Classic Conversations: Pop culture Interviews with Jeff Dwoskin

Rebeca Arthur was hired for one week on Perfect Strangers and stayed eight years.

Before that she was a working private investigator in New York, and one of her agency's cases was Robert Durst. She talks about playing Mary Anne Spencer opposite Bronson Pinchot's Balki Bartokomous, photocopying her own backside for Scrooged, improvising with Bill Murray, getting career advice from Bob Newhart at a table read, and the dog who got a SAG paycheck out of Match Game. Forty years after Perfect Strangers premiered, she is still working, still funny, and still friends with almost everyone she has ever worked with.

Show Highlights:

Perfect Strangers. Rebeca Arthur auditioned for Jennifer, read the Mary Anne sides on the back page, and told the casting director she wanted the other part instead. The one week guest spot turned into eight years, and she and Melanie Wilson were on the phone with each other, using call waiting, when the calls came in telling them they were coming back.

Private investigator years. She could not get a waitressing job in New York, so she answered an ad, was told she would never make it as a PI because she was too noticeable, and immediately decided that was the job she wanted. She worked cases for three years while finishing school.

The Robert Durst case. Her agency was hired by Durst after his wife Kathie went missing, but only to field the tips coming in off his reward offer, never to look for her. Her boss Jerry kept telling the staff their hands were tied while Kathie's own family called the office demanding answers.

Scrooged. A production assistant walked her down to an office to photocopy her rear end for the film, and yes, it was actually hers. Bill Murray built the whole scene with her on the spot, kept forgetting what he had just improvised, and had her feed his own lines back to him between takes.

Newhart. Bob Newhart lowered his newspaper at a table read, listened to her worry about a prop gun in a play she was doing, and told her to walk to the phone right then and quit. She calls him one of the most generous actors she ever worked with.

You're going to love my conversation with Rebeca Arthur

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Yes, the show used to be called Live from Detroit: The Jeff Dwoskin Show

Ways to support the show:

Buy me a coffee (support the show)

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Love the books I talk about on the show? Here is my Amazon store to shop.

SPONSOR: STAMPEDE SOCIAL Drive engagement from your social channels and podcast with Stampede Social's Instagram and Facebook DM automation! Visit https://stampede.social Also check out: Why Instagram + Stampede Social Is the Growth Strategy Podcasters Need in 2025 (and Beyond)
Thanks for checking out Classic Conversations! Dive into pop culture nostalgia with comedian Jeff Dwoskin as he hosts the best TV and film interviews. Hear inspiring stories from actors, comedians, musicians, and pop culture icons about the road to success. Part comedy, part drama—always entertaining.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Thirty years after the last shot was fired, the bank robber and the FBI agent who chased him are sitting down together.

Steve Meyers helped Scott Scurlock pull off the Hollywood Bandit crime spree that hit 19 Seattle banks and took roughly $2.3 million between 1992 and 1996. Shawn Johnson was the FBI case agent who spent four and a half years hunting them. Both appear in the Netflix documentary How to Rob a Bank, and both say the film left out the story that actually matters, which is why they reconnected, why they are now friends, and what really happened on Thanksgiving Eve 1996.

Show Highlights:

How to Rob a Bank (Netflix). Steve Meyers and Shawn Johnson break down what the documentary got right, what it padded with filler, and why the cartoon reenactments were lifted from Steve's unpublished manuscript without credit.

The Treehouse. Steve wrote the book in his first year and a half in prison as stream of consciousness, then edited it down over the years, and Shawn says reading it put him back inside the case with details he never knew as the lead agent.

The reunion. Shawn tracked down Steve's phone number after the Netflix release, then drove the friendship forward after reading the book, and Steve brought the original prison manuscript to Virginia for a four day sit down last November.

Scott Scurlock, aka Hollywood. Steve describes the man behind the disguise as a chameleon with a different personality for everyone, a builder and volunteer wildland firefighter who studied FBI journals to learn why other bank robbers failed.

The lawsuit nobody talks about. Six months after the shootout, Detective Mike Magan and four other officers sued Scurlock's parents for $250,000 apiece for trauma, and Steve calls it the strangest footnote in the entire case.

You're going to love my conversation with Steve Meyers and Shawn Johnson

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Follow Jeff Dwoskin (host):

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Podcast on Instagram

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Yes, the show used to be called Live from Detroit: The Jeff Dwoskin Show

Ways to support the show:

Buy me a coffee (support the show)

Dashery/TeePublic Store: Classic Conversations merch and more!

Love the books I talk about on the show? Here is my Amazon store to shop.

SPONSOR: STAMPEDE SOCIAL Drive engagement from your social channels and podcast with Stampede Social's Instagram and Facebook DM automation! Visit https://stampede.social Also check out: Why Instagram + Stampede Social Is the Growth Strategy Podcasters Need in 2025 (and Beyond)
Thanks for checking out Classic Conversations! Dive into pop culture nostalgia with comedian Jeff Dwoskin as he hosts the best TV and film interviews. Hear inspiring stories from actors, comedians, musicians, and pop culture icons about the road to success. Part comedy, part drama—always entertaining.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Douglas M. Wilson has been in the room for some of the strangest and most memorable television of the last thirty years.

A four time Emmy nominee, he went from being an assistant at MTV to the Comedy Channel, then spent the better part of a decade on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, rising from associate producer to showrunner. From there he built an entire second career in unscripted television with LA Ink, The Pickup Artist, American Inventor, Best Week Ever and Paris Hilton's My New BFF. He breaks down how the Politically Incorrect panel was engineered, why Bill Maher was far kinder than his on air reputation suggests, and why he believes a bad profit deal, not the 9/11 comments, is what actually killed the show at ABC.

Show Highlights:

Buffalo and Broadway. He grew up flying to New York for weekends of four and five shows, directed A Day in Hollywood and A Night in the Ukraine in college, and walked away from theater directing once he did the math on a decade of apprenticing for free.

The Comedy Channel. His first television job was as Janet Scardino's assistant at MTV, and he left for the Comedy Channel, an office full of comedians where he worked on Night After Night with Allan Havey, The Higgins Boys and Gruber and Rachel Sweet's show.

Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Scott Carter brought him on as an associate producer and he left in 2000 as showrunner, and he lays out the four chair formula behind every panel, why John Waters was the best guest they ever had and musicians the worst, and how generous Bill Maher was about his work despite agreeing on almost nothing personal. He blames an ABC demand for Tom Cruise, not the 9/11 comments, for the end of the show.

20th Television and Best Week Ever. A two year overall deal produced four shows total, and the Best Week Ever pilot he built and called in every favor for was taken away from him when VH1 moved production to New York.

The Eyes of Nye. He spent a stretch commuting to Seattle to work with Bill Nye, who he calls the genuine article, a host who would not let anything scientifically wrong get on the air.

The Pickup Artist. He cast men who genuinely could not talk to a woman, which turned Mystery's seduction series into a show about making a real connection, and he is proudest that couples ended up watching it together.

American Inventor. A short run with Simon Cowell's Syco and showrunner Clay Newbill, where he ran the studio episodes and found the format flawed, closer to a pitch competition than the invention challenge the title promised.

LA Ink. He read several books on tattoo culture before taking the job, worked with Kat Von D, Corey Miller, Hannah Aitchison and Kim Saigh, got tattooed by Kat Von D on live Fox 11 news, and watched TLC's push for personal drama drive the original artists out.

Paris Hilton's My New BFF. He kept his distance by design and handed the relationship to a younger producer, and he describes a human chain on a Tokyo rooftop to hold back fans plus a final elimination twist that is genuinely ruthless.


You're going to love my conversation with Douglas M. Wilson

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Follow Jeff Dwoskin (host):

Jeff Dwoskin on Twitter

The Jeff Dwoskin Show podcast on Twitter

Podcast website

Podcast on Instagram

Subscribe to my Youtube channel

Yes, the show used to be called Live from Detroit: The Jeff Dwoskin Show

Ways to support the show:

Buy me a coffee (support the show)

Dashery/TeePublic Store: Classic Conversations merch and more!

Love the books I talk about on the show? Here is my Amazon store to shop.

SPONSOR: STAMPEDE SOCIAL Drive engagement from your social channels and podcast with Stampede Social's Instagram and Facebook DM automation! Visit https://stampede.social Also check out: Why Instagram + Stampede Social Is the Growth Strategy Podcasters Need in 2025 (and Beyond)
Thanks for checking out Classic Conversations! Dive into pop culture nostalgia with comedian Jeff Dwoskin as he hosts the best TV and film interviews. Hear inspiring stories from actors, comedians, musicians, and pop culture icons about the road to success. Part comedy, part drama—always entertaining.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Bob Gunton has spent five decades building one of the most quietly essential careers in American acting, from originating Juan Perón in the first Broadway production of Evita to becoming the face of institutional evil as Warden Norton in The Shawshank Redemption.

He talks about how a pseudo Spanish accent almost got cut from Evita until Hal Prince intervened, what it took to make Sweeney Todd his own after watching Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury do it upstairs, and the wig audition that landed him Shawshank. He also shares his Vietnam service, the Bronze Star at Firebase Ripcord, and the dog tag that found its way back to him decades later, plus the story behind playing the ghost of Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters Afterlife.

Show Highlights:

Bob auditioned for Hal Prince in cavalry boots and a three piece suit with his hair slicked back, and when he dropped the Perón accent in rehearsal because nobody else in the Evita cast sounded Hispanic, Prince pulled him aside and told him to put it back in.

Working alongside Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin in Evita earned him a Tony nomination and a Drama Desk Award, though he values the seven or eight Al Hirschfeld drawings on his wall more, since every one of them has a Nina.

His Sweeney Todd revival at Circle in the Square played directly beneath the theater where he had watched Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury, and he reframed the show as a family story rather than a Victorian class parable, with his own wife and daughter sitting in the audience.

Sweeney Todd was his last Broadway show, and he explains why climbing that particular Everest made the jukebox musicals that followed impossible to care about, plus how California gave him Follies and On the Twentieth Century opposite Carolee Carmello.

He walked into the Elvis Meets Nixon audition in full character with nose plugs and a Nixonian haircut, improvised a bit about Ed Muskie crying in the snow, and had to do the whole thing twice because nobody thought to tape it.

Playing Captain Benjamin Maxwell in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Wounded let him sing Minstrel Boy with Colm Meaney and work opposite Brent Spiner, his Big River castmate, in one of Gene Roddenberry's sharpest ethical conundrums.

Frank Darabont wanted him for The Shawshank Redemption from the start, but Castle Rock made him camera test opposite Tim Robbins wearing a custom wig, because he was shooting Demolition Man with a shaved head at the time.

He wrote a full backstory for Warden Norton for the first time in his career, built around shame and religion, and explains why the movie only works if the warden is the single source of darkness rather than the three wardens in Stephen King's novella.

Bill Murray in full Ghostbusters gear was the first thing he saw stepping out of his trailer on a movie he had been told was called Rust City, where he was cast as the dirt farmer, which turned out to be the aged ghost of Egon Spengler.

Also discussed: The Perfect Storm and the unsalted Warner Brothers water tank, 61* shot at Detroit's Tiger Stadium with Billy Crystal, The 33 and playing the president of Chile, Argo, Dead Silence, Elvis Meets Nixon with Rick Peters, Morgan Freeman's narration, Ted Turner and the TBS rotation that saved Shawshank, and his finished memoir Or Am I Being Obtuse.
You're going to love my conversation with Bob Gunton

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Follow Jeff Dwoskin (host):

Jeff Dwoskin on Twitter

The Jeff Dwoskin Show podcast on Twitter

Podcast website

Podcast on Instagram

Subscribe to my Youtube channel

Yes, the show used to be called Live from Detroit: The Jeff Dwoskin Show

Ways to support the show:

Buy me a coffee (support the show)

Dashery/TeePublic Store: Classic Conversations merch and more!

Love the books I talk about on the show? Here is my Amazon store to shop.

SPONSOR: STAMPEDE SOCIAL Drive engagement from your social channels and podcast with Stampede Social's Instagram and Facebook DM automation! Visit https://stampede.social Also check out: Why Instagram + Stampede Social Is the Growth Strategy Podcasters Need in 2025 (and Beyond)
Thanks for checking out Classic Conversations! Dive into pop culture nostalgia with comedian Jeff Dwoskin as he hosts the best TV and film interviews. Hear inspiring stories from actors, comedians, musicians, and pop culture icons about the road to success. Part comedy, part drama—always entertaining.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

John O'Hurley has spent forty years in television as J. Peterman on Seinfeld, the host of Family Feud and To Tell the Truth, a season one finalist and eventual champion on Dancing with the Stars, and for more than two decades the voice of the National Dog Show every Thanksgiving morning.

He talks about landing the Peterman role one day after his own sitcom was canceled, the ten years he spent as a daytime soap opera star on Young and the Restless and All My Children, voicing Mayor Doofenshmirtz on Phineas and Ferb and King Neptune on SpongeBob SquarePants, and the phone call in 2000 that made him a shareholder in the real J. Peterman Company. It is a full tour of a career that touched almost every corner of American television.

Show Highlights:

The producers handed him an actual J. Peterman catalog and told him to sound like it reads. He describes the voice he found as a 1940s radio drama crossed with a bad Charles Kuralt.

Season one of Dancing with the Stars ended in a voting controversy so tangled that ABC ordered the finale run a second time. O'Hurley won the rematch against Kelly Monaco and sent the money to cancer research, where a match from Michael Milken pushed it to nearly a million dollars.

The body double hired for his twin brothers storyline in daytime soaps was Chazz Palminteri, who spent his downtime in the dressing room writing A Bronx Tale.

He hosted Family Feud for four seasons and explains exactly why he walked away, along with the contestant answer that broke him: name a classic film starting with C, and the man said Sea Biscuit.

The National Dog Show exists because NBC Sports executive John Miller rented the Christopher Guest movie Best in Show one weekend and pitched a dog show for the two hour gap between the Macy's parade and football. It now pulls close to 30 million viewers.

You're going to love my conversation with John O'Hurley

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Follow Jeff Dwoskin (host):

Jeff Dwoskin on Twitter

The Jeff Dwoskin Show podcast on Twitter

Podcast website

Podcast on Instagram

Subscribe to my Youtube channel

Yes, the show used to be called Live from Detroit: The Jeff Dwoskin Show

Ways to support the show:

Buy me a coffee (support the show)

Dashery/TeePublic Store: Classic Conversations merch and more!

Love the books I talk about on the show? Here is my Amazon store to shop.

SPONSOR: STAMPEDE SOCIAL Drive engagement from your social channels and podcast with Stampede Social's Instagram and Facebook DM automation! Visit https://stampede.social Also check out: Why Instagram + Stampede Social Is the Growth Strategy Podcasters Need in 2025 (and Beyond)
Thanks for checking out Classic Conversations! Dive into pop culture nostalgia with comedian Jeff Dwoskin as he hosts the best TV and film interviews. Hear inspiring stories from actors, comedians, musicians, and pop culture icons about the road to success. Part comedy, part drama—always entertaining.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.