Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (11 page)

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 God, 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 damn 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
Saturday 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 competitive 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
Saturday 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
Saturday 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.

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

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 documentary.

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 assume distorted proportions. We end up embarrassed 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 Téa 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 passage 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 1978–1982 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 fucker 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.

And that’s all you can hope for: to lose track of time and to get into a zone to produce writing that you’re happy with. So I’d recommend that to all young writers. Just write. Lose yourself. And when you look up, maybe you’ll be somewhere you always wanted to be.