Show Notes

• Making movies at age 10
• Newspapers + computers = publishing software company
• Life on the improv comedy circuit
• Telling stories with historical documentaries
• What you should do immediately if you want to be a filmmaker
• The biggest thing that holds people back

Connect with Brian Kruger

Website – https://stunt3.com 
Website – https://briankruger.com/
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/StuntBrian
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/briankruger/
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/briangkruger
Twitter – https://twitter.com/briankruger
IMDB – www.imdb.me/briankruger

Summary

A former comedian and software entrepreneur, Brian Kruger discusses making movies as a 10-year-old, and how his childhood hobby evolved into making historical documentaries…and garnering two Emmy nominations.

Full Transcript

Brian Bartes:

Welcome to another episode of Life Excellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers, and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field so you can learn their tools, techniques, and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success.

Welcome to Life Excellence. Brian Kruger grew up in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He was part of the comedy group Stunt Johnson Theater and they headlined around the country working with legendary comics like the Smothers Brothers and Rich Little. In 1998 Brian started a software company, Woodwing USA, which developed a system for magazine publishers to create virtual publications, enabling writers and page designers to work collaboratively around the world. He sold that company in 2009 and started the film company Stunt3Multimedia to make historical documentaries. Since then Brian has produced nine feature length films, two of which garnered Emmy nominations. In his first film, The Girl In Centerfield, Brian partnered with writer Buddy Moorehouse to chronicle Ypsilanti’s Carolyn King, who as a 12 year old in 1973, fought for the right for girls to play Little League. In 2011, Brian and Buddy teamed up again to produce Black and Blue, The Story of Gerald Ford and Willis Ward in the 1934, Michigan-Georgia Tech football game. That film recounts the story of Georgia Tech demanding that Michigan bench it’s only African-American player before it would take the field against the Wolverines. Last year, Brian screened his film Where The Brave Dare To Tread: The Bob Arvin Story about C. Robert Arvin, a West point first captain who was killed in Vietnam in 1967. He is currently working on The Torch Murders, the story of a shocking local crime in 1931 that had national reverberations. Please welcome Brian Kruger. Hey Brian, thanks for being on the show.

Brian Kruger:

Thanks for having me, Brian. It’s great to be on there.

Brian Bartes:

Brian, I know every kid in the 1970s played baseball either in their backyard or in the streets, but I’m not sure every kid became a filmmaker. So how did you get into film-making?

Brian Kruger:

Well, what happened was my grandfather had a garage sale and we were kind of helping him out with it and I saw the super eight camera. I asked him what it was and he said, it’s a movie camera. And I said, oh great. He goes, yeah, I’ve made movies of you guys when we go on vacations. And I said, great. He goes, do you want it? And I said, sure, and he gave it to me. So I was so excited and I went back home to my friends, Matt and Matt-I had two friends named Matt-it comes into play because we became MBM Productions, Matt, Brian and Matt. And I started shooting my first movie not realizing that you had to put a cartridge of super eight film in it-that was a little eye opening for a ten-year-old. And that’s when the problems began, having to buy film and get it processed was a $14 endeavor. Came from a family of five boys and a dad who worked at a factory was a little tough, but hey, you get into fundraising early that way.

Brian Bartes:

Obviously I want to learn more about your documentaries and I’m especially curious about this latest project, The Torch Murders, but let’s back up and kind of walk through your career. You’re a comedian too?

Brian Kruger:

So I always wanted to be a school teacher. So I did that. I was a high school teacher in Ypsilanti in the late 1980s and it was great. But I kept getting laid off because the way the school system sort of works in Michigan and a lot around the country, it’s all union based. So whenever pink slips went out, they whacked the lower third of new teachers, which I was always one. It’s very unlike business. I thought I was very good. I was young, single, so I’d stay up late, helped with the baseball team and got home at midnight after helping to direct the play or maybe coach forensics. I’d always get hired back, but the pink slip was tough. And one day a representative from an Apple computer distributor came by and said, hey, you’re the only guy we know around here that can teach Apple II computers-word processing, spreadsheets and database-would you like to be an education consultant? And I thought, well, I don’t know. And then they scratched down a number on a piece of paper, like you see out of the movies. And I said, okay, I’m gone. Picked up my teaching stuff and I never went back.

And from there I was moonlighting as a newspaper reporter for Booth Newspapers, covered sports. And those two things, Apple computers and writing for Booth Newspapers, got me into the newspaper business. And like they say with newspaper people, if you cut them, they bleed ink. And I never got out of it. I parlayed those two careers into a career that dealt with electronic publishing systems for newspapers and magazines. And by 2000 I had met some guys in the Netherlands who had developed a really nice editorial front end system that did just that. So I brought it to the US. I bought the western hemisphere, and started to sell that software to any magazines, books or newspapers I could find. And we got Booth, Hearst and Time Inc. And by the end of that decade, I was doing that. But the whole time I was doing stand-up comedy with three of my friends from high school. And that turned from being a hobby to something that was much more. Evidently we were funnier than we thought we were going to be and found ourselves on the improv circuit, working Las Vegas and having a great time. We ended up doing that for almost 15 years.

Brian Bartes:

The comedy business is a tough business. I know I watched a documentary recently with Jerry Seinfeld and there was another comedian, and Jerry was sort of breaking back into comedy after doing Seinfeld for years, and this other comedian, I forget his name, but he was trying to break into comedy. And I really had this appreciation, even for a guy like Jerry Seinfeld who, the guy is known throughout the world literally by name and by face, and yet what he said is that bought him about 90 seconds. So in other words, he could go on the stage and the audience would give him grace for 90 seconds because he was Jerry Seinfeld, probably the best known comedian in the world. And, but he only got 90 seconds. And then after that, he had to be funny. Can you tell some stories about just the challenge of standing up there? I mean, it seems like you’re standing up there basically naked exposing yourself to the audience, whether it’s five people or 500 people and you need to entertain them, you need to be funny. So how do you do that?

Brian Kruger:

It is, now that’s tough. And I actually, I really sympathize with Jerry Seinfeld, who like you say is, he’s great. We got our break from Tim Allen. We opened for Tim Allen before he signed with Disney. And watching him was amazing. Because there were four of us, we always had kind of a-we were a different type of act. We would plant people in the audience and heckle ourselves. We caused a lot of commotion. We always had a lot more respect for the stand-up who was up there by himself because-even Tim Allen said this- that you could be good one night, but if you’re working in a small town in Wisconsin somewhere, and you bomb, you got a long drive back. And I can’t imagine what that’s like, only hearing it from people. And that just takes a lot of perseverance and a lot of courage to go up there and do it, and really believe in what your craft is and really believe in your material, or writing new material. So while I respect that, we didn’t-and I’m not patting myself on the back-we didn’t bomb too much just because we were raucous. It was like, if there were five comedians on the bill, they were all stand-ups, and then a group came out, we got a lot of leeway, a wide berth, because people are…it’s almost like they’re afraid because there’s just so much going on. That said, we did have some down times and it just helped to get back in the car and laugh with each other. The guys that do it by themselves though, there’s a lot of courage in that, lots of courage, and lots of respect from us for those guys.

Brian Bartes:

And so what caused you to get out of that? I know you were about, probably 10 years into Woodwing USA, and I think that’s about the time you stopped comedy. Did it just become too much?

Brian Kruger:

What happened was we just got older. Our friends were all married and having kids. We were in our late thirties, we started to think about marriage with the people we were with at that time. We all had different jobs, too. One of us was a police officer. The other one was the managing editor of a Gannet newspaper. We made enough money for one guy. We didn’t make enough money for four of us. So it just kind of became a let’s-grow-up thing. Plus, our skits about The Brady Bunch and My Three Sons were getting long in the tooth, come the two thousands or so. And we liked riding it, but we had done a couple thousand shows and I think we ready to step away. So that’s what we did. And we used to work colleges, and just a side note, Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t work colleges anymore just because of the political ramifications. It’s really hard to be funny on campus now. And that used to be a big part of our income, doing the college circuit. Nobody would touch that now at all.

Brian Bartes:

It’s a tough crowd. I was watching…the other night we stumbled into George Carlin who does a bit on germs, which is actually really good and timely. And he, politically, he couldn’t do it now, but the content actually is perfect for what’s happening right now. But we started watching the Carson show and I made the comment to my wife that you really, you can’t, you almost can’t do comedy anymore.

Brian Kruger:

And I completely agree. So you noticed that, you saw that.

Brian Bartes:

Well it just seems to me that in today’s world, if you offend one person, then you’re offensive and comedy is, and I don’t know, it’d be interesting to talk to real comedians, well, you would have a sense of it, but to talk to comedians about it. But comedy to me has always been being able to not take yourself too seriously, being able to poke fun at things. And what’s happened today is there such a strong filter for offensiveness that again, I think if you offend one person in the world today, then you’re labeled offensive. And that really, I think that jeopardizes the whole comedy business.

Brian Kruger:

I’ll go you one step simpler on that. And that is we always looked at comedy as being holding a mirror up to the audience. And if you see yourself in the mirror, it’s funny and you’re there for entertainment. It’s fun. Now, if you hold that same mirror up, you’re going to find, like you said, one person, you’d offend one person and with social media you’re done. Because it’ll go out all over the place that you did “this” on stage. Well, the stuff that we did on stage back in the day, we were cutting the edge, but cutting the edge got us to Las Vegas, we made a lot of people laugh. So that was fun. Just no way we could do that again.

Brian Bartes:

So thankfully when the Brady Bunch jokes stopped being funny, you were about 10 years into your software company. Tell me about that. You talked a little bit about the start of that, but talk about what happened over the next 10 years with that business.

Brian Kruger:

So before the internet and high speed internet, especially with images and such, if you and I, Brian, ran a magazine and I was in New York putting the pages together and you were in Bosnia reporting on it, before our software came along, you’d write a story, have your photographer take pictures there. And then you’d-we called it sending it over the wall, which means you’d put it on the wire and you’d send it into New York and you wouldn’t see it-that story or those pictures-again until it was on the newsstand. What Woodwing software allowed us to do back then is throw everything into a virtual page. So you could get out of the foxhole or wherever you were, go to a computer, log on and see how that page was coming together. And that was efficient for production, but it was even more efficient for advertising because it used to be, in the case of Time Magazine, for instance, they had to be all put together by Tuesday night so it could go to print on Thursday morning. Well, we gave Time Magazine and all of their publications another 24 hours to sell ads, which made the return on investment really quick. And so that became very popular with a lot of the magazines and newspapers and such, and that was mostly in print. With fading out of print, both in newspapers, books, magazines, and everything else, I decided it was a good time to get out of the business, which was fine. I had to come home and tell my wife that I was going to be a documentary filmmaker, which was an interesting conversation because the revenue stream is a little different, different than that.

Brian Bartes:

So you’d been doing that about 10 or 12 years. Why documentaries, why historical and biographical documentaries?

Brian Kruger:

It was kind of by accident. I had done a feature film a few years before, but just as an actor. I was a producer of it, but really I was just in it. That was fun. Documentaries for me did a couple of things. I love documentaries, first of all. You get complete control if you’re doing something yourself. You go out and find the story, you interview the people, you shoot it, you edit it and you get it out again, you tell it your own way. When you’re doing a feature film that involves a lot of people there’s a lot of voices and a lot of rooms that want a voice on how that goes.

We ran into a story about the first girl to play little league baseball, and we didn’t run into it. My writing partner, Buddy Moorehouse actually played on her team in 1973 and I was playing across town. So we knew this story very well. We decided to make that the first story that we told in a documentary story. And it’s fascinating. And what we decided that was interesting about it-and we’ve used this all along now-is we want to tell stories that people will look at and go, that happened? That happened here? I had no idea that happened. So all of our stories are about that. And Brian, I could spend the next 60 years and never leave-I live in Michigan, Wayne County, Michigan-never leave Wayne County and do a documentary every year because there’s so many stories out there that people forgot.

And I’ll make this short. When we were shooting that film in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, on the way out, we were talking to the vice president of communications, a guy named Lance Van Aulken-I think he might be the president now. And I just happened to ask on the way out, I said-and I was a little league coach-and I said, Lance, do you guys have a hall of fame for kids here at Williamsport? And he said, no, no, Brian, that would be insane, we’d have parents all over us, which is true. I coached in Grosse Pointe. Grosse Pointe parents would want their kid in the hall of fame. Anyway, so literally it’s like out of Hollywood, I started leaving the office and he goes, but if we did, we’d start with a guy in your backyard. And I said, who? And he goes, have you ever heard of Pinky Deras, Art Deras? And I said, no. He goes, oh my God, come back in here, you’re not going to believe this. And he had almost, like right here on a file cabinet, a manila folder that-and he started reading me baseball statistics of this 12 year old kid. And they’re phenomenal. He was a pitcher and it was, I won’t recite them now, they’re just amazing statistics. And he said, we have never seen anything like him before and never will. He’s our Ty Cobb. And he goes, I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t know if he’s still alive, but he came from Hamtramck.

So of course, Buddy and I get on a plane and we head back to Detroit, instead of going home to our wives, we just go right out to Hamtramck, what used to be Polish Town. It’s quite a bit different now. It’s very Syrian now, it’s kind of cool. But we had to find a Polish bar and just start asking people, have you heard of Pinky Deras? And this is the second of three of these movie moments-one of the last remaining Polish bars in Hamtramck, opened up the door. It was dark, a beam of light shown across the bar with four guys sitting at it. We said, anybody hear of Pinky Deras? And everything stopped. And they turn their heads over and they said, come on in. So we went in and they said, we don’t know what happened to him, last we heard he was a police officer in Warren. Said, thanks guys, so we get in our car and we drive out to Warren, go straight to the police headquarters. Somebody knew enough about who this guy was that took us right to the police chief. So we’re sitting in a police chief’s office-and this is like an hour and a half after we had landed at Metro-and we told him the whole story about Pinky Deras. And he stopped for a second after we said it. And he said Artie? And I said, yeah, Art Deras. He goes, no way. And he sat back, he goes, I rode with that guy. And I said, is he still alive? And he said, yeah, he lives up on 16 Mile and Mound. And he goes, I had no idea he was that guy. So we drive out. This is the third part of that. We knock on the door, open it up that far, an old face comes out and says, hello? And I said, are you Pinky Deras? And he said, yes, I am. Nobody’s called me that in a long time. And I said, well, I’m Brian Kruger. I want to do a movie about you, and he looked, and he goes, well, come on in. And that’s how that whole thing started. And that was our first Emmy nomination, The Story of Pinky Deras, which is an astonishing story. I won’t bore you with it now, but amazing story.

Brian Bartes:

So you really stumble into these. Literally, it sounds like a little bit of luck in the beginning and a little bit of detective work and you’re on your way.

Brian Kruger:

And I’ll say that, and this will ring true with you because you seem to be that kind of guy, it’s not so much luck. It’s keeping your eyes open and appreciating who’s around you telling you something. I think we walk around with blinders all day long, and it’s especially egregious with senior citizens. We walk by people who are in their eighties and over as though they might be in the way. And you might not do it even in a rude way, but it’s like, well…sometimes you see it manifest on the roads-what’s that old guy driving for-he’s in my way, or you’re at the grocery store and you just don’t pay attention to them. Those people are gold mines. And as a documentary filmmaker, I’ve made the mistake of waiting too long sometimes to start a story and realizing that I lost that person just years before, and I could have talked to him if I just would have talked to him. That’s been the biggest lesson I’ve learned out of all this, is value people, probably 60 and over. Everybody has amazing stories to tell if you just listen to them.

Brian Bartes:

Someone once said that luck is when preparedness meets opportunity. So you’re right.

Brian Kruger:

Couldn’t agree more.

Brian Bartes:

You need to be aware, you need to be looking out for that. But everyone has a story, and it’s so fascinating. I was just talking to someone this morning about having conversations with people and how fascinating it is and how wonderful it is because everyone has a story. And it’s just so interesting.

Brian Kruger:

It really is. And we miss them, sometimes they’re right in front of our eyes. My wife, Roseanne, and I help with a mass-we used to before COVID-at the Rivers Senior Citizen Home in Grosse Pointe. And they’re just nice, really nice older people. And I wouldn’t spend a lot-I’d talked to them, but it was very cursory, until one of them passed away. And I looked at her obituary, this frail old woman in the back, and I thought, well, she was sweet, I’m really going to miss her. But I read her obituary and she was an undersecretary for Ronald Reagan in the Education Department. This woman was a power broker. And yet I looked at her as somebody who might be knitting, and I don’t want to bother her today, but now all I wanted to do is sit and talk to her for three hours-so much to offer. And when it’s gone, it’s gone, you don’t get that anymore. So that’s my warning, my advice in everything is please stop and talk to people who are older than you. Value, value, who they are. It makes a huge difference.

Brian Bartes:

It’s wonderful that you’re capturing at least some of those stories so that people can continue to know those stories and experience them for years to come. Brian, as you know, our show is called Life Excellence, and Life Excellence is about constant and never-ending improvement in every area of life. So I’m always interested in learning about success strategies and how to apply them to our own lives. And I know you speak to film students, and I’m just wondering, what do you tell kids who ask you for advice on how to become a filmmaker?

Brian Kruger:

It’s funny you should ask that. It just happened again a few days ago, and again, last night. A few days ago I was at the Apple store, the local Apple store, and a real nice young man saw that I was making a purchase and looked at my profile and said, hey, you’re a film guy. And I said, yeah. And he goes, well, I want to be a filmmaker someday, what should I do? Same question you just asked. And I said, my suggestion is-and he’s all ears-I said, so tomorrow when you get up, make a movie, start something, shoot something. You’ve got-I did a whole Ted talk on using your iPhone as camera, they’re great-go out and shoot something, shoot a scene. Because by four o’clock that day, if anybody asks you what do you do for a living, you can say, I’m a filmmaker and I work at Apple to try to support my film business. Whereas if they asked you that today, you would say, well, I want to be a filmmaker someday. And there’s a lot of power in that first statement. There’s a lot less power in that second one. So my advice is go do it, go shoot film. And don’t wait. I think the same thing can be said for novelists, for people who want to be a painter, want to be a screenwriter. They always talk about that next thing they’re going to do it someday, or even a podcast-I want to do a podcast someday. Well, you know what-do it, just do it tomorrow and then you’re in the business.

And so what I say is now has been easier than any time in our history in film-making, especially, couldn’t have done what we did 10 years ago, if it was 20 years ago-film cost a fortune, cameras cost a fortune. Now you can do it. So I’m telling filmmakers, anybody who asks me-start shooting. And if you go to my website, Stunt3.com, you’ll see something called mini docs. They’re five minute documentaries shot in 15 minutes. And I’ve gotten so much feedback on those, probably more than some of my other films, because they said, we love those. And just because I stepped out one day and started doing it.

Brian Bartes:

So there’s definitely something to be said for action. It’s true with photographers. It’s true with musicians. It really is so incredible today that we have the internet, that somebody can create a song with their guitar in their basement and put it up on the internet and become, of course, it’s not an overnight sensation, but they have the ability to get seen in a way that they certainly didn’t have probably five years ago, certainly 10 or 20 years ago.

Brian Kruger:

I agree. And Brian, we’re of similar age. When long before digital cameras came along, and if you go all the way back to our super eight years, even if we would’ve made the Citizen Kane of super eight films, you couldn’t show it on TV. It wouldn’t be shown on TV. Right now, this moment, let’s say our podcast right now was so epic that there’s a chance it can go worldwide. Well, it will go worldwide as soon as it goes up, but it can be a worldwide sensation and turn somebody into a filmmaker right now. And that’s never happened in history before, because we have distribution, it’s cheap to make, and the quality is amazing. Everything we shoot now is broadcast quality off our phones. So what better way to be a filmmaker than to start making films? I’m not a big fan of moving to LA and joining a film crew and working your way up. Those days are gone. They’re made all over the place now. And if you really want to do it, do it.

Brian Bartes:

So what do you think holds people back? Why don’t they take action?

Brian Kruger:

Fear of failure, and I think that’s very common. As long as they say, they’re going to write that novel and they never do, they can always pretty safely say, well, someday I’m going to write that novel. Whereas if they write it, it’s not very good-which chances are it won’t be the first time around-they won’t be a failed novelist, or they won’t be very good at this, or won’t film a very good documentary. Trust me, the first few things that I made, I look at it and go, oh man, and I’m sure 10 years from now, I’ll look at what I made now and go, oh man. The point is, go make it, go shoot it, the first one’s not going to be as good as the second or the third-you’ll have your moment. But whenever you don’t do it, there’s a safety in that fear, avoiding, the fear of not participating. Well, you know, I’m going to write that novel one day and when I do, better than Hemingway. And you can keep that in your mind your whole life and never execute.

Brian Bartes:

That’s great advice, I appreciate that. Brian, your latest project is The Torch Murders. And I want to make sure we touch on that. The Torch Murders recounts a crime that took place in Michigan in the 1930s. How did you get involved in that story? And when do we get to see it?

Brian Kruger:

Okay. I got involved in the story in 1983 long before digital film or anything. And I just got paired off with an older guy who was golfing in Ypsilanti. He was golfing for a sponsorship per hole for MS, and I golfed with him for about nine holes or so. He’s 80 some years old. And he told me a story about this murder that happened in 1931, where four teenage kids, two boys and two girls, were brutally murdered on a Tuesday morning at two in the morning. And their bodies were burned and discovered the next morning. And by Thursday night-and go with me on this-72 hours later, the three murderers that they found, by Thursday night, were in a car and heading to Jackson prison to serve four life sentences, one for each kid. What happens in those 72 hours is remarkable. The story goes worldwide. It’s in every newspaper in every city around the world. There are lynch mobs trying to find out who did this murder, but it’s a swift justice story. And long and short, it’s all about a swift justice story, which we don’t do anymore, thank God. And I follow the murderers through their lives, two of them pass away early, but one gets out of prison in the late sixties, pardoned by Governor Romney in Michigan, and how he ends up back in the city where he committed the crime and dies that evening-first time back to that city. When I asked people from Ypsilanti if they’d ever heard of this story, they say no. And when that happens, that’s a Brian Kruger Stunt3 film because I go, we’ve got something here, you know. That’ll come out sometime Q3 in 2022. COVID set it back about a year. COVID does damages to documentaries and about everything else.

Brian Bartes:

Oh, that’s fantastic. Well, we’ll look forward to seeing that. We’re about out of time, but I really appreciate your taking the time to talk today, Brian, this has been terrific. Best wishes for your continued success and I look forward to the release of The Torch Murders. And until next time, this is Brian Bartes, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.

You have been listening to Life Excellence with Brian Bartes. Recording and post-production provided by Stunt3Multimedia. All rights are reserved by Brian Bartes. For more information, visit BrianBartes.com and be sure to visit us on YouTube at Life Excellence with Brian Bartes.