This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:18] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hello and welcome to The Drama Book Show.

[0:20] David Rigano: My name is David Rigano.

[0:21] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And welcome back and happy new year, David.

[0:25] David Rigano: Happy New Year, Mark.

[0:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: How was your cruise?

[0:28] David Rigano: My cruise was fantastic. Went to the bar.

[0:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I do mean the one on the boat.

[0:31] David Rigano: Yes, yes. Listen.

[0:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: What happens in the Bahamas?

[0:36] David Rigano: Truly. No, we went to Key West, Bimini, Grand Cayman, and Cook Islands.

[0:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I went to Allentown.

[0:43] David Rigano: Nice.

[0:44] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Very cool. I was gonna ask, I knew that you went somewhere.

[0:47] David Rigano: But it was great. It was with my whole family, my parents' fortieth anniversary.

[0:51] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[0:51] David Rigano: And my brother and his wife and my brother and his girlfriend and me and my husband and my brother's girlfriend's parents were also having their 40th anniversary.

[0:58] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So that's they were there so cool.

[1:00] David Rigano: Along with their son and daughter-in-law and two grandkids. So it was 14 of us on this cruise.

[1:07] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But we all did our own thing.

[1:07] David Rigano: Yeah, we all kind of did our own thing and then we'd meet for dinner.

[1:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Nice.

[1:12] David Rigano: And do like the entertainment stuff at night. And then often we do like one excursion.

[1:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We had an eight-person table and a six-person table.

[1:25] David Rigano: Okay.

[1:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And it was alternating who would sit at the six-person table with the kids, aside from their parents.

[1:31] David Rigano: Of course.

[1:32] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But just by chance, I never had to.

[1:37] David Rigano: Which is crazy, because the one who actually has worked with kids and comes from places like Disney and Toys R Us.

[1:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Never ended up at that table.

[1:45] David Rigano: And Santa Land, yeah. No, just because there were two days where we didn't eat together.

[1:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I recently graduated from the kids' table at my family's Passover Seder.

[1:54] David Rigano: So yeah. I think I was always in that weird, awkward space because I was like six years older than the next one when it came to the grandkids of our family.

[2:04] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so I was always too big for the kids' table, but too small for the adults' table.

[2:08] David Rigano: So it was like this weird in between.

[2:10] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So it was just that all over again, really.

[2:13] David Rigano: Yeah. But no, it was probably the most wonderful time. I think I learned from it.

[2:20] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I learned that I need to balance better.

[2:23] David Rigano: The big takeaway. Definitely relax.

[2:28] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I've never went to take a vacation to take a vacation. All my vacations have been like, oh, I'm gonna go watch my show or I'm gonna go visit family or something like that.

[2:35] David Rigano: And I have to I had to remind myself, because at one point I sat down to write and I was like, Mark, yeah.

[2:42] David Rigano: But it was like a moment of creative work is work, and I have to remember that because I'm so used to like work, work all day, go home and write and forget that I have to balance.

[2:52] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So it was nice to just not charge my laptop and play on a boat for a while.

[2:59] David Rigano: Were you just out there playing bocce with the other old men?

[3:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: No, I found a boxing bag.

[3:05] David Rigano: Whoa, White Lotus real quick.

[3:07] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's why I found, you know, this case punching bag on the boat, and so I was able to keep up with kickboxing while I was there.

[3:16] David Rigano: And then we ended up befriending a bunch of gays on the boat that happened to be there.

[3:21] Mark-Eugene Garcia: They actually had the LGBTQ meetup on a nightly basis.

[3:27] David Rigano: Oh, wait, so like they did that on their own, or yeah, the boat did.

[3:30] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, the boat.

[3:30] David Rigano: Oh yeah, the ship did the Celebrity Apex. Wonderful, wonderful.

[3:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I will go with them anytime.

[3:35] David Rigano: I thought you meant like there just happened to be like, yeah, we just organized it on Scruff.

[3:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I thought like some LGBTQ meetup group was like, let's go on this cruise.

[3:44] David Rigano: No, and we're like, we're just gonna tag along with that.

[3:45] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, no, they had the boat organized. Yeah, there's so many events and activities and meetups and stuff on this.

[3:53] David Rigano: It's so cool. And so one of them was that, and it just happened that it was always during dinner, like when their scheduled dinner was at 6 p.m.

[4:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I actually one of the islands we went to was Bimini, and we had a great time at the beach, and then went to a bar and got effectively Bimini wasted.

[4:11] David Rigano: That's called Bimini Bombini Boo.

[4:13] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And we had so many, and then we're so Mimini, yeah.

[4:16] David Rigano: So Mimini.

[4:18] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And we'd had two dinners already, like with the family at six, and I told by that time, and I was getting on the boat and I messaged my brother.

[4:27] David Rigano: I was like, hey, I am really drunk. Can you please tell mom that I am too tired to go to dinner?

[4:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Like, I don't want to go to a family dinner. This Bimini wasted.

[4:37] David Rigano: And he was like, Absolutely, that's fine. Dinner was always on deck four at this restaurant.

[4:44] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We had the same like standing reservation at the same restaurant.

[4:47] David Rigano: And so Rod and I are like in a room, and then we're like, we are too wasted to go to dinner with a family, but we are not too wasted to meet up with some messy gays and just like talk and talk at the bar.

[5:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So we decided to go. So we went to this meetup at 6 p.m. at the same time as my parents' dinner.

[5:06] David Rigano: And what I did not know is that a few other family members had also canceled on dinner.

[5:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So my brother, who was going.

[5:14] David Rigano: That was your night to sit at the kids' table, but that was.

[5:16] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It was. My brother who was going decided to take my mom somewhere else.

[5:21] David Rigano: And so he took her to deck five.

[5:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so I'm talking to my new gay friends, and me and Rodrigo are there, blah blah blah, just chatting.

[5:31] David Rigano: And this woman walks up behind me, puts her arm around me in front of all of them, and says, Are you avoiding your mother?

[5:41] Mark-Eugene Garcia: No, mom, no. If I may quote former Drama Book Show guest moderator, Marissa Jarrett Winokur.

[5:51] David Rigano: You are so busted.

[5:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Truth.

[5:55] David Rigano: And my sister-in-law sent me that text right afterwards. You got caught.

[6:01] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I was like, no, mom, I just didn't want you to know I was too wasted for dinner. I'm sorry.

[6:05] David Rigano: The next day she messaged me, Have you recovered? Where are you now? I'm like, I'm in the pool.

[6:09] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I'm out. I went to bed at that was at 6 p.m. And then I was in bed by 8:45. That's how strong those drinks were.

[6:14] David Rigano: And I did not wake up till the next day. But man, they were good.

[6:18] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But it was it was wonderful. So tell me about Allentown.

[6:21] David Rigano: I did not do any drinking in Allentown because I was at the Pennsylvania Thespians Conference.

[6:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Nice.

[6:27] David Rigano: This was my third year with Pennsylvania. I've done New Jersey in the past. I wasn't at New Jersey this year, and then New York Thespians is coming up in March.

[6:38] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[6:38] David Rigano: No, I think it's in April. This anyway, it would it was like on my birthday last year, the New York one.

[6:43] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So I was teaching a high school theater workshop on my birthday, which was such a cool thing.

[6:48] David Rigano: But yeah, I teach a couple of different high school theater workshops, both of which I am adapting into books. So maybe we'll be talking about those books here at some point.

[7:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's like a trailer.

[7:01] David Rigano: Yeah. But I teach a course called Playmaking, which is all about all of the collaborative forces who come together to put on a show and figuring out at what stage of the game you need to bring different collaborators on for different types of projects.

[7:17] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And the one that I was teaching out for the Pennsylvania Thespians that weekend was called Focus on Staging.

[7:24] David Rigano: And it's a directing workshop where we look at how staging can manipulate the audience's focus.

[7:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Nice.

[7:30] David Rigano: And I did three workshops. If I ever expand this, it would be fun for me if to do like different scenes. Right now I when I shake up the scenes and I go, okay, we're doing Proof with the first group, and we're doing The Grown-Ups with the second group, and we're doing You Can't Take It with You. Those were the three plays that I did.

[7:51] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's just for me.

[7:52] David Rigano: That's just so that I don't have to do the same scene three times in a row. But like one of the reasons I brought The Grown-Ups in this time is because we're always looking at how would you stage this in a proscenium stage versus how would you stage it in a thrust stage versus how would you stage it in the round?

[8:08] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And because the focal points are all different, and how like what the audience can see is from different angles, and how you want to manipulate the audience's focus to tell the story is different in all of those.

[8:22] David Rigano: And of course, with The Grown-Ups, most of the plays that I do, Proof, You Can't Take It with You, those were all originally performed in prosceniums, and then we're slowly moving away from the proscenium and thinking about other ways that we can stage things.

[8:38] Mark-Eugene Garcia: The Grown-Ups was written to be an in-the-round environmental production where you were literally sitting next to the cast.

[8:47] David Rigano: Now we're going the other way.

[8:50] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So if I ever had the opportunity to take this class and turn it into month-long or just a multi-week class, then it would be really fun to start with something very traditional and then slowly move away from that.

[9:02] David Rigano: But still, you can do The Grown-Ups in a proscenium stage.

[9:05] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So we're saying now we're going the other way and saying, okay, how would you stage this experiential show in a traditional proscenium theater? Because it gets people thinking outside of what the traditional staging for something encourages you to create your own.

[9:19] David Rigano: That's so much of what I try to do with both of these courses, is I think that a lot of high school theater kids have and they have amazing things these days. When I talk to these kids, I'm always so impressed.

[9:37] Mark-Eugene Garcia: What's your role in your drama club? And I remember one year a kid was like, because when I was in high school, I'm sure when you were in high school the same, if you were a techie, that was it. You were a techie.

[9:46] David Rigano: Yeah.

[9:46] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And that just counted for anything that had to be done backstage. And I had a kid who was like, I'm the A2 at my high school.

[9:53] David Rigano: Like what? Yeah.

[9:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I would have been like, what does that mean? I didn't know what an A2 was until my friend was doing that on Broadway.

[10:01] David Rigano: Yeah.

[10:01] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And these kids are getting to do that. So it is so amazing what they get. And I look at these catalogs of the other classes that are going on down the hall from me, and I'm so jealous that I'm in here teaching my class sometimes instead of being able to take some of these.

[10:16] David Rigano: Yeah, no, I see courses for that stuff. And I'm like, also there is so much of what's available to high school theater students that really just exists within the proscenium.

[10:31] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so much of what they're doing is brand, it is not brand new, is like it's established stuff. So they get a finished script, and then someone tells them how to put it into a box, and they do that.

[10:44] David Rigano: And so with Focus on Staging, I'm really trying to get them to think about how they can stage stuff and what might be appropriate outside of just the proscenium stage that most of them are likely to only have worked in a proscenium.

[11:01] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[11:02] David Rigano: Some of them have gotten to work in a thrust or have seen a thrust. A lot of them know what in the round is, but have never maybe even set foot in an arena theater.

[11:13] Mark-Eugene Garcia: The first time I was in an arena theater or a theater in the round is they turned my black box in my college into a theater in the round.

[11:20] David Rigano: And all of the new of the students who were like, especially the intro to theater students, did not know what to do with that.

[11:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And at one point they did the wave.

[11:31] David Rigano: I just remember like we were getting ready to go on. I was doing Rainmaker, and we're getting ready to go on stage. And the stage manager, Sheriff, the stage manager was like, we have to pause for a minute because the audience is doing the wave.

[11:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I just remember hearing the from outside the theater going, what is happening?

[11:48] David Rigano: But yeah, like I want to get them to think outside of I'm trademarking this is gonna be in the book outside of the paradigm of the proscenium.

[11:56] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Nice and the same thing with Playmaking. I don't want any creative kids who want to write or direct or choreograph or compose or produce or any of those steps that go into getting a play on stage.

[12:13] David Rigano: I don't want them to think that it's this thing where a genius writer sits alone in a dark room for a month and just spits out a masterpiece.

[12:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: There's so much collaboration, there's so many collaborators who come on board early in the process. And then I even talked what one year I was teaching that class, and a kid had an idea for a play that could take place on in a subway car.

[12:37] David Rigano: And I said to him, have what I'd like you to consider, because I'm always saying consider where this needs to be. Don't just think, oh, I write a play and it goes into a proscenium.

[12:48] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I said, I want you to consider a play like this happening with audience on two sides. Almost like the audience is the subway platform and the play's taking place on the tracks in between.

[13:01] David Rigano: So that's my there's one thing that I as an educator can pass on to the next generation of theater makers. It's that you do not always have to do your shows in a proscenium.

[13:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: You don't even always have to do your shows in a theater.

[13:17] David Rigano: No, not at all. It's a lot of doing things your way.

[13:21] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah. Who does things his way?

[13:22] David Rigano: Who does it?

[13:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Julian Schlossberg.

[13:24] David Rigano: Julian Schlossberg absolutely does things his way.

[13:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: What's one thing I can think of that is absolutely doing things your way?

[13:31] David Rigano: Creating a book and calling it a part two?

[13:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Calling it My First Book Part Two.

[13:36] David Rigano: 100%. And that is is what we're here to talk about. We tangented a little bit, but also because we've introduced Julian before. If you've listened to the podcast that we've had, I would I wanted to call it My First Book Part One, but it's not. But we had his first book up here. And in this, and that was moderated by Susan Stroman.

[13:56] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Right.

[13:56] Dylan Glick: And this one was moderated by Renee Taylor.

[13:59] Mark-Eugene Garcia: He knows some cool people.

[14:01] Dylan Glick: He knows some cool people.

[14:03] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And she was a blast because she was on the second she got out of the cab.

[14:09] Dylan Glick: Yeah.

[14:10] Mark-Eugene Garcia: She was on and ready to go. There was no green room. There was nothing.

[14:14] Dylan Glick: She was hosting from the door through the audience till we sat down.

[14:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Uh-huh. And Nora was doing introductions.

[14:22] Dylan Glick: Um, and she was like heckling Nora while it was happening.

[14:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It was at one point, Nora was like, Are you heckling me? It was she was so wonderful.

[14:31] Dylan Glick: You have to go. I got heckled by Renee Taylor too. No one can ever take that away from me.

[14:36] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's and it's it was one of those moments where and she called me afterwards at one point too. And it's one of those moments where it was up there with getting called by uh Parsons.

[14:45] Dylan Glick: Yeah.

[14:46] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And these people that I know and love and being like, oh my god, one, they have my number, and two, especially like they're amazing theater people, but culturally speaking, they're people who you have watched in your living room your entire life.

[15:00] Dylan Glick: Yes, and have been a part of that, or I've said their punchlines to my family and been like, oh, this yeah, it was incredible, and she was such a great host.

[15:09] Mark-Eugene Garcia: The two of them together are really hilarious, but just to have her here in the store was she was making some blue jokes, and she was just having a blast.

[15:18] Dylan Glick: And then we want nothing less than that.

[15:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: No, nothing, and it was it was just wonderful to have her here.

[15:22] Dylan Glick: Have you have you met her?

[15:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I have not. I couldn't be here for this one, and I was so bummed.

[15:28] Dylan Glick: A because I loved Julian's first event, and then B because Renee Taylor.

[15:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, yeah, it was incredible. And we it was uh and it brings me back to even a couple days ago we had a little nanny cameo again because we had Daniel Davis here at the store, and it was just a moment of me almost fainting when I saw him come up to ask a question, and then he ordered a book, and then he goes, Oh, and my name is Daniel Davis.

[15:51] Dylan Glick: I'm like, Oh, I know that.

[15:52] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I got that part already. I did that to someone the other.

[15:54] Dylan Glick: Because I was like, I was already gonna say, by the way, I loved you in this show, because this actor like did a bit in the audience and she got right in my face.

[16:04] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Uh-huh.

[16:04] Dylan Glick: And so I was gonna be like, Oh, you got right in my face in this show. And I thought, and then she was like, Oh, if you don't have this in, can I order it? And I was like, I can't be like, What's your name?

[16:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, no, exactly. Like, I didn't want to ask his name because I knew it.

[16:18] Dylan Glick: And so every time I did that to some poor actor who I love, I think his name is Graham Stevens. He uh was in the show 2000, wow, A Thousand and One Nights, and it was a musical based off of the play, A Thousand and One.

[16:32] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I love this play so much so good, and he was so good in it. And I happened to see at work while we were here, like he it got announced that he was in the new cast of Beetlejuice that was coming when it first came back to Broadway, and I was so happy for him.

[16:47] Dylan Glick: This person I have never met, who I've only seen in this one show twice. But it was fresh in my head that wow, he's making his Broadway debut. He was in this off-Broadway thing I liked, blah, blah, blah. And he walked in, like maybe an hour later, walked into the store.

[17:01] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, wow.

[17:01] Dylan Glick: And I looked up. Same day as the announcement.

[17:03] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Same day as the announcement, same day as I saw it, and had this revelation and this connection. My my synapses were like connecting, and he walks up to get a book from a shelf, and I said, Yeah, oh my gosh, you're in Beetlejuice.

[17:14] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And he looked at me like I was king nuts.

[17:16] Dylan Glick: And I was like, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. What I was trying to say was I saw you in a thousand and one nights in a day. You were fantastic. And then I saw today you were in Beetlejuice, and I was very happy for you. I'm gonna walk away now.

[17:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: This was uh if we're gonna name names, this was Catherine Wake. Okay, and she had been in the other Josh Cohen, which I loved in that show off Broadway. I still listen to the album. It's so much fun.

[17:38] Dylan Glick: And she played like everyone in it played a million instruments, yeah.

[17:41] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And she was so fun, and she played an old Jewish lady. She's a young, funny comic actress, but she was playing an old Jewish lady in one scene.

[17:51] Dylan Glick: And that was the scene where she got in my face in the audience.

[17:54] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So I was going to be like, I loved you and the other Josh Cohen, and you got right in my face. And then she was like, Can I put in this order? I was like, okay. I was like, this would be where I would ask you your name, but I'm just gonna type it in.

[17:58] Dylan Glick: And then she was like, and it's spelled. I was like, oh no, I know how it's and then she was like, wait, I was like, yeah, I saw you and the other comment.

[18:14] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, amazing.

[18:15] Dylan Glick: Yeah. I love it. I love recognizing actors. I love giving them their details.

[18:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And it's one thing, I think, when it's Daniel Davis, and maybe Daniel Davis goes, I haven't been on the nanny in forever, but you and I are old.

[18:26] Dylan Glick: That's what people have to realize.

[18:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I don't know if you saw the single tear that just went down my face. But it's one thing when it's someone who's been on TV. I do also love when we can go. I saw you in this off-Broadway show.

[18:39] Dylan Glick: Yeah, totally.

[18:40] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Like I saw you in this random thing. And especially like I have been following your social media. I've been following your in since I saw you in that show because you were so funny.

[18:45] Dylan Glick: Yeah.

[18:45] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Because you were so talented jumping from the keyboard on one side of the stage to the drums on the other side of the stage to picking up like a guitar or something.

[18:56] Dylan Glick: Yeah, there's certain shows, like the entire cast of I Wanna Fuck like Romeo and Juliet, like immediately followed because they are all so good. And I have followed to see what they've done because I want to see what you do.

[19:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: There's certain shows that do that, that are actors that do that, where it's like immediately I'm like, this person, I just want to know what they're gonna do next.

[19:13] Dylan Glick: Um what we're gonna do next is listen to Julian.

[19:17] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Is listen to Julian and Renee.

[19:20] Dylan Glick: So with that, let's dive right in.

[19:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Okay, ladies and gentlemen.

[19:26] Dylan Glick: Okay, you're gonna introduce us.

[19:32] Mark-Eugene Garcia: If you're ready for me to get started.

[19:34] Dylan Glick: Sure.

[19:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Okay, perfect. Thank you so much. Do you lock the door that other people can't get in?

[19:39] Dylan Glick: We have somebody there, so if anybody shows in, we'll usher them through.

[19:44] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Okay. Welcome everybody to the drama bookshop, and welcome also to the drama book show. We have these microphones here, and so we're recording for the drama book show podcast.

[19:55] Dylan Glick: And the drama book show is an interview, QA, book signing, and live podcast recording all rolled into one. We have events every week, and you can find out more on our website, dramabookshop.com. We're so happy to have you all here. So thank you so much for coming.

[20:09] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Who is some other big stars you've had here?

[20:12] Dylan Glick: Some other big stars that we've had recently. We had, let's see, the other events that I worked. We had uh Charles Bush, we had Shane Town, we had uh recently we have Joe Iconis, the composer.

[20:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's okay. Yeah, because we had many cool folks here. And now we have two legends I'm very excited to introduce. I was here working my shift, minding my own business, and I was asked if I would be available and interested to introduce Julian Schlossberg and Renee Taylor, and I was ecstatic to say yes.

[20:44] Dylan Glick: Oh my Renee Taylor, a legend.

[20:56] Mark-Eugene Garcia: This is a lot of pressure. I have seen your incredible solo show.

[21:04] Dylan Glick: Oh, and he was the producer, Junior Schlossberg. My life on a diet, it was incredible, and you won a special United Solo Award for it that year, too.

[21:14] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes. Before you toured it. And we have Julian Schlossberg, of course, the legendary producer and our author and honored guests this evening. 50 plays.

[21:25] Dylan Glick: And I was in two with the 50.

[21:30] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And we work together every 37 years.

[21:35] Dylan Glick: And then that doesn't include your work in film Hollywood as well. And Castle Hill Productions.

[21:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I know I've got a list of some folks here. I'm really going off the cuff.

[21:46] Dylan Glick: I don't wonder who he knows.

[21:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, no, you're just being heckled.

[21:50] Dylan Glick: I'm just by Renee Taylor.

[21:54] Mark-Eugene Garcia: No, no, tell say who he knows.

[21:56] Dylan Glick: I know Renee Taylor. And Elaine May, George C. Scott.

[22:01] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh my god.

[22:02] Dylan Glick: John Cassavetes's here.

[22:03] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh my gosh.

[22:04] Dylan Glick: Gina Rollins, we lost today, wonderful actress as well. And then you interviewed so many more folks as well. Jack Nicholson, Jane Fonda, Bob Hope.

[22:14] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so we're at a legendary intersection of the entertainment industry between the two of you. I'm so grateful that you're here. And that you're promoting this one.

[22:21] Dylan Glick: Don't make me cry.

[22:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We're very grateful and we're grateful to all of you. So I'll turn it over to the two of you to have an excellent conversation. So thank you so much.

[22:30] Dylan Glick: Thank you, Ms. Taylor.

[22:31] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Thank you, Mr. Schlossberg.

[22:33] Dylan Glick: So I was supposed to interview you. That's the that's the deal, really.

[22:37] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Okay. So what did you say about how we met?

[22:41] Julian Schlossberg: You came on my radio show. I had a radio show on WMCA.

[22:45] Renee Taylor: That everybody was on.

[22:47] Julian Schlossberg: For how many years were you on?

[22:49] Renee Taylor: Nine years.

[22:49] Julian Schlossberg: I was on from eight to midnight.

[22:52] Renee Taylor: And uh a lot of hours. But it was an interesting time because it was the 70s, and uh whatever the reason, I had spent much of my career as an executive. And I had worked at the ABC Network, and then I worked at Walter Reed Theaters, and then I worked at Paramount for a couple years.

[23:12] Julian Schlossberg: And I started doing this radio show. And you were making a million dollars a year at Paramount when you wanted to quit.

[23:22] Renee Taylor: A million a year and he wanted to quit twice.

[23:26] Julian Schlossberg: Yeah, I felt it wasn't enough money. Actually, it was really funny. I did try to quit at a two-year contract. I tried to quit after the first year. And Barry Diller, who was the head of the studio, said, I'm not gonna let you get out of your contract because it's a two-year contract.

[23:44] Renee Taylor: I said, but I'm not happy here.

[23:46] Julian Schlossberg: And he says, I don't understand. What are you not happy about? And I said, I'm diametrically opposed to everything you do here.

[23:56] Renee Taylor: And he said, diametrically?

[24:01] Julian Schlossberg: I had to stay for the two years that I was there. But Renee and her husband Joe Bologna came on my show, and Renee said.

[24:13] Renee Taylor: Oh.

[24:17] Julian Schlossberg: Okay. We just finished a play, and I'd love to read it to you and hear what you think. Can we come over and read it to you? And he said, Yeah, my mother's in town. And I said, Joe's mother's in town. So we'll read it for the mothers and you.

[24:36] Renee Taylor: And they laughed hysterically.

[24:38] Julian Schlossberg: And he said, Listen, if a Jewish mother and an Italian mother laugh hysterically for two hours, this is gonna be a hit.

[24:47] Renee Taylor: So I said, how about if you produce it? And he said, I never produced before.

[24:53] Julian Schlossberg: And I said, what could be hard? How hard could it be? Actually, how hard could it be? I said. He said, look, I let me think about it.

[25:08] Julian Schlossberg: So then he called me a few days later and said, I have somebody who has money. Maybe you could come and read it for him. It was Alan Klein who was the manager of the producers.

[25:21] Renee Taylor: No, of the Beatles and Beatles.

[25:23] Julian Schlossberg: And the Rolling Stones.

[25:24] Renee Taylor: And the Rolling Stones.

[25:25] Julian Schlossberg: Oh, I didn't know.

[25:27] Renee Taylor: He had some money.

[25:28] Julian Schlossberg: Oh, yes. So we read it for him, and they went in the other room, and I was listening to what they were saying. And he said, I think this is very funny. What do you think? Yeah, I think it's funny. Maybe we could produce it. He said, I never produced. And he said, I never produced either.

[25:47] Julian Schlossberg: So Julian said, So we'll learn together. And that's what happened.

[25:52] Renee Taylor: That's what happened.

[25:53] Julian Schlossberg: That was it had to be you. And we ran for a few months on Broadway. It was so much fun, and it was so easy that my whole life I've thought, how hard could it be about producing, about directing, about acting, about writing.

[26:10] Renee Taylor: But how hard was it for you to write?

[26:13] Julian Schlossberg: The second book. What happened really was that I after I wrote the first book, which didn't take too long because it was during COVID, because over the years we had dinner parties, I would tell stories, and people would say, Why don't you write a book? I said, Oh, sure, okay. I had many other things to do, and I wasn't going to write a book, but COVID convinced me that I better do something because I was going a little nuts, not being able to go out or to socialize and to see friends.

[26:45] Julian Schlossberg: And so I started writing the book. I finished the book, and I think one of the things that I found so funny, it got lovely reviews, the first book. It's called Try Not to Hold It Against Me. And what was amazing to me was the good reviews, that was great. But what they all liked in common, the thing that they found the most interesting was that the chapters were short.

[27:09] Renee Taylor: I thought, I guess that's a compliment of some sort, but I was looking for more.

[27:15] Julian Schlossberg: So after doing the first book, I was I did a lot of shows, a lot of podcasts, television and radio, and I was asked a lot of questions about what I had done in the past, and I realized I had forgotten a lot of stories. So I thought I'll try to write a second book. I don't know if I have enough. And between the two books, there's 600 pages, and that's enough. I'm done. I'm finished. No, but Elaine wrote the Elaine May wrote the foreword to this book and the other book.

[27:48] Renee Taylor: And she said she doesn't want to write any more forwards. In fact, what she actually said at the end of her foreword is Julian has explained to me that in the foreword game, you work for nothing, and once you've written the foreword for one book, you were basically contracted yourself to write the foreword for all of the author's books at the same price.

[28:19] Renee Taylor: You're also obligated to appear with him on television, at art centers, book clubs, libraries, and on podcasts. Fortunately, Mr. Schlossberg's next work is going to be a play. It is, aren't you going to write a play?

[28:34] Julian Schlossberg: I've written it, yeah.

[28:36] Renee Taylor: You've written it?

[28:38] Julian Schlossberg: I've written it.

[28:39] Renee Taylor: And I'm playing the mother.

[28:40] Julian Schlossberg: Oh, as always.

[28:44] Renee Taylor: We better do it while I'm still young and beautiful.

[28:46] Julian Schlossberg: It's true. I have to move quickly.

[28:49] Renee Taylor: Yes. Anyhow, Renee and Joe came into my life and fortunately never left. And we spent an awful lot of time together. And even though Renee is sitting here, I've said it without her being here, one of the finest comic actors I've ever worked with, I've ever known.

[29:08] Julian Schlossberg: And I worked with fortunately almost all the big ones at that time. Because I worked with Woody Allen and Elaine May and Mike Nichols and Myron Gilbart and Neil Sanderson. I'm glad this is being recorded for posterity.

[29:18] Renee Taylor: For posterity.

[29:22] Julian Schlossberg: And also for lawsuits. Anyhow. It's been an honor working with you, and I only had one disagreement with him when we were doing It Had to Be You. I wanted to wear a very expensive fur coat when I seduced the guy in the play because she opens it to seduce him.

[29:48] Renee Taylor: Yeah.

[29:49] Julian Schlossberg: And I wanted to wear a very beautiful, expensive coat. I think it was Russian Fox or something. And he came down to the theater and he said, "Renee, I don't think you should wear an expensive coat." And I said, "Why not?" And he said, "Because she's down on her luck as an actress, and the audience will feel sympathy for you if it's a ratty old coat."

[30:22] Julian Schlossberg: But if you come out in a gorgeous coat, they're not gonna like you. So he talked me into it. Some people would say that's because he was the producer and didn't want to spend the money. But I swear that was my release. No, I really trusted him when he said that to me that the audience wouldn't like me if I didn't wear a ratty coat. I really saw the point of that. I thought, how would I feel about an actress who came out that drop-dead in a fur coat?

[30:59] Julian Schlossberg: So I put the producers into the movie into the Fine Arts Theater in New York and the Granada Theater in LA. So I got to know Mel Brooks. Most people don't know this, but The Producers died everywhere in the United States, except in the two towns I played in. Not because I played it, but New York and LA. That's why.

[31:34] Julian Schlossberg: Because he was looking at the house, counting the money, whatever. And what he did, I got out and I had a belief, and he yelled. He never said "Judah," never called me by my name. He would always say, "Schlossberg." As if that was my first and last name. "Schlossberg, what are you doing with that belief?" And I said, "I'm going to Chicago." And he said, "Chicago is double Newark."

[32:03] Renee Taylor: What does that mean?

[32:04] Julian Schlossberg: Just that's what he thought. Chicago was double. She's in The Producers. She plays a bride. And then just before Sid Caesar died, Joe and I went there for dinner, and Mel came and Carl Reiner came, and Carl Reiner became, we became very good friends. He wrote 30 books. And whenever I'd see him, he'd give me a bunch of books that he just wrote.

[32:36] Julian Schlossberg: And he came with books, and Mel Brooks said to me, "Did I ever thank you for playing Eva Braun?" And I said, "No, that was 35 years ago, or maybe 40 years ago." He said, "Thank you." I said, "Oh, thank you for thanking me." And he said, "You were one of 30 girls that auditioned for the part."

[33:01] Julian Schlossberg: And I remember your audition like it was yesterday. He said you were the only girl that came to audition for Eva Braun with a New York accent. And I thought that was so funny. He said, "Leave me, flee me." Anyway, he remembered my audition. I was so touched by that.

[33:32] Renee Taylor: I think you should tell the audience how you auditioned for Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan.

[33:41] Julian Schlossberg: That's how my name became Renee Taylor, because they were only seeing authentic Southern girls. So Baby Doll. And for Baby Doll with Carol Baker, who got the part. And so Abe Newborn was a very famous agent. Did you ever know him? Famous agent. And he said, "We have to find you an authentic..."

[34:07] Renee Taylor: My name was Renee Wexler.

[34:10] Julian Schlossberg: And I was 19. And he said, "We have to find an authentic Southern name, and you're gonna have to have a Southern accent the minute you come in the door. So you have to take speech lessons." And we found a general who lived in the South whose name was General Taylor.

[34:32] Renee Taylor: Zachary Taylor.

[34:33] Julian Schlossberg: So you're Renee Taylor. So I said, "Okay," and so I took speech lessons. I was so excited to audition for Tennessee Williams at Elia Kazan, and as I did a scene from 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, and I said, "We were so excited to be on the porch swinging back and forth. We were so surprised when the fire broke out."

[35:02] Julian Schlossberg: And Tennessee Williams said, "Excuse me, Miss Taylor, what part of New York are you from?" And that was the end. But I kept the name because I thought the studio might call me. And I had registered as Taylor. So I was since I was 19, and now I'm some years old. So I kept Taylor. And it's been a very lucky name for me.

[35:34] Julian Schlossberg: Yeah, yeah. The very first film I produced, I always had loved Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, Paul Ryder, and Howie Morris. And I was living with a lady and we were walking on the beach, and I said, "I wonder if the producer of that show is alive." His name was Max Liebman. And I looked at it, and those days you could look it up in the telephone book, and there was a telephone book, and it had his name and a B next to it, which was meant business, business.

[36:09] Julian Schlossberg: So I called, told him who I was, I was working at the Wolverine Theater, liked to talk to him. "Come on over." So the two of us, this girlfriend and myself, went over to his office, which was in the back of City Center on West 56th Street. I said, "Mr. Liebman, do you happen to have any of the kinescopes of 10 from Your Show of Shows?"

[36:33] Julian Schlossberg: And he said, "Well, follow me, young man." And I followed him down a long hallway, and he opened up a closet door, and he said, "There's a hundred and fifty-six 90-minute shows on kinescope." Wow. And that's how I said I want to do a movie. I want to take the 10 best sketches I can find and make a movie out of it.

[36:57] Julian Schlossberg: And at that time, there was a very popular television show called This Is Your Life with a man named Ralph Edwards. And they would take famous people and they would be shocked that they had been taken and they would bring them up on stage and bring people from their past. And it was nice. Sid Caesar did a takeoff with Carl Reiner called This Is Your Story.

[36:57] Julian Schlossberg: This Is Your Life. And Sid is in the audience, and Paul comes in and says, "Is it you? Is it you?" No, it's you, and he faints Sid Caesar, and then he says, "Come on up," and Sid Caesar doesn't want to come up. He won't come up. And the ushers have to grab him and drag him up. And when I watched that, to this day, I have never laughed that hard on anything I had ever seen.

[37:44] Julian Schlossberg: And I knew one thing that I had gotten one out of the ten I wanted to get, and that would end the movie. Because nothing is as funny as that's what I'm saying. I just hope one day you can... The movie was called Ten for Me Show of Shows.

[38:00] Renee Taylor: And it was a movie?

[38:02] Julian Schlossberg: I made a movie, yeah.

[38:03] Renee Taylor: And it played in the theaters?

[38:07] Julian Schlossberg: No. And the irony of all this is how crazy the entertainment business is. The film didn't do big. It got great reviews, and I had the headline of the ad said, "Hail Caesar." And then all the great reviews. We didn't do much business. People thought, "Hey, I'm not going to pay for money I could have seen on television."

[38:28] Julian Schlossberg: But a strange thing happened, almost as if theater guide or someone was watching. An airline decided to strike the studios and would not buy their movies because they were charging too much. And so I took Ten for Me Show of Shows. We played every... You couldn't believe it was the most amazing thing.

[38:53] Julian Schlossberg: You mean we get about a little... Delta and the Continentals, it was like North Central and Frontier and Alaska, everybody, everybody thought they had no movies, they had nothing, and they had Ten for Me Show of Shows. So while it died theatrically, it was a giant... If we did as good as any studio had ever done on a movie. So you just don't know. It's one of the crazy things about show business. You don't know, you do know that you're gonna lose a lot, but you don't know where you're gonna maybe make it.

[39:25] Renee Taylor: But of all the great stars that you've interviewed, who was your favorite and still is your favorite?

[39:31] Julian Schlossberg: George Burns.

[39:32] Renee Taylor: Right, he was amazing.

[39:34] Julian Schlossberg: He was, I don't know, 110 at that time. And I don't even know if he had made the Old God movies yet, probably not. He told this incredible story. He and Jack Benny were the closest of friends, and Jack Benny would fall over laughing, whatever George said. They would go to the Hillcrest Country Club, and George would say, "Pass the salt," and Jack Benny fell out of the room. Funniest thing he'd ever heard in his life.

[39:59] Julian Schlossberg: So Jack Benny is about to go downtown Los Angeles and sign the largest contract in the history of show business with the network. And then he and George were gonna lunch at the Hillcrest. So George is there, and in comes Jack Benny, and he says to George, "You can't believe it. You can't believe what just happened." And George says, "I know, Jack, you signed the biggest deal."

[40:26] Julian Schlossberg: "No," he said, "if you go 30 miles per hour on Wilshire, you'll make every light." That's the kind of stuff you just relish. No, I like his joke. He said that when he was like 98, he was asked to sign a 10-year contract with Caesar's Palace. But he didn't because he didn't know if there'd be a law around that long.

[41:02] Julian Schlossberg: He was great. No, but tell about Elaine, how you met her.

[41:07] Renee Taylor: Elaine May. Actually, this is really, you'll forgive me. But it's all in the first book that's on sale today called Try Not to Hold It Against Me. No, I was at Paramount Pictures, and I got a call from Elaine May, who I never met and never, and worshiped from afar with Mike Nichols on their show at the Golden Theater that ran for almost a year, sold out, and then Elaine quit. She had enough. Couldn't do it anymore. And I said hello, and she said, "Warren Beatty tells me that you're okay for a studio executive."

[41:46] Julian Schlossberg: Which I guess the bar wasn't very high. But studio executives. And she had made a movie called Mikey and Nicky. It was involved in a lawsuit. She had taken the movie and stolen it because she didn't want to give it to them, and they were going to sue her. It was really very exciting. But anyhow, I had nothing to do with any of that. But when she came up to see me, she wanted to know if I would look at the movie, which I was glad to do. And Barry Diller, who was my boss at that time, the head of the studio, asked me what I thought, and I said it's a really good movie. And he said, Really? He was so surprised. He was under another management. It wasn't under his management. And that's the funny thing about studios.

If the studio new president is not thrilled with the other pictures that were made when he or she wasn't the head, so they don't do much for it. If you get caught as a producer or director that your film was greenlit by this group, and they're out now, and the new group comes in, generally you're the enemy. Or if not the enemy, certainly not anyone they're interested in. Anyhow, I saw the movie, I fell in love with the movie, and then I fell in love with Elaine. I just found her the most extraordinarily interesting, exciting, brilliant human being. I have a few little stories about Elaine that I will read just very short. That I have this whole group of chapters called Name Dropping. And it's got every Peter Falk and Kazan and Elaine and Mike and Nichols and George C. Scott. But let me just quickly read a couple of things that Elaine has said over the years.

[43:41] Julian Schlossberg: One of the great wonders of the war of my world is my lifelong friendship with Elaine May. Famous for her rapier wit. She started as a half of the comedy team of Nichols and May. Here's Mike Nichols interviewing Elaine as a starlet named Barbara Musk. Mike, I hear you're doing the story of Gertrude Stein. Elaine says, Yes, I'm playing Gertrude. Mike said, I thought, oh, I thought she was being played by Spencer Tracy. Only as a child, Elaine said. I'm often asked, is Elaine funniest in real life? Here's my answer, and I took notes. I say to her, Joe Mankowitz has betted a lot of stars like Loretta Young and Joan Crawford. And Elaine said, everyone betted Joan Crawford. She was a bed. I said to Elaine, how does a young guy flirt today?

She said, You call her lawyer and ask if it's okay. On telling me about a robbery in her apartment, she said he didn't want to steal wrinkled clothes. On her film Ishtar, she said, if the number of people who said they hated Ishtar had seen it, I'd be a rich woman today. On guilt, she said, guilt is the appendicitis of emotion. Wow. Once Elaine had a leak in her apartment that couldn't be fixed. She called Frank Gary, the famous architect in Los Angeles, and he gave her the number of a top man in New York City. When she called him, the man said, please tell Frank, I can't fix the leak in your ceiling now. I'm fixing the Brooklyn Bridge. Elaine was having dinner with Orson Wells. She wanted Bristol Cream Sherry.

Austin said to her, Oh my dear, that isn't even wine. Elaine said to me later, little did he know that my idea of fine wine is Mogan David. Jeannie Berlin is Elaine's daughter. And I said to her, Elaine, Jeannie's really worried about you. And Elaine said, I don't blame her. Sometimes I could make her laugh too. While working together in an editing room one day, she said, Oh, Julian, you don't have to be so defensive. And I said, I'm not being defensive, Elaine. I'm just giving you an explanation, your honor. Back to her. I said, I know comedy is hard. She said, No, being interesting is hard. On a Sunday in August, Elaine wasn't feeling well. We couldn't find a doctor, and I spent a lot of time trying, so finally I got one on the phone. I say, Elaine, here's the doctor, talk to him. And she said, Hello, Doctor, how am I? Anyhow, I could go on and on.

[47:00] Renee Taylor: How did you meet Elaine first?

[47:02] Julian Schlossberg: Oh my goodness. I was at a play called Easy Does It with Tom Poston and Louise Lasser. And I wore a bikini, and I thought it'd be very funny if I was modest, and I put my finger over my belly button, but I walked out in a bikini. And she started laughing, and then the whole audience, just on my entrance was laughing and laughing. She came backstage and she said, I'd like you to be in my show. Oh, it was an improvised, the third ear. The third eye, the third ear. And there was a lot of people in that Peter Boyle and Peter Boyle, Louise Lasser, Reddy Santoni. Jamie Shanchet, isn't it? Jamie Shanchet. There were five people. We were one of five people. And it was just very exciting. Working with her, I learned so much about acting, and she was very brave.

She'd say, do a sketch about cancer. And I'd say, Elaine, they're gonna walk out, because in those days, people didn't make jokes about cancer. She said, so let them walk out. So I went out and I did that. Whatever she told me to do, I would do. And people left, but it was just great that she was so fearless.

[48:27] Renee Taylor: And didn't she give you an idea about writing what you...

[48:27] Julian Schlossberg: Oh I used to? It was improvise theater, and I would come in with ideas written on little pieces of brown paper bags and napkins and things, and I'd say, Here I here's an idea that I have for a sketch. And she said, Renee, if you want to be a writer, you have to invest in a yellow legal pad and a yellow pencil. And so I started, I did, I still write in long hand because I'm still computer illiterate. And I still write in long hand with uh on the yellow legal pad. And she's the one who told me that's what writers do.

[49:18] Julian Schlossberg: A lot of people felt over the years in the business that I met Mike Nickels through a lane, but the truth is I met Mike Nichols first. What happened was I was buying for the Walter Reed Theaters, which was a national chain of 80 theaters throughout the United States. But in New York City in the 1960s, 70s, you would launch a movie by opening New York. That was it. You didn't open 500, 1,000 or 1200 seats. You opened one theater in New York that often decided what that movie was going to do throughout the world based on what had happened in New York. And I had at that time the Coronet, the Baronet, the Fine Arts, the Festival, the Little Carney, the 34th Street, the Waverly on Broadway, the Anstor, the Victoria, the DeMille, the Ziegfeld.

We were the most important theater chain in the city of New York. The biggest competitor on the East Side was Don Rugoff, Cinema Five, who had wonderful theaters, cinema one, cinema two, the Sutton, the Beakman, the Plaza, but he had no West Side Theater. And we had the ability to play what we call Day and Date. You would play Broadway and the East Side. And it would be dependent. You could play a movie like Peck and Pa's The Wild Bunch on Broadway and still play it on the East Side. You could play James Earl Jones in the Great White Hope on Broadway, but you still play it on the East Side. And so that was the kind of thing that happened, and whatever the reasons, I was made the head of the company at 27.

So I was very young, and I never ever thought it was about me. I always knew it was about those theaters. And never kidd myself, never went to my head. Because I knew damn well if I was out of a job, all the people calling, writing, giving me gifts or bribing me, would all be gone. And one felt swoop. And so I was fortunate that I knew that. I'm very grateful that I knew that. And but it was a wonderful time. I was very happy because I was buying for movies all over the country. Because we were in Boston and Chicago and Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle. It really was something. And it was a great time to be in the movie business. I was really enjoying that part of it.

[51:49] Julian Schlossberg: But I also, as Renee said, I started to do this radio show. And that was really knocking me out because as a kid, I had grown up with these people who were sitting right next to me talking to me about their career. And then they told people, hey, there's a kid in New York who knows, he knows the business. Come do the show. And so because it was eight to midnight, it was on for four hours, I was able to do whatever I wanted. And I was able to, I did shows on Attica, the prison. I got prisoners on. I was shopping one day at Bloomingdale's and heard these four kids playing music to Christmas music. I said, Come on, my show. It was just great. And because they didn't care. The WMCA, they didn't care about my show.

It was on Sunday night. They'd given up Sunday night, they didn't care. And we ended up having a very top-rated show where the management left me alone. So it was a wonderful time for me. And I met so many people, Renee and Joe being true, but so many people. So it was interesting. And that's what I wrote about, about talking to Bob Hope or Burns or whomever, Nicholson. And what I was always interested in where they came from. And I'm now tomorrow. I'm going to be interviewing for my show Christine Baransky. And what's interesting about Christine, you think she's this intellectual, sophisticated person who came from money. She's a little Polish girl from Buffalo, who came from nobody. But she's that's how good an actress she is. So yeah, it's been it's been great to write these books, but it's also been great to be able to talk to people about it. And I guess I've enjoyed sharing.

[53:39] Renee Taylor: Do you have any great stories about John Cassavetes's?

[53:42] Julian Schlossberg: I loved him. And I thought Mikey and Nicky was a masterpiece, and he and Peter Falk were just absolutely incredible. But I was in love with him, and everybody was in love with him. And I called up the actress who was in a Jeannie Berlin's friend. Sherry. No, Joyce Van Paten. And I said, what was it like doing a love scene with Joe Cassavetti? She says, I don't remember. I said, you don't remember kissing John Caservetti, I would never forget that. So tell me about him.

[54:19] Julian Schlossberg: Not kissing anybody. No, but I never kissed him. But I did like him. John was clearly the most courageous person I ever met in show business. He would mortgage, literally mortgage his home to make his movies. And whether you like the movies or you didn't like the movies, it was what he wanted to do. And I always admire that anybody who would do stuff like that. This business could continually, people call themselves artists. I maybe met five, maybe six, and he would be certainly one of them. Francis Ford Couple always mortgaged his house, didn't he? He does. He's about to get really hurt, I think, on this last movie. Oh no. But anyhow, so John makes a deal on a movie called Faces. Very interesting film.

And the movie, he doesn't tell anyone, we're going to have a sneak at the DeMille Theater, 1,500 seats. And he goes on the air and he says, anybody coming to the DeMille Theater, come in for nothing and look at the movie. Didn't tell anybody, but he that's what he decides. So of course, thousands of people here in New York, it's going to be for nothing.

[55:36] Julian Schlossberg: They show up, and we can't get them all in, and it's a real nightmare. But I befriended him or he me, and I had never seen a movie like *Faces*. It was nothing about faces that was a Hollywood movie. It was people who really were raw. It was so raw. And Jenna Rollins, his wife, is brilliant in it, and Seymour Cassell and John Barley, the man who had the horse in his bed from *The Godfather*. That's John Marley. All of these people were being emotionally ripped apart in this movie. And but I got to know John, and I ended up representing him. And I represented him on *Faces*, *Shadows*, and *The Killing of a Chinese Bookie*. Oh. And I'll tell you how he worked, just to give you an example. I made a deal with HBO to play all those movies.

Now, these are not the kind of movies HBO plays, even in those days. These are clearly art movies, two of them in black and white. This is not for that they do. And they were gonna give me $300,000, $100,000 for each movie. At the same time in Los Angeles, I made a deal with a Z channel for those three movies, but they were a small little cable company, and they were gonna pay $10,000 for the three movies. So John stayed at the Wyndham Hotel on 58th Street, and I go over there and I say, John, I've got such great news. I've sold HBO. Oh, how much are you getting? I said, 300,000. He said, turn it down. I said, John, this is HBO. This is an incredible deal. They don't buy this kind of movies.

You're giving them, he said, you just want it because you have you're getting your distribution fee. I said, I'll give it up. What do you think of that? How much I want the distribution. I want your movies to show under no. Wow. I said, what about the Z channel? Take it. I said it's 10 grand for the three movies. He said, yeah. But everybody who has the Z channel in LA are in the film business. And I want them to see the movie. And that was John Cassavetes. Wow. I think a lot of people would say that's crazy. Certainly in my case, I was unhappy because I really wanted those movies to play. And while I was very cavalier about giving up the distribution fee, I knew that if he took it, he would never let me give up the distribution fee.

So I didn't like the idea of losing 75 grand at that point. But that's the kind of guy he was. And I, Renee has mentioned *Mikey and Nikki* through rather mac kind of complicated machinations. Elaine and I got the movie back from Paramount. And we've owned it together for the last 35 years. So it's great that we have a movie that she made that we own and can sell all over the world.

[58:43] Renee Taylor: And have you?

[58:44] Julian Schlossberg: Yeah. And do they know what a masterpiece it is? Because I think it was all people who do. If you've never seen it, at the end of the movie, they're good. Anyone here who has not seen it? Everybody has it. Oh. Nobody's seen it. You've never seen it. I don't know. Tell the story of it. They're two friends, and there's a hit out. Just don't tell the end. Oh. Yeah. You don't want to do that. Oh, that's what I was going to tell. At the end, it's a comedy, but at the end of the movie, I won't say what happens. But at the end of the movie, I was sobbing and I couldn't stop sobbing at the end of the movie. I called Elaine up and I said, This is a masterpiece. I said, I feel sympathy for everybody in the picture.

The good people, the bad people, and it was based on her family. They were hoods. They were in the mob. And it's their stories from her. The relatives were in the middle. She grew up in the Yiddish theater, as did a lot of people that became famous, mostly Elaine and Sidney Lumet were from the Yiddish theater as actors, both of them. But I met Peter Falk, and I really wanted to work with him. I really was very fond of his acting and how he handled himself. And I first went to him to do the trial, play Joseph K in the trial. And he was very much like the Colombo character. I do not do a good Peter Falk, but I don't know, G Y. Let me think about it. I don't think I want to do that. Anyhow, he didn't do it.

He turned it down. And then I never wanted to do a remake ever. But I had this idea that Peter Falk could be so good as the one-armed man in *Bad Day at Black Rock*. Oh. And for the first time, I had tried five different deals with Peter. For the first time he agreed. And he was going to do it. And I knew the heads of MGM only because of the Walter Reed and the Paramount years. So I went to them, and Frank Rosenfeld at that time was the head. And he and his henchmen sat around a table and got very excited about the possibility of doing this movie with Peter. And I thought we had a deal, but anyhow it turned out that we didn't. And one of the things you learn when you produce is that Forest Lawn is filled with producers who think they have a deal. Anyhow. And also the definition of an associate producer. Right. The only person will associate with the producer. That was actually Billy Wilder, not me.

[1:01:52] Renee Taylor: You've had such a career.

[1:01:54] Julian Schlossberg: It's just. You want to write two books about it. Is that a great lead-in, or is that a great lead-in? I had decided, I had a friend named Barbara Copper, who's a wonderful documentary filmmaker. And she had made this movie *Harlem County, USA*. And she came on my radio show, but she had no distributor. And so I felt that Don Rugoff, Cinema 5, even though we were competitors, I liked him. And I called him and he said, Why don't you take it? I said, because I'm not distributing. I'm at this point I wasn't a distributor. And he distributed. I think it may have won the Academy Award, but even if it didn't, it's a terrific movie, *Harlem County, USA*. So she about a year later called me and said, would you produce a concert movie against nuclear energy?

I said, I don't understand it. And she said, well no, it's just going to be rallies, and we'll be in Madison Square Garden for five nights. I said, okay, let me think about it. And then let me think about it. And I said, okay, I'll do it. And we ended up to this day, the only movie that Bruce Springsteen's ever made was *No Nukes*, the film that I produced and co-produced and co-directed. And we got the great cameraman, Haskell Wexler, to do it, and we had nine cameras, and we shot all over the garden. And then we went to Battery Park City and had the largest outdoor rally in the history of the world at that point, over a quarter of a million people. Where Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt and Graham Nash.

Everybody was there. It was a wonderful experience. And when I did that film, I had hundreds of thousands of feet of movie. And we had to try to put a story together. And so I rented a big editing suite in New York. And the guy who was a landlord had a big Italian friend who would come in and say, Can I watch what you're doing? I said, sure. And he said, I listened to your radio show. I said, Oh, so you're the one, you know, that joke. And he said, I'd like to come, can I come watch the show? And I said, sure. And so he started watching the show and became, I guess, a groupie of sorts. And then I never saw him again until I went to the movies, and he was in *Fort Apache, The Bronx* as a co-star, and his name was Danny Aiello.

And I was so surprised to see what had happened to him because he had been a greyhound bus driver, he had been a bouncer at the Fillmore East, and he had all these disparate jobs, and he now had become what he always wanted to be this movie star. So years went by, as we say in the business fade out, so we fade out. And I'm at the Westwood Marquee, and I get on the elevator and Danny gets on the elevator. I go, Danny, he goes, Hello. Okay. Everybody okay? Yeah, I'm fine. Okay. So I figured, okay, that's the end of He's Gone Hollywood, and that's it for me, and who remembers whatever. And I was really hurt because I don't know, mentored him. I didn't mention him, but I certainly helped. And then a wonderful thing happened.

I was doing a play called a late May play called Stanley Donen was directing called *Adult Entertainment*. And I wanted, I said, this is a great role for Danny Aiello. I said, let's see if he'll come in. And he came in and he grabbed me and hugged me and threw me up in the air, and I thought, this is almost like Jeff Allen Pi. I was snubbed a few years ago. Now I'm hugged this week. And then from the rest of the time till Danny passed away, we became friends. So you don't know. I can't answer. I don't know what happened. I do know that he was gonna be the star of the movie called *Ruby* about Jack Ruby, which was made, by the way. Not that anyone saw it, but it was made. And I think he was right at that point where I think he may have gone Hollywood.

Maybe. I don't know. But I always liked him, except for the elevator. And I have a famous Danny Aiello short. Good. He came to the theater wearing dark glasses, and his wife said to him, Danny, you take off your dark glasses in the theater. And he said, Shh, it's a look.

[1:06:53] Julian Schlossberg: One of the people I had gotten very close to was this is like name dropping, so forgive me, but that's what I'm here for to name drop. Was George C. Scott, and who I found to be a wonderful person who had a lot of demons. He was he had been a marine, he was a heavy drinker, as we all knew, and had a terrible temper, but may have been, if not the greatest actor of our time, one of the two or three greatest. Did he kill people in the war? No. Oh he I think Charlie Durning did. Yeah. Anyhow, George was very much against me going to Paramount. He lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and we took a walk around his beautiful property, and he tried to convince me not to go, but I really always one of my goals was to run the studio.

So I was gonna be going in as a vice president, and they kept telling me, you're the third highest paying person in the studio, as if that was gonna change my feelings. Because I couldn't say yes, say no, and I'll get back to you. But anyhow, George, I asked him, I said, I thought I knew the answer, which was what's your favorite movie? And I was sure he would say *Patton*. And without a beat, he said, *Dr. Strangelove*. Well, interesting. You just don't know what Why wasn't it *Patton*? I don't know. I didn't ask him. I was happy to get the answer and move on to the next question. He was so great. It was great. And he called me one day and he said, I want you to produce *Patton 2*. I said, What?

He said, I want to do I want to do a movie called *The Last Days of Patton*. He said that movie really didn't show all the things that happened to Patton after he let he was either friendly fire or hit by his own people, but whatever it was, he laid in a kind of 10 days in dying, just dying. And I, okay. And I said, very exciting. I'd love to. I'm very flattered. I thank you. And he then said, I'm hiring this writer, and I'll get you the script as soon as it's done. So a few months went by, and the script came in, and the first thing I noticed about it, it was 170 pages. Now, a regular script is 90 to 100. And you can figure that it's generally a minute a page, generally. This is of course very easily changed. Sometimes you can, if someone types much smaller, if they don't space it as much, you but that's basically what it's supposed to be.

[1:09:32] Julian Schlossberg: I took the script, I took my level yellow legal-sized pad, and I started writing what I'd done my whole career, my notes on what I would change or what I think should be changed, what I suggest you consider.

[1:09:45] Julian Schlossberg: And up to the Greenwich I went with my notes, and I walk in. And first thing George says, Is that are those notes? I said, Yeah. He said, That many? I said, it's just the first pass, and it's just some of my ideas, and let's just see what you think.

[1:10:04] Julian Schlossberg: So we went through first two or three, and he said, We could let's shoot that, and then we can fix it in the editing room. Now, there are a few words as a producer that get you nervous, and one of them is we'll fix it in the editing room. This is not what you want to hear. Because if you got you don't want to have to fix it in the editing room. Often you do, but you don't want to go in saying I'm gonna fix it in the editing room.

[1:10:31] Julian Schlossberg: I think by the third page, George clearly said to me, Julian, I'm wondering, maybe we should have this meeting another time. And I said, George, I'm wondering what you think. Maybe I shouldn't be producing this. And he said, Yeah, maybe you should.

[1:10:50] Julian Schlossberg: And I took my 12 or 13 pages, took them home. He never got the movie made for theater, but CBS produced it in a two-parter, and he was there with Eva Marie Saint. So it got done as the last days of pattern as a TV. Oh, but it was another example of a miss that almost made those things happen when you produce, you just don't know.

[1:11:16] Julian Schlossberg: I uh George was doing Death of a Salesman, he was playing Willy Loman on Broadway. He directed it as well. And uh his production, he directed? Yeah. Wow. And we were gonna have dinner afterwards, and as we were leaving, he I said, Oh, George, take off your bald cap. He had played Willy Loman bald, and he said, I don't have a cap.

[1:11:39] Julian Schlossberg: I shaved my head for the role. And we went out and uh we were having dinner, and the autograph hunters were all around, but not coming close, they're scared of George C. Scott. And two of them started coming, and George went like this, like a traffic up, like that, and they just scattered. They all left.

[1:12:00] Julian Schlossberg: And we finished our talk, and I said, I think I can do Death of a Salesman for Television. Will you direct it? And he said, Absolutely. Oh, wow. So I went to the fellows who were running something called Rockefeller Center Television. You've never heard of it. It was called RC TV. Didn't last long. It was a combination of Rockefeller Center and RCA.

[1:12:25] Julian Schlossberg: And I went to them and they said, we'll do it. This was such an exciting time for me because here I was going to have George C. Scott in this Arthur Miller classic for television. Unbelievable to me. All I needed was Arthur Miller's okay. Now, Arthur Miller at that time was really know it. Everything he had done after Death of a Salesman and All My Sons, it just hadn't worked.

[1:12:53] Julian Schlossberg: Incident at Vichy and The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, a whole bunch of plays. He just, and also, because I had represented Dustin Hoffman on the movie Death of a Salesman, and Arthur was a partner with us. I knew that he was not shy about liking money. Some people like it more than others.

[1:13:12] Julian Schlossberg: And so I was totally confident that he would let me do the play and shoot him. So I went to his apartment, 22 East 68th Street, and talked with him, and he said, Is George going to use the cast for Brooklyn? And I said, Yeah, well, absolutely. That's the cast. He wants to do that.

[1:13:31] Julian Schlossberg: He said, Well, I won't do it. Why don't you do it? He said, You know that I have been a very liberal man. I have fought for civil rights, but you can't have Willy Loman's neighbor black. And George has made the neighbor black. And unless he I said, you don't want to do it because of that. And he said, no, I just don't.

[1:13:56] Julian Schlossberg: And so we never did. Nothing to sell him. I say this as to give you the example of when projects are relid or when they're done, it's an amazing thing. Because there are so many that you never hear about that never get done. And then there's another kind where you get the money, you get the screenplay, you have your director, and the studio will do it. You can't find the financing.

[1:14:24] Julian Schlossberg: So it's a tough game. And the only way that I think I was able to survive it was the fact that I was, I knew how to acquire movies, finished movies from my years at Walter Reed. And so I was able to buy films that people didn't even know were available.

[1:14:45] Julian Schlossberg: I've told the story of the Marx Brothers A Night in Casablanca, that I was able to buy the negative, meaning you own the movie for the world, and it was the last movie the Marx Brothers ever made together. And I'll tell you a quick story, which I've told before. So a couple of people have heard it, but a couple of people haven't.

[1:15:07] Julian Schlossberg: When the Marx Brothers announced they were making A Night in Casablanca, it was right after World War II, 1946. And they get a letter to the Marx Brothers from Warner Brothers, saying, we've heard about you saying you making A Night in Casablanca. We own the name Casablanca. We own it. We made the movie Casablanca. It's our name. You can't do it.

[1:15:29] Julian Schlossberg: Marx Brothers' Pete Lawyer writes back, don't be silly. It's a city, it's in my right. What are you talking about? Back and forth in that back and forth? And finally they I found all these papers when I bought the negative in the file. And finally, they asked Groucho Marx to write to Jack Warner.

[1:15:46] Julian Schlossberg: And Groucho Marx wrote the following. If you people continue to harass us about the name Casablanca, we are going to countersue you. Because we were the Warner Brothers before we were the, sorry, we were the Marx Brothers before you were the Warner Brothers. We own the name Brothers. That's a great story.

[1:16:11] Julian Schlossberg: Yeah. That was a great story. Anyhow.

[1:16:15] Renee Taylor: Maybe there are questions from the audience.

[1:16:15] Julian Schlossberg: The audience.

[1:16:19] Renee Taylor: About how to be a producer.

[1:16:20] Julian Schlossberg: The audience doesn't care.

[1:16:23] Renee Taylor: They do.

[1:16:25] Julian Schlossberg: How about how not to be a producer?

[1:16:28] Julian Schlossberg: I could tell some stories.

[1:16:32] Julian Schlossberg: I'm going to read you Renee's chapter in the book. Is that all right?

[1:16:36] Renee Taylor: Sure.

[1:16:37] Julian Schlossberg: Oh, I think so. I guess I'd have to put my glasses on, obviously.

[1:16:49] Renee Taylor: There was a long pause. Anyway, I was very thrilled that he asked me to write a chapter in his book, because I loved his book. And there are a lot of wonderful, famous people that he wrote about that I'd still like to meet, that I haven't met.

[1:17:07] Renee Taylor: So I was ordered. I was ordered to write the chapter about you, and I was honored to know you. I've known you 40 years.

[1:17:18] Julian Schlossberg: Oh no, more than 45.

[1:17:22] Renee Taylor: 45.

[1:17:23] Julian Schlossberg: 45.

[1:17:24] Renee Taylor: And I'm in my late 30s. That's how is it possible?

[1:17:31] Julian Schlossberg: I asked you.

[1:17:32] Renee Taylor: Working with Joe.

[1:17:33] Julian Schlossberg: Okay.

[1:17:34] Renee Taylor: I first met Julian when he was, he asked my husband Joe Bologna and me to be on his radio show. We had just finished writing It Had to Be You in Vermont and we're looking for a producer.

[1:17:46] Julian Schlossberg: You've heard the first part. Why don't you come over and read it? And I read it and you produce it.

[1:17:52] Julian Schlossberg: I never produced it.

[1:17:53] Renee Taylor: And she said, how hard could it be? So we've covered that.

[1:17:58] Renee Taylor: Anyhow. So we got Alan Klein. And Alan said, he brought Joe and Renee writes, Joe, Julian, and me to California to work on the play. We went to the Beverly Hills Hotel to celebrate.

[1:18:14] Renee Taylor: And at midnight, we were walking along the path of the bungalows, and Joe yelled out for everyone to hear. We're the only folks here with a Go Project. Meaning that everybody else was trying to make a deal.

[1:18:31] Renee Taylor: Julian got us the talented young director, Bobby Dreyfuss. Alan suggested Francesco Scavullo, who had photographed everyone from Liza Minnelli to Salvador Dalí.

[1:18:43] Renee Taylor: And I remember you paid him $14,000 to photograph us. And I was so excited, Francesco Scavullo that was going to photograph me and Joe, and I got there, and he said, What do you want to do? I said, What do I want to do? You're getting $40,000. You tell me what you want to do.

[1:19:08] Renee Taylor: I couldn't believe it. The play was a great experience for Joe and me. There was only one itch. We all had hope for a great New York Times review. Clive Barnes gave us a rave review, and he had been the New York Times first string reviewer.

[1:19:28] Renee Taylor: But his review ran in the New York Post a few weeks before he had left the Times. Our review in the Times was not a rave review. Luckily, Alan and Julian had leased the Golden Theater for three months.

[1:19:41] Julian Schlossberg: Oh.

[1:19:42] Renee Taylor: Okay. So the run was assured. Many years later, I did a show at the Herbert Bronfman School in the village based on a book I wrote, My Life on a Diet. Joe co-wrote it with me and directed it.

[1:19:55] Renee Taylor: Elaine May brought Julian to see it. And a few months later he said, I haven't stopped thinking about your show. I want to do it. Because I think we should work together every 39 years.

[1:20:08] Julian Schlossberg: So we'll meet 39 years from tonight.

[1:20:20] Renee Taylor: After Julian said and called and said, I've got the money. I said, Renee said, There's no way you could have gotten the money. He said, All the backers said they could hardly see or hear you, but you were so funny anyway that they'd like to see it.

[1:20:35] Renee Taylor: They think it would be a great show if they just could see and hear you. So that's how we got back. Anyhow, it's a little more than that.

[1:20:46] Julian Schlossberg: But it's Renee writes, this was a big break. What happened was I guess I I gave, I only gave, I know, I only gave Renee only one note. Nothing to do with the coat.

[1:21:00] Julian Schlossberg: This was the note from the show. And I said to her, Renee, you never smile during the show. And I said, That's because everything that happened to me in my life while dieting is very serious to me.

[1:21:16] Julian Schlossberg: But I said, But it's okay for the actress to have fun. And that was a big breakthrough for me. It was because I never smiled the whole show. I was trying to be serious.

[1:21:30] Renee Taylor: Yeah, but it was such a funny show. Anyhow, I have to admit Julian getting me to smile helped me totally let go of my crazy adventures in dieting. Thank you.

[1:21:48] Julian Schlossberg: And we are back.

[1:21:50] Dylan Glick: Now that was just another bunch of tea that was spilled.

[1:21:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[1:21:54] Dylan Glick: The secrets of Hollywood and the part three.

[1:21:57] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[1:21:58] Dylan Glick: And the banter of Renee Taylor that I love.

[1:22:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We're gonna go from the fun.

[1:22:05] Dylan Glick: Yes.

[1:22:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hollywood backstories to a little more of a serious talk with our next one.

[1:22:10] Dylan Glick: Because we had Alejandra Campa Verde bring in First Jen.

[1:22:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So in our next episode.

[1:22:16] Dylan Glick: Oh, oh go on.

[1:22:17] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Which is more serious, but is not without tea.

[1:22:20] Dylan Glick: Oh, there was so much tea.

[1:22:21] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[1:22:22] Dylan Glick: No, it was a wonderful night.

[1:22:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It was a very interesting night because of the actual events that were happening that night.

[1:22:28] Dylan Glick: But we're not going to tell you in this episode.

[1:22:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We're going to tell you in the next one.

[1:22:31] Dylan Glick: So remember, yeah.

[1:22:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So remember, please follow us on Instagram at Drama Book Show Podcast.

[1:22:37] Dylan Glick: Please subscribe to the Drama Book Shop on Eventbrite so that you can be alerted every time we add in-person events to our calendar.

[1:22:44] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Give us a nice review or a like and subscribe or some happy faces or just happy thoughts.

[1:22:49] Dylan Glick: Yeah, exactly. It all helps.

[1:22:51] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And remember, all the books we talk about can be found here at the Drama Bookshop.

[1:22:55] Dylan Glick: And so can we.

[1:22:56] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And we will see you at the bookshop.