#367 Alan Katz Shares Tales from the Crypt

Speaker 1 0:01

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Jeff Dwoskin 0:28

all right, Angie, thank you so much for that amazing introduction. You get the show going each and every week, and this week was no exception. Welcome everybody to episode 367 of classic conversations. As always, I am your host. Jeff Dwoskin, great to have you back for what sure to be the ghoulish episode of All Time. Alan Katz is here. We're diving deep into Tales from the Crypt. Alan Katz is a producer, writer and podcaster. We're going deep. And that's coming up in Joe's a few seconds. And in these few seconds, Barry Livingston was here last week, meaning I've had all the Livingston brothers on my podcast. That's right. Barry talks my three sons, Ozzie and Harriet, and his decades long career. So many stories. Do not miss that, but right now, do not miss this deep dive, not safe for work, for the most boring conversation, just a warning. Headphones on for some of this, you don't wanna be blaring it around the kids, deep dive into HBO Classic Series, Tales from the Crypt, from the man, Alan Katz, who was there from season three on, kept that show alive. So many stories, and we're diving in right now. All right, everyone. I'm excited to introduce my next guest. He has Tales from the Crypt. He's been to the outer limits. He stepped into Freddy's Nightmares, and now he's the host behind the wildly successful podcast, how not to make a movie, and the donor. Welcome to the show. Alan Katz,

Alan Katz 1:58

how are you? Thank you, Jeff. It is a pleasure to be here. Pleasure to meet you. I usually

Jeff Dwoskin 2:02

don't kind of theme that intro is like I did, but it just accent yours. Just kind of fell into place. It was, well, I've been

Unknown Speaker 2:10

a few places myself. Yeah,

Jeff Dwoskin 2:12

it just, I'm, like, I wrote the first one. I'm like, how far can I push this?

Alan Katz 2:17

Hey, you know, a good metaphor. Hey, you know, until it pops. You blow it up and you blow it up and you blow it up.

Jeff Dwoskin 2:23

You have quite an interesting background and career. It seems like it was very heavily focused in horror ish themes or Yeah, and

Alan Katz 2:33

it's funny, I'm not a horror person. When I came to LA in 1985 I was a comedy guy, and the screenplay that I was taking around town was a thing called down to earth. Yeah, it was a comedy. I grew up in the east, totally East Coast person. I went to school in New York. I went to Vassar. I was a drama major at Vassar, and when I got out of Vassar, I was, I was going to be an actor. I went to one audition, and I felt kind of a fucking idiot trying to make a living this way. I thought I'm going to go be a writer instead. But hey, I was young and really stupid back then. I had a friend from school who Carol young, because who would become an agent in William Morris, and she said, Why don't you try writing a screenplay? And during the summers, I was home, and I was working for a film company that made training films and industrial films. And so I was working as a grip, and I was writing first professional writing, and one of the directors we worked with, he also was a big film guy, and so we started talking about the film script together, and I wrote this thing called down to earth, and I sent it to Carol, and she said, this is speech, I come out and meet and greet people. It's 1985 and I had been to LA once before. I was a New York wannabe, and to me, LA was the stupidest place on the planet, the land of the avocado head. And I went out for a week of meet and greet. And it was June, 1985 you know, June in New York. It's it's hot and humid, and everything smells like this, LA, man, it's the desert. It's dry, it's beautiful, it's sunny, it's great. And everybody was so nice to me. Man, so much smoke getting blown up my ass. It was fantastic. One night, my agent, Carol took me to a movie premiere st Elmos fire, very heady stuff. And then I had that next morning. Often someone said you should take a drive through to pay through Topanga Canyon. And this was 35 years ago, before much built up. Now it's within the city limits. And you go from the 101, heading toward the water and the scent you're driving through the Santa Monica Mountains, they just plunge into the sea or within the city limits. By the time I got to the Pacific Coast Highway, I was completely converted, and I could not wait to move out to Los Angeles. I got corrupted, just like that. And I got really lucky, because one of the first people I met in that first week was a guy named Gil Adler, who became my creative partner for a decade. Gil was trained as an account. He had worked for Sid finger, who did the books and all the Bond movies, among other things. And so Gil understood, as a as a producer, if you have a buck to. Spend on your movie. Don't spend $1 one. You ain't got it. But hey, if you can do this movie for 99 cents instead of $1 and make it look like $1 Oh, better yet, make it look like $1.10 or $1.15 even, then you're on to some and again, it's solving problems, not by throwing money at them, but ultimately, as we began to write and produce together. You wrote your way out of the box. You didn't spend your way out of the box because Gil not just a responsible producer who understands the nuts and bolts of the process, but also has the creative instincts creatively get out of it. Really sucks. When producers bring you into an office and there's a problem, they go, here's the problem. You've solved. It. Go Team much better. Ultimately, Gil and I ended up doing tells from the crypt together. We did Freddy's Nightmares. Then Gil, because he was such a good producer, HBO really liked him to to save projects. He went in to save a project of theirs called Vietnam war stories that was in a terrible problem just spending way too much money and just out of control. And Gil went and solved the problems, and it became won a bunch of awards. And so when after two seasons of tales from the crypt, nobody knew where the production was, it was completely lost financially. I'm jumping all around here. Tales from the Crypt was not developed like a normal TV show. Normal TV shows go through a development process. Tales from the Crypt did not back in that time when tells from the crypt was created. TV and film were two vastly different worlds. TV was here. Movies were over here. People did not travel between them freely like they do today. The occasional Tom Hanks or Robin Williams would make the leap from TV to film, but if you were going film to TV, that meant your career was pretty much done. So these worlds were separate. HBO at that point, was basically movies, and they the first original programming. Was first in 10 dream on which basically were just single camera shows with tits and the word fuck. Nothing extraordinary about them beyond that. And then one day you get these four mega producers, Joel Silver, Richard Donner, Bob Zemeckis, Walter Hill, who approached HBO with the idea, we want to put feature film scope inside little, teeny box. HBO said, Yeah, and that's pretty much what partners did. They went right to work, writing scripts, no development process as to well, okay, what's, what's the show, what's the season, what's, you know, there was nothing. Even the way the Crypt Keeper came about was not through any kind of development process. He was not developed until I got to on the one hand, yeah, they started making episodes that started writing episodes, but they never. Joel found Kevin Yeager, who created the Crypt Keeper puppet. And Kevin found because the Crypt Keeper character in the comic books, in the easy comics, is an old white guy with stringy hair. The Puppet is a separate creation entirely. And so Kevin created the physical puppet. He found John kasir, who became the voice of the Crypt Keeper. But at no point in that process did anyone develop the character and say, Well, okay, so who is this? Who's the character? No one did that. As the script would get written, the writers would throw some lines at the Crypt Keeper. And basically, for the six episodes, the first season, 18 episodes, the second season, for the first 24 episodes, he basically just said, whatever they threw at him, there was no there, there, because these were movie guys and not TV guys. They didn't do any part of this TV show. H tales of the crypt like a regular TV show. When you do a TV show, the first run, or even the second run, the license fee that's paid for to be on the air is not going to cover the cost of production. That's why, in in TV, in the old model, you would look for a what's called a deficit partner, and they were going to pay for what it really cost to make a TV show, and their hope was that they would make their money back when it got the syndication. If it got to 65 episodes, the partners never went for a deficit partner. And so HBO cash flowed the first season and the second season. At the end of the second season, the night, the night before the rap party, the rap party, the executive producers were handed a financial statement from HBO that said you were a million dollars cash in the shitter. Get out your checkbooks, or there's not going to be the third supposed to be the third and final season. So the first thing well that they reach for their checkbooks, and they canceled the rap part the executive producers, and they fired the producers like was their fault, and they hired Gil because Job was minus less a million dollars because, you know that was now going to take and get taken off the budget to pay the executive producers back, see it out, see it to the grave, and that was supposed to the end of it. Well, I was Gil's writing partner. I got hired, in part, to oversee the to be the keeper of the EC flame, to make sure that that brand and that franchise was red lint in in the scripts, because they'd lost track of that, because nobody was minding the store. My other job was going to be to write the Crypt Keeper, and the problem was no one had developed his character, and as I sat down to write him, well, I don't know how you write a cipher, and especially if it's supposed to be funny, I don't know how you write generic funny. You know how that is? There's got to be some kind of you. Point of view in there somewhere, or it's just generic. And so in order to just do my damn job, I had to create him, just so I could write him. Now, I grew up a huge Groucho Marx fan, and so the Crypt Keeper became my grouch you know, I had to fill him with a personality so I could write him nearest one at hand. And being a writer, and I just stole as liberally from me as I possibly could, and I literally filled the Crypt Keeper character with me. And so, you know, when we would sit with John, you know, John's voice is there, and I don't not me in appearance. It's not my voice, but everything he said, and every idea in his head was me. Did

Jeff Dwoskin 10:36

that help him? Also help the Crypt Keeper? John? Oh yeah. Oh, yeah.

Alan Katz 10:40

Because John, you know, suddenly we took the Crypt Keeper to places he hadn't been to before. And so it opened up John's ability to act, to be the character, because we suddenly gave him stuff to be. And so it was for it was a great relationship, great partnership with John. Because sitting, you'd write the script, and when we would sit and record the Crypt Keeper. Yeah, it was understood that we would riff into some, some additional, hey, if we could find some stuff that was better, take the better stuff. But hey, it was fun to sit and riff that stuff together. That was really an incredibly that was, that was great fun. The truth is, writing the Crypt Keeper segments, you know, we would produce them, like three or four I'd go, because it was a production. The Crypt Keeper was six puppeteers working at the at the same time, there was three people working his face with, you know, his animatronic face with servos. One person was the right arm, another left arm, and another person controlled the kind of pitching lean of his body. So I would sit with John, and we would record these things. Writing them was the hardest thing. It was like pulling organs through your nose, like passing a kidney stone the size of a basketball. Yes, decide, okay, he's going to be, he'll he'll be playing golf this week. He'll be reviewing, reviewing movies or cooking or or reviewing, you're talking about wine, his love of wine this week. But then you'd have to create these word lists to begin to look for words that would successfully cryptify and then make them flow in some kind of organized like the story that we wanted him to tell in the setup. And so it was always a kind of a Rubik's Cube and making them work. Just so you didn't want to overwork certain words, because it was really easy to overwork certain words, because it gets exhausting. They go, it's comedy's hard man, someone should write that down. So pills from the crypt didn't end in the third season, and it wasn't, yeah, and suddenly we reinvested in getting stars to do the show. And that happened in that season, and the audience came back. And more importantly, because the Crypt Keeper became a real character. He became the franchise. And more than anything, that's why tales from the crypt, I think, became successful. Yeah, the episodes are important. But couple years ago, M Night yamaline wanted to people wanted to redo Tales from the Crypt for years, and there's a very particular reason why it will never happen. But M Night yamlin, when he optioned the easy comics, he thought he was getting the Crypt Keeper. And it wasn't until he was explained, he was explained to him, No, the Crypt Keeper in in the Tales from the Crypt comics is one piece of IP. The Crypt Keeper in the TV series is a separate piece of IP. Now the problem comes here. One of the executive producers of Tales from the Crypt is a guy named Joel Silver. Now, Joel, I don't know if you know anything about Joel Silver. Joel a great movie producer, an impresario, really, in the old fashioned sense, he's kind of got that sense of it, but a difficult personality, and everyone who works with Joel eventually comes the conclusion that he is such a giant fucking asshole that life is way too short to ever do it again. And the Gaines family, Bill Gaines his family, who owns EC comics, they hit that point with Joel, and they would never make a deal to do anything with Joel ever again. And so Tales from the Crypt. You see comics and the Crypt Keeper are permanently divorced. Where will the children go for Christmas? I don't

Jeff Dwoskin 14:02

know. Let me, let me ask you a couple questions. One is, I see why your passion for for what you brought to the character. Because I understand that when you're creating a character, the importance of having something that you can base it on, because you have to be able to ask it, well, would it have said this or done this, or, you know, and how would it have reacted in the sertram sense, and you have to create that world.

Alan Katz 14:24

You shouldn't be writing the character, the character, if you get to that place, the character is speaking for themselves, and you're just the typist.

Jeff Dwoskin 14:32

The interesting thing about tales from the crypt, you touched on it briefly, is that the Crypt Keeper is so integral to, I think, people's memories or feelings about the show. It's interesting, because when you think back, like on the only other show that I can think of, maybe Alfred Hitchcock Presents with Alfred Hitchcock, but like Twilight Zone with Rod Serling and I would argue that the reason every Twilight Zone reboot failed was. Because they really couldn't recreate the narrator. They couldn't replicate a Rod Serling. It

Alan Katz 15:05

is integral, integral. If the in and the out the episode, you'll tolerate bad, you'll hope for good. It's the weirdest damn thing. It really is. It's Rod Serling is the Twilight Zone. The Crypt Keeper is tales from the crypt, and with the Crypt Keeper who led horror conventions these days, which I love, I love talking to fans. And what I learned very quickly a strange fact for an awful lot of people, tales from the crypt was their gateway drug to horror, and they a lot of people then why they all watched it as kids, some despite the fact that their parents who were watching it told them, No, you are not watching this. But with a lot, a surprising number, they watched it with their parents, because their parents felt like there was something okay about tales from the crypt, which is straight. Well, it was the Crypt Keeper, because even though he was, he was in episodes of things, I know that we he fried brains, he hung people, he shot people, they were skeletons, and in the episodes, we did all kinds of heinous, disgusting things. But somehow the crypt Keeper's persona, that Groucho element, kind of told you it's okay, man. We're just burning down the world together. We're we're all okay, we're cool. We're all being subversive here together. I think there was something in that that created the relationship that people have two tales from the crypt is really emotional and it flows from their childhoods. In many, many cases, it's developmental and elemental. What made

Jeff Dwoskin 16:29

these powerhouse producers and directors even want to do this? I get the idea of it. Well, you know, let's put passion

Alan Katz 16:37

of what was the passion for Tales from the Crypt. And hey, these are guys who color outside the lines. You know, they thought about doing it as a feature film. HBO presented an opportunity to do little feature films. And so that was really what they approached HBO with. This way they didn't have to invest a year or two or three. Could do it in a couple weeks. And so for their perspective, they could get their yayas without having to invest too much of their time and energies. You

Jeff Dwoskin 17:06

came in on Season Three, three with Gil. And then were these Fauci I'm guessing Joel Silver was around the whole time, because you have quite the feeling for him. And

Alan Katz 17:16

gosh, yes, gotcha. And we made the two feature films. We made demon Knight, which was terrific movie, and making tales from the crypt, everyone in my how not to make a movie. Podcast, we talked to everyone that we made the show with, and all of us to a person. And when we look back at the experience of making tales from the crypt, it was one of the highlights of all of our careers, because of who we got to work with, and there was virtually no interference from the network. God of the 75 episodes that I made of tales from the crypt, I think I got three notes from HBO over the whole all those years. Wow, that was wonderful. Yeah, they just, they trusted us to go about our business and make the TV show, you know, one or two. Oh, there was the episode that Billy Friedkin directed called on a dead man's chest. There was a sex scene between Yul Vasquez and Sherry rose. And Billy shot some really, yeah. He really directed them intensely, and they got very into their performances. And then one of the shots in the delis that went to HBO, you'll Vasquez gets up out of bed, and as he turns into the camera, his erect penis box up into the shot, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, and it's in the dailies. And I got a call from HBO. They said, Billy does not think he's going to put an erect penis in this episode, does he? And I calmed them down. No, no, not just the dailies. Relax, relax, relax. But that was the note we got, and we put out that fire in about couple of seconds and went on about our business

Jeff Dwoskin 18:42

were now, were there other kind of parameters that you knew to kind of stay away from? I mean, we gotta, we know, wreck penises is one of them. But, like, is there erect now, I was like, Well, I mean, because it was pretty gory, right? So, I mean, like, there

Alan Katz 18:56

was no no. We could do anything we wanted. The only thing was, it was an erect penis. They didn't show many penises back then. Now, penis, penis, penis, yeah, then they didn't show a lot of penises, and certainly not a super happy penis. They might show some bush, but anything more articulated than pubic hair. They didn't have standards and practices. They just had, there was a line in the sand that I guess they collectively decided they didn't want to cross yet. But other than that, no, there was we could do anything. We could say anything, I think of the episode, what's cooking with Chris, with Christopher Reeve and Bess Armstrong. You know, there's a wonderful one of my favorite shots and everything that we did when Judd Nelson hacks off the two butt steaks from from meatloaf's corpse hanging in the cold locker, you know, and it slaps them down onto the silver tray. I mean, I can tell you a funny story about meatloaf, if you care to hear. I would love to when we shot that, you know, we wanted to have this scene where full body. Hang in there. We wanted to have a shot where Judd's character was gonna whack off a stick. In one shot, you whack off the stakes and you slap them on the tray. We wanted no cutaways. We wanted we wanted it to look as authentic as possible, like, holy shit, they're serving human flesh. That's what we wanted in the shot. To do an art chelated body like that, you need a month. And we had an idea who we wanted the moment that our casting director Victoria burrow suggested meatloaf, that was a yes on a bunch of different fronts. One because I was a fan of meatloaf. Bat out of hell when I was in college, that was like, oh my god, I must have worn out copies of the vinyl record. But it was just hilarious. The idea of I'm casting meatloaf in a show about cannibalism, that's funny all by itself. Oh, come on, come on, come on. And then when he said yes, it was great, but it took a while to get him to say yes. And you know, we had that body at three weeks we, you know, Todd master said, We gotta, we gotta go. We gotta go. And so, well, we had an idea of what meatloaf looked like, a heavy set southern guy. And so we found a body double who we thought matched pretty well, and we cast him, and Todd went to work and created a great body double. Uh, we didn't see meatloaf until the day before he shot. He came in for wardrobe. When he came in for wardrobe, we it was a shock, because he had just finished a crash diet. He had lost 90 pounds, and he was so proud of house, felt he looked now, and he won. And so we were like, oh my god, what are we doing? Then he wanted to see, you know, can I see the body double? And he said, okay, and it, oh my God, that's, that's, that's even worse than what I used to look like. And he was really, he was very unhappy with that. And he understood the production issues, of course, you know, we were going to shoot that body. The problem it presented was that when he walks into the scene, his body didn't look like that. Body was underneath his clothing, so he had to wear a fat suit.

Jeff Dwoskin 21:44

I wrote this down. I was like, because it was like Christopher Reeve in that episode. Yeah, it's a hilarious Crypt Keeper, intro and outro too. But like Christopher Reeves restaurant, for those who want to go check it out, is saved by cannibalism, but it was going bankrupt because his focus was, he wanted to be the first all squid company, all squid restaurant is, like, the whole show starts with him, like saying, squid on a stick. This is gonna be the next big thing. I wrote it? I was like, this is, this is really funny, yeah, Bess Armstrong is in that one. There's a

Alan Katz 22:26

personal joke. There's squid on a stick. I once made a my family made a trip together to Japan, and I got terrible food poisoning from eating a street food, squid on a stick. And so that that was kind of the motivator, or the whole squid

Jeff Dwoskin 22:41

thing. That's really funny. It was nice behind the scenes, well, I guess, and and me looks passed away too. The

Alan Katz 22:47

Yeah, very there's a documentary coming about Christopher that really looking forward to. Christopher was, was lovely. He was he was interesting to work with. When you as an actor get wedded to a character like Superman, and it's such a particular character, and it's had such a particular effect on many of the the men who have played Superman. I know I've had a couple of great conversations with Brandon Ralph about his experience playing Superman. He worked with Gil on Superman Returns. It's a weird piece of casting Superman. All casting a little weird, but casting Superman is especially odd. Batman can be anything, because really, Batman is a guy with a dark past who puts on an outfit, but Superman is very much the way that he's describing Kill Bill in Kill Bill too, before he dies, Bill does it an incredible monolog about why Superman is his favorite superhero, and he describes the fact that, yes, while Batman has to become Batman, Superman just is Superman, Clark Kent is his disguise, and so he has to hide the fact that he's always Superman. So when you go to cast Bruce Wayne, or you're casting Bruce Wayne, when you go to cast Superman. You're casting Superman, not Clark Kent. And so to make that even more challenging, in film, I've cast a lot of actors. I never, ever cast an actor to act. The last thing on earth I want them to do on film is to act. Thing in the theater, yeah, the people in the back row have to see and hear you. You're going to have to act. So that can happen. But the camera, like the microphone, it's right there in your face, and it sees and hears everything you don't need to shout. You don't. So I in my mind, every time they act about to cut it out within a month, it's not going to make the movie. I need actors to be as honestly as they can. They can be from an emotional standpoint, I need them me to be as emotionally authentic and raw and real. I'll give them a different name. We'll put some different words in their mouth, but the emotions that flow, I don't want them to act them. I need them to be them. And that's the craft is learning how to be on cue more or less the. That train monkey, but it's a really hard thing to do. Well, it really, really is Christopher got cast because there's an element of Superman in him. That's why he got cast, and that's why he still sticks in our heads as that character. Because whenever we associate the character, all those qualities in the character, those qualities are also inside Christopher, that's why it works,

Jeff Dwoskin 25:23

right, right, put to your credit and the show's credit, you guys were known for casting people like Christopher Reeve off of their norm. Oh

Alan Katz 25:32

yeah. And that was the fun of working with Chris. But Chris, at the same token, was always keenly aware of the fact that I'm I am not that. I am Superman, but the world saw him as that, and that was going to be bigger than whatever he did on tails from the crypt. And so certain things he could not do or would not do, because he was aware of the fact that his own persona now was tied up in Supermans. It's a fascinating thing to watch. It had to be a very hard thing to experience, because, yeah, it does limit you. You are keenly aware of the fact that you are attached to a franchise that's bigger than you. And part of your attachment is who you are, and therefore what you do in the decisions you make. Yeah,

Jeff Dwoskin 26:14

he was, he was Superman. I mean, it was like, plus it was also that was tied with like it was, like, the biggest movie event ever, right? You'll

Alan Katz 26:23

believe a man can fly. That was the tag. That was the tagline looking at it these days is, are you joking? You joke? Well,

Jeff Dwoskin 26:30

you gotta look everything in contact at one point, Atari, 2600 was the shit. And, I mean, so everything in I

Alan Katz 26:38

was thinking the line from the movie, he catches Lois Lane, and he says, I got you. And she says, You got me. Who got who's got you?

Jeff Dwoskin 26:47

That's fine. So, I mean, you worked with Richard Donner, so Right. So

Alan Katz 26:52

yeah, Dick was each of the partners was very different in their own way. They were really fascinating. You know, they're all great filmmakers. Dick, total Stoner, animal rights guy, the hardcore, you know, he didn't have a whole lot to do with the show. When I was on it, he was doing his movies. One episode had to do with animals, where, suddenly, day before we were to shoot a scene, he suddenly, in theory, there were rabbits that were being tested. There were no rabbits, but there were cages and implied rabbits, and he would not let us shoot that. So we had to write ourselves around that, simply because it was important to him and he, I wish he had time that all better, but we figured it out. Joel, I think I described but Joel, I had some fascinating experiences with Joel. And if

Jeff Dwoskin 27:38

he lives to be good at what he does, I mean, right? I mean, he's done some amazing things. He's been the inspiration for was past

Alan Katz 27:44

tense, because nobody will work with him anymore, nobody that kind of shit. You know, it's, it's, it's of the past. Nobody wants to work with that anymore. And so he's, he's been hoist by his own screaming petard, alas, as happens Walter, a poet, I would say, Walter Hill working with him, watching how he would create shots a poet, especially a poet of the down and out. Zemeckis, Bob zemeck Is everything I know about the art of compromise, the art of collaboration. I learned at Bob Zemeckis his feet, that man understands how to get the very best out of everybody. Quite remarkable, really. He gets everybody on the crew invested in the project, and it really becomes this thing of ours. And that's why the epitome of the Bob zemeck is creative experience is there will be at least a time or two or three, but at least once, where whatever you're doing, and in every Bob Zemeckis movie or episode, there's an impossible shot. There's something where, if you know anything about filmmaking, an example, Castaway Tom Hanks on the desert island, right? There's the shot. He's been looking at the mountain in the middle of the island. And finally he climbs the mountain, and he gets to the top, and he's ultimately, he's going to scope as he gets to the top. We see as he reaches the summit. It's a narrow little foothold, fairly big enough for one person, but he stands there, and the camera is kind of on his shoulder, and his face and his shoulder are in the shot. And he gets to the top of this narrow little promontory, and he stands and he does a, basically a 360 sees that the island is surrounded by reef. And if you know anything about movie making, there's a question that's in your head and it's screaming at you, where's the crew? How are you getting this shot? Piece of equipment as big as Tom is, how are you getting this it's literally an impossible shot. And having worked with Bob, I know when they're on location, they all trudged up that hill to the top, and Bob says, All right, guys, here's what I'm thinking about in damper can happen. The camera is gonna be right here so we can see Bob. And there's, yes, we can see Tom in the shot the whole time. You're gonna hear gonna turn 360 All right, guys, how are we gonna do this? And that's the question, how are we gonna how we how are we gonna do this? Guys? Now Bob is not saying it like an asshole, going, Yeah, you'll figure it out, and I'll be in my truck. Seller. He's got ideas. He is putting the question on the table creatively for all of these crafts people to apply their craft and their experience and their thinking too. And your idea might not work completely, but it might work in conjunction with this other idea that didn't work completely and subtly. The next thing you know, everyone's like I said, they're completely invested in it, and it's the most remarkable thing, not only to witness, even better to be part of, where you get asked the impossible question, and lo and behold, came up with an answer. The collaborative process is awesome to begin with. When it works, it can be horrible when it goes to shit, but when it works, and you all stand and you look at the thing that you made together, there are a few feelings of pride to equal it. Even making something yourself. You can't share that with anybody. It's great. It kind of makes it suck a little bit when you've got a group of people who you sat in the trenches, the bombs going off, and you thought, how much are we going to do this? You did it. Oh my god. There's nothing to equal, then nothing that's amazing that experience. That's why you do it. That's why you want to get onto the mountain, and that's why you want to stay on the mountain, if you would all possibly can, sorry

Jeff Dwoskin 31:11

to interrupt. Have to take a quick break. I do want to thank everyone for their support of the sponsors. When you support the sponsors, you're supporting us here at Classic conversations, and that's how we keep the lights on. And now back to my amazing conversation with Alan Katz, how did the show survive, even before you got there with this many people, without any egos clashing? I mean, those are all like real power. I mean, I'm not saying, I don't know that any of them to be a drama egos person, but it just seems like you put that many very distinct talents in one room. There's gonna be disagreements. Well,

Alan Katz 31:44

Joel, walk point. And so it wasn't like they all had to make collective meetings. Joel, walk point. So Joel was in our face all the time. Joel's people were in our face all the time. And to be Joel's people is your Joel wannabe, which means you're 1000 times worse than Joel, because, man, you're going to swing your little dick around 1000 times harder because it's such a little dick. That's just how the politics are. You endure it in turning the show around and getting orders for a bunch of additional episodes, we also got orders suddenly universal said, Hey, let's do some three crip branded feature films. Everyone was excited about that. And the mandate was do three completely different movies, like an anthology, great, great, great. And so the first one, ultimately, there were some other movies that were competing. This is demon Knight. Demon Knight, terrific script. We got Ernest Dickerson to direct, Billy Zane and Jada Pinkett. Bill Sadler, God love bill. That whole cast, Dick Miller and CeCe pounder and

Jeff Dwoskin 32:44

Bill Sadler was death and Bill and Ted too, right? Yes, yes,

Alan Katz 32:48

yes, yes. He was. Bill was wonderful. There are two times that the Crypt Keeper has worked with another character. In demon Knight, he works with is it demon Knight? No, no, not in demon No. In the beginning of bordello of blood. He works with someone. And in one of the episodes, he works with death, the Grim Reaper, Bill Sadler. And in another one, he works with the mummy, also Bill Sadler. And that was fun working, you know, having the Crypt Keeper work with a live character, Bill Sadler, could do anything. Having Bill Sadler as the Grim Reaper work with the Crypt Keeper writing that was that one was fun to write. That one was absolute fun because, yeah, because you got, you

Jeff Dwoskin 33:25

had repar Tech, so the first movie gets made, and then you're, you've conceived of a, there's a different movie before bordello that you're working on, that you're the assignment,

Alan Katz 33:34

yeah, the assignment was three different movies. And we, when we were making demon Knight, we were already developing the second movie. And we had developed this thing. It was originally called Fat Tuesday, and we had developed it into a script called Dead easy. The mandate was three different movies. Demon Knight is a monster movie by and large. We wanted to do well, neither Gil and I are horror guys at heart. We saw crypt as, all right. We didn't want to get labeled too before it was too late. And we saw this second movie as our chance to show everyone that we weren't just one trick ponies and so dead easy was a psychological thriller. Took place in the swamps outside New Orleans. The villain was this great Harlequin character, a really terrific villain. They said. We spent a year and a half developing the script. Universal liked it. They began throwing money at it. We spent months in New Orleans prepping it. We had hired. We were hired. We were going to hire a young, unknown actress to play the female lead. Her name was Selma Hyatt, nice,

Jeff Dwoskin 34:31

nice. That would have been a good win. Yeah, really and truly.

Alan Katz 34:34

Three weeks before the start of principal photography, Universal Pictures pulled the plug on dead easy. They said, Stop, don't spend any more money. Come home, you're not going to make that movie. And when we got back to the Los Angeles, they stuck a script under our nose. They said, you're going to make this movie instead. It's called bordello of blood. Oh, you still start in three weeks because your production schedule hasn't changed, your release date hasn't changed. You still start in three weeks make this movie. Now, where did bordello of blood? Come from. At about the time that all this was happening, a brand new studio had formed called DreamWorks. DreamWorks was Steven Spielberg leaving his deal at Universal to form a new company, still on the lot at Universal, but he was a separate entity now, and he began to make talent deals. And universal was desperately afraid of afraid of losing another big piece of its talent. My executive producer, Bob Zemeckis, who even was his mentor, universal approach, Bob, I don't know any other part of that deal. I know one deal point. Obviously, the deal was good enough. Bob stayed. One deal point was that universal agreed to buy half a million dollars the first student script that Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale the future guys ever wrote when they were film students at USC. That was it. It was just a way to put money in Bob's pocket as part of a large overall deal. Probably the fact that it helped Bob Gale a little bit, I'm sure Bob a very loyal guy, that probably helped a lot too. That was it. But now universal was sat there with it, spent half a million bucks. They thought, well, we're going to eat this. Wait a minute, Bob's about to executive produce this other movie, this dead easy thing that was $50,000 on that script. Fuck that piece of shit. They'll take it out of their budget. Dead easy is dead guys, you're gonna make bordello with blood instead. It's got Bob's and Mecca and Bob Gale's name. I can't argue with that fact. And so that was why we made bordello with blood. And we were given three weeks to to rewrite it, to cast it, to design it. We ended up making it in Vancouver. Why? Well, Joel, my executive producer, was always at war with the IA, the union that represented our crew who worked for us, non union, until one day they struck us because the union said, guys, you're gonna strike. And so they shut down a TV movie for Fox that we were doing since the union went fuck you to Joel. Joel's answer was, fuck me. No, fuck you. And so when we came back from New Orleans and we were going to make bordello with blood, his idea was, I'm going to make it anywhere but Los Angeles. And so we went to Vancouver just because we weren't in Los Angeles. Now, there was nothing in Vancouver for us. Filmically, there was no reason for us to go to Vancouver. In fact, at the end of the day, it was a very stupid idea because, and again, once we made the decision to make bordello of blood for this entirely inorganic reason, just because of a deal point, nobody, none of us, wanted to make that movie. We went from making a movie that we're all dedicated to. It was our future. In our minds, this was a whole different way that our future was going to go. Instead, we're making a student movie called bordello of blood. Student movie. It was written Bob Zemeckis and magdale would go on to write back to the future. They weren't those guys when they wrote bordello with blood in at USC. I'll give an example one of the challenges of the rewrite of my boss when he was a student. The main character in bordello with blood is a small town detective. Now let's do the math. How much business can a detective do in a small town? Not much he doesn't live in a small town. There's no such thing as a small town detective. That's the kind of thing that a film student would create, because they haven't lived in the world for 10 seconds. But our obligation was to make the character who cannot exist in the world make sense. Well, you can't, and you're supposed to write him and make him funny too. We went to Vancouver in July to shoot our movie. It's a horror movie. Horror movies, the one thing you need lots and lots and lots of because it's a horror movie, is night when you go that far north in July. One thing you don't get a whole lot of is night. It gets shootable dark, 1130 to midnight, and then the first light appears in the northern sky, four o'clock ish, you get four, maybe four and a half hours of shootable dark. We expect a 13 hour day, and when we went to shoot our the climax in a glass church. Stupid, stupid, stupid, well, obviously it was as impossible as everything else that we attempted to do, not in the zemeckian, in the Zemeckis, in McKesson sense of how are we going to do this, guys, but because the the massive hole that we'd shot in our foot was bleeding and getting bigger every day, just every day was stupider than the day before. Right down to the casting. I mean, why did we cast Dennis Miller to this day, I could not tell you he is not who the audience, our audience wanted to see. In fact, Dennis did not want to do the movie either, and when we asked him, when Joel asked him, Dennis said, All right, I'll do it for a million dollars, figuring no one in their right mind would pay Dennis Miller a million dollars to be in a movie because nobody had. Joel said, yes. Well, didn't have a million dollars in our budget for that acting, but half a million dollars. We went to Universal we said, Can we get some help, some breakage here? They said, give a fuck about Dennis Miller? And so we had to take it out of our budget. $12 million budget, you know, we put most of the money into what our audience wants to see make up, special effects. Well, I took half a million dollars out of makeup special effects to pay for an actor. You keep

Jeff Dwoskin 39:47

calling him an actor, I I'm not even sure he was an actor. The I hired him to be an actor to be hired. What I mean is he could pay that much for someone who's really just a comedian who did, oh

Alan Katz 39:58

yeah, and look. He's talented at what he does. He is not a generous human being, and that gets quickly recognized by everyone who works with him, who is not beholden to him. And within about five minutes of arriving in Vancouver, he managed to piss off through and because the reason I go into but he managed to get the entire the rest of the cast hating him so but that was Dennis. I know why Joel wanted Erica oleniak. That is his the thing he wanted was never going to happen. And Erica, it turned out, didn't want to be in the kind of movie that we were Erica. Well, yeah, Eric from Baywatch and from under siege, where she pops out of a cake. Hello, here my breasts. Hey, that's this is part of how your reputation the movie. This is part of why we hired you. Then I hired, we hire you to be in the movie bordello of blood. And you decide you don't want to be that actress anymore. After we've hired you,

Jeff Dwoskin 40:50

you have to evolve. Alan. You have to evolve. Was Goldberg in this movie too. Would she have an uncredited role that I see she

Alan Katz 40:58

has an uncredited role on a pickup day. The actor who was the most problematic, though, was Angie, and it's not a reflection on Angie, who is a lovely human being. Yeah, it was because of why we hired her, and that was not our choice either. That was Sylvester Stallone's choice. At the time that we were shooting bordello of blood in Vancouver, Joel was shooting another movie across the border in Seattle, assassins, starring Antonio Banderas and Sylvester Stallone. Stallone was engaged to Angie at the time, and I guess he heard that we were gonna be making this movie in Vancouver. And one day, on the set of assassins, he approaches Joe and says, Hey, Joe, he may make a movie in Vancouver. And instead of being a responsible executive producer who says, That's a great idea. Sly, but let me check with the guys. Let me see if that could work out. Let me say that would work for them. No, he went, That's a great idea. Sly, it's done. And we begged him not to do this because, you know, Angie, a lovely human being, a very good person, a very talented supermodel, but she really was not an actress, and the villain in your horror movie is kind of an important piece of casting. You know, if you cast, I don't know, Pee Wee Herman as Freddy Krueger, it's just not gonna work out good. It's the casting is really important. We wanted Robin Givens. I think Robin would have been extraordinary Angie. It was. It was a terrible ass because she didn't have the chops for it. It's not her fault. She really didn't have the chops to do it. Joel wouldn't listen to us the loan. Even when he saw the screen test that we did, he didn't care. It turned out he had an ulterior motive, and he intended to use our movie as the consolation prize for when he broke up with her, which is exactly what he did. Two thirds of the way through our movie, we were aware of the fact that he was cheating on her on his set. Our production office heard stories from their production office. There's a very famous story about Stallone that he has never denied. The only question has ever been on which movie set did it take place? And I'm telling you, it took place on Assassins, because I had never heard the story before. Heard it for the first time on my set, on the bordello of blood set, because I heard it from production office. Heard from the assassin production office. Stallone finishes the scene, goes back to his trailer, unaware of the fact that his wireless lavalier mic is still broadcasting to the cart. And there's a young woman waiting for him in his trailer, and she proceeds to blow him. And apparently sly is very particular about how he like his blow he likes his blow jobs. And so now people are gathering around the sound cart listening to him go, yeah, that's where I stroke the shaft, cup the ball. Yeah, cut the ball. Stroke the shaft. The next day he shows up on the set, the entire crew are wearing T shirts that say, stroke the shaft, cup the balls.

Jeff Dwoskin 43:33

Do any of these T shirts exist? Alan, have you ever seen one? Because those would be good to find on eBay or something.

Alan Katz 43:39

They would be worth a small fortune. Now, like I said, he's never denied the story. The question's only ever been on what set I can tell you how I heard the story. It was from my production office. It was from their production office because it happened on their set. I tell the whole story of and there's so much more, so much of the the making of bordello blood in the first season of the hell not to make a movie podcast, which Entertainment Weekly called the best film podcast of 2022 it's the every last bloody, gory detail, humiliating detail, the first season of the hell not to make a movie podcast,

Jeff Dwoskin 44:14

too. I do have a bordello a blood follow up question though, Bob Gayle and Robert Zemeckis, what did they think of the show, the movie? Well,

Alan Katz 44:23

Gail, I don't know. You know, Bob Z was towards the end when we were cutting the show, and towards the end, we were so spent. It was such a it was an emotionally draining experience, because really it was every day was negative. It was a negative creative experience. It just sucked the joy and the creative juice out of us. We were cutting it in Los Angeles towards at the end, and Bob came in to help with the cut, to just he had some ideas. And I watched Bob Zemeckis. I was in the editing room for a little bit of this. Bob created a little seamless the suggestion of something that we. Never shot. He creates the inference. He creates the idea that Angie and Erica had something sexual between them, that something sexual happens between them. And Bob saw a way to do it with bits and pieces of film that we had. He needed one pickup shot, just one body crossing in front of the camera to sell the connection with you know, you didn't want to see the faces. It was just a mid body shot. So with one body in the background and the body crossing in the foreground, just to put them in the same location. So in your head, you thought, oh, they are in the same place. Everything else was single, single, single one shot, one little throwaway shot to connect them. And it's amazing how it works. Anytime you have to spend some time on a film set with Bob Zemeckis or an editing room, all you had to do was just watch or listen. You could learn so much. Bob was great because Bob, Bob had nothing invested. It didn't make any difference to Bob, whether bordello of blood existed or not, whether it succeeded or failed or not. It was neither here nor there. This was a movie he never expected to get made anyway. And so this was all, isn't this hilarious, guys, we made a deal point. Hey, this, this is my deal point movie, from their point of view. It was easy. They didn't spend two seconds in the trenches. We Bob came to visit the editing suite. He had some fun, and he got back to his real life. The movie we had to start when we started because of our release date, and they did not keep our release date. They let the next thing, it was a Halloween. You're going to be a Halloween release. They let it go, and they held us for the following August doldrums. That's like, that's like burial. It's no not in burial. It's seeing a pond in a pond in the middle of the woods. And nobody knows. Just awful. I remember by then when we we did board della with blood, and then we shot the last season of Tales from the Crypt in London, which was an interesting idea, but there was also a large degree of fuck you to the Union. But that fuck you to the Union wasn't as a fuck you to the Union. It was a fuck you to work to our crew, our loyal crew who worked for all those years with us. It was that kind of sucked. But we went to London, and that was great, on the one hand, because we had, Hey, you want to shoot a show that takes place in the castle. There are castles. There are castles. But we were pretty spent by then. I know I was creatively spent on the show, and bordello of blood had finished me. I was done, so I Yeah, the last season, season seven, and tells from the crypt, except for Scott Nimr froze episodes because Scott still gave a shit. Yeah, except for Scott's episodes. I think that's just a whole throw away. Forget about it. My fault, my fault, my fault. But being in England, what was cool? It was a problem, though, because we it was just more stupidity. We not only we moved to England and we thought we could produce the show in exactly the same way. Well, no, we couldn't. So we were clashing with our production culture versus their productive culture. Now, it was funny in places, in American TV, in Hollywood, let's say very important to craft services tape. You know, that's the place where the whole crew is going to graze over the course of the day. It's It's food, and depending upon the budget of the of the movie or the TV show, that can feed a small nation a good craft services table. And that's how it is. Our executive producers, Joel and Bob, and when you when we would go visit their sets, I remember visiting Bob's set. Death becomes her, Oh, my God, that I bet their craft services table had a Michelin star or two. You know, Joel would all. He would come visit our set because, well, we didn't have that kind of budget for our craft services table. That craft services was okay for, you know, Ross, he would refer to it as gum and water, all right, so there's big Hollywood movies. There's ours. We went to England, and we're having a production a meeting with our production manager, Chris, and he's saying, talking about the craft services table, and there really wasn't going to be when he said, so really, the question is, when the when the lads come into the morning, you know, we'll serve them some tea, of course, and coffee for those who want. But the question is, the biscuits, and Gil and I looked at each other, and biscuits, that's an issue. What he said, Well, you know, I think we should just give the lads of biscuit. As he said, if you put the tin down, they'll take more than one. And we sat there blinking at the man like, oh, okay, and I forget what the decision was. Hey, it's your country pal. If you think you can do that to the crew and not have them revolt. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, it's the there were cultural differences that like that took us by surprise, and it shouldn't have.

Jeff Dwoskin 49:31

This is amazing. I have a few trivia points I'm just gonna throw at you. You tell me, go

Alan Katz 49:35

for it. Go for it. I'm trying to give you the inside is dope. I possibly get I

Jeff Dwoskin 49:39

love this. It's down to the biscuit. It's down to the biscuit there, right? So do you know what the show was called in Japan, Tales from the Crypt, yeah. But you know how it was marketed in Japan? I have no idea how. How was it Hollywood nightmare? I guess it was what it was called, dude, yeah, yes. Okay, yes. And then this was an. Interesting thing I read is that the famous tagline, it's it's not TV. It's HBO came from and was born from a marketing campaign for the TV show Tales from the Crypt.

Alan Katz 50:14

It actually there's a story that goes like this during the cast and crew screening a couple of crew in in between the episodes they were, I think the first episode they showed was Dick Donners. Dig this cat. He's real gone, which is fucking amazing. And as they're waiting for the second one to start, one or two the crew members are sitting, and one says, Wow, that's great TV. And the other one says, Not TV, it's HBO. And the two HBO execs in the row ahead turn and they look at these guys, they realize, Oh, my God, we just heard our slogan. But not just their slogan, their culture, and that's really the key. What HBL from the crypt did for HBO is it changed its understanding of itself, and it stopped seeing itself as TV show with movies, but movies inside little box, and it changed their culture and how they looked for material going forward. They always had a sense of you could see this on TV, not just tits and the word fuck, but subject matter, but scope, but they Yeah, even the small shows had to feel like an independent movie that the TV, that TV could never do. And it was a cultural change that allowed them to to be a home for a place something like the sopranos Game of Thrones. Their culture had to change, so that as they began to think about original programming and their brand, it really started with tales from the crypt. And once HBO changed the television landscape, you know, the whole model before HBO became successful at the subscription model. It was all advertising driven. And as I mentioned, syndication back in the old days, I don't, I don't know if they even do it anymore, because it's syndication. Yeah, I guess indication is still out there. But yeah, you weren't going to pay on the first the second run for for it, you had to get to syndication. And syndication worked an ad cycle in syndication is 13 weeks. And so you were going to strip the show five days a week, Monday to Friday. So five times 13 is 65 so in the old days, when you went to pitch a show to the networks, anybody really, it had to be an idea that could survive 65 variations on the theme, because that's how you were going to that's how it could be profitable. If it couldn't be profitable, then we're going to do it. So that's why, back in the day, they didn't do shows with continuous story lines, because people were going to watch them in syndication out of all chronology. And so everything had to be fairly close ended. There might be a couple of two, three parties, but that was rare, because harder to syndicate, they might not be part of the syndication package, because they're a problem. And so when you went into pitch a show, you pitch something that they could do 65 variations on a theme. And so it limited the kind of stories you could tell. HBO broke that mold, because they weren't reliant on 65 episodes. They were subscription. Subscribers were paying for every episode. That really is what nets, net, what Netflix took up, and that's the streaming wars really had to do with an extension of what HBO create. And the whole idea that you could eat a whole show in one fell in one giant gulp. Is, hey, I love the idea creatively, as an audience person, that can be really a compelling thing from a network standpoint, that's deadly, because if the audience can eat the whole thing today, what are you going to serve them tomorrow and the day after? That's really expensive to have finished shows that the audience can watch every In fact, it's, it's a you can't, nobody can afford that. It's unsupportable. And that's what happened. Everyone's thought for two seconds that they might could do this. Well, you'd have to get new new subscribers at such a rate. It's an impossible it's no it's not going to happen. And so that's why it all crashed and burned. And that's why the TV, the TV business right now is, oh, it's in the shitter for 1000 reasons, but the economics are completely screwed up because everyone threw their lot in with streaming, and it was never going to work for economic reasons. And now Netflix owns it, really. Netflix is the God, and they've suddenly realized, you know, we can't afford this either, and so they have advertising platforms. You got to pay extra to do without the ads, everyone else is watching ads, and it's kind of going back to the old model, but without the 65 that's not baked into the design, these stories are all continuous. You're not going to be able to there's indication of a kind. There are places where, you know, there are cable channels, but that's the puzzle that they have to figure out with that. And so the TV business is, is a mess right now. I agree with you 1,000%

Jeff Dwoskin 54:53

and can't thank you enough for sharing all these amazing stories with me. You're awesome. Well, thank

Alan Katz 54:59

you for. Allowing me to just go on a tear here and a tear there. You You are very generous with with allowing me to go off, oh man,

Jeff Dwoskin 55:07

you're awesome, dude. It's love to have you back sometime we could, I'm sure we could dive into a bunch of other stuff. There's all your order we didn't cover, but I do just looking at my notes. I meant to say, instead of say, hey everybody in the BNA. I meant to say, hey boils, boils and cool and cool

Unknown Speaker 55:26

boars and ghouls.

Jeff Dwoskin 55:30

I'm like, Oh, I'm gonna write this down. It's clever. It's

Alan Katz 55:33

hard to think like the Crypt Keeper, trust me, you don't do that to yourself. It well,

Jeff Dwoskin 55:37

I was watching a bunch of them. I'm like, yeah, it's, it's not like, it looked very difficult, but it very good. Very well done, sir. Very well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Alan Katz, thank you very much for joining me. I appreciate you very much.

Alan Katz 55:51

The pleasure was mine, and I absolutely look forward to doing it again with

Jeff Dwoskin 55:54

you. All right, how amazing was Alan Katz, raise your hand if you watch Tales from the Crypt. Raise your hand if you're gonna dive in and try and find all the episodes and watch every episode of Tales from the Crypt, either way, you're a winner. So many great stories from behind the scenes of one of the first really great episodic shows on cable television, Tales from the Crypt from Alan Katz, who was there so many great stories. Check out Alan's podcast. I'll put links to them both in the show notes. And wow, that just flew by. Huh? Huge thanks again to Alan Katz. And, of course, a huge thanks to all of you for coming back week after week. It means the world to me, and I'll see you next time.

Speaker 1 56:35

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Classic conversations. If you like what you heard, don't be shy and give us a follow on your favorite podcast app. Also, why not go ahead and tell all your friends about the show. You strike us as the kind of person that people listen to. Thanks in advance for spreading the word, and we'll catch you next time on classic conversations you