Episode 55: Old Love + Altercation + Bones

Weird. Welcome to the Life and Times of Captain Barney Miller. I'm your host, Mike Whitejoy me. Of course it is the rookie Christashu. Can we call me that anymore?

Given who we have on this episode? Is that even fair anymore? Mike White I don't even think that that Nom de guerre plumer, nom de Philip, I don't think. I don't think that works anymore, given the Max Gale is about to be gracing our podcast here in like forty five minutes. I don't know you're still a rookie to me, Chris.

I never won't be. I'll be I'll always be bringing you your mail. Mike. Apparently that's right. Proby, Yeah, that's right exactly.

I just keep failing upwards. It's the Peter principal exactly. On this very special episode of the Life and Times of Captain Barney Miller, we were talking about three episodes of the original Old Barney Miller, Old Love, Altercation and Bones. Old Love originally aired April second, nineteen eighty two. I was exactly ten years old that day.

Altercation, which dropped on April ninth, nineteen eighty two, and Bones, which came out April twenty ninth, nineteen eighty two. We've got Hal Linden, Alan Bergman, and Max Gale in the director's seat, and we also have Max Scale on deck and interview about Bones his career. You're all kinds of stuff, so very excited for that. But before we get into that, Chris, what did you think of these three episodes? Three from the final I should say I.

Was about to say two things. Hey, this is our penultimate episode of the show, which is pretty crazy. We are now at the point where the next episode of the show is going to be the end, and it's a little, I don't know, it's a little bittersweet that we have Max Gail on this episode because you know, we've spent so long talking about him, and obviously we've seen several episodes that he's directed, but this is, you know, this episode that we're going to be talking about at the end of our episode is his final episode that he directed. And so I think that these three episodes, I think broadly, Old Love, Altercation and Bones I think are pretty good. I think Old Love is interesting.

I mean, again, like anything with Dietrich is strange, because Dietrich is a strange guy and this is one of the stranger Dietrich episodes I feel anyways, altercation. I think also each of these episodes feels like it's kind of wrapping up a story here, or at least a character's kind of not plotlines so much, but at least some of their story beats from throughout the show. And Old Love I think does the least of the three in that regard in terms of actually pushing the ball forward. But we actually get to see that Arthur Dietrich is, you know, quite the lover. Well, I mean we already knew.

That, but oh yeah, firsthand. Huge hog, huge hog leg even. Yeah, I mean we've seen Old Love before. We watch it for the last episode, though. A different way.

So it's nice to see again, and you know, to see one of the characters we just talked about with Norman de Luca, the Mario Racuzo character. That was nice having him back and getting accused of attacking a guy and breaking his ribs, and I guess he did break the ribs. There's no accusation there, but he was trying to perform the Heimlich maneuver, and I hear it's very common to break some ribs. Guy had no idea what was going on, thought that he was being mugged and tries to get Racuzzo arrested. But I think we start off the episode with that, and then we start off pretty quickly with Sharon Spellman as Cynthia Reesparrow, who's the old flame, the old love of the title, coming back into Dietrich's life, and yeah, we get to hear more about his time when he was in college and the protests that he was a part of, and yeah, she's the one that got away.

They have that real Maudlin sentiment to this, but also feels like Dietrich's very very happy to see this lady. And it's kind of a you know, you're talking about bittersweet, how bittersweet it is that we're coming to the end of this very bittersweet episode, and really especially Landisburgh's line about when she says, I'll give him my best to her husband and he's like he already did, Like oh nice, yeah he uh. You know, Dietrich is I think one of my favorite characters in the show. I mean, all the characters in the show are great, all the main characters in the show are great, but Dietrich was you know, he was the one that came in late. Same you know, same with Ron Kerry.

I mean really, you know, they kind of came in late to the show and had to find their groove within the groove of the three people for people that were on the show at the time. And you know, Steve Landsberg, I think I think he's managed to cement a spot for himself in the show, and I think this episode is a is a good indicator of that. I mean, again, like the fact that they can get as much mileage out of the out of him having an old fling as they do it is I mean, that's the whole point of the episode, but I mean it's the whole point, but it's also I mean, the episode I think is okay in its own right, outside of the A plot, which isn't necessarily always the case, because we do get I think a pretty good B plot with the child actor who beats the shit out of his agent.

Did you recognize this gentleman. Kind of he's been on the show before? Right? Well, what it help if I talked about a psychic giving him a nose bleed in a restaurant? Oh god, yeah, you're right.

Modern Problems is very own yes. Plus he was also in Murder Can Hurt You, so we've talked about him a few times now. Murder Can Hurt You and Modern Problems, boy, the two things that people are waiting asking for, yearning for someone to talk about problems. Oh man, oh man. And you know when I posted the Fletch episode of the Chasing Chevy Chase podcast recently, somebody said, oh, I can't wait till you guys do modern problems and I said, we did that a while ago.

Your wish is my command. Here you go, here's our episode. So why would anyone wish that upontment cells willingly modern problems is? Oh god, it's just yeah, Murder Can Hurt You as one thing, but modern problems is another. And Mitch Krendle has a very short filmography, and the fact that he has both of those on there is pretty rough.

Yeah. Well, it's funny because we just did an episode about being There and he has an almost blink and you miss it kind of appearance in there. But I love how that's the one photo that they have from stuff on IMDb being There. Yeah. Yeah, I'm all right, that's one of his best known roles.

I'm like, okay, cool. Yeah, he hasn't worked in thirty years. Yeah, maybe we should reach out see if we can. But uh, you know, we got Mexicale. They even get this.

Guy night He'll be on Night Court eventually, so yes, also that. Will be there eventually, so I'm looking forward to it. But yeah, I like that whole thing. And I like how his mother is the silver bearing lady and you know that is his agent, even though he beat him up, is the most sympathetic to his cause. Right, yeah, well, and that's and that's the That's the thing that I think works about the plotline in the episode is the fact that they kind of don't go the direction of what you're expecting.

They go the direction of Okay, well, his agent is actually sympathetic like and and he's not an asshole, which is weird because that's kind of the expectation when you have an old white man coming into the precinct. Is legal. He's what it feels like to me. Anyways. Yeah, he could be another mister Felch, the guy with the broken.

Ribs, right exactly exactly have you. Seen his wooden leg? And Mitch Mitch Krendle plays such like, I don't know, he plays such a I don't know how to put it other than he's just a little shit. He's like a grown up adult little shit. Like he acts like such a little shit the entire episode.

It's so fitting with him being the former child star, though. I think he did that on purpose. Yeah, it works, per I'm saying, like it works perfectly. You know, him and modern Problems is one thing, but him here, I think he's pretty great. Yeah, him and Mario Rakuzo are pretty great.

Has Mario Racuzo plays such a I don't know when we talked about that Twilight Zone eighty five episode or Night Gallery, whatever the fuck it was. At this point, all that is just run together. I guess it was Tails from the Dark Side. I think it's, yeah, Tales from the Dark Side where he was cooking up uh uh, who is it Freddy Duke in the Big Pot? Yeah?

Yeah, oh what are all these carrots doing in here? I think we said this last time. I'll say it again this time, Like he is unbelievable as a villainous character. Mario racuz is. Well, he's got those beautiful eyelashes and he just like there's a couple of times where they look at him, and he's kind of a sad sack in this and I'm like, he's yeah, he is.

It's hard for me to see him as anything other than the dope, and I think I blame Barney Miller for that, but that's vine. But yeah, he he's great. I mean, everybody in this episode is great. I think I'm not gonna say we've seen this before because I think there are some of the elements in the episode that make it feel a little different than the last couple times we've seen something like this. But I do like that we have a reoccurring character, and we have, you know, a fair amount of people in the precinct too.

I mean I think we have one, two, three, four, three or four people yeah, four, yeah, five even actually. Yeah, because we get the child actor, his mother, his agent, We have the Racuzzo Racuzo, the guy that he quote unquote mugged, and then even the old flame coming back. So yeah, a lot of people in the pre Sancton. I think they're all in there at one point, and I like the whole uh, the way that they shot that when it's Dee Trich talking with Barney, but he keeps looking over Barney's shoulder and making eye contact with his old flame, Like, oh, that's nice, and that was unusual because it's different camera work than I'm used to. Well, I think they're trying to emphasize I don't.

I mean, like Arthur Dietrich and this woman like, I don't. I don't know where it goes because I don't think it goes anywhere. I think that's obviously the point. But that's it. I like the way that he I like the way and spot that they leave his character effectively.

Yeah, yeah, I do too. And again he's an enigma. We have no idea really what's going on. But I love that whole little speech he gives about how he always wants to be the best at everything, and I like I was saying that in front of his coworkers, basically like I'm the best cop here. I also like him apologizing about the long lunch, Sorry about the long lunch.

Oh yeah, following up on his uh coming in, No, my alarm clock didn't gough atlantic climactic, isn't it. Yeah. I love Dietrich. I mean, he's to your point. That's that speech at the end that he gives everybody where he's like I could have been a good doctor.

I could have been a good lawyer, I could have been a good husband, but you know, I wouldn't have been the best. But then I'm the best cough Like all right, sure, wow, what a dickhead. But like at the same time, you know, and then he goes, you know, a present company excluded. But you know, like I think, at the end of the day, these four plus you know, Levitt, are the best of the NYPD. So I don't think he's he's far off.

I mean, I think that's kind of the point. Barney definitely is the best of the NYPD. If not the singular best person working in the NYPD might be the case. And he wants that promotion. Man, we definitely get a little bit of that.

I think it's in the is it in the Altercation episode or is in Altercation? Yeah? So yeah, to your point, we're kind of wrapping up this whole storyline with Harris and the lawyer. The rip sister. Yeah, Arnold Ripner, Alex Hentelhoff himself.

What an asshole. He's so good at being an asshole. I love how much of a jerk this guy is. He's so good at it. Yeah, he comes back in after Ron, Harris just gets another book done in the last couple episodes.

Yeah, last I knew he had writer's block. Yeah, now he's like, I got another book done, and it's like wait a second. But it was a little bit of a downhill. It was like maybe there was a couple months in between the last episode in this episode, I don't know, but yes, it was a little odd to me that all of a sudden, Harris just has another book. Like, like literally, he just has another book.

Right. I'm not saying it's lazy. I'm not saying they could have done a better job. It's just like, give us some context as to where the fuck this came from, because to your point, the last time they talked about it, he literally had writer's block. Yeah.

I want to say there might have been one mention of not having writer's block, but win, Yeah, I think it was like just in the last couple episodes. Though it was not that long ago. I mean, Blood on the Badge took almost the entire season at the time. Season seven or six and seven. There's something like it was not an insignificant amount of time that they spent another you know what, this reminds me of literally reminds me of Death Star two.

Yeah. Oh yeah, well it's just like we had another one like shitting in the wings, Like why. Somehow Arnold Ripner. Yeah, well and that's the thing, like they needed to get Rpner back. I understand that, like and I appreciate that, but the way the way they the way they got him back is ridiculous.

What I just was very surprised that he ends up popping written it right in the mouth. I'm like, what, like you're gonna allow. That, Bernie. I would think there would be immediate action against Terris, but burning seems okay with that. And then we get can we talk about this other plot line because I have I have Oh my god, I have a question for you.

Sure, Miriam Beard NETHERRII her character has like penises in the freezer of her house, right, yeah, she's like a fucking murderer. No, like she's a literal yeah yes literally, oh yeah. Total stalker. Yeah. It's very funny because I thought that I was getting her in the lady and I can't remember her name hopefully Richard's yelling at his podcast.

Or from a Buary. No, the lady from from Alice that played flow on Alice because she's another redhead and she looks somewhat similar but two totally different actresses. And I know that she had been in this before. I think this is like her third appearance on the show, fourth appearance, last appearance on the show, And I kind of wish that she had been in here as this same character a few times, maybe, just to like, is this comes out of nowhere, This memory's weight field character comes out of nowhere, and it's just like, Oh, you finally caught me. I've been, you know, stalking you since you were a fucking rookie.

Yeah, it's so weird, fucking weird, it's fucking weird. So she's been in three other episodes in season five and season six, in season seven, and now this being her last episode, I'm so fucking confused as to how we're supposed to take this as anything other than immensely unsettling, deeply creepy. Oh yeah, I mean they play it for laughs. Of course, they also played rape for laugh you know, a couple of seasons ago. Very true, they very much did.

Yeah, I don't think that this would be taken as lightly these days. But yeah, because it's just weird that She's walking around with all these clippings and things. I'm like, oh, when the way she reacts, I mean, she plays the role very well because the way she reacts to Barney, I'm just like, Oh, there's the really wrong going on here. And it takes you the entire episode before you find out. Yeah, and I I don't get it.

It's fucking weird. Like you have Ripner and Harris, which is I think the more important storyline, But I don't understand what they're what what is the point of the I don't know. I don't know. I don't get it. I really don't understand.

Now, she was mugged, right. And he like stopped the muggers from taking her purse. Right, But I'm saying, like with this new one with like right now she's in the precinct looking at mug books and she eventually doesn't she finger Robert Pastarelli. I think, so okay, yeah, and she and she gets and she gets mugged in front of the police station. Right right, I would say that's pretty convenient.

Yeah, But then but then she's obsessed with Barney, and it's so weird because it is she meant to be maternal because she looks like she's. His age, I know, right right, Yeah. That's the weird thing for me. It comes off very maternal, but it's like, is she meant to be? Yeah?

I mean, if anything, he looks maybe a little older than man. But yeah, I was very happy to see Todd Sussman back as the stockbroker. Who's just. Wasted to the gills, I guess with all of these drugs, and he seems to be living his best life right now. Yeah, Todd Sussman looks perfectly stoned the entire episode.

He's great. I mean, it's like, so many of these actors are very familiar to me from other things, but it Sessman and handle Off, both of them classic mash actors for me. So I'm just like, yep, okay, I've grown up with these faces. And Susmen's face. Oh it's just so good.

It's got that hang dog look to him. It's so good. He plays Yeah, he plays OpEd up really well. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, he's he's great. I mean, I just if it were me, I would have given what happened with Rypner and Harris a little bit more time.

Same uh, same, because I don't know they don't. It's I'm of two minds here. It's that they don't make it seem like it was important enough, even though they already had. So It's like they kind of undid a lot of an entire season's worth of work with Rypner and Harris and Blood on the Badge. They undid all of it just so they could have a cheap gag of Harris punching Ripner in the face, which we don't even see, which ultimately goes nowhere, right, And and what we get to see some of the friction between Barney and Harris finally sort of maybe resolved.

I don't. I mean, like, I don't even want to say it's been resolved. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, and I think this is the only resolution we're going to get. I doubt that Ripner's back for any of the finale.

And yeah, this whole thing of like, oh, we I love looking at your artwork on my wall. But then later on he's like, oh, I didn't get any money from this. I'm like, what is he talking about? Yeah, like, can you sell the artwork? I imagine that Harris had some pretty nice pieces.

Yeah, I don't. I don't I don't understand either he did or he didn't. Get stuff, Like, I'm very confused. It's almost like again, it's almost like they shouldn't have done anything other than the Rypner storyline or the Ripner storyline and the creepy woman. But I think having a third storyline in there kind of gets in the way of everything, and that ends up being, at least for me, the stumbling block of the episode, because the stuff with Rypner just doesn't feel like it.

As much as I appreciate them kind of finally putting a cap on the story, I don't think they did a very good job of it. Yeah. One question that I wanted to ask Max Scale when we were talking with him was when did they know that this was the final season? Like did they go into this sounds like, and you guys will hear this later, it sounds like they knew that this was the last season because of his negotiation, Like, hey, I haven't directed you know, like I have an episode do for me, you know coming up here, because I would have thought, Yeah, to your point, they would have done more with the book story earlier, done more with Rpner, maybe even brought him back in earlier. Than this and then had this be the resolution.

Yeah, it's very strange. It's very strange, and it doesn't really work, and it's kind of a waste of the Harris storyline because honestly, I was kind of okay with where they had left it. Yeah, same here, and I would have been okay without Harris even writing another book. Yeah. Also that Yeah, because I also don't know what this book is about either, right right?

Yeah, because it's not like because Wojo ask them, like, am I in this one? He's like, oh no, No, I'm like, oh, okay. Right, Which also that's the that also begs the other question, like what the fuck was Hair's writing about? Right right? Like, I mean, I'd be pretty cool if it was like a sci fi book or something.

Fish twenty forty nine. Fish, Fish twenty sixty nine, Fish sixty nine. I'm very curious if they will address that in those next three I mean, I'm on tender hooks right now about how this whole thing wraps up, because it's very smart the way they plant the seed in the next episode with Bones, where we have the rifle, and I know that that rifle is going to be a big deal coming up, and this whole thing. I mean it plays it starts off like a regular regular Bernie Miller, where it's like, oh, there's no water, and like, okay, yeah, we haven't had something like that happen for a little while. Like I think it was super cold in there.

They didn't have any heat. But like we've seen flooding, we've seen all of this stuff happening. But they precinct's been pretty good for the last couple of seasons, but now this one it's, oh, we don't have any water. And I don't get the joke of the Spanish guy who comes in and is the repairman and he starts speaking to them in Spanish, even though he can speak perfect English, right, well, not perfect English, some pretty good English. Yeah.

I really like the janitor with Harris or not with Harris. With Levitt, I thought that that was Billy's. I thought that was really smart, kind of giving Levitt someone to kind of be an advocate for him, who's, you know, in a similar position that he is, know, kind of look down on by everybody, kind of treated poorly by everybody. And I think it's interesting because it's taken this long to the second to essentially the second to last episode of the show because the next episode, when we do our next episode, it's technically all one episode. So yeah, it's it's interesting that they finally have somebody advocating for Levitt other than himself, because nobody's really done that for him up en to this point.

No, and you would think somebody would, you know, you would think, gosh, I mean, Barney really should recognize the talent that Levitt has. I'm these words are coming out of my mouth and I'm surprised to get I'm like, oh, like five seasons ago, I would have been like, get this guy out of here. But it's like, right, I freaking love love it now. So it's like, yeah, like he really wants to do a good job and he's trying his best. He might be misdirected sometimes, but he really wants to do a good job, right.

And he also doesn't appreciate being treated as kind of a nuisance by Barney and them, which I think what's interesting is this episode. I thought it was gonna come to a head and then it kind of goes nowhere. Oh yeah, just really backs down very quickly. Yeah, I didn't understand what was the deal with that? Did you?

No? No. I was like, oh, okay, finally Levit's gonna just let him have it with both barrels. But no, it just kind of turns the other way very quickly, and. And at the same time we do get to see Levitt kind of lose it right a little bit, but not as much as I would have thought.

Yeah, I mean, he gets mad and he's like covered in poop at one point, I'm assuming or dirt or mud or whatever that is. Like, yeah, I'm not. Sure what that's supposed to be it because I don't know what they're working. I mean, obviously a wall falls in later on, and I guess maybe it was the wall doing Yeah, I was. It's funny because basically Levitt's going out the same way he came in, because remember when he was the mole digging through you know, before he was Levitt, and he looked almost the exact same with all the dirt all over his face.

Yeah, yeah, no, you're right, And what a weird callback to like what fucking five seasons ago. Yeah, before little Levitt was even little Levitt. Yeah No, I like the idea of him finally feeling so put upon that he's like, I'm fucking done here with you guys. But it's like it's come too late, like, yeah, unless unless they come back to it, which I guess in Landmark they might. But it feels like there's more important things to deal with now, you know.

Now they're gonna have to wrap up eight seasons worth of stuff all in three episodes. Nott sixty minutes, right. Yeah, pretty much all the commercials taken out. Yeah, what are your what are your expectations for the last episode of the show, because you've never seen it or you have. I probably saw it, but when it originally aired, so it's been a minute since.

It's been a minute since nineteen eighty two, so I was having my tenth birthday this year, I'm having my fifty third. So it's a little yeah, my expectation, boy, because obviously the A story is going to be all about this, well it might not even be the story, but the whole thing is going to center on the rifle, and that it's a artifact of some sort, and that they're going to close down the one two and turn it into a historical monument or something. That's my feeling now. I haven't read ahead, you know, Otto, I love you, but I can't read to the end of the book yet, you know, I got I gotta stay back from that stuff. So that But then as far as like, it feels like it's just going to be a cavalcade of guest stars and just have all of these people that we've seen throughout the years coming back.

Now. I haven't looked this up, but I seem to remember the last time we saw Barbara Brary, we said, and we'll see her again in the finale. No, we won't. No, I don't make so. Holy shit, Okay, I thought for sure we would get her.

I don't think we might get a Fish appearance. Maybe I don't think so. Really, I don't think so. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know.

Take some prop bets here on a fifty year old episode of a show. Do we think Fish is going to show up? If memory serves, I don't think Barbara Barry shows up if memory serves, I don't think Avagoda shows up. But I think Scanlon shows up. Scans would make sense.

James Gregory shows up. We better have fucking Luger. Man. If we don't have Luger, I'm gonna be pissed. And he's got to come back.

Well, No, that's the thing. We I think we determined that his wife is not going to be shown. Again, right, I assume they're gonna mention her in some passing in some passing way. That's my expectation. Anyways.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm I'm expecting. I'm hoping that they can, that they can tie everything together. But at the same time, like I feel like they're gonna focus more on the building than anything else. No, I think it's gonna be the people.

I think they will. I mean, Ernie is so invested in the community and these people he's been helping out for so many years, right, I mean, what are these guys gonna do? Are they just going to go off to other precincts? I don't. I think that for me is going to be the part that I'm gonna have hard time watching.

Is that last oh, the last moment of the last episode is not going to be a pleasant experience for either one of us. I feel like I think we're probably both going to be in the throes of some emotion because I mean, we spent a lot, you know, and I think that this is, you know, like anything else. I think it's a good and a bad thing. But we have been covering this show for a very long time. We have been covering this show since twenty twenty.

Yeah, you're right, we started this right after the pandemic started. I think. Yeah, life is so drastically different now from where it was then for both of us in so many ways. And yet, and yet Barney Miller has been a consistent thing. I mean literally, like, you know, we started the Colchak Show by we, I mean you, you put out the you know, the kind of call to somebody to be on the Colchak Show with you, and this has come from that.

And you know, Colchack didn't get an ending, not like this show is going to and this is going to be I think the first thing that we've ever watched together that has some semblance of an ending, like some semblance of a conclusion, some finality to it. Because when we did rankin in Bass with Richard, who will be joining us on our final episode, that just kind of stopped. I mean we just kind of determined we're done with this. It's like once we watch Landmark one, two and three, there's nothing else, There's no more Barney Miller there. We could go watch the other family feud appearances or you know, ten thousand dollars pyramid or whatever.

But this is it, and I'm hoping the show does a good job at landing the plane, because for ninety nine percent of the time, this has been one of the most consistent shows I've ever seen. Oh yeah, Yeah. There's only been a handful of times where we've said not good enough, Yeah, this, this doesn't work, doesn't work for us. Yeah, and that's infrequent at best. Oh yeah, yeah.

I mean I don't remember offhand how many. Oh I can look it up. There's one hundred and seventy episodes of Bernie Miller, and for me to say a handful haven't been good. Yeah, we have done. I think this is either episode fifty four fifty five, and I would say broadly, almost every episode of our show that we've talked about, we've been at least able to find one or two of the three episodes that we've liked.

And that is not the case on so many of the things that we have watched together. I think the only time we got a total blind side by all three were those Dorsey episodes. I didn't dislike him as much as you did, but you're right. I mean those I think might be us a bridge too far, and I mean, look, you know, Wojo's Girl I think has its oh, I think problems. Well that was a very on ev I know Wojo's Girl wasn't the seventh season, but the seventh season felt like the most on even one.

Yes, I agree, and if. Season eight has felt much more like, Okay, we're going back to the well in a good way. We're seeing some real things that we want to see, and we're seeing familiar faces, we're seeing some familiar plot lines, but we're getting some good storytelling. Yeah, I know, I completely agree. I've actually found season eight to be rather pleasant in terms of what it's done, where it's gone, the storylines that it's kind of spent its time on.

No, I've enjoyed Season eight immensely. I'm I have very little trepidation going into the final episode, because you know, from everything that Max Gale told us, from everything that I've read in Auto Bruno's book From the Files of the Old One Too, which you can find at Bear Manner Media, I don't think even with the seventh season being kind of middle of the road, it was still much better than most things like that. We holy shit, we've watched episodes, we've done episodes of other shows where nothing has been worth talking about, and we have struggled to spend forty five minutes talking about anything. I don't think we've ever struggled to talk about this show, not in any substantive way anyways.

No, No, we've definitely had a much harder time when it comes to like Twilight. It's on eighty five, right. Which you wouldn't think would be the case, given that this is a sitcom, given that this is like, theoretically for me, this should be the hardest thing to talk about. Neither one of us spend any amount of time talking about comedies on our respective movie podcast because they're not easy to talk about, because you end up just going remember this one funny line, remember this other funny line. But I honestly think that talking about Barney Miller every month for the last five years has helped me learn how to talk about comedies better, because they are genuinely one of the hardest things to talk about.

And we do the Chevy Chase podcast together, you, I and Mark Begley, and those are all primarily comedies, and I'm not sure we ever would have done that if we hadn't been doing something like Barney Miller, where we're forcing ourselves to be critical and kind of, you know, objective about comedy, even though comedy is in so many ways the most subjective of subjective things, because there are plenty of comedy that just don't don't work for people, like just doesn't broadly doesn't work at all, and that's you know, comedy is very subjective in that regard. And I think objectively, Barney Miller is a great show, one of the best shows ever made. And I think subjectively it's one of the funniest shows ever made, because it still makes me laugh when the show came out in the late eighties or in the late seventies, early eighties, like, and it's still making me laugh in my thirties in twenty twenty four, damn near fifty years later.

So pretty impressive. Yeah, very impressive. Yeah. I wonder if talking about Squad might have helped us out a little bit there too, with because yeah, it's it's tough to talk about comedy. It's the hardest thing.

Yeah, I feel like we're giving this one a little bit of a short shrift. This bones episode, but you do get to hear a lot more about it when we're talking with Max. So listening to me calling Max with mister Gail. Mister Gail, Yeah, our friend Max Gail. Well, I mean, you know, that's that's the weird thing, you know, getting to talk to Max Gail because we've already obviously recorded it.

As we're recording this episode, it was really, you know, pinch myself, I'm dreaming that we were getting to talk to Max Gail. And Max, if you are listening, thank you so much for I think making the show one of the things that, like, again, as someone who is thirty four years old, who was not even alive when the show was on, I was still what god eight years from being born when the show went off the air. For fuck's sake, click yeah, man, the show goes off the air in so Bones airs April thirtieth, nineteen eighty too. I'm born April twenty second, nineteen ninety. I mean, like, this show is on long before I'm even an inkling in anybody's mind, especially in my parents.

But getting to talk to Max Gail was I don't know, like I've talked to a lot of actors as I know you have, but I've never spent so much time with someone as I have with Max Gail, like genuinely, Yeah. It's pretty wild, yeah to and I can't even imagine. Yeah, we'll talk about this more next month when we talk about Landmark, but just this letting somebody into your living room for so long. I mean, yes, the show ran for normal people eight years. For us, it's gone five years.

It's still five years of our lives where every month we're checking out three episodes of this show and just most of the time laughing our asses off and just having a great time with it. And yeah, you form these relationships with these fictional characters that you see walk around on screen, it really means something. And you know, I think, you know, you'll hear me ask Max Gaale about it in the interview. I ask him because, you know, and this was something I kind of wanted to bring up as we as we kind of reached the nadir of this show. But it was interesting because Max says in the interview that he perceived him and Barney in the show as having a older brother younger brother relationship and as opposed to a father son relationship, and once he explained why I kind of understood more, and I agree.

I think I after rewatching the episodes today in you know, in not in hindsight, but in you know, after the fact of having hearing him say that and hearing him talk about kind of his interpretation of their relationship. I mean, I think it is like older brother, bigger brother in a lot of ways, like and and I wanted to kind of bring that up because you know this show, and and you know previously Colchak the Nights Talker, you know the Colchak tapes. These are the two shows that like you and I have really become friends, and like you and I have become I think, like genuine creative partners. And you know, I look up to you immensely, as I know the character of wo Jehowitz does to Barney and the show.

And so I'm just passing that along to you. As you know, you always joke about me being the rookie. Well, I I appreciate it, and I do internalize that I probably have more wo Jehoits in me than I would like to. Uh. I would like to admit I don't know about my love of sex workers.

Maybe that's a Wojahoitz thing that stays with him. But that's all me. I mean, that's what I was doing this evening. I couldn't make it back home on time. Tips Oh okay, well that was you.

Okay. You know, I'm frequent, frequent solicitor. So now you're more the Barney of the two of us. You're more level headed and and you know, and that's what I appreciate about you know, you and your friendship, and you know, the creative kind of spirit that you bring to the things that we do. Because to your point, and again, to pull back the curtain on this a little bit, I mean, we've been doing the show for five years.

We've been doing this show for five fucking years. I've known you for only about nine years. We've been right, We've been doing this show for about half of our friendship. Like this has been this show has been the biggest in terms of like long term project. This is the longest term project I've worked on that has like a conclusion to it.

And so yeah, I mean again because culture Cast, I don't think it has any end date in sight. Projection Booth doesn't have any end date in sight, and so this is kind of like I mean, we spent five years with Hall Lindon and Max Gail really and Ron Glass, you know, and to be able to get to talk to one of the three, one of the two surviving is kind of you know. I mean, that's the other thing that bums me out. I Mean, I wish we could have done this show fifteen years ago, Like can you can you imagine doing this show at like the early days of podcasting when Landisburg and Levitt and you know, well, Ron Carey and Ron Glass were all alive, like and you could have just got like all of them, because at one point Auto got some of them.

I mean, Auto was you know, Auto got got in a lot of ways, a lot more than we did, which is why we're such big advocates for his book. But I mean, that's the other thing that's hard about this show is at some point there will be no one left from this show, and the only way that people are gonna find it, I guess is by word of mouth or because that's my concern here, and that's kind of what I always wanted to be part of in making you know, creative content is preserving things that matter to me. And at some point there will be no one left from this show, and I don't know who's going to talk about this show at that point. And at some point there will be people who did not see this show live. There will be people who have only ever seen this show show because their mom and dad told them about it, or they saw it on Nike at night with their grandma or something to that effect.

And I don't know about you, but for me, being part of the preservation of these kinds of things as maybe pedantic and banal as our commentary might be to some people. And I'm not saying we think it's that, but I understand if people don't like, we have to say, why are they talking about this show they don't even like it, that's not true. We've spent so much time watching this show. If you don't think we like this show, to have your fucking head exam in rank. But it's just it's crazy to me because I've always wanted to be part of the preservation and the you know, the adoration of things that other people make because you know, I don't think as I'm sure you would agree, like sometimes it's the hardest thing to do is be an advocate for yourself so other people advocating for you is really important, and I don't think Barney Miller is a show that needs us advocating for it, but yet nobody's talking about it in twenty twenty four.

You know, we are like but it's not like people my age broadly know Barney Miller is, which seems like kind of a shame because people my age know about all the other cop shows like Law and Order or Criminal Minds or NYPD Blue or all those shows that I mean again varying degrees of quality portrayal of police officers. But that's the other thing, and I mean again, in our divisive and divided times, I know that cops are kind of a dirty word, but like Barney Miller shows what I think we all wish cops would be, oh idealized concept of the police. And you hear Max talk about it because he doesn't really get into it, but he mentions like kind of being at odds with the fact that he's playing a police officer, but he has like, you know, mixed feelings on the police because I mean again, he's playing a cop in a cop show.

But he's also a very in tune guy. I mean, like very in tune, which I mean, we both obviously appreciate it a lot, but oh. Yeah, well just to hear like, you know, oh yeah, I took these gigs so I could basically help fund all of these movements and these people that I respect and want to help. I'm like, that's so super admirable to be. Like, I wish I could be that fucking cool, you know, I know, right, yeah, I know it's I wish I could be that cool.

I wish that I had the platform to do as much as Max Gale has or I mean, Larry Hagman was the same way, like a lot of those, like a lot of actors you don't think about or don't know a whole lot about. We're like really banging the drum. No pun intended for a lot of the causes, because, like you said, Bones is kind of getting a short shrift because we want to let Max talk about it. But I will kind of say, like, I also think that the Indian storyline in the episode kind of gets short shrift. Frankly, like it does, Yeah, it really does in kind of an unfortunate way, given the fact that we know how much Max Gail the person cares about the Indigenous people's plight and the causes of the indigenous people of our country, and yet here he is directing it essentially the penultimate episode of the show, and they kind of sideline the main storyline.

That is the title of the episode, It's not great. It's not great. Feels kind of bad to be honest. Yeah. Yeah, And even having Ivor Francis on here, I was just like, Okay, cool, this is gonna be good.

He's barely in it. Oh yeah, okay. And and I have a question here. So it's nineteen eighty two. They're making jokes about scout masters having sex with scouts in nineteen eighty two?

Yeah, are they? Isn't Isn't that what that is? Aren't they? I I did not pick up on that at all. I thought that this guy was.

Talking about going into the woods with him, and he's like, I know what happens when we go into the woods with people like you, Like he does say that, the kid does say that to the scout master. Truth. So I was like, is this, like, was this a thing in eighty two that people knew about? Like, well, yeah, I'm pretty sure, because I mean, my wife's cousin who's gay. He had his first experience with a scout master, so oh dear m Yeah, and he's sixty two years old.

So yeah, it's been going on for a while. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. I guess I not that it's been going on, but that people have been like tuned into it, right, because I was a little surprised when Barney Miller was like hey, I was like wait what, like wait a second, Like I didn't Barney Miller, we didn't need this, Like what the fuck? Yeah?

Yeah, I mean because this guy, the scout Master I played by Howard Platt, who we've seen before. He was one of those prep people that was living underground with the Horress Yah. Also fantastic in mash another familiar face. But yeah, he seems like a very very decent die and he just wants to help people out. And I think he didn't he like foil a crime, right.

Yeah, you would beat the shit out of a mugger, right, picked the wrong person to mug. Don't mug a scout master though I didn't know scout masters were known for being so tough. Yeah, yeah, I guess it's all of the Maybe their hands are strong from making all those fires or something. I don't guess my scout master's technically like the scout master that I had when I was a scout is trained. I don't know, he's like a black belt or something in like Japanese like katanas and shit.

So he's like so, I guess I wouldn't want to fuck with him. To be fair, this guy, I mean, Howard Platt does look like you could kick your ass six ways from Sundown. So it's a big dude. Posso yeah, and yeah, because wasn't he Also because he's basically trying to like recruit the one kid, like you're saying. And Cheeto Gomez the great what a great name for an actor, pen Cheito Gomez and.

Who so reminds me talking about going all the way back to earlier episodes, he kind of reminds me of like an alternate version of the guy who is trying to hold up I think that might have been a Martinez who is trying to hold up the station in both of those Ramone the Pilot and the lifetimes of Captain Barney Miller the Pilot, I think that the robber guy was the same person bringing us all the way. We're the first goddamn episode of the. Fun redemption for Ramone. Redemption is spelled r A M O N ramone. Yeah, it was, it was.

I mean, look, I think for me, the most endearing part of the episode was Luis Avolos as the janitor for me. Hey, hey, sus Maria Sanchez, which also great name. Uh yeah, but. I again like you you you said it and I'll let Richard had him hear it from the mountaintops. Yes, Richard, we like Ron carry a lot now and he was the him having someone advocate for him in this episode was I think, for me, one of the best moments of the entire show.

I'm not kidding. That scene where the janitor goes to bat for him. I actually was like, wow, Wow, this is a moment that the show earned in the last couple seasons. It really earned it. So no, I actually really liked this episode.

I just wish they had actually, you know, given Max Gale's storyline time to you know, time, just give it time. You're right, well, I think we should quit teasing the people and actually line up and play this interview. What do you think give the people what they want? To start off, you are a local legend for me because I grew up in Riverview, so right across the water from Groziel. Oh no shit, excuse me.

Oh incredible. So when you were on the air and just a young pup starting off with Barnie Miller and some of your earlier projects, you were, of course all over the free press, the news. Just hey, the local boy made good. When I would go back, did he try at times and go down to Grocil maybe to drive around or for whatever reasons, And I would see how much that whole area changed from when I was growing up. You'd go across the toll bridge we called it on gross Steel.

There was the free Bridge and the toll bridge. But I used to ride through there on my little homemade motor scooter to Windott to rehearse with the guys there in the rock and roll band. I was in, Billy Slamosi and Tommy Moran. We all poles are Irish man. When you went across that bridge and hit there, the Windot chemical smell hits you.

And what is now all kind of grasslands or open space along the river there. It was very industrial. Yeah. We used to get the nighttime light up from mcclous steel when they'd bring out the steel in the evening. Yeah, we would go and park it in high school at the north end of the island, which was mostly dumping from the steel and other things over the years, so there was this kind of extended area where you could go and usually find a safe place to park and make out the night sky was mcclous steel.

How did you decide to become an actor? It's more than at a certain point, more closer to now then Back then I recognized, Okay, this is what I can do, It's what I'm drawn to doing. It's what if worked out for me in a way. On the other end, it was always there. My mother had been in it.

She was twenty one when she started having kids, and she had four pregnancies and three of them were twins, so she had five kids in three years and all seven kids in six years. But she acted in the local amateur theater and stuff. My dad had been a piano player, had a band and the big band era. As we were growing up, he was booking the bands of the guys who had been in his band. So we had an agency.

He had a small office supply store in downtown Detroit and one wind out that he opened because he'd been stationed at the Navy base down it. So that's how I got to Grociel When they had all these kids when the war was over and we all grew up there. It wasn't like it was a really weird things for someone to go there, but it was much more my twin sister or my younger brother. People would have thought if you'd asked anybody when we were all in high school, who's going to have an acting career? I would have been down low on that list.

And it just kept showing up in a way. After college, I took a teaching job outside of Detrode up and Gross Point at a private school. They didn't care that I had no teaching credentials or anything. I'd gone to an Eastern college and played sport, went to a small school back east. That's what the dads wanted who were sending their boys to this school.

That's what they were hoping their boys would be. So I got hired. And after two years of that, I just felt stifled or locked in by the situation, and I went out to ann Arbor. I could still get in the business school still for applications, and I ended up as an economics major, so I got into the Business school. I always said I was majoring in staying out of Vietnam, because at that time it wasn't so strongly politically.

I was actually in my thirties. I was talking with my mom one night. Her dad was my grandfather, was a World War One psychological casualty. I knew him as the great old Irish grandfather, but she knew him as a guy was what they would now call PTSD who had a very up and down life personality and stuff. And so she planted in the brains and my brother and I, if you can do something else, don't get caught up in that.

In the business school, you could take a course outside of the business school, as long as a graduate level course, so that you could take a real estate law course or an engineering course or something like that. I couldn't get in the arts school because I didn't have any portfolio or anything. Looking through all the things that were available, they had this class in the drama department. I thought, oh, we'll look at movies and write papers. I can handle that, and I talked my way into it in a way.

So that's another story in a way. But I'd learned you could come back late and having missed registration the University of Michigan. I was like thirty thousand students registering over a few dations with classes that people were camped out to get into a PhD seminar or something. But if you come a few days later because your grandmother died or something, A situation I discovered by accident. But then I said, okay, So I went and talked to the professor and I was with a guy.

I was on the rugby to big Russian Jewish football player, played a couple of years with the Elers, but was in the landscape architecture. Anyway, I got in that class. It was an interesting time. So then when I did make it to twenty six and I did get my MBA, and I left, and I'd hooked up with a sort of junior high sweetheart who had moved out to California. So I headed out to San Francisco and was not sure what I wanted to do or what I was going to do.

I was playing piano bar gigs, and I took the law boards and there was a kind of a situation. The play had opened up based on the novel Once Threw Over the Cuckoo's Nest Douglas had bought the rights and hired Dale Wasserman, who went on to write the book, for Manivel to write the play. A nurse Ratchet was a comic villain, and Billy Bivid didn't commit suicide. It was a lightened up thing. Didn't run very long.

But some years later a couple of guys in San Francisco produced and rewrote parts of the play to make it more like the book, which is narrated by the chief, the half breed Indian guy. And anyway, I had read that. I had picked up that book on the floor where my roommate to the bathroom and read it straight through. And I also had read Buried My Heart at Wan't Knee around that same time as I headed out to California. When I got to San Francisco, a group of Native Americans called themselves Indians of all tribes I think, But they had occupied Alcatrap.

The person had been closed. There was a lot of conversation and the press and politics. It should be at park, it should be a gambling casino, it should be condos. And a bunch of natives went over. Because there is a treaty, it says a federal government abandoned lands.

They need to go back to the original owners. But eventually they got them off. They shut off the power and everything. They held out there for quite a while, but they weren't quite able to make it stick. A while later they did.

Over at Davis, California, there was a Navy base that got abandoned, and there was also the same Reagan was governor. We're going to make it a primate center for the University of California. They won the right to create a Chicano Native American University, the Coda Quezakoto, and it's still in operation. They were forced to get it going in two years and a lot of things that made it a challenge, but they won that. But in this case, that was going on and I happened to see.

So they opened up production amateur in Olver and Mill Valley. It got a good response, so they decided to go for it and they opened up production in the down on kind of North Beach area, San Francisco, this little theater and got a great review. Not from the regular critics, they didn't think much of it, but Herbcane, who was the columnist San Francisco Chronicle. The days they gave it a great review. They had a run on their hands.

They put out some things for people to run the snack bar and for understudies, and I kind of a mistake that it was that one was for understudies, wasn't one ads I happened to see it. I had just taken the lawboards around that time. I was playing at piano barg gave them five to nine. I'll to keep going to school. I just I couldn't see any And when I go in to meet with IBM or Levi Strauss or something for young they would know better than I that I wasn't going to fit in there.

I'm supposed to know that, but you're not supposed to see that. And I went down and I ended up being asked to understudy the Chief, and a few days before they could ever rehearse it or anything, the guy playing the Chief had this ongoing artistic conflict with one of the other actors over this style of acting, and he couldn't stand it. But he was a big weightlifter and the other guy was a string being, and he gave him a push after the curtain call and the rest of the cast said, okay, that's enough. This is the next thing I know. I get a message and be at the theater at six and they showed me where to be standing when the lights shut down and the light would come up on.

I was playing the Chief and I ended up going on for two years, during which I got a beaking part of a TV show. I got my first line in a movie in Dirty Hairy, just the last minute thing that they decided to have a couple of hoods hold them into tunnel and he'd pull out his big dirty airy gun. And another movie was the second Mister Tibbs movie called The Organization. Had a lot of young actors from our groul. Julia and I became friends on that film, and Ron O'Neil and some of the young guys from New York were casting brought out to San Francisco.

So I was having this understanding. I was getting something about acting in theater that I'd never known. I called it the mask off part. There's a mask on part of theater as there is in life. Hey, the roles we play, Shakespeare said, we're all actors on the stage.

But there's the other part where even if you're pretending to be someone else or looking for some kind of truth through imagination, you're opening in a way that you might not certainly in public life might bring you there. But all that time I still was kind of like, this is what I'm doing now, but I thought i'd take it down. I went down to La State got involved with the Actors Studio, so I was doing stuff when I was drawn to the connection that people had and the commitment to act theater and what it is is is something ancient, but still I was not really and that's still what I was doing at the time, and had done the play in New York, and then I started running long distances on the beach where I had bootlegged into a place that I could afford in a wait, and I started processing a lot of my own just life growth full spiritual things that had been going on for me that was really driving my looking to find out what is this all about?

And I started processing that in rhyme and which I would usually do to say something to my folks at Christmas time or something like that sometimes surprised me, but it was a way of expressing emotions and other kinds of sentiments. So I thought, oh, that's what this acting is about, getting me to hear, so it was more into the just the creativity. And around that time I got the Barney Miller interview, and then they offered me the part to do the pilot. They'd done the show once and the pilot was not picked up. Danny convinced they brought out his partner.

The guy made way more money off of Barney Miller than I everybody. I never met him. He told me, well, I had a I do in this part. I've given it a different name because things might change, but he's not available. Charlie Hayded it was you guys probably know that if you're that much into the show.

I did that. I thought, I'll take the money for the pilot and I'll go up to Big sur where I knew some friends that had a big house on the hill with a big deck on a main layer, so the basement layer actually looked down the hill out from out underneath the main deck went down through the oaks out to the ocean. It had a futon and an upright piano and that was it. And I know I could rent that place for nothing, and I thought that I'm going to go there and write songs. That's that name for me.

But the pilot got picked up right away and it was fun. That instance is okay, I'm going to go give it a shot. There are certain things that bothered me because the character was written like a Polish joke in a way, and I felt obligated to the ways it was being played and the way I read for Danny real broad at chewing gum they do it. But one of the pilot episodes that was kt with Wojo comes in doing karate. Thank you for mentioning that, yeah, because it was one of the things that I brought up so many times every time we'd watch an episode and be like, why is he doing karate?

In the intro? What happened? I said that Danny, and this is part how this take on the show worked, but the stuff at home didn't work. It was like Dan watched it Danny Thomas show. But I think it was I said to Danny, I need to get some time off or something.

I need to learn some karate. So his first will come in was you don't know karate. I thought every young actor knew karate, and I said, no, I don't. He says, they just kind of go around like this and shout stuff at each other. I was saying, yeah, and I said, I know enough about it that I know there's more to it than that.

And if we were doing kind of a skit on a variety show or something, then fine. But if we're supposed to be really cops and I'm supposed to be really a marine, he says, okay, I'll get to when he went and hired like at the time, the best guy, big Hawaiian guy, I have forgotten his name, but to come over to this set, and so we're talking and I was fairly fit and stuff. But Danny says, so you guys shout stuff at each other, right, No, that's not what that is. Danny really sure sounds like it. So he taught me some moves.

But it would have been interest if Oojo really could kill you with his thumb, if he really had some skills. And yet there's so much more I could have done with that as an actor, but all I did was that and thinking still what was bothering me was just he wants to be on the stakeout, you know. And Varney finally says okay, and see, oh hey, I'm gonna go to Getzucas, And what I knew, I didn't want to play him as a Vietnam guy. That was like a loser, Rambow, you know what I mean. Most of the Vietnam guys were played as some version of somebody who's totally fucked up or else has this other kind of set me.

Rambo was alone, had a great way of creating a kind of heroic version of Hayman. Hugh was a great storyteller at all. But I didn't that wasn't in me, and all that stuff bothered me. But when the show got picked up and I had to think, and I went down to Yuca Tannel with old rugby friend of mine from San Francisco who was self working through He was at a moment of do I go down this direction or not? And I remember one point he was talking and he gave a kind of a shrug like Tevy and Fiddler on the Roof.

Are you guys familiar with Philler on the when he's got it on his dan On one hand, my daughter, she's this and she loves this guy and all of that, and on the other hand, tradition and in the end he goes on the one hand, the other he's got his hands there in his tradition. He decides it was kind of like, what the fuck? And I decided that what it would be is that while Wojo had some kind of understanding about Poles and the role of Poland or some Poles during the Holocaust, and the roles of others, and he didn't have a whole kind of intellectual thing he built around, but he had something and about a sense of justice and kind of respect for that part of Barney, which Danny, when he first met with Hallie says, I want because he went after Hallie play that part.

Hall had won the Tony for the Rothchild's which now many people want to blame them for everything. This was the show about them rising above prejudice and all that stuff like that. But for Wojo, there was just a respect there that kept him from judgment. And his experiences in Vietnam, which I never tried to nail down so much about. I knew many people who'd been in Vietnam, and some who'd been on the front lines and walked to the point and stuff like that, and others who'd been medics.

But instead of going the way of really working on the karate and maybe being a marine and what all those things might have met along that time. I had these songs I started to write, and a friend of mine was working with Buffy Saint Marie, and she shared some songs with Buffy who at that point Buffy familiar with Buffy Saint Marie, but so she was on sestame. She didn't Her message was pretty strong and uncompromising in a way that as things evolved out of the sixties, particular were protest songs and stuff like that. Dylan had his own way. He was always not quite coming down on it.

He didn't let himself get drawn into it that way. But anyway, she invited me to be a part of this tour, which in the end didn't happen. But through Buffy I met a number of Native American people, some of whom I've been watching on TV or Time magazine. Dennis Banks and Acknowledge, just one of the leaders of the American Indian movement, certainly when Wounded Me was going on, and other people. Floyd Westerman, who as a singer songwriter could have been the Indian Charlie Pride, wonderful country singer.

He was said once I would have been the drunken Indian Charlie pride because the things that those people knew a lot of Dennis Floyd, a lot had been in the boarding school system. I connected with them at a time was really life saving for me, because otherwise it was the time of John Belushi. I knew John when I was doing The Cucka's Nest in New York. John was doing Lemmings. It was a play.

Chevy Chase was in it. A lot of the Saturday Night first cast came out of that play. It was a spoof of Woodstock called Lemmings. So that what really was including I would always be invited to go to either ceremony, and I started to get a condition into spirituality and ways that then I it brought me to an understanding of the Christianity that I've been raised in. Our town's one Protestant church generic the Episcopal Church.

But until the town grew and the Presbyterians feeled off over here in the Luthergs peeled off over there, and now it's competition for people in the seats to pay for that new church and stuff, and the Catholic Church they got their own thing. And I went down that road until there was no answers about Vietnam or civil rights or something. I went into science and to Carol Jung. So at the time there was a lot of ways of understandings that didn't cause me to jettison anything i'd come to before. It actually helped me to understand it and where it see it fit together and stuff, because there are a lot of profound understandings in those cultures as well.

And so all of this is background on what that meant to me about the Native American and bones. Okay, because friend that how often when any people were in town, they'd come over to the sheet very often showed up with eight or ten people. It was all right, it was, but at the same time it wasn't you know, it was a lot of it was seen as very radical what I was involved, except that I wasn't radical about it. Some of the things I got involved did without there being discussion about it, like the Agent Orange show the way they went at it. So we had done a show where an old Indian wants to die in central and played by a wonderful actor, very distinguished and stuff.

Yeah, it could have been done as a real homeless person in a way if there was What the writers didn't understand is there is somebody that was that together and that in touch with what that was. There were a lot of people that knew who they were, paying attention to them more and more people. It was actually something that was passed the Native American Freedom of Religion Act in nineteen seventy seven, so people didn't have to go underground your ceremony. You know, there were a lot of things that I had come to know that the writers didn't, and there was a limit to how far I felt it was okay to go in terms of trying to I was more like, was now how to play those how to find it, and then how to find it?

In Wojo it was his experience could have been Wojo had experience with the Native Americans in Vietnam, a lot of more higher percentage of Native Americans joined the armed services than any other ethnic group. But it was such a the response was so high. It was the only time they ever replayed a show in the season that it was first done during the prime time. They actually showed it, and I suddenly realized maybe it was in a rerun, but it was. I know, it was the first time they re showed during the same season because it got such a great response.

So when it came time to negotiate for the last year, I made it as a part of my deal that we would do another show about Native Americans. I didn't usually get all that involved. I had an old agent. You originally signed for a certain amounts and bumps the show gets picked up, everybody understands you're going to come back. Didn't work well for people who quit and left their shows.

There were some great examples of. People that quit and left, you know, and I'm thinking of Gregory Sierra with Gregory. Gregory had to deal with the network to get his own show, and then they said we're going to put you into this and then we'll spin you off. He accepted it. It wasn't like he had a lot of options.

And he's wonderful, strong heart and a tender heart at the same time. Delegate. So there was a time when hell had said something in an interview. Somebody asked him, how do you feel about it. You're putting people in a jail cell.

We take it seriously, and sometimes we send people off to w but we play it like this is what we got to do and this is what our job is. But we don't take it as a matter of fact, he said, one of our actors has done time, and Gregory a lot of his family didn't know that he had done some time, and he thought it was obvious and intentional on Al's part to out him, and he announced that he was not going to have any conversation with Al Linton anymore. So for a couple of shows we did it that way, but it became it was crazy verishing the scene. Well, you tell mister Lindon that I think would be better if we did the scene. And so there was a time where I was in the midst of them and I edged it in a way where they had to start talking to each other, and then Danny came down and they went up through the office.

They see, this has got to stop, and it did. But I think Gregory had a lot of reason to feel like there weren't people were short shortening him on integrity wise, and so when it came to doing the spinoff as a hospital show, Gregory didn't have it the accent Shanto had, and he did Shakespeare stuff, so he thought he was going to play a doctor, but he was not going to be using this accent, and Danny kind of felt, I don't know, how to write for him. If he's not doing the accent, that's where I get that it's funny. So it had things going again. But his reason for making that choice was he was trying to get what he felt he had heard.

And then the other one was the network. Danny's deal with producers is if the network likes somebody thinks they can spin it off and make more money, that's what they do. He can't really say I'm not going to do that. And Abe had come back first like a year and a half response to Fish, which was wonderful, and he felt that he was primarily responsible for that, and in a way he was. But Danny felt in the writing this great old character that he was primarily responsible.

And they both work, but he wanted them to change the name of the show to Fish and Barney and stuff. So when it came to doing the spinoffs, Danny certainly had more being Jewish and he had more to bring to it. But it just didn't work. It didn't quite at first it did, And I remember Danny and how would go. We'd be getting together for the table readers.

Somehow did you see those Rady? They were good. They'd both kind of shaken their heads in a way. They didn't quite understand what it was about Abe's way of working that didn't necessarily hear the music of the lines. His way of working, he says, you try to be as much in the scene as possible.

When it comes to saying the line, you let your mind be as Freezerberg And they were like this does that mean? There? You lay to look at each other, like what He's a method where you're saying, Abe got is a method? Act? Well, in a way, that's there's what the method.

There's lots of discussion and debate about what is the messive? What is it? It gets overused and a lot of people misunderstand it. It's doing certain but certainly it's not the same as hearing a certain sort of rhythm and beaten stuff that's a part of a vaudeville and a whole history that's there. And so Abe didn't go with that.

During the breaks, he would sit at his desk where the rest of us would go make phone calls and go to the bathroom. He just sit at Fish's desk and twirl pencils or something. Just stay in that. So there were times where the joke was Fish gets up and goes to the bathroom. And in the early or first year and a half or so, when we still had a studio audience, he'd be into that space.

And I think that was a part of why when he got up and went to the bathroom was funny. But also a part of it was the whole setup. It led to getting up going to the bathroom. But those would be the parts that because we would shoot for the audience and then the audience would go home, and then we'd start back in and do the whole thing because sometimes the audience was too ready to laugh at the big and that gets you starting to headpoint to the joke. It's a certain thing where with Barney it had a lot of little things that end up in a payoffs.

It was character compared to a lot of other sitcount but there was that great response to a But when his show didn't work, he didn't come back for me. A couple of years later, they got the idea of doing a Wojo spin off. They had the idea that Wojo because they had this thing that they've done the story I think twice where Wojo falls for a hugger. I think there's somewhere in there, Danny's experience with life in Vegas and whatever those days it was seeing much more as a victim's crime. It's cute that Wojo keeps busting this house or repute because he has a crush on the gall But the show that they write about where he asked her out and she says, sure, I'll go out with you at the same price as everybody, and then he's you, guys may know this story.

It might have been a Nauto's book. The show is that Woju Fini, he and Barney are the last to leave. When he's talking about he's kind of was just kind of asking Barney, who I always thought of more as a big brother relationship than a father's son relationship. I know that a lot of other people saw it more father's son. But he's and finally he says, Barne, could you lend me fifty bucks and they'll pay a day.

And the network is saying, you can't say that. They'd thought about the whole storyline, but they say at the end, but yeah, no, you can't say that, and he says, what do you mean, I can't say that people will think that he's going to spend it on her. He's just that's exactly what they're going to think. That's the whole point. The whole show leads payoff.

We can't. So we're shooting the show like after the audience has gone home, kind of thing we might have often got by then gotten rid of the studio audience. But we're still shooting and Nan he's up in the office talking about them, and no On Pitlick is directing, and he calls up. He says, we're there now, so what do we do? He's shoot it the way he just called their bluff.

So those are those kind of dynamics within the network and what Barney Miller was and what we could deal with. So we get to that last year and the season is going on and there's no Indian script and there's no talk about the Indian script. And I had a story that I felt, really having been there since really the beginning of that particular iteration house Barney Miller, which was the one that lasted, that I felt like, I see a way where we could do something. I'd spent a lot of time up in the Mohawk Reservation and it was with a lot of activists. I felt that an actress who could play the part that would get past a lot of these ideas people have.

But Nanny told us. He says, okay, is how we're going to end the show. The last three shows are going to be about it becoming a historical place and so on and so forth. And I said, I still got this deal. But what if we did it, thought of it as the last four show and we could establish something in the show that a story I have in mind about put in context about that historical there's an older, richer context around the whole thing, and it's woven in.

There was one part of a mohawk woman who worked in the police station downstairs. A lot of mohawk people were down in New York. And then there were the other guys who worked high steel from six nations. The ones who tended to be the foreman were the Longhouse people, the still traditional mohawk people because they didn't drink, and they tended to have those jobs because they held it together. And the more progressive were the ones who turned Catholic.

Now for three fourth genera, there was that kind of stuff on the Longhouse. People felt like this tribal count. When they first asked the loss to create tribal consuls, the tribal consul of the Mohawk and other six nations. They got together, they elected their leaders, and the thing they did was just span the tribal consul and go back to their traditional way of leadership and stuff, which by the way, was the kind of the influencer of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and others. There is a way to have a way to beeple to govern themselves without having a king.

There was no real model of that anywhere in European all mindset was he got to have somebody at the top. And so I thought it was a wonderful wait. And I had another character that I wanted Charlie Hill to play. Charlie was a dear friend of mine and a wonderful stand up comedian, but also had great acting skills. He was a young guy who had never been tested in battle.

This was based on me. My friend Russell means brother Bill me and Russell is a big strapping guy and great spokesman it. But during Vietnam he was an Arthur Murray dance He was pretending to be Italian and teaching Arthur Murray dance. He was still a fighter where there was a lot of stuff between the people who had the jobs who were Christianized, and Bill Means had been in Vietnam and he'd bought the point and he's very soft spoken to total different personality. So if Charlie plays this guy, he wants to do something during his stripe, So it comes and takes some things from a museum and he climbs up on a building because he thinks, I'm Indian, I can do this.

Once he gets up there, he's totally parallaxed. And this other Indian guy who's there knows because I remember when I was on the Mowkwerds are saying, the biggest thing we have to get people to know is no, you're not because you're Indian. The people who get all casual or ego or like that, they tend to not live very long. So so had these different things that I felt there was a way to have the story come in with the arrest. I pitched that.

I made the point that we have to do an Indian story, and the writers they just did not want to hear my story. And I didn't have a good enough way of understanding why they might not want to hear me. So they wanted a story about the you know, the young guys that's trying to get the old guys to like get with it with time, trying to get them to come in. He said, that is now what's going on in Indian country. The young people are looking for the elders who have kept either secretly or outwardly, have kept that connections.

And so we kept butting heads and then finally Danny stepped in and wrote it the way he did, so the anthropologists and the Indian guy are And the episode that we did before that was when a whole bunch of traditional Hasidi I guess Jews take over the squad from and there's smoke and everything, and somehow that was okay. But when I'm pitching this thing and finally saying well you have cast, ended up casting Dennis Banks's brother, Mark Banks, his older brother. But I said, will you at least read these guys that I know? She says, well, okay, but if I cast one of them, I don't want these guys coming in and taking over the set, I said, Danny, I just didn't have a way to understand with to have a sense of humor about it.

What are you talking about? So I've always felt a certain sort of sadness that we never got those levels in that last Thank you for letting me pick my bones on that. But I think the insight for me is because I found I would be whether it was the ceremonies or like powells and stuff where they would always bring the flag in, and I connected with a lot of Vietnam, and I found that I found people that had a complete understanding of I started to get to this point before and I didn't quite make it that they had an understanding of the history of things, and they also had their experience in Vietnam, but they didn't take that into something of being crazy. They get a hold it all with a sense of a larger sense of values or principles or understanding teachings.

Floyd used to say, when you have good teachings, you don't need leaders sometimes to help when there were splits amongst the Indian movement, because all movements that have charismatic leaders have all religions. It happens when you have good teachings, you don't need leaders. I've always felt a little sad that we didn't get more of that into that story and that way of ending Barney Miller, and that certainly way of wrapping up my life experience through that time that gave me called it like afterward in fairly quick secession, I did a movie. I learned that and I didn't really understand the timing and things on a film set. When do you need to get ready?

When is your time to pitch with Barney Miller. There were a lot of times, I know when the time was, I'd be the one to get I don't think we really quite have this scene. I think there's something, there's a lay on something that we'd work on it, and in time that got to be okay. I got better at doing that, but there was a recognition of there's something the other people who had way more acting experience and of different kinds of theater like cal and Ron Glassett and Shakespeare and stuff, and so there's a way you do sitcom and I was looking for something deeper. Not I was a beginner, so I didn't really It's not like I really knew so much of just how to do that.

But if I made it, there's one contribution that I had, Because everybody made their contributions to that. I think it was that part of just needing to examine a little more deeply, and then finished with one story back to fish about how that kind of work for all of us. Okay, we did a show where they hired a really tall actor because it required it, and he has to get out of the shell and go to the john and he's in there a long time and somebody goes in to get him. Might have been ron Kerry somebody. And they come out and I say, dead.

And what happened? Well, he unscrewed the light bulb and stuck his finger in the sucking has put in the toilet and shocked himself. And Abe had the line. I didn't realize he was that tall, So how saying, how do we play this? We've never played that someone actually dies here?

How are we being with it? So that's the question, and people are looking and Abe goes, I know she play it with a loose hat because he had the fedora and the guy could pull it down over where were you on the night to flip it up? Say Gal, what do you say? You and I the hat a loose hat. We should play it with a loose hat.

I thought it was just a perfect description how to play it, and I remember Danny and Hal looking at each other, what the fuck is he talking about? But the thing was that we took that time to really explore it and raise the question. And I think that's what a lot of people who have really enjoyed the show was. That kind of work went in from the writing standpoint, and that kind of respect for the material and the audience. It wasn't like, Ah, there's people out there between York in LA.

They don't the way a lot of TV would considered. I feel like those are the levels that if you care that much about the show and stuff, that you've got your own sort of take on them or understandings or whatever. That's where it all still resides in my heart. With those other Native American stories that were on the show, were those directly your influence? There was on one other that dealt with Native America.

No, it wasn't like I went to them and we should do something, or they came to me. But I think that fact that I had gotten this involved, I had because I came to see and on maybe this is something I can do with the fact that I'm in a show. So whether it's TV Guide or US magazine or whatever. You know. I learned that even still if I tried to make some issue I tried to do that, they would always frame it more like the big, wonderful actor helping out the poor, downtrodden Indians.

It was not at all, you know, which led to me for the nineteen eighty when Horrible Video was just showing up, to start teaming up with documentary filmmakers i'd come to know who were all shooting six to meet Steam Millimeter film and just going to the places that I was going anyway, and doing the things I was doing anyway, but having a way to record it. And I had an idea of a show to go on Opposite Johnny Carson. They had this spot that they couldn't get anybody to watch anything, and they would use up their second showing of Spencer for Hire or some other hit show they had, and they still wouldn't get an audience. And then the advertisers say, well, you got to get us bag. We didn't get the audience we paid.

And I was pitching this idea of a docu musical Saturday Night Live generation version of Charles Carrault's On the Road Sunday Morning Show where it was about music and stuff and it would be anchored in this Native American world that was out there. But what happened was Nightline. That's a hostage crisis took place in nineteen eighty and Nightline was born. So those executives who would come over and watch us tape at night as we were their grown up show. I had the number one show, but we kept getting the Peabody numerous times, and I had when I say pitched it, I didn't really know how to pitch like people pitch things.

I die, but I would talk to them about this is what I think would work, something that was related to what's going on in the world, not like who's got a movie out now, but at the same time having humor and music at the core of it. And so when Nightline kind of ate up that space, we're trying to figure out how to use the tapes. Maybe because it had been part of my deal it paid me some money that would be for this docu musical. But when they saw some of the stuff from up on the Mohawk Reservation, when this confrontation was going on with the Longhouse people, and there was too radical for them, and then we stopped doing the show, and I put all that on the back burner away because of getting married and all that family stuff.

And now I'm in a place of getting them digitized. There's a lot of stuff in that nineteen eighty A lot of things specifically for Indian There a lot of places in the Indian community, colleges in India, studies departments and stuff like that where they have media, they have acting and directing, filmmaking, camera way, they have people learning to do this, and you're starting to see stuff like that show up streaming and stuff like that show. Over the years, there there's been a lot of that, but I think there's also a lot in there for how do we look at how we share with the rest of life on the planet and with each other in some kind of way that has a spiritual nature to it and has a high thinking nature to it, and isn't about this against that I'm trying to find.

I don't have money to just get it digitized and stuff, and it's to challenge. It's old, it's on an old platform. We have better cameras and work phones now. But anyway, that's one of the things that I'm looking to do because I do feel like we are as a species in need of something that's less divisive. And I like the definition of dialogue a conversation with a center instead of sides.

I was really surprised. I was watching a documentary about Go Below the Average. Yeah, I was very surprised to see you show up in the background. There was more focused on the Native people that he was interacting with here in the States, but I think it was at your. Place, yes, So what happened there was in the process of all of that, and there was a certain time there was Dennis Banks and Buffy Saint Marie put their heads together at a time when there were several bills being put into Congress.

I think this was seventy seven. Maybe they were called it Let's finally be Good to the Indians Act or something, but they were really about undermining the reservation system. Instead of making it less confining for Indian people, they were looking to just undermine the whole thing. And so they came up with this idea walking across the country, starting with the ceremony at Alcatraz, which is where a lot of the first Native prisoners were taken from Hope and Lakota and stuff. So they'd say, yeah, they're on an island out in the ocean to break that thing.

And they filled a pipe and carried the pipe across the country and stuff. And I was there at d and then I was on the Walk a lot, and then I was going around from the cities. In those days, the major cities like Detroit or Cleveland or whatever, they had their own talk show after the morning talk shows. There wasn't a view. The networks hadn't realized, oh there's an audience here, so they didn't have their own And so I was able to get on any of those because they were still showing Bernie Miller.

And then when the Walk reached Washington, I was there and this guy, Jean Pierre difty year had French guy absolutely Belgium, and he had made this film about somebody he had met some years earlier on a Dockford National Geographic col Rowney, about any he had met and about what was going on in the Amazon. He got Marlon Brando to narrate it and it was nominated for Academy Award. And he was in Washington, and I was there, and I got brought into the press conferences and by did have lunch with by Ali, with Ali and who I was because I was a part of that, and Jean Pierre. There's guy Elena caustioniis. She was in a couple of movies with Jack Nicholson.

She was a Greek hardcore wonderful gallup and she was having these roller skating events over in the valley that they can keep the paparazzi out and stuff, so if you were on the invite list, he could give in a roller skate. I knew her. She's the one I wanted Danny to cast for Walju's girlfriend. And they just had their own ideas what Wojo's girlfriend would be, like, what is their life going to be? He said, what if their life is about nothing?

He hoaks up with a former hooker? Can he continue being a cop? Their lives changed, So maybe their lives are all about the postman who's retired and now his life has changed. They didn't really have a night. So I finally told Danny, I said, I mean, I don't want to do this.

They see what happened with Fish, I said. He finally said, okay. He gave me a private letter that said that if it did get picked up, he wouldn't make me do it, And I think that he probably thought, oh, I'll get max if it gets picked up. But I didn't want to leave the show. We had a good thing going.

Why would I want to leave it? Plus now I only got a couple more years on my contract or whatever. All of those are the layers. I think each actor had their own issues. We never got together.

As said, it's all going together. I kind of wish maybe i'd propose that probably would have been up to me. I've inherited second billing because A left. And I was going to say you mentioning the fact that the spinoff, like you were second build in the show, like by the time that came around, And we'll be honest with you because you can listen to the episode where we talk about it. Wojo's Girl is a rough episode to watch.

The fact that they were thinking about a spinoff is crazy because your chemistry with how Lindon on the show really is like the pillar of the show is the two of you together. A lot of people feel that way. There are those that just love Ron Glass and that I think it's kind of spread out in a way, but I think it became that out blue. That's where they could put this stuff, and it was it would have been nice to get into something where we really get with somebody who's really gonna give it back to him about what he thinks about stuff. But she still sees something in him, and I think that she would.

It brought a whole bunch of other actors to that show because she amongst the people. If you just think of Jack Echelson and the other actors in the world he was in and stuff, and she was much cherished in that group because she was asked her. I said, would you be into doing this? He said, know how to talk to them in a way, say listen to you guy. And I was more about, like, what's the other side of his life.

I'm living that once in a while there's a chance to act in something, but there's also this whole other side of this visibility I have and how can I make it useful beyond the kind of typical TV guide story. I was more about that and just exploring that in life, Like with David, when there was an American guy you talk about David Gobolol, there was an American guy, Bill Linebeck. He'd gone to film school in London and then he was down in Australia and he connected up with David, and David wanted to tell a story about a guy who had, through the Aboriginal still talked about an American guy just before the turn of the century, had come down there to start it cattle operation, because by then the whole cattle thing.

People would raise money in the stock market and mainly in Boston to start a cattle operation so they could bring beef protein into the city to feed all the factory worker. That was in the time of Go West young Man. The big population grow growth was not in the West, but by then it had just become so set up how it worked that he went. This guy went to Australia to try to set up a cattle operation in the Northern Territory, and he never succeeded, but he did end up marrying an Aboriginal woman and being the first Sheriff of Darwin, and the Aboriginals still talk about him. His children offspring aren't running the stock market of Australia, and he wanted to do this story, and so they raised some money for a film called walk About to Hollywood, so they could come to Hollywood and try to pitch this and they signed Buffy to play a part of an Indian woman who goes with him to Australia because she's killed the killers of her husband and now she needs to get away and David wanted to beat Indian people.

I said, well, then you got to call talk to Max Gale. And I knew through my friend Jean Pierre, who'd made the film about Rownie. That's how I knew Bill this group of guys that had made films and new stuff like that, and so that's how I got to know David, and we spent quite a bit of time together, and that's how we happened to be out of my house. We were out there a lot, but on that day we rolled my upright piano out on the deck plates and stuff. Somebody just sent me.

I haven't watched the whole film, but somebody just the other day sent me a link to that, and I have sixteen millimeter film of that time. It's pretty moldy. I don't know if it's any good. But also when I was down there in Australia, which in the end we weren't able to get the movie made, there was a phone strike. There are whole bunch of things that happened and we just had to cannot make it.

But I was with David up there and then out on one of their branches, their stations where they had cowboot Aboriginal cal hand like that, and there's been an effort recently to try to pull together a memorial for him. I was a great experience. He was so bright and ended up being with them, And because I was with one of the produce the film, and we're the only two white people, and David hadn't gone through the stuff he was supposed to go through for white people to get into Ramaginny there in the village and that Northern Territories area in Land. And so eventually some wardens showed up and a truck and gathered us up, and at that point we were at adullage meeting. It was all very interesting.

But most of the time that ten days or so, I was with David and his mother and sister and his friends, his cousin and just went on walk about. We're sitting around the fire getting ready to make a meal, and one of them looks over that they do, like the lot of Indian people, they point with their lip and their chin. They get their directions where such and shuts that people think they haven't answered. But if they're saying, you go down there about two miles and the hours the left, can you take a left? Then something all over there with their mother.

He says, Now look over and here's this kangaroos and watching it. So just as we're there, one of them picks up his spear with a spirit shower a thing on it gives you like another joint, and they'd already demonstrated from early how accurate they could be. He nails this kangaroo and they go over and in about the same time in a pizzas here they drag it over and slid it open and start throwing the organs into the poles and slaves slightness skin off and me it's just like about it as quickly as you would get a pizza order and the bread rolls or the cheese sticks or whatever. It was a really interesting time to see that and be with that, and David was having to make his own. He'd gone off.

Now he was back, and he was also he flaunted the roles. He didn't get us in there the right way. And so they are having this meeting. But on the other hand, they were dealing with. They were starting to get offers negotiation, people coming at him to negotiate deals around what they would do in order so they can do uranium mining and arniland.

And they were looking for experience what had been the Native American experience. And they knew that I knew about. I had stuff I could share with them and what had happened in South Dakota and in the Arizona. And we're having that conversation, and then they're talking, and every once in a while the English would appear because they didn't have an Aboriginal for so all of a sudden before Wheeler or something. Now and you're talking and that every once in a while, this one der I would say in a beautiful almost like an Oxford read than an Australian accident.

But to say to something David, yes, you haven't been around here during that time or the thinking level, that energy didn't shift, It just came out in this other language that I could understand now. Yeah. He ended up though, really having playing a significant role in getting Aboriginal people more understanding and recognition of the profoundness of that culture. Yeah, I know. Ralph the Hare made a recent he and his wife made a documentary about David.

I think it was like that three years ago, and I've been looking forward to seeing that because I know he worked with them quite a bit in Australia and like Ten Canoes and some of those other films. A. Yeah, I haven't seen that. I heard about that. I think it's interesting though, because and this was something I specifically wanted to ask you because she just recently passed away.

But Linda Lavitt, the chemistry between the two of y'all on the show is if they were going to spin off a show, why wouldn't it just be the two of you? Like that. She gave it to you just as well as you gave it to her. In some of the episodes of our show, I bemoan the fact that there were no women in the precinct because every other base is effectively covered in terms of what you're expecting, especially of the time. I spread a great obituary a on Linda, but it talked about the last play that she did, and it described her tone where she could be supportive and judgmental at the same time.

I don't have the words, but there were a wonderful, you know, mix of things that you usually wouldn't think would be in one person because they're so paradoxical, and she had that. And I really liked Linda and the other producers who were there mainly to just help Danny through writing late at night, you know what I mean. Danny always made all the decisions, and they had been after him, bank her an offer, bring her on, go what are you waiting for? And when then she got cast and Alice doesn't live her anymore, and they grumbled about it, but that's what happened. I think she would have been happy to come out and do the show.

I can imagine what that would have been like with Linda Lavin and Steve Landsburg and Ron Carrey and yourself and Hal Lindon and Ron Glass. You mentioned yourself about being a very forward thinking person. Imagine in the eighties that kind of show with the diverse cast that Barney Miller had, including a female lead, Like, yeah, that's something else, right, especially at the time. Barbara Verry could have brought that kind of stuff to it, but they didn't run. And finally Barbara after saw the handwriting on the wall, We're not going to shoot.

She said, look, Danny, I just can't keep coming down every three or four weeks to bring Barney his lunch. Right, you're not going to create something for me, then you know, let me out. And I'm not sure what that was. Some of it was just Danny and his way of he did my world, Welcome to it Now. That was the server thing he did to that girl, Marlo Thomas.

So it wasn't like he couldn't write for he was a showrunner on that. But at the same time, that was all another era of looking at gender relationships. That's been the one thing when we've done the show that I'm sure our audience got sick and tired of me complaining about early on was where is Barbara Barry? Stop billing her in the show if she's not going to be in the damn show, because I don't know because her, like with yourself and Hal and everybody else on the show, like it was so well written and the chemistry is so good that every time you don't see that person but they're build, it's like I want to see that. I would like for them to be there because the chemistry is so great.

Barbara's wonderful. I remember one time he was talking about something and people ask her, how do you act Shakespeare? Said, it's selly. You know, you learn how to act and then you can do Shakespeare. Because for me it was all new.

I'd been around Lisa Strasburg and that energy and all, but it was still a world of great opportunity some of these people, Barbara and other people who'd done lots of Broadway and lots of theater and brought chops to it. Dick Gray, Ready, why do you feel like Barney and Wojo had a big brother little brother relationship versus a paternal relationship? Because I think that's where Mike and I thought it was. But I'm very curious per you, obviously, having been on the show and having been the character, Why is your perception the way that it is big brother, little brother as opposed to father's son to him? Yeah, I think I think that's way.

Maybe even how might say that. But for one thing, we're just not that far apart in age, that's fair. Ain't that eleven years older than I am? Or so maybe eleven or twelve, But you know, so that's not a father son relationship. And I think just in terms of that, the physicality on occasion on a couple occasions we went for a run together around There was a sort of a lake up above in Hollywood, just a big water resource but with a track around it that we went running a few times.

I was definitely like competitive with him. That was amazed. Oh close, he kept up to me, you know, and I was not going to let him beat me kind of thing. But I just didn't feel like my dad was thirty two when I was born, So my dad was not a really young dad, but a ten year difference. That's just that's the main reason.

It's just that I think that in some ways, although we never really was never really developed explored there if some of it came up in one of the lenders with a hotel thing where I said something to her about my dad. Yeah, my dad said, because we worked on Easter. My dad said, if the lord can get up and move a rock, you can work. Never really quite got into even for myself as an actor, or with what his relationship with his dad was. But I felt like with Wojo, he just like it said often about any of people and Polish people, they think more with their heart than their head.

And I think that he came from that place and so he did recognize that thing in Barney that he had a lot of respect for that maybe was part of it. So there was something about what his older brother was into that held something older. You got to work with Dan Curtis. I was curious how that experience was with the first of the Black Widow. Oh yeah, I did.

Actually. The thing I remember about that in particular was that I worked with Patty Doo, who I'd seen like growing up as a child, you know, and Tony Franciosa. I did a few other experiences when I auditioned for the Actress Studio and I did a scene from Cuckoo's Nest and I got a call from I'll come back to Black Widow. But I got a call from Martin Landou Hello, Max, this is Martin Lando. He said, yes, we were very impressed with your auditions.

Because when I did it, I went out to the parking lot after and a bunch of people came after. Lee wants to know, who are you? What have you done? And I said pretty much that I did that play. I've got a couple of little speaking parts.

And I heard from other people that they had quite a conversation because Lee was reluctant to bring me in as a member. They made me abserver. Was this of a status that let you come to the studio, but you're not quite yet a member. He wants to see you get up and do some sessions, But people tell me. He kept saying, I don't know an Indian who cries.

And when I heard that, I thought, that doesn't make any sense. And when I started to spend time with Indian people, I found that people are It's not like somebody cries and everybody's, oh, don't cry, here's a hanky excess. People are crying because there's something that's some emotion, but it's not okay. They're not crying for a fact. But so I and then I he said, we thought maybe, We said the character seemed to be like very powerful, but not in touch with it.

I said, that's pretty much him. He's a big guy who still thinks he's little. And he said, so we thought, maybe you'd come back an audition and maybe do something save from street card name desire and this Martin Landau voice going. And it was like that would be Stanley Coals or Mitch. There's no way I was going to go and do a scene at the actor's studio from steep Car name desire.

I did not have any kind of feeling like yeah, I could do that all right. And then what happened when the show was picked up is just life became more interesting with these other things. And certainly it helped me to not to do as I say, John Belushi, where you get a job, you're making money, you're getting famous. John was a much more bigger talent personality out there, way way more than I, way more committed to was that whole idea that you've got enough money to buy drugs for your friends, and who is going to tell you that you got your head up your ass if you're doing too many of them, you know? And are you going to listen to them?

And stuff? And so by connecting in with something that not only opened up a lot of ways to think about things that I was looking for, but also just was way more important than a little TV show or something, and a chance to be connected in a way because coming into those times were when the cops were all the pigs. If you were in that side of things, which I was not that one sided about, but I for Indian people that I was beIN with, they were with the law as it was written dealing with Indian people. It wasn't like they just wanted to knock off gas stations or something. For eight years we saw well jehoas but for one episode, as far as I know, and I don't think this happened again, but for one episode we saw Max Scale and that was the goodbye to Jack Sue.

I found that very brave that you didn't come out as once, you didn't have the hairpiece you were you. What was that like to send off a friend like that and a coworker like that? What was the interesting time? The idea was that we were all ourselves talking about Jack, but they had written something for everybody. And then I decided to find being me and I want to do that, and so I think I was like the third person, maybe the fourth.

Anyway, Hall said something now whatever the order people said their thing, and I just said, that's nice. I just want to talk about how I feel about Jack and what I don't and I said what I had to say, and then Al said, you know, I want to do that too, and then they we said, oh, then let's do that, and all of that scripted stuff was jettisoned. So it was good too, Jack was the one. As I became more involved, more and more involved with sort of the Indian movement and that kind of stuff, Jack was the one who most understood what I was finding out about life in America. Of course he did his don't experience being in camps, and so he got that.

And then there was this other thing that it probably might be one of your questions, but that I directed and how directed a couple of shows. And the way that came about was that pretty much from the get go, we'd be doing the show and Danny would come down, there'd be a director. According to the Union rules, you couldn't direct, write, and produce. You could do two of those, but you couldn't do all three. So Danny couldn't produce and write and also direct.

Okay, see, I had to have hire a director. The pilot and stuff we did, and then the first episodes they'd have directors and it's the show hit. We'd have directors that would say, oh, I'm going to do Barry Miller, I'm going to make it Ready of Fun. And most other shows, the way they work was the table read and put the show us on its feet and then runs through it for the writers at the end of the day, and the stuff they'd like, they'd keep in and you'd come in the next day and there'd be rewrites. When then you do that and that's how the show came together.

But more and more Barney Miller was coming where they didn't really have the end of it written. There had been originals, grip it got the idea, maybe they hired that writer, but now they were starting to make it more like Barney Miller, and sometimes that would change the end. And so we got used to really looking for where's the reality scene, not to get all who's really but we're looking for that, and then as the show would get that into the final rewrites, which sometimes we would catch up she we're shooting, and we've caught up, and now we get the last few pages down and we sit down, we read him, we put it on its feet, find out where we're going and how that works. And which was Ned Batty signed on and he didn't have it.

We'd get that two days of rehearsal. He still hadn't seen his character's script. He said, I'm going I can't do this. But we would have directors that would really if something was funny, then they kind of want to just keep drilling that, and that kind of was not how we were finding the show. And then what would happen is we'd get to shooting, and by then Danny had learned he hated the whole idea of being up in the booth where the directors would be on blocking day.

So they're looking at all the monitors up in the booth and the actors are going and then now over the sound here, Max, could you take a step to your right, right here, right now, you're blocking this whatever. And I was often I would be the one that would be a say, you know, at this right this moment, right here where you're trying to nail it down, actually, I think there's something else that happens. And then Danny would okay, wait a minute, he'd come be a while, and then you hear his footsteps on the edge of the sound stage. You need come up and we work it out and then you go back up. And the next thing I knew, they brought down what we called a quad four monitor that were set up and the director could see those and we could see them made a circle, and those for the camera that that was behind the camera, but we could look over and see what that issue was, where I see where I'm getting into that shot or whatever.

And as we knew that, when it came to shooting, Danny was going to come down and after a little bit he'd say to the director Joe or whoever, did you mind if I just in he'd say something to tell or before long Danny's directing, and some of the directors would keep trying to come up with directions for us the tea, but it's so clear Danny's he's just on another level and we are all in a relationship. So Hal and I went to him and said, look, Danny, why don't you let us all together do that part that you don't figuring out, Oh, somebody hasn't been out of the room long enough to have gone downstairs and come back, or how do you figure it out? So that it was just coming in, we're into hearing this much of the sound, and then he's as he's walking out, he said, whatever that flow that you find it so that then you can play it like it's just happening.

Danny did, and he wasn't interested in that part of it at all, And we'll do that and then you could come down so we did an al directed one when Danny came down took over, and then it was my turn and we were talking about Jack. Jack at that point had found out that he had cold camp. He was supposed to go in the hospital, but I learned later that he said, I don't want to. I want to be there for put it off for a week. I don't want to suddenly be out of the show.

And Max, he didn't tell me that. Others told me that after. But what happened with other thing was that Danny came down and it was weird into it, and then I saw him standing there on the edge of the set when I got out of the director's chair in front of the quad. When I stepped back and I said, come okay, we've been waiting for you, and he says, good night everybody, and he walked off. And I don't know whether who was more panicked me or the rest of the crew, because I was the hippie guy of the crew.

What the sock are we going to do? So it was a vote of confidence, but then finally settled on having to know him. But then we'd been an observer and the pilot. He really understood how we worked. How it worked, So that was difficult.

I think, what was Wojo's Girl one of the ones I did directed, or no Wojo's Problem Right. My problem with that was said, he's confusing impotence with sterility. He's sterile. He thinks it means he's intent. I said, he knows whether he's impedent or not.

I made the adjustment. It's just that there is something about sterility because that was when some of the younger writers had taken over more and the younger writers didn't get that complexity where if you have a character that on a conscious level he's going this way and an unconscious level he's going that way. He thinks this woman with their shopping basket and her homeless she shouldn't be doing that. But on another level he's feeling her humanity and the wrongness of it. So there's that battle going on what's the right thing to do?

And they tended to write more on the nose. I had a question that's a little away from Berney Miller, but at the same time not which was speaking of being max scale as a person that was acting during the late seventies early eighties on a network TV show. Was it just expected that you were to do other things like Battle the Network Stars twenty or ten thousand dollars Pyramid, because I loved your appearances on those and I was just curious how that actually came in. They were offered to. I mean, if I Battle of Network Stars, do you want some ridiculous amount of money to do this thing?

You know? And I was involved in these other things, so I said, yeah, oh, these guys are trying to raise money to do such and such. Well, I'll do Battle in the Network Stars and then I can put that money there. Ten thousand dollars Pyramid or well, they fly you to New York first class, they put you up in a hotel. You do this show?

Why say no? Yeah? No, Yeah. I was there to say no. There were a shows I didn't want to do that I would get offered, like love Boat.

I just thought kind of cheesy. Maybe I just had too much attitude. I ended up doing a murder. She wrote sometime later. That was a little different because Angela Lansbury, you know, such an incredible kind of talent.

We do a Columbo show away from Barney Miller. So we're Levinson and Link Disciples over eat. I remember going up in an office to talk to Danny briefly about something that Peter Fawk was there. Michael Landon was another one. Danny wanted the show that was like Little House on the Prairie, but it was a Jewish family because he knew that a lot there were a lot of Jewish homesteaders and men that was Jewish.

There were all those interesting connections. But Peter Fawk and that group that did those films with Cassave eighty and that way of improving, and was so much stuff to get in. I'll sometimes look at the possibilities that were started to find maybe more of that with Wojo, but I think at the time it was more about just finding where the relationships we had with each other translated into how the characters thought about each other. When I was watching Barnie Miller the first time around, I was watching with my folks. That was their show and I was part of it.

The show that was for me, though, was the one that you did afterwards with wiz Kids. Can you tell me a little bit about wiz Kids? So I had done this this movie DC Cat okay, and when I talked with Joel Schumacher about it, I think this could be the first of a series of movies like it was instead of sort of broad and slapstick and car washy, because that's what Joel had done before, he'd done carwak Well Jamaic, and he agreed with it all I'd signed on for it, and one of the things I learned doing it was I just didn't understand when to get yourself ready and that sort of thing. So then I got this offer to come in and meet with Phil de Gare about whiskets, and they had done the pilot, and then it worked that twenty something reporter that they go to see because he's got a little bit bigger computer, should be an older guy, because then we get something in the show to peel to the older git.

So I was on the list of people like Nick Nolty and people who weren't going to do it, but the network had a list. But at the top of the list is somebody who might And I thought, oh, this is so et eighties. But what if this reporter, what if Ken Keysey decided he wanted to head back down and get involved or something like that, you'd have sort of sixties and eighty and my hair was long. I'd stick it up under my wojoe air piece now And at the time, though, I was recording some songs because I'd gotten married and my wife got together with my best man, Merl Saunders, who was a wonderful San Francisco keyboard player with everybody from Miles to Jerry Garcia. We were friends.

I met him when he was playing with Buddy and Phil was kind of a hopeless dead head, and he had also gotten the job of producing the next iteration of twilight Zone, and he wanted to get the Dead to do the music for the twilight Zone, but he couldn't get through to them because they had a barrier out for anybody that was that head over heels. You can come to our concerts and tape them and sell the tapes and all of that, but as far as like coming backstage, and we got our own thing going. So he said yes to all of my ideas. I wish I had thought instead of Ken Kesey, which I had a connection. I just occurred to me just the other day.

If I'd said, what if he's a dead head, kids could have gotten all those same value, the same sensibility, and it would have up lots of things. But anyway, It ended on being something where the guy that was the line producer this is now at Universe, Barney Miller was an outlier. We shot at an outlying studios Universal. They got a whole bunch of stuff going on there. There are a whole bunch of the trade guys, the camera and all the craft services.

All of that are people. They're Party Universal. If they can get on a show, then they know they're going to be working for a while. But the line producer, he knows that, so he's gonna he would fire somebody every week to keep everybody like on their toes. For the kids, it was like, did you hear they fire Joe?

So I went and talked to the guy when he was kind of like, who the fuck do you think you are? He wasn't that direct about it because I was an actor and I had a deal to direct to them. So there were those levels going on. And they had cast A Martinez, who I knew because he had done some party Miller's I didn't know that A had gone to UCLA and stuff. He was so into his good character that he played, who was kind of like Danny as a kid.

It was that character. Then the leather Jack that was like Danny the Jewish son of a single mother who wore his leather jacket and when the Marines. But I'm trying to get with Phil and get a deeper level what they were bringing up, and the show every week for a certain number of shows that we're dealing with somebody that was a division of Nascore, Nasty Corporate. It was a record company or something. NASCAR was behind it in this kind of cartoonish way.

And then around that time when Reagan and stuff and I came down from higher above, no, we should have them get involved in some kind of international kind of spy agent, and they wanted to do it in a way that my character wouldn't know anything about that, And I said, well, still, these kids can't come to work without a social worker and a school teacher and their parents on This doesn't make sense that these kids are working for this international spy agency and no adults know about it. Of course, a few years later there was some films of spy kids movies where it was pretty much the hat right. They were hit movies. But for me, it was just a lot of trying to make it be about that. I put a lot of my attention into so much so he and I never worked out a way, well what is it about?

He's my brother in law. We don't get along, but what is it? We don't get along with it? And Phil had no idea. He just thought that would be funny if it and we never found it.

I never really found that time with A. I've known him so much better now and I only needed to open up the conversation. But I got fixated on the other so much that I didn't realize that there were things that in retrospect when we found out finally found out my wife was sick, I realized there were signs about this. There were some very I won't go into it now, but there were things that made me boy. I don't want to get so wrapped up in a show again that I miss something really major going on in my fanily.

But Matthew laborator, brilliant young man, ambidextrous, autistic, and his adoptive mother talked about how she dealt with him at a point where she would just hold him down. I guess he does a lot of voiceovers. I saw his brother recently, hasn't been doing much acting, but doing voice work. Just so smart and skilled. He gets throw up a football with either hand or a base far He just totally em But that was it with Phil.

We went up to a Grateful Dead concert because of course I always teld it. It ended up at Merle with merl that connection and they do and Merrell's son, Tony, who worked on that. Tony played based on the stuff we recorded and work. He still gets royalties for the music of the Twilight Zone because it still shows. It was a cautionary experience of getting wrapped up in the wrong way and not understanding where to put.

If I understood some other things differently, I might have been able to express what was going on, or differently think about let's make him. I didn't understand the Dead. I had met Jerry. I kind of liked their music, but I didn't really get what it was about them and how they approached and how they evolved, what all that was that was so unique. So thank you for your patience and let me run on like.

That, Maxis was such a pleasure. I really cannot thank you enough for your time. You're so generous. I think we spent the same amount of time or invested it. I remember one of those therapy group therapy groups should At one point when I had first come out here anyway, and some guys talking about this time with his wife, and it seems pretty much through every clear to everybody else.

There was a nune when he said, but I've invested so much time and so much said, no, you spent it. Well, we passed an equal amount of time here together and I did most of the talking. It was so great. Yeah. Likewise, well, I didn't think it was going to happen, Chris, but we finally bagged ourselves as a celeb.

Oh right, we finally have a Max Gail for our show. Who the Max Gale, not a the the singular Max Gale, who I think would have kept talking to us if we didn't have to go. Yeah. No, I think you're completely right. Yeah, very very generous with this time, which was fantastic, and I wish that this had happened a few seasons ago.

We kind of like we do with Otto and checked in with him, been like, Okay, what'd we get wrong? Yeah, and I'll tell you because you were talking about whiz Kids. Right at the end of the interview, I went and looked at what he looks like in Whiz kids. He looks like Jimmy Buffett. I can see that.

I could see that. I need a pencil. Then mustache, Yeah, with the hair and all that Boston Blackie kind Oh yeah, yeah, with the hair. It's the hair and the mustache. It's that like the nass mustache and the hair.

Let's say, Jimmy Buffett. I was like, Wow, you kinda look Buffett esque. Are you excited? Are you excited to plug? Who's going to be on our final episode of the show.

It's not gonna just be us, shocking, I know. Won't just be us, It'll be two of our fairly regular guest co hosts. We're gonna have both. Richard had him and Otto Bruno back for the final time to discuss Barney Miller as we go through the finale of the show. Landmark Part one, two and three, a three.

Part episode of Barney Miller. Wow. Hopefully, hopefully the three parters are better than the two parters. Yes, because the two parters are, for the most part, not good. No, no, but I really hope that this sticks the landing.

I know some people on the Facebook group that we are. I think we're both in the Barney Miller Facebook group. But occasionally somebody will post that last image from the show, you know, the thanks from all the folks of the old one too, and I'm just like, that's gonna make me cry because even when I see it out of context, I'm just like, all good things, you know, kinda get to an end. Yeah, I'm really excited to end this journey together and to put a kind of cap on Barney Miller because we, like I said before, we didn't get the opportunity with Colchak. It just kind of ended, and Rankin and Bass just kind of ended, So this will be I don't know, I'm excited.

I have a little bit of trepidation. I am quite sad as well, because Barney Miller has made a positive impact on my life. I mean, I'm you know, we joked about this and I didn't want to tell Max Gaale about it because it wasn't his. But I collect sports cards, and I was at a sports card store in Omaha over the holidays and I bought a Hal Lindon one of one signed card, which I would never have bought if I had not watched Barney Miller. And I think about just the things in my life that I have watched or liked and the weird avenues of life that they have taken me on.

And I am very grateful to you, Mike, because you picked Barney Miller. I did not. You know, you picked Colchak. I did not. I technically didn't even pick night Cord.

I think you were just like you want to do Night Court, and I was like, sure, I'm very amenable. So I just I, if anything, I'm very amenable. Some people may not believe that, but I am. I just wanted to thank you again, Mike for sharing this journey with me, because you know I reached out to you on that Colchak Facebook post seven eight nine years ago. Now and now here we are knocking on the door of closing out our I guess first real big boys show that we've ever done.

So yeah, well, we really couldn't have gotten here without each other, and then especially all the help that we've gotten from folks like Richard, also from Auto. I mean Auto's book has just been an invaluable resource. It's just like the Wizzy X book when we were doing the Coulchak stuff. It's like and the same thing doing Colombo like the Wizziac. I look at his Columbo File every single time before we record.

You know, it's like cam Kaenig's book some of these other ones that we've talked about. So yeah, Auto has been a tremendous help. And then of course having John Walker writing our opening theme song has been wonderful, and we close almost every episode with the the the theme song of all theme songs. I think it was what season four's version of the Barney Miller theme so freaking good. We stand on the shoulders of giants because we are beer men, and that is the reality.

We sit and talk about everybody else's shows and spend time screaming at the top of our lungs how important everybody else's stuff is. And yet to your point, we could not have done this without you know, the listeners as well, So thank you so much for joining us for this journey through Barney Miller. If you're someone like me who'd never seen it before, someone like Mike who is more familiar with it, or someone like Richard or Otto who's you know, an immense fan of the show and it is nothing but love for it, you know, I think to your point, you know, I don't want to inflate his ego without without him being here. But Auto's book has been We have done a lot of work. Auto has done that much time, fucking ten second amount of work that I we spend five years talking about this show.

Auto spell like a decade writing a fucking twelve hundred page tome about the book. So if this show has not been enough for you, go read Auto Bruno's book about Barney Miller, which you can find on Bear Manner Media, because it is kind of, as far as I'm concerned, the singular piece of information about the show if you want to know everything, short of going and doing like we did and getting in touch with Max Gale to talk with him, that's the best resource because Auto spoke to family members of Steve Landsberg and Ron Kerrey and other people. And I believe you've spoke with some of the people who are now who have now since passed away. Even so, yeah, Auto, and you know, Auto's expertise has been invaluable because to your point, like every time we do an episode of our show, I always read along in the book where we are because sitting on my shelf right over there.

So any opportunity to plug Auto's book, I'm gonna I'm gonna use it, So here you go, Auto, here's another freebee. We should still be paying Ham. Yeah, Altra the hell he's given us. I mean without Auto, No Max Gail, so exactly. Yeah, well, Chris, until we come back for our final episode.

What are you working on these days? Audio diversions over at weirdingwaymedia dot com. This show and so many other great shows. Eighties tv Ladies, which is hosted by Richard Adam's better half, Susan Lambert HadAM and Sharon Johnson. They got to talk to Bouce box Lightner from Scarecrow and Missus King.

We didn't get to talk to Bruce box Lightner because we don't have a reason to not because we don't want to. But if that's something you're into, Eighties tv Ladies is a great look at TV shows from the eighties, and if you're watching Barney Miller, you might be into TV shows from the eighties. Ain't take take a look at ones with women. So yeah, that's where you can go and find something that I think you might be into. If you're into this or our Colombo Show, which can also be found over weirdingwaymedia dot com.

What about you, mister Mike White. Well, now I'm just thinking, well, gosh, I gotta do a Tron episode if they've got Bruce Box's Lightner. I mean I sued that they got the inside track. Baby, they're friends. They're friends with the Box Lightner, with the Box, the double b Bybee.

Yeah. No, I mean I love Tron and such. Who Oh, I can't wait for Tron three with Jared Oh. Is that happening still? Yes?

It is right, it is Oh, it is actually happening now with Jared Letto. Oh boy, he added so much to that sequel to uh uh Blade Runner? Oh yeah, or or Morbius. Are all those other films that he's been goode? That's what we need.

Barney Miller. The reboot with Jared Leto is Barney Miller. Watch as everyone collectively implodes. I can't even imagine him anywhere near the glory of that mustache. Stuart Townsend tried to play Colchak.

That's all I'm saying. I'm saying, there's a president for for for kind of weird what's eccentric dudes playing old school characters that it's just like not hard hard past. And we were the biggest defenders of Stuart Townsend on that Call Teck podcast. But even I can't defend it now. Yeah, yeah, no, no, I can't either.

Yeah. As far as what I'm up to, everything can be found over at Readingwaymedia dot com, except for the one show that we do with Richard Adam, which is exclusive to our respective patreons Patreon dot com slash Culturecast and patreon dot com slash Projection Booth, which is our ranking on Bond Podcast, where every month we are talking about a different James Bond film. As we are wrapping this up this episode, well the Bond episode won't come out for a little while, but we're yearing up to talk about and never say Never again. And I have a feeling in that I'm want to be saying never quite a few times during that episode. I hope to never have to watch that movie ever again.

Oh boy. Yeah, that's it's funny because I used to be one of my faves, but uh, that ship. Is sailed time and distance from things prove out in the end. I still have a big crush on Barbara Carrera. So I saw a big crush on the old man Sean Connery.

Oh well yeah, who doesn't Yeah right, ah, well, thanks everybody for listening. Come on back next month and we will wrap up everything and then come back sometime later in twenty twenty five. We haven't decided yet, but we're gonna start digging into some night Court, which I've got a video I'm gonna have to share with you. Somebody took the camera of It's and music from Bernie Miller and put the night Court opening over it, or vice versa if it's the night Court song over the Bernie Miller opening. But yeah, I feel that these are spiritual cousins.

Yeah, and uh, I mixed man night Court talk about something I've ever seen. I remember really disliking it the first time around, so I have I'm hoping that this will be a lot funnier This time me too, mm hmm