Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (43 page)

I can understand the motives, I suppose. I’d love to go back and redo my earlier work. I can see the crudeness of it, as well as the potential, but I just know that it would not be better—it would only be slicker.

Actually, that was the great appeal of writing the scripts to
Ghost World
and [2006’s]
Art School Confidential
. The process was very fluid. The ability to just change a character’s name is something that no comic-book artist would ever have the luxury of doing. It would be such a pain in the ass to reletter somebody’s name or to reorder scenes in comics. I’d just say, “Forget it,” and move on.

With the
Ghost World
script, I made a million changes right up until the very last minute. We changed Steve Buscemi’s character’s name from Sherwin to Seymour the day we handed in the script for the first time, and I’m still not used to it.

How was
Ghost World
green-lit? It was unlike any other Hollywood movie dealing with teenagers I’d seen up to that point—maybe with the exception of
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
and
Heathers
.

Who knows how that film ever happened. It was the most cobbled-together financial arrangement in the history of film. It was held together by spit and Kleenex. It was very low budget. There are a million Sundance films made every year with this kind of money.

The screenplay for
Ghost World
is not your typical Hollywood fare. Even the action descriptions are different from what one would normally find in a script. For instance, this is from the very first page: “A large, hirsute man, wearing only Lycra jogging shorts, watches the Home Shopping Network while eating mashed potatoes with his fingers.”

[Laughs] When Terry and I wrote the
Ghost World
screenplay, we would take turns and hand it back and forth to each other. We were just adding detail upon detail to crack each other up. We showed one of our producers the first ten pages, and it was just packed with descriptions: “The high school graduation banner should be sponsored by Dunkin’ Donuts.”

Never in a million years could we have afforded the rights to Dunkin’ Donuts. The producer said to us, “You know, perhaps you should have looked at another screenplay before you started.”

It’s really a miracle this movie ever got made, quite frankly. A lot of people sort of missed the point of it.
11
Both Terry and I were so green when we were pitching it. We would tell executives we wanted to make another
King of Comedy
[1982] or
Scarlet Street
[1945] or
Crimes and Misdemeanors
[1989]. Big mistake. The executives would look at us as if we were insane. It’s like saying, “We’d like to take $6 million of your money and shred it for an art project we’re doing.” The people who make the decisions in Hollywood are never the oddballs or creative types, so you have to tell them what they want to hear. It didn’t take long for us to start saying things like, “We want to make another
There’s Something About Mary
.” We had no intention of doing that, but you must at least make the effort to be reassuring.

You just mentioned a movie I’m not familiar with:
Scarlet Street
. What is it about?

It’s a
noir
movie, but to me,
noir
is more about a state of anxiety and profound loneliness—an awareness of the quotidian grimness of the postwar world.
Scarlet Street
is about a poor, ugly loser [Edward G. Robinson] who gets hoodwinked by a horrible woman and her pimp, almost willingly so, since even this cheap thrill is preferable to his emasculated existence with his harridan wife.

The original version, directed by Jean Renoir, is even better. The [1931] movie is called
La Chienne
, which translates to “the bitch.” I’m not even sure “the bitch” meant the prostitute, as much as life itself.

What is it about
The
King of Comedy
that you like so much?

I think it’s Scorsese’s best movie—just a perfect little film. I enjoy anything that has an ending that is happy for the characters but is bad for us, the viewers. That ending knocked me to the floor the first time I saw it. I really wasn’t expecting it.

I also like any movie that deals with the ugliness of the relationship between star and fan.

And, of course, Jerry Lewis. I think he’s very appropriate for the role of the late-night TV host: wired, angry, very close to losing control.

I read an interview with the Asian actor [Kim Chan] who played Jerry’s butler in the movie, and he said that the scene when Jerry was yelling at him from outside the house to open the front door was not an act. It was completely real. Jerry was pissed off at the guy for not being able to open the door, and Scorsese luckily had the genius to keep it in the movie.

This next question may very well be the most specific in this entire book, if not in the history of humankind—but here goes anyway. There’s a scene in
The King of Comedy
that has always fascinated me. It takes place when Robert De Niro is eating in a dim sum restaurant with a date. There is an extra in the background who stares directly at and mugs for the camera. Have you noticed this?

I have, actually. From what I’ve heard, this extra was a friend of De Niro’s who was just hamming it up. But why would Scorsese have allowed this to happen? It makes no sense. It might be the only time that an average viewer will ever notice an extra. But it somehow adds to the unreality of the film; the scene is very dreamlike.

Were you into teen films growing up?

I never connected with that sort of film. I couldn’t relate to the problems of average suburban teens at all.

But I never really considered
Ghost World
to be a teen film. It was more about these two specific characters working through something that felt very personal to me. I wasn’t necessarily trying to communicate with teenagers, and I never really imagined they would be as much of our audience as they have.

You say you weren’t necessarily trying to appeal to teenagers, but you did manage to capture teen dialogue extremely well.

I wasn’t exactly a teenager when I wrote that movie, and I couldn’t have told you what an average seventeen- to eighteen-year-old sounded like or what slang they used. It was a total mystery. So I used a modified version of the slang I knew, and I tried not to take it in a too-specific direction. I really wanted the script to be read by somebody of just about any age and not seem dated or corny or overly mannered or overly screenplayish.

All writers want to achieve that with dialogue, but how did you manage to pull it off?

I was really interested in the secret life of girls from the time I was in high school. I’ve always been fascinated by this alien species. I loved the rhythms of their speech, but I wasn’t overly familiar with it. As I got older and actually
had
girlfriends, I’d always ask them to tell me specific stories about what it was like behind closed doors.

It also helped that I had a very special place in my heart for Enid. I have true affection for that character, even though a lot of the audience saw both the movie and the comic as an indictment of Enid. I’ve always found that strange.

Why do you think that is?

Perhaps they found Enid too judgmental. Also, she’s a part of a leisure class and her problems are hardly matters of life and death, but she still complains about every little detail.

Enid tries to create an interesting life out of a potentially dull existence by uncovering—or actually manufacturing—the strangeness beneath this seemingly sterile world. I find that heroic.

If Enid were truly cynical, she would have just gotten a retail job in her town and given up. Enid thinks there’s something better out there for herself, and she searches to find it. That has to count for something.

What should also count is Enid’s utter disdain for the commercialization aimed at teens her age.

How many teen girls her age are even aware of it? I find it horrible. I find the commercialization and the suburbanization of this country really, really depressing. I’m lucky enough to live in a rarefied part of the country [Oakland, California] where there aren’t too many strip malls. But every time I go on a road trip, it’s just the same thing over and over again.

What did you learn from your experience as a screenwriter that you later used for writing comics?

I’ve learned basic rules of dramaturgy that you don’t necessarily learn only doing comics. I learned about the nuances of a bigger plot arc, where characters have to travel longer distances emotionally. I learned to rid everything that doesn’t work, even though I might have spent a long time on it.

I’ve always noticed a cinematic flow with your comics.

When I’m doing the comics, I don’t think in terms of cinematic flow. Comics have their own rhythm—that’s what they’re all about. It’s the beat to the storytelling that makes them come alive.

Look at
Peanuts
. Charles Schulz had a perfect rhythm in every single strip. They always worked. Robert Crumb also has that talent, as did [the first editor of
Mad
] Harvey Kurtzman.

If you really want to succeed as a cartoonist, you have to do more than merely create cool eyeball kicks.

What does
eyeball kicks
mean?

If you’re drawing a really detailed, tricked-out image, and your only concern is how it looks on the page, then that only goes so far in telling a story in comic form. It’s just a series of kick-ass images.

How does one learn to create rhythm that’s appropriate to comics?

You have to learn it to the point where this rhythm is in your head. You can’t overthink it, because if you do, the comic becomes fussy and stupid. It has to arrive with no effort at all.

And that even holds true for the rewriting. You cannot labor over something for too long. If that’s the case, just start over and try again.

Really, in the end, each cartoonist has to develop their own rhythm—as well as their own reality.

How have you managed to capture your own reality?

I have to distill all of the elements and then make it into my own. Years ago, cartoonists would have a “morgue file,” which contained photos of every imaginable reference: cars, radio sets, boats, buildings. But I don’t want anything like that. To me, it’s much more valid to
remember
what something looks like.

For instance, if I wanted to draw a Starbucks store, I could take a photo and then trace it. But what I really want is for this Starbucks to be my
internal
impression of what that world is like. Doing that adds value to something like this. It may not be perfect, but it won’t be dead on the page, either.

There’s a specific paradigm that has frequently shown up in your comics: middle-aged children living with their elderly parents. What is it about this relationship that interests you?

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time around these old parent figures. I was pretty much raised by my maternal grandparents.

My grandfather, James Cate, was an academic at the University of Chicago, and he had a lot of interesting friends. His next-door neighbor was Enrico Fermi, who helped create the atomic bomb. Saul Bellow was a friend, as was Norman Maclean, the author of
A River Runs Through It
.

There would be a knock at the door at night, and it would be a professor friend of my grandfather’s. They’d sit up until God knows when, two in the morning, and just talk.

Do you think this type of childhood later affected your writing?

It certainly didn’t hurt to listen to these brilliant people endlessly converse with each other for hours upon hours. Beyond that, my grandfather was a very, very funny guy—very different. He was born in a tiny little town in Texas and he somehow made himself into this world-class history professor. His whole shtick was that of a backwoods rube, and he used it to disarm people. Every year at the university he used to perform in a series of skits called “The Rebels.” He’d write and perform in campus parodies—I loved this as a kid.

On the other hand, my mother was a mechanic. There was a dichotomy in my life. My stepfather, who was a race driver, died in a crash in Elkhart Lake, Indiana, when I was about five. I guarantee you that the crash today would be nothing—he’d walk away from the car just fine. Back then, though, cars were not padded correctly.

I never forgot the details. I suppose it gave me a sense of mortality, in which I knew even at a young age that things could go very badly, very quickly. My earliest memory is of feeling anxiety.

You were obsessed with death?

I was, and, even more specifically, I was obsessed with the Leopold and Loeb murder case. I grew up about five blocks from where they carried out the killing. They went to my high school—obviously, sixty years before I did—but that story just haunted my entire adolescence. It still haunts me.

Why?

They did this horrible thing, and now all they could do was sit there and wait for the authorities to find them. I’ll never forget that feeling: Doom is approaching, and there’s not a thing you can do about it.

It seems that you remember your childhood with great clarity.

I think most cartoonists remember every little slight, every playground insult. I was telling somebody the other day that I can remember the name of every person in my second-grade class. They were astounded by this, but how could anyone not remember them?

Do you remember your classmates out of anger?

No. I was perfectly happy in second grade. It’s not really based on holding a grudge. On the other hand, I can’t remember somebody I had dinner with two years ago. It’s just the intensity of childhood. It was being with the same group of thirty kids every day for a year and trying to figure out who you are in relation to them.

Everything that’s happened to me as an adult seems like a fantasy. For a long time, if someone were to wake me up—this is just hypothetical—and ask me how old I was, I would give an age of about eighteen. I think it’s now up to twenty-seven, but that’s only recently changed. I still identify with that period between being a kid and being an adult, when you’re confused with how exactly you should fit in with the rest of society.