Rebecca Rose Payne 0:00

Hi everyone. I'm here today with our guest, Steve Maselson. He is a producer, writer, actor, and documentarian with more than four decades in the entertainment industry. His career began writing jokes for Joan Rivers and Rodney Dangerfield, and he has since worked across film, television, comedy, and independent filmmaking. His work includes a documentary and rare interviews with Rosa Parks that are now housed at the Smithsonian. Welcome to the podcast.

Steven Maiselson 0:26

Thank you, Dr. Payne. Great to be here with you today.

Rebecca Rose Payne 0:28

Great to have you. So to start, you've sustained a creative career for more than 40 years. What qualities do you think have made that type of longevity possible for you?

Steven Maiselson 0:38

Well, I think there's a you know, there's a passion and desire, a stick-to-idness that happens when you kind of get this idea in your head and you don't want to let it go. And while you may go in different directions in your life, while you're just trying to live life, to, you know, make ends meet and do things that you still have in the back of your mind what you plan to do, what the your intention is for your creative process, for how you want to move forward as a as an artist and as a creative person. So we all kind of go through stages like that. And my early years, I had this creative dynamic that happened. And when I moved on to college and I went to business school, it kind of went away and it was lost for a little bit. So I had to kind of pursue something else and find my way back to it, which uh happened in the late 80s. And I joined um the Screen Actors Guild and started doing work and then eventually moved out to LA. And, you know, you kind of moved from acting to maybe a little more creative. In Denver, we were doing this cable television show that we could just do whatever we wanted to. We could make whatever show we wanted. We did a like a skit comedy show called Disposable TV. I did a a baseball um documentary about baseball coming to Denver back in the late 80s called A Baseball Chautauqua, where I went to all the stadiums and asked them, Do you what do you think about baseball in in Denver? You know, and what do you think about purple uniforms? So it's that kind of creative thing that's going on, but you still have to go to work and do things. And you're hoping that some of this stuff gets recognized over time. And it could take, like you say, four decades for some things to really be recognized. I mean, there's artists today that, you know, they did their work and they died in poverty. And a hundred years later, people are like, oh my God, what this is incredible. But that artist never got to hear any of that, right? And sad for that artist, but great for us because we get to know that person's art and we can understand their hi their past and their history and what happened with them.

Rebecca Rose Payne 2:49

Definitely. So you've worked both as like an actor, a writer, or a producer, and a documentarian. Do you feel like these roles all bring out different parts of you, or are they expressions of the same type of creative instinct?

Steven Maiselson 3:02

Aaron Powell I think there's a through line with all of it. When you're on a movie set, you're working with a director, you're working with producers, you're working with other actors, you're kind of in a collaboration, and everybody works differently. There's directors that don't want you to change a word in the script because this writer has such great words. And so you don't. And then there's directors like Quentin Tarantino that just want to ad-lib everything and just let people be themselves in that character. And there's a dynamic that happens between all that, but there's a trust issue that goes on where you're saying, I trust you to know that here in this place you're going to deliver exactly what I want. And I'm going to make you feel comfortable enough that you can trust to do that. A lot of that rolls over into the production end of making documentaries, the one we're working on now. The person I'm working with, you know, he went through 9-11. He went through PTSD. Just in talking to him and, you know, bringing the whole subject up of, well, you wrote a book and you did all this stuff. Let's make a documentary. And working on that over time, it's taken us a year to get to where we have a whole production team now, where folks have come on and said, Yeah, I want to participate financially or I want to participate on a production level. And this then raises the bar for what you're doing. It makes the creative process much easier and more exciting, more fun. And for me, it still becomes a place of delegation where I trust that, you know, Dr. Payne's going to ask some really great questions and that she's expecting and trusting me that I'm going to give her really great answers. And so that takes place really throughout every aspect of life. If you're going to try to be creative, move forward in whatever it is. It could be making labels for tuna cans. Okay, well, let's, you know, trust each other and figure out what we want to do and how we want it to look and get the best thing that we want to produce at the end.

Rebecca Rose Payne 5:11

At what point in your career do you feel like you really started trusting your own creative taste? Or was that from the beginning?

Steven Maiselson 5:17

In the beginning, when we were doing stuff in Denver, doing our own things on cable TV, that felt like a creative process where there were no rules and you could just do whatever you want. And you just came up with whatever idea you felt like and you just you went with it. And part of that is that it gives you the ability to move on to the next thing and say, yeah, maybe it's not as hard because I did these other things and this is all we did. We just, you know, stood in a room and turned on a camera and flipped on the lights and then just kind of made it up as we went along. But there comes a point, you know, where there's a serious message. I had a script that I worked on that's about time I spent with Hank the Angry Dwarf from the Howard Stern show. I was his chaperone for six months. So what a great time. Yeah. You know, you go all around, and we're going up and down the East Coast. I got this angry dwarf with me, and he's got a thousand dollars in his pocket, and anybody could just pick him up and run away with him, you know. And he's a joker, he's a goofball. But you've got to take him to these events where people love him. He's like adored. And it just kind of sets you off to thinking, what happened here? How did I end up in this situation? And then in the end, I wrote this script about it. And now just recently, it's starting to get some some momentum. You know, a couple of festivals have have looked at it. I just got to um semi-final level. I'll find out today if I made finalist level for a new um film festival, Seville International Film Festival, that's right out here. So it's kind of funny that you, you know, you worked on something 10 years ago, you know, and you've had it out there and you've asked people to read it and you've done something about it, and you know it's just a goofball comedy buddy road trip pick. But, you know, maybe now's the time when people want to see that kind of thing. And so when people start reading it and it picks up speed, then you're like, well, this is kind of cool. You know, this is like really a memoir. You know, they always say, write what you know, and sometimes you do and sometimes you don't. You know, when you write science fiction, you're really not writing what you know anymore or historical fiction or something like that. You just you were never there. You're just making it up as you go along. But that's kind of what happens when you're, you know, in these circumstances where you're a chaperone or you're working on documentaries or you're an actor that you just kind of like you kind of go with the flow and and hope and trust that other people can trust you.

Rebecca Rose Payne 7:49

Yeah. So like when you're working on a project like that, or like say a project, do you tend to complete it and put it down and then just like pick it back up when it makes sense, or is it something you're actively working on for 10 years?

Steven Maiselson 8:03

You know, it's like depends on the project. If it's a script, then I want to finish the script. I want to get it all done. And that to me is a success. That says, you know, I'm not 30 pages in and I'm still thinking about act two. No, no. I got 108 pages of a solid script. I know that it's not gonna be perfect right now. I'll have to fix it. I'll be sending it out, getting coverage, getting feedback. Directors are gonna change things, actors again, fine. I don't care. That's the whole process of what it's all about. But as an artist, I've got this project where I found all these cameras in my house. Like an old brownie cameras from the 20, like way back, like at Argus 75. And I took it to a camera show and said, because they're like, we'll buy your cameras. I mean, I have a box of them. And this guy's like, there's one item in there that's from a hundred years ago or something. So you can look at slides, a dual slide viewer. Yeah, I'll give you $15 for that. I said, bro, you know it's $150 online. What why are you stop it? Well, the rest of this stuff is no good. Okay. So my idea was to take each camera and make an artist display out of each one with maybe photos that look like what the camera took, a little history about what the camera is, who invented it, whatever. I got a Polaroid land camera that's made by land, land invented Polaroid. And it's like an accordion, this camera. It comes out like this and it sets up. And the guy went to Africa and he shot pictures of rhinos on it, you know. And okay, but that project, it's still sitting in a in a bin upstairs in my art room because all these little art projects that I do, little craft things, I'm like, well, I'll get to that later. Because then something else came along, like a documentary or a script that I'm working on. I'm like, then I got distracted from that. So it can depend on what my what your project is, what your creative thing is. And at some point I'll be like, yeah, I'm gonna spend a month and I'm just gonna do this camera thing and I'm gonna see where I can put it in a gallery somewhere, or this show is gonna be in May, and I'm gonna try to get it done by May. And that deadline will set you in motion to try to get that at least part of it done. And if you didn't make it by that May, well then you'll just keep going and you'll try to make it by you know, Miami in December or Paris in in April, whatever it is.

Rebecca Rose Payne 10:27

Aaron Powell Of all the things you've created or contributed to, if you had to pick one that gave you the deepest sense of fulfillment, what do you think it would be?

Steven Maiselson 10:36

It's not really just one project that I think about when you ask that question. It's like the fullness of what I've done over the span of, like you say, 40 years, like four decades, is that I get a real, just a great feeling about the fact that I did these things. I went out and I wrote these scripts, I worked on these documentaries, I was able to get it into these places, and I still have more and I have more to do. So there's a whole volume of work. You know, it's like Jeff Koons, he doesn't just have, you know, giant blow up, what looks like shiny metal balloon structures out there. He's got lots of different things that he's doing all the time. But when you think of Jeff Koons, you just think of those.

Rebecca Rose Payne 11:21

Yeah.

Steven Maiselson 11:21

But he's got so much more work that he does that you never really see because you don't really think about that when you think you'd have to go to his website and dive deep down into, you know, a lot of the stuff that he does. So it's kind of like that. You're looking at the fullness of your work over time. And that's what really gives you the biggest joy is that it's not just that one thing. Well, they always ask directors or what's your favorite. It's really hard to say. It's like the whole thing, the whole process, it was really, really becomes your favorite in the end, is just even the bad times. Even when you were out in the freezing cold as an extra in Denver, but you know, there's big name actors that were sitting out there with you at the same time. And you think, well, that was tough at that time, but I had really great times too.

Rebecca Rose Payne 12:10

Yeah. Do you think that over the four decades you've been working in entertainment, your idea of what success looks like has changed?

Steven Maiselson 12:20

No, I mean, people equate success with with dollars in the bank or likes on Instagram or how many followers you have. And that is success in one aspect, but you have to look at success as what you've achieved for yourself and what you've created for you. Whether somebody wants to do anything with you, or whether it becomes the biggest thing that you've seen in a million years, and people pay so much money to have it or see it, whatever it is, people stumble on the next big invention by mistake. And now they're billionaires. And they didn't even think about how they, you know, they were just saying, I want to solve this problem because it's difficult for me to do this. And so I just made this little thing, and now everybody wants one because it solves their problem too. So that success may be that thing that he created or she created for that thing that has to be, uh, I can't say I I now I made it so I don't have to do that anymore. Now I've got this, it fixes that problem. But maybe they never thought about what they'd make of the patent or all the money that they'd make out of it. They just wanted to solve that little problem. And that was their success.

Rebecca Rose Payne 13:38

Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. I also wanted to talk a little bit about your work with the Rosa Parks footage and what it was like to handle such an important piece of history and how that came to be, and how did that shape your understanding?

Steven Maiselson 13:54

Just a an odd circumstance, my friend was wanted to work on this educational series about women. She called it uh significant women of the decade. And the first person she wanted to interview was Rosa Parks. And she had a list of folks that she was going to interview, and she's gonna make this at the time in the 90s. You know, you'd make a educational documentary that would go into schools. And it'd be about seven, eight minutes long or so. And then we'd compile a whole volume of them. And this was her first one. So she got it set up to go and drive all the way from Denver to Detroit and meet with Rosa Parks, and she got a whole camera crew. She was a makeup artist before she really got into this whole idea of doing production and documentaries. And so she was able to get a news crew there and a couple of cameras, and she just talked to her for three hours and asked her question after question after question, and then said, help me edit this and put it together and make it into a documentary. So my old part was that I didn't get to meet Rosa Parks, but it feels like you're in the same room with somebody when you hear what their words are over and over again, and you're looking to find a way to tell her story with her words and kind of with the questions that were given. And with the documentary, you have to build it like a piece. Like I'm a big Ken Burns fan. So, you know, let's go get some archival shots and add some uh voiceover from somebody else and really make it something that is gonna keep your attention for at least five minutes, you know, so you at least you get the understanding of the story and how she felt and what she went through in that whole situation. So it was really great. And I had the footage for so long, and I didn't really know what I should do with it as far as like give it back to the Rosa Parks Foundation, or I didn't really want to market it myself. I didn't think that was right. I didn't really want to impede on her name, image, and likeness. So some friends of mine were involved with the um Smithsonian, the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And they helped me to just get it to them, and they're planning to incorporate it into Rose's collection. I think of the Smithsonian as kind of like that last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. And this is the thing about the Smithsonian. It took me a very long time to just, even with help from friends who are big donors to the Smithsonian, it took a long time because there is such a huge influx of Americana. And I mean, the Smithsonian's like 19 museums and they're all over the world. And that to me is a success. That whole archive of her and what she had to say for that whole time, not so much the documentary I made, but really just what I had on tape of her is there and it's safe. It's not my basement. There's not gonna be a flood, right? It's at the Smithsonian. Yeah, it's back there by the lost arc. I get that. It's okay. You guys will get to it. I have time. But the hope is that people will see that and see the words that she said back in 1992 at that time, because really nobody had really interviewed her up until that point. And then all of a sudden, people started to, oh, Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks. So I just wanted to get that part in there. So, you know, an artist or Amanda Gorman who wants to write poetry about the words that she says. So the image that you see of her in those videos, an artist might want to paint them or sculpt them or something like that. So that gives other artists inspiration by having you give them that kind of fuel that helps them find a direction they want to go into with that subject.

Rebecca Rose Payne 17:46

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And it's so impressive. We're just about out of time, but what are you like hoping to do next? Is there anything big on the docket for you?

Steven Maiselson 17:55

It's like I'm at the next chapter that things are really starting to move forward and that a lot of the stuff that I've been trying to do for a while is starting to happen. And when that happens, then all the stuff that you want to do that you haven't even thought about trying to get done. I'm a big uh horse fan, and I want to do a documentary about how horses are really like a stunt animal for humans and have been for millennia. It's like a picture horse, you know, that's what we call it in the movies, is that you're a picture horse. And these are like trained animals that are actors, they know what they're doing, they're involved with the whole process. But that's been that way since we were shooting arrows off of them or they were pulling chariots for us. So there's a whole other story there. There's um a bunch of different areas and people that I want to go further into. And it makes it difficult when you don't have really the movement of status of people recognizing what you're doing. And that's starting to happen. And it's all because of Dr. Payne's podcast, really.

Rebecca Rose Payne 19:04

Great. So happy to be of assistance.

Steven Maiselson 19:07

She's she's sending me up, right? Yes. It's beautiful.

Rebecca Rose Payne 19:11

Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your perspective with us and how you've your twisty, windy, and like successful career.

Steven Maiselson 19:20

I appreciate you having me on and uh I look forward to um talking to you with again and your audience sometime soon.

Rebecca Rose Payne 19:27

Yes. Thank you.

Steven Maiselson 19:28

All right.