There it was, just like old faithful, the eternal fountain of filth. Thanks for watching! I'm the the There it was! Just like Old Faithful, the eternal fountain of film! Okay, so, as I've said before, every once in a while, Skid Row Studios is going to kind of do these little side shows where, you know, it doesn't really fit into any of the weekly shows, or maybe I just want to do it myself once in a while, and someone that I'm really interested in, I want to get the inside story about what they do and why they do it. And tonight we have Waylon Bacon. Waylon's a filmmaker and artist among, other things, and we're going to talk to him tonight about the films he makes and, and get into, you know, how it's done and everything it takes to make a movie because of your passion for movies and something you do without a whole lot of money. So, Waylon. Hey. You're on the show, so. Good. How's it going? Good, man. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming over to Skid Row Studios so we can, we can talk about what you do. I've known you now for, I don't know, a few years now. Yeah. And we actually met through your mother. I'm a big Charles Bukowski fan. Anybody that knows me for more than five minutes, knows that. And, Waylon's mother was in the book, Women. And she, she introduced me to you. And, and I think, what, what was it? I, I, you did a drawing and I actually purchased the drawing from you. I had intended on, on getting that tattooed on my body somewhere. That I never followed through with. Do you remember that? Yeah. I forgot about that. It was a, it was a picture of a, of a crazy, of a crazy looking, I think it was a Latina woman on a bus or something like that. Do you? I think, yeah. Yeah. I think I have that in a sketchbook. Yeah. I used to get people on the bus and, and I'd fart a lot. I have it around here somewhere. Really? I think it's downstairs actually. Oh, killer. We should dig that up. I'd love, yeah. I'd love to see it. But, so I'm, I'm just very interested in what it is that you do. You make, you, you started in the Bay Area. That's where you grew up. In Berkeley? Berkeley or Albany actually. Yeah. Berkeley Light is Albany. Albany is like if Norman Rockwell did a picture of Berkeley, it would probably look like Albany. Right. So, I want to know, how is it that you get these films done? Your latest film is, is called Help Wanted. Is that correct? That's the latest one or, I don't know if you release them in different orders based on, you know, how long it takes to edit or whatever. Sometimes I know things come out in different orders, but, I'm pretty, I'm pretty Nazi about that. I actually like to make sure I get everything out in the order that it's being made. And I try really hard to make sure I do something about once a year to once every two years. Help Wanted, I kind of fell off the track because I'd had a, I've been going strong. I, I was able to do one every year because I was playing at the San Francisco Underground Film Festival every year. And it was such a great place to showcase your work. It really would get the fire under my ass to make sure I got, something produced in time for that festival's deadline. So, you know, 2006, 2007, 2008, I did something. 2009, we shot Help Wanted and then I went into debt and had a slight, I don't know, like existential crisis. I had, I had my, like an eight and a half moment where I just, I couldn't figure out what the movie was supposed to be about anymore because it was such a process to make it that I ended up editing the same 20 minutes of film for like a year and almost lost my mind actually. It was really. So, so sometimes the process of just getting the film done kind of sometimes overpowers the original idea and, and you get caught up in that, that whole thing and then you have to kind of go back and, and search what it is that you were trying to do in the first place. The, the message. Yeah, totally. Well, because you get, you're such a different person from the day that you write the script to the day you finish shooting because so much stuff has transpired in that process. You know, the film usually is not the film that you wanted to make. And that's, I think it's an old cliche, but it's true. And, you know, you start, you feel a little bit of, I don't know about other people. I always feel a lot of pressure too because unlike doing a, you know, like a drawing is just you and a piece of paper. You've involved all these people and you feel kind of like you owe it to them to make sure that the film was good because they work these long hours. I don't pay anybody and they usually eat a lot of crappy food on set for 14 hours a day. So I feel like the least I could do is get them a good looking film and that, that always weighs heavily on me as well. And I'm sure anyone else. So it's, um, you know, it's often hard with all that surrounding you to kind of figure out what the heck it is you're trying to make. So, so, and that's, that's another thing that I just find very interesting. How do you pull off making such a good looking film? I mean, I can share willpower. Yeah, I don't know. I was working. I've worked 40 hours a week. It's very, but, but I, but I have to imagine that there's equipment involved. That's not cheap. Like, well, yeah, I mean, I got, I actually got a little bit of a break because, uh, when I, when I first started doing all this stuff in high school, um, I was either borrowing, uh, cameras from friends of mine who, uh, whose parents actually had money to buy them cameras. Or I would, uh, I enlisted at a city called San Francisco and I was just renting equipment from them. But all this stuff was really low grade equipment. And, uh, I had a rich aunt and she died in, uh, around, uh, 99 or 2000. And so she left me like, not like a lot of money, but just enough money to buy a camera and a computer and, uh, and a shotgun microphone. And so I use that stuff to, uh, edit all of my, and shoot my first three or four films that, uh, you know, are the, the first three, four films that I actually thought would be worth showing people basically. And so there was my lucky break because I mean like the sad thing about making movies is it's a great art form, but it's like, you really have to have money to do it. It's a very classist art form. Um, I think most filmmakers are probably upper middle class to middle class. And, uh, yeah, I don't really know what to add to that, but, um, so, so yeah. And, and, and you, you say that those were the first films that you wanted to show people. So, so I take it as, uh, you were always trying to make some kind of movie or, or something for a long time. I mean, when, when did you really think about, uh, trying to do this, you know, as, as something that you can, uh, get your word out or, or express yourself as? Probably, I think middle school. I know earlier than that, I, I definitely had an interest in doing it. I mean, I remember, um, forcing my friends to dress up, like members of the Toxic Crusaders, which is the cartoon show based on the, the Toxic Avengers series by Troma. Cause I wanted to make a Toxic Crusader movie. And then I had my dad just put a camera on his shoulder. I barked orders at all my friends. I remember firing some poor friend of mine. I got so fucking pissed. Uh, but then in middle school, I got really into the idea of actually making a movie. And the first thing I seriously pursued was, uh, I wanted to do a straight remake of Plan 9 from Outer Space. And, uh, I had, I still have the script actually for like a, I don't know, 12 year old. I wrote this incredibly long. It wasn't very good, but it was like an attempt to do Plan 9 as a straight horror movie. And from then I, uh, branched out and then I tried, I actually, the first thing I shot was an adaption of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. And, uh, yeah, that was, so, you know, and I'd never show that to anybody, but at least, you know, it was my first actual film. But you still have those tapes? Oh yeah. Yeah. It's pretty funny to watch actually cause I had a fake, I got this giant, uh, fake spider at a Halloween store. It was huge, made of rubber. And then I ended up taking a foam and duct tape and spray paint and made it look more like a giant beetle. And so there's all these shots where, you know, the, you can see the, like the opening of the book, the guy wakes up in bed as a giant insect. And then the whole first scene in the book is all his per, his point of view. And so I tried to do that with the film. So I, you know, stuck a camera on my lap and then put this bug on my lap and proceeded to just wave these legs around in front of the camera. Actually, I was on YouTube the other day and somebody else made a Metamorphosis movie and they did the same thing. Funny enough, it was really obvious that they were just waving a fake legs in front of the lens. So, so the, I, I keep hearing, um, this kind of reoccurring theme when I hear you talk about your films is just the inventiveness of, of trying to get some of these effects on, you know, with little to no money. There's a lot of tricks that I hear you talk about all the time, you know, oh, we did this to get this effect or you were just talking about the film, uh, Bob. Um, before we went on. Um, and, uh, do you explain, explain that a little bit? Like, you know, how do you learn to do these things? Is it just pure imagination or, or do you learn these tricks from, from other places? Like, you know, you always hear about these, you know, how we got this effect, you know, for nothing, you know? Well, I mean, that was definitely, um, so like I was a total makeup nerd as a kid. I was really, my, my idol was Lon Chaney. And, uh, so I used to spend a lot of time, like fucking around with my face to make myself look like one of his characters. He played, uh, the Phantom of the Opera, the original version, actually the only good version I think actually that's ever been done. He was the first Quasimodo. He was in the first, uh, American vampire film. And so I would spend all this time trying to duct tape my nose up to look like him. And that really, you know, it all gave me an interest in doing makeup. And because I didn't have funds to buy stuff, I would just get creative. So I'd steal, uh, I'd go through my mom's makeup sack and try to figure out how to make stuff work that way. And then, um, the other contributing factor, was, uh, my dad used to do the house up on Halloween and I would help him out and we'd make the whole thing into a haunted house. And he was really crafty about, you know, he would make a pulley system. So the, when you open the front door, a coffin to the left of the door, the door, the coffin door would swing open and this creature would lunge out at the kids on the porch. And, uh, he, you know, and that was always done really cheap too, but he made it look good just in how he presented it. So I think when I started making movies, I already had kind of a angle on how to do something. I wanted to do stuff from a purely, you know, creative perspective. And it also just gave me a love of trying to figure out how to pull stuff off with a little money. I'm also just really cheap. I don't, sure. I get leery about spending loads of money because I don't believe that, uh, you know, any vision in anyone's head really is worth like, you know, millions of dollars. Not that I even have millions of dollars to work with, but if I did, I mean, I think I'd feel really guilty. So I always trying to look at how to do this thing as cheap as possible. Well, I mean, some of those big, big budget, films, you know, that, that are out seem more like a display of someone's, uh, um, digital animation skills than there is any kind of storyline or, or, uh, Oh yeah. depth to the movie. Stuff like Avatar. I always feel like I'm just like watching somebody masturbate on camera, you know? Uh, and there's, it's kind of joyless. I mean, it's really fun to get in there and try to figure out like how you're going to do something, you know? And, uh, yeah. And you can actually come up with some really interesting stuff. And you don't have a lot of money. Uh, one of my evil in the, the first evil dead film, the best part of that entire movie is the whole last half where Ash is by himself and he's losing his mind in the cottage. And that whole sequence came about because the entire cast and crew left. They were like fed up. They've been shooting for so long. They just up and left the, uh, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell and Rob tapered and the other guys. So they had to figure out how they're going to finish the movie. And they had the creative solution of let's just make Ash go insane and have the house torture Ash. So that's where all the really big, really bizarre, fascinating camera angles come in. That's now, you know, made Sam Raimi famous enough to the point where he's directed the super, uh, the Spider-Man franchise. So, uh, I actually think lack of money is, uh, almost better than overabundance of money. Right. Forces you back into your imagination. Totally. I mean like a certain amount is good. I mean, I'd like to have enough money to pay people. That would be good. That would be good. But, uh, other than that, you know, I think so, um, we got the theme song. So one of your films, I, yeah, Bob, the Bob theme song. Uh, I just, I just made you watch Bob. Yeah. And we, and we just watched this, um, maybe play that in the background. Yeah. And Bob actually is, uh, based on a three panel, uh, comic book I did. And I just, again, for the San Francisco underground film festival, I needed to come up with an idea and I needed it fast. And so just took this three panel comic and the three panel comic, there was a guy walking down the street, looked at this big, huge grin on his face. And everyone around him is saying, hi, Bob, hi, Bob. And then at the last panel, he's got a thought bubble with a noose in the thought bubble and he's crying. So in the film, uh, I elaborated on that, except since it's a film, it needs to be kind of flashier. So at this time, instead of thinking of a noose, he actually gets run over by a car multiple times. Actually, it was like the most fun I've ever had actually shooting a Gore effect as I'm getting run over by this car. And the thing I noticed at least, you know, from my interpretation, the interesting thing was when this person hit Bob, they're just like, sorry, Bob. And it was kind of like everybody's being very nice to Bob and everybody's loves Bob. But then when Bob's dead, nobody really cares that much either. The guy just kind of drives off. Sorry, Bob. It's like a film about California. Really? Yeah. Passive aggressive environment, you know, right? And especially in the film world, actually, it's like a sea of ambiguity constantly meeting people who just, you know, even if you're like really low in the totem pole like me, you'll meet people who will do a certain amount of brown nosing and then talk about you behind your back or just never return a phone call or, you know what I mean? Something you don't really know where you stand with people. I think the fact almost all the films I've done are really about paranoia and distrust in a lot of ways. So, and that kind of leads into my next question. You're in LA now. Yeah. So what? LA of the beast. Yeah. I mean, this is the place to be if you want to make films. You know, ironically too, I never, I didn't actually come to LA for film. I thought that would be a mistake. I came to LA because I've been working like a series of different day jobs throughout the Bay Area. And during Help Wanted, it really broke me because I just couldn't possibly, it was really hard to manage working 40 hours a week and try to get this film done. It was like a really complex big film. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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Like you feel kind of embarrassed. Right, right. And I also think that it's one of those industries from my observations where I almost feel like you're better off keeping a safe distance from it, you know, because I like making my movies, but I don't like it enough to want to just make films for the sheer art of filming stuff. I mean, it has to be, you know, my own project or else it would be sheer torture. So I figured this way I could at least have some financing coming in and then I'd be free to go off and, you know, make my movies, but I'd be able to dictate my own schedule a little bit more. Are you fearful that someone will see one of your films and really like it and then say, hey, I want to finance you to make more films? Is there a scary side to that where you're like, where if you are given that opportunity to pay people that maybe it would slip out of your control or things would change, you know, it would feel different? Actually, no, I think that would be awesome. I would love that. And I've definitely, you know, poured myself to anyone I've worked with on storyboards. You know, oh, I make movies too. But I get concerned about when you're done with the movie trying to actually get it released because trying to get a movie released, at least in a movie theater now, is just complete insanity. They don't, there's not the variety that there used to be. Even as far back as the 90s, you'd have, you know, a couple of blockbusters. You'd have a couple of weird little films. Not even like indie films, just, you know, the lower budget Hollywood films would get out there. But occasionally some strange films would come out. And now I look at the marquees at movie theaters and it's like the same movies every season. And I think it's because everything's so expensive they don't want to gamble anymore, which is bizarre because it's an industry totally based on gambling, but people aren't gambling, so they're just remaking stuff or they're just releasing these, you know, $60 million movies that then they spend another like $2 million advertising and they want to make sure they make all that money back. So my concern would be to like, you know, shoot something that would be whatever I make, which is probably just say it would be a little bit offbeat and having it either just get shelved, which happens quite a lot, you know, they can't figure out how to release a movie, just gets put away, never gets released, or, you know, have it just kind of disappear, you know, and you wouldn't make your money, you wouldn't get it into a movie theater. So I'd almost rather go the route of just shooting a movie and, you know, putting it online or touring with it. You know, like the old exploitation filmmakers in the 30s, they used to go from town to town, set up a tent and screen films, like the circus basically coming to town. So I'd, you know, I'd almost feel more comfortable doing that. So I guess I'm a little bit of a control freak, but it's just, you know, it's just a sadness to see that an industry getting so completely flattened out. Right. Yeah. So it's about making the film and then, you know, being to make it available to those who really want to see it instead of, you know, some huge gigantic release where, you know, I don't know, Transformers 4 or whatever. Yeah, there's not really a place for anyone to do anything that's in the middle, you know, because I wouldn't say I make, like, art films, but I wouldn't say I make, like, blockbusters either. You know what I mean? I definitely am conservative enough to think that if you make a movie, it should be entertaining. Right. You know, but at the same time, you know, realistic enough to know that I don't have it in me to shoot the kind of thing that actually gets put into movie theaters these days. Sure. So I almost feel like movie theaters are going to be like vaudeville in 20 years anyways. You know, I see the industry sort of eating itself alive, just making bigger and bigger movies that are increasingly harder to make their money back. And eventually I think it's all going to fold and it's all going to go to the internet anyways, which is, like, sad. You know, there's nothing better than going out to a movie theater and watching a movie. But I'm pretty sure it's all going to be on the internet eventually anyhow. Yeah, it does seem to be going that way. And you keep hearing stories about the large movie houses fearful of the internet, and the same with music as well. And, you know, those big companies are starting to feel the pinch of people being able to do, you know, like what we do. You hear, we can say what we want, we can do what we want, we can make it actually sound as good as those movie houses or whatever, or, you know, radio broadcasts, and we control everything. I don't know. I think that's cool, but I understand movie is different and you do want to go to a theater to see movies. You know, that's fun and always a good time. It also begs the question of, like, how are you going to make money? Like, that's the really big problem I think is it's not, I think it's what everyone's so freaked out about. It's not so much that the big industries are all, you know, strangling to death. I think that's actually great. But it's sort of like a deck of cards that's been thrown in the air and we don't know how they're going to land because no one knows how the heck we're going to make money anymore. You know what I mean? Because people are so used to having free content on the web that it doesn't work to pay people to download your stuff. You know, people are like, oh, fuck that. I'd rather, you know, go see something for free. Yeah, if you put a price on anything on the internet, people are just like, screw it. Oh, totally. And it's really hard to get people to watch something that they don't know is good. As in, if you're an indie filmmaker or you make, especially with indie films, actually, it's really hard to convince people to watch an indie film, you know. And then get someone to pay for an indie film, I think you'd be dead in the water. I don't think anybody would do it. So I think people are going to have to start getting really creative on how they make their money. You know, I don't really have an answer myself. I just started selling swag on my web page, sort of in my, and that's sort of like my bid is the films are free. But you should buy a T-shirt, you know. And then I've got a DVD I'm releasing. And so even though you could get the films for free online and watch them, the DVDs got all these special features, which I kind of reason, like the only reason anybody buys DVDs is actually because they have special features on them. And, you know, so you'd sell a DVD with stuff on it that they don't have. Plus, you know, people really like something they often want to have, like something tangible to hold onto about it. But, you know, it's a lot more work than just getting a film out in a movie theater and reaping the profits. We have the same problem here. I mean, I'm thinking every day about what I could do to monetize this podcasting thing. And, you know, because I'd love to do this all the time. Of course. Unfortunately, you know, I got to work the full-time job to even make this possible. But, yeah, if anybody out there has got any bright ideas for both of us, let us know. Please. Well, while we're on the subject, we're on the subject of depressing stuff. We were talking about Bukowski earlier. Do you want to play that? I've got a great copy of Tom Waits reading Nirvana by Charles Bukowski off of his 2008 album Orphans. Let's do it. Let's do it. It's phenomenal. Not much chance. Completely cut loose from purpose. He was a young man riding a bus through North Carolina on the way to somewhere. And it began to snow. And the bus stopped at a little cafe in the hills and the passengers entered. And he sat at the counter with the others and he ordered. And the food arrived. And the meal was particularly good. And the coffee. The waitress was unlike the women he'd known. She was unaffected. And there was a natural humor which came from her. And the first thing she said was, you know, I'm going to go to work. And I said, well, I'm going to go to work. And I said, well, I'm going to go to work. And the fry cook said crazy things. And the dishwasher in back laughed. A good, clean, pleasant laugh. And the young man watched the snow through the window. And he wanted to stay in that cafe forever. And a curious feeling swam through him that everything was beautiful there. And it would always stay beautiful there. And then the bus driver told the passengers that it was time to board. And the young man thought, I'll just stay here. I'll just stay here. But then he rose and he followed the others onto the bus. He found his seat and he looked at the cafe through the window. Then the bus moved off down the curve, downward out of the hills. And the young man looked straight forward. And he heard the other passengers speaking of other things where they were reading or trying to sleep. And they hadn't noticed the magic. And the young man put his head to one side, closed his eyes, and pretended to sleep. There was nothing else to do. Just listen to the sound of the engine and the sound of the tires in the snow. .! Yep. Bukowski. So good. Fucking so just straight and unpretentious. But like very, you know, I'm weirded out if I meet someone who's read Bukowski and they didn't connect somehow. You know what I mean? Like anyone who can write so eloquently about taking a beer shit. You know, I think he's got something going for him. Yeah. And everyone knows that I love Bukowski. And I've been, you know, I've been reading Bukowski. I've been reading Bukowski for a long time. And there's still a lot more I can read. So anybody out there, go check out Bukowski. Please. So Help Wanted. Mm-hmm. This is the latest. Let's talk about that. Oh, okay. I really like this film a lot. I just like all the characters. They're all real people. The guy with the beard that was helping you, or helping the guy through his first day. Oh, Alex Cole. That guy's great. He just pulled it off so naturally, I think, you know. That was such a great thing for me because I met him at the San Francisco Underground Film Festival. And he's a local stand-up comedian from San Francisco. And he's totally brilliant. He's really funny. And he's a great guy. I love him. And I was so struck with him that I ended up writing the part of Dog for Alex, not really knowing if he'd do it because he's not, you know, he wasn't like my friend. I just had met him at a festival once. But I sent him the script, and he was like, yeah, I'll totally do this. So the best thing about having that, a situation like that where you write a part for an actor, is you don't have to direct the actor at that point, you know? Right. I mean, what's my motivation? You're like, nothing. You're Alex Cole. That's your whole motivation. Just do it. Just play it straight. That was the only thing. You know, just be as droll as humanly possible. And the way he did it, he was so desensitized to what was going on where the character whose first day it was was just completely freaked out about everything going on. And he was just like, yeah, whatever. You know, it's just another job or whatever. Yeah, he did that really well. And actually, the lead, Justin Lamb, I actually got through Alex. Justin Lamb is also a stand-up comedian. And I couldn't find anybody to fill the role. All I wanted was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Nazi youth type. I mean, that was actually what the casting call said. And we couldn't get any blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Nazi youth, I guess because we weren't in Los Angeles where there's like lots of those guys running around. But Alex was like, yeah, I know this dude. And actually, he wasn't blonde at all. Justin actually is a brunette, and he had a beard and a mustache. But he came in and he did the only good, because he had the combination of being naive, and he's not actually naive, but he played naive really well. And he had to be likable or that movie wouldn't work. Because as an audience member, you have to be with him even if he is absentmindedly going along with what's got to be the most morally ambiguous job in history. So he let us dye his hair blonde and shaved his beard and mustache off. So yeah, Alex Cole is a huge, huge help for that project. He's also the three-time air guitar champion. Wow. Yeah, I guess someone just recently stole his trademark, his ridiculous glasses he wears when he does it. But someone just stole them at this year's air guitar championship. I know, right? There's no fucking justice in this world. Yeah. So to see Waylon's films, go to waylonbacon.com and definitely check out Help Wanted. I mean, I don't know. Do you want to talk about what the film is actually about? Or is that giving it away? Oh, no, I'll totally talk about it. Oh, okay. Yes. Go ahead. I mean, I leave the plot so ambiguous anyways, I don't think I can give too much away. It's obviously made by somebody who's worked a lot of jobs. And I have. When I was 13 or 14, I started working summer jobs right up through April this year, actually. And so that's like 14 years of shit jobs. And Help Wanted came about, originally I was writing a script about all of my bosses. Because for a while I had this habit of constantly getting the worst bosses imaginable. And I can back it up. You go to Yelp and look up any place I've worked at. Of course, now I don't want to say what these places are. So I was writing profiles of them, and that wasn't really coming together. And then I was writing another script about a guy who accidentally killed somebody, was haunted by their ghosts. And that didn't really come together. And those two scripts ended up becoming one script for the next one. And I was writing about a guy who's trying to get a job, and he gets a job at this warehouse, where it turns out it's a processing facility for dead hookers, homeless, and immigrants. And they're killed by the employees, who the management constantly has to pump up with antidepressants and Prozac because they have visions of the people that they've killed. But it's a completely legal job with health insurance. And so the main character is kind of a... I don't know if I'd say dumb, but he definitely doesn't question authority, and he doesn't question what's going on around him. He doesn't question what's going on around him. He doesn't question what's going on around him. And so he kind of goes along with it. And that's the basic plot in a nutshell. It was also kind of an excuse to inject some social commentary, because half of me kind of relates to the situation where you need a paycheck. The other half was about... I worked down the street from UC Berkeley for a while, and I got cranky about noticing that there was this whole generation coming up that I felt didn't have any interest in doing anything other than just getting a degree and getting a good job. And I was like, I'm not gonna do that. That was like their sole aspiration and goal, which made me feel kind of like George Bush I. There's no rebel rousers anymore. People don't want to fuck shit up. They just want to get a good paycheck and sort of buy into this American dream that I thought we had pretty well established as a crock of shit to begin with. So there's the Berkeley in me. It came out a lot there. Yeah, I mean, it's true. I mean, there is no... revolutionary spirit in people anymore because they've just been kind of whipped into their role. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what happiness you'd really get from just, you know... Having money is necessary, but I don't think it's the end all. You know what I mean? I think people are fearful of instability, and some people live their lives by what is safe, I guess. Yeah, I mean, the whole country got very stagnant around 99, actually. I remember... Like, and here's how much of an old fart that I am. Like, I remember after Nirvana broke up, and I said, well, shit, there goes my favorite band, so I got to wait for the next thing to come along. And the next thing never came along. What came along was Britney Spears. And for me, that was like the beginning of the end. And so... And that was, you know, what, 1999? When that started? So we're talking 10 years where it's been culturally very stale. And Help Wanted might be just kind of about a lot of my bile coming up about that, just feeling that everything's very stale. People are very unimaginative. And, you know, everything has kind of got this veneer of shiny peppiness to it, but underneath it's actually kind of ugly. Let's listen to Dog's speech. Ah, perfect. All right. Once you get the body up on the hook, what you want to do is strip off all of the clothing. And then grab the hose. You're gonna have to rinse down the entire thing. And be careful of the hose. We got it from a firehouse, so it's got a little bit of a kick to it. Now, grab the cleaver, and you want to separate the head, the arms, and the legs. Arms are gonna go in the left corner, heads in the right, legs back in the left. Now, here's the kicker. You got to do this in about 20 minutes. Over that, you're into overtime. Management hates that. But once you get the hang of it, that 20 minutes is gonna seem like nothing. All right? Let's get you out of here. Do some paperwork, all right? That's great. So... The thing I love about that is that, you know, if you've ever had a shit job, and you're on that first day where the guy's kind of showing you the ropes, you know, he hits that perfectly. You know, like, you know, this is what you got to do, and kind of showing you the ropes of the new job. You know, I remember working at McDonald's for a day. Oh, my God, really? You could substitute, you know, anything... any shit job with what he was doing. He was just saying right there, you know. Totally. And that's always the worst day of any shit job, is the first day. Of course. Because you're getting this glimpse into what you got to deal with for the next, you know, X amount of years. Yeah. This is what I got to do. Yep. Totally horrifying. All the gargles there are supplied by Sandra Rizzer. Did I tell you about this woman who played the dead, the not-quite-dead-yet hooker? Um, yeah, but go ahead and talk about that. That she, uh... The person who was supposed to play that part dropped out. Right before, like, the two or three days before we were supposed to shoot that scene. And so I found this other lady on a page called The Actors Cafe. You can basically shop for an actor for free. And got this lady in, and, um... I couldn't believe it. She's got to be 75, and she's hysterical. She's a stand-up comedian. And, um... I don't really know what else to add. She saved our butt, and she had a good sense of humor about it. Let us, like, cover her in fake blood. She never complained once. Where did you find all these stand-ups? Um, well, that was actually the whole pitch for the project. Because I was passing the script around, and everyone said, It's so fucking dark, Waylon. Like, this is the darkest thing you've ever written. Yeah. I said, well, it'll be really funny. We're gonna cast it with stand-up comedians. It'll be hilarious. So I already knew Alex was a stand-up, and was able to just kind of peruse my space and Craigslist and find other stand-up comedians who fit the bill. Sandra, who played the dead hooker, was an accidental stand-up. I didn't know she was gonna be a stand-up comedian. But, you know, it worked out. She's sitting there cracking wisecracks while we were... We had a super soaker with fake blood that we would just kind of pump up and hose her down with. Nice. The music there is by Jason Miller, who's a friend of mine. That was the theme music for Help Wanted that was playing in the background. Can we cue some of that again? Sure. I was really happy with the way that tune came out. Yeah. Give me a second here. Oh, okay. But, uh... Talk to me a little bit about how you found the location for Help Wanted. The location? Oh, well, it was... Actually, if you get the music cued up here, I'll talk about Jason a little bit. But, yeah, because he's... He's actually in a band called Lemurians. But before he was in the band, him and I were both just these two film-obsessed nerds, and he really wanted to do music. So he started doing the music on all my stuff. And I think Help Wanted's probably the best thing he did as far as, like, a film score goes. He just... I temp-scored the movie with Esquival. I don't know if you know Esquival. Yeah. Yeah. So I said I wanted something kind of like Esquival, but menacing. And so Jason's solution was he got this old beat-up rhythm box from the 40s and programmed it with this funky beat. And then he got a trumpet player in, and this Hannah, an asshole, I can't remember her last name, did the vocals. But I think it's just a phenomenon. Just a phenomenally creepy piece of kitsch music. That's great. Yeah, it totally works. And it kind of plays at odds with the visuals, too, because it's really, like, a dark, grimy-looking film. And you wanted the locations. Yeah. That was one of the other things about this film that I really liked, is that it looked like the location you got that was kind of the meat locker for these dead hookers and homeless people, it fit the film perfectly. You know, you had these multiple rooms and this long hallway where, you know, you had to go into, and there are flies buzzing around and dead hookers and what have you. You know, it's funny, it's actually, it's three or four different locations. Wow. Yeah, because we couldn't find one that accommodated everything. The first thing we found was a warehouse that's over on Mandela Parkway in Oakland, and they had no electricity, and we didn't have the money for a generator. So we just used the backyard, and that's where the whole scene happens, where they're loading in the bodies. Eerily enough, part of the freeway that collapsed during the 89 earthquake was right over that field. So for all I know, there might have been some bodies on that field. Wow. At some point in time. And all those flies that we got were there, but we took, we had, I'd saved bags of trash for a week, and then we just dropped them on the ground and shot for a couple of hours, and as it got hotter and hotter and everything in the bag would start to melt and rot, flies would just come out and we'd have to gather around, so then we'd get these low-angle camera shots and make sure we got all the flies buzzing in front of the camera lens. And then the interiors were an olive oil factory that we shot at that was also in Oakland. I got that through my dad, actually. A friend of his in AA happened to own an olive oil factory and heard that I was desperate for a location because we were two weeks to shooting with no location. And I was actually proposing to the terrified cast and crew that we do a guerrilla shoot at an abandoned warehouse I'd found in East Oakland somewhere. And everyone was against it except me. I was like, ah, fuck it, man. What are they gonna do? You know, luckily we got a legit location. We only had to pay them the money to, we had to pay for a security guard to be there. And it was really cheap. It was like 100 bucks a day to pay the security guard. And then the long hallway is a place called Attic Storage in San Francisco. And then actually the scene where the cars are pulling up is actually in West Berkeley. It's a totally different location. So, actually I guess it's five locations. Six if you count the office. And then seven because I had to do pickups in my apartment. So we had to make my apartment look like various parts of the other sets we shot in. The location stuff always makes me kind of laugh whenever I watch TV because downtown's filmed so much. And it's used as both downtown LA and New York City. But it looks kind of like New York City outside. Well, what they do is, you know, as long as you have a yellow cab that says New York City Taxi, you put a subway stall on the sidewalk that leads to nothing, then all of a sudden downtown LA is New York City. And most people don't know the difference. It's actually one of the reasons I like downtown LA. You know, I was under the assumption downtown Los Angeles was just a lot of glass skyscrapers. So I was really happy when I discovered it was this incredibly disgusting, festering, you know, shithole with all these amazing, beautiful old buildings. You know? And that's one of the reasons I really like. That's one of the reasons I wanted to move to New York City. Yeah. Actually, just that environment. Not because I romanticize being poor, because it's not fun at all. But there is something kind of beautiful about seeing buildings in that state. You know? And especially in a town where there's a lot of, you know, LA's one of those places where it doesn't matter where you're standing, you never quite feel like you're on even footing. Downtown's one of the few places in Los Angeles where I actually feel like this is very real. You know? Right. It's a lot down here. And I think most people from Los Angeles are doing themselves a disservice if they don't come down here and check it out and understand some of the history down here. Oh, there's so much. Yeah. And for me, you know, coming from a small town on the East Coast and growing up in a small town, I just, I feel very lucky to even be here. So when I see downtown Los Angeles on TV, even on shitty movies, I get excited because I'm like, wow. Like, that's outside my door. And, you know, that's cool. That's actually one of the great things about living in LA, too, is driving past places and realizing that it was the location for something you really loved. Right. My girlfriend and I drove up to Griffith Park and found the house they used in the original House on Haunted Hill. Yeah. And what was neat about that was right before then, we had discovered where the Bradbury building was that they had shot a lot of Blade Runner at. Right. Well, we realized looking at the House on Haunted Hill that they'd also used that in Blade Runner as the interior of the apartment. Yeah, and that's the other funny thing is that after you live here for a while and you start to know these locations, you can see a film and you could be like, that's not where they're saying it is. You know, I know where that is and it's nowhere close to where they say it is. Or they'll start off, you know, in downtown LA and in the next, you know, take they're in the valley. Oh, yeah. And you're like, they're not close to each other. But you feel like you're in the right place. Yeah. You feel like you got the inside information because you live here, you know. Absolutely. I get that way about San Francisco a lot. I'm convinced that no one's actually shot a movie in San Francisco that really makes you understand what it's like to live there. Except for the, strangely, the only film that ever came close is the 1970s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland. That is the only movie shot in San Francisco that actually captures San Francisco. Yeah. Because that's the city I see that being, probably New York too, but, you know, they're so guilty of that. People just, you know, casually walking through Chinatown. I was like, no one just casually walks through Chinatown. Right. You know. Yeah. So, um... Let's... Go ahead. No, you first. Oh, I was gonna say the next thing we have on your list here is the band of the guy who does your music. Yeah, this is Jason's band. I wouldn't say it's Jason's band, but he's definitely in it and was a founding member. It's called Lemurians. Some of you might have actually heard them. They got a new record out called Transmillennia on Factory Street Records. And this song is called... God help me. Hashashashin, if I'm pronouncing this right. Which, according to Jason Miller, is where the word assassin derives from. Apparently it's Sanskrit. But he might be full of shit. I don't know. But it's a really killer song. It kind of reminds me of Lucifer Sam off the first Pink Floyd album. And it's definitely got that sort of a, you know, cinematic bent to it. You know, which is perfect for Jason because he's, again, you know, a phenomenal movie score person. I'll shut up. Here it is. Here it is.! guitar solo guitar solo guitar solo guitar solo guitar solo guitar solo guitar solo guitar solo guitar solo guitar solo guitar solo guitar solo guitar solo guitar solo guitar solo Ooh, spooky. So what was that? That was Dance Belinda off the first Dr. John album, Grigri, from 1969. Cool. Yeah, and then of course before that was Ha Shashin from Transmillennia, the new Lemurians album. That was really good stuff. Yeah, they're really good in concert. Yeah. You know how you feel like you're on drugs, even if you're not on drugs. That's always good. I like those. Yeah. Because being on drugs in public places is a terrifying experience. Have you ever heard of a movie called Holy Mountain? Oh, yeah. Jarowoski. That movie, I actually just saw it for the first, and I could only watch maybe 20 minutes, probably before my brain just started to hurt. I thought you looked a little bit pale when I saw it today. Yeah. Because I had the same thing with that. I had a neighbor who was just as subversive as I am, and he was like, you've got to see this movie, Holy Mountain. But, you know, he goes, I've got to warn you, it's really intense. I said, whatever, I'll be fine. So I get 20 minutes into it, like you, and I turned it off. I said, oh, fuck, man, I can't watch this shit. This is fucking bizarre. And so I thought, maybe I need drugs. Maybe drugs would help. So I, you know, not that I do drugs, but I still have to watch it. So I went to a drug store, went to a bunch of pot, and tried to watch this movie again. And, of course, it was even more horrifying. So I finally called a bunch of friends over, a bunch of guys, and we all sat down and watched this movie together. It was like mass rape by a UFO. I mean, this movie was out there. If anyone hasn't seen this, it's sort of like about Jesus and aliens. And, I don't know, it's got a scene with a woman humping a mountain for spiritual purity. I read the wiki page about this movie, and the director or the writer actually distributed psilocybin mushrooms to the actors. I'd heard that. Yeah, brainwashing and shit. Yeah, he's out there, John Wosky. You know what's weird about him, besides that, and the fact, I mean, he's got his real son in a lot of his movies, like El Topo, too. He's got his real son in that film. And he makes these really far-out movies, but they look beautiful. Like, they're the kind of films you would expect to see come out of a college. But he's got enough money to fund these films to an extent that they are epics, and they're glorious to look at. I mean, they're just, you know, if you watch that film on silent, it's like watching this really fucked-up painting. Yeah. But the films are really dark. Yeah. Yeah, have you seen the Santa Sandra yet? No. That's like his most accessible film. And it's also incredibly strange. But in that one, it's about a woman who, a guy whose mother is part of a subdivision of Christianity where they worship this woman who had her arms cut off. And at some point, the mom has her own arms cut off, not on purpose, and comes back and finds her son who has gone insane and been in a mental institution for 12 years and proceeds to use him so that she can execute crimes against women. Wow. Yeah, I'm trying not to give too much of the plot away because it's one of those, there's more to it than that. You'd have to actually sit down and watch it. So, what are you up to now, Waylon? Right now, I'm whoring Help Wanted. And it's actually going really well. So, Mike Everleth writes for a webpage called Bad Lit, the Journal of Underground Film. And he first started writing about my work because he was covering the San Francisco Underground Film Festival. And he's really been championing me ever since. He was the first. He was the first person who ever actually really wrote anything nice about me. And so, he's been covering Help Wanted from the day I started posting storyboards to my blog to the day it premiered. And since I put it online, he's really been pumping it up. And it's been leading to some really good things. So, I've been invited to three European film festivals. One's in France, one's in the Netherlands, and one's in Switzerland. Being invited doesn't necessarily mean you'll get in. It just means that they heard about you and they're inviting you to submit. But I also found out that I am playing at this year's Comic Con. Which is great. Because I was trying to get into Comic Con last year to go promote Help Wanted and the tickets sold out so fast, I couldn't make it. That's what my friend says, that as soon as the tickets go on sale, they sell out right away. Oh yeah, you'd have to be at home all day with your finger on the return button. Any minute now, any minute now. So luckily, I actually didn't have to buy a ticket. Now I just get to go for free. When is that? That's going to be July 21st. Oh wow, that's coming up soon. That's coming up really soon. I'm playing on Friday night at 9.30. So if anyone is going to Comic Con, Help Wanted is playing Friday night at 9.30 p.m. I also just found out that there might be a segment about Help Wanted in Fangoria Magazine. And for me, this is like, I could totally quit making movies right now and I would be just fine. Because Fangoria Magazine is my all-time favorite magazine. I used to get in trouble bringing it to school and stuff. So to actually get my name in Fangoria would be neat. I've come a little bit close. Shannon Burla is my makeup artist and she actually had some of her work that she did while she was studying at the Tom Savini Makeup School featured in Fangoria. So for a while though, every time I opened up a Fangoria, I'd get a kick out of like, oh hey, I know the person who did that. That's great. Yeah. So that's kind of what I'm doing. I've been working on a documentary about my father. You mentioned that to me a couple weeks ago. Yeah. That sounds really interesting. I'm trying really hard to make sure it's a good thing. It's not shit my dad says. You know, that was my beef. But I really, Help Wander was so exhausting, I kind of thought, well, I need to get off the horse or get back on the horse and shoot something. And my father has always spun these incredibly strange stories about his time spent in the Navy and just his life growing up as a kid. It's much stranger than you'd think. And around the same time, my friend Mike Edwards got access to a really nice HD camera. That shoots at 24 frames a second. So over the opportunist, I took advantage of this and started going around my dad's house with Mike's camera and I shot like 14 or 15 tapes that I'm currently trying to whittle down into a good 20 minute piece. That's great. Thanks. And what's your father think of that? He thought it was great. I mean, he's a complete ham. I think he was really excited that I was going to get all of his stories on tape for posterity. He was probably, a little bit horrified that what I really wanted were just all of his really good sex stories. He's got these amazing sex stories from the Philippines. And, you know, I really was kind of focusing on the absurdist because there's a tricky thing about doing documentary where you start to, you want to make sure you're not exploiting the person. And if the person happens to be your dad, it's like really a doubly sensitive situation. So I figured the best thing to do would be to try to keep it light, you know, try to keep it funny. And, you know, just keep the angle on the fact that he is just a spinner of tall tales, you know. And is something like that something that you'll try to, you know, push in the same way that you do your other films? Probably. I mean, we'll see how it comes out. I get a little bit nervous because, again, it is my dad. And I don't know how it's going to come out. But I probably would. I mean, yeah. Why not? Because the next thing I want to do is a feature and I'm sure it's going to take me a really long time to get that off the ground. And so my other goal was shooting the dad doc because I wanted to make sure that I had something going immediately after Help Wanted because I don't like to be stagnant for too long, you know. You get kind of bummed out, start thinking you're never going to make another film again. I think it's really good just to keep going. So since you've been here in L.A., you know, I assume you're meeting a lot of different people in this industry. Yeah. There is a creative energy here in Los Angeles that regardless of how you look at L.A., you can't really deny there's just a lot of talented people here. Are you meeting people that, you know, in the back of your mind, you're like, I want to use this guy for something? A little bit. I haven't met too many actors. I'm mostly meeting behind the scenes people. And I've been looking at it more like, you know, okay, good. As long as I have friends, I know I can get a movie pulled off. You know what I mean? And especially if they're interested in a creative endeavor. So looking at it that way, totally. Yeah, you know, it's weird. The vibe here, San Francisco is really not a pro-L.A. place. But I've noticed that L.A. is not anti-San Francisco. And what's weird is that networking and making art in L.A. is actually a lot easier than in San Francisco. Because, San Francisco seems very concerned with being, they want to be artsy and they're trying to figure out what to do that will differentiate them from Los Angeles and New York. You know, the two big showbiz towns. San Francisco is kind of like a gray zone as far as art goes. Not that it doesn't have art. It's got tons of art going on. It's just that it doesn't know what its art identity is. Because, I mean, it's kind of got the documentary identity. But a lot of, you know, if you're a narrative filmmaker and you want to do, and you're in San Francisco, you feel kind of at odds. And so San Francisco ends up being kind of a tougher town to network. And it's harder to, it's harder to meet other artists. I actually made a lot more friends directly involved in the arts in two months in L.A. than I did in like 10 years in San Francisco. I'd say, you know, yeah, go figure. It's very strange. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely something that I've heard multiple times. When you go to San Francisco and you say you're from L.A., you kind of get this look like, oh, you're just some plasticky, you know, shallow guy or whatever. But L.A., L.A., when I ask people in L.A. what they think of San Francisco, I always get, typically I get very positive responses. Oh, it's a beautiful city and we love to go up there, you know. That's about it. And yeah, it's kind of strange. But, you know, it's something that I noticed when I first came to L.A. and I never expected, you know, I try to do some writing and stuff. Kind of when the spirit moves me. And it's nothing I ever considered even showing anybody. But, you know, here in L.A., right away, it was just this downtown magazine contacted me and started to include my writing in their weekly or their monthly website updates and things. And then the Krabby Joe's sign kind of came together and I had that, you know, restored. And people, we're just all over willing to help trying to put that somewhere and just help me out in ways that I don't think would have ever happened in San Francisco for some reason. I don't know. I often wonder if it's like a combination of economics, because San Francisco is such an expensive place to live. I think people get very, you know, people get very closed off. People aren't as friendly in a weird way. People are friendly, but it's very hard to quite connect. And it might just be because everyone's so busy trying to fend for themselves that it's really hard to justify finding time to start bringing somebody else into your fold. You know, it's an extra weight on your shoulders in addition to the weight of trying to pay the insane San Francisco rents. You know, and the other thing is I think in LA, like, art is really like Los Angeles is bread and butter. You know what I mean? I mean, paying for a movie ticket in Los Angeles feels like buying cheese in Wisconsin. You know, you feel like, all right, I'm contributing to this place as a breadwinner. And so I've noticed when you're doing something creative, people get really like, yeah, let's do this. Let's do that too. And yeah, it's really refreshing, actually. I'm surprised. I was really apprehensive about moving here. I think another element to it is that there's so many people here trying to make it or get their art out there that even if you can help someone else, just by that association, like, it kind of makes you feel like you've contributed even to your own success in some way. Yeah, it was very much like a networking, type of town. But I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, that's great. Networking's great. Yeah, I mean, people might view it as like opportunism. Well, this guy's only talking to me because he thinks that maybe it'll benefit him later. But it's really, really hard to make money doing art. And so that's, there's nothing, you do have to be kind of opportunistic about it. You know what I mean? There's this certain sleaze about trying to make it in show business that I think is absolutely necessary. So what do you want to play next there, Waylon? Well, geez. Looks like we've got Can't Complain up next off of the 1989 album Mosquitoes by Stan Ridgway, who is, speaking of Los Angeles, he's a Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter. He is lamentably, regrettably known as the singer for Wall of Voodoo. He did Mexican radio. And I only say regrettably because his solo work is far superior. He's done some amazing stuff. He's a great songwriter. I would say his songs are kind of like, audio movies. And you just play it. You guys will figure it out. All right. How you doing, Bert? Well, not so good, Charlie. My back's gone out. I cut my finger kind of gnarly. The job's the same and so is the boss. He's still a big ass. My wallet got lost. My wife's sick in bed. She says she'll never get well. And all these kids today have gone to hell. And all that government paperwork caught up with me. Had to hire a bean counter for an outrageous fee. And I don't know if the chicken or the egg is to blame. But all things considered, I guess I can't complain. Cheer up, Charlie said. Things could be worse. Well, yeah, I know. But did I tell you that my landlord's a cop? My neighbor's insane. But all things considered, I guess I can't complain. Out on the water Where the sailing wind all go The water's high While all the fish swim low Out on the water Where the sailing wind all go The water's high You know what, Bert, Charlie said? You got the wrong attitude. Sometimes life's a big game in the paths you can choose. Things may go wrong, but you gotta stand tall. Well, I know, Bert said. But well, that ain't all. My hair's falling out. The roof leaks when it rains. But all things considered, I guess I can't complain. Cheer up, Charlie said. Things could be worse. But all things considered, I guess I can't complain. Out on the water Where the fishing wind all go The water's high While all the fish swim low You know what, Bert, Charlie said. You got the wrong attitude. Sometimes life's a big game in the paths you can choose. Things may go wrong, the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain the roof leaks when the rain No, the water's high while all the fish swim low. You know what, Bert, Charlie said? You're a real loser. So I'll see you next week if you live till then. As Bert walked out on the sidewalk, ten floors up, two men lost control of a hoist at just the right time and a big Steinway Grand flattened Bert like a dime. And as a crowd gathered round and asked what was his name, could it be the chicken or the egg to blame? Well, the only thing heard was that all things considered, he really couldn't complain. So if you're a loser in life and your gun's out of ammo, just remember the story about Bert and the piano. Because if you can't string the bow, and you're clean out of resin, someone may have planned for you a music lesson. Keep your eyes to the sky. It could be a brand name. Remember all things considered, you really can't complain. I'm the man the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the tears the ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ So that was some Beefheart. Captain Beefheart and his magic band. That's Dr. Dark off the album Lick My Decals Off, Baby. Nice. Yeah, yeah, great title. And again, there was Stan Ridgway before that with Can't Complain off of Mosquitoes. Stan Ridgway has a new album out right now called Neon Mirage that everybody should pick up. I'm constantly championing the guy about the music. I was a huge fan as a kid and I didn't know anyone who liked Stan Ridgway. I'd go to concerts and it would be me and then a bunch of 40-something truck driver types. And I sheepishly gave Stan a copy of a movie I'd made. I was like, I was listening to a lot of Olive Voodoo when I made this and I hope you like it. And he actually wrote me an email back and was like, hey, this is great, good work. And it actually was really encouraging that a musician I respected liked my stuff enough to write me an email about it. That's great. Yeah. So, why don't you get into some other areas there? I know you have some other things you want to discuss about film and you were talking about cartooning and yeah. Yeah, so as far as film goes, well, let's see, what else did I want to talk about? I guess we could talk about how I learned kind of what, not, okay, so we were talking about how it's very hard to make movies and you have no money. Right. And I watched a lot of Ed Wood movies as a kid and Ed Wood obviously had no money. But I also realized that he didn't know how to, one of the reasons his films are bad wasn't necessarily that I think they were inherently bad. I mean, like, I don't think Plan 9 is any worse than, you know, Invaders from Mars or anything else that was floating around in the 50s. He just didn't know how to cover up his low budget. And that was sort of not being creative with his camera angles. So that was one thing that I tried to do. And one reason is why, like you said, you think the movies look really good is that I'm just really big on, we use a lot of close-ups and medium close-ups to cover up the fact that there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of money going on. And rhythm too, you know, you can create rhythm with the editing and it covers up a lot of what else is going on. Is that something that you kind of learn just through trial and error or? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Did you have any kind of mentors coming through this? A little bit. So my best friend in high school, or God, elementary school, actually, I've known this guy forever. His name is Hoku Uchiyama, who's quite the filmmaker in his own right. And he was the first guy I knew who was really just gung-ho about making movies. And I actually learned a lot about directing watching him direct because he was the first guy I knew who was trying to shoot a three-part narrative film in middle school. And, you know, would bully us. And I was like a fascist about how stuff had to be. And, you know, it was hard work, but he always actually achieved results. He was the first person I knew who played the Cannes Film Festival when he was 21 years old when that happened. Wow. Yeah, yeah, he's phenomenal. So he was really a mentor for me. My friend Kamala Appel actually taught a film workshop at the Albany Senior Center. I don't know why it was at the Albany Senior Center, but she was also very supportive just in the sense that she would, you know, she wouldn't give me direction, but she would definitely look at my work and encourage me to continue doing it. That's good. Yeah, very. Other than that, bad screenings was the biggest thing that I ever learned from. There's nothing worse than sitting there and watching your film bomb. Yeah. And you really learn what works and what doesn't work. Because when you're watching people watch a movie you've made, you can actually feel it when something isn't working. You know, you just feel this vibe. And it's the worst thing in the world. It's like... Everyone staring at you with your pants down and not being impressed. It's kind of what it feels like. And, you know, having enough experiences like that, I started to kind of... Learning what to do and what not to do. I think most filmmakers when they started had the impulse to try to make stuff really long and drag things out. In fact, I know I was a gigantic Jim Jarmusch fan when I was younger. And so I had this impulse that maybe I could do a Jim Jarmusch-y kind of thing. And I quickly realized that Jim Jarmusch-y kind of thing only works when Jim Jarmusch... does it. And it really doesn't work when you're using video instead of film. So... So... I guess one thing I'm curious about more on the technical side of things... How do you do your editing? I use Final Cut Pro. I'm like everybody. So you're using computers to do editing. I mean, is that what you pretty much have to do these days? Pretty much. I mean, you could do it other ways, but it almost seems... like pretentious at this point to do it another way. Final... It's just, you know, and you can use Adobe Premiere as well, but just the idea that you can edit from home is great. Just in the same way that a lot of musicians can record from home now. You can make your movie in the morning having your coffee in your bathrobe, you know? And it's actually... It's a great way to work. I actually find I get all my best work done if I wake up at 8 a.m. and I get to it before I even have time to be that capable of cognizant thought. You get a lot of good work done. Yeah, I've been trying to convince my full-time job that I would get a whole lot more work done if I could just stay here instead of going to the office. Yeah, working at home is a great way to get stuff done. I know some people have a hard time with it, but I think it's way preferable. Yeah. You know, and with Final Cut, you also have a lot of leverage that you couldn't before. I never really got to edit film film, but I did get to edit hi-8 tapes where you really were locked into your edit when you made an edit. You know, you would just take... I'll photograph off of one tape, select whatever couple of seconds you wanted, and transfer it to another tape, and then you'd do that, and that's how you edited your movie. But once you edited it, that was it. You were locked in. So you only had one real print to work off of unless you wanted to re-edit the entire film. Final Cut Pro is nice because you can cut something and then you can fiddle with it endlessly. And that actually might be sort of the devil in the program, too, is that you could spend like six years just sitting there fucking around and trying to get your film as perfect as humanly possible. I know my poor brother, my girlfriend loses it because I'm constantly fiddling with Help Wanted before it screens. We had a thing where it actually premiered at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival, and it was slated to screen again the next day at a bar in San Francisco. And I literally went home from that screening in Berkeley, had notes I'd taken during the screening, woke up, and then spent the whole next day editing the movie, and then exported it to a DVD, and then ran it over to this bar coffee shop like 10 minutes before screening and had like a different cut of the movie to show them because I thought it would work better. And then I made notes during that screening, too, so I could go home and make more adjustments before I sent it off to the film festivals. I mean, that's the curse of Final Cut Pro. When you do a screening, how do you do that? Do you just get your friends together? Do you try to get random people off the street? I have gotten random people off the street. I generally screen in places that are screening other things because it takes the edge off of you to fill the place. You know what I mean? I've had a couple situations. Like, I played at the Fright Night Horror Film Festival in Kentucky with My Worst Nightmare, and that was one of those things that was really sink or swim. It was up to you to make sure that you filled the theater. So I spent two days drinking with people and trying to get them to become interested or at least become my friends so I could get chummy enough with them to get them to come watch my movie. And then, like, five minutes before screening, I was in the movie theater with flyers and just fired people. You can come in right now. The movie's screening. It's screening. It's got, you know, I tell them what was in the movie. There's a bug. It crawls out of a guy's nostril. It's fucking horrifying. You should come in here. You'll love it. And so I actually managed to fill the theater this way. That's great. Yeah, but, you know, preferably, you would, you know, that's hard. You feel like a rock on tour. So, um... What would you say are your biggest, uh, influences? Um, let's see. So, there was the Jim Jarmusch, um, who I just enjoyed the, uh, how confidently slow his movies were. You know what I mean? There's, like, that difference between being slow and, like, confidently slow. And the fact that he seemed to find, he'd find beauty in these little moments that most people would probably gloss over. And that was one thing I really liked about him. You know, he made the world look totally unique. I'd never seen the world look the way it looks through a Jim Jarmusch film. Uh, John Waters was, like, a massive influence when I was little. Uh, I have friends, actually, who will never forgive me because I showed everybody Pink Flamingos when I first stumbled upon it in my teen years. Uh, uh, Terry Gilliam, too. I really love Terry Gilliam. In fact, there's a whole, that sequence in, uh, Help Wanted where he's walking down the long hallway is a bit of a homage to Brazil where he's, uh, actually going into, uh, the Ministry of Information and he goes to the main torture chambers and he's walking down a long white hallway. That was sort of a, because, yeah, a little tribute there. Who else? I think as far as filmmaking, that might be it. I mean, um, there are filmmakers I definitely enjoy a lot. And, uh, you know, as a filmmaker, the older I get, the more I watch films with different eyes and I see things that I really appreciate. And, uh, other filmmakers. Those are the guys who are probably my big influences. I always thought you had a, uh, a touch of David Lynch to some of your films. Oh, I definitely like David Lynch. Uh, in fact, I saw him speaking about meditation a couple years ago. Wow. And, uh, I was terrified. Where? This is, uh, in Emeryville, actually. Oh, okay. You know, and he really is. At the Ikea. Yep, you know exactly who you're talking about, yeah. Yeah, David Lynch, love him. I remember, uh, actually I saw Eraserhead and Pink Flamingos on the same, on the same night. I picked both of these movies up at Movie Image on the recommendation of a friend. And it was, it was really, one of the most terrifying film screening events I've ever had. Because, uh, both of those films were on like anything I'd ever seen. And I was, I was frightened. You know? I didn't know, I didn't have anything to hang my hat on. And, um, it probably altered my whole perception on how I watch movies. Yeah. So, right now, um, one of the gigs you're, you have here in, in, uh, L.A. is storyboarding. Yeah. And, um, tell me, tell me how that process works. You just get a call from somebody and they say, hey, we need some storyboards and... Oh, that would be great. But... No? No, I have to, I have to go hunting for storyboard jobs. And it's a lot like trying to get a date because you just, you know, you may think that you got, you know, what this person needs, but they oftentimes don't. And so you end up, you gotta go through a lot of rejection and then every now and then you'll get something. And the, the trick is to get a couple of high class gigs and, uh, you can put that in your resume and it really impresses people. They don't actually, they, they might not care how good your work is, but, you know, if they see you've worked with somebody, they might, they might dig on that. Uh, but it's a, it's a great fun way to make a living. Um, storyboards are really useful for me because again, when you, uh, have little money and you're shooting, you need to be very efficient. And storyboards are a good way to be efficient because you don't have to map out your shots on set. You've got them already mapped out. Um, and so I've been storyboarding for myself for a really long time and, uh, figured that I could maybe storyboard for other people too. And, uh, yeah, got down here and immediately actually got a job where I had to storyboard, uh, almost the, almost this entire film in like three weeks, which is, which is a lot harder than it sounds. I mean, like I initially thought, oh, this would be like nothing. I'll sit around the house. I'll draw all day. I've been, you know, drawing since I was seven. It'll be no more, it'll be no work. But I started to realize that at my fastest, I can probably do about a page an hour. If, uh, we're talking like the penciling and then the inking. And, uh, occasionally if you have to conceive of the way a scene's gonna flow too, that's a whole other bag where you have to think about the sequence of shots. And, um, if I was doing, if I was doing the, like 17 scenes, that's, uh, most of the movie. And I had to work 14 or 15 hours a day every day for three weeks straight just to get this thing finished in time. Wow. Yeah. It was great though. I can't say what the movie was, but they were giving me, these scenes were fucked up. These, like beyond anything that I could think of. My girlfriend made me stop telling her what I was drawing because she was having nightmares about it. Wow. Yeah. A lot of like fetuses and twins and midgets and, you know, it was Lynchland. Centipede. Two. The centipede. Have you seen The Human Centipede yet? I have not seen the, everybody talks about it, but I haven't seen it. I almost feel like I don't have to see it. I've heard so much about it. Um, somebody told me about a pretty crazy film called The Antichrist. Oh, yeah. Fuck. It's, yeah. I haven't seen it yet. It's the worst date movie of all time. I kid you not. Antichrist is something else, man. It's good though. Yeah. It's really good, but it's, uh, it's dark. Nice. I'm gonna have to watch that. No, you absolutely should. Well, if we're talking about, uh, childhood stuff, the, the Cramps were one of my favorite bands when I was a kid because it was the first band, I had parents that were really hard to shock because they were, they were, you know, my mom hooked up with Bukowski, my dad was in the Navy, and I couldn't find anything that would upset them. So finally I got my first Cramps album and this album was called Smell of Female and it made my mother pale and I've loved them ever since. What's this song called? This is called Call of the Wig Hat off of Smell of Female. Yeah. Technical difficulties. Oh, there. Well, I'll take you Do you keep a moron in wet-hat suspense? I'll tell you that later, but first I'll tell you this. I'm a freak. I'm a freak. Well, now, Ray tore his hair out and Sally threw a mirror. Vince went ancient and cut off his ears. Ruby went to town to treat the upside-down. Sally spilled some powder and had a tantrum in her gown. She went, Well, my mama had twin babies on one sweet summer day. She beat one in the head and I'm the one that got away. Protected by my wig and my Frederick's distinctive pants, I wrote my voice to Hollywood and did a wondrous dance. I went, Well, my gray jumping cat pushed you the limbo on my face. But no one seems to notice when my wig hat is in place. Well, my wig hat lifts me higher than I've ever been before. Now you can go and buy your saddle, but a wig hat's not just that for me. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. Now, that is where the men in Zodica, when they get the blues, they butter them the best when born with matching shoes. It's a part of the wig hat that brought me to this place. It's just a great big, fat, very fashion race now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. What was that? That was boingo boingo. And I got to say, that song was Insects off of Nothing to Fear from 1982. Cool. It's totally cool. That was the soundtrack to My Youth and probably a lot of other. I think anyone who is a horror-obsessed nerd in the suburbs, that Oingo Boingo is their soundtrack. It's a very peculiar and very specific subcategory. Yeah. Yeah. So among your many talents, another thing that you do is cartooning. And let's talk about that. Yeah. And that's kind of how I fell into storyboarding because I've been drawing before I started doing film. So when I started doing film, in fact, initially, when I started doing film, you know, like I was saying, they were kind of boring. They were sort of slow, Jim Jarmusch-y, rip-off type pieces. And someone said, well, you know, you cartoon. Why don't you do animation? But I just realized that I didn't have the patience to sit there and draw the same image over and over and over again. So I started making cartoon, like, you know, these sort of cartoony films as an alternative and a way to kind of try to bridge those two different interests together. So really, I actually became a filmmaker because I'm lazy. But, you know, the cartooning thing is something that I've been doing since I was about seven or so. So what's an example of, did you have kind of like, you know, character, recurring characters, or was it always something different? It was always something, well, I had one recurring character because I harbored these delusions. I was doing comic books, and I was writing this thing called The Adventures and Anxieties of Jack Shriek. It got as far as making a zine of it or a little mini comic and trying to distribute it at WonderCon one year. And I actually went as far as I built a mask of the character who looked a little bit like the painter of The Screamer. Yeah. Crossed with Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera with a pug nose and sunken eyeballs. So I made a mask of this thing, and since the mouth was open down to the stomach, I stuck it in. And I stuffed the mouth with the mini comics. And so if people wanted a mini comic, they had to reach into the mouth and pull out a comic book. Nice. I thought I would sell a ton. I sold like one to some sympathetic rockabilly chick. Oh. So there went my dreams of being a cartoonist. But I still draw. Yeah. Quite frequently. So tell me some of the things that you had in your cartoons. Well, let's see. I had like, you know, they weren't very original. I read a lot of X-Men as a kid right up until the 90s, and I got kind of disgusted with the Marvel. I thought everything got too big. You know, it lost the human element. And so I started reading like Zippy the Pinhead and Mr. Natural and stuff. And that's actually where I learned to ink, was copying Chrome cartoons, because I'd never seen inking like that. You know, you don't see crosshatching in Marvel comic books. So most of my stories probably had a little bit of a slant like that. I had one where like a guy wakes up in the middle of the night from a nightmare, and his mom comes in and says, what's the matter? And he says, oh, I had this horrible dream that everybody hated me, and they were just pretending to like me. Even the dog hated me. His mom says, that's, you know, totally silly. Everybody loves you, even the dog. And then she closes the door and she goes, I wish someone would fucking beat that kid. And the dog goes, me too. Stuff like that. That's pretty sick. Thanks. Yeah. And then I used to draw a lot of old Universal movie monsters too. I had sketchbooks and sketchbooks filled with every, you know, Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Frankenstein monster. And I can't quite work that out of my work. I just recently started doing illustrations for Beatnum Magazine, which is a literary journal that publishes in England. Oh, cool. And I was really nervous when they hired me, because I said, no matter what I do, this shit, it's all going to look freaky and morbid, no matter how much I try to rein it in. There's this undercurrent that I can't get rid of because I'm self-taught. Luckily, they actually really like the work. They keep requesting me back. That's great. How do you find that? Same way I found storyboard jobs. I hunt them out. I just peruse the internet. I go to Craigslist a lot and look under creative gigs. There's a, I think it's called Cartoonist United, is where I found Beatnum. And they had a whole thing like, we don't pay, but we'll get you published, which sounded just fine to me. And how do people find that magazine? Beatnum, you can find Beatnum at, they actually just have a website, a web page, beatnum.com. And you can order the magazine directly through them. You can also download the magazine. So if you don't want to go through the process of shipping it, you can actually just download it and view all the artwork there. It's a great magazine. They usually, they have a, they actually had an article about Bukowski and Tom Waits the other day. And their obsession with lonely, tortured waitresses. That's great. It's good. The one, I just, the first thing they had me do was a short story called Whores Who Were My Friends by a guy named Chuck Taylor. So, actually. Yeah, we might have exhausted the subject of me. Let's talk about you, Jeremy. How did you get started doing this? The podcasting? Yeah. I always liked talk radio. So talk radio is something that, I wanted to see if I could mimic, a radio station without actually having to pay for the FCC license and the expensive transmitter and, you know, pretty much unless you're a huge corporation, you can't start your own radio station. True. Unless you do pirate radio. But, you know, the range on pirate radio is, you know, not that far. So when we built this thing, I just thought, you know, I want to make this successful. I want to make this exactly like, as much like a real radio station as I possibly can. And then I want to bring my friends in and have them talk about what they do. And being in LA, you know, your friends are talented people most of the time. And so it was easy, you know. I just talked to some people and we started recording. Lots of bands here, you know, a lot of what we do here at Skid Row Studios is music related. I'm really trying to get into some other subjects. That's why you're here. And then we got some other people coming in doing, there's going to be a show that talks about what's going on in Skid Row. Oh, the actual Skid Row. Yeah, the actual Skid Row. Right down the street from this place, by the way. Yeah. Just a block east of here. And then we're going to have a show coming up called The Love Bite. We did a pilot. We did a pilot of that a few weeks ago and it did really well. Two women talking about kink lifestyle and sex and everything that goes with it. Where was I? It was a really good show. One of the women has a doctorate in psychology and they both just like sex a lot. You were telling me about this with the pencil up the butt. Yeah, yeah. That was the quote. First thing I ever put up my ass was a pencil. That's extraordinary. Did we ever figure out what end went first? No, but I'll find out for you, Waylon. My girlfriend and I have been debating this endlessly since you first told us that. Because I'm erring on the side of the eraser end myself. I think that just seems... Yeah, well, it depends. If it's a brand new pencil, then either end would work. Yeah. If it's a sharpened number two up the ass, it's kind of rough. Yeah, that would really suck. Yeah. So, yeah. And thank you so much for coming in here. Man, thanks for having me. You've been here many times before and kind of hanging out while other shows are going on and partying out on the patio here. Oh, it was great. Some of the first real social interaction I had was when I got here. And, you know, everyone who works here is a great person. Again, it's really easy to make friends with your gang. Yeah. I've had enlightening conversations out on the porch there. Yeah. A lot of good people come through these doors lately and that's another thing that makes it fun doing this whole thing. How many times a week are you doing this now? Like four? Yeah, it's about four. It might turn into five soon. We're doing a little bit of shifting. We got the piñata hour on Wednesdays. Porn star Ava Vincent's gonna be here this Wednesday. Ooh. Looking forward to that. I'll bet you are. Thursday is the More Music Radio pod. This week they're gonna be doing a show dedicated to chip thrash. Are you familiar with chip thrash? No, no. Who's chip thrash? Well, chip thrash is a genre of music. Music that is all created on 8-bit Game Boys. I'm so on hip. I hadn't heard of this. Yeah, it's hard for me to keep up with what the kids are into myself. Okay, good. These shows are actually keeping me informed. But yeah, there's a sequencer device that you can get for an application for a Game Boy where they just create these games. They just create these crazy electronic songs on Game Boys. And we actually had the guy that's coming in, we had him on a different show a long time ago, and he's gonna come in again on this show. His name's Cool Skull. And they're into the chip thrash thing that the kids are into. So, yeah. I mean, hopefully he'll come back. Oh, definitely. And as you have things coming out, let us know what those are. Yeah, I'm just about to release my first DVD of work. Help Wanted isn't on it, but it does have Poster Boy and the previously mentioned Bob and My Worst Nightmare. Great. And yeah, I'm hoping people check it out. What was the smoking film? That's Poster Boy. That's actually got the most YouTube hits. Not even because people like it, because it's got the most people. Yeah. And the movie has the same name as an artist in New York, named Poster Boy. And he takes apart Subway billboards and then reconfigures them and puts them back up again. Someone did a news piece on this guy, and all these people went online and went to YouTube and looked up Poster Boy and saw my film. You totally planned that, I think. I wish I'd planned it. Like Troll 2. Oh, like Troll 2? Yeah. Poor Troll 2. God, have you seen that documentary? Yeah. Oh. I mean, I was at the New Beverly, went there, and all the cast and crew was there. Oh, cool, dude. I want to meet the dentist. Yeah. I'm sure he's everyone's favorite. He just loves the fanfare. He's just way into it. And he loves saying his line, his famous line about... What is it? You don't piss on hospitality? Exactly. You don't piss on hospitality. I won't allow it. He loves it. He's just waiting the whole night for people to ask him to say that. That's beautiful. Yeah. See, that's the great thing about films. Some films, it takes a while. You throw it out into the ether, and then it comes back to haunt you years and years later. I doubt any of those people thought that Troll 2 was going to lead to any kind of long-term success. Yeah. And that's the weird... Not like Poster Boy's successful. Well, that was the weird thing. It was like two years after I uploaded it, suddenly it had 32,000 views. I think it's up to almost a million hits now. Wow, that's really good. But all the comments are like, what the fuck is this? Yeah. I wanted some fucking artist. This is bullshit. That's funny. And it made me really happy, actually. I was kind of excited to rankle people on YouTube. Yeah. Well, Waylon, I think we've come to the end here. And we're going to go out with some Sly and the Family Stone. Yeah, damn right. From the album, there's a riot going on. Great. Hey, thanks for having me, Jeremy. Thank you very much. It's been awesome. All right. I'll be back. I'm the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the Let it go, let it go, let it go Well, when I saw a boy, he was so sure Let it go They said I had a man And then they tried to pass it around on film Well, the light of the light I keep the light the light I keep the light the light I couldn't buy my friends extra peg at all. You're ready, ready. Once I turn red, and it looks funny today. You're ready, ready. You're ready, ready. I don't wanna die. I don't wanna die. I don't wanna die. I don't wanna die. I don't wanna die. Thank you.