The Point Radio: MANHATTAN Is No Bomb

One of the surprise hits of the summer as been MANHATTAN, WGN’s fictional take on the creation of the atomic bomb and the people who designed it. Tony award winning actor, John Benjamin Hickey talks about his role on the series and what it’s like playing around in the past. Plus it may seem crazy, but these guys go to abandoned hospitals and creepy sanitariums looking for the weird and unworldly. Meet the guys from GHOST ASYLUM, a new series on Destination America.

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Transcript

The Point Radio Hey it's Mike Raub, one of the nice delights of the summer has been the series Manhattan on WGM, the Super Station. And John Benjamin Hickey, the star of the show, comes along and talks about how much fun he's had playing in the past.

Plus haunted hospitals and scary sanitariums, those are just a couple of the locations for Ghost Asylum. And we talk to the guys who go in and bust them every single week. Let's get to The Point. This is The Point, The Point Radio, get The Point Radio.

Actor John Benjamin Hickey has a pretty hefty showbiz resume. He got a Tony Award for The Normal Heart. He got an Emmy nomination for his role in The Big C and he has a recurring role in the CBS series The Good Wife. But now his latest project is an ongoing series on the WGN Super Station Network.

It's called Madhazen. It's not about New York City. It's about the men and women in 1944 who went to Los Alamos, New Mexico, the middle of nowhere in this government created secret suburb. And there they built the world's first atomic bomb.

They made this huge leap in scientific discovery. So it's about that scientific discovery, but it's more about the lives, the emotional lives of the people and the sacrifices they had to make living there. One of the things I wasn't really aware of is that the men and women who worked on the bomb would go home at night and not be able to tell their husbands, their wives, their

children anything about what they were doing. So there were a lot of secrets. There were lies. There was a lot of government surveillance. And I know that doesn't sound much different than the world we live in today.

And I think that's one of the beautiful things about this show. It's this historical drama, but it feels utterly contemporary in how we feel about invasion and secrets and government. And it's really, really exciting. And I play Dr. Frank Winter, who's the lead leader of the Implosion Unit.

He's a brilliant nuclear physicist who's building a different kind of bomb that nobody else thinks is going to work. But he knows for certain can. So he's up against it. He's not the most politic person.

He's got a bit of a tough bedside manner. And he's a bit gruff. But I love rooting for the guy. He's a great, great character to play. Doing a period piece like this usually has some bad challenges.

Is that true here? Oh my God, man. You know, I think it's the opposite. Playing a period piece, when you get to put on those crazy great suits that they wore back then, and when I get to put on that fedora, it just maybe I'm just a really shallow guy.

But I feel like the clothes make the man. And there's something about that time and place and the way people dressed and the way people moved and the way people smoked and the cars they drove. And we work on 10 acres of a set in Santa Fe, New Mexico. So we're in the exact place where this all happened.

And the atmosphere that is just built in, it really does. It sounds silly, but it really does a lot of your work for you. And acting is make-believe. It's living truthfully under imaginary circumstances. So I think the further away I can get from my boring day-to-day life in New York City

and kind of leak through time makes acting all the more fun and actually in some ways easier. As I said, John has a pretty well-rounded acting resume, having worked with some of the best. Any thoughts about writing or directing? You know, it's interesting.

People always tell me I look like a writer that I should write. I can't write a sentence. But you know, television has changed so much that I have, for instance, I have a great idea for a TV show. And now you can go places like Amazon.

The ground keeps changing for what you can do on television. And you can make a series of eight episodes of something and then the next season of that series it can have a whole different cast of characters. So the answer to your question, the short answer is yeah, I daydream about it all the time and I always star myself.

So I need to get off my butt and do something about it to continue having this terrific career that I'm having. Doesn't seem to be a lot of doubt that Manhattan will be picked up for a second round of episodes, probably sometime next year. So I asked John of his feelings on that and pretty much what he's up to over the next

few months. I'm glad to hear you say that we've been picked up for a second season. We haven't gotten the official word yet, but we have such an extraordinary fan base and the critical acclaim for the show. You know, I make it my business never to read reviews, but the reviews for this show have

just been so fantastic that we hope we get to do it for a long, long time. And I'll tell you, I've never had more fun on a job, but I've also never worked so hard. So I just finished about a month ago and I'm enjoying some real R&R and hopefully I'll have that for door back on in the next few months and back in that dusty, windy, brilliant town of Los Alamos, you know, making this making this amazing TV show.

Episodes of Manhattan there every week on WGN, the super station. And you can catch up on this entire season right now at Hulu Plus. Here comes the latest in pop culture. Machinima has relaunched their YouTube channel for premium scripted video, calling it now Machinima Prime.

It currently has about 1.4 million subscribers and they promise even more short films and web series based on video games and comic books, along with some help from their partners like Warner Brothers, who will be giving them that Justice League series we told you about a few days ago. The channel promises to ramp up immediately with new original content being produced on

a daily basis. Looks like Colin Farrell will be picking up at least one of the lead roles in the next series of True Detective for HBO. HBO has not officially confirmed it, but Colin certainly has in tweets and on online over the weekend.

No official start date, but right now most people expected the second run of True Detective to hit HBO sometime late in 2015. Dynamite Comics has made it that much easier to pick up some of their DRM free digital comics. They now accept Bitcoins along with all the usual forms of payment like Visa, MasterCard,

American Express, Discover and PayPal too as well. You do need to log in with a Bitcoin client if you do want to use the process. Lots of interesting things too up for sale at dynamite.com's digital page including some sales involving some bundles of recent comics published by the company over the past ten years.

Pretty good deals too. Check it all out right now at dynamite.com slash digital. The Supergirl TV series pilot has found a home and now it looks like all major television networks have their own superhero series. CBS is following the trend by picking up a commitment to Supergirl, the one announced

last week by Warner Brothers Television as being already in development. Right there along with CBS is Fox with the Gotham television series, NBC with Constantine and of course the CW with the Arrow and Flash series. No word yet on exactly which part of the Supergirl mythology this will follow, although according to Variety it seems to be the pretty standard version, with Cara Zor-El being Superman's

cousin and escaping from Krypton just before the planet's destruction. Warner Brothers also revealed that David Ayer, who is the director of the new upcoming Brad Pitt war film called Fury, will be the director of their Suicide Squad movie, no official date yet for that, but it has been in the works since as far back as 2009. Ladies and gentlemen, start your gift list.

It all begins this week in the comic stores with some cool things waiting for you and possibly some time to think ahead to what you might be wanting or wanting to give for the holidays. Over on the Dark Horse shelf, an old familiar property, Aliens, is back this time with a new series, Aliens Fire and Stone, that begins with the first issue this week.

Future's End continues at DC with Tyens being Aquaman and the others, Future's End number one plus Future's End first issues for Booster Gold, Catwoman, Flash, Harley Quinn, Justice League Dark, Red Lantern, Sinestro, Star Spangled War Stories, GI Zombie, and Superman as well. And for that gift list, here's something cool. It's a Batman Death of the Family Book and Joker mask.

It's a book, of course, featuring the classic story and beautifully reproduced, and a replica, hand-painted, vinyl latex mask of the Joker, all included in a really cool package. Interestingly enough, and like I said, we're going to start giving you a couple of things every week you can add to your list for gift giving or receiving for the holiday season that believe it or not is not that far away.

Also from DC, a special edition of Sandman Overture number three. From IDW, the Cartoon Network's Super Secret, Crisis War Hits issue number four. And then back on that gift list for something that I find to be really neat. It's a Marvel Covers Artist Edition hardcover from IDW featuring beautifully reproduced, and I hate to keep using that term, but it really fits again here.

Copies of some of the greatest covers of Marvel Comics shot from the original artwork as well. They're all here, John Buscema, Jack Kirby, Don Hack, all the greats in some of the classic covers in a form that you probably have not seen, even if you've seen those covers hundreds of times over the years in the comics. One more thing on the gift list.

From Image, A Voice in the Dark gets a new run of issues, this time called Get Your Gun, first issue out this week. Read Out number one gets a second printing, just like Low number two, and Low number three is out this week as well from Image. And from Marvel Rocket Raccoon number one gets a third printing, and from Tomorrow's,

another edition to the gift list, American Comic Book Chronicles. These are really well done historical volumes covering pretty much comics from week to week, year to year, through the 60s, 70s, and 80s. There's two volumes available for the 60s, one for the 80s, now here's one for the 70s as well, out this week from the folks at Tomorrow's.

All these and more in better comic stores right now, talk to your retailer if you don't see the things you want, he's more than happy probably to order those for you. Check out the list of the comic stores in your area with the Comic Book Locator Service, 1-888-COMIC-BOOK, with a free link on the front of ComicMix.com or a website called FindMyComicShop.com.

Chasing the paranormal in the great outdoors or in residence is this frightening enough, but now a new TV series takes it one step further into some of the scariest places in America like haunted asylums, sanatoriums, and mental hospitals. That's what makes up Ghost Asylum, and it's headed up by the Ghostbusters known as the Tennessee Wraith Chasers.

That includes Chris Smith and Doogie McDougall. I talked to Chris initially about how he got involved in this. Was he scared of the paranormal as a kid? He mentioned as a childhood thing, as a child I was scared to death of this stuff. I never would have thought I would have been chasing it.

I had a paranormal experience in my 20s, my early 20s, in my grandfather's old barn. I saw something I couldn't explain that scared the heck out of me. Basically after that, I got curious. I always say after I went home first and changed my shorts, I started investigating stuff, looking online, reading books, seeing if I could find other people who did it.

I did, I found four good old boys like me and we've been doing it ever since. And for Doogie? Well, the same thing, the kid, I was scared, watching scary movies and all that jazz. But my grandmother, she had a bunch of experiences after my grandfather died. And everybody just thought she was getting old and people minded.

I just sat back and listened to her claims. And I really loved my grandmother. So anything that I could help her with, I was going to help her with. And she ended up getting sick and I got a chance to investigate her claims when she was out of the house.

And everything she told me was correct. There was things going on. And after she passed away, I've kind of made it my life's mission to, I guess, avenge, avenge whatever was haunting her there and try to figure out what it is. She may already know what it is now that she's passed on, God rest her soul.

That's my life mission. Me and other guys is to try to figure out what this stuff is and why it plagues people. And why sometimes it's just a friendly thing to people. Just, I don't know, it's one of those things that's haunting the minds of a lot of people, apparently.

As I had said, even without the additions of ghosts, well, these locations are pretty scary on their own. The network, they find locations that people want us to come into. But one thing with us trapping these ghosts, we have a chance in these old abandoned mussalems to actually, I guess, perfect our craft to try to capture this energy.

Because you don't want to go into somebody's residence and try to take out something evil if you don't know how to do it correctly. So we might as well implement these in these old abandoned mussalems to try to craft it so we can take it into residential homes. And if those people are having bad experiences, we can take the bad experience out of the

equation. We can take it out of their home and actually do something for them and actually, quote, help them. I asked the guys why these places always seem to be filled with pretty frightening paranormal activity.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there was a lot of death, a lot of suffering that went on in these places. And I mean, you also got to think, when these things were open, the practices were much more archaic. They did a lot of things that now in practical medicine, we are so advanced.

They used to do lobotomies, put people in ice water baths. A lot of things that would traumatize anybody. So I mean, yeah, absolutely. I think that those walls soak up that energy. I mean, it's just like that old saying, if walls could talk, and they do.

All right, I had to know about some of their scariest moments. Well, we show up, we get all the information that we can get the history on the place, which Porter, these are a story and he tries to dig up as much information of these places as possible and dig up people to talk to. So we can get as much in our mental status that we can to try to figure out a storyline

or something, something that goes along in here that we can talk to whatever is in here, whatever spirit. So we can kind of get their story and we investigate, we bring in trigger objects, something that's familiar to maybe who is there at some point and to make them feel at ease with us. You know, we just try to talk to them and let them tell their story.

We don't want to press them too much. Sometimes people ask us, you know, hey, do you do you provoke these things? Well, if it's very quiet, then we will start doing a little bit of provoking just to try to get some interaction. And it's just like with somebody, a child or another human that's not listening to you,

you're going to be like, hey, hey, listen to me. You know, you need to talk to me. So you know, we do that and we try to get as much evidence as we can with digital recorders, all the different instruments that we use. And then at the very end, we take it all back to Tennessee, review it.

If we have a trap set up or a vessel, we test it to see if we've actually contained any energy and then that kind of gives us the synopsis of the place. Chris Doogie and the Tennessee Wraith Chasers take on the paranormal every week on Destination America. New episodes of Ghost Asylum every Sunday and see more right now at destinationamerica.com

That isn't for the podcast, but a busy week for TV fans. And look at that New York Comic Con right around the corner. We got it all covered for you a couple of times every week on websites like ComicMix dot com, michaeldavisworld.com and getthepointradio.com. And you'll find us at the iTunes pod guest directory, of course.

We're easy to follow on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram too under the point radio. But the best place to be is right back here in a few days. Thanks for watching.