S1 Ep16: ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY EPISODE!

[00:00:15] Welcome to Homicide Life On The Set, a podcast about the Emmy Award winning television show Homicide Life On The Street. With myself, Chris Carr and Susan Ingram.

[00:01:09] Hello everybody and welcome to Homicide Life On The Set. So it's our one year anniversary. Susan, how are you doing? Woohoo! One year anniversary. We made it. We've done it. Yeah. It's kind of hard to believe, isn't it? I know. It is crazy, isn't it? To think there's been a year now and we've done so many interviews. I'm like, wow, it's all a bit of a crazy blur in a good way.

[00:01:30] But also, I think we should also acknowledge two years working on it because we put in almost a year of developing and figuring out what we were doing and contacting people. And thanks to your lovely wife, we have these great graphics. Thank you, Andy, for the awesome music. Yeah.

[00:01:49] So it really, it also marks our two year since Chris emailed me out of the blue and wanted to just talk about how Homicide was shot. And that was the impetus for the podcast, which has really just been a gift. I mean, thank you so much. Well, thank you. Because if you had not emailed me, this would not be happening. Well, if you hadn't replied, it wouldn't be happening either. Right. Exactly. So thank you.

[00:02:19] Right. And apparently some people did not reply. I think you said you sent out a couple of emails. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think... I would love to hear who didn't reply that we can like razz on now. Luckily for those people, my memory is so poor, I actually can't remember anymore. But I did email a few people in various positions in the camera department. And a few directors, actually, as well, just out of interest. Oh, really? Oh, I don't think... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And nobody got back to me other than you. So...

[00:02:49] Is this like, oh, somebody emailed me? But it's great. I'm glad it happened that way. Some of the best sort of, you know, sort of friendships do happen that way, you know, through random encounters, etc. It's been really cool. It's been a wild ride. Somebody wants to talk to me. I'll email them back.

[00:03:04] But also, I think, and I do sort of analyze this in my head a little bit. I do think for me, specifically, unlike many other people we've interviewed and many of the people on the show, that I walked off that set, whatever it was in the middle of season seven. That was the last thing I did in the business, except for some small... I did do some small projects around here with Todd Evans, who was our loader, who was also shooting some independent things himself.

[00:03:34] But that was the last thing I did in the business. And I think it's stuck with me maybe more heavily than other people that went on to do these incredible other, like 30 years of other, you know, other projects and big projects and big movies. And obviously other TV shows, other Tom Fontana projects, other David Simon projects.

[00:03:58] But that maybe I answered because I was like, oh, you know, that that because I still do miss being in the business. And it was around the 30th anniversary of the show starting filming, wasn't it? Because obviously, for me, the 30th anniversary is 2024, because I first saw it in 1974. But it was filming in 1992, if I remember correctly. Three, I think, was the first. 1993, yeah. Maybe we were shooting before three. Yeah.

[00:04:27] So for you, it was kind of like the 30th anniversary. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so I could imagine, yeah, I'm a person that's a reminisce about things. So, you know, yeah, timing, et cetera, if you catch the person at the right moment. It's been nice to share a journey with you because obviously this has been a very personal journey for you. I'm the outsider looking in, but for you, you're reconnecting with people. Not anymore, Chris. No, it's true.

[00:04:52] I've somehow become a guest star in the history of homicide now, which has been good. So, no, it's been amazing what an experience it's been. And obviously, being able to visit Baltimore, et cetera, was truly mind-blowing last year. I mean, it was, you know, as I jokingly say to some people, it was the most Baltimore experience I could have had because there I am with the cast and crew of Humicide outside what was the Humicide building in Baltimore. You can't really beat that.

[00:05:22] So it was a real, real wild ride. So just before we start our chat between ourselves, I just want to point out we'll be taking a mini break and taking April off. So there won't be an episode in April, but we will return in May and we will be returning on the 15th of May, which is a Thursday. And that'll be the second Thursday of each month. And that'll be our pattern going forward. So keep an eye out for us on the 15th of May and we will be back.

[00:05:51] Not to ramble on, but I was watching, I've been telling you, I've been re-binging. And I watched the episode, and I should have the names in front of me, I don't remember the title. The one where the little cadre of spy wannabes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. The one where the guy that gets buried alive. Yeah. On the parade grounds of Fort Holabird. That's it. Which, when Chris came to visit, Chris wanted to visit Fort Holabird.

[00:06:17] Not only, and I don't think I remembered that it was actually in an episode. Chris wanted to visit because it was a spy school in the 70s, 60s and 70s. Oh, from World War II till the 70s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. World War II. So it originally was, was it also, was it originally a hospital and then parts of it turned into the spy school? Yeah, memory took, yeah, yeah. I think the military intelligence took it over and, yeah, it became this sort of spy school.

[00:06:42] So I'm watching that episode last night and there's the only remaining building of the complex and also only remaining building that was the spy school, which is now a veteran's clubhouse. I don't know if it's still in use, but so when Chris came to visit, we went to Fort Holabird, which was right across the street from Jimmy's famous seafood, where he got his taste of steamed crabs for the first time. Yeah, so crabs and spies is a good combination. And so there's the building.

[00:07:10] I mean, I totally had forgotten that we, we had shot there. Although I think that was, I was not season six, I think between episodes nine and 14, something like that. I was on the John Waters film. They let me jump off and do something else and come back. So I don't think I actually worked on that, on that episode, but it was fun to see that. And the fact that we had actually visited it when you came to town. So, yeah, you really got the Cook's tour, the Ingram tour. Yeah, it was fantastic.

[00:07:39] It was fantastic driving around and walking around and, and then, yeah, in the harbour, seeing what I've dubbed Mahoney Towers now. It's the Luther Mahoney building. Yes, exactly. And I just watched that again. Yeah, yeah, no, it was so cool. I mean, it's so surreal because for me, you know, because it's weird because when, you know, being in England and your only experience of Baltimore is watching this TV show. So everything is sort of connected to that. So when you finally go there, it's such a weird experience to suddenly actually physically being there.

[00:08:09] It's a bit, for me, it's an equivalent of when, because we have a lot of historic buildings in the UK. With a bit of imagination, you can kind of take yourself, you know, read all these history books about these important conversations that happen in X, Y, or Z castle or whatever. And then you go there and it's a bit like that. It's sort of like going to a historic site. So when we went inside the Pendry and we saw obviously the empty ballroom and then you showed me where certain parts of the set were,

[00:08:36] it was akin to kind of, for me, like going into a castle or something. It was like, wow, this is where this happened and that happened. But, you know, obviously it doesn't look like it other than the bit of the window. Here's why they chopped the little boy's heads off. Oh, sorry. That's British history. I'm sorry. A lot of British history is chopping people's heads off. Yeah. And I live not too far from where some of that happened, you know. And there's even a pub that has a hangman's noose outside to celebrate such things. Lovely. You know, so. That's verboten here and we don't do that. No. Oh my goodness.

[00:09:05] But, but yeah, it's so funny. Was it like deja vu? Did you have a deja vu feeling too? Because you'd seen these places, like when we went to Vaccaro's or when we went to Fort McHenry, or is it just so different seeing it in person than watching it on the show? For the Pendry building, especially when I arrived at night, yes, it was very familiar and deja vu-ish. When going, to find out, the waterfront was the only one that was a bit of a disappointment because it's changed so much. Different inside.

[00:09:34] If anything, Cooper's looks more like the waterfront did in the show than the waterfront does. Right, because Cooper's hasn't changed inside. No. And when I went into Cooper's, I was trying, hang on, was this the bar they filmed in but they just changed the name? I was all confused for the first day of like, hang on, because Cooper's does feel more like the waterfront. Because also the waterfront is a lot bigger than I imagined it being. Because if for some reason on screen, it looks a bit smaller. I think they bumped out some walls and stuff for sure. Yeah.

[00:10:00] Because the area in the back with the pool table, I think has been way expanded. And of course, when they cleaned it out and painted everything white and put in the ceiling fans, it looks, yeah, it's very hard to recognize as, sorry to say, but sort of a dark grungy bar we were shooting in.

[00:10:47] Yeah. Wait a minute. Yeah, this isn't what we ordered. But it was really good. So it was like, so if you want a really good crab experience, I definitely recommend the waterfront. Yeah, that was good. That was good. Oh, dear. But yeah, so no, no, it's been awesome being a part of all this, really. And we've been told that the podcast inspired the reunion, which is amazing. So many people said that. That's crazy.

[00:11:14] We wouldn't be at the reunion if it hadn't been for the podcast. And I think it just really sort of, it was, and thank God for Stephanie Fontana and Kathy and Greer who put it all together. And if anybody else, name I missed. But the podcast got everybody talking and thinking back and it really sort of drew a circle around it, right?

[00:11:40] And then they just sort of tightened up that circle and got everybody. Well, not everybody because it was, you know, difficult to get all 6,000 people that worked on the show into Coopers. Yeah. But yeah, that was quite the experience. And I have to say to our listening audience that Chris was quite the star. It's the first time in my life I felt like a celebrity. In the last time probably.

[00:12:07] The night before they had a get together at one of the bars and I just went home because I tapped out on six years of bar experience in Phil's Point working on the show. But I don't remember if I was tired or what my problem was that day. We'd been driving around. Chris is immediately recognizable apparently now. His stature and his face and his voice is recognized all over the world now.

[00:12:36] Because didn't you say the guy, where were you recently? And as one of our rabid homicide fans from across the pond. Yeah, it's hilarious. Collared, collared Chris. It's so funny. So I was an extra on my friend Alex Barrett's new feature film. And it's a film called The Date because I actually didn't know the title of the film. I had to look this up because I wasn't sure. The Date, D-A-T-E? Yeah, The Date. Okay. And so I... You have to tell us when it comes out. Yeah, and I was a background extra in a bar.

[00:13:06] And I was roped into playing pool, which I'm terrible at. I'm terrible at playing pool. I'm terrible at all ball games, actually. But anyway, there's a whole other probably podcast in itself. So I was waiting for a fellow extra to join me. His name was Matt. I didn't know who Matt was, but he was sort of tangentially connected to various circles of friends of mine. So I'd never met Matt. But so anyway, so Matt finally turns up and everybody's like, oh, Matt, this is Chris. Chris is Matt. So we're having a general kind of quick chat about, oh, how do we know Alex? What do we do?

[00:13:37] And when I mentioned podcasting, Matt stopped me and said, hang on a minute. You're not Chris Carr from Homicide Life on the set, are you? And I was like, yes. And instantly he's like, oh, I love that podcast. And, you know, it was so funny. Wow, that's cool. And a whole new sort of friendship started from there because it's so nice and quite sadly rare experience to meet somebody else. He's actually seen Homicide. And then to be able to talk to him about it passionately is such a rare treat.

[00:14:06] And so Matt Murdock, who's also a filmmaker who went to the same university I did, but it was a couple of years ahead of me. He was inspired by Homicide and he was very much inspired by the kind of character driven nature of the show and has gone off to direct sort of short films. And I think also art films, if I remember correctly, that have been very much influenced just by that approach to things. And he's been to Baltimore himself. He came twice. So he's got some really cool Baltimore stories. I won't ruin them. It'd be nice to maybe have Matt on and other fans in the future.

[00:14:35] We want to have some super fans on at some point. Yeah. For sure. He did manage to come to Baltimore just as they, I think, wrapped the movie or season seven. So he did. And apparently there used to be a shop selling Homicide memorabilia briefly in Fells Point. And he went there. He managed to sneak into the Pendry and he actually got to, I think he, did he say he got to see the set? I can't remember now. But anyway, so he was a huge fan. Well, he snuck into the Pendry before it was the Pendry. Yeah, exactly.

[00:15:05] Before it was the Pendry. And then he came back not long ago, but he missed the homicide board in Coopers. So a lot of people missed this. So in Coopers, if you're going to go up the stairs, that's where you'll find the homicide board. The murder board. And he's from season six. So having a chat with Reed next to the homicide boards where I met Reed at the reunion. And we were trying to work out if they changed the board every season. I was going to say, how is it from season six? I don't know this.

[00:15:35] Well, yeah, it's from season six. So there's a question that needs to be answered somehow about whether they saved the board each season or whether for some reason season six they saved that board. Why it was different. But that particular board is specifically from season six. Oh. Well, since I'm now re-binging, I'm just about more than halfway through season six. So re-binging everything again. I'll see if I'll keep an eye out for that and see for whatever reason it looks different. It's interesting. In season seven. Yeah. So I don't know. Maybe they think they were going to get canceled.

[00:16:04] They packed everything up and then had to rebuild it again. I don't know. Because I think the squadron did get a redecoration in season seven. Yeah, maybe that was it. Yeah. Maybe that's what it is. I keep waiting as I'm watching season six. I'm like, you know, I guess the painting didn't happen until seven. Yeah. So, well, after, yes. Because it happens after. The shooting, yeah. Fallen Heroes 1 and 2. It's the second one. And his junior bunk, isn't it, manages to get a police officer's gun. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:31] So it was at, yeah, that and those two end season six. So, yeah. So season seven is when it's dark blue. And so maybe that, yes, I would agree that's probably what happened. But, you know, I didn't, I don't know that I was, I mean, I was maybe cognizant of it at the time. But I'll keep my eye out as season seven pops up this week to look for the difference in the board. Yeah, that's funny. So if anybody's in Baltimore and you want to see some bit of homicide history, definitely

[00:16:59] go to Cooper's and go up the stairs because it's easy to miss because most people just hang around the front bar of Cooper's and that'll be it. That was a surprise to me. And I've certainly been there since I left the show. Yeah. And didn't know it was there. And when I went to Cooper's, I was explaining to the bar staff what it meant, what it was because they weren't sure. So I did my bit to explain it. And then obviously the next day the cast and crew came in and suddenly it became a very homicide experience for all of them because they were all in their twenties. No idea what the show was. What is that?

[00:17:29] And I have to go back and look again, not to toot my own horn, but because my name was on there. I was on the murder board. Oh, did we tell you if it's still on there? Hang on. I can't, I can't remember. No, it's not there then. And it was way back. I want to say maybe season three or four it was on the board. All I remember on the board is that Kellerman had two open cases. That's what I remember. Hang on a minute. Yeah, you have a picture of it. I've got the murder board here. I have a picture of it somewhere too.

[00:17:58] So we've got Ballard, Bayless, Foulstone, Geraghty, Kellerman, Lewis, Munch, Pembelton. Yeah. And if I remember mine was under whoever the first, on the first on the left, whichever detective that was, my name was under. Oh, okay. Yeah. But then I also forgot, I'm watching the episodes. It's when Kellerman is suspected.

[00:18:20] It's sort of the crossover between Kellerman being suspected in the graft from the fire department when he was a fire detective. And then it sort of overlaps with the Luther Mahoney shooting. But the lawyer that comes in is named Ingram. And I was like, and I totally forgot. There was also a character named after me. That's really cool. I'm just going to assume it was named after me because like, who else would it be named after? Yeah. I don't, I'm not seeing you on the board.

[00:18:50] I'm looking at it now. I've even got a video of it. I'm not seeing it. I have a picture of it. I have to see if the picture I have shows the top. Well, it's the picture that's on our about page. The picture on our about page. I don't know if it shows the top and what year it was. Yeah. This one says 1998. And it's, unfortunately, it's a bit of an awkward angle to photograph. You never quite get a flat on image of it. It's very hard. But anyway, maybe get a drone in there or something. They're everywhere. There we go. So I want to know. Oh, hang on. So this episode is going to be about me and Chris. Okay.

[00:19:21] Forget all these famous people we've been interviewing. Now it's about us. Although Chris. Apparently I am famous now. Arguably Chris is famous now. In very small circles, but yes. Right. Tiny circles. So I want to know. So you said you weren't aware of the show until 94. Yes. And you were what? A toddler? I was 13 years old. I was, I was, hang on. I've got notes about this. But no, I was 13 years old when homicide. It was the summer of 1994.

[00:19:50] And I just moved into a new house with my, my mum. And all on, all. So channel four was the broadcaster in the UK that showed homicide. And I just remember that summer was just this constant trailer on a loop of like munch saying homicide. Homicide. And then the trailer voiceover saying from Barry Levinson comes the award winning number one TV show in America. And I was like, and being a kid, well being, yeah. And I just, I don't know.

[00:20:18] I was exhausted by kind of crime stuff and all that. And, and my friend John Singleton and I were like really excited about this show homicide coming on. And I'm sad to say when I first watched it, it was a disappointment, but I was a 13 year old boy expecting gunfights, et cetera, and something akin to Miami Vice. And it wasn't that at all. But as I got a little bit older, only two years later, I rewatched the show and, and I suddenly really began to appreciate it. How did you rewatch it? Was it on reruns?

[00:20:48] It was just, it was just, it was what it was. I think. So basically, I think I, if I, it's difficult to remember exactly how, I think I watched the first episodes and I probably didn't watch much more. And it became a bit of a curiosity that I'll just dip into once in a while, but it was about season. I'm trying to work this out. I think it was about season four, which was about 95, 96 in Britain, where something about it really caught me and I, and it just clicked.

[00:21:16] And I just started watching it kind of all the time from that point on, just following it every week. And it was on Saturdays. And then in 1998, they kind of, because channel four, so what I didn't realize at the time is only when I've looked into it again, that apparently channel four, were quite bad at showing it properly in order. Whilst when I first. Really? Yeah, apparently. So apparently they would show a few seasons and then it would sort of stop. And then, but what I do remember is in 1998, they kind of re-showed the whole thing.

[00:21:45] Two episodes at a time on a Saturday. So I kind of managed to revisit the whole thing over the sort of 1998, 1999 to 2000. And they stopped it at the end of season six. So they never showed season seven on channel four. And so I was left like, how's this show end? That's so weird. It was, it was, it was, I think just channel four didn't want to buy season seven because they wanted to. It's like that book, the unofficial homicide book also ends on season six. Yeah. A lot of things sort of ended on season six and then season seven kind of happened.

[00:22:15] Um, and I, and I don't know why, and I didn't watch season seven until 2006 when I bought the DVD. Um, and I was at university at that point. Um, so I bought that in the movie and finally finished homicide, um, and had that sort of sense of completion, but, uh, no, it, it, it just, so I think for me in particular, like when I was, uh, studying drama, um, and media studies, um, when I was sort of, what was I 16, 17, 18.

[00:22:43] So when I was in, yeah, Sixth Horn College stroke, which is senior high in the UK, in America. So when I was at Sixth Horn College with senior high in America, that's where while studying film and learning a bit about drama and stuff and watching homicide on Saturdays, something really clicked. And there's this show, I realized how special it was. And we learned about the French new wave when I was doing media studies. And I started, this sort of picture started to form that was more whole than my kind of adolescent view of homicide. Why? Well, there are enough gunfights sort of view.

[00:23:10] So whilst then I realized the action was actually the, you know, it was the, it was the dialogue. It was the, you know, the, the tragedy of it and stuff like that. And then also the kind of the, what also was interesting was how funny it was. It was like, it's a very funny show, um, because of the kind of gallows humor. It wasn't funny at the sacrifice of drama, which a lot of shows do now. What drives me up the wall a little bit nowadays is what, um, I think we call it a reverent dialogue

[00:23:36] where there's a moment and then somebody has to say a quip to kind of remove the seriousness of the moment. And then we kind of come back into it. It's all about irony now instead of just sort of like observational humor. Yeah. And I, I'm really interested in sincerity and we live in a world that's obsessed with irony and it drives me up the wall. So homicide is a very sincere show as far as I feel. Um, obviously a little moments of irony, but it's not the guiding force of it. A lot of television today is obsessed with irony. Um, and I think irony makes people feel smart. That's the problem.

[00:24:06] And also irony is now like, like, um, define the definition of real irony is not what people call irony these days. Yeah. But yeah, it, I think, yeah, I would agree. I think there's too much emphasis on, um, clever cleverness. These are sort of clever little quips. Yeah. Like you said. Yeah. And I, and I blame it squarely at Joss Whedon and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then Marvel, because that's what popularized that approach.

[00:24:32] Um, in my opinion, I could be wrong, but I, I, I put aim at him. There you go. From the mouth of Chris Carr, the famous Chris Carr. So, um, you know, television historians, et cetera, feel free to disagree. But I think that's for me where it starts. Oh, we're going to get so many emails about that. Like the emails we never get. Yeah, it's true. Finally, we'll get emails. How many emails did we get today? None. So, yeah. So no, it's so funny.

[00:25:00] So I, to me, Homicide really started in the summer of 1994 and that trailer. And weirdly, a lot of, um, I think also in the early days in the pre-internet world, um, movie trailers and, and like the publicity of films and TV was quite a big deal and it went on for weeks. And so you have this, you build up this weird relationship with something because of the publicity you've seen. And usually when you watch these things, they don't quite live up to the weird version you made up in your head of it.

[00:25:27] Um, uh, and so it was kind of like that really, but I'm glad I stayed curious with it because it became a massively important piece of viewing for me from the years 1996 to 2000. Um, and, and it just sort of stayed with me and, you know, the characters of like, uh, you know, Pembelton and Bayless, I think if anything, I really love the debates between those two, because what made that show different from other cop shows is they were debating the nature of life and death.

[00:25:56] You talk about like belief and disbelief. We're talking about all sorts of sort of weighty topics that a lot of TV just didn't talk about. And it was quite interesting. So, um, that really stood out for me. So yeah. And then, and then just the kind of vivid characters of Howard G, Lewis, Kellerman and Munch. Um, and then Dr. Cox, uh, who I will admit had a bit of a teenage crush on. Oh, there you go. Michelle, we're going to have you on. He'll admit his crush later. Oh my goodness. So yeah. So no, no, honestly.

[00:26:26] She was terrific. She was, she's amazing. And she's great in everything she's in. I remember her in Battlestar Galactica. She's briefly in that and a, uh, two parter, but she's so brilliant. And, um, so yeah, it's such a great show. So no, that's amazing. It's absolutely amazing troop of actors in that show. I mean, re rewatching it again for the, who knows how many times it, it, it really is in many instances, stunning, still stunning to me how good the writing and acting is. Obviously everything's not perfect.

[00:26:53] You know, there's hits and misses, but you know, on the whole consistently. I mean, I sit there and, and, and have myself and say out loud to the TV, like, wow, like, wow. Like, where did that come from? And it's interesting. You talk about the, the conversations between Tim, Tim Bales and Peltel. I can only think of their real names, Kyle and Andre. So much of which centered around God. Is there a God? Why isn't God here? Is God here?

[00:27:21] I don't believe in God anymore because of what I see every day. You know, those kinds of things. And in rewatching season six, there is a lot of God in season six. Of course, there was earlier on with the murders of the women's bodies that were dumped and dumped in churches, the white glove murder. But now I'm watching, I just finished watching the ones where the priests were murdered, which was either two or three parter. Oh yeah.

[00:27:48] And in addition to, which I think is one you're, you're going to ask me that later, but in addition to Kaddish, which is one of my favorite episodes. Oh yeah. I love, that's one of my favorite too. Which is Richard Belzer. Yeah. But there are parts in Kaddish. And also I think Valentine's, the Valentine's Day, which was right before Kaddish, where there are almost the Scorsese-esque cuts between the baby being baptized in the Catholic church and

[00:28:13] the rabbi and saying Kaddish at the, not the wake, sitting Shiva, sitting Shiva in Kaddish. Mm-hmm. And the rabbi and the minion, they have the men's prayer group and everything. And the cutting between the two, very sort of Scorsese-esque in it. And it sort of builds up the import sort of, and how weighty these topics are for people in their lives.

[00:28:41] But also the juxtaposition of the different religions and people interacting with them. Mm-hmm. And there seemed to be a lot more of that to me in the last half of season six. And who knows, I don't know why that is, maybe why I felt that way. Yeah, Kaddish. Yeah, Kaddish's pretty good. Beautiful, beautiful episode, but also the cutting back to the past and everything.

[00:29:09] And I also, one of the things I realized, not to get off topic, first of all, that neighborhood in Pikesville was like two miles from my house. So that was like the best location we'd ever gone to because it was like right around the corner from me. But also the thing I don't think I ever realized later was the rabbi that's reading the prayers in the graveyard and then is also, when they're sitting Shiva at the house, is a rabbi that

[00:29:36] I came in contact with later when I worked at the Jewish Times. Oh, cool. It was Rabbi Wahlberg. I believe it was Rabbi Wahlberg who was actually in homicide. Thirty years later, literally, I'm working at the Jewish Times. And Rabbi Wahlberg, who had been at Beth Tafila Synagogue here, which is three miles from my house, was at, for 40 years, I think he was, I think he was the rabbi there, is retiring.

[00:30:05] And so I do a story on, I talk to him about retiring and his 30 years there. And then I talk to the new rabbi who came in after him. And as I'm watching Homicide the other night, I'm like, oh my God, that's Rabbi Wahlberg. Like 30 years later, I have this very personal sort of interaction with him in a completely different place and time and thing. Yeah. Really, just really, really. And also the realization when we were talking to Isabella that I had worked with her on Real Men.

[00:30:33] And the things that popped up later and before that I didn't know that I had interactions with people from the show was just really kind of odd. But Kaddish is, yeah, beautiful. Yeah, such a great episode. Beautiful episode. And funnily enough, yeah, I vaguely remember watching that when it first sort of came out over here as well. Because I was, yeah, I would have been a teenager in that because it's teenage munch, isn't it? So it's like suddenly it became quite relatable. No, it's a really moving episode. Yeah, it's a really cool one.

[00:31:02] The other weird memory I have of Homicide is a bizarre one, but because you mentioned about first impressions, I think, of the show and your questions you sent to me. And I don't know why, but the one weirdly relatable thing with Homicide for me was the weather. Because the show was starting the summer and ending kind of spring. And so it kind of, usually I think Homicide came out around September time, if I remember correctly.

[00:31:29] It was starting September and ended around probably March or something. And so the show kind of matched the weather I was experiencing in England. And a lot of it's predominantly grey as well, which England, and right now is grey. Generally, England's 80% grey most of the time. So strangely, because I always remember the early episodes of each season, it was really hot and sweaty. Yeah, because I think it started in July or August. Yeah, and then you kind of end up in winter coats and stuff.

[00:31:58] And that totally kind of, yeah, felt very relatable. Because I remember when it came out that summer, it was a very hot summer of 1994. And yeah, just that opening impression of that first episode. Everybody's really hot and stuff. So yeah, it's quite funny that. Yeah, and it's funny. And hats off to Jay Tobias, one of the assistant directors who has sent us some footage from behind the scenes of the show. He had somebody shooting video a couple times. And I was watching the one he sent us yesterday, which was behind the scenes when we were shooting

[00:32:27] Requiem for Adina. Yeah, such a great episode. And the whole crew was breaking into a row house downtown. And everybody is, I mean, I'm in like this gigantic parka. And I mean, we all have like this gigantic, we used to stand around and say, where'd you get that parka? Or the boot form? You know, because we would be outside 12 hours when it was 10 degrees, 15 degrees, whatever. But so we're shooting that scene and the video that, and I can't remember who took the video,

[00:32:55] but the video in the middle of shooting, it starts snowing. Right? Yeah. So we started the scene, it wasn't snowing, and then it's snowing. So it just sort of, we all, we shot and what, and then the, I also watched the episode the other night, which I also don't think I worked on. I think I was gone at that point, working on Pecker. That sounds terrible. Working on John Waters film called Pecker. Not the porn film.

[00:33:21] The one with Steve Allen and his wife, where the guy falls off the roof and he shoots him through the, through the, through the window. And there's a scene with that, not just drizzle, standing outside, trying to figure out where the guy came from, how he fell off the roof, driving rain. It completely soaked the actors, driving. It wasn't like, okay, stop, let's get an umbrella. Let's put a thing up. Let's stand under, you know, the canopy. Let's get them out of the rain.

[00:33:50] He's like, no, just keep shooting. They're getting soaked, driving rain. So yeah. Lots of weather. That's so funny. Lots of weather on the show. I thought it was bizarre. It's so true. But it's just things, you kind of weird things you pick up on. I was just like, yeah, that made it very relatable. And I don't think we ever faked like, like we were shooting. I don't think somebody can email me and correct me. I don't think we ever faked, like we had to pretend it was winter when it was summer. I don't think we ever, we did have snow.

[00:34:20] We made snow. Josh corrected me on that. We did, we did make snow in one episode, which was, I think not in the winter, but generally it was, it was whatever in, in, in the script. It was the same time of year generally that, that, you know, we were shooting at and that was supposed to be in the story. So, so, okay. So before we get to me, so we'll stick on the famous Chris.

[00:34:45] So how did you go from, so you, you were studying media and film in school. And so, so tell us a little bit about that path. So what did you end up doing in, in film? What are you, you know, what do you do now? And then the developing the cop show idea that brought you to emailing me and thinking about the style of homicide. Yeah.

[00:35:11] So what, what, what was your, you know, how did you get, how did you get to what you're doing today and talk a little bit about what you do today? Yeah. Yeah. Well, so starting at the beginning. So, um, I've always just had this lifelong fascination with movies and I think, you know, um, getting a little bit personal. So when my parents divorced, I think one of the things that for me was a sanctuary was watching movies and TV. And if anything, the biggest, the movies that really caught me early on were the Star Trek

[00:35:38] movies, you know, Star Trek two, three, four, and five, you know, um, the wrath of calm. Yeah. And I was a total obsessive and I had this video box set back then at VHS. Um, that I probably went, you know, I, I, I did know I repeatedly watched a lot of the same stuff constantly, but I took comfort in it. It was uncomfortable about being a Captain Kirk and stuff, you know?

[00:36:00] Um, and, and so as you get a bit older, um, and you realize that, you know, you can make movies and stuff. Um, it's all very exciting. Um, and so really, sadly, the way the education system, what I never really got to actually, um, and my family weren't a particularly artistic family. So I didn't really ever get to hold an actual camera until 17 years old. Um, and so that was at, um, sixth form college, which is senior high in the state.

[00:36:30] Um, and so what I, what I could do there was rent cameras out over weekends and film stuff. So when you first get a camera, you just film everything. So I caused like, I remember once I filmed just cars going down the road, right. And I caused a massive traffic jam because people thought I was a police speed trap, you know, which for a few weeks is quite fun to do, but, uh, and were you shooting on film or video? This is on VHS. So this is, this is actually shooting on VHS. So it's my earliest stuff.

[00:36:57] Um, so I, I, yeah, we shot everything on VHS and then I moved to mini DV. So, um, so my first projects on VHS with these big shoulder mounted cameras by Panasonic. And so through media studies, we were given specific tasks to do. And so one of them fun enough was to make a, a film trailer for, uh, um, uh, like a police movie. Cause we were studying the crime genre and we were studying film noir.

[00:37:25] Um, and so we were told, right, you've got it, you know, you've got it, you've got a choice of doing a trailer for a police drama or something. I can't remember what the other one was. And for me, like police drama. Oh, brilliant. This is it. You know, had guns and everything, you know, so it was always a really fast paced cutting and this, you know, my, I also wanted to be an actor at one point. So I'm in it. My friend, a good friend of mine who, um, who sadly no longer with us, a good friend of mine called Oliver Ince.

[00:37:50] He and I just would constantly filming random components for these various media studies projects. And eventually we would bring all this stuff together, together in the editing bay, um, on, on early computer editing on something called VM studio and just put these things together. And then, and then I'd be like, Oh, that didn't work. I'm going to go out and film it again. So the inner Kubrick came out and suddenly we're filming repeats of the same thing, but slightly differently. Um, or I recast something and you know, all sorts of random stuff.

[00:38:20] And this is a mini epic was going on in the background. Every other week I was filming in some high rise car park somewhere. I want to see it. I want to see that. Well, it's on YouTube. I can, it's hilarious. Oh, you're kidding. Really? It's called no respect for the law. It was hilarious. And it's, it's, um, and, and on top of that, I combined footage from movies and things, because obviously I couldn't blow up a car, but I wanted one to blow up in it. I wanted a helicopter, didn't have one. So I just nicked it from a film. Luckily with the funny thing is when you nick stuff from, um, films that are on VHS, the quality sort of starts to match a little bit.

[00:38:50] That's right. Right. Yeah. It was quite funny. And if you degrade it enough as well, it starts to match a bit more. But I mean, obviously, you know, it was never convincing that we did that stuff, but it kind of sort of fit. And, and so I had a lot of fun with this thing. Um, and, and, you know, you're trying out different things. You're learning about screen direction, you know, jump, you know, you're learning about match cutting, et cetera. And it just became this mini epic really. And then ended up just being this like two minute little video.

[00:39:18] Um, but that's sort of what we did. Um, and, and it was so much fun. So at that point was, was any of your shooting emulating any of the homicide style? If you had started watching that when you were younger? No, no, I, I was mindful of it, but no. Like we're jump, jump cuts were acceptable. Well, my first ever short film has a very specific homicide three, you know, the three cut thing, whereas the same thing three times. So I did this, um, my first ever narrative short films, this very pretentious film called Prologue.

[00:39:47] Um, that's sort of about a guy who's stuck in an office job wanting to be an artist, et cetera. So very much mirroring my life at that time. And there's this very one, there's this one moment where this guy's endless, because I used to keep constantly writing ideas down and notes. So I was always, so one of my characteristics in my twin is just constantly writing random things down. And so the character in the film is like writing lots of notes. He rips his paper out, throws his pen down. And I wanted to show how exhausted and exasperated he was.

[00:40:15] So the, the jump cut thing made a lot of sense to me and it was boom, boom, but it'd be timed with the music as well. And it's shot in a very homicide way. Actually, there's a lot of homicide moments where we're handheld swapping for one character to another. And it had a, it was very French new wavy and all that, and had a great, a lot of fun with it. Um, and, but obviously the film wasn't great. I had problems like sound problems. There's always a thing. It plays early films, um, and stuff.

[00:40:41] And, and, and then I was also going for my phase of not using actors who trained in acting I was to use real people. I think a lot of filmmakers go for this, Oh, real people. And then you realize, they'll be fine. And then you realize real people are not great. And you realize why people study acting. Um, I was in one of my, one of my friends films in, uh, at UMBC and it was like, um, we're recasting your park. It's heartbreaking. It's like, but yeah. I was so, I was so wooden, you know, I was just so bad.

[00:41:11] And they got an actor, which made total sound. I mean, they got somebody that was in the acting program and she was great. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. So I know that kind of stuff. So, so it's a very early days. And then, and then I went to university. Um, I was very lucky at university. We had like masterclasses with Jack Cardiff. Um, so Jack Cardiff, the famous cinematographer. Jack Cardiff. Matter of life and death. People, if you don't know, people, if you don't know Jack Cardiff, look Jack Cardiff up. He is my favorite technicolor British cinematographer.

[00:41:41] He is just, I mean, and his films have a Jack Cardiff look. Yeah. If a film comes up, I'll go, Oh my God, that's Jack Cardiff. Like you can tell from the saturated, I don't know his black and white stuff if he did black and white, but the color stuff. He did do a little bit. Yeah. Very much has a signature look. Well, he was the pioneer with technicolor and stuff. So yeah. Just beautiful. And I have this lovely memory of sitting next to him in the cinema whilst we're screening, um, uh, a clip from a matter of life and death.

[00:42:11] Um, and it was just so nice to be next to him watching his, that was his first film as director of photography officially. So be able to sit next to him whilst he's rewatching this thing and then giving this masterclass. And then I was asked to interview him. So there's this tape somewhere in Italy of me interviewing Jack Cardiff that I've never seen again. So the guy who filmed it was a guy called Danilo from my class is Italian, who then after uni disappeared back to Italy. Danilo, we need that film. And, and, and I was, the other thing as well, I wasn't very well when I was filming

[00:42:40] this interview and I was worried that I'd given Jack Cardiff a cold. So for like two weeks after what doing this interview with him, I was constantly looking out to see if I'd accidentally killed the poor man. But no, thank God I hadn't. Um, and, um, and we learned, so it's funny enough as well. One of the other things about Jack Cardiff, he talked a lot about obviously studying paintings, looking at the nature of light and shadow and the quality of light in different places. In his book, he talks a bit about when he used to go on holiday and he's right.

[00:43:08] You know, when you go to different countries, the quality of the light changes slightly. Um, and I remember when I was in South Korea in the winter of 2002, that there's a slightly kind of weird warmish quality to the light, which gives almost a slightly brown effect. It was really weird. And I remember noting that. And then, you know, in other places you go to, um, like in England, you get a lot of soft light. In France, you get a lot of soft light. And funnily enough, the soft light. Yeah, and Paris has got its own thing on it. Yeah. And that's, that's what influenced the lighting of the French New Wave movies and stuff.

[00:43:38] And, and so you just sort of learn all these things. And, and, um, he encouraged us all to buy light meters and things and study the light in that way. And so I have this light meter that I, you know, occasionally break out to see what's going on with the light and stuff. Um, and it was just fantastic. And we, and we would do exercises about like, um, if I remember correctly, now this might be the Billy Williams exercise. So Billy Williams, who was the DOP on the film Gandhi and lots of other amazing films of Richard Astenborough.

[00:44:06] He, he, we used to do these exercises about lighting a, a scene where somebody comes into a dark room with a lit birthday cake. Um, so it's all lit by candlelight and stuff like that. So that was very interesting. So, so these were really great things. And see the University of Creative Arts in Farnham, which is where I studied film, we would shoot on 16 millimeter film. So the, the University of Creative Arts in Farnham, in Surrey. Farnham. Farnham. And, and so it was at the time when I went there, it was called the Surrey Institute of Art and Design.

[00:44:35] It then changed its name to the University College of Creative Arts, but somebody somewhere thought it'd be funny to call it the Farnham University College of the Creative Arts. Now, what does that spell out? So somebody made up some t-shirts saying I graduated from, you know, without saying it. Um, but, but no, it's official title these days is University of Creative Arts and it's in Farnham because they've also have a branch in Epsom and somewhere else.

[00:45:01] Um, and, and it had this wonderful film department and I studied cinematography there because that was the strongest, um, department. It was run by this lady called Noski Deville. And, um, and she was fantastic. And, you know, so we would shoot on film, we'd shoot on, uh, mini DV, which was the video format in those days. He also shot on Beta Cam and Digi Beta. Um, and then, you know, we were encouraged to build relationships with like the various sort of camera companies. So we did day trips to Ari and Panavision and stuff.

[00:45:29] Um, and I, I shot with, uh, an Eclair, um, 16 millimeter camera because the, the, we, so we had Ari SR2s as our main camera, but they were always a nightmare to book. So I would book out the Eclair to try out different things. Um, and I also had my own Super 8 camera. So it did all sorts of, I was really into time-lapse in those days. I was filming lots of sunsets and stuff. Um, and, and got time-lapse down to a kind of fine art by the time I finished.

[00:45:56] And I've not used it since sadly, but I loved doing time-lapse, uh, sunsets. It was a bit like going fishing or something. It was just kind of fun to hang out with a few friends, cameras ticking away and you're just chatting about life or whatever. And while the camera's ticking away and then you go and process the film and then you realize, Oh shit, I got the mathematics wrong. It's gone too fast. Um, so you'd have to do it again, you know, it's quite funny. Or you got the exposure wrong. All the exposure. Clicking off one frame at a time. Yeah.

[00:46:26] So that was all fun. And then, and then, so from university, I then for a while did do some, um, I did do cinematography on low budget music videos, but I didn't enjoy that so much because in those days in 2006, everybody was shooting everything on mini DV. So I'd gone from film to mini DV and it was a massive letdown. Um, cause mini DV was very difficult to light because it was very easy to over light it. Um, and with tight budgets and things, it was just always very hard to kind of, I used

[00:46:56] to take digital stills as well. So, um, so I had my first ever DSLR camera, which I bought in, um, when I graduated in 2006, I bought this camera off eBay, uh, cause I really wanted to kind of master stills photography as well. And I always used to find when I DP'd a lot of, um, low budget music videos, I'd be really happy with the stills. I took the video, I think it would look crap. So what the mini DVs were just not as forgiving? No, no, they had zero, like they, they, they, like their latitude. Yeah. They had zero latitude. It was like, yeah, it was horrid.

[00:47:26] So it was, it was a horrendous format to film on. Whilst film, I like a lot of things I, you know, I knew I, by the time I finished on film, I knew my style. I used to like overexposing the film by a stop. So you get a bit more information in the shadows and then bring it back. And it made everything look really nice. And I even once got a compliment from a lab about my negatives. They look really good about it. And I was really pleased by this. So I kind of got this, this weird little thing that I was doing. Um, but my, my big hangup, and, and this is probably because I have dyslexia, I had a

[00:47:54] real hangup about where to put lights and how to light movement. So I think I, in the end, I probably should have been a stills photographer. But there we go. Because I just recently. Yeah, like movement. That could be a problem. I'm like taking a still image is significantly easier for me. For movies and not being. I know. So it's like, yeah, so there we go. And I know the other lesson I learned in life is I'm always better at telling people what to do than actually doing it myself. There you go. So you're a director. Great at barbecues, you know, like, yeah, you should do this, this, and this.

[00:48:24] If I do it myself, no, I'm going to burn it. I get the experts in, but then tell them how to do it. So, you know, so, so yeah. So then, then, so all of these things I would do, like I would learn about like, you know, cinematography, I'd learn about editing, I'd learn about sounds. I did, at uni, I did a lot of jumping around departments, only because I was going to get, get an idea of each department and kind of what they needed from you as a director.

[00:48:50] Because my goal always was to be a director and I wanted, and I'd learned from a lot of bad directors that communication is very important on film sets. And a lot of people, you know, if you get the communication wrong, it can cause all sorts of problems. And so I was really like just wanting to be a better communicator around and be able to talk everybody's different language, like talk to the sound guy and be there for his or her needs. Same for the cinematographer, give them the information they need, et cetera.

[00:49:19] Just so then it makes it all a bit more harmonious and a bit easier for everybody. Because I've been on set, one thing I've noticed on the film sets that I've been on is mutiny always starts at the back because, because information doesn't filter all the way back to the back of the set. So there's a lot of people who are very experienced people who have no idea what's going on down there, but they're like, well, God, this is taking forever. And God, I could have shot three of these by now and blah, blah, blah. And it kind of starts from there.

[00:49:47] And on low budget films, mutinies are a problem because with low budget films, because not everybody's being paid properly or sometimes they're not even being paid at all. It's people's goodwill that keeps them on the film set. And if people are not motivated to come back, you do find situations where people just stop coming. And I've been on a few films where I got promoted, where people kept leaving and I kept going up the ladder because things like that. And funnily enough, the first ever quote unquote proper film I've worked on was a film called Proctor.

[00:50:17] And it was directed by a really famous director now who was at the National Film School called Joakim Trier. So Joakim Trier got nominated for an Oscar a few years back for a film called The Worst Person in the World. Really great Norwegian director. And I was on his graduation film. And the problem he had on there, he and his DP were both Norwegian. So a lot of the time they would just chat to each other in Norwegian, which meant then a lot of the rest of the crew had no idea what the hell's going on.

[00:50:45] And as always, you know, when you're learning and you're crafting stuff, sometimes you do spend a bit too long on shots that when you think about it, actually probably shouldn't have spent four hours lighting a letterbox when we should have spent four hours filming dialogue or something. But in those days, you know, when you're a film student, you're kind of trying out all these things and stuff. And so, yeah, people would get annoyed and leave and stuff.

[00:51:08] So I went from being like the most junior production assistant to, God, almost a third AD by the end of it. So it's quite funny. Yeah. I mean, I think even on, obviously, even on Seth's where you're getting paid, if the crew builds resentment because there's either people at the top, either in production, but, you

[00:51:32] know, if the director on the set is not either prepared or often if they come in latitudinally and haven't been in a crew before, maybe hadn't worked their way up and come in sideways as a director and don't understand, you know, when you say, you know, we're going to shoot at night and I need the whole street lit.

[00:51:56] But if you don't know what that takes to do that and have expectations or to change that in the middle of the stream and don't have and don't understand what the crew has to do, it, yeah, definitely, it builds resentments all the way down the line. And you will have an angry, slow crew if you don't either know what you're doing or if you may know what you're doing, but you may not communicate well to the crew.

[00:52:26] You know, even, and I hate to say this in an empathetic way, but in a way that, you know, everybody needs to work together because there's a hundred people there doing 50 different jobs. Right. So, um, yeah, I would say it happens on sets where you get paid to not just sets where you're working for free. Yeah. And I think it's an important skills as a director to try and, you know, to get the crew on board with you and get everybody on your side, because as a director, everything's kind of against you. The second you turn up on a set, time's against you, lights against you. Um, I don't

[00:52:55] know, there's all sorts of things, the budget, the, yeah, because the big thing between film and theater is the logistics filmmaking is a logistical challenge and an artistic endeavor. Um, whilst in a theater is an artistic endeavor that's in a enclosed space. So, you know, significantly different. Um, and you know, you're in the real world. Um, and at times where I have to remind crew, cause you could get this weird mindset sometimes. Um, so I produced a few

[00:53:21] things too. So I filmed on this very dodgy estate. I'm jumping ahead of a story now, but, um, there was this film called victims that I produced. Um, with, uh, Hattie Moraghan and Brianna Corrigan and Brianna Corrigan's famous for being the lead singer of a band called the beautiful South. And we were, so we filmed this, um, with, for a scheme with film London. So they financed the film and also we were with the Hammersmith council. So they provided certain empty buildings for us. So there was a, some sort of a state

[00:53:51] that, uh, one of the towers was to be demolished, but they were waiting for people to move out of it. So we had access to all sorts of flats in this building. Um, and all sorts of shenanigans would happen. Um, so like first day of filming, I realized suddenly somebody was still living in the flat that we'd been given. I had this in, I had this weird sense of somebody's been in this room. I just had this feeling and I can't quite pinpoint exactly why I had that feeling. Um, but the first

[00:54:20] day of filming, I obviously being the producer, um, and the whole thing on my shoulders in terms of logistics, I turned up like two hours before anybody else was due to talk to unlock the flat and go in. And I discovered this family who didn't speak English. And, and, and I determined, I realized quite quickly they were Polish and our director of photography was Polish. So I called up our director of photography, explain the situation and suddenly it became the UN and this sort of weird sort of thing where we had to try and find them somewhere else to go because we were supposed

[00:54:48] to be filming in this place. And unfortunately we would have to tell the council and also meant we couldn't store any equipment in this flat because people who we didn't know who they were, were living in this flat, um, which was supposed to be empty. So it is stuff like that. And so that, that already, you know, first day of filming always takes the longest. And when you've already got this situation where there's a family living in the flat that you've been given by the council that you're supposed to be filming in, but there's a family living in there. And now you've got to find a very,

[00:55:15] very humanitarian way to get rid of them so you can start filming, but at the same time, make sure they go somewhere that's safe and secure for them. That's the kind of stuff you have to deal with sometimes. Um, and on a low budget film, we've got like zero resources. So it's a lot of charm and whatever to try and kind of fandangle things. Right, right, right. I thank God that happened. Especially low budget. Yeah. And then, and then, and then a few days later we were filming on

[00:55:41] apparently one of the dodgiest estates in London, which is the Clem Atley estate. People could tell me that's dodgy or not. Um, and a few things happened. So, um, the first funny story was we were filming a guy getting beaten up and then these kids and their bikes goes, you're not doing it right. You're not doing it right. You know, this is how you're supposed to do it. Then some other kid that came up to me a bit later said, the guns come out at seven, implying that we need to leave by seven. Um, then, um, and then I'd given a speech earlier in the day to remind the crew that we're filming in a

[00:56:11] quote unquote hostile environment. So you must not leave anything unattended, especially expensive lenses, laptops, et cetera. It also creates the buddy system. Um, and lo and behold, our editor on this film, for whatever reason, decided to leave his laptop in the middle of the car park of the estate and walk away from it. Now in real life, what scenario would you leave your expensive laptop in the middle of a car park and walk off? I don't think anybody would do that. So why on earth

[00:56:41] do people do this on film sets? But they do because there's this weird sense on a film set that yeah. And we had no security or anything. That's an enclosed environment, right? And within 30 seconds, somebody clocked the laptop. Luckily I clocked it before they did and got it and saved his laptop and then had a go at the editor and said, why on earth did you do that? And you completely disregarded what I told you. So stuff like that happens all the time on film sets. And then we had a police helicopter swoop through towards the end, chasing someone. And it was a wonderful day. And unfortunately,

[00:57:09] none of that stuff could end up in the film. But I'm just going to interject for American audiences that don't watch British television and a state is not what an estate is here. Oh yeah. Yeah. What is the state? In England or London is a housing project. Yes. It's not. And here in a state is like a McMansion and a big fancy. Oh, got you. Yeah. We weren't filming on Downton Abbey. And a movie star living in it. Yeah. Yeah. So an estate is a housing project. As they would say, this ain't Downton Abbey, love. Exactly.

[00:57:38] That's where we were. So yeah. The guns come out at seven. Wow. The guns come out at seven. Yeah. So that was my fun on that film. And then, yeah, beyond producing independent stuff on the side, you know, I've done a lot of kind of corporate films. I've worked for three years for a company called WDF Productions. One of the cool things there, I learned a lot about production management and sort of building crews and things. And we did a lot of cool arts

[00:58:05] documentaries. So we did profiles on filmmakers. So there's a British filmmaker called Alan Clark, who directed a lot of BBC dramas like Made in Britain, Scum. He launched like Ray Winstone. He launched Gary Oldman, people like that. And he was very highly regarded director who died too young. I think he was only in his 50s when he died. He died of a heart attack. And he was

[00:58:32] he was very much, I don't know, he was just very much in a particular niche in the British system and a bit of a purist. So I think he did get some approaches from Hollywood, but he just didn't want to work with movie stars. He wants to work with kind of gritty unknown actors, which sadly only gets you so far with movies, really. And also on top of that, he had a hostile BBC because he was always pushing the limits with things. His stuff was very hard hitting. And it's the sort of thing that would upset,

[00:59:00] you know, middle class people. And so the various controllers at the BBC got annoyed with him and would, you know, so we did a really great profile on him and interviewed people like Ray Winstone. We interviewed like Paul Greengrass, who was inspired by Alan Clark. One of my favourite people was an investigative journalist called David Yallop, who wrote this really good book about hunting down Carlos the Jackal. So I had a great time chatting with him.

[00:59:27] And, you know, David Yallop told me all sorts of stories about how people tried to assassinate him and things. It was, I had a really great day of David Yallop. And this particular documentary is now on the BFI box set that goes with the BFI Alan Clark box set. So you can, what they've done is they divided the film up into sections that are relevant to the movie you're watching. But I also shot quite a few of those interviews as well. So my cinematography trainings be quite handy in the sense of that I can sometimes come in as a camera operator and

[00:59:57] that sort of, when the low budget things have, you know, dipped in as a cameraman from time to time, I do a lot less of that now, but I have done that in the past. And so that was really handy. And then we also did a really cool thing for Sky Arts, which is one of the TV channels here about a British filmmaker called Chris Pessett, who wrote a film called Radio On. It's a bit of a cult classic. And it had Sting in it. And we went and filmed him at various sort of locations around London that he

[01:00:25] had used. So that was really great. And then we also did some stuff for the Criterion Collection about Carol Reed and sort of filmed interviews with academics. So one of the fun ones, we went to this place. I can't remember where it is now, but there's this place where in outside of London where they have all these old trains. So different eras of old trains, you can rent them out. And we rented out an old train carriage from that was sort of a

[01:00:52] 1930s train carriage. And it was all about a film called Night Train to Munich. So we were filming these two academics talk about Night Train to Munich on an old train carriage. It was great fun. You know, it was so much fun doing that. And then one other cool highlight was a music video for Thomas Dolby. So who's now a lecturer at Baltimore, John Hopkins, Thomas Dolby. Now he's at Thomas Hopkins. But back then he was an 80s sort of star. And also he's the man, he made his fortune.

[01:01:21] Is he at Hopkins or is he at UMBC? No, he's at Hopkins. Is it Hopkins? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some other famous sound guy that's at the school I went to. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Thomas Dolby actually, despite being a very successful 80s musician, actually made a lot of his sort of fortune in the 1990s, creating the technology behind polyphonic phone ringtones. So all your the ringtone technology on old Nokia phones,

[01:01:46] Thomas Dolby created that. I don't know how he did it, but he did that. And so he disappeared from music in the 90s and the early 2000s, just being a kind of technology person. But in 2010, a good friend of mine, Paul Maverick was directing this music video and he needed some help just sort of sorting out the logistics and also a B camera operator. So he and I shot this music video called The Toad Lickers. It's all about what happens to people when they lick psychedelic toads.

[01:02:13] And it's hilarious. And it got nominated for a Webby Award and it was on like the BBC News and things. It was great fun. And we've got like parkourist dresses Prince Charles. We've got like Muppets in it. So I've forgotten his name, but one of the lead guys, one of the lead puppeteers behind the Muppets did all the Muppets stuff for us. And that was so cool. So there's a lot of stuff like, you know, comp Jim. Not Jim Henson. Not Jim Henson himself, but he worked for Jim Henson.

[01:02:41] He's the guy who worked for Jim Henson. Jim Henson's from Maryland. Yeah, well, he trained, this guy trained under him and worked on the Muppets. Um, how Mike Quinn. So Mike Quinn was one of the puppeteers in the Muppets. And he was like, you know, he famously had to hand up various puppets and made them come to life. And that's what he did for us in this music video. Um, and so he filmed all that in Arizona. We filmed in the UK. Um, and one of the most amusing things from that shoot, we had to film some pickup shots of,

[01:03:11] um, of somebody looking at Jaffa cakes in their hand and these, on these Jaffa cakes are written, like, eat me in Tippex or something. So we, and weirdly, for some reason, we ended up filming outside the Shell building, um, in Waterloo. And this security guard comes storming over, like, why are you filming out here? And we said to him, oh, we're just filming a man holding Jaffa cakes in his hand. It sounded so ridiculous, right? This security guard was like, what the hell are these guys

[01:03:40] on? And then we showed him the footage and he realized quite quickly that we were being totally straight with him. And he just said, oh, very professional. And then walked off. And so we carried on filming Jaffa cakes outside this building. And a Jaffa cake is like, is like a chocolate covered donut sort of thing? Well, it's a chocolate biscuit with marmalade in it. I don't eat them because I'm allergic to oranges. It's got marmalade in it. And a biscuit here is a cookie. Yeah. So a cookie with chocolate, so a chocolate cookie with orange jam in it.

[01:04:08] Or orange jelly. Sorry. Orange jelly. And, and, and it was the funniest thing ever. Um, and yeah, so some of the random stuff I've done and then obviously, um, all of that aside. So obviously you've always been like, how is this linked into directing and stuff? And so for me over the years, whilst doing all these other paid jobs from corporate things, I'm also developing my own content because sadly, um, in outside of the studio system, as a director, you've got to kind

[01:04:35] of prove that you could direct. It's like, I was saying something the other day, it's like trying to be a lawyer, but you have to kind of have a few successful cases under your belt before somebody trusting to be a lawyer. Right. So, um, as a director, you always have to constantly be proving yourself so that people can see a sure thing. So then they can hire you and you sort of go in and cause a lot of responsibility of directing. So I get it. Um, and so you have to make short films that showcase what you do. And so one of these short films I made was called the dry cleaner, which I wrote and directed. Yes. Everybody go see that on YouTube. It's terrific.

[01:05:05] Actually it's on Amazon. Is it Amazon and Apple? Amazon and Apple is where you get it. You can see the trailer on YouTube, but Amazon, the award winning trailer, but, um, Go rent it. On Amazon, you can, yeah, you could, well, I think, can you rent it? You might, it's only $1.99, but you can get it on Amazon and Apple. Um, and it was my first sort of foray into trying to do the kind of movies I wanted to make. So I want to make, you know, my goal has always been to make kind of realistic feeling thrillers. Those are the films of the nineties and two thousand really light, like the works of Michael Mann and people like, oh, homicide,

[01:05:33] you know, they have this little authenticity to them without being boring, but there's something about it. It's quite grounded. Um, but then that gives you license to kind of, um, you know, be, uh, you know, sort of profound with it if you wish, et cetera. And so the dry cleaner was my first attempt at original spy fiction. Um, and it's a contemporary spy film set about a British intelligence officer named George who recruits a Middle East, Middle Eastern student

[01:05:58] named Lydia and Lydia might have some insight on this revolutionary group that may or may not have to ties to terrorism. So it's a war on terror story and it kind of, um, tries its best to sort of navigate some of the moral complexity of both, um, a British intelligence officer having to recruit a student and also the difficulties of investigating terrorism. And, um, because I did a lot of, you know, touches on that, the ethical nature of recruiting

[01:06:25] a student exactly to tattle on her own people. Yeah. And then, and then how she feels about that, et cetera. And it was, it was just, you know, it was trying to find the human story within this sort of very big geopolitical thing. Cause my other passion alongside cinema, I've got a few passions, but my other big passion in life is espionage. I've always been fascinated by geopolitics and espionage. Um, and so alongside all of the film stuff I've been making, I've, um,

[01:06:52] been sort of researching about spies and things. Um, and I once met a real spy. The first ever spy I've met was a KGB man who defected to the West called Oleg Gordievsky. And Oleg Gordievsky, um, might well have saved us from world war three in the 1980s and 1983. And, um, and eventually he got found out. So he was a, basically he was a Russian who ended up working for the British because he

[01:07:17] didn't like the Russian system. So he was a double agent run by MI6. And eventually he got betrayed by an American traitor. And it's believed to be Aldrich Ames is the man who betrayed him. Oh, and he was a CIA officer who then started selling secrets to the Russians for money to pay for his very expensive lifestyle. He is believed to be the man who, who exposed Oleg. Um, there is some debate whether there might've been somebody else as well, but anyway. And so Oleg had to be, uh,

[01:07:47] smuggled out of Russia and he got smuggled out of Russia in the boot of a car, very glamorous. Um, and, and it was a very life and death situation and he was very lucky to get out alive, to be honest with you. And anyway, he ended up in my hometown and I recognized him. He was a customer of mine at a supermarket I was working at. I used to sell, you know, I used to have a part-time job work at my local supermarket on the meat and fish counter, which is the most gruesome job you can get. But I learned a lot about filleting fish and stuff. Um, and so I used to sell Oleg Gordievsky

[01:08:16] salmon. And, and so I asked him one day if he was, excuse me, sir, are you Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB agent? He's like, yeah, yes I am, you know. And then eventually recommended I read his book, which is what most good spies do now. Um, and his book changed my perception of how espionage works. And what's his book called? Next Stop Execution by Oleg Gordievsky. And it's really good. But there's also a newer book, um, called The Spy and the Traitor that provides extra

[01:08:45] insight into what happened. And that's by Ben McIntyre. And, um, but Oleg's book just changed everything for me about how spying works. And I realized it is a very, you know, people-driven profession. It's not about blowing stuff up. It's not about James Bond sneaking into things going undercover. It's about getting a British intelligence officer to find someone in, should we say,

[01:09:09] the target country who may give you secrets from that target country? And that person becomes the agent. And it's that person who's in danger. The British intelligence officer probably just the worst that happens to them is they'll get expelled from the country. But the person who they're running, the agent's the person in danger. So in my film, the agent's obviously Lydia. She's the one who's this student, has these ties as revolutionary group. And I've always just been fascinated by

[01:09:32] this bond between the, um, intelligence officer, the handler, and their agent. Because there's something really sacred there because you're in this world of mistrust. But between those two people, they have to completely trust each other. And I've always found that really fascinating. I feel like that's a real lot of scope for interesting drama. And I have to tell you now, a lot of spy fiction is a real disappointment. Most spy films are just about blowing stuff up or a sub-genre of action. There's very

[01:10:00] few spy films that are actually reflect the reality of it. Um, actually, in fact, one of the best spy shows I've ever seen is a French show called Le Bureau. Um, Le Bureau is the, one of the most authentic shows about spying. Obviously it's dressed up a bit. Isn't that the one that's been remade? It has been remade, uh, in, uh, by Paramount Plus. With Richard Gere. That's it. It's called The Agency. Yeah. And I've only seen a few episodes of The Agency. So The Agency is very good, but it's not,

[01:10:25] there's something missing about it. And I think maybe because of the cultural factor, I haven't seen enough of The Agency yet to see if they start making silly mistakes, but The Bureau is based on interviews with former French intelligence officers. And then they kind of made up a lot of stories inspired by those interviews. So there's a lot of authenticity there. What films would you recommend that are good? Well, um, I think, uh, The Courier with Benedict Cumberbatch is really good. Cause that's all about the Oleg Penkosky affair,

[01:10:53] which is a different Oleg. Um, and, um, The Courier is all about a British businessman who gets recruited by MI6 to contact Oleg Penkosky, who's basically MI6's man in Russia, who is sort of helping provide information about the Cuban missile crisis. And Oleg Penkosky sadly comes to a very bad end. He gets found out, his treachery gets found out by the Russians and he gets executed. And there's

[01:11:19] debate about how he was executed. Some people believe he was burned alive. I've never personally seen enough to convince me he was usually a Russian trader. You should just get shot in the back of the head, but apparently Oleg Penkosky got burned alive. I don't know that's true, but a lot of people I respect tell me that is the case. And I know some people out there are expecting to tell me that's not the case. So I have no idea, but he did die. Um, and Benedict Cumberbatch plays a guy called Greville Wynn, who is the British businessman who MI6 kind of used as a go between,

[01:11:49] between, um, Oleg Penkosky and MI6. So that's a really good film. I was going to say, so how, so how old were you when you met Oleg at the fish counter and between then and when you started your Secrets and Spies podcast? Oh yeah. So I was 17 years old, but I met Oleg. So long time ago. Yeah. So this has been, you know, my other passion next to homicide. Um, yeah. So, and, and it was an honor to meet one of

[01:12:14] the world's most effective spies as your first spy you've met. I've met a few spies now, but, but, um, to be him, to be my first. Amazing. Cause I'd love to do a film about Oleg Gordieski, but I suspect that because of Ben McIntyre's book, somebody will beat me to it now, but who knows, maybe somebody's listening there and it might all come together. But, um, if you ever do need somebody, cause one of the things in Oleg's book is dry cleaning. So dry cleaning is this technique used by spies. Before you go and meet your source, you need to make sure you're clean of surveillance.

[01:12:43] And so what you have to do is set up a, um, you give yourself a lot of time. So before you go and meet your source, you allow yourself three to five hours to do this technique of dry cleaning. And it's got to look like you're not doing anything. So what you do effectively is you pretend you're going shopping or you're pretending to go and, um, meet somebody else for a bit and so on and so on. You do lots of very innocent looking activities, but what you do is you study those around you and you're always

[01:13:13] questioning, is there a familiar face that keeps popping up? And if there is, you abort the meeting and that's what dry cleaning effectively is. And the goal, well, the goal frankly is to find out somebody's following you, but also you've got to make sure it doesn't look like you're dry cleaning. So you don't, cause the last thing you want is because if the KGB suspect you're running someone, the last thing you want to do is confirm it for them by acting like a complete wally and doing lots

[01:13:39] of spy stuff, because then they're going to throw all the surveillance at you for weeks on end. The trick is, as Oleg puts it, is you want them to get bored of you and you want them, you want to think, make them think that you're a low level, whatever, and not important because every, every intelligence agency has finite resources. And so, you know, they don't have unlimited manpower.

[01:14:04] And so they have to put that manpower on things they think are important. So they think you're not important over time. They will give up on you. Obviously you should never drop your guard, but you want to lull them into this sense of you're not important. And that's how you conduct despionage basically. That's what I learned from Oleg, um, my KGB training via book. But, um, so yeah, so the other, the other spy film I would recommend is a quite a good one about the CIA called Spy Game

[01:14:30] of Robert Redford and Brad Pitt. Um, now it is quite a showy movie, but it kind of talks about different eras of the CIA from Vietnam, the cold war to the nineties. And it's all about, it's sort of this sort of story about this seasoned spy played by Robert Redford who has to try and outwit management and kind of set up a rescue mission for his protege, who's been arrested in China and is about to be executed. And there's a really cool film. Um, and it's got lots of realism within it,

[01:15:00] whilst a lot of crazy action film stuff too. But, uh, but I spoke to Michael Frost Beckner on my podcast a few years ago. So he's the guy who wrote that. And Michael Frost Beckner does know what he's talking about. And he also ran a show called The Agency, which was the first ever American show to film at the CIA. And quite a few directors from Hummer side did go on to do The Agency. Um, and Jay directed an episode of The Agency, but he just forgot about it.

[01:15:27] So, so for our listeners that don't know, Chris has a podcast called Secrets and Spies, very professional, very, it's, it's not, um, it's not a conspiracy theory show. It is actual interviews with, um, MI5 people, former spies, um, who, who like Chris just said, all they all and CIA that all have written books since they've gotten out of the, out of the life. But, uh, when did you start Secrets and Spies? Almost 10 years now?

[01:15:55] Nearly. It's 2016 is when it started. Yeah. So it was just as I'd finished making the dry cleaner and, and like with low budget films, they always take a lot longer than you think to finish them because, um, you're pulling favors. So with the dry cleaner, we had like our editor was pulling, I was pulling favors for, you know, to get our editor to work on a film. We had some motion graphic stuff involving facial recognition that pulled quite a favor, but we couldn't do that until we had picture lock. And then I couldn't get picture lock because then the year after the dry cleaner, I suddenly did a

[01:16:24] lot of directing commercials for a bit. Um, and then my editor was direct, uh, editing a lot of stuff. So we had a lot of problems. It took like two to three years to finish the film. Um, and so out of all that sort of frustration, the podcast is sort of born and I, because I was sitting on a lot of material, uh, that I'd use for my research. Um, and I don't know, I just, I just, I, I'd also became a big podcast fan. So my other passion when I was a kid was radio,

[01:16:50] um, and a TV show called Midnight Caller with, um, Gary Cole, who was this, uh, you know, crime fighting DJ. So the other fantasy in life. Um, and so, um, yeah, so sort of weirdly podcasting ended up becoming this weird natural progression, um, of, of, uh, what I do. Um, and, and it just sort of partly was supposed to be a research tool to inform my writing. And then it kind of became

[01:17:16] its own thing. Um, and now I'm in a weird place where I'm becoming a more successful podcaster than I am filmmaker. So it's all very weird. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's quite funny. So that's how, so, so Chris's podcast, Secrets and Spies is what led, is what led to this podcast because without that, um, we would not have this incredible expertise behind us. Um, you know, Chris does all

[01:17:42] the tech, Chris had the platform did, I mean, Chris did everything. I've basically as a former journalist, you know, do the research and the questions and, and, um, you know, obviously we interview people together, but without Chris's background, technical knowledge and his, the podcast he'd already had up and running for years, um, this would have never happened. So we said, you made it a lot easier. Interesting progression. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I remember,

[01:18:11] you know, with podcasting, it's all about sort of, um, you got to get a rhythm with it and a life balance. And, and I think it's very easy to kind of try to do too much too soon, if you know what I mean? And burn yourself out. And that's one lesson I learned a long time ago. So like the Secrets and Spies, we were monthly for a good few years and then progressed to being every two weeks. Now we're weekly and it's taken a long time to build up to that. I can't believe that you're weekly. That

[01:18:36] just boggles my mind. I know. So it's like. You're weekly and you are also still doing some filmmaking producing in between. It's just as, I know this, which is obviously we're monthly, but nevertheless still, because Chris, Chris does all the editing and all the sound smoothing out and all that. Um, really, I don't know how you, there must be two Chris cars. I wish God. Yeah. Get into cloning, but, uh, yeah. Oh my goodness. No. Um, I think my other passion in

[01:19:05] life, coffee helps in that department. There you go. That'll help. I had a good day yesterday and I was thinking, well, I must be feeling better. I had a really good day yesterday. I realized I had like five cups of coffee. Of course my coffee, I have to make half calf. Oh, okay. Yeah. Heart skipping thing, but still it was like, that's how you got all that done yesterday. Yeah. Good old coffee. But I mean, that's, that's probably enough about me. I mean,

[01:19:32] honestly, Susan, I mean, one of the things that has blown me away about you is you've worked on so many very cool films. I mean, not, not only have you worked on what I think was the best police show ever made still. Um, you've worked on like Scarface, you've worked on, you know, stop making sense, which is this legendary concert film directed by Jonathan Demme. You've worked on Murder,

[01:19:55] She Wrote, um, you know, Gettysburg, uh, you know, so many interesting things. So how, how, well, how did you get started in pursuing film? What, what started you on that journey? The short answer would be, I only, I only took things that were iconic. No, just kidding. Um, everything was a huge go figure. How did that happen? Um, accident. I mean, I often talk about

[01:20:22] this, about how we have moments and you probably had moments like this too, moments in your life that if they hadn't happened, um, you wonder what path your life would have led. Right. Um, and I know Boots talked about the, you know, the, um, his roommate bringing the camera, the, the parents of his roommate bringing the camera and say, finish off the role, which he'd never,

[01:20:45] you know, had any inkling or interest in camera or filmmaking. Um, so I just have to talk about how everything started. Um, I grew up in a household where we watched a lot of old movies, um, very, uh, very respectful of old movies of old black and white movies. When I was a kid, they were throwing everything on television to fill television airtime up. So Saturday mornings was the dead end kids,

[01:21:13] um, the three stooges. I mean, all, all those kinds of like 1930s serials. And then of course, Saturday night movie, the Sunday night movie, the Friday night movie, we were all old movies. And although I'm sure my mother watched some of these with me, I remember more watching them with my dad and my dad knew every character actor, every person in the films. So I got a really good background at home when I was young, just of watching old films. And I don't know, you know,

[01:21:41] that just was sort of by accident. And then our local library used to rent out, I think they were a dollar maybe, I think they were a dollar black. They were called, it was a film called Black Hawk that, um, transferred famous old silent films to super eight. So sometimes on a Friday night or a birthday, my parents would set up the projector and all the kids, you know, on our street would come

[01:22:06] up in to the living room and we would watch like Charlie Chaplin movies or Buster Keaton movies in the living room. Um, but I never thought it never occurred to me. I probably like you, when you were young, that you could actually have a job, you know, in the movies. My dad was a radio engineer. So there was a little more open idea in the house that you could do something interesting, right?

[01:22:33] Like be in radio. Um, my brother ended up going into television. He's an Emmy award winning television engineer. So I went into high school, regular high school here, Woodlawn High. Hoot, hoot, go Warriors. And two of the teachers were film buffs, a social studies teacher and an English teacher. And they taught, never been done before. I don't think it ever was done since. They taught a

[01:22:57] film history, film history class one semester that I was lucky enough to take. And I did a paper on the special effects and horror films, including King Kong. Nice. The original, excuse me, the only King Kong as far as I'm concerned is the original 1933 stop action film, which boggled my mind when I read how they made that. I had no, what do I know? I didn't know anything when I was that age, when I

[01:23:24] was 16. When I read how they made King Kong, it completely like, completely obsessed me. I was completely fascinated with it. And I think some of it was my, my initial approach and probably always my approach to filmmaking was technical as opposed to artistic. I don't think I ever had an artistic bent to make my own films. I think the technical side was always the thing that I was interested in.

[01:23:52] Anyway, so I took that class. And then I found out that University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC, had a film program. And I, it was not a major at the time. And I thought, well, I'll take American Studies as my major and I'll have a film minor. And the semester that I started there, they had a film major and boots talked about it. And when we have other guests on that we'll have another guest on,

[01:24:21] I think that also went through the program there. It was a ridiculously amazing amount of equipment and access. And it was just unbelievable to be in the ground floor of that. So, uh, I worked there. So I got to teach people how to use the ARRI BL. We had Bolleux, we had CP-16s, um, we had Nagras, uh, and we, of course, had Super 8 films. We also started out with black and white Porta Packs that were two system, you know,

[01:24:50] the camera and the, and the, the reel-to-reel half inch tape separately. You know, we learned how to, how to edit video. We learned how to edit film. And we also did outside projects, uh, for commercial companies. So then we got actual commercial filmmaking experience while we were still in school. So that was just, and also an amazing group of intelligent, interesting, artistic students that

[01:25:18] were there. Now you talked about having Jack Cardiff at school. The only, I think, famous filmmakers I remember were the Maisel brothers who were pretty famous documentary filmmakers. They came and talked to us about, about what they did. These are the guys that did Grey Gardens, everybody out there. If you haven't seen the original documentary, not the dramatic film, which also was very good, but go back and watch the original documentary, Grey Gardens. Um, really kind of amazing. So, um, and, and then just

[01:25:47] happened. I got out of school. I was working on, like you, I'm sure did when you got out of school, working on little projects. Like I worked for companies that shot wedding videos. Oh, I've done. Love that. You just sort of feel like you're like, you know, you're just treading water. You're not really getting anywhere yet. And, um, I certainly wasn't using much of my skills that I learned at college. And then one of my, I had also been working for free for friends and doing free things. And one of my

[01:26:16] friends called and said, Hey, I'm shooting a film in a broken down mansion. In green spring Valley. Would you shoot it for me? He was going to, he wrote it and directed it. And I have vivid memory being on the phone with him thinking, I just told myself I was not going to work for free anymore. I'm not going to work for free anymore. But he was a really good friend. I thought, you know, could always good experience, you know, shooting some 16 millimeter black and

[01:26:41] white. Um, we're on that film. We're shooting in the attic of this mansion that happened to be, had broken up into apartments. And some of our friends from UMBC, one in particular, Larry Singer was a still photographer, I think lived there and had told somebody else that was a former UMBC student who was now a producer in New York, um, came through to scout the location for a horror film called

[01:27:07] the house on sorority row. Now, if I hadn't said yes, and I'm only saying this to people, sometimes you just have to say yes to things. If your gut says say yes, even if you just told yourself the day before, I'm not saying yes to those things anymore. Um, if I hadn't been there in that attic shooting that project with my friend from school, I would not have heard

[01:27:32] before anybody else knew there was a film company coming through to shoot a feature film. Um, so I got in on the ground floor with that. I worked as a PA when they came to town clean, helping clean out the mansion before we shot there and then gave them my resume to the production office and got brought on as a second assistant camera person. Arthur Ang, bless his heart, local AC was the first AC. He taught

[01:28:01] me everything I needed to know about being a second assistant and Tim Surstead, who is a very well known LA cameraman came into town to shoot it. He was originally from this area from Silver Spring, I think. So here I am working with a Hollywood cameraman, a local camera assistant, but he, he was so good at teaching me everything. And then one day as we're like, um, probably a couple of

[01:28:26] weeks into shooting or toward the end, Arthur sees a little tiny article in the back page of the New York variety, which used to be like a broad sheet newspaper. I don't even know if it's exists anymore. And it said that the camera union in Los Angeles is giving a training program, like the DGA, the Directors Guild of America does a training program to get their people in the pipeline.

[01:28:51] Um, the camera assistant, I mean the camera local, which at that point was 659 international photographers, um, were giving a training program. And he said, you know, why don't you try to do this? And I somehow, I think the deadline was, was in a week, almost done. I took it home. I sent the application, I managed to get the application in just under the wire and got accepted into the training

[01:29:18] program to at least go first, take the test. So I went to LA. I was also applying to UCLA grad school. I got into UCLA grad school. I thought, you know, I'm going to apply for this training program while I'm at UCLA and the film program. And, um, you go to take the test. You don't know it at the time, but there's a thousand people there. I think DGA gives about 2000, lets about 2000 people take the

[01:29:45] test. A thousand people taking the test. They whittle it down to the top 100 scores. They interview those hundred people and they pick 10 people for the training program. Wow. I mean, even when I, it still gives me goosebumps when I think about that now. Um, I just remember at the time thinking,

[01:30:07] I am, this is happening. I am making this happen. I mean, I took it so seriously. And so you go in for the interview. I go into an interview in West Hollywood and I walk into the interview room and there's a big giant Oak table and around the Oak table are the heads of the camera department at Burbank studios, the head of the camera department at universal studios, the head of the camera department

[01:30:36] at Paramount studios, the head of contract services administration were the people that administered all the union stuff. Um, it was, could have been incredibly intimidating, but for some reason I was like, this, this is how I am. I am getting this. I don't know what. And so because I had so much experience at UMBC, because I'd done a feature film before I got there.

[01:31:03] And at some point during the interview, they said, what are you going to do if you don't get into the training program? Well, apparently everybody else that I trained with later said, Oh, I'm going to apply for the training program again. That never occurred to me. I said, look, I'm getting into the business. I'm either going to go get back again with Tim Surstead. He's a cameraman out here. The director works out here. I'm going to hit everything. I'm going to keep going to you. So I'm going to do

[01:31:31] Amr local. Um, but people, like I said, people told me later, Oh, I'm going to take the test again. Like that literally never occurred to me. Um, so I got in, uh, I got a letter at home. I remember my dad had parent, had apparently held the letter up to a light bulb before I got home to see whether I'd gotten in or not. And as I'm opening the letter, I see my dad's has like tears in his eyes because he's so

[01:31:57] proud of me. So that, you know, Arthur Ang, all props to Arthur Ang. Cause I never would have known about that training program if he hadn't seen that little ad in the variety. So I move out there. I had already been, um, I had already been out there at UCLA for a quarter. I only went for a quarter because the training program started, um, in January of the following year. So I finished at UCLA grad

[01:32:25] school and started the training program. Unlike the DGA, which is a two year program, the camera program was about 10 months to a year, somewhere in there. And at the time, uh, the heads of the camera departments, which of course were all old white guys, good white guys, but they were like, you know, literally these were world war two photog unit guys. These guys that had been, yes. World war two photog unit guys that were now heading.

[01:32:50] They must have some stories. Wow. Yeah. Dick Barlow was at Burbank and the guy beneath him, um, whose last name was, I think it was Dan Don, somebody had a, Kelly was his last name. You know, these old school, you know, Navy photog guys. And I remember at the time Dick Barlow, when we had one of our first meetings said, this is not a quota program. And I felt like standing up and saying, thank you for doing a fucking quota program. Cause if it wasn't a quota program,

[01:33:18] I would not be here. So the 10 trainees were five white men, two Asian guys, two white women and a black man. So it obviously was an effort to integrate the camera local, which was obviously overwhelmingly white men and a very, very difficult to get into. So that was just an unbelievable.

[01:33:45] So what they did was they sent you out to all the loading rooms at the time. All of the major studios had camera departments. They had all their own cameras. They had these gigantic loading rooms where you could have like five or 10 people in there loading films for all the shows that are going on, on, on, on the, on the property, on the, you know, on the, um, at the studio, that system was breaking down

[01:34:14] and going away when I was a trainee turning into rental units. So camera would be from Panavision. You would go to Panavision and prep your equipment loaded onto a five ton truck. The five ton truck would sit outside the studio, outside the soundstage. And that's where you loaded your film. But when I started, the camera department still existed. So that's where I learned what the, what the term

[01:34:41] whistling in the dark means. Oh, okay. I did that on the top. Yeah. Whistling in the dark basically is a way to remind yourself that you still exist in the dark. Okay. Right. So we would be in these, and especially at Burbank studios, they had a gigantic loading room and I'd be in there by myself for many, many minutes loading, downloading and uploading films that were, you know, film that

[01:35:08] was coming in. And they'd done in the dark. From the studios. So you don't expose the film. Yeah. Whenever you see, whenever you see things on TV where they're, you're doing stuff and there's a red light on in the room and they have a whole scene in there. Well, if you're actually unloading and loading the film, it is in complete and utter darkness there. And there's not many times in your life ever where you actually are in like velvet black darkness. There, there's just not many places

[01:35:34] where you are in complete darkness. And I, it, it, it gives you this eerie feeling. Like I used to feel like if I stepped the wrong way, I would fall into another dimension. It sort of messes with your head. Yeah. So that's, so I learned to whistle in the dark to remind myself I was actually still in, in, of this dimension. But anyway, that was an awesome experience. I have to give a shout out to my friend, Linda

[01:36:00] Vincent, who was one of the loaders in the loading room. The other way to get into the camera local at the time was to be a loader and work in the loading room. Like, I don't know how many years they, how many hours they needed to get before they could get on to working on a set. But here they are training the trainees who blow through there and get their camera card, get their camera local card, their union card, and they're training us. So props to them because they also got in, but they got in behind us,

[01:36:29] which is very politically difficult situation to be in. Um, but they were absolutely terrific. And my friend Linda and I have been lifelong friends, friends since then. And she was absolutely wonderful. Also one of the few women also in, in the business at the time in camera, the other woman in the training program, Joe Carson went into, we had a choice. We could go into, um, special effects

[01:36:54] camera. She went into special effects. So I like literally never saw her again. Um, she went, I think she went on to work at industrial light and magic and stuff like that. Um, but anyway, that, so we got thrown into all the loading rooms at all the major studios and then put on sets and taught by the second assistant on the set. So I came with some knowledge after having worked

[01:37:17] here on the house and sorority row. Still a Hollywood set is, is quite the thing to be thrown into and to learn. It was pretty nerve wracking until you really got your feet under you. But some of the things I worked on as a trainee, I worked on the TV show, Lou Grant, uh, with Ed Asner. Uh, I worked on the Devlin connection with Rock Hudson and Jack Scalia. I mean, Rock Hudson, that was just blew my

[01:37:46] mind to be on a set with Rock Hudson. And I have to tell you my Rock Hudson story. We were working, we were working in one of the, um, um, California has a string of missions, um, that go throughout closer to the coast, but go throughout the state, much of the state, um, from very old missions. We were shooting in one of the missions for the show. It was very early in my career and it was raining cats

[01:38:13] and dogs. And so I'm like struggling with my cartload of equipment. I have trying to cover everything. I'm like so nervous, like I don't want anything to get wet. And, um, the mission had a, um, cloistered area. So it had a courtyard that was covered, you know, so I got all the equipment under, under there and I'm like, totally like flustered and like nervous. It was one of my first days on the show. So I didn't quite know the camera assistant, the cameraman, I didn't know anybody yet. And at

[01:38:41] some point I had a, I had one of those see-through plastic raincoats, you know, there's really cheap, like you literally, you get at the dime store and it had a snap on hood. And I don't remember how, in some, some way my hood falls off and it falls off on the other side of the camera, uh, cart into a puddle. And I, I go around to bend over, to pick it up in this hand, this big hand in a gray suit.

[01:39:07] Comes in and I'm bending over and he's bending over and he picks the rain hat up and he says, here you go. And I look up and it's freaking rock Hudson, like right there in my face. This was before he got ill was when he was still just stunningly beautiful, six, four, six, five, whatever. And I,

[01:39:29] I think I probably just went, you know, I had enough, I, it was, it just blew my mind. And then he just got up and went into the set. We were shooting inside the church. I always remember him from the film Seconds, which is my favorite, one of my favorite John Frankenheimer films. Oh my gosh. Yes. I have to, I had it on my list of one of the ones to watch again. Yeah. That was an interesting film. And then I worked, worked on a series at the time was called Second Family Tree, but when you look it up now, it's called Family Tree with Ann Archer and James Spader when he was

[01:39:59] like 17, like, like a nobody. Right. And then the first feature I worked on in the training program was the Star Chamber with Michael Douglas and Hal Holbrook and Sharon Gless and Yafit Kodo. That's a, yeah. So I crossed paths with Yafit Kodo in like 1983, 10 years before I'm on Homicide.

[01:40:24] Yeah. And that was shot by Peter Hyams. Well, he was on, he was technically the director, but he shot the whole film. Yeah. He tends to do that. He is a kid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause like 2010, which I quite like and Capricorn One and a few other films he's directed, he seems to be the DP. Yeah. He was always behind the camera. We had a DP of record, Dick Hanna, who I hate to say this, Dick, if you're still out there,

[01:40:49] but spent a lot of time on the camera truck. So, so Peter really, really, really operated as the DP. And then the operator was Ralph Gerling, who was one of these really super old school guys. Great, great people to work with. And then Mike Chavez was one of the camera assistants. And Mike is the person that recommended me for Scarface, which was the first film I worked on when I got out of the training program. In the training program, I also worked on Heart to Heart

[01:41:19] with Robert Wagner and Stephanie Powers, who were just a lot of fun to work with. I remember one day it was my birthday and I was on the camera truck getting stuff ready and I was getting the card out. And this woman comes up, puts her arms around me and says, oh, happy birthday. I'm so happy for you. It was so nice having you on the show. And I'm looking at her, I literally have no idea who it was. And it was Stephanie Powers before she'd been in the makeup trailer. Oh, wow.

[01:41:48] Stephanie Powers' entire face is covered with freckles, which you had never, ever seen, ever, in any movie she's ever been in because she has stage makeup on. And finally, while she was in my face, I'm like, oh my God, Stephanie Powers. Terrific. They were absolutely, oh my God, they were so much fun. Yeah. But one day I wore a t-shirt to work that had James Dean's picture on it. Oh, cool. From Rebel Without a Cause or something like that.

[01:42:17] From Rebel Without a Cause, which was one of Natalie Wood's early adult films. Obviously, he had started as a child. And Robert Wagner's assistant, one of his close buddies, comes up to me and said, you probably, you need to take that t-shirt off. Because it's going to strike some chords with him because he had lost Natalie Wood not soon before that. Not too soon before that.

[01:42:44] Oh yeah, it was like 1974, wasn't it, when she died, I think, wasn't it? Somewhere in there. Yeah. It was obviously before I worked with him. So I went in the camera truck and turned my t-shirt on inside out so that you couldn't see him. Then the last thing I worked on as a trainee was the television series Casablanca. Oh yes, I remember you telling me about it. I had no idea that existed until you told me that. Remake of the film. Yeah, that's hilarious.

[01:43:13] Shot by Joe Byrock, who at the time was in his 80s. Absolutely amazing hard lighter. But he had started his first film, I think I'm pretty sure it was his first film, co-photographed It's a Wonderful Life. So somehow they were, I don't know what the co-cinematographers were, but he was one of the cinematographers on It's a Wonderful Life. So these are the kind of people, like I come into the business as these guys are still around, right? That's so cool.

[01:43:42] And the coolest thing was they went back to the original blueprints from Casablanca and reconstructed the set based on the original blueprints. And so when you walked in there, if you like, you know, put your hands up like blinders so you couldn't see off the set, you were on the 1940 set of Casablanca. I mean, it was amazing. Even down to, they wanted to get the original lamps.

[01:44:09] Because, you know, studios, they don't throw anything away. It's all in the prop shop. It's all, you know. And so they wanted to get the original lamps to use that in the cafe scene, in Rick's cafe scene. But those lamps were working on another period TV show called Bring Them Back Alive on the Burbank studios, on Warner Brothers Live. Bruce Boxleitner, I think. Yeah, yeah. Bruce Boxleitner. And one of my friends, shout out to Jeff Norvett, he was working on Bring Them Back Alive. So they had the original Casablanca lamps in their show.

[01:44:39] But just absolutely amazing. Absolutely amazing. And then one of my, that show, this happened to me a couple times when I was a trainee. I had a trainee. The trainee was Laurie Craig, who had won an award from Toyota for screenplay. Oh, cool.

[01:44:54] And had won a car. And the ability to come out and get on the soundstage with some productions. And so she became my trainee on Casablanca. And we are still good friends. She wrote the screenplay for Ella Enchanted and Pauly and a bunch of other films.

[01:45:10] When she grew up in WK, you know, got, she got her, got an agent and, you know, became a screenwriter in LA. So, so that was amazing. But then at the end of my training program, Mike Chavez recommended me.

[01:45:24] And I did maybe one or two things beforehand, like Wizards and Warriors. I did a test for Airplane 3. I worked on Dukes of Hazzard second unit, a couple of other things. And, and I was recommended for Scarface, which was my first film with John Alonso.

[01:45:42] And, and John Alonso had the best camera crew in the business. I mean, they were just, the camera crew was amazing. And weirdly enough, my very first day as a trainee, when I walked on to the back lot of Burbank Studios, I'm like completely lost. I don't know where the camera department is. I don't know how to get there. I'm like all nervous.

[01:46:03] I walked through, I have no idea who it is. I walked through a set where they're shooting a film on the back lot. And there's these guys with little white, like golf, terry cloth, golf hats, white golf hats, a couple of guys. And I went up to one of them and I said, well, do you know where the camera department is? It turned out he was the gaffer. That was a John Alonso film, Blue Thunder. Oh yeah. I was going to ask about Blue Thunder in a minute if you were on that. He was shooting on the back lot. Yeah.

[01:46:32] So the first time I walk into a back lot, I bump into Alonso's camera crew. I don't know that until later. And, and I get on Scarface. So right out of the, out of the training program, um, I'm on this giant, giant film directed by Brian De Palma, written by Oliver Stone, who at the time was not super famous yet.

[01:46:57] Oliver Stone was not famous. Obviously De Palma was, and obviously Pacino was. Um, and the interesting thing that sort of dovetails, which we talked about when we interviewed Boots was, um, John Alonso had come up. Actually, John Alonso, you watch your late night Westerns and TV shows. John Alonso was an actor for a while.

[01:47:46] Oh wow. He was a cinematographer in, in, you know, in LA in the eighties. This, you know, was not like there were no black cinematographers. There were no women cinematographers. So, you know, he was a groundbreaker for sure. And he had worked with some big dudes. Famous for Chinatown, isn't he? Chinatown. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He was nominated for that.

[01:48:08] Yeah. And I remember him from Star Trek Generations, cause he was the DP on that. Um, and, um, he had this sort of trademark warm lighting that was coming through a window and one or two scenes, but, uh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we would sometimes when we were working exteriors and he was looking through his contrast glass and trying to figure out, you know, how we're shooting, if it's bright and then a cloud goes by or whatever, he would always look through the contrast glass and say, Jimmy, help me out. Talking to James Wong out.

[01:48:43] Mm-hmm.

[01:49:04] Handheld. No, John. Um, but I remember at one point, so we had always had basically two camera crews going cause there was just so much, you know, so much of the shooting and the big scenes with the gun. I mean, the guns going off and the machine guns and the blood everywhere. Grenade launcher on the bottom of a gun, you know, his little friend. And the day that, that, that Pacino burned his hand on the barrel of the gun. Yeah. What was that like being there in that moment?

[01:49:33] Well, screaming and falling on the ground. Now I read a thing in his memoir, by the way, people, his memoir is absolutely terrific. There's a lot of celebrity memoirs that aren't great. His is absolutely terrific. Um, and he talks about going to the hospital and I don't, I don't remember that. I remember him screaming when he burnt his hand, but I don't remember him going away. I guess he did. Um, but, uh, there was blood everywhere all the time.

[01:50:02] I remember my shoes sticking to the floor, specifically the scene where they're cutting off angels leg or arm or something with a, with a, um, with a chainsaw. One of the, one of the scenes. Oh yeah. I remember that scene. Yeah. So the exteriors and things that was, they shot in Miami for a week and they shot in New York for a couple of days, uh, for the exteriors and also for the blue screen backgrounds that we use.

[01:50:28] But everything else was shot in LA and also in Mendocino, which is North of LA. Um, but it was a six months. I started on it in November. We weren't done until like May. It was the longest thing besides a TV series I'd ever worked on. Gigantic. I remember being in, um, in the, the lobby, you know, that scene in the lobby where he dies at the end, where there's the two spiral staircase, well, arcing staircases that come down and the reflecting pool at the bottom that he falls into.

[01:50:58] And of course we did a lot of takes of like all the materialitos, like running through the house, like with the machine guns and everything. And John Toll, who was the B camera operator who became in his own right, a famous cinematographer later, John Toll like puts his arm around me and says, watch what's happening here because you will never see this again.

[01:51:19] Meaning just the scope and, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the character of it, um, was really quite astounding to be in the middle of. I remember one day also being on that set and John had set up, I don't think this had been done anywhere else. A giant silk that covered the entire ceiling of the set.

[01:51:45] The lights are on the catwalks above the silk. And we're all sitting there. We're setting up a shot at some point and we hear this pop and everybody looks up and one of the bulbs had blown. And I suppose the filament or the hot, the hot glass came through the silk and we're all looking up and there's a little tiny hole and it gets bigger and bigger.

[01:52:14] And then the flames are licking at the edges of the hole. The entire silk starts to burn to the edges. And this is soundstage 12 at Universal Studios, which is, which is at the time the biggest or second biggest soundstage in Hollywood. It is gigantic and it's got a hundred year old wood in it. I mean, it is old, right?

[01:52:38] So we're all standing under it and realize that this place is about to catch on fire, right? It's already catching on fire because the silk is burning to the edges, to the edges of the wooden catwalks. So we all got out. Luckily, Universal had on the studio grounds, had a fire department. And the fire department comes in and literally hoses down the entire set. I mean, like hoses it. I mean, you know, I gotta hose it down.

[01:53:08] It's on fire, right? I don't believe any of the catwalks caught. They caught it before, you know, it went anywhere else. The silk basically almost like just disappeared, right? It wasn't giant flames, but it was flames. And it just sort of evaporated with, you know, with, with the flames. It was really strange. And then the suits came down from the black tower. There's a black glass tower in the Universal. They came down and we were always on the edge, like on homicide.

[01:53:37] Like, are they going to shut us down? Because we're over, we're over schedule. We're over budget. We're over this. We're over that. I mean, my recollection is Pacino had a deal, pay or play deal that he got $50,000 a day. For every day. If we went over schedule and we went over a month. Yeah. Now, whether that's true or not, that's what I remember. Al, you can like email us and tell us if that's true. So he made out eventually, but that was, that was an incredible experience.

[01:54:06] And by the end, the entire crew was crazy. We were all shell shocked. And it was also at the height of the cocaine like industry. And so there was, well, I wasn't doing it. I couldn't, I tried it once. I never do that stuff. Lots of cocaine usage because we had these long, long, long, long days. Well, this is the problem with cocaine. Yeah. It's the upper. Yeah. Yeah. Although that's not what Pacino, Pacino was a prince. He was in character the whole time.

[01:54:36] He never got out of that Tony character. I think later in his career, he stopped with that sort of method kind of thing. Um, but he was, um, he was snorting, uh, uh, milk sugar all that whole time, which probably ruined his sinuses. Yeah. Who knows what that did to him. Jeez. But when we were shooting in Mendocino, Universal was known at the time as being, uh, historically cheap, like super cheap.

[01:55:03] Um, and when we were shooting in Mendocino, he gave us a party at the hotel we were shooting at. He paid for it. He sat off in the corner at his table and he gave the crew a party. Um, we didn't get much respect from the studio heads. They didn't pay very well. And they also just weren't great. I mean, they paid fine, but it was, they were known as being cheap. The next day on the set, we're shooting at one of the mansions in Mendocino and, um,

[01:55:33] or Santa Barbara. And, uh, Pacino walks on the set and the entire crew like stands back in a line and claps as he walks in to thank him for giving us a party and realizing like giving us a party and his party was in essence, thanking us for our hard work. So I always have like deep respect, uh, for him for doing that. But, um, yeah, Scarface, that was amazing. Amazing. And so then I worked on a bunch of other things with Alonzo.

[01:56:00] So I wanted to ask you about one of the most successful crime shows of all time, Murder She Wrote. How did that come about? So after Scarface, I worked on The Yellow Rose. I was Sam Elliott and Sybil Shepard. I did Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme and Jordan Cronen with somewhere along the line. I don't know if it was before. I worked with Dennis Dalzell and his crew, Jeff Norvett and Bill Garrett was the operator.

[01:56:30] Jeff was the first assistant. Somewhere I worked with them. Um, it might've been on Wizards and Warriors. And then they asked me to come on Murder She Wrote with them. And I did do 37 episodes, um, of Murder She Wrote, uh, somewhere in the middle, like the middle season, like maybe two and three or three and four, somewhere in there early on in, in its, in its, uh, many years, in its many seasons.

[01:56:59] And, um, they were nice enough, bless them, that when John Alonzo had a film and they asked me to be on that, they would let me go do a feature and come back to Murder She Wrote. So I was very lucky, very, very, very lucky. Um, I worked with, I mean, they, Dennis Dalzell was a, an absolute prince of a cinematographer.

[01:57:24] He had a wild reputation apparently earlier in his career, but had settled down, was an absolutely lovely man. And so was his operator, Bill Garrett and Jeff Norvett, still friends to this day. Just absolutely. I don't, I don't know how I lucked into working with some of the most amazing people. So here I am, I'm all set up. I worked with a very well-known feature cameraman. And when I'm not doing that, I'm back with these guys that are doing television.

[01:57:53] And they also did V and a number of other, uh, a number of other things. Oh yeah. V, V's a classic. Yeah. So Murder She Wrote, obviously iconic today. Um, and funny when you watch it, when you watch it now, uh, I would say if you can look on IMDB and watch the episodes that Dennis shot, he, he lit Angela Lansbury so beautifully.

[01:58:17] I think I said this on, on another episode, we had a special lavender net that we used in front of the camera, in the camera, and then a lavender net that they use in front of the lights. Um, he also did that classic, um, lighting on women. They use it mostly on women. I'll say that that sounds discriminatory, but they did back in the day. Very high, hot light, very high, hot light directly in front.

[01:58:46] There's a little tiny shadow under the nose and blows out any wrinkles or anything else you got going on there. I could deal with that. Yeah. Me too. I need one now. So, um, she looked, she looked terrific. I don't know what happened. I know that he took a lot of time to light her. And I think at some point they wanted him to hurry up.

[01:59:10] And, um, we unceremoniously, uh, got canned on the show. I think because Dennis was taking too much time to light her, but she looked, the show looked terrific under his, his cinematography. So I'd say if you can look on IMDB, go watch a couple episodes that he shot. Cause it was gorgeous. Some of the guys earlier and later, um, very much, we've talked to this on earlier.

[01:59:37] I'm not dissing anybody, but because you have to work so fast in TV, uh, very flat, sort of bright TV lighting. Um, he, he just, he did a terrific job and he was terrific. Um, and we all quit with him. Of course it's like, we're going with you, dude. Oh yeah. We're all heading out. But that was interesting. Cause of course I said earlier, I grew up watching all these old films and who are the guest stars? Well, one of them was Patrick McNee, who you're a big fan of. Right.

[02:00:06] Uh, well, Patrick McNee, we're, I was a huge fan growing up of the Avengers with Patrick McNee and Diana Rigg. Diana Rigg was my idol growing up and he, I left the show for a week or so. My mom was my first, my mom's first incidents with breast cancer. Oh, okay. So I left to go home and that was the episode Patrick McNee came on. I came on the very last day. I came back from Baltimore to LA the very last day.

[02:00:35] Patrick McNee was on and we shot, we had one scene with him first thing in the morning on the back lot coming out of a movie theater or something or a theater. And, um, and I made sure, believe me, I made sure I walked up to him and shook his hand and said, I just have to tell you, I, you know, I grew up watching the Avengers and that was, you guys were my idols and whatever. I blabbered all over. At that point I was a little better than I was with Rock Hudson. How was Patrick McNee when you said that? What did he say to you? What was he?

[02:01:04] Oh, he was a completely gracious, like you would expect him to be just terrific. And he looked great. Um, yeah, just really sweet. So some of the other people on the show when I was on it, Cesar Romero, um, who was the, the Joker in the original Batman series among many, many, many other earlier big films. Uh, Stuart Granger. Oh yes. Classic. Stuart Granger was a huge British, famous British, um, one of the things I remember about Stuart Granger.

[02:01:32] And I remember about all of the old Hollywood actors that we had. Um, now you would expect these old Hollywood actors to be like hiding somewhere in a dressing room. These people were ready. They were in makeup, in costume. And often I remember Stuart Granger being on the set for whatever. I don't remember what the scene was in his pajamas. The set, the scene was, he was in his pajamas. The famous actor, Stuart Granger in his pajamas. Ready. He like, he wasn't in his trailer.

[02:02:01] In a dressing room. He was on the set in a director's chair in his pajamas waiting to go on, ready to go. And that's what I remember about the old Hollywood actors was, man, they were there and they were ready to go. There was no scraping them out of the trailer, scraping them out of a dressing room anywhere. They were just, they were terrific. And also Roddy McDowell, who I also worked with on Overboard. Judy Giesen, who was also British, big British actress. Sid Charisse.

[02:02:31] I mean, come on, Sid Charisse. I mean, I was a huge, crazy Fred Astaire fan. And Sid Charisse was in, I think it was the bandwagon. Anyway, big Hollywood technical Fred Astaire movie. Sid Charisse. Sid Charisse. Howard Keel. I mean, these people are just like unbelievable. But the thing I remember most about Angela Lansbury, completely terrific, wonderful person.

[02:02:59] And she would come on the set sometimes from across the soundstage. We shot this at Universal and a lot of it obviously was done in sets and also on the back lot, including that we were near the studio tours. Oh, I've been on that tour. We were taught, so was I before I got in the business.

[02:03:25] We were taught, you do not stop the tour bus, right? That was their big money at Universal, right? So like you're shooting like a famous TV show. You gotta stop for the bus. This tour bus does not stop. We had to stop for the bus. So I don't know how many thousands of films or, you know, Super 8 films and people's snapshots

[02:03:53] of their vacations in Hollywood that me and Jeff were there like waving and jumping up and down as the tour bus went by. So that was always fun. So we always shot back where like Bruce the Shark, the mechanical shark from Jaws was. I've seen the shark. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen the psycho house. Apparently they have a woman with a knife running after the bus sometimes, but they didn't do it the day I was there, sadly.

[02:04:20] So that was always fun shooting on the back lot. But I have one, this is not a funny story. I have one really weird, really weird memory from working on Murder, She Wrote. We were going off the lot just a couple of blocks to a funeral home, to shoot in a funeral home one morning. And in the van on the way to the funeral home, we hear that the Challenger- Oh yeah, that's 1986, yeah. The Challenger has exploded.

[02:04:49] And we go to the funeral home and as we're setting up inside and everybody was, you know, pretty sort of stunned by that and quiet. And I go into the funeral home into the showroom and there's seven caskets in there, which is how many people died on the Challenger. It was just struck me at the time was like, okay, that's just really weird. Horrific, synchronistic, yeah. Yeah. But Angela Lansbury was terrific. Sometimes she would come in, you'd hear her come in from across the soundstage and she

[02:05:19] would start, you know, she did Gypsy on stage, right? So sometimes she'd hear her from across the soundstage going, I have a dream, a dream about you, baby. So she was just really a character and really terrific. And her brother, Peter, I think it was her brother, was one of the producers on the show. And her son, Anthony, directed some. So he was there sometimes too. But yeah, that was a terrific experience.

[02:05:48] And like I said, that camera crew, those guys absolutely love those guys to death. They're really terrific, terrific people. And V, I think we were only on for a month or so on V. That was where I figured out who Robert England was, the guy that played Friday the 13th, right? It was Robert England without his scary makeup on, without his Freddie makeup on, right? And Mark Singer, he was terrific. Mark Singer was in that. He was a really sweetheart.

[02:06:18] Mark Singer, and so the other stuff I worked with Alonzo, including Overboard, also Jojo Dancer, Your Life is Calling, which was the semi-autobiographical film that Richard Pryor made about his life. Richard Pryor was absolutely, absolutely terrific, sweet, just a really sweet, sweet, sweet. He was such a sweet person.

[02:06:43] And we shot in Peoria because that's where he, you know, part of his growing up and, or the characters growing up. And I had relatives in Peoria. And they came out to the set. And one of my cousin's daughters had Down syndrome. And so he was so sweet. He like talked to them. He took pictures with Karen on the front porch of the house we were shooting in. And that ended up in the local paper.

[02:07:10] He just was, he was just a sweetheart. And watching him, some of those things he had to relive, like lighting himself on fire. You know, we shot the scene where he dumps rum all over his head. And then it cuts to the window exploding as he catches on fire. And I don't know, have I told this story on another episode? No. Oh. So we're in a mansion, you know, where he had been, had, had, had in the, in the story

[02:07:38] and also obviously in his life had vowed he was never going to do any more rock at the time. I guess we call it crack now, but he was going to smoke any more rock. And then he finds one in the carpet and he goes around crawling on his hands and knees and like starts smoking the crack, the rock. And, and then at some point he gets so upset, he dumps the rum all over his head.

[02:08:02] And I'm watching this and I'm seeing how incredibly, this is an emotionally, super difficult emotional thing for him to, I mean, you can imagine, can you imagine the PTSD from that and then reliving it? Now he's also directing it. He's acting and he's directing it. So it's his thing, right? And I remember he dumps the rum and it was probably water or something, dumps it all over his head. And he's just standing there and he says, cut.

[02:08:31] And the, the set gets really busy. All the guys are going to change the lights because we're going to go outside and take the camera outside and we're going to shoot from the other side with the window exploding with the, you know, flames and whatever. And he's just standing there by himself. And I went up and put my hand on his back. I didn't say anything. And he said, thank you. Because I could just see, it's like, I could not imagine what that would be like for him to relive that.

[02:08:58] And yeah, he was just, he was an, he was absolute prince. He was a terrific him. And Gary Marshall, another one of my favorite directors ever, Gary Marshall, who was, who did Overboard and also Nothing in Common, which was an early Tom Hanks film with Eva Marie Saint and Jackie Gleason. I mean, Jackie Gleason, come on. I mean, he was, he was an old grouch, but he was an amazing person to watch. And Eva Marie Saint, weirdly enough, I don't know how I found this out. Maybe my mom told me.

[02:09:28] One of my uncles used to be a very well-known radio personality in New York in the probably forties. And Eva Marie Saint was in one of the shows that my Uncle Dick used to announce for. And I went up to her at some point during the show and said, I don't know if you remember, my Uncle Dick, you know, was on the, I don't remember which CBS radio, I don't remember what show it was that he did with her. I said, do you, do you remember who Dick Dunham is? And she shakes my hand.

[02:09:58] She goes, oh my gosh, what a good looking man. So she remembered my Uncle Dick, which was really nice. That was fun. Tom Hanks was a lot of fun. That was young, crazy. That was a young, crazy Tom Hanks. And then all the people, all the guys in it that were his compadres at the ad agency were all Second City people. I think we talked about this in the Isabella episode. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Dan Castellaneta, Castellaneta, I think his name is, who went on to do The Simpsons.

[02:10:27] You know, these guys went on to be, you know, to become the big, big stuff. Also did, Isabella and I talked about Real Men, which was another John Alonso film with John Ritter and Jim Belushi. Great fun to, great fun to make. Although some of it was kind of difficult because it was in a seriously disgusting neighborhood. I hate to say that, but it was a neighborhood that was mostly abandoned.

[02:10:53] And there was an animal rendering plant next to it. And so at some point in the afternoon, they would start rendering the animals. And it was like, you couldn't breathe. And it was like, really? I couldn't imagine people had to live next door to that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. God. Horrendous. And then there was the great outdoors with Dan Aykroyd and John Candy and a 1,400-pound Kodiak bear. Now, that wasn't John Alonso.

[02:11:20] Oh, is this the famous TV bear? I think it's some, yes. Yes, Bart, the bear. Bart, the famous bear. And that was Rick Waite. Rick Waite was the cameraman on that, who I think that was the only thing I ever worked with him on. And Ricky Mention was his first assistant, who was an absolute prince. Ricky, if you're out there, loved working with him. But the bear, weirdly enough, the bear was originally from this area.

[02:11:46] He was adopted when he was a pup or whatever you call bear cubs when he was little and then trained and ended up in the movies and TV. But he's originally either from Annapolis or somewhere around in Maryland, which is really weird. There's a question about this bear. Was he down to earth or was he a diva? He was down to earth. They would bring him in. He had a gigantic, picture a gigantic dog crate. But like gigantic, right?

[02:12:13] Because this guy, when he stood up on his hind feet, he was freaking 12 feet tall or something. I mean, he was just a stunning piece of animal. And they had built the entire house that they show outside on Big Bear Lake in the film. They had rebuilt the entire house inside. Same studio, same stage that we shot Scarface on. Stage 12 at Universal. Gigantic house. Pine trees. I mean, the whole thing. You thought you were somewhere else.

[02:12:42] And so when we shot with Bart, they had to put a perimeter around the set with electrified fence. Okay. Okay. So Bart would not pass the electrified fence. Okay. There's a scene where he comes into the house and wrecks the inside of the house. And at some point, he's chasing the actors. I don't remember if it was just the women or also John Candy and Dan Aykroyd.

[02:13:08] Anyway, so the cameraman, bless his heart, Rick Waite, pretty macho kind of guy, decides we're going to be on the C camera. So we have an Aerie 2C silent camera. They've got a couple of, I guess the other cameras are out on the porch outside the electric fence. Where am I? I'm inside the electric fence with the macho, sorry, Rick, macho cameraman with the Aerie 2C. I'm pulling focus. Bart the bear is in front of us.

[02:13:38] We're backing up the stairs. I have at least one or two, we've talked about this, the focus whip. So I could get as far back as I could. The bear was taught by the trainers right next to us with a baton about a foot and a half long, a wooden baton about a foot and a half long. The bear is trained. When you shake the baton in his face, he opens his giant maw.

[02:14:04] Now he's not growling, but you could see all the way to his tonsils, his giant bear teeth and everything. So what are we doing? We're doing closeups on the bear, the 1,400 pound Kodiak bear. And the whole time I'm thinking, what the heck am I doing? I mean, it was, I mean, obviously when you work with animals, like, oh, they're trained. Oh, they're, they're, you know, they're docile. Oh, they're this, they're that.

[02:14:31] It's like that bear, they could take one swipe in friendliness and take your head off. I mean, the guy, he was ginormous. He could have a bad day for, you know, you know, he could have his coffee or something, you know. So that was, that was, and when you watch the film, there may be one quick cut that we did of, you know, of that. It was, it was kind of creepy. And then one night we shot at night exterior at Griffith Park and same thing. I don't remember if we had shots of him running through the woods because there

[02:15:01] was a scene where he goes into a cave and the little, there's little girls that are in the family that are missing and they're down in the cave and the bear goes in the cave with them. So we're shooting some exteriors in Griffith Park and they got the electrified fence and everything. And I go into the camera truck to get something and I probably to get a jacket, I reach up to the top shelf. This is so typical of guys. I reach up to the top shelf to get my weather gear down and the sound mixers, duffel bag

[02:15:30] was up there and I accidentally bump into it and a chrome Glock falls out of his duffel bag onto the floor of the camera truck next to me. Very easily could have gone off and killed me. But apparently all the guys were packing that night because we were out in the wilds, I guess, with the bear and they figured they're going to shoot the bear if the bear goes crazy. I don't know. But it was another one of those situations where like, okay guys, just leave your guns at home. Yeah.

[02:16:00] That would be helpful. But that was fun. Those guys, John Candy, they were terrific. They were a lot of fun. But the bear was incredible. They would hand them to open an entire six pack of high C juice, give him the entire six pack. He would drink the whole six pack at once and a dozen donuts. This is what they gave the guy to wake up. He'd be sleeping in his giant crate and then they would wake him up with a six pack of juice and a dozen donuts.

[02:16:25] But yeah, that was quite an experience being with him. And then I worked on other stuff like a couple of days on Lethal Weapon 2 where we're blowing houses up. Yeah, yeah. You were talking about this house exploding and something melted on the camera. So there was an Airy 2C probably dug in a hole in the middle of the yard and the third or fourth camera assistant had put a plastic bag over it to protect it. And it's always, it didn't matter which show you worked on.

[02:16:52] If the special effects guys were setting stuff up, you better walk 10 paces farther back than they tell you to walk because they love blowing stuff up, right? That's what they do. So this house, once again, in some neighborhood that was falling apart, I don't remember where we were. The entire house, I mean, the entire house is obliterated in one big, I mean, there was probably multiple, obviously multiple charges. But I just remember just this gigantic, like, you know, explosion and mushroom cloud, literally

[02:17:22] mushroom cloud. That's how big the explosions were. And the entire plastic bag melted onto the camera because it was in such proximity, this giant fireball. I remember the poor guy, the third assistant camera was like freaking out. And we were like, do not, he started running into it while everything was still on fire and falling from the skies. Like, do not leave it. Do not run in there. The thing is melting.

[02:17:50] That was also the night we worked in, I think, San Pedro, which is right on the water. And they exploded the shipping container and the Mercedes blows out of it into the harbor with all the money coming out. And then we were shooting in a derelict old boat. There was a big gun battle in the derelict part of the boat. Yeah, that's it. Where Joss Ackland, he says he has diplomatic immunity.

[02:18:17] And then Danny Glover says, it's just being revoked as he shoots him. And we shot, for some reason, we shot some process shots in there. Process shots are when, you know, it's a car chase, but the people really aren't on the street. So we shot a bunch of black screen, actually. And I guess they keyed in the stuff later of Mel Gibson hanging off the back of the car. And that was, I think I've told you this before. He was the only person I was nervous about banging a slate in front of was Mel Gibson.

[02:18:46] I know nobody, I've worked with all these other giant stars. I don't know why he intimidated me. How was he? Was he all right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't remember anything bad. He just, you know, they were all having a good time. I mean, that was a, talking about a macho show. That was a macho. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a macho show. And Quantum Leap with Scott Bakula. Oh, Quantum Leap. And Dean Stockwell. Dean Stockwell, that's it. What a prince, too.

[02:19:15] Oh, man, that's such a classic show. Childhood show. And that was with a cameraman named Hank Lebo, which I worked on a couple of TV shows with. I think he also shot Hard Copy, which was not the news show, but a TV show about working in a newspaper. But Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell were just, I mean, just sweethearts. We shot one episode in a, somebody asked me about this recently, that building. It's this famous building in downtown LA called the Bradbury Building.

[02:19:45] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? I've been in there. It's such a great place. From Blade Runner, from Blade Runner and stuff. Yeah. So it's got all that amazing, you know, wrought iron, cast iron work inside and the wrought iron elevators. Is that the one where he's a private eye? Yes. And Claudia Christian's in that episode because she was in Babylon 5. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. I remember this episode. Oh, God. I used to bring home VHS tapes of dailies from stuff like that. And I had some dailies from that. I don't even know where that all went. How funny. Oh, cool.

[02:20:14] That's such a cool building, the Bradbury Building. It's beautiful. I've been in, I was in there in 2017. Just so cool. Sadly, as a member of the public, you can't go up to the top floors where they film the Blade Runner stuff. But it's just, yeah, it's so unique. And it's been in so many shows. But it's not a working building, is it, anymore? I think it is. Well, it sort of is. It's used a lot for filming. But no, no. Right. But like as far as people having offices and stuff, I don't know that it's. I think on the top floors, they might. I could be wrong.

[02:20:42] But because you can't go up beyond like, I think it's the third or fourth floor, if I remember correctly. So after that, it's all private. So I'm assuming it's either residential or his offices or something. I don't know. But such a cool building. Yeah, that was fun. And I think the last thing I worked on, I was working on a show called Snoops. Lloyd Ahern was the cameraman on that. And Bob LaBonge was the operator. Or Alan Easton was the operator. Bob LaBonge maybe was the first assistant. We started it in L.A.

[02:21:10] But then because it was about a husband and wife PI team in D.C., we came back to D.C. Oh, cool. To shoot. So we shot in D.C. And I think that was the last thing I did when I first quit the business because I came back into the business later when I was on homicide. And Tim and Daphne Reed, they were really fun. But it was funny. Like, they weren't from here. So they would mispronounce things.

[02:21:40] Like, the Potomac River would be like Potomac River because they weren't from L.A. or from wherever. They weren't from D.C. And people would have to like, no, no, it's the Potomac River. And then backing up a little bit, I worked on a film, a TV film called The Women of San Quentin, which was about the women guards, the prison guards at San Quentin with Stella Stevens. And Bob Stedman was the camera on that. But that was not just Yafit Kodo again.

[02:22:10] So that's the second time I worked with Yafit Kodo before homicide. And he recognized why he would recognize me from being, you know, as I was a trainee. I was a scared little person on Star Chamber. But he recognized me and said hi. He was like so sweet. And he did the same thing when I came in on the set on Homicide. So props to him. He was a real sweetheart.

[02:22:32] But we did a big scene in that in an abandoned prison in Colorado where there was a big prison riot scene with the real prisoners. And like Gettysburg, where when we did in the movie Gettysburg, when we shot on the actual Pickett's Charge field and the Confederate reenactors were hellbent on taking it this time, did not want to stop. When everybody said cut.

[02:23:02] The prison guys in the riot scene, they had a hard time getting them to stop. Luckily, everybody had like... They were method. Yeah. Luckily, everybody had like rubber pipes and rubber bricks. But they were having a good old time. That was beautiful, though. That was... I don't remember. Outside of Colorado Springs. An abandoned prison there. But Gettysburg. So I quit the business for a couple years and then got back in the business.

[02:23:32] I got married and divorced in three and a half minutes. And when I got divorced, I was like, oh, my God, what am I going to do with myself? I made a couple phone calls and I got back into the business here. And one of the first things I did... I did a bunch of commercials and stuff, but did Gettysburg. And that was obviously close... Well, it wasn't close by. It's about an hour drive from here. Absolutely wonderful. Case Van Ustrom shot that. You had a relative.

[02:24:01] It was in the real Gettysburg, didn't you? Yes. What was that sort of like for you with this sort of family connection to the whole thing? Yeah. So weirdly, my brother and I didn't know we had a family connection until my brother had come to visit the set. And then my parents came up to visit the set one day. And my mom said, oh, you know, we used to take drives up here when I was a kid. And your grandfather... Actually, it was a grandfather that was the German grandfather, not the Irish grandfather.

[02:24:30] Anyway, so he said, we would always go look for your great-great-grandfather's name on the Pennsylvania Monument. And I'm like, what? What? And so that's when we found out that my great-great-grandfather, James Kinsella, from County Wicklow, who had come over during the potato famine and ended up signing up in Philadelphia, I think, or New York.

[02:24:54] Probably came in on the boat in New York, signed up in Philadelphia with the Pennsylvania volunteers who were one of the units in the Civil War who were in almost all of the major engagements. Yeah.

[02:25:12] And so we, from there, we went and talked to one of the rangers and found out we could write to the War Department, or the Defense Department, then the War Department back in the day, and got all of his service records and found out all. So he was at, yes, he was in 1862, he was at the Battle of Antietam, which is also in Maryland. Well, Gettysburg's in Pennsylvania.

[02:25:38] He was wounded on the battlefield at Antietam, put in the hospital, recuperated, still had the bullet in his thigh, goes back into service with the Pennsylvania Volunteer, 71st PA is who, the unit he was with, is in the Battle of Gettysburg.

[02:25:55] The 71st Pennsylvania, where, if anybody out there is familiar with Pickett's Charge, the angle is where the Pickett's Charge was concentrated on the clump of trees, but also the, and there's a stone wall that had an angle. The 71st Pennsylvania, we're at the angle where the Confederate 10,000, how many of them were concentrated to come across Pickett's Charge, the Pickett's Field, at the angle.

[02:26:24] At one small point, some of the Confederates broke through, a few of them broke through, got across the wall.

[02:26:32] And apparently, at some point, my great-great-grandfather, James Kinsella, was captured by the Confederates, marched across the Pickett's Charge field, back to the Confederate lines, at some point marched to a train, put on a train to Richmond, put in a Confederate prison camp on Belle Isle, which is an island in the middle of the James River, where many people died of dysentery and starvation.

[02:27:03] Survived that. Go figure. Survived that. Goes to the hospital. A lot of people, if they were too ill, stayed, were maybe transferred to another unit, but then became hospital orderlies and people, you know, that didn't have to be in battle. So I think he was at Belle Isle, like maybe five or six months. Survived that.

[02:27:29] Lived to be 80 years old at a time when people didn't live to be 80. Well, after he got out of the Civil War, he became a Baltimore police officer. So if you watch the first seasons of Homicide, they show a close-up of very early Baltimore police classes, you know, or the groups of police officers.

[02:27:52] We have a photo very much like that of my great-great-grandfather as a Baltimore police officer in the 1880s after he survived the Civil War. So, yeah, so we knew some of that story, yes, while we were working on it. And so when we're shooting the Pickett's Charge scenes, when we're shooting, you know, those kind of things, and my brother also became a reenactor. After we found out my great-great-grandfather's history, my brother became a reenactor in that unit, 71st Pennsylvania unit.

[02:28:20] So we both have had the experiences where you sort of like try to block out, for me it was like block out the cameras and stuff, and sort of feel like, could I get an inkling of what it must have been like for him to be in the middle of that chaos? But that was a really, that was all exterior shooting, lots of battles, because I was brought in, because that's when they had all the extra camera stuff. Originally was on the B unit and then was sent over to the A unit to be the B camera focus puller on the B camera.

[02:28:49] So it was, that was a terrific crew. And a lot of the guys up there were Homicide, who I would later see back on Homicide, because it was the Baltimore crew. We were close. There were people from L.A., but a lot of the crew were from Baltimore, the Grips Electricians and all that. So I met a lot of those guys up there. And then after that, I got on Serial Mom. I'm not quite sure what the connection was with getting, I know Boots got me on Serial Mom.

[02:29:18] I know it was somebody that got from Gettysburg, got me on Serial Mom. Anyway, and then Boots was the connection to Homicide. So I worked with him and Tom Lappin. I was the loader. Tom was the second on Serial Mom. And then they asked me to come on Homicide because their loader had left. And I was the loader for the, I came on the second season. They had been on the first, they were on the first season. They came on the second season. And then when Tom left, I bumped up to be the second. That was my connection.

[02:29:47] So Susan, you returned to Baltimore and now working on Homicide. So you mentioned Boots helped you kind of get on the show. So what was it like kind of coming back and working in your home city? And what was it like being on that show that was very different to, sort of as we say, the more traditionally shot projects that you'd been on prior to that? Yeah. So before Homicide, working on Gettysburg, it was nice to be working here.

[02:30:16] Because I had moved back in 1989, 1990, and did some other things while I was married and then got back into the business. So it was literally, I made four phone calls to Boots and a couple other people I worked with and not worked with, people I went to school with. Richard Chisholm and Bob Dorsey and I don't know who the fourth person was.

[02:30:39] So it was a trip after being gone for almost 10 years to come back and to be able to work at home, especially because I had no idea what I was going to do with myself when I got divorced. And it occurred to me, oh, you know, you used to have this really great career. So that was amazing.

[02:31:03] Working, that's an interesting question because obviously working in Gettysburg, I was driving an hour to get there every day. But then they put us up in the sleaziest hotel on the outskirts of Gettysburg. They managed to pull some pennies together. So I was working, I was staying out there too. But yeah, good question.

[02:31:27] Working in Baltimore, I was thinking about this this morning because when you work in the film business, and you know this too, even though you're doing something different every day, if you're going from project to project, your job is the same. Right? So whether I'm in Gettysburg or whether I'm in Baltimore, I'm going on a camera truck. I'm getting the equipment out. I'm loading magazines in the morning. You know, we're conferring about what equipment we need for the day.

[02:31:56] So the job is the same, but the circumstances are never the same. They're always different. So working in the city was really cool. I love Baltimore City. And I grew up in the county, but my mom grew up in, I mentioned this in another episode, my mom grew up in Pigtown in West Baltimore.

[02:32:19] And so when I was growing up, we did all our shopping downtown on Howard Street when all the major department stores and shoe stores were still down there. So I had a feel for it and an affinity and a love for Baltimore growing up, even though I didn't grow up in the city. So coming back into the city, it wasn't like, oh, geez, I'm going into the city now, which a lot of people who don't live in the city feel like.

[02:32:48] Like they're intimidated by the city. So I was happy I had that background of being in the city a lot because my mom was a city girl growing up. So it was nice to be working back in Baltimore. You can't argue with working in Fells Point because it was an amazing location to work in. And many of the places we went were areas that I was familiar with, except for, I mean, even the projects.

[02:33:17] I mean, my mom had taken us down to the projects. She had done a fresh air program and got some kids out of the projects one year, a handful of kids. And so even going to the projects, I think we even shot. My recollection is the Luther Mahoney projects that, you know, where his community center was. My brain tells me it was the same one that I went to as a kid, nine or 10, when my mom was doing this fresh air program. We met a mother and we took like five kids out.

[02:33:47] And we did it for quite a few months through the summer into the winter. So working in Baltimore was really cool, but it was an easy drive and easy commute for me. So that was also good. And then I hadn't worked with 16mm since college. I had never worked with Atons. I worked with other 16mm cameras, but not Atons. But the handheld nature of it, I was used to from working with John Alonso.

[02:34:12] So the idea that you're with him, and I've noticed that some of these videos that Jay Tobias sent us, there's a little more, there was some work where we had pulled out the tripod here and there. So going back and forth between the tripod or the butt dolly or even one of the videotapes,

[02:34:35] the videos that Jay sent us had, I think like a small dolly. It wasn't a peewee though. It was something. Anyway. So the idea of working with a handheld camera, even though it was 16mm, was not different to me. I was used to working with a cameraman who would on a dime say, you know, put it in handheld mode. So we were constantly with Alonso going back and forth, changing the camera over, putting the handles on,

[02:35:05] you know, that kind of thing. And I think, I want to go back and look, but I think Alonso also used two handles, is my recollection. I may be wrong about that. I have to go back and see if I can find any photos. So that, the handheld nature of it wasn't that different, especially when I bumped up to second on Homicide, because I started as a loader.

[02:35:27] So I wasn't in the middle of everything until the, you know, season three or at the end of season two. I can't remember when Tom left. But having to grab the camera off the cameraman's shoulder when I worked with Alonso was my job, because then it leaves the first assistant's hands-free and he can go do his measuring. He can like confer with the cameraman. He can do whatever he needs to do.

[02:35:54] And then the second, which was me, standing there holding the camera. So often on Homicide, didn't happen all the time, but often on Homicide, because obviously Boots and Dave also would grab it. So the idea of grabbing the camera and holding on to it while the first did what they needed to do, you know, wasn't that different. So, you know, I'm trying to think, I was trying to think this morning. I don't remember.

[02:36:23] I'm certain I had to settle in with the equipment because I'd never worked with an Aton before. I can't remember if when I started in the second season, I met them at the rental house and actually did the prep with them, which would have helped me a lot as far as getting familiar with the camera body and the lenses and loading the magazines. I sort of in my brain think that I did, I probably did do that.

[02:36:53] They probably asked me to come down to the rental house when they did the prep. So that would have familiarized me with the cameras too. But I don't have any specific memories of it being a difficult transition at all. Certainly, like just a terrific crew. So, and I knew a number of them from working on Serial Mom and Gettysburg

[02:37:22] and also from growing up in Baltimore and going to UMBC. So the crew, many people were familiar to me. So that was really cool. I know that Tom Lappin might not like me for saying this, but I know when I started on Serial Mom, Tom was a little worried that I would come in and be an asshole Los Angeles camera assistant. You know, that I'd been in LA for eight or nine years and I was going to come back

[02:37:48] and be some like egotistical know-it-all when I came and worked with them on John's movie. And he did tell me later, he said, well, I thought you were going to be an asshole. Because you're coming from LA and you think you know everything. And I never thought that. I never thought I knew everything. So what are your earliest memories of being on Homicide? Yeah, I don't know that I remember anything specific.

[02:38:16] One of my main memories is when they asked me to do it, I was ecstatic. Obviously, because I was familiar with the show. I was familiar, but there had never been a TV series. You know, you could argue that what's the cop show that a bunch of the guys worked on? America's Most Wanted. You could argue America's Most Wanted was here quite a bit.

[02:38:44] But really, a series had never been shot here. So when and if you're a freelancer and you're going from project to project, either a couple days on a commercial, a couple days on pickups, because we did a lot of pickups here for other things that had been shot here. But also, even a feature film. John's feature films weren't incredibly long, a couple of months max. So, you know, when you get asked to do a series, which is going to go six, seven, eight months,

[02:39:13] it's like cha-ching. I mean, I hate to say that, but it's like, wow, I have a steady job, which is what you never have as a freelancer, right? You never have a full-time job that lasts forever as a freelancer. So I do remember, I actually have a vivid memory of being on the camera truck on Serial Mom when he asked me when, and that may be a false memory, but I think that he asked me when we were finishing up Serial Mom if I wanted to go on to Homicide for the second season, because they had already done the first season.

[02:39:44] And just being like ecstatic that he had asked me to do that. So I was like super, super duper happy to be on the show. But as far as like, I went back and looked at some photos of us when it was Boots and Tom Lappin as the second and me as the loader, you know, just shots on the street, you know, downtown. And trying to remember, even just as a loader, I don't remember except that I always loved

[02:40:13] my loading rooms when I was a loader. Um, I always loved the way I had them set up and there were pictures of Elvis and James Dean and, you know, stuff. And I probably had a radio in there. I don't know. But, you know, very organized because you have to be able to find everything in the dark when you have a loading room. So you, you know, you set it up the way you like it. Well, what was a typical day like for you on Homicide then? Well, I think we talked about this with a lot of our guests, well, especially with Boots.

[02:40:37] So, you know, we'd get there before call time because we were, it was sort of considered by Jim Finnerty, um, you know, and then it trickled down the line that if you weren't there before call time, you were late. Yeah. It's very filming. In Hollywood, you were, you came on call time. You didn't come a half an hour, 20 minutes early and set the camera up because yeah, you just didn't do that. So we'd get there half hour early, 20 minutes early, open the truck up or the truck would be open.

[02:41:04] And, um, between what was on the call sheet, uh, probably the first probably would talk to Jean. Um, I have a lot of memories of starting a lot in the squad room, but I don't know that we started a lot mornings in the squad room. I sort of feel like those were later in the week, but maybe, maybe first days we started in the squad room sometimes, but it could be anywhere. It could be on the street. It could be in a house. It could be in a mansion. It could be anywhere.

[02:41:33] And so you're deciding what you need. The carts come out. Um, you throw all the equipment you need on the carts after, let's say, so Boots builds the camera in the camera truck. Um, there's a head in the camera truck where he can, um, mount the camera and we get, you know, I give him a magazine. He puts the film on. And he probably talks to Jean about what the first, first shots are. What kind of lens do we need? You know, are we using a short zoom? Are we using a prime?

[02:42:02] What are we using, um, for starters? And then he would check everything, make sure the transmitter's working. Um, you know, check all the electronics, um, make sure it has a hot battery, you know, a fully charged battery. Um, and, and put the camera together. And then, um, uh, say if, if we were on the sound state, well, not the sound, so we were in the, in the now Pendry hotel.

[02:42:26] Um, when we were at the rec pier, uh, there was a very long three story high ramp. Um, and so we would all, all of us, camera, grip, electric, everybody that had, uh, craft service, everybody would be pushing our carts up this three story high ramp, um, to get all the equipment up to the sets, up to the, um, the squad room sets. Uh, and then once you got in there, Jean had the camera on his shoulder.

[02:42:54] Boots would give Jean the camera, uh, and they would, uh, do a couple of rehearsals. And like we said in earlier episodes, um, it wasn't the kind of strict blocking you would see in other shows where the actors are expected to go to the same place every time they do, every time they do the shot and expected to hit their marks. On other shows I'd have, I think I mentioned this, like multiple pieces of colored tape

[02:43:20] all up and down my leg on my jeans that I would pull off and put down as marks while you're blocking, uh, the scene, which we rarely did in Homicide unless there was some set shot, like, you know, some sort of a framed shot that needed to be done. Otherwise there were no marks, which made it a lot easier for the second assistant. Cause that can be one of the most stressful things. Color coordinating the marks for five or six or eight actors.

[02:43:50] Yeah. Ridiculous. So a couple of run throughs and then, you know, they would light the set if we were on a set or if we were in a home or in an inside location, otherwise out on the street, it would just, you know, be deciding, you know, what, what the exposure was going to be and, and all that we often did shots and boots mentioned this, where we would go from outside to inside

[02:44:16] and, um, somebody would have to pull, um, you know, pull the F stop as they were moving through from outside to inside. I don't remember if boots or, you know, or John, I don't think John could have been able to do that while he was moving. Um, so boots probably tried to do that while they were going through, you know, from outside to inside and, and, you know, changing the F stop. Um, and then all day long, normally, and I should have pulled out some call sheets, but

[02:44:44] you know, we might have four or five locations. And so all day long, you're putting everything back on the packing, everything up, putting everything back on the truck, getting to another location, unloading everything, putting it all back on the cart or carts. If we had, you know, more than one camera all day long or some of the time, um, we would have two carts. Um, and that, and we could just do that all day long, loading, unloading the trucks and,

[02:45:11] and, and reconfiguring whatever you needed camera wise for whatever scene, whatever scene you were doing. So it was a lot of movement, a lot of movement all day long, unless for whatever reason, maybe we had days where we were in the squad room all day and then you get a little bit of a breather. Okay. Okay. Do you have, um, any memories of working with the cast that you'd like to share? Cause it was such an amazing cast.

[02:45:38] Well, I think I mentioned earlier, um, walking on the set and Yaf, having Yafit recognize me and a big smile and, you know, saying hello and, you know, what are you doing here? Kind of thing. Nice to see you. That was really nice. Um, I wasn't familiar, uh, certainly familiar with Ned Beatty, um, you know, which was a thrill to be working with him. Um, so Yafit and Ned, I knew. The other cast members, you know, we weren't really, I wasn't really familiar with, I should

[02:46:06] have been familiar with Isabella when she came along, but I forgot that I had worked with her before. Um, so Andre and Kyle and, um, well, Richard Belzer, I also had worked with before on Scarface. He played a standup comedian in the, um, in the nightclub scenes in, in, in Scarface. So I was familiar with him and he didn't know me because that was, you know, he wasn't there the whole show.

[02:46:32] Um, so watching them obviously was, I mean, it, it was an amazing to watch that ensemble cast do what they did. And also we've talked about this before, everybody learning to dance around with the camera. I mean, for Jean to be moving through those five, four, five, six, eight characters and

[02:46:58] having them sort of, you know, like the Red Sea parting for the camera crew as it goes through and going back to their spots and, and always being on as the camera shifted around and swung around to them unexpectedly. And I know many of them have said that was exciting because they could never be off. They were never off camera. I had worked with on many shows, many traditionally shot shows where the star might leave. Like, let's say we do a closeup on them and then we swing around to do a closeup on,

[02:47:28] on the supporting actor that's in the scene. And, and the, the, the star goes off to their trailer and an assistant director or somebody is reading the lines, um, to the, to the supporting actor. So everybody having to be there and be on all the time definitely was different for sure. Definitely different than, than the traditional films and television shows I'd been on, on before.

[02:47:53] Um, there was also just sort of, and you know, I know people talk about, you don't, you don't, you throw away the bad memories. You only remember the good stuff. People say that about childbirth, right? Why would you have a second child after going through that horrible pain? It's because the body says, don't remember that. Right. Um, I mean, certainly we had difficult, difficult days. I mean, I, I certainly had blowups with people off and on, not as much on homicide as I had

[02:48:22] had toe to toe with some people on other shows I'd been on. It was a, it was, and you can tell, I think too, if you've watched those videos that Jay has given us, there was, there was a lightness and, uh, there was a, you know, I don't want to overstate it, but sort of a joy on that set. I think everybody just, I mean, that, that video he sent us the other day when we were all so totally like almost unrecognizable. Unrecognizable. And it's a very serious episode.

[02:48:52] Yeah. That was the Requiem for Adina, but almost unrecognizable in all our gigantic layers of clothing. So we're outside. If we had that much clothes on, it was probably 20 degrees or below. And we're outside all day in that. And yet everybody's joking around and fun. And I mean, you know, I mean, I'm sure that there, there obviously we all had our days when we weren't in a good mood and there were crew people and cast members that weren't necessarily happy all the time. Yes.

[02:49:21] But I do remember there being, once we got into that rhythm with Jean, because of course when I started, that was a new cameraman for them, but it was not new for me because I wasn't on season one. So it wasn't some kind of weird shift for me. Um, but they were starting with a new cameraman and, um, I think, and, and Jean had such a great attitude that, that, uh, super trickled down to the whole set.

[02:49:49] Jean's, you know, really playfulness and, and loving what he was doing. So, um, that's one of the things I remember, uh, is, is how pleasant a set it was to be on pretty much all the time. I mean, you know, we had horrible locations and we had a horrible situations for sure. Um, but yeah, that, that's the one, that's one of the main, one of the main memories. What was the question?

[02:50:18] Just working with the actors, what was it like? The actors! Actors, schmacktors, yeah. Yeah, I, I, yeah, I, I, yeah, I don't have anything specific except that they were so good. You know, I mean, obviously everybody points out Andre, you know, because he was like the Shakespearean, you know, actor, uh, you know, in his sort of delivery, but everybody was so good. Yafit was so, everybody was so good. Melissa was just terrific.

[02:50:45] Um, I think it was just a pleasure watching all of them, you know, they were all terrific. Yeah. Yeah. One, one question I did want to ask you was, did you find the topic of the show challenging? Cause especially as it took inspiration from local murders and you being a Baltimorean? Well, it's interesting. Um, I had recently moved back. Well, not that recently. I had moved back in 89.

[02:51:12] So, um, but you know, what, what do we get desensitized? Like we're desensitized now at some level. Um, there was almost a murder a day in Baltimore when we were shooting that show and it sort of became, and it sounds terrible, but it was sort of like, that's the way it is. Right. Um, it was also that way in many other cities across the country.

[02:51:38] Um, so I think less being disturbed by the subject matter and more being pleased or even proud that we were working on a show that was, first of all, based on that amazing source material, based on David Simon's amazing book. Um, but that it was throwing light on that in a way that I don't think had been done before.

[02:52:06] That, um, we didn't, we weren't working on a back lot pretending it was downtown Baltimore. You know, we weren't on the universal, you know, uh, New York street back lot acting like it was Baltimore. We were in Baltimore and we were in the neighborhoods where those murders were occurring and the drug dealing was occurring and the overdose deaths were occurring. So in some ways it, it felt good that we were shining a light on it.

[02:52:36] It also in some ways felt weird because of the disparity between, um, you know, here we are a bunch of working people, um, coming into a depressed neighborhood that has had no attention thrown on it and where people, um, often, even in those horrible situations, you know, getting up and going to work and, you know, people trying to live their lives, but in difficult situations.

[02:53:03] So it, it was, you couldn't ignore it, right? You couldn't ignore the disparity and you couldn't ignore the poverty and you couldn't ignore, I mean, we, we mentioned this before. We would work on streets where the entire block, there might be, let's say there's 20 homes on the block. Um, 15 of them might be vacant and boarded up and, or the boarded up doors broken

[02:53:32] through and people trying to live in them, um, in, in, in a vacant home. And in between people trying to still live their lives, people still getting up and going to work. Um, and some of the neighborhoods just felt like bombed out shells. I mean, really in that way, yes, was depressing. I remember writing, I wrote a series of poems about, um, just my impressions

[02:54:00] of, of, of working in, in these depressed, you know, sad areas. But I did feel like we were at least throwing some light on it, whether it helped anything or not. I have no idea. But I think it might've made more people maybe aware of things. It also may have, you know,

[02:54:22] in reinforced stereotypes. Um, unfortunately. So yeah, I mean, we, we would still, we would be in a neighborhood like that out there happy as larks to have a job, right? And be joking around, even though we were in, in a very depressed area. Like the, the, the scene from the Requiem for a Demon where they're breaking the door down. Um, you know, we're all out there joking around and, and it's, it's a, it's a sad, depressed neighborhood and with a bunch of vacant homes.

[02:54:52] Yeah. Were there any episodes that you worked on that stand out for you that you're kind of, that you're proud of? Um, and then what's it also like revisiting the show now as a viewer? I wouldn't necessarily say there are any specific ones I'm particularly quote, end quote, proud of because, you know, so far down the line as a second assistant, like,

[02:55:18] you know, I'm not making creative decisions. Um, I think it was more of the, the episodes where it's like, wow, I got through that day proud, like driving home sort of exhilarated that we had gotten through that, whatever that was. The, the ones that stand out often are the ones that were the most physically challenging or the ones that were, um, the most distressing just from, like I was talking

[02:55:47] about before, from a poverty sort of, um, situation. And one of my most vivid memories is the fire part one and two because the warehouse fire that we shot, um, I mean, we were, obviously we were there with the cameras burning down a warehouse and I was on the B camera with, I'm pretty sure it was Bob Dorsey, who was also somebody I knew from UMBC. And we were standing across the street. The warehouse

[02:56:16] was fully engulfed. All of the windows were, were completely pouring out, you know, 10 foot high flames. And, um, same thing, like with, I was talking about the Kodiak bear earlier. I'm like, I have the focus whip on and I'm trying to get behind as far behind Bob as I can get because the heat is almost unbearable. The heat is almost unbearable and I'm across the street. So, um,

[02:56:41] you know, there were situations like that, that, you know, I mean, you're working in front of a gigantic half a block long burning warehouse. Yeah. That's gonna, that's gonna stick in your memory. So other real quick, other episodes, the one that somebody else has talked about where, where Richard Belzer pulls out, pulls out a drawer and like a million cockroaches, literally like a million cockroaches go everywhere. And, and I remember banging a slate in that house

[02:57:07] and jumping into the bathroom and just being like, Oh, and being in abandoned buildings, quite honestly, where people had gone in there to defecate. Um, so we were in some really challenging places, but then we were also in some of these beautiful mansions, you know, in Roland park. So the, also the contrast there was also pretty striking to go in a mansion in

[02:57:34] Roland park and the next day being an empty building with toilet paper, you know, on the floor. Yeah. Um, and the sniper episode also, I remember because we were on top of those buildings and I remember going up inside, um, the, um, Broma Seltzer tower, which is actually a copy of, of the, um, the tower in, in, um, Florence, the Florence clock tower. That's what the Broma Seltzer tower is a

[02:58:01] copy of. And I remember going up this, up the ladder onto the roof and trying to hold onto the camera with one arm and trying to go up the ladder with the other arm. I'm not quite sure how we did that. Um, that was pretty challenging. And also that was really disgusting because the whole inside of the place before you got to the roof was literally, I'm not kidding you, caked in like inches of pigeon

[02:58:25] crap. Yeah. So those are the kinds of things that, you know, that you remember as well as being in the box with some of this, you know, the stars, people that, um, and, and, and the guest stars that we had, you know, Robin Williams and Chris Rock and, you know, and when Charles Durning, I just watched that episode last night. He was just terrific. That was a cool episode because it had the flashbacks of

[02:58:50] the thirties. I remember being in that junkyard after the rain and the completely muddy junkyard full of derelict cars. Yeah. So why do you think homicide still resonates today? I think as I'm re-binging it again, I think the honesty, the honesty in the writing and the performances, um, just really comes through. Obviously there's times when the writing and the performances aren't perfect,

[02:59:16] but I think that that it sort of feels like it's grubs through many layers of fakeness. You know, there, there seems to be an honesty about it that I think still rings true. And obviously I just mentioned the source material, uh, from David's book and, and how irrelevant that still is obviously. Well, our murder rate has dropped here fairly dramatically. Um, and our, um, nonfatal shootings

[02:59:43] have dropped fairly dramatically here in the last few years, but all the other social issues are still there, you know, crime, racism, classism, sexism, justice or no justice, you know, all those things and, and how complex and complicated all those things are and how people struggle with, you know, I mean, even just talking about what it was like working, you know, being a white girl, making a good living coming from the suburbs and driving into this horribly depressed poverty ridden areas,

[03:00:13] you know, you struggle with that yourself philosophically too, but also you mentioned earlier, the humor, uh, it is, it, it really is funny and, and funny in these weirdly honest ways, like the kinds of conversations that you have with friends, um, you know, that, that may not have anything to do with anything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But they're the kind of things that you

[03:00:39] talk about in real life. Um, and, and yeah, shooting the shit as we call it. Yeah. Exactly. So, uh, so yeah, I, all, all those things and, and somehow, like I said earlier episodes, I mean, besides maybe the clothes a little bit here and there, maybe a hairstyle, maybe a dress that has, you know, to the shoulder pads are too big, but it just, it doesn't even look, it doesn't look 30 years old either. I'm not quite sure why.

[03:01:08] Well, it's because society hasn't changed that much. I think it's actually the episode of Sniper, isn't it? The second episode where, uh, Pembelton says that originality stopped in, was it 1987 or something? There was a particular year. Um, he mentioned that it, originality has stopped and in some respects, yeah, society is just sort of repeating itself. There's no distinct, fashions any longer are there. We don't, you know, like the sixties, you think of the sixties as distinctive clothing, you could think. And the big hair from the eighties. And the eighties.

[03:01:37] It was a little bit of that here and there, but there, but that was sort of worn off by the time it got to the nineties. And I think because the detectives are sort of all sort of rumpled regular people, there wasn't the fashion to laugh at. Like you'd look at some, you know, TV shows and movies from the nineties and like, you're laughing at the gel and the hair and, uh, you know, what, whatever the styles were then. Um, and I just think there was sort of a classic wardrobe props

[03:02:04] to the wardrobe department, um, that still makes it not look weirdly old or out of fashion. Yeah. I feel like we're in an era right now, the way people's clothes do look like the nineties. A lot of people wear stuff that I remember people wearing when I was a teenager, you know, I'm like, okay, yeah. You know, certain things have come back. Oh, interesting. Well, um, is there anything else you'd like to add before we sort of wrap up today? Anything? Ask me the food question. Well, yeah. Okay. What are your food recommendations for Baltimore?

[03:02:34] Well, there's recommendations and then there's what we ate. So recommendations would be like what we, I steered you to when you came, which is you definitely have to have a crab cake because people that say, Oh, I've had a crab cake and they live in like San Francisco or they live in Florida. It's not the same. So you have to have a Maryland crab cake when you're here and ask somebody when you're here, where's a good place to get a good crab cake. Um, and obviously the steamed crabs

[03:03:02] also, I would say, unless maybe you're in Louisiana are, are going to be good and different than other kinds of steamed crabs you've had. Um, the other thing, and we've mentioned this in the other episodes, it was really nice to have the daily grind across the street, uh, from the sets, um, because you could go over there and get a coffee, get a latte. I was trying to remember what, what I remember what my coffee drink was. And I was thinking maybe latte, but then in the summer it was always the

[03:03:28] granitas, which was the frozen coffee, which were amazing. Um, and then when we were out on location, if we weren't going to eat off the catering truck, it was finding a sub place, you know, some Italian neighborhood sub place, um, or obviously no joke, the fried gizzards from, you know, Joe and Josh and whoever went to the corner store, those were always, were always really good. Um, but then locally,

[03:03:53] locally, uh, there's a thing called burger cookies, uh, which are really well known, which are half of the cookie is chocolate ice cream, ice cream icing, and half the cookie is a soft, a soft sort of vanilla cookie. It's hard to explain unless you had one. They're amazing. Um, and, and also if you go to any bakery in Baltimore, they'll have chocolate top cookies, which is a little different from a burger

[03:04:16] cookie, but chocolate top cookies are a thing here as well. And, um, and then I do remember eating at Cooper's and the burgers and fries there. And then when I think Boots mentioned when we had, uh, when we worked nights, we would, the catering truck would be there when we got there at three or four in the afternoon for call time. And it was the one time we would have cheeseburgers. We didn't have cheeseburgers

[03:04:41] normally, but at night, night shoots, they would make cheeseburgers for us. Um, and then there was also, also, if you could get to the catering truck in the morning, a breakfast burritos or, um, quesadillas in the morning. I used to love, uh, just a cheese quesadilla in the morning, but, um, um, but, but, but yeah, and there was tons of places in Fells Point to go and grab, uh, something when we were on the sets to go and grab a sandwich or a sub. So that was something we were always

[03:05:10] working on in the morning. Where are we going for lunch? Who's going to make the lunch run? What are we going to get? Just like in the squad room sets where they were making, um, Andre and other people go out and, and, and get the, but pizza, we didn't, well, we did pizza sometimes because brick oven pizza up on, on Broadway, um, was a good place to go run and get a pizza, uh, at lunchtime. But yeah, it was, uh, yeah. Fun stuff.

[03:05:37] Yeah. Yeah. I was just thinking, um, about my trip to Baltimore. I really, I really enjoyed, um, Patango's, that coffee place. That was really cool, which was, um, just opposite the Pendry. Um, that was a very cool little coffee shop, actually, I thought. And that back in the day when we were shooting on homicide, that part of the building was an old

[03:05:58] school antique slash seafaring themed junk shop. Uh, you know, with like diving, like old diver Dan diving helmets and, you know, weird stuff. Uh, and then after that, it was a Bonaparte, I believe a Bonaparte bakery before it. And I hadn't never been to Patango till, um, till you came to visit. And then of course, next to that was where the morgue, our morgue sets were, which is now a cafe, which is kind of funny.

[03:06:29] Yeah. Yeah. That's that, that is a fancy wine bar thing, isn't it? If I remember correctly. It's yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Brilliant. And, um, so we went to Jimmy's for the steamed crab, didn't we? And then it was Phillips for the crab cakes, which were very nice. Right, right. Phillips. Yeah. Phillips. We got to Phillips late. It was just at the end of the, of the steamed crab season. They're like, we don't have steamed crabs. I'm like, oh my God, Chris, what are we going to do? So yeah. So you had, you had the crab cake and I had the, uh,

[03:06:56] I had the, um, soft crab sandwich. So you could see what it was like to pull, pull the legs off the soft crab, the fried soft crab and eat it. Um, yeah, that was good. And Jimmy's famous. I always have to say Jimmy's famous seafood in Dundalk, not Jimmy's, which is in the show in Fells Point, which is unfortunately no longer open. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Cause that was where that, that was the diner where the, um, at the end of Sniper,

[03:07:23] where they're having a chat about originality. Um, yeah, I've got a little bit of footage of, of that that's now closed, but it's, uh, yeah. Yeah. And I had forgotten the last bunch of episodes I've been rewatching in season six. There were a lot of scenes in Jimmy's. Um, and I've forgotten how much we had shot in there. They had good, uh, fried egg sandwiches. I do remember getting fried egg sandwiches. Sounds good. Sounds good. Well, I think that that's a good place to wrap up. I think for

[03:07:49] today is there's been a one year of homicide life on the set and thank you everybody for joining us on this journey. Um, and you know, again, thank you so much, Susan for a answering the email and be setting this all up and just, uh, you know, joining me on this amazing journey that we've been on. Yeah. Well, thanks for sending that initial email. And I guess we should have thanked all of our guests, uh, along the line. Well, yes, we should thank our guests. Yeah.

[03:08:11] John was the first one and Kyle and Josh and Joe and David Simon and Melissa and Isabella and, uh, Tony Lewis and Reed Diamond. And of course, Tom Fontana and Julie Martin and, uh, Jorge Zamacona were the second, they were actually the second ones and boots. And who am I forgetting? Did I get

[03:08:37] everybody? I mentioned Isabella. Um, the sound guys, the sound guys, Lorenzo and Paul, that was terrific. Yeah. And the ADs, Jay, Frank and Miles. Yeah. Jay, Frank and Miles. That was terrific. Yeah. Everybody has been so much fun to talk to. I just have to say that everybody has been so candid and so entertaining and so just a joy to like reconnect with. And it was really fun to have Jean on a second

[03:09:06] time with Nick Gomez. That was fun. Yeah, that was, I thought a really good deep dive into sort of like the, the artistic philosophy, um, that, that they had about the way they wanted to shoot film and, and what it meant to them to be able to shoot film that way. Um, that was a terrific, that was a terrific conversation. So, and, and we hope everybody will keep listening, um, because we,

[03:09:33] we do have plans to keep going and we have some people lined up for the coming year, including more, more cast and crew and creators. And did we want to mention we're taking a break in April? We'll be back in May. Well, yes, yes. So, so we're going to be taking a small hiatus over April just to kind of, um, get ourselves back into the rhythm of things. So we'll be returning in May. We will return on May

[03:09:59] the 15th and, uh, we'll have a brand new episode for you and we will continue on monthly, hopefully for at least another year, maybe more. Um, we'll see how we get on because we've got lots of ideas of different people to chat to. Yes. Um, we will keep doing it as long as we find interesting people to talk to. Yes. And we just made connection with a bunch of people that haven't been on yet that we're all, all excited to, to, to come on. So we're looking forward to those. Well, you were just saying

[03:10:24] earlier, there are about 6,000 people involved in homicide. So a lot of interviews that, you know, I never counted. It seems like when you scroll, when you scroll through IMDB, it's just the actors and the directors is about 6,000, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe I'd never be that many interviews, but certainly be quite a few. So, um, thank you again, everybody for listening and for your support over this year. It's meant a lot to us. It's been nice

[03:10:50] just sort of bumping into people now and chatting about what homicide means to them and how much they're enjoying the podcast, which is great to hear. So, you know, thank you again, everybody for listening and we will catch you on the next episode. Thanks to the super fans out there that also will hopefully get a couple on to just talk about being fans and still following the show. So yeah, in the months ahead, we will, we'll probably be reaching out some of our super fans as well to see what sort of homicide meant for them and how it's inspired them. Cause we know

[03:11:17] there are some listeners who went on into careers in law enforcement, um, and, and other things too, that kind of are related around this sort of topic. Um, and some of you have gone on to do make movies and things like that. So, so we're going to try and sort of find some interesting people who've got an interesting story to share about how homicide sort of changed their life and inspire them on the path that they're on. So keep an eye out for that too. And if you have an interesting story, feel free to

[03:11:43] drop us a message on, on any of our social channels and, um, yeah. So thank you again, everybody for listening and we'll catch you on the next episode and be made a 15th. Take care soon. Bye for now. Thank you.