Has anyone written more screenplays than Albert Einstein? On this episode of Looking Up, Dean Regas consults with comedian, screenwriter, and Chris Hadfield look-alike, Thomas Lennon, on this very question.
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Episode Transcript:
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Dean Regas: A brief warning to all looking up regular listeners. This episode will have absolutely, positively no scientific value, and it's really all my guest's fault.
[Thomas Lennon:] Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think we should worship the sun and moon as powerful gods and fear them.
Dean Regas: You will soon hear my conversation with actor, comedian, and screenwriter for the night at the Museum series, Thomas Lennon. You might recognize his face or possibly his legs from his long stint as Lieutenant Jim Dangle on the mockumentary police TV show Reno 911.
[Thomas Lennon:] I feel like I bring a real joie de vivre to law enforcement…
Dean Regas: But since this is a podcast, maybe you'll recognize his overly cheery voice as Eddie, the shipboard computer in the movie Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
[Thomas Lennon] Oh, I'd love to fella, but wouldn't you know what? My guidance system has been deactivated.
Dean Regas: I met Thomas last year when I was speaking at the Yerkes Observatory, and I thought, whoa, this Hollywood actor must really love space.
From the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio, I'm your host, Dean Regas, and this is Looking Up. The show that takes you deep into the cosmos or just to the telescope in your backyard to learn more about what makes this amazing universe of ours so great.
My guest today is actor, comedian, and screenwriter, and an absolute train wreck for any serious podcast, Thomas Lennon.
So let me set the scene. I’m giving my, “Tour of the Universe” talk at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin. It is the talk where I fly the audience virtually around the universe from the surface of the earth to the edge and make lots of stops along the way. There's about 60 people in the audience, but when I make a stop at Saturn, there's this sandy haired, mustachioed man near the back of the room that looks really familiar.
By the time I pass Pluto, I'm convinced I know him from somewhere. He's famous, maybe an astronaut. And after leaving the Milky Way, I got it. It's definitely, absolutely Canadian astronaut and social media sensation, Chris Hadfield. Oh my gosh, Chris Hadfield is in my audience!
After my presentation, I casually bump into Chris Hadfield in the hall, only to find out it is not Chris Hadfield, but instead Thomas Lennon. What the heck is he doing here?
Thomas Lennon: Hi, this is Thomas Lennon. I am a writer for the most part, and an actor somewhat. I am best known as Lieutenant Dangle from Reno 911. I wrote the Night of the Museum films. And for your listeners, I am the voice of the heart of gold in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Eddie, your shipboard computer. It's nice to be here Dean, in the room where I met you, we're sitting in the room where we first met.
Dean Regas: Yeah, that is exactly true. We're here at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, and I gave a talk here and you were in the audience, and I was like, looking at you in the back. I was like, wait a second. Is that guy an astronaut? Like you, you have an astronaut vibe. I think you should play Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut that's famous for having a mustache and playing guitar.
Thomas Lennon: No, I see what you're saying about that guy. I'd have to lose a couple pounds to be honest though. I've seen him. He is real slim. Everybody gets real slim in space. I can't explain why, but it seems to work.
[Chris Hadfield]: Chris Hadfield here aboard the International Space Station. We keep busy on board the space station, long days, lots of work, physical exercise. At the end of it, you're tired…
Dean Regas: I heard an interview you did on another podcast about the newfound thing of celebrities going into space, and you had some interesting takes on that. What's your thought of celebrities going into space? And if they asked you, would you do it? These are two very different questions.
Thomas Lennon: One, I'll be so psyched when they ask me, because it'll be like I'm finally a celebrity big enough, you know, to go beyond the Hollywood squares and into the lower stratosphere. Would I go into space? No. I've always looked at the compartments and known that the space was not an option for me.
Any space travel would never be an option for me, just simply based on the claustrophobia of it all. Could you conceive of getting into something like one of the Apollo capsules, you know, in, in, in a lot of movies, it is nice you get to see people kind of like floating around and there's a little bit of stuff around them, and then you look at the actual vehicles and they are a sarcophagus, you know, you're diapered up in a sarcophagus. And I'm not saying I don't want to do that, because that would certainly be something I would try, but I don't think I could, I don't think space travel is a possibility for me until, you know, 2001, you know, where there's a loop that I can jog on with invented gravity.
Dean Regas: But what if I throw in one extra little thing to the space travel? And that is, you could either design your own outfit like Katy Perry. Or, and/or they provide you with teeny tiny space shorts.
Thomas Lennon: First of all, you mentioned Andor which is a great show that I haven't seen, and I know you love all of the Star Wars canon, all of it. And second of all, if I go to space, I'm wearing that Katy Perry outfit already. Just for the joie de vivre.
Dean Regas: You mentioned that you were one of the screenwriters for the Night at the Museum series, and I mean, did you have this idea that this thing was really going to take off and be such a hit and just writing in general, how does that work for you? Like, is writing better than acting? What would you rather do? Write, direct, Act?
Thomas Lennon: To me writing really is probably the number one. And well, I mean, I've written a lot of things. Some have been enormous flops, some have been big hits, but I always sort of write with the same intention and everything.
And the Night at the Museum. The idea seems so perfect. It's based out on a very, very short children's book that's about as long as the book, Goodnight Moon. It's very short, mostly pictures. And then we were given the book to look at and we did the thing that we always do, which is we think about like, okay, so everything in this museum comes to life at night and the guard takes it for a walk around the park, and then in the morning if you see the guard asleep, it's only because he was up all night walking the dinosaurs around the reservoir in Central Park.
And so, we're like, well, this is an amazing idea. And who doesn't love the notion that everything in the museum turns on when everybody goes to bed? So, like how could we create some kind of mythology around that, that it makes just enough sense to hold water as a movie. It was always a lot of fun and, fun to make it almost make sense, you know?
And one of the neat things is we actually wrote a draft for the first version of the second Night at the Museum. It ended up being at the Air and Space Museum which was fun and one of the great museums in the world. And the place where I knew I would never go into space. because I saw the outfits the seating’s really rough. Anyway, Night at the Museum writing is a lot of fun.
I write every day, just for fun. I love to write. I will get up and write. I'll get up some days at three or four in the morning and start writing until the world wakes up and then I'll do it again. The way some people like to roller skate or play guitar or have a yo-yo. It’s like my happiest place to be, even if it’s just for me.
Dean Regas: And, you know, getting something like that, the Night at the Museum, it's a short story. And then, but did that give you like this kind of freedom, like it had this, this overarching part, but then you could go with it wherever you wanted?
Thomas Lennon: Exactly. The great thing is there wasn't really that much there, which was fun. It's kind of fun. It’s a great sort of thought experiment sometimes for someone to give you, like, okay, here's an idea. Like, we're going to make a movie about Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, and it'll be, you know, the day that Albert Einstein came to Yerkes and like now you have two things.
You just have Albert Einstein came here. He only wanted to see Niagara Falls and Yerkes Observatory where we're sitting right now, which is pretty cool. So what was that like? You know, like now fill in all of the blanks around that. Like what was the day like? Because like if you see a picture of him here, everybody's in wool. Everybody's in eight layers of black wool. And it must've been really interesting.
And they came by train, of course, you know, like to start to fill in all the details of what, what was Einstein's Day like here. Maybe I shouldn't talk about it because maybe this would be a great new night at the museum movie, and they're still making them, so I'm just going to save whatever Einstein's day was like here at Yerkes. In case you thought of that. Also, you don't have the rights to that.
Dean Regas: Well,speaking of inspirational, I am here to pitch an idea for you. I'm hoping to inspire you to write a new series called A Night at the Observatory. I'm thinking romcom, buddy comedy, maybe starring a youngish, graying Astronomer with glasses, that's kind of skinny, but talks a lot on the radio a lot, you know, something like that. What do you think?
Thomas Lennon: Dean, here's how we do this movie about you. You're working here at Yerkes Observatory, but way across the lake there's sort of a lonely widow and she's got a telescope, and so you are looking at space, but she's looking at you and then you keep not quite meeting.
It feels like it could be a lot of fun. I think we're going to have a lot of fun with this one, and then it turns out, She's an alien and she was always here. She was here to make sure that you didn't see the attack. Because you were the only guy that knows how to work the telescope here. So she was on an advanced team.
See, this is where my mind starts to break because everybody's like, we could have made this a fun rom-com. And I'm like, yeah, yeah. Okay. So Dean knows how to work the telescope. So there's like a few people left that can work the of Refracting telescope. So the aliens who are coming know that, if you can see through that, you know they're coming. So they got to send somebody in. They gotta send an advanced team, a honeypot, to get you the hell out of the equation. That's our movie. It may not be good, but we're already filming it because we're here.
Dean Regas: Holy smokes. That like that wrote itself. It's unbelievable. So that's what every astronomer's significant other is! They’re really an alien trying to distract them from the invasion.
Thomas Lennon: Correct.
Dean Regas: That blew my mind, because I know all of these astronomers and their significant others. They’re definitely aliens, that's for sure. Wow, this is why talk to geniuses, this is what comes out, this is what happens. So, yeah, let's write this.
Thomas Lennon: Dean, we're sitting here in, in Yerkes where Albert Einstein came as a relatively young man, but if we're being honest, I've written way more movies than him like by a lot. Like it's not, even if you're going head-to-head, me and Einstein, I mean mustaches, obviously both legends, but sheer screenplays, I’ve got to have him beat right? We're going to have to look it up and we'll be back after a short break, but I think I've written more movies than Albert Einstein.
Dean Regas: You've also worked with a lot of different characters out there, but who's the most Einstein person you've worked with?
Thomas Lennon: No one I've ever met could do this equation that's on the board behind us right now, which is the white dwarf stars equation. I'm going to go ahead and say the smartest person I've ever met, maybe he's just pretending, but it does… it seems like Shatner seems quite bright.
I recently was at an event with Shatner. I was in my Reno 911 outfit. He was zipping by on like a scooter, but William Shatner zipped by me and he said, “Great legs.” And I thought I can actually die happy now because Admiral Kirk said, “Great legs.” There's another story Picard asked me about my legs. Also, I've been around all the enterprise captains in shorts, which is another whole story, life choices. Be careful what you wish for kids.
Dean Regas: Well, Thomas it has been so fun chatting about all things space. We're going to solve this equation together afterwards, and then maybe go up and see the biggest refracting telescope in the world.
Thomas Lennon: Thanks, Dean. That was a lot of fun.
Dean Regas: So, people often ask me, what is my favorite astronomy or space movie? In fact, Thomas Lennon asked me too. And you know, I usually ham and haw and I don't answer very quickly because you know what really is going through my mind? All the really bad space movies.
Armageddon, of course, Apocalypto, they totally messed up that eclipse scene. Various Star Wars films. So, I go negative first because it's really difficult to watch space movies that get things so blatantly wrong. It drives me crazy.
[Scene from Armageddon]: Captain America here blew the landing by 26 miles. How the hell do you know that? Because I'm a genius.
Dean Regas: For example, one thing that really bothers me in movies is how they portray sunrises. You know, like when a director wants to show the passage of time or to reinforce that it's morning and a new day has dawned?
But in films, you got to notice the direction that the sun rises. If the show is taking place in the United States, Canada, Europe, or most of Asia, the sun should rise above the horizon and travel up and to the right. Up and to the right.
Not many sunrises in film happen that way. They too often go up and to the left. Well, why is that? Because the camera person doesn't know where to aim the camera to catch the sun rising. I mean, it's below the ground. It could rise up anywhere. So to save time and worst of all, (save from hiring an astronomy consultant like me who could tell them where to point the telescope) they instead record a sunset.
A sunset, they can more obviously document and the sun will appear to travel down into the right until it's obscured by the horizon. So once you get that footage, all you got to do to make a sunrise is to play it back in reverse. Thus, the sun will rise up and to the left. Now you know the trick.
If you see a sunrise traveling up into the left, better take place in Australia. Or they just lost all respect from this here astronomer!
Looking Up with Dean Regas is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio. Kevin Reynolds and I created the podcast in 2017. Ella Rowen and Carlos Lopez Cornu produce and edit our show, and think I should totally grow a mustache like Thomas Lennon. All right, but I'm not wearing his short shorts from Reno 911!
Jenell Walton is our Vice President of content, and Ronny Salerno is our digital platforms manager. Our theme song is Possible Light by Ziv Moran. Our social media coordinator is Hannah McFarland, and our cover art is by Nicole Tiffany. I'm Dean Regas. Keep looking up!
