The Brother From Another Planet, Baby It's You | John Sayles, Vincent Spano

good evening welcome to the Billy Wilder theater this is the home of public programs for UCLA film and television archive my name is KJ relf I'm a film programmer with the archive and it's my pleasure to welcome you to tonight's double feature of the brother from another planet and baby it's you both directed by our guest tonight Mr John sales [Applause] the film and television archive would like to acknowledge our presence on the traditional ancestral and unseated territory of the Gabrielino tongvar peoples we're humbled to do work in this community so the first film tonight the brother from another planet was preserved to 35 millimeter by former UCLA archivist Mr Ross Littman he also preserved a few are here on Thursday the two other features that we watched that night at John's first two features and we're also screening a 16 millimeter print of baby it's you both come from the archives collection which is the home to sales and partner Maggie renzi's Anarchist convention moving image archive so tonight's screening is part of five nights in Los Angeles for Mr sales uh which will conclude uh continue tomorrow uh with a double feature of Lone Star in limbo and that's over at the arrow theater in Santa Monica that starts at four o'clock a little bit of an earlier show time for the to accommodate the longer run time of both of those films and um Francis McDormand will be there joining John for the Q a that's a really special exciting opportunity I haven't seen Lone Star in such a long time and I'm so excited to see it on the big screen um for me for the first time on the big screen um and then the long weekend that we've planned here will conclude on Monday which is a holiday um we'll watch the new digital restoration of made one followed by City of Hope um and so after the first feature tonight please I encourage you all to stick around for a q a um we will be asking John to come on stage and for a conversation with screenwriter Josh Olson and they'll be joined about halfway through by Vincent Spano the star of baby it's you and he can talk about his time working on that film um but first before we kick off with brother from another planet I want to invite up to the Wilder stage to say a few words the inevitable John sales [Applause] uh hi so thanks for coming uh brother from another planet um was a movie that um I it's the only movie that I ever made that came from dreams um I had been um we we were trying to make mate one and the money was getting very iffy and then it fell apart and I had just before the money fell apart the day before we were going to fly down to West Virginia and start to make it um I had been uh in the mixing room and mixing is a very expensive process for a low budget filmmaker you know it's like it feels like it's about a thousand dollars a minute and um I was having these these kind of pressure dreams about movies and the first one was that I I was writing a movie for Joe Dante that was called from outer space and there wasn't much of a story to it but it you know it had that old 50s title with the you know with a kind of 3D title coming at you and then it was about um very humanoid looking people except they had the little antenna and they had landed and they they were working at places like the motor vehicle department and they were and um and but there you know it just didn't it seem more like a Saturday Night Live skit than than a movie um a night later I had a dream that I was uh directing a movie in black and white uh called Bigfoot in the city um that was about a Sasquatch that was loose in Seattle so there were a lot of you know wet down cobblestone streets and everything and and all I remember was I I dreamed the last scene in it where the wound it was it kind of obviously based on um uh on man out the James Mason uh Carol Reed movie and um this wounded Sasquatch was lying on these cobblestones in an alley and there was a Jack Webb looking you know detective standing over him saying book them um and I woke up and I said that is more like a Saturday Night Live skit than a movie and then finally the third night I had a dream and it was an African-American guy walking down 125th Street and the way that you you realize things in a in in a dream without having them dramatized uh I said God that's the most alienated guy he's so alone there's all this action because 125 Fifth Street is pretty Lively and he's so alone and why is he and then I realized he's alone he's alienated because he's an alien and uh I I was sitting with uh Maggie renzi and and uh Peggy reisky who are going to produce uh meekwon and commiserating over the fact that the money had just Fallen apart and I said well I have this idea um and and it's about don't ask me too much but it's about an alien who crashed lands in in the harbor and and ends up kind of assimilating up in in Harlem and um I think we can make it for very little money in about four weeks and they said well you hate to shoot in the winter I said no no no no you you start producing and I'll start writing and um I I started writing I wrote a a draft in about a week and a half and I had been writing for people I was I was adapting Clan of the Cave Bear into a movie and they they and back in those days they actually flew writers out to the West Coast instead of just waiting until they showed up um which is my career now um and they uh I they flew me first class which I think they were supposed to do back in those days and when I checked in uh the stewardess said well you won the lottery and I I was in seat number you know 1B and I got on the plane and what she meant was I was sitting next to Paul Newman and uh and the poor stewardess in the little jump seat who was facing him like this far away her knees were shaking the whole takeoff and so I'm I'm writing away and I'm writing away I'm right I'm I'm trying my second draft of brother from another planet and some guy who worked for there was a company then called Playboy Productions who I apparently had a meeting with one time so oh here's my chance to meet Paul Newman there's a screenwriter with you know so he comes over he said hey you're trying to write a screenplay and one you know flight to La I think well that's the idea and and I didn't introduce him to Paul Newman because I didn't know Paul Newman so he walked away thinking was a real jerk and Paul Newman's turned to me I'm so relieved I I saw you writing brother brother brother and I thought you were a religious fanatic and I was going to have to hear about it the second half of the flight so so this is a movie that um I wrote very quickly uh we got the crew together very quickly we shot it very quickly and uh we shouted Up In Harlem and just had a great time um every day was just a scrum and but we were getting good stuff with really good actors uh uh Joe Morton had been in one movie before uh it was mostly a kind of Shakespearean theater actor with this wonderful voice and I cast him as a character who doesn't speak um uh if you're making a low budget movie having your lead be mute so you can shoot a lot of mos and and leave the sound people you know back at the restaurant you go a lot faster and and you know you'll get a good a good feel for New York City in the in the early 80s so I'll be back and talk to you later hi I'm uh Josh Olson um screenwriter co-host with Joe Dante of the movies that made me well hey I was going to bring you up okay fine uh the writer director John sales thank you I was going to do a big introduction for yourself [Applause] how are you doing good um so I have to ask you first John as a uh a writer or novelist your master character structure dialogue Nuance uh you're an icon of independent film um what was it like doing fight scenes with Steve James yeah Steve James is uh um was died very young he was in a lot of kung fu movies he was a lot of you know uh kind of movies that played on 42nd Street he had been in a play that I had written and he and Tom Wright the other guy who's in the in the fight in the bar with us uh were both kind of stunt man actors uh if you ever saw Fort Apache the the Bronx they actually throw bottles at themselves in the movie because they both play policemen and gang members and they were wonderful they you know they we worked out a very you know that fight in the bar at the end uh we worked out and I storyboarded it with them and everything like that but we only had that bar until like 6 30 when the bar opened again up in Harlem and so we had to be out at 6 30 and uh that's why no broken mirrors well it's why we dropped about 12 shots and so at some point you know with maybe 40 minutes to go I said guys we're way in the back of the bar how do we get to the front of the bar and they figured out the thing with throwing the pool balls to drive those people back and Tom was um doubling for Joe and when he does that flip and he was probably in midair doing that flip five minutes before we were out of the bar so it was that kind of day um and and Steve you know he he said you know you're going to get a lot of adrenaline so try to slow yourself down a little and David and I managed not to hurt ourselves doing it but that's good um a lot of the Men in Black that we played um we shot you kind of notice if you're really paying attention we shot a lot of that backwards so when we walk into the bar the first time we actually started on the stools turned around and backed out of the bar and you see us walking in the street that way a couple times and it gives a very strange movement to things um I just did anybody else notice that at first I thought we might be able to do our dialogue backwards um and the only thing we were able to do is when we order beer which is reap um and and it sounds like beer back but when I tried to do whole it sounds like a David Lynch movies yeah yeah that gum you like um yeah uh well I wanted to ask you too um you know I Ernest Dickerson had only done a couple of short films well I wanted um African Americans to be heads of departments we were going to be shooting in Harlem and also just at that time there weren't enough African-Americans on Crews Spike really hadn't started yet and and he really did a lot to to bring people into that part of the the the you know industry um Earnest had shot uh a movie um in Curacao and he told me it was in 35 uh because he figured he'll never see a movie I shot in Curacao and it was actually in 16. um and he had shot um Joe's bedstuy Barber shops which were Spike short and I was just you know I really wanted an African-American cinematographer and there weren't that many choices around and then I got Earnest and I saw Joe's beds and I said I got like the best cinematographer I hadn't made many movies and and we weren't really able to work with IA guys yet or anything like that so I just got really really lucky very lucky yeah and then um and Joe had some credits but had you had you worked with Joe no I knew I knew Joe Morton as a theater actor he had a very good reputation as a Shakespearean theater actor um he had been the boyfriend of a actress I had worked with once and I had so I like met him at a at a you know a play and then uh when we had people come in to read you know for a part how do you read somebody for a part who's mute so I would just meet these actors and some of them I knew their work and some of them I didn't and uh just talked to them about how do you get into the movie business and stuff like that and Joe told a story his father had been a military guy so Joe had grown up on military bases all over the world Okinawa and and maybe Guam I think in Germany and stuff like that and then his his when he was 10 years old or so his his father died and he moved back to the states to his mother's neighborhood in Harlem and he had a slight German accent and kids beat him up because he was an alien you know and I figured yeah I know this guy's a good actor and uh I think he really understands his story the first day we worked with Joe and you know I I had to say them we've only got four weeks to shoot we're not shooting in sequence and you know this is a story about assimilation so by the end of it he can he can pass he's kind of dressing like humans more he's walking like humans more you know he it's he's really still an alien but he's he's learned to kind of not send off signal like there's something weird about this guy and that's a that's a real Arc and the hardest thing in movie acting is you're shooting out of sequence and if you've got an arc from one place the other you're shooting scene 13 scene two that you're dying scene then you're meeting your wife and then you know and then you're divorcing your wife the next day and then all the scenes in between um so I said Joe you're gonna have to keep track of your Ark you know ask me questions if you need it but I'm going to be really busy trying to make a feature in four weeks and he just did it brilliantly you know he just he just when I put it in order you see him assimilate yeah he does evolve I was wondering about you know what was the sort of day-to-day Direction cause there's such a there's such a sort of openness to the character and in good ways and bad you know we we talked a little bit I I just said I I think this guy can um if he can look you in the eye no matter what language he can kind of understand what's going on and so then I I wrote the the the scene on the subway where the guy does tells him the card story and he's confused because there's no reality to it I mean he can look at the guy but he's telling him a story that where there's no real people and and that came because Fisher Stevens was in in the scene um when he came in to audition for Baby It's You which you see next um the casting director said oh and Fisher do that card trick for him and so in the script it says he sits down on the subway and next to him is Fisher Stevens who does his card trick for him because I didn't remember the card trick and I cast Fisher and he said yeah I remember I can do that um we shot that um it's very difficult to shoot especially back then I think you know if you didn't have a gazillions of dollars in the subway in New York um and the guy who was in charge of the liaison between the subway Department was was kind of a a sadist and he would promise you you had a a day and then he'd say oh no I won't give you a half day um and usually it was not in the subway itself it was in a Subway Museum in Brooklyn so we would put strip up lights next to it and you could open and close the doors and stuff and you know we kind of have people rock or whatever and uh so we we you know he cut us down a little bit in time and we're doing that Subway season and seeing and Fisher does his trick and I said to the extras who are mixed group of extras okay you know here's this phenomenon when you know um you know when when the doors open I'm gonna do the voice I'll put another voice in later it says you know 96th Street next next stop 125th Street and all the white people get off and uh got it everybody and this one Japanese American guy raised his hand and said what do I do and and I said that's the story of your life isn't it laughs that's well that's lovely speaking of um a script I was I've you in question but it's it's such a lovely scene when um Joe uh telling the singer how much he loves her music how did you script that and if so how or was it just no you know Joe Joe was such an expressive actor I I said you know one thing that he did was once I told him that you have to be looking in their eyes there's a couple times when people are talking to them and the way you do you look away and he'll do he'll do this or he'll move to get in their eyes uh he also figured out because you know of of other things that happened in the movie that you know he has this outlet and he said I'm I think I'm really you know any any High electricity any voltage I have to cover that up I'm very sensitive there you know um and so he he just wants to communicate so badly one thing I did is I said you know go kind of I'm not going to do many takes and so um you're going to get a lot of nice opportunities to be doing this the first time with this actor and just just like in real life if something doesn't speak they don't hear or they don't speak your language people talk a little louder and more slowly with them and even the actors because Joe would stay away from them and not say what are we going to do in the scene most of what you've seen in this movie is First Take and so he's he's trying to express himself and he would leave that kind of to the last minute he wouldn't you know and and really and and then people are getting this guy for the first time yeah that's fantastic um the uh like all of your movies it always strikes me as as diverse and as wide-ranging as they are in in everything really and even in genre uh there's always this sense of the place and the people who live there um and it just seems like you've spent an extraordinary amount of time in a lot of places to have gotten that deep into it how much time had you spent in Harlem very little actually so yeah I've been in other black neighborhoods and you know went to very mixed high school and stuff like that but um one of the things I was very conscious of is that Harlem just like Hollywood is is it a real place and it's an iconic place you know and so it has a play a part in people's imagination um quite honestly when we started shooting up there uh there was just stuff that oh that's there where it's in the movie right you know here's the vibe here I'm gonna get that in the movie um uh it was the great thing about it is we made a movie for I think it was four hundred thousand dollars um the minute we said we were shooting in in Harlem the teamsters chose not to even ask us whether they could be involved in the project but we could park anywhere we wanted because there was a lot of parking spaces up there so so many of the usual problems of shooting in New York City were not there we had parking wherever we wanted um I sometimes you know we were shooting at nights and the police said well we have to be on the set and we would say could you be two blocks away because your presence is going to cause more problems with the neighborhood and the and the vibe because we're having a nice time here and people are coming and watching the the scene where um uh Joe Morton's you know the brother uh shoots himself up with um uh heroin and then he he kind of comes out and he's whizzing and and you he he we kind of do a 360 and there's this kind of big jump and then it comes back and he's moved up right into the lens um we had 300 people at two or three in the morning we're just watching and being really nice about moving but a 360 there was nowhere for them to hide and so Ernest said well the guy's stoned so I can just kind of do a camera movement over them and so there were 300 people there who you don't see in the shops but we you know people just kind of what's this about oh that sounds cool um well you talked earlier about where this one came from but I mean I wonder do you uh do you find yourself you know driving through places you've never been and stories coming out of them as you go or you know it's a disease you know you see a great looking place oh that would be cool in a movie you know you're wrapping up alone and I said oh this would be a great shot from a balloon and you know so that happens all the time it's just you know the Practical side of your brain just says no way in hell am I gonna get to do something here or you know that movie that I just thought of just practically it's not going to happen so this one came from a dream we're going to go back in time now one film uh the baby it's you and where where what was the Genesis of the the Genesis of that was uh Amy Robinson had originally a a company with Griffin Dunn and Mark Metcalf other actors that they had started basically being actors out of work and oh we'll produce a play and we'll be in it and many producers have started that way um and so they produced a play and then they actually produced a movie um uh from an Ann Beatty uh novel um that that ended up being called um chili scenes have went well it was a chilly scenes of winter and then they made it sound like a skiing movie I forget what the eventual part Head Over Heels yeah yeah chilly scenes of winter Head Over Heels are not the same movie but you know that's what happened to it and uh Mark Metcalf went off he's the guy who plays neither Meyer in Animal House and so he kind of had more of a career at the moment so it became from Triple Play it became double play and I had made one movie and so they came to me and they said well we have this idea um kind of based on stuff that happened to Amy when she was in in Trenton high school and she was about two year two older than me and as she told me the story said oh that's what happened in the girls locker room here's what happened in the boys locker room I'd gone to a very similar high school and so she brought me this idea of this this kind of romance between this you know kind of Hoodie guy but very romantic hoodie guy and this Jewish girl destined to go to Sarah Lawrence which was a romance possible in high school yeah and then in the American class system it's not going to continue not so much um and I loved the idea and so I wrote the script and various things happened and finally we ended up making it at Paramount after it had been at another studio and they put it in to turn around and actually um a wonderful young woman named Claire Townsend who was one of the first female Studio Executives uh had been at the original studio and when they put in it to turn around she says well I want to see this movie and she kind of became the agent for setting it up somewhere else um and so you know it kind of evolved between you know what I kind of knew and felt about the period and what Amy knew and felt about the period with this this Siege of this romance between these two kids um which seems like a good place to uh should we bring on the Sheik yeah the chic [Applause] and if you and if you uh stay with this series um uh Vincent's also got a kind of the lead part in um City of Hope yeah that's Monday night yeah another great film uh so how did you get casting or yeah yeah uh uh uh um wonderful uh Margie simpkin who was our casting director just threw everybody you know and I you know after the first day of casting I said you know those people were all too old and she said oh you really want them yeah I mean I'd already said I want them to be close to the age of high school kids and they were you know people were 28 years old and stuff like that you know and she said you really want them to be that and so she you know a new group of actors and we saw everybody we saw Sean Penn and we saw you know Tom Cruise we saw some really good actors and I kept just saying well he's not Italian you know and some of them were Italian and they just you know and and then Vinnie came in and uh I had seen you in over the edge right I think that was the only thing I'd seen you in at that point and I just said well that's the guy you know all right and the same thing with Rosanna we got down to like five five actresses we actually did screen tests with them and Rosanna had only been in one or two things as well and then the studio had some idea about a couple other one guy who's like British or something like that I'm not a bad actor but he's British yeah come on right um and uh they kind of at the last like a week before we were going to shoot they said well we're not so sure about this with that cast and they said well that's the cast and and we kind of stonewalled and they said okay go ahead Do It um it was only three million dollars and we kind of did it in a kind of buyback program and uh and it was a great shooting experience and then it was kind of a nightmare during the editing oh I wasn't well because they wanted it to turn into um porkies or you know like a teenage comedy which it was never meant to be well at the time that John was casting the film I was actually off in Morocco shooting the blackstein returns in the middle basically in the middle of the Sahara Desert you know and you know this was uh 80 um one 82 maybe early 82. so you know you couldn't just do self tapes back then you know there was no such thing I mean you barely had cameras um I mean I think there was one RCA you know portable VHS which is a big huge thing with a camera and a big wire so the way I held John's interest I don't know if you remember this I I asked the actress um Jody thielen if she would just read the scene with me and I took like a cassette like I had a Genesis cassette or something there in Africa and I had a recording you know a recording thing and we put it in there and I read the scene and my manager was visiting with Matt Dillon and it was just timing we were like a little family back then and I also did a screen test for The Outsiders and the way I did that was I got them to give me you know some short ends and the sound lonely some you know some extra tape for the Niagara and we did a little screen test right before lunch so there I was like this Arabian Prince and I threw everything off and put on this you know Pony boys older brother uh costume yeah and we shot that so again my manager was visiting so what he did when he came back to New York he went back to New York with Matt and they brought the negative and the sound and this little cassette tape I was like please I love the script I Love This I Gotta play this part I gotta be in this movie please get them to wait for me to come back and that's what did the trick because John was able to go over and look at the sound was never sunk up but he got to see me like what I look like right now in uh over at Barry malkin's I think editing place and listen to the cassette and literally I'd been away for six months and the day after I got back I was in the office reading for John and uh and Amy and I think um and Marjorie of course yeah yeah it was it was actually fun you know of course if you you cast a high school movie 10 15 years later or some of those people are going to be real names and stuff like that um but it was It was kind of fun to read for it and we ended with some kids who were younger than the part that they were playing um you'll see Robert Downey in in this I think was the first movie he made that his because he was in Small Parts in his dad's kind of experimental movies and uh we did cut his biggest scene out so I think he knew it as maybe it's you for a long time maybe it's you Matthew Modine this was his first movie um and uh and really some some of the actors in it who do wonderful work who never really acted that much you know before and kind of you know which happens to actors as well drop by the wayside Gracie pollen was in it yeah um did you did you test the two of them together at any point or was that uh I don't think we did I I think I remember testing you with our friend Marisa who's not even in the movie he was like 10 years too old well I I think I just read for you and then you did the screen test yeah for me to see my chemistry with the girls right right and so I did test with multiple girls but not that many but uh and then Rosanna came in yeah and everybody knew it was like okay okay yeah because I was wondering because there's such a such a probable chemistry between them that's uh um well how was that was that you were talking before about you know obviously the sequence but this one particularly goes through all these various time frames did you try to stay in any kind of we we tried to do the high school stuff first and the college stuff second you know a little bit and because of locations we could kind of do that yeah we didn't get to shoot you know totally in in sequence but I think the you know some of the meeting stuff between them we got to do first and then the the uh we they kind of stayed away from each other before the first big makeout scene and stuff like that um but yeah you don't get I had Michael Bauhaus who had had shot one movie in the states that never got a release and but I knew his stuff from from fassbender's movies and Michael was his English was pretty good then he was a wonderful guy his two sons were working on his camera crew um and he also was was like the best operator I've ever worked with so he in those days you know when it was a neighbor movie not a i a movie you could operate and and just like the first day I said oh my God first of all this guy's a great operator and second of all we are so on the same page when I say low and wide this is before video assist and I looked through the camera that's my low and wide because very often you're low and wide and the dp's lone white are are very very different he is and he thought you had everything set up and you got to move it over and stuff like that and it was like geez you know we're you know and just a great and the other thing was that um Michael his parents had been actors so he'd been around actors quite a bit and and so even though he didn't always understand the English he had such a dramatic sense of the heat of a scene so when we have some of the big dramatic scenes between you know uh Vincent's character and rosanna's character I would say okay just build me a big cage so they can move around uh he would be whispering in German with his this guy Hunt's book or his Focus puller who never made a mark on the lens or the floor just one of those guys who could do it never made a measurement didn't even carry a uh and Michael would whisper in German I'm going with a girl I'm going with a girl or or Vincent Vincent Vincent Vincent you know and he and the focus would change is they move around each other so it kept a spontaneity between them I didn't have to you're you're having a screaming fight breaking up with it with this you know person you loved and I'm gonna make you hit a mark yeah and was just like guys you know just get into each other and go where you go and Michael could follow it um with this great you know Hans spoke almost no English except for great uh no um Mothers of Invention lyrics so you know at lunch he would come up to me and start but it's the ugliest part of your body some say you know some say a toast I think it's your mind I talked to the director yeah um so which yeah so you um Fisher Stevens notwithstanding did I would imagine and I'm just guessing that your scripts are you're fairly tight with the script no yeah there's not a whole lot of improving yeah I mean how Vincent what's it like when you're when you're sort of you know as an actor you know you get a lot of I get a lot of scripts a lot of them kind of lay there uh you have to sort of bring them to life for somebody when you're reading like John's sales dialogue and knowing I'm going to get to do this well that's the amazing thing about John's films they they people ask a lot was the film improvise and I said no that's how good John writes that's how good he can hear people how would they tell like what they what how and and as John will tell you like when he writes a character like the movies about that character even if it's for one scene or a few lines so it's he economically gets out what needs to be created in that moment to establish that that character who they are and so when you read a script like that it just speaks to you and you're like I just have to show up and say these words and of course do it as naturally and the combination of this too ends up with people going oh man how much of that was improvised yeah and it was it was all the page all of it yeah I like Joe Morton and Verizon brother from another planet yeah well no truly truly a lot of times I just said here's the situation Joe he couldn't blow a line because he didn't have any lines but there was a certain amount of leeway he has more leeway than any other actor I've ever worked with uh so as a Philly boy and die hard Springsteen fan I got to ask um how'd that happen um yeah that was kind of a a complicated thing um uh let's see um I had uh first of all what we when we contacted you know Bruce and his people we said well here's the deal um we're gonna use your songs and you get to see the cut and if you hate it we'll take them out we've got alternates and stuff like that um so so we'd kind of you know through his his through um uh I think I get the contact through Dave Marsh who's written about him who was a a friend of of Maggie's brother-in-law and you know and then uh John John uh uh Landau who runs his operations yeah I was kind of interest in that and yeah and then they like the film and they not only let us use the music but they said well you know we own we own the performance and CBS or whoever owns the publishing um or no we own the publish and they own the performance we'll give it to you for like a dollar or something so we paid half price for Bruce Springsteen songs because they you know that was really really generous and you know all the rest of the stuff is period stuff and I just felt like though he he just this was his world and so you don't hear it coming out of jukebox but we got to use these four songs and you know and I got to cut to them which was just a threat you know uh Adam raised a cane and stuff like that and I knew those songs and I knew they would energize the scenes and I was a huge Springsteen fan as a Young Man I mean I knew about him very early because my mother's friend Chris was a journalist for the Rolling Stone and she would get these demo demo versions of these albums early and I was I was just so crazy about Bruce and then we did the movie and and then it was I was 19 years old I was and because of the film I sort of gotten in at his office and they'd get me tickets and one of the performances I went to in out at The Meadowlands they said uh you know we want you to go into this room after the show and and then Bruce was there he came out he said man how you doing he's like uh I really like the movie man I really like the movie I said you did you did he said he said yeah I said did you did you see it in theaters oh yeah I went to the theater yeah well like during the day or night nah I went during the day it was kind of alone I just put my legs up and I watched the movie and I thought it was really great man I really liked it so much I was good man I was good uh it's the only movie that I didn't have a composer uh a guy named Joel sill um who was a kind of record producer in New York he he did all the clearances that soundtrack today would cost you more than five movies well you couldn't get it on video forever but um there were there used to be a lot of little publishing companies and you could kind of deal with them and then they all Consolidated into like three who who cut no breaks for anybody so uh when the movie came out finally when Paramount kind of you know paid off some things they were supposed to pay off and it finally came out on DVD we had to change a few songs yeah but none of the group songs we had to change um we have time for just a couple questions from the audience I think if um anybody has a question we've got a microphone there there you go oh we're getting you a mic don't worry hello uh this is one of my favorite teenage romances of all time so thanks for making it thanks um I wanted to know how you guys kind of won the fight with Paramount about trying to make it more of a porkies or kind of like raunchy team comedy which is so not you know they read the script and they they gave us the money to make it and then during the editing or something uh porkies and um Fast Times at Ridgemont High came out and they just decided it should be more of a high school comedy um and we you know we we showed a cut and they did a test marketing thing and it tested like 66 yeah which is low for them and was pretty good for me um and then uh basically they kicked me out of the editing room um I had a new editor come in they um brought me to the screening of the new one and another test screening and I thought it was just incoherent I didn't like it at all I just said you know I'm not going to put my name on this guys it's your movie but you know I'm not going to put my name on this and it tested one point lower than my head so they just I think they pretty much just said okay we don't want the bad publicity this guy taking his name off it and making a big fuss so we'll just let them finish it and then we'll basically sit on it so so they they let us make the movie and and it's pretty much the cut that I wanted to um and then you know there's a book called produced and Abandoned and bakery is used is one of the movies in the you know they kind of half distributed it we talk to people in the distribution arm who said we were told we would be fired if we were caught working on this film and trying to get publicity for it so so it had a very small very quick release so it was it was kind of a standoff um but you know the movie holds up and and uh you know they didn't make any money on it and they also told Griffin Dunn one of The Producers oh we'll take care of when when you you cleared rights for music there were theatrical rights and then synchronization rights which which covered things like home video and they they just lied to him they said oh we covered those and then they said oh actually we didn't cover those and so it was not available for another seven or eight years until the regime changed at Paramount and uh the guy in the video Department who'd always wanted to put it out was able to you know finally get them to pay off those few you know those those kind of fees to the publishers uh one more question before we're a gentleman here right in the middle um uh nabit was a union that had come into existence because in IA you know up to about that point um if if you started as a camera assistant it was going to take you 50 years to get to be an operator they just they had a lot of operators and they didn't want the competition or whatever so a bunch of young guys who were really ready to shoot form this Union a bit and and they had some really good you know crew people in it because Paramount did it did the movie as a negative pickup which meant that they they gave us a slip of paper that we took to a bank who loaned us three million dollars to make the movie and then Paramount it wasn't officially a Paramount movie so it didn't have to be an IA movie and uh Amy had heard about this guy you know Michael Bauhaus who had shot this actually uh he had shot this movie called Mr Wonderful which starred Joe Pesci before he was well known very good movie uh made by Peter lillianthal and uh um Argentinian filmmaker but never got it picked up and so she I think we can you know make this cheaper with with neighbor but with really good DP she had all these fasciner movies um and and once again we were on heart you know we we were New Jersey we shot in Hoboken I think we should have one shot in New York City um we went out to you know uppsala college and shot a couple days there or something like that and and truly the only problems we had were were with the teamsters um we we had a meeting our our production manager had a meeting with Vinnie lutzy who was the New Jersey Teamster guy who proudly said I'm the most indicted Teamster captain in America you know so we had to hire these Jersey guys and then the New York Teamster said you know they don't have jurisdiction over Jersey they're just a bunch of we have jurisdiction so we had extra Teamsters on it and the New York Teamsters who were real professionals said said we're not getting any vehicle with one of those Jersey driving so we were carrying the Jersey guys um and so that made things a little complicated but basically the rest of the crew were great you know and Michael was a wonderful you know leader of troops so I had a I had a ball shooting there's more money than I'd ever had I I hadn't made anything over a million dollars at that point and Michael was not only good he was fast and he was nice with the actors and the actors you know liked working with him so it was kind of a dream job for me uh well I guess we're yeah that's all the time we've got so John uh Vincent thank you guys so much thank you thanks for coming here thanks for making this um hope you'll stick around we're gonna take a brief break and then come back for a Baby It's You enjoy it