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 that 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?”

It is my great pleasure to have Ken Friedman join me as my guest! Read on to explore part one of our conversation, and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview. For the full transcript with exclusive content, join our private Circle community.

FB:

You know, we we met years ago when I was living with Peter Markle, the director of the masterpiece, Hotdog: The Movie. Peter directed the film. I did the ski stunts and turns out that he’s also from Minnesota, and we moved in together in a duplex on Wooster Street. What I remember most vividly about first meeting you is how you came into the apartment and completely ghosted me. You walked right past me, sat down with Peter and started talking about the film you two were co-writing, Youngblood.

KF:

I remember going to Peter’s to work on the script for Youngblood and, by that time, I was already enthralled with skiing. You showed up after me and I was doing some editing with Peter. So, you were just an interloper. I probably had somewhere else I wanted to be other than working with Peter and you further delayed things until I was informed that you were a champion skier and, at that point, I decided that I was gonna get to know you better!

FB:

At the time of Made in U.S.A., I was an aspiring actor and you had written and were going to direct this movie. My friend Nancy was the assistant to your girlfriend, Sally, who was the casting director. So, you guys all asked me to come in and read for this small part in the first 10 minutes of the film, with not that much dialogue. The way that you wrote the script was unique because you wrote the action description in first person. It was the liveliest script I’d ever read because all the dialogue was from the character’s point of view. Tell us the premise of the film because it feels quite contemporary.

KF:

Before I wrote the film, I was going back and forth between Los Angeles and New York a lot. I did a lot work with different producers and directors on both coasts. So I was on a flight to New York and I was reading an article in Newsweek magazine, about a place called Centralia, Pennsylvania. There was a coal fire under the town and the description in this article said, “The streets glowed red at night.” I said, “I gotta see this, it sounds like Hell on Earth. I gotta go.” So I rented a car in New York and drove to Centralia, which is about two and a half hours from New York. Sure enough, there were red spots on the road, fumes arising from the cemetery, and caved-in houses. It was really interesting. There were hundreds of small coal mining towns that were established in the early 19th century. The people lived on top of the mines and the workers would go down and go into the tunnels. It was deep mining coal and during World War II, the need for coal was great but he restrictions on mining were so expensive that they began using cheaper coal from New Mexico and Arizona, and these towns died. There were slag heaps of open coal and tunnels everywhere. On Easter, 1981, a fire broke out at the Centralia town dump. There were only 30 people left living in the town, mostly widows of miners that had died of black lung, so there was no real urgency from the authorities to put out the fire. For two years, the fire burned, and it found a seam of coal near the surface and charred its way down. Eventually, the charring down of the coal fire found the open tunnels full of oxygen, and it exploded. There were miles and miles, 1,000-2,000 feet below the town, that were now cooking like a barbecue. That’s where the fumes came from and that’s why fire that sometimes found its way up to the surface, which would create sinkholes. It really was Hell on Earth.

FB:

Hell on Earth and also a preview of what we’re experiencing now with climate change.

KF:

I wondered when I went there, what happens to people who grew up in this town? No jobs, houses falling apart, no work. I began to think of the social contract. That thing that we all signed up for. That if we don’t run traffic lights, we don’t beat up people without reason, if we follow the rules and follow the law, society’s part is to give us a house, a wife, two children, a picket fence, and a dirt bike to play with on the weekends. But these people didn’t get their end of the social contract so they grew up sociopathic. I wanted to take these two eighteen-year-olds from this town and send them across country. Wherever they would go, would be another environmental disaster and another group of people not offered the social contract.

FB:

What were some of the other towns that weren’t offered the social contract?

KF:

The TCDD contamination in Times Beach, Missouri. Radiation from uranium mining on the Indian Reservation in New Mexico. It was my idea that if I’m going to shoot this, I didn’t want to do a documentary, but I wanted to document. Part of the concept was that we would shoot in all these locations that were damaged environmentally. We had hazmat suits. We had pregnant people who couldn’t be on the set. But we really went in there. We couldn’t even take our own vehicles when we shot at Times Beach. We had to use the special vehicles they had for a couple of families that totally refused to move. The characters visit all these locations, basically trying to get laid. That’s the only thing in front of them. Along the way they meet a girl from Times Beach, Missouri whose whole family die of cancer. She was not offered the social contract so she was psychopathic. That’s Laurie Singer’s character and she leads these guys into greater and greater criminal activity, making them test themselves and see how far they were gonna go.

FB:

Great concept. I remember the cinematography was just absolutely stunning. One of the main assets of the film.

KF:

Yeah, the juxtaposition of the beauty of America with the destruction.

FB:

Such a great message. Such a great film to shoot. Can you share how you got started or what inspired to write?

KF:

I was 11 years old. My father was a businessman but wanted to be a writer. My mother wanted me to be a psychiatrist. Everybody in my family were psychiatrists so, even at 11 years old, I knew I was destined to go to med school to become a psychoanalyst. I use to get cramps when I was writing with a pencil. I just hold it too tight. So my parents got me a Smith Corona electric manual typewriter and I began tapping out stories. For whatever reason, I was never shy about showing stuff. It’s still that way. Criticism didn’t didn’t bother me a whole lot. I wrote these stories and some of them are really quite good. My parents thought writing was a good thing and they got me an electric Smith Corona clamshell typewriter, which made things even faster and better. It started out at Clark University and I flunked out of there and got drafted, and would have been on my way to Vietnam, but I began seeing a shrink. My parents weren’t going to allow me to be drafted no matter what. Going through analysis when I was 19 years old put me in touch with what I liked to do. I liked to go to movies and I like to write and “click.” I had gone from Clark to Nassau Community College to Hunter College to NYU, determined that I was not going to be a psychiatrist.

FB:

You found something that you love.

KF:

I still feel the same way now teaching it mostly right. I never considered it work. It’s fun. Making movies is fun. If you want to be rich, go to Stern Business School.

FB:

So what was it like at NYU with Oliver Stone and Scorsese as your teacher and Ben Kaplan, who became a good friend of yours as I remember?

KF:

Marty had a class, before he made Mean Streets, and he was picking up extra money teaching. At the time, he was just this little guy jumping up and down with more enthusiasm for movies than anybody had ever seen. We had this class, and we didn’t know what the class was, and he walked in and he showed one great American genre film a week. The Big Heat, Sweet Smell of Success, Only Angels Have Wings. Howard Hawks, John Ford, Hitchcock, all the great auteurs. The most inspiring moment was Wild Bunch, which is one of the great films.

FB:

You’ve worked with me as a consultant on The Looking Glass Wars and helped shape the direction originally. We talked about it as a movie – What’s the structure? Who are the characters? What’s the character have to say? What are the character’s obstacles? What’s the character’s story?

KF:

It was fun to talk story with you and Liz Cavalier and some of the other people. I was thinking about it on my way over here that your inspiration, from my point of view, was to take a black and white story and colorize it. That Alice grew up in the Industrial Revolution in England and that was a real world with political problems and good guys and bad guys. The world that’s been created before in film. And that, you know, stark and gray and, and true to Lewis Carroll’s world, but also Frank Beddor’s world of Wonderland, a place in color. Without industry, but not without struggle, not without competition, not without good guys and bad guys. It was another version of the time and the fluidity of characters being able to move from one world to another was what sets your books apart.

FB:

When I was making The Looking Glass Wars into a TV series I wrote a short amalgamation of the books and the graphic novels to have in the bible and I made a few changes. I thought nobody would ever read it because it’s way too long. However, you really appreciated the content and said it would serve me one day. Now, it doesn’t serve me in the sense of selling it but it certainly serves me when I talk to other creatives and they want to have a quick overview that gives you a beginning, middle, and end without reading 15 books. I wrote it in prose style and I gave each of the characters there are five or six pages, and I gave each one of those to you. You read them very quickly, and were enthusiastic and gave me great critiques on them.

KF:

It’s still in the teaching I do, and I’ve been teaching at the grad program at NYU for 17 years now. Character, character, character.

FB:

It’s one thing if it’s a movie. It’s another thing if it’s a TV show. And if it’s a TV show you have time and that’s why people tune in, they want to see the character’s struggles, the obstacles, the release. The world gets them in, but the characters keep them coming back. So, I want to acknowledge and let you know how much I appreciated that feedback because now I’m proud of writing those stories but at the time they were driving me crazy.

KF:

I feel the passion for the story you’re telling when I read your books.

FB:

I’m going to jump to four of your movies that I’m really interested in hearing how they came about. White Line Fever was an early movie. I know you worked on The Fugitive with Harrison Ford so I’m curious about that. Also, Cadillac Man with Robin Williams, who’s amazing. I quoted a couple of his lines from Good Will Hunting at my wedding, so I’m a fan and then I remember some crazy stories with Mickey Rourke in Johnny Handsome. But, let’s talk about The Fugitive first because that was one of my dad’s favorite movies. He loved Harrison Ford at the top of his game.

KF:

I had just come off of Johnny Handsome and Cadillac Man. So, I had written two movies within one year that had major stars with major releases. I was hot. With The Fugitive, they were having trouble getting a script out of it. Walter Hill was directing it and Alec Baldwin was starring but they didn’t have a script yet. But Alec had committed to do it. Walter was going to direct it. I’d done Johnny Handsome with Walter. And Chuck was producer of Johnny Handsome, so he and Walter and I were kind of a team. And we came in to the big, big, big budget film and took over the writing directing of it. Walter was one of the greatest screenwriters in Hollywood history. I learned more from him about writing than from anybody else. And so we came in as a team. We had a little different take on the movie, but about 23 minutes of the film came out of that partnership. We wrote two different drafts and there were probably three or four writers who did drafts before us and three or four writers who did drafts after us. But when we made it, 23 minutes remaining in the movie came from the Walter, Ken Friedman, Chuck Roven version. This is an interesting story, because it’s how films get written and I tell the story in my class.

We had to take meetings with a producer and Warner Bros., and everything was good. Train crashes. Harrison Ford gets away. He’s on the run. Tommy Lee Jones comes in as the cop and says, “He’s been on the run for six minutes and 20 seconds, can’t go more than a mile in this direction” and put out a circle. But Harrison Ford manages to escape. He’s a doctor, and goes into a clinic, sutures his own wound, and continues his escape. But, Tommy Lee Jones goes after him. They have a couple of close calls, then you find out they’ve caught the fugitive. But the guy they caught is somebody else who escaped from the train and Harrison almost gets away but of course they find him again. At Niagara Falls, and he’s going to jump in the falls and die. Harrison Ford says, you know, “I didn’t do it”. And Jones says, “I don’t care”. And that whole section of the movie, we wrote, I wrote a lot of the dialogue. And then the cops reconnoiter, and how they’re going to find him. And that’s where we parted ways.

We were lovers of the TV show. We did not make it a revenge picture. The big problem with the film, I felt how can this rich, powerful, handsome guy allow himself to be found guilty of a crime he didn’t commit? He would’ve had the best lawyers. Why didn’t he put up any defense? Because, in the TV show, which dealt with the same problem, he had a shitty relationship with his wife and she was an alcoholic. He worked overtime just to get away from her. So, one night, he stays at the hospital when he doesn’t have to and that’s the night when the one-armed man kills his wife. So, he’s feeling guilty. He feels that he needs to pay for the crime so he chooses not to defend himself. This is the story as we saw it, and what we worked out with Alec and Walter and Chuck. They were thrilled. They didn’t mind that change to the character.

FB:

You have great stories. We’re going to have you back on the next episode and I can’t wait to hear about all your other films!

KF:

I’ve had hundreds of people come through my writing classes at NYU, so I talk about this stuff. And always love to share some of that.

FB:

It’s a gift and thank you for sharing your gift today.

Check out part two of Frank’s conversation with Ken Friedman!

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