Episode 484 - Mr. Teel James Glenn

Mr. Teel James Glenn is a martial arts practitioner who specializes in sword fighting. He is a stuntman and fight choreographer.

The fight choreographer's job is to first make it safe, second, tell the story that we need to tell and if possible allow the actor to create his character in the fight. People fight the way they think and the way they are emotionally.


Mr. Teel James Glenn - Episode 484

As a sickly kid, Mr. Teel James Glenn dreamed of being a superhero as he started to be fascinated with reading comic books. Mr. Glenn would, later on, become a novelist and illustrator as he also pursued a great career as an actor on stage and movies, stunt work, and fight choreography. Mr. Glenn played Vega in CollegeHumor's Streetfighter: the Later Years. With 30 years of experience under his belt, Mr. Teel James Glenn certainly gives us an insight into his journey as a martial artist.

Mr. Teel James Glenn is a martial arts practitioner who specializes in sword fighting. He is a stuntman and fight choreographer. The fight choreographer's job is to first make it safe, second, tell the stoiry that we need to tell and if possible allow the actor to create his character in the fight.

Show Notes

In this episode, we mentioned Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Bill Wallace, and the book The Way of The WarriorYou can check out Mr. Teel James Glenn novels on his Amazon Page

Show Transcript

You can read the transcript below or download it here.Jeremy Lesniak:Hey there! you're tuned into whistlekick martial arts radio episode 484 with today’s guest, Mr. Teel James Glenn. My name is Jeremy Lesniak, your host on the show, founder of whistlekick and everything we do here is in support of the traditional martial arts. If you want to see everything we do, check out whistlekick.com. That’s our online home. It's the place to find our store and if you use the code PODCAST15, you can save 15%. Martial arts radio gets its own website and that’s whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. The show comes out twice a week and the goal here at whistlekick is to connect, educate and entertain traditional martial artists throughout the world. If you want to show your appreciation for what we do, there are a number of ways you can help by making a purchase, sharing an episode, following our social media, telling your friends, picking up Amazon books, leaving reviews or supporting the Patreon. If you think the new shows we’re releasing are worth 63 cents apiece, not to mention all the back episodes you get access to, consider supporting us  at $5 a month by visiting Patreon.com/whistlekick and signing up and if you do, guess what, you're going to get even more stuff. We’ve got exclusive content there that nobody else gets to see or hear or watch. One of my favorite things about talking to martial artists is that they take their martial arts out into the world and they incorporate it in different ways and today’s guest is one of the best examples, if not the best example, I've ever seen of that. With an extensive acting resume and a ton of books to this credit, not to mention all the martial arts that he actually trains, Mr. Teel James Glenn, exemplifies training and training for life. I had a fantastic time talking to him and I know you're going to have a fantastic time listening to our conversation. Good morning, how are you, sir?Teel James Glenn:Really good. I'm good! I was certain that I was going to blow up the house or something.Jeremy Lesniak:That would be a first. To my knowledge, this is going to be episode, I think, 482, I don’t think we’ve had any casualty or loss.Teel James Glenn:BOOM! And that was the end of the show. How are you doing?Jeremy Lesniak:I'm doing well and yourself?Teel James Glenn:I'm generally a late night person so you're getting me on the flipside.Jeremy Lesniak:I appreciate that. I appreciate your willingness to be flexible.Teel James Glenn:Thanks for asking to chat. It's nice to talk to people.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, well, you’ve done some interesting stuff.Teel James Glenn:I often tell people it seems much more interesting on paper than it was to live through but yeah, ultimately, I guess it is.Jeremy Lesniak:And I think we can probably make that claim to just about anything. That to experience it, it's incremental but then, when we take a step back and we look at it, obviously, you don’t write up the gaps of the time. You don’t write and say I did this thing, 4 weeks later, 6 weeks later I did this other thing.Teel James Glenn:It's true. I actually, I do a thing, because many years ago, I have imposter syndrome and I always have a Type A+ personality, I always think I knew enough but instead, one new year’s, I look back at my year and say oh man, I'm didn’t do anything this year and a friend of mine, are you nuts? You did this, this, this, so I started a journal where anything of any professional consequence, I write down so in those periods where I'm feeling like I'm not doing anything, I can look back and go oh, in February, I did this, this, this, I finished that, I started that, oh, ok, I wasn’t sleeping the whole damn months and it helps. It becomes a physical symbol that I wasn’t just watching episodes of Perry Mason late at night.Jeremy Lesniak:Do you find your type A+ personality in conflict with the creative side of what you do?Teel James Glenn:I've kind of harnessed it. I technically sort of have an addictive personality and if I like something, I tend to leap into it completely. I've tried to harness that with working out, with finishing projects. I'm very big on finishing stuff that I start. If I happen to start a novel or a short story and I have to do something else because of a deadline and I don’t get to finish it, it's like a little elf sitting on my shoulder whispering I'm waiting, I'm waiting and so, I get back to it because I've got a lot of friends who have many projects they’ve begun and then kind of petered out on and I tend to try and really push through to finish. That’s why I've done 31 novels.Jeremy Lesniak:Say that again, 31 novels?Teel James Glenn:Yeah and, I don’t know, 9 or 10 collections of short stories.Jeremy Lesniak:Okay. I don’t think I've…I think of some of the most famous writers that I don’t know and I don’t know if Stephen King’s written 31 novels.Teel James Glenn:Oh no, he has and Isaac Asimov wrote 200. William Gibson wrote over 200 just shadow novels. Mind you, they're not like…G.R.R. Martin has written, I don’t know, 10? And it takes him 2 decades to write a freaking novel.Jeremy Lesniak:The Game of Thrones fans out there are nodding along as you say that.Teel James Glenn:People forget he’s also written a pile of short stories. He was a short story editor for the Twilight Zone in the ‘80s. He has a lot of work. It's just not as novels but I keep a record of all my book submissions and short stories going back to 1977 and I had to number them so I can keep track of them. I have 464 manuscripts that I've written to date that are projects I've begun and I would say I've finished all but maybe 5 of them at some point.Jeremy Lesniak:Are there any commonalities?Teel James Glenn:Generally speaking, adventure. Generally speaking,  I try to have a positive view in my characters. I don’t like, for instance, I don’t like lionizing villains. I don’t like the trend where you take some heinous character from literature or make up your own and then build a show or a series around them because, to me, it's one thing to understand your villain, it's another to make the villain a sympathetic character. To me, that’s a cop out. It allows you to do, morally, anything and justify it and I guess I'm much more traditional that way. I believe in good versus evil so I'm very traditional in that sense.Jeremy Lesniak:As you say that, it's bringing to mind, from my experience, the most recent, at least my most recent experience with that kind of a character being the Joker movie.Teel James Glenn:I think it's a movie that never should have been made primarily because a, the joker exists because Batman exists so to do him in isolation is really only half an experience and the other is he should always be a little mysterious. I mean, one version of the Joker had him being the guy in the red hood who is a criminal but we never really knew about that criminal’s background. We just knew that he fell in a vat of stuff and went whack-a-doodle. I think it needs to be that. Basically, the Joker movie was just taxi driver meets Bozo.Jeremy Lesniak:It's succinct but at the same time, possibly the most apt description.Teel James Glenn:Literally, even to the point, every time I used to see the trailer of him running, he’s like running away from something in the trailer, he’s like the Bozo running because he’s got the full hair and the whole thing and basically, he recreated the ‘80s. He even put in De Niro in it so it's very much Taxi Driver. He lionized that director and he lionized that film. It's like when they turned Dracula into a romantic here back in the ‘80s. He’s a giant mosquito. He feeds on us. How is that romantic? On the other hand, I don’t mind really understanding the villain. I don’t mind, because every villain thinks he’s the hero. In my career as an actor, I've only played bad guys. I have never been cast as a good guy in 42 years as an actor and every villain thinks they're a hero in their own story so I do understand that. I just don’t think we need to hear their story because, at one point, there were 3 cannibal TV series on television.Jeremy Lesniak:I'm finding these 2 facts interesting. The fact that you're not in your own literally efforts exploring villains at the depth that is popular today and yet, being cast exclusively as a villain.Teel James Glenn:I'm 6’6”, I'm 270 pounds. For most of my career, I've had dark hair. Now, I've had silver hair so now I'm often the posse goon and also, I do, I don’t know, 20 or 30 different accents so I've been goons from various countries. Now, I'm the boss of goons from various countries. I just intimidate a lot of casting directors and very often, the actors are cast as heroes are 5’8”, 5’9”, pretty people. So, ok, yeah, the giant, he’ll be the killer and I can do it so I can tap into my Celtic rage when I need to be the bad guy.Jeremy Lesniak:Kind of biblical in a sense.Teel James Glenn:Yeah, beware of Jewish guys with stones, they scare me. But, also, I do the physical stuff so often, I'm hired for a fight scene and they discover I can do more dialog and my character gets bigger or they’ll hire me for some dialogue scene and discover that I can do the physicality and edit it in. Less so, of course, as I get older but I go back and forth between saying lines and falling down on a regular basis.Jeremy Lesniak:Those physical skills, if anybody takes a look at the things on your acting resume, or just the differences and the roles that you played, they're quite diverse. I'm curious where, 2 pieces and I hope we get through as much of it as we can because there's a lot there and obviously there are time limitations but when did that start and how did you end up doing so many different things?Teel James Glenn:I was a very sickly kid growing up and of course,  naturally, when you're really sick, like asthma and fever and I was tall and skinny and of course, when you're that way, the first thing you do is decide you want to be a superhero so I fell in love with the old movie serials. The adventures of Captain Marvel, Spy Smasher and when I was 14, I saw the Chapter 2 of the Adventures of Captain Marvel at a comic book convention. I was already into the comics and superheroes and discovered Doc Savage and physical culture at that point and I saw this incredible stunt work in the perfect blending of the actor and the stuntmen to make special effects to make Captain Marvel do these heroic things and I'm like I want to do that so I made Super 8 movies. I taught myself how to do stair falls by falling down the marble stairs in my high school. I used to run Super 8 film of the old serials and frame by frame look at how the stuntmen fell and moved and then I read everything I could on it and so I started to teach myself. I couldn’t run but I could jump off a garage roof because I knew how to build a box rig and I didn’t have the wind for a long fight scene in the real world but I can do a choreographed scene so that actually and that, I have to say when I was, I was a bit about 8, maybe or 9, I discovered the 1st issue of Judo Master comics and it opened up the world of martial arts to me. It was like wow, this is a person who can make himself do these stuff. I discovered it even before I discovered Doc Savage and that’s what got me into reading about martial arts and getting into it and once you, anybody who’s like a dojo rat and you go from one thing to another, physical skills translate. You can learn to juggle because you got the eye-hand coordination then you can learn to do tumbling and then you can, for me, the sword was sort of the thing that opened up the world for me. I took a class called Swashbuckling 101 with a guy named Momo Ricard and it was to research a book I was working on and the minute I held the sword in my hand, I knew that was what I wanted to be for the rest of my life and so I started to train myself to be in shape to do the stage combat with the sword and from there, everything else came so that’s, I guess, even though the Judo Master was the first hint that I can make myself into something; when I held the sword, it really kind of transported me into the next level of this nonsense but I still get just as excited holding a sword in my hand as I did the first time 40-something years ago.Jeremy Lesniak:Does it matter what kind of sword?Teel James Glenn:Generally not. They never let me do court sword because I'm so big but I really love court sword because it's delicate and it's pretty but I love katana. I love longhorn, I love dao, I love geom, anything. I studied knife. I have a practice kukuri that I work out with. To me, it's all these beautiful ballet of death and it all translates with the unarmed and I don’t know, and of course, the romance of the concept of a chevalier, of a knight. One of the reasons why I took Hwarang-do, one of the things Hwarang-do are called the Knights of Korea. The concept that you could be a better person. To get a black belt in Hwarang, you have to write a poem or paint a picture or do a dance and because the concept was you weren’t just a fighter, you were a warrior. You had to have other civilized skills and I love that concept and to me, the sword embodies that in theory. In the reality of the world, we’re just thugs with pointy things but I like that concept of being a better person, a complete person, not just a fighter. There's an old saying, in peace time, a fighter is a liability but in peace time, a warrior is a doctor or a fighter or a singer that the skills translate so to me, that’s a part of it. To be a complete person, an artist, a writer. One thing I'm not is a singer, thank God.Jeremy Lesniak:That might almost be too much talent.Teel James Glenn:Well, it might be, if I were successful at them all, that could be but I think doing a lot of things allows you to see, I think people who do only one thing get a narrow view of that thing and it actually makes them weaker. I think a certain amount of generalism allows you to see whatever your passion is from a different angle and so you can always improve it. I'm a better writer because I'm an artist. I'm a better artist because I'm an actor. I'm a better actor because I'm a fighter. I'm a better fighter because I'm an artist and to me, they allow me to see it from a slightly different angle and not have a one point of view.Jeremy Lesniak:As you're talking about this concept of the warrior and having value even in peace time, that concept is very much at odds with a subset, and I have no idea how big it is but a subset in the traditional martial arts community who have really pushed hard into this self-defense and physical application is all that matters and if it's not relevant to those scenarios, then it's not worth training.Teel James Glenn:Yeah, that’s the Krav Maga concept. In a society like Israel, that’s essentially always under attack, they have to come up with something that’s quick and dirty and effective and they don’t really want to lay philosophy on it. They don’t have time for that because their society is being immediately attacked but ultimately, if your society is no longer being immediately attacked and you have a bunch of people whose only solution to things is to punch, stab and kick, you can't actually build a society, a civilized society. There's a great book called The Way of the Warrior and it goes through various warrior cultures and ultimately, it states that the purpose of the warrior is to make themselves obsolete.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s a pretty powerful concept.Teel James Glenn:Yeah, to create a concept of a society where they're no longer needed because all warriors are outsiders. You can't be a member of your society if you're only thing is killing. You're not invited to parties because you’d be the one killing them. John Wick does not get a lot of dinner invitations and their concept is that, ultimately, tai chi is the ultimate martial art in that it takes your enemies’ aggression and turns it on them and, in theory, makes them part of you. It converts aggression into coexistence and to me, again, it's a philosophical concept because ultimately, you want to have an army that can shoot and blow up stuff but that’s the concept of the United States, in theory, of a civilian army. We don’t have a large core of professional fighters. Athens didn’t have a large core of professional fighters like Sparta did yet Athens actually won most battles that they dealt with with Sparta. Sparta had one view and because of that, they couldn’t think outside of the box, they couldn’t adapt, they couldn’t think about the next battle. It was each individual battle and I think, if you want to take martial arts as a defense thing, yeah, MMA. But even Rory Gracie, I think he was at a video recently, he talks about the fact that if you want to take self-defense, competition jiujitsu wasn’t the thing because you can't do all the stuff you need to do in self-defense. You can't gouge eyes, you can't bite throats out, you can't rip off testicles. When I trained in Hwarang-do, my instructor was the head of the Seoul Military Academy at one point and from early on, he said, at that point we weren’t doing competitions at all. Hwarang-do was not a competition art because it was too deadly and he said, if you want to train for competition, step over here and we will train differently but if you want to take Hwarang-do as a war art, then do it this way. We have white belt techniques where you are literally ripping parts of people off and you can't do that in a competition. You can do it once but they take you away to prison so the sport aspect of it, the health aspect of it was very different and that’s something you have to do. You have to think am I taking this for this reason? For me, I always took martial arts, for me, it was always about what I can do on film with it, what I can do on stage with it so I would learn the real technique and say how can I make this work in a fight scene in Romeo and Juliet? So, that was my focus but at the same time, I bounced in a biker bar so I wasn’t about to do stage slaps if I had to be in a fight so I had to learn the other stuff. Although, I imagine they would laugh hysterically if I was doing fake fights to myself. I think that that subset of the community is perfectly legit but it's, at that point, it's not martial arts. It's fighting arts or it's pure combat and there is a difference. If you look at competition fencing now, it really has very little relationship to a sword fight in 1850. There's almost no connection because they have taken, even boxing, as effective as boxing is, they have taken much of the lethality out of it. They're given bigger gloves, they can't hit certain places, you can't use your elbows and your forehead which is usually called the 3rd fist. You can't kick people in the shins and hit them in the throat so they’ve taken as much lethality out of boxing as possible even though it's still violently smacking people’s heads and stuff but it's not as lethal as street boxing at all. They have removed the lethality for the sake of being able to repeat things and not cripple everybody every single match so it means, I love the fact like in the Filipino Arts, you learn weapons first because the concept of the Filipino Arts is if you get killed in the first year of taking our stuff, you never learned the really deep stuff so we’re going to give you the really difficult stuff to start with and then, we’ll teach you the subtle stuff later on and Hwarang-do has some of that. I said our white belt techniques were pretty aggressive because the idea was we want you to be around the philosophical stuff in a couple of years and I think it's just what you bring to it if you want to do competition, then you're learning it with a different focus than if you're living on the streets somewhere and you know you're going to need to fight somebody to the death anytime soon. That’s something that’s a different focus.Jeremy Lesniak:You’ve mentioned Hwarang-do a few ties so I'm wondering, would you call that your principal art, the one that you spent the most time on, maybe?Teel James Glenn:The one I spent the most formal time with, yeah. I'm kind of a dojo rat, or dojang rat, in that I’ll train with anybody in anything and maybe that makes a slut, I'm not sure, but that’s the one I studied the most formally for 7 years and with one of the reasons I think I did, it was an incredibly versatile art. Each level feels like a different art because there are grappling levels, kicking levels and punching levels and there's a soft-hard level, there's a pure hard level and part of it is because one of the tenets of it, when you reach black belt of a certain degree, you're required to go to another art, learn it to black belt level and bring it back into Hwarang-do so one of the black belt forms were how to clear your pistol so it used a lot of all the other things I have learned. I suddenly felt comfortable with it because it had all these different things that I was learning in other stuff because, I don’t know if I got exactly martial ADD but because my focus was what could I use in shows, I learned a lot of pieces of lots of things. I had the advantage when I’d gone into it was my good friend and ultimately, my instructor, Michael Brown had been a black belt earlier and when his master went away, he didn’t train in any other arts so there was a gap and when Master came back, he was retraining in the older black belt style was much rougher than what was currently being taught and I got to be his uke so I actually kind of, on the receiving end, learned a lot of the heavier black belt stuff from the older school while he was practicing to regain his black belt. He’s now a Master and he has schools down in Cincinnati so I had the advantage of almost learning it at 2 different levels. My own levels that they somehow softened for America because you couldn’t break as many people here as you could in Seoul Military Academy and then, his which had been really hardcore old school stuff which is I tend to take a lot of abuse which is why I worked as a stunt man so I didn’t complain a lot and so, I could be in a heavy wristlock or somebody else might be screaming, I would be like uncomfortable so I’d be in my mind going oh, that’s where you put pressure on that. Oh, that’s cool. Plus, I'm big so people like to practice on me because they figure uh, you're take down the giant, I can fight the guy in the bar.Jeremy Lesniak:Right, right. Have you ever had an experience in a fight scene, some kind of film work, stage work where you really wanted to take the techniques or the fight scene in a different direction than maybe the stunt or fight coordinator did? Ever had a disagreement?Teel James Glenn:When I worked with other people, there are often times I thought well, I wouldn’t do this or I wouldn’t teach this but when you're hired,  you do what they say unless you're absolutely certain it will lead to pain, to the actor being hurt. I've done stuff where I used to work for [00:31:13] who did a lot of New York soap operas. I was in Parts of Us and there was one actor on One Life to Live that if you were in a fight scene with him, you were going to get tagged. He just couldn’t do choreography and he would lose it and he would hit you. Anytime there was a fight scene coming up, it would be a case of ok, who are we going to sacrifice to spar with him and you're a stuntman. You can't hit the actor back so you kind of, you know it's coming and you just kind of take it and it wasn’t like the guy was necessarily doing it maliciously. He just couldn’t get it. Many actors get into it emotionally and they can't separate that this is a technique that needs to be learned, not an emotional experience. Apparently, that was the case of the Joker film. I remember this was online, it was about him improvising his fight scenes and you don’t improvise fight scenes because then it's a real fight.Jeremy Lesniak:Can we unpack that a little more because for those of us who haven't spent time in structured fights?Teel James Glenn:Basically, a choreographed fight, I mean, Hamlet has to win his fight every night. If you just let 2 actors fight, sometimes Hamlet would lose and then, the play doesn’t work so fights have to be choreographed like a dance, very much like a dance, which is Bruce Lee was so good at it on screen. He was a cha-cha champion and it's choreographed very much, even unarmed. Same with swords, it's choreographed in beats. It reaches a crescendo, it has a climax; preferably, there's some kind of a twist towards the end of a fight, when you think one’s going to win and the other does. It kind of has to have a story every fight and the fight choreographer’s job is to, first, make it safe. Secondly, tell the story that you need to tell and, if possible, allow the actor to create his character in a fight. People fight the way they think and the way they are emotionally so Jason Bourne, for instance, would fight very differently than a 50-year old overweight guy who is suddenly terrified that his daughter is being raped and he has to leap in and he has no physical skills. It would be a very different fight than Mr. In Shape, Jason Bourne, or John Wick so you have to tell the story, you have to make it safe for the actors and, as I said, some actors don’t get it so the stuntmen who are the professionals often had to absorb that punishment. They have to realize that the actor doesn’t know how to pull the punch or is not always going to be on his, he’s not going to be exactly where he needs to be throwing a punch and there might be real energy in it and if there's real energy in it, and you're in the way, you're going to get hit. There's the story that, I just saw this video with Stallone on L-Ray, the director’s chair and he’s talking about the fact in Rocky IV, he had Dolph Lundgren and Dolph Lundgren, a Kyokushinkai black belt and a kick boxer and they were in the ring and Stallone said to him at one point, ok, we’ve got all the choreographed stuff, let’s do a sequence where you just unload on me. You can actually get the glove hitting into me and stuff so Dolph was like I don’t think that’s a good idea. No, no, I box, it's ok, go ahead and so Dolph unloaded on him and bruised the lining of his heart.  He was in the hospital for 4 days because he wanted the ‘realism’ and the realism is if Dolph continued for another 30 seconds or a minute, he could have killed him! There's a point. This is the part where no, this is a real fight. Let’s not really hit each other.Jeremy Lesniak:I would imagine that as long as you’ve been doing this, you’ve talked about one particular actor that you knew, if you worked with him, you would have taken a shot.Teel James Glenn:It happened with different actors at various points. You could tell it's personal, that this guy was going to get it so he kind of just sucked it up.Jeremy Lesniak:What about the other end of the spectrum, were there other actors that you found really took to it and did well and you enjoyed working with him?Teel James Glenn:Oh my gods, yes! Preferably, actors who have dance backgrounds. I worked with a woman, I did a movie called Jersey Justice where she beat me up in it. Maria Soccor, great actress, really sweet woman and she’s Apache and Filipino and she was training for another movie that she did with Wesley Snipes and she came to me to do some knife training and I looked her in the eye and said, my dear, you are the block of granite. Statue’s already hidden there. I just have to unleash your genetic heritage and we trained for a couple days and she was really good. She just took to it like that. Same thing, I had a dancer, I did the Scarlet Pimpernel the Musical and the lead who was the Pimpernel had a ballet background and I was able to, in a very short time, do really complex blade work with them and actually, the best is, I choreographed the Three Musketeers at West Point. West Point had the most amazing theater. You could fit the whole student body in there which means you could house a zeppelin in it. It is so huge and Broadway level in terms of all the technical stuff with platforms and it was me and two other choreographers. We had 6 hours to choreograph the show and each of us took a musketeer, choreographed their fights and then, there were a couple of blended fights like ok, you do the lady fight, you do this one so in that 6 hours of rehearsal time which is a very, very short amount of time. Normally, for a show, certainly something like the Three Musketeers, you would have 50 hours but in this case, all of the participants, all of the actors and actresses were cadets which means they were the smartest, the most physically active. They were cadets playing cadets when you think about it because they were playing the musketeers and we could show them one technique once and they got it so if the next war is choreographed, we are going to win. So amazing and in 6 hours, we did maybe 50 or 60 hours’ worth choreography time. We showed it to them once and they did it once. If there was a correction, the correction was made and that was it. We were on and they were exquisite.Jeremy Lesniak:Where would you chalk that up to because that sounds really atypical?Teel James Glenn:It is atypical but they were 18 to 20-year olds, 21 year olds who were in peak physical condition, who were all intellectually superior because you don’t get into the Point if you're not the best of the best. They were trained to look, observe, absorb and copy. They really were exactly what you want. It's the same thing with ballet dancers. Ballet dancers are trained to look, absorb and copy and in this case, it was because they were learning how to field strip guns and the battle tactics of the Spartans and trigonometry so they were really all working in very high level so it was an incredible delight. It was probably the pinnacle of the most perfect storm of goodness a choreographer could ask for. I mean, I've had a lot of experience but I've had some really good experience with a lot of people. One of my things, because I've studied so many different things, I can tell you if somebody’s walking across the stage what they’ll be good at by how they move and I think, most martial artists can recognize another martial artist by just how they move or how they position themselves in a room or their attitude. There's a certain way where you can carry yourself in certain arts certainly and so, I can look at somebody and go ok, they're not going to be good for punching but I think they're going to be good grapplers. I think I've been wrong sometimes but generally, I can peg it and I try to find what works for the actor. The trick is to find what makes them look the best in the role that they’ll be the most comfortable with. You get an actor like Keanu Reeves who is willing to train hard as anything that he gets the point where the stuntman consider him one of them, that he’s up there with them and that’s the gift from heaven for a fight choreographer. He can do anything or can't do anything, walk around it. It's hard on stage but on film, you can usually find a way to fake it but on stage, I've done 60 Renaissance festivals and everybody there has to be able to pull their weight because it's a long day or if you're choreographing, say, Cyrano, usually they cast an actor to play Cyrano does not necessarily have sword work even though he’s supposed to do this amazing sword fight so Valvert, the guy he has the big duel at the beginning where it's usually, I would say 99.9% of the time, you bring in a ringer for him. You bring in a sword expert, a really good stage combat guy to make your Cyrano look good and you build a rapport between the 2 of them and you give Valvert, Cyrano just moves the sword to the left and the right and Valvert does all the physical stuff so it looks like Cyrano’s so good he doesn’t have to do anything and that’s the other extreme of it where you just work around it. It’s like, have you seen some of these Broadway musicals where you see basically an older actor or actress, they're walking in the middle and people are dancing around them like on these old variety shows and they're really not doing much, because they can't, they dance with everything around them, you make them look good and that’s really all you can do. That’s the job. The job is to make it safe and make the actor look good.Jeremy Lesniak:One of the things that we talk about on this show is the idea that stepping into learning a new skill, another martial art or a weapon or whatever, is generally an advantage. I feel strongly in diversity in the martial arts experience is an asset. You’ve learned a lot of different things so I would expect that you have, if not a system, at least an approach where you'll tackle a new weapon or a new fighting style.Teel James Glenn:My first thing is I'm a white belt. I'm always a white belt. I really work very hard than if I'm learning from someone. I just recently got pistol certification. It's something I've always wanted to do. I do use long guns but I've never used pistols very often. Not real pistols, stage weapons and I wanted the real certification so I did a course with a former Marine and even though I've read a lot about it, I've actually done lectures on using weapons for writers, what caliber, this is a clip, this is a magazine, that kind of stuff. I literally approach it as if I knew absolutely nothing and just emptied my cup and took whatever he gave me because I have confidence that he really knew his stuff and he does and they're called Guns for Reel, Charles Haskins is the instructor, he’s really good. I just always approach it as if I'm a white belt. I really don’t, I mean, every once in a while I might go oh wow, it's just like, but not to say, oh I know this but oh, I kind of recognize that, that’s cool and keep myself empty because there's always something new to learn. There's always some nuance that somebody else has learned. I'm a big believer that nobody should ever teach anything unless you’ve studied with 3 different teachers of that thing so that one teacher might cancel the other out but if there are 3 teachers, chances are that you might not pick up the bad habits from any of them and you'll filter and you'll be a better teacher because you’ve seen other people’s approaches from different nuance but when I'm a student , I'm a white belt. I'm always a white belt.Jeremy Lesniak:That takes quite the suspension of ego which is something we’re not all good at. Is that something that came innately to you?Teel James Glenn:No, I think it's a recognition of I've been lucky to study with people who, they knew a hell lot more than me and the only reason I was able to learn from them was I did not tell them what I knew. I asked them what they knew. I actually had an acquaintance who wanted to study sword with me and he did a class and it's almost like you never want to, doctors are never supposed to care for their own family. We did a class but he kept, he’d never had a sword in his hand. He watched a lot of movies and stuff but he kept saying do it this way and we do it that way and at the end of the class, it was cool and I never asked him back for a class again because he didn’t want to learn. He wanted to show what he knew and I think by then, I already had this attitude but that really crystallized it for me that if you're going to learn something, you can't show the teacher what you know. You have to see what the teacher knows and ultimately, in terms of ego, the ego is if I'm good at something, I’ll be good at it. If I'm not good at it, there's no point pretending I'm a heavyweight boxer because the second I get in the ring with Tyson, I will be dead. I mean, it's almost like math is absolute. Fighting is absolute. There's a yes and a no. You either can be taken out or not. State combat is a little different. There are 50 choices for how to block this and, mind you, I'm doing a block because I'm right here. There's 50 choices on how to block this, the question doesn’t become what's the best choice, the question becomes well, what would show off the actor better or what would look better on camera or on stage so it's not an absolute but in a fight, you're knocked out or you're not. There's no bullshit about it so I think, martial arts in that way, real martial arts, not necessarily competition because I know you used to do things where like even if you miss, yell akia shout and maybe the judges will think you hit him; well, that’s kind of if you want to win a competition as opposed to you want to learn something. I actually was a terrible competitor because I never took competition seriously. I was always interested in learning stuff so I would do outrageous things just to see if it will work and so, I didn’t do very many competitions because eventually, Hwarang-do let us compete but just within the schools because our stuff was too nasty for other things. I did a Ssireum which is Korean wrestling which is kind of like sumo but it's older and I was the champ for the school but because I didn’t take it seriously because I wasn’t hurting anybody but competitions are not fighting. Competitions are sets of rules with specific things and if that’s what you want to do, you can be a winner at that. I mean, it's not like the old days with Chuck Norris and Superfoot Wallace where they were making full contact, before there were pads. It was absolute. You knocked the guy out or you didn’t. Anything short of that is not actually a test of martial arts. It's just a test of whether or not you can follow rules. I guess, again, it comes back to the ego thing. I want to learn stuff, I've never been interested in belts or certificates, I kind of just want to learn stuff. I figured all knowledge is cool and I think that one of the reasons I became a writer. I had all the stuff in my head I got to get out and it gave me an excuse to do lots of research but yeah, there's no point in having ego because ultimately, there's always somebody bigger or stronger or faster or younger or sneakier and so, just learn cool stuff and do cool things and try to be a good person.Jeremy Lesniak:Sounds like that could be the title of a biography. Maybe your autobiography.Teel James Glenn:The closest I’ll ever come to an autobiography is I did a murder mystery called Murder Most Fair and it's about a fight choreographer putting on a Renaissance fair, his best friend was murdered and he has to solve a murder and about 75% of the book is real because I don’t think my life is all that interesting necessarily but once I put it into context like that, it sounds interesting. I think other people who do other stuff are fascinating to me. It's life. Just life and I'm very lucky. I'm still alive, I have friends who are not. Most of my parts work at my age and some of my friends, not. I've got a good stunt buddy of mine who had a stroke 7 years ago, 8 years ago and just woke up one day and his whole left side didn’t work and since then, he’s actually directed a bunch of web series and he's been a great inspiration. In fact, this can happen to anybody because he was in great shape so I consider myself lucky everyday I wake up and take a breath and there's some opportunity to do cool stuff and learn new things so I don’t take life for granted.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s good. I don’t think anybody should. I know too many people do and hopefully, few of those people are listening today and if anyone out there is taking their life for granted, stop. Stop right now. If you could work with, if you could do a scene with any martial artist, this is like a twist of a question that we ask often, any martial artist alive today, someone who passed away, anyone in the world. If we had a time machine, we could bring somebody back and put them on stage or on film with you, who would you want to work with?Teel James Glenn:Oh my lord. That’s a 2-part question. One is if somebody was alive, it's a toss-up between Michael J. White and Wesley Snipes. In either case, they would kill me because obviously, I'm the big scary white guy but I respect both men so much as martial artists and as actors that it would be an honor to get my clock cleaned by them and in terms of anyone who existed, I’d love to do a fight scene with Jock Mahoney. Great stuntman, actor and I guess…Jeremy Lesniak:That’s a name that doesn’t ring a bell for me. Can you tell us something about him?Teel James Glenn:It's sort of an inside name. He was Sally Fields’s stepfather. He was Tarzan in a couple of films which weren’t his best acting but he was a stuntman who came into his own in the 1940s doubling Errol Flynn and eventually had his own career doing mostly westerns but he doubled people for many years and he produced westerns and stuff. He was a great physical guy and had a TV series called The Range Rider where he did these incredible fight scenes on a low-budget weekly basis. I guess the other one would maybe be Shō Kosugi. I loved the work he did through The Master and of course, Bruce Lee but Bruce Lee is just somebody that I have to get into a really long line to get to fight him and I would have loved to have done a swordfight with Gene Kelly. People don’t think of him as a martial artist. His Three Musketeers, his physicality in that is so brilliant and again, being a ballet dancer and actually every kind of dancer but he could do anything. Of course, Errol Flynn is the guy I'm still trying to be or Guy Williams. Guy Williams who was Zorro on the TV series. He did a good portion, probably 70%, of the action on it. All of the swordfights were him. The only time they would double him was when he was jumping off stuff, some of the horse stuff when he ran down but that was one that influenced me as a kid. These days, I'm working with Sensei Mo on a film right now; I'm playing the bad guy, of course and it's being distributed by Wesley Snipes’ company and so, in the back of my mind, there's a hope the next film, Wesley and him might actually be in, I might get to be in so there's a reasonable chance that I could get myself beaten up by Wesley Snipes in the next film.Jeremy Lesniak:Oh, that might be awesome.Teel James Glenn:I used to go when I was 15, I’d go to Chinatown to see movies before they came anywhere else and so, I just played, I'm playing one of the bad guys in this movie called Blood Mix but I talked my way into being the end fight where the hero has to fight his way through 30 guys before he gets there?Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah.Teel James Glenn:I talked my way into being 2 of those guys so I could be in that long fight.Jeremy Lesniak:How 2? Different costume?Teel James Glenn:Yeah, different costumes, it's different guys and I got shot but I got to be part of the big fight. That was kind of the 15-year old me went hihihihi because the rest of the time I'm the great bad guy in the film. I'm the guy who haunts him through his nightmares and Master Crow and so it was a very solemn and there's no physicality in that. That was just actor me but this I got to do the physical stuff so it was fun and finally, one of my long list of bucket list things, you know all of these years I've been doing stunts, I've never gone through a window. I've gone through open windows, I've jumped out but I've never like crashed through a window. That’s on my bucket list of things to do.Jeremy Lesniak:Maybe Wesley Snipes can be the one to throw you through the window.Teel James Glenn:I could get 2 birds with one stone. He’d kick my ass out the window. I'd be fine with that. I'm doing a Western later this year so I'm getting some of my bucket list items off. A guy from Brooklyn getting in a Western is kind of cool.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s really cool. Do you have a favorite fight scene?Teel James Glenn:Wow. Favorite sword fight is the final sword fight of the Tyrone Power Mark of Zorro, bar none. It's just a brilliantly choreographed fight. Favorite unarmed, wow, I have to say, at this point, the elevator fight in Winter Soldier, Captain America: Winter Soldier. Brilliantly choreographed. Everything in that fight told you something about the characters and at the same time it was really exciting and I think the Chuck Norris fight in Way of the Dragon because it really, again, it was a story. It told you what you needed to know about the characters and advanced the plot at the same time so it's kind of perfect.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s really cool. You’ve told us about some of your upcoming projects but if we look out a little further, you told us bucket list items and who you want to work with and films you got coming up but are there bigger goals? Are there, is there a weapon you're working on learning, is there an art you want to learn? You don’t sound like somebody who’s sitting on their laurels ever. You described yourself at the beginning as a Type A.Teel James Glenn:Actually, I have 2 books coming out with a character called John Shadows which I'm calling Martial Arts War because it's detective books but he is the son of a kuyoshi who was an assassin of the Emperor during World War II so the martial arts are very much a part of this story. If you can imagine Mike Hammer and Shō Kosugi in one character and those are coming out and I kind of hope they will get some visibility and I actually want to start studying Sambo. I've been waiting. I have a stint from a sinus infection and had planned to start earlier but they wanted me to leave it for 6 months so I'm hoping to start that later this year because I don’t have a lot of grappling and I would like to learn some, I’d prefer blocks to strikes when it comes to fighting and so I’d like to learn a little bit more inside stuff and I think Sambo’s an incredibly efficient art and like I said, I'm doing this Western and in the back of my mind, remember the first John Wick film, he comes up at the door and goes how are you doing, Francis and he has the gun to the guy’s head? I want that role in one of the future John Wick movies. I would love to be a guy who John Wick takes out perfectly after some dialogue. That’s one of my put it into the universe goals because I think those films are brilliant.Jeremy Lesniak:Who would have ever thought that an actor from Bill and Ted would become someone that we talk about so often on this show?Teel James Glenn:I know! It's amazing but it's a testament to someone who has opened himself to learning. When you look at him now compared to the stuff he did in Matrix, he is what martial arts are. It's a learning curve that goes on forever. It's astounding. It's the reverse, you had Chuck Norris learning how to act, kind of, and all of these actors, all these martial artists learning how to be actors and now, we have it the other way around.Jeremy Lesniak:I'm excited to see Matrix 4 with his dramatically improved martial arts skills.Teel James Glenn:I know! It's going to be really interesting. I think it's a movie that doesn’t need to be made but I’ll go see it.Jeremy Lesniak:I think we all, I think that’s probably everyone’s summary. This movie doesn’t have to happen but I'm going to watch it anyway because how could I turn it down.Teel James Glenn:Absolutely.Jeremy Lesniak:If people want to find you online, check out the books that you’ve got or upcoming projects or anything like that, websites, social media, anything like that, what do you have for us?Teel James Glenn:Theurbanswashbuckler.com, that’s my blog. Actually, one of my goals this years is redoing the website. It's a couple years old and I'm on Amazon, Teel James Glenn. I've got pages on Amazon with my stuff. Got books coming out this year so they can find me. I can’t hide. I often said I'm distinctive enough that no matter how many pantyhose I put on over my head, the guy in the bodega will say oh, the robber was TJ. It was that guy. I can be found.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s phenomenal. I thank you for coming on. Thanks for your time and I’d like for you to pick how you're going to send us out. I ask the guest words of wisdom or anything like that, how do you want to close up this episode?Teel James Glenn:Be as kind to yourself as you want people to be kind to other people. Most people don’t know how to be kind to themselves.Jeremy Lesniak:What a ride that one was. I had so much fun! I can't tell you how exciting it is. Here we are close to 5 years in and I still get to talk to these amazing people who share these amazing stories and get me fired up about training. What's better than that? I keep saying I have the best job in the world so, sir, thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing everything and just thanks for being so open. I had a blast! If you want to check out everything from this or other episodes, bottom line if you want more, go to whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. There you can find the videos and links and social media and pictures and more and we’re constantly looking at ways to improve the website so if you haven't checked it out for a while, head on over. There's probably new stuff that we’ve added since you’ve been there last. If you're down to support us and all of our work, you have lots of options. Use the code PODCAST15 to save 15% at whistlekick.com or leave a review, buy a book on Amazon or help with the Patreon, Patreon.com/whistlekick and I hope that if you see some whistlekick apparel, out in the wild, you'll introduce yourself. Let’s build a global community of traditional martial artists who support each other and support training and support cross training. I think you know what we stand for, 5 years in and if you have suggestions for guests or topics or anything like that, email me, jeremy@whistlekick.com, and make sure you're following our social media, @whistlekick, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and that’s it. Until next time, train hard, smile and have a great day!

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Episode 485 - Martial Arts Radio Live (Episode 6)

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Episode 483 - Becoming a Better Martial Arts Teacher