Random Reminiscing: Looking Back at My Many Random Roles Interviews (Part 23 of Quite a Few)
Featuring anecdotes from Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa, Max Casella, Ted Danson, Gilbert Gottfried, Fred Melamed, and Peter Jacobson
Back in 2021, when I celebrated the 10th anniversary of my first Random Roles, I was feeling a tad nostalgic, so I decided that I wanted to start looking back at my contributions to this A.V. Club feature, since it’s the portion of my freelance career of which I’m most proud.
If you accidentally missed the previous part of this reminiscing (and you may have, because it was in 2021!), you can check it out by clicking right here…and if you missed the part before that, well, each installment has a link to the previous installment in the intro, so just keep on clicking back until you’ve read ‘em all!
If you’re all up to date, though, then for heaven’s sake, why are you wasting time with this intro? Just dive right in!
Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa:
Pearl Harbor (2001)—“Cmdr. Minoru Genda”
Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa: You know, half my family was from the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the other half was U.S. Army, and I was raised on Army posts during my childhood, so I pretty much began my life with a split-brain sort of thing. [Laughs.] But Pearl Harbor was very much a thorn in my side growing up. December 7 was not a wonderful day to go to school, and to have that sort of notoriety between Thanksgiving and Christmas… I mean, it could really ruin your week. In fact, there were times when I purposely didn’t go to school because of Pearl Harbor Day, because certainly there was enough media about it every year to remind everybody. So when I heard they were going to make the movie, I thought, “Oh, no, please not another Pearl Harbor mention!”
But when I found out the nature of the story, it was really a love story. They were sort of forming it around the success of Titanic and hoping for Titanic’s box office. [Laughs.] The oddest part, though, is that the casting director was in the middle of talking to us about the project, and he goes, “There really isn’t a Japanese section of the film. They really have to put that in.” And they went to great lengths to not insult the Japanese, because Japanese box office could’ve been huge. So it didn’t get derogatory, it didn’t do anything negative, so I thought, “Good, then I can play this role.”
Like I said, I don’t generally do much research at first, I kind of get into it and feel it out, but that’s one subject that I spent a lot of time reading about growing up, because it created such a negative image of the Japanese without really knowing the Japanese. To this day, Americans really don’t understand the Japanese nature, but it’s not an easy thing to understand. [Laughs.] But I’d done the research, and I knew this character was a real historical figure, so it was important to give it my absolute attention, but it was also important with certain lines to play it in a way that allowed Americans to relate a little bit better. Mako, who played Admiral Yamamoto, he was an amazing person and actor, and it was great to work with him. He was very interesting. But there were still some… moments on the film, though.
This is another part of my career, but playing Japanese characters and being in environments that are Japanese, like a character’s apartment or whatever, if you have directors or art directors who just don’t know what’ s what with Japanese culture, then pretty soon something’s just passed through. I’ve been through many times where I’ve pointed out the incorrectness of so much of what’s been done to a set. But on Pearl Harbor, I’d heard horror stories about Michael Bay, so when I got to the set and saw him going off on people and yelling and just getting crazy, I just decided, “Stay out of the way. Don’t say anything.” But I just couldn’t help it this one time, and this is actually what set me into a good relationship with him.
Like I said, they were majorly trying to please Japan, and the centerpiece of the set was a map of Pearl Harbor that was probably 20 feet across and had the longitude and latitude lines. I said, “Michael, we can’t use this set.” He said, “What do you mean we can’t use it?” And he just… I mean, he started going off! And I’m thinking, “Holy shit…” But I had to say it.
“Michael, you do not want to shoot this scene. All the writing in Japanese…”
“Yeah? What about it?”
“It’s upside down.”
So he goes, “Oh. Okay. All right.” And then he walked off. And I thought, “Oh, shit, I survived that one.” [Laughs.]
We were in Corpus Christi, which is the home of the USS Lexington, which was one of the three aircraft carriers that had left Pearl Harbor three days before the attack. There’s a whole bunch of conspiracy theories about that, because the aircraft carriers were the main target of the Japanese, so to send them out of port… It’s no coincidence that they weren’t there when the havoc went on. But they used the Lexington one day as a Japanese aircraft carrier, where the Japanese planes took off for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Then the next day they used it when Billy Mitchell took off to bomb Tokyo, which is typical Hollywood stuff to make the most use of a set. But the day we were shooting the Japanese part, they in fact had put a Japanese flag over the spot that they’d left to commemorate the kamikaze attack when this old man who was a veteran of the war—his three brothers had died in the war—was yelling and screaming at the top of his lungs, “Take that Jap shit off of that ship!” He was just going off. Finally, when he said, “I’m gonna kill those Japs!” they called the cops. And he’s an old guy, he was harmless, but it was enough to get him taken away. I felt bad for him.
There was another time when we were on the set of that ship while we were shooting the Japanese scenes, and there was a scene that was written to have a table on the deck of the aircraft carrier where the admiral and myself were sitting and having tea. We’re not English, for God’s sake. In a war situation, you do not have tea on the deck of a battleship. I said, “Michael, the Japanese will just flip out at how incorrect this scene is.” And he was, like, going [Makes growling sounds.] I said, “Michael, please trust me on this one.” And he looked at me, stared at me, and he goes, “Okay.” And we just ended up doing the scene standing up on the deck, which is at least more likely than them sitting down at a table.
It was really weird doing that film, after all the stuff that I went through growing up in the South, all the crap that I took for being Japanese, and knowing that the Japanese were not the shit people that they’d said. When I was on the deck and we were shooting the scene where I’m watching these zeroes go by through my binoculars… I mean, I got a little choked up. I thought it was amazing that they were doing a film where the Japanese weren’t looking wimpy, and I felt really proud to be Japanese. although the act itself wasn’t something to be proud of. But whatever it was about that moment on the deck, I just flashed back through my entire life and how I was always taught to be proud to be Japanese, to never surrender and all that stuff, and it all came up in that one moment. It was amazing.
Max Casella:
Newsies (1992)—“Racetrack Higgins”
Blood Drips Heavily On Newsies Square (1992)—himself, producer
Max Casella: Racetrack! Yeah, Newsies was my first movie—my first theatrical movie—and I was really excited about it. It was a historical piece, set in 1899, so I threw myself into that like a madman and lived at the L.A. Public Library, researching the role and everything, studying Jacob Riis photographs. I loved doing it. It was a huge, long adventure—six months!—and I just loved Racetrack. I just jumped right into. Racetrack and all of those guys, they were like little men. They dressed like men, so they pieced together their outfits. Like, Racetrack was a bit of a dandy, so he had a pocket watch, a vest, and spats, or whatever it was. I always felt like the Artful Dodger in that way. [Laughs.] But, yeah, I really threw myself into it completely.
There’s at least one interview with Christian Bale where he talks about how hormones were running high on the Newsies set.
Hormones were running high! I don’t know what he meant by that specifically, but obviously they were. Except there weren’t enough girls to go around, was the only problem. I was actually living with my girlfriend at the time, so I wasn’t really…well, you know. [Laughs.] Also, because I was older than a lot of ‘em, I was 24 or something, and a lot of the other guys were younger, I remember some of the younger guys kept asking me about sex and stuff!
The thing that I find most fascinating about the film isn’t even Newsies itself: It’s the horror movie you made while you were filming it: Blood Drips Heavily On Newsies Square.
The fact that anybody even knows about that is just crazy, man! I can’t believe that thing got out, and now it’s out there and it just proves to you that nothing stays a secret. Everything comes out. [Laughs.] We made that for fun because we were bored on long days of shooting.
Me and Michael Goorjian were the two main people behind it. Michael was sort of the director of it, but I filmed a lot of it, and between the two of us… That overtook us completely for a few months, making that thing. That was a lot of fun. And we edited it in the video camera! It was one of these early ’90s video cameras with a VHS tape that would go inside the camera, so we would just shoot it chronologically. [Laughs.] We’d shoot the scene until we were happy with it, and then we’d shoot the next scene right after it! And everybody’s in it. Christian’s in it. Bill Pullman’s in it. It became a whole thing. We shot some of it at my house, and my girlfriend is in it. That whole period of my life, it’s right in there.
Ted Danson:
Creepshow (1982)—“Harry Wentworth”
Ted Danson: Now, who were the players on that? It was Stephen King, George Romero was the director, and the makeup effects were by… oh, what’s his name? Tom Savini! So it was like the royalty of horror movies, and… [Suddenly starts laughing.] Hey, uh, what kind of article is this? I’m trying to think how much I should tell you here.
You have carte blanche. There’s not much that’s off limits around here.
Okay, then: two memories. One is that my scenes were mostly with Leslie Nielsen, who—and you can Google him and see him doing this on talk shows—went through a phase where he had a handheld bellows-like thing that was a fart-noise maker.
Oh, yes. I am familiar.
He was relentless! Most people would do something like that, get a few laughs, and put it away. He… would not. We literally got asked to get off an airplane because we were in first class, and when we sat down, he was on one side of the aisle and I was on the other side, and every third person who would walk by, he would do his fart machine. [Laughs.] Restaurants would ask us to leave. He was relentlessly in love with his machine, with no sense of shame.
And my other memory is of my last shot in the movie. My character has been buried in the sand on the beach below tide line, so that the tide comes up and slowly drowns him. Leslie Nielsen kills him, and then he comes back as a waterlogged zombie thing. So what they’ve done is, they do the outside scene on the beach, but then they want the close-ups, so they make a little aquarium tank. I got in a wetsuit and climbed in, and somebody would reach down with an oxygen tank ventilator thingy, and I’d breathe, and then they’d take that out. And there was a yoke made out of… I don’t know, wood and fake sand, so it looked like my head was buried in the sand, underwater.
Well, since I had no oxygen in the scene, I had no dialogue, so I figured, “Well, what the heck, it’s the last shot: I see no reason why I can’t go off with Tom and smoke a doobie and then do my shot.” [Laughs.] You know, I was so paranoid that I would be screaming, “You fucker!” in genuine paranoid fear that I was drowning, I was so looped on this marijuana. That was never to be repeated ever again, I will say. You can choose to use that story or not. Okay, next!
Gilbert Gottfried:
The Further Adventures Of Wally Brown (1980)—“Bernstein”
Norman’s Corner (1987)—“Norman”
Most people assume your first TV appearance was when you joined the cast of Saturday Night Live. Before that, though, you did a pilot called The Further Adventures Of Wally Brown.
I had flown to L.A. to audition for something else, and that thing I didn’t get. Then I had a friend of mine out there who was a comedian that I knew from New York, and he said he was doing this pilot, and they’re casting one of the other roles. He called them and recommended me, and I went in and auditioned, and they liked me and used me. This is a lesson in how show biz works and how things get made: One of the producers or creators—whoever he was—was a big fan of the song “Charlie Brown.” You know, “He walks in the classroom, cool and slow…”
Sure, by The Coasters.
Yeah. So he liked that song, so he decided to make a TV series out of it. Because there’s so much in one song to go on. So Wally Brown was this black kid, and he had a white friend, and—talk about originality—the white friend’s father was a cab driver who lived in Queens who was a bigot, and he had a dingbat wife. [Laughs.] And amazingly the show didn’t take off!
There’s two things in the credits of the pilot that stood out, the first being that Peter Scolari was one of your co-stars.
Yes! Then he later went on to Newhart and—most importantly—Bosom Buddies, with Tom Hanks. I wonder if Peter Scolari throws darts at pictures of Tom Hanks. [Laughs.]
The other interesting thing was that it was directed by Lowell Ganz.
Yes, Lowell Ganz of the team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, who created a lot of very successful things. This was not one of them. [Laughs.]
That reminds me: As far as other people I’ve worked with who seem to have the Midas touch, but I guess were wearing gloves when they worked with me, I did what was called a backdoor pilot. That’s when you disguise something as a TV show with the hope that it’ll become a series. They do that a lot on series. You’ll have a show like Married With Children, where all of a sudden Al would say, “Hey, it’s my best friend Doug!” And the audience would go, “Well, if he’s your best friend, how come in all the years of watching this series we’ve never seen him once?” But after Doug showed up, all of the characters from Married With Children would pretty much disappear for the rest of the episode. They do that for a lot of shows: They’ll introduce a character just to see if they’re popular enough to make a series.
But for this one, they made what was supposed to be a special, and it was called Norman’s Corner. I was a newsstand owner, it was about me and all the wacky people I came in contact with, and it was written by Larry David. And, you know, everything else he did turned to gold, but on this one, I think he was just testing out his pen to see if it wrote. [Laughs.] So that was a pretty much forgotten-about show, except that a couple of years later Jerry Seinfeld was wanting to start his show, and they said, “Well, he’s creating it with Larry David.” And somebody at NBC said, “Larry David? Isn’t he the one that wrote that piece of shit for Gilbert Gottfried?”
The other members of the cast were impressive, especially for someone who’s a fan of old show biz: Henny Youngman, Arnold Stang, and Joe Franklin all made appearances.
Oh, yes, that’s true. Joe Franklin, by the way, who was also on my podcast.
Yes. And promptly died.
[Laughs.] It’s in the contract! You’ve got to look at the small print when you sign!
Fred Melamed:
Curb Your Enthusiasm (2011)—“Dr. Thurgood”
Fred Melamed: When I got that call to do that show, I had been a fan. My wife and I used to watch with great enjoyment and enthusiasm all the time. I remember we’d lay down in bed and put it on, and we really liked it. But I didn’t realize that that show is entirely improvised. [Laughs.] I just didn’t know it! You get a little piece of paper, about the size of a fortune cookie, that says, “You’re Larry’s psychiatrist, and you’ve billed him for some hours that you didn’t see him in the office. You just met him at this baseball card show.” That’s all it says! So you have to make the whole thing up. The first two or three takes, I’m, like, “Oh, uh, fancy meeting you here at this, uh, baseball card show, and, uh…” [Long pause.] Yeah, it was about like that. Fortunately, it’s all shot digitally, so you can just keep going and come up with some ideas.
I actually had a therapist who dropped some show biz names, much to my chagrin and shock, so I thought, “Hmmm… this would be a good thing to try.” So I just had this in my mind, and I wanted to initially choose a celebrity who was not a big, huge star, but kind of a mid-level star, to show this bad habit of naming celebrities. So I thought, “Who’s somebody who’s a rock star who’s not really that famous but is sort of famous?” And I was thinking of Grand Funk Railroad, and I had a friend who was always talking about Mark Farner. His thing about Mark Farner… He slightly made fun of him. He used to say, “The great thing about Mark Farner is that he only plays the important notes. He doesn’t mess around with the unimportant notes.” [Laughs.] So I thought, “I’ll try this.”
Larry had no idea I was going to do any of this, but I said, “You know, let me tell you a story about a patient of mine. I don’t want to reveal who he is, but he was the lead guitarist for Grand Funk Railroad. Oh, well, I guess you could just look it up on the CD now, because I’ve told you he was in Grand Funk Railroad. His name is Mark Farner. And the thing about Mark Farner…” And when I did this, Larry started laughing so much and so hard that he couldn’t respond. He couldn’t catch his breath. But he managed to say, “Go on! Go on!” So we had to repeat it a couple of times so that he wouldn’t laugh, but then we got through it, and I thought, “Oh, this is great! So I’ll be the psychiatrist who does the name-dropping!”
So then we were doing another scene, which was in the office, where he’s upset because I’ve billed him for when he’s talked to me, so I thought, “Okay, I want to mention somebody who’s more famous this time. Not a movie star, but still somebody who’s famous.” And Alec Berg and Dave Mandel, who are writers on the show, said, “Try a famous director.” “What, like a movie director?” “Yeah, try that!” So I thought, “Well, it’s got to be somebody that everybody knows. It can’t be somebody like [Michelangelo] Antonioni. It has to be somebody who’s fairly well known to everybody.” And I decided, “Well, people probably know Star Wars.”
I actually had some doubts about whether that was the right thing to do, and I have to be honest about it: I did think to myself before I said it, “Well, you know you’ll never work in a Star Wars film, right?” [Laughs.] “If you say this thing about how he hires prostitutes, you’re never gonna get that call. You’ve got that great Darth Vader voice, and you’re never gonna get that call.” But I decided, “Well, it’s a fair trade.” So I went with George Lucas: “I don’t want to tell you who he is, but I have a very well-known client who’s quite a well-respected movie director. I don’t want to say who he is, but he did direct Star Wars…” And Larry said, “Everybody knows George Lucas directed Star Wars!” And I said, “You know, not everybody’s in show business, Larry…”
So it was great to improvise like that, and it worked so well. I think honestly that, since I have this kind of respectable veneer about me, when I do these horrible, outrageous things that somebody’s never supposed to do, like be horrible to your children or completely tipping somebody’s identity who’s your psychiatric patient, I think comically it works out, because I look like such a trustable figure. [Laughs.] And, in fact, through the vainness of trusting authority figures, I’m revealing them as the scoundrels they are! But it was fun not only because I got to meet Larry, but I also got to become friendly with Dave and Alec, who wrote the show, and I’ve gone on to work with them on many other things, like Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator.
Peter Jacobson:
Good Night, And Good Luck. (2005)—“Jimmy”
Peter Jacobson: God, you make me feel like I’m a successful actor! [Laughs.] I know I’m going to sound like an idiot, because I actually think that everybody’s the nicest guy ever, but I’m telling you: George Clooney, Roland Emmerich, Sidney Lumet—these are literally the nicest people. They’re all so good. Maybe I’m just lucky I’m not working with any assholes… yet.
It was just one scene, but he created a world that was so tight and so real. Here again, it was exciting for me to go back to something that I knew growing up. My father was actually a local anchorman in Chicago, and he knew everybody at CBS and all these guys, so that was sort of his era. He’s a little bit younger, but he knew all about this, and I felt immersed in that world growing up, so it was really exciting. When I met George Clooney, I mentioned that to him, that it was really exciting, and I guess his father was also a big TV guy in Cincinnati when he was growing up. So we bonded on that, and he showed me around the set. He really was just super duper nice.
Again, it was just one scene, a cool elevator scene, where the hardest part was getting the set to shift, so that it looks like you’ve moved from floor one to floor six. Because when the doors open, it can’t be the same set. Although you’re not actually moving: they’re just scrambling around, maybe turning the elevator around. So that was a bit of a difficult thing, technically. But just getting the patter of the dialogue, talking on top of each other… It was just a hyper-real feeling. I loved the period, the ’60s. I felt like I had a really cool tie on. I liked my hat. George Clooney was nice. It was just really a sweet little day of work. And I got a S.A.G. [award] nomination out of it! I was, like, “You included me on that list?” I just couldn’t believe it.
When we talked to Richard Kind, he said about the movie, “I think I should’ve played Fred Friendly, who was one of the homeliest Jews ever to walk the planet. And instead they get this great-looking Irish guy to play Fred Friendly. Yeah, it was George. He gave himself the role!”
[Laughs.] Welcome to the business, Richard! He and I can relate: that’s all it ever is. Believe me, I can play a Jewish guy, another Jewish guy, and then another Jewish guy, and then maybe a Cuban guy. Or at least a Middle Eastern guy. But for me, they’re all Jews. Which is good! If it’s a good role, I’m happy to play it.