#1271 - Billy Corben

Joe Rogan (0:01)

Five, four, three, two.

Hello, Billy. We're live.

Billy Corben (0:11)

Yo, Joe.

Joe Rogan (0:11)

What's going on, buddy?

Billy Corben (0:12)

How are you doing?

Joe Rogan (0:13)

I watched a new documentary this morning in the gym. Loved it, it was fucking great. It's crazy. I love your use of little kids.

I don't wanna give away too much of it, but it's about the steroid scandal involving baseball and Alex Rodriguez, but what was the choice to use little kids to play A-Rod and all the other key principles involved in the scandal, like to use little actors?

Billy Corben (0:39)

What kids?

Joe Rogan (0:40)

Oh, come on, fella.

Billy Corben (0:40)

You're just high, dude.

Joe Rogan (0:42)

Oh, I was pretty sober.

Billy Corben (0:44)

It's the gym, yeah. So you now know the story because you've seen The Doc, and if people remember the biogenesis steroid scandal, if not, the movie, I think, recaps it pretty well.

The thing that struck me is it like all these guys acted like children. They really did.

And to boot, so we've done some sports docs in the past. We did some of the ESPN 30 for 30s, like The U, and when you do a sports doc, I mean, I don't wanna say it's easy because making documentaries is a challenge, but sports docs are pretty like paint by numbers. It's like you interview some players, you interview some coaches, some journalists, they mention a bunch of games and you show a bunch of game footage. It's a pretty straightforward process.

With this one, it's not about baseball. It's baseball adjacent, I guess, but it's about shit that went down in nightclubs, in shady clinics with fake doctors, hotel rooms, bars, locker rooms, so you got a bunch of talking heads in your documentary, but then you got nothing to cut to, you got no B-rolls, so I'm like, we're gonna need to shoot recreations here, which is, to me, I don't know. It's like when you're doing non-fiction filmmaking, it's fake shit when you film recreations, so it's like, I'm like, how do we do this in a creative way that's consistent with the tone of the movie, which was always called Screwball, meaning it was always like a farce, like a Carl Heisen or Elmore Leonard Cohen Brothers-esque sort of Florida fuckery farce, and so we just wanted to keep in that mode. So I'm watching the characters, so we got Tony Bosch, who is the fake doctor, and Porter Fischer, who is the whistleblower, who stole the medical records and started this whole thing. They were then stolen from him and then sold to not the highest bidder, but any bidder, in every bidder they were sold to, and they're talking, and I'm noticing that they had like a very similar storytelling style, like, for example, Guy will be like, so I walk into his office and I say, I want my money. And he says, I don't have your money. And I said, well, you better get my money. And he said, what are you going to do about it? And I said, I'm going to break your neck. And I'm like, oh shit, they're so vivid. And in the moment and talk in dialogue, so we could drunk history this, right? We could edit together the doc and then have the actors lip syncing the actual interview dialogue. And all the actors will be eight years old. And I don't know, like I've always wanted to do it. Like way back, Spike Jones, 1997, Biggie video, Sky's the Limit. Biggie had just been murdered. He was faced with this challenge of producing a posthumous video. And so Spike Jones was like, okay, we'll just do a straight up classic bad boy records, circa 97 music video, Cars, Versace, Wardrobe, Girls, Mansion, Hot Tub, but they'll all be eight years old. You got Baby Biggie, Baby Puffy, Baby Busta Rhymes, Baby Little Kim. Yeah, it's brilliant. And so I was like, what a great, I was always kicking around since 97 And then I saw this off-Broadway musical about 10-ish years ago called A Very Merry Unauthorized, let me try that one more time.

A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant.

Don't ask me to say it again. I can't say it again.

So it's this wild musical, like very Bowie-esque score written by a couple of Yaleys.

It's like, it's a Christmas pageant performed by elementary school kids, but instead of the story of Jesus, it's the story of L. Ron Hubbard.

All with like, in like a school play with like, you know, paper mache like sets and construction paper costumes and props. And I wanted to, I got together with one of the composers. I said, listen, I'd like to get the rights to your musical and make a Scientology documentary using the kids and the musical as a framing device. Because in those days, no one was making, now everybody makes Scientology documentaries. In those days, nobody was doing it, particularly because like the church is so litigious. And so they had kind of left this musical alone. So I thought like, that might be a cool buffer. Like maybe if I make a documentary, it's a little light, you know, and it's like this children's musical, but we intercut it with real documentary investigation, interviews, and that maybe we'll kind of get away with it. Nobody wanted to make that movie, dude. I mean, nobody, I mean, doors were closing before I even knocked out, like got to them.