John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S2E17 How NOT To Make A SPY Movie

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

IN THIS EPISODE We join with another podcast in the Costard & Touchstone Family - The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast - to explore how NOT to make a SPY movie. John and Alan Katz (he's both the host of The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast and the co-writer/executive producer of this the Dead Drop podcast) talk about the spy TV series and movies that inspired them both when they were kids, in John's case, to become a spy, and in Alan's case, to want to write about them. And, they'll discuss the process of turning real life spy stories - like John's - into a movie or TV series. SHOW NOTESYou can find The How NOT To Make a Movie Podcast everywhere you find your favorite podcasts or here. If you enjoy Dead Drop - and The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast, please check out the rest of our podcasts at Costard & Touchstone. Your next podcast obsession is just a click away! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast, it's a Costerden Touchstone production. I'm John Curioca. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. As always, we thank you for listening and for liking, rating, reviewing, and commenting on the podcast. This episode is kind of special. As I've mentioned, Dead Drop is produced and published by a podcasting company called Costard and Touchstone Productions, which makes about a dozen different podcasts about a wide

variety of subjects. The guy who started the company, Alan Katz, came out. of the movie and TV business originally. Among Allen's credits, he wrote and produced the iconic Tales from the Crypt for HBO. Pretty great, right? He also made feature films, some good, some not so good. In his first podcast, the How Not to Make a Movie podcast, Alan told the story of how he went from working at the top of his craft making crypt to making crap. A tales from the crypt branded movie called Bordello of Blood. Entertainment Weekly called the podcast's first season about the making of Bordello of Blood, the best film podcast of 2022. That says a lot. Since then, the podcast has gone on to talk about

the whole process of making movies and TV shows. All of that is by way of introduction to the fact that this episode of Dead Drop is a joint episode with the How Not to Make a Movie podcast in which Alan and I are going to talk about how not to make a spy movie, a subject near and dear to my heart. As most of you probably know, I've got a few movie and TV credits of my own to talk about. John, first of all, it is so much fun, just the thought of doing this with you. After all these podcasts that we've created together, can I tell you, before we begin this joint podcast, how proud I am of what we have done, done, but I'm really proud of you. And I love

all the things that are happening to you. There's a word in Yiddish Kvel. Hey, thank you, man. To experience joy at someone else's success, I'm quevelling watching the world

see you the way that I see you. Thank you so much, man. Alan, you and I have been friends for a long time, and we've been through some lean years together. Holy cow. Yeah. And so honestly, first of all, thank you and thank you for your friendship. But I am so happy that this is happening to both of us. We talked for years about doing something together. As you bring that up, let's bring the audience into the, how it is that we even know each other,

because it's kind of a weird, how did this happen exactly? Now, the reason that you and I know each other is because we have Nick Mechanic, the other executive producer of this podcast, was at one time my agent for a time he was your manager, but you still have projects together that you're working on. So you still are involved together with creative endeavors based on you and stuff you have done. But Nick is responsible, I will give an aptly credit.

When Nick was, Nick as an agent when he is on, his game, there is nobody. He's great. I can attest to that. The fact that I did a couple seasons on the outer limits when, man, I wouldn't have hired me. A total testament to Nick's absolute determination. He would not take no for an answer.

He really was a great agent. So I, a tremendous loyalty. Yes. And deserved loyalty to Nick. Yes, indeed. I don't know how you met. Nick. Oh, it's a funny story. I was represented by a firm in L.A. that no longer exists. Nor should it exist. They're terrible. So I said I had an idea for a television series that I wanted

to pitch to networks. It was called Bomb Squad. And it was a procedural that was a day in the life of the New York City bomb squad. And so my agent coupled me, partnered me with a writer. Now, I looked up this writer's credits on IMDB. He had written two episodes of the remake of Bugs Bunny.

Right? So this was it. And I said, I don't think this is the right guys. Trust me. I know this guy. I've known him all my life. I love him. Frank Sinatra's his godfather. I'm like,

Okay, LA's not my world. Okay, let's go for it. We started HBO. They laughed us out of the building. We pitched it all over the place, but lo and behold, we sold it. We sold it to the WB. Remember the WB? Oh, dear.

Why did HBO laugh you out of the building? That must have been fun. Because they're like, this is kind of a law and order type of thing. This is not, this is, we pitched it at the height of the sopranos. Oh, my. wire. That is so funny. You bumped into a problem that I created for you. Yeah.

Because of Tells from the Crypt. Tells from the Crypt is the show that Trans, it's not TV, it's HBO. Right. That happened because of Tells from the Crypt. Yeah. That thing happened. Tams from the Crypt made HBO the premium network. And then it was followed by Oz.

And then after Oz, the Sopranos, and six feet under and the wire. And we give its own. Right. It had to be stuff that, yes. And so if HBO saw it as to procedural, then, yes, there was no way that HBO was going to do it. Okay. So that's why, so I apologize.

My fault. My fault. My fault. We sold it to the WB. And they gave us an advance. And the writer, the advance was not a ton of money. It was $75,000. That's not bad.

Boy, they put up, okay, they put up for the writing. Yeah, they did. And we split it 8515 because it was my idea, but he was doing all the work. So I took my 15%, which wasn't much, but that's okay. And we had very... Are you going to make us all do the math now? We had very specific deadlines. And I was taking this very seriously because it was the very first show I had ever sold in Hollywood.

And the writer literally disappeared. Literally. So he's not participating in any of the conference calls. He's not answering his door at his house. He doesn't answer his phone. What happened to the guy? And so I'm calling the agent saying, Ilan, the guy just disappeared.

What do we do? He better be like hold up in a cabin somewhere writing this thing, writing the pilot. No. He had not received. a pile of money like that in years. And as soon as the check cleared, he bought a whole bunch of cocaine and went on a bender that lasted six weeks.

He spent every dollar of the money and didn't write a single word. So I had a friend who was one of the stars of HBO's series Six Feet Under. And I was complaining to him. I was like, like the worst possible scenario. This guy snorted tens of thousands of dollars of an advance, and they probably, he's under a bridge somewhere. And so what the heck are we going to do? So the WB told us, get out of here and don't ever come back. So I was so mad. I told my friend from six feet under, I'm walking away from this management company. They're terrible. They're terrible,

the position that they put me in. And he said, you should talk to my guy. I met this little firm, and I'll introduce you to my manager, Gary Osdahl. So I call Gary Osdahl. He's like, hey, how are you? Nice to talk to you. And I told him the story. He's like, oh, yeah, you need representation. I said, I really do. He said, there's a guy working for me, Nick Mechanic. He's coming out of something himself, and he's reestablishing himself, rebuilding himself. He introduced me to Nick, and we've been together ever since. It was Gary Oswald. Connection. Okay. So you and Gary, because for a little while when Nick was putting his trying to put his shit back together again, he worked for Gary. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh, ha, huh, huh.

Yeah. Okay. Cool, cool, cool. Oh, and Gary, he's done very well for himself. He's the executive producer of Cobra Kai and he's making a lot of money and like making shows that actually, yeah, yeah. Like Gary, a whole lot. Okay. I know when Nick told me that he was working with you. and he described you to me, having always been a spy story aficionado, I, wow, that was, I got the worst conversation. Yeah, I remember our first conversation where you and I sat, we had dinner in the valley somewhere. I don't remember exactly where, but we had dinner and we threw out 20 different ideas.

We were trying to mix the spy genre with the horror genre, and we just couldn't think of anything that might work. We were trying so hard to shit this thing. Yeah, to ship something out. Sometimes you just look past all the organic stuff. Rather than look at the two people sitting there in the room. Now, of course, if what had happened now had happened, then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Alan. That would have taken us. I don't know if you remember that conversation. There's one thing that I remember. it was one of the terrible ideas that we came up with. We were trying to mix these two genres. And you said, what if? I told you a story.

I was like, the first question anybody ever asks when they get hired into the CIA is, where are the aliens? And I asked my boss, where are the aliens? And he laughed. And he said, that's what we all ask when we first get here. And if there are aliens, they're at the Pentagon or something controlled by the Pentagon. There are no aliens here. So I mention that to you.

And then you said, what? if we have a show where there's this new CIA officer and he's asking these questions, he's looking for the aliens, and he goes down into the bowels, the basement, the sub-basement of the agency, it's late one night, and there are vampires down there. And I was like, that is a terrible idea. That's a terrible idea. We were trying so hard to come up with something. Oh, my.

But, of course, these days I would have looked across the table and said, John, tell me about you. Yeah, the times have changed, haven't they? And, but that would always have been where the better story lay anyway. Yeah, it took us a little while. But we both had to live a lot more life before we could get to such a place where we could do that. Now, the last time that we actually got to speak, that we saw each other, our friend Nick has found sobriety. Yes. He was in the throes of his various addictions and a terrible self-destructive streak.

And you had, he was at his apartment. You had gone there. he, oh gosh, what happened to Nick. And we'll try to quickly get through the Nick story. Just, yeah, we won't get into the gory details because there were lots of them. Yeah, lots. So I live in the Washington, D.C. area.

I live in Arlington, Virginia. But I go to L.A. with some frequency. And I've always treated this Hollywood thing as a really fun hobby. I'll come up with an idea. I mention it to Nick. We'll put it on a one-pager. And then Nick makes appointments at studios or networks, and we go and we pay. pitch it. And over the years, I've sold eight different shows. One of them actually made it to pilot.

Nothing's actually made it onto TV, but it's fun for me. And it can be lucrative. But anyway, I had this idea, and Nick said, why don't you come out to L.A. and we'll put it together. So I fly out to L.A. My brother happens to live in Studio City. So I always stay with him in Studio City. Nick at the time was living in Koreatown. And so I called him the night before. and I said, I've arrived. And he said, come on over tomorrow morning at 10. But stop and get me a sausage McMuffin with egg before you come. I said, get your own fucking sausage McMuffin with egg.

You live on the same block with the McDonald's. Why am I going to stop at the, okay. So anyway, because I'm an idiot. I stop and I get him the sausage McMuffin with egg. And then I go to his apartment. He's in this garden apartment. And I go right on the dot at 10 o'clock because our meeting was 10 o'clock. and I knock on the door, nothing.

And I was like, doggone you, Nick. I knew you were going to screw me. So I bang on the door, nothing. And then I sat on the stoop. And I thought, maybe he went down the block to get a coffee or something. So I'm sitting there. And about 20 minutes past, and I got so pissed off that I got up and I kicked the door. And it opened.

And there's Nick, laying in a pool of blood. he had gotten so drunk, he's laying next to an empty bottle, he'd gotten so drunk that he passed out and fell and hit his head on the corner of a coffee table. And it's just a giant pull of blood. I was like, dog, got it. So I call 911 and the ambulance comes. And I said to the ambulance attendants, I said, guys, I don't know where I am. Can I go with you?

and they said, yeah, we're going to take him to, I think it was UCLA medical science. Cedar Sinai. Cedar Sinai. It was Cedar Sinai. So they said, yeah, we're going to Cedar Sinai. So I rode with him in the back of the ambulance. And we get to Cedar Sinai. They take him into the ER and I go to the registration window.

And the woman there was like actively rude to me. And I said, and this is really not my nature, but I said, excuse me, I don't think I appreciate your attitude. And she says to me, let me tell you how this is going to play out. This is the third time he's been in here this week. Now, I didn't know any of this. This is the third time he's been in here this week. He's going to raise his voice.

He's going to start swearing at the doctors and nurses. He's going to demand an egg salad sandwich. And he's going to come out of here screaming and yelling. And as soon as she said it, I hear him screaming, swearing, You motherfuckers, get your fucking hands off me. I want a fucking egg salad sandwich. I couldn't believe it. And I said to her, I am really sorry.

So finally, I knew at the time to call you because I knew he had this other friend, Alan. And I don't remember if I had Nick's phone or if I had you. you in my phone. It was before we had actually met, but I called you. And I said, Nick's in the emergency room at Cedar Sinai. He's really screwed up. And then you met us at the emergency room. Right. And then he comes out. He's got 10 staples in his skull to stop the bleeding. He's got blood all over his face. The funny thing is he doesn't even eat egg salad sandwiches. He has no memory of this. Yeah. It's just something floating in his head, something from Yeah.

That just seems to come out of those moments. But I'll tell you, let me add one other thing, if I may. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I did not know you, but I immediately respected you because you said something to him. And I was like, oh, amen. We sat him down there in the emergency room, in the waiting room. And you said, Nick, we will, you will always be our friend. But you will no longer be our manager unless you clean up your act.

and I said he's right Nick I'm not doing this again and I thought wow I like this guy Alan yeah this is a good friend we had been through a lot and when you have a friend who is in that position

it comes a point where tough love is the only love yeah that's it just how it is but you and I remember we yeah That was how we met. And right off the bat, there was just a connection. We just liked each other.

Yeah, we did. We went on to have a meeting. We tried really hard to create something out of nothing and the nothing one, as it does. And then stuff happened here, stuff happened there. I ended up, God, during the pandemic. Right. A tells from the crypt fan group. three guys from various parts of the country, who also happened to be fathers started a podcast called Dads from the Crypt.

And these three guys, they reviewed all the episodes of Tales from the Crypt, and they gave parenting advice. Oh, my goodness. Yes. One of the dads, Jason reached out to me. He said, hey, we're going to be reviewing an episode that you wrote. Would you like to sit in with this? And I thought, oh, that sounds like a great idea. All right.

It sounds like fun. Sure. And remember the pandemic? and we were happy to talk to anybody. Mm-hmm. And it was great fun talking about the episode with the guys. And a few weeks later, Jason reached out again. He said, hey, we're going to be reviewing Bordella with Blood,

the second tells on the Crypt feature film. Do you want to sit in? Long story short, the making tells from the Crypt was an incredible creative experience. Yeah. Because of all the creative freedom that we had, working with the people that we got to work with feature-grade people on our little TV series. And the point was,

bigger than TV. The incredible freedom got, over the course of 75 episodes, five seasons that I was in charge of crypt, I got three notes from HBO, total. Wow. Three notes.

Wow. Not three pages of notes. No, three notes, totally. And they were all, they each had a funny little story to them. So it wasn't like they went, you got to do it. It wasn't.

And each time was really nice, except for one time. One time they said, you're not going to let Billy Fried can do that right. but that's something else entirely. Yeah, HBO was wonderful to work for. The franchise, the Krip franchise exploded and suddenly Universal Pictures said we want to do two feature films.

We want to do three feature films. The first one was a really good movie called Demon Knight. And somewhere on the way to making the second movie, everyone lost their fucking minds. From the top to the bottom, from the studio, everybody. And we went from, we turned away from making a movie that we all wanted to make, a thing called Dead Easy, to making this thing called Bordello of Blood for entirely cynical reasons. We literally made a movie, Bordola of Blood, that nobody making it wanted to make.

And what a shame. The result, if you do something that's cynical, do not be surprised when every day is stupider than the day before. That's exactly what happened making that movie. From the audience, the audience's perspective, it's just a mediocre little heart. movie. But from my perspective, I went from really the top of the

craft doing Kells and the Crypt. It was a dream job to a fucking nightmare of our own creation. Bordello of blood. And so when Jason said, hey, you want to talk about making more dolo of blood, I said, Jason, the story of making that

fucking movie is not some little half-hour conversation with you. It's a, ding, bell goes off in my head. It's a podcast unto itself. That was the birth of the How Not to Make a Movie Podcast. Fantastic. The first season of which was called The Making of Bordello of Blood. And the mission when I first sat down to make this podcast, half of this episode podcast,

my half of the podcast, this is also a Dead Drop episode. Yep. My mission was to tell the story of the making of that fucking fiasco with balls to the wall honesty. I wasn't interested in telling the actors' story because they were outsiders, too. It was really about the crypt group who went from making a product that

we love, Tales in the Crypt, to a thing that it ultimately, before Bordeaux of Blood was even out, man, relationships ended, I got it was a fiasco. And it set me on a road toward really a two

decade long, really deepening depression in a writer's block. Oh, sure. Yeah, that, oh, man, but long story short, I hit bottom, I bounced. And part of the recovery process was these guys saying, hey, you want to do this podcast, suddenly deciding to make this podcast, the hell not to make a movie podcast, which that first season, Entertainment Weekly, called it the best film podcast of 2022. Wow.

The reason that they gave for such kind words was because of the honesty. Mm-hmm. The honesty. That, to me, I found while I was making that podcast, making the first season of this podcast, the hell not to make a movie podcast. What a wonderful storytelling medium. Ironically, I have come to love podcasting as a creative medium

far more than I ever loved movies or TV. You know what, Alan, when I first got out of prison, my first real job was at a progressive, think tank called the Institute for Policy Studies. And like any left-wing organization, they're always broke. And so they were looking for ways to try to bring in a couple extra dollars. There was an intern working for the summer. And he said, there's this new thing people are doing called podcasting. And I remember saying, yes, I've heard of this podcasting. And the executive director kind of looks around and he looks at me like what are you guys talking about and i said you just kind of talk into a

microphone and do your own radio show but it's recorded and then instead of broadcasting it over the radio you put it online so it's available to anybody who wants to listen to it no matter where they are in the world and he said and people are listening to that they're listening to just random people And I said, yeah, they are. It's actually very popular. That was in the summer of 2015. I wish I had heeded my own advice because I was like, you should start that. You should do that.

You should podcast about public policy or whatever. I wish I had started doing it at the time. Everything in its time, my friend. Yeah, that's right. Everything in its time, you weren't quite ready for that yet. You had other things you had to do for a... Oh, yeah. If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes,

I'd like to suggest another great, granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't, what it felt like being in all those dangerous places. like war zones and natural disasters doing his job taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the photographer will put you right there on the ground right next to David. Inside his head, in fact.

It's a hell of a podcast and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costard and touchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone. Like the donor, a DNA horror story, the hall closet, sage wellness within, and the how not to make a movie podcast. Who knows, your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now back to Dead Drop.

Podcasting, I really discovered this was the thing I always wanted to be when I grew up. And now, a couple of years after you started your podcast, all of a sudden, at the Golden Globes, they've got a category best podcast. It's the future. It's the intimacy that is so appealing. What I tell people all the time, to take an idea from our heads, if we were to say, hey, John, I got an idea for a TV series. He went, that's a great idea. It would still be 10 years to get the script ready.

That's on average 10 years for the script to be ready for the marketplace. And then we couldn't just take the script out because, look, We're not writing the script for the marketplace for the audience. We're writing it for a handful of executives. Five, six executives. That's really who we're writing the script for. Now, those executives, we've now written, it's a TV series, season one, episode one. Yeah.

All right. We're asking these people to put up a shit ton of money. Yes. Develop it. All right. So they can legitimately ask, all right. So season one, episode one, what happens? episode two and three and four and five, what happens over the course of season one? And hey,

is there a season two? What happens season two and season three and season four? Who are all these characters? What's the look? What's the feel? They're entitled to ask all these questions and that's why creators of TV series, in addition to writing that script, they also have to create a Bible. That is 60 to 70 pages of incredible detail about the universe that you're asking the money to invest in. And yes, there's very fair of them to want all this information ahead of time. The Bible done right itself. That's a year or so to really to get that right. And as you write that, that's going to inform the script and the script's going to inform it. So there's a lot of rewriting that's going to happen along the way. It's very time consuming. Okay, now you've got

everything ready for the marketplace. The whole point, the thing you're trying to do here is you're trying to convey from your head to a handful of executives' heads, what's the franchise, what's the IP? But before we can even get there, we have to get them to read just to get these people in the executive suites to fucking read, you have to create a pitch deck. A PowerPoint presentation that half a dozen to a dozen slides, a couple of words, mostly pictures, to give them a sense of what am I going to be reading? And that doesn't write itself either or conceptualize itself.

A decade, if you're lucky, to get all this stuff ready to appeal to a handful of people just to get them to put you into the development process. And if they say yes, okay, that's just the opening to the meat grinder. Who the fuck knows what kind of sausage is going to come out, the anus end of this thing? You're right? Once you say yes when you go, they say yes to you, okay, we'll put this into development. Right. That means they're going to cut you a check.

That means you have to sign a certificate of authorship, a C of A, you, the writer who have been working on this for this whole fucking decade. The C of A is a necessity because of the nature of film and TV distribution. You can't have some writer assholes saying, I hate the politics and country X. You can't distribute there. Can't have that. So, in essence, it's a buyout. And whatever they're going to pay you then, you are giving up your rights to this material throughout the own universe in perpetuity.

And yeah, you're going to get paid. There will be money. But trust me, lion's share ain't going to you, my friend. It is absolutely not going to you. All right. Now, to take the same idea and turn it into a podcast. We can write, produce, distribute, that's the key. It can't distribute a TV series or a feature film like the big kids,

but we can distribute a podcast same as everybody else. It's very democratic that way. Distribute, monetize, and collect on the monetization. No one in an executive suite has anything to do with us. And we've nothing to do with them, thank goodness. That's right. And so, all right, so we've created the thing, we've monetized. hey, we still own it 100%.

It would still make a really great TV series. In the old days, I'm giving away our secrets here, but in the old days, we would have gone cap in hand as we have trying to impress upon these people in the executive suites, what's the IP? Well, now, everyone knows what the IP is. It's there in our podcast. The audience knows, the advertisers know, Again, we've monetized and made money.

Instead of having to go cap in hand, oh, please buy, they're going to come to us, the people in the executive suite, because they're always looking for material that they can relate to. They're going to come saying, hey, that podcast, their drop would make an incredible TV series. And we're going to go, hey, you're right. And we'll make a great TV series. And they're going to hand us a check. And we're going to look at it and say, you know, that's really pretty.

But you can have to add some zeros and move. the decimal point over because we don't need your fucking money. The power in any negotiation lies in the word no, the ability to kill the deal because you don't need to make it. I honestly believe that podcasting is a way to flip the whole power dynamic away from the money and back to the creatives where it truly belongs. And so really the cake in this experience is what we're doing here and now, making the podcast. And I feel that way especially with Dead Drop. That is pure cake.

And the, we're beginning to make some nice money on Dead Drop. Yeah, that to me is the cake. The ancillary sale to these guys who want to make, turn it into a TV series, that's the icing. No, that's the sprinkles atop the icing. And yeah, it'd be nice to have their money in our pockets, but we don't need it. To tell the story, we've already told it exactly the way we wanted to tell it without their interference. May I add something to?

I thought I wish you would. There's an A-list TV star who told me a story one time along the same lines of what you're talking about. He had a brother to whom he was very close and his brother died. His brother had a drug problem and he died of an overdose. And so this actor wrote a show, wrote a pilot about two brothers. who were very close. One went in one direction, the other one in the other direction. Their lives were completely different. One was making it. The other wasn't. He sold the show to a network. And then the executives got involved. Everybody was telling him, what a beautiful show it was. This was a work of

genius. It's so artistic. It's so beautiful. But we have some comments. We have some pages. We have some notes. A year later, they had turned it into a comedy and he walked away. And you don't get that in podcasting. Nobody's going to come and turn our podcast into a comedy and make us look like two idiots. I have said repeatedly on this, the hell not to make a movie podcast, that I cast a lot of actors over the course of my career in movies and TV. I never hired any of them to act. God, that was the last thing I ever wanted any of them to do for the camera on stage. Yeah, you got to act so the people in the back row can see and hear you. But the camera's right in your face.

And if you act, camera will see you acting and we'll have to cut all that out, leave it on the floor. What the camera and the microphone does, what they both do, it's, they need to see you being. And the more honestly you can be on camera, really, just you emotionally raw, emotionally honest, the people who we think of as a great actor, they're just emotionally honest at those key moments using words that aren't theirs, but they're able to tap into their absolute emotional truth. Truth that they can, some good decision making. How do I think about this the right way?

Think about everything that's going on. But yes, it's looking for truth in a world where. It's very tricky to come by. All that said. Now, what we're actually here to talk about today is a love of how not to make a spy movie is what we're calling this. I, when I think about, because we're pretty much the same vintage, we're not too far off them. I got a few more miles on you, but in some ways you got a few more miles on me. So there's that.

When I think of the first spy that I ever encountered where suddenly I understood as a little kid, as a story convention even, that spies exist, I guess it had to be James Bond. It had to be. It's Bond. And I think Bond opened up spy stories and spies, super spies to the world.

TV, now I didn't, I think the first spy I ever encountered was not actually James Bond. I think it was Maxwell Smart. Uh-huh. So I think the first spies that I ever really encountered had to be, the TV series from the 60s, and there were some classic spies.

And as I look back, as we put together, how do you tell a story about spies? Or what are the things that poured into our heads that made us, all right, all right, I'd like to tell the story about spies. I'm interested in spies. And to me, Maxwell, Max, what, Mel Smart was to read, Don Adams. Mm-hmm. It's funny, the show was written by, among other people, Buck Henry. Oh, my gosh, I didn't know that. Yeah, Buck Henry was among the people who wrote that show.

And Buck Henry would go on to write as a screenwriter, The Graduate. He wrote the screenplay for Catch 22. Oh, a couple of just some terrific movies. Just one of the best comedic screenwriters of them all, I had the honor of working with Buck on Tales from the Crypt. Wow. We hired Buck for an episode where he played the MCRAD, at a convention for morticians

where they actually kill somebody. It's about someone, well, I'm going to know what it's about, but Buck played the MC. I didn't write the episode, but we had to write a song. So I wrote the song that Buck sings at the beginning. Oh, my gosh. And we got to work with some really cool people and tails from the crib, just the coolest people in Hollywood,

everyone from Tom Hanks to Kirk Douglas. But I'm not a starfucker. And it was great working with those people. the only person I ever worked with who I got a little starstruck was Buck Henry. Wow. Because Buck wrote the graduate. Wow. And so to me, Buck Henry was a god.

And I got to meet one of the gods. And he was a lovely person too. Anyway. Yeah. So Get Smart was I think was one of my first. Did you ever watch Get Smart when you were a kid? Absolutely. My dad loved it.

He just loved it. And so we used to watch it every week. The Cone of Silence. Mm-hmm. Agent 99. Yeah. It had so many funny bits that just as great stuff just to get your ear key to great comedy. There was the prisoner.

Would we call that a spy? Yeah, that had a spy. Sure. Outside the box approach to telling a spy story. Sure. I think they only made 17 episodes total. Really? I don't think I realized that.

Yeah. It's a very, it's a limited series. It's just 17 episodes. episodes. Wow. The Wild Wild West was, they're not spies, their secret service, but they were tapping into the same, because James Bond had suddenly got everybody juiced about spies. The Man from Uncle. The Man from Uncle was very popular. Did you watch Man from Uncle? I did indeed. Yeah. These things, spies were just so hip at that particular time. The Saint. I remember the St. Well, yeah. And that was, all right, guy with spying capabilities made to play both sides of the coin.

Right. That kind of thing. There was the Avengers. Also popular. Yeah. And another interesting take on the spy. And that was really Emma Peel was the first sort of kind of alpha female in that territory where she could kick anybody's ass. She was so wonderful and she was so hot. And she was so hot. How could you not love Diana Rigg? And then, of course, there was Mission Impossible. Yeah, Mission Impossible. I think it might have been my dad's favorite. With Peter Graves and Leonard Nimoy and just a fantastic cast of serious actors,

that show was a real hit. A great setup. Really, it's just, I marvel at their ability to come up with all the variations on the theme that they came up with. And then the gimmick of this table is self-destruct in five seconds. Brilliant. Yes, absolutely positively. Now, staying in the realm of TV, those I think are the classics of spy TV. I'm going to throw out some titles now that I think these are the could be classics.

They're a little more recent vintage. And so perhaps they need time to sit or perhaps their classics are ready. Hey, that's what we're here to talk about. the equalizer. Yeah, the equalizer was a good one. Yeah, that was well done. The thing is, most of these spy-related TV series are not true to life. Right.

And so they veer into the fantastical. That was one that was good. It was true to life. It worked in that same way. There was McGuiver. McGiver. It's become a verb. Yeah.

You can McGuiver a situation. Right. Okay, so there's the innovative spy. Right. Then it gets a little less fanciful as we, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, that character. Very well done. Can you tell you a little snippet about Tom Clancy. Go for it.

In 1991, the FBI set up a Tom Clancy task force because they said that somebody must be leaking classified information to him because nobody could know that much about so much in the classified world. And the truth is that he just was a voracious reader. And there was so much that was out there in the public domain and he was able to retain it and then use it in his own writing. It was all unclassified. He just had such a mastery of it that he made it look classified. And then they disbanded the task force. Crazy. Excellent.

Burn notice. Oh. There's a special place in my heart for burn notice. Yeah, yeah. I was sitting on a plane. In 2009, I don't remember why I got upgraded, but I was flying to L.A. And I happened to be next to a guy named Matt Nix in business class. I had never met Matt Nicks before.

I'd never heard of him. And I generally don't speak to people on planes. I mind my own business. They mind their own business. I read my book or watch a movie or listen to a podcast or whatever. Matt was very talkative. And finally, at one point, he asked me, what do you do for a living? And I said, oh, I'm the chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

He said, that sounds fascinating. I said, now, actually, it's not. It's rather boring and bureaucratic. But my old job, you might find more interesting. and I told him about my job at the CIA and Abu Zabeda. So I said, what do you do for living? And he said, oh, I'm the creator of a television series. I said, oh, might it be something I've heard of?

And he said, maybe it's the number one rated show on Basic Cable, it was on the USA Network. I said, what's it called? He said, burn notice. I said, oh, my God, I love burn notice. In fact, I said, your tradecraft is so good. I've actually taped the show so I could watch the credits in slow motion to see who you have advising you

and you don't say and he said we don't have anybody he said I've been so obsessed with spy genre films since I was a little kid I've read every book and I just do all the writing myself by the time the plane landed in Los Angeles I was the consultant for Byr notice I did six episodes in season six, and Matt and I have been friends ever since.

He hired me then to be the script consultant on True Lies, a spy series based on the film True Lies with Arnold Schwarzenegger. That ran on CBS for one season. And this is one of those situations, Alan, where he would send me the scripts. And I would read him and say, this script is fantastic, right? And I would make little notes in the margins. The only big change I ever made was you can't do this operation in London. This would never be permitted in London.

You got to move it somewhere else. And then they moved it to Brussels. And I was like, oh my God, they took my advice. And then there was another one where the bad guy was somebody that just wouldn't be the bad guy. And I said, this just isn't going to work. It's just not real life. And they made the bad guy in Albanian. And that worked.

The funny thing is, he would send me the scripts as soon as you would write them. And I would make my changes. But then the scripts would go to the... the network executives. And then when they finally aired on TV three or four weeks later, they were shit. And I was like, wait a minute, that's not what was written. That's not what was called for in the script. Or I didn't say that when I was commenting on this one scene.

And unfortunately, the show was canceled after one season just because it became this, you know, kind of typical broadcast network watered down power. for the masses. And it was a failure. They weren't HBO. They were not HBO. Tinker, Taylor, soldier, spy, and smiley's people have put them both together because they're grosses.

Two of the greatest. John McCarray, you and I have had this conversation before, but John McCarray really was the greatest. He really was. Ian Fleming, of course, is in the same kind of category. But John McCarray was the trailblazer here. even as a professional spy like I was, I can't put his books down.

They're that good. It wasn't just the craft. It was the human beings. His characters were so rich and so deep. And then you couple these really fulsome characters with a spy story that is genuinely believable and took place during the Cold War where there were clear good guys and bad guys.

And it really made for a series of great books and then great movies. How frequent is it, Alan, that you read this book and it's amazing. And then they make it into a film and the film is shit. But not so with his. In the case of the first version of Pinkertailer Soldier Spy with Alleganis playing George Smiley. Right. They played it out. They gave it enough breadth that they could tell the story as he wrote it.

It's the subtleties, the very small moments. And sometimes it takes time to lay the beats out. And it's the, you've got to see it twice. So the third time, you're seeing it. Wait, that's different. And it's that alteration that really walking it with George. Yeah. Tremendous patience in the storytelling.

That's the key right there. Tremendous patience. He doesn't force anything on you. He lets the stories. arc play out just the way it's supposed to play out. For the emotions to resonate the way that they need to resonate when you get to the ending, one of the themes that runs through John L. Karee is love is the thing you can still betray. Yeah.

It is often really what they're up against, that if what they do what's right for their job, they'll destroy the person or the thing that they love. That's right. Or vice versa. Yep. Uh, switch of gears, alias. I was not crazy about alias. I never watched it.

I don't know. Yeah, it just was, it was another one of those, you know, big budget, broadcast media shows for the masses. Kind of like 24. But 24 was worse in that. That was the next one on the list. Oh, okay. Just as well. You took us there yourself. Go for it. Good. 24 had a political message that I resented.

It was like 24 was, and listen, I love Kiefer, Sutherland. I think he's a terrific actor. But 24 had a political agenda behind it. And I objected to that. I thought that it was meant to, it was meant to get the American people to buy into the so-called War on Terror, which is all fine and good. I believed in the War on Terror, too, but not when it went nuts and started torturing people and started killing American citizens without ever having charged them with a crime. And I remember watching one episode of 24 where Jack Bauer is on the Washington, D.C. Metro. And the train stops at the Arlington Cemetery station, which is one of the very few above ground stations. And he jumps out of the train and he's got a nine millimeter drawn.

And he's like firing at people. and I remember saying, oh my God, how many felonies can you possibly commit in 30 seconds? There's literally nothing about this that is believable. Nothing. Oh, and by the way, torture works, and we're going to torture this guy, and it's going to save America.

So it just wasn't for me. I'll mention two more shows, and then we'll move this along, Homeland. Now, Homeland's very good. Season three had a little bit of a hiccup, but Homeland is very good. It's very well written. The storyline is completely believable.

Where it differs from real life is when an officer loses their marbles overseas, you bring them home and you get them treatment. You don't tell them work harder, double down. That's just nonsensical. Then they're going to go nuts and become serial killers. or mass murderers or something like that. But Homeland as a series, I think not only was well written,

well directed, well produced, well acted, it also came at the right time when the American people were beginning to question the official version of events. I enjoyed it very much.

The Americans. I think the Americans is probably the best spy-related show. of the last 20 or 25 years. The Americans was created by and written by Joe Weisberg. And Joe and I used to work together in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. Joe is a little bit younger than I am, probably 10 years younger than I am. I really liked the guy.

And I went into the office one day and he said to me, hey, I quit this morning. And I was like, what? What do you mean you quit? What are you going to do? he said this job it's just not for me i just can't like in my gut he said i can't get people to commit espionage it's just not for me i said what are you going to do and he said i'm writing a novel but i'm not married and i don't have any kids and i'm going to hollywood to find my fortune his novel came out a couple of years later it was really good funny thing it was all fiction

but it was still heavily redacted by the CIA. Like he was so close to real life in this thing that they heavily redacted it. And that was a surprise to me. But then just a couple of years later, he came out with the Americans. One Emmy after Emmy after Emmy, and the guy never has to work again

as long as he lives. It's a wonderful idea. Yeah. It's a wonderful idea. What the Americans is about is a group of what are called illegals. During the Cold War years, the Soviet Union, the Soviet KGB had a program called the Illegals program where they would take people, usually children or teenagers, they would send them to these camps in the Soviet Union where they would learn to become Americans or British or Brazilian or French or wherever they were going to go by.

To the point where they're steeped in American culture, they can talk about base base. or football like you and I can. They speak with American accents. You would never know that they were Russians born and raised in Russia. And then they're sent with false documents to the United States. Now, back then in the days before the Internet, all he had to do is like, let's say I'm born in 1964.

They would go through old newspapers. They would find a baby born in 1964 who died at the age of a few days. Then they would apply for a birth certificate, get the birth certificate, apply for a social security card, get that. Once you have the social security card, you apply for a passport. The next thing you know, you're American. And nobody has any idea that your entire identity is based on a dead baby from 1964. It's harder to do now, but that's how they did it then.

And then these people arrive in the United States, and as in the case in the Americans, they opened up a travel agency at DuPont. Circle in Washington. And so to the average, you know, neighbor or friend, they're just a husband and wife who own a travel agency. And in fact, they're spying for the KGB. And so the show is about the operations that they carry out, meeting with their handler, turning Americans, killing Americans, infiltrating the farm, the CIA's training facility,

collecting information on nuclear weapons development or advanced weapons systems. it's absolutely fascinating. And then toward the end of the series, rather, they decide to bring in their 16-year-old daughter. And they drop cover and they tell her who they really are. They tell the son, too, the son's 14. The son hates it and the daughter is all in. It was fascinating.

They did a really beautiful job. I have not seen the Americans. It's one of those shows that I've always thought, you should watch the Americans. And you have to start from the very first episode. Yes, yes, yes. no, this is not a thing you can join halfway through. No, it's a full story from beginning to end,

but that's why it works so well. It really took those characters, organic places. It really did. In a future conversation, we can go into greater detail about a lot of terrific series. The night manager is fascinating because it's Le Carre,

but Tehran and Fowda are fascinating shows. I have recommended Fowda to everybody who would Listen, Fowda is a joint Israeli-Palestinian production, which of course couldn't be done today. Yeah, yeah. Pre-October 7th, of course. And it follows both shin bet as they try to infiltrate Hamas. And it follows Hamas as an organization of national liberation and shows how they try to fight shinbet.

You end up having deep sympathy for both sides. That's how beautifully written this thing is. As I said, it was incredible when it came out. And I think it ran four or five seasons. It was carried on HBO. I don't think they could do that today. No, no, no. Man, that bridge, not just burned, blown up.

We would also talk about slow horses, which is fascinating. Gary Oldman's very good. Tehran, you mentioned. There's another one called Berlin Station, I haven't seen yet. at Berlin Station News. There's a terrific show out of France called The Bureau. I heard about that. Very good, intriguing, really good.

I want to check that out. As a general rule, stay away from any show that appears on ABC, NBC, NBC, CBS, or Fox. Just stay away. You'll feel dumber when the show is over. It will actually kill your brain cells.

There was an absolutely god-awful show on CBS called the COVID. overt affairs. Oh, my God. Talk about nonsensical. Nonsensical to the point of being offensive, where you've got this CIA analyst. First of all, the President of the United States

is this African-American woman and her son is engaged to a woman at the agency who's an analyst. And this analyst feels free to just walk into the Oval Office like she owns the place. And there's a one scene that I objected to quite strenuously in which she just walks into the Oval Office and the president looks up and she says, Madam President, I need to take a hit out on someone. And I thought, oh my God, okay, first, you're under arrest because that's a felony.

Secondly, you're under arrest for trespassing because I don't care who you are. Even the director of the CIA doesn't just barge into the Oval Office like he owns it. What kind of stupid show is this? It lasted a season or two. I'm embarrassed for a former colleague of mine who was the script advisor. He should have run screaming from the room. Instead, he thought he could make a couple of bucks. But it was just a disastrous show.

I hope he bought something nice with the money. Seriously. In another conversation, we'll talk about the other James Bond that... Yeah. Because there were some other... movies, especially in the Mids, in 1966, there was Matt Helm. Right. Matt Helm.

Dean Martin played Matt Helm in Murderers, Rowe, and that was 1966. The same year that James Coburn was playing Our Man Flint. Oh, he was terrific. Yeah. Oh, yeah. There are a lot of them out there. Remember those movies? I would rather segue into your IMDB page.

John. I'd like to finish this conversation going through. And you talked about your path to this town. You came to L.A. It's kind of a lark. So as we peruse your page, it says writer, script and continuity department, actor? Actor. Actor.

I'm proud to say that I'm a member of the Screen Actors Guild. I am a bona fide Hollywood actor. You just appeared as, it says, locksmith, in a thing called below world's end. What the fuck is this, John? Because that got you your sad card. That got me my sad card. So I have a dear friend, Tyrell Ventura, he's the son of Jesse Ventura. And he called me one day and said, his dad had never been so happy as he was when he was acting.

And I said, sure, he made billion-dollar blockbusters in the 80s. Who hasn't seen Predator, right? Or Running Man? These were major films of the 80s. And he made a lot of money. And he said, we wrote a movie. called Below World's End, and we wrote a character just for you.

I said, oh, thank you. No, no. I appreciate it, though. I said, I have never acted before. I would be stiff and unconvincing, and I'll ruin your movie. And Governor Ventura said, we thought of that.

And he said, I'm going to give you the same advice that Jack Nicholson gave me. He said, Jack Nicholson said, there is no such thing is acting. Jack Nicholson told him, look, I play exactly the same character in every movie I'm in, which is just Jack Nicholson. And when you think about it, one flew over the cuckus nest is no different from The Departed or about Schmidt or any of the other movies that Jack Nicholson has been in.

Chinatown, they're all Jack Nicholson. And so, as I mentioned earlier, it's Jack being Jack as honestly as he can. And it's his emotional honesty. Yes. That's the bottom line right there is his emotional honesty makes him convincing in every single one of those rules. So they said, we wrote this specifically for you and you're going to be in it. So I said, okay. So they said, we're going to shoot in Mexico, Baja Mexico for the entire month of October last year. And I flew down to Mexico. It was a wonderful cast of professional actors.

I was the only one who was not a professional actor. The star is Jeff Fahey, who has been in almost 400 different TV series and movies. He's a brilliant actor, a very well-known character actor, and a genuinely all-around great guy. And the other actors, absolutely wonderful people. We had such a great time. And I saw the final cut of the movie a couple of days ago. and it is fantastic. My partner and I watched it together

and we're about two-thirds the way through it and I noticed that she's crying and I said, are you okay? And she said, this movie is beautiful. And I said, I gotta say, it's a good movie. I'm terrible in it.

I am stiff. But Sean Penn watched it and he told me I was wonderful. Which made me laugh. It's a friend. It's very kind of you. He called me mercurial and convincing. I said, thank you, Sean.

So it's coming out at the end of August. They're talking to distributors right now. The worst case scenario is that it ends up on Tobey on one of the streaming services, and people can watch it there. The best case scenario is we head to the film festivals, but it's coming out at the end of the month. And then, crazy as it sounds, just a couple of days ago, I got another movie.

And I'm playing a traveling independent journalist going from campus to campus. I don't want to spoil it. But we're going to start filming it at the end of September. And it's funny. Where? Where are you shooting? All across America. They've rented a bus.

And they told me the other day, they've just wrapped the bus to make it look like a concert bus or something. And we're just going to go from campus to campus and doing our thing. Wow. It's the craziest thing. So I embrace it. It's going to be so much fun. Never in my life did I ever think that this would happen to me. And yet here it is and here all the stuff.

And I would throw in the... In addition to Dead Drop, you also do daily briefing. Yeah, I do... It's called John Kiriaku's briefing room. Briefing room. On YouTube. And I'll tell you, I've only been doing it for less than three weeks. and I have almost 225,000 subscribers in less than three weeks.

It's turning into something. And that's something I'm very grateful for. People like our podcast, Alan, dead drop, and they like briefing room. And I think this is my future. And then for fun, I give speeches all around the world. I'm leaving for Vietnam tomorrow morning. And all of a sudden, I find myself as some kind of a Hollywood actor. Because you are leaving for a far-flung destination

in the time in particular, and I know you've got to get some vaccination stuck in your arm. I do. I'm going to let you run because we've been talking far longer than I thought we were going to talk, but that does. This was fun. We have to have more conversations like this. And, hey, let's promise to do that between us.

And that's to you, the audience. Amen. Thank you much for so much for sitting on my podcast. Thank you, Alan. This was great. Thank you for being on my podcast. Hey, there you. And thank you, everyone.

We'll both see you all next time. I hope that was as much fun for you as it was for me. Coming up in season three, it's back to spying. I had to reclaim my life and get it into some kind of working order, which included finding a job. Since spying was what I knew best, I decided spying in one way or another was going to be my way back. Meanwhile, the thing that put me in prison after I blew the whistle on it,

torture, was finally getting its day in court. and more importantly, the court of public opinion. And the public did not like what it was hearing about what the CIA was doing. If there's anything worse than torture, it's covering up torture and lying about the fact that you tortured and then covered it up. There's a lot more story left to tell. Lots more whistleblowing and a lot more spy. Till next time, I'm John Kiriaku.

Dead Drop is written by John Kiriaku and Alan Katz. and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kariaku, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers. This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production.