Poking A Dead Frog Part 23

How, specifically?

My five older brothers, who were big potheads, had a lot of underground comics when I was growing up, so I saw Zap Comix when I was really young. Probably the first p.o.r.nographic images I'd ever seen. So there was all this acid-induced imagery of animals and weird characters f.u.c.king each other and doing strange things and it reminded me of the old cartoons I loved from the thirties and forties, but with bizarre, graphic s.e.x. As I got older, I just really started connecting with Crumb. Not with his very specific s.e.xual fetishes-G.o.d bless him-but for his honesty, what he says about life, work, art, the past, and the decline of American culture. How jazz died after 1932. [Laughs] I've been collecting that same kind of music since I was about thirteen. I've always felt a strong personal connection there that I can't completely articulate. Crumb kind of helped me escape into my own mind.

What were you trying to escape from?

I felt very isolated at home. I grew up in a very dysfunctional family. I always wished that I had had a sister, because I just relate better to women. In general, I think women are superior to men in every way. They're just smarter, more thoughtful, more compa.s.sionate. I always thought that if I had a sister, she would've been the one I could've talked to and relied on. It was an insane house. A h.e.l.l house. Every one of us had padlocks on our doors because no one could be trusted. I can remember hiding the money I saved working for a landscaper, but no matter where I hid it-even in the gap behind the heat register that was literally underneath the floor-it would get stolen. I grew up with such paranoia. If you used the phone, someone would always be listening in. And whatever information was collected would be used against you somehow. Things like that were constant. No sense of privacy. Believe me, I'm not doing this justice. This is the soft overview. [Laughs] I don't have the stomach or the nervous system to go too far down memory lane with all the specifics.

Your situation sounds as if it was a step beyond the typical dysfunctional household.

I'm sure everyone has their stories. Most families are f.u.c.ked up in one way or another. All I know is, I grew up locked in my room with my books and my old records, and I hardly ever came out. I tried to avoid all interaction with my brothers, and I didn't want too many friends. Sort of a self-imposed isolation based on my circ.u.mstances, but I actually enjoyed it. Maybe I would have been like that no matter what. I'm still like that.

How did you get the writing job for Letterman in 1985?

Well, Dave's probably the most important person in my life. He gave me my career-which I later set fire to-and basically gave me a reason to live. I was attending NYU film school and came on to Late Night a couple of years after the show started. I just cold-called and asked if they had any internships available, and my timing was lucky. I was able to work for Steve O'Donnell, who was the head writer at the time. He's a great guy and was hugely supportive. He bought me a lot of meals in those intern days. It really felt like a family back then. And Chris Elliott, who was already writing and performing on Late Night, became my best friend. Chris suggested I start showing my material to Dave. So I began to give monologue jokes to Dave's a.s.sistant-those were the days before he was surrounded by the goons with earpieces-and he really liked it.

What was your particular style of joke?

My jokes were barely jokes. I wasn't good at writing topical material, and it really didn't interest me. My material was more about Dave talking about his white-trash relatives or telling the audience that he spent the weekend sitting on his front porch waving at trucks. A lot of it was just glimpses of things I knew from growing up in rural Pennsylvania, which probably intersected with Dave's Indiana experiences.

Eventually, I was hired as a writer and I dropped out of college. I still look back at Late Night as the happiest period of my life, with all due respect to my wife and daughter.

You make your TV days sound so easy, almost like a dream world.

No, it was a lot of work, but so much fun. And the luck of timing! I walked in there at the exact right moment and I happened to be the right guy. I went from an intern to a researcher in the writers' department, which was a paid position, and then I was promoted to writer. But I kept putting those opening remarks on Dave's a.s.sistant's desk. And I'll never forget the day Dave called me in and told me how much he liked them. It was a big turning point. Today, it would be hard for an intern to replicate that experience. Late Night, and I guess the world in general, was a small shop back then.

Also, Late Night was a completely different culture than a place like SNL, where you heard a lot of stories about drugs and things like that. Our staff was a direct reflection of Dave, a guy from the Midwest who wasn't impressed with show business and didn't act like a big star. We were all pretty grounded people. The most decadent it got in the office was too many cigars and too much talk about baseball.

What in particular did you find so appealing about Letterman's sensibility?

At the heart of it was his aversion to bulls.h.i.t, specifically when it came to celebrities and Hollywood. You didn't really see that att.i.tude before Dave. And it was coming from a real place. It wasn't an act or "shtick," to use a beloved Yiddishism. Dave loved doing the show, but anything beyond that was of no interest to him. He never cared about being part of the club or making friends with other celebrities-all the s.h.i.t that a lot of people relish in the business. They fantasize about that experience. So my thing for Dave, even before I met him, was all about a sense of genuineness. Beyond that, he's still the smartest and funniest guy out there. Since Late Night became a big deal in the eighties, so many performers have borrowed the Letterman "aloof, cynical, wisea.s.s" thing, but for most of them, it's not coming from as real a place. It's just a persona. And incidentally, I think Dave's honesty and decency is what cost him The Tonight Show. He would never in a million years make a play for Johnny's job as long as Johnny was still doing it. Whereas Jay was sneaking around and going to the affiliates and kissing their a.s.ses and all that s.h.i.t. Dave's a respectful guy. He had too much admiration for Johnny. It's not in him to behave that way. He worked hard all those years and turned 12:30 into a lucrative time slot, and he absolutely deserved The Tonight Show. That whole thing was f.u.c.ked.

How did you come to bond with Chris Elliott, who eventually became your writing partner on the show?

Chris was a writer and performer on Late Night, and he was there from day one; he started as a production a.s.sistant. He was already performing The Guy Under the Seats sketches when I got there. I was a huge fan, like anyone else who was watching Late Night at the time. Before I met him, I a.s.sumed he was probably a p.r.i.c.k, based on his persona on the show. I could never quite tell if it was a put-on or not. He seemed a little Michael O'Donoghueesque, the National Lampoon writer, who I heard was a real piece of work. Brilliant, but, you know . . . keep your distance. But he wasn't like that at all, and we bonded almost instantly. It was a strangely deep connection. We came from completely different backgrounds, but we had so much in common-how we thought, our sense of humor, the movies we were obsessed with, neither of us could spell. [Laughs] We were the furthest thing from Harvard boys.

You helped Chris create characters for the show. I watched some videos of these characters recently, and I have to say, I still find them just as funny as I did in the eighties-but I also find them just as bizarre and, in some cases, just as frightening.

I don't think Chris or myself-or anyone else who wrote with him-ever consciously tried to make something weird. I think a performer who's got a really original voice, like Chris, doesn't overthink what they're doing. The character he created for the show-and in all his roles he was basically the same character-had been a part of him since he was a kid. He told me that that's how he acted in school with teachers. But what really made it work on the show was Dave sitting there to his left. They were a comedy team in the great vaudeville tradition. Chris was the arrogant idiot who wasn't impressed with Dave, and Dave's reaction to that was just calm amus.e.m.e.nt. The audience, by nature, was always on Dave's side, so that's a funny dynamic. And quite frankly, it was pretty brave of Chris to always play into that. I think that's where the undercurrent of awkwardness or strangeness came in. You were never quite sure if you were watching a genuine uncomfortable moment or not.

I really think Chris was the first guy to do the modern-day Arrogant Idiot, which is now a staple with a lot of comedic actors. For me, though, no one's done it better or braver than he has. He came at it in such an original way-look at those early characters like The Panicky Guy and The Guy Under the Seats. How often do you see something that's not derivative of a million other things? Chris's work never felt like that.

The studio audiences during Chris's Late Night performances appeared to be almost bewildered. Oftentimes, there was literally no laughter.

That's the risk you take when you're writing something that's more a c.o.c.keyed performance piece and less joke driven, although there were plenty of times we thought we had some real jokes in there and they died, too.

But there was never a victory lap for baffling the audience. We wanted people to like the piece. And, most of all, we wanted Dave to be happy with it. Another thing: It wasn't that easy to get a laugh in 6A back then [the Rockefeller Center Studio where Late Night was shot]. I don't know why. You really had to earn it. It was a smallish studio, and I think audiences were different. Whenever I see a late-night talk show now, the audience seems so ramped up. They've been conditioned to behave differently. Or in Leno's case, instructed to run up and shake his hand. Like he was Neil Armstrong or something. First day back from the moon.

Were you involved with the Marlon Brando character that Chris performed on the show?

I was. That came out of Chris and me hanging out and talking about Brando and how nuts he was and how terrible his later movies were, like [1980's] The Formula. Chris used to imitate Brando up in the office, but in a way that had hardly anything to do with the actor-it wasn't a cla.s.sic imitation. It wasn't Brando the actor, it was Brando the mental patient. Brando the cartoon. I don't think we were that far off from what he was really like at the time.

I guess that would explain the dance that the Brando character would perform every time he appeared-a spastic shimmy around a pile of bananas.

The Banana Dance, oddly enough, came from The G.o.dfather, but it had nothing to do with Brando. There's a guy in the G.o.dfather wedding scene, and you only see him for a second, and he's holding a drink, doing this little dance-he's shaking his hand in a funny way, and both Chris and I remembered the guy doing this little hand movement. The Banana Dance was based on that.

To Chris's credit as a performer, he didn't really seem to care whether he got the laughs or not.

I remember Carrie Fisher was standing backstage once, waiting to go on the show. I doubt she'd ever seen Chris do Brando before, and he walked over to her-in character, in full Brando makeup, holding his little Styrofoam cup of coffee-and said something like, "Miss, if there's anything you need, please don't hesitate to ask. And I wish you the greatest success on your appearance tonight." She looked horrified. Another time there was an astronaut on the show-I forget who-and Chris, as Brando, just drove the guy nuts in the greenroom, asking him a million questions and referring to him the whole time as "Mr. President."

Chris was always pretty fearless. But when a piece died on air it wasn't like, "Yeah! We got 'em!" He wasn't like Andy Kaufman that way. The goal was to do something different and get a laugh. And when it didn't get a laugh, you just told yourself the audience was too dumb to get it. [Laughs] Cla.s.sic writer denial.

Chris once came out as himself-which he began to do more and more as the show went on-and he was telling Dave how he was earning extra money by working as a costumed performer on Sesame Street. He said, "I landed a new gig as Big Bird's left leg with another guy. There are two other guys who man the right leg, and another five guys up top." And Dave said something like, "Wow, who knew it was that labor intensive?" And Chris said, "Yeah, it gets pretty hot in there . . . so we work without our shirts." To me, that was really funny-the idea of it taking a sweatshop to operate Big Bird. There was also this touch of h.o.m.oeroticism thrown in to boot-always a cheap, reliable go-to for Chris's character. Anyway, that got nothing from the audience.

Except in the homes of future comedy writers. Did you have any idea, at the time, the mark you were making on pop culture?

Not long after I arrived, we did a show that took place entirely on an airplane going from New York to Miami. When we landed, there was a big crowd of fans waiting for Dave at the airport. I remember then thinking that something was really clicking with people, maybe even more than we realized. But the show was popular almost from the start, before I got there. As far as being an influence on anyone, I don't think you're aware of that when it's happening. It's always looking back, many years later. But, yeah, I think Dave and a lot of the things we did on the show turned out to be hugely influential in the comedy world. I can see Dave's influence in commercials, on YouTube, on all sorts of things.

The writing staff for Letterman in the mid-eighties was one of the greatest TV-writing rooms of all time.

A lot of really talented people. But the trick was being able to write for Dave, and I think the people who were in that room at the time were just about the only ones who could do it. It's a specific thing-Dave's voice, his sense of humor, his worldview, you had to share some of that to be able to write it. Merrill Markoe was really the one who came up with the template. She and Dave were the creators of Late Night, which started back with [1980's] The Morning Show. But there were a lot of great writers there in the early days who helped shape it: George Meyer, Jim Downey, Steve O'Donnell, Gerry Mulligan, and some others.

It sounds like you really enjoyed your time there. What made you eventually move on?

I didn't consciously decide it was time to go, but I had been there five years and was starting to feel like I wanted to do more long-form writing. I guess I was thinking about trying to write screenplays. I was definitely not interested in sitcoms. The thing about working for Dave, at least for me, was that it was such a great experience-a somewhat sheltered world-that it made it hard to leave the nest. And I think there was a little fear and a bit of contempt for what was on the other coast.

How did the opportunity to create TV's Get a Life occur?

Around 1990, Fox offered Chris a deal to create his own show, so he asked me if I'd write it with him, and because it was Chris, I thought maybe it could be something interesting. But I honestly never thought it would get past the script stage. We'd just write it and that would be that.

We started batting some ideas around, including a show where Marlon Brando moves in with a family and becomes a nanny. That was probably more for our own amus.e.m.e.nt; I don't think we actually considered it. But it was the launching point of something-the idea of doing something like an old sitcom. Then Chris started talking about a weird version of Dennis the Menace, where Dennis was a thirty-year-old man, and it grew from there-he still lives at home with his parents, he's a paperboy, all that.

We were talking earlier about how you don't necessarily enjoy comedies that feature characters who refuse to grow up. But wouldn't Get a Life be an example of just that?

Get a Life was about a guy who was a lunatic. We made Fox think it was about a guy who refused to grow up. At the time, in 1990, when we pitched it to the network, they were puzzled by the idea of an adult man still living at home. Wouldn't that just make him pathetic? Or mentally ill? I remember, later, Chris pitching an episode about his character getting his driver's license, and they were instantly all over that: "What thirty-year-old wouldn't have his driver's license?" Chris told them he was actually in the process of getting his. [Laughs] It was true. He was thirty-one, but he'd lived in New York his whole life and never learned to drive. His wife had to take him for the test. She was standing with the other moms.

If you could do it again, would you make Chris's character on Get a Life less weird? The character, over the course of thirty-five episodes, manages to set himself on fire in order to join a gang, hears children's voices in his head, and suffers hallucinations involving a roller-skating monkey who wears a gold sequined vest. Not typical prime-time fare.

I guess for the time, it was a little more acid-trippy than other sitcoms. Sometimes Fox would complain and try to shoehorn different elements into the show to make it more normal, like doing more stories about Chris teaching his b.u.t.toned-down best friend to "loosen up." But Chris's character was pretty much identical to the one he played on Late Night, living in the same strange reality. And we weren't going to change that. As far as some of the surreal bits on the show, maybe it got to be too much at times. I didn't love everything we did. Sometimes going weird is just the lazy way out. But, by and large, I don't think we would have changed too much of that.

In retrospect, would you have changed anything on Get a Life?

Well, I absolutely hated the pilot. That was all about trying to make Fox feel comfortable so they'd pick up the show. It just kept getting further and further away from what Chris and I wanted. Lots of cutesy moments in that first episode. I remember thinking, If that's what the series was going to be, I didn't want to do it. And I always hated the hot laugh track. A lot of people thought that was by design-part of the sitcom parody-but it was just s.h.i.tty mixing. Way too loud. I don't know why it stayed that way. Generally, as proud as I am of Get a Life, I just never felt it was as smart as it could have been. A lot of the episodes are uneven. It never reached a real level of greatness, in my opinion. Maybe we were too distracted by the network beating us up or whatever. It really wasn't a good time in general. Chris and I had a lot of creative differences with certain people and weren't equipped to deal with all the politics that went into it. Again, this goes back to what I was saying about feeling insulated and protected back at Letterman. We were rubes and the show got away from us.

What sort of notes did you receive from the Fox executives to "improve" Get a Life?

Essentially, it was always about making it more grounded. I just never understood it. They knew what they were getting into with Chris. They gave him a show based on what he had done on Letterman. Why they thought he should be in something more grounded is strange. The whole purpose of the show was to satirize traditional sitcoms, not become another one.

I remember one of the executives being perplexed by the ending of the male model script ["The Prettiest Week of My Life," September 30, 1990], which was fairly silly and straightforward-Chris wins a runway contest. But the executive's reaction was, "I don't get it. What happens? So he becomes a f.a.g?" [Laughs] Yes, that's what happens. He becomes a f.a.g. Sort of like Lon Chaney Jr. turning into the wolfman. So, I mean, how do you even react to something like that?

There were also things like Fox saying Chris can't just be a paperboy, he should be the head paperboy. Their thinking being, a thirty-year-old paperboy, well, that's just an imbecile, but if he runs the whole outfit-hey, that guy's going places!

Have you ever, as a TV and movie writer, been saved by executives' notes?

I've had plenty of great notes from executives and producers over the years, and I've also had some bad ones. Like any writer. But with Get a Life, there were literally no good notes. There was too much of a creative disconnect.

An entire generation of comedy fans speak about the show in reverential tones, claiming that it was a huge influence. How do you feel about the cult status of Get a Life?

It's gratifying. When we were doing the show, there was no sense that anyone was watching. There was no buzz about it. It felt like a failure on every level. Coming from Late Night, I knew what it was like to work on a show that people were talking about. That feeling didn't exist with Get a Life. So the fact that it's had something of an afterlife is a nice thing. Most of that is due to Chris's fan base, I think. And I don't mean to sound so down on it. We did some good work on the show. We had a lot of good writers. Spent a lot of late nights eating ravioli out of Styrofoam take-out containers. Then I'd drive the forty-five minutes back home, from Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood to my apartment in Santa Monica, at three in the morning, taking Sunset the whole way because I didn't know the freeways yet. Cherished memories.

Cabin Boy is another so-called "cult cla.s.sic." Can you tell me how that movie, released in 1994, came about?

Tim Burton was a big fan of Chris's. He knew his work from Letterman and had seen Get a Life and wanted to meet with him. So Chris brought me along. It was a fateful moment for both of us. Like when the guys in Deliverance pull the canoe over to take a rest. In a nutsh.e.l.l, Tim was about to shoot the first Batman movie, and he decided that for his next movie, he wanted to go back to a simpler time and direct a small comedy like he had done with Pee-wee's Big Adventure. So we batted around a few things and somewhere in the process of talks and various meetings Chris and I pitched a movie that would be a cross between [the 1937 movie] Captains Courageous and the Ray Harryhausen films, like [1963's] Jason and the Argonauts.

We specifically were trying to come up with "Tim Burtontype ideas" and that one stuck. Tim loved it. So Chris and I were very excited; this was a nice little gig after the emotional toll of Get a Life-Chris starring in a Tim Burton movie and me writing it. Writing features had been my goal all along, and even though this wasn't something I personally would have written if I were pitching or writing a spec, it was for Tim Burton. After this, I'd be able to write my own ticket! So Chris and I broke the story and I went off to write the script. When I was done, Tim and his producers went crazy for it. I'd never been showered with so many compliments in my life. They sent a gigantic fruit basket with a note that literally said, GREAT JOB! YOU DID IT! I was so emboldened by the prospects of Cabin Boy, I immediately sat down and started writing my next script-a 1950s period drama about an incestuous brother and sister that takes place down south on a worm farm. That's not a joke; that was a real project.

Anyway, everything was moving along just fine, and then I got a call one day saying Tim had changed his mind about Cabin Boy. He no longer wanted to direct it; he wanted to produce it. He felt it was more of a "Chris and Adam thing." In fact, in an incredible moment of generosity and wrongheadedness, he'd decided that I should direct it. Now for the record, as if anyone gives a s.h.i.t, I was absolutely against that idea. My plan was to sit back and watch my stock rise after writing the smash-hit, Tim Burtondirected Cabin Boy, and then collect on that by directing my indie worm farm drama. Anyway, the more I resisted directing it, the more Tim's producers and my agents pushed me to do it: "How often does an opportunity like this come up? You'll regret it for the rest of your life!"

I have to say, that does sound like an opportunity that does not come along often.

Right. And I started to become paranoid that I was sabotaging myself and that I never made the right decisions and that I was a coward and my own worst enemy. And if I didn't do it, everyone would lose faith in me and they'd never want to work with me again. That's basically my brain all day long. So in the spirit of self-improvement, I started to believe what they were saying. Maybe this was the right thing for me to do. Maybe Jesus himself was speaking through these Hollywood people, gently leading me down the right path. So Chris and I talked about it-he was always supportive of me directing the movie-and suddenly I was on board.

What was the shoot for Cabin Boy like?

Well, an interesting thing happened-it actually occurred during preproduction but continued throughout the process. I realized I didn't like directing. See, I don't really like being around people, and that phenomenon tends to come into play when you're directing a movie. The endless meetings and questions, I just have no stomach for that. And this was a technical movie to a degree, with special effects. s.h.i.tty effects, but still, I was sitting in three-hour meetings to determine the scale of a stop-motion ice monster. I have zero fascination for stuff like that. I was not one of those kids who took their toys apart to see how they worked. I could not have cared less. Look, the whole thing was doomed from the start. It was done for the wrong reasons-by everybody. And it was a valuable lesson-never do anything just for the opportunity. Always go with your gut-your original instinct. But then again, my gut fails me constantly, so maybe there is no lesson.

Do you think if it had been a script that you specifically wrote for yourself to direct, you would have enjoyed it more?

Probably so. A smaller movie. With a much smaller ice monster.

I was going through some of the newspaper reviews for Cabin Boy from that time, and I couldn't quite believe the headlines. Criminals who murder their families don't receive this level of hatred. "Ugly Cabin Boy Should Be Forced to Walk the Plank," Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. "Cabin Boy Drowns in Nonsense," The Oregonian. And my personal favorite: "Who Gave These Morons a Camera?" from The Fres...o...b..e.12 [Laughs] Well, who am I to argue with that? Chris and I will never understand why it p.i.s.sed people off so much. If it were just a simple case of a B movie coming out that bombed and got s.h.i.tty reviews, fine. I'm pretty sure that happens all the f.u.c.king time. But this was something different; this was supernatural. [Tom Green's 2001] Freddy Got Fingered will be gone and forgotten one day, but Cabin Boy will be infuriating people for generations.

It really put both Chris and me in a dark, awful place for a long time. Our mental states were really off. It was so confusing-why was this silly little movie even on anyone's radar? Why would critics put so much effort and pa.s.sion into destroying it? It's not like the world was clamoring for this thing and then felt burned.

The day Cabin Boy came out, reviews started coming through my fax machine, sent from the Disney publicity department-Disney had produced the movie. It got to the point that whenever I heard the fax machine click on I'd run out of the room. All day long, the reviews would slowly roll out. How many times could I read the headline, "Cabin Boy Sinks"? For days, I was too embarra.s.sed to leave the apartment. And when I did, it felt like my neighbors and everyone on the street averted their eyes when they saw me. I mean, I actually felt I was seeing that happen. I was gone.

And yet, here we are, years later, and Cabin Boy has a cult following.

With Get a Life, the cult became apparent not too long after it stopped airing. Cabin Boy took a lot longer. I think the best thing that's happened is, Chris and I finally feel okay with it. For a long time we disowned it. If everyone was saying it was that bad, it had to be that bad. But as time went on, more and more people started telling me how much they liked it. Here in New York, Cinema Village and the Ninety-second Street Y did some Cabin Boy screenings a while ago, and they invited Chris and me to do a Q&A afterward. And we realized that a lot of the audience had been really young when it came out and had no idea about the bad reviews and all that. So when we talked about that stuff, they didn't really understand what all the drama was about. I'll never forget this nice girl came up to me and looked me in the eyes and said, "Stop being so hard on yourself." [Laughs] It was probably the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me.

Can you see influences from Cabin Boy on comedies that came after? Say, the bizarreness on Adult Swim shows? Or with something like 2012's Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, another fan favorite, but one that many critics thought went too far?

I haven't seen that movie, but I doubt anyone was influenced much by Cabin Boy. Some people may have liked it, but I can't see it inspiring anyone to go out and create. [Laughs] I don't know. There are a few bands and some hip-hop guys who were into it. The dialogue's been sampled a few times.

How bad was the postCabin Boy funk for you? Did it prevent you- Oh . . . can you hang on a sec?

Sure.

[Silence on the other end of the phone line]

h.e.l.lo?

Did you hear that?

Hear what?

The prost.i.tute screaming.

[Long pause] Are you joking?

No.

Where the h.e.l.l are you?

My office.

Your office? Where's your office, the red-light district?

On the Upper West Side [in New York City]. It's a tiny studio apartment I rent to get away from home to write. I've never seen her, but I hear her all the time. The walls are so thin. She entertains businessmen during the day. The doorman says it's actually a mother and daughter, and they're both prost.i.tutes. They work separately. They sublet it from some weird guy who's hardly ever there.

I'm, uh . . . this wasn't in your official bio. This actually sounds like a character from Cabin Boy. So . . . does this in any way prevent you from writing? I would think a prost.i.tute screaming would be the opposite of having a white-noise machine.

I liked it at first, but it's just annoying now. And they both have a habit of letting the door slam whenever they leave, and my whole apartment shakes. Prost.i.tutes can be so boorish these days.

The glamour of being a writer.

I guess.

You don't mind being in a room alone all day writing?

No, being alone has always been my MO. There are times, though, if I'm depressed about whatever-and I'm frequently depressed-when I suddenly feel a little lonely and isolated. But then I just go for a walk. I actually think I'd do quite well at Gitmo.

Do you think it hurts your career to be a TV and movie screenwriter in New York rather than in LA?

I guess it doesn't help, but I just can't live out there. And I'm out in LA at different times throughout the year, so it's okay. I love my life in New York and it's where my wife and I wanted our daughter to grow up. So it's a trade-off.

What are you working on now? How do you spend most of your time?

I'm in the middle of writing a screenplay and a memoir [Will Not Attend, Blue Rider Press, 2014]. Also, I just finished a pilot for ABC that didn't get picked up.

What was it about?

A nice girl who works in a candy shop in Cape May, New Jersey, gets falsely accused of murder. She's eventually exonerated, but now she's tarnished; a lot of people in town still believe she did it. In retrospect, I think it was a subconscious love letter to Fatty Arbuckle. Maybe I should repitch it that way.

How does pilot season work?

It's a long process that starts around June or July. If you're not writing on spec, you typically find a producer you think would be a good creative match and talk about your idea. If they like it, you take it to a studio. If the studio likes it, you pitch it to the network. If they get onboard, you have to write the script.

But that's no guarantee that the script, even though it was bought, will ultimately be shot and broadcast, right?