Poking A Dead Frog Part 26

I'll always keep writing, in some way or another, because it's the healthiest thing I know how to do. Emotionally, I'm a mess. There are a lot of things that I don't like to deal with, personal stuff-the kind of stuff we all face-and comedy lets me confront that stuff as best I can and hopefully get some relief from it.

In the end, do you think you'll ever find anything resembling consistent happiness?

I mean, it's a chemical thing. So I'll never be the kind of person who does cartwheels or stands around parks holding balloons. But that doesn't mean I don't love the life I have. Sometimes I don't remember to enjoy it enough, but I'm extremely happy that I get to do what I'm pa.s.sionate about.

And I think it's getting better. In recent years, I've worked with comedy writers who are really balanced people, who approach writing in a shockingly healthy way, and they still produce funny work. And that's been really good for me to see, because it's proof that you don't have to be this writhing, screaming husk of pain to be a comedy writer. People who aren't tortured can also create satisfying comedy. It's just a myth I was brought up with, even at The Onion. This feeling of, "You shouldn't care if your life is a disaster. Go with it because it's only going to produce something worthwhile." I'm now realizing that that's just not true.

At the very least, I don't need to conflate so much of my self-worth with my success as a writer. It's tough. I've spent half my life writing comedy. It's more than an ident.i.ty-it's all I've accomplished in life. I dropped out of school, there have been disappointing family issues. The one thing, the only thing, I've always excelled at has been my writing. But it doesn't have to be that way.

ULTRASPECIFIC COMEDIC KNOWLEDGE.

ALAN SPENCER.

Working as a Hollywood Script Doctor You've worked as a script doctor on quite a few major Hollywood scripts over the years. Do you know how much money those films ended up earning, collectively?

They've grossed more than $100 million. One grossed under half a million, but that was mostly from matinee business. Senior discounts knock down your average.

Can you tell me the names of any of these movies?

No.

So, as a script doctor, you're not allowed to talk about the specific movies you've worked on?

No, not in my case, because there are some confidentiality clauses. Many times, before walking into a punch-up session featuring a roundtable of comedy writers and comedians, we've been required to sign a form agreeing not to talk about the project or our contributions. If you don't sign, you're not allowed into the room. It makes you feel like you're in Mission: Impossible. There are some movies where people see my name at the end credits, and it will read, "Special thanks to," and they ask, "What's that about?" That's when I've worked on a project as a script doctor. Or maybe just brought a deli platter to the set.

Also, you know what? It's not fair to talk about these things, because it's not my work, ultimately. I didn't incept it. I don't have authorship on that. They're not even stepchildren or adopted-more like I'm babysitting. Unless the idea was generated by me, and unless there was a large amount that I wrote, then no, I don't believe my name should be on the credits as a writer. I tend to only want my name on things that totally reflect my sensibilities. Sometimes the original work from the writer who's been thrown to the lions is really good; it just needs some objectivity to remind everyone why they were drawn to the material in the first place.

My name is on a "Very Special Episode" of The Facts of Life [that aired in 1983], and the only things that remained from my original draft were the punctuations. The episode was called "What Price Glory?" and it was a heavy-handed treatise on illiteracy. A football star dating one of the girls [Tootie] was illiterate. Andy Kaufman, who was a friend, watched it and wondered why it wasn't funny. I told him because it was a "Very Special Episode." He asked, "It's very special because it isn't very funny?" I couldn't argue. Anyway, there's just so much inveterate credit grabbing going on most of the time that it should warrant DNA testing.

It seems like the best comedy writers in Hollywood-the most creative, the ones with the most singular voices-oftentimes prefer to work as script doctors rather than going through the difficult process of selling their own screenplays. Why is that?

You know what happens? It's the rejection of this business, of writing scripts you care about, either not having them made or having them not made well, and that starts to affect you. You want to win. You want your original script to be bought. But if you're emotionally invested in your work at all, then you're in for a really rough time.

Maybe you're invested early on, but not after a lot of failures or unproduced works. And you turn into a short-order cook. You take a little pad and pen and go, "Okay, what do you want?" You start taking orders. And you do it to the best of your ability. If your work is-even to the slightest degree-personal, you'll always take it personally. There's a dearth of personal work out there. It's now a machine with easily replaceable parts. That's why there isn't as much hesitancy about replacing creative figureheads on their own shows. If Rod Serling b.u.t.ted heads with a network today, they'd fire him and call it John Stamos's Twilight Zone instead. Actually, I would watch that.

So what happens is that when you rewrite other writers' work, you're now detached. You don't know the baggage and the history and the in-fighting, all the personalities clashing. You just look at the work and say, "Well, here's what you need to do," and you get it going. If you disagree with a note or an idea, you don't resist. This is not your car being painted. You make it the best it can be, and they thank you. And you move on. You turn into almost a utility player, and you do the job. You get well compensated for it, but you don't have any emotional baggage attached. And you also don't have the same commitment of time; you're not going to spend years on a project. It's an easier life, and for me it just makes sense.

With the script doctor thing, no matter what you do, it's an improvement. You're brought in to fix something, and there's a sigh of relief. So you're Mighty Mouse: "Here I am to save the day." If it's better, then you know you did your job. And usually, invariably, the script's going to be better or more in line with what they want. And your career and reputation is not necessarily fully at risk, and you move on.

Who are you writing for when you take on a script-doctoring job? The studio executives? The director? The audience? Yourself?

All of them. You bring your own opinions to it. It's similar to the medical profession. You come in, you look at the patient, and you identify what's wrong. Then you describe what you can do to remedy the situation. You're a diagnostician.

In the end, the audience is a major factor. They're the final vote. You have a test score that you need to achieve. You have to bring this number up for the studio to be able to release the product. When you deal with the insecurity and the alchemy of comedy, you need an audience. They're the missing ingredient, so there's always going to be a degree of tension or misunderstanding without an audience to validate you. You ultimately need the vindication. There's a long-standing tradition of nervous executives in a room decreeing what is funny and what isn't-and then an audience enters the equation and casts the deciding vote. It's best to throw yourself on the mercy of that jury rather than argue your case. If people don't laugh, you've been found guilty.

What do you most often notice missing in the scripts that you doctor?

I've noticed that it's very important to have a wonderful third act-a powerhouse ending. Everybody walks out satisfied from that. It can't be a downer these days. It can't be like the ending to Midnight Cowboy. I mean, there's a reason you don't see endings in movies anymore like the one that's in Midnight Cowboy. Made today, Ratso and Joe Buck would be battling a mult.i.tentacled CGI monster attacking their bus.

But if a movie scores a very high rating with an audience, even with a sad ending, would the executives keep it?

Sure. The executives don't care about sad endings if they work. You can't take t.i.tanic and reshoot the finale in order for the ship to miss the iceberg or just lightly graze it. But if the audience complains about it-if they're unsatisfied-that's a problem. And executives get greedy, too. A lot of times they'll want the film to score higher-higher, higher, higher. There used to be a rule of thumb that if a movie didn't test well it could still find its audience; that they weren't made with a cookie cutter and could still be big hits. Nowadays, if a movie doesn't test well, and even in some instances when it does test well, it won't be pushed by the studios.

Who is the typical audience for these screenings?

They tend to be mainly tourists in Hollywood. Everything's formulized, everything is distilled for them. They're told that the movie will be like Parenthood meets Independence Day. Or Schindler's List meets Jura.s.sic Park, whatever.

I would love to see the test scores for that last product.

Might just be through the roof-after the dinosaurs were made more likable.

It seems that everyone-screenwriters, executives, studios-prefer landing on the side of safety rather than on the side of risk.

Everyone plays it very, very safe. As a writer, you want your material to be made and to be seen. It's an occupational hazard to confound or to be too outre on the page. For a writer now, security is pre-existing success. It's very important to have something tangible that was well-received to show executives. I've worked on a million shows and movies, and I've created two series, Sledge Hammer! [ABC, 198688] and more recently Bullet in the Face [IFC, 2012]. It's imperative to show something tangible to executives so they'll trust you and feel secure about whatever project you're bringing. Trading roles, we'd require the same. Getting notes from an executive with many hits under his belt feels very different than getting them from Ed Wood.

There was a writer-this would be the first time that this has ever been told, this particular story. There was a writer who sold a pilot to a network. He told them that it was the top sitcom in Ireland and he acquired the rights to it. He had the data and charts showing what a big hit it was and why, and how it made all this money and ran for years. He said, "You know, you can't watch the original show because the accents are so thick, the brogue is heavy. You'll never understand what's being said. But I have the scripts, and we'll retool it for America."

And this writer sold this show to a network in the midst of buying season, around 2005. It ended up not running, but it proved to all be bogus anyway. The show never existed in Ireland. It was a total con job. His presentation was so well-crafted and dazzling, no one checked.

How was the hoax eventually discovered?

It was not discovered.

So how do you know about it?

He told me.

He told you? The writer?

Yes.

You don't have to name names, but is this writer in the industry? Is he well-known?

Uh, he's in the industry. [Laughs] He's got an IMDb page. Then again, so does Charles Manson. I'm not joking; check it out.

What does this hoax tell us about Hollywood?

I don't know. As the old saying goes, n.o.body ultimately knows anything. Actually, I think marketing people rule the day. They make the decisions. And they like to work with people who have produced something tangible that yields reliable data to a.n.a.lyze. There used to be a time when an executive would call the marketing people in and show them the finished projects. The marketing people would then describe how they would sell the executive's project that he had shepherded and green-lit. Now the marketing people come in and tell the executive what projects to make.

How content are you with your career? Are you creatively satisfied?

Well, I'm content because I've been allowed to do something original over the years. The contentment comes from doing something that's mine and stands out a bit. And I'd think that would be true for anyone: You have to pursue your own projects that no one else could write. Something with your name on it that represents your point of view and your opinions and your vision of the world-or, at the very least, what you'd like to see.

It's an interesting world we're in. And it hasn't changed all too much over the years. There's a biography about W. C. Fields that came out in 2003 [W. C. Fields: A Biography by James Curtis, Knopf]. There are letters that W. C. Fields had written to the studio about jokes, about his scripts, defending certain cuts, that sound like a comedian today battling an executive. No different. I mean, you could change the date and the language and the things that they're complaining about, but they're exactly the same. The Marx Brothers once battled the studios over a joke. When the executives saw that the joke wasn't cut and was still in the movie, they asked Chico Marx, "Why wasn't that joke cut?" And Chico said, "The G.o.d of comedy kept it in."

So it kind of defines what the relationship is always going to be: a comedian versus the executive. A funny person with one expertise and a business person with another. If either one tells the other how to do their job, tensions surface. So, you have to figure out a way to work together or trust things. You have to have a certain pragmatic and diplomatic personality, because if you fight with somebody, you have to remember, first of all, an executive's job is on the line. You also have to remember that it's not your money. If it's your money, you can do whatever you want. But you have to put yourself in the other person's shoes, and n.o.body wants a writer coming into their office, or into their world, regarding them as an idiot. That's not healthy, and some people starting out have an att.i.tude they're going to war against decades of past battles. There's always a virtue to listening, and there are intelligent people in Hollywood. You have to be a politician and a diplomat. Also, a human being.

It is a struggle. There's always a system to buck. But there's a way to do it. I've been doing it since I was fifteen. You have to have an individual voice, even if you're script doctoring. You have to do it your way and put your stamp on it, so at the end of the day n.o.body else could have done it the same. The more personal, the better. The more that it's told from your own personal experience, the better.

Also, the moment you start writing things that don't personally make you laugh, you're finished. If you're just being calculating and hedging your bets, if you don't have any kind of belief in how funny it is and are just offering safe and easy laughs and nothing that can ever surprise, then you are done, you know? That's it.

PURE, HARD-CORE ADVICE.

MIKE DICENZO.

Supervising Writer, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon; Senior Writer, The Onion I would say that the best humor comes from things you're pa.s.sionate about. Write what you're pa.s.sionate about, and what you know about, and it always translates better. One of my first big bits on Fallon was Jimmy impersonating Neil Young singing The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song. I'm a huge Neil Young fan, and I'm a huge fan of nineties TV, it's what I grew up with. When you're able to take something you love and put a funny spin on it, it's always going to feel that much more genuine.

I definitely try to watch other late-night shows. I have some friends who work on Colbert, which is a great show, and I'll just flip around, or I'll watch clips that I see posted online. But more than anything, I think the important thing is to keep your own sensibility. You should always be excited about what you're writing. Because once you get to the point where you're like, "Ugh, this is a job, and I gotta s.h.i.t out some jokes," then you're in trouble. It's good to take a step back and remember that you have an awesome job where you write jokes for a living. Of course, every comedy show has a certain quota of jokes that you just have to do. It is a job. But if you can find enough bits that you're in love with, that you're excited about, it keeps you invested and it keeps your sensibility intact. Because when you're excited to write something, you think, This feels right.

I always tell aspiring comedy writers, "Just write as much as you can. That's the only way you're going to get better at it." Do it any way you can-write a bunch of jokes on Twitter, start a web series, start a funny Tumblr-anything. Just produce funny writing and eventually it'll get noticed. All it takes is one person in the comedy business to notice you and find your stuff funny. I've been lucky enough to be in positions where I can help out people I thought were funny, and now a few of them work at The Onion and at Fallon.

And that's another thing: If you get any success in comedy, help out your friends who are trying to do the same but who might not have a job yet. I was lucky enough to start right out of college at The Onion, and I helped a couple of my friends get hired there. Same thing at Fallon. You would hope that your friends, if they succeed first, will help you, too. Help each other out, and everybody wins.

MEL BROOKS.

In April 1969, Mel Brooks did something that would strike fear into any writer-he walked onstage at the Academy Awards and tried to follow the act of two universally beloved and iconic entertainers: Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles.

Brooks was no comedy novice. He'd cut his teeth on a show with the most legendary writing staff in television history, Your Show of Shows (195054); co-created (with Buck Henry) the wildly popular TV series Get Smart (196570); and written and performed on several 2000 Year Old Man alb.u.ms with Carl Reiner. But this was different. Brooks was up for Best Original Screenplay for The Producers, his feature debut as a filmmaker, and Rickles and Sinatra, the presenters, had the audience in st.i.tches with their impromptu bits about cue cards and fascist Italians.

When Brooks's name was called-his compet.i.tion included Stanley Kubrick and John Ca.s.savetes-he accepted his award, grumbling to Rickles, "You did twenty minutes. You killed my whole thing already." But he eventually wrestled away the mic, and managed to do the impossible; he upstaged the bigger names. "I'll just say what's in my heart," Brooks said. "Ba-b.u.mp, ba-b.u.mp, ba-b.u.mp."

Born in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks was raised by his mother, Kate. His father, Max, a process server, died of kidney disease when he was thirty-four and Brooks was just two. He was the youngest of four boys. Although they were poor, "so was everybody else," he says. When he was nine, his uncle took him to see Ethel Merman in Anything Goes on Broadway, and he immediately decided that he wanted to go into show business.

At twenty-four, he was hired as a writer for Sid Caesar, first on Your Show of Shows and then on Caesar's Hour (195457), where he worked with future legends such as Neil Simon (The Odd Couple), Mel Tolkin (All in the Family), and his future collaborator Carl Reiner. Brooks made a big impression on Reiner, who on a 2011 HBO special recalled Brooks's first pitch during a writers' meeting: "This guy I never saw before got up and started talking about his problems as a Jewish pirate."

Brooks went on to write and direct a half-dozen comedy cla.s.sics, including The Producers (1968), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), High Anxiety (1977), and History of the World: Part I (1981). Regrettably, there was never a History of the World: Part II. Brooks has also written two hugely successful Broadway musicals based on his own movies, The Producers (2001 )and Young Frankenstein (2007), and probably one more by the time you read this. He's one of only eleven people on the planet who belong to the elite EGOT club-artists who've won at least one award in each of the big four of American creative awards: an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. As Brooks once said in History of the World, "It's good to be the king." He was pretending to be Louis XVI (and his head had just been nestled within Marie Antoinette's ample bosom) but he might as well have been talking about his own life and career.

Brooks will never again have a moment like he did at the 1969 Oscars. These days, he's the legendary entertainer that n.o.body wants to follow. But Brooks isn't the kind of comedian to push aside younger performers or hog the spotlight. This was apparent in November 2012, when Brooks appeared as a guest on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live to promote the DVD boxed set The Incredible Mel Brooks: An Irresistible Collection of Unhinged Comedy. The eighty-seven-year-old comedian didn't just let his considerably younger and less experienced host take the lead; he was also sweetly encouraging when Kimmel's jokes fell flat. "It almost worked," Brooks said after one of Kimmel's gags imploded. "It's a good premise." Dropping a less than casual hint, he added, "I wrote for Your Show of Shows for ten years, and I happen to be free now."

You might just be responsible for getting more people into the field of comedy writing than any other person in the history of mankind.

You've left out Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and a couple of others.

Yes, but the writers' room at Your Show of Shows is seen as the equivalent of the 1927 Yankees-as good as it gets. The image of bantering with writers of such talent, I'm sure, influenced more than a few writers to get into the comedy field.

Maybe, but it wasn't all fun and laughs. It wasn't all like [the 1993 Neil Simon play] Laughter on the 23rd Floor. We worked hard. There was a hostility in the air. It was very highly charged. It had to be, you know? The room was filled with this amazing talent, and it was compet.i.tive. Sometimes the room was just bathed in laughter. Other times, the compet.i.tion was fierce. You'd brawl over each line, each joke, each idea.

You're not making it out to be like the writers' room on The d.i.c.k Van d.y.k.e Show.

When you have that many creative minds fighting over so much creative material, it's bound to get heated. These shows were weekly, live, each of them ninety minutes long.

Looking back, I do think the writing staff was about the best bunch of comedy writers ever a.s.sembled under one roof. You had Joe Stein, who wrote Fiddler on the Roof and Zorba; Larry Gelbart who created the sitcom M*A*S*H and who wrote the screenplay to Tootsie. Brilliant. You had Mike Stewart, who was just the typist for the room! He later went on to write Bye Bye Birdie and h.e.l.lo, Dolly! This was the typist, not even a writer for the show!

Not as frequently mentioned was Lucille Kallen, who was another tremendous writer. She wrote a lot of the domestic sketches. Very hard worker, she was very talented. And then there was Mel Tolkin, who was our head writer. One of the best comedy writers who ever lived. Just a wonderful comedy writer. He'd sometimes write extraordinarily cheap jokes. You know, "She married a station beneath her. He got off at 116th Street and she got off at 125th Street." Bad, bad, wonderful-bad jokes. He sculpted a lot of the monologues, domestic sketches with Lucille. Also, a lot of parodies of foreign movies.

Your Show of Shows would frequently parody foreign movies, which was rare at the time. How many of the viewers even saw these movies? Did the writers even see these movies?

Well, n.o.body in America had ever seen a foreign movie, but we, the writers, were from New York. We were New Yorkers. There were a lot of movie houses that showed j.a.panese movies, French movies, Italian movies, certainly. We were all familiar with the format, the style, the look and feel of these movies. The trick was to make these parodies funny to viewers who hadn't seen the original. But yes, sometimes, we would parody a movie that none of us had even seen. We just a.s.sumed that it would look a certain way, and then we'd parody what we imagined.

The writers for Your Show of Shows seem to have been very street-smart. These weren't writers who studied comedy in college.

Well, you're talking to one of them who never graduated college. I mean, I only had maybe a year of college at the most. I was a street corner comic in Brooklyn. I wasn't the funniest and I wasn't the best. There were many great street corner comics who really would give you the state of the neighborhood, the world, in these one-liners. A lot of what I learned came from those street corners, especially when it came to being funny.

Do you think that affected the comedy, when it was more streetwise? Now, a student can actually major in comedy at college.

I do think the comedy was different. We had real-world experience. A lot had served in World War II. The comedy had to have been affected by that alone.

I don't think there is such a thing as studying comedy writing. There's no way. If anybody could be a teacher of it, I consider it would be me. I've done as much, possibly more, comedy writing than anybody who has ever lived. And yet I can tell you that it's almost impossible to teach. I had a friend who was an actor. His name was Andreas Voutsinas and he was Greek. He played the gay roommate [in the 1968 movie] The Producers. He once said to me, "Or you got it or you ain't."

He began the sentence with or, which I loved. What he said wasn't grammatically correct, but the point is that you got to have it from the beginning. Either you got it or you don't. You can't teach writing. You can teach some of the basics of writing: act one, two, and three; how to create a premise; how to develop a story; how to sharpen jokes. But you can't ever teach people how to get talent in their guts. You can't teach people how to express this gut-level talent. That's just impossible.

If you learn by anything, you teach yourself. And mostly you learn by your flops. Whenever I lecture at schools, I say, "Don't avoid the flops. The flops teach you what not to do in the future." That's just as important, if not more important, than teaching you what to do. What not do to.

What specifically did you learn from your flops?

Many times, especially when I first left Caesar's Hour in 1957, there was a lot of hubris in my writing. There was a lot of arrogance. I would think, The h.e.l.l with this. If they don't get it, they don't get it. But I get it, it amuses me. Sometimes I would laugh at very personal, private, obscure jokes, which delighted me. But I realized, How many people is this for? I've got to include some of the audience, or else. I learned from several failures this way.

I wrote a TV pilot in the early sixties for ABC called Inside Danny Baker. It was about a little kid with an imagination and a vision. He dreamed of being different things, like all kids do. He was like a young Walter Mittytype. It's really a good little show; it could have been a nice little series. But it didn't work. It was too personal. I was that kid. I didn't lower myself enough with, you know, s.e.x jokes. You want things to sell; you've got to make them somehow down and dirty and attractive. It was too simple, too pure, and I was pleasing myself. I should have said, "It's just a little too mild to get on television."

What I'm saying is that you just can't be too far in your own head. What I eventually happened upon is a combination of high and low. To give you a specific example, in High Anxiety, I had references that people might never have heard of, such as names of psychiatrists, types of a.n.a.lysis, specific references to Hitchc.o.c.k movies. In High Anxiety, an audience would have had to have seen at least three or four Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k movies to understand what the h.e.l.l any one scene was about. At the same time, there was action, there was suspense.

That would go for Blazing Saddles, too. You had a line like, "The only thing that stands between me and that property is the rightful owners," but there was also a cowboy punching a horse. There were cowboys sitting around a fire, eating beans, farting. You know, just basic thrills that a writer has to give an audience. And I didn't leave those thrills out.

With Inside Danny Baker, the show that I mentioned earlier, it was just the story of this kid and his dreams. It was all too personal.