This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Robert Bannon: Welcome to the Roundtable, everybody. Welcome to Broadway World. Welcome to where artists talk about art. I am so scared to write something because when I open that little document, that cursor starts blinking at me. I get such anxiety. What am I going to write? Well, our next guest has figured it out. She has written incredible screenplays and movies. She has an incredible new show that's coming to New York that we've gotten to talk to some of the cast with. Now we have the writer, the creator, the mind behind all of this. People, listen to me. If you're looking for something to see, you need to go to A Walk on the Moon. And Pamela Gray, who has an incredible career that has written the movies that we love and is now coming to the theater with this incredible piece. Pamela Gray, welcome to the Roundtable.

[0:56] Pamela Gray: Oh, thank you. I'm thrilled to be talking to you.

[0:59] Robert Bannon: Pamela Gray, why are we scared to write and why are you not scared to write?

[1:05] Pamela Gray: Who said I'm not scared?

[1:06] Robert Bannon: You're not? In my head, you're successful, prolific. You're a screenwriter with major films.

[1:13] Pamela Gray: But there's still the blank page. There's still the voices. They don't go away. I mean, yeah, once things start to happen that make me happy as a writer. But every new project is terrifying. And it's normal to be scared of the cursor. I've been teaching different forms of writing since I was in my 20s. And I tell people, you make a 15-minute appointment with yourself. And if you can go to the frickin' dentist, you can say for 15 minutes, I'm going to put a pen on a paper and just gush. Now people do it on the computer. I still think the handwritten way. And just don't edit. Don't correct your spelling. Just start getting it out because you have to beat the voices that say, I'm not a writer. I don't know.

You just have to start getting it out. And even now, I mean, even with some of these songs that Anne-Marie Malazzo wrote for the musical, my brilliant composer-lyricist started with me. I said, I'm going to just write you a monologue. I'm going to tell you what Walker is thinking and feeling and take it from there. And I just, again, it's just, I'm gushing, I'm gushing. I mean, I know these characters, but to just kind of get inside what they would gush out if they could talk instead of sing. So no, every, you know, and the negative voices that this isn't going to work, or this is going to be the one that I can't finish, or this is the one they're going to hate. I mean, it's part of being a writer. You know, I don't know any writers who wake up saying, I'm great. I'm wonderful. It's going to be a great writing day. It's like, oh my God, how long do I have to do this?

[3:11] Pamela Gray: Maybe that's where the good writing comes from. And it's the same with art. Artists are across, you know, I run an English department here in Detroit. And it is very hard to take people who are not naturally writers and explain to them the art. It's what I love about writing as a singer, as an actor, is that sometimes we look at art like, oh, that's a painting. That's a song. That's an actor in a movie or a Broadway show. But the written word and the choices and the colors and the pictures that you choose in writing is just as much of an art form. And it's exciting to try to explain that. Do you know when you fell in love with writing? And did you? Or did it find you?

[3:49] Pamela Gray: I did. I fell in love with writing in second grade. And I realized I said on another interview, I gave the wrong name of the teacher. It was Miss Jatrofsky. And Miss Jatrofsky had us writing as little children. So the first big assignment was we had to take a pre-existing children's book and write our own version of the book. So there were a series of books about Veronica the hippopotamus. And I don't know why this was what I wrote, but it was Veronica Goes to Hollywood. And believe me, when I was seven, I wasn't thinking about going to Hollywood. And we had to illustrate it on construction paper. And Veronica was the hippo. When she looked in the pool and saw her reflection, she imagined that she had on sunglasses and people were asking for her autograph.

And she didn't want to just be the regular hippopotamus. So she goes to Hollywood in her own little plane. And then there was a puzzle pilot whose eyes were bugging out because he sees a hippo flying a plane. And she gets there. And because she's a hippo, they assume she's going to be a stunt woman. And I have pictures of them throwing pies at Veronica the hippo, who says, this is not what I expected. And she goes back to the pond and gives up. So we had to make a book jacket and then had to have like a little author's bio at the end. And it says, Pamela Gray enjoys writing, but she's going to be a teacher because writing, she claims, takes up a little bit too much time. Okay, I was seven. But it was true. It does take up.

[5:44] Robert Bannon: I think it's taken up your life is what it has really taken up here.

[5:53] Pamela Gray: But I loved it. And I got a lot of kudos from my family that I had this young person's talent. And I just enjoyed writing stories. And a big accomplishment was that the school librarian accused me of plagiarism. When I submitted a story for the school magazine, again, I'm seven. And she said, original. And even then I knew like, Oh, really? You thought I stole it? And then my first published poem was in PS two or three wings magazine. And it was called I like school. I like school every day. The teachers are Mary, the principal's gay. And in retrospect, I might have been right about. But I was published.

[6:45] Robert Bannon: That was published and that was ahead of its time. It was ahead.

[6:52] Pamela Gray: Not ahead of its time. When you my time, actually.

[6:58] Robert Bannon: I'm sure my students are writing poems about me like that right now. And they're also right. When you when we're here, we're talking about this show that is coming. What I love about this show a walk on the moon musical.com everybody is what I want. We're talking about go there get tickets right now you only have through August 22 for this iteration because I know August 22nd for this iteration because I know there's a life for this show out here in this world that will live on beyond this. It has an incredible cast. I want to get into the thick of that. But I want to ask you, because knowing and reading a little bit about you, you grew up in Brooklyn. You I'm assuming you had a mom. You grew up in a Jewish household.

This story has when you read about it, summer of 1969, a Brooklyn mother and housewife takes a trip to the Catskills. If you're born where you would have been a certain age in 1969. Is this a story that comes from something in you? Is it out of your imagination, history and homage to something? What is this story and how to come to you? It feels somewhere similar to something about your life.

[8:08] Pamela Gray: There's the world is the world of it is my life. And I long before I ever thought about being a screenwriter, I discovered that I was always explaining the bungalow colonies to people who didn't know what that meant. And it got more intense after Dirty Dancing came out. And people would say, Oh, so that's what you did. I said, No, that's what the kids whose fathers were doctors and dentists did. And they went for a couple of weeks. I was in the shtetl, you know, that the working class Jews, I mean, my parents saved up all year for a $250 summer rental for these bungalows. And the dads had to work during the week, they couldn't afford, you know, I don't know, know any fathers who had vacations, except my best friend, whose father was a schoolteacher.

And that during the week, it was women and children, and grandmas and a couple of Zadies, a couple of grandpas. And so, over time telling that story over and over again, I thought it began with, I want to write the first movie set in a bungalow colony, because people don't understand what the working class Jews did. So it was, I want this world on screen. And then since I'd been going, you know, since I was five years old, it was like, Okay, so which summer would it be? And for one second, I, you know, the knee jerk was Summer of Love 1967. And I was like, you idiot. Summer of 69, when I was there, and you had Men Walk on the Moon, and three weeks later was Woodstock. And this pivotal memory that I've talked about before is that most people who weren't in the Catskills don't understand that Woodstock was in the middle of the Borscht Belt.

They got kicked out a wall kill, they found a farm in the middle of bungalow colonies. And I saw the hippies walking to Woodstock through the chain link fence around the swimming pool. And the moms are playing Mahjong and the grandmas are playing Canasta. And it's like, I want to be with them. And I was 13. I'm not going to lie about my age, and I couldn't be with them. There was one moment in that summer that I said to my mom, there's a concert near White Lake, can I go? She goes, All right, you know, I said, all the counselors are going. And to this day, I don't know what she really heard. But she came into the bungalow and she said, You're not going to that concert, they're bringing up the National Guard.

And with all the research I've done, I've never heard about the National Guard. So I don't know what she read. But the other counselors, and when I say counselors, we were 13 year olds taking care of like five year olds. But they all, they snuck out. And I was the stupid good little Jewish girl who wouldn't break the rules. So I didn't go. But I sometimes wonder, had I gone to Woodstock, would I have written this movie? Was there any part of it that was wish fulfillment? But that culture clash, and I do remember that the sense that we were trapped, I don't know if I would have had the language, but we were trapped in the 1950s. I mean, those bungalow colonies were not evolving. That's part of what people loved.

My parents would go every year with the same friends. And there were a couple of years with the relatives and then someone's son hit the baseball in someone else's face. And then we never went with those relatives again. But it was this community that just got created, you know, from June 30, and ended on Labor Day. And as a child, I just loved being in nature. I was in a part of Brooklyn. It wasn't, you know, Park Slope. It was this new development called Futurama. I kid you not. We started out living in my grandmother's apartment in Flatbush. And this was an area called Flatlands, built on swampland. And they made all these two family apartments for blocks and blocks and blocks. Everything was attached.

Everything was identical. The streets were paved. They came by at one point, and everyone got a sapling. And that was, it was a stick. That was my tree. And we would go to the Catskills. And I just loved being in nature. I mean, loved it. I didn't know fruit grew on trees, you know, that we would pick blueberries. Like, I just didn't know what fresh air was. And so, as a child, I loved that. And then, as a preteen, there was more freedom. You know, you could be running around at night. There weren't cars. There weren't dangers, even. So, it was this strange thing where I was like in a fishbowl, because my parents were there when I was coming of age. But there was also the sense that sky's the limit, because we're in a bungalow colony. And, you know, where you could hitch into town. That was the most dangerous thing to do, was to hitch. So.

[14:04] Robert Bannon: Yeah. It sounds like, I grew up in Jersey, Italian and Irish family. But my Italian family, we were landscapers. And we would go up to, they would go up to the Concord every single summer. And that was, they had a big landscaping convention. And the culture and seeing the people and the world that was there is its own little microcosm of society. And what I love is that when you wrote a movie, which won awards, which you won awards for the screenwriting, which is ranked as one of the most romantic movies of all time, when you look at lists and you see the incredible list of people who are in this movie, if it's Diane Lane and Liv Shriver and Anna Paquin and her Tova, who is a Broadway icon. And, you know, there is a Viggo. What happened to him? He became a superstar, a giant superstar. And directed by the incredible Tony Goldwyn, who has been a part of your career for a long time.

[14:38] Robert Bannon: A minute. To take it and make it into a musical is an undertaking. How did the idea to take your beautiful script and movie, when you're smiling at the end to Jimi Hendrix with the counterculture, juxtaposition, brilliant ending of this film, and put it on stage, it's got to be quite an undertaking.

[14:59] Pamela Gray: It was quite an undertaking. I've been telling people my musical is having its bat mitzvah, 13 years to get to New York, total. We were in San Francisco in 2018, but by then we'd already been going for a few years trying to make it happen. And then Jersey in 2022. It happened because it was someone else's idea. There were these big Broadway producers and they wanted to do it without me. And they thought I would be so overcome with excitement that I would just sign a contract and say, yeah, go and do it. And that isn't what I said. And I mean, originally I said, look, I wrote musicals in high school, but if you have an experienced book writer who would work with me, someone who knows what they're doing and an experienced lyricist who would work with me because I would want to be involved, I'd be interested.

And I, on my own, went, I was going to New York anyway for Passover. And so I thought, well, I'll meet with the producers and just hear what they had to say. And it was this out of body experience because I was in a conference room and they had a book writer who had already started writing and they had a composer who had already written five songs and they just thought I'd say, oh, this is so great. Okay. Yeah, you can have it. And it's not what I said. I, you know, I said, well, and the book writer, I thought he'd written musicals. He hadn't written one. You know, he had some off Broadway show that was successful. And I said, you know, with all due respect, what do you think you can bring to this that I can't? And he said nothing.

And the composer, you know, was confident that I was going to love everything. And then the famous producer got really mad at me and took me into his office and said, you think you can write a musical? Well, prove it. And he challenged me. He said, I want a document that describes every scene. I want sample dialogue. I want descriptions of every song. I want to hear what the set is. I, you know, I want the entire structure and you give me this document and I'll pay you such and such. And my lawyer said, no, he's going to pay you such and such. And I took it. I was like, why not let me try this. And but what what he didn't know is that his development person, and it was probably the time when they were looking through movies that could become musicals, had sent me samples like these two page summaries of musicals.

And so I sent in this document that was like 40 pages because that's, you know, musicals, 130 pages, if you have to describe everything. And he said, what the hell is this? Who's going to read this? I said, well, that's what he asked for. He said, well, no one's going to read it. I said, OK, thank you. I'll take my money. And unbeknownst to me, the composer who had been staying in touch with me through the years, you want to do this, you want to do this. He was friends with Michael Greif. And I got a call from Michael Greif. And the reason I wrote musicals in high school is Brooklyn High School's had this competitive program called Sing. They made a movie about it. That wasn't the reality of it.

But each class would be given a topic, you know, from freshmen to seniors. And you had to use you parodied actual Broadway show tunes. That was the music that you wrote lyrics to. You had to have a certain number of skits. You had to have a backdrop. You had to have a certain number of these giant props. And I wrote the script and lyrics every year. And I had read when I read that Michael went to Lincoln High School. When we got on the phone, I said, were you involved with Sing? He said, was I involved with Sing? I was the director every year and I we won as juniors. I said, well, I was the writer every year and we won as juniors. He said, well, here we are. And I developed it with Michael and this composer for a few years.

Michael got us to New York stage and film where we were in the powerhouse theater. So those casts, they were still on book, but people came for performances during the weekend. And then we continue to develop. We did readings in New York. And then Michael works on more than one thing. And Dear Evan Hansen was taking off and he left. And there was this limbo period without a director. And after a year, Michael had said to me, find a Jewish woman. That's what you need. And Cheryl Keller was attached and we developed it all over again. And she helped get us to ACT. So we had our first production in 2018, which is completely different than the production we had in Jersey, which is now completely different than what we have now.

So it's been a long road. I just wanted to get to New York. I always think of Christopher Guest in that, which was the first movie, we're going to Broadway. I was like, all right, Broadway, just get me to New York. Just get me where the New Yorkers are, where the Jews are, where people know this world and just get me in New York. And it took a long time, but we're in New York and it's fabulous.

[21:02] Robert Bannon: You are in New York. You are in New York and people can get tickets right this very moment. And you can see the show A Walk on the Moon and you can be in there. When you talk about a cast, we just had the other day, we had Max here and we have Sam coming on next week. And we're going to push, I'm going to, Pam, we're going to get this show, get tickets to see this show. Talia and Max were in the tour of Parade. They broke my heart. I saw it on Broadway. I saw it here in Detroit. I saw them in Detroit. They broke my heart. They can sing and act their teeth out. This cast is incredible. This cast, I mean, I knew during auditions that, oh my God, look who we're getting. And so Talia and Max already had this bond, which was fabulous since they play Pearl and Marty.

And then we got Sam for the blouse. The blouse man is the hardest role to cast because of the preconceived, anyone who's seen the movie, they want Vigo. So, and they're not, it's not going to be Vigo, but it's still got to be this sexy, charming, other worldly character. I mean, our blouse man at our bungalow colonies, Larry Leibovitz, very nice Jewish guy who came up in his station wagon with the blouses in the back seat. So the two conceits of the screenplay are what would happen if the summer of 69, the blouse man was a hippie or someone of that world. And what would happen if one of these housewives had an affair? Because the jokes were always about, well, what are the men doing back in New York?

And so it was like the two what-ifs and we really did have every type of vendor. And once I figured out summer of 69, I thought, okay, is it going to be the knife man, the dress man, the bathing suit man, the blouse man, the fruit man? And I don't know, just somehow the blouse man just hit that it was going to be that guy. And it took off from there, but I was also able to conjure up my own Catskill memories. My parents were great. Once the film was cast, Lee Evan, Diane, and Tony Goldwyn went to my parents' house for bagels, cream cheese, and lox and told them stories. And my whole family was contributing. It was like, who had memories of what? And it was just a glorious process of writing the screenplay and just coming, remembering all that detail while creating this fictional story, the what-if story.

And the Anna Paquin character, and now our fabulous Sophie Polino, who plays the Alison character, they were based on me. Although I wasn't as smart. I was as bratty. I was as angry, but I couldn't articulate. Alison now knows, she's got the Life Magazine. She knows how many boys were killed in Vietnam that week. I wasn't that smart. I knew I was anti-war. I knew I was anti-Nixon, but I didn't have a political language that this young woman does. But I was just pissed at everything. And I was pissed that I was there with my parents still, because I'm a teenager. I have a boyfriend. We're making out in the woods. But the Blouse Man is actually based in the summer of 68. This was my first boyfriend.

He was a townie. And the townies were the non-Jews who would come play softball against the Jews. And so there was this rough looking, sexy looking 13-year-old non-Jewish boy who was my first boyfriend. And that was the image I had when I thought about Pearl Kantowitz having an affair. It would be someone who wasn't Jewish, who wasn't from her world, who was just different in every way, and met some needs that she couldn't even articulate, which was a challenge as a screenwriter, where you're taught screenplays are about a main character who wants something and will do anything they can to get that thing. And Pearl Kantowitz wants something, but she can't articulate what she wants. Same problem with the musical.

You know, it's, I want something, I don't know the words for it, something's missing. And somehow everything happening this summer is making me want it even more, whatever it is. And I, yeah. It resonates. The 1969, where this takes place, and through the generations and decades of you, since you wrote it, it resonates today. And in the time that we're living in today, we are anti-everything, well, we should be, anti-everything that's going on. And there is a sense of a revolution, hopefully, or of a time, a yearning, a looking for something that we're in right now. It's as relevant, as important, this story as ever. I told Max, I said, Sam's the troublemaker in this play. I know already he's trying to move in on you. Max said, oh, don't give it away, but y'all better watch him. You better watch Sam now.

[27:02] Pamela Gray: You having this up and having seen it, I don't, I've never written a movie. So it must be fun to go to a theater and see one of your movies with an audience. It must be incredible to see a musical that you wrote with an audience. What's it like for you?

[27:12] Pamela Gray: Oh my God. It's so visceral because you're breathing the same air as the audience, and you're listening to their reactions, and you're watching how everybody laughs at the same joke, Monday, Tuesday, and then suddenly on Thursday, no one's laughing at the joke. I can tell when there are people in the theater who know the movie, because the minute Tove Feldschuh announces the blouse man, they start laughing and tittering, and if you don't know the story, you don't know what that means. And you can tell how filled with Jews the theater is by certain things that they're laughing about, but you can also tell when there are people who've gone to the Catskills. The minute the men start competing about how quickly it took them to drive up there, and you hear people laughing, it's because they remember that.

They remember the husbands competing. Oh really? It took me an hour and a half? No, liar. You can't possibly get, you know, and it was always about beating the traffic and who got out of the boroughs early enough on a Friday night, and it was a very specific culture. So, and when there's a quiet, you know, a week ago, it was just a very quiet audience, and it was like, what? You know, just this nerve-wrecking feeling of it's not working, it's not working, but you don't really know. Like, we had an audience last night that seemed very quiet, and then afterwards, there was a woman crying to me after about how moved she was, you know. So, but it's alive, you know. When I would go to the movie theaters, you know, I would hide out in the bathroom and hear what people were saying, you know, but I've gone to the, I've done that a little bit here, but mostly it's in the theater you can tell the responses, and so the aliveness of theater on everything.

[29:17] Pamela Gray: And why I love going to theater and going to musicals myself, it's happening on these different levels for me because I'm hearing an audience response in real time. So, no, it's fabulous. It's fabulous for me. It's so exciting and so fun and fabulous. It is the show you need to see this summer. You need to see this summer.

[29:43] Robert Bannon: For you, a little bit about your career, when you look at, you know, Conviction and music. You know, when I was thinking about you, Music of the Heart is another show that could be a musical to me. I mean, it is a musical in my head. And all of this, the career that you've had, is it surreal to turn on the TV and see, you know, Meryl Streep and Cloris Leachman saying your words or to see this now, go to a theater and see your name on a marquee? When Hilary Swank wins, you know, awards after awards, but it's in your movie, what's it feel like?

[30:21] Pamela Gray: It is surreal. It is, you know, oh, that's my name on the list. I don't, I am so not a jaded writer. It's still, I can't believe this. I just, you know, and I, when I was in New York months before we opened and I saw that, okay, we're off Broadway, but oh my God, Hamilton's over, it was like, how can this be happening? And no, I love, I never got past the excitement of seeing the name of the movie on a marquee. And there was a theater, I was living in Sonoma County. As soon as Walk on the Moon came out and I had enough money to buy my first house, I moved to the country because my whole life stream was to live someplace that was like the Catskills. So I bought a house in Sonoma County and I found out that there was a movie theater on the Berkeley border that was closing and going out of business, an indie theater, and the final movie they were gonna show on their final night was Conviction.

And I got in the car, I sent a picture of the marquee to Hilary Swank, because you could see the light on Conviction and then the light off, and it was breathtaking to see the movie as a beautiful theater was being extinguished. But no, it's, I don't, I never get over the excitement of it. And just the whole dream of writing for film and television, I mean, it wasn't like everybody said, oh yeah, you're gonna be able to do that. It was like, you think you can do this? I was like, yeah, me, someone, people do it. You know, they do it, they're humans. I mean, if a regular person can become this, I'm a regular person, maybe I can become this. You know, so, but it's, you know, it's, I am considered successful because I've had even one movie made, but I have a whole career of movies that didn't get made.

It's really painful because each one is, you know, it's a baby. I mean, I started out as a poet. No one rewrote me as a poet. You know, you can get rewritten, you can get fired. It can just sit in a drawer. But I'm very, I love the movies that got made that I wrote. I love my Star Trek episode. That was my first credit, but I'm, no, it never gets old.

[32:59] Robert Bannon: Oh, oh. Am I muted? Unprofessional. You were suddenly muted. What did you say?

[33:10] Pamela Gray: She was an intern at Star Trek, and then all of a sudden she's rewriting episodes, and they're making them. What?

[33:19] Robert Bannon: Well, yes. Good chutzpah. That is, that is good chutzpah.

[33:24] Pamela Gray: Thank you. Well, you know, the interns, I think, so it was this TV Academy Script Writing Fellowship, and if you won, you got placed on the, just to sit and observe a writing staff of whatever show wanted the intern that summer. So, you know, I wasn't 19 years old. You know, I was a 35-year-old woman in film school, and I told the story of Veronica the hippopotamus, and I think that's why I won the Academy. And that summer, it was Star Trek, and when Michael Piller, the executive producer, called and said, you know, we've chosen you, I said, based, because the script I got, it was a wonder-your-respect script, and I said, I'm just curious, since you are a sci-fi show. He said, no, we're not.

It's a show about characters, and you know characters, and I loved the script, and we want you. And so, again, because I was a grown-up, I wasn't, yeah, I was intimidated like the first week, and then on the eighth day, they were brainstorming an episode, and I just threw out an idea. You know, I said, well, what if Keiko is in labor? It was called the Disaster Episode, where the ship was upside down, and crazy things were gonna happen, and Michael Piller said, gold star for the intern, and he called me into his office, and he said, so we bought a story, we like the story, but the writers who sold us the story can't really develop it, and I know you're not allowed to write, you're not in the Writers Guild, but what if you just tried it as an experiment?

You tried to figure out this story, and if we like it, we'll buy it. So he liked it, they bought it, and then the biggest gift he gave me was the chance to co-write with Jerry Taylor, the only woman on the writing staff, and she let me write each act, and then she would give me notes, and so I got co-writing credit, and I got to go to the set one day, and the next day, Gene Roddenberry died, and Paramount shut down the set. You know, no one was allowed, it was a closed set, no one was allowed to go and steal things out of Gene's office, so it was the first Star Trek episode that Gene Roddenberry didn't see, but it was amazing having it on television, and it was a 24th century rape story, so I, you know, as a feminist, I got to write a story that had meaning to me, and it was so exciting because my parents were watching it in New York, and my cousins were watching it in New Jersey, and I had a viewing party in Oakland with my old friends, and I had a viewing party in LA, and it was like, I'm on television, because it was really, really fun, and then I'm like, I'm in the Star Trek encyclopedia, because somehow they got a hold of my first version of the script, because Michael Piller said, every chapter, someone has to go into a coma, and so my idea was, the basic story was this psychic family was on the planet, they were doing, but why wasn't really clear, so in my story, they were like archeologists mining memories on different planets that might go extinct, so they would psychically go into your mind and pull out a memory to like, this was how they were going to save civilizations, like oral historians, and so the idea was, one of them was bad, and one of them, when he was pretending to mine a memory, he was turning the memories into nightmare memories, so first I had to tell what all the memories were, and one was Geordi, the blind character, was going to have this nightmarish memory that really didn't happen, that he was a blind child in a fire, and then Michael came to me, he said, can't do the fire one, we're having a fire in another episode, we can't afford two fires this season, but somehow, in the Star Trek encyclopedia, it says, Geordi went blind in a fire, which was never my idea, but anyway, it was so much fun to be part of this show that has a cult following.

[38:26] Robert Bannon: Lives forever.

[38:28] Pamela Gray: It lives forever, it lives forever, and once DVDs came out, I used to get like 56 cents residual when they showed my Star Trek episode, sometimes I get $56 now.

[38:40] Robert Bannon: See?

[38:42] Pamela Gray: I got a residual the other day from Acting Life, from Saturday Night Live, it was nine cents, I don't know why they mailed it, it cost Screen Actors Guild more money to mail it, they could have just donated it to some, I don't know, but it would cost my dues might go down if you don't have to keep paying the stamp, so I get it, but I'm happy if you got 56.

[39:06] Robert Bannon: I have a one-cent check from Star Trek, I have it framed in my office.

[39:12] Pamela Gray: I would too. As a teacher, I brought up the movie, and I don't wanna keep you, you've been so generous with your stories, but I brought up Music of the Heart being a musical, it was a movie that I remember, I really am obsessed with Gloria Estefan, I'm obsessed with the song. You are somebody, when you look at your films, I think you discover stars, because so many people have had their first big break on your sets, and they become superstar actors, because you find people and give them a vehicle to be able to be incredible.

[39:45] Robert Bannon: If it's common in Tom Felton to, the people that did Music of the Heart, like everybody became a big old star. It must be very-

[39:53] Pamela Gray: Well, that was mostly with The Walk on the Moon, I mean, Meryl, she kinda had it.

[39:57] Robert Bannon: Well, Meryl had a career, I mean, I guess.

[39:59] Pamela Gray: Yes, Meryl was, but you know, Kieran Culkin was in Music of the Heart.

[40:05] Robert Bannon: Yeah, see, that's what I'm saying.

[40:08] Pamela Gray: No, and he was really funny, and he was really good. He was so cute, and you had Jane Leaves, and you had Angela Bassett, and you had Aidan Quinn, you know, Aidan Quinn, the legendary Aidan Quinn, about Broadway and all that. So you have found the most incredible people who like to recite your words, because you tell incredible stories about beautiful people, and that is something really special.

[40:30] Robert Bannon: Thank you for that.

[40:31] Pamela Gray: I was given the task, Miramax said, we want Angela Bassett in this movie, so by tomorrow morning, we need you to write a scene that Angela Bassett would wanna play. And my mother had been a school teacher and a principal, and it was the character of the principal, and I said, Ma, I need your help. So she gave me an idea for a scene, and I was like, and Angela Bassett took the part. But yeah, and I think everyone knows by now that I was hired to write Music of the Heart for Madonna, which it was called, my title was 50 Violins, and that didn't work out. And oh, shucks, the Boobie Prize, we get Meryl Streep.

[41:17] Robert Bannon: You get Meryl Streep.

[41:19] Pamela Gray: Meryl Streep is not a bad backup option. But I'm gonna confess something. I started like showing off in the writing, once I knew it was Meryl, I wrote this monologue that she hated, it's out. But she was wonderful, and Hilary Swank, I mean, Sam Rockwell, I mean, to watch, the cast of Conviction alone is extraordinary. But the Blouse Man, we struck gold, and both of those really struck gold.

[41:53] Robert Bannon: Gold, if you wanna see the words and the writing and the story that started it all, you can go right now. I love the theater you all are in. It is perfect. It is fabulous. Gorgeous, gorgeous. Go, run to the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater at the Laura Pels Theater, right in the middle of 42nd Street, 46th Street, right where it all is going down. My goodness, that's why I've never been in a PAM movie. I can't even read. A Walk on the Moon Musical.com is where you can go and get your tickets right now through August 22nd. I know there's already been talk. People are talking. I'm sure this show has a life. This story will continue on.

[42:28] Pamela Gray: I hope so, I hope so. And my fingers will be crossed. I want everybody, if Jewish or non-Jewish, born in 1969 or not, it is a story for everybody about love, relationships, and wanting something. So you agree, everybody, get a ticket, come out.

[42:46] Robert Bannon: I thank you for that. Really, I think there's something for everybody in this story, that people will identify with one of the characters, many of the characters are just being back in that time period, and oh, this is, well, everybody hated the president then, huh? Sounds familiar. Young people wanted to rise up and revolt, hmm, yeah. And women, women wanting more rights. Sadly, when this movie came out, that wasn't an issue.

[43:19] Pamela Gray: And here we are.

[43:20] Robert Bannon: Here we are. And that's why writing and art is so important. It documents history, and it helps us, hopefully we watch this and remember, we don't wanna repeat the same story and we do something different about it this time. I am grateful, thank you for the hours and days and months and years of your life that you've taken away to write for us, to give us joy and entertainment and learn something. It is not unnoticed, and it is incredibly grateful, and we're so lucky to have your words and stories forever.

[43:48] Pamela Gray: Thank you for being here.

[43:49] Robert Bannon: Oh, thank you for everything you just said and for having me, it was such a gift.