Sick In The Head: Conversations About Life And Comedy Part 3

Albert: I never wanted to be a director. When I started, when I wrote the script for Real Life, I didn't want to direct it. And I went to Carl Reiner. And, really, directing is just the dictation of the style. You wind up doing it because-"No, no, no, don't cast him." You know? "We'll put Elliott Gould in the thing." "Oh, no. He's wonderful, but don't put him in that. That's terrible."

Judd: That's exactly why I became a director.

Albert: I mean, Steven Spielberg seems to have wanted to be a director from thirteen. He put his dog in a certain position and made him eat at four o'clock. He liked to direct it. But, to me, directing is tedious. Especially if you're acting in it. And I'm inherently lazy. I would stay in the trailer until someone came to get me: "It's four o'clock. You're not going to be able to do the horse shot if you don't-" "Oh, okay." So when I act in people's films, I have this perverse thing of watching it rain, and I'm like, I think I'll eat another scone.

Judd: Do you ever wish you directed more?

Albert: Here's what I think. I think Woody Allen was the last person to get in under the radar of testing and promoting.

Judd: Because he doesn't have to do any of it?

Albert: Yes. And I admire that, because the hardest part of the movies I made was the release part. I mean, some of my movies tested well enough where they were confused, and others tested so terribly that it's like you killed their children. And that whole period where you have to dodge phone calls and figure out what to do. I came just at the time where I had to go on the plane with them. You just had to, or they wouldn't talk to you again.

Judd: Was it the Real Life screening where the studio executives flew home without you?

Albert: No, Modern Romance. Frank Price was the head of Columbia at the time, and they had seen all these dailies, and I had had screenings. I ran this film fifteen times, just for my own good, and the audience was great, and they laughed, and the executives, they'd laugh. So then, what they did is, they surprised an audience. They told them after they came to a movie that they had paid for, which was Seems Like Old Times, that Goldie HawnChevy Chase movie. So we went up to San Francisco, and they surprised them with Modern Romance.

Judd: So they make it a double feature? And they are exhausted by the time your movie starts?

Albert: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there was a big party planned at the Fairmont, with hors d'oeuvres and liquor, and everybody left and just flew back, and they didn't tell me or [my co-writer] Monica Johnson or [my co-star] Kathryn Harrold-and I think [my friend] Paul Slansky came up just for support, and the four of us just spent the night in that ballroom alone, and they tell me I was the funniest I've ever been in my life. And then, when I got back to L.A., it was as if I had secretly changed every minute of the movie in a dungeon. They had a box of cards and they said, "You need to read these cards." This was 1980, so I was still able to say, "I'm not going to read the cards." So they read them to me. Like Guantnamo.

Judd: I get the same cards.

Albert: So Frank Price said, "You need to add a psychiatrist scene to explain the problem, or you won't have a second week." And I didn't add a psychiatrist scene, and, of course, what he was saying was: If you don't fix this, we're doing nothing. And they did nothing. But the nice thing about that experience was that Stanley Kubrick befriended me.

Judd: Really?

Albert: He screened the movie, and I was really-I couldn't get out of bed. I was just feeling like: This is impossible, this kind of work. How do you do this? A very famous young director at the time said to me, "Why don't you just do what they want? What's the matter with you?" And I'm going, "I didn't make the movie to do what they want. I'm trying to say something." So Stanley Kubrick said it was the best movie on jealousy he ever saw, and he said, "This movie would make twenty-five million dollars with the right support." And I just thought, Jesus Christ, this is great.

Judd: You struck up a friendship with him?

Albert: We wrote back and forth. Then one day I said, "Maybe I should come and visit." And he went, "No, no, no, no, I don't really live anywhere."

Judd: And you never heard from him again. How were your reviews?

Albert: Remember, there were key outlets that could give you a career. Real Life got a rave in Time. By Frank Rich. So I got enough good reviews that I kept having a career.

Judd: You're always able to make the next movie.

Albert: I can make the next movie tomorrow. The thing that keeps me hesitant is the third act. What I mean is: The first act is writing, the second act is making, the third act is releasing. And if I can just get over that, nothing would stop me.

Judd: Do you ever just think, I've done so much-I'm a highly respected person-who gives a f.u.c.k about all that?

Albert: Yes, I do. Listen, I like acting. I liked acting in your movie. I liked Drive. I like taking these parts, and that's satisfying. I run into a lot of people who are really nice about "When's your next movie coming out?" And I think about it. I just have to make sure I'm at that place where the third act wouldn't bother me.

Judd: Does that get worse as you get older?

Albert: It probably gets better as you get closer to the end. It would be funny to think, Oh, I have terminal cancer, but I'm worried about the cards.

Judd: I've been done with This Is 40 since the end of May, and it comes out at Christmas. It's a seven-month gap, which is like telling a joke and waiting seven months to see if people laugh. It's torture.

Albert: There's no real immediacy in movies. Even in comedy alb.u.ms, the irony is, if I didn't bring a comedy alb.u.m to a friend's and sit down and listen to it with them, I never heard my comedy alb.u.ms played. I've never heard reactions to them.

Judd: That's what's interesting about Twitter. I get tweets every night where someone says, "I'm watching Freaks and Geeks right now." It's a great way to connect with people who are watching your work at that very moment. Do you have that experience?

Albert: Yeah, but Twitter is the devil's playground.

Judd: It sucked you in. You're addicted now.

Albert: I don't know if I'm addicted. It's a horrible waste of time for the writer of it, the reader of it. We will lose the war to China because of Twitter.

Judd: So why are you still doing it?

Albert: Well, because I always liked the ability to comment on a good story of the day. And it's the easiest thing when you read the morning newspapers and then you go: "Look at this-they're bombing Europe." And it's amazing, whenever you do anything political, I'm sure you know.

Judd: The vitriol.

Albert: "I hope you die!" It's just so funny to me.

Judd: If someone says, "I hope you die," and I tweet back at them- Albert: They say, "No, I love you."

Judd: Yeah. Every time.

Albert: Every time. I know. I love that. And they are so shocked. I had a guy that said, "Go drive your car into the ocean and never come up, you vile piece of s.h.i.t." And I said, "All of that from that comment?" And the guy said, "Oh, my G.o.d, I didn't know you'd answer back. I love Modern Romance!"

Judd: So you're not currently writing a movie? Do you have notebooks? Do you have ideas?

Albert: I have tons of ideas. One of the reasons I didn't go into it again was I am enjoying acting and there were so many movies I turned down as an actor because I was making my own movies. Every time I see Boogie Nights-you know, I got offered the part that Burt Reynolds got. And I remember going into a screening room and seeing Paul Thomas Anderson. No one knew him yet, and I watched Hard Eight, and I thought, Oh, this is good-this is someone you would like to take a chance with. But I was just getting the money to make The Muse, and if you're writing and directing and starring in a movie, you can't stop.

Judd: You said you were friends with Harry Nilsson?

Albert: I was. He was one of these comedy-freak guys. He would come and see my shows and he was very sweet and a ma.s.sive drinker. I didn't drink and I wound up being the driver. And then he introduced me to John Lennon, because they were best friends. I spent a lot of time with Harry Nilsson and John Lennon during those May Pang years, when he was out here. Those guys would get rowdy, but John Lennon was certainly a fun person. And John Lennon, again, was a frustrated comedian. All these guys-comedy, to them, was the holy grail.

Judd: So three single guys running around.

Albert: Harry wasn't even single. He was married. His wife was very forgiving with him leaving and coming back the next month. Look, sometimes it was too much. He was friends with Keith Moon. The Who were staying in Century City, and Harry said, "Come over. Keith is here-we're having a thing." Now, listen to this. I had just done a Mike Douglas in the afternoon and flew back from Philadelphia. And I come walking down the hall, and the housekeeper says, "Oh, you were on Mike Douglas-you were wonderful." "Thank you so much." I go in the room, and in about twenty minutes Keith Moon threw the television out the window. It was sixteen stories up. And now the room is destroyed, and I'm going: I was recognized-I got to get out of here! How can I get out of the Century Plaza without being seen? Because I know in court she's going to go, "The guy on The Mike Douglas Show!" You know? And I'm sitting there with Keith trying to be a Jewish mother: "Don't throw the TV. If you want to get your frustration out, go run around the block, because the TVs, they don't want them thrown out the window."

Judd: So how old are you when you're hanging out with John Lennon? Are you, like, twenty-three?

Albert: Twenty-five.

Judd: And did you grow up so much around show business that it didn't blow your mind?

Albert: It's a great question, because nothing blew my mind in show business, and he was the only person-the first time I met him, Harry said, "Get in that car there," and I got in the backseat, and there was John Lennon, and the one thing I prided myself on in my comedy, you know, I'm not a person that was ever on. I was funny. I knew when to stop. I wasn't that manic on, and I was on with him, and I didn't know how to get out of it. I didn't know what to do. And he said-that still remains the greatest thing to me-he leaned over and said, "I've known you for a thousand years." And I just never felt bad again.

Judd: That's right in the post-Beatles moment.

Albert: He was going through a lot. He was separated from Yoko, but I remember my alb.u.m, Comedy Minus One, had just come out and was in Tower Records. So he and Harry and I went in. He bought them all. He bought three boxes of them. Then he drove down Sunset and hurled them out like Frisbees. And again I'm going, "Don't do that. You'll get a littering fine." Boom. He's just throwing them out on the street. So it's good and bad. I mean, it helped my Billboard number, but now they are all over Sunset.

Judd: Was that inspiring creatively?

Albert: It was interesting to know what they think of comedy. They love comedy so much. It's a language they don't speak as eloquently. As much as you listen to the Beatles and say, "How do you write that song?" they're going, "How did you say that? Where did that come from?"

Judd: Were you doing stand-up in those years?

Albert: I started on television. I had five years of network television before I ever got up on a stage. The first thing I ever did was in 1967. This guy Bill Keene had a little talk show at noon, and Gary Owens took over for a week. He knew about this dummy bit I used to do, this ventriloquist thing, and I was on Keene at Noon. From that I got an agent and three Steve Allen shows in 1968. I only had one bit. I did that and then I made up two other bits.

Judd: Did you have to show them before?

Albert: No. No. It was a time when people trusted you. They said, "What are you going to do?" "I'm going to do this-it will be four minutes." Almost n.o.body laughed, but Steve Allen laughed so hard. And that was the laugh you needed. From that, in '69, I was offered a spot as a regular on a Dean Martin show. Then, from '70 to '73, I must have done eighty variety shows. There were so many. Glen Campbell. Helen Reddy. The Everly Brothers. Johnny Cash. Hollywood Palace. After all of these shows, I did Merv-I did Merv Griffin's CBS show fourteen times. And then, after all these years, I got a call from Neil Diamond. His manager said, "Would Albert want to open for Neil?" And I had never done that.

Judd: You'd never done it live, on the road.

Albert: My first couple of months was taking television bits and trying to make them fit into a live act. Eventually I felt comfortable onstage, but I went back to doing primarily television. In the early 1970s, d.i.c.k Cavett was very hot. And I hadn't done Johnny Carson. I'd done everything but, and I said to my agent, "I'd like to do d.i.c.k Cavett. I think that's a cool show." And they didn't want me, and I went to The Tonight Show. By default. And that was one of the lucky breaks I had. I did, like, forty of those shows. Half of them don't exist, because it was during those years in the seventies where they erased over the tape. It breaks my heart. I would do a new bit every time for Johnny, and that was a h.e.l.l of an experience. Just once every five, six weeks. Make something up in the bathroom and go do it on The Tonight Show.

Judd: That's a lot of bits.

Albert: A lot of bits, but you had Johnny's confidence, and it didn't matter if the audience laughed. Johnny laughed, and that's all that ever mattered. But eventually they laugh. When Johnny laughs, they laugh.

Judd: Did you develop a friendship with him?

Albert: I would pay my respects and go to Las Vegas and see his stand-up, and he wasn't an easy guy to be a friend with. He came into my dressing room one night before the show out of the blue and he sat me down and said, "You need to be married." And this is a guy that's been married three times.

Judd: How old were you when he said that?

Albert: I was twenty-eight. And I said, "How come?" And he said, "This is too hard to do alone." Now, by the way, he's right on that account. But I didn't want to go through four wives just to accomplish that.

Judd: How old were you when you got married?

Albert: My forties. And I was very fortunate when I met Kimberly-things gelled. There weren't all these problems, everybody who has these relationships. I was an expert at it. I made Modern Romance. People used to stop me on the street. I get this a lot, where they honk their horn and roll down the window and a couple says, "We got married because of Modern Romance." I don't know what to do. I feel so bad.

Judd: What does that mean?

Albert: I don't know.

Judd: That means, "We both like it."

Albert: That means they're both screwed up. I had a very wise person tell me that he thinks marriage, when you're younger, you keep thinking you can fix things. That's what people do. And you can't really fix anything. It shouldn't be a ma.s.sive difficult thing every day. Life's difficult enough. You can fix little teeny things. If a person likes to eat their peas off a plate, and you like to eat them in a bowl, you might win at that. But that's about it.

Judd: Were you a difficult person to date?

Albert: I wasn't a bad boyfriend. I had relationships with some of the women who were in the movies. And I wasn't a cheater. I was a pretty loyal guy.

Judd: You weren't like the guy in Modern Romance.

Albert: Very early on I was. I had a relationship that was immensely physical without the other components. And when you're young, that's confusing, because you're being told, Well, what do you think relationships are? They are physical. But you need a little bit of everything. I tried my hand at the most funny women, but I'm not a person who believes you want a person like yourself. You want key things in common, but you don't want the nutsiness to be the same, because that's too much.

Judd: What kind of dad are you? What are the TV rules?

Albert: TV isn't an issue. It's more the screens. It's the games, and there's rules about that, and there's nothing before homework. They are not big TV watchers during the day. They are at night. When I was a kid, that's all we had, and I watched a lot of it. We could trick our parents and say it was good for us.

Judd: What are your kids into?

Albert: My daughter, Claire, is an amazing singer and writes songs. And is a good writer. And very creative, and can draw. Jake is the funniest kid I know. He's got a real sense of humor. He's become a reasonable magician. I take him to these places on the weekend where they have what's called Magic: The Gathering. And there's like forty people who look like they work for Microsoft and my son. And he wins most nights. But the most important thing is that they've got good souls. They've got good hearts. They know what kid to befriend when that kid needs it....I don't see the kind of cynicism that you see in other people.

Judd: In us.

Albert: Yeah, well, I don't think I was a person who made fun of other kids. That wasn't my style of comedy....I've never talked this much about myself.

Judd: Do you like the idea of your kids going into show business?

Albert: If I can't talk them out of it, yes. My mother kept trying to talk me out of everything. "Honey, fall back on business." I never knew what it meant, and that's the way it should be. I sum up all of show business in three words: Frank Sinatra Junior. People think there's nepotism in show business. There's no nepotism on the performing side, especially in comedy. I don't know of any famous person that can tell an audience to laugh at their son.

Judd: You once said you got such a kick out of making people laugh on the phone that it slowed down how much you would write for yourself.

Albert: That was a big problem for me and still is. I have to be careful. I'm going to go do Letterman for This Is 40, and I told my wife and a couple of friends of mine what I'm going to do, and it makes them laugh. We were having dinner, and my wife goes, "Tell them what you're going to do on Letterman." I said, "No, no, no." Because my problem was always that when I thought of something funny, if I called up a buddy, and I did it, the ship had sailed. I didn't need seven thousand people. One person worked. The chromosome had clicked and I had an o.r.g.a.s.m. I was done.

Judd: And so you didn't need to write a movie.

Albert: It's terrible. It's not a commercial gene.

Judd: At some point it's like: How much need is there to-how much is too much?

Albert: Let's ask you that. You work a lot. I mean, if you enjoy it, it's good. If you wake up and it feels like it's destroying you, then you need to think about it.

Judd: True.

Albert: There are many aspects of work that are amazingly rewarding. The actual doing of it. The writing, when it goes well, there's no better creative high. A day on the set where you a.s.semble a bunch of great actors and you brought this to life. That's a wonderful thing. There are other aspects where I've fought for things in movies. The movies that I've directed, for the most part, I've been able to win at the cost of alienating people.

Judd: Such as?

Albert: I wrote this movie with Monica Johnson called The Scout, that Michael Ritchie directed. I can't stand the way it ends, and it was a fight that I lost. I yelled so loud at Peter Chernin, I never worked at Fox again. I lost my temper. I went crazy, and I said, "Look, you're not the one in the paper getting..." And, sure enough, The New York Times, it was like the reviewer was listening. She said, "I'm so surprised that Albert Brooks would end a movie this way." And I'm going, "Albert Brooks didn't end a movie this way!"

Judd: The work can really bring out the worst side of you when you feel like someone else is ruining it. I can completely lose my mind.

Albert: But you're supposed to. If you're in a position where an argument can win, you're supposed to argue. I mean, I've lost only a few arguments. That was the good thing about writing and directing my own movies. For Lost in America, they were telling me, "He doesn't have enough stupid jobs before he decides to go back to New York. Put in more jobs." And I said, "When you have a man in a crossing guard outfit, there's no other stupid job." They said, "Just try some." So that was easy, because I was able to say, "Here's one: Find someone who looks like me and you film it. If it works, we'll put it in." That argument I can win.

Judd: How does it feel for you that these movies that were painful at the time and didn't make that much money are now cla.s.sics?

Albert: It's cool, but it's not an active feeling. You don't get up in the morning going, "My movie's still here-f.u.c.k you." That's not a joyous daily feeling. I mean, as I told you, there's no line at the bank for being ahead of your time.

Judd: How did you find the process working on This Is 40?

Albert: I liked it with you, because of the rehearsal. I like the idea of what the father was going to be. People ask me all the time about improv, and I tell them improv is just the final icing. You need a structure. It's like, if you're going to commit suicide, you need the building to jump out of.

Judd: Which comedians made the biggest impression on you when you were starting out?

Albert: The biggest influence was Jack Benny. Because of his minimalism. And the way he got laughs. He was at the center of a storm, he let his players do the work, and just by being there made it funny. That was mind-boggling to me.