Eddie & Jeff Transcript

November 3, 2007

Dr. Kent Gustavson: Hello and welcome to Sound Authors radio. It’s November 2nd, a couple days after Halloween, but because I’m still in the spirit, this is the Halloween show. We’ve got Jeff Hickey on the line. Jeff, are you there?

Jeffrey Hickey: Yes, you do.

Kent: What did you do for Halloween?

Jeffrey: Actually, carved a few pumpkins, set them out. It was actually kind of a let‑down, because we didn’t get many trick‑or‑treaters this year, but we live in a part of the world where there’s not that many children. We live in a pretty remote area.

So it seems like the trick‑or‑treating mostly went on elsewhere this year. It used to be a huge tradition, though, at our house, where we would carve about 50 jack‑o‑lanterns and I would have spooky music pumping out through speakers outside. People would come from miles around to see the sort of stuff we did.

It used to be something. Also, I used to do lots and lots of reader’s theater shows ‑ like as many as about 25 in 14 or 15 days, around that time ‑ doing spooky readings.

Kent: You carved 50 pumpkins?

Jeffrey: Yes, I’m a master. I’m not shy about it. I’m pretty rudimentary at the carvings, but I am a master at cleaning them and preparing them for carving. I’ve got the proper tools. I could clean a pumpkin in about a minute and have it ready for you to carve.

Kent: Do you use the pumpkin?

Jeffrey: .. For compost, [laughter] eventually. Yeah, you know, we do use the pumpkin seeds, some of them at least, but most of them just go right into the compost and end up in our garden. So in that sense, they do get used.

Kent: So I sat in front of my house with a pumpkin on my lap, carving it, pulling out all the insides. In my family we always cut all the pumpkin out of the inside and we saved that too ‑ cooked it down. But it takes hours to cook that stuff.

Jeffrey: Well, it does.

Kent: And hours.

Jeffrey: And it all depends on how much you can stomach the smell of squash. Personally, I’ve only got a couple of hours in me for a year. I’m not a huge squash man.

Kent: Butch? Are you a squash man?

Eddie Munster: Not much, no.

Kent: We got Butch Patrick on the line now; we had a little technical difficulty. Butch, this is Jeff Hickey.

Jeffrey: Hey, Butch, what’s up man?

Eddie: Oh, not too much. Right now, I’m just kind of relaxing, having had a hectic last few weeks.

Jeffrey: You and me both, buddy.

Eddie: Yeah, I can appreciate that.

Jeffrey: I’m pounding down my morning cup of coffee here.

Eddie: Yeah, we were… I’m in Vegas. Did I say I was in Vegas?

[laughter]

Kent: You said… yeah…

[laughter]

Eddie: Yeah, anyway, I’m in Vegas right now. I’ve been traveling back and forth across the country quite a bit the last 14‑17 days, so I’m pretty tired…

Kent: You’re especially known for Halloweeen time. You’ve been booked every day solid on radio shows and appearances, is that right?

Eddie: Yes. Yeah, I was doing between six and twelve shows a day for a few days, that’s for sure.

Kent: Can you tell us what the Munsters do on Halloween?

Eddie: Munsters on Halloween? Well, most of the Munsters have passed, so it’s just me and the girls, but Marilyn Munster shows up at this house in Texas that this couple built that looks just like the Munster house. Every year. They have an annual event.

I went to the first house warming ‑ or in the Munsters’ case, maybe a house cooling! ‑ opening on Halloween, and she’s been taking it over ever since. But this Halloween I was out at a huge convention in Vegas called the SEMA convention which is for automotive products and racing wheels, anything to do with after‑market.

Performance cars. So there’s a huge convention in Las Vegas. I actually had a pretty good time out here.

Kent: Jeff, did you watch “The Munsters” growing up?

Jeffrey: Absolutely.

Eddie: Yeah, most people did. Even if you’re as old as I am, which is 54, or much younger, you can still catch it on one of the cable channels, or if your parents maybe have purchased it on DVD. It’s pretty cool, it’s done really well.

Kent: How long were you in makeup before shooting?

Eddie: About an hour got me started. Then throughout the day, there were touchups throughout the day.

Kent: It was pretty heavy, I mean, they had you pretty much… there was a lot of make up on you.

Eddie: Well, yeah. You had ears, you had eyebrows, you had a hairpiece. And then you had face makeup as well as fairly much body makeup on your hands and your knees.

In addition to that, anything that would be special effects‑related that day; which could be anything from wires and a harness to carrying around breakaway props and toys and this and that. Or knowing that things were going to be coming out of the.

Ceiling at you, so not to look up and catch an eyeful of dust.

Kent: Did Fred Gwynne’s… like, his head, that little addition to his forehead ‑ did that ever come loose during shooting?

Eddie: No. There was no addition. What are you talking about?

Kent: .. Really?

[laughter]

Kent: I always thought that there must be something built on.

Eddie: I always wanted to say that to somebody: “What make‑up?”[laughter]

No, the thing was shaped for him. His went over his eyebrows, and then tucked under his eye socket. So once that was attached, it was on pretty good. It wasn’t going to shake loose very easily.

[laughter]

And then the staples helped.

Kent: It….. as they would. Staples are handy for anything.

Eddie: Yup.

Kent: Butch Patrick’s latest book is with author Helen Darras. She wrote a biography of Butch Patrick. It’s called “Eddie Munster aka Butch Patrick.” It’s available online at www.themunsters.tv. Can you tell us a little about the book, Butch?

Eddie: Yeah, everything’s fine, everybody likes it, everybody that’s purchased it seems to be really happy. We’re just moving along, plugging along. As you know; we’ve got to get the ball rolling, which we’re doing. In fact, I think Helen, she’s the.

Computer person in the group here, I think she put them up on eBay, and we’ve been getting some sales that way as well.

So, we’re all over the place, it’s a good book, we’re really pleased with it. Basically, right now, I’m going to go speak in front of a bunch of people here who are in town looking at property and stuff in Las Vegas. So, you know, we’re taking all kinds of different avenues and then hopefully, we’ll be doing a book stop tour throughout the northeast real soon.

Kent: And Jeffrey Hickey has a brand new audio book coming out called “The Coach’s Son”.

Eddie: Cool.

Kent: And that’s a re‑release of a book that was published about a year ago, is that right, Jeff?

Jeffrey: Yeah, that’s right.

Kent: And Jeff is also known for… there’s some audio books that we’ve done in the past for Halloween, even, right?

Jeffrey: Well there was one, it wasn’t specifically for Halloween. I had a whole series of stories that I would do for Halloween shows, but I did a CD that had certainly spooky themes to it, called “Bats and Bones.” That explored the notion of death within the presence of life. And then some of it was comical, some of it was more stereotypically scary, and the rest of it was more introspective, but still pretty haunting.

Kent: I have a question for Butch. When you were a little kid, what was your favorite Halloween costume? What did you do, did you dress up as Eddie Munster on Halloween?

Eddie: No, no, that was being done every day of my life, so I would take advantage of the professional makeup people up at the studio, and forewarn them that I wanted something really good, so they made me some really nice masks and over the years I gave them away to people. But I had a killer mummy mask that was made and.

Then I had a really good, it was kind of like an alien head that Alfred Hitchcock had been using in one of his specials, so I took that and some Outer Limits stuff.

If I had to run around and be a character, the wolf man was always one of my favorites, because he was really agile and he was always running around. Eddie Munster was supposed to be a wolf boy. The wolf man, even before I did the Munsters, Lon Chaney Jr. as a wolf man with Abbott and Costello was always one of my favorite movies.

Kent: How about you, Jeff, what was your favorite costume?

Jeffrey: Man, I don’t even remember that much about them. My favorite costumes, actually, have been what my kids have worn. The stuff that they really got into, you know, various sorts of costumes.

One time Brendan, one of my sons, who’s very agile and nimble, sort of like this reverse man, where his feet were his hands and his hands were his feet, and he walked around on his hands trick‑or‑treating. [laughs]

Kent: And strange, that sounds good.

Jeffrey: It was really cool, I mean, he could only do it for so long before he just had to rest. But he would approach each house in this strange outfit, and it was very cool, it was very cool.

There was also my wife, she works over at Pixar, and there was a contest amongst the animators; actually amongst the whole company to see who could wear the best costume. She built an entire chicken coop for herself. It was actually this large chicken coop.

Eddie: Yeah, yeah, like chicken wire, probably. [laughs]

Jeffrey: Yes, yes, it was cumbersome, but it was quite well done.

Eddie: That’s great, I love doing crazy stuff like that. I’ve created for a friend of mine down in Florida, the same costume he wore three different times, in three different years in a row. One year he won back stage passes at the Stones, one year he won 5,000 dollars, one year he won like 2,500 bucks, and it was just a really simple thing.

It was called the invisible man and woman. What he did was just make like a headless horseman situation, where the shoulders and neck were above his head. Then he had a little thin wire and a cap and some sunglasses. His girlfriend had a little thin wire and a hairpiece and some sunglasses. So, everywhere they went, it looked like they were walking around as the invisible man and woman. But.

It was so effective. [laughs]

Jeffrey: Sounds great.

Eddie: It was.

Kent: How much do you love Halloween, Butch, do you like it enough that every year you can come out and do these appearances and signings and you love it?

Eddie: Well, you know, I like meeting the people and Halloween is fun. It’s just that it’s extended itself into such a long holiday as opposed to just being the thirty‑first now, because of the kids not being able to trick‑or‑treat like they used to when I was.

Growing up.

People now have opened up these mini‑theme parks and corn mazes and hay rides and this and that, which is all fine and dandy, but getting into the business of Halloween is probably what I would wind up doing moreso as opposed to being a celebrity going to the place. I think I would be better served to design my own place and oversee a location, which is what I’m probably going to do next year.

Kent: Very cool.

Jeffrey: Yeah.

Kent: Well, Butch has a brand new biography out; it was written by Helen Darres. It’s available on the web at themunsters.tv and it’s also available from Blooming Twig Books.

Jeffrey Hickey has a brand new audio book coming out and that’s also available on the web. His web site is www.jeffreyhickey.com.

Thank you both for joining me, Happy Halloween.

Jeffrey: You’re more than welcome, thank you Kent, thank you Cat, nice to meet you, Butch.

Eddie: Nice talking with you buddy, bye bye.

Jeffrey: Bye bye.

Kent: And, I’ll be back in a few minutes with author Nicky Cobb, and she is an expert in spiritual life, and we will chat about a bunch of things coming up.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Halloween, TRANSCRIPTS, Fiction, Entertainment, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Hollywood, PODCAST