

    PLUME: How long did it take to arrive at a story that would sustain a feature?

    McCRACKEN: We came up with two stories. It took us a couple of months… we came up with two different ideas – one that was purely an action show, and then on that was more of a subtle character piece. The network liked both of them , so basically what we did is created a hybrid of the two ideas – and thus we have the movie that we just finished.

    PLUME: And it’s essentially a prequel…

    McCRACKEN: Yes, it’s a prequel. It tells the story about how the girls were born with superpowers, but they weren’t necessarily heroes at the beginning of this movie, so the movie is about the events that happen in their life to make them decide to be heroes.

    PLUME: I’m assuming Mojo Jojo was a given as the villain…

    McCRACKEN: Yeah… Yeah… For me, definitely. He’s like the catch-all villain – he can be really silly if he needs to and evil if he needs to. He works on a lot of levels.

    PLUME: I was reading the Animation Blast website the other day, and I found Amid’s take on the poster interesting, seeing as how the writers listed are artists and not screenwriters – as has been the recent way of doing things in the animated feature realm…

    McCRACKEN: Yeah, definitely…

    PLUME: How hands-off in the process has Cartoon Network been? They seem to exist in this little bubble of creativity in a raging storm of something less than that throughout Hollywood…

    McCRACKEN: Yeah! We didn’t have any screenwriters. I don’t believe in scripts – if you’re going to write, then you also have to draw, if you want to work on Powerpuff. That’s what we did with the movie – all the guys who wrote it are the same guys who storyboarded it and visualized it, figured out all the shots, and basically made the movie. So it was being written and boarded at the same time – basically like they used to make animated movies.

    PLUME: Before they forgot…

    McCRACKEN: Before they forgot, yeah…

    PLUME: How would you say that method enhances the end product?

    McCRACKEN: There’s a lot you can do without words. You can say a lot with pictures. It’s a visual medium – and especially with animation, you can do a lot that you can’t do in live action. Because it’s drawings, you can kind of go anywhere and create anything you want. It really just gives you a sense of when you need to have dialogue and when you don’t, and if your pictures are telling the story, you don’t need to have all this talking. A show like Samurai Jack – that Genndy is doing – is a testament to that, where there’s hardly any dialogue in the whole show, but you can totally follow it because the visuals are selling that. I think a lot of times, in my experience, scriptwriters fall in love with their words and feel that they need to describe everything. There’s a lot to be said for a visual way of telling stories.

    PLUME: How would you describe the atmosphere at Cartoon Network? Why are these kinds of projects allowed to flourish there and not at, say, Nickelodeon?

    McCRACKEN: Well, for one thing, the executives in charge at Cartoon Network are cartoon fans. I mean, these are people who grew up loving animation and loving cartoons, and the only difference between them and me is they don’t know how to draw. They’re just kind-of frustrated artists who wish they could draw cartoons, but they don’t – so they go to a network where they can say “yes or no” to good ones getting made. They trust us as creators and give us a lot of freedom to do what we do, and they basically say, “Look… We don’t know how to make cartoons. You definitely do, so you go ahead and do that and we’ll put them on the air”. They love animation.

    PLUME: Is there a definite sense amongst you all of operating in a bubble?

    McCRACKEN: Yeah, pretty much so. We’ve been working this way for a number of years, so we’re pretty happy with the system we’ve got here and the way things work. I’ve even had my agent saying, “Well let’s try to shop you around and do this…” And I’m like, “Well, I’ve got freedom here. I can make the cartoons that I want to – why would I want to go somewhere else? Where every decision has to be made by committee?” That doesn’t appeal to me.

    PLUME: Was there any hint of that committee approach while you were working on the movie?

    McCRACKEN: Not at the beginning. Near the end, as we were finishing it up, there was a little more involvement – just because this is such a big investment from the network’s point of view, that they were like, “We want to make sure that everybody’s on board with this movie and there’s nothing in it that could be problematic.” There were a few edits that had to be made from Warner Bros standpoint, but nothing so disastrous that it affected the final film.

    PLUME: Content editing?

    McCRACKEN: Not so much content – moreso pacing. The movie is really fast and it moves along really quickly, and I think there were just some parts where Warners wanted to keep it going a little. They felt like it maybe got a little slow in certain parts. There were a few content things, but nothing major.

    PLUME: So where’s the advertising for the movie?

    McCRACKEN: Good question!

    PLUME: Every time I turn around, there’s another Hey Arnold! ad, but no Powerpuff…

    McCRACKEN: You know, I’ve been wondering the same thing myself. I don’t see any posters, I don’t see any billboards, the only commercials I’ve seen are the one’s Cartoon Network’s been airing. In theory, Warner Bros is putting $20 million into promoting this movie. The movie comes out in 15 days – hopefully I’ll start seeing it.

    PLUME: I was speaking with someone earlier about the film, and they said, “When is that coming out?”…

    McCRACKEN: Yeah, exactly. I’m hoping that word-of-mouth on the film – people seeing it and liking it – that that will drive more people to the theaters, because I haven’t seen the billboards or the posters or anything.

    PLUME: Do you worry about it opening opposite Men In Black II?

    McCRACKEN: A little bit, yeah… I mean, there’s been lots of billboards and posters and ads for that movie for a number of months! I think everybody knows that’s coming out. It’s somewhat of a different audience, though, then the Men In Black audience.

    PLUME: Do you have any fears – quite valid, with Warners’ history – of this being another Iron Giant?

    McCRACKEN: I hope not… I hope not… That was some of my initial fears when we originally got involved with Warners, was that they haven’t had a lot of success with their animated films. Hopefully they’ll see the potential with this one. The one thing we have going for us is that we’re already a proven property, and so hopefully that will help us at the box office – that people know what Powerpuff Girls is, whereas Iron Giant was a new thing.

    PLUME: Of course, here’s hoping that there’s some advertising to remind people when it comes out…

    McCRACKEN: Yes! I would… I’m waiting for it… Maybe July 2 we’ll start seeing everything… The day before it comes out…

    PLUME: Hopefully it’s not July 10…

    McCRACKEN: Exactly! Post-promotion…

    PLUME: “By the way, did you know this movie opened last week?”…

    McCRACKEN: Exactly!

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  • FROM THE VAULT: Rowan Atkinson Interview

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    Conducted ~7/2003

    atkinsonWhat comedy fan doesn’t know the name Rowan Atkinson?

    Whether it’s the snide Blackadder or the simple Mr. Bean, Atkinson has earned his comic stripes.

    I got a chance to speak with Atkinson when he was promoting the spy spoof Johnny English – a film about a completely inept British agent called into action after an explosion kills all of MI5’s competent agents, leaving English to save the country.

    I’d long been under the impression that Atkinson did not like doing interviews, and could be a bit of a prickly pear (in fact, I was warned of such by the publicist for the film, prior to the interview). When I’ve gone into an interview with those preconceptions, they’ve usually been quickly dismissed as soon as we get to chatting – and Rowan was no exception.

    However, I did feel a bit of pressure throughout, as I got the sense that he didn’t suffer fools or puff pieces. Since I hoped I wasn’t the former and definitely wasn’t interested in the latter, I think things went well. You be the judge…

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    KEN PLUME: What aspects of the Johnny English character appealed to you enough to make a feature film? Because originally it was a character in a series of commercials, right?

    ROWAN ATKINSON: Yeah, we made it for these commercials for a credit card in Britain. We did the campaign for about 5 years, and we must have made 13 or 14 commercials. They’re only one minute commercials, but they all had a filmic quality to them, even though they were just commercials and had a slightly ridiculous character in it – who at the time was called Richard Latham, and we rechristened him Johnny English for the sake of the movie, because it’s a name people are more likely to remember. And I did like the character, and I liked the feel of the commercials – they felt like, as I say, mini-movies. So it felt like quite a logical progression to think of maybe the character – and above all, the relationship with his sidekick, called Bough – his relationship with other people is always very interesting. In the end, what he needs by his side is the voice of reason to provide a sort of comic contrast to his flights of fantasy, which he indulges in so much… The biggest flight of fantasy being that he’s really good at his job – and that’s the role that Ben Miller playing Bough in the movie and Natalie Imbruglia playing Lorna in the movie fulfill, really. They are the voice of reason.

    PLUME: Similar to the dynamic that existed within Blackadder?

    ATKINSON: Yeah, except that, I suppose, as Blackadder I was the voice of reason and Baldrick was the guy with the flights of fantasy – but yes… I like partnerships. I mean, Mr. Bean was conspicuously not a partnership – although, yet again, it’s valuable to have straight men or the authority figures that Mr. Bean interacted with in a very funny way, because he’s sort of such a natural anarchist. But at the same time, Mr. Bean is a very, very self-contained character because he’s so sort-of introspective and so selfish and self-centered that there’s no particular need to have another person in the scene to make him funny – whereas something we discovered quite early on is that Johnny English really is only funny when he’s got an audience of some kind. Or when he’s got somebody to interact with… either a group of people in a room in front of whom he can make himself look ridiculous with great ease or a partner – someone to sort of…

    PLUME: Bounce off of?

    ATKINSON: Bounce off, exactly.

    PLUME: What were the difficulties in expanding the character out in order to fill a film?

    ATKINSON: Well, yeah, this is always the difficulty. It’s the difficulty we had with Mr. Bean, actually, when it went from TV to film. You certainly discover that you need to explain more about a character. In TV, and in particular in commercials, you don’t really need to explain very much at all – you just say he’s a spy and he’s a little bit theatrical and overblown and smug and he’s not very good at his job. And you don’t sort of ask any questions about that sort of thing in a commercial – but as soon as you get to a movie, and you’ve been with the character for 30 or 40 minutes, then you start asking questions like, “Why is he allowed to have this job? How has he managed to hold this job down for so long?” And that’s why at the beginning of the movie, for example, we tell the story of the fact that he is no good and everyone knows that he’s probably not very good, but he’s given the job because suddenly there’s nobody else. So he’s thrown into it, and that kind of explains why he’s there and why he’s got it. Of course then the movie actually goes on to justify why he could return. He could return in another adventure because – against all the odds – he succeeds, and that’s rather a fun aspect of the character in that even though he’s a bit of a fool and self-deluding and all those other things, he’s weirdly committed… weirdly brave, I think. He’s brave and committed and good-hearted, and he genuinely wants to save Queen and Country – it’s just that he’s got this very overblown view of himself. And that’s what provides the comedy.

    PLUME: When you talk about expanding the character for the purposes of film, what were the lessons you learned in that regard from the Bean movie?

    ATKINSON: Just that you have to explore more facets of the character. You can’t just have a single attitude. The great thing about sitcoms, for example, is that you can get away with a character with, really, one attitude – like Blackadder is just a relentlessly cynical man. And that’s the joke. And he’s cynical and negative in a very witty way. We would have the same problem if we tried to make a Blackadder movie – I think if you just had a relentlessly cynical man who never acknowledged the ramifications of his own actions, etc. etc., then I think it would be a very odd movie. That’s what we had to do with Mr. Bean – we had to get this very, very selfish and kind of autonomous character to acknowledge that maybe he’d done something wrong 2/3 of the way through the movie, and then the last 1/3 is him trying to put things right again. So we had to give him feelings – which actually wasn’t very easy, in which I slightly regret it in many ways, in terms of the character’s history. Because I like the fact that he’s a natural born anarchist who doesn’t give a damn about anybody else – and I quite like that aspect of Mr. Bean, but we had to kind of dilute it, or explore the possibilities. And similarly, with Johnny English, he couldn’t just carry on walking through scenes where he thought “this” and it turned out “that”. We had to have him reach the point when he was fired – which he is – from the job, and then he becomes somebody slightly different. Suddenly he’s a kind of man-on-the-run, and the establishment that he’d worked for and fought for for so long suddenly abandoned him and declared that he was no good and regretted ever putting him on the case. And that’s quite a nice character thing, when you can see him pick himself up, brush himself off, and start again – and then eventually he succeeds and everyone loves him by the end. So it’s a pretty tried and tested formula, but it was a very important thing to do with the character.

    PLUME: Would you say that it was easier to adapt Johnny English than it was to bring Bean to the big screen?

    ATKINSON: Hmm… That’s a good question… I don’t know. About the same. I think maybe Bean was a bit more difficult, actually. I think, in many ways, we had to compromise the character more.

    PLUME: Do you think those compromises affected the audience reaction to the film? It seems a lot of people were split on either loving or hating the Bean film…

    ATKINSON: Yeah, I know what you mean. I absolutely know what you mean. I don’t know, is the answer. I probably haven’t done enough listening or enough research into what people thought, but I think undoubtedly there is an aspect to Mr. Bean which is rather fun in short doses. It’s fun just to see him selfishly pursuing his own agenda – which he does so readily. I think the movie, because it had to have a story and involve other people – when we decided, rightly or wrongly, that we wanted him to acknowledge the consequences of his actions, it meant that you did end up with a compromised version of the character. So I would agree. Whereas with Johnny English, I don’t think we’ve compromised the character at all, actually. I think we’ve just given him a firmer grounding in reality.

    PLUME: In recent interviews, you’ve mentioned the desire to revisit a film version of Bean…

    ATKINSON: Yeah…

    PLUME: How different would that be from how you handled the first film?

    ATKINSON: Hmmmm… These are extremely good questions that you’re asking me, if only because I was thinking about this this morning, because I’m kind of in a quandary – because Johnny English, thankfully, internationally… and whatever it does here, we don’t know… but internationally it has been very successful, so they’re already talking about, “When are you going to sit down and write a sequel?” Which is flattering and sweet and we might well do it. But, of course, I’ve always had this hankering to do more Mr. Beans someday. I didn’t want to do it straightaway, which is why we went off on the tangent of Johnny English – but if we sat down again, I don’t know. You see, whether I should just do half-hour TV episodes, or whether you could make a movie that was more episodic – more self-consciously episodic, that was a kind of “sketch movie”… more like an Austin Powers movie, where the story is not particularly important, nor is the interaction of the character with the story that important – you just enjoy the jokes for what they are.

    PLUME: So it’s a matter of acknowledging that it’s a character with a clearly defined character that’s not going to vary much?

    ATKINSON: Yes, exactly. I think it’s sometimes better if he doesn’t vary very much… or whether you give it a different kind of conceit… Mr. Bean sits down to write his autobiography, and he remembers all the marvelous moments in his life.

    PLUME: Which would allow the character to remain true to its episodic strengths…

    ATKINSON: I think the character does tend to suit an episodic thing, because what’s fun about him is that he doesn’t care about anyone else, and it’s very difficult for a main character – a lead character – in a movie to not care about anybody else.

    Continued below…

  • FROM THE VAULT: Carl Reiner Interview

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    Conducted ~10/2004

    reinerBe it his work with Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows, the creation of The Dick Van Dyke Show, numerous “2,000 Year Old Man” pairings with Mel Brooks, Steve Martin’s classic comedies, or any number of accomplishments too long to list, Carl Reiner is a true comedy legend.

    He’s penned quite a few books (his Enter Laughing is a must-read), plays, and films. He’s like a Renaissance man sans the puffy shirt. He even made a return to films as a key member of the gang in the Ocean’s 11 franchise.

    I leapt at the chance to chat with Carl, even if it was originally intended to be a fluff piece on the short-lived Dreamworks CG show Father Of The Pride. Would you pass up an opportunity like that just because the show it was attached to was an unwatchable mess (through no fault of Carl’s, it must be said, as he just provided a voice).

    It was a truly memorable experience talking to Carl – particularly memorable was the technical gaffe that erased the last 10 minutes of our conversation. I would have been disappointed if I had walked away from it without at least one embarrassing anecdote.

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    KEN PLUME: It’s a pleasure to be speaking with you…

    CARL REINER: Yes, how are you!

    PLUME: I’m doing well – hope you’re doing well…

    REINER: Yes, but just give me your name again…

    PLUME: Ken Plume…

    REINER: Ken! That’s all I need… I’m not gonna call you Mister….

    PLUME: Should I call you “sir” ?

    REINER: Yes, please… Absolutely…

    PLUME: Well, it’s a pleasure to be speaking with you, sir…

    REINER: Thank you… You’ll have to amend that after we finish – you’ll say, “I was mistaken at the beginning,” or “It’s just what I figured.”

    PLUME: Even if I was mistaken, I would never admit it…

    REINER: Never! You’re an honest man… An honest man! A man who wants to be honest, anyway…

    PLUME: I try… I often fail, but I try… You’re one of two people that I’ve wanted to interview for years…

    REINER: That’s what you say every time you open a conversation…

    PLUME: No, honestly! I’m being truthful now…

    REINER: Oh, okay…

    PLUME: You and Mel Brooks…

    REINER: Oh, well, I agree with that. I would rather speak to Mel Brooks than anybody I know. I’m not kidding! I mean, we speak on the phone once in awhile… A couple of days ago, he was going to London… and I never come away from the phone after speaking with him that I’m not laughing.

    PLUME: I’ve tried for years to get interviews with both of you, to little success…

    REINER: Well, you’ve got the second level…

    PLUME: Right now, you’re tops…

    REINER: The best you can do right now!

    PLUME: Touché! So I have to ask – is there anything left that you haven’t done, that you’d still like to do?

    REINER: Yes… It’s something that I don’t think I’ll ever do now. When I was very young, and I heard Enrico Caruso sing “Pagliacci,” I said, “That’s what I want to do with my life! I want to be an opera singer!” I was 7 or 8 years old, and I had a wonderful voice. As a matter of fact, I sang in Broadway musicals. The only thing I’m missing is I have no rhythm and I sing off-key often, if there’s no music helping me. So if I had different genes or if someone could infuse a gene – or maybe the stem cell thing will find a gene for me – to make me so that I could sing. I would probably have a different career than I think I would want, and if I did have it, I’m sure it wouldn’t be as good as the one I have!

    PLUME: Maybe you should just get a small electrical device implanted to shock you into tempo…

    REINER: (laughing) Yes! As a matter of fact, in my first Broadway musical – Call Me Mister – the show opens on a bunch of guys, G.I.s, onstage in a military formation, and offstage you hear, “Sound off!” and they have to go, “One, two!” But I have to hit the right note, because they’re going to sing in the key I give them. I said, “Jesus Christ, I’m gonna goof it!” So they arranged for a trumpet to hit that note right before – “BAAA-RUUMPH” – so I never missed it. But if that trumpet weren’t there, I don’t know what would have happened…

    PLUME: It would have been a whole set of keys…

    REINER: Yeah!

    PLUME: In listening to the opera music, was it the performance that drew you in, or just the music in general?

    REINER: You grow up with what’s in the house, and your tastes are honed by that, and my father liked classical music. He listened to the Saturday afternoon operas from the Met, and he had these red seal records – one-sided records – and Caruso was one of the ones he had. And this was a soaring song – if you know “Pagliacci,” it soars. It makes your hair stand up! And I was thrilled by it, and I never lost the interest in hearing a good tenor belt opera.

    PLUME: Do you in any way regret not being able to pursue that?

    REINER: No, I don’t regret it. As a matter of fact, I had the best of two possible worlds – comedy and opera – when I did Your Show of Shows. I could always sing opera recitative, fake recitative, and when we got Earl Wild as the pianist, and he found a way that we could do operas – because you can’t follow recitative. I mean, how are you going to get an orchestra to play in the key you’re singing? But he did a brilliant thing… He said, “We’ll do the operas in the style of…” In other words, say if we did a Verdi opera, he d said, “We’ll take a song…” I remember the first one he suggested, which was “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” done in the style of either Verdi or Mozart. (Click here to hear the clip) The orchestra could be playing the key and we’d be singing gibberish, but “in the style of….” So I got to sing opera on Your Show of Shows, and it was very satisfying for me and, I think, for the audience! Did you notice I was singing fairly on key?

    PLUME: (laughing) I did notice that…

    REINER: (laughing) Yeah, okay… Just checking…

    Continued below…

  • FROM THE VAULT: Brent Spiner Interview

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    Conducted ~11/2002

    spinerHe’ll probably be forever immortalized as the android Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

    But Brent Spiner is also an accomplished stage (Sunday In The Park With George, 1776) and screen (Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, Independence Day) actor.

    But yes, he will probably always be Data – not that there’s anything wrong with that.

    I’m can’t recall the exact rationale for doing the interview, though it may have just been the recurring theme in the bulk of the interviews I’ve done – a whim. I do recall that Brent was a good sport when it came to the length of the interview, which he generally didn’t do at the time.

    Here it is…

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    KEN PLUME: Am I correct in understanding you’re a Texas native?

    BRENT SPINER: Correct.

    PLUME: Houston?

    SPINER: That’s even right.

    PLUME: This would be Texas in the ’50s, early ’60s?

    SPINER: My time in Texas?

    PLUME: Your frame of reference…

    SPINER: Pretty much, yeah.

    PLUME: What was that atmosphere like at that time? You hear about that being a turbulent time in certain other areas of the country, but you never really get to hear about what was going on in Texas…

    SPINER: Houston was a really great place to grow up. I don’t recall it being turbulent, but I recall it being really pleasant. It wasn’t that big a town then – I mean, it was big, but it wasn’t like it is now. It wasn’t like a huge metropolis. I remember the Shamrock Hilton Hotel – it was sort of the focal point, the center point of Houston. That hotel was actually the hotel that I believe was in the movie Giant – the opening of that hotel is what Jett Rink’s hotel was. That’s because it was opened originally – before the Hilton’s got it – by a guy named Glen McCarthy, who basically James Dean was playing in Giant. He was the wildcatter.

    PLUME: Would you say that it was the cosmopolitan center of Houston at that time?

    SPINER: Definitely … The big ballroom there was where all the touring greats performed – at the Shamrock Hilton. IF you were ever going to see somebody, it would be there.

    PLUME: Was it a place that you frequented for those type of performances?

    SPINER: Well, I really frequented it for the swimming pool, which was gigantic. The biggest swimming pool I’ve still ever seen. It was just where all the kids hung out in the summer. And I mean kids, because we were young when we were there. I remember nights in Houston, and our idea of a good time… there was a place called the Blue Bonnet Gardens that served watermelon. To date myself, these were the days when you could only get watermelon in the summer.

    PLUME: When it was truly a seasonal product.

    SPINER: Exactly. Houston had air conditioning, but not much, so to cool off you’d go out for a drive at night and then go to the Blue Bonnet Gardens for watermelon.

    PLUME: It was generally confined to businesses, it wasn’t really a residential thing at the time, the air conditioning and such?

    SPINER: Oh yeah, hardly anyone had – I remember the first air conditioner we got was a window unit. I would sit in front of it about 12 hours a day, just looking at it and praying to it – the god of cool air.

    PLUME: At what age was that?

    SPINER: Probably around 7.

    PLUME: So at that point it was a very revelatory moment.

    SPINER: It truly was. Really, when I think about Houston and what we did, it’s an odd thing because my mother did the same thing when she was a child, and I’m sure the kids today – well, I don’t know if they’re doing it today – but for years the tradition in Houston for kids, like 11-13, in that area, was to get on a bus, take the bus downtown, go to a place called James’ Coney Island for a hotdog, and then go to a movie at one of the three downtown movie theaters that were palaces… you know, those big movie theaters that don’t exist anymore.

    PLUME: So it was all first run …

    SPINER: Yeah… big, beautiful – I remember when The Ten Commandments opened, they turned the whole place into an Egyptian motif… which it remained. The Metropolitan Theater remained Egyptian for years.

    PLUME: That was one of the first Scope films, wasn’t it?

    SPINER: I think it was.

    PLUME: So it must have been an impressive sight.

    SPINER: Oh, it was. Anytime you went to the movies in those days it was impressive, because it was a big deal. Do you remember Road Show engagements? I remember seeing Lawrence of Arabia on a road show engagement. I’m not sure exactly what that meant, but I think you had your tickets in advance and there was always an intermission.

    PLUME: Wasn’t it the movie equivalent of going to a play? “This is the destination – this is what we’re doing for the evening?”

    SPINER: Yeah, absolutely.

    PLUME: How big an influence was television at that time in your life?

    SPINER: Huge, huge. My mother owned a furniture store when I was a kid. I say my mother, because my father passed away when I was 10 months old. That’s why I don’t reference him as much. But my mother had a furniture store that had been my father’s, and she ran it through the first 7, 8 years of my life. So we had a television pretty early on. I know from the age of about… certainly 2 or 3… we had gotten a television by then. I used to sit in front of it in the morning and watch the test pattern for at least a good two hours before television came on. And that really dates me, because there were test patterns then. It was an Indian head.

    PLUME: How mesmerizing was even the test pattern?

    SPINER: Oh, it was fantastic.

    PLUME: I just can’t imagine something like that… it must have been like having the equivalent of a movie in your home.

    SPINER: It was, and it was the 50’s so we were watching – do you know the film Avalon? It’s a brilliant movie, and it really captured that whole feeling of what it was like to get a TV back then, what it meant; and how it probably destroyed America as a family.

    PLUME: Provided too good a distraction…

    SPINER: Exactly. But I remember watching television in the early days, and the things that really just grabbed me, like Sid Caesar, and Berle, and Steve Allen, and that kind of stuff.

    PLUME: It’s interesting to hear where your tastes gravitated towards at that time.

    SPINER: Oh, I know… One of the great nights of my life, and this is really embarrassing to say, is that I watched Lucy, first run.

    PLUME: Embarrassing from which perspective?

    SPINER: How old I am, actually. But it was, I think it was Tuesday or Wednesday nights, Lucy, and it was incredible because most people now that watch Lucy have seen them at least 50 or 60 times. But we had a new Lucy, every week.

    PLUME: And the concept of reruns was completely alien…

    SPINER: Oh, totally. They were doing like 36 shows a year then, maybe 48.

    PLUME: And summers was what, summer replacement shows at that time – as opposed to summer reruns…

    SPINER: Exactly. Summer replacement shows that I remember really getting on to – well, I really fondly remember the era of Warner Brother Westerns… with Lawman, and Cheyenne, and Bronco Lane, and all that kind of stuff.

    Continued below…

  • FROM THE VAULT: Nick Frost Interview

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    Conducted ~9/2005

    frostTo the majority of the American audience, their first introduction to Nick Frost was as Shaun’s slovenly (yet loveable) best friend Ed in Shaun of the Dead.

    To the UK audience (and the hipper element of the American audience), however, Frost hit the scene in Simon Pegg & Jessica Stevenson’s sitcom Spaced, where his turn as “intense” best friend Mike proved to be a favorite in a show full of stellar writing and memorable performances.

    As himself, Frost was the presenter of Danger! 50,000 Volts!, a reality series that found him giving survival tips on scenarios ranging from dehydration in the desert to subduing a crocodile (think of it as TV version of The Worst Case Scenario Handbook).

    More recently, Frost co-starred in Hot Fuzz, Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright’s follow-up to Shaun, and was the lead in two series of BBC2’s sci-fi sitcom Hyperdrive as Space Commander Henderson, the captain of a 22nd century British spaceship tasked with trying to get aliens to relocate their businesses to England (in competition with the Americans, who are offering Florida).

    My interview with Nick was another one of those “Oh, what the heck…” ones, as I just had an impulse to try and track him down and do exactly what follows – a candid conversation on his life and career. So enough of the formalities – let’s get this show rolling…

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    KEN PLUME: Tell me about your early life…

    NICK FROST: Oh, god. Seriously?

    PLUME: What made you give up a doctorate in physics to pursue acting?

    FROST: (laughs) Um, well, I didn’t…I left school when I was fifteen.

    PLUME: Your choice?

    FROST: Yes and no, really. I mean, I wasn’t very good at school and my parents were not very well. They were quite sick. And so, I kinda felt as if I had to leave school to financially support them. Do you know what I mean?

    PLUME: Certainly…

    FROST: I kinda felt like I had an obligation to do that.

    PLUME: Was this a decision that they supported? Did they understand where you were coming from in that?

    FROST: I don’t even know if they kinda knew, do you know what I mean? I kinda kept it to myself and told them: I’m not very good at school, and, you know, I’m not a scholar. You know, you need a bit of money, we need some money, so why not, you know, why not let’s just leave school and get a job, you know?

    PLUME: Was it a difficult decision for you or did you have to really mull it over a bit?

    FROST: Not really, you know, I didn’t at that stage…you know, I didn’t…I was a very different person, Ken, I was really different to who I am now. To leave school and having to go to work it seemed… normal, you know?

    PLUME: How would you describe the person you were then?

    FROST: Oh god, I would say… a loutish idiot.

    PLUME: Was that a nature issue?

    FROST: Well, you know, I’m from a working class… it sounds really f***ing hackneyed, but I’m from a working class background, so being a man in a working class kinda background, you become a certain type of person, you know?

    PLUME: Right.

    FROST: And I was that person. Even right up until I was seventeen, when I left home and went and lived in Israel. And that changed me. That was my university, in a way.

    PLUME: What led to that decision to make that drastic a move?

    FROST: Well, I – this is really in-depth now, but I was having trouble with drugs and stuff. And I kinda made the choice to… you know, someone said to me, “It would be better if you were to leave the country for your own good and for your own health.” And I did.

    PLUME: Was it something that you were an active participant in or were people pushing you into, “this really is the right decision”?

    FROST: No, I loved it. I loved it. I mean, I do have that thing in me. Well I think I had it in me more than I do now, but… you’re with a group of mates and it just felt really natural, you know, to get off your head. That’s a very London-sounding saying, isn’t it?

    PLUME: We’ll put a glossary at the end…

    FROST: “To get off your head!” Sound like someone from Snatch. But yeah, you know, I mean, I was sixteen, seventeen, and it just seemed… it was normal. It wasn’t (horrified whisper) “Oh my God, we’re doing drugs!” it was just… you know, you got in your car and you drove and then you’d take some drugs and you’d laugh a lot. And it wasn’t anything more sinister than that, you know.

    PLUME: Was it something that you saw that could develop into an issue?

    FROST: Well, I mean… yeah. That was what made me go away and so, for me to have moved three thousand miles away, you can probably guess that it was getting a bit serious.

    PLUME: Was it developing into enough of an issue to make that serious a move?

    FROST: Yeah.

    PLUME: What led to the decision for the destination to be Israel?

    FROST: I had a friend called Brendan who went and lived on a kibbutz and he was older than me, much older than me, and I kind of sought his advice, and he said, “Go to Israel,” you know. And it was the best decision I ever made, I think.

    PLUME: How much of a wake up call was it to be that far away?

    FROST: It was great. I loved it. It just felt… I was meant to stay for three months, and I ended up staying for almost two years.

    PLUME: What did you do during that period?

    FROST: Oh God, I just… it just felt right to be there. And I just loved it and I just wholeheartedly kind of, you know, embraced the lifestyle. And…what did I do? God, I worked in the fish ponds. And I picked cotton and I picked apples. And I worked in a plastics factory. And I…what else did I do?

    PLUME: Are you sure you didn’t live in the American south?

    FROST: Yeah, I was doing all that. I lived in Louisiana for a time – no, I didn’t think of it. Yeah, you know, it was lot of… it was manual work. And I kind of like that. I like that kind of… you know, you can see why people become addicted to the army and prison.

    PLUME: That sort of regimented work ethic?

    FROST: Exactly. You get up at half-past five, you go to work, you come home, someone gives you cigarettes, someone gives you a bag of clean laundry, you know, you swim for an hour, then you sleep for two, then it’s dinnertime. But I loved it. I really loved it. And I didn’t want to come home, but, you know, you think: well, I’m now almost twenty… I had to go home. That and I got…caught. I got caught. I got caught and arrested and deported. Because I’d overstayed my visa by, you know, fourteen months.

    PLUME: So one way or another you were going back home.

    FROST: Yeah.

    PLUME: But mentally did you feel somewhat that you had made a decision that you needed to go back?

    FROST: God, let me think. That’s a long time ago. Probably. I mean, I’d fallen in love with a girl… with a couple of girls. And they had gone back to England. And you know, it was that kind of thing. I believe that everything just kind of goes in a cycle, you know, so the people that we had on the kibbutz who were really cool and amazing, and the kind of amazing time we were having, suddenly wasn’t so amazing, and all the cool people were going, and loads of new people came… and I just felt, well, f*** it, I’m just gonna go home.

    PLUME: Did you have any kind of idea what you were going back to? Did you ever fear that you would go back into the pattern that had sent you to Israel in the first place?

    FROST: No, not really… I mean…

    PLUME: Or did you already feel that you were a different person by then, than the one that had left?

    FROST: Well, yeah, I was. Because I… that was it then, I’d left home. I left home when I was seventeen. And I never went back, I mean – I went back, but I never went and lived back with my parents. I mean, that was it. I just came back and moved in with one of the girls that I’d fallen for and then that was my life then, and everything that got me into my troubles before Israel was left back in another part of London, you know?

    PLUME: So this would have been what, around the early 90s?

    FROST: Yeah. Yeah, I’m originally from a place called Essex and all my mates and stuff were in Essex. But when I came back from Israel, I moved to a place called Kentish Town, which is in the north of London. And so, you know, I’ve never been one for going back – I never look on Friends Reunited, I’ve never gone to a school reunion, I’ve never really gotten in contact with anyone from my school… I kinda think about this, and I think, “Is it bad? Is it sad?”

    PLUME: Is the motivating factor, as you said, just to not look back, or do you consider that such a different time and a different person that there’s really nothing to revisit?

    FROST: Yeah, I think it’s kinda nothing to revisit, you know? You know, it wasn’t incredibly enjoyable, and, you know, even though I had good friends, it wasn’t “we’re friends for life.” The friends I’ve got now are, you know, the proper, real deal friends for life. And I’d just… you know, I’d just f***ing die for them.

    PLUME: As you said, there’s a difference between the friends you make in high school and the friends you make in college, as it were.

    FROST: Yeah. And there’s that thing, especially when you’re on kibbutz, you know, people are coming and going all the time, so there’s that thing where you say, “Oh my god, I love you so much, I’m going to miss you so much, I’m going to cry everyday and I don’t know how I’ll get through life without you,” and then, you know, four or five days later, you think, “Who was that person?”

    PLUME: As you’re busy collaborating with the new people.

    FROST: (Laughs) Yeah, exactly. I think my time in Israel has kind of painted me with that kind of, you know, once people go, it’s: “Oh, well, that was nice.”

    PLUME: So in some ways it really prepared you for being an actor.

    FROST: Yeah, that kind of lonely…

    PLUME: Moving from production to production.

    FROST: Yeah. Exactly. But, god, I’d never… I mean, I came home and I had no qualifications, I had never been to school really, I hadn’t been to university – I had never even thought about university, you know, and I was a young man and just didn’t know what I wanted, really. And I don’t think, to be honest, I knew… even now probably what I want. Do you know what I mean?

    PLUME: Well, you could always go back and finish that doctorate.

    FROST: Yeah, of course I could.

    Continued below…

  • FROM THE VAULT: Graham Norton Interview

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    Conducted ~2/2003 & ~8/2004

    Graham Norton may not be a household name here in the United States, but he’s certainly made an impact in the UK.

    A few years back, I became hooked on his Channel 4 show, So Graham Norton, which soon morphed into the nightly V Graham Norton. It was brilliant not only for its humor, but also for what it got away with (which would seem shocking to American viewers raised on the comparatively tame Carson, Leno, Letterman, and Conan). A sexual, scatological, pop culture blender unhindered by the often Puritanical bent of network TV in the US, his show was anything but buttoned-down.

    Norton himself is an impish whirligig, chatting up guests spanning an eclectic spectrum ranging from Cher and Dustin Hoffman to Lindsey Wagner and the mom from The Waltons. Hell, he even journeyed to the States to do an episode at Dollywood. He’s also keen on audience participation and games that exist somewhere in the realm between camp and delirious rubbish.

    After his lengthy run at Channel 4, he was given a short run on Comedy Central, titled The Graham Norton Effect, presenting essentially the same show. However, Comedy Central decided (foolishly, methinks) not to renew, and Graham went back to England.

    Upon arriving back in England, Graham struck a massive pact with the BBC. After a few confused years bopping around as the Beeb tried to decide what to do with him, someone finally had the bright of idea of letting him do what he does best, resulting in his talk show return with The Graham Norton Show – a near identical clone of his Channel 4 heyday.

    I originally tracked down and chatted with Norton during his V Graham Norton period, going in-depth into his background. I then followed that up with a second interview as he was about to begin his run on Comedy Central.

    Hope you enjoy them both…

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    KEN PLUME: You were born in Dublin?

    GRAHAM NORTON: Born in Dublin, but never really lived there. When I was about two, I think, my family started to move around Ireland. My dad worked at Guinness, the brewery, and I think he must have been a bit rubbish at his job, because they just kept transferring him all the time. It wasn’t until I was about 14, 15 that we settled in a place called Bandon, County Cork, which is down in the south.

    PLUME: So this was what – late ’60s, early ’70s, mid ’70s that you’re coming of age in Ireland?

    NORTON: Yeah, that’s when I was kind of aware of things – kind of early ’70s, I suppose. What would I would have been… around 7 or 8 then.

    PLUME: What was the social fabric like in Ireland at that time?

    NORTON: Well, Ireland – it was a place apart. Although it was very close to England and close to Europe, it was a world apart. It was a very old fashioned place, I would say. But in lots of ways, I was kind of slightly outside the fabric of society, particularly because it was Southern Ireland – because I was growing up as a Protestant in Southern Ireland.

    PLUME: What is that like? That almost sounds like an outsider in a room of outsiders.

    NORTON: Well, it is slightly, in that I think it was 1% or 2% of the population are Protestant. So, you know, we went to Protestant schools and things. I never knew – mostly we lived out in the middle of nowhere, so there was no one to know. But whenever we did live with neighbors, and they had kids, I would never know those kids, because I didn’t go to school with them. Yeah, it was isolated, I suppose, but not miserable or anything. I think I quite liked it.

    PLUME: Were there the same frictions in the South, as there were in the North?

    NORTON: No, not at all, because everyone just got on it with it. The mix of the population, because it was so Catholic – essentially, Southern Ireland is complete Catholic. There was no conflict… You know, 2% of the population – if they’re not happy, really, they should move.

    PLUME: And really, how much of a threat is 2%?

    NORTON: Really. And they’re Protestants, they’re nice Protestants.

    PLUME: In comparing the social structure, was it just that the conflict became socialized in the North as opposed to the South?

    NORTON: Well, no, I think the North it was to do with Sovereignty. You know, in the South, because it become a Republic, I think the Protestants who remained there, chose that. They decided it. Whereas the Catholics in the North, didn’t. It was just a situation very badly handled at the time, and they did it, it was a quick fix to turn the six counties into that kind of little adjunct of Britain.

    PLUME: But it really wasn’t a fix, was it?

    NORTON: Ah, no. Short term solution, and presumably all the politicians who made that decision quickly retired, going, “Phew.”

    PLUME: It’s all on paper. Well, how would you describe your childhood? Would you say you were isolated away from the other children wherever you would move just by nature of the school you would go to?

    NORTON: I mean, it all sounds quite miserable in that it was quite isolated, so it’s one of those odd things. When I talk about it, I do kind of think, “God, that sounds miserable.” But I don’t remember it as being miserable. I remember watching lots of television… television was my friend. But I was quite happy about that. It would have irritated me if people had come around and interrupted my viewing habit. I grew up in a one station environment – it was only one television station. But they bought in mostly, because a lot of culture links with Southern Ireland are far closer to America than to Britain. Lots of the TV they bought us, was American.

    PLUME: So would it be America of the 1950s, 1960s, or current American fare? How outdated was it?

    NORTON: Oh, it was a real mix of things. You felt like they’d buy like one hot show – like they’d buy Charlie’s Angels or something – but then in order to buy that, they’d have to buy lower stuff. So suddenly you’d be watching Charlie’s Angels, but you’d also be seeing That Girl… I Love Lucy was there. What else did we get? We got a lot of really odd shows that they never got here (in the UK), like The Flip Wilson Show – which I remember really, really liking …

    PLUME: So it was an entertainment potpourri…

    NORTON: Yeah, it was a real entertainment potpourri, but like I say, more heavily dominated by American shows than British.

    PLUME: What was your preference? Of the shows you would watch…

    NORTON: I loved Lucille Ball growing up. I remember liking The Flip Wilson Show that was on. I supposed I was just generally drawn to American programs more than British programs. British programs, it looked like Ireland. There were hedgerows and things, where it was exciting in America. There were no hedgerows in between houses. Shared lawns – it was very thrilling to us.

    PLUME: There was space between houses…

    NORTON: Yeah, that too.

    PLUME: What was the view, then, through the prism that you were looking through, of America?

    NORTON: It was very odd. I thought I was looking at America, I thought I was seeing America on television. It’s only when you go to America, you realize, “Oh, no – I was looking at California.” That’s all I was seeing, ever … It was a real surprise when I finally got to California and realized, “Oh, this is where they make television. Now I get it.”

    PLUME: Well, how was your view, then, of the UK?

    NORTON: The UK to me, just seemed – I thought Britain was a much more urban place, a much more sophisticated place, and in a way kind of frightening. Because, I remember I was getting into my teens, and punk rock arrived, and I just remember being so depressed, because I was thinking, “Oh no!” Finally I’m old enough to go out – I don’t want to be dirty and be spitting on people. America on that level always appealed much more, in that it always seemed kind of more glamorous, whereas Britain was always a bit grungy, a bit real … You could tell that people were living in the same sort of economy as we were, and they were just making the best of it.

    Continued below…

  • FROM THE VAULT: Bob Balaban Interview

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    Conducted ~11/2002

    Over the course of his 40 year career, Bob Balaban has worn numerous hats. He’s been a writer, a director, and a producer, but he’s most well known as an actor, appearing in Catch-22, Midnight Cowboy, 2010, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, many Christopher Guest films, Seinfeld – just to name only a few.

    It was in Close Encounters that he played the role of the translator, David Laughlin, and it was the on-set relationship with Francios Truffaut during the film that formed the backbone of his wonderful – and highly recommended – memoir of this period, Spielberg, Truffaut and Me: An Actor’s Diary, which provided a good enough excuse to do this interview.

    The real reason, though, is that Balaban’s one of those actors you always see on the screen, and his is a career I thought would be fascinating to find out about. I certainly enjoyed finding out more about him, and I hope you do, as well.

    Here’s my interview with Bob Balaban…

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    KEN PLUME: Am I correct in understanding that you’re from a Hollywood dynasty?

    BOB BALABAN: A very quiet Hollywood dynasty. My dad was born in Chicago in 1908… his parents came from Russia. They settled in Chicago, where they lived in a little tiny grocery store with eight or nine children – in the backroom all together – and my grandmother got the idea to go into the movie business. She basically went to a nickelodeon one day with two of the older brothers – Barney and John, I believe – and realized that there was this thing called the movie business, where, when the product got stale, you didn’t throw it away like an old bunch of lettuce – you merely sent it back to the movie company and they sent you back another movie. So immediately, this appealed to her. Also, it was a business that was never done on credit, while their little struggling grocery business was a lot of people writing down chits and then never paying it back, because my grandfather was a very sweet person and hated to collect from other poor people. So the movie business was the perfect thing for them, and about a couple years later they had built several theaters. By the ’20s in Chicago, they had the largest chain of theaters in the Mid-west and eventually merged with Paramount. My Uncle Barney, my father’s oldest brother, became Chairman of the Board and President of Paramount in the ’30s and remained for many years. Sam Katz, who was the partner in Balaban and Katz – who was at that point married to my aunt – went off to run MGM and become head of production for many years, including the musical years with all those great things they did in Arthur Freed’s musical unit.

    PLUME: How much of that legacy was surrounding you during your childhood years?

    BALABAN: Nothing. I was basically unaware of it. First of all, if your relatives are doing something when you’re born, you kind of assume – I did, anyway – that it was unusual. I didn’t pay too much attention to it. Later on, I’m now completely fascinated in everything they did, and it’s just so historically interesting to me, I wish I knew more about it. I’m always trying to read about it and talk to older relatives, very old relatives at this point, obviously, and I’m really, really interested in it. But as a kid, I wasn’t aware of it particularly, other than the fact that I could go to movies for free.

    PLUME: Were your childhood years spent in the Hollywood area?

    BALABAN: No, no, no….

    PLUME: Or were you part of the Chicago contingent?

    BALABAN: You have to remember – the theaters were in Chicago, my parents always stayed in Chicago… as did most of the relatives. Barney eventually moved to New York, because Paramount Pictures was run out of New York – even though the studio was in Los Angeles, the ownership was always in New York.

    PLUME: The actual corporate offices…

    BALABAN: Yeah, they always were. Even when Gulf and Western took over, there were big offices on 1500 Columbus Circle. But you have to remember, the Paramount building was 1501 Broadway – it’s still there. It’s a great old building, and Barney, I’m sure, used to fly to California frequently, and certainly was on the phone, I’m sure, all the time, but didn’t spend much time in Los Angeles.

    PLUME: But the main home base for the family was still in Chicago.

    BALABAN: Yeah, a lot of Chicago relatives.

    PLUME: How long did the family own this theater chain?

    BALABAN: Oh, I guess 30 years or something – 40 years? Longer.

    PLUME: Was your father involved in that business at all?

    BALABAN: My dad was the baby. When he was born they were already successful. They sent him to business school – he probably would have loved to have been a poet or a writer or something, and he was very creative. This never went away for him. When he got older, they helped set him up in business in a chain of art houses in Chicago. He built a wonderful, landmark theater in Chicago called the Esquire Theater, and owned the Chicago and the Carnegie, and some other wonderful theaters where I loved going when I was a teenager, and eventually became a pioneer in cable television and owned and operated a series of stations around the country… also some radio stations and other things. He was the baby, he was more into some of the new technology, and was very forward thinking, all the time. Great man… he died last year at the age of 92.

    PLUME: Am I correct that he was also a pioneer in the idea of pay-per-view?

    BALABAN: Yes, he was. As early as the late ’50s, as I remember it, he was working with an inventor to try to figure out some kind of way that you could get first run movies and other special events into your home, on your television set, by paying per view. At one point he came home with a box that you put quarters into, that would enable a signal to be transmitted, release the signal, and you could see all these amazing things for 50 cents or a dollar, whatever it turned out to be. This obviously was not the wave of the future, technologically, but it obviously was – he had grasped immediately the concept of how much …

    PLUME: Convenience entertainment?

    BALABAN: Convenience entertainment, not leaving the house. I mean, the whole idea of movies was it was special to go to see – you went to a movie theater to see something that was magical and amazing, in a very special location. But obviously as television began, it so undercut movies that he was trying to think of a way to combine seeing these special things, and the fact that people were just captivated by the magic box.

    PLUME: So, monetarily, the best of both worlds.

    BALABAN: Yeah. And it still proves to be.

    PLUME: How would you describe your childhood?

    BALABAN: A lot of puppets. I was very much in my room with my marionette stage, you know, creating these incredibly boring things that I felt were so fascinating, and forcing my relatives to come, and charging money for them to see my little productions.

    PLUME: What were the standard thematics behind the productions that you would mount?

    BALABAN: Oh, I never thought about it thematically too much… I’d be embarrassed to talk about it. But I’m kidding – ultimately it was thematically about lost people. I was probably writing sort of existential, Sartre-like puppet shows long before I had ever read No Exit. That’s what my puppet shows were like – you can imagine. We had people on clouds, floating about, not knowing where they were or what life really was, and people, characters, who would populate a play and then turned out not to be real.

    PLUME: So definitely not the standard Punch and Judy that other kids would be doing…

    BALABAN: No. If anyone would have been paying serious attention to my puppet shows, I would have been sent to therapy very young.

    PLUME: Were they issues you were working out, or …

    BALABAN: There was no working out. I’m from the Midwest, and I loved my family. I had a very good time as a child, but I was also – I have a theory about Jews growing up in the Midwest, that there is an ultimately sort of wonderful avoidance of a lot of things, and a great acceptance of whatever is happening. Which, if it’s okay and it’s nothing too terrible, you were kind of left to grow up on your own. My family was loving… they were very supportive and very affectionate, and basically I could do what I wanted, and basically it wasn’t anything dangerous, thank God.

    PLUME: So do you think it was more a matter of living in the now, as opposed to forward thinking?

    BALABAN: Yes, I would say it was very much that. You know, “They’re okay, the kids, let them be – they’ll be fine.” And more or less, we were.

    Continued below…

  • FROM THE VAULT: Dave Goelz Interview

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    Conducted ~1/1999

    After my interview with Muppeteer Jerry Nelson, Jerry was kind enough to provide access for to the set of Muppets From Space, and vouched for me to his fellow Muppeteers.

    What followed was over a month of me just hanging around the set in the increasingly cold January of 1999, part of which was spent chatting with and ultimately interviewing Muppeteers. Also, getting my hair cut by the production’s hairdresser… just because. Well, my hair was getting too long. She cut it with a razor. I felt like a movie star.

    Anyway.

    One of the Muppeteers I met was Dave Goelz. Goelz, if you’re not familiar, is the Muppeteer responsible for Gonzo, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Boober Fraggle, Zoot, Beauregard, Uncle Travelling Matt, and many, many more.

    And he’s a pretty nice guy, to boot. Below, you’ll find our conversation…

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    KEN PLUME: First of all, tell me a little bit about your background…

    DAVE GOELZ: I have always enjoyed puppets, but at two times during my childhood puppetry became a hobby. When I was five I became a huge fan of Howdy Doody, and when I saw a Howdy dummy at the local toy store, I got very excited. My folks said that if I saved half the money, they would match my funds and I could get the dummy, which I believe cost either $3.95 or $7.95. I saved every penny of my 25 cents per week allowance, and in no time my parents were surprised that I was ready to make the purchase. The next Christmas my parents gave me a Howdy Doody marionette. During this period I was also interested in the original Time for Beany puppet show, starring Stan Freberg and Bob Clampett. I had Beany and Dishonest John hand puppets made by Ideal Toys, but was disappointed by the official rubbery Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppet. My mother made a beautiful Cecil for me completely from scratch. She was a big influence; she showed that you could make whatever you needed.

    When I was thirteen, I became interested in marionettes. In junior high school I had become fascinated by the theater, with its curtains and colored lighting. My father built a marionette stage for me, and I equipped it with three strings of our Christmas lights; one whole string in blue, one in red, and the other in yellow. That way we could plug in different strings to make a range of colors. My friend Eddie Paul and I wrote scripts and put on marionette shows for our family and friends. I had a little printing press and we made tickets for the shows, for which we charged ten cents. We made well over a dollar in less than a month. Easy money.

    After high school I studied to be an industrial designer, and entered the profession. After a couple of years I started watching Sesame Street on Saturday mornings and just got hooked. I had been a Muppet fan for many years, but now I started getting fascinated with the design process that went into what I was seeing on the screen. Who were these people who created the puppets, costumes and performances that were so evocative? I got very curious.

    One day, I read in a newspaper and read that Frank Oz was to appear nearby at a puppetry festival, so I took a day of vacation time and went to see him. I was just blown away by the two shows Frank did at Mills College in Oakland. During the first show, I was like an assassin. I was in a window above and to the side of the stage with a telephoto lens and a couple of rolls of film. It was fascinating to see Frank working. During the second show – they had to give two shows since so many people came – I sat out in the audience. I could feel the love for those characters all around me. After the show, I got up to go back home and back to my job of designing these boxes for scientific instruments. As I trudged to the car amidst a buzzing crowd, I had a strong feeling that I should be doing puppetry, but I had no idea how I could make a living at it. I didn’t think there was any potential at all, so I was just sad. Within about a month of that day I was asked to make a business trip, which was a very rare event. Not only that, it took me to Pennsylvania. At the end of my work, I took a week of vacation time and went to New York and visited Sesame Street. How odd that my whole career grew out of six days of vacation time. I went to Sesame Street every day and just watched them work.

    PLUME: Was the set more open then as opposed to now?

    GOELZ: At that time Sesame Street was shot at Teletape Studios at 81st & Broadway. I had pre-arranged with Frank Oz to visit the set. This was the fall of 1972. I watched them shoot for the entire week and they were all very kind to me. I had brought some puppets with me that I had made, and the Muppet people there said, “You should show these to Bonnie Erickson, head of the Muppet Workshop,” .

    So I phoned Bonnie and went across town to visit her. When I showed her my puppets, she said, “Oh, that’s great! You can build puppets. You should meet Jim, but he’s in France right now.” About a month after that, I was sitting at my desk in California and the phone rang and this voice said, “Hi there. This is Jim Henson.” I went, “WHAA?!?” He sounded like Ernie! I jumped up and looked over the partitions around the lab. Everyone was just working normally, and I had Jim Henson on the phone! I couldn’t believe it. He suggested that we meet in Los Angeles the following week when he was scheduled to appear on a Perry Como special. So we met in Los Angeles, and I showed him my portfolio. It was an industrial design portfolio that covered my career. It went something like this: John Deere tractor, American Airlines interior, Hewlett Packard laser interferometer — puppet. I told him my objective was to illustrate how my background was perfect for becoming a puppet designer. In fact, it was.

    We agreed to stay in touch. I planned to borrow some video equipment and start performing in my own videotapes. In about a month or two I got another call from Jim saying, “I’m coming to San Francisco – would you like to get together?” So I booked a hotel for him in Los Gatos. I took him out to dinner and when I picked him up he was waiting outside; a tall, gaunt figure standing in the rain. He looked frail and vulnerable. Later I would learn just how strong he really was. After dinner I showed him the tapes that I had just completed. This was around February of 1973, and he was contemplating doing a Broadway stage play that utilized many forms of puppetry. He asked me if I would be interested in being involved both as a designer and a performer. We stayed in touch and by June we worked out a deal where I came to work for six months on the designing and building phase of that project. During my stint, Muppets got a series pilot with ABC, so we put the stage play aside and worked on the pilot. Jim asked me to perform three characters in the show, so I stayed an extra couple of weeks for the shoot. Jim invited me to join the company, but I didn’t feel at home in New York, so I went back to California.

    I had been on a leave of absence from my electronics job, and during the extra two weeks that I stayed in New York, I was replaced. I realized this was a good thing, because I had been afraid that I’d go back to work, get comfortable and secure and never pursue this work that I was passionate about. After a few weeks I started my own business doing industrial advertising and videotape work using puppets. Soon I had a couple of clients and was doing good business. After about 8 months, Jim made me an offer that I couldn’t really refuse. Jim proposed that I keep my main industrial client, come to the Muppet Workshop as a designer/builder, and perform occasionally in specials. It gave me the Muppet work that I was passionate about, and included several escapes to California each year. This was an example of Jim’s business genius. He knew I didn’t like New York, so he conceived of a deal whereby I would get to leave frequently to service my client. How could I say no? So I did it.

    Continued below…

  • FROM THE VAULT: Stan Lee Interview

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    Conducted ~6/2000 & ~4/2002

    I’m a comic fan. Despite what I think of the emaciated, dying industry as it exists today, I’ll forever hold fond memories of my comic book reading childhood.

    And if you’re a child of comic books and Saturday morning TV (like myself), then Stan Lee is instantly recognizable as the creator (with artists such as Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, & Don Heck) of Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the Avengers, Daredevil, X-Men, and many, many more.

    If that list reads like a story out of a Hollywood trade magazine, it’s because all of those properties have gotten – or are about to get – the big screen treatment.

    As with many of my interviews, I got a hankering to chat with one of my childhood idols, and went out and did it. When chatting with Stan, you’re instantly aware that his mutant power is sheer, unbridled enthusiasm. He has been, and remains, a dynamo of boosterism.

    And a fun guy.

    Also, despite his claims that he has a bad memory, many a gem will slip from that forgotten treasure trove if the circumstances are right.

    What follows are two of the interviews I’ve done with Stan, the first of which was while he was having huge success with the internet media start-up Stan Lee Media – which would end the year under a dark legal cloud (through no fault of Lee’s) that would decimate the company.

    The second interview followed about 2 years later, and was mainly me taking a promotional opportunity just to chat with him again.

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    And on a quick tangent, here’s a bit of fun I was able to arrange to celebrate Halloween last year, after joking about it with him in one of my interviews – Stan Lee reading Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven…

    And now, without further ado, delightful discourse with the dandily dignified (and definitely dear) Stan Lee…

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    KEN PLUME: If you were to sum it up, what was your introduction into the comics industry?

    LEE: Well, I applied for a job in a publishing company… I didn’t even know they published comics. I was fresh out of high school, and I wanted to get into the publishing business, if I could. There was an ad in the paper that said, “Assistant Wanted in a Publishing House.” When I found out that they wanted me to assist in comics, I figured, “Well, I’ll stay here for a little while and get some experience, and then I’ll get out into the real world.” In those days, it just didn’t seem like comics was the kind of field that anybody would want to make a career in. They were the absolute bottom of the cultural totem pole. Nobody had any respect for comic books in those days.

    PLUME: So this is, what, the early 40’s?

    LEE: It was either 1939 or ’40 when I started… I can never figure out which year it was.

    PLUME: You described it as a temporary job…

    LEE: I thought it was at the time…

    PLUME: So what exactly were your aspirations at the time?

    LEE: I just wanted to know, “What do you do in a publishing company?” How do you write… How do you publish? I was an assistant. There were two people there named Joe Simon and Jack Kirby – Joe was sort-of the editor/artist/writer, and Jack was the artist/writer. Joe was the senior member. They were turning out most of the artwork. Then there was the publisher, Martin Goodman… And that was about the only staff that I was involved with. After a while, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby left. I was about 17 years old, and Martin Goodman said to me, “Do you think you can hold down the job of editor until I can find a real person?” When you’re 17, what do you know? I said, “Sure! I can do it!” I think he forgot about me, because I stayed there ever since.

    PLUME: And it was Timely Comics at the time, wasn’t it?

    LEE: Yeah, it was Timely Comics.

    PLUME: What did the position of editor entail at Timely?

    LEE: I was responsible for all the stories, either writing them myself or buying them from other people. In comics – in those days, anyway, and always when I was there – being the editor meant being the art director too, because you can’t just edit the stories without making sure the artwork is done the right way so it enhances the stories… And the stories have to enhance the artwork. They have to go hand in hand. So I was really the editor, the art director, and the head writer.

    PLUME: So you were a jack of all trades?

    LEE: Yeah.

    PLUME: The 40’s and 50’s have always struck me as a very nebulous time at Timely… What exactly were the events that led up to the boom of the early 60’s?

    LEE: Well, what happened was that – until the early 60’s – I did everything the publisher wanted, and his way of publishing was to follow the trends. Whatever was selling at the moment – he would publish books in that genre. For instance, when it looked as though Westerns were hot… we added a lot of Western titles. When Romance stories were doing well… we published a lot of Romance books. Then we did a lot of War magazines. Then Horror. Then Crime. Then the Animated-type of characters… The Terrytoons-type of things. We did Teenage titles. We never were leaders in the field – we always followed the trends. In those days – until the early ’60’s – comic books were very cyclical. There were trends… One year, Romance books would be hot… One year it would be Horror stories…whatever… and we just went along. We were like a production house – we just kept producing whatever was hot at the moment.

    All during that time, I kept wanting to quit, because I felt, “There’s no future in this.” I’d say to my wife, “I’m going to give it another few weeks and then I’m getting out of there.” Then I’d get a raise, or we’d add some new magazines, and I’d get a little bit interested in them and I’d figure, “Well, I’ll stay a little bit longer.” Somehow, the years just kept falling away and, before I knew it, I’d been there for 20 years.

    It was now 1960. By now, I really wanted to leave, because one edict that my publisher had was that the stories had to be geared towards young readers – or unintelligent older readers. We weren’t supposed to use words of more than two syllables, and we had to have simple plots – no continuing stories, because he felt our readers weren’t smart enough to remember from month to month where they had left off. It was really boring.

    In either ’60 or ’61 I said to my wife, Joanie, “This time, I’m really going to leave.” She said, “Well, if you’re determined to leave, why don’t you first do a book or two the way you wanted to, no matter what the publisher says? The worst that can happen is that he’ll fire you. You won’t care, because you want to leave, but at least you’ll get it out of your system.”

    It happened that – at that time- my publisher had been playing golf with Jack Liebowitz, who was one of the bosses at DC comics – which in those days was called National Comics. Jack Liebowitz had told him that he had a magazine called The Justice League, which was selling very well, and it was a group of super-heroes. So Martin came to me and he said, “Hey Stan… Why don’t you do a group of super-heroes?” Again, this business of following the trend.

    I figured, “All right, but this time I’m going to do it my way.” Instead of the typical heroes that have secret identities and nobody knows who they are, I did The Fantastic Four – where everybody knew who they were. And instead of the girlfriend who doesn’t know that the hero is so-and-so, I had the girl in the series actually be engaged to the hero, and she was a heroine – she was part of the team. Instead of the typical junior sidekick, I had a teenager who was also the brother of the heroine – and the hero would soon marry the heroine, so they would be brothers-in-law. The fourth member of the team was a monstrous-looking guy, called The Thing, which was not a typical super-hero type in those days. I also tried to give them fairly realistic dialogue, and I didn’t have them wear colorful costumes. I always felt that if I had super-power, I wouldn’t immediately run out to the store and buy a costume. Somehow or other, the book caught on. We had never gotten fan mail up until that point… Sometimes we might get a letter from a reader that would say, “I bought one of your books and there’s a staple missing. I want my dime back.” And that was it. We’d put that up on the bulletin board and say, “Look! A fan letter!” Suddenly, with The Fantastic Four, we really started getting mail… “We like this… We don’t like that…. We want to see more of this.” That was exciting! So I didn’t quit. Then we did The Hulk, and that did pretty well…. And then the rest is history.

    Continued below…

  • FROM THE VAULT: Sir Ian McKellen Interview

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    Conducted ~6/2000

    I must admit, I don’t recall exactly what my rationale was for chasing down this interview, other than just respecting Sir Ian as an incredible actor who was just beginning to really get noticed by Hollywood. The first X-Men was just about to open, and the first installment of The Lord Of The Rings, The Fellowship Of The Ring, was still in the future.

    Regardless of what the circumstances were, this is one of the interviews I’m most proud of. Sir Ian was wonderful, speaking n full candor, and I thought our conversation hit a wonderful groove. I also managed to do the interview before such in-depth pieces like this became a bit of a rarity for him.

    I hope you enjoy it…

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    KEN PLUME: Tell me about your formative years… What drew you to acting?

    SIR IAN McKELLEN: Before I ever acted as an amateur – which I did a great deal at school and at university – I used to go to the theater with my parents in the north of England, where I was born and brought up… Theater of all sorts. A weekly repertory theater played every week at the Bolton Hippodrome, visiting opera and ballet companies at the Theatre Royal, vaudeville theater at the Grand. For Shakespeare and the classics, sometimes my parents took us to the big city of Manchester close by to see famous actors in all sorts of plays. I was also taken by the school each year for a week’s camping in Stratford-on-Avon to see the Shakespeare season there. That’s how I first enjoyed acting – mainly through the theater, as we didn’t go to the cinema much. It was because I enjoyed watching other people act that I thought, “I’d like to have a go at that myself.” There was no early intention of being a professional. I went to study English at Cambridge, and there did a great deal of acting with friends who were determined to become professionals: Trevor Nunn – who now runs the National Theater, Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir David Frost, Peter Cook, and others. I caught the bug there… It was then that I realized, “Well, if they’re going to be able to do it in the professional theatre, then perhaps I can myself.” When I left Cambridge, I applied to regional repertory theaters in the UK and got accepted by one of them… And here I am, still at it.

    PLUME: This would b e around the late 50’s, early 60’s, right?

    McKELLEN: I started in 1961.

    PLUME: What was it about acting that enamored you of the process?

    McKELLEN: When I started to do it, I discovered I could do it. I think it’s as simple as that. I didn’t have any other specialties that I was good at. Growing up and finding tan enjoyable activity which the grown-ups admired – or don’t object to – for a nice well-behaved boy was fulfilling. It gave me an identity that otherwise I didn’t particularly feel I had.

    PLUME: Did your heart stray in any other directions?

    McKELLEN: Before acting, I wanted to become a journalist. I also toyed with the idea of being a chef – but that’s only when people asked me what I wanted to be. In fact, I always used to say I wanted to be an actor, but I didn’t ever believe that I was good enough to be come one. It was only at Cambridge, when I was surrounded by others who wanted to become professionals – and when I got a few good reviews in the national press of my acting – that I thought, “Oh well, maybe it’s okay.” But what did I really enjoy about it? It probably has something to do with my sense of being gay… It’s very difficult to talk about this or analyze it. If you were growing up gay in the 1950’s in the north of England, you had a secret which was difficult to share…

    PLUME: If not impossible…

    McKELLEN: Well, it used to feel like it was impossible. Yet, when you were on stage, you could be absolutely open about your emotions and indulge them and express yourself in a way that – in real life – I wasn’t doing. I think that was part of the appeal. Certainly I felt, when I decided to become a professional, that, “Oh good… I’m going to be able to meet some real-life queers.” Because I’d heard that the theater was full of them… and so it has proved.

    PLUME: How would you describe the atmosphere at Cambridge? Was it conducive to the fostering of an artistic bent?

    McKELLEN: There’s still no drama faculty at Cambridge – nor at Oxford – but a great deal of acting went on at the time. Undergraduate groups of actors run by the undergraduates and advised by theater-mad dons – one of them, John Barton, left Cambridge while I was there to become a senior director at the Royal Shakespeare Company. So we had connections with the professional theater, and during each vacation we were recording the whole of the Shakespeare’s works, playing supporting parts to professional actors who were brought down for a weekend in Cambridge to record a play at a time. Some of our productions used to play in London on professional stages. The line between being an amateur actor and a professional was nicely blurred. I was told by my tutor that if I went on acting, my academic studies were going to suffer – and they did – but we were all young gentleman and we were thought to be responsible enough to do whatever we wanted to do, and what I wanted to do was indulge myself in the theater, and I was allowed to get on with it pretty well.

    PLUME: How difficult was the transition out of Cambridge and into the “professional world”?

    McKELLEN: Well, it seemed easy, because I was very keen and very enthusiastic and in love with the theater and the idea of theater -and professional theater people seemed to be the most fascinating in the world, and there’s no where else I wanted to be. It didn’t feel, by that time, like strange territory. It was just constantly fascinating. I just looked around for the people who were the best at it and tried to contact them and work with them. None of this was fueled by a desire to be a star, or famous, or rich, or be in movies or even in television… It was theater that I was interested in. Appearing in front of a live audience, and the problems, technicalities, and joys of that. It was also rooted in – and this is why Cambridge was crucial to me – a respect for the word and the text of a play… Which, of course, overlaps into your studies. You study Shakespeare, you study plays, and so – for me – there’s never been much of a division between people who write about the plays as academic texts and study them for examinations, and actors like me who analyze them for performance. We seem to be in the same business, really.

    PLUME: So you’re saying that the study and need for understanding is the same, but the decides to take it a step further and get up on the stage and perform it…

    McKELLEN: Yes, that’s right.

    PLUME: What were the opportunities afforded or the challenges inherent for a young actor starting out in the professional world at that time?

    McKELLEN: That sounds suspiciously like “What advice would you give a young actor…” I think the point to be understood is that we’re all different. I’ve never been a fan of theories of acting. I didn’t go to drama school, so I was never put through a training that was limited by someone saying, “This is the way you should act.” We all act differently. Acting is a very personal process. It has to do with expressing your own personality, and discovering the character you’re playing through your own experience -so we’re all different. We all do it in different ways. My experience is my experience, and it isn’t necessarily relevant to anybody else. I certainly don’t disparage someone whose attitude towards their work is utterly different from mine – that’s up to them. I think the only judgement I would make is “Are they doing it well?” and “Are they doing it seriously?”

    PLUME: How subjective is the critique “Are they doing it well?”

    McKELLEN: Well, then you have to say, “This is the script as written. This is the style in which it’s written. Is this actor adopting the right style and playing his/her part appropriately within the story that’s being told. That’s how I would make a judgement. It wouldn’t be of any interest to me, necessarily, to know how he/she had achieved it, or what their experience was before the moment I actually saw them on stage.

    Continued below…

  • FROM THE VAULT: Jerry Nelson Interview

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    Conducted ~12/1998

    While trying to come up with the best term that describes Jerry Nelson, one’s mind turns inevitably to the words multi-talented and multi-faceted. Both contain the prefix “multi,” meaning many, and they illustrate the numerous talents – and characters – contained within him. From his humble roots in Oklahoma to his literal hand in creating cultural icons (The Count von Count, Floyd Pepper, Gobo Fraggle, Robin, Emmet Otter, Lew Zealand, Crazy Harry, Herry Monster… The list goes on and on…), Jerry has accomplished much in his long and distinguished career. Although you don’t ever see him, you know and appreciate it when he’s there.

    I’ve long been a fan of the Muppets, and being the inquisitive person I am, I researched exactly who the people were that worked to bring the Muppets to life – those wild men and women known collectively as Muppeteers.

    Through the still-newish medium of the internet, I had begun a correspondence with longtime Muppeteer Jerry Nelson, and when the back-to-back filming of Elmo In Grouchland and Muppets From Space brought him to my backyard, I arranged to have a lengthy sit-down interview with him.

    It was also through Jerry that I was able to hang around the set for months on end (effectively sacrificing my college career – an anecdote for another time) and befriend many a Muppeteer.

    Jerry has become a good friend over the years (we also share a birthday, which led to me helping pull off a big surprise party for his 65th – gulp! – 10 years ago), and his life’s work has contributed nothing but joy to both children and adults for generations. I hope you’ll understand why doing this interview was so important to me, and I hope you get a kick out of it as well…

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    KEN PLUME: Tell me a little bit about your background…

    JERRY NELSON: I was born in Oklahoma in 1934. I lived there with my mom until I was about 6, then we moved to Washington, D. C. and I grew up in that area.

    PLUME: Was it a job related move?

    NELSON: Yeah, as a kid it was my job to go to school. It was during the war. My mom and dad were divorced, and she took a job with the Navy Department, so we moved there for that. I spent summers with my grandparents in Tulsa, and the rest of the time I lived in D.C.

    PLUME: So you were 6 when you moved to Washington…

    NELSON: Well, I was probably 7 or 8. I know I was already in school. I remember about three schools in Oklahoma. One would have been a kindergarten, one would have been a first grade, and the other one would probably have also been first grade or the beginning of second grade. I know when I started school in Washington I was in the second grade. The reason I remember one of the places in Oklahoma was because is was a one-room schoolhouse. I was in a class room with all age kids and the teacher would move around, kind of like an arena. That was a good learning experience early on.

    PLUME: Going to Washington schools must have been quite a shock after that…

    NELSON: Yeah, going to Washington was a big change in my life. It was a big school. The first school I went to in Washington, I had to wait after school because my cousin went to the high school next door, and I used to wait in the playground so we could go home together. We had to go by public transit that involved a streetcar and a transfer to a bus. It was fairly complicated travel for a second grader.

    During those days we’d listen to radio. That’s probably where I became fascinated by voices and accents. I would hear names and think, “Oh, that’s the same guy that does this other voice on that other show.” That was probably where I became interested in the fact that you could regulate your voice and do different characters.

    PLUME: How cliché was it that families would gather around the radio and listen, whereas today you have every member of the family going to their rooms to watch their own TVs…

    NELSON: Radio was more of a family thing, although in my family when we watched TV we would do that together as well. I suppose today everyone has their own TV or computer or whatever they’re interested in and it certainly seems more fragmented. Society is more fragmented. People, rather than staying with their nuclear family, tend to adopt families who are more in tune with them.

    One of the major things that Jim saw with puppets, and Bill Baird also, was that they weren’t just a children’s entertainment, that they could also entertain and educate adults as well. Jim was the one who really connected in this struggle with The Muppet Show, but it took the success of a children’s show to enable that. People who had never seen The Muppet Show used to ask me, “What is that?” and I used to say it was an entertainment program for children of all ages. That’s the way I always thought of it, because there were different levels that appeal to different intellects, different age groups. The jokes were there for very young minds, but the jokes were also there for the older audience. That’s the interesting thing about Sesame Street. Young children would watch it over and over again and they’d watch the same show at the end of the week. When they first started, at the end of the week, they’d run the full week’s programs and children would watch them all over again. Nowadays, kids will do that with videos so that they know it by heart. They have minds that are busy looking at other things. They’ll watch the storyline, then they’ll watch a character, then they’ll watch the background. Eventually life comes along to distract us.

    PLUME: Sesame Street is on what, its third generation now?

    NELSON: At least. That was the interesting part. When kids were 6 or 7, they’d go, “Aw, I don’t watch that stuff anymore. I’m too old for that. That’s a children’s show.” Then somewhere in their teens they’d start watching it again, and then in college they’d start watching it again. It has a perennial quality to it.

    PLUME: Nothing is really too dated, either.

    NELSON: No, not really. You can look at some of the haircuts, maybe that would date it, but not the themes or the humor.

    PLUME: What were your interests in school?

    NELSON: By the time I got to high school, I was interested in country music and at some point in school, I don’t know how it happened, I got involved in a school play. It was fascinating and a lot of fun. As a youngster, my mom had put me in some group that traveled and did shows for Jaycees and Lions Clubs called Juvenile Review that a guy had put together. We did shows like Tom Sawyer and Hellzapoppin, Jr., which was basically tried-and-true vaudeville routines. We also sang on the radio in the Washington area. After that, I didn’t do much until the play in high school, and I thought, “I find this interesting.” I stayed with the idea of being an actor after that. For a while I thought radio and television were good. Throughout high school my musical tastes developed… I still like country, but now I like jazz and classical music as well. I realize music has shades for various moods and you’re not restricted. I stopped playing guitar when I was focused on jazz and thought, “Well, I can’t play jazz.” At some point, maybe in the 60’s movement came about, I started playing again because I thought, “Oh, I can play that.” In terms of acting, that was put on hold when I went into the Army. I was in the Army for two years and went to Japan.

    PLUME: Was this right after high school?

    NELSON: About a year afterwards. This was at the tail end of the Korean conflict, so I got the GI Bill and was able to go to school. I went to school for about a year and a half and thought, “Well, I’m not really doing anything here. If it’s acting I want to do, I should be in New York studying acting.” I felt like the thing to do was forget about school and pursue acting.

    PLUME: When year was this around?

    NELSON: I got back from the military in ’56 and went to school from ’56-’57, moved to New York in ’58, and stayed there for a couple of years.

    Continued below…

  • FROM THE VAULT: Penn Jillette Interview

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    Conducted ~9/2003

    Without a doubt, Penn Jillette was an interview that had me worrying.

    I’m always trepidatious going into an interview with someone who’s fiercely intelligent and highly opinionated – as any right-thinking, overly self-conscious person would be.

    Despite my reservations about making an utter fool of myself, what usually (thankfully) happens is a kind of verbal high wire act, where the conversation feels like its dancing along on the thinnest of threads, propelled by an intellectual energy and give-and-take that can be quite exhilarating. And no, I’m not being hyperbolic.

    Anyway, the interview with Penn was done with no real agenda in mind other than to just try and get some background and insight into a man and a mind I’ve always found fascinating.

    And I made it out alive.

    I’ve long wanted to have another conversation with Penn – and numerous attempts to chat with Teller over the years have been scuttled by scheduling snafus – but I’m happy if this piece is the only one I’ll ever have.

    Below, you’ll find my original intro to the piece, followed by my conversation with Penn Jillette…

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    Does anyone really not know who Penn Jillette is?

    Anyone?

    Well, if you’re culturally impaired, I’ll give you a bit of a hint – he’s the louder, larger half of the comedy and magic tour de force, Penn & Teller.

    In other words, he’s not the small, silent guy.

    If you’re still in the dark, you can visit the official Penn & Teller website. Also be sure to watch their Showtime original series, Bulls***!, the second season of which should be ramping up soon.

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    KEN PLUME: Going back a bit – as far as your evolution as a performer – my understanding is that you started out by doing Renaissance Festivals…

    PENN JILLETTE: We did a few of those, yeah.

    PLUME: How would you describe the evolution of how you existed within each of those acts – because in your early years, you had a different partner, right?

    JILLETTE: Kinda-sorta-ish. When I was in high school and junior high, I was juggling with Michael Moschen – who is a MacArthur Genius Grant juggler, and has PBS specials and stuff like that. A very serious juggler. And Michael and I, and his brother Colin, juggled through junior high and high school, and right upon graduating… well, kinda graduating… After getting out of high school…

    PLUME: A clever play on words, there…

    JILLETTE: After that, I went to Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth Clown College, and then came back and started juggling with Michael, and we were club-passers. Serious club-passers. No talking, no jokes – just really jock juggling stuff. We were first in the world to pass nine clubs. Now people are doing eleven – but at the time in the early 70’s, that was a big deal. And I met Teller during that time. I had just decided to do stuff in showbusiness… I would do anything. And one of the anythings on that list was a Renaissance Festival – which I absolutely made no concessions for at all. I just did my street show as written, and they pretended it was Renaissance. Which, you know, Renaissance is just Hippie – it’s got nothing to do with that actual time period. It’s just a Hippie festival, now. Another excuse to do macrame and drink beer. None of which I do. Teller and I worked Renaissance Festivals and street performing – actually more real, no kidding around, Philadelphia street performing than we did Renaissance Festivals. And during that time of us working together – which was not long, a few months – we wrote a show, which was going to be Teller and another gentleman by the name of Weir Chirsamer and me. We were going to do a show called The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society. Teller and I wrote most of that show, and Weir helped when he came in at the last minute. Then the three of us did that show first at Princeton in ’74, I guess…. Yeah, that seems about right. I should know this. And then we just fought the world to be able to do The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society show. We did that from the early 70’s until ’81, and during that time got to be the longest running show in San Francisco, in a little theater there called the Phoenix Theater – which I believe now is a Korean restaurant.

    PLUME: What was the format of the show?

    JILLETTE: It was very much what you would think of as Penn & Teller now – just younger. Teller and I have had kind of an odd movement in our career, in that we’ve gotten more aggressive and nuttier as we’ve gotten older. Most people kind of roll off, but the earlier stuff… it might have been artistically wacky, but it didn’t have the same skepticism and blasphemy that we have now.

    PLUME: Is that a confidence issue or a success issue?

    JILLETTE: Part of it was that the third member of the group at Asparagus was Christian. So in order to speak for the group, you can’t be a skeptic or pro-science – you had to be a Christian. So that changed the tone of it somewhat. It wasn’t success, because Teller and I, by the time Asparagus Valley got together – within a year, we had achieved all our goals. I mean, our goal was to earn our living doing exactly what we wanted. Which is many people’s goal. But we didn’t have any of these Madonna/Howard Stern/”king of the world” type ambitions. We knew that we were kind of odd and creeps, and we wanted to do odd, creepy stuff for people who wanted to see that. I’m a big fan of huge populations of people, so you’d think with 300 million people in the country, you don’t even have to please 1% to be phenomenally successful. Elvis and Colonel Parker were bothered that there were some aboriginal indians that did not know the name “Elvis.”

    PLUME: That’s what led to the “Great Album Airdrop” of ’67…

    JILLETTE: Yeah! But that has really never been very much to me. I remember that there was a woman that I dated very early on in the 70’s when we were doing early stuff, and I overheard from somebody – and this is friend of a friend of a friend stuff, but since it’s about me, it doesn’t really matter much, the exact sources – but I heard back that they asker her if we had changed when we were getting more successful, and her answer was, “No, they didn’t change at all. Not because they stayed humble, but rather because working in a s***hole on the street, they felt what they were doing was the most important stuff in the world.” Teller always has the gift of… well, I guess he’s worked hard for it, really… of confidence. He really can believe that what he’s doing is important and good if it’s important and good, kind of regardless of the venue. And Teller and I have never been venue-oriented. When we first went on Broadway – our first run on Broadway… even, I guess, a little off-Broadway, since it was so f***ing successful… we would have all these journalists saying, “Is this really a dream come true, that you’ve worked for all your life?” And it was so difficult to answer, because we didn’t want to appear to lack gratitude. We didn’t want to appear to not think we were lucky, or to be in any way unpleasant, but the truth was it never crossed our minds to have that goal. We never had what I call a “venue-driven” goal. I mean, I just can’t imagine saying, “I want to be on Broadway.” What does that mean? It’s a little like saying, “I want to work in a blue building.”

    PLUME: Is there any venue that you wouldn’t perform in, or that disappointed you in any way?

    JILLETTE: Well, you know, we wouldn’t play Sun City when we were asked. And we were the only ones who were asked to play Sun City. No one in the video that said, “We ain’t gonna play Sun City” was asked! And actually, we didn’t say “no” when we were asked, we just told our agents – they probably didn’t pass this off… We told the agents to send out to Sun City that we had a very simple rider – that Penn and Teller each got $500 a week, each of our crew got $500 a week, we got airfare, we had decaffeinated tea and decaffeinated Diet Coke backstage, and equal rights for all people in the country we were performing in. And we said, “Just send that to them, because maybe it will blow by them.” We thought that maybe if we ended Apartheid, you’d be able to say, in five years when you saw us on Letterman, “That bit kind of sucked, but hey – they ended Apartheid.”

    PLUME: And it’s great for the bio…

    JILLETTE: Exactly! But there have obviously been venues and shows that we weren’t crazy about, but the question kind of implies a categorical thing, and I don’t think there really is one.

    Continued below…

  • FROM THE VAULT: Rick Moranis Interview

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    Conducted ~10/2005

    In early 2000, I did a massive in-depth interview with Dave Thomas, of SCTVand Bob & Doug McKenzie fame (which you can read HERE). During that conversation, I mentioned to Dave that I had attempted to arrange an interview with Rick Moranis earlier in the year, and encountered one of the most intimidating yet courteous declines I’d ever had when Rick answered my query with a phone call in which I essentially had to pitch him why the interview was necessary. I also had to explain the internet and the emerging field of online journalism.

    Yes, I was utterly intimidated.

    Nothing in Rick’s performances would have prepared me for the deep (deep!) voiced, utterly serious, level-headed, and most of all inquisitive person that rang me up that day, who finished our brief chat with a polite decline of the interview, as he felt he had nothing to talk about or promote.

    Now, I’ve never wanted to do an interview just to pimp a product. I’ve always tried (when not doing favors or assignments) to chat with people I genuinely have an interest in conversing with, as I don’t believe in prepared, iron-clad questions. I want to have a conversation with someone. I think that’s far more interesting to them, to me, and to whoever might be reading the interview in the future. So I knew that Rick’s belief that he had nothing to offer in an interview was wrongheaded. Convincing him, however, would be an uphill battle.

    It was during that aforementioned interview with Dave Thomas that I tried again, asking Dave if he would make my case to Rick.

    Rick wouldn’t budge.

    A couple of years later, I tried again, and contacted Rick’s agent about setting up an interview.

    I got my second phone call from Rick, in which he again declined to be interviewed – very nicely – but for pretty much the same reasons.

    I had to admire a man that, when most people would simply let a request go unanswered or have their representative deliver the news, actually picked up a phone and said, “I’m really sorry, but I just don’t feel like doing this.”

    Towards the end of 2005, though, there were rumblings that Rick was going to be releasing a country music album through an independent online label. Sensing that this might finally provide the ostensible rationale for Rick to finally do an interview, I contacted the label to see if he might be interested in having a chat to promote the album.

    And he was interested.

    And I was delighted.

    Even though the interview was set up to discuss the album, I’ve never let something like that hinder me. I always do an interview with the idea that, once I’m on the phone, a natural conversation has the potential to go anywhere.

    And my conversation with Rick did touch on many things.

    Since then, I’ve kept in touch with Rick, and still find him to be nice, warm, intelligent, and utterly intimidating. Just less so than before.

    Anyway, here’s my interview with Rick, which you’ll find below the original introduction…

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    I’d be surprised to encounter anyone who’s turned on a TV or watched a film in the past 20 years, but didn’t know actor/writer/comedian Rick Moranis. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ll know Rick from SCTV (where he co-created the legendary McKenzie Brothers with Dave Thomas), Ghostbusters, Honey I Shrunk The Kids, and many more flicks through the years (including a guilty fave of mine, My Blue Heaven).

    I got a chance to chat with Rick about his career, including his Grammy nominated album, The Agoraphobic Cowboy.

    Before you go thinking it’s some comedy album – it’s not. Yes, many of the songs are funny and the wordplay definitely comes from a brilliant comic mind, but it’s more in the vein of Randy Newman or Harry Nilsson – and trust me, that’s strong praise. With a country flair and a solid backing band, Moranis has recorded an album that never becomes kitsch or a novelty, but stands on its own two feet as a legitimately enjoyable listen. For more information, check out his official website at www.RickMoranis.com.

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    KEN PLUME: Anybody who goes to your website can read the background on why you decided to do the album. You’ve spent the past 15 years raising your kids and have managed to take work when you wanted to take work. What made the timing right to do a project like this?

    RICK MORANIS: I don’t know that I would even guess whether the timing was right or not. I didn’t go into it thinking like that. I just decided to do it because I’d written the songs and got the kind of feedback on it that led me to meet and play the stuff for some musicians, particularly Tony Sherr, who wanted to record it, so I did it. I wasn’t even thinking about the endgame on it, so I didn’t have any kind of career plan in mind. But then again I never approach career like that. I just took opportunities as they came up and decided whether to do things based on the merits of the individual project.

    PLUME: Would you say there was a certain amount of serendipity in how this project came together?

    MORANIS: I think my whole career has been serendipitous.

    PLUME: Have you at any point ever had a plan or direction for yourself?

    MORANIS: I don’t think I’ve ever had a plan or direction for myself. I’ve actually made decisions based more on what I didn’t want to do than what I wanted to do.

    PLUME: What would be one of the first decisions you made based on something you didn’t want to do?

    MORANIS: Based on something I didn’t want to do? I was offered… when was that? Hang on, hang on… I can’t remember exactly when it was, after which radio job, but after a radio job, a deejay job at a Toronto radio station that I left. And again, I can’t remember which one it was so I’m not sure whether I was terminated or I quit, but I was offered another job that paid well and was in Toronto and was a morning show and high profile, and I decided to not do it. Because I knew that it was time to move on.

    PLUME: What would be the reason you were terminated?

    MORANIS: When I was at CFTR doing the all-night show at the tender age of 19, there was a management change. And what’s often the case with radio is, when a management change comes in, they change personnel. That’s not limited to radio, of course. There’s many companies that change personnel when managers change.

    PLUME: What was the initial appeal of radio for you?

    MORANIS: Well, I got a job spinning records for deejays when I was in high school, so the appeal was the fact that it was paying $3.00 an hour and it was an unusual and very exciting and fun job.

    PLUME: When you became professional, you would change your playlist according to what the station was playing at the time. But what would you say your musical tastes as a teenager were at that period, when you went into radio? Your own personal musical taste?

    MORANIS: At that time my personal musical taste was a variety of contemporary music. Obviously the dominance of what was called rock at that time, having been exposed to all the music of the 60’s from the British Invasion, Motown and the California sound of the Beach Boys. That led to discovering some of the more interesting bands that were coming out of England and the States that were doing what became known as album-oriented rock. The AOR format. Be it Led Zeppelin or Genesis or American bands like Spirit, or the early Steve Miller Band. Jethro Tull. I guess that’s back in the British category, Jethro Tull, right?

    PLUME: Right.

    MORANIS: But I also had been exposed to middle-of-the-road music as a young kid because my mother always had a middle-of-the-road radio station on in the house. So I was aware of Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett. I recognized a lot of the standards. Some showtunes. I also had an uncle who listened to a lot of classical and opera when I was a little kid, and whenever I visited their house, he had records on of various symphonies and also some Broadway musicals. So I had a lot of exposure. But being a teenager who had an electric guitar and had a pretty lousy rock band I could call my own, I was for the most part into rock and roll.

    Continued below…

  • FROM THE VAULT: Dave Thomas Interview

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    Conducted ~1/2000

    Dave Thomas has a reputation for being a guy quick to temper who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, going all the way back to his Second City days and the landmark comedy show that grew out of them, SCTV.

    As is my wont, though, I didn’t care about whatever reputation he may or may not have – I viewed him as a comedy icon and someone who would probably be fascinating to chat with.

    And, after you read the interview below, I hope you’ll agree.

    He’s also known as one half of that most-Canadian of duos, Bob & Doug McKenzie, alongside Rick Moranis (you can read my in-depth interview with Rick Moranis HERE).

    I’ve since stayed in touch with Dave, and my own personal opinion of him hasn’t changed in the time I’ve known him – he may seem gruff and succinct, but he’s smart, funny, and a genuinely good guy. He’s got an amazing comedy mind, and he’s also one of those writers who has a knack for mentoring the next generation.

    Oh, and if you ever talk to him, ask him about his car.

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    KEN PLUME: Tell me a about your background, growing up in Canada.

    DAVE THOMAS: Well, I didn’t grow up just in Canada. I was born in Canada near Niagara Falls in a place called St. Catherines. Then I lived in Toronto till I was six. Then we moved to Durham, North Carolina. We were there in the early 60’s. My Dad was doing a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Duke, and ended up becoming a philosopher, lecturer, teaching college, and ultimately a medical ethicist. Then we went to Britain. Both my parents were British. We had relatives in Scotland and Wales and my father ‘s parents lived in Birmingham, England and we spent time with them all. After that, we came back to Canada when I was twelve, so I was gone for awhile.

    PLUME: Sounds like you had quite a global childhood.

    THOMAS: Yeah, it was interesting. We went to Britain every summer, pretty much, when I was a kid visiting relatives. My brother and I got pretty good at the British dialect, and it was primarily so that they wouldn’t think we were Americans or Canadian and therefore rich.

    PLUME: Wouldn’t want that misunderstanding.

    THOMAS: Then they (slipping in to cockney accent) “wont you ta pay feh every’ting, see? An that’s not nice.” My parents – my father particularly – were kind of comedy aficionados, so at that time I was exposed to a really wide swath of comedy, from Peter Sellers and the Goons – which came out of my parent’s British background – to Andy Griffith when we were in Durham, North Carolina. This was before he did The Andy Griffith Show, and in fact before he did No Time For Sergeants, when he used to do comedy radio stuff and comedy records. Also Jonathan Winters and Tom Lehrer, who was actually kind of an academic’s comedian.

    PLUME: So you had a rather eclectic and widespread comedy background.

    THOMAS: Absolutely. No question about it.

    PLUME: Was there any disappointment in going back to Canada?

    THOMAS: No, actually. It was just all part of life. I think kids are very accepting. “What? We’re moving here now? Oh, okay.” I don’t think they turn into moaners and complainers until they’re teenagers.

    PLUME: Did it have any impact on your teenage years?

    THOMAS: No, I was settled by that time. I found myself sort of restless and wishing we would move again when I was a teenager, but I was kind of settled in Canada by that point. Canada is sort of like a looking glass into the United States. It’s like a balcony seat in a theater. Marty Short’s father was Irish, and he used to describe the US as “The Excited States” – that there was always stuff going on there and everything seemed bigger and people reacted in a bigger way to things. Canada, by comparison, is much more conservative and reserved. Anyway, when I got to college, I ran into Martin Short and Eugene Levy and Ivan Reitman -we all went to McMaster University. There was no theater or film course at this school, so we just started our own theater and film stuff, because it was what we were all interested in. We were all general arts students. The McMaster Student Council funded some things, and we talked them into funding films, theater groups, and plays – in some cases out own plays. So we just spent our undergrad years putting on shows. It was a lot of fun. Then, right after college, Marty and Eugene got roles in the Toronto production of Godspell and I took a job as a copywriter for McCann/Erickson. I wrote ad copy for about six months, and then I did some low-level promotional campaign for Coca-Cola. The campaign hit big, and I ended up being the head writer for Coca-Cola Canada out of McCann in Toronto, and then they sent me to New York to work with this guy named Bill Backer, who was creative director for McCann worldwide at that time. Around this time they were opening a Second City Theater in Toronto.

    PLUME: The initial troupe was in Chicago, right?

    THOMAS: Yeah, that’s right. They started out in Chicago in about ’58 or ’59. That was the Elaine May, Mike Nichols, Paul Sills crowd. A decade-and-a-half later, they opened up a branch in Toronto. I wasn’t in the first cast that they put together, and it’s a good thing, too, because they ended up closing that theater because they couldn’t get a liquor license, but it was a great cast. Joe Flaherty, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner and John Candy were all in it. All very funny people, and I went and saw that show and thought, “This is what I really want to do!”

    PLUME: But you were firmly entrenched as an ad guy.

    THOMAS: Yeah, making a lot more money with McCann/Erickson than the Second City Stage salary which was $145 a week. By comparison, I was making about $50,000 at McCann/Erickson as a successful copywriter. In fact, my creative director said, “In another three years, you’ll be a creative director,” This compliment was in fact the straw that broke the camel’s back, because then I realized that was as far as I want to go in advertising, and that would be well before I was 30, so I realized I’ve gotta get outta here. Anyway, I saw this Second City Show, and I saw these very funny
    people, and thought, “I’ve got to be part of that.” So when they closed the show on Adelaide Street and opened six months later at the Old Firehall, I auditioned and got in.

    PLUME: What year was this?

    THOMAS: This was 1974. It was just before Lorne Michaels started his recruitment program for Saturday Night Live.

    PLUME: How did you miss out on that?

    THOMAS: Very simple, really. Danny had been doing this improvising stuff for quite some time, and he’s a very unique talent, so he got scooped from the Toronto company, and Gilda (Radner) got scooped from the Toronto company, and then Lorne went to Chicago and grabbed Belushi. Lorne knew Chevy from other shows as a writer. And candidly, I think he just didn’t think I was as funny as those guys. Anyway, at that time, I was a relatively new addition to the Second City Stage cast and happy to have the job there.

    PLUME: Was there any disappointment amongst those who were left behind?

    THOMAS: Some. I remember some good-natured bitching. But, for the most part we were all happy to have jobs. I think. I know I wasn’t disappointed.

    PLUME: But they didn’t know how big SNL was going to be anyway.

    THOMAS: Yeah, nobody knew. It was just some new show that some Canadian producer was putting together in New York. We had no idea it was going to be big. Within six months of SNL starting, the guys who ran the Second City theater in Toronto decided to start up SCTV. So, for me, getting into the cast of SCTV was just a miracle of good timing. First I’m in the right time and the right place to get the stage show, and then just as that’s getting kind of ripe, they start a TV show. Again, in the right place at the right time.

    Continued below…

  • FROM THE VAULT: Terry Gilliam Interview

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    Conducted ~10/2000 & ~8/2005

    Terry Gilliam was the first member of Monty Python I ever had the pleasure to interview. As you can imagine, it was quite a momentous event for a comedy fan such as myself. I confess to being a bit nervous, but I needn’t have worried – of all the Pythons I’ve had the chance to chat with, Terry G was easily the most open and candid, with no subject taboo.

    This first interview was conducted a month out from the start of principal photography on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and while he had his usual pre-shoot jitters, this was a very confident Gilliam, still riding high on the financial and critical success of 12 Monkeys and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Unfortunately, as we all were able to view in the documentary Lost In La Mancha, the production of Quixote unraveled quickly, leaving Gilliam emotionally drained.

    Over the next few years, audiences would be hard-pressed to even find theaters playing Brothers Grimm (marked by battles with the Brothers Weinstein) and the gothic Tideland (both are worth a second look on DVD. And, as we all know, tragedy marked the production of his latest film, The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus, further fueling the ludicrous chants of the so-called “Gilliam Curse”.

    Immediately following this 2000 interview is my second in-depth conversation with Terry, which took place as Brothers Grimm was being unceremoniously dumped in theaters in the Fall of 2005 as part of the slate of final Weinstein films pushed out when they departed Miramax. I think both pieces, read consecutively, provide an interesting study of Gilliam as a filmmaker and man who, above all, keeps on pushing forward.

    Parnassus, though, feels like a Gilliam film from his classic period – like Time Bandits and Brazil – and will hopefully mark a new era of productivity from a remarkably gifted filmmaker. Heck, even Quixote is back on the docket.

    A quick aside before we dive into the interview itself. In 2006, THINKfilm was doing a rather horrendous job of marketing Tideland, and I worked with Terry on guerilla marketing techniques. After a failed attempt to get him booked as a guest on The Daily Show, I suggested instead that he crash the line of guests waiting to see the show. At first a bit reluctant, Terry eventually embraced the idea – and enthusiastically made the sign you’ll see in the video below, shot by Terry’s daughter (and now producer) Amy Gilliam and edited rather slapdashedly by myself. I still think it’s a nice bit of absurd fun – and proves just how beloved Terry is by audiences, if not executives.

    And now, here’s the original interview…

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    KEN PLUME: If you could, give me a little background on yourself – pre-industry…

    TERRY GILLIAM: I was born in 1940 in Minnesota – in Minneapolis – and grew up in the country… dirt roads, swamps, lakes, woods… Huckleberry Finn / Tom Sawyer existence. When I was 12, we moved out to Los Angeles, to the San Fernando Valley – to a place called Panorama City. At that time, there was a panorama – now you can’t see it for the smog. I went to school out there, and went to college at Occidental College – where I graduated as a political science major. After college, I took off for New York and got a job with Harvey Kurtzman at Help! magazine. I was the assistant editor. Basically, three people did the magazine – it was Harvey, myself, and a production man. One of the things we did there were fumetti, which were a series of photographs done like cartoon strips. I think it was the beginning of my filmmaking, in a sense, because we had actors, we had sets, we had locations, we had costumes, we had lighting – all the things that go into making a film, except nothing moved. I was always in charge of putting those things together. Help! magazine was an amazing place at the time, because Harvey Kurtzman was one of the great idols of my generation of cartoonists. So it being, at the time, the only real national comic magazine – Mad being, up to that point, infantile – all the people like Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton (“Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers”) – all the guys that became the great underground comic artists in the late ’60s were applying their stuff to the magazine. So I got to be friends with all these people. Out of that, came a meeting with John Cleese – who was over with a group called Cambridge Circus, which was the Cambridge University Footlights revue, who had come to New York – and I got him to appear in one of these fumetti. We became friends, and years later that produced a certain team effort.

    PLUME: A little cult show not known outside many circles…

    GILLIAM: Exactly. The magazine eventually folded and I went off and hitchhiked – this was in 1964 or 1965 – and I hitchhiked around Europe and fell in love with Europe. I came back to the States and stayed there for another year and a half working in LA in advertising, because as a freelance cartoonist and illustrator. I was only making enough money to get me one meal a day – so I got a job in advertising at an agency. The guy who got me the job was Joel Siegel, who is ABC Good Morning America‘s movie critic. For one of the jobs there, Joel and I did the movie campaigns for Universal Studios – which, again, these circles keep completing as life goes on. After 11 months, I quit.

    PLUME: What kind of a transition was it, going from sort of outside, avant-garde on Help! magazine to as mainstream as you can get in an advertising agency?

    GILLIAM: Help! was free and New York was very interesting because I got to meet a lot of really interesting people and work with them – Gloria Steinem, Esquire Magazine, Paul Krasner had The Realist…there was The Outsiders Newsletter, … all that was going on. In LA – Carson Roberts was the name of the agency, and I think Carson Roberts are responsible for the phrase “Have A Nice Day”… the creative director who hired me had formerly worked with Stan Freberg – Freberg had done some of the great puppet shows and comedy albums of that era. So it was an interesting time. I got hired as an art director and copywriter, so I was able to do all aspects of a campaign. It was a pretty free and easy place, and I very quickly didn’t like it – but it was a job. I would arrive late in the morning and go into my office, lock the door, and hide there until lunchtime, and then go take a very long lunch – then come back, lock myself in my office, and leave very early.

    PLUME: What aspects of the job did you not like?

    GILLIAM: Office life. Brazil is very much a result of my time in the agency. I was frustrated by having to deal with the client. One campaign I did – which was for Anderson Split Pea Soup, whose selling point was that, unlike Campbell’s, you didn’t have to add water – I wrote and designed the whole campaign with radio ads and everything. They did a test of the whole business, but it didn’t increase sales. It was only later that they discovered that one reason it didn’t do well was that the soup wasn’t available in the shops. So that kind of ridiculous stupidity got to me.

    Continued below…

  • FROM THE VAULT: Joss Whedon Interview

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    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.

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    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…

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    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…

  • FROM THE VAULT: Neil Gaiman Interview

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    Conducted ~2/2005

    I originally conducted separate interviews with both Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean in the lead-up to the theatrical release of the film MirrorMask. Both Neil and Dave were a delight to chat with, and I only wish more time had been alotted to do both gentleman justice. Who knows? Maybe that will be rectified at some point in the future.

    After interviewing Dave, I then had a sit-down (by phone, anyway) with Neil. Below, you’ll find my original intro for the piece, followed by the interview itself.

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    15 year-old Helena longs for a normal life. Maybe that’s because she was raised in a family of circus performers. When her mother falls seriously ill after an argument, Helena blames herself – right up until the night before her mother’s operation, when Helena falls asleep and enters a dreamworld full of masked denizens and bizarre creatures ruled by two opposing queens. The White Queen has fallen gravely ill, and it is up to Helena to navigate the strange world she finds herself in and retrieve the one object that can cure the queen’s malady – the MirrorMask. But is she dreaming, or is something far more sinister afoot?

    That, in a nutshell, is the story of MirrorMask, a fantasy adventure directed by Dave McKean, written by Neil Gaiman, and produced by The Jim Henson Company (quite the power trio, eh?). The film recently had its premiere (to critical and audience acclaim) during the Sundance Film Festival, and will a screen near you in the coming year (you can view the trailer at the official site).

    I spoke with Dave McKean here, and now here’s writer, storyteller, dreamweaver, and Douglas Adams fan, Neil Gaiman …

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    KEN PLUME: So, from what I hear, Dave thinks you’re a bit of an a**…

    GAIMAN: (laughing) Well, you know, it’s true! He won’t work with me! And I say, “Dave, work with me. I’ll give you money.” But no…

    PLUME: So, from your perspective, going into these 10 intense days of writing the MirrorMask script at Jim Henson’s home, did you know it was going to be as rocky between you and Dave, initially, as it turned out?

    GAIMAN: Well, the nice thing about it is it was never really rocky personally. We’d been friends too long and we’d worked too well together for it to have ever been personal. But it was odd. Because we’d worked together so incredibly well for so long, neither of us had ever noticed that we’d never actually come up with something in the same place… Or known that we had completely disparate ways of working.

    PLUME: Was there a sense of disappointment that there was that kind of gulf…

    GAIMAN: No… In fact, we were talking about this the other day, that now that we know that’s part of the process – what it really was, was a sense of shock. You have to understand, you’re talking about two people who had worked together for 17 years at that point, and never had an argument.

    PLUME: Must have been quite a wake-up call…

    GAIMAN: After 17 years, you’re finally having your first arguments about something because you have completely different ways of working. And now, we were talking about the fact that probably what will happen is the next time we go off to do a big fantasy movie or whatever – whether it be to the Henson’s house or a Caribbean island – we now know that we do argue. And neither of us ever really argued… We had a very, very simple rule, which was whoever cared most about something, won. In fact, when it got to one point – there was one argument that we had where we really couldn’t figure out who cared most, so we tossed a coin.

    PLUME: Who won?

    GAIMAN: Dave won. And then having said, “Okay, fine. You got it Let’s carry on…” Dave then decided he needed now to spend 5 hours convincing me that he had been right – and then at the end, he decided to do it my way.

    PLUME: So, in other words, the coin toss is out next time…

    GAIMAN: I don’t think we’ll do the coin toss next time. But the point is that now that we know that this happens, neither of us is afraid of it. Neither of us would think twice about the fact that we’ll probably wind up, next time, arguing. And that’s fine, because we both argue because we care.

    PLUME: Was there any point that you didn’t think the process was going to work and you’d resolve the differences, or did you always believe you’d be able to work through it?

    GAIMAN: I don’t know… It’s very hard, because you’re talking about the events of 3 years ago – literally 3 years ago. We sat down on the 2nd of February, and we finished on the 12th of February 2002.

    PLUME: But as Dave said, there were certainly times that he would go upstairs and play the piano, you’d go downstairs to write, and you’d just not talk to each other for a bit.

    GAIMAN: Well, it really wasn’t not talking to each other in the sense that “I don’t want to talk to you” – it was very much two different working methods. Part of it also had to do with the fact that Dave was not a writer – in the same way that I am not an artist. When Dave would do a cover painting for Hellblazer, when he did the first Hellblazer paintings, the first thing he would do was draw the entire cover and the color it in, and he would do the whole thing in colored pencils, and then when he was completely satisfied with it, he’d paint it. So Dave’s rough would be the thing. These days, 17 years later, you’ll say, “Dave, do a book cover. What’s it gonna look like?” And he’ll squiggle in the bottom corner and go, “This is going to be a cat, and then I’m going to have a load of stuff floating around here. It’ll be really cool.” And you go, “Oh, okay.” And then he goes of and sort of makes it all up while he does it, and that’s how Dave does covers now. That’s pretty much the way – when I started as a writer, I would outline everything, and I’d knew I had the entire story and everything worked out before I began to write. But over the years, now I find that incredibly dull. I’d much rather know some of the high points, but discover all the rest of it on the way…

    PLUME: Doing it much more intuitively…

    GAIMAN: Yeah, and make it up as I go along. Just figure out enough so you know who the characters are, you know what’s happening, and you know where it’s going, and then go write it. Find out the cool stuff. And Dave just thought this was ridiculous. He thought that we should actually outline everything that happens first, and then start writing it. Eventually I just said, “Look – you can stay upstairs if you’d like and you can outline stuff, but I want to get these characters out and find out how they talk. I want to know what they sound like. I want to know who they are – and the only way I’m going to do that is by writing them.” So that was the point where Dave stayed upstairs and played his piano, and I went downstairs and just started writing. And then we went out to dinner and I showed Dave what I’d written, and he quite liked it. And that was actually when everything started to fix.

    PLUME: In any way do you think that the approach Dave was championing was a way for him to feel he was actively participating in the script process?

    GAIMAN: I don’t think so, because Dave was an active participant all the way through…

    PLUME: But do you think he had the perception that, by stepping away while you wrote downstairs, he was no longer actively participating? It seems like wanting to outline it and have everything down was a way to be more concretely there…

    GAIMAN: No, I don’t think so – I think that was just how Dave had always written things. Dave is visual. I’m about words, and Dave is about what he can see, and Dave wasn’t comfortable with feeling he had a story until he had a hundred 3×5 file cards filled in – each with a drawing or an event or a little thing on it, and it went in exactly the right order and they were all there, and he could look down and see them and move them around.

    PLUME: I asked Dave the same question, but what do you feel was the turning point when everything clicked and started to come together?

    GAIMAN: There was maybe only 3 bad days at the beginning when things were tough, and then I started writing. Once I started writing, and Dave started actually sort of enjoying what was being written – even though he thought I was mad for not having 3×5 index cards – things started improving. And then we were probably a week in, and Terry Gilliam came over for lunch. He was standing there with his back to the gas fire down in the basement just warming up – because it was *really* cold – and he looked and he saw this big piece of paper. Dave and I had gone out and we’d bought this giant pad, and I’d drawn a line down the middle, and we just sort of covered the pad with each of the events and each of the people, and everything that happened. And it was really Gilliam just looking down at our giant sheet of paper with this line and saying, “That looks like a movie.” And it was wonderful… It was magic. It was like Jesus popping into your Sunday School and going, “All right, you’ve definitely got the 10 Commandments down, now.” It was great – that feeling that, if Terry Gilliam says that it’s a movie, then it’s a movie, and we’re dong all right. And suddenly the incredible sort of lack of confidence that was plaguing us up to that point just went away, and we carried on and had fun.

    PLUME: There certainly was a restrictive budget to consider when actually writing the script. How much of what you conceived actually made it to the screen?

    GAIMAN: I’d say *exactly* 73% – possibly 74%. I don’t know!

    PLUME: You kept a running figure… That’s good…

    GAIMAN: (laughing) It’s very weird, because you’re not looking at something… Because we built it knowing what the budget was, there wasn’t ever a place where we had to compromise because we didn’t have the money. I’d decide to do a scene in a school or whatever, and Dave would just say, “No, you can’t do that. We won’t be able to afford it.” And he’d come back with a counter-offer. So I could have a school scene or a hospital scene – well, I’ll take the hospital scene, then. So that was right back then and there in the plotting and original first draft of the script stage.

    PLUME: Having seen the film now, how much of what Dave was able to bring to the screen differed from what was in your mind on the page?

    GAIMAN: In 17 years I’ve been writing things that Dave has drawn – I’ve done comics and I’ve done children’s books – all I’ve ever learned from this is that it doesn’t matter what I have in my head when I begin… What Dave will give me will be stranger and more magical, and sort of beyond what I’d ever expected. So there’s a level on which I’m cheerfully writing monkey birds and giant floating stone giants and feral sphinxes with human faces, and griffins and things – and what Dave delivered was not just stranger than I’d imagined, but I think stranger than I could have imagined. But that, for me, is the joy of it. It’s the joy of sitting there at a kitchen table and writing a scene where our heroine gets pushed into a room filled with a bunch of music boxes which then open to reveal dolls who transform her, bit by bit, into a sort of evil, dark princess version of herself, whilst singing The Carpenters’ “Close to You.” And suddenly you’re looking at it on stage, and it’s stranger than I could ever have imagined. So there’s never any feeling in there of disappointment, of going, “Gosh, I imagined this as looking so cool, and what Dave gave me is so much less than that.” It’s always, “Oh my god. This is so much weirder than I’d ever dreamed of.”

    PLUME: Have you been surprised by the reactions it’s gotten so far in the screenings you’ve attended?

    GAIMAN: There’s one moment in the thing where the audience applauds, and that took us completely by surprise. One line of dialogue in a scene that we wound up having to fight for a number of times. It was the one scene that didn’t work in the script as far as everyone was concerned, but we knew that it could work, but it just was odd. It was a scene that after it was shot and then cut together, it didn’t quite work. It was the one scene we had to move it around a little bit in the plot. I saw a video of it in October and it still didn’t work, and then I figured out some lines of dialogue that would get us from the scene before into that scene. We had, in many ways, the coolest scene in the thing – but in other ways just the best thing about it is it’s the scene that the entire end of the movie hinges on. If we cut it out like everybody wanted, it wouldn’t have worked – and we also wouldn’t have gotten our one great moment where people don’t just laugh, they actually applaud… Which none of us expected, and we only learned during the Sundance screening.

    PLUME: In what ways would you approach working on another project with Dave differently? What knowledge would you apply from this experience to the next?

    GAIMAN: I think the thing that I got, and I don’t know about Dave, but I think the thing that I got from this was just not worrying about the arguments. It wasn’t that either of us were scared of arguing, and it wasn’t that either of us hadn’t been through creative relationships where you do butt heads and fight over stuff, but it was simply the fact that in 17 years we’d never had any sort of disagreements. So it was, “Oh! This is strange. I didn’t know we did this.” So I probably expect that more, actually, going into it now, and not worry about it and not be scared of it, and just go, “Okay, well, it’s just part of the process.” The main thing is we both care intensely… So caring is good.

    PLUME: Have you had any initial discussions as to what the form of a follow-up might take?

    GAIMAN: Nope. The only thing we’ve discussed is that we’d like more money.

    PLUME: And a little time to sleep…

    GAIMAN: Oh, it’s the same thing, frankly. Dave, bless him, made a film that looks like it was made with $40 million for $4 million. But where it came out of is Dave sleeping and Dave getting to see his family, and all of those kind of things. So if we did it again… There is nowhere, making this film, where we had enough money to throw money at a problem to make it go away.

    PLUME: So you just threw Dave…

    GAIMAN: (laughing) Yeah, we just threw Dave at the problem! And Dave threw himself at the problem, and he would make things go away. But it was really frustrating for me, knowing that if something went wrong with the computers… Something went wrong at one point and it turned out the electrics in the building they were in just were not in good enough shape to handle the amount of computing and air-conditioning load they were putting on them. And there was nothing that could be done about that. In a normal Hollywood situation, you’d take a few thousand dollars and you’d throw it at that problem, and you’d either get new offices or new electrics, but Dave couldn’t do it. What I’d love to do, having made a film that looks like it was made for $40 million with $4 million, what would be really cool is getting to make something that looks like it was made for $200 million with $20 million. That would be really fun. Just enough to make Dave happy.

    PLUME: I have to ask, being impressed with your film about John Bolton…

    GAIMAN: Oh, thank you!

    PLUME: What is your next directing gig shaping up to be…

    GAIMAN: I hope Death: The High Cost of Living…

    PLUME: Is that finally looking like it will happen?

    GAIMAN: Well, it certainly looks like it. I just handed in the third draft of the script to New Line… except that I just realized – Coming in on the plane yesterday, I just realized something that I need to fix and change. The problem with adapting your own stuff is that it’s much, much harder to… You’re really attached to the way you did it the first time, and then slowly you realize, “No, that’s actually wrong. I need to make this character the same as that character, and throw out that scene, and do a new thing,” and “Oh damn, I’m going to lose that….” And then there’s sometimes even a small feeling of disappointment going, “Oh, the fans would have been looking forward to seeing that scene happen, and now I’m not going to make that scene happen.” So it’s just trying to figure it out for myself…

    PLUME: Do you think you’ve found the middle-ground?

    GAIMAN: I think I certainly have, but I think I may want to do one more draft before we actually get down to shooting. But certainly everything looks fairly like it’s happening, and so that’s happening from a directing point of view. Then on a film point of view, the next thing that’s happening is I have to fly out to Hollywood in a couple of weeks for meetings with Robert Zemeckis and Roger Avary about the Beowulf film. That’s the motion capture movie that we’re making.

    PLUME: You’re sure he’s not just going to do an Old English Polar Express 2…

    GAIMAN: No, no… And what’s fun about Beowulf is, having made Polar Express, Bob is now going, “Okay, we have this technology. We made it look like this in Polar Express, but now we’ve learned” – kind of like MirrorMask, they’ve learned all the things they did wrong, and he also wants to try and do it as an adult film, using that technology.

    PLUME: How comprehensive an adaptation is this going to be?

    GAIMAN: It’s pretty comprehensive. I mean, we go all the way from the beginning of Beowulf through to the final act with him as a 75 year-old king battling this dragon. So it’s the whole thing. We wrote it as a live action script, which Zemeckis fell in love with, and of course now we’re going to have to go back and figure out how we turn it into a motion capture script, because things that would have been difficult, and expensive – like the dragon – are now going to be very cheap. But things that would have been cheap and easy – like two people standing around, talking to each other – are now going to be an awful lot harder to pull off convincingly, so we’re going to have to figure that one out.

    PLUME: And when are audiences going to finally see your inevitable collaboration with Terry Gilliam?

    GAIMAN: I don’t know. I read an interview with Gilliam recently where he mentioned that he’d pretty much given up on Good Omens, but he mentioned that he and Johnny Depp might be interested in giving it one last try. But I haven’t heard that from him – I just read it in an online interview, so god knows if it’s actually true. You know, I love Gilliam. I think Terry is a genius, and I would work with him like a shot on anything he wanted to work on.

    PLUME: It seems like there’s almost too much momentum on something happening between you two that something eventually has to happen…

    GAIMAN: I very much hope it does. Really, I just love getting to work with geniuses, because they make you look good.

    PLUME: It’s interesting how similar Dave’s experiences bringing MirrorMask to fruition are to the process behind Terry’s early films, like Jabberwocky and Time Bandits…

    GAIMAN: Absolutely. And Time Bandits was always the thing that we held on to when we were making this film. You had to have something in mind as the kind of thing that you’d like this to be kind of like. We knew that we were doing something in a particular genre – it’s the genre that Wizard of Oz is in, and the genre that Labyrinth is in, and it’s also the genre of Time Bandits… Although Time Bandits stars a boy rather than a girl.

    PLUME: Do you think there’s a hesitancy, or fear, from Hollywood to actually do a dark fairy tale in the vein of pictures like Oz and Time Bandits – the sort of Grimm route of showing the darkness and the light?

    GAIMAN: I don’t think it’s Hollywood, but I think there is a sort of idea of what a family film should be and what middle America likes – and to be honest, I have no idea if it’s true or not. I do know that there are definitely mothers out there who feel that it is their job to protect their children from anything that might make their children think – or scare them, or stir them, or make them happy or sad, or whatever. And then there are definitely people out there who feel that children happen to be people, and people really like art that makes them think and makes them work, and makes them feel. And I do fall into the latter category.

    PLUME: I was speaking with John Lloyd the other day, the creator of a wonderful UK program called QI that we’re going to be doing a feature about – have you heard of the show?

    GAIMAN: With Stephen Fry…

    PLUME: Yeah. A really great show, that manages to be both educational and truly funny in the same breath. But we were talking about the natural inquisitiveness of children and how they learn, but we got to talking about when babies begin to walk, the natural instinct for a parent is to reach out and keep them from falling if they begin to see their child go over. Come to find out, this is actually not a terribly good thing to do, since children naturally have what is called the “Parachute Reflex”, which is that, if they begin to fall, they will automatically fall to their hands and knees, cushioning the fall. If, however, the parent lunges for the child to protect it, it distracts the child and they don’t go into the reflex and instead just fall. So it’s a matter of…

    GAIMAN: Letting them fall. Letting them learn. Absolutely! It’s like people say to me, “How do you make sure the right children don’t read Sandman,” or whatever. And I think that kids are really, really good at figuring out for themselves what their limits are. Kids self-censor. You’ll never find a kid – until they sort of hit mid-teens and there’s peer pressure and weirdness – you won’t find a kid going and turning on something they don’t want to see, or that they think will be too scary for them or too weird. Kids are very, very good at self-censoring.

    PLUME: Or, if they have a question, asking the question…

    GAIMAN: Yeah, exactly. They ask. And it’s lovely.

    PLUME: What one project currently on the periphery would you love to see come to fruition?

    GAIMAN: On the periphery… God, there are so many of them floating around. There are things I’m looking forward to. I’m looking forward to seeing what Henry Selick’s Coraline actually looks like when he’s finished it. I think that will be enormously fun. I’m so looking forward to actually getting Death rolling, because I think it will be fun. Most of all, I guess I’m looking forward to… I think the next thing Dave and I are going to do is an adult project, and we know what that is and it will be fun doing it – if there aren’t a lot of surprises. But I’m really looking forward to heading off with Dave when, again, all we have is a budget and the idea that whatever we want to do is going to be better and cooler than MirrorMask was, and to see what we come up with.

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  • A Bit Of A Chat with Ken Plume & Benari Poulten 3

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    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 another chat with writer, comedian, and US soldier Benari Poulten, about adult skate, Settlers of Catan, food flair, Desaad, Joh Yowza, teapot tempest, and ambient drugs.

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  • A Bit Of A Chat with Ken Plume & Rebecca Watson 7

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    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 another chat with author, presenter, and skeptic extraordinaire Rebecca Watson, about forever Swatch, Kenny Paris, butter beer, Book It Becca, Cosombies, and Poochie.

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  • A Bit Of A Chat with Ken Plume & Jackson Publick 2

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

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  • A Bit Of A Chat with Ken Plume & Tim Minchin 2

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    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 another chat with comedian/actor/musician Tim Minchin, about Matilda, Judas, smarting, Icarus, pride, and growing up.

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  • A Bit Of A Chat with Ken Plume & Charlie McDonnell 5

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    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 another chat with vlogger, musician, and presenter Charlie McDonnell, about dedication, fear, travel, Boris, and Doctor Who.

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  • A Bit Of A Chat with Ken Plume & Robert Popper 2

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    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 another chat with the creator of FRIDAY NIGHT DINNER and the man behind Timewaster Robin Cooper, Robert Popper, about Thatcher pranks, fleas, injuries, mutt birds, pawns, dinners, and Simon Death.

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