From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. The show can also be heard at KCRW.com.

My guest director, John Batham, has had an amazing career from directing on stage at Yale to doing films that basically are iconic.

We think of movies such as War Games, Saturday Night Fever.

And now, of course, he's directing episodes to Heroes and has a great book.

I was just told Lawrence Fishburn recently has been recommending this book to first-time directors about how to

handle yourself on a film set. And John, the name of the book is? I'll be in my trailer. And tell the

story about the title of the book. The title of the book comes from an unfortunate incident between

John Travolta and myself in his first movie and my second

movie, Saturday Night Fever.

And we're on the Verrazano Bridge and it's like 20 degrees below zero in February shooting

in the middle of the night.

And the production manager is worried about a stunt where people have to fall off the bridge.

So they say, let's do it,

let's do it real quickly before it freezes up and gets too icy there. So I quickly stage the

scene with the stunt doubles and the actors are in makeup getting ready and so on. So I just figured

it out just right where they're going to be standing when this accident happens and we shoot the guys falling off the bridge.

It's terrific. Now a couple of hours later we get out there and we bring the actors out and say,

okay, now we're getting to the part where you guys get out on the bridge and you fall off.

And you stand here and Travolta, you stand here and Bobby C. be here. And Travolta looks at it and he goes, I'm not standing there and I'm not going to do it

that way either.

And I said, well, it was kind of accidental, you see, because the stuntman had to do this

...