Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a short interview I had with Peter Segal at Comic-Con about his adaptation of the classic TV show, GET SMART! My track record with Segal’s movies is pretty good. I’m a sucker for Drew Barrymore and I fully admit to loving 50 FIRST DATES. On the surface I should have hated it… big budget star vehicle romantic comedy, but I’m too much of a softie. I also surprisingly liked ANGER MANAGEMENT, I unabashedly love TOMMY BOY and remember enjoying the Jack Lemmon/James Garner team-up MY FELLOW AMERICANS, but admittedly I haven’t seen that one since it came out. The GET SMART footage they screened at the Con was also surprisingly good. Funny, big… like they plopped Maxwell Smart in the middle of a real modern action movie in the BOURNE style. So, enjoy the brief chat and enjoy a few wonders of modern technology I like to call sound-o-text!!

Quint: I’m such a fool for a good cast and watching personalities play with each other and it seems that you were very conscious of putting some amazing people in this movie. You have General Zod as your bad guy for God’s sake…

Peter Segal: Well I appreciate you saying that and I have to say when he came in and I met Terence [Stamp], he was the only person we wanted to play Siegfried… He actually said “You know Pete, people always ask me to say ‘Kneel before Zod,’ so I do,’” and he did and I thought “oh, this is so cool. I have General Zod actually saying “Kneel before Zod,” and he was in white tennis shorts and I was like “this is like an out of body experience!” But you know, it’s interesting because I grew up with the show. With Steve and I around the same age, we both grew up with it and we didn’t want to screw the pooch. We knew that we are dealing an iconic show, probably one of the top three most remembered television series in history. You name it, THE HONEYMOONERS, DICK VAN DYKE, or I LOVE LUCY… and why we did it is because we felt that if we embraced it and embraced the spirit of the show and really didn’t try to reinvent the wheel… because if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it… that there could be a place for it forty-three years later.

Quint: Well what makes would make it work is to not completely change the tone or completely change the basics, but by put these different personalities in these roles, in this universe.

Peter Segal: Right and we consulted Mel [Brooks] and Buck [Henry] and Leonard Stern and I asked those guys, because I wanted to know… I was fascinated… Chuck Roven is one of our producers and he produced BATMAN BEGINS, which I think is one of the best comic books ever brought to the big screen and I loved the fact that even the last CASINO ROYALE or the last James Bond was an origin story and I thought, “there’s a place for that here,” and so I asked Mel what he thought and he thought it was a great idea and so did Leonard. Mel ironically told me when THE PRODUCERS went from the big screen back to Broadway that he introduced a bit of an origin in that transition, so he said “I did it myself. I think it’s a great idea.” So once we got their blessing, we felt like we were on solid ground.

Quint: Yeah.

Peter Segal: We’re going to find bumps along the way, because so many people love it exactly the way it was, that we’re going to hit a trip wire here or there, but we are really trying to pay attention to the details of the show that made it so lovable.

Quint: Even with the cast, my main worries… I just kept thinking, “Well THE AVENGERS had a great cast and that turned out to not work,” but AVENGERS decided to make it so cornball, but it was such a different kind of comedy than what the original was…

Peter Segal: It was.

Quint: It sounds like you’re trying to avoid those pitfalls.

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Peter Segal: Well we’re trying, you know, there’s no way that we can top the original show and we are not trying to. There’s no way Steve, and Steve has told me, there’s no way he can do a better job as Maxwell Smart than Don Adams, so we are just trying to do the best we can and bring GET SMART to a new generation who haven’t seen it before and my son, who is seven, already keeps humming the theme song and he’s loving watching the doors the way I did when I was a kid…

Quint: Yeah.

Peter Segal: And that was a Leonard Stern creation, the doors, and you know, there was nothing funny about it. It was just cool and so to find that same balance between our cool action and of course the core comedy, that’s the challenge.

Quint: What spoke to me more than the leads that you put in the movie is when you’ve got Masi Oka and you’ve got [David] Koechner… There’s only so much, especially when you’re trying to be funny, that the leads can do…

Peter Segal: Right.

Quint: They can wear themselves out really quickly, but I love that you gave them a solid supporting structure.

Peter Segal: Yeah and we’ve thrown in a couple of new characters, you know, Masi and Nate Torrence play Bruce and Lloyd, the inventors, because I remember a lot of times the chief would go to a closet and pull out a gadget and show Max “here’s your new gadget,” and I thought “well there’s an opportunity there.” We have our characters and I agree with you, that if you get away from your main characters for a scene or a half of a scene, you look forward to seeing them again, because they can wear thin if it’s just constantly them there. And The Rock, Agent 23, there was an Agent 23 on the series, but this guy is the mentor to Max, you know, and he did a great job. I was thrilled to have the guy doing a movie like this and although he has done a couple of comedies, it’s not really in his wheelhouse and that’s what I find exciting.

Quint: He’s actually really good at it. As a matter of fact, I think that it might be some of the reason why he hasn’t really found his Schwarzenegger starring vehicle, because I think that he has such a sense of humor and they don’t really make those kinds of movies… If he was in the eighties, I think he could have been as big as Schwarzenegger, because they were making movies like COMMANDO, which could be really tongue and cheek…

Peter Segal: You’re right and I think guys like that or guys like [Adam] Sandler, who will do a commercial vehicle and then do something a little more artistic like PUNCH DRUNK and I think in the same way, Dwayne [Johnson] is balancing different kinds of movies and I think it just increases the longevity of your career.

Quint: Well I need to ask if the cone of silence is…

Peter Segal: Oh absolutely…

Quint: I figured that was a given, but…

Peter Segal: Oh yeah, no we have and I told Buck, he said “is my beloved cone of silence in the movie?” and I said “of course.” He said “Ahh…”

Quint: I’m glad because no cone of silence would be like doing the film without the shoe-phone.

Peter Segal: Well, the shoe-phone is in there too, but then the hard thing was “how do you get the shoe-phone in a contemporary story?” We figured out a way and we situated Control… He always… the car pulls up and he goes up some steps and then he goes down an elevator and we said “Well, what is the building on top of the elevator? We could say it’s anything… It just has to be in Washington,” so we put it under… because the same steps looked like they were at the Smithsonian, so we put a lot of the gadgets in the Smithsonian and the cover was, as you will see in the movie, a tour guide walks by and says “ and this is what is left of CONTROL, a super secret spy agency who once battled the evil forces of KAOS,” and you see the shoe-phone and there was a cone of silence from the TV series, which was hilarious… two fishbowl like bubbles with a tube that looked like a bong and like the stereophonic gun… We got to put all of these gadgets that we could find, and some we rebuilt…We rebuilt the shoe-phone… and then someone told me, “you know the actual shoe-phone from the series rests is in the Smithsonian,” and I didn’t know that.

Quint: That’s pretty awesome.

Peter Segal: So it was pretty cool.

Quint: That’s great, so you were being true and you didn’t even know it.

Peter Segal: Exactly. Ironically. I was more true than I had thought.

Quint: I’d be lynched if I didn’t bring it up before we ended this interview…SHAZAM… Are you still doing it?

Peter Segal: Absolutely. We’re working on the script right now and John August is working on it and I have to say I’m really excited about this. This is one of my favorite comic books and I had to remind myself when I researched again, once I signed on, that it was the most popular comic in the world in 1939 and because of a lot of legal problems it was shelved away and enjoined and when it came back again and during that time Superman thrived, but what I think is relevant about this comic is that element of BIG. BIG meets Superman. There’s no comic out there… I mean, Iron Man has that flawed character and that’s what makes that unique, but this kid is a prepubescent boy that gets to morph and become a superhero and I think you’ve got to… that’s so rich… you know, to find two actors, because I don’t think one actor can play 14 and 28… that’d be a little creepy like CLIFFORD or something, I don’t know, but that’s why I think they came after a guy like me. I know some people said “why him?” I asked that same question when Stan Lee came to me… I was on FANTASTIC FOUR about 8 years ago for about a year and a half and Chris Columbus had given it to me and then Stan Lee met me and I asked “Why? Why me?” and he said “Well, because MARVEL heroes have flaws and therein lies their humor” and I think that’s why New Line came at me with that one, so that’s going to be fun. I’m looking forward to it.

Quint: I think SHAZAM would kind of lend itself be the kind of counter-superhero movie, because the emphasis is on fun and you don’t have to force a… it’s almost starting to become a cliché, where you look at BATMAN and SPIDERMAN like there always has to be that dark brooding side of the super hero. That definitely works, but it’ll be interesting to see something different.

Peter Segal: It served its purpose, because a lot of comic books had become so glossy and losing a sense of themselves, that by bringing it back and grounding it. The Dark Knight was cool again, but now if you keep doing it, then that will need to be refreshed and so that’s why again I don’t see that element in other comic books… the boyish wonder of it all and I think that’s going to be a blast, to tell that story.

Quint: Do you have any other projects circling or are you diving right into SHAZAM after this?

Peter Segal: I’m hoping to. We’re expecting to see our first draft in a few weeks. I’ve got several other projects that we sold last year. I, THALUS, which is a comedy about the first Olympiad to Universal. We have BLACK AND WHITE at New Line, which is NFL refs who throw the Super Bowl… and we have one at Disney called GOBLINS, which is based on Brian Froud’s drawings and we have created a story for them.

Quint: I was so depressed when The DARK CRYSTAL sequel fell through…

Peter Segal: Yeah.

Quint: It’s like, I think that we’re ready for a great kind of Henson fantasy again.

Peter Segal: I’ve got all of his sketches just wall to wall in my office. If you’re ever in LA, come by I’ll show you.

Quit: I just might take you up on that. So I think that’s about it.

Peter Segal: Alright, great. It was nice talking to you.

There's the chat. Hope you guys enjoyed it. The best is yet to come... I think tomorrow afternoon will be perfect to post my 20 minute long discussion with Tobin Bell and I still have at least half a dozen more interviews circling. I just gotta move my ass, pick up the little orange lightsaber cone things and bring them safely down so you can read 'em. I did get a note from Segal after the Con where I mentioned he said on a panel that Mel Brooks and Buck Henry both have cameos in the movie. Not so. Brooks was busy finalizing YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN's stage show, but he did say that they're trying to get a last minute shoot in with Barbara Feldon. That's pretty nifty, yeah? God, I had such a huge crush on her... Anyway, keep your eyes peeled! So many goodies on the way! -Quint quint@aintitcool.com