Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski are the award-winning screenwriters and producers behind films like “Ed Wood,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt” and “Man on the Moon.” On the small screen, they were also behind the Emmy-winning miniseries “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.” Their new movie, “Dolemite Is My Name,” starring Eddie Murphy, tells the story of entrepreneur Rudy Ray Moore, an inspirational figure of the Blaxploitation film movement. The screenwriting duo obviously trades in biopics -- real-life stories about real-life people. But that's a tricky trade. How do you tell the story of a life? What players do you eliminate or consolidate? What timeline do you cover? This week’s episode of “The Call Sheet” covers that ground and a whole lot more!
Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski are the award-winning screenwriters and producers behind films like “Ed Wood,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt” and “Man on the Moon.” On the small screen, they were also behind the Emmy-winning miniseries “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.”
Their new movie, “Dolemite Is My Name,” starring Eddie Murphy, tells the story of entrepreneur Rudy Ray Moore, an inspirational figure of the Blaxploitation film movement. The screenwriting duo obviously trades in biopics -- real-life stories about real-life people. But that's a tricky trade. How do you tell the story of a life? What players do you eliminate or consolidate? What timeline do you cover? This week’s episode of “The Call Sheet” covers that ground and a whole lot more!
KRIS TAPLEY: I'm Kris Tapley and you're listening to THE CALL SHEET, a show that dives deep into the craft of your favorite Netflix films and series with some of the most talented artists and artisans in the game.
I’m very excited to dive in with my guests today. So let's go ahead and hear from them now.
LARRY KARASZEWSKI: My name is Larry Karaszewski and my craft is screenwriting.
SCOTT ALEXANDER: My name is Scott Alexander. My craft is screenwriting and my hobby is playing jazz piano.
KT: Scott and Larry are the award winning screenwriters and producers behind the films like “Ed Wood,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt” and “Man on the Moon.” On the small screen they were also behind one of the best shows I think I've seen in ages, 2016’s “The People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story.”
Their new movie “Dolomite Is My Name” tells the story of entrepreneur Rudy Ray Moore, an inspirational figure of the blaxploitation film movement, who reminds us not only that it is never too late to realize your dreams, but more importantly, that no one else is going to realize them for you.
But as you can see by their credentials, Scott and Larry trade in biopics. Real life stories about real life people. And that's a tricky trade. How do you tell the story of a life? What players do you eliminate or consolidate? What timeline do you cover? Do you go from the cradle to the grave? Do you choose a potent slice of life? And what really gives you the right in the first place?
Where does the writer ultimately find that sweet spot between representation and reality? So let's get into it.
EDDIE MURPHY (CLIP FROM “DOLOMITE IS MY NAME”): I ain’t lyin’ man, people love me. Hey, if you play this song, I guarantee you motherfuckers’ll hopping and squirmin’. When I used to play this record live, motherfuckers would actually faint.
They would faint on the floor. I'd have to call the ambulance to pick all these motherfuckers up. Okay. Every time I played, in fact, they started calling the hospital in advance and tell them, “Rudy gonna be singin’ tonight, make sure you're ready cause we finna be carrying motherfuckers out the club.”
KT: I ain't lyin’. People love me.
That's the first thing we hear in the film. And I love it because to me it kind of sets up an overriding theme, which is: Rudy Ray Moore – this guy had an unwavering confidence in himself. He had this sort of just bold faced determination, and I think it was a key ingredient to his success.
We're going to get into the inception of the project and the origins and stuff in a bit, but before we dial it all the way back, I wanted to talk about that idea because I actually think it's prevalent in a lot of your work.
Is that something that you wanted to get into the film, bake it in from the beginning, that kind of a thematic idea of confidence?
LK: I don’t know if it was consciously we were going to bake it into the very first scene. You know, it's so baked into all of our characters, because all of our characters in general are people who are swimming in the wrong direction, who are constantly being told “no.”
And so without this, you know, insane belief in themselves. they wouldn't get anywhere, whether it's Ed Wood or Larry Flynt, it gets – it's the key of the conflict in our movies.
SA: I mean, Kris, you are onto something that I think Rudy is the first one of our characters who just likes to talk about himself. And is a braggart.
LK: But what also is interesting though, is that second line, “People love me.” In a weird sense, it was Rudy recognizing that there was an audience for what he did. He feels like he's got something to offer the world that the world actually wants.
KT: Yeah. Well, let's go back to the origins, the very beginnings of this project.
You've talked about it plenty, I'm sure by now, but just how did you get hooked up with Eddie Murphy on this? What is the earliest start of the “Dolomite” movie here?
SA: The love of Rudy goes back to college days in the 80s. Our buddy Dan Waters, we were all living together, brought home a VHS of “The Best of Sex and Violence” starring John Carradine as the wraparound host.
LK: A trailer – exploitation trailer compilation.
SA: Two hours of drive-in trailers. And it was back to back, “Dolomite,” “Human Tornado,” “Disco Godfather,” which are completely out of their minds. They're highly recommended to your listeners. You should go watch, especially watch the “Human Tornado” trailer.
LK: They're the greatest trailers of all time. “Human Tornado,” probably, I would say is the greatest trailer of all time.
SA: Yeah. So, we fell in love with Rudy off these trailers.
LK: But the project, I mean, the answer, right to your question – the project began about 16 years ago. We got a phone call saying that Eddie Murphy wanted to meet us. And so we were like, “Oh, Eddie Murphy, that's fantastic.” You know, we’d never met Eddie.
And, so we went out to his office and we walked in and Eddie started doing lines from “Ed Wood,” actually performing as the characters, performing as Bela Lugosi, performing as Tor Johnson. He did a great Tor Johnson. And then he looked at us and said, “Do you guys know who Rudy Ray Moore is?”
And we both started laughing because it was like, “Yes.” We were like, “Fuck yes, we know who Rudy Ray Moore is.” And we just started talking about Rudy with Eddie and we instantly got it. That he wanted to do an Ed Wood style movie. We made it a point in the past, never really to write specifically for one actor, because that way your movie can get trapped if you do that.
But for us it was like the idea of like, Eddie Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore… even if we had to make it, we were going to see this movie. And a couple of days later, Eddie got us in the room with the real Rudy Ray Moore.
SA: And Rudy was quite excited. Rudy was always looking for respect and attention.
And this was Hollywood knockin’. Like “Finally, they're gonna make a big movie about me.” And he told us a lot of his war stories. And as we hung out with him, and you know, he showed up in the outfit and he's got the hat and the whole routine. But after a bit, the routine dropped and then he sorta just became the real guy.
And that's when we first got a sense of this duality with Rudy and that he was not that character we knew from the movies. He was a real guy and he was old and he'd been on some rough road. And you know, when you're a comic on the road for 40, 50 years, that is just a brutal life. You got to see that these were two people, which ended up becoming the theme of the movie.
LK: The title of the movie “Dolomite Is My Name” is specifically about, it's about someone creating a creation that becomes this person.
SA: Some people think that we screwed up because the catchphrase in the movies is “Dolomite is my name and fucking up motherfuckers is my game,” and I was like, no, we didn't get it wrong. We were just trying to make a thematic point.
LK: Yes.
SA: He wanted his legacy to be honored. You sort of felt like he had accomplished some really important shit back in the day, and now he had kinda been kicked aside and now he was old. And now people had kind of forgotten him a bit.
And I think we were trying to honor that idea, that he just said, “God damn, no one is going to help me. No one's gonna give me a handout. No one's going to give me a job. No one's gonna give me anything. So I just have to make it happen for myself.”
And we really wanted to honor that spirit.
LK: And also, I think, yeah, the way you kind of said earlier about the sense of: there was there was a quiet man in there as well.
That we always knew we were going to write a really outrageous, funny version of the story, but it really made us see that, wait a second, it also can be poignant. Yeah. You know, when he would just sit down and just kind of be eating his – he ordered a bunch of calzones that day.
SA: A lot of calzones.
LK: He's this quietly eating this calzone and there was kind of, there was a sadness there that, I think that stuck with us.
And then whatever, we went out to try to sell the project and we couldn't sell it. And so everyone went their separate way and we felt terrible. And we kind of let Rudy down and Rudy wound up passing away in I think 2008. And we thought that the time had passed by for us. It was not gonna happen.
And then we did “The People vs. OJ Simpson,” which was a phenomenal success. And we've been in this industry long enough to know that when you have that kind of a hit, that sometimes you can go back into an office and pitch them that crazy idea. And maybe the studio executives won't think you're that crazy for that one month.
You know, you only got a very, very short time period to do it in. So through John Davis and John Fox, the producers, we got word back to Eddie. And because Eddie hadn't made movies in awhile – he hadn't said “fuck” in 20 years in a movie, so we didn't know where his head was. We thought he was semi-retired.
KT: I didn't realize that.
LK: Yeah, it's crazy. I think “Life” was the last movie where he cursed.
SA: That’s ’99.
KT: Wow.
LK: You know, he makes that word poetry. I mean, strangely enough, when we actually got down to write the movie, we were writing the movie as a tribute to Rudy Ray Moore. We're also writing the movie as a tribute to Eddie Murphy.
For us, we wanted to write the greatest Eddie Murphy movie of all time. That combined all of his talents, whether it was, you know, that X-rated comedy nightclub stuff he used to do, he's a great musician and singer. The way that he can do amazing, dramatic roles, like he did in “Dream Girls” or even, you know, he can be poignant.
So we wanted to make one movie that had all those pieces. And so we got word back to Eddie and Eddie just jumped in. He was like, “Yes, I'm 1000% in,” but we went into Netflix like a week later. Because we had had this problem selling it like 16 years ago, Scott and I came in very prepared.
SA: We were nervous because we had crapped out trying to sell it where people just gave us blank looks like, “Rudy who? Rudy? What? Rudy Ray who?” And so we had this whole prep about, you know, how important Rudy was and what an innovator he was.
And we got to pitch to Ted Sarandos who's the chief over there. And Ted just cut us off saying, “Guys, I started out in video stores in the 80’s. Rudy kept us in business. I know who he is, you can justcut to the end.” So it's like, Ted got it.
LK: Ted got it. I mean, I think Eddie got up after that and did like the first couple of lines from “Signifying Monkey” and it was like, “the deal's done,” you know? No more pitch. It's over.
SA: We still had a bunch of pitch left and you know, I was trying to say, “So anyway, at the end of the first act…” and then the producer's like, “Shut up, we're done. We sold it!”
LK: “Stop talking!”
SA: “Get out of the building!”
LK: “All you can do is blow it now. Shut up, Scott.”
SA: “Get your parking validation and leave.”
We left the Netflix meeting, we made the deal. And then we didn't talk to Eddie until we had written a draft.
KT: Really?
LK: I mean, but that being said, we had, you know…
SA: But we were trying to kiss up to Eddie, because we, Larry and I, made a secret pact that we didn't tell anybody, which was: we only cared about Eddie.
Because we knew if Eddie says yes, the movie happens. And so we're just trying to please Eddie Murphy. And so, you know, Larry and I are just complete trivia, in the weeds freaks. And so we were just trying to pack in just so much esoterica from showbiz history back in the sixties and seventies. A lot of esoteric references that we knew Eddie would get.
LK: Also, here's something that a lot of people don't know about a Murphy is, he is a movie nut. I mean, he really knows cinema and he'll sit down and talk about Jodorowsky or he'll talk about, you know, Pontecorvo’s “Burn!” or, you know, he'll do all that, you know?
I remember him one time saying that Brando made them watch “Burn!”
SA: Oh, that’s right!
LK: Because Brando thought it was better than “The Godfather.”
SA: He got invited to Brando's house and Brando was like, “All right, we're watching ‘Burn!’ tonight.“
LK: And so he really, he gets cinema. And so we had that kind of connection with him.
But when we were writing it, we were just writing it once again, to please Eddie, and then please ourselves. And it was an interesting thing for us to write this script because we were coming off of two rather big projects. We were coming off of “The People vs OJ Simpson.” And we're coming off of a Patty Hurst script that unfortunately hasn't gotten made yet.
But both those projects were thousands and thousands of pages of court transcripts. And each person in each of those projects had written like five books.
SA: And to go to Rudy. It was very limited. There were, I mean, again, because –
LK: Like Lady Reed’s a great example, very little is known about Lady Reed.
SA: What do we know about Lady Reed? We knew she had a son. We knew her first name was really Nancy. We knew she had once sung backup in New Orleans. That's it. That is all we know about Lady Reed.
LK: Before she meets Rudy. I mean, what happened after she met Rudy – She does talk, there are interviews and things like that of her talking about her days with Rudy.
SA: I'll give a shout out to our main research guy, Mark Jason Murray, who lives up in Northern California and has devoted the last 20 or so years to detailing every moment of Rudy's life and interviewing everybody in Rudy's life, and he spent a lot of time with Rudy. And so he had a lot of great first-person interviews that he gave us access to.
And he gave us access to his research. So in terms of, you know, how did we learn about Rudy back in Arkansas and the details of that? We got that from Mark.
KT: Let me ask you about, like, structure. When you start attacking that, like how do you attack the passage of time here? Because –
LK: That's actually a great question for this particular project because I think when we went and pitched it originally –
SA: But we didn't really like the passage of time.
LK: Yeah, passing of time is a negative, because we think that's kind of what makes regular biopics kind of suck. But for the most part, we like to just really concentrate on a short amount of time. And we always ask the question, “Why is this person being remembered?” And the answer's usually the third act of the movie.
But in this case, strangely enough, when we initially proposed the project, we were going to show Rudy making all of his movies. But the more research we did, we found that the real good stories are all about the making of “Dolomite.”
SA: I mean, the predicament was: always know your ending. And it was like, all right, why did we sit through this for two hours? Okay, that's why.
And so for Rudy, his legacy culturally, socially, it would be that most of the early rappers say it started with Rudy. And, you know, Eazy-E and Snoop Dog and the guys from that generation all said, “We got it from Rudy. He should get the credit.” And so in our minds, we wanted –
LK: We had to figure out how to get to the 80’s somehow.
SA: We had to get to the early eighties to get to early rap.
As we started doing our research, we started falling in love with the early records and with the Chitlin Circuit. And so the idea that Rudy recorded the album literally in his living room and then literally borrowed $250 from his auntie who had fallen off a bus and gotten a settlement. Right. And then pressed the records and then it has friends come over and assemble them and glue the stickers on and stamp the little devil on it.
It was so charming. And then he's selling them out of his car trunk. How fun is that? And now he's going to go back on the road and he's going to drive across the South through the Chitlin Circuit and he's going to carry that and merch table and he's going to sell them records after the shows and then he's gonna set up in the parking lot and sell them out of his car trunk. Because nothing ever stops Rudy from trying to make another $5.
LK: But Rudy, actually sort of never went off the road. I mean, I saw him perform live in the 90s at a place called Club Lingerie on Sunset Boulevard. And it's funny. Later, I think Eddie was at the same show, but it was very much, you know, almost what you see in the movie where Rudy would perform and then he hung out at the merch table. You know, he had his own merch table. I think Blowfly was on the bill that night as well.
SA: He sold Dolomite back scratchers.
LK: Yeah. Actually what he would roll in the town and he'd go to like, you know, sort of the Goodwill place and he'd buy like all the ashtrays he could find, then put a Dolomite sticker on them.
And so then he'd sell them as merch at the table later as dolomite ashtrays.
SA: It’s just garbage.
KT: That’s brilliant.
SA: And the world of the Chitlin Circuit, which was, you know, clubs for black audiences, for black performers, was a world that we had just not seen in movies. And homemade party albums, we hadn't seen in movies. And so that stuff just started eating up our screenplay and it turned into the first half of our movie.
LK: And this is what made this movie different, was the racial element. The fact that like, you know, that Rudy wasn't let in by the gatekeepers and had the sort of do it by himself.
And then just to see those building blocks of becoming a record star then a road star. Then making his movies.
SA: Rudy and his friends, they're all black and none of them are getting hired. And when they look at all the billboards on the Sunset Strip for all the big new movies coming out – and nothing against James Coburn or Steve McQueen – but that's who's starring in the studio movies.
LK: We're making movies about the past. We want to make sure they also are speaking to what's happening now, and this is a way to actually make the movie about representation. That whole “Front Page” scene. We're not going out of her way to actually say that “Front Page” is a terrible movie.
We looked at what movies came out at that time period and we were thinking, what would be the film that would be if you saw people laughing and having a great time, and you land on the row of Rudy and his friends, and no matter what you think of the “Front Page” or Matthau and Lemmon, it's like, “Wait a second.” This movie is not speaking to them. Almost even beyond that, this movie is pretending they don't exist.
KT: It's also interesting too, because he has that epiphany in that moment. He's busting his ass on the circuit. He's traveling all around. This is how he's able to get out there and he sees this flickering light. If he just does that. It's got more reach.
It's almost like the romance of filmmaking isn't part of the equation. It’s the efficiency of what he's trying to do.
LK: You can save gas money by making your movie!
SA: That's us doing our screenplay craftsmanship where, you know, “Front Page” is serving as a plot mechanic for us.
LK: When we were sort of trying to figure out the structure of the movie, we weren't gonna make it to Eazy-E. We had to figure out some way of connecting Rudy to the legacy of hip hop.
KT: Snoop.
LK: Well, Snoop. But we came up with him running into that young kid at the movie theater where you saw him literally passing his pimp cane down to a next generation.
That sort of solved our problem where, you know, you'd walk out theater, if you hadn't made the connection already, if you're walking out, you're like, “Oh my gosh, that is that –Oh my God. Rudy did affect those 10 year old kids who heard those dirty records.”
KT: And that kid has his own flow with how he's doing his spoken word stuff.
LK: Correct. We were very happy with that. And then that allowed us to be – not have to go to 2 Live Crew.
KT: Well, speaking of the signifying monkey, obviously, you know, African American folklore is in the bedrock of this story because Rudy Ray Moore in his lane, you know, is an extension of that legacy.
You know, filming at the Dunbar Hotel as he did, which was the ground zero for the Central Avenue jazz scene. It's very fascinating. I'm just curious how that element took shape as you were writing this kind of connection to the past.
SA: For me, I mean, this stuff was wonderful, because it made the movie richer.
I mean, like you bring up the Dunbar and you know, whatever, we just started Googling Dunbar hotel and reading how important it was to the Black arts scene in LA in the 1920s. And Ella stayed there and Duke Ellington stayed there. And then these poets would stay there.
Also, you know, this, these are in the days of heavy segregation. And so, you know, all the black artists had to stay there. And so it just sort of gave a richness, to play up the Dunbar and actually tell the story of the Dunbar to the audience.
LK: Yeah. I mean, we kept on stumbling on to those things. The Dunbar hotel, Dolphin’s of Hollywood records. These were very important cultural places for the African American community.
SA: And the toasts. So we really wanted to sort of explain, you know, what is a toast and how far back do they go, and how it was just sort of this informal, boastful, rhyming storytelling.
LK: Yeah. That went on, I mean, for hundreds of years, and passed down from generation to generation and Rudy monetized it.
I mean, it's funny, sometimes people come up to us and say, “Oh, well, you know, did Rudy ever give royalties to the hobos he got those stories from?”
KT: I feel like I asked you that a while back.
LK: They don't really get it – that those hobos didn't make up those stories. You know, they certainly put their own spin on it and the way Rudy put his own spin on it –
SA: “Why didn’t Rico the hobo get royalties?”
LK: Well, Rico did not write “Signifying Monkey.”
KT: Another line that stood out to me as well, and I mentioned the first line, but when he says, “How'd my life get so damn small?”
I love that line because there’s something that edges up to self pity, but it's not that. It's almost, again, that determination to, like, do something. The way he reads it anyway, the way Eddie kind of intones it. It's a tone of self admonishment, you know, like in other words, there's something about him as you've written him, he never bogs down.
You're screenwriters. And I imagine that's a quality you need to have as screenwriters. So are you putting yourself into Rudy?
LK: I actually believe we put ourselves in the every character where you write, which is crazy. You know, so many times people ask us –
SA: All the biopics are autobiographical.
LK: They are, and people say, why is that line in there as well? Like, because my grandmother died that week when that happened or something. But I actually think before he even said that I was going to answer, that we're now older dudes. That maybe if we had written this 16 years ago, that line wouldn't be in there.
But I think, we know too many guys that we started out in this industry together, who now unfortunately, you know, no longer are able to get movies made or that dream of being a big time director didn't happen for them. And it’s painful and it hurts. And it's not because they're not talented, not because they don't deserve it. It's just more that some things happen.
And so for Rudy to say, “How’d my life gets so damn small?” Like, you know, I came out here to do something and I've got all this determination and I know I have the talent. I know there's no audience for me, but I've been stuck, you know. Definitely it was something we put it in there on purpose and Eddie made that line just beautiful.
KT: Yeah. I also wanted to talk about the word “fuck.”
LK: Ah.
SA: What do you mean?
KT: Because you know, it's like rat-a-tat in the film. How much of that is in the script?
LK: That’s a great question.
SA: We were trying to dole out the swearing, right? And we would actually look at pages and go, “Oh wait, there's seven here. Let's try to knock it down to two or three.” But once you get on the set. And it's Rudy and Snoop and Mike Epps and Craig in there. Everyone's having fun. This was a fun movie to make. Then you get a little more swearing.
LK: Sometimes a lot more swearing.
KT: It starts to flow.
SA: And then the motherfuckers, and then you watch the movie and you go, there's four of them and the first 10 seconds, okay. I mean, when Eddie swears it just, it frees him up and then he's just so damn funny. And it's like, it's fine that he, you know, he had that run of family films, but Eddie Murphy is not being utilized in PG.
Eddie Murphy in R is where he can cut loose and be free. Larry got indignant yesterday. Because as a matter of pride, he went to some “fuck” website –
LK: There actually is a Wikipedia page. It says “movies that say the word fuck.”
SA: And we weren't at the top!
LK: No. “The Commitments” beat us. And I was like, what?
SA: Larry got very sad and sulky.
And I was trying to explain to him that this the guy at the Wikipedia page needs to be corrected, or as you would say, admonished, because I don't think he's including “motherfucker.” So I think he's excluding motherfucker and only including fuck. Which if you're trying to rank “Dolomite Is My Name,” isn't really fair.
KT: Has anyone counted all of them?
SA: No, Kris, that's your job.
KT: I think I'm going to do that. Yeah. I think someone needs to do that.
LK: I mean, I've been saying it – like, we do panels and stuff like this. I have one set line, which is always, you know, “It's the sweetest movie ever made that says motherfucker 300 times.” I assume 300, I’ve been saying 300 so…
KT: I’ll get you an accurate number.
SA: He's put the number 300 out there. I don’t know if it’s high or low.
KT: Well, you say it was a fun movie to make. I want to talk a little about the production. Were you guys present much?
SA: Yeah. I mean, before you're on any further, just like praise Craig Brewer, who is such a sweetheart, so talented. He brought such joy to the movie, brought such musicality to the movie.
KT: He was obviously vital. How did he surprise you as far as his vision?
SA: I mean, in terms of the, the director's vision, he definitely had us bring more music into the screenplay, which was so fitting because, you know, Rudy was basically a frustrated vaudevillian. You know, we have that line early on, you know, “Vaudeville's dead, I don't need an eight-in-one.”
And, you know, where Rudy could shake dance and Rudy could sing, Rudy could tell jokes, Rudy could read your mind, whatever you need. And so Craig really had an appreciation for all of that. And Craig has grown up in Memphis and is really entrenched in sort of like the, the blues bars and and the black music scene in Memphis.
And he knows that world, and he just really wanted to bring sort of the grit of that world.
LK: We show our characters a great deal of affection. We love our characters, but sometimes we can be a little smart-assy about it. But Craig doubled down on the affection in a sense, like he really fell madly in love with these characters and gave them such dignity and gave them such heart.
SA: Especially Lady Reed. He loved Lady Reed.
LK: And so all the Lady Reed stuff works so beautiful in the movie. And I really think that I give Craig, you know, so much credit for that because he really saw that character was a special character. And you know, when he films those so quiet moments with Rudy and Lady Reed talking to each other, it's just, it's so beautiful.
And there's just certain things. There was some, you know, he had so much love and affection for these characters that you kind of do too as an audience. And one of the other things that really surprises about this movie, we always felt the movie would end in a little bit of a hooray, but I don't think we were expecting, and proabbly even Craig wasn't really expecting, that you were actually going to be as touched emotionally as you are in that.
SA: I mean, the end of our script was very heartfelt.
LK: Yeah.
SA: But Craig nailed it.
LK: Yeah. Craig, nailed it. That limo scene. I'm sorry, I could watch that limo scene a thousand times. And it's ridiculous, it's a limo scene, you know what I mean? Actually, Craig yelled at us like the day before we had to shoot and he's like, “Wait, this is the third act climax of our movie and you've got six people sitting in the back of a limo reading bad reviews? Like, what? Why? Why aren't they racing to stop something?”
SA: On paper, it's a terrible scene. And Larry and I should be shot having five pages with six people shoved inside one car.
KT: Yeah. I think that the scene has the high point of the film. Which is when he says, “I'm proud of myself.” That’s the peak.
SA: Yeah, and “I’m proud of you guys.”
LK: Yeah. That’s funny you should bring up “I'm proud of myself.” I remember it was one of the very last things that we had a discussion about before he turned it in. It was like, he says, “I'm proud of myself.” Should he actually say, “I’m proud of myself?” Yeah, he should.
But yeah, that always gets me for some reason. I'm really touched by the fact that, you know, he's like, “No matter what happens.” In fact, we actually started saying that all the time because we're going through a whole period now where we go to a lot of screenings.
So a lot of times we're like pulling up at a sort of a premiere with the same people who are in the movie. You know, we're in the back of the car. And so one of us always ends up saying to the other person, like, “No matter what happens, you all did a great job.”
KT: What was it like being able to shoot everything here in town?
SA: I mean, it's so nice. It’s such a privilege to just sleep in your own bed and then wake up and we'll show up in the morning. We don't have to show up at 6:00 AM with Craig. That's his problem. Because he's directing. We can roll in at eight or nine, you know, stay for a few hours, get a free lunch, you know, and then go to work, write for the afternoon and usually drive back to the set, you know, and watch the last couple hours of shooting, so it's lovely.
LK: Yeah. You know, looking back at our career, we've really told these stories of eccentric people, but we've also sort of told the story of like Los Angeles showbiz fringe for the past, for the 20th century, you know, and then –
KT: Maybe subconsciously you're trying to stick around here.
LK: Yeah, but like, thinking about the last two projects we did, “OJ” and “Dolemite,” they really are about the city of Los Angeles. And they're showing you different parts of the city. Ed Wood with the Brown Derby and Musso & Frank’s.
SA: I mean, we were lucky with “OJ” and lucky with “Dolemite,” you know, that the studios gave us enough money to do it right.
LK: And I mean, one of the great joys of “Dolemite Is My Name”'s shooting was the fact that Quentin was shooting “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood” at the exact same time.
You would literally drive down Sunset Boulevard and there'd be two blocks of 1969 Hollywood. Drive another block and oh my God, there's a block of 1974, Los Angeles. And also because both movies are about show business, we would take – we had marquees –
SA: A couple times I drove into Quentin's location thinking I was at our location. We did get into a marquee battle with Quentin.
LK: We had a bunch of movie theaters and marquees and posters that got cut out of our movie, but every time one of us would shoot a scene that took place outside of a theater, you know, we would say, we see you're frigging “Krakatoa, East of Java” and we raise you, well, you know –
SA: We raise you “The Hindenburg.”
LK: Or “The Girl from Petrovka.” Yeah. We got this thing back and forth. It was really, really funny.
KT: That’s so geeky. I imagine there's a lot of real estate between these two things, so I'm just curious: how was a Wesley's performance of D'Urville different than how you wrote him?
SA: Oh my God, it's a great actor story. And it's also interesting and that he did it without really changing the script.
So when we were casting, when word got out that Eddie Murphy is going to be playing Rudy Ray Moore, the flood gates opened, and the casting directors, it was all incoming phone calls. Every comic in town wanted to be in this movie. And it was this dealer's choice. We got everybody we wanted. It was amazing.
But then it came to D'Urville. And in the movie, structurally – this is screenwriting – he is the straight man. You know, when we write characters, characters are themselves, and they also represent other ideas. And D'Urville represents the people who have made it. He represents the establishment.
He has worked for Paramount Pictures. He has an agent. He is legitimate. He is different than Rudy and his ragtag pals sitting around a coffee shop saying, “Why can't we break in?”
LK: And the real D'Urville was that, I remember he really looked at it like, “Oh my gosh, I'm somehow directing ‘Dolomite.’ This is a black ‘X’ on my career. I don’t really want to be here.”
SA: Yeah, he regretted every minute of it.
LK: And he drank on the set, but what Scott’s saying is absolutely correct. He was a straight man. He was in “Rosemary's Baby.” He was in “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.”
SA: And certainly we had written all the scenes, which is, you know, Eddie as Rudy does a bunch of bad karate chops.
You know, and angle on D'Urville, you know, grimacing and reaching for his vodka. You know, and there was a lot of that. And so the idea was, “Oh my God, well what if we cast Wesley Snipes?” Because Wesley is a real actor. Wesley has gravitas. He has a heaviness in the good sense that he will represent something different than the funny guys are running around the rest of this movie,
LK: I mean, actually even before we came up with the name Wesley, the idea was: the other parts would be cast with funny guys and D'Urville would be cast with, you know, I don't want to say a “real actor,” but, but an actor who was more from the straight world. And then Wesley seemed the perfect version of that.
SA: And yeah, so again, now we're just making up silliness – we're filling in the dots here. Our fantasy version of what happened is that Wesley was driving to the set on his first day and looking at the pages and going, “Okay. All right, so it's going to be me with Eddie and and Mike and Craig, and they're all going to be funny, and then I'm just going to be… somber? Fuck this! Why can't I be funny? Wait, everyone in his movie gets to be funny except for me?”
And then he showed up at that strip club on his first day, and all our eyes popped out like, “Whoa, this is an interpretation going on here!” Yeah, we weren't expecting this. But then we kind of looked at Craig and he said, “I think it's working! Why don't we just roll with this?”
LK: And the funny thing is, is how closely he actually stayed to the original lines. But the fact that he was like doing this crazy thing outside of the lines that just made it all work on another level. Oh, he did come up with one of the great lines. We will not take credit for this. He did come up with the “cinemagical reality.”
KT: Oh, he did? Oh man. That one’s got a life right now.
LK: The whole other, the rest of that scene though is actually stolen from – you're asking her, how do we put ourselves in these things? We directed a movie called “Screwed” that Dave Chappelle is in.
SA: This is back in the late nineties.
LK: Yeah. And Chappelle was always someone very fascinated with the movie making process. We were quite surprised that Dave hasn’t actually directed a movie because he was really –
SA: He was asking questions about lenses and lights.
LK: And we remember we were on the set one day and he got into this thing with our DP who was a very straight guy.
And it was like, it was, he had to light, Dave Chappelle and Norm McDonald in the same shot. And he was complaining about how hard it was. And Dave was like, “Well, what makes it so difficult?” And he's like, “Well, you know, black people absorb light, white people reflect light.” And Dave was just like, “What the hell?”
But then for the next like week or so, he'd, we'd walk around and say like, “I absorb light!”
SA: “I absorb! You reflect! I absorb! You reflect!”
LK: And so we would just laugh so hard about it. And then whatever, 20 years later we're writing the script and we're like, “We can put that Chappelle thing in.”
KT: Yeah. That's awesome. “Ed Wood,” I just wanted to touch on, because the 25th anniversary this year. It’s fascinating that these two movies, you know, there's similarities. Eddie's brought it up, you know, as an inspiration. You said he was quoting it when you met him.
What I want to know is how has that work like, settled or deepened in your view, in the rear view now looking back on it? And also I'm curious what those two characters, Ed and Rudy Ray Moore might share.
LK: That's funny. Maybe we should have had Rudy Ray Moore go and have a drink at Musso’s and run into John Cassavetes. What, you sold your house to make your movie. I did that too!
KT: Shoot that scene in black and white too.
SA: When “Ed Wood” came out, we were so proud of it and, whatever, I probably have to go back from “Dolomite” all the way back to “Ed Wood” to remember another movie where it was such joy on the set every day. It was just really a sweet experience. And you know, the movie came out and we were all so proud of it.
The reviews were amazing. And then nobody went. I mean, when Larry and I wrote “Ed Wood,” we don't think anyone had ever written a movie about somebody who was from the margins that no one in the world had ever heard of. And we had this idea, which is: why can't you celebrate somebody who wanted that American dream, even though he was in the shadows his whole existence, and he died impoverished?
Over the years, people who love movies discover the film, because the movie has a big heart. And the movie is such a celebration of filmmaking and trying to express yourself and trying to make art and so many people in the business we've talked to over the years who have said, “That's my favorite movie about movies because I feel like I've lived it.”
And anyone in the film business has started out in the trenches. Well, except for Eddie. Eddie started at the top and never left. But everyone else, the rest of us started down in the gutter somewhere. And so I think that element of it really touches people. It's nice that it's sort of crept its way up into respect and being in some kind of pantheon.
KT: Yeah, absolutely. What do you think the two guys share?
LK: They share a never-say-die. Also they share that they were actually making movies they wanted to make. The difference between the two is that Rudy was recognizing a need and an audience.
My favorite exchange in the movie is when the guy says, “You're not supposed to make a movie for the five square blocks of people that you know,” and Rudy says, “Hey, those same five blocks are on every city in America.” And that's like, that's sort of the difference between him and Ed Wood. And you know what's really funny, they end on a similar note with that sort of like a premiere of their big movie.
That last sequence in “Dolomite Is My Name” actually happened on the Chicago premiere of, “Dolomite.” It was at the Woods Theater. And when Rudy showed up, the place was jam-packed and the guy had actually added a 2:00 AM show and people were lined up, you know, and it was like, it was like eight o'clock or something.
People were lined up around the block and Rudy was like, “People have to wait out there til 2:00 AM? Well, fuck that. I'm going to go out and entertain them.” So he set up a little box and walked up and down the roads and he just entertained people for hours and hours and hours. And we heard that story.
It's like, that in a nutshell, was who Rudy Ray Moore is. He had this connection to the people and he really just loved the hearing laughter, and he wanted to hear people react to what he was doing and saying. And so that seemed like this a great way to end the movie.
SA: Here's a little Kris Tapley exclusive for you film nerds. The ending of Ed Wood takes place at the Pantages, but we did not shoot inside the Pantages. We shot at the Orpheum. So “Dolemite” and “Ed Wood” both end in the same theater.
KT: How was that an exclusive? You haven't told anybody?
SA: No, no.
KT: That's amazing. Well, we're going to wrap it up here with just some quick rapid fire things.
SA: Oh boy.
KT: Quick answers. If someone were writing a biopic about you, how would you want them to approach it? Actually, I don't know how you answer that one quickly, but see if you can.
LK: I’d be a little skinnier.
KT: Okay, perfect.
SA: Can I be taller? We're very superficial.
KT: That’s where my head would go.
LK: You know, because this sounds very egotistical to say this, but I keep on expecting like one day to open up at, like when the Blacklist gets announced and see that number six is some fucker wrote a movie where we're like…
SA: We used to do a shtick about this! We used to just joke about it. Our biopic. Because when you write biopics, you have to combine stuff because you're taking a bunch of years and you get two hours to tell the movie.
LK: And you set up a character, you gotta use a character.
SA: And then there's, as some of you may remember our first film was “Problem Child,” with John Ritter. He used to always talk about how I always drive convertibles.
So the guy writing our biopic would research this and be like “Scott has convertibles.” So it would be a scene with Scott, Larry, Tim Burton, and John Ritter driving around together in that red Sunbird.
LK: Talking about that next project. And it's like… no!
SA: Because you kinda just like combine stuff.
KT: How do you clear your head when you hit a creative block?
LK: Just by staring at each other. Yeah. We work in the room together and we… You know, I will say the creative blocks happen a little less because you have the other person. That is the benefit of having a writing partner, is that you can feed off each other. And so there is that element of like…
I think over the years too, we've learned that almost like Rudy Ray Moore: Let's just do it. Like, you know, the creative block is just sort of sitting there. You don't know how to write that scene? Write them driving to the scene. Write them parking outside of the scene. Write them going to the receptionist of the scene. And eventually you're going to start getting to the scene.
SA: With the biopics and with all the crazy research a lot of times, I mean, just now, this thing we're working on now, sometimes I'll just start flipping through the books. And just finding like, “Oh, well this is kind of crazy. Hey Larry, check this out.” Then it's just like a weird piece of trivia, but it can just be a little bit of a spark.
KT: And then what was the movie that made you fall in love with movies?
LK: Uh, this is a different answer to that question…
SA: You’re gonna outsmart him!
LK: Because I really love movies. Early on, I'm from Indiana and my dad worked at a factory. My mom was a waitress. But I just was obsessed with movies from when I was nine years old.
And I saw everything from that age. And so I have this kind of encyclopedic thing about movies of the early seventies. But when you first start watching movies, you kind of recognize the actor. And I think the movie that changed that and made me realize there were people behind the scenes of a movie – I saw a movie called “The Conversation.”
SA: Well aren’t you highbrow!
LK: Francis Coppola's movie that he does between Godfather and Godfather II. And I remember as a kid, that was the first time I realized there was someone behind the curtain, that, wait a second, someone was telling me the story. And, wow, this is different than just a normal thing.
And so I think that was probably the movie that made me you know, think about directing and writing and all that. It took me to the next level. And it probably was hitting me at the right age. I was, it must've been like 13 or 12 at that point. It was hitting me right when I was like becoming a real person.
SA: Yeah. Kris, I'll give you an answer I've never given. I'm just thinking about your question. I'm going to say “King Kong.” The original. 1933. Yes.
LK: No, the Charles Grodin version.
KT: Yeah, you never know!
SA: Yeah. Jessica Lange. Charles Grodin. Jeff Bridges. John Guillermin.
LK: See, we know our movies. You can pull up John Guillermin, you know?
SA: Yes. I'm pleasing nobody, as you would say.
LK: Who wrote that movie? Who was that?
SA: Your buddy! Lorenzo Semple!
LK: Oh, that's right. Lorenzo Semple? Or Stirling Silliphant?
SA: Ooh.
LK: Ooh.
SA: 1933 King Kong. I was interested in starting to make Super 8 movies. And when you're, you know, eight or nine years old, the easiest way to make movies is by yourself or with your mom helping you.
And so I was making simple animation and I don't have any talent for drawing. So I was doing simple cutout animation and simple clay animation. And then I got a book called “The Making of King Kong,” which talked about all the early animators and it talked about the directors and it talked about glass shots and how they would project Kong onto a screen –I'm sorry, how they, they would project Fay Wray onto a little screen – and then have the animated King Kong puppet act in front of her and create the illusion that she was small right next to his hand. On just a total techno freak nerd level. And you know, I was 10 years old. This was just so interesting to me.
And so then I really got into animation and I was trying to do King Kong Willis O'Brien kind of effects in my bedroom when I was 10 or 11. I've never really thought about this. And then I would just keep going back to that book like, “Well, how can I do this? How can I do this?”
And so I was really learning about the process then. So yeah, I think that pulled me in.
LK: And I looked it up. Never, never argue with Scott Alexander. It’s Lorenzo Semple, Jr. Who was amazing!
SA: You were friends with him!
LK: I did a bunch of evenings at the American Cinematheque. I would have booked “King Kong.” I booked “Marriage of a Young Stockbroker” and “Pretty Poison.”
SA: And no one showed up.
LK: No one showed up. But I love those movies.
KT: Guys, thank you so much for bringing me into your office here. We've been doing this, by the way, surrounded by this daunting array of work.
LK: And the Smothers Brothers!
KT: I've been staring at Woody Harrelson on a crutch for the last hour, which is awesome. But anyway, thank you again and I loved the film so much. Congratulations on it. It seems everyone that sees this is excited by it, so congrats on it.
SA: Thanks, Kris!
LK: Thanks, it’s been fun.
KT: So again, the movie is “Dolomite Is My Name.” I think it's quintessential Scott and Larry really, and not just because it's a biopic. If you follow these guys’ work, I think you'll find they trade in strange, true stories about people who made their own way on the fringe. Rudy Ray Moore fits perfectly in the tradition of guys like Ed Wood and Larry Flynt, self-made men of confidence who ignored the status quo and followed their own compass.
Not unlike Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski n fact. I think when you see the film, whatever your lot in life, you will find it to be quite inspirational. So check it out. “Dolomite Is My Name” is available to stream on Netflix right now. I ain't lyin’.
The Call Sheet is a Netflix podcast hosted by me, Kris Tapley. The show is produced by Noah Eberhart and the team at Blue Duck Media. Stuart Park created all the original music in this episode and a special thanks to the team at Netflix.