- Wait, you have a TV? - No, I just like to read the TV guide. Read the TV guide, you don't need a TV. (rock music) - Hello and welcome. It is Wednesday, which means it's time for an only episode of TV Guidance Counselor. As always, I am can read your TV guidance counselor and I wanna thank you for joining us for the first episode of our second year, the first episode of 2015. I cannot thank you guys enough for listening all in 2014. It was the first year of the show and I had a ton of fun doing it. I plan to go as long as I can doing this show because I love it and I love the emails and all the responses I get from you guys, which is one of the things that keeps me doing it. We had a great year as far as guests go. Some of the people I got to talk to in just some of the really fun episodes and it will be difficult to top but I will do my best to have an even better year for 2015 and I cannot think of a better way to kick off 2015 than with my guests this week, Mr. Jim Beaver. Jim is an actor, he is an author, playwright, film historian, just a fascinating guy. You've seen him in a million things but listeners of this show probably best know him from things like Deadwood or Supernatural, a show that I often bring up where he plays Bobby. As I mentioned, he's a film historian and a playwright, his play Verde Gries, actually going to be produced at the Theatre West in Los Angeles in March of this year. So definitely go and check that out if you are in the area or get in the area by March and definitely go check it out. You can also get his book "Lice That Way" about the sad loss of his wife. It is a beautifully written book, very good read. That's at licethatway.com or you can find it at Amazon or any bookstore. I highly recommend you pick that up. Now Jim was nice enough to speak to me after it was no doubt a very long weekend for him after appearing at a fan convention here in New England. He was suffering from intermittent laryngitis but was nice enough to power through it and muster up a voice to speak to me. And I'm so glad that he did because I really love talking to Jim. This was a very fascinating episode. He's an interesting guy and I think you will like it very much. So please enjoy this week's episode of TV Guidance Counselor with my guest, Jim Beaver. Mr. Jim Beaver, Jim, thanks so much for doing this. I'm happy to do it. It's been a long weekend for you so I'm happy that you're taking the time. I really appreciate it. So you were just saying that you as a kid would get TV Guidance and you would circle what you were going to ask that week? TV Guidance was not an oral thing so it could exactly be a mad drive. But it was my guide for living. I'd pop down to the story every week when it first came out for the following week starting on Saturday. I never understood why it started on Saturday. Well you need like, oh yeah, the TV Guidance week goes Saturday to Friday which is very weird. It's probably that's how they, I think, and I don't know if this is a parker phone up but I think that's how the ratings were calculated on the 50s. So they would calculate them. It would take two days to get it by Monday so they would know, you know, probably came through on a machine in a glass dome that can tell it's like for something. I think that's why initially and then they just kept it. In the 90s they tried to change it to do a Monday through a Sunday and for some reason they had, there was like a rebellion. I don't understand the schedule. So where did you grow up for people that don't know? I grew up in Irving, Texas which is a suburb of Dallas. Dallas had probably three or four different network clusters. Three network stations. But would you get the other networks from some of the other Texas cities? 'Cause I know that Austin would have its own affiliate. No, no, we got, I mean, first off, when I was growing up, it was all over the air. For about half of my childhood we had five stations. Five, four. Three networks in a UHF? We had three networks, we had channel four which was CBS, we had channel five which was NBC, we had channel eight that was ABC and we had channel 11 which was an independent. - Right, the local theater. - With the monster house? - Channel 11 was, yeah, they had nightmare on Saturday nights. A guy named Bill Cantrell, I think. Cantrell can't tell. Played a guy named Gorgon. - Gorgon? - And he was great 'cause he also did a morning show called Slam Bank Theater where-- - Like a kid named Icky Twerp who had three Stooges. - Oh, okay, since three Stooges stayed. - And when I was growing up, I thought Icky Twerp was one of them and I couldn't understand why they were called the three Stooges and there was obviously this fourth guy. - Why is this guy not being mentioned ever? And he never put two and two together that he was Gorgon as well, probably. - Well, you know, after a while, at some point, at some point-- - That's about 20 weeks though which is a certain level of sophistication. - So were you most interested in the movies? Because for most people, this was the only place you could see a lot of 'em, these kinds of movies. They never came through your town. - I mean, I had TV shows I watched. I mean, I was absolutely hooked on "The Lone Ranger" and "Superman." What I first really started paying attention was as a teenager when I began to get interested in movies and that's what I would grab the TV guide every week in circle. I didn't circle regular shows very much. I circled movies on one. - Well, those two, you knew when they were on. I mean, they would be at the same time every week but the movies, I mean, did you ever do the thing where you like set your alarm clock? 'Cause at two, they're showing you this movie and it's the only time to see it. - When I was a kid, it wasn't nothing showing it. - Go off it. - Everything went off at 11, 30, 12, 30. Shows would just go off and then there would be this test pattern, you know, with a picture of the Indian in the target. - Oh yeah, yeah. - It's kind of fitting for-- - For Texans. - Did you have siblings growing up? - Yeah, I mean, I've got three younger sisters. So did you ever have to sort of negotiate with them if there wasn't a movie and they wanted to watch something? - Actually, I was just telling this story to my daughter a couple of days ago about how her very charming and gracious Aunt Renee walked me over the head with a kitchen chair because she wanted to watch Love That Bob and I wanted to watch Superman. - Well, Love That Bob. I mean, that would incite violence in most people. - Yeah, yeah, well, it didn't take much with myself today. (laughing) I can't wait for her to hear that. It didn't take me over the head with a chair again, but-- - We'll send her a DVD set of Love That Bob. - Yeah, yeah, well, that might make her happy. (laughing) Yeah, we kind of had, it was like every other day was, it was a little off balance, I think. It was like every other day was my day. - See, like a rotation. - And the other days, it was my sisters as a group because they all wanted the same thing. - Right, three younger girls are gonna probably be in 10. - You know, I rode the bus home and flew off the bus to the house to get there first and turn on the TV. - Would you parents watch these things with you? - Not those shows. - Yeah. - You know, we had a pretty strict eight o'clock bedtime in our house. I was in high school before they let that go. - To 830. (laughing) - Well, they gave it, it got a little wilder after that, but it was almost never possible to stay up late, to watch something. - Right. - Maybe if something ran to 830. - Right. - But there was no staying up to see the late movie. - Did you have a sneak? - Well, for a long time, what I would do was I would ask my dad to watch it and tell me the movie the next day. - And he would do it? - Sometimes, yeah, you know, if it wasn't too late. But I think that probably resonated with him because he used to tell me about his big brother in the depression going off and going to the movies and coming home and telling my dad and his little brother. - The plot of every movie he saw. - Was there ever anything that your dad relayed the plot to you? And then when you actually saw that movie, it was disappointing. Like it wasn't as good as the way your dad had told it to? - No, I don't. - I don't think so. I mean, I remember very clearly him telling me the story of a movie called 30 Seconds Over Tokyo. - Yes. - The next day. - Spencer Tracy? - Yeah, yeah. We watched a lot of movies together and really bonded over several. But we had TV shows that we watched as a fan late. - Right. - And Saturday Night was Mr. McGoo and then get smart. - Right. - And get smart was a revolutionary show at that time. - Yeah. - That show was so, I think ahead of all the other comedies because it was just, it was so smart and fourth wall breaking and going in a sort of loving way. It wasn't, it wasn't in a way that was sort of snarky. - It was, it was a lot of fun. And it was, I mean, it was so funny. And, but it was smart funny. And then of course, years later I had a very weird connection with it because I married Donna Adam's daughter. - What was that like when you first met her? Did you know that she was-- - I knew that she was his daughter. We were both members of the same theater company. - Okay. - It was around that, oh yeah, it's Donna Adam's daughter. You know, it was just kind of, I mean, Hollywood, everybody, somebody's daughter. - That's true, unless they're someone's son. - Yeah, if they're not, they're from out of town. - Right, right. - So it wasn't, it was kind of an interesting bit of trivia, but it wasn't the main reason. - I love "Get Smart" so much. - Yeah, yeah, no. - And so "Superman" was your, sort of your main thing. - Yeah, yeah it was, that was, I mean, I was a comic book collector, but I really love that show. - Was it comics first and then the show or the show first? - I think it was, I think it was the show first, 'cause I liked the show before, probably before it agreed. When I think back to owning and buying comic books, I think of myself as being somewhat older, but I can remember watching the "Superman" show when I was very young and right up through, through the end of its run and, you know, for years after, it was a re-run forever. - Oh yeah, I mean, it was, it re-run forever in the '80s. - Yeah. - I think it only stopped re-running frequently in probably the early '90s. - Yeah. - It was 40 years of, almost on every night. - Yeah. - And they made a ton of episodes. - Yeah. - I mean, seasons weren't really 22 episodes then. They could do 150 episodes. - Yeah, they did 104 episodes of that. And I'm sure I saw everyone. I'm 20 times by the time I was 12. - You would know by the opening credits which episode it was. - Well, opening credits pretty much the same. - Yeah, yeah. - It was very familiar stuff. - And it's sort of what led to you going out to Hollywood. - Well, yeah, in a weird sort of way. As I mentioned, I had this fascination or almost fanaticism for old movies. And like you say, in those days, the only place to see old movies was on television. And in those days, you could see them constantly. I mean, there was a morning movie at 9 a.m. And there was an afternoon movie at 1 p.m. - Especially on the weekends. - Yeah, on the non-network stations, there were lots of movies. - Right. - 'Cause they didn't have the regular programming to fill it. - It was cheap filling. They'd be able to buy this whole package. And it's two hours full. - And I saw amazing films for the first time all chopped up with commercials. - Right. - And you were kind of used to that, you know? - Yeah. - But I got really fascinated with old movies and eventually decided I wanted to write about them. And 'cause I got very interested in the history of American film in particular. And I was very interested in the lives of actors and people who made the movies. - Especially in the first part of the 20th century where those people all had lives before they made movies. - Yeah. - 'Cause it was new. And they brought this sort of weird life experience to there being an actor. And I think people take for granted now where you have people who are like a third generation actor or like I always knew it was gonna be an actor. - Yeah. - It wasn't like that. - And a lot of these were people who didn't grow up with the movies. The movies came along after they were already around having lives. - Right. - Whereas nowadays, you know, an awful lot of people grow up thinking I'm gonna get into the movies. - Yeah, I didn't have to be discovered. It sounded good to me. - And after I got out of the service, when I was in college, I started writing film history and writing for a film magazine in New York called Films in Review. And at one point, the editors, the films in Review did a lot of articles on older actors' careers. - Like filmography kind of overviews stuff. - Yeah, exactly. And I had written several of those. And at one point, the editor said, "We've gotten a lot of requests for an article on George Reeves who had played Superman in the '50s." And he said, "Do you want to take a crack?" And I said, "Yeah, I know that show really well." And I know a fair amount about him, I thought. - So I started working on this article and that led to a decision to try and write a book about him. And that's what led me to Hollywood. - Because I think people listening may not understand how much was involved in you writing these articles. You couldn't go online and do a search. I mean, you had to talk to people probably or sit in the library. - I haven't finished that book on George Reeves. I've been working on it for over 35 years, I think, on and off. I spent months and months buried in archives and library basements and in the proverbial dusty city hall records departments. - Right. - And I bet I could get most of that information in a couple of hours tonight off the internet. - But his voice was such an onion. I mean, probably the deeper you got, the more stuff started. - Well, I was standing in space. Like I said, it started out as an article. And the more I researched the article, the more I realized that, wait, there's too much here for an article. - It's not that it's the most eventful life ever. - But it's such a great illustration of kind of what Hollywood could do to people. - Yeah. - I mean, he, you know, I don't know, probably a tenth of what you know about what he went through. But he was probably, for a long time, the single most famous case of typecasting ever. - Yeah, he could probably still is. - Yeah. - Especially in terms of its negative effect because typecasting is a lot easier to get over than it used to be. - Yeah. And it was a specific kind of typecasting where if you're a character actor, typecasting is your bread and butter. But if you're a leading man, typecasting is exactly what you don't want. - Unless your typecast is a leading man. - Right. - I mean, unless being believed is what you do. - Right. - But being the lead in a very specific kind of genre show, especially one that's primarily aimed at children, that's not the way to get the Oscar for best actor. - No. And people were challenging to fights. Hey, here's Superman and you could take, you know, awful, awful. Did you see Hollywood land? - Yeah. Actually, I was a technical advisor on the movie. - So you were, you approved of Hollywood land? - Well, largely. I came on after they had been in pre-production for quite some time. And they were very open to my advice and suggestions and recommendations. However, there were a lot of them that it was too late to do anything about it. They didn't have money left for a script rewrite. And you can't just change the scripts, but he's got to get paid to rewrite it. And so there were things in it that I disagree with, things that I thought they either shouldn't have included or things that they overlooked. But they were extremely willing within the restrictions they were working under to adhere to what I thought was accurate. They asked me in great detail about what real life characters were like so that they could cast well. Even smaller, less important characters to plot, do you have a picture of so-and-so in Rand? And they would work really hard. They tried to be authentic. And at the same time, make a movie that people would go see. A lot of Reeves fans did not like the movie because it didn't focus, for example, on his charitable activities. - People don't wanna watch that though. It's not a good-- - But you can't-- - No conflict. - It doesn't matter who the person is. Nobody goes to a movie to see somebody's charitable contractions. They go to the movies, see dramatic things happen. And if it's true, you want those dramatic things to be true. As I told a lot of Reeves more fanatic fans, the only authentic movie of his life would be 45 years and six months long. - You're taking a snapshot of a person's life. You have to take some liberties. - And I mean, the moment you don't include something, you're telling a lie. - And so-- - A lie of omission. - Yeah. - So Hitchcock said that drama was life with the dull bits left out. - Right, right. - Sometimes the things that those of us who care deeply about a public figure want included are among those dull bits. - Yes, I think people in fandom, especially, and this is probably something you encounter in your life now as the subject of fandom, people sort of forget that their enthusiasm for a thing is fairly insular. And for something to be successful at all, it has to appeal to the public at large, and they're not really concerned with that minutia as much. And for someone, you know, that's hard for, I don't know if this was hard for you as a fan of things to get over as well, but me, you know, grind for a huge comic fan into horror movies and all those things. You kind of, it's a coming-of-age moment when you go-- - Oh, this, why am I getting so angry about this? It doesn't really matter. - Yeah, yeah. I think more importantly, in this particular case, there was an awful lot of Reeves' fans have very great difficulty accepting the idea that he killed himself. - Yes. - To believe that a guy in his position would kill himself. - Yeah. - And there's a lot of hostility to the notion that he did. And I think the movie didn't come down very hard against that notion. - Right. - And so there was a lot of disagreement there. But I think, for the most part, the movie simply didn't present him as heroically as some of his fans would have liked to have seen. - Right, but they grew up as children watching him, as Superman, which was part of the problem. - And the fact is, what interests me, what engages me with the story of George Reeves, is not that he was some icon of respectability and honor, but that he was a man. - Yeah. - That he was a human being. - John. - What he went through in his life was just the variation of what we all go through. And he had good times and bad times and he behaved well and behaved badly and everything in between. To me, that's interesting. That's a lot more interesting than some guy with no faults. - Yes. - Which is impossible. - Yeah. - And I mean, the thing that I find fascinating about his story is that, to my knowledge, he's sort of the first, I don't wanna use the word victim, but the first example of someone whose fame was unique to television in that, because these shows were re-ran forever, which is something only television did, people thought of him always as that character. So, I grew up when I'm four years old and someone 20 years later grows up and they're four years old, they're still watching him, he never ages, he's Superman still, and when you're a kid as far as you know, these are contemporary shows. And that's something very unique to television and the fact that this has been piped into your home and there's sort of a personal connection. And so, he's sort of the first person that I can think of that suffered from, because of that. - Yeah, yeah, there were a lot of others, I think, who experienced it, but I think you're right, I think he's the first major one to suffer from, which is a good point. - Television is this amazing thing that brings so many people, entertainment and information and it's easy to forget that it affects the lives of people on both sides of the glass. - Right, and that there is two sides of the glass. - That there is two sides of the glass. Yeah, yeah. - I mean, I imagine you probably have people coming up and talking to you like your Bobby and asking you about how to get rid of a ghost in their house or something. - Um, maybe not that extreme, but. - A little more than I would like. - Right, right, for some people that's at all. - Yeah, well, I remember not long after I moved to Los Angeles in the early 80s, I became friends with an actor named David White, who had played Larry Tate on The Bewitched Show. - Yes. - And I was very fond of David. He was a bit of a curmudgeon, but he was a great actor and he was a wonderful man. And I discovered the curmudgeon's side when I accidentally called him Larry. And he said, "My name is David." And I never forgot again. - Yeah, but it's an easy mistake to make. - It's an easy mistake to make because I had spent hours and hours, hundreds of hours, watching him be Larry. - And probably tens of hours watching him be David. - Yeah, and now I see it more patiently now because probably at this fan convention, this comic-con that I'm at this weekend, probably 20, 25 people call me Bobby today. - Do you answer to it? - Well, you know, I usually, - My name is Jim. - I don't make anybody feel bad. - Yeah, do you know how it feels? - I may go, who? - Yeah. - But, you know, I try not to make a big thing out of it. It doesn't really bother me. It means that they've paid attention to me. - Right, and they've connected with the character. - They've connected with the character. I think it's a little odd not to be able to tell the character from the actor. - Yes. - But, it's not unusual if it can be odd without being unusual. - Especially here, I mean, we're recording in Rhode Island and it's so far removed from, I mean, good, I was like, super nasty guy shooting Vancouver. But it's so far removed from Hollywood. - Yeah. - So, for people who are here, it's probably not as front of mind as if, you know, if we're in LA and I see on a coffee shop, I'm like, you know, I'm gonna think you're the actor and not the-- - Yeah. - You're more aware of it, it's probably on an industry. - That's true. - And here, you know, they work in a brick factory or something, so. - And the fact is, too, that a lot of people don't read the credits. They don't even know who the actors are. They just know the character. There are probably, as famous as Harrison Ford is, there are probably people out there who only know Indiana Jones. - Right. - And have no idea what the name of the guy who plays it. - There might be people who only know him as a carpenter. (laughs) Guy did good work on my dole. (laughs) - Well, you know. - I would find that order to believe, but it's possible. - There's a famous story about Roy Rogers at the height of his fame. And he was in, during the '40s, he was on a bond tour trying to sell war bonds. And he went back to Chicago and around the Midwest tour. And everywhere he went, you know, he's in his big, fringed cowboy in a game. He's dressed like Roy Rogers. - He's Roy Rogers, 'cause the train would stop. He'd come out on the back and wave to the fans. - Right. - Finally, the tour was over and they were heading back to California. And he got out of his cowboy dance and he's relaxing. Now he's just being, Roy Rogers was born in a place called Duck Run, Ohio. His real name was Leonard Sly. And he had grown up there. And then he'd become a singer and he'd go into Hollywood and he'd change his name to Roy Rogers. So he's on his train and a fella comes up to him and goes, "Hey, hey." - And Roy's going, "Well, you know, okay, I've been spotted." "I've been spotted." And the guy comes up and he says, "Leonard Sly, where are you being?" - So he went to high school where there's something? - Yeah, had no idea that he'd become famous under another name. He was just the guy I went to high school with. - And it's amazing to think that that could have, like in the current world and this environment when it out, that couldn't happen. - I don't like it. - I don't think you could disappear and re-emerge as a new person without, I mean, just everyone's so-- - Not unless you originated in Zambia. - Right, right. Maybe I don't find it back. Yeah, it's a different world now. I'm not, I won't say I'm completely comfortable, but I'm not particularly uncomfortable when people call me by my character name. - But I think you come from sort of unique, position as you, 'cause you started as a fan more than your average actor. - Very much so. - Very much so. Put it this way, I don't take it personally. I'd rather that they know that I'm Jim and then I play Bobby and not confuse the two, but it's almost more for their sake than mine. - Right, right. - People shit no sex. - Right. - But I get, if I ever do get a little fidgety about it, it's, you know, a lot of times on social media where I'm pretty active. If I mention I've got a cold, somebody will inevitably say, well, are you sure a demon hasn't put a curse on you? It's like, no, I've got a cold. - Yeah. - I just got a cold. - It happens. - And even if a demon did put a curse on me, he'd put it on Bobby, not me. - Right. Also, that's a pretty weak demon curse. - Yeah. - I curse you too cold. - Yeah. My entire life doesn't revolve around the character I played on Supernatural. - Right. - But most people's connection to me does revolve. - Right. - Do you think of yourself as a writer or an actor? - I'm an actor who writes. - Is that anything good? - Yeah. - Even though he started the other way around. - I had been an actor for 10 years by the time I went to Hollywood. I got out of the Marine Corps in 1971 and went to college with the intention or the hope of becoming a film historian. A lot in 1971 there. - It wasn't really film historians. - There were classes but you had to go to UCLA or USC or NYU to take them. - Right. - Not where I was going to school in Oklahoma. So theater classes were the closest I could find. - That makes sense. - I'll take some theater classes, get some theater history and that'll back up. - I'll understand the actors a little more if I know what they're coming. - And then I got involved in the campus theater property. I started doing plays and whoa, this is great. This is the most fun I have ever had. And I just said, that's what I'm doing. So I acted all through college, all through the 70s. I made my professional stage debut and a year later in '72, but didn't really get much work until I moved to New York in '79. - 'Cause I can't imagine there was a lot of work where you worked. - I mean, there was a professional work. - Right. There was a lot of summer stock and that kind of stuff. - I did a lot of theater. I moved to New York in '79. Now in the meantime, I had started writing film history. I read a book on John Garfield while I was in college. Also writing plays '78, late '78, oh my gosh. I started working on what I thought was the George Reeves article. - Right. - Coming soon, George. - Yeah. - I'd still remember in the early '80s, telling people I think it'll be out in six months. - Are you familiar with Tim Lucas, who does a magazine called Video Watch Dog? - Yeah, yeah. - I mean, he wrote this book about Mario Bava that took him 40 years. And it's, I mean, it weighs 30 pounds. - Yeah. - And that started as an article as well, so. - Wow. - Never know. - I was at an awards ceremony at the Western Writers of America this summer and there was a fellow there getting an award for a biography he had written that had taken it 45 years. So I felt a little better. - Right, right. Well, if you're writing a life story, it should almost take a lifetime. - That's one way of a lifetime. (laughing) - But I was writing plays. I was writing biographical articles for films and review. All of that. But I was constantly focusing on acting. - 'Cause New York in 1979 must have been pretty interesting. I mean, that was, when I was growing up, that was the sort of terrifying, exciting New York that people think of. - Yeah, that was great. I loved it. I really loved New York. - Did you ever been there before you moved there? - No. I moved there without ever having seen the city before. - But had you had your ideas about it? I'll come, I imagine, from movies and television. - Well, most of them, I suppose. I mean, I had done five seasons at the Dallas Shakespeare Festival and a lot of New York actors worked there. So I knew. - You knew some people you weren't just-- - I knew some stuff and I was very widely read. - So it wasn't a complete shock. I mean, now, granted, I was 28 before I knew what a bagel was. - Right. - But that's just being from Texas. And that's from being from Texas in that time. - It must have been very different to, I mean, just the expanse of Texas and everything so far away. And now in New York, where everything's in a block, you could get everything you need in one block. - Yeah. - So that was amazing. It was amazing. I loved it. I loved it. It was intense and very different from what I was used to. - Would you go see movies? - Like, 42nd Street or-- - College, yeah. - Yeah. - Closetly. - The Blaker Street, the Othelia, I saw old movies. - Yeah, 'cause they had revival houses. - That was the heyday of revival houses. - Yeah. - And man, I saw some great stuff. - In the height of the Midnight movie, that was sort of the heart of it. - Yeah. - We got some in Boston, but it was spillover for me. - It was a great time. - Yeah, almost like another college all over again. - Yes, very much so. And I was very seriously working on this book, on George Reeves. Then I was in a position to actually interview people who had known it. I did a lot of that there. But then eventually I said, "If I'm gonna do this right, I have to go out to LA." - Right. Although it sounds like you kind of want to go out there and do acting as well, and that was sort of your push? - No, not really. Not really. I went out there thinking I was going for six months. - Yeah. - I went out for a research trip. I had already done one, right? Going out for a couple of months. Got some great interviews. Going back to New York and then I thought, I need to do it again. And then I'm gonna do it again. And I did it again, but. - You're still doing it. - 31 years later, I'm still here. - Right, right. - While still there. - But it's, I mean, it's easy to kind of want to stay there. I mean, being from Boston, when I got through to do comedy shows, I'm just like, "Why wouldn't I live here?" - Everything I love, you know, everything seems very familiar because I've seen it in so many things. - Yeah. - You know, there's so much going on and the weather is nice, the food is great, it's. - I had been out there. When I was in the Marines, I used to go up on a weekend to Hollywood and just walk around and take in what I thought were the, you know, the movie history. - Right. - The touristy movie history. - For the most part, by the time I actually lived there, I knew that, you know, the grand old Hollywood was gone. - Right. - And then, I mean, I'm still, I still love going on the studio lots and knowing. - You know, it was there. - Hey, I'm Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanley. Shot double in demodity and stage. - Here's the sandwich house. It's right there. - Yeah, yeah, I mean, I love that. But by the time I moved out there, I was a lot less starry-eyed. - Right. - I was not there for work. I went out there to work on this book. - Right. - But while I was there, someone read a play of mine that, and liked it and offered to produce it. And that turned into, I got a career writing television. - 'Cause was it, Twilight's on the first television running? - No, Alfred Hitchcock. - Oh, it was Alfred Hitchcock, that's right. - It was the revival. - Yes, yes. - It wasn't the '50s and '60s. - Right. This was the 1985, '80, '45. - The '80s, yeah. - The new Alfred Hitchcock hour. And a lot of those were remakes of the original series. - Yeah, it was, it was a combination of originals, of remakes of older episodes, and new adaptations of the story. So it was a combination of what the old show had been. - Right. - With remakes of some of the-- - Right, and they would re-appropriate his old introductions for him and everything. It was a really interesting way to do that. And at that time, there was a huge revival in the anthology series, which we really hadn't seen since the '50s. So you had the new Twilight Zone. Alfred Hitchcock presents amazing stories. - Yeah. - And then sort of the syndicated more 'B' stuff, like "The Lost from the Dark Side" and "Monster" and these sorts of things. But it was interesting when you see the parallels between the '50s and the '80s. We're very, very similar politically and economically, and you see that in the television. But it was probably a great way in those anthology series for a guy like you to get in. - Well, it was a great way to get in. - It was also a great way for a guy like me to write, because I don't really like writing other people's characters. I like doing my own stuff. Two or three of the shows I worked with most were anthology shows. And that was great, because I mean, I wrote four Hitchcocks and I wrote four, an HBO anthology series called Vietnam War Story. And all of those were, I got to, I might have a premise or I might have a previous version that I needed to build it around. But I could do whatever I wanted to. - Right, they're like-- - With the characters. - As long as it's in this budget and it's this long, it's whatever you want to do. - Yeah. And whereas you're right for the normal television show and you're stuck with, well, this guy wouldn't say that. This guy can't do this. - I'm the showrunner and these are my characters. I know what they would do. - So I like that a lot more. I mean, I've written both kinds of television, but I like the anthology much more. - How different was it for writing for television than the plays you had written? Was it what you thought it would be like? Or was it sort of a shock? - Well, my playwriting background was in some ways, it was in some ways good training. It trained me to write good dialogue. - Right, but especially with television anthologies, that's what it was. - But on the other hand, it trained me to write long, extended scenes of people talking. - Right. - And the dialogue was good, but it went on way too long. I had a really hard time learning how to cram the story I wanted to tell into the 30 or 60 minutes that I had to tell it. - Right. - That was tough, it remains tough for me. I haven't written for television since the '80s. - I had a great little career for a while, and then at the freelance market, which I wanted to be part of, because being on staff for a show, man, I couldn't act. - And a staff show was likely gonna be the situation you were talking about that you wanted to avoid. - I mean, I'd have been happy to be on staff on a show if I hadn't wanted to be an actor, mainly. But I knew the minute I signed on one of these staff jobs. - Not gonna act. - That's it for at least the run of that season. - Right. - And I wasn't interested in that. So-- - Was it the writer's strike in '87 that kind of made the freelance-- - '88 writer's strike just kicked the legs out from under the freelance market. My theory is that the strike went on just long enough that when it was over, there was still time to salvage the fall season. But only if the scripts were written incredibly fast, which meant they didn't have time to break in new people, and the showrunners all just said, "Okay, let's do it." We're gonna do it. - Or we're gonna remake Mission Impossible with all scripts. - Yeah, and they suddenly realized they could write that their showrunners and their staff could write all of the episodes if they weren't just a little harder. - They do more with less, and then once they start doing that, they go, "Why don't we always just do this?" - Exactly, exactly. You know, it used to be half the shows on television. Half a series, half a season's episodes would be written by freelance. - And people don't understand that it was easy, but you could just, some guy from the street, you could basically submit to any show, and it had a decent chance of probably getting out of it. I mean, that's how-- - It's a great writer. - Yeah, and that's crazy now. I mean, people won't look at anything because there's, I mean, the businesses change so much. But at the same time, people are more able to actually produce things on their own, to try to get, I mean, it's a completely different world. - Yeah, it's a very different one. But the great thing for me was that in the middle of that collapse of the freelance writing market, I stumbled into an active acting career from the spring of 1988, until now, I never made another new penny writing for television, but financially I never missed a beat. - Right. - I made the same money in '88 that I made '87, but I made it acting. - Right, and that probably felt better. - It was, oh, it was incredibly, it was incredibly better. - What was the first acting role in television that really, that you were like, this is it now, it's not just, it's not just I got this one acting here. Now I'm an actor, this is my job. - It wasn't, it wasn't television. It was this, it was a feature film that Norman Jewess directed that I almost literally stumbled into. I mean, if I hadn't walked out a door at the exact moment I did walk out that door, I wouldn't have bumped into the person who arranged for me to get this movie. And it was not a huge box office success, it was a pretty big critical success, but it started me around the road. And then I started doing lots of television and lots of movies. So everything, in terms of my being an actor who could get a job, it was a movie called "In Country" and it came out in '88. Everything kind of stemmed from that. It wasn't so much that it stemmed from that, from people seeing that movie as it was. That movie got me agents. - It got me in the door. - It got me in the door. - Yeah. - It got me in the door, and once I was in the door, I could do what they needed me to do. And it was probably enough fuel for you to go, "This is a real thing, I can do this." - Yeah, and I mean, there's so much luck involved. - Oh yeah. - There's so much luck involved. - You have to be as good as you can be at what you do, but your fate's not really in your hands in a lot of ways. - Yeah, Shakespeare says the rightness is all. You gotta be right. - Right. - You gotta be ready to be plucked. - Right. - Whether you get plucked is up to the gods. - As long as you did everything right, you should hopefully hope that that works out. - Yeah. - Did you watch the things you were in? - Oh yeah, I watch everything. - Yeah. - Yeah, I'm not one of the, I don't understand actors who don't watch the things they're in. I mean, I understand that they have a point of view that precludes them doing it. - Right. - But I don't know what that point of view would feel like. - Right, see. - To me, I wanna see how I did. I wanna see how it worked out. Did they cut where I thought they would cut? Did they focus on me, or did they focus on the other guy? - Right. - Did my inflections and intonations play the way I thought they were playing? - Right, you should take did they use? How does it fall on the rest of the episode that I wasn't there for that or the rest of the movie? - I'm blessed with a kind of divisible mind because some people don't like to know what goes on behind the camera. - Right. - They just wanna see something and enjoy it. - Right. - And get involved in it. And my dear late wife used to complain a lot because I would say, oh look, there's a boom shadow. - Or-- - It would take her out of it. - Or, you know, this was the 43rd take and she's like, don't tell me this, I'm in the story. - Right. - For me, I can do both. - Right. - And I can get deeply emotionally involved in a story and at the same time go, why did they use that take? - Right, that is unique because I find that when I talk to people in the business and even my friends and people, it almost ruins the ability to still continue to love stuff because they go, oh, that's my friend. He's not that guy or, you know, they just can't-- - No, it doesn't bother me at all. - Once you know all the sausages made, you're not, you don't want to get it anymore. - Yeah, it doesn't bother me at all. I really did knowing how it's made, thinking about how it's made and at the same time I get lost in the story. - So it's almost like a magician where they go, I know how you're doing the trick and I'm impressed that you pulled it off, but I really enjoyed the trick as well. - Yeah, yeah. - Really the only performer in your family? Did they think it was unusual for you to proceed this? Was it like-- - Well, my dad was a minister. And so-- - Which is performance? - I saw him up in front of an audience, you know, two or three times a week and I just deeply admired him and I'm sure that what later in my life became a comfort in front of a live audience. It stems a lot from emulating his comfort. - Do you still do a lot of theater? Did you-- - I do as much theater as I can get. - Right. - It's harder and harder because it's sometimes consuming and it doesn't pay. Even the highest paying theater pays a pittance compared to what being on a television episode does. And if it were just me, it would be one thing, but I've got a little girl who I won't let sleep on other people's couches. - Right, yeah, when your passion becomes your job, it sort of, not taints, but it colors the way that you approach what you want to do. - I mean, I used to, one of the things that some of my friends used to rid me about that actually I think was one of the smartest things I ever did was I devoured actress biographies and autobiographies. And I learned to avoid a lot of mistakes that way. - Yes, oh absolutely. - Oh, I'm not gonna do what so-and-so do you. - Cautionary examples are-- - Yeah. - They're all out there to learn from. - Well-- - Don't do it. - I learned enough in advance that I didn't fall into a lot of the same potholes. But I do remember thinking, I'd read about Marlon Brando, for example, who had such a great presence and success on Broadway. And how, when he left to go to Hollywood and make his first movie, you know, swore he would come back to the stage. - Yeah, and he did. - And never did. - No. - And there were lots of examples of that. - Right. - Of great stage actors who went to Hollywood and never made, never did another play. And I said, well, that won't be me. I will always do theater. - 'Cause it's, could you find out the ground? - Yeah. - Oh, absolutely. - Yeah. - And it's a different kind of acting. It's rewarding in a different way. It's not better, it's not worse, it's just different. - It's more immediate, it's bigger than it always. - And everything, the entire story, everything, happens the same night. The entire story happens the same night. - And it sequenced. - In sequence. - Which many things do. - And the audience sees it the same night and you receive their response the same night. - Right. - Whereas you work on film or television and it's all out of order, you may get the part six months before you shoot it. You shoot it in pieces, in and out of order, over a period of weeks. And then you wait anywhere from six weeks to 18 months. - Right. - To see it. - With the point you forgot about. - And you don't see it with the audience. - Right. - You know, there's not that immediate audience sensation. And you don't get the feedback. - Right. - Unless you read it in the magazine or something. - Right, which is a different kind of feedback too. And I mean, so you've never done like a three camera sitcom, right? - Yeah, yeah. - Okay. - That's the closest overlay. - Yeah. - What's the kind? - It was called Thunder Alley. - Okay. - And it was me and Ed Asner and a five year old boy named Haley Joel Asner. - Oh, yes, yes. I do remember this show now. Yeah. I mean, Ed Asner was at the first time you had met him. - Yeah. - But did you grow up watching? Were you a fan of Grandma's? - Sure. I mean, Grandma's. - It was Lou Grant, you know? He was, I mean, I knew him from a lot of other things. Yeah, but he was, he was Lou Grant. - Yeah, I mean, that's what everyone identifies. - And I loved him. I still love him. He's a dear, dear, dear friend. I absolutely adore him. And he's very much like Lou Grant a lot. - I imagine, yeah. - He seems like one of those guys that had a life before he acted. Like he's got that life behind him and he does. - Yeah, absolutely. You don't watch him and go, "Oh, yeah, film school." - I believe everything he's saying. - But he also takes on roles that seem very much like him. - Yeah, he's a good man. But I found it a lot harder to go back to the theater as often as I would like. - Right. - Simply, mainly because in the past decade, I've gotten, God, it's hard to say it out loud, but I've gotten successful. - That did not success. - It's not like, I mean, I define success as being able to make a living doing what I love. - That's pretty good definition. - And the last decade, I've been able to consistently make a living. And, but that means I can't take six months and go do something that doesn't let me make a living as much as I would like to. Although, I mean, my one remaining unrealized professional goal is to do a play in New York. - One year is more acting one. - Coming to act in one, to act on Broadway. I mean, it's a common goal, but, and I, you know, I worked a lot as an actor while I was in New York, but I was almost always on the road. And I haven't done Broadway, and I'm just waiting. I'm waiting, but I don't have all that much longer to wait. - Not to say it. - I mean, you know, I'm not 28. - Well, yeah. - And it's not like, oh yeah, I'll do that in 25 years. - You might need to age into the right role. - Yeah. But I'm at a point where it's a little easier to start thinking, well, I've got some savings. Maybe I get a little of them for six months. - Right. - And take a risk. - And do this thing I want to do. So, I'm absolutely open, if somebody calls up and says, we want you to come to a play in New York, I'm probably gonna say yes. - Yes, I imagine you would. - Yeah. - You've done comedy, obviously, in the sitcom stuff, and-- - Did stand up for a while. - Did you really just stand up? - Yeah, I did not know that. Why did you just stand up? - Well-- - In LA. - When I first got to LA, my best friend put me up, and he got me a job at the place where he worked, which was the old Variety Arts Center in Los Angeles, which was a lot of things. It was a-- - It was a true variety. - It was a collection of Vaudeville memorabilia. It was a place where they did recreations of Vaudeville. - Oh, here. - It was-- - They had a supper club in the roof garden with an orchestra in White Tie and Tail. - Where was it? - Downtown-- - It was downtown, okay. So, it was part of that old world. - Yeah, yeah, it was run by the guy who runs the Magic Castle. - Okay. - And he was just, you know, they had WC Fields Trick Pool table in the end. - That's amazing. - The entire collection of Edwin memorabilia. - So, for you, that must have been-- - Oh, well, I got hired on as a film archivist. And basically, I cataloged their collection of films there, which was, there was no reason for me to be paid to do what I was doing. - Right. - It was fine, I loved it. But they decided to open a comedy club, and they did an opening night. Their MC didn't show up. When I was down in the bar having a drink, and the manager said, I don't know what to do. We've got comics coming, and no we didn't see. - And this was part of the boom, too. - Yeah, yeah. - And this was when stand-up was-- - And so, he said, would you just introduce the comics when they're here and ready to go on us? - Right. - You know, and so I did it, but it was open mic, and it was first night, and not all that many comics knew about it. - And it was downtown? - And it was downtown. - People didn't go downtown. - People didn't go downtown. - Yeah, it was, this was in the sort of the height of the Skid Row, you know. - Yeah, I mean, it was, I mean, the punk rock scene was down. - The famous pantry restaurant, which never closed, was across the street from us. But other than that, there wasn't much going on downtown that didn't, that was legal. - Right. - And so, the comics were coming in, because they had paper at the town with news about this club. - Comics will find stage time. - But they were coming in consistently, and so there were these big gaps. - So you had to do that? - So I would just wing it. - Right. - And basically what I did was material I remembered from old comedy records when I was a kid that I used to do at parties. - So like vaudeville stuff? - Well, no, I mean, it was from comedians, but it was not well owned. - It was intense, right. - It was, you know, it was 20 years old, at least. And it was just gags that I remembered that I used to repeat for people. - Right. - And it was obscure enough. You know, I wasn't up there doing Bob Newhart. - Right. But people don't know, but a lot of people forget about the sort of the whole party records movement. When the honest stand-up was these sort of local, a lot of it was very dirty. It was almost this underground thing where you would get these LPs and people would put them on. - Yeah. - And it was a whole activity. - Yeah. - There were thousands of comics that made their living like that. - Yeah. I mean, I knew better than the get up there and do bill because. - Right, right. - But what I was doing stuff kept Curtis. - Right. No one's going to stand up and be like, "That's kept Curtis." - Yeah. And it kind of saved the night because we had an audience, but we didn't know, and comics, very, I mean. - Just the episode of "Prolise" now. - 20, 25 minute breaks between comics. - Oh, wow. - It was rough. And so I just filled in with whatever I could remember from this stuff and it went over well. And so the guy, the manager asked me to stay on as the permanent MC. So I stayed on as a permanent MC and every night I'm doing the same stick from the same records. - Right, right. - And then I began to add to it, create my own stuff that fit in with it. And I am seed there for about a year. And there were lots of times, because we were downtown off the beaten path, there were lots of times when, if I wasn't up there talking, nobody was. - Nobody was gonna. - So I did it for about a year and I had a great time. - And, you know, my stuff was all chord ball of Texas. But hit stuff. And I never, only once or twice ever took it anywhere else. 'Cause I wasn't really interested in it. It was a career, it was just something fun to do. - Right, and that's a very different live feel when you perform that. Because it's in the moment immediate. And that's one of the things I think about it. - Love you or hate you instantaneously. - Yes, absolutely. And it is very difficult to write that ship. But you at least have the option. Like if you're doing a play and they hate it, you're not gonna change the third act of the play halfway through the play. But with Stand Up, you can at least go, maybe I'll take it this way and see what happens. And you can write the ship if you need to, which is interesting. - Well, I was. - I think you bit by that bug or you're not. Like I think people go, this is the thing for me or it isn't. - I, you know, frankly, there were too many comics around. - Yeah, that was probably the worst time to try and be a comic in the early '80s in LA. - And the ones who were flailing because they were failing were unpleasant enough that they wouldn't want to be around them. - Well, it's sort of the opposite of an actor. I mean, knowing so many comics doing it for a long time, they're generally not happy people. And they're also not team players, you know, they're out for themselves. And they usually, you know, develop their sense of humor as a coping mechanism for something or as a defense for something. So it's interesting for people when they have to deal with them, and they're like, "This guy's really funny, "but he's a miserable bastard." - Yeah, yeah. - They're going to deal with it. - Yeah, well, I can't interview those. There was a guy, he wasn't a miserable bastard by any means, but there was a guy who would come in every night and do Johnny Carson's jokes from the night before. - Really? - Yeah. - And not, I mean, he would do Karnek. He would do, do you think no one would notice it? - It's like, really? - That's very, very, very, very-- - I mean, he was clearly not a bright ball. - Right, right. - Oh, there's a lot of those as well. - Yeah, he would just come in and he would do Carson from the night before. - That's topical. - It's topical. - People on the day old. - Yeah, exactly. - Exactly. - And people would just go, "What?" - Right. We know this one. We saw it last night. - Oh, it was funny last night. I mean, it was like he didn't even, it wasn't like he was stealing. He was going, "Look what this guy said." - Right, right. - It said, "I'm saving it, man." - Right, I'm just relaying some information to you. I think that's the difference, too, if you look at the sort of the LA at that time versus New York at that time, and there was a huge exodus of New York comics to LA as well. You had a lot of people who would go, "I want to be an actor. "I'll do stand-up to become an actor "because they were seeing stand-ups get what wasn't theirs." And that's not the way to do it. But it made a lot of people go into that field and go, "Yeah, this is the way to do it." So you're getting a glut there in New York, not so much, because the industry wasn't there anymore. - Yeah, yeah. - So that's why you have that glut. - Yeah. - Would you want to write a television show again, or do you not? No, no interest. - No, I mean, I had an idea for a series a few years ago that still lingers in the back of my head, but the fact of the matter is, it's something that I would someday want to present and then drop off at the network and let them do whatever they want. - Right, right. - I had no interest. Do you want to drop that kid off of college and have that on? - Yeah, I don't want to, you know-- - It's an all-consulator. - I love having written, but I don't much like writing. - Right, the process is not fun. - It's, I want to, sometimes it's fun, but I'm, you know, I wrote insatiably in my 20s and early 30s. And then, I mean, it was the kind of thing where I wouldn't stop to eat for days. And then, I got to where I could act almost as much as I wanted to. And it just filled that expression-- - You weren't kind of confident. - You didn't need it anymore. - I didn't need it in the same way. Now, I still, I still got ideas, I still got unfinished projects. I've still got projects that I would love to do if somebody would say yes. Hasn't been all that long since I pitched a mini-series to HBO. I would eat, but even as I was pitching it, yes. I hope they don't take this. - If they, well, I hope they do. - Yeah, yeah. - Great, great story. - Right. - But if they do, I actually have to write this. - Right, wouldn't it be a lot of work? - Yeah, yeah. - So, you're, I would say you're, you're a noticeable character actor in the best way possible. - That's how I like it. - Yeah, yeah. Do you ever, do you ever think I, I almost want to write an episode of this, sir. - Well. - You have an idea for this character, 'cause it's sort of similar to, it's coming from a similar place you are. - Largely no. - Right. - It's almost mixing business and pleasure. - I remember, I remember when we were, we were doing, we'd just done the Deadwood pilot. And David Milch asked me if I wanted to write something for the show. I said, oh yeah, that'd be pretty cool. And he said, well, send me a sample, and I sent him a play I had written. And then, sometime later, he was like, you're still interested in writing for the show. And by that time, we had been picked up, and we were, I was getting ready to start working on it, and something told me, don't do it. Partly, it was unique to Milch. I thought one of the things that's going to save me on this show is to be precisely the actor he needs. - That someone else's character is not rock, boat, with anything else. And I don't want him getting mad at Jimby or the writer, and taking it out of Jimby or the actor. - It's almost like being you're an agent. - Yeah. But also, I didn't have, I no longer had the drive. Plus, that was the fact that I looked at Deadwood, and I said, I can't write this well. - You thought it was above your heart? - I'm good. I'm not particularly good at structure, but I'm real good at characterization and dialogue. - Right. - And I thought, I can't do it, I can't do it as well. - Right. - Well, what I didn't really realize was I didn't have to do it as well, it was all going to go through Milch before coming here. - Right, you can't do it anyway. - But, I just decided not to, not to try to make too much of this. - Right. - Not to let go of the-- - You're there as an actor. - Yeah, I thought I'd let go of the bone in my mouth for the one that's in the reflection. - Right, right, absolutely. - And, well, this would be interesting too, where sort of the three biggest sort of shows in the last 10 years would be that you've done, it's like Deadwood Supernatural, Justified, and they all have very strong, well, or had at some point, very strong showrunners that were, it was their thing. - Yeah. - So that might have been part of the reason why you would have been. - Well, the truth of the matter is, it either didn't interest me in the sense of, well, like with Supernatural, it wasn't really my area. It wasn't a genre that appealed to me, particularly, as a writer. - Right. - But I imagine Westerns. - Westerns, yes, but Deadwood was so not your typical Western. - Right. - If somebody had said you want to write a Justified episode, I could probably say, "Yeah, I think maybe I do." - Right. - Deadwood, I was intimidated. Supernatural, for the most part, it just-- - You couldn't lock it in? - I don't think in terms of, oh, let's create a monster, or let's work through this mythology. - 'Cause even though you'd work for Alfred Hitchcock show, it's a big leap to a supernatural. - Yeah, and I mean, it's been, I was a teenager the last time I regularly read science fiction, fantasy. - Right. - Fiction, I just, I moved in. - It's changed, yeah. - But there was a time in, oh, the end of season six, I said, "You know, it'd be fun to write a Supernatural episode," 'cause by this point, I knew my character really well, and knew the show really well. I thought, "I can do this, it'll be fun," and they'll probably do it, if it's a good time. - Yeah, and that time things were really shaken up. - Yeah. - And I started working on what I thought was a really good idea, and in the middle of it, I got a phone call telling me they were killing me off. And I thought, "Well, that plays hell with my script idea." - I'll have to rethink this a little bit. - Yeah, so, and actually, even before that, they told me they were burning down my house, which was central to the plot of the story I was working on, it went... - You see the writing on the wall? - Yeah, so it never got more than three or four scenes written. And it was an interesting idea, but I couldn't do it now. - So when they tell you something like that, I mean, you've been on that show for three seasons and I think maybe four, which is the season one. - I started season one. - Season one, oh, that's right, yeah. But you came back as a regular the next season. - I've been, I came on at the end of season one, and I've been on it, recurring widely varying number of episodes every season since, so. - Oh yeah, 'cause you were in... - I haven't done season 10 yet. - Came back as a ghost class season. - Yeah. - But that's gonna be the longest running show you've done, and it's, I mean, 10 years of a character, is. - Yeah, that's pretty amazing. That's pretty amazing. I wasn't, oh, when I'm onto that show, thinking it was a one shot, and I think you don't get out, come in, do this guest shot on some show I've never heard of. - Did you get that call that says, "Well, you're coming back." - Yeah, you're coming back, "Oh, well, maybe you're gonna be around for a while, who knows? You're still alive, maybe they'll bring you back." - Which is not the case for many of the episodes in that show. - It took them 57 episodes to kill me. - So what's your reaction when you hear something like that? - I imagine you'll probably mix where you're like, "Well, now I can, now I'm not locked into this." - Yeah, it was much worse on Deadwood. - 'Cause you probably had much more of an affinity for the show. - Deadwood was the greatest thing I have ever done in my career. It was, I got, for three seasons, I got to play on the 27 Yankees. I got to discover the double helix. I got everything an actor would ever want out of the work. It was the most extraordinary time and experience of my life. And when they told me it was over, at a time when we had been assured that the show itself was going on, it was devastating. It was probably my second, the second deepest emotional hole I've ever been in. - Yeah. - It was awful. Because as far as I knew, the party was going on without me and I was disinvited. - Right, which is even worse than if it was just overall together. - Yeah, if I had known then that we were going to get canceled before they shot anymore, I would have accepted it with a very different kind of-- - Oh yeah, I'd have been depressed. - If the whole ship's going down, it's different from you just getting kicked overboard. - Yeah, exactly. - And of course what made it awful was the fact that dramatically, it was incredibly good. - Did you revisit that show as a viewer? - Oh, yeah. - Go back and watch it. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. I watch it a lot. - It's a great show. - So part of the morning was probably, as a fan, you didn't get to see how the thing ended. - It would have been my favorite show ever if I hadn't had anything to do with it. I just think it's the best thing on television now. - Did you ever try to get out of the writers, what would have happened just as a fan since you had that channel? - No, not really. - Yeah. - I mean, we all kind of knew. - Right. - We knew some basic stuff. - Right, right. - And David shared it a little bit. You know, the fact is he wrote half the time, if you believe him, half the time he didn't know what was coming up. - Compulated, right. - He was just, "I'm gonna do this," and this is where it goes. - Well, I believe him in the sense that a lot of writers work that way. I tend to plot out everything before I write it. - See, you're writing towards a goal, but... - I've never written a TV series. - Which people, I think, don't understand the skill involved in that, because you, especially with the way TV series now, are now where they want a serial arc. - Yeah. - Where you have to plan a show that is going somewhere without going somewhere, because you can't end the plot too soon, - Yeah. - 'Cause you run out of stuff. - And the real art, the hardest thing, I think, and the thing that doesn't get appreciated enough about television writers, these days, writing series TV, is that they have to start a season. They have to lob the ball into the air, blindfolded, knowing where they kind of vaguely want it to go, and then they've got to run down to the other end of the field and catch it. - And hope the ball still is there when you get to the other end. - 'Cause, I mean, for example, I'm justified. I had this great storyline in season four, and I had already done episodes in season two and three without knowing my character's backstory, and I had already done episodes in season four without knowing my character's backstory. The reason, they didn't know the character's backstory. They set up season four. There's this guy who has disappeared that everybody's looking for, who has this specific history, and they are three or four episodes into the season, - I don't know who they got. - knowing they have to wrap the season up in 13 episodes by resolving this guy's story and the mystery of who he is, and they didn't know who he was. - It's a murder mystery without knowing who did it when you start. - Without the writer, no one who did it. - Yeah, yeah. - And they were three or four episodes in, and they said, "Well, it's got to be somebody that's already established." - That we trust. - But who can it be? It can't be this guy because we know he did this 20 years ago. - Right. - We've already set that up. We can't erase that, and they were juggling characters. And I'm like, "Wait a minute. You didn't know this in advance? - Yeah. - You didn't say, "Let's create this character so that we can do this down the line." - Yeah. - No. They said, "We're going to do this down the line. Now we're going to find somebody who feels..." - First engineer this. - So it ends up being you. - And there was a huge character flip. - It was a huge character flip. - And were you like, "Well, will you kind of like, "Well, this would be interesting as an actor?" Are you kind of like, "What the hell?" - It was, well, I thought it was fascinating. - Yeah. I mean, there weren't people. It's not going to happen. People were legitimately shocked for a good reason because you couldn't see it coming because it wasn't because of the craft at all. - They didn't even know it was coming. - Right. To me, it was a preeminent example of the ability of writers to throw the Hail Mary past every season. Supernatural. They told me very early into the season, that they were going to get into shooting the season. - Yeah. - Season 7, that they were going to kill Bobby off. But they said, "Don't worry. You will be back." - Which on any other show would make sense? - Right. But they didn't know how or when. Even after we shot my demise, and they said, "Don't worry. You'll be back." I'm like, "Well, when? How? We don't know yet." - I got stuff to do. - We don't know yet. You know, it'll probably somewhere around episode 17 or we're thinking, and I'm like, "How do you not have this line out?" - Yeah. It's not that far in advance. We have to- - But that's the reality. My sense is that very few shows start filming episode one of the season knowing how they're going to get to episode 22. - Yeah. I think it's very, very rare. - But I can't imagine not knowing. - I'm the same way. I mean, when people were watching Lost, and they're like, "They're making this up with their coil." I'm like, "Of course they are." - Well, anybody can make something up as they go along. - Right. - To have it reach the end, and you go, "That's perfect." That feels inevitable. That's brilliant. - Right. Like a show like Fringe. I don't know if you watched Fringe. Fringe was probably my favorite show in the last 20 years. And it was the people who made Lost, but they learned their lesson. And so they go, "We know where this is ending, and we know how it's going." And so what you ended up getting was this perfectly balanced show where when you finish the series, you go back and watch the first season, and you go, "They put it there." - Yes. - It paid off four seasons later, and they put it there. But it was very unusual to see that. - Yeah. I think that's incredibly unusual. And I think it's remarkable of writers to be able to create on the cuff and come up with something that looks like it was intricate in the plan. - Oh, yeah. A retro engineer. Because it sounds like Kripke had a sort of a five-season plan. - You had a five-season plan. - And then the show goes for 10. Who knows how long it's going to go for. And, you know, what do you do? What do you do? Especially with that five-season plan was pretty much, that's a pretty big plot to tie up. What do you do after that? - Yeah. Yeah. - And I mean, you probably had no idea what they can do. - I'm just, I just don't say the line. - It's a mystery. And that mystery seems to me to be way harder than I want to work. - Yeah. No, I agree. I agree. The stress involved with that. Were you just showing up and doing what they are just figured out? - I come up, I come up, I look at the script. I think these are good lines. These are not good lines. I'm going to say them all, as I can, and then I'm going to go home. - Do the jars. Yeah, exactly. Do you still watch a lot of old stuff that you watch as a kid? - Oh, yeah. - Do you watch that more than new things? - Yeah. There aren't a lot of new movies that appeal to me. Very rare. I see most of them during the last month or two of the year. - Right. - Because I'm not big into Crash Bank and I'm not big into Boo, and I'm not big into people's limbs being saw at all. - It's spectacle now. The circus doesn't engage me very much. I'm much more interested in human travel, whether it's funny or not. So, I watch the new things that the radar says are worth catching than I ought to. But, mainly, I try and complete my viewing of all the old stuff I haven't seen and revisiting the stuff that I missed. I'd rather watch a bad old movie than a mediocre new movie. - Well, because you get a lot more than I think out of normal, because you see this. - I don't know what it is. - I mean, to me, I think you're seeing a sort of historical artifact. You're seeing the movie, but you're seeing a place and a time, and you're seeing the snapshot of what created the environment that that movie came from. That's interesting to me. I watch a terrible old war movie, or like an old, what was the real great Z studio, not Republic? - PRC. - Yeah, that would do these just real, but it was interesting to see that old LA, or I'm getting something out of it like that. And, you know, now it's not... - Yeah, I mean, it's kind of the same with television. I'd probably rather watch an old M squad episode than Law and Order SVU. - Did you feel like you had to educate your daughter with that stuff? Did you make her watch the show? - My daughter doesn't care much about movies, unless Mustard Keaton or Laurel and the Lady. - So you're like, "I've done my job." She doesn't care much about music, unless it's The Beatles or Tommy James and The Shondell and The Supremes. She's stretching and growing out of that a little, but her foundation is good. - And that is rare. I think that you find young people that don't know much past the last 10 years. - Yeah, she doesn't know much later than the last 70 years. - Did she watch you in things? - The only thing she's seen really is a few episodes of Supernatural. - Yeah, I mentioned Deadwood had some language restrictions. - Yeah, she doesn't seem terribly... she likes the fact that I'm an actor. I mean, I think she likes the fact that that's what I do, but she doesn't seem particularly interested in, as far as I can tell, in what I've done. She doesn't say, "Oh, she'll be old episodes of something you did." - And she doesn't have that desire to be an actor? - I think you might have to ask her, but my sense is that she is unfortunately more interested in fame than in... - Right. - But I think that's generational. - She wants to be a singer. She wants to be a pop singer, and she's working really hard at that, but she talks a lot about auditioning, but I don't think she sees it as anything other than a way to get famous. - It means to an end. - Yeah. - Yeah. And I think that's generational. I think it's different. When you first started getting in things, did your family back in Texas watch you and stuff? - Yeah, sort of haphazardly. I mean, they would come to my plays, and that was always fun when they would come. But when I started doing television, they would watch that stuff. If I was in a movie, that was a little harder, because they didn't go out to the movies very much. - They're all still back in Texas. - Well, they'd be like, "Oh, we saw that movie you were in. What movie such, such?" - Yeah. - "Oh, well, mom, that came out six months ago." - Yeah. - Yeah. - "You just had the video stuff." - You know, when my dad died, we were going through things, and there were dozens of video tapes of my shows, so I know they once. They were cheerleaders for what I was doing, but they seemed... - They were quietly proud. - I think they were quietly proud, and at the same time, I mean, it hasn't been 10 years since my mom said, "Well, don't forget, they're hired at Burger King." - They think it's not a real profession. - I think my, you know, all my mom, she lives on Mars anyway. Most of them are. I mean, it must be... I mean, she grew up in Texas, so it's a million years away. You know, they couldn't even comprehend what the world is. - She'd never been to a set episode. - I mean, you might as well have said, "I joined the circus." Like, it would have probably made more sense. - It's a... Now, granted, my mom was always a movie fan, and she still got a collection of clippings and things from when she was a kid. - Do you think that's where you got that love? - I think that's where I got some of it. Yeah, because she would recommend things. - Right. - You know, you should watch this. It's a good movie. - Right. - And her, you know, God Garfield's in this. You'll like it. And I think she's very proud of me. I think my dad was too, but there was never this sense of, "You go get 'em, man." - Right, right. - We're behind you, 100%. - It was more like they were really happy when something worked out. - But they were always like, "Well, yeah, but what are you gonna do for a living?" - Right. What's your backup here? - Yeah. - Yeah. - But it's nice that it sounds like your dad, you know, having grown up watching these things with him. You know, he probably had that real... - He got the chance to see some real success on my part. - Yeah. - He didn't live to see Deadwood. Of course, he would have curled his hair. - Right, right. - But this is not the lone ranger. I don't think my mom's ever seen it, but you know, at some point I reached the point where I stopped calling and saying, "Hey, I'm on such and such." - Because it was just... - It was like, it would be like, "Hey, I just put another fender on a Chevy." - Right, right. - I got a big business conference in Oklahoma. - So? - Yeah. - I mean, I don't think it was ever so to them. - Right. - It kind of was to me. It was like, "I'm not gonna call every week, every time I'm on something." - Right. - Because it's... - I'm on things all the time now. - Yeah, it's weird. I mean, I don't get it. We're back to that luck thing. There's 200,000 actors in LA. - But you met... - 50 of them, like, 5,000 bucks a year. - Right. - And how I got to be one of them, I don't know. - You were the right guy for the part at the right time. - I went through the right door at the right time, so... - And then it's, you know, I mean, I think that, especially in this business, there are those moments where your life is split into before that moment and after that moment, more than anything else. - Yeah. - For better or worse, for some people. - Yeah. - And it's a lot of good events. - It's loved. I mean, it's been such a great life. It was... I mean, there were times I was worried. - Right. - I... Right before I got deadwood, I hit a low spot where I just wasn't working enough to support a wife and baby. And I thought, "Man, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? A middle-aged and don't have anything else I know how to do. I'm too lazy to write." - And it's hard to go back to the real world where, you know, I see this with stand-ups where they go, "I need to go back to construction or work in an office." And you go, "Oh, there is. I mean, what have you been doing for 10 years? There's nothing on here." And you go, "Well, you know, you might as well have been in the French Foreign Legion or something for 10 years." - Yeah. But, you know, I was lucky. I mean, the first time in my career, I ever thought I might have to do something else. The next day, I used to get a week or two later I had deadwood. - The best thing you had, you found it completely changed my life because I've never stopped working. - Brett said. - Right? And I don't think you got. It's amazing. But I never, ever think it couldn't have happened to somebody else instead. But I think that sadly, that's an unusual outlook. And I think a lot of people don't look at things that way. And I think you're a better person for it. - I think the people who don't look at it that way got their first breaks too early. - Yeah. If they'd never heard no. - You know, somebody, I go to these comic conventions and fan conventions and events all the time and people constantly ask me, "Do you mind? Do you mind that people come up to you and want to talk to you about the show?" I said, "I worked for 35 years before anybody cared what I was on." - And you wouldn't go if you mind it. - Although I have seen people that do. - I mean, it's an utter privilege for me to meet people who like what I'm on and what I do. - And it comes into their homes and it spreads to places you would never imagine. And it affects people's lives. And to me, whenever I start to feel bad about comedy or trying to do anything creative, I go back to saying, "Are people better off for having owned me?" And it's in any capacity and seeing something I've done or just personally knowing me. And I think I can say that. And I think that's the prime example of that. You're seeing that in action, these people coming up to you. - You know, Preston Sturges made that great film, Sullivan's Travels, about a guy who, you know, he's sick of making stupid comedies and he wants to make something serious that'll change the world. And at the end of it, or near the end of it, he sees what a simple little Mickey Mouse cartoon can actually do for people who have nothing. And, and how it lifts their lives out of drudgery. - Absolutely. - And he goes, and he realizes, "You know, this stupid stuff isn't that stupid." - Yeah, it has a place. - Now, I like smart stupid, but I'm not saying we ought to all, you know, praise heaven for Honey Boo Boo. But I do an episode of a sitcom that's just silly and I still feel like I did some good in the world. - Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even if it's just, I mean, I think there's a difference too between, I mean, reality shows a whole different thing. You know, they have writers and they're not reality, but I think those are more like time passors. - Yeah. - And some are more active where you're, you're, there's a catharsis and you're, you're getting a sense of relief instead of just staining off stuff. - Yeah. - It's not a distraction, it's a relief. - I don't want to make too much of this, but I have had probably five different letters or emails from people who told me that watching supernatural saved them from suicide. - I'm sure it has. - Getting involved in it. Now, I'm not saying we're curing cancer here, folks. I just mean that you can't dismiss out of hand the positive effects even innocuous things can have. - Yeah, it gives people a sense of community too, which I think is one of the great things about, you know, as much as I complain about the war, the, you know, the internet and all the world being small and all the stuff, it's still, it gives these people this sense of community that they couldn't have before. And that's why we see so many more of these conventions and there are people who go, there's, you know, I'm in a nowhere town, wherever, but there's other people like me, all their places, and we don't all have to go to New York. - First convention I went to, I had my eyes open because I was talking to some fans about why they came and one of them said, well, you know, we would come to these even if none of the actors did. - Yeah. - And everybody around said, oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. - They want to talk with like-minded people. - They want to be with people they only know from online, they want to be with people who feel the same way they do. And I'd get that entirely. If I weren't on Supernatural, I probably would never have watched it. - Right. But you're not the target audience. - I'm not the target audience. - If there is my, I'm part of a target audience for other things. - When you were 20, there was a Superman convention, you probably would have gone to that if they had something. - I might well have. There's something about feeling part of a community. And if the stuff we do can be the greatest sound that the sooner or the oyster that forms that community around it, that's a pretty cool thing. - Yeah. And I think too, back to, you know, where we started here, where you get the TV guide and you plan your week, part of that is something I look forward to. - Yeah. - No matter how bad your week is or what's going on, you go, I know I have that thing to watch. - Yeah. - And I know, and some people would dismiss that as being kind of sad. But really, it's no different for people going, I'm gonna have a beer, I'm gonna watch the game. It's the thing, the small thing I enjoy. - Yeah. - And when you have a show at Supernatural or show, you know, like Deadwood or whatever it is, they know every week I'm gonna have that. And I can look forward to it every week. And that's big for people. - And, you know, I forget who said that, you know, life is basically ugly, brutal and short. And you find the daisies where you find them, and maybe all we're doing is making artificial daisies. But there are worse things to do for us. - That's true. You could be getting rid of daisies, which is a lot worse. - Yeah, we could be spreading pesticides. - Removing the jewelry in the metaphor. - It's quite all right, it's quite all right. It's been a long weekend. - When we were talking about doing this, I didn't even hope thinking, okay, what, what are we gonna tell me about the shows that I look forward to and everything? - Right. - And never really actually do that other than Superman. But I remember watching Combat. Combat was combat. I mean, it wouldn't stand up as well today, but it's still one of the greatest drama series ever on television. - Did that taint your, or not taint necessarily, but put, give you expectations for when you joined the service? - I don't think so. - Yeah, you knew it wouldn't be like the things you saw. - I don't think so, no. - Yeah. - Trying to think if there's anything that did, you know, I saw the John Wayne movie, The Green Parade the night before I left for a boot camp. - Was that good or bad thing to do? - I think I was smart enough to know that this doesn't have anything to do with real life. - Right, right. - If I'd seen platoon the night before. - Yeah, I mean, there was a huge shift in the way that war was presented after Vietnam. - What not just that war, but war itself? - Yeah, yeah, war overall. It wasn't as patriotic when they were shot off. - It wasn't, it was ugly and brutal. - Right, and that's what people used to explore that. I think before that, people had to get those feelings out through genre things. So, if they're feeling bad about World War II, they're making a horror movie about vampires. They're not making the horror movie about World War II, which you could easily do. - Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I had bad timing. I read, I saw The Green Parade the night before I left for a boot camp. I read John, I finished reading John, he got his gun the night before. - Oh, got it. - Do you ever see that movie? - Yeah, yeah. - That's brutal. - It's like, you know, maybe I should. - Well, no, you know, I went in all those things with my eyes pretty wide open. - Yeah, might have helped. - Well, I don't want to blow your voice out, so I'm taking up a lot of your time. - Well, I've enjoyed this. - Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time. I love this conversation. - It's a real pleasure. I'm on a bread, I said, an actor's a fellow of you ain't talking about him, but he'll be listening. So, I could join listening all through this. - Thank you so much, Jim. - Yeah, it's a pleasure. And there you go. That was Jim Beaver. I told you, he's a great guy, fascinating guy, a really smart guy, and you're definitely going to want to check out some of the stuff he has written. And I know you enjoy seeing him and the things he's acted in, so you will like the things he's written just as much. As I said, it's life's thatway.com is the site we can find out about his book. You can go to his Facebook page. All of those links will be on tvguidenscounselor.com. As always, you can email me at canadikenread.com or at tvguidenscounselor@gmail.com. I will get back to you as soon as I can. Any questions, feedback, I love hearing from you guys. You can always go to our Facebook page or you can review us on iTunes, on Stitcher. I do read those, no shock there. But I love hearing from you guys. I love hearing what you think of the show. If you have guests you'd like me to try to get, I will do my best to get them. We have a new episode every Wednesday. Sometimes we have special episodes on off days. You never know, so be sure to subscribe and I will at least see you again next week, next Wednesday, for an all-new episode of TVguidenscounselor. I was 28 before I knew what a bagel was.
