Episode 7
”Tony Pizzaiola Picks His Spot”
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John Judd as Tony Pizzaiola
Patrick Poulin as Tommy Marcusi
Philip Edward Van Lear and Jessica Dean Turner
If you’re my age, and I hope you aren’t, you may sometimes wonder about how much you’ve changed over the years. I more or less always feel like my teenaged brain is still sloshing around inside my middle-aged body, barely paying attention while it steers my attention through traffic with the window rolled down and one arm doing dolphin tricks in the wind. Sometimes circumstances force us to change; maybe it’s a marriage or a kid, or some kind of grief or illness, or maybe you got so rich that it ruined your mind and turned you into a deeply boring weirdo that no longer makes music of any value.
Or maybe your identity change is court-ordered. Maybe your life has gone so wrong that for your own safety, the government offers you a trade: tell us about some OTHER criminals, and we’ll give you a new social security number and, I assume, a haircut and an apartment somewhere and a job. Maybe for the first couple of years your co-conspirators are looking for you to exact their revenge, and you peek through the venetian blinds at a suspicious van, and you call your handlers in WITSEC and tell them to run the license plate. But that’s gotta end, right? And then you’re just some guy. You’re Steve in Scottsdale. You’re Barry in Omaha. You get egg noodles and ketchup. When it’s 10 years later and you’re at Costco picking up your prescriptions, do you ever accidentally tell the pharmacist you need the Atorvastatin for “Switchblade Larry”?
This is where we enter “Tony Pizzaiola Picks His Spot”, with the man currently known as Jeff Arnold living a fairly quotidian existence - a job, an apartment, at least one friend, indulging in some low-stakes gambling to get the heart pumping a bit. But when Tony thinks he’s been spotted and his fight-or-flight response kicks in, he’s forced to inhabit that former persona again and struggle for survival. And that’s before things really go south.
When the alert comes, Tony has to answer the same question as everyone else: who am I gonna be for these last few minutes? But Tony and Tommy are two guys who’ve spent their whole lives facing down existential danger, and I liked the idea that they were both sort of saying: Yeah, a missile, ok. What can I get out of it?
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John Judd plays Tony with his signature amount of intelligence - I’ve never seen a character of John’s that wasn’t fully illuminated from the inside. Patrick Poulin made Tommy way funnier and more charismatic than he was on the page - there’s some real sparks between these two guys, and we’re so lucky that it ended up in the recording. And what a Murderer’s Row (if you’ll forgive the expression) of supporting talent! This is by far our biggest cast, and each person absolutely delivered.
I want to give a special thanks to the great Philip Edward Van Lear, who navigates the world with grace and skill. My longtime pal and cherished collaborator Carole Dibo kills it as agent Karen Backe - named after another great friend who created the incredible Incoming key art that you see every time you listen. And of course I want to shout out my kid brother Jonathan who plays the asshole in the bank. I didn’t write the part specifically for you, but it feels like I did.
There’s one cameo that’s particularly special to me. As a lifelong fan of America’s greatest-ever rock band Pavement, I know that Bob Nastanovich is something of an expert in the horse racing community, freelancing for the Daily Racing Form, owning horses, working as an agent for jockeys, etc. So, in a fit of unbridled (sorry, I couldn’t help it) optimism, I just reached out to him and asked him if he’d be up for playing the race caller. And he got back to me right away and said yes! This has been my big lesson from making this project: aim at the people you want to work with, stifle your impostor syndrome, and just ASK. When I look at the scope of the incredible people who’ve collaborated on this project - especially Bryen and Chris and Marika - I cannot believe that it’s all happened. If you are a person who makes stuff or wants to be, learn from my good fortune. That’s how I got Bob Nastanovich to be in my show.
Surrounded By Sound
Every episode of Incoming is mixed in Dolby Atmos - which means if you have fancy headphones like AirPod Pros or some kind of sophisticated home setup, the action will seem to take place in 360º around you. This is thanks to the impeccable work by our Atmos mixer, Noisefloor’s own Victoria Salazar. Here’s what she had to say about the process:
“Mixing in Dolby Atmos for Incoming was a lot of fun! I really enjoyed the process of moving things around to make it feel immersive and using that same tool for transitions between scenes to make it unique from traditional film mixing. (check out Ep7 when they go through a revolving door ;))
“A really cool part of mixing this was being able to listen to the wonderful work everyone had done, visualize the scenes in my head and then set up the layout of each scene using panning, equalization, and reverb (NOTE: LOOK AT THE PHOTOS TO SEE SOME OF VICTORIA’S LAYOUTS). Usually there’s visuals we’re tied to in mixing and that sometimes limits us on different techniques we can use. But for Incoming I had the chance to push myself on multiple levels (...get it) and it was a very fun way to change up my workflow!
“Each episode has a unique twist in the mix, and one of the things I had felt like they needed was balancing within the “space” so if “Jeff” from Ep7 was sitting on the left in the racetrack, I had the mustached guy yelling from the crowd to the right behind him.”
