Remington Steele: Making it Happen with Jerram Swartz

Good morning, Eighties tv Ladies. I'm Susan Lambert Adam and I'm Sharon Johnson. Eighties tv Ladies is our podcast where we get to talk about female driven television shows from the nineteen eighties. Today we're diving into the last couple of seasons of Remington Steele. We have a special guest today who worked on some of the final episodes of the show.

And if you don't know by now, Remington Steele starred Stephanie Zimbolist, Pierce Brosnan, and Doris Roberts. It ran from nineteen eighty two to nineteen eighty seven on NBC. And I know today we're going to be talking about both seasons four and five, but all my questions are about season five. I don't know that I have any questions about season four, but still looking forward as always to talk about it. But we have a special guest today who worked on season five.

Is that why it's the one where you have all the questions? Well, that and because season five is infuriating, confusing and just playing weird. It may have suffered some season five the show is canceled and then it wasn't Blues. It may have before we get started with season four just to recap. At the end of season three, Remington Steel takes off because of immigration issues, state license issues, and Laura Holt has said things were easier without him, so he disappears to the UK, and then in season four we pick up with Laura and Mildred showing up in the UK to find him, and they do in the first two episodes.

Then they all reconcile and Laura spills the beans to Mildred on the Remington Seal secret truth, so Mildred now knows that the man she knew as Remington Steel is not Remington Steel. By the end of season four, Laura and Steele have a fake marriage to keep him in the country. A lot of the fans were both excited and unexcited by that, but it was the end of it was the end of the series at that point. Then the show is canceled and they think it's over. Season four just to concernate a little bit on stuff that I really found a challenge in season four is some of the episodes felt like, oh, here's the wrestling episode, right, you know, But also Laura Holt really is and Stephanie Zimboless is doing a beautiful job, but she Laura Holt, keeps sort of having to insert herself and assert herself into her own show.

Is what it felt like to me that it was a lot of the Pierce brows in the show. Again hard default the appeal of him, but it becomes the struggle of the show. The struggle of the show becomes not them working together, but him dealing with his immigration issues and him struggling to kind of win her over and him doing this and then Laura being mad at him for it, and then Laura basically going, no, but it's my agency, you know, and it's my this, and so it felt more like she was sort of always on the defensive in season four a lot, even though it started I think pretty well when she shows up and it's like, Okay, I'm coming to get you because you're an idiot for running away. I wonder to what degree some of that had to do with the fact that television, and certainly Remington steals more episodic at that time, and they with that, they have a tendency to write and rewrite certain beats of the relationship, where because because I think from research, they know that most people don't watch every episode.

So for those of us that do watch every episode, it does become repetitive. You're thinking, didn't they resolve that already? But okay, we'll go, we'll move on. This happened in the eighties a lot because if you missed an episode, you missed it till the summer, right or rerun, And so they didn't do a lot of tracking relationships so carefully as you would kind of have to do now. Now it is about watching you know, one, than two, than three, than four, than five, and you're just consume them all, almost like a mini series.

And I'm also not trying to give the writers too hard a time, because writing that many episodes of television every season is really hard under the best of circumstances, and it's easy, it was probably easy, if you will, for them to fall in the pattern of, Okay, we're going to write about this conflict, whatever it is, instead of trying to be a little bit more for lack of a better word, creative in the way that they dealt with the situation, the circumstances between them. Maybe they felt like they'd kind of I don't know's there could be a lot of reasons for it. I think it was one of the shows that was kind of inventing how to do that somewhat for the first time on television. True, a lot of people I think that would then do will they won't they?

A Jim and Pam or a thing really had had those four runners. They Stood on the Shoulders of Giants by Fredminton Steel exactly season four. I actually liked the first couple episodes of London because because I liked it when they went on location, but also there's an episode four Steel, episode five where Remington Stuffer is a memory loss and it turns out apparently he lost the agency in a poker game, and I just thought that was actually very clever. You know it it comes a case, and I thought it was a pretty cover case. I loved when Louie Anderson came on and guest starred.

I thought he was really just adorable. And that was for a Steel spawning episode twelve, they had to chase down some missing you know, Russian caviar as you do for the American caviars are, which was Louie Anderson's father, like he had made some deal and he didn't want his daddy to find out because he was like the son that was always messing up. And then I also another episode that stood out for me was Suburban Steel episode thirteen, kind of in the dead middle of the season and a dead man shows up in Laura's sisters kitchen. Laura and Remington have to take care of Laura his nieces and nephews, and I think there are direct nods in that episode to Scarecrow Missus King because Laura's sisters car is basically the same station wagon as Missus King drove.

One of the ones that stand out for me that season is Coffee, Tea or Steel, which is set on a luxury airline, and to be honest, I think it stood out for me more because of the depiction of air travel as being this potentially this this luxurious experience where you have stewardesses as they call them at the time, walking around with trays of drinks and all the space up in the first class or wherever these people were sitting and you know, chairs, and I had frankly never experienced that, and it certainly isn't the case these days that you would see something like that on a plane. So yes, it felt like a cruise ship, yes exactly. Yeah, I like that episode because also in that episode is You Know Again, Laura goes undercover as an airline steward is and is treated poorly because of it as a woman.

Also, Terry O'Quinn guest stars on that from his right. So at the end of season four the series is canceled. Looks like Pierce Brasen is gonna be cast as James Bond and Stephanie Zimbolist actually is cast opposite Peter Weller in RoboCop. But summer repeats happen. Remington Steel ratings go up and they reboot the show and they call everybody again.

We need our everybody back and they had shut everything down, so they call everybody back. Stephanie doesn't get to do RoboCop. Pierce Brasen has to wait to do James Bond. He does that Crazy People magazine cover where he's like, I hate them pretty much. And we come back for basically three TV movies, sort of six episodes or three TV movies.

We're still not sure. They have a bad Honeymoon in Mexico meets Romancing the Stone kind of episodes. They introduce a romantic rival for Remington Steel to try and make a love triangle happen Jack Scalia, we'll talk about him in a minute. And it's still all about the immigration. So Remington goes back to la and then has to go back to London and then finds out he inherited a castle with a lot of debt, and then suddenly we're in Scotland and then suddenly we're wrapping up the show.

But at least they bring Daniel Charmers back from Zimbalist Junior, which I thought was quite lovely, and then they kind of wrap up Remington Laura pretty well. It's kind of nice. And also it's very clear that season five is about him. It's really not about Laura. It's all about him, and the season, I mean, the series is really tipped from being initially about heard being about them and now it's all about him, and is everything that's going on is revolves around him, and she's just sort of there.

Well then and then they introduce a guy character and Mildred has nothing to do. But even what they do with the guy character is first he starts out is one thing, and then suddenly he's something else, and then he suddenly something else again, and it's very confusing, and don't really care because they're not at all consistent with what or who he's supposed to be, which I just found a waste of time at the end of the day, as much as I like Jack Scalia from that time, So you know, yes, but you know who could answer maybe some of these questions, not all of them. And he's not responsible for any of the writing of this season or any of the conceptual stuff. But I want to introduce our guest, Jerem Schwartz, who worked on some of the final episodes of Remington Steel.

We've known each other for years, he and I since he worked with my husband Richard Haddam on an incredible mini series called The Lost Room in two thousand and six, starring Peter Krausa, Julianna Margali's Dennis Christopher, Peter Jacobsen, and l Fanning. It is a beautiful, underrated not that many people know about it, mini series that everyone should see. The Lost Room. Jerem is an assistant director and production manager with over one hundred credits that include et the Extraterrestrial, The Blues Brothers, and The Walking Dead. He has filmed on locations throughout the US and Europe.

Aerem left the glamor of sixteen hour work days for the comparative sanity of the life of an analyst at the California Film Commission. He is also an occasional lecturer and producer director lyricist for seven seasons of the Pasadena Follies. So welcome to the show, Jerem. How are you fantastic? Thank you?

Oh, I'm so excited to have you on. Jeremy, tell us a little bit more about yourself. I mean, of course we have your bio, but how did you get into movies and television in the first place. I took a class in college about movies. I went to a college in England called Sussex University, and the assignment was to write a screenplay.

And so I did that and they said, okay, now go produce it. It's like i'mamana, And so we built our own lights and we took our sixteen millimeter film camera and pushed it three stops, so that, I mean, we just invented it with some guys from school, and we had little green screen little things and it was terrible, but that was fun. And when I graduated, I came to America and got into the Universal studio's mail room, and there I started delivering mail to people whose names are now on the buildings, the Alfred Hitchcocks and the Verna Fields and the people like that, the little cross room. And from that I found out about a thing called the Assistant Director's Training Program. And I went down to USC one morning and took the test and I did not get in.

And then the next year I went down to USC and got in, and the rest is history. I've done that for years and years and years and years. That's amazing. That's through the director's guilt, through the director's guilt. Yes, and they still have that program, ye I do.

Okay, all right, let's just cut to the chase of how you ended up on season five of Remington Steel. You know the life of an assistant director. When I started, if you worked at Universal Studios, they would put you on show after show after show, and you just stay at the studio. But Sharon Gless and I presided over the very end of the studio system. I think she was actually the last contract player in hollywe he was.

I just read that. For both of us. It was the end of the studio system, which meant that once I was through the training program. I had to find my own work, and that meant going from place to play, studio to studio, independent, independent, depending on who liked you, who didn't like you, And eventually, over forty years it became who died and didn't die. But so from time to time I would find myself working at CBS Radford on shows.

And what was different then is that the people who hired the assistant director in television were basically the producers in the Oh, I can't think of the guy. Oh, Abbey Singer was there at that time? Oh? Okay, is that a name that anything is familiar to me? He was the Abbey Singer is the man after whom the shot the Abbey Singer was named.

May I, yes, explain the Abbey Singer shot. This is something as an assistant director you learned very quickly. You had to announce when you're on the next to last shot of the day, we're on the Abbey Singer. And the reason for that was back when I knew Abby he was in his eighties, seventies or eighties, way back in the day, probably the fifties or sixties. He was an assistant director and he was famous for saying, okay, this is the last shot.

Okay, this is the last shot. He never actually got the last shot correct, so the next of the last shot his historically the Abbey Singer. So when you know that you have two shots left, you make the announcement to the crew. It is crazy because I guess I assumed that Abbey Singer was an actual person, but I didn't never actually knew that. Anybody knew.

He was a total sweetie pie. Oh that's great. There's actually one other old soul that I'd like to do a commercial for it because his name is largely forgotten at this point, and that is Wally Worsley Junior. And when I was a trainee, when I was a young puppet Universal, he was an old dog there he was, and I worked with him. I knew him when I was in the mail room, and then later I worked with him on ET.

He was the production manager on Et the ex Terrestrial. He had been the prop man on Wizard of Oz. Come On. He and his dad, Wally Worsley Senior, had been the director of the original Lon Cheney Hunchback of Notre Dame. Wow.

So that is pretty amazing. So you started when like old Hollywood's was still around. But the end, the end of it, the end of the studio system, like you said, and Sharon Glass talks about that in her book. I did have a camera assistant say to me on a movie. He said, are you the same Jerem Schwartz.

It was working in the seventies, and it's like, Okay, I'm gonna have to kill you. I think most people like me are familiar with the studio system as it applied to actors and actresses, but not as much to the production crew. That was something similar in that regard. So that's really interesting that that was also part of the system. And really when I started, everybody was everybody looked like they were in their fifties and sixties, and they were all white guys, and they all smoked.

And coffee craft service cost to nickel a dime or something yet to pay for coffee for coffee a craft service, and it was very crude. It was very crude. Um. So you asked me how I got Ontomington Steel and it was really just one of those calls that I've worked. I guess was Derek Kavana on No, I don't think so, it's just one of the guys at CBS called me, and sure, you know, I went in and I met the director, who was a guy named Chris Christopher Hibbler, who came from a a line that was well regarded at Disney in particular.

His dad was so he had a cool first name. Do you remember. Oh no, I don't remember anything at Disney. Okay, So I had worked, Actually i'd worked with Chris so as possible. He put my name in at some point on a Disney movie.

I'd been a second assistant director on something called Hot Lead and Cold Defeat. Yeah. I saw that title with Jim Dale. Okay, yeah, and uh, you know it was kind of an old timey Disney kids movie. It was a western, and I who's the head of the studio was run somebody who had been Walt Disney's son in law, and they still remembered Walt and Chris Hibler.

He told me stories about how he had had to work with Walt, teaching him how to sign his name the way it looks on the TV show Wow My God. Christopher had directed a promo at Disneyland, and they had all kinds of ways and complicated routines that you had to go through. And there was a giant shot of things happening and things happening and people doing things and dancers, and they were screening it for Walt, and Walt said, what's that little triangle of grass there that isn't green? What's wrong with that? So he was relating how extraordinary attention to detail Walt Disney head.

And it's like there was still at a time and I can't remember what year, it was, probably seventy seven seventy eight that you know, this was still a name that was spoken with reverence. For sure. He did not make a joke about Walt being in a cooling chamber somewhere. Somebody said it while I was there. This would have been seventy seven, seventy eight, waltwo.

No, somebody actually said, you know, that's not the way Walt would have said it. Done it or done it? And somebody said waltwo. And it's like everybody's everybody went nuts. Yeah, now I think you get in trouble for doing that.

Now. So when you joined the crew of Remington Steel, I would imagine that the crew was maybe half folks that had worked on the show before. To what degree were there people who had worked on the show before it was canceled, and they were all new to me, and I mean it wasn't clear about anything. I can't Here's the thing that I remember about it. First, I get to go to Ireland.

Well, I have my wife and I have my new baby. Kate is six months old. Oh my god, Kate was six So what I'd like to do? I asked, hold on, hold on, I just have to picture that for a minute, because I know Kate. Okay, what I'd like to do is, I'd like to take the first class ticket that you give me as an assistant director, as a member of the Guild and change it into two, you know, steerage tickets.

You know. There we were with this little six month old baby, and she had already been on location when she was six weeks old. We went to Texas to do a movie Adam, the sequel to the movie Adam. And in fact, she hasn't appearance in TV Guide being held by Joe Beth Williams in the ad art. That's so funny because they'd had a little baby there, so she was there, and she was so this was her second location and so what I remember was the excitement of going someplace fantastic, and we hadn't been to Dublin before.

I had been as a student, but Debbie and obviously Kate had none. But we started off filming in town and the only part of the filming that I remember is that we did a car chase and it was in the little alleys behind in Pasadena. We were not we were not centered in Pasadena. But this was, you know, before pas sad really happened. We had we were living in Altadena at the time, so we were very familiar with the Pasadena and the little alleys between Union and Colorado.

Okay, all right, all right, I know where you're talking about. And we had like a London cab and a car that we were going to double over that and we did some some chase stuff here, which we later did there. All right, I'm going back and looking at that last episode. I know what. I know what chase you're talking about.

Okay, good, I don't. The other thing I remember is once we got to shooting is that it was clear that there was a cloud remember pigpen in, Yes, there was a cloud over uh the name of the star Pierce Broson, Pierce Browson's head, and that was all around James Bond. I mean that that he was just perpetually in a bad mood because he would never ever get to play James Bond. Now, that was clearly that that was never ever going to happen. I mean that's what it looked like, right for sure.

It looked like that that that ship had sailed in some ways. So I think that and I and I that as a great life lesson. You know, the great life lesson is if you're Pierce Brason and they say you can't be James Bond, that it doesn't mean you're not ever ever going to do James Bond. It just means you're not going to do James Bond this time. And I've referred to that in my life.

Actually, So, were you aware of all of the drama around Pierce Brosen not getting to play James Bond at the end of season four before you started working on the show or was that something you learned when you got there. No, I mean I might have might have known about it. I don't care. You know, he was he was professional, He was fine. Stephanie.

I liked we met her dad at one point he came. Was he in my episode? He's in there your episodes. Yeah, I remember at that point doing some research and finding about his father. Yes, the violent and things, some bricks there.

I mean, that was very impressive. I mean that was probably the most impressive celebrity aspect of it for me was you know, the what was it the violinist to the tsar? Right yeah? Yeah, and not bad for a nice Jewish boy, right right, right. So I will say this, the performances are not lackluster, correct, They are working really hard.

So I'm going to give some Like it was clear to everybody that he was really bummed that he lost. I mean, and who wouldn't be. It looks like you just lost playing James Bond, a role that quite honestly you were kind of built to play and thought you were going to get to play, and then you lose it because they want to just take a slight advantage of your contract. Well, and I'm sure that helped them, right that the notoriety around, oh he could play, his value went up to the show people and we surmise that that's exactly why it was brought back, because it was canceled and then literally at the last minute when it became a parenty who was going to be cast as James Bond. They said, oh no, well we need to do this, We need to do more of this because everybody got excited about watching remonton Steel like they're like, oh, the new James Bond.

So we have questions, questions, so many questions. Would you part of the castle? Was there a castle where you were? We were filming Dublin for London. We brought a red bus up, red double decker bus up from England to Dublin.

They don't belong in Ireland. Oh that's so funny. Okay, So I just assumed you were filming Dublin for Scotland, so you were How stupid is that? They had a great studio there by the way, a very old studio way out in the Booneys. You can look it up and find out the name.

I can't think of it now, it's still there, but I remember we were filming police squadroom there, and there was in every squadroom you go to, there's like pigeonholes filled with papers and stuff. And I happened to look at it and it was time cards from guys working at the studios in the fifties and sixties. I mean it was just you know, it's just random paper that happened to be around that the art department had access to and jammed them in and jammed them in and jammin in him oh Ardmore store. Yes, and memorably memorably, I had a production meeting to lead at Ardmore and they gave me a rental car and I was like forty five minutes late because I got totally lost in the backwoods of driving around.

It was before satellites, of course, it was all real time, real life stuff. There's no cell phones, there's no you know, there's no video. You're filming on film even for a long time. I'm not sure. I'm not sure when what's that reflex cameras came in.

I remember when I started as a trainee that not even the camera operator could see exactly what image was going on to the film. He had to rack over right right. It's like you had to look through here and then kind of assume what was going to be there. Now, you know, any idiot on the set can see exactly, you know, on his iPhone. Sometimes they broadcast right, I can see exactly what the shot is.

But then even the operator couldn see Wow, all right, so you were on like four and five then, or you were no. I think it would have been one and two, three and four or five and six. Right, you run three and four? Yeah, so you run three and four. So I accept that.

Okay, I'm gonna yes, I mean, no Castle, right, but I think when we were watching it, your name came up on four or five. It would have been four, have been I mean I came up on five or six. It came up on one of the ones. Okay, maybe somebody owes me money then yeah, all right, all right, all right, so no Castle. But I am glad you got to meet Evans m Lewis Junior.

He's wonderful in the show. And I have favorable feelings for Jack Skellia two. That was a nice guy. Well that's good that he was a nice guy. It was the wrong It was the wrong show and the wrong part I think for him, Well it would have been if they had been consistent with what who this character is supposed to be.

They changed what he was every episode and there were only six episodes or three hours, and but he's this and it was so confusing. He does a fine job, that's not him. He's gone. He's got a great career. He's was totally the hunk of the eighties, you know, one of the hunks of the eighties and is still working and worked a lot, did a lot of cool.

So it was the writings an actual and you know, major league baseball player. And I also think that in some ways they were like, Okay, well we're not going to have Pierce, but maybe we'll get Stephanie and a new guy. Like for a minute, it feels like that's what they're trying to do. Oh, I hadn't thought about it. From that ste In that season five is like, oh okay, so you know he had to come back for season five.

He's not going to stay. Maybe we can carry this show through. That's what it feels like. And that may have been Michael Gleason. That may have been somebody at the studio, which would have made sense if at some level if the show weren't called Remington Steel, because how do you continue the show without Remington Steel.

You can't put another guy and say this is now it's the spinoff. Right. Your job as the first as the director is just to keep things rolling. My job is the first assistant director is to prep the show within an eyelash of its being and to take the script, break it down, figure out how along everything's going to take the film, put the strips in order. We still had cardboard strips.

Strips okay, so cardboard strips wouldn't Can you explain this to our listeners. This is a technology that was invented, according to Lare by Charlie Chaplin and his secretary, and that was they would take strips of emosion and write on it with a grease pencil what the scene was and emotion is film strips. Film strips expose film strips so it's like not reactive, and pin it on a bulletin board. And evidently this woman came up with the idea of giving each actor a number, Charlie Chaplin being number one, and that's where number one on the call sheet comes from. From that moment, nice and having a list of the different characters, not the actors, but the characters and numbers that go down.

And every time a character number one is in the scene, you put a one there, and every time number two is in the scene, you put a two a little bit lower. And so you can see by this array on your corkboard where one works and for example, you don't want Charlie waiting around, so you don't have a scene with one at the beginning of the day and one at the end of the day. So it's a graphic way of looking at the information, and that became by the time you get into the thirties, you have the technology that I was brought up on, which is cardboard strips of different colors, daytime, nighttime, interior, exterior, there's a whole Actually, each studio had its own. Yes, well, I mean that's how I learned in film school nineteen mid eighties.

So well, that's how it was. That's how we did it for years, and for years, even after we had computers, I still kept a board that I felt that I was able and to this day I will tell you that my boards were five to seven percent better because there was a tactile aspect to moving the strips around to get the correct schedule that you don't get when you're dragging and dropping on a computer. Well, just to have a visualization of it in front of you. For me, I could see that being better for me. But you can't do a lot of computers.

You can't get the whole movie in front of you. Yeah, that's what I think. That's what I mean, to see the whole picture of what's happening, and to have to walk to the end of the movie and pick strips and bring them to the front of the movie. Yes, yes, so it is different. And I remember some big movies we worked on had multiple boards, head boards that you know, stretched run And I worked with a director who said that, and what would happen is every time you have a list of strips that are going to be your day's work followed by a black strip, it says, okay, everything before that is this day Thursday, day seven, right.

And there was a director that I worked with. He said that the act of putting the strips that you've shot behind the header board as the header board moves down is better than going We still do the board exactly the same way. Movie magic is really kind of the go to technology other people have, other people have tried to come up with things. It really is the standard. It's a very effective way of manipulating information and being able to print out vast amounts of incorrect information very quickly.

I heard that by the time I got to Riptide, we had gotten it down to the point where I would finish prep. This is the night before the production meeting. At seven o'clock. I would finish at Cannell's office, which is still at How the office isn't there? The building is there?

Libreya and Hollywood Boulevard. Yes, drive down to Barbara's place on Santa Monica and drop it off to them, and they would work all night and generate the and generate those shooting schedule, production meeting. I'm sorry that Rich isn't here to talk about riptide. I think he wants to a whole podcast on riptide that I'll leave to you and him. You also worked on a lot of cool seventy shows.

Emergency one of the first shows you worked on. It was literally a first show I worked on. I worked so much, so many hours on that I sometimes slept in the fireman bed on the set. Oh that's so sweet. I was Randolph Mantooth and Kevin ty Tye.

All right, so we say that again. Kevin Kevin Tye, Kevin Tye. R Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tye. They were so adorable. They were saving lives all over town.

Julie London. Julie London, who is the band leader that that I don't know with white Haired Nono. He was also in the show. Oh, I don't know, and Robert Fuller. Okay, Randy Mantooth.

It was so funny. He was like he was like this idol, right, he was like sexy one. Yeah. Nice guys. They were really nice.

And Kevin was more of an intellectual. So I had a nice rapport with him, and he did a lot of movies for like he was in six Man Out. Oh, he's done a ton of stuff. No, no, really, what's the name of that writer director that did a bunch of cool stuff with Kevin Tye Nine Men Out? Who did that?

Oh Sales, John John. So he did a lot of John Sales movies. Yeah, that's right. I mean, he's just done a lot of movies. But I didn't know that he was, like, I guess he is one of those go two guys.

Sure. So the thing I remember about Randy Vantooth who were shooting, we were always shooting in really hot places and it was like you'd get the script. I remember it, it's like, oh, yeah, we got a car in the roof this one, and you know what, other horrible whatever horrible things are happening. But I remember we were shooting way out by Magic Mountain, and those days it took a long time to get the Magic mount right, and it was a million degrees. And he invited me into his trailer and he offered me an ice cold Verner's diet ginger Ale and I'd never had it before, and that was like his thing that he loved, and he was very generous and sharing that with me was Bobby Troupe.

They thank you. Yes, Yes, he was a big deal bandleader. He was a big big deal, big big deal. Yeah. And Julie London was a great singer.

Well, Emergency was like the first time I was like, oh, that's what Los Angeles looks like because it was set in LA. But you also worked on Barnaby Jones and Colombo worked with Peter Fok Buddy Epson. Buddy Epson was adorable. He would occasionally fall asleep during takes, you know. And about thirty years later, I went to my bank in Altadena.

It was the Bank of America up on Lake Avenue and there was a security guard there, a much older guy with big mutton chop, white mustache, and he said to me, did you work on Barnaby Jones. I said, yeah, I worked on Barne Jones. He said, I remember Barnaby Jones trying to teach you to tap dance, and swear to god it was true. He was. He was a standing on the show.

Oh my god. Wow. So that came back to hunt me many many years later. Adam wouldn't say, Hunt, I think you should. You should put it on a plaque somewhere that Barnaby Jones taught you to tap dance.

No, we didn't. He wasn't successful as a security guard set. But how did that come about? That? He was?

Of course, I mean, of course I was a young schmuck. You know, can you teach me to tap dance or something? You know, I don't remember what it was, but it was like, of course, I want learned a tap dance from the original tin Man, from the tin Man, the tin Man. We're gonna take a little break, We're gonna come back. We're gonna ask us some more questions of Jerem and his life in the eighties upon television and movies.

Life in the eighties. All right, Sharon, welcome back, Welcome back, Jared. We are see we're getting goofy over here we're getting a little bit silly. Well because we're having this a great conversation. It's been so fascinating.

All right, So again not an eighties TV lady at all, but we have talked about The Blues Brothers. That was your first movie as a first assistant. Well, so what happened was I had started at Universal in the mail room, and then when it came time, once I got into the training program, I was kind of seamlessly integrated into emergency there. That was a show there. So I'm still working at the studio, which clearly I'm the only one that loved but okay, Melissa loved it too.

I didn't see it unfortunately. Yes, Julie London, I worked on a couple of features there start. The first one was Swashbuckler. Ever anybody ever hear of that? That was a pirate movie before pirate movies were successful, after they were successful, before they were successful.

Yes, with Robert Shaw and James Jill Jones and Jean Via Bucheld. I'm trying to figure out how I never knew about Swashbuckler considering the cast, because wow, I'm gonna have to find it and watch it. So James Wilt Jones was the nicest guy in the world. And Jean Vi Bucheld was so hot. She was great.

All right, well, okay, now we gotta go. I'll watch a swash. And Robert Shaw was a drunk jerk. And at one point we were standing next to each other, and he was he was super intellectual, really smart. He wrote a bunch of plays.

He wrote The Man in the Glass Booth. Oh yeah, okay, you know he was. He was very much into the bottle at that point. This was before the Sting, but after Jaws, all right, so yes, it was after No. Seventy three four.

Then I guess maybe he was after this thing. We were down in Mexico and he's standing there in his little rid pirate outfit and we're watching James Will Jones do a thing and suddenly he hits me in the ribs. He just goes like whap, and he takes my breath away. And I look at him and he says to me, and there's nothing you can do about it. Are you serious?

I am serious? Wow, So I got custody of the story. So here we are, and I'm not ashamed. I'm not ashamed to say that I came back to Universal and they hired me actually while he Worslee and some of the other guys. They hired me for a couple of months to wander around, poke my nose around and write the manual of Universal Studios and this is this department and this is who's here, and thing like that, and they took out all my jokes and all my quotes and all my cartoons and things, and they made a corporate policy for several years.

So that was a nice gig. And then they promoted me the first assistant director and I was working on a show called Buck Rogers in the twenty fifth century, also one of my favorites from the childhood, Bitty Bitty Bitty. This was nineteen seventy nine. The Universal. At that point, it was still like a college campus and everybody kind of knew each other, and you'd visit each other's sets, and you'd see people at the commissary and kind of, you know, it was it was like it was like a collegial sort of organization.

And people started disappearing. It was like one by one people were disappearing, and it's like, oh what happened to France, Oh wish she's in Chicago. Oh what happened to? They sent him to Chicago, And what was happening is they were prepping this movie called The Blues Brothers there, which was just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and they were expanding the number of people they needed to work on it. And sure enough I got this called Jeremy, You're going to Chicago.

So I was a freshly minted first a d I'd been a first on one or two episodes of Buck Rogers and they were quick to tell me, we don't want you to go and run the set. There's a guy, David Saz who's been prepping with John Landis for months. He's going to run the set. David, by the way, is to my mind, like the best in the business. The work he did on Blues Brothers is second to none.

But we need help coordinating stuntmen coming in and out, loes mobiles, this security at the mall, things like you know, they couldn't even enumerate what they needed. We just want to send you there. So okay, well that's whatever it is. It's better than Buck Rogers in the twenty fifth century. And so I kissed my girlfriend goodbye.

I said, I'll see you in three months. A week later I sent her a ticket. We've been together ever since nineteen seventy nine. That's my wife. You just take her to all the best sets.

Well, that's right, I mean, but this is obviously before nineteen eighty six. So that was the first one I took her to, and so we will always have Chicago as kind of a romantic You know, this isn't necessarily what you wanted to know about. I will tell you one story from that, and that is, Uh, there is a scene in Blues Brothers at the malliar with Yeah, I'm familiar with it. Can you tell me what the first shot, the first interior shot is after the car has been all right, I guess I spoke to crash through the wall going into the mall and they come into a toy store. And so we had a toy store set in the in the mall, and we put a fake wall there and they ran the car through, and it bursts through and knocked over every shelf in the thing and knocked all the toys off the shells.

And you know, when the dust clear, everybody okay, everybody's okay. John landis pull took picked up a Kermit doll, Kermit the Frog doll that had fallen over here, and wired it to the front bumper of the Bluesmobile. Okay, and you can't see it. I've looked frame by frame, I've tried to see it in the thing um and then we shot for a week there, complete mayhem. I don't think you could do that scene today, certainly not the way we did it, because we were all working in this interior thing cars with exhaust, actual glass, not breakaway glass.

I mean, how hazardous, how dangerous by today's standards. Back then, it was like, oh, yeah, we'll take one for the team. We're gonna, We're gonna. You know, it's gonna be fine. And by the way, John Landis would later go on in nineteen in nineteen eighty two to kill three people at the at Indian Dunes on Twilight Zone, and I'd be happy to come back and talk about that all day long with you.

But what I will say is that if if David Sazna had been the first on Twilight Zone, it would not have happened that he would have had the wherewithal to say, John, let's stop the shot, let's do this properly, we'll get the shot, it'll be where you want it to be. It, but we're not going to do it unsafely. So I just want to do that shot out. So anyway, at the end of the week of shooting, and the place was, you know, trashed, right, there was nothing there, I found the Crimit doll and so I took that home and that has become our icon for Debbie and me. The every location I've been on Poland, Italy, everywhere, Kermit's come with us.

The portrait of our children has them holding Kermit, and it's just like that really became a kind of an icon for us. Our first try so wonderful. I love sorry so much. Oh my gosh. My favorite thing about Blues Brothers is its sweetness.

Like it's it's got a lot of heart for a movie that's about it's about the music. It's about the music, you know. And I tell you, Cab Calloway, I was, I was just I met him, I was just could not have been more knocked out. That is fantastic, more than Aretha Franklin, more than anything. Now.

I only did the Chicago portion. They came back and did an awful lot of it here, which I was not on on payroll for unfortunately, but I had a great time. We had three months there and it was fantastic. It has a lot of that recklessness, revolutionary like rawness of the seventies movies and television, and yet it also is the beginning of okay, really, let's just do a you know, twenty five minute car chase and crash things. Well, you know, I guess what they had in the seventies for a brief shining moment is when they were letting auteurs do studio movies.

They were letting it right, is that the streams crossed and you had the Chinatown and you had The Godfather had right, and there um Harold and Maud and you know that that kind of group of things. And then it just became clear that that's not the movie the studios, that's not the business studios wanted to be in. Well, and again, it was also Jaws and Star Wars that turned into everything into a blockbuster, right, like, like suddenly, that's the that's the business we want to be in. And I love both those movies, but in some ways their success marked the beginning of a blockbuster era that has never ever ever left us. I'm going to tell you my Jaws story, even though it's completely off the track.

Okay, you've heard it, I think, but this is just viewers out there. Okay, let me paint you a picture that in nineteen seventy four we'd all been I was in the mailroom at Universal and we were aware that there was this movie that they were shooting that was really in trouble and it was Jaws. And there were a number of reasons that it was not shut down that are not particularly well known. One is that Marsh Green, who is the film executive, his brother, Hilton Green, was the TV executive. They had both grown up as part of the Universal family.

Their dad had been Doug Green had been Mary Pickford's director, right. They came by it, honestly. So anyway, Marsh was out with a heart attack, and John Oser, who was the head of the budget department, was also out for health reasons for a particular amount of time. So they were not my perspectives, they were not getting the information amalgamated correctly to shut down the movie. They would absolutely have shut down.

So anyway, so Jaws is going on. We're aware that there have been issues with it, but you know, it's also there's the big Shark. At one point we'd actually snuck out from the mail room to see where the Shark was being built, and we'd seen Bruce and you know where he is now, right, he's he's a universal on the tram tour. Isn't that him? No?

He is, you know something, there might be more than one Bruce. I'm onto the impression that the real Bruce the Shark is hanging in the Academy Museum. Oh really, when you go up to the top floor, he is there in space there for it. So anyway, the movie is getting ready to open, and it's about a month before the movie opens, and I can't remember if they've had the Dallas screening where they got the idea, oh yes, this might be a successful movie. But there's going to be a screening this Wednesday coming up.

And I go to my friends Stan Musgrove because you know, I've been smoozing him for a year in the mail room, and I say, can I get into this screening? Can you can you help me get into the screening on Wednesday? Said okay. I came back the next day. Okay, here's what you do.

The screenings at eight o'clock at a Core eight. You stand outside the main gate. A white limo will pull up, the back door open, you get in and you can go as May West's guest, hold on, we're sitting up. Go for your listeners. May West was the first Madonna.

I don't know, even Madonna is probably dated. Now who the Lady Gaga? Before there was Lady Gaga, there West. And then before there was Madonna, there was Marilyn Monroe. And before Marilyn Monroe, there was May West.

May West was a creator. She was a playwright. She was She was much more than Marilyn Monroe. Right, and she was arrested and she had a play on Broadway called Sex. I mean she was really, she was the real thing.

Okay in nineteen seventy four, she's eighty three years old. She is still making movies. She was in a movie called Sect that sex tete that very year, and I you know, I can't believe it. Yes, I will go there. I'm absolutely going to do that.

So there it is a quarter to eight, I'm there. The car pulls up, door open as I get in, and there she is. Right, you are going wow to see John. Yes, in a white limoes with May West, the shortest rite in the world, in a white limo, because they've already arrived at the studio. Okay, so there's two or three other guys in addition to the driver.

It's not a one on one date. You know nothing. I don't expect anything's going to happen. Part I am probably the worst built guy there. Okay.

And so we go into the Hitchcock Theater, right, park, get out, walk in, and I'm sitting next to her, and we're a few minutes earlier, right, waiting for the lights to go down, and she's starting to tell me some stories about the nineteen thirties, how she discovered Carrie Grant, how she had a an all white apartment, that she had a pet monkey and he threw his feces all over the place, right, And I am in hog heaven. This is the greatest thing. I mean, I'm a big fan of the movies of the twenties and thirty, so I'm well aware of who she is and I am having such a great time. Then the lights come down, and none of us has ever seen Jaws before, right, we don't know. Everybody knows now that there's this poor stunt girl that goes out from the from the party and it is going to get eaten immediately.

May West has not finished. She is still telling me the story because once you start her at age eighty three, she finishes when she's ready to finish, and she has this arc. She has the whole thing down to a science, and nope, can shark is going to stop her from I was like, May West, shut up. I'm trying to watch the movie. So that really it just made my twenty one year old head explode.

It was like one of the greatest nights of all time. When you get into the limo, though, what does she say? Does she say anything to you? Or does it hello? I'm sure you know, I don't even remember.

That part is not known to us. Now, that's one of the most amazing stories I've ever heard. There's so many parts of that that are amazing. The best part that's right, that's right, shut up by West. Oh my goodness.

Okay, so it's a little off topic. It isn't, but it's it's a great off topic. One thing about Blues Brothers. I'm going to say yes is my assistant whom we found in Chicago. I interviewed a few was a gal named Ketterer Lee Frauenfelder.

That's a name who was brilliant. She was so smart and she has been Tim Burton's assistant director and executive producer for about twenty five years. That is fantastic. Wow. I mean, her career is so much better than my career.

But I was lucky, very lucky to have her un with his brothers. Oh, that's fantastic. Your career has been pretty good. Yeah, but it's not Ketta Lea's career, but I do. But I do have the curbt doll and she does not.

So there you go, so there, all right, So Cagney and Lacy, we got to talk about Cagney Lacy because this is eighties TV ladies, after all, let's bring it back into our sweet spot. And you worked on a couple episodes of Cagney and Lacy. How was that? What was going on? It was fun?

It was great. I like the Ladies. What season was it? Do you remember? Had they been around for a while?

I mean, oh, yeah, they I was one of the very last seasons. Okay, yeah, so it was obviously then it was it was Sharon Glass playing yes, yes, there, we've talked about that before. We're going to get when we get to Cagney Lacy, we will we will dive further into that whole three Cagneys, which I'm very excited about. But yeah, so what it also looks like and again we haven't you know, we haven't examined it closely, but it definitely was a show that in the eighties felt like it was trying to be a feminist show. It was clearly here there they're two ladies and their cops.

But there one's a single lady, single lady, and the other's a nice married lady with a lovely husband. Don't worry, she still likes to have sex with him, right that. It's fine. But it's you know, again, more than the other shows we've yet really talked about he looked at closely. This was a show that had an agenda and was also an issue show.

Like it was like you know, the the you know, Hill Street Blues, the hospital show. It was called Barney Rosenswag. He was really the genius behind that. And so for every episode what we would do is we would come to ARC and I am production designer, would sit in Barney's office in a small office, kind of crowded around, and he would take us through the script beat by beat and explain to us exactly what the intention was. That was always very useful, and it was really the first show we're going to be talking about that is about the two female leads.

It's their stories and they're the ones that are driving story without having the counterpart who is who is a man? Obviously there are men in the show, but the show is really about their relationship. They are driving the story. It is their journeys to their and and that female work friendship so particularly unique even now, like there's not a lot that is that is focused on. These are two people who work together and they create a relationship that is a friendship but also a working friendship.

And they didn't hang out together. Yeah, I mean because because Lacy went home, she went to her husband and her kids and had stuff to do it and Chris went out to wherever it was that she went to and lived her life as a single woman in New York, you know, So good for her, good for both of them. Yeah, And I think that's one of the things I like about the premise and the show that it does show that balance that there isn't one way to be a feminist. It's it's a you know, a combination of things. All right, But that was shot in LA.

Yeah, it's set in New York. Shot in LA that They always said that was their biggest mistake. Yeah, it was not shooting it in New York, as we were like fighting it. I remember, this is the first time I found I saw this particular gag. It was that our camera truck said New York Times on the front and New York Post on the back, so we can park get in the shot.

But it was always it was always guys rushing around putting license plates on to real cars, and you know, because you didn't have the CGI, you know, you couldn't just do that. Oh my god, all right, that's fantastic. I have one memory that has nothing to do with Cagney or Lacey, but it was just a funny thing that happened. We were shooting in the Alexandria Hotel downtown down at that point. It was one of its terrible periods.

It's come back, it's gone away, it's come back, it's gone. I don't know where it is right now. So we were shooting a scene where Cagney and Lacy come out of the elevator and they run down the corridor for something. So the cameras set up in this little landing opposite the elevator, and we're ready to go, and the other elevator door opens, and you know, we all look over. You know, we're controlling the elevators.

I'm in charge of you know, Okay, it's on holding it. But unexpectedly that the other elevator door opens and this guy looks out and he sees the camera pointing essentially at him, and as the doors close, he goes stella. What was great about it, and of course the late episodes, was that we were filming at this lot on Lacy Street. As it happens, there's actually there's actually a lot there, right. And what was great it was so close to downtown that it was very easy to make moves to and from the studio.

We could go out through running shots and then come back in and have lunch and shoot the rest of the day. And also it was unusual in that is we shot I believe seven and a half days per episode for the Okay, we didn't we did not crossboard. We shot seven and a half days an episode that meant that lunch on the eighth day we changed directors. Oh, okay, that's a little bit crazy. Wow, Well, you know it was fine, but it was always funny to have like an extra director's chair saying director on and hanging around for the guy said.

We didn't always finish exactly at lunch. Yes, you can put the tremor there. More directors than we're used to seeing at the time, all right. And so more recently you've worked on Mercy Street and Astronaut Wives Club. And you know what I would call like a twenty fifteen TV ladies shows?

Is Mercy Streets something that you guys are familiar with. I was familiar with it, the PBS show about Civil War nurses. Yeah. Yeah, it was a great show, I thought. I thought that was a terrific underrate, a show that never found its audience.

And finally what happened after two seasons the people would not work for PPS money anymore. And so you work with the film commission. What are you doing now? So I'm helping with the films that get tax credits movies in California. And part of the process of getting tax credit is you have to submit your script, your budget, your schedule, you know a number of different things, and I'm tasked with going through evaluating, correcting the budget.

Certain things qualify, certain things don't qualify, and then we throw a bunch of mathematics at it and we can figure out your show is going to provide more jobs in California than your shows. It's mathematical, you know. Whether it's accurate, who can say. But it started out as a lottery, and it's conceived that this is more fair than a lottery. Every show that receives a tax credit also needs to give back in the sense of having and hiring an intern, bringing a class of students onto the set to visit and neb around, doing a teacher externship, things like that, And I'm in charge of that.

That's the career readiness requirement. And so I put shows together with schools, you know, with whether it's the Fashion Institute, whether it's John Muir High School, whether it's a ghetto film school. You know, I get them together. And we've been doing a lot of panels lately where the director and the producer, we had people from Macbeth, the show Macbeth do a very generous panel for I forget who it was, and Sue were eventually going to be linking to them on our website so other people can see those and enjoy them. All Right, So we have three questions then we ask all of our guests.

So, first question, what's the eighties ladies driven TV show that's most resonated with you think back to the eighties. And I wasn't watching TV in the eighties. I was shooting. I was you know, I had a time only for my career and for my family. Can you give me a hint what shows were on?

You know what? Because you were working with people, I'm going to give you what eighties ladies actress was fun to work with, fair enough on Cagney and Lacy. There was Time daily, Sharon Glass. Time. Time was my favorite.

I loved Time. Okay. Yeah. And actually, and I became friendly with Ellen Burston for a while. She wasn't really an eighties lady on TV, but I did.

I did a show with her in the would have been late seventies, and she and I became scrabbled buddies and we corresponded for a while. I really liked her. We were taking an airplane to Texas to do the show. And I was sitting next to her, and as we started our descent, she says, hang on, I have to help land the plane. And then we landed.

She was okay, all right, I love I loved her. That's fantastic, all right. And what are your current any current television shows with ladies leading the pack? TV movies? Well, there's some good ones on Game of Thrones.

There's some ladies that I liked on Games of Thrones, which I recently caught up with. We also recently watched m Tremay. Oh and do you know that one? You haven't seen it, but yes, thoroughly enjoyed it. And there were a couple of wonderful ladies in that There was a gal who ran a restaurant that her travails were terribly interesting.

And I liked the ladies in that show a lot. Oh and Hacks and that's wonderful. And I think both leads are good, although I think the young writer is a bit of a jerk. The young Writer's a little hard. Jean Smarts amazing Jean Smarts.

I've done a number of shows with Jean Smart. She was in Samantha who she did Samantha Samantha who okay, And Melissa McCarthy was in that too, okay, and she was fantom And I love Christina and Christina Applegate is tops in my book. She I love her. One weird thing after I got a cell phone, after I got an iPhone, and I kept trying to try automatic dial. For whatever reason, the cell phone decided it would always call Christina Applegate.

Calling Christina Applegate, I have to hang up real quick. I mean, I don't know why said it just got it into its head. They do have a mind of their own self. I loved her. She was just so much fun.

I was a production manager on that. I wasn't on the set, so I wasn't really connected that closely to him. And we all thought Melissa MacArthur was fantastic. It's fantastic. The great cast, great cast on that.

That was a show that really was I think overlooked unfortunately. Yeah, I mean, but it did it. Sorry, it ran for a while. I think only two seasons, with a little more, I think two seasons. Yeah, when my mind was three seasons.

That third season was amazing. Yeah, when we went to Ireland. Going to Ireland is always the best. So third question is what's the most action hero slash television moment you've experienced in real life? Okay, So we were doing a movie called The Thirteenth Year, a TV movie about for Disney, about a kid that turns into a mer person.

It was kind of it was kind of a metaphor for adolescence. And we we're filming down in one of those Newport beaches or sort of places, and two things happened in quick succession. One was we were on some rocks or something overlooking the bay and I walked out in front of the crew and I was holding the board in front of me to explain something. And I suddenly realized I was doing Moses right with my tablets in front of everybody. And then just as that happened, the location manager played a prank on me, which took me so by surprise it made me think I was crazy.

And that was there was a ferry going by, and this must have been three hundred yards away, and everybody on the ferry suddenly went hello, Jerem, and it's just like it, just you know, I just like it. So those two things, those two things happened at almost the same moment. And so that was kind of weird. Okay, that's a good one. That's a good one.

Oh my god, it has been such a pleasure to have you on the show and hear all these stories. Thank you very much. I had a good time. Thank you so much, JAREDI thank you. Hey, Susan, what time is it?

It's audioography time, Sharon who. You can find out more about the Television Academy at Emmy's dot com. That's Emmys dot com. They have really cool events, some of which are open to the public. And Jerem mentioned the Director's Guild of America DGA training program and you can find out about that program and other director development programs through the Director's Guild at DGA dot org.

And there will be links on our website to those resources. And if you want to watch Remington Steel on streaming, breaking news, all five seasons are currently available on Amazon Prime and Apple TV. We're not sure for how long all five seasons will be streaming, so go watch them while you can. And Sharon, I'm not saying that the last three seasons are now available because of eighties TV ladies and our fans, but actually that is what I'm saying, because I'm telling you When we started this podcast, only seasons one and two were legally available anywhere online, and now we've got them all. I think it's us and our fans.

Thank you Eighties TV Ladies fans, and a book I want to tell you about Backwards and in Heels by film reporter and critic Alicia Malone. This book highlights stories of specific women in film, from Alice ke Blache to Ava de Verne, while exploring the past, president and future of women working in film. It's really quite good, even though it's not just about TV Ladies. Next time on Eighties tv Ladies, the amazing, adorable and ever surprising nineties TV babies will be back Certa. Megan and Sergio were assigned three episodes of Remington Steele to watch, so we are looking forward to hearing the thoughts of the youths.

If you're Evington Steel fan, I'm curious what three episodes you would pick to represent the show to someone who has not watched it. Let us know at Eighties tv Ladies dot com. In the meantime, please follow, rate and review on your favorite podcast player or on Apple Podcasts. We love your suggestions and questions. Keep them coming and as always thanks for listening.

We hope Eighties TV Ladies brings you joy and laughter and lots of fabulous new and old shows to watch, all of which will lead us forward toward being amazing ladies of the twenty first century. So they