Hey everybody. Welcome to my guest tonight. This is Jeff Revilla, your host. I've
got an amazing guest. We are going to have a crazy good time, I
can tell you that just based off of the pre interview here, Alan
Katz is joining us tonight, one of the hardest persons I've ever had the
research and we're going to find out all about that. Let's hear the
theme song.
From haunted tales to backstage fights
he's lived the chills and Hollywood Hollywood nights
Alan Katz is telling all
on my guest tonight with Jeff Revilla, y' all.
Light mice
scream it's time to go
Let the
cryptic
stories blow.
Allan, welcome to the show. And, and by, by one of the
hardest persons ever I've researched. I, I, I do want to, I do want to
point out that it's all downhill from here after that song. Jeff.
Well, that's great. That's the way I love the, the best shows are that way.
They always roll downhill. And when we talk about research,
you have great credentials through Hollywood. Tales from the Crypt, Freddy's
Nightmares, the Outer Limits, those lists, those are easy
to find your information on, but finding the background information. The
reason I said it was so hard is I came across 93 different
Allen Katz's and you know, it's very hard. Like
I had your birthplace at Chicago. You're actually from Baltimore. I found out
I grew up in Baltimore. I was actually born in Rome, New York.
My dad was in the Air force at Griffith Air Force Base. He was a
flight surgeon. I,
when I got to Los Angeles in 1985 and I,
I went, I, I was always a theater
person. I was always a theatrical, kind of a creative kid
growing up. And I was a drama major at
Vassar. And after I got out of
Vassar, I thought I was gonna be an actor. I did one audition. I thought,
what kind of an idiot does this for a living? I'm gonna be a writer
instead. An even bigger idiot. But I had a friend
who'd become an agent at William Morris and she said, hey, you should try
writing a screenplay. Now I was Liv. I was in New York at that point
and I was, I wasn't gonna act in the theater. I was going to write
plays. I was a New York person. And
Carol said, you should try writing a screenplay. So, okay, I
wrote one. She said, that's pretty good. And it was getting some good response. She
said, you should come out, meet and greet people. So
In June of 1985, I flew out for a week. Now,
to me, LA was the stupidest Place on the whole
planet. The land of the avocado head.
And yeah, New York. But
nice to be there. Actually, it was really nice because it was June.
And June in New York is. It's like June in
Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, you know, it's hot and it's humid in New York.
It smells like piss. I don't know if it smelled like piss in Pittsburgh.
In la, it's the desert, there's no humidity whatsoever.
And gosh, people were so nice to me. They
blew copious amounts of smoke up my ass. I highly recommend
that. It's very appealing. One night my agent took me
to a movie premiere, St. Elmo's Fire.
William Morris represented it. And so I, my view was
entirely backstage. It was very,
very seductive. And the next morning I had no
meetings and someone said to party at the after party at
say no. Most Fire, even more seductive, said you should take a
drive through Topanga Canyon. And 40 years ago it was
a lot less built up than it is now. It's rather
wild and beautiful and remote, yet within the
city limits. And as I drove from the 101, the
freeway through the Santa Monica Mountains, they plunged
toward the Pacific. And as I got to the PCH where the
water is, I'd been completely seduced.
Louisiana wasn't my lady, but I was definitely LA's bitch.
And I screw New York. I moved out and
I got entirely seduced. Among the people I met
that first week was a guy named Gil Adler, who
became my best friend and my creative partner for a
decade. And together Gil and I did
Tales from the Crypt and we did a couple of feature Crypt based
feature films. We did a very
good. Well, when Gil and I went aboard Tales from the Crypt in the third
season, we didn't create the show, but we went aboard.
We didn't create the show, but we saved it. And actually I co
created the Crypt Keeper, though he existed before I
got there. The
When HBO first did Tales from the Crypt back In the early
1990s, HBO was still basically movies. And they were just
dipping their toe into creating
original programming. They had a show called first in 10 and another
called Dream on, which were basically just single camera shows with
tits and the word fuck. But if you took those out, they were basically just
single camera, regular single camera shows. Suddenly you had
four mega Hollywood producers, Joel Silver, Richard
Donner, Walter Hill, Bob Zemeckis approached
HBO and said, we want to put feature film vision inside little your little
teeny TV box. And HBO said, yeah, do whatever you want.
And they, not knowing how
to make a TV show, really, they just started writing scripts.
The how you develop a TV show, there's a
process and especially in, in the case where you want to take
a franchise from a comic book and put
it into a TV show, it's
really, it's not, it doesn't happen by magic.
It's work to take all the elements from the one
medium, from the comic books and make every frame of your
TV show feel like you're reading the comic book. It takes work.
Well, the executive producers, those, they never hired anyone
to do that particular job. And the first season,
the first six episodes, you know, they got away with it.
And then HBO ordered a second season which was 18
episodes. And then it began to catch up with them. The fact that there was
no development process. And so the franchise kind
of began to get away from the writing since no one
was maintaining the franchise.
They also didn't run it like a TV show. Normally you get a
deficit partner to help pay for what it costs
to actually produce the show until you get to profits.
They never got anyone. The executive producers.
And so after the 18 episodes were made, the night before
the wrap party, the executive producers were handed a financial statement
from HBO who had been cash flowing the whole thing. And, and they said,
you're a million dollars cash in the hole. Pay us back right
now or the third season, forget about it. Now the executive producers
were going to make a lot of money that third season. They figured they'd take
that million dollars right out of the budget. Nothing. So they
said, okay, great, they got out of the checkbooks, they fired everyone, they canceled the
wrap party, they got out their checkbooks and they cut HBO a check. And they
hired my partner, Gil Adler, because Gil
is a great producer, came out of the theater in New York, but
he trained as an accountant and he understood this basic principle. If
you have a dollar to spend making your movie, do not spend
A$1. You have not got it.
Now if you can, if you can make
your movie for 99 cents,
98 cents, don't make it look like a dollar. That's even better.
Hey, if you could make it, you know, do it for 98 or 97
cents, make it look like a dollar one or a dollar two. Wow,
now you're on to something. So Gil's solution
to creative problems, because mo the entire creative
prop process is problem solving. Rather than
throwing money at the problem, you throw more creativity
at the problem. And that was exactly how I felt. So
we work quite well together. When Gil went aboard as
the producer HBO had hired Gil. He had done a show
called the Hitchhiker for them. They had a very problem,
problematic show called Vietnam War Stories that was way over
budget and way over schedule. And they dropped Gill
in. He was shooting in Savannah and he took it over and
they brought it in on schedule and on budget and it won
a bunch of awards. And now they had a similar situation. Hbo, with these
Hollywood producers, producers with no idea how to make a TV show. And they wanted
Gil to take over as producer. And since we needed a story
editor, we needed someone to have control of the script. Skill said, well, I want
Alan to do it. And since no one had been doing that job and HBO
didn't care, the partner said, okay. And so
even though, to be honest, I did not have the bonafides
to do that job, I. Yeah, I
began co running Tales from the Crypt with my partner Gil.
Now I had two jobs on the show. My first job was to
maintain. To maintain the franchise,
to make sure that every, every frame of our
TV show was redolent of everything that we loved about
the comic books. That was one of my jobs. And so every script had
to go through me before it got to our department heads or to
casting. Everything had to go through me. So I was the last word.
My other job was to write Crypt Keeper segments.
Well, just as the executive producers had not developed the
TV show in a normal way or deficit
partner, they hadn't developed the
Crypt Keeper either. Now, Crypt Keeper in the comic books is
an old white guy with stringy hair. The executive
producers wanted their own Crypt Keeper. And
Joel Silver, one of our executive producers found, stumbled upon
Kevin Yeager, more or less. And Kevin Yeager, he also
created Chucky. He's a great special effects
creative. He, he created the Crypt Keeper puppet.
And then Kevin found John Kassir, who became the voice of
the Crypt Keeper. But it never went through a
development process. And no one ever asked the question,
who is he? The Crypt Keeper, in the first season
and the second season, whoever wrote the episodes threw a bunch of words at the
Crypt Keeper. And yeah, that's whatever it
was. Well, as I sat down to write
Crypt Keeper segments, I bumped into the problem. How do
you write for a character that doesn't exist? I don't know how to write
for a cipher. And since you want it to be kind of funny, you can't
do generic. You get generic. So just to do my
damn job, I had to create a character.
Now, I grew up loving old movies and I
loved the Marx Brothers, Groucho, especially And the Crypt
Keeper became my own little Groucho. And
I had to invest him with a personality,
a character. And being a writer and therefore somewhat lazy, I
reached for the closest thing at hand, which was me. And so I
filled the Crypt Keeper with me. He
looked like Kevin's puppet. He sounded like John's voice, but every
word out of his head, every word out of his mouth was me.
At. Something happened during that third season, which was
supposed to be the last, and HBO was quite ready to
write the whole thing off. We turned it around.
We suddenly, well, reinvested the franchise. And suddenly the
audience came back. We began to get big stars.
We committed to making that happen. But the
real thing that turned the franchise, or just around but
into a franchise was the Crypt Keeper, the creation of.
Suddenly he went from being the puppet that talked
to being the Crypt Keeper of the franchise.
And that really was when it took off. That's why
Universal suddenly ordered three feature films
as a testament to the strength of the Crypt Keeper a bunch of years ago.
People have been trying to remake Tales from the Crypt for years. It will never
happen, and I'll explain why. But a couple years ago, M. Night
Shyamalan, he had optioned the comic books
and he was going to remake Tales from the Crypt as part of a
horror wheel that TNT wanted to do on Thursday
nights. He didn't realize when he optioned the comic books
that the Crypt Keeper he. He had the rights to was the old white
guy with stringy hair. It ain't the Crypt Keeper that was created
for the TV show. These are two separate pieces of intellectual property
of IP owned by two different people.
Now, the Tales from the Crypt comic books that is owned by
William M. Gaines's family because Bill is no longer with us.
The puppet is owned by the Crip partners in
and point everyone figures the Crip partners, that's Joel,
Joel Silver. Now, Joel is, in his
day, a great producer, a. An
impresario, but a major league,
one of the biggest assholes on the planet. And
most people come to a moment when they suddenly it strikes them life
is too short to work with Joel Silver anymore,
forever again. And most people get to that point, the Crip
partners, the other Crip partners got at that point. They didn't want to work with
Joel anymore. And Bill Gaines's family
hated Joel at the end, and they would never work
with Joel ever again. And so because of
that, Tales from the Crypt and the Crypt Keeper
are divorced forever. Where will the children go for
Christmas? I don't know.
I really Wanted to focus on. You said something so profound that is really
important to the way I approach creating and
generating something. You said, it'll never be created again. You gave this backstory.
But I wonder in what you created, putting yourself into
the character. And I've seen something in your years there, only a
few producer notes came back to you from HBO. And
was it the three. Three notes over the course of
75, 72 episodes. And I'm wondering if back then in
HBO, in that time period, without having all this
maybe control hovering over you, you were free to create without
having to worry about hierarchy and executive structure.
Or was it just. You just got away with it because HBO had no idea
what was going on. Oh, no, no, no. Hbo, their whole attitude
was, you're the creators, go create. They were wonderful. I
loved working for hbo. Everyone who did Tales from the Crypt, as
we all look back at our careers, we would tell you that it was
rarefied air simply because we were doing
such an odd hybrid show with the
most remarkable people, huge Hollywood stars, Kirk
Douglas and Tom Hanks coming to do our little TV show. At a time when
feature films and TV shows were different
galaxies. Gosh, you. They
people did not go back and forth. Yeah, the occasional Tom Hanks or Robin Williams
would go from TV to movies, but if you were going from movies to tv,
that meant your career was over with son.
It's almost like you. You had this DIY environment in
this studio system, which is. That's what I think is so rare.
Well, in the TV system now because we had
suddenly made Crypt pop. Universal
Pictures ordered, they want to do three Tales from the Crypt branded feature
films. And that at first was great.
The first feature that we did, I'm quite proud of. It's
called Demon Knight. Ernest Dickerson
directed it. Billy Zane is a wonderful villain. Jada Pinkett is
and Bill Sadler are the heroes. Great cast.
What a wonderful cast all the way around. Yeah,
it's still. I think it's a classic horror movie.
The mandate was make three different movies. Now, Gil and I,
neither of us came out of horror. Both of us actually came out of comedy.
And we really did not want the town to view us
as one trick ponies. And so we saw the
Tekken, the second Tales from the Crypt feature, as a way to.
To show what we. What else we could do. And
a lot of the rest of the creative team at Crypt felt the same way
we had in the. While we were working on Demon Knight, we had beg
begun developing a script that evolved into a project called
Dead easy. And it was a very different from
the monster movie that is Demon Knight. This was
a taught psychological thriller about a recovered memory
that took place in the swamps outside New Orleans.
And there was a great villain, this Harlequin character.
Universal Pictures was. They bought in. They. We were
spending money. We spent months and months
outside New Orleans looking for locations and prepping. We were
casting. We had a young unknown actress named Salma Hayek to play the
female lead. And we were on the way to making a
movie. And three, three weeks before the start of principal photography in New
Orleans, Universal Pictures said, stop spending money. Come home. You're not making that
movie. And so we flew back to la
and when we arrived, they put a script under our noses. They said,
you're going to make this movie instead. It's called Bordello of Blood.
Oh, by the way, your release date hasn't changed. It's still starting. Three weeks.
Get to work rewriting this thing. You got to start making this
now. Where did Bordela Blood come from? At the same time that we were making
that, we were doing our thing. A new studio
called DreamWorks had come into existence. And DreamWorks
was Steven Spielberg leaving his deal
at Universal. Not the lot, but his deal. And he began
as a studio making talent deals with other talent. Universal
was desperately afraid of losing another piece of talent, one
of my executive producers, Bob Zemeckis. Spielberg was his mentor.
And so Universal went to Bob, they said, bob, we love you, Universal. What can
we do to make you stay? And he,
I guess the deal was, was good enough because he stayed. I know one deal
point. Universal Pictures agreed to pay Bob Zemeckis
and Bob Gill the future back. The future, guys. A half a million dollars for
the first students, granted, they ever wrote when they were film school
students at usc. A little thing called Bordello of Blood,
just as a deal point to make Bob Zemeck estate Universal. But
Universal suddenly thought to itself, we're just gonna eat this half a million dollars.
Wait a minute. Bob's about to produce this other horror movie, this dead easy thing
we spent with $50,000 on that script. Screw that. We're taking out of their
budget. Guys, you're gonna make Bordello and Blood instead? Look, it's
got Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale's name on it. It's bigger than all Cats and
Gil Adler's names. Go start making
the movie. So we went from making
a project that we were all committed to emotionally, creatively,
to making a student film. And
nobody wanted to Make. None of us wanted to make that movie. It was not
in no way, shape or form.
Yeah, literally no one who made that movie wanted to make it. And
when you get onto a project where you're making
something you don't want to make, don't be surprised when every day is
stupider than the day before. And that's exactly what happened with the making More
Delaware Blood. It was my own personal Waterloo.
You know, I was the day to day
physical producer of the movie and I was
getting paid to be there, but I didn't want to be there doing it. And
that was the wrong attitude. We were making a movie. You do the best you
possibly can when, when
your bosses don't seem to give a shit. And God, the casting of
that movie was especially disastrous, the three leads. Because Joel insisted on
casting those three characters himself.
And that was especially calamitous in multiple
ways. I don't know. I can't tell you to this day why Joel wanted Dennis
Miller to be the lead. No
idea whatsoever. I, I couldn't. I know
why he wanted Erica Leniak, but he was never going to get in her pants.
That was never going to happen. She was in a long term
relationship and she decided after she
accepted the gig to act in Bordeaux
Blood that she didn't want to be that kind of actress in these kind of
movies anymore after she took the gig.
And then there was the villain of our people. Well, not villain. She
played the villain. Angie is not a villain. And that's the problem. Angie
Everhart, why we cast Angie. And Angie is a
wonderful, lovely human being, but we had no business casting
her as the villain in the piece. And I'll explain this very
quickly, but the reason that we cast Angie is because
at the time that we were making Bordello in Vancouver, which
was stupid, Joel, our executive producer,
was making another movie called Assassins in Seattle
starring Antonio Banderas and Sly Stallone, who at the time was
engaged to Angie Everhart. And one day on the set,
Sly walks up to Joel and says, hey, Joel, here we make a movie in
Vancouver and put my girlfriend Angie in the movie. That way we can visit each
other across the border. And Joel, instead of being a
great executive producer and saying, that's a great idea, slide, but let me check with
the guys, make sure it works for them. He said, that's a great idea, Sly,
period. And so he committed us,
he committed us to hiring his
actor's girlfriend to be the villain in our movie. Now
here's the thing. In my career, I cast lots and lots and lots,
lots of actors. I never ever cast any of them wanting
them to act. The last thing I want an actor to do
is act because it'll end up on the cutting room floor in a theater where
the people in the last row have to see you. Yeah, you gotta act. You
gotta act. But the camera's right in your face
and it sees everything. Especially you, acting
for film and tv.
For a camera, you have to be as
honest, real as you possibly can, as
naked as emotionally naked. That's what a great actor
is. We give them different words, different. We put words in
their mouth. We give them, the character, a name. But at certain
points, they need to be able to access these emotions
and they have to be real. They cannot act them. If
you act them, it'll suck. They have to be.
Well, in the first Tales from the
Movie Demon Knight, Billy Zane's a great villain because.
Not because Billy's a villain, but because Billy's an ego. He's an
egomaniac. Like a lot of great actors, He's. And
that comes across as wonderful as villainy. But there are
also some dark corners to Billy, some very dark corners. And that's
why, yeah, he's a great villain. He doesn't have to act
it. He can be it. Well, Angie is
a lovely person. There's nothing villainous at all
in or about Angie. And so when you hire
an Angie Everhart to be the villain in your movie, she can't be
it because she's not it. She has to
act it. And that ruined everything.
Not her fault. Miscast.
But we did it for the stupidest of all possible reasons. Now, it turned out
that Stallone had an ulterior motive
and we were going to be the consolation prize because he intended to break up
with her, which, in fact, he did 2/3 of the way through our movie.
And we were the consolation prize that. Hey, but I got your movie then,
all right? She could chance some of that to be the villain.
She could have in the end, two thirds of the way through. But by then
she was. We'd have to get her past the
weepies just. Just to do her damn lines.
Well, all right. Telling the bordella blood
bordello of blood was a catastrophe. We. They. They
didn't release us at our the next Halloween like they were
supposed to. They held us to the following August. By the time the movie came
out, it was so catastrophic that Gil and I were no
longer best friends or creative partners or even speaking to each
other. We did not talk for 25 years.
And over the next two decades, I did Outer Limits a couple
seasons and that was great. But I began a two decade
long descent into depression,
writer's block, and
I was keeping a secret from myself for 45 years. That was doing more
and more damage. In fact, it was why I think
Bordello of blood happened
three days before Christmas 2016. I came within literal inches of killing
myself. And I knew I'd
been heading in that direction. I'd been terribly afraid of,
of medicating myself because I. That's a whole
other possible hornet's nest of things that can go wrong.
And I grew up in the medical culture. My dad was a surgeon. And so
I knew what my GP knew and I knew what he didn't know. And
I did the research myself. And so. And I knew I was capable
of the ultimate self harm. I headed straight to my gp. I told
them what I had done and what my plan was. I.
They said, do you think maybe you should. They asked me three times if I
thought perhaps I should be hospitalized. I said, look, no, I came here because I
want to not do this. Here's the medication I've, I've
researched. I want you to prescribe this for me. And they, they got out their
smartphones, they said, okay, this seems reasonable. And they
wrote the script. I picked it up, went home, told
my family what I was going to do, and I took that first dose. And
then that's when I got really lucky. Within 36 hours, I
leveled. I felt the drug
contain the darkness. The darkness is still there, but it
cannot get at me anymore. And because the darkness could not get at me,
I could confront the secret that I'd been keeping from myself for
45 years. That when I was 14, I was molested. I was
sexually molested twice by the religious director at the synagogue where my family
belonged outside of Baltimore. Now, it's not the first time.
The first time is bad. But for me, it was the second time that
really fucked me up. Because the second time happened
only because I didn't say anything after the first time happened.
And so when you walk in the second time, thinking I
must, surely I made that up. And then you realize what
you've just walked into because you didn't say anything.
Well, every terrible thing that happens to you thereafter, your
fault. It's not, it's not, it's not rational. But
that is what you do. That's what I did. And as
you become an adult and terrible things happen when you're an
adult, catastrophically terrible things can happen. You can,
yeah, you can take your whole career and flush it down the
shitter as, as I, as I did.
But I spent a lot of those two
decades telling stories about the making of
Ordello of Blood. It was kind of my own little catharsis.
The. The pandemic happens. And
during the pandemic, these three tales from
McRib fans start making a podcast called Dads from the Crypt.
And one of the dads, they review
episodes that tells him the Crypt and give parenting advice.
Jason Stein, one of the dads, contacted me, said, hey, we're going to be
reviewing one of the episodes you wrote. You want to sit in with us? I
said, yeah, great. And I sat in and
it was such fun. A couple weeks later, Jason reached out again. He said,
hey, we're going to be reviewing Bordello of Blood. You want to, you
want to sit in again? And I said, jason, the story of the making
of Bordello of Blood is not a half hour conversation with you. It's a whole
podcast unto itself. And
this is when. This is where my podcasting career started.
And I know you wanted to talk about this, so this is kind of
where it happened.
I suddenly realized I wanted to tell the whole story of the making
of Bordello of Blood and as a podcast. And that was the first season of
the how not to Make a Movie podcast, which Entertainment Weekly,
I will point out, called the best film podcast of
2022. In order
to tell the story and what I wanted to do
when, when I, when I
dealt with my secret. It is absolutely true what they say about
the truth, setting you free, amazingly
liberating. And I,
you know, if you can't tell yourself your own story,
really, how, how well can you tell other people's stories?
And I went. Because of this
thing happening, I think I went from being
a damn good writer, being a storyteller,
because now that I could tell my own self my story, I could tell
anyone my story. I could tell anyone's story with that kind
of balls to the wall honesty, because that
was the point of the exercise.
I had a friend from school. As I
began to do subsequent seasons of the Hell not to Make a Movie
podcast, a friend from school, from, from
elementary school reached out to me. He had a,
A story, something that happened to him, a real story that he wanted to turn
into a movie or a TV series.
And when he told it to me, this became my. The first story
podcast, the Donor. I explained to him
the, the process of taking an idea from, let's
say, My head out into. Turn it into a TV
series or a movie. Let's do a TV series. Years.
This is years in happening
years to get the script right. The first episode. All right, let's say
it's a TV show. So I need more than just the script. I need the
whole Bible. All right, that's the first episode. What happens in
episodes two through how many episodes in the first season?
And all right, what's the story arc for the first season and the second season
and the third season and the fourth season? And who are all these characters?
What's the universe like? What does it feel like? What does it look like? What
does it smell like, even. Well, to create that
50 to 60 pages. Spend another year really to
get that right.
Then, all right, you've got your whole package together. All right, now you turn to
the marketplace. You got to get a bunch of executives to read this.
This material. Now, to induce them to read.
Excuse me, to induce them to read, you have to create a. A
pitch deck, which is the whole concept
in storybook in comic book form with
minimal minimum words, mostly images, just to
really to convince them to read the thing. That's just to get
in at the top of the meat grinder. And then if
they say yes, it's got to go through the meat grinder
with the whole creative process and your wonderful
idea. If that's script and package, who knows what's going to come out the
other end as the sausage. I said to. I
said to him, you don't want to do this. I said, look, to take an
idea from our heads into a podcast.
Well, does the only person standing in our way is
us. There's no executive. There's no executive suite. There's.
Think of all the in the way over. There's only one in our way here,
and it's us.
We have to find our own audience. We have to do all
the promotional work ourselves. But it's like
was doing Crypt at hbo. The freedom is
incredible. It's wonderful. My friend
Hal, call him Hal,
worked his way through medical school in the
mid-1980s as an anonymous sperm donor.
Jump forward 27 years. He's successful. He's a successful
radiologist. And he joined
23andMe. Curious about his health genes. It never occurred to him the
ramifications of adding his DNA to a growing DNA
database. That's what 23andMe and Ancestry's
DNA section are. He lost his donor
anonymity. Suddenly, seven total strangers found Daddy.
Except six of them had no idea their actual biological father
Was Hal a sperm donor?
The seventh one of the daughters brought a thing
called genetic sexual attraction to the
table. Now, the adoption
world has known about genetic sexual attraction for quite a long time.
It turns out when people who are genetically related to each
other, when they are not brought up with each other
and they. When you put them together later in
life as adults, it's not unusual for there
to be intense emotions and sometimes even
sexual attraction. They
describe meeting someone who they feel
like they've known their whole lives, who laughs at the same
things they laugh at, completes their sentences. A feeling
of intimacy they've never felt with anybody else in their entire
lives. The woman who coined the term genetic sexual attraction,
Barbara Gagnier, gave up a son for
adoption when she was 16. And she met him
25 years later when he was an adult. And
upon meeting him, she says she fell head, head over heels in
love with him and she was quite ready to have sex with him. And he
was. He loved her too, but wasn't sexually. Wasn't able
to. Yeah, he didn't, he didn't feel sexual
attraction toward her, but she used
the term genetic sexual attraction to describe
that feeling. All right, when this one
daughter brought this idea to this
conversation. Hal had been
married for 20 years to a woman who brought a son from a previous
marriage. He had raised this son as his own,
adopted him as an adult, but he had never raised a biological child
of his own. Suddenly, having seven biological children,
he was actually quite open to having. Well, he wasn't going to be
their father. He didn't father them. But having a fatherly
relationship with them, as much as they were open to, he had money
and he was quite open to cutting them in on
the inheritance because they were blood.
When genetic sexual attraction, when this hand grenade was tossed into
the tent, it blew everything up. His
desire to have this familial relationship with his,
with these kids of his just
became a nightmare scenario
and absolutely bonkers
for me. I found while I was telling Hal's
story and the Donor, this became the Donor, a DNA
horror story. It's seven episodes. While
I was telling Hal's story, I found that I had become the
thing I always wanted to be when I grew up, which is a podcaster,
I loved telling how story. I love telling my
story in to make a movie podcast. I
love storytelling in this medium in
part because of the intimacy. You know, people listen to our stories
and our voices, earphones or earbuds or in their cars
with just giant sound pod, really, and
they take our voices and our Stories, and they put them inside the most intimate
space between their ears, inside our heads, inside their heads.
And it, it's such a.
It's an honor and a privilege to be. To be there telling
our stories, but it comes with a lot of responsibilities too.
And I found while
telling how story that it was
really the most rewarding creative experience I'd ever
had because there was nobody
in the way of telling the story as honestly as I wanted
to tell. And Hal was willing to be balls to the
wall honest. And that was my thing. I
decided to create a company called Costard and Touchstone Productions.
And in the
middle of, while I was making Hal telling Hal's story,
I had to do some background research on the whole donor conceived community.
And one of the donor conceived community who very graciously agreed to
talk to me was a woman named Donna Hall. Donna learned at 40
that she was the product of a sperm donation. And that rocked her
world. But when Donna told me the rest of her
story, I said, says Donna, you're a podcast unto yourself. She said, I know.
She said she'd been trying to tell her story herself, but
even a great story needs to be told the right way to be
a great story. And I said, donna, let me help you tell your story.
And so after I was finished telling Hal's story, I began
telling Donna's story with her in the hall
closet. Donna grew up in the 80s
and 90s in a lower tier crime family outside
of Philadelphia. Now, the Halls weren't the
Corleone from the Godfather movies, but they made national
headlines just the same. Phyllis Hall,
Donna's mom, maybe the worst mom
ever, spent six months in prison for child
endangerment. Donna's stepfather, John Hall,
a true criminal mastermind, was the Philadelphia Police
Department's favorite snitch. He put more than 25 people behind
bars on bullshit confessions that John hall created
himself to mitigate his own considerable legal peril. Among
the people that John hall put into prison was his
own stepson, herb, who spent 18 months awaiting trial
for a murder he did not commit. John hall also put a man
named Walter Ogrod on death row for
25 years, 24 years for a murder that
Walter did not commit. When Walter finally got free,
Pennsylvania paid him $9 million for their mistake.
There are still a few people in prison because of John Hall. There's a
guy named David Dixon serving a life sentence in Pennsylvania
because of a John hall confession. Nobody
should be sitting in prison because if anything, John hall got them to confess.
Donna hall describes what it was like growing up in a family
where one or more of the adults every single day
of her life did something criminal. What makes
Donna. I'm biased. Donna's a great storyteller.
She's not an ounce of pity in her.
She's funny, she's brash. And
I think what really makes it pop is that her
story isn't just true crime like you've never heard it before.
It's a story about. It's her journey toward
safety and most importantly, empowerment.
And the Hall Closet is eight episodes,
and you have never heard a story
like that before. It really is true crime like you've never heard it.
Among the people that we, that we talked to was Herb
Hack, her brother, who spent 18 months in prison
as a storyteller.
Holy cow. Suddenly, to have access
to stories I couldn't possibly make
up, could not possibly. They're better than anything that I
could make up. And to get to tell them in a medium where
it's radio, so it's theater of the mind. And
what I like to do in my story podcasts
is I like to bring the world
that we're talking about to life as much as possible
with sounds. And we use music a
lot. Yeah, there's a lot of music. Music is great to keep
track of the emotional underpinnings of what we're talking about. And
it's also helpful sometimes to, to keep the rhythm going. And, and
it's, it's. I, I, I like, I bring
everything I know about movie making and TV making into
podcast creation. And so really, I want to bring a cinematic
experience to every single one of these podcasts. And
suddenly, God, I've got four out in the
marketplace. I've got, of course, hell not to make a movie podcast. Like I said,
the donor, the Hall Closet. I have another one that's
about to relaunch called Sage
Wellness within, which is about Chinese medicine.
But in the months ahead, over the course of this summer, I've
got four new podcasts that are going to drop, which are all that. I'm working
with four different journalists.
And that's incredibly exciting. After the last election,
a lot of journalists. American journalism was dying anyway. The
last election pretty much finished the job. And
a lot of journalists don't know what to do. Where do you go to tell
your truth? Because the legacy media
has sold out completely to, to the powers
that be. It will do whatever you tell it to do for the most part.
There are a lot of journalists who don't want to do that.
They got a thing for Their integrity, they want to maintain it.
Podcasting is the perfect space for them
to continue doing what they do.
So I'm working with four different journalists on four different journalistic podcasts. Those will
begin dropping in the summer. One is called a secret war. It's about
the secret war in Laos. The most bombed
country in the history of the world is Laos. Laos.
The United States bombed Laos every day for nine years during the
Vietnamese war. We did it in secret
and we destroyed a jewel. And this journalist,
Manila Chan, she's Lao American, she's wanted to tell
this story for her whole 25 year journalistic career, she's wanted
to tell this story and could not get any traction. No one was interested in
telling it. Well, the podcasting world, you can do it,
you can tell it. And so
the one thing that Manila adjustment that Manila has had to make, and she's made
it fantastically, she was a mainstream
journalist. It's just the facts in podcasting,
who you are is so important.
And I said to Manila, you,
Manila, have to tell this story. Not a neutral
journalist. You will use every last bit of. You will keep your
journalistic integrity intact. It's got nothing to do with that. This is advocacy
journalism. But your advocate advocating for
the truth about something that the world needs to
know about. And this is a personal story. You need to make
it personal. And she rose to that challenge
fantastically, fantastically. Because this is a very
personal medium. So I've got a dozen,
literally a dozen podcasts will be out in the world before the end of this
calendar year. I love this medium, a lot
of storytelling in it. And
yeah, we're just beginning to generate a little
advertising income.
My company's battle plan, first of all, we're on a
mission to make the world a better place through storytelling
and podcasting. Our medium. The one thing
when I, you know, we connected and we're going to have this conversation.
And the one thing as I started to research and started to learn more
about what you've been creating recently and what you have in the
pipeline. And when I started to research back to tails,
there was this through line that I can only see through my eyes. Right. You
can only perceive the world through what you know, through what you've experienced. And,
and so obviously here's me looking at your
storyline as a guy who, I grew up in the 80s. I was
skateboarding, I was into punk rock and, and this, this
independence. And I've been drawn in my adult life. I
played countercultural sports like disc golf. And I've been Podcasting
for, for about 10 years now. And that mentality
is very liberating. That, and I'm seeing it in what you've been creating
lately. And I saw that in those early days at hbo. There's
this, there's this thread that connects those, the two dots.
And I love, love the wild, Wild West. Oh, I, I, yeah,
yeah, yeah. And I really wanted to hear your perspective on,
you know, you're talking about podcasting and these
projects that you're working on, but the, the like, who, who
are you taking notes from? And, and who do you have to answer to when,
when you're creating podcasts?
And that's what I, there's no one standing between you
and your story except you.
And there is a
trick, there's a secret sauce. You got to make great content.
Great content or content that a lot of people will listen
to. That's the challenge.
And yeah, it's not easy. You
can't, you can't say, well, I'm going to make great content and
people are going to listen to it. It doesn't work that way. It's work
and it's a crapshoot. But if you make
great content and you persist and
perseverance is a very important thing. Being in
the right place at the right time means you were in the right place at
the wrong time up until the, that moment. And people were walking
by you, looking at, looking at you like, what the are you standing there for?
What are you stupid? And then suddenly that door
opened and everyone looked at you like, how did you know?
How'd you know to stand there?
Perseverance. If, yeah, you got to believe in what
you're doing and you got to persevere. And that doesn't guarantee success either.
But you got to see the long term, strong struggle of it and
the vicissitudes will come and you gotta
surf them and survive them if
you can. Yeah, if you can
survive long enough, you'll, you'll just outlive the
bastards. If you look behind me, I'm
surfing right now. Last year I opened the Probably. I
believe it's the world's first theater space dedicated to live podcasting.
My accountant would tell me to about the
perseverance, but I am, I'm standing here.
I fully believe in live podcasting. I believe in live
events. I believe that this is the, the way that
podcasters small and, and I'm always harping on the DIY
podcasters. But there's other ways that
you can do something and support yourself than just
focus on Trying to get host read ads. And so
I'm standing on this pillar right now. When you said that, I'm like, oh,
you know, I've, I believe live events are the future for sure for
podcasting. And I'm standing here taking wave after
wave. You know,
one of the other parts of my design by having create,
produced podcasts, story, actual story, podcast,
a bunch of the podcasts that I have in mind that I want to get
to some of the big ones, the really big, big, big
projects, things that I wanted to do as, as movies and
TV shows, TV shows especially. Now, as I said, the process
to get those made is ludicrous. But
what you're trying to do, to get in the door at the top of the
meat grinder. The whole point of the exercise
is to impress upon them your ip,
your intellectual property. You're trying to get these
apes to comprehend, to get the idea from my
ip, is this from your head into their head so they can turn
around to their bosses and go, all right, it's this.
The,
it's it. It's ultimately
about the value of that ip.
When you go to sell it, you go cap in hand and you're trying
to convince, to, trying to make them understand
your ip. All right, if I produce it as a podcast
first? Well, I put the IP into the
podcast. It's there on the table where everyone, the audience
included, can hear it and in their mind
see it. And if I've got an audience and an audience
of size and we've got a couple of advertising dollars coming in. Well, the
thing about people in executive suites, the thing you
really have to understand about them is that they're risk averse.
They make a wrong decision, you're going to get fired. Extremely risk
averse. When you walk in the door with your idea
that you want them to develop, that means
they're going to have to take a risk into the unknown with you
that it will, what is it? But if you
put the IP there on in a podcast, there's no
risk. Everybody knows what the ip, everyone can see it. Hey, it
had. Look how big the audience was. Look at the advertisers that it had.
And instead of me having to go sell it cap and
hand, they're going to come and they're going to want to
buy it and they're going to come to me, they're going to say, hey, you
know that podcast that make a great TV series? And I'm going to
say, yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're right, it would.
And they're going to go, hey, here's a check. And I'm going to go,
oh, that's nice. You're going to have to add some zeros and move the decimal
point over because you have competition. Yeah.
My goal with podcasting, one of the goals with my company,
with Costard and Touchstone, is to flip the power dynamic
away from the money back to the creatives and the
ideas so that, look, it's always in the power.
The power is in. No. To say, I don't want your
check. No, I'm not going to make a deal with you. No. Go the fuck
away. The power. I want the power of no.
I don't want them to have the power of no. And podcasting,
excuse me. Podcasting is an exquisite way to
flip that power dynamic because we can create
everything. I can tell, literally, I can do
the whole production myself. And because.
Yeah, because the AI has gotten very
sophisticated and yeah, there are downsides
to it, but it can fill in blanks that, hey,
to create a sound design,
what it cost a fortune before I can do with just my basic subscription
and all kinds of places where you can nip
sound from here and there. Really not bothering anybody.
Anybody with an idea in their head and
a little bit of technical knowledge. And really, anyone can edit a
movie these days. Anyone can edit sound. Anyone can do any of these things these
days. It's incredibly
democratic. It's really just a matter of
how you tell your stories and how you get them out into the
world. Yeah, you see, you know, based on the book by.
And I never even thought about it, but based on the podcast, you know,
by Alan Katz, you know, you see, there are. In the
movie. Yeah, they're buying podcasts now. Hey, Rachel
Maddow sold her podcast for ultra.
Made quite a lot of money. It was a podcast first
to. And to make the podcast cost, relatively speaking,
nothing compared to what it cost to make a TV show.
Yeah, really and truly, now it doesn't cost nothing
because it costs our time. And if we were paying people to do all the
various jobs we do as solo independent podcasters.
Yeah, we. It'd be great to have an assistant editor.
An assistant. It'd be great to have a couple of people,
especially doing a dozen podcasts. Yeah, it would be great
to have staff. I'm kind of counting on it at some point, because otherwise this
is going to get. This is going to be fatal. But
the fact that I could even create a body of work as quickly
as I've created a body of work could not
possibly do this in any other medium.
Not even remotely possible. But one can do it here.
And look, with my company, I'm, I'm not
after one project. I'm after a business.
It, it is, it's a numbers game. And I, I, yeah,
I, I, it would,
it wouldn't break my heart if a year from now, when, when I've got all
these different podcasts out, if someone approached me and said, wow, your company does
so much, we'd like to put some money into
it. Hey, let's play Shark
Tank. Yeah, it is, I mean,
it's no different than the studios. That's a numbers game too. You produce
100 movies to get five profit ones or
profitable ones. And that's, it's. I've never heard that model applied to
podcasting, which I love it. I'm, this is, this is a better bet.
Yeah, but, but this, this is a better bet because it literally
doesn't cost. Yeah. Relatively speaking. Anything. I mean,
I, yeah. As I,
the deal that I make with everybody, my
creative partners. First of all,
in terms of rights, what are we talking about? I'm
only ever talking about what I refer to
as the unique
interpretation of the story. That is the
podcast. That's the only thing that
I'm ever talking about, rights wise. So I'm not
interested in anyone's life rights. I don't want what I'm not entitled to. I just
want to tell this little piece of the story this particular way. If that,
if that's what the story that someone wants to tell is a movie or a
TV show. And that's actually, hey, look, that's the whole reason I told the story
this way. Here's how you should tell the story as a movie or TV show.
That's why I did it that way. So, yeah, I pretty much guaranteed myself that
I'm going to get it this way. But, but it's still, it's a very narrow,
you know, tranche of anybody's
life or anybody's rights. I want to really limit that
as much as possible because, yeah, podcasting,
I don't want to get in movies and tv, man. The
legal, the legal stuff can be,
that can kill you. Yeah. And so I'm, I also, we have
to be savvy about what rights are we talking
about in these stories. And if someone comes
looking for, you know, to buy stuff, we got to be very
savvy about what we own and
what we don't. Because that is the
wonderful thing about podcasting. We, the
podcasters, own everything.
A hundred percent.
And if there's ever going to be any money, it's an
ownership.
The. That. That is the
ownership part of it. And Even back in 20
2005, 2006, I owned a skateboard shop at that time,
and I was doing mail order, and I started listening to podcasts, and I had
gone to college in the late 90s, early 2000s, and I'm listening
to some really early podcasts, and I'm packing
orders and shipping out, and I'm realizing that I'm getting a
better education from these free podcasts than
I got in four years of business school. It's relevant,
it's up to date, it's showing me how to do
things today in the age of the Internet. And.
And it's from the point of view of the workspace itself, because
they're in it, doing it. Yeah. And so that
idea to me is exactly what you're talking about and that
exactly what you're doing now that there was so much control
and power, if people just understood the power of an RSS feed
and the content that you can create and distribute on your own,
it is unbelievable to where it was
25, 30 years ago. And to have that kind of control
and, you know, to create, you know, almost, if maybe you're. Think of
your podcast as even pilot working pilots
that are completely pitchable, instead of just having a
book or a script that has nothing behind it, here you have a
product that has. That's you've brought to life, and
you can show some numbers, show some statistics, show the interest, and
it's. It's such a better model than just getting a
script. Let me point this out, too. Getting people
to read is so
hard, but listening to stuff's much easier,
and they can do that while they do something else. They can. Hey,
that's why podcasting is exploding, because people can
listen to podcasts while they do something else, while they
exercise or go for a walk or drive
places. It's.
Yeah, you sit down and watch a TV show. You got to sit down to
watch a TV show. Although my kids, their experience of watching anything is
always through their phone. But. Okay, okay, okay.
More or less. Oh, my goodness, Alan, this has been so great.
I got you for an hour. I'm so glad you could join me for
this hour. Where can people find you? I know there's a couple different
websites. Is there a best website that has everything listed, or does the production
company have a website? There's one. That's it. Yeah.
Costard and Touchstone.com should
be live very shortly if not.
But we're putting that together. Each and every
podcast is findable wherever you listen to
podcasts.
The donor podcast.
The donor podcast. The Hall Closet,
which is also@thehallcloset.com sage
wellness within. Like I said, they're all wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Yeah, Keep checking out.
I will be there shortly. And. And there's so much coming. You know, hopefully
there'll be a. There'll be some fireworks for. For to draw everyone's
attention. So great. But of course, doing other people's
podcasts is also of incredible importance because
it's. It's such a vibrant community. That's, that's really.
Yeah, keep. Keep listening out for me. I'll. I'll keep doing podcasts and,
and hopefully we'll. We'll. We'll find each other. We will. Absolutely.
I can't wait till the next time we meet Alan Katz. This has
been incredible. Thank you for sharing everything with us. With us on
my guest tonight. Let's go back to that theme song.
From Harley Tales to backstage fights,
he's lived the chills in Hollywood night.
Alan Katz is telling all
on my guest tonight with Jeff Rovilla, y' all.
Light
scream. It's time to go.
Let the train
stories blow.
