Episode 568 - Mike Judge
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck sticks?
Marc:What the fuck stirs?
Marc:I am Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:Mike Judge is on the show today.
Marc:I've always wanted to talk to Mike Judge because I always knew he'd come from my hometown, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I figured we could talk about that for a while.
Marc:Like, I literally believe that we have friends in common, that we didn't go to the same high school, but we're around the same age.
Marc:So there's a bit of that in this conversation connecting about Albuquerque.
Marc:I've been I've been very nostalgic lately.
Marc:I don't know if it's I don't like to call it nostalgia, but I'm sort of trying to sort things out.
Marc:I kind of go on these missions into my memories.
Marc:To try to, you know, kind of target where it went wrong.
Marc:I'm on these stealth missions into my memories and I just stand there and I'm like, look at what's going on here.
Marc:This might be something.
Marc:Why are you in that hotel room?
Marc:I think that's a problem.
Marc:And I pull out.
Marc:Then I kind of regroup, and I'm like, we're going back in.
Marc:Let's go back in.
Marc:Let's go back to that hotel room.
Marc:All right, so this looks like sophomore year of high school.
Marc:You're in a hotel room.
Marc:That's your buddy Dave.
Marc:That's Chris.
Marc:Chris, that's Chris.
Marc:Oh, I remember this.
Marc:You guys had just taken a handful of yellow jackets, and those two guys, yep, they're both making out with girls on both beds, and you're just standing there like an asshole.
Marc:because your girl split, and now you're going to break those two giant bottles, those glass Sprite bottles that we're using to mix with, and make a scene and ruin the party.
Marc:All right, let's pull out.
Marc:I'm out.
Marc:I'm out.
Marc:Yeah, those are the memories.
Marc:Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Marc:Datsun B210.
Marc:First car.
Marc:Got it as a gift from my parents right after I finished my classes at McGinnis Driver's School.
Marc:McGinnis Driver's Ed.
Marc:Drove around that car.
Marc:Wrecked it the first month.
Marc:Combing my hair in the rear view.
Marc:Put that car through a lot.
Marc:a lot of driving a lot of drinking and driving at age four fifteen hanging out in front of liquor stores dude you get us a pint of southern six of heinies get us a pint of southern six of millers dude can you give me a half pint of jack six of millers dude can you get us a pint of southern who are the people that got us that stuff
Marc:We were kids.
Marc:I was 15 driving around.
Marc:There was gunplay.
Marc:Albuquerque was exciting.
Marc:Driving out with my buddy Dave.
Marc:He's dead now.
Marc:Me and Dave in a 73 Firebird with the Holley double pumper.
Marc:Bored out cylinder heads, whatever that means.
Marc:Fast fucking car.
Marc:His dad owned a stereo store, so he always had a good stereo.
Marc:Me, Dave, Bob, Brian, Chris, Damon.
Marc:Some combination of that.
Marc:Running around, drinking booze, driving around in the car.
Marc:Then Dave, he's always having problems with the Firebirds.
Marc:We got a Scirocco.
Marc:Volkswagen Scirocco.
Marc:Then someone... We just cruise around.
Marc:Cruise around the McDonald's.
Marc:Let's go to Highland High McDonald's.
Marc:I go to Highland High.
Marc:We all got our own McDonald's.
Marc:Let's go by the McDonald's.
Marc:He was hanging out.
Marc:Cruising to McDonald's.
Marc:Dave and Andy were out.
Marc:Cruising some other McDonald's.
Marc:Up by Eastdale.
Marc:Some guy shot a bullet right into his car.
Marc:Right into Dave's car.
Marc:Shot a bullet.
Marc:Never got along with Andy.
Marc:Don't know what happened to that guy.
Marc:Dave is dead.
Marc:Mentioned that, right?
Yeah.
Marc:All right, let's go.
Marc:Let's go down the memory hole.
Marc:Here we go.
Marc:All right, I'm driving.
Marc:I'm driving my car.
Marc:I got a pint of Jack because that's what I drink.
Marc:I drink pint of Jack, and I drink it fast.
Marc:Don't like beer.
Marc:It's too filling.
Marc:Damon's with me.
Marc:I think Pete's in the back.
Marc:Pete came.
Marc:Hey, he didn't hang out with us too much, but we went by his house.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:It was me and Damon, and we went by Pete's house because we were going to drive up to Santa Fe.
Marc:There was a game.
Marc:It was a game between Santa Fe and Highland.
Marc:I didn't care about football, but I wanted to hang out.
Marc:That's what I was about.
Marc:Let's hang out.
Marc:What's everyone doing?
Marc:Yeah, I'll drive.
Marc:I'll drive and we'll go to the football game.
Marc:So I'm driving and go by Pete's house.
Marc:And I remember we got like a fifth of Passport Scotch.
Marc:We stole like a fifth of Passport Scotch from Pete's dad's liquor cabinet.
Marc:And that's what I was drinking.
Marc:I didn't want to drink beer.
Marc:So I'm pouring Passport Scotch into soda.
Marc:Coca-Cola.
Marc:We drive to Santa Fe, right?
Marc:We drive to Santa Fe.
Marc:to the football game.
Marc:I kind of remember that.
Marc:It's an hour away.
Marc:Kind of remember that.
Marc:I remember walking into the game.
Marc:I remember looking up at the stands, and a lot of my high school was in the stands.
Marc:It was cold out, and I was shit-faced.
Marc:And I remember dropping to my knees in front of everybody in my high school and laughing hysterically.
Marc:And then I was walked up the bleachers by a couple of friends, probably Pete and maybe Damon.
Marc:And they sat me in the bleachers, and then I don't know what happened.
Marc:All I know is that I was laying in the bleachers, and then the next thing I know, there was some, like I remember being cold, and then I remember waking up for a quick moment, and Damon's holding his hand up, and it's all bloody.
Marc:His fist is all bloody, and we're driving.
Marc:And then the next thing I know, I wake up in Albuquerque,
Marc:at the mcdonald's and i'm alone and i'm in a booth and i got my head in my hands and i wake up and i don't know where my car is i don't know where damon is i don't know nothing and all of a sudden people start coming in from the game all the cheerleaders and the jocks and all the people all the people i didn't like but were around because i didn't have i wanted to hang around with people no idea what happened
Marc:Then some kid comes up to me and he goes, dude, you were on your back in the bleachers throwing up like a fountain.
Marc:Like a fountain.
Marc:You were just throwing up.
Marc:Looked like a fountain.
Marc:I'm like, what?
Marc:And then some girl I had a crush on, he went to go get a milkshake or something.
Marc:She walked up to me and I was like, hey, how's it going?
Marc:Trying to be cool.
Marc:Not knowing the history of my evening because of a blackout.
Marc:And she goes, why do you have rice in your hair?
Marc:Yeah, that's how that night ended.
Marc:Then Damon came with my car.
Marc:He had gotten into a fight.
Marc:That's what happened.
Marc:Drove somebody home.
Marc:Then I got in my car and went home.
Marc:High school, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Marc:Before I committed my life to the art department.
Marc:Those are the trying days of trying to be accepted by the cool kids.
Marc:And then I went to the art department and became a high school artist.
Marc:Anyways, Mike Judge is here.
Marc:We went to high school in the same city in different high schools.
Marc:I just remember something, senior prom.
Marc:Maybe it was junior prom.
Marc:I'd just like to put it out.
Marc:I just want to apologize to Cam McCullough.
Marc:That was a bad night, and I was rude.
Marc:I apologize.
Marc:I just remembered that.
Marc:Yeah, high school, man.
Marc:There's so many stories.
Marc:So many stories that revolve around vomit, around coming in my pants, around bad grades, around long car rides that don't end well.
Marc:I do remember one time me and Dead Dave drove to Santa Fe.
Marc:And I don't know what we did up there, but we were driving back.
Marc:It was night.
Marc:It was late at night.
Marc:And we were driving back on old Highway 14 that runs behind the mountains, behind the Sandias, through Madrid, the ghost town.
Marc:But it was night, and the moon was big, and it was bright, and we were stoned.
Marc:And we listened to Pink Floyd animals in its entirety driving on a dead highway.
Marc:Just me and Dave moving through the night, following the moon,
Marc:listening to Pink Floyd Animals.
Marc:And when Pigs on a Wing came on, what song is that with the guitar solo, man?
Marc:Oh, I just got chills.
Marc:I just got chills.
Marc:We're going to talk to Albuquerque's own Mike Judge here in a minute.
Marc:That's how I see him.
Marc:The guy from Albuquerque.
Marc:Let's talk to him now.
Marc:Mike Judge.
Marc:St.
Marc:Pius High School, so you're a year ahead of me.
Guest:Yeah, I graduated when I was 17, though, so... My brother went to Pius.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But he's two and a half years younger than me, so I don't know that you would have known him.
Guest:My sister would have known him.
Guest:What's his name?
Marc:Craig Maron.
Wow.
Marc:He was a tennis guy.
Marc:I don't remember.
Guest:I knew some people that went... Oh, we must know a ton of the same people.
Marc:We must have common friends.
Marc:I always wondered that.
Guest:Yeah, if... I'm trying to think... I went to Albuquerque High one semester, and I know a lot of those people, but...
Marc:I had a couple friends who went to Albuquerque.
Marc:Devin Jackson was a book.
Guest:I know him.
Guest:You do?
Guest:Or I did.
Guest:In junior high, I knew him.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, Devin Jackson, Ty Montague.
Guest:Ty Montague, dude.
Guest:He ended up going to... Wait, are we on?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, cool.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Yeah, Ty Montague ended up...
Guest:He's a big advertising guy, dude.
Guest:Yeah, in New York.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When Beavis and Butthead was happening, when it was first getting going, I was in this guy's office at MTV, Abby Tercouli, and he said, oh, yeah, tell Ty Montague.
Guest:I'll call him back.
Guest:And I thought, you know, I'm in Manhattan, and I'm like, how many Ty Montagues are there?
Guest:And I said, is he from Albuquerque?
Guest:He said, oh, I don't know.
Guest:He works at Chiat Day or whatever.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said, ask him if he's from Albuquerque.
Guest:And he's like, all right.
Guest:And it turned out he was the Ty Montague that I do when I was in seventh grade.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But him and Devin Jackson were friends, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Devin got into writing, didn't he?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Devin, he was a ball player probably when you knew him, basketball.
Guest:Yeah, basketball.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah, he did.
Marc:He wrote a book.
Marc:And he's still a writer.
Marc:He lives out in Santa Fe.
Marc:And he's got a kid and an ex-wife and the regular stuff.
Marc:Like all of us.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't have the kid, but I got a couple ex-wives.
Marc:Yeah, and his dad was friends with my dad.
Marc:His dad used to be the physician over at the University Health Clinic.
Marc:Oh, right.
Marc:I remember that.
Marc:Dan Jackson.
Marc:I've been talking about, do you remember Captain Billy?
Guest:Oh, hell yeah.
Marc:Like, you know, he got shot.
Guest:Yeah, I remember.
Guest:Did you go on the Captain Billy show?
Guest:No.
Guest:I went out, like, on your birthday, you would go on and sit in the bleachers.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:My uncle worked at that station and knew him.
Guest:Where was he on, KOB?
Guest:He was on KOAT, wasn't he?
Guest:Okay, KOAT, Channel 7?
Guest:There was Uncle Roy and Captain Billy were the competing children's show guys.
Guest:I don't know how it came down for you, but I remember my mom, I'd heard that he'd been shot and that he was with some guy's wife.
Marc:right that's what my dad said my dad's a doctor and he was at the hospital when they brought him in oh he was right and that's the information i got then i recently went back and did some research on it because i've been talking about it on stage about childhood memories and the angle of the bit was that you know my father came home you know and i was like seven or however old we were yeah that's about yeah right and he said you know someone shot captain billy and in my brain i'm like how
Guest:Yeah, I mean, you watch Captain Billy.
Marc:That's where I saw cartoons for the first time.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, like, I couldn't even... But my dad, being as inappropriate as he was, I said, why would anyone shoot Captain Billy?
Marc:He's like, well, some guy comes screwing his wife.
Marc:And the joke is, in retrospect, that's really the most important thing I learned from Captain Billy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's so weird.
Guest:Like, that was my... I mean, I watched Captain Billy every morning.
Guest:And, yeah, I remember...
Guest:And first hearing maybe from one of the neighborhood kids that Captain Billy, well, I'd heard he'd been murdered and that he was screwing somebody's wife.
Guest:And then I remember asking my mom about it.
Guest:This was kind of, she was trying to soft pedal it to me, I guess.
Guest:And she goes, she said, well, it could be that he was just sort of giving her a friendly pat on the back.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was misinterpreted.
Guest:I was trying to, like, not tarnish Captain Billy for me.
Guest:Or make you understand what it could possibly mean to be fucking some guy's wife.
Guest:There's a lot of... It is such a dark, like, typical of Albuquerque, like, you know, you're just a local childhood guy.
Guest:But then I remember years later, my uncle worked at that station.
Guest:He was saying that he thought Captain Billy was gay, but...
Marc:Well, here's what I heard.
Marc:I went and did some research on it, and somebody had set out to clear Captain Billy's name and said that it was a lunatic.
Marc:A lunatic, like he was doing a pledge drive or something on TV, and this guy's wife was on the show, one of the phone bank people, and Captain Billy came and like...
Marc:put his arm around or something.
Guest:Yeah, see, then I heard that what my mom said may have been partially true.
Guest:Like it wasn't, the guy was paranoid, delusional.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:And he had had, you know, he had been on the inside in a mental hospital before.
Marc:And it was, there was more to the story.
Marc:It would not help my joke.
Marc:So, like, the information I got was the information I got, and I don't need to... Retractively make your joke not work.
Marc:Well, just sort of like, if there's any people that are related to Captain Billy or need to know the story, do, like, sort of an addendum to my act.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I think I first saw, like, Heckle and Jekyll, and he used to run some of those old cartoons.
Yeah.
Guest:yeah all the Tex Avery stuff and you know Roadrunners they'd play all the old Warner Brothers stuff right and it was I mean that's where I first saw that stuff and you remember that oh yeah you were obsessed with cartoons at that point
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I would have.
Guest:In fact, I had another Albuquerque thing.
Guest:I had one of the first weird cartoon dreams I had.
Guest:Remember this Ed Black's Chevrolet and that crow?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was a really weird drawing of a crow because it was just facing camera.
Guest:You usually draw a crow from the side because it's just like the beak part.
Guest:It was just a circle face, weird, or oval face.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You had a dream that that crow was like 200 feet tall, and it was like going through the streets with a pitchfork stabbing people.
Guest:But it was animated.
Guest:It was like kind of a cartoon dream.
Guest:Ed Black's Chevrolet.
Marc:Ed Black's Chevrolet.
Marc:There was Ed Black's.
Marc:There was Gallus.
Marc:It's so funny that it's such a specific landscape.
Marc:It's weird because I'm making up for something here.
Marc:I had Bryan Cranston in here, you know, and they shoot all that in our hometown in Albuquerque.
Guest:Yeah, it's...
Guest:That show is one of the first to really, because they shoot so much stuff there.
Guest:But when I watch Breaking Bad, that really feels like Albuquerque.
Marc:Right.
Marc:They use that octopus car wash or whatever the hell it was.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:That's like a landmark to me.
Marc:And in the Albuquerque Bank building, that's in No Country for Old Men, too.
Marc:They say that's shot in Texas, but in that shootout scene at the end of No Country for Old Men- Oh, is that the-
Marc:You see the First National Bank building right there, and anyone who's lived in Albuquerque.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:They shot it right there at Central and what is that, San Mateo in one of those hotels right there?
Guest:Yeah, there was that, and then there was, yeah, Kistler Collister.
Marc:Kistler Collister, right, with the department store over on, that was on San Mateo.
Marc:But that hasn't been Kistler Collister forever.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I don't know what the hell that is now.
Marc:There's so many weird memories that happen when you grow up a place.
Marc:I remember walking to that foodway.
Marc:I remember the first time I got dragged home by some guy.
Marc:Not in a bad way, but I remember one time me and my kid brother were going down to, I think it was called Foodway.
Marc:I totally remember.
Marc:Yeah, I don't think they exist anymore.
Marc:But we decided for some fucked up reason we were going to crawl across San Pedro.
Marc:And some guy decided he would walk us home and tell my parents about that.
Marc:Like, I don't know what's wrong with your kids, but they decided they were going to crawl on the street.
Marc:But I remember, like, while Cranston was in here, and I was so nervous about the interview, I completely forgot to even make Albuquerque a point of reference.
Marc:And I knew places he was eating.
Marc:Like, there's one scene where they ate it at a place called Taco Sal's, which is, like, way up on, like...
Marc:Eubank or Juan Tabo.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:And it's in a strip mall, but it's a great Mexican place.
Marc:The only reason I knew about it is because my buddy Dave's dad owned a store up there that we worked at and we went and ate there.
Guest:I met Vince Gilligan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we talked to Albuquerque for a while.
Guest:You know...
Guest:Yeah, it's just a lot of the same, well, Frontier restaurant.
Guest:That was so important to me, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I spent so much time.
Marc:I spent a lot of high school in Frontier.
Guest:Yeah, high school.
Guest:Yeah, that was.
Guest:And one of my best friends worked there, and it was just.
Guest:That's still there.
Guest:It's still good.
Guest:Really good, yeah.
Marc:Well, one of my mentors early on was Gus Blaisdell, and he used to own the Living Batch Bookstore, which was right next door to Frontier for a while.
Marc:Bearded dude was a real smart guy.
Marc:I worked at the Posh Bagel across from Yale Park.
Marc:When I was in high school, like when I was going to Highland, right there, there was a bagel place.
Marc:Didn't last long.
Marc:It was next to the guitar shop, and there was budget records.
Marc:Oh, by Highland High School?
Marc:No, right across from the university, right on Central.
Guest:Oh, right there, yeah.
Marc:Right around the corner from the general store, and Natural Sound was on Harvard.
Marc:Oh, totally, yeah.
Marc:And then the guitar shop had that wooden front to it, like right there.
Guest:Did you ever go in there?
Guest:Yeah, I used to go to those because my dad was a professor for a long time.
Guest:He was an archaeology professor at UNM.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, and an archaeologist.
Guest:But, yeah, I used to go over there.
Guest:I was also in the Albuquerque Youth Symphony, and we would – so Pope Joy Hall, we'd rehearse.
Guest:Right there.
Guest:Yeah, Saturdays we'd wander around those places after rehearsal.
Guest:What'd you play?
Guest:I played trombone back then.
Guest:I played upright bass also, but in the Youth Symphony I was playing trombone.
Marc:So you started playing music really young?
Guest:Yeah, like fifth grade.
Marc:Trombone, so you can read music and you can do all that?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Trombone.
Guest:I don't play that anymore.
Guest:It's a hell of an instrument.
Guest:I got a bass when I was in high school and started doing that, and then upright bass, but...
Guest:yeah trombone you got it's one of those things like violin you gotta you have to stay on it and you know like yeah your lip you know like for me to play now i would have to yeah it'd take a long time to get back to work out with a with whatever you call it the mouthpiece yeah the uh well trombone's one of those ones where you can't sort of like i'm just gonna hang out at home and jam
Guest:Yeah, that's the other problem.
Guest:Probably bass is like that, too.
Guest:It's not... But you can go on runs.
Guest:Yeah, you can still... But, yeah, trombone, you kind of want to play with people or in a horn section or something.
Marc:Was that the original idea?
Marc:Musician?
Guest:Yeah, I thought about it.
Guest:I mean, I guess I took to it pretty naturally and I did, you know, I was, yeah, I was going to, I just didn't, maybe when I was really young, but no, I mean, by the time I was in high school, it was just, you know, you had to go into science was the idea.
Marc:Was that the idea that you grew up with?
Marc:I mean, like an archaeologist, what kind of digs did your dad do?
Marc:What was his focus?
Guest:The Anasazi was his thing.
Guest:He was at Chaco Canyon.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Well, he started when I was really little.
Guest:He was basically the Anasazi and the pre-Columbian before Columbus.
Marc:So your dad was on digs, and is he like a preeminent Anasazi guy?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, he's pretty... I mean, in that world, yeah, he... This author, Jared Diamond, who wrote Guns, Germs, and State Building, like Pulitzer Prize guy, he... I was meeting with him when I was doing the movie Idiocracy, and at some point, he... Why were you meeting with him for that movie?
Guest:Fox had said, okay, you know, let's hire a futurist.
Guest:And I was just, you know, I'd read Guns, Terms of Steel and Collapse.
Guest:And I was like, can you hook me up with Jared Diamond?
Guest:I just kind of was a big fan of his writing.
Guest:And I just thought I'll use this to try to meet him.
Guest:And his kids were huge Beavis and Butthead fans.
Guest:He has these twin sons who are super genius.
Guest:But at the time they were like 13.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so anyway, he at some point, like during the interview, I said my dad was an archaeologist and then I got an email from him the next day and he said, is your dad the Jim Judge?
Guest:Maybe the only person who would ever say this.
Guest:Like the guy who did.
Guest:And there's.
Guest:something in his book i think collapse about just pack rat shit that preserves itself and like my dad had something to do with and he's cited in in in a jared diamond book like his further reading about the anasazi oh really one of my dad's books yeah so that must like he's no it's really cool actually i mean he's and he's he's been in documentaries and national geographic articles and things like that and he's still around uh-huh he's retired but what's your mom do
Guest:she was uh actually she was she was a teacher at highland for a while come on yeah spanish taught spanish and french and then she became a elementary school librarian she got tired of the high school teaching i don't know how the hell high school teachers do oh it was no fucking idea especially in albuquerque it was rough yeah and at the time we grew up it was rougher it seemed like it was pretty like i remember i think it was rougher it seems like it yeah
Marc:No, definitely.
Marc:I mean, there was a time where it was like one of the second most violent cities in the country.
Guest:Albuquerque, yeah.
Guest:I think in the 70s, there was a couple years in a row where it was the highest per capita violent crime cities in the country.
Marc:I don't remember really seeing that, but I do remember the great thing about growing up in New Mexico is you could get your driver's license when you're like 15.
Guest:It was a while, 14 to nine months.
Guest:You get the learner's permit.
Guest:I remember a friend in my high school,
Guest:Hadn't gone through puberty yet and had his driver's license.
Guest:He looked like a little eight-year-old driving around.
Marc:He'd get pulled over all the time.
Marc:Did you get your permanent at 14, nine months?
Guest:15.
Guest:Where'd you go from Albuquerque?
Guest:UC San Diego.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Which was kind of, it wasn't my first choice.
Guest:I'd actually, I wanted to go to UT Austin and something got, I ended up getting accepted, but something got screwed up with, I don't know, my application or the acceptance letter.
Guest:I didn't get it.
Guest:I found out too late, as I recall.
Guest:I really don't know why I went to UCSD.
Guest:I told my guidance counselor I wanted to just go somewhere in the southwest, and she just put that on the list, and I applied.
Guest:I was saying engineering and music stuff, and that just came up.
Guest:And what did you end up studying?
Guest:Physics.
Guest:Got a physics degree.
Guest:Did you do well?
Guest:I did well considering I hardly went to class.
Guest:I was kind of known for just like I would start going to class and then I would just realize I'm not paying attention.
Guest:I'm just learning everything from the book anyway.
Guest:And then I discovered, you know, now with the Internet, I think you can educate yourself.
Guest:Back then I discovered I could just go to the engineering library and just get better books on the same topic.
Guest:It seemed like they always picked the worst books for some of these like –
Guest:Some of these classes.
Guest:And so I ended up, I got straight Bs.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, they're trying to get a lot into those textbooks, I guess, and they might not explain it as fully as they could.
Guest:Yeah, and some physics textbooks, they almost pride themselves, engineer types in physics, almost pride themselves on not explaining it very well.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Like, oh, you don't get it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you could find these other books that would have better explanations and tons of practice problems.
Guest:That break the code.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's like philosophy, too.
Guest:It's like you've got to speak the language, but it's English.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Why does everyone have to have a different definition than what it really is?
Guest:Yeah, there's a lot of that in the academic world.
Marc:Yeah, that's how it sustains itself.
Guest:You need us to decode it.
Guest:Job security, yeah.
Marc:Well, what were you thinking with physics?
Marc:I mean, what was the plan?
Guest:Well, I started out in engineering, and I was just going to get an engineering job.
Guest:A lot of people talk about what a big nerd they are.
Guest:When I was in high school, I had a ham radio license when I was 12.
Guest:So I was kind of an electronics guy, and I thought, okay, I'll just be an engineer and get a job and then...
Guest:Back then, they'd tell you, oh, if you get a science degree, people will be handing you jobs like it's in... Here's some money.
Guest:Yeah, and it's just not true.
Guest:But I was in engineering and then just realized physics, fewer class requirements.
Guest:So it was a practical thing.
Guest:Believe it or not, it was a little easier for me to get a physics degree.
Guest:I think I'm better at the conceptual stuff than the...
Guest:I mean, maybe I'm not explaining that right, but just stuff that's more pure math and physics rather than just here's 20 engineering problems or 40 engineering problems.
Marc:You have to be able to wrap your brain around the abstract to get physics, correct?
Guest:Yeah, I think so.
Guest:And I was, I guess, better at that.
Guest:And also, I realized you could still supposedly get engineering jobs with a physics degree and
Marc:I'm never clear what that means.
Marc:What's an engineering job?
Guest:It can be a lot of different stuff.
Guest:My first job was actually the F-18 fighter jet.
Guest:All the electronics that test itself and the software that test itself.
Guest:Now it's very common in cars.
Guest:It gives you...
Guest:You got your rear flasher is off, is broken or whatever.
Guest:The F-18, it was just all its self-test stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was working for a company that did that.
Guest:Really?
Guest:That made the plane or just that panel?
Guest:No, they just did the test software for the...
Marc:So you were already proficient at computers?
Marc:Is that something else you learned?
Guest:Yeah, I'd done some programming, but this was actually, this job that I was on, we were going through all their software and trying to find, and the schematics, and trying to find failures that the software wouldn't catch.
Guest:And so we were evaluating it.
Guest:This was, like, 85, and the F-18 was all over the news because of Top Gun, I guess.
Guest:But it was really not working very well at the time.
Guest:Like, when they bombed Gaddafi, I remember, like, at the office, because we were on Coronado Island, and they were, like, saying, you know, the F-18s just flew on that mission for...
Guest:publicity and for using their radar, I guess.
Guest:Oh, right.
Guest:But the bombs were dropped by whatever those were reliable.
Marc:Yeah, they couldn't trust the F-18 to do the bombing.
Guest:But now the public likes the F-18.
Guest:Yeah, but now F-18, they had worked out the kinks.
Marc:So you were just working for a military contractor?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you just got that job out of college?
Marc:Yeah, I got just sending resumes around.
Marc:And you were just in a room full of guys.
Guest:So I picture it like the right stuff.
Guest:No, it wasn't.
Guest:It was literally cubicles.
Guest:I kind of modeled a lot of office space after my first two jobs.
Guest:And this was it was just gray cubicles with schematics on them and piles of software and a computer.
Guest:And it wasn't glamorous at all.
Guest:No guys sitting around with models of things?
Guest:No.
Guest:I mean, occasionally I would have to go on base and you'd get to go look at an F-18 in the distance.
Guest:Oh, there's an aircraft carrier.
Guest:But I was going to look up like if a part was obsolete or something like that.
Marc:Just going to a counter with a guy.
Marc:Do you know if this part still exists?
Guest:But occasionally, like, I don't know if I look at my Wikipedia page or something, and it's true, like, technically I worked on the F-18, but I wasn't out on an F-18 on a carrier giving a thumbs up to somebody, you know.
Guest:yeah it was a cut a few wet a few removed yeah yeah so what so you worked there for a while and then and then what happened um I lasted about a year there and then I moved up to well I was actually playing music the whole time I was playing like three nights a week with uh this kind of George Thorogood type guy this sort of drunken slide blues player who
Guest:And I was actually paying pretty good.
Guest:And then I moved up to the Bay Area.
Guest:Who was that?
Marc:What guy was that?
Guest:His name was Blonde Bruce.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:Is he a blues guy?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This was a long time ago.
Guest:Are you a blues guy?
Guest:I mean, that's just what I got.
Guest:I started playing that and got more blues gigs.
Guest:And I played upright bass, too.
Guest:So it was sort of like- Could you slap bass?
Guest:Do the whole thing?
Guest:Yeah, I did the slap rockabilly thing.
Guest:I always wanted to play more rockabilly country.
Guest:But all the gigs I got would be blues bands.
Guest:Was that the music you liked in high school?
Guest:i went through a phase where i was really yeah i was really into like elmore james and all right me too man really like yeah brownie mcgee sunny terry all these like old blues guys yeah so you got the blues brain i do too man yeah i saw a lot of these guys too i saw i saw brownie mcgee and really yeah where one of um i saw him in san diego at the belly up oh really when you were in college yeah i was like it's weird because fake id we were how'd you get your fake id
Guest:um the first one actually i don't know if you ever did this in albuquerque a friend of mine i hope to get you would make a giant poster right yes yeah i got the same id to cut out yeah stick your head you do a color card and you put your head and then you'd cut it right you'd cut it out you'd sign the name with a big sharpie so it looked like a when it was reduced down to size right yeah
Marc:But the weird thing about the board I got is that the guy couldn't change the information on the board.
Marc:So me and my buddies all got fake IDs, but they all had the same fucking name.
Guest:Yeah, same here.
Guest:Yeah, my friend, I won't say his name, but his brother worked at the airport and he had the binder.
Guest:So he took a picture of a Wyoming driver's license and blew it up with an overhead projector, traced it all out.
Guest:So whatever the fake name was, in fact, he even put his three-year-old nephew up there and gave him a fake ID.
Guest:And he was 21 just for fun.
Marc:I remember my name.
Marc:My name was Tom Bynes.
Marc:It'd be so hilarious if it was your buddy who was making those, because we did it at a party or something.
Guest:Oh, just everybody stepped up.
Marc:Yeah, people who wanted to buy it could buy it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that was the amazing thing.
Marc:And also we'll get back to where you went.
Marc:But the thing about Beers and Butthead and the thing that like obviously the entire world responded to it, but it felt very familiar to me because there was a certain.
Marc:Well, I don't know.
Marc:Maybe it was because it was you were from Albuquerque and I knew that.
Marc:But there's a weird thing that happens when you can drive at 15, but you can't drink till you're 21 because it's sort of weird and dangerous.
Marc:But, like, everyone's going to get booze.
Marc:And most of us, when we grew up like that, we were driving around with six-packs and going up to the rocks and, you know, hanging on the mountain.
Marc:But all you did in Albuquerque was drink and drive around.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There was nowhere to go.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, you would get, like... I mean, we... It's crazy, like, how lawless it seemed.
Guest:Like, I remember getting in... Coming out of a movie and my friend... Like, a bunch of us get in the back of his pickup truck and he just...
Guest:It was over kind of by where St.
Guest:Pius was at theater, and there was a big vacant lot.
Guest:The Wine Rock?
Guest:He just like, yeah.
Guest:Louisiana?
Guest:Coronado?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he just like, yes, same area.
Guest:He just like jumps a divider, jumps a curve, and just starts doing donuts in this vacant lot.
Guest:And just right out there...
Marc:you could see it from lomas from and just no one ever seemed to get pulled over by the cops yeah it was funny because like that i've done i've been in that car let's just fucking go do donuts let's go we used to get shopping carts in the mall parking lot at wenrock like after
Marc:Like we drink all night driving around.
Marc:Then we get shopping carts and put them in front of my buddy's Firebird and just get them going about 40 or 50 miles an hour and just let them destroy themselves on the curbs.
Marc:And that was like a big night.
Marc:But there was something about that weird frustration that having access to a car and access to liquor and nowhere to go and no girls.
Guest:And you couldn't go to like no one owned a house.
Guest:So you could, you know, yeah, you had to drink outside somewhere.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Maybe someone's parents would be out of town, but you're just destroy that place.
Guest:Destroy the place with no parents.
Guest:Yeah, you could have a license.
Guest:We had a pickup truck that a guy had left for my dad.
Guest:It was a Datsun.
Guest:Before anyone knew about Datsun, it was like a 59 Datsun.
Guest:You could actually crank start it if the starter motor didn't work.
Marc:They've been around that long time?
Guest:Yeah, but these were – you hardly ever see these because they weren't – somehow this guy had one.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he, to avoid the draft, went to Canada.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I guess he ended up – he couldn't come back.
Guest:And then I think he ended up dying or something.
Guest:But we just inherited this truck that was – we learned to fix engines on it.
Guest:But we could, like, if there were three of us, we could each pitch in a dollar and have enough gas to drive, you know, all night long.
Guest:You learned how to work on cars?
Guest:Yeah, on that car mostly.
Guest:And, you know, my dad and my brother did, but –
Marc:that was your first car kind of yeah we sort of nobody really owned it how many brothers you got uh just one and then one sister yeah well i and also there was a lot of guns around yeah like i saw several guns in high school yeah some guy pulling you aside going check this out like holy shit oh yeah we got shot at once outside out one night you know oh i mean i so i worked at uh jack in the box and whataburger
Guest:Which Whataburger?
Guest:The one, I don't know if it's there anymore.
Guest:It was on, it was kind of down in Martinez town on Lomas, but downtown.
Guest:But that was real grand?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I remember there was a Navajo Indian guy, Jonathan, and this other guy, Larry, who's sort of, you know how like Native Americans and rednecks kind of hung out?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's a flannel.
Guest:This is a country.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he used to say, he'd go like, he'd go, yeah, you know, me and Larry, you know, sometimes, you know, we just go out on the West Mesa, you know, just shoot at cars.
Guest:It's like,
Guest:fuck are you kidding me i was this is my first job i think i was 16 i mean not my first job i've worked other jobs but like at a and then he uh one day he goes uh he goes hey man you want to go out after work with me and larry i was like oh what are you gonna do oh we're just gonna go roll queers and i i didn't i didn't know what that meant i said what do you mean you know kick their ass take their money i was like ah yeah i can't tonight i'm uh
Guest:I was such a gringo.
Guest:I was just like, well, yeah, no, I don't think I'm going to go beat up fags with you guys.
Marc:It does sound fun.
Marc:But, oh, God.
Marc:Well, that's the weird thing is that, like, when we grew up, it had to be 60 or 70% Latino, easily.
Marc:Yeah, it always felt like, yeah.
Marc:I mean, we were the ones that were, you know.
Guest:Yeah, at Jefferson Junior High, I felt like I was the minority, you know.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Even at St.
Guest:Pius, it was more mellow, I suppose, than a...
Marc:But I never got a sense of tension until Cholo started happening.
Marc:It was always more sort of disco-oriented and platform shoes.
Marc:And then all of a sudden, something happened.
Guest:Viva La Raza.
Guest:Yeah, the Chicano power movement.
Guest:And it was kind of like...
Guest:Yeah, I distinctly remember a guy I used to ride the bus with, Richard Quintana, and we were really good friends, and all of a sudden, just at some point, like at a certain age, he couldn't be seen with me.
Marc:Right, and then the gang started happening a bit.
Marc:Yeah, and the flannel shirts only buttoned at the top with the white shirt and the bandanas.
Marc:It just all changed.
Marc:Suddenly got, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:so after uh san diego you where'd you get the where you this is when you got the job in silicon valley yeah i went up there my my uh ex-wife we were my girlfriend at the time it was from palo alto and she'd gone back and i thought i'd give it a go up there and uh yeah then i had i had an engineering job and then i started playing music again and all through you played bass huh
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then after that, I played bass for a living for like five years almost until Beavis and Butthead.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The engineering jobs up there had one that lasted like three or four months and another one two months.
Marc:But did it give you a sense of like, was it really the kernels of your understanding of Silicon Valley or was it just another job?
Guest:Well, it was kind of the kernels of my understanding of it because I just... I mean, that was... The job in San Diego, military contractor, whatever, that was sort of like cubicle, dreary, whatever, but this was a whole different...
Guest:They were like cults or something.
Guest:It was very weird.
Guest:I feel like it's still like that up there.
Guest:And I just didn't fit in.
Marc:A cult of product?
Guest:I'm just kind of believing in what we're doing.
Guest:And we are the leaders of the world in Silicon Valley.
Guest:And we're...
Guest:And this is sort of pre-boom, right?
Guest:A little bit.
Guest:There was a boom back then, but this is definitely pre the boom now, and it's another level now.
Guest:But there was a bit of a boom going on.
Marc:Was it a personal computer boom or some other technology?
Yeah.
Guest:personal computer I think and just kind of computer in general boom was still going on the second job I had there was actually for Galley and Kruger that makes bass amps and guitar amps so when did you so what happened so you played bass for five years before Beavis and Butthead where were you living then
Marc:Then I moved to Dallas.
Guest:Dallas?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You didn't know what the fuck you were going to do.
Marc:Are you on any records?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm on Doyle Bramhall Sr.
Guest:'s, a couple of his albums.
Guest:And this guy Anson Funderburg and Sam Myers, they were like a duo.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They were on a label called Blacktop that was in New Orleans.
Guest:That was in the 80s.
Guest:So I'm on...
Guest:Playing bass on those.
Guest:And then other stuff here and there.
Guest:There's Ray Benson, the Asleep at the Wheel guy.
Marc:I'm on one of his things.
Marc:I just got a big package from them.
Marc:They pitched him as a guest, and I didn't really follow up on it, but he's still at it.
Guest:He's got amazing stories.
Guest:Yeah, he's still at it.
Guest:And then...
Guest:But I didn't have any great... I mean, I was always just doing it because I didn't... It was a way to not work in a cubicle.
Guest:And I was really trying to go into writing or comedy filmmaking.
Guest:Not stand-up ever, but just... I knew I couldn't pull that off.
Guest:But I wanted to...
Guest:I started making animated films.
Guest:I finished the first one in 90, but I bought a camera and started messing with it in 89.
Guest:How did you learn how to do that?
Guest:I actually just got books at the library.
Guest:For animating?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I kind of knew.
Guest:I just always was interested in it, so I just kind of knew.
Marc:What was the moment where it was doable?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The moment was in Dallas at the Inwood Theater.
Guest:They used to have a thing, the animation celebration, which was just every year they'd take the best animated shorts from all over the world and put them together like as a feature and it would just play in indie movie theaters.
Guest:and um i would always go just thought really cool stuff they'd have in there and um in the lobby they had cells on display of this guy paul clare haught who lived in dallas who had made a film and had gotten it in there and i was looking at these drawings and going shit there's a guy that lives in my town and he's doing this and because i always thought you had to have a ton of money or you had to buy all the equipment special machine yeah and i thought wait i bet you can just rent the equipment what
Guest:And then I got books on it, and then I just got this animation fever.
Guest:I just decided, I'm going to do this.
Guest:I just wrote down every idea.
Guest:Had you ever drawn?
Guest:Yeah, I'd always drawn a little bit, but I never took a lot of pride in it.
Guest:I would draw to just do something.
Guest:I could sort of draw...
Guest:Someone would get under my skin like a professor or someone like when I was a musician, like this guy that I was touring with, and I would draw them.
Guest:I'd get this urge to draw them, but I wasn't great.
Guest:I can't draw landscapes and houses and trees, but I would just draw faces in a way that could make people laugh.
Marc:Like Venus and Butthead?
Guest:Yeah, you know, that was...
Guest:That sort of thing.
Guest:And I would draw on notebooks and stuff.
Guest:But I never took pride in like, oh, look.
Guest:And I tried to do some panel cartoons a little bit.
Guest:But I don't think they were ever that great.
Guest:What, for print?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But that kind of wasn't my thing either.
Guest:But I had a hunch that I could make something funny if I could figure out how to put it together.
Marc:But you always gravitated towards animation.
Marc:It resonated with you.
Marc:What about it exactly?
Yeah.
Guest:I don't know what it is.
Guest:Well, stop motion was another thing I really wanted to do.
Guest:I'm actually better at sculpting than I am drawing.
Guest:So I always wanted to do Gumby stop motion stuff.
Guest:Have you done that?
Guest:Just a little bit when I first got around the same time.
Guest:And then I realized that involves just a lot of hardware and building sets and all that stuff.
Guest:Too much work.
Guest:As shitty as my drawings are, it was like... That was a quicker path to getting something done that could be funny.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So it wasn't the original stuff.
Marc:So when did you make the first cartoon?
Guest:The first... I bought a Bolex movie camera.
Guest:It's a 16-millimeter little single frame.
Guest:I did...
Guest:I did like a test.
Guest:I tested some animation with it, and that was 89.
Marc:Single frame kind of thing?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You get a peg bar, and the paper's punched, and you register it so it doesn't move.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I finished a test, and I got the film back, and I was like, oh, my God, this actually looks like a cartoon.
Guest:I can really do this.
Guest:It was like one of the most exciting.
Guest:And I wasn't telling anybody.
Guest:I told my wife.
Guest:I showed her, and I'm like, look at this.
Guest:I can make a cartoon.
Guest:What did she say?
Guest:She thought it was really cool, actually.
Guest:And she was working an engineering job.
Guest:She had been physics, too.
Guest:So she was in tech in Dallas.
Guest:And anyway, so I... Is that why you ended up there?
Guest:Sort of.
Guest:Well, it was actually started because the Anson Funderburg guy offered me a gig.
Guest:And then she was saying, oh, look, my company has a branch there.
Guest:You can do it.
Marc:You can play bass.
Guest:And it was just so expensive to live in the Bay Area.
Guest:I just couldn't... Oh, it's crazy.
Marc:Yeah, I lived there for a couple of years.
Guest:but i um so you do this thing you do and then the first thing i finished with sound and everything like i timed the track out with a stopwatch i didn't know if that was going to work either and that was the first um it was called office space and it was the character milton and the boss coming and taking a stapler right and that's how that started
Guest:Yeah, so that was the first animated thing I ever finished was called Office Space, and it was pre-Dilbert, and it was just, you know, the guy with his, you know, a kind of short-sleeved guy with his Coke bottle glasses at his desk.
Marc:So real basic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But that one got, ended up, you know...
Guest:I just had VHS copies.
Guest:I couldn't, like, I had one of those Tascam four tracks with a cassette tape, you know, back then.
Guest:So I did the soundtrack.
Guest:I did all the music and all the voices and the sound effects all as kind of a radio play, and then I animated to that.
Guest:That's how you do it.
Marc:Oh, I see.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Time out where every syllable is going to happen, and you shoot it.
Guest:And I remember getting it back, and I put it in the projector, and I just hit play, going, fuck, this is never going to work, and just it sunk up perfectly.
Guest:And I was like, holy shit.
Guest:Ha, ha, ha.
Guest:this is really a cartoon i just made and then i and the atom was split yeah yeah i split the atom of yeah and then i sent out i called 411 literally like i felt so stupid as uh mtv like i just got names of anybody i could comedy central all these people and how many when you made those calls how many did you have in the can
Guest:Two.
Guest:Two office space.
Guest:I had one office space and then another one that was just this kind of fat, dumpy guy watching a health food commercial.
Guest:It wasn't great.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I put them both on this tape.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And mailed out like 14 copies or something like that.
Guest:And then I started getting calls.
Guest:Really?
Guest:At this point, I think I was 27.
Marc:Who were you getting calls from?
Guest:I got a call from the kids in the hall, believe it or not.
Guest:I got a call from a show called Night After Night with Alan Havey that ended up running.
Marc:I remember that.
Marc:Yeah, the one-on-one.
Marc:The audience of one, yeah.
Marc:I've interviewed him.
Guest:Yeah, I ran into him recently in a bar in Santa Monica, and I was like, man, thanks for... Did he say something?
Guest:You were the first guy to ever put me on TV.
Guest:That's amazing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So he ran it as a piece on Night After Night on Comedy Central.
Guest:yeah and they actually flew me to new york which was amazing and and uh but they you know they said how many of these can you do how fast and you know i let them have that one for like i think they paid me like fifteen hundred dollars or something like that and that covered my cost and a little bit more but for me to keep doing more of them at that price would have been i was just like i'm just gonna animate other stuff and so i ended up you know and i was getting stuff in festivals at that
Guest:But it's pretty work intensive the way you were doing it.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It'd take me about six to eight weeks to do two minutes.
Guest:So that was – I was just like – You know, if it's $1,500 and I clear $200 and I'm making them – you know, I already got one on their show.
Guest:So it's like that's my – you know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That was just a cool thing to –
Marc:And then what happened?
Marc:So you get a little attention, kids in the hall, but MTV didn't, did they?
Guest:No, not right away.
Guest:But then I just kept making them.
Guest:So I made one called, is this character Inbred Jed?
Guest:That one wasn't very good.
Guest:And then the...
Guest:let's see and then the fourth one i did was beavis and butthead it was a short called frog baseball yeah and at this point my stuff was playing in this in this uh thing called sick and twisted animation festival yeah it was in the animation celebration where i'd first seen it right that one ended up i i got to go see that play in the same theater in austin and that's cool
Guest:Yeah, so then there was a show on MTV called Liquid Television that would license shorts.
Guest:Yeah, so they licensed four of my shorts and put them on there.
Marc:Which ones?
Guest:Well, at that point, I'd done two Beavis and Buttheads.
Guest:So they put both of those on.
Guest:They put Office Space, and they put the inbred Jed one.
Guest:And these were how long, usually?
Guest:Around two minutes, most of them.
Guest:The second Beavis and Butthead short was like four minutes, I think, or three or four minutes.
Guest:And then what happened?
Marc:Well, so then they... Did you do... Were they on Saturday Night Live, too?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The first thing I ever animated, Office Space, After Night with Alan Havy, then it got on SNL, actually.
Marc:And they just... How'd they set it up?
Guest:They ran it... It was on the night that... Last time Nirvana was on there was 93.
Guest:So Beavis and Butthead had already started going by then, but...
Guest:But and then I did three more for SNL and they weren't very good.
Guest:The fourth one was pretty good.
Guest:I was just kind of it was it was sort of a weird.
Guest:I was hiring a couple of people myself to help and just like just the timing of them wasn't great.
Guest:But that, you know, it led to the movie.
Marc:But you were still doing them at home.
Guest:At that point, Beavis and Butthead was going, and I was in New York.
Guest:So Beavis and Butthead was in full production.
Guest:So I wasn't really doing them at home, but I sort of was with those ones.
Guest:It was me and two other guys in our spare time.
Guest:They worked on Beavis and Butthead, and we were just animating like crazy to get these things for SNL.
Guest:Like Lauren would call on a Friday and say, ask me if I could have one for tomorrow.
Guest:I was just saying.
Guest:he'd call you directly yeah he'd call me directly and say you know we're a little short on material could you have one tomorrow and just say no they take with three of us it would take like two or three weeks you know and so so all this sort of kind of happened in a in a perfect storm within a year or so you know the the momentum of this thing yeah i went for like 90 was when i finished the office space one 91 it was on comedy central and 92 beavis and butt had happened and
Marc:And you did a deal with MTV for a series.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that gave you a production schedule.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it seems to me that, if I'm not mistaken, you sort of single-handedly saved MTV, the network, because they drifted into irrelevance, and no one gave a shit anymore.
Guest:Yeah, they were in... It's funny.
Guest:I didn't know what ratings meant.
Guest:I mean, I knew what ratings were, but I didn't know what the numbers... I wasn't even thinking about it going into this, and then...
Guest:After the first episode aired, the next day, Abby Terculi, kind of the exec on it, comes in and says, we got a one.
Guest:And I said, a one doesn't sound like a very high number to me.
Guest:But they've never had one ever.
Guest:He said, normally that time slot is 0.6.
Guest:And then the next day, it was on every day, which was just crazy.
Guest:And the next day, it was like 1.2.
Guest:By the end of the week, it was 1.8.
Marc:But this was... This was the first week?
Guest:Such a train wreck.
Guest:They were supposed to have something like 15 episodes by March 8th when it premiered.
Guest:And I remember this guy they hired who didn't have an animation studio.
Guest:He was just... No, it was just a train wreck.
Guest:We ended up having just two episodes ready.
Guest:So what we did is took my two shorts and put videos in between them and cobbled together another one.
Guest:And they just were...
Guest:By the end of the week, there was another one coming in.
Marc:So a third one.
Guest:So just three episodes airing over and over again, but the ratings kept going up.
Guest:And then they finally did a smart thing and just took it off the air and waited until we had more.
Marc:Well, that's interesting because that would have been the equivalent of viral now.
Marc:By word of mouth, it actually probably helped you in the long run.
Guest:I think it did because everyone was like, what happened to that show?
Guest:Where'd it go?
Guest:And then three months later or something like that, it...
Guest:You got another 12 in the can?
Guest:And the episodes were better, and they started to get better.
Guest:Yeah, so it was... Yeah, in a weird way, it ended up helping.
Guest:And the shorts had been on liquid television and were getting a lot of buzz, so... So it's just like you changed everything.
Marc:Not just for you, but I think for America.
Guest:I made America stupid.
Guest:I was...
Guest:Yeah, no, it was a crazy time.
Guest:I didn't really appreciate it at the time.
Guest:I mean, I was married.
Guest:My daughter was a year and a half old, and I was just working 16-hour days, and we lived in a lousy condo way up in Portchester, and I was taking the train in and just kind of... Portchester?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know where that is?
Guest:Way up north.
Guest:Yeah, it's up between Greenwich and Rye.
Marc:But it was an amazing time because, I mean, Beavis and Butt had literally, there was something so, it resonated with so many people so quickly.
Marc:And that, you know, it was just a matter of weeks, it seemed, before people were imitating them and, you know, showing their friends.
Marc:And it was so specifically, I think what registered to me and I guess to everybody else is that it's a very specific American townie experience.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, like, that I grew up with and that we grew up with.
Marc:You know, I don't know if that – but I think just about anywhere.
Marc:I mean, everybody seemed to know that guy or know those guys or have gone to high school with those guys.
Guest:Yeah, definitely.
Guest:I mean, yeah, and that's what I heard from the get-go is, oh, I grew up with guys like this.
Guest:And to me, it feels very Albuquerque.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it turns out to, you know, just dumbasses are universal.
Yeah.
Guest:cross language barriers maybe but I don't know looking back on it at the time it in a weird way on one hand I was I wasn't I wasn't surprised that people would connect with it once I got it I felt like the first two that aired were horrible and a lot of the early ones weren't good but once I knew once I got the good ones on that it would at least I felt like it would connect with some people I didn't
Guest:I didn't really know it would get as big as it was or piss as many people off.
Guest:Why did it piss people off?
Guest:All kinds of reasons.
Guest:I mean, it landed right in this pocket when...
Guest:I guess the, I don't know, the wall had gone down in Europe, you know, like the end of the Cold War and not a lot of news.
Guest:And suddenly just right at this time, right before it came out, all of a sudden it was like violence on television and television corrupting the minds.
Guest:And then, you know, here's this show called Beavis and Butthead that's a cartoon and everyone thought of cartoons as for kids.
Guest:So this was just, you know.
Guest:Our kids are watching this.
Guest:Yeah, and just, and it was such a...
Guest:I wish – I mean, at the time, there was such a just assault from the news media of just, you know, this horrible show.
Guest:What's this world come to?
Guest:And I wish I had pointed out more.
Guest:It took me a while to get – this is cable TV.
Guest:You have to call up and order it.
Guest:You have to pay your bill.
Guest:You have to be there when the guy installs it.
Guest:You have to take all these steps.
Guest:And for these mothers or parents just to, like –
Guest:My kids are watching.
Guest:Look what my kids are watching.
Guest:You need to change.
Guest:It's like just you went and it's like going and buying Hustler magazine and leaving it on your coffee table.
Guest:Look what my children are looking at.
Guest:You know, but also it's like you can lock it out.
Guest:It's so easy to do.
Marc:And the weird thing is, is that where was the argument?
Marc:It's like, well, the three stooges.
Marc:We're pretty violent.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I know.
Marc:You know, it's not like, and specifically animation, it's like, it's not real.
Guest:Yeah, it's not real.
Guest:And it's not, I mean, also just, you know, a typical Roadrunner, Warner Brothers, you know, Tex Avery stuff.
Marc:Horrendous.
Guest:That coyote went through such shit.
Guest:Banging people in the head with pans.
Marc:Poor coyote.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it's now it's kind of I wish I John Christopher Lucy.
Guest:There was this thing that like MTV's publicity department was always just breathing down my neck.
Guest:OK, when they ask you that, they were just running afraid, running scared from every attack.
Marc:But meanwhile, it's the greatest publicity the show could have.
Guest:It was it was good publicity.
Guest:But I just remember it was some, I don't know, Access Hollywood or somebody doing a thing about... And they had me and John Crisfalusi, not together, but interviewed separately.
Guest:And here I am just being like defending the show and being all serious.
Guest:And then it cuts to John Crisfalusi saying...
Guest:Every cartoon needs a good beating.
Guest:And he's just being funny.
Guest:And it cuts to him like in front of this computer screen where there's one cartoon character bent over and another one's just punching him in the butt in the animation cycle.
Guest:And I'm just thinking, why didn't I just...
Guest:embrace it and be funny like that i i feel like i was always taking these questions too seriously you know instead of just going hey this is a comedy fuck you yeah which well you're a serious guy was it weighing on your conscience at all well there was a i mean actually to yeah there i mean what happened was there was a couple controversies like there was a
Guest:There was a thing where somebody had... This kid in a trailer park had set the trailer... He was five years old, I think, or four?
Guest:Five.
Guest:His mom left him alone with a... And there was a one-year-old in a crib who ended up dying in the fire.
Guest:And when...
Guest:They were about to arrest—this didn't come out in the news.
Guest:They were about to arrest him for—I mean, her for, you know— Negligence.
Guest:Negligence.
Guest:And she said, well, he was watching Beavis and Butthead, and that's why he set it on fire.
Guest:Not that he was five.
Guest:And then it blew up.
Guest:Like, it was the first story of every major network news that night.
Guest:And it was like Dan Rather.
Guest:I remember he said, you know, in Ohio, a—
Guest:Child died after, you know, this kid was watching Beavis and Butthead, and his opening statement of the news ended with him saying, leading us to ask ourselves, how did we ever get from Leave it to Beaver to Beavis and Butthead?
Guest:And...
Guest:And it was a little scary because it was like everyone is blaming the show for the death of a kid.
Guest:Well, it came out that they didn't even get cable at that trailer park.
Guest:She was just – there had been another story in the news about Beavis and Butthead and somebody doing like a – some kid like with a lighter or something.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:But so she just kind of was about to get arrested and blamed Beavis and Butthead and the cops bought it and –
Marc:But she wasn't home.
Guest:She went out on a date and left the kid's home.
Guest:A five-year-old and a one-year-old.
Guest:And then it turned out the kid had started another fire the year before, before Beavis and Butthead had ever gone on the air.
Guest:Yeah, but it's so weird that they like that.
Guest:And left matches, lighters, whatever, you know.
Marc:But left the kid.
Guest:He left the kid, yeah.
Marc:That wasn't it.
Marc:The opening story was like, how did we get from Weaver to Beaver to Beaver's butt head?
Guest:Now, where the fuck was this mother with a five-year-old in a trailer?
Guest:I look back on it and just say, why didn't MTV come out?
Guest:They were just, oh, don't do any interviews.
Guest:I just wish that I had stood up for it more and not been so like, oh, shit, a child died.
Guest:You did feel bad.
Guest:Yeah, you felt bad.
Guest:You don't want to be the guy who's going out and saying,
Guest:when a child just died, you don't want to be the one who's going out and saying, hey, man, my show, you know.
Guest:Yeah, where's the mother?
Guest:So it was, you know, yeah, this, yeah, how come the mother, I blame the mother, like, that's the, it was a very odd time.
Marc:You didn't want to get, you didn't want to enter the dialogue, because that would have put you in dialogue with.
Guest:Right, yeah, with, yeah, exactly, I didn't, so, but, you know, looking back on it, I don't know, I wish I had, I wish that they had maybe stood up for it a little more, but I mean, I kind of, I don't know.
Guest:It seemed to have done all right.
Guest:It all worked out.
Marc:But at that time, so this is a huge success.
Marc:Then you had to get management and everything else, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because I think we had the same.
Marc:We were with Three Arts.
Marc:You were with Rotenberg.
Guest:I met you like in 95.
Marc:Yeah, I was with Dave Becky.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And I don't know.
Marc:Yeah, we did meet.
Marc:And I remember I was sort of like, hey, we're from Albuquerque.
Guest:You're like, yeah.
Guest:You hardly ever meet showbiz people from Albuquerque.
Marc:No, it's rare.
Marc:I think David Hyde Pierce is from Albuquerque, isn't he?
Guest:Yeah, that's right.
Marc:I didn't know him.
Marc:I think he's younger than we are.
Marc:I met him once.
Marc:So once you get management, once this thing takes off like it does, I mean, what was the plan?
Marc:I mean, it didn't seem to me that you were calculating about having a career in show business necessarily.
Guest:No, and yeah, I mean, I was always into filmmaking, and that's what I wanted to do, sketch comedy or something.
Yeah.
Guest:yeah michael rotenberg uh they signed me from the beginning i didn't have a lawyer at all i couldn't get lawyers to call me back i through a cartoonist that i met i can't remember who knew through the just newspaper cartoon you know world new matt graining's lawyer and i couldn't get her to call me back it just i just probably sounded like some guy bullshitting i've got a
Guest:MTV wants to make the show, you know.
Marc:So before it even started, you were trying to get some, yeah.
Guest:And so I ended up doing, and I got a music lawyer in Texas that kind of just said, oh, don't sign it.
Guest:And I ended up really negotiating a deal with them myself that wasn't a good deal, but it was, you know, it's kind of like the...
Guest:I knew, you know, I read it.
Guest:You can read a contract.
Guest:Kind of.
Guest:It's one of those things like physics, though.
Guest:There's a word or two in there that everything could hinge on a word.
Guest:I mean, I knew basically.
Guest:But I was making two-minute short films in my house.
Guest:To take it to another level, I would have to do a deal with a network, and they're going to have to own it.
Guest:That's just the way it is, especially when you're nobody.
Guest:And I didn't know it was going to be a hit.
Guest:I thought they were going to make some of those little MTV IDs, and I would get $20,000, and I'd be happy.
Right.
Guest:Did you end up getting screwed?
Guest:Well, I sort of... Yeah, the original deal was about as screwed as you would think, but in a way, I didn't.
Guest:Their lawyer had all the bad intentions of a good lawyer, but wasn't a really good lawyer, so the contract... I think she didn't really understand that... I think she thought I was going to be doing all the animation myself, and so there was a fee that was a per-minute fee, and then later...
Guest:Years later, when I was renegotiating... Well, also, they needed me to make the show.
Guest:They realized they didn't know what they were doing, and just to... I did the voices, and I just kind of had the whole vision and everything, and I was... I mean, I was doing all the video.
Guest:I mean, it was all... I was doing it all, so they realized they needed me, and then I was able to renegotiate based on all these kind of... They realized if you went by the letter of the contract, they would owe me a lot, even more money.
Guest:So I ended up getting...
Guest:I remember whatever year that was, finding out that I was getting paid more than Tabitha Sorin, and I felt pretty good.
Guest:So the second season, you were able to really... Yeah, well, and the second season came right away.
Guest:I mean, the season was 30 to 35 episodes, and we just... There was never a break.
Guest:It would just do as many as you can, because they were putting it on every day, which was just ridiculous for an animated show.
Guest:So we did...
Guest:Probably 80 in one year.
Guest:But these are 15-minute episodes.
Guest:How many total?
Guest:I think total right around 200.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:I think when it was all in.
Marc:And how much ownership did you end up with?
Guest:Ultimately, now, supposedly, I've got a 50-50 deal almost with them.
Guest:But at the time, I had almost no ownership.
Guest:I mean, I sold them the characters.
Guest:just kind of after months of negotiating and just going and having the deal done and then just sitting there in Dallas going, well, shit, I mean, might as well.
Guest:It's not like I'm going to sit here and keep making these by myself and putting them in festivals.
Guest:I'll just find something else to do.
Guest:And so I just, you know, sold it to him thinking, just take some money for this and move on.
Guest:If they do something with it, they do.
Guest:And not knowing it was going to go full on series.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They withheld that information from me until I sold it to them.
Marc:And were you working on a computer or still doing cells?
Guest:All cells.
Guest:I didn't even own a computer then.
Guest:I did it all on film.
Guest:And even when the first season was done in a really horrible digital ink and paint, except for the shorts that I had done.
Guest:And from then on, it was all film.
Guest:So not computer.
Guest:Yeah, never computer, other than those few episodes in the first season.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:And so now you're sort of a... It seems to me that without you, you don't really get South Park.
Marc:You broke open something.
Guest:I might have, yeah, a little bit.
Marc:I mean, The Simpsons was running, but that was a different thing.
Guest:The Simpsons definitely opened the door for, I think, for everybody just about.
Guest:But yeah, and then...
Guest:Yeah, I mean, Beavis and Butthead, I distinctly remember when they were talking about doing a series with it, you know, of course they would say, well, they'd look at, you know, when The Simpsons did this.
Marc:But there was also this weird almost DIY quality to it.
Guest:You know, there was a roughness to the animation and to... Yeah, I think I opened the doors for shitty drawings being on TV.
Yeah.
Guest:I did not frame it that way.
Guest:No, but I mean... Yeah, I mean, what I was trying to do... I was a big fan of National Lampoon Magazine and a lot of cartoonists that had really kind of cool, like, notebook-style drawings.
Guest:And I always imagined...
Guest:I wanted to see this stuff animated.
Guest:In fact, at the same time that the Simpsons shorts were on the Tracy Ullman show, there was Mary Kay Brown, M.K.
Guest:Brown, who I was a big fan of.
Guest:Great, great animator.
Guest:Yeah, really great stuff in National Lampoon.
Guest:They animated some of her stuff for that same show.
Guest:It was called Dr. Nagatu.
Guest:It's about impossible to Google because she spelled it with an exclamation point in the last name.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:um but it was uh really cool i just love the way it looked and and that and also the the pacing of it and so when i was doing the first office space milton thing i was kind of thinking of the way that stuff looked and she also did weird kind of almost dark domestic very yeah very like this weird woman who was teaching cooking yeah right yeah those were trippy man yeah really trippy really funny stuff too like um
Marc:And who else was in the back of the Lampoons when they had the color comics at the back?
Marc:They had some S. Clay Wilson stuff in there sometimes.
Guest:Yeah, S. Clay Wilson.
Guest:There was a bunch of Mimi Pond, B.K.
Guest:Taylor, all these really great stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Drew Friedman and Harvey Picard sometimes, I think, and Bill Griffith.
Guest:I mean, that stuff to me... Actually, there was a guy named Mark Merrick.
Guest:And, I mean, I could just... Buddy Hickerson, all these...
Guest:great people that had different uh linda berry like just really cool ways of drawing and none i'd never seen any of that animated so that was kind of i was trying to do that just animate something that didn't look so slick and yeah yeah and partly because i just can't draw that slick and and then how long before like what when you chose to like i imagine that doing you know king of the hill and conceiving of king of the hill and having these you know characters with emotional depth
Marc:was sort of the next evolution of you as a guy moving towards film and moving towards sort of exploring responsible adult themes and that kind of stuff.
Guest:Yeah, it was...
Guest:Yeah, I was a big fan of just classic television like Leave It to Beaver, The Griffith Show, Bob Newhart especially.
Guest:I wanted to do something different than Beavis and Butthead, and also they wanted a show specifically to follow The Simpsons, so I didn't want it to be too much like The Simpsons.
Marc:So that's a huge break for you.
Marc:I mean, when that must have been offered to you, you must have been like, holy shit.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, it was a little daunting.
Guest:I tried not to think about that too much, but I actually didn't think... Honestly, I did this overall deal with Fox, and I always just kept thinking I'm just going to retire and do weird little stuff for fun, but this...
Guest:i remember thinking well it was very daunting but then i thought you know what i'm just gonna pitch a show that i want to do i'm not gonna and if if it's not what they want to do they'll say no and that's that and right and i i sort of kept thinking they were gonna say no it's like just these like the first drawing i had was four guys with their beers and then the family and kind of based on the neighborhood i lived in outside of dallas and um
Guest:But it just kept – and actually in Albuquerque too.
Guest:I lived in a – I had four different Fort Worth – people from Fort Worth living in my neighborhood.
Guest:And I had a paper route for – that was – Texans are their own thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They seemed to find each other in Albuquerque too.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My neighborhood was – they were all around us.
Guest:I mean the last neighborhood.
Guest:We lived all over the place there.
Guest:But the last neighborhood I was in when I was in like high school and all that.
Marc:So it was uniquely Texan in that way.
Marc:It was really based on Texans.
Guest:I think it's sort of the way, you know, you'll hear Canadian comedy people, a lot of them will say, you know, you're right next to the United States, you can kind of observe it as an outsider.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I kind of feel that way being in New Mexico, growing up there, and Texans, you know, they flood our campgrounds every three-day weekend.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:My dad would just he, you know, he grew up in Montana and Wyoming and just wide open spaces.
Guest:And he he just hated crowds.
Guest:And and when there was these, you know, big three day weekends and just Texas license plates, he would just like be muttering.
Guest:Just goddamn Texans everywhere.
Guest:And so I kind of grew up with this view of Texans.
Marc:They think they're in their own country.
Marc:There is definitely this.
Marc:I was just there and there's definitely this feeling that like, you know, Texas is Texas.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And whatever else is going on out there, that's someone else's business.
Guest:Well, it's kind of like – I mean, and once I moved there, I just loved it.
Guest:But it is that winning – it's the winning team that you like to hate unless you're on the team.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like, hey, you know.
Guest:But –
Guest:Did you notice growing up in Albuquerque, it seemed like any time there was a middle-aged male authority figure telling you to do something, they had a Texas accent.
Guest:Excuse me, boys.
Guest:What are you boys doing?
Guest:Moving along.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But everyone else talked like a cholo.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Marc:And their pants, their shirt were always tucked into like Western style slacks.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And they had a tie usually.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, in the 70s, they still had their 50s hairdos.
Guest:Yeah, swift back.
Guest:Yeah, maybe longer sideburns.
Marc:So King of the Hill ran for a long time.
Marc:I know that the guys who were riding with me on my show did some King of the Hills.
Guest:Oh, I forgot.
Guest:Michael James.
Marc:Those guys are great.
Marc:Yeah, they're working with me, and they've been with me on the last two seasons of my show.
Marc:But they told me that when you were in Texas, that you were actually doing the voices and sending them in.
Guest:yeah by that point yeah we were just about everybody was doing the voices remotely uh towards the end there yeah and but you feel you stand behind it all the way through yeah yeah i was uh i was uh i mean you know there's there were some some years some seasons better than others but um i was i started to back off being involved when uh john altshuler and david krinsky took over because they were
Guest:i just found that they were always kind of making whatever decisions i would have made and just the episodes got started to get really good and uh and who was running the show greg dan i know this was when john ultra and dave krinsky oh they were running your show he was running it at the beginning i mean i was i was there a lot the first who was greg greg was yeah and uh he he left to do the office um the american office uh sometime i don't know just i don't know what years those were happening but um
Guest:yeah and then uh a couple different people ran it and then john and dave took over probably i don't know the last like six seasons or something and how does that work so you you know you you're the creator and then it just sort of has its own life yeah i mean i was first season most of the episodes were either treatments that greg or i had written yeah and then uh
Marc:How'd you get to know him?
Marc:How'd you get paired up with him?
Guest:I actually met him at the same comedy festival I met you at, I think, 95 Aspen Comedy Festival.
Guest:And he had been on The Simpsons.
Guest:He was Conan O'Brien's writing partner, actually.
Guest:And then he...
Guest:I'd written the pilot and done the drawings, and he... I was going to work on the Beavis and Butthead movie, and they said, you need a showrunner.
Guest:And Greg did a rewrite of the pilot, and he did a... I had the Laotian neighbors moving in and the social worker coming all in the pilot, and he...
Guest:He took the Laotian Neighbors moving in and had that be like second or third episode and then added the character Luann.
Guest:I think he came up with, I did the drawing, but he, and he rewrote it and then just, you know, it was kind of a good fit because he had done, he'd been working on The Simpsons.
Guest:He knew how to oversee a lot of the, you know, animation stuff that's really going to be foreign to somebody who's only done live action.
Yeah.
Marc:But it's interesting, too, that given The Simpsons, the license they take to do just about fucking anything, at the drop of a dime, and even Family Guy to a certain extent, that King of the Hill still stays true to almost a sitcom format.
Marc:With animation, you can go to the moon in a frame if you want.
Guest:Right, yeah, and The Simpsons did go into outer space, and I love that stuff, but I...
Guest:And I don't know, for whatever reason, I guess because I was basing it sort of on Neighbors I'd had and stuff like that, I just kind of... I just wanted to make it realistic.
Guest:And then also, I think that's the way maybe I tend to write.
Guest:Although Beavis and Butthead gets a little crazy sometimes.
Guest:But I was...
Guest:I also just wanted it to be... I remember saying to one of the executives on it, I said, well, I think we want to have it be different from The Simpsons and not just be just like The Simpsons.
Guest:And he kind of looked at me like...
Guest:Hmm, that's an interesting thought.
Guest:Like, I think executive, you never, I don't think anyone's ever gotten faulted for being exactly like something that was really hugely successful.
Marc:Oh, no, of course not, because in their mind, what he's really thinking is, but The Simpsons makes a lot of money for us.
Marc:Yeah, it's like, why do you not want to be?
Marc:Yeah, you should be exactly like The Simpsons.
Guest:And so I realized that wasn't a good thing to say, but I just kind of said, oh, it's an interesting thought.
Guest:I'm not sure if it's a good idea, but I mean, then I just made the, and Greg was on board for making it,
Guest:you know realistic and having the pace that I wanted and yeah so yeah anyway I think you were I was very involved early on and then at a certain point what I would do is just I'd be back in Austin I would take the storyboards you'd move to Austin by that point yeah and do notes on the storyboards they have a thing called an animatic and in some ways
Guest:you know we were in century city and film roman did the animation they were way out in the valley and most of the time you were on video conference or the phone anyway so might as well be in austin you liked austin yeah and you were there for how many years
Guest:I still have my house there, geez, from 94 until a couple years ago.
Marc:So how did Office Base happen?
Guest:Well, that same deal I'd done with Fox, Peter Chernin, who ran the whole thing at the time—
Guest:had also at that same comedy festival.
Guest:That was a good thing I went that year.
Guest:That was a, he, he saw, um, in a theater, we just ran a bunch of my stuff, including the four Milton office space shorts that had been done.
Guest:The original one.
Marc:This was at Aspen 95.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Same, same year.
Guest:He had seen that and just, he actually, he wanted a, he said that there should be a movie.
Guest:This, this could be a movie, the Milton character.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:I didn't see a whole movie in it.
Guest:Well, I had wanted to go into live action actually for, I just was always, you know, I mean, when I first was doing the shorts, one of the things I was thinking of is trying to pitch myself as a Terry Gilliam animator to a sketch show, you know, like the way he was to Monty Python.
Guest:That was your big plan.
Guest:That was my plan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in fact, I actually, there was a show called The Edge with Julie Brown as a sketch show, almost all female on Fox.
Guest:And Bill Plimpton had been doing animated segues and he had quit and they asked me to, and it was right around the time Beavis and Butthead was getting going and I did a couple for them and then they canceled the show.
Guest:But Jennifer Aniston was on that show actually, that's where I first saw her, but...
Guest:Anyway, so yeah, I'd been just kind of kicking around live action stuff.
Guest:And yeah, I said, I don't really see a whole movie in the Milton character.
Guest:And they got some writers to try to pitch and nothing landed.
Guest:And they said, well, what if it was...
Guest:I'd had another idea just kind of based on my time as an engineer about something like that.
Guest:And they said, well, what if you just do a movie?
Guest:They pitched to me a movie like Car Wash, but the workplace is your office setting that you've got there.
Guest:And I said, yeah, I could try to do that.
Guest:Car Wash.
Guest:Remember the 70s movie?
Marc:Oh, no, I know that would be well, but it's interesting.
Marc:I would never have thought that was the precedent.
Marc:I know.
Marc:That would be the good thing.
Marc:How about Car Wash?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, there was a...
Guest:There was a 50-50 chance you'd be like, what movie?
Guest:Car Wash meets nothing that you've ever seen other than maybe 9 to 5 or something.
Marc:Yeah, Car Wash was amazing.
Marc:It was Franklin Ajay.
Marc:Professor Irwin Corey was in it.
Marc:Richard Pryor was in it.
Guest:I remember that song.
Guest:Johnny Withers, I think.
Guest:Yeah, it was one person after another coming through, and it wasn't.
Guest:So that's like when, you know, later, I mean, one of the criticisms of the office space was maybe it wasn't strong on story, but I would say, well, they told me to.
Guest:do something like car wash.
Marc:But see, I think that's a misconception about story in general that if you have a journey, you know, what the fuck do you need a story for?
Marc:You know what I mean?
Guest:Well, yeah, it is a little... I mean, what's the... I think it's also a very easy thing for critics to pick apart going, oh, well, it doesn't have the three-act structure or the, you know...
Marc:Yeah, I mean, in the small experience I've had in writing television, I mean, you've got to make choices like that.
Marc:But I've had, there's been some success in, you know, if the sort of movement through the scenes is strong enough, no one's going to be like, nah, it didn't make sense to me.
Guest:I mean, you know, whatever carries you through to... Right, whatever carries you... I mean, you know, J.J.
Guest:Abrams said an interesting thing when... I think... I forget what script.
Guest:He used to... I used to have him read stuff, and I used to know him back then.
Guest:But he said, you know, you want to write... The way he said it, like, whether it's a screenplay or a cut of the movie, you want it to be like if you give it to someone to read and they're two pages in or 30 pages in...
Guest:50, if you take it away from them, you want them to say, wait, wait, no, give me back.
Guest:I want to see what... Right.
Guest:And you can accomplish that a lot of ways.
Guest:It can be like by wanting to find out what's going to happen to the kidnapped kid.
Guest:Or it can just be, you know... Does that guy ever get his staple back?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or just like...
Guest:This is reminding me of people I know.
Guest:I want to see what's going to happen to them.
Guest:There's a lot of ways to get that, and it's not necessarily always going to be this kind of simple.
Marc:So how did the script end up?
Marc:How did it end up?
Marc:Did you write the whole script?
Guest:yeah i wrote it uh wrote it turned it in and then um to my surprise they just kept i just it's another thing where i just kept waiting for it to not happen i started to get cold feet at one point i was just um my producer i i you know i i said well if we're gonna do it we got to shoot it in austin my kids are in school i don't want to go live in la for whatever and and uh
Guest:I remember going like, okay, just tell me when it's getting close to too late to back out.
Guest:Cause I may want to not do this.
Guest:I was just like, I don't know if I want to put this pressure on myself.
Guest:Cause you're going to direct it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was going to direct it.
Guest:And I was like, also just thinking, you know, what if this, I couldn't tell, like, you know, what if I can't find the right cast?
Guest:What if it sucks?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I was just going through all that.
Guest:And yeah,
Guest:I remember pulling up – they had opened a production office and pulling up and seeing like an 18-wheeler and people constructing sets and going, oh, shit.
Guest:It's happening.
Guest:This is really – those people are building those sets so I can have my little play pretend with this stuff I wrote and just getting sick to my stomach.
Guest:And then, oh, Jennifer Aniston's flying in and –
Guest:You know, there's going to be paparazzi.
Guest:Oh my God, what have I done here?
Guest:But one of the things that really tipped the scale, there was a few moments, but when Gary Cole came in to read for the part of Lumberg and I was just going, oh my God, if nothing else, if I can get this guy.
Guest:And he was kind of basing it on what I'd done in the cartoon, but he was taking it to this other level that I was just...
Guest:I'd only seen him in a made-for-TV movie where he played a serial killer, and I just thought, you know, if I get nothing else but this guy in a movie doing that, at least I got that.
Guest:And Stephen Root doing Milton, and then it started to come around, and I just thought, okay...
Guest:At least I know I have some scenes that me and my brother and my old roommates and musicians, friends of mine will laugh at.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But that was a lot of stress I wasn't used to.
Marc:But the characters were so defined, and the performances were fucking amazing.
Exactly.
Guest:Yeah, I felt like... I remember rehearsing with Ron and Gary Cole a scene where he's asking him to come in on Sunday.
Guest:And it's just the three of us in these cubicles of sets had been built.
Guest:And I'm just laughing and thinking, this is great.
Guest:And neither of them are laughing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They're playing it straight.
Guest:Am I just making something that... And Gary Cole actually hardly ever laughed through the whole thing.
Guest:And when I realized, I was thinking, does this guy...
Guest:know that this is funny or maybe it's not funny and why tell him either way and why tell he's what he's doing is was just seemed like magic to me and when there's a dream sequence where he's having sex with what's supposed to be jennifer aniston and so he has his shirt off and and uh we're about to shoot and i come up and i i had gotten the idea at the last minute to have him have the coffee cup and we're saying too and i
Guest:I come up with a coffee cup.
Guest:I'm about to hand it to him.
Guest:And I'm so used to him not laughing.
Guest:And he just starts busting out laughing.
Guest:And I was like, okay, Gary gets the joke.
Guest:He's just so focused.
Guest:He's just such a focused actor.
Marc:That's a hilarious beat.
Marc:That was just in the moment.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I thought, you know, he's had the coffee cup in every single scene.
Guest:Why not?
Marc:Now, so did you make exactly the movie you wanted to make?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I'd say...
Guest:I'd say just about everything in it.
Guest:There was some... Maybe... Like, there's one thing I can think of.
Guest:There's one... The studio is so up my ass about everything.
Guest:I mean, they didn't like the music I put in there.
Guest:I fought them on that.
Guest:I fought... They didn't like the cast.
Guest:They fought me on almost every detail of it.
Guest:So it was...
Guest:And I won all of them.
Guest:One thing I can think of, there's one, this is like petty, but there's one shot of Ron Livingston, the main guy, at the very end when the building's burning, there's one shot of him smiling that I don't like.
Guest:And this is how much they were meddling.
Guest:It was down to the last final edit and we're mixing.
Guest:And there's a shot where his smile looks more natural and not as big as that one.
Guest:And that one didn't.
Guest:And they just fought me.
Guest:And I was like, you know what?
Guest:It's like a two or three second shot.
Guest:Let them have it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Now I look at him like, ah, fuck.
Guest:I should have.
Guest:I won every other battle.
Guest:Why did I put that?
Marc:That was the one bone you threw them.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And it's one of the last shots of him in the movie.
Guest:And I'm just like.
Guest:ah shit it still sticks with you yeah a little bit but i mean if i i can't believe i got all those ghetto boys songs and all those great i mean i i you know that when they're smashing the printer that song i had to fight tooth and nail to get that song in there and and damn it feels good to be a gangster they didn't want that they didn't so it's i i feel lucky that i got the movie
Marc:Well, the interesting thing about, again, is that that movie just over time and even now still kind of builds this cult following.
Marc:And it's a reference that almost everybody knows about.
Marc:And people can watch it multiple times.
Guest:Yeah, it's really nice.
Guest:It's been really sweet for me to have people still like it.
Marc:Because on the release, how did it do on the release?
Yeah.
Guest:Didn't do that well.
Guest:I mean, it wasn't a huge disaster because it only cost $10 million.
Guest:But over time.
Guest:Oh, it's been a huge profit for them.
Guest:I mean, they've made, they still make money off it, I'm sure.
Guest:It still airs on cable.
Guest:It took them forever.
Guest:There's this, the red stapler, Swingline didn't make red staplers.
Guest:And I painted it, had them paint it that color so it would stand out in the cubicle.
Guest:And so over the years, when it started to catch on, people would call Swingline to try to get a red stapler.
Guest:They didn't know what they were talking about.
Guest:There was a Wall Street Journal article about this.
Guest:And then someone was selling red staplers on eBay illegally and making a bunch of money.
Guest:So Swingline just started making red staplers, and it became their biggest selling stapler ever.
Guest:and it was i actually originally i think it was boston staple staplers was in the script and boston said no you can't even use our name we don't want to yeah and swing line they didn't give us any money but they said yes right so uh so take it off for that boston staplers yeah or whatever you're called are they still selling red staplers
Guest:Yeah, they sell a lot of them.
Guest:I think last time I checked, it was their biggest.
Marc:That's amazing.
Marc:So how many years between that and Idiocracy?
Guest:So that was 99, Office Space came out.
Guest:Idiocracy came out in 2006.
Guest:So yeah, after Office Space, I just said, I'm not doing this anymore.
Guest:I'm just going to...
Marc:Why?
Marc:Was it too taxing the experience of directing?
Guest:You didn't like directing?
Guest:Taxing.
Guest:And also, I wanted to just be there for every one of my kids' games and recitals and just to be around.
Guest:I was tired of always getting on a plane and flying to LA.
Marc:And you made bank.
Marc:You could relax.
Guest:Yeah, and King of the Hill I could do from Austin, and so... Practical.
Guest:Yeah, I took it easy for a while.
Marc:And idiocracy.
Marc:And also at this time, I mean, now South Park's out, and you are sort of this respected senior in a way.
Marc:Elder statesman.
Marc:An elder statesman, but also what I started to realize about these animations, about South Park and about Beavis and about The Simpsons to a degree, is that...
Marc:You know, there's an amazing freedom to animation.
Marc:I mean, you can fucking, you know, say and do almost anything and imply almost anything and take on sacred cows or really turn things inside out.
Marc:You know, when it's couched in animation, it just seems like the freedom of it is amazing.
Marc:And, like, I don't know what your relationship is with those South Park guys, but, I mean, once that started happening, you know, it had to be impressive.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:No, I love South Park.
Guest:I know those guys.
Guest:I've gotten to know them really well over the years, actually.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, in fact, I met them before South Park came out when they had done that short.
Marc:The Brian Boyatano.
Guest:Yeah, the Brian Boyatano thing.
Guest:And, in fact, they came to the... Were they Three Arts too?
Guest:Did you... I don't think they ever were.
Yeah.
Guest:Three Hearts went after him, I'm sure.
Guest:But they came to the Beavis and Butthead movie premiere, and that's where they met Isaac Hayes for the first time.
Guest:He was playing, because he did the opening song for the movie.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:I don't know if that's how they ended up choosing him, but they did.
Guest:That's where they met him the first time?
Guest:Yeah, at the Beavis and Butthead premiere.
Guest:I remember those guys being there.
Guest:Yeah, they've... Man, I mean, they're so talented.
Guest:That stuff is just...
Guest:Smart and blowingly good.
Marc:It stays relevant.
Marc:And those characters, again, I think that, not that you created a playbook, but to use sort of like kids with demented points of view, the traction you can get from that is amazing.
Guest:Yeah, there's also something that's funny about animation.
Guest:It didn't occur to me until I was well into doing it, but it's hard to explain.
Guest:There's something kind of cowardly in a funny way about, you know, you're doing these little drawings and you're making fun of people and you're hiding behind this.
Guest:You know, you're not putting your face on the camera.
Guest:Yeah, but it also makes it funny to me that it's cowardly for some reason.
Marc:But it's not cowardly.
Marc:It's actually the most reasonable and also the most accessible way to explore the things that people think or feel, but they aren't allowed to express.
Guest:Yeah, that's true.
Guest:There's a scene in Kill Bill that Quentin, he went into animation for this awful thing where this
Guest:the girl's mothers that killed on the right.
Guest:And, and I remember him saying it was, you know, I thought it was great.
Guest:I thought it was genius movie, but that him saying that, you know, I didn't want to actually drip blood on a little kid and stuff.
Guest:And he went into this, was the anime?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Anime style stuff.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:Yeah, you can do a lot of stuff that you wouldn't- Take license.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:All right, so you find- What was kind of boiling up in you that created the next movie?
Yeah.
Guest:I had gotten the idea... I guess I was just thinking about evolution or something.
Guest:I'd gotten the idea when I was writing the Beavis and Butt-Head movie that now that we don't have predators, what happened?
Guest:It just favors whoever has the most kids.
Guest:I was just thinking about that.
Guest:Then I started thinking there could be something funny.
Guest:I'd seen... Well, the year 2001 was coming up, and...
Guest:I'd watched 2001 again and just thought, wouldn't that have been funny if that movie was just, you know, giant Walmarts and the Jerry Springer show instead of this clean future, high-tech future that everybody envisioned.
Guest:Everything's pristine and nice and it just doesn't seem to be going that way.
Guest:And so I just thought, what if you just charted from the 60s to now and just kept going out in that direction for another 500 years?
Guest:And it was just...
Guest:I was also, I was at Disneyland with my daughters and, um, in line at the teacup rides and, uh, this, this like, uh, this kind of this redneck mama behind me with her two little kids, like, you know, three and five years old, like mine were, I guess, mine were a little older, but.
Guest:And then a Mexican woman comes up, and I guess they had had an argument before, and this woman behind me starts going, Yeah, say that to my face, bitch.
Guest:I'll kick your fucking ass, bitch.
Guest:Come over here.
Guest:And she's yelling back, and I'm just thinking...
Guest:disneyland and the teacup rides and this wasn't how disney walt disney imagined this being you know and i'm just my daughters are with me and i want to just turn around and you know say something to her but it was kind of scary like i thought a fight was going to break out yeah anyway i just that that was actually the instigate i had written the treatment for it a while before that but i thought thought wow i should really um i should really do something with this and uh
Guest:That was the moment?
Guest:Yeah, that was the moment.
Marc:There will come a time where everyone will talk like this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'd just broken my ankle surfing as I was on crutches.
Guest:And I had a lot of time sitting down.
Guest:So I just started writing it then.
Guest:And then I put it on a shelf for a while.
Guest:And then Eitan Cohen, who worked on King of the Hill.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I had Fox hire him, and then we went and actually wrote it over a period of, I don't know, two or three months.
Guest:Just we'd get together.
Guest:It was the first time I'd written like this, where we actually wrote it in the room together, the first draft.
Guest:And then I went and did a rewrite later.
Guest:But it was something I put on the shelf.
Guest:We were looking at making it in 2002 and couldn't get anybody to be the lead in it.
Guest:Nobody wanted to.
Guest:do it and then I went and did a full rewrite of it why didn't they want to do it I think the script wasn't it was good it was a good idea but it wasn't that great and then when it came back I rewrote it and maybe it was a little better but I was I still I mean one of the things about that movie it was sort of a bigger concept than it was a movie to really it was such a I felt that big concept and it didn't I mean it could have it wasn't that's the weakness of it I think it's a better idea than it was
Guest:You need a big budget.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:That's what I read about.
Marc:It's like a dystopian satire.
Marc:I think Office Space is a workplace satire, but the things you were tackling logically were huge, and they were global, literally.
Marc:You could feel that you had budgetary restraints, but that made you lean into the actual jokes that you had.
Guest:I mean, the other thing, we were... Well, I was a little afraid to make it just because it was very daunting.
Guest:At some point when we tallied it up, I realized we had something like 65 speaking parts, which is not a good idea.
Guest:Right.
Guest:To find that many people who can play convincing dumbasses and... Ended up getting a lot of my friends actually in it.
Guest:But when Luke Wilson wanted to make it, then that's when I thought, okay, this could be... I'd sort of...
Guest:I remember thinking of him when we rewrote it, and when it actually, that's kind of who, the rewrite I did was imagining him doing it just sort of, sometimes it helps you write when you're thinking of a particular actor.
Guest:And then he responded really well to it, and so, yeah, then it, we started, we shot it in 2004, and then it was, didn't come out until 2006.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I'd never seen Dax before, and I thought he was genius in it.
Guest:I thought he was great.
Marc:I mean, I couldn't believe it.
Marc:As a comedic performance with this weird heart, he was great.
Marc:There was a part of him that just couldn't wrap his brain around the fact that he might have been human or more human.
Yeah.
Guest:i loved what he it wasn't how i imagined that character and he i had known him he had done king of the hill and i'd met him he came in and read for that and it just i just loved it it kept it stuck with me and that was another one though that there was one guy who was the head of i think marketing who got it in his head the problem with the movie was dax's voice and he wanted dax to completely loop the entire movie in a different voice and
Guest:I had him do a couple scenes just to say I tried and it just – it's always nice to hear that people like Dax in that movie because I loved it and I hear that a lot actually.
Guest:But, you know, it's weird how one person in a studio can get in your head and go like, shit, maybe he's right.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:But I –
Marc:after a certain point though it's like you got to go like who the fuck is that guy yeah you're like you know they're like it's it's weird that you know someone can say something with authority and make he made everybody else there believe it too it's right it's really it's interesting because you can assign blame to an entity but then when you realize it it's like might just be one asshole yeah and it's like who the hell is that yeah
Marc:I mean, I just had this realization recently.
Marc:Like, everyone who assigns blame to corporations, I mean, obviously there's blame there, but it usually comes down to, like, this is one douchebag who's going to... And then that douchebag keeps getting promoted, usually.
Guest:Of course.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So what happened with that movie, ultimately?
Marc:You feel like you made the movie you could make or you wanted to make?
Guest:I mean, that one I could go, well, I wish this scene looked better.
Guest:There were scenes...
Guest:I felt like it was cursed from the beginning.
Guest:It was supposed to take place during a drought.
Guest:We shot it in Austin during one of the wettest summers ever, so we were constantly having to kill grass and put dirt down.
Marc:I mean, it was... Big undertaking.
Guest:Yeah, and it was...
Guest:I felt happy with what we had to work with, how fast it had to be done and everything.
Guest:I felt like I did as good as I could have done.
Guest:I mean, like I say, I do feel like it was maybe a bigger concept than it was a movie, and that was tricky.
Guest:But I think, I mean, we got it in on budget.
Guest:There wasn't, you know...
Guest:We had to cut a lot of... I wish I could have spent a little more on special effects.
Guest:I was getting so tired of... We came in on budget and they said, you know, you're going to be over on special effects, but don't worry about it.
Guest:Every movie's like that.
Guest:And then...
Guest:We did a test screening where there was literally just drawings of stuff like the Washington Monument.
Guest:No matter how much you prep an audience, it didn't go well.
Guest:And so then they just started saying, and they had promised me, you know, oh, we won't use this test screening against you.
Guest:This is just to see how it plays.
Guest:And then they immediately said, this didn't score well.
Guest:We need to cut the effects budget.
Guest:So I ended up having to... They were nickel and diming me on effects so badly.
Guest:There was a point where...
Guest:I just said, look, I'll pay for this myself.
Guest:I'll pay $30,000 to not have another one of these meetings.
Guest:And I actually ended up, without even telling them, Robert Rodriguez has in Austin, he has his own special effects people, and he said...
Guest:He said, look, I'm in between movies.
Guest:Because he finally got frustrated with effects companies and just said, I'm going to hire my own people.
Marc:He's got his whole operation down there.
Guest:Yeah, and so they actually did a couple effects shots.
Guest:Just to help out?
Guest:Just got free, yeah.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:And they were as good as any we had gotten, and we just put them in the movie.
Guest:I think we gave them a special thanks.
Guest:I hope we did.
Marc:You guys are friends?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, because you do voices in the Spy Kids movies, right?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I'm in a couple of those.
Guest:I'm in all three of the first three.
Marc:What's the character?
Guest:Donegan.
Guest:Yeah, I don't know.
Guest:I think I'm the missing agent in the first one, so a lot of it's my picture.
Guest:And I think he painted himself into a corner with that and had to have me in the other two.
Guest:But it was really fun to...
Marc:Oh, so those aren't animated.
Guest:Not yet.
Guest:They might be making an animated version, or maybe they have.
Marc:So you actually, you're the guy.
Guest:I'm actually in those things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm in office space also.
Guest:I'm the manager talking about the pieces of flair.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Do you like acting?
Guest:I'm always wearing a mustache.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When it's the right thing, I think I'm happy with what I did in Office Space.
Guest:But usually, like in the Spy Kids movies, I'm basically sort of the asshole cop with a mustache type thing.
Guest:And I think you could get better people than me to do that.
Guest:I was doing a lot of just kind of exposition and stuff.
Guest:It was really fun to do, though, just because my kids were in that age group where they were watching those movies.
Marc:Oh, so I was like, my dad.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And also just watching Robert.
Guest:I learned a lot watching the way he works, which is different than a lot of directors.
Marc:And then you're friends with the Jackass guys, apparently.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:They're good guys.
Marc:Knoxville's a great guy.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:I love that guy.
Marc:Yeah, he's great.
Marc:Good spirit.
Marc:There's a good American spirit to those movies.
Guest:Yes.
Yeah.
Marc:i really love those movies there's very few movies i've seen twice in the theater and i saw the first one twice in the theater and it still worked yeah oh god the the first time you see the first jackass that's like a big day yeah because you can't like right out of the gate you're like what the fuck is happening and it's just pure funny the spirit of it is just so yeah it's like and it's all it's life it's there you know there's people risking their lives yeah
Marc:For your entertainment.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Literally.
Marc:In the rawest way possible.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, I'll be honest with you.
Marc:I did not see Extract.
Guest:Oh, it's fine.
Guest:No, I'm going to watch it.
Guest:What happened?
Guest:It was just a little movie I made sort of at a not great time in my life.
Guest:It was very low budget and there's some good stuff in it.
Guest:I think Ben Affleck's amazing in it.
Guest:A lot of good performances in it.
Marc:What was the seed of the idea?
Guest:um that started with just a friend of mine talking about being married and just uh and we were just hypothetically talking about uh a guy who wanted to get divorced and hires a gigolo to see if his wife will cheat on him and right and then but then also i had an idea about a guy adam's extract was a you'd see as you're driving south of austin they make extract and i had a separate idea about um
Guest:just kind of a, a crazy kind of criminal girl who was really hot coming into the mix, kind of based on something that had happened, someone I'd known.
Guest:And, and I just writing these scenes actually a while ago and just kind of combined them.
Guest:And I don't know, I just had it lying around for a while and just, um, put it together.
Guest:And Jason Bateman wanted to do it.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I thought it was – I like it.
Guest:It's not – it didn't do super well, but it also hardly cost anything.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, I think everyone – it was mostly private investors paid for it, and then Miramax came in at the end.
Marc:Everyone got their money back?
Guest:yeah i think everyone did all right on it it's still it was less a year ago it was in the top 10 itunes oh yeah downloads yeah so it's i mean it gets it gets some uh some traction here and there is it picking up a little cold following yeah yeah it seems to be okay i gotta watch it i apologize for no no you know i've done all i can yeah i mean i enjoy silicon valley a lot and i'm not easy and in some of the and some of those guys like i have personal problems with oh
Marc:as a comedian.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Yeah, a lot of them are, well, yeah, you got, well, you've worked with Kumail, right?
Marc:I've worked with Kumail, I've worked with TJ, and Josh Brenner's actually my assistant on my show.
Guest:Oh, that's right, that's right.
Marc:I forget that you got, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, so he, you know, him and I actually have an onscreen relationship.
Marc:But, like, Kumail and I, no, I respect these guys, and they're funny guys, but, like, you know, I'm a cantankerous fuck sometimes.
Marc:And TJ Miller, like, sort of as a person, has always sort of annoyed me.
Marc:But he's fucking, he's great.
Marc:And I know him.
Marc:And, you know, I'm a known cranky bastard.
Marc:But he's great in that.
Marc:And Kumail's great.
Marc:And everybody's great.
Marc:And I just had...
Marc:Martin Starr in here recently.
Guest:Oh, that's right.
Marc:He said he did it.
Marc:But the show's really funny.
Marc:I mean, it's just purely funny.
Marc:And it's like the world you created with those comic actors and the idea behind it, it all equals great comedy to me.
Marc:And I think people are responding to it that way.
Marc:What was the evolution of that idea to screen?
Guest:That started with a couple that John Altshuler and Dave Krinsky, who were on King of the Hill, had... John had talked about an idea with engineers.
Guest:And, you know, obviously, like I had known that world.
Guest:And he was talking about...
Guest:doing something sort of like falcon crest or dallas but about the about tech money instead of right oil or wine scott rudin had pitched me an idea about gamers they had bought the rights to some story i think and i just know video games i don't know enough about that and right that's something if you get it wrong they're just gonna yeah you just get yeah hated on on reddit yeah you'll be washed up on reddit yeah
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I said, well, what if, you know, would you want to do something like this about startups in that world and shot the pilot.
Guest:And then when it became series, Alec Berg came on to co-run it with me.
Marc:I think that the casting is pretty amazing.
Marc:Middle Ditch is great.
Marc:TJ's great.
Marc:I think they're such a great combination.
Marc:Everything hinges on that dynamic.
Marc:And they all seem to settle into their characters so beautifully.
Marc:The comedy doesn't seem like you've created a world where you can go a bit over the top because they all want to go over the top.
Marc:The nature of their ostentatiousness
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Is is is over the top.
Marc:And these are people that don't really know how to do that.
Guest:So that's what's interesting about the world is these people have so much.
Guest:There's absurd amounts of money going into into this world.
Guest:And there are people who don't quite know how to enjoy themselves.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They they don't they wouldn't know how to flaunt it if they tried, really.
Guest:And they don't really want to.
Guest:And I mean, it's just it's yeah, it's pretty crazy.
Guest:Yeah, the cast, I think, I love the cast.
Guest:And they actually, geez, I think all of them, except all the main people you see on the poster, and then Josh, who wasn't on the poster, but is, you know, main character in the show, plays Big Head, all of them.
Guest:read for TJ's part, for Ehrlich.
Guest:And then I went back and sort of... I mean, we had some other characters in there, but we had a Satanist and whatever.
Guest:But then seeing each of them had certain qualities that I recognized in the world of engineer nerd types.
Guest:And so I went back and kind of tailored, just kind of wrote to the way they played it.
Guest:And it's just... The way they all gelled, I could tell right away shooting the pilot, just when they all sat down...
Guest:They all sat down in that main room in the places, basically, that they are in the show.
Guest:Like, Martin sat in the corner.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I was just like, yeah, okay, this works.
Guest:You two over there and TJ kind of wandering around.
Guest:And I didn't realize they all had this – I didn't know – I knew Thomas and I'd worked with TJ, but I didn't know that they all had these – I didn't know Kumail was a stand-up.
Guest:I didn't know that they all knew each other from improv and all these –
Guest:And Thomas, yeah, they go way back.
Guest:And then Martin.
Guest:And then, actually, Josh was in a... When he was, I don't know, like 12, was cast in a movie that I was producing that ended up having the plug pulled on it.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Because he's from Houston, and it was a local fire.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And he came up to me while we were shooting.
Guest:He goes...
Guest:hey, do you remember this movie?
Guest:I think it was called El Camino Love Story.
Guest:Yeah, I can't remember the character's names.
Guest:I was just like, oh my God, I totally remember you.
Guest:But he was a kid then.
Marc:What's interesting about these characters is that the way their innate vulnerabilities as sort of
Marc:overly intelligent nerdy guys plays against their ego like there's always going to be this weird they're they're never going to be able to get rid of this this inherent you know vulnerability that comes from their intelligence and their their their nerdiness yeah you see it i mean you see it all the time i've i've uh i've met a lot of big tech billionaires and they're still socially awkward and some of them are even a little aspergery you know yeah and uh
Marc:this totally reminds me of what you know like the guys i knew at in physics and in and in silicon valley who are just super smart to create a world where that can really work and and to have it be as and to have that type of character and not make fun of that type of character and that like you know martin star you know to have him be a satanist and just sort of be matter of fact about it is is it's just beautiful like they like
Marc:Usually these, you know, that cast of characters are punchlines.
Marc:And here, you know, they're driving the narrative and they all have a fully, you know, rounded human component to them that they're sympathetic.
Marc:They're not punchlines.
Marc:And they have an inner life.
Marc:And there's a vulnerability to all of them that's just great.
Guest:Yeah, that's what the goal was, you know, to make it.
Guest:Yeah, and like this Satanist thing was, you know, every time I've met or heard of one, they're like science fiction club or something.
Marc:Yeah, and even the head of the Satanist church, Anton LaVey, was like this huckster.
Marc:He was a carny.
Marc:He was a goof.
Marc:But it's really just about sort of like do whatever the fuck you want.
Guest:Yeah, and it's some odd people joining a club.
Marc:Well, it's funny because it's sort of like what swingers really look like.
Marc:You ever see pictures of swinger parties?
Marc:It's like a trailer park.
Guest:Well, we had this book, and there was a picture of a satanic baptism, and it's just like...
Guest:fat, weird, unattractive people naked and just standing there with these cheap, almost papier-mâché-looking goat heads and stuff like that.
Marc:It's the human component.
Guest:When you'd hear about Satanism in the 80s, it was always Pat Robertson or somebody talking about this dark, evil force out there that we need to combat.
Guest:And when you really look at it, it's just a ragtag group of weirdos.
Marc:Right.
Marc:They want to fuck one in different places.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Well, great job, man.
Marc:It was great talking to you.
Marc:I appreciate you coming down.
Guest:Yeah, thanks.
Guest:This was fun.
Marc:That's it.
Marc:That's the show.
Marc:How cool was that?
Marc:Talking to Mike Judge.
Marc:Albuquerque, man.
Marc:I felt it, man.
Marc:I felt the connection.
Marc:I felt the connection, the Albuquerque connection to the animation.
Marc:I just wanted to say our theme music is by John Montagna.
Marc:Other music on today's episode was by DJ Copley.
Marc:Right now, we'll do some of my music.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com.
Marc:And do what you got to do.
Marc:Get the free app, upgrade to premium, get some justcoffee.coop, pal.
Marc:Check the wtfpod.com slash guide to see who's been on the show.
Marc:You can do all that stuff, man.
Guest:You can do it.
Guest:Boomer lives!