The Charleston Marketing Podcast
Welcome to The Charleston Marketing Podcast, the podcast that dives deep into the world of marketing, with a specific focus on the vibrant city of Charleston. Join us as we explore the strategies, trends, and success stories that shape the marketing landscape in this historic and captivating coastal city.
Each episode of The Charleston Marketing Podcast brings you exclusive interviews with local marketing experts, industry thought leaders and Charleston entrepreneurs who have harnessed the power of effective marketing in the Lowcountry and beyond. From strategic communication, social media, PR, digital strategy and everything in between, we uncover valuable insights and actionable tips for our listeners.
The Charleston Marketing Podcast
Television Insights and Community Impact with Tom and Katie
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Tom Blomquist, the mastermind behind iconic TV dramas like "Walker Texas Ranger" and "The A-Team," takes us inside the rollercoaster ride of his illustrious career. From his humble beginnings in Mount Prospect, Illinois, to rubbing elbows with TV legends in Los Angeles, Tom shares the serendipitous encounters and relentless drive that propelled him into the entertainment world. Mike Compton and, guest co-host Katie Blomquist, sit in awe while Tom opens up about the trials and triumphs of his journey, including the gritty hustle of surviving in Hollywood and the pivotal mentorships that shaped his path.
But it's not just all Hollywood glitz and glamour. We dive into the heart of creative resilience, exploring the evolving landscape of TV writing and the grit required to thrive amidst fierce competition. Tom's tales of navigating industry pitfalls, from canceled shows to the shift towards in-house writing teams, offer a candid look at the business's realities. The episode also delves into the creative synergy of feedback, teamwork, and the intriguing intersection of psychotherapy techniques with artistic expression, highlighting the delicate balance between maintaining artistic integrity and achieving commercial success.
Beyond the screen, we celebrate Katie’s inspiring nonprofit work with Going Places, which brings joy and mobility to children through custom bikes. Her story, born from a simple GoFundMe campaign, has blossomed into a movement spreading smiles across the nation. This episode is a treasure trove of insights, from the adrenaline-pumping stunts of TV production to the heartwarming moments that define community impact. Whether you're a fan of TV thrillers, a budding writer, or someone seeking inspiration, our conversation with Tom and Katie promises to leave you both entertained and uplifted.
Presenting Sponsor: Charleston Radio Group
Title Sponsor: Charleston American Marketing Association
Cohosts: Stephanie Barrow, Mike Compton, Darius Kelly, Kim Russo
Produced and edited: rūmbo Advertising
Photographer: Kelli Morse
Art Director: Taylor Ion
Outreach: Lauren Ellis
CAMA President: Margaret Stypa
Score by: The Strawberry Entrée; Jerry Feels Good, CURRYSAUCE, DBLCRWN, DJ DollaMenu
Voiceover by: Ellison Karesh
Studio Engineer: Brian Cleary
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Welcome to the Charleston Marketing Podcast, powered by the Charleston American Marketing Association and broadcasting from our home at Charleston Radio Group. Thanks to CRG, we're able to talk with the movers and shakers of Charleston, from economy to art, from hospitality to tech and everything in between. These leaders have made a home here in the Lowcountry. They live here, they work here, they make change here.
Speaker 2:Why let's talk about it. Hello and welcome to the charleston marketing podcast powered by the charleston american marketing association. We're here recording in the charleston radio group studios. Big supporters of camo gotta give a shout out to charleston's favorite dj. Dj jerry feels good with the beats at the beginning. Thanks to all our supporters. Mike Compton here, co-founder and president of Roomba goroombacom, and your incoming president for the Charleston American Marketing Association. I'm here with a guest co-host. What's up, katie?
Speaker 3:Hey, katie Blomquist. I'm the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Going Places and I am the communications director on the american marketing association board here in charleston.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, um, katie, I'm gonna let you do the honors of just saying hello to the guests today and kind of like getting a little. Who do we have here today, today?
Speaker 3:we have my dad. Hey, tom blumquist don't hold that against me the king, as we like to call him in our home.
Speaker 4:Oh, is that right. It's an old inside family joke Inside family joke.
Speaker 2:We'll dive into that later I can't wait, tom, the king of big screen.
Speaker 4:Yes, go ahead.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're really excited to have you here today. Thank you, I'm excited to get to be a guest, special co-host for this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're going to do great Katie. And so just to kind of make Tom feel even more awkward, we're going to read a little bit of his bio. I could not not read his bio. Tom is an award-winning screenwriter, producer and director who has been associated with some of the nation's most popular television dramas, including now. Some of us might have to Google these things, okay, because they're a little bit older, but I, I, I'm familiar with a lot of them katherine marshall's, christy right, walker texas ranger.
Speaker 2:Everybody knows about walker texas, the a team. Pause for pause for drama there. I mean I gotta hear some stories about the a team hunter, riptide swamp thing, farscape werewolf in a heartbeat, fame la and hardcastle mccormick oh my gosh tom, what is going on?
Speaker 2:and serving as consulting producer for the feature film blood pageant starring snoop d-o-double-g. In addition to his work in television, bloomquist has published three books the novels silent partners and devious thinking and the textbook eye of the storm. I can go on and on and on of the storm here. Tom, uh, you're. You're also an educator. You taught screenwriting at the american film institute university of south california, chapman university, ucla writers program. Dear lord, uh, where do we even start to, to, to, to open up the onion? Of tom why?
Speaker 2:can't he keep? One what's wrong with this guy? And then he's got all of the all the other different uh stuff that he's worked on, because you can't remember them all for crying out loud. There's so much stuff, tom how do you?
Speaker 3:why don't we start with how it started?
Speaker 2:oh, that's a great well, as the daughter asks, how did it start?
Speaker 4:well, what did you go? Where were you from? I'm from mount prospect, illinois, uh, northwest suburb of chicago okay, midwest love it near the arlington racetrack, the old arlington racetrack. If anybody knows that area, that was a landmark. Um, and it all started uh yeah, I was interested in theater as a kid okay I learned very quickly in high school, did you?
Speaker 4:yeah, high school some plays which we learned quickly that tom should not be performing and he's a behind the scenes guy, sure, well, you gotta find that out um, and, but it was really fun and um and I was. You know I was writing all the time.
Speaker 2:I didn't even realize what do you mean. You were writing all the time as a high school kid. You were just writing all the time.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I was like on the high school paper you know, and wrote sports articles and I was a drummer in a band, a popular local rock group, and wrote articles about music and the genesis of rock and roll and all that, and wrote articles about music and the genesis of rock and roll and all that and so all of that I've described it to people. It's like this all comes from the same place. It's the same itch you're trying to scratch in life which is telling stories, entertaining people.
Speaker 4:And I didn't even realize you could be a writer. You know, we grew up in this middle-class suburb. Sure, you know, if somebody said well, I'm going to move to Hollywood and be a TV writer, they'd think you're nuts.
Speaker 2:It wasn't even on the menu. You know it wasn't an option. What decade are we in to right Like? What year is this?
Speaker 4:The 60s, the 60s, so especially in the 60s. Yeah, I graduated from high school in 68.
Speaker 2:You were a rebel back in the day I was a rebel.
Speaker 3:Yeah, back then people, you stayed where you grew up.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, you know, you stayed in kind of the same general vicinity At least in our kind of microculture of a family and everything, and so the but I was always the kid in the accelerated English class, you know the fast track thing. And because it was easy and fun, some guys were into math and it was like they could ace it and I couldn't figure out algebra or geometry to save my life. But this was just natural and was fun. When I went to college, I went to Southern Illinois University because they had a really good radio TV program one of the top five in the country in those days, and they had an awesome school of music.
Speaker 4:I didn't know what I wanted to major in. I thought maybe I wanted to be a professional musician, I didn't know. And you kind of channel into the things that fit, yeah. And so I'd be in a class in the TV department and we were supposed to do a project yeah, and instead of going to the library and finding something, I'd say, well, I'll just write it, it's a lot easier and I don't have to leave. And so somewhere along the line in those days I thought I wanted to be a TV director, like do the news or local politics?
Speaker 2:So you had a clue, you were clued in there. I mean, that's it, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:And then a different dream emerged, which was I wanted to be. I thought I wanted to produce TV commercials. I thought, wouldn't that be great? To you know, do these 20 second, 30 second, 60 second? Spots in those days.
Speaker 4:And, of course, sell people products they don't really need. All of that that's fine, but huge budgets and I thought wouldn't that be cool? Yeah, so I started looking for what my job would be when I graduated, because my classmates are the people right ahead of us. I could see where they were going. They were all going to TV stations around the Midwest and getting good jobs as producer directors and whatever. And I just don't want to do that. I've got to be I, I think an ad agency. So I started writing letters to ad agencies all over the world. Okay, here's who I am, here's what I'm studying. I know you have to recruit people. You do recruit people, you know, from time to time on big campuses. What do I have to do to be one of those guys? You know and I write. I went to the library and looked up all of the that's before the internet libraries big building full of books.
Speaker 4:Okay, so I would look up who's the production manager head of production for this agency and I was writing letters and a couple of them wrote me back and ultimately one of those turned into a job at Footcone and Belding in Chicago.
Speaker 2:How many did you have to send? 80.
Speaker 4:You sent 80? 80, on the typewriter, 80 letters Hand-typed. Hand-typed, yeah, customized letters, because I would try to reference products that they had, or whatever. Sure Did a little research, Just so they didn't think I was a complete goofball. And a couple of them did respond Most of them just toss it, but ultimately one of somebody. This was my sophomore year of college I got three years ahead of me.
Speaker 4:How do I get a job when I graduate? That was the whole goal, yeah, yeah. And this one guy at Fucona Belding, bill Heyer, I don't know. He was amused. Something about who's this audacious kid writing letters at 19 years old. Oh yeah.
Speaker 4:Come work at one of the top five agencies in the world. But he said I know the school you're going to and stay in touch. So I did, I called him once in a while. I never did meet him, by the way, but we were corresponded by snail mail and my senior year I thought okay, you know I'm going for the big score now.
Speaker 1:I hope I've lined up a job and he said well, I've got good news and bad news.
Speaker 4:The good news is, the bad news is I'm retiring and I'll be out of here in a couple of weeks. But the good news is I've given your file to my successor, dwayne Bogey, who you know, who you know. We'll be expecting to hear from you and I'm thinking I got a file there's a file with my name on it. This is a score Right, but I was also devastated that I spent three years on this guy.
Speaker 2:This guy and who's.
Speaker 4:Bogey. And who's this guy? Yeah?
Speaker 4:So I called and long story short, he said. His secretary, kathy Lonergan, said yeah, mr Bogey would be happy to see you when you're in the Chicago office. So it was in the Chicago office. So when you're home for Christmas, come and see him. And I went in at 9 in the morning with my suit and tie and everything and she said here's your schedule for the day the day. I thought I was just meeting him. He had me scheduled to meet all these top executives at the agency. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3:And she said he'll see you at the end of the day. Is that typical of how they interviewed back then?
Speaker 4:Well, it ought to be how everybody interviews, because instead of going to some HR computer thing, some computer program that prescreens you, this was all done.
Speaker 2:But you didn't have any of that. No, you had to meet each person, each level, and Dwayne was the head of the Hallmark Reading Cards account.
Speaker 4:He was also the executive producer of the Hallmark Hall of Fame drama series. Little did I know I got the job Congratulations, it was awesome. But when I showed up for work it wasn't to be a junior producer. He was looking for a protege to train into becoming him, becoming a producer of the Hallmark Hall of Fame movies what the heck. And it was like lightning bolt just zapped me and whatever it was to this day and we became lifelong friends and I couldn't tell you what he saw, except maybe some of him in me. I don't know, I have no idea. That's amazing, but I was part of that group of people reading scripts that were being submitted for the four or five Hallmark movies every year. Oh my gosh, so you're romantic too.
Speaker 2:This is not the Hallmark Channel. Sounds romantic right now, doesn't he?
Speaker 4:This is not the Hallmark.
Speaker 3:This is not the whole thing, you're going to be the wife next. Funny enough, that's where he met my mom. Yeah, I met her. There Was at this job, so it really was meant to be Uh-huh.
Speaker 4:Yep, that's right. So you'd be sued for pursuing somebody at work nowadays, but back then everybody was dating everybody.
Speaker 2:We're talking 70s, 80s, right that's right Free for all Wild West. So 70s, 80s, right that's right, Free for all Wild West.
Speaker 4:So I got the bug for writing by reading all those scripts. Oh, amazing and all those books and talking about stuff and realized I don't want to be the guy at the agency. I want to be the guy writing these. And so I wrote a bunch more letters, tried to transition to Los Angeles. I didn't even know what a writer really was, I didn't know what that meant know, even know what a writer really was.
Speaker 3:I didn't know what that meant and I moved to la, having never visited he just moved, which is well?
Speaker 4:no, I went, I I hadn't. I went out to visit a friend of mine who was a star, struggling actor, slept on his couch for a couple weeks and tried to have as many interviews as I could. And one, uh, very important executive, grant tinker, who was mary tyler moore's husband and ran their company, the mary tyler moore's husband and ran their company, the mary tyler moore company. Um, he said look, you're young, you're single, quit your job, drive out here, dig in. I'll help you if I can. Yeah, so I went back. Everybody thought I was nuts. I was quitting a job I presumably could have had for life. Really good job, really good job 27 years old.
Speaker 4:I was 24. Yeah, early.
Speaker 3:And my mom went with him. She quit her job. There too, she came a few months later.
Speaker 4:but yeah, she came out, so now I'm out in LA.
Speaker 2:What was she doing, though? What is your mom? And what's her name?
Speaker 3:Ann.
Speaker 4:Hi Ann. I'm not sure she wanted that disclosed on the show.
Speaker 2:Her association with us is the tens of people that listen to us.
Speaker 3:No, my mom was very lucky. We were very lucky. She was the stay-at-home mom and my dad worked from home so it was really great to have them both home all the time. I'd come home from school and run out to the guest house where my dad's office was and he'd take a break and you know, talk, chat about my day. And my mom did full-time charity work at Operation School Bell Okay, called Aunt Banny.
Speaker 4:That's where she got the nonprofit bug.
Speaker 3:And the entrepreneur bug from him Kind of combined them both, but they, she, and so then, after I graduated high school, she then worked in my high school but waited a few years after I left and went back to work. I was gone. I was like, what am I going to do?
Speaker 2:Back then, what was she doing?
Speaker 4:She was a secretary in the account management area of the agency. I went out to LA and I was scratching around trying to find a job similar to the one I had. You know and was it came in second a couple of times.
Speaker 2:Of course, of course you can't I mean.
Speaker 4:And I had, and I was writing every day, every night, trying to figure out how to do this and and it was bleak. I mean, I didn't know what it meant to learn your craft Right and compete at that level. I was just just a kid. I didn't know what it meant to learn your craft and compete at that level. I was just a kid, I didn't know. Yeah, and apologies to any 24-year-olds out there. I was a kid. Maybe you were you were Young adults.
Speaker 4:You're further along than I was Young adults, but anyway, I spent every dime I had. Yeah, I was living in a $105 a month apartment with no kitchen. Right, I had, I was living in a $105 a month apartment with no kitchen.
Speaker 3:Just a hot plate right.
Speaker 4:I had a hot plate and a mini fridge and a girlfriend. She was in Chicago.
Speaker 3:So she didn't come back yet, but she came there Eventually later.
Speaker 4:One of the compelling stories about what happened to me that moved me forward. We were talking earlier, before the show, about, you know, wanting to do something and then it didn't happen. You open doors, a door opens, you jump through it. Well, there were no doors opening and I spent all my money because I didn't want to get a day job, because there were no answering machines or answering services. Even so, what if I miss a call for a job? So you spent every dime I had. If my parents only knew how broke I was, you know, they would have come out, they thought I was nuts for leaving and they would have dragged me back to Chicago.
Speaker 4:Yes, so I went to file for food stamps oh dear okay and so I went to the Burbank, the Glendale, california food stamp office and I was sitting there at my lowest point because I'd given up a great job and I was not getting any traction at all. What am I going to do? I'm going to spend all my money.
Speaker 2:Did I do the right thing? I don't think you know this story.
Speaker 4:But I'm sitting there talking to this emotionless clerk, the food stamp clerk, that, this bureaucrat, and he was this really unpleasant little man with a bad toupee, I remember that and he was asking me the questions you know well, what are you doing? Are you working? And I said, well, I want to be a writer. He said what I said yeah, I want to be a television writer, writer. He said, oh, that's, that's never going to happen. And and I now I'm at my lowest point, right, I'm, I'm, I'm one life crisis from flinging myself off a freeway overpass, you know and this guy says that's never going to happen. I said what, what, what, what do you mean? He said I wanted to be a tv and it didn't happen for me and it's not going to happen for you. Oh my gosh. And he said trust me on that. And at that moment I said I'm never going to let this son of a bitch get under my skin.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no kidding.
Speaker 4:Pardon me all of you, but I said I'm never going to be this little man, Bitter, burned out, awful little man.
Speaker 4:I'm never going to be that guy and whatever happened to him is not going to get to me, it's not your story and that propelled me from that point forward, through a lot of years of trial and error and victories and defeats, to see my dream happen. Sure, because this awful little man told me that I was a failure before he said just get a job. Just get a job. You know, anywhere You're never going to make this happen, because it didn't happen for me. What I learned was, of course, los Angeles is full of people who didn't have their dreams come true.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4:And why they do and they don't for some people. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Who knows? But?
Speaker 4:it was crazy, Tom. Did you eat? Did you get your food stamps? I? Got my food stamps, all right, okay, and I lived on granola and scrambled eggs.
Speaker 2:For how long, like weeks?
Speaker 4:It was a year and then Grant Tinker, mary Tyler Moore's husband, called me and said you still out of work? He knew I was and, oh, he had invited me. When I came to Los Angeles he said listen, anytime you want to see Mary's show. The Mary Tyler Moore show was the number one sitcom on television.
Speaker 4:And he said anytime you want to come and watch Mary's show shoot, just call my assistant and she'll get you a pass. So I went every Friday night to watch the show shoot smart, and I'd see him up in the booth and kind of wave at him and let him get some face time a little time and I'd see him afterwards if I could get to him to thank him, and so he knew.
Speaker 4:What I realized later was that he was watching me. That's what this guy's made of. Yeah, let's see how you want to come out to la. Okay, you came, you. Now what put him through it? Let's see what buddy. It got to the point where people that worked on the show I think thought I worked at the company Because I was there all the time. That's the idea.
Speaker 4:So Betty White was one of the stars of the show. She passed away in the last couple of years, oh my gosh and her husband, Alan Ludden, who was the top game show host, Password and some of those iconic shows. He would always be standing off by the cameras watching his wife do her show, and I'm standing next to him Pretty soon. I'm not sitting in the audience anymore.
Speaker 3:I'm now standing on the floor with the crew, with the crew, yeah, with the crew.
Speaker 4:And just because they would think what are you sitting up? Come on down here with us. So I think all these people you know Mary, maybe even all thought I worked there because I'm waving at Grant Tinker. So they and Alan was so nice and my parents came out to visit, not knowing that I was living on food stamps and I was sucking air yeah.
Speaker 4:And I remember they came over and I said mom, dad, I want you to meet Alan. They were like freaked out because he was the guy, the game show guy. And he went oh, mr and Mrs Blomquist, your, your son. What a wonderful young man. We all think the world of him. I think he thought I worked there. It was hilarious, but he could not have been more gracious. Perfect. And then, betty, come on over here, top parents are here from chicago and everybody.
Speaker 3:It was so great and and I don't think I knew that, that's a wonderful story and and everybody was in on it and I'm watching.
Speaker 2:Make it till you make it.
Speaker 3:That's the true story of fake it till you make it.
Speaker 4:And they were just so welcoming Ed Asner, all these people, they were just wonderful people doing this cool show and I'm again being exposed to all this really great writing Exactly the top writers in Los Angeles, notoriously at that company. And so eventually Grant called and gave me a job, but it was in the drama area, because he wanted to expand into dramatic series and I had some background in that With the.
Speaker 4:Hallmark thing, so he wasn't just doing a friend a favor type of thing. It was like I need a young guy and Tom has that exact experience. He's been vetted because he was at Footcone and Belding on this Emmy-winning series so he may know something and I've seen what he's made of. He's coming every week and he's punching real hard and he's asked me for job references when he was a finalist or something. So I got a job there and it was there helping develop some drama series. Lou Grant was a series that was a spinoff for Mary that I had a small role in kind of moving things through. But I got to know all the dramatic writers they made deals with, sure, and these were really these were the top of the top. You know guys. They had development deals with them and I would read their stuff and meet with them and talk to them and show them my kind of pathetic early scratchings on paper and that was really where it I made a turn.
Speaker 4:I got to do this I I I'm learning more and more and found a writing workshop that one of those writers had been in when he was a young guy yeah, and, and that's where it all started, for you know, and then you've read all this list of shows and you bounce from thing to thing, either as a freelance writer, which Katie mentioned. I'd be working in the office we had at home, Gig working. In those days there was a lot of that available to writers.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay was there.
Speaker 4:And now the business model is different. Now they tend to hire all their writers, was there and you know. Now the model. The business model is different. Now they tend to hire all their writers and everybody's on staff and they don't welcome freelance writers in. When I was producing series in charge of shows later on, I loved having fresh ideas and voices come in, you know.
Speaker 4:So about half the scripts would be written by the staff, me or a couple of the other writers that work there, but I loved having these guys come in and pitching story ideas and bouncing ideas with them and then have them go and do their take on the show. And it might require an extra draft or two to get it exactly right for the show's kind of mandates, but you're going to get a kind of a level of writing. I think that's not otherwise possible because these guys don't live and breathe the show 24-7 like you do.
Speaker 4:And they might just have an idea, a way to write a character or develop the series kind of arcs differently. And so I loved that. And now, sadly, today, I don't know how people get started, even because you can't really audition a script for them as a freelance writer, so I honestly have no idea how the staff shows up.
Speaker 2:You know there's always snail mail. I mean you wrote 80 letters. You know you could do that. Yeah, we could do that.
Speaker 4:Email Nope. Yeah, nobody is going to read those letters anymore. That's really sad.
Speaker 2:Maybe it could be another idea another content idea.
Speaker 3:Look at this unique form of communication.
Speaker 4:It's all HR now.
Speaker 3:Everything is HR.
Speaker 4:You've got to get through those layers before you actually get to a human being that might actually look into your soul and see who you are and what makes you tick. When you're staffing a tv show you know some new show, they do a spin-off of Grey's Anatomy or whatever. Uh-huh they, they have writers that have been on staff before they move over. And then, but how does somebody today I truly don't know, how does somebody say well, here I, here's my work well, you know um one guy we had on the show and I'm looking at the podcast now Ben Toll.
Speaker 2:Ben had a great story. Ben and his buddy rode the. Atlantic Ocean.
Speaker 3:Ben Toy.
Speaker 2:Not Toy, not Toll. T-o-w-i-l Ben Toll. And he said he just if he had a mission and he had something that he wanted to do, you just get it done. Like you, went to the studio every Friday you do that.
Speaker 2:You make the emails, you write the letters Like you and him are those type of people that are on a different level. There's nothing that can stop a type of person Like if you have something in your head, you're going to get it done, there's no barriers. If there's barriers, you just find a way around it. What do you mean? It's interesting. It's right here on this list. Your work is amazing.
Speaker 4:Obsessive, compulsive comes to mind. Hard working also comes to mind.
Speaker 4:Well, work ethic has a lot to do with it, and and self-motivated right I mean that's a unique quality, especially these days especially these days, and that's the kind of ignorance is bliss I honestly, I did not realize, yeah, until I was in real deep right, uh, how hard it is, yeah, to get in the business, uh, and then how hard it is to stay in the business once you're in the business for a million reasons, correct and it's like a moving target in some respects and you're blindfolded and you're shooting at a moving target and if you hit it, you hit it, but you can hit it a second time. You can hit it a third time. Right.
Speaker 4:And there's some of that to this, but obsessive, compulsive does certainly come to mind.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, because you, you know it has some body blows you get your big break, and then the show is canceled right, you said you had two of those before I had.
Speaker 4:Yeah, there were a couple of those and, and along the way there's shows that you really believe in you think you know. You know I really like this show. Not only am I thrilled to be working on it, but I would watch this as a civilian person, just watching TV at home. And other times you're working on shows that are, you know, awful, and you know you hate your life, you hate everything about it, but you're doing it because it's a job. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And you hate yourself for doing a job just for the money. And you hate yourself for doing a job just for the money, right, because you're also trying to be creative and make it better.
Speaker 2:Welcome to our world.
Speaker 4:Exactly, but that is show business. Yeah, and there's more business than there is show sometimes, as they say, isn't that it?
Speaker 3:Never thought of it like that, is that?
Speaker 4:true, but it's very true, and you meet some amazing people along the way. I was in this writing workshop when I was working at MTM.
Speaker 4:I wanted to be a writer and so Jim Burns, a great writer, one of my role models, was reading my stuff. And I said how did you learn to do this, jim? He said, well, I was in a writing workshop up on Mulholland Drive. I said well, is he still around? Yeah, he's there. I said does he have a workshop now? He said, well, I don't think so. I said would you ask him if he would do it again? And the guy said yeah, if you can get six or eight people together, come up to the house once a week. Anybody Come on. What do you mean? His name was Robert Dennis. He was one of the original story editors on the original Black and White Perry Mason series, the half hour Perry Mason show. And just this veteran old guy. He wrote 500 episodes of television in his career, a couple of novels and we would all throw in 10 bucks so his wife could buy coffee and cookies, but he never, charged us a dime and you'd bring your stuff up, He'd read it out loud and he'd go Mike, Mike, Mike.
Speaker 4:Oh boy, Try it again. And that would be it. But out of that, if you're paying attention, your professional standards start to take form. Sure, there were some people in that workshop that were better writers than me. Just intuitively, just organically, the stuff they brought in was really good.
Speaker 2:You're going to find somebody better than you in many things mostly right.
Speaker 4:Well, one guy I remember was a LA Fire Department paramedic and he wanted to be a writer and he had some really good stuff, but Bob would give him negative feedback. We'd all read each other's stuff and he couldn't get past the fact that, well, I wrote that that's the way it is and he fell away.
Speaker 3:Well, maybe I mean part of the strategy of that is just preparing you for the rejection. You know when you're actually submitting to like get a job or you turn in a script and they're like this isn't good, this isn't what you know. You have to be able to handle it.
Speaker 4:Cuts them out, weeds them out early, the worst thing you can do when you're trying to be a writer at certainly a professional level, anything more than a hobbyist is. You can't believe your friends and family when they tell you you're a genius. Oh my god, this is the best.
Speaker 2:This is gonna make a movie out of this.
Speaker 4:This is great right you know it's like you know it might be great oh my chances are it's not as great as they think it is, because you need informed eyeballs. Yes, to critique. Yes, you know you mentioned my novels.
Speaker 5:I I'm editing my third novel right now and I same I, I did, I'm not, I got it I got it, uh, to where I could get it, yeah, but you lose objectivity.
Speaker 4:I have no objectivity anymore. What I I, you know you have to step back from it, right? So I sent it to three or four writer friends before, also novelistsists and screenwriters in their past. And what do you think? Tell me what's working, tell me what's not working. Anything you want to say, put a puke on it fine, and out of that comes a kind of objectivity.
Speaker 4:Somebody says this section here you had me and then you lost me. I don't know what. I lost my great. I can fix that, you know. Or I think you're missing a chapter, I think there's a piece missing. Here you go. You know, of course, what an idiot. Why didn't? I see that Well, because you have no objectivity, and to do this at a professional level you have to be able to have somebody say it's okay, right, but maybe or have somebody say this is really working and you're firing on all cylinders.
Speaker 4:You need to hear that too, but it's got to come from somebody that knows really what they're talking about yes, yes, yes, yes and uh like, if one surgeon says to another surgeon you know, wow, that that procedure you did is unbelievable, you know well, that means something, because he knows what he's looking at versus us going in and being like oh so wow, that was amazing.
Speaker 3:It was amazing. We don't know what we're looking at, so I was going to make a reference or a reference or a story behind it.
Speaker 2:Bringing that to marketing right, because you want to have your team kind of sharpen your your skills too, right? So the team. You, you in my head. I'm sending my stuff to my team. So yesterday or tuesday or whatever, we had our status and I had been in the radio charleston radio station the day before with with matthew trying to do some ads for the podcast, so I showed the team the ads. Oh my god, they laughed me out of the zoom call like no, there wasn't any, there is no, they work for you, right.
Speaker 4:So you fired them all. You know what I mean well, you know it's.
Speaker 2:You know, I got a business partner too, you know. But, yes, right, so we could deal with it. It was my team. I know people I can make a phone call, but there is no. You know, I love that about my team, right? Because there is no, hey oh, that's a great idea. Keep going with that idea.
Speaker 2:No it would be like no, what are you doing? Do it again. Don't be salesy. I just need to deliver it without sales. So anyhow. But yeah, steel sharpens steel. You've got to trust the people that you're working with, and then the product at the end of the day comes out 100 times over.
Speaker 4:Pretty awesome. When you're trying to, let's say, do screenwriting, you're peeling an onion that may have many, many layers, the actual script you're going for. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And it's easy fairly easy to work really hard and get a layer or two or three off of that onion. But there's more layers under there and with experience you can uncover those yourself. But everybody reports to somebody and, like Steven Spielberg, when he makes a movie doesn't just make a movie, he shows his first cuts to George Lucas, francis Coppola, robert Zemeckis these top filmmakers oh wow, they show each other the first cuts of their movies privately. So they get fresh, informed eyes. Sure, steven, what the hell were you thinking? This doesn't work, thank you, because he doesn't have the objectivity. I mean. Everybody reports to somebody. You have to have meaningful, supportive, nurturing feedback. It does no good to have somebody go you suck. What am I supposed to do with that?
Speaker 2:Right, they laughed at me, tom. I mean, I get it.
Speaker 4:But you have to have that as long as you've been doing this. Whatever that was, it wasn't perfect, exactly. Well, okay, wake up, make a change, or not, or not, or not. And the thing about I used to tell my college students, screenwriting students that a screenwriter is not a writer, you're a tailor. What do you mean? You're a tailor? Well, you have this little tailor shop in the mall.
Speaker 4:The guy comes in and says I'd like you to make me a suit. Yes, sir, I can make you a suit. What would you like? Well, I want the scratchiest burlap you have for the pants. I want the zipper on the side. I want the waist Too tight for my big belly and my big butt. And then I don't want the front open. I want one lapel smaller than the other and one sleeve. I want to just do a quarter sleeve, three quarter on one arm. But, sir, that's what I want. Are you going to make it or not? Yes, sir, I'll do the best I can to your specifications. So you make the suit.
Speaker 4:The guy comes in, tries it on. What the hell are you doing? Why is one sleeve shorter than the other? And the zipper ought to be in the back, not the front. But, sir, I don't care what you say, I want it the way I want it. Yes, sir, I'll be happy to make that suit for you. That's what a professional writer does, because you're writing for someone, even if you write a screenplay on your own. You've got one that you're working on and you finally sell it to Universal Pictures. As soon as they buy it, they own it. Now they say well, you know that love story between the guy and the girl from college. We think it ought to be between a goat and a hamster. But that's not what I write. That's what we want.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's our script. Do you want? To do it, or should we bring somebody else in? Mm-hmm.
Speaker 4:Ultimately, it's somebody else's thing, mm-hmm, and it's yours until it's not yours. And if you're writing, if you're a freelance writer, somebody is paying for that. And it's their money. Yeah, their party favors, you know. Yeah, that's that Right. And so that's a hard lesson to learn, hard lesson to learn, and you learn it over and over and over. And even if you're the executive producer of a hit series, yeah, you've still got studio executives Right, nervous network executives.
Speaker 4:You've got people nervous actors who have perhaps even a huge amount of influence uh more influence than you because of their, their it's their face on the screen, of course, yeah, and so you, you learn to roll with it to some extent, and if you can't, then it's really not for you right this is conversation, is not intended to be a recruiting effort for people to get into the tv or no, but what?
Speaker 2:because it's not for everybody. Well, everything everything you're saying relates to the marketing world and to the advertising world yeah, you get a budget, you get an ad, get a product it's their product. You have to tailor it. Yeah, I mean, that's perfect, it really is. It's a great. So when you're how do you? Come up with all these ideas. Um, so you get a project and the project gives you back in the day. Now I know you're writing for yourself, you're, you're pretty much. You got all these great stories and you're writing and I can't wait to talk about that.
Speaker 2:We'll end with those books, but before then, where do you drum up these ideas?
Speaker 4:well, katie can attest the fact that it's a severe mental illness that I have.
Speaker 2:Which one is it? All of them.
Speaker 4:All of them? Yeah, I have. It's funny when you live in a world of stories and even people that are doing this as a hobby write short stories or whatever poems. You learn early on to get as much stimulation and feedback as you can from the world around you. So I'm an obsessive-compulsive newspaper reader.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:I read the newspaper in my working life. I would read a couple of newspapers a day and leave them all stacked up, which my mom loved. Sorry Mom if I missed a couple of days, I would go crazy that I might have missed something you might have missed a story that inspired you that happened into the newspaper that yeah, and you don't know where, where these things are gonna come and where they love where they're gonna poke you yeah so we'd go on vacation and we'd have somebody watching our house and we'd say, whatever you do, don't throw any of the newspapers when we come home.
Speaker 4:It'd be a stack like this and ann would roll her eyes oh my god, this guy's gonna, and I would but. I would get through them all, and I would clip out things back back when I was reading a physical newspaper right but when we moved from los angeles, I I had six file cabinets in the garage, tall ones, full of articles and ideas and notepads and stuff you don't know where it's going to go.
Speaker 3:He always kept a notepad next to his side of the bed because he said he would wake up in the night with this idea and would be afraid to lose it. So he'd always write it down in the dark so he wouldn't forget.
Speaker 4:Oh, that's.
Speaker 4:In the car too I'm glad you you mentioned that because I heard a great interview with paul mccartney once, uh, a radio interview for one of his albums with wings. And they said john lennon had just recently died. And they said well, you know, you're paul mccartney, what's your? You have your thought about what your obituary is going to say. So I know exactly what he's going to say.
Speaker 4:Paul McCartney, former Beatle, a member of Wings, composer of Yesterday, died today. And they said really, why Yesterday? He said it's the greatest thing I'll ever do and he said the irony is I didn't write it. The interviewer said well, what do you mean? You didn't write it? You wrote it. He said no, I dreamt it. He said I woke up. I would write things down in the middle of the night, in my sleep. Sometimes it made no sense. I woke up one morning and that song was there and he said it's the greatest thing I'll ever do. And I dreamt it. He said I had to fill in lyrics and things, but he said the melody, whatever it was written out. And he said I've got songs I've labored over for weeks that I wouldn't play for anybody. They're horrible and this thing the greatest thing I'll ever do. I just channeled it.
Speaker 4:And it was waiting for me when I woke up, and later I went to a seminar at the Director's Guild in Los Angeles and it was a psychotherapist Dr David Grand was his name and he was a psychotherapist out of New York. He treated a lot of the first responders and survivors of 9-11. Okay, a really interesting guy and he was applying some of these psychotherapy techniques to creative people and to sports figures. All right.
Speaker 4:How do you channel whatever that mysterious thing is forward into the most usable thing? His book is called the Grand Method, by the way.
Speaker 2:The Grand Method. I'm writing that down.
Speaker 4:Yeah, but basically it's a way way described it is that all your involuntary stuff, your blinking of your eyes, your heartbeat, all of that happens in the back, here in the reptilian part of the brain, where all the intellectual stuff happens is is something have to have an inspiration. It's got to go from here to here, and your, your mind, is most, uh, creative when it's at rest. That's why you have ideas in the shower, yeah, you're sitting there shooting blanks, oh, and you realize that right. And or you wake up in the middle of the night you've solved all the world's problems because your mind is completely at rest and on the lawn the pathway to go from here to here is uncluttered, okay.
Speaker 4:As soon as you wake up and the world starts to happen, things get in the way of of it, like like log jabs, sure, and artists, actors, spend their life learning acting techniques to clear that, so they can have a clear channel to where they can actually use whatever's happening back. I didn't know that and and so like method acting and all that. It's all about getting rid of the obstacles, sorry, obstacles meditation.
Speaker 2:Is that that?
Speaker 4:helps anything like that, to, to, to, to clear that out. So he has a technique. There's something called EMDR that they use in psychotherapy, where they have headphones and they beep from one channel to the other.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's just like trauma too.
Speaker 4:Yeah, oh yeah. He said there were people that were catatonic after 9-11, completely unresponsive, and they were able to with months of EMDR technique. He said it's like guys coming back from war and the PTSD They've seen things so horrific that they can't unsee them. And he said it's like in the old days when they had movie projectors and theaters and the film would get caught and you'd see the thing just frozen on the screen. And he said so, if you can clear that away, you have a chance at least to have a normal relationship with life around you.
Speaker 4:And there were people that became functional after 9-11 because of EMDR that all these therapists were doing. And he said well, if it's that powerful, what would that do for creativity? So what he did? Well, he said well, if it's that powerful, what would that do for creativity? So what he did? He said, well, one of the most soothing and restful things you can listen to is certain kind of music. So he got the soft Brazilian jazz and he would pan it Left channel 100%, then pan it over to the right channel 100%, then back over slowly. Then pan it over to the right channel 100% and back over slowly.
Speaker 4:Well, when you stimulate this side of your hearing. This wakes up. When you stimulate this, this side wakes up and by alternatingly stimulating the left and right lobes, it clears the pathway in the middle that blocks you from being the best sports guy. Why was Kobeant so much, so much better in basketball than half the guys on his team? They're similarly physically, you know, capable. They have the same nutrition, the same training, the same uh textbook learning about basketball. But one guy is superior and it's about focus. It's about to hear him. Take it, he. So. He has Olympic athletes and all kinds of people in his practice and actors.
Speaker 4:So he did a demonstration. I was a longer story than you are in no, the he did a demonstration.
Speaker 4:I'm sitting in the Directors Guild of America and there's 500 movie and TV directors in the room. Okay, and he had an actor come on stage. He had never met him. The guy had just finished performing in a play in Los Angeles, whatever it was, and he said he introduced him. He said I asked you to come with a monologue. And he said, yes, it's a monologue. He'd been delivering, you know, three times a week for the last six months in the play. So he stood up in front of all these directors and did his dramatic monologue and it was great. I would have hired the guy in a minute. He was a wonderful actor, all kinds of nuances, it was terrific. He said, okay, now I want to demonstrate this technique. So he sat him in a chair, put headphones on him and we could hear through the speakers what he was hearing. And he put on the soft Brazilian jazz and it was just so mellow and cool. You know just the vibe of that was wonderful. And he said, okay, close your eyes, sit there.
Speaker 2:All this kind of stuff they do in meditation Right, left, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's just going left, right.
Speaker 4:Instead of beeps, the music is going. So because you've got the extra oomph, you know that music will do to your brain.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so, and then he's talking, doing the psychotherapy stuff. You know you're sitting in a chair, yes, okay. Are you relaxed? Feel your feet on the floor, feel your back against the chair. You know totally chilling him out. Then, okay, now I want you to imagine yourself walking down a long hallway. I said, yeah, okay. And he'd say now there's a door at the end of the hallway. You see the door? Yeah, I do. Open that door. Okay. Now in it's a huge room and there's a full length mirror in the middle of the room. Do you see the mirror? Yes, I do. The guy's. My eyes are closed, he's just and he's meanwhile this music's playing. Whole audience is like getting drawn in.
Speaker 4:We're all totally like what the hell is this? He said okay, as you approach the mirror, the reflection is not going to be you, but it's going to be the character that you played in the play. Do you see the reflection? Yes, I do. Great, now I want you to look at him in the eye. And now I want you to step into the mirror. And the guy said okay. And he said are you in the mirror? Yes, I am. He said okay, now I want you to open your eyes and start the music. Now I'd like you to do the monologue again. It was like a different human being, and I'm not kidding, no kidding.
Speaker 2:Here's a trained actor. He did a really good job the first time. He was great the first time and then the second time.
Speaker 4:It wasn't even human, it was the transformation. It was like going from black and white to color. And this is a guy who had been doing this same monologue for six months, knew the character, knew how to play it, did a great job and it was amazing. Wow. And he said so. You know, if you're a writer and you have writer's block, something like this could help. You know, you sit down and listen to the headphones and you know, or have it on the speakers, you know in your desk and you know you get a panning.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say I'm trying to find in my head I'm trying to like okay, so you just sit in a room, you probably google and you go position right, left, position.
Speaker 3:you just sit in a room. You probably Google and you go position right, left, position.
Speaker 2:You just do it yourself. Yeah, but you could record that.
Speaker 4:You know you could do it here in the studio before you leave. You know you could get some really cool thing. But there's all kinds of auto things where you pan left, pan right.
Speaker 2:And you pick a slow thing. That's the same thing you too. Yeah, it sure is.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, yeah and so and then. But the whole idea is to relax yourself into a place where these obstacles don't occur. And, like I used to when I was writing for a living, I would get up at five in the morning. I'm not a morning guy, but I love writing in the morning.
Speaker 2:It's so nice to hear Tom. I am not either. Oh, it's awful.
Speaker 4:It's awful, but at 5 in the morning you're half asleep. Yeah, you're Paul McCartney asleep you know what I mean? Uh-huh, uh-huh. There's not a thought in your head?
Speaker 4:Right, and I'd make a cup of coffee and I'd sit at the dining room table in my bathrobe and I would just be writing and I would do that for a couple hours and I didn't have the EMDR music playing or anything. But it's the equivalent is, I was so relaxed there wasn't a thought in my head I could barely awake. Yes, so whatever comes to you is going to be arguably more pure. I like it. It's not editorialized. You're not. The phone's not ringing, You're not worried about anything.
Speaker 3:Nobody else is up. You're ahead of the game. You did always write with music on, though that was my next question.
Speaker 4:Well, I can't sit in a quiet room.
Speaker 3:I have trouble right now.
Speaker 2:I don't like it either.
Speaker 5:I need music at all times or the TV on Anything.
Speaker 4:And I was that way as a kid, doing my homework, and I have this little transistor radio on and I'd be playing WLS radio in Chicago or WCFL, listening to all these rock songs, and my dad would come in. What? The heck are you doing? You're supposed to be studying. I have to have. It's a dual brain thing. I can't explain.
Speaker 4:Classical music was my favorite back in the day. Yeah well, I learned over time to put on the kind of music that would be best a triggering mechanism for what I was writing for the genre that you're writing it might be classical, it could be jazz it could be.
Speaker 3:You know, if you're any scary.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, sometimes katie just knocks on the door you know I want to go there don't even get me started on that right now but the um, uh, you know, everybody has their own process.
Speaker 4:Yeah, um, you know what. What gets you to that place. You know, like I was talking about actors and method acting. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of different philosophies about acting classes. They're different but they all get you to the same place, which is an emotional availability of purity that you're not getting in the way of whatever you're doing as an actor. So it's an honest, truthful I'm so sorry. That's all right. How dare you? Don't spit on the mic, tom, can't you see I'm talking? Um, anyway, the uh, they all get you to the same place. So you know some people.
Speaker 4:Uh, you know, I love going to coffee shops and just sitting, not a coffee house coffee shop with a pot of coffee and some eggs and a diner and sit there for hours.
Speaker 4:You know, uh, it's a great environment I can like zoom right in on whatever I'm doing, so for some reason, in that environment, interesting, um, but just to have in my office now, here you know, to have the tv on just what doesn't matter. What's on I'm not watching, yeah, it's just background, right, and the background noise somehow helps me focus on what I'm doing. I couldn't explain why Music, of course, is a big To me it was almost like moving forward.
Speaker 2:It's something that else is moving forward. Now I'm going to be moving.
Speaker 3:It's like it motivates me doing the dishes.
Speaker 1:Let's say right, I'm like oh, I don't want to do this.
Speaker 2:Well, if I put some music on, yeah, okay, doing dishes is so bad, and then to the effect, the ideas come afloat or running, working out that type of thing, if you look up that EMDR, what it is this guy.
Speaker 4:Dr Brand he's written several books on this, but it's worth trying to get you to the best access to your creativity more quickly, right? Because, well, all it's really doing is putting your mind at rest, and when it's at rest it can become. All this stuff back here can go forward. Yep, because we all got these ideas. Oh, you're driving in the car and you're you know, suddenly, oh my God, I forgot. You know Aunt Trixie's birthday. Where did that come from? Sorry, aunt Trixie.
Speaker 3:It was back here somewhere. Where did Aunt Trixie come from?
Speaker 4:That's so weird. The new novel he's writing that's from your real family.
Speaker 2:Your other family. Your real family? How many? Oh wait, one of my thoughts is are you an only child as well? I've got two brothers, two brothers. He's middle, middle kid, middle kid. And then Katie is obviously the only child.
Speaker 4:That's right, and she's the product of some weird lifestyle. We don't have to go there, she's sitting right there. But it's true. I mean your dad does these stupid stories for a living. It's amazing.
Speaker 3:It's not a normal life. It took us on lots of fun going to visit him on location. I got to go to a lot of cool places.
Speaker 4:She got to be in some of the episodes.
Speaker 3:I was always an extra I got to have lunch with Chuck Norris in his trailer. Chuck Norris, just all these cool vacations We'd get to bring friends. Sometimes it was a cool added lifestyle thing. We lived in New York, manhattan, for a summer. Vancouver Fun stuff.
Speaker 4:There were vacations for you. I was with it, but still, that's the advantage of doing stuff on location. The disadvantage is then your family's not there and you're hanging off a cliff by yourself. Yeah, missing stuff, missing your stuff, my family, my dogs, my friends, my stuff, you know everything.
Speaker 2:What brought you to Charleston?
Speaker 3:Me what does? That mean so I moved here 13 years ago.
Speaker 2:Oh, you did.
Speaker 3:I went from LA to Colorado, to Chicago, to Charleston. So after I graduated high school I went to University of Colorado. Boulder then my whole group of college friends and I moved to Chicago where we lived for six years, and then I moved here 13 years ago. So my parents just kind of waited to see where I was gonna settle and every time we came here it was great yeah what years Halloween is, when you closed on your house.
Speaker 4:That's right. I always remember that date, exactly six years ago. Yeah, she had her nonprofit.
Speaker 2:So you started going places before they moved here.
Speaker 3:I started seven years ago. Seven years ago, seven and a half years ago.
Speaker 4:But she would call and say, oh my God, somebody just sent us $1,000. We'd call and say, oh my God, somebody just sent us $1,000. And you want to say let's go have a drink and celebrate. Oh, we're 3,000 miles away. But every time we visited we thought this was a great place, just as she did when she visited her cousin here, but they were like we're watching this online with the rest of the world.
Speaker 3:We should be there.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so we retired early. We retired and I was teaching full-time at the university by then and uh ann was working in the high school office at the school she had gone to and uh in la, and and we just like, what are we doing? Yeah, I don't want to I don't want to be here and missing out on all this so right we? We kind of decided let's pull the plug and sell the house and move here.
Speaker 3:Nice they're like we're so glad you picked here and not, you know, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Well, chicago, that's where all of our relatives are on both sides, so that would have been great too, but it gets cold there.
Speaker 4:She could have been in the Arctic Circle and it wouldn't have mattered. We would have still eventually gone there, yeah, but she happened to to, thanks to her cousin, stumble on this amazing place, isn't it?
Speaker 2:great, we didn't know anything about. You moved in what?
Speaker 4:2019, then that's when I'm 18, so I moved here in 2019.
Speaker 2:Uh, from tampa, and uh, just made it right.
Speaker 4:I mean, just squeaked in before the covid and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else, really but here I wish we'd done in a couple years earlier.
Speaker 3:You know now that I know what I know and they live like 10 minutes from me, so it's when did you land then? What's that?
Speaker 2:Where did you land Snee Farm Snee, yeah. Yeah, my in-laws are in Snee. Yeah, law Lane, and she's just oh, that's right by them yeah.
Speaker 3:What is that Law Lane right by them?
Speaker 4:yeah, we were around the block, that's funny um, but the um she's always been within. You know, a five minute drive of us and uh, now she's very close and it's got a great place and it's nice to be around because I used to see them like once a year.
Speaker 2:You know it was yeah, for a long weekend, so it's much better now now it's like let's go get dinner tonight, okay, but it's oh yeah it's like let's go get dinner tonight, okay, but it's a great place to be retired.
Speaker 4:We get to be a part of her nonprofit and help when she needs help.
Speaker 2:We're going to build some bikes soon don't we Yep yeah.
Speaker 4:Ann does a lot more stuff to help her than I do because I'm semi-useless, as you can imagine.
Speaker 2:Well, so moving into that, you're not semi-useless because you're putting some of this brain power into work here, I am honestly very excited. I, on the way here, I'm like hope he brings a book and you're gonna give this to us.
Speaker 4:No, these are yes no, I signed them for you. Oh, you signed, that's right, that's right, I signed them so I've now I've now eliminated any potential value they will ever have show a picture.
Speaker 3:You know well.
Speaker 2:So the camera the ones that aren't using youtube right now are our traditional podcast the first, this first one.
Speaker 4:We're talking about silent partners, silent partners is a forensic thriller and um, and you asked what, uh, early on, about? You know where did the ideas come from? Yes, and this was in one of those moments of sitting on a deck with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, thinking about perfect ways to murder somebody. My gosh, which is the twisted things that you do when you write. I've done a lot of cop shows and detective shows. And what is the crime? How is the crime? Is it a perfect crime? And so our next door neighbor sitting on the balcony right next to our townhouse was a forensic pathologist. Oh come on so.
Speaker 4:I'm literally talking to him about. You know, are there any cool ways you could kill somebody and be undetected? Oh yeah, there's a bunch of them. And then he's telling me the inside baseball stuff about the coroner's office and autopsies and literally the murder people are getting away with every day all across the country. And I was like, oh my God, oh my God, this is great. And I took a couple of those seeds, sure, and planted them back here, you know, and eventually Silent Partners emerged and so that was my first novel. It took a long time to get it done because I didn't know anything about writing a novel. It's very different than writing I was.
Speaker 2:That was my next question. Yeah, the whole business behind that's pretty interesting too, especially nowadays with the ai and, and you know, people just taking advantage of being an author.
Speaker 4:Quote unquote yeah, well, I, you know, I, I, I you're like I don AI.
Speaker 2:You're like a walking.
Speaker 4:AI with stories, aren't you? I don't know about AI writing a novel. Prompt, tom, you know there's probably people getting outline ideas or drafts out of AI. Exactly, I'm old school. I'm actually going to do the work, yes. And then the other one, devious Thinking, is a revenge comedy Born of again very early in my career, when I was working on the Hallmark Hall of Fame. We were doing a Hallmark movie in Rome, and so you're living there among them.
Speaker 2:You're in the hotel as Romans do.
Speaker 4:Giancarlo was our driver, driving Dwayne and his secretary and me to the set every day and you're immersed in all these wild Italian personalities and it's such a vibrant, semi-insane culture and the stuff that I heard about and witnessed and the conversations I had with guys in the crew, some things that actually occurred in front of me, weird incidents all got filed away and ultimately it turned into it's two women who get even with the two jerks that did them wrong. Okay, they happen to two americans, but they're stranded in rome, all right, um, by reasons of the plot, and they're going to get even with these two guys. And many of the things and some of the people are at were real and I happened right in front of me and they all got woven into this picture of the tale, but it's every jerk that ever treated a woman wrong, frankly.
Speaker 4:A lot of the guys you and I have met and known in our lives.
Speaker 3:it's Just not us, though, right? Maybe some of the guys you've dated you might want to. Oh, probably. But why don't you give a summary of what the you just said forensic thriller? But can I give a little bit of a summary? Oh, the summary of what Sound.
Speaker 4:Partners is so Sound. Partners is a young guy who's a paramedic at UCLA Medical School. Okay, he's working part-time as a paramedic to pay for medical school and he winds up doing backstage paramedic duty at the Greek Theater, which is a big concert venue in LA open air, really fabulous, okay. And he's angled, lobbied to get this duty for this concert because the woman performer is, you know, the taylor swift of, you know his life, you know she's, she's young and she's beautiful, she's popular and everything. And he meets her, um, and they have the.
Speaker 4:The night of every guy's dreams, uh. And he thinks not only oh, my God, did I just spend a night with this perfect woman, but this could be something. Oh, he's in love. The next night she drops dead in the middle of a concert, oh, okay, and he's unable to save her and he goes into a spiral because he can't believe that this woman he admired, the woman he made love to, was what the coroner said was a drug addict. He can't believe it. I looked in her eyes. There's no way she was a drug addict. She never used drugs, ever. I know that. What could this be? He starts to look into it and the more he looks into it, the more someone's trying to stop him from looking into it. That's what the forensic thriller part comes in, like a Hitchcock movie, I mean. Things are happening to him and they get more and more specific.
Speaker 3:The deeper he gets, the crazier the stuff is.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and he's basically having a breakdown. I mean, he doesn't know what's real, what's not real. He's really up against it, but he's using his medical knowledge from school to help fuel him along the way to try to solve what really happened to her. And it gets like these kind of stories do. It gets very exciting and there's a lot of danger. I'm sure there's a trail of bodies and all that stuff. Oh my no.
Speaker 3:I'm going to dive into it and we will link these with the podcast. So if anyone's interested in purchasing these books, we'll provide the link.
Speaker 4:This one's also an audio book. It's on Audible.
Speaker 2:This one he's pointing at Silent.
Speaker 4:Partners. That's an audio book. They're both on Kindle as well.
Speaker 2:Who was reading it? Are you reading it? Is Katie reading it?
Speaker 4:No, no, no, an actor, a professional actor, a professional actor Will Sterling did a really good job playing all the different characters.
Speaker 2:There's actually a trailer my dad had made like a movie trailer for Sound Partners. Yeah, that was my next question.
Speaker 3:When is the movie when we link the books you can buy, both from his website and the trailer for the movie. For the book is on there and you're watching the trailer and you're like but I want this to be a movie too. It's with professional actors. He wrote, directed it and it's amazing. So if his subscription didn't hook you, the trailer will. For sure?
Speaker 4:Well, it was fun, because you write a book and how do you promote it? How do you market a? Book. Yeah, and I thought well, we all see movie trailers, they're really exciting and they draw you in. I thought, well, I know how to do that. I'm a TV producer, so I adapted scenes from the novel into script form and hired actors and put a crew together and shot full scenes, even though you only need sometimes just one line of dialogue. You said what, and that's all they show you.
Speaker 4:But I wanted the actors to have the whole scenes for their demo reels and also to be able to say that line of dialogue in a context of the dramatic moment In the moment. So I did way more work than I probably needed to, but it was really fun. Oh, I bet, did you produce it here or in California? It was in California.
Speaker 2:When are we going to start producing stuff here? This is where we go when? Yeah, you know Danny McBride, who moved here.
Speaker 4:First you were on the McBride crew. You know, if you've got $30 or $40 million, we can make something. Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Katie, we've got a lot of bikes to build. We've got a lot of fundraising to go.
Speaker 4:Send your money to me and not Katie Katie for devious thinking. Instead of a trailer, it's a bunch of YouTube promo videos. Oh, okay, because those too I can do. I did those here, but I put a couple of silly ones up. How?
Speaker 2:was that? What were you doing? What does it look?
Speaker 4:like they're little commercials, testimonials from fake people, things like that, but it got to the point where people would shoot them and send them to me. I got a couple from people that, just like I love those little commercials you did for your book, here's one, and then I would clean it up and put it up there Are all these linked on your website. They're all on my webpage. Okay cool, but they were fun to do.
Speaker 3:And what's your website?
Speaker 4:TomBlumpquistcom. Yeah, there we go, but anyway it's something I could do to tell people hey, I'm out here, here's my book, and the promos are important, and it's something I'm able to do that maybe another writer who's not from production couldn't do, and I can make this happen.
Speaker 2:So did Lindstrom Legacy find you, or did you find Lindstrom I?
Speaker 4:am Lindstrom Legacy.
Speaker 3:Tell that quick story, mr.
Speaker 4:Blomquist.
Speaker 3:You're so smart, our last name should be Lindstrom.
Speaker 4:My grandparents. My grandfather was born a Lindstrom. Okay. And his parents were killed in a horse and buggy accident of some kind back in the day. Yeah, accident of some kind back in the day. And so he and his brother Fritz and his sister Ellen were adopted by three different families.
Speaker 3:I'm so sorry.
Speaker 4:They were adopted in the small town by different families so they could still be in the same school, so each family, like kind of the neighborhood took a kid, so they could all still grow up together.
Speaker 3:This isn't one of your. Tom stories right, this isn't a story. This isn't another book.
Speaker 4:This is a real life story.
Speaker 3:So he was adopted by the Blomquists and so but he was Swedish, so Lindstrom is a Swedish name. Yeah, sure. The Blomquists were Swedish, so our you know Swedishness is still so all our lives.
Speaker 4:my older brother and I especially, would say to our dad why didn't you change your name back when you wrote me? So I know it never occurred to me I probably should have. So when I decided to become a book publisher, I thought the perfect name is Lindstrom Legacy. So I'm the legacy Lindstrom thing. So it's the only time that name will occur in life, but Lindstrom Legacy is me, so you're publishing your books.
Speaker 2:Do you have any other writers under?
Speaker 4:your publishing. No, this is just me putting my stuff out there, and that's pretty cool. It's like what's happened in the publishing world is no different than indie music or movies. Why does an artist sign with a big label? They just put their music out there on their own and you don't have all those layers of management, scrutiny, editorializing on what you're doing. And to make a movie at a Hollywood studio is taking on a whole lot of bosses and partners and collaborators that maybe you don't necessarily want. But if you can raise the money and make the movie yourself, why wouldn't you? And so that's kind of what this was. It was. You know I don't. You know I'm not trying to be John Grisham and you know best-selling author and all that. I don't. You know I'm not trying to be john grisham and you know best-selling author and all that I don't care about. This is me.
Speaker 2:This is my retirement yeah, can I do this?
Speaker 4:am I able to physically do this right at a, at a, at a decent level, uh, creatively, and if people like it, great, and they responded very positively to these. But it's not about me trying to be, you know, the new Random House guy. Yeah, you know, if they stumble on my book and want to pick up the book, fine, we'll talk about that, but it's not about that. John Grisham's first book was printed in a local print shop and he used to sell them out of the back of his car at football games, in the parking lot, I believe it. I mean literally, john grisham yeah, that's funny.
Speaker 2:And how old was he when his first book came out?
Speaker 4:I don't know. Was he? Well, he was a lawyer, um, so he's probably in his 30s, but still he, you know, he literally had boxes of these. He'd go to supermarkets like the girl scouts are selling cookies. He's out there selling his first novel, and then one of the big publishers, you know, simon Schuster or somebody. He picked it up and then he became John Grisham. The John Grisham. This is me being retired.
Speaker 2:I'm the guy playing golf on the weekend? I'm not trying to be on the golf tour.
Speaker 4:You know, and it's just, it's fun metaphor, wrong one, but anyway that's what this is like for me, and it's enormously fun. I'm going to be a writer when I retire it's not that easy.
Speaker 2:It's a great way to be retired anybody can do that let me look at this list again of stuff Before we close. I have to ask about the A-Team. Sure, is there a story? Is there you know? Come on, a-team, for crying out loud. Matthew Chase is asking too, and he's not even near the age of the age of.
Speaker 4:There is an episode named did you write some of the wrong one? I keep saying that did you write some of, did you? Yeah, I, I, I was mr t, I was at. Oh, mr t, get your sucker um what you're talking about, fool. Yeah, there you go. You know, uh, and george for part. I love it when a plan comes. Yes, they, I was right that you wrote that well, I didn't, I love it.
Speaker 1:Every script had it, but no, that's pretty cool, all right, the I, steve Cannell, invented it, all right.
Speaker 4:I was at the company Steve Cannell Productions no kidding and I was producing one of his other shows, riptide Okay, which was a big hit on NBC and it was the A-Team. And Riptide and then Remington Steel were the three shows they had on NBC on Tuesday nights, and so I always wanted to write an A-team. I'd love the show, I was a big fan of it, I got a kick out of it and they would write down the hall. You know Frank Lupo, the executive producer, and Steve Campbell would write down.
Speaker 4:And I said I'd really like to write one. He said well, why don't you write?
Speaker 4:one. So on weekends I'd go in and I'd write my A-team script while I'm writing and producing Riptide during the week. And so I wrote an episode in the third season it was called Blood, sweat and Cheers about NASCAR racing and stock car racing. And they liked it. I loved writing it. And so a year later, riptide was winding down. It was not going to be renewed and they said well, you already wrote one of these, why don't you come over and produce A-Team?
Speaker 2:You need another gig.
Speaker 4:And I was in the company. They had to put me somewhere Right, and so I took off my Riptide hat, put on my A-team hat and got to do that. So cool.
Speaker 3:And literally you actually had those hats.
Speaker 4:I had those hats. Hanging in this office how many years or how many episodes, that was one, the last season, the last season, and it was really cool and fun because you get to be a 10-year-old boy again blowing things up.
Speaker 2:It's great oh speaking of blowing things up.
Speaker 4:It's great.
Speaker 2:Oh, speaking of blowing things up, oh yeah, I already know what you're going to say, and so you're on set. Too right, a lot of us are.
Speaker 4:I mean, look, when you're writing you're stuck at your in those days. Typewriter or computer, yeah, exactly, but you need to be. If you're a producing-level person, you have to have a lot of presence some presence on the set Because things go wrong and if you're there you can make a quick correction. It evolved to the point where now shows have one of the writers always on set.
Speaker 4:And it might be. You know your script is shooting Monday, so Monday you'll spend that whole next week and a half babysitting your episode, shepherding it through when the director or the actors have questions. You can make dialogue changes. Better you do it than some actor starts changing his dialogue. Better you, who has all the pieces of the puzzle in your brain, do it.
Speaker 2:Stick to continuity stick to the story.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, so, anyway, one of Katie's favorite stories and actually it's probably the coolest thing I ever got to do on a TV show was I was doing Walker, texas Ranger, and we blew up an entire neighborhood. What I mean? Literally blew it to tooth picks.
Speaker 2:Oh, my gosh. So what state are we in when we're doing this? It was Dallas, Texas.
Speaker 3:And I got to be an extra.
Speaker 4:Katie was an extra.
Speaker 3:It was on a girl that was kidnapped right.
Speaker 4:Yeah, by a mad bomber.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it was a vacant neighborhood right, yeah.
Speaker 4:So Janice Berkland, our location manager, came into my office one day and she said DFW Airport is demolishing an entire subdivision and they've been bulldozing houses for weeks and there's one cul-de-sac left. Do you want to blow it up? Yeah. I said yeah, we didn't even have a script for it.
Speaker 1:honestly, You're writing around that. We'll build a script around this, you're writing around that.
Speaker 3:It was a great episode. It was a really good episode.
Speaker 4:We're going to blow this thing up. And so they said, yes, you can blow up these houses, but you have to haul the stuff away. We said, no problem, these were six luxury homes, these would be million-dollar homes in Sneap Farm, I mean just beautiful homes and they're all empty. So we sent in the special effects guys. They scored all the support beams and everything, had 50-gallon drums of gasoline, all prime recorded, you know up, and all we knew was that Chuck Norris was going to jump out of a window and run to camera and the house was going to blow behind him. And then we would blow every other house in the neighborhood as people are being evacuated. We had no script, so we just said we're going to do this. And then one of my writers.
Speaker 4:Terry Nelson figured out a script that would end with that, and it was a mad bomber on the loose and chasing you know, walker, so much longer.
Speaker 3:He was rescuing the girl from the mad bomber. He rescued the girl, got her out of the house and I was one of the people running from the house, the whole neighborhood of the residents running out of the homes so oh yeah, I got to be there and see the explosion and I remember it really well.
Speaker 4:We're, uh, about 200 yards away from the houses behind a blast shield, yeah, watching this happen and the concussion blast from these homes blowing.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean you could feel it. I mean it was like somebody just shook you in your chair like an earthquake and it was very cool. And so the shot of Chuck diving through this window and he comes up and he's just booking right to camera, the house just goes to toothpicks behind him and he's still running and we went gee, chuck, you were really hauling. He went. Are you kidding me? Holy crap, there's shingles and everything. I was wondering.
Speaker 4:He just had the best time. It was so fun for him. And there's some stuff on YouTube where you could see you know, chuck being interviewed about it and how we how we did it. But we had helicopters, we didn't. The faa had to cooperate, because you can't blow up a neighborhood when planes are landing well, you mentioned the airport being there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's right there, it's now it's now a runway.
Speaker 4:When you land at dfw you're probably landing, probably landing where that subdivision used to be. So they had to reroute planes. They had to notify all the pilots. You know, if you see houses and fires down to your right, don't worry about it, it's just Tom.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's.
Speaker 4:Chuck. Norris blowing up a neighborhood. It's okay, there's no terrorists or anything. So because you could see these planes coming in and you wonder what are these people thinking when? They're looking out their window, ladies and gentlemen, on your right you'll see a neighborhood being completely blown to bits. It was the coolest thing ever and Terry wrote a great script and it was a really good episode, in part because these are production values that a weekly TV series does not have, correct right, Especially back then in the TV series.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, this isn't a movie, yeah right yeah, I mean diehard movies.
Speaker 4:they would take advantage or lethal weapon. They would do this stuff all the time. They've got $50, $60, $80, $100 million to do, not on a weekly TV series. So for us to be able to do that was really cool and we had a good script with it. Everybody enjoyed it and it was special for all of us. But I got to be literally 10 years old again, blowing up a whole neighborhood. And you look at the camera the helicopter shot. It looked like Dresden after the bombing runs in World War II. I mean, it was just black smoke and just flamed out, trashed out houses. Unbelievable, it was really fun. It's not. It was called Blown Apart, by the way you can find it on.
Speaker 4:YouTube Blown Apart.
Speaker 3:It's an episode of Walker and look for my little feet and look for Katie standing by the side of the road seventh grade oh was it.
Speaker 4:I think you were seventh grade, yeah, um that's crazy.
Speaker 2:Uh, my one stint I had with making a movie. If you imdb, imdb me you'll see one ad credit. Second ad credit hardest thing I've ever done. What was it hardest job ever done, uh?
Speaker 2:it's called random tropical paradise island. I mean, it's not the best of names, right, but um, it was probably. It was shot in december. I just had twins that december, that september. So my wife was like we're gonna do what? But you know this and you know this too, katie, living the lifestyle. It was a whole month, oh yeah, a whole month 16, 18-hour days.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, and you were just in that moment. There's nothing else you can think about other than call sheets where the talent needs to be. Do they have their dailies? What am I going to like Putting out fires constantly, Putting out fires constantly? It was honestly at that point I was like, okay, I know, I really don't want to do that but it really isn't for everybody yeah, it's a true story when you mention those hours, people don't realize those are typical hours.
Speaker 4:That's not like an extraordinary work day. It's 16 hours. Yeah, 12 hours is the minimum. Yeah, if you give a 12 hour day, uh, on a tv or a movie set, you're happy. It's like a half day you're getting out, because 16, 18 hours is what they normally turn out to be, especially towards the end of the week. Yeah, um, and because you, you drop scenes and all those things you have to make up rewriting the night before.
Speaker 4:oh yeah, oh yeah. Guys like, oh yeah, rewrite the script. Like what do you mean? There's a new script. Yeah, amazing, it was just crazy. What's the how to describe it? If people knew how much effort goes into even a terrible movie or a terrible TV series.
Speaker 2:This would be one of those. No offense guys.
Speaker 4:No, but it's the same effort goes into something that works and something that doesn't no no, no, 100%. And you look at something and we've all seen movies on Netflix or whatever and you go oh my God, they've got three Oscar winners and a really cool idea, and it's terrible. Why is that? Well, we don't know why. Necessarily Something chemistry was wrong.
Speaker 2:Here's the cover work random tropical paradise. Good, uh, poster. And look, I mean it had names. Like this guy here can't remember his name, but I like him. Sorry everybody. Yeah right, uh, brian greenberg, oh yeah, brian greenberg. Brooks wheelan. Uh, joe joey. Joey pants was in it. Oh yeah, like I had to. Like Mr Pants, mr Joey, it's time to go, you know, because at the second game, you know, I'm tired of wearing all that and base camp, base camp. Yeah, and all right, here I come, let's go. I could have waited till I opened up the door you know, I mean like all that type of stuff.
Speaker 2:It was just, I got the whole gamut of movie making experience and I woke up weeks later in the middle of the night thinking I needed to be on set.
Speaker 4:Post-wrap everything I remember sweating, waking up and being like wait, it's like waking up and you think you have a term paper or something and you didn't turn it in.
Speaker 3:And you never went to class.
Speaker 2:I was like oh, I had those dreams often. Cruise are really hard working. I never went to class. I was like, oh it was. I had those dreams often, listen Dramatic. Brittany Furlan.
Speaker 4:Crews are really hard working. Yes, and Spencer Grammer, and that anything it almost. You'll understand this. It's almost a miracle that anything good ever is made, because there's so much stuff that goes wrong Can go wrong.
Speaker 4:Whether it's the script doesn't work or some of the wrong people are on the crew or the actors have issues, whatever it is. I worked on a show once you'll love this okay and will not use names but I worked on a show where the lead actor was having full mental breakdown kind of mode Problems in his personal life. I think there were some chemical enhancement issues happening with him to cope with the incredibly long hours and I got a call he won't come out of his trailer. What do call he won't come out of his trailer? What do you mean? He won't come out of his trailer? He will not come out of his trailer.
Speaker 4:He wants to see one of the producers Drive down to the set. What's going on? I think the hair and makeup people are trying to kill me. Oh dear what. What do you mean? I think they're poisoning me through my hair follicles. True, this guy.
Speaker 4:now you can see how far off on the ledge he was You're not getting him back. Oh no, we got him to work. Oh, you got him to go to work. It's in the hairspray here, I'll spray it. It's like it's fine, don't worry about it. And then one other time he was convinced the crew was trying to poison him through his instant oatmeal and he wouldn't come out until one of the producers came and said well, I'll eat it.
Speaker 4:It's fine, yes, but the point is not to make fun of him. He's a wonderful guy, by the way, and a terrific actor.
Speaker 3:But it was the pressure of those hours, this particular show shot a lot of night work and at night people get a little, yeah, lack of sleep stress. It makes you kind of lose it a little bit.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and even if you go home and you sleep during the day, it's not the same People that work nights at hospitals. God bless them, because that's special. You have special wiring. But if you're just making some TV series, you know you're not used to that. That's not a lifestyle. You do it for one, two, three, five years but you never really get used to it and then it changes on the next show Exactly. And as a producer, the goal there is not just get some good scripts together and make the show entertaining, but now you're a shrink.
Speaker 4:You're dealing with somebody who's having authentic human problems and your job is not to judge them. Your job is to figure it out and help remove the obstacles, make it better, give them a day off, whatever you can do to try to get them from here to here painlessly. Every show I've worked on has had some element of that. Somebody's marriage is blown apart and they're just miserable and their dog died and they hate each other.
Speaker 4:Two actors had an affair when they made the pilot. Now they hate each other and they don't want to be in the same scene and they've got to be in every scene together. Things like that happen and it's human nature. So you're writing scripts and you're doing all this stuff and the crew's working their butts off for 16, 18, sometimes 20 hours a day.
Speaker 4:Everybody's starting to come apart at the seams. And then you're kind of like, how do I help get this thing in a forward motion and still recapture the fun that everybody should be having? And to that point it was a series. I won't even mention the name. But a friend of mine called me and said what are you doing? I said, well, I'm just you know freelancing why. He said do you want to come write the last episode? I said, really. He said, yeah, none of us can stand the thought of writing one more. This is a huge hit show, a major hit show. Yeah, he said more, this is a huge hit show, major hit show, yeah, they said. He said, uh, we, we can't. We, we hate our, we hate our lives, we hate these characters, we hate the star, we hate each other. Nobody, we've. We've all written so many of these. We can't bear the thought of writing one more episode. Like, keep in mind a major hit series and well, jeez, I love that show. Yeah, I'll come in.
Speaker 4:And I wrote an episode and a couple of friends of mine a friend of mine that I'd worked with was directing it, coincidentally, and another director that I'd worked with was actually going to guest star in it because he used to be an actor and it was so fun to go to their set. But the crew was like the walking dead. They're zombies, they're all burned out, they're all over it to be an actor and it was so fun to go to their set, but the crew was like the walking dead. You know, they're zombies, they're all burned out, they're all, they're all over it. It was the last episode and everybody has already checked out. They needed fresh legs. The writers we're talking about you know a fair amount of money per script to write and they didn't want the money. Just, please, just have somebody else. I can't stand it. And and that doesn't reflect their lack of professionalism, right? They just couldn't do it again because of the hours, you know I mean you're in 20, 20, 20 days, 20, 30 days, 60 days.
Speaker 2:You're working on the same project.
Speaker 4:I worked 80 and day, 80 to 100 hours a week for decades, which is why I look like decades you look great I'm 25 years old I've lived a hard life, yes, but the truth is, um, that's to do it and do it right. At least for me, that's what I had to do. Yeah, exactly that is your life, and and I completely understood what these guys were going through the whole writing staff, total pros, been on a bunch of hit shows, you know big hit, this show, big, big, big hit show and they just couldn't do it. Yeah, it's like I can't. Please, god, don't make me write another one of these. I mean, I just want to go on vacation. I want to be done with this. I'm going to pull the plug, wrap my computer up, but you got an obligation, you got to get it.
Speaker 2:you, you got to get it, you got to figure it out.
Speaker 4:Anybody know, anybody want to write one of these?
Speaker 2:Call Tom.
Speaker 4:Tom, tom, maybe Tom's free and and I was, and it worked out because I loved the show. I'd always wanted to write one and I never got a chance.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh. So it was great, you get to read the. You're not going to tell me who that is. I'll tell you later. Tom, this has been fun. Have you had fun? I've had a good time?
Speaker 4:when do we start recording Matt?
Speaker 2:what are you doing here, katie? I want you to talk about your non-profit too. I want to talk about going places real quick yeah, I'll give a quick overview.
Speaker 4:So we give new, new custom bikes get your checkbooks ready, everybody and um new custom bikes to whole schools of low-income elementary students and big surprise bike reveals.
Speaker 3:So we're giving 400, 600 bikes at once and we've got uh two bike reveals this winter, one in nove, one in December, one's November, uh 22nd and then December 19th. So we, uh, we'll be building those bikes and then surprising all the kids at Frierson elementary school and Mitchell elementary school. That's cool.
Speaker 3:And we're, you know, looking for those end of year donations and you want, you know, companies either pay the government the money, you pick a nonprofit. We'd love to be your nonprofit, but I actually posted just today on social media. Eight years ago this month, I was a guest on the Steve Harvey show and he donated $20,000.
Speaker 2:How did you get into Steve Harvey?
Speaker 3:I was a teacher.
Speaker 2:No, not me oh, it wasn't a connection. No, no, I don't know him. You don't know everybody on TV. No, I, I don't know him, you don't know everybody on TV.
Speaker 3:No, I was a teacher, did a GoFundMe to get all 650 kids in my school bike.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's your first time at that. This first course. Yeah, it was just a GoFundMe.
Speaker 3:I was still teaching first grade. Yeah, and I had it started because Twitter partnered with TJ Maxx. Yeah, and they did. They found six women around the country doing inspirational things and I was one of them. They found it through. I don't even know. I think they just found it because I was social media. They looked at.
Speaker 3:GoFundMe campaigns. I'm not even sure. Oh, you know how they found it. This is how it all started. I won a GoFundMe campaign. Who could raise the most amount of money in X amount of hours or days would win $10,000 for their school. Not for their campaign, for their school. I won that.
Speaker 2:Oh, so then, how much did you?
Speaker 3:$10,000 for my school. I don't remember how much I had raised, probably close to $17,000 or $10,000.
Speaker 2:How much? What was your time frame? Like a month, like three weeks A?
Speaker 3:couple weeks. It was the very beginning stages, and so I won this, and so that press release went out. Amazing. And so then TJ Maxx and Twitter. I was one of the six women that they found, so this big New York marketing agency did handle all that. And then, through all this, now all these TV shows are starting to call. So Steve Harvey was one of them, and they flew me out, donated 20 grand on on the spot and um, from there it went truly, truly viral.
Speaker 4:it raised over 80 grand in three months, and that's, you know, one thing led to another was supposed to give her 10 000 and he was so taken by the interview, yeah, that he surprised her with another 10 000.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the big check I have actually says $10,000, because that was the predetermined amount they decided. And he was like whoa, this is way cooler than I imagined. I'm doubling that.
Speaker 4:Because he talked about his bike and how much it meant to him as a poor kid. It's amazing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's on our social media, if you want to check it out. Going Places what?
Speaker 2:are your handles.
Speaker 3:So Instagram is at going underscore places underscore nonprofit, and then Facebook is just at Going Places nonprofit, and so you'll see that video, the whole segment. And then I also did kind of a recap video after it where I explain how it happened that I got to go on the show and then what it was like being on the show and all the kind of behind the cool stuff. So it was a wild experience.
Speaker 4:And if you want to know how little I had to do with this, I mean literally nothing to do with it when she was in her hotel room in Chicago. This all happened like whirlwind right. Oh, they called me at 4 pm and said we want you on an 8 pm flightm flight tonight. Oh my god.
Speaker 4:So she gets to her hotel in chicago to do the show in the morning and I call her and said look, I used to work in tv. I produced a talk show at one point. You know, do you want any? Any pointers? Yeah, some notes. Dad, I got this. She shut me down. I got this. I because she's been done doing so many press interviews and things like this. Yeah, by then that I got this. No, yeah, I really learned. So I had literally nothing to do with it.
Speaker 3:I was doing all these live interviews, like CNN would interview me on their sister network, hln, with Michaela Ferreira, live on TV. So I learned very quickly how to be clear, concise right away in the first take and get out everything I want to say in like one or two sentences. So I that helped on the talk show was able to be really eloquent and say what I had to say. And you know, perfect my gosh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was cool.
Speaker 3:So eight years later, eight years later, here we are what's the future we've given almost 5,000 bikes, locks, helmets and bike pumps.
Speaker 4:Wow. And we did one out of and these are really nice bikes.
Speaker 3:They're custom.
Speaker 4:These are not the kind of low-rent kind of bikes. These would cost you $250 in a store if you bought them. They're custom, heavy-duty, well-made, really good bikes. She designs the colors and everything. We're very proud of her for that. They're really cool.
Speaker 3:We did our first out-of-state one this past February. We gave 830 bikes in Arizona. The Deanne Flores Shirts Foundation funded the whole thing. That was awesome. We do have the capability to do this outside of Charleston which is kind of the goal is to be able to keep doing these, having companies or foundations fund the entire project. Then I come in and I actually do it all for you. So that's the goal, for sure.
Speaker 4:And when you go to one of these the bike builds, you kind of can skate over that term. Go to a huge warehouse and you see hundreds of bikes, dozens and dozens of people building bikes, all the stack of boxes that they come in. Take them apart, put all these bikes together and you see the little kid bikes, the medium bikes, the adult bikes, just as far as the eye can see and we do it in like two or three days all perfectly lined up very quickly it's.
Speaker 4:I mean it's a lump in the throat kind of thing, All these people from the community coming out. You've got guys in suits and ties taking lunch break. You've got the local fire guys swing by in their fire truck and build bikes until they get a call and they're going to go, kids come with their families, a lot of military, former military families, because some of them are beneficiaries of these bikes a lot of retired military mechanics.
Speaker 4:They love coming yeah, no, and it's, it's. It's really cool to be a part of that. Uh, if people find that on her website to sign up for like a two-hour shift, I do come in there right it's fun.
Speaker 3:Companies will send teams during the workday because it's a team-building opportunity. Some companies will actually pay us for their staff volunteer time, so that's always a cool benefit. But a lot of companies give their employees hours per month they can take off and work to go volunteer, so we get a lot of those.
Speaker 4:There was one wonderful guy who had a trucking company. They used to pro bono provide the semis. You have to haul these bikes to these different schools on a schedule and one day we were at a school in downtown Charleston and he said it was out in front of your warehouse down in the peninsula. And he said what do you think of that semi? She said looks great, it's an 18-wheeler. He said it's yours. And. I remember what.
Speaker 4:He said, yeah, I made some calls and a friend of mine had this. He said it's not new, but it works, it's perfectly safe.
Speaker 3:It was the trailer part of the semi.
Speaker 4:And he said so this is yours and anytime you want me to do something, I'll hook one of my cabs up to it and we'll do whatever you want, but this is yours. So she still owns that.
Speaker 2:So you have a trailer Yep, a semi truck trailer Yep.
Speaker 4:Because there may be some bikes left over. That's neat, you know from one of these things Like a yard and um, and she's got the key. You know the combination of the lock and, but that's the. That's cool, the community that we are now living in you know, people will do that he was a wonderful guy and he passed away tragically, but what a great guy and his company stayed with her for a long time and other companies have jumped forward yeah, bw mitchum.
Speaker 3:Now um provides all of our semis and then, if we want to use the bikes that are currently in our trailer, they'll go, attach their cab to our trailer and deliver it for us.
Speaker 2:They're on time.
Speaker 3:They help, the drivers help. You don't find that with any other truck company.
Speaker 4:They're amazing. You know how expensive new tires are for your car. Yeah, Was it last year.
Speaker 3:I think no, imagine on the semi truck.
Speaker 4:Two years ago. The guy was late with her trailer. And we're what? When's he going to get here? When's he going to get here? Well, we went out and saw him. Tires didn't look right to us. We gave you all new tires. Those tires are like for an airplane, they're huge.
Speaker 2:I'm sure they're thousands of dollars each. We gave you all new tires. Oh my gosh, are we going to brand this trailer?
Speaker 3:Did we already skin this trailer To spend money on something like that?
Speaker 4:is not money to us.
Speaker 3:It's worth the money that's money that's not going towards bikes. It's not really necessary, since it just sits kind of in a lot. So if someone wants to sponsor, that'd be awesome, or a company that makes the skins that would do it, let's design it first she's got a great logo Going places.
Speaker 4:That would be really neat. It's got a great logo Going places. Yeah, it is, that would be really neat. Actually, the guy that passed away that got her the truck, that's what he wanted to do. Yeah, he said I'm going to make that up. I'm going to make some phone calls. I know all those guys They'll do it. I know we can get it. And then he didn't survive that year.
Speaker 2:But yeah, but yeah, and it would be really cool, some artist's rendition of your logo tagged on the trailer, anyways, An in-kind donation yeah.
Speaker 4:Text it right up, yeah exactly, and then the bike giveaways.
Speaker 2:I will share with you. Yes, it's got to be emotional.
Speaker 3:I every time get worked up.
Speaker 4:So all these same but sometimes different volunteers will come offload these bikes, line them all up perfectly like a showroom, cover them with tarps, and the kids are clueless, they don't know, Even if somebody told them they're getting a bike. They don't remember. So they come out and all these volunteers lined up for, you know, for 50 yards, 100 yards. Everybody pulls the tarps off at the same time and the kids are stunned. And it takes a while for them to even register. Nobody's ever given some of these children anything. Sure, they don't get a Christmas present, some of them.
Speaker 4:Right, and so the kiddies had to work it out with the teachers that afterwards are you excited about the bike? What bike? That's my bike. Yes, you're going to go home with that bike. They can't process it. It's so beautiful and I think she's changed some lives out of this.
Speaker 3:I would say 5,000 bikes, Almost yep.
Speaker 4:But when you have nothing and been given nothing, if not the kids, the parents, some of them have been so sure, uh, I mean the. I'm reminded of the one uh note card you got from the one mom who lost her job. Single mom was approaching. It was the fall she was.
Speaker 4:She had no idea what she was going to do she couldn't afford to pay her utility bills, let alone get her kids presents. And now they get a brand new bike and she wrote Katie the most beautiful heartfelt letter thanking her because it saved her from that awful moment. Of my kids are, I can't get them anything for Christmas. We may not even have lights that are on, you know, and and so, as parents, obviously that that's what we want to be. I mean, who wouldn't want to live their life around that? And that's really cool.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you got people out of her a little bit, huh, I mean your daughter, oh yeah, but even if she weren't my daughter, I'd be proud oh, okay this and, and we're not sure whose daughter she really is, but that's another still out there that's right, uh, anyway, no 70s is crazy time 80s crazy time, but it it's really something early 70s, excuse me I was, I'm 78, I'm 83, baby, but I'm gonna.
Speaker 4:I'm going to make that pitch to people. Forget my books and forget me. Go to Going Place's website. Well, there's some cross-marketing for sure.
Speaker 2:And has she made her character in a book ever?
Speaker 4:I mean, are we writing our family members in any stories. Well, there's laws against that in some states I'm not sure I can do that. No, she's been a character. I've named characters after her in tv shows. Um I bet, I bet um, I, I do like naming villains and stuff after friends of mine, so they are okay, your next book is gonna have somebody named mike in it.
Speaker 2:He's gonna be a goof. Um, this is a friend of ours, isn't?
Speaker 3:it.
Speaker 4:Yes, our friend britney phillips on the on the cover of his book with uh by the photographer alex she shout out to those two that was really fun, uh, meeting them and uh, they were dating at the time and she was his model for a lot of their sure his portraiture and stuff and and stuff and this came out of that conversation. It was really fun.
Speaker 2:She's got an amazing look too. Oh, she's beautiful and he's super talented and then he did my author photo as well.
Speaker 4:A very talented photographer.
Speaker 2:Well, there's talented people here in Charleston. Sure and that's what we're doing here in the marketing podcast. We're digging up those talented folks. Well, I will do a different plug.
Speaker 4:I'm on the board of directors at the Queen Street Theater.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:Footlight Players at the. Queen Street in the French Quarter and talk about talented people.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 4:The actors and singers and musicians in this town.
Speaker 3:It's the oldest playhouse in the city.
Speaker 4:Yeah, the oldest theater company in South Carolina. This is our 93rd season and it's incredible. It's a wonderful. It's an old cotton warehouse, okay.
Speaker 3:Footlight Players Queen Street Theater.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and it's a 20 Queen Street and anyway they I was asked to be on the board a few years ago and it's really fun to be involved with them but what cued me on that was the thing about the talented people. Talented people Our team that runs the theater, kyle and Brian, are talented guys. Kyle directs about half our shows, sometimes more, and the actors and the people that you know. I wasn't sure what kind of scene that might be.
Speaker 4:Well, you're coming from LA, you know it's like okay, and they said you want to be part of this theater. So I went and saw a show and thought about it and I was very impressed with the people in the show and it sounds biased and elitist. But why would I have reason to think that there would be?
Speaker 4:this level of acting talent and directing talent in Charleston. It wasn't even on my radar screen, elitist radar screen in LA. And holy crap, I mean these people. I mean there's more than one, these people. I mean there's more than one.
Speaker 4:There's dozens that would have very big careers in new york or los angeles if they wanted to go and do that, like I did and you've experienced on your movie and it's like. But they love living here. Some of them are from here, some landed here during covid, some landed here because their real job brought them here. But the guy that starred in our last show is a physician at MUSC and he's been in a whole bunch of our plays. He's a terrific actor. He's got a great look. He could totally make a living as an actor if he wanted to.
Speaker 4:A leading man kind of guy and he's a doctor and a couple of scientists are part of it All the real lives. You know, somewhere they got the acting bug. Many of them have MFAs in theater from important schools. They landed here and they get to act at the Queen Street Theater and also other theaters around town. There's so many talented people, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the plays are great. Yeah, I need to go, I need to go to something.
Speaker 2:For sure, get your tickets, come see it. Done yeah, the plays are great. I need to go to something. I'll get you tickets. Come see us.
Speaker 4:They got great Christmas shows we're doing a Christmas story based on the movie we're doing that play coming up. There's a couple of really good ones happening in the new year. I'll get you some tickets Do you like opera?
Speaker 2:Are you an opera guy? No, well, no, but we've got this really cool. Um halo. It's called uh, holy city. Arts and lyric opera, yeah, yeah have you met the uh dimitri?
Speaker 4:and no, but I know who they are yeah, they're, they're talented.
Speaker 2:They were on the show not too long ago.
Speaker 4:Leah was on the show like I said, I love, I love opera. I know who they are. I'm just not. I would have connected.
Speaker 2:You guys, if you get, if you would love to offer, because they're um, there's just a great group of people as well I know I certainly heard of them, yep yeah, yeah, um again, and we've had um spoken artists of poetry uh on the show, so we're really wanting to just kind of showcase how many cool people there are here we did it today with you.
Speaker 4:Tom, Thank you for being on the show. That's very kind of you to say. It just shows that you've used up everybody in Charleston. Is there anybody left? How about this guy? Let's drag him out.
Speaker 2:This might be our 24th, 25th episode. There's so many more cool people. We're just now getting underneath the surface. 24th episode, 25th episode. No, so, there's so many more cool people.
Speaker 4:We're just now, you know, oh thanks, uh, getting underneath the surface well, and it's I appreciate the chance to just talk about this stuff because it it was a big part of my life.
Speaker 2:This yeah, I'm excited for sure, but it's.
Speaker 4:it's fun to talk about um, in part because I know so many people I mean they watch TV, Everybody watches TV or Netflix or something and how this all works and who's behind.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's not part of the average person's normal life. So, there's just so many.
Speaker 2:Everything's new information to them, yeah, and you know what were you saying.
Speaker 4:No, it's just, and so it's one reason I went into teaching it too is I can share some of how it works and maybe, in the case of students, help them steer maybe in a more productive direction or avoid some of the mistakes that I made or I saw people make.
Speaker 4:You know I mean I had to fire people from shows for mistakes they made and it's like, well, I can help you with that. You know, don't do these things and you'll be in good shape, right. And so it's very enjoyable and I appreciate the opportunity of course, of course.
Speaker 2:No thanks for sharing and the books the devious thinking and the silent partners, and the third one coming out one's called poster boys.
Speaker 4:It's about writers. It's about guys like me, of course. Why not? Uh, the writers of your favorite tv? Yes, and how twisted and eccentric. Oh man, are you writing something right now?
Speaker 2:are you got something noodling right now in the back of your head TV shows, and how twisted and eccentric Are you writing something right now?
Speaker 4:You got something noodling right now in the back of your head Like literally right now. Actually I'm finishing Poster Boys, but I already know what the next one's going to be and I try not to think about it because I don't want to go down that rabbit hole.
Speaker 4:But, I find myself making notes and file it away under useless information until later to go down that rabbit hole. Okay, okay, okay, but I find myself, you know, making notes, sure you know, file it away under useless information until later. But, um, right now, poster boys is all encompassing, so cool and it's, it's my line. Do you ever see, uh, get shorty or read the book? Yeah, okay, john travolta. So that book is in that general type. It's an inside twisted spoof of Hollywood and all the kind of semi-insane people like me that work there and populate these TV shows that I worked on, and these are all friends of mine and me, all kind of composited together.
Speaker 2:I can only imagine some great stories in there.
Speaker 4:It's been fun traveling down that road Memory lane. And also kind of self-therapy Like how sick are you? What is wrong with you? Like sitting around trying to come up with ways to murder people. It's that just not normal. And I get it. I completely understand it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's that's just not normal, you know, and I get it, I completely understand it. But it's necessary. It's good to be not normal, right? If? Well, if you're going to do that for a living, you better not be normal because you've got to come up with, you know. I mean, you mentioned the guys on law and order, svu the world they have to occupy yeah for that horrible yes victims unit dick Dick Wolf, I mean, and all those writers and actors.
Speaker 4:They live the most horrible world, occupy it every day, because that's what they're thinking about, but that's what you have to do, you have to go there.
Speaker 2:What an amazing world. Yeah, yeah, thanks for letting us dive in just a little bit, because there could be another hour conversation about why shows don't run, and, and you know, all this, that and the other, we'll have to do that.
Speaker 4:You want to talk about that. You want to do a pure marketing promo kind of conversation there's a lot of that.
Speaker 2:I'll take you up on that, you bet, take you up on that, katie. Where can we find going places?
Speaker 3:you can go to goingplacesnonprofitorg. Um. The best in vote for the best and for the most recent information is our social media, instagram and facebook and then we've got uh, tom, what's your dot com?
Speaker 4:again, tom, blomquist dot com b-l-o-m-q-u-i-s-t yep, and then, and that's all the stuff about me and about these books and and stuff is there and and uh, so cool well, that's great.
Speaker 2:And you're, you're based out of charleston, you're, you're here in mount pleasant, yep, and and you're still working. Your your tush off, you're behind off well writing, you're gonna. You got a list of accolades for crying out loud 18 my favorite. Of course you're talking about my mom dressed me up as uh mr t one time oh yeah I was like eight seven years old mohawk face. I'm like I don't know if this is. I don't think I should these days circa 80s, so anyhow that's funny um, thanks again, tom katie.
Speaker 2:Good work, thanks, matt. Thank you, uh. Before we leave, I'd like to thank our sponsors the Charleston Radio Group, jerry Feels Good and, of course, the American Marketing Association. If you want to be a sponsor or a guest on the show, reach out to podcasts at charlestonamaorg and we'll get back to you. Thanks again, tom Katie, charleston, we'll talk to you next time.
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