The Point Radio: Melissa Fumero Still Smokin’ On BROOKLYN 99

It’s a new season of the Fox hit series BROOKLYN 99, and our favorite detective, Melissa Fumero, is along to talk about how her character is only slightly less neurotic (but still adorable) despite a few changes in the show this year. Then actress Illena Douglas shares the news on her month long hosting gig on Turner Classic Movies’ TRAILBLAZING WOMEN

We are off to New York Comic Con. Follow our exclusive coverage here on Instagram or on Twitter here.

Transcript

The Point Radio. Hey, it's Mike Raub. It's that time of year again when I get to sit down with actress Melissa Fumero from Brooklyn Nine-Nine talking about the series and her being a superhero. Plus actress Ileana Douglas is hosting a whole month of great films on Twitter Classic Movies

and we've got a preview. Let's get to The Point. This is The Point. The Point Radio. Get The Point Radio.

In season three for the award-winning comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Fox and there's a lot of changes coming. Yeah, absolutely. Big changes is right. You captain, Jake and Amy, what's going on?

That's actress Melissa Fumero who plays Amy Santiago in the show. We talked about her character and about how after the past couple of seasons where Amy's been, well, slightly neurotic. Has that changed at all? Oh, Amy's definitely been chain smoking.

We just haven't seen it on camera. Yeah, I mean, I guess you could say that perhaps being in a relationship has calmed her a little bit but I like to always think that there's sort of a nervous breakdown, always sort of looming or just sort of spinning inside of Amy at all times. But yeah, getting a new captain, seeing Holt leaving, that's all been hugely upsetting

for her and just really thrown her off in general. And then on top of it, dealing with what's going on with Jake and what are her feelings and what she wants and her fears about it and all of that. It's kind of overwhelming. I think her head is just sort of in a tailspin and she's just trying to tackle one thing

at a time. One of the things that's made the show successful from the beginning is a great rapport the cast has, both on screen and off. Oh, definitely. I mean, it was sort of magical the first day that this cast met and we all gelled really

quickly. That very, very first table we, everyone just got along really well and everyone sort of has a similar kind of energy. We're all sort of laid back. There's not one person that's kind of out in the stratosphere.

So we all get along really well and I think that that has elevated the show and the work on the show. And yes, being in season three, having spent so much more time together, it's definitely deepened in a lot of ways and has just made it even more fun and collaborative on set. And I mean, we truly are.

I know everybody on television shows does this, but I'm actually serious. We actually are friends on the show. If we hang out, we have dinners together. A bunch of us went to Paris together. Like it's a real thing.

We're not like BSing it. So who does the best Terry Crews impression? Oh man. Well, Andy just does the best impressions in general. So I would probably have to say Andy, he can kind of do everyone.

So he's just good at impressions, you know, that whole like XML thing. So overall, how's your character progressed over the past seasons? I think it's been like a joint effort with the writers, you know, it definitely, Amy's Amy's a complex person. And I think we definitely explored what exactly that was for her season and tried to really

hone in and dial in on who exactly she was. And you know, she's this very capable detective who also is really socially awkward sometimes and sort of really nervous and anxious. And when she's doing her job, she's really kind of confident and calm and focused. And so it was, you know, a little tricky sort of finding the balance between those two without

it seeming like two characters. And I think the writers and I just sort of dialed in on it slowly and kind of then once we found it, we're like, oh, there it is. There she is. You know, a lot of that came from relating, I think, to the other characters, you know,

how she is the whole, how she's Jake, for showing her personality in that way through circumstance and the other characters. And then, yeah, and it's just been and she's also grown too. You know, that's what I love about the unborn, my sure is they don't keep their characters frozen in one place.

They put them in circumstances that forces them to grow. And that's definitely been true for Amy, you know, be it little by little and tiny baby steps, but she's definitely not the same girl she was in first season. And that's been really fun to play because otherwise it'd be boring if she was, you know, still doing all the same stuff.

So overall, if we could offer Melissa any role in any project beyond Brooklyn Nine-Nine, what would you love to do? Oh, oh, man. So many things. I would love to either be, I love scary movies.

I think doing a horror film would be super fun. Or I also love like sci-fi kind of fantasy genre. So like playing either like a character, you know, being that doesn't exist in real life, like an elf or someone that can fly like an older superhero would be super fun and sort of like using like the height of your imagination if you can.

So would you be a good girl or a bad girl? A villain or a hero? It's fun to play a bad girl. I think I would have to go with villain. Melissa Fumero and a talented cast of Brooklyn Nine-Nine with new episodes every Sunday on

Fox. And you can catch up right now too on Hulu. Ten more years of Transformers. That's just part of what's going on right now in pop culture. The Watchmen might be coming to television, HBO in particular.

There are rumors out there that Zack Snyder has been meeting with HBO to discuss a TV series based on the DC property. There's no real other information out there. Although it is said the meeting may be readapting the original graphic novel or even the 2012 sequel Before Watchmen.

Horizon has finally launched their final version of the Go90 streaming video service. Original content is there as well as material from Comedy Central, MTV and other sources and clips too from the NFL Network and ESPN as well. The service is ad supported so that means it's free and it's available for both iOS and Android devices.

Seven more kid-friendly series are coming to Netflix. The very first is Glitter Force. It will be available in December. About long after that DreamWorks Dawn of the Croods will also debut before the end of the year.

And then early in 2016 they'll be adding Lost and Found music and Lego Friends as well as Buddy Thunderstruck which will debut late in 2016 or maybe as far out as 2017. The El Rey Network has finalized a deal to pick up episodes of Constantine and Almost Human from Warner Brothers. The episodes that originally ran on networks a year or so ago will now air on El Rey.

It will debut in November. The USA Network has picked up the two hour pilot for a supernatural drama executive produced by Tim Kring of Heroes. It is The Wilding and it centers on a blended family who welcomed back their 17 year old daughter after she's released from a mental health institution.

Don't worry Yellah when that will hit the network. Another example of a comic property heading to the big screen maybe even before it hits the comic book stores. The new series from Mark Millar which is called Huck has already been optioned by former Warner Brothers executive Jeff Robinoff Studio 8 and they plan to bring it to the big screen

sometime not far down the line. Millar is writing the comic series. It has art by Raphael Albuquerque and features the story of a dimwitted gas station attendant in a small town who happens to have super strength and performs good deeds anonymously. It's a show that really just won't die.

Unforgettable is on its way back to television. Now to A&E with a back to back premiere set of episodes that begin in November. November 13th is the air date for those episodes and the full fourth season will follow after that on A&E. Well you can look forward to another decade of the Transformers as according to Hasbro

CEO Stephen J. Davies who said that there are at least four more sequels in the Transformer franchise as well as a possible TV show and more Transformers and digital too as well. CBS has given the green light to a second season of Zoo that will premiere next summer on the network. Meanwhile ABC Family has canceled Chasing Life after two seasons mainly due to poor

ratings. This month Turner Classic Movies is shining a light on the gender gap in the movie industry and showcases some great films done by some great women all in a month called Trailblazing Women and it's hosted by actress Iliana Douglas who told me just what we can expect. They're launching a multi-year programming which that's what I think is so fantastic

and this year it's going to focus on specifically on women directors and on the historical contributions of women directors and then we'll see where the project goes over the next couple of years but they've partnered with Women in Film and I really think that it just shows that there was a tipping point that this was something that people were talking about and it's thrilling to be associated with PCM who has shows classic movies, obviously great film here as stars

like Betty Davis and Catherine Hepburn but now starting this initiative where we're going to start to focus on female directors and over 50 films in the series and I've been lucky enough to work with eight female directors, nine if I include myself, so I think women directors are great. I've sought out working with women directors.

For Iliana, granddaughter of actor Melvin Douglas, the movie business well has almost been the family business and I asked her if she seemed the gender gap changed at all over those years. I think that I grew up in an era of the late 70s where you think of all these great actresses Jane Fonda and Susie Spacek and Jessica Lange and they were all in the movies and then moving

into the 80s, seeing directors like Susan Seidelman and Joan Micklin-Silver, Joyce Chopra somebody I had worked with behind the scenes early in my career and going all the way into the 90s and as I said I will work with eight female directors. I was doing programs for what was then the independent film channel and Bravo and it didn't seem as if there was any big deal and it's only within what I've noticed is in the

past 15 years that the opportunities for women filmmakers have dropped out. That also coincides with working in independent film and watching the bottom drop out of independent film making too. You don't think it's a real thing? Listen to some of the stats.

Well men outnumber women 23 to 1 as directors of the 1300 top grossing films since 2002. The five to one ratio of men working on films to women, only 15% of the writers in Hollywood are women, only 20% of the editors are women and only 2% of the cinematographers are women. The celebration covers well over a century of movie history. You're a history buff, you know the first night is just going to be dedicated, you're

going to be showing a film from 1896. So anyone who loves even classic film history just to have the opportunity to see such a rare film, it might be the first narrative film ever made and it's directed by a woman. And so a lot of these silent films, they've never really been seen before on television. So that's for them.

Then as we move into the next night, we're going to go into the classic, the Hollywood system which was like 1930 to 1950 and we're going to be seeing the work of Ida Lupino and the work of the very unsung director named Dorothy Arzner. She was the only female director in the studio system. So Ida Lupino's work, this film Outrage just completely blew me away.

A difficult subject, it's about a rape and the aftermath of how that violence changes a family, but just an astonishing film. Then we have a night of foreign films with Lena Verte Ruler who is still working, Agnes Varda, a French filmmaker, still working. And there's a fantastic movie, Salam Bombay.

If people like Slung Dog, Millionaire, this is a film that was made about the same topic years before that. Then we're going to head with Alice and Andrew's who I've worked with on Grace in My Heart into independent films and then we're going to go into the 90s with mainstream films. Wow.

It's great. I mean, I'm telling you, it's a cornucopia of movies. There's going to be a movie for everybody and I can't wait to hear what the fans think. Trailblazing Women hosted by Ollana Douglas all this month on Turner Classic Movies. That's it for the podcast, but here's your homework.

We're on the way to New York Comic Con and you can follow us easily. Look for pop culture upload on Instagram and see what we're up to and also follow us on Twitter under PC upload as well. The podcast is on websites like ComicMix.com and GetThePointRadio.com and in the iTunes podcast directory as well and we'll be back for that in a few days.

See you in New York City. GetThePointRadio.com.