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That's an idea I've been kicking around with Ted and some others. Say, Kevin, you done any acting...?

I've just added an interview with Ted about the background of the play. Here's a sample:

Can you think of any modern day actors that you think could play Karloff, Lugosi, Lorre and Chaney?

I wouldn't try to-- at least not for this. People have done fantasy casting, like Karloff as if played by Liam Nelson. Bela Jr., first time I met him, when I had written a script about his father, brought up Laurence Harvey as a possibility (except that Harvey was already dead.) That wouldn't have been bad. In a perfect world, I think Claude Akins should have played Lon Chaney Jr. in Man of a Thousand Faces, for instance. In 1957, he would have looked and been just perfect. Think about Martin Landau as Lugosi: really, there's no resemblance physically. But the script was right, the Rick Baker make-up was right, and the part was extremely well-written, so you accepted it.

The thing I bear in mind here is, the play's the thing. Richard Nathan's A Night in Elsinore, for instance, is Hamlet, as done by the Marx Brothers. Groucho is Hamlet, Chico is Horatio, Harpo is the Ghost of Hamlet's Father; Laurel and Hardy are Rosenkrantz and Guilderstern; the players are The Three Stooges. It's such a brilliant parody-- entirely true to Shakespeare, but also precisely true to the movie comedians' characters. And when we did it, obviously we all tried to emulate the screen characters, but it was the behavior of the characters within the story which was more important than dead-on impersonations. And his play has been put on in a number of places, in a number of ways-- including an all-children cast, with no actor over 14, and some as young as 7 or 8. Clearly, that's a lot different from the version we did in Pasadena, but apparently it worked great.

At one point, about 2003, an actor-producer I knew, John Clark, read the play and wanted to do it with Ron Jeremy as the Ed Wood character. John wanted me to rewrite it into a generic sleazeball film maker to make it more Ron Jeremy-esque. Well, I actually have a great deal of respect for Ron Jeremy's comedic talents. This did not work out, and I didn't seriously consider it, certainly did no revisions-- but it was not such an insane idea, to think out of the box.

Here's the url for the full interview:

http://drunkenseveredhead.blogspot.com/2009/12/with-interest-shown-in-play-too-man.html