The Point Radio: Donal Logue Thrives In GOTHAM

Donal Logue is Harvey Bullock in the new Fox series, GOTHAM and he has a lot of say about it, including how this compares to his previous roles and what it’s like to be part of a story where everyone already knows the ending. Plus, it’s the 60th Anniversary for The Guinness Book Of World Records, with a ton of new wacky entries and some old ones that may never be broken. Ever wonder how it all began? We go right to the source to answer that and more.

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Transcript

The Point Radio Hey it's Mike Raub, we're back in Gotham this time to talk to Harvey Bullock. Actor Donald Loeb talks about what it's like to be in a story where everybody pretty much already knows the ending. And the Guinness Book of World Records has been a part of pop culture for decades. But there's still some surprises to come and we'll tell you what those are.

Let's get to The Point! This is The Point! The Point Radio! Get The Point Radio! In the new series Gotham, actor Donald Loeb has captured the role of Harvey Bullock,

a familiar character to the Batman mythology. Now Donald himself is an actor with a lot of range. Looking at characters he played in Sons of Anarchy, contrasted to his comedy on Fox a few years ago called Grounded for Life. So with all these different kind of parts, where does this one fit in?

Yeah, Lee Torque and Sons of Anarchy was probably a little tougher than Harvey Bullock. Yeah, no, it's great. It was interesting because at the TCAs a critic asked that the show was really violent and it wasn't for young fans. I mean, anyway, my kids watched more of The Rink when they were 2 and loved it. But I was like, compared to what? Vikings and Sons of Anarchy?

Like, come on! But yeah, it's been fantastic. Right now we're right in the middle of production. So it's hard actually to kind of get yanked from that because we're finding these rhythms and strides. So it's a blast in every episode so far is really, really strong.

We always felt the pilot was strong. And what's interesting is usually even if you watch the pilot for the Sopranos or something, it takes a while to find a rhythm for a show. But I think we found one pretty quickly and so we're just we're having fun with it. It's exciting to share it because all of those kind of what if, how can you questions will be answered once people,

more people see the pilot. Donald told me how important it is to him to get this character right. You know, get a thumbprint on a world that's very important to a lot of people. You know, so my only experience with Harvey Bullock Pryor was the animated series. And my kids would watch it as we drove up to our house in Oregon.

And so I was familiar with that, but I obviously was going to make it kind of my own thing. And but now, yeah, now you take your place on the shelf among all the other people who've had a kind of play in this world. And it's exciting. He told me he was attracted to the show, but not necessarily just because it was part of the comic book world. You know, it's interesting.

I've never really been on a show before where you had to try and create the say something like Terriers, which the title isn't really implicit of what it's like. You have to generate all of that kind of information. You have to go give us the pitch. It's like you don't have to pitch Gotham in the nomenclature, you know, like,

and to me, I was always drawn by it, not because I'm necessarily into fantasy, the superhero aspect of it. I always liked it because it was kind of Raymond Chandler, ask James Elroy. I always liked the New Irish part of the American kind of like the end of the American urban belly type thing. And I underbelly of of almost all. It's kind of like it became Gotham became this descriptive term for just almost the seedier side of any big

metropolitan center. So that that's what really drew me to it. And that's what we're kind of playing up. It feels like Chinatown. It feels a bit like he's Jake Eddy's in Chinatown and the Jim Gordon comes.

He's really idealistic, but he's partnering up with a guy who's kind of been through it and been beat down. But maybe he's got one good kind of he's got a bit of goodness left in him to answer that. You know, it takes a guy like Jim Gordon to bring that back out and Harvey Bullock. Well, how challenging is it to be doing the prequel to the story where everybody basically knows the end? I always felt that like Don Don DeLillo, say his fiction, his fiction was always strongest when it was like,

I'm going to take the Kennedy assassination and invent possible scenarios to lead up to. We know what happened. We know the events of that day. So it gives you it gives you really something. The hardest thing when inventing a narrative storyline is beginning middle.

You already have these kind of tent poles to hang from. So so I just think that it's a big advantage because and the one the challenge would be, say, like from what you'd asked before, people know, look, we know that at some point, Batman is Batman and the penguin is the penguin doesn't fight the moniker of the penguin. He learns to embrace it and become it.

We know we're going to get to that point. So you don't I don't think there's there's suspense about like, oh, will the penguin survive this episode? How do you build that kind of suspense? But it's just like, oh, my God, it's that just if only for that, we wouldn't have had all of this.

From concept to camera on Gotham, there have been a few changes. One has been in the character of Bruce Wayne and showrunner Bruno Heller explains that it changed when we got David Mazzus in the role because he's hands down the best young actor I've ever worked with. Anyone I don't know of any of the actors.

He has profound understanding of human emotion and a kind of focus and concentration and energy that allows you to play adult themes with a kid. The danger was, which we tried to steer away from initially, was that if you have a kid in a lead role, then it's a kid show and you have to write it to the kid. He understands and can play very complex, difficult, dysfunctional, sometimes scary stuff.

So he's both the core of the show is good. The moral center of the show, but certainly Bruce Wayne will play a much larger part in the show than we initially thought. The story begins when Gotham premieres on Fox on September 22nd. See more at fox.com.

So what's going on in pop culture? It might be time for some more Bud Bundy. He is confirming what variety had told us a few days ago, and that being there may be a Married with Children spin-off in the works. This one would center around actor David Faustino as Bud Bundy,

no word yet on whether the rest of the cast would be involved, but more than likely they would at least in some capacity. They were all together just a few days ago to celebrate Katie Seagal's entrance to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Murder and the First will be returning for a second season to TNT next year.

They'll get a 10-episode season two, mainly because of high ratings. The show averaged about 5 million viewers in its first run, and the sixth and final season of USA's White Collar actually comes along earlier than we thought. It was set to debut in the network in 2015. Now the final episodes begin on USA on November the 6th.

Ever since the very first important miniseries was introduced into modern comic books, there's been the problem of the delay, and now that has struck the death of Wolverine series, which is supposed to ship an issue a week over four weeks. Two issues did come out in September, however now there's a delay. The next issue won't be out until the first part of October,

and the fourth issue won't even be out until possibly the middle or toward the end of the month as well. In typical domino fashion, this causes a problem with the series that were supposed to take place after the death of Wolverine, including the death of Wolverine, Logan's legacy, that's been moved to the end of the month, as well as the death of Wolverine, Deadpool,

and Captain America, which will be moved to possibly the end of October, maybe even in November. Get the latest details from your retailer. Guardians of the Galaxy keeps on raking in ticket sales. It's passed the $300 million mark here in the US, $600 million worldwide, which puts it on a track by the way to possibly surpass, if not tie, the money brought in by Avengers,

getting pretty close even before DVD release. Lots of multiple covers and more major events to continue to this week in the comic store. Starting at Boom Studios and the debut of George Perez's Siren series. George has a bunch of multiple covers here, and there's also one done by Cameron Stewart, and the series itself, well, certainly deserves a look.

And again, it begins with the first of six issues this week from Boom. Over at DC, Future's End continues this week. It's Batman and Robin, Future's End number one, followed by Batman, Superman, Batwoman, Green Lantern New Guardians, Justice League, Red Hood and the Outlaws, and Supergirl, Future End 2.

Like they say on TV, wait, there's more. There's Superman, Wonder Woman, Future's End number one, Teen Titans, Future's End, Trinity of Sin Pandora, Future's End, and Wonder Woman, Future's End 2 as well. Again, all number ones. And they also had those 3D motion covers attached if you want to talk to your retailer about maybe

grabbing those. From Dynamite this week, Bionic Woman season four begins a continuation of where that TV series left off decades ago. There's a couple of different covers to that as well. And also on the multi-cover category and also from Dynamite this week, the first issue of

Purgatory with a whole bunch, maybe even about 10 different covers to this one. But it's a book that also deserves a look as well. From IDW, The Super Secret Crisis War continues this time with Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. There's a first issue of that this week.

And from Marvel, Deadpool gets a biannual number one. Hulk gets an annual number one. And there's a second issue to Edge of the Spiderverse 2 from Marvel. All these and more waiting for you in a comic store in your area. There are bunches of ways to keep track of those.

Comic Book Locator Service is the one that's been tried and true for quite a while. Check it out at 1-888-COMIC-BOOK. There's a link to that on our website, ComicMix.com. Or also another website called Find a Comic Shop.com. Seems like the Guinness Book of World Records has been around, well, forever.

But they've got a big anniversary coming up, and that got me thinking about how it all got started. So for the answer to that, I went to Guinness Spokesports and Stuart Clackston. Way back in 1951, the managing director of the Guinness Brewery, that is the beer, of course, was on a hunting trip in Southern Ireland in County Wexford.

And a discussion arose in the party as to what the fastest game bird was, the clover, the grouse. No one could come up with an answer. And he also tumbled to the fact that people must have these sorts of conversations over a pint in the pub. You know, what's the fastest and the tallest and so forth.

This is, of course, way back. We didn't have cell phones or anything like that. The internet wasn't even around. It's talking about 1951. So it was an obvious conclusion to come to.

So he decided that what he would create would be a book called the Guinness Book of World Records, which would be kept in pubs, which would sell Guinness, which would list all of these superlatives. So he got in touch with a couple of reporters, fact finders, Norris and Ross McWhorter, that were working in Fleech Street in London, pitched the book to them. Four years later, August 27, 1955, the very first edition of what was then called the

Guinness Book of World Records hit the shelves. No one really quite knew what to make of it because it hadn't really appeared before. But by Christmas, December 55, it became a best seller. It came to the United States the following year in 1956. And the rest, as they say, is history.

We now sold in over 100 countries, 25 different languages. And, you know, we certainly would say that it's certainly been a lot of fun and a pleasure and an honor, really, to be chronicling record-breaking feats now for 60 years. Storts job for Guinness is not just marketing. My job in particular is I am the marketing director for Guinness World Records.

But what we all are trained in, and I've been with the organization now for 12 years, is adjudicating, which means being actually on site as and when record attempts happen to judge whether or not they are successful. So anyone can set a Guinness World Record. It's a completely free process.

The easiest way to do this is just to go to our website, GuinnessWorldRecords.com. And you can either mail in your evidence or you can have somebody like myself or one of my colleagues come and adjudicate your attempt in the process. In the new edition, there's a lot of new records out there. And Stewart was more than happy to share a few.

Got the longest golf club, which is 14 and a half feet long and was used to drive a ball 182 yards. The tallest male teenager, he's lifted and he stands at seven feet, one and a half inches tall, and uses a 524 shoe, which is bigger than Shaquille O'Neal uses. The world's longest ton is just under four inches and belongs to a California native Nick Stoebeler. And the world's largest yo-yo is actually 11 feet, nine inches in diameter, weighs 4,620 pounds,

and was made by Beth Johnson from Ohio. And as she put it, which is probably something you could apply to all record breaking, anything worth doing is worth doing right. So not only do we look at some of the latest record breaking facts and feats, but the book also contains an interesting kind of look back over six decades of record breaking as well.

All right, that's the new stuff. But there have been some records that have never been broken so far. Absolutely. I mean, there's certainly many that have stood the test of time. It's remarkable.

I mean, records that were published in the very first edition in 1955, and are still published in this year's edition in 2015, include the tallest man in the world ever is still Robert Pershing Wadlow, who was last measured in June 1940, and he was eight feet, 11 inches tall. And he still stands literally as the world's tallest man ever.

The best selling single in the world is still Bing Crosby's White Christmas, selling an estimated 50 million copies worldwide. The largest diamond in the world is still the Kalinam, which was found in a diamond mine in South Africa and weighed 3,106 carats. So there's definitely plenty.

But it's also remarkable to sometimes see how some of the records in the first edition have changed. In 1955, the world's tallest building was the Empire State Building, of course, in New York, 1,472 feet. Now in 2015, the world's tallest building is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which is almost double, 22,716 feet, which is going on for half a mile tall, which is remarkable.

And just again, just shows how we have progressed just in terms of our feats and what we can do 60 years later. In another, an interesting example is the world's most expensive bottle of wine in the first edition was an 1806 Lafite Rothschild. That was $50.

Today, the world's most expensive bottle of wine is a 1947 Chivar Blanc, $304,000. So it is quite remarkable, you know, not only what has stood the test of time, but how the world has changed in 60 years. Check out all that and more in the Guinness Book of World Records' new edition for 2015, the 60th anniversary edition, by the way, available right now at Amazon.

And that's it for right now. We're back in a few days and not long after that, you can get your hands on that new Wonder Years DVD set. We've got the original cast from the show. Everybody loved to talk about that and a lot more that's transpired over the past couple of decades.

All that and more coming up and you don't have to miss a minute of it. If you go to the websites like ComicMix.com, michaeldavisworld.com and get the pointer radio.com or grab the podcast anytime in the iTunes podcast directory. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram under the point radio, but always be right back here in a few days.