Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast - Carl Gottlieb Encore

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

GGACP celebrates the summer season (and July's upcoming Shark Week) with this ENCORE of an interview with screenwriter-director Carl Gottlieb, the writer of everyone's favorite summer blockbuster, 1975's “Jaws." In this episode, Carl discusses his work on "Jaws 2" and "Jaws 3-D," the ingenuity of Steven Spielberg, the effectiveness of “unseen horror” and the many challenges of bringing the original “Jaws” to the screen. Also, John Belushi spoofs Richard Dreyfuss, Groucho guest hosts “Music Scene,” Ringo battles the Abominable Snowman and Carl and Steve Martin team up for “The Jerk.” PLUS: “The Absent-Minded Waiter”! “Son of the Invisible Man”! The Smothers Brothers vs. CBS! Sterling Hayden vs. the I.R.S.! And “The Jaws Log: The Musical”! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And we're once again recording at Nutmeg with our engineer, Frank Verderosa. Our guest this week is a producer, author, actor, Emmy-winning writer, and Oscar-nominated director. Emmy-winning writer and Oscar-nominated director. He started out his performing career as a member of the San Francisco-based comedy troupe, The Committee, and went on to write and perform in popular variety shows and situation comedies such as the glenn campbell good time hour the flip wilson special the george burns comedy week the ken berry wow show chico and the man all in the family the odd couple the bob newhart show and of course the groundbreaking and rule-breaking Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, for which he was awarded an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Comedy.

He also wrote the feature films Dr. Detroit and The Richard Pryor Vehicle, Which Way Is Up, directed the Ringo Starr comedy Caveman, and Oscar-nominated short The Absent-Minded Waiter, and appeared in movies MASH, The Long Goodbye, Johnny Dangerously, and Clueless, and of course, in a pair of iconic films that he also happened to write, Steve Martin's The Jerk, and a little picture called Jaws. He's also the screenwriter of the sequels, Jaws 2 and Jaws 3, and the author of a best-selling book, The Jaws Log, an indispensable production guide, and behind-the-scenes look at the making of one of Hollywood's greatest adventure films. Please welcome to the show a man of many talents and the artist formerly known as iron balls carl gottlieb yes yes yes i i'm gonna it's always interesting to put you know on your resume you know uh the jerk part of iron balls

mcginty is it on the resume as iron balls mcginty if if i still had a resume yeah it it on the resume as Iron Balls McGinty? If I still had a resume, yeah. It's on the IMDB page as Iron Balls McGinty. Now, before we turn the mic on, you started to say you had a Pat McCormick story, and that's something we can

never wait with. You know, I took a wild chance that Carl, who's been around and knows everybody in Hollywood would know Pat McCormick, and we hit pay dirt. Yes, yes. Well, you know, after his stroke he went to live in the motion picture home up in

Calabasas, you know, and he was a resident there, and he had lost his speech. As a result of the stroke, he couldn't speak he had aphasia and they put him in a room uh he shared a room with stanley kramer the great director and stanley kramer was at the at the motion picture home because he was in an advanced state of senile dementia so jack riley and some of the guys went up to visit Pat at the home, and then they came back to the farmer's market where that particular crowd used to meet for donuts and coffee once a week.

And everybody said, well, how's Pat doing up at the home? And Jack said, well, Pat can't talk and Stanley Kramer can't think, so the two of them get on great. They just growl at each other all day long. So I met Kat Kramer, who's Stanley Kramer's daughter. And I said, you know, this is the story I heard. And, you know, I've told it. But now that I've got you here, you know, you're Stanley Kramer's daughter. You were there.

She said, no, absolutely true. He and Pat just, you know, got on great as roommates because, you know, Pat couldn't talk and Dad couldn't think. I heard, was it Ronnie Schell who told us that they walked in? That was the Army's Army's guy. And Ronnie Schell or somebody walked in the room, saw Stanley Kramer and said, Pat, you finally got a meeting. On the junket to San Francisco for the movie with Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn. Oh, foul play. Foul play.

They had charted a plane. It was the heyday of Warner Brothers, I think. They charted a plane and the whole cast was going up and the drinks were flowing and Pat stood up in the aisle and picked up Billy Barty, who's also in the cast, picked up Billy Barty and

held him and said, I'd like to thank the members of the Academy. We never run out of Pat McCormick stories. And it was Pat McCormick who said, you know, somebody asked him for directions. How do you get to Malibu? He said, you take Sunset down to PCH and then you turn right and go until you hit Ben Vereen. Now, there's one story, if you haven't heard it, we'll move on. Are you familiar with the Pat McCormick helicopter story?

I don't think so. Oh, then I'll tell you about it later. It'll take up too much show, but we'll tell you after we wrap. show but we'll tell we'll tell you after we wrap and so you yeah well now you're credited as having written the screenplay jaws how did that come about well um uh i was friends with spielberg we had the same agent mike medavoy was our agent and he was constantly pairing us up to go out and sell up you know pitches we'd come up with a pitch. Mike would set up a meeting. We'd go take the meeting. And we'd never sell a pitch because Stephen was locked in to direct whatever it is we sold. And at that point, he hadn't directed any movies. He had just

directed television. So nobody wanted to take a chance on him as a director so he couldn't sell a feature script but i acted in two of his movies his television movies that he did i did oh yeah you're in something evil and uh something savage and the savage savage right and uh so you know we were acquainted he he lived in laurel canyon i lived down on gardener street in hollywood we'd He lived in Laurel Canyon. I lived down on Gardner Street in Hollywood. Very often our paths would cross. And he went off to do Sugar Land Express, which was his first feature. And it was very well received critically, but tanked at the box office.

And Stephen, who has a really good career sense, figured, okay, I've got to do a popcorn movie. I've got to find a popular movie to direct. So on the desk at Zanuck and Brown's office, he saw the galleys for Jaws. It eventually novel. They had optioned it in pre-production, in pre-publication. So he looked at it and said, oh, this is something I could do. And they said, yes. Zanuck and Brown said, yes, this is something you could do. So Stephen called me and said, look, I'm going to be doing this movie. It shoots on location. Maybe you should be in it.

We'll find a part for yourself and you'll be there for the run of the picture. And you can help with improvisation and do some stuff with local actors who I have to hire. Because you had an improv background. Yeah. And comedy. Right. Sure. And Stephen wanted to not make it a straight-ahead horror flick.

So I went through Universal Casting. I got the part of Meadows, the publisher of the newspaper. And then about three weeks before we started shooting, I get a call from Stephen. I'm at the Bel Air Hotel with Zanuck and Brown. I showed them your memo because he had sent me a copy of the script with a note on the cover saying, eviscerate it.

So I had sent him some notes on the script, some were accurate and some were less useful. But he had shown the memo to Zanuck and Brown. They said, well, let's have him in here. I came in. We talked about the script. It started out to be bagels and lox on a Sunday morning. I didn't leave until it was dark, and it was like after tea time.

We had brunch and tea, and then they said, well, maybe we'll put you on to do a dialogue polish. You can go. We'll hire you as a writer, too. At that point, I was a story editor on The Odd Couple. I was, you know, I had a network TV job. But in those days, you know, if you could get out of television and into features, you would. You'd grab that opportunity. So Monday they made an offer.

Monday afternoon we accepted. Tuesday I was on a plane with Stephen. We flew to Boston where he was casting extras. And three weeks after, or two and a half weeks after that, we started shooting the movie, having taken the script apart and not completely replaced all the material yet because there wasn't time. So I wrote the first scenes that were on the schedule,

I wrote those first, and then I just had to write ahead of the schedule as we were shooting the movie. And it's kind of great for a writer to be doing a production rewrite on the set because there's nobody to rewrite you. It's too late. Once you turn in your pages, the next day they're shooting them, and there's that. And then there was the terrible realization that I had to cut my own part because the editor of the paper was less and less important to the story.

As the script evolved, my part got smaller. And it was, you know, that's, no writer should be asked, no writer actor should be asked to do that. It's cruel to cut your own part. But it was for the better. Right, of course. Kill the. But it was for, it was for the better. Right. Of course. Kill the babies, right? Yes. It was for the greater good. Right. So, but on the release prints, when the picture first came out, the credits, you know, it was just Scheider, Dreyfuss and Shaw, Jaws with Carl

Gottlieb, Lorraine Gary, and Murray Hamilton. I'd like big co-star billing. And then, you know, 10 years later, it was, I was no longer on that title card because my character was less and less. Well, Meadows is still in there. He's still prominent. Yeah, he's still there

and I still get residual checks as an actor as well as the residual checks as a writer. And the fish movie is the gift that keeps on giving. It's always shark week somewhere. Yeah, true.

And it's funny. week somewhere yeah true and um it's funny nowadays i mean the definition of blockbuster is jaws and the definition of powerhouse director spielberg yeah but back then it was nothing like that no they the uh uh universal's high hopes for that year, 74, that year they were betting it all on Hindenburg and Airport 75, which tied up all the special effects at the studio, which is why we got to make, we get an independent contractor to build the shark because the studio was overwhelmed. They couldn't build the shark in time.

The Hindenburg with George C c scott oh yeah doesn't and imagine looking back not not exactly a big monster hit no no no so and and jaws was intended to be kind of you know a popcorn summer movie oh it was always that and it was only after the first paid preview, the first two paid previews where the audiences went nuts, that Sid Sheinberg says, you know what, let's open this on a lot of screens. And at that time, that was kind of a revolutionary concept. Didn't you say they opened it in the second run theaters first? Well, they were first run theaters, but they weren't the good ones. They weren't the good ones. They weren't the good ones, yeah.

In L.A., we were at, east of Vine, it was the World Theater. Now it's something else. Right. It was east of Vine. And in Westwood, we had one of those crummy UA houses. We weren't at the Westwood or the Bruin, you know, the two big Westwood theaters. Right, right, right, right, or the Cinerama Dome. Yeah.

Or any of the good ones. We like ordinary theaters and then and and to lou wasserman's credit he says the best word of mouth for a movie is there's lines and you can't get in so let's you know let's open it wide but let's not go too wide so it opened in what was then a revolutionary 450 screens, and then later, when it became obvious that the film wasn't going to stop, they expanded it to 700 or 800 screens. The days before multiplexes, when there were lines around the block to see a movie. We're both old enough, obviously, to remember Jaws mania. Yeah. And that summer, you know, it was happening. It's a cultural phenomenon.

And what did you – you read the book, obviously. Yeah, I read the book and I read the draft. Because Peter Benchley wrote a draft of the screenplay, and it was – I guess it wasn't good. I think it was a way to give him more money for the book rights. They said, oh, and you can write the screenplay. So he wrote the first draft of the screenplay, and Zanuck and Brown said, oh, and you can write the screenplay. So he wrote the first draft of the screenplay, and Zanuck and Brown realized, oh, this guy is not a screenwriter. I mean, he's barely a novelist, but he's at that time in his career.

So they got a guy, a writer named Howard Sackler, who was a real screenwriter. He wrote Great White Hope. He wrote Grey Lady Down. He was a real screenwriter, but he was kind of faithful to the book and did an okay adaptation, but it was

the style of the script. The only thing I can tell you about that script, that draft, which is the draft I worked off of, was that it made sense to cast Jan Michael Vincent as Hooper and Charlton Heston as Quint for that script.

Right, and the love triangle with Brody's wife was still intact. Yeah, well, it was still intact. So when we started filming and we saw Dreyfus and Lorraine Gary, they're such like a nice Hamish peep couple. You know, we couldn't, you know, it was impossible to think of him cuckolding the Roy Scheider character. So that subplot went out the window along with the mayor's connection to the mafia and the real estate developers. You know, there's a whole lot of crap that had to go. There was a whole lot of crap that had to go.

So it was mostly a question of pruning all the underbrush and just getting down to the story of three guys and a fish. I've heard you say that there's no original Jaws script. People claim there is, and you say there may be some edited versions floating around, but there's no true original that exists. No. There's no true original that exists. No. The closest that comes to it is, there was like 10 copies that the, Stephen's personal assistant on the film and also the apprentice editor was Verna Fields' son, Rick Fields.

So he took the lined script, you know, with all the script supervisor's notes in it, and the extra writing that I did for post-production, I wrote dialogue for looping and ADR. And it took all of Joe Alves' storyboard sketches because the whole third act, all the men against the sea scenes were basically storyboard. There was no script. There wasn't a script that says the shark swims left to right and Quint fires a harpoon at him.

It was just storyboarded that way. Interesting. So they shot the film from storyboards. All the dialogue had already been filmed. But it was just that big, heavy, bound, and it's nicely bound with the Jaws logo on the cover. And that's the only thing that can pass for an original script because the original script was just those, you know,

blue, yellow, green pages all folded up and carried in crew's back pocket. And who was the one who designed the shark? That was Joe Alves, the production designer. And he's actually the first guy on the payroll. He got hired before Spielberg. Because Joe's job, Zanuck and Brown were stingy bastards. Well, they're both gone now, you can say that.

And they had Joe. Joe had a charge. He was under employment at Universal, and they asked him to do some sketches, storyboard sketches of the shark and victims. And they used them to pitch the tower that they should actually invest in this movie and make this film. So Joe Ows was the first one on the picture. He designed the shark. He did all the research. He discovered, and they kept saying, we need a big shark.

And Joe discovered from his research that the bigger sharks get, the fatter they are. So when they said, we want a 30-foot shark, Joe said, it's going to look like a barrel. It's just going to be a big, fat fish. So the optimum would be like 20 to 25 feet would be as big as you can get it and still keep it slender and deadly looking. So that's what he did. Joe designed the shark.

And a guy named Bob Matty, who was in retirement, a special effects guy, who built the squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Remember Kirk Douglas fights this giant squid? The guy who built the squid built the shark. You know, reading Jaws, your book, and we have to plug, this is the expanded edition, and both Gilbert and I read this way back in the day, The Jaws Log, which is terrific and one of the best books, not just for Jaws fans, but one of the best books about making a movie that you'll ever want to read.

I'm very proud of that. You should be. And reading it, you realize how many, and of course Spielberg gets the lion's share of the credit, I suppose, but how many heroes that Bob Maddy and Joe Alves and yourself and Verna Fields and Bill suppose but how many heroes that bob maddie and joe alves and yourself and bernie fields and bill butler and how many people are uh great artists yeah are the heroes of this picture and at the time everybody was it's like a triumph of the studio system and all

those people were kind of under contract and we were making this movie on location and everybody was just it was a difficult shoot it It was a long ways from home. Maybe we were over budget, over schedule. And everybody just soldiered on and tried to make the best movie we could. Who knew? Yeah, who knew? And what happened, the look of the film and how Spielberg wound up directing it was because the shark didn't work. Yes.

We built this shark, and it wasn't hardly any time to test it. So before they put it on the trucks and shipped it off to New England, it was built or fabricated here in Hollywood. They tested it in fresh water, and it seemed to work. And then when they got it and put the rig in, it's a complicated understructure that you can't see. It's steel rails and stuff. As soon as they put it in salt water, electrical circuits fried. Things started corroding.

Aluminum turned to dust. And it was a huge effort just to keep something in front of the camera that looked like a shark right in part because because spielberg was determined not to shoot in a tank on the lot but to but right but to shoot it in the water yeah and at sea and zanuck and brown who were both you know products of the industry when they were putting the project together they just assumed that somewhere in the world there was a shark wrangler who they could get who would train a shark to do two or three stunts. And, of course, they had to be disabused of that notion very quickly.

Gilbert and I were talking today, and it's about the problems that beset the film, and it's not just the mechanical shark. It's the Teamster stuff. It's the weather. It's people who were stealing equipment. It's the boatmen went on strike. I mean, every possible thing that could have gone wrong, you guys must have felt like you were cursed. Well, you know, there's an iconic line from the movie, because, you know, we're going to need a bigger boat.

Right, of course. iconic line from the movie because you know you're gonna we're gonna need a bigger boat right of course now the the way for 20 years i wouldn't take credit for that line i said you know what roy probably improvised it on the set you know more power to him because i wasn't on the set that day then i one of the fans of whom there are many pointed out to me that on the Blu-ray edition of the DVD or the extra materials, there's an interview with Roy Scheider, who was still alive at the time. And he said, oh, no, that was in the script. So I said, oh, hooray for me. I didn't know I wrote that. And then it turned out it had been in the script because when they started shooting they had this the ss garage sale it was just a

barge with all the equipment on it and things would fall off and it was it wasn't steady and it was a piece of crap because zanuck and brown were stingy and they they they avoided renting the support boat that they should have gotten which which was a big ocean-going tugboat based in Martha's Vineyard, skippered by an old salt on the vineyard. It's called the Whitefoot. Finally, when the crew was at rebellion point, because they kept saying, we're going to need a bigger boat. We've got the Orca, but we need a bigger boat for the crew, for the

cast to have lunch and help buffet the picture boat against the wind. So when anything broke in the first few weeks of filming, they would say, we're going to need a bigger boat, trying to convince Zanuck and Brown. And Roy used that line in a lot of different scenes. He kept saying, we're going to need a bigger boat.

But he said it at the perfect place in the movie, so it became an iconic line, but it was based on reality. We did really need a bigger boat. And halfway through filming, Zanuck and Brown finally bit the bullet and hired the right boat. You heard him. Slow ahead. Slow ahead. I can go slow ahead. Come on down and chump some of this shit.

We're gonna need a bigger boat. Shut off that engine. that's a 20 footer 25 and and it's funny that through the shark not working spielberg tried hiding the shark, which made it scarier. Well, wasn't that something you guys were channeling, The Thing, one of your favorite movies? Yeah, not even channeling. We both, when we were scratching our heads, figuring out what, we don't have the shark today, what are we going to shoot? What scenes are left with dialogue?

When we were going through all that uh we both said you know in the we both knew the thing you know there's not by the way we should say not john carpenter's the thing but the original howard hawks christian i b howard hawks yeah that thing right that's james Arness as a carrot. Yes. As a giant defrosted carrot, yes. So we both were very well aware of that film, and we knew that unseen horror is even scarier than visible horror, kind of like even in Psycho, where you never see the killer and you hardly see the stabbing. You think you see it, but Hitchcock is such a whiz.

So we were well aware that an off-screen shark could be as ominous or more so than an on-screen shark. And, of course, Stephen did that incredible opening death scene with the actress, Chrissy. Chrissy and then we had to think of other scenes like the guys on the dock and scenes where you can see what the shark does but you couldn't see the shark you see a leg

severed leg floating down trailing blood in the water and stuff like that it's so smart you guys had such good instincts and it's kind of like a lot of the movie is not a fear of sharks but a fear of the ocean yeah yeah but he keeps giving you that point of view shot of the water and yeah and it's like that first girl who gets killed yes you don't see a shark you don't see a shark. You don't see what's happening. Yeah.

But you go, something horrible is happening to this girl. Yeah. And then when you actually see the remains at the morgue, it fits into a little cat box, a little busboy's tray. That's all that's left of her. Bus boys tray. That's all that's left of her. We really thought that was a real subtle, horrible way to say a human being, you know, because the doctor opens the door to the refrigerator where they keep the bodies, and you're expecting, you know, a body bag to come out. And it's a tray with a hand. Spoofed in a very funny way by John Belushi in the first. Yes, yes. This was no boating accident. Chewing the scenery in his Dreyfus impression. Let's talk about the casting a little bit because it's all in the Jaws log.

And it's fascinating. Did Richard Dreyfus, who you knew as Ricky Dreyfuss, you had history. You had worked with Carl Reiner in the committee. Excuse me, Rob Reiner in the committee. They grew up together. Yeah, and Rob and Richard and a couple others had a little improv group of their own in L.A. They'd come up and hang out at the committee and watch us and then go back to L.A. and work on their show. So, you know, we had history.

And he had passed on the script. He had told his agent, you know, this is a movie I'd rather see than be in. And so when I got to Boston with Stephen, we still did not have Hooper and we didn't have Quint. With how many days to go? About 15 days before start of principal photography. Wow.

So they reached out to Lee Marvin, who would have been a pretty good Quint, but Lee Marvin was on a fishing expedition in Baja, California, and said a word back. He says, I'm fishing now. Why would I want to go back and pretend to be fishing? So Lee Marvin passed. I was very much in favor of Sterling Hayden, who would have been wonderful. We love Sterling Hayden. Yeah, but he had problems with the IRS. He couldn't work for wages because the IRS had attached his wages. He could work as a novelist and sell his books and

get royalty. But if he had a salary income, the IRS would grab it all. So he couldn't take it. So Zanuck and Brown, in desperation, reached out to Robert Shaw, who was a sturdy physical guy and was a great actor. They knew him from this because they'd made The Sting. Yeah, they knew him from The Sting. So he agreed, and he had a lot of things in his contract. In case they went over schedule, he would owe a lot of money on his salary, so he built in a lot of penalties. So he wound up making way more than Dreyfuss and Scheider made. So now we're getting close.

We got Robert Shaw, and I called my wife in Los Angeles. I said, you know, can you find where Richard is? I've got to speak to him. So it turns out my wife calls back and says, you're in luck. He's in New York. So I called Richard in New York. I said, you've got to come up to Boston and meet Stephen. You know, when you turn down the script, that's a different script.

We're rewriting it. I'm up here. We're going to make it a little funnier. You're going to like it. Come on up. Meet Stephen. Just give it one last shot. So Richard came up to Boston where we were casting, and he walked in, and he was dressed almost the way he's dressed in the movie.

He had a scruffy beard and rimless glasses and a watch cap and a Levi jacket. And Stephen took one look at him and said, don't change a thing. Don't get a haircut. Don't do it. If you're going to do this film, you got to do it just the way you look now. I love that. And so then we talked for a few hours

and told him there would be comedy. And while we were talking, we found a joke that's in the movie that plays great. Because Zanuck and Brown were stingy bastards. Did I say that? Yeah, you did. Say it again. We were staying at the Holiday Inn in Boston

and room service at the Holiday Inn in Boston is styrofoam. No China. It's all plastic stuff. And we were living on the room service because we couldn't go out to eat. We had to, you know, we had casting appointments every 15 minutes all day long. So, so, uh, uh, we had the remnants

of our meal and, uh, Richard was, it was like crushing a cup. And I'm going to say we, cause I don't know who in the room actually said it. I'd like to think it was me, but I said, you know how that macho thing where guys crush beer cans or they break them on their head. You know, it'd be great for Hooper. If,

if Quint crushes a beer can, Hooper can crush a styrofoam cup. And Steve was a great, great put it into the script. We'll do that. And so we did. It's a great moment. And it's,

and it's a good, it's a good moment. Yeah. And I heard a. It's a great moment. And it's a good moment. Yeah. And I heard a story that, I mean, the movie, when it was being made, was considered disaster. Yes. And that Spielberg went to a dinner party and introduced himself to some woman who said, Oh, you're that director who everyone says your career is over now. I wouldn't be surprised.

Because, you know, it was touch and go for a while. I mean, people who had seen the film and had seen the, you know, because Verna Fields was on location, so she was, as soon as we finished filming, you know,

all the segments of a particular sequence, she'd start cutting it together because, you know, that's what she was there for. And as sequences started to come together, you'd see, you can see the potential in the film. And then, of course, when it was finished, it was great. And at the time, you know, like nobody ever sets out to make a bad movie. If you're on the set of a bad movie, nobody is saying this is going to be a stinker. You're doing your best to make a good movie. And that's what happened on that picture. Everybody said, well, yeah, it could be a career killer, but let's see what happens when it's released.

Because this is an axiom for the movie business. No picture is ever as good as the dailies or as bad as the first cut. Oh, that's profound. It turned out to be a movie that changed American filmmaking and changed the studio system, changed the way movies were distributed, changed everything. Yeah, and sadly, not for the best as that evolution has turned out. In some ways, yeah.

This obsession with opening weekends and $100 million grosses. You can't hit a home run every time. Not for the best, but hard to hold it against the film. I remember also seeing an interview where Dreyfus, I mean, it was like he was apologizing for the movie. He said something like, well, I've got nobody to blame but myself. I shouldn't have taken this movie. And for 40 years, he's been dining out on those John the Jaws stories. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. He, it was, he, he and Roy went to, after a couple of weeks, I think it moved over to a big theater in Times Square, the Rivoli or one of the,

you know, a big Times Square movie theater. And there's a, there's a shot of it, the marquee and everything. But Roy and Richardson like snuck in after the film had started so they wouldn't be noticed. And they watched the film and they saw the audience reaction. And that was the first time they had seen it in the theater.

They only seen it in, you know, screening rooms. And after that they got, they, you know, they had, they had to admit that it was good work. And it must have dawned on them at some point they were about to be stars. Yeah. I mean, Richard had American Graffiti had already opened, so Richard was on the radar and Scheider had been on the radar from French Connection, but not like this.

Yeah, it made everybody. And one of the best things in the film is the last bit of dialogue, which you added in post. Yeah, yeah. I used to be afraid of the water. Yeah, it's great. It's a perfect way to end the film. Thank you. And you being the writer also of Jaws 2.

Yes. I have to ask you, what happened to that convenient fishing expedition that Hooper was on? I just watched Jaws 2. Yeah, he was off on the Aurora doing, because he didn't, see Roy had a contract. He had to do the sequel. Yeah, I read in an interview with you that he was none too happy. No, he wasn't. And Zanuck and Brown, when they got a green light, because the iron law of sequels is only the last one loses money, which is why you have Police, A.A., Anime 12, Friday the 13th, 10. Why they all end at some point.

Only the last one loses money. So after Jaws, it was clearly going to be a sequel. And Zanuck and Brown offered me the screenplay. They said, you can write the sequel. I said, great. And they said, for scale. I said, oh, God, you guys, you know, my agent said, I can't believe that they're offering scale.

And then we said, you know, Zanuck and Brown are stingy bastards. And I turned the job down. I said, I'm not writing it for scale. I have other things to do. I'd written Which Way Is Up. I was back, you know, doing comedies again. Working with Richard Pryor. Yeah.

So I turned him down. And I remember saying to my agent at the time, I said, tell him no. back you know doing comedies again working for working with richard prior yeah so uh i turned him down i remember saying to my agent at the time i said tell him no and when they come back and i think they will it's going to cost them so sure enough they started they started with another director and his wife who fancied herself a screenwriter and they started shooting jaws 2 and after a week of dailies it was obvious that this director and his recon reconfigured screenplay were you know not cutting it and it's very rare that hollywood actually fires a director off a film that's in production but they fired john hancock and shit canned his script uh right, right by his wife, Dorothy Tristan.

You know, we, we name names here. We name names. Well, it's a podcast. No one's really listening to Carl. So they,

then they, then they call, they called me and I, I got what I should have gotten. And, uh, and the picture went and, and,

and it's time was the most successful sequel until Godfather two. So it, it did. Okay. And will, And the picture went, and its time was the most successful sequel until Godfather 2. So it did okay. And are you ever planning on doing a movie on Hooper on that fishing boat? No, but it would be nice to revisit him. By the time we got to Jaws 3, the same thing happened. They started with a script that wasn't working, and they had to fly me in to work one two and three i did on location while we were shooting they didn't ask me to do jaws four for any reason jaws for the revenge jaws for the revenge that was michael kane yeah yes and and uh and to this day, I've never seen it.

I have no idea what it's about. Well, there you go. And the shark follows the wife to the Bahamas. Yes. And to the mall. Yeah. We will return to Gilbert Gottfried's amazing, colossal podcast. But first, a word from our sponsor.

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No, that was mostly Joe Alves' responsibility. Joe Alves directed Jaws 3D, we should point out. Because he directed miles of second unit on two. And he was ready to direct, and he was the one who said Jaws 3D. He's the one who suggested 3D, and then later regretted it because the technology was not perfected. So there was a lot of problems. And we had a producer who was even stingier than Zanuck and Brown. We had Joe Dante

on the show and we talked a little bit about Jaws 3, people nothing. Or people zero. And how close did that actually come to happening? I have my first, my memory of it was that it was never more than a high concept and that they Spielberg and Zanuck and Brown

said to the studio don't mock a valuable franchise like this it's good advice don't shit where you eat but since then I've met Maddie, you know, I know Maddie Simmons who was Lampoon.

Sure. And he says, he claims that they actually got about a million dollars out of universally developed a script. They did some research. There is a script somewhere. Yeah. And,

and that apparently there is a script somewhere. I've never, I've never seen it. And, uh, but ultimately it was uh you know the studio said no way are we making this film so goodbye and what i've noticed with sequels is each sequel has to unlearn every lesson they learned in the previous one.

Yeah. Like, in Jaws, the three things they never learned is, one, there is a shark, two, they should close down the beach, and three, that they need a bigger boat. Yes. And these are three things they never learned. Yeah, because you have to repeat the same mistakes

to put the characters in the same kind of jeopardy. Like the boats were getting smaller. Yes, if anything. Well, that was my contribution to Jaws 2. That was when the studios were obsessing on the youth market. And the script that they had was dark and unfunny and not good.

But it had some teenagers in it because Brody's kids had gotten older. So my take on it was, okay, if you're going to put teenagers in jeopardy, which was emerging as a horror trope or a meme, you know, let's really put teenagers in jeopardy. I invented this like seagoing car culture, cruising culture, where, you know, people get in their cars and cruise Van Nuys Boulevard or Hollywood Boulevard. It was like American graffiti, cruising. So I said, okay, so what about if you're a teenager and you live on an island and everybody sails and surfs and swims, that you'd have a bunch of teenagers with a bunch of boats who would do things collectively. And then when the shark comes, they get in trouble, and then the sheriff has to ride to the rescue. So we had that.

Go ahead, Carl. I'm sorry. So, yeah, we – and in Jaws 2, of course, we didn't have the luxury of hiding the shark. Everybody knew what the shark looked like. So we contrived the fiery explosion. So now it was not only a bad shark, but it was a scar-faced

shark. Now it was really mean. Well, of course, the sequel also boasts arguably the best tagline in movie history. The best advertising tagline. Just when you thought it was safe to tagline in movie history. The best advertising tagline.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. Right, right, right. Tell us something about Murray Hamilton. We've done 200 of these shows, and he's come up. We've talked about old Twilight Zone episodes. And The Hustler. Eddie Deason was here talking about working with Murray in 1941. And one of our favorites.

He was a wonderful actor. He's in a movie called Seconds with Rock Hudson. Oh, sure, it's Reichenheimer. Oh, yeah, Rock Hudson and John Randolph. Yeah, right. And he's wonderful. He's a wonderful, wonderful actor. The graduate.

Of course, yes. But he had a drinking problem which he kept under control most of the time, but there's a story in the Jaws log in the book about he went out, you know, he was out drinking one night and crossed the path of a skunk on the way

Oh yeah, it's one of the good stories in the book. He went to pet it. He thought it was a dog. Yeah. Pussy cat, a little black and white pussy cat. Oh, pussy cat.

Excuse me. So, so he got properly skunked and, you know, and he came into the hotel and fell asleep in the lobby and everybody, you know, the night desk clerk, what's that?

Jeez. What's that? Oh, it's Mr. So I had to burn his clothes and put him to bed upstairs. But the next day, he always had it together on the set. You could never tell that he was drinking. He played that corrupt bureaucrat as well as anybody.

Oh, yeah. He just had that kind of, maybe Spielberg, as I suppose, always had an eye for casting. But boy, he's just perfect. Was he the first actor cast? One of the first. I think Roy was the first principal cast. Roy was the first principal. And Murray, I think, and Lorraine Gary.

Yeah. A lot of great stories in the Jaws log. And another drunk on this set was Robert Shaw. Oh, boy. Hollow legs. Yes. Well, he's in that great British tradition of Richard Harris and Tom Courtney. Oh, Peter O'Toole.

Peter O'Toole. Yeah, they could all bend the elbow. Yeah, they were all a tradition. Yeah, Shaw, the famous Indianapolis speech, that was shot over a period of two days. And the first day, he put whiskey in the teacups and was really drinking. And by three in the afternoon, he was shit-faced. He started improvising around the speech.

And he had largely crafted that speech from Sackler's work. And he was totally messing it up and Stephen was very understanding and when they wrapped at the end of the day he apologized profusely to Stephen he said I'm sorry I'd realized I knew I thought I could do it but I and Stephen said don't worry you know we got lots of film. We're back on the set tomorrow. We'll do it again. And Shaw said, I promise, not a drop until we wrap. And the second day, he shot it cold sober.

And the genius of Verna Fields' editing is that there's shots from the drunk day and there's shots from the sober day and there's shots from the sober day, and you can't tell. Oh, that's fascinating. Unless you look at it on Blu-ray very closely, if his eyes are a little watery, that's the drunk day. If his eyes are dry, that was the day that he did it sober. Sometimes that Sharkey looks right into your eyes.

Sometimes that sharky looks right into you, right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes like a doll's eyes. When he comes at you, doesn't seem to be living until he bites you and those black eyes roll over white and then, oh then you hear that terrible high-pitched screaming. The ocean turns red, and in spite of all the pounding and the hollering, they all come in and rip you to pieces. She must have used the cutaways to Scheider and Dreyfus. Exactly. To break them up. Yeah, exactly.

She had to do that. Yeah. There's so many good stories I was starting to say in the Jaws log, which we want people to get and want our listeners to get. And maybe we'll come back to them at the end. But the story about Steve Spielberg leaving the island is wonderful. I was telling Gilbert on the phone how he beat a hasty retreat. Robert Shaw drinking with Thornton Wilder to all hours of the night.

Full of great stories. But let's ask. Go ahead. Spielberg, to this day, follows that pattern. The last shot of the film, the last shot of the production, he's not there for that he's gone he's gone and obviously not the wrap party yes right no he said he sets up the shot get rehearses it gets it all right and then he then leaves and i'm told and i heard robert shaw was like a real bastard to Richard Dreyfuss.

Yes, yes. He was, you know, Richard was, you know, Beverly Hills High School guy who had done two movies and a lot of television. You know, Richard played the little Jew in Gunsmoke. Oh, he's in Bewitched. Yeah, he was. Turns out he was a bunch of stuff. And Shaw, of course, was a real actor and a real writer. He's got five published novels.

He wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning play called The Man in the Glass Booth. Sure. He was the real deal. And he would tweak Richard. He would do things like when they know how when they're shooting Richards close up and Shaw is off camera, just as they put the sticks in, just before they clap the sticks for Dreyfus, Shaw would lean in and say, mind your mannerisms. Roll them. Did he say something about Paul Muni, like if Jew actors come back into vogue, or you might have a future? Does this ring a bell?

It doesn't, but I'm sure that... Sneaking in some anti-Semitic cracks and... He could do that. To get his goat? Yes, with all affection, because he knew Joe Dreyfuss was aggressive, you know, patently Jewish. Doody Kravitz, you know, can't get more Jewish than that. Right, of course, Gilbert loves that picture.

Oh yeah, it's a great film. Let's ask you, we started a talk before we turned the mics on about something, speaking of directing, something Gilbert and I

are extremely fond of that you directed and that is, because we had Ed Begley here a couple of weeks ago and Gilbert and I were gushing about his brave performance

in The Son of the Invisible Man and the very criminally underrated Amazon Women on the Moon. Yeah. And you did that with him. Your friend Gary Goodrow turns up in it. Yes, and Larry Hankins in it, too. And Larry Hankins, who you went to school with. But, boy, that is a—and Gilbert and I were saying,

it's directed by somebody who had obvious affection for those universal horror pictures. Yes. You're really convinced you're watching a 30s universal horror movie. You got everything but Uno O'Connor in there. Yes. Yeah. The camera guy totally got it. He lit it for black and white.

And it was just fun. And, you know, you can't move the camera too much because in the 30s they didn't have very sophisticated dollies and cranes. If you did a dolly shot, you'd have to be pretty, you know, pretty circumspect about it. So, you know, yeah, I really did my homework. I watched the James Whale movies. Yeah, it's so faithful.

Yeah. Yeah. And the thing I like about it, it wound up being the key art for the poster campaign. They did that. Right. The other thing I directed for that, it's an anthology for the listeners. Amazon Women on the Moon is an anthology picture with five directors. Yes, find it, I will say to our listeners.

Yeah. And there was one that didn't make the initial cut, but is in the DVD. It's a Chekhov on wires. It's a flying version of a Chekhov play in which the Russian nobility are sipping tea at a dacha in the countryside. Very Chekhovian. But two or three of the characters fly. They fly in on wires. They fly out.

They make entrances and exits on wires. That was restored for the DVD? Because I haven't seen it since the movies. I think it's on the DVD. Oh, got to get my hands on that. And just getting back for a second, did Shaw and Dreyfus ever get along with each other during the No, they

had an ongoing rivalry, animosity. Dreyfus got back at Shaw, but Shaw was, I think, smoking at the time, or drinking. I think they may have been on a lunch break when Shaw was having a shot of whiskey with lunch. And he said, no, this is really a bad habit.

I should stop it. And Dreyfus said, that's easy, and took the shot glass out of his hands and threw it over the side, which caused a gasp from the crew because you don't take you don't take a man's drink and throw it away when he's still drinking but Dreyfus did that and uh it it didn't make them love each other love each other any much anymore it could have only helped on screen because there's there's there's there's animosity in the relationship between Hooper and Quint. Yeah, that tension is there. And it works so well for the story that when Scheider says, you know, when we get out, you're not going to do this when we're out there, are you?

You know, fighting with each other. Yes, we are. Yeah, perfect. This is the perfect dynamics uh and again speaking of you directing carl and gilbert and i both watch this we've both seen it but we watched it again yesterday as the uh wonderful absent-minded waiter oh yeah that works with you it's just great seven minutes of bliss it's just like a mini ste Martin film. Yes. Yeah. It was originally, I guess he wrote it as a sketch for Sonny and Cher. I guess he made it, but not for himself.

I think it was probably for Sonny. People forget he was a writer on many sketch shows. Yeah. Including the Smothers Brothers with you and Glen Campbell. Yeah, that's where we met. So he had written it, and when we were at Paramount, when we'd gotten the contract to do the jerk at Paramount, the guy was David Picker, who was president of Paramount at the time,

actually understood Steve. He got Steve and saw that he was going to be a big star. So he signed him to the studio for like a three-picture deal. And as part of that, he said he said you know in the old days if i was running a studio and he had an up-and-coming comic like steve we'd put him in a couple of b pictures as a comic sidekick you know jack oaky or something you know some some semi funny person and. But so the screen audience would get to know the guy, and then when he was ready, you'd give him a vehicle to star in. Well, the studio system and those kind of releases don't exist anymore, but Picker's genius was, okay, we'll make a short,

and we'll attach it to, I think it was going to go out with Grease, because we know Grease is going to be a big picture, and if we give the short to the exhibitors for nothing, we just splice it on so when they run Grease, they'll run the short. Then the film audiences who are coming to the theaters to see a big movie, they'll see Steve Martin on the big screen, and they'll automatically accept him as a movie star. Smart thinking. because at the moment he was a comic and he was starting to play big rooms like the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in LA, but 2,000 seaters, 2,500 seaters.

He hadn't become a stadium comic yet. That was just as he was breaking. And then so he said, we'll do the short subject. And Carl, you're, you know, you and Steve are writing,

you know, you, you can direct it. I said, great. Cause I was hoping to direct the movie when it came out. So I, I, I did as good a job as I could on the short,

which was great. I mean, you know, we call, we got our, our friends to be in it, uh, Terry Gar and,

and Buck Henry and some of the, some committee people in the kitchen, on the kitchen staff. And I remember, you know, we shot for a day or two and then we were done shooting. We only had the set for two days. And I went to dailies and I realized, and it was the first big thing I had directed with, you know directed with big cameras and a real crew and a real set on a real lot.

And when I saw that it would cut together, I was kind of walking. We were walking back from the screening room, and I basically went off where nobody could hear me and went, yeah, yeah, good, whoo. You know, I vis-audibly said yes. That's nice. You had a moment for yourself. Yeah, yeah, good. Woo. You know, I vis-audibly said yes. That's nice. You had a moment for yourself.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it did work out really well. It's so good. You know, it's funny. Larry Hankin did a short subject a year later called Solly's Diner, also a comedy, which was also nominated for an Academy Award. So I went, I was a member of the Academy, and on the live-action short subjects,

they have a screening at the Academy. You vote, you have to go to the screening to vote because as though, you know, you can't see the movies anywhere. So I went to the screening at the Academy for the five live-action short subjects, and I'm watching, and, you know, absent-minded waiter plays, it gets big laughs,

and then comes a movie about paraplegics playing basketball. Veteran, wounded veterans. Oh, is that Inside Moves, Richard Donner's movie? It was what Donner's movie was based on. It was a Canadian. I see. It was from the Canadian film board, which, you know, kind of stack the deck in favor. Cause most of the shorts made in those days were made by Canada,

you know, Canadians. So I saw the guys in the wheelchairs. I said, Oh, you know, when it comes to comedy versus guys in wheelchairs, the guys in wheelchairs win every time.

So then Larry, so then Larry, so then Larry Hankin makes his short, which is a comedy, and we go to the screening, A, so we can vote for it, and we're watching the other shorts, and they're not so good, and Larry's short plays very well. And then comes a short by Lynn Lipman called Number Hour Days,

and it's about Holocaust survivors living in Santa Monica, 80-year-old people with tattoos on their arms. And I said to Hank, that's it. You know, you're done. You know the Academy voters. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we had M. Emmett Walsh here and Bill Macy.

You're the third person we've had here associated with the gas station scene. Yes. In The Jerk, which is just a wonderful piece of comedy. Yes, yeah. How did you guys write? I know that Steve Martin and Carl Reiner were carpooling to work and coming up with things because it was during the gas shortage. How did you guys sit down? What was your process, you and Steve?

Well, they said, you know, Steve approached me and said, look, you know, you did the comedy with Pryor, and I'm doing a script. I have never written a movie. Can we collaborate? I said, sure, of course. So we made a deal, and they gave us a little office in the writer's building at Paramount because it was still a Paramount picture at that time. And we'd show up, and they had a couple of IBM Selectrics

and yellow pads and pencils and nothing. You know, day after day, looking at each other going, well, what about, what if, you know. And then after like two weeks of no progress whatsoever, Steve said, well, my manager thinks it should be about money because everybody's interested in money. So we said, okay, something about money. And then Steve said, there's a line in my act that always gets a laugh.

Whether the act is working or not, it's like a saver, and I hate to use it, but, you know, because as Gilbert knows, when you do something for your act in a you know on in media it kind of gets you can't then when you do it in your act they say well he stole that from his you know the film so so steve says i was born a poor black child and then we that it hit us we wait a second what if you were born a poor black child? You know, how would that play out later? I mean, you would grow up in a family.

So we wrote the whole first, you know, the opening scenes with the family in the Delta Blues country in the South. And so that was the first scene we wrote. And then after that, it became a road movie. He hits the road and he winds up in L.A. And then there was a regime change at Paramount. The new guys, Barry Diller and Mike Eisner, didn't want to do any Steve Martin projects. So they outvoted David Picker. You were halfway through writing the script at this point?

It was done. Oh, it was done? No, no. It was half done. Uh-huh. And they weren't much interested in it. And it needed a rewrite. And I was unavailable or for some reason I couldn't work on the rewrite.

And I was unavailable or for some reason I couldn't work on the rewrite. So they got Michael Elias, who was another comedy writer who had really good chops. And Steve knew him and trusted him. So Michael Elias and Steve worked on the next couple of drafts. And then David Picker, as executive producer, made a great deal with Paramount. He said, look, you still owe us for two more movies, you know, whether you make them or not. So you can either spend $500,000 or $800,000 of the studio's money on scripts, or you can give Steve clear title to the short, clear title to the screenplay that he wrote, and we'll walk away and everybody's happy you don't have

to make a steve martin movie and we who want to make a steve martin movie can certainly place it elsewhere which they did they made a deal at universal like in a minute and a half and it became a universal picture a low budget comedy by the way like 3.1 million or something like that. Yeah. We will return to Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast after this. And how did you become Iron Balls McGinty? Which we were, you know, we were going to ask that, Carl. Yeah. Yes. Well, we were, they, you know, they said, you know, do you want to be in the film?

I said, yeah. You know, what scene? They said, do you want to be in the film? I said, yeah. He said, well, there's a scene that ends in a fight at this fancy Beverly Hills house, which the exterior was different from the interior. So I said, okay. So I showed up for my one day of filming as one of the four bad guys who Steve beats up. for my one day of filming as one of the four bad guys

who Steve beats up. And I have some dialogue in the scene, you know, walk and talk. And then the fight breaks out and the last thing was the kick, which was kind of nerve wracking because, you know, we didn't have stunt doubles.

I mean, there was a there was a fight there was a fight advisor on the set who like showed and he showed steve how to kick me in the walls without hurting me so talk about business talk about trusting your fellow actor but so we we filmed the scene you know the kick, you know, he hops up and down. He hurt his foot. And then in editing, they actually found the character didn't have a name. It was, you know, Thug 2, Thug 3, you know, just the four guys, one of whom was a stuntman and a wrestler, Gene LaBelle. Anyway, so – and Lenny Montana from The Godfather. Oh, Luca Brasi.

Luca Brasi's in that scene. So it was in post-production that they put in the clank sound and then wrote the dialogue for the restaurant scene where the cut is, you know, you hear clank and then you cut to Bernadette Peters comforting Steve, said, oh, you had no way of knowing that was Iron Balls McGinty. It's just so fantastic.

This is, you know, the joke like came together over time, you know, in shooting and post-production. One of the biggest laughs in the theater, the first time I saw it it and it stayed with me and and they i heard the big disappointment to steve martin was when he's singing you belong to me oh it's such a sweet scene yeah because he's playing the ukulele yeah he wanted it to be a touching moment. Yeah. But he said that people were, like, using that scene to go to the bathroom and buy popcorn. Yeah. You know, that's the problem, you know.

I mean, it's—and, of course, you know, soon after that, he became one of, you know, wild and crazy guys. Right. And you know, that, you know, and then he burnt out on performing comedy. I mean, soon after that,

when he was doing stadium shows, he played out the season and they just didn't perform live again for 10 years. I mean, he just burnt out on it. Yeah. Wanted to do different things. By the way, only a couple of years later,

he makes Pennies from Heaven with Herbert Ross. And boy, I'm in the group that thinks that film is sadly underrated and unappreciated. Yeah, I was not a fan of it. I mean, congratulations to Steve for learning how to tap dance. He's so good at it. And congratulations to Chris Walken, who has one of the greatest.

Yeah, he steals them. He steals them. Steals his scene great. Everybody forgot that Chris Walken was a chorus boy on Broadway. He was a hoper, yeah. Yeah, he's a dancer. And he did a great job. Did Stanley Kubrick love the jerk?

Do you know anything about this? I have no idea. I'd heard that he wanted to work with Steve Martin because he loved the jerk so much. Well, sadly, nobody ever told Steve. Interesting. I heard that Christopher Walken, his dream in life really was to just be a song and dance man. I think that's true. a song and dance man.

I think that's true, because he, you know, if you've ever, I mean, my first job in the theater was in summer stock in college where we were doing musical theater. You know, I was a stage manager and I played small parts.

But there's something infectious about, you know, Broadway musical theater that if you do that successfully, you don't want to do anything. Anything else is not as much fun because every night is a new audience. Every night you get this adulation from a live audience, this incredible positive feedback. The one thing I haven't done is Broadway. I've done almost everything in show business.

But the Jaws log is currently we're negotiating an option for someone to do it as a Broadway musical. How bizarre! I have no idea how they're going to do it. I don't know what the musical numbers are going to be, but it's a Broadway musical. How bizarre. I have no idea how they're going to do it. This has to happen, Carl. I don't know what the musical numbers are

going to be, but it's a reputable composer-lyricist team who've had shows on Broadway, and they think they can do it. So, more power to them. I mean, I can't wait, because I want, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't we all

want at that moment, you know, five minutes, Mr. Gottfried, orchestra's in the pit. That's usually when Gilbert panics and wishes the theater would flood. Yes. So he doesn't have to go on. Maestro's in the pit, overture, five minutes, mister. You know, Gilbert, you wouldn't mind cannibalizing your act to put something, to make a movie from one of your stand-up bits.

Oh, yeah. As Carl was saying that Steve did with the black, born a poor black child. Yeah, but I know that feeling definitely where you think, okay, now when I go up, they're going to all go, all right, yeah, I heard that joke already. Yeah, yeah. It's a cross comics have to bear. I mean, when we were doing the Smothers show, we had like four working comics on the staff. Murray Roman, Steve, Bob Einstein was funny.

John Hartford was a performer. I was a performer. And the Smothers, of course, had been a nightclub act for 20 years by that point. And there was always this moment where, you know, nobody in the writer's room can come up with a gag, and you need a joke, or you need a blackout for a sketch. And somebody who is a performer goes, all right, here's something that I know this works, because it's in my act or i've heard you know and then you know you painfully

give it up and then it becomes belongs to the ages after that it's no it's no longer yours especially if some other actor delivers a line that's that's that's the worst part they get the credit for being funny you were you were you discovered by by uh for lack of a better word by dick and tom when you were performing in L.A. live with the committee? Yeah, we were at the Tiffany Theater right up on the Sunset Strip. Six nights a week, two shows a night, three on Saturday. That was a wonderful time. A lot of people came to see the show.

And it was fun to do. I mean, it was Los Angeles in 1968, right after the Summer of Love and all of that, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And what a great writing staff. Yeah, that was. I mean, Lorenzo Music and Einstein, who we had here, who's nuts. Yes. And Mason Williams and Alan Bly. And I don't know if Pat Paulson was in the writer's room, too.

Well, a guy named Cecil Tuck who wrote with Pat was Pat's writer in the room. He specialized in the Paulson monologues. So Cecil Tuck, yeah. And John Hartford was a great instrumentalist and a solo performer in his own right before. Not like Glen Campbell, but he was a talented onstage performer. And Steve, too. And, of course, Steve. Was on that writing staff.

You described that experience on the Smothers Brothers show as all highs, no lows. Yeah. 30 million viewers a week. Yeah. It's kind of inconceivable now, you know, the kind of numbers in the three network universe. If you were a top 10 show, you know, like I say, 30 million viewers a week. You became part of the culture.

Stuff that you did would wind up, you know, part of the culture. People would be, people would quote your own lines back. Water cooler show. Yeah. Treva Silverman once said, she was a very successful writer on MTM. Treva wrote the Chuckles the Clown episode of the. Mary Tyler Moore. Mary Tyler Moore show.

And one time Treva was a New Yorker who commuted back and forth, you know, fly over country. But one trip, she decided to get off the plane in Denver and rent a car and, like, see America for a little while because she had some time on hiatus. So she gets off the plane, rents a car. So she gets off the plane, rents a car, and before she gets out of the rental car lot, 10 people have said to her, sorry about that. They're doing get smart lines. They're doing Mary. Oh, Mary. They were doing lines, and she fled back to L.A. and said, oh, my God, we're telling them what to say. I don't know what to say until we write it.

And she just came back with a, you know, convinced that the media had too much power. And you you said you don't believe comedy could be taught yeah it's by the time you know what a sense of humor is it's too late to get one you know you're either somehow you're either funny or you're not and you you can learn like the craft i mean you can teach somebody you know to do things in threes or to hold for hold for a laugh you can teach them mechanics but to be inspired to do it and create it is one of the unknowables like an ear like having an ear for music maybe yeah it's something you're born with or or or that you learn it at such an early age. So I don't know how you would,

if they allowed this kind of experimentation, if they gave you a three-year-old and said, make a comedian out of this person, what would you have to do for the next 10 years to make that kid funny. I mean, you know, it's,

it's, you know, it would probably be cruel. I mean, I imagine, I would imagine. So, you know,

what a great problem. I mean, just Gilbert, we should ask our friends, if you were given an infant to make a comedian out of him or her, how would you do that? I think your son is becoming a comedian. Yes. I think you're going to deal with that.

My son, once my son learned the word penis, that became his punchline for everything. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it had a penis. Ha ha. It works. Ask you about some of these guest stars on the Smothers Brothers show. Oh, yeah. Because obviously the show was, you guys were on top of the world.

We talked about it. It was a water cooler show. It was a show on everybody's lips. Jonathan Winters, Moms Mabley, Liberace, Jack Benny, Woody Allen, we talked about it was a water cooler show was a show on everybody's lips jonathan winters moms mabley liberace jack benny woody allen of george burns mickey rooney don rickles any anything stand out any any story about anybody uh liberace was great because he was a very serious showman. He understood showbiz. And we had a sketch where Bob Einstein plays the first appearance of Officer Judy. Oh, Officer Judy, yeah. Who stops

Liberace from playing the piano and says, you're doing the minute waltz in 48 seconds. You're going too fast or something. It was a speeding ticket for playing too fast. And we were worried that Liberace was all full of himself and was doing Las Vegas and was that guy. And boy, he was first at rehearsal. He was pure show business.

He understood his responsibilities. He understood his character as being kind of flamboyantly out there uh and and you know off stage he wasn't nearly as camp as he was on stage uh so you know you got to see you got to see in a variety show where people are doing sometimes doing things outside their comfort zone for a laugh. You can judge a lot about a character, about an actor. If, if they would play outside their comfort zone and let somebody else get the

laugh, you know, some, some never got it. You know, some, some were very full of themselves. And I heard, like, they say the Smothers Brothers came at a perfect time

because all the old greats were still around. Yeah. And when they accepted the Smothers Brothers, the older audience said, oh, okay. Yeah, that's what Bob said. Yeah. Because the first two seasons, before the brothers inherited the show, when they had some network-approved producers and like that,

the network wanted television stars to do the show, and I guess they insisted they, they, um, um, they've insisted on it and the Smothers Brothers would reach out and they would get people like Jack Benny and George Burns to do the show. And the Sunday night Bonanza audience, which was the audience that we took by force, Bonanza was the number one show. And then the Smothers Brothers came on the air

and knocked them out of the number one slot. So that Sunday night audience, which is especially in 1966, 67, 68, Sunday night was the most watched night of television. 8 o'clock was the prime that was the Ed Sullivan slot. It was the prime you know that was the ed sullivan slot uh the it was uh it was great to to have a comedy show in there so yeah having the established stars on made it acceptable and then once once they became accepted then they became then they were just you just adorable scamps. Did you work with Groucho when he hosted a music scene?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was that experience like? Well, David Steinberg was a Groucho groupie. Right. And he desperately wanted the part. There was a musical called Minnie's Boys. Oh, sure. That was about the Marx Brothers. We just had Peter Riegert here

who was in the New York production. Yeah, and Steinberg wanted that part and he never got it, but he was a Groucho groupie and he wanted to have him on the show and Groucho was tentative, but he agreed to meet with the writers and David, so we went over to

Groucho's house to pitch him on doing the show, trying to get him to agree. And that was when Aaron Fleming was taking care of him. And he was frail, but still very funny. And we were admiring the posters on the wall, because he had all this souvenirs of a career in show business, pictures of the Marx Brothers with the King and Queen of England, and just all this wonderful memorabilia. And we're looking at it, and we're gawking. I mean, we go, wow, whoever thought?

gawking. I mean, we go, wow, you know, whoever thought. And Groucho murmurs an aside to the two guys, writers, myself and one of the other writers, who were just within earshot. He said, because we were saying, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. And Groucho

said, I would trade it all for one good erection. It's a great story. And I heard Tommy, Tommy Smothers didn't get along with, was it the president of the network? Bob Wright at CBS. Yeah, when we were canceled,

it was half of it was, you know, the network's concern with progressive politics and us being against the war in Vietnam and doing that, being activists and all that. But the unsung half of that conflict was that Tommy and Bob Wright, who was I think the head of programming at CBS at the time, really disliked each other as people. And when CBS had to cancel the show, they had to do it on some bullshit contractual terms because personal taste didn't matter. If Tommy was ignoring Bob Wright's notes and not taking his calls, there was nothing Wright could do about it except cancel the show.

And the distrust level was so high toward the end of the series that Tommy – and the network had a very heavy hand in editing the show. I mean, if they didn't like something, they would just take a meat cleaver to it. Because two-inch high-band tape, which is how the show was recorded, it was very difficult to edit in those days. And you didn't want to edit the show. You could cut during a blackout. But to edit in the middle of a scene was difficult and obvious.

And the network would just do some clumsy awful edits so in order to prevent the network from tampering with the show tommy read the contract very carefully and there's uh in every contract there's what they call delivery terms you know you will deliver a two high-band master tape with these technical qualifications at such and such a time. So Tommy figured out that if he could get the tape to New York on a Friday night for Sunday air, he was within the limits of the contract. So he would hold back the show. He wouldn't show it to the network. He wouldn't preview it. And we had a guy, an intern whose principal job was on Friday morning. They'd

give him the tape in the editing bay and he'd hand carry, they'd buy him a ticket to New York. He'd fly to New York, take a cab to NBC and deliver the tape of Sunday's show. And that drove the network crazy because of course the, the only thing that they did was the only thing they could do was they could preview it on closed circuit for the affiliates and in the red States and, you know, all the, you know,

how should, how should I describe them? The, the mouth breathing, knuckle dragging, Neanderthal cousin, fucking red state people would look at the show. And if they saw something they didn't like,

they would instruct the transmitting engineer to turn the sound down on Sunday night. So the audience, you know, go, what? You know, they wouldn't hear it.

And then they turn the sound back up and nobody would know. Everybody would think it was their TV set or it was a glitch, but that was the only way the red state conservatives could censor the show. Did you know that, Gilbert? No. You were actually turning the volume down on the transmission. Boy! Yeah, that came out in the trial because when the Smothers sued CBS for wrongful termination, CBS's defense was, well, you weren't satisfying the delivery requirements.

You were in breach of contract. And in the depositions and in the discovery phase, they learned that the network was doing this to having the transmitter engineers do that stuff. Now let's get to Caveman with Ringo Starr. And Jack Guilford. Yeah. And Avery Schreiber. And Avery Schreiber. Shelley Long.

It was a great Dennis Quaid. Great cast. Yep. Yeah. I mean, Gilbert and I were talking about it. I mean, an ambitious undertaking to try to not only make a comedy out of One Million Years B.C., but to not use dialogue for 90 minutes. Yeah, that was a challenge. And after the movie came out, a French director named Jean-Jacques Arnault made a movie of Clan of the Cave Bear, which was also about prehistoric man you know with daryl hannah

playing the oh yeah yeah yeah and they made a big deal about having anthony burgess do the script and you know he was an expert in linguistics and he could they invented a language so i i i went to see a screening of it and the director was there was a new york screening so i went up to jean-jacques and i said you know uh i had a similar problem that you have and you know because there was no language and we have to make a movie without language so i had to invent a language also and he just turned his back on me and walked away because he was a serious filmmaker you're see. You're only a comedian.

I'm only a comedian. I was just doing a funny film. And yet, John Matuszak, who was a natural actor, he was a football player. Of course. A great football player. But he was also a natural actor. He got it.

He could do gibberish, you know, Atuka, Lunda, Lana. He could do that stuff and make it sound like dialogue. He had that knack. And it's from that movie that Ringo married Barbara Bach. You were a matchmaker, Carl.

I've been a matchmaker on two movies. On Dr. Detroit is where... Oh, Donna Dixon, right. Met Donna Dixon and fell for her. Very good. And I padded her part a little bit to give her more to do with Dan. So I have that.

And then Ringo and Barbara both started Caveman with a different pair of partners. Ringo was going with a wonderful photographer named Nancy Andrews, and Barbara was dating some italian industrialist because that's what bond girls did if you were a bond girl you married an italian industrialist and she was of i can name two jewish bond girls she's one of them barbara bach and jane seymour very good he can also name two Jewish Bond villains, Carl. Ooh. Yes.

Gertrude? Well, the first one. Gertrude. Dr. No, Joseph Weissman. Joseph Weissman, a notorious Jew. Right. And he was notorious. Aren't they all?

But, and also, a trick one, Yafit Kodo. I didn't didn't you know i didn't know that we found out he was jewish we assumed he converted like sammy but no jewish from childhood wow isn't that strange go figure i'm gonna i'm gonna write an auto i want my autobiography to be called Jewish from Childhood. Who wasn't? There is a biography. I think it's a very serious autobiography called Born This Way. You know, watching Caveman yesterday, and it almost plays like a silent film. Because it's a lot of visual gags.

Yeah. Almost like Keaton's Three Ages. Yeah. Which I watched very carefully. I'm sure. And then I remember there's a gag in Caveman where the words come on the screen, 1 million BC, and then it says 1230 PM. What, it says October30 p.m.

What, it says October 9th? Yeah. It turns out that I didn't know that, but I think that's John Lennon's birthday. It is. Yeah. Yeah, I thought that was an intentional homage. No, no, that was just a fun coincidence. It was the joke to say, you know, a million years ago, Tuesday, October 30th, or whatever the date was.

And what was Ringo like to work with? You called Richard Lester for advice before you worked with Ringo? Yeah. I had been in a movie called Petulia, which shot in San Francisco. Sure, great movie. And all the committee, everybody in San Francisco for movie trivia music

buffs, it's the only movie in which a Jefferson airplane and the Grateful Dead appear and play. I love that picture. So I had a scene with George C. Scott, and I was directed by Richard Lester, and he was a great guy. He hung around the committee, appreciated what we did. He cast a lot of committee people in the movie. So when I knew I was going to be working with Ringo, I called Richard Lester in London.

I said, hey, what can you tell me about working with Ringo? And he said, well, he said, he's not a trained actor. I get that. He said, what I did, and I suggest you do it, is use two cameras. When you're shooting Ringo, it's going to be very hard to get him to match because he you know no no two takes are the same and you if you want to use him if you want to match in editing best to have him on an isolated camera on his close-ups so you've got something that you know that that will be synchronous that you can work with so uh i i took the advice and wherever i could shoot with two cameras, I had one on Ringo so I could edit. And luckily Dennis Quaid is preternaturally gifted at matching. He can remember exactly where his hands were

and how his head was tipped when he read whatever line. We did some pickups on the dragonfly scene with the squishing. Yeah. whatever line we did some pickups on the dragonfly scene you know with the squishing yeah we did some pickups on that scene like seven weeks after we shot it in a different you know we we shot it in durango mexico and then we had to do a pickup a couple of shots that we needed for editing we did them on the back lot at churubusco studios in mexico city and dennis you know so the editor comes down to the set with film clips to show Dennis, you know, what he was doing at the time. And Dennis without, you know, in the first

rehearsal, just nailed it, just did all the same things he did seven weeks ago physically, and no problem matching. And then, and luckily, I had another camera on Ringo. So I got all of Ringo's reactions. So it worked out great. And then Ringo was very conscientious about if I told him I needed him to do something for camera, he would say, oh, it doesn't make any sense, but I know the camera needs me to do this, so I will. I'll do that. And he was a pleasure. Barbara Goldbach, that's her name.

Wow. There you go, Gil. Shebara goldbach the jewish bond girl daughter of a new york jewish uh la uh new york jewish detective wow her dad's a cop even more interesting a jewish detective yes and his daughter's a bond girl what about the great jack gilford we've had a couple of people here who've worked with him. Oh, the best. And we just adore him. Yeah, he was wonderful. We were shooting in Mexico on Passover, and Jack's wife organized a Seder for the crew in Mexico City.

So in the middle of Mexico, we went up to some, there's a suburb of Mexico City called Polanco, which is like the Jewish, it's the Beverly Hills of Mexico City. And we went to a Jewish center and had a real seder with haganas and jack gilford and john matusak they all answered you know did the four questions uh and and i had a connection with gilford uh with uh zero mostel uh because they had done a funny thing on Broadway. And my uncle was an accountant who was partners with Zero Mostel's brother. There was an accounting firm called Gottlieb and Mostel.

Wow. Accountants. So I kind of knew about Zero Mostelelle and i could talk to jack about that then we talked about radio days and the blacklist i mean you know he was terribly affected affected by the blacklist yeah uh and but a sweetheart madeline madeline gilford that was what was some of the stories he told you about the blacklist? It was so patently unfair. There was a guy who had a chain of, a small chain of supermarkets

in upstate New York, and he was a patriot. And he published, at his own expense, an eight-page flyer throwaway called Red Channels, in which he named names of commies and commie sympathizers. Oh, sure.

With not much research going into it. I mean, just basically whoever he thought was a commie Jew. Lee Grant was in there and got blacklisted. Yeah, and he would just put their names down and say they are Reds. And Jack was having a wonderful career in radio. they are Reds. And Jack was having a wonderful career in radio. He was on his way and doing very well in commercials and on radio. And then one day

the calls just stopped coming. And then somebody said, have you seen this? And they showed him a copy of Red Channels in which he was named. And he said, it was New York City. Everybody went to those meetings. It was like New York in the 30s. Russia was the great experiment. A lot of people were what they called premature anti-fascists because they were against Hitler at one time.

And the only other people who were against Hitler were Bolsheviks. And, you know, Lindbergh thought Hitler was the best thing ever. So there was a lot of America firsters, which was a movement that existed before our present. Everything was new again. Yes. I was always fascinated when I heard that thing, you know, like the pre-fascist. Premature anti-fascists. Yes.

I mean, like, when was it too early to be against Hitler? Well, as you said, some of them just went to one meeting. I had a screenwriting teacher who was friends with Zero, a gentleman named Arnaud Dussault. Yeah. And he went up writing horror films in Mexico, like the Horror Express with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Sure. But he, you know, he went to a couple of meetings. He wasn't a communist.

They were looking for alternatives. They were looking for, they were interested in ideas. Yeah, there seemed to be a lot of problems. You know, the Stalinist, the revelations of the Stalin era had not surfaced yet. You know, Lillian Hellman refused to believe it even when it did happen. I think Lillian Hellman was an unreconstructed Stalinist. I hear. Don't hold me to this. But, yeah, there's a wonderful Philip Roth novel called The Plot Against America

where he does an alternative history where Lindbergh becomes president in 38 and wants to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler and start rounding up the Jews in the U.S. It's a very plausible, scary novel. It could happen here under certain circumstances. Yeah, we just lost Philip Roth, too. Tell us, as we wrap it up, Carl, our fans would be upset if we didn't ask you about working with the great Randall and the great Klugman on The Odd Couple. Again, consummate pros.

Tony Randall once I saw him we were at the table read on a weekly show the first time the actors see the script is basically gets delivered to their house the night before the table read that's the show you're going to shoot that week

so we're at the table read and Tony Randall is reading and he gets to a point in the script he throws the script across the room and says don't underline everybody goes what he says if the line or the word requires emphasis trust the actor to understand that in context of the dialogue don't tell me that this is an important line by underlining it it doesn't make it important if it's not if it's a you know if it's a misplaced emphasis just don't don't underline don't tell me

what when to underline don't tell me when to accent a word i'll find it he's very very angry about it he felt that you know we were demeaning the craft of acting by indicating with italics or underlining that certain words required emphasis. He said it should be obvious from the text. How did you like Lugman? How did you find him? He was great.

He would just smoke cigars and go off to the bookies between takes. He was a serious gambling guy. So they were those two characters. Very, very much so. Yeah, I mean, Tony Randall was fussy and meticulous, and Klugman was kind of a sloppy guy.

And both Oscar Madisons liked the ponies and liked to bet. I mean, of course, you've heard the stories about Matthau. Yeah. I heard that Carol Matthau had to borrow money to bury Matthau because he had gone through a lot. But he's in Westwood Cemetery. I think he's over there. It's an expensive cemetery.

He got in. Yeah. What a wonderful actor. Carl, I hope this thing happens. By the way, we could talk to you for hours. We could talk to you about your love of pirate movies and how you grew up in New York reading pulps and listening to radio dramas and all this cool stuff. I hope this Jaws thing happens.

I hope this Jaws log musical. It's a fascinating... Me too. I just want to be backstage and see the chorus girls coming down the spiral staircase, clattering in their high heels in their skimpy costumes, and the stage manager saying, 10 minutes, please, places for the opening.

Five minutes, Ms. Bryce. That's the show business I signed up for 50 years ago. I also heard you say, this is interesting, the last thing I have on my card is that you heard Spielberg lament the fact that he wouldn't be able to make half the movies of his favorite directors because the studio system was over. Yeah. I found that interesting.

He said that to, he was, I was writing, he was going to accept the Fred Zinnemann Award or something. I was going to ghostwrite some remarks for him. So we were chatting at the time. We were still seeing each other on a more or less regular basis. And he told a story to me. He was at Fox working on something. The editor, the guy who was the executive in charge of editorial, was a guy named William Hornbeck. And Stephen didn't know who Hornbeck was,

and there was no IMDB at that time. So he casually mentioned, he says, you were an editor before you became the vice president in charge of editorial. The guy says, yeah. He says, I cut a few films. So Steven said, well, what films did you do? So he started naming them. You know, High Noon, Gentleman's Agreement. You know, there's just a cascade of Hollywood history. And Steven said, you know, just listening to him, I realized that even, and this was after, you know, Indiana Jones and after ET

and, you know, this was after, after he, this was when he was already Steven Spielberg. He said, I don't, I don't have any trouble getting a movie made, but I won't have time in my life to do what these guys did when they were doing two three movies you know a year yeah and my my favorite uh unsung director is a guy named michael cortez sure we're just talking about him the other night yeah and if you look at cortez's credits he's got like you know 80 or 100 films and like in the same year he directed uh casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy. Amazing. What other director does that?

It's just impossible these days. Or Victor Fleming making The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind within 18 months, even though there were other directors. That used to be a movie trivia joke. What do these three films have in common? Wizard of Oz. Gone with the Wind. gone with the wind gone with the wind and captain's courageous with spencer tracy right they were all directed by victor fleming and so how come there are no victor fleming festivals that's interesting interesting and if you look go ahead no no you go i was just gonna say, you're still out there.

You're still speaking at Jaws conventions. You're busy. This thing was just optioned. I'm writing a musical. You're writing a musical. It takes place in Australia in 1916. It's about Australia and vaudeville. Wow.

I would love to see that. Oh, yeah. Based on a true story my my ex-wife's uncle lou handman was a songwriter composer in the golden age of songwriting and in 1916 he was a young vaudeville guy who couldn't get a job on broadway so he and his partner there were song and dance act lou played the piano and jack cook danced song boys from song land they build themselves and uh they couldn't get a job so they stowed away on a freighter headed for the british empire somewhere because they figured the british empire was fighting world war one and there were a lot of there was a shortage of young men so if they went somewhere where all the young men were at war, at least they could get a job. So they stowed away. They were arrested on ship. They were discovered. The captain thought

they were spies, German spies, because they were Jews from New York, Hebrews from New York. So he jailed them as spies. They took them off the ship in chains in auckland new zealand and they said no no we're not spies we're entertainers and they got a uh expert witness who was a playing it was an american vaudevillian who happened to be playing in auckland and he was brought into court and he vouched for them he talked to them he said yeah they're there they are who they say they are they're green but they're not you know they're not spies and then a guy in the back of the courtroom this is all true it's a newspaper clippings of the period i have the newspaper clippings wow a guy raises his hand and says if you please your worship the judge if you will

release these boys i will put them to work in my theater. My name is Benjamin Fuller. I own the Princess Theater in downtown Auckland. So the judge said, okay. They had played the piano in the courtroom to convince. So they left the courtroom. They went on stage. They were billed as the stowaways because they had made all the newspapers down under as these two guys who stowed away aboard a ship. They were billed as the stowaways.

They were a hit. They were held over, and then Fuller signed them to a contract, and for the next year and a half, they played all over Australia and New Zealand, and Lou fell in love, and when America entered the war, Lou was a patriot, and he enlisted. He went to the American consulate in Johannesburg, South Africa, where they were playing at the time, and signed up for the draft.

In late 1917, Lou came back to America and was sent to Camp Upton on Long Island where Sergeant Irving Berlin was putting together a soldier show. And he was the piano player. This is great history. Yeah. And as a piano player, he played some of his songs for Irving Berlin. And Perlin said, who's publishing you? He says, nobody yet. So Berlin said, you come to work for me. You can be a song plugger. I need you. You're the rehearsal pianist for our big soldier show that we're doing on Broadway. And sure enough, Lou went to work for Irving Berlin and soon after published Are You Lonesome Tonight, which was written in 1922 and

debuted by my mother-in-law when she was 17 and a vaudeville star. She toured with her uncle lou very cool so the the the movie is about the the stowing away on a ship being discovered becoming a star and then leaving it to go come to america and write are you lonesome tonight and a hundred other hits but there's also personal history in it yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how I found the story. I didn't even know there was an Australian vaudeville. No. I suppose it makes sense.

And I can't wait to see this movie now. Exciting. Yeah. And you should write that autobiography, Peripheral Vision, Carl, that you've been threatening to write. Yeah. And I want to plug your books,

The Jaws Log. I want to plug your David Crosby books, Long Time Gone. And since then, we didn't even get into that Log. I want to plug your David Crosby books, Long Time Gone. And since then, we didn't even get into that. We'll talk to you about that another time. And The Little Blue Book for Filmmakers. Yep. A handy-dandy manual.

But I urge our listeners, if you love Jaws, as we love Jaws, as Gilbert and I, and don't listen to us, listen to John Landis and John Krasinski and Brian Singer and Rob Reiner and Steve Martin, who wrote the blurbs for the book. It is terrific. Gilbert and I, and don't listen to us. Listen to John Landis and John Krasinski and Brian Singer and Rob Reiner and Steve Martin, who wrote the blurbs for the book. It is, it is terrific. I've read it several times.

It's, it's arguably the best book about the making of a film. Thank you. And, uh, come back and we'll just talk, uh, Errol Flynn movies or Michael Curtin's movies.

I'd love to. Yeah. Now you guys are fun. Yes'd love to. Yeah. Now, you guys are fun. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. So are you.

Errol Flynn hated the Jews, right? Yes. That's the rumor. And he was from Australia. He was from Tasmania.

That's right. And he liked the young stuff, too. Oh, yeah. So they say. What was that? He wanted to title his autobiography in like me yes carl so much we didn't get to we'll talk to you about delta house next

time and and and richard pryor and kenna you've done you've just done too much and how many people by the way worked with a marx brother and a beetlele. Oh, my God. Not many. That's right. Wow. I never thought of it that way. It's a short list. It's a very short list. And Spielberg. So thanks for coming.

Thanks for schlepping. My pleasure. This has been Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast with my co-host Frank Santopadre. with my co-host Frank Santopadre, and we've been talking to the great Carl Gottlieb, or as he's known to his true friends, Iron Balls. Yeah. They couldn't even at least give you a Jewish name like Iron Balls Shapiro? I always wondered if the Jews had gone west, would all the western states have names like Shapiro's Crossing?

Fort Feinstein, Feinstein, you know, Gelbrecht, corners, you know, all those names. We'll talk to you next time, too, about what you gave Stephen for Close Encounters. But I was just happy to be here for the historic meeting of Gottlieb and Gottfried. Oh, that's right. Oh, one question before we go. I heard

that Lorraine Gary's yeah, Lorraine Gary's maiden name is Lorraine Gottfried. You know, I don't know that to be a fact, but I will ask her. I always do her as Gary, but I wouldn't be surprised. She married a Sheinberg. Yes, she did. You'd be surprised.

She married a Sheinberg. Yes, she did. I mean, I know 10,000 of our fans are going to go, oh, well, of course, and here's the entire history. Do we have 10,000 fans? Well, they're the ones listening who tune in by accident. Carl, we'll let you know when it's up. Okay. And we'll be in touch.

Our listeners will love this one. It's just got so much stuff in it. I look forward to it. Thank you, man. Thank you. Take care. Have a good one. You know, while you were playing that just now, I had the craziest fantasy that I could rise up, float, right down the end of this coronet, right through here, through these valves, right along this tube, come

right up against your lips, and give you a kiss. Come right up against your lips and give you a kiss. Why didn't you? I didn't want to get spit on me.