Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (15 page)

Garry:
You get defensive.

Judd:
You get defensive. But I always thought,
Oh, this is fun.
The quest to make you happy, I enjoyed. It’s fascinating because I’ve had the same experience with Lena Dunham on
Girls—here
is a writer who is running a show, who stars in the show, and we know, based on how much work we get done each week, how much sleep Lena gets, and how sane she can be based on how much she’s sleeping or how stressed she is about upcoming episodes. It’s a very similar type of experience. And I think Lena benefits
from my experience on
The Larry Sanders Show
in some ways because, for six years, I got to watch how the show was made—what helped you, and what didn’t. So when we built her show and figured out how to staff it and how to write it and how to pace ourselves, I was able to tell her about what happened at
The Larry Sanders Show
and maybe help her do it correctly.

Garry:
It sounds like you are saying that it’s everything in the moment. On any given day, you can see everything that Lena brings to the stage, to the writers’ room, that day. So you start there and try to take her somewhere.

Judd:
Yeah. It’s Lena’s show, and we’re all there to help her. Some weeks she may love our ideas, she may love our whole script. Other weeks, we’re just trying to feed her so she gets excited and goes off and writes a script without us.

Garry:
So it’s not a discussion of ego, it’s actually a discussion of someone’s emotional life and where they are in the moment, which is incredibly usable for the writing and the shooting of the episode itself. That’s what we were teaching in the room at
Larry Sanders:
The answer isn’t on this piece of paper. It’s in this space right here.

Judd:
Her insecurity about being a writer is what her show’s about, really—a lot like Larry’s insecurity about being a talk show host. The battle in the writers’ room, on some level, has all the same issues of the battle of trying to be a writer in New York.

Garry:
So, as an example, if a writer came in and got defensive about a script he was going to rewrite for
Larry Sanders
, we might in fact find a scene where Larry’s saying, “You know, Phil’s just—he doesn’t want to rewrite these jokes, he’s just fighting with me.” Instead of getting caught up in this real-life theater that’s going on in the room, observe it. Because that may be what goes on the paper in the end.

Judd:
It all becomes fodder for the show.

Garry:
Translating experience to paper. That’s so hard to teach, isn’t it?

This interview was conducted by Mike Sager and originally appeared in
Esquire
in October 2014.

Harold Ramis was the original cocky nerd. He was the guy, more than anyone else in this book, whom I secretly thought I could be like. He was tall and lanky and goofy, the guy standing next to Bill Murray who was, in his own quiet way, every bit as funny as Bill Murray. Harold Ramis had a hand in almost everything of note that happened in comedy over the last few decades. He wrote for
Playboy
and the
National Lampoon;
he was the first head writer for
SCTV
, as well as one of its stars; he co-wrote
Animal House, Stripes, Meatballs
, and
Ghostbusters
(which he also starred in); he directed
National Lampoon’s Vacation, Ghostbusters, Analyze This
, and God, the man co-wrote and directed
Groundhog Day
, which is in the running for greatest comedy of all time.
Groundhog Day
is hilarious and spiritually deep, a perfect encapsulation of the Ramis Worldview, and definitely one of those movies that people will be watching in a thousand years—if people are still here in a thousand years.

I first interviewed Harold when I was in high school, and he was thirty-nine years old, about to make
Ghostbusters.
“Why do you think so many people from Second City and
National Lampoon
have become famous in the field of comedy?” I asked, as if there was an easy way to answer this. And he very patiently said, “The same reason that all the doctors who graduated college when I graduated college are now taking over the medical profession. It’s our time, you know. Second City is great training. I won’t deny that it’s a great way to learn how to do comedy, but as far as us all coming into prominence, you know—it’s gonna happen to our generation soon. We’ll be the old guys.”

I was lucky enough to work with Harold on the film
Year One
, in 2009.
Everyone who was involved in that movie was thrilled to have a reason to be associated with him and to have a chance to download his thoughts about life and his legendary career. Harold was very interested in Buddhism, and he had taken everything he liked about the religion and condensed it onto one folded piece of paper. He gave me a copy of it on the set of
Year One
, and I still have it at home. He once said to me, “Life is ridiculous, so why not be a good guy?” That may be the only religion I have to this day.

Judd Apatow:
When you look back, not in terms of quality but in terms of a good time, what movie do you look back on and say, “
That’s
the one we had a great time making”?

Harold Ramis:
The good-time movie for me has been every single one of them, without exception. I don’t say that as a Pollyanna, because there have been nightmare situations. I thrive on disaster. I’m very excited when things go wrong. I’m really attracted to outlandish and excessive human behavior. Any experience with Bill Murray is better than any other experience because he does things no one you know would ever do. Every ride with Bill is a potential adventure. I say this with love and considerable distance, because I don’t talk to him and I don’t see him, but the memories of doing those films with him or even doing a film like
Vacation
—it’s kind of the best of all possible worlds for a social person, which I am, because you assemble everyone you like, and if you’re lucky you pick a beautiful place to make a movie or a real interesting place, and then you’re with them for months with nothing else to do but focus on the work. It’s like an excuse: “Can’t drive the kids to school. Can’t help you with your homework. I’m working.” I know a director, Marty Brest—even when he was shooting in L.A., he’d move out of his house. He’d just say to his wife, “I’m not going to be any use to you anyway while I’m making this movie.”

Judd:
My wife is so onto that. She considers all work play. If I’m not working and I say, “I’d like to go to the movies with my friends,” she’s like, “You goof off with your friends all day long.”

Harold:
I had the same thing with my first wife. I said to her, “I’m working so hard for you….Blah, blah, blah…You don’t appreciate…” She said, “You love your work. Don’t ever claim this is hard for you.”

Judd:
What was the first movie you directed?

Harold:
Caddyshack.

Judd:
So you started at a very low level.

Harold:
It
was
a low level. We were already kind of corrupted by the initial success of
Animal House
, which I’d written. I had been professionalized for ten years before
Animal House.
I’d been paid for writing and performing starting in 1968. So 1978 was when
Animal House
came out, and I felt I could always support myself. I was through the job-struggle period, and things were happening just as I thought they should. I went from improv comedy on the stage to doing television stuff, and then the treatment for
Animal House
gets bought, the movie gets made, and it’s a huge hit. Producers literally waited outside screenings to meet me, Doug Kenney, and Chris Miller, and they asked, “What do you guys want to do next?” It was like a dream. So I said, “I want to direct the next thing I write.” Jon Peters, best known as the hairdresser who married Barbra Streisand and a fine producer in his own right, looked at me and said, “You look like a director.” I was wearing a safari jacket and aviator glasses at the time.

Judd:
Did you guys all get money from
Animal House
, or did you all get screwed?

Harold:
Well, we didn’t get rich. I got $2,500 for the treatments, and Chris, Doug, and I split $30,000 for the final product, $10,000 apiece. They slipped me another two grand because I did the final polish. We shared five net points of the movie, 1.6 each. There were no gross players in the film, and it was relatively low budget. When the movie came out, we did a quick calculation and thought, “We’re going to make some money.” I think we made in the under-$500,000 range, but in 1978 that seemed like a lot of money. I literally went to the bank in Santa Monica with the review and bought a house.

Judd:
Tell me a little about Doug Kenney, who is a
National Lampoon
legend, and also a little bit about your thoughts on having a group of
people that’s doing a lot of work together but separates as the years pass. What was that social world like for those people?

Harold:
Having Second City as my first professional experience was great. Second City is so different from stand-up. In the world of stand-up you really talk about killing, not just killing the audience but killing the other comedian. It’s a competition every night. You want to be better than anyone else. But the whole thrust of Second City is to focus on making everyone else look good because in that process we all look good. It’s more than collaborative. Your life onstage depends on other people and on developing techniques for creating cooperative work. We have rules, guidelines, games, and techniques that teach that. It fosters a spirit that exists to this day. Anyone who’s ever worked at Second City can run into any other generation of Second City players, and they instantly share a language and an approach to their work. John Belushi got hired from Second City. We were in a show together, and he got hired to do
National Lampoon.
They did a big Woodstock music festival parody called
Lemmings
—it was a big breakout show for John. Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest were discovered in that show. John was able to write his own ticket at the
Lampoon
, and when the
Lampoon
wanted to do a nationally distributed radio show, they let John be the producer. John brought me, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Brian Murray, and Joe Flaherty from Second City. We all moved to New York and had this great, cohesive Second City spirit. Doug Kenney was a really sweet guy, a hippie dropout from Harvard that started the
National Lampoon
and then took a year off to live in a teepee in Martha’s Vineyard. He’d written a book called
Teenage Commies from Outer Space
, and he was their resident adolescence and puberty expert. He did the
High School Yearbook.
He did “First Lay Comics” and “First High Comics.” So we did a stage show from
Lampoon
, John, Gilda, me, Bill, Brian, Joe. We took it on the road, then we did the
Radio Hour
for a while, and then Ivan Reitman saw us perform in Toronto. He wanted to do a movie with the
Lampoon
, so I said, “What about a college movie?” He said, “Who do you want to work with at the
Lampoon
?” I thought Doug was the smartest, funniest, nicest guy, so Doug and I teamed up, and then later we brought in Chris Miller. Doug was always really elegant. He wanted to be Cary Grant. He wanted to be Chevy Chase, basically, but he didn’t have
the performing chops. He was as smart as could be. Doug used to do a thing where he would stand at my bookcase in my house, close his eyes, pick a book, randomly flip to a page, start reading from that page, and at some point start improvising. You wouldn’t know where the book ended and Doug’s improv began. He could do it with any book on the shelf, just his little parlor trick.

Judd:
So those were the salad days, socially, for that group? It wasn’t like, “Oh, no, the group broke up because…”?

Harold:
Not then. After
Animal House
was successful, Doug and I joined with Brian Murray and wrote
Caddyshack.
Doug produced it, I directed it, and Brian acted in it. We were so arrogant and deluded that we thought
Caddyshack
would be as big as
Animal House
, but to have your first movie be, what was then, the biggest comedy ever sets the bar a little high. Doug was already troubled, already wrestling with self-esteem issues because of family problems and substance abuse issues. We had a horrific press conference for
Caddyshack.
It was one of the worst public events I’ve ever attended, and it was kind of my fault. I said, “Wouldn’t it be great to get Chevy, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield, and Ted Knight on the stage to talk to the press?” Well, they scheduled it at nine-thirty in the morning. None of those four had ever been up at nine-thirty in the morning. Doug showed up at the press conference drunk, stoned, coked up, and sleepless. He hadn’t gone to bed the night before. Chevy was rude to the press. Rodney was totally out of it. Bill was crude and off-putting, and the press was hostile. At one point, Doug stands up and tells them all to fuck themselves, and then passes out at the table. Chevy concludes his last TV interview of the day with Brian Linehan from Toronto, and Brian says, “Chevy, what would you say about so-and-so?” Chevy says, “What would I say? Can I say, ‘Fuck you, Brian’? Could I just say, ‘Fuck you’?” This is a televised interview. The next day someone sends me a clipping that says, “If this is the new Hollywood, let’s have the old Hollywood back.” So Doug was depressed, and I get a call—I don’t know why I’m being so self-revealing. Doug says, “I’m going to Hawaii with Chevy for two weeks to clean up.” You do not go anywhere with Chevy to clean up. I thought,
This is a potential disaster. I cannot go on this trip.
Chevy came back. Doug did not. Doug fell from a high place on the island of Kauai, and his
body was found a couple of days later. It was beyond tragic. I’d been in a room with this guy eight hours a day for two movies. He’s like my brother and best friend. And he’s much loved by a great number of people. It was sobering, but in a way it became like a Rorschach test for each member of our group. Some thought suicide: Doug was a victim of his own substance abuse, his own depression, whatever. Some thought accident: He was careless. It was just fate, an existential accident. Others thought he was murdered by drug dealers on Kauai. There was no evidence for any of it. It just depends on how you see the world. We eventually concluded that Doug slipped while looking for a place to jump. Same with John Belushi. John died two years later of an administered overdose, but it’s not suicide when you let a stranger shoot you up and you don’t know what’s in the needle. If you’ve even gotten to the point of putting a needle in your body, it’s a form of suicide. John Belushi—as a nice segue from Doug Kenney, just to really perk up your morning—was pulled twice from a burning bed. If it happens once, it’s kind of a wake-up call. If it happens twice, you start thinking,
Maybe I have a problem.

Judd:
You always hear that when
Caddyshack
was being made everybody was on drugs and partying during the shooting.

Harold:
Everyone in the world of that age was on drugs and partying. It was the eighties in Florida. There were hotels literally built of pressed cocaine. They had so much cocaine, they just used it as construction material.

Judd:
I’m always fascinated when you hear about people being on something when they’re making
Saturday Night Live.
I think we got drunk once in the
Larry Sanders
writers’ room, and then just went home and wrote nothing. So I’m just fascinated.

Harold:
Well, one of the miracles of substance abuse—when you use something enough, it eventually loses its effect, whatever it is. That’s why addicts have to take more and more of it to get high. You’re not even high anymore. Eventually, John Belushi—people would come up to him at parties and just hand him drugs because they thought that was the way to John’s heart. They’d give him a little gram bottle of cocaine and go, “John, you want some coke?” He’d go, “Yeah, the whole bottle.” You become a
glutton. It’s a form of gluttony. If you’re high all the time, that becomes your sober state. Eventually, all your judgments become relative to that state. That was the miracle of getting sober for me. It’s not different. It’s the same. I have the same problems, urges, desires, ideas, and thoughts. I don’t need to be high. Eventually getting high, I realized, just made me sick. I was sick.

Judd:
How does it feel—I would assume you would become numb to it at some point—to have a body of work that…in a way, I guess it’s kind of like being the Beatles. Does it get boring dealing with the impact of your body of work on people, how much it means to people? Can you feel that anymore?