My hope is that the film Wall Street 2 will actually serve as a way for us to bridge that gap between Wall Street and Main Street. Certainly that's dealt with in the film of how it does affect everybody, so, you know, I always find that when you can create a movie or a play or a book that gives somebody a safe theoretical place to discuss what is really going on in the day it tends to forward discussion, so that would be my hope coming out of the film.
John Buffalo MailerCinema and theater - it's apples and oranges. You can't really beat movies. Yeah, when you're on an Oliver Stone set everybody brings their A game. Everybody brings their A game, from the top to the bottom and in between. In terms of theater you know there is no way to really duplicate that rush you get when you take an audience that is live and right there in front of you through the journey of a great play and you go through these emotions so that they can experience them without having to go through them themselves.
John Buffalo MailerWhat's against legalization in a practical sense? A couple of college kids figured out how to take a hemp plant and turn it into newspaper and it was actually a better quality of paper. It was cheaper and if you plant hemp in a field it revitalizes the soil. You can grow food in a dirt lot if you do enough harvest of hemp. I don't pretend to know the specifics of the economics of it to say how much we'll be getting, but there is money to be made there that is not being made because it's illegal.
John Buffalo MailerThere's also just socially, personally. There is something naughty about pot. There is something that is rebellious and outlawish and a kind of, you know, a finger in the eye of the government saying, hey, you can't tell me what to do. That would be gone if legalize it.
John Buffalo MailerI mean the price of our technology may very well end up being our humanity, so I think you got to have that balance. Personally I try to do one for one if I can. Do a movie, do a play, do a movie, do a play - while at the same time writing and being in that cycle.
John Buffalo MailerI was about 20 when my mom got sick with cancer and it was bad. It was very scary and at the time I was doing my first screenplay and I was on deadline and was alone with my father in Massachusetts. I said, "Pop, you know, I don't how I'm going to work. I don't know how I can get this done. You know, I got to hand this script in and I can't think about anything but Mom." He said, "Well, you know, now is the time when you're going to learn what it means to compartmentalize." And those words really had an impact on me.
John Buffalo MailerWhatever the reasons, 2008 it felt as though the combination of distribution models starting to tighten and the publishing and film and music industries having to revolutionize themselves to catch up, and understand how this is going to work in the new millennium has made it a lot easier to pursue multi-platform careers. It's much easier to hire one person who can do three or four different things than one specialist in that field.
John Buffalo Mailer