Alan Katz: From Hollywood Success to Storytelling Redemption

Alan Katz, the legendary writer and producer behind Tales from the Crypt, joins Rich Bennett for one of the most honest and powerful conversations ever recorded. Alan opens up about Hollywood success, creative betrayal, the disastrous making of Bordello of Blood, and the depression that nearly cost him his life.

This episode goes far beyond film and television. Alan shares how healing from trauma transformed him from a writer into a true storyteller and why podcasting has become the ultimate platform for creative freedom. If you care about storytelling, mental health, authenticity, or the future of media, this is an episode you cannot miss.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:37 Alan’s early life and writing career
• 7:52 Tales from the Crypt origin story
• 15:22 Creating the Cryptkeeper
• 19:07 Why the show was almost cancelled
• 23:17 Bordello of Blood disaster
• 42:27 Career collapse and betrayal
• 45:46 Depression and suicide attempt
• 49:13 Healing and truth
• 52:37 How Not to Make a Movie podcast
• 1:00:13 Why podcasting empowers creatives
• 1:10:20 Dead Drop and modern storytelling
• 1:16:45 Purpose, joy, and creative fulfillment
• 1:28:02 Rapid-fire question
• 1:32:21 Closing and supporters

Transcript

Wendy & Rich 0:01
Coming to you from the Freedom Federal Credit Union Studios- Hartford County Living Presence- Conversations with Rich Bennett. 

Rich Bennett 0:27
So what happens when your biggest hit also becomes your greatest regret? And then you build a career out of telling stories that make others rethink the way they tell theirs. Meet Alan Cats, a former TV and film writer and producer whose early success included co-creating one of my favorites- the legendary tales from the crypt. And bringing that badass crepe keeper to life. But then comes the film he never wanted to make, the second tales feature, 'Bordello of Blood' and everything changed. From crash land in his career to launching his own podcast company 'Costard and Touchstone Productions', Alan now dedicates himself to the power of true stories told with raw honesty. With, wait a minute-that's wrong. So I was gonna say five podcasts but he said 9 now, so 9 

Alan Katz 1:22
It 

Rich Bennett 1:22
podcasts. 

Alan Katz 1:22
is-when I first sent that information across to you, we had five. We just-this very week have dropped four more brand new podcasts. Well, three new podcasts and the second season of the whole closet. 

Rich Bennett 1:35
Holy cow! So 9 total and you probably still got more that you're working on. 

Alan Katz 1:42
There are a dozen in various stages of coming into being. 

Rich Bennett 1:46
That is awesome! Alright so first of all, I definitely want to get into the podcast in part, but for those people that live under a rock, and never even heard of tales from the crypt. 

Alan Katz 2:01
Get out 

Rich Bennett 2:02
r- Yes! 

Alan Katz 2:02
from under the 

Rich Bennett 2:03
Yeah, get 

Alan Katz 2:03
You need to 

Rich Bennett 2:04
it! 

Alan Katz 2:04
expose yourself to a few things. 

Rich Bennett 2:06
'Playing everybody how you got into producing to the Hollywood scene and especially now with the podcast'. 

Alan Katz 2:17
I had a remarkable ride. I gotta say. I certainly-if you told me when I was 16, where my life would end up? I would have thought you, "What 

Rich Bennett 2:32
fuck?" 'Ah-ha!' 

Alan Katz 2:32
the 'Smoke and then? Can I have it? Can I have 

Rich Bennett 2:36
'Exactly!' 

Alan Katz 2:36
a bail?' I grew up in Baltimore on the east coast and I was a theater, a drama-rama kind of person. You know, of all the plays that we put on. I was always in those. I went to Vassar outside in New York and I was a drama major at Vassar and that was a experience. And when I graduated from Vassar, you know, I should point out, I've always been a writer. 

Rich Bennett 3:06
great 

Alan Katz 3:06
I've been writing professionally since I was 16. That was the first time anyone paid me money. 

Rich Bennett 3:11
Oh, 

Alan Katz 3:12
'Type.' 

Rich Bennett 3:12
wow! 

Alan Katz 3:13
So, I always took writing for granted. When I went to Vassar, I thought I was going to be an actor. I went to one audition after graduating from Vassar. I was completely unprepared. I Frank sucked, frankly, but I walked out of the audition thinking, saying to myself, 'What kind of an idiot makes during living this way?' I'm going to go be a writer instead, which is really just a different version of an idiot. But... 

Rich Bennett 3:38
[laughter] 

Alan Katz 3:40
And I began making, you know, the lind industrial films and training films when I was living in New York. And writing plays, and I still thought New York theater, New York was the center of the universe. I had a friend from Baltimore where I grew up. She had become an agent in the literary department at William Morris and Los Angeles, Carole Yomkis. And Carole said to me, knowing that I was writing again and working as a writer, she said, 'You should try writing a screenplay.' And that had been in my mind, and so I said, 'Okay. I've been tapped one out, and I sent two.' And she said, 'This is pretty good. You should come out and meet and greet people.' And so, in June of 1985, I flew out for a week to meet and greet people. Now, at that particular time, burgeoning New Yorker that I was, Los Angeles was the stupidest fucking place 

Rich Bennett 4:35
plate. 

Alan Katz 4:35
on the It was the land of the avocado head. That's fucking stupid. but, you know, June on the East Coast, you know, New York, especially it's hot, it's humid already, and every place smells like piss, but in LA it's the desert. There's no humidity. It's, it was beautiful and back in 1985 was a lot less crowded than it is now, and it was, it was lovely, and people were really, really nice to me. They blew copious amounts of smoke up my ass, it was fantastic. Uh, one, 

one evening, Carol, my agent took me to a movie premiere St. Elmo's Fire William Morris, represented the package, and I had this backstage view, man, that was in toxic. At the party afterwards, someone pointed out I had no meaning scheduled the next morning, they said you should take a drive-through to Penga Canyon. why? Now, which is what I did, the Penga Canyon is a lovely somewhat wild part of Los Angeles a lot less wild 

Rich Bennett 5:43
Right, 

Alan Katz 5:43
now than it was back in 1985, but the drive, from the, from the 101, the freeway through the Santa Monica Mountains is they plung into the Pacific Ocean at the Pacific Coast Highway. Oh my God, it's beautiful, you're within the city limits. By the time I got to the water I had completely seduced by Los Angeles, New York, New York, and very next month I moved out everything. I, me and the dog, we moved out to Los Angeles and among the first people I met that first week when I went out in June was this producer named Gil Adler and Gil quickly became my best friend, my creative partner. Now, I did not come out of horror, I have a horror, it was not my thing, I came out of comedy, what I was, what I wrote, what I was pitching, these were all comedies. And Gil, Gil came out of theater in New York in comedy, but he trained as an accountant and so he understood that if you have a dollar to make your movie or TV show or show, do not spend a dollar one because you haven't got it. Now if you can make your TV show or movie for 99 cents and 98 cents make it still look like that dollar, this is good. Better yet, if you can do it for 97 cents, make it look like a dollar one, well now you're on to something. creative process is problem-solving 

Rich Bennett 7:15
The 

Alan Katz 7:15
and Gil's solution to the problems wasn't throwing more money at it, it was throwing more creativity at it, which was exactly the way that I approached it. So that was the nature of our creative bond and Gil was a, again like a strong producer, he had worked for HBO on a series called The Hitchhiker. 

Rich Bennett 7:36
Oh yes. 

Alan Katz 7:37
He shot up in Vancouver and he was, you know, brought that in, did a great job with that. A little bit after that, HBO had a problem production, that big money talent, it was over budget, the schedule was a mess. It was called Vietnam War Stories, it was shooting in Savannah and they sent Gil in to take it over and try to write the ship and he did. He brought it in on time and brought the budget on to control and it won awards. So he did. Nothing got compromised. A couple years later HBO had another problem production and he did some of this to steady the ship and that was called Tales from the Crypt. Now at the time of the HBO started Tales from the Crypt. This is in the late 80s, they were still mostly the movies. They really just began to dip their toe into original programming. They had a show called Dream On another called First in 10. But these are basically just single camera shows with tits in the word fuck. 

Rich Bennett 8:47
If 

Alan Katz 8:48
you took tits and fuck out of them, they're basically just network-ready single camera shows in every other way. 

Suddenly you had these three, four mega producers, Hollywood movie producers, Joel Silver. Joel, of course, is the little weapon franchise, the Matrix movies, Predator, Alien movies. This is all Joel Silver action movie franchises. Walter Hill, 48 hours and lots of great action movies. Richard Donner, The Omen, Superman, Returns and of course Joel Silver. I'm a Bob Zemeckis. Forrest Gump, back to the future. Castaway. These four mega producers approached HBO with a passion project from their childhood. Uh, EC Comics, tells him the crypt, the

well, the vault of horror, all of the horror. And they approached HBO and they said, 'We want to bring this passion project from our

from our boyhoods', and we want to bring this feature film-sized vision and sticking inside your td box and HBO jumped up and down and said, 'Yeah, do whatever the fuck you want, guys'. 

Rich Bennett 10:04
[laughter] 

Alan Katz 10:05
So, normally in a tb series, you go through a development

Rich Bennett 10:10
right. 

Alan Katz 10:11
Because

alright, it's not automatic. Oh, I want to take a

the franchise features from a comic book written in the 1950s with a very particular, you know, stylistic look and

Rich Bennett 10:24
that was the 

Alan Katz 10:25
all 

Rich Bennett 10:25
50

Alan Katz 10:25
those elements. Yeah. 

Rich Bennett 10:27
Wow! 

Alan Katz 10:27
50s is when the EC Comics were all published. But you want to take all that stuff and transfer it into a whole different medium of td series. Well, it doesn't transfer itself. You

someone has to 

Rich Bennett 10:38
Right. 

Alan Katz 10:39
oversee the

how do we take all these elements and

from here and put them into that? Well, no one got hired to do that. The first three episodes of Tells from the Crypt are three classics. They're amazing. Dick Donner's, Dick this cat, he's real gone. Walter Hills, the man who is death and Bob's all through the house. Three fucking brilliant bits. One amazing television. Holy fucking cow. And that's why HBO ordered 'The in a Back 3', and then they ordered a second season of 18, and a third season of 13 episodes. As they headed into the second season, the 18 episodes, nobody was minding the store in terms of the concept. So the episodes were kind of up and down. They also never did what you

what you need to do in a TV series. Well, how do you pay for this all? 

Rich Bennett 11:32
Right. 

Alan Katz 11:33
HBO was going to pay, in essence, what's called License Fake'. Now, whatever HBO was going to pay for the first time, that it was going to get shown, the second time was going to get shown, that's not going to

that's not going to pay for the cost of production. You need a deficit partner to come in and cover the cost until you

until this thing becomes profitable, if it ever becomes profitable. And they never got anyone to do that. So HBO was cash flowing the whole thing. And the night before the season two rap party, HBO handed the executive producers

these four big movie producers

a financial statement that said, 'Guys, you're a million dollars cash in the whole. If you want your season three and there's lots of money for the executive producers, for use in season three, if you want season three, pay us what you owe us.' And so the executive producers promptly cancelled the rap party. Fired everybody, god after checkbooks, and paid HBO a million dollars to get their season three, knowing that first of all, they took the million dollars out of the budget for season three. So they got their million dollars back immediately. So that was how they were going to do this. They needed the season three just to pay their debt. And the whole point of season three was to see HBO into the, see Tales of the Crypt into the graveyard. And that's why HBO wanted to hire Gil Adler because he would be a responsible producer who wouldn't cost them any money, you know, he would get it done efficiently. And that would be the end of Tales of the Crypt. Now, I was Gil's creative partner at the time. And since the crypt partners had never put anyone in that, that's called a story, a producer position, a creative producer position, responsible for overseeing the franchise. A showrunner, in essence, is what they never, they never got. All right, 

so if they were going to have a season three, they needed producers going to be Gil and since Gil said, I got to have Alan, that's how I got the job doing Tales of the Crypt, so I did not have the bonafidee's to do anything, well, to, to be the showrunner on that. Now, Gil and I had worked together on a show called Freddie's Nightmares. 

Rich Bennett 13:56
Yeah. 

Alan Katz 13:56
The Gil had produced and we wrote a bunch of episodes for and Gil directed. The first time he ever directed was Ona Freddie's Nightmares. And we learned a lot from that experience. But Tales of 

the Crypt, my job when I got the Tales of the Crypt was one to oversee the transfer of all those franchise elements. from the comic books into the script to be really that showrunner that had not been there before. And so I was the last typist that every script saw. I was before it went to our department head, went to casting, before we made anything, it had to go through me. That was my first job. To make sure that everything was redolent of our source. That 

Rich Bennett 14:45
Right. 

Alan Katz 14:45
it all felt like tales from script. My other job was to write all the cryptkeepers. 

Rich Bennett 14:52
Which was the funny parts. 

Alan Katz 14:55
Now here's the weird thing. Just like there was no development process for the TV series tells from the script and no deficit partner, no development process for the cryptkeeper either. The cryptkeeper in the easy comics is a whole white guy with a stringy hair. The executive producers wanted their own cryptkeeper and one day purely by happendstance at a storage facility. Joel Silver, executive producer, had his locker here and across the hallway was a storage locker owned by a special effects maestro named Kevin Yeager. And among Kevin's other creations is Chuckie. So, when Joel saw what was inside Kevin's Yeager 

Rich Bennett 15:45
(laughing) 

Alan Katz 15:46
Oh very good. Inside Kevin's locker he said, "You're going to make me a cryptkeeper." And that's what Kevin did. He made the cryptkeeper. Now the cryptkeeper was actually six puppeteers working in concert. There was one the left arm, one the right arm, one was the body forward, backward and land rule, and there were three other puppeteers working the animatronics of his face. So that was a remarkable creation and a remarkable bit of puppetry as well. But no one ever asked the question, you know as who is he? Oh I should point out I jumped ahead to Kevin created this incredible puppet and then Kevin found Jon Kaseer to be the voice. So he had a great puppet, a great voice. But no one asked the question, who is he? And so whoever wrote the scripts throw dialogue at the cryptkeeper and that's basically what he would say. Now my job was to write all his segments and I don't know how you write for a character who doesn't exist, who isn't there. And so just to do my damn job I needed to stick a character inside him because I spent you wanting to be funny. You can't be generic. It has to come from some place inside the character. Now I grew up loving old movies in addition to being a drama I was an old movie lover and I love the Marks Brothers. 

Rich Bennett 17:22
Oh my god, don't 

Alan Katz 17:24
tell 

Rich Bennett 17:24
Groucho. 

Alan Katz 17:24
me. The cryptkeeper became my little groucho. 

Rich Bennett 17:28
Really? 

Alan Katz 17:28
look at all the puns 

Rich Bennett 17:30
Well 

Alan Katz 17:31
and so I yeah he became my little groucho and having to stick a personality inside the cryptkeeper and being a writer in there for somewhat lazy, I reached for the closest personality at hand which was mine. And though the cryptkeeper looks like heaven's puppet, he sounds like John's voice, every thought in his head, every word that tumbled from his animatronic mouth was me. 

Rich Bennett 17:57
Wow. 

Alan Katz 17:59
And a strange thing happened over the course of the third season, which was supposed to be the end of Tales from the Crypt. And because Gill and I reinvested in the franchise elements, that the passion that drove the project to begin 

Rich Bennett 18:13
Made 

Alan Katz 18:13
with. 

Rich Bennett 18:13
it good. 

Alan Katz 18:15
Well it just reinvested it with some passion. We also went after big movie stars because that was also part of the original mandate. So we went after that. But more than anything, it turns out at the end of the day, in retrospect. It was it was investing the cryptkeeper with a 

Rich Bennett 18:36
personality 

Alan Katz 18:36
that actually altered the outcome. And by the end of the about the middle of the season, HBO realized because the response to season three was so strong that no, they shouldn't end it now. We should continue it. And we ended up doing five, I ended up doing five seasons in 70 some odd episodes. And doing Tales from the Crypt everyone who worked on that show would tell you looking back on, on, on their careers was one of the highlights. 

Rich Bennett 19:12
Yeah. 

Alan Katz 19:12
I gosh. The five seasons that I worked on that I oversaw the 70 some odd episodes. I got a total of three notes from HBO. Three. Well, that's... 

Rich Bennett 19:26
Wow! 

Alan Katz 19:27
wow, what freedom, but that was the freedom we all had to do the jobs we got hired 

Rich Bennett 19:33
Right! 

Alan Katz 19:33
to do. It was a magnificence, yeah, it was a great, it was a great creative experience. Uh, as we got going on the fourth season, Universal Pictures saw that our franchise suddenly was a franchise, it was not before, and our franchise had value beyond the little TV screen. And so Universal Pictures said, "Hey, we'd like you to do three tell some of the crypt-branded future films for us. They could all be completely different, and your rant, you're an anthology, and there's all be completely different," and we said, "Okay, let's do it." Gill was supposed to direct the first one, but we're not horror guys. 

Rich Bennett 20:16
Right. 

Alan Katz 20:17
We were, we were very much worried about the town. Hollywood Pegging us as one trick ponies, we were horror guys and nothing but, and since we were not horror guys to begin with, that was the last thing on 

Rich Bennett 20:29
Exactly. 

Alan Katz 20:29
earth we wanted. 

For a little while, we, the crypt partners toyed with making a thing called some dust-tilled dawn, with a guy called Quentin- 

Rich Bennett 20:40
Uh-huh. 

Alan Katz 20:40
But we couldn't, we couldn't make a deal with Quentin, and so that went, if differently, we found, I think a script that was better, called Demon Knight and my side-vorius, in Eason Rife. And we ended up making that instead, but that was a monster movie. Really, and Gill didn't want to make a monster movie, so he said, "I'm not going to direct this one. We'll do the second one. That will be ours." And so instead, we, we oversaw the script and production of Demon Knight, which we got Ernest Dickerson to direct and Ernest did a fantastic job. An amazing cast. Billy Zayne. 

Rich Bennett 21:20
Oh, yeah. 

Alan Katz 21:21
Is the villain. He is, he's amazingly good, uh, Jada, Pinkett, no, Jada Pinkett, Smith, and Bill Saddler are the heroes. They're, they're really terrific. The whole cast is good. Uh, terrific movie, yeah, I'm really super proud to have, have my name on it. We began working on developing the script that we wanted to do as the second, court movie. Uh, it was a thing called Dead Easy. We had evolved it from a script we had found called Fat Tuesday, and this became our passion project. Dead Easy was what was going to, supposed to be the second, tells them the script feature, it was a taught psychological thriller about a recovered memory. It took place in the swamps outside New Orleans. It had a great, Uh, villain. A franchise villain, this Harley Quinn character, 

Rich Bennett 22:15
uh, uh, tradition. 

Alan Katz 22:16
uh, universal pictures must have been down with it because we were spending their money, and we were, God, we were casting. We had cast a young, unknown named Salma Hayek to play the female lead. 

Rich Bennett 22:26
Really? 

Alan Katz 22:27
We spent six months in New Orleans prepping the movie. Three weeks before the start of principal photography in New Orleans, Universal called us, they said, stop. Don't spend another penny. You're not going to make that movie. Come back to Los Angeles. 

Rich Bennett 22:40
Wow. 

Alan Katz 22:41
And so, shaking, we got on, we went back to Los Angeles and when we got there, they stuck a script under our nose. They said, hey, you're going to make this instead. It was called "Bordello of Blood." They said, your release date hasn't changed. You still start in three weeks. 

Rich Bennett 22:56
What? 

Alan Katz 22:56
Get going. You're writing this thing, guys. Get to work. Now, where the fuck did "Bordello of Blood" come from? Okay. And about this time. A new studio called DreamWorks had come into being. Now, DreamWorks was Steven Spielberg leaving his deal in Universal, not the lot, but leaving his deal in Universal to set up shop as a brand new studio. And he began to make deals with other talent as a studio would have to. Universal was desperately afraid of losing another big piece of talent to this new studio, one of my executive producers, Bob Zemeckis. Spielberg was his mentor. Universal approached Bob. He liked me in Universal, but he didn't make his day. And I don't know any other part of the deal he stayed. So I'm sure the deal was good. I know one deal point. The Universal Pictures agreed to buy the first student script that Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gail ever wrote when they were still film school students at USC. A thing called "Bordello of Blood" for half a million dollars. 

Rich Bennett 23:58
Wow. 

Alan Katz 23:59
That's it. It was a deal point. It was simply a way to put half a million bucks in Bob's pocket. And there was no intention to make the movie, but now Universal's that they're thinking to themselves. Geez. We're just gonna eat half a million dollars. Wait a minute. Bob's about to executive-produce this other car movie. This did easy thing. Well fuck bad. That cost me $50, 000. That's good. That's good. That's good. We'll take it out of there a bunch of guys. You're making boarded out of a blood instead. That's got Bob's and Megas and Bob's and Bob's and Bob's and Bob's and Bob's name, or that's bigger than Ellen Gets and Gil Adler's name, right? Guys, you got three weeks. Get going. Now 

this was crushing because we all went from prepping to make a passion project. Something that we thought would take us- would demonstrate to the town how multi-faceted we could be. To make it a student movie because of a deal point. What the fuck? How fucking cynical? Do you 

Rich Bennett 25:01
Wow. 

Alan Katz 25:01
want to- can you possibly be? 

Well once you 

once you head down that pathway this deeply cynical pathway do not be surprised when every day is stupider than the day before, which is exactly what happened. And in 

very short order really, every single decision that God made thereafter seemed to be for the wrong reasons or the worst possible reason. In the end we made boarded out of blood up in Vancouver Canada, not because Vancouver Canada we suddenly said, "Hey, the thing we need to make this movie successful is up in Vancouver." No. We went to Vancouver because Joel, so, for my executive producer, was always at war with the IA, the union that represented our crew. And sometimes Joel was winning the war, and sometimes the I was winning the war. Well, the IA was winning the war. Well, a little bit before this they had struck, it shut down a TV movie we were doing for Fox. And so Joel's attitude at that point was still fuck me? No fuck you. And so rather than make the movie in Los Angeles with our crew who knew how to do what we do, we went to Vancouver simply because it was the nearest production hub. Outside Los Angeles. 

Rich Bennett 26:24
Wow. 

Alan Katz 26:25
Now, that proved rather costly because we're a horror movie. Our stock and trade when you're making a horror movie is night. We were doing this in July. When you go that far north in July, one of the things you do not have very much of is 

Rich Bennett 26:44
The 

Alan Katz 26:44
night. sky doesn't get shootable dark until about midnight. Four AM. Yeah, yeah, shootable, shootable dark. And then it doesn't, it gets into the first hints of sunlight, but four AM. You pretty much you're done. So your 13 hour filming day is four hours. 

Rich Bennett 27:03
Wow. 

Alan Katz 27:03
Why would you make such a choice? Why would you make? Well, we didn't make the choice organically. We made the choice. We're gonna go here instead. Well, what what foolishness, and of course that bit us in the ass repeatedly. All right, our first problem though was rewriting the script because the main character is a small town detective. Now ask yourself. How much business can a detective really do in a small town? No, no, no, no, yeah, a small town detective. That's the kind of thing that I don't know film 

Rich Bennett 27:42
students. 

Alan Katz 27:42
school Coch because they're fucking film school students who haven't lived in the world for two seconds to know. Oh, that's pretty incongruous actually. So we have a character. Well, I got to rewrite this character in three weeks to make the character make sense. How are you gonna say that at no In no way can this character explain to himself? Well, all right. How do I? And then I become a small town detective. What led me here? Where where did I come from exactly? No such person exists. And that's gonna make it hard when the actor whoever we eventually hire comes to you and says so who is this guy exactly? Well, he's no funny actually because no such person could exist. All right, but this was part of the problem that we had to solve but was absolutely not solvable. All right, casting became 

if we could cast well, we might be able to to get through this, but Joel took over casting the three leads and that became quite problematic now 

Rich Bennett 28:49
We 

Alan Katz 28:50
wanted, like I said, the the hero is incongruous, but we had we wanted Danny Baldwin and we could have hired Danny Baldwin, Danny Baldwin was quite willing to do it But Joel insisted no, he wanted Dennis Miller, 

Rich Bennett 29:06
huh? 

Alan Katz 29:07
And to this day, I cannot tell you why Dennis Miller, our audience was there for special effects make up. At that time, Dennis Miller did a, uh, a, uh, a political comedy show for HBO, which our audience had nothing to do with. Uh, uh, now, Dennis didn't want to do the movie and when Joel said, hey, I went to do this movie, Dennis said, alright, pay me a million dollars, figuring no one in their right mind would pay Dennis Miller a million dollars to be in a feature film. Hey, we saw his quotes before, we made this ludicrous offer. He had done three or four feature films for scale. 

Rich Bennett 29:46
[laughs] 

Alan Katz 29:47
...scale, which is all he deserved, period, because he had no feature films, no, he's not that guy. But, he said, Dennis said, I'll do a few million dollars and Joel said, okay, we didn't have a million dollars in the budget for this. We were a $12 million movie, I had half a million bucks in the budget for that role. We went to Universal and we said, can we get some help or get some breakage and they said, we don't know why you're firing him. I mean, do we think it's stupid? No, you can't have any breakage. 

Rich Bennett 30:20
Wow! 

Alan Katz 30:20
Looking at your budget, which is what we did. So, we were $12 million movie. All the money was in special effects make up. We took the money out of special effects make up, out of the thing that our audience wanted to see, to pay for an actor they had, they didn't give a fuck about. That was what our executive producers did, what Joel had us do. All right. For the female lead, Gill and I wanted an actress named Bridget Wilson, Joel, wanted Erica, Elenyac. I didn't, I never understood why he wanted Dennis. I understand why he wanted Erica. He thought he could score on her. 

Rich Bennett 31:01
[laughs] 

Alan Katz 31:02
He was involved in a long-term relationship. That was never going to happen. And it turned out that just after Erica agreed to be the lead in a movie called Bordello of Blood, she decided she didn't want to be that kind of actress in that kind of movie. Even though, I will point out, we had a quarter million dollars in the movie for that role and Joel paid her half a million dollars. So, that was another quarter million dollars that had to come out of special effects make up. Our audience would be interested in that actor, but the world was not clamoring for that actor at that time. He paid her that extra money because he wanted to impress her and as part of the "Hey, I paid her more than anyone who's gonna be in the movie". 

Rich Bennett 31:48
[laughs] 

Alan Katz 31:52
Erica, like I said, never wanted to be in the movie and Gil is a terrific producer and whether he is producing, whether he's directing, what he likes to do production-wise is to start shooting on a Thursday. So, you get Thursday Friday. If you have any big production issues or script needs to be fixed in some way or an actor needs to be replaced, you have the weekend to do it, you can start the first week fresh with most of your production problems. Hopefully, if not solved, at least you've seen them coming. And so, you can begin to address them. It's just, it's very clever producing. And so, we had started shooting on a Thursday and we shot Thursday Friday, a couple of bar scenes with our actors from Vancouver. I'm expecting Erica Aliniac to be on an airplane Saturday, flying Saturday to settle in on Sunday to be on Wardrobe On Monday to work on Tuesday. On Saturday, I get a call from her manager, telling me she ain't getting on an airplane because we need to rewrite the script first. 

Rich Bennett 33:00
What? 

Alan Katz 33:01
'Cause she doesn't want to be that kind of actress in this kind of movie. Well, the character is written was a former porn star named Chestio Toul and she doesn't want to play a porn star. Well, there are bits and pieces of plot that hinge on the fact that this character played that. We're shooting the movie already. You want me to rewrite it now? What the-? Ultimately, her manager and I negotiated down to, okay, she's, she was a former plus-sized porn star named Chabio Toul, who has now is now unrecognizable in her current incarnation. 

So we agreed on this and finally social-generalman airplane, and she was there, but from the moment she arrived, she made it quite clear she had no desire to be there. The villain of the piece, we wanted Robin Givens and we could have gotten Robin and I think Robin would have given us a fantastic performance. But at the time that we were about to start making Bordeleu of Blood and Vancouver our executive producer Joel and our executive producer Dictana were making another movie in Seattle called Assassin's which Dick was directing Joel's executive producing it started Antonio Banderis and Sylvester Stallone and at the time Sylvester Stallone was engaged to a supermodel named Angie Everhart. 

Rich Bennett 34:33
Oh I forgot 

Alan Katz 34:34
that. And 

Rich Bennett 34:34
about 

Alan Katz 34:35
one day on the set of assassins apparently Stallone approached Joel, he said "Hey Joel you're going to be making a movie in Vancouver? Why don't you put my girlfriend in the engine and movie that way we could visit her to the course of Bordele?" And Joel instead of being a responsible executive producer and saying "That's a great idea Slime and let me check with the guys to make sure it works for them!" He said "That's a great idea Slime!" Period. And he

our executive producer committed us to hire the girlfriend of an actor on one set to be the villain, the most important part. In another movie just to take a visit each other across the border. 

Rich Bennett 35:16
Wow. 

Alan Katz 35:17
It wasn't because Joel suddenly said "Angie, you'd be brilliant in this movie because something is

no that was not what happened. That was not the reason for anything." Now it would turn out at the end of the day that Slime actually had an ulterior motive. Um he wanted to break up with Angie. 

Rich Bennett 35:37
Oh 

Alan Katz 35:38
wow. And 

Rich Bennett 35:38
oh 

Alan Katz 35:39
at the end of the day two thirds of the way the movie

he did he broke up with Angie and we were the consolation prize. And hey I got you a movie didn't I? Which is what he said to her

hey what he said to her when he broke up. 

Rich Bennett 35:51
wow 

Alan Katz 35:54
Um now before that happened early on of course the point in the exercise was so we could visit the board. So early on our production office would arrange with their production office to transport Angie from Vancouver across the border to Seattle, get the visit and then get her back in time to work at the end of the weekend. So our production offices had a relationship. There was a lot of communication between the two of them and our production office became aware very quickly that Slime was fucking around behind Angie's back. 

Rich Bennett 36:33
Oh shit. 

Alan Katz 36:34
And because now our production office knew, we all knew. The only person who really didn't know was Angie and that was a very uncomfortable secret to have to keep. Now there's a story that's a very famous story that Stallone has never denied. The only question has ever been from on what set did this take place? And I would tell you this took place on the set of assassins because I had never heard the story before. And I heard it from my production office in Vancouver who heard it from the the assassins production office in Seattle. And the story goes something like this. Stallone finishes a scene. He goes back to his trailer unaware of the fact that his wireless Lavalier mic is still broadcasting to the sound card. 

Rich Bennett 37:23
Oh shit. 

Alan Katz 37:25
There's a young woman waiting for Stallone in his trailer and she proceeds to suck his dick. Now apparently Slime is very particular about how he likes his hummers. And now people are beginning to gather around the sound card and they're hearing Stallone. Yeah, that's where a cup of the bowl is stroking the shaft. Yeah, a stroke 

Rich Bennett 37:42
Wow. 

Alan Katz 37:42
the shaft. The next day he arrives on set and the whole crew are wearing t-shirts. That's a stroke the shaft. 

Rich Bennett 37:49
the bowl. 

Alan Katz 37:49
A cup of 

Rich Bennett 37:58
Oh my god. Oh shit. 

Alan Katz 38:02
That is a true story he has never denied. I bet you he still has his t-shirt. 

Rich Bennett 38:06
I was going to say I wonder if he's still got the shirts. Somebody going to see him wearing that on the set of Tulsa King or something. 

Alan Katz 38:15
Yeah, so that didn't work out so good. Here's the problem. Angie's a lovely human being and this is not a knock on Angie in any way shape or form. This was you know casting is a serious thing. If you're going to do it that frivolously I've hired lots and lots of actors over the course of my career. I can tell you when I hired them to be in a movie or TV series the last thing on earth I ever wanted them to do was act. 

If you act for the camera the camera will see it and will have to cut it all out. Great film acting isn't people acting it's them being. These, what they're able to do, is to tap into something honest inside them. Absolute, truth of who they are, that's what you're seeing. They're not acting. They're being. That's the essential. The camera, like the microphone, is a bullshit detector. And if you bullshit, we see it all the time. We see bullshit acting. And, and that's our response. Inside, our heads were going, ehm, I'm going along with it, but that's 

Rich Bennett 39:27
Right. 

Alan Katz 39:27
bullshit. Well, great acting, sells us, 

Rich Bennett 39:31
because- You feel it. 

Alan Katz 39:32
They're being. Alright. Billy Zane is a wonderful villain in Demonite. He's a wonderful villain in Titanic, because there's a darkness inside Billy that he can tap into. 

Angie is a wonderful person. Through and through, there's not a villainous, anything, inside her. Even if she had been a trained actress, which she was not, she would have had to act villainous, and that would not have worked. She was not a trained actress, and so all she could do was try to act villainous. It's not her fault. It's the only- we threw her into the deep end, a- a person unable to swim into the deep end of the pool and said, 'Save yourself'. Wow. It's a terrible, unfair thing. It's a terrible unfair- ask on our part. But again, we didn't hire her, because we thought there was something inside her that would deliver for our movie. We hired her because she was- the visitor was close to the border. 

Rich Bennett 40:38
Wow. 

Alan Katz 40:38
So it was a terrible, cynical thing to do, and not- not good or healthy for anybody. Alright, so like I said, the "Stolong" broke over the 2/3rd of the way through the movie. By the time we got to the end, we didn't have a finished movie. Gosh, our Canadian crew hated us. 

Rich Bennett 41:02
Cheers! 

Alan Katz 41:03
In fact, we didn't even throw the- if I had thrown the rap party, nobody... No, none of our Canadian crew would have come. So our Canadian production manager, Karleen Nysted, she threw the rap party, and I was the only American who showed 

Rich Bennett 41:18
Wow. 

Alan Katz 41:18
up. And that was not comfortable. That was uncomfortable. That was how terrible a shoot it was. It was- well... 

Rich Bennett 41:27
It was not a but a 

Alan Katz 41:28
We- 

Rich Bennett 41:28
night. Sounds like, 

Alan Katz 41:30
Yeah, we did not- we could have made our release date, but we didn't. And instead Universal held us till the- our release date was Halloween. We said 

Rich Bennett 41:39
right. 

Alan Katz 41:39
it was a Halloween movie. Said they held us till the following- 

Rich Bennett 41:42
What? Why? 

Alan Katz 41:43
Didn't they- then they held us the couple more months till the next Halloween. They dumped us in August. The Doldrums, they dumped us. 

Rich Bennett 41:49
Wow. 

Alan Katz 41:50
By the time the movie was released, in between it- it took- and it uptaken so long to cut the movie and get it ready, we did the final season of "Tels from the Crypt in London," which was not- which was nice to be in London, but that was not as- that was not- that was- that was a terrible year of "Tels from the Crypt," what a sad way to go out. By the time the movie was released, Gill and I were no longer partner. We- I had- the show that was- that succeeded "Tels from the Crypt," we were supposed to do a science fiction series based on the EC Comics and they- zone fired me, he said, "I don't know, I don't want you to be on the show, you're not going to do it." 

Rich Bennett 42:33
Wow. 

Alan Katz 42:33
And I- I thought Gill, my partner of a decade, would walk with me and he didn't. He went to do the show and- and I found myself in a terrible place because- All right- with Gill, you know, the first couple of scripts we worked on, we wrote 

Rich Bennett 42:53
Right. 

Alan Katz 42:53
together. But Gill and I had a very unusual situation where we produced virtually everything we wrote. And so, though Gill didn't- it wasn't part of the actual writing process, in- fill making, the writing continues all the way through to post-production. The script is really just the first part of it, and so in my mind, the writing process in significant ways continued, and so it didn't bother me to put two names on the script. 

Rich Bennett 43:21
Right. 

Alan Katz 43:22
Because it would reflect two people's creative input. But now that Gill and I were no longer creative partners and I needed to go out and restart my career, all my scripts had two names on them. And I could explain as much as I liked. Well, I thought this night- what are you talking about, dude? There are two names on the script. Get the fuck out of here. And so, I found myself absolutely flat-footed. And I was able to score a couple of seasons on the outer limits at the show time, and those were two really good creative years, but I started into a two decade long 

Rich Bennett 44:06
Feel 

Alan Katz 44:06
depression. 

Rich Bennett 44:07
like something was missing. 

Alan Katz 44:09
Oh, well, it's a deepening depression and a writer's block I didn't even know I was in. Now, the good news was I spent those two decades raising my two kids, because I, you know, when you, when you get kicked off show, Bismountain, 

Rich Bennett 44:24
yeah, 

Alan Katz 44:25
it can get really hard to get back in and, and that was really painful. I was suddenly disconnected from my world and there was, and because it was a, such a, a nasty split. Everyone who was still working, they were with Gil, you know, so Gil got all the friends, he got all, all my whole creative community, I literally got, but that was, that was, that was me sent myself up for a failure. It turned out now, 

Rich Bennett 44:56
but you weren't expecting that either. 

Alan Katz 45:00
Things, things got, got very dark. I was in a self-loathing rage three days before Christmas, 2016 I came within literal inches of killing. 

Rich Bennett 45:09
Oh, shit. 

Alan Katz 45:11
And I knew I'd been heading into a terrible, terrible place. I knew I needed a mood stabilizer, but my dad was a surgeon. I grew up in the medical culture. I knew that my GP had no background whatsoever in this kind of medication. The last pharmaceutical rep who walks through his office, "Hey, you don't need to press patients. We make this product. Check them out on this. Maybe it'll help them." Well, mood stabilizers are very, it's a lab experiment, under the best of circumstances, and I did not want to be a lab experiment where none of the boxes were checked off. I had done my own research and now I knew I was quite capable of doing something fatally stupid. And so I drove right to my GP. I told them here's what I just tried to do. And here's the medication that I would like you to prescribe for me. And he whipped out a smartphone. He said, "Okay, that makes sense. He wrote the script. I picked it up. I went home, I told my family what I was going to do." And they said, "Okay." Because they knew I needed to do something. And I took that first minimal dose and that's when I got so lucky. Within 36 hours, I leveled. 

Rich Bennett 46:19
Wow. 

Alan Katz 46:19
I felt the mood stabilizer, the limotrogen, put the darkness in a cage, not a box. You still see it. You still see me. But it could swipe at me but it couldn't get me anyway. And because my self-loathing rage could not get at me, I could confront the secret I'd been keeping from myself for 45 years. That was at the heart of the self-loathing rage. I turned out that when I was 14, I was sexually molested twice by the religious director at Physic Immune and the synagogue where my family belonged outside of Baltimore. Now, the first time was bad, of course, but it was the second time that really fucked me up. Because the second time happened only because I didn't say anything after the first time. And it was during the second time that my 14-year-old brain said to myself, "This is happening because this is your fault. This is all your fault." Now, that was not true. It was not my 14-year-old self's fault that an adult was using me like a sex toy. But, that became the template. And as you head into adulthood, blaming yourself for everything and trying to fix it accordingly, that doesn't solve any of the problems and it really makes things worse at the end of the day. And as problems get worse and worse in your life, well, it is so true. What day say about the truth? Setting you free. That I was finally able to confront this and stop blaming the 14-year-old me for something I had no business blaming me for, first of all, hey, if you can't tell your own story to yourself, can you really tell anyone else's story? Of course not. And in this moment, when I could suddenly tell my story with balls to the wall honesty to myself, well, I could tell anyone else's story. And I went from being, I'll pat myself on the back a really good writer to being a storyteller. And that 

Rich Bennett 48:36
big difference, 

Alan Katz 48:37
the difference, all the difference in the world. And that became my whole reason to be. Now, I went from wanting to kill myself. I walk around in a perpetual state of bliss. Now, the limotro-gene keeps the darkness like is it an engage, but I'm aware of the fact that we live in a crazy 

Rich Bennett 48:56
You 

Alan Katz 48:56
world. In an 

Rich Bennett 48:57
think? 

Alan Katz 48:57
asshole world. You know, I've got a great therapist and that's perspective. I smoke copious amounts, so THC flower. That gives me focus 

Rich Bennett 49:09
Yeah. 

Alan Katz 49:10
because I've got a lot to do. 

But otherwise I know why I'm here. I'm- During the pandemic. A "Tells From The Crypt fan" group. Three "crypt" fans from various parts of the country, they created a podcast called 'Dadds From The Crypt'. 

Rich Bennett 49:32
'Really?' 

Alan Katz 49:33
They reviewed, yeah, they reviewed all the episode of "Tells From The Crypt" and they gave parenting advice. One of the dads reached out to me. Jason and he said, 'Hey, we're gonna be reviewing one of the episodes you wrote, you want to sit in?' I said, 'Yeah, that sounds like fun!' And I did, and it was fun. Great fun. 

Rich Bennett 49:50
That was your first podcast that you ever, were on or whatever? 

Alan Katz 49:55
I had done a podcast during the pandemic with a friend. I've always been grateful to Hebrew School for making me the 8thiest I am today. 

Rich Bennett 50:03
Okay. 

Alan Katz 50:05
I had a social friend over the course of raising my kids who I became friendly with and I didn't know what his job And when I found that, he was the, uh, the, the pastor at the Silver Lake Community Church, he was a uh, uh, a, a Piscopalian, uh, priest, a preacher. And as soon as I knew that, he became so sexy to me, we became even friendly, we had lunch all the times. And just, those conversations became so much 

Rich Bennett 50:37
fun. Okay. 

Alan Katz 50:38
Um, we started doing a podcast called the, the, the faitheism project podcast. It was, you know, uh, an, an atheist and a, an a Presbyterian pastor walk 

Rich Bennett 50:48
a... 

Alan Katz 50:48
into 

Rich Bennett 50:49
[laughs] 

Alan Katz 50:49
As together in "Here's What Happens" And I learned a lot. I learned how to be a podcaster while doing it, but you know, we never had much of an audience. We didn't have... 

Rich Bennett 50:58
But you had fun! 

Alan Katz 51:01
And I learned to the, oh, it was such a, a wonderful experience, I, I would do it again in a heartbeat. I thought, anyway. So, it wasn't my first podcast, but a couple weeks later, Jason reached out to me, he said, "Hey, we're gonna be reviewing "Bordello of Blood." You want to sit in again?" And I said, "Jason..." The story of the making of that fucking movie, in a half hour conversation with you. That's a, that's a podcast unto itself. And that was the impetus for the first season of the "How Not to Make A Movie" podcast, the Making of Bordello of Blood. Which, that first season, when, which I told the whole story from my origins, to the Making of Bordello of Blood 2, even a funny little story at the end. You know, I, when I was raising my kids, I did a lot of coaching, a lot of youth coaching, soccer, basketball, ultimate frisbee. 

Rich Bennett 52:01
Oh, wow! 

Alan Katz 52:02
And ultimate frisbee, it was great fun. You know, that's, it's, it's self-efficient. You know, there are rules, but among the people that I coach, Billy Irish, her brother Finneas, coach, no? It's, it's silver like, you know, that's, this is the kids in the silver like neighborhood. Um, one day there was a dispute over the rules, and we couldn't, didn't know what the answer was. So I went home, I looked up the rules, and I bumped into something that blew my fucking mind. Who created ultimate frisbee? 

Rich Bennett 52:34
What? 

Alan Katz 52:35
Joel Silver. 

Rich Bennett 52:36
Come on! 

Alan Katz 52:39
blew my fucking mind! Ah, 

Rich Bennett 52:43
wow! Oh shit! 

Alan Katz 52:46
So I told the whole story. Every last bit of it, it's, and that's the first season of How Not to Make a Movie Podcast Available Wherever You, you listen to him. Favorite podcast? Entertainment Weekly called that first season, the best film podcast of 2020-22. 

Rich Bennett 53:01
Nice! 

Alan Katz 53:02
You're proud to say. I really enjoyed the process of 

Rich Bennett 53:06
Yeah. 

Alan Katz 53:07
storytelling in this medium, because that's, yeah, there was a lot of stuff from, well, in order to make the podcast. And I wanted to tell the story as honestly as I 

Rich Bennett 53:16
Right. 

Alan Katz 53:16
possibly could. I knew, and I didn't want to talk to the actors, it just was about the people who made the movie, who, who had experienced tell some encrypt and understood why this fiasco was the antithetical, it was the literal antithesis. So to the creative joy, this was the despair of a pure creative synthesis. 

I was going to have to talk to Gil, because he needed to tell, you know, I needed his part 

Rich Bennett 53:47
Right. 

Alan Katz 53:47
of the story. And so we had not talked in 25 years. 

Rich Bennett 53:50
Wow! 

Alan Katz 53:52
And I reached out to Gil, I said, "Here's what I want to do. I want to tell the story of making of that fucking movie." And I want to talk about our breakup and all the stuff that happened, but I don't want to talk about it beforehand, I want to do everything live on my... 

Rich Bennett 54:05
"Just the way it should be." 

Alan Katz 54:07
Yeah, he was rather fearful of that, because who knows where it's going to go. But he said, "Okay." And it was the willingness to be the reason that Clark Collins, the writer at Entertainment Weekly, the reason he told us, the reason that he called us, the best film podcast of 2022, was because of his incredible honesty. 

Rich Bennett 54:26
Wow. 

Alan Katz 54:28
And that was important to me, and I- I found, yeah, that telling a story

this device here

this is the microphone, it's a bullshit detector. Oh, try lines

the audience will hear every last deception. Uh, uh, why not make a couple more seasons of The Hell Not to Make a Movie Podcast? Four seasons so far in total, it's now on hiatus because of god. 

Rich Bennett 54:53
Other things 

Alan Katz 54:54
the world. 

Rich Bennett 54:54
in 

Alan Katz 54:54
Other podcasts right now. But, uh, while I was making these subsequent seasons, a friend approached me from school, a guy I grew up with, with a story he wanted to turn into a screenplay, it was a movie, a TV series. Now, to take an idea from, let's say, my head turned it into a TV series. Well, this script takes years to write that script. The average is 10 years. 

Rich Bennett 55:22
Jeez! 

Alan Katz 55:23
From starting to the thing actually seeing the light of day in production. 10 years is the 

Rich Bennett 55:29
DALM! 

Alan Katz 55:29
average. Let's say you're quick. You can do this in four years. Alright, now you've got a script. Well, if you're going to go sell as a TV series, you wrote season one, episode one, one happens, episodes two and three and four in the rest of season one. One happens, season two and season three, season four. What's the whole story or who are all these characters? What's the tone? What's- you have to write in the right, if you want to sell this, because people are going to have to put up a lot of money, you're going to have to write what's called a Bible. 

Rich Bennett 55:58
Right. 

Alan Katz 55:59
write it. And that's another year or so to get right. And the Bible is everything you need to know about the whole series, and as you write that, that's going to impact the script you wrote, and back and forth. Alright, 

Rich Bennett 56:12
Why? I 

Alan Katz 56:13
let's 

Rich Bennett 56:13
didn't 

Alan Katz 56:13
say you can do this in two years. Oh, it's a complicated process. Now you got your script, you got your Bible. And now you're ready for the marketplace. Well, the people you have to have to impress you have spent all this time and energy writing all these words for a handful of executives. And you need them to say, yes, let's put this in the development, but to induce them just to fucking read, you have to create a pitch deck, which is a PowerPoint presentation, a couple of words, mostly images, just to convey what it is. So these apes will go, OK, I'll gain to read this one, I'll gain to read that one. Well, that doesn't create itself either in a heartbeat. And so it takes forever, and then, OK, let's say you get the ape to go, OK, I'll put this one into development. Well, that's just the top of the meat grinder. Now it's got to go through a whole fucking development process, and there are still thousands of ways and assholes standing in your way, and at any one point, anyone else assholes can kill you did just because they're an asshole. And who knows what kind of sausage will come out the other end of the swinter of this meat grinder? Who the fuck knows! And worst of all, the worst part of, as the writer, when I go at the very beginning of this, having spent all these years to impress a fucking executive, and he goes, OK, let's put it into development, the first thing I'm going to have to do, if I want to get paid, is sign a thing called a certificate of authorship. It has to do with the nature of filming TV distribution. It goes throughout the world, and you can have some writer asshole going, "You know what? I don't want to sell this to Russia because I hate them." You can have 

Rich Bennett 58:00
Oh, 

Alan Katz 58:00
that, 

Rich Bennett 58:01
wow. 

Alan Katz 58:01
so you have to in essence buy them out at the start, and that's the certificate of authorship. In order to get paid as the writer, the initiator or the project, you have to give a ball your rights in perpetuities or out the known universe. You no longer, you might've spent years working on this, you don't own it any more. 

Rich Bennett 58:19
Wow. 

Alan Katz 58:20
All right, if I take that same idea, and I turn it into a podcast, I control every last bit of the writing, the production, the distribution. I can send this out to the whole world, 

and there's any distribution. The monetization and the collection of that monetization all by my loans, if any, only person taken a cut is the credit card company, they'll get their percentage. Otherwise, it all goes to me, and I still own it 100%, and bonus. Hey, I know all the stuff that I ended up working on. Yeah, they make a great movie or TV series. In the old days, I had to go cap and hand to those apes in the executive sweets, trying to convey from my head that there is "What's the IP?" What's the friendship? "What's the IP?" Well, if I do as a podcast, everyone knows what the IP is, it's there in the podcast. The audience can know what it is, the advertisers know what it is. Everybody does. And so instead of having to go sell it to them, they're gonna come 

Rich Bennett 59:36
Bye! 

Alan Katz 59:37
buy it from 

Rich Bennett 59:37
Yep. 

Alan Katz 59:37
me. And they're gonna say to me, you know, that, that would make a great TV series I'm gonna go 'Hey, you're right, it won't!' And they're gonna go 'Hey, there's a check' and I'm gonna look at the check, and I said this was really pretty, but you're gonna have to add some zeros and move the decimal point over because you have competition, jerk, get the fuck outta here! I believe podcasting will flip the power dynamic from the money to the creatives. 

Rich Bennett 1:00:06
I think it 

Alan Katz 1:00:07
is. 

Rich Bennett 1:00:07
already 

Alan Katz 1:00:07
Because, yeah, yeah, it's happening now. All the rights 

exist with the creatives, and that's the power of no. In any negotiation, the power rests with the word 'no' to say 'no'. We're not negotiating any more fuck off. And that now rests with, if it's all about the content, make great content if you build it, they will come. Alright. 

Rich Bennett 1:00:34
And I bet that's why you're seeing a lot of people from Hollywood starting their own podcast now. 

Alan Katz 1:00:40
Relatively speaking, I'm gonna say it costs nothing, that's not true. That's not true. But... One person can do this, 

Rich Bennett 1:00:50
Yeah. 

Alan Katz 1:00:51
as I do, for nothing. It's speculative. What built into the budgets and all my podcasts have a budget, yes, they're being done on spec, but once the cash flow begins in before we can say it's in profits, it has to get paid for. There's a production budget. Now, here's the difference. My production budget is minute compared to an episode of TV. It is... it's not even pocket change, it's the "lint". It's the fluff onto the lid, it's really relatively speaking, and that's the appeal. You can develop. You can put a show through its development process as a podcast. And you still have a... you have a finished product at the end of the day that an audience can enjoy, so you can... It'll... Unless you're stupid, you can figure out a way for it to pay for itself. So long as you don't... so long as you don't break the bank, so long as you just... yeah, you know. So, I had a friend approach me with a story, and he said, "I want to make this a great TV series." I said, "No. They never let you do this. You'd have to compromise this, or in a thousand different ways." All right. My friend worked his way through medical school in the 1990s as an anonymous sperm donor. Jump forward 27 years, how? Let's call them how? It's successful radiologist. He joined 23 and me curious about his health genes. Never occurred to him the ramifications of adding his DNA to a growing DNA database. That's what 23 and me is. He lost his donor anonymity, and suddenly seven total strangers found daddy, except six of them had no idea. Their actual biological father was this guy, a sperm donor. It is as fucked up a story as I had ever heard in my entire life, and I got a thing from fucked up stories. You know, I love weird off-beat dark stories. And this was true. I couldn't make this up if I wanted to, and I said to my friend, "We're gonna do it as a podcast." Instead, it said, "Okay." And I really loved telling his story in the medium. In order to tell his story, I learned about a community. I didn't even know existed. The donor conceived a community, this whole community of people, discovering that they who they thought they were among the people who graciously gave me tremendous background was a woman named Donna Hall who learned at age 40 that she was donor conceived. 

Rich Bennett 1:03:28
Wow! 

Alan Katz 1:03:29
When Donna told me her story and keep in mind, in the donor, these people that he's bumping into, these are 25, 26, 27-year-old people. These are not children. These are adults, discovering as adults. Wait, my story doesn't flow from you, my story flows from a stranger who I don't even know, because where you come from is your story? Your genes are your story. A woman named Donna Hall agreed to give me some tremendous background. When Donna told me her story, I said, "Jesus Christ, Donna, you're a podcast unto yourself." And she said, "Yeah, I know. I've been trying to do it, but..." And that's the other thing that, in working with Donna, to do her podcast, "How Story Became the Donor a DNA Horror Story." And that was my first story podcast. And the Donor a DNA Horror Story, wherever you find your favorite podcast. Donna, is the evidence, is the proof that even a great story has to be told the right way for it to to work as a story. Donna grew up, oh man what an amazing story. She grew up in a lower tier crime family outside of Philadelphia in the 1990s. The halls worth the Corleonis from the Godfather movies, but they made national headlines. Donna's mom, Phyllis, maybe the worst mom ever. She made headlines as the Home Alone mom. She spent six months in prison for child endangerment. Phyllis, her stepdad, John Hall, was a true criminal mastermind. He was the Philadelphia Police Department's favorite snitch. He put more than 24 people, 25 people behind bars, based on bullshit confessions that John Hall concocted to mitigate his own considerable legal jeopardy. Among the people that John Hall put in prison was his own steps unheard, who spent 18 months in prison awaiting trial for a murder he did not commit. John Hall put a man named Walter O'Grott on death row in Pennsylvania for 24 years, based on a murder Walter did not commit. When Pennsylvania finally released Walter, they gave $9. 1 million to make up for. Donna describes what it was like growing up in a family where every single day, literally one or more of the adults was doing something profoundly criminal, an amazing story. Donna is an amazing storyteller. She's vivacious, she's funny. Her story is a trip from a nightmare world to safety and empowerment. Telling her story, I found I had become the thing I always wanted to be when I grew up, which is a podcaster. When I say telling her story, Donna tells her own story, but it's the storyteller. I've got a house style. It's an interview. It's a conversation. But the kind of things that interest me aren't necessarily the thing that interest other interviewers. And so we take this extensive interview and I disappear from it. All you hear is Donna and we add sound and we add music. And the goal is to take you as deep inside her experience as we possibly can in the moment. So you know, when she's talking about some rather dark things, you're there with her. I found being able to story tell like that in this medium was sheer creative joy. 

Rich Bennett 1:07:16
It's almost like before TV you had the old time radio shows. 

Alan Katz 1:07:23
That's what it is. 

Rich Bennett 1:07:23
Yeah, 

Alan Katz 1:07:25
but radio still had to broad cast. 

Rich Bennett 1:07:28
Right. 

Alan Katz 1:07:28
Tribution system still, you still had to go through a company. 

Rich Bennett 1:07:32
Right. 

Alan Katz 1:07:33
Well, now we have podcasting and the internet and it's, it really, it's my distribution. I use, I use a cast and 

Rich Bennett 1:07:42
yeah. 

Alan Katz 1:07:43
And then I uploaded them and no, it's all over the world. That's, that's it. 

Rich Bennett 1:07:48
The difference between now and well radio in general is people can listen, hit that pause button and come back later and continue listening. 

Alan Katz 1:08:00
can. 

Rich Bennett 1:08:01
You 

Alan Katz 1:08:01
Oh, and it's a. 

Rich Bennett 1:08:02
Dell, 

Alan Katz 1:08:04
right? Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I realize that that's all I wanted to do was podcast. Gill and I, you know, not only did we become friends again after working on, on the Hell Not To Make A Movie podcast, but we began to work together creatively. We had put together a terrific project. This is last year, which we wanted to take out to the TV marketplace. But the film and TV business are so fucked up that even really a great package that we put together earn Stickerson was going to direct it. We had some interesting actors lined up who had great social media presence. We had six million social media presence lined up to come in. We had an incredible package of the tales from the Crypt guys doing a tell some the crypt like show it's not whipped. But it was a continuous story, but it was so Kriptian. 

Rich Bennett 1:08:54
Have anything to do with like elves or anything? 

Alan Katz 1:08:57
No, it was about flesh eating ghouls. 

It's called it. It's called. It's called are you. Are you afraid? 

Rich Bennett 1:09:07
Okay. 

Alan Katz 1:09:07
It's about fresh eating flesh eating ghouls. That's the last thing they it's the last thing you'll. If someone says are you afraid it's because the flesh eating ghouls knows you are and that's what they're about to feast on is your fear. 

Rich Bennett 1:09:20
Yeah, 

Alan Katz 1:09:20
yeah. We could not get arrested we couldn't and so I decided I want nothing more to do with this business podcasting is where I'm going to put everything and I will do are you afraid there's a podcast. 

Rich Bennett 1:09:32
I like 

Alan Katz 1:09:32
Yeah, 

Rich Bennett 1:09:32
that. 

Alan Katz 1:09:33
I will do it as a podcast first. I threw myself into podcasting and uh, right now as we speak I've got 9... complete, you know, 9 

Rich Bennett 1:09:43
Podcasts? 

Alan Katz 1:09:44
podcast. 

Rich Bennett 1:09:44
9 different shows, yeah. 

Alan Katz 1:09:46
9 different shows out in the world, uh, the one that I just started releasing most recently was super excited about because it is exploding. It's getting... gosh, incredible response. It's called, uh, John Kiriaku's 'Deg Drop'. My friend John Kiriaku is an X CIA author. He is maybe the best... one of the best known spies in the entire world. During the war on terror after 9/11 we went after Al-Qaeda's leadership. John was in counter-terrorism, and he was part of the group that captured the guy who we thought was the number 3 at Al-Qaeda. John's known to go was Abu Zubeta in Pakistan. And we captured Abu Zubeta in Pakistan, and for the first 60 hours that we held Abu Zubeta, John Kiriaku was his handler and his interrogator. 

Rich Bennett 1:10:37
Oh wow. 

Alan Katz 1:10:39
Eventually Abu Zubeta was moved on to various other interrogation sites, some black sites that turned out in the end. We learned that actually he was not the number 3 at Al-Qaeda, he was not a prince, but he was the number 3 at Al-Qaeda, and he gave us lots of really good actionable intelligence. In spite of that fact, John learned that we water-borted the Abu Zubeta 83 

Rich Bennett 1:11:01
Daniel! 

Alan Katz 1:11:01
times. He now lives at Guantanamo. When John learned that we had done that to the man, he ratted out the torture. And 

Rich Bennett 1:11:13
Okay. 

Alan Katz 1:11:14
he spent 23 months in federal prison, the reason we don't have a torture program anymore is because of John Kiriaku. So it's a rather famous incident 

Rich Bennett 1:11:22
when 

Alan Katz 1:11:23
he told the story to a journalist from ABC, I think he spent 23 months in federal prison. John has told his story many, many times, but not like this, not on this granular level. And what I wanted to do, and in Dead Drop, the first story that we're telling, because it's really the subtitle is What Makes a Spy Tick. And the first spy that we're going to talk about is John. What makes this spy tick? And this, the first series is going to be, I have no...my start out, I thought it was going to be 5 or 6, it's the next set of 10. Now, I don't know how many episodes it's going to be. It's the story of, alright, I want to take you through everything that made John as a human being to the moment when he decided he had to 

tell the world that America was torturing people. I want to place the audience inside his head as he makes this life changing decision and world changing decision. We just started dropping, I actually the fourth, this is the third episode, just dropped on Monday. We've already got 10,000 listener downloads. 12,000 listener downloads are ready, we've struck a nerve. We dropped on the same day that John appeared on the Joe Rogan experience. 

Rich Bennett 1:12:45
Really? 

Alan Katz 1:12:47
Yeah, John, so John, because John Kiriaku appeared on Joe Rogan, he was not allowed to mention the podcast, because Rogen didn't want him advertising anything, but they had a two hour call in a conversation. John was mostly, John Kiriaku doing all the talking, and Joe Rogan got more than 2 million views on Facebook and on the YouTube channel already. On the Joe Rogan, that episode has gotten 2 million views already. John is a remarkable storyteller. 

about time that the whole world really got to know him, 

Rich Bennett 1:13:26
It's 

Alan Katz 1:13:26
and that's what Dead Drop is really all about to take you as deep inside the experience of what makes A Spy tick. As John explains in one of the episodes, the reason that they recruited him, and he got recruited by a legend, by a CIA legend, they need people who are honest, and yet so much sociopathic. People who, like I said, are honest, but can live in a grey area where, okay, I'm gonna have to do this to accomplish that? Okay, people willing to bend the rules to enforce the rules, I guess, is what they're looking for. 

Rich Bennett 1:14:09
Some amazing, I've had a couple of people that have either worked in the FBI or CIA, I'm spec ops, amazing people to talk to. Interesting, 

Alan Katz 1:14:20
breed a 

Rich Bennett 1:14:20
Oh, 

Alan Katz 1:14:21
cat. 

Rich Bennett 1:14:21
yes, and the thing is, with what you said there, you don't know how many episodes it's gonna be yet, that's the joy of podcasting. 

Alan Katz 1:14:31
Oh, and that's just this one story 

Rich Bennett 1:14:33
Yes! 

Alan Katz 1:14:33
we're telling. There are lots of stories we're gonna tell when we agreed to do this. Part of the point of the exercise. We didn't set out. to make money. And you should never start doing a podcast 'cause you wanna get rich. Do not count on any such thing even remotely happening. The point of the exercise is to tell a story with absolute honesty. If you can do that, alright. And hey, you have all the creative means at your disposal here. 

Rich Bennett 1:15:08
Yeah. 

Alan Katz 1:15:09
If you just wanna sit and talk into the mic, your one obligation is do not bore your audience. And so, so long as you can create this bond with an audience, and... yeah, give that audience version of your story that compels them to keep listening to 

Rich Bennett 1:15:31
a 

Alan Katz 1:15:31
you, well then you have got something. And if you can get enough of those people, you can have advertisers and/or other ways to monetize. But it all starts with telling an honest story, 

Rich Bennett 1:15:47
Mm-hmm. 

Alan Katz 1:15:47
honest. 

Rich Bennett 1:15:48
That 

Alan Katz 1:15:49
And- 

Rich Bennett 1:15:49
bullshit detector will pick it up? 

Alan Katz 1:15:53
Absolutely positively. And so, that has been my journey to really from where I started to where I am. And as I said, I now walk around in a perpetual state of bliss. I'm 

Rich Bennett 1:16:08
every- You're 

Alan Katz 1:16:08
Single 

Rich Bennett 1:16:08
happy! 

Alan Katz 1:16:09
day... I'm from the start of my day to the end of my day. I'm being creative. I'm- I'm- I'm storytelling with an incredible- All these people's stories and again, there's like- John, there's another podcast that I'm really excited about. It's called Justive Photographer with David Swanson. David is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist. David, David- he's- the guy that he- He took one of the iconic 9/11 photos of the first responders down to the pit. He's covered War Zones from Serbia to Afghanistan to Iraq, natural disasters, Katrina, earthquakes, and Haiti, the wildfires here in Los Angeles. And this podcast tells the stories his photos can't. His photos can tell you what it looked like 

Rich Bennett 1:16:59
Right. 

Alan Katz 1:17:00
standing in all those dangerous places. But they can't tell you what it felt like standing there. And that's what Justive Photographer does. As- as David explains- you can go to War Zone and you can leave it, but the war zone never 

Rich Bennett 1:17:14
you. 

Alan Katz 1:17:14
leaves 

Rich Bennett 1:17:14
Exactly. 

Alan Katz 1:17:15
And it changes you. And that also is what it's about how telling the story changed the storyteller. 

Rich Bennett 1:17:25
Wow. Now, have you worked with any businesses when it comes to storytelling? 

Alan Katz 1:17:31
Uh, yes. There's one of our- one of our podcast is called Sage Wellness Within. On Dr. Andrea Thorpe, she's a practitioner of Chinese 

Rich Bennett 1:17:42
medicine. Uh-oh. 

Alan Katz 1:17:43
And this is about Chinese medicine. It's also about her practice. 

Rich Bennett 1:17:47
Ooh. 

Alan Katz 1:17:47
But it's- it's about the 5,000-year-old 

Chinese medicine, which 

Rich Bennett 1:17:55
Still 

Alan Katz 1:17:55
is- 

Rich Bennett 1:17:55
works? 

Alan Katz 1:17:55
Three? It's quite when you actually 

Rich Bennett 1:17:59
Yes. 

Alan Katz 1:17:59
understand what is the nature of it's thinking. You realize- you realize it sees us in many ways much more profoundly than modern medicine does. It understands us much more profoundly. Because it's- it's very metaphorical. 

Rich Bennett 1:18:17
Mm-hmm. 

Alan Katz 1:18:18
And that's sometimes what modern medicine thinks of as your other old fashioned. Well, no, it's being metaphorical in human beings or metaphorical. My dad was a physician, he was a surgeon. 

Rich Bennett 1:18:29
Yeah. 

Alan Katz 1:18:29
And he was always quite clear on the fact that what he did for a living was Equal Parts Science and art. And the art part is because he's dealing with human beings. And we're sometimes actually quite often bad at saying what's wrong with us. 

Rich Bennett 1:18:45
Yeah. 

Alan Katz 1:18:47
You have to really understand human beings if you really want to know what's hell on them. 

Rich Bennett 1:18:54
Mm-hmm. 

Alan Katz 1:18:55
It's- it's not tricky. 

Rich Bennett 1:18:57
It's- 

Alan Katz 1:18:58
Then that and Chinese medicine. And again, because we're always comparing things our experience to another 

Rich Bennett 1:19:06
yeah. 

Alan Katz 1:19:06
experience. That's what a metaphor is. Two experiences unlike each other that suddenly- the one reveals something about the other. I would say that's why AI can never- ever duplicate- 

Rich Bennett 1:19:17
Oh, no! 

Alan Katz 1:19:17
You say 

Rich Bennett 1:19:18
No. 

Alan Katz 1:19:18
AI cannot- AI can not- it can't understand the metaphor. AI must be literal. And metaphor comes from human experience comparing a sunset to a Buick or hey what what what David does in one of the episodes a photo He he didn't take but wishes he had After a very brutal day where a bunch of Marines died as the vehicle which they died was being hauled down the hallway by other Marines One of the Marines was standing on top of it and it set up this A ray of sparks, and as David sat in in the vehicle behind he said it looked like he was Like he was surfing 

Rich Bennett 1:19:59
Wow, 

Alan Katz 1:19:59
and it was the most extraordinary thing he'd ever seen. It was so beautiful 

But he just let the moment go he didn't reach for his camera. He just soaked it in something he wasn't used to doing but 

Being in a war zone could have a moment of of profound beauty like that it was That's what I want 

Rich Bennett 1:20:21
cap 

Alan Katz 1:20:21
to 

Rich Bennett 1:20:22
and that's 

Alan Katz 1:20:22
the unexpected 

Rich Bennett 1:20:23
Yeah 

Alan Katz 1:20:25
Beauty but also the humanity that's That's my goal 

Rich Bennett 1:20:30
and that's that's the thing with the podcast like his him, you know Rod Stewart always said it best every picture tells a story But the thing is the photographer how many of those shots did they miss And they wanted to tell that story Now they can't because of the podcast 

Alan Katz 1:20:50
or what it took to get that shot 

Rich Bennett 1:20:51
yeah. Yeah 

Alan Katz 1:20:53
And David tells about hey he got wounded in Iraq He was there with a unit of Marines doing a firefight and they ended up in a ditch and Yeah, not and not everyone 

Rich Bennett 1:21:06
for 

Alan Katz 1:21:06
survived 

Rich Bennett 1:21:06
some times. They have to be reached age. I think of E. Regime raising the flag You know, I mean that's not the Original thing that you see 

Alan Katz 1:21:17
No, no, no, no, no, it's 

Being able to tell these stories that's that's 

Rich Bennett 1:21:27
It's a 

Alan Katz 1:21:27
that's 

Rich Bennett 1:21:27
plan 

Alan Katz 1:21:27
my purpose in life 

Rich Bennett 1:21:28
it's 

Alan Katz 1:21:29
and 

Rich Bennett 1:21:29
a 

Alan Katz 1:21:29
it's this medium is everything I God I cannot imagine wanting to do anything in 

Rich Bennett 1:21:35
no 

Alan Katz 1:21:35
any other medium and the people in this community Are wonder 

Rich Bennett 1:21:40
I look forward to and it's funny because the weekend comes and it's like okay is it Monday yet because I look forward to doing this yeah, I love I This and this is networking what we're doing all the people 

Alan Katz 1:21:55
and 

Rich Bennett 1:21:55
you 

Alan Katz 1:21:55
always 

Rich Bennett 1:21:56
meet 

Alan Katz 1:21:57
always 

Rich Bennett 1:21:57
always always and you stay I mean I can't tell you how many guests I've had on more than once Because especially when it comes to podcasting 

Alan Katz 1:22:06
Oh 

Rich Bennett 1:22:07
because I mean hell I knew you wrote beyond again because I know there's going to be other new podcast at that you need to talk about 

Alan Katz 1:22:15
But 

Rich Bennett 1:22:16
your daughter's got to send me the damn crochet thing 

Alan Katz 1:22:20
we're part of a community and 

Rich Bennett 1:22:21
Yes, 

Alan Katz 1:22:21
even podcasts with which tread the same territory We're not competing with each other because of the nature of how people consume podcasts They can consume us all we be we're not competitors. We're companions 

Rich Bennett 1:22:33
Thank you for saying that because I I was talking to a good friend of mine. I got I got him into podcasting and he just guessed it on a podcast and he actually Guessed it on two podcasts and the one podcast that he was on the host got pissed at him for going on another podcast I told him right away, I said then that host should not be podcasting there's 

Alan Katz 1:22:58
He doesn't understand the nature of podcast exactly 

Rich Bennett 1:23:01
Exactly. You should 

Alan Katz 1:23:02
That's good for his podcast because the more people that suddenly when I like that guy when he he's on another No, no, no, no, you idiot. That's you don't you're not looking for exclusivity. It's really And not the way you're thinking 

Rich Bennett 1:23:16
now 

Alan Katz 1:23:16
about it The only exclusivity should be the person it should be the way that your interview went exactly Your interview is the only exclusive you are entitled to if you have if you don't have any the insight to create a great interview then Well that ain't on them that's on you mate Exactly 

Rich Bennett 1:23:33
Big question here. Where can is there like one website where everybody can go to to find all of them? 

Alan Katz 1:23:40
Yes, yes, there's there's a there's a one-stop shop 

Rich Bennett 1:23:43
okay 

Alan Katz 1:23:44
And and that's it costard and touched on.com ht tbs But if you just type in costard and touch don't COS ta rd AMD Touchstone t o u ch st o n e dot com costard and touched on dot com that will link you to it's what we're all the podcasts are and we'll link you to where you can listen to them But of course, they're all available wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts But the master list is there and even some of our coming 

Rich Bennett 1:24:16
attraction. I love oh, oh say that again come into attraction 

Alan Katz 1:24:19
We've 

Rich Bennett 1:24:20
got 

Alan Katz 1:24:20
we've 

Rich Bennett 1:24:20
I love 

Alan Katz 1:24:20
Tell me a track 

Rich Bennett 1:24:21
that 

Alan Katz 1:24:21
is, we've got some, we've got some really, really, really cool podcasts in the works. 

Rich Bennett 1:24:28
Question for you. Cuz I have to go in and listen to them. Trallers. 

Alan Katz 1:24:35
Yes. 

Rich Bennett 1:24:36
You do trailers for your podcast, right? 

Alan Katz 1:24:38
I, when I can, yes, and the only, the only, the only, the only times I don't is just cause I haven't had 

Rich Bennett 1:24:45
Right. 

Alan Katz 1:24:45
time. It's the only reason, but a good trailer, yeah, hey, look, if, if it brings in another listener, if, if the time it, if, if it helps sell and that's what it's job is, 

Rich Bennett 1:24:56
Yeah. 

Alan Katz 1:24:56
it's a sales tool. 

Rich Bennett 1:24:58
Mm-hmm. 

Alan Katz 1:24:59
Uh, yeah, there's no reason not to do it. Anything to help bring people in, if you can take 90 seconds and convince someone that they need to listen to your podcast, well, you have to do that. 

Rich Bennett 1:25:15
Yeah. 

Alan Katz 1:25:16
Cuz otherwise don't walk right 

Rich Bennett 1:25:18
Exactly. 

Alan Katz 1:25:18
by. It's, it, really, that build it. They will come. 

Rich Bennett 1:25:24
doesn't 

Alan Katz 1:25:24
If you don't build it, nothing will happen. It's that simple. 

Rich Bennett 1:25:27
Don't bullshit them. Don't 

Alan Katz 1:25:30
Oh, 

Rich Bennett 1:25:30
bullshit. 

Alan Katz 1:25:30
no, no, no, really, this has got to be, look, it's, it's an honest sales pitch. Why you, why now, why this podcast? 

Rich Bennett 1:25:36
Mm-hmm, 

Alan Katz 1:25:37
and what will, what will give them a hint of the 

Rich Bennett 1:25:41
Yeah. 

Alan Katz 1:25:41
experience? Of what, these are people who listen to a lot of podcasts. Okay. Okay. Why, why, why might this one get under their skin? Cuz that's really should be your mission to get under their skin and not into their heads. Yes, yes, yes, but, man, down to their mitochondria, where, when's the next episode dropping? Really? Can you not drop in the day sooner? Are you bastard? 

That's what you 

Rich Bennett 1:26:09
Oh, 

Alan Katz 1:26:09
want. 

Rich Bennett 1:26:10
God. 

Alan Katz 1:26:10
That's what you want? 

Rich Bennett 1:26:10
Well, Alan, before I get to my last question, is there anything you would like to add? 

Alan Katz 1:26:18
Yeah, haven't I said too much already? 

Rich Bennett 1:26:19
Not, not at all. 

Alan Katz 1:26:21
Haven't 

Rich Bennett 1:26:22
Not 

Alan Katz 1:26:22
I 

Rich Bennett 1:26:22
at- 

Alan Katz 1:26:22
just going on and on and on? Just shut the fuck up 

Rich Bennett 1:26:24
Lemme, 

Alan Katz 1:26:24
already. 

Rich Bennett 1:26:25
I could, no, you can, I could sit here and listen to you for hours. 

Alan Katz 1:26:29
You, you are, you are too kind. 

Rich Bennett 1:26:31
Seriously, because I mean, you're, you're, you're, your story, you're telling stories and that's the important thing. I keep telling, that's one of the things I love about this. That and the learning, I learned so much, the stories that I hear and we talked to people that are in addiction recovery a lot. And 

Alan Katz 1:26:50
Sure. 

Rich Bennett 1:26:50
the stories I hear from them, I can't tell you how many times guests have brought me to tears, not just of laughing, but because there are stories in the sadness. 

Alan Katz 1:27:00
Oh, gosh, 

Rich Bennett 1:27:00
And- 

Alan Katz 1:27:01
oh, 

Rich Bennett 1:27:01
Hey, 

Alan Katz 1:27:01
gosh. 

Rich Bennett 1:27:01
it's like, oh my God, but- And I think the biggest reward I've gotten is when somebody a listener reaches out to me and thanks me for a guess I've had on. Because it's changed their life and that's what I look for, for every, every time. All right, now, this is going to be tricky. Pick a number between one and 100. 

Alan Katz 1:27:25
57. 

Rich Bennett 1:27:26
57, why 57? 

Alan Katz 1:27:29
it's my wife's, one of my wife's lucky numbers. 

Rich Bennett 1:27:32
Oh, 

Alan Katz 1:27:32
Actually, 27, these are lucky, 27, I think of that, 

Rich Bennett 1:27:35
All 

Alan Katz 1:27:35
20. 

Rich Bennett 1:27:35
right, so 27, not 57? 

Alan Katz 1:27:37
27, 

Rich Bennett 1:27:37
Okay. 

Alan Katz 1:27:38
not 57. 

Rich Bennett 1:27:39
All right, now I gotta go back, hold 

Alan Katz 1:27:41
I 

Rich Bennett 1:27:42
on. 20, 

Alan Katz 1:27:42
really never- 

Rich Bennett 1:27:42
no, no. Okay, okay, this is good. These are, I got a hundred different questions here, and I don't even know what they all are. What's a habit, you've cultivated that has significantly improved your life? 

Haha. 

Alan Katz 1:27:57
A habit. Well, all right, I would say tennis. 

Rich Bennett 1:28:02
Oh, really? 

Alan Katz 1:28:04
Yes, I've played tennis my whole life, but up until I got to the other side of my depression, I hated it, because I didn't know how to coach myself. Well, if you're always angry at yourself, you think by screaming at yourself, 

Rich Bennett 1:28:19
Yeah. 

Alan Katz 1:28:20
you did it wrong, you did it wrong. Okay, that will not help you do it right. As I began to get mentally healthy and I began to coach myself, I suddenly found a for tennis I didn't even know I had, and not just the love for it, skillset. I was always an okay player, I suddenly, I started getting good because I understood how to coach myself, and I suddenly, how to make myself a better player, and I began to discover that, okay, not only, all right, but I'm enjoying tennis completely, where, suddenly, it's fun from the moment I get on the court, to the 

Rich Bennett 1:28:59
right, 

Alan Katz 1:28:59
moment I leave it. Fun, but I began to discover the zen of it, and I began to discover life lessons in tennis that I could take to work with me, and lessons from work that I could take into tennis, and suddenly, tennis, it wasn't just a great recreation, it was adding to my storytelling, and 

Rich Bennett 1:29:22
oh. 

Alan Katz 1:29:22
my storytelling was adding to it. 

Rich Bennett 1:29:24
Wow. All right. 

Alan Katz 1:29:26
So that's how I would answer 

Rich Bennett 1:29:28
that question. Now I got to get out there and try to play tennis. now I'll try I'll try pickleball first. 

Alan Katz 1:29:35
Oh, You know, you you should. It's a thing about tennis. It's apparently the healthiest sport you can play 

Rich Bennett 1:29:45
really. It 

Alan Katz 1:29:46
is that actually is that there is data that says of all the sports you could possibly play. It's the least. It's the least hard on your body while delivering the most aerobics and all the other things in in keep you. Yeah, it's during the pandemic. Interestingly, having played tennis all the way through the pandemic, when other sports were off off, you know, 

Rich Bennett 1:30:14
contact 

Alan Katz 1:30:14
You 

Rich Bennett 1:30:14
sports. 

Alan Katz 1:30:15
couldn't play basketball. You couldn't you know that they closed basketball courts. They didn't close tennis courts because you stand so far away from the person you're playing with so you could play tennis with someone even during the pandemic. And so a lot of people started playing tennis during the pandemic, because it was the one for the exercise that you could do. 

Rich Bennett 1:30:32
I had no idea 

Alan Katz 1:30:34
it got harder to find a free court after the pandemic. It fucked everything up. 

Rich Bennett 1:30:39
Alright, so what you're telling me instead of putting that gardening in my backyard, I need to put the tennis court in. 

Alan Katz 1:30:48
Absolutely. I'd say put a pickleball quarter but they're loud. That's a noisy. 

Rich Bennett 1:30:53
Well, yeah, 

Alan Katz 1:30:54
this will 

Rich Bennett 1:30:54
hate. 

Alan Katz 1:30:55
fucking 

Rich Bennett 1:30:59
If I put the podcast studio back there, it'll probably hate me then too, because when I'm not recording, I'll have to be barbecuing and, well, I never mind. That's a whole other 

Alan Katz 1:31:08
Things 

Rich Bennett 1:31:09
story. 

Alan Katz 1:31:09
podcasters have to 

Rich Bennett 1:31:10
I'm 

Alan Katz 1:31:10
do as part of the 

Rich Bennett 1:31:11
telling you. 

Alan Katz 1:31:11
podcasting. 

Rich Bennett 1:31:11
I'm telling you, Ellen, I want to thank you so much, man, it's been a true honor and. 

Alan Katz 1:31:18
pleasure has been mine, Rich, really, 

Rich Bennett 1:31:19
The 

Alan Katz 1:31:19
and truly you are a gracious host and and. Thank you for having me, 

Rich Bennett 1:31:25
man, all and the door is open anytime you want to come back on. 

Alan Katz 1:31:29
I will take that again, because there's there are more podcasts to talk about. More stories to talk about it and you know, I tell these stories because they 

Rich Bennett 1:31:39
me. 

Alan Katz 1:31:39
mean a lot 

Rich Bennett 1:31:40
I 

Alan Katz 1:31:40
to 

Rich Bennett 1:31:40
love that. Ellen, thanks a lot. 

Alan Katz 1:31:42
Thank you. 

Rich Bennett 1:31:44
Thank you for listening to the conversations with Rich Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and learned something from it as I did. If you'd like to hear more conversations like this, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. And if you have a moment, I'd love it if you could leave a review. It helps us reach more listeners and share more incredible stories. Don't forget to connect with us on social media or visit our website at conversations with rich Bennett.com for updates, giveaways and more. Until next time take care, be kind and keep the conversations going. You know, it takes a lot to put a podcast together, together. And my sponsors help add a lot, but I also have some supporters that actually help me when it comes to the editing, software, the hosting and so forth. There's a lot that goes into putting this together. So I want to thank them. And if you can, please, please visit their websites, visit their businesses, support them. However you can. So please visit the following Full full circle boards, nobody does charcuterie like full circle boards. Visit them at fullcircleboards.com. Sincerely so your photography live in the moment they'll capture it visit them at sincerely so you're calm. The Jopitan Lions Club serving the community since 1965, visit them at JopitanLinesClub. org. And don't forget to e at the end of Jopitan because they're extraordinary.