David Mamet

David Mamet is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright, screenwriter, and director. He first gained acclaim in the 1970s with plays like Sexual Perversity in Chicago, American Buffalo, and later the landmark Glengarry Glen Ross, which earned him both a Pulitzer and a Tony nomination. A founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company, Mamet’s prolific career spans theater, television, film, and essays. Mamet’s most recent play, Henry Johnson, premiered in 2023 and is currently being adapted for the screen. Starting May 9th, Henry Johnson will be available for rental directly through the film’s website - and will also be screening in theaters across the country, including stops in Dallas (May 6), Santa Monica (May 9), and a weeklong run at Bryn Mawr Film Institute in Pennsylvania (May 9–13). ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Rick Rubin?

  Tetragrammaton.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  I think I've been very fortunate because I never got an education, so all I did was read all the time.

• 0:29Rick Rubin?

  What are your thoughts on education in general?

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting that you should say that because I, for years I wanted to write a book about education. My wife said, "Please don't," so I did. And I imagined this school, prep school in New England. And I wrote the memoirs of a fellow who had been the headmaster for 50 years and who knew the founder.

• 0:53Rick Rubin?

  Fictional story.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Yes, all fictional. And so I put all my ideas about education into the education.

• 0:59Rick Rubin?

  What's it called?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  It's called Some Recollections of Saint Ives. I'm very, very happy with it.

• 1:05Rick Rubin?

  I'd love to see it.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. I spent my life thinking about education because I didn't have any. And I went to the Chicago Public Schools. It was very traumatic for me because everyone said I was stupid. And they kept putting me in remedial reading classes and never opened a school book. And so I grew up thinking it was really, really stupid. But at the same time, they were putting me in remedial reading classes. I was reading all the time, but I never put the two things together. That I was actually getting an education, but I wasn't getting it in the school.

• 1:39Rick Rubin?

  You weren't getting their education. You were educating yourself.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  So what were they educating me to do? They were educating... And looking back, it would have taken about a thousand of the energy and the psychic reserve to just do the stupid fucking exercises, but it never occurred to me. And I think it didn't occur to me because my main trick was being stupid. That's what everyone told me what I was, and so I was very good at it, right? You used it to your advantage. It was a world I was comfortable in. So would you say it gave you freedom? I don't know if it gave me freedom, no, but it it was bearable. It was more bearable to think, I understand the world, I'm stupid.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Rather than I don't understand the world and everybody who's in a position of authority is wrong. Yeah. So then I spent a lot of time thinking about education and I and I and I went to an acting school and I was thinking about the way that education took place because I I didn't understand what they were doing and it didn't make any sense to me. And then I started a couple of acting schools, did a lot of directing. And so I've always been thinking about how people learn, how I learn, what is education? For example, one of the things you'll see in the book, it's all anecdotal. And a guy shows up and he says, uh, he was a prisoner of the Japanese in World War Two.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  And then he was in Manchukou and he goes prisoner of the of the Russians. And he learned Japanese and he learned Russian. And because they let him get some books, he learned Greek and Hebrew and Latin. And he shows up and he says to the guy, I'd like a job at this school, teaching languages. And the guy says, what language can you teach? And he's like, I think I can teach whatever you want. So the guy says, well, do you have any degree? The guy says, I don't have a degree. But he says, I'll tell you what, he says, the classical languages. Tomorrow morning, he says, you you choose Latin or Greek. The guy says, okay, Greek. He says, good. He says, give me your worst students at eight o'clock in the morning.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Just have one stipulation, don't feed them anything.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  The guy says, okay. He says, come back at four o'clock, they're going to be speaking Greek. So the so the students come up and they haven't, they haven't eaten anything and they're sitting there. And the guy's got a big plate of scones.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  He looks at the scones and he says, "Food, food," he says in Greek, "food, food." And he says in Greek, "Stand up," he points at the guy, kid stands up. And he says, "In Greek, you want food, you want food?" And the kid says, "Yeah." He says, "In Greek, say it." Kid says, "I want food." The guy says, "Good, come have a scone." And so the kid sits down and someone else says, "I want food." So the guy says, "In Greek, you want food too?" The guy says, "Say it, I want food too." In Greek. In Greek. And so the kid eats the thing. And so he says this, the kid, "Good?" The kid says, "Yeah, good."

• 4:52Speaker 01

  So at the end of the day, they're speaking Greek. And what he does halfway through the day is he starts writing it down, the words in the Greek alphabet. Food, and he writes down the word for that. Good, he writes down the word for that. Because what the guy figured out is all prisoners must learn to speak the language of their captors immediately. And the word they learn is "don't eat." So they have to learn to pay strict attention. And the way languages are not taught. You can study French for five years and know nothing, but if you're there for three weeks, you're going to speak the language. Because the language that you're trying to learn is accompanied with gestures.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  And you understand the gestures, that the person who's speaking the language is trying to communicate with you, trying to help you communicate. And so the guy, the headmaster says, "They learn the alphabet too, isn't it hard?" He says, "Every fifteen-year-old boy loves codes. It's just a code." So my life as a teacher, and as, I suppose, as a thinker, and certainly as a director, is how to teach. How do we actually learn? And what's the test? Like, we send kids to college studying. In my generation, you say, well, they're gonna become more themselves. They're gonna be open to the world. Or they're gonna become exposed to whether...

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Well, that's bullshit, because there isn't any test. So if the test is, you're gonna be able to speak French. You're gonna be able to do calculus. That's a test which can be applied to the school, to evaluate the school. What if it's you're going to become more yourself? Or you're gonna become more open to other blah, blah, blah? The kid realizes that's nonsense. I can, I'll go along with the gag, but it's just nonsense. So how does that apply to the arts? How does it apply to directing? What applies to directing is you can, you have to understand what you're asking the person to do. And it has to be something that can be done. The real trick to directing actors is you really don't have to do anything.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  The actor understood the script when he read it. There, there's nothing more to it than that. The actor simply shows up and says the lines with an objective somewhat like that. Is that all there is to it? Yeah, that's all there is to it. And I've worked with the greatest actors in the world. And whether they're conscious of what they're doing or not, that's what they're doing. So people say, do you spend a long time directing your movies? I said, I don't spend any time directing my movies. The actors show up, but you know what the script about, because they read it. I say, you got any questions? No, okay, go. And it works just fine. So I realized from working with other directors, myself as a playwright,

• 7:42Speaker 01

  that most directors have no idea what they're doing. They're just, they come out of the English department. Because the, what the director's job is, in addition to designing the, the scenery, is to keep the actors from tripping over the scenery. And to stage them in such a way to increase the audience's enjoyment through the staging. For example, if you're the audience, most directors have the actors talking like that to each other. Those guys can't see him, those guys can't see him. Everything should always be in a diagonal. And you can move the actors so that the person talking has the attention of the audience. And if you don't, you're not doing your job. So the job of a director used to be called stage manager.

• 8:26Rick Rubin?

  Did the director start as the stage manager? That's what it evolved from?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the job of the stage manager was to make sure that no one's gonna upstage the star and to move them around. It's a very, very simple job. And the whole thing's changed in the end of the 19th century with Stanislavski. And he thought that we had to investigate the character and find the inner meaning of the character. There isn't any inner meaning of the character, just actors saying lines. It's just like, you know, after you listen to Glenn Gould play Bach, everyone else sounds like bullshit. Because his unspeakable genius is, to the best of his ability,

• 9:12Speaker 01

  playing the music and getting himself out of the way. So the idea of interpreting music or interpreting...

• 9:19Rick Rubin?

  I feel like Glenn Gould interprets Bach. Because if you listen to other people play Bach, they play it more just the notes. And he's playing the notes, but he seems to be reinterpreting it in a way that others don't.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, one can certainly make the case. Yeah, but that's how I understand it. So the job of a director is basically to say, "Pick it up and knock it off." Right? Because the actors get it.

• 9:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Would you say the words of the play, that's it? Is it all in the words?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Well, where else would it be?

• 9:55Rick Rubin?

  I'm asking.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Well, my question is rhetorical. Where else would it be? If you pick up a script and shake it upside down, the character's not gonna fall out. It's just words. So people talk about how difficult it is to do Shakespeare. Quite the opposite is true. They use this thing in the world.

• 10:12Rick Rubin?

  You just say the words.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  You say the words. The purpose of the words is to have the speaker...

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Affect something in the other person. It's not to communicate ideas, right? So if I'm trying to get something from you, which is what all drama is about. If I'm smart, I'm going to tell you through the best of my ability, what I think is more likely to get a response out of you. Most people say I'm going to get a response out of them. I'm using my words to make them understand what I want out of you.

• 10:49Rick Rubin?

  So if you just focus on the character you're playing against and say it to them, that's the actor's job.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't even have to focus.

• 10:58Rick Rubin?

  Just do it.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  We have, listen, it's like I always say, people sit and watch a television show in a bar and somebody comes up and says, oh, what's happening? And the other guy says, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She was just discovered cheating on her husband and that's her best friend and she's trying, she's trying to get him to tell her it's okay. That's all you need, right? They aren't going to say, well, as I know and you don't because I saw the first hour, she had a very difficult childhood and she has all these characteristics, see? For example, that's, so if you look at movies and television, almost all of it is narration. It's people talking about something that happened before. You know, geez, I know why I'm telling this. When I was young, my kitten got run over by a dump truck and da, da, da.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Oh, we really need to do this, Jim, because as you know, if we don't, the, the blah, blah people are going to take over the thingy over there. They're explaining to each other. Understanding drama is really understanding how the, what the audience wants, which is actually kind of easy because we were an audience before we were dramatists.

• 12:06Rick Rubin?

  Do you write like you talk?

• 12:08Speaker 01

  I hope so. I have a bit in my, in my book, Recollections of St. Ives, where one guy is, wants to teach history. He says, here's what we're going to teach history. He says, the best history book in the world is a flea market. He says, here's what we're going to do. And I take the kids to the flea market. I can give them each a $5 bill and I say, buy something. And tomorrow, come in and tell me all about it. So they come in and tell me all about it and he says, "Okay." He says, "Then if I say to them, 'Stand up and just tell me about it in your own words.'" And I say, "Good. Right, now write it down." They just learn creative writing, because that's all creative writing is, right? It's telling it in your own words.

• 12:51Rick Rubin?

  So when you're writing a script, do all the characters speak the same way?

• 12:55Speaker 01

  No, of course not. My mind is a raging fire. Everybody speaks different, you know, because I get to dress up like they do. But if you think about it, when we fantasize, as we all do, all the characters in our minds speak differently, don't they?

• 13:10Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Same thing. It's just writing down fantasies.

• 13:14Rick Rubin?

  When you imagine a character, do you have a person in mind or an actor in mind when you're writing, or no?

• 13:21Speaker 01

  No, just picking it up.

• 13:24Rick Rubin?

  No imagery in your head?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  No.

• 13:27Rick Rubin?

  Tell me what your process, how it actually works.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  I write it down. I'm making it up and I'm writing it down. And I was thinking about Bach, you know, if you listen about to the Partitas and so forth. As a musician, tell me if I'm wrong, it's obvious that he's just transcribing an improvisation, right? So does he say, "Oh, da, da, da, this and that?"

• 13:51Rick Rubin?

  I think all music is, most music is written that way. It all starts as improvisation. It doesn't start theoretically, if that's what you're saying.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:59Rick Rubin?

  It's not intellectual.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Right. But I'm saying, I'm thinking, "He wrote down, and so I'm going to go to the treble clef, I'm going to do the bass clef. Oh, what happens after 16 bars?" No, no, no, no, no. Sounds to me like he's sitting down at the piano fort and then writing down what he's playing.

• 14:17Rick Rubin?

  And that's your experience of writing, same thing?

• 14:19Speaker 01

  I think so. What do I know?

• 14:21Rick Rubin?

  Before you start the story, how much of the story do you know?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Sometimes I know a lot, and that's wrong. And sometimes I know a little, I got to figure it out. Because at the end, it has to be an equation. One thing is... I find it very upsetting about modern music because it doesn't resolve. Most of it is just, it's a chant, whereas the same four bars played over and over and over again. Yeah. So, okay, you know, it's elevator music. Yeah. But we miss the, uh, we miss our beloved cycle of fifths, don't we? We miss our, our resolution. If there's an extraordinary resolution of music, it's just like an extraordinary resolution in drama. They say, I never thought of that, but wow, yes, now I see.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Tell me, what do you remember about the idea for House of Games? I was doing this movie for Bob Rafelson and Jeff Nicholson. Postman always rings twice. We were shooting in Santa Barbara and I was living over here. And I would commute back and forth in my wonderful little 1968 Carmen Gia, best car ever made. And I was listening, speaking of Glenn Gould, to Glenn Gould play the, um, the C minor takara. And it's six notes, right? It's C minor from C to A. That's all.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Modulates and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it keeps going on and on and on in ways that you just, that are so inevitable and so shocking. And I thought, wow, I wish I could write like that. So that was kind of my inspiration. The idea for it being about con men? Well, I, I, I spent a lot of time in that world by accident growing up in Chicago. I spent a lot of time playing poker with criminals. And I also spent a lot of time working in phone rooms. What's a phone room? A phone room is a boiler room in the old days. You're selling, for example, Imaginary Land in Arizona, which I, one of the places I was working. And there's 25 guys there to reach on the phone and they're given very bad leads.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Sometimes actually cold calling out of a telephone book. And they're trying to set up a date with you. I say, oh, Mr. Room, hi, this is Richard Room. Yes, thanks. Oh, my name is Dirk Bogart, and I work with the Glen Realty Company. I understand that you were, you were someone in your family, put in your name as someone who was interested in making a profit and land. Is that true? If that's true, what I'd like to suggest to you, your name has been picked at random out of a pool, and the president of our company is going to be in town just this afternoon. And he'd like to talk to you to get your ideas about how to form this program. What, what would be a better time for you? Would be four o'clock or six o'clock? And of course, your, your wife would be with there.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  So I did that, and I sold carpets over the telephone.

• 17:16Rick Rubin?

  So you, you had these jobs?

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And it was a really interesting world to me, because there's a lot of the salesman, not the people in the boiler room, but the salesman, they call them salesmen, right? They, a lot of them lived in a hotel, you know, they were, a lot of them were drunk and addicted. They had a lot of times they didn't know and didn't care what they were selling. They're just great at selling. And then I started playing poker with a lot of guys who, who were criminals and hanging out with them and listening to them talk and so.

• 17:45Rick Rubin?

  How old were you at that time?

• 17:47Speaker 01

  I don't know, twenty-two, twenty-three, something like that.

• 17:49Rick Rubin?

  And what were your thoughts going on at that time? Was it just, this is really interesting? Did it feel scary? What were your thoughts?

• 17:56Speaker 01

  I was just living my life. It was never, um, I remember I went to this hippy dippy school, it wasn't really even a college, but it pretended to be. And I went to visit a friend from high school who was at Harvard, this person who you're from Harvard. So I went down to Cambridge, went into Harvard Yard. And it was one of the most stunning experiences of my life. I looked around, I saw all these people my age who had a life, and they had support, and they were, they were made. They didn't have to worry about, I always looked at them at the mouth, you know, because I didn't have any career, I didn't have any skills, I didn't have any contacts. But these people were just, they were made. That was it.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  And it was, it was stunning to me. So, you know, I guess my great motivator has been two things. One, I was given a gift, so I'd be a fool not to use it. And the other was I was always terrified of poverty.

• 18:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. When did you become aware of the gift?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Well, I woke up one day, I started writing and then I wrote these little sketches. I used to work at Second City in Chicago. Not on stage, I worked as a busboy and I worked as a piano player for the kids' shows. And I saw the sketches that they were doing, improvisational comedy. And then I started reading Pinter's sketches. And I thought, oh, it's the same thing. What they're both doing is writing this tragico-comito blackouts. And then I discovered Chekhov, and that's what he's doing. None of his plays have a plot. They have a setting and they're all like seven to 12-minute tragico-comitico blackouts. So I said, well, hell, I can do that. So I did.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  And one thing led to another and I started writing plays and I liked it. Who were your contemporaries at that time? Well, my contemporaries at that time were the people that I was working with in the theater in Chicago, among them William H. Macy and among them Malkovich, a little bit younger than I am, and Gary Sinise, they're both a little bit younger than I am. And a lot of those guys, they became very well-known, Macy among them, Billy Peterson, you know, who did N C I S or Lorna, one of them, whatever the hell he was doing. And Nishak Taylor did Designing Women. And also Warren Casey, who wrote with Jim Jacobs, who wrote Grease. So we were in a little theater the size of this and he was in the garage across the street doing Grease.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  And then Stuart Gordon was there with the Organic Theater and people from New York started coming saying, geez, what's going on here? How do you think it was different than what was going on in New York? Well, it's completely different because none of us saw a career. It was just what we were doing. There was no money. There was no upside? No, there's no upside, I didn't have no time of my life. Yeah. And everybody was working a different job and putting the money into the theater companies. Because why not? You know, it was the Beatles, you know, it was the greatest experience of my life. Yeah. And we were in these rundown neighborhoods, transition, and the people started coming from the neighborhood. And they'd come up to you on the street, they'd say, you know, Dave, I saw that play you

• 21:12Speaker 01

  did last week, it wasn't really good. That was so wonderful. It's just like, that's the way that you talk to the plumber or the butcher or something like that. Fucking loved it. Good job. Yeah, good job. Well done. That's very Chicago, right? Nobody's impressed by much of anything. Yeah. My dad used to say, "New York's the biggest hick town in the world," which I think has proved to be true. How else do you think Chicago informed who you are? Well, my parents were first generation. They were born right off the boat. How did they end up there? Do you know? Yes, some of the mammoths went to Ellis Island and went to Brooklyn, and some of them went to Montreal and came down through the lakes and ended up in... But as usual,

• 21:53Speaker 01

  if somebody knew somebody in the Landsman Shaft, right, the informal self-help organizations. But they used to say, "If you can't work in Chicago, you can't work anywhere." So I don't know if that's true now, but it was then. They did every job in the world, because you could always go get another job. But one thing about Chicago was that the American literature of the 20th century all came out of Chicago. Really? Yeah, every bit of it. So that was the tradition. I'm not aware of that. Yeah. That's the tradition that I grew up in. And I used to go cut school and go to the library downtown and just read. And I loved the Chicago ones, you know, Willa

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Cather and Dreiser and Frank Norris and Ben Hecht, who wrote The Front Pages, you know, the transformative American play, and on and on and on. Nilla Larson, who wrote Passing, and Richard Wright, I mean, black and white. And, for example, B. Trayven, who wrote The Jungle. How many white came out of Chicago, for Christ's sake? I didn't know that. Yeah. It's all Chicagoan. I always hear the expression, "The machine politics in Chicago." What does that mean? Well, Chicago was always a machine town. It was run by the Dailies, and it was a democratic machine town. The question is, you know, it's Joey Montana, and I say, "You don't want to live in a town where you can't fix a parking ticket. Who do you got

• 23:17Speaker 01

  to talk to around here?" was always the question. You know, working as a cab driver, you know, we're always getting shipped down by the cops. And it was clear, if you worked for anything in the city, you had to kick back part of your salary, right? And if you wanted to get the streets cleaned, you had to vote Democratic and blah, blah, blah. It was very clear. But there was nothing hidden about it.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  So I, when I grew up, it became, I found it odd that people didn't understand how politics worked, right? That it was A, people with a good idea who were gonna get taken advantage of by the people who got into it for the money. And then it was all about power and that the purpose of the Constitution was to protect us from the government. It was not the job of the government to do good. Cause you know, I don't know how to do good. I think about it all the time and I'm a huge sinner. Why would these schmucks who are getting into it to steal have a better idea about how to do good? So it's, it's kind of stunning to me that a lot of people don't, well, some are coming to realize it.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  What do you know about the Great Chicago Fire? Well, one of the things I know is that because of the Great Chicago Fire, I think it was 1903, 1906, it was impossible to build a theater in Chicago. We couldn't do it. The fire laws were too strict. Then for some reason in the seventies, the fire laws were relaxed. And because they were relaxed, our little neighborhood, right around the corner from Wrigley Field, these little theaters sprang up. You know, 50 seats that were, ours was an abandoned car barn, one of them was an abandoned dairy, one was in a garage, these little theaters sprang up. Folding chairs? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So it was a space? It was a space.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  So even today, anyone who grew up in the theater, if you show them a black room, their eyes light up, they say, well, this is great. I could do anything here. And indeed you could, because one of the other secrets that we learned was that stage design is very, very difficult. There was a guy called Adap Apia, he was a great designer in the early twenties, late eighties. He said, the set doesn't make any difference. He said, what makes a difference is the correlation between the stage and the audience. It's an amphitheater, right? In effect, if you look at an amphitheater, what set could you put on the amphitheater to make it better? So is it possible to do a set which is better than a bare stage?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Yes, but it's very, very difficult. So my thing has always been if you can do it on a bare stage and keep the audience's attention, it's gonna be hard to beat it. In fact, if you can do it right and do it on a radio, you don't need a set. And we had a little theater, the Goodman Theater. A guy called Greg Mosher came in. The Goodman was an old death house in Chicago. And Greg took it over and turned it into a great theater and hired all of us. And he had a little space, the second space theater, which was, I think, eighty seats. And it's always true that if you have a theater with a big space and an experimental space, nothing good is happening on the big space, right? It's all happening there. And it had a back wall.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  It was built in like nineteen twenty, a back wall. And it was plaster. And over the years, they painted up, they put on paint, they'd taken it off, they put up a mastiff and taken it off. They blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we always ended taking the set away because that, for some reason, was the most magnificent. You know, it was like pollock if you could paint. And that was just stunning.

• 26:58Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:00Rick Rubin?

  Have any of your works been used as radio plays? Do you know?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. I did a bunch of them as radio players. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, I think I did a few as radio plays last year for the BBC, I think.

• 27:11Rick Rubin?

  Fantastic.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:12Rick Rubin?

  I'd love to hear that. Have you ever done therapy?

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. What a waste of time. Jesus Christ.

• 27:19Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about it.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Well, here's the thing. I've known in various capacities therapists and psychologists and psychiatrists. And like any other profession, few of them were smart. Maybe one or two of them were wise. But, and I did a lot of reading about psychoanalysis when I was young. I got very interested in it. I read everything. And I realized that there's a kind of a cross-pollinization between Stanislavski and Freud are co-evils, right? And that the quote "method" as adopted here in the United States was taken from the teachings of Stanislavski

• 28:02Speaker 01

  and practiced by people who are all involved in therapy. And they were all communists, so they're also involved in the whole communist Marxist idea of self-revelation and sharing a goody-buddy-boo. But I realized that most therapy that I've either participated in or seen those close to me participate in was a recitation of grievances. And it's like you said about the monk, right? You say, "Oh, I'm a bad monk." Yeah. Right? You're a fucking monk, dude. Yeah, you either are or you're not. Yeah. So the recitation of grievances I saw cross-decked from my experiences in the theater, it lead to nothing. I know how this person feels like, but who cares?

• 28:46Speaker 01

  The audience don't care. I want you to say the stupid lines. If the play's written well, they'll get the idea. You're just there to get the idea. So I had a bunch of terrible experiences with psychiatrists and like that before I came to realize that absent the stuff you could get out of either Uncle Joe, "Don't worry, you'll grow out of it." Yeah. Right? Or a good clergy person, "Shut up and obey the rules." Yes. Or, if you're really fucked up, some psychological drugs. They got nothing to offer. Here's the thing, if you go into the theater, you have to pay something. You have to. You can't put on a play for free.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Seriously, it could be a nickel, but just like they say it when the Jews do the census, you have to put a half shekel in the box. Let them put a quarter in. That allows them to believe. It triggers them into being able to suspend their disbelief. They're investing in that experience. Exactly. They're investing in the experience. If you don't invest in the experience, you don't believe, right? So they have to invest something. But the opposite is true too. When you go to therapy and like that, most of the people, and there are of course a few exceptions.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  You're also investing for the right to believe in something which is not true, which is that complaining or finding the reason that you cheat on your wife is somehow gonna free something. It's also, it's just not true. People do not act badly and feel upset because of something they saw in the closet for 45 years. It's just not true. So that's what I think about therapy.

• 30:39Rick Rubin?

  Your main character in House of Games was a therapist.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:43Rick Rubin?

  Who had written a successful book.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:45Rick Rubin?

  And there's a scene at the end I wanted to ask you about. She looks different. She's dressed in flowers instead of her old uniform. And her friend leaves the table, and she steals a lighter from the next table.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:05Rick Rubin?

  What did you mean by it?

• 31:07Speaker 01

  That's what I meant by it. That throughout the thing, Joey Mantegna's saying the broad's bent. Right? If she weren't bent, she wouldn't be going all over this stuff.

• 31:14Rick Rubin?

  So she's proving him right?

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's the old joke, right? There's a hypochondriac and goes to little kid, get taken to the therapist. He says, "I've determined the root of your son's problem. He's a thief." So there. Also, we see this whole idea of the primacy of therapy, which is it's completely self-referential. There's nothing wrong with that. We're all self-referential all the time, unless we do a bunch of yoga and so forth, because our mind is a monkey mind. But it leaches over into identitarian politics and the criminal justice system. "Oh, I wonder why the guy did that." You see it every day on the news. You look like you're so healthy that you don't watch the news.

• 31:54Rick Rubin?

  I don't watch the news.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I gotta stop it. It's just fucking bullshit. But they say, "Well, Da Da Da went in and he killed his mother and father. I wonder what his motives were." Well, A, it's who would know? And B, so what?

• 32:11Rick Rubin?

  At any point in your life, were you interested in magic? Like card tricks, magic?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Sure, but I got interested in magic not as a practitioner, but through my associate Ricky Jay, who was the greatest magician, maybe the greatest performer of the 20th century. And I did many, many things with him.

• 32:28Rick Rubin?

  How did you meet him?

• 32:30Speaker 01

  He was in the park. He was doing Shakespeare in the Park. And I saw him performing magic. And I was talking to Jules Fisher, the great lighting designer. He's a great friend of Ricky's. And I said, oh, I wonder if he'd come over and perform for my 30th, 40th birthday, something like that. They said, you're crazy, Ricky doesn't do that.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  But we called Ricky. Ricky comes over and performs. So I fell in love with him. I said, geez, this guy's a great actor. So I did many movies and television shows with him. One of them you might enjoy is, I did a Funny or Die called "Lost Masterpieces of Pornography." And he's introducing the lost masterpieces of pornography. And it's Eddie O'Neill and Kristen Bell in a porn movie from 1935 that takes place in the roving chambers of the Supreme Court. It's called "June Crenshaw, Sex Kitten to the Supreme Court." And Ricky's introducing it. So we talked all the time about the difference between magic and drama.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  And the Aristotelian idea that you have to use the mind to lead people to a conclusion which is both surprising and inevitable.

• 33:47Rick Rubin?

  So drama works the same way as magic, essentially?

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 33:51Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the Phil Spector project.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  You know, I ran into a long-lost relative of mine. There aren't too many mammoths, but there's one in New York who's working at Yeshiva University. And she's the granddaughter of my cousin Eddie the cop. Eddie Mamet was a cop for 40 years. And he was there and he asked me to speak at Yeshiva. And then Eddie's son came over and they started talking about the history of my family in Poland. And they said, well, you know, we're actually spectres. He said the mammoths weren't offshoots, that the whole blah, blah, blah. Phil Spector, so I'm probably related to Phil Spector. When did you find this out? Two weeks ago. Really? Yeah. So, anyway, so somebody called me up. Who was it? Maybe Barry Levinson called me up, something like that.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Said, you wanna do this movie about Phil Spector? And then he took it to HBO and I talked to HBO over there. And I said, yeah, okay, I'd love to do a movie about Phil Spector. What do with Al? And the deal is, you gotta leave me alone, you know? I'll do it, do the best job I can. See you at the opening. So they said, okay. The fools.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  So anyways, we're doing Phil Spector at the time of our life with Pat Midler. And she threw her back or something like that. Two weeks into the shooting. Heartbreaking. We had to close down. I'd asked Helen Mirren earlier if she would do it. She said, I'm busy. And then she said, no, no, no, I'm going on vacation with my husband and bead. And I called her up. She was on vacation, Helen, in Spain with her husband on a Friday. And she said, I'll be there Monday. Wow. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Did you write the script? Yeah. And did you ever meet Phil? I didn't meet him, but I, somebody invited me that I wanna go see him. He was in the joint.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  And I said, no, no, no, I'm making up a story. You're not recasting a story. And I asked Al and Al said, no, I don't wanna be in, I wanna do my own thing. So.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  How did you decide on Al? Well, I love Al. I mean, I've worked so often with Al. Yeah. And I'm working on a new movie. Now I'm trying to put together this movie, the movie. And he said, he'd take a part in it if he's free. That'd be great. It's the same old story, but this new movie is another confidence game movie. About these two guys who find this rich mark who's a dealer in Americana. And he's also gay. And so what they wanna do is sell him the Abraham Lincoln letter that proves that Abraham Lincoln was gay. And they've been waiting for years to find this perfect thing. And as they go to the forger and it's, it's pretty cool.

• 36:45Rick Rubin?

  It sounds great.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and John Malkovich said he played one of the guys and went to see who's gonna play the other one of the guys.

• 36:51Rick Rubin?

  So when you're writing a story about a real person, the case of Phil Spector, how do you research or do you research? You just make up from scratch?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, Shel Silverstein, who was my closest friend, he said, never do research. When you do research, you're just reading bullshit written by somebody who didn't do research. So the problem with biography is, you know, I was thinking a lot about in reading your book, the question is, what do you throw away, what do you keep? Right? I'm always working with this question. So I always knew that a good writer is gonna keep what others throw away, but it was also is gonna throw away what others keep. So if you're looking with a biography, there's all this stuff. It's very difficult because if you're dealing with someone who's putting up the money, they're gonna say, wait, where does he chop down the cherry tree? Right? Or wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, what does

• 37:44Speaker 01

  he blah, blah, blah, this or that, and the next thing. So the problem is with writing biography is to throw this stuff away, to say, what is, what's the actual story?

• 37:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  And then take it from there and let your imagination work.

• 37:57Rick Rubin?

  And when you say story, do you mean story or essence of the character?

• 38:01Speaker 01

  There isn't any essence of the character.

• 38:03Rick Rubin?

  It's just story?

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Aristotle said that. He says, there's no such thing as character. Character's just habitual action. That's all we know about anybody. Anything other than that is narration. That's how we understand characters. Oh, anybody understands. What does the guy do? That's his character. So for the writer and for the actor, both, there's no such thing as a character. The audience will get the idea. They imagine a character based on what the actor does and the words coming out of his mouth.

• 38:36Rick Rubin?

  So the people in the audience imagine a different character depending on who they are. Would that be accurate?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Well, yes, and it's very much like listening to a radio personality. It's an illusion. They think that they imagined something, but they didn't. Because if you ask them, well, okay, describe it.

• 38:55Rick Rubin?

  Describe it, they can't.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  So it's, it's an illusion. You can leave, you can leave it out. Because art is all about what can you leave out and it's still there. Do you think of yourself as spiritual in any way? Oh, yeah, sure. Tell me how. Well, I mean, you know, God, God, it amused God to put me here, you know, and... So you're a believer? Oh, yeah, sure. Do you pray? Sure. How do religion and show business work together? They don't. But show business is the bastard child of theater, which is, of course, the bastard child of religion.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  So it all starts with religion? Sure. It all starts with, exactly so, with connections, all metaphysics, right? It's a connection to something beyond our consciousness, which nonetheless we intuit is true. But it's true in a way different than fire burns, but it's true nonetheless. Describe more. I think everybody believes in God. I think we just call it by different names. And some of them actually call it the devil, and some of them, it actually is the devil, whether they call it that or not. So if you read the Torah, which I do, it's all in the Torah. What does God want you to do? Do justice, love, mercy, walk calmly with God. You want some extra tips? Okay, here's 10 commandments.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  You want some extra tips in addition to that? Okay, here's several Jewish observances. These are all designed to calm our mind such that we are receptive to higher power. That's what they're designed for. If we, like you're a monk, you do them, you're gonna get the benefit. If you don't do them, you're gonna pay the price. So rational human beings devote so much energy to saying, "That can't be true," right? It's not that God doesn't exist, but he's doing a rotten job. "I think I could do a better job than that. Let me make up all these laws and rules and regulations. And P.S., I'm gonna throw out anything that says it's religious because that's irrational."

• 41:04Speaker 01

  But if you look at human beings, we're all irrational, constantly. If you look at what's on the news, which, you know, it's absurd, and it's evil. So if you don't say God exists, then it's very easy to say, "Well, obviously, then evil doesn't exist either." But wait a second, how do I account for the fact that everything's screwed up? It's those guys over there.

• 41:28Rick Rubin?

  Is there any benefit for rationality?

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 41:32Rick Rubin?

  Tell me.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Well, to distinguish between this and that, right? If you can't distinguish between this and that, you're a vegetable, right? Is it reasonable to let women get beat to shit? Because someone says that men should be able to compete against them? Is it reasonable, right? So reason is very, very important. So the Hebrew word for reason is "bina", which means between. I judge between this and between that. I use my reasonable capacity. But the other hand, we have the monkey mind. How do we deal with it? One way we deal with it is through art.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Freud said that music is polymorphous perversity, right? It affects us in this extraordinary way that feels very much like reasonable propositions, but it's not. So whoever rises from his prayers, his prayers have been answered. If we rise from experience of art, something beyond ourselves, our prayers have been answered, right? It's not going to cure world hunger, right? We become a little bit less devilishly insane for the four minutes of a song or two hours of a play.

• 42:45Rick Rubin?

  So you're describing it as beyond entertainment?

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:50Rick Rubin?

  It has a higher purpose?

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:53Rick Rubin?

  It does for me.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me too. Listen, it's easy to entertain people, to get their attention through sadism and pornography, which is what most television and movies now are, right? But it doesn't have any affect other than the moment, other than its capacity to impale addiction. Because it means you have to do it again, you have to do it again, you have to do it again. Because, yeah, okay, now they finally took off their clothes and they're engaging in X, Y, and Z. Now what? Well, they're going to take off more clothes? But because you can't, what's the next step? Sadism. In effect, snuff films, which is what Luigi Mangione is

• 43:39Speaker 01

  and what all the anti-Israel rioting is about, right? It's because we tried the best thing we know how, which is people fucking constantly, and it didn't work.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  What's next? Physical violence and murder.

• 43:58Rick Rubin?

  Have you ever been censored?

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. Yeah, I got blacklisted all the time. Yeah, sure.

• 44:03Rick Rubin?

  How?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Well, people just lost my number, right? They said, "We can't do his plays because he's..." Or whatever. I don't know what the hell.

• 44:10Rick Rubin?

  Have any works been banned?

• 44:13Speaker 01

  I don't know if they've been banned, but you know, they've certainly been saw. I had some, somebody wanted to do some plays of mine the other year, and they went out to all the theaters here, the Mark Taper Forum, and the Kirk Douglas and Blood. They said, "No, no, we can't touch him."

• 44:28Rick Rubin?

  How is playwriting different from other kinds of writing?

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Finally, playwriting is reducing a

• 44:39Speaker 01

  unidirectional human interchange into dialogue. That's all it is. So, that's hard to do. Somebody asked John Barrymore, "What are your favorite 10 plays?" He said, "There aren't 10 good plays."

• 44:56Rick Rubin?

  I love John Barrymore.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  I love him, too.

• 44:59Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember the first time you saw one of your pieces performed?

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was in Chicago. It's a piece called "The Duck Variations." In Chicago, a little theater, like 50-seat theater. It was great. Yeah.

• 45:18Rick Rubin?

  What was the experience? How did it change from the page to the stage?

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Well, it didn't change much from the page to the stage because the actors were really good. Changes from the page to the stage if the actors want to get a good idea. And Henry Fonda said that they gave him his first Oscar, one of our great actors. Never got an Oscar. They gave him one for Lifetime Achievement Award, and it means "Thanks, die now," right? He said, "I want to thank all the directors who cured me of my good ideas."

• 45:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Are you ever surprised by what you see on a stage? Oh, yeah, sure. And ever in a good way or only in a bad way? Well, no, no, many times in a good way. People do something, they're like, "My god, that's genius." Like Hemingway, he's writing in Death in the Afternoon, and he and a friend are in Barcelona and they're watching. The great bullfighter, I think it might have been Manolletti. And Manolletti performs a pass. The horns of the bull are so close and Manolletti moves so little. And he and his friend look at each other and they just shake their heads like that. How could he do it? How could it be? So I've had that experience many times, watching actors.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  How is a play different than a film? Well, in a film, you get to eat popcorn, and in a play, you get to read your program.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Beyond that? Well, it's completely different, right? Watching a film is a construction, finally, by the director, working as the comptroller and as the architect and as the designer. So the French come along with this alter theory. I don't know what the fuck that means. Of course, who's making the movie if not the director? Except if the director's not making the movie, and then the studio heads are, you know, in which case one would be better not to have been gone. How did directing come into your life? Well, I started directing because I went to the Neighborhood Playhouse School in the theater in New York and studied for a year. And I had no idea what the teachers were talking about. It didn't make sense.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  And nobody could do it. The idea that you had to find something to substitute for blah, blah, blah, and that you had to relate to your own experience. And they had them doing these silly games that made people more self-conscious. And so I saw that, and I learned so much watching the actors doing it. I said, "No, no, no, there's got to be a better way." And so I wanted to stay in the theater because I loved the theater. Loved it. I felt so at home there. But I couldn't be there as an actor. So I became a director with my own little theater companies. And there was nothing for us to do because we couldn't pay royalties. So I said, "Okay," so I wrote plays for them to do.

• 48:13Rick Rubin?

  And then what was the first film you directed?

• 48:16Speaker 01

  House of Games.

• 48:17Rick Rubin?

  And how did that come about? How did you make the jump?

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Well, I worked with Rafelson on Postman, and I followed him around. He said, "Follow me around, follow me around, follow me around." And so I was watching what he was doing. A lot of it I understood, and a lot of it I said, "You know, I think I could probably do it differently." And then I wrote these two movies for Peter Yates, the great director, Peter Yates. And he was going to direct them. The first one was House of Games. At the last moment, he said, "I can't do it. Why don't you do it?" So I met this wonderful producer on Places in the Heart called Mike Hausmann. And he said, "Yeah, I'll produce it for you." I said, "Well, I haven't directed a movie before." So shepherded me through the process.

• 49:03Rick Rubin?

  And good experience?

• 49:04Speaker 01

  It's wonderful. It's absolutely wonderful.

• 49:08Rick Rubin?

  What were you doing with Rafelson on the Postman movie?

• 49:13Speaker 01

  I wrote the script for it.

• 49:14Rick Rubin?

  I didn't realize you wrote it.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wrote it. And we were shooting.

• 49:18Rick Rubin?

  Typically, when you write a script and someone else directs it, do they want input from you or do they want you to go away?

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Both. I mean, two mutually exclusive ideas. Rafelson wanted me there. He didn't change anything. He wanted me there. A lot of people have asked me why I want to be there, but I said, "Fuck, no." And for the most part, I don't want to be there. Anybody who's on a set who's not essential is deleterious there. They're dragging it down. You've got to be essential. So when I give the people a script, I'm saying, "As far as I know, this is as good as it can be. If you shoot this, you paid me and you have my word on it, you're going to go up with a pretty good movie." Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so. But I got really sick of people taking my, both as a playwright and as a film director, people taking my work in misunderstanding. It's pretty fucking simple.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  You know, show up, say the words.

• 50:14Rick Rubin?

  How has theater changed over the course of your life?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Theater?

• 50:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Well, it's died, but it's always dying, right? I was very fortunate because they changed the...

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Fire laws in Chicago and because none of us had anything better to do. Or could we imagine anything better to do than putting on the plays? And so there we were like nineteen, twenty, twenty three years old. All of us recognized, although we never said it, that that was the best theater happening in the English speaking world that night. We're having the time of our life. And it spawned the whole Chicago theatrical experience of Steppenwolf and Saint Nicholas and the organic theater and Victory Gardens and Remains. The whole generation of people coming up. And then what happened, of course, is that things die because they're unsuccessful and things die because they're successful.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  So the neighborhoods became gentrified and went away. And the actors and directors and writers that became successful became gentrified and ran away. And then New York became gentrified and went away because New York was the clearinghouse for American theater because it had an audience. The audience was mainly middle class and largely Jewish. And they knew what they would do and they patronized the theater. So when those people got priced out of existence, Broadway still existed, but who was going to come? Tourists. So because tourists are going to come,

• 51:54Speaker 01

  you're appealing to a very different clientele. So you have to get something that's going to attract them. You aren't going to say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that guy did the designs last year for a fellow. I'm going to go see him because he's designing. There's a Strada this year. So you had to put stars in, so the prices went up. And so the advertising budgets go up and so, okay. You know, it's like being the best boatman on the Erie Canal.

• 52:23Rick Rubin?

  Do you think in the good days in Chicago in the theater, the fact that there were maybe not high expectations was helpful in it being good?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  No.

• 52:36Rick Rubin?

  What do you think allowed it to be as good as it was?

• 52:40Speaker 01

  We were on fire. What allowed the Beatles to be as good as they were, right? Yeah. Was it the humidity in the cellar? No, they're just fucking on fire. They got lucky, they found each other. They'd all been gifted by God, a little bit of symbiosis. Tell me about your Kennedy assassination film project. Oh, I wrote this great Kennedy assassination film that I put every, I was gonna direct it and put everybody in, everybody was in that film. Malkovich was in it, Shia LaBeouf was gonna play Oswald, Al was in it. It was a dramatic film. Oh, yeah. So who else was in it? Viggo Mortensen was in it.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  John Travolta was in it. The cast just wanted forever, they all read the script and said, yeah, you bet. Courtney Love was in it, Rebecca Pidge was in it, everybody was in it. Louis CK was gonna do a part at one point. And then these guys came out of nowhere, they had a better idea than making a movie, they thought they'd just sue each other.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  I don't understand. Neither do I.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Is there a chance it will happen in the future? I don't know. But it started out because Joey Montegna called, he said, there's this kid, he grew up with, called Nicky Solozzi, who was a part of the Giancana crime family, I think Giancana was his uncle in Chicago. And Nicky wrote this script about what was happening in Chicago when Ocado and Giancana decided to kill Kennedy. So I read the script, I said, yeah, okay. It was actually terrific. So I got together with Nicky and I said, yeah, this is terrific. I said, I'm gonna have to rewrite it. If you wanna do that, you know, we'll split everything, blah, blah, down the middle. He said, sure. So I wrote the script and then I gave it to all my friends and they said, you bet. They said, I'll be in, do it for nothing.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  These great cinematographers and designers, they all get in, do it for nothing. And then, um...

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 54:43Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the Zapruder film.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  I read this book. It was a compilation of articles by film historians, by cinematographers. And each one takes, looks at the Zapruder film. And, you know, I spent a lot of time in the cutting room and so forth, and I'm reading what they're saying. They say, yeah, there's stuff missing. It's just missing. The film disappeared. They took it and they shipped it from Dallas, where there was a Kodak facility, to LA. And then they shipped it back. And then I wrote a, wrote a wonderful movie for Cate Blanchett. She was gonna do For Nothing, about the Zapruder film. And that fell apart too, unfortunately. Oh, that's a good movie.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  It's about the guy, basically this guy called Slavko Vorkapitch, who did all of the montage and process shots in movies, the trick shots.

• 55:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  That used to have to be done either in a camera or the lab. And he dies and he leaves his money to this woman, his granddaughter, who comes to the great house in Pasadena, finds out that he doesn't own the house. He has no money. He's getting $10,000 a month from some corporation. So the question is, why did they pay him? And it turns out that he was the guy who fixed up the Zapruder film.

• 56:05Rick Rubin?

  Why a book of essays now?

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Because I was going crazy for, you know, I did, this is my third book. This book, third book of kind of political socio-ruinations. First one was called The Secret Knowledge. The second was called Recessional. And this was the third one. Because, you know, I'm getting old and I don't know if I'm retired or not, but the businesses changed. It's more difficult to get stuff made because the people with whom I came up, who was a generation older than I, and now are a generation the same as I, and now are a generation younger than I. And so the reaction is, who? That's completely understandable. So I was looking around, I had too much time in my head. So there's something I just, I don't understand. What's happening to our society?

• 56:53Speaker 01

  So the answer is, of course, it's in the Bible. It's what's always happening to our society. Right? Good is fighting evil and good intentions are fighting concerns for personal security and safety. And the people are turning back on God and they're screaming at each other and shooting each other and...

• 57:10Rick Rubin?

  In the new book, you compare yourself to Vanna White. Can you explain?

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Oh, Vanna White, of course. Because Vanna White would come out and she'd gesture like this at the refrigerator. That was her job, right? And so she did it for years and years and years. I thought, well, yeah, that's basically what I'm doing. I'm gesturing at the refrigerator and saying, that's a refrigerator. So that's what the essays are about.

• 57:39Rick Rubin?

  You wrote that democracy is an outgrowth of the Torah.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Well, sure. The whole idea of the Torah is they came to, I think, Hillow, the great sage. And they said, can you tell me the whole Torah standing on one foot? He said, yeah, I stood on one foot. He said, what's hateful to you don't do to your neighbor. Now go study. So the Torah really comes down to that. And one of the differences between Judaism and our cousins, the Christians, is in the understanding of the golden rule. The Christians say, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But to the Jews, that's a foreign and incorrect statement. Because what they would say is, I'm not going to do unto you as you would do unto me. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  No, I'm going to turn it around. I'm going to not do to you what I want you to not do to me.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Because that's more provocative, right? I mean, who knows? I might be screwed up. I might want you to do this to me. That's not a very good idea. But I certainly know what I don't want you to do to me. But, right? I don't want you to malign me, hit me, sue me, lie to me, those things. I'm not going to do that.

• 58:56Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the power of myth.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Well, it's all myth, right? Isn't it? I mean, everybody believes in the myth. Part of what happened in the last election is people say, let's call a myth a myth. Right? That we shouldn't be jailed for suggesting that something may not be an actual fact, but a myth. That we should be able to differentiate between the two and make up our own minds about which is which. So you say, oh, you can't believe in Jesus. That's a myth, right? Or you can't believe in the fact that the Jewish people have always lived in. That's a myth. But on the other hand, you say, well, we need to apologize to the Mogwampe Indians because we're on their line. That's not a myth. That's a fact. And if you say that's a myth... You're evil.

• 59:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 59:43Rick Rubin?

  You compare government to the mafia in the new book. Can you tell me more about that?

• 59:47Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, growing up in a machine town, which was basically, you know, mafia town. The Ocados and Jean Cas were in line with the Dems and with the Daily Machine and all that. But you say, what does the mafia say? Well, guess what? You have to pay me protection. If you don't, we're gonna kill you, the mafia says. And the government says, oh, we're gonna throw you in jail. Now, guess what? You have to buy our products, the mafia says. You have to buy our light bulbs and you have to buy our electric cars and you have to buy our showerheads. Oh, you don't like that? Oh, you're gonna go to jail. Guess what? We're gonna tell you who you can hire, the mafia says. You're gonna hire my cousin Vinnie over there.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  You're gonna pay him too much money, or else we're gonna blow up your dry cleaning establishment. Well, how is that different from affirmative action? Oh, guess what they say? You're gonna give me all your savings. I'm gonna invest it for you, and it's probably not gonna be there when you get back. What are you gonna do about it? Right? So, the Constitution, and starting with the Declaration, is to protect us against government being oppressive. It's not to do good, it's not to elect people to do good. The difference is, the mafia doesn't say, I'm gonna do good. They just say, do it, I'm gonna break your kneecaps.

• 1:01:04Rick Rubin?

  So, they're similar, except the mafia might be more honest?

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Well, yes, they're less hypocritical, certainly. Do it or else. What part of bang, bang, don't you understand?

• 1:01:15Rick Rubin?

  How much do you trust historical accounts?

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  That's a very good question. I guess I don't trust them very much at all. And I tried to read a lot of them. But if you say, where's the information coming from? There were several really good books written about the South and the beginnings of the Civil War at that time. So, I really enjoyed reading them. And one of them was Frederick Olmsted, who designed Central Park, was a great designer, and a building designer, and invented the Red Cross, did all sorts of things. And he wrote a book called A Journey Through the Southern Slave States in 1855. And what I realized from that was, what people are missing in Uncle Tom's Cabin is that the real evil...

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  It's not Simon Legree, right? It's the people who said, "Well, what are you gonna do?" You know, "Yes, these are my slaves, but I treat them better." So that the horror in Frederick Olmsted's account and the horror in Uncle Tom's Cabin is the way the good people treat their still slaves. Right? The guy says to Uncle Tom at the beginning, "You know, you've worked for me your whole life. I'm gonna free you when I die," which is already, if you think about it, bullshit. Right? People say, "Washington Jefferson freed the slaves when they died." What's good about that? They wrang them dry and said, "Well, I have no use for you. Fuck it, off you go." So the guy runs into difficulties. He says, "Tom, you know, you're such a great guy. You basically raised my children, dah, dah, dah.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  But what can I do? I'm gonna have to sell you down the river. What can I do?" So that's...

• 1:02:56Rick Rubin?

  Oh, that expression, "Sell you down the river." I never made the connection.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you...

• 1:03:00Rick Rubin?

  That's what "sell you down the river" means.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the seven-minute rule.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Ricky studied for years and years with two guys. He came out here, spent a week with a guy called Di Vannan in the seventies, who was the greatest stage magician of his day, and with a guy called Charlie Miller, who was a mechanic, which is to say he was a cheat at the card table. They're the two greatest card manipulators in history. And so Ricky studied with him for years and years and years and took care of him till he died. And Ricky was going up to the Magic Castle one day to meet Di, and he was late. And he comes up and his di is in the parking lot. And he says, "Di, I'm so sorry I'm late. I'm so sorry." And Di says, "That's okay. I've been watching the way people put on their coats." Right?

• 1:03:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  So watching the way people behave is fascinating. I was talking to my wife yesterday. I went to this restaurant. I said, "You know what?" I said... If you take two women who are available, right? They aren't hooked up with anybody at this point in time. If they're out having lunch, they gesture more than people who are attached. And she said, oh, that's true unconsciously. Did you just notice that? I noticed that I just noticed that I noticed it. In that moment, you noticed it? I noticed that I'd always noticed it. Oh, you always noticed it. I wasn't conscious of it. Like, I did this movie with Shia, and he's talking, it's coming out called Henry Johnson, right? It's coming out. And he's talking to the kid, and he says, well, he says, a woman, you're looking down the street.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  A woman looks away like that. Why does she do that? I says, I don't know. So she can get your attention. The movement catches your attention, right? Right? A woman puts her hair back adjusted. She doesn't see she's raising her breast. They do it unconsciously. But I realized that all people are reacting unconsciously to each other. They're completely unconscious of it. Like, if you look at guys walking down the street, you know, if you think you're more of an alpha male than they, a lot of them, they'll lower their eyes. Interesting. So I noticed that the question is, why is a scene seven to 10 minutes long?

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  And the answer is that unconsciously, we humans are programmed to check for danger at certain times. And that we make a little check at every seven minutes, which is the length of a show when they had commercials, seven minutes, boom. Kind of the length of a scene, length of a comedy sketch, length of a vaudeville sketch. And if you put three of them together, you make a much larger look at 20 minutes after the hour and then at 20 minutes to the hour. And the French say, un ange passe, an angel passes. At 20 minutes after the hour and 20 minutes before the hour. What does that mean?

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  The silence descends because people are looking around. And if you go into a theater, most plays go up about seven minutes after the hour, and the audience quiets down unconsciously. They aren't looking at the watch as they're talking. But at seven minutes after the hour, they quiet down. So that's the seven-minute rule. So I was wondering about that because I was wondering about the springbok. The spring buck is in a book. The spring buck is an African large goat, like a cross between a goat and a giraffe. An antelope, it's an antelope. And they spring up in the air and look around. They spring up in the air and look around, spring up. Like on their hind legs? They jump, they go right up in the air. And they're in flat lands. So they go up in the air to check about what's happening.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  They're in a big herd, they need to check about what's happening. So I said, now we know why the spring buck hops, right? But I started saying, when does it hop? When does it hop? So I said, well, obviously, there are springboks that have built in this internal engine, right? And the ones that hit the number correctly are gonna breed. And the ones that don't hit the number correctly are gonna become poof the lion. So that becomes over time inbred. Do you think the seven-minute rule applies to everything? I don't know, maybe. It might. Yeah. It might. Tell me about carnival barkers. Carnival barkers?

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Well, Ricky was a carnival barker. Was he? Yeah. I loved carnivals. When I was a kid in Chicago, there's this place called Riverview, which was an old carnival, which became this huge amusement park. It was just filthy and full of all sorts of freaks. And they had all these carnival barkers. And the barkers, you would say, like, they're on the inside, folks, they're on the inside. See the world's living hermaphrodite. Adam and Eve, brother and sister, man and wife, in one single body exhibited not to be rude or vulgar. No, no, no, but to show you one of nature's curious mistakes. See the electrode lady. The electrode lady from Johannesburg, South Attica,

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  she and her sister struck by 20,000 volts of electricity. Her sister died, and she lived. The doctor said she lived because she was immune to the shock of electricity.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Great. Ricky used to do that as part of the show that I directed. So the carnival part, that appointment is to get you inside. Right? Gets you inside to show you the marvels that were inside.

• 1:08:37Rick Rubin?

  Is there any equivalent to the midway today?

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's a good question. Might be. I grew up on, there's this space just south of, basically, Chicago. In Hyde Park, there's this long, long park, which was the midway for the Columbian Exposition of 1893. And it's still there. And this is still referred to as the midway. No, people don't realize that's

• 1:09:01Rick Rubin?

  That's why.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Goes back to the Columbian Exposition.

• 1:09:05Rick Rubin?

  What's Signal 25?

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  Signal 25 is, people know that the old Carneys chant was, "Hey, Rube", which was, the Carneys would shout if the cops showed up or if the locals were turning on them, they would shout, "Hey, Rube", but that, like most jargon, by the time that became widely known, it was superseded by Signal 25. But by the time we figure out that was superseded by Signal 25, Signal 25 has been superseded by something else.

• 1:09:37Rick Rubin?

  What do you believe that most people don't believe?

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  I believe in the devil.

• 1:09:44Rick Rubin?

  What do you believe today that he didn't believe when you were young?

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  I don't believe that most people, including me, are good at heart.

• 1:09:54Rick Rubin?

  And you thought that when you were young?

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  Sure. I was a red diaper baby.

• 1:09:59Rick Rubin?

  Was there an event that changed that opinion or just the wisdom of time?

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  You live long enough and you get out of the bubble, you're gonna see a few things. You know, Rebecca West said, "Nobody of a mature age, looking around, ever did not say, 'Certainly, the world is so evil that it must end soon.'" So, there you are.

• 1:10:23Rick Rubin?

  You mentioned the 12-step program several times in the book.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:27Rick Rubin?

  What's your relationship to AA?

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  My grandpa used to say it's the only great modern religion. One of the wonderful things about it is that there's no infrastructure.

• 1:10:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Tell me about God.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Well, we don't know about God. I mean, that's part of the definition of God. Right? That there is a reason that we're here. And my wife's father is a renowned physicist, and we talk a lot. And he's a complete agnostic, right? We get back to the Big Bang. Where did that come from? Well, we don't know. Well, okay.

• 1:11:05Rick Rubin?

  I heard it described as the first miracle.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  And if you look at the ancient wisdom in the Torah, I mean, obviously, it's Jewish wisdom, but a lot of it goes back before that. I mean, sure, it comes from the Sumerians, and who knows where it comes from before then. Because people intuited the growth of life on Earth from the sea, right, to the crawling creatures, to the mammals, to man. And they also intuited or observed the growth from the family to the state to despotism. And they also intuited the growth of technology to the point where it overrides devotion to God and kills us, called the Tower of Babel. So it's extraordinary. It's all, it's all in the Torah. It's all there.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  This is ancient, ancient wisdom that people said, oh, wait a second. Ain't that funny? Let me figure this out.

• 1:12:01Rick Rubin?

  Would it be helpful for everyone to study the Bible?

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  No, it'd be helpful people to study Bible if they want to study Bible.

• 1:12:10Rick Rubin?

  Are you always writing?

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  I think I unfortunately am, you know, I, I just finished a movie, and I just finished this a couple of books, and I got a couple of books more I gotta finish. And I'm sure my, my last thought, whenever that's gonna be, is, well, wait, I'm not done yet. But someone else is gonna be in charge of that.

• 1:12:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:31Rick Rubin?

  From the idea to the execution of a project, does it typically happen quickly, or might it take a long time?

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Takes as long as it takes. You know, some plays I worked on for many years, batting my head against the walls, I couldn't figure it out. Some plays I wrote quickly. But I think of the Plains Indians had a dance called the Buffalo Dance that ensured that we turned on the buffalo. And it never failed. Every year when the buffalo was supposed to return, they did the buffalo dance. And the reason it didn't fail is if the buffalo didn't show up that year, they kept doing the fucking buffalo dance until the buffalo came back. So that's why I'm gonna think of myself. I'm gonna do the buffalo dance until the buffalo comes back.

• 1:13:19Rick Rubin?

  Are there any things that you have a notion to write, but for whatever reason you don't bring yourself to do it?

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:13:29Rick Rubin?

  You follow up on all of the inspiration? Is inspiration the right word?

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  I think so. I mean, what do I know? The whole thing is a mystery to me.

• 1:13:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  Sandy Koufax wrote some pamphlets explaining how to throw a fastball over a hundred miles an hour. Right? You should take a look at that if you haven't seen him. And he has all sorts of diagrams and angles and that, okay? So it makes sense to him, right?

• 1:13:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. In story structure, is there any benefit to randomness?

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  I always thought of randomness was like, you go to a mentalist, right? You go to a psychic. There's one thing that they'll always say. You know what it is? They'll always say, you know, you have psychic powers too. You've felt that, haven't you? Right? So a lot of people think they have a book in them or a movie in them or a poem in them because they understand you can take random thoughts and put them together and they sound a little bit different than human speech. So perhaps they're poetry. But that's not what I do for a living.

• 1:14:43Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about campfire songs.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Oh, I love campfire songs. Yeah. Yeah. We loved, we loved singing them songs. And I've been writing a lot of songs lately. I write a lot of them with my wife and she does the music and a lot of my...

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  I love writing songs. And one of the songs I wrote was, I was thinking about Frankie and Johnny, which was a campfire song.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  I'm thinking, okay, that doesn't make any sense. Why is it Frankie and Johnny? Because a lot of these songs that we that become part of our consciousness are adopted from the pornographic. For example, people saying it's a long way to Tipperary, right? What they really sang was that's the wrong way to tickle Mary. Right? And the people say John Brown's body, Liza Muldering. But what they really sang was John Brown's body. It's a 14 inch long dick. Right? And so I was thinking about Frankie and Johnny and I said, well, obviously the lesbians. Right? So I rewrote that whole thing of Frankie and Johnny.

• 1:15:51Rick Rubin?

  Are those stories apocryphal or are those?

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  No, those are, that's all true.

• 1:15:55Rick Rubin?

  Those are true?

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like bless them all, bless them all. It was of course fuck them all, fuck them all.

• 1:16:01Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03Rick Rubin?

  Is there any part of the system that isn't corrupt?

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Is there any, well, is there any human action which isn't corrupt? You know, they used to say in Vermont, only two things money can't buy is true love and homegrown tomatoes. We're corrupt. I am and you are because our mind is corrupt. Duh. It says that in the Bible, it's the beginning. What's the snake doing there?

• 1:16:29Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the limits of language. How close can you get to saying what you really are experiencing? Or is that not important?

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  I don't know, but I was struck by what you said about if even if someone's wrong, that's information. Right? So that's how I feel about me. Like, I don't know, I'm really fucking feeling, I know what I'm writing.

• 1:16:52Rick Rubin?

  No one knows, no one knows anything.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  Well, as somebody said, how do I know what I think till I've heard what I say?

• 1:16:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. What is zero point?

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Well, the zero point is something that one of the Russian film theorists, I think Podovka, said. There's some point where, if you have a three-act structure, where the action has to stop. Between act one and act two, and act two and act three, the hero runs out of ideas. That's the zero point. Right? Prior to that, everything in the first act is one scene leading to a second scene, which leads to a third scene. It all makes sense until they finally run out of ideas. So where's the new thing gonna come from? Because you're between the inhalations and the exhalations of the Buddha. Something has got to emerge, which changes the direction that the hero takes. So that's the zero point.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  So it's a very, very helpful concept. Because both the hero and the writer have to be out of ideas.

• 1:17:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  Right? Because if you know what happens already, once in a while, you... so does the audience.

• 1:17:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Do you think about that when you're writing, or no?

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:03Rick Rubin?

  You do?

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:18:04Rick Rubin?

  You focus on the structure?

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it's all I focus on.

• 1:18:09Rick Rubin?

  Do you ever write where the first draft is too long?

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:18:13Rick Rubin?

  You do?

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I rewrite constantly. Because, you know, every time you write it, you say, "That's great." Come back tomorrow, you say, "That's garbage." And eventually, eventually, eventually, get to something else. You say, "Okay, now I understand what the project wanted to tell me." Now I've gotten away from my preconceptions.

• 1:18:31Rick Rubin?

  You start with preconceptions, and then the project reveals itself?

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like this, you know? I can play anything in the world in the key of F, right? I don't give a shit, right? The Star Spangled Banner, or, you know, or the Mendelssohn E-flat. But my fingers are always gonna go to where they know the best way to play in the key of F is, right? If I gotta play an F-sharp, I gotta rethink everything to break past the obvious.

• 1:19:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Because my mind is gonna go to the obvious.

• 1:19:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  So that's what we do.

• 1:19:07Rick Rubin?

  How did the Merchant Marines change you?

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  Oh, I was just in for a summer. But I thought it was wonderful, because, you know, got to look at a different part of the world that you don't get to see.

• 1:19:17Rick Rubin?

  And what was it like? What did you take away from it?

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Well, I loved it, you know, and... One of the wonderful things was coming back into Chicago, down through the Sault Ste. Marie. When you're looking at Chicago... Chicago is very beautiful. The lakefront is very beautiful. And you're going from Chicago to East Chicago, Indiana. It's very, very beautiful. And you put on your go on a shore clothes. But by the time you walk one mile to the gate of inland steel, you're stone black, covered in soot and.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  But I met some interesting people there.

• 1:19:54Rick Rubin?

  Tell me what you remember about Glenn Gary Glenn Ross from the original Inception.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  I was working in a, in a phone room selling land over the telephone. And at some point, I started writing about it. I was at a, at a restaurant and I was listening to somebody at the next booth. I couldn't see who they were. They were talking. I couldn't make up what they're talking about. I thought, wow, that's fascinating. So I wrote one scene about that, then another one, another one. And so then the whole thing, I said, okay, now how do all these things come together now? But what I loved was the whole idea. And people don't recognize because, and it's being played so well, that they're being asked to participate in a vocabulary and an organization that they can only understand by listening harder.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  The opposite is, well, here we are in a laundromat, right?

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  So that was Glenn Gary Glenn Ross. We did it in Chicago, which was wonderful. Greg Mosher directed it. And with the exception of Robert Prosky, no one knew who any of those people were. We went to New York and I just kicked everybody's tushy.

• 1:21:03Rick Rubin?

  How did winning the Pulitzer Prize change your life?

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  You know, it was pretty great. It's the, the American equivalent of being knighted. So it's, it's a nice thing to have. Sure, why not?

• 1:21:14Rick Rubin?

  How do you say you learned your craft?

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  The only way you can learn playwriting is through an audience. Anything else is a waste of time because you can't fool the audience. Billy Wilder said, you know, individually, they're idiots. Collectively, they're genius.

• 1:21:30Rick Rubin?

  Oh, that's great. I never heard that.

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've never met a dumb audience. They get it.

• 1:21:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  They paid, they showed up, they get it. They've suspended their disbelief.

• 1:21:40Rick Rubin?

  You always assume they understand what's going on. You never lower the idea for them to get it.

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  Why would I do that? They're gonna get it.

• 1:21:48Rick Rubin?

  So much of what we see is done that way.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:21:51Rick Rubin?

  Lowest common denominator.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's done by idiots who imagine somebody dumber than themselves. But if they imagine that, there is nobody dumber than themselves.

• 1:22:00Rick Rubin?

  That's great. The verdict, you wrote the script, but it was based on a different story. Yes, the story existed?

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  It was based on a book.

• 1:22:07Rick Rubin?

  A book?

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  The guy who was the lawyer for the woman that wrote a book, and I wrote the script.

• 1:22:12Rick Rubin?

  How is that process different? Writing a script based on a book instead of starting from scratch?

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  Well, it's different because you have to throw so much out. Because people don't know how to read scripts. Who should they? Right? Even most people in the movie business don't think they even do read scripts. They read coverage. So if they say, "He came into the room, and you knew immediately he was a doctor because he had that look in his eye." Although you might deny your immediate impressions because of the incredibly expensive gold Rolex watch on as well. How you wondered, could he put these two things together? They love that shit, right?

• 1:22:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  But you can't, how do you film that? It doesn't make any difference. So if you take a book, the first thing you have to do is eviscerate it. You have to say, what is the actual story? So if I say to you, "You read that book, what's the story?" You say, "Oh, this guy, you know, he, he found a million dollars in the thing, and his son stole it from it." Okay, now I can write that story. You don't say, "Well..." You really have to understand the town in which he grew up. Right? "We're gonna start with the description of his parents and how they came to fuck Phil in 1902, and how he grew up in a dysfunctional family, but yet, one day, he married the rich woman who get..." Say, "What's the story? What's happening? What's the story?" So we know this because if we say, "Oh, I saw a movie last night." I say, "What's it about?

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  You tell me the story."

• 1:23:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  If you start saying it as great visuals, it means it's a cock of poop.

• 1:23:45Rick Rubin?

  Have you ever seen a great movie that didn't have a great story?

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  I don't think so, no. Here's something I realized. All of us know when the scene we're about to see is pointless. How do we know? We get up to pee.

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  Why do we get up to pee then? If the thing keeps our attention, we don't get up to pee. We know from the first second that nothing's gonna happen. Yeah. So audiences are super, super smart. How do you think your plays differ from the plays that came before you? Milton Friedman says that culture is an absolute inheritance, that the way that we deliver the milk or install the plumbing or train the military is an absolute inheritance, that we're building on what others have done, and the same thing is true in the theater. So I'm building on what others have done, the very fact that the theater exists.

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  And as I say, I got certain inspirations, and also I have certain bad examples. I looked at, for example, the plays of Eugene O'Neill, and I saw the only thing wrong with them is anyone who ever left wanted to kill themselves. You know? So you could learn by rejecting things from the past? Sure, so and I still do it today, and I do it all the time. I'm looking at a movie, so wait a second, why does this not work, or why does this work? Or how would I fix this to make this better? And I used to do that with Shell all the time. We'd say, yeah, I heard this joke, but it doesn't quite work, or blah, blah, blah. Or there's this song lyric that blah, blah wrote, how do we fix it? The idea being that these entities exist in a metaphysical world,

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  independent of their perception, and that we can say, okay, I gotta tweak it a little bit. My wife, for example, her mother's a very famous yoga instructor. My wife grew up doing yoga, she does a lot of yoga every day, and so Yengar yoga, and so what she learned from her mother, you do yoga? I've done it. Okay, so what she learned from her mother, and what she tries to teach me, you know, lummox that I have, is move the hip a quarter of an inch here. Right? Okay, lower your shoulders a quarter of an inch there. Oh, now it begins to make sense.

• 1:26:08Rick Rubin?

  You keep a diary?

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  I probably do. You know, I have my little work book, you know, and I got sixty years of them. And I used to write like a ten, fifteen page scene every day and write movies. And then I also write, oh, why was I born? Why have you deserted me, oh, God, after everything I've done for you, all that kind of stuff. Dear diary, I wonder if Jim really likes me, you know?

• 1:26:37Rick Rubin?

  Do you ever look back at them?

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:26:40Rick Rubin?

  Is the purpose of it, by writing it, you get to release it from your head?

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  Maybe, yeah.

• 1:26:47Rick Rubin?

  There's gotta be some reason if you don't look back to do it.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  I know. I don't know what it is. I guess it's, I remember I'm done with something. Because it was just in my stupid head. But my hands are all shot, so it's very hard for me to type and hold it. So I just complain.

• 1:27:02Rick Rubin?

  Do you still play piano?

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I play piano every day, yeah.

• 1:27:06Rick Rubin?

  Great. How's your relationship to writing changed over the course of your life?

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  Has it?

• 1:27:12Rick Rubin?

  Same?

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:14Rick Rubin?

  How were you most misunderstood?

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  I don't know. My wife said to me the other day, she says, you know, Dave, I think you really don't care about what other people think of you. I said, well, that may be true, maybe true. I'd rather be liked than not liked. What the hell? You know, they're as fucked up as I am.

• 1:27:34Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember your dreams?

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  I remember them until I forget them, yes.

• 1:27:40Rick Rubin?

  Do you ever write them down?

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  No, no. Well, one of the things I learned from dreams and from reading Freud is mainly full of shit. He said he understood the meaning of the interpretation of dreams. Well, he's about five hundred thousand years too late. But one of the things I remember about my dreams that helps in the writing is it's always the overlooked something that doesn't belong that's going to be the key to understanding of the dream, the drama. What have I left? What have I forgotten? Why did I write there was a dog in scene two and I never came back to the dog? Either the dog is wrong and that place doesn't belong, or it needs to pay off over here.

• 1:28:24Rick Rubin?

  Does it always have to make sense, what you're writing?

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:28:28Rick Rubin?

  But in life, things don't always make sense.

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I'm not doing life. I don't know nothing about life.

• 1:28:35Rick Rubin?

  Does a story start at the beginning and work its way to the end? Or might you start with something and you realize, oh, this is really the ending?

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, of course.

• 1:28:43Rick Rubin?

  It could happen anyway.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could happen anyway at all. So the idea is, what do I got? Where does it belong? And sometimes it sits in a drawer for 20 years. And sometimes I'm not going to get up until I finish it. Sure.

• 1:28:55Rick Rubin?

  How does a theater company work?

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  Well, the theater company, in its perfect form, you have to be young, right? Because people need to be devoted to the company more than to their families and more than to their other careers. So these companies in which I grew up with were the only really legitimate socialist enterprises that I've ever experienced. Everyone says, "Our devotion is to the company. We're going to make money and support the company. If I write it, you're going to act in it. If you write it, I'm going to act in it. If someone needs to build a set, you got to do it because I'm taking the tickets." Marvelous. The nice thing about it, as opposed to a commune, was Daddy was never paying for it.

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  Everybody was completely mature and devoted member of a group.

• 1:29:45Rick Rubin?

  What do you think drew you to the theater in the first place?

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  The girls, certainly, and the fun. Also, you know, people used to say, "There is nobody likes a smart aleck. Nobody likes a smart ass." And that's the first thing that I knew from the grownups said that wasn't true.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  Because I liked smart alecks. I liked being a smart aleck. So you get to go on stage and be a smart aleck and entertain the people. How great.

• 1:30:12Rick Rubin?

  Did you go to the movies a lot when you were a kid?

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  Oh, all the time, yeah.

• 1:30:15Rick Rubin?

  What were things that you remember, favorite movies?

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  You were very fortunate in Chicago because on Skid Row, on Clark Street, there was a theater called the Clark Theater. And it was thongs and derelicts and homeless. And it was open 24 hours a day. And they changed the double bill every day. And the guy who ran it was a cineophile. He was a genius.

• 1:30:38Rick Rubin?

  Every day?

• 1:30:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:40Rick Rubin?

  That's amazing.

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  Double bill every day. So we'd say, now we're gonna have a week of Jimmy Cagney.

• 1:30:44Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  We're now gonna have a week in which titles were done by Saul Bass.

• 1:30:49Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  Right? Well, now we're gonna have a week in which Saul Polito did the cinematography.

• 1:30:54Rick Rubin?

  That's your whole education.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  Oh, man. So we all used to go all the time in high school. You couldn't sleep in the middle of the night. You just go down and watch the movie.

• 1:31:00Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  It's magnificent.

• 1:31:02Rick Rubin?

  Great. Any other experiences you can think of like that, that you were lucky to experience?

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  Sure. Oh, my movie House of Games premiered in Chicago around the corner from there at the Fine Arts Theater. And I was up watching it in the projection room. And the guy said, yeah, this is an arc light projector, or actually it's flame going through two blacks of light. What the fuck it is. It's the last one in America.

• 1:31:28Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  And it gave such a magnificent projector. So if you go and look at restorations of black and white films, for example, they did stagecoach at the Arrow, and it was completely restored. And you realize what all that, what black and white was really about. And what it was about was the blacks. Because they had this nitrate stock, silver nitrate, it was silver, that eventually it all just blew up or disintegrated. Actually, I'm premiering my new movie at the Arrow. Do you know about that?

• 1:31:59Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  Oh, I did this movie with Adam Jonak and Shia LaBeouf. And we did it as a play in Venice, then I shot it as a film called Henry Johnson. And premieres at the Arrow Theater on the ninth of May.

• 1:32:14Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  And it's really good. And I think you know, one can also get it online, Henry Johnson, the film, something like that.

• 1:32:20Rick Rubin?

  Taking something that starts as a play, how do you reset it in a film? Or do you just shoot the play?

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  No, you don't just shoot the play. You gotta say, okay, let me start from zero. All I got is what the people say. What are the people doing? Because if I shoot it correctly, you can turn off the sound. Like with any movie, if it's a good movie, you don't need to hear what they say. Right?

• 1:32:42Rick Rubin?

  That goes against everything you've said up until this point.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, no, the words are important in the theater. The words are much less important in the movies.

• 1:32:51Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  Sure, it's about pictures. It's about pictures. Think about it, you know, guy shows up on stage, he says, Jesus Christ, you know, I would do anything for a cigarette, you know, yeah, the, the, the, the, the speech can go on forever, right? Guy shows up in a movie, he gets a pack of cigarettes, finds it's empty, right? Which is more effective in the film?

• 1:33:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, opening the drawers, looking for the match when realize there are no matches left in the matchbook.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you think about it, if you start thinking in images.

• 1:33:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  There's nothing left to think. He tears it up, right? He sees a half a cigarette there, but like, oh, well, he takes it out. And now he doesn't have a match. He opens up the drawer, he's looking for the matches, and he sees a little, a little box over there. And he, he takes the box. What are we all wondering?

• 1:33:46Rick Rubin?

  What's in the box?

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is right, actually, out of The Last Tycoon by, uh, that's how he describes movies, man. He's absolutely right.

• 1:33:56Rick Rubin?

  Is it harder to take something from words to pictures, or to take something from pictures to words?

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  It's all harder, except when it's easier. And somebody said, it might have been Curtis LeMay, he said, "Everything in war is simple, but everything that's simple is hard."

• 1:34:20Rick Rubin?

  It's great.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:59Speaker 02

  Do you know about the connection between Charlie Manson and MKUltra? The US government's mind-control operation? What if everything you thought you knew about the Manson murders was wrong? Join Ayesha Akambi for a once-in-a-lifetime in-depth conversation with Tom O'Neill, author of the runaway bestseller Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. In this limited deep-dive series, Tom O'Neill unpacks his 20-year investigation into the CIA's mind-control program, linking it to Charles Manson, and the disturbing secrets buried in America's history.

• 1:35:40Speaker 02

  From missing FBI files to Hollywood cover-ups, government surveillance, LSD, and the dark collapse of the 60s hippie dream. This is the story behind the story. It's not true crime, it's true chaos. Hear it on Athenium, the new podcast on the Tetragrammaton Podcast Network, available wherever you get your podcasts. Truth isn't just stranger than fiction, it's far more dangerous.

• 1:36:12Speaker 03

  Coming soon on the Athenium Podcast.