Speaker 1: Look out. It's only films to be buried with. Hello,
Speaker 1: and welcome to films to be buried with. My name
Speaker 1: is Brett Goldstein. I'm a comedian, an actor, a writer,
Speaker 1: a director, a man about town, and I love films.
Speaker 1: As AA Milne once said, I think we dream so
Speaker 1: we don't have to be apart for so long. If
Speaker 1: we're in each other's dreams, we can be together all
Speaker 1: the time. Like how we can also sing a song
Speaker 1: from Aladdin and immediately feel connected by it. That's a
Speaker 1: lovely AA. Every week I invite a special guest. Ever,
Speaker 1: I tell them they've died. Then I get them to
Speaker 1: discuss their life through the films that meant the most
Speaker 1: of them. Previous guests include Barry Jenkins, Kevin Smith, Sharon Stone,
Speaker 1: and even yed Nanbuls. But this week it's the brilliant writer, actor, producer,
Speaker 1: director and creator mister Mark Frost. Head over to the
Speaker 1: Patreon at patreon dot com forward slash Brett Goldstein, where
Speaker 1: you get an extra twenty twenty five minutes with Mark.
Speaker 1: We go deep. He tells a secret about Twin Peaks.
Speaker 1: We talk about the best beginnings and endings. We talk
Speaker 1: about all sorts of Stuff. You also get the whole
Speaker 1: episode uncut and as a video. Check it out over
Speaker 1: at patreon dot com. Forward Slash, Brett Goldsteam, Ted Lasso
Speaker 1: Season two and one is available on Apple TV Plus.
Speaker 1: You can watch the whole thing in one go. Super
Speaker 1: Bob and Soulmates are available on Amazon Prime in most countries,
Speaker 1: so get on with that. So, Mark Frost, this episode
Speaker 1: is genuinely, deeply meaningful to me. Mark Frost co created
Speaker 1: Twin Peaks with David Lynch. It's the show I saw
Speaker 1: when I was far too young, and I would credit
Speaker 1: with making me the man I am today. I have
Speaker 1: loved and obsessed over Mark's work for many, many years,
Speaker 1: and so the chance to talk to him was a
Speaker 1: real honor. We recorded this over zoom a few days ago.
Speaker 1: I think you're going to hear in the first five minutes,
Speaker 1: however excited I am. I'm like a dog running around,
Speaker 1: you know when a dog is just like needs to set.
Speaker 1: I'm so excited I'm talking to But it was so
Speaker 1: special to have this time with someone who has so
Speaker 1: profoundly influenced my brain, and I'm extremely grateful to him.
Speaker 1: And by the way, he was proper wonderful. I think
Speaker 1: you're gonna love this one. So that is it for now.
Speaker 1: I very much hope you enjoy episode one hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty seven of Films to be Buried With. Hello, and
Speaker 1: welcome to Films to be Buried With. It is I
Speaker 1: Brett Goldstein, and I am joined today by a novelist,
Speaker 1: an actor, a writer, a playwriter, a screenwriter, a director,
Speaker 1: a producer, a creator, a legend, a huge hero, a father,
Speaker 1: a son, and a living god amongst us. I can't
Speaker 1: believe he's here. Please, welcome to the show. Is the brilliant,
Speaker 1: it's the amazing. It's Mark Frost. Hello, Hello, Hello, Mark Frost.
Speaker 1: You forgot to mention Championship Pole Vaulter. I know, and
Speaker 1: I'm kicking I'm literally kicking myself right now. What idiot?
Speaker 1: It's usually the first thing on my CB. I don't know,
Speaker 1: Mark Frost. I'm gonna I'm gonna be straight with you. You
Speaker 1: You are in one of three people that I've had
Speaker 1: in this podcast that I've been most excited to talk to.
Speaker 1: One was Barry Jenkis, the other was Brene Brown, and
Speaker 1: the other is you. And in all three of those cases,
Speaker 1: I'm slightly like overwhelmed by I have so many things
Speaker 1: I want to talk to you about. I'm so excited
Speaker 1: to talk to you, but I also I guess I
Speaker 1: firstly need to know what your tolerance is for being
Speaker 1: told you're brilliant. It's one of them, like it is
Speaker 1: in if you're like, please don't tell me I'm a
Speaker 1: genius for an hour because it made me sick, or
Speaker 1: if you love it, just tell me, well, I have
Speaker 1: no aversion to it. I mean, it's it's it's your opinion.
Speaker 1: So I who am I to tell you what to think?
Speaker 1: You know what I mean? All right, listen, you're a genius,
Speaker 1: so look are you? Very kindly said that you'd listened
Speaker 1: to some episodes of this podcast, so you might already
Speaker 1: know this. There are two things that take up most
Speaker 1: of my brain. One is the Mappis and the other
Speaker 1: is twin Peaks. And I've often last I'll drift off
Speaker 1: and so I want to say, what are you thinking
Speaker 1: about it? And I'll go, oh, twin Peaks, like it
Speaker 1: takes up It lives in my brain. If I'm ever sad,
Speaker 1: I'll just look up a new theory on twin Peaks.
Speaker 1: I just love reading any new take fantastic. You built
Speaker 1: this world that and I think you know this, that
Speaker 1: it lives forever in people's minds and they take it
Speaker 1: into all these different realms, and I know you never
Speaker 1: say what it all means to you, as much as
Speaker 1: I might ask you, right, You're never gonna. Well, I've
Speaker 1: always been a big believer that people get to interpret
Speaker 1: your work however they choose. You can't impose your sense
Speaker 1: of what the meaning is or what you were trying
Speaker 1: to say. If they didn't get a bit and get it,
Speaker 1: if they got it in whatever form they think it's
Speaker 1: it works for them, then they got it. So why
Speaker 1: the lily? Have you ever read like a take on
Speaker 1: it or someone's told you, oh, well, twom pixis about
Speaker 1: this and it's made you angry where even no, it
Speaker 1: is definitely not that it can be anything, but it's
Speaker 1: not that once in a great while. I mean, I
Speaker 1: did get a twelve page letter from an inmate in
Speaker 1: a prison in Missouri once about thirty years ago, who
Speaker 1: who explained what he thought it was all about. And
Speaker 1: my part involved aliens and murder, and I think a
Speaker 1: lot of things that might have been personally dangerous for me,
Speaker 1: so I felt that was not the theories I wanted
Speaker 1: to ascribe to. Oh my god. I mean, when you
Speaker 1: create something like this and you send it out into
Speaker 1: the world, you can't control how people are going to respond,
Speaker 1: but you can certainly try to weed up the people
Speaker 1: who feel that you've been speaking directly to them through
Speaker 1: a tinfoil hat. And maybe it's best that we not correspond.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm worried I might be by today's people.
Speaker 1: I mean, I Frett did not exaggerate when I do
Speaker 1: say I've talked about this in like injuries. I think
Speaker 1: it's a defining, defining moment in my life. And my
Speaker 1: sister is I was nine years old. Me and my
Speaker 1: sister had been out somewhere and we came home and
Speaker 1: my dad was on the sofa and the TV was on,
Speaker 1: and we said, Dad, dad, whatever, and he went just
Speaker 1: shut up, sit down. And it was like one minute
Speaker 1: into the Twin Peaks pilot, as we were nine and eleven,
Speaker 1: and we watched it and it was the greatest thing
Speaker 1: we've ever seen, and it scared the absolute shit out
Speaker 1: of us. And I was supposed to me and my
Speaker 1: sister had shared a room, and I was supposed to
Speaker 1: finally move and have my own room. But we were
Speaker 1: so scared. I think it was meant to be my
Speaker 1: first night. Oh man. We were so scared that I
Speaker 1: brought my mattress from my room and just slept next
Speaker 1: to my sister's bed and stayed there until I was eighteen.
Speaker 1: I mean, well, we really helped, helped in your formative years,
Speaker 1: you know, your revolutionary path. I'm happy to hear that
Speaker 1: it slightly did. I think it's in filmed. Much of
Speaker 1: my thinking on a lot of stuff. Can I as
Speaker 1: about the Return to Inpeace? The Return which is an absolute,
Speaker 1: staying cold masterpiece. I've read a lot of what you've
Speaker 1: said about it, but I'm curious. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of shows that came back. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: things that came back. I won't name them. And there
Speaker 1: lots of things where people are like, oh, bring back
Speaker 1: that thing we love, and it came back, and they
Speaker 1: brought back the thing you loved in the way you
Speaker 1: wanted it, and for some reason it was disappointing, and
Speaker 1: it was It's like, it's like pet cemetery. You know,
Speaker 1: you brought back something from the dead, and if you're
Speaker 1: trying to if you're trying to recreate it in its
Speaker 1: original form, it's still dead. It becomes quite horrifying, I think.
Speaker 1: So my feeling was we had an opportunity to tell
Speaker 1: a story that was about the most fundamental issue we
Speaker 1: all face, which is the passage of time. You can't
Speaker 1: fight this process. And if time is a river, then
Speaker 1: your boat's going to be in a different place twenty
Speaker 1: five years later, and we all were, as we discovered
Speaker 1: when we all got back together, everybody was in a
Speaker 1: different and I wanted the show to reflect that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I didn't want to do the cozy tropes that
Speaker 1: people freaked out about thirty years ago. I wanted to
Speaker 1: jolt them again, you know, and show them the world's
Speaker 1: changed and we've all changed, and let's see that on screen.
Speaker 1: It was a unique opportunity, and I felt that was
Speaker 1: really the theme of the piece was too this is
Speaker 1: what life does to you, and it does different things
Speaker 1: to different people, but it leaves no one unchanged. So
Speaker 1: that was fundamentally what I thought we were trying to
Speaker 1: get at. That's amazing, but I was saying, I was like, weirdly,
Speaker 1: in its own way, you did do exactly what you
Speaker 1: did with Twin Peaks originally, which was give people something
Speaker 1: they'd never seen before, Like that was the thing. It
Speaker 1: was like, why we love Twin Peaks. In the fast
Speaker 1: it was like, wow, this is blame in my mind,
Speaker 1: and you did it again by not doing the same. Yes,
Speaker 1: the very first conversation we had about it when I
Speaker 1: went back to David and I said, I think we
Speaker 1: have an opportunity to do this and to get europe
Speaker 1: conversations after that initial meeting to pinpoint what we were
Speaker 1: going to talk about and what we were on about.
Speaker 1: And it had nothing to do in many ways with
Speaker 1: the old Twin Peaks. It was Yeah, it was set
Speaker 1: in the same place that had many of the same people,
Speaker 1: but their concerns had changed, the world had changed, and
Speaker 1: the show needed to reflect that, so we just went
Speaker 1: for it. There's a couple of things I would like
Speaker 1: to ask you, which are more I hope not just
Speaker 1: specifics Twin Peaks, because I'm sure you won't answer them
Speaker 1: if they're about that. But in Twin Peaks, there's certainly
Speaker 1: the suggestion of evil as a outside force, as a
Speaker 1: sort of spiritual thing that can take over someone. Is
Speaker 1: that how you feel about evil? I always read these
Speaker 1: theories that is not a spirit and is just I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm going to put a heavy, heavy spoil there warning
Speaker 1: on this episode, but so I read these things like,
Speaker 1: to me, it was always was possessed by But then
Speaker 1: I've read lots of things going now, that's just how
Speaker 1: people would rationalize it when they're in these Do you
Speaker 1: believe that evil is an outside force that can I've
Speaker 1: attate someone or do you think it is just within man?
Speaker 1: I think it's both. I've always described evil as a
Speaker 1: lack of something. It's a lack of human empathy. It's
Speaker 1: a lack of understanding that other people are autonomous beings
Speaker 1: with their own course in life. But if you are
Speaker 1: sociopathic or schizophrenic or psychotic, which can be caused by
Speaker 1: many of the things we just talked about, child abuse, neglect,
Speaker 1: severe mistreatment by your parents, I mean, that's usually what
Speaker 1: leads to this. That's evil. That is a fundamental human truth.
Speaker 1: To mistreat your own child is a great and almost
Speaker 1: unforgivable evil, and it's often what results in these people
Speaker 1: who are evil themselves. I mean, I think we've had
Speaker 1: ample evidence of that in this country in the last
Speaker 1: five years. When you see a leader rise to the
Speaker 1: top who is himself profoundly ill, which I believe that
Speaker 1: man was. It infects people who are vulnerable, and it
Speaker 1: has done almost incalculable damage to our social fabric here
Speaker 1: because putting someone like that in a position of power
Speaker 1: is so profoundly effective to vulnerable people who don't know
Speaker 1: any better or who are susceptible to that kind of thinking.
Speaker 1: So it's a chicken and an egg, and it's hard
Speaker 1: to know which is which. But evil almost never sprouts
Speaker 1: without that kind of provocation or origin story. I taught
Speaker 1: in a prison for a year when I was a playwright.
Speaker 1: I taught writing to inmates, and I spent time talking
Speaker 1: to these guys. And you don't talk about what did
Speaker 1: you do? Why are you in here? Unless they volunteer.
Speaker 1: It's a kind of an etiquette it's probably best that
Speaker 1: you adhere to. And so there was a guy in
Speaker 1: the class who very quiet turned into assignments, never spoke
Speaker 1: in class. It wasn't a bad writer, actually had some
Speaker 1: insightful stories. And I was very curious about him because
Speaker 1: he was obviously intelligent and the middle aged guy. And
Speaker 1: as I was about to leave, when the six months
Speaker 1: was up. I was very curious. I finally did break etiquette.
Speaker 1: No ask someone else, what did that guy do? And
Speaker 1: he was a former repairman, radio and television repairman, and
Speaker 1: he murdered his entire family. Oh my god, Wow, you'd
Speaker 1: never have known it to look at him. He was
Speaker 1: as mild mannered as could be. It could have been
Speaker 1: a momentary madness. It could have been there was something
Speaker 1: truly dark and evil inside him. I don't know, but
Speaker 1: there he was serving on five life sentences. And you
Speaker 1: walked away from that going there's something at work here
Speaker 1: that seems to be a central theme of the human experience.
Speaker 1: If you don't adhere to social norms and you feel
Speaker 1: you were above the law, you're going to run a
Speaker 1: foul of the system. And the system has to self
Speaker 1: protect it itself against that kind of darkness. So it's
Speaker 1: very naughty. It's a very thorny human problem, and we
Speaker 1: haven't solved it yet for a long way from doing it.
Speaker 1: Are you telling me that? And about talking about the
Speaker 1: recent president that the woodsman with the radio, that's Trump
Speaker 1: with TV And in a way, I mean, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: it's all grist for the mill. We never talked about what.
Speaker 1: We were writing it before he'd come to power, and
Speaker 1: we were shooting it, you know, the year that he
Speaker 1: was elected. So in a way we kind of anticipated
Speaker 1: some of these things. But if you've got your ears
Speaker 1: tuned to the right frequencies, you know, you can you
Speaker 1: can pick these things up. When you're storytelling and you
Speaker 1: are a Canarian in the coal mine, you want to
Speaker 1: just you know, put out bulletins. Everyone's spoiled. Let's say beware.
Speaker 1: You know, danger had there be dragons, you know those
Speaker 1: areas the maps they used to fill in. That's that's
Speaker 1: where we are right now. I've obviously a lot of
Speaker 1: reading on your staff, and there's a book Conversations with
Speaker 1: Mark Frust, which is very good. And then you talk
Speaker 1: in quite an optimistic way about in the grand course
Speaker 1: of history, we are always in a better place than
Speaker 1: we were. But then you say, these last four to
Speaker 1: five years have been traveling, How do you feel given that,
Speaker 1: I think you are tuned to these vibrations, where do
Speaker 1: you how do you feel right now at this current
Speaker 1: point in history? It's up to us, you know. That's
Speaker 1: That's what I always feel about the human evolution. I
Speaker 1: don't believe that we're being guided by benign supernatural forces.
Speaker 1: It is truly a world of people with free will,
Speaker 1: and it's up to us to write that ship and
Speaker 1: set it in the right direction. And we've always been
Speaker 1: able to do that up until now. We're now facing
Speaker 1: much greater consequences to our behavior than we have in
Speaker 1: the past because of the number of people, the size
Speaker 1: of the civilization that we've created, and there's plenty of
Speaker 1: people who were saying, Okay, we got to do something.
Speaker 1: Now there seemed to be a disturbing number of people
Speaker 1: who say, why change. You know what works for us.
Speaker 1: We're making plenty of money, and they're not thinking beyond
Speaker 1: their own generation, you know. And that's that's the thinking
Speaker 1: that we have to instill in people if we're going
Speaker 1: to survive. I think that's the and storytellers should have
Speaker 1: some small part and not preaching to people, but showing
Speaker 1: them what those consequences might be. I don't think there's
Speaker 1: any it's any accident that we've had a lot of
Speaker 1: dystopian stories being told, including apocalyptic ones. That's in the air,
Speaker 1: and it's a possibility. So here we are very interesting.
Speaker 1: The one other thing, well, actually, maybe we'll come to that.
Speaker 1: But do you know what, I've just lived to the
Speaker 1: nights I made for this, and I've just seen something
Speaker 1: and I'm like, I forgot to tell you something. Oh no,
Speaker 1: something I should have said. That's an idiot for us.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, I'm literally I was excited about
Speaker 1: me and you and I forgot. I have to tell
Speaker 1: you this quite important, quite important thing. I'm gonna I
Speaker 1: feel like I had died. I'll just say you've died.
Speaker 1: You've died, Mont prest Well, I knew that. Oh okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah that was oh yeah, no, I've been living with
Speaker 1: that thought in my mind really for most of my life.
Speaker 1: So it's it's all a dream. It is a dream.
Speaker 1: It is all a dream. But but I died in
Speaker 1: a way that was very and who was the dreamer?
Speaker 1: So you know, I've been working on this what I
Speaker 1: felt really strong original screenplay for quite some time, just privably,
Speaker 1: my own passion project. And I finally finished it and
Speaker 1: I showed it to my agents and they were they said, well,
Speaker 1: this is very ambitious. You know, I don't know what's
Speaker 1: going to happen, but you know, good on you for
Speaker 1: doing it. And they send out on a Friday Saturday morning,
Speaker 1: I got a call. You know, we've had four studios.
Speaker 1: I want to do this. Uh. Spielberg and Scorsese are
Speaker 1: both in. They say Leo wants to do it, Brand
Speaker 1: wants to do Jennifer wants to do it. And the
Speaker 1: shock killed me. Boy. So here we are. Wow. I mean,
Speaker 1: you are the first presentive died of shock and uh
Speaker 1: and I love it. I mean, I'm so sorry, just instant.
Speaker 1: Was there anyone around at the time when you were
Speaker 1: just in your office? No, I was just I was
Speaker 1: just on the phone. I mean that's how they found me.
Speaker 1: They found me with the phone still in my hand,
Speaker 1: a big smile on my face. I mean I was,
Speaker 1: you know, I was at the best mood when it
Speaker 1: actually hit. But yeah, you gotta go, You gotta go.
Speaker 1: Do you worry about death? Not as much as I
Speaker 1: used to. I guess you know, if you live long enough,
Speaker 1: and you know a lot of people who have died.
Speaker 1: And I've also this is odd. This might not surprise
Speaker 1: you about me, but I've written a number of things
Speaker 1: about who were alive at one point or another, and
Speaker 1: during that process, on three separate occasions, that person appeared
Speaker 1: to be in a dream and encouraged me to keep
Speaker 1: doing what I was doing. Yeah, that one was the
Speaker 1: book the greatest game ever played. Yeah, I had about
Speaker 1: you know, a wonderful young man in Francis we met
Speaker 1: who became the first American born player to ever win
Speaker 1: the US Open and the first amateur to do it.
Speaker 1: Changed the course of the sports history. It was really
Speaker 1: the big bang of the startup golf. He came to
Speaker 1: me in a dream and said, yeah, keep going and
Speaker 1: affirming that what I was on about was true. I
Speaker 1: had the same experience with two other projects, So that's incredible.
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe that means I need medication, but these
Speaker 1: things do happen to me, and I've been aware. I've
Speaker 1: had experience with a ghost which was intensely creepy and
Speaker 1: we terrifying us to tell me that. Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: working at a wonderful regional theater called the Guthrie Theater
Speaker 1: in Minneapolis, where I was a high school intern and
Speaker 1: appeared on all sorts of mainstage productions and really got
Speaker 1: my training and got my start in the business from
Speaker 1: that point on. And as you probably know, most theaters
Speaker 1: are considered some of the most haunted places. That's why
Speaker 1: we leave the ghost line on stage every night, they
Speaker 1: actually leave a solitary bulb lit. This is a tradition
Speaker 1: really around the world in theaters. I think it's something
Speaker 1: to do with the intensity of feeling that people have
Speaker 1: when we're part of that theater, and when they die,
Speaker 1: often tragically or suddenly. They say these spirits are drawn
Speaker 1: to places where they were most connected. So there was
Speaker 1: a rumor there was a ghost in the guthrie, and
Speaker 1: the stage hands one night said, look, you know a
Speaker 1: few of you guys in the program, We're going to
Speaker 1: go out on stage tonight after everybody's gone the doors
Speaker 1: are locked after midnight and set up a Wuiji board
Speaker 1: in the middle of this thrust stage. The rumor was
Speaker 1: that an usher who had worked at the Gut three
Speaker 1: during its early years and had been the happiest. I
Speaker 1: guess that he had been well there, had committed suicide
Speaker 1: and his ghost supposedly was still in the theater. His
Speaker 1: name was Dick Miller, and some of the people that
Speaker 1: we knew had known him, So oren't we go. We
Speaker 1: tried out the widge board. I'd never even played with
Speaker 1: one before, and I was one of three people who
Speaker 1: put our hands in a little because they call it
Speaker 1: a planchet, the thing that moves around and spells. And
Speaker 1: as we started to ask questions, something was moving this
Speaker 1: thing around. It wasn't me, and it was spelling out
Speaker 1: somebody was writing down letters, and it was spelling out
Speaker 1: things as it got going faster than we could spell,
Speaker 1: with no stop between words. So it became quickly apparent.
Speaker 1: And two of the other people were kids my age.
Speaker 1: They weren't the stage hands who were there to try
Speaker 1: to direct this or minis or scare us. And he
Speaker 1: identified himself as Dick Miller, and we said, goose bumps,
Speaker 1: you know you're you're pretty freaked out. So where are
Speaker 1: you now? And he spelled out top now the Guthrie
Speaker 1: at a second stage called the Other Place theater, which
Speaker 1: was a few blocks away in an old and everybody
Speaker 1: called it the gop. It was the acronym for it.
Speaker 1: So we thought, do you mean the Other Place? And
Speaker 1: he said no, And at that moment we heard footsteps
Speaker 1: in the catwalk above our heads, and the next thing
Speaker 1: I remember is standing outside the theater literally fled. It
Speaker 1: was one of the freakiest things you could possibly imagine. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that was pretty wild. That was pretty wild. I never
Speaker 1: touched a Wuiji board again. I just those things are
Speaker 1: not to be trifled with. So you know, some of
Speaker 1: my the the stuff in in your work and Inpatidianto Impaques,
Speaker 1: the black lodge in the Red Room, and these facts
Speaker 1: of another place and spirits in the thin line between
Speaker 1: space and time. And is that something you feel, well,
Speaker 1: it's it's something that I feel as possible. And you know,
Speaker 1: there's a wonderful phrase, if it's an Irish phrase of
Speaker 1: places that are that have qualities like what you're describing,
Speaker 1: are known as thin places, saying that the veil is
Speaker 1: quite thin between here and there. And I've been in
Speaker 1: places like that and felt it. There's an abbey in
Speaker 1: the north of England in Whitby, which was actually the
Speaker 1: abbey that was the inspiration for bram Stoker's Arrival of
Speaker 1: Dracula in the North of England, and I visited it
Speaker 1: when I was researching my first book, The List of Seven,
Speaker 1: and I felt it there. I felt something was going
Speaker 1: on there. So you know, you, I guess I'm what
Speaker 1: you would call a sensitive in that sentence, is that
Speaker 1: when I've been up against these things and I was
Speaker 1: shooting years ago in an old nineteenth century insane asylum
Speaker 1: outside of Montreal. We were using this as a location
Speaker 1: for the show I was doing, and there were parts
Speaker 1: of that hospital where they had kept you know, the
Speaker 1: violently criminally insane that you just felt a darkness you
Speaker 1: couldn't even approach. It was overwhelming, and anybody, everybody in
Speaker 1: the crew just said, I can't go in that room.
Speaker 1: There were there. So I've had experiences enough like that
Speaker 1: to know, yeah, there's something going on there. So do
Speaker 1: you with all there's things that you feel in think,
Speaker 1: do you think there's enough to life? Do you what
Speaker 1: do you think happens to you when you cross? I
Speaker 1: feel that something survives, and I don't know what it is,
Speaker 1: and I don't think we're our brains have been a
Speaker 1: bandwidth to understand what it might be. This is why
Speaker 1: I feel that most religions, which trying to conquertize the ineffable,
Speaker 1: you know, the things that can't be described, are inadequate
Speaker 1: to the town. The experience I had watching in two
Speaker 1: thousand and one the first time was much closer to
Speaker 1: a genuine religious experience for me, because I felt it
Speaker 1: hinted at something like that, and it was smart enough
Speaker 1: not to say and that's because it's ABC and D.
Speaker 1: It simply gave you the feeling of what that might
Speaker 1: feel like. When cur DeLay's character is in that room
Speaker 1: at the end and you see him age through his
Speaker 1: entire life in a span of seconds, you realize he's
Speaker 1: in the presence of something much larger than we are.
Speaker 1: So I assume that whatever it is, it is of
Speaker 1: that magnitude, it's beyond our comprehension. And if we can
Speaker 1: get like a little tiny, just a weak signal of
Speaker 1: it and believe that that might be a clue that
Speaker 1: could lead you to some sort of understanding about it.
Speaker 1: So that's been a lifelong pursuit for me, is to
Speaker 1: try to understand this, because, yeah, death is terrifying when
Speaker 1: you're young. I mean, you think, what do you there's
Speaker 1: an end to this wonderful experience I'm having. You've got
Speaker 1: to be kidding me. And but that's what makes it precious,
Speaker 1: you know, so it becomes part of your existance, and
Speaker 1: as you get older, you know, the Tibetans say, if
Speaker 1: you want to have a good death, you'd best make
Speaker 1: a friend of your ending and and prepare for a
Speaker 1: good death, because that's, apparently, in their worldview, a very
Speaker 1: important part of the process. Oh wow, well you prepared well,
Speaker 1: my friend. Because there's a heaven. You're absolutely welcomed in
Speaker 1: you get here. I was welcome, no questions asked. They
Speaker 1: don't even ask for id eat. They're like, you come
Speaker 1: with me right in the thank you like getting that
Speaker 1: TSA pass at the airport. Yeah, you're pre pre checked,
Speaker 1: preche It's filled with your favorite thing. What's your favorite thing?
Speaker 1: My favorite thing would be dogs. It's well, this heaven
Speaker 1: is made of ducks. I mean you you. The couches
Speaker 1: are made of dogs, living dogs. They're they're strong and
Speaker 1: they can take it. They lay them, but you sit
Speaker 1: on them. The wolves are dogs. Everything is dog. You
Speaker 1: not the food. The food is served on dogs and
Speaker 1: the dogs. But we're not having dogs, having no one's
Speaker 1: The dogs are very, very happy and they jump with
Speaker 1: over you. They're delighted to see you and they're they're
Speaker 1: very they're great. But the dogs in heaven, as dogs are,
Speaker 1: want to do they want, and they're obsessed with you,
Speaker 1: and they want to know about your life. I want
Speaker 1: to know everything. They want to go for a walk
Speaker 1: if you talk about everything, but they want to know
Speaker 1: about your life through films. These are film being dogs, sure,
Speaker 1: And the first question they ask is what is the
Speaker 1: first film you remember seeing? Mark Frost. Well, it's quite appropriate.
Speaker 1: I'm five years of old and my favorite aunt takes
Speaker 1: me to Grammond's Chinese Theater, which is a wonderful place
Speaker 1: to see your first films. Yeah, for those listeners who
Speaker 1: haven't been there, I mean it's a world famous yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's it's a palace inside and it's it also
Speaker 1: has the feeling of a temple, a holy place, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a kind of consecrated feel. And we walked in.
Speaker 1: The movie had just started, so it was already pitch Black,
Speaker 1: which was very daunting, but it was like entering a
Speaker 1: mystery school. I felt, this is frightening, but I really
Speaker 1: like it. And we walked in and the and the
Speaker 1: movie playing was I'm sure you know it a Disney film,
Speaker 1: Sean Connery's first starring role, Darby Ogill and the Little
Speaker 1: People nineteen fifty nine. Yeah, it's it's Disney working in
Speaker 1: that minor key of Irish whimsy, as the post titus
Speaker 1: to say, with a wee bit of magical Shenanigans, you
Speaker 1: know that. And it's about an old souse in a
Speaker 1: village who stumbles upon the Lepricun king, King Brian, and
Speaker 1: he steals his gold, as you know your want to
Speaker 1: do when you run into the lepricon king, and it
Speaker 1: creates all sorts of havoc in the village and it
Speaker 1: puts his daughter jeopardy. And there are truly terrifying scenes
Speaker 1: of ban cheese and a kind of spirit carriage driven
Speaker 1: by these wild horses, and it scared the pants off me.
Speaker 1: But I came out of that experience going into the dark,
Speaker 1: being terrified, having a happy ending coming out and understanding
Speaker 1: this was a rite of passage and I have I
Speaker 1: now am a member of the church. At the cinema,
Speaker 1: that was that. That was my induction and uh and
Speaker 1: I felt, yes, That's what I'm going to do with
Speaker 1: my life. That's incredible. Did you say then, did you
Speaker 1: say that that's what I'm going to do? I said,
Speaker 1: I want to see it. I want to see this again,
Speaker 1: and I want to go to another movie tomorrow and
Speaker 1: I want to go to have a movie every day
Speaker 1: this week. And you know, I didn't have the vocabulary
Speaker 1: to fully express it. It was, It was it exactly,
Speaker 1: that was. That was when I was seven, that connection, Um,
Speaker 1: so that was that was. You couldn't ask for a
Speaker 1: better introduction to film and the high temple of the
Speaker 1: magic of the movies. That's really wonderful. So what is
Speaker 1: the film that made you cry the most? And are
Speaker 1: you a crier? And I'm interested in this because your
Speaker 1: work is very emotional. There's a thing about all the
Speaker 1: versions of Twin Peaks and all the things you've done,
Speaker 1: there's no I think maybe another reason it is timeless
Speaker 1: is there's no irony and no one's like being cool, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: people cry in Twin Peaks. They're really crying. Everyone feeling
Speaker 1: everything they are feeling at one hundred percent and there's
Speaker 1: no caveat for that. It's like, this is emotion, this
Speaker 1: is truth, This is straight down in the middle. And
Speaker 1: so for you, what is that for you? Well, that's
Speaker 1: how life is. You know, you have got to experience.
Speaker 1: If you're not experiencing the full range of emotions in life,
Speaker 1: you're you're listening to Instead of the full stereophonic sound
Speaker 1: you could be having, You're you're listening to a little
Speaker 1: transistor radio. You know, irony is that I think often
Speaker 1: a protection against feeling emotion, and it's it's it's it
Speaker 1: tends to be. I think of an adolescent stance that
Speaker 1: we take because emotion frightens us, and I think if
Speaker 1: you don't grow past it, you're limited in some way.
Speaker 1: You need that the full range of human experience and
Speaker 1: emotion is one of the vehicles for that. So I've
Speaker 1: always felt I want to make people laugh, I want
Speaker 1: to make a cry, and if I make them think,
Speaker 1: that's that's a tertiary thing. But if you don't move them,
Speaker 1: they're not going to give a shit. They're not going
Speaker 1: to remember it, they're not going to say that thing,
Speaker 1: whatever it was, made a difference in my life. And
Speaker 1: I understood that kind of early on because of the
Speaker 1: things that moved me. So the movie that really made
Speaker 1: me cry the most, and I am a crier, particularly
Speaker 1: at movies that that were. I don't like to be manipulated.
Speaker 1: I don't like tear jerkers per se. It's like I
Speaker 1: don't want to kill an animal to make people pride,
Speaker 1: you know. It's like Old Yellow really pissed me off,
Speaker 1: you know. But if it's legit, if it's part of
Speaker 1: the story Cinema Paradiso. I mean, the first time I
Speaker 1: saw it, didn't know a whole lot about it. I
Speaker 1: didn't know the director's work. It's so fundamentally about the
Speaker 1: experience of the movies and this marvelous relationship between that
Speaker 1: young boy and Philip Dore's projectionist, and how he kind
Speaker 1: of outgrows the relationship, the sadness of leaving a youthful
Speaker 1: mentor and going on to the big city and having
Speaker 1: a career and losing touch with his emotions and having
Speaker 1: a painful divorce and having success in the world but
Speaker 1: feeling unfulfilled. And he comes back when the projectionist dies,
Speaker 1: and you know the scene I'm talking about. At the
Speaker 1: very end, they had a rule in the town that
Speaker 1: people were allowed to see scenes of people kissing, so
Speaker 1: he was required to cut all those scenes out of
Speaker 1: the movies that they were showing, and he finally finds
Speaker 1: the reel of the compilation of all those scenes. I mean,
Speaker 1: I could cry just thinking about it. And it's that
Speaker 1: incredible Morricone score. It's maybe he's there. I think he's
Speaker 1: the greatest film composer, and that maybe his brain score.
Speaker 1: I cried for half an hour that scene played up.
Speaker 1: Couldn't leave the theater. The lights came up and I said,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I need to stay here for another twenty minutes.
Speaker 1: It devastated me because it addressed all these concerns. It's like, okay,
Speaker 1: people have to feel something. If you don't feel what
Speaker 1: you're feeling, it's going to make you ill at some level.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that that scene had everything for me. And
Speaker 1: it's your two it's your two touchstones is the Church
Speaker 1: of cinema and the passage of time. Yeah, exactly, beautiful.
Speaker 1: What's the film that scared you the most? And you
Speaker 1: you that means, I mean you make You've scared me
Speaker 1: more than yeah, and I don't, I don't. Yeah. There
Speaker 1: are things that as a kid, you know, remember I'm
Speaker 1: growing up in the sixties. It's it's black and white
Speaker 1: television till like nineteen sixty four. And the way you
Speaker 1: learned about things, there was no Internet, it was like
Speaker 1: this sort of it was. It was weiji parts. That's
Speaker 1: how you've got all your information. People would say, you
Speaker 1: gotta see this, you gotta see that. My brother saw this.
Speaker 1: My brother saw that, and there was this thing going
Speaker 1: around about this picture called Psycho that you know that
Speaker 1: we heard. Oh my god, you have to see this,
Speaker 1: you can't. They won't let you in the theater. So
Speaker 1: finally it shows up on television, probably sixty five, sixty six.
Speaker 1: I don't know how that on network TV they're showing
Speaker 1: There was nobody who knew how to manipulate your emotions
Speaker 1: more than Hitchcock. He's one of the foundational geniuses of
Speaker 1: the artful, and he created something that was so thoroughly
Speaker 1: terrifying to me that I remember watching it with two
Speaker 1: friends and we started on the sofa. By the time
Speaker 1: we got to the motel, we were on our feet,
Speaker 1: kind of pacing. By the time we realized Anthony Perkins
Speaker 1: is looking at her through a peep hole, I moved
Speaker 1: behind the sofa, and by the time the curtain was
Speaker 1: torn open and the knife came in, I was below
Speaker 1: the sofa. I had I literally I couldn't watch the
Speaker 1: scene the first time, and all three of us are
Speaker 1: crouching behind the sofa. It was that frightening, and that's
Speaker 1: where we watched the rest of the movie, kind of
Speaker 1: peeking up to see, Okay, what's coming. Oh no, he's
Speaker 1: going in the house. I'm going back down. So that
Speaker 1: was the most scared I've ever been as a kid.
Speaker 1: The movie that most frightened me more as a grown up,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure you know it is The Tenant, the
Speaker 1: Polanski movie from nineteen seventy six, Absolutely terrifying, and he
Speaker 1: plays the lead role. My god, that this man's psyche.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, he's been through things in
Speaker 1: life that should kill twenty other people. So in his work,
Speaker 1: I guess he's exercising some of those demons. But if
Speaker 1: you ever really want to not sleep for two nights,
Speaker 1: just pop on the Tenant and you know, go to town.
Speaker 1: Do you think I'd tell well, you must know this,
Speaker 1: I would say this more for the listings. I'm sure
Speaker 1: you know this. One of the things I really love
Speaker 1: about Psycho is that because I always think about doing
Speaker 1: this myself with when you get notes that he the
Speaker 1: shower scene, he wasn't allowed the shower scene, and they
Speaker 1: said you need to make cuts, and he made zero
Speaker 1: cuts and resubmits it and said I've done what you asked. Yes,
Speaker 1: And they's like there's like eighty six cuts and yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, and like less than thirty seconds. So you
Speaker 1: know this the scene in one of the all time
Speaker 1: scariest scenes of all time for me is you know,
Speaker 1: the reveal of who killed Laura Parma and this scene
Speaker 1: of where we learn that I've been told that yeah,
Speaker 1: and did you? I'm just again? That was like network
Speaker 1: TV and it's horrorf it was. Was that a fight
Speaker 1: to get that past or no? I mean, because we
Speaker 1: had we had set the ground worlds very early. We
Speaker 1: just said, look, you're in last place, ABC. Your network
Speaker 1: kind of sucks and you have terrible ideas, you know,
Speaker 1: and there's a reason people don't watch your shows. So
Speaker 1: if you want us to do this, don't fuck around,
Speaker 1: you know, just let us make the show that we
Speaker 1: want to. And we would get notes and I would
Speaker 1: go okay, thanks, you know, and hang up. And so
Speaker 1: they truly did leave us alone. I don't ever remember
Speaker 1: fundamentally having to change anything. I love. I love to
Speaker 1: hear that. No, what is the film that most people
Speaker 1: don't like? It's not critically acclaimed, but you love it
Speaker 1: unconditionently you don't care what anyone says. Mark for us,
Speaker 1: I thought a long time about this because there's a
Speaker 1: lot of films, and some of them were horror movies. Like,
Speaker 1: you know, the Ninth Gate I find endlessly appealing. I
Speaker 1: gat it's Polanski. But The Ghostwriter another sort of underrated
Speaker 1: film he did that most people don't like. I thought
Speaker 1: it was terrific. But the one that is truly an
Speaker 1: execrable movie and which I just if it's on I
Speaker 1: have to watch it is Flash Gordon, you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's so perfectly awful. Um. It's like I think somebody
Speaker 1: described it as a fairy tale set in a disco
Speaker 1: in the clouds with really bad acting. Us. It's so
Speaker 1: it's such it's a giant easter Ham, you know, and
Speaker 1: everything about it is doesn't work, but it's so over
Speaker 1: the top, and it's got a great score by Queen that.
Speaker 1: You know. We still listen to the immortal Sam Jones
Speaker 1: as Flash Gordon, you know, who never worked again until
Speaker 1: I think Ted too, Yes, you know, um, and and
Speaker 1: a bunch of very committed great actors like Max Vansdo
Speaker 1: you know, if you if the actors will commit to
Speaker 1: the idea, it doesn't matter how awful it is, as
Speaker 1: long as it's a full throated performance. They're not standing
Speaker 1: back and commenting on, oh my god, I'm slumming they're
Speaker 1: embracing it and Max Vndo, who is one of the
Speaker 1: ten greatest actors in the history of the cinema as
Speaker 1: make the merciless. Come on, I mean, let's go. I'd
Speaker 1: watch every right now, everyone's on the same page. I
Speaker 1: think it's consistent, like everyone is tonally. Whatever time they've
Speaker 1: agreed on, they've agreed on it and they just went
Speaker 1: for it. You know. Yeah, it's movies like that are
Speaker 1: pretty rare, honestly, that are when they're that bad, but
Speaker 1: they're that committed. Xanadude would be another one that's like that.
Speaker 1: You know. Well, again, it's to do with the lack
Speaker 1: of This is not a bad film by any means,
Speaker 1: but there's something about it. Have you seen the film
Speaker 1: and net then oh yeah, oh yeah, No, Leo's characters rock,
Speaker 1: I mean wild. But ye, but everyone one is fully
Speaker 1: That film does not work if anyone is not committed,
Speaker 1: If there's a moment of self consciousness, the whole thing
Speaker 1: falls apart. No, it's quite amazing. It's amazing. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: is the film that you used to love? You loved
Speaker 1: it a lot, but you have voiced it recently and now, yeah,
Speaker 1: this makes me very sad because when I saw it,
Speaker 1: I really adored it, and they're friends of mine, and
Speaker 1: I love their work generally, and I believe that they've
Speaker 1: made a good half dozen masterpieces in their life. But
Speaker 1: I went back during the pandemic and revisited a lot
Speaker 1: of films and I hadn't seen Fargo in a long time,
Speaker 1: and I didn't think it held up. And I and
Speaker 1: I for a couple of reasons, It's still I lived
Speaker 1: in Minnesota for ten years, so I know, and they're
Speaker 1: from Minnesota, and we had friends in common back there,
Speaker 1: the Cohen brothers. And I think it's in many ways
Speaker 1: still brilliant, but it's not as fully formed and as
Speaker 1: as accomplished as I believe some of their other pictures were.
Speaker 1: Very soon afterwards, I think they were on the cusp
Speaker 1: of becoming master filmmakers. But the thing you forget is
Speaker 1: that Fran McDormand is only in the film for about
Speaker 1: twenty five minutes. Really, he's got very few scenes. It's
Speaker 1: most you're mostly with Steve Usemi and Peter Stormar, and
Speaker 1: you're with Bill Macy, who, God love him, I know him.
Speaker 1: He's a wonderful actor. He had the worst Minnesota accent
Speaker 1: I've ever heard. It's that's not how people their talk.
Speaker 1: You know. I lived there for a long time, and
Speaker 1: oh my god, you know, it was just not right
Speaker 1: went on there. Okay, you know, I mean he missed it,
Speaker 1: and he's a meticulous actor, and it's a it's a
Speaker 1: tough accent to master. So it wasn't as powerful and
Speaker 1: as and as strong affilment after twenty years as I remembered,
Speaker 1: and that was that was kind of a that made
Speaker 1: me sad. Shame, yeah, shame, sham in it, Frost. I've
Speaker 1: been looking forward to this one. What is the film
Speaker 1: that means the nice to you? Not necessarily the film
Speaker 1: itself is any good, but because the experience you had
Speaker 1: around seeing it, that will always make it special. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: this is a very specific instance. It's nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 1: I'm still living in Minnesota, and Minnesota is in what
Speaker 1: you would commonly call Tornado Alley. In the summer, from
Speaker 1: like southwest to northeast, tornadoes come through there with some frequency.
Speaker 1: I had never been in the years i've been in
Speaker 1: and I'm with a buddy and we're going to see
Speaker 1: Cheech and Chong's big first movie up in smoke, and
Speaker 1: we may or may not have been hot when we went.
Speaker 1: I don't remember. It's likely that we were. And we're
Speaker 1: in a little it's a little, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: bandbox multiplex in a suburb just kind of northeast of Minneapolis,
Speaker 1: and we're digging the movie. They're hilarious, we're laughing our
Speaker 1: heads off. There's almost nobody else there. It's like two
Speaker 1: o'clock in the afternoon, late in the run of its
Speaker 1: first run, and suddenly we hear the sirens go off outside.
Speaker 1: The sirens are there for tornado warnings. And I look
Speaker 1: at my buddy Hall and he looks at me, and
Speaker 1: there's like ten minutes left in the movie, and he says,
Speaker 1: should we leave? And I said, it's almost over, let's wait.
Speaker 1: So we stay and we watched the end of the
Speaker 1: movie and it's hilarious, and we get in the car
Speaker 1: and we drive back home and we realize that in
Speaker 1: the interim in that ten minutes, the tornado swept right
Speaker 1: across the area where we were going to be driving.
Speaker 1: Had we left when the sirens went off, Oh my god,
Speaker 1: Cheech and Chong saved my life. Oh my god, you
Speaker 1: are here. Because how about that. That's an absolutely true story.
Speaker 1: That's fucking great. I always new I like teaching Chong,
Speaker 1: something about him, something about him, something about someday they're
Speaker 1: going to save my life. Well, what's an unusual addser
Speaker 1: we've never had that. We've never added till day day
Speaker 1: passed by because it's teaching too on the same and
Speaker 1: I I dare say you won't have another. I'm just
Speaker 1: saying that's going to be a one off. But we
Speaker 1: didn't know how many people they've saved. What is what
Speaker 1: is the film that you must relate to us? It's
Speaker 1: a complicated answer because I think it changes as you
Speaker 1: go through life. You know, when I agree, when you're young,
Speaker 1: it was it was Hud. I was Brandon, Dewildo and
Speaker 1: Hud watching the adult world through his eyes. And prior
Speaker 1: to that, shamee, you know, I had a real connection
Speaker 1: to him. Was a young actor. I felt, Oh, he's
Speaker 1: a good stand in for me. I get that guy.
Speaker 1: Although he died, you know, maybe he went to see
Speaker 1: Chechen Chong and left when the sirens went off. I
Speaker 1: don't know he found out authority. It is exactly. He
Speaker 1: didn't go as own way, So I thought about this
Speaker 1: a lot, and I think the film that I most
Speaker 1: relate to in a way that was meaningful to how
Speaker 1: it affected me was It's a great movie. Sullivan's Travels,
Speaker 1: Preston Searges, nineteen forty one. I was a very serious
Speaker 1: young playwright at the time, and I was going to
Speaker 1: work in the theater. I was going to write plays.
Speaker 1: I had gone to school to do that. I'd taken
Speaker 1: a year off to go to Hollywood and I worked.
Speaker 1: I wrote The Six Million Dollar Man and two other
Speaker 1: shows for a year, and I thought, I'm not ready
Speaker 1: to do this yet. You know. I saw a lot
Speaker 1: of things that made me think, and I tell the
Speaker 1: story in the book that you looked at. But I
Speaker 1: was at an a list Hollywood party. It was at
Speaker 1: Burch Schneider's house. If you know who Burch Schneider was.
Speaker 1: He was the son of the head of Columbia Pictures.
Speaker 1: He started BBS Films with Bob Rifles and they made
Speaker 1: five Yeasy Pieces and the Monkeys and The King of
Speaker 1: Marvin Garden's Easy Rider. You know, they were on top
Speaker 1: of the world. And this is nineteen seventy four. Everybody
Speaker 1: was there. I walked in the door and somebody handed
Speaker 1: me a joint. It was Jeff Bridges, and I take
Speaker 1: ahead and I hand it to Jack Nicholson and he
Speaker 1: hands it to Lily Tomlin. You know, it's like I'm
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like I've gone I've landed an oz. Right.
Speaker 1: So I end up out by the swimming pool and
Speaker 1: I'm sitting on the diving board and I strike up
Speaker 1: a conversation with a very nice British director and Terrence Young,
Speaker 1: who had actually directed, among other great movies, Doctor No
Speaker 1: and Goldfinger. And he takes an interest in me, you know,
Speaker 1: and he's that thing when someone's the one they call
Speaker 1: you by your full name. Well, Mark Frost, you know,
Speaker 1: what's what's your story? And so he tell I tell him,
Speaker 1: you know, I was a playwright. I came out and
Speaker 1: I'm doing this and he sense just he says, Mark,
Speaker 1: you know, look around everybody you see here, we're all horrors.
Speaker 1: We're all doing this for money, and they know what
Speaker 1: our price is. Wow. And it was really, you couldn't
Speaker 1: have written the scene in another I mean, it's and
Speaker 1: I said, oh, really really okay. So I about three
Speaker 1: months later I went back to the theater and thought, okay, well,
Speaker 1: maybe he's right, you know, it's you don't want wanted
Speaker 1: to be one of those guys about whom they say, well,
Speaker 1: we know what you are, We're just negotiating your price.
Speaker 1: You know. I wanted to I wanted to go see if, okay,
Speaker 1: am I going to be a serious playwriter? Am I
Speaker 1: going to be a horn? That seemed to be only
Speaker 1: the only two options. And then I was teaching film.
Speaker 1: One of the things I did during that period away
Speaker 1: from la and one of the films I was teaching
Speaker 1: was Sullivan's Travels because I loved Preston Sturges. And you
Speaker 1: may know. The story of the movie is he's it's
Speaker 1: Joel McCrae as this very successful Hollywood director, but he's
Speaker 1: making a junk in his mind. He's making Ants in
Speaker 1: Your Parents nineteen thirty nine, you know. And so the
Speaker 1: whole thing is he wants to make a serious film
Speaker 1: called Oddly Enough, speaking of the kone brothers, Oh brother,
Speaker 1: where aren't they? And he goes out on the road.
Speaker 1: There's a hobo he wants to tell during the depression,
Speaker 1: and he wants to tell the story of the common man.
Speaker 1: He wants to create art and long story, short series
Speaker 1: of mishaps and misfortunes. He ends up on a chain
Speaker 1: gang with amnesia in Georgia and one night they're taken
Speaker 1: into be shown a movie and they're showing a Mickey
Speaker 1: Mouse cartoon before the movie starts, and he looks around
Speaker 1: and he sees all the inmates crying their eyes out
Speaker 1: with laughter, and how funny this cartoon is. And he
Speaker 1: has this epiphany, we don't have to make great art.
Speaker 1: We just need to make people laugh. We need to
Speaker 1: lighten their load, we need to give them some hope
Speaker 1: in the world. And he remembers who he is, and
Speaker 1: he goes back to Hollywood and he gets the girl,
Speaker 1: and he goes back to making wonderful, popular movies. And
Speaker 1: so that movie changed my life. About the court. I
Speaker 1: had a good friend who had been my mentor who
Speaker 1: went to Carnegie mell In ten years ahead. If I
Speaker 1: didn't named Steven Bochco, who had created a show. He
Speaker 1: had been the guy who got me started Hollywood. And
Speaker 1: you worked on Hill Story Breeze. Yeah. Yeah. I had
Speaker 1: come on the air and he said, you know, come
Speaker 1: on out. I want to I want you to work
Speaker 1: on the show. So I said, you know, hang out
Speaker 1: I'll be right there. And that was that was the
Speaker 1: that was a turning point in my life. So I
Speaker 1: do cry of that movie with kind of so. So
Speaker 1: in simple terms, you were like, I'm a player, I'm
Speaker 1: an artist. You went to Hollywood a man that a
Speaker 1: horrible man said, if you're here, you're a whole. You went,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be a whole. She went back.
Speaker 1: He was a nice man. He was a nice yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but he said if you're here, you're a whole. And
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, that doesn't sound great. So you went
Speaker 1: back to being an artist. Then Stephen Voska, who was
Speaker 1: an artist working in this world, said come and work
Speaker 1: with me and we'll make an amazing thing about history. Please,
Speaker 1: And he went all right, yeah, and I got me
Speaker 1: into And at that point I had lived for four years,
Speaker 1: you know, with that vowel poverty, and I was tired
Speaker 1: of having a charget when you start in the winter
Speaker 1: and you know, taking the bus when it's ten below zero.
Speaker 1: It just wasn't that much fun. So can I ask
Speaker 1: you you were a playwright, and I've certainly read and
Speaker 1: that you want to get bet you doing that map. Yes,
Speaker 1: I've written the first play I've written in forty years,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna thanks. We're going to mount it. I
Speaker 1: think next summer it should you want to? Okay? So
Speaker 1: I had a great great uncle, my father's great uncle
Speaker 1: was a writer in the family. He'd been a newspaper man.
Speaker 1: More importantly, he was FDRs secretary from nineteen thirty five
Speaker 1: to nineteen forty five. It was a man named Willhassett.
Speaker 1: I knew him when I was a kid and during
Speaker 1: the war years when there was a press blackout. He
Speaker 1: had known Roosevelt since the teens. He covered him during
Speaker 1: the First World War when he was the under Secretary
Speaker 1: of the Navy and my uncle was working for the
Speaker 1: Washington Post, so they became friendly. Twenty years later, he said,
Speaker 1: I need somebody over here who knows a little bit
Speaker 1: about everything and can write, you know, good prose by
Speaker 1: the qubic yard. Come now, and he went to work
Speaker 1: for him. He worked for him till the day he died.
Speaker 1: He was with him when he died. He went on
Speaker 1: by the way to have the same job with Truman
Speaker 1: for seven years. Because Roosevelt had told Truman there's only
Speaker 1: one person you can't do this job without, and it's
Speaker 1: it's him. So during the war he kept a diary.
Speaker 1: FDR couldn't be covered by the press when he was
Speaker 1: traveling for security reason, so old newspaperman he keeps a
Speaker 1: journal of those four years, published in nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 1: considered one of the great sources on the intimate life
Speaker 1: of FDR. So the play is FDR at War and
Speaker 1: it's those four years through the lens of this relationship
Speaker 1: with my great uncle. And so I'm very excited about
Speaker 1: how long is this play currently? It's you know, standard
Speaker 1: lengthy one intermission. Yeah. Is it as much about their
Speaker 1: relationship it is the history or is Yes, it's very
Speaker 1: much about their relationship, but it's also about all the
Speaker 1: battles he was fighting, not just with the access powers,
Speaker 1: but with his doctors and his health and his marriage
Speaker 1: and Republicans and Congress and all the things that even
Speaker 1: his allies. I mean Churchill as a character, it's it's
Speaker 1: a fantas has to glimpse into who he is as
Speaker 1: a person. Fascinate. Wow, congratulations, that's exciting. So what are
Speaker 1: you going to put it on? We're going to do
Speaker 1: it off Broadway, probably in western Massachusetts. So I think
Speaker 1: in the fall and then hopefully and will you I
Speaker 1: don't really know how it works it Will you be
Speaker 1: heavily involved in casting, rehearsals, everything, or do you hand
Speaker 1: over plane? No? You know, I mean the thing that
Speaker 1: I do remember about the playwrights in charge? You know,
Speaker 1: he's yeah, okay, great, you are the master of your
Speaker 1: own ship there. So I sort of will welcome that
Speaker 1: opportunity to go back and have some input because I
Speaker 1: feel very strongly about this piece. So that's very cool.
Speaker 1: Can I ask you want to have a best along
Speaker 1: these lines? I get the impression that you like to
Speaker 1: basically do corect me if I'm wrong, you followed the
Speaker 1: idea whatever the thing is the right format for the thing.
Speaker 1: This is a book, this is the players the TV show.
Speaker 1: It's not that you go, I want to make a
Speaker 1: TV show. You go, what's this idea? Is that correct? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Form follows function. You know. You have to figure out
Speaker 1: the idea and then figure out how best to tell
Speaker 1: the story. If you've got the storyteller gene, which I
Speaker 1: believe I'm sort of born with. And then natural selection,
Speaker 1: it so happened I was shown a path that allowed
Speaker 1: me to develop it. I've learned and I've done it.
Speaker 1: I can't think of before I haven't done I mean documentary,
Speaker 1: sports writing, non fiction fiction. They're all the same. To me,
Speaker 1: it's all the same. It's just that the form churches
Speaker 1: so anywhere. We are not Okay, we're everybody's favorite. But
Speaker 1: what's the sexiest film you've ever seen? Us? Okay, this
Speaker 1: is this is an unusual answer because I don't think
Speaker 1: that sex per se on screen is terribly sexy, because
Speaker 1: I've filmed those scenes before, I've directed people in them,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's it's very technical, it's the it's
Speaker 1: the furthest thing from romance, and sexy to me is
Speaker 1: inexorably tied with romance, and the sexiest era I think
Speaker 1: in making was the era that included people like Barbara
Speaker 1: Stanwick and particularly Ginger Rogers, so I think was the
Speaker 1: most alluring human female person to ever appear on screen.
Speaker 1: So the sexiest movies for me are like Top Half
Speaker 1: and even more so a lesser number one called care
Speaker 1: Free that's Rogers in a stare. But there was never
Speaker 1: a more sensual, beautiful, funny, witty, graceful, incredible athlete dancer
Speaker 1: than Ginger Rogers. I defy anybody to top her as
Speaker 1: a So that to me is that's romance, yea. And
Speaker 1: I can watch those movies. They are evergreen. They and
Speaker 1: Ginger Rogers is every bit as contemporary as anybody that
Speaker 1: we know. And she'll live forever, I think because of it.
Speaker 1: Yet in classians, this makes me feel sick that I'm
Speaker 1: going to ask these category some category. Mark Frost traveling
Speaker 1: bind is worrying, why done film? You went? Surely shit,
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry. That's all right, because I haven't I
Speaker 1: have I have an appropriate answer. I had a huge
Speaker 1: crush on Haley Mills as a as a young person
Speaker 1: who didn't but I hadn't quite awoken to the idea
Speaker 1: of why I would find her so attractive. And she
Speaker 1: made a movie. I think she made like six movies
Speaker 1: for Disney, and I probably saw all of them, but
Speaker 1: she made one called Double Trouble where she played twins.
Speaker 1: And so there was something about seeing two Haley Mills
Speaker 1: that just made my system kind of short circuit. And
Speaker 1: I it made me, was like, to quote myself, feel funny, um,
Speaker 1: because I you know, I was I was waking up
Speaker 1: as an adolescent, were not pre I was pre anolyscent.
Speaker 1: That was the first time where I went, something's going
Speaker 1: on here in my body and there are two Haley
Speaker 1: Mills and I just can't handle and I've got double trouble.
Speaker 1: I've got double trouble. Is it didn't? She's the original
Speaker 1: Parent Trap as well, wasn't she? Yes? Yeah, she was
Speaker 1: always playing twins, she was. Did she put twins in
Speaker 1: her trap too? She must have done, because they're twins
Speaker 1: in Parent Trap? But they yeah, I think I think
Speaker 1: they are. I think Disney would like people really like
Speaker 1: it was well, they doubled down. They realized we can
Speaker 1: get two Hairy Mills for the person one so two
Speaker 1: that sounds like the kind of kill would make, you know,
Speaker 1: a whole load of the audience feeling very funny right there,
Speaker 1: very funny, very funny. Mark Frost. Objectively, what is the
Speaker 1: greatest film of all time? China Town? Great answer? Not,
Speaker 1: Benn said, in this category, no killing, which is surprising.
Speaker 1: It usually is on a list in it Why for
Speaker 1: you is it? China Town? It's number one. It's a
Speaker 1: perfect script. It's a perfect script, there's nothing wrong, quick script.
Speaker 1: And it's the most complex, mediest actable fluid ride that
Speaker 1: I've ever taken in a movie. I remember walking out
Speaker 1: of the theater so It in Westwood the day it
Speaker 1: opened in nineteen seventy four. My girlfriend and another couple
Speaker 1: we walked out and we talked about it for four
Speaker 1: hours because it's It's like a giant trap that closes
Speaker 1: on you at the end and you realize that everything
Speaker 1: leading up to that has been preparing you for something
Speaker 1: that you can't quite handle the first time. And I've
Speaker 1: watched it probably more than any other film. I watched
Speaker 1: it at least once a year. It's a it's a
Speaker 1: perfect script, it's perfect performances by two of the greatest
Speaker 1: stars we've ever had. I mean, I think Nicholson is
Speaker 1: arguably top three the greatest movie stars we've ever known.
Speaker 1: I've met him and he's a wonderful guy. And that
Speaker 1: movie spoke to me because it was about things that
Speaker 1: mattered to me. I had moved to la when there
Speaker 1: were still orange fields in the valley, and I didn't
Speaker 1: know that the hidden history of La as Robert Town
Speaker 1: was able to lay it out. So the film had
Speaker 1: it had mystery, it had political relevance, it had obvious sexiness,
Speaker 1: had had huge star power, and had had a director
Speaker 1: at the top of this game. Again, one of the
Speaker 1: handful of great directors we've had in this art form.
Speaker 1: I can't get enough of it. If I if I
Speaker 1: had to die and come back in the context of
Speaker 1: a movie to live in a universe, that would be
Speaker 1: the universe I would choose. Really, Yeah, can I ask
Speaker 1: you this? So you're an actor, an actor and a writer,
Speaker 1: and there's a story about technics in I Ca'm sure
Speaker 1: I've taught it on this before, but but it's really
Speaker 1: stayed with me. I think it was in an interview
Speaker 1: with someone where someone said to him, you're one of
Speaker 1: the great movies stars. Your your CV is incredible. You know,
Speaker 1: there's really not really a bad film on your resume.
Speaker 1: Why is that? Is it lack? Is it good fortune?
Speaker 1: What is it? And he said, now, it's because I'm
Speaker 1: a good writer, and it's that he knows he knows
Speaker 1: the job. I think that's absolutely right. How interesting? Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he had great taste, he had he had It took
Speaker 1: a long time for him to get there. You know,
Speaker 1: he bumped around Hollywood for close to fifteen years before
Speaker 1: Easy Rider, you know, busted him out, and he was
Speaker 1: in the Corman World, which was a great training ground.
Speaker 1: You know, it's given us so many incredible people. It
Speaker 1: was it was like summer Stock for film. You know.
Speaker 1: I never worked for him, but I had plenty of
Speaker 1: people friends who did. It was a training ground, and
Speaker 1: so he came out of it knowing where an actor
Speaker 1: belongs to the ecosystem of a film. So he's a
Speaker 1: great teammate. You have to have teamwork, and you if
Speaker 1: you're number one in the call sheet, you better be
Speaker 1: a good teammate. If you're not, then you're not going
Speaker 1: to be number one for long. We've both known the
Speaker 1: people who are number one and are jackasses, and it
Speaker 1: makes everybody's life miserable. And his job is to make
Speaker 1: sure that everybody else is having the kind of experience
Speaker 1: that he thinks contributes to a good film. I really
Speaker 1: admire that. Yeah, that's wonderful in terms of you and
Speaker 1: collaborating and stuff like, it's you work alone. I'm just
Speaker 1: fascinated in there. I guess I've got two questions of you.
Speaker 1: One is like energy, as in, you write a novel,
Speaker 1: you write a play that is a kind of completely
Speaker 1: solo pursuit where you are alone in a room just you.
Speaker 1: You've worked on History Blues where it's a group writer's room,
Speaker 1: and then you've written with David Lynch where it's just
Speaker 1: the two of you, particularly the Return Road, it's just
Speaker 1: the two of you. Is it a big process for
Speaker 1: you to go? Okay? I now need to sort of
Speaker 1: summon the energy that involves collaborating with huge people, the
Speaker 1: kind of social dynamics of that. The you know, when
Speaker 1: you direct, it's an incredibly social job versus the I
Speaker 1: guess it's a big question, but like, do you think
Speaker 1: you're an introvert? Do you think you're an expert? Do
Speaker 1: you need to balance these things out? If you've done
Speaker 1: a big kind of social job, do you want them
Speaker 1: want to Yeah? I think, I think I'm both. I
Speaker 1: think and I enjoyed both for different reasons. I realized
Speaker 1: that I after having directed a fair amount and having
Speaker 1: done a feature, I realized that wasn't how I wanted
Speaker 1: to spend my life exclusively. Every once in a while, sure,
Speaker 1: but if your if your bread and butter is writing,
Speaker 1: you've got to have that solitary processing time, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's it's tons of fun to collaborate
Speaker 1: and it's actually much easier when you've got sports is
Speaker 1: always the metaphor for me. I played a lot of
Speaker 1: sports as a kid. So Hill Street Blues it was
Speaker 1: like being on a basketball team. You know. It was
Speaker 1: like past the ball over there, he takes it, runs
Speaker 1: with it, he takes a shot. You know, you come
Speaker 1: up with a scene, you come up with a line.
Speaker 1: It was a group effort, and because we did a
Speaker 1: lot of team building on that show, it was it
Speaker 1: was a fun process and it was bruising because it
Speaker 1: was also you know, you got to fight for rebounds
Speaker 1: and you got to you got to get your own turf.
Speaker 1: You know, you're trying to mark. You mark your turf
Speaker 1: at the same time that you're trying to do served
Speaker 1: the overall good. So I like them all for different reasons.
Speaker 1: But as a writer, you've got to come back to
Speaker 1: that discipline of sitting down and facing the blank page
Speaker 1: or the blank screen. So they're all the same to me,
Speaker 1: They're just different ways of experiencing. And do you you
Speaker 1: seem to me very then like you see my dad
Speaker 1: know you you seem like very mentally well and kind
Speaker 1: of how do you deal with or do you ever
Speaker 1: have problems with the ego side of it, particularly, let's
Speaker 1: say twin Peaks. If you hear people talk about twim
Speaker 1: Peaks and they go, oh, David Lynchay's twin Peaks or
Speaker 1: something like that, is there a part of view that
Speaker 1: it's like, hey, what the fuck? Like do you? Oh?
Speaker 1: Do you? Never? Do? You tell me? How do you
Speaker 1: deal with when you're used to doing things on your
Speaker 1: own and then when it's a collaboration and people might
Speaker 1: talk about other names? Do you know what I mean? Sure?
Speaker 1: And that's an ego concern. You know, your your ego
Speaker 1: pops up and says, hey, what about me? But if
Speaker 1: you're confident in what you do and you know what
Speaker 1: you did and are from the process and the people
Speaker 1: who were making the thing, no, I mean they know
Speaker 1: I was the showrunner on the show, So no, it
Speaker 1: doesn't bother me. It's like, I'll put it this way.
Speaker 1: The checks we get are the same size, and they
Speaker 1: both have our names on them. So that's enough for me.
Speaker 1: You know, I know what I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I know, You've never I'm just fascinated by anyone. I'm
Speaker 1: always fascinated by, you know, double acts, by anyone. Any collaboration. Sure, like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm sure you enjoyed Get Back as much
Speaker 1: as I did. It's my favorite film of the year.
Speaker 1: I always wanted to be a fly on the wall
Speaker 1: with those guys and see how they worked it out.
Speaker 1: And we saw that. We saw that, and the answer
Speaker 1: was it was because they could check their ego at
Speaker 1: the door when they were in the room together, and
Speaker 1: it was a beautiful thing to watch and to know
Speaker 1: that they still loved each other even though they were
Speaker 1: having troubles. They worked it out. So that's what you
Speaker 1: do when you're committed and you're in the room, You're
Speaker 1: work it out and what happens afterwards is out of
Speaker 1: your control. And I learned a long time ago, don't
Speaker 1: worry about things you have no control over. Yes, you're
Speaker 1: a zen master. And what is the film that you
Speaker 1: could well have? What's I and I have again any
Speaker 1: time of time? Well, yeah, that's one of them. But
Speaker 1: since since it has its own category, I think I
Speaker 1: have a particular funness and it's similar themed for lurid
Speaker 1: crime dramas said in Los Angeles, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: subcategory that I adore. But so that includes La Confidential
Speaker 1: and Heat, which were both brilliant movies and two that
Speaker 1: I will watch anytime they come on wherever they are.
Speaker 1: I'm stuck. I'm watching the whole movie. But the one
Speaker 1: that I watched from that era over and over again,
Speaker 1: and I don't exactly know why yet is Ronan to
Speaker 1: Nro and Jean Renault's and John Frank and Ivory was
Speaker 1: his last great movie, and He's He was a great director.
Speaker 1: My dad worked with them in the early days of television,
Speaker 1: so I heard about and you know, great movies early on.
Speaker 1: I think that's a one or full film to get
Speaker 1: lost in the world of that movie is spectacular, So
Speaker 1: I will watch that obsessively. If it shows up, well, well,
Speaker 1: I'm surprising and brilliant. I don't like to be too negative. Yes,
Speaker 1: let's let's do it this best we can. You've ever
Speaker 1: seen every version of the Alamo. I mean, let's let's
Speaker 1: examine this. You know, they never give you the context.
Speaker 1: Those guys were there to spread slavery into a state
Speaker 1: that belonged to Mexico. You know, their cause sucked. They
Speaker 1: were bad people for pursuing it. And the fact that
Speaker 1: they're presented time after time is these heroic figures who
Speaker 1: die tragically in a noble cause. Is enough horseshit to
Speaker 1: fill you know, Sofi Stadium. It's it's a garbage story
Speaker 1: about awful people, and people keep trying to retell it.
Speaker 1: That's so. You know, John Wayne's version is beyond terrible
Speaker 1: for all sorts of reasons. But every version of it sucks,
Speaker 1: and it's for that reason. It's a bad it's a
Speaker 1: bad cause you're betting on the wrong team. Yes, it's
Speaker 1: like a film about Hitler inviting plan Yeah exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like, I don't want any part of that.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. I mean the other one that's a contender
Speaker 1: is I'm sure you've had this mentioned before. There's a
Speaker 1: movie made mid fifties called The Conqueror. Do you know
Speaker 1: this movie. It's the story of Genghis Khan. It stars
Speaker 1: John Wayne, Yeah, oh boy, and Susan Hayward. And not
Speaker 1: only that, it was the last film ever produced by
Speaker 1: Howard Hughes. They shot it in an area in Utah
Speaker 1: that was directly downstream air quality wise from the nuclear
Speaker 1: testing ground in Nevada, and of the two hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty cast members, over ninety of them got cancer and
Speaker 1: over fifty of them died. Oh my god. And that
Speaker 1: was also true, including John Wayne and Susan Haywarton and
Speaker 1: many other people in the movie. So not only is
Speaker 1: it John Wayne's Genghis Khan is, on the face of it,
Speaker 1: the worst idea you've ever heard. It killed everybody who
Speaker 1: made the movie, you know, and Howard Hughes pulled it
Speaker 1: from distribution. You can't find it now. And he used
Speaker 1: to sit and watch it obsessively in his penthouse along
Speaker 1: with Ice Station Zebra. Those were the two movies he
Speaker 1: would watch. We know about Ice Station Zebra. Why would
Speaker 1: he watch obsessively because he was cuckoo for Cocopus. So
Speaker 1: I think that objectively makes it the worst movie, and
Speaker 1: that it killed nearly everybody who contributed to it. That's
Speaker 1: what often is is that they're up the raid making
Speaker 1: Genghis Khan. Yeah, exactly, Oh my good. Right in the
Speaker 1: middle of it. Twelve I think they. I think they
Speaker 1: set off twelve h bombs at the Nuclear Testagram during production. Yeah,
Speaker 1: have another cigarette, duke, you know you have nothing and
Speaker 1: performed very funny stuff, very funny. What is the film
Speaker 1: that's made you laughed at? I have to go back
Speaker 1: to the classics for this, because I started going to
Speaker 1: these movies when I was in high school. The University
Speaker 1: of Minnesota Film Society started to bring back those old
Speaker 1: classic movies. And when I saw Buster Keaton's The General
Speaker 1: for the first time, I fell on the floor. I
Speaker 1: mean I was equally I was laughing as hard as
Speaker 1: I was stupefied by what he had pulled off. If
Speaker 1: people don't know the movie, I mean, it's a silent film.
Speaker 1: It's a Civil War story about a guy who kidnaps
Speaker 1: a train and tries to take it away from It's
Speaker 1: a true It's based on a true story. He's sadly
Speaker 1: a Confederate guy who was being chased by a Union
Speaker 1: army and it ends with him with an actual train
Speaker 1: from the era driving over a gorge and blowing up
Speaker 1: the bridge and the train plunges. It's one of the
Speaker 1: greatest shots and sent them a history. And Buster Keaton
Speaker 1: made all this stuff up on the spot. He was
Speaker 1: a genius beyond compare. He was again one of those
Speaker 1: people who helped invent the vocabulary of film. And The
Speaker 1: General I think is I mean he's made He made
Speaker 1: one masterpiece after another, but that, to me was the pinnacle.
Speaker 1: And the only thing that made me laugh as hard
Speaker 1: as that was WC. Fields trying to sleep on his
Speaker 1: porch in It's a Gift, which I think is my
Speaker 1: favorite of his movies. You know that. That? Yeah, and
Speaker 1: he has never been mentioned on his podcast. You're kidding.
Speaker 1: I don't think he's ever come up on his podcast.
Speaker 1: Says he was a genius. He was an absolute tragic
Speaker 1: genius and people should go back and look at his movies,
Speaker 1: the Benk Dick, It's a Gift. These are perfect movies,
Speaker 1: the classics, and he will make you roar with laughter.
Speaker 1: And then you know, the Marx Brothers and Horse Feathers
Speaker 1: is the one that makes me laugh the most. But
Speaker 1: they that's anarchy, you know, personified. It's fantastic. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: what's that? I'm afraid I've never seen it because I
Speaker 1: don't think we got to it in the UK. But
Speaker 1: you made a show on the air. Yeah, and that
Speaker 1: sounds like Mark's Brothers, Is that right? Kind of what? Yeah?
Speaker 1: It was inspired, Yes, it was inspired by the wonderful chaotic,
Speaker 1: an archic energy. It was about a live television show
Speaker 1: in the fifties. They came out of an idea. My
Speaker 1: dad had been the stage manager on one of the
Speaker 1: great shows of that era, of Philco Playhouse, so I
Speaker 1: had all these stories about things that went wrong when
Speaker 1: people were live on the air, including some favorite famous actors.
Speaker 1: So we put all those ideas into it on the air.
Speaker 1: Next time you're in LA called me up and I'll
Speaker 1: show it you just maybe an I hope everyone had that.
Speaker 1: When I show up at your house, you can't go
Speaker 1: to place. Brett's here again, he said, listen to this podcast. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: just give him the DVD. It's like, I'm busy but
Speaker 1: slided under the door in frost. Now I need you
Speaker 1: give him me all this time and told me in
Speaker 1: the secret picture in section, how Annie was you? This
Speaker 1: has been beyond brilliant and I'm so grateful. I've loved it. However,
Speaker 1: when you wrote this screenplay, he sent it off and
Speaker 1: Friday and Saturday morning you get a call from your agents.
Speaker 1: They say four studios want it. Leo wants it, Merril
Speaker 1: wants it, Jennifer Lawrence wants it. J Loo is interested,
Speaker 1: which I was paying excited about. It's a big war
Speaker 1: amongst the biggest Hanks. Once they're looking, and you died
Speaker 1: of shock instantly with a smiling thing. You've probably never
Speaker 1: been happier, which never would be again. Wow, I've popped
Speaker 1: around to see on the air, as promised, but I
Speaker 1: brought the coffle with me just in case you never know.
Speaker 1: And I walk in, I go, where's my anyone seem
Speaker 1: money and Jesus upstairs they're talking to his agents. I go,
Speaker 1: all right, I know creep upstairs. No it's Mark. Sorry,
Speaker 1: he's still on the phone, but it's silent, like maybe
Speaker 1: maybe he's not the fade. Mark. Sorry, I'm going you're dead,
Speaker 1: But you look so happy. I don't want to disturb you.
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, maybe he's fine. So but you're so
Speaker 1: happy in your shock. You've you've, you've, You've stuck to
Speaker 1: the chair with sweat from happiness. And so I can't
Speaker 1: get you off the chick. You're stuck in this chair.
Speaker 1: So I have to chop up the chair, you have
Speaker 1: to chop you up anyway. I pack you in to
Speaker 1: this coffin and it's full. It's misjudged the size and
Speaker 1: impotized for that, but this coffin is absolutely stuffed for
Speaker 1: the Mark Frost and they're really only enough for him
Speaker 1: for you to have one DVD that I can slide
Speaker 1: into the side for you to take across to the
Speaker 1: other side. And on the other side, it's movie night
Speaker 1: every night, and one night it's your movie night. What
Speaker 1: film are you going to show the people of having
Speaker 1: the dogs of Heaven when it is your movie night,
Speaker 1: Mark Frost, You would think it would be trying to
Speaker 1: tell you were but with that planet to done, But
Speaker 1: I'm I'm gonna try to do a planet at the
Speaker 1: apes ending here. There's an Italian film from a few
Speaker 1: years ago called The Great Beauty, Yes, which I can't
Speaker 1: get out of my head, and I feel if I
Speaker 1: watched it a hundred thousand times, I would find something
Speaker 1: new in it every single time. And we're going to
Speaker 1: be in heaven for a while, so I'm going to
Speaker 1: take Sortantino's The Great Beauty with it because I want
Speaker 1: to get to the bottom of it. That is a
Speaker 1: magnificent answer and a wonderful film, Mark Frost, God bless you.
Speaker 1: Is there anything you would like to tell people to listen,
Speaker 1: look out for read watch for you guys. There's a
Speaker 1: terrific new show what's not New on Apple called Ted
Speaker 1: lasso that people should inhale because we've been through some
Speaker 1: hard times these last few years, and this show will
Speaker 1: be like a bomb to your soul. It will make
Speaker 1: you feel that anything's possible, that there is good in
Speaker 1: the world along with sorrow, and we will find our
Speaker 1: way if we trust our own internatures to relate to
Speaker 1: other people, to care for them, to befriend them, and
Speaker 1: realize that we are all in the same boat. And
Speaker 1: we'd better start rowing in that direction. So thank you
Speaker 1: for that. Right well, you can make me cry, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to get you saying that I'm going to
Speaker 1: send it to the whole team. It said less because
Speaker 1: it will mean a lot of sticks, So thank you
Speaker 1: very much. I was, of course, I think it's this
Speaker 1: ending that you have coming out that you would like.
Speaker 1: I know, well, I mean, I've got the play. I've
Speaker 1: got the play. I've got two other projects that I'm
Speaker 1: working on. Nothing that's about to happen, so it's it's
Speaker 1: premature to be promoting it. But I'm doing a novel
Speaker 1: of the play as well. You you that's interesting, you really,
Speaker 1: you really We did the novel the novels, which I
Speaker 1: fucking love of twin Pete. Yeah, like oh the oh,
Speaker 1: the world. Yeah, I mean it's it's a way to
Speaker 1: that's how you that's how you build worlds. And as
Speaker 1: a writer, I always wanted to build a world. Tolkien
Speaker 1: I think inspired me in that regard. Um, So that's
Speaker 1: what I'm that's my objective. Whenever I'm tackling a story,
Speaker 1: I want to give you a full rounded experience, because
Speaker 1: that's that's how we understand our own world. I seeing others.
Speaker 1: You are a brilliant man. Thank you Mark for us Brett.
Speaker 1: I've really enjoyed it. Yeah, I loved it. How if
Speaker 1: you have a wonderful death. Thank you? Good days, he sir.
Speaker 1: So that was episode one hundred and eighty seven. Head
Speaker 1: over to patreon dot com forwards left Brett Goldstein for
Speaker 1: the extra twenty twenty five minutes of chat Secrets of
Speaker 1: video with Mark. Go to Apple podcast. Give us a
Speaker 1: five stars rating. But don't tell me about the podcast.
Speaker 1: Don't want to hear about it. What I want to
Speaker 1: hear is about the film that means the most to
Speaker 1: you and why that's a lovely thing to read. And
Speaker 1: my name Amen's obsessed with reading, and so thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you all for listening. Thank you so much to
Speaker 1: Mark for giving me all that time. Thank you to
Speaker 1: Scrubs Pitt and the Distraction Pieces Network. Thanks to Buddy
Speaker 1: Peace for producing it. Thanks to ACAS for hosting it.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Adam Richardson for the graphics, Lisa Alladen for
Speaker 1: the photography. Come join me next week for another incredible guest.
Speaker 1: I think I've got an absolute banger again next week.
Speaker 1: So that is it for now. In the meantime, have
Speaker 1: a lovely week and please be excellent to each other.
Speaker 1: Battles