The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 273 - Paul J. Davids

Oct. 19, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:07:16

Edition 273 - Paul J. Davids

This time Hollywood insider Paul J. Davids on his recent work - and his latest - about thelife and death of Marilyn Monroe...

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	Thank you for keeping the faith with me and with the show, both here online and also the radio show on Sunday nights in the UK.
	Very kind thank you for all of the emails and responses to the show.
	If you want to get in touch with me, you can go to the website theunexplained.tv.
	That website designed by Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
	You can follow the link from the website and then send me an email about the show, maybe a guest suggestion, whatever you want to say, or if you'd like to make a donation to the continued running of this show.
	I'm going to be doing some shout-outs on this edition because I didn't do any on the last edition and we've got some catching up to do.
	This edition, we're going to have a very special guest.
	His name is Paul Davids.
	He is very much a Hollywood insider, this man, writer, director, various films to his name, including Roswell, about the Roswell UFO incident, The Sci-Fi Boys, and many, many others.
	He was also involved in a number of television productions.
	And what we're going to be talking about mainly on this edition is his latest video presentation about the life and the death of Marilyn Monroe.
	Now, it's a subject that has been tackled by many other people before, but I think there is a lot in what Paul's presentation says that is maybe more cogent, maybe better than some of the stuff that's gone before, but you can judge in just a moment as we talk to Paul Davids in the United States.
	Let's do those shout-outs.
	Carl in London says, your show is awesome.
	Thank you, Carl.
	I remember the radio show of 2005, he says.
	My radio show in the UK now is on Sunday nights at 10 p.m., by the way, Carl, on Talk Radio.
	From Mario, interesting email.
	I'd be very interested to have an episode, he says, where you just talk about yourself and the things that you believe.
	Hmm.
	Maybe one day I might do that, Mario, because a few people have suggested that.
	This from Rob, still enjoying your shows.
	David J. Hogan, a pleasant surprise.
	I expected to hear from somebody just plugging the book, but he told some very good stories, some which are not told that often.
	Claire says, firstly, and most importantly, thank you for the hours of podcasts available and also the Sunday night show, The Unexplained on Sunday Nights, was brought to my attention by Ian Lee on the radio station playing part of the interview about the Amelia Earhart conspiracy.
	Yeah, now that was an interesting one because it was one that didn't go quite to plan.
	The person we were talking with didn't really want me to ask that many questions or unpick the story that much.
	He just wanted to tell the story, it seemed to me, so we didn't get very far, and that's why I haven't put it on the podcast.
	I hope that explains to some people who've asked about that why it hasn't appeared here.
	Chantal in Austin, Texas says, some things that I'm going to be looking into, actually, I'm going to be looking at the things that you suggested.
	She says, my husband travels a lot for work and listens to your interviews while he's on the road.
	I listen when I'm driving in the car, running errands, or sometimes when I'm cooking.
	Nice to hear from you in Texas, Chantal.
	From Glenn in Iowa, every week or thereabouts, I find myself looking forward to your latest show.
	In my humble opinion, you should move to the U.S. to replace The Void Left by Art Bell.
	I'm sure there'll be many different opinions about that.
	I would love to move to the U.S. and do that.
	Chris Munch in Los Angeles, thank you for your email, all your points noted.
	Aaron in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, an interesting take on the Illuminati from a biblical perspective and all the points that you make, Aaron, noted too.
	Denise in the US, thank you for your email.
	Steve Spraggs, thank you for the link you sent me.
	Hi, Howard.
	Love the show.
	My name is Andrew and my dad, Matthew, love the show.
	And all the time we listen to the show and please keep up the good work.
	Thank you for that, Andrew.
	Sue in York and also James Jenkins both sent me interesting stories.
	Thank you for those.
	Lee asks, I'm looking for the show about Amelia Earhart.
	I think I've just explained what happened about that, but I will touch the subject again, but perhaps not with the same person.
	Eddie says, hi, Howard.
	Firstly, I'd like to say I love the show and have been a fan for a long time.
	I listened to your podcast with Eric von Daniken and really enjoyed it.
	Probably the most that I've enjoyed a podcast for a long time.
	Thank you, Eddie.
	Somebody who wants to be known as the ear, I don't really like pseudonyms and don't tend to read emails that come in under a pseudonym, but I'll make an exception here.
	Says, congratulations for the Eric von Daniken show.
	Didn't we go through all of this stuff last time?
	A couple of people have said that.
	I think it was a different take on his previous work.
	Plus, we talked about a lot of the stuff that's been in the news this year.
	So I do think it was different.
	Stephen Worthing, the best material from the radio show Steve, will appear on this podcast.
	So look out for it.
	Trevor in Cambridge, your comments are noted.
	Thank you.
	Alex in Albuquerque, New Mexico, wants to hear Stephen Greer back on the show.
	I agree.
	Got to get him on.
	BMB Johnson liked Dave Paulitis and also made a guest suggestion.
	Thank you.
	And finally, Richard in Ireland says, I was outraged by the emailer you gave a shout out to on the last podcast saying that the unexplained doesn't have top guests.
	Richard says, Eric von Bernigan, Edgar Mitchell, Linda Moulton Howe, Nick Redfern, Nick Pope, Richard C. Hoagland, are they not top guests?
	Richard, I have to be impartial, but I agree.
	Thank you very much.
	If you want to get in touch with me, go to the website theunexplained.tv, follow the link, and you can send me an email from there.
	I'm rushing because I want to get to the United States now and talk with Paul Davids about Marilyn Monroe and his new presentation about her life and her death.
	Paul, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
	Howard, thank you for having me.
	I was going back through my archives, you know, and you were on the old radio show on Talk Sport Radio about 11 years ago, and I think we were talking about Roswell.
	I think that probably would have been Roswell 11 years ago, 2005.
	So that was before I made Jesus in India.
	Yeah, it probably would have been talking about the Showtime movie, Roswell.
	I was executive producer.
	And that's what it was about.
	And the sad thing is that not all of those shows survived, so I don't have digital copies of all of them.
	So if anybody's listening to this, and I know Some people did keep the shows.
	I would love to get that one because we can do, what do they call it in America?
	An encore presentation.
	Okay.
	I love the way on various radio shows in the States, they don't say, This is a repeat.
	They say, This is an encore presentation.
	Just, you know, it's a very neat and effective way of saying it.
	For those who've never heard you speak or heard about you, give me a rough description of you and the stuff that you do and have done.
	Well, I've been a producer in Los Angeles for, gee, I guess we're talking back into the mid-1980s when I worked on the original Transformers cartoons at Marvel.
	There were 80 episodes that I was production coordinator of, and Stan Lee was there then, and we produced a lot of those animated action shows, G.I. Joe and Defenders of the Earth, and I was on board the Transformers.
	And from there, George Lucas contracted me to write six sequel Star Wars novels.
	This was after the first three Star Wars movies had been out, and it was during that gap of about 10 years before the fourth production.
	So those books even had a special release, a special publication of a British edition in the UK.
	So that was The Glove of Darth Vader and The Lost City of the Jedi, six books all the way up to Prophets of the Dark Side.
	So that was exciting.
	And it was around that time that I was the executive producer of Roswell, the UFO Crash Story for Showtime.
	And after that, Howard, I began making smaller budget, independent films on edgy topics where I could choose the subject and get as deeply into it as I wanted.
	Some of them were documentaries, some dramas, but I'll name a few for your audience.
	So after Roswell, there was Timothy Leary's Dead, which was about the LSD guru who proselytized psychedelic drugs in the 1960s.
	Timothy Leary of Harvard University, who ended up doing a hard time in prison under the Nixon administration.
	But very much a guru of his time, wasn't he?
	Yeah.
	I did a biography of him with him about a year before he passed away.
	What was he like?
	Because look, his name comes up very often on this show and in emails that I get.
	What kind of a person was he?
	When you met him face to face, you're not recording anything, you're looking into his eyes.
	What was he like?
	Well, you know, I met him back in my days as a student at Princeton when I was working at the New Jersey Neuropsychiatric Institute.
	This was really during the heyday of psychedelia.
	I was working with one of his close associates, Dr. Humphrey Osmond, who did mescaline research and really was responsible for turning on Aldous Huxley with mescaline, which resulted in the famous book, The Doors of Perception.
	In those days, you know, Timothy was a lecturer.
	He set up Millbrook in upstate New York, and he was a visionary, and he had such a following.
	He was so positive-spirited.
	He felt that there was a revolution of consciousness that was underway that he was promoting, and he was out to change the world.
	By the time I made the film with him, which was the last year of his life, he had been through years of prison, years of being on the lamb in one country or another.
	He was in Algeria, he was in Switzerland, he was arrested in Afghanistan.
	And there was a certain crustiness, a certain hard edge.
	It wasn't as visionary and positive spirited about a world of consciousness exchange.
	He had gotten back to smoking cigarettes and even drinking whiskey occasionally.
	So that was Timothy toward the end of his life.
	But he was very coherent and able to tell his story extremely well.
	And was he disillusioned with what had become of the world?
	Because in the 60s, from what I've seen of it, people thought that anything could be achieved and you could change anything.
	I don't think he believed that anymore at that point.
	So a lot of reality had set in for him.
	But he was brilliant.
	I mean, he had written so many books.
	The bibliography, the hardback published bibliography of all of his writings itself is 300 pages long, just listing all of his writings with a paragraph or a page on each one.
	So major writer, psychologist, had an extraordinary life and was a leader, really, for millions of youth in those days.
	And as we coast up to the presidential election, 2016, I wonder, this question could not only be asked of him, but a number of other people who are iconic and emblematic of their times.
	I wonder what he would have made of this.
	I don't know.
	I just don't know.
	He would have either just thrown up his hands or he would have found a way to laugh.
	I don't know.
	Or maybe gone back to the substances.
	Who knows?
	I don't know if he ever really left them.
	All right.
	Anyway, Howard, you know, from that movie, which, by the way, was very popular and did film festivals around the world, including Toronto and the Venice Film Festival, so many of them.
	The publicity on it was like a couple inches thick.
	Then I did a film about Vincent Van Gogh, which was a fantasy drama that I had written.
	It was based on the premise if Vincent Van Gogh could come back today for 100 days and discover that he wasn't a failure after all, that he was a success.
	What would happen as he realized that his paintings are now worth billions of dollars?
	You know, he sold one painting in his entire lifetime.
	So that one was whimsical.
	It made use of the famous Don McLean song called Vincent.
	You know, everybody knows it as Star Night.
	Starry, Starry Night.
	And Universal released that.
	Again, I think they released a special edition in the UK.
	Probably still easy to find.
	And then it was one after the other.
	I did The Artist and the Shaman, a story in Sedona involving Native American shamanism and my own work as a painter under the inspiration of a particular shaman named Rohilio.
	Then came The Sci-Fi Boys, which may have been my most successful documentary to date, which was the history of special effects in movies from the very early days.
	The silent movies, Willis O'Brien's earliest work, then Ray Harryhausen, and then Dennis Muir, and then the digital effects at Industrial Light and Magic, hosted by Peter Jackson at around the time he was just finishing King Kong.
	So that one, people really seemed to love it.
	It's really a heartfelt story of all of the career people that created the profession of special effects.
	Then came Jesus in India, which was very controversial.
	It was based on, well, the question, where was Jesus during the missing years that are unaccounted for in the Bible, age 12 to age 30?
	There's a big jump cut in the Bible.
	Nothing there.
	And in India, they say he took the Silk Road to India and he was in India in those years among Hindus and Buddhists and then returned to Judea to begin his ministry.
	So was there any evidence for that?
	Well, what was there?
	It's a lovely thought, but I'm sure some of the religious fundamentalists would be up in arms about that.
	But what was the evidence for that?
	Well, I just wanted to address the religious fundamentalists because the main person in my movie is a writer named Ed Martin who'd written a book about this.
	And then we went to India together, 4,000 miles across India, six weeks of shooting in India.
	Ed Martin was raised as a fundamentalist in the Church of Christ, and he was booted out of his church after his family had a lifetime of loyalty to this church in Texas.
	Booted out for his obsession with this idea of Jesus in India.
	They just couldn't go there.
	And as far as the evidence is concerned, you know, there's many stories of ancient manuscripts, Hemis Monastery, Jagannath Temple, where the so-called Pope of Hinduism is, the Shankaracharya.
	Their tradition goes back 2,500 years, and we interviewed the Shankaracharya, who claims that Jesus was there.
	We went to the Vatican and spoke to a representative of John Paul II who said Jesus was not.
	So all sides of the story are there as we search for ancient manuscripts that would shed light on the mystery.
	It's really, I think, a wonderful movie with an incredibly wonderful musical score.
	You have such an eclectic, such a broad body of work and such a range of skills, Paul.
	And it's wonderful, isn't it, that it seems to me that you've lived your life on your terms.
	You know, there are those of us, in a very small way, my story is similar to yours, I think.
	My background is mainstream.
	I was the man who told London that Princess Diana had died.
	I stood at ground zero and did all of that stuff.
	But my real love was this material.
	And my career as a news person equipped me with the skills necessary to do this.
	Sounds to me like your story in a bigger way is quite similar.
	Well, I do think I've been really fortunate.
	It was slow getting started.
	You know, I have a degree from Princeton, I think I mentioned, in psychology.
	And I was very, very fortunate to have been one of the first 15 students of the entire world, really, accepted to study at the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies in its opening year, when everyone they accepted was on full fellowship, when they provided a production budget for a first student film.
	And then it was located in the Doheny Mansion in Beverly Hills.
	And we had access to the greats of Hollywood.
	We had them coming to the Institute for seminars, and I got to meet my heroes.
	Even with that head start, it took me around four or five years to get my first footing in the business.
	And that was working for the great agent, absolutely exceptional man named Paul Coner, who came over to the States with the director William Weiler.
	He was brought over by Carl Lemley, who founded Universal Pictures.
	And I worked right at his side for five years with all the greats that he represented, which included people like Amar Bergman and John Houston and Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda.
	I was right in the middle of that world of the twilight of the old Hollywood.
	And then had a first producing opportunity with Effley Bailey on his show Lie Detector.
	And then from there, it was Transformers.
	And it wasn't until, you know, I was into my, well into my 40s that I actually directed my first film.
	So it was a slow step by step.
	Yeah.
	And it required a lot of personal risk because when I started making the independent films, the money had to be found independently.
	And, you know, we mortgaged our one and only house at that time to be able to make Starry Night.
	And a year after the film was finished, nobody wanted it.
	You know, it looked disastrous.
	And then Universal Pictures, in their home Entertainment Division decided they were going to release what they called Film Festival Favorites on video.
	And Starry Knight had won the award as the audience favorite at the Newport Beach Film Festival.
	That was kind of a big deal then.
	So they accepted it as one of the package of seven or eight or nine films that had been Film Festival favorites.
	And that got it out commercially.
	So then it goes to television, then it's a DVD.
	And that really got me, you know, started.
	So easily, couldn't it have gone the other way?
	Yes, it could.
	Absolutely.
	If they, you know, you look back at these key moments in time, if Universal had never picked that up for distribution, you know, I would have been stuck with a big second mortgage and no future.
	But look at how things went.
	Before we talk about Marilyn Monroe, I have to ask you this.
	You're very much an insider there in Hollywood, it seems to me.
	You know a lot of people and have known a lot of people.
	One of my secret weapons, my wife, my wonderful wife, Alice, we've been married for decades and only married to each other.
	She's a senior vice president at Universal Teacher.
	It's always useful.
	She manages the premieres.
	She started out as a teacher of kids with learning disabilities and then worked for a film festival and then was a junior publicist.
	And she really worked her way up the ladder one step at a time.
	And she's been managing the premieres of Universal Now for over 15 years, every single major premiere.
	And that has really helped put me right in the swim of people who are making movies for much, much, much higher budgets.
	So you've answered my question, I think, really.
	How do you make headway in Hollywood and how do you stay there?
	You've got to have somebody looking out for you.
	Yes, I think you need to get yourself connected and develop the respect of people who want to work with you and want to push your projects forward.
	And you need to get adjusted to hearing no many, many, many times.
	I mean, for every project that's gotten made, I probably have at least five more that got scripted, maybe budgeted, that never got made.
	Some of them may have gotten close, like the face on Mars got close.
	I don't know if people remember only too well.
	Absolutely.
	Yes, very, very popular topic on my shows.
	So Richard, during the height of the face on Mars craze, before universal, I'm sorry, before NASA got photography that really cast doubt on the whole idea that this was an artificial structure, Richard Hoagland still believes it is artificial and that it's surrounded by the ruins of a kind of a city that includes pyramids.
	I would say very much in doubt by a lot of establishment people now.
	However, we actually got a contract from RKO Pictures, the studio that made King Kong, to make The Face on Mars as a feature film.
	And we were in development there for, I think it must have been almost two years of many, many drafts.
	And Jason Hall, Jason Dean Hall, who ended up writing American Sniper and getting an Academy Award nomination as best screenwriter, he was the writer on the project then.
	And we thought it was going to move forward.
	And then, alas, the creative director at RKO, who had developed about six pictures and thought they were going to make them all, RKO changed its plans.
	They let him go.
	And all of the pictures that he had developed there went into limbo.
	Including yours.
	Including mine.
	Two years of development.
	I mean, does that break your heart?
	Yes.
	I was set to be director.
	Listen, my heart was broken many times on Roswell.
	People don't know.
	You know, Roswell is a kind of a classic movie now.
	You know, Kyle McLaughlin, Martin Sheen, Dwight Yoakum are in it.
	And it really tells the story of Roswell the way I think it happened at any rate.
	And, you know, based on a lot of solid testimony from people who were there, military people, people of the town.
	And it was a trailblazing film.
	But we were in development on that for a year and a half at HBO.
	And the script went through eight drafts.
	And finally, when we got to the point where we thought they were going to let us begin casting it, they canceled it.
	They canceled it.
	And that was the blackest day, the bleakest day of my life when Roswell was canceled at HBO.
	So all of that psychology experience, I guess, was very useful because you've got to pick yourself up off the floor then.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	And, you know, you can't see around the corners.
	You never know what's coming next.
	And that's why you have to stay strong because little did I know then that six months after Roswell was killed at HBO, incidentally because they decided to make the attack of the 50-foot woman with Daryl Hanna as their one flying saucer movie instead of Roswell.
	But little did I know then that within about six months, seven months, Showtime would pick up our Roswell project, would pay off HBO, would actually increase our budget, and would give us everything we needed to make the movie brilliant, brilliantly.
	I mean, you know, all the period cars and we had, you know, we had actual, you know, World War II bombers and Air Force bases, you know, that go back to World War II.
	It was an amazing production, but it grew out of terrible failure, you know, disaster.
	So you've got to see every negative.
	You've got to see the germ of a positive within it.
	Otherwise, you're never going to get through.
	Yes, you know, and live with a lot of, You know, live with a lot of hope.
	And as Casey Kasem used to say, you've got to keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.
	It sounds to me like that is the greatest sage advice anybody going to Hollywood can possibly take.
	And, Howard, the other thing is, you never know where life's going to take you in terms of what you're going to end up doing, I found.
	In other words, yes, one could have predicted I would make the sci-fi boys because I was a sci-fi boy from the time I was a kid.
	But the movie The Life After Death Project, which I made after Jesus in India, never, ever would have guessed that I would have gone into that project.
	And that one happened because Forrest J. Ackerman, the great impresario of science fiction who brought science fiction into the mainstream from being out on the fringes, he passed away at age 92.
	He was a mentor, sort of an additional father figure for me for it was probably close to 50 years.
	And he was an atheist, and he did not believe in life after death.
	But he said half kidding, you know, half jokingly to me one time, you know, gee, if it turns out I'm wrong, maybe I'll drop you a line.
	And, you know, here's a man who had traveled the world, had the keys to many, many cities.
	He coined the term sci-fi.
	He lived in the Acker Mansion, which was crammed to the gills with science fiction props and memorabilia and horror props.
	And Ray Bradbury called his house the Fort Knox of science fiction, because that's where the gold was.
	So he was massively influential.
	He, as editor of Famous Monsters magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, 200 issues approximately, he inspired everyone who ever went into the fantasy filmmaking business for decades.
	And he would travel the world and he would always drop me a line with postcards from different cities.
	So I have these postcards, a pile of them.
	And it was just sort of to say, hi, you know, I'm here in Munich now.
	You know, I'm here in Rome.
	I was thinking of you.
	And he dropped me a line.
	And then after he passed away, he kept his word.
	He dropped me a line.
	He dropped me a line after he died.
	How did he do that?
	He did it as an editor would do it.
	He did it with ink on a document.
	When I was alone in my vacation house, I had a document that I knew was normal.
	I'd printed it out.
	I'd looked it over.
	Nothing strange about the document.
	It was sort of a diary of business meetings and lunches from the previous year.
	I was going to go over it for tax purposes.
	And it was about a week after the grand tribute we had for Fari Ackerman.
	I was one of the speakers at it.
	It was at the Egyptian theater in Hollywood.
	You know, every seat taken.
	This man was so honored and loved.
	And he, well, I didn't know it was he at first.
	I mean, this is my conclusion that I've drawn after years of research on this.
	But what happened was I was out of the room for five minutes.
	I come back and suddenly the document has been slightly changed.
	Four words on the document have now been neatly and surgically targeted and blacked out in two different levels of blackness, precise.
	So you can slightly read the first two words, but the second two words totally blacked out.
	And it's still moist.
	And no one there who could have done it.
	So this, I mean, if ever anybody wanted proof of a ghost, this was my encounter with the, and I didn't know at first, you know, the Fari connection came when I deciphered the pun within those words.
	He was a punster.
	He loved wordplay, word games, words within words.
	And when I realized there was a word within one of the words that he had blacked out, it was the key to understanding why this was a thank you for my role in the tribute.
	Oh, what was the word?
	What was the word?
	You know, I don't know.
	Should we get that in depth of it?
	I mean, people can still get the Life After Death Project.
	Okay, I'll tell you.
	I'll tell you what it was.
	I'm going to be, it's going to frustrate me for the rest of this conversation unless you tell me.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So there's a man named Joe Moe, a Hawaiian fellow, very dear, wonderful man.
	I admire him so much.
	And he cared for Fari the last 10 years of Fari's life, closest man to Fari, Joe Moe.
	And unbeknownst to me, Joe, who had been one of the principal planners of the tribute, had an apparition after the tribute, a Fari coming to him and thanking him for the tribute.
	And he said it was more real than reality itself.
	And then at the blink of an eye, Fari was gone and everything was just normal in the room again.
	But he said it was Fari's personality.
	There was humor in the way he thanked him.
	So, but Joe said, you know, I'm such a skeptic about this thing.
	My brain wants to tell me, no, you know, it's some kind of a waking dream or something, you know, couldn't have happened.
	It felt like Fari came and spoke to me, he said.
	So the words that were blacked out on my document, there was a man with a similar name to Joe, Joe Amode, who was a distributor in New York.
	I'd had one conversation with him in my life up to that point.
	And this on the document indicated that on such and such a date, spoke to Joe Amode.
	All right.
	Listen, Fari loved names within names and puns within puns.
	And when you see that Joe Moe is contained within Joe Amode, it's just what Fari would have done to tell me he spoke to Joe Moe.
	It's exactly what Joe said to me after he had the apparition.
	It was like Fari came and spoke to me.
	So it was like confirmation.
	So the evidence that he was giving you worked on a number of levels because you knew that his mind worked that way.
	And, you know, that was designed to be something that would flag, That would grab your attention.
	Yes, and I was part of that tribute to Fari that Joe had organized.
	So it was like all in the family.
	But I treated this as evidence.
	I ended up at Indiana University with the chairman of the chemistry department.
	That's when the research on the ink began that lasted three years and left two world-class major chemists completely befuddled.
	And one of them, Dr. John Allison of College of New Jersey, began to have haunting things happen to him that were documentable.
	A couple of them were actually caught on film because I brought my video camera to the laboratory as they studied the ink.
	And the plot just, it thickened.
	I mean, it kept getting deeper and more and more incidents.
	So first I did the Life After Death Project.
	They showed it on sci-fi.
	I did a sequel to it.
	So if anybody gets the DVD, it's number one and number two.
	And it streams online.
	It's easy to find.
	And would you spoil the story by telling me roughly what was unusual about the ink and the origins of the ink?
	Because thereby must hang a tale.
	Well, let me say this.
	Academics insisted that I write a book about this after the movie was with the help and cooperation of the scientists who were involved.
	Because three scientists at three different universities spent years working on this.
	So with my co-author, Gary Schwartz, we wrote a book that came out in April called An Atheist in Heaven, The Atheist Isfari Ackerman, An Atheist in Heaven, and The Ultimate Evidence of Life After Death.
	That's the book.
	And Dr. John Allison, who studied the ink for three years, has a chapter in there with all of his charts, graphs, scientific results, and he explains why it was impossible for him to reproduce this ink obliteration as it happened, that it was a massive mystery to science.
	So, you know, one could read the book and get it from the mouth of the scientist who worked on it for three, three years.
	Like the greatest showman on earth, you leave us wanting more.
	And I'd love to do a whole show with you about the afterlife research because that is one of my personal fascinations.
	And I've got a lot of stories of my own that I've told on this show, things that have happened to me.
	And, you know, I am pretty much convinced that there is more to this.
	I'm hoping so anyway, than we see and we appreciate.
	I want to get on to the Marilyn Monroe project because that's what we're here to talk about.
	And I know you want to because it's the new project.
	This has been a long buildup to it, but I think it's a good background for people understanding how I would get there into a project like this.
	It's called Marilyn Monroe Declassified.
	Great title, but why did you choose to get into a subject that so many people have raked over in the last two or three decades?
	Why go back to that?
	Well, I think there's been new information that people who have raked it over hadn't been able to put together to get the full story.
	So.
	All right.
	The quote that sticks with me, having watched the whole thing today, and I have to say I was enormously impressed because you don't resort to Gee Wiz.
	You tell a story and you tell it well, and you tell it with people who knew stuff about her and were involved.
	But you don't resort to weird imagery and odd camera tricks and all the rest of it, the stuff that we see on a lot of TV shows.
	It's a great narrative.
	I loved it.
	But the quote that stays with me is from the end of it.
	She is described as the quintessential victim.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	She was a pawn in a large political chess game that was filled with danger for her that she was not aware of.
	She didn't know the danger she was in.
	And it started really when she married Arthur Miller, the playwright of Death of a Salesman.
	It was her third marriage following Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee baseball player.
	But Arthur Miller, back in the days of the House Un-American Activities Committee, when the communist witch hunt of Senator Joseph McCarthy was in full bloom, Arthur Miller was communist-leaning.
	He wrote for communist newspapers.
	He seemed to be a sympathizer.
	He was called before the House Committee.
	He got into trouble when he wouldn't name names.
	And Marilyn Monroe was married to him.
	And so does that mean that I inferred from what I saw on the documentary presentation that the inference to be drawn was that she was guilty by association, and that's all.
	Well, yes.
	I mean, or let's put it this way, she was a person of interest, and they wiretapped her because they wanted to know who the Millers were talking to, who their friends were.
	And they did associate with other fellow travelers, as they used to be called in those days.
	Yes, she spent some time, didn't she?
	She stayed with some people who were well-known communists.
	But that's not to say that she was.
	She was just interested in people, it seemed to me.
	You know, she was sympathetic to some of the things the communists promoted in those days because it had to do with integration.
	It had to do with believing that blacks and whites were equal, you know, that blacks should be able to live in white neighborhoods and that there shouldn't be prejudice and discrimination based on race.
	That was Maryland's position.
	And that was a very sort of leftist attitude.
	I mean, this was the days before Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights bill.
	And you know, the eruption of violence that happened in the United States at that time.
	Well, Maryland was in favor of, well, let's put it this way, very opposed to racism of any kind.
	She loved people.
	She loved all people.
	So in some ways she was in the wrong place knowing the wrong people at the wrong time.
	Yeah, and in that case, having a right ideal.
	But it caused her to be wiretapped.
	And not just by the FBI, because once she went to Mexico and cavorted with a Vanderbilt heir who was himself a communist, then the CIA got involved in spying on her.
	And the mob, the Chicago syndicate, headed by Sam Giancana, notorious and famous mobster in those days.
	Who, like a lot of these people, eventually came to a sticky end.
	Yes, yes.
	And he had such a vendetta against the Kennedys because the mob in the U.S., particularly in Chicago, felt that they had helped John F. Kennedy win the White House, that they had helped deliver Chicago and the crucial votes that he needed.
	And he just won by a sliver, you know, just by a hair.
	If he'd lost Chicago, lost Illinois, he wouldn't have been president.
	And they felt that they should have gotten something for that.
	And they felt they had been promised by his father, Joseph Kennedy.
	And in fact, all they got was a kind of undeclared war on them.
	Yes, yes, because Robert Kennedy was appointed Attorney General, the brother of JFK, and he made it a mission to go after these people and try to put them all, try to get convictions.
	So poor Marilyn was sandwiched between, it seems to me, a number of dark power brokers.
	I felt for her terribly because what privacy did the woman have anyway?
	But then she's being wiretapped not only by the mob, but also by Hoover.
	You know, she was living a life that was so fragile in many ways.
	Yes.
	And then when she became involved with President Kennedy, you know, she sang happy birthday, Mr. President, at his last birthday party.
	And at that point, the security services will start to get interested because they think, well, she's got some, you know, communist connections here, and she's involved with the Kennedys, and they're at the top of government here.
	This is a powder keg, they would have thought.
	Wiretaps, not only of her phone, but of Kennedy brother-in-law, actor Peter Lawford, who had an estate out in Malibu that President Kennedy would come to frequently.
	There were a lot of parties out there.
	Marilyn Monroe attended.
	And the wiretapping revealed that President Kennedy was disclosing classified information to Marilyn Monroe.
	This was the big problem for her, that she would talk to friends about classified things that she had been told that she had no right to know.
	And not just secrets of the Cold War, but also stuff that would be dynamite even today about UFOs, apparently.
	Yes, yes.
	And there's good evidence for that.
	You asked, why did I get into a subject that had been hashed over by so many people over the years?
	And the release of various documents in recent years is part of that.
	The fact that certain people who had either lied after she was found deceased, some of these people changed their story 20 years later and added incredibly essential details to the narrative, including the fact that Robert Kennedy had visited her in the afternoon of her death.
	So I felt that someone needed to take all the pieces of the puzzle, to go back to the original testimony in 1962 when they declared her a probable suicide.
	Testimony.
	Which is a word that is never used, is it?
	It's almost never used.
	The word probable in connection with suicide, you don't see.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	That in itself was extremely unusual.
	There was no suicide note.
	They couldn't determine it.
	The investigation was botched, I think sabotaged.
	And it was never a criminal investigation because they declared it a suicide from the beginning.
	When they tried to have a grand jury look into this about 20 years later, based on additional information, political forces squashed the grand jury before it could get started.
	And the foreman of the grand jury who was about to announce the assemblage of the grand jury was some, he was fired.
	So that never happened.
	So had that grand jury, that had been impaneled by that point, had it?
	It was ready to go.
	Yes.
	Or it was being empaneled, and then it was stopped.
	So isn't that amazing, though?
	If we just take half a second out to think about that, you know, we have the elapsing of 30 years, 30 years on from the events.
	A lot of people not around anymore.
	Many other people are at the very end of their lives.
	And yet, even 30 years on, somebody somewhere, it can be argued, wanted this stopped for some reason.
	Well, absolutely.
	And, you know, I mean, the Kennedy family was very concerned about people digging into this deeper.
	We have very clear statements from there's Chief of Police Daryl Gates and Chief of Police Los Angeles Tom Redden.
	Both indicated that Bobby Kennedy had been there in Los Angeles on the day of her death.
	And now we have testimony that he visited her in that afternoon and that there had been an altercation.
	And what's the altercation about the book, about the little red book, the diary, the dynamite pages that could blow the gaff on the whole thing?
	Is that what the argument was about, we think?
	It could have been.
	I think that Bobby Kennedy's purpose in going There was really to break things off because she'd had a relationship with President Kennedy, she'd had a close friendship with him, and things were just getting too hot.
	J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, was watching them.
	I think that he wanted to break it off.
	One of the key points that got lost in all of this is that Police Chief Tom Redden stated unambiguously that her death was treated as a top secret intelligence operation, the handling of it, the investigation of it.
	And he said specifically because of the involvement of the Attorney General of the United States, and that's Robert Kennedy.
	Now, this wasn't to say that Robert Kennedy had a hand in her death.
	As a matter of fact, one of the things that comes out in my film through the Giancana family, the brother of Sam Giancana, Chuck Giancana, wrote a book called Double Cross with a nephew, whose name is also Sam Giancana.
	And they said that Sam Giancana had confessed to them that Marilyn Monroe's death had been a mob hit.
	But he claimed that it was a contract killing that came from the CIA.
	And this was explosive, but rather ignored by the news when it came out.
	Now, one of the things that my film does that people haven't done before is it takes a look at a CIA document that became available.
	It wasn't actually declassified, but there was a CIA archivist who pushed it into the public domain.
	Let's call it Edward Snowden style.
	And the document has been authenticated because it's been used in hearings proceedings with the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act and even an appeal.
	And the CIA never disowned the document.
	They never said, look, we're not going to allow an appeal on your request for further documents because the document is bogus.
	No, no, they did not say that.
	They accepted it.
	So this document, written a day before Marilyn Monroe died and signed by the man who was then head of counterintelligence for the CIA, that was James Angleton, recorded on the wire tap the classified information that Marilyn said she was prepared to tell in a press conference.
	The words would tell all were there.
	So when Sam Giancana said that he was basically given the assignment by the CIA for this to be a contract killing to eliminate her, there's documentation in the CIA, well, the CIA document, James Angleton, that supports that.
	And of course, when I heard the name James Angleton, of course, lights turned on with me because of a recent show that I did about another case.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	You interviewed Peter Janey, the author of Mary's Mosaic about another JFK mistress, Mary Pinchot-Meyer, who was murdered about one year after JFK was assassinated.
	She was shot twice while jogging near her home in Georgetown.
	And when the publisher of The Washington Post, Ben Bradley, who was related to her, went to her home after her death, he found James Angleton there in her home looking for her diary.
	You know, you want to talk about Marilyn's Little Red Diary and what it might have exposed.
	Here, the publisher of The Washington Post in his autobiography tells us that James Angleton was there in the home of murdered mistress Mary Pinch O'Meyer looking for her diary.
	So James Angleton is connected with, is implicated, whatever adjective one should choose.
	He's there in both cases of the deaths of two of JFK's mistresses, Marilyn Monroe and Mary Pinch O'Meyer.
	And it's a deeply dark and very dirty chapter of American history by the looks of it.
	All the indications are there.
	Talk to me about one person who was pivotal in all of this and to an extent recanted or certainly was a lot more transparent towards the end of her life.
	I'm talking about the housekeeper at the time, Eunice Murray.
	Eunice Murray.
	She worked for Marilyn Monroe for many years, actually living with her.
	And she even wrote a book, My Life with Marilyn, or I don't remember the exact title, but she wrote a book in which she really whitewashed the circumstances of Marilyn's death and certainly in the book never revealed anything about the fact Robert Kennedy had been at her home that afternoon.
	But toward the end of her life, in a BBC interview, she admitted that Robert Kennedy had been there that day.
	She couldn't hold the secret anymore.
	It was a burden on her to keep that secret.
	And she said there had been an altercation between them that day and that she said protectors of Robert Kennedy had stepped in to protect his interests.
	But I think my investigation would say that she may have misinterpreted who it was that showed up later, that knock on the door.
	We think that the death was done with a barbiturate suppository and made to look as though it was a pill overdose.
	And if we look at it with the prism of 2016 and what we know now, but they knew this then, it wasn't possible to do that to yourself with that many barbiturate pills.
	And not only that, next to her bedside, there was no glass for water to take pills.
	So a lot of things did not add up about this, and a lot of people knew that.
	Yeah, that was the testimony of Jack Clemens, the first, well, the desk sergeant who first showed up when her death was reported.
	No glass of water.
	He said To him, he didn't believe it was suicide right from the beginning.
	He said the body looked staged on the bed.
	You know, there was no vomit, as would be the case with this kind of a drug overdose.
	She had a massive high level of the barbiturate in her blood.
	The toxicity level was so high that some connected with the pill company said that if trying to swallow that many pills, you'd be dead before you'd get there, before your blood toxicity would reach that level.
	Now, some have disputed this.
	There have been debunkers or those who disagree who've attempted experiments with the pills and why were there no undissolved capsules in her stomach.
	People felt medical specialists felt, yeah, there should have been undissolved capsules that wasn't there.
	And others have done experiments to try to say, no, no, could have been, could have been even an accidental overdose if it wasn't a suicide.
	But I don't think so.
	And you asked me, Howard, why this topic, for me, when other people have gone there to look into this, for me, it was the master jigsaw puzzle.
	It was the question of taking all the pieces that no one had put all of them together before.
	Going back to 1962 and the testimony the year of her death, getting the changes in testimony from people like Eunice Murray, even the tip from her psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, who said, you know, I can't tell you the whole story.
	You know, go ask Bobby Kennedy.
	I mean, there's so many pieces in this along the way.
	And then comes an FBI document that was declassified and discovered and studied by film director Philippe Mora, who was one of the people in my film.
	The CIA document studied by writer Don Burleson, who made appeals under the Freedom of Information Act to the CIA regarding that document.
	All of these pieces, the whole big canvas, I feel that my film, Marilyn Monroe Declassified, is the first time that anyone has put all of it together.
	And it does not come up with a conclusion of Bobby Kennedy having been the hand behind her death, as some writers have maintained.
	I mean, I think there is a major book that claims that.
	And the fact is that the mob wanted the Kennedys out.
	And by timing this to a day when, through wiretaps, they knew that Bobby Kennedy had been there, you know, the mob had every reason to expect that Bobby Kennedy's fingerprints would be found in the house.
	Maybe letters from him.
	Maybe that diary.
	And were they kind of hoping, do you think then, that, you know, that version of the story, that twist on events would get out into the public domain?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	They hoped the investigation would point toward Bobby Kennedy as having been there in the afternoon, his fingerprints.
	He'd have a lot of explaining to do.
	And they hoped for the downfall of the Kennedy administration.
	Well, they didn't get it that year, but they certainly got it, you know, about a year later, November 22nd, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
	A lot of blood in this trail.
	Gian Carner himself was killed.
	And Giancarna's almost right-hand man, certainly one of his main operatives, was also killed.
	Yes.
	Giancana ended up with eight bullets shot in his own home.
	So, you know, very dark story.
	And Jack Ruby, who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of Kennedy, so that Oswald could never talk.
	Jack Ruby had his connections to Sam Giancan and the Chicago mob.
	You know, he was a racketeer in Texas, and his connection with the mob was suppressed at that time.
	It never came out.
	You know, we can look at it now.
	So it's 2020.
	I'd forgotten until you reminded me in the video presentation, the documentary that I've just watched, there were two coroner's reports.
	Now, how many times in the case of a death are there two coroner's reports, one that countermands, that supersedes the first one?
	Yes, and the detective who discussed that said, if ever you have two separate coroner reports, then you have a cover-up.
	In this case, however, both of the coroner reports were structured to come up with the conclusion of probable suicide.
	But a lot of evidence was left out and suppressed.
	And in fact, the autopsy was never completed because the biological tissue samples that Noguchi and Dr., well, I don't know whether Dr. Kurfey, he was the actual coroner.
	Noguchi was sort of a junior coroner at that time.
	I got the impression that this hung rather heavily on Noguchi's conscience.
	Yeah, that he sent samples, tissue samples to the lab and that all of those tissue samples disappeared.
	They were destroyed before any testing was done.
	Well, if you have vital specimens destroyed, you can never make a case for anything, can you?
	No, no.
	This was a cover-up of massive proportions and made easier by the fact that it was quickly declared a suicide, so there was no criminal investigation.
	You know, I wanted to go back to one thing you said at the beginning.
	Again, why would I go here into this analysis of the death when other people have picked over it?
	And I did feel that from the vantage point now of 2016, with all of this evidence and these documents, that we can put the pieces of the puzzles together now.
	And for Marilyn, for Marilyn's sake and the sake of her memory, she should not be remembered as an actress who was despondent and took her own life with pills when the evidence that we have today says, no, she was murdered.
	What would you like to see, though?
	What would you like?
	We're talking about justice for Marilyn here, is what I think you were saying.
	What would you like to see happen?
	Well, you know, I don't know.
	I think it'd be a little bit naive to think that something really could happen at this late date.
	Somebody of the principals are deceased.
	I don't think anyone's going to really reopen this case, but I would like to see more widespread public acknowledgement of what happened.
	And hopefully the film, and again, it's called Marilyn Monroe Declassified.
	Hopefully it could help that to happen the same way that my film about Roswell helped alert the public to the fact that there was a cover-up regarding the Roswell incident.
	So that would be, you know, that would be my hope.
	And also, I do think, you know, that Kennedy's name should be cleared in connection with the accusations that have been made that they had Marilyn murdered, because I don't think that that's what happened.
	I think the evidence with having the confession from Sam Giancana and one of his family members saying, look, they timed it, hoping to entrap Bobby Kennedy because he had been there that day.
	So Bobby Kennedy was essentially a second intended victim in this, not to murder him at that time, but to ruin his reputation and perhaps bring down the Kennedy administration.
	The mob would have thrilled if that had been the result.
	The person that we have to feel for, of course, is Marilyn.
	As we said at the beginning of this, that description fits so well.
	Especially now at the end of this, as we know more, having talked with you, she is the quintessential victim.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	And there have been others.
	I mean, again, Mary Pinchot-Meyer is certainly an example.
	And there were victims of MK-Ultra and discrediting, usually females.
	Do you think this kind of stuff goes on today?
	Did it go on in more recent times than this?
	You know, this was 50 years ago, and this was an era pre-internet.
	We were all more innocent.
	This is an era where everybody knows everything, supposedly.
	Do you think this sort of stuff could go on now?
	It would be speculation because, you know, we're saying that intelligence agencies were involved in Marilyn's death over 50 years ago.
	Today, you know, we don't know.
	I mean, there's so much secrecy.
	There's so much of a furor about the possibility of a couple classified documents seeing the light of day.
	I mean, there's millions of classified documents that are kept under wraps that were not shown.
	So it becomes very hard to put together a historical picture or really know what's happening today.
	I do think things with the mafia have changed drastically because, you know, back in the bootlegger days of Al Capone and their Tommy guns, right?
	And all those murders and all that violence.
	Well, and the beginning of Las Vegas was shrouded in it being connected to the underworld.
	But today, you know, Las Vegas is mainstream.
	It's all corporations.
	It's, you know, the mob is, you know, the money has become, well, you know, we have the Fortune 500 companies.
	It's taken on a legitimacy through the corporations, the casinos, whatever.
	The mob doesn't operate in the same way that it used to.
	I don't think that's it.
	And very much life imitated art because in the Godfather films, they went legit in the end.
	Yes, that's the point, isn't it?
	Yeah, I was just going to say, I don't think you'd have a Godfather story as good as that one today.
	I don't think so.
	What about everything now?
	If you listen to conspiracy theory broadcasters, he hates that term, I know, people like Alex Jones, everything is about globalism these days.
	I don't know what you make to any of that.
	I try to shrink from making anything of that.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	There are certain dangerous areas that I don't venture into, but I have ventured into UFOs wholeheartedly.
	I've even been deeply involved in providing UFO information about Roswell to President Clinton, both while he was president and as former President Clinton.
	Is it frustrating to you, as it is somewhat frustrating to me, that every time we get a new president and whoever it's going to be this time, and last time it was Obama, and before that it was Bush, and we were always told every time that this is going to be the president, and it was said about Bill Clinton, who opens the files and tells the truth about UFOs, and it never happens.
	It's very frustrating.
	You know, there's been a lot of talk about that now with the possibility of Hillary Clinton because John Podesta is their campaign manager, and he has expressed on a number of occasions his interest in opening the UFO files.
	He stated that one of his regrets of his years in the White House with Bill Clinton was not having gotten those files declassified.
	So, again, it's held out there in a tantalizing way, but we have been disappointed many, many times.
	While at the same time, more and more UFO incidents happen.
	More and more people of strong reputation come forward and say that there has been extraterrestrial contact, that it is concealed from us.
	So that's the world.
	That's the reality of the world that we live in now.
	And I've hoped that my films could, you know, open, shed some light, open doors to some of these mysteries.
	I don't want you to breach any commercial confidentiality here, but what are you working on next?
	You know, I'm trying to sort that out.
	I've been so busy for so long on this.
	So I'm going To take a bit of a vacation from jumping into making another film right away.
	I am a painter.
	I'm an artist.
	And oh, I wanted to talk about where people can find the information.
	Totally, we have to get there.
	And now that we're at the end of it, this is your chance to tell the world.
	Okay, well, to see my art, Paul David's, that's David with an S at the end, and then a hyphen, and then artist.com.
	That's my main website now.
	And you can see hundreds of these paintings, works of art I've done that are in many galleries.
	So that's another of my passions.
	For the Marilyn Monroe movie, the website is Marilyndeclassified.com.
	And it has been released now in the U.S. If you're outside the U.S. and you want it, you can order it through the MarylandDeclassified.com website or drop me an email at starrynightmovie at aol.com.
	That's S-T-A-R-R-Y-N-I-G-H-T movie at AOL.com.
	Starry Night, of course, having been one of my films.
	The Life After Death Project, there is a website, lifeafterdeathproject.com, and Amazon has that film, and it has the book, An Atheist in Heaven.
	Someone said in England, you can get that for Kindle at Amazon.
	I need to be checking that out.
	We have a lot more to talk about.
	I've really enjoyed this, Paul.
	Let's not wait 11 years next time, hey?
	No, not at all.
	I'll wait to hear from you, Howard.
	I really appreciate the opportunity.
	All right.
	Have a great California day.
	Thank you.
	Paul Davids, and I'll put a link to his work on my website, theunexplained.tv.
	The website, of course, designed, created, maintained by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
	Thank you very much for supporting the show.
	More great guests coming soon, both here online, where it all started 10 years ago and also on the radio show.
	So until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	I am in London.
	And please, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

▲