As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.

The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”

For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Gary Murakami join me! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.

Frank Beddor 
Welcome to the show Gary Murakami. I'm super happy to have you on and we're here to talk about the love of your life, Liz Cavalier. You guys were together for 30 years. I met Liz shortly thereafter.

I want to have this shared experience with you because, unfortunately, Liz passed away in 2016. She was not only the love of your life, but she was the most inspirational and important creative collaborator and friend that I had here in Los Angeles. She was instrumental in all of these creative endeavors, many of which we would sort out in coffee shops, taking notes, and you would often accompany her and do your own thing while we were talking about story. 

I wanted to start today's chat based on our lunch a couple of weeks ago. You mentioned that you had a lot to do with Helmet Head Girl Hero. I met Liz through a producer friend and the first thing I read of hers was this script: Helmet Head Girl Hero. It was an amazing script and I just loved the tone and the personality. You said that was her big break. Can you, as a way of introduction, lead us to your meeting Liz and then subsequently your collaboration on that script? 

Gary Murakami 
I met Liz in Santa Monica at a dance and exercise studio. I was taking dance classes. I remember wearing red tights that I had drawn stuff all over. Liz was stretching and exercising and I thought, “She's really sexy.” But she was married at the time. So we eventually became friends. We hung out pretty much every day, going to cafes and taking trips to places like the Channel Islands. Eventually, her husband got arrested in Pakistan for smuggling heroin. So that ended the relationship. Liz had a really dramatic life. I think she passed more in her life than anyone I've ever known.

FB  
I knew this was going to be a good podcast. 

GM 
He was in Pakistan. Eventually, he bribed the police so he got out but she didn't want to be involved with that. Turns out he was bipolar as well, too. So that was enough of that. But we got together in 90 or 91 or so. She was looking for a story to do. She had gotten some stuff done, but never got it made. 

She told me stories about her life. She was always a precocious child. Really smart. So much so that her parents had difficulty dealing with her because she was also the class clown. Her grandparents told her parents, “Look, she's just so smart. You guys don't know what to do with her.” So she was looking for a story and after hearing all the stories of her as a kid I told her I thought she should do her own childhood story. She was so cute. So precocious. She was always climbing trees with binoculars, creating forts, and spying on the neighbors. 

When she was about four, she was annoyed with the neighbors so she wrapped a note for them around a rock and she tried throwing it out the window. But the velocity kept taking the paper off so eventually, she picked up the paper, knocked on the door and gave it to the annoying neighbor. 

So I said that she should write a story about your life because she was so precocious and so cute and there were so many stories about it. She said, “Yeah, but they don't do leading women or girl heroes.” I responded, “No, sure they do. People want the hero to be somewhat vulnerable so they can rise up and become a hero. They love it. What's more vulnerable than a little girl or a woman trying to make it in life?” So she did. I never helped her write it but she would always bounce ideas off of me. So that's how that started.

FB  
The lead character's name was Beverly. I thought she maybe needed to increase the size of the production. So we came up with this idea that there was a real conspiracy with Russians. So it became “Helmet Head Goes to the Moon”. I was convinced it was a hit movie and we had a lot of traction. 

But then Paramount made Harriet the Spy. That stopped the momentum of Liz’s script. But then I had this other kid’s idea, which was based on this dog in Telluride. It was called Dog Breath, which was funny but I didn't think it was a big movie title. Then Liz said, “How about Eating Avalanches?” I said, “Okay, now that's pretty cool. That's memorable.” We developed this story that took place in Telluride about this dog that would go up the mountain with its owner. It became like a Goonies-style treasure hunt. In Telluride, they had this old mining town that still had all of the shafts and you could go down and tour to see what it was like in the early 1900s. But Liz was so much fun and so creative and she really created a lot of empathy with those characters. We worked on that for so many years. I loved working with her. We would butt heads a lot, though, because I would work from the plot side and she hated working from the plot side, she only wanted to come from the character and the inspirational side. 

But the most significant aspect of us working together was her writing on the Hatter M graphic novel series and all of the wonderful characters she came up with. Where do you think she got this inspiration from? You talked about her as a child being precocious and super smart. She was way ahead of her time in terms of focusing on women characters. That was one of the reasons she didn't think these movies would get made because they were female-led. Now, almost all of the television and films for a period of time were women-led, which was a nice reversal. Sadly, she wasn't around to see the transformation, but she came up with some amazing characters - Realm, Shaman of the White Flower Tribe, from graphic novel number three, The Nature of Wonder, or Jet Seer, which is one of her favorite characters. Did she talk about these characters and how they were coming together? 

GM 
Liz was an assertive person. She was the leader of her gang back in Eaton, New York. She was the class clown and always instigated stuff, like the high school graduation prank. Everyone got in trouble. Liz was a bad liar so she always got caught. She got caught shoplifting because she was such a bad liar. 

All the characters are her. I was reading Zen of Wonder, and they're all her, Hatter M included. She had that very rational, realistic side but she had the other side where she was just surreal and liked to be inspired by thoughts that came out of nowhere. I always encouraged her to write women leads because my mom was really important in my life. My mom was such a strong person and Liz was the same way. A very strong, capable woman. 

FB  
You’re also a very creative person. You've been an artist and you're an actor. What other things have you done? 

GM
I booked that video job. 

FB
Congratulations! You owe me lunch.

GM
I will pay for lunch. It's being produced by Tennyson, that huge Chinese company. They’re drawing up the contracts this week. They’ve written me into the cast. I didn't book any of the two characters I did, but they liked me so much they're writing me a character. And I may do other characters as well in the project. 

FB 
You and Liz had a really unique relationship. I'd like you to talk about that a little bit but also the creative space that you lived in. I was always struck by the art on the walls, the spontaneity, the affection, and the path less traveled you both took. Both creatively and in terms of how you see the world. The two of you were so in sync and you were so compatible, which doesn't seem like the most romantic thing, but compatibility is ultimately so romantic. Because when you feel compatible, you feel yourself. And whenever I was in your presence, you both felt like yourselves yet you also felt like one. Is that accurate?

GM 
Whenever I went to the restroom if the door was unlocked, Liz had a camera and she’d just bust that door open. There are so many pictures of me on the toilet going, “Liz why do you do that?” She’d say, “Because Gary, that's the most animated I see you.” When we got our first apartment together, I remember, she would get a bucket of water whenever I went to take a shower. She’d have me screaming. We’d be laughing so much. At one point the neighbors were like, “Shut up!”

FB  
I love doing this podcast because you don’t normally get stories like that in life. Those are very, very funny. She was such a practical jokester.

GM 
Constantly. It was almost too much. You know how much Liz liked to talk.

FB  
Would you say that you're super chatty or not?

GM 
Not at the time. But when she passed away, I missed all that chatter so I decided to become more chatty. 

FB 
With The Looking Glass Wars, the idea behind it is that it's the true story of how Alice came to our world and Lewis Carroll got the story wrong. So Liz wanted to create the Hatter M Institute for Paranormal Travel, which was a group of people who got together to discover the secrets of Hatter’s 13-year travels in our world and she never wanted to break that fourth wall. Whenever we went to Comic-Cons or schools, or did any interviews, it was, “This happened. We're sticking to it. This is the real story.” She was so committed to it and it was so much fun to watch her pontificate on the work that they've been doing or the secret missions they were going on when we would do Comic-Cons. Did she talk about the conception of that? 

GM 
Wonderland is real to Liz. That idea that Wonderland is real, or the realm of imagination is the fourth dimension comes from Edgar Cayce, who was a clairvoyant and psychic in the early 1900s. There's a whole foundation based on him, the Association for Research and Enlightenment. He said that all ideas, all imaginations, are in this fourth dimension, and anything on Earth is imagined there first, and then it’s here. The original, which is in the other dimension, is much more vivid. She took that seriously. When I read Hatter and all the characters, I see her philosophy, because she always wanted to start a religion.

FB  
That does not surprise me. After the success of Scientology, she was probably thinking, “Yeah, I can do better.”

GM 
She took those ideas about imagination really seriously. That’s what our conversations were most of the time. They weren’t based in reality. It was, “What if?” and “Maybe this.” So we would go investigate in the Desert Hot Springs and look for clues and stuff like that. We’d play k.d. lang and Sergio Leone tapes in the car while we were cruising around the desert.

FB 
You guys did a lot of exploring off the beaten track. She was often feeding her imagination and I think it’s so important as a writer, to be very open to receive. I remember her saying one time that ideas are everywhere. They're just all around you. As long as you go out into the world and explore, you will find ideas. You'll be inspired. You'll be touched. She lived that life with you.

GM 
She did. Liz told me if she were a man, she would have wanted to be a Merchant Marine so she could explore the world. She really meant that. 

FB 
She did a lot in her imagination as well. 

GM 
Physically as well, too, though. Liz was able to take care of herself as well. She had the strongest punch of any woman I've ever felt. Not that she punched me in the face, she punched my hands and stuff. She had great torque in her body. She never wanted to be the kind of writer who was just kind of anemic-looking just typing away. She wanted to experience things. She wanted to be capable out in the world as well. She always tested herself, riding the metro by herself or just driving by herself. Just the challenge of yourself out in the world. I think she put it into her writing as well through the kinds of characters that she admired.

FB  
She was so well-read. She would introduce me to writers that I had no idea of. I think it was out of that the Wonderland portal idea emerged because she was interested in pop culture but she was interested in pop culture through a unique lens. That Wonderland portal was her baby. She was in charge of the content and she would pull all the content from pop culture and then write whatever she wanted to write. It always seemed to be catching the zeitgeist of what was next.

GM 
Liz always wanted to be ahead. She had the spirit of a pioneer. She just wanted to be ahead and if you wanted to join, great. If you didn't, that's fine, “See you later.”

FB  
That’s why she loved that World War II story about the WASPs, the Women Airforce Service Pilots. She came up with Sis Kipling as a character, who had all the agency in the world, all the ability to fly a plane better than the men. Held back by society but damn determined to bust out and to make a difference. I see how much of herself was in the characters she created. That’s where the best writing comes from. When you put yourself out there, people feel it, then it comes off the page the way it's meant to come off the page. 

She was terrific. I really miss her deeply. The conversations, the back and forth, and the little Christmas presents that would show up in my inbox. She was funny at Comic-Cons. I'm very outgoing and I'm sticking my hand out, stepping in front of people, and waving them over to the booth. But when Liz started talking to people, they would lean in and she would engage them on a deeper level. I was giving them the elevator pitch and she was giving them the reason they should really care. It was really impressive to watch, her passion for the inside game of what the graphic novel was about, or a character she introduced or invented. I also miss getting her perspective on things.

GM 
When she was ill, her friends had come from New York to help out the last two weeks. They were more in grief before she passed away and she was actually trying to cheer them up and help them. And I thought, “Why does Liz have to do this?” But she was good at that stuff. I never saw that side of her before that time.

FB
She was really nurturing, especially in the creative sense. “Let’s all come together. Let’s deal with this. I think I have a solution. I think I have a point of view. This is going well, let me take that off your plate.” She was incredibly giving like that. But the longest lasting really comes down to the work and the five graphic novels. If you read those graphic novels and look at the back matter and think about other comic books, you will see an enormous talent in Liz. She came up with almost all of that back matter. All of it was important to her to contextualize these ideas in the book, but to contextualize Wonderland, the power of imagination, these characters and where they came from, and then the fun. I want to lean into how much fun and how comedic she could be.

GM 
I read her graphic novels and I said, “You got that comedic rhythm.” She said, “Really?” She had no training in that at all. It was natural to her, in both writing and in life. She just had that rhythm and timing.

FB 
You write you write from being, which is exactly what she did.

GM 
That’s why Helmet-Head was so successful. It was her.

FB  
That’s still an amazing piece of work. I was thinking about how I could turn that screenplay into a book. 

GM
We read that several years later and we were both so shocked that she didn't realize it contained a lot of the things between her and her parents when she was a little girl. She exposed a lot of things. She had no idea she wrote that stuff. She really didn't. It’s like, she subconsciously put it down on paper.

FB 
I have a lot of different drafts as well, but I think it would make a great book. Tsunami Surf Sisters is going to make a great graphic novel, which we at Automattic are in the middle of creating and expanding. We’ve been really inspired because it seems so perfectly timed now. She was really ahead of her time. Tsunami Surf Sisters is about a bunch of female surfers who are interested in what's happening to the oceans. So it has an environmental slant to it. If there was a relevant time, I think now is as good as any. We've been working on it as a graphic novel and certainly want to honor Liz’s contribution. 

I'm also keen on Sis Kipling as a graphic novel as well. Liz and I learned a lot of television and movie projects stall out whereas writing books and graphic novels, you have the full experience of creating something, publishing it, and then taking it out to the audience. It feels no different than my movie, There's Something About Mary, than going into a Comic-Con and selling a copy of Zen of Wonder, and having the readers come back and say, “When's the next one coming out?” 

How much interest did Liz have in writing novels? 

GM 
I remember her saying that full-on novels are just too much work and take too much time. She likes short, fast, funny things that had a point.

FB 
That's why she liked scripts and graphic novels because you can write those relatively quickly. They're dynamic in the creation and they're collaborative, which was perfect for her because she was so outgoing. We did all of our best work in coffee shops just sitting there talking.

GM 
I remember so many of them.

FB  
What was Liz's or your introduction to Alice in Wonderland? Did that subject come up much in your life together?

GM
It was a constant thing. Alice was such a big part of our lives. But in reading the characters she wrote, each one is a part of her. They seem to be living, like dream symbols. Nekko was the Zen part. Alan Watts was a Zen advocate and also Eckhart Tolle, who is huge now, (as you said, she was always ahead of her time). He wrote The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, which is basically mindfulness and being present.

FB  
That's absolutely true. I remember she introduced me to Alan Watts. Nekko was the Zen guide for Hatter in book four, Zen of Wonder. She also created Little Dick, who was also in book four. 

GM 
And Mr. Murakami, where Hatter said, “The crapper?!” Thanks, Liz.

FB 
That’s very funny. Really relevant given where this conversation started her taking pictures on the crapper. Now we know an inside joke that I did not know about.

GM 
This is actually a dream from last night, I was in bed and she was poking me in the bed and I heard her laughing. Then the last thing was you and I were walking in Santa Monica on Fourth Street and we got to the overpass over Ocean Avenue. You said stop, “You're ready there and you're gonna take photos.” I said, “Okay, Frank. I like this like that.” And you gave me some little toy butterflies to pose. I couldn't hear you because when I said “Frank, you didn't finish your sentence!”

FB 
She talked a lot about dreams. She talked about mindfulness a lot. 

GM 
She was very much into it. She was taking cold showers back then. Which is really big now in all the longevity stuff. She used to take cold showers in the morning and she would pound her chest.

FB  
As I said, way ahead of her time. What was her first introduction to the classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?

GM 
I'm sure it was in school but she never really talked about that much. She got into Alice only when she started collaborating with you and she started expanding. I think she wanted to update it. Add more to it. 

FB 
Suddenly, we both became really aware of Alice and pop culture. “Did you hear that band has an Alice song?” Or she would send me a piece of art from a garden where the plants were Alice-themed or cut out.

GM 
I think she felt that the film and story were going to become not so literal and not so black and white, because I think I really believe people can understand metaphor now. Or accept gray areas, whereas before it had to be this way or that way. I really feel that Liz felt that everything was going toward where one symbol would mean many things. It wasn't just one thing and there were many gray areas. In a way, everything’s become surreal. It's almost unbelievable.

FB  
If you’ve just reread Zen of Wonder you can see she really communicates that successfully.

GM 
She does. She didn’t respect the powers that be, the elite. She felt that an individual had their own power and they could do whatever to make a difference. 

FB  
Do you remember she came up with a character for Whoopi Goldberg, the Queen of Clubs? The Queen of Clubs is best friends with Redd except she doesn't believe in Redd’s ruling theories so she's working behind the scenes. Then Redd finds out and it’s no good deed goes unpunished, off with the head. Liz would laugh and say, “Whoopi’ gonna die.” Then I had to tell Whoopi that on The View. It turns out that Whoopi Goldberg is a huge Alice fan and was in the TV movie. She narrates the Alice in Wonderland statues in Central Park in New York. 

FB 
The outpouring of support from her friends who reached out to me when we all got the news that her illness was terminal, which is a really hard moment in life to contemplate. She often shared with me some of the pain she was in and in doing that, I felt like I was a little bit on the journey with her. Because I know she was really private. And she didn't, but we had

GM
Most of her friends didn't know. She didn't want to tell anybody.

FB  
Why do you think that is?

GM 
She was so into organic food and cold showers. She said part of it was that she was embarrassed. With doing all that, that happened.

FB 
She described this growth that was in her stomach as this kind of alien. In the end, she just wanted it to get out and move on. I just thought she was incredibly brave and it really revealed, yet again, another side of her courage and her sentiment because she didn't seem that afraid. Even though she was taken young, she prepared herself. She used to tell me, “Check in on Gary.”

GM 
She was always concerned about me because I was not worldly at all back in those days. I became so after Liz left because I had to. 

FB  
Thirty years is a long stretch with one person. It was a really great, successful run.

GM 
She lived a very full life. Maybe two or three lifetimes full and I told her so. She knew it. She did not die perfectly preserved. She was worn out because she did so much. That's the way to live. 

If you just look at you and your family, the Beddors, you guys race cars, you’re flipping in the air off of ski jumps and risking your life or being paralyzed. You guys weren’t trying to stay perfectly preserved. You had the Sin Bin and, sorry about the Sin Bin, maybe your friends don't want to hear about that. Your mom was the fastest car driver in her age group. She beat your father who was a big, wheeling dealing business guy. You guys live fast and full.

FB  
Thank you for that. The Sin Bin isn’t a big deal other than for my mom. I had moved out to Salt Lake City and was on the U.S. Ski Team. I had made a little bit of money and I bought a condominium. Very modest, but I bought a condominium and I called my mom and told her and for whatever reason, my mom associated that with a “Sin Bin” as she called it. “I don't know what you're doing living in a Sin Bin.” Somehow, condominiums were different from houses or apartments. I guess she had seen too many teen or college movies. I teased her relentlessly her entire life about the Sin Bin.

GM 
I’m sure it was squeaky clean.

FB 
It was far from squeaky clean. Squeaky maybe. Having a full life is what we all hoped for and Liz did. She made my life so much more exciting and richer. I really learned how to collaborate and communicate with somebody on both the creative side and the friendship side because, after 28 years, you're gonna have your differences and you have to sort those things out. I've been lucky that I have a lot of long-term friendships and I attribute that to taking responsibility for my part of differences and being able to express that. She was equally good at that, which makes for a good friendship.

GM 
I related to a lot of the messages from Nekko to Hatter because Liz told me that she always saw me as Hatter. Not that I'm trying to get myself into your movie.

FB  
You’d be a good Hatter. 

GM 
Nekko’s messages to Hatter were, “Don't be so rational. You gotta be open. Gotta be in the moment. Gotta be spontaneous.” Liz even got me to take an improv class. I've had many dreams since reading Zen of Wonder. I think one of the reasons she wrote Zen was to provoke insightful dreams in the readers, because all the characters are so surreal. 

FB  
She had all those Japanese demons which I didn't realize there were so many.

GM 
For everything.

FB  
I thought Catholicism was scary.

GM 
Catholicism is scary.

FB  
You drew some characters for Liz and me for one of the graphic novels. You drew a Milliner, I believe.

GM 
Yes, a Milliner. Sarah, your producer, sent them to me. I don't wanna brag, but I was surprised by how good they were. They're very flowing. 

FB  
They're really good.

GM 
I mainly drew them for Liz because I think she always wanted me to be a visual artist. When I was young, that's what they said I should be. I told everyone I was gonna become a graphic artist. I didn't know what it was but it sounded really good and adults approved of it. “I'm gonna be a graphic artist. I'm gonna go to art school.” I was in line to do it until some other grade school kid's mom called my mom and asked, “Which art school is Gary going to because I want to send my daughter?” My mom said, “What are you talking about?” But yeah, I left it for Liz to show you. She was encouraging me to do that. I like him. I was surprised.

FB  
I've gone back and looked at a lot of different artists and I've been surprised in terms of the different styles and what people have been able to produce in the world of Wonderland.

GM 
Originally, I guess Hatter was supposed to be bigger and bulkier like a bodybuilder. But I remember telling Liz, “No, I think you should be because of his skills, more like Bruce Lee.” More like a swimmer with a more athletic build and able to move quickly and all that just popped up. 

FB 
That was a really good choice. I think Bruce Lee is the perfect prototype for Hatter, a stranger in a strange land with a remarkable set of skills that many people underestimate. You get the satisfaction of the comeuppance for the know-it-alls or the baddies who think they can take anybody.

GM 
No matter what Tarantino says, Brad Pitt cannot beat Bruce Lee. 

FB  
That's for sure. I'm going to keep you posted on the creative material that we’re trying to birth into the world that Liz was a part of, whether that's Tsunami Surf Sisters, Sis Kipling, or Helmet Head. I was even thinking Eating Avalanches might make a nice nostalgic adventure story. So we keep her memory and her work alive.

I'm going to take the graphic novels and repackage them. I think as we move forward in terms of getting a TV show or a musical going, there's going to be a resurgence in interest in reading the graphic novels. 

GM 
I'll be going to Peru from the 14th to the 25th and apparently, there's an underground city underneath Manta Picchu. I'm hoping to bribe somebody like $1,500 or something to get under there. We have a shaman, Don Juan, who's going to be leading some meditation so maybe he can get me into that underground city and I'll report to the Hatter Institute.

FB  
For any Hatter sightings or exotic artifacts, you might discover.

If you were a character from Alice in Wonderland, either my book or from Lewis Carroll's book, would you think you're Hatter Madigan, as Liz suggested? Or do you have another idea?

GM 
That or the free ghost Mr. Murakami, from the outhouse.

FB 
Okay, the character that you already are. All right, good. Thank you, Gary. Thanks for going down memory lane with me about one of the most important people in both of our lives, Liz Cavalier.

GM
Yes, long live Liz. Thanks, Frank.

FB
Long live my queen. Take care, buddy.

For the latest updates & news about All Things Alice,  please read our blog and subscribe to our podcast!