My next interview subject and I have some history. In 2006, Jack O’Halloran, who you’ll remember from his role as Non in the first two Superman films with Christopher Reeve, joined a forum I was a member of and answered three questions apiece from users of the site. I asked him three questions, and in a way, Mr. O’Halloran’s coming to that forum inspired me towards my own interviews.

Jack sent me a friend request on Facebook a decade later, and when he did, I knew it was time to reach out for a more extended interview. That’s exactly what happened on August 22nd. I elaborated on questions from 2006 and asked him some new ones, and I hope you all enjoy getting to know him better.

Say hello to Jack O’Halloran!

Johnny: First of all, I would like to thank you for taking the time to do this.

Jack: No problem.

Johnny: I always start off with these two questions. First, what were your pop-cultural likes growing up, like favorite movies and music?

Jack: I liked most films. I came up in an era where we had Saturday matinees and serials like Tarzan, Flash Gordon and all that stuff. Music? Rock and roll was in the 50s and 60s time frame when I was growing up. I got into jazz in the 60s, and I also liked classical music.

Johnny: What were your high school days like?

Jack: Well, I started high school in Philadelphia and finished in New Jersey. I went to an all boys Catholic High School until my senior year, and then I switched over to a public school in New Jersey which had boys and girls, so it was a whole different experience. I had a great athletic career in high school. Football, basketball and track prepared me for future sports in my life. I enjoyed high school. It was a good experience.

Johnny: Alright. What’s your favorite memory of your boxing days?

Jack: We were very, very close to a Muhammad Ali fight three or four times, actually. One, in particular, we thought the fight was really going to happen, but there were some situations with Ken Norton’s management and Ali’s management. Norton got the fight that we were signed to do. It was all about money. I fought some very good fighters in some big places, like the Royal Albert Hall in London and The Grosvenor House. I beat a lot of good fighters. I lost a few fights to some good fighters that I probably shouldn’t have lost, but that was my own foolishness of not preparing correctly. That was a time in my life when I was going through a lot of things, and I didn’t listen to people the way I should’ve. If I did, things would’ve been a lot different, but that was down to myself. I also suffer from a disease called acromeglia, which a lot of people didn’t have a lot of knowledge of. They interfered physically with you. I don’t use anything as excuses for anything. Whatever I did, I did of my own volition, and it is what it is. Would I do things differently? People always say, “If I could do it again”. I don’t know if there would’ve been different outcomes. Probably, but it is what it is and I don’t worry about spilled milk. I just move on and do what I do.

Johnny: Alright. What led you to make the transition from athletics to acting?

Jack: I really liked the movie business. I mean, I like film. I lived a life where I actually lived a couple of different personalities at the same time. I guess you could say acting was a built-in deal. They did approach me a lot of times when I was younger, and I had to say no. When they came to me to do Farewell, My Lovely, the time seemed to be right for me. I went out and did a screen test, and Robert Mitchum said I should be in the movie. Mitchum and I became good friends, and Farewell, My Lovely became a very successful movie. It launched my career from a standstill to working all the time, and it was a very good film.

Johnny: Okay. When it comes to Farewell, My Lovely, did you read any of Raymond Chandler’s work before signing on for the movie, and if so, did the books influence your portrayal of the character Moose Malloy?

Jack: I knew who Raymond Chandler was. I did see Murder, My Sweet with my pal Mike Mazurki. When they came to me to do the film, I think the biggest influence was Mitchum, and the way I did it, and it worked extremely well. It showed that I had an ability to handle the industry, and I had presence. I created a presence on the screen. I remember, when the movie came out, friends of mine from the East Coast called me and said, “They paid you to do that movie?” (Laughing) I was just being myself in a situation. I had a lot of street activity from where and when I was raised. I had a lot of street sense and knowledge, and it worked very well for the character of Moose Malloy. I was very comfortable doing that. It was a great opportunity to work with a great actor, and there were some great actors in the cast. The crew was brilliant. There were 4 Oscar winners on the crew, and you couldn’t ask for a better crew or a better ensemble of actors. There was Mitchum, John Ireland, Harry Dean Stanton, Anthony Zerbe, Charlotte Rampling…They were all very talented people. It was an enjoyable pleasure to do and be introduced into the film industry that way. I turned down a picture called The Great White Hope with James Earl Jones, which some days I kick myself over not doing. I also turned down The Thomas Crown Affair with Steve McQueen. They were in Boston, and I kick myself for not doing that. I thought that was kind of foolish, but at the time, I wasn’t ready to get into that area. When The Thomas Crown Affair was being done, I had just started boxing. When they came to me to do The Great White Hope, I had just knocked out Manuel Ramos at the Forum in L.A and was ranked number two in the world. It was just things and times. I probably should’ve looked at the films more at the time. The Great White Hope was a huge movie. It was the biggest movie in Hollywood at the time. James Earl Jones couldn’t believe I said no to it. I just did what I felt, and I had that kind of streak in me. With Farewell, My Lovely, it worked out right. The timing was right. When I set out to do it, I knew I was going to do it. There was not going to be any turning back, and it all came together very well.

Johnny: Cool. Your next film after Farewell, My Lovely was King Kong, where you played Joe Perko. What was your favorite part of working on that movie?

Jack: Again, you’re talking about working for an amazing producer, Dino De Laurentiis. We had a great cast. Jeff Bridges was a brilliant actor. Jessica Lange is just an amazing lady. Charlie Grodin’s a great actor. Rene Auberjonois and all the cast were brilliant. Unfortunately, we had a director who wasn’t the greatest, but we had a great script and producer. If we had a different director, as good as it was, I think the film would’ve been much better. It was a long shoot. It taught me a lot. I learned a lot in the industry while we did it, and everything I did was a learning experience. It was my first time working on a giant movie. It was a big production, a big film…A 30 million dollar picture was big in 1976.

Johnny: Definitely. I’m sure you get asked this question a lot, but as you played Non in the first two Superman movies, what do you think made them succeed while more recent adaptations of the Superman mythology haven’t quite earned approval?

Jack: First, you had Richard Donner. Richard Donner lived, ate and breathed Superman. It’s very sad that they didn’t allow him to finish Superman 2, because then you would’ve had 3, 4, 5 and 6, and it would’ve been a whole different franchise. The first two were done under Donner’s auspices. Richard Lester came in and he shot a lot of things, but he still followed the pattern of Donner. 1 and 2? You’ve got to understand that Superman was the first American superhero, and the way they did him and portrayed him was the way he was projected in the comics. That was this great American way, helping people, not watching people get harmed or marred, going out of his way to prevent that. As they went on afterwards, they got darker and darker, and then they changed the costumes. Superman IV was a disaster because it went from a Warner Brothers picture to a Cannon picture, so the quality of the film wasn’t the way it should’ve been. The fan base got cheated terribly. Christopher Reeve wrote the script, but it just wasn’t the quality of film that the first two were. 3 was bad, but 4 was worse, and then Warner Brothers came back and did Superman Returns and Man Of Steel. They’re never going to find another Christopher Reeve. I don’t think there’s another actor who will do Superman and Clark Kent the way he did. He just did that role so well, and it was sad that they didn’t do 10 of them the way they planned to. It’s like Indiana Jones sequels, which would’ve been very different had Harrison Ford dropped out of them. You know what I mean? Chris was a unique actor in a certain way. Like I said, they’ll never do that role as well as he did, and you’ll never find anyone who will put the emphasis on creativity and the all-American way of life like Donner did. Richard Donner and Tom Mankcewicz were really proud of the Superman thing. It was just sad. It was sad that the producers that did the film got greedy and were looking for shortcuts. They had a reputation for doing that, and it was sad that they got away with it, so maybe if Warner Brothers had stood up more and taken control of the franchise, it would’ve been much stronger. 1 and 2 stand out so well. We broke a lot of technology rules with the film, and we made waves in the industry. The cast was brilliant. The ensemble was terrific. When you work with people for four years, you get to know everybody very well, and it just worked out well. I mean, Marc McClure as Jimmy Olsen was brilliant. Terrence Stamp was a brilliant actor. Sarah Douglas was a brilliant actress. Margot Kidder was a perfect Lois Lane. Gene Hackman was brilliant. I mean, Gene’s a great actor. You don’t get much better than that. They cast it well down through the parts in it. That worked extremely well. That was good. It was a great experience. I enjoyed doing the films, and I’m glad they came out as well as they did and they have. Here we are, almost 40 years later, and generations of children still go and see them and embrace them.

Johnny: On the current series Supergirl, Non is a speaking character, while your interpretation was silent. Since you chose for Non to be mute, what do you think of his current portrayal?

Jack: Well, you know, Non was a scientist in the first place, and then they lobotomized him. When they asked me about the character and doing it that way, I wanted to do a mute person. Jackie Gleason had done a picture called Gigot, and he was nominated for an Oscar for it, as a deaf, dumb mute. I said if I ever have a chance to do a character with facial expressions and body language, I’m very glad. When we looked at the Superman script, Zod was this overzealous, vicious general. Ursa was a maneater of a vicious person. Someone had to be linked to the children, because Superman had a young audience. I decided to take Non, this large, brutish guy, and do it like a child learning how to walk, learning how to talk, learning how to work my eyes, having child mannerisms. I was very proud of it, and I was glad they allowed me to do it because it really did work. I get to meet so many people, and they say “You scared me to death, but I loved your character so much”, because they related to him as a child.

Johnny: Moving into the 80s, in 1987, you played Emil Muzz in Dragnet, which I consider to be an underrated 80s comedy. That was an amazing cast you were part of.

Jack: I thought it was a great film. It had a point of view that you could see it 10 times, and every time you see it, there’s a one-liner that you missed. Aykroyd had so many one-liners in that picture. It was fascinating. Danny took the character to heart. He really did a great job of mimicking Jack Webb, and Tom Hanks was brilliant. He was on the threshold of becoming a star. Harry Morgan was great. It was a great cast, and we had a lot of fun doing it. It was a fun movie to do. I enjoyed Dragnet. I loved the scene we did where they were interrogating me. I thought it came off really well between Tom and Danny and I.

Johnny: Was there talk of having Emil Muzz turn good at the end of Dragnet, or was he intended to be a heavy throughout?

Jack: I think he was intended to be the way he was. It worked for the film, because he was an independent heavy. It was kind of a neat role. He was affiliated with this band of bad guys, but he was doing things independently like myself.

Johnny: Okay. In 1988, you played Simon Moon in Hero And The Terror. Since you didn’t exactly speak positively about Cannon when referring to the Superman movies, were you nervous about doing a film for them?

Jack: No. You know, I liked Chuck Norris, and again, it was a different character so I could show a different side of my ability as an actor. (Laughing) I remember when my poor wife came from England, and she was on the set one day watching me work. She couldn’t believe that I went up a ramp and came back down as this person. It scared the daylights out of her that I could change into this really ogre-type guy, you know? Again, I liked the idea that I could take and expand on a mentally deranged individual, and put life into him. It wasn’t a scary factor that was required. It was more of, again, facial and body movement, and being able to portray something that made the character jump out and gave a little presence to the scene. I thought that worked very well. What did you think?

Johnny: I thought it was a good movie. I thought it was enjoyable. I know that Siskel and Ebert had given it Two Thumbs Down, but then again, they didn’t really care for a lot of stuff like that, so you can’t always trust a critic.

Jack: Yeah. They didn’t like the script, but they didn’t knock any actor. They were very kind to many things that I did.

Johnny: Going into 1990, you played Angelo in the comedy Mob Boss, which was the last film of Mike Mazurki, who had also played Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet. Did you compare notes on your portrayals during downtime on the set of the movie?

Jack: No. I did that film for a friend. It was a low-budget movie, and a friend asked me if I would please do that to help him, so I did. I’m used to doing bigger productions, but I did it because a friend asked me to do it, so I did.

Johnny: Okay. Going into 1994, you played The Yeti in the live-action version of The Flintstones. As that movie had many different screenwriters, both credited and uncredited, on what draft did you character come in?

Jack: Well, you know, the thing that bothered me about The Flintstones is that it’s the only picture that I have ever done where I had footage cut out. They had come to me to do a couple of commercials for McDonald’s and another company. I did scenes where they were trying to break into the gate at the quarry, and confrontations with Rosie O’Donnell and Elizabeth Perkins, and they were very really funny. They worked very well, and they were cut out. There were several scenes that I liked in the film that were taken away because they were making room for a cameo by Elizabeth Taylor. It was sad because I thought the director was way off-base with what he did, the way he cut the picture. They spent so much money, and the film could’ve been so much better. There was a lot of great talent in that movie, but they just didn’t collaborate. I’ve always studied the industry, and I’ve been very fortunate in my career to work with some great actors and some great production people. On Farewell, My Lovely, we had John A. Alonzo, who was nominated for an Oscar for Chinatown, while Dean Tavoularis, who won an Oscar for The Godfather, was the production designer. King Kong had a great cinematographer. Superman had Geoffrey Unsworth, who was brilliant. I learned a lot about the camera from Geoffrey, and I learned about editing. I learned production and different things about making movies. When you have a director who can do seven takes or eight takes and make a scene work, then you have a pretty good director. When a guy has to shoot 40 takes to try and patch something together, that sort of makes for someone who didn’t do their homework, and makes it a lot more convoluted. I saw that happening with The Flintstones, and it was sad because they had built the film up. It could’ve been a lot better. People like Halle Berry? I thought her character was wasted with the screen time she had. It was just talented people that were not used properly. It’s just like in Superman Returns. You had Frank Langella and other people walking around throughout the movie. They didn’t really have the chance to show how great of actors they really are, you know?

Johnny: Yeah. Your answer about learning about production actually leads me into my next question. You produced a movie in 2007 called The List. A romantic comedy, how did you become involved in that project?

Jack: I lived in Europe. A guy from London came to me and said he had a project. I helped him raise some money for it. I liked the storyline and I liked the cast. There were some pretty good actors in it. It’s very sad. These guys didn’t raise the money they said they raised. I worked as a producer on it because I got the film done. It never would’ve gotten done otherwise. We patched things together and it worked. It had some great qualities to it. It’s not a bad film. It’s really kind of a cute movie. It worked very well to tell a story. Sydney Poitier is a very clever actress and a nice girl. Unfortunately, when your budget is stretched, and you’re having a lot of friction doing things, and holding these things together with a tight piece of string, the distribution could’ve been a lot better. Had it been distributed differently, I think it would’ve done very well. Wayne Brady is a good actor. He didn’t get the justice that he should’ve. I just think the cast worked well, but it was a tight, tight, tight budget. Working on a daily basis, you were wondering if you were going to get it done.

Johnny: Okay. Apart from The List, and a Superman documentary in 2006, there’s something of a gap in your filmography between 1994’s The Flintstones and the 2009 short Remembrance. Was that break an intentional or an unintentional one?

Jack: I lived in Europe and I did a lot of writing. I have a book that I’ve written called Family Legacy. It’s done very well. It’s the first part of a trilogy. We’re going to make a film out of it shortly and, I believe, a TV series. I don’t want to say much about the television deal, but I believe it will be some of the most riveting television ever to hit the screen. The story is a brilliant story. If you liked The Godfather, you’ll love Family Legacy. It’s real. It’s the story of my father and where I come from, and it’s about the growth of a nation. It’s not just a mob picture. It’s about government, industry, unions and organized crime when they were all partners, all up to 1960. It shows how the country was opened and expanded, how monies that came from the streets fueled industries, how people like Meyer Lansky and a few other clever accountants funneled money into major corporations to help the country grow and make jobs. It wasn’t all just gangsterism. There was a lot more safety in the streets. There was a lot more cash flow going around in the streets when certain people ran certain things. It was a much more safer environment. You didn’t have the weapons and drive-by shootings, and you didn’t have the violence in the neighborhoods you have today. When I was a younger kid growing up in Philly, we never locked our doors. Children played in the streets every day and no one was ever snatched or kidnapped. The word “respect” was more in the air than it is today. My father was kind of a famous guy. His name was Albert Anastasia, and he ran a little company called Murder Incorporated. They were the glue. They held things together. It was just a different era.

Johnny: On a different tack, what talents do you have that you haven’t been able to show off yet, but you hope to do so someday?

Jack: I have a script that I wrote that we’re getting ready to do called Ballad Of A Simple Man. There was a picture in the 30s called The Informer. John Ford did it, and it won 4 Oscars, including Best Actor for Victor McLaglen. A character actor won a leading Oscar award. It’s an Irish picture from the 20s, which was a great era, and what we did was we’ve written another adaptation of the book, which came out very well. We’re getting ready to do it. I’ve been sitting on it for almost 40 years. I started to do it a few times, and I didn’t particularly like the deals that were being put together. We’ve come up with a way to do it in Ireland and do it well. I think it will win some awards. It’s just a really, really nice piece, and I’m really looking forward to doing it. I’ll do the McLaglen role, which I’m really looking forward to doing.

Johnny: Very cool. As you’ve attended conventions like Chiller Theatre and The Hollywood Show, what’s been the most rewarding part of attending those shows?

Jack: It’s meeting the fan base of different pictures that I’ve done, and getting different reactions from people over the different careers I’ve had and how they’ve held it together. It’s always nice to understand that people acknowledge different films that you do. One film I did that I feel got a very bad push in the dark was The Baltimore Bullet. It was a great little film with Jimmy Coburn and Omar Sharif. Again, it was a victim of production and distribution. The company didn’t have the proper monies to facilitate distribution of the film, and it affected it very badly. That was sad. I really felt bad about that film because it was a nice little movie. If you ever have the chance to see The Baltimore Bullet, you should see it. Working with Coburn was an experience, and Omar Sharif was just a brilliant guy. It was a real fun picture. Again, you had a pretty good cast and we had a lot of fun filming it. We shot a 9-ball tournament down at MGM that year. Paul Newman came down and we shot some pool with him. It was a fun movie to do. All the old pool hustlers came out to shoot that. Everybody was there. It was a good experience.

Johnny: Now I come to my final question. I don’t normally end interviews on this question, but since you already answered what my normal final question is, instead I’m going with this: What would you say has been the biggest change in the entertainment industry between 1975 and 2016?

Jack: I think the problem is the ownership of the studios. It’s done by MBAs now, and they really don’t have the same creativity that the old studio magnates had. They don’t have vision, and what’s coming is they’re remaking too many of the old classics instead of doing different films. I think they’re getting caught up in spending too much money. Making it back is never going to happen by the time you get done with prints and advertising and everything else. I think there’s going to be some changes coming, and I think we’re involved in doing some of that. We’re going to take movies back to the creative, and more independent companies are popping up. A lot of actors that are stalwarts in the business are tired of being miscast in certain roles and certain things, and they’re doing films of their own volition. I mean, James Franco and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. George Clooney does it. There’s a lot of product that’s coming out from very creative people. I think there’s going to be a great turnaround, and some things are going to happen in the next several years for them.

Johnny: Well, here’s to it. That about does it for my questions. As I said at the beginning of the interview, I want to thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to do this.

Jack: It’s my pleasure. Have a great day, and thanks for reaching out.

Johnny: No problem. I actually think, in a way, I kind of owe my celebrity interviews to you. As I mentioned in an earlier message, you answered some questions on a forum back in 2006, and I had asked you a couple of questions. That kind of inspired me towards doing celebrity interviews as a hobby.

Jack: I’m glad it’s worked out for you.

Johnny: It definitely has. I thank you again, and I’ll be in touch with you both on Facebook and through e-mail. I’ll speak to you soon.

Jack: Thanks so much. You be well, and take care.

Johnny: You, too. See you later. Bye.

Jack: Bye.

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I would once again like to thank Jack O’Halloran for taking the time to speak to me. Who will I flash back with next? Stayed tuned.