Sexy Boomer Show with Steven Leiva Transcript

AE Guy: [00:00:00] Welcome to Phil and Ted’s Sexy Boomer Show with your hosts, Phil Proctor and Ted Bonnitt. Phil and Ted's guest today is animation film producer and prolific author, Stephen Leiva. And now your sexy boomer hosts, Phil Proctor and Ted Bonnitt.

Ted: Welcome to Phil and Ted’s Sexy Boomer Show I'm Ted Bonnitt.

Steven: And that means I must be Phil Proctor.

Phil: And we have a very special guest today. A Renaissance [00:00:30] man, he's a honored and prolific writer. And so we're going to have a lot to talk about. We have a mutual friend in Ray Bradbury, which we’ll talk about too. And I wish you could see all of the hats that he brought. He's got all these hats cause he, he does so many different things. He's gonna put on a different hat. When we talk about certain areas of his life. Steven Paul Leiva.

Ted: Thank you. I thought it was time to mention who he was.

Steven: Well, thank you. And it's, it's good to be in your pleasant company.

Ted: It's nice to have you. You've worked with so [00:01:00] many interesting people. You worked as a producer.

Steven: Yes. I worked as a producer starting out in animation because that's how I got in to the business. I started out just wanting to write that's that's my passion. And I wanted to be a novelist. And a friend of mine asked me to help them edit a film newspaper, which he called the Cinemaphile.

And we, we got accredited even though we were under their print run because they liked it so much at the motion picture producers association. But I had met a man, Phil Chamberlain, [00:01:30] who worked at the motion picture academy and was also involved with the animators organization called. CEFA And there was a job to be an executive secretary. I had to work for June Foray, who was the president. And, you know, you knew June. Rocky, the squirrel blind squirrel, Natasha.

Ted: Of Bullwinkle fame.

Phil: I did a lot of animation stuff with her.

Steven: Yeah. Then later got hired by Filmex LA international. Positioned to be an animation programmer because suddenly, now I'm an expert on animation.

I worked [00:02:00] there for a year then I decided I really want to produce, because I had fallen in love with animation ass performance art. It's not an illustrative art. It's not a graphic art. You use illustration use graphic, but it's acting. And I fell passionately in love with that. So I, then I decided I wanted to.

But I, I needed an entry way and that was to start doing publicity for studios. That was a one man little publicist shop. So I had Bill Melendez. I had Chuck Jones.

Ted: The great Chuck Jones of Looney tunes fame. Chuck Jones [00:02:30] is a legend.

Steven: He was a legend in his own mind, too. But so I started doing that which led me towards meeting a lot of people, but I kept pleading that animation had to get out of the kiddie market because we were at a point where Disney was dying. Everybody predicted Disney animation was dead. In the late seventies. And of course, soon Katzenberg and Eisner came in and they went, they wanted to dump the animation department and Roy Disney wouldn't let them write [00:03:00] Disney Jr.

I thought animation should, should grow up.

Phil: Yep. Good for you.

Steven: And so I kept pleading and talking to people and then a friend of mine had an animation camera services. You've got to see this saying, I shot for these guys that some were at Disney. They all came out of Cal Arts and it's like, it's like a trailer for a movie they want to make it's all in pencil test.

And I love pencil tests. Cause that's when you see the real animation before it’s colorized. So I go over and I didn't expect much. Okay. But it was based on an old comic book called the spirit. He created Sheena of the jungle and it was one of the most beautifully drawn comics of the forties. So perfectly animatable.

And so he shows this trailer to me and it's brilliant and it's the best character animation of adults I'd ever seen in my life. And I said, whoever, these guys are, I want to meet them. I want to help get this movie made. Well, it turned out to be Brad Bird who made Iron giant, the Incredibles and Family Dog.[00:04:00]

So I met with him and then a partner of his at the time. And I said, I want to help you. And he said, and this was so Brad. He said, I will only work with George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, or Gary. Gary Kurtz was Lucas's producer on Star Wars and American Graffiti and Empire Strikes back was in the process at the time or had just been finished.

And luckily I had met Gary Kurtz and I got to know his assistant Bunny, so I called [00:04:30] up Bunny and I pitched the idea. And she later told me, he said, if anybody else had called, we would have rejected it. But one, I like you and Gary loves the spirit. I met with him and we made a deal.

Gary tasked to me to negotiate with Will Eisner for the rights. Eventually hired me as the director of animation development and an associate producer on another project, which was going to be an animated feature based on the old Windsor McCay early 20th century comic strip [00:05:00] Little Nemo in Slumberland

And it was a co-production with the Japanese. And when he brought it up to me, I said, why I already know about that because the two years before the Japanese had approached Chuck Jones, when I was doing publicity for Chuck Jones, the Japanese wanted it to be an American co-production. The Japanese wanted to use American animation technique, which is the animate to the voice track.That's right. As opposed to. Typical Japanese way, which is to do the voice track after the anime.

Ted: I think that if you're you're, you're doing the [00:05:30] process of animating to a voice track, it would allow for more personality expression.

Steven: Well, that's exactly the point. That's the way the Americans do it. The Japanese, their stylistic see American art, as I was told, it's all about the form.

The form, the three-dimensional form when you, when you draw it's ever, since the Renaissance, Japanese art is all about the line. That's right. Yutaka Fujioka, who was [00:06:00] the head of a TMS Tokyo movie, He really wanted it to look American.

So that was the brief. And they came to Chuck Jones. Chuck Jones suggested as a screenwriter, So he had meet Ray when Ray had his office in Beverly Hills. And that's the last I heard of it until Gary mentioned it. And what had happened subsequently is Chuck turned it down, Chuck suggested they go to George Lucas, [00:06:30] George Lucas turned it down.

George suggested they go to Gary and Gary picked it up. So I was on that project for two years, a year of development here, and I hired all the American staff, including a young man American who was working up in Canada, named Roger Allers. Now if you know the name, Roger Allers it's because he co-directed and co-wrote the Lion King. And of course co-wrote the Broadway musical the Lion King, which is the greatest grossing musical in the history of Broadway. And it's still running, still running, you [00:07:00] know, because lions don't give up a lot of pride, a lot of pride.

Ted: Now you were working with Chuck Jones after his loony tunes career.

Steven: Oh yeah.

Yeah. After Looney tunes and after MGM and I met him through a Cefa and then he was one of the first people I went to to be a client. Now I was a cheap publicist, I think a hundred dollars a month for each client because I just wanted an in. Right. And in 1990 we formed a company. Chuck Jones Productions.

He had been approached by Leslie Brick to do an animated film. Now a little mermaid came out in 88, 89. So suddenly. The explosion, which I predicted by the way, in variety and the late seventies, the animation would ever come back. I said that there's young animators people don't know about. And eventually they're going to make animated features that will gross over a hundred million.

And everybody thought I was an idiot. And my girlfriend at the time was mad at me once. And she said, you, in this animation animation stuff, they just think you're a pompous ass son of a bitch. And later my later [00:08:00] girlfriend, who's now my wife, Amanda. P A S O B, you have to use that for a vanity license.

So if you'll notice, that's my email address. I thought if I'm going to be a pompous ass son of a bitch, because I'm passionate about something, but then I'll wear it as a badge of pride. But Leslie Brick has had come to Chuck. Chuck said, will you go meet with them? And I met with them. I love Leslie because I love Scrooge, which he had done is one of my favorite Christmas movies.

Well, he had a script which was quite frankly God awful. [00:08:30] Yeah. And it was every person who doesn't understand animation thought in an animation script should be. I advised Chuck against it. And I said, but you know, Chuck, if they're starting to come at you thinking they can raise money with your name.

Well, we can do that. Let's start it. So we did. And. The the only thing that we, we, we get some comic book cards for Upper Deck, they got a license from Warner brothers, and we did an animated sequence in a. [00:09:00] A bad film called stay tuned. We took John Ritter and Pam Dawber and turned them into mice.

Ted: What was it like being a partner with Chuck Jones?

Steven: It had its ups and downs. To be honest with you, Chuck was older at the time and w to be perfectly honest with you when I left which I was asked to leave, it was not under circumstances I would have liked. I have my side of the story, which I'll probably never tell anybody.

I'm sure they had their side of the story.

Phil: You were chucked out!

I was chucked out. But the main [00:09:30] reason was I wanted to bring in all this young talent I knew. Chuck's idea was I was basically there to find him work.

Ted: Okay. Is there anything that he left you with in terms of casual wisdom?

Steven: Oh, he left me with himself that he was a great rockantour. A great storyteller. He was often kind and very generous. He had a huge ego, which is not unusual in Hollywood. You didn't hold it against him. It was his do, let me put it this way because he was talented because [00:10:00] he was a man who wanted to be a fine artist, but he was a young man in the depression so the only job he found was to wash cells for the Slessinger Company, which was bought by Warner Brothers and they made the Looney Tune cartoons.

Maybe he started somewhere, but then he worked himself up and became a director. He was erudite. He was very extremely, well-read had a huge library and he was sophisticated where Fritz Freeling was a vaudevillian and Bob Makinson and Bob Clampett, they were all very [00:10:30] funny guys and made great cartoons. But Chuck was a bit more sophisticated and you can tell with some of his cards.

Ted: The comedy, which was so good. Was Chuck funny like that?

Steven: Yeah. And, and when he was funny, it was telling stories. And he physically could be a little Chaplain-esk, but he readily admitted that he stole from Chaplin and Buster Keaton and, and all that. But he, I think he had a grasp of human psychology that was greater than [00:11:00] others. And he always said that Bugs Bunny was who he wanted to be, but Daffy Duck was who he probably was not so bad, not so bad.

Ted: I'm just curious about the creative chemistry between Mel Blanc and Chuck Jones, because Mel brought so much to it, obviously. How did they go back and forth? How much of it was Mel? How much it was Chuck?

Steven: I saw are you recording sessions with mail? When, when Chuck did some TV specials, whether they're new to in characters and he also in 78, 79, produced a [00:11:30] cartoon called the Bugs Bunny Rabbit Movie, which was basically a compilation of some of his shorts, but with bugs in his Beverly Hills home reminiscing with his carrot in a dressing gown.

And so I was there during the recordings for Mel there at that, by that point, There wasn't much directing him. I guess Chuck subtly directed him. but it was all there on the script. Now, the way Chuck [00:12:00] work, as, as I saw because later he brought in for some of these things, Mike Multis, who had been his writer at Looney Tunes.

Now Mike was a New York, Dem’ Dees” diesel, ‘dose guys. So he would come up with physical gags, I think, but then Chuck would do what Chuck called character layouts, which were of course gorgeous drawings of the characters imposes. That was basically the acting because in animation it's an art of going from pose to pose [00:12:30] and then filling in, in between and the poses are frozen moments of movement.

And so he not only did. Put out the movement there. And he obviously had acquired a wonderful sense of comedy timing, which in animation, you can, you know, do one 24th of a second. You can control what he wrote, all the dialogue. I don't think I'm not sure Mike ever wrote any dialogue because in his character layout he would write, Chuck would write the dialogue.

[00:13:00] Cleverness, I think was pure Chuck. Now, I wasn't there in the Looney Tunes days, but I saw a little bit of it when when I was doing publicity for him and, and some of it later, but mainly during the days in the late seventies, when I was in his office, falling in love with his assistant, Mary.

Phil: You seem to have left quite a trail of secretaries behind you, right.

Steven: Yeah, they might say I've had several of them call me up and say, that was the happiest days of my life.

Ted: “Oh, [00:13:30] you were so animated.” You were in this animation world. And eventually Space Jam

Steven: Space Jam was, well, we get a call from the agents is Ivan. It's going to do this film called space jam and he can't find animators animators.

He said, No one wants to do it. They said it's impossible because it had an impossible deadline. Why did it have an impossible deadline? A big tall sweaty guy named Michael Jordan had to get back to [00:14:00] playing basketball. So they had a window to film him. So in three days I set up this ad hoc animation studio for Ivan over the phone.

There were two studios in London, one in Ohio called Character Builders, but it was a innovative film in the use of green screen.

Ted: The supply chain is so labor-intensive animation and that, yeah, at least full animation is partial animation.

Steven: This was going to be full animation.

Ted: And the difference between full and partial for people who may not know is [00:14:30] for like Looney tunes was full animation in the sense that the entire body's animated, the cheaper ones, just the mouth,

Steven: really cheap ones do that. There's some body movement, but animation is either done on what are called twos or one. Full animation and that is a different poles, a different move. Every two frames. There's 24 frames per second, and film. Certain people like Richard Williams, who did the Roger Rabbit animation. He always animated on once, which I found a little bit too rubbery.

We brought all these people [00:15:00] out and got them to work. And then they started filming Michael Jordan and were furiously trying to feed them scenes. You know, you got to shoot the live action in less than you seen with characters that have no live-action we, and we could go off on her own.

The film got made. You got, got made on time. More studios had to be added.

Ted: Animation continues to be very popular. Adult Swim, for example,

Steven: but that's of course not the kind of animal. I mean, I like the stories possibly, but it's not full character.

Ted: This is what I wanted to ask you about the [00:15:30] Simpsons who started in 1990, I guess it was, they've done all their animation work in South Korea.

Steven: Well, there were cheaper and grown up in Asian animation. They were using. A more stylized form. Yeah. And everything from Hanna-Barbera the early days on, if you don't want to call it limited animation, you can call it stylized animation.

Ted: Doing a weekly half-hour. That's huge. Yeah. You got to crank them out. How many artists work on something like that?

Steven: Hundreds

Ted: You made an interesting point about what's [00:16:00] really animation and CGI. Which to me is a lazy man's approach to filmmaking in some respects where it's trying to replicate reality, as opposed to an original medium, where they're doing something fantastical that you can't shoot in reality.

Steven: I’ll argue with you a little bit there. Because one of when I was young and, and promoting animation, I would argue with people because every animator would say, don't do an animation. What you can do just as well in live action. Constantly kind of cut the kind of stories [00:16:30] you can do. I said, no, it should be, don't do an animation the same way you would do it in life.

So CGI, there's some very good performances in CGI Pixar and things like, sorry, stuff like that. Yeah. There are also performances there's just in 2d, hand-drawn animation and, and even in CGI, it all starts with hand drawings. There is a sense of you're creating the illusion. And the closer you get to reality, the less you lose of the magic of the [00:17:00] illusion of life.

So you believe in Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and, and the Seven Dwarfs and Dumbo. You, you believe in them because they've been performed because they, they get your empathy. You understand them. There's a psychology there. Sometimes in CGI the performance is still there. And there are animators that are performing them, but you don't always get the exaggeration. And it [00:17:30] was all about exaggeration

Phil: Rugrats ran for 14 years and it was wonderfully animated. Well, they recast it because most of us are dead and, and they did a CGI version of it. Yeah. And it doesn't work. No, that looks like a rubber duck.

Steven: Yeah, that's a CGI. I really don't like when they look like rubber dolls, well, it loses the edge. It loses because in [00:18:00] animation it was all about an exaggeration. You would exaggerate the, the audience would get the joke and get the feeling. They don't necessarily see it as exaggerate. So stretch and squash, which was the big thing in animation.

Anything could happen. Art is an extension or a version of life that is more real than real because it's not real. Does that make sense? What I fell in love with and what I learned at the knee of Chuck J. And Richard Williams. [00:18:30] And and I knew Frank Thomas and Ali Johnson from Disney was the beauty of this performance, art of the acting.

And any other thing in animation, I'm just a fan of if I like it, but it was that. And, and of course it's all become CGI and I liked, and I liked some CGI films, but hand-drawn animation. But anyway, after space jam, I wrote. Hollywood is an all volunteer army. And then I just continued from there.

Ted: All of this genius rubbed off on you.

Steven: No doubt. Yeah. It's [00:19:00] why I like, and my art, I finally came to the conclusion after Space Jam. Well, I came to the conclusion before that is prose is prose. I love putting words on a blank piece of paper and I love sculpting words and I love I think of it like sculpture. I think of it as using clay or chipping away on, on marble stone or using oil paints for painting or the movement of a dancer. That's what prose writing, good prose writing [00:19:30] should be. Now the problem is in getting respect for it because everybody can write, but not everybody can paint or dance. I mean, really good dancing or play a musical instrument or applying

Phil: Or fly a plane.

Steven: So they respect all that. If they can't do it, but everybody can write. So they think they, they don't see the. And is that why?

Ted: Typically in Hollywood writers get the worst treatment

Steven:. They always have. Well one, all the powers that be in Hollywood resent the writers because they [00:20:00] need them. And it's like, I don't, where's my glory.

Even if you sold an original script, once you sold it, it becomes work for hire. And you're not in. And that's another reason why I liked to write novels because I do everything. I am the cinematographer, I'm the director. I perform all the characters.

Phil: I want to ask you now about the Creature Feature. It's an absolutely wonderful book, but the audio book version it is even I think, more wonderful.

Steven: Even as the author, I would agree.

Phil: Oh my goodness. And Steven allowed me the opportunity to hear it and to write about it, which I, I, to praise it, which I did gladly. And it definitely signifies what you're saying about the aspect of control that, that you exhibit, because it [00:21:00] is a full blown involving movie for the mind. It really is. How did you hire Seamus?

Steven: Seamus Dever who had played Lieutenant Ryan on Castle? He's an incredible actor and he impressed me so much. I wanted to do an audio book, so I really wanted Seamus, but I was quite frankly too shy.

I said, I don't want to bug him. So finally I called Seamus up and I proposed it to him and he went for it like, like a shot because his best friend is [00:21:30] Ramon DeComp who’s big and audio books.

Phil: The main lead of creature features is a female. That part went to his wife. Right?

Steven: Vivacia is the character. It's a small TV station in Chicago in 1960s, early 1960s.But Kathy Anderson, who plays her, was trained at Actor’s Studio And it just is going to quit because I'm an actress. I want to go to New York. I want to be on Broadway. And so she quits and her, her agent was very upset over this which he would be cause she's his only client.

Anyway, she quits, but on the way home and she lives in Illinois, she stops off to see mom and dad. And things are just strange. She thinks at first everybody's acting weird. It's sort of a tribute because they're all fans of her. She wants to get as far away from Vivacia as possible, but it turns out these aren't the real people. They have been taken over by monsters [00:22:30] from, from the fifth dimension or maybe the sixth. I haven't worked that out yet.

Ted: Let's take a listen now to a clip from Creature Feature, A Horrid Comedy.

Clip: “Once in power Kathy and I believe I can start on the road to be among these people. Then we will grow, spread out creep and slither our way into the body politic, sucking up all the power our bellies will hold Kathy. We can shape things to our comfort. We can make this world as we want it.

Holy Hannah, Kathy thought. This is lover's lane, not Pennsylvania Avenue. But damn!

Steven: I love radio drama. I love radio comedy.

Phil: I highly recommend that people go online and get the audio book, especially our audience, because I don't know how many of, of the 12 people who are listening to us are [00:23:30] suffering from macular degeneration like I am, but reading has become much more challenging and listening to these wonderful audio books that are being cranked out right now.

Steven: Everything I write, I write for the human voice, even though I'm writing prose for print in my mind, it's always for the human voice. It's always a performance and literature is an oral tradition.

Phil: Yeah, good old Homer. We're not talking about the cartoon!

Steven: Here's the thing. Whether they can read print or not, they can get a deal on the audio book. [00:24:00] Ah, I'm bringing down the ebook to a paltry 99 cents. And the thing is with Amazon, if you buy the ebook, then you can get the audio book for about half off.

Ted: Where would you find it?

Steven: I’m exclusive to Amazon.

Ted: You have a lot of scifi. And you had something about the moon written in the tradition of HG Wells, Jules Verne journey, to where, and you also have a story about coming to earth and observing earth from an ET’s perspective, traveling in space. Is this an interest of [00:24:30] yours?

Steven: Well, yeah, I grew up up watching scifi movies and reading science fiction and Tom Corbett but then obviously star Trek hits in 1966.

And I still, I actually prefer science fiction and film. I don't read as much as I, I started to, as a kid, I read a lot of [00:25:00] 19th century literature and I read a lot of literary fiction and I have. What I consider to be literary fiction. I have a series of novels. I call my love, sex and pursuit of happiness series.

And the first one was called By the Sea. And that's by that's about happiness, although love and sex figure into it. The one that came out earlier this year is called Bully for Love, which emphasizes love, but sex and pursuit of happiness involved in it. And next year, I'll come out with The Reluctant [00:25:30] Heterosexual, which is about sex, love and pursuit of happiness.

Ted: So, Steven, what do you have coming up? What's your next plan?

Steven: Well, I just finished a novel, which I will try to bring out later next year, which is called The Definition of Luck it has to do with well, like all works, I suppose, the human condition and right now, and whether we can survive this planet, but it's really about friendship.

Ted: Well, Steven, thank you so much.

Steven: Thank you.

Phil: I certainly hope that when [00:26:00] some of your other novels come out, you can come back and talk with us again. Thank you for taking us on a wonderful adventure.

Steven: Okay.

Phil: Well, Ted we've we've met our true Renaissance man today talking with Steven. It was absolutely wonderful fun. And it kind of like getting into the way back machine.

Ted: A look at old Hollywood.

Phil: Yeah!

Ted: Don't forget to visit our website, sexyboomershow.com. If you'd like to hear all the other episodes with all the interesting people we've had. And if you are listening to. On your [00:26:30] phone hit the little subscribe button.

That doesn't mean it costs you anything. It just signed you up for an alert on your podcast app. When we drop a new episode.

Phil: I can't wait to listen.

Ted: All right, Phil, until next time. See ya’!

AE Guy: You've been listening to Phil and Ted’s Sexy Boomer Show Featuring Phil Proctor and Ted Bonnitt and their special guest, Stephen Leiva. Music by Eddie Baytos and the Nervis Brothers.

I'm A. Earnest Guy. Tell your friends about The Sexy Boomer Show! Produced by RadioPictures.com. The makers of fine podcasts for seasoned hipsters, man.