Poking A Dead Frog Part 4

And to be fair to comedy writers just starting out, there really isn't much money in it.

No, there isn't. There never really was, but there's a whole lot less now. It's just not a viable thing. It really isn't. The New Yorker, to its credit, is still viable, but often they'll just publish an unfunny piece by somebody you've heard of instead of a very funny piece by someone you've never heard of.

It's just so difficult to write humor for print. I tried to figure this out recently. When I was at the National Lampoon, I think I wrote a million words. G.o.d help me, most of them were supposed to be funny. I can't imagine anyone doing that again. I can't imagine myself doing it again. Send the guys in the white jackets and nets. Looking back, you just can't believe it.

You once said that it was Doug Kenney, the co-writer of Animal House and Caddyshack, who-more than any other National Lampoon writer-was able to get things done in Hollywood. Why was that?

The real beginning for National Lampoon in Hollywood was Doug Kenney. Doug was a naturally funny writer of print. In retrospect, and I didn't realize it at the time, he was also a gifted writer of movie comedy. Doug just had a great, natural comic instinct, which could be applied to anything. When he got the opportunity to do Animal House [in the mid-seventies], it was clear that that was what he was really meant to do.

It was mostly because Doug had a fundamentally cinematic sort of sensibility and he was quite relentless in his pursuit of projects he cared about. It takes a profound sort of focus and determination to get anything done in the movie world, and he had both. He was also a very, very good collaborator with everyone he worked with.

Over the years, there's been much discussion about Kenney's death in Hawaii in 1980 at the age of thirty-three. According to some, he jumped off a cliff. According to others, he slipped or was pushed off a cliff. What do you think happened?

I don't know. Honestly, I just don't know. I think it's possible that he killed himself. The whole thing is so murky. Doug had his ups and downs; there's no question about it. I guess it comes with the territory. Years before, Doug had gone to visit friends in the Caribbean, and he was caught with marijuana in his luggage. It wasn't very serious. He knew people who had good political connections, and he got off. But he would never travel with drugs again. So I think he was out in Hawaii and he may have tried to score some drugs. This might have been a drug deal gone bad, and he might have been killed. But I honestly don't know.

There are stories about Doug being unhappy with the way Caddyshack turned out. Do you think he was unhappy with the movie or unhappy with his life?

I think a little of both. When Caddyshack was released [in 1980], he was kind of depressed. He said, "Oh, well. It wasn't another Animal House." And I said to him, "Man, give it time." It was one of the funniest movies I think I'd ever seen. But he was comparing it to the great success that Animal House achieved, and that wasn't fair.

You collaborated with Doug on Bored of the Rings. Can you tell me how that came about?

I convinced Doug, who had not read Lord of the Rings, and who had correctly thought it was kind of a stupid thing, that we should write a parody of it. We were able to sell the idea to Ballantine, the publisher that originally put out the paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings. And again being careful, we sent a letter to J. R. R. Tolkien saying, "We're thinking of parodying your books. What do you think?" And he sent back this sweet, very quirky letter that said, in essence, "Well, I don't really know why you'd want to bother, but if you're silly enough to want to do it then that's okay with me. Go ahead."

After we managed to get a small advance from a publisher, Doug speed-read Lord of the Rings in one day and ended up writing probably three-quarters of the parody. I remember sitting across from him at a sort of double desk in a Harvard library, each of us with a portable typewriter, and I sat there fussing over a paragraph, and he was writing pages as fast as he could type. It was unbelievable. He wrote thirty-five or forty words per minute. And it was hysterical. I mean, it was just unbelievable. That was Doug-that was pure Doug.

When we turned it in, the head of Ballantine, Ian Ballantine [who published The Lord of the Rings], basically picked up the ma.n.u.script with a pair of fireplace tongs. It was noxious to him. He wasn't thrilled about it. Meanwhile, over the years, that book [published in 1969 by Signet] has helped support the Harvard Lampoon. Simon & Schuster published yet another edition in the fall of 2012.

The National Lampoon's style of print humor was very dense, and not wedded to one cookie-cutter premise. There were many different types of genres that were parodied, from comic books to game instructions to yearbooks to magazines. It must have been an exhausting publication to put out month after month.

Absolutely, and going back to Doug, he had a great gift for the visual. He was the one who more than anyone said, "Listen, the material in the magazine can't just be words on a page. We should do absolutely strict and accurate parodies." Doug completely and instinctively knew that this was a great opportunity to do funny work. It was just in his blood. Once we all caught on to how it was being done, it became very clear that this was the direction to take.

In the very early issues of National Lampoon, the art direction appeared looser. It wasn't necessarily very accurate to what it was parodying.

It was clumsy in the beginning. Until [art director] Michael Gross came in around the sixth or seventh issue, it was not working. To his great credit, Michael called up our publisher, even before he was hired, and he said, "You know, this is a funny magazine, but it looks like c.r.a.p. I'm an art director. Hire me. I'll fix it." And we did, and he did. He saved us, really. Total accuracy for what was being parodied. It was easy to confuse the real with our version.

This very talented comedian named Ed Bluestone came to the office in 1972 with the line, "If you don't buy this magazine, we'll kill this dog." The next day Michael found a dog who would turn its eyes away from a pistol, with a little prodding. The photo was shot for the January 1973 issue. I saw this picture and simply couldn't believe it. And it was, like, with a wave of his left hand. Magic. So that's the type of thing that made all the success possible.

How often was the magazine sued for depicting too accurate a parody?

We were continually sued. In one [1973] issue we published a Miracle Monopoly Cheating Kit. We printed out $1,000 and $5,000 pieces of Monopoly money to be slipped among the game's $5 and $10 pieces of Monopoly money. The only reason we didn't get sued is because Lampoon writer Christopher Cerf had gone to college with the son of one of the Parker Brothers, who called off the dogs. People were always suing us. Oftentimes, we had to settle out of court and just tell them, "We're sorry. We won't do that again."

Do you think the magazine could work as well today as it did in its prime? So much of this type of humor depends on the audience's knowledge of what's being parodied, and a lot of the print formats you dealt with aren't as popular as they used to be.

That's absolutely right. It was a moment of shared experience. With the visualization of a lot of print and the introduction of television after World War II-and this was for my generation-you had this attic stuffed with shared experience and memories. Everybody had read The Sat.u.r.day Evening Post, everybody had read the stupid comic books, and we connected. It was just an entire world of visual references, and we ran through them at the speed of light. The amount of material we consumed in a few years at National Lampoon was shocking. We just used it up.

Most of the humor in National Lampoon-and it's now more than forty years old-remains fresh. This even includes material that, in lesser hands, would feel very dated, such as Watergate or the Vietnam War.

It's very lasting. It was very difficult to produce, but I do think most of it has lasted. Some of those parodies I can still look back at and laugh out loud. I reread the 1964 High School Yearbook parody recently. That was unbelievable; I mean, just great.

A lot of comedy fans feel that the 1964 Yearbook, published as a book in 1973 and edited by Doug Kenney and P. J. O'Rourke, invented nostalgia. At least a certain type of nostalgia-looking to the past, but with the knowledge of what we know now.

I wouldn't argue with that. Well, I'm not sure we invented nostalgia. We did package it well and gave it momentum. But as a symbol of it, yes. The format of a high school yearbook is the one complete true universal, at least in this country. That's gone. I mean, are we going to now have people sharing their first experience via Twitter? No. So everybody lived through high school. And the high school yearbook was the distillation of this experience.

This is a very specific type of nostalgia. When you have references to high school girls "out sick a lot" and "crying in Home Ec," really a euphemism for being pregnant during a time when such a thing was not accepted, that's a different type of nostalgia than looking back fondly on concerts held in the town square, musicians playing oompah music.

Right, it's completely different. There's a depth to the nostalgia, or a width or a breadth, or whatever geometrical metric you want to use. I think that partly had to do with us growing up in a time, the sixties, when it was unbelievably straightlaced and tight-a.s.sed. Things started to loosen up a bit after Kennedy's election, but the first time I ever heard of anybody using drugs was in 1965. It was marijuana. I remember someone saying, "My G.o.d, if they ever catch that guy, he's going to federal prison for life!" Can you imagine? Two years later, you couldn't walk through Harvard Square without getting a contact high. It just all fell apart. So the National Lampoon's timing in that sense couldn't have been better. We got a chance to draw on this shared, weird background of the boomers at a time when everything was coming loose. I think the National Lampoon was the first printed magazine that published every single four-letter word.

I remember early on the publisher telling us, "I've got some bad news. I got a call from the printing plant. They won't print a particular cartoon." I think the cartoon's punch line was, "Oh well, go f.u.c.k yourself," or something like that. Within six months, though, they were printing everything. They just gave up.

This was before even Playboy began publishing four-letter words.

Absolutely. To their credit, Playboy was more careful, because they were smart. They were printing bad pictures and they didn't want to get involved with bad words. Hugh Hefner wanted a clean-dirty magazine. We were very content to have a dirty-dirty magazine. Hefner was a very smart man. When I was on the Harvard Lampoon, we wanted to do a Playboy parody. We cold-called Hefner to ask his permission. His secretary said, "Just a minute." Hefner came on the phone practically immediately. Not only did he say he'd love to have it parodied, but he said, "I'll arrange for you to use my printing plant. I will tell them that you're solid citizens. And all you guys have to do is make sure you get signatures from some of your rich graduates on the bill to make sure we don't get stiffed." We printed around 635,000 copies in September 1966, and we sold them in eleven days.

That was really the beginning of me thinking, My G.o.d, I don't have to go to law school.

That was the first inclination that there was something big out there?

That was the first really big one. We realized that not only could we do something that was going to be on newsstands all across the country, not just on the East Coast, but we realized that certain production values could be achieved, which was a necessity for accurate parody.

The material from the Lampoon, both Harvard and National, is very much druggy-based. Was there ever any drug use for you?

No. And not because of any sort of moral rect.i.tude. I guess, like Bill Clinton, I didn't inhale, because when a friend offered me a puff on a joint, I took a deep drag and almost choked to death. The perfect negative reinforcement. No one ever offered me anything stronger-they probably figured like that cla.s.sic Woody Allen gag, I would sneeze in midsnort and blow all the high-priced c.o.ke away.

Do you feel that comedy writers can improve their humor-and reach areas they wouldn't have been able to reach otherwise-if they are drunk or stoned?

No.

It must be strange to talk about some of your college cla.s.smates who later become such comedic icons. Is it all surreal?

Totally surreal. Everything seems completely accidental. It's that philosophy that if you cross Sixth Avenue at Forty-second Street instead of at Forty-third Street, you'll end up alive instead of being hit by a car. I mean, it was all so completely, unbelievably accidental. I went to Harvard. My father went to Yale in the cla.s.s of 1913. I went to Harvard to p.i.s.s off my father. It was youthful rebellion. That was the only reason. If I had gone to Yale, none of this would have happened. No way. I have no idea where I would have ended up. All so trivial.

So much luck really does seem to play into it all, both in terms of achieving success and not achieving success.

You hate to admit it, but it's all luck. It's just really all luck. And that's why it always frustrates me, as a lifelong Democrat, when I hear the Republicans talking about hard work. "It's all hard work." Well, yes, it is always hard work, but there are a lot of people who work very hard and are unlucky and they get screwed.

The people who started the National Lampoon were very fortunate. We came along at a very particular time. All the restraints were coming loose; it was probably one of the last times when you could start a monthly humor magazine. When we first went out, we were one of the first magazines of its kind to have a seventy-five-cents cover price. That was considered a wild, wild gamble. Who would pay seventy-five cents for such a thing? Well, of course it made it possible for us to exist. For a long time we couldn't get advertising. The advertisers would say, "I'm not going to advertise in that disgusting magazine." But that soon changed. At 295,000 it was disgusting. At 305,000 it was an important audience that needed to be reached on its own terms.

It's notoriously difficult to get advertising for a comedy magazine, as opposed to say, a golf magazine.

If the National Lampoon was being started today, we'd have all those ads of two people sitting side by side in bathtubs, with the man trying to get an erection. There are very few advertising categories for a humor magazine. With golf magazines, you can advertise clubs, clothing, golfing books, anything related to golf. For us, cigarettes was a major advertiser, to our eternal shame, but I do not apologize. We never hesitated to take cigarette advertising. My G.o.d, we needed it. We would have been dead without it.

You've been leery over the years to talk about your National Lampoon days. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen you interviewed for any books about the magazine or its writers-and there have been many.

Well, it's not any sort of hidden agenda. It just gets exhausting. I didn't think most people writing those books were very fair witnesses to what had gone on. It just seemed easier to not get involved with it. Also, it's very hard to tell the story. Part of the problem is that a lot of the story is just d.a.m.n dull. Other than occasionally receiving a box of dynamite sent to us at the offices, like what happened in 1972, it was just grind, grind, grind. Day in and day out, the deadlines were just brutal.

A couple of years after I left [in 1975], I remember giving an interview to a reporter for Esquire, who misquoted me, and some of those misquotes hurt a few people. I swore to myself for a long time thereafter that I would never speak of it again to anybody. I felt I couldn't trust them. But now I've kind of mellowed. It's all sort of become part of history. Sad to say that most of the people who would have been hurt by such things are now dead.

Did you ever have any regrets about leaving the Lampoon after only a little more than five years?

No, it probably saved my life. I had a college friend who was a psychiatrist who told me, "If you hadn't gotten out of there we were going to come and get you. You know, there's no way you would have lasted much longer." Selfishly, I don't feel any particular guilt. I had the best of it. By the time we got Nixon out, and things were sort of cruising along, we'd kind of done it. And the really great gifted people began to leave. Even though he could be really difficult, Michael O'Donoghue was an extraordinary talent, but he had gone on to Sat.u.r.day Night Live. I knew we couldn't compete with SNL. And Doug had moved on to Hollywood and was not coming back. There were not a lot of other people of that same caliber. And it was becoming a bit more of an uphill fight and a little bit more of a routine. I just got burned out. You can only do something at that level for so long.

Are you content with your writing life now? Publishing a humor book every year or so?

Sure. No one is really ever completely content, but yes. Things worked out much better than I could have ever imagined. I love writing books, although publishing has become more compet.i.tive and so difficult. It's hard to come up with these little trivial books and really expect to get them out in the marketplace. But I write books now like I used to write magazine articles. French for Cats: All the French Your Cat Will Ever Need [Villard, 1991] would have been the shortest magazine article I ever wrote. And it's a book!

Were you ever conflicted by your choice to become a comedy writer? Did you ever feel that you should have pursued another occupation?

Even though I really sort of stumbled into humor writing as a profession, I can't imagine doing anything else.

National Lampoon has had its ups (and mostly downs) since you left. Are you at all affected when you see the magazine and its brand struggling from a business and creative standpoint?

Well, in my heart of hearts I think I always knew it was likely to have a somewhat fleeting golden age. Once Sat.u.r.day Night Live came along, and the new generation of smart, very contemporary situation comedies started coming on the air, there were far more interesting and lucrative outlets for the kind of highly talented writers we were deeply dependent on and never could find enough of. It was always a struggle to come up with a month's worth of often quite highly produced pieces-a typical ninety-six-page issue was about half editorial material and half ads, or nearly fifty blank pages to fill. In a way, I think we had a pretty narrow window of opportunity creatively, culturally, and financially. It really seems in retrospect like we came along at just the right time, and we were just unbelievably lucky.

So, what advice would you have for a young humor writer? Or for someone wanting to improve his or her lot in comedy writing?

The only advice is you just have to do it. I think you just have to start writing early. I think one of the other things is to just go to Hollywood or to go work for Sat.u.r.day Night Live. But the thing with those jobs, while often remunerative, they're also all-consuming. I don't think there are a lot of people who write television comedy, or for movies, who are writing books on the side-unless you get to the point where you've made your bundle and you can just write anything. But, at that point, you don't, do you?

Maybe it was always this way for the comedy writer. S. J. Perelman was always complaining that he never had two nickels to rub together. He never seemed to have enough money. Robert Benchley did well out in Hollywood but it killed him; he was just never happy there. So, I don't know. Things happen, things change. It's not the same as what I went through; it's just different. I'm just grateful that I had a shot.

ULTRASPECIFIC COMEDIC KNOWLEDGE.

JAMES L. BROOKS.

Screenwriter, Director, Producer, Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, As Good as It Gets; Creator/Writer, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, The Simpsons

Getting the Details Right

The shows you created, such as Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi, and The Simpsons, have influenced an untold number of comedy writers. Who would you count as being an influence on your own writing?

Certainly high on the list would be Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the screenplays to Network, Marty, The Hospital, in addition to historically great television. When you talk about someone unique among American screenwriters, he's way up there. A great writer. And his position was very rare: He exercised final control over his movies. In other words, he hired the director-in one instance, he was even able to fire the director-and he was able to control the final cut. He was the controlling force on his films as the writer. Which is as rare as it gets. And he was prominent in both movies and in television.

On the original poster for Network, which came out in 1976, the tagline reads: "Prepare Yourself for a Perfectly Outrageous Motion Picture." That outrageousness quickly became commonplace. The movie now almost appears to be a doc.u.mentary.

Well, I remember when I first saw Network-and I'm a Chayefsky lover-but I was cranky when I first saw the movie, because I thought the heroine played by Faye Dunaway was farcical to the point of utterly no connection with reality. And then a heartbeat later, not only was this character not farcical, but she suddenly was all over the place. Chayefsky stone-cold saw the future-and he did that a few times.

That's a tough trick for a writer to pull off, especially when it comes to comedy: to be prescient while also not confusing audiences with anything too new and too unrecognizable.

Well, Chayefsky's [1971] movie The Hospital was just as prescient as Network. He predicted the current state of today's health-care situation when there wasn't a whisper of it.

Paddy Chayefsky has been criticized for writing dialogue that was considered, by many, to be too "written." That the words out of his characters' mouths were perhaps too preachy and too poetic.

That was the big argument about Chayefsky, because he was making films at a time when films were supposed to not be about words, but just all images. And there were these arguments-endless, really, they just went on and on-that the minute you're aware of the writer's hand, the screenplay could no longer be good. But my point was and still is: If you're aware of glorious writing, so what? I never had a problem with that. Chayefsky's dialogue was also brilliant in its variety. His writing was always big-hearted and full of emotion. He could write dialogue for regular people: Marty, Marty's mother, the characters in [the 1957 movie] The Bachelor Party. But he could also write totally convincing dialogue for geniuses: Network, The Hospital, Altered States.

And these days there are any number of writers following in Chayefsky's footsteps in television, which has become the place for the best of our writers to be supported in wherever their talent takes them. I believe great writing should make you aware of it. I think it's a fun thing.

There are stories about Paddy Chayefsky being an incredibly intense, obsessive writer. That he thought of writing, as well as life itself, as almost being a contact sport.

And that's something that I completely understand.

How so?

I see writing as righteous. There are a lot of things in life that we spend time worrying about, agonizing over, being involved with, having it a.s.sume distorted proportions. We end up embarra.s.sed by how much priority we give to so many things that, ultimately, we can't control. But that doesn't happen when it comes to writing. Writing dignifies any turmoil it puts you through.

Would you consider yourself to be an obsessive? Many of the characters in your movies seem to suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder. I'm thinking in particular of Jack Nicholson's character in As Good as It Gets, as well as Holly Hunter in Broadcast News and Tea Leoni in Spanglish.

I can't imagine that any writer doesn't suffer from obsessiveness-a humility that you feel toward your work. Writing is not something you do offhandedly. It should continue to mean as much to you after years of doing it as it did when you first started. I sort of think it's supposed to be ever humbling.

This intensity hasn't seemed to wane over the years. I was listening to the DVD audio commentary for 1987's Broadcast News, and you were talking about some of the jokes that you wished you could rewrite, from a distance of more than ten years.

When you write and direct a movie, you are legally insane. It's an absolute distortion of reality-it just is. You're not thinking straight. So when you see the movie again as a rational human being, with some detachment, it becomes a different thing. I saw Broadcast News for the first time after many years of not having seen it. I was channel-surfing and then stayed with it. I finally realized what the movie was all about. It's about three people who lost their last chance at real intimacy.

Now, at the time of making the film, I couldn't accept my ending, thinking it should be more definitive. But with the pa.s.sage of time, I saw that same ending as correctly defining the journey.

You're a writer with a reputation for doing a tremendous amount of research before you even begin the process of starting on a script. For Broadcast News, you spent a full year doing research on the news media. How important should research be to a screenwriter, even if the script is going to be a comedy?

It's extremely important-at least for me. I love doing research. The script, the characters, the comedy will always benefit from research. It was one of the best times of my life doing research for Broadcast News; just hanging around with journalists was fun. I have this rule: If I hear something being said three times while I'm doing research, then I believe that it's generally true. Well, while in the midst of hundreds of hours of research, I heard it said at least three times that some powerful women in TV journalism would privately cry in the course of their working day. And so I had Holly Hunter's character in Broadcast News cry on a schedule to release tension. There are countless similar examples of things that work in your film that never would have been there without research.

Have there been other occasions when your research has helped you either define or create a character that wouldn't have existed otherwise?

Lots. It is always important. When we were researching for [the 19781982 sitcom] Taxi, we spent twenty-four hours at a New York City garage called Dover Taxi. We read about the garage in a New York magazine article ["Night-Shifting for the Hip Taxi Fleet," by Mark Jacobson, September 1975]. And we came away with a character that we never could have ever have created on our own-the Louie De Palma character [played by Danny DeVito]. I saw a cab driver bribe a dispatcher in order to get one of the cleaner cabs. This was clearly something that went on all the time. But when the dispatcher saw me watching, he did a bit of theater, slapping the cab driver's hand away in an effort to look innocent. And that's how Louie De Palma was born.

You once said that if someone writes a good script, it will eventually be read. That sounds encouraging, but it's also a sentiment that many struggling Hollywood writers might be surprised to hear.

Well, that's the great edge a writer has. Somewhere, somehow, you can get your script read. And if it's good, you will be noticed. If you're an actor, you need other people in order to act; a director needs other people in order to direct. But writers can be alone in a room and do what they do, without any help. It's all in their hands. And sooner or later, someone will give it a read.

Has writing become any easier for you over the years?

You know, I had a nightmare the other night-a literal nightmare-that I was talking to someone about writing a screenplay and he told me that he wrote fourteen pages a day. Now, I've written more than fourteen pages in a day for a lot of television shows. But never for a movie screenplay. And when you're working on a movie, there are just so many days when nothing gets written down. That can be tough. Hence, the nightmare.

But I have learned that if you awaken each morning and know the questions you're asking yourself and know exactly the problem you're attacking, then the writing process-even if it's really slow, even if nothing gets on paper-becomes a genuine process. And if you're in a genuine process, there are no mistakes. If nothing gets down that day, it's supposed to be that way. As long as your unconscious is preoccupied with the work, you can get into a kind of zone where what seems to be inactivity is progress. The novelist Jonathan Franzen made a comment that brought me to my knees. He said something like, "You can't call yourself a writer if you can get the Internet on your writing machine." That's brutal. But the f.u.c.ker is telling a hard truth. So, right away, the bar is that far from your grasp.

Other writers have told me they have the same personality tic that I've experienced over the years. People used to ask, "What do you do for a living?" It took me more than twenty years to answer, "I'm a writer," without my voice breaking and without me feeling self-conscious. To be a writer always felt too big to be true. I grew up in New Jersey, where my ambition was to survive. I don't mean that in a sad or dramatic way; I mean that in an absolute factual way. It's not rhetoric; it's just a real basic fact. I could only picture myself selling things, like working as a shoe salesman. I did not have the ability to dream of being a writer. I did not have any of the self-confidence you need in order to try to become a writer, and I think I only achieved what looked like self-confidence because I did love to write and I could lose myself in the work. Others saw my focus as self-confidence. But it was just me getting away from myself for a little while, writing what I wanted.