Podcast Transcript
Photo courtesy Mindy Tucker
Buzz Knight
Hi, this is Buzz Knight, the host of the taking a walk podcast series. And we are in New York City. We’re going to be taking a walk on the upper East Side, the Carl Schurz Park. Frank Santopadre is going to be our special guest. Frank is an accomplished comedy writer known for a lot of great work ghost writing but other work with many comedians. And he’s also known for being the co-host of Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast. So, we’re going to be talking about the late break Gilbert Gottfried as well, with Frank on this episode of the taking a walk podcast.
Frank Santopadre
Here taking a walk with Buzz Knight. All right.
Buzz Knight
Well, Frank, did you bring what I asked you to bring for this episode of taking a Walk?
Frank Santopadre
What was that?
Buzz Knight
I said, bring your best personality with you.
Frank Santopadre
What did I say?
Buzz Knight
You said something to the effect of.
Frank Santopadre
Can I bring Larry Storch’s personality instead?
Buzz Knight
You could bring Larry, I suppose.
Frank Santopadre
Larry is almost 100.
Buzz Knight
Is he really?
Frank Santopadre
Yeah.
Buzz Knight
Well, Frank, thanks for joining me.
Frank Santopadre
Of course.
Buzz Knight
The taken a walk podcast series. I’m really excited.
Frank Santopadre
My pleasure, Buzz. Thanks for asking me.
Buzz Knight
You have a storied career you want to give our audience?
Frank Santopadre
Is it storage? It’s storied. Yes. The two kind.
Buzz Knight
No, I don’t know if it’s page six New York post story.
Frank Santopadre
I think so.
Buzz Knight
Thank God.
Frank Santopadre
Street news. Remember the street news? Yes. I used to sell on the subway. Yeah. Well, I’ve been a comedy writer since the 80s. I’ve written everything a comedy writer could write. I’ve written award shows, talk shows, roasts speeches, political speeches, celebrity speeches. I wrote bubblegum cards for the Tops company. I wrote Garbage Pail Kids. I wrote wacky pets. I wrote Bazooka Joe comics. I wrote puppet shows. I wrote game shows, terrible sitcom, the works. And now I’ve ghost written for a million comedians. And now I am a staff writer at The View, where I’ve been for ten years at ABC. And we just also wrapped the Amazing Colossal podcast with the late, great Gilbert Gottfried to after 660 something episodes, I’ve lost count. Well, but it’s been a body of work.
Buzz Knight
We have a lot to talk about. So let’s start first of all with the late Gilbert Gottfried, And obviously you did a lot of work with him and how did you first meet him?
Frank Santopadre
That’s a long story, but I’ll shorten it. I became a fan. I was a kid, I was maybe 18 or 19, and I went to the comic strip just with a bunch of friends to see comedy. And I was not aware of Gilbert. He was not a household name. He’s not really in movies at that time or television.
Buzz Knight
I just felt for a second that I think maybe at that very notion you just mentioned he was cursing us from.
Frank Santopadre
Somewhere, don’t you think? Yeah, probably. I could hear it. Probably. It’d be a hard voice to miss.
Buzz Knight
Right.
Frank Santopadre
I just fell in love with this comedy. I was a kid. I was in film school. I was a little bit adrift, not sure what I wanted to do, and his humor, his obscure references, everything about him spoke to me, and I mentioned this at his memorial service. I became a Gilbert groupie, and I followed him around, really. Not through the streets when he was doing his laundry, but from gig to gig, from club to club. Caroline’s used to have a club at the Seaport here, way downtown. And in those days, he had the energy for long sets, and he’d come and he’d do just a wonderful 90 minutes set, and I couldn’t get enough of them. I think our first official meeting was me kind of being a fanboy and approaching him at the bar and just talking about Bella Lagosi and all the obscure stuff that he loved to talk about. And then the joke is, over the years, I would meet him time and time again at functions. I wrote him on a show called Caroline’s Comedy Hour. I gave him a lift to a nostalgic convention in Burbank, and it was like the gag on The Simpsons, where Mr. Burns has met Homer hundreds of times and has no idea who he is. Every time Smithers has to explain that’s one of your globs from seven sector g. Gilbert never knew who the hell I was. I dined at his house. I’ve been to restaurants with him. As I said, I wrote for him. I’d been on shows with him. I’ve been on talk shows with him. And I’d say, Gilbert, you remember me? And he’d say, yeah, you’re the guy in the blue shirt. And he was not good at learning names, knowing people manners, social niceties. I came to work for a show called the Joy Behar Show on CNN. And then he became our kind of Tony Randall. He became our emergency fill in guest when somebody would fall out at the last minute. And he came so many times, and his wife Dara, would accompany him, that eventually Dara got to know me, got to know my name, and through his wife, he finally acknowledged, after 20 years of us interacting, who I was and what I did. And then I was asked by Dara and by his agency to work on some new material with him, which was an impossibility, because Gilbert didn’t do new material.
Buzz Knight
He just wouldn’t know.
Frank Santopadre
He was still doing bits about I’m, Dickens, He’s, Fenster and John Aston. References from 1966. Of course, that would go on to become kind of the meat of our show, of our podcast. But he didn’t want to do any new material. He didn’t want to update his act. Long story short, we went up spending long nights on the phone, many long nights on the phone, and laughing, and it formed the basis, our common love of obscure show business and forgotten character actors and old horror movies and formed the basis of the show. His wife finally said, Why don’t you guys do something with this? And podcasting was pretty much new. It was 2014, not so new, but there weren’t a lot of people doing them.
Buzz Knight
But do you think Dara was just trying to get Gilbert out of the house?
Frank Santopadre
Maybe. I think she was trying to give him new business, some reason for top shows to have him on something that he could plug something that he could plug on the road. And we were novices. We had no idea what a podcast was. We didn’t know how to turn the mics on. We recorded them at his kitchen table. And we just call people I mentioned Larry Storage, we just call Larry Storch or Adam West or Dick Cavett, or just pick up the phone and Robert Osborne, the late Robert but this is.
Buzz Knight
Your Rolodex, not Gilbert’s.
Frank Santopadre
It was both of us. Yeah, it was both of us. We just thought, wouldn’t it be fun to talk to these people about their careers? And it didn’t seem like when we did the research on the podcast landscape, that anybody was doing this show, nobody was doing a nostalgia show, so we thought we’ll do the Joe Franklin Show, but with actual celebrities. Right. And we did this for a while with our friends. Jay Thomas and Dave Thomas from SCTV. Bob Saget. Artie Lange. Paul Schaefer. Initially, it was people who were hanging around, people who were in their seventy s and eighty s that weren’t doing that much, really. And our friends, our friends in comedy. And then it started to get good. We started to figure out what the hell we were doing, and we started attracting real legends like Carl Reiner and Norman Lear and Dick Van Dyke. And at that point I realized it wasn’t a lark, it was becoming a historical document.
Buzz Knight
Well, because they all knew it was a labor of love.
Frank Santopadre
I think so. I hope so, because it sure was. Those names, Robert Wagner, Bruce Dern, Peter Fonda, Joel Gray, people like that started Peter Bogdanovich started giving us a bigger audience, and as I said, a little bit more cachet as a historical document, which is what it was. It became an oral history. Quite accidentally, for us, it was just, let’s do this, it’s fun, let’s talk to these people. Let’s tell them how much we love them and appreciate them.
Buzz Knight
Did you ever get let down by somebody?
Frank Santopadre
Oh, yeah. Isn’t that inevitable? You’ve been interviewing people how many years?
Buzz Knight
I’ve been let down many times, sure.
Frank Santopadre
I won’t name names out of my respect for the, but yeah, I think some people were afraid of Gilbert initially, were afraid of his reputation as kind of being an abrasive comic or a risk taking comic or an impolite comic. So I think people came on with their loins girted, and I think other people just weren’t very good interviews, but that’s okay. That may have been a failing on my part, but we did so many of them, we just decided to crush people with volume. We did, as I said, well over 600 shows, and I think I’m happy to say more of them. Do not disappoint.
Buzz Knight
Yeah, well, it is a document of history, for sure, and that’s what’s so beautiful about it. But I think the passion is there. There’s no doubt that you guys love.
Frank Santopadre
Who you were talking to. We did. It was driven by that. I mean, it really became a lesson for me because in show business, I spent so many years chasing other people’s projects. For years I tried to get on late night talk shows, and I went up on a daytime talk show. But the lesson for me was throw your own party in your backyard and invite people. Throw your own pool party as opposed to ringing the doorbell and trying to get invited into other people’s parties. I spent a lot of time and a lot of energy trying to get on the cool show, get on the hip talk show or the cool sitcom, and they’re very clickish and closed systems a lot of the time when we started this as a lark, and suddenly it felt, oh, my gosh, I’ve got my own talk show. I can pick up the phone and call any of these people Patton Oswalt and Matthew Broderick and Jim Gaffigan and Richard Donner and Peter Bogdanovich and any of these people. So it was a real lesson in doing your own thing, following your own passion, and it was always driven by passion. Any money that we made from the show was really just a pleasant surprise, you know, when it started to become popular. And then we got on Sirius XM and the audience expanded, but it was really just done out of love. It was just a big valentine to the people we loved as kids.
Buzz Knight
Well, I want to go back to The Joy Behar Show, which you mentioned, and I was fortunate to be friends with the late Jay Thomas.
Frank Santopadre
Oh. Wasn’t Jay great? Oh, my God. One of our early episodes. It’s a seaplane.
Buzz Knight
Yeah.
Frank Santopadre
Wow. That’s going to throw your audio out of whack. Right here. Let’s let it go.
Buzz Knight
Right there.
Frank Santopadre
Look at that.
Buzz Knight
Wow.
Frank Santopadre
Should we explain to your audience that we’re standing along the East River?
Buzz Knight
Yeah, paint the picture first before we.
Frank Santopadre
Get back to you. I mentioned this already. We’re in Carl Schurz Park on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which is a 14 acre park that most New Yorkers don’t take advantage of. And should the home of Gracie Mansion.
Buzz Knight
Which is right over there, which we’re.
Frank Santopadre
About to walk up to. Yeah. The mayor’s official residence. I’m not sure the mayor actually lives.
Buzz Knight
In there, but somebody does.
Frank Santopadre
But somebody does.
Buzz Knight
But back to Jay on the Joy Behar show.
Frank Santopadre
I love you Jay and I happened.
Buzz Knight
I happened to be hanging out on an afternoon, some weekday afternoon and having a bunch of laughs. And he said, oh, you got to come over to the show. I said, of course. And it was this really unique group of people that happened to be there. The one that stands out. I was just in awe that she was a guest on that particular show was Sandra Bernhardt.
Frank Santopadre
Oh, yeah.
Buzz Knight
Just like in one of the greatest movies ever.
Frank Santopadre
Lovely comedy. Gilbert and I were honored to introduce that movie down at the film for him.
Buzz Knight
Oh, you were?
Frank Santopadre
A couple of years ago, yeah. A big fan of it.
Buzz Knight
So how are you personally coping with the loss of your friend Gilbert?
Frank Santopadre
Well, it’s a big loss. In addition to missing him, I’m missing the show. I’m missing what we created together. I’m missing that energy. And it was a party every week, and I loved being in the room. I love the energy of it. I love getting the opportunity to tell these people how thankful we were for their work. So I missed that. And I’m trying to think of what I’ll do next. But I do miss him. I don’t get to get on the phone and talk about Red Skeleton’s porn collection with anybody or Bud Abbott’s porn collection, for that matter. For that matter. This is authentic New York right here. Get cooing. Pigeons, barking dogs.
Buzz Knight
I know we’ll go the other way.
Frank Santopadre
This is live audio, folks.
Buzz Knight
I know that’s what people sometimes don’t believe that we’re actually walking. And they say, Well, I heard this noise, or it sounded like you were huffing and puffing. I said, Because we were walking. We’re actually walking.
Frank Santopadre
We’re walking on pavement, we should point out.
Buzz Knight
But it’s a beautiful day here in New York and it’s the Upper East Side. Yes, we’re in the east 80s, which is very cool.
Frank Santopadre
It’s a beautiful park. It’s a dog run. There’s a walk here called Finley Promenade where you can walk all the way down to 59th Street Bridge. And if you stand here, you see this varies the view of the bridge. It’s great.
Buzz Knight
Yeah, it really is.
Frank Santopadre
It’s a wonderful view. It’s a beautiful part of the city.
Buzz Knight
Do you ever seem to, as people often do after someone passes, do you think, man, I wish I had this one more conversation with him that I have.
Frank Santopadre
He was the kind of guy where no matter what terrible mood or terrible state of mind or even physical state he was in or I was in, we could just pick up the phone and talk for hours about silliness. And he’d launched into some politically incorrect bit or imitation. And he was special. He was funny pretty much all the time. And I do I miss his energy, and I miss the immediacy of that. And again, I miss what we created. I think there was a marriage, really, that developed over the course of 600 odd shows in eight years.
Buzz Knight
And you know, the challenge of creating chemistry, that you just don’t create chemistry. It doesn’t just happen. It’s a magical thing.
Frank Santopadre
Right. You were in radio a long time. I guess you know that ours was accidental, I think. And I think the show worked because we were coming on it from two totally different places a lot of the time. Somebody said, a friend of ours, Drew Freedman, said, I figured out why the show works. You’re doing two different shows simultaneously. I love that. I was doing the old Cavett show . I was doing these in depth, heavily researched, respectful interviews. And Gilbert was a lot of times doing the shock jock thing. Right. He was blowing it up, but that was him. Yeah. Matthew Broderick would walk in the room and Gilbert would say, can I tell you can I curse on this show? Of course. Gilbert would say, can I tell you how much I fucking hate Ferris Bueller’s Day Off ? And only Gilbert could get away with that. I couldn’t get away with that. And I was mostly trying to do a respectable, almost like an American Film Institute interview with these people. I was trying to do a career retrospective, street a little bit. I was reverent and he was irreverent. We had the great producer, Irwin Winkler on the show who produced wonderful movies like Raging Bull and Good Fellas and the Rocky series and The Right Stuff. All Gilbert would ask him about were his bombs. How could you make They Shoot Horses Don’t They? What were you thinking? So the combination of that, the dynamic of that’s a little like, I don’t know, I’d say Dick Cavett and Howard Stern trying to host a show together a little bit. The dynamic of that, I think, is one of the things that gave it its energy. Those two things kind of clashing.
Buzz Knight
Yeah, you can’t just but in a.
Frank Santopadre
Beautiful way, create that, just go and it’s why it stroke a luck. It’s why I won’t, why I’ll resist the temptation to do some other version of it without him. Because it’s the fool’s errand as far as I’m concerned. I know it was magic. I know it was a certain chemistry we locked into.
Buzz Knight
Well, you had a number of favorite guests on the show, so many so I wouldn’t even know where to start. But I’ll start with one in particular, John Byner.
Frank Santopadre
A wonderful guy, but he’s a perfect example of a guy who was a star and could do anything and a great comic, and a great comic actor and a great impressionist. And in a little way he’s been lost to time because you know the business as well as I do that these people are forgotten. Not many people work consistently into their seventy s and eighty s don’t have a Love Boat anymore, or a show that’s a vehicle for those kind of veteran stars. And that was Gilbert’s and my philosophy about the show, I bet these people are as good as they ever were, and if we give them an invitation and put a mic in front of them, I bet they’ll catch fire. And John Byner was a perfect example. He hadn’t lost a step just launching into Ed Sullivan and Dean Martin impressions and great Paul Williams impression. And so that was another thing that I was proud of, is that we got to showcase these people who weren’t in their heyday anymore.
Buzz Knight
But he, at the height of his.
Frank Santopadre
Career, was massive wonderful and could do anything. It was on every television show. And that wonderful show, Bizarre with Bob Einstein, who was another great guest, super Dave.
Buzz Knight
Oh, my God, tell me about him.
Frank Santopadre
Hilarious. Arguably the funniest ever lived. And he just came on and the guests would take a different approach. Sometimes the guests were reverent and just happy to be there. Other times they just attack us and roast us. And Einstein decided he was going to rip us for 90 minutes.
Buzz Knight
Just went at you.
Frank Santopadre
It’s wonderful. If you haven’t heard that one, that’s a good place to start. And then there would be an episode that was a little more in my wheelhouse, like, because I’m an old rock and roll fan. Neil Sedaka a Brill building legend, and there’s another guy that’s not a household name anymore. We’re standing here on a promenade. If I stopped the people in their twenty s and thirty s jogging past us, I’m not sure they would know who Neil Sedaka is. And he was wonderful. And people forget how much that music influenced people,. And he was great. He came into the room, he hugged Gilbert like they were old friends. He was like a long lost uncle to us. And that was something that was lost during the pandemic, was having to do the show of resume. We lost that intimacy. We lost a lot of that immediacy and that intimacy. There was no replacement for it. He came in and he sat down and we put a keyboard in front of him and he played his hits and told us how he wrote Laughter and the Rain, and it was a clinic. And those shows, the educational shows, I think, are my favorites. Yeah.
Buzz Knight
Where you just see behind the scenes.
Frank Santopadre
Yes. Jimmy Webb, too. The great Jimmy Webb.
Buzz Knight
What an influence he had on the musical spectrum.
Frank Santopadre
Absolutely. And again, we recorded them. We got a little at Nutmeg Studios in Midtown. We got a little keyboard. We couldn’t drag a piano into the studios, but we had little portable keyboards, and he and Gilbert sang MacArthur Park together, and it was magical in the best way and the worst way. Yeah. And those were the shows for me, a guy who read the Top 40 charts and I’m obsessed about pop music, and in another life, I wanted to be a songwriter. We had the Holland brothers on the Motown writers. Oh, my God. 40 top 40 hits. Yes. I mean, icons. So to talk to those people was especially satisfying for me. We did a lot of different shows. Some shows were historical in nature, some were just funny. Some were like roasts. There’s a little bit of everything. If you dig into that archive, and it’s a vast archive
Buzz Knight
How much pre-planning did you guys together go through?
Frank Santopadre
Him? Almost none. Me and all. Consuming them out. Right.
Buzz Knight
So you went back and looked at the YouTube stuff or articles.
Frank Santopadre
I learned about ten or 15 shows in that if you’re going to do a show that long, 90 minutes, and you’re going to try to get your arms around a career like Bruce Dern’s or Robert Wagner’s, or Jimmy Webb or the Holland Brothers, you really better know your shit.
Buzz Knight
Yeah.
Frank Santopadre
And furthermore, I saw it as a gift to them, as a thank you to them. We’re walking in the direction I think that’s a guy I know right there with the tank top. I felt like it was a gift to them, like it was a proper thank you to them to know everything about them because they weren’t getting paid for doing the show. Right. And I felt like one of the things we could give them was that thorough a tribute. So I would spend days and days reading the books, watching the movies, finding any other podcast interview I could find, really going in depth so that no stone was unturned. And Gilbert had this funny thing where he would lose his track sometimes and just stop talking. Like, halfway through the show, I’d say, Gil, are you there? And he’d be frantically looking at some his notes consisted of something he would scroll on the back of a bus pass or a supermarket receipt. And so I’d also have to fill a lot. So I had a stack of cards called Filler. I had a stack of cards called Bring Gilbert Back In, which is when the conversation started to bore him. I would do things like, Gilbert, Bruce loves that movie. You love you both love Ghost of Frankenstein. And he’d say, oh, really? And then he’d be he’d be back on it again. So there was a lot of extra maintenance, and the research was consuming, really consuming. It took days, but I’m grateful. I’m glad I did it, because I get made better shows.
Buzz Knight
My sense, though, with you is you did the prep and immerse yourself and who the next guest was going to be, and you just wanted to know it inside out, so then you didn’t really have to script yourself, but yet it was all coming to you where you wanted to head. Is that fair?
Frank Santopadre
Did you do interviews that long on the radio? Did you? 90 minutes interviews. Did you do those little 15 minutes.
Buzz Knight
Radio interviews you can’t do generally in the way radio is set up, the long interviews, which is very sad. Of course, I did at one point.
Frank Santopadre
I knew that if I knew everything about the person, that I could direct the show. I could choreograph the show through the cards as I went. I could actually move them through their career in some kind of chronological order. I could produce the show live in the moment. And of course, Gilbert would throw a grenade into that because I’d start with the they left film school, and then you made your first film. And then Gilbert would immediately ask them a question about throw everything completely off kilter. Yeah, but again, that was the fun of it. And that was the fun of two different people doing two different shows at the same time. But I felt if I knew everything, I wouldn’t be surprised. I didn’t really want to learn much on the air. And then this happened. And then that happened. And then you went in this direction, and why did you go in this direction? And sometimes they would say, I can’t believe you know that much about me. Because I had researched things from 40 years ago that they’d forgotten that they ever said, I love it. That was fun. That was always a blast to sort of work that parlor trick when I could. And that only came from really deep research. But again, I always saw it as a gift to them. I always thought that the least we could do is know everything about them.
Buzz Knight
Okay, so you bestowed on me a terrific gift, and maybe you could tell.
Frank Santopadre
The audience, well, I gave you a chicken sticker. Yes, a sexy chicken sticker. This is a chicken. This is art done by a fabulous artist named Mark Macho. And this is the comedian, Ronnie Shell. Yes, Ronnie Shell came on the show and told us that the great Western actor, the golden age movie actor, Alan Ladd, had a sexual fetish for chickens, which, of course, is the kind of cold, hard fact, the kind of unassailable truth that you only find on the Amazing Colossal podcast. Pure bullshit. But we went and made merch about it, so we made a sexy chicken sticker. Please don’t sue Ladd family. And this is a magnet. This is a fridge magnet with a face of Caesar Romero and an orange wedge. And if you’re listening to this show and you’ve ever listened to the Amazing Colossal podcast, you’ll know what that means? This one was floated by Gilbert himself. Another what would they call it? An urban myth. Yeah. That Cesar Romero enjoyed young males tossing orange wedges at his naked buttocks for sexual pleasure. And so when we started to make the merch, my wife, my very clever wife Genevieve, said, well, we have to do something with the orange wedges. So we made these. And we also made little enamel pins that are just orange wedge pins. And my buddy Mike Webber is a screenwriter. He wrote the movie 500 Days of Summer and The Disaster Artist. He was nominated for The Disaster Artist. He said, I’m going to wear the orange witch pin on the red carpet at the Oscars, and every official photograph of me on the red carpet will have the orange wedge pin on it. And I said, if somebody asks you, tell them you’re supporting the migrant, the workers, the fruit pickers. So there you go. So that is entered into. If you do a Google search for Caesar Romero orange or orange wedge, you’ll get pages that come back to us. So I always said allegedly on the show to protect us. But it’s a silly thing. Of course, it isn’t true, but we had a lot of fun with it.
Buzz Knight
How much allegedly did you talk about the prowess that Milton Bele had?
Frank Santopadre
That came up quite a bit, so to speak. Did you edit the show? Try not to. Okay. Because this is my co writer at ABC sitting on the park bench.
Buzz Knight
Oh, my God. Do you want to say hi to him?
Frank Santopadre
Well, unless he feels shanghai, but he suddenly up to you. My co writer of The View, folks, is sitting here on the promenade on a bench with his back to us and he’s got earphones in and he’s listening to music.
Buzz Knight
I think if he has earphones, I leave him alone.
Frank Santopadre
Well, then I leave him alone and not even mention his name.
Buzz Knight
But, you know.
Frank Santopadre
Yeah, Milton Berle came up a lot.
Buzz Knight
I would have to think so.
Frank Santopadre
You know the comedy writer Alan’s Zwiebel It’s an original Saturday Night Live writer. Yes. He was on the show many times and he’s one of the few people who claims to have actually seen it. And he described it as an anaconda. So Gilbert became obsessed with that. Again, how could I do this podcast with anybody else? And I know who would bring that kind of minutiae and obsession with silliness and showbiz urban myths? It became so much a part of our brand and our identity. Allegedly. Allegedly. But it’s one of the things that makes him irreplaceable as a host.
Buzz Knight
But isn’t it the greatest when you just break into tears laughing with somebody?
Frank Santopadre
Like it happened many times Gilbert did.
Buzz Knight
Like I am from you recounting this.
Frank Santopadre
I’m glad you’re laughing.
Buzz Knight
Is that the greatest gift?
Frank Santopadre
It is. I feel when he passed, I felt proud that I had some role in putting well over 1000 hours of content, of new Gilbert content out into the world to add to his legacy. Right. That felt good. I was glad to be able to facilitate that in any way. And I laughed. When you listen to that Bob Einstein episode or when we interviewed Brad Garrett from Everybody Who Loves Raymond, those are 90 minutes of laughter straight through authentic. There were times. When we were recording in his kitchen, where I would have to get off the mic and I got on the floor because I couldn’t nothing better. We had a nostalgia writer named Steve Cox, an author on as a guest, and somehow it got into Danny Thomas’s predilections. Supposedly, Jerry like, I won’t go into detail, but Gilbert, please do. Gilbert launched into a Jerry Lewis, an impression of Jerry Lewis with a hooker. It’s on the episode The Steve Cox Show. C-O-X-I lost control of the show and I went up on the kitchen floor in a fetal position on the linoleum. It was this in Gilbert’s kitchen, in Gilbert’s house. In the first 20 shows, mostly we did from Gilbert’s house before we kind of became legit and people engineers came into our lives offering studio space.
Buzz Knight
I think it’s his lovely wife Dara going, Get out of here and go somewhere else and do this.
Frank Santopadre
It may have been. Although in the first 20 shows, in the kitchen, she was the engineer. She was the one sitting at the coffee table. I can’t believe I just said coffee table. That’s a reference to something I said before. Indirectly, she was the one that sat there and set up the mics. JayThomas in fact, we recorded in Gilbert’s kitchen. He borrowed a pair of Gilbert socks, and when Jay passed away, Gilbert was pissed off that he didn’t get his socks back. So there you go. But I recommend that episode, too. Jay Thomas that’s a funny one. There’s so many good ones. I’m so proud of so many of them now. And to go back into the we did 600 shows. 200 of those are just me and Gilbert kind of riffing about stuff, and probably 400 and change our celebrity guests. But every time I say I’m going to pick a favorite, I pick 30.
Buzz Knight
Who that you never had that
Frank Santopadre
You were close to getting so many. Yeah, that’s a whole other interview. I mean classic comedians like Jack Carter and Norm Crosby. It kills me that we didn’t get them. And then there were people that we chased forever, like George Hamilton and Richard Dreyfus and Alice Cooper and the great Norman Jewison. The director still around 96, I think. The director of The Heat of the Night and Moonstruck and a lot of other wonderful movies. So you can’t get them all. A lot of people got away, but I’m really grateful for who we had and what we made of it.
Buzz Knight
Did you guys make the transcripts available?
Frank Santopadre
There are no transcripts, but I suppose someone could do that. All the episodes are sitting in a dropbox and I suppose at some point, I don’t know, there’s been talk of a book with some transcripts and photos. I don’t know if that will happen. The wound is still fresh and the show just ended in April, and we’re still putting up classic shows, we’re still putting advertising on them, and they’re still doing fairly well. And there’s a classic show up every Monday, which we call the encore show, and there’s a colossal classic every Thursday. So we’re going through the archives and distributing them and reposting them and giving people a chance to rediscover them.
Buzz Knight
What I love, too, is reading the fresh comments from people who obviously either never wrote or just discovered the show. That must really be really pleasing to you to see those.
Frank Santopadre
Very gratifying. Very gratifying. I mean, I was very emotional after Gil passed, not only because of his passing, obviously, but because of the outpouring of love and affection and gratitude from people, not only the guests, but I’m still answering emails. He passed on April 12. I’m still answering emails, Instagram messages, Facebook messages, they poured in. But people who said things like, the show got me through surgery. The show helped me through a divorce, through depression. One gentleman wrote and said his wife passed away and he took his son, and they got in the car and they drove across country just listening to show after show. And you can’t put a price on that. I get choked up thinking about it. That some silly thing that we did as a lark, mostly to amuse ourselves meant so much to people.
Buzz Knight
Yeah.
Frank Santopadre
That’s so rewarding. If you’re in this business and you’re lucky enough to do something like that, to work on a project that touch people that much. Yeah. I’ll be answering emails, letters and cards came from I’ll be probably answering them through the entire summer. There were thousands really wishing us well, thanking us for what we did, telling us what an important document it was, and then also the guests, celebrities reaching out to me and saying, that was the best interview I ever did, and that was the most rewarding interview I ever did. That’s priceless to me.
Buzz Knight
You can’t beat that.
Frank Santopadre
I’m so grateful.
Buzz Knight
Well, it’s a great testament to taking on a project with passion and love.
Frank Santopadre
It is. And I would say that to young people in the business, and it’s a lesson I had to learn myself. Follow your passion and start your own thing if you can. My wife said at the beginning of the podcast, she left a sign in my office that’s that wonderful line from Field of Dreams. She left a little postcard in my office, and it said, Build it and they will come. We never knew if we were going to have an audience. We thought, well, guys like Buzz Knight listen for us sitting here interviewing Ken Berry and Danny Iiello and people like that. Tommy James fans will listen. Super fans, showbiz nerds will listen. Our friends at the Friars Club will listen. But we thought it best. It’s going to be a cult thing and that it resonated with so many people. I think people would write and say, I never heard of this guest. I didn’t know who this person was, but the passion and the excitement with which you guys talked about him or her. I’m a fan now before I came aboard. And so I think that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that do your own thing, do it with love, and people will show up.
Buzz Knight
Yeah. Jump off the curve. Don’t obsess about perfection. Just do it.
Frank Santopadre
Yeah. And don’t be trying to join somebody else’s team. Don’t be trying to hey, I wish I was. Again, that was my mistake. I wish I could be a writer on this show. And the funny thing is, if I had gotten on a late night show or one of those things, I wouldn’t have the time. I would have been slavish to the job and the hours, and I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to sit and interview all these people myself. So the road not taken. But again, that is the advice. Find the thing that you really love and just chase it with all your heart, and I think you’ll find that other people share that and will come along for the ride they did with us. And it was really a beautiful surprise, and here I am talking to you as a result. It’s great advice on a 200 degree day in Manhattan, and I’m really grateful.
Buzz Knight
That we were able to find the time to take a walk. And thanks for sharing great stories, but thanks for the gift that you left us with the late, great Gilbert.
Frank Santopadre
Thanks. Thank you. Yes, he is irreplaceable and will not be forgotten anytime soon. And thanks for saying those kind things. And thanks for asking me.
Buzz Knight
Thanks for taking a walk
Frank Santopadre
Did we learn anything about Manhattan and Carl Schurz Park?
Buzz Knight
Yeah, I learned that it’s a new hideaway and it’s a great walking spot. And I’m coming back.
Frank Santopadre
Visit anytime. I’m going to go say hello to my co writer.
Buzz Knight
I’ll bring my best personality when I come back.
Frank Santopadre
Those were authentic New York pigeons you heard. By the way, folks
Buzz Knight
Thanks, Frank.
Frank Santopadre
Thanks, Buzz. Taking a Walk with Buzz Knight is available on Spotify, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
About The Author
Buzz Knight
Buzz Knight is an established media executive with a long history of content creation and multi-platform distribution.
After a successful career as a Radio Executive, he formed Buzz Knight Media which focuses on strategic guidance and the development of new original content.
