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Talking Texas History
Talking Texas History
East Texas Literary Journeys, Pt. 2
Part 2 of our conversation with Joe Lansdale, an award-winning author and screenwriter, as he unpacks the influences of East Texas history on his storytelling. Lansdale shares insights on writing for screen adaptations and reflects on the evolution of characters across various mediums, all while urging listeners to remember past lessons as they weave their personal narratives.
This podcast is not sponsored by and does not reflect the views of the institutions that employ us. It is solely our thoughts and ideas, based upon our professional training and study of the past.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Talking Texas History, the podcast that explores Texas history before and beyond the Alamo. Not only will we talk Texas history, we'll visit with folks who teach it, write it, support it, and with some who've made it and, of course, all of us who live it and love it. I'm Scott Sosbe and I'm Gene Preuss, and this is Talking Texas History. Welcome to another edition of Talking Texas History. I'm Gene Preuss.
Speaker 1:I'm Scott Sospe.
Speaker 2:Today we're going to pick up on part two of our discussion with award-winning author, screenwriter, storyteller East Texas' very own Joe Lansdale. You may be familiar with his Hap and Leonard series or even the film Bubba Hotep. Joe's got great stories for us and we're going to pick up on part two now. We hope you had a great new year and it's going well for you. We're ready to continue our season three with part two of East Texas Literary Journeys with Joe Lonsdale.
Speaker 1:You know I think I have told you this before you know when you read. When you read something, you know when it's a good writer. It's when you picture something in your head and who they are, of course, and you get pictures. And I had photos in my head of Hap and Leonard. And then I saw the television series. It was on the Sundance Network and Purfoy and Michael Kenneth Williams. When I saw them, I said the Sundance network and Purfoy and Kenneth, michael Kenneth Williams. When I saw them, I said that's happened, leonard, that's what they look like. They did a great job casting those guys.
Speaker 3:They did, you know, and James was having he's British and so he was having a little trouble with the accent, so I was on set a lot, so he was trying to pick up that and I told him one day I said, man, man, you're gonna have to find something in the middle you're just gonna put your eye out trying to get this accent.
Speaker 3:I you know I said if I was listening to it I'm not sure I'd understand it, but but the uh um thing was is they were really dedicated to it and christina hendrix in the first season was just wonderful and she nailed everything. You know, when I first met her sure, her accent was there because she was in character, you know, and she she was a great actress. All the people in it were and, uh, they filmed that in Baton Rouge, which is not that different from East Texas, and uh, so, yeah, it was a very, very good series and I liked them. They made changes sometimes I disagreed with, but on the whole I thought they were really close.
Speaker 1:Yeah you know it's one of those that the first season was the best season for me. They seemed to. They seemed to get away from what made the first season work, so much as they went later on what they do they do four seasons, three three.
Speaker 3:I liked all three seasons. They're all good, but yeah season to me was gold and there's some things, like I said, I have some, some beefs here and there, but it was. It was very successful. Help my book sales Cold in July was a good film. They made that with Don Johnson, sam Shepard and Michael C Hall.
Speaker 1:And then the Thicket's out now, which is based on my novel the Thicket. Yeah, I saw that that's out. I need to. I need to watch that. It's on Tubi right.
Speaker 3:It's probably less like my book than any of the others. Is that right and uh, but it's still a good film. But if I were to say is it like my book, I'd say 40% you know, you know what?
Speaker 3:You still get a hundred percent of a check right. I got a hundred percent and the and the other um. The other things, though, were much closer, and I felt very happy and satisfied with them, and I felt that people who watched them would get my work. That would be. Those were my stories, even though there were alterations. It was very close, and so I was pleased with that. And bubba Hotep, of course, I've been very fortunate with and I don't tell how many options and screenplays I've written that never got made, but I got paid for. I did stuff for Ridley Scott, you know David Lynch options, stuff of mine, I mean, so I've been very fortunate in that way.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, let me, let me jump in here. I want to bring in something that you mentioned earlier. You're talking about racism and I've seen Bubba Hotep, but you're talking about a half and Leonard you talk about. You have this theme in there as well, where you have a main character who's black and another main character who's who's white, and it's it's their friendship and one of the things when I saw bubba hotep and I don't know how much of this was you and your writing, or the, the, uh, the interpretation that the director gave or that the two actors gave, uh, and great actors, right, great actors, um, in that and it's a.
Speaker 2:You know, it's kind of a out in the one, and the first time you watch it it's kind of a I don't know what. The first time you watch it it's kind of silly, uh, and the premise is kind of silly. But as I was talking to you right before we got started, the more I think about it. I do think about it quite a bit is there is a deep, there is a deep level. There's a deep thing to it about how we perceive reality and aging. But the other thing that I think is interesting is at the very end, there's this transformation where Bruce's character Elvis, who's not really Elvis, or maybe he is really Elvis.
Speaker 3:I let people find that out for themselves.
Speaker 2:Goes to Ossie Davis's Jack Kennedy, and it's that he says, mr President, right, which he had not said. The whole movie.
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 2:And then at the very end, he says I'm going to take it that this person is just like I. Really believe that I'm Elvis.
Speaker 3:And it was also that he had presidential behavior.
Speaker 2:Right, and I think that I thought that was very interesting in that movie is that, and it was also that he had presidential behavior. These two guys who are polar opposites in so many respects and yet they have this common. What are you trying to say? What are you trying to say about racism and people?
Speaker 3:I'm trying to say that you know, once you know somebody, you might have a totally different opinion than what you've been taught. You know, if you're told black people are bad and you grow up with that all your life, but you're not really spending time with black people outside of maybe occasional cross path work or whatever, especially during the era that I grew up, is that I'm saying that you learn more about people by being around them. You learn more about people when they have the same opportunities and then you see people be able to grow beyond where they are, because a lot of times people, white people when I was growing up, a lot of them would think well, why don't they do better if they're so good? Well, because they didn't have the opportunity to do better. They couldn't. You know, when I was a kid they couldn't even go to the same schools until I got a little older. But when they integrated but for that there was segregation they, you know, they go to a restaurant. They're not going in that restaurant, but they might go to the back and get some food and they couldn't go to the movie. They had a separate entrance upstairs, you know, and I remember seeing them going up that stairs and I told my I was a little kid and I told my mom, I said, why are those people going up that stairs? She said I don't know, it's not right, but and it don't want to always be that way. And at the moment, in that moment, I don't know that, it was an epiphany tip for me, but I never forgot it and later on I thought about that a lot and I've seen racism change it. I'm not going to try to say there's no racism, but I don't think it's the problem.
Speaker 3:It was in the 50s and 60s and 70s because they really had no recourse, none whatsoever. You know. Courts were going to rule against them. There wasn't going to be an opportunity to get above your standards because you couldn't get those jobs. They wouldn't hire you, you know. And so a lot of that stuff changed and started changing in the late 60s, but it didn't really impact East Texas almost till the 80s, you know. And through the 70s there were still areas that were segregated, you know, secretly segregated, but still segregated. So I've seen all of that happen and so racism and seeing it is built within me. And you know, I certainly didn't suffer from being white, but I still was very understanding of it because I was doing the same job as they were. We were working in the Rose Fields and the aluminum chair. Well, not the aluminum chair factory, I don't think they hired blacks in the aluminum chair factory, but in all of the field work, for instance.
Speaker 3:But a lot of those people, they never did anything else but that, not because they didn't want to, not because they might not have had the intelligence or whatever. They did not have the opportunity, and it wasn't even making your own opportunity. They couldn't make their own opportunity. They were up against that ceiling and that was it. Well, that's changed dramatically. I mean, I remember you never saw a black lawyer, never saw a black doctor, and you only saw black teachers if they were teaching at the segregated school, when they integrated the school. I don't remember us having any Black teachers. It could have been something, but I don't think so. I don't think we had any Black teachers because they weren't considered smart enough.
Speaker 3:You know you don't go to a doctor that's Black or a woman. They don't go to a doctor that's a woman. They don't know what they're doing, which is, and you know, my doctor is female, and so all of these things have changed and I know many black people that are in fine professions now. So I don't, I don't want to say gee, it's all gone. But I tell you what you don't want to go back in time and the good old days as people talk about weren't that good if you were black or if you were gay. You're not living in those days.
Speaker 2:And to tell you the truth.
Speaker 3:There was no air conditioning, you didn't have a lot of the medical help that you have now. You didn't have a lot of the drugs and the technology. There's things I wish I could go back to if I could pick and choose. I like the sort of openness we had, you know, and we didn't everybody didn't. Every time you went to a store, I mean like a government building, you didn't have to go through a metal detector and you know things have changed, and some of it for a reason. But that saddens me. But when I look at like racism and homophobia and all that that, that still exists but not like it did.
Speaker 1:It's different, Although I worry sometimes these days that we're regressing a bit. We are. We are regressing. We talk about the Hap and Leonard and these others. But you've also written a number of books. I don't know I'm calling them this. I don't know if you'd call this supernatural Westerns to some extent, or Westerns and it, which is nobody, does that hardly at all. So tell us about those, how you can see those and how you know. How do they fit into the genre, how accepted are they?
Speaker 3:I guess is the right way for that well, you know to also to jump a little forward, there are I influenced a lot of people now who are writing those kinds of things and uh, and I've influenced people that don't know, I influenced the people that influenced them. There are a lot of people writing happen Leonard way style type things that didn't do it. And the black writers and uh, hispanic writers and uh, female writers like May Cobb, I mean there's so many and they were all influenced by my work. That feels good. You know, gay writers, all those people they said, oh, I read that. I didn't even know you could do that.
Speaker 3:So when I did the Weird Western, there had been, like Robert Howard did Weird Westerns. He did some great short stories and so I'm sure that influence was there and there were. I read these old dime novels. There was a collection I picked up of hardback and then they had a run of I think Ballantyne or somebody did a run of these old things and Dead in the West. The first one. I was influenced very much by a film called Curse of the Undead, oh really, and it was a vampire Western. And then, yeah, you know what was it? Billy the Kid Meets Dracula and stuff like that. Was it Billy the Kid Meets Dracula and stuff like that, and Frankenstein's Daughter, and you know there were all kinds of Westerns that were being made. You know they even made a Western that was all with little people. You know.
Speaker 1:Yes, I've seen footage of that.
Speaker 3:It was such a fad and such a thing. So all of that stuff probably influenced and and the dime novels robert e, howard and uh. But when I started writing uh dead in the west, curse of the undead, was was a big influence. I think I even mentioned that at first, plus comics like jonah hex and later on, which I wrote later, but at that time I believe jonahx is being much more weird than they actually were.
Speaker 1:I guess it's the thicket I have not read it, though Nobody else was doing it. I have not read the thicket, which is the movie that just came out either, and I guess it fits into that that genre Is it? Not a weird one, okay.
Speaker 3:It's a. It's a historical. Okay, my favorite of my books actually the bottoms is the most famous and the one they even teach in college and in high schools and stuff. But the uh is paradise sky oh, yeah, yeah yeah, absolute favorite of all my books is that right? I don't know, people can decide on that or another, but it's certainly my favorite.
Speaker 2:Okay, I've got to ask you, because my wife wants to know this what inspired Bubba Hotep?
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:Is it a play on the on the word succubus?
Speaker 3:No, but, but it is. I came up with a title Bubba Hotep as a joke, and I but that title stuck with me. I thought that's kind of funny. And so one day I got a um, we did things by letter then and phone. I either got a letter or a call. I don't remember what Paul Salmon was doing an anthology called Elvis is dead, and there was Lee uh, I mean Lou Reed and a bunch of offbeat writers were doing stories, and so he said would you do a story for this? And I went, yeah, I'll do it. And I didn't really have any idea.
Speaker 3:But when my brother who is, I told you, before, 17 years older than me, lived in Memphis, he tried to record at Sun Records. His wife that he met there graduated high school with Elvis Presley. So he was introduced to Elvis and he even went to a broadcasting school one time and was trying to get into that and he was sitting talking to another guy that was there. She was also trying to get in. They were both desperate to get a job and that was Johnny Cash. And then, weirdly, my daughter, who's a singer and songwriter, was produced by Johnny Cash's son in her last two albums, and so that connection was there, you know and this is before my daughter was born, though, but I mean the connection with with Elvis, and that era was there and my brother trying to record his son records.
Speaker 3:In the meantime, as a child, uh, when I was about 11, um, kennedy was assassinated. So that impacted me a lot, because there was nothing like that. At that time, everybody felt like assassinations of a president were in the past that was Garfield and things like that but that hit me. And then at one point, my mother was in a car wreck and had to be in a nursing home, and you know she never came out of it. She had damage to her that you couldn't take care of her yourself because it was 24-7. So I would go, I would be in that nursing home a lot, visiting with her, and you know this, and that my brother too, and I would listen to conversations that people were having, and a lot of them were about nobody remembers me now.
Speaker 3:All the things I did in my life don't matter, no matter how much I was lauded, and I thought, well, that's going to be true for a lot of people. Right, and you may be remembered, you don't know. Elvis is certainly remembered. But he had reached the point in my story where that didn't matter anymore, cause, you know, we all, we all arrive at the same destination, sure, and so all of that influence, bubba hotel, and when I wrote it I thought it was, and Don nails that story.
Speaker 3:It's probably 98% what I wrote. There are the 2%. There's some changes that I think, and I understand why he did them. One was money and another was that he needed a different kind of introduction here or something like that. But and he removed some characters. You know, I even had Dillinger. I personally thought there were Dillinger in there, and so some of those things were movies. That just didn't have enough, you know. But all of that came together and I sent the story and after I sent it I said that is one crazy story. And I wrote a withdrawal letter and I was going to pull the story and before I could send it the acceptance came. So this is our best story, this is our favorite in the book.
Speaker 1:I thought yeah, I always knew that.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a great background to that. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's such a fascinating story and I think it's what people have thought about when they think of you. Probably that's the first thing that comes to mind. But you've done other things in hollywood. You've done other things and work with movies and things. So you always hear all this talk about how the industry is such cutthroat and how it's. You know people go there and they change. You worked a lot with hollywood but still live in natchitoches so you hadn't gone completely California, right. What's it like? What's it like being in that industry, writing screenplays, dealing with all the people in the movie industry? Just give us a little idea of what it's like to do that.
Speaker 3:Well, all the bad stuff you heard is true. There are a lot of great people in it. I mean, you know actors like Bruce and James and Mike bless his heart, and so many others are are. You know, bill Paxton was a friend of mine and you know a lot of those people. They're all. They were all great people and there are great. You know Don Coscarelli, who directed Bubba and also he did another one of mine called incident on and off of Mount Road for masters of horror showtime, you know, and they were great people there and we're still all friends, you know, and but when you get into it, the industry itself is an entity unto itself and it's it's an evil bastard because it doesn't care about you. It's there to exploit you. That's what it's for. You have to realize that when you make it, you know you're there. They have lawyers there that are only there to exploit you.
Speaker 3:And sounds kind of like college administrators, and so you know it's a tough industry it really is. But you know, I wrote a script for the second season of Happen Leonard and I got banned from the set in the from the on the second season. I didn't get to go to the set, and that's because the showrunner who's a friend of mine now, john Worth but what happened is James had called me and told me what they were thinking about doing and doing this this is a big variation from the book and I said I hate to have my name on something like that. You know, I said that's awful. And so James went back and told him. But what he told me is that I don't want to do it. I think Lansdale's right and so he wouldn't do it. So they were going to do it my way and they did. But what happened was that I got to do the script but they said well, you can take your name off of it. I said no, no, no words, punish myself because I don't like what you're doing and you're, you're paying me for that script and it's an acknowledgement I'll have. And they did some tinkering with it, but it's pretty much what I wrote. But, um, you know, so I had that and then later John actually I, my agent was telling me that he even said it in some article somewhere that I was right and he was wrong and that he shouldn't have done it. But we, we became friends.
Speaker 3:I, I really liked John. I think he's extremely talented, but I do think when the show, the first season, which was also the showrunner, was also the director was great but it was a lot of work. So they got a guy that did TV and knew how to put TV together. But I think it suffered because of that and I think it was. In some ways it was much better. But in some ways it suffered because of that because I think that the way Jim made it was like a little like a six part movie and it felt more movie like than television life. But that doesn't mean I didn't like second and third. I did. I, I love that whole series and you know I got to meet people like Lou Gossett and stuff like all of that, cause I was back by the third season. They, they, let me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they let you back on set after the third season. That's great.
Speaker 2:I'm just listening because this is it's a fascinating. So I've got two questions and I'll ask the first one here what does it feel like to have stuff you've written, that being produced by somebody else in a different medium film, television reinterpreted and your characters come to life? I mean Scott and I many of the people who listen are authors. Right, we write, but it's going to be a long time before anybody puts anything I write to film. Right, if you're waiting for a book for me to write, don't wait for the movie. I can tell you that. But for you, what is? What is that like to see that translation?
Speaker 3:Nervous, you know, uh, the thing is, if you sign the contract and take the money, then you, you know, being a whiner doesn't, doesn't pay. But I've often been with some of them, given the opportunity to have my own say, and I always say that when I'm a uh, like a producer, sometimes a producer I've also been, you know, a producer on some stuff, which means that I have a say and but yet they can do anything they want, no matter what I say. But it's, you know, I felt like, uh, what I say, but it's, you know, I, I felt like, uh, when it's good, I feel fortunate, and mostly I've, I've been fortunate, but I would like to control more and in fact I'm trying to produce more. I want to direct a film of my own and, uh, that we're working on that and we'll see. So there there is that need for me to have more input than I've had in the past. And it's not that I won't change even my own work. I have.
Speaker 3:I've done adaptations of my own work and I've written scripts that were not my own work. I did adaptations for George RR Martin of Howard Waldrop short story and I did one of Howard's novels Vincent D'Onofrio did, directed and starred in the little short one which will eventually come out. But he made changes after changes were made, but they were all. They were all good changes. You know, I didn't have any problem with that and first of all it wasn't my story but I adapted as close as I could so I didn't have to feel bad that if they change things where it was a little different, then you know I didn't have to say, well, I did that. But the things they did didn't really matter, they improved it and most of the time that's not the case. So you feel, you always feel a little, a little nervous, I mean.
Speaker 3:And when Love, death and Robots adapted three of my stories, I liked all three of them. I thought one of them they switched the character that ends up not turning out well, let's put it that way, and I thought that was a mistake. But it's a beautiful and pretty close to my story. They just pretty literally put my stories there. So that felt good. Creepshow did what me and my son and daughter wrote. Uh called the companion and it was changed quite a bit. I read the script. I liked the script. I didn't love the, the actual result.
Speaker 3:You know, I thought which one was it, which one was it Uh, it's a creep show the first season of the revival, you know the series, not the movie creep show.
Speaker 3:No, no, no, it's a good series and uh, but uh, it was the first season and I think it was like one of the first three episodes or something. I think they would do two each time, if I remember correctly. And uh, you know, I wrote Batman, the animated series, and when I wrote for that, they pretty much did my scripts. As I wrote them, I sort of pre-directed them, which has made me, you know, practice, uh, with the idea of directing in a way, even though they were scripts. And I remember on they have a box set and Bruce Timm says I wish we could print his scripts on here, you know, because I think my scripts were fun, because I put stuff in it that the audience will never see but that the people looking at it will see.
Speaker 3:And script writing is not a blueprint. When people tell you that, I always cringe because blueprints are no fun to read. But what you want to do is you don't want to overdo it and you don't want to tell the director how to do it. And the animation, I felt a little different. But it's a different animal, it's a very different animal and the best of the screenplay should be fun to read, just like anything else, it almost should be like a prose poem and moving you from one scene to another, and a lot of people don't feel that way and a lot of things that are filmed are filmed as blueprints. But I believe that you need to bring yourself to it without taking away, if it's an adaptation, without taking away the author, and I always believe that you can do things closer to what they did than a lot of people do. When they'll tell you, oh, they just won't shoot, or they'll say film and a book aren't the same, I always go, oh, really, no joke.
Speaker 3:I knew that I've actually written a lot of screenplays, but the thing is is that a lot of times they don't change it because of that. They change it because they want to. They change it because they had ideas that they have never used and did not have enough talent to put together, so they weld it to somebody else's idea. And then the screenwriter I want to be known for my work, not this guy so they begin to change it. And even in the television series Happen Lender, which I love, you have a writer's room, and I don't love writer's rooms, even though you know that, because you got too many cooks and uh, and then everybody wants to put their piece in and, and as a business they try to do that. This person, you know that dog that peed on that hydrant, I did that, you know and you go yeah, really Well, that made a big difference, didn't it? But it's just, you know stuff like that, and but overall I've been very fortunate. But yeah, it's always a nervous kind of situation.
Speaker 2:OK, so this podcast is about Texas history and you know we say at the beginning it's about people who write it and people who've lived it. You're one of those people who've lived it and made it so and you've kind of talked about this already. So I'm going to ask you just to kind of round up those thoughts again how has Texas history helped to shape your work.
Speaker 3:When I was growing up, texas history was taught in schools and it was a very important part of what we were taught and I never thought of myself as a kid, as an American. I was a Texan. As I grew older, of course, I began to understand it was a bigger situation, but we were really taught to respect and love Texas history. Some of the Texas history we were taught has changed because more information has come along, but I always felt that we had a unique place here and I felt like that we had a unique history, having been a country and having all the things. We had a unique place here and I felt like that we had a unique history, having been a country and having all the things we had happened good, bad, however you want to perceive them. I thought that this place has almost a magical feel, almost a magical realism about it which influenced what I did. And so, to me, texas history, history in general I'm a big.
Speaker 3:I almost, you know, majored in oh, I did major in history briefly, but I just I love history. It's very important to me and it's been the result of me writing things like the Thicket, the Bottoms, you know, sunset and Sawdust, a Fine Dark Line, paradise Sky, which is, yeah and Edge of Dark Water, other books but my love of history, those are all historicals. My love of history has influenced that and it's also made me excited. And what scares me these days is nobody learns from history anymore. Maybe we never did and we don't learn from history. We just repeat the same foolish things over and over and over. And I keep thinking it's right there, just look at it, look what we did before, don't do that again. See how it worked out. And so to me it's also. It's informative. It teaches you how to live. It teaches you how to respect what's gone before without accepting everything that's gone before you know. So, to me, very important.
Speaker 1:We always want to leave our guests. We always ask a question at the end of every one of our programs. If we have a signature for the tens of people who listen to our podcast, this must be it. So we always give the last question to the guests and this is their chance to leave us with words of wisdom. So we ask joe lonsdale, what do you know?
Speaker 3:not much and when you get a list, then you know, you know. But I would say, for writing, I'll give you a writing tip write like everybody you know is dead, don't write oh wow, that is good don't write for friends.
Speaker 3:Don't do that. Now. Some people have the ability to have an idea about what the audience want and I'm nothing against that. I mean, I've been trying to sell out forever but it just doesn't happen. And I just felt that when I tried to do that, when I first started, I was looking for you know what's the slant? Well, the slant changes by the time you get finished and also it takes away from your own personal or the depth of your personal involvement in the work.
Speaker 3:And, like you were just talking about, I can bring history, I can bring my own past and I can put it in what are commonly thought of as genre novels, which I love. But I also love literature and mainstream novels, but I think the best genre novels are literature. I mean, I'd argue all day long that Raymond Chandler and James Cain wrote literature. You know crime backgrounds, but it's literature and Ray Bradford and a lot of other writers that worked in those fields. So I think that's what I've learned for me to be able to have the career I've had, which has been really good, is write like everybody I know is dead.
Speaker 1:That is great. We've had some really good ideas. People ended with that's one of the best, and I've never heard that. Of course, as a historian, we get to do that a lot. Everybody is dead. Everybody is dead. We're right about it. So, joe, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for agreeing to come on with us. Thank you.
