Episode 725 - James L. Brooks
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuck-a-crats?
Marc:What the fub-a-click-ins?
Marc:How's it going with you guys?
Marc:I got back from Salt Lake City this morning and had a great time.
Marc:Had great shows.
Marc:Wise Guys is a good club.
Marc:Keith, the guy who runs and owns the place, a good guy, is all solid.
Marc:Crowds are great.
Marc:I've been to Utah many times.
Marc:I like Utah.
Marc:I don't know why.
Marc:There's no place like Utah.
Marc:There's no place like Salt Lake.
Marc:And every time I'm captivated and mystified because it's very pleasant, but very weird.
Marc:Like when people ask, what's it like?
Marc:What's Salt Lake City like?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I don't know what to tell you.
Marc:No place to compare it to.
Marc:Very pleasant,
Marc:and very odd and we all know why it was a city built by a relatively new religion religiously speaking it's a new one new franchise exciting new offshoot
Marc:Joe Smith went up into the mountains, came back with some ideas, some visions to make Jesus American, to Americanize the Jesus, and it took.
Marc:Who knows?
Marc:So they set up shop in Utah, and they built their little...
Marc:cozy theocracy there and i uh i like it i like it i'm a bit fascinated i'm a bit fascinated and who am i necessarily to judge the faithful and those with hope
Marc:When I don't have anything in place, but hopefully coffee works in the morning.
Marc:Hopefully something will keep me afloat.
Marc:Good sense of being grounded in my body and in my jobs and in my creativity.
Marc:That's what I'm banking on.
Marc:I got no big system that cost me 10% of my jack on a yearly basis.
Marc:Something's costing me money, but it ain't that.
Marc:But anyway, did I mention James Brooks is on the show today?
Marc:The Honorable James L. Brooks.
Marc:amazing creator career and show business he was uh yeah created the uh mary tyler moore show taxi the simpsons directed and wrote terms of endearment broadcast news as good as it gets the guy is uh uh an innovator in television a a mold breaker
Marc:One of the greats also did some great cameo in Modern Romance with Albert Brooks.
Marc:I cannot say enough about James L. Brooks.
Marc:I had a wonderful conversation with him.
Marc:I do want to tell you the tale.
Marc:The tale of the...
Marc:The baby, the baby tale from Marin.
Marc:And thank you so much for all the amazing, positive feedback on the last season of Marin and the finale of the season and finale of the show itself.
Marc:Just really, people are really getting it.
Marc:And I put a lot of effort into balancing that last episode.
Marc:I did write that one.
Marc:I didn't direct it, but I was certainly up the director's ass a bit, specifically about that last shot.
Marc:Well, here's the deal.
Marc:In the finale, I have to tell you that there were three babies and you only need two.
Marc:And it was not a comfortable situation.
Marc:It was not what happened.
Marc:Here's what happens.
Marc:We needed a baby and I needed the baby to at least pass as something that could come out of a union between me and the woman in the show.
Marc:Anna Kunkel, who did a great job.
Marc:So it had to look like our baby.
Marc:Had to.
Marc:So you end up, during casting, I go through stuff, and then the casting agent sends us stuff.
Marc:When you're dealing with an eight-month-old, it doesn't need to be that specific.
Marc:You just need to get babies.
Marc:You need babies.
Marc:And, well...
Marc:I had other things going on, so I left it to my showrunners.
Marc:They showed me a few pictures of babies that were on the computer, on the site, babies that had dark hair and looked like they might be me or might be my kid.
Marc:I let them cast a baby.
Marc:I okayed a bunch of possibilities, and that was that.
Marc:The day we're shooting the finale, and look, man, that shooting schedule, it is tough.
Marc:I mean, it's quick.
Marc:You don't have time for rehearsals.
Marc:You got to just shoot, shoot, shoot to make your day and get everything in without going overtime too much.
Marc:We rarely went overtime.
Marc:But I'm in every scene.
Marc:I'm preparing, and I'm off set.
Marc:And I'm on I'm in my trailer.
Marc:I'm getting makeup and going over the lines and they take me to set.
Marc:And the first scene that we shot, if you watch the finale, was me in my trailer with binoculars looking at Shay played by Anna Conkle and her mom.
Marc:And the baby, you know, Shay is leaving, giving the baby to her mother.
Marc:And there's that scene where she's getting in the truck, in the van with her friends.
Marc:That's the first time I see the baby literally through binoculars that we cast.
Marc:And I felt like something was up.
Marc:I wasn't sure.
Marc:I'm like, could that be my baby?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It's still pretty far away.
Marc:And I don't meet the baby.
Marc:I don't meet the mother.
Marc:I just go start rehearsing for my next shit because I'm not in a scene with them.
Marc:And then the next scene that we shoot is the scene where I'm having the conversation with Shay at the table.
Marc:And her mother walks in with the baby.
Marc:And I have that exchange with the baby.
Marc:And it's a pretty powerful scene.
Marc:It's an important scene.
Marc:Now, Rob Cohen's directing.
Marc:Showrunner Steve Aglarum is out at the Video Village.
Marc:Everyone's around watching this.
Marc:Writers.
Marc:And then they bring the baby in.
Marc:And, you know, I'm doing the scene.
Marc:And the grandmother walks in holding the baby.
Marc:And this is the first time I'm seeing the baby up close.
Marc:And it's a little awkward because the baby is definitely not white.
Marc:And I was like...
Marc:because i don't want to be inappropriate i don't want to feel you know like i'm you know racist i guess in this way but i i went up to rob cohen the director i said is that baby reading correctly and he's like yeah yeah i mean the baby's dark but i mean you're jewish and that happens a lot of jewish babies you know are dark when they're born and i'm like but you know
Marc:Is it?
Marc:Okay.
Marc:All right.
Marc:And then I go out to Sievert and I say, is that baby, I mean, does it look all right?
Marc:And Sievert's like, yeah, yeah, don't worry about it.
Marc:It'll be fine.
Marc:It'll be fine.
Marc:And I'm like, okay.
Marc:And it's just, and I'm not a prima donna and I'm not, you know, I don't put my foot down much, but you know, something wasn't quite right with me, you know?
Marc:And then we do this scene again and you know, I'm holding the baby and I'm like, you know, this baby is, it's a, the baby's has black features and you know, it's not, it's just, it doesn't,
Marc:It was a very difficult thing for me because because I knew, look, I don't want to.
Marc:I want people to work.
Marc:I certainly want babies to work.
Marc:And, you know, I don't want to be weird.
Marc:But this baby looked ethnic, looked black, looked light skinned, black.
Marc:And I just was, because I thought to myself, well, that's okay.
Marc:But then it would imply a completely different thing.
Marc:There would be another layer of mystery or meaning to it.
Marc:Or something arty.
Marc:And that was not what I wanted out of the finale of my show.
Marc:This is my script.
Marc:It's my decision.
Marc:It's my show, ultimately.
Marc:And I went up to Rob again, I think.
Marc:And I said, I don't know, man.
Marc:That baby...
Marc:It doesn't look black to you?
Marc:I mean, I don't want to be a dick here, but I mean, this baby's got to look a little like my baby.
Marc:And the funny thing was is that they knew, but they just kept trying to rationalize because, you know, we didn't want to lose the day of shooting.
Marc:There was a lot at risk.
Marc:So they were willing on some level, if I would just go along with it, to just kind of like, yeah, be all right.
Marc:And it's a very awkward situation.
Marc:But, you know, come take three, and I'm holding this baby, and I'm like, dude, you know, you got to do something.
Marc:This is the finale of the show.
Marc:This is not supposed to be an art film.
Marc:This is supposed to be pretty specific.
Marc:One of the parts of the narrative is not for people to go like, wait a minute, where's that baby from?
Marc:So I went out and I said, see, but we can't do it.
Marc:I can't do it.
Marc:And I felt bad.
Marc:But it was a casting decision, and we had to get another baby.
Marc:I mean, that baby got paid for the work that it was contracted to do, and the mother, I don't know what she was told.
Marc:But apparently after the fact, they told me that these two babies, you have to have twins, were 50% Latino, 25% black, and 25% white.
Marc:And the thing said that they could play white on their resume.
Marc:and uh and and that was that was it so we we had to um i guess fire a baby for for somewhat racial reasons from just a miss uh yeah maybe it was misrepresentation but i will say this that if you do look at the baby in the finale when i'm in the um
Marc:in the RV with the binoculars, and Shay's handing that baby to the mother.
Marc:That is that baby.
Marc:So that baby made it in, and then we had to find other babies.
Marc:But it was hard to find babies that would maybe look like my kid because you need two babies.
Marc:If you're lucky, you can get twins.
Marc:We couldn't get twins.
Marc:So in this weird, frantic clusterfuck of a casting call, we had to find some babies.
Marc:There were no twins available.
Marc:So we had to find two different babies that look kind of alike because they can only work a few hours a day.
Marc:So we somehow managed to find a couple of babies that were a few months apart that look enough alike.
Marc:And there's three babies in that show.
Marc:But it was kind of an embarrassing and difficult day.
Marc:Firing a baby is not easy, especially for somewhat racial reasons.
Marc:Moving on now to Mr. James L. Brooks.
Marc:Look, this guy is one of the greats.
Marc:And it's very interesting.
Marc:There's a lot of talk about luck.
Marc:And a lot of people don't necessarily factor in.
Marc:Some of you know that.
Marc:But this is a great, very prolific creator and writer.
Marc:And he mentions luck a lot.
Marc:And luck is definitely a factor most of the time in getting success and holding on to it.
Marc:My timing for the first time in my life when I started this podcast just happened to be cosmically in line.
Marc:My timing was lucky.
Marc:I didn't have any real forethought about it.
Marc:It came when it did, but everything synced up and I got lucky.
Marc:I think I can deliver the goods, but sometimes that initial push is just a combination of forces that you had no control over.
Marc:So please enjoy me and James Brooks.
Marc:Nice to see you, Mr. Brooks.
Guest:Good to see you.
Marc:It feels like it's been a long time coming for some reason.
Marc:What swayed you?
Marc:What swayed you this way?
Guest:You know, they always say indigenous people.
Guest:There was a certain time when they felt cameras captured their soul.
Guest:And, you know, I think they were absolutely right.
Guest:So I'm not, you know, I'm not.
Guest:But I just love your show so much that I thought, you know, it was almost like a responsibility to show up.
Marc:that you had to come do it.
Guest:Yeah, he began to be too self-conscious not doing it.
Marc:Well, I think the first time I reached out to you was because Judd tried to put us together, right, a few years ago.
Guest:I remember that, man.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah, what was that for?
Marc:Well, no, he said that you should do the show.
Marc:Apatow said you should talk to James L. Brooks.
Marc:And I'm like, all right.
Marc:And then I emailed you.
Marc:And then you were like, okay, maybe we'll do it or something.
Marc:That sounds like it.
Marc:Yeah, it was a few years ago.
Marc:You were writing something.
Marc:Still on it.
Marc:Still on it.
Marc:Always writing.
Marc:Jesus.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But still writing that.
Marc:No, really?
Marc:Do you know what it is?
Marc:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Is it a never-ending thing?
Guest:No, hopefully not.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Though there are days when it seems like that.
Marc:What is it?
Guest:It's screenplay, I think, is the technical term.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And you've been writing it for a couple years?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Does it generally take that long?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This is stretching.
Guest:If I kept records like this, which I don't, this might be a record setter.
Guest:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:How long has it been?
Guest:But it's in this groove.
Guest:It's...
Marc:been that kind of rhythm for me uh-huh and what what what does that entail every day with that i mean you have a story obviously in your head so i mean now see that's great that you think that and you'd assume that and and and and the way i'm i'm flattered
Guest:By your having that belief.
Guest:I sort of found it.
Guest:I sort of started with some characters on this, and it became a story I never would have imagined at the beginning.
Guest:So I wrote it with a great deal of freedom, which I'm now paying for.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:What kind of freedom?
Guest:Just to say, you know, a scene doesn't have to go this way to match an outline.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Surprises can happen to you, and they did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm going to sound more positive than I feel.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:We'll see if it sticks.
Guest:But it was exciting in a certain way doing it that way, roughly knowing what I wanted to address.
Guest:Based on characters.
Guest:But not having a story.
Guest:Yeah, based on characters and seeing where they went.
Guest:and um and and a lot of unexpected things happen now i'm going through and giving everything a purpose so it's a little that's interesting and trying to make it adhere to a spine right like to try to try to answer the question the reason i have called you here today yeah right yeah yeah the reason i've summoned you characters to move through this and hopefully the audience yeah
Marc:Oh, that's interesting that you start with characters.
Marc:I mean, there's been some pretty strong characters that you've created, so that makes sense that you would start with characters as opposed to... What?
Marc:I mean, you know who I just saw yesterday, because he's on my TV show occasionally, is Judd Hirsch.
Marc:Oh, wow.
Marc:Yeah, and I said I was talking to you today, and he's like, oh...
Marc:Yeah, Jim Brooks is great.
Marc:You know, all the funniest stuff in Taxi was him.
Marc:He said that.
Marc:Not so, but.
Marc:But he had one example, which is weird.
Marc:And I'm trying to remember what it was.
Marc:It was a tag where Christopher Lloyd, the tag was, could you slow it down or something?
Marc:And then he said it slower.
Marc:Do you know what I'm talking about?
Guest:Oh, no, that's a classic.
Guest:That's a classic joke.
Guest:It's not a tag.
Guest:It's a classic joke.
Guest:We believe it rivals that Jack Benny, you know, your money or your life, that legendary laugh on radio.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Because Jimmy Burroughs, who directed the episode, it was, you know, a burnt out, you know, drug casualty, which the Reverend Jim was on Taxi.
Guest:And Chris Lloyd, great and funny.
Guest:And he wanted to be a taxi driver.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And so he had to take a driving test.
Guest:And it was, what do you do with a flashing yellow light?
Guest:The answer was slow down.
Guest:And what do you do on a passing?
Guest:Well, it kept on going.
Guest:What do you?
Guest:And Jimmy Burroughs, and the laugh kept on getting bigger each time.
Guest:And Jimmy Burroughs just arbitrarily at one point said, that's it, you know, and just did cut.
Guest:And it would have been great to see when we started to go down the mountain that the laugh became less.
Guest:But that's the biggest joke I've ever been around.
Yeah.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I don't know who wrote it.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:You don't have any idea?
Guest:I really don't know.
Marc:You don't?
Marc:Because I heard that about, someone else said that.
Marc:I heard another rumor that even with The Simpsons, to this day, if they're stuck, they'll call you and you'll deliver a tag.
Guest:Well, you know, not when they're stuck.
Guest:We sort of all live on this little conclave doing The Simpsons.
Guest:So I'm around and it's great.
Guest:You're there every day?
Guest:I mean, for a lot of it?
Guest:I'm at three days a week, yeah.
Guest:So you love to work?
Guest:i love that work i love that job i love i love that every week you know i'm in a room with writers i respect and you're pitching jokes and you're it keeps you it keeps exciting right keep it it keeps your level it keeps you good and in the freedom that you were able to to sort of you know get from from animation i mean i think we're sort of going backwards but but let's let's not do that let's let's start let's go backwards let's go backwards
Guest:Go all the way back.
Marc:Come on, man.
Marc:Well, when I was looking, when I was doing my minor bit of research on you, like I realized that my mother was, like I remember Room 222 because my mother watched it regularly.
Marc:And like it's in my mind.
Marc:Karen Valentine is in my mind.
Marc:And the other guy, the guy who played the principal, what was his name?
Marc:Constant.
Guest:Michael Coates.
Guest:Michael Constantine.
Marc:Michael Constantine, and then like Mary Tyler Moore, Rhoda, these were my mother's shows.
Marc:I used to sit at the base of the bed and watch these shows with her, and they're all your shows.
Marc:And I guess maybe, obviously it wasn't just my mother, it wasn't a small audience, these were huge shows.
Marc:But how did you like start, because you seem, your reverence for writing and for the writer is deep and you put the writer at the top of the sort of artistic pay scale in a way.
Marc:Where did that, when did you start writing officially in your mind?
Marc:What was the drive?
Guest:I don't think I have an honest answer for that.
Guest:I always read plays.
Guest:When I was a kid, I read plays.
Guest:I read plays more than books for some reason.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And I read books, yeah.
Guest:But I never imagined that anybody could actually become a writer.
Guest:And even though, you know, and then I took some courses, some good ones, you know, just some courses in writing.
Guest:So it always was a great thing to me.
Guest:But I don't think I'm alone in that, you know, because when I talk to other writers, and maybe you have it in your way,
Guest:And that it takes about 20 years of working as a writer before if somebody says, what do you do for a living?
Guest:You can just say, I'm a writer.
Guest:I'm a writer.
Guest:You know what I'm talking about?
Guest:Sure.
Marc:There's a confidence element to it, but there's also...
Marc:And also, like, whether or not you've been paid to do the job.
Guest:I mean, on some level, if you're paid to do the job... Well, I mean, even after you're paid to do the job, because it's every... You know, people who do it, love it, wanted it.
Guest:You know, it's just, you know, for everything it is, it's...
Guest:So that you can't believe that it's your profession for a long time.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:You think you're getting away with something?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that's generally true in Hollywood.
Guest:Can I ask you a question because it was on my mind from before?
Guest:You know, when you're talking about freedom and stuff like that.
Guest:Do you feel very free in your work?
Guest:Now?
Guest:Do you feel, yeah.
Guest:Do you feel like...
Marc:Yeah, I feel like what's happened for me is that, you know, I found this weird little niche that enables me to do pretty much whatever I want.
Marc:I'm relatively hard on myself about, you know, conversations in retrospect, and I'm still pretty hard on myself about my comedy and stuff.
Marc:But the freedom that the one thing that I think about constantly is, you know, how much money does anybody need?
Marc:So like, you know, and I'm not really driven by that.
Marc:And I sometimes I'm worried about that.
Marc:does that make sense yes like I can do whatever I want I don't know if I'm utilizing it the best I can so there's that so whatever freedom I have it's not allowing me peace of mind but maybe it will I think you have to get to a point where you honestly don't give a shit on some level and
Marc:And also, it comes down to me as sort of like, well, what do I... Do you ever ask yourself, what do I really want to do?
Marc:Or are you doing exactly what you want to do?
Guest:No, I never ask myself... I never question what I do for a living.
Marc:But no, for your fun and for your heart.
Guest:That I find... Like, I'm sort of...
Guest:I never you know my thing people people's joke about me for so long yeah was that I'd always turn good fortune into misfortune and talk about it that way and people and you know I have decades of people doing those kind of jokes off me you know that I'm you know that I'm always worried about something and and for a while now I've been quite the reverse and and and that's that's disorienting a little weird for me well that's I think that's freedom right
Marc:That is freedom of mind.
Marc:It's peace of mind.
Marc:It's okay.
Marc:Things are okay.
Guest:And you're very lucky when you can... There used to be a time in movies where if you went in and said, I have a crazy idea, people would lean forward.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I don't think they're leaning forward anymore.
Guest:I think if you come in and say, you know, you describe your movie as another movie that's been made or something like that, that's and I'm not putting it down and I'm not saying things are bad because great movies always happen somehow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So any bitching about it is erroneous.
Guest:But it becomes everybody has to talk business talk in a certain way right now.
Guest:The conversation is.
Marc:Well, there's a lot of panic, isn't there?
Marc:I mean, it seems to be that because the media landscape is so vast and the possibilities to really make money with something unique and original has become less and less and things get lost very easily.
Marc:I would imagine most executives you're talking to are 75% thinking whether or not they're willing to take a risk or whether or not they're.
Guest:Well, no, the answer in movies is pretty much, no, I'd rather not.
Guest:They don't seem to want that out of me.
Guest:What they wanted out of he, she, them was to make it a business, and that was always impossible, and now it's been done.
Guest:It was always crazy to try and predict what a movie would do.
Guest:Come on, who are you kidding?
Guest:And now it's a science.
Marc:Now, it's a science, but it doesn't mean we're getting quality movies.
Guest:But we always do still get quality, sometimes despite.
Guest:It used to be because it was nurtured.
Guest:Television today is like that.
Guest:Television, you know, the search for originality is commercial.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, the pursuit of excellence is commercial.
Marc:Wasn't it always?
Marc:In television?
Marc:Well, I mean, wasn't it always the drive to hold sponsors?
Marc:I mean, from the very beginning, from when Uncle Miltie was, you know, holding a box of soap?
Yeah.
Guest:There was a time when sameness was very much in television.
Guest:And, you know, the situation comedy.
Guest:Meaning that that was a kind of comedy that everybody did where something happened.
Guest:And rather than the people involved or somebody's quirky idea or writer-producers sort of look at the world.
Guest:So that used to have a same.
Guest:But now television is, you know, exciting.
Marc:But when did you, like, what was the beginning?
Marc:How did you get from Jersey and whatever you grew up in?
Marc:What was the path?
Guest:I got very lucky and got a job as a page at CBS after I messed up college.
Guest:Where'd you go to college?
Guest:Briefly, NYU.
Guest:And what were you studying?
Guest:You don't remember?
Guest:That's a long time ago.
Guest:No, I think it was public relations.
Guest:I think it was as close as I could think of coming to writing.
Guest:I didn't know quite what it was.
Marc:That's one of those great vague majors.
Marc:Yes, yes.
Guest:PR.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And were you writing in college?
Guest:No, it was the first time in my life that I was having any fun at all.
Guest:So I sort of messed things up.
Guest:What style?
Marc:What year was that?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I don't know years.
Marc:What was the type of fun that was messing you up?
Guest:No, it wasn't.
Guest:I actually...
Guest:was in a fraternity oh yeah yes um and and and i had a good time there yeah yeah and and there were women in the world and yeah which was which i i i hadn't allowed myself to consider in high school and um were you uh were you sort of withdrawn in high school were you like a bookie guy were you like we i was a class clown but not a beloved class clown
Guest:Not where they'd say class clown in the yearbook and I'd be smiling and I'd be with a girl with the same smile.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:Not like that at all.
Marc:No, the troubled kid with the rage in his eyes.
Guest:You know, there were beatings after school.
Guest:It was their form of applause.
Marc:So you had an effect.
Guest:That's the one.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I...
Guest:I would act out in class a lot and try and do bits and stuff.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, who were your inspirations when you were a kid?
Marc:Were you always a comedy fan?
Guest:Always a comedy fan.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Always a comedy fan.
Marc:And who did you gravitate towards early on?
Guest:Let's see.
Guest:There were some people who wrote books funny.
Guest:I read plays.
Guest:I read comedy plays.
Guest:Your show of shows was like a miracle.
Guest:It was like a miracle.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Well, that was really the first freedom of situation comedy, right?
Guest:And Sid Caesar was an original talent.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Never anybody like him since.
Marc:Did you ever build a relationship with him?
Marc:Did you get to know him at all?
Guest:I never knew him.
Guest:No?
Guest:I know Mel Brooks.
Guest:Everybody knows Mel Brooks, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was a time at the Fox Studios, every once in a while when it's supposed to be like you dreamed it would be.
Guest:Every once in a while, my fantasy is in front of me.
Guest:You'd go to the commissary to eat and Mel Brooks would make a round of tables, making everybody laugh hilariously, including you each day in a certain way, very generous.
Guest:And it would be amazing.
Marc:This is what show business is.
Marc:I'm here.
Guest:And you'd hear the pockets of laughter follow him around.
Guest:He made the rounds.
Guest:It was amazing.
Marc:He's an astounding force of nature, that guy.
Guest:He did the Tracy Ullman show once, which gave birth to The Simpsons.
Guest:Nobody was watching.
Guest:We were on a brand new Fox network.
Guest:Tracy, brilliant, crazy brilliant.
Guest:And the show's so tough.
Guest:The one time that he did the show as a guest star.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was literally on the floor laughing.
Guest:It was just so exquisite to be on the, you know.
Marc:It's amazing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He still has that too.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, it's really astounding.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:All right, so you get a job as a page at CBS.
Marc:You like comedy.
Marc:You don't know what you're going to do.
Marc:You screwed up college.
Marc:And you get this gig.
Marc:How did you get that gig?
Guest:My sister's best friend was the secretary to the person who hired Pages.
Guest:It was just that because everybody else had a fancier background than me.
Guest:And then we all, it was amazing because I was a kid.
Guest:And I was 18 or something.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we all, there were like 12 of us on staff.
Guest:And I was from New Jersey, and I didn't know anything.
Guest:And I think like seven were gay, and it was my first time.
Guest:And I'd hear glamorous stories.
Guest:I'd hear people having these social lives.
Guest:We were all in a lounge all day together, bullshitting all day.
Guest:Everybody was a little like taxi.
Guest:Somebody wanted to be an actor.
Guest:Somebody wanted to be this.
Guest:And you wore a uniform.
Guest:and you were assigned to receptionist duties.
Guest:And everybody got promoted, and I was still there.
Guest:And everybody went on, and I was still there.
Guest:And you're 18, and you put on that cape that you wear when it's cold, and you have to stand outside, because you have doorman duties as well.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, and now you've been doing it for two years, and now the faces in the lounge are different, man.
Guest:And you start to...
Guest:And a kind of terror starts to grip you.
Guest:You're like, am I ever going to get out of here?
Guest:And it was really like, yeah, what did they do?
Guest:At what age did they call you in and say?
Marc:You've seen two turnovers of the pages?
Guest:You know, it was your back hunches under the... You might have been that guy.
Marc:You know, the guy that, you know, in 1980, that's like, he's been a page for 40 years.
Marc:God bless him.
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:And they just keep you on out of charity and then you, oh boy, you avoided that.
Guest:I called the executives by their first name.
Guest:Exactly, exactly.
Guest:Anyway, faced with that, I got a vacation relief job.
Guest:A copy boy at CBS News went away for two weeks.
Guest:I went in and CBS News, you needed Ivy League.
Guest:You needed to get in that door.
Guest:But for vacation replacement, you just filled in.
Guest:And that was editing copy?
Guest:No, copy boy is get me coffee, get me the copy from the wire machines.
Guest:And he didn't come back.
Guest:So I stayed, and that was my break.
Guest:So you did a good job, and they're like, the kid's gone?
Guest:I didn't do such a good job.
Guest:I mean, there's no good way to get people caught.
Guest:I guess I...
Guest:I don't even think I spilled less than the next guy.
Marc:And that was a break in the sense that you were afforded the education of what that position offered you?
Guest:I have always been a news buff in some way for some reason.
Guest:I'm a crazy news buff.
Guest:What does that mean exactly?
Marc:That you just like current events or that you appreciate?
Guest:Well, right now, I try and read two newspapers cover to cover.
Guest:Oh, every day?
Guest:I can't always do it.
Guest:What are your papers?
Guest:New York Times and L.A.
Guest:Times.
Guest:L.A.
Marc:times not cover to cover and this is some this is an area of uh of expertise and necessary responsibility to the culture at large that is uh that is deteriorating reporting so that must be frustrating on some level to to you know that you know that's a common complaint around writing is that you know what's the integrity of anyone's story and we live in a culture where anybody can pick whatever truth they want from any every source that they want and uh there's no bearing on the truth
Guest:If the New York Times falls for any reason... We're all in trouble?
Guest:Really, we are.
Guest:Really, we are.
Guest:And that's absolutely not going to happen, I guess.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's a scary thought.
Marc:So this commitment to the news, where did that lead you early on?
Guest:I was a news writer.
Guest:I got a job as a news writer.
Marc:How did you learn how to do that?
Marc:Just by reading copy?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I auditioned for the local radio station that was also a CBS station.
Marc:In Jersey?
Guest:No, in New York.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:In New York City.
Guest:And it was a union job.
Guest:It was a Writers Guild of America East job.
Guest:And I did that job.
Guest:And then somebody I worked with came out to California and...
Guest:became a big shot at Walper Productions, which was an independent documentary house.
Guest:There were a lot of people coming from all over there.
Guest:And they did syndicated series.
Guest:TV.
Guest:TV, yeah.
Guest:And they called me out.
Guest:And I came out here.
Guest:And I was here uprooted.
Guest:I was newly married.
Guest:And I think I wouldn't have had the guts to leave a union job, but God bless my wife at the time.
Guest:She said do it.
Guest:She was very supportive, and she supported us when I was laid off six months after I got here, which I was.
Guest:So what was that gig out here?
Guest:What did you do?
Guest:I was unemployed for a while.
Guest:Did you do documentaries?
Guest:I did do documentaries.
Guest:I did do documentaries.
Guest:I got rid of my phobia of insects doing documentaries because I had a...
Guest:I had a real phobia of it.
Guest:I'd make female sounds when I saw a bug.
Guest:Was that a thing that happened often?
Guest:And then the only job I could get after I was laid off, they called me back.
Guest:to do a National Geographic, to write a National Geographic where you looked at a small screen moviola all day long with the most massive shots of bugs you ever saw, and it was the war against wasps and bees.
Guest:And it would be, I'd look at the screen, I'd shudder, I'd write, I'd shudder, and then it was like aversion therapy.
Guest:I got rid of that.
Guest:So you're writing the narrative, the narration?
Guest:Yes, yes.
Marc:In the world of bees and wasps, this is... Did you have to later edit it?
Marc:I'll be like, oh my God, oh my God.
Guest:This is horrible.
Guest:The horrible wasp.
Guest:If you can read this, please.
Marc:Just help, help.
Marc:So in looking at where your career went from there, you know...
Marc:So what were you collecting intellectually or skill-wise during that time?
Guest:Bill Friedkin came through there as a young director.
Guest:I just talked to him.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah, you got to listen to that one.
Guest:He was amazing.
Marc:So, okay, this is interesting because you are a contemporary of those guys and he came out of Chicago with that documentary about the prison.
Guest:Huge out of Chicago.
Guest:I mean, glittering as a star out of Chicago.
Marc:What, because of that documentary about the inmates?
Guest:Yes, yes.
Marc:And that's what delivered him out here.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you met up with him somehow?
Guest:He was way ahead of me on the pecking order.
Guest:I mean, I was like a... In the documentary world.
Guest:Well, he was a star.
Guest:He came here as a star director.
Guest:In the documentary world.
Guest:Right, right, that's what I mean.
Guest:But with all the ambitions to direct.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he was the first one to bust out and do... Because everybody, I think, wanted to do that.
Guest:We all did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he busted out and he did the Sonny and Cher movie.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:And I...
Guest:And I remember – I wish I could – We didn't talk about that too much.
Guest:And I can't get it out of my mind then because I talked to him about it.
Guest:He was a godlike presence, you know, and still is to me.
Marc:What was your first encounter with Bill Friedkin?
Guest:He was –
Guest:He had a personality a little like Quentin Tarantino.
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:A little like that.
Guest:It was just a big human being.
Guest:It was great to be around.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And with his first movie, he was giving script revision notes to whoever was writing it.
Guest:And his one rule was, you've got to put him on the high dive.
Guest:You've got to put him on the high dive.
Marc:That was his line?
Guest:That was his, yes.
Guest:That was his.
Guest:For script revision?
Guest:For audience.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Audience that you have to get them.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:With the Sonny and Cher movie?
Guest:With the Sonny and Cher movie.
Guest:So imagine when he did French Connection.
Guest:Did you spend a lot of time with him?
Guest:Some.
Guest:I mean, I guess we all looked up to him.
Guest:He really was charismatic.
Guest:Who were the other we all?
Guest:The other guys.
Guest:Other producers, other people who aspired to this.
Guest:There was Wallen Green who became a really prominent screenwriter.
Marc:But these were all in the documentary field at this time.
Guest:We were all in the documentary field.
Marc:And Friedkin was the guy that broke out with the Sonny and Cher movie.
Marc:And then when he made French Connection, were you like,
Guest:Holy shit.
Guest:He did it.
Guest:But you knew he was gonna.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:He's one of those guys.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:I think so.
Marc:He had that shine to him.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He was the one who said, I'm gonna.
Marc:Just that confidence as a writer and documentarian.
Marc:Yes, yes.
Guest:I wish I could say that.
Marc:Where does he get the balls to say he's going to do it?
Marc:So when did you, what was your move out of documentary?
Marc:I mean, how did that happen?
Guest:I was unemployed.
Marc:For six months.
Guest:And I try to write spec scripts for Dick Van Dyke.
Guest:Everybody wrote a spec script for Dick Van Dyke at the time.
Guest:Nice guy.
Guest:And I actually had a friend who came from New York who was actually making it as a comedy writer.
Guest:Who's that?
Guest:Her name was Treva Silverman.
Guest:And she was writing The Monkees.
Guest:When they had all fresh, edgy writers, she was one of them.
Guest:And then I went to a party one night, a New Year's Eve party.
Guest:I'm unemployed.
Guest:My wife is working.
Guest:And I couldn't get any action.
Guest:I couldn't find a job.
Guest:I had that standard thing in my head that somehow the only, to me at the time,
Guest:In all reality, if I couldn't get a job writing in some way, I would get a job selling ladies' shoes.
Guest:I know there are more choices.
Guest:That was your backup plan?
Guest:I know those aren't the only two jobs in the country, but that was my reality for some reason.
Marc:That it was women's shoes or a job in entertainment?
Guest:Yes, yes.
Marc:But there were no other retail jobs that came to mind?
Guest:I know, and I had done some selling.
Guest:I don't know whether that was a self-motivational thing or not.
Guest:It wasn't a fetish.
Guest:No, no, no, no, no, no.
Marc:Either I'm going to be in television or I'm going to be on my knees.
Guest:You're going to draw psychological implications for me thinking I wanted to be on my knees to women.
Marc:No, I mean, crazy of me that that would be the only plan B. That's a weird place to go.
Marc:That James Brooks' only plan B at the beginning was women's shoes.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So, all right.
Guest:More shoe stores than studios.
Guest:that's for sure back then there were so anyway i went to that new year's eve party and we're all mutts and and and a couple walks in from another party and said and and the guy said thank god finally real people and they're dressed formally and and we're at the mutts and that was alan burns who is one of the greatest guy pillar of the community talented you know
Guest:And I was in a conversation.
Guest:What was he doing at the time?
Guest:He had three series on the air at a very young age.
Guest:What were they?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:But there were like, it was that time, and he had just created.
Guest:Late 50s?
Guest:What are we talking?
Guest:No, we're in the... Early 60s, mid 60s?
Guest:Late 60s.
Guest:Late 60s.
Guest:Mid 60s.
Marc:Oh, right, because of the monkeys.
Guest:Mid 60s, yeah.
Marc:It's funny to me that this person that you knew, the woman who was writing for the monkeys when they had edgy writers, there wasn't this weird... None of you ever thought, like, it's the fucking monkeys.
Marc:It was a gig, right?
Marc:It was a good gig.
Marc:It was a funny show?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:It was a show that wanted to break barriers.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:It was a show that wanted to screw around.
Guest:Okay, right.
Guest:Very much so.
Guest:That was a rebellious show.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:And she later won Emmys writing for Mary Tyler Moore.
Guest:For you?
Guest:Sometime later, yeah.
Guest:You gave her that gig?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But she was very important to the Mary Tyler Moore show.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And so Alan had created My Mother the Car.
Guest:Not familiar.
Guest:The show was a network show about a man whose mother came back as an automobile.
Okay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you heard a woman's voice.
Guest:You didn't see anything move.
Guest:You didn't see any mouth move, but you heard a woman's voice.
Guest:And it was Dakar.
Guest:But it was, yeah.
Guest:A hit show?
Guest:No.
Guest:It lasted a season.
Guest:He had done a number of hit shows.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he had created.
Guest:He was no longer with it.
Guest:He had a partner, and they were creating other shows.
Guest:They were in on He and She, which was an amazing show.
Guest:And he got me a chance.
Guest:He got me a chance to write a script.
Guest:I mean, just being a nice guy.
Guest:He just did it.
Guest:That's how it happens.
Guest:And then we ended up.
Guest:That got me into freelance writing, and the freelance writing got me a chance to do my first pilot, which was Room 222.
Guest:And then he came in and began producing the series that I had created, and then the head of the studio where we did that show was Mary Tyler Moore's husband, the much-beloved Grant Tinker, and he put us together as a writing team.
Marc:You and Alan Burns?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And now Room 222, at that time, like, see, I'm not nostalgic, but I have to assume it seemed to me that at that time, Hollywood, television business, the movie business was a more intimate business.
Marc:It was a smaller business.
Marc:And there were three major networks.
Marc:Once you were in...
Marc:Did you all kind of know each other?
Guest:That was the time where I really felt what you're talking about and the way that you read books and the movies in the 30s and 40s like this was television in the 70s at Paramount Studios, where it was exactly everything you dreamed of.
Guest:There were a bunch of us.
Guest:First of all, there was an absolute wall, a literal wall and a figurative wall against people in television going into the movie side.
Guest:Literally, we drove in through a separate gate.
Guest:Literally, all our space was on one side of the studio.
Guest:The movies were on the other side of the studio.
Guest:Everybody was doing great.
Guest:It was Tom Hanks and Robin Williams and Rob Reiner and Ron Howard and Penny Marshall and...
Guest:And, you know, we were all of us there, and we did Taxi there, and we all did go to each other's shows.
Guest:By the way, it was the 70s with everything that was and behavior and everything else, and we all partied.
Guest:Yeah, Taxi had a really good party that you had fun at every week.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:but but getting there i mean you know from room 222 getting the taxi i mean there's also other credits i mean it it just it's interesting to me you know talking to you now that uh you know you you did these other shows i mean you wrote a little bit for the andy griffith show you wrote a little bit for my three sons right so you were sort of on that girl yeah yeah you were on set for that stuff right no no no writer didn't go there didn't never saw an actor until i opened the wrong door one day and went you
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You were kept separate.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because now, you know, the writers are on set and you work through stuff.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:We did it that way on every show that I was part of creating.
Marc:But that was a big change.
Guest:was it not i mean it seems to me that like you know writing that you know in going with the theme of the writer is is of utmost importance that that during those that earlier television that you know you delivered the script and that was it well you got notes and you did a draft and then it was rewritten there was a there was a show called hey landlord which was uh which was you know jerry belson and gary marshall were fantastic comedy writer team writing team and they did hey landlord
Guest:And I got an assignment on Hey Landlord, which was my first audience show.
Guest:And it was very early on.
Guest:I mean, it was, I think, the second or third thing I did.
Guest:And they had a staff that I would have given anything to be on, but I wasn't up to that stage.
Guest:And I wrote a script, and they gave me notes, and I gave it back, and my sister and I went to see the show.
Guest:We got to see the show.
Guest:That you wrote.
Guest:Yes, and we're online, and then somebody realized that I was a writer, and he said, you know, this is the audience line.
Guest:You can...
Guest:And I came in, and the show started, and my sister would say, is that yours?
Guest:No.
Guest:Is that yours?
Guest:No.
Guest:And then somebody comes in a bear suit.
Guest:Somebody came into the scene in a bear suit, I think a woman in a bear suit, that was clearly going to be there for the whole show and was not in my script at all.
Guest:And I don't think I had a line in.
Guest:And they were very kind to me afterwards, but it was just I didn't see it coming.
Guest:I didn't see being completely rewritten coming like that.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:And that must have been scarring on some level.
Marc:One of the lighter ones.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The first one.
Marc:It was the first one.
Marc:So they're lighter, only retroactively.
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:More time to fade.
Guest:Right.
Marc:If that one was your last experience in television, that would have been the biggest scar.
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:I'd be the guy in a bar.
Guest:Buy me a drink and I'll tell you a story.
Marc:Remember the bear episode of Hey Land.
Marc:I remember this.
Guest:Can I show you this script?
Guest:The original script, there was no fucking bear.
Guest:Tell me what you think.
Marc:The point is, is that from room 222 and you're meeting or becoming part of Grant Tinker's thing, that it seems to me that Grant Tinker is very revered for giving the writer a certain legitimacy and the executive position he deserves.
Guest:Like going back to our conversation earlier about not having, you don't have a boss, right?
Marc:Right, I don't.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:No.
Guest:Okay, I've had bosses all my life.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I'm saying there's one thing better than not having a boss, that's having Grant Shanker as a boss.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And when did that start?
Marc:Because was he there?
Guest:We started it.
Guest:Alan and I started it because Grant, Mary Tyler Moore, his wife, had an on-the-air commitment from CBS.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He gave us the opportunity to do that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he couldn't be part of it because he was still an executive at Fox.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it would be conflict of interest.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So he had to keep sort of hands as much off as possible.
Guest:And we went into an office not having ever done this together before.
Guest:And we hired the show accountant for some reason.
Guest:It was like crazy.
Guest:It was really as close to inmates running the asylum.
Marc:So he basically gave you a producer's job.
Guest:Oh, yeah, we were the showrunners.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But at that time, the showrunner... But there was no company.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There was no production company.
Guest:So we had a... So what we did sort of form the production company, which we had no business doing.
Marc:That became MTM?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And he recognized that.
Marc:I mean, did he set up the company before he hired you?
Guest:Well, there was a company.
Guest:There was his...
Marc:mary's manager was part of it yeah lawyer and there was us and that was it so mary tyler moore so now you're in the position you hired the accountant you've got all this freedom you got this amazing talent who was from the dick van dyke show and how did you you guys develop that show i mean what was the pitch who was involved with that
Guest:Just the two of us.
Guest:And we started out with a bad idea, which we went to New York to pitch to CBS, which was so much the top network then.
Guest:And it was a bad idea.
Guest:And we pitched it, and they asked us to step outside.
Guest:What was the bad idea?
Guest:She was divorced.
Guest:And the guy, this really happened.
Guest:In the meeting, the guy in charge, and there were all these vice presidents around, the guy in charge explained to us that there are three things that the American public doesn't want.
Guest:A divorced woman, men with mustaches, and Jews.
Guest:He said this.
Guest:And nobody's going to mistake me for anything but, you know.
Guest:All of them?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Other than a divorced woman?
Guest:Well, you're two out of three.
Guest:We might have a problem.
Guest:And they told Grant to fire us, and he didn't.
Guest:And then we came up with the idea that became the show.
Guest:And Grant, who later became the chairman of NBC.
Guest:But she was divorced, wasn't she?
Guest:No, in the pilot episode, she moved to Minneapolis because the guy she put through medical school dumped her when he became a doctor.
Guest:Okay, right, so never married.
Guest:Yeah, never married.
Marc:So when you started doing this show, how long did it take for it to become a hit, and what was...
Guest:Uh, we, we handed in, um, we, we did the show.
Guest:We had a very bad run through with an audience that was, I mean, you want to die.
Guest:Like, like Alan, it was the only time in my life I tried to do a warmup.
Guest:Alan and I were going to do the warm-up to the audience.
Guest:And I did like that classic Jackie Gleason when he was on television.
Guest:I couldn't utter a word.
Guest:I was paralyzed.
Guest:And Alan had to carry me and stuff.
Guest:And the show... You two went out there together to do a team thing?
Marc:It's your first time doing stand-up?
Guest:The only time.
Guest:The only time.
Guest:And I just don't know what possessed me because I choked right away and stayed choked.
Guest:There was never a moment when I could get words out.
Marc:That didn't instill comfort in your live audience?
Guest:And Alan, poor Alan, soldiered on every once in a while turning to me.
Guest:It really was like a sketch, but it happened in life.
Guest:And then we did a rewrite where I think it just...
Guest:We didn't know what was wrong, and the script supervisor, Marge Mullen, suddenly we had everybody who represented Mary, everybody around Grant.
Guest:We had 14 stricken people staring at us in our office after this disastrous run-through.
Guest:And Marge Mullen said, what if the kid, because one of the characters had a kid, said she liked Rhoda?
Guest:What if we did that?
Guest:And we did that, and we cut, we were long, and we cut.
Guest:Those are really basically the changes we made, and it went from Z to A. You know, it's because they didn't, Rhoda didn't get one laugh in the run-through, and we were long, and those are the two things.
Guest:But I don't think we would have, I think it needed both fixes.
Guest:I think we needed to tell the audience it's okay to like Rhoda, who was being nasty to Mary.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And then they gave us a disastrous time period where we couldn't succeed,
Guest:And then this thing in television history, the business like president of CBS just took over as president.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was the only one ever in the history of television to cancel top rated shows, really top rated.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Ten shows because he thought their time had passed and they were bucolic and he wanted to have a new kind of comedy.
Guest:Uh huh.
Guest:Changed our time period.
Guest:All in the family went in at about the same time, just a little ahead of us, and changed television for the seven days.
Guest:That one guy.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Who had the courage.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a very Republican-American businessman who did this thing that nobody has ever done before or since.
Guest:I don't think it ever will happen again, and changed the face of television.
Marc:He noticed that things were changing, and he said the business has to change.
Marc:I guess so.
Marc:Well, thank God for that guy, huh?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And so he gave you a new time slot and everything took off.
Guest:Yeah, we followed all in the family, which was amazing.
Marc:Did you have a relationship with Norman?
Guest:A little bit, a little bit.
Guest:We were competitors in a way, you know, because we were doing shows and we were always up against each other for awards and stuff like that.
Guest:But we'd sit there on Saturday night always watching all in the family and saying, oh, shit, we're no good, you know, because it was so great, you know.
Yeah.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, really.
Guest:I mean, we, we, I mean, it just, you know, it was, it was, all in the family was just a revolutionary show.
Guest:We were an evolutionary show.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Interesting.
Marc:But, but, but, but the thing is, is that you were fairly revolutionary.
Marc:I mean, you know, to have, you know, Mary as a central character, a career woman.
Guest:Our timing was, our timing was very fortunate because it was exactly, the feminine revolution was starting, you know, so suddenly...
Guest:Just what was happening around us gave us stories and put meat on our bones.
Marc:Well, it's the same with All in the Family.
Marc:I think it's an equally revolutionary show because it was maybe like they seem to be good companion pieces, really.
Marc:I mean, at the time, both politically and otherwise.
Marc:I guess I'm just trying to make you feel better.
Marc:I'm good.
Guest:I'm good.
Guest:I'm good.
Guest:It was not a failure.
Guest:Mary Tyler Moore was a fine show.
Marc:I accept that.
Guest:so okay so now no they were decided they wanted to go everybody had a meeting one day where they wanted to go off high so they said let's let's let's let's leave after six seasons yeah and you know and i was seeing this thing swirl around me this meeting about you know we decide when we get off we wouldn't get kicked off you know let's go after six and i said seven
Guest:And everybody said, okay.
Guest:So I got an extra year doing it.
Marc:Seven seasons you did.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then you did the spinoffs.
Guest:I did Rhoda.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that went well.
Marc:My mother loved that show too.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:We were hoping she did.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:She loved it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was Val and she was great.
Guest:And we did a crazy thing there because we divorced her in the second year of the show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it turns out that guy from CBS was right.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:I remember the husband kind of.
Guest:What was that?
Guest:Kind of a lunky guy?
Guest:And it just, you know, we were just stifled on, it was hard to come up with stories.
Guest:It was hard to come up with stories with Rhoda Married, you know, the quintessential single woman.
Marc:Because it wasn't necessarily a romantic comedy.
Guest:Yeah, we were having a tough time with stories, really.
Guest:That was sort of it.
Marc:But not with Mary Tyler Moore because he had so many characters, right?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:No, that was, yeah.
Marc:And Ted was like, where did you find that guy?
Marc:How did that happen?
Marc:I mean, how did you develop it?
Guest:Ted, God bless him, man.
Guest:He was like a spirit.
Guest:He was so intrinsically funny.
Guest:That's an amazing thing to be intrinsically, to be a comic spirit inside yourself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was almost like, and that's why the show was great for me because
Guest:I mean, Chloris was a method actress.
Guest:She goes back to the group theater.
Guest:Brando had called her the best actor to come out of the same discipline he did.
Guest:Chloris Leachman.
Marc:Also inherently funny, though, right?
Guest:She's a glorious actress who can do anything.
Guest:She's a glorious actress.
Guest:And then there was Val, who was from Second City.
Guest:Mary, who was from television comedy, Ed was Second City.
Guest:Second City, yeah.
Guest:Ed was Second City as well.
Guest:And then Betty White came in, you know, who was just... And talking to them about their backgrounds and their training was my college.
Guest:That was like...
Guest:And I ate it up.
Guest:I loved talking about it.
Guest:And Val was story theater as well.
Guest:And she would get her old acting teacher out and they'd do exercises.
Guest:And sometimes we'd join the acting exercises.
Guest:It was fantastic.
Marc:So that was your whole education about how to work with actors and cast and see how things fit together.
Marc:Yes, yes, yes.
Marc:And see what they could bring to characters.
Marc:Yes, yes.
Guest:and what but like um and ed asner is fundamentally funny he's one of those guys that could you could just watch breathe to be funny yeah yeah but he also can do heavy stuff yes absolutely but ted was just a comic spirit comic spirit and and yes yes where did he come from and he and georgia angles who came in oh i just saw her she's she's she she is screamingly funny anytime she wants to be
Marc:So the ensemble... So imagine what it was like.
Guest:Yeah, so you get it.
Marc:But in working through the scripts, how many were on staff for Mary Tower Moore?
Guest:It was you and Alan and... Ed Weinberger, Stan Daniels, and then I think that was... When did you bring the woman?
Guest:David Lloyd did a lot of scripts every year.
Guest:And what was the woman's name from the Monkees?
Guest:Freeva Silverman.
Guest:But I think everybody was freelance except for a handful of us, yeah.
Really?
Guest:Yeah, very different on The Simpsons now, yeah.
Marc:And did you guys write by just committee?
Marc:Did you sit in a room and pitch?
Marc:Because I know, I've only worked on one TV show, and how it seems to work, I'm just wondering how long that was in place, where you got a writer's room, and you get it up on the board, and everybody pitches, and then people go write their scripts off outlines.
Marc:How did it work then?
Guest:There we put enormous work compared to what we do now into the story conference, what the story was, key jokes, bits, act breaks.
Guest:It would be a very thorough, and then we'd get it in, and Alan and I...
Guest:or Ed and Stan would do a rewrite, and then we had a run-through, and then we'd either have an easy rewrite night or be there till 3 in the morning rewriting, sometimes throwing out, you know.
Marc:Really, yeah.
Marc:But, you know, but... And what determines that?
Marc:I mean, like, you know, is it just your sensibility in terms of, you know, the comedy or how the story balances?
Marc:You know, what determines, like, you know, staying there all night to fix something?
Yeah.
Guest:Our feeling.
Guest:Jay Sandrich, who directed almost all the shows, he would give his input.
Guest:But basically, it was up to us.
Guest:We didn't do it for that reason, but when you attack your script,
Guest:It just makes everybody else feel secure because, you know, you're not blaming everything on the actors.
Guest:You're not blaming, you know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You're taking your responsibility.
Guest:But then if you believe in a script that's not happening on the stage, then instead of going to the rewrite room, you stay on the stage and try and make it work.
Marc:And that's the other thing.
Marc:live audience, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you knew when things were tanking.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And every once in a while, there's an easy laugh that, you know, Ted mispronouncing, we stopped doing at a certain point, even though it was like, if you go slowly, that could go on forever.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Grace dictates that you take another step.
Marc:Oh, because you thought that it was cheap after a point.
Guest:After a certain point.
Yeah.
Marc:Too easy.
Marc:And then you did the Lou Grant show for a little while.
Marc:That went for a while.
Guest:Which was amazing because that was a comedy character spun off into a drama.
Guest:And that was the easiest thing to get stories for.
Marc:Interesting that he could evolve that.
Marc:That's a testament to his amazing chops.
Marc:Yes, yes.
Guest:That he could tweak it like that.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Whose idea was that?
Marc:I think it was, you know, mine and Alan's.
Marc:To take off the comedy, to make that character have more depth around.
Guest:We'd done a spin-off and we said to ourselves, when is a spin-off not a spin-off?
Guest:And then when you spin off into another form.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So that was a big experiment in a way.
Guest:It felt like a good idea at the time.
Guest:It worked for a while, right?
Guest:Oh, Emmys, yeah.
Marc:Now, Taxi, I think, is a whole other generation of people that came to that show.
Guest:I've been writing women's issues for seven years, and I wanted a show which was primarily a male show just for that reason.
Marc:And how did the magic of that creative process, how did you come up with Taxi?
Guest:There was an article in New York Magazine about a cab company where everybody wanted to be something else.
Guest:And this is how great Grant Tinker is, man.
Guest:He owned the article.
Guest:He bought it.
Marc:He optioned the article.
Guest:And now four of us, who were very important to the company, left to form our own little group.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Myself.
Guest:Which was MTM.
Guest:Myself.
Guest:We left MTM.
Guest:To do.
Guest:To do.
Guest:To form a company of ourselves.
Guest:We had an on the air.
Guest:We had a few on the air commitments.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:From different networks.
Guest:And we went over to Paramount.
Guest:We were going to use.
Guest:We were hoping that with television.
Guest:We could make a contract.
Guest:That if we did a television series.
Guest:They would give us a chance to do movies.
Guest:Of course.
Marc:Was this a unique thing?
Marc:Was this a revolutionary thing to create what would be a production company of your own that actually functioned as a production company?
Marc:I'm not sure.
Guest:Which was this Gracie Films?
Guest:No, this was John Charles Walters.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:That was the name of it?
Guest:Yeah, we wanted to sound like a great Protestant guy.
Guest:So that's that company.
Guest:We wanted it to be formidable, have a British ring to it.
Guest:It was based on nobody's name?
Guest:No, we made up the name, and then somebody found a sign, a big wooden sign that said John C. Walters someplace, and we hung it up.
Guest:And this was your production shingle for Taxi?
Guest:For Taxi and the Associates, which we did there.
Guest:And the contract to make pictures...
Guest:was never fulfilled by Paramount.
Guest:There were all sorts of gizmos in it because we were supposed to be able to make very small movies as part of it.
Guest:And somehow there was a flaw in the contract where we never got that.
Guest:You didn't know that going in?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Did you yell at the lawyer?
Guest:No, you know, it's not the sun moment.
Guest:It's the attrition, as you realize.
Guest:Oh, right, right, right.
Guest:The conditions that have to be there.
Guest:Yeah, and so Tinker was like he... So we called Tinker, and we're four people who have left his employ, and it was a jolt to the company at the time.
Guest:And I said, can we buy it back from you?
Guest:He says, I'm giving it to you.
Guest:So that's who this guy was.
Marc:Whoa.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That's heavy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then, so you had this article, and how did you start thinking in character first?
Marc:Here's how lucky we were.
Guest:I'm sounding like somebody's just making a list of breaks, but I guess.
Marc:No, but it's true.
Marc:But it breaks filled in with process, filled in with the creative thing.
Marc:It's all good.
Marc:We went to do research in New York.
Guest:We went to the company the article had been written about.
Guest:We're the cab company.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We stay in the cab company all night and we're overnight from like midnight to whatever it was.
Guest:And then we wanted to have breakfast with a group of cab drivers in the morning.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And that was going to be basically our research.
Guest:Right.
Guest:During that time, we saw the dispatcher being given a bribe for a clean cab from a driver.
Guest:We saw that surreptitiously, and he knew we were watching, and he's waving the guy who's offering the bribe away.
Guest:Just for a clean cab?
Guest:What does that mean?
Guest:That's not a filthy cab.
Guest:It's not banged up.
Guest:It works.
Guest:Right.
Guest:A good cab.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that was the birth of the Danny DeVito character.
Guest:Just seeing that.
Guest:Just seeing that created that character.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And now our problem was, how do you make a hero for... How do you make Judd Hirsch a hero?
Guest:What delineates him?
Guest:And the article was about everybody wanting to be, you know, something else, a boxer, an actor.
Guest:And now we're there.
Guest:And all the cab drivers that we're going to have breakfast with say, let's wait for whatever his name was to come in.
Guest:And now there's...
Guest:really solid sort of clearly charismatic young guy comes in with his cab and they and you can tell he's a hero to everybody there yeah and everybody who wants to be everything else so we asked him the question about what do you want to be he says me i'm a cab driver and that was and then immediately we knew that's what made him a hero and that was judge that was that was that was the basis for judd's character
Guest:And where'd you get Reverend Jim?
Guest:This was so great.
Guest:Danny, of course, you know, legendary.
Guest:I mean, you can't you can't talk enough about it.
Guest:He had just been in Cuckoo's Nest.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And slowly but surely all the all the all the character actors from the Cuckoo's Nest therapy group started to come on the show.
Guest:Chris being one of them.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it was a guest spot that evolved into— It was one episode that went through where Reverend Jim was born, and we wanted to do a drug casualty, and we wanted to do somebody whose brain was fried.
Guest:But not menacing.
Guest:But it's always like, I can't imagine anybody else who could have done that part.
Guest:Danny, I can't imagine anybody else who could have done that part.
Guest:I remember I went into ABC with 103 Fever when Judge Hirsch's contract was falling apart because I knew he needed an actor as great as he was or else it wasn't going to work.
Guest:I mean, this is what's so... You know, this is, I guess, the thing that you can't face day in and day out.
Guest:How...
Guest:So many things have to walk in the door to you for something to really work.
Guest:It's just you need the right action.
Marc:How big was the casting process, though, ultimately?
Marc:Long.
Guest:We go long casting process.
Guest:Unusually long.
Guest:Unusually long where we need somebody to hold them back.
Guest:I still do that.
Marc:Yeah, and DeVito was just part of a process?
Guest:Oh, DeVito, we were trying to find the character, trying to find the character.
Guest:Danny came in one day to audition, and he said, which of you guys wrote this shit?
Guest:And he was hired immediately.
Guest:And that's a true story.
Guest:We just all fell down laughing, and that was it.
Yeah.
Guest:You're hired.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the other ones, it took them a while, huh?
Guest:Mary Luke's had a lot of auditions.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And Tony... Tony Dance had never acted before, but he... I don't even know how he... He was a boxer.
Guest:He was a boxer.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Kaufman...
Guest:Oh, God.
Guest:Andy Kaufman, man.
Guest:We go to the comedy store.
Guest:Was it here?
Guest:Yeah, here.
Guest:And we're watching Andy, who was great.
Guest:We're there to see Andy.
Guest:And Tony Clifton is opening for him.
Guest:And we're seeing Tony Clifton was a comic who insulted the audience.
Guest:He got booed.
Guest:People almost physically went to the stage.
Guest:He was a slime ball.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Andy's manager comes over and whispers in her ears, that's Andy.
Guest:And it was a long time.
Guest:You don't know about Tony Clifton?
Guest:Oh, I do.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:You know Andy did him?
Guest:Sure, of course.
Marc:Yeah, I've had Zamuda in here for three hours.
Marc:I know the mythology of it and I know the reality of it.
Guest:And it was amazing.
Guest:Andy was the father of performance art, in a way.
Guest:And then he comes on and kills his Andy after being loathsome as Tony Clifton.
Guest:And we couldn't get over it.
Guest:I mean, you can't get over it.
Guest:It was just, here's a unique talent.
Guest:And then Andy, as a condition for doing the show, insisted that we hire Tony Clifton as well as a character.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:from the beginning that was a prize from the beginning what was he what season did he come in on first oh he's there from the beginning yeah and um and what about the the the latke character i mean how was that character we had a we had a we had a foreign mechanic that was it yeah foreign generally speaking yeah yeah we didn't know what foreign meant yes right yes and um and we so we gave him a dressing room
Guest:And what happened, he was there for seven shows.
Guest:And Andy was brilliant.
Guest:And, you know, he was always in character.
Guest:When Carol Kane came in to play his wife and, you know, Academy Award nominee coming in to play his wife, they went out one night and they talked the foreign language together and nothing else all night long.
Guest:You know, because Andy made up a language that we started to...
Guest:Integrated?
Guest:Yeah, work with.
Guest:And it was the greatest thing to write because he came from a mythical country and we could make up religions, we could make up social mores.
Guest:It was a treat to write.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But meanwhile, while Andy's character's working, Tony Clifton's in the show and he's shitting all over the actors.
Guest:He's acting like a prick to all the actors, you know.
Guest:Offstage?
Guest:During rehearsal, during, you know, where they were going to kill him.
Marc:You didn't know when Tony was going to show up?
Marc:And they knew who he was.
Yeah.
Guest:So he would act like Tony Clifton.
Guest:He would, fuck you, Andy.
Guest:No.
Guest:And Tony Clifton went, ah.
Guest:So there was just no way it could continue.
Guest:Did you not know when he was going to show up, Tony?
Guest:It was, you know, we wrote, he started to, it was like,
Guest:Andy loved it because in his alter ego as Tony Clifton, he was starting to be written out of shows.
Guest:He was given very small parts.
Guest:It was a perfect Tony Clifton excursion into network television.
Guest:It was perfect.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But we couldn't do it anymore.
Guest:It was just...
Guest:screwing up morale, a huge problem.
Guest:Tony Clifton was.
Guest:Tony Clifton was.
Guest:So Ed Weinberger conducted the negotiation to ask Andy to accept that Tony Clifton be fired.
Guest:And
Guest:And Andy said, and he was still very private about, I mean, Andy would never talk to any of us about Tony.
Guest:Andy wasn't Tony.
Guest:And he said, if you do it this way, if you give me a, and they set up a plan so that he wanted to be publicly fired.
Guest:So Tony Clifton shows up with two prostitutes on his arm.
Guest:And Ed comes down and fires him.
Guest:And Tony Clifton starts to resist being fired so much that security guards at the studio who were not in on it had to be called.
Guest:Tony Clifton was dragged out of the studio, thrown out of the studio physically.
Guest:And then Tony Clifton went to a phone and called Ed and said it was the best time of my life.
Marc:You guys just had to indulge this.
Marc:You had no choice.
Marc:I mean, even when you're saying that it was affecting the show negatively, you were all part of this.
Marc:Yes, yes.
Guest:We did it to get Andy.
Marc:And it was just part of a talent negotiation.
Marc:These were the conditions by which we had to behave under to keep Andy.
Marc:And did you ever feel like you got to know Andy at all?
Guest:It was great giving him notes because when you gave him notes, he'd stay in character.
Guest:So you'd walk over to Latka, Harris' name, and you'd give him an acting note.
Guest:And he'd look at you like, what was he doing here and what were you doing here?
Guest:And then he'd do the note exactly.
Guest:And then Andy also brought back pro wrestling, I mean, single-handedly.
Guest:He's the one who popularized it again.
Guest:And then he had this match, this wrestling match he had.
Marc:Yeah, the famous one with Lawler, was that his name?
Guest:where he was taken to the hospital.
Guest:It made headlines all over the United States.
Guest:He was taken to the hospital, put in traction.
Guest:He was almost paralyzed because of actually doing this wrestling match.
Guest:And then we saw the tape from Saturday Night Live or something, and we slowed it down, and we saw that it was a stunt, a brilliantly performed stunt.
Guest:Wrestling is, yeah.
Guest:Well, that he was a pile driver where he was putting down his head, and you could see just how perfectly rehearsed it was so he was able to break the ball.
Guest:And I called him up because I said, you know how shitty it was for us to think you were badly injured?
Guest:He said, you know what it's like to be in traction for a week?
LAUGHTER
Guest:solid point yeah and is that where you met uh sam simon sam simon was yes key to the show yeah to a taxi yeah he was he was a story editor and then a producer he and ken eston they were partners and what did he bring charles brothers who went on to do cheers were also on staff it was a great writing staff and david lloyd came with us from you know from mary it was a great writing staff how many were in there
Guest:More.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's Bob Ellison.
Marc:And the same kind of structure as Mary Tyler Moore.
Marc:You guys would be story heavy and then just work it through, the two of you?
Marc:Ultimately?
Guest:Well, there were four of us then, and, you know, we each did our thing.
Guest:But you know how you can show with a great spirit?
Guest:Because, you know, the producers for the run-through, just before you do the show, stand where the audience is behind a rail.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And after the actors do a scene in the final dress rehearsal, after the actors do a scene, an AD says, actors to the rail.
Right.
Guest:And you can tell a good show if the whole, if every actor just rushes up to the rail to get notes, to talk it over, to think how to do something, to rehearse a different, and that's the spirit we had on that show.
Guest:And remember, we're talking the 70s, you know what I mean?
Marc:The great time for the... Yeah, with Paramount a lot, and everybody knew each other, and it was fun.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And so when Taxi ended, it ended on purpose and you were happy?
Guest:No, we were canceled after, I think we won.
Guest:I say this because we all feel religious about it.
Guest:Everybody on Taxi feels religious about the experience.
Guest:You know how you look back and you say, that was a great time.
Guest:We knew every minute we were having a great time.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, it's great.
Guest:It was amazing to know it as it's happening.
Guest:And the show was canceled after we won the best comedy three years in a row.
Guest:And the show was canceled by ABC by a guy who was in there for one year in the job where he could cancel us.
Guest:And I called up Grant, who was now chair of NBC, drunk.
Guest:Because I started, when we were canceled, it was, you know, when we...
Guest:I started to drink.
Guest:Really?
Guest:When we were canceled.
Guest:Yeah, we were canceled in the morning, and I started to drink.
Guest:It was, you know, we loved this.
Guest:And then, bit by bit, every actor drifted into my office without anybody calling anybody until everybody was there.
Guest:And now we're all drinking, you know?
Guest:And we...
Guest:And I called Grant, a little drunk.
Guest:And just the great guy.
Guest:And he said, I can't do anything for you.
Guest:And I said, I'm not asking you to.
Guest:I just want to just vent.
Guest:And he was at NBC.
Guest:And they picked us up for a year.
Guest:I mean, so it's Grant again, man.
Guest:Grant to the rescue.
Guest:And did you stay in touch with, are you still in touch with Grant?
Guest:I haven't seen him in a long time.
Guest:I haven't seen him in a long time.
Guest:But the way I feel about him, everybody who worked for him feels about him.
Marc:He was sort of a champion of modern television.
Guest:And he was a writer's friend, man.
Guest:He was a writer's friend.
Marc:Well, yeah, it seems like he really gave the writer the position he deserved.
Guest:Yeah, well, yeah.
Marc:As a creator of shows and given the freedom necessary to do what they do.
Guest:Which television does for writers.
Marc:Oh, I know, yeah.
Marc:It's pretty amazing that there are some pretty incredibly talented people that do very interesting things given the freedom to do it.
Marc:And if they take it seriously and they're truly creative, it's amazing.
Marc:So after Taxi, how long was it before you decided to do motion pictures?
Guest:Let's see.
Guest:Taxi took... How long did you drink for?
Guest:I think we all saw the sun come up together.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:So it was just a night.
Guest:It wasn't months.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:I'm a disciplined guy.
Guest:Good for you.
Guest:Taxi... We started Taxi in the late 70s.
Guest:I did my first movie.
Guest:I took... My first movie, I think I did...
Guest:I took a break from MGM to write a movie which was Starting Over that I also produced.
Guest:And then I went back.
Guest:And then the director, Alan Pakula, of Starting Over was offered a book, Terms of Endearment, to do.
Guest:and he didn't want to do it, and he suggested me for the job.
Guest:And so I read the book, and I think at the time, it's certainly... Pakula did All the President's Men.
Guest:All the President's Men, and he was my top choice.
Guest:And I read this book,
Guest:and um alan who was terrific and really sort of mentored me because i i had written the picture and i was it's produced and i was barred from the set the second day of shooting starting starting yeah why and rightfully so because of making faces while the actors were working you know i i was the worst thing of you know the the line they went to the line right and my face would show it and this was your first experience on a movie set
Guest:First experience on a movie set, and Alan took it for two days, and then he said, Jim, you can't come to this set anymore.
Guest:It's not like a director knows everything, but he needs the illusion that he does.
Guest:Noted.
Guest:But then he let me in the editing room, and I was fully part of editing the picture, which was a great education.
Guest:And then he recommended me for this job, and I read the book, and I think at that point it was the second time in my life that I really cried when I read part of that book.
Guest:I mean, it was the second time I think I was not...
Guest:So it was an experience for me to cry.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said... Not a crier?
Guest:I said, well, at that time.
Guest:I think I've cheered up four times in this interview.
Guest:I felt those.
Guest:I felt it too.
Guest:And so I...
Guest:I did it.
Guest:And it took me four years to raise the money after I had the script.
Guest:It was very involved.
Guest:And Grant Tinker.
Guest:I didn't have enough money to take.
Guest:I felt the picture would be bullshit unless you were on location.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:College Town, you mean?
Guest:Where was it?
Guest:No, just Texas.
Marc:Oh, in general, yeah.
Guest:This was a book by one of the great Texas writers.
Guest:If you're going to do it on the back lot, you're starting like you're full of shit.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So we were short of the amount of money needed to make it a location picture.
Guest:And Grant bought it for NBC, pre-bought it for television for NBC.
Guest:And that was the difference.
Guest:So we were able to.
Marc:Did that strike you as an actual business move or a friend?
Guest:Oh, no, it was absolutely helping me out.
Marc:And that's, that's, this guy's beautiful.
Marc:This guy's beautiful.
Marc:So he's your angel.
Marc:This guy's beautiful.
Guest:And best looking guy in the world.
Guest:Excellent tennis player.
Marc:You know, just, you know, just golden, you know.
Marc:The opposite of a Jewish person.
Guest:Witty, witty.
Guest:No, no, he was, we, we, I'm telling you, anybody who, you'll, anybody you ever interview work with this guy will talk just the way I'm talking.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:No, no.
Marc:I mean, he's revered by.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And nobody has anything bad to say about that guy.
Marc:But it's just interesting.
Marc:I just see all these sort of like, you know, strung out, you know, kind of neurotic Jewish writers.
Marc:And he's like their champion.
Marc:Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Marc:But so Larry McMurtry wrote it.
Marc:Did you have a relationship with him?
Marc:Great brief relationship.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's quirky.
Guest:He's a quirky human being.
Guest:He had written a brilliant screenplay himself.
Guest:I felt totally humbled writing about a state that I've never been to before I started doing the research and
Guest:And I went to see him in Washington, D.C., where he ran a rare bookstore.
Guest:And he's a very prominent writer.
Guest:By running a bookstore, I mean he's at the cash register.
Marc:Last Picture Show too, right?
Guest:Yes, Last Picture Show is a screenplay.
Guest:And he's at the cash register, the bookstore.
Guest:And I come just to pay homage, I know.
Guest:And finally he just said to me, look, I wrote the book, you write the movie.
Yeah.
Guest:I did a Larry McMurtry impression.
Guest:Wait a minute.
Guest:I felt pretty good doing that.
Guest:It was good.
Guest:It was solid.
Guest:You were in it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was a great gift because I was too – what's the mental version of being tongue-tied?
Guest:I was too caught up with his work and trying to do justice to it.
Guest:And it was a very difficult writing job.
Guest:I remember it was perhaps one of my hardest because at a certain point there was an option of the book and the studio had to buy it and they hadn't seen my script.
Guest:And then they bought it and I'm on page 80 of what would, you know, the first draft was probably 150 pages.
Guest:And I didn't know where to go.
Guest:I didn't know how to go forward.
Guest:And that's what I felt throughout my life, that you never consciously burn a bridge, but some bastard is blowing up your bridges behind you as you move forward.
Guest:And suddenly I couldn't not be doing Terms of Endearment as a script.
Guest:And I couldn't figure out how to go forward.
Guest:What were you stuck on?
Guest:I don't remember, I remember the feeling and I remember the emotion and I remember that I went around physically blushing a lot.
Guest:You know, really blushing.
Guest:And I felt sort of crazy, you know, doing that.
Guest:And then I was—there was one night I was hanging out with some people, and one of them was a concert pianist who had never had the courage to play New York.
Guest:You know, he just didn't want to meet that test.
Guest:And I talked about this, and he said—
Guest:Oh, I do that.
Guest:I know what it is.
Guest:It's a state of shame.
Guest:And suddenly him giving a name to this condition and for me not feeling like I was the only one who ever went around blushing because they couldn't solve a script, I think that freed me up and that gave me the energy to keep
Guest:I think that was the kick.
Marc:And did you at all in that moment, like, see, was it one of those sort of things where you were all of a sudden given a lens to look back at your entire life with that, you know, that, that, that, that obstacle, that shame that you were so hard on yourself or that, you know, what, what was it exactly?
Guest:No, it's happened to me since.
Guest:Not very often, but it does happen to me.
Guest:What is the shame, though, specifically?
Guest:Well, that's the name he gave it.
Guest:Maybe there's a better name.
Guest:No, no, I like the name because it's like... Yeah, I think it's accurate.
Guest:I think it is accurate.
Guest:You're ashamed that you can't solve what's in front of you.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Huh.
Guest:Yeah, it made me, yeah.
Marc:That's fucking heavy.
Guest:Oh.
LAUGHTER
Marc:No, because shame is a weird, paralyzing, almost nebulous thing that has many sources that's usually wired deep into your being for some reason.
Marc:And it's like it's stuck in your soul.
Marc:You know, to overcome it's a powerful thing.
Guest:Yeah, it's a heavy word, it is.
Marc:Yeah, I guess that's what I'm getting at.
Marc:Were you able to track it?
Guest:No, it wasn't.
Guest:It was project specific?
Guest:Once I heard I wasn't the only one to have it.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:I'm hoping you'll say me too at some point.
Guest:No, of course.
Marc:Are you kidding?
Marc:I'm in my garage.
Marc:This is a shame temple.
Marc:This is the best I can do, Jim.
Marc:I'm going to walk into it every day.
Marc:I live here.
Marc:But...
Marc:All right, so you got through that, and you executed the script, and you did the movie.
Marc:Because that was a pretty astounding ensemble, and that movie was a devastating but uplifting movie somehow.
Guest:This is it.
Guest:My take on the movie was that I was doing a comedy,
Guest:And my definition of comedy is that people laugh frequently while watching it.
Guest:And nobody remembers that's what the movie was.
Guest:But I was in the previews, I'm clocking laughs.
Guest:I mean, I was, you know, that was.
Guest:That's your training.
Guest:And including, I said to myself, I had to get it because cancer was such a
Guest:horrible word then when we made the movie that I just had this I gotta get a laugh on the word cancer how do I do it and it's sort of built into the script and you do and people are surprised but they're laughing at the word cancer and you're sort of on the side of the experience when you do it the way it worked in the script
Guest:It was so amazing because Deborah Winger was the daughter.
Guest:Shirley MacLaine was the mother.
Guest:It's basically a mother-daughter story.
Guest:I created the character of Jack Nicholson for the movie.
Guest:He wasn't in the book.
Guest:He wasn't in the book.
Marc:And that was... What was the casting on this like?
Marc:I mean, was it like television?
Marc:Did you have to go through a lot of people?
Marc:Did you attach these people before?
Guest:You know, it's like it was murder to get Jack.
Guest:Deborah was very important to getting any financing at all.
Guest:And she's, you know, and she helped me get Jack.
Guest:She was like amazing.
Guest:at that point, you know.
Guest:And surely, I interviewed every actress of the right age I think that you could think of.
Guest:You know, usually we'd go out to lunch or something.
Guest:Because, you know, it was even more shameful than, you know, the parts for women, major roles for women.
Guest:And then somebody called me and suggested Shirley.
Guest:And I remember we were both, for some reason, we both stood when we had the discussion at the end, when we were, you know, just the kind of getting to know your conversation we had.
Guest:But then we stood up, when we stood up at the end, instead of looking at each other and standing looking at each other, we both stood...
Guest:side by side looking at the wall, not facing each other.
Guest:And she said, this can be important.
Guest:And it was like a strange woo-woo moment.
Guest:And surely God knows that's her woo-woo stuff.
Marc:And then she killed.
Marc:And when you say it was...
Marc:I mean, because at that point, Jack, I mean, what year are we looking at?
Marc:1980.
Marc:So he had done a lot of his major movies.
Marc:And what makes it difficult to get somebody like him to embrace a role like that?
Marc:Because it was a little against type for him at the time.
Guest:I think, you know, it's, yeah, it's an unknown person, me.
Guest:Right.
Marc:relatively small budget picture yeah though healthy enough to go on location you know it's just a supporting role right well it's just interesting because I don't remember if I read it I assume I read it because I don't know that I could be this in intuitive about that role as a as a as an a former astronaut that did you direct him to be sort of constantly looking up at the moon
Guest:It's so interesting.
Guest:We're filming, and he's an astronaut in the picture.
Guest:A retired astronaut.
Guest:Yes, a retired astronaut.
Guest:And a plane's flying over.
Guest:And everybody's waiting for me to say cut, but we had a very tight budget.
Guest:Right, right, right, sure.
Guest:So it's like the sound man's looking at stuff like that, and Jack just plays an interest in planes and looks up at the plane and plays the moment.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think that's what you're talking about.
Guest:And, man, he was like, he'd come up to me at the end of the day, and so great.
Guest:He'd say, you want to know the worst direction you gave today?
Guest:And he'd tell me the worst direction I gave.
Guest:He'd say, you want to know the best direction?
Guest:It was like heaven.
Guest:He's helping you out?
Guest:It was just, it was fantastic, man.
Guest:It was fantastic.
Guest:And you guys did three movies together.
Guest:Three movies.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, he's, you know, I once won an argument about, at the time, when it was whether Dustin Hoffman or Jack Nicholson was the best actor alive,
Guest:And I won the argument by saying that Jack could do either role in The Odd Couple.
Marc:Well, it was phenomenal for movie fans to see him do different things, even when I was a kid.
Marc:And when that came out, that when you're a movie fan as a kid, you love these guys.
Marc:You got your guys.
Marc:And to see him in your movie or in Pritzy's Honor or anything that got him out of being Jack, where he would have to adjust.
Marc:his talent as an actor to do a role that wasn't, you know, McMurtry.
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Or The Shining.
Marc:It was a fascinating thing for me to see him really work as an actor.
Guest:And his comic talent is, you know.
Marc:It's great.
Marc:Yeah, he's great.
Marc:The balance that you were able to sort of do
Marc:you know, which I think you probably learned in some, because, you know, when you were doing television, you didn't shy away from things.
Marc:So the balance of cancer and comedy and something as heartbreaking as somebody dying at the end of a movie who was your main character and having that still, there's strength there through your other characters.
Marc:I mean, that, you know, that was a, you know, I guess I'm just, you know, going to blow.
Guest:And everybody's seeing it without an audience.
Guest:It's not a comedy.
Guest:Everybody's seeing it without an audience, but with an audience, it was like, it played great.
Marc:Well, no, you had to have the comedy to balance with that story.
Marc:What's the story?
Marc:A young woman who's got a philandering, emotionally suppressed husband and an overly protective lunatic mother dies of cancer.
Marc:If you were to pitch that.
Guest:It wasn't quite our log line, but it's accurate.
Marc:But, you know, that was a phenomenal event to make a mainstream.
Marc:It was a comedy.
Marc:And then again, when you did broadcast news, I mean, that's a romantic comedy, as my friend Lynn Sheldon says, where nobody gets who they want.
Marc:Yes, yes, yes.
Marc:You know, that was another heavy hearted process.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But where did that movie come from?
Marc:Was that something that just...
Guest:Just cooling out after terms of endearment and just traveling around and just saying, I'll figure out what I want to do next.
Guest:At that point, you have the opportunity to get something done if you want to do it because terms have been successful.
Guest:And a friend of mine got me into the political conventions, and there I hung out with some reporters, and that's where I got my story and the idea for it.
Guest:And I'd always been a- News guy, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I'd always been.
Guest:And then it was trying to do a romantic comedy.
Guest:where you weren't stacking the deck so everybody was rooting for one guy or the other, and you just saw what happened.
Guest:And we shot it in continuity, and I did think that at the end of it I'd be able to resolve.
Guest:A romance?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Between Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks?
Guest:Well, no, the only way you could go is with Bill Hurt.
Guest:That's the only way you could go, I think.
Guest:And Holly Hunter?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, and I actually went back, you know, because it was a perverse ending, and I went back and shot, oh, this is a, there was a French film that at the end, the classic French successful film where the two star-crossed lovers, the guy gets off the train at the end, and there she is waiting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's the end.
Guest:And they go to each other.
Guest:And then I read that what the director had done is that the guy didn't know the actress was going to be standing there.
Guest:And they improvised it so it was genuine.
Guest:So I went nuts.
Guest:And I said, let's do a reshoot where we do that.
Guest:And I told Holly Hunter that we're going to put her in a cab.
Guest:We had to redo the part where she leaves the airport.
Guest:At the last minute, Bill Hurt was going to get in the cab.
Guest:We were going to film it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We were going to film it.
Guest:And I knew they were each good enough to where something was going to happen that would solve me not having a perverse ending for the movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then just before he opened the door, somebody said, hi, Bill, and blew it.
Guest:And I went out of body.
Guest:I mean, I don't know what happened for the next 10 minutes that people end.
Guest:With rage?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I was inside it.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:And then we talked and they did something and we put together a scene and later on people told me I should end the movie with that scene who saw it.
Guest:But once I had that goal, you know how crazy you get.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it ended the way it ended.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It was a little painful.
Guest:I believe it was truthful, by the way.
Marc:No, I think that's true.
Marc:I think it was the right emotional way to go.
Marc:That's the thing about the way you balance where the comedy becomes invisible because the characters are so well-formed.
Guest:And it's so interesting for the actors when they're not trying to stack the deck.
Marc:Right.
Guest:When you can go into each scene and not try and reach some.
Marc:And I think that was a big sort of fairly serious, the first one for Albert, right?
Marc:Where he really had to carry a movie to some degree.
Marc:He was great.
Marc:He's great.
Marc:He's great.
Marc:How far back does your relationship go?
Marc:Because my only point of reference for you was, you know, his producer in Modern Romance was that role.
Marc:Didn't you play the producer?
Marc:The director.
Marc:The director, right, right.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:So you were the director guy.
Guest:He told me, so do this for me.
Guest:It'll be fun.
Guest:You were hilarious, though.
Guest:It was a fourth billing, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:You were hilarious.
Guest:And I was the world's, I was a director's nightmare.
Guest:I'd say, let me do it again.
Guest:I'd be at his trailer before he got there in the morning.
Guest:Listen, I have this idea.
Guest:But until you stand on that side of the camera, the vulnerability of that,
Guest:And you see why people have director approval in their contracts.
Guest:I mean, you feel you haven't gotten and somebody's saying move on.
Guest:So I always consider it a blessing that I, you know,
Marc:that you got to do that yeah that i got to because you learned the other side because i felt it yeah not learned it but felt it uh-huh this sort of heartbreak of like oh just just you know just i can't do exactly what i want to do like give me one more right right right yeah you know you know and how what if we did this and i was that guy right right right right sure sure following the director the day's over the nuisance you were the nuisance yeah how did you get to know albert what was that
Guest:We always, in the early 70s, Rob Reiner and Penny Marshall were married and had a house in the Valley.
Guest:And like 15 or 20 of us got, you know, single people.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, we would always end up there.
Guest:Hanging out.
Guest:Like every night, you know.
Guest:Albert, genius, you know, just doing.
Guest:Amazing.
Guest:And people, you know, people doing great stand-up in that living room.
Guest:Harry Scherer would be playing straight.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:yeah god that must have been a blast though it was fun right people when we did when we did uh broadcast news people always thought we were fighting and we were just doing our friendship right all the time you know that's what it was yeah and then um well then like again with jack nicholson is a dan rather character right and then um and then you did uh
Marc:i'll do anything was the next movie right but that was after the symptoms with albert again yeah yeah yeah yeah and and did you because those terms of endearment broadcast news were like huge movies now as you like make movies when when things don't go as well as you want box office voice how does that affect you
Guest:uh deeply yeah uh deeply it's uh and and i'll do anything i did it as a musical and then we had i guess it was the worst professional experience of my life yeah um because on our first preview i thought we were in because i never you know and i had i had made some critical mistakes i think like i thought
Guest:I just love actors so much, I'm not gonna worry about their singing voices, I'm gonna judge the performances, everything.
Guest:And I work with Prince, and I work with Sinead O'Connor, and I work with Twilight Thorpe, it was amazing.
Guest:I worked with these amazing people on this musical.
Guest:And then when we previewed it,
Guest:The first number, and I was sweating the first number, and after the first number happens, we got them, and we're getting our laughs, and my editor and I give each other a thumbs up, and then it went so downhill.
Guest:And then they were laughing, as your mother might have told you, at the movie instead of with it.
Guest:And then people started to leave.
Guest:And this is a test screening?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:First test screening on the lot.
Guest:You know, the end of privacy.
Guest:And now, but it gets worse from here.
Guest:And I called everybody in and I apologized to them.
Guest:You know, all the people have been working in post-production that I had led them to this path.
Guest:And let's get to work tomorrow and figure out what to do.
Guest:Next day, LA Times writes about the screening I had.
Guest:And they assign a reporter to go to every screening.
Guest:So it
Guest:Everything, all my attempts to pull the movie together and screening it again, everything was written about like a series.
Guest:It was horrible.
Guest:Talk about a state of shame.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Yeah, it was brutal.
Guest:And finally, everything public, and so we were notorious.
Guest:We were the musical that had cut most of the music out.
Guest:And...
Guest:And there were clearly holes in the thing that was released.
Guest:I think the heart was true.
Guest:I think there were performances there.
Guest:But it was as bad as... You can have a failure and it opens and closes.
Guest:This was dragged out for months.
Guest:Before it even got there.
Guest:Before it got there.
Guest:When it got there, it was an anti-climax.
Guest:I couldn't tell you anything.
Guest:All people wrote about was the fact, where's the music...
Guest:And then, because I'd been through such a horrible experience, and I knew everybody, not everybody, but I'm not the only person who's had, you know, I mean, it's common to have great disappointment.
Guest:It's a common experience.
Guest:So I wanted to do a documentary about that experience.
Guest:And I wanted to just, I thought it would be great for somebody to be able to see, okay, the guy's still walking and he went through that.
Marc:This is your way to overcome a shame that you couldn't contain it.
Guest:And I started to get excited about it because I thought I'd do the story, we'd do the documentary, and I'd say, and here's the movie they saw that night.
Guest:And show the first thing I previewed.
Guest:This is how you were going to present the film.
Guest:And show the first, yes.
Guest:It could only be sold as a double feature.
Guest:The documentary.
Guest:It would be a short documentary.
Guest:It would be...
Guest:But I thought, I'm excited now.
Guest:I'm pitching you.
Guest:I'm excited now.
Marc:That would have been the reasonable end for a story.
Marc:It's like James Brooks has done an amazing thing.
Guest:He created a documentary disclaimer for his film.
Guest:Not even.
Guest:No, I was totally responsible.
Guest:It wasn't my responsibility.
Guest:It was a claimer.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:Like you've been led wrong.
Marc:You've been led to believe the wrong things about this film.
Guest:But then judge for yourself.
Guest:And Prince, we couldn't clear the music rights with Prince and to the songs that he had done.
Guest:For the film?
Guest:Yeah, for the film.
Marc:Let me just ask you a basic question.
Marc:I don't always understand.
Marc:I don't know if I've been in a position to ask it because I haven't talked to that many directors who have done this.
Marc:What were you thinking by doing a musical at that time in the world?
Marc:I mean, what was it?
Guest:You'd made two huge films, and I just don't... I wanted to do the truth about Hollywood.
Guest:I wanted to do the truth about Hollywood, and I thought the best way to do the truth about Hollywood was to make it a musical.
Guest:That was my thinking.
Guest:I wanted to do the heroism of a work-a-day journeyman but talented character actor.
Guest:I wanted to do... I mean, I had real reasons.
Guest:I wanted to... Movie testing was in there.
Guest:I do think I...
Guest:I do think in there is a real observation of the business at that time.
Guest:I think that's still, if I went to look at it today, which I'm not doing, I would think that's in there.
Guest:I would think a real honesty and reporting about Hollywood at that time.
Marc:But were you a fan of musicals?
Guest:uh yeah i was theater you know i was a theater but was it something i'm not a musical guy but was it was it something about the the history of hollywood and the popularity of musicals that led you to to try to to do that form no i just thought since hollywood is larger than life i needed a larger than life form to do the truth that's what i mean that was my thinking i'm not defending it this that's interesting isn't it interesting to you in retrospect
Marc:I mean, because it's like, it's such a challenging thing.
Guest:What's interesting to me, yeah, in retrospect, I got one letter from somebody who'd seen it and who was the offspring of a famous Broadway composer and said, my father always said the key to doing a musical was keep the plot as simple as possible, which I had not done, certainly.
Guest:And nor had I done, you know, and I should have honored, I mean...
Guest:I should have had, you know, I made key mistakes, clearly.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But, you know, you live and learn, right?
Marc:You did all right.
Guest:I did all right.
Guest:No, you pay the dues.
Guest:You know, your question initially was there is a recovery process, absolutely.
Marc:And we need to talk about The Simpsons, because that's certainly the... No recovery needed yet there.
Guest:No, I mean, could you have ever imagined?
Marc:I mean, okay, so let's start with Tracy Ullman.
Marc:So you find her as a talent?
Marc:You wanted to work with her?
Guest:Somebody sent me, her agent at the time, Martha Luttrell, sent me her tape and you're knocked out.
Guest:And people love that show.
Guest:You're knocked out.
Guest:I mean, you know, it's like, you know, a genius in the same way Andy was a genius.
Guest:Nobody, I mean, very few people saw the show.
Guest:I mean, it's, but, but I mean, I mean,
Marc:But it had a serious cult following in the sense that she was undeniably unique.
Guest:And we were doing a half... It was crazy.
Guest:We screwed around.
Guest:It was a brand new network.
Guest:We were doing a half-hour variety show.
Guest:We would have an audience there, and it would take us three hours to do this half hour, so we'd have to keep on replacing the audience because her makeup and prosthetics took so much time between the sketches that we did.
Guest:So it was brutally hard to do, and she was...
Guest:One night while I'm doing the show, I have a knock at the door and I open the door and there's an African-American guy standing there and talking to me about being lost and stuff like that.
Guest:It was a weird conversation and the conversation keeps on going on.
Guest:It was sort of bizarre and then suddenly the guy says, Jim, it's Tracy.
Guest:That's how great she is, man.
Marc:That's how great she is.
Marc:Amazing.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So Groening had just done these.
Marc:How did that relationship start?
Guest:So when we did the Tracy Ullman show, we thought that we should try and cram entertainment every place.
Guest:We were doing things with black and in space.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So we thought the bumpers that usually, you know, just before you go to commercial.
Guest:I remember, yeah.
Guest:We do these 30-second animations.
Guest:From Life and Hell.
Yeah.
Guest:and i i somebody had i got a great gift from from polly platt who worked with me on terms of endearment after terms of endearment of of an original matt graining panel from life in hell where the eight ways to die in hollywood you know one was freeway shootings or stuff like that the last two were failure and success you know you're right and it was and i had it up and i loved it so i called him in
Guest:when it came time and we called somebody else in, he came to my office not wanting to do Life in Hell.
Marc:And he had not done any live animated stuff, like any movie, it was all panels.
Marc:Not at all.
Guest:And he came in to see me and he didn't want to do Life in Hell, so in my outer office, in minutes, he basically came up with The Simpsons.
Guest:In like five minutes, he basically came up with them, basically came up with the thought.
Guest:And we did it.
Marc:What he just said is the family.
Guest:I forget what the pitch was.
Guest:And I remember some of the early pieces.
Guest:And if you see them now, it's like you ever saw Steamboat Willie.
Guest:It sort of looks like the crude beginnings of those characters.
Guest:That's not quite the Mickey Mouse we know.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:Yeah, and then we had these huge waits for the audience, as I said.
Guest:So as we were on, we were on for about five years.
Guest:We gathered a lot of these things, and we start to show them to the audience during the waits or the form of man.
Guest:Just back to back.
Guest:Yeah, back to back, and they killed.
Guest:And then there was one...
Guest:There was a Christmas party we had where our animator who had done those got drunk and cornered me.
Guest:And when he cornered me, he just told me the passion of all animators to have an animation television show on.
Guest:There hadn't been one for 25 years.
Guest:And it just knocked me out how his eyes shone with this.
Guest:And we did it.
Marc:And that was the story, huh?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Sam, Simon, myself, and Matt.
Marc:And you thought when you brought Sam, he wasn't working for you at the time, but you knew he was the guy?
Guest:We had worked together a lot.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We had worked together a lot.
Guest:And he had done Saturday morning animation.
Guest:So he bridged both worlds.
Guest:And what we had for the first two years was we won't tell anybody who the actors are.
Guest:No publicity on the actors.
Guest:We want them to experience this as real.
Guest:We want them to know we're not doing a cartoon.
Guest:We had so many rules about that.
Guest:We were paranoid on the subject.
Guest:and we were gonna do character, we were gonna do the kind of, we were still gonna do the kind of, you know, and we had rules that we wouldn't go too far, you know, Matt had rules, you know, and one of the things I think that happened is... Graining had rules about what... You can't go into space, you can't, you know, just how far you go.
Guest:You have to keep this... And he'd say brilliant things, he'd say this should be a family on television that watches television,
Guest:We knew we were doing Dysfunctional Family.
Guest:We knew we were doing that.
Marc:But you wanted to keep the emotions human.
Guest:We wanted them to be believable characters.
Guest:But to a paranoid extent and held to it for two years and then started to let go of all our rules bit by bit.
Guest:We still have some.
Guest:But I think that was...
Marc:Was that just for story reasons more than anything else?
Guest:We wanted them to believe the characters.
Marc:Right, but once they were established after years and years.
Guest:Well, you can't.
Guest:It was becoming too big to contain on a certain level.
Guest:And there's none of us who don't appreciate it every day.
Guest:There are many of us who have been there since the beginning.
Guest:There are lots of us who have been there for a while.
Marc:And also, but as a training ground for amazing comedic talent and actors and writers.
Guest:Brad Bird came, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Conan, Brad Bird, yeah, yeah.
Marc:I mean, like The Simpsons is the gold standard of comedy writing.
Marc:But I guess it's interesting to me that having created these sort of seminal, live, non-animated shows around comedic characters and human emotions and stuff,
Marc:Was there, in you now, looking at The Simpsons and the amazing impact it's had on culture and continues to have, I mean, does that, in your mind, has the power of real people in their capacity to generate comedy and emotions and comedy, has that been diminished somehow culturally?
Yeah.
Guest:No, because it's unique.
Guest:We're all small parts of this final thing that's iconic, which iconic is a weird deal.
Guest:It's weird.
Guest:And there's a language about it, so it's a sense of service.
Guest:It's like we're working in the Vatican or something.
Guest:For the Church of Simpsons.
Guest:Overall, yes.
Guest:We care enormously.
Guest:When we did the movie...
Guest:The movie was the toughest damn script, one of the toughest damn scripts we ever did or any of us ever did.
Guest:Because of the pressure you put on yourselves?
Guest:I think we were white-knuckled.
Guest:And the whole thing with The Simpsons is you're screwing around.
Guest:You're loose.
Guest:And we were white-knuckled and had to break through that.
Guest:We had to get to the point with something we cared about so much to write as if we didn't give a shit.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Challenging.
Guest:Yeah, it took us a while, but yeah, yeah.
Marc:Were you able to, at some point, break loose in the writing process?
Marc:Yes, yes, yes.
Marc:And were you all conscious of the fact that the reason why you were having a divorce?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:But what do you do about that?
Guest:Don't be nervous.
Guest:Don't be nervous, somebody says to you.
Guest:Yeah, what do you do?
Guest:Okay, thanks.
Marc:And your company, the Gracie Films Company, you've worked with, obviously we put out your movies and the Simpsons movies, but you did Cameron Crowe's two very big movies for him.
Guest:Yeah, and we did Bottle Rocket.
Guest:Wes Anderson, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, which were first-time writer-directors, and I'm doing it for the third time right now, he said.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we're in post-production on that, which is interesting.
Marc:Well, what's your relationship with Cameron like?
Marc:I mean, how involved were you with Jerry Maguire in Say Anything?
Marc:In terms of like, did he come to you and go like, how do I fix this?
Marc:You seem like a fixer to me.
Marc:Or can you help me out with this moment, with this scene?
Guest:It was much more informal than that.
Guest:We just must have talked.
Guest:a million hours.
Guest:But not in any conscious way.
Guest:The thing that I respect so much and what's really fun for me is that with Cameron, with Wes, with the young woman I'm working with right now, they have voices.
Guest:They're distinctive.
Guest:They're distinctive writers.
Guest:And it's fun for me to get out of myself and try and
Guest:help their thing.
Marc:And that's a rare thing.
Marc:A voice?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Especially if you get, if you, I think it's something that you must see too in staff writing for television, that there is a system that gets ingrained that can diminish voice sometimes.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:So this is exciting.
Marc:You don't want to mention this director's name?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:What's her name?
Guest:Yeah, Kelly Fremont Craig.
Guest:I mean, yeah, I just don't want to be semi-plugging or something like that.
Guest:When's the movie come out?
Guest:It'll come out in the fall.
Guest:It'll come out in the fall, and she wrote a distinctive heroine, and she...
Guest:and she spent she served her time on it and uh and she has a real voice is this this this girl the girl in the movie talks like not quite like anybody you've seen before and um yeah that's exciting yeah and i don't want like i feel like we're winding down but i want to do i do want to talk a minute about as good as it gets because that was uh that was like that was his movie right and
Guest:I did a year's rewrite on a very terrific script written by somebody else.
Guest:And so I feel like it was like we were writing partners, but we didn't work at the same time.
Guest:It was one of the great openings, I think, for a comedy film.
Guest:where a man takes a dog and puts it down a garbage chute.
Guest:And that's the opening of the picture.
Guest:And that was the opening of the picture that I set out to rewrite, and that still is the opening of the picture.
Guest:And Jack was the only person on earth that could play it, I believe.
Guest:Because before I had him, I had to think of anybody and I just thought maybe, but it would be different.
Guest:And I think that's true more often than any of us can face.
Guest:Where to do the thing you have in your head, as you go down the list a little, it's no longer the thing you had in your head.
Guest:Right, right, sure.
Guest:It'll be something else, and every once in a while, something better than you had in your head.
Guest:But in this case, I felt that was the only man who could do it.
Guest:Greg Kinnear, who now, I'm going to say, you tell me how I sound telling you this.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I couldn't begin to guess the number of people I read for Greg Kinnear's role.
Guest:I couldn't begin.
Guest:Great actors.
Guest:But just that right tone, that tone that you take for granted, that tone that looks so simple that Greg brought to it, which was an honesty, just a simplicity, and brilliant and just elegant comedy moves instead of... And the range of actors, dramatic actors, comedy actors...
Guest:names you know 40 people i respect like crazy and would be a pleasure to work with yeah couldn't nail that helen hunt who was doing a series at the time only one who could do it in my mind only one who could do it you know yeah and and and to work the schedule of her doing the movie and the series at the same time it just it was mind-bending
Guest:But we did it.
Guest:And I think it needed all of that.
Guest:It needed all that.
Guest:And it needed a dog trainer who was treated with great respect and who helped us author the performance of the dogs in the movie.
Guest:Tough with animals, huh?
Guest:I mean, if you do it that way, it's not.
Guest:If you're waiting around for the dog to do it, but if you really give the dog the time you give an actor, it gets less tough.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Dog was a pivotal dog.
Guest:Pivotal dogs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Then one did this, one did that.
Guest:It's like casting babies.
Marc:You got to have a couple.
Marc:They had a look-alike.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, and it paid off.
Guest:Yeah, it was, yeah, it was War of the, I don't know, did you ever see War of the Roses?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So it's sort of War of the Roses.
Guest:I take, you know, Michael Leeson.
Guest:He was a writer there.
Guest:Danny directed it.
Guest:I think it was one of the darkest comedies.
Guest:And I love that.
Guest:I love that we did a major studio black comedy.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:It doesn't happen too often.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I think it is a classic.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And as good as it gets, had to have elements of that.
Guest:Had to get really dark in order to...
Guest:earn a heart you know right yeah yeah yeah that's right you had it yeah yeah yeah it took a while that's right yeah yeah and riding that edge that jack had arrived yeah was i think the most difficult thing in his career and and it was murder for me and and i could not help him at a certain point all i was doing was saying no that's not it driving him crazy
Guest:to get the turn to to get the to thread the needle to not be too angry to not be right that sick fuck you know yeah yeah to yeah to not doing that and maybe his own frustration and the relaxation of the frustration is what what murder he was going crazy i mean but i mean i'm telling you where it was it was bending him bending me and there was one day um we were doing a scene and and and i think that movie would have
Guest:maybe not been finished if we hadn't been good friends i mean i it was it was it was really a test yeah and then there was one day and this you know where it was just we were batting our heads against the wall and um and it wasn't working and i i heard myself sending the crew home
Guest:This is with like four or five hours left to shoot.
Guest:We're on a huge soundstage.
Guest:Larry Kasdan was there as an actor.
Guest:And I remember feeling so lonely when I saw Larry leave behind those huge doors that closed like with this slam.
Guest:And the doors slammed and it was Jack and I alone on this stage.
Guest:I have no idea what we said to each other.
Guest:We talked for three hours.
Guest:The next day everything was okay and we had the character.
Guest:And I have no idea what we said to each other.
Guest:Huh.
Guest:And his story, his story about it, I come off much worse.
Guest:His story is that I kept on saying too angry, too angry, too angry.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then in one scene he absolutely exploded and I said, that's it.
Yeah.
Guest:But it could have been something like that.
Guest:I understand that it could have been his experience.
Guest:I exploded in anger, but it was just... You can't name it.
Marc:And what is your... I forgot to bring this up, but Judd speaks very highly of you.
Marc:Do you advise him at all, ever?
Guest:Oh, no, I don't think anybody advises Judd.
Guest:I'd just like to see you as a Buddha who is sought out to add to... No, I think there was...
Guest:I admire Judd.
Guest:I mean, I think Judd's great.
Guest:I think, and I love, I sort of, one of the things I admire is that he tends to give his scripts out, ask for notes, usually everybody's note is the same, it's too long, and he doesn't give a shit.
Guest:and i really do admire that it makes him a real filmmaker it makes him a real you know it makes him a real individual writer yeah and he's and he's and he has he has a way of doing movies like i think we'll be reading about the way he did movies for you know decades i mean you know i mean he's good guy well the interesting thing about you too in relation to some of the other um you know mogul-y people i've talked to oh what a word yeah
Marc:But it seems that you're still, I think that whatever has happened with The Simpsons and however you're engaged with that, both creatively and what you've been able to get from it financially, has enabled you to be very selective and do exactly, you don't feel to me as a guy that's like, we gotta do more movies.
Guest:No, no, it's never been like that.
Guest:No, it's never get big.
Guest:It's never been anything like that.
Guest:But where I am spoiled is, you know, it's always been my fault because I've been getting to do what I want for a while.
Guest:So, you know, everything that's wrong is my fault.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And I'm privileged to be able to say that.
Marc:That's the risk you take is sort of like your production company is not so big where you can throw a producer who's working for you under the bus.
Guest:No, it's always been.
Guest:Every picture is intimate.
Guest:Every picture is done with the spirit of an individual.
Guest:The spirit of this thing, the spirit of what we just did, we're all going nuts.
Guest:We're passionate.
Guest:I do believe in The Simpsons.
Guest:When we work in The Simpsons, we are into it.
Guest:We're serving something bigger than ourselves, and that feeling is there.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Judd, I had on here years ago, and when he was in high school, he had recorded several interviews with comedians, and you also did something like that?
Marc:You didn't interview when you were in high school?
Guest:Oh, I did.
Guest:Oh, I did.
Guest:I did.
Guest:Okay, yeah.
Guest:Like, I did.
Guest:I was, as I told you, my high school life and stuff.
Guest:We didn't get that into it.
Guest:So not only was I somebody that, you know, wasn't exactly...
Guest:social hit.
Guest:But my picture was on the front page of the newspaper every week because I got interviews.
Guest:I got interviews nobody could get from my high school paper.
Guest:And as a person who got them, they always took a picture of the person you're interviewing and me.
Guest:So this guy that, you know, just...
Guest:A little bit social awkward.
Guest:So the high school stars weren't getting their pictures in the paper.
Guest:My picture was in the student paper all the time.
Marc:How were you doing this?
Marc:Who were you interviewing?
Guest:I was trying to remember.
Guest:My favorite was Louis Armstrong.
Guest:I interviewed Louis Armstrong.
Guest:And you were a kid?
Guest:You were like 15?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:15, 16, yeah.
Guest:How did you get the interview?
Guest:Like, what was the premise?
Guest:I don't know how I did those things.
Guest:But was he playing at a theater in Jersey or what?
Guest:He was playing at the Paramount Theater in New York City.
Guest:And Louis Armstrong.
Guest:And I wish I had that picture now.
Guest:I wish I had that picture now.
Guest:And I asked him, I thought I asked him a great question that I don't think anybody had ever asked him before.
Guest:I'm bragging.
Guest:I asked him, you tell me, you'll be honest with me.
Guest:How do you take care of your lips?
Guest:It's a great question.
Guest:Well, the answer made it a great question because he starts to produce creams and ointments and tells me about the thing he has to go through before every performance.
Guest:Yeah, and I have sense memory of it.
Guest:You're getting tingles?
Guest:Yes, yes, yes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:So you were backstage at the Paramount?
Guest:Because he was really Louis Armstrong.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:The only one.
Guest:But I mean, and that's who he was, who we, you know, that's who he was.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:He had a whole system.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I just, and I told my kids, I shake my kid's hand and I said, you're connected now to Louis Armstrong.
Marc:You loved Louis Armstrong.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, still do.
Marc:Yeah, he was something, huh?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:What drove you to do this?
Marc:Journalism or the need to be on the cover of the paper?
Marc:No, believe me.
Guest:I wish they wouldn't run it a few times.
Guest:I got lumps for it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:i don't know i don't know i i driven is the wrong word um i did it it was it was the only i did it yeah but it serves as a great you know testament to uh to sort of balls and also you learn things right i like balls yeah and you're good you feel good you want to talk about is there something i missed i know there's a lot there
Guest:No, I'm afraid it was no good because I enjoyed myself so much.
Guest:There's a certain point I go back to, you know, it's great.
Guest:I won't be doing this again.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Why?
Guest:I don't think so.
Guest:No, because it gets, you know, I don't know.
Guest:It's being the moment, you know, that sort of stuff.
Guest:I love your job, man.
Guest:I love your job.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Don't you love it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, the thing about me is that if I don't talk to somebody, because once we're done here, I will put this in a can.
Marc:And my producer and business partner and genius editor will take it from there.
Marc:All I'm going to have is this.
Marc:And I get so attached to these conversations with people.
Marc:that, you know, it helps me as a person.
Marc:And you and Terry Gross were... That was crazy.
Guest:And there are several examples of this.
Guest:I forget the woman who was on your show that you were clearly flirting with.
Guest:That was sort of great.
Guest:All of them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was great to hear, but sometimes it becomes an, I'll just say it because it's true, it becomes an art form.
Guest:There's nobody I spoke to who really knows Terry Gross's work who didn't hear that interview and feel the revelation of who she was as a human being.
Guest:Beautiful thing.
Guest:And she's been on stages before and she's been interviewed before.
Guest:lots you know and and and the the you're being able to talk about the challenge of interviewing obama the experience afterwards but still when you did it yeah that man you you did it yeah you you did it yeah it was you know and it was different than anything he'll ever do you know it was yeah it is yeah you know i the thing with terry you know was it was amazing it was an amazing you were it must have been a high it
Marc:It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life because it just couldn't have, it made me proud that I was able to respect her because in my life, I've gone through periods where I was too self-involved or too cynical to have that.
Marc:the humility enough to really respect what was happening.
Marc:And it was like a big sort of rites of passage for me that I'd somehow become a decent person in having that conversation with her.
Guest:Does that make sense?
Guest:Decency is a great ambition.
Guest:Thanks for talking to me, Matt.
Guest:Okay, pleasure.
Marc:James Brooks.
Marc:James L. Brooks.
Marc:What an amazing career.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed that.
Marc:Don't forget to check out WTFPod.com, powered by Squarespace, for all your WTFPod needs.
Marc:How would that be?
Marc:Huh?
Marc:All right.
Marc:Shall I play us out?
Guest:Boomer lives!