This Way Network: Michael Gavlak & Joel Fieri
Michael Gavlak:
It is my friend, Joel Fury. Look at you with that microphone.
Joel Fieri:
Yeah, look at you.
Michael Gavlak:
Oh, I saw shadows so you’re not alone. You have some tech support?
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. My thoroughly professional, industry professional assistant here
Michael Gavlak:
Is that Mr. Drexler?
Joel Fieri:
How’s that?
Michael Gavlak:
Is that Mr. Drexler? You guys are-
Joel Fieri:
That’s Mr. Drexler, yes.
Michael Gavlak:
You guys are joined at the hip, aren’t you?
Joel Fieri:
I don’t know.
Mr Drexler:
Only when the camera’s on.
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. As long as I pay him, he hangs around.
Michael Gavlak:
Oh, got it. Yeah. That’s how you’re joined.
Joel Fieri:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Michael Gavlak:
Okay. Welcome to the chat session.
Joel Fieri:
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Michael Gavlak:
I really enjoyed the session we had when I was doing the Romeo and Michael show.
Joel Fieri:
That’s right.
Michael Gavlak:
When I had the co-host and it was two on two, it was us filling an hour with question and answer. When you start a conversation with somebody, there’s so many different directions you can go. And when I’m listening to you talk, questions will pop into my head and I have to be like, “He needs to finish what he’s saying, but I really want to ask about this.” But then another question comes up. We all have that experience where-
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. That’s the challenge of conversing, is not trying to get your point in, but listening. Right?
Michael Gavlak:
Listening, right. The listening. So what I like about the chat session, this thing we’re doing here is bringing guests in. Sometimes we have multiple, we’ve had four or five in here at one time. In that case, I can sit and be quiet and just let people talk and listen, but we’ve been doing the one-on-ones for a while too. And so there’s different formats. And so I would like you to tell this audience how we met and what you’re about, first, and then how we met. So imagine nobody’s ever… We did interview on the Romeo and Michael show, but imagine this is a fresh audience, nobody has ever met you, they don’t know you. Who is Joel Fury? What are you about?
Joel Fieri:
Wow, you’re desperate for content here.
Michael Gavlak:
No.
Joel Fieri:
If I’m the star, it’s pretty boring. I’m one of those people that doesn’t have a real exciting testimony. One of those Christians that nobody would want to hear my testimony.
Michael Gavlak:
You’re wrong.
Joel Fieri:
Well, yeah. And just a short tangent here, I used to do a backpacking ministry with the guy who had juvenile hall offenders from things and he would want us to tell them our testimony.
Michael Gavlak:
Christian testimony.
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. And here am I, this pasty white boy from
or whatever. I’m like, “They’re not going to want to hear my… These guys are gang bangers and they’re-”
Michael Gavlak:
You’ve never been on the wrong side of the tracks in your life?
Joel Fieri:
I haven’t.
Michael Gavlak:
You see it, but you’ve never been over there.
Joel Fieri:
Right. Well, Sullivans told me about the… Whatever. Right. I don’t know.
And it’s not quite that bad, but I’m like, “They won’t want to hear that.” He goes, “No, they need to hear that there’s another side of life. They need to hear that there are experiences that they haven’t gone through. There are people that… Whatever.” So I’ve always held onto that.
Michael Gavlak:
Yeah.
Joel Fieri:
But no, I’ve been a Christian most of my life. And what? Since I was 11 years old but my mom had always taken us to church. My dad didn’t go to church. My dad was pretty much an atheist and didn’t have much room for God or church. My mom took us. So I’ve been a Christian most of my life and never really strayed. I tried to stray a couple times and then there’s that still small voice, saying, “Joel, this is not what I have for you and you wouldn’t be good at this anyways. You’re not going to be a good rebel.”
Michael Gavlak:
Oh, interesting.
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. So my background, I graduated from San Diego State University. March Madness today, four o’clock.
Michael Gavlak:
Wait, what round is this? Is this-
Joel Fieri:
First round. First round.
Michael Gavlak:
Oh gosh. And how many is it again now? They expanded it. It was 64 or 68?
Joel Fieri:
60… I don’t know. They have four teams playing in.
Michael Gavlak:
Uh-huh (affirmative). So there’s a wild card round to try and get in or something like that.
Joel Fieri:
Yeah.
Michael Gavlak:
Yeah, yeah.
Joel Fieri:
But so they’re in. We’ll see if they can get past the first game. But so I graduated from San Diego State, hung around San Diego. I did various different jobs in my twenties. When I was my thirties, I became a public school teacher and I taught for about 15 years in San Diego city schools.
Michael Gavlak:
Subject?
Joel Fieri:
And I taught graphic arts, it was vocational ed. So I taught kids to do photography, and run printing presses, and…
Michael Gavlak:
Art.
Joel Fieri:
Yeah.
Michael Gavlak:
The technical side of a type of art.
Joel Fieri:
Yeah, vocation called graphic arts. It was basically the printing industry, basically. That was my background. And I’ve been a printer of… So if there’s anything I’m trained for, it’s being a printer and being a teacher.
Michael Gavlak:
A four color press, a six color press?
Joel Fieri:
Oh, no. I just ran the-
Michael Gavlak:
A web-
Joel Fieri:
… small duplicators.
Any quick print shop you go into, back in the day anyways, you would see a little press called an AB Dick 360 and that’s what I ran.
Michael Gavlak:
Got it.
Joel Fieri:
So real simple stuff. I didn’t get the kids to… These are high school kids from inner city, San Diego, they weren’t going to be doing four color process or-
Michael Gavlak:
Filling the fountains with ink and changing plates in plates.
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. No, they’re not going to do-
Michael Gavlak:
I actually did that. I did that for a while. It’s funny.
Joel Fieri:
Did you?
Michael Gavlak:
I worked in a press room. I was the Pressman’s helper on a floor color printing press.
Joel Fieri:
No kidding?
Michael Gavlak:
I did it. I hung plates.
Joel Fieri:
I had no idea-
Michael Gavlak:
I used acetone to clean it off and everything.
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. I didn’t know we had that shared background.
Michael Gavlak:
The connection. So that’s what this conversation, that’s what chat session is about. I want to get to know you and how-
Joel Fieri:
Okay. Well, there you go. Yeah, no, I ran a small offset duplicator, the you go into quick print and say, “I need 1,000 copies of these.” They make a plate, put it on, and that little simple one pillar press.
Michael Gavlak:
Wow. We had a bindery too. Right?
Joel Fieri:
Well, then you know what a guillotine paper cutter is.
Michael Gavlak:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Oh, speaking of which I had a friend that came to work there who actually also worked in a Ford plant or whatever in Michigan, those presses that press the fenders, let’s see, he lost these first two fingers in one of those presses.
Joel Fieri:
There’s lots of guys I know walking around like this because-
Michael Gavlak:
Chopped it right off.
Joel Fieri:
And if people don’t know what we’re talking about, have you ever cut a big stack of paper? You can’t do it one a time. To do it a all at once, you need a very strong hydraulic press with a guillotine, and it is a guillotine. And every time, the first time I saw that machine, I was shaking. And I’ve never seen anyone see that machine operate that wasn’t, “Oh my.” It makes a big noise and it just cuts through this giant stack of paper.
Michael Gavlak:
It cuts through anything, it cuts through whatever you put under.
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. And try teaching a class with a bunch of inner city teenagers, and you’ve got to give them that press, that cutter. And that’s when I was mean Mr. Fury, if there was ever anybody, two people touching that press, I would-
Michael Gavlak:
They needed to have the fear of you so that they would have the appropriate fear of that-
Joel Fieri:
The machine.
Michael Gavlak:
… invention.
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. So yeah, that was my teaching background for several years. And like I said, with these inner city schools, the way education is, I’m in these inner city schools with these teenagers, 35 different languages in Hoover High School, the school I was at in.
Michael Gavlak:
Wow.
Joel Fieri:
San Diego. Kids right out coming from Somalia, from Ethiopia, from Laos, from, Vietnam, whatever. Kids that didn’t speak, English, kids that had never seen any kind of machinery or process at all, and I have to teach them to do this stuff and keep them safe, and keep all their fingers on and keep, their eyes from being burned with… Because I had acids, I had solvents, I had all kinds of stuff. So it was fun, it was a little-
Michael Gavlak:
So a lot of visual aids, a lot of visual aids?
Joel Fieri:
Yes. In my teaching career, there were many times when I learned to teach other than verbally. Like early in my career, when you teach people that don’t speak English, you have to find other ways and they’ll do that to you too. When I was a young teacher, they’re, “Joel, you have all the ESL one kids because we don’t have a place for them.”
Michael Gavlak:
Figure it out.
Joel Fieri:
You’re teaching whatever and you have 45 seats, so they’re in your class, teach them. And so you very quickly learn, first of all, whether or not you have to be a teacher in that setting. And then you also you learn different ways to communicate other than just verbally. So it’s quite an experience. It really was.
Michael Gavlak:
15 years?
Joel Fieri:
About 15 years, yeah, teaching. Yeah.
Michael Gavlak:
San Diego school district?
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. With a short spurt in Seattle, but yeah, mostly San Diego. Yeah.
Michael Gavlak:
So you’re a west coaster born in a… Well, I was going to say a godly home, but when you mentioned your father was an atheist, I was about to interrupt and blurt and say, “You have been on the other side of the tracks, right? A divided home.” It’s actually an anomaly for a child of a parents of two different persuasions for you to follow the Christian one. Well, one of them is going to prevail. Actually, what I’ve heard statistically, that most children who grow up in a home where one parent is Christian, end up not being Christian or at least straying for a long, long, long, long time. So you were almost, you considered straying from the faith, but never. I won’t ask you your personal questions about what’s the worst sin you’ve ever committed. But you’re not from that side of the tracks.
Joel Fieri:
No.
Michael Gavlak:
But what was that like in that?
Joel Fieri:
Well, it’s funny. I’m one of four children, the youngest of four, three of us are Christians and one is not. The nicest guy, the nicest person of all of us, is the one who’s not the Christian. Drives me nuts and-
Michael Gavlak:
Fascinating.
Joel Fieri:
Yeah, and my brother is the nicest guy in the world and the rest of us are a little cranky and we fight all the time and he’s like, “Why should I be a Christian if all of my siblings are fighting?” And I’m like, “I don’t have a good answer for you. All I know is you need…” So it’s funny. But I don’t know. Our dad was such a rough guy. My dad, it’s funny, he grew up in Chicago in the 1920s. He was born in 1923 in Chicago and grew up. And it’s funny, at his funeral about 10 years ago, I was reading his… He wrote out a final message thing. And part of it was, he said, “Yeah, when I was in Chicago as a kid, I had it a little rough. I was an Italian kid in an Irish neighborhood.” And it struck me as I was reading that, and I knew his background, my grandfather was this prototypical, good fellow. The hat, the fedora, the smashed nose, whatever. He was-
Michael Gavlak:
Really?
Joel Fieri:
Oh, yeah. He was a rough, rough guy. We were all scared of him. So my dad-
Michael Gavlak:
So what’s your ethnic background?
Joel Fieri:
Italian. Fietti, I’m half Italian and-
Michael Gavlak:
So you’re serious. The fedora and you’re a-
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. No, yeah, he was a scary guy.
Michael Gavlak:
Ties to the Chicago family.
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. He was one of Al Capone’s soldiers, whatever.
Michael Gavlak:
Are you serious?
Joel Fieri:
My dad, he used to ride in the back of my grandfather’s car. He would put all three kids on top of a seat and underneath that he’d have all the whiskey crates. So if the cops ever pulled them over, he’d look and they’d look back and they’d see three cute kids and they wouldn’t. So this is how my father grew up.
Michael Gavlak:
You were used for your grandfather to smuggle-
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. So this is when my father grew up still.
Michael Gavlak:
Prohibition.
Joel Fieri:
He was much better to us than his dad was to him. But anyway, so my dad grew up in that. When we think of that time, we think Al Capone versus Bugs Moran-
Michael Gavlak:
He was used to smuggle. Yeah.
Joel Fieri:
… Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. And I remember I went up to my aunt who grew up with him and I said, “This was pretty rough wasn’t it?” She goes, “Oh, you have no idea.” She goes, “You have no idea what we went through.” So that’s the background my dad had. And-
Michael Gavlak:
What year is the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, just to…?
Joel Fieri:
Oh God, I think it’s probably 19-
Michael Gavlak:
It was during-
Joel Fieri:
I have a pretty good… 1929 maybe.
Michael Gavlak:
During prohibition? what-
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. During prohibition, yeah, because that’s-
Michael Gavlak:
When did the prohibition start? What was the…?
Joel Fieri:
Hm, don’t know, sometime in the twenties.
Michael Gavlak:
Yeah, in the twenties and then when did it officially end? So it was after, it was thirties or…?
Joel Fieri:
I think sometime in the thirties, I think Roosevelt.
Michael Gavlak:
Early.
Joel Fieri:
It was one of the things that he did. So yeah, my father was that kind of man.
Michael Gavlak:
You didn’t know any of that stuff or you found out from your…?
Joel Fieri:
He talked. He wouldn’t mind talking about it a little bit, but of course he wouldn’t tell me everything. Yeah, so the more I go through life, the more I realize how my dad lived his life. It wasn’t until he got in the Navy in World War II, that he saw the officers on his ship, how they were educated and what gentleman they were and how they live life. He’s like, “Oh, I don’t have to lie, and cheat, and steal, and whatever else.” He goes, “There’s a better way for me to live a life.” And so he found when he got out, he survived the war in spite of getting his ship blown out from under him by kamikazes, and he met my mom who was the daughter of a minister, Protestant minister. My dad was this Roman Catholic, godless Roman Catholic, and I don’t know what my mom was thinking, but she saw that-
Michael Gavlak:
Careful when you say godless Roman Catholic.
Joel Fieri:
… that rough little Italian guy, bald Italian guy and said, “That’s the guy for me.” And so they got married.
Michael Gavlak:
Match made in purgatory.
Joel Fieri:
Oh, they made it work.
Michael Gavlak:
February 14th, 1929. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Joel Fieri:
There you go.
Michael Gavlak:
February 14th.
Joel Fieri:
Valentine’s Day, 1929. Not bad, huh?
Michael Gavlak:
I have a team working. Yeah, you were good. You were on the year.
Joel Fieri:
Yeah, my team cast shadows on me. Your team comes up with the answer right away.
Michael Gavlak:
Well-
Joel Fieri:
Good for you.
Michael Gavlak:
… I am actually… So since we’ve met a bunch has happened, this thing, this team that you’re referring to, has happened since we met and-
Joel Fieri:
Yeah, uh-huh (affirmative).
Michael Gavlak:
So I came out of nowhere when you and Drexler or Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Drexler, and I sat in a restaurant down in your area, you’re a Southern California boy-
Joel Fieri:
Well, no, that’s not the first time we met. No, man, come on now. You remember what happened? Jefferson and I could vividly remember what happened. You came into our studio.
Michael Gavlak:
That was the first time?
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. You came to our studio and you walked in and you walked into our main studio, which is a big sound, for us it’s big, not for Warner Brothers or something, and you saw our soundstage and you-
Michael Gavlak:
Okay, I do remember now.
Joel Fieri:
Yes. Do you remember what you did?
Michael Gavlak:
I just exploded on the scene, didn’t I? I’m like, “Wow.”
Joel Fieri:
Yes, you did. And afterwards-
Michael Gavlak:
Wow.
Joel Fieri:
… Jefferson and I said, “This guy is either nuts or he’s a tortured creative genius.”
Michael Gavlak:
And you’re still trying to decide which.
Joel Fieri:
We’re still trying to decide.
Michael Gavlak:
Okay.
Joel Fieri:
All right.
Michael Gavlak:
So keep going.
Joel Fieri:
Keep going? So yeah-
Michael Gavlak:
I walked in… Wait, how did I-
Joel Fieri:
Well, you were-
Michael Gavlak:
You sent the address. I was connected to you through, and we can drop names here.
Joel Fieri:
Oh, Savoca. Steve Savoca.
Michael Gavlak:
Steve Savoca.
Joel Fieri:
Who we have pretty much just… Him, we’ve concluded that he’s nuts.
Michael Gavlak:
So that’s why you were leery, right? You were, this is that Savoca friend?
Joel Fieri:
That’s right. Any friend of Steve’s. Oh my gosh, the dude is insane.
Michael Gavlak:
He was actually… So Steve Savoca was… I had two best men in my wedding.
Joel Fieri:
Really?
Michael Gavlak:
Steve Savoca and my roommate at the time.
Joel Fieri:
Okay. Yeah, no, Steve has done a little bit of… Well, you wrote a TV show for him and he filmed part of it here in our studio.
Michael Gavlak:
Well, actually, so I wrote the first draft. The concept, the seed idea, he came up with and I wrote a draft and-
Joel Fieri:
Oh, okay.
Michael Gavlak:
I’m living in Hollywood and the movie 13 had just come out. I don’t know if you remember that movie. It was an adolescent… I don’t know if it was a suicide story or something. It was some gritty, independent film that had just come out that made a cultural impact. And he’s like-
Joel Fieri:
Oh, yes. 13 people made this-
Michael Gavlak:
That’s a different thing. I think 13, the movie, may have inspired the series or something because there was a suicide series story. I forget what it’s called.
Joel Fieri:
Oh, I know. It was… Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Michael Gavlak:
But there was a predecessor to that and it may have inspired it. So it was an independent film and he’s like, “I want to do something, the Christian version of that.” And that’s all he said. He’s like, “I want to do it, we’re going to call it this.” And so the name, I went with the name. I loved the idea. And I did a draft, I watched the movie, I used it as a template, a feel, and I wrote something and it was too… And I went further because to 13 is a dark film and I pushed the envelope a little bit further and he’s like, “This is what… Okay. If you can make it.” And so then it’s a big project to get, as you know, having your own studio and dealing with productions, there’s a lot involved with getting it done. This was just a seed idea.
Michael Gavlak:
And so I was busy working my job at work and he took and re-imagined. He didn’t take my script and I was fine with that, it was our idea but it’s his idea. I was more going to help him out with this idea and I loved the idea. And then he got a version of it made and it looks really nice. And anyway, Steve Savoca, our friendship, I don’t know what I was talking about with him, but he says, “You need to meet this other friend of mine.” And how did he reach out to you or… Do you remember?
Joel Fieri:
Oh. Probably the same way, “Yeah, you need to meet.” So we arranged and-
Michael Gavlak:
Get together.
Joel Fieri:
… yeah, you came down from Hollywood to down here to the lower part of the state, in more ways than one. Sometimes the San Diegans, we have an inferiority complex compared to the LA guys.
Michael Gavlak:
Self-deprecating.
Joel Fieri:
And I was born and raised in LA, but I converted to a San Diegan many, many years ago. But yeah, so you came down and we talked and you had quickly got a sense, it seemed, of what we were doing here and what the possibilities could be. Yeah, and then the three of us met and we talked about all your projects that you had in mind, especially your… This is where the genius and the crazy part is still up in the air on some of your projects.
Michael Gavlak:
Full disclosure here. I’m going to go full disclosure to those watching and listening, this conversation right now between Joel and I is the result of Joel. Every periodically he’ll drop me a text, “Updates? What’s going on? Updates?” Because I’ve been saying a lot of crazy things to him for a couple of years now and we’ve been in the middle of a lockdown for a couple of years. WE have plans, many of the plans in a man’s heart, but it’s the Lord’s purpose that prevails, which is pretty much that’s the narrative of this project. I’ve been on this exciting development journey of an intellectual property that I own, that happened right here on the place behind me in the map, et cetera.
Michael Gavlak:
And you heard what I’m working on and immediately were very, very interested in that. And there’s all kinds of other things, like you said, multiple projects and they’re all related, but there’s multiple and I’ve been developing, developing, developing different content and you having a studio and being a godly Christian guy and just being a couple hours down the road, I have the sense immediately when I met you guys that at some point we’re going to be collaborating on something, utilizing to the max what you have available and what I have. And always in Hollywood development, it’s this purgatory of its own that only certain people know the details. There’s a tip of the spear of a production. You’re developing something, there’s a tip of the spear. And I’ll just disclose to you, I had a conversation with a literary agent this morning prior to this.
Joel Fieri:
Oh, here we go.
Michael Gavlak:
A literary agent that’s going, “Are you going to sign our contract or not?” So that’s the source material of everything that I’m developing. I have intellectual properties that I own. They’re all mine. But this one that I owned part of is the lead. There’s one lead project that you know about.
Joel Fieri:
Right.
Michael Gavlak:
So I’m in conversations with this literary agent and my lawyer saying, “That version of the contract, you should not sign.” So there’s the update.
Joel Fieri:
Well, hey, listen to your lawyer because as you know I have a little experience with Hollywood productions from my couple of years back.
Michael Gavlak:
Could you elaborate?
Joel Fieri:
Yeah, I was-
Michael Gavlak:
Specifics. Tell us what you’re talking about?
Joel Fieri:
Well, I’m on the credit time, a co-producer of a film by Dennis Prager and and Adam Carolla called No Safe Spaces that came out a couple years ago. Originally the idea was hatched in Dennis Prager’s backyard I think.
Michael Gavlak:
Right, for me actually. Yeah.
Joel Fieri:
Yeah. And I’ve always been a fan of his, and I’ve done some work with his producer, Dennis Prager’s producer, and his producer asked me, “Do you anyone who would be interested in investing in a film by Dennis Prager?” And I went, “Me, please.”
Michael Gavlak:
I’m here. So you were in this backyard, you were in Dennis Prager’s backyard?
Joel Fieri:
Well, no, this is before that.
Michael Gavlak:
Oh.
Joel Fieri:
But then he said, “Hey, yeah, they’re having a meeting. A Hollywood meeting in Hollywood Hills and a cocktail party in the backyard in the Hollywood Hills. You want to come?” And so I asked my wife, I said, “You want to do the Hollywood thing? I’ve never done this before.”
Michael Gavlak:
But it’s a different world.
Joel Fieri:
She goes, “Yeah, yeah.” She goes, “I think I got a black dress somewhere.” So going up there and we did the Hollywood thing. And we talked about this and that was in 2015. And me being just my naive self with no experience in this, I thought, “How much time could it possibly take?” You have your script, you have your idea, you get your money, you shoot it, you edit it.
Michael Gavlak:
And do it, do it.
Joel Fieri:
You put it in the theaters just like that. And so four or five years later, this movie finally comes out after many, many name changes, just many incarnations of it. And finally came out to be something totally different than what it was when we talked about it at first. So yeah, so like I said, it’s not just production it’s-
Michael Gavlak:
Well, Carolla, wasn’t involved?
Joel Fieri:
No, at the beginning he was not. You’re right, yeah. So he came on later and then not only making it, but then there’s the distribution and then there’s finding… And nowadays with cancel culture, finding, Amazon wouldn’t touch it, I think. And Netflix wouldn’t touch it and so we had to find a way to get it out. Finally, it made it out into theaters. But that was five or six years after when. And the subject actually was cancel culture on college campuses. By the time the film came out, cancel culture had gone from college campuses to our society.
Michael Gavlak:
It permeated other institutions at the deepest level.
Joel Fieri:
Right. So it was a timely subject. But like I said, by the time we got it out, the subject had metastasized. And so…
Michael Gavlak:
Because I was your plus one at the premier, the Hollywood premier, right? Was it Chinese?
Joel Fieri:
Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
Michael Gavlak:
Grauman’s. We did a red carpet for the Hollywood premier of No Safe Spaces. Everybody that’s anybody in that realm was present. Like, “Oh, look. There’s Ben Shapiro and there’s Dave Rubin. And there’s-”
Joel Fieri:
And boy, anybody out there listening.
Michael Gavlak:
Larry Elder.
Joel Fieri:
You should have seen Mike work the room. Hollywood Mike.
Michael Gavlak:
Okay. Here’s the funny thing. Oh, yeah, you were watching me just bounce from person to person.
Joel Fieri:
Because I’m too shy. I was too intimidated by everyone. You were like, “Hey.”
Michael Gavlak:
Well, the crazy thing is I have a good friend who is also there. And usually he’s the one that invites me to these things and now I was coming with you and he’s like, “Oh, you’re here.” And one of our mutual friends that he introduced me to that is a name on one of my projects, if this other project goes, that guy’s going to be known as the producer of it, and he walks in the front door, John Sullivan. John Sullivan, I’ve met him a couple times. He’d done a budget for me and knows about my project and is interested when the financing comes. And he walks in the front door, I’m like, “Hey,” and I’m just monopolizing this time right before this thing goes on, and I didn’t realize he had written No Safe Spaces. He’s the writer of No Safe Spaces. I’m like, “Oh.”
Joel Fieri:
That’s right, and he was the second or third. Andrew Klavan actually wrote the original script. I think so. Or they hired him. And then, yeah, so there’s all kinds of big names in conservative circles there.
Michael Gavlak:
It’s weird for me to realize that I’m at that level. I’m just working a job in Hollywood and I have friends and I get invited to things, and it doesn’t feel like I’m a person of any import or influence. I’m just excited about a project I’m working on. But then I find myself friends with people like you and friends with people like Brian Godawa, he’s the close friend that was at that thing. Joel, we’re running out of time though. When the clock hits nine here, Pacific time, I have to go to work. But since I have this daily, this is Monday through Friday, a chat session, I just want to… I hope you come back because we barely scratched the surface.
Joel Fieri:
Sure.
Michael Gavlak:
And I want to do this as a regular thing. And I do have a side project we’re trying to… We’re about to launch something that may be a fundraiser and if we get that funding, we’re going to be staffing up and employing your studio. All right.
Joel Fieri:
Okay.
Michael Gavlak:
It’s in the works.
Joel Fieri:
I have this on tape.
Michael Gavlak:
Right. You have it on tape and you have it in your memory because every time-
Joel Fieri:
On the internet.
Michael Gavlak:
… I’m with you, I’m saying something like this.
Joel Fieri:
That’s right. All right.
Michael Gavlak:
In the last couple minutes, I just want… What would you say to this audience, it’s mostly Christian, I do a Bible show before this and we are.
We believe we’re doing God’s will, we just want the kingdom of God to be added to daily and this is how we’ve decided to do it. And I appreciate you coming on. What would you say to our Christian audience right now about anything? I’ll let you… I’m putting you on the spot.
Joel Fieri:
Oh, yeah. Boy, you are putting me on the spot.
Michael Gavlak:
Say goodbye to our crowd or say see you next time. Whatever.
Joel Fieri:
All right. Yeah, going back to cancel culture and we haven’t even gotten to what I’m doing with the podcast network, but there’s…
Michael Gavlak:
Christian Podcast Central, go there.
Put it in a link in the description below. It’s Christian Podcast Central.
Joel Fieri:
Thank you.
Michael Gavlak:
That’s another thing that Joel is doing, make sure you go.
Joel Fieri:
There’s so much pressure on us now to be silent or to say things that we know aren’t true. But with the more people like you and people on our network, we started the network because we can’t be that. A lot of people talk about being the hands and feet of Jesus. Well, in some sense, that’s true, but we are also the mouth of Jesus. We’re also the voice of Jesus here on air. So don’t stop telling the truth. We know the God of the universe, we’re on the winning team and we want to bring as many people onto that team as possible. Even if they don’t really want to come or want to hear it, they still need to hear. So keep up the good work. Like I said, I caught a little bit of your Bible study beforehand. This is what we need. We need good Christian content out where the people are and this is where people are.
Michael Gavlak:
Yeah. If you build it, they will come. It’s a line from a movie which is appropriate for what I do, but there’s a deep truth there. It’s like we now have the technology at our fingertips to do everything we want to do. We don’t need the Hollywood studios anymore. You don’t need Hollywood, the system. It’s at your fingertips, start doing it. You have to start from somewhere. We’re building a network and then the network, isn’t just the technical thing. It’s the human beings. It’s you. You’re a main artery of this network, connected to me, a couple hundred miles south of me that I see in the future as a part of what I want to do in the kingdom. I think what God wants to do with us in his kingdom. So thank you for coming on Joel. I got to know some things we have in common, like printing and then we don’t have in common, like related to the mob. So thank you. Thank you, Joel.