A Smattering of Anecdotes You Probably Haven't Read Before
Including excised bits from conversations with Carol Burnett, Lewis Black, Dustin Hoffman, Bruce Hornsby, Holly Hunter, Kenneth Branagh, and Nick Searcy
Let’s see… What do I have for you today?
Well, we’ve got a couple of bits that were cut from Vanity Fair interviews, one very long bit that didn’t make it into a Variety piece, an anecdote that was too long for a Virginian-Pilot article, and then we close with three anecdotes which all have something in common: each one was originally intended for a Random Roles interview. (The first two were from conversations that ended up being way too short to be turned into pieces, and the last two is from a full interview that I was sure they’d want but which, in fact, they did not want. D’oh…)
The one caveat: if you were in the Facebook group I created a few years ago, then you may have read these already. Otherwise, though, you almost certainly haven’t.
Now go forth and be entertained!
Carol Burnett:
My very nice editor at Vanity Fair opted to lose the last Q and last A from my Carol Burnett interview because she liked the full-circle aspect of opening with her new Netflix series, A Little Help with Carol Burnett, and closing with her very first series, Stanley. I liked that idea, too, so I had no complaints. But I still liked this bit, so...here it is!
You said you’d consider doing another scripted series, but—speaking of working live—would you ever consider going back to the theater?
Carol Burnett: Well, just a few years ago I did Love Letters for six weeks with Brian Dennehy on Broadway, and that was a wonderful time. It was so easy! It was just all in one act. The curtain would go up at 7:30, I’d be out of there by 9, and I’d go back to the hotel or go out with friends or whatever. And Dennehy is such a wonderful actor, so I enjoyed that. But I wouldn’t want to go for any length of time. Eight shows a week is a bit rough. I think I’ve been there and done that.
But my goal when I started out was to be on the stage, doing musical comedy. I never thought of television. I didn’t grow up with television, so it was never in my realm of thinking. But then I got on The Garry Moore Show while I was at the same time doing eight shows a week of Once Upon A Mattress. I doubled for quite a few months, and then I realized that I’d rather do a different musical comedy revue a week than do the same thing night after night after night. It started with Garry and then it went on to my show, but we really did a Broadway musical comedy show a week, with sketches, costume changes, doing different characters. The variety of television appealed to me more, and…it just kind of happened that way!
Lewis Black:
When I did my interview with Lewis Black for Vanity Fair, I wanted to ask him some questions delving into matters beyond the stuff he's generally known for. This big chunk failed to make the cut when my editor made *her* cuts, which is a shame, because it's the stuff that I thought was the most interesting part of the conversation.
As we come into the conversation, he'd just talked about how little success he'd found on the small screen in terms of actual acting (as opposed to, say, on The Daily Show)...
You’ve had some success in films. In fact, your first role was in Woody Allen’s 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters, and more recently you turned up in his 2016 Amazon series, Crisis in Six Scenes. How did you find your way into his circle of actors in the first place?
Lewis Black: It was through Juliet Taylor, who was his casting director and really just one of the all-around great casting directors. She came up to me and my friend Rusty McGee—who has since passed on, but he’s in the movie as well—when we were working at this place the West Bank [Cafe] in New York, and she said, “You know, you’re going to be in a Woody Allen film.” And I’m, like, “Yeah, ha-ha-ha.” And she said, “No, come down and meet Woody.” So I came down, and I didn’t read anything: he just shook my hand, and that was it.
You mentioned the West Bank Cafe. You were their Playwright in Residence. That’s not a title that a lot of people get to utilize in their careers nowadays.
No, it’s not, really. [Laughs.] I was Playwright in Residence at a theater in a bar, which was in the basement of a restaurant.
But the title makes it sound so highfalutin.
Doesn’t it? I had to come up with something. That was my own idea! But when I was there… I mean, they essentially threw us out, but if that hadn’t come along, I wasn’t really planning on going anywhere! When I look back at it, it’s that thing of time and place: if we’d had the access to the kinds of tools that are out there now, it would’ve been an explosion, I think. And I don’t think I’m talking out of school, because the people who came out of there had not been seen before. And we were there at a time when nobody was been seen, because the dearth of theater was just starting.
It’s fascinating that Aaron Sorkin and Alan Ball both had works performed there.
Yeah, Sorkin and Ball, James Gandolfini... There were a lot of folks who went on to do other things. It was a place where people could be seen at a time when there weren’t a lot of opportunities to be seen, and I thought the option was better for a casting director to see you in something you wanted to be in rather than to trundle on down to the East Village and watch you in a four-hour version of Miss Julie.
So at what point did you shift to doing predominantly stand-up? Was that something you’d always had your eye on?
No, I’d been doing it on and off, but then down at the West Bank I was really hosting every show, so I was onstage 15 minutes every night at least. That was the transition.
At the end of the week, we’d do a show for free, and Rusty would play, and we had actors who wanted to do stand-up, some improv folks, and some people who wanted to play music. Michael Wolf, a jazz artist we knew, played at the shows during that time. And in those shows, every day I’d look at the paper and rip out the articles I wanted to talk about, and at the end of the week I’d go talk about them onstage. And over the course of the time, I developed a whole series of bits.
So the folks from Catch a Rising Star asked me to come over, and I went over and started doing that, and I learned how to transition from what I was doing at the West Bank and make it work better in a comedy club. And when we were thrown out of the West Bank, I started spending more time doing it. So I transitioned out of Playwright in Residence into road comic. [Laughs.] And I worked all the clubs in New York, going from one to another, and then after that I hit the road!
Dustin Hoffman:
When I did a piece for Variety on cinematographer Owen Roizman after he was named the recipient of an honorary Oscar, my editor said that I should try to get an interview with someone of note who'd worked with him, and since he'd worked with Dustin Hoffman on two very different projects - Straight Time and Tootsie - I figured, "What the hell: I'll see if I can get Dustin Hoffman." So I did. And that's when I realized the power of sending an email that features the phrase, "My editor at Variety asked me to do a piece..."
When I got on the phone with Hoffman, what I discovered very, very quickly was that he was a talker, and he was going to talk for as long as he wanted to talk, no matter what his publicist - who was also on the line during the phoner - might tell me in regard to wrapping up. Even as he talked, though, I knew there was never any chance that everything he gave me was going to make it into the piece, mostly because the piece was only supposed to be 400 words, and this story alone is 1,500 words!
That said, this was one of those occasions where losing a lot of the specifics was something I was totally willing to tolerate. Even if the world at large didn't get the whole story, to hear Hoffman on the other end of the line, telling me this tale in that very distinctive voice of his, was an experience that was absolutely priceless. I followed Roger Ebert's philosophy of interviewing if you let people talk, they are apt to say just about anything.
In other words, I just kept quiet and let Dustin Hoffman be Dustin Hoffman.
“I don’t know who you’ve talked to – people give different answers, and people have different memories – but… I think Sydney [Pollack] did an extraordinary job, and the results show themselves in Tootsie. But Sydney was not originally going to be the director.
“I had hired Hal Ashby to direct it, and for a year I had an agreement with Columbia – because I had done Kramer vs. Kramer for them – that I wanted to do makeup tests before we even went into pre-production. I said, ‘If I can’t get the makeup right…’ I wanted to be able to walk down the street and not have people turn and look at me and say, ‘Who’s that guy in drag?’ I wanted it to be convincing. And I didn’t want it to be in the style of Some Like It Hot, which was brilliant. So I worked on the makeup, and we had different people – one for hair, one for the makeup itself – to get it realistic. And then Hal Ashby fell out because he was doing Lookin’ to Get Out, a Las Vegas film with Jon Voight, and he said he was finished, and the studio said, ‘No, you’re not.’ And he said, ‘Yes, I am,’ and he joined me to set a start date for Tootsie. And they got a notification from whatever studio was behind Lookin’ to Get Out that said, ‘We’re saying that Hal is not done, and if you start that film, we’ll enjoin it’ – that was the word they used – ‘and not allow you to make the picture.’ So at that point, Columbia came to me and said, ‘We’re not going to be able to do it with Hal Ashby.’ He had been on it over a year, and we’d worked together so wonderfully. We’d been looking to do something for several years!
“So they decide to let Hal Ashby go when we’re in what I guess you would call pre-pre-production, and I did not hire the crew, because we didn’t even have a script! I think we somehow went to Larry Gelbart, and he had done a draft which we felt didn’t work, and Mike Ovitz, who was my agent, said, ‘Do you want to try Sydney Pollack? He hasn’t done a move like this, but maybe he’d be interested in it.’ And I went with my collaborator, Murray Schisgal, who had written the first couple of drafts, and we kind of talked Sydney into taking it on, at which point he wanted to do another draft with Larry Gelbart, because we had said that it didn’t work. We were on a Christmas holiday, so Mike Ovitz said, ‘Why don’t you go with them?’ They were going to Vail or somewhere in Colorado to work on the draft and also ski. And I said, ‘Yes, I would like to!’ And Sydney thought it was a bad idea. Sydney, God bless him, wasn’t that much of a collaborator. That just wasn’t his style. So they went off together, and I got a phone call from Sydney after the new year, and he said, ‘Larry couldn’t cut it.’ Anyway, we did get Elaine May, and without her we would not have had a movie. She was magnificent. In three or four weeks, she took us to the point by adding characters – the Bill Murray character, the Teri Garr character – that we could go into pre-production.
“In the meantime, I’d still been doing these makeup tests, trying to get it right. It was very difficult, and we were still struggling, because I had a beard line, as all men do. And it didn’t matter how close I shaved. I shaved as close as I could. I wound up shaving in the sauna! And to the naked eye, I did not have a beard shadow, but the minute you looked at the film, I did. So we worked on that, to try and eliminate it, and dipped it in different combinations of makeup, I think even going to find the kind of makeup they used in Japan for Noh dancers and actors, who dress as women. They had a certain way they did the makeup.
“Finally we got to start shooting, and I remember – I think Owen was there, I was there, and Sydney was there – we did some screen tests with different lighting, etc., and Sydney said, ‘I think we’re okay now.’ He shot the angles he wanted. I said, ‘But I don’t think you should just stay with static shots. I think you need to shoot me moving. I’m going to be moving in the film. I’m not going to always be under ideal lighting.’ And Sydney didn’t think it was necessary. So we didn’t do any then, and we started the film. And right from the beginning, most days you’d go to the dailies, every day you’d go to the rushes, and the crew’s there, I’m there, Owen’s there, and Sydney’s there. The makeup is, from my standpoint, pretty awful. And Sydney would say, ‘Owen hasn’t yet done the color correction, but when he does, you won’t see a beard shadow.’ I asked Owen, ‘What do you think? Is it because of color correction?’ And I thought Owen was very brave, because this was in front of Sydney, and the hierarchy is always that the D.P. reports to the director, but he said, ‘No. I think it’s a problem.’ And I don’t think Sydney liked hearing that. But that was Owen’s feeling. And at that point I said, ‘I’m gonna stop shooting. We’ll tell Columbia that we cannot resume until we have solved this problem.’ And Sydney and I had a…strong argument. I’d been working over a year just on the character and the makeup, and Sydney said, ‘Everybody knows you’re a man!’ And I got…somewhat explosive then. And I said, ‘That wasn’t the deal! The deal was that the audience could agree to themselves that if they saw me walking on the street, they would not look twice!’
“So we shut down shooting, and we got a new makeup person. At some point it was George Masters, I think. And I think my wig came from Ann-Margret, because it was hard to find a wig that would move, and you wanted it to move and not look like a wig. When we went back to shooting, the first month we were behind a day every two or three days, because it took a long time to get the makeup right – a couple of hours, at least – and I’d go where the camera was, and Owen would adjust the lighting again, and he would come up and look at me very, very carefully. He took the job very seriously. And he said, ‘You’re okay there, you’re okay there, but right under your left eye, it’s kind of peeling off, and you’ll probably be doing close-ups in this scene.’ So I would go back to the makeup room, and it would take at least a half-hour to fix that part that was peeling off. And then he had to adjust for less makeup, because I think it was the summer. So I think after we shot a month, we were a month behind. But I think Frank Price of Columbia had faith and knew that we were trying to get as realistic a look as we could, and I think without Owen I probably would’ve shelved the picture. Because I believed him. And it was a tough moment for him. But he told the truth as he saw it, and as I saw it. And somehow we got some kind of makeup blend in which you didn’t see beard shadow even after being cleanly shaved.
“It’s kind of like the irony of doing a film about convicts. I remember thinking, ‘This is like those little movies that take place in prison where they talk out of the side of their mouth and go, ‘Here comes the screw,’ because they didn’t want them to hear. That’s what I would do with Owen. If I had a problem or whatever, I’d go up to him and out of the side of my mouth I’d say, ‘Whaddaya think?’ And when he could, he would answer me. Because I think – in my memory – he and I were pretty much in accord if a thing was being covered enough. And to be fair to Sydney, he was the director and was certainly responsible to his higher-ups, who were the studio, and he was very concerned that we were so behind, as he should be. And I think it caused him – as it does with probably most directors – to start watching the clock, because you don’t want to get to the end of the day and not have the scene completed and have to cut shots or whatever. That was not my concern, nor was it Owen’s. All we wanted to do was to get the best scene, coverage and lighting-wise, as possible.
“So that’s kind of the shorthand of Tootsie, I think.”
Bruce Hornsby:
When hometown hero Bruce Hornsby put on his annual Funhouse Fest in Williamsburg in 2016, I talked my editor at The Virginian Pilot into letting do a piece commemorating the anniversary of The Way It Is. In doing so, Hornsby provided me with the secret origin of his band, The Range. When the piece ran, only the first paragraph of this story appeared in the actual article, and I get that. It's a very detailed answer. But I *like* very detailed answers!
“In 1984, I put together this band, and it was just called The Range. I was trying to hide behind a name, sort of like Mark Knopfler always did with Dire Straits. You knew it was his trip, but it wasn’t called Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits, it was just called Dire Straits. So we were just called The Range, and we played around town at the classic rock joints: Hop Sing’s and Madame Wong’s and Club Lingerie. We did all these gigs around town, and we got offers of demo money from about five labels, but we ended up going with Epic. They gave us the money for the demo, we made the demo, and then everybody passed on it, but even though the next year I made the demo that got us signed to RCA on my own, the band stayed intact.”
“The drummer was my old drummer from my band around here: John Molo, my old University of Miami friend. We were in one of the jazz bands at the University of Miami, so we became friends from that. He lived in DC, and when I got out of school, I asked him to come down and joined my band. So he did, and…well, hell, he played with me ‘til ’98! So he was the drummer, and…
“Okay, you may or may not have heard this story about how I got discovered on December 1, 1978 at the Jolly Ox outside of Hampton Coliseum. We were fans of Steely Dan and Michael McDonald and all that. You know, we came out of jazz school in Miami, and we just liked what those people were doing, sort of jazzy harmonies in a pop context. So we were big fans of Mike’s, and when the Doobie Brothers were playing Hampton Coliseum, we went over and found him, and we told him, ‘Hey, Mike, we’re the baddest motherfuckers in town, and you should come hear us over here at the Steak and Ale!’ ‘Cause they had a night off, and they weren’t playing ‘til the next night. So long story short, he did come, and he heard us play all my songs, and he was…I don’t know, highly impressed, I guess. [Laughs.] He invited us back over to the hotel, we hung out with him, they played us their new album, which was what became their big smash comeback record, Minute by Minute, and we became friends.
“Okay, so the opening act for that tour by the Doobie Brothers was Ambrosia. So we met the Ambrosia guys, too, ‘cause they all came over and heard us the next night. Mike sat in with us that night. After their show, they all came over. He dragged them all over. ‘Hey, you’ve gotta come hear this band over at the restaurant!’ So we made friends with Ambrosia, we stayed friends with them, and Joe [Puerta] was the bass player for Ambrosia! So he was a friend of mine in all those days. In fact, Joe got me a gig.
“Okay, so as you know, I got fired, blown out, dropped by 20th in ’82, so I was scuffling around for about a year, and then Joe Puerta got me a gig. He got a gig with Scottish singer Sheena Easton, and he helped me get a gig, too. I got that through Joe, and I did that from ’83 to ’84. So we were tight friends, and we were always together on the road, playing with Sheena. I was in a couple of Sheena Easton videos – it’s laughable, I look just hilarious – and I’m actually in an old Ambrosia video, too. One of my sons, Keith, plays basketball at LSU, he just finished his career there, and one time he’d had a rough game and was feeling kind of bad, kind of blue. I said, ‘Hey, go on the internet and look up this video by Sheena Easton, and it’ll cheer you up ‘cause you’ll love your dad looking like such a clown.’ So that’s his go-to move now when he’s had a tough game: he goes and watches that and feels better. [Laughs.]
“Anyway, so that’s bass and drums. But Molo played a lot with a guy who was in the band of the old Dukes of Hazzard guy, Tom Wopat. I actually did a gig playing piano with Wopat at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City! [Laughs.] Hey, there’s nothing wrong with an amusement park gig! You know, just a guy trying to make a buck playing music in L.A. Wopat’s a great guy. He’s subsequently had a great career as a Broadway actor and singer, and he’s really great. He’s done very well on the Great White Way. He’s a great talent. The masses know him from The Dukes of Hazzard, but he’s got a lot to him. The best part of Wopat, the masses don’t know about it. But that’s sort of standard: most people don’t get turned on to that because they don’t see it on mass-market TV. But the guy who was playing guitar with Molo in Wopat’s band was named George Marinelli. I loved his playing. He also played in a popular sort of R&B band called Billy and the Beaters, who had a big hit with ‘At This Moment.’ George was in that band.
“So I got George to be the guitar player, and then I started looking for a fiddle / mandolin / guitar player, and somebody turned me on to David Mansfield, who was most well known for being in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review, but he’d been in a band with T-Bone Burnette when they were kids called Quacky Duck. He was doing film scores for Michael Cimino. He scored a bunch of Cimino’s big movies. He actually has an incredible scene in the old Cimino movie, the much maligned – but unfairly maligned – movie, Heaven’s Gate. There’s a great scene in an old bar, in sort of a meeting house, where they’re having a big dance. And this little guy comes out on roller skates and starts fiddling. He’s roller-skating around the room, and he’s just fiddling his ass off. That’s Mansfield. I said, “Man, I want him!” So he agreed to join…and that was our band!
“We did a whole song and dance around L.A., playing all the clubs, making that demo for Epic, and everyone’s going, ‘Oh, kids, it’s going great! It’s going great! It’s going great! Aaaaaaand you’re out.’ Which is what led me to my next move, which was what got me signed the next year. So that’s the long-winded – but interesting enough – story of how that band got put together.”
Holly Hunter:
The Burning (1981)—“Sophie”
Holly Hunter: Oh, my goodness. [Very long pause.] What do you want me to say?
Well, since it was your first film, let’s start with how you got involved in the project in the first place.
It was a casting director named Joy Todd, who was a wonderful, beautiful person who gave me some real breaks when I first got to New York. She gave me several legs up, and The Burning was one of them, because I made more money than I’d ever made before. I was there in North Tonawanda and Buffalo for six weeks and made all these new friends, and my paycheck was extraordinary. [Laughs.] And I had a blast! It was my first movie, so I was kind of a glorified extra. I didn’t have any responsibilities, really. It was just very exotic.
What was it like stepping in front of the camera for the first time?
I was a nervous wreck. A complete nervous wreck.
Did you eventually get the hang of it?
Oh, no. [Laughs.] Not at all. I got the hang of nothing about acting on that movie.
Did it provide you with anything other than just experience?
Well, I remember that they had what was called the piggy, which would show up on the camera cart every day after lunch. The piggy held a six-pack of beer. [Laughs.] Listen, that was the ‘80s. In fact, it was 1980. The camera crew drank beer after lunch, and they actually had a permanent attachment on the camera cart. There were many details like that that I was very taken by. They captured me.
Kenneth Branagh:
Chariots of Fire (1981)—“Cambridge Student, Society Day crowd” (uncredited)
Reportedly, your first onscreen appearance was in the midst of a crowd in Chariots of Fire. It’s in your IMDb listing, anyway, but then it also credits you as “uncredited.”
Kenneth Branagh: In 1980, I was a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and I was doing a cleaning job. In fact, I was cleaning the toilets in the St. Martin’s School of Art, Charing Cross Road. [Laughs.] But that’s down the street from RADA, and I went up there and…sometimes you get notices about accommodation or other jobs, but I went up there, and it said on a little postcard, “Would you like 10 pounds a day for two days, food included? Go to the Chelsea barracks on Saturday morning.” So I went there and discovered, oh, it’s a film. “You’re gonna be an extra. Go over there, we’ll put you in some 1920s clothes.” And we were driven down the next day in a coach to Eton College, and I met friends of mine who were in drama school elsewhere in London – there were a few hundred of us – and we did the scene where they run ‘round the courtyard, and we also recorded the hymn “My Vow to Thee, My Country,” which you hear some of in the film. We sang that all together in the chapel.
It was particularly interesting and memorable to me because I was introduced to show biz. It was 200 – 300 drama students standing in the quad, and the first assistant director said, “Would any of you like any lines?” And I was practically trampled to death, because 200 – 300 drama students…I mean, it was dangerous. It was like a fire alarm or something. And I realized, “Jesus, I’m gonna have to be really quick off the mark if I want this!” And it was for the group immediately around our heroes, saying, “Come on, Abrahams! Come on, you! You’ve got rockets on your socks!” Or something like that. It was sort of words of encouragement that we were going to be offering up. And, of course, if you’ve got a line, you get more money. I did not get a line. [Laughs.] But I remembered, “Wow, this is an emblem for my life in show business: 300 guys my age, and they all want the line to say, and they’re all quicker than me. I’d better do something about this…”
Nick Searcy:
Runaway Jury (2003)—“Doyle”
Nick Searcy: A dream come true: getting to work with Gene Hackman. He’s always been my hero. And the first three days I was there, I couldn’t even bring myself to speak to him. I just didn’t know what to say. And Gene is kind of like… He’s almost introverted. He’s kind of shy. You wouldn’t think that, but he is. He’s very focused on the work. So we just didn’t speak…and I worked with him for about eight days!
So about the fourth day, I was in the makeup trailer, and Gene would always go into the makeup trailer. He had his own hair person who would always dye his hair. You know, to put a little color in his hair. So I came in one day, and she said, “You want me to do your hair? Gene’s not here yet.” And I was almost shaved bald for that movie, but I said, “Sure, okay!” So I jump up in the chair, and I’m getting my hair done…and Gene Hackman walks into the makeup trailer! He comes up, and I’m, like, “Oh, shit, I’m in Gene’s chair!” But he looks at me in the mirror, and he goes, “You’re doing hair? Why?” First thing he ever said to me. [Laughs.] I’m, like, “I’ll get out of the way,” but he said, “No, no, take your time!”
I’ve got two more quick stories about Runaway Jury. There’s a scene where Gene Hackman is supposed to kick a trashcan at my character, and the director, Gary Fleder, is, like, “I want to make sure Nick’s not hurt.” So Gene goes, “Ah, no problem. So which way are you gonna go?” I said, “Oh, I’ll probably dodge this way.” He says, “Okay, I’ll kick it the other way.” So we do the scene, and Gene leads me to the right, so when I dodge to the right, he kicks the trashcan and hits me in the arm. And Gary’s, like, “Is Nick okay?” And Gene Hackman turns to the guy next to him, the extra, and goes [Holds out his palm.] “Ten bucks.” He’d bet he could hit me!
And the other funny story… You know, there’s the big chase scene in Runaway Jury with me and John Cusack. Well, the first scene, the first day, seven in the morning, it’s a 200-yard sprint down Jackson Square with the camera on a four-wheeler sort of following me. So I’m running as hard as I can the first four takes of the day, and I think on the first take I probably pulled every muscle south of the border. [Laughs.] After we got that shot, I just went back to the trailer and lay on the floor. I couldn’t even make it to the couch. I just went, “Holy shit!” I was just beat.
But I had a lot more stuff to do that day—running up stairs and this and that—so I had to take all this aspirin and stuff to get through it, and I was just dragging my ass through every shot. Fleder was, like, “Do you want to put this off for another day?” “No! Let’s just get this over with. It’s gonna hurt just as bad either way.” By the end of the day, I’m, like, “Everybody, I’m going to make an announcement: I’m okay. Stop asking me if I’m okay. I’m okay, all right? I’m gonna make it!” So we got through the day, but the next day, I swear, I was like Tim Conway on The Carol Burnett Show. [Laughs.] I could not walk. It took me two weeks to get over it!
Oh, I’ve got one more story! Cusack had a guy with him, and he’d always have a football between takes. Cusack was a pretty good player in high school. So we’re doing this shot, and I’m supposed to run around the corner, and he’s supposed to come around after me. I said, “John, we need to do a football take: I’ll come around the corner, and then when you come around the corner, just have that football and hit me with it.” [Laughs.] It was a great shot: I’m running right towards the camera, I’m carrying a toolbox, he comes around the corner, I throw the toolbox down, and he hits it right there. I caught it right on camera. It was great. And Fleder’s, like, “All right, enough fucking around…but that was good!”