Episode 664 - Eric Bogosian

but the fuck here is what the fuck there's what the fuckers what the fuckers what the fuckers what the fuckers what the fuckers what the fuckers what the fuckers what's happening it's me mark marin this is wtf my podcast welcome i'm a happier here as you can probably tell perhaps unless these mike's are absolutely fucking amazing which they might be but you could probably sense the room is different you can probably sense that perhaps tonally things are a little different i am in probably i'm gonna go ahead and say the second greatest city in this country i i i i'm not even gonna go into why one is one or what one is that's what i coward i am but i'm in chicago for a couple of days doing a thing i don't even know if i can talk about the thing but god damn it i love chicago i shot my special in chicago for those of you who haven't seen that special i know it's hard to find i know it's hard to get but go to epics hd.com and there's a way you could probably watch it you might even have epics and they have it on the thing there at the demand place at epics hd.com but don't worry in a couple of months it will be on hulu and we can all watch it together on hulu a lot of people get the hulu eventually all will see it more later with me mark marin tape right here in chicago that's why i was here i'm here to do a joe swamberg thing that i'm not really supposed to talk about but uh it's a pretty cool thing i'm acting i'm doing some uh you know acting for me i'm i think i'm uh i'm okay at acting uh the part of me i can do it uh you know on camera for marin i can also do it uh in other places and i can do it where you can change the name so this is the trick of my acting technique is that my technique is act exactly like yourself give or take a little bit turns this down turn that up if you can make those kind of adjustments and then just have a different name for the character and then if people say like well he's not really acting maybe they don't understand the character that's how i justify and rationalize my acting technique if you'd like to learn how to act with the mark marin system here it is uh just try not to be too self-conscious act like yourself react to things honestly and listen and then take some direction like you know move over there and over there uh can you do an accent probably not if i can't but uh can you do uh can you turn can you can you speak a little uh lower yeah but you might have to remind me because i do a lot of mic work where you're not even supposed to speak well but it's an enunciation thing but anyway so i'm doing some acting and i'm sitting here in my room this is morning before my call time and there there are actors i'm acting with that uh i'm pretty excited about there's people i haven't met but i'm going to be acting with uh jane atoms who i'm very exciting to me because she's one of those actresses that um i think i've met her but i don't know i'm just very familiar with uh with her work and i feel like i know her and that happens a lot that's one of the reasons i think that the podcast functions the way it does is i have a peculiar familiarity with people i've seen once but uh but i guess the point i was trying to make i'm also working with some young actresses i'm working with uh emily rhodikowski and i'm working with um alixandra marzella who is a uh performance artist emily is an actress they both seem like lovely young women uh smart talented people but the thing is like i don't know like alixandra i don't know what she's a performance artist and all i know is i'll tell you this right now i'm in my room right now um doing this i'm talking on the mic i'm being as honest as possible i don't feel great feel a slight nag of a buggy kind of but you know i'm not that that's between me and you i'm just trying to you know kind of suck it up and do the work and she's probably in a room uh doing a naked um snapchat i don't know what snapchat is it was just shown to me recently and i don't know what this whole world of art is i don't know this immediacy i can't get involved with it am i just am i a dinosaur am i am i almost extinct uh with my intellectual context almost uh diminished is it culturally completely irrelevant artistically i mean the woman i'm seeing sarah kane she's a a painter i understand painting i understand a beautiful abstract canvas i understand the skill set that goes involved that gets involved with that but there's a whole world of technological expression art that uh i don't know man maybe i got to get hip maybe i don't have time but uh it's interesting to see it i'm also working with uh david pesquasi who's a chicago guy who i've known uh i have a couple of scenes with him why am i telling you all this am i just gloating no i mean i gotta tell you what's going on and what exactly what is going on joe swanberg is uh directing and i love that guy maybe you guys uh heard me um interview him i think he's a great director and he's very fun to work with and today you know i have to act like uh i'm getting boozed up because it's chicago so today's show speaking of art speaking of performance art elix andro marzola is the new incarnation of performance art i was on the lower side of man hatton during the i would i would think it is the tail end of what was the performance art scene of the 70s and 80s i think it was sort of crashing down my point is eric bagozian is uh on the show today eric bagozian the uh writer actor performance artist uh playwright one man show inventor i think it was bagozian you know outside of theatrical presentations of maybe how hulbert doing marx wane and some other stuff uh i think that bagozian can be credited for um creating the modern one-man show and making us all feel that uh we could perhaps do a one-man show i've talked about gosian a couple of times and i've seen him several times and uh he was one of those guys that you know when i was in new york you'd see his books at st mark's bookstore and you'd be like that guy's the guy sex drugs and rock and roll man and uh drinking in america i think was one of the other ones and you know he was just a he was a dude he was a force down there i think i saw sex drugs and rock and roll two or three times twice as it works in progress and once as a finished piece and i he was one of those guys where i was always sort of like all right this guy's really fucking good he's got a lot of momentum he's got a lot of power up there he's good at the characters but why isn't he just doing stand-up comedy because he's going for the joke a lot of these characters are going for the joke and of course me as a younger man i was like that guy's just a comic that doesn't doesn't have the guts to go in the comedy club whereas men are doing stand-up comedy you know that was a that was my attitude and obviously whatever he did for himself provided him a very wide buffet of possibilities to grow as a creative person to the point where you know i it's not out of nowhere because he's been working on it a long time but he uh he's actually um he's written a book that that talks about a little known story uh in in relation to the Armenian genocide called Operation Nemesis about a bunch of uh i think i believe Armenians that lived in america who arranged the assassination of many of the uh architects and executors of the Armenian genocide and and but gozion just went down that rabbit hole and started doing that work man i'll tell you there was a time where i tried to do the one-man show thing i mean some of you know that but i remember when i did Jerusalem syndrome i got to be honest with you man i was like i didn't know what the fuck to do there's been so many junctures in my career that were sort of uh fueled by by a desperation a need to do something that you know could put me somewhere i worked really hard i'm putting that one person show together Jerusalem syndrome which became a book i used to do these fucking two and a half three-hour shows at this little place called not a 45 me and kiersten aims who was my uh director and dramaturge just editing and recording and putting things together and then we got to run at the west bet theater we had a set decorator and it was like a big deal that was like you know it was a big deal for me to not improvise to stay on a script to to do actions when i was supposed to be act doing actions to to make movements that were planned and written it was it was ridiculously difficult a couple of months i ran at west bet i don't know what i was thinking but uh but i i got a i got a new york times review and the guy was like he seemed to like the show i guess but i think his his note was um the character of maryon doesn't really transform and i never got that out of my mind that that theatrical performance something that's called a piece of theater there should be some transformation i don't know who's fucking rule is that or if that's just a rule that that's something that happens in act at the end of act two or whatever if it's not just about story it's some sort of transformation but uh you know it was a fairly positive review and at the end he said uh we'll see what happens with this mark maryon character this is where one person show ends up this was a painful thing in a way where you know because it was dreus on syndrome is roughly about a trip to israel but more about framing all of my weird obsessions and compulsions and some sort of spiritual context or religious context that uh you know i i couldn't get a regular agent uh you know and and i got a personal appearance agent that that dealt with uh random people who did one person shows jennene frank god bless her does a great job but uh i started to booking uh jewish community centers oh oh bian i'm doing so much better i don't know if you really know you know you really feel in your guts what you are and what you're doing and what it means and you know what you need to do to perhaps change your life when you're you're doing your off-Broadway show at the jewish community center you know in newton massachusetts or i uh you know for like a half a house of people that were expecting something fundamentally jewish and uh you know where you're cussing and you're doing your little bits too you know a lot of senior citizens a few younger people but uh i need let's just say my friends i've hit a few bottoms in in this life but uh but now i'm in chicago working with joe swanberg and some interesting people and i'm excited i talked to bagojian about i always bring it up and we actually like eric we are i believe we are friends uh the times we spent together have been engaging and exciting he's a very um excited and manic and thoughtful and and bright guy and he's a creative guy and he likes to talk so it's great for me so enjoy this uh conversation that i had with eric bagojian and again i'm uh i'm not in the garage right now so there will be no guitar playing at the end i don't even know why i'm telling you that now i decided i don't want you get your expectations up eric's new book is called operation nemesis it's available wherever you get books all right so this is me and bagojian so did you rent them or say these yes of course i have to why is that what your feeling was yes do you want to show because in in la if you show up and you don't have a nice car suddenly you're like a second-class citizen all about you i was driving a 2006 camera for years and i finally had that moment where i had to go to an event i pulled up to the valet and i was like embarrassed and i never thought about it before i was really clung to just to clean it i got clean i just got new and i can't clean it i'm no good with it and i already fucked it up i have a car in new york you do but it's totally covered with dust and what kind of car is that just the toyota highlander they drive in with 150 000 miles right so what are you doing why did you come out here i have been coming back and forth here for about a few months because i wrote this book about an Armenian revenge conspiracy operation nemesis so you're out here on true story true book not a fictional book a real this is real history so at some point you sort of walked into this this story and you're like you're gonna be a scholar you're gonna learn it you're gonna get to the bottom of it but that's a new thing right for you really yeah and also something i didn't really plan on because this was gonna be a screenplay like seven years ago arminions are always saying why don't you write something about the Armenian genocide and like what am i gonna write and then i heard about this young guy who had killed the leader of the Turks in burland in 1921 as a revenge against the genocide and i thought oh this will make a movie it should take me a couple of months to write it i started it all made sense that he got acquitted because they felt that since he'd seen his whole family massacre he had a right this is what he had said in court and i for ten years yeah yeah and once i started doing research on it you can get the court transcript online the man's name is so come on tat laryon yeah good luck with yeah yeah yeah yeah once the first hour your research is spelling that so have a good morning and learning how to say yeah and then i found out that in fact he was a member of a hit squad operating out of massachusetts there was a obscure book that came out of france that i found in translation yeah and that there wasn't just him there were a couple of dozen guys and that they targeted six they targeted all these Turkish leaders and they knocked off six of these guys though pretty much all the guys who committed the genocide were killed by Armenians five years after the genocide from massachusetts well they were people all over new england massachusetts were the organizers they were these small businessmen and they recruited these gunmen men who were like ex-militarians and other guys were familiar with how to put this was uh this was uh this was uh solely uh this was not uh sanctioned by the government of armenia uh this is historically a little vague but no they couldn't sanction it because the government army it was a very small so was it like munic was it like the israeli revenge from munic was there some sort of cool verdict operation within the government that's like you guys were not saying do this but go ahead if you have it was more of something that a political group had decided that they they they there had been devastation and different people were like what should we do should we save the orphans should we raise money to get women out of muslim bond is just post genocide okay before we go too deep into it because i live you know right here clandale and the Armenians are part of my day-to-day life actually and you know i i hear about the Armenian genocide but but i'm ignorant of it so is this something you grew up knowing about oh absolutely what's what happened when i was a little kid my grandfather used to sit and tell me stories when i was five years old he said if you ever meet a turk kill him right i mean these were the kind of the numbers in the events in in a short in a short way uh what happened world war one under the fog of war yeah the the leaders of the what was then the ottoman empire the turkish government figured they can get rid of all the Armenians well and when nobody's looking and take over that that turf they yeah they could take their property right you could take their their position their minds their factories and also get rid of them because they were christians in the muslim country this is a it's a horrible echo of what's actually happening right now over there and so in the in the 1915-1916 with a big killing years and the estimates are over a million people who are in the we're talking about civilians here we're talking about women children just going through the streets shooting them or actually camped well they send out uh soldiers if it's a small village you just bring everybody you just kill everybody or you kill all the men right or throats or whatever and then send the women on a deportation caravan with their children which goes into the desert which you can't survive uh-huh this is classic and so if they can possibly get to the place in seria which was where they were aiming them which is this desert and they might go in circles for weeks and then finally you know just wear them all out anybody who got there they were concentration camps and then they died there as well in dares or which is what which is in the news all the time now as like as a jewish guy you know you grow up with these stories you know they never forget the holocaust you know generation even if i didn't have a family that would that died in the holocaust it was something that you were brought aware of culturally as a jew so now as an Armenian kid you're full Armenian yeah so your grandfather would tell you this these stories he saw his family get killed maybe well he saw things that he would tell me but like they would get round up everybody into the church lock the doors and burn the church down with the people in it and that was something that he told me about terrifying as a kid i don't know what i made of it it all seemed like it had happened very far away in a very first of all i had no way what is Armenia where is Armenia where we middle eastern did they ride camels i didn't know any about that so we grew up with these rituals and habits and foods you know in culture yeah i loved it i loved it i loved being Armenian in fact you know just trying to embrace my roots which to be honest coming into this hollywood thing in the 80s and i have an agent saying if you fix your nose and straighten your hair and change your last name you have a future in the studio they really say that yes he took me to the grill when i got signed up William Morris in 1983 he looked at you you have a lot of talent just do these but then right after you said no did he say like well we'll catch you as a jew that's my job pretty much i am the archival jewish guy on everything i do right you did that what he out movie i was well done well done well done what was that we played the brother and one constructing that was great thank you i learned a lot about acting doing that particular bit really from him because he's pretty on hand off i just i was i only had a few lines i mean i had a few pages of carol and erin and then i and i was like today i'm not going to go to craft services and hang out all day and talk complain about my agent right stay in my trailer and i'm going to just keep doing these 12 lines over and over again right and uh and he goes fairly slowly lighting and everything and i was in there like six hours i already knew it when i got to set going deep Jew and then i went yeah but i really thought about what what are you really saying here what's happening and i'd never really done that deep work before and that and was it showing how i bring it to everything i do i say wait a minute you think you know this you think you know your lines you think you know what this scenes about but stick with it you'll there's more here you just haven't found it yet and so that's been sort of a new part of my my MO right so it's my assumption like you know i'm looking over you know what i'm interested in about your life that that this project this operation nemesis for whatever reason that you went down this rabbit hole at a time in your life where i i think it was probably important to you to connect with your heritage and also like in large my sense of who i am which includes like who my grandparents are what it means to be Armenian and all this kind of stuff but this is in terms of keeping it at arm's length right i'm a little uh or literally running away from it because i imagine not unlike me you know when you're young and creative and you want to make your mark there's a liability to you know getting hung up on on tradition or your pastor you just want to be who you are and do your thing i also i was that i mean i was a super i was one of the first mall rats in the united states i built a mall near my home where'd you grow up in massachusetts in wuber and we built the Burlington mall and i used to just me and my friend we got busted there how old are you in potnut i'm 62 so i'm 52 all right so ten years before i that was the first mall that was that was when i started happening so we they didn't know when they built a mall so that it would attract teenagers we'd just go there and around yeah and we were in the park a lot smoking we could actually just drop the acid as well in the cops bus that i'm like next thing i'm in handcuffs tripping on acid in a jail cell in preliced it i'm actually trying to get my uh what's the picture they do with that little number the mugshot we can't get it i might ask somebody look it up for me so what year was that so that was like 69 that's late 71 71 i just gone to college i'd come back to hang out with my homies and we so you're going going to you're going to college that first year the entire culture is blown open by the 60s and it's sort of just setting lung into just pure drugs and rock and roll the uh it was like a junior version of that because that was all happening when i was still in high school well that's what i mean like right so the the actual revolution was already subsiding and just now in infiltrating pop culture in the form of music so everybody but i was already doing all that stuff i mean i started doing bad stuff when i was in high school yeah what was the bad stuff then you know acid acid acid but acid acid and i worked in a drug store which wasn't helpful so but that was like the real acid right yeah that was a mythical kind of like that was the real shit but we had we've had uh bikers we burn yeah so we would i would grab a bottle of something and i'd take it up to these guys yeah can i say this now yeah like i'm gonna bust it for doing i think it's a statue of limitations fucking 50 years ago white cross you know i find a bottle of white cross and i find these bikers and they'd say here here's a bag of weed for that and that's because that's all i wanted was to some of those like bannies almost there was like a little white speeds yeah i take like five of them and i love hanging around those guys because they kind of protected me i grew up in a town that i mean it wasn't there were a lot of tough guys i remember i wasn't i wasn't right so i needed i needed the big guy and you are a minion so you're surrounded by these like you know these uh new england counties which are some of the hardest most interesting people i i know guys i come from where i started doing comedy in all those towns oh yeah the satellite towns are Boston all over new england and it's intimidating there's some intimidating cats out there well i made sure i had one of them right now because you'd be sitting there you know smoking weed at some party yeah and having a drink and there'd be some guy just watching you glowering like who's this guy yeah yeah who the fuck are you yeah and then Mikey would stand up and he's okay he's okay and then i wouldn't you know years later Mikey took a bite out of me when we were in the middle of a fight like a bite like a bite i had teeth marks for about six years where's Mikey now Eric he's six feet under something yeah he was a great guy so he growing up in new england now okay so was there an Armenian community because he talked in watertown where i was a little kid yes and there was the st. James church and that's where i was an altar boy and i did an altar boy and catholic no Armenians are Armenian Armenians are Armenian apostolic they have slightly different groupings like especially down here in southern calone you have the the the more political Armenians they're they're one group and then there's the the guys that i came up with which are like but they're all Armenian Armenian is the oldest christian religion pretty much in the world in 301 ad the the Armenians decided to become christian maybe at the time it seemed like a good idea yeah so there's still a few people that remember Jesus or had a grandfather that my grandma these are run with Jesus oh yeah the first apostles went to Armenia yeah that's where they went right Bartholomew we're at work we got spread the word unfortunately a few hundred years later you have the the first giant muslim empire the Arabs they don't really like christians right and they're followed by the the the Turkish muslim empires the Mongols all none of these guys are happy about christians and it's still going on it's sadly sadly sadly on my way here today i was thinking we're going to talk about whatever it is we're going to talk about incense such bad shit is happening over there right now i wish we you know i wonder to what degree just if we can take one second to be a little political sure to what degree there's a kind of a racism against middle eastern people that people don't care about what's happening to all these Syrian refugees it's just some statistic and especially for us as Americans who started all this crap in the first place and why everybody's running all over the place over there what are we doing to help them you know these it's going to start getting cold out there in a month or so and these are just families to sneak all over the place in fact it was this kind of thing that kicked in my feelings about what were my roots back when Serbian Bosnia was happening in the 90s i would watch these refugees coming out of these towns and let's say that must have been what it was like for my family and my people because this is what happens they come in these people just yeah living their life yeah not bothering anybody they're not even political or they're not thinking about it no they're just they know they're in the street no army shows up they take all the men off and they put a bullet in their head and then they take all the women and they do stuff with the women and then who knows i mean in the in 100 years ago the children were valuable too you could a child you could keep that child to be like a slave to you or you're or could be a child to adopt the child right so at any rate i just think that we got to think about this is a major humanitarian yeah screw up and i wonder to what degree because these people are Middle Eastern yeah nobody seems to care that much i mean people care i don't know like it might be that but it's also just about American culture in general that the you know the level of distraction and immediacy to people's lives you know and their concerns are selfish but also complicated i don't know that necessarily you know Americans are bad people are judging in this Middle Eastern it's just not here i know we started it that's the thing i know but you know we have some responsibility well i'm not arguing with you but i don't know if that if that occurs on a personal level i don't know that if the average American if they really knew what was going on i think they'd be like why i'd like to help but i think the leap for an average personal you know one on one American to go like this is my fault that's a different political issue but a humanitarian movement you know certainly should people should be aware but what i think is interesting about you is that you early on in your career have always been you know a voice of brutal satire of this country so your your awareness of what America is on not necessarily political level on a cultural level was intact you know from the beginning and as you get older now you get wiser and you get more empathetic and your heart gets bigger you're able to sort of broaden that the understanding of what America is responsible for on a global level you know into this awareness now in this work with Armenia but like when i look at think about you you know or whatever i uh project as who you were on the lower east side in 1980 or whenever the fuck that started yeah that you know you you were an angry sweaty you know manic voice you know attacking America from the inside classic angry young man who knows everything knows better and with great indignation i'm telling everybody off and i know what's right and you don't know and i'm going to tell you although i did it all as you say in satanic or sarcastic afterwards you know the whole idea was to create a you know street people by the way i just want to tell you that those old monologues that i used to do yeah i have all my friends doing them now and we have them online 100 monologues.com i just want to tell you that we've been spending a couple of years we've now got 50 of them because it turned out over those 20 years i had done a hundred different bits yeah and characters oh yeah and somebody was saying one day i don't know who it was one of my friends i said you know i could do one of those and then we started shooting them and collecting how they hold up they're good yeah funny it's more funny some are better than others i mean there's people on there like i mean gentele does one of the one of the bits uh michael shannon does one that stool bar does one i like that funny that guy so give me a sense of this because this is like a piece of the new york puzzle i not talk to anybody that you know that that era of performance when i think performance art really started to have don't say performance art to me but okay no just define itself that's what it's called so you know it's not called stand-up comedy you know you can call it theater we call performance let's call it okay but i'm just trying to you know the same people you want to take responsibility for seria as americans we need that we need to sort of broaden out you know performance art is what it is to them but now they know it's performance but uh but what was it what was the scene because you come out would you go to theater school and then go to new york i mean you're in mover how the fuck did you i was i was at theater guy i had never been to theater when i was a kid run a teenager we did theater one day in english class right and i was like a fish to water i was like this is this is great what is this we're doing what was it it was shakespeare we were doing romeo and julia i played capulet i yell at julia for getting home late all the time or whatever and you're like i can yell i can yell i was that was that was that was that was mover and acting right and they turned it was like a little drama club and i started doing that and it was just you know i really like in it to sports uh like everybody can play sports everybody can do theater right there's always one guy who for whatever reason he can stand up there and he can hit right home runs in in six games and and i just had an ability to do this i think it was probably because i spent so much time i was a kid locked in my bedroom talking to myself in the mirror but at any rate i lived in this fantasy world and when i was given the opportunity so there i am an actor so he says you're an actor you should be an actor you should be an actor you should follow this but i come from a very working-class background like you don't go in the arts you don't do he's a bookkeeper right and my mom was a hairdresser or is it you got brothers and sisters i got a younger sister she's great she's a school teacher uh-huh and um so i didn't think it was a practical idea and i went off to college and i didn't do it and i ended up doing theater again in college and then i studied it just a theater group right then i finally said okay look i dropped out because i was doing too much acid and stuff and then i went back and it was acid that was your drug of choice acid perfect that's a lot of work don't worry i worked my way into the more relaxing that yeah and and note and i have to say this because i know that the young insert out there was sitting stopped everything 31 years ago so and i totally have a big chunk half my life but i for me for this guy for this junkie i have to be i have to be clean and sober or i can't do anything i'm disabled yeah it's a disability i know but but i'm not gonna be i'm not gonna show up for work i get that but like a lot of like what year did you get sober uh 84 all right so this is like you know like i said i mean how come you do so much stuff about being high on drugs and everything when you don't do any of that stuff yeah but you did some fairly you know uh some very powerful work that you know life-defining work you know career-changing work when you were fucked up but i got inverted everything i'm not saying it's a good thing rooms i get it i get it i you know i'm sober too and you know we talk about that here but it's sort of interesting that a lot of times people i'm not romanticizing it but uh but you had to hit the wall pretty hard and pretty publicly and you certainly explored um the uh you know the negative side and positive sides of drug use and drinking in your work before you cleaned up well and you know i mean i don't regret it i mean i think you know that's everybody says that it's been down that really really you want to survive it you don't want to come out the other end of being a box yeah yeah on the right side of the grass i think or is it right is that what it's wrong? the wrong side of the roots yeah well i so yeah so i came so i gave up i gave up the whole when i came to new york i was so intimidated i was so intimidated i was so intimidated i graduated and i just moved to new york i had come as a student and then i decided i want to live here because it was just amazing in 1975 and city was insane it was like it was like broken wasn't it yeah i was living in times square and i just thought this was the craziest best thing i'd ever i wanted to be here it was just chaos pirates criminals everywhere absolutely the cops would just leave at night like 11 o'clock at night they were gone and everything just went into total chaos and the and the trains and everything and i was young so i didn't care i thought this was a real way and i also was getting deeper into the adventure of the drugs and so you go as a student and you check it out and you like holy shit this is what is happening but i can't i can't compete as an actor i feel like really i give up yeah and i end up in so-ho around all these visual artists so i come and move there yeah in 76 76 i worked in place called the kitchen right and all my friends were either composers choreographers or visual artists they weren't i didn't have any theater guys but this was sort of the beginning of that that that artistic renaissance of of sort of a whole new type of expression there was an art scene in new york that you know wasn't like the painters of the you know 50s and 60s that sort of evolved out of that you know whatever the new york art scene was and i was going into all these different areas and taking real chances though right well it was i'd go out very minimal and it had gotten very esoteric my cool people when you got there well just prior to that you basically feel glass is the king of music or he's becoming just starting right and there's everything yeah donald jud and you know really clean high-minded shit yeah yeah my crowd is you know Robert longo and Cindy Sherman and um it keep hearing was over another neighborhood but that's all everybody's making pictures of things stuff that anybody can look at and go oh i get what this is and um and we were having fun we were also in the clubs like all the time and this was just what had happened what were the clubs like cvs or the other ones like mud club and um tier three so at that time you know you're seeing a zillion young people showing up in new york just thinking what crazy shit can i use all the music that's going on that's that's the height of cv gb's right and that's like the whole new york punk thing you know music is being i've been i showed up my thing i was not hip to the punk thing until somebody said we're gonna go and i'm like i don't want to do that punk thing when f- hendrick's died i didn't want to go here anymore rock and roll and i said no no come here this thing yeah and i don't know i think it was like um oh who was it the heart breakers i'm not teddy harry johnny johnny johnny johnny johnny and this stuff was like real down in grey rocker all hands anymore yeah uh maxis and city and uh that was what i i was like i love this and then i was just clubbing for the next three years right but what was the creative process when did it become apparent that you know you could that there was a new theater happening that performance was viable well it was it was all about a community so there's all these lofts and people are just doing the craziest stuff some of its like real theater some of its like not real theater you know like Willem de Fos down the street doing was to group with was to group yeah and they're and they're doing and spalding was around in those days was he of course i was falling in one of her oh i saw spalding when i first got to new york he was already doing to the crime by sam shafferty that's how he was great guy he was great what did he play what did he play what he play in that he was uh hot oh yeah yeah and he um and i went backstage i was like this kid yeah i just i thought that was great he goes and i said could i you know would you have a cup of coffee with me which people asked me all the time and he goes uh no but you can buy me a drink right we went to magoose and he was incredible i never forgot the fact that this man was kind to me we were friends sadly what do you tell me anything i mean what can you tell anybody that's pretty much the smartest thing anybody could tell you is like a kid yeah just go yeah you know like you do it you know right that's what everybody has always said to me that's what bauverstone said to me when we i was writing talk radio the movie of it it was like i don't know what to tell you just keep writing right so you see the one now but keep running around there's all this vitality and we're going on and shit going on and you're going on and you saw some stuff where you like oh what is that shit yeah oh all the time but the the main thing was we were entertaining each other right we're like who can make up some crazy shit it's going to make the other guys laugh as opposed to i'm gonna make something go to Broadway or make something that's gonna be like commercially and there's no commercially anything you've got some nights eight people in the audience oh i know yeah and i had one place when i was like six people in mother spoke english i'm like playing to the guy who's taking the money at the point by itself um and so i would be when i was writing i started creating these characters these monologue things and of course it was like when i first started it this was very intimidating i mean now people are so used to seeing this stuff but to do an old bum or something a really crazy yelling at you kind of bum who had done that you know the only person who you know they always forget that Robert Klein was the guy who first started doing street people we did that bit please do you remember please please please please this guy in the street he did junkies comedian so and then prior did it too well in prior these guys were a big influence on me the energy they'll like come out and yeah the first first prior live movie right knocked me out and i said i want to do that kind of energy in a theater because i am so bored with what's happening in the theater so i started doing this stuff and it was very aggressive never saw comedy though i think we talked about this before because there wasn't really a comedy club scene there so i'll give you a pass on that but was there ever a thought today it was sure because at a certain point they started lumping me together with the new comic scene which it was breaking literally star yeah well you know gillbert was doing his stuff and yeah yeah and so they would say you're a part of this right a squire wrote a piece about it or something so i go okay i'm gonna go do that so i went to catch i stand up there you know they have a green light and a red light as soon as i started talking they started playing in the red and i'm feeling like being run over and mugged it and say i could not do it there's two things i will always have tremendous respect for it one stand up comics i can't do it yeah and two radio talking you know i did the guy in the movie right but to do it for real yeah it's hard it's hard they've i've been guessed i've guessed there's a people who say hey why don't you take the show for a night then scale so what i mean right and i'm trying to think of what to say i can't think of anything because if i have a month the right a line sure of it yeah yeah then i'll play the guy yeah just to fill that dead air yeah yeah keep going yeah oh it's and also i don't think people realize that everything you say you've got to be ready to stand behind yeah and if i have time to think about it i can do that but to be a guy who says this is my view of life yeah and i'm gonna it's gonna be consistent and i'll end yeah but what does it mean if he comes a character you know it means character everything you do is a character you're a character right now i'm a character right now i think like this in real life yeah i know i know i know you're quiet you can't really talk and he's right well i was thinking about you with your cats and i was thinking if people could always see what i how i actually spend my day i have plants yeah why are my plants and my big moment of the day is checking the mail to see if i got a residual check yeah four dollars from talk radio it's running on some cable channel yeah i'm gonna get a coffee yeah all right so okay so you're doing this and you like i'm gonna bring this intensity this energy these characters to theater and i mentioned like a loft scene i was in like all kinds of clubs what was that other one that was uh yeah the other one that lasted a long time not it wasn't the kitchen it was somebody it seemed like someone lived there it wasn't quite in so-ho is upstairs and i had a lot of performance marleen had her place what was it called i don't know our means or something but yeah right places right but if that's where it took place so when you're saying before you're sorry you're performing for your friends that was also a community of people that were interested in seeing this stuff so it wasn't just you and you and smalding or you and Cindy or whoever you know people would know that it was something was happening and you'd all go see that thing eventually the neighborhood got so big that you know you could have a hundred people or what and actually built and built and built i think lory anderson was the first one to start doing set shows repeatedly uh-huh which you know that situation you usually did one night right that was it and then you never did that bit again but she would make a particular show and then i did the same i started thinking yeah this is like a do a set show with several characters yeah i would do a dozen characters did franklin fernes all these places the kitchen and was the first show drinking in america no no this is the first show was called man inside then fun house and then drinking america was the first one i did sober which was like a hit show and by then i was in real by then joe pepid scouted me brought me to the public theater i'd done a couple of shows there that i did that in american place because joe said i couldn't come back do any more solos at the public because we don't do solos anymore than i do drinking in america it's a huge hit and joe comes to joe pepid goes why did you leave us i said well you kicked me out that's why yeah well you come back and you can do whatever you want to do you are in the slot now january you're whatever you want to do will open in january 1986 and i said well i have an idea for thing about a talk radio guy he goes great you got anything written i had 20 pages yeah i was already in their calendar for the next you know that was based on the berg thing no no that came in later oh really well the guy that i created was an annual bernel bernel bernel very similar to the character i created for the play right and when we were going to make the movie i said to ed pressman this is very complicated i said ed pressman there's a book about this guy who got gunned down in colorado uh-huh it wasn't it wasn't color yeah um and we better buy this book because my play sounds so much like i believe me i did not base the play on this guy right but when we did the movie i said i merged the two servers and you have a few adoption the book so you're able to yeah we had the book is was part of our package um and creepy rocket thread glare come in at the end rocket's portal rockets it's so great yeah i know rockets i i saw him towards the end you know like he would you know like he would around because i was living on a second between a and b and eighty nine in ninety eighty nine to ninety one ninety two and i don't remember where i saw him but i was excited and i didn't even know what his place in the whole theme or things was but i knew he was in that you're moving and i knew he was sort of a guy uh low-reseus rockets was a famous character of the scene right junkie big junkie right and kind of a doorman at various places uh-huh the secret to rockets which i only knew from working with him was that his brother had been one of the people that established microsoft or something and it cut off a chunk of stock for him that caused two cents he had given it to him and become worth all this money and then he was able to keep up his chunky life based on microsoft stock so you sort of something like that's a great thing about new york that you don't see a lot in the same way is that there are actual characters within the scene that don't necessarily do anything but they're an organic part of the scene that add to the the the whole sort of energy of the environment and that happens a lot of new york it's like that's that guy you know like yeah well we had such a huge community of amazing people and when aids came it just level oh my god it was horrible that people we lost so many beautiful people yeah at the eichlberger and marrying uh Klaus noemi hiring so many and and then dope did its job too and for people and so yeah it was but i i don't know if that always happens or doesn't happen to community in that in the case it was truly i think it's a singular event that i know i think that you know what happened there and because it's it's never recovered from it and it sends generations searching for it you know for decades after what you guys started you know like long after when i was there in the 90s there was still this sort of like the residual idea of living a performance life on the lower east side but it didn't have the vitality or the originality necessarily that you guys had because you were at the epic center of it and it's cheap we had cheap housing i mean it comes down to like if you don't have to pay that much in rent if you can live there right you're 23 years old of course you're gonna live a rock and roll existence but between you and spalding and i guess i i think in some weird way you know karen finley brought a lot of attention to you know what was going on down there but also but in a way that people were you know able to mock it because i don't you know the performance art became this like what are you gonna put yams in your pussy you know so so it sort of got minimized by a mainstream culture because of characterization i live to that amazing bit that time where uh they were like making fun of it world world federated performance art or something and adam san was pretending to be me and he has like a curly wig on and he's doing something like my bits and i think that anytime something happens you know culturally that that can be seen as a show business whether you want it to or not and it isn't show business then show business is eventually gonna gut it yeah are they are they either gonna steal it or they're gonna gut it well what was weird is it became very successful yeah by the time i did sex rock and rolling 90 90 or 91 or something i mean we rolled up the biggest advance on an off-Broadway show ever i saw that show four times oh my god it was weird because like i always had a little bit of a problem with you i was like you know is he a comedian what the fuck is that good no i don't what does that guy do you know because i was like you know die hard comic and i'm like he just wants to be a comic you know and then i went to see uh because i read about you and i'd seen i'd seen probably seen you talk radio by that point and i'd never seen you live before but then for some reason i went to see it and you were still workshopping it was at the place where stomp was right that became where the orpheum right yeah so i saw it in some version and then i you know in a smaller place i don't know where he does 122 i used to do all my stuff right them right right we're gonna do a benefit over there in a couple so like and then i saw all these different characters and i'm like oh shit this guy's great and then like you know i watched some of the characters then i went to see it again and some of the characters were gone and i was thinking they're like why do you think that guy out you know what we're what happened to that guy and then uh and then and then when i saw it finally at the orpheum i'm like so this is the final show but i still was sort of like why miss that one guy where's that guy the one guy i still remember which guy i miss was the doctor with the guy with the bong like i'm a rebel you know the guy who was like the outlaw but he was just sitting on his couch smoking a bomb like god i gotta be whatever you don't and then there was the guy with the coke can you know i got a huge cock that guy stayed in though that guy right it was great yeah i'm in the um kind of a long thick well shaped prick the kind girl's dad for yeah you're laughing so what yeah yeah yeah yeah he's sort of like this isn't that everybody's fear is that like there's some guy you know who's a moron kind of guy i'm still good at work he has no money but he can get any woman yeah yeah yeah those guys are massive schlong but after that i was sort of like wow this guy's you know really something you know i'm not you know i don't need this validation but he i'm like that was my right so it all builds up to sex drugs and rocker mode that was but was that was that before talk right after that was sort of like the pith of everything going really right for me right then i did that and then a couple years later i did patting nails in the form of my forehead which i even like better i saw that show to suburbia at Lincoln center right and then i did the segull movie around the same that nineteen ninety ninety four i was it was hitting all the cylinders full and when did you meet your wife your wife's a theater director right we've been married 35 years so she made you drunk joe bonnie yeah yeah i've drunk more than drunk and i said to her this is my lifestyle this is who i am take it or leave it and she would like cry instead i was sad and then four years later i mean she's getting up every morning at eight o'clock to go to work i'm still like out of it and i'm hey some people need ten hours sleep at night you know it's a snotically horrible terrible and and then it just i don't even know what happened i mean somebody just said you know how you do it and i said everything's great yeah right like no income with your dad's definitely i'm waking up with it sweats every morning and they said we'll come with me to the thing to the thing yeah this is exciting i talk about it but it's um and that was what a mitzvah right so um and then said the Armenian guy yeah and i'm gonna get my how you can come to my bar mitzvah okay good let me know when it is i'll write you check if you're jewish and is really uh bond i'll give you a 25 dollars really savings bond you know i'm probably giving you a treat yeah yeah you're a treat so do you collaborate with her too right a lot well she directed all those early shows and then she sort of peeled off and was direct nuts and sort of she peeled off at her own shows and now she's one of the premier directors in new york she does stuff with you know neil abute and susan lori parks and lin nottage all the big very very smart Pulitzer prize winning now from that you're a dude you know how many friendships do you maintain are you friends with Cindy Sherman do you are you still like close to the the core group i mean i mean we don't see each other all the time i mean you get older and you have like sure yeah we do see each other we um we all love each other very much um so this is the main much of my new circle of friends is sort of enlarged into another world of art theater and and even movie and tv people who are just kind of my pals i basically play poker now so that's what i that's who my sort of friends are you play cards once a week almost once a week but like actor guy we have got me started in this thing when we were doing talk radio on Broadway and he said i'm having a poker game and it's like i don't gamble i don't do anything i don't like the numbers nothing and that was so he's like i'm like sick into it right when i said like well yeah we really want you to come and then give you us hundreds of hours yeah until you figure it out i was i won that night and i was like that got you and i lost no stuff they always love the guy especially an established game if you go like i don't really know how to play oh you really got to come and then they all know each other's tells but you don't even know what the tell is and you're like you leave bro because you left out the first night and i've played everybody and it's it's it's a lot of fun but uh so how do you get from like you know we do you do sex drugs and rock when we start to do movies you're writing books i mean you write novels too yeah that was after the play thing kind of stopped in the late 90s i had kept writing plays i still write plays but they were just weren't getting produced and so i was fascinated by i mean there's all the things that the internet have changed things yeah and the fact that you could buy a book anywhere yeah it changed the watch people fucking on your phone but you could be it's an amazing world we let well yeah well yeah so you can get a book to somebody in the brassica that they couldn't get at their local bookstore and that changed everything i mean david foresta wallis and all the kind of great stuff that was coming in that period dayveggers yeah i'm like i don't know i like books so i started writing books and i and i wrote three novels and um i don't think i ever found that audience but the thing about a book is it's still there yeah and i had been doing so much ephemeral stuff around it there's so many of these books here and you know what i haven't read most of them and don't tell you but a few of them i read a book that i gave you i was that perfect heart is a it's so like navel gazing existential i'm saying erica look i got through it maybe it'll help you don't don't kill my voice man also i think you can do things when you're young you can't do when you're old and there's things when you can do when you're older so i can do long form now and have the the presence of mind to stick with it until i have 300 pages done whereas when i was writing those short things i had a million ideas but i couldn't i could never complete so that's what all i could do is about a three-minute monologue and i could write that and work on that and now i'm in this other zone where maybe my ideas aren't so great but i can write something very long you have discipline you have a different type of patience you have creative confidence and i had been writing all through this period once i did talk radio i was working for the man here in hollywood right i didn't you know see it right or one i know i was i was an actor and ci for one order that was more recent but just i worked as a screenwriter for you know oh yeah like a doctor like give it to bagojian you know i get a book or something and you adapt it i mean none of them got made into movies but i got paid i got paid wga so like you got health benefits and so that was like my invisible job right nobody knew i was doing right and i did that for about 15 20 years and it was good yeah you have kids right i have two boys yeah how old are they 28 and 24 holy shit yeah holy shit is right so they're like how they doing great good yeah they're not in college anymore so now i can start to do my own life again run around do you hang out with them oh absolutely i mean that's i'm not gonna say i mean my relationship with my parents was fine but it's typical of that time which is there to parents and i had it but i had that completely i love you but fuck you i gotta go and i'm angry at them and i'm not around and i go away from a few times but my my guys i mean i spent a lot first of all i'm the generation of dads who spent a lot of time changing diapers and doing all that stuff and always around them my wife was working a lot so i'm with and so now they're these men that i have i have a relationship with i don't have with anybody else and you know what they make me laugh and i was like that's all i care about in relation and they don't know drunk care right yeah never that's great yeah they didn't never see me drum they heard the story i heard the story i was early on when i was first getting sober and they were little daddy could get a little they call me crazy daddy and everybody would like leave the room because i'm going nuts how did you with that because i you know like i'm just reckoning with that now in the last few years you know at 16 years sober the the rage problem finally exhausted itself it literally that's about when it burns up well more and more there's less and less to like what am i what am i being so freak what am i so crazy about when i was right yeah what am i afraid of yeah now for me it came to a sudden end because a friend of mine's son died from a drug overdose when he was like 18 years old my best friends it was mind-blowing heartbreak just and it changed my whole notion of what's important what is important my life and what am i losing my shit over this because he didn't do the Spanish homework right cares right and so i just stopped i just said this right i don't care because it was all about fear like they're not gonna get into college or something right right what really right you never cared about this shit in the first place why is this something that you're losing you're going nuts and so i just stopped as if this kid ends up on the couch for the rest of his life smoking we which they never did any of that stuff but it's interesting what kicks in you know despite whatever you grew up with there is that idea that you want your kids to have a opportunity to you know to find their way in the world to do the responsible thing even if they're you know they think that they don't want it now there's that i imagine with the kid where it's like you may think that you want to be this way now but you're gonna regret it yeah and you're in some shame you were carrying well we had more frank conversations than i ever had with my parents i mean i i would say to him like harry when he was 12 or something i said look look i just want to tell you this is my first time being a dad okay so you got me some slack here just go with it a little bit right and i would say so like you know um you know how you kind of feel weird around girls and you're shy smoke weed it'll be like multiplied by 10 so if you want it to be a lot worse start smoking a lot of grass and then you'll never talk to a girl again and it's great because he was um well he had a girlfriend and he got laid a lot more than i did i was and that's a whole other problem yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's called statuary rape Harry you can't do that so so you've had all these different sort of lives creatively you know as a you know performer and actor screenwriter novelist and then collaborator with with other people and stuff and and so i imagine like this brings us to this point where you know you want to own your heritage and then this book like i just have to assume that and i'm projecting and you can tell me if i'm wrong that you know when this thing started to blossom and and sort of you know review all these things to you not only about the Armenian genocide or about the history that your your sense of family and everything else must have just kind of converged as well on this yeah in the sense sure i mean you respect what it look when you're a kid old guys are just old guys you know they're not that but they don't seem to have and then you go oh i get it he went through all this stuff this is what being this guy is i mean for me it was it was a reversal of i had rejected myself as a sort of ethnic i was not going to be this epic yeah i get exactly and then as i more recently i've like no you are you know own it yeah love it the music the food you know i was in the sixties if i yogurt or something yeah just an Armenian food yeah food stable and we call it the little kids in the neighborhood they watch me eating it like how do you eat how can you eat that stuff that's disgusting and now everybody eats yogurt shishobabob all the things that were things i grew up with it were so weird and foreign but that's me you know now we are pretty anti i mean i said this earlier but i mean middle eastern people are kind of like endlessly put down in our society and that's what i look like i look like a guy who's an arabar or a few or whatever yeah and i'm um i have to i have to kind of get past that you know it's weird we live in a society i actually said this the spike lee one time where black people can be like heroes and white people are heroes but brown people aren't you know and i i think that's changing that's changed lately but pretty much the united we in our society every country we have ripped off we claim that they're the ones that are doing like the arabs are the sneaky people because we've been stealing their oil for like 75 years the mexicans are lazy we're we're we're right all these people are there's somehow bad or less than us black people are violent i mean come on there's like black culture is not black culture is actually more warm and embracing than than other cultures that i know of so now we put down all these people and i and i and i like i accept this idea of who i am in some way kind of less than that's crazy it's just it is a little hard for me one of the things about having kids is that i look at my boys and they are beautiful and wonderful and i remember when i was there age i was so self-conscious about my hair this curly hair people come like tuxedo my skin is a little dark and other kids and i look at my kids like how can i ever thought that about myself what a horrible thing so the the act of operation nemesis the act of creating this book not only it's an active integration yourself into your heritage and also the history of what you're talking about into the fabric of our culture that you know you're raising awareness and also now you're a celebrated Armenian i would imagine i mean you're here to oh there's a community particularly the um the people who are the Armenian community has a very political side and a very non-people side in the political side i was never part of that world uh there the Armenian National Committee who are actually having this big bank with this weekend and have and are honoring me with giving me an award they have been so supportive they are also the people who made sure everyone was aware of the Armenian genocide the centennial of it last april which just happens i don't know if this is some kind of mark or something but i was born on april 24th which is the day that they commemorate the the beginning of all the killings at any rate yeah i've gotten to know these communities that are super tight Armenian communities here in southern california all over the place i was in vegas the other day i was like visiting the church there and do they think you got it right you know i was very wary of that as i was working on the book because i'm talking about some stuff that they were involved in a hundred years ago and and finally gave it to them in march some of the big guys in the in the community took me aside at this event and they said we're with you we like the book and um supported it and had told all their people to to to read it and buy it and this is this is a new story to a lot of Armenians absolutely yeah the old story the um the original tatlarian story of the kid the engineering student who shot tatlat posh in berlin is a story that a lot of Armenians know the story of operation nemesis that there was this huge conspiracy operating out of new england that knocked off six major turks who by the way like i said if you're going to talk about the Armenian genocide you got to mention that five years later they did this but that's news to a lot a lot a lot of people and uh and i think it's interesting not just as an Armenian but in terms of world history i don't know of any story i mean munic is kind of related to it but they basically knocked off a whole government it would be like if a Jew had found Hitler and Gurring and gerbils and all these guys and and killed them we just all he tried yeah yeah he got a few yeah and it has the same kind of um uh like with eichmann going into another country and doing this is not legal right so you're you're stuck with this thing of like it's kind of illegal it's not kind of it is illegal what they're doing they're kind of murder incorporated going after these guys oh you mean that yeah and then there's a sort of sense of like what is god what was justice and then justice and then you basically say what's right and then if these guys are really and they are responsible for murdering a million people then some people felt it was their job to go and not let them get away with it or maybe come back to power later and keep killing more Armenians which was another part of it well they had by the way i had to say they had already been condemned to death by trials after war there were war crimes trials and all these men had been they were it was already established in court in turkey um but in any rate i just this story blew me away i didn't know it i honestly working on it i thought i was going to get it done a lot faster than i'm good friends with sarah vowell and she was sort of like rabied me through this thing a little bit and and so i thought oh i can write a popular history i'll just learn all the facts and then i'll kind of put it in my own voice but it turned out to be a much more serious and hard thing so but halfway through it i realized i was really in deep with a complicated story but what are you gonna do you got to finish it so i kept going and so you had that discipline and you wrote something that you know where else but i mean i had to finish it what you're gonna climb a mountain go halfway it's gonna be a text it is a text it's a it's an audiobook too so it's me reading and i don't know how to pronounce any of these Armenian names so it's just insane trying to say all this stuff i can i don't even have pronounced my own last name you know it's like it's bagojian bagozian what is it will be correct pronunciation spaholian yeah that's not yeah that's not yeah that's what it's about too true first started my career today we have eric how do you say that name come on really yeah you can have me honest i guess you're gonna do this right i get all the time meringue moron moron fucking horrible it might i think it's simple so i was complicated than yours yeah yeah uh so what part of new england did these guys work from boston then there was a guy in albany there was a cpa in albany there was an insurance agent in harford kennadik and they were all part of the same political party and they basically said this has to happen it reminds me of the cubans too with the plot to kill casters like they're these expats who you know want to take you know do what's right so they knew that this kid sahkamantar laryon had shot and killed somebody in constant an obel who they who was seen as sort of a traitor and they recruited him they brought him to boston they looked him over because they knew they wanted him to get caught so that then in the trial he could talk about the Armenian genocide they wanted people to hear about it so they needed a guy who who would be presentable and he was a very sympathetic character with this did he know he was going to get caught yeah he the plan was to get caught and to go and and then get as many witnesses into the trial as possible to talk about the Armenian genocide which is what they did so this was a very famous trial 1921 New York Times covered it it was covered all around the world and this guy was so sympathetic because everybody thought that he had been the survivor of these massacres he had seen his mother beheaded right in front of him and he was this engineering student happened to see this guy in the street and went and got a gun of course none of that was true he was he knew exactly what he was doing in fact i even referred to a cia manual on on on how to kill people and the way he killed the guy which was to shoot him in the back of the neck right at the top of the spine that is the most effective way to make sure that you're in and he can't shot he killed all six of them no no he killed him and then there were other assassins who were operating all around europe there were there were all kinds of people there were Armenians who spoke turkish who pretended to be turks and it was one guy who actually got circumcised so that when he was in like the the hamam that turks if they saw him they would think that he was muslim because muslims get circumcised like jews do and right all right so he um anyway all these different guys were all over the place in rom they knocked a guy they got the grand viseer they went back to berlin they killed two more guys there they got somebody in konstantinopo they got jamaal pasha in konna tableesi and they basically one other guy got caught he also got cut loose based on some idea of temporary insanity and they basically grew up most of them are old men here in california by the 1960s there's pictures of them hanging around each other i can show you in the picture this guy killed two people this guy killed three people this guy killed out here like in glendale uh san francisco oh yeah so they kept in touch yeah oh yeah they knew each other they never they didn't talk about it one of the interesting things about this whole thing was it sort of came out of nowhere these were all nobodies they were all like nobody ever knew these people and then once they shut the operation down they basically put all the stuff away and then talk about it ever again so when i heard this story it was like what and where's the book on this where's something about this and i couldn't there was this one obscure book coming out of france by jokdaroji and use that for some source and then i did my own research found out that british intelligence probably helped these guys out british intelligence wanted these turks killed as well and they thought well we could kill them or we could just tell the Armenians where they live and so they i think they slipped the address to the Armenians it's fascinating because like you know you did this great service for the community and for history and for everything else and you just you know the impetus was like nagav now write a movie and then all this one became a bigger responsibility it became a humanitarian responsibility i don't know obviously whatever the compulsion was like how is this story not been told properly yeah i mean it wasn't an i didn't see how there was no upside for ego there's no money upside i mean little brown paid me in advance but it wasn't that that was like an in it for that how did that feel for you doing something relatively selfless i don't know why i do anything i just do stuff i mean i'm on you're so good to say that no listen i did i met mike jon when i was working with richly letter i met mike judge down in austin i said i love bivis and butted do america love bivis and butted and if you ever want anything because well we're gonna do this movie bivis and butted to america and so i said well anything so he had me do three voiceovers in that movie you know scale five hundred months or something and i forgot about it and uh you know whatever it was fifty thousand dollars later uh with all the royalties and everything because the movie was a huge effect it's probably the biggest hit i've ever been involved with but i'm i try to lead with well let me put it this way i try to lead with have fun keep you know keep things interesting and every time i try to do something for money or i'm i get this big plan i wrote an action movie one time because i thought i would sell it and get millions of dollars it never works out yeah all those plans right don't go i'm no good with the plans i started a production company i was gonna make a live video which exists spent sixty thousand dollars in this thing yeah nothing couldn't get anyone no one wanted no it doesn't exist yeah i mean go on that put it monologues dot com site and see what's so you're you're doomed to uh to operate from your passion i'm doing having being clueless i just don't know i can get possessed the first thing i write your compulsive person i mean nobody writes in our media and history book just because you know like i think i'm gonna it just makes sense you know when i'm working on anything writing and i know you've had this experience it can it quickly becomes a dead end or it like opens up like a flower right oh wow i found this thing this works that's what you're looking for yeah that's that's the moment you know you can hope that but you can't plan it is basically where you say no you don't know what and and i and i don't know where it's coming from and i've kind of given into yeah let's see what happens sure i mean it makes like a little more exciting because since i'm not planning everything yeah uh who knows what's gonna be next year i mean that you take the law and order thing i mean my friend Warren light calls me up one day and says come over the offices today and say hi to everybody i go i'm really busy that i can't go because well dicks here come over and say tick wolf i said i really want and i'm sick because i really think you should come over and say hi to dick so i come over dick wolf says hi to me and says do you want to be the captain on law and order and 60 episodes later i've just i mean i've had the time of my life and it was a blast doing the thing did not see that coming and you made a living doing what you do yeah it's good i was having cups of cod walk in the room say four lines drink a cup of coffee and get to be in that beginning the header of the of the show what do they do and you wrote this amazing book about the this uh this unfold on me that paid for it that paid for the book it's an exciting life you lead in operation emesis just came out a few months ago right yeah and you have you are an active part of a community that you you just you know through youthful condescension detached from and now you have done this amazing deal i realize how lucky i am to be one of these amazing people called Armenians so that's what i am all right well it's great talking to Eric thanks mark that's it that's the show um thank you for listening i appreciate it i i mean eric goes man that was great it's always good to see him it's exciting talking eric wagosian is like being on an amusement park right good times what else do i got to tell you wtf.com you know get your stuff do the thing you want posters for christmas it's getting tight it's getting tight now you might be able to make it underway don't know but uh enjoy yourselves and i'll talk to you monday got some big shows coming up what else i gotta brush my teeth and get dressed and go be an actor do a character that's vaguely like me so we'll uh mute it just trumpet for the end yep boomer libs