The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast · A L Katz

S4E14: It Isn't Goodbye

April 15, 2025·39 min·2 clips

HBO demanded a million-dollar repayment mid-production or season three was dead.

The host treats the milestone like a reckoning. After four years and 160-plus episodes, he steps back to talk about what podcasting has meant to him, and why it became the creative form he had been waiting for without quite naming it. The show circles back to Tales from the Crypt, where so much of this story really began. He sounds like someone who only now has enough distance to see the shape of that earlier work, the way time can turn noise into pattern and let the forest show itself after years of staring at trees. That perspective leads straight into Bordello of Blood. He revisits the deal-making around the film, the pressure of staying in the orbit of major talent, and the way one purchase for one studio became a bad bargain with real fallout for the franchise and for him. He does not soften it. He calls the movie mediocre, admits the crash it triggered in his own life, and lets the shame and irritation sit there without polishing them away. The story then widens into what came after. There were a couple of good seasons on The Outer Limits, a son born in Vancouver, and then a long drift into depression and writer's block that made it possible to keep writing for other people while losing touch with his own voice. That wound matters. He traces how he poured himself into raising his two children, and how that devotion was real and worthy while still leaving a missing piece behind. The episode keeps deepening instead of wrapping. He returns to the same pain again and again, including the moment he came within inches of hurting himself badly, and the burden of a secret he carried for two decades. Near the close, the tone shifts again. The sign-off is not a clean farewell but a loose, affectionate refusal to make one, with talk of fall plans, special episodes, Patreon bonus episodes, and a promise that the conversation is not ending here. It feels like an honest transmission from someone who has lived long enough to understand the damage and the joke at the same time. The bruises are still there. So is the gratitude for the work, the collaborators, and the strange life that made the podcast possible. What remains is a candid portrait of how a career, a franchise, and a private life can tangle together and leave a person changed.

As heard by us

A reflective farewell that folds podcasting pride into a bruising Tales from the Crypt and Bordello of Blood reckoning.

The episode reads as a creator looking back after four years and 160-plus episodes, with a weekly rhythm that has clearly become part of life.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a late-night listen that keeps opening into the mess behind the movie business.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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