Steven Simon, a UCLA- and Loyola Law School-educated producer behind Smokey and the Bandit ($200M on a $4M budget) and Somewhere in Time (1980), discusses its cult revival via HBO and Mackinac Island reunions, including $250K-per-shot LADAR effects. His metaphysical films like What Dreams May Come—which grossed $100M and won for Visual Effects—sparked debates on suicide, afterlife judgment, and quantum consciousness, with emotional impact even on terminally ill viewers. Simon’s Metafilmics aims to redefine cinema as a spiritual tool, contrasting Hollywood’s corporate-driven violence with his genre’s deeper societal dialogue. With $20M sought for creative independence, he warns of First Amendment paradoxes while advocating filmmaker accountability, comparing it to O.J. Simpson’s duality. Future tech like "immersion" filmmaking could shift focus from desensitization to self-examination, aligning with Princeton’s mind-matter research. Bell teases a paradigm-shifting announcement on the 27th, leaving listeners intrigued by uncharted revelations. [Automatically generated summary]
Stephen Simon graduated from UCLA and Loyola Law School, being admitted to the California Bar in 1974.
He practiced law until being hired by legendary producer Ray Stark in 1976 as Stark's personal assistant.
What a trip.
In 1977, Simon was responsible for the acquisition, development, and production of Smokey and the Bandit.
Remember that starring Burt Reynolds, which grossed $200 million on a $4 million budget.
Boy, movie makers love that.
He was then made head of production, I can imagine, and supervised The Electric Horseman, a property he acquired and developed for Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, Neil Simon's The Goodbye Girl, starring Marcia Mason and Richard Dreyfus and three other Neil Simon projects, Murder by Death, The Cheap Detective, and California Suite.
I bet a lot of bells are being rung out there.
In 1979, Simon left Rayshark to produce Somewhere in Time for Universal Studios.
The film starring the incredible Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour has become a cult classic.
It sure is with me.
It's perhaps my...
He's made two of my favorite movies.
During the production of Somewhere in Time, Malthus in Game Simon Dial Galleys of his newest novel, What Dreams May Come.
This began Simon's 20-year odyssey to get to What Dreams May Come filmed.
And that in itself would be a very interesting story, I would imagine.
You're about to hear it.
Simon also produced All the Right Moves for 20th Century Fox, starring Tom Cruise, the smash hit comedy Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and its sequel, and the Tony Danza comedy, She's Out of Control.
From 1990 to 93, Simon was president of production for Dino DeLaurentis Communications, which time he oversaw the international distribution of an eye-opening backstage view of the Madonna tour, Remember Truth or Dare, which was an international hit and an instant classic of the rockumentary genre.
Other films Simon supervised for DeLaurentis included director Sam Ramy's occult favorite, Army of Darkness, Once Upon a Crime, with John Candy, and Cuff's A Cop Comedy starring Christian Slater.
In 1994, Simon met his new partner, Barnett Bain, and Metafilmics was created, leading to the successful conclusion of Simon's dedication to What Dreams May Come.
What Dreams May Come, what a movie.
When I last interviewed Stephen, I had not yet seen What Dreams May Come, and he was trying to describe it to me.
I think I've seen it about 10 times since, and I'm not somebody who watches the movies a lot of times.
In 1996, Metafilmics secured financing for the film from Polygram.
Filming commenced in June of 97.
The film released in October of 98 through February 1st, 99.
What Dreams May Come, folks, grossed over $100 million worldwide and has received two 1999 Academy Award nominations for Visual Effects and Art Director.
And I could be wrong, but I believe that it won for Visual Effects.
I have never, Stephen, done something because of a movie, but there is going to be a reunion at, I used to call it Mackinac before I knew better, at Mackinac Island where that movie was filmed, and it's going to be this fall, and I'm going to be there.
I really have had the feeling you can't go home again.
That was such a beautiful, romantic, extraordinary time.
You know, it was the culmination of me wanting to make this film, which has got me, actually that book, which Somewhere in Time was based on, is what got me into the movie business.
And we can talk about that in a second.
I have such great memories of it.
I have had that Thomas Wolfe thing in my mind.
You can't go home again.
And it's such a romantic weekend about such a romantic movie.
But fortunately for me in my life now, I'm very much in love with a wonderful woman named Catherine Miller, who publishes a magazine called The Holistic Health Journal.
And we are going to go to that weekend for the first time since, you know, I haven't been back there in 18 or 19 years.
And I think it's because of Catherine being in my life and me feeling like I have someone that I love that I can go there with.
I don't think I could go to the Somewhere in Time weekend and not have someone that I love.
I don't think you'd want to go there without Ramona.
And I guess it's just the right time.
Three months before the end of the millennium, we're coming up on the 20th anniversary of Somewhere in Time, its release, which is in October of 1980.
And I'm beginning to hear actually a couple of rumbles that Universal may, on a very limited basis, re-release the film in a few theaters and a few cities to mark the 20th anniversary, because as you may or may not be aware, Somewhere in Time was not a successful film when it was first released.
It was a time in which an old-fashioned, romantic movie like Somewhere in Time was just not a part of the public consciousness.
And we, I think, made a serious mistake with the way we distributed the film.
It was opened in a thousand theaters at one time.
It's the kind of film that probably needed to be opened in a few theaters and built word of mouth.
And that was 19 years ago when you could actually still do that.
It's a lot harder to do that today.
And I think we made a mistake by doing that.
I think it might have found its audience a little bit better.
But at the same time, it probably just was before its time.
And it really wasn't until two things happened.
HBO started showing movies without commercial interruption and Somewhere in Time was among the first batch and they got an extraordinary response to it.
So they started to show it a lot.
And then this wonderful man who worked at Hughes Aviation for many, many years formed this fan club for Somewhere in Time.
And it began this passionate attempt to get television stations around the country to play the movie.
And people began to be aware of it on the basis of cable and of television.
And that's how it caught on.
And most people that you talked to did not see the movie in the theater.
If Somewhere in Time had been released sometime in the last five years, I'll bet you it would have grossed the $100 million that you just grossed with What Dreams May Come or better.
It was written by a wonderful man named Richard Matheson, who most of your listeners are going to remember from being one of the key writers on The Twilight Zone.
He and Rod Serling wrote most, if most of the Twilight Zone episodes.
He wrote The Incredible Shrinking Man.
He wrote I Am Legend.
He's really one of the great science fiction and fantasy writers that we have in the world.
And he wrote two love stories.
He wrote Somewhere in Time and he wrote What Dreams May Come.
And Somewhere in Time, which was then Bidtime Return, was written and I think originally published in 1975.
And I had always had this tremendous passion to get into the movie business.
But the timing wasn't right.
And I went into a bookstore and a clerk said to me, you know, I know the kind of books you read.
You've got to read this book.
And I read that book and I put it down.
I said, okay, that's it.
I'm in the movie business.
I've got to get that book made as a film.
And I begged my way into a job, literally begged my way into a job with Ray Stark as his assistant.
And the first call I ever made when I got that job was to Richard Mathis' agent.
We set up a lunch.
I met him.
And I said, listen, Richard, I don't know what it's going to take, but I want to make this as a movie.
Will you shake my hand?
I promise I'll do it.
And we shook hands.
It took three years.
And we went off to make the film.
And the actual making of the film and how that happened is also a story.
And Richard Matheson actually was at the Coronado Hotel, which is where the book was set.
And he really thought about when he was in this hall of history they have there looking at these photographs of these actresses, I wonder if I could go back in time.
And the book was originally set there.
We could not shoot there because we could never make it look like 1912 at the Coronado Hotel in San Diego.
So that was why eventually we found Mackinac Island.
But there was a lot of opposition to it.
And I had just left Ray Stark and had this book in development at Universal.
And a couple of very serendipitous things happened.
One, this wonderful director named Chanel Swark, who directed Somewhere in Time, had just saved Universal a lot of headaches by coming in and doing Jaws 2 for them under very difficult circumstances.
And they felt they owed him a favor.
And Janot and I got together and he said, I've always wanted to do a movie like Portrait of Jenny.
And I said, oh, I've got the right book for you.
So we got Janot and we developed this script and we turned it into Universal.
And this wonderful man named Ned Tannen, who was the head of the studio at that time, was deciding whether or not he would make it.
And the production executive on it said, well, we've got to give him a list of actors.
And we made up this list of actors.
This is, by the way, two months after the release of Superman 1, in which Chris Reeve became this huge international star.
And Verna Fields, bless her heart, who is our executive, who was an editor and actually won the Academy Award for editing JAWS, said, Steve, you've got to put Chris Reeve on this list.
And I said, please, Verna, don't put Chris Reeve on this list.
If you do, Ned's going to say, I'll make this movie only if I can get Chris Reeves.
Well, then the question, obvious question, is this movie that was before its time, how in the world did Chris, did Chris view it the same way when he was presented with the script?
You know, when you get to be, when you have that kind of mercury rise, you're surrounded by a lot of people who want to protect you and in so doing, protect themselves.
My guest is none other than Stephen Simon, responsible for actually two of my favorite movies of all time, period.
One of them is Somewhere in Time.
And if you look on my website on my, over on the left-hand side at www.rfl.com, I just took a webcam photograph of a photograph that I've got of Jane Seymour.
It is the same photograph that was in the film.
And it's not possible to look at that photograph without falling in love with it.
I don't know.
There's just something about it.
And the way she looks and the way she radiated, it's all right there.
Anyway, we'll get back to all of that in a moment.
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Well, I started it out down a dirty road.
Started out all the way and you stayed out as you crossed the hill and the time to get up.
You will get still away.
You're listening to an on tour presentation of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bad.
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And now, the best of Coast to Coast AM with Art Dow.
And the owner of the hotel, I got the script to the owner of the hotel with a note saying, you know, please read this and you'll see that your hotel is going to be one of the stars.
And he called me and he said, yeah, we'll do this.
And so it was a magical time for everybody.
We all knew that it was very special.
And Jane and Chris, when they've been interviewed over the years, have always had a very, very special place in their heart for this movie because we know the lives that it's affected.
We know how many people have fallen in love through its spell, whose vows have been renewed through its spell, who have been brought into a sense of the eternity of love, the idea of soulmates, which began in a very smaller way in Somewhere in Time and then was really the basis for the entire film of What Dreams May Come.
And that's why Richard wrote the two books, his companions, but we'll get to that later.
Jane and Chris have a great, great love for Somewhere in Time and for all of the people who are so passionate about it.
Well, they always, from time to time, will run it because they know it has such a passionate following.
It still rents, you go into most any video store, it's still there, it still rents the soundtrack, which was sadly one of the things that I think was under recognized about the movie because John Berry wrote such an amazing score, such an extraordinary score for somewhere in time.
And it wasn't appreciated right away either.
And now I know they still sell a lot of those soundtracks every year, and it has become a perennial for the people who love it.
It does cast that spell, and I think that what's underneath that is the fact that we're all looking for that special person.
The people who have that special person, like you with Ramona, myself with Catherine, and everyone else that we know that has that, you cherish that, and this reminds you of that, and it brings you closer.
And people who don't have it so much want to have it.
And I think there's a powerful link, actually, between Somewhere in Time and What Dreams May Come in many different ways.
And one of them is everyone would like to believe that the person that they love and the person who loves them would travel through time and would go through anything to be with the person they love.
And What Dreams May Come is actually going through literally the pit of hell to redeem your wife's soul.
And somewhere in time, it's about traveling through time to redeem your love.
Yes, and has, when I read the galleys for that book, which Richard gave to me during the entire making of Somewhere in Time, he said, this is my new book.
And I remembered that so vividly because I stayed up all night.
I read the book.
I cried.
I read it again.
I cried.
I went over to him and I said, Richard, we made a handshake deal on Somewhere in Time.
Let me make the same deal with you on What Dreams May Come.
I promise you I'll get it made, and I promise you it won't take three years.
It didn't take three years.
I was right.
It took 20.
And it began this tremendous saga.
And the thing that connected to me in What Dreams May Come and connected to me so powerfully is that all of the great love stories, all the great love stories, are based on the obstacles between the lovers, starting with Romeo and Juliet.
And every movie that you've ever seen, the obstacles between the lovers are the linchpin upon the power of the film.
Most of them dealt with the industry and the world being ready to take the next leap.
There have been a lot of films that have taken place for five minutes or ten minutes like that in an afterlife.
And as you remember, for instance, in Heaven Can Wait, you know, it's white clouds and things like that.
This entire film takes place in the afterlife experience of the main character.
And being able to visualize that, number one, and number two, being able to have the consciousness that an audience would be ready for it, has taken a long time.
And we had to find the right script, which took a while, the right writer, and we found this extraordinary writer in Ron Bass who wrote this amazing script.
We had to find the right director who would have the courage to take it on.
There were a lot of directors over the years who were intrigued by what Dreams May Come.
But when I would talk to them, they would say to me, you know, Steve, I just don't know how to visualize it.
I don't know how to do it.
And Vincent Ward, who directed the film, is this extraordinary New Zealand visionary director, came in and said, fellas, I know what to do.
We're going to put him in his wife's paintings.
And it'll be like handrails for the audience to go into the afterlife.
I think, and as I said, the world wasn't ready for it.
We're so much as a humanity today more ready to look at what it really might mean to be human.
And you mentioned at the beginning that in 1994, 95, when Barnett and I got together and we formed Metafilmics, which is Metaphysics and Film, it was the synergy of Barnett and I coming together and saying, okay, we're going to be consciously spiritual people.
We're going to have a consciously spiritual film company, Metafilmics.
We're only going to make these kinds of films.
When we set that intent out there, me getting together with Barnett was the thing that clicked everything over and which allowed us to then actually go out and be able to put the film together.
And the world started to be ready to look at things like this and say, okay, I'm willing to go there to see what I really might be like.
And frankly, the technology, and you're right at the beginning, you did win the Academy Award for Visual Effects, and the guys that created this under Vincent's director.
We were very proud of those guys because they really had to create a technology that had not been done before.
You can't create nature in a computer.
It's the one thing that you cannot do.
Because leaves and water and things like that don't, if you completely do a CGI computer graphics, the human eye knows that that's not nature.
So it was the conceit of this to actually go out and shoot in nature and then do all of the computer graphics after it.
So literally everything had to be hand-painted by artists.
And for those of your audience that have seen What Dreams May Come, when Robin Williams goes into that painted world, there are 54 shots in that painted world from the time he wakes up until the time the world becomes real.
And each one of those shots wind up costing $250,000 to be able to affect because of the sophistication of the technology.
And what's so funny about all of that is that I'm telling you, within a year, you'll be seeing that on commercials on television.
Well, maybe you can explain to the lay person, and I'm sure one of those when it comes to films, how Robin Williams was able to do the interaction with what would later be combined with these incredible visual effects that I have no idea how you did.
Well, because I can tell you that, because what Robin was in nature, we shot those sequences primarily in Montana.
And what happened is, to try to put it in the simplest form, is that Robin and the dog and Cuba and all of that was shot on legitimate locations in the way you would shoot anything out in nature.
Then what happened is that the technology that was employed is it was called a LADAR, which is laser and radar camera, was brought in after we left the location.
And it would map in an extremely complicated, computer-like way, all of the geography that we shot, every single angle of everything.
Then the original film and that technology was taken back to the Visual Effects Company, put together, what's called composited together.
And then when a radar map and a computer map was actually made of everything we did, they took the natural shots and then started literally hand and computer painting every single frame so that the paint strokes were actually applied on top of what was really a tree.
Okay, I've done all that, but what I mean is when you were on location with Robin, how did you translate to him and communicate to him what it was going to be so that he was doing the right things in Montana?
And so you were able to sit down with them beforehand, show them what the end product was going to be, and with the aid of the real thing around them, the beauty around them, and, oh, boy, there's some beauty in Montana.
It was the first part of the film we shot it there, and then most of the rest of it was shot in these huge hangars, abandoned hangars in San Francisco on Treasure Island.
You know, the end of the Cold War was one of the greatest things that ever happened to the movie business because a lot of these army and naval bases have been decommissioned, and they have these enormous hangars and spaces that are not useful for anything, and now they're being used by movie companies where sound stages are not as big and they're much too expensive,
And through the help of a wonderful man named Ted Field, who owns a company called Interscope, we approached Polygram to finance the film.
And they were willing to do it, but we needed a movie star to front the film because they would not put up that kind of money unless they had a big star.
And it was really kind of a universe of one because we sat down and said, okay, look, who can we have in this movie?
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We need to have somebody who will take the audience into the afterlife.
We need a fantastic actor, but we need an actor with great personal presence with the audience that the audience trusts.
There were a lot of unique things, and it really kept going back to Robin, Robin, Robin.
So we made Robin the offer.
We held our breath.
You know, usually it takes weeks when you hear something like that.
Two days later, we get a phone call saying Robin wants to meet.
And again, usually when you sit in those meetings, particularly with someone of Robin's stature, it's like, well, you know, I like the script, but I want you to change this.
And if you'll do this, then maybe I'll think about it and I'll see you in six months.
Well, we go into the room with Robin, and he sits down and he says, fellas, I got two things to tell you.
One, I'm in.
I'm doing the movie.
The second thing is, I'll play all the parts if you want me to.
Oh, he bought the whole thing and basically said, you know, I love this script.
I love what you're doing.
It's going to take a long time.
And it did.
It took us a year to prepare the movie.
It's going to take a long time.
I've got a couple of movies to do in between.
But I'll be there.
And let's make the deal.
And then we went about the process of casting the film.
And we got Cuba right after he won the Academy Awards, which was very, very fortunate for us.
And again, we had a search for the woman.
There was a lot of talk about having a movie star play that role, but a big movie star.
And we really thought we wanted to, again, find an actress who could play the range in that film.
You know, there's a lot of controversial parts of What Dreams May Come, a lot of controversial parts.
The fact that we made a huge film that all has as its basis, we create our own reality, both in life and in the afterlife.
That's a big concept for a lot of people to accept, that there is no such thing as a real world that you walk around in, that life is an illusion, and everything that you do in it is your own creation.
And we knew that we had these things.
That was one.
Certainly the suicide aspect of it has been very controversial.
Stephen, I'm going to tell you a very brief story about a young lady that I had on the program whose name was Sarah.
And Sarah had a near-death experience, which was the most remarkable I've ever heard about in my whole life.
Sarah was a young lady.
She was a church volunteer.
She was on her way home from that volunteer work at church riding her bicycle.
And she was hit from behind by a vehicle doing about 55 or 60 miles an hour.
She was thrown several hundred yards in the air, broke just about every bone in her body.
You know, her life signs all stopped.
She barely, she's still recovering, actually.
But she had this most incredible NDE that was detailed over a couple of hours in which she went to a place that contained both what we would think of as heaven and definitely what we would think of as hell.
Kind of an interesting, if you ever get the opportunity, we have the real audio accounting of that.
You can actually hear her tell the story up on my website, but it was, boy, oh boy, was it something.
And of course, that is what dreams may come dealt both with heaven and hell.
One thing I wanted to ask you was, there was only one reference in the movie that I recall to God, and it was very short, and it was, there was a question about God, and I think the answer was, he's up there, or he's there, or something like that.
And Cuba looks upward and says, oh, he's there, smiling down at us, shouting down at us that he loves us and wondering why we can't hear him, you think?
When you're going to do a movie that entirely takes place in the afterlife and deals with everyone's beliefs, the debate is extensive, long, and unending and heated.
I bet.
And the conversations about every single word in that film were very, very in-depth, and there was a lot of passion on all sides.
And, you know, when you're the producers like Barnett and I were, you know, you're kind of at the center of all of that.
And it was very important for us to have the movie have a very strong, central spiritual vision.
And the spiritual vision was, in this afterlife, in this afterlife experience of this character, the rules were, you create your own reality.
And we felt that that covered everything because if you are a fundamental Christian, then your afterlife is going to reflect your beliefs.
If you're a Jew, it's going to reflect your beliefs.
We think the world gets into trouble when any group comes along and says we are the only truth.
But we didn't want to exclude God because we felt that that would be inappropriate as well.
And so what we really wanted to do was talk about this afterlife as not being heaven because truly it was not heaven.
It was his creation of what his life would be like with his wife.
And there was a lot of controversy, again, about talking about your own reality.
I've had people come up to me, I had actually this happened to me at a birthday party, and say to me, gee, I loved your movie, but the thing that really disappointed me in this spiritual movie is that you had all those Judeo-Christian visions of hell.
And then literally three minutes later, I had somebody come up to me and say, God, the thing I love most about your movie is that you had no Judeo-Christian visions of hell.
So everybody sees their own film, but hell was not hell.
And again, I've had people say to me, you know, you guys are inhuman monsters for creating in people families that had loved ones commit suicide thinking that they would be in this kind of torment.
And then we've had people come up to us and say, God, we've run suicide prevention centers.
We've had young people who have tried to commit suicide before.
And we've sent them all to see this film.
And they have a completely different understanding of what human life is like.
And, you know, I think when you want to do something on, again, on the edge, on the spiritual edge of humanity, you're going to engender passion either way.
And frankly, I would rather make a film that people either loved or absolutely hated than make a film that was kind of like in the middle.
Well, you know, Stephen, I've interviewed a lot of people who have had near-death experiences and have claimed a lot of things.
But one common thread in all of them is that they have a life, a full life review, and they, in effect, judge themselves whether it would be to go to the place where Robin Williams did or his wife did.
What Dreams May Come actually was the genesis for that idea with Richard Matheson was that he had done a tremendous amount of near-death experience research, and he had done it for somewhere in time.
And then when he had the idea for What Dreams May Come, he wanted to do something about a love story in the afterlife.
And what was striking to him, and you read it in the literature, which is voluminous, What Dreams May Come may be the only novel ever published, maybe, I'm not sure, that actually has a bibliography as a novel.
And it has an extensive bibliography of the research into near-death and afterlife experiences.
And what Richard found, which is what caused him to write the book the way he did, is that all around the world, people who have near-death experiences relate primarily the same experience.
Not exclusively, but primarily that they feel this beckoning light, that it's very pres, you know, it's very comforting, that they go through a tunnel-like experience, that their loved ones are there.
The only people who do not relate that experience are people who are revived after suicide attempts.
And that's why Richard thought, aha, that's a great idea for a book.
And that started off the whole idea of what dreams become, which then, as you know from seeing the film, went into a lot of other areas of what does it mean to be alive?
What does it mean to be human?
I think, therefore, I am.
And all of the kinds of things that I think people, as we get within now, just 100 or so days of the year, or whatever it is, at the end of this millennium, people are asking themselves questions, okay, much of the media tells me that as a humanity, I am depraved, I am greedy, and I don't care about my fellow person, and I'm not really good as a human being.
Is that true?
Is that really true?
What does it really mean to be human?
Why are we here?
What are the definitions of success?
And if we have a second here, I want to tell you the most extraordinary thing that happened with What Dreams May Come.
Because of all of the stories, of all of the things that happened, it was the thing that had the most powerful effect on us.
When I say on us, on Barnett and myself.
The opening weekend of the film, you know, we were very involved, as unfortunately, we all get with money and grosses and how much did it grow and how are we doing and what are the critics thinking.
And Barnett's wife, Sandy, and my fiancé, Catherine, were saying to us, guys, you know, you have to think of a different definition of success because you guys have a metaphysical film company.
It can't just be about money.
And they were totally right, and that's exactly what we were thinking.
And then along came this wonderful story.
We get a phone call from the distributor, one of the distributors of the film in the Midwest, that there is a man in Milwaukee, and he certainly allowed me now to use his name, a man named Chuck Weber, who had a daughter, a 17-year-old daughter who had terminal cancer.
And she was dying literally within days.
And she had seen the trailer for the film and really wanted to see the film, but was too ill to get out.
And very quickly, and Polygram was fantastic about it.
We got a cassette made.
And those of you who know anything about piracy and stuff like that know that studios are terrified of doing this.
We got it by messenger and by courier to these people in Wisconsin, to the Weber family.
And I left a message on their home machine saying that I hoped that it would do some good.
And I didn't hear anything for about two weeks.
And then Chuck called me and told me about the last three days of Amanda's life.
And Amanda was 17, died of a very rare form of cancer.
And she had been very brave, but at the end, she had a lot of fear.
And she was home.
It was really within a couple of days of her passing.
And they got the film, and she had a bunch of her friends in from high school, and they all watched it together.
And Chuck told me that as he watched his daughter watch the film, he saw her fear disappear.
And she became completely at peace.
And the next day was a beautiful fall day in Wisconsin.
She wanted to be taken out to a park.
She wanted to see all the colors, which she connected to the afterlife colors in the painted world and what dreams may come.
And she really let her dad know that she now had a frame of reference for when she died.
And then the next day she did pass very, very peacefully.
And when Chuck related this story to us, he basically said, you know, this film made the entire difference to the last two days of my daughter's life.
And since, Chuck has become a very, very, very close family friend.
A lot of Amanda's things were sent to our daughters, Carrie, who's 19, and Heather, who's now 13.
And he sent things to our sons, Eli and Danny.
And the families have become very, very close.
And of all of the things that happened with What Dreams May Come, that's the one that will always stay in my mind because we now have a new definition of success for what we do with our filmmaking.
Where I have a problem is if they try to, anyone, anyone, including me, tries to make somebody else believe that I have the truth.
There is nothing in What Dreams May Come or in any of the work that Metaphilmics has done or will do in the future that is going to say we have the answers.
We have no answers.
We have a lot of questions.
A lot of questions.
And that's what we hope.
What we hope will happen is that people will see these films, will see dreams, will see Conversations with God, which we're in the process of preparing now and other things that we're doing, and walk out and say, all right, now I want to talk about this.
And they'll talk to their friends.
I remember walking out of previews of what dreams may come, you know, 40 minutes after the film were finished, and we would see people in the parking garages having heated arguments.
This one loved it, this one hated it, this one thought this was right, this one thought this was ridiculous.
And we looked at ourselves, Barnett, and I said, God, we've done our job.
You know, we've started a dialogue, again, about our humanity.
And that's what we want to do.
so there were the mail then reflected exactly the same kind of great but it was not really I think they understood what we were trying to do.
The people who had the strongly negative reactions to it were really principally people who felt an enormous amount of pain because of the suicide angle, having had families, members that had committed suicide.
And that's something that I can only say I completely understand and completely respect.
And I can feel that.
And what we always tried to say to them was, look, it is the position of the movie that that is a choice made by every individual, and love can overcome it.
If the suicide had been for some horribly selfish reason, then one might imagine that person, according to the way your movie was laid out, might create their own hell, but they were not automatically sentenced to any hell.
When we originally envisioned the film, and you know, this happens much more than people think happens in movies.
You know, when you see a movie, you think, well, that's what they planned, and they planned that from the beginning.
More often than not, there has been a lot of reshot footage because you think something's going to work and then you show it to an audience and you realize that it didn't.
And we had an ending on that was much more extensive and went much more into the karma of Annabella's suicide.
And the decision that she made to be reborn into a life where she would have a certain karmic debt that would be a result of that and Robin's choice to go back and be with her.
And they are originally, in the original ending, were reincarnated as a small boy in Philadelphia and a little girl in Sri Lanka that were going to get together through various circumstances.
And when we previewed the film, we realized that the ending was much too long, much too complicated, and that the journey had been so difficult and emotional and intense for the audience that we needed to do something with the same general idea, which was to do the reincarnation, which we knew we had to end the film with, but to do it in a different way.
And again, to give the people at Polygram so much credit, they allowed us to go back and spend another couple of million dollars, even though we had already spent a lot of money to go back and do the ending right.
And we're much happier with the ending on the film than we were with the original one.
Yeah, people seem to what Art's talking about for the listeners is that on the Saturday night of the Summer in Time weekend that is done the last weekend in October of every year at the Grant Hotel where we shot at the fan club, takes over the whole hotel.
They actually do a 1912 ball and dinner, and everyone comes dressed in 1912 costumes.
And I guess we're going to take our shot at that and do our best.
Well, fortunately for me, Catherine had already seen it.
She'd seen it.
Now, Catherine is a fellow traveler in these areas.
As I mentioned, she has a magazine called Holistic Health Journal, which totally deals with issues of health, but also emotional health and spiritual health and well-being and things like that.
She is very much a part of this entire thought process and living process and experience process that we're all going through.
So she had already seen the film, fortunately for me, and we didn't, but we both had a very strong connection with it.
And she was the one that really said to me, well, when the summertime weekend comes up again, let's go.
You know, let's go do it.
And now that she's in my life and such a positive influence in my life, that's what I'm going to do.
Oh, I should say one thing before we go to the phone so that we don't get some irate phone calls from Somewhere in Time fans who, because I've heard this before, that there's some guy named Stephen Simon going around masquerading as the producer of Somewhere in Time when that guy's name was really Stephen Deutsch.
And I have to say to people, it's one and the same.
My name was Stephen Simon when I was born.
My father died when I was four, and my stepfather, who was a wonderful man, adopted me.
And when What Dreams May Come, after all these years, finally got approved through this synergy with Metaphilamics and my partner Barnett, I decided to go back to my birth name of Simon because it felt to me like a proper acknowledgement of my heritage.
So there is a difference because Stephen Simon is the producer of What Dreams May Come and Stephen Deutsch is the producer of Somewhere in Time, but I'm the same guy.
And there's a lot of filmmaking going on that's not so good, and there's a lot of controversy about it.
And a lot of people are saying, well, it contributes to violence.
There was just a survey done that seemed to suggest the exact opposite.
The American people now are beginning to not think of films in the way they have been in recent years as contributing to the deterioration of our society as we see it all around us right now.
It is a challenging thing because these kinds of movies, what most people call fantasy films, what I consider to be metaphysical, spiritual films, 2001, Field of Dreams, Heaven Can Wait, What Dreams May Come Somewhere in Time, and there's this whole long litany of them.
We are, at Metafilmics, we are really crusading to have these films be recognized as a genre.
And what we've really become convinced about, and we are actually right now in the process of raising $20 million for our company so that we can be completely independent of the entire Hollywood structure, because we really want to be able to do these films with a certain degree of integrity so that we don't have to sacrifice them to the kind of homogenization process that goes on when you're trying to appeal to everybody.
What Dreams May Come does not appeal to everybody.
And what happens with most of the Hollywood movies today, and it's not because these are bad people running the studios, because by and large, and I know it may surprise a lot of people, these are very decent, well-meaning people to a great extent, but because of the corporate takeover of Hollywood over the last 15 years, there is a lot less entrepreneurship and a lot less looking to the future, like saying, hey, movies for the internet is the future, guys.
I mean, we're going to be doing that real soon, and there's going to be hundreds of millions of dollars made, and there are going to be movies that never get any distribution other than the internet.
And these movies about people looking at, again, what does it mean to be human?
These kinds of things that are happening as a result of the millennium consciousness is happening.
This is the growth.
This is the future.
We can't do that within the system that we have now, and that's why we're becoming independent of it.
As far as the, we can't do it on a consistent basis.
We got Dreams Made.
We're doing other things as well.
As far as this debate that's going on right now, the film business has traditionally not led anything.
The film business, if you look back through history, has basically reflected what's going on in society.
And it is my belief that that's the same thing that's going on now.
I think that a lot of these violent films that have been made, which have certainly contributed to a lack of love, a lack of respect, and a lack of empowerment in the society, would not be made if people weren't paying and going to see them.
As Winston Churchill once said, democracy is the worst form of government ever devised by man, except for all the others.
It's a tremendous paradox.
And people don't feel comfortable in the middle of paradox.
People like to have to solve it one way or the other.
And the truth is, we do have the First Amendment.
We need to respect it.
But as an industry, we need to take responsibility for what we do as individuals, as filmmakers, and say, look, we should not be doing this, whether it makes money or not.
There are other ways to make money.
But as far as the government coming in and saying, okay, you can't do it, then what happens?
What is an acceptable level of violence?
And who then decides what that is?
I think a lot of the stuff that gets made is really, really damaging, not only to young people, but to people across the board in desensitizing them against violence.
And I don't like personally, I don't like those films.
But again, I don't want somebody saying to me, look, you can't make metaphysical films.
I don't want to say to other people, you can't make violent films or you can't make this.
We just need as a society and as an industry to be more comfortable living in the paradox in between.
You know, to use a strong example of the last couple of, the last several years, people found it really difficult to accept for those people who believe that O.J. Simpson was guilty of murdering his wife, that O.J. Simpson was this tremendously engaging, warm, wonderful, fantastic, charismatic personality who also might have been a really cold-blooded killer.
People wanted him to be one or the other.
They couldn't stand the idea that he was both.
And we live in a society where we have the First Amendment.
We need to have freedom, but we need to not exploit it.
And that is an individual personal responsibility, again, for creating your own reality.
The same difficulty is rampant on the Internet right now.
In other words, on the one hand, you've got this all-important freedom of speech First Amendment thing.
And on the other hand, you've got accountability, screaming for accountability about some of the things that are done up there.
And the balance is so delicate and so difficult.
If it goes too far in one direction, we're going to lose what we consider to be so precious and bring on exactly what we don't want, some sort of regulation or law that will begin to infringe our freedoms.
So we must be responsible on the internet and with filmmaking.
I have been the head of three different film companies and have been fired from all three jobs.
I've made more movies that haven't made money than movies that have made money.
You know, to quote the wonderful Jerry McGuire character, the Dickie Fox aging character that kept coming in, you know, in truth, in life, I've failed as much as I've succeeded, but I love my life, and I love my wife, and I wish you that kind of success.
Again, what is the definition of success?
I'm not a wealthy man by any stretch of the imagination, not in any way.
I've had my problems along with everybody else.
It is often difficult at times to make a living.
But I have a passion in my life, and I have people who love me and who I love in my life, and I have a direct through line to my life.
I see what my life is about.
My life is about my family and my friends and the people who love me, and in my work, it's about trying to illuminate parts of the human condition that empower us and enlighten us.
And that at times we're going to succeed, and there are times that we're going to fail.
But my success in life is not, in my own estimation, determined by whether I make money or whether I don't make money.
It's how I feel about myself as a human being at the end of the day.
Well, you know, listen, those people who have read the Celestine prophecy, you know, that is one of the precepts of the Celestine prophecy that we are all getting to a place where we will have the capacity and the ability to make a living doing what we love.
I think that, and I think again, there's an understandable reason for this.
I think that most critics, now, we have to differentiate critics here.
There are electronic critics, the television press, and there are print critics.
The print critics are basically a very cynical group of people.
Now, that's not their fault.
You know, they're forced to watch 150 movies a year.
And most of the movies that they see are pretty bad.
I mean the truth is we don't make as many great movies as we make movies that are mediocre.
And they get inundated with constant cynical themselves, constant cynical kind of filmmaking.
It makes them turn off.
And I think that when you see something that is genuinely hopeful, they basically suspect the motives behind it.
And a lot of them are not comfortable with it.
Bless his heart.
Gene Siskel was certainly not that way.
Roger Ebert is certainly not that way.
The television press tends to be different.
I think as far as the critics were concerned with Summer in Time, and Chris at one point told me this, he really thinks that they were kind of, quote, waiting for him, unquote, after Superman.
All press likes to build people up on their way up, and then when they get there, they like to knock them down.
Well, that's unfortunate, because I think it just really was an incredible, and still is an incredible movie, and I've always recommended it to anyone who wanted a good romantic love story.
It's funny, when I go out to the Facts Machine, I find questions that have simply just been answered.
Somebody wrote another love story in the afterlife movie with Meryl Streef and Albert Brooks in Defending Your Life, which was a very good movie.
And he goes on to say, this is Frank, in Hollywood of all places, in the DVD release of What Dreams May Come, there's an alternate ending where the two characters are shown reincarnated in Sri Lanka and Pennsylvania.
What led to the selection of that ending that was used instead without reincarnation actually being shown?
Well, yes, as I said, we realized when the film is in front of audiences that the ride was a particularly intense one, and that once we had the reunion in what we call Summerland, that we did not want to go back on the ride again, and that we wanted to give the audience a real emotional release and have there be a synergy at the end.
And the reincarnation is actually very specifically mentioned because they talk about doing it, and then you see the little boy and the little girl at the end of the film, and you know that's the two of them.
If you have the passion in your gut, you'll make it.
It's that simple.
People try to discourage people from getting in the movie.
They say, Oh, it's too difficult.
There's too many people.
That's a bunch of baloney.
If you have the passion inside of you and you really feel that you're not going to be happy in life unless this is what you do, then you'll find a way to do it.
If you want to be a director and you're young, start with a video camera.
Make movies.
Get a video camera and start making your own movies.
Find some place that you can edit them.
Make home movies.
That's how Spielberg started.
And then if you want to go to school, one of the great things that's happened in the United States over the last 10 or 15 years is that there's been an enormous proliferation of film schools, which are no longer theoretical film schools.
They actually teach people how to be filmmakers.
And they're all over the country.
There are literally dozens and dozens and dozens of them.
And it's easy to find, and that's certainly a way to do it if you want to do that through college.
If you don't want to do that, and you have the capacity to do it, then I would urge you at some point or another, once you get out of high school, and if you decide not to go through the college route, to go to Los Angeles, come to Los Angeles, which is really still the filmmaking capital of the world, and find your way, which is not difficult to do because it's all over the place, find your way into production companies, into agencies.
You go to the Director's Guild.
They have an apprenticeship program that they take people on.
It is not a tremendous mystery.
What separates people from the people who succeed and the people who don't is not so much talent, although talent is enormously important, it's will.
But at the same time, there is a large independent film community and television now, particularly with the proliferation of all of these cable channels.
There's a company called Siteson.com that owns all the technology to putting movies over the Internet, and they've already done it.
I mean, they've already put a movie on the Internet.
And I actually saw it on a computer.
And if you think that television and films are now big, wait until the country is wired and people have high-speed either cable or high-speed ISDN lines and they can download movies off their computer in five or six or seven minutes.
The explosion is going to be enormous and there will be a lot more films that will be needed.
And if you're 15 years old, you're coming in at just the right time if you really love it.
If you don't, don't try because it's too compelling.
First of all, my request would be if you're going to film something along the lines of Summer and Time or what dreams may come in the near future, I would strongly request and urge you to cast Salma Hayek as the ingenue, the heroine, while she's still in her prime.
I think I'm quite a film death, and I think I've got a pretty well-rounded view of some of the films throughout, you know, from the 30s to the present, and I cannot think of a Hollywood actress that is more stunning going back to the 30s.
My suggestion would be if you're going to, or if you've already put this film company together focusing on metaphysical films, I think a perfect book that should be brought to the screen would be Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus Trilogy.
Now, if I'm not mistaken, if I'm not mistaken, that is the basis of The 13th Floor.
Oh, is it?
And that's a terrific movie.
I had nothing to do with it, absolutely nothing to do with it.
It's a film that I think, unfortunately, was not terribly well marketed and has some unfortunate problems within it on vis-a-vis the casting.
But people who love this kind of filmmaking, it's gone, unfortunately, from theaters, but it'll be on video, I'm sure, relatively soon.
And I believe that that is the basis for the 13-4.
unidentified
Well, when I saw What Dreams May Come, before I heard you way back on Arts Show and found out that you were responsible for both Summer in Time and What Dreams May Come, I mean, I immediately flashed on Summer in Time.
And then when I heard you, I can't remember how many months ago it was, it all made perfect sense.
I'd say in my top ten films, those are the only two romances that I can think of.
And I think that what I like about those films, I would imagine in songwriting and film writing, film, script writing, those are two separate creative genres.
But to write a romance and not have it come off as schmalty or overly sentimental is extremely difficult.
And there's no part in either of those two films that ring untrue.
I thank you on behalf of Richard Matheson, who wrote the screenplay and the book for Somewhere in Time, and Richard and Ron Bass, who wrote the screenplay for What Dreams May Come.
And I wince a little when anyone says that I was responsible for it because I can tell you that, and I do not say this with any false modesty, it's just the truth.
Filmmaking is such a collaborative medium.
Oh, yeah.
No one, I mean, my partner Barnett and I and all of the other people, I have myself a little bit of a problem when I see a credit saying a so-and-so film as a director because I think in some ways it really discredits all of the people who contribute to it.
But on behalf of all the people that contributed to all of these films, I thank you.
unidentified
Well, it's certainly a collaborative process and it is a testament to the writing and the direction.
In this list of films that I would include, Summer in Time and What Dreams May Come, I mean, to give you an idea of some of my tastes in films, which I think are pretty broad or eclectic, Usual Suspects, Grand Canyon, there's the elemental, the metaphysical, but there's also these are films that challenge your intelligence and they're not predictable.
They have twists and terms.
My two questions that I was going to end with, obviously, it sounds like Richard Matheson is still alive then.
But as I said, please don't wait 20 years for Selma.
Are the books still in print?
And my last question would be, Art, I think there was a listener that called right around Halloween, not Halloween, excuse me, Thanksgiving of last year, who actually faxed you and said some connections between the book Somewhere in Time and something about the book that Christopher Reeve, the character in the film, gets and how that circuitously is based on an actual book of...
Mr. Simon, I just want to say how much an impetus for changing my life your movie has been.
And again, I won't say your movie, but the movie.
It was an excellent, excellent film.
And I can't tell you how many times we've had little coffee table chats here in Austin about this movie and about the implications for the fact that we've come to believe we really do make our own reality and most likely make our own afterlife.
I saw Somewhere in Time when I was eight years old.
Wow.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, my dad pretty much forced me to watch the first five minutes of it, and then I was completely glued to it when he sees that penny, and my heart just sank, and it continues to sink.
And I was just recently married, and we went to Maui for our honeymoon, and we were at a video store in Maui, and this girl comes in and asks the guy at the front desk if they have this movie called Somewhere in Time.
And the idiot says, no, no, I've never heard of that movie before.
And I almost slapped him right there.
I helped her find it.
And she ended up renting it before the end of the night.
The question I want to ask you, first of all, was was it your decision not to further develop the relationship between the parents and the children prior to the afterlife scenes where Robin Williams is reflecting back on the conversations with his son and with his daughter?
Well, again, none of those things are ever one person's decision.
That's a joint effort on behalf of the producers, the director, and the writer, and the financing entity, and the actors.
It's a very hard thing to say one thing.
That was something that we talked about a great deal.
And we really decided not to do more of it, simply for the sense of the pacing of the film.
And originally the film started off the way it was originally written.
The film actually started off with the car accident.
And that the entire, all of the relationships with the children and with his wife were done in flashback and kind of in a very disjointed way to give the audience the sense that the main character had, which is jumping around in time.
We found it was very confusing for the audience.
And so we actually re-edited the film to make it much more linear.
And we did have a lot of conversations about should we do more with the family.
And ultimately for reasons of pacing and for reasons of the mystery of the film, we decided not to.
But there was a lot of conversation as to whether or not maybe we should have.
unidentified
That's really interesting.
And the second part is for both of you to speculate on.
Mr. Bell, I've listened to your show for quite some time.
And I'm really, really fond of it.
My therapist says not to listen because she thinks it's a reason for my panic attack.
But I just wanted to ask you, I've listened to your shows about the afterlife and near-death experiences for quite some time.
And one of the things that occurred to me and kind of my circle of friends that I talked about your show with on a regular basis, one of the things that we kind of decided was is that it's not so much what happens during the near-death experience, but the part of what makes people...
the question about whether or not people return and those that stay, we've come to think of the afterlife experience, the near-death experience, as kind of a play that's put on for the person that's experiencing it.
And that the afterlife, excuse me, the near-death experience in and of itself is judgment.
And the judgment occurs when the person says, as beautiful as this place is, I love those that I've left behind too much to allow them to live without my presence.
And that, in fact, would be the judgment.
But the judgment is made when they say, you know, as beautiful as this place is, I have to give it up to go back with my family because they need me really...
So if at one of them you should happen to be in the middle of some sort of function and some really old lady came up to you and that watch that you now don't have and put it in your hand, I wonder if your heart could handle it.
I mean, that was Richard's idea, you know, that the whole conceit of it is that he wills himself into the past by taking everything from the present out of his sight and out of his consciousness, again creating his own reality.
And that when he, you know, that the only way to get him back would be to have him find something that he took with him inadvertently.
Now, there's a great numb, you know, mind twister here that no one could ever figure out.
If anyone can come up with the answer with it, good for them.
Well, Summer in Time, I've been both those movies, Summer in Time and Heaven's Gate can both be rented.
Summer in Time, I know, is available in all of the, you know, at Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.
They always have it.
And I don't know about the smaller video stores, but I would imagine most of them do because Summer in Time has turned out to be quite a favorite on video, and I think it's pretty much around.
unidentified
Cool.
And also, I'd like to know your viewpoint on what happens after you die.
But I think, again, the choice is made from a standpoint of, you know, our soul is this eternal being that has this, you know, extraordinary light and resilience to it.
And whether that's completely our choice and what our means is that, you know, I believe that we are all multi-part, multi-dimensional beings.
And what is the choice?
I mean, by which part of us, you know, when I say without the ability to rationalize, it always reminds me of that wonderful line in the big chill.
And I think it's the Jeff Goldblum character is challenging Bill Hurts, saying, you know, the ability to rationalize is a lot more important than sex.
And Bill Hurts says, no, that's not true.
And Jeff Goldblum says, I can prove it to you.
Have you ever gone a day without a rationalization?
Steve, I want to ask you, you had some really great source material to work with on these two movies, being Richard Matheson books.
I'm 47.
And Matheson has always been a big part of my life, going back to I Am Legend and, of course, his Twilight Zone stories that were adapted for The Twilight Zone.
Let me ask you, what are the difficulties in adapting a novel to movies?
It's a terrific question and something that is not often addressed.
They're completely different delivery systems.
The novel is always the personal experience of the viewer, of the reader, excuse me.
And you can insert yourself into any character that you want and envision yourself as such.
When you have a film, it has to become very specific to the actor or the actress that's playing the role.
So you don't have that kind of freedom.
It's a very different kind of a delivery medium.
Reading is all in your imagination, and you can imagine anything.
Filmmaking is really in the visual imagination of the director and all of the technicians that are actually making the film.
And it is much more specific, much less to the imagination and more practical than novelmaking.
And this is why most people say, well, the movie wasn't as good as the book.
Well, you can use the unlimited sources and resources of your imagination when you're reading a book.
And when you're watching a film, it is a much more specific experience.
And when you're reading a book, you may envision a character in, you may envision yourself or someone you love or someone you know or someone you hate as a character.
When it's in a film, it is personified in one actor who's playing that part.
And if you didn't foresee the character as being that way, then you don't love the book, the movie as much as you love the book.
And there are very few exceptions to that.
Certainly The Godfather being one of them.
I mean, you know, I think everyone kind of acknowledges that that was a movie that was at least as good, if not better, than the book.
But most people, a lot of people have a problem making that transition.
Well, you know, again, it depends on whether or not they understand the grammar, the film grammar that we've just talked about.
There are several people now writing.
I mean, John Grisham, for instance, never tries to adapt his material, his own material.
There's always writers who adapt his material.
And he understands that when you adapt a novel, you adapt a novel.
And you have to make certain changes within the novel.
For instance, and What Dreams May Come is a good example.
In the novel of What Dreams May Come, when the wife commits suicide, the children are still alive.
It's a big change.
And it was always an enormous problem because we always had the question of how are you going to create sympathy for a character who has a husband who's passed on and in grief commits suicide and leaves children behind.
It was a big problem.
And Ron Bass came up with a solution of having the children pre-decease them and then be able to use them in the way that we did.
And to his everlasting credit, Richard Matheson, who is one of the truly great, and I mean great gentlemen of the world, when he read the screenplay, called Ron and said, you know what, if I thought about that when I was writing the book, I think I'd have done that too.
And most novelists are not so egolist that they would admit that.
And a lot of people who are writing books also today have the understanding, you know, look, it is an adaptation.
If I like the movie, I like the movie.
If I don't like the movie, I don't like the movie.
The amount of people that are required to produce this, the logistics, the eating, the catering, the camera people, the sound people, the groups, all these people, it scared the hell out of me.
Yeah, it is a tremendous amount of fun, as I said before.
If you have the fire, if you really love it, my youngest daughter, Heather, who's 13, has this fire in her belly to be an actress.
And a lot of my children have had, all of my children have had, at one time or another, that interest, and then have kind of lost it.
Heather has it, and she's not going to lose it.
It's something that she is going to pursue, and I am going to help her with because I know that that is something that she could not live without trying.
If you just think it's fun and you just think it'll be a great lark, it's just, as Art said before, there's just too much rejection involved in doing these types of things, and people are going to get discouraged and stuff like that.
It just took me about a year to write, and I was so heavily absorbed in the book.
I was wondering if when you work on a film, I understand you're working on this new one, Conversations with God.
I was wondering if, with it being a collaborative effort, you've got so many things going on, if you are able to focus on your next project while you are immersed in the one that you're in.
I'm in the process in my life of also transitioning where I want to produce, but I also want to direct.
And I'm finding myself really beginning to focus more and more on just doing the thing that's in front of me.
It's very difficult if you really love the material and you really love the process to really get deeply involved in more than one thing at a time.
And we are doing conversations with God.
We're doing all three of those books, and we're actually developing them for television.
And again, that's another conversation that if somebody wants to get into, we can talk about.
I personally tend to really get very focused on what it is I'm doing at the moment and really get immersed in it.
And it's not a terribly good or beneficial trait for a producer to have.
Frankly, it's one of my challenges in life as a producer because you really need to keep a lot of balls in the air at the same time because you don't know where they're going to land and you don't know what's going to get made next.
And I tend to get very focused in on one or two things at a time.
As a director, as a writer, that's really necessary.
You really do need to focus on that.
As a producer, you need to have a lot of different things going at the same time.
unidentified
I see.
I was wondering if I could suggest my book for some future reading for you when you do have the time.
Yeah, well, this is something that I actually thought about before we did this interview tonight and anticipating that.
We get an enormous amount of material, as you might imagine, being very focused on doing just this kind of material.
People tend to find us.
It's not that complicated.
And even though I'm not going to give the phone number out, you know, Metaphilmics is located in the San Fernando Valley in California, and it's not that difficult to find us.
And if you do find us, we're a couple of months behind in our reading.
And you have to, you know, and I know you've talked about this with yourself.
It really, you are at a place, I think, in any creative endeavor where you really have to feel that if you don't do that, you don't know what you're going to do in life.
It's not like, well, this would be a fun thing to do.
You know, the reason you stayed at radio, I'm sure, is because this is who you are.
They have just not shown any interest in doing that at this point.
So there is no plan to do that.
At least that I know of.
Now, you never know, but at least as I know of it, And seeing that I produced the original, I should know about it if it was happening, but I don't know of anything at this point.
No, it took a couple years before I got the guts to admit what happened.
See, I made the mistake of being involved with the wrong people, and I overdosed on some...
Yes, like a needle in my arm, and I was gone.
My heart stopped.
I stopped breathing.
I was dead for about three or four minutes.
And the CPR brought me back, and I completely changed my life around.
So I will never go there again.
Anyway, my question for Mr. Simon.
Sir, you mentioned earlier about going independent, and Star Trek, the people of Star Trek and everything, they have really good moral things going for their movies a lot of times and like the condition of humanity.
And I just wondered if there was any way that you could get the people of Star Trek on board for the independent filmmaking crew.
So that might give you a really good jump in the right direction.
That's a mantra that I would love to see my children live by.
I mean, we talk about this a lot, and my comment about that is that that completely is consistent with my entire feeling about life, that this life that we live is a grand, fascinating illusion that we project together into and about an enormous human experiment that we're involved with on this planet.
And when you come to realize, as by the way, science has come to realize, that the expectation of the experimenter has an effect upon the outcome of the experiment when the entire conversation that is going on in the world of quantum physics is about God,
because they've finally gotten to the point where they recognize that there is this peace that they'll never quite be able to get.
And when you look at a table in front of you, and again, if you listen to science, and science tells you that that table is not real.
Your consciousness determines it is real because it puts all those atoms together, but it isn't really real.
And then you step back from it and say, well, that's if you believe science, because, you know, during the Renaissance, science kind of took over as the arbiter of everything.
And I think we're kind of going back to a period of time now where there is more balance and people are beginning to look at issues of faith.
You know, skeptics always say to me, well, you know, you can't prove that.
Oh, I think, you know, you look all around us in life, Art, and again, we all know people like this.
You know, there are people who go around thinking that their life is awful and that they're never going to have any luck.
And the truth of the matter is they don't.
And then there are people who are just magical manifesters, and it's nothing more than will and intent.
And when you look at that, you realize that people do actually create their own reality.
And we're living in a world today when actually there are enough people who believe that, and enough people who are fascinated with it, whether they believe it or not, who are curious about it, that we're going through this enormous evolution in the course of human thought and human belief where we're really delving into mysteries that have at this point always been mysteries.
And now we're beginning to tap parts of our brain that we've never been able to tap before.
And phenomena in the world are becoming more available to us, and we're beginning to understand things more, and we're looking inward.
It is, you know, part of the vision of Metafilmics of our company that after 100 years almost now of filmmaking, almost 100 years since movies were developed, that basically all of the outer landscapes have already been mapped.
I mean, this is one of the great complaints that people have about movies is, you know, it's the same old stuff over and over again.
Well, that's because the outer stuff has been mapped.
It's the inner stuff, the stuff about really the complexity of where we can go and who we can be and the coming technologies where we're literally going to be able to be able to put the audience in the experience of a movie.
It's called immersion.
It's a technology that is already being worked on.
It's already there.
It's kind of a helmetless version of virtual reality.
And you'll literally be able to sit in a 150, 200 seat theater, maybe three to five years from now, and literally be a part of the film.
Not interactive.
You won't be able to affect the outcome.
But if there's a scene that's going on between two characters at the beach, you're going to be walking along the beach with those two characters.
Now, when that happens, when that happens, when that's available, the fascination that we have with violence and things like that will no longer be something that you can stand back from.
And people will, at that point, I believe, and I had faith in this, will want to go deeper into who we really might be.
Okay, well, it's kind of like at the end of the movie.
I don't know if you've seen this art, but at the end of the movie, when Kelly McGillis and Timothy Hunting finally meet, there's this tinkling sound, almost like china or crystal being tinkling.
Yeah, and I hadn't seen that movie until much later, maybe around 27, 28.
But when I was 18, when I met this person, I happened to be introduced to this person, and it was the person that I had dreamt of when I was 15.
And before I even looked up, everything that happened in that movie about the movement around them and sounds around them that slowed down, everything drowned out around them.
It was almost as if time slowed down.
And all the ping coin that was occurring around them.
That's exactly what happened when I met this person.
And it floored me when I saw the movie because I knew there was someone out there, there must be someone out there who made this show who either had experience or knew someone who did.
Actually, you bring up a movie that the writers are very, very dear friends of mine.
The two men who wrote that film are two extraordinary writers named Ray Gideon and Bruce Evans.
They also wrote the Stand By Me, if you remember, Stand By Me, and they also wrote Starman, which is another wonderful film.
And I actually, now that you've asked, now that you've brought this up, I'm actually going to ask them whether or not they, where Maiden Heaven came from, because I actually don't know.
unidentified
Yeah, because that movie, that just really amazed me because exactly how it happened, I thought, you know, I wasn't going crazy.
I knew that it was a real experience and that someone else must have had known about it someplace enough to have put it in the movie.
Well, we're at a place where we really kind of have to.
There isn't much left.
And we really are kind of looking at all of these big issues.
And if we don't look inward and we don't look to ourselves, there has been so much disillusionment, particularly in the so-called American dream over the last 30 or 40 years that it really has gotten to the point where success has become completely equated with money.
And that means that Bill Gates has to be the most successful person in the United States, in the world.
But is he really?
He certainly is the most successful at being able to make money, but is that really the only definition of success?
And I think we're all now beginning to look at saying, well, you know what?
Maybe there's a different answer.
And that's why there's all over the culture, all over the culture, on radio with you, in books, in movies, in television, in music.
You know, Madonna's last album is completely spiritual.
This last album is completely spiritual.
You have books like The Celestine Prophecy selling millions and millions and millions of copies.
You got touched by an angel on television.
You've got films constantly that are asking these questions.
It's all over the culture.
This is no longer a compartmentalized thought process.
When I said nothing had ever been made in actually realized afterlife settings, I think Albert Brooks would be the first one to admit that what he did in Defending Your Life, which I found to be hysterical, I loved Defending Your Life, was not meant to really be the afterlife.
I mean, that was comedy.
It was done in a very simple sense, and it was to be able to tell the story.
But I'm a talented comedian and writer from Chicago.
I've written for the Chicago Tribune.
And I know, Stephen, that you couldn't possibly take ideas from us to you because you'd be overwhelmed by the responses with the listeners to Art Show.
But as an honor to Art Show, I was wondering if I could give you my email address and if you would let me run a comedy idea for a movie I had past you by contacting me.
First of all, as I say, I always try to qualify everything I say because, you know, this is just my opinion.
I have made as many mistakes in judgment in this business as I have made good decisions.
We're all just guessing, and no one knows that there is no truth.
So this is just one person's opinion.
And then I will proceed to say, this is why I don't want to pursue this for whatever reason.
I always have asked people who give us material, and I'll always talk to them first and say, look, if you want us to read this, then I need your permission to give you a completely honest answer.
Praise, in many ways, is the enemy of the writer, particularly in a very early stage.
Well, I personally, again, this is my own personal feeling, and perhaps it's a hope as well, that we have been delving into the dark shadow side of our duality for a very, very long time.
And it's very difficult to embrace and know the light unless you embrace and know the dark.
And if you deny the dark, that's when tremendous violence happens.
And what I personally hope and believe is that we're coming to a period of time now where we're going to be able to embrace much more of the light side of our being, which is the creative, magical, positive side of our being.
I am not one of those that believe that the lack of prognostications of the future of mankind coming to an end in the next 10 or 12 years has anything to do with the end of the world in a cataclysmic way.
I personally believe that it means it's going to be the end of the world from the way we used to know it and a new evolution of being that is really going to be extraordinary.
I am a very, very, very hopeful person, and I believe that we're about to go into something really beautiful for those, again, who choose it.
I think there will be people that choose the dream, and there will be people that choose the nightmare.
If you believe that you create your own reality, that's where you'll be.
To both of you, I appreciate your morning's program.
It's a wonderful program and quite enlightening.
And I really, really want to thank both of you for even this 53-year-old man who has seen a lot of life all the way from where I was born in Nazi Germany to Brazil, where I was under a quasi-military government, to this country.
And I bless this country.
My point coming is that even at my cynical age of 53, I always like to revert back to that faith-saving aspect of my inner spirit called imagination and romance.
And to both of you, Mr. Bell and Mr. Simon, I want to tip my hat off to both of you for bringing that, even to those of us who are in our old age, not just for the young, but to maintain that spirit, to be able to write poetry and so on, to have that hope and flicker, to continue with our better side of ourselves, I'll put it that way, and bringing reality and our hopes and dreams and making them come true.
Well, actually, my partner and I try to do as much of it as we can ourselves.
It's getting fairly unwieldy.
This is not like trying to read an action movie or a comedy.
When you're talking about the kind of subject matter that Metaphilics deals with, we're very protective of trying to give everybody at least a proper hearing.
Unfortunately, most of the material everywhere, and it's not just this kind of material, most of the material everywhere is pretty weak.
Writing has fallen to a pretty low level in general.
And that's because writers are not being developed.
And writing a screenplay is a very, very, very collaborative process.
It really needs nurturing, and there's not a lot of it going on.
unidentified
I don't know if this is the most appropriate way to ask you this, but I could have just called the Directors Guild and gotten your information through them.
This is probably the best way to do it, too, by the way.
So I deal with some very heavy subjects and some people that feel that there's just no purpose to their life.
And one of the things that, just a comment here that I try to explain to them, I tell them that's not what they were created for, to self-destruct.
And then we evolve from that point on to work from within as opposed to working from without, which seems to happen with a lot of us.
We think it's always external-based.
Something out there is going to make us happy.
And so I find that what you're talking about here is really the essence of what's our purpose and what's our passion at this moment.
And my compliments to you.
Somewhere in Time was an excellent production.
It just was a really well-crafted movie.
In fact, my mom's got it, and I will go back and review that because it's been some time, and John Berry's score was outstanding.
Thank you.
The other part here is that Victor Frankl comes to mind.
I read his book, Man Search for Me, and what was so poignant about Victor Frankl was the fact that you can take everything else away from you in life but the ability to choose what you want to think.
And he illustrated that in his dialogue in that book.
One question for you.
I had rented What Dreams May Come, and I had it for five days.
I did not see it because I believe it had the R rating.
I took it to the family and they said we are not looking at R rated films.
That was TG13.
It was.
Okay, then they had it mismarked at Blockbuster.
I'm sorry, I will go back and get that.
And I was wondering, why do they put an R rating on such good films when more people could be exposed to it?
I think that you'll find a lot to talk to your clients, your patients about in the meaning of life because a lot of people, particularly young people, and it's a tragedy in our society that there are so many suicidal young people, they really believe that that will end their suffering and end the pain that they're going through.
And if they really determine that it's not going to do that, that it's just going to make it more difficult for them as they transition and realize that they chose to come here, it can be a very comforting factor because then you can really choose to live your life in a different way.
And we've had a lot of very gratifying results from that, from particularly young people who have tried to commit suicide before and have seen this film and have really realized that it's not a particularly appetizing option.
I've always wanted to ask this of somebody in your business, and that is, the rumor on the street is that if you make a motion picture, which is, you know, perhaps PG-13, if you just throw a scene in to get yourself an R-rating, it's worth X number of million dollars more at the box office.
And this is one of the nice things that's happening now.
One of the really, I think, one of the positive things that's happening in our business.
R-rated movies are very difficult in a lot of parts of the country.
It has been a very lenient thing in big cities where people who are not supposed to get into R-rated films have been able to get in.
But it's becoming much more difficult, much more difficult to be able to get into an R-rated film if you're not 17 or literally accompanied by an adult.
And there is such a huge audience there of people who go to movies constantly, who are 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 years old, that unless the material really demands it, like Saving Private Ryan could never be a PG-13 movie.
You know, there's not a booming film business in North Dakota, so we're not in North Dakota.
It's not that difficult, no slight meant to North Dakota.
It's not that difficult to find us if you're meant to find us.
But what I would really suggest is that you try to find somebody who is a lawyer or an agent or somebody along those lines who can help you get your idea down on paper and get it organized and get it protected from copyright infringements and things like that.
And then try to find the proper people to read it.
And if we are the proper people, you will find its way to us.
I can tell you that we are developing something now that we are definitely going to make that found its way to us by somebody who just heard about us and decided that he wanted to find us, and he did.
And he sent us a script, and it took us two months to read it.
And it was one of the few that we've read that we really like.
And we're actually going to wind up making that film.
And for the record, yes, oh yes, I indeed choose my own music and have been sort of compiling it for years now to the best of what I love and what means something to me.
So the answer to that is a clear yes.
Okay, that's it for now, everybody.
Tomorrow night, a fascinating program.
I guarantee you're not going to want to miss.
And just a little tickler for you.
On the 27th of this month, there is going to be a paradigm shifting announcement on this radio program.