what?

We're in the same business and you can wish that on me and my family and your colleagues and the people who are actually going to work every day and doing the best to make these beautiful stories that put fucking money in your pockets.

And that's what you wish on us is that we lose our houses.

And I realized that the disconnect between the creative community and the people who were writing the checks is, first of all, unprecedented broken in a way that it's never been before, but that these guys relinquished their rights to call us colleagues.

And I started imagining a world which was all of the things that for my 76 years on the planet pissed me off and I wanted to fix it.

It's all going into the studio.

But what it is fundamentally is it's a fucking love letter to the labor force.

dogs?

Christ.

Yeah? Dropped your goggles.

Thank you.

so

No, um, look, I think he wants me to put him back on, so I'll, um, goodbye, Lauren.

Gotta go, honey.

Call you after.

She sounds very kind.

You know, how did the love of performing, where did that come from?

My first high school play.

Um, you know, I, I got cast in a play in high school.

Uh, it was a very stylized kind of a Théâtre de farce kind of a thing.

So, uh, I was thrown right into the, with the wolves, uh, in terms of, you know, coming up with a sort of a comedic, multidimensional kind of a performance, and I found that to be as seductive as anything that had happened to me.

I was, I don't know, 15 years old.

And so from, from that experience, I did every, every single other play in high school till graduation, then four years of college, just one play after another, and then two more years of graduate school.

Uh, what was the preparation like?

Absolutely

...

it, it, it really ties into what we're talking about now.

When we went on strike, I think we, I think we went on strike at midnight on June 6th, 2023.

Following morning, I'm having my morning coffee and I'm, I, I do an Instagram Live and I'm talking about how I'm from a lower middle-class Jewish New York family, and if it weren't for organized labor, my parents would've, you know...

But because of organized labor, they had a shot at the American dream, which is basically raising your children and retiring with dignity, okay? So I'm a union guy, and, and but, but it's never good when, when we have work stoppages because the wrong people get hurt and a lot of people can't sustain their way through, and it's...

And there's gonna be blood.

Why would we quit?

Pre-filming or post-filming?

First ever time I met him personally.

I received a letter from him.

He had never made a film before.

It was 1990, something like that.

And it was a letter that I kept.

It was an incredibly beautifully written thing.

The documentary on the pendant hedge tree sounds so good.

Yeah

... you know, in terms of, uh, their professional contribution and their ability to sustain themselves in the profession.

So they were coming at it, uh, the two people who had the most influence on me, uh, and my, you know, trajectory, which is to throw myself in, um, to this tripped-out world of, you know, dramatic literature and then also, you know, the mounting of it on its feet and, uh, and, and participating in creatively inserting oneself into this amazing contribution of, of, um, existential ex, uh, uh, exploration, which is basically what theater and, and, and, and, and literature, g- great literature does.

Yeah.

All the time.

All the time.

I mean, and I, I, um, I'm gonna plug a memoir that I wrote about 14 years ago called Easy Street the Hard Way.

Um, you can get it on Amazon, or you can go to my Instagram page, and it'll send you the link.

What was on your mind with all that and now climate change and the fires?

Don't look up was, uh, was, I thought a magic trick because of the way it threads the needle between, um, how obsessed we are with the perception of things vis-a-vis social media and what's trending and what's hot and what's important and what we need to consume ourselves with juxtaposed against a world-ending event where an asteroid is on its way to destroy us all.

And it was a very, very... tough needle to thread adam mckay did it artfully and brilliantly and um um i think one of the most heartbreaking aspects of what we're going through now with these these fires that are of a historic nature is all of the finger pointing in the and the and the uh blaming and naming and coming up with every kind of excuse other than the fact that what we were dealing with on Tuesday night, which is the night when I got an evacuation warning personally because I live in the foothills of the Eden fire.

was something way beyond politics, way beyond what your beliefs are.

This was an act of nature that was, I mean, the likes of which we'd never seen before.

And we're seeing more and more of these year after year after year.

it makes you ask a lot of questions and pointing fingers and putting the blame on people are not going to answer any of those questions.

Did you find that you learned anything about how people take it and took the film and sort of you're almost heroes version of, facing reality? How are you going to fix a problem if you don't acknowledge a problem?