Jim Meskimen — Character and Voice Actor

Click HERE for the podcast version of this interview

John Gaspard: Today, we're going to talk about your life as an actor and having a diversified pool of things to draw from to be a working actor. I listened to a couple other interviews with you, and there was one point they kept coming to that I wanted to avoid, which was immediately talking about your mother. My connection is, and was, that we went to the same high school, Southwest high school in Minneapolis. So, I thought, well, that's my great connection. And then my friend Jim here, who is … one of the reasons he's here is because he is a working actor as well, but in a much smaller market here in the Twin Cities. So, I thought having him as part of this chat would be interesting. Jim, what is your story?

Jim Meskimen: And he happens to have the name of Cunningham.

Gaspard: Well, we're gonna get to that. Here we go.

Jim Cunningham: Therein lies the story. Your mother made an appearance along with some other famous TV moms at, you know, we're very proud of the fact that Spam is produced here in Minnesota.

Meskimen: That's right. That's right.

Cunningham: And there is a Spam museum. It's that important to us, Minnesotans.

Meskimen: Yes, I know she's been there. We had some Spam swag that she gave us one time.

Cunningham: Well, there, it was from that. She came as a famous mom, along with some other famous TV moms, Barbara Billingsley, and--

Meskimen: And Florence, maybe? Florence Henderson?

Cunningham: I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I was the emcee of that event and I was interviewing them as they arrived on the red carpet. And I said to your mother, Oh, I'm just so thrilled to meet you because my last name is Cunningham. And more than that, my dad's name is actually Richard Cunningham. And so is my brother.”

Meskimen: Oh, my gosh.

Cunningham: During the height of the Happy Days craze, we literally had to have an unlisted phone number because every third call was, “Is Fonzi there?”

Meskimen: Oh my God. Oh my God.

Cunningham: And your mother said to me, “You have to prove to me that your name is Cunningham.” So I took out my wallet and showed her my driver’s license. And she said, “Oh, you poor darling.” And she gave me a nice hug and a peck on the cheek and it was just, I cherish, I cherish the memory.

Meskimen: That's really sweet. That's hilarious. She challenged you like someone would make that up, you know, so she had to really get to the bottom of that one.

Cunningham: But your mother was just charming and a delight.

Meskimen: That's great.

Cunningham: Yeah. Sorry. We got off on a tangent.

Gaspard: We've given the elephant in the room some peanuts. Now we're shoving it off to the side for you.

Meskimen: Well, if I may say it is, it is no problem at all. I love to talk about my mom. She has blazed such a path for me, not in terms of, you know, any kind of practical nepotism, but just because everyone loves her and loves what she represents. And so I find it very easy to make friends with strangers in this way, because you're already kind of disposed to, well, you must not be such a schmuck, you know, he’s got this mom. And so I'm always very happy to talk about her. She's a delight and she's 93. She lives very close by and she's very happy in enjoying her retirement.

Gaspard: Excellent. All right. So we want to talk about being a working actor, but before we dive into the acting part, I know when you started out, you were focused maybe more on art and cartooning and that. How did you make the switch from that to acting?

Meskimen: Well, I kept both plates spinning. I studied, I taught myself to cartoon and illustrate, enough to be a professional, you know, not enough to be a super genius, kind of in demand, tremendous demand person. But enough to work. And I did that in New York city. And I had this need to perform. And so, I also did plays, I would do little projects.

I would perform, you know, when I could. When I went to college, I didn't take theater classes, but I would do plays, you know, people would audition. And if there was a guy — I was very good at accents. So, you always needed a funny guy with an accent. Sometimes, you know, I could get the part of the old man, the old French guy or whatever. And that I just was always a few clicks above the rest of my fellows there.

So I really kept both these activities going while I was sorting out which one was gonna be the path. Cause I really honestly wasn't clear on what I'd be doing. And, I felt strong feelings about both, but I didn't feel at that time, I didn't see how I could mesh them together. I didn't see how one was going to be, how I’d have to jettison one completely.

And it took me a while to figure that out. And when I did, it was a big relief and I went, okay, I know why I want to pursue acting. I know what's honorable about it. I know why it's right for me at this time. And so I'm going to go for it. And then I went with full energy towards that, but I always, I mean, I haven't forgotten how to draw or paint and I do it now. I'm older, I'm 62. That was when I was 23.

So at this point in my life, I wouldn't mind sitting home and painting a little bit and being away from everybody. But at the time I felt like I needed a more social existence, a more social career that would have more collaborative aspects.

Cunningham: As you look back on things, do you remember some of the first things that you got that were maybe, you know, of note?

Meskimen: Yeah. I started off, I came to New York and I started a bunch of things all at once. Cuz New York is a great place get started, you know, and start things and be a starter. So I was studying acting and I was studying improv. I had a false start. I went and studied at the Stella Adler school for a while, which was a disaster. And I vectored off of that as fast as I could. And I got into improv, which was much more suited to my temperament and I think is better training in general.

So I was doing that. I was looking for an agent and I was also supporting myself as an illustrator cartoonist in the meantime. So I didn't have to be a waiter. I could have a pretty decent job.

So the first things I got had to do with my ability to do impressions. And be a voice actor. So my improv group that I was in had a gig weekly doing what was then a regular feature of the old McNeil Lehrer report, if you ever remember that show?

Gaspard: Oh yeah.

Meskimen: The McNeil Lehrer report, which was a news show. It was like a hard news show, but it had a funny section every Friday. They would take the political cartoons of the day and just by kind of zooming in and out and changing panels, they would sort of, you know, semi-animate them statically. And they would add voices to it.

And then they hired us to do the voices of, you know, Boris Yeltsin, then Reagan and whatever was happening on the time. And we’d go in every Friday. It was my first AFTRA a job and I think I made $114 bucks a week, but it was $114 bucks a week, you know, back then when a ride on the subway was 50 cents.

That was like, this is okay. So that was a nice, kinda like, oh, that's a stability, you know? Cause I think I did, we did a whole, I don’t know, a season or more of it. And every week, you know, it was kind of cool.

My biggest breakthrough came in the area of on-camera commercials. And I had remembered that my mom, when she was a single mom, she would, every now and then before Happy Days, she would get guest spots on things like Mannix and Mission Impossible and Hawaii-5-0. But those were pretty few and far between. And then, if she booked a commercial, it was like, oh, you know, thank God because it would generate enough income, through residuals for her.

And back then commercials paid very, very well. Today it's more rare, as you know Jim. It's kind of a disappearing thing, as things go on the internet. But a network commercial back then could help you stay alive. So, I had that in my mind. I was like, you know, I need to get into commercials.

So, I auditioned and eventually, after a couple of years, actually two years at least going on a lot of things as a young man, I started to get into commercials.

And there was one very, very lucky day that changed my life completely. And it had everything to do with whatever else I was studying, because I was studying communication at that time. I was studying improv at that time and those things came together in a beautiful way.

I had an audition for a grocery chain out of Texas called Skaggs Alpha Beta, the euphonious name of Skaggs Alpha Beta.

And they were looking for a spokesman to interview people in the store. And they had had some market research that told 'em that, you know, you call yourself the friendliest place in town, but you're not so friendly. So, they wanted a friendly spokesman who could talk to people, actual real people and have fun and whatever, you know, and be clean and not insult people.

And that was what I had been studying in improv, you know, clean comedy. Supportive comedy, you know, not cutting the legs off of people. So, I got this audition. I went physically and did it and they said, “oh yeah, yeah, that's great. We're gonna hire you.” I'm like, great. It's three commercials and three regional commercials, which is not a huge deal, but for me it was like, well, this is great.

Then after we did those three commercials, they came back about a month later and said, “all right, we want you to be our spokesman to do all our stuff all year long. We'll give you a contract, radio, TV, photo, you know, put you in the newspaper, the little circulars and billboards and what have you.”

And it was like, forty grand. And I'm like, oh my God, I didn't even know this existed. My mom never had anything like this. This is like new territory. Well, I did that for five years for that company. And every year, the price went up, the contract got sweeter. By the end of it. I was making, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just on that job, which would take about seven days a year to do.

And that changed my life, because it gave me tremendous confidence, because I created all the material, I improvised every second of it. Maybe not every second, but you know. And it gave me the wherewithal to exist in New York comfortably without having to really sweat the day job and to do plays and to do things that, you know, if you have time, you go and you do improv shows and you don't worry about, am I making any money? You don't sweat it.

And then I actually got known because the footage, I would take the footage and I would cut it into reels and I would send that around and I got more spokesman jobs. So, you know, it was like a side business that sort of developed outta nowhere.

Off of one audition. Sometimes it makes me scared to think: what if I was late? What if I didn't make it that audition, life would be so different.

Cunningham: Somewhere in the multiverse, that's happening.

Meskimen: That poor sucker in the multiverse but he probably has all my hair. So it's fine.

Cunningham: Did you do any Happy Days with your mom? I was just thinking as a young kid, did you do any? You know, walk-ons or extra work on any of the shows your mom was doing?

Meskimen: No. The only time when she became Marion Cunningham—your pseudo mom—she got me into an episode and my sister, not the same episode. She exercised a little bit, you know, and it happens to be one of the most famous episodes of Happy Days that I was in.

I'm a young man, 17, on the beach looking buff. And I come and announce the fact that they've caught a shark out in the water. And then the rest of the show is about how Fonzi’s going to jump the shark.

Gaspard: But it sounds like growing up, that you learned the life of a working actor because you've lived with a working actor, is that safe to say?

Meskimen: A hundred percent.

 I think one of my primary advantages in my life has been that I saw what it is, you know, and what it isn't. And I saw it. My mom also was particularly driven and also focused and intent, you know. She's a high achiever. So, whereas a lot of actors go, well, I'm waiting for my agent to call and I don't know, I can't do anything, you know, until they give me an audition. Maybe I can, blah, blah, blah.

And I realized that's like a losing attitude. Because what I saw was a woman who went, Hmm, uh, who can I call? What can I do? Who must I reach out to? Who must I meet? Should I do a play? Absolutely, I should do a play and I should let everybody know that I'm doing this play. And even though it's a crappy play and I'm getting no money, I'm gonna do it.

And I looked at that and went, okay. I see. You need to promote yourself. She hired a PR person. She always had a PR person and would utilize that in any way that she could. And then, how do you live and raise kids and pursue this weird career that is so herky jerky, what do you do? And I saw how she did it. She would economize and we hired out—she always remembers this—we rented out one of the bedrooms in our house. Mind you, we have three bedrooms.

We hired out a third of our house to a college student, because, you know, that was 60 bucks a month or something she would get and shared a kitchen with this person. And, she would do plays and she would volunteer for things and she would push it along, push it down the road.

I remember vividly seeing her rehearse lines for an audition over the sink. We were getting ready to have dinner or lunch or something. And she's going to take off in a minute in the car and drive to Hollywood and do this audition. You juggle, but she was a hustler, in the sense of a hard worker. She was a depression child and I think that came as just part of the territory back then.

But even more than other people her age that I observed, she was just intent. And it came from this vision that she had of as a girl of seeing her name on a marque and changing her name too—so it would look better—and just being like, I'm gonna do this. Which I recognize now from my life experiences and for my own philosophy that it's a very smart way to go about it.

Gaspard: Yeah, it really is. You know, it's interesting in looking at your career and then looking at my friend, Mr. Cunningham here, who I've known for 30 some odd years.

Meskimen: Oh, wow.

Gaspard: And seeing that you both have a very similar mindset when it comes to not saying no to things. I learned that from Jim. Don't necessarily say no to something right away. Listen to what it is. A lot of times you're gonna accept stuff just because you're not doing anything else and why not. And you never know where it's going to lead. You both have this living in sort of a limbo world of: I don't know what's coming next, but because you've said yes so often, and because you're easy to work with and because you bring the goods and because you have so many different threads, there's almost always something coming in. Because you've just kept the streams open. And that's why I wanted Jim to meet Jim, because you both represent the same thing just in different towns.

Meskimen: Soul brothers!

Cunningham: Exactly. Well, I'd like to think.

Gaspard: But now you have an online course to help actors become working actors. Because there's a real difference between an actor and a working actor. I’m in the low budget movie world and there's a difference between being a screenwriter and a screenwriter who's working or being a director and being a director. You can say your thing, but to actually be working at it on an ongoing basis, doesn't necessarily just happen. And it sounds like in your course, you're going to walk people through that process.

Meskimen: Yeah, I've really tried to do that. That's exactly right. You can break down a career, and I'm sure Jim understands this very well, like you have the production side of things, which is the rehearsing, showing up, acting, great.

And everybody's focused on that. You're like, that's what acting is. Well, that's right. That is one sliver of the job. The other sliver is marketing. There's also a kind of a sliver that's having the big goal and the vision and sort of the planning and being the visionary of the organization, because you're an organization. There’s finance, there's paying bills, there's keeping one's self fit, medical things. There's a lot of different moving parts to it.

And, and most of us think of acting as like, oh yes, there I am on the stage holding the skull. Giving the speech to Yoric. Okay, that may happen, that may be part of it, but that's like an eighth of it or a 15th of it. So, in my course, I've tried to share what those other parts of the organization that I do.

Because I was paying attention, thank God. It didn't just happen by luck. It happened very concertedly and very determinately. So I know what we did. And I say we: I've got a little team of people, with my wife and now my daughter helps me, agents, managers, other people to actually keep it rolling, because it is that kind of life, the freelance life.

And there are many different kinds of freelancing lives that people can lead. But in an actor freelance life, you don't know the next week. Like, I looked on my calendar yesterday. And I went, wow, there's a lot of blank space on that calendar. And yet there is no blank space in, you know, my bills summary--I'm going to have to pay whether there's something or not.

So now today, because of all the promotion that I do during the week, now I have a couple jobs. I never sweat it because—probably like Mr. Cunningham—I know that these are the actions that I have to do. I know that schedule's gonna fill out. It's gonna fill out ahead of me almost like a train track rolling out in front of the steam engine.

So, in the course, yeah, I've composed a bunch of different videos where I talk about certain things about auditioning, about promotion, marketing, and other very important aspects of keeping the career rolling. I don't teach acting. I'm not going to go there. My wife has a wonderful acting school and anybody can check that of out if they want to. It's called The Acting Center and they run online courses as well as in-person here in LA.

I'm not teaching anything, but I'm sharing. What did I do? And what have I found after 35 years of doing this are the important steps to take, the important actions to always keep in, and what might happen, and how I've bobbed and weaved and kept things going so that I didn't have to take another job.

I never had to back up and go, well, I retreat, you know, now I'm gonna go and just go into teaching or now I'm gonna go into, you know, real estate or nothing wrong with that. And I know a lot of actors have done it, but I have not had to. And I'm a little bit stubborn at this point. I'll go kicking and screaming into any other, non-artistic field.

Gaspard: Good for you. Without giving away too much of the course, we’ve got a couple questions that I'm always interested in when it comes to this sort of career. What's the biggest mistake that beginning actors often make?

Meskimen: I think the biggest single mistake is to have the right mindset concerning who is creating the career. Because we come seemingly with hat in hand, as actors, to the audition, to the theater, to meetings, interviews, we can fall into the trap of thinking, I'm waiting for someone to give me something. When we're really desperate, we're really like beggars and it can get pretty bad. And as any actor who's been begging knows, it just doesn't work very well. It's very unattractive. Unless they're hiring a beggar. For the role of the beggar, you know, then it's okay.

All other times it's really anathema. So, I think it's a viewpoint of like, I am gonna create this career. That's what I saw my mom do. And that's what I exercised too. I totally mobilized that, because I'm a creative person, I like to create. So, it was kind of like, well, here's a good excuse: You want an excuse to create? Guess what? Your whole career is up to you.

What you wanna do, what you're good at? How much you pursue it, how well you do, how fast you go, how much you get paid. It's really kind of up to you. And that may seem counterintuitive or stupid, or, you know, bewildering to people as they just start out, because we are looking to collaborate. We are looking to fill a hole that someone else has created.

You know, somebody is out there right now, writing a part in a show that will need to be cast. And the casting director will be looking around for that person. That hole didn't exist until that writer came up with it. So, in a way, they have created that, they've created that opportunity, that position that needs to be filled. But we can always sort of be ready for those things. 

I believe in sort of deciding and picturing things and putting things out there in the universe. So, I do that sometimes I'll go, you know, somewhere someone is writing a great part for me and, it's very difficult to actually link that to cause and effect. But the fact is I've been working as I said for a long time.

So, I think it's just a mindset of: you have to take the hat out of your hand, put the hat on your head or on a hook and go, you know what? I am the guy in charge. So, how much money do I wanna make? What do I wanna do this year? Take charge. Don't go, well, I hope, if only, well, maybe if things go well, somebody might possibly grant me…

No, no, no. That's a losing attitude. That's an expectation, you know, and being the effect of something rather than actually trying to cause something. So, it's a hard lesson to tell people, because so much of life is sort of dictating that we behave like people that are created upon. You know, we are marketed at, you know, come and watch this movie, sit in the dark while we tell you a story and feel this way and laugh at this part and, you know, and pay this money and, oh, okay.

We get that all day long. There's stuff, just shooting at us all day long and at some point, the artist has to kind of shake it off and go, what do I wanna make? I'm gonna make it, you know, I'm gonna produce it, I'm gonna create it.

And so that's what I think is the biggest change. The biggest mistake that could just go through a whole lifetime or a whole career of a person is like, they're thinking like, God, the agent will give me the thing. And then I might, if I possibly do well, they will give me the part and then maybe they'll keep all of it in and not edit out all of it.

And, and then maybe they will pay me and you know, all this kind of awful , you know, slave kind of mentality. As much as you can turn that around. You'll notice that the very big actors didn't take no for an answer. They developed their own projects. They were fussy. Sometimes they were saying, I won't do that, but I'll do this, you know.

They're demanding on themselves and, and many of them have created their own things. I always think about Billy Bob Thornton, would Billy Bob Thornton have the terrific career he does today? He's a great actor, but do you have the career that he has today if he hadn't decided, man, I'm gonna write this script and star in this Sling Blade thing myself.

I don't know. I doubt it. And there's lots of examples of people like that, because he wanted to do it, cuz it was something he observed in life or had this idea, I think while he was on another shoot and he turned, you know, the material of his life into this project that he believed in and miracles happened. And a lot of stories like that.

Gaspard: So you had the advantage of growing up, watching a working actor. So you had probably a bit better sense of that world than someone coming in from the outside doing it. But was there anything that you were surprised by once you started being a full-time working actor?

Meskimen: One lesson that I learned very quickly was: I probably would've had a commercial career about two years earlier, but I made a mistake. A strategic error.

There's a lot of potency to beginner's luck in show business. We hear a lot of stories. They're almost like legendary stories about people who went well, you know, I wasn't, I didn't even have the audition. I went with my buddy and my buddy didn't get the job. And I did. And you hear that there are gazillion stories like this.

Right? Same thing happened to me. I went with my friend to visit a girl who was working for Barbara Shapiro casting in Manhattan. And I went to say hello to this girl. And she said, “oh, by the way, you know, we're casting for this beer commercial.” So I got a call back. I got a second callback.

I got a third callback and they pay you for the third callback. But in between the second and third callback is where I made my error. This is funny, because it was related to impressions and impressions has always been a door opener for me. It was a Miller beer commercial with guys sitting around at campfire.

And I went well, I'm playing a guy who stands up and does a John Wayne thing. That was me. They kept calling me back, kept calling me. And then I had some stupid conversation with the girl that I had been going out with at the time. And she said, “why don’t you do Henry Fonda?” And I went, “yeah, I'll do Henry Fonda.”

That was the end of that. So the lesson I learned is a very important lesson. Most actors pick this up very quickly, but I just kind of screwed up. It’s that if they keep calling you back, don't change anything. It's going right.

If they ask you on the day: Okay, we saw your John Wayne. I wonder, can you do any other voices? That would've been the perfect time to whip out your Henry Fonda, as they say. But I screwed that up. Two years before I got another really good opportunity. So, I never change anything now. I learned that lesson very quickly.

When I did finally book a commercial, I had gone in and I got a call back and I remembered on the day I had like a headache. The day I did the first audition, I was cranky. And on the day I got the call back, I'm like that day, I'm like, well, I feel great. Well, I'm not gonna act like I feel great. I'm gonna be cranky.

And I went in and I booked that job. By applying this do not change anything.

Cunningham: Smart. A lot of people don't think that through, boy. That's a really good tip. If you're an actor listening, that's the price right there. You just got gold just dumped right into your lap. 

Meskimen: Yeah, it would be like, if you went to a restaurant and you had the halibut one time and you go, oh my God, this halibut's great. I'm gonna come back. And if they serve you the halibut and now it's in a totally different sauce. You're like, what the fuck? I came for the halibut. What happened?

Cunningham: What happened? As you think about, you know, actors like me, can you point to some, you know, sort of generic, “Hey, this is here's another trap don't fall into this one?” Something that you see other actors kind of making that mistake again and again?

Meskimen: Sure. And it's related to my first comment about what's the biggest challenge in changing this mindset of who's in charge and being in the driver's seat, if you will, of your career. And I think I wind up talking to a lot of people, particularly guys our age who maybe have not made their peace with social media.

But for me it was a major breakthrough to finally have the discipline to get onto YouTube and begin what has become the last 11 years of really, just an interesting chapter of my life, where I have something that I would've loved to have in New York, which is this access and ease of production.

Anyway. Not to talk too much about myself, but just the fact that most actors are underutilizing, I think, the technological reality of today, of being able to share performances with the world and to generate interest in what you do. And to also creatively expand and reach out and come up with content yourself that may not at first have any kind of monetary value to you, but as a product, as a promotional activity, is virtually free and can create great windfalls and attention.

Are you doing anything on YouTube or anything?

Cunningham: You know, I'm really not. And not only am I not doing it, but you're the first person to suggest that if you were to use that in some way, that there would be a benefit there. Now, I'm not a great actor. I'm better as myself than I am as anybody else in general.

And that's where the bulk of my work comes is being me in front of a camera, or on stage. The challenge has been thrown down now: what could I do on YouTube? And could that effect, because as you mentioned, as you get older, the opportunities decrease.

They're looking for a 30-year-old, they're looking for a 40-year-old, and I'm not that anymore. I always used to tell people what you want is the number of auditions to go down and the number of jobs you're doing to go up. That's the goal. And now I'm finding that's no longer true for me. It's inverted now.

Meskimen: Yeah. Well, I can speak to a couple of points to that. So, I understand about playing yourself and being like a spokesman or being like something, a character that is more or less how you appear to other people. I would suggest that you're much bigger than that.

You're much more various than that. Your possibilities and potentials as just a human being are far beyond what your body might dictate: how you look and how you think about things, even some ideas you have. I think you're bigger than that as an individual. And one of the things that I love about acting is that one gets to occupy a completely different point of view.

(as Ian McKellen) For example, this is why I do a lot of impressions is because sometimes I can just change into another person and look at things completely different point of view.

That's sort of the magic of it. I mean, the expectation of an actor generally is that they can do different things. You wouldn't buy a Swiss army knife and find that it has one blade and go, I'm really happy now.

You'd go, wait, where are the scissors? Whereas the ballpeen hammer or whatever. To be an actor means I can play a lot of different characters. I can play a lot of different roles. Now, as we get older, maybe, you know, that gets narrower, but we can certainly always push. Push it out. And I think you can surprise yourself by what you're actually able to do.

You've got a lot of wisdom now, you've earned that over the years, you've met a lot of different kinds of people, and I think it's probably something to take a look at. An actor, if you look at the job description, if there is such a thing it's like knowingly taking on another point of view to help tell a story, that's kind of a quick definition of what it would be like. 

So if you are facile and ready to occupy other viewpoints, to look at things from the point of view of someone who's, you know, just physically exhausted or someone who's been just kicked around their whole life or someone who's just won the lottery. You know, if we practice this, which is what they do at the acting center, just kind of changing viewpoints and looking at things from different points of view, then you discover that, you know, I can do a lot of different things. Because a human being is like that. A human being can adopt all kinds of different viewpoints and feel all different kinds of ways and express different kinds of emotions.

And there's a great freedom in that. I think you'll blossom if you start to have a little try at that.

Cunningham: I like that. That's good advice. I like it a lot.

Gaspard: You know, it's interesting. You mentioned social media and we're all of a certain age and feel like things might be passing us by, but Jim Meskimen, your use of social media, your use of YouTube—I found you on TikTok—your promotion of yourself does not seem like promotion. It does not seem like marketing. It is just you, having fun, doing the things you do. And then in some cases it's impressions. It's other cases, it's you doing characters that you've created. And I think that's sort of the secret to promoting yourself on social media is: Do what you love and eventually people will find that and want to be part of that.

Meskimen: Yeah. And there's an example. Thank you for noticing that. I appreciate it. And I'm having the best time. Two things I wanna say about that. one is: I don’t know if you've ever heard the entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuk?

He said something very, very helpful about branding. Because branding, when we talk about branding, it immediately sounds like something we don't wanna have anything to do with. But branding is reputation. That's another good synonym, your reputation. And we prove our reputation all the time. By how we talk to people, what we do, what choices we make, it's pretty simple.

So if we let people know, Hey, I was at this concert and I had a great time. Well, we know that about you. We know that you love Fleetwood Mac, you know, and that you had a great time on last Wednesday. That is your reputation too. If you create a character or you go to a play or you just say, God, you know, this is on my mind and I have to say something about it. That's your reputation too. That's your brand. People get to know you that way.

And the other point I wanted make was in terms of the volume of what I do and how it doesn't seem like branding. It's just me having fun. And that is indeed entirely what it is.

There was a guy when I was kicking around New York, back in my twenties, in various subway hubs, like grand central station or times square in the subway downstairs. Every now and then I would walk past this young man who was a drummer and he was banging on—not drums—he had like a joint compound bucket. And he had, I swear, I remember one time he had crisper from refrigerator—you know, the shelf, the drawer.

Anyway, he was banging away those buckets and those instruments, which obviously did not cost a lot of money. And the sound just racketed through the subway. And it sort of integrated; when you walked through to that drum beat. You were kinda like, yeah, I'm in New York and I'm walking.

Not for nothing, this is the right soundtrack for this little part of my life right now, you know? And how many people would walk by this guy every day? Was in the hundreds of thousands, probably, right? So, there is a guy—this is a great example, if you think about it in terms of social media—this was a guy who was drumming for a massive audience every day.

And were people giving him money? I never gave him a dime. I mean, he couldn't have made more than, I don't know, 75 bucks a day. Who knows, maybe made more than that. But that wasn't the point. The point was 10 years later maybe, or earlier, there was a production, called, Bring in the Noise, Bring in the Funk.

This guy got hired. He was seen by the director. He was in a Broadway show. He was performing seven nights a week. I can guarantee he wasn't making $75 a day. And it just was like: oh, look at that. That's a great, very easy example of like, okay, this is what obviously he loved to do it.

Nobody said here is the way to the Broadway: Get your bucket of joint compound young man. And go thee to Times Square. No, not a chance. He loved rhythm. But he made it go right. And I don’t know where he is today. I don't even know the guy's name, but I know that it was the big start of something with tremendous potential for him, you know.

Gaspard:  Follow your bliss. Like they say, you never know. I have two working actors in front of me right now. Tell me about rejection and dealing with rejection and how you deal with rejection

Meskimen: Oh, good question. Yeah. Rejection is like a kind of a shock to the beginner, because we kind of know it's coming, but it still hurts.

And the fact is that it's something that you have to kind of make friends with, which sounds really, really impossible. I just watched a video of a guy who—I think it was Joe Rogan. I watched a little on TikTok. Joe Rogan was talking about this ice-cold bath. That you know, it's now a thing to do these super cold plunges to try to handle inflammation in the body.

And I watched him because I want to see you go in that bath. And he went in. I'm like, how long is he going to stay in that thing? It's 34 degrees, just above freezing, but he was in there. I lost interest. So he went on for minutes and minutes. And being judged and being rejected is like that cold bath.

Now, Joe Rogan said that the first time he went in that bath, he could do it for about a minute. And then he got the hell out of there and went into a sauna. Probably. Now he can go in for 15 minutes. So, it was like that for me with rejection. Because, you know, you prepare something it's—and when you're an actor, it's different than other jobs. Because other jobs, if you're producing, like, even a piece of artwork, you know, it's exterior to you.

It's not you. It's that piece of paper. It's that object that you've created. With an acting job, it's like, oh, it's your hair, your body, your face, your tone of voice, your presence, your smell. It's all what you're offering, you know, whether you want to or not, it's there. Especially in the pre-Zoom days.

So, the levels and the dynamics of you being judged are just exponential. You know, you're like, wow, oh, you didn't like it the way I sat, you didn't like the way I said that one word, you know. There's all these swords to die on. But if you recognize and get familiar with the procedure, then after a while, that bite that it had originally does start to taper off.

And at this point— and early on for me, I'd done hundreds of auditions—I'm like, some I get, some I don’t get. Unless somebody says something really cruel, which is a whole different category of thing. There is just a natural judgment and evaluation. That is part and parcel of being an actor, where they go, “thank you very much.”

And you never hear from them again and you go, wow, that's one thing. If someone says, “yeah, you know, you're not quite right. You're not quite good enough. Boy, we were really expecting something better or, wow, that sucked.” I mean, there's a whole range of othernesses. Then that that is something that you don't necessarily get comfortable with.

But after a while you kind of gird your loins and go, well, that comes up, I have a different response to that. You know, I'm gonna say a little something or I'm gonna make a mental note: This casting director is an asshole. But that's different. The everyday kind of, “thank you very much for coming in rejection,” that's just something that if you do it enough and if you're not too precious about it and you don't take it personally, cuz it is not personal, it absolutely is not.

You know, one good thing too is to—if you're an actor and I have not done this, so I'm giving you this advice that's kind of secondhand—but go and participate in a casting process where you're not being cast. Watch other actors come in, be a reader or something, and observe the variety of people that come in and what is attractive and what is unattractive and what is distracting and what is not distracting.

And it'll give you some reality on like, oh, okay. We've interviewed or we've auditioned 15 people for this role, 12 of them could do it. They were fine, but this one's hair is this way. And this one has a little better this and you know, and I don't know, I met this guy before, I'll work with him again.

They're arbitrary, small kind of gentle reasons why the person gets hired. And it's not the Roman arena where they go, Thumbs down. You're dead. Now it’s thumbs down, you are a failure. You—it's your turn to be eliminated. It's not that. It's like, yeah, you're great. You're great. I got nothing to say except the director wanted to work with this guy.

And you’ve got to make your peace with that and go, yep, I would do the same thing if I was a director. I wanna work with this guy. Who cares? It doesn’t matter.

Gaspard: I still remember William H Macy saying once he was on a TV show and went up to the producer/director, the guy in charge, and said, “thanks so much for casting me in this.”

And the guy said, “yeah, it was between you and another 5,000 people, but you’ll work.”

Meskimen: I just found out—this is interesting—I got a role in a show that I'm gonna work on next week. And I was like, wow, great. You always, you know, these days, Jim, you know about this, you do these at home self-tape auditions, and it seems fake. It still seems kinda like I'm not in show business. I'm just doing it in the back of my house, but they call you up and they go, you know what? We want you for the role. And I'm like, oh, okay, great. And I'm all chuffed about it, you know, excited.

And the wardrobe man, when I went to the wardrobe fitting, for reasons of his own I'm sure, told me that, “Yeah, they originally hired another actor to do this part and then the schedule changed and so he couldn't do it.” And so then I found out, you know, in that sort of covert way that I was not the first choice.

I still get to do the job. But that's another aspect of things that could come in and sour things and you can start to feel sort of like a victim a little bit. But you know what? I just look at, what am I trying to do? I'm trying to get bigger and better parts in bigger and better shows. So that like, like Jim said, maybe I don't have to do so many auditions. Maybe they come to you and say, we have an offer. I love that. That happens sometimes, but I am also very happy to audition. I'm very happy to meet with people because for me, I look at an audition is a performance.

Especially these days when they expect a performance. I don't hold the script. I memorize it. I work it out. I spend hours and hours and hours getting that show together and shoot it to the best of my ability, put the best sound on it that I can and fire it back as quickly as I can.

And it's fun for me. I like the activity of acting. I like the activity of portraying a different person, of trying something out.

And that's, that's the joy of it. And the chore of it.

CLICK HERE FOR THE PODCAST VERSION OF THIS INTERVIEW

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

When Fast, Cheap & Under Control first hit shelves in 2006, it became the underground handbook for a generation of indie filmmakers. Now, two decades on, this 20th Anniversary Special Edition proves the lessons inside aren't just timeless—they're more essential than ever.

What's changed? Technology. Platforms. Distribution.
What hasn't? The grit, ingenuity, and sheer determination it takes to make a great film with nothing but vision and hustle.

Inside, you'll find:

  • Exclusive interviews with legends like Steven Soderbergh, Roger Corman, Jon Favreau, Henry Jaglom, Kasi Lemons, Dan O'Bannon, Bob Odenkirk and more

  • Over 100 images bringing the stories to life

  • 40+ links to trailers, scenes, and supplementary material—turning this book into an interactive master class

  • Real-world case studies from 33 groundbreaking low-budget films—from Clerks and El Mariachi to The Blair Witch Project and sex, lies, and videotape

  • Field-tested lessons from the author's own four features—proof that these principles work in the real world, on set, in the edit room, and on screen

Whether you're shooting on your phone or scraping together a micro-budget, this is your master class in turning limitations into strengths.

No film school required. Just this book. 

Roger Corman called it the textbook for his legendary filmmaking school. Now it's your turn to learn from the best.

Buy the Book: “Fast, Cheap and Under Control (20th Anniversary Edition)”

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

  • Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

  • Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

  • Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

  • George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

  • Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

  • Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

  • Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

  • Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

  • Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

  • Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

  • Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

  • Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

  • Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

  • L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

  • Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

  • Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Buy the Book: “Fast, Cheap and Written That Way”

Magician and Filmmaker Lance Burton on his low-budget feature debut, “Billy Topit: Master Magician.”

Click here to listen to the Podcast version of this interview

John: I loved Billy Topit, both Jim and I did. I've made a number of low budget movies in my life, about a half dozen of them and the driving force behind them has almost always been, let's get together with some friends and make a movie. I got the sense that that was kind of part of the DNA of Billy Topit. Is that right?

Lance: Well, yes, I just have to correct you on one thing: Billy Topit was not a low budget movie. It was a nobudget movie. We literally just decided, you know what, I'm not going to spend any money. Everyone volunteered. So, if it ever makes any money, I'll go back and pay the actors.

John: Well, okay. But as someone who has done the same thing, I’ve done that a half dozen times with the no money. The results you got, given the no money status, were great. Your sound is exceptional. One of the things that's normally a big sign that it's a low budget movie is the sound is not good. It's a hard thing to get right and when you do get it right, it makes it sound like a big budget movie. The cinematography is terrific, the editing is fantastic. I don't know if you bought the music, or if someone did the music, but whatever it was it fit perfectly, and it just sailed along. So, for a movie that had no budget, you did an exceptional job of making a real movie.

Lance: Oh, thank you. You’re right, the sound is the one thing you really don't want to skimp on, because that's something you really can't fix in post a lot of the times. So, we did try to pay attention to the sound recording. As far as the music goes, some of the music was from my show that I already own. Some of the performance pieces, some of the music we use just for the movie, was rights free music that that I got from a company called Digital juice. They have all different sorts of music and it's searchable. So, you can find you know, rock and roll hard driving music, you can find, you know, instrumentals, you really have everything.

Then there was a couple of pieces that a friend of mine, who's a musician wrote and recorded for me. And one of the pieces in the film, my lead actress, Joelle Rigetti, she had actually recorded an album a couple of years ago and she gave me the album during the production. She said, “Hey, anything on here you want you're welcome to use.” And I listened to it and there was one track, I went, this is perfect for this one scene I have. It's that it's the scene where the whole cast is waking up on the second day, brushing their teeth and getting ready to go out. That's actually the lead actress singing.

John: The stuff you picked all really meshed well together.

Lance: Oh, thank you. It was during the post-production process when it really struck me—as we were editing and doing that—how much the music adds to a production, not just a live show. I already knew that for a live show. But as I was making the film, it really just struck me again, you know, wow, music really does add a whole new dimension to the movie or live show.

John: Yeah. So, where did the idea for the movie come from?

Lance: Well, I'll tell you exactly where it came from. When I was a kid, there was a television series on TV called The Magician starring Bill Bixby. It only lasted one season, because the network got a new president that came in and he just, you know, cancelled all his predecessors’ shows. But it actually did good in the ratings. But it only lasted 22 episodes.

The magic consultant on The Magician was Mark Wilson and so when I moved out west, I met Mark Wilson, and became friends with him. Then when I was shooting Knightrider, guess who they hired to provide all of the large illusions and props for the episode? Mark Wilson. He was sort of the magic advisor on that television show. So, Mark, and I got to hang out for seven days on the set as we were shooting. He's actually in the episode. You can see shots of him. He's sitting in the audience during one of the opening performances. In fact, I get him up on stage at one point as a volunteer. So, anyway, one day after filming, Mark and I are going out to dinner and we're in his car and we're driving along. And he says to me, “Lance, how do you like doing this work?” And I said, “What do you mean, Mark? You mean like this episode?” He says, “Yeah, how do you like, you know, acting on this, this TV show?”

And I said, “I'm having the time of my life. I get to do magic. I get to act. I get to work with a stuntman, and this is great.” And he says, “Well, you're doing a good job and you ought to think about doing more of this.” And I said, “More of this, so what do you mean?” He says, “You ought to start a notebook, start keeping some ideas of how you could incorporate your magic into a TV series or movie, you know, like with the Bill Bixby series.” And I thought, Oh, that's a good idea. So, I did, I started writing, every time I had an idea about how to use magic within the context of the drama series, or, you know, a story, I would write it down.

So, after a few years, I had all these sort of clever things that I came up with, to use magic and propelling the story forward, or to get out of this sticky situation or whatever. And every few years, I've pulled that out, and I'd go, “You know, I'm going to try and go pitch this,” and I would go to Los Angeles and set up some meetings. And I was trying to pitch to do a series every few years and we got close a couple of times, but we never were able to sell it. But the area I was working in was so similar to things that would pop up on my TV screen later. I kept thinking, “Man, I've got something here, I just need to, like any kind of magic trick, you know, I get it in my head and it's frustrating, I just I gotta get it out, I got to put it on the stage because it's like in my brain is like scratching the inside of my skull and it's really annoying.”

By that time, the technology had progressed to the point where we had these high-definition cameras that weren't, you know, astronomically expensive. And we had editing software so that somebody on their laptop could put out a professional looking product. So, I finally just said, hey, you know what, I'm gonna do this. And I called my buddy, Michael Goudeau and he came over and we fleshed out the story. And then we wrote the screenplay within, like two or three months. And then we eventually just started casting it and shot it. So, it all goes back to Bill Bixby and The Magician from 1973.

John: Well, most things do. Most things do go back that. Were you always planning on directing?

Lance: You know, directing and acting at the same time is really difficult. But I had been doing it all my life, you know, with my live show. And we started in on this thing and then at some point, I heard an interview with Barbra Streisand, and someone asked her that question, and they said, “Is it difficult to act and direct in the same production?” And she had a great response. She said, “No, it's easier that way. That's one less person I have to argue with.”

Jim: She's right. Absolutely right. So, talk a little bit about how the movie changed, you know, from your initial script and then through shooting and editing. Were there a lot of kind of, oh, let's do this. Oh, that didn't work.

Lance: I'll tell you what: when I first had the idea, I didn't have a real clear idea of the tone I wanted to take, you know? As far as it could have been a drama, it could have been a comedy or whatever. But I started chatting with my buddy, Michael Goudeau. Now, Michael worked in my show, as my special guest star. We've been friends for, you know, since the mid-80s and Michael said, this was his idea. So, I gave him credit.

He said, we should write this is a family film and I said, why is that? He says, because I have two small children and about two or three times a year, I have to take them to the movies and we have to pick a family film, and they're always horrible. That's why I'd like to see a good family film. Something good, we can take the kids to see. And I said okay, that's fine. You know, that fits. Magic's always been considered a good family entertainment.

So, we chose to write it as a family friendly movie, and as a comedy, but I give credit to Michael for that, and it didn't alter that much. Once we had the script completed, the idea was, you know, to keep to the script as close as we can within reason. Now, there were some scenes that were improvised and there were some things that I added during the course of the movie.

I'll tell you one thing that we added: the film starts with a dream sequence, with Billy floating a lady in the air. And then he wakes up in bed and you realize, oh, that was just a dream. He doesn't really have a big Las Vegas show. He's a birthday party magician and that was the first thing we shot.

So, as we were shooting, I read a book by Robert Rodriguez about his experience shooting El Mariachi. That was recommended to me by Rory Johnston, who played the bad guy in my movie. When I explained to Rory what we were going to do, he said, oh, you're doing like a no budget movie, like Robert Rodriguez. And I said, Who's Robert Rodriguez? He said, he is just a director, he started out by making this movie called El Mariachi. He had $7,000. That was it and he made a whole film.

And so, I bought the DVD to watch. I wanted to see what a $7,000 movie look like. And then I read his book and he had some really interesting advice and thoughts. He was talking about the power of three—which magicians will do also—where you have a callback, or something keeps popping back up, and it happens three times. In El Mariachi, there's like this sort of dream sequence. But it happens three times. And I started thinking, he's got a really good point there. So, I started thinking, where else could I insert, I need two more dream sequences? And I’ve got to find a place to insert them. So, we wrote two more dream sequences and found the right place to put them. And we shot that, but that kind of happened once we started once we started shooting.

Jim: You know, John, as he's mentioned, has shot some low budget movies here and there, populated largely by friends of John. And I get the sense that, in watching your movie, that these people are all your buddies, that they're all your pals, these are all your friends.

Lance: Oh, yeah, they're all my friends. The only time there were people in their movie, really, that I didn't know, like extras in the restaurant. We would just ask people, do you have any friends that you can come over and be background actors? And a lot of them are my friends. Like the birthday party scene: those kids are all kids of friends. Like, hey, if you got kids, bring them over to my stage manager's house.

John: It really looks like you guys are having fun throughout the whole movie. I don't mean to denigrate it in any way, but it's a really goofy movie. It is surprisingly silly in a really fun way.

Lance: It's a silly movie and a lot of that stuff is Michael Goudeau. Everybody loves Michael and loves his comedy and kids especially love him. So, that's we wanted to go for. For instance, when we were writing the date scene, you know, that was a silly scene and they were doing the game with the milk, the little milk containers. And Michael said, listen, when I take my kids to a movie, when it gets to the romantic the date scene, they are bored. They are like, oh, they're falling asleep going, oh, when is this over? So, let's beef this up with something silly. Hey, great. That sounds great. So, again, a lot of that stuff was just the purpose of the movie was to keep everybody's interest.

John: And that's probably something you've learned from being on stage forever, is feeling when the audience might be getting bored and being ahead of them.

Lance: Yeah, you don't want to get to that point. You want to keep it moving.

Jim: Your friend Michael is in the movie?

Lance: Yes, he is in the movie. He's one of the jugglers.

Jim: Okay. But the taller one or the shorter one?

Lance: The shorter one. He was my co-writer on the screenplay and also co-executive producer.

Jim: At the very end, in the credits, there's some very clever, funny, little teases about the possibility and it was sort of like, gosh, I hope there is a sequel. Is there talk of that--?

John: And I will say, I'm going to speak from my podcast partner here. We're standing by ready to help you if you want to do.

Jim: Absolutely. I’ll drop everything.

Lance: Billy Topit Part Two, The Empire Strikes Back. Billy Topit Part Two, the Search for Spock. I tell you, that was just me getting at the end of the editing process and doing the credits and it's just going out. This will be funny. Just me just making up silly stuff.

John: And the image of you doing that of sitting on a computer and editing, do you have the filmmaking bug now or you going to it doesn't have to be a sequel, Billy Topit, but...

Lance: I've enjoyed. Here's the thing that I enjoyed the most on the whole process was learning to edit. My good buddy Bob Massey was our photographer and our editor. But in the process of editing, I would go over to his house, and we would work on it and then he'd have to go do something. I was like, do we have to stop? And one day he said, you know, I can give you the software. I bought this and I can put it on two computers legally. So, if you want to, I'll show you how. I went, yeah.

So, I went out, I bought this and I put this stuff on, and I started to learn how to edit. Bob was there to help me, show me. I really loved it. I really, really loved the process.

And a lot of it is very similar to magic. I'll give you a good example of that: There's a scene at the end of the movie where they've opened the big show and I do the sawing a couple into eight pieces. So, we got the two, the boy and the girl and they get sawed apart and they come out of the boxes at the end. And the boys were in the girl’s clothes and they chase each other offstage. And then they run past the camera and then the second shot, you see them run into view in the wings. And then they have a scene in the wings.

Well, we shot the first part, with the doing the trick, and then running past the camera. We shot that at the Monte Carlo hotel in 2010. And the scene in the wings, we shot in 2013, on the other side of town at Rory Johnson's church that he went to. They allowed us to shoot there. So, the two scenes that are supposed to be at the same time were shot three years apart in different locations.

As we were shooting the first one, I knew in my mind what I wanted to do: I wanted him to run past the camera, and then I would pick it up. And the rest of the cast hadn't even been cast yet by the way. I didn't even know who the other actors were going to be. But I knew there was a scene over there. So, as they run past, I'll pick it up. Whenever we get to that three years later, we shoot the thing.

Now I'm editing it together. So, now I take the music from the first part of the shot, playing during the trick and the audience reaction. You get the audience applauding and cheering, and they run past the camera and we go to the second shot. But you still hear the audio, you still hear the music playing, and you hear me out on stage going thank you and the audience applauding. And so now when you put it all together, it's like it's seamless. No one knows that that scene was shot three years apart. It's like a magic trick. It's an illusion. There's a good example of how the sound helps enhance the illusion. And there are a few magic tricks that we do on stage where sound is a very big part of the illusion.

John: I don't know at what point in the process you read Robert Rodriguez’s book, but he based El Mariachi on what he had available. He wrote the script based on the town, the bar, the tortoise, the dog, all of that. You seem to have done a very similar thing, in that I'm guessing you already had some footage you on stage or was it a relatively easy thing to get. For an average person, that's a really hard thing to get.

Lance: Exactly. And I had to shoot all that before the show closed, because we were getting ready to close the show. So, we captured all of that all the stuff that had to be shot in the theatre, we captured that.

John: But for the average person writing a script, to write that in a scene, you can't shoot that. The lights alone in the ceiling are more than your budget.

Lance: And I was well aware that. I had this opportunity that we'd written it into the script and it's like, okay, I gotta shoot this now, because if I wait another two months, it's all going to be gone.

John: Exactly. And I felt the same with the scenes in the casino, which would be I think, normally a difficult thing to do. But you obviously had a relationship to make those happen.

Lance: The casino scenes, those were all shot afterwards. That was my buddy, John Woodrum, who owned this little casino called the Klondike. We wanted it to be a locals type Casino. I talked to a few of the casinos and some of them were like, yeah, we'd let you come in here and shoot, we have a coffee shop. How many days do you need it?

And I'm going to myself, I don't know how long this is going to take to shoot. I never shot a movie before. And then finally I went over to see my buddy, John and I said, John, I've got this movie I'm shooting, and some of the action takes place in the casino. And there's a coffee shop and you've got a coffee shop. What would you think about a shooting here? And he looks at me says yeah, whatever you want. Come on in. I'm like, what? Come on, anytime. That's like, Okay, I found this. I found our location.

John: You are a low-budget filmmaker at heart. You got all the tricks that are necessary to be good at this and you did it on your first movie. That's exceptional.

Lance: It was a fun process and it's not dissimilar to shooting a television special or a TV show, but it is a little different. There is obviously magic in it. But you know, there's also the whole second element of the story and doing the scene and the acting and getting all the actors on the same page.

John: And speaking of the actors, I was thrilled to see our friend Louie Anderson in there. He was a Twin Cities guy who I knew back when he was here and I had the good fortune of working with him a couple times in the corporate arena. And to see Johnny Thompson obviously having so much fun, it was just great. And then to see Mac kind of turn up. I don’t want to spoil it. But he does turn up

Lance: Mac turns up there near the end of the film. It was great fun, being able to work with Johnny. To be able to direct your mentor is a really special thing and that was just so much fun working with Johnny, and he was just so good in this role.

John: He was such a good actor, he really had that ability to turn it on.

Lance: And Pam too.

John: Oh, yeah, Pam was in there as well. It was just so much fun to see them just pop up like that.

Jim: A delight, the whole thing was from start to finish was a delight. I watched it by myself after my wife went to bed and I just was giggling through the whole thing.

Lance: Thank you. Here's my favorite story from the whole process. I had this idea to do the trick on the telephone, The Wizard, that that anybody that is amateur magician knows the trick. Well, when Michael and I were coming up with a storyline, I had this idea of using The Wizard as part of the kidnapping thing, to find out where the assistant was being held. In order to do that, of course, I had to show what The Wizard was.

The reason I wanted to include that was I wanted kids especially to be able to watch the movie and then after the movie, I wanted them to be able to perform The Wizard for their friends. After we had our premiere, my wardrobe lady from the Monte Carlo—and she also did wardrobe on the movie—she called me like a week later. Her stepdaughter, who was in junior high school at that time, the little girl had gone to school the next day and had performed The Wizard for her friends. And when I heard that, I was like, yes, touchdown.

John: Mission accomplished.

Lance: Mission accomplished. It's exactly what I wanted. I wanted kids to go and actually perform a magic trick for their friends.

Jim: But I really liked how you then turn it around and use it as a plot device.

Lance: It's integral to the story. Yes, and those are those are especially the kind of things I like with magic in movies or TV shows: where you can take something and bring it back in later as a practical device.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

  • Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

  • John Sayles: Writing to your resources

  • Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

  • John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

  • Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

  • George Romero: Casting

  • Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

  • Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

  • Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

  • David Lynch: Kill your darlings

  • Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

  • John Carpenter: Going low-tech

  • Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Buy the Book: “Fast, Cheap and Under Control”

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

  • Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

  • Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

  • Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

  • George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

  • Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

  • Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

  • Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

  • Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

  • Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

  • Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

  • Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

  • Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

  • Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

  • L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

  • Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

  • Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Buy the Book: “Fast, Cheap and Written That Way”

Neal Marshall Stevens on "A Sense of Dread"

Click Here For The Podcast Version of This Interview

Neal Marshall Stevens is a screenwriting force of nature, best known for his spine-tingling scripts that have continuously enthralled horror film aficionados. From his significant breakthrough with the chilling remake of "Thirteen Ghosts" to the psychologically-driven terror of "Hellraiser: Deader," Stevens has a knack for weaving tales that keep audiences on the edge of their seats. His work masterfully blends the macabre, suspense, and intricate character arcs, creating a cinematic experience that lingers long after the credits roll. Get ready to delve into the mind of the man who's been giving us goosebumps for years in this interview with John Gaspard and Brian Forrest.

JOHN:  Neal, you have a really long and storied history in the horror cinema. Can you remember the very first horror movie that had an impact on you?

NEAL: Well, actually, looking back, the first movie that scared the hell out of me wasn't a horror movie. It was actually a Disney movie called Johnny Tremaine. It was a kid's movie. And there was a scene in that movie, Johnny Tremaine was a kid during the Revolutionary War who knew Paul Revere, who, as you may remember, was a silversmith. And there's a scene in that movie, the British are coming and Paul Revere has got this urn of molten silver.

It gets knocked onto a table. Johnny Tremaine trips and puts his hand face up into the molten silver and fries his hand. And I'm sure I know I, every kid in the audience goes like (sound effect.)

But that's actually not the scariest part of the movie. Later on, surgeons are unwrapping his burnt hand, and they look down and they react in horror.

His fingers have healed together, stuck together. We don't see it and they say, “Oh, we're going to have to cut his fingers apart,” which also happens off screen. And again, in our imagination, imagining no anesthesia back then, it's a revolutionary war. So, poor Johnny Tremaine has to have his healed together fingers cut apart.

The memory of what that must be like has lasted. I must have been like five or six when I saw it. My parents dragged me to see Johnny Tremaine, it's a happy Disney movie. I'm 67 years old, so it's been over a half a century since I saw this movie and was appropriately traumatized by those images. So, Disney knew how to scare little kids. That's for sure. 

JOHN: He sure did. Wow. That's a horrible story.

NEAL: Yeah. As for official horror movies that scared the hell out of me, again, we used to watch Phantasmic Features on the TV in Boston. I remember a movie called Teenagers from Outer Space. They weren't actually teenagers. They were all in their thirties. But anyway, these invaders had a skeleton ray that as they would aim it at someone, it would flash and you're instantly reduced literally to a skeleton. And they were, they didn't care who, so as soon as they come out of their spaceship, there's a barking dog—bzzzt!—and the dog falls down, reduced to bones.

They didn't care. They would use it as a woman's climbing out of a swimming pool—bzzzt!—skeleton floating in the pool. The casualness with which completely innocent people are reduced to skeletons. Again, absolutely horrifying. Couldn’t have been much older than nine or ten when I watched this movie. But the fact that human flesh has reduced the skeletons, but also the casual innocence of which people are reduced to flesh is stripped off their bones. It's terrifying to me.

BRIAN: I wonder how you parlayed that early sense of, “Oh, I like horror movies” into, “I want to create horror as a genre. “

NEAL: Well, I was one of a whole generation of kids who got super eight cameras and made, you know, we made stop motion movies and made monster movies in their basements. Pursuant to that, I was writing scripts when I was 13 years old. I guess people now do it with phones. We didn't have cell phones back when I was a kid, but we had super eight cameras and then, you know, a little cartridge things that we'd slug in.

And so, I made tons of those little stop motion movies down in my basement.

BRIAN: Do you still have some of them? 

NEAL: I guess I may have them somewhere. I think I have an old creaky super eight projector somewhere. I don't think you can get a bulb for it anymore.

BRIAN:  I've got one up there. I wonder if it would work?

NEAL: Yeah. That's the big question. I wonder if it would work? Heaven only knows.

JOHN: But that's a great way to learn visual storytelling.

NEAL: Yeah. When I ultimately went to NYU grad film and, and all the films that we shot the first year were all silent. First silent film then silent with sound effects, but you weren't allowed to use sync sound until you got to second year, if you made it that far.

JOHN: Did you make it that far?

NEAL: Yes, I did. I actually graduated. Back at NYU, it was a very rough program at the time. They cut the student enrollment in half going from first to second year. So it was, it was a rough program back then.

JOHN:  That's brutal.

NEAL: Yeah.

JOHN: So, you leave film school with something under your arm that you've shot. Where does that lead you?

NEAL: It certainly didn't get me much in the way of employment at the time. I ended up going right back to NYU. I ran their equipment room of all things for something like six years. But during all those six years I was writing. They had like a computer that they used to turn out the schedules. And then when I weren't writing schedules, I was using that computer to write my screenplays using WordStar. If anyone remembers that old program. God, it was horrible, but it was free, because they had the equipment room.

And eventually I sent some stuff to Laurel Entertainment, which is the company that did Tales From the Dark Side. And they had an open submission program. If you signed a release form, you could send them stuff. And I'd gone in and I'd met Tom Allen, who was their senior story editor. I had a screenplay and I went in and talked about it. He liked it. It wasn't for them, but then he invited me to submit ideas for their new series, their follow-up series to Tales from the Dark Side, which is a thing called Monsters.

And I went in, and I pitched some ideas, and they bought one. And it turned out to be their premier episode of Monsters. And shortly after that, tragically, Tom Allen passed away. And the VP, Mitch Galen, invited me in and said, “Would you like to take over and be our senior story editor on Monsters and our other projects?”

And meanwhile, you know, for the second part of that whole series, I was still working in the equipment room at NYU and also working as a senior story editor on Monsters and being their creative consultant and reading hundreds of scripts for Laurel Entertainment. And then eventually I quit the equipment room, and I went and I worked for them full time and wrote a bunch of episodes for Monsters.

And I was a story editor on The Stand and The Langoliers— which wasn't so good—but on a bunch of other projects, it was just an enormous learning experience. And The Stand I think turned out really well. Other stuff, The Langoliers, did not work out really well. And a bunch of other projects that were not horror.

BRIAN: Why do you think some things, especially, let's talk about Stephen King, why do you think some of those things adapted well and some didn't?

NEAL: Well, The Langoliers was not, it wasn't that great. Wasn't that strong a project. And I think the idea, trying to make that and stretch that out into a mini-series. wasn't that strong. It wasn't that strong, the material wasn't really there. I think there are times when staying faithful to the material is the right approach. It certainly was the right approach with The Stand.

Working with The Langoliers, you know, there were certainly elements of The Langoliers that were strong. And other stuff that was really just so-so. And I think if you'd had the willingness to step aside and do something different with it, it would probably have ended up—especially because they were expanding it into a mini-series—being just devoted to the original material, I think, ended up with a product that was really thin. Plus, we had hired a special effects company that the Langoliers themselves were just horrible. It was really substandard, honestly. So, it did not work out very well.

BRIAN: I'm guessing with all these different projects you had to work on, you probably had to start dealing with types of horror and genres of horror that weren't in your comfort zone. Maybe not even what you wanted to do. What kind of learning curve was that for you?

NEAL: You end up having to deal with a lot of different kinds of horror, especially with, you know, working in Monsters, where you just were turning stuff out tremendously fast. But also, I grew up with a certain kind of horror.

I was never a huge fan of slasher stuff. I missed that whole era of horror.  Certain kinds of movies appealed to me. That particular kind of transgressive material never really clicked.

JOHN: Why do you think that is with you?

NEAL: Because this simple act of repetitive bloodletting, for me, it always felt thin. I mean, it's not that I objected to explicit violence or explicit gore. I mean, I think that Dawn of the Deadunquestionably is one of the most brilliant horror movies ever made. And there certainly, George Romero didn't pull back from explicit violence. Or a movie like Hellraiser, the same deal.

It's a question of how the filmmaker employs the use of graphic violence to elevate the material. What I've told people when you watch a movie like Dawn of the Dead, the first 10 or 15 minutes of that movie—which by the way, I saw when it virtually when it first came out and saw it in the theater—you had never seen anything like that opening scene in terms of graphic violence from being bitten and heads being blown off and all the rest. You were just put through the ringer, watching that opening. And after that opening, the movie was never that violent again. He never showed anything like that again.

And you didn't have to, because you—having seen that opening scene, you were—you were so blown out of your seats. You said, “I'm watching a movie where anything could happen to anyone.” And that was a kind of really intelligent and that kind of thoughtful use of violence is what George Romero was always able to do. It was understanding how graphic images can affect the psychology of the viewer.

JOHN:  Do you think it's also that with Romero's films, they're actually about something, whereas a slasher film is really just about a body count, but with Romero, he always had another thing going.

NEAL: Well, of course, I mean, no movie that isn't about anything is ever going to really, from my perspective, be worth watching. But I mean, even a movie like Hostel, which is exceptionally violent and harrowing, is certainly about something. And I think Eli Roth's movies, which get a really bad rap, are very much about something. He's got something to say with his depictions of violence and his images. Not necessarily to my taste. I certainly wouldn't say that he's not, he's making movies that are certainly about something. He's not a dumb filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination.

JOHN: So, you work on Monsters, and then what happens?

NEAL:  I worked on Monsters. I worked there for around six years, and then they were acquired by a big studio, and they were shut down. And so, I was out of work. I'd known a woman named Debbie Dion from Full Moon. I figured, well, I'll give that a shot. I'll call her up and see, maybe I could write for a Full Moon. And so, I gave her a shot. I, you know, reintroduced myself and said, you know, “I'm looking to see if I could get some job, maybe writing features for Full Moon Entertainment, Charlie Band's company.”

And they said, “Well, we pay around $3,000 for a feature.” And I said, “Well, I got paid more than that for writing an episode of Monsters. That doesn't seem like such a good deal.” And then my unemployment insurance ran out.

BRIAN: Suddenly it's a very good deal.

NEAL: Sounds like suddenly a very good deal. But, you know, I made it very clear that money buys one draft, and if you want to rewrite, you got to pay me again, because I knew what development was like, where they just expect draft after draft after draft, and I'd say, “I can't do that, that doesn't make any sense.”

And also, having worked for Monsters, I had learned to write really fast. I could write a pass on a Monsters episode in two days, so I knew that I could write fast, because these were 80-page scripts.

And so, I started writing for Full Moon, and over the course of like the next few years, I wrote something like... 50 or 60 features for Charlie Band. And a lot of them got made, because they're not wasting money on movies that don't get made. Tons of them got made.

And in the midst of doing that, I was, you know, whenever I got a break writing a full movie, I would write spec scripts, you know, in the hopes I could sell something of my own that wasn't for $3,000. I didn't have an agent at that point. I didn't have a manager at that point. And so, I'm not really good making cold calls to people. It's not my thing. I just like to sit, write my scripts.

I'd come home one day, and I saw my wife was on the phone having this long conversation with someone. When she was done, I said, “Well, who was that?” “Oh yeah. I called up to order something.” I said, “So she's really good at getting on the phone and talking to people and calling them.” And so, I convinced her to be my manager. So, she agreed. She changed, you know, she went out under her maiden name.

She managed to get an option on a science fiction script that I'd written that, I mean, it was ultimately bought. It was never made. And then I decided, you know what? Horror is really my bread and butter writing for Charlie Band. But I don't really have a horror spec. And most of what was out those days in horror didn't really scare me that much. I should really write a script that would scare me. So, I wrote a script called Deader, which I thought had all the stuff in it that I thought was really scary.

And Judy went out with that script, sent it to a bunch of people, sent it to some folks at Stan Winston's company, as they had a development deal. The producer that she talked to really liked it, asked if he could sort of slip it to some people. He did, he sent it to someone, a producer at Dimension, it's based in New York, and he really liked it. And they showed it to Bob Weinstein.

Bob Weinstein called us on Sunday. Am I half awake? Talk to Judy. Because they didn't know that Judy was my wife. He said, “This is the best goddamn script I've read. I'm like three quarters away. Come in on Monday and we'll talk about it.” So, we came in on Monday and they bought the script.

And of course, at that point, it sort of went all over town. And for a very short period of time, it was like the flavor of the month and everyone loved me. And I got myself an agent and got myself like three pictures. And as I was a really big, big to-do. From that, I also got 13 Ghosts.  I had like a really big opinion of myself after, after that sale.

JOHN: Has that been tempered since then?

NEAL: I kind of got the opinion that like, wow, selling scripts is easy. People wanted to hire me because that script was super hot and was all over town. I learned subsequently there are flavors in writers, and I was like that flavor of the month. That fades and then you have to really do a lot more work to get things sold. That was a hard lesson to learn. But I've managed to keep working over the years. I've written many scripts, sold some, and it's been a decent career.

BRIAN:  I was just wondering, you were having all the success writing screenplays, when did you decide to make a jump to writing a book?

NEAL: Over the last five or six years, I've been teaching. A woman that I knew from NYU, actually, Dorothy Rumpolsky had been instrumental in starting a screenwriting program at David Lynch Institute for Cinematic Studies. And she realized at one point that she had a number of students who wanted to work in a horror. She remembered me back from NYU many years ago. So, she got in touch with me and wanted to know if I was interested in mentoring those students. And I said, absolutely. I done some other online teaching at other places. And so, the way it works is, you fly out for an opening few days where you meet the students. And then you fly back to where you come from. They go back to where they come from. And it's all done remotely, the mentoring. And so, I've been doing that now for five or six years.

And during that kind of get together, you meet a bunch of guest lecturers and other teachers, other mentors. And a number of those people had written books for Michael Wiese productions. And, in the course of chatting, they suggested, well, you, you know, “You have a kind of encyclopedic knowledge of horror and horror cinema. That might be a good book for Michael Wiese. Give them a call and see if you can come up with a pitch and an interesting take on it.” And so I did, and I called them and they responded. And so we were off to the races.

JOHN: The book is really, maybe delightful is the wrong word, but it's a captivating book because as you read through it—you have outlined breaking down our different types of fears—you can immediately in your mind go, “Oh, that's what that movie was doing. Oh, that was that. That's what was happening there.” What was your research process like?

NEAL: I think that the research kind of developed over the decades as I studied what made movies scary and what was working, not only in the movies that I was watching, but in the movies that I was writing. I mean, in the same way that when you work as a screenwriter, it becomes almost second nature to try to figure out what was working and what wasn't.

Talking to fellow filmmakers and screenwriters, you have to say, “How many times do you watch a movie?” And a lot of times I will watch a movie 8, 10, 20 times. And there's a process that works when you watch a movie that many times, where you say “Certain things will work every time you watch a movie.”

In the same way that you can watch a comedy and you can laugh every single time as certain things comes up. And other times, you start seeing the nuts and bolts and say, “Well, this is always working and here they're just connecting stuff.” And you start saying, “Ah, I get it. I see what they're doing. I see how they're taking this piece that works and this other piece that works and they couldn't quite, they kind of, they found some connective tissue to stick it together. I see exactly what they're doing.”

And you start understanding—whether you're watching a comedy or you're watching a drama or you're watching a scary movie—they knew exactly how to make this thing scary. And this is how they're doing it. And they understood exactly how to make this thing scary. And it's like, ah, this is what they're using. Whether it is a spider crawling on someone, that's always going to work. Or, “Oh, I see, this is just a jump scare.” And the jump scare is, I understand, that's just, because a big bang, a loud noise, a hand reaching in from, that's just, that's always going to work. It's going to work no matter what. It's just a kind of placeholder scare, because they couldn't think of anything better.

And there are movies where it's just jump scares. And you can always use a jump scare. You can sneak up on a cat and jab it and it'll jump. It's an instinctive response. And if a movie is just relying on jump scares, you know it's because they don't have anything better. They haven't got any deeper than just having the phone ring and they turn up the soundtrack. You can always get an audience to jump by putting a loud sound on the soundtrack.

JOHN: Is there an example you can think of though, where there is a jump scare that you think is a genuinely good, effective jump scare?

NEAL: I can think of a movie that has two really excellent jump scares. John Carpenter's The Thing. When the doctor's giving the electric shock to the guy's  chest, and the chest opens and slams shut on his hand. Didn't expect it.

That's a super great jump scare. It is perfectly integrated into that scene. Everyone jumps, but it's also a brilliant continuation of that scene. Second jump scare, when MacReady is testing everyone's blood. And saying, “We're going to do you next,” puts the needle in, and that thing jumps out of the Petri dish.

Fantastic jump scare. We didn't see it coming. Everyone jumps. And it's again, it's perfectly integrated into that scene. So, two brilliant jump scares in what's already an incredibly brilliant movie.

BRIAN: I remember watching the commentary on Jaws and Spielberg said he got greedy with his jump scares. He had the moment towards the end of the film, you remember that Jaws comes out of the water while it's being chummed. And he said he got this great reaction from the audience, and he wanted one more. And he went back, and he added in the scene earlier where the corpse face comes through the hole. And he said he never got the audience to react as well to the shark after he added in that corpse face coming through the hole of the ship. And I wondered, do you think there's a point of diminishing returns with jump scares in one movie?

NEAL: I think there absolutely is. I mean—and I have no end of admiration for Jaws. I think it may be one of the most brilliant movies ever, and it certainly has stood the test of time.

JOHN: So, we've each come armed with some movies here that I thought it would be fun to talk about them with you, so that you could sort of delve into the different types of fear that are outlined in the book and we'll just sort of checkerboard back and forth here. I'm going to start with one of my favorite sense of dread movies, and that's Don't Look Now, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, directed by Nick Roeg which I saw way too young. First R rated movie I saw. I remember I knew that it was supposed to be really scary, and I went with my older brother, and we were standing in line and the seven o'clock show was letting out. And I said to my brother, “Well, it can't be that scary. They're not saying anything.” Not realizing that they had all been stunned into silence about the last five minutes of that movie. So, what are your thoughts on Don't Look Now and where does that fit?

NEAL: When I talk about the sense of dread, which is what my book is about, it's the notion of those aspects of our lives that we think of as safe and secure and dependable and sacred being suddenly or unexpectedly penetrated by the unknown or the unnatural, the unexpected.

And you have to say, well, what are the things that we depend on? We depend on our homes. We depend on our families. And so that relationship of parent and child, what violates that? And the loss of a child, loss is already wrenching. And so, this sense of parents having lost a child, but then this notion that, well, maybe not, maybe the child is still out there somewhere, is so deeply disturbing. And so this weird, this quest, this pursuit in them. And meanwhile, in the background, you have the sense of a killer, of killings going on. This really disturbing notion of the woman's half decayed body being pulled out of the water is just as an image is—and again, the notion of human body being reduced to mere flesh—it’s deeply disturbing. And nakedness, coupled with decay, it's deeply disturbing. And all of this sort of happening in the background.

We don't quite know how these pieces connect. The notion that the search for the child and the notion that there's a killer on the loose. We know, because the nature of cinematic storytelling is telling us that somehow these things are going to connect, because, I mean, in the real world, there are countless thousands of things drifting around that don't necessarily hook up. But we know that one thing is going to collide with another. And so, there's this growing sense of profound unease, because we know, somehow, this child in this Red Riding Hood cape is wandering around, it's like, is this the child? Is the child going to become embroiled in this?

But what we don't, certainly don't expect is the ending that confronts us in the finale, which is so incredibly, the reversal is so terrifying and so hits us in the face of that sense of innocence—revealed in such a terrifying way—is the essence of dread. Where we expect to find innocence, we find a nightmare.

JOHN: What's great about what Nick Roeg did there was—if you read Daphne du Maurier's short story—he basically shot the last paragraph of that short story. Cinematically, he figured out the way that she's laying out what's going on with Donald Sutherland’s character at that moment. He figured out a way to make it cinematic. So, like you say, all the pieces suddenly fall into place in those last few seconds. And, like you said, we've been brought to this place, we had no idea that that's where it was going to turn. Neal, tell me about Enemy from Space, and what you like about that.

NEAL: Enemy from Space is the second of the three Quatermass movie, adaptations of the serial. It's in the same vein as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and all these other movies about human beings who are being invaded and infested by alien forces.

In this case, over the past few years—but in the context of the story—there have been rains of these tiny little meteorites. Anyone who finds them, they crack open and what's inside infests human beings. And you can find these tiny little burn marks, these V shaped marks on them. And the parasites take them over and make them into these kind of human slaves. And the premise is they serve this larger being, this kind of group entity, and they proceed to start building these atmosphere plants, with the goal ultimately to turn the earth into a colony for these beings that come from outer space.

But the notion of these human beings, they have infiltrated our government, infiltrated our community, and they gradually take people over, scary enough. And they have built this enormous plant that looks, he says, this looks just like this proposed lunar base with these giant atmospheric domes. A group of people managed to infiltrate one of these bases and he looks inside, manages to get close enough to look inside one of these domes and inside are the parasites. When they're released, they grow together into this thing that looks like a giant blob. That's what it looks like outside of the human hosts.

And a bunch of these guys are trapped inside of the atmosphere of plant. And they realize this thing, they can't survive outside the human body. They need methane to breathe, because that's what their home planet is like.

“What we need to do is we need to pump oxygen into this dome to kill this thing. That'll destroy it.” And voices come over to say, “Look, this guy's crazy. There's nothing inside this dome. You send some representatives over, we'll show you anything you want.”

And Quatermass says, “You're crazy if you go over there, you're going to be infected. You're going to be taken over.” But they managed to divide, they send the guys over and Quatermass is pleading with them, “Listen, they're going to get on this speaker. They're going to tell you that everything is fine, but you can't listen. Don't listen to them, whatever you say.”

And then they hear this sound. This hideous sound of screaming coming down the pipes, the pipes that they've been sending oxygen down to the dome. They say, “What the hell is that? What's going on?” And then they look, they see the pressure has gone way up. There's something wrong. And the pipe is burst, the pipe that's sending oxygen to this dome. And they say, “What is it? What's happened?”

And they look and something is dripping down through the pipe. And they say, “What is it?” It's blood. They took the guys that they sent, and they pushed them into the pipe. They say those pipes have been blocked with human pulp in order to keep the oxygen from coming into the dome. That is one of the most, again, all you see is just these drops of blood coming out of the cracked pipe, but that has resonated as one of the most terrifying moments from any movie that I saw, again, as a little kid.

I've seen the movie recently and it's still incredibly terrifying. And again, the architecture of this web of pipes, the cold black and white architecture, is horrifyingly chilling. And the notion of human beings being reduced to mere flesh, being used as material for blocking a pipe. And the pipe's only like, it's like this big. So, you can imagine this person shoved into a pipe is hideous.

JOHN: It is available on YouTube if anybody wants to watch it after that. Brian, do you want to ask about folk horror?

BRIAN: Actually, I was going to jump ahead just because of what Neal was just talking about. I thought this would dovetail nicely into a question I had about a fear of contagion. And you can wrap body horror into this. Movies like The Thing or 28 Days Later, or probably The Quatermas Experiment as well. How does that fear of our own bodies being infected or watching another body change or be infected in unnatural ways? How does that—I don't want to use the word appeal—but how does that appeal to our sense of dread?

NEAL: Well, I think you also have to run back to one of the most common— whether it's psychological or physiological—which is obsessive compulsive disorder.

You say, well, what exactly is obsessive compulsive disorder? We have built in grooming behaviors, whether it's cleaning our hands, we clean our skin. That's wired into us. And when you turn the dial up too far, that turns into obsessive compulsive, obsessive hand cleaning or scratching, itching, hair pulling, all that stuff. It's wired in behavior, in the same way that dogs will scratch, we will scratch.

And so, all of that, we react to it in the same way that if you see a spot of dirt on someone's forehead, it's almost impossible to “Clean that thing off. Get rid of that thing.” I mean, we're built in a certain way to respond to distortions, infections, invasions, in the same way that if someone's eye is cocked to one side, we react to it. Someone's face is distorted. We react to it negatively. We have to work not to respond to it.

It may be a bug, but it may be a feature, because we are built to respond to a diseased or distorted members of our community. It's a survival trait. And so, in some ways, horror movies respond to that. Distorted human beings, Hunchback of Notre Dame or Igor or anyone else who are distorted, deformed, limbless creatures—Freaks—are employed in horror movies in a variety of different ways.

BRIAN: And it's a very different thing from seeing an arm chopped off versus seeing an arm with three hands that are all operating. Both of them is something happening to your body that you might revolt towards, but it's a very different reaction though, right?

NEAL: It is, but it's—in a sense—it's all variations of the same thing. There's a central human norm, and that which varies from the human norm beyond a certain point triggers a reaction that says, “That's not the way it's supposed to be.” And it's just, eyes are too close together, eyes are too far apart, eyes are too big, or there's an extra one. There's one missing. We recoil from it. We recoil from something that is too different, too far off the norm.

And of course, in strictly social terms, you can say, but why, why should we? We shouldn't really respond in that way to others who are too different. But we do respond that way, and it comes with the programming in a very real degree.

JOHN: How does that connect, then, to another movie on your list, The Island of Lost Souls, from 1932?

NEAL: I think it's central to that list. The notion of the difference between that which is human and that which is animal. And Moreau, who experiments with making animals into human beings, but not really. And the sort of terrifying revelation when our hero and the woman—who we know to be an animal woman, but she looks fundamentally human—escape out into the woods and come across the animal person village. And the realization to what extent Moreau has been experimenting. It's not just tens or dozens. The animal people just come flooding out of the woods. And it's just hundreds.

And the extent and the depth and the kind of nightmarish quality, they're all different. They're all horrible. And it's just like, what has Moreau been doing? He experiments with these animals, gets them to a certain state, and then he just discards them and moves on to something else. This utterly careless, sadistic god of this army of nightmares. And you sort of see when they do their, you know, “Are we not men?” And you just see row upon row upon row of these hideous nightmare faces. And you just say, “My God, what has this guy been doing for years? Just making these monsters.”

JOHN: It's a classically creepy movie. I do want to ask you about the classic ghost story movie, The Haunting, and what that says about our fears. If you can, maybe tie that into Ghostwatch, because there's a similar sort of thing going on there.

NEAL: They're both intriguing. They both are opening us up to this notion of unseen nightmare forces, especially the original Haunting, which shows us nothing. All you ever see: Doorknob turning. A face that may or may not be in the wall. This horribly loud banging on the door. A moment where someone thinks that her hand is being held, but there's no one there. It is simply this notion of a house that is born bad, but never really fully explained.

Again, you have this idea of the world itself that should be well behaved, that should be governed by comprehensible natural laws. But there's something deeper and darker and incapable of truly being understood, nevermind being controlled. And if you just prod it a little bit too much, you're going to open it up to forces that are utterly destructive and utterly malevolent.

And in both of these cases, you have this man of science and his team that are going to find out. “We're going to find out for sure whether there really are ghosts, whether there really is a supernatural, whether it really is life after death.  We're going to nail this down for science.” Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that. These are things that are, that are not meant to be explored, not meant to be examined. Go back.

BRIAN: I'm reminded of Van Helsing's sign off on the original Dracula, where he said, “Just remember, there really are such things in this world.”

NEAL: Yeah. Yeah. And, and the same thing is true in some ways on a much more terrifying scale with Ghostwatch, where it's just, it's this kind of, “It's all just fun and Halloween, we're going to explore this. It's the most haunted house in Britain.” And it's broadcasters whose faces everyone knew at the time, and they were playing themselves. Going to this haunted house where you had these poltergeist phenomena. And we're all going to, “We're going to do it live and call in with your own experiences about being haunted.” And it all just goes so horribly wrong.

JOHN: Now, Neal, I just watched that for the first time this week. Heard about it for years. I had no idea that those were real broadcasters. I thought they were really good actors. But to someone in Britain watching that, those are faces they saw all the time?

NEAL: Yeah. Those are real broadcasters. They had their own shows. They were real, the real deal.

JOHN: Wow. I highly recommend renting it because—it'll test your patience a little tiny bit, because it is quite banal for quite a while, as they lead you into it. But now this new bit of information that these are all faces that that audience who saw it, quote unquote, live that night, it's as terrifying as I imagined the Orson Welles’ War the Worlds would have been. Because it seems very real.

NEAL: And apparently the way they did it, is that there was a number you could call in. And if you called in that number, they would tell you, it's like, “Don't worry, this is all just a show.” But so many people were calling in, they couldn't get through.

BRIAN: This really is War of the Worlds.

NEAL: So, they never were able to get to that message that would tell them, don't worry, it's all just a show. So apparently it panicked the nation, because part of the premise was at a certain point, the ghost that was haunting the house got into the show. And so, the studio itself became haunted. It was really spectacularly well done.

JOHN: It is. It's great. Let's just sort of wrap up here real quick with Neal, if you have any advice for beginning screenwriter about how to best create a really powerful and effective horror screenplay, any little tips.

NEAL: Well, first of all, and I touched on this before, jump scares don't work on the page. You need the loud bang. You need the hand reaching in from the side. You describe that and it doesn't work. So, you have to rely on creating that sense of dread. And while writing screenplays, you have to keep things tight. The concept, the idea—in the same way comedy screenplays have to be funny—scary screenplays have to be scary. It has to be scary on the page. If it's not scary on the page, you're not going to sell the screenplay. And that’s the fundamental trick. You got to make it scary on the page.

JOHN: Excellent advice. All right, let's just quickly, each one of us, tell our listeners a recent favorite horror film that you've seen in the last couple years.

I'll start with you, Brian.

BRIAN: Just last night, I saw Haunting in Venice. And it worked because I had seen the other Kenneth Branagh/Agatha Christie adaptations, and I was very familiar with, and you know, you already know generally that kind of detective whodunit story: it's going to be very, you know, using logic and rationality.

And when they had this episode that was sort of a one off—sort of a departure from that usual way that mysteries are solved—it was very effective. I think if I'd seen it without having already watched a bunch of Agatha Christie adaptations, I would have said, “Oh, that's an okay Halloween movie.” But having seen those other ones, it was an excellent Halloween movie.

JOHN: Excellent. That's on my list. The movie I would recommend, which really surprised me, my wife literally dragged me to it because it was a French film called Final Cut, which is a French remake of a Japanese film called One Cut of the Dead. At about the 30-minute mark, I was ready to walk out, and I thought, why are we watching this? And then they took us on a ride for the next hour that, it's a really good ride. It's called Final Cut.

BRIAN: And this is not to be confused with the Robin Williams Final Cut from... ?

JOHN: Not to be confused with that, no. Or if you can go back to the original and watch the Japanese version. But what's great about the French version is they are literally remaking the Japanese version, to the point where they've made all the characters have Japanese names. Which the French people struggle with enormously. It's a highly effective film. Neal, how about you? Take us home.

NEAL: Okay. It's not a new movie, but I just saw it very recently. It is a Chilean stop motion animated film called The Wolf House. It describes the adventures of a young Chilean woman who escapes from a repressive German colony and ends up in this bizarre house in which she blends into the walls.

She's escaped with two pigs who grow up with her in this house, but again, nothing, no way in which I describe it is going to convey to you how deeply disturbing and chilling this movie is. It really is quite indescribably bizarre and disturbing and just well worth your time to watch. It's not quite like any other movie I've ever seen.

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