Weirding Way Media.

Welcome to episode one hundred and thirty four of the Film we Mentor's podcast.

This is Jamie Benning, your host for the next hour or so.

This time, I'm speaking to James Kahn, the novelist behind some of the most well known movie novelizations from the nineteen eighties.

You'll know his work if, like me, you grew up with well thumbed copies of Return of the Jedi, Indianna Jones and The Temple of Doom, The Goonies, and Poltergeist on your bookshelf.

For many of us, these books were the only way to revisit our favorite films before home video was widely available, so James's work left a real impression on fans at the time.

In our conversation, James explains how an unexpected call while he was working as an er doctor in Santa Monica led him directly onto the set of Et the Extraterrestrial.

He tells the story being part of a group of doctors dressed in hazmat suits helping bring Et back to life on the screen.

That experience introduced him to Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg, which opened the door to his first big opportunity, writing the novelization for the currently in production at the time, Poltergeist.

From there, things snowballed, and Spielberg gave James an unusual level of creative freedom on these books, allowing him to flesh out characters, add backstories, and bring a personal voice to the books.

We discuss how some of those choices became part of fans understanding of the stories, like ben Kenobian Owen Lars being brothers something I still think is in my head more than the prequels these days, and James's inclusion of details about Anakin's duel in the Lava Pits years before the prequels ever existed.

Those details, of course, from the Return of the Jedi novelization, we talk about the type deadlines, the secrecy, a few surprises, including how the draft of the script James was given for Return of the Jedi had Luke Skywalker killing the Emperor, but maybe that was a decoy script that Lucas gave him.

From there, we moved through his other projects, including Templar Doom, where he gave short Round his own character backstory, and The Goonies, where he experimented with telling the story from Mikey's point of view after reading Huckleberry Finn.

Throughout, James reflects on what makes a great novelization, not just retelling the screen play word for word, but finding a space for extra character moments and emotional depth.

And we also discuss his memoir at Jedi Memoir A Double Life, which ties together his Hollywood career and his years in emergency medicine before we dive in.

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That's Patreon dot com, Forge slash Jamie Benning.

This is an independent show, completely independent, and it takes time, resources, and everything else to put these episodes together.

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Okay, here's my conversation with movie novelization author James Cann and I'll be back at the end for a bit more chabbering on.

James, thanks so much for joining me.

We finally got around to doing this, and now I'll let you down a few times, but we finally got there.

It does.

It does tell me how how did this transition of yours happen from one career to another, from being in the medical profession to being a novelist for movie books.

Yeah, it was.

It was a very unique kind of entry.

I was.

I'm an emergency room physician.

I was working in an emergency room in a hospital in la and Santa Monica actually, and one day we got a call from a woman asking if anyone down there could help her figure out how to resuscitate an alien.

So I wasn't there at the moment.

The call was taken by another doc there at the time, and he said, sure, we can do that.

Why don't you come on down tomorrow and we'll show you how it's done.

So then he got me involved as well as the head of the ear because he knew I had a love of wanting to be in the movies.

And it was Kathleen Kennedy and she came down to the ear with Melissa Matheson who had written ET, and they were filming ET, and we gave them a demonstration and I was the corpse.

I was ET, and they pounded on my chest and they were impressed enough they said, okay, you're hired for no money.

It was a voluntary gig.

And we showed up the three of us and a couple more doctors and number of them is from the Saint John's EIR went down to Laird's Studios Monday morning where they were filming.

Laird Studios is a satellite of MGM at that time.

It's where they filmed Gone with the Wind back in the day.

So it was exciting to be there.

And so they dressed us all up in hazmat suits and we were the doctors in that big tent resuscitating ET.

So you know, we all had a hand and pumping on his chest.

And if you watch the movie again, at some point there's a point where alarm bells go off because his heart has just stopped, and five doctors run into the tent and I'm the fifth doctor holding a clipboard.

But you said you were a big fan already of movies, so you're aware of the kind of magnitude of a new Steven spielboug picture.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was always a great fan and always wanted to somehow insert myself into the movie made process.

I had.

I had actually written one screenplay at that point, a sort of semi auto biographical thing based on my experience in the emergency room, right, so you know, and that got that got me an agent actually and some interest, although no one actually bought it, but I was always I was at that point still trying to get in the door somehow.

Was that just born out of a dissatisfaction of the job that you had found yourself in.

No, No, at that point.

Eventually I was dissatisfied with the job.

But at that point it was very exciting.

It was like commando medicine.

I'd always wanted to be a sorcerer from my childhood, reading Fantastic Tales and Strange Worlds comic books, and and being in an emergency room doctor felt very close to that where people would be brought into me.

Dad set actually and I would pull them back to life.

It was a very wizardly kind of occupation.

Yeah.

Nice, and and and so you find yourself in on on set there for the moments when Eat is after Et is found by the stream there, and he's white and he's fading and all of that.

How do you then go from being essentially an extra in that scene?

I assume it was a few days work.

Was it a free ones it was meant to be a week's work?

Yeah, And then.

I didna say, we're also involved in initially rewriting the scene a little bit.

They asked us to fill in, you know, realistic dialogue.

He wanted it to be as realistic as possible, and eventually, except for the spoken lines by the key characters, he asked us to just add lib as if we were actually carrying on a reprosuscitation, So you know, we're shouting out an able API and charge the paddles up to two hundred, as if an ap epenephron would do anything for space alien.

But we went through the motions like that.

Yeah.

It is quite a sort of alarming scene that one, isn't it, Especially for kids?

I mean I was only was I seven or eight when that.

Came out, and yeah, it was very intense.

I remember, I remember being quite upset at that point, like what is happening?

Because it it does have that feeling of being in a hospital where you're relinquishing your trust for a moment to these professionals without really having the knowledge of what is fully really going on.

Yeah, and then for a little kid, it's like, is et dying?

You know what's going on?

It was?

And then he did die for you know, it was very very moving and sad and intense.

I thought, yeah, it makes that bond all the stronger, doesn't it.

Yeah.

Yeah, And watching Spielberg direct direct that seems really remarkable too.

He turned into uh, at some point, into a child himself.

He would he would get down on his Dodgers so he could be eye to eye with the kids in this scene and and talk to them like they were.

You know, okay, okay.

Imagine now you're your best friends just come from out of space and all these guys are coming in and they're you don't know what they're doing to him.

It's just like kids talk to.

Each other when they're making up games, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, He's does really seem to have that ability to pull those performances out of kids.

Yeah, Thomas was quite a performer.

I mean I've seen I'm sure you've seen it as well, that audition tape where he's just a kid.

You got the job, got the job, But then how do you how do you leap from there to.

So at that point I had already written a couple original novels of my own, right, I've written a murder mystery called Diagnosis Murder published by a now defunct I think small Press, and I'd written a much larger novel called World Enough and Time, which was a sci fi fantasy novel by Del Rey, which is a big imprint Time.

And I got to know, uh, actually after after they after she bought the book, she was in New York.

I was in LA, but she was going to be out in LA.

And we said, you know, well, let's get to meet each other.

So we had basically tentatively scheduled a meeting, and then she had to cancel at the last minute.

She was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel because she had a nosebleed that wouldn't stop.

So I said, no problem, and I got someone to take over a couple hours of my shift, and I went over to the Beverly Hills Hotel with my all my tools to stop nosebleeds, and I fixed her up and we had our meeting in her hotel room.

Wow, these moments are sort of you know, sliding doors, almost, isn't it?

Very much?

So?

So I had I had, I had the SI Fantasy novel published, and I thought, okay, well, this is the only time in my life I'm ever gonna be in contact with Steve even Spielberg, you know.

And I was extremely nervous and how did I have the nerve to even think about doing this?

But you know, if I didn't do it now, it was never gonna happen.

So I cornered him in his office between takes.

They were doing another setup, and I had brought my book with me, a little paperback.

It's actually, now.

That I think of it, it's it's right here there.

It is old enough in time.

And my wife, Jille Littlewood, did the silhouette illustration.

Uh.

So, I said, mister Spielberg, this must happened to you all the time.

But I have this book I published with del Rey, and and it's a sci fi fantasy.

I wonder if you'd ever consider making it into a movie.

And he was very gracious and took it and said, well, you know, I'm really busy right now, obviously, but I'll put it on my shelf and someday, when I get time, I'll take a look at it.

And I promise, so thank you very much.

And you know, I felt like at that point nothing was gonna happened, but I at least had bragging rights that Steven Spielberg took my book.

But the next day he a pa ran up and said, mister Spielberg wants to see you in his office.

Wow.

I thought, oh, what did I do wrong?

But I went there and he said he read some of it, he liked it.

I said, so you want to make it into a movie.

He said no, but he was behind the eight ball on Poltergeist, which was then in post production, and they'd been having trouble with the novelization.

And if I assured him that I could finish writing the novelization in one month, I could have the gig based on my writing sample.

Basically, Wow, I thought a month.

You know, I'm scheduled for a dozen shifts in the ear This month.

How can I I can't get out of those and I never I didn't even know what a novelization was at that point exactly.

I had read that.

Graham Green after doing the movie the Third Man, liked how it came out so well that he wrote the novel from his own screenplay.

So that was the first first example of the novelization, I think, and I loved both those, both the movie and his books.

I thought, well, I could do.

That, So I thought, maybe I'm sure I can find people to take over at least some of my shifts.

So I said on the spot, I can do it.

And were you given the script to that point to work from or any daily?

No?

Daily?

Is that?

I?

You know?

The first thing I did was go back and get all my friends to cover all my shifts in the hospital that month, And that afternoon they messengered me the final script, the shooting script, and an envelope full of about I don't know, thirty production stills, pictures of all the characters of the Beast, just so I knew how to describe the people and what was going on.

Photos of the set so I could accurately describe the movement that was happening and the script, and that's all I had.

And they ensconced me in his Spielberg's conference room at MGM.

There's a big conference table surrounded by about twenty old school video games, mistle Command and Donkey Kong and Centipede.

And because he was a big game player.

Yeah, and so I sat there.

I didn't I didn't have a computer at that time.

I had a notebook, a spiral notebook, and a pen.

So they also hired a secretary to transcribe everything I wrote on an IBM Selectric typewriter because I'm not sure computers were even used at that point, or maybe just.

Very very well processing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so and I remember the IBM's electrics very well, these little balls that spun around, that's right, and spewed letters on the page.

So she would come in.

I would write every day from nine in the morning until nine at night in this room, this dark room, there's one window facing on an alley wave of pacing another building, and just write.

And every couple of days I would give her what I had written the previous days and she would go in another room and type it up.

And that's how we did it.

I did it in twenty six days wow, and turned it into Actually I did the first draft in about two weeks.

I turned it in and asked if it was kind of short.

My first draft tend to be sort of skeleton.

Outlines of the plot, and then for.

Subsequent drafts I in fill with character developments and internal monologue and backstory and relationships and things like that.

So after I turned in the first draft, I asked Frank Marshall, who was producing and who is my main liaison at that point, whilst Stephen was busy directing, if I could add additional material that wasn't in the script.

So so they read it and they liked my first draft a lot, and they said, go for it, write whatever you want.

Wow.

So yeah, pretty much free rein then.

Total free rerain in this one.

And so I brought in a lot of material from my own personal experience doing ESP research in medical school and I and I gave put that in into ten Genius character and brought a lot of that information in and developed this whole otherworldly story that was going on in the astral plane.

And it was really enjoyable.

It made it much more like an original novel to me.

It was you know, I was following their basic story structure and plot structure, but creating a whole world that was my own world.

Yeah, because I guess a typical movie script is like what ninety one and twenty page is?

Maybe?

Yeah?

Yeah, when when you've got it in a novelization form like this, I mean, did you have a word target like, no, not at all.

I just wrote until it felt like it was done.

Yeah.

And you know, Poetry Guys came out actually much thicker than some of my subsequent novelizations.

I think because I brought in all this extra material.

And was that released before the film came out or at the same time.

Same generally the same day.

Sometimes I released the book a few days earlier as our marketing to gin up excitement.

About the movie.

But I think, as I recall, these were released at the same time, probably because they were on such a tight time crunch.

Yeah.

Yeah, And did that lead straight into Return of the Jedi?

Then was that the next thing that happened or yeah?

Yeah, then just you know, right place, at the right time kind of thing.

Right as that was finishing, George Lucas called his buddy Steve and said, I'm just wrapping up principal photography on Return of the Jedi.

You know, anybody who could write a novelization for it.

And so, you know, Spielbery really loved the poultry Ast novelization and he highly recommended it.

And then the additional kicker was Jedi was being published by del Rey, so my publisher, Judy Lynn Delray, also gave Lucas high recommendation for me, So that that happened almost just seamlessly.

You know, they offered it.

I said, yes, same deal.

I didn't see any any actual screening of the film.

There was still in the last days of filming principal photography and pickup shots and things.

So they sent me the script and a bunch of slides and photos from the shoot that I used to and you know, by that time I was already familiar with who the characters were from the earlier film.

Yeah, and did you read it was Alan Dean Foster did the original Star Wars in under George's name?

I think?

And then it was Donald Glood, wasn't it right?

Yeah?

Who did Empire?

Did you read those too?

Sort of?

I didn't.

I didn't want to.

I do feel different, actually, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I wanted to just make this my own thing, and I tried to conform into a pattern of what would have gone before.

And I remember like reading this book as a kid and kind of being blown away by those extra details about you know, Owen being Ben's brother and Anakin's fall into the molten pit.

All of that stuff was in my head for twenty what was it, eighty three to ninety nine?

How long that is.

You know, that's the stuff I expected to be having.

So was that stuff that was fed to you?

Was that stuff you came up with yourself.

But both the stuff about Owen's brother and obi Wan was just made up out of whole cloth by me, just because my I had a sense I think even when well I don't know when, but but I had since they were brothers, antagonistic brothers, and in my in my mind, I made up this whole backstory between them, that obion Wan was the older brother and he was restless and he wanted to be a Jedi, but his father wanted him to take over the farm uh and and uh.

But he left and there was a lot of rancor and family acrimony, and he was told never to come back.

You know, he had a big fight with his brother who wanted him to stay, and his brother, Owen said, don't ever come back here.

If you leave now, don't come back.

And then he did come back, you know, obviously with the infant Luke and asked if they would care for him.

And my thought was still that Owen said no, I told you it.

Ever come back.

But but Brew had always wanted children of her own, and she she prevailed upon her husband to take Luke in.

Yeah, it makes sense, It really does make sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and uh, you know, but and Owen trying to exert some kind of controls that at least all right, but never come back to this this farm.

And so you know, obi Wan just stays in seclusion, hermit like in the uh elsewhere in the planet, kind of looking looking over Looke from afar, make sure, making sure nothing bad happened to him.

So that was all my backstory and my invention the uh the lava pits.

I only got a single word from George saying, you know, I asked him.

At one point, so what was the deal?

How did this happen with with Darth And he said, well, they had I'm not sure exactly how it's going to work out.

But but they had a.

Big laser fight duel on this planet where there was laba flowing and and Darth was almost killed and mutilated and and left to become bionic hmhm.

And it's funny how like, you know, obviously in the prequels, some of that was undone, not the molten bit, but the Owen and Ben being brothers.

But I, you know, I was fully expecting that to be I thought it was you know, canon wasn't a term fans unit back there particularly, but I was convinced that that's what was going to transpire.

Did and and you can still buy the novel today in like anthology form or separate, but it's still got all of that stuff in there.

I wonder why they've never kind of weighed in and removed bits and.

Yeah, I think they must have liked it, yea, and said, yeah, that's kind of I believe that let's keep that in.

Yeah, we I just think of that scene at the table.

You know that Wizard's just a crazy old man and you know, stay away from him.

Essentially.

It does feel like a family a.

Family thing, does Yeah, things like what you'd say at Thanksgiving dinner, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, with your extended family and your crazy uncle who you hate.

Yeah, and there are there are other things that I put in that they did cut out.

The biggest one was.

Somewhat not a real extended scene, but it went on a couple pages of Princess Leiah when she's in captivity with a job of the Hut thinking thinking to herself, well, I can make it through this if I made it through being tortured by Darth Vader.

And then she has a long memory about what that torture was like, of being mind probed by those robots, and it was a pretty intense scene.

And I think the editor or whoever was in charge of going through all that must have thought, well, you know, he's her father.

That's pretty creepy to think about a father doing that to a daughter.

And maybe that's an image we don't want people's minds.

Yeah, and I think all of this, you know, the story we're telling here in a way is that, you know, the creative pursuit of creating the trilogy was an ongoing thing.

It was a milliable thing.

You know, it wasn't all completely set in George's mind.

Maybe the brush that the you know, the big brushstrokes were, but thea was not.

No, I know which is which is?

Uh, you know, it doesn't amuse me exactly, but it amuses me a little bit how intensely fans follow canon and insist on cannon.

Yeah, and got crazy sometimes of something.

There's arguments about what is canon what isn't canon, But you're right, it's a very valiable creative process.

Yeah.

I was never a fan of the prequels, you know, I was too.

There's too much expectation for me, and I was kind of my expectations were not met.

Having read things like this and imagined for fifteen years, you know what that might be like.

And yeah, I think a lot of us were disappointed in those.

Yeah, and I'm still in the position where I don't.

I haven't really watched revisited those films.

So in my mind, this book still exists, the comics still exist, the game still exist, all of that stuff, which is just this kind of what if.

Yeah, it doesn't have to be rigid and it doesn't have to be precise.

I like the idea that it's it's a bit more loose and a bit more malleable.

As I said, Yeah, I hear the book was Was it the best selling novel of nineteen eighty three or one of the best selling novels?

Was the best selling novel?

Yeah?

It was number one on the best seller list New York Times best seller list for months and months and months.

And I mean the expectation on that movie was massive.

Of course, you know, it had been you know, six years, hadn't it, And it was to be the final chapter for now at least.

Did you feel that pressure when you were writing it?

Oh?

Yeah, First I felt like stunned, like I'm going to be part of this.

I know, how did this?

How did I get so lucky?

And then and there was intense secrecy around it, you know, yeah, sign that disclosure state documents all day and night just to make sure that.

I wasn't going to disclose anything.

There's a lot of sure And in fact, that one interesting story is the script that I that I was given.

In that script, Luke is the one who kills the Emperor, not Darth Vader.

And that's how I wrote it in the novelization I submitted.

And when I got it back to see that Darth Vader had actually done and I was surprised.

And when I saw George at the it was the fourth of July party up on the Skywalker ranch.

After the release, I said, what was up with that?

Did you change your mind at the last minute or and he said no, I always knew who was going to kill the Emperor, And I think he must have put in fake plot twists in various scripts he gave to various people who had to see it in order to do their jobs, so that if they were going to reveal some thing, they would reveal the wrong thing.

Kind of muddy the water, because I think on Empire, I think the line that Dave Prowse delivered was Obi Wan was your father to Luke on set, and of course they over dubbed it later on with James L.

James.

Yeah, it's you know, canny individual.

Yeah, he hasn't got to where he's got, you know, not being prepared.

Yeah.

I've interviewed a bunch of people that worked on that movie, and I interviewed the editors shot.

One of the EDGs that Sean Barton as well, was based here in London, and you know, they talk about the film being having quite a few deleted scenes actually, and I think they've been published over the years on blu rays and things were they included in the novel from memory, like the scenes where Darth Vader's still going around choking every other officer that comes in his path.

I haven't read it a little one.

Yeah, no, I haven't read it for a little while myself.

But no, I don't remember that being part of the script or the novelization.

How did you sort of go about kind of working out the ewoks as well, because they were the kind of secret at the time, weren't they.

I remember they weren't kind of revealed too late on just from a few stills presumed that you had on maybe even some of the sketches.

Or yeah, yeah, I had a couple sketches and a few stills, And and there's another thing that was deleted a little bit is that they looked so much like wookies to me, like like, you know, baby cousins of wookies, that I included that as a piece of backstory, that there was an ancestral relationship that I went to at some length, which they mostly took out, but there's still one line left in there about some possible ancestral back in the day I shared genetics that diverged and one one one group speciated into Wookies and the other ewoks.

Which is fun because you know, from a creative point of view, from George's point point of view, there is a connection between them because he wanted them to be Wookies, and then he'd already established Chewbacco is technical and can fly a spaceship and all of that stuff, right right, and that's why he went for you Box.

So they did sort of appear out of each other.

But they wait, but they wanted in in the draft.

They wanted to downplay that.

Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

And then the other book I've read of yours and I still have my childhood copy here in front of me, is the Temple of Doom.

So did Spielberg just sort of come back to you by default or did you have to pitch for it?

Or yeah, no, I did.

I was.

I was there sort of go to guy at that point.

I I had turned in every novelization in under a month, so I was Someone once said I was faster than anyone better and better than anyone faster.

That's great, so.

So so yeah, they just whenever they needed anamalization, they just automatically came to me.

For that and for the Goonies, and for Poltergeist two, although that wasn't strictly speaking of Spielberg production.

And they even came back to me.

They came back to me and asked me to do the novelization for the next Indiana Jones.

I think it was the last crusade.

At that point, I was a head writer on a TV show right now, this said.

The novelizations had given me entree into the greater universe of Hollywood.

So I started writing spec scripts and pitching myself and I got a job being a writer for a medical show.

Basically, oh cool.

What was the show?

It was called Family Medical Center, and it was a syndicated was called a strip show, which just meant it was a thirty minute show that played five days a week consecutively, and it was produced to go opposite at that time Johnny Carson the Late night Show, to be a sort of an alternative for people who were tired of watching late late night.

So but it was an exhaust job.

I wrote all or part of one hundred and sixty seven scripts that year, and so I had no you know, time, energy, your bandwidth to write another novelization and regretfully turned it down, and then after that they didn't ask anymore.

You mentioned with Poulter guys that you sort of had the opportunity to flesh things out, and from memory Temple of Doom you flesh out the backstories of Short Round and Willie.

Yeah.

I mean it's a dark film, but it gets quite dark at points.

Yeah, and sort of more graphic in spots as well.

Yeah.

Yeah, And again the ones I did for Spielberg, he gave me a free license to do whatever I wanted.

He liked dis liked to do it the ways I went and that I did go dark there and it felt like a dark film to me, and I did.

And I love the character Short Round, so I gave him a whole I think I gave him a whole chapter about his backstory and his life.

I think it was like a a and the life of Short Round leading up.

To the moment he met Indy.

Yeah.

Yeah, and that chapter.

I titled the chapter a Boy's Life.

It's about Short Round.

But that was a little easter egg inside joke for us, because the working title for ET was A Boy's Life, That's right, And that was I think because Spielberg saw that movie is is largely autobiographical, but he was the kid in that film who had always been hoping for a space alien to come down.

Yeah, and he's doing another movie with an alien or aliens at the moment, I believe his picture.

Yeah.

Yeah.

With the Goonies, I think that book came out before the film because I remember an American a friend at school that had an American cousin.

Maybe it came out before it came out here in the UK, maybe, Yeah.

But there, of course with the scenes with you know, the Octopus.

Yeah, and there's a little different there's a different dialogue, different exchanges, you get sort of different impression of the characters in that as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Octopus stuff was in the script that I got just cut out of the final movie because apparently the footage was so ridiculous looking.

Yeah.

I think it has been seen now and again, like the conventions and things.

But yeah, but yeah, for for the Goonies, I prepared myself by reading Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain because it seemed like a similar kinds of at least subtext and theme, and it was first person narrative spoken by the boy.

The young boy who was going on this adventure talking about this, you know, amazing adventure that had happened to him and Huck Finn.

It was an adventure down the river and the goonies, was an adventure under the caverns under the city, and it felt like that's the way I wanted to do it.

So I kind of patterned the speech pattern and the sensibility on Huck, and I wanted it to have the feel as if Mikey was telling this story to a friend years later about this amazing thing that happened to him when he was a kid.

So I wanted it to have a sort of casual and yet intimate feel about about the prose.

So, you know, it starts out saying, so, my name is Mikey Walsh.

So you know, maybe this is a guy he just met in the bar and he's sitting with So my name is Michael Walsh, and here's my story.

And it's it's kind of the way a kid or an older kid talks and kind of ruminating, reminiscing on this amazing thing and kind of contemplating how it affected his life and how he got here.

Yeah, you take you take sort of full advantage of what the medium of writing offers.

You know, it's not just plastering in the screenplay and working around it.

I mean maybe that's how you began, and you were kind of fleshing things out in the early stuff.

But by this one it does feel like it does have a different feel to it feels kind of very self contained.

Yeah, And from the beginning I wanted it to be from like He's POV.

That presented some problems because there are parts of the film that he didn't know about that he wasn't involved in with was it chunk who got kidnapped by the bad guys?

And so?

But I found a way to solve that by by having you know, there's one chapter where he they reunite with the Chunk and he says, and this is what Jun told me happened to him?

Yeah.

Yeah, because the film is like full of you know, I mean, it's just pure on screen energy.

I mean it was like, yeah, starts from what I hear, you know, overlapping dialogue and gags and you know it breathless and chaotic, doesn't it exactly?

And and I had to find places.

I wanted to find places in the owl to put a pause on that and to to to stop the the reckless abandoned and say, okay, this is a time for you know, sort of going over what we've been through, worrying about what's coming next.

There was there was ah The one I remember was when they're in the caves and they slide down this sort of water chuots uh into a lake and I had I had them flooding on the lake for quite a while in the book A dark lake is very dark and and and each one of them has monologues talking about something that's that this whole thing has brought up for them.

You know, his brother, I can't remember his brother's name now.

Even Josh Bolin in the movie.

Talks, talks for the first becomes vulnerable and talks for the first time about his claustrophobia and how that came about.

Mm hmmm hmm.

So by this time you this, I mean, this is what eighty four eighty five, guonies was it by this time?

Were you getting the chance to see any footage at any point?

Or were you still working from stills?

It was a still's.

The one thing I was able to do with the Goonies is the set was still up, so I got to go onto the pirate ship.

Ohhow which where was that?

It was on a sound stage at Warner Brothers, sitting in about I don't know, two feet of water, yeah.

Which by by which point it is probably a bit stinky in there.

That w was.

Yeah, I did not want to get in that one.

Yeah, But the.

Ship itself was really cool.

It was I believe seven d's scale.

And everything camera.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was all laid out as you saw in the movie.

So it was very That's exciting for me because I've always been a big movie fan.

Yeah.

Yeah, and with with Poltergeist too, because Spielberg, as you said, wasn't really connected to that such.

You were working presumably directly with Mark Victor.

And Michael Grace Grace.

Yeah.

Did that change the kind of approvals process or your approach to expanding the sort of mythologies.

No, they were just like Spielberg there.

They knew my work as well, and we'd been friends before that.

They just said, you know, write what you want.

M because I mean I've read a few novelizations over the years, you know, because that was the sort of way to revisit the films.

Yeah, VHS DVD at the.

Time, no streaming.

It's like once you once you saw it in the theater, you unless you wanted to shell out another ten bucks to go see it again, and then after its first run it was gone altogether.

The only way you could revisit it was with the novelization, yeah.

Or the sometimes a comic adaptation.

Yeah.

What do you think sort of separates a competent novelization from a great one?

Then?

I think the ability to look just deeper than once you get in the movie, to use the movie as a prompt.

Really, you might see something happen in the movie, just a glance or an exchange between two characters that makes you think, well, where did that come from?

You know, why, why are they saying that?

What about their backgrounds or previous relationship led to that?

And then you know, then the creative process takes over and new makeup stuff m yeah.

Yeah.

And with Star Wars having sort of remained in the public sphere for decades now, if you found yourself kind of wanting to revisit the stories behind making these novels, what do you mean, Well, if you ever felt like you could write a memoir or you know, I have a website, a blog, or doing an interview like this obviously.

Yeah, yeah, I just did write a memoir.

Did you were aware of that?

Did you know that I was just leading you into it?

Oh?

Thanks so much.

I appreciate Jedi memoir.

Double life, Yes, my double life.

Yeah, And that was My kids had been urging me for years to write a memoir just because of all these wild, crazy stories that I had told them growing up, both Hollywood stories and emergency stories.

And it always seemed like kind of a measure of hubris, like who in the world besides my family would care about my memoirs.

But you know, I'm getting older, I'm thinking about my legacy, thinking about and also interestingly, I've just been going I had just been going.

Through boxes.

That my father had left me that included oral histories that he had taken from his parents who came over here from Russia in the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century.

And they were remarkable, adventurous, intense stories about fleeing, bizarre, and they're always fascinated me.

So I found them again and I was reminded, you know how much I love to hear about my grandparents' stories.

You know, I bet my grandchildren might like to hear about my stories too, And I'm at the stage of my life now where I'm I've got grandchildren now, so I wanted them to know all these things that my kids already knew, but inevitably my kids would forget about many over most of them.

Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons I started doing interviews and started a podcast because when my granddad passed away, he was a very good storyteller.

We couldn't remember the details and they were gone, you know, and my grandmother would say, oh, no, wasn't it this guy that was involved, And my mom would say, no, I'm sure he was there at the time, And I really wish that I'd interviewed him.

And we keep saying we're going to get my kids to interview my parents as well, just to kind of yeah, because they open up slightly differently as well to when there's a generation skip exactly.

And my father was first doing this, you know, at that time we kind of rolled our eyes, like, oh, Dad, but I'm so grateful he did that and got those stories.

And even when you mentioned details, the detail that jumped out of me.

Now, I was just telling this story to one of my kids, A few weeks ago was Jews in Tsarist Russia were often drafted for thirty years.

When they were drafted, they had to go in the army for thirty years and they were put on the front lines.

So he was.

Taught, my grandfather was taught a trick how to get out of the draft, which is he would jump from a chair to the floor onto one leg repeatedly until he dislocated his hip.

And then and then from then on he was able to dislocate his hip at will.

So when he was drafted, he dislocated it and limped in and they said, well, you can't fight.

So they said to wow, goodness me.

And if that had not been recorded, you know, you never know that.

Yeah, And I don't have any stories like that, but you know, I have some pretty interesting stories.

But you know, when I've worked in live television for twenty six years now and I've traveled the world multiple times, and it's not until now that I'm working remotely and I'm sort of back into the not know, not humdrum life, but the less adventurous life.

I'm in Singapore, Malaysia, Burma, you know places that I've been that I realize how extraordinary a life I've kind of had over those twenty odd years, and how much I know that other people don't know about the world and those experiences, and everybody's got those experiences to a certain extent.

But I think, you know.

You should write a memoir.

Yeah, maybe one day I will, you know, I'll get to a certain point, maybe I'll look back and you know, just from this podcast, I've ended up at Skywalker Ranch and Lucasfilm, Ye, to Martha's Vineyard, and I'm making a documentary about production designer that worked for Spielberg.

Ye moment.

All of that come out of just talking to people on this podcast and you know, just having that passion for it and kind of making your own luck.

And that's what I love about your story is that you always seem to have that ability to, like you said, you know, this is the only chance I'm going to get to speak to Steven Spielberg and ask him this question.

Most people would have said, this is the only chance I'm going to get.

I'm not going to do it because I'm going to mess it up.

I mean, finally, I felt like, well, what's the absolute worst that can happen?

Absolutely, he could say no, yeah, yeah, and I would and I would feel embarrassed or humiliated or sorry that I asked.

And you'd be sore for a few days, and you'd have a story to tell.

Like you said, I think somebody told me once that, yeah, a what's the worst that can happen?

And be nobody else is any better than you are.

You know, there's still a human There's still a connection to be made if you can make it.

And there was.

There was also incidentally, and in this memoir, I jump back and forth between emergency room man and Hollywood, and that was.

A lesson I learned.

While learning how to be a doctor that there were lots of times where you felt completely on up to the task, but you had to just jump in and do it and and overcome that that bar of fear and uh and you know, and then afterwards, you know it's okay.

Yeah, you sort of get to a point, don't you, where you're no longer sort of faking the conferences.

It's just sort of there without you realizing.

You start out feeling like a charade.

Yeah, and uh, it comes together and.

Then suddenly you're the old guy, yeah, teaching me exactly.

But you know, the the The axiom in the emergency room was watch one, do one, teach one right?

Nice?

Nice?

So where can people get hold of my Jedi Memoir of Double Life?

Yeah?

Until last week on Amazon, and there's some kind of oglitch, so it's the pages down for about a week or so.

But if you just wait a week or two, it'll be up on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and the publisher's website, which is Bear Manner Media.

Great.

All right, Well, I'll make sure I leave those links in the in the show notes because I'm not sure by the time I put this out the page will be back up and running.

Yeah.

Thanks so much for making time to chat to us, because I know, you know, as soon as I had mentioned on my social media I was talking to you, people were like, oh wow, I love his books and they mean so much to me.

And they're sending me pictures of their shelves full of books.

Yea, and I know, and I've had that on the I don't do cons a lot conventions, but when I have gone to sign books, you know, there's a line of people waiting for me to sign Jedi and they all say the same thing, how important this book was.

To them growing up.

They kept it under their pillow and they learned how to read with it, and the brilliant pages.

Fell out by the time they were finished reading it.

So it's a great legacy to have.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was really very moving to me.

That was James Cahn.

What a treat to finally get to speak with him.

As I said at the top of the interview, it was very on and off for a while, had clashes in my personal life with the interview dates that we'd set, but we finally did it.

I'm glad we finally did it, and it was great, you know, to dive back into those books again after all these years.

I loved hearing about how he took those iconic scripts and expanded them into something deeper and more personal, and how his additions like Ben and Om being brothers or the wookie Ewot connection lived in fans heads for decades.

Really, they really did.

If you enjoyed the chat and you're a regular listener, I'd be hugely grateful if you could support the podcast and Patreon.

Every opis so it takes time to research, record, edit, and release, and your support directly helps me keep making these conversations.

Happen.

So think of it of a way of saying I value your work.

Jamie.

Please keep going because otherwise I don't know if people are enjoying it.

I hope they are.

Anyway, you can find the link at patreon dot com forward slash Jamie Benning, And don't forget about the YouTube channel, the Film Youmentary's YouTube channel where I'm where I've been posting some videos recently, some snippets of these podcasts, some extra little bits and bobs that I've collected over the years.

I'll be back soon jabbering on with another behind the scenes artists.

Until then, thanks so much for listening, and I hope you can do so.

For the next episode of the Film Youmentari's podcast, We Are Getting Way Media