Jeff Ornstein 0:01

Hi everyone, and welcome to Next Act with Jeff Orenstein. I am Jeff, and on this show we celebrate people on the cusp of greatness, those building on past successes in some of the curious and inventive and sometimes unexpected ways they have achieved those, and stepping into moments that could define their legacy. We'll talk about current projects, lessons learned, and the extraordinary opportunities ahead. So the best is yet to come. Today's guest is Steven Mazelson, founder of Yada Productions, documentarian, producer, writer, and sag actor, whose career spans film, television, theater, and voiceover. From appearing in projects like Die Hard 2 and The Sopranos to creating a Rosa Parks documentary now housed in the Smithsonian, Steven has spent decades chasing meaningful stories in an industry built on hustle. His journey is one of persistence, reinvention, and believing the best work might yet still be ahead. Welcome.

Steven Maiselson 1:01

Thank you, Jeff. It's great to be with you, man.

Jeff Ornstein 1:04

Well, perseverance is the number one good quality that makes a person fit for this industry. So, and obviously you've got it. Right. First, let's so so let's let the uh listeners know a little bit about Yada Productions. Can what can you tell us about that?

Steven Maiselson 1:18

You know, I kind of just started this idea back when I was in Denver. I did this um first, really the productions that I started with was with Mile High Cable Vision. They offered a program where you go and learn how to use their equipment and you could produce any show you wanted to produce. Oh, yeah. And so we did that. You know, this was like the mid-80s, and cable TV was just really kind of coming up. And so there was this whole kind of late night, off the grid. There's what, five channels you were watching at that time. And so if channel six was on at 1 a.m. and they had this, and it's because you got cable TV, then you did that. So we started out making a skit comedy thing called disposable TV. And it kind of became a cult classic in Denver. And people got involved with it, and um, it was just a lot of fun to just let people write their own skit and do their own thing. And who cares what it is? You can put almost anything up on cable TV at that time. They had, you know, censorship things, of course. And uh out of that, I then uh created this other let's call it a documentary. It's called the Baseball Chautauqua, where Denver was going to get a baseball team, and we were kind of talking it up. And I wanted to, I wanted a baseball team for Denver. We had the AAA team for many years. And it was like, yeah, you know, let me go on a tour around the country and interview people and ask them, what do you think about Denver having a baseball team? You know, and I would ask people, what do you think about their color being purple? You know, like purple mountains, majesty, get it right. There's no purple MLB teams. And they would laugh about that and say, whatever. But it was a great little thing to put together. And, you know, I met a lot of, you know, legendary players and went to ballparks that are now torn down, that set so many records, right? And it was just a fun way to kind of uh do the on the road touring kind of thing.

Jeff Ornstein 3:14

Mm-hmm.

Steven Maiselson 3:15

I kind of um felt like there was more to do. I moved into doing acting, writing, producing in LA because Denver was just such a small market, and there's just so many things that you can do in that place. And if you want to do more things, you have to go to a bigger place.

Jeff Ornstein 3:31

Right.

Steven Maiselson 3:31

And so I lived out there for 10 years, and I just use Yada Productions as my storyline. And then, you know, here you're watching Seinfeld, and they're going yada yada yada. You're like, well, wait a minute, do I get any royalties for this now? My company's been nameless since 1989. Right.

Jeff Ornstein 3:47

That was gonna be my question. Was it yada yada yada, or was it an acronym or something? So now you've answered that.

Steven Maiselson 3:53

No, I I've done the etymological research on it, and basically it's just a word that means etc. It's just like blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. And it's fun to say. And people get a kick out of it when they see it. And that makes me smile and makes me laugh.

Jeff Ornstein 4:09

So in LA, you were doing acting and writing and directing and producing, I guess. Did you find that you were better suited towards to one or the other, or did they all hold appeal for you? And are you still are you still doing all of them?

Steven Maiselson 4:23

You know, that's the thing. When you're out there in LA, you know, it it's a big hustle, and you're trying to find your niche. When you go to acting auditions and Jason Alexander is there, and the guy who plays Jason Alexander's doppelganger is there, and all these other people that you just see over and over again. And someone's gonna get that job because they're gonna hire somebody that looks like him. And at some point, you might get that job because somebody else is working, or you might get it because you fit it perfectly, and they don't, you know, they're looking for just that thing that you can provide. But that's such a slim margin of victory. And that business, you know, no, is the thing you have to get used to because you're gonna hear it 90, 95% of the time. And you're waiting for the moment that, you know, what direction am I gonna kind of pursue? And what have I been doing? And here I'm, you know, outriding horses on Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman and working on uh, you know, extra jobs here and there, and my agents sending me out. They have a model and talent agency. So I'm on some photo shoot for someone who wants to take stock footage, and I look like, you know, a businessman downtown with a a five-pound cell phone in my hand. And so you just kind of go with the flow and you meet people and you hopefully create something that you know you want to have to move on with. Right. I was on the Paramount lot for a while. I sold like a yellow pages they had on the Paramount lot. So you'd go around to businesses and then the people could just open up this book on the Paramount lot and find whatever they needed. So you'd made a lot of connections through there, and I met a lot of people through that. And I thought, well, I got an idea for a script, and it it comes from uh this story, from this movie, so on. So I pieced it all together. And just in the work and doing all that and crafting something and saying I finished it, and then putting it in the marketplace. I mean, those are victories right there to say that I've accomplished that for myself. I did that. And, you know, like we were talking, well, you know, here it's 20, 25, 30 years later, from that thing that you wrote. It took uh, you know, Sylvester Salone 10, 12 years to go from writing Rocky to making Rocky, you know, uh it takes a long time. You hear about people who say, I've had this idea in my head for 20 years. Right. And they did five or 10 projects to get to that point where they're now working on that project that they were trying to do 20 years ago, like like Richard Lenkladder or somebody like that.

Jeff Ornstein 7:11

Aaron Powell So tell us a little bit about the coffee shop, because the coffee shop was this brain child you had, obviously, when you were working in the on the lots. And can you tell us a little bit about what the storyline was? And and also I'm sure everyone would like to hear about now, 30 years later, it you're sort of thinking that there's a reinvention perhaps in store for it.

Steven Maiselson 7:30

Aaron Powell You know, when something kind of like it's like your child, your baby, and you want to see it nurture and grow and and move on in life and and change and and become a different thing. So back then, it was just a story about a coffee shop in Manhattan. And then over the decades, how it changes and how like uh there's a different story that happens in each decade. And so there's a story that happens in the 60s and the 70s, the 80s, and then of course we got up to the 90s. But now that we're, you know, here where we are, there may be additional stories that we want to have take place in this coffee shop that's existed for 60 or 70 years. Maybe one person or two people have run the place solo. They, you know, talk about, you know, how uh corporate restaurants have just invaded the whole world of their little lunchonette style, people who come in every day, the neighborhood folks. And it's really about the stories of what happens to the people who are sitting there, and then the coffee shop in general goes through some changes, a bus runs into it, and yeah, you know, it gets changed around over the decades, too. And you know, somebody at October Films, Peter Collin Bach, decided it sounded like a great story. And if I made it, they would have the domestic rights. They would just start to put it in the theaters for me. This is a hard thing to get done, right? Yeah, sure. You get to sit and call 3,000 theaters and say, Oh, I got this great movie. Yeah, right. So I started to send it around to agents, and that can be a very difficult task. But, you know, now it's all when you speak to people about reading your script or anything, they don't even want to read it. And they don't even want you to send it to their agent or their lawyer. There's a whole shutdown of the independent voice anymore. And that's why a lot of people have just had to do it themselves and find a way to make it on their own.

Jeff Ornstein 9:28

So you know what's really interesting about this concept is that you know, you have the coffee shop, which is a microcosm of the world, right? It's still in the world. But if you did it by decade by decade, I mean there's been some pretty seismic shifts culturally that have gone on, you know, and literally just from the nineties to now, you know? Aaron Powell In fashion and in everything. How people socialize, right? How drugs kind of weave their way into society and then out of society, and you know, and social awareness and the environment. I mean, there's so many things that take precedence and then back into the background. It's very interesting.

Steven Maiselson 10:03

And someone's making a payphone call in the 60s when somebody's on their cell phone in the 90s.

Jeff Ornstein 10:09

So you're like, you're crazy. You're gonna go look for a payphone, you're never gonna find it. So I went into the department. I said, let me use your payphone. So interestingly, though, and I love the fact that this is this passion project that's still sort of harboring a neighborhood in your brain. Now you're thinking about making it into a musical. That's my understanding.

Steven Maiselson 10:29

Well, you know, the person that that I got to, one of the agents out there for um Cheryl Lee Ralph, she was in Dream Girls, she's on Abbott Elementary right now. She just won an uh Emmy. And so just the way that I've crafted the main character of Thelma in a coffee shop, she just fits it perfectly. There's accents involved, dialects. She's, you know, she's her own person, and that's really who Cheryl Lee Ralph is. And I got a chance to uh meet with Cheryl Lee. She had a film festival back in the early 2000s called the Jamaican Film Festival. So we went down there, we were trying to rustle up some money, we went met Richard Roundtree, we met, you know, lots of celebrities, and Cheryl Lee could be nothing but wonderful to us, and she's a marvelous person. But, you know, I always think that her space is on the stage. And then I think, well, you know, Sam Jackson's wife, she's a stage person, you know, Miss Richardson is out there doing, you know, to kill a mockingbird and doing that, and she'd make a great director. And there's too many people that are passionate about creating their own music and their own style and having their own voice, like Alicia Keys has done what she's done on Broadway, which no one would ever think that she'd do something like that. You know, hey, tell us your life story and put it together with your own music, and it's still running and it's still a great thing.

Jeff Ornstein 11:59

Oh, I can listen to her sing all day long. In your mind, when you think about the coffee shop as a as a musical, do you hear a certain kind of musical vibe?

Steven Maiselson 12:08

Well, I think because of the decades that it runs over, that there's the opportunity to create a whole genre-like situation where if it's the 60s, maybe there's a folk side to it, and you get in the 70s and more of a rock disco theme, you know, and you can go ahead and tailor your music to the decade.

Jeff Ornstein 12:29

Very cool.

Steven Maiselson 12:30

And there's other stuff that I put in it where, you know, in one part of the show, there's a story about I call it the fortune child, and this man meets his daughter after years. He doesn't know that she exists, and they get together in the coffee shop and so on. And he tells her the reason why she's the fortune child is when she was born, he passed her underneath an elephant three times. Because that was the thing to do to bring fortune to the child in his culture. So let's bring an elephant on the stage. Every show. And just have them do that thing. Lion King brings an elephant on the show every show. It's just not an elephant.

Jeff Ornstein 13:08

I'd like to also for you to speak a bit about this Rosa Parks documentary you made, because I mean, we'll let their listeners know that this is now housed in the Smithsonian.

Steven Maiselson 13:18

Yeah, it's really interesting.

Jeff Ornstein 13:20

That's phenomenal. That's a part of history forever, hopefully. So tell us a little bit about it and what your involvement was.

Steven Maiselson 13:25

And what happened was in the when I was in Denver, I met a a woman who's a makeup artist, and she did makeup on everybody who ran through Denver, every star that came through, every broadcaster. She had her own line of makeup, and um, she's pretty well known in the area and throughout the country and would travel around a lot. And she had decided, I'm gonna make an educational series to go into the schools. It's gonna be just about women and kind of uh women of every decade. I'm gonna pick different women and and I'm gonna get interviews with them. And for whatever reason, she was able to get an interview with Rosa Parks. She drove to Detroit and interviewed her, and she got a guy from CBS to put a camera down, and she had two cameras interviewing her at the same time. And she says, Well, can you edit this and and put together a documentary for me out of all this video I got? I got all this interview with her, and you know, the audio wasn't all that great. We had to really play around with it to get it done right. But I did it, and then it just kind of never got off the ground as far as an educational tool. She was never able to really continue with an interview process. She's like, I want to interview Hillary Clinton next, and I want to interview this woman next. And it just didn't move forward. But meanwhile, I had all this tape on Rosa Parks. I had it on three-quarter inch. I had it on, you know, VHS. And I'm kind of like, I don't want to put this stuff in a machine. I don't want to have to mess it up in any way, but let me give it to a place that I know that it will be safe, that they're gonna use it in a way that other people can take advantage of it. You know, I want people to see it, and then if you're a poet like uh Amanda is, you know, you'll hear Rosa Parks' words of answering those questions, and maybe you'll write some poetry out of it, or see her image, and maybe an artist will paint a picture or you know, sculpt something based on that. So that's kind of why I wanted to get it out there into that venue.

Jeff Ornstein 15:37

Right.

Steven Maiselson 15:38

So it has a larger access to everyone, and everybody could see it. It takes a long time to get through that stuff, though.

Jeff Ornstein 15:46

Right. But she's a great character because you know, today we live in a world where everybody wants to become famous right away on Instagram. Yes, and you know, the everyman and anybody can become famous. And she's someone who became famous, and she was an everywoman, she was just an everywoman. Right. And she made a mark on society and civilization that's still prevalent today. So, but she's the real deal, she's not like the insta celebrity.

Steven Maiselson 16:11

Right. And the picture that you see is two days old. You know, they take her and they put her on the bus. The guy who's the white man who's in the picture with her sitting behind her in the picture is actually from the newspaper. And then there's a photographer. So that picture that we're all famous, oh, there she is in the bus sitting, and the white man's behind. That's a staged photo from days later.

Jeff Ornstein 16:34

Right.

Steven Maiselson 16:35

Nobody ever caught that. You know, the woman was getting off at her stop like in three or four blocks. What do I need to move for?

Jeff Ornstein 16:43

Right, right. Wow, that's really interesting. So you have another big project I'd like to speak with you a little bit about, which is Sleepwalker Tunnels. Right. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Steven Maiselson 16:54

What this project is about is um a guy I went to college with, his name is uh Rob Sleepwalker Weisberg. He was just an everyday guy, an accountant, worked downtown at the World Trade Centers. 9-11 happened. He's stuck in the middle of it. You know, he's there. He's a volunteer fireman, he goes to the fire station. What can I do to help? Says, just stay here with me. Everybody is at this building. I need someone just to just even just be here. So he did that. He was stuck down there for 24 hours or something, got a ferry across to Jersey, finally made his way home out here on Long Island. Years later, he's dealing with depression, suicidal tendencies. He says, Uh oh, the way I'm gonna get over this is I'm gonna go walk the Appalachian Trail. Okay, fine. So he tells his wife a story. He's going with the whole crew and everything. He's not, he's going all alone. And now she's all worried about him. He goes down there and at a walk in that trail, and he's bringing awareness to his plight in mental health. And all of a sudden, media outlets are showing up at the towns where he comes down off of the trail, and they start interviewing with him. So he's got all these interviews from different areas, and the guy comes off and he's got the beard down to here, and he's lost all this weight, and he makes it all the way to New Hampshire, and about 350 miles before the end, his ankle is just it's gone. There's nothing he can do. He he he ends it. But it taught him that he wasn't gonna kill himself.

Jeff Ornstein 18:36

Right, right.

Steven Maiselson 18:36

He tells this story where he's walking down part of a you know rocky area, and he's about to take a step, and he's thinking to himself, I better watch out with my next step. If I break my ankle, I'm dead up here. But for a person who went up there to decide if they were gonna kill themselves or not, what's the difference whether you broke your ankle, fell down, hit your head, and died right there? Right. If that was your purpose in the first place. So he realized that when he was worried about if he'd do that, that he didn't really want to kill himself. And that was the switchover for him.

Jeff Ornstein 19:12

I could see a lot of people taking a real interest in this as a film because 9-11 affected so many people so deeply, the sense of violation, a sense of loss, reading the New York Times and where they showcased 15 people every day, and you just, you know, with a little paragraph, you felt you knew these people, and it was very moving. We are of of course, as is my nature, we're over time, but I wanted to ask you one more question. Right, go ahead. Because I loved it. So you describe yourself as part of the 90% who f just fell short. Right. But you're so good natured and you've got so many interesting stories. I mean, what does falling short actually teach you that winning never could?

Steven Maiselson 19:50

Well, I think that we fall short and we win. And so we know what happens in both situations for the most part. Sometimes we fall short in things that we really want to win. Right. And other things we win that those were easy wins. Right. You know, writing a script about Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf and the six months I spent, you know, running around with him and making sure people don't pick him up and start running away with him because he got a thousand dollars in his pocket. There's a passion at some point where you decide, well, okay, I'm gonna do that or do this. And so that's where it all came down of.

Jeff Ornstein 20:25

Well, I gotta say, I think, you know, I've always believed that being content is the best possible mindset a person can have. And I think you sound like a person who's very content. I mean, you know, whether you whether you make it to the golden crest, you make it near the golden crest, you've learned something from falling from the golden crest. All in all, it sounds to me like you've you're pretty content with all the creative endeavors that you've had.

Steven Maiselson 20:47

We got a foot and a half of snow outside. I got my palm trees on.

Jeff Ornstein 20:54

Let's just enjoy it. I have to wrap this up. My producers are giving me the stink eye. It's uh Steven, it's been a pleasure having you on this show, and I wish you good luck. If Coffee Shop should emerge as a musical, I'll be first to buy a ticket. And uh, I'll also be looking for Sleepwalker Tunnels because I think that's that's a story that'll resonate with a lot of big audiences.

Steven Maiselson 21:14

It's coming out soon.

Jeff Ornstein 21:16

Look for it this summer. Okay. Thanks for tuning in to Next Act with Jeff Orenstein. Follow, subscribe, and stay connected to your favorite socials at www.next actpodcast.com. Keep chasing your next act. The best is yet to come.