The Dana Gould Hour

Hello! And welcome to season to the newest episode of The Dana Gould Hour podcast. Fasten your enthusiasm harness, we are blasting off, yet again.

We have two, count 'em, two, fantastic guests today. Richard Edlund is a legend. In his amazing career, he is known first and foremost as one of the founders of ILM, Industrial Light & Magic, which created the special effects for a little film called Star Wars, and revolutionized how movies were made in Hollywood. But that is just the tip of the iceberg, Edlund began his career in the late '50s early '60s. When you watch on old episode of the original Addams Family TV show, that's Richard Edlund's hand coming out of the box as Thing. He designed the font for the original Star Trek ,and on and on and on.

Also, Dave Bertolino is here. Dave is the creator of Spooky World, founded in Berlin, Massachusetts, the middle of nowhere! Spooky World became a nationally known horror theme park attraction. It started from nothing, and immediately became HUGE. Dave has a new book out entitled Behind The Screams At Spooky World and he'll be here to discuss that. Who looks like an accountant but is close pals with Linda Blair, Tom Savini and Alice Cooper? Dave Bertolino, that's who.

True Tales From Weirdsville tells the tale of schlockmeister par excellence William Castle. From Emergo to Percepto to Illusiono, William Castle was the gimmick king of b-movies. Larger than life, stranger than fiction, more real than any reality you can conjure, Mr. William Castle.

There are some great live performances coming up, so check out the events page at www.danagould.com/events/!

And now, it's on, to our filthy business.

Hello! And welcome to The Dana Gould Hour podcast. Fasten your fun belts, we are blasting off, yet again.
 
We are joined today by legends. You heard me. Mark Frost is a legendary writer, first in television. He started out on The Six Million Dollar Man, moved on to Hill Street Blues, co-created Twin Peaks with David Lynch. In motion pictures, he wrote and directed the film Storyville, he wrote the 2005 The Fantastic Fourand its sequel Rise Of The Silver Surfer and he has a new book out entitled Yankee Sphinx, which tells the story of FDR from just before America's involvement in World War II up through his death. It's told through the eyes of FDR's Great Uncle, Will Hasset, who worked as FDR's speech writer and press attaché, one might say. We cover a lot of topics and a lot of ground and I am super happy that Mr. Frost sat down and gave me his time.
 
Gary Rhodes is a writer and film historian who has written, among many other titles, a multi-volume set on the strange life and career of Bela Lugosi. He's written about Ed Wood, he wrote the book Horror At The Drive In, Essays In Popular Americana and he has an excellent new book out entitled Weirdumentary: Ancient Aliens, Fallacious Prophecies and Mysterious Monsters from 1970's Documentaries. Before streaming, before cable, before the History Channel and Ancient Aliens, these topics were explored in documentaries at your local Cineplex. Many were produced by the late great, Sunn Classic Pictures. UFOs, Elvis, Bigfoot, they're all here, in the pages of Weirdumentary, and we're a-gonna talk about it.
 
And now, it's on, to our filthy business.

Hello! And welcome to The Dana Gould Hour Podcast. Fasten your enthusiasm harness, we are blasting off, yet again.
 
This episode is a little late arriving, my apologies. In addition to my going on staff at a new TV show, which has forced me to rearrange my schedule a bit, we also had the taping of the Dr. Z live show at the Netflix Is A Joke Festival and the launching of the Hanging With Dr. Z season 4 Indiegogo campaign.
 
Then we had some technical difficulties that delayed us a bit as we cleaned up some recordings and, long story short, we're late. BUT, we're here now and the next month's episode is right on schedule so we should be all caught up in no time.
 
We're going to start this month's episode with a discussion of Hel Mel. What is Hel Mel you ask? Well, it's short for the intersection of Heliotrope and Melrose Ave in Los Angeles, which is an arty little neighborhood over by LA City College. And it's also the name of an art gallery and art collective, located there, that was formed by actor Val Kilmer. We're going to talk to Steven Meyer, who was a longtime friend of Kilmer who ran the gallery with him. Steven has had a wide-ranging career stretching from the New York theater and music scene stretching to well, the LA art scene. Excellent conversation with Steven Meyer.
 
Also, Julian David Stone is here. Julian grew up in the Bay Area where he started his career as a rock 'n' roll photographer, and he's here to talk about his book of photography, No Cameras Allowed: My Career As An Outlaw Rock N Roll Photographer. In addition, He has a new novel out called It's Alive, which is a novel, but based in the very true story of the tumult, chaos and corporate fuckery that went on behind the scenes at the Universal Studios in 1930, the week before the studio began filming Frankenstein. One of the studio's all-time hits, a film with a culture impact that we still feel today, and the week before it started filming, the whole thing almost fell apart. If you like horror movies, or just movies, it's must read. Especially when you realize that what happened at Universal during this short period in 1930, is STILL going on today. Bananas.
 
True Tales From Weirdsville tells you the sordid tale of a man who came to be known as The Emperor Of Night, The Marquis d'Hervey De Saint Denys, who, in the 1800's discovered for lack of a better term, the concept of lucid dreaming. Dreams when you know you know you're dreaming. This concept moved through the history and is still with us today. The conceit that you can actually write and direct your dreams. It's TRUE. Lucid dreaming. It's real. I think. Or is it?
 
As for me, on Saturday May 16th I'll be at the Historic Everett Theater in Everett Washington, just up the road from Seattle.On Saturday June 27th I'll be in Pittsburgh, PA as part of the DVE Comedy Festival and fans of Hanging with Dr Z are invited to be a part of our season 4 Indiegogo campaign. For information on all this stuff, please visit the live appearances page at DanaGould.com or, my Facebook or Instagram pages.
 
You can follow Dr Z on Instagram at HangingWithDrZ.com in case you didn't know.
 
Lastly, thank God, this program is brought to by you. Although you may here a couple of spot ads here and there, this show has always relied on its listeners for support, and we never fail to appreciate you. And so, if you are not one already, please consider becoming a Dana Gould Hour Sky Cadet. Go to our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/DanaGould. Five bucks a month gets you extra audio content video content and some other junk. We don't have graduated levels. Five bucks a month and you get some stuff. A simple deal for complicated times.
 
And now, it's on, to our filthy business.

This is a very special episode in that is constituted of a series of deep dives into several different subjects in which I have a rabid interest. Hopefully you do as well. If not, you're in for a long-ass listen.
Unless you're new to the show, you know of my deep and abiding interest in all things David Lynch. So, it was a pleasant surprise when I learned of the book A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Untold History of Twin Peaks by Scott Meslow. Scott has written for such publications as GQ, New York and The Atlantic. And his book is far too in depth and accomplished to have been thrown together as a quickie cash-in following Mr. Lynch's passing. Quite, as it turns out, the contrary. Scott had pitched his book years before and was well into the writing of it at the time of his passing. And he talks about how the attitudes of his interview subjects changed from before and then after that event. And the book itself if great. You don't have to be a Twin Peaks nut to enjoy it, as it's also a story of how an idea becomes a show, what happens when that show, which was always greater than the sum of its parts becomes a cultural touchstone, etc. etc. etc., Scott Meslow, the author of A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Untold History of Twin Peaks is here.
As of that weren't enough, Thom Shubilla, who has been here before to discuss his books Prime Time 1966 – 1967: The Study Of Television's First All Color Season, and James Bond And The Sixties Spy Craze. He is also one of the producers of the documentary Drew Friedman Vermeer Of The Borscht Belt, and has another in series of "I Know Dana Gould Will Buy It So That's One Sale Right There" books, King Kong Vs. Godzilla: The Most Colossal Conflict The Screen Has Ever Known. It's ostensibly about the making of the 1962 Toho Studios love letter to me known as King Kong Vs, Godzilla, but it's also just a fantastic story of show biz and deal making. It has everything: guys selling properties they think they have the rights to but don't, guys selling properties they know they don't have the rights to but selling them anyway, and yes… murder.
True Tales From Weirdsville takes a deep dive into the life career and bizarre death of 1950's scream queen. She made some weird ass movies, Attack Of The Fifty Foot Woman, Attack of The Giant Leeches, but what she did on screen could not compare to what happened in real life and that is a promise. The late, lovely and talented Yvette Vickers.
For details and links to my upcoming appearances, please go to the live shows page at DanaGould.com.
And now, it's on, to our filthy business.

Hello! And welcome to season 15 of the Dana Gould Hour Podcast. Fasten your enthusiasm harness, we are blasting off again.

Mark Malkoff has a new book entitled Love, Johnny Carson: One Obsessive Fan's Journey To Find The Genius Behind The Legend.

Johnny Carson is so larger than life now it's important to sometimes take a step back and appreciate his accomplishment. Unlike today, when there are 8,000 channels, and three network late night talk shows. Johnny Carson hosted The Tonight Show when there were around ten channels total and one, count 'em, one late night talk show, which he hosted for 30 years. He interviewed over 25,000 guests, navigated America's cultural conversation from President Kennedy through President Clinton.

Mark's book covers the debuts of then-unknown comedians who are now household names. He talks about Johnny's feuds, and he had some. There were periods of time when William Shatner and Orson Welles were banned from the show. But Mark's book is very affectionate. It's honest without being exploitive. It dishes a lot of dirt but it's never bitchy, I can't recommend it enough. Mark Malkoff. Right here. In the human flesh. 

The second interview is with two dudes who have written extensively about two films from a very special time in American cinema-going. Back in the 70's, you see, before cable and VHS tapes and streaming, if you wanted to see a movie, you had to wait and catch it on television. And if you wanted to see it uncut, you had to find it playing in a movie theater. And that's it.
Because of this, more people went to more movies more often. And, since this was before multiplexes, movie theaters were more random. You didn't have 16 screens in one building. You had sixteen different movie theaters scattered around town. 

John Gaspar has written a book about a very strange event at one such theater in one of my favorite cities in the goddamn world, and yours too, Minneapolis, Minnesota. The book is called Held Over: Harold And Maude At The Westgate Theater and it tells the story of Hal Ashby's 1971 black comedy Harold and Maude, that starred Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort, that ran for two years at the Westgate in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina. The film ran for so long, the neighbors protested, demanding a new movie! It's a terrific book about what movie going in America used to be like, before the multiplexes took over.

John and I are joined by Ari Kahan, who is the archivist of The Swan Archives, which is I can best describe as a labyrinthine database covering all things pertaining to 1974's Brian DePalma cult classic, Phantom Of The Paradise.

Don't know too much about Phantom Of The Paradise you say? No worries, you will by the time we get there, True Tales From Weirdsville takes us on a deep dive inside that mid 70's glam-rock Faustian gem, Phantom Of The Paradise.