The Maniacs Can Lick Hands Too Expertease

Danno Sullivan, since you specialize in things that go bump in the night, I thought we could probe your area. What? Of expertise. You're listening to Expertise, spelled wrong. The podcast where the world's most expert experts discuss their areas of expertise expertly. Expert comedy writer Clare Sera and expert comedy writer Danno Sullivan bring their expertise to other unrelated expertises. Clare Sera, it is a treat to be on your show today. If you don't mind, I would like to conduct this podcast interview with an upturned flashlight shining on my face. Oh my gosh.

Yes, I don't mind at all. It will freak me out a little bit, but I don't mind. Let's go full Blair Witch Project. Are your listeners going to be okay? I would suggest to my gentle listeners that they do the same. Let's all get into the spirit of being scared in the night. Everyone turn your lights off. Get your flashlights or your torches for our international crowd and let's go. Now, Clare, things that go bump in the night. The bump itself is not what's so terrifying. What's terrifying to people is the night. Of course, the dark of night. It's because you don't know.

You don't know what the bump is. Now there are two kinds of bumps. There's an audio bump, but there's also a physical bump, Clare. So this is what I want you to do right now is turn your lights all the way out. And then hold on, hold on, please. Okay. My lights are out. Yeah. You've got the clapper. Oh yes. Yes, absolutely. Ooh, it's dark in here. I'm impressed at the budget though, of your podcast. So what most people don't know, Clare, is that every time you go to sleep in the night, if you nap during the daytime, it's not the same. Oh my gosh. That's absolutely true.

Yeah. Yeah. But while you're asleep in the night, your body becomes covered with bumps. And those are the bumps in the night. Are you talking like a type of rash or hives? Hives is close, but postules is how we refer to it. Kind of oozing, pussy. If you ever wake up in just a pool of crustaceous goo, that's from a bump in the night. So if I am hearing you correctly, hold on. Do you mind while we chat? I'm just going to turn my lights back on. Oh, that's like magic. It's technology. So you are speaking of literal bumps in your body that appear while you sleep.

And you know, our podcast does come under the auspices of the FDA rules of standards. So you can only broadcast accurate medical information? That's exactly right. And I feel like I'm going to just need to alert our listeners that in our show notes, we will have places to get tested and that if that is something that you are dealing with in the night, there are places that can help you deal with that. All right, now let's get back to your postules. I had a clapper installed while you were doing that long public service announcement. Right. And Claire, I've got to say, you really have kind of changed my life with this.

Well, I don't know if you noticed when I clapped, the lights did not go on. Why is that? Because I've hooked it up to my stereo. And this is Bitchin' Claire. This is classic rock attached to the... ...in stations. I love it. That's quite the personal playlist you have there. I'm not sure that we're going to have to edit out some of the words of that song. That's... Would you mind turning that song off? Sorry. Yeah. If you don't mind me asking, I noticed in the documentary that you made. Things that go bump in the night and things that go bump in the night, too.

That it's not just, you know, the things that scare most people. A bump in the night is an intruder or an animal. But aren't there a lot of industries that have to run at night and that just have natural things that make bumps and noises? And those are not necessarily threatening or bad. I just want to bring a little bit of comfort to, say, our younger listeners. You know, that... Yeah. And Claire, I think that's so admirable. And what I would really advise is to remind your listeners right now, they can turn their lights back on. You had them turn their lights off.

And I think if you want comfort and reassurance, let's get those lights back on. Everybody. One, two, three. There we... Oh, Claire, you're clapping turned off my lights. Oh, let me... Okay, let's... There we go. No, I... Oops. No, no, my lights are off. I'm sorry. Only one of us should clap at a time because... All right. Very good. Okay. I'll do one clap. You do one clap. There we go. Okay. Sorry, Claire. I'm going to clap off the Steve Miller. Okay. Very good. There are so many, so many nice things that go bump in the night and... Sometimes my dog goes bump in the night.

And I feel very comforted knowing that I've got a trained hybrid Rottweiler, German Shepherd, Great Dane at the side of my bed. Maniacs can lick hands too. That was a scary story. That was really good. I'll tell you the story real quick. It was about the blind lady who had a trained German Shepherd. And every night she would say, Rexy, is everything okay? And Rexy would lick her hand and she'd go to bed. And then one morning the police found her dead body and scrawled in blood on the mirror was the message, Maniacs can lick hands too. Maniacs can lick hands too.

That was the sequel to Maniacs can lick hands, which I believe you wrote and produced. Yeah. Before the woman was blind, there was much less danger implied with a sighted woman. But we made up for it by having a blind dog. You know, I think it's really important for us to come to terms with the psychological fears that we have as children, that we bring into our adulthood. The nighttime itself is not a evil place or time or thing. There is no reason to be more scared at night than there is in the day. Not truly. And I just want to let all of our, especially our younger listeners feel empowered knowing that when they go to bed, they're as safe in the night as they.

No, keep the lights on. Keep the lights on kids. At the very least have a very bright night light. If you'll take my advice only, only sleep near a floodlight, a lighthouse or on a movie set with those halogen bright lights. When they say movies. No, they say lights. That's how movies get made. I've never been on a movie set, but it would be so exciting to be there when they say movies and then those bright lights come on. That's how movies get made clear. Yeah. The stagehands know exactly what to do. You shot movies and people start acting, stage props, start getting moved around.

And that is a spot of safety. Yes. We've put together a charitable organization to allow kids to sleep on movie sets. Now we've tried to work up an arrangement so that these are mostly movie sets that have the feel of home. You know, you don't want your kids sleeping on the set of Jaws or something. Right. Or maniacs can lick two, one or two. Say instead, a family film, you know, family film, blended, blended, for instance. Anything where they mentioned boogers often. Right. It's uplifting and silly. When we were working on maniacs can lick hands one, we had a whole group of kids come in to sleep on the set and it was such a hardship for the workers, Claire.

You know, cause we did feel the obligation to get the dog parts off the set before the kids came around. It was a very low budget film, as you can imagine. We could not, we could not afford that. What do they call it? Stage blood. Yeah. Oh, what did you use? Well, we used a blood, non-stage blood. Actual blood, blood, blood. And I can't tell you the number of German shepherds we went through and not even the dogs. Right. Because it was set in the countryside. Of Germany. Yeah. So we were able to get a lot of unprotected sheep to provide the non-stage blood that we needed.

When you tell kids to go ahead and sleep and they're sleeping in the light, bright set, which actually means they're seeing the blood and gore all night long that's smeared on the sets, on the walls. There's a little dichotomy there, you know, trying to provide peace and comfort, trying to get a movie made for crying out loud. Oh, I know it. But then I also can only imagine that, because kids will find, they'll crawl into little spaces to sleep. And by the time the director's up there and shouting, movies, that you've got little kids running out of holes and from under beds and just adding to the chaos.

In Maniacs Can Lick Hands 1, we had to work it into the script. That's one of the excitements about low budget filmmaking is sometimes you got to roll with the punches, which was also on the craft services table. We had both roll and punch, but some of the scenes where you just see, Rexy was the dog, you know, just like Lassie, like we could afford Lassie, but we had Rexy, Rexy 1, Rexy 2, 3, 4, and 5. We lost five in the course of shooting and wound up with Rexy 6. But somebody would say, Rexy, place. And that means go to your place, Rexy. And Rexy's place was, he had to be able to jump from niche to niche.

He was meant to sort of represent a vampire dog in this movie. Oh, of course. Right. So two things went wrong. One, as he went from one niche to another, there would be another small child seeking comfort and solace, trying to sleep in there. And there would be this huge whelp of noise as the child alerted to the presence of a giant German shepherd landing on him from above. Right. With giant, I'm assuming prosthetic vampire teeth. Teeth and wings and claws. The claws were natural. Rexy 6 had not been well cared for and had these wonderful natural claws. Yeah.

And then Rexy would be shocked to find this child in there and instincts would kick in, Claire. Oh no. Oh no. Yeah. So we went not only through six dogs, but a certain number of children too. There's, there's so much to unpack in that one. Um, well, I do know, and we'll put it in the show notes that you have started an organization called Rexy's place where you've been forced by the SPCA to pay back dogs that have been injured on movie sets. Well, you say forced, like we would not do that anyway. You know, we loved those dogs. Yeah. You hadn't been doing it, but after the order came down, you started doing it.

Yeah. That was the motivation. We needed to do what we really wanted to do anyway. So yeah. I hear that. I hear that. Legalities. Sure. You know, coming back to things that go bump in the night and a lot of this was to help the children, find them a place to sleep where it would be nice and bright, and then you would put them in niches that were then dark and the movie set, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say. Yeah. By the way, road to hell one and two are available as part of our four movie set. That's great. We'll put that in the show notes.

Thank you. Our intentions were absolutely good, Claire. So many of these children, they didn't have a place to stay. They didn't have pets to love. Yeah. They only had darkness to sleep in. Well, they were, there were German children, I'm assuming. Children of the German shepherds. The dark, dark people, the Germans. And rather like the court order that demanded us to make restitution to the dogs that had been killed in the making of the movie, you know, we had the dream to do that and not really the motivation to do that until the court order came through and with the children, we had the dream and we moved on it without a court order.

Now, surely there's some nobility in that, even if the end result was not perfect. Meaning? Meaning that we lost several children. You lost several children. Yes. But what is death, Claire, but an eternal type of sleep? And what were those children seeking? Eternal sleep. Peaceful. Peaceful sleep. With no fear of things that go bump in the night. Nothing bumps in heaven. Dano. That's my favorite Eric Clapton song. Um, well, gosh, this has been, I just got to work my way through this because it gets me. No, it's, it's very sad. It's too bad he turned out to be who he is.

All right. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this has been a much more emotional podcast than I'm, than I'm used to. I knew it would be a surprise. I knew that it would be eyeopening, but Dano, you are a man of many great conflicting gifts that you give to this world. We do give to this world, Claire. And what we do try to give has not really got the attention we've sought, except through some very niche fan magazines. So really, thank you so much for having me on your podcast to talk about, you know, yes, things that go bump in the night, but really kind of a chance to, to flog these movies that really, really could, could use a boost.

I mean, to talk about the charities for the dogs and the children. Right, right, right. Well, I tried to get our assistant, Jorge, to put the access to the movies up on our show notes, but I, I'm seeing that they were immediately flagged by the MPAA. And I, so I'm not, they're actually not rated, not in the sense that they haven't yet been rated, simply that there is no rating that they can find that would apply to this kind of movie. And you know, I take it as a compliment. Right. As an artistic film director, who else has ever had a movie made that is unable to be rated?

Unrateable. Unrateable. They wanted to rate it, you, you for unrateable, but they were afraid that would confuse people to give only four movies in the entire history of movie making, this particular, you rating. Right. And so what they decided instead was they just put a label on that says, you rate it, you get to decide. Well, I'll let our audience decide whether they want to watch and rate. I thank you so much for coming on. I'm, I'm disturbed, but Dano, I feel like, what is life if you don't get disturbed every now and then, if you don't get a little frightened?

What is life, Claire? What is life? What is art? Art is life. Life is art. Art for art's sake. Art is Garfunkel. Garfunkel is Simon. Simon and Garfunkel. Spirit podcast app, like the expert listener, we know you are.