Name: TOM FONTANA | Seinfeld, Oz, HBO
Uploaded: 2025-02-16T20:14:35.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'TOM FONTANA | Seinfeld, Oz, HBO' from The Adam Friedland Show on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-02-16. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'TOM FONTANA | Seinfeld, Oz, HBO' from The Adam Friedland Show on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-02-16. Transcript available.

TOM FONTANA | Seinfeld, Oz, HBO

hello folks we're back again with our third installment of the lost episode
series this week
our guest was tom fontana who uh as some of you know problem probably none of
you okay this week
our guest was tom fontana who created the show oz on hbo which was about a
maximum security prison
he also worked on the legendary television series homicide life on the street
um it's a really good
interview i don't know if you guys are going to care but he's a really good guy
and uh i think you
could tell this is like this was recorded 20 uh what was it 2023 it's it's
interesting because if
you kind of match it with my arc in if you've like been following the series
like this is when i decided
to try and start being a good interviewer and uh during the edit we had to cut
out me saying to
some extent so at some points i i said it every single question and at some
points i would say
up to three times during a question to some extent uh i've become a better
interviewer at this point
i think uh he's he's a really good guy really interesting conversation i i don't
know if you
guys are who fucking cares what you think honestly i'm growing with confidence
every day
i am you people have no idea
how high i can fly there's a story called jonathan livingston siegel
um kobe bryan was uh between his rookie and second year in the nba he was
lifting weights
at gold's gym in venice beach california or uh marina del rey california i don't
know why it's
important that i remember that and because he said he had a boy's body and he
got a call
and he picked up his phone while he was at the gym and he's the call said kobe
it's michael
i'd like you to come to neverland and he said this must be some sort of joke
and he hang
up and then uh he got a call call back uh shortly thereafter he said kobe i'm
not shitting you it's
actually michael and so he went out to neverland ranch and met um fellow fellow
uh icon michael
jackson and he gave him a book called jonathan livingston siegel about a bird
who wanted to fly
higher than any other bird and at some point he would uh fly too high i don't
know what was what's
the story about can someone look that up i've never actually read a book
basically michael sat kobe
down and he said listen i see you and i know that you're like me you're
different and i know that
they will give you everything and i know that they will take it away and that
is what society did to
both those men i'm gaining confidence every week and much like that siegel jonathan
livingston siegel
in this child's book that michael jackson gave kobe bryant i will fly so high
that it might kill me
he flew faster he wanted to fly faster and higher than any siegel before him he's
bored with
bored with squabbling over food jonathan is passionate about flight and pushes
himself to learn everything
he can and every other siegel made fun of him every other siegel made fun of
him this is going to be one
of the funniest things that ever happens in american culture a fool a joke a jester
a clown
will become one of the most important public intellectuals of our time kobe bryant
michael jackson
adam friedland
i used to watch oz with my family i used to watch oz with my family uh when
this uh we'd watch on sunday
nights we watched the sopranos and then oz it was kind of the first prestige
television series
it kind of did set uh everything in motion for like how television changed it
preceded the sopranos
were it were not for oz there would be no blackish
next week we conclude our series with the um much anticipated hasan piker
episode
um so stay tuned for that and then the rest is history strap in guys
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our next guest is perhaps responsible for modern prestige television i think i
think for i thought you're
going to say the end of civilization as we know it our next guest is
responsible for a majority of
modern day slurs in the american vernacular um no uh everyone please welcome
writer producer tom fontana
normally we do a big we do a big walkout but you're complaining that you're old
and i i am old i would
have tripped on the thing and the face in the rug it would have just it would
have been a great opening
it would have been funny i know yeah but now i'm a drama guy i don't do funny
you don't do comedy
no there were funny parts of oz there were i actually thought it was the
funniest show on
television but i was in the minority there i thought it was the sexiest show on
ah good good um no but
i actually used to i we had um we had another guest uh ernie ernie i saw that
one yes um who was the
warden um of oz and i i told him when he was on the i don't know if it actually
made the episode but i
told him i used to watch it with my parents uh in in succession with the sopranos
and um
watching that amount of uh of prison rape with my mother was quite an
experience i think it's kind
of like made me uh into the person i am today for for better or for worse
better for worse well i you
know my sweet sicilian american mother uh i would call her every sunday and she'd
uh and tell her
what was going on and i said look ma there's a show coming on that i did and i
you cannot watch it
under no circumstances can you watch it and she said what are you talking about
of course i'm going to
watch it you're my son and i love you i'm going to watch your show i go no you
don't really you don't
really want to watch and she argued and we argued and then she won because she's
the mother and
and i said okay watch it but under two conditions one is we never speak of it
and number two if a
friend of yours says is that your son tom's show deny me okay so two weeks go
by nothing on the thing
and then third sunday she says can i ask you one question about us and i go ma
we said we're going to
talk about it and she goes just one question i go what she goes are any more of
those nice boys going
to die yeah that's my mother was my i thought you were going to say that she
converted to the nation
of islam it's funny i had a similar experience we used to do a podcast called
come town oh my god yeah oh
my god is right and i've heard like six months i didn't tell my parents about
it and then my dad
saw on the internet that i was on a podcast called come town we tried to choose
nick chose the what
what he thought was the worst least appealing name for anything and then we
used to refer to ourselves
as the come boys and my dad called me furiously one day and he said do you
think a woman will ever
marry a come boy and thus far he's been proven correct after the women in america
see this interview
yes your phone isn't going to stop ringing oh my god i've gotten pretty much
every guest laid thus far
really yeah yeah we're going to be going to we're going to i gave my dick to
the smithsonian did you
i don't uh i don't have much uh you know well i was going to ask i could get it
back but uh it's so
funny it's uh i was going to ask you actually we brought up penises uh within
what was it 30 seconds
of this interview but you must have seen probably over a thousand penises in in
the flesh in your life
like a like a like a basically like a penis doctor's amount of penises uh i
wouldn't say and it's not
like when actors came to audition i made them drop their drawers and show me
their penis i sort of went
on faith you did a casting couch no i did not i did nothing other than judge
their acting and uh you
know i understand the character that played ada bc said that his uh audition
was behind a hole where he
put his he put his member through it but apparently he used to take his penis
out a lot on set well what
was great about uh ada wally was that if it was in the script that it said ada
bc takes out his penis
he would say i don't understand why i take out my penis in this scene and i'd
be like well if you
don't want to take out your penis don't take out your penis i'm not going to
force you to take out your
penis yeah in the very next scene that we would shoot that day he would just
take out his penis it
wasn't scripted he would just improv taking his penis out yeah but he wouldn't
do it in a scene where it
was written he would only do it in the scene after i've i've tried to do that
um but we don't have
the we're not shooting in in 8k right now so it wouldn't really pick up strike
that from the record
strike that for the record adam no that's great that's a nice prank to you can
really only do that
on a production where it's uh where it's pretty much all male yes yes there
were no there were no
women on the set uh at that particular moment yes but uh you can especially in
this day and age yeah
though though anyone who worked on it we actually had um uh you know uh sexual
conversations with the
cast and the crew uh even though it wasn't required at the time because the
because it was so intense
we wanted to make sure everybody i mean i i didn't want anybody to come on
there and
think uh oh what did i get myself into so i i was very serious about making
sure that people felt
comfortable yeah what was remarkable to me is how many people felt comfortable
taking out their penis
um yeah i mean i think one thing that's interesting about the show is it was
kind of at the forefront of
having male nudity in popular media and and homosexual sex well we didn't just
have homosexual sex i thought
of all kinds of sex well i kind of no we didn't have bestiality yeah yeah like
if we had done another
season you would have that's where i would have gone you would have had a you
would have had animal
inmates perhaps yeah i would have had like an anteater or something you know
that guy would have been the
bell of the ball let me tell you nowadays there's this conversation about
representation and like
homicide was like had some like launched careers of like so many like famous
black we actually had
uh at one time uh had more uh a more diverse cast we had more people of color
than we had white people
as regulars on the show yeah because barry levinson who's my business partner
and he comes from baltimore so he knows he knows the the the territory our
feeling was that the show
if we're going to shoot a show in baltimore it needed to represent the town
yeah and you couldn't
just say well and look they're all there's all these white homicide detectives
it just felt dishonest
so right do you think that homicide could be made nowadays because i think like
the nice the interesting
thing about that show is that things weren't it wasn't like a car chase heavy
programmed it wasn't
like sexy it wasn't violent it was it was a procedural and it was like there
was a lot of conversation
happening it was a sloppy procedural because we um unlike law and order which
was running simultaneous
while we were on um we didn't solve all the murders and we didn't actually do
the law very well
we were just we were more we were more of people about the characters that's
what we really cared
cared about was who are these who are these men and women 