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hello this is the podcast that explores aspects assigned an image based cultural production and their wider implications I'm the host and creator Paul the pliers as this is episode thirty one and it's being released on the thirty first of October I thought I'd do a Halloween spectacular focusing on the story behind one of the most iconic faces of fright building on the last episode on the little stranger that went into the paranormal and adaptation this time but go back to where it all began with Mary Shelley's eighteen eighteen novel Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus and its impact on film and visual culture via theatre mainly focusing on the nineteen thirty one universal pictures classic Frankenstein is a story about a budding scientist who is consumed with the notion of creating life in nontraditional ways and in doing so brings but mass destruction Victor Frankenstein is the ultimate dead beat dads he abandons the creature he toiled so hard to create art of the detritus of tasks deeming the creature as a grotesque abomination Frankenstein refuses to face his responsibility for bringing it into the world the creatures monstrous behavior is incited by continual for Hammond to rejection in response to his gruesome appearance in physicality has life is so miserable that he fights to destroy his creator by killing his loved ones and wearing him dying over an arduous GS merry called when was a young woman of nineteen when she first conceived the story during the summer teen sixteen around that time she experienced various family debts including of her half sister funny and her first child with her lover Percy by Shelley whom she married later that year after his wife took her own life Frankenstein can be read as a family drama centering on a lack of parental nurture while their prime richer baby was dying Percy Shelley Galavant it with merry stepsister Claire Clairmont history also so involves the failure of communication and mutual support and the death of the gentlest most vulnerable members of a family name in this sense depict can be read as an imaginative re working of the author's left experience that is subjective allegory history originated when merry called when and Percy Shelley spent an unseasonably cold summer in Geneva Switzerland in eighteen sixteen with Claire Clairmont Lord Byron and John Polidori he published the first English language vampire story to from peer based on the TLC hard when traveling in the Balkans stuck indoors the group held a ghost story competition Godwin's ideas apparently developed from conversations about three contemporanea scientific proposals aimed at tackling the problem of violence and violence and being a skill if medical philosophy following the belief that non nothing and today's lack the vital spark or sold possessed by living organisms empirical scientific evidence has since the early nineteenth century superseded such ideas the proposals the group discussed where Rasmus Darwin's hypothesis that single celled parasites generates spontaneously the corpses could be restored using a galvanic battery and the third suggested reconstructing a body to be reanimated these romantics with a capital R. so these ideas as scope for county and lighten and soft tyre Mary Shelley herself engaged in the adaptation process for Frankenstein when she published a revised version in either team's thirty one and which narrative details are changed and some awkward writing and praised literary critic mired in Butler states in the Oxford reprint of the first taxed that the eighteen eighteen version is the more important and serious spec calling it a pioneering work of science fiction Butler also discusses Shelley's own knowledge of the works function %HESITATION position pointing out that in Shelley's preface to the eighteen thirty one reservation she contends quote with many signs that her tax originated and sophisticated satirical conversations which traded the gothic historically as a symptom of the feudal mentality and dusty occasion for a modern critical appropriation above all her action turns on the classically comic motive of the protagonists incompetence on quote Shelley appropriated the scientific thinking of her day and a heart wrenching S. grisly dramas that ultimately sends the message that love and being loved are all that matter in addition to this I college I used to reading by placing different versions of the story within their own contacts we can consider the story of Frankenstein as a malleable allegory reinterpreted both for each new generation and place of production throughout the rest of the nineteenth century there were many theatrical adaptations of the story and the film versions that led to the creatures globally recognizable iconography our doctors from the performance dramas rather than either version of the source taxed the first phone to stem from the east that we know of was made by Thomas Edison's company and a ride to nineteen ten and such silent era compressions verbal language is lost and fever of tableau depictions alongside the emergence and rice of synchronize signed and sent him out more talkies in the late nineteen twenties the studio systems in Hollywood which has come to dominate the global market by then we're beginning to forge marketable genres many genres and styles of filmmaking developed from the adaptation of existing stories many of which had already been me as has compressed silent one readers and cinemas first two decades from adaptations of what in the early twentieth century may have been considered low or middle priced examples of that gesture and Broadway theater the smaller studios like universal and Warner crafted for example early horror and musicals universal's nineteen thirties creatures features have injured with consistent cycles of updates including the dark universe series currently under way although it seems to have stalled a bit recently while monster movies are perhaps less respectable than hyper I. each in Austin or Shakespeare on film the universal pictures releases of adaptation psych Dracula and Frankenstein both in nineteen thirty one at least percentage pictorial realize Asians of what cinema can show the taxed cannot in the case of life imitating art a decade after the novel's initial publication Kim the park and hair martyrs and had number of William Burke and William hare work career for a purse or press erection men from Ulster he and eighteen twenty it took to murdering people and selling the bodies to Robert Knox one of the pioneers of anatomical study and teaching and the ticket is on clearer Frankenstein finds his supplies of body parts the nineteen thirty one film directed by James whale fills the blank by showing the nine named Henry Frankenstein played by Colin Clive and his accomplice Fritz played by Dwight Frye he also played around field and Dracula the same year retrieving the body of a hiring to mind and deter Fritz stating the wrong type of pre and from an anatomy lecture auditorium just on that name change and the universal film Victor Frankenstein has been given the first name of Victor's friend and then awful Henry clerical while his name has been transferred to a fiance Alyssa best friend Victor Moritz in the film and a love triangle between them and the less effective March is she is played by Mike Clark perhaps the irony of the connotations of the name are transferred as Henry is triumphant at the end of the film will factor laces site on Elizabeth that Fritz destroys the normal brand and must stand still the abnormal or criminal brain raises the issue of eugenics the belief that better human beings can be produced from selective breeding also notable here is sat Frankenstein senses servant to carry out the theft on his behalf he transfers to crime to human specimen lesser than himself in terms of class education and appearance frets as a hunchback while Henry is present degree of roping he directs frets his criminal activities are mediated by his servant absolving him of direct involvement in criminality it's notable does that Henry also passes on his romantic and familial responsibilities to Victor he never looks after Elisabeth himself Fritz and Henry and body the differences or lack there rose between normal and criminal brands the brands to generate characteristics as Henry picked sent banks a question of the characteristics of his and France's brilliance as they seem to have no ethical or moral compass and no empathy for fellow humans the notion of the line of thought coined as eugenics and the late nineteenth century first emerged with the ancient Greeks Shelley knew her Greek myths adding her fictional scientists about pantheon of gods ironically though Prometheus means for thought that love what Shelley's eponymous doctor has this is likely because the romantics saw Prometheus as a figure he strived so hard for improvements in human life he often over reached with unintended negative consequences Frankenstein mirrors but also sits in tension with the Greek Titans other traits Prometheus created a man from clay and to fight the chords by stealing fire for which she was severely punished he is highly intelligent champions human kind and give them the resources that enabled their progress Frankenstein fancies himself as a modern Prometheus updated in the nineteen thirty one film as Henry saying now I know what it feels like to be called meaning the cost of monotheistic Christianity he created a defined burst but the creation does not here to the plan like humans depicted and religious to acts such as the Christian Bible the creation wants to determine its own life and destiny like the floods the solution to combat its disobedience is to destroy the experiments Henry it's not so much punished for his blasphemy but is taught some humility and convinced of the proper order of things by the end he is absolved and forgiven by his family and Tignes folk even though they suffered because of his hubristic and short sighted vanity projects zero eight Henry claims to be perfectly sane it is his morals the need to be questions the fact that few do you question them under one person Dr Waldman who does is killed and it certainly faia Henry's negligence is troubling given the Frankenstein families high social standing his father is a Baron Henry's ability to get away unpunished on questions and on ski it's with his disregard for the consequences of his actions it's evidently dying to his privilege and social status another example of how I found even when compressing and changing and novels narrative can also redress its emissions occurs in the pivotal scene of the creatures animation and Shelley's tax this scene is sketch basically and vaguely and one short paragraph here is the eighteen eighteen version and which Victor Frankenstein the kind stay experience making it seem like a supernatural phenomenon it was on a jury every night in November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils with an anxiety that almost a mind to tie Kinney I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet it was already one in the morning the rand powdered dismally against the peons and my condo was nearly burned to each plan by the glamour of the half extinguish lights I saw the total yellow hi if the creature opened it breathed hard and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs when the film takes over the role of narrator the V. Jill spectacle is privileged what matters is the audience's reaction and engagement and the wonder and horror erupting into life as a witness and wheels film we also witnessed the emerging trademarks of a franchise and the spectacle of horror that would excite the audience who've been for warned of the spectacular reanimation by the address at the film's opening the framing device such as a actor Edward found Sloan who plays Henry's mentor Dr Waldman onstage cautioning the fears on harder to come is identified as a method of adjustment and adaptation studies and an instance of expansion and a story that has otherwise been compressed and shifted to have big time yet it does in a way reflect the bank's own framing device as a story related by Walton the arctic explorer and letters to his sister understaffed %HESITATION Xing the epistolary narrative presentation the problem stoker waited out for Dracula later in the nineteenth century a film like Frankenstein can be considered as a hybrid adaptation and that it departs from the original but remains treatise on authorized later versions the animation scene became so pivotal and theatrical and cinematic treatments of the story because it bears the most potential for drama thrills suspense and visual spectacle while retaining the strangeness of its original description what is so spectacular about this first feature length film of the story as such the reanimation is dependent on electric charge as of course is cinnamon as Thomas each point site in his pick adaptation and its discontents films about reincarnation are often themselves reincarnations monsters and medicine carnations that can never really die whale's Frankenstein is an example of a tax that goes beyond adjustment on instead revises the source taxed mysteries are transposed and changes are made for the purposes of re contextualize ation films like Wales based on the nineteenth century gothic fiction re write the stories and rather than denigrating the pics the films on one level and getting critical assessments of them an introductory framing device is also present in the sequel to bride of Frankenstein released in nineteen thirty five and also directed by we'll this time it is free and this merry Shelly narrating the story to Percy Shelley Lord Byron this film is a revision of volume two of the pick and which the creature relates this tale of how he learns language and desires a mate of his own kind Elsa Lancaster plays both Mary Shelley and the creatures meant he is animated and the finale and credited simply as a question mark and the closing credits which is the same as the creature and the opening credits of Frankenstein and similar to the a name of a creature they said in the first theatrical production in eighteen twenty three while there is long understates conflation between Frankenstein and his creature the bride of Frankenstein does this with the author and her creation both the story and defeated brides the story is re contextualized in the sense that Shelley's novel was anti scientific warning of the dangers of meddling too much with the natural order and based on medical research in Europe at the time and nineteen thirties Hollywood there was a fascination with scientific discovery pushing the limits of possibility and of course use an artificial life for becoming demands and obsessions already intense full time the film's irony lies in the fact that dialogue could not be heard but the articulate voice the creature develops in the bank never emerges just a monstrous grown fashioned by actor Boris Karloff in the first film and spar statements in the second in many ways the creature reflects the nature of sentiment thinking again about his story and film as allegory the themes in Frankenstein and create ostracism of of being perceived as a deviantart cider technological innovation first this is supernatural and morally ambiguous monsters and victims it's hard to tell which is which and theatrical productions from as early as eighteen twenty three the monster was voiceless and infantile wild Frankenstein surf and frets he goads the creature with others the creatures innocence and sense of morality and justice arm up to fight on the implied fears empathy grows as we witnessed him being tortured by the idiotic and contemptuous frets political reading suggests that the creature personifies violent radicalism while the inept liberal politician who unleashed problems is helpless against them it is natural then that when transferred to cinema the creature symbolism would become equally relevant to the medium as well as T. I. she's in contemporary society and sentiment dad passed moments and people are revived reanimated made on dad's like sentiment the creature is the product of technological innovation and experimentation like a film tax to creature comprises still fragments spliced together to form a whole entity that is given movement that is scientifically explicable it seems to many of us like magic and develops a life of its own I do for each of its creators thinking here by the film's capacity for reply and the legacy in popular culture of the film and its characters their iconography remains classical must developing along with the contemporary like sentiment in mute creature one way or another finds its voice his existence is given a degree of immortality adaptations ensure the survival of characters like him the cinematic nature islands the interchangeable idia Frankenstein with his creation are communicated visually in the nineteen thirty one films finale noted Plato episode nineteen twenty seven play by Peggy Webb playing from which this film is directly adopted that first gave the name Frankenstein to the creature after his maker directly linking their fractured and merry Chang identities a sequence in the film that signify says is one in much detail at first race face each other through the turning mechanism of %HESITATION when males interior as light passes three it's and casts on Karloff's creature it looks like a film projector while the divisions and the spending mechanism resemble individual film frames passing through the machinery the sequence cuts back and forth between close ups of the two faces seeing each other through the wheel and the shots the film evokes sentiments even nation from already moving image devices such as the Jewish trope and C. praxis scope as it faces almost planned to gather in the rapid sequencing and a wide shot of the Moabites site the milk they L. there is a merger but it is unclear who they're pointing up at as the river shot shows both Henry and the creature when the scuffle seems to be over with Henry the apparent factor that he's alive exclamation as repeated further converging the creator and his progeny the final sequences of the film are perhaps where it deviates most from the novel rather than driving Frankenstein tear torturous deaths the creature instead meets a tragic end and the fire sacked by the angry Lynch mob formed after he accidentally joins that'll Maria and exemplary moment of blame culture and racial prejudice the mop violently chased him to his fiery death of course he isn't quite dead and as a precursor to all such cinematic undead murderous phantoms returns for more in the sequel the images at the film's climax have much to say about eight thirty nineteen thirty CSA as well as what could be shown and pre Hayes code Hollywood the film may be set vaguely in central Europe but the issues are prevalent in north American society and politics the disused mill is the site of Frankenstein's lab on the creatures birthplace the young thinking mob and the urgency to kill the thing they do not understand burn dine this place if industry science and creation the fire spreading up the windmill shown and a long shot invokes the cross burning K. Klux Klan under violent persecution of African Americans the times folks who need little evidence thought or discussion to form of vigilante Lynch mob not to capture but to kill the creature reflects real intolerance and serious violence against those of third and society notably Henry feels the idea of exterminating the creature is murder but has no qualms about taking bodies and creating a life from parts of cadavers it is only after the creatures attempt to communicate with a less oppress the Henry grace T. and seats the lynching on the wedding date the cried celebrating the heteronormative upper class union quickly become defense full mop without considering the issues at stake the death of the young girl is caused by the combination of the naive creature and both their negligent fathers with an absence of mothers both Maria and the creature are innocent children she shows him kindness but he used to be infantile to know his own strength and possesses no language yet her father and the Chinese people decide that the dry and Maria was murdered with a question or investigation no one take self responsibility it is perfectly possible that she could have trying to applying a loan why has a child for each living so close to water where she's allowed to play alone never been taught to swim there is no evidence of the creature or in fact any kind of unknown assailants no one checks the girl for cause of death no one questioned her father who walks through the time carrying her lifeless body no one blames Henry as the creator of the creature and he certainly doesn't blame himself the comment times tracks back from Henry showing his lack of responsibility for the life he created and hi it's resistance to maltreatment pits the times people and his loved ones in danger the camera also tracks back when the creature goes for Elisabeth suggesting that the lack of responsibility is also experienced by the film's implicit narrator and by extension the audience returning to the family narratives the nineteen twenties and thirties and Hollywood so increasing interest in psychoanalysis and the Frankenstein creature dynamic couldn't be more easy to pull in the film the creature takes a shine to Elizabeth Henry Frankenstein's fiancee if Frankenstein is the creatures father than Elizabeth is at least the step mother to baby and this operation of life making if we take Shelly as the creatures mother and another sense than else along casters to roll a Shelley and the bride to page the analogy even further he tries to do away with his father to find happiness with his mother and the pics though the creature kills Elisabeth on the wedding night to make factor suffer the Hollywood version sees Elizabeth surviving as a price for Henry and his means to create a son of natural births this correction of Henry's behavior reduces the potential queerness of Frankenstein's relationship with his creation for much of the film Frankenstein is immersed in the homo social world of body snatching and scientific experimentation we learned early on from Melissa best conversation with family friend Victor Henry's experiments began after their engagement he uses his work to resist heteronormative domesticity marriage an undertaking familiar two days namely producing a male heir to carry on the family Snowblind at least in what is regarded as the natural way his resistance to committing to your woman and the social mores of its class perhaps indicates homosexuality or at least a preference for self pleasure he spends more time with friends and allies the best and he cannot create the creature alone and the fact it has two fathers both of him abuse and neglect him Henry sexuality is further cleared and debased and the creatures animation the raw materials for the manufactured sun rise through a hole in the roof at the top of the mills tar a lightning storm creates a frenzied climax and Henry repeatedly exclaims it's alive all the actions to create life combine and exert of performance and Henry serenity after the animation is almost post coital the creation manifests an anxiety over women biological conception and birth thing that is women sleeper and place in society the depicted home a social world of science and effective of the tournament progeny for the heights of Frankenstein must be if woman born the meal %HESITATION night mother this creation of life is seen as a poor aunt and unnatural this gives rise to the abuse of the creature showing high it becomes monstrous he is the progeny of what is viewed as an unnatural union and the silenced victim of domestic abuse provoked into defensive actions that scene and a blinkered way make him seem inherently violent mostly because he cannot communicate his experiences that is not to say that no one is willing to try and isn't very it knows the creature is inherently goods and does not fear him Elizabeth also senses something amiss on her wedding day but she does not share the child's lack of fear of difference even if she could articulate her intuition Henry is unwilling to lessen unlocks for sites and a sense of responsibility he finished he locks her in with the danger of safety in company but the creature decides not to harm her he has not yet become vindictive the importance of the story Frankenstein and its impact on culture should not be underestimated on the bicentenary of the novel's first publication this is an endearing story and symbol of the risks of human achievement and the darkest recesses of human nature not only that but merry wells and craft Shelley Nagel it when the daughter of an early feminist activist long before such a thing was a notion at just twenty years old give us a story if you press desk grief and destruction that not only spawned a life of its own but the science fiction genre and influences across media she could never have anticipated I hope some of these ideas cause a bit of discussion because there's a lot more to say about all of this if you find this useful they're interesting please consider making a regular pads via Petri on dot com forward slash AV cultures or donating to pay pal dot me forward slash PDA prior to sustain and improve the podcast subscribe on iTunes so you never miss an episode and sure why not give it five stars thanks to all previous episodes are listed on the podcast page of the website at forty of visual culture style wordpress dot com thanks very much for this the next time
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this is audiovisual cultures the podcast that explores different areas of the arts and cultural production with me paula blair visit patreon.com forward slash av cultures to find out more and to join the pod well hello it’s great to be with you for another audio visual cultures i’m paula blair and we’re looking mainly today audio production and we might get into some other areas with my very special guest beau lamour i am really excited bo to have you on the show today and you to hear all about your amazing career that you’re having and have had and will continue to have in many different areas um but but i think most uh most prominently in audio drama production um so boa very warm welcome to you thank you very much so how are you doing today are you having a hot one over in la today it’s gonna get there it was it was pretty it was pretty warm here where where i am yesterday about 90. so uh that’s not bad it has to get i grew up in the uh when i was very young i spent a lot of time in the um coachella valley down in palm springs so it takes a lot of heat to make me unhappy okay that’s really cool to know um brilliant well thank you so much for for joining me today and we’ve got quite a big time difference so i’m really grateful for you accommodating that as well um so bo would you be happy to give us a bit of an overview on your work so far your career because you’ve done loads of different things but would you be happy to just give us a few pointers um i started out wanting to be a filmmaker um i went to the california institute of the arts i studied film uh with alexander mckendrick who is a uh uh you know a scotsman and uh was a terrific teacher a bit hard to take personally but he was uh he was an amazing amazing teacher and so he sort of he sort of gave me a grounding in traditional traditional film and i also studied with there with ed emsweller who was actually the man who invented um digital cinema he did the first piece of digital animation ever in the world and um and so uh i got out of cal arts i went to work in the film business i have worked intermittently in the film business over over many years um in the mid-1980s this is a few years after i got out of school uh then i have to back up a little bit my father is uh at least in the united states a very well-known novelist he passed away about 30 years ago but he wrote 90 novels and about 200 short stories and in the mid 1980s when he was still alive uh his publisher bantam books which is now penguin random house started a program of doing audio publishing and dad was always very popular and uh bantam like to kind of practice on things or experiment utilizing his work and his fan base because they always knew they wouldn’t fail too horribly um if they if they went out to those fans they would get a good trial run on whatever they did and so they decided they wanted to start with their audio publishing program um using his material and he was a little bit reticent and they wanted to start small so they wanted to start with short stories and he sort of said well my old short stories are not maybe not my best foot forward and uh what do you think if we created a little more production value than just that and did them like uh like old-time radio drama and they liked that idea and we went through a certain amount of teething problems when they first started off they were just going to take a story and being a publisher they were very literal about their literature and they just wanted to take a story and uh you know take each line from the story and assign a character’s line you know to that character and then any narration was assigned to the narrator and they did a couple of those as sort of a beta test and when my father heard them he wasn’t very happy with it he came to me and he said you know i don’t think they’ve got very good actors and would you go find out go to new york find out what’s going on see if you can get better actors well i went to new york and i found out what was going on and um i realized that the actors were terrific i mean a lot of them are people that you see in movies every day these days you know they were just starting their career in those days doing uh broadway or advertising or whatever and they would come in and do our our shows but what was happening was is the the people who are doing it at the order of of the publisher were just transcribing the story and prose is not drama and so we had to create you know we had to create scripts with scenes that actors could play they could actually dig their teeth into and do their job in prose if you write every line of dialogue it’s incredibly boring um on the other hand in drama you have to have every line of dialogue because the actor sort of stair steps their way into their dramatic performance their their the moments build based on what the lines and the intentions are and so uh i started writing scripts and i went out to ucla and a couple of other theater groups around los angeles and i collected a kind of a cadre of writers and uh we we all started creating audio scripts which none of us really knew how to do we were all film and theater people and and so we we kind of figured it out as we went along and ultimately we did about 60 plus um dramatized audios the early ones we did were about an hour so there were 60 page scripts that ran ran an hour we produced six of those a year for quite a few years and uh then the program slowly started scaling down but as it did i loving to do it produced a few more shows that were uh two and three hours long and were when i we did those especially the early shows we did them in a very kind of old-time radio format so the actors were all there at the same time the show was recorded pretty much in order there was a sound effects man who came in with a whole bunch of great old vintage sort of sound effects props and he had he had this vest that he had all kinds of stuff hanging from and he used coconuts for horse hooves and he was quite good at it they were it was remarkably convincing sometimes and um and all that stuff was recorded all at the same time and then it was cut uh you know quite because a lot of it was on one track you couldn’t do an awful lot of editing and in a scene there might be two or three edits sort of jumping from one take or another that were one was better than another and um and then throughout that program and definitely those last two long shows um i produced some shows with my own group of people on the west coast and we worked very much more like a film and this is more of what we’ll be talking about as we go along um we worked much more like a film production so uh every actor had their own track we did a lot of cutting the sound effects were all done in post-production and generally in the in the field was really you know with the real things and um and so it was much more like doing the uh the post-production on a movie because that’s what we knew how to do and um and so the last show that we did was in 2015. it was called the diamond of giroux and uh i i don’t know that they’ll be um anymore i’ve kind of moved on to other things but i’m more than happy to tell anyone anything i know at any time brilliant that’s amazing thank you yeah it’s really fascinating i was reading on the website to say uh you know that background of um getting started from your father’s work that’s just so fascinating um and either just eventually there becomes a blend when you’re editing so much to the extent that you’re actually becoming a co-author and you how was that experience i mean it must have been a lot to carry personally but also you know um you know professionally what’s that done for you as well do you think well particularly doing this in the audio was just an amazing training ground um and it it allowed me to look at a story and kind of what i i’m an old hot rodder so i say like lift up the hood and see what’s see what’s actually underneath underneath there and you know sometimes a story is uh not necessarily what the audience or the author thinks it is the wonderful thing about pros is that everybody experiences it’s just code you know it’s just letters of the alphabet and everyone experiences it differently um i’ve even caught myself i this is a remarkable thing about reading prose but i’m going to use an example about script writing i’ve even caught myself working on movie scripts where i realized that in my imagination a character entered a building that looked one way but when they were exiting in the building it looked a different way in my imagination this isn’t really coming across in the script but i would catch myself doing that and i’ll go oh my gosh you know if i’m doing that with my own work how in the world are different people taking prose writing and interpreting it differently and so the wonderful thing about reading a novel or a short story is you the reader turn it into the ultimate experience for you those characters look and act the way that your subconscious would like them to those locations look the way your subconscious would like them to and as soon as you start taking that stuff more literally so the next step literally would be like an audio drama the step after that would be a movie so in one where you hear it the other one where you hear it and see it and the director and everybody engaged in the production um starts locking down what those imaginary experiences are that changes the story quite a bit for a lot of people and of course successful filmmakers successful directors successful writers in those other areas the reason they’re successful is they find a way of creating the thing that is most palatable to most people when they interpret that experience um and so you know when you lift up the hood on a story it’s um i was working on a a mini series adaptation for one of my dad’s novels that was never made but it i it had been this wonderful adventure story kind of kipling-esque of a young kid in the american west and he eventually goes to europe and then comes home it was a wonderful story but i realized it starts off with his mother abandoning him his mother is a prostitute in the west and she abandons him to sort of seek her fortune in other things she can’t have a kid hanging around okay and he’s he’s fobbed off on this gambler who becomes sort of a pseudo father for him and later it turns out that his his real father has left him some things and by the end of the story the mother who abandoned him is now relatively wealthy and successful and but she’s trying to get this stuff that the father left him from him and the gambler um is a man who’s doesn’t trust anyone and he has only very limited relationships with women and things like this and i i just realized oh my god this is all about the relationship of the women this is all about the impact of all of these different kinds of women on these on these people and um ultimately the young hero meets this woman who’s very very dynamic and a little bit of a tomboy you know she’s exactly the opposite of her kind of of his kind of femme fatale mother and um i don’t think my father ever realized that it was all about sort of looking at all these different incarnations of what a female character could be but that’s what it is and you don’t really have a choice on the first page his mother abandons him okay it’s gonna be about his mother okay you know it’s just that’s it and um and so you when you start taking what’s in a story uh literally and like instead of like looking at the individual characters in the individual sentences if you take the individual individual actions seriously and take them as the code um which is what you have to do in drama um it definitely leads you to think about stories in a different way that’s so fascinating um just those the the machinations of storytelling like um how those how you see how the same story then crosses different media that’s really fascinating when you start to adapt it so it’s really interesting that you’re talking about realizing what the story actually is not just the narrative not just the plot but what the story is and what story is being told but then it’s translating it across you know from a novel to as a teleplay you uh an audio production that sort of thing so you must have tremendous experience now in that adaptation process and um is that something you’d like to talk about a bit as well you know just um absolutely i mean i certainly haven’t done this as much as some you know hopefully you’ll be able to recruit some wonderful executive producer you know for television or something like that and get somebody who’s really had an experience you know had the experience of doing it over and over i’ve written screenplays i’ve produced movies but i mean at a very minimal level and you know what you do have on your hands today with me is somebody who’s thought about it a lot and thought about it very personally because i’m working with my father’s work and so my approach is always one of gotta make this work but also got to be respectful um you know it’s not just another job so there’s a lot to get into there and um you know something we thought we might talk about as well is writing specifically for audio drama and how that differs from writing for say live action television or film or writing for uh new writing for print production you know and that sort of thing so is there are there things that you’ve learned in writing for audio so we we got some hints of some things you know and thinking about sound design and where that might come in and how actors need to speak and maybe interact with each other it’s it’s different um are there any things is there anything there that you think might be quite useful for people i’m not sure because i don’t think there are tremendous differences okay now let me explain that a little bit sure i started out looking at film i started out studying film but i became a relatively good writer doing audios and one of the things that the audios forced me to do was to really really work with the characters and uh work work everything out through characterization and so there is nothing wrong with that in film there is nothing in that that you shouldn’t be doing in film it just audio forced me away from what at the time was a a skill set of visual storytelling and and forced me to go somewhere else so i actually think that the two things are quite complimentary um obviously you you know you want to do as much interaction in character interplay in audio you know as you can and audio always has the problem of portraying action so i’m just gonna i’m gonna back up a little bit we started as i said just a few moments ago transcribing short stories so that meant we started the process even though we changed things very much along the way we started the process using a narrator um there are lots of people who do audio production who think using a narrator is cheating and that the entire story should be played out in in dialogue um i find that to be one of two things either incredibly hard and i have only been able in my own writing i’ve only been able to kind of do it once okay or it’s incredibly bad so you know the dialogue is always trying to tell the audience what they ought to be seeing and that puts an incredible amount of i keep saying incredible but that keeps putting a lot of emphasis on things that are other than the characterization the characters all have this second agenda which is the writer’s agenda which is to tell you what they ought to be seeing i hate the writer’s agenda if you see the writer’s agenda in the writing i think it stinks and um i all i want to do is see that you see what the character wants and that’s it and so the easiest way of doing that is to remove the writer’s agenda completely and just give it to a narrator okay so i have worked with i did one story where none of the scenes had a narrator um but there was a narrator that came on between certain scenes that was kind of like a historian and he kind of kind of got you to the next place where you could experience the next scene or the next series of scenes so he he bridged those gaps and i think there might have been one or two sentences of this is what you’re seeing in that in that whole show and uh that was about as good as i’ve ever done now granted i’m also working with westerns and adventure stories and all kinds of things that have to do with the visual physical physical world so there are plenty of other options in audio you know for different kinds of stories that might be less narrator specific um then i did a show that was a first person narrator and i really liked doing this a lot and so it was kind of a it was kind of a audio noir or you know roma noir story about a guy who gets himself in all kinds of trouble you could kind of see it as a minor alfred hitchcock movie or something like that and in that case the main character the protagonist or sort of anti-hero character is telling you the story but the way it was written and the way it was played it’s an excuse okay i’m going to tell you this story you really have to understand i’m not a bad guy okay this is this is this is what happened okay and so the narrator is all uh you know basically he’s telling you this story and all the scenes are flashbacks or flash into the thing that he’s telling you and and he’s trying to express himself and explain himself and then we did uh we did a i did another one that was kind of a hybrid and that was like uh a narrator that told you the action that was going on in the story but was often also kind of the historical guy and those sections were kind of in a very sort of 19th century language um and um and then i’ve done just a whole bunch of them that were kind of traditional traditional narrator and you always try and find a voice for the narrator that isn’t just the facts um but so the you know a difference from film is you mess around with a narrator a bit like a novel and in fact i think in a novel a lot of times i probably respect the sort of novelist like my dad who got out of the way of his audience and just gave you it was quite minimalist and not trying to push a bunch of style down your throat the idea was that his voice would disappear into your imagination and um when you’re doing an audio that doesn’t really work all that well and so sometimes having a particular goal for the narrator a particular way that the narrator presents information is important it’s also very important i’m going to jump around a little bit here but it’s also very important for directing narrators because directing narration is awful directing an actor you know you can say you know he’s talking about something else but you can say get her to give you the shoes you know and that’s his subtext and that’s his doable action that’s what he’s trying to do and so the actor’s like oh okay whatever i’m doing i’m trying to get her to give me the shoes um it’s really hard to come up with that kind of stuff for a narrator you know you’re basically saying tell the story well duh the guy knows that having a particular style or like with the first person narrator you know um explain yourself you know make people understand that you’re not a bad guy all right well that helps a lot when you’re working with a narrator so audio can have a little more of a narrator type thing audio might work out more things in scenes that have dialogue than not but they’re still they’re pretty similar i’d say i bring a lot of my audio skills to film and uh you know maybe that’s one of the reasons i haven’t worked in film all that much i don’t know but there you go yeah uh it’s so interesting um hearing your thoughts on on the narrator um and narrative point of view because i think certainly in film even when there is no literal narrator of the film there is an implied narrator in the film itself you know so like you were saying it’s in the visual aspects it’s how a certain scene is framed you know how yeah you know how the actors are blocks or whatever you how it’s lit all of these things can communicate what point of view an implied narrator is coming from and so all of the things that you’re saying there about how to get that into audio production when it’s things you can’t see but you’re trying to put it in the mind’s eye say of the listener that’s really really fascinating so um you know it’d be quite interesting to try and probe that a little bit more if we can if we can dig in it but we might get there through some other ways as well well the first thing that popped into mind just as you were saying that doesn’t have anything to do with my work and i do a film and i was thinking about well so how does that work and the first thing that i thought of was horror movies and horror movies are uh an interesting point of view they they alternate between a voyeurs point of view which is quite pulled back okay so that you know a little more than the characters and then of course if something’s going to scare you you jump into the character’s point of view um but uh that was the only thing that just popped into my mind as you were as you were talking and uh and please ask me some questions yeah no it’s a useful example i think um so i mean i suppose then it’s um as you were saying when you’re trying to get actors to maybe convey it maybe in the way that they say things or the way they’re carrying their voice for example um you know so then you know it’s those directing techniques because you’ve written undirected for quite a few audio productions together and you know that communication with actors you know how do you how do you decide right this is how i want you to set the line or you is there i suppose like with any kind of production is there a is there a dialogue then between you and the actors of you how do they think their character should be and how much autonomy do they have and is it a negotiation between you all or do you have a very set vision you know how does that work when you’re working with them okay so first of all that starts with writing and one of the things one of the things that doing the audios allowed me to learn one of the just incredible gifts in my life was that i could take a script um to in the in the early days i could take a script to new york i could watch 60 or 80 actors audition on scenes from that script and then i and then the script would be produced but watching a whole bunch of different actors play the same scenes was incredibly educational and the first thing that i realized was if you hand a scene to 60 actors and 45 or 50 of them do it poorly it’s not them it’s you and you need to write a better seat okay you need to make their intentions clearer in their actions and their lines you need to make the words more purely appropriate to their character and you need to give them the a logical build from one emotional moment to the next and um and then if you can get 45 or 50 of them to do it you know it’s never going to be your ultimate expectation but if you can get 45 or 50 of them to do it and you’re sitting there going huh okay you know if we printed that if that was if that was what we ended up with i could live with that and then as a writer you did your work so the first thing to do is direct through good writing and um that means the director has to do less and less once i and then you’re and then you’re casting and so the next the next step of directing is is picking who those actors are going to be and i like to pick interesting people luckily you know we’ve always had a wide assortment of people that we could cast i live in los angeles the the last show that we did we cast um you know through the internet which i hadn’t done before and um it was we had 2500 submissions and i mean you know we we ended up reading 400 people and it took a week it was harder than doing the show um and uh i you know i look for actors that have an imagination when you when you watch them doing what they’re doing is like is there some sense that they actually see or feel or imagine in the environment that they’re in um and actors that can work in front of a microphone but they still can use they still use their body they still you see muscles firing you see things like that because this uh an actor organizes a lot i mean unconsciously an actor organizes a lot of their thoughts and their feelings and how they work on the character by how they move and when we’re doing audio there’s almost no blocking and so uh they you you strip away this incredibly valuable way of remembering what you want to do with a scene and knowing what your intention is and things like this the the blocking is a mnemonic for for all that stuff and and so you’re going to force them to work in front of a microphone i like to give them a lot more room to move around than i used to but pretend we’re working just in front of a microphone and so when you see you know when the uh you know when the heroine of the story says no wait and then the idea in the story is that she mounts up her horse and you know you you’re looking at the back of the actress and you see the muscles in her back like twitch and her leg move a little bit and stuff like that it’s like oh yeah that’s the one you want you know it’s like because she’s getting on that horse um you know you look for people that have a very vibrant imagination um i also just tend to look for people who are fun fun to work with because i’m gonna have to work for with them for a day or a week or whatever i’m gonna do and it shouldn’t be boring and it would be nice if you know maybe i was friends with them for some time to come and uh there’s just you know there’s just things like that i tend to look for people who speak multiple languages don’t know why they just tend to be interesting people and they’ve got uh you know like that uh like that wonderful science fiction film that came out a couple years ago where the language like reprograms your sense of time okay
languages do uh program different things in your mind and so i kind of look for that although i have no real good explanation for why i like that and um if an actor is a good actor i mean just coming back to one of the earlier things if an actor is a good actor and you see on their resume that they have and of course resumes are padded with all kinds of idiotic stuff but you you see and can’t believe um on their resume that they uh that they have a background in dance or martial arts or or something like that those are also again you wouldn’t think of that for audio necessarily but the thing in my interpretation of it um you you don’t actually go away from the physical because you’re not utilizing it you go deep into the physical because you can’t do as much with it and and so so the next step to directing would be would be getting a good getting a good cast and getting people that when they came in seem to have they seem to understand the character or to actually just be that person um once i’m in the studio uh i don’t talk to now prior to going in the studio i’ll take my script and uh every single line and every single intention in the script i go to the back of the previous page and i write down the doable actions okay so this is sandy meisner acting 101 okay so i studied acting for a long long time i’m a terrible actor it doesn’t mean i don’t i don’t know what the actors are doing and uh i write down you know i think like okay so what is the actor trying to accomplish in the scene okay does that change at some point and then with every line how is that line attempting what exactly is it doing to attempt to get to that goal okay and i write that down and i write down any subtext that i can think of um and i don’t talk to the actor about this but if they start to get lost i can look at that line just track right over and go do this you know like i was saying get her to give you the shoes whatever whatever it is and um uh and then we don’t do any rehearsal or anything like that because things have changed a little bit but after a phono code we were always union productions so after phono code tells you that your rehearsal time costs the same as your recording time and so my feeling is i’m just a raw material guy all i want i want to get as many takes as i can i want to get as many interpretations as i can i do a ton of stuff in the editing room and so my feeling was it we couldn’t afford to do enough rehearsal to make rehearsal worthwhile so my feeling is is we just we go in the studio and we i just let it rip now once in a while the act sometimes the actor will sort of say you know what’s my general background what am i what am i doing i had uh i did one uh show with a really wonderful actor who’s i think he went on to teach at yale or something like that um and you know he said so you know what’s the background of my character and i said well you know i i cast you intentionally like really well this guy so this story takes place during the 1880s but this is an older man who is a who was a mountain man i go you you know um you’re an old hippie you know you’re a transcendentalist you know kind of walden pond guy who went west and lived with the indians and things like this and so you know he’s you but if you look at the generations if you go back and track the history of it there were people like that and they were that same generation in a previous incarnation you know and so in that case i was sort of telling him how i wanted him to approach the character but i was also just saying you know i cast you right you don’t even have to approach the character you are that guy um and uh so sometimes you have a conversation like that uh which is which is useful but a lot of times i won’t you know i won’t talk to them too much about it other than to other than to make them feel better about that kind of stuff if i’ve done my job right and then you know we’ll record a few and a lot of times so i also like writing scenes with three four five six seven characters um this is kind of the super bowl of writing two characters is easy um the more characters up to a point the more characters uh the more productive a scene can be and the more quickly it can move through information so if you have two characters and they have to emotionally stair step to get to a particular emotional point what can happen if you have three characters is one character goes here another character goes here the third character goes here okay and then whoa you’re already up there you know and um and so having a bunch of characters is a riot but it’s it’s hard to manage as a traffic pattern with actors and as a director and everybody’s got to know what they’re doing and when they break in and when they don’t break in and how they manage it so a lot of times we’ll do a couple of takes just to get things settled that’s the rehearsal um then uh i’ll record a few and i’ll give people pointers a little bit oh i want a little more of this i want a little more of that and um and then i generally will stop recording the whole scene say it’s a three four five page scene and i’ll break it into pieces it might be by the page it might be beats the kind or sections that kind of straddle a beat to kind of begin a little bit before a certain moment in the in the scene and end a little bit afterwards so that we can we know we can cut in there and um and i’ll do those smaller pieces and this is important because the in doing audio the actors we generally work through so many pages in a day that you can’t really ask your actors to memorize the script and you know we’ll do 20 pages a day and uh if you’re doing a movie or a television show or something you might be doing anywhere between 2 and 10 pages a day with 10 pages if you’re doing a 10-page day it’s usually a lot of action and nobody has to remember the lines um so uh
will you know they’re constantly looking down at their script and kind of picking that up and so what happens is in editorial you can hear i can hear i look away from each other it’s like that focus characterization just drops okay when they go back to the page so the idea is get enough takes so that the moment they look at the page is different in as many of the different takes as possible so you’ve got that focus for the whole scene but you got to do a bunch of them to get that um and uh and then a lot of times what i’ll do is i’ll go in and if i’m unhappy with an area uh i will change a few words or i’ll try and find words that the actor is more comfortable with um and uh words that have maybe uh an emotional meaning to that actor that that the original didn’t and i didn’t realize it um and i don’t really recognize these things i just i just change them and see if it works and uh and then when i’m really kind of getting the last few things generally what i’ll do is if i’m working with one actor i’ll push the other actor aside and i’ll play that part and when i when i do that i will give a performance that pushes the actor that i’m working with in certain directions and um you know that will steer their their performance to give me various things but i’m just collecting tons and tons and tons of data i don’t know what i want i don’t know you know if i see something show up in the scene that looks particularly good um i will then start once i’ve got the whole thing i will go and i will chase that thing because it’s like i don’t want to give that just because there was a moment of it doesn’t mean i want to give it up if i’ve still got time on the clock for that scene before i start running over time i’ll go chase that particular idea if i can and and try and get some more of that i also look for if you do a lot of takes like this you know so i mean this a lot of takes might be somewhere between uh six for something that’s fairly simple and i mean in a scene that’s got a lot of people and we break it down into a lot of little sections we might go 70 80 80 takes and um they go very it’s not like a taking film they go very fast i mean everybody ends one and they start another sometimes they’ll just go to the cast i’ll just go go for three we’re just going to roll we’re going to roll right through and you’re just going to finish it and as soon as you want to start again just start again and the the gold that i’m looking for is if i’ve got different versions of the take and it’s good to start with this kind of calmer one but end with this heightened one okay getting the piece that allows me to jump from interpretation to interpretation you know i don’t always get it exactly where i want it but getting it somewhere in there is suit that’s just wonderful when that happens because then i then i have this huge range of stuff that i can activate rather than being locked in in one interpretation um so there that’s wow i’ll shut up for a minute now that’s fascinating um i uh i’m i’m really into uh certain animations and i love watching videos of the voice actors playing their characters because they really do become their character so often you know it’s so cool watching that um so yeah i definitely get where you’re coming from i imagine there must be studies of that where the kineticism and the body actually does come through the voice you know it really must stay so that’s really cool to hear your experience of witnessing that as a director and a writer i’ll give you an example in that area if you’d like sure um uh in an early show that i directed um i had a guy who was going into a building and uh he was supposed to walk up onto the stair of the building and there’s a guy he knows there and he he’s going to walk in the building his motivation to get into the building he walks past the guy and as he walks past the guy who turns to him he goes jim okay and goes in just ign kind of curt acknowledgement oh my god we started recording that it was just like jim jim jim jim and i mean it was it was endless and we never got what we were looking for and finally in desperation i took the actor and i just moved him back about four steps and i just said walk past the microphone and when you get to the microphone just turn to the microphone nod and say jim okay and then keep going okay and bam one take perfect okay so the movement clarified it i also had you know i worked with a wonderful young actor a few years ago who had started out as a dancer and um his performances were kind of dull until he came on to the thing he just he would just like jump up and down in between takes and he which and he wasn’t it wasn’t even movement that had anything to do with the performance he just would kind of jump up and down and sort of dance around and do stuff and then he’d settle down at the microphone and it was great um so the lack of motion in audio is often a problem there was a there was i believe it was a vividly uh uh bolivian director um about 30 or 40 years ago who came to the united states and did some work with lucasfilm but but radio drama work with lucasfilm and he’d done an awful lot of radio in bolivia and he blocked everything like a play and he had big like those big old dolly mounted microphones that would carry the uh that would you know follow the actors around like they were in a movie and um i don’t know that listening to that stuff my memory of that stuff isn’t like oh my gosh those performances were exceptional but it was it was another way of working things out that i think worked very well i think that all brings us really nicely onto thinking about the technology behind all of this and those sorts of techniques where the microphones are almost being used a bit more like cameras or a bit more like um how microphones would follow the actors on the camera in in movie making as well um and i imagine that today it’s much easier to do repeated takes because you’ve got the digital technology and you can do it fairly endlessly whereas before maybe on tape but it’s not just so easy i imagine very similar to how i film it’s not just so easy to do endless texts yeah expensive yeah so um so i was wondering is it because i mean we we got in touch really because i had seen a post of yours on the audio drama hub on facebook and um and a shout out to jack bowman who has been on the podcast before he’s an audio drama producer here in the uk and he he introduced me to that group as well and so that’s why i’ve been seeing all your amazing posts about this and you posted about you know actually innovating certain technologies you know and and coming up with things to solve problems um so i was i’m really very interested to hear more about that you know so it’s not that you’ve been actually developing stories and storytelling and all of those sorts of methods but actually the technology to produce them as well and i’d love to hear more about that if you’re happy too oh yeah i have to say i’m i’m fantastically lucky in that uh i i’m pretty good with the theory of things but not so good with the practice and so i i have um a producer editor who is amazing at figuring out ways of executing the crazy ideas that i come up with and i had he’s passed away a few years ago but i had this wonderful wonderful engineer which you i believe you saw the post on and um and he could just not only was he terrific at regarding things but he could just build devices that i imagined or i needed to have so the particular thing that we were talking about i have to give you a little bit of background so i like working in stereo i like doing as much with the stereo space as i possibly can and um one of the hardest things was to figure you know do i want to block factors around in the stereo space and then somehow block the production or the creation of sound effects in some way that tracks them and when you put all of the stuff in the same recording will like line up and sound like it’s at the same spot this is a nightmare okay and uh very difficult to do and of course the more you utilize the stereo space the more difficult it is and i like to get really clean dialogue tracks i like to not worry about anything but the voices when i’m in the studio that’s the only thing i want to deal with and so uh i ended up you know i record all my voices mono but on individual tracks they can be panned around the stereo proscenium um and placed with both panning and uh you know so panning and volume um and uh and a little bit of reverb to create you know are they further back are they closer to you things like that um but then how to make the sound effects follow them and so i was talking to howard our engineer and there’s some kind of a joke it’s only funny to engineers and i don’t really understand it but they would make this joke about a monophonic pan pot okay meaning some somehow that you would pan something from left to right in mono which of course you can’t do and he i had heard him say that a couple of times and i was like howard um we’ve worked with ms technology which i’ll explain explain in a second and i want you to i want you to build me a monophonic pan-pod and and so he did and
he drove away wow in utah and about three months later he came back with this device okay so this is the panner and over here we’ve got one of the one of the knobs is the volume which you know basically does your in and out and this does your back and forth and okay now i’ll explain how this thing works and we don’t use that any longer that’s old tape analog technology we’ve got our own version in digital in the digital world now so we record our sound effects in a technique that is called ms okay for mid side and in this particular interpretation you have a the mid mic is a cardioid or hypercardioid mic that basically records forward and then you use a figure eight mic which is not a stereo mic but it has a positively and negatively phased lobe that go out to the sides okay and when you interface the mid plus the side and the mid minus the side okay you get left and right in fact almost every microphone that’s out there that allows you to switch how wide the pattern is is an ms is secretly an ms microphone with a switch that either adds more side or subtracts side and um and thus it gives you a narrower view you know for you know not so much side or a wide view for a lot of side and a lot of ms microphones are intended to be decoded at you know into left right stereo at the moment that you’re recording well the thing that i realized i’m not unique in this i’m just cut off from other people in the audio business and so i i feel like these things are my own idea because they are but i’m sure they’re not very unique um uh i’d sort of say well why do code in the field why why decode that at all until the last moment that you have to um just keep it mid-side and then as you turn up and down the side channel you get more or less environment so you can choose the size of the space sort of that you’re not the side of space that you’re in you know it doesn’t make it sound it does make it sound bigger it uh
it doesn’t really make it react like it’s a different sound but you get a you know you get more of it and then uh if you control the volume of the mid channel you get something that seems closer to you or further away from you and then why not put that mid channel on a pan pod okay and now you can pan it back and forth within the within the scene and why not automate that pan pot so that during the scene or in the old days before automation we could hand move the center so that something can actually move during the scene all right so we can kind of automate all these different all these different movements so we began recording our sound effects in mid-side and leaving them that way bringing them into our post-production and now we can we can record every sound effect we wanted just kind of right in front of the microphone and then we could decide where we were going to place it and how it was going to move and do all these other things in post and um and so
we later i mean just to go on one more level we later changed it to what we call mso technique which is mid-side and
i’ve so microphones here so you would take we use these sennheiser mkh uh microphones and so we have the uh the figure eight microphone okay which we would mount in a holder like this and then we have a cardioid microphone which we would mount you know so that the mid the figure eight does the sides and this does the center all right and then we will put those those will be mounted on a on a tripod to record our effects and then mount it down near the ground so it gets a good acoustic coupling with the ground we would have a uh microphone the advantage of an omni-directional microphone is it records a lot lower frequencies if you think of this in this microphone matrix you think about it as a as part of a speaker this is like the microphone for the subwoofer okay it’s like a special low frequency mic or the mic that’s going to record the lowest frequencies you can record for the subwoofer and so we roll off that low mic at about 300 or less and so it’s just just taking in the the lower stuff and the other microphones handle the other things the first time we experimented with that we did a recording of a land rover driving over a kind of a rough road and we were sitting there in our studio and it was like the thing drew drove through the back wall i mean it was amazing having that just a little bit of extra low frequencies it was terrific you know now we’ve got sound effects that we can move around so when i do um you know we do things like we’ll we do all of our foley in the actual environments we don’t use a fully stage so i’m very i’m very lucky my family has a ranch in southwestern colorado and it has uh it has several old houses on it and each one was built at a different time and each one has different floors and different doors and different banisters and things like this and um and so we’ve got all these different floors we can record and things it’s like having a foley stage but it’s all the actual places in actual acoustic environments you’re not having to fake anything it actually sounds like a room um and it’s kind of isolated from that you know you’re not hearing too many other things and and so uh you know we would go in and we would do when we would do foley which is your you know like your footsteps and all these things that are physical handling of things um to get footsteps we would do we would have what we call a foley series and that would be we would do a walk up to the microphone walk away from the microphone stand in front of the microphone walk in place and there are kind of techniques to do this which i won’t get into that’s really key but um you know there’s ways of making it sound better and better we get little this is so useful in creating great performances little adjustment of the feet like a little scratch or a little creak on a board or something like this same thing with a chair if you’re sitting here my chair will make a little bit of noise um if you get the idea that someone moved in their chair you can add that to the performance like maybe they’re a little uncomfortable or maybe they’re getting ready to get up or something like that super super i mean it can make or break an actor’s performance having those wonderful sound effects and so we would just do these various things in front of our microphone array and and then we could place the stuff where we wanted later now in general we would also do things that were not just like right there in front of the mic if we kind of knew that certain things were going to happen and we would use them in a particular way we weren’t going to paint ourselves into a corner um but uh it was an incredibly productive manner you know now we do now we do it all with automation in a digital audio workstation and um uh it it made things you know in the in the midst of a very laborious process it made things go you know very quickly and um ms has been a has been a godsend to us and we figured out some extra ways of using it so that was you know that was one kind of innovative um innovative thing that we did it’s also fascinating just from my film theory background and i you know i i i so often associate things like proximity with camera and lenses and and all that and it’s just so great to learn more about how that works with sound as well it’s so cool well here’s another thing and this gets i know i talk to people in the in the audio drama business about this and it just seems to put them to sleep but it’s so important and it has a lot to do with what you’re talking about um when you’re doing any kind of a recording it’s incredibly important to understand and i learned all of this from working in the film business it’s incredibly important to understand the size of the venue that you’re working in and um in a in a feature film you’re working in a giant venue and you can play the soundtrack very very loud because you’re you’re filling up a big space but because you can play it very loud that also means you can play things very softly because you have this difference because the top goes up so high you get extra bottom you know the bottom is much lower so you get this extra bottom and that gives you a sense of space and depth that when you are working in a smaller venue like all of our stuff is engineered to play well in a car okay so small and kind of a loud environment so we end up compressing things quite a bit so that you can hear the fainter sounds you know and the louder sounds don’t overwhelm you and so knowing the size of your space is is terribly important and um and then choosing a playback volume when you’re editing and mixing and that reflects that space all right so if you’re going to be working in a relatively small space you don’t have a particularly high playback volume what that forces you to do is take all the lower sounds and mix them up hotter so that you can hear them now you’ve got compression without ever using a compressor you know a lot of times we will edit at higher volume and then mix at lower volume and so we have we have a specific volume that we use when we’re editing 79 db at the editor’s years and then we will mix at 77 or so um for the car and so what ends up happening is the the show has this sense of space and particularly like the diamond of jeru takes place in the jungles of borneo and we went to all kinds of trouble to build these really thick environments i mean we probably spent as much time creating the multi-level ambience as we did doing all the sound effects and it was just glorious while we were editing we went to mix it
you know it just became smaller and more you know less good but that’s where our audience is so that’s what we have to do so it is you know it is important to know the size and space that you’re working in just like if you make a feature film you can present some you can present a scene that’s a great deal darker than you can on television because you know that audience is watching it in the dark you know and so any amount of light will be useful if you think somebody’s going to be watching it in a bright living room you have some other things you have to take into consideration it’s the same it’s the same set of problems and it’s worked out the same you know the same way gosh that’s so cool to learn about thank you um great so uh you mentioned there the diamond of jeru and you’ve worked on quite a lot of ones and i guess i gather that was really quite a massive production for you that one yeah yeah and do you want to do do you want to talk a bit about that one um and any of the other work that you’ve been doing because that was something adapted from your father’s work was yeah well you’re going to love this because it’s written it’s right up all of your your theory alleys
the diamond of drew was written in the late 40s or early 50s by my dad it was a short story um he sent it off to his agent who was not able to sell it it wasn’t particularly good certainly not one of his better efforts and just because he was working on other things when it didn’t sell he threw it in a box and it went in the back of a closet and it didn’t get published and after he died we were putting uh i was putting the book of his short stories together and i thought okay i’ll i’ll stick this in the book of short stories i’m not that happy with it i’m not quite sure what i’m going to do and then the editor got back to me and they’ve done what they call cast off on the page the page count and it wasn’t um the book wasn’t long enough and it wasn’t long enough with the diamond really in there and that was the only reason i’d stuck it i was kind of desperate it’s the only reason i’d stuck it in there as i knew i was a little light and so it came back that it wasn’t you know the book wasn’t long enough and i thought okay that i like that story but it really needs some work so i did what we call in the film business a page one re-write and i thought i’m going to take this 20-page short story i’m going to turn it into an page novella and i’m really going to expand on it and you know and uh turn it into what as much that i can make it into the ultimate version of what my dad was trying to what my dad was trying to accomplish i didn’t know anything about borneo i didn’t know anything about this luckily i ran across somebody who knew a bunch and gave me some research things and i was able to you know i was able to pull something together that worked that worked pretty good first person story uh you know kind of uh people going upriver to a diamond prospecting in in borneo a man and his wife doing it sort of for fun and getting in all kinds of trouble and the hero is the guy who kind of has to go after them and save them and uh so there it gets published book comes out it’s relatively popular um a few years later a friend a friend of mine is on the uh he’s on a plane coming back from morocco where he’s looking for um locations for a kind of a biblical movie with and he’s traveling with an executive at uh usa network and they’re talking and in those days usa seemed to have the idea that what they really wanted to do was uh a couple of movies in every genre and so she told my buddy mike joyce uh she said you know we really want to do kind of an indiana jones sort of classic adventure story and and mike was like well i know where to find that so he got off he got off the plane and he called me up and he goes does your dad have anything and after i thought about it and thought about the kind of budgets that they had available and things like that and i came back and i said well the diamond of jeru is probably the one that is most is most reasonable it doesn’t need an awful lot more than sort of jungle and a little town on their on the river and then the big the big problems are taken care of and um so uh we agreed that that we would try and do that and they bought it and and i’m just gonna i’m gonna keep going with this dramatic story here for a second because it’s something you’ll appreciate um this is what breaking into the movie business actually looks like you hear people talking about their br the way they break in and they’re always like saying well i think this particular you hear these stories here in hollywood it’s like this actor is looking for this kind of story or this kind of stuff and that kind of stuff and it’s always third hand and it’s always like the pile of gold at the end of the rainbow it’s always complete complete idiocy um but in this case they bought the thing in late november the entirety of hollywood shuts down between thanksgiving and about a week after new year’s i mean nothing moves okay um there’s no traffic i’m joking but i mean it’s just like nothing goes on and it was just before that and i thought i want to write this thing but you know every network has got their flavor of the month writers and i wasn’t the flavor of the month writer for anybody and so i thought well i know a couple of other things in may i think in june and july of that year there was going to be a
a writer’s strike possibly an actor strike both contracts were coming up and i thought you know if they don’t get this thing made before summer it’s over it’s not going to happen because things that get delayed in hollywood just die and so they bought the dumb thing right at a tricky critical point maybe they shouldn’t have even been acquiring any new material until they knew what was going to be able to happen so there when they come back they’re going to be desperate for a script or they just wasted the option right so i just went crazy and i wrote this script in like a month and turned it in and they were unhappy that one of their producers they you know as soon as they start as soon as the powers that be start to see power congealing in any place other than themselves they’re not very happy with that and so they weren’t very happy with it but they also realized exactly what i had said that that you know they had this looming deadline all right so that’s what breaking in looks like in hollywood recognizing certain conditions that that make you know make your thing work um that are actual conditions that are that are really legitimate and hard not the rumor that somebody might want something like this anyway um you know by april we were making the movie in australia and um it was a lot of fun it was definitely one of the most i’ve only worked on kind of movies of the week which is kind of like the bargain basement of the movie business and um it was definitely the most creative of all of those experiences and it and it was very hard and it was a lot of it was a lot of fun and it was a lot of different it was also as every movie is incredibly disappointing and all kinds of you know terrible things happened to my script and at the same time my script was turned into this this physical reality that was very exciting and and really wonderful and we got done with it and random house was asking me to do one more audio production and i thought well i’m sick of westerns i’ve done you know 59 58 westerns and i want to do something but i want to have a soundscape that is really distinct and you know i started thinking well the mid 20th century in borneo is pretty distinct and and it’s not what i’ve been doing and so uh i rewrote it again now i’m gonna go back and say a couple other things about this when i wrote that when i took the novella and i turned it into a screenplay i went from the first person of the the guide the guy that goes after the man and woman to uh rescue them and i added a bunch of scenes with the man and woman okay so it expanded to this uh to to cover almost in first-person way or at least more closely this second group of characters when i did the audio um i started realizing start realizing i realized halfway through making the movie that uh the borneo native characters are really fascinating and that i had in many ways kind of neglected them and i wanted to spend more time with them and so when i did the audio the story grew again and included the story of those characters to the point where you actually recognize that everything that everybody’s doing hinged off of a particular moment before any of these people ever arrived in borneo that just had to do with the dayak or native characters and um so uh it the story the story grew and encompassed more points of view each time um of course when we got around to making the audio you know we had all kinds of fun because we got to we hired nate we had native guys who came from borneo we had they we had a bunch of other actors also playing uh characters from borneo and the guys who were actually from borneo taught all those guys melee so there’s all kinds of times in the story when they’re talking in melee and so they got like language language school and uh we had all kinds of australian actors and british actors and uh you know it was it was a it was a an accent fest and it was a lot of fun what a story um what journey that one story has had as well it’s amazing like every production format possible yeah yeah but i love that i love that idea that you expanded it and um went in and gave more space to those more native characters and it’s really interesting to see that happening more in general now i think um because uh you know they’ve been so neglected i think just very generally and to to just uh counteract that a bit and give them more space that’s really great to hear um you gave me the web address for all of that so i’m gonna have that in our show notes forever so that people can go and check all of that out because you’ve got really detailed notes on everything it’s a really thorough website for so i really will just encourage yeah a lot of videos a lot of photographs um yeah there’s a lot of material there yeah great so i really urge anybody who’s listening or listening to or watching this go and check that out the diamond of jury it’s really fascinating production story i think um so gosh that’s a lot i feel like i feel like we’re only starting to scratch the surface with everything that we’ve talked about um and i mean i’d really love for for you to come on again sometime and to get into some detail uh on some other things um is there anything that you’re working on at the moment that you would like everybody to know about the thing that’s most exciting that i’m working on at the moment has nothing to do with film or audio um
uh i’m going back into a lot of my dad’s uh materials and i’ve created this program called louis lower series called louis lamour’s lost treasures and so uh we produced um two books uh full of stories that my dad didn’t finish there’s actually a few in there that he did finish but have are unpublished as of today but most of them are are unfinished and i take his notes and his correspondence and other things that i know about what was going on and i try and kind of explain to the reader where this story fit in his career and what he was trying to accomplish what the rest of the story would have been like and uh it’s kind of you know it’s a book for a fan uh of louis lamour to to see all the other kinds of things that he wanted to do in his life because many of these things were genres that he did not uh sell a lot of stories in and things like that um some of them were ideas that he had that were just too weird to you know too wild to sort of actually be able to be something that uh he finished you know the the in any author’s life their most ambitious work is the work they don’t finish because it was too ambitious and uh so there’s a lot of very interesting things in there it’s also uh these books and there’s some other pieces of this which i’ll explain in a second um all of this work is also a pretty good kind of history lesson on uh how writers worked in the paperback book business that you know started just before or during world war ii and it’s still with us but probably hit its peak in the late 80s or early 90s and um so it’s a whole kind of it’s a whole kind of literary era and it’s a it’s a look from the inside from the from an author’s career kind of looking looking out at everything that was going on at that time so the other thing that i’ve done besides these two books of unfinished work is i’ve gone into a bunch of my dad’s older finished novels and done the same thing added this kind of bonus features in the back that talk about the story behind the story what was going on you know i just did one for uh kiowa trail that uh explains that although it never went anywhere as a film that story was actually my dad wrote that for catherine hepburn wow because they had had a long uh kind of acquaintance with one another talking about trying to work in this film and talking about trying to work in that film she even tried to get him involved in writing the sequel to rooster cogburn which was the she did with john wayne in the 70s and um and so they they weren’t close friends but they they knew and respected one another very much and so you know knowing that story is kind of the interesting backstory to kiowa trail and where it came from there’s a another one called caligan which is all about us just driving around the desert looking for the locations you know it’s really it’s really kind of a down and down in the dirt four-wheel drive you know kind of like uh uh investiga location uh expedition um so they’re all different and it’s kind of a almost like a random access uh biography of my father’s um uh professional life it doesn’t go into a lot of personal into a lot of personal details it’s really it’s about the writing it’s about the literary industry and things like that and so that’s the uh i’m hopefully within the next six months or so i’ll kind of wrap that program up i’ve been working on it for about four years and uh and so that’s that’s my my big project for the moment amazing yeah really important to have all that history preserved that’s great fantastic work um bo is there anywhere where people can find more about you on the internet do you have your own website that people can look at i do it’s probably not the greatest thing in the world but bo lamore.com okay where you can go but just also looking around on louisamore.com and all of its associated there’s a whole kind of constellation of blue more websites and you know that’s the kind of stuff that i’ve been doing for the last 35 years you know well before my dad uh my dad passed away you know i was already kind of uh working on all kinds of stuff around the perimeter of his of his career and uh and so you know that you can get a pretty good idea of the things that i’ve done yeah it seems that you’re very much an archivist as well in the history and you’ve got an awful lot of things going on there i’ve had to become this i didn’t really start out life uh you know um start out life looking to be an archivist i’m sort of uh you know i’m sort of a a motorhead that that ended up getting tossed all of this all of this paperwork and um and so uh you know if i’m if i’m not like got the hood up on my car i’ve got the hood up on all the paperwork yeah this has been so informative and yeah i really hope that we can keep in touch and um i’m i’ve so enjoyed learning so much from you about all of this and i look forward to learning more um i think once you when if you get through your dad’s stuff you’ll have so much more to say about all those technologies and to do that history as well because it’s all so important i think and um it’s part of such a big network of so many things you know it’s it’s really amazing everything that you’ve been working on and it’s been such a pleasure talking to you today a pleasure talking to you if i can ever help you with anything that doesn’t have anything to do with me i’m certainly willing to do that too so well i’m a super nervous at all yeah that’s really generous yeah i’m super super nervous at all less total amateur so take any help that’s offered well you’re doing a great job and it’s amazing through people like you the kind of information that’s getting out into the world it’s really it’s really i mean i wish i was 20 years old and trying to learn everything about all the things that i know a little bit about now because i just can’t even imagine how deep i could go if i you just get on the internet and start following all kinds of different podcasts and stuff oh yeah it’s overwhelming but yes it is it’s important i think all of us are contributing to yeah preserving that logging it and keeping it in posterity hopefully so yeah thank you so so much for steph really enjoyed it
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this is audiovisual cultures the podcast that explores different areas of the arts and media join me your host paula blair and the researchers practitioners and enthusiasts i meet along the way see our website at audiovisualculture.wordpress.com and other links in the show notes for more information for now enjoy the show hello thank you for tuning in to another episode of audiovisual cultures we’re taking a virtual trip to hollywood today with my very special guest pam munter who is a former actor a musician an author and a film his story and we do love those on this show we’ll mainly be talking to pam about her latest book of short stories and plays fading fame women of a certain age in hollywood published this year in 2021 with adelaide picks before that though i’d really love to give a very warm welcome to pam it’s so wonderful to have you on the show hi pam hi paulus thank you for having me this is quite a pleasure to be speaking to another film historian that’s a rare treat for me awesome that’s great i’m hoping we can get into some proper nerdy business if i film uh especially early film in hollywood um and i can learn a few things from me as well before we talk about your book as well just wanted to ask how are you doing where bites are you joining us from i live in palm desert california which is about two hours east of los angeles it’s in the desert it’s really interesting when you think back to early early cinema and read about basically what a desert california was you know the whole of it before hollywood was built out of that arid landscape we’re catching up with that a little bit later on with your work would you be happy to tell us a bit more about yourself and your work and your interests sure i had the good fortune i think to be born and raised in los angeles which is a stone’s throw from hollywood uh my parents they weren’t into the business at all nor were any of the neighbors they were pretty solid traditional blue collar kind of folks but my mother took me to a film when i was five years old believe it or not and i remember the movie even and i was hooked i thought you know that’s the kind of life i want to know more about i wanted to be in it i mean it was so different from my everyday life with housewives gossiping about their husbands and drinking coffee and that’s maybe crazy i just couldn’t imagine a life like that so i kept going to movies even as a kid i spent my babysitting money going to movies and where i grew up even though my parents weren’t in the business a lot of people were i went to school with some famous kids in my high school for instance there was ryan o’neal and sandra d and nancy sinatra and a lot of the kids of celebrities sitting next to me in my english class was a mousekateer if you remember those and so fame just didn’t seem that far away to me you know it seemed like a doable thing but back in those days paula there was no mass media telling us what these people really like that we saw on the screen the hollywood was controlled by five major studios and five white men who were lord master of their domain and the only thing we knew about these stars that we adored came from the publicity departments of those studios who funneled the information to movie magazines that was it that was all we had you know there was no cable tv there was no not even any uh national enquirer you know or any uh newspapers that would tell the truth because all of that was controlled by the studios who were very wealthy and usually pillars of their communities but you know i never quite bought that i always wondered even as a kid could all these people be so freaking happy all the time i didn’t understand you know we saw pictures of women and men hugging and there were no gay people of course they were invented later on
they were moving or they were vacationing or they were on the set and they’re all immaculately dressed and i just was so fascinated with that world well i realized very young that even though i loved it and i wanted to be a movie star as all kids did at that age i knew that probably wasn’t really likely so i went into other fields i actually became a clinical psychologist and practiced for a quarter of a century and saw a lot of celebrities in therapy which is interesting and fun for me but i always kept writing about the business it was something that fascinated me i wrote i don’t know maybe two dozen articles very lengthy articles on not so famous movie stars for some of the magazines like classic images and films of the golden age and the ones that told the truth this is after the era of the five studios and i love doing that because i was afraid that people like i don’t know joan blondell or celeste home or joan davis would be forgotten so i took a lot of time out of my life to do that so i was writing nonfiction that was my life i read it i wrote it i loved it never read fiction never liked fiction it was not very politically correct to say since i just produced a book of fiction but that’s the truth i had left the practice we closed it down because of managed care it was just so intrusive it was very hard to feel ethical about doing lengthy psychotherapy when there was so much intrusion into the process from the outside and i went into an mfa program in performing arts creative writing and performing arts and i wrote a autobiography a memoir called as long as i want to be and i was fine i got through with that and then the head of the department said you know you need a second field i thought oh i’m in real trouble now because this is the only one i know he said why don’t you try fiction oh man wow that’s like saying why don’t you fly to mars tomorrow morning you know i just didn’t know how to do it how to go about doing it but then i thought you know i have an awful lot of information about hollywood history in my head to serve no functional purpose at all to anyone what happens if i take some of those stories fictionalize them and in some cases make them anonymous some of the stories in the book fading fame aren’t about a specific movie star but about a collection of people thought maybe i could get away with that you know maybe we could call that fiction because it was now the stories i tell there’s one in particular about joan davis who was a vaudeville performer i don’t know if you’re familiar with that name her history was amazing really she was in radio she had her own shows on radio she was did films for years she had a hit television program called i married joan in the 50s and then there was nothing they canceled their show what happened to joan davis what happens to women who get too old for the studios for the public no they’re no longer desirable even female comediennes like joan davis apparently had a shelf life that ran out so i wondered i wondered a lot i had written some place years ago that she had had an affair with another comedian named eddie cantor who’s also very famous more famous than she actually vaudeville movies all that kind of state a lot of stage work television i thought i’m gonna make a story out of that i mean i don’t know if it’s true i don’t know how long it went on but coincidentally both joan davis and eddie cantor had had homes just a few miles from where i live well as a former researcher i couldn’t help myself i had to drive over there and take a look which i did in joan davis’s house they were working on it i don’t know what they were doing but obviously she didn’t live there anymore she was long dead as was cancer but there were open doors and i thought ah should i go in and look around you know it helped my story maybe if i knew exactly what the setting was and i stopped myself come on come on this isn’t a research piece this is fiction back off but i discovered that even though they had long ended their affair if they ever had one they only lived a mile and a half apart in the palm springs area so what a great story this could be so that was the kind of way i fictionalized real stories for fading fame and there were a couple of others like that where i took the a nub just a little nugget of the reality and turned it into something i thought i could use that’s brilliant to hear yes i wanted to thank you as well for so generously sharing the text of your book with me i really enjoyed the short stories i didn’t manage to get to the place but i really enjoyed all of the stories and that one was really poignant in particular and i was wanting to ask you about to what extent you was anything from historical documentation and how true even is that in the first place um and then how much of it was imagined you know and played with that sort of thing so that’s really interesting to hear that stuff was in my head you know i i didn’t have to do the research i knew that joan davis had been an alcoholic which he is in my story also because of biographies written by other actors who worked with her and talked about her difficulty functioning sometimes because of alcohol in fact a lot of the women in these stories drank too much it was one way of coping i suppose with the loss of their fame you know the people who were in that era of show business had nothing else many of them started very young in mary pickford’s case she was on stage at six supporting her entire family on the vaudeville stage not much education which is true of all of these women none of them were well educated or college graduates few of them were high school graduates for that matter and they didn’t go through the normal developmental stages so their lives were filled with dare i say fame or the acquisition of it and when that was gone it’s like their identity had just been stripped away there was not much left and as you say it’s poignant to see people who were so talented uh mary pickford is a great example of that and she was the first female executive in hollywood she ran her own studio big star in the 20s she was called america’s sweetheart married douglas fairbanks and they were this dashing couple all over the papers and that’s also in my story because anybody who knows hollywood history knows mary pickford i didn’t really have explained who she was but a lot of her success was due to her screenwriter francis marion uh and they became good friends now i have them doing francis marion wanting a little more from mary than friendship but clearly fictionalized i hope i think i don’t know who knows this stuff but mary pickford had such a sad ending she ran the silent films ran out and she ran out i mean there was not much left she had gone through her entire career even up to the age of 40 playing young girls with curly wrinkly hair and at 40 you know you just can’t get away with that too much anymore and the public didn’t want to see her as the actor she had become as mary pickford so she kind of faded away the interesting part was that francis marion went straight up from there she won two academy awards for screenwriting the first woman i think to win two academy awards for writing film and mary who’s really the sad part to me is not just dissolving in alcohol which is sad enough but the fact that she lived in this mansion in hollywood from the early 1920s through two husbands and ended up living there still as she died you know you think about movie stars norma desmond you know the famous fictional character in sunset boulevard and she wasn’t too far from that it was a hard story to write but i thought it was a story that needed to be told even fictionalized because that’s what happens to women who get too old they get thrown away yes i had thought about that comparison with sunset boulevard.com was in my mind quite a bit when i was reading some of those earlier stories and how that’s depicted and i mean it’s made into a film noir and surrounded by you and murder and everything it’s glammed up a bit but there’s so much about what happened and and who didn’t make it when the talkies came in really sad yeah it is sad when technology comes in like that a lot of people get left behind actually with most of the men who got left behind the women get uh jettisoned because their age mostly you know the film moguls want someone they can imagine having sex with and once they got into their late 20s no sorry you know next they didn’t want the ones that actually they had signed the contracts i recently watched bombshell i don’t know if you’ve seen that film but that’s a very contemporary example of that very sort of thing happening at fox news based on a real story it’s very prescient so although your stories are set in the past they’re set in another century depressingly now it’s a very prescient issue is that idea of women needing to be stuck at a certain age and having value only because of what they look like and it doesn’t matter how talented they are or how committed they are how hard they work or any of it yes it’s still very much with us i particularly enjoyed the stories jerry’s interview and the curtain never falls i think because as well as those stories that look at perhaps the more negative impact of all of this context those two stories they have a bit of a lift in them and the characters that are depicted geraldine leonard and maggie bose they get to be quite heroic in their own ways so i was wondering you know if you had any thoughts on that because there are more positive ending stories in the book as well but also are there any any other favorites of yours or any other highlights you’d like to mention well the curtain river falls came out of a single line i heard i don’t know if you’re familiar with rosemary she’s gone now but she was probably best known for a television show called dick van dyke show she was one of the main characters in that but she had a long and illustrious career again on stage nightclubs and stuff like that she had there was a documentary about her just before she died and the interviewer said you know how are you doing and i don’t know she says you know at night when i’m in bed i go over my act i thought ah how poignant is that here’s a woman 80 something at that point and she’s still thinking she’s going to get back to it so there’s a story there’s got to be a story in that and everything that came out of maggie beau’s story came from that one line in the documentary so you never know when uh inspiration is going to strike actually my favorite story i think is the one that’s called dinner with daddy and it’s the story of irene selznick irene mayer selznick who was the younger daughter of elbie mayer the kingpin of mgm really one of the founders of mgm as in metro golden mayor and i have her in the story coming back to the family mansion in bel air which i have actually seen and uh it’s been years since she’d been there she doesn’t know why she’s there it’s a family dinner and daddy’s being daddy and ordering people around and there’s a butler and there’s a younger sister or older sister actually who is on her constantly and all like most of us when we go home as adults some of the old patterns come back so easily in spite of ourselves and we see that in dinner with daddy there’s a lot of history and dinner with daddy that i threw in sort of incidentally i have irene challenging her father on why he would invite charlie chaplin to dinner with a high school girl well it’s again a fact that charlie liked young girls i don’t know if he ever had dinner it’ll be mayor’s house i don’t know if they were friends i don’t know if they work together but it was an irresistible tidbit i also threw in uh in the story about mary pickford a tidbit about peg entwistle who is a sort of a footnote to history she uh was a young actress who is probably best known for killing herself by jumping off the hollywood sign which is very sad i bet i have her at the dinner party with mary pickford and francis maria so any story where i can insert real history even as a parenthetical aside it’s just more fun for me and i think that’s why i like the selznick dinner with daddy story and that’s one that ends happily too incidentally i mean she one of the reasons the family is there is that they’re announcing their divorce and irene helps her mother learn to cope with what she knows will be an awful ending in the family again i don’t know if that happened i do know that irene sort of made her bones as a producer on broadway in the streetcar named desire in 1949 she completely changed careers which one of the things that makes this such a positive story i think she wasn’t a victim like some of the others sort of feels like they were she made the best of a bad situation married to an awful person david selznick who was obsessive-compulsive and a womanizer she had the good sense to leave so some of the stories as you say are positive i don’t know that whether they end well or not affects how i feel about them some of them are harder to write than others everything that mattered was very hard to write because it’s about a real person who actually did kill herself by whom i knew so that made it a little tougher to write in many cases i had met these people in different settings i had met doris day for instance a couple of times i was a huge fan of tourist day i consider myself the world’s expert on doris day so i couldn’t not put a story about her in the book even though it’s it’s kind of dark comedy more than positive or negative and she just never learns her lesson and never did accidentally right up to the end she always put her life in disreputable men’s hands it was a fun book to write really and and as you suggest all the stories are quite different we have young women in their 40s who have been shipped out because of age and we have older women like ethel barrymore who’s probably the oldest subject who is on set with frank sinatra doing a film in which she kind of it’s not a walk-on but it’s a character part it’s not what she has been used to doing and that was hard to write because i knew that she struggled in her later years and i knew she was in that movie because i had seen it it was one of my favorite films i knew the lines and everything was embarrassing and i just had to include her in it somehow so all these stories are a part of me really and they involve people that i felt some some emotional connection with in jerry’s interview to you mentioned she’s in sort of a nursing home sort of a last stage of life dementia process and i knew an actress like that i kind of watched her go through all those difficult stages and she had people around her which gary didn’t have she didn’t have family at least in this story but i thought it was an important story to tell because all the memories you know when you get older like that come flooding back not necessarily in sequence you know she’s an unreliable narrator we don’t know if these things are true she talks about a murderer you know we don’t know if this actually happened the plays are a little different you say you hadn’t hadn’t read those they are also a little bit about real people but they’re lighter there are dark comedies intended to be kind of oh my god did she say that kind of situation same theme though it’s you know the post-metoo era what happens to women after they pay their dues what do they do themselves and how do they cope with that and what are they willing to do to get it back and one of the stories we see one of the women in the plays janet drake private eye we see two women who are fighting over the same role and they’re both older you know they’ve played it once one of them played it on television one of them played it in on the radio which tells you their age and there’s a movie now being made with this character and both of these women want that part well what are they gonna do to get it it was a fun thing to write because i sort of knew those people in a way i hope you’ll enjoy reading the plays when you get to yeah i’m looking forward to it yes just thinking about drawing out more on some of those things that you’ve mentioned as well that idea of competitiveness just runs right through the whole thing that how so many of these actresses and writers and musicians performers in general they were pitted against each other and pitted against other people and new things coming in all the time and and just how much that eats away at them and there’s a lack of really developing deeper relationships that i hope has changed to an extent these days um it seems that actors are more or at least they will maybe continue to perform solidarity and collaboration but i don’t know i feel like some of that’s more genuine these days and so that’s part of the pathos i think of so many of those stories is that they’re underpinned by that competitiveness yeah i think that what has changed today for the better has been the strength of women’s networking you know they didn’t do that then they were at the mercy of men sadly there are still no women at the head of studios they’re still all white men but more at the secondary and tertiary levels of authority and they have helped other women i think rise you know it wasn’t until the 70s that another woman ran a major studio after mary pickford in the 20s took him 50 years to do it which is pretty amazing and discouraging but sadly that was not to last that was a short-lived era we had sherry lansing at 20th century fox and i think she was a ceo at paramount for a couple of years we had don steele at columbia and amy pascal and stacey schneider at universal but i don’t think there are i think a couple of them are dead but i don’t think any of them are in power anymore again the competitiveness at that level was uh every bit as vicious if not more so than competing for a part against a younger actress it’s a tough life you’re never quite good enough yeah it’s that idea of even if you’re more than good enough you just don’t look the way somebody might want you to look or you’re not prepared to do something that a producer wants you to do in private i mean hopefully the landscape’s changing because you mentioned as well earlier that of course these were all white men highly privileged people at the tops of these studios and today we maybe don’t have studios but there are certainly maybe independent production companies so somebody like aveda renee can have her own production company and you know in a way we’ve come so far but it’s been such a difficult fight for somebody like that to you not only have the gender barrier but the racial one as well so hopefully that landscape is changing maybe not fast enough but i don’t know there is a legacy to what these women suffered as you depict well we still have netflix and amazon you know to control the uh cinematic universe as you say there are smaller independents but then there’s people like harvey weinstein who ran them one of those smaller independents who’s notoriously predatory of course we know that he’s in jail which is a good thing and and many of his cohorts have had to resign their positions there’s a group of men at cbs who had to resign because of sexual harassment even feminist ellen degeneres had to explain to her fans why producers were harassing women on the set and fired them or they quit i’m not sure what happened actually so you’re right it still goes on i think that women banding together to help one another climb to wherever as they want to go is probably the best antidote for the sexism in the industry and talent is wonderful but as we know it’s not enough yeah very true
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i was wondering as well pam who do you expect to be the reader for this book and do you have hopes for it it would be great if your book could be part of that landscape of change yes i would hope so i’ve been a feminist since i was about eight and tried to get girls into little league that wasn’t possible back then uh so i’m hoping that it will ring that bell loudly that this is what we do to women and what we’ve always done to women in this business and we need to rethink that because it’s not worth it you know people shelf life it shouldn’t be a matter of shelf life it should be a matter what they can contribute and for how long my publicist was telling me that a lot of the people who are reviewing it are women so i would guess that’s the natural audience i mean the subtitle is women of a certain age in hollywood but i think anyone who is curious about how things were you don’t have to be a film historian to be curious about how a harvey weinstein could happen and be such an ogre for so many years you know how did he get away with that you know the casting couch goes all the way back and it was a normal accepted event if a woman wanted to be up on that screen she had to lie down on the couch first that was just unfortunately a given i don’t know that that’s true anymore i don’t think it is certainly there are those predators out there but it’s not as widespread as it once was and i think anybody who cares about that issue will be curious about these stories at least i hope so it was fun to write because of the feminist background i’ll say that because i was a clinical psychologist for so many years i felt that i could get inside their heads and give the reader some idea about how women think about these things how they process that kind of oppressiveness and disappointment and uh edging process itself you know as we know some of them did pretty well with that i think the strength to my writing is always the internal dialogue it’s not so much what happens it’s how the the woman processes the information and that was extremely fun to write because i think i know more about that probably than anything having been in practice so many years yes i think there are a lot of the characters who tend to almost build themselves back up again by tearing down another woman there’s quite a lot of that and that’s part of the system that’s part of the culture you know you have to really put it in that context and remember that this is conditioning that everybody’s going through that’s right part of that competitive nature the adversarial nature of the business i think continues i i don’t think that’ll change there’s so few slots for stardom and so many people will want to get there and not just women of course but women i think are subjected to a different kind of criteria than men are men can age gracefully carry grant i think is the greatest clark gable the old stars i mean they they acted until they died in their old age and there aren’t many women like that you think of who they might angela lansbury is a favorite of mine and she’s what 93 or something 94 now and it’s acting up until last year i don’t know if she’s still working that i mean there are women who can do it but that’s because she’s so powerful she has produced her own television series has the money and the backing to pretty much do what she wants there aren’t many performers who have reached that pinnacle that she has yes i think they start to get thin in the ground in the uk we’ve got people like judy dench who’s in her 80s now um i think helen mirren would probably be in that category i think she’s in her 70s you know so i think in a way it’s loosened up a bit it has changed but you have to build a lot of power to have that level of control yeah and you can count them on one hand or maybe two if you’re lucky yeah i think there’s still so much discussion of what these women see stars what they do with their bodies what they are socially permitted to do and expected to do and often being hauled over the coals for doing something they’re expected to do that they get criticized for not doing and what are they meant to do you know because i think there’s instances of or there are mentions of facelifts and geoplastic surgery and that sort of thing quite a bit in the book and these are just necessities that especially hollywood stars have had to meet but yet even today the headlines are very derogatory towards people who do anything cosmetic with their bodies there’s still say pressure on people you when when somebody’s had a baby for example to get that weight back off as soon as possible and it feels quite glacial any change in mindsets there i agree i agree in fact there are pictures in the press of mostly women who’ve had bad plastic surgery we don’t see that but men are having it too you know they are under the same pressure that women are to appear to be younger how sad that is i mean the people you’ve mentioned and i’ve mentioned even katherine hepburn who worked almost to the end was old and grizzled and beautiful you know it’s a different standard perhaps that we need to evolve to where the aging process is a thing of beauty not something to be shunned and plastic surgerized out of existence that’s it yeah i mean there’s so much talk now about body positivity and loving your body as it is but yeah there’s still so much tension with you need to be this sheep and that size and hide your wrinkles and dye your grey hairs and all of this stuff i just want people to be able to breathe yes it’s a silly example maybe but i’ve been watching um star trek voyager and there’s the character of seven of nine and played by jerry ryan and she’s squeezed into these corsets and she’s made as tiny as possible and you in these skin tight outfits and i just look at her and i think gosh that’s really painful looking and yet all these teenage boys 20 odd years ago were getting very excited over you know and it’s very strange to me but the whole barbie doll thing you know when i was a kid you could put your fingers around your waist easily you know with one hand the thumb and forefinger and what are we telling girls if that’s the standard to which they have to adhere you know it’s unrealistic and not very healthy i might add be part of the conversation with av cultures pod on twitter instagram and facebook pam was there anything else you’d like to tell us about some of your other work as well while we’re chatting and you know because you’ve mentioned your psychology background and your autobiography as well and you know is there anything else you’d like to point out that might be interesting for listeners to think about too well i think as a writer i’ve pushed myself beyond my comfortable limits writing fiction and writing plays for that matter and i would suggest to people that they do the same thing that they make the best use of themselves they can to use themselves up so to speak to access all their skills and develop some they didn’t know they had to sounds corny but to live life as fully as possible because it’s a it’s a carpe diem world you know we don’t know how long we have and why not take advantage of what you do have and make the most of it whether it’s helping other people or you know writing books like i do in essays i have essays up the wazoo and on my website pamundr.com by the way you know why not it’s part of making life meaningful and you know if you don’t do it who will that’s great yes because i was going to ask you as well if you had any movie advice or just anything you’ve learned over the years as you say you were um you’ve met so many and spent time with so many of these types of celebrity before and i mean if there was somebody who’s maybe aspiring to or is just starting out in the entertainment industry as well as um those really important messages you’ve just said you is there any advice you would give to anyone in that position well i think what we’ve learned from at least the stories in fading fame is the importance of getting an education when i was a kid i thought that walking down sunset boulevard or going to the brown derby would mean i would be discovered you know and some talent agent would come up to me and say you’re the one i want for my next movie well there’s still some of that fantasy i think going on among young actors that if they put themselves in certain settings they will be discovered well if that is ever going to happen you need to get grounded in education first and i mean standard education honor doesn’t mean actors studio education i mean a good liberal arts education so you have a sense of how the world is not just your little world or the world of show business but all of it and it will also stand you in good stead when the fame starts to fade if you’re ever fortunate enough to be famous it’ll give you something more to it than just seeing your name in a marquee and sadly the women in my book fading fame that’s all they wanted and pretty much all they got for the most part wasn’t enough it’s our responsibility to fill our life responsibly i think those are really accent points that puts me in mind again of so many of the characters in the stories they don’t understand their own downfall quite a lot of the time because as you say there’s not that basic education they don’t understand the maths around the money that is disappearing on they don’t understand what because they don’t have basic legal understanding either and again it calls to mind for me the um character of geraldine leonard who has the humility to go and get a job in a typing pool when her work dries up i mean i love that about her i love that she just didn’t care she just i need a job i could do that and she had had that education to be able to do that you know i really loved that part in the story we had her feet on the ground and a lot of these women sadly did not she was a good example of that she knew what she had to do and she went and answered fan mail for an actor who was more famous than she would ever be again as you say humility it’s really nice to see him somebody who’s almost famous she wasn’t quite famous but almost famous yeah and we so often forget about actors who play the smaller characters or supporting characters it was so lovely as well to just have it i really i think that was my favorite story i just i just raced through it because i just loved her so much you know i just wanted to give her a cuddle or something i really admired her you know that she’d been a supporting actor to a much bigger actor and was doing a lot of work in westerns and then tv westerns i was that a bit of a reference to rawhide oh no it was probably before wrong i didn’t okay it was uh i think probably early 50s is where i i had her having her career at small studios i think if she’d been on rawhide she would have been more famous real she didn’t have that happen to her i liked her too i liked her a lot as i was writing her and you know sad that her mental faculties were declining and as you say i wanted part of me wanted to go and say it’s okay it’s okay this is gonna happen to you and you’ll be all right everybody cares about you and you know just a lovely person i think yeah i think she was awesome and because it was sad in a way the dimension how that affects her but her attitude was just so lovely and positive that he just thought oh she’s awesome she’s just so awesome and she doesn’t know how awesome she is it’s great i really fell in love with her she seemed to accept any you know whether it was famous or having to get a job or losing her faculties or having mismatched shoes or whatever it was nothing seemed to bother her very much it’s admirable i think i wish i were selling flat absolutely yes it felt like life goes it’s a really lovely example actually that she wasn’t bothered that she just i think i will shoot him oh well yes oh god i’m glad you like that one yeah i did actually it was one of the last ones i wrote i felt i needed to have something lag ethel you know where the person is clearly coming to the end ethel was not declining mentally but she was declining physically but jerry had uh some issues with dementia as you say and it didn’t diminish her enjoyment of her life though as you say it was uh inspiring that she could look back and still wonder what happened in certain instances and and still miss the man she loved and was with just good memories that she had which is wonderful i would hope that we would all have good memories in our 80s yeah or be a total hero like maggie yes yes indeed pam is there anything else you’d like to chat about today anything we haven’t got to that you really want to say well i could tell you how it all started really the writing thing oh yeah it’s weird it was strange when i was a little girl there was a republic studios and monogram studios which are bmc studios and best sold their entire film load to television stations which were having trouble filling the content and so they would show old movies all the time and one time i saw a movie and i was just captivated by the people in the film there were teenagers and i was just a kid i was probably eight nine maybe and then i saw a couple of weeks later there was another film with the same cast on tv and every time after that i saw it was in tv guide was what we used to those days i would somehow get sick you know i would get a headache or i just couldn’t bring myself to go to school i would come up with some faux illness so i could stay home and watch these movies and there were a whole bunch of them and i couldn’t figure out who they were and how many there were and when i got older and started to do this writing about people i’ve looked up the cast which you could do more easily at that point you know years later decades later and i found that the star of the these movies was freddie stewart and it’s probably the only thing he ever did were these eight movies starring quote the teenagers two words uh and it had the same cast june pricer was in it i wanted to write about him and i wanted to write about them because it was unfinished business from my childhood who were they well the only person left alive was noel neal who was best known as the original lois lane of superman fame and she was still alive she was in her 70s i think by the time we met and i spent a lot of time with actually we became friends a lot of time asking about these movies well they were all shot in two weeks this wasn’t rocket science this wasn’t metro golden mayor if you know what i mean they get the thing and they if they made a mistake they just keep going they just roll right over the mistake and i think it was that that got me interested in knowing more about these people from my own childhood that i saw on television and in movies that transfixed me for some reason freddie stewart had a glorious a conscious soprano voice he sounded male certainly but it was very high and clarion and in fact one of the songs he sang penthouse serenade was one of the songs i did on stage in new york when i was performing because it was like an ode to him you know he had made such a difference in my life in so many ways i met his daughter and he was long dead by the time i was writing but it’s little things in life you can grab onto like that and value and uh you can change your life because you’ve just had so many experiences weird part of being alive it’s supposed to be interesting yeah yeah make it interesting yeah you’ve been so generous with your time and your stories and everything and um it’s been so interesting to hear about that process of doing the historical research and carrying it with you for such a long time and then doing something creative with it that’s a really interesting approach and hopefully it will attract people who maybe aren’t too bothered about reading history or biographies or anything but might go for those you know if they’re framed as stories and you know they’re pretty quick to read as well you know you can sit down and read one um and not that long an amount of time and you know it’s very digestible and they stay with you i think they’re you know they’re visually i think quite striking too so it’s been really great to hear just about that creative process but also just the background that you’re coming from and the you know the psychology of these people and what they what they were negotiating with in their own minds as well as in the outside world i can’t thank you enough for taking so much time oh thank you for having me let me put in a plug for fading fame it’s available on amazon.com also as an e-book as well as a paperback so if your listeners are interested in knowing more about some of these stories they can find it at the end of their keyboard brilliant and i will be sure to put those links for the book and for your website in our show notes wherever people are finding this as well so you’ve no excuse but to go and check them out oh great pam hunter it’s been just such pleasure i’ve really really enjoyed spending this time with you and thank you so much for your generosity with your time and ideas and taking so much out of your morning well thank you paul it’s a pleasure to be with you thank you for having me
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this is audio visual cultures the podcast that explores different areas of the arts and culture of production with me Paula Blair visit Petri on dot com forward slash AP cultures to find out more and to join the policy welcome to another audio visual cultures podcast I am polo player and deployed to I have a treat for you today I am beyond excited to welcome filmmaker and historian Dr Gary D. roots Gary thank you so much for joining me hi are you and where do we find G. well we find this in many places during a pandemic mainly I suppose the best dancers at home like we're so often confine let me start by saying thanks so much for inviting me to talk %HESITATION I've noted your research for years and so it's always great to have the chance to chat with you though I'm physically in Orlando Florida now my part of my heart always belongs to the north of Ireland where we first met but more than anything else the best answer like I guess we will give us %HESITATION and hold you know in the middle of this horrendous play sets just as you mentioned that there anyway Carrie and just for listeners to carry and I have known each other for I would say it longer than either of us wants to add minutes to remind my grey hair anyway mine's coming might mean well on the way later the batter's eye below there's also there's always hair dye I'm definitely considering that right now so you like you know you're always like fabulous I had the privilege of being taught spicy garlic when he arrives at queen's university Belfast in two thousand five and that was the final year of my undergraduate degree and she also %HESITATION where the internal examiner for my peach state which is very exciting remember all I remember all of it very well I was so excited to get to Belfast means and it was so great the entire cohort of students you work hard on or so such extremely creative intelligent and dedicated students far more than I'd work with at the undergraduate level before it was extremely exciting and of course we shared an interest in Irish cinema and that became of course quirk to your PhD work and so I was so proud to be a small part of that process and and your success with that project no that's very kind Kerry you've been writing more picks than I can keep up west so I think it be nice said start talking about some of the methods okay and really get into a your research areas so we'll see what where you want to go with this it might be you get sick at the most recent thing out of the way because what we're all living through the man it is quite relevant something you from working on anyway which I like to tell us a bit about your hi cinema has been affected by epidemics research of course thank you yeah thank you for that question it's an area of research that became very interesting to me many years ago I was actually an undergraduate at the time and I was going through as it is interested in film history I was going through these old publications like variety The Hollywood Reporter and all of those and I would be turning the pages and looking for things of interest to me on subjects like the horror film one of my other areas of interest I kept seeing over and over again in these old publications yellowing crumbling publications from the nineteen twenties thirties forties I kept saying so many movie theater tragedies that had affected audiences and some of them we we maybe know a little bit about a film like %HESITATION inglorious bastards the queen Tarantino film for example picks up on the flammability of film and the fact that some fire sometimes happens it could kill people and so I was saying those things as they occurred in American these old newspapers these old trade publications and I kept saying over and over again and I started photo copying all of it because I thought there is you know I've never heard about this and it was five years and it was bombings it was sometimes murders that people would use the darkness of the movie theater to shoot another person for example all these very tragic stories but I found quite interesting in that they were so forgotten and it ended up culminating in a book of mine over a debt about a decade ago called the perils of movie going in America you know all these regrettably bad things could happen by just going to the movies but one part of it that I should now introduces the fact that along with everything I've just mentioned and other horrors you know they were they were unfortunately you know people would get groped frankly in the darkness you know %HESITATION so there was sexual assaults and things that would happen I mean a lot of this of course exacerbated by the cover of darkness because you know what it's a rather interesting thing although we're so used to in today's world to go into a movie theater it's set in the darkness with strangers all around as you know that was a rather new thing to do at the end of the nineteenth century to plunge into darkness with strangers but with all of the horrible things that could happen one of the others that became a chapter was the sheer number of pandemics and epidemics that affected movie going a century ago and even a little more recent the most famous of the move would have been the nineteen eighteen influenza the great influenza pandemic so much has been said of it lately where century later it's I suppose and pandemic terms the nearest example the nearest touchstone for us during all of this that's true for our movie going situation as well and so that became so much of what I was writing about in that book although there were other epidemics like polio like scarlet fever those tended to be more %HESITATION regional in America more short term you know shutting down a feature for a few weeks sometimes they were moored strictly demographic you know sometimes that theaters would remain open during polio epidemics but children Morgan made it because they were the ones that would contract Holyoke but the pandemic of nineteen eighteen cost most theaters in America to shop for about half of nineteen eighteen hands in an eerie precursor to today's world to re open and then have to shut again because of the surges of second way each you know the desire for everybody for their own mental health but also on the exhibitor side of the fence to start making money again to not go out of business to be able to sell movie theater seats again take a it's again so so this is something of my research is actually began when I was an undergraduate it ended up being a book and %HESITATION it's interesting how I don't know if it's the return of the repressed or what it is but you can do a project and then years later only years later is its relevance maybe %HESITATION or becomes more Roman you know the research because right when the pandemic fit and everything began to shop in America in March of twenty twenty I got a phone call from the Chicago Tribune saying Hey it looks like you're the only person that you know has written about this before and then that led to me talking more about it writing my own updates about it in the New York Daily News and and elsewhere because it's one of those moments where hopefully you know our research can have meaning for the world outside of a dusty library shelf yeah well I mean in a way it quite fits with your interest in horror because it is quite all horrific in its own way all of that stuff yes very much so in fact my op ed in the New York Daily News was published at Halloween last year and it was actually in some ways drawing the very connection you're talking about including the red death and post famous story the masque of the red death to our present situation because a lot of horror films have been horror stories traditionally have been about plagues both real like the bubonic plague as well as kind of concocted like post story did creating it like for the sake of of scaring people and and these things have continued through the years you know I know there's a getting some slight contagion have obviously been watched probably and thought about probably as much or more the past years when they were first you know released so there is a a very scary you know connection here one of George Romero's stating horror films you know where I'm going is always are at two steps ahead of me crazies your main course Romero having been the director of night of the Living Dead and dawn of the dead most famously but he made some of the crazies about a an epidemic and of course that was remade even World War Z. %HESITATION you know some of some of the zombie craze of recent years some of the stories about how the zombies get started or a pandemic related epidemic related as I recall it was probably the first season of the walking dead yeah where the journey of survival was leading to the CDC Erica Yoon the center for disease control and that's another odd thing I haven't I haven't really thought that much about it or written that much about it but clearly that there is a curiosity however accidental and so many zombie films in America being about epidemics pandemics in the years not too many years before and leading up to our present situation I think twenty eight days later it comes from monkey so there's that species jump that happens is quite interesting to think about it nine oh yes which is very fast and because obviously there's talks about where did this come from was it from a bad or so forth and that's been true of some prior diseases and epidemics and so forth in in human history in order they originating from other species of animals it's true of the folklore too isn't it because you know you get bit by a vampire you know and %HESITATION you know unless you like the empires and sometimes I should go for it but but you know so well either well or or rob but there is that characteristic you're Ryan and twenty eight days later was Gus was such a watershed moment I think for a lot of us that are interested in horror films and interested in British horror films and how it was seen at the time to really inject new life into and may be injected in a pandemic world is even an interesting word but inject new life into the British horror film that was so well known in the sixties and seventies and and it's very much again a key into and and maybe pressing of our current situation would certainly I don't mean to make light of what we're trying to study and understand it and %HESITATION and not make light of it but I do think that there are some interesting yeah there so there's a lot of interesting interactions between horror and %HESITATION plagues including our current pandemic yeah I suppose that's not saying is playing out scenarios I find in the arts so the movies are there a matching necklace what happened this could be the series of events that happens and you know but if people are in their own may face at the minute I specific way of understanding what's happening to us because we're paid in our little boxes were stuck at home I suppose we've only got our imagination I don't really know where I'm going with that I'm just thinking sorry if it's just playing out scenarios of what could potentially happen because there's such a big difference between a maybe like a zombie land and twenty eight days later ones very serious in the other one isn't spring yet there by essentially the same thing %HESITATION yes yes well and that makes my mind go fast and so many places that your faults there because you're raising so many interesting issues and and I think that certainly there's this fascinating connection between horror and comedy yeah you know as genres maybe two sides of the same coin sometimes they've been set aside I think that they're two of the most consistently popular genres in film history they both emerged basically in the eighteen nineties and they they really don't have much of a of a period of disappearing honest in the way that say musicals or western institute the consistent popularity of boats and everything from what we might call dark comedy which can be so often in horror films to the fact the company itself is I think inherently subversive somebody is so often on the end of the joke so to speak you know that maybe a lot of people are laughing children you know on a playground but then there's the one crying because they're the one being made fun of you know comedy can be rather in its own way so cruel so I think that there's some real connections there and I think that that's true throughout horror film history which we see played out in in two basic ways that one would be that the serious horror films in many cases what inject moments of comedy relief comic relief the idea particularly in areas like the nineteen twenties thirties and afterwards forties fifties we'll have something really scary but then we'll have somebody make a joke of it a couple of minutes later to help the idea was to relieve the tension of the movie goer it's just been put through the trauma of screen terror and then across the other trajectory if there's two main ones the other trajectory would be that kind of zombie land approach where the horror and comedy or combined it wants into something that may be dark I mean one of the things that always attracted me about certain types of Irish literature going back you know would be the darkly comic sensibilities and I think horror at times has gone down that road where horror and comedy or in other words he added he ends in creating the sensations and sometimes at those moment very peculiar situate sensations and emotional responses because you know when something's darkly comic does it frighten us do we laugh we laugh is is it an uncomfortable kind of laughter I think all of that's very fascinating and I think you're right that the imagination can help in these ways and sometimes it's maybe life imitating art or art imitating life and maybe it's an interesting I think in the history of horror even thinking back before cinema you know literature painting visual culture folklore there's kind of I think interesting kind of dance macabre here when you talk about twenty eight days later on I'm reminded one of my forthcoming publications is about the unproduced film revolts of the dead which would have been in nineteen thirty two or like thirty two early thirty three film directed by tod Browning okay Brandon was very yeah you know Browning I'm not in the list probably due in may nineteen thirty one Dracula you may nineteen thirty to fill freaks he's considered one of the you know one of the great horror film directors of course like all directors there were projects he wanted to do that didn't happen and I was able to locate all of his notes in the script drafts for a film that he never made in a forthcoming book and it's called revolt of the dead hand of course Browning live through the pandemic of nineteen eighteen nineteen and his film revolt of the dead seems like it's harking back to the nineteen eighteen epidemic because it's about a kind of a %HESITATION route in which doctor that wants to turn the whole world into the living dead knitting which spread across the whole world you know like like twenty eight days later like a %HESITATION World War Z. you know he's basically wanted to create albeit with kind of a supernatural origin a kind of pandemic of the Living Dead and in the script increasingly people start getting knocks on their door from dead relative it's who aren't the same people go to movie theaters they go to restaurants that go to the to the night clubs for young people used to maybe go more often for dancing and music and soon the dead infected dad over populate the living and and M. scary where you literally in the script you go to a restaurant and they're more dead people at it then there are the living and so this is kind of I think what you're talking about you know that it's a I think it's an interesting dance where it's back and forth you know I mean I think as so often he was in horror you know PO weekend with the mask of the red death was kind of a pressing it ahead of the game in some ways you know so it's fascinating it's it's horrifying but it's very from state from a scholarly terms as well as I think moviegoing turns audience terms you know these things can help us I think that's one of the great things about horror potentiality Horace to be cathartic to be scared through entertainment but maybe from the safety of our of our whole social media says it's probably a good please send CV asking a bait probably one of your best known picks UP the birth of the American horror film because certainly those of us who are young we think we invented everything and actually as you say it started right at the start of cinnamon I suppose for anybody listening he might be under the misconception that old films and silent films are very stuffy industry at a fast what would you say about that well I I'm always looking for ideas here about convincing people of the merits of going back to look at earlier years of failed and even how to work with the young filmmakers and %HESITATION young film students and so forth you know how to get them interested in hearing aids before for example in the twenty first century %HESITATION especially a period of black and white cinema of even silent films the earliest days of cinema I don't know the best approach to getting people I've tried various mechanisms to get them excited I think there's a few ways that I try and not least of which is the fact that some of the best known filmmakers today certainly in the western way well certainly in my home country of America would be people like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino filmmakers whose films and their careers their interviews everything about them exemplify that their achievements and and and and I will be in the limit to just those two but there are two examples of names most people I think now they're films constantly reference built upon the tradition of cinema they are lifelong students of film history and and they of course attribute their success in some measure to their knowledge of film history and we can go back to so many other filmmakers right think that's true as well some of the great film makers are among the biggest collectors of film history and film memorabilia and so forth because they love the cinema and if you love the cinema there's not a starting date on it in other words you can love films made before the year two thousand and I think also I would say to younger filmmakers or trying to convince people to share my hopefully boundless enthusiasm and passion is if you're wanting to make great films the film genres we love have existed so long be it comedy or horror as we've already said or others if you're wanting to develop script ideas if you're wanting to think about cinema in your own ideas being part of the genres indeed we could argue the film itself is a genre I argue that in the same way Mekelle box used to argue that the novel was a genre whatever its topic or focus speed a western novel or a you know a drama or what have you but it all still in other words what we try to argue is that you can find incredible ideas in the past it can be because the genre is always reinvention it's building on what has been done before the cinema is about that sometimes obviously in the form of direct remakes you know as we talk a new Texas chainsaw massacre film is about to come out the first one was made in the seventies so sometimes this of course most obviously happens with the three makes but it could have been more vague ways with story lines with themes it can happen even with you know I I grew up loving George Lucas there still the Star Wars universe multiverse whatever it is universe I suppose with the Mandalorian everybody loves and Amanda Morgan is doing what Lucas did in the seventies by using a lot of white transitions fallen out of favor for decades but that he loved from the nineteen thirties films and serials he watched in so it doesn't have to be about finding old story lines that are interesting about finding some techniques that were popular once upon a time but not as much now and so I think here is in Willits fountain an incredible reservoir of possible inspiration of all types for young filmmakers even in direct terms right before I came to Ireland this spring before I came what I ride in Ireland in the north of Ireland that full in Belfast at queens and met you in so many wonderful students the previous spring I had my last group of American students and one of them wanted to make a short film called director's cut that was going to be a short horror movie and the cut was going to have in the title more than one meeting as you can gather probably going you know the slasher time about ourselves he got fairly far along before he realized and then I met him and had to relay the unfortunate news nectar already did a film called director's cut it was a horror film that at least in the most basic idea that you get from that title it had been done before and so I think even if you're committed to doing something extraordinarily noted perhaps you're interested in all of Asgard or experimental you want to do something that's never been done before it does help to know film history so you're not reinventing the wheel as that student was trying to do and fortunately he moved on to another project and that was wonderful for him but he had gotten far long before I met him with something that was on knowingly copy and past so if you are going to work with the past it's best to do of course is a very knowing away which is one of the things course yeah that we love about people like Quentin Tarantino and again so many other filmmakers that work in this same kind of way no yeah so I wanted to see Askey a fight your work on political safe because you've written probably I I don't know maybe the most comprehensive biographies of lego say and because he is a figure that we certainly anyone who knows her stuff about horror film they know he's out is so I was wondering if you would mind if there are any listeners may be younger listeners who don't know who you were talking about aids or you know as you mentioned earlier he was Dracula he was Dracula yes it's hard grinding struck in that you know and that was back with the universal horror the creature features in a way that they were doing in the nineteen thirties but that was you know one of the first ones to snatch but that wasn't all he did he had such an extensive career and credit tumultuous life I think is while I mean would you be happy to to tell us a bit of bite yes well I I would love to and I suppose in different periods would go see has been known for different reasons for example when I first met you and I was first starting to work with some of the first year students in Ireland in courses like introduction to film I would sometimes show them Tim Burton's movie ed wood because it depicted let go see a very tragic late in his life it was a Tim Burton film that dramatized you know starring Johnny Depp and Martin Landau the dramatized the most tragic Lugosi's life and and I would show it to first year students stand because they they would remember that the film to come out when they were ten years old a war or or and heard about it and of course now it's much further in time from the release of that film and it was in other words a bit of a more modern touchstone for me to talk about legacy then and now it's very much passed into the past so speak from another century now we're now we're much cheaper but more than twenty five years I guess talking with people who may not know Lugosi I suppose now the best way is the white first white would be the way that most people have historically known who he is throughout the world and I think he connects a little bit with our our last exchange because it is a way in which film and by extension popular culture so often reinvents or builds on the past even in ways that sometimes audiences aren't aware in America this past Halloween there was a commercial for a candy bar we would call them here chocolate bar I think you might say called kit kat our colleague as overall used to eat the every morning when I would have T. within United also they're known for their note elsewhere in the world but they're popular they were popular here in America and it was it was a commercial thirty second TV commercial where Dracula in the usual dress the Cape the clean face shape shaven face pretty good looking hair slicked back black hair and affecting a kind of a of an eastern European kind of Hungarian slash remaining accent was on there pouting and of course wanting to sink his teeth into a kit kat candy bar and that commercial is even available to go see died in nineteen fifty six that commercial was him in in a sense refracted at least through popular culture reincarnated through popular culture there is a children's cereal in America known as Count Dracula its mascot from the nineteen seventies until to day is another of those imitators I suppose is another term we could use there's an extent to which even later Dracula's although still not known necessarily to younger people later Dracula's of the screen white Christopher Lee and Franklin Jela their depictions of Dracula drool calmly go see it particularly to the extent that in Bram stoker's novel Dracula was very different in appearance than the way we think of Dracula including on that kit kat commercial at any time if anybody affects the voice the Kate a so much of what we think of of Dracula in popular culture is not from Bram stoker's norm rather from Bela Lugosi actually what most people know most readily rather than say the long white mustache that he hasn't stoker's novel it's much more let go see who played even in nineteen thirty one film previous to that on Broadway and he turned Dracula in some ways a monster yes a supernatural vampire yes into this kind of alluring sexualized vampire so much of folklore the vampire was often repulsive and obviously vampires do repulsive things you know biting people drinkable yada yada but we go see really turned vampire I think we see this again in ways like we even there's a character named Bella in twilight films yes you know and yes different double go see some P. and Baylor would be the proper pronunciation of course right we do it in American a lot of places people did refer to informatics careers Bela Lugosi but regardless this whole notion that the vampire could be sensual the vampire could be sexualized and attractive yet even hypnotic another aspect of the vampire we think about %HESITATION often the hypnotic on ice and instilled throughout the decades sometimes this coincides with cinematography to have the extreme close up of the ice trading on ice it noted our eyes and victims who sometimes maybe don't mind being the victim because the vampire and in later films even as women vampires but the vampire become so sexualized and attractive and sexy frankly in the twentieth century until now all of that begins really most of that I should say not all but most of that begins with Lugosi's on screen depiction in nineteen thirty one and in various respects he keeps crying role throughout the rest of his life to the extent that he was literally buried in his Dracula okay so much for the two intertwined and mild saying and I I you know I don't want to self plagiarize but I think if you announce that you can say it because I've written more than once then life will go see play Dracula after his death Dracula has played Lugosi by that I mean that that again what we think of as Dracula is as much or more like go see as it is Bram Stoker that's how it was and I you know I saw those spooky movies on television as a little child and they will be in the same way I guess go story so often three little children I grew up when they were still showing black and white films on TV so I started singing in the late seventies even though he was by then long since deceased fascinated and have gone on as you kindly point out to write about it and and that's been a great deal of fun and some of the projects that come out of that have been enjoyable I think that Dracula it's a nice example of quite an early sign Diarra film designed area was quite firmly establish I think by that point and I think they were doing some very exciting things with audio at that time I think it's something that you covered I remember in teaching was the influence of a lot of emigre directors because a lot of the directors were talking about you were making the sums were British or they were German or Austrian or that sort of thing so %HESITATION you know there's that influx of that expressionist training coming over here's one of his last teaching I taught am I showed it for signs yes you know so I thought it was a nice example of a film from that %HESITATION already signed area that is actually really challenging said technology at the time yes you know I was wondering if you if that was something that he thought of I know you don't ma'am may be necessary to USA a static so much no I love it and the stakes are so much wonderful part of the horror film and a film history and even the history of a statics becomes I think so fascinating as you're rightly pointing out and I love it and I do try to write about it and I and I love the pier you're talking about because you know there's moments in film and I think we some of us have lived through it with the rise of C. GI the rise of digital projection the rise of motion capture where new technologies because a major change to cinema and this happens I think in some ways very much constantly you know the film theorist Andre Bazin used to say that film is constantly evolving which meant in his mind and I'm paraphrasing that still has yet to be invented exactly because it's always turning as he said rightly into something else you always turning into something else I think what you're pointing out that so crucial is there are particular moments of major technological upheaval because much more maybe profound change than at other moments and the introduction of sound was very clearly one of them but on that point you're pointing out of early sound is so profound because and I write about it in my next forthcoming journal article is for the journal popular film music and it's about the seconds all talking film in America which was called the terror it was released in the second half of nineteen twenty eight a lot of people would have you been seen it in the Halloween season of nineteen twenty eight and it was based on a story by Edgar Wallace and it was one of these kind of we would call them old dark house stories that were popular at the time where a lot of people gather either in an old house original tale in the middle of the night people getting start getting killed and even if the killer turns out to be just somebody wearing a mask there's a feeling that maybe there's the supernatural is a play and so forth it was the first of what we I suppose in retrospect would call a horror movie Insel neck it's playing with sound no it doesn't do it nearly as well as and because your use of and is the very best example and obviously by one of the master renters and one of the master directors who became emigrate as you rightly point out to Hollywood has never some of the others like Karl Freund who work with laying the great cinematographer who came from Germany to America ended up shooting Dracula in nineteen thirty one unit of directing one of the early universal horrors that follow Dracula which was the mummy in nineteen thirty two some people will probably think of it maybe the %HESITATION the Tom Cruise version or something in recent times you never know the remakes or the re inventions of these bottles so much of that was with the immigrate culture or stories coming from other countries and the terror was a British story but what most interestingly did it's a lost film but we have the sound discs because some of the first talkies they would have what was basically the equitable large record if you can imagine a large audio record music record and it would play in sync with the film being projected it was not a great system I mean if somebody bumps the needle the sound would be a synchronous and had a problem but for some early talkies even after lost films we cannot watch the films there's photographs from the terrible we can't watch it but the sound discs are there %HESITATION and I was able to access them and write about them for the first time and we start to get which you would probably expect in film sample we still get it and we'll get it in I suspect like the next conjuring film or what have you and ideas the sound of the human screened for the first time we get the sound of the screen but we also get the sound of the storm the sound of heavy winds through the trees and some of the sounds that we associate it certainly before film sound people associated with things that were frightening you know a lightning bolt or whatever that might frighten a child were you know a pet dog or whatever and they start to show up in the terror the very first time and it becomes very quickly adopted as a static in subsequent mystery horror films in nineteen twenty nine and thirty to the extent that by nineteen thirty there was a comedy a short that you can find on you tube called the laurel party murder case with laurel and hardy and third old house the middle the nights we can happen it's all take off on the second story you know to an extent knives out in more recent times has done some of this so again you know this never goes away keeps being reinvented but in the long run hardy version they so overdue the sound effects as to parity it's a fascinating example in nineteen thirty only a couple of years after you know a few years after sounds felt they were already prepared like we're laying on extra thick for the joke and then taught Browning immediately after makes Dracula in sound what you were asking about and he forgoes heavy thunder and lightning he for ghosts spooky music in favor of much more subtle sound effects like complete quiet except the creaking of the coffin lid opening in and trying to be much more restrained and it's so interesting because it is such an early point in film sound relatively speaking I mean you know three four years he's pulling back rather than laying it on thick and so it's interesting how these things you know can sometimes evolve quickly and how much is that expire role in the horror film including sound whether it's the spooky music or the spooky sound effects or the silence dates for the silence and that's what some of us love the most or or sometimes in horror films it's another reason to think so wonderfully about silent films it's a reason to think about parts of Dracula the talk Browning which are no music no dialogue I think one of the interesting things and we we have guests have the old phrase deals slang phrase you know that silence speaks volumes or phrases like that it it you know in America grew up hearing phrases like that may be used to get me to shut up but you know it was you know there is that I think that's one of the great things it's it's like you know when you can have a special effect when you can have moving camera sometimes the makers forget that they can let it stay still when you can collect extremely rapidly filmmaker sometimes forget that they can have slow paced and when you can do anything with still sound incredible possibilities now we can forget sadly what you've just rightly mentioned which is silence can be so very powerful even when the first impulse is to have twelve tracks or more audio going at once but just because you can use technology in a certain way doesn't mean we always you don't have to and so that's a wonderful point and certainly I think very salient for horror films you know you mentioned earlier it might be nice to see see what your connection with Irish and amazed because it may not seem immediately obvious horror and already sent a man and Irish cinema isn't enough we could get inside because I think there are there are a lot of connections there I suppose a nice segue would probably be interview with a vampire Neil Jordan if we need a Segway yes yes the way to connect a couple of these things when we first met you were teaching our cinema and dot really sparks at massive interested me because I'd had an interest in Irish literature when I was at school and then was really came to carry that on I'm excited in English and film degree so I was saying I researcher Hans Irish film and that sort of thing so is wondering what you know what you're interested in our nation well I I really appreciate that questioning and you remind me so happily of my arrival in Ireland but also so I try to be unflappable that's impossible and one of the spookiest moments and not a horror films okay but I guess it's a nervous moments was when I walked in to teach that course because I felt a little out of place not only is it immigrate myself and living in another country for the first time but I felt I felt a little %HESITATION I would never want to be seen presumptuous in teaching a course on Irish cinema in Ireland I had taught Irish semi actually America previous a couple of times what I ate that was a bit nervous actually going in to teach all of you because I thought gosh I feel ill at ease real ill informed maybe you know to take all that long since as an American and in Belfast what I suppose my interest would be two fold in and one I think it started with horror and they're certainly these tremendous connections between horror and Ireland Irish literature Irish folklore from obviously the pain she threw a film I saw and I I don't think a lot of Irish film scholars I don't know that any of never really talked about it much but when I was ten twelve years old I I was in love with horror movies I was also in love with Francis Ford Coppola who directed the godfather films in Apocalypse Now and early in his career he had made a film called dementia thirteen right early nineteen sixties and it was a gothic horror story set in Ireland it was actually shot in Ireland and you know it's readily available on YouTube it's rather well known film in terms of coklat studies because it was basically a second film but I think Irish film studies it's completely unknown connections go deeper I mean stoker was Anglo Irish they're such a great tradition of Irish gothic novels and as I grew my interest in horror I grew in my interest at heart literature as well as horror films so there's all these fantastic connections and Irish horror stories on film but the other thing to happen to me when I was a teenager was by about the age of thirteen and of course you know I grew up in the state of Oklahoma I grew up in a town that I will in American terms certainly most terms would probably consider small town twenty five thousand people I grew up in I guess I'm trying to think of the the best way to say it but it probably a and as a native American everything you know kind of a masculine type culture in terms or that parameters and so John Huston's films spoke to me greatly as a teenager his films like the Maltese falcon an African queen and these films with Humphrey Bogart who was one of the great cinema tough guys and you know his later films like the man who would be king was Sean Connery and Michael Caine and you know you can kind of see probably quickly understand maybe or or see that you know kind of okay a lot of his films in his life %HESITATION I became fast about Houston's life he was quite an explorer and hunter and you know very masculine and all that very much human waves kind of hit me way of twentieth century American cinema and he was deeply interested in Irish literature and by the time I was in high school he was making his film the debt based on choice and there was a credible documentary film made about it Houston and show the behind the scenes footage showed in talking at length this is before the kind of making of featurettes we know today by by a large number some examples but they weren't it was before DVD years before that cottage industry so to speak so I S. I became entranced by the time I was sixteen and seventeen I became entranced with James Joyce and the dead when Houston said in his mind it was probably the greatest short story ever written in the English language that spoke volumes to me the film version he made which I found to be quite faithful I'm talking at length for question and now maybe exploring what might interest came from these different angles from horror as well as Joyce and then about that same time Beckett because I was also one of my other favorites as a teenager was a Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett had made keeping film later in king's life of course and and it kind of all on guard film and I was I was also getting in transfer you know it's easy to romanticize thing when you're a teenager and I you know the passion for it all and I was and I was getting interested in basket because of his work with Keaton and I was particularly intrigued because Kevin brown will have made this incredible documentary about cheating and he had forty two Keaton's saying you know you didn't even understand the film you know which I think yes he's one of the yeah exactly the genius filmmakers in my mind he said he didn't quite understand it but he liked packet and everything so I was coming in Ireland for all these different directions to conclude I would say that in the night you know in the nineteen nineties America really what Americans always had this love affair with Ireland is regrettable exceptions during some immigration periods baby in the nineteenth century and so forth but there's a lot of love affairs in in the later twentieth century certainly from you know everybody you know celebrating St Patrick's day to the nineties when the commitments particularly the film version you too there was a particular love affair with a different times before in the sixties I think with JFK for a lot of people but in the nineties it was like it was Neil Jordan and Jim Scherr instills were exploding onto the scene my left footed one you know at the academy award and Chris I was graduating from high school and about to start university right at that moment then there's you too and I particularly fell in love like I heard it on the radio and I was driving I mean I remember the moment so clearly I was driving down I. forty in Oklahoma City are your state that runs around a lot of America and I'm burning down the highway in an old car the only one I could afford at the time I'm burning on the highway and this voice comes on the radio this band what I didn't know the name and I had to ask a friend later that day who is singing this and it was the cranberry so you're gonna set but you know I heard including that kind of Irish weighed in at the end of the song which went from the Irish but meeting pop music even more Irish sound at the end of it just seem to speak to me in ways and again as a more romantic young person a romantic maybe more the German sense of that term my great grandfather was from Ireland cord so on Cherokee and mainly that but I'm you know I have a McCord whose family was actually from the north of Ireland even America from Cork and I've met him once is a little tiny child very memories on more work well on all of that and so I had that connection to Ireland as well so forgive this long biography ladies that I fell in love with this and then I fell in love with an Irish woman who was in America and all roads lead you know what I had to leave but I had to leave and it was this tremendous love affair I cannot tell you how achingly I miss Carrickfergus my favorite places how much I've missed the Belfast city centre the people there there's so many Dunluce there were so many places I like to go and go repeatedly I just unending love affair if it helps any I'm just thinking back said you saying you felt a bit of %HESITATION this American coming in and telling the sorry students about our cinema I don't think one of us ever saw thought not not one of us ever so thought we we were all really excited to he's American he's because so many of us hadn't met an actual American person so many of us just hadn't traveled very much and a lot of us had never even met people from the other side of Belfast because we were that generation that was emerging from the call list yes you know and this is so this is two thousand five and stuff so things were really only just opening up properly at is it took a few years after the agreement relay and a lot of assets I mean may I was the first time ever had friends from west Belfast for example I never never really met anybody from not far away before and then suddenly there's this bona fide Americans whose proper proper American you know and it was so exciting for us to relate maybe sorry maybe improper puts your to your to clients but it was it was such a joy because everyone was so welcoming I mean that was one of the great things about about living hearing role was the generosity and the charity and the welcoming nature of of the entirety of the island you know it was just like a beautiful thing so so it's so nice to hear that and it didn't seem like such a fascinating moment at that point one of my biggest memories of Belfast at that moment was the sheer number of cranes %HESITATION yes construction rains around the city it seems like a truly under construction obviously and reconstruction with the cranes but it felt to an outsider and admittedly neophytes our eyes to Belfast it seems almost as metaphorical as it did physical construction cranes and this coming together of peoples and and I suppose some of my great memories stand would have been with the film students and how film students working together on projects from those two different communities and film production or film studies in you know bringing them together it was really a remarkable moment in Belfast you know it really was it's so nice to remember all that actually it's so good to hear your side of it I mean we all just felt like kids you know so we didn't know what where you come from or anything and but that was back at that time when I think students and certainly undergraduate ins had reverence for he ever researching them it didn't matter who they were what age they were or whatever the person at the front of the class was the authority and that was it I mean if we didn't even think to question anything like that where is I think it's become very different certainly my experience was very different when I was teaching it's so good to hear it from your experiences while because I think we even though we were from there we were it was all new to us as well so that's pretty interesting to think about it that way yeah well it's it was it was a wonderful period and one of the my favorite periods you know as we look back and there's sometimes a few years that we're so happy here and sometimes maybe a year to that's not and so forth I was one of the happiest periods in my life and a lot of it was queens and was filmed queens and was all of you there and and of course you know the tremendous colleagues who were there at that time like because overall and and Raymond in the network you know some people who are no longer even at queens that moved on or retired but it was quite a %HESITATION wonderful meeting of everyone I think Cynthia I have very special memories Terry said Kerry is there anything we haven't covered that you would like to touch on just so thankful for having me %HESITATION that allowing me the chance to chat and chat probably chat too much but I I love talking about obviously all these issues and %HESITATION so it's it's great to have the opportunity to do so I have so enjoyed it it's been great because I mean we've known each other for a long time but I think this is the first time I've heard a lot of all of thought so that's been really a treat for me and it's been so good to catch up it's been a while and yeah it's good to reminisces while back home with somebody who loves to fight yes indeed it well even hear your accent now and back to hearing American accents every day and some of them are quite nice but I miss the accents of people essentially ready but but it was such a beautiful thing really the Irish accents from throughout the island needles are are are so beautiful and almost melodic to here and I miss that so much I sometimes I had to you know with some of the Belfast people talking so quickly I had to listen very carefully well I got I got better at it over time so it's great to hear even the accent I missed so much well it's great to hear you eating yeah come thank you enough for your time saying this it's been really really fun and I hope pretty informative for lots of people as well it certainly has been for me to sign K. ands take care and all the best with everything you're working on thanks so very much all the best to you and all of the listeners including as we trudge out hopefully soon the last of the hand
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this is audio visual cultures the podcast that explores different areas of the arts and culture of production with me Paula Blair visit Petri on dot com forward slash AP cultures to find out more and to join the policy I am really pleased to welcome shade Donovan he parks transatlantic trade as an interdisciplinary performing artist educator and artistic director of the indigo arts collective the very warm welcome TJ hi are you today hi Paula thank you so much for having me and I'm doing well I had a day of creating and some collaborating already so off to a good start since I'm sick hopefully we'll get into quite a lot of fear practice when it comes to collaboration and all areas of Europe because she have a lot of strings to your bow so there's a lot for us to catch three today could I ask you to give us a better sense of life line of your practices and a bit of an idea of all the different areas your work touches on absolutely so like a lot of practitioners I think I started off as a performer growing up I was dancing professionally in a really young age and then ever to is that right got into singing and acting and studied at university who went to LA into the actor thing for a while and worked as a cracker for there and time that I came to England to do my MFA in acting and east fifteen acting school and as I was leaving I was like okay well I have all of this training to be an actor now but what I need is the work but obviously I already lived my early and mid twenties in LA doing the whole addition saying that ran that momentum and the energy is great but also entering my you know late twenties and and sort of leaving that young performer space I was really really excited to start developing my own practice and so that's what I did when I left drama school I was like okay great when I start my own company invented my own work and see where that goes and fortunately for me it's been going well and I really been enjoying that journey and but so you know speaking of my background Hey do you have a lot of interdisciplinary spirit in the work that ideal it's a lot of the body work a lot of work having to do with dance and movement and sort of the blending of dance with film as well and projections okay the work is sometimes text to stage right I've written and staged plays more often the not it's collaborative I work with groups of people I ran workshops with them do generate material right so we devised in group settings or it's very %HESITATION installation based so the last physical project I did I was in a real place right now but %HESITATION I guess it was during coal bed but we did it safely was installation performance art gallery so I have a lot of curiosity is I think the heart of my practice is very much an inquiry we'll find something that I have a burning question about and then usually that has to do with issues of female identifying characters right social justice looking at communities that tends to be the teams that I got really passionate about that song generating free on one of those teams and then see where it goes and so it could be a play could be a dance piece it could be a fellow can be an installation lights while that's a lot said get started with I was going to ask you about the sorts of things and she sat here south flat work got into the server was very interested to hear more updates as you say the women identifying female identifying areas and what kinds of concerns that we re is we've got some really brilliant videos on your website there's a really fantastic demonstration of the really white breasts of work that you see but you seem to get ready take bend to specific issues as well so you've got quite a range but I could tell from your website that there may be particular things and it might be something really currents like the murder of fly Remicade here somebody like facts or reading huge as she sent a fax to selected by rights and equality and things which I like to maybe talk to Siri some specific examples maybe if you have something that you feel like work to reading reading pile just to help flash site first yeah so to speak to the example that you just mentioned I did complete a piece I guess in December of last year so we have an audience then it was sort of an auto ethnographic exploration of identity right which was prompted by an assignments that I was given as the second masters actually last year in contemporary performance practices and so the prompt was to create you know an automatic before its exploration and I grew up third generation Irish in New York to a very transatlantic Irish American family right so we have a lot of family in Ireland that we went to visit a lot and that was very much part of my growing up and serving the differences I felt personally and culturally between them I didn't care because it's kind of like Irish American nine people with Irish she sounding names that maybe originally came from Ireland centuries ago and then like the contemporary sort of Irish diaspora in New York and where those intersect and blend and other similar color difference out there elements of that that I explore in that piece through the use of bringing in some Irish language and tying in sort of the contemporary discussions around what's going on in the north of Ireland and the sort of attachments I was looking I guess at three different facets of my own identity one of them was Irish cultural identity in the diaspora space and that was something particularly I was a growing up with that culture friend of mine in the states but then moving to England and experiencing it then in a different way product even more front of mind than usual and so I played with that by bringing in elements of Irish language in questions of what parts of identity we sort of hang on to you they have these maybe sort of romanticized folkloric elements and and what parts are useful in creating identity today but then also the difference between things being very far in the past and things being part I have sometimes with instructor asked for identity exploration there's this desire to either bring things that were quite far in the past and resolved really friend of mine and focus on them in a way that might not be productive but then also the flip side of that taking difficult obstacles that actually not only were recent history but had implications on current history and saying well that was a long time ago we're not going to discuss that so I play a lot with that in the peace and I create a soundscape for the work a lot of which is some spoken word poetry that I wrote for the peace and a lot of that speaks to that that sort of juxtaposition between what belongs in the past what is the pay asked how is it relevant how do we look at it and then incorporated that whole narrative with this American female commercialized beauty standard pressure and also I thought was something I wanted to explore and the fact that our now ex president fortunately I feel apologize upon him to political but at that time our president to add a lot to say about women and their bodies and how they should look and what's appropriate in terms of how to engage with women right very much outspokenly sharing funny you know asides assaults that he thought were you know fun little tidbits all that sort of nonsense made for a wealth of sound bites that I could pull from that I also incorporate in the soundscapes are juxtaposed some of the things that he had to say about women within my own self who is performing in the peace physical Ising this struggle I was surrounded by mirrors of all different sizes all over the space constantly putting on and taking off makeup putting on and taking off clothes yeah that's sort of one example right there was an element at the end of the work right invited people up from the audience and I gave them each I'm here to hold and I manipulated their bodies with my body to sort of ask the audience to come into this world that I've created and explore for themselves what it feels like to be on display and sort of at the whim of other people's implants so yeah that's one recent example and my sort of last project I was able to do with physical people and with touch and not participate or any element signs ready partial certainly I think with theater we have this invisible division okay here they're performing and I just sit here in the dark and I don't get involved you know in the audience and separate cuts he deliberately destruct that's I think that's what I find really fascinating about its experimental forms of performance art in areas of visual art where there's a deliberate destruction see that passivity and enforcing of a performance on the spectator I find that she shared interests and how did people respond to that when you got them to be active and monkeys you know I think we get vantage was that I had an audience of a lot of artists and theatre practitioners and people that were game for that sort of interaction obviously when you're doing it in a more public forum with a little bit more of an anonymous audience there may be some levels of percussion there you know heads up you want to give them things like that but I found some of the feedback I received was that it was actually a really powerful I'm sort of connecting experience because the piece did build for quite a while right with the audience just watching the interaction really didn't come into the end and there wasn't necessarily a suggestion that they would be invited to participate so it did sort of comes a little bit of a surprise but it tied in with the invitation that I was offering with the work for the audience to sort of think about these themes in their own life and how they might apply to their own personal identity but I'm bringing them up and giving them the mir you know some of them shared that it was really nice to be able to connect what they've been thinking about watching the peace to then what was physically happening with them in the space so yeah nice overall way to connect the teal I think if I were to do the peace again I'd be interested to see if there are moments I could explore earlier in the work to begin that invitation a little bit earlier hopefully you will get the opportunity do you think there's any way of saying that kind of thing online or as other creative challenges that's the sort of thing you're having to work Sir at the moment is hi can you say something participate hurry and an online space even just performing in an online space told must be really challenging at the moment yeah I mean I think it is and I think part of my philosophy a little bit here has been to kind of resist adapting existing work to the digital space which I see a lot of people do beautifully and I think there's a need for that and that's a great way to exercise practice that that's your you know what you're feeling called to do but I think for me what I've been enjoys creating work specifically within these restrictions like being very intentional about embrace those restrictions and those obstacles and maybe mine them for a different way of making work rather than trying to adapt my normal practice within the constraints of the digital space I've been enjoying creating collaborating in new ways just in fun well that's great to hear that's really positive so have you find it a really positive experience adapting your approach that way yeah I think what I found so early on in lock down in the spring you might remember there was all this conversation right about Howell Shakespeare wrote some of his best work in the plague and all this is to me Shakespeare became circulating around is this icon for how we should all be generating work in lockdown and my training as a classical actor and I loved me some Shakespeare and he started thinking what can we do that's not bad right it's not locking ourselves in in writing our greatest masterpiece but how can I use this exciting momentum of Shakespearean creation right now to create an interesting so obviously the man right a hundred fifty four sonnets we think I'm sure there are lots of scholars who would love to get into with me about that you know we accept you know generally that he whoever recalling Shakespeare created these a hundred fifty for work and I was like well that is a lot of people that I can get involved in something so I decided I was going to create this virtual gallery a hundred and fifty four performance pieces I sort of just reached out to my network so they ended up getting a hundred but for people from all over the world a handful of them I knew personally some of them I knew through sort of networks are friends of friends are we run set together once or something and then most of them just sort of expand out from that so I ended up assembling this beautiful international ensemble and to keep the peace sort of consistent I created a little workshop activity to sort of approach the task and I gave that to all the participants to sort of kick start that process and then give me a few specific restrictions but mostly it was up to them to take this workshop and to generate whatever came from itself some people did traditional delivery of the tax rate but most people really take into their own hands I had original music compositions coming in animations stop motion choreography group works happening in digital ways that were then recorded and sent in Sam it was really incredible and it was at a time when we were really starting to just settle in this is in March April really started to settle into like what we were doing in the world that people were losing contracts and it was all still very fresh and confusing I think for me personally and for a lot of the participants in the feedback I received was that it was really grounding that we were all all a hundred and fifty four of us plus some right to send a few people did group works we were all kind of in this together and I continue to collaborate with some of those participants in different ways on other projects since then but that to me was really miraculous and emphasize the power of the flexing our technology anyway so you know it was a late night sleepless idea that fortunately snowballed into something that has now sort of I think really reshaped my practice in a really positive way since obscenity wonderful let's install second great that it's hot the lag say generate closer collaborations for years while little wonderful thing to have it isn't put together so workplace can people find that it's not something that we can stumble upon on the internet somewhere yeah absolutely so it's linked to my website but it's also on the email itself is a showcase on video now and it'll be there until March of twenty twenty one so it'll it'll be there and showcase form for the full year and then after that all the individual videos will remain available there dot com slash showcase slash summer response series this is what we're talking about collaboration which I'd like to talk is a bit three the end to go arts collective is that an extension of four easy to projects that you've been doing and they attach to box or is that something that you a separate Titus and to go to work yeah so essentially I am it's just sort of the umbrella under which I create my work at this point right and then I sort of set up like a production company when I launched my first show which was a one woman show when I left drama school because I wanted someplace to then put the proceeds which at the time I was like hopefully I get some proceeds right once I was sitting up and shown to be able to take whatever I mean put it somewhere that was set aside just for work and continue to produce out of that so it started off as just me but the assets of all from project to project depending on what my needs are all take on other artists students support the project and then they with me become part of the collective rights on the side of response series I had to really great women helping me out with marketing and was sort of rounding up and communicating with some of the participants and things like that and then they came under the umbrella of the collective while they're working together and then now if I need support like that for a future project they'll be some of the first people go to and say Hey do you wanna come back on board and help me with that but it really is just me ultimately having a space where I can create under sort of a United front and just to sort of continue to build my practice with this body of work and tastic I mean how do you go about finding collaborators and you mentioned earlier that sometimes people are already in your network or is it you've worked with them before and so much I think I have your they can for some some specific can mean hi T. cast that net heights to find people it's interesting right because typically but back when I was making work mostly choreography and small projects like that in Los Angeles I would just put out on casting websites right like I would post on backstage or you know sort of the U. K. equivalent of Mandiant spotlight right things like that but for the last year really during this whole block I'm curious I found so much response on social media I haven't needed to use any casting sites %HESITATION which really I think speaks to the power of that as a tool right it has its downfalls as well right into consumes a lot of our time and can be sometimes distracted but I think also super helpful so you know attach that I'm looking for artists in the post and other people that I've worked with other companies I work with a loss and then share that and I end up getting all of these great submissions and I really don't have to do much more than that I think also to the advantage of having gone to a drama school at U. fifteen with a lot of alumni that are working and really active that's been great about snow all ten of the fifteen people from different years and different cohorts in different you know areas of study that I never would have known otherwise so that's been wonderful I even connected with a few people accidentally who ended up going to the same undergrad university is me two lane university in New Orleans and we found that out in common as we were already working together on a project so it is I think it's a small world but having the advantage of having a New York network and L. A. network and then when you're in London I do get quite a lot of friends of friends of people of people of you know that extended performer world really is quite large I was gonna ask you bite your transatlantic connections and how you work because obviously it's the before times so we're thinking of that must have been a bank and packs in the in a massive change for you because it's normally you're working between the UK and the United States sayings recently have had a bit of a hotel not a mountain are you managing to keep some saying virtual going there yeah it's interesting because I've been in the U. K. over three years now but I realize this last year I go back and forth a lot right so I've never actually banned it just here in London you know whole full year I'm usually back in the states between three and six months out of the year depending on what what I'm working on so yeah it's been strange it's definitely the longest I've gone without travel a long time summer of twenty nineteen night toward a show to New York LA and London and I was supposed to be taking it to Edinburgh this project now bumps at December twenty twenty two it also had to reschedule things like my wedding and they're important life events but yeah it's been challenging but I think what's great is that although obviously there's times I was to negotiate I still have been able to do some collaborative work particularly with some artists in Los Angeles I recently completed a project called choreography can find it she collected six dance artists %HESITATION after movers from sort of all over but mostly I had a handful of them in Europe and then two of them in Los Angeles and we did these virtual movement workshops over the course of the week that we did together on zoom and that were all about mining the space for choreography which sounds maybe a little bit abstract right there was one day where we looked at lines and textures rates like the texture of your carpet or your couch like how do you transition that into movement right if you had to make a piece of furniture in your space your dance partner how can we create partnered movement with that objects that it feels participatory and then what if we take that movement okay be there in a place something totally different so you know he's really fun to play and they generated really beautiful work but I am yes some of those artists are based in California so we're you know he does mean sometimes weird hours for people doing the best to keep that up because I think it's important for me personally to just logistically to stay connected to my my U. S. collaborators as well it sounds like a healthy way of working as well if you can build and play time as you say with your work so you're working but it's fun and it's playtime and is probably very different from the typical working from home experience do you think that something that people Hey maybe Hausa inverted commas normal job he can only get office job rich Intel laptop all the time do you think that something that you know eating curries incorporating into your day is an exercise like that I mean it's not because I know you have an educational I'm spent so what he did as well I mean is that something you grades maybe China courage people today is think about those things I mean you turning your domestic space and she announced JD %HESITATION and just totally re framing Heidi thank and maze in space yeah I mean I think absolutely there's something to be said about getting to know your space in a new way and finding the possibility and the fun in that I mean even if it's something as simple as rearranging where you put your desk time to time like when the seasons change can you move your desk so you're maximizing your natural light breaking you change your view are you seeing different things at a different window slightly just minutes just to diversify your confined experience right one of the activities we did in our workshop process was to find a place in your space that you've never really looked very closely at such a really zoom in on it for me the example I gave was like that small space between the arm of your sofa and the wall right that like little gap like what's what's going on in there like what is it what does it look like what angle do there what's the light like what doesn't make me think of right and it is a little bit abstract right but it was really interesting and what sort of movement and creative impulse could come out of that really simple almost stupid thing of just really intimately engaging with corners of your apartment was really off the funds I think there is definitely a space to think about you know if you're someone that's open your laptop what can you do to get to know your home environment in a way that feels fresh that's great stuff it's really interesting way of thinking about things and it makes it fun because things are just so happy at the moment and then I think we need reminders set we should try and play and have more fun at times today to try and left things a little bit I was wondering as well if you're not working because you've done some voice over acting before in the past I was wondering it's not something that's quite viable for you at the moment is that something you've been doing lately hi just out park free yeah absolutely you know it's funny you should I just finished recording a radio play okay recently actually become a resident artist you know radio play company and was started by he's fifteen alumni and lovely talented man name Shaun Dale he's great the company is called borderless theater company in this particular project of theirs it's called radio plays and they're taking new work that hasn't been produced wrestling then produced a small scale and then they have this company of voice artists and they're recording this place they have a director that guides the work and then we release them sort of in podcast format so I have been doing that and then actually just schedule those just cast in another project and there is a great start recording soon so yeah it's definitely a really great way to be able to do some work right now for sure that's great to hear how did you get in safely Saxon and providing voice overs causing you some some documentary type park as well hi did you fall in salon the first place really just from I mean obviously it's always when it's on your mind right is something you can do as an actor right have that scale but when I was eight fifteen we had a unit specifically on voice acting and we had this wonderful professor command to just work with us on that in small groups and really got a lot of sort of personal coaching we got to go in you know a professional studio set up and really tested out play around and I found it really exciting and it hadn't occurred to me prior to that that I would get that scene buzz from it as I did performing onstage I always sort of relegated to this like we could do that if I may but I don't know if it's for me right beginning to flex in a real way with some of those give me life feedback I was like actually this is really fun and exciting so from U. sixteen that I just started sending out some demos here and there and trying to build up a little bit of work it's certainly something that I'm still you know I'm feeling fresh in and I'm wanting to continue to develop it's fun to you because you got to be I mean I say most of the work that I've done has just been my traditional voice started with a slight accent every once in awhile here and there but I find them people that do animation and you can put all these ridiculously other to you sounds and there's this anonymity that you don't have what you're the body onstage sort of freeing and in a fun way to because it's no longer about what you're looking like or who you are even in this way is when you're on stage performing you have a little different kind of freedom that I think it's fun to play and for sure I'm a great lover of animation and voice actors and stuff yeah I just really admire and I'd just imagine it must be so much fun because you're not self conscious by what you like I can be as silly as you need to fade together performance I you know so it's really ready because they're based on experiences making network we touched on this earlier but you mentioned that he writes as well so I mean you're doing a huge amount of stuff is there any part of your writing that you you want to go three of and a bit more detail and she said your poetry and perform spoken wires and spark an arms race what was it that drove you to write your own place and not just asked in somebody else's did you have a burning desire to have stories to tell that sort of thing Jack great question when I was a teenager and stuff I was really really into poetry and I did you know local and state poetry competitions and it was like something I was really had a lot of momentum with and then the acting in the dance took over and I stopped really writing for anyone other than myself up until very recently so it's something in the last three or four years that I've kind of just brought back into part of my creative identity but I really been enjoying doing that and it really started with writing that one person show when I was leaving drama school because I was like okay well I need work I'm graduating I was based here in the U. K. right with an American accent and I was going to be back in the states are part of the summer and I wasn't in a position to be auditioning for summer stock or anything that was going to need to be in the same place for a while because I had quite a few months ahead of me of bouncing around and part of our dissertation is fifteen was to write a short ten minute solo piece so I had the base of the work already and you know it existed and I really enjoyed what I came up with that I I wanted to give it more life and I think transcribing story to tell right part of what I think is important as an artist is to tell stories of people who maybe weren't able to tell their own stories at the time or similar me to guide current people and communities into a safe way of telling their own stories that might otherwise be difficult to tell so looking at this sort of other side's perspective and bringing that to light I think it's very important and the piece that I wrote was about a woman %HESITATION in the nineteen twenties who had been sort of wrongfully put into an asylum for having a child out of wedlock and and that sort of narrative is really a tale as old as time and initially I had developed a piece based on sort of the ongoing news about the mother and baby homes in Ireland specifically starting with two of them right back in the mid two thousands and for people that aren't aware I encourage you to maybe pop that into Google and you'll just be overwhelmed with the amount of incredible resources and news articles and things that you can find about this ongoing developing story of this system of institutions that went on for me up until the nineteen seventies in Ireland and it's a whole fascinating thing yeah I did my and my second master's dissertation sort of all about that but anyway that was the impetus in my brain the play ended up shifting and it took place in the U. K. it was based on a collection of different women who were real %HESITATION but I sort of research quite a few women stories and then pick the pieces for all of them to create this one fictional woman who appears in the play but it was because I wanted to explore this idea of institutionalized women women and shame right and this challenging Gino somewhat gender specific relationship between women and their bodies and what their bodies do and how that impacts their worth they are right so that writing to me very much came naturally out of this desire to tell the stories of these real women who at the time many of whom right ended up only getting out of these institutions as elderly women when they were finally being closed down only for people to discover that there wasn't anything wrong with them that would have merited the meeting some sort of special care that was that work and I think all of my writing comes from a place of really needing to get out someone else's story or a collection of people's stories I think that Santorini enough anyway if coming back full circle in a way because thanks so much of that is so important to see and hear and tracks and Irish diaspora X. stories as well you I'm from Northern Ireland and there's been so much theatrical work in the past twenty years since the agreement and so on and they said there's official pace where there's not really much fun things thrown at arts and culture but it's in those little spaces where those stories of trauma and collective trauma but from so many different angles are beginning to come straight a lot of that and that similar ways to what you're describing is some new projects that bring people from all different backgrounds together and I community theater projects and and their stories and then I suppose in a way it's out of west across I could see you were saying earlier it's based on their tree stories but their identities are anonymized but it's a really specific experience you know so it's really wonderful that you're engaging in that kind of work as well and these are stories that they probably J. have affective connections with similar things in all parts of the world but that you keep coming back to see these Irish questions and specifically the Irish woman's experience so I'm just thinking it's really lovely that you bring the sayings to lights and see an audience that's been hidden away from society for such a long time thank you and I think to particularly right in the Irish diaspora community in the United States there is this sort of selective curating of cultural understanding right and so a lot of it has to do with old ideas of nationalism and like a condo it it sort of stuck in time a little bit I think for some people what they cling to as sort of a desperate national identity I think what's missing in that conversation in a lot of space is certainly not an academic spaces but I'm kind of a pedestrian you know Irish American space is a connection to contemporary understanding I was Irish and non Irish national identity and also on the flip side of that taking a look at some of the historical parts that are more difficult to explore right like this collaboration of church and state organizations to not only institutionalized women but also to be reluctant to cooperate up until very recently %HESITATION in terms of opening up conversations about that and looking closely in sharing information with us right and then also the fact that there is this need to sort of been look internally as well and why that was able to go on when it did and how to some extent it was even a secret to some people in society at the time right depending on the sort of life you're living and the degree of privilege that you had that might not be something that ever came into your purview but for someone who lives down the road from you that could have shaped their entire life in a really catastrophic way and like you say those teams right a shame and secrecy and cultural sort of looking the other way on things that need advocacy are universal across the globe and when I presented my dissertation work which is called to the point of disappearance that focused specifically on to %HESITATION and sort of historical realities and then the contemporary implications and this is of course before the recent report which just came out and has been released I'm trying to make my way through all what is IT nine thousand pages of it when recreational reading but the piece was presented in September so is prior to the release of that information looking at affirmative it be objects not space to translate a feeling around that so that people that weren't necessarily informed on the specifics of the history could still walk into a space where they get a sense of all of those elements right the shame and the secrecy and that search for justice and I there were giant laundry sheets hanging from the ceiling at one point that we projected a film on to you and then we had seven hundred and ninety six individual baby socks number in a big pile in front of the queue and then myself as a performer in that piece durational mom and I'm just sitting there and sewing them together I didn't get through all seven hundred ninety six but had it been you know re presented I would continue to build from there and there is an element with that shadow puppet theatre where myself and in a non coated world we had to adapt to this but the audience was supposed to be invited to participate in cutting out B. is dolls and hanging them up in this larger than life sort of theater and ended up just being me because he couldn't physically involved them so is this sort of Trinity of object based sensory experiences right there also accompanied by the soundscape to sort of give all of these feelings without there needing to be a direct understanding because there has been a lot of narrative work done around these topics in the last five ten years or so lots of plays and site specific work and things that I think sometimes if people don't know enough about the topic can make people go oh well I don't know anything about that that's not for me but I had a few participants come through that really had absolutely zero prior knowledge she did walk away feeling how I was hoping it would feel so that was a nice way to exercise bringing those topics that are really important to me personally into a space where they can have the value and then personal value for anyone absent yet I imagine that's the physical presence of said sells socks and the sheets that's a massive number hi many people can imagine that many individual items and of course we're talking it bites bodies that those numbers are related to a little tiny probably some things and see find a way of visualizing physical icing that for people and confronting them I said say this is what that looks like that's incredibly powerful and amazing and deeply deeply sad so I imagine it was not necessarily an easy experience but I would say a very important one forest does abstract numbers are hi many finance stocks just lots and I think it's easier to put in a box and forget about it but if you can see it and you can what you know in an ideal world war Oxford walk among staff and top and the experience must be incredibly powerful that's exactly right and I and I was inspired by there's a lot of people protest art that was happening particularly when the pope came and visited I'm forgetting the name out of the group but there is an organization of women that had cut out little strings of paper people holding hands sort of thing they cut out the seven hundred ninety six of those and put them up on the gates and their images of baby shoes that people are bringing the candlelight vigils and seeing them on the ground response to that in objects I thought like you said the step our call and I was like what would happen if we actually I could settle the space with the correct number of these objects so that it is something that you're forced to confront in a real way I'm personally as well it was really challenging said I mean it was at a dark projects develop and certainly you know I was very hands on and I was collecting these objects and touching them and using them and it was certainly I think in some ways I mean for me personally I felt like some way of honoring some of those answers some of that energy in a way that was positive right like even though they're not people that first of all I got to live out their lines but also obviously people that I had direct connections with Mabel to sort of honor their existence by calling attention to it in some way I think it's important you know as well when you're creating to connect to the purpose of what you're doing especially when it is difficult material so you can power yourself through rather than really get too bogged down in in the realities of what you're looking at because it can be challenging when it such difficult material yeah it must be pretty tricky to find a balance between doing justice to the subject matter and keeping yourself mentally while while you're doing something like that and also %HESITATION approaching it and an ethical way ends hi Fardy patient and he's going to react and what way and not sort of saying it's a lot to juggle do you find that you have ways of work injury G. check in with people that sort of thing I mean in terms of them representation and it being ethical and that sort of thing that was a big concern for me going in right because I'm away here that it's not my story right like I didn't have a relative in that space like there are many and this is I think some people don't realize that there are very many living people right whose brothers or sisters those babies apart right whose mothers were in those time they're very much alive in an active many of them and speaking to politicians and organizing and telling their stories right now those resources are accessible so I did spend a lot of time going through people's accounts listening to advocates speaking to politicians hearing sort of what their priorities were and and some of them are different depending on the group right but trying to make sure that what I was doing wasn't advocacy for a cause that wasn't mine to advocate for but more in support of these Sir yeah more in the interest of just bringing awareness to something that current advocates were affected by it are wanting people to bring attention to and I think the challenging thing with this particular topic as well comes a little bit with the role of religion and and so that's really a key factor in the story and something that I certainly represent in the work as somebody that was brought up Catholic I feel I have at least a little bit more space to play in the representation of that because it's coming from my own right in terms of background but taking care to not alienate any audiences with the message that I'm communicating but also true and you know representing my feelings and understanding of how all those different socio political or religious elements sort of shaped that's right but in terms of keeping tabs on myself personally with the work you know it's five chat about it with my mother and my grandmother is that something that you know I have an interest in these things because of their interest as well right when the story of this broke when it did that to thousands that wasn't the first time that I heard about the sort of I was brought up with a little bit of a knowledge around the subject already said we chat about it and my grandmother who's ninety one an absolutely delightful state things you know like well you just are constantly having all of these really cheerful research projects what are you going to do next or how was your day or how can you know so just somebody that knows where you're working you can take you out of that space if that's all you're talking about because there certainly were parts of that process or my mother and my grandmother both would be like this is all you've been mentioned in the last few times I've been on the phone maybe let's take some time to discuss some of what you're doing to bring levity to this you know the stage because it was part of my dissertation as well so not only was a creating a work rehearsing it I was writing about it I was compiling a year's worth of research about it so certainly I think it is important to have someone that knows you know to voice that when that's your process whether it's your partner or your friends your family say Hey this is the amount of time devoting to this kind of work and I'm calling out now that I know I'm gonna need some monitoring here you could call me on it when it's consuming me when you notice that or if you could check in if I send you a message you know being an advocate for yourself in that way and reaching out to your network I think is key yeah that's a really important points yeah definitely because it's a lot to carry other people's trauma you know you can fail at and a post memory sense perhaps as well associations reconnection string a lineage back to the homeland but yeah I think it's a lot because I know certain MIT subbase it was not dissimilar areas that was traumatic relating to the complex and so on so it's a lot to carry so those other people's stories when their horror stories essentially and they're very very meals are all too real and you know you are dating west facing up to I mean you can't not be political affect something exact sincerely house said be prepared to confront their religion and anybody subscribe so that religion is like these people they said they said yeah they talk the lightest upright pro life celerity set with stock it is the work of art T. ask those confronting questions of people just invite them to maybe you should have to think I thought I'm just going to present this and you take it as you find it so yeah that's a really healthy approaches ten I probably should have taken more of what kind of approach myself the number of years ago but it's hard it is because it is like you and it's so important it's real people it's recent history set and it matters right and I think the key here in offering the stories as questions particularly I think particularly when it comes to religion right where that what's supposedly the heart of those institutions it's hard to write the idea is that you're supposed to be aiming for higher ideals than the average person right so even more so I think it's important to pose questions in that direction and for people that really are doing their best to live their lives in that way right I've seen some positive responses to that sort of challenge I think it is important time in Ireland also in the United States and I think globally to really have these conversations now so that we can unpack some of these really difficult incongruence he's right and be able to then voice and say yes this was inconsistent with what we say we want and yes that should not have happened and yes we're going to name all the ways the stakes remain and then be able to put that to rest and then move forward thank you so much and so powerful now I think more than ever and a lot of ways a lot of these issues are ready Prashant even in the United States Lindy because there's been so many hard fought rights have been rolled back over the last number of years they are related I think because if you cut time abortion access for what comes next year gonna start shaming people he have crisis pregnancies and it's just going to snowball where do you draw the line before it ends up becoming something like those long trees in those homes I think in a way it's a reminder that we need to have conversations about these difficult divisive and she's you know we need to be grown ups about that and people have pregnancies people get pregnant for all manner of reasons and all sorts of things happen and so it comes down to eight what do you want from women what you want from bodies that can get pregnant absolutely and it's and it's not like we haven't already lived there and seen the many many detrimental consequences not policing women's bodies and what damage that can do so you know it is interesting particularly in America where it is I think somehow this is that people are constantly Mr Mannering and nation of immigrants right that was taken from an existing group of people founded on the idea that everyone experienced persecution of all different levels from anywhere in the world should be able to come and live with their rights to practice their life as they choose right that's literally the definition of are very new country and yet somehow there's this imposing colonialist Christian European ness on to everyone's bodies and and right and I think what we've observed is that it's only divisive right and it it's not constructive anyway to try and be policing people's bodies but yeah I could I'm sure at you could as well go on and on about this for quite a long time but fortunately and I think Joe Biden is a great example he somebody that is outspoken about being a man of faith right like identifies as being Catholic and also recognizes that his job is to lead a free democratic society said his personal beliefs on abortion for example our birth control whatever they may be don't actually matter at all because that's not his job his job was to govern for a diverse nation of people so looking forward to the separation of fundamentalist ideology from ability to govern I think we're really overdue for some of that yes I know I know it got his work cut out for him really does or guy extra ice cream for gel exciting times this tentative times but exciting times it's really amazing to see work like yours as part of such a huge network of telling these really important stories and I think you know you mentioned earlier I mean being somewhat of an outsider I happen to think that the outsider I mean because in a way if your night cider best affect and the door maybe that's the best kind of approach you know and I I see a lot of value in being able to see things from the art sites and to have that perspective because I know I encountered this a lot when I was doing research by northern Ireland's and you know I mean this from there I was in the playoffs but no where to places to Hanjour sometimes because people do you know where we are and %HESITATION what side of the track she might be from and that sort of stuff but I think whether you're naive or not you can ask the naive stranger and really pack a punch I think I see a lot of volume now I think it's hugely important that you've done this work yeah I think yeah I think to you know when I at some point it could have been sort of interrupted my dissertation I was interested in trying to find some sort of temporary home for the peace in the states because there is all this enthusiasm around Irish American nous but then sometimes a reluctance or ignorance to doing the work of educating so I'd love to be able to sort of share this there and get some eyes on in the states to sort of igniting awareness in some spaces where maybe it needs to be ignited but I think too yeah it's been this interesting last few years of being somewhat other right even just being you know immigrant that sounds silly for me calling myself that but like coming to live in another country even though I come with a lot of privilege and don't really experience a lot of the other things the same way that somebody else might there are certain things that I've experienced and observed and encountered that I'm like oh wow this is giving me such a unique perspective a tiny tiny glimpse into what it must be like for people that are coming from extremely different cultures into totally new cultures you know different languages getting to glimpse at that for Stanton has really been wonderful I think of a gift for me and also being able to look critically this is something hopefully I'll have the opportunity to do a little more research on and explore a little bit with some community generated performance practice in the future I have some work on building towards us down the pipeline but looking comparatively at the our staff spread in the U. K. and in the US particular comparing London and New York and taking a look at where those differences arise and where they come from how it informs the creative and performing live cultural work that's come out of those spaces you know like you say answer straddling all of those little zones I have been in and out which is a nice place to be excellent yeah that's science last name so I'm very conscious step I've taken up quite a lot of your time and you've been so generous about a talking Siri so many of your ideas and direction is there anything that we haven't talked to you to say that you'd really like to mention so that people know about it stay with your work I guess it's just that you know like I said a lot of what we've been doing virtually is workshops that I'll create and then leave but the group of artists to then generate whether it be a Filmer virtual gallery or something like that I was actually just chatting this morning collaborating with someone who runs a dance school was looking to adopt some of my workshops to be used for kids right so if there are any practitioners out there that are interested in creating some somewhat misspoke workshops to run with your theater communities I'm very happy to hear from people who are maybe wanting some support for some guidance or just about some ideas off of in terms of generating something like that and also we are running a little virtual project right now but hopefully we'll have a home as sort of a projection element to the future project later on but something called doorstep dances never to be sharing on our social media starting mid February and it's essentially just a bunch of movers who created really interesting movement work exclusively in their door frames and death we're doing it with a little virtual fundraiser for U. S. nonprofit called dancers responding to aids which is a really all nonprofit who I had the privilege of working with as a young dancer they do incredible work and right now they're raising funds to be able to provide meals for people in the performing arts who have been affected negatively by coding HIV related illnesses that need extra support due to the crisis so we're doing the stress of dance virtual project to raise some funds for them I will be putting that out on our Instagram and social media channels starting in February so if you want to have a little click over and watch some really interesting movement explorations we love for you to check that out too wonderful and he sent them in to goes that that's what's or what %HESITATION what kind should we be looking for for that J. yes that's just acting in the arts collective on Instagram that's fantastic thanks do you have any other socials or your website that you want to point people to words to keep up with those projects shops or Instagram is probably the closest to the polls because we're posting a lot of stuff on there and I website is while it's through my website so just J. Donovan dot org I mean you get to the home page you can click to either look at my stuff for then you can click the indigo arts collective side so you can head over there for more information as well and then on the website is where you can sort of see and hear some exact projects I've shared with you all about today their video clips and sound clips and some press and things like that that's wonderful really fantastic thank you because you've been through the ringer I think what we've had to re create the peppy topics and we've had a lot of joy that's coming through in a lot of your current projects as well so that's really adequate positive notes and done after you went to that dark there so so I really encourage everybody to the Cape flats shade on offense thank you so very much for your time today is really generous of you to talk through everything and send your work just signed so wonderful and important so thank you so much for joining me today thanks hi I really enjoyed it and I have so many wonderful questions about some of what you shared about your research as well so we'll have to connect later for me to hear more about that absolutely SO talk your ear off I thought
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