Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing,
Speaker 1: whatever it is, whatever you do, you're our daughter, and
Speaker 1: I will love John Robin Bates has a new play
Speaker 1: on Broadway, recently nominated for a Tony. Other Desert Cities
Speaker 1: is about family dysfunction and the choices we make. There
Speaker 1: are consequences to our actions. What does that mean? How
Speaker 1: could I trust you? How could I ever be in
Speaker 1: your presence? My dear Robbie, as he's known to many,
Speaker 1: pursued similar themes in the drama he created, an executive
Speaker 1: produced for ABC Brothers and Sisters. Robbie's strengths as a
Speaker 1: playwright are magnified by the talent he surrounds himself with.
Speaker 1: Dan Sullivan directed Substance of Fire in Joe Mantello directed
Speaker 1: Other Desert Cities. Robbie Bates often writes for ethic actors
Speaker 1: he admires, like Stacy Keach and Ron Rifkin, who have
Speaker 1: worked on several of Robbie's stage and screen projects. In
Speaker 1: the theater world, you would be hard pressed to find
Speaker 1: someone who wouldn't want to work with Robbie. He comes
Speaker 1: across as kind, human and humble. During our conversation, he
Speaker 1: confessed there's been a dark side to his success on Broadway.
Speaker 1: He's been spoiled. John Robin Bates can barely think about
Speaker 1: going back to the smaller theaters. I'm ruined. I'm ruined
Speaker 1: from off Broadway now. I I sort of say things like, well,
Speaker 1: that plays an off Broadway play, it's not a Broadway play.
Speaker 1: Making fun of myself. The difference is, you know, you're
Speaker 1: in this great, great, grand old house, you know that's
Speaker 1: built for a kind of big experience, and the drama
Speaker 1: is somehow expanded. I mean, I I've listened. I never
Speaker 1: knew the difference, so I was always and when you're there,
Speaker 1: you feel there's a di at different tapestry there. When
Speaker 1: you're in a Broadway house that lends itself to the
Speaker 1: kind of the imp ward of the project. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of different things going on. You know, the audience
Speaker 1: has bought into an experience for which they've usually sadly
Speaker 1: paid more money, and so it changes the dynamic, it changes,
Speaker 1: there's more ornamentation around it in some way. The laughs change,
Speaker 1: which is odd. The laughs are sort of bigger and
Speaker 1: more expensive, and so so what was the arc of
Speaker 1: other desert cities before you went to Probably it began
Speaker 1: where in the Mitzi new House, which is the beautiful
Speaker 1: Jewel theater in the basement of Lincoln Center. I think, small, intimate,
Speaker 1: and in fact even claustrophobic. What happened was Joe Mantello,
Speaker 1: who directed it, immediately had a sense of of having
Speaker 1: to build space around things, and that when once it
Speaker 1: moved in the transfer, I actually believe the play got
Speaker 1: better in its move It just all came together and
Speaker 1: someone I did a little work on the play, and
Speaker 1: for example, what work did you do? I worked a
Speaker 1: little bit on the ending of the play, the last
Speaker 1: few minutes of the play. But it went so well
Speaker 1: off Broadway Lincoln Center. When you do that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: what is it that propels you to do that? It's
Speaker 1: just the knowledge that there's more to mind from it.
Speaker 1: And mostly it was, you know, Joe's great sort of
Speaker 1: probing sense of I think there's a deeper truth there.
Speaker 1: I think we've glossed over something or skipped over something.
Speaker 1: You have a success now on Broadway that if i'm
Speaker 1: I could be mistaken, but it's been a while since
Speaker 1: you had it to this level. This is a like
Speaker 1: Substance of Fire again. You know where you had great,
Speaker 1: great notices and people have said wonderful things about your
Speaker 1: career and your future. That was twenty years ago. I
Speaker 1: know when you look back on some of your place,
Speaker 1: would you change them? I can't. I just have to
Speaker 1: keep moving forward, right, I can't do it. I know
Speaker 1: that people do, but you know I can't fight old wars.
Speaker 1: I would find it disablingly backwards looking for myself to
Speaker 1: go back. I think some of my plays have been
Speaker 1: less successful to me than others. And to me, it's
Speaker 1: all been about the process of getting to the next
Speaker 1: play or getting to the next day. This play, though
Speaker 1: at the core of it it comes out of trying
Speaker 1: to understand the ways in which people collapse, even though
Speaker 1: the subject is not necessarily depression. I want to take
Speaker 1: two plays Substance of Fire Sullivan directed and Now You're
Speaker 1: on Broadway and had been at the mid Sea with
Speaker 1: other desert cities, and Joe directed. Compare and contrast Sullivan
Speaker 1: with Joe in terms of their director very similar. They
Speaker 1: are meticulous, meticulous miniaturists with big, expansive visions of what
Speaker 1: logic and a world are comprised of. They're both indefatigable.
Speaker 1: They never give up, They live and breathe it. Their
Speaker 1: approaches are very different. Dan has a kind of almost
Speaker 1: holistic view of of the logic of a play, and
Speaker 1: Joe because I don't know, maybe because he was an
Speaker 1: actor for a long time. Even though Dan had been
Speaker 1: an actor, Joe looks for a different kind of character logic.
Speaker 1: He's always asking and what happens next. Dramaturgically, he's very
Speaker 1: much about the engine and the motor and Dan is, well,
Speaker 1: he's also actually, he's actually all they're They're so similar
Speaker 1: that it's only a matter of their temperaments that are different.
Speaker 1: Dan is like a priest. Yeah, he's more jesuitical and
Speaker 1: then tell her was what uh? To the extent that
Speaker 1: you want to say, He's passionately, passionately dedicated to leaving
Speaker 1: no stone unturned. And I think one of the reasons
Speaker 1: he went back to acting this last year did The
Speaker 1: Normal Heart on Broadway, and I think it's because he
Speaker 1: had to re experience the the sort of dynamic of
Speaker 1: what it means to be an actor, to get under
Speaker 1: the skin of the experience and find out what kind
Speaker 1: of communicator he is with actors. By acting again. Dan
Speaker 1: has a a kind of remove about him, and Joe
Speaker 1: tends to delve, oh sort of with sword, kind of
Speaker 1: play stile play. Yeah. But they both have in common
Speaker 1: is real rigor about their work, ethic and their intellectual
Speaker 1: understanding of a subject, of a world. Sometimes, although it's
Speaker 1: not always useful, I divide directors between directors that you
Speaker 1: want to please because you want them to like you,
Speaker 1: and directors that you want to please because you don't
Speaker 1: want them to hate you. And I don't think I
Speaker 1: need to tell you which one would be which in
Speaker 1: this case, you know, because Joe seems so intense, It
Speaker 1: just seems so smoldering all the time. Well he is
Speaker 1: he No, he wants you to show him. He doesn't
Speaker 1: want to have to tell you what to do. He
Speaker 1: wants you to bring something amazing to the table every day.
Speaker 1: It's why one loves, for instance, our mutual friend Nathan
Speaker 1: Nathan Lane, because every day he brings something new, what
Speaker 1: they call him money player. Many people, I think don't
Speaker 1: understand this is not always the case that the theatrical
Speaker 1: experience movies are very, very different when you work with
Speaker 1: the director in the theater. A lot of them don't
Speaker 1: tell you this or that they edit. You know. The
Speaker 1: most famous example who I love is Joey Tillinger who
Speaker 1: Tillinger basically says nothing for the for the three weeks,
Speaker 1: and then in the last week he selects. My recollection
Speaker 1: of Joey was it was three weeks of me doing something.
Speaker 1: I'd say, what do you think? You say? What do
Speaker 1: you think? Babe? Do you think it was? I just
Speaker 1: I can't do it that way. I see it as
Speaker 1: all about stripping away and finding that kind of improvisatory
Speaker 1: freedom that's locked in the text, and that involves a
Speaker 1: combination of savv nous and analysis and getting off book
Speaker 1: really fast and being to move around really fast, and
Speaker 1: then setting joe I'm told is a stickliff for that
Speaker 1: get off books because nothing really happens until you do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's difficult, especially in a world now, where
Speaker 1: as I recall, you used to have five weeks of
Speaker 1: rehearsal for a straight play, we've gone to a four
Speaker 1: week rehearsal. Four weeks that goes by like like you sneeze.
Speaker 1: I like shorter rehearsals with Bob Falls, another great director.
Speaker 1: I did three hotels this last summer at Williamstown with
Speaker 1: More Tierney and Stephen Webber, and they had two and
Speaker 1: a half weeks Everything is Dangerous two and a half weeks.
Speaker 1: Tell me about when a play like Substance of Fire,
Speaker 1: How did that come to you? You know, it's interesting
Speaker 1: that play in this place share something in common. They
Speaker 1: came out of despair. They both came out of trying
Speaker 1: to write myself out of a kind of real sense
Speaker 1: of despondency and loss. And to the extent you want
Speaker 1: to talk about it, what was the despondency Back in
Speaker 1: I had been working on a play for a long
Speaker 1: time that was eventually became a play called A Fair Country,
Speaker 1: but at the time it was called Dutch Landscape. And
Speaker 1: I worked on it impossible play to do when you're young,
Speaker 1: about growing up. Did it at the Taper in Los
Speaker 1: Angeles and I lost the play. I actually lost it,
Speaker 1: you know, in rehearsal and development through nobody's fault, you know,
Speaker 1: certainly not Gordon Davidson's who directed it. If anybody was
Speaker 1: at fault, if you can even use that word because
Speaker 1: it's it's theater, it was me. I was just in
Speaker 1: despair over how did I let this happen to me.
Speaker 1: I used to work at Book Soup in Hollywood, and
Speaker 1: I borrowed the office above Book Soup to try and
Speaker 1: figure out. You know, I was no longer working there,
Speaker 1: So I was sitting up in this office above the store,
Speaker 1: and I was surrounded by books, and I thought, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've read all of you. I've read you, you, you, you, you, you, you,
Speaker 1: and none of you did me any good whatsoever. I
Speaker 1: don't know how to fight. First line of substance fires.
Speaker 1: Look at all these books. The play is about learning
Speaker 1: how to fight and articulating the things you need, articulating
Speaker 1: the ways in which you have to express yourself in
Speaker 1: order to somehow achieve a kind of victory that goes
Speaker 1: beyond words what scias victory. Isaac doesn't really have a
Speaker 1: victory in an odd kind of way. He goes down
Speaker 1: with his own ship. But he's unyielding. And I think
Speaker 1: I tried to learn how to be unyielding, and writing
Speaker 1: that play it didn't do me much good. Why well,
Speaker 1: because life is life and plays or plays, and you
Speaker 1: can't actually learned that much by writing them. You have
Speaker 1: to live. Do you find that in the ensuing years
Speaker 1: you wind up going up against things that just crush you, right,
Speaker 1: they crush you. I realized that I'm not going to
Speaker 1: compare battles with television networks with going through the Holocaust.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, the Isaac character, there are
Speaker 1: some people who they are just incapable of the happiness
Speaker 1: that leads to real intimacy because there's something that just
Speaker 1: cannot get over. I think it's very true, totally true
Speaker 1: of that character. And in his case, he has very
Speaker 1: little choice. He's locked in battle with this melancholia that
Speaker 1: won't lift, which I think people don't have a real
Speaker 1: honest understanding about. They don't know what it's like to
Speaker 1: be betrayed on like the ninth level, something really hideous.
Speaker 1: I think despair is the dimensions of one's despair are
Speaker 1: so difficult, called to quantify, so difficult to paint, so
Speaker 1: difficult to expose, and it's such a huge subject. Certainly,
Speaker 1: other desert cities is steeped in despair. You know, you
Speaker 1: said talking about network battles, But I had I sort of,
Speaker 1: you know, was ejected from my one adventure and television
Speaker 1: up to that point, I was creating brothers and sisters,
Speaker 1: and it was a very unhappy, very difficult experience for me.
Speaker 1: And again at the end of that thing, I sort
Speaker 1: of I came back east, you know, after having been
Speaker 1: west for a little bit. And what was the first
Speaker 1: thing you wrote after? About? There are three plays in
Speaker 1: my drawer because I had forgotten how to write that.
Speaker 1: This is the thing I think about with other desert
Speaker 1: cities is it's the play where I learned. I taught
Speaker 1: myself how to write again because I was so used
Speaker 1: to writing to please people. What happened with ABC, well,
Speaker 1: first of all, networks being what they are, the people
Speaker 1: who commissioned the piece and who are invested in putting
Speaker 1: it on the air end up leaving. And so you're
Speaker 1: left with a kind of in a kind of parents
Speaker 1: and not necessarily particularly caring supportive step parents slightly bewildered.
Speaker 1: I mean, the guy who really ran the entertainment division
Speaker 1: kept saying, I I don't understand why anybody watches this show,
Speaker 1: and I would say the same thing, except for different reasons.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was really it was bizarre. She would
Speaker 1: call me and scream at me. I actually said to me,
Speaker 1: I don't know who you think you're talking to, And
Speaker 1: I would you know, politely hang up and say I'm
Speaker 1: I'm leaving the conversation now. At one point I said
Speaker 1: to them, don't you feel like there's something wrong? I mean,
Speaker 1: look at this amazing cast, Sally Field, Callista Flockhart, Rachel Griffith,
Speaker 1: Ron Riffkin, Patty Wedding, on and on and on. Don't
Speaker 1: you think there should be some higher intentions, some integrity,
Speaker 1: maybe some I don't know, do you want do you
Speaker 1: want to try and get an Emmy or something. I
Speaker 1: didn't even know how to speak their language, but I
Speaker 1: thought Emmy would be something that they would recognize. And
Speaker 1: a literal quote from the head of the studio was, no,
Speaker 1: I don't need awards. The ratings are good enough for me.
Speaker 1: This happens in the first season, the first season, and
Speaker 1: you are gone after how many seasons after the first season,
Speaker 1: So it was all this takes place in one television season,
Speaker 1: one nine month period. Yes, you know, someone comes in
Speaker 1: to sort of manage the show, and they're beholden to
Speaker 1: the network in the studio, as they should be. And
Speaker 1: I'm beholden to an aesthetic and I'm an idiot for
Speaker 1: being beholden to in a sthetic. But you know, people
Speaker 1: love the show, and it went on for another four
Speaker 1: seasons after that. You maintained some participation in the show.
Speaker 1: You know, how is that possible? You created the show,
Speaker 1: You are the creator of the show. Correct. There was
Speaker 1: a writer's strike, and there was a force masure clause
Speaker 1: forced masore being active God. The studio network could use
Speaker 1: that clause to nullify any contract they had with anybody
Speaker 1: they like. I had been very vocal during that strike
Speaker 1: about what I considered at the time the very unhealthy
Speaker 1: dynamic between the producers and the writer's guild, and I
Speaker 1: wrote about this way too much. What was it? What
Speaker 1: was the name of those uh blogs you wrote on
Speaker 1: huffing impost leaving l A. Yeah, a lot of them
Speaker 1: were very insanely painful and actually lead to again other
Speaker 1: desert cities. The girl in the play can't stop writing
Speaker 1: about things that affected other people, and she wants some truth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then she's left with the debris. So it all
Speaker 1: came out of you know, I pick up the phone
Speaker 1: one day and I see that, you know, people's deals
Speaker 1: are being canceled, but there are people who haven't made anything.
Speaker 1: And I suddenly I'm I was gone, And I even
Speaker 1: before that wasn't sure to what extent I was ever
Speaker 1: going to go back. I knew I would have some involvement,
Speaker 1: but then I had none whatsoever. But for me, what's curious,
Speaker 1: And again you don't have to answer this question. I'm
Speaker 1: just curious, which is, as the creator of a television show,
Speaker 1: there is typically a windfall for that person as the
Speaker 1: creative that show. If that was taken away from you
Speaker 1: through some contractual slide of hand, where did all that go?
Speaker 1: All went to the network? They took it all for themselves.
Speaker 1: I can't speak to that. I'm just not going to
Speaker 1: talk about it, but I am going to say that
Speaker 1: I think it was the best thing that ever happened
Speaker 1: to me because it would have been dirty money, right.
Speaker 1: I think it would have destroyed me in some way too.
Speaker 1: I have no pride in the thing that made me wealthy.
Speaker 1: Would have made me terribly uncomfortable, and I would have
Speaker 1: felt that I had betrayed whatever promise or potential I'd
Speaker 1: set up for myself as a writer that if I
Speaker 1: was going to survive at it, it couldn't be compromised.
Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin, and I'm talking with playwright John
Speaker 1: Robin Bates more in a minute. This is Alec Baldwin
Speaker 1: and you're listening to Here's the thing. The idea for
Speaker 1: John Robin Bates's new play, Other Desert Cities came to
Speaker 1: him when he was back on the East Coast. I
Speaker 1: was sitting at a beach with my notebook, and I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about how to get back into it and what
Speaker 1: matters to me, and I just sort of self destructed
Speaker 1: at Brothers and Sisters. I had written about personal events
Speaker 1: that implicated other people in some way that I hadn't
Speaker 1: taken into account the consequences. And I found myself very
Speaker 1: much like the character in my play played by Beth
Speaker 1: Marvel and Rachel Griffith at various points, a writer who
Speaker 1: is a dangerous creature. And I had a note to
Speaker 1: myself play about daughter of a famous family who writes
Speaker 1: a book about her growing up in this family, something
Speaker 1: like that, the danger of telling the truth that turns
Speaker 1: out to be a lie. And at that moment, this
Speaker 1: lady of a certain age walked by me, and she
Speaker 1: looked to me like um Pat Buckley, the old doyane
Speaker 1: of New York conservative politics, the wife of Bill Buckley.
Speaker 1: Bill Buckley and I had lunch with her once and
Speaker 1: found her to be charming and engaged. And this woman
Speaker 1: walked by me on this beach with her hat and
Speaker 1: in a one piece bathing suit. I immediately felt the
Speaker 1: mother in that play. And I suddenly remembered Old California
Speaker 1: the way it was when I was a kid, and
Speaker 1: we were just in the throes of an election at
Speaker 1: the time, too were about to be and the Republicans
Speaker 1: of certainly of that period and even more so today,
Speaker 1: we're very confusing to me because they didn't seem recognizable
Speaker 1: to me as having a coherent, cohesive coach and argument
Speaker 1: for their principal positions, which had to be Prince a
Speaker 1: Bold in some way. The play just came together in
Speaker 1: one fell swoop, Old California Conservatives, the old hollywel System,
Speaker 1: Reaga Nights. I even remembered I'd gone to high school
Speaker 1: with I think, the daughter of John Gavin, and I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, because I love Touch of Evil, and there,
Speaker 1: I think, isn't John Gavin. No, he's not in Touch
Speaker 1: of Evil. He's in Psycho case in all these movies,
Speaker 1: and I thought about he was the ambassador to Mexica.
Speaker 1: That's right, as is the Stacy Keach character and my play,
Speaker 1: and I thought about your characters based on John Gavin
Speaker 1: to some extent. They're all these archetypes. At the back
Speaker 1: of all this, of course, there's also Joe Mentello, who
Speaker 1: you know, we're no longer a couple, but he's my family,
Speaker 1: my best friend, and you see, being a couple of
Speaker 1: one year two thousand and two. So it was a
Speaker 1: while and he kept saying to me, with all possible respect,
Speaker 1: nobody's waiting for the next Robbie Bates play. And you know,
Speaker 1: these are chilling words because I have so much to
Speaker 1: say and it's not coming out. My equivalent of that.
Speaker 1: As my agent said to me, he goes, it's not
Speaker 1: that these people don't want to hire you because they
Speaker 1: don't like you. He says, they don't want to hire
Speaker 1: you because they don't think of you at all. Jesus, Well,
Speaker 1: it's terrible, because the worst thing that can happen to
Speaker 1: an artist, I'm invisible. I no longer matter for me.
Speaker 1: Writing plays has always been very tricky. I don't know
Speaker 1: a lot, I don't have a lot to say. I
Speaker 1: reach things very slowly, and I I sometimes it seems
Speaker 1: facile and easy, and to me, some of the times
Speaker 1: my thoughts and my sort of expressed opinions in place
Speaker 1: seem hollow or naive, even because I know they're deeper
Speaker 1: truths always to be found and that I'm But don't
Speaker 1: you think that seeking them and being aware of that
Speaker 1: makes you more likely to find it than anybody? You
Speaker 1: didn't go to college? Did you know why you wanted
Speaker 1: educating yourself? I wish I had gone to college. It
Speaker 1: was a depressed and unsettled kid. And why I don't
Speaker 1: I think I wasn't at peace with probably any element
Speaker 1: of who I was, whether it was a sort of
Speaker 1: nascent intellectual or sort of pre expressive homosexual kid. Or
Speaker 1: where variously l A from you were born? Where in
Speaker 1: l A and you lived seven then Brazil for three
Speaker 1: years in Rio, and then South Africa for six and
Speaker 1: a half years until I was eighteen. And your father
Speaker 1: was in the condensed milk business. My father worked for
Speaker 1: a giant multinational carnation milk. Yeah, it was a condensed
Speaker 1: milk business. So l A, Brazil, South Africa, and then
Speaker 1: back to when you finally get back to la how
Speaker 1: old are you so? High School's over? I just finished
Speaker 1: high school. I'd sort of lost time through all. The
Speaker 1: trial was high school in South Africa, Like I couldn't
Speaker 1: get used to things like cricket and corporal punishment. You know,
Speaker 1: you get cane for like not doing well on a
Speaker 1: spelling test, literally caned. And I think, actually I was
Speaker 1: so busy trying to be sly and charming that I
Speaker 1: forgot how to be me. That I think led me
Speaker 1: to rebel against learning itself. So I was sort of
Speaker 1: interested in the few things. I was interested in literature history,
Speaker 1: but I wouldn't apply myself to anything except escape, and
Speaker 1: part of escape meant not going to college. I was
Speaker 1: really lonely, and I I kind of became a depressed kid,
Speaker 1: and that manifests itself. You can say, I think I
Speaker 1: did you know you were gay? Then yes, I definitely
Speaker 1: knew that. I knew that add to your depression didn't
Speaker 1: make you feel more isolated. It wasn't proactive the gay
Speaker 1: community there in talking about getting caned. Yeah, well, um,
Speaker 1: I think my parents, who loved me very much, were
Speaker 1: distracted by their own terrors. There are certain families that
Speaker 1: are born in terror and live in terror. Um conceived
Speaker 1: in terror. I need you to write a player for me.
Speaker 1: I want to be called conceived in terror? Go ahead, well,
Speaker 1: I mean death of a salesman? Is is a family
Speaker 1: that lives in terror? You were how old when you
Speaker 1: arrived in Durban? Ten? The eight years? Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: there almost eight years critical time, ten years or so
Speaker 1: all of your real back half of your childhood, your
Speaker 1: teenage years especially you are in Durban. Yes, it was
Speaker 1: seventeen or something when we left. But you had finished
Speaker 1: the high school program. No, no, I finished it in
Speaker 1: l A where Beverly Hills High. What was that like? I?
Speaker 1: You know, was the only kid I knew who rode
Speaker 1: their bike to school because everybody else's parents had given
Speaker 1: them a fiat literally, yeah or something. Who are your friends? Then?
Speaker 1: Who did you become friends with? Anyone? Oh? Yeah? In fact,
Speaker 1: Jenny Livingston went on to make Paris Is Burning, great documentary,
Speaker 1: Tina Landau, great theater director. Gina Gershawn my oldest friend
Speaker 1: from high school. We were in place together in the
Speaker 1: drama department. So I became friends with and I say
Speaker 1: this with real respect and love with fellow freaks. How
Speaker 1: are you feeling about yourself and about life that last
Speaker 1: year in Beverly Hills. I think I was scared to
Speaker 1: death still. I mean, it was just a new form
Speaker 1: of foreignness, but it had the pattern of something very
Speaker 1: familiar to me. But you know, I remember being taken
Speaker 1: to a party really early on, and I had developed
Speaker 1: a kind of weird eye beforehand for art. I thought
Speaker 1: maybe I was going to be a painter or an artist. Story.
Speaker 1: And I walk into this house and there is a
Speaker 1: giant David Hackney and next to it is a giant Mother. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm standing in front of this giant painting that's famous
Speaker 1: that I've looked at in books Thames and Huts and
Speaker 1: art books while I was in Durban at the Art
Speaker 1: Library of the University. I do the world was just
Speaker 1: very real and different, and it was easier to like
Speaker 1: have sex, and it was easier to to function. Were
Speaker 1: you writing? I guess I was sort of writing, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what were you writing? I was writing really bad short
Speaker 1: stories about alienated Paul Bull's kids adrift in foreign countries,
Speaker 1: which is basically tell you that youruth still what I'm doing.
Speaker 1: It just looks slightly the wallpay ris pretty or Now
Speaker 1: where were you living at that? I was living um
Speaker 1: on friends sofas like the parents of children. I went
Speaker 1: to high school. I was I was just a freak,
Speaker 1: you know, And I was at odds with my family
Speaker 1: at the time, you know, and I had escaped and
Speaker 1: it was just a nightmare. How do we get from
Speaker 1: there to fair country? Gordon Davidson, you know in Pinocchio
Speaker 1: where he falls in with actors. I'm walking around. I
Speaker 1: ran into this girl I knew from high school. She said,
Speaker 1: what are you doing? And I'm sort of looking for
Speaker 1: a job. I think I'm starving to death. I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: she said to me, And I should have known. She said, well,
Speaker 1: my father just fired me. He needs he has a
Speaker 1: new assistant. And I was like, well, what does he
Speaker 1: do and she said, oh, he's a film producer. Who
Speaker 1: was the producer. This is great guy, and he was.
Speaker 1: He a working producer. I'm only asking for a name.
Speaker 1: My first day at the office, he says to me,
Speaker 1: whatever you do, answer the phones, but never pick up
Speaker 1: the phone. And I was like, I don't even know
Speaker 1: what that means. And he said, you'll do fine. And
Speaker 1: he had a gang of cronies, all of whom had
Speaker 1: contempt for the studio system and had worked around the
Speaker 1: edges of it, or in it had done well, fallen
Speaker 1: out of favor, usually had destroyed themselves through my favorite thing,
Speaker 1: their own ambivalence. I found myself at home for the
Speaker 1: first time in my life win the nest of scorpions.
Speaker 1: Yes I did, I found myself. I said this, I know, yeah,
Speaker 1: because nobody is trying to pass. It's a den of
Speaker 1: thieves here. It was still the days of speaker phone,
Speaker 1: and they would have fights. They had a tower on
Speaker 1: Sunset Boulevard. They had a nest of rooms in a tower,
Speaker 1: and they would be fighting with each other and then
Speaker 1: they would suddenly be a pause. Someone would say, jeez,
Speaker 1: if you could see what I see right now, that
Speaker 1: girl walking down Sunset she is so beautiful. The fight
Speaker 1: was over nothing meant any That's right. One of the
Speaker 1: masks for a glass of water is in my first
Speaker 1: few weeks there two what do I know. You would
Speaker 1: go to the sink, bring a glass of waters, spit
Speaker 1: it out like practically on me, and say this isn't water,
Speaker 1: and I would say, yes, it's water. What are you
Speaker 1: talking about? That's water. It's I want professional water. And
Speaker 1: the whole time became about professional water. How long did
Speaker 1: that last three four like, uh four some years. No, No,
Speaker 1: but it got you the scorpions that's looking down at
Speaker 1: the women's asses for four years. And I would copy
Speaker 1: everything down. And so at the same time I started
Speaker 1: hanging around with these actors, there was a sort of
Speaker 1: an equally desperate contingent of avant gardists odd playwrights out
Speaker 1: there in l A, living on the fringes of everything.
Speaker 1: And so I lived between these two worlds, one of
Speaker 1: which was sort of drunk and druggy, and the other
Speaker 1: was insane. Megalt Noma, I can't say the word megalomaniacal.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Meg, I'm here for maniacal. You just think
Speaker 1: of the words and I'll say that, thank you. I
Speaker 1: think we're gonna be in each other. I know. It's
Speaker 1: like Bluetooth, the technology. I had to come up with
Speaker 1: a play for one of these sort of workshop things
Speaker 1: that we would put together, and one of these playwrights
Speaker 1: said to me, so, what's your play, and me bulsh
Speaker 1: fitting which is something I just did. I said, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's called ms Lansky Zelinski on the spot. I just
Speaker 1: came up with the next on those guys, Yeah, I said, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's called Ki just based on the guys in the tower,
Speaker 1: so it's just them talking and I put all my
Speaker 1: notes together and we did it and it was the
Speaker 1: first one you wrote. Yeah, now you're on Broadway. The
Speaker 1: show is a big success. People have said wonderful things
Speaker 1: about the show. I worshiped Stacy. I mean, I work.
Speaker 1: He is one of the great wild mustangs of of
Speaker 1: all theater history. And in this piece, it is that
Speaker 1: Reagan crowd, it is that Bush crowd, it is that
Speaker 1: blue blood Republican crowd, the conservative crowd. Stacey captures that.
Speaker 1: I wrote the part for him. Do you wrote the part? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I knew that there was nobody who could capture that better. Ever,
Speaker 1: we had worked together before, he had done ten Unknowns
Speaker 1: at the Taper, and it was a revelation because the
Speaker 1: character has to have a dignity as well. Yeah, Stacy
Speaker 1: brings in the guy. We sit there and go, I
Speaker 1: get it. I would have followed him. I wanted him around.
Speaker 1: He's great and I love him so much. You know,
Speaker 1: he and Joe didn't know each other, and so they
Speaker 1: got on the phone before rehearsal and Stacy says to Joe,
Speaker 1: you know, I've worked with Robbie before. We worked together before,
Speaker 1: and I know him well, and do you do you
Speaker 1: know him? If you worked with him? And how well
Speaker 1: do you know him? And I kind of know him?
Speaker 1: And we lived together for twelve years. But that's Stacy.
Speaker 1: He's like, oh damn. The great thing about Stacy is
Speaker 1: he brings centuries of actors honor onto that stage with him,
Speaker 1: the honor of honoring fellow actors, the honor of Snake,
Speaker 1: the privilege of being an actor, the privilege of being
Speaker 1: in the theater, not missing a single show in his seventies,
Speaker 1: the rituals of it, the privilege of working in the
Speaker 1: theater is the thing that has been of everything that's
Speaker 1: happened to me. Just the great honor of being in
Speaker 1: the American theater in some capacity is what I'm left
Speaker 1: with that it's a privilege to be in it. I'm
Speaker 1: lucky to have found my way back to it. What's
Speaker 1: institutionalized and working in the theater is a hunt for
Speaker 1: truth that doesn't exist in the movie business, in the television.
Speaker 1: Do you know what you're doing next? Are you onto
Speaker 1: something now that you're writing? Who knows? I can't tell yet.
Speaker 1: I just can't tell you scribbling. Yeah, I'm supposed to
Speaker 1: be doing things. I'm a mess at all times. John
Speaker 1: Robin Bates says he feels like more of a grown
Speaker 1: up as a flight When he started out in l A,
Speaker 1: he was couch surfing at the homes of his friend's parents.
Speaker 1: Things are different Now I have a home, I grow stuff,
Speaker 1: I'm responsible to people. Have a dog. I have a
Speaker 1: dogs three what's the dog's name, Trip, Trip, Yeah, he
Speaker 1: has three legs. He's a great dog. This is Alec
Speaker 1: Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing.