From the WNIN Tristate Public Media Center in downtown Evansville.

I'm David James and this is Two Main Street.

Now, before there were streaming services and hundreds of TV channels and thousands of shows to pick from, the major networks counted on a few hit programs to see them through to the next season.

High ratings meant more viewers and more commercial revenue.

Of course, a competitive, high stress environment.

And my guest not only survived the TV wars, he thrived producing and writing some of the most successful shows in TV history, including Roseanne and Home Improvement.

His credits also include The Cosby Show, A Different World and movies, What Women Want, Where the Heart Is, and Walker Payne.

After a long career in Hollywood and now living in New York City, Evansville native Matt Williams is back home to honor one of his acting and directing mentors, John David Lutz at the University of Evansville.

Matt Williams, welcome home.

Thank you so much.

It's good to be here.

A little chilly, but it's good to be here.

Well, good to have you here.

Now, before we talk about the new John David Lutz theater lab at UE I know everybody's excited about that.

Let's go back to 1968, Matt.

Oh, boy.

Reitz High School opening night of A Man For All Seasons.

You have a starring role of Sir Thomas Moore.

So what was going through your mind?

Waiting for the curtain to go up at Reitz High School packed house?

I'm sure I had two thoughts.

Okay.

Don't forget your lines and don't trip on your robe, because I was Sir Thomas Moore.

I had this long robe.

And of course, they took my head of hair, and I don't have to do it anymore.

Nor do you.

And they put powder in it and turned it white.

And I was Sir Thomas Moore.

And I kept thinking, whatever you do when you walk down the steps, don't trip on your robe.

Well, that kind of guided you through there.

And you were okay.

There was a lot of dialog in that.

A lot of dialog, A lot of dialog.

And I was a little worried.

Even Kinnaird-Kattau eventually.

But even Kinnaird was the director and our teacher and I a few days before we opened, I go, I don't know if I know all the lines.

I don't know.

And she said, Matt, stand center stage.

And she said, I'm going to test you.

And she took the script and she arbitrarily flipped to a page and read a line.

And I responded with my line.

She flipped to another part of the read.

She says, You know, this play backwards and forwards, relax and enjoy it.

That she gave me the confidence I needed to step out there and do it.

So what were the reviews?

Nobody said yuck.

I think a few people might have fallen asleep.

It's a long play.

Yeah.

Now, any other other plays at Reitz?

Yes.

The very first play I was in was a children's play for children's theater called Land of the Dragon.

Okay.

And I played the Goofy peasant, and I was kind of like the comic relief.

Okay.

And we did a lot of interaction with the kids.

And I remember one of the lines [reciting] That was the magic word to have the dragon appear or something.

And so my job was to get all the kids in the audience to go.

[reciting].

And they would yell it loud enough, and then the dragon or whatever would appear.

But, Man For All Season, that was your first real serious role.

Yeah, it was.

It was.

And then Eva Kinnaird, God bless her, she she knew I was interested in directing, so she made me her assistant director for a Little Abner when she directed the musical.

But I think the main reason she did it is I recruited all the football players to be extras and in the chorus.

That's right.

You were on the Reitz football team, of course, the west side of Evansville, football power Reitz High School.

What was your position on the team?

I played fullback and pulling guard on offense and I was on defense.

I was quarterback.

And so I back in those days you played both offense, defense and the specialty teams, so you never left the field.

Both sides of the ball.

All the time.

Herman Byers of the coach, winningest coach, I don't know if he still is, but the winningest coach in Indiana football history.

And you know, I was visiting the bowl the other day with my friend Mike Fershe who played for Mater Dei my archrival.

Yes.

Yeah, definitely.

And and we were we've been best friends since 1968.

So we were visiting the bowl and I said, you know, the thing about Coach Byers, his philosophy was to make practice.

So grueling, so tough.

When you got into the game, it was kind of fun.

It was actually easier.

And so you just went out there and kind of had fun.

And I think it was his last season at Reitz right?

Yes, he retired after that.

It was his very last season.

Now, that was Herman.

Jim Byers, that his son and he was my coach at the University of Evansville.

So you had the Byers family.

BYERS Jim Byers was the coach, and I attended the university on a football scholarship.

Mm hmm.

And so that was a little incongruous because I was a football player majoring in the theater department.

The football players would call me Thespis.

So you were juggling football and acting for a while, literally.

I mean, I would I would get off practice in the afternoon, run across campus, grab a bite to eat, go get into rehearsal, rehearse until like ten or eleven at night, and then go home, do whatever homework I had to do and just keep that cycle going.

But it taught me discipline, you know, And people think sports and theater are so separated.

So I think so, yeah.

They're not.

It's the same thing.

You've got a playbook just like you have a play.

You have a director who's your coach, you have a team, you have to work together.

I have to know what the guard's doing.

I have to know what the actors doing.

So the discipline of sports just naturally dovetailed right into the discipline of doing theater.

And you have an audience and you've got an audience and they let you know if you're doing well or not.

That's right.

That's immediate feedback.

Yes.

Okay.

Now, we talked about Herman Byers last season and was, I guess, 27 years.

I think he coached at Reitz?

Oh, yeah.

Incredible.

Now, okay.

Your starring role at the University of Evansville, A Thousand Clowns, which was directed by your mentor, John David Lutz.

You played the role of Murray, right?

A thousand Clowns, Right.

And you did some singing.

And I understand in that play you did not very well, but I did.

I had to learn to play the ukulele and sing.

And I guess that was my senior year.

It was one of the roles I did there.

And Murray- And another one here, uh, let’s see Emile in the forest, The Italian Straw Hat.

Oh, yes, yes.

That was a lot of slamming doors and and falling over.

And and I remember in the play, I think I forgot her Susie's last name, but she was supposed to slap me on stage.

And at that moment, I turned on I went well, and she slapped me.

And when she did, it dislocated my jaw.

Oh, you're kidding.

No, for just about three to eight seconds, Ellen.

Oh.

Huh?

Oh, he went, Oh, my jaw.

And I went like this and hit my jaw.

And it kind of popped it in.

And then I continued with the line, the moment of panic.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Now, Rebecca Guy does that, right?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Rebecca Guy and I acted it on a lot of plays together.

And when I wrote my first play between Daylight and Booneville, right, she played the lead.

Oh, in New York City.

Rebecca Guy played the lead, and that was directed by John.

John David Lutz.

Yeah.

You you look at this thread of John David Lutz, it carries on for a lot of years.

Right now you have this role of Murray living in New York City, which is kind of interesting.

Yeah.

Now you live in New York City and he was rearing his young nephew and they were trying to take his nephew away from him, weren't they?

Yes.

Yes.

It was kind of an antique.

It's Murray goal, if I remember correctly, wrote the play and it was kind of a anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian play, because at that time it was like, oh, let's get rid of the rules.

Let's remember Murray would go to movies in the middle of the day.

He had no structure to his life, and that was kind of the essence of that character.

Well, this was the time in the sixties to the turbulent sixties.

Oh, yes, It kind of mirrored the times.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Now, another we talked about playing Emile in the Farce.

Farces are always fun or just chaotic, which is part of it.

Now, you went on to the University of New Orleans for post-graduate studies.

Yes.

Any plays or performances there, Matt?

Yes, I. I got a full scholarship to be part of the acting company, so I got paid to go to school to act, which was a pretty nice.

And then when I was there, I concentrated primarily on directing and I remember John David Lutz had directed a again, there's the John David Lutz thread had directed a production of The Rimers of Eldridge.

And so for my Master's thesis project, I directed The Rimers of Eldridge.

And at the time I was the only graduate student to ever direct a play on the main stage.

All right, It was great.

It was really great.

And it goes back to learning by doing sure, this was John David Lutz.

This, was you know, the UE philosophy is get your hands dirty, build the sets.

Sew the costumes you act, you direct, you learn by doing and I was so prepared to go to graduate school, to be honest, the main reason I went to graduate school, I was intimidated to move to New York.

So I thought, I'll hide out here for a couple of years.

But I'm glad I did because I honed my my craft.

By the time I got to New York, I was I was ready to work.

Now, let's talk about your family, Angelina, your wife, an actress as well, actress on Broadway, off-Broadway.

She has done TV and movies, but for the last 26 years, she's been the artistic director of the Cherry Lane Theater.

That's a historic it's it's I've seen pictures of.

It's gorgeous.

Yeah.

It's going to be 100 years old as a theater this year.

I think it's the oldest running off-Broadway theater, right?

Yeah.

And so Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, it just goes on and on.

All had their premieres and plays there.

The the history of that place is pretty amazing.

Very intimate, too.

It yes.

Only 179 seats.

So it's intimate.

It's perfect.

I remember I saw Sam Shepard's True West with Malkovich and Sinise when they first came out of Steppenwolf and did it there.

So to be there, it was one of the first theaters I attended when I arrived in 1976.

And then flash forward 10, 15, 20 years, my wife's running it.

That's pretty cool.

Now, Sam Shepard, you directed him in a movie.

Did I did.

I directed him in a movie called Walker Payne.

And I remember vividly sitting in the trailer and Sam came to me, says, I don't know about this one speech here.

And he says, What if we work it?

And I and I'm sitting across from Sam Shepard and he's rewriting the dialog that I had written.

And I thought, this is pretty cool.

I'm being rewritten by a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, so somebody is going to rewrite you.

That's who you want.

Rewriting.

He has some gravitas.

Yeah, he's got a little gravitas.

Definitely.

Oh, yeah.

And now you have two children, Grown children, I assume?

Yes.

Fred and Matise?

Yes.

Are they in the business?

They were my my daughter was a went to USC film school.

She was a documentarian for a while, went to Thailand and shot a documentary, went to Haiti and shot a documentary.

And after doing that for a while, she said, I want to go back and get my master's.

And she got it in transpersonal psychology.

And it's an involvement of world religions myth.

It's very intuitive.

And what she ended up doing was adopting rescue horses and she does equine therapy, so she has sessions with her rescue horses.

And so her therapy is through equine and through the equine method.

And so and my son got a degree in acting from B.U.

and then after he got it, he goes, I don't think I want to be an actor.

He really like music a little more.

He got a degree in psychology and he is a school counselor now out in Los Angeles.

Wow.

Yeah.

And any grandkids?

It's funny you say that.

Breaking news.

Breaking news.

Angelina and I are expecting our first grandchild March 26th.

Oh, congratulations.

Yeah, that is exciting.

It is.

It's our very first grandchild, and we can't wait to spoil her.

It's a her.

Oh, we're going to spoil her, spoil her, spoil her.

That's good.

Any.

Any critters in the home, any.

Oh, yeah.

We've got in fact one of the, one of the essays I'm reading at the University is in the John Lutz Theater is called Nova, and that's our Labrador puppy.

So we've got that.

We have my father's five mini horses.

I inherited from him.

We have chickens, we have sheep.

We live on a small farm in the Hudson Valley, so we've got a lot of critters.

Definitely.

Well, that kind of leads me into the the glimpses you book glimpses.

You can do some readings and yeah, as part of the fundraising for the the theater Lab for John David Lutz.

Tell me about the book.

The book is a collection of humorous essays and what I call spiritual musings.

The full title is Glimpses a comedy writers take on life, love and all that spiritual stuff.

And so the book consists of three threads My family, that's the family I grew up in, as well as the family I created with Angelina, my career and my spiritual journey.

And I breed those three story threads together to create the memoir.

It's not the usual chronological this happened.

This happened.

It's a collection of bite sized chapters that I hope are really funny.

I want people to laugh a lot and then put the book down and think about what they read.

Because my real intent is I want to open hearts.

I want I want people to to to feel and to embrace the fact that kindness is important.

Goodness is important.

And the glimpses refers to if we look around, if we really take the time to look around, you will find little glimpses of God everywhere.

And by God I mean grace, moments of kindness, tenderness.

And it is really what I hope is an uplifting book.

But first and foremost, I want people to laugh and that I want them to feel.

And then I want them to think about what they're feeling.

So we could do this on stage.

You could.

You could.

You could.

You could.

You could not.

But you could.

I think you could do it, David.

I think you should, but we'll talk about that later.

Okay?

You call my people, okay?

Okay.

We'll never go.

Okay.

Now we talk about the Cherry Lane Theater.

Of course, COVID 19 probably did a number on the theater and a lot of other theaters.

All the theaters.

I mean, Oh, my gosh.

It just shut everything down in New York.

Excuse me.

My wife and I both got it very early on it.

Oh, you did?

Oh, in March of 2020.

And she was sick for about ten days.

I was very sick for about a month.

And of course, New York was an epicenter.

We were the epicenter at the time, you know, 104.5 fever and all of this.

My friend said, you have to go to the hospital.

And I said this sincerely.

I said, I'm not going because if I'm going to die and I thought I was I said, I want to die at home, not on a gurney in a hallway and and be put in a semi truck.

Exactly.

So thank God I rode it out.

My immune system was enough that I recovered and everything's great now.

But it was it was a month of really, really harrowing experiences.

So is the stage returning now?

Oh, yeah, it's bouncing back.

In fact, the Cherry Lane Theater was the first off-Broadway it may, may even have been the first Broadway, but the first off-Broadway theater to open after COVID.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Good.

Yeah, that's good.

So, Matt, do you have a favorite football team?

I really don't.

My son was a Jets fan for a while, and the years that he was a Jets fan, that was pretty excruciating.

They lost him.

Of course, now that he lives in Los Angeles, he's become a Rams fan.

Okay, So I'm a Rams fan because my son is okay.

There you go.

That's right.

You don't want to be on the opposite end of it.

So now in your storytelling, we find those good old Midwest, Midwest values of hard work and perseverance.

It's now you grow up, grew up in a household where both your mom and dad were hard workers.

Your dad on the assembly line at Whirlpool, my mom worked on the assembly line at Whirlpool.

Seriously?

They probably worked together at the same time.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Out of the 21 plant.

Yes.

Prepared refrigerators.

Absolutely.

She also worked at the ordnance plant, too, during the Vietnam War.

They were making ammunition.

Whirlpool did that, too.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

Now, your mom, a waitress and a hairdresser.

Where did she waitress?

At the Three Coins.

Oh, my gosh.

The Three Coins.

She started at a place called The Oaks, which no longer exists.

It was out on Highway 41, and she was a waitress at The Three Coins.

Oh, my gosh.

That's something.

Now, did she do the hairdressing at her house?

No, she got a she went back to what we called beauty school.

Oh, yeah.

Beautician certificate.

Not a beauty school dropout, though.

No, not a beauty school dropout.

That's good.

That's good.

She and she did that for a while.

She was a colorist, so.

Oh, hey.

Yeah, you know, So always a demand.

Yes.

That's a smart.

Now, any any siblings, Matt?

Yes, I have a brother.

I'm the oldest of four.

I have two brothers, Randy and Bradley and my sister Beth, She lives in Florida.

My one brother lives in Kentucky and the other brother lives with me on the farm in New York.

There you go.

There you go.

Now, you grew up in the Darmstadt area, is that right?

Yeah, We were out on Highway 41.

We had five acres.

And it was interesting I always thought of it as the country.

Oh, yeah.

Back then and the other day I drove by McCutchanville and I went, You know, none of these houses existed.

This was, this was just open field.

But yeah, we grew up there with on five acres and we had everything.

We had horses and donkey and guinea pigs and sheep.

And at one point, believe it or not, we had two alligators because how did that happen?

My grandmother and grandfather went down to Florida and they were driving and this was back in the very early sixties and people would sell alligators, baby alligators on the side of the road.

And so they brought us back to baby alligators about six inches long.

And these things spent the winter on our break, our breakfast in our basement, and grew to about three feet long and were the meanest things on Earth.

So our house was a little bit of a just constant tumult, you know.

Sure.

Constant chaos.

So did you take them to the 4-H Center and show them off?

You know what happened?

We it got warm in May.

We set them out in the breezeway in a cage and had a little puddle of water and a freak snowstorm came through and it dropped to freezing.

And when we came out the next day, they were both stiff as a board and you could grab their tails and drive a nail.

I mean, it was.

Oh my gosh.

But I think they went peacefully.

Oh, yes.

Well, that's an interesting little side story there.

Okay.

Now, it's funny that the Darmstadt kids went to Reitz.

Yes.

That’s a long haul.

I think I think it has to do, if I'm not mistaken, with the Evansville school system years ago, Reitz was the only school at one time that had an agricultural program.

Right.

So they would ship the people out in the country on the farms, to Reitz.

So that was a long haul, to Reitz.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

You remember your very first job, Matt Williams Oh, I had so many.

I mean, you had a lot jobs on the farm.

I did, but I was a hog carrier in the summers for my uncle and the hog carrier.

You know, you mixed the mud and carried the bricks.

I was a carpenter’s assistant.

I the the job that's most in fact, I write about it in the book.

The essay is entitled Toilet Dancing.

Okay.

Okay.

Because I worked at Peerless Pottery.

Oh, yes.

And I worked the graveyard shift, and my job was basically to sweep the floors in the toilet factory from like 10:00 at night to six in the morning.

And so it was me had a had a push broom in a warehouse full of toilets.

And that was and that was my job one winter when I was attending UE.

Now didn't they have like some huge ovens?

Huge ovens.

That's the first part of the night.

The first part of the night you have a wheelbarrow and a shovel and you go up where the kilns are.

Sure, and the molds shake the air bubbles out of the clay.

The clay splashes on the floor.

So the first few hours you go in, it's probably 120 degrees.

You scoop up the mud, you put it in the wheelbarrow, you wheel it down three or four flights across the parking lot where it's 12 degrees outside.

And it got to the point where I got tired of putting my shirt coat on and off.

So I just work without a shirt.

You hit that cold air and all of a sudden you explode into a ball of steam.

So you went from that toilet job to scrubbing toilets in the Big Apple?

In the Big Apple.

When I first moved to New York, I knew no one I had no contacts.

I went to all the off-Broadway theaters and no one's Who are you?

Get out of here, that kind of thing.

So I went to the Wonder Horse Theater and I said, I volunteer.

What do you need me to do?

I'm looking for a place.

I'm looking for a theater community.

And I think they tested me.

They go, Well, we've got this bathroom that's hasn't been cleaned in ten years.

If you scrub that and you clean out the storage area, we'll see what happens after that.

So I did.

I scrubbed the toilets, I cleaned it, I went through all the storage, got it organized for them, and they said, we're not going to give you the main stage.

We're going to give you the lobby, which was a substantial size, and you can mount anything you want down there.

And so because of scrubbing toilets, I was given the opportunity to direct a collection of one act plays and I got my first New York credit.

Well, that's quite a story.

Yeah.

And it's definitely old Hollywood and no old Broadway like Fanny Brice, you know?

Yeah, No, you plug it in, you just bugger.

The thing about theater.

You've roll up your sleeves, you show up, and if you pitch in, you are usually accepted.

So that's great.

That's a great story.

Now, your resumé commercial work.

Well, I was starving.

I was an unemployed actor and I'd done a few commercials in Indianapolis when I lived there before moving to New York in 1976.

And so after about a year, getting kicked around and being unemployed, I went, I've got to eat.

I've got to pay my rent.

So I thought I could do commercials.

So I took it and I knew that wasn't the end.

That wasn't my ultimate goal.

So I started practicing.

I would hold the product up next to my head.

I look into the camera, not Bob, my head or blink.

And I every day I would read copy and I would read newspapers and it's just too good.

And so I started auditioning and thank goodness I had a bunch of national commercials and they at the time paid really well so I could afford to live in New York because of commercials and pursue what I really wanted to do, which was direct plays.

So what were you hawking?

I hawked everything from men in Speedstick Deodorant, Lysol spray.

Oh.

Oh, I don't know.

It goes on and on.

Yeah.

So, okay, now you're in New York City and you get a gig on The Cosby Show.

Oh, Did the soap opera come before that?

Yes.

Oh, well, I don't want him to pass over this.

Well, what happened was you're all I was always auditioning.

And this this sounds ironic.

I guess I was always auditioning just so that I could work as an actor to make money because I really wanted to direct.

So I got cast on the Christian Broadcast Network soap opera, Another Life as Dr. Ben Martin.

Yes, I have that here.

I researched that.

Yes.

And he he was a surgeon.

Surgeon.

Good guy, doctor, but a lot of problems, you know, and newly married and a baby on the way.

So all the while, he married this gal who was engaged to somebody else.

Yes, Laurie.

Laurie was engaged to Russ Russ.

Right.

And I understand that this soap opera is still being played overseas.

Oh, I hope not.

It's so embarrassing.

I'm so bad.

The Netherlands, I think.

Is it really?

Yeah, it's on.

And it was big in Nigeria, too.

I found it.

I do know that.

Yeah, I do.

And what's really strange, when it was when we were recording it and I was acting on it, I was with some friends on a brief vacation in the Bahamas, and I'm walking down to board a boardwalk toward a boat and there's some people in a sailboat and they go, Hey, you, come over here, come over here, Mark.

And I thought, What?

And they said, Look, you're on TV and they turn their television around and I'm watching myself on Another Life on a sailboat in the Bahamas.

And I'm like, okay, this is a little Oh, that's wild.

Now, that ran from 1981 to 1984 and as we said, it's still in reruns out there.

Folks still find it out there.

Now don't look for it.

So you were a good guy in that.

I was a very good guy.

The ultimate good guy.

Good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it had some, I guess, religious overtones.

Oh, yeah, it did it.

You know, it's it's it was ironic.

You go, okay, soap opera.

You're thinking infidelity.

Oh, yeah.

But it's a Christian soap opera.

So you had that.

But it was all handled in a slightly different way.

But do you know what the real the real benefit, joy of working there?

There was a man named Linwood Boomer who was the executive producer, and he would notice that I would always watch the cameras.

And he said, Are you interested in three cameras and directing?

And I said, Absolutely.

He said, Anytime you're not in a scene, come into the booth and I'll show you how we cut and direct and snap multi-camera shows.

Oh, And so I did that and I was watching taking notes.

And he said, Are you interested in editing at all?

I said, Absolutely.

He said, Anytime you want to drop in the editing bay, we're going to show you how we put the edit, put together, edit and mix the three camera show.

I had all that experience with a three camera show as an actor behind the scenes director editing the soap opera ends two weeks to the day I get a call from The Cosby Show to come in and interview for a multi-cam television show.

And in the interview, Tom Werner says, Do you have any experience with multicam television?

And I said, I, I most certainly do.

About three years.

Oh, that's that's wonderful.

That was fortuitous.

Definitely.

So now we go to The Cosby Show, and you've mentioned that maybe Bill Cosby's not a personal hero of yours, but you did learn a lot from him about comedy acting.

I have to bifurcate the man.

Sure.

Yeah.

And his problems from the iconic comedian who was groundbreaking.

I got paid to write a show and watch Bill Cosby perform comedy.

And I watched every rehearsal.

You know, you're working all the time.

We worked incredible hours on that show just to keep up.

But that was I was kind of thrown into the deep end of the pool in the fact that my very first job writing for television was the Cosby Show.

It became the number one show everywhere.

It was huge.

And so I, I, I learned so much.

And this was the one lesson I learned one day.

I'd been on the show for about two or three weeks as a writer, baby writer.

I got my notepad, my pencil, and I'm standing and I'm watching a rehearsal and it's Rudy and Theo are doing a scene.

They're rehearsing, and I feel this elbow in my ribs and I turn and it's Bill Cosby and he's got a cappuccino in one hand, a cigar in the other.

And he leaned over to me and he said, Hey, man, if you were home right now, wouldn't you want to be a part of this family?

Mm hmm.

So my head exploded.

I went, That is the key to television.

Mm.

It's not.

Shove the jokes out at the people, invite people in, invite them into and become part of the family.

And so I carried that through.

Roseanne Home improvement, all the shows.

In fact, when you watched the title sequence on Roseanne, that 360 around the table, right.

The camera goes around and everyone's gathering around the table.

I designed that very consciously to work on a subliminal level to invite the audience to come in, pull up a chair and sit at the table and listen to Dan and Roseanne.

And that was the key to television.

Bring them to the table as well.

Bring bring the audience in.

You get to sit on the couch with Tim and Jill.

You get to go to Tool Time.

You get to be a part of this as opposed to sit back and let us blast you with jokes.

You invite the audience to come in and be part of the family.

I have a Bill Cosby story as well.

He performed at the old Robert Stadium, I remember, and he was on his comedy tour, and I was invited to introduce him.

So they took me back to the green room to talk to him before I introduced him.

And so Bill's there with his cigar.

You know, just lay laid back, you know, sir, you know, I'm out am my doing the show, you know.

And so he wanted to know from me about the audience, what do they do?

What's are they blue collar?

What are what do they work?

What do they like to do?

I want to know of my audience.

So he was interviewing me about the audience so he could go out there and be comfortable with them and find a way to connect.

Yeah.

And I thought, Boy, this guy's brilliant.

And he went out there and just slayed them.

But isn't that see, that's the wonderful thing about stories and especially laughter.

Stories and laughter connect us.

Any time I tell you a story, there's a connection.

There's a personal connection there.

And if I can make you laugh or you make me laugh, we're sharing that laughter, and that connection grows deeper.

Yeah.

And that's why when people would say, Oh, it's only a sitcom, I go, No, no, no, no, no.

This is serving a higher purpose.

You are opening something up in people.

You are connecting with people.

If you have 6 million people all laughing at the same time at the same joke, that's pretty powerful.

Hmm.

Golden age of sitcoms.

This these sitcoms followed The Beverly Hillbillies and those kind of the country.

Yeah, shows like that.

And then they kind of went to the more urban shows and the more sophisticated shows.

Now, you talk about Roseanne, a lot of Evansville connections to Roseanne, a lot of backdrops.

You have Saint Boniface Church.

I think, though, your grandmother grandmother's home, Vonda Brown's home on Rickard Avenue.

Yep.

Also a house on Runnymede.

So a lot of local connections there.

Well, you just draw from what you know and it was a working class family and I thought, well, this I grew up in a working class family.

Why not draw from what I know?

And the production designer did fly to Evansville, took pictures all over, including my Grandma Brown’s house and the interior.

And so you're even even in Roseanne.

I told the production designer, I said, all my uncles were independent contractors and they all added on a mud room to their house, but they never finished, of course.

So you got the stud walls and the insulation, but no drywall.

So when we designed the Roseanne house, that back room outside the kitchen was the mud room that was never finished.

I love that.

I love it.

Now, Silk Roseanne wraps up a mega-hit.

What were the ratings for that?

It it hit number one pretty quickly.

Yeah, like in six or seven episodes, I think, of course, there was this Roseanne chapter in her life.

Could be a future book.

A lot of drama involving that with your exit.

And that can save that for a book.

Okay.

So you you go from Roseanne to another incredible show, Home Improvement.

Yes.

I signed a deal with Disney, made an overall deal.

And in between, I did a show with Carol Burnett called Carol and Company.

It was an anthology comedy series, and that ran about two and a half years.

And then we'll talk about working with Carol Burnett.

Well, you've got look, I've got Bill Cosby, Carol Burnett, Roseanne, Tim Allen.

These these people know comedy.

And that's why I had my foundational work on The Cosby Show.

I understood how comedy worked.

So no matter who I was working with, you look at that individual and you adjust the writing for their cadence, their rhythm, their personality.

You don't abandon who you are, right?

But you adjust.

It's I'm sure it's just like a baseball player, you know, or a quarterback but with each personality, you're playing the same game.

But you there's nuance and just and so with Carol Burnett, she's so physical.

She's so physically funny.

And I learned a lot from her just just how to take a moment.

And by tripping or by falling or we laughed walking into the studio about the curtain rod through her dress when she swooped down the stairs.

These are iconic moments and live audience.

Live audience always.

Yeah.

Because that energy, you have 300 people inside of studio, you know, laughing.

There's a lot of energy and performers pick up on that about Yeah, yeah.

And then everything's elevated.

But the real the real joy and probably the high point of my television career was home improvement.

Yes.

Working with Tim Allen.

And tell me about Tim Allen off camera.

Tim Allen is one of the nicest human beings on earth and when Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was running Disney Studios at the time, he said, I've got this stand up comedian, I want you to meet him.

And I had just come off Roseanne.

I said, I don't want to meet him.

And he said, I want you to meet him, have lunch.

I said, I don't want to I don't want to work with another standup.

And he was down and he kept saying that.

And finally he said, Matt, I'm not asking you to marry the man.

I just want you to have lunch with him.

So I went to lunch.

I took David McFadzean, a UE graduate, and my partner went dancer to the lunch.

I sat down with the casting director, Gene Blythe, and Tim and Tim and I sat across from each other and within 5 minutes we were swapping stories, laughing.

It sounded like I grew up in his household.

He grew up in mine.

He's from the Midwest, large family.

And we and I started saying things like, When you were in church with your brothers, did you ever do this?

My brother would take his shoe off and I would reach over and I would then flick it about all the way down the aisle.

And then we started trading stories about our wives.

And by the end of the meal, I went, I feel like this guy is my brother and this is the truth.

Got up from that lunch, were walking across the Disney lot back to our production office.

I turned to David McFadden and I said, If we do this show, if we work with Tim, it's going to be a top ten show.

And he and David looked at me like it's only been a lunch.

But in my gut, that true voice, that voice that lives inside you, there was no question if we did this right with them, it was going to be a hit show.

Okay.

Matt has a new book called Glimpses Searching and Finding Goodness in Our Lives.

So, Matt Williams, are you in a good place now?

I'm in a very good place.

I'm like, yeah, I'm I'm 71 years old, is probably the happiest I've ever been.

Our family's healthy.

Everyone's doing well.

That's what it's all about.

It's all about.

And if you know, if your kids are happy and your wife's happy and you're healthy, you've got everything.

You do.

And after closing down my production company and moving back to New York to write books, it's been liberating because I don't have a thousand meetings a week.

I'm not getting notes from the studio and the network.

I can just sit and daydream and whatever bubbles up, I get to put on the page and write and rewrite and rewrite until it's done.

Yeah, but it's that freedom that has just been so delightful.

I'm wondering, you also are a professor at Columbia University.

Yes, I am an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University.

I teach a television pilot writing class.

It's a comedy half hour writing class.

So I've got about 35 years experience.

I'm bringing it to the into the classroom.

And what what that is, is it's only graduate students.

They cap the class at 12, and it's filmmakers and playwrights who want to learn how to write for TV.

And the delight for me is I have students from China, Mexico City, Iran, Palestine.

They're from all over the world.

It's quite a mixture.

So think about this.

You have 12 students, probably from seven different countries here with seven different languages trying to write a comedy pilot.

And it's really evident when comedy is funny.

It's funny no matter what language as as opposed to being so culturally specific, it doesn't translate, you know, translate.

So that's been a that that keeps me stipulated.

That keeps me really sharp.

And I like it.

That sounds like a sitcom right there.

You know, it could be.

It could be.

I believe it could be hilarious.

Oh, it could be all the nuances and everything.

Oh, yeah.

And then the meltdowns of the student who didn't laugh and then this.

And then one of my most serious student last semester goes, I've never written TV and I'm not very funny.

And she handed in the script every other line.

People were guffawing.

So you go, okay, she's discovered something.

She's got it.

Okay.

Now we'll talk about the other talent at the University of Evansville, the theater department, Rami Malek, Ron Glass, Jack McBrayer, and of course, David McFadden.

Quite a group there and as many more.

Carrie Preston, it just goes on.

You've got Emmy Award winning, Academy Award winning.

I even said last night to the students, I said, when you look at this in a wide perspective, you have across the country in regional theaters, on Broadway, off-Broadway, in TV and film, you have UE graduates either on the stage directing, acting behind, the stage managing, theater's stage managing.

It's pretty astounding that this this small department has turned out so many working professionals.

And John David Lutz, of course, the reason you're here.

Yes.

For most of the theater lab, of course, I think he was what grew up in Boonville, Boonville, Indiana.

And he was one of the very young when he started at the University of Evansville.

Well, he was a he attended and then he left and got his master's in Colorado.

If I'm remembering correctly, and came back was a teacher.

And it's interesting, the very first play I ever saw on Shanklin Theater was Hamlet.

I was in high school at, right?

Yeah.

Eva Kinnaird I brought the drama class to Shanklin to see Hamlet starring John David Lutz.

So it's again that John David Lewis read that I talked about it.

So I was there, you know, and of course, 50 years, I think, at the University of Evansville, an incredible career there.

So let's go from to television now to movies.

A Wild Hearts Can't be Broken.

That's a Disney film set during the Great Depression.

Yes.

This was the very first movie I ever wrote.

A friend of mine, a dear friend, Ollie Sisson, was in New Orleans and he said, I met this woman, said she's living on the outskirts of town.

She's blind, totally blind, and she's an older woman and she used to ride diving horses during the Depression and I went, What?

And he told me the whole story of Sonora and ah, Atlantic City when it was at Atlantic City and at the height of the Depression, it was I think this is a true fact.

It was the highest grossing event or entertainment during the Depression.

People would line up to watch the diving horses at Atlantic City and we that we wrote that we shot it in I think it was Virginia Beach and down there.

But that was my very first film And it was it was it was a wonderful experience.

Did you have diving horses?

We had Corky, I got to remember Corky's last name.

He was our horse wrangler.

And of course we had the ASPCA and everyone else and they weren't diving off of 30 foot the magic of movies.

It was it was like a five foot platform that we made.

It looked like it was 30 feet and the horses were kind of having fun.

They've just plunged into a tub of water.

But oh yeah, but yeah, that, that one has that one has lasted.

I have students that are 24, 25 years old.

They go, What you wrote and produced Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken?

And I go, How do you know this?

And DVD's streaming services, right?

What Women Want.

That was a very successful movie.

That was with Mel Gibson.

We developed that at Disney and then in turn around, it ended up at Paramount and Nancy Meyers rewrote the script, directed it.

She's brilliant.

And she said, I'm only going to do this movie with Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt.

And at the time, it just clicked.

You know, it was it was the right time for that kind of comedy.

And it was a huge hit where it was kind of like the maybe the cusp of the empowering women.

Yeah, But yes.

And I think that was a good timing for that, that film.

Absolute definitely.

Okay.

We talked about another movie, Oh, Where the Heart Is starring Natalie Portman.

It was terrifying and wonderful and joyful and grueling.

Of course, it was my first feature film that I ever directed.

I produced with a couple of other people, and I it was my first time as a director, and Natalie Portman at the time had just turned 18.

So she's 18 years old.

Right.

Now, I've got Ashley Judd, I have Joan Cusack and all these wonderful actors, and we shot in and around Austin, Texas.

Okay.

And one of the things I remember about that shoot two things.

One, for about two weeks was dead of summer.

It hovered around 100 to 105 degrees every day, even at night.

So we had to bring in blocks of ice.

And those big fans you see at football games that blow cool air.

So the actresses wouldn't pass out on the set?

Sure.

The other thing were the rattlesnakes.

One of our hero locations, the crew would have to go out in the morning every morning and chase the rattlesnakes off the set before we could set it and come out in a Taylor Payne starring Sam Shepard.

Uh, Walker Payne.

Oh, Walker Payne.

Yeah.

Oh, Walker.

I'm sorry.

That's all right.

Yeah.

Sam Shepard.

And that was a grit, that's that was off brand for me.

It was a very gritty drama about the world of dogfighting.

And here I've done all these warm hearted comedies.

And this one, I said, I just have to tell this story and get it out of my system.

And it was a gritty drama.

And working with Sam Shepard, of course, that was that was a high point.

Do you ever get starstruck?

Not really.

I'll tell you the truth.

The only and this is going to sound funny the only time I've ever been starstruck was on the Cosby Show.

It was my first season.

I think it was the first season.

And Lena Horne.

Oh, my.

Lena Horne walked into the studio and all the molecules in the air changed and I turned and I looked at this woman and I went, She's an angel.

She radiated something ethereal.

She didn’t walk in the room.

She kind of like glided in.

And it's the only time in my 40 year career where my mouth dropped open and I went, Oh, my gosh, who is this person?

But Lena Horne?

She was just angelic.

Okay, now we can't forget back home you were among the founders of the New Harmony Project, a gathering of writers and artists giving them space to create in this inspirational community.

Yes.

New Harmony.

Well, the credit really begins, with Jeff Sparks, it was his idea.

And Jeff Sparks said, I think we need a writers retreat where we celebrate family celebrate, you know, goodness and and feel good writing.

And he reached out to me, to Carol Copeland, Rosie Copeland, to David McFadzean, Walt Langan, and he brought us together in Indianapolis and said, I've got this idea for a two week program where writers gather and they workshop their work and they read it.

We perform it for the public, and that was what, 35, 40 years ago, and it's still running well, it's just very inspirational there.

Okay.

Now, what do you tell aspiring actors and writers if want to get in the business, work, work, work, work?

I just talked to the students last night at the university and I said, Live your life with intention, build your career, your career with intention.

Don't go out there and just hope something happens, okay?

Look at the landscape of the entertainment world.

Do an evaluation, honest evaluation of who you are and what are your talents, and then decide very specifically what is your super objective.

Where do you ultimately want to end up?

Sure.

And I knew I wanted a production company and I knew doing commercials and soap operas and everything else.

I wanted a production company that would get you there, that would get me there so I could conceive, write, package and produce new works for theater, film and television.

That was my end game.

And everything I did from that first commercial to the soap opera to The Cosby Show, to all that was to launch Wind Dancer and have that production company so I could do that.

So and I tell them tenacity trumps talent.

I know a lot of talented people that moved to New York and after two or three years just gave up the tenacity, the resilience, because you're going to get rejected a lot.

And as a writer, I tell the writing students, I go, You're going to fail your way to success.

You're going to write a lot of bad scripts, and all of a sudden you're going to write a good one, and then you go write a better one, and then you're going to write an extraordinary one.

But you got to write those bad ones first.

Sure.

So what's next for Matt Williams?

You've got this new book, Glimpses.

Yes, I've for whatever reason, the stories are pouring out.

Okay.

I've got two other books that I want to write, and I think there's this big novel that's stirring around because every morning when I wake up, these characters are talking and I'm sitting in this world.

So I haven't written a word other than a lot of doodles on a yellow pad right now and just going, Are antagonists okay, this is Oh, oh, there's the world.

What period is this set in?

So I don't question it.

I tell my students right from the heart at it, from the head.

So that's what I do.

I just kind of whatever comes out and then step away from it.

Evaluating go, Oh, this actually is a short story or Oh, this is the novel.

So I have at least two, two more, maybe three more books in me as of right now.

That's great to hear.

Well, Matt Williams, an incredible career in the entertainment industry.

And it all started right here in Evansville on the stage at Reitz High School.

Matt Williams, A Man for All seasons.

Thanks for being my guest.

Thank you so much.