Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (40 page)

Judd:
Why not?

Michael:
Because I don’t live in the past. That just dredges—I know exactly where I was during that period. It’s like asking about Beatles songs. I don’t care anymore. Game over.

Judd:
What kind of arguments did you get in with the censors?

Michael:
Well, the censors were actually pretty nice people. They had this concept that people turning the dial would hit NBC and go, “Ah, NBC: the quality network. Oh, now my children are safe to watch this.” But people have no idea what network they’re watching.

Judd:
What would be examples of the skits they didn’t let on?

Michael:
Oh, a lot of ’em. The thing I got fired over last time was this piece about NBC president Fred Silverman called “The Last Ten Days in Silverman’s Bunker.” It’s built with Fred Silverman as Adolf Hitler and they would not let it on. It was a twenty-minute sketch starring John Belushi as Silverman. Twenty minutes. And they fired me for having written it.

Judd:
They ripped Silverman up in the show, though.

Michael:
But not the way I ripped him up. They
pretended
to rip him up. I ripped him up.

Judd:
So this is when you left the show. This is the—

Michael:
This is the last time. Grant Tinker, the president of NBC, personally axed me. That bitch.

Judd:
What were the contents of that skit that were so—

Michael:
It’s been a long time. It, ah—you sort of had to see. Silverman always had some new wacky idea of some show that was going to bring him back on top. It was all Silverman talking to his generals. He had a show called
Look Up Her Dress
, and the camera was right under these women’s dresses. Women would stand on a big Plexiglas thing, and if they missed one question, we’d look up their dress—it was all these silly giggle shows, you know, that this guy wanted. He was very clever, it was very smart.

Judd:
And then you left the show—what did you do in between the time you left and when you came back?

Michael:
I wrote a song for Dolly Parton called “Single Women.”

Judd:
Are you serious?

Michael:
I am serious. Top ten. One of the top ten country songs in the country. In fact, I just wrote two more country songs. It’s easy. It’s just a skill I have.

Judd:
I don’t know if you’re kidding.

Michael:
I swear to God. See, I wrote a lot of music for the show. I wrote music for Madeline Kahn.

Judd:
“Antler Dance”?

Michael:
I wrote “The Antler Dance.” Of course, the legendary “Antler Dance.” I wrote “The Castration Waltz.” And then I wrote “Let’s Talk Dirty to the Animals” for the Gilda Radner show. And suddenly it occurred to me:
Why am I writing these novelty songs when I could be writing real songs and collecting real royalties on ’em?
So I did, and I did.

Judd:
Why did you decide to come back to
Saturday Night Live
in 1981?

Michael:
Money and the promise that I could do whatever I wanted. As it so happened I was totally boxed by a big towheaded dork called Dick Ebersol and his Judas accomplice, Robert Tischler. And they hired people like—ah, you know, not a box of talent between all of them. All I had was Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo, who’s decent. Lame writers. I was totally miserable. I was nuts and finally they fired me.

Judd:
So when you came back, did you know as soon as you got there that this wasn’t gonna work?

Michael:
Yeah, I began to get some idea. I tried. I brought in a couple people, but really—we just couldn’t do anything, it was impossible, and I actually sort of engineered it so I’d get fired.

Judd:
So you wrote that skit that got you fired because you wanted to get fired?

Michael:
Oh, yeah, I was asking for it. “Come get me.” I was just being so obnoxious. I was dressing like a maniac. I was attacking the cast. I did something so funny. There was a Christmas show, and afterwards, there was a meeting. And they came in, they thought I was gonna give them presents or something. I did. I gave them an honest evaluation of their talent. I ripped them apart.

Judd:
What did you say?

Michael:
I was on a roll. I was just on a tear and I went through every one of ’em. Ah, they made me angry.

Judd:
Did you write anything at all that you liked?

Michael:
I wrote some things—I did the TransEastern Airline ad during that period. I did, I don’t know, a couple of things I like. But it was uphill all the way.

Judd:
And then you left and now you’re working on a screenplay?

Michael:
I’m working on a screenplay with Mitch Glaser, one of the writers from
Mondo Video
, on a detective story set in Miami. I think we’re about forty-five pages in.

Judd:
And what kind of story is it?

Michael:
It’s a serious detective movie with real violence and real villains. The hero is a funny kind of guy. He’s an asshole. He likes to jerk people around; that’s how he gets his kicks. Somewhat like me in a way. Very much based upon me.

Judd:
What’s gonna be in the screenplay that the masses are going to enjoy?

Michael:
Sex and violence, you know. They always go for that. This is just loaded with sex and violence. It’s very funny.

Judd:
And people will like it? I mean it’s not just for people who like and enjoy humor, but I’m sure, you know—

Michael:
I don’t care about people over forty-five. They can be tossed in a shallow grave, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t write to them. Let
Masterpiece Playhouse
or something write for them. I write for people younger than myself. My target group’s about twenty to twenty-five—always has been.

Judd:
If you could move into doing whatever you want to do in the future, what would it be?

Michael:
Rule the earth. And people would have to do whatever I say, and give me their stuff—all their stuff belongs to me if I want it. It’d be great.

I met Larry Gelbart at the end of his life, and I’ve always regretted that I didn’t get to spend more time with him. I was juggling a bunch of projects at the time, basically just being my distracted self, and when he died, I had this feeling of devastation. Because I realized I had missed it. I should have found a way to connect with him more.

So, when I was introduced to Mike Nichols, I resolved not to make the same mistake again. I was alert to the idea that every moment with him was precious. I asked questions, I listened. He was already in his eighties, but still sharp as a tack, funny as can be, but also incredibly open and willing to tell me anything I wanted to know about his journey and his work. When I would have breakfast with him, I would record our conversations because I knew he was saying so many things I would want to remember for the rest of my life.

When
This Is 40
came out, I screened it for him in New York City, and I remember him coming up to me afterward. He had tears in his eyes because he was so moved by how personal it was, which was wonderful to hear, but really what I came away thinking was:
This man is so connected emotionally, so moved by human beings and touched by our struggle.
That was his genius. He was completely plugged in to the human experience, and what was dramatic and humorous about it. I miss him.

Judd Apatow:
This is so exciting. I’m such a gigantic fan of yours. Many years ago, when I first tried to write a good screenplay, I wrote a screenplay with Owen Wilson. We drove across America, trying to write it, and I remember being in a hotel, watching
The Graduate.
We took out notepads
and outlined it because we were trying to understand how it worked and we didn’t
understand.
We were trying to figure out how much information the movie gave about Benjamin, the main character. And so we just wrote down everything. Like, we don’t know anything about him. All we know is he ran track and worked for the school paper and had no friends.

Mike Nichols:
It’s funny. I’m trying to think back to what we said to each other about Benjamin. We said very little to define him because we’d had this very strange experience, which was as we saw boy after boy come in to play him, it never seemed right. We’d seen every actor in the country in that age range, which was actually seventeen to thirty—that’s how old Dustin was at the time. Thirty. He was, in fact, two years younger than Anne Bancroft. But I had seen him playing a transvestite fishwife in a play called
Journey of the Fifth Horse
, which was a sort of Russian-type play. And I said, “I like that guy. Why don’t we have him in to test?” He had that strange thing, which I had experienced in the only other movie I’d ever made,
Virginia Woolf:
He was better when he was on film than when you were looking at him. Certain actors have a deal with Technicolor. In the bath overnight, they do things to them. Somehow, we couldn’t get him out of our heads. The whole thing of casting—tell me, how do you feel about casting? Do you outline who you’re looking for, or do you wait to see who turns you on?

Judd:
That’s a good question. When we did
Freaks and Geeks
, we knew we wanted real kids and we decided that they didn’t even have to be actors. Wes Anderson had just made
Bottle Rocket
, which had all these strange people in it—people who were his friends from Dallas, like Kumar [Pallana], who’s in all of his movies and who’s, like, just a magician who owned a coffee shop. And I thought,
Wow, he’s finding all these interesting guys and putting them in his movie and teaching them how to act.
And it seemed to make the work better. Once we liked someone, we tried to work with them again. It’s scary meeting new people.

Mike:
It’s interesting that Wes, you, and Louis C.K. are all people who are deliberately going in the other direction—untheatrical, unleading people, uneverything. It’s so refreshing and—in
This Is 40
, what I got excited about was that nobody has ever done a movie that was absolutely reality.
For real, actual reality, actual wife, actual daughters, actual jokes about each other and you, together. You have to have an incredibly finely tuned sense of how far you can go. You have some kind of sense of what’s perfectly okay. I don’t know. You either have it or you don’t.

Judd:
Maybe we should take a look at a clip from one of your movies, just to embarrass me.

Mike:
Can we do a clip that I brought that’s not from one of my movies? I’m very boring on this particular subject. This is a moment where I think we can watch an actress invent movie acting. Sound movies didn’t happen until about 1930. That’s how young talking movies are. And there was a stage when movies were like plays: They were photographed. And then after that, they were like plays photographed with some reality beginning to show except in the acting, because the acting was still catching up. You can see, in this clip, that they are character actors and they’re very good but they, you could put them a mile away on the stage. And then here comes Garbo and you can actually see her in this clip—you can see the character thinking something, realizing something about herself. It’s not
Traviata
, it’s
Camille
, which is the same plot as
La Traviata
—namely, a very fancy courtesan falls in love with this young guy and they’re happy and his father comes to see her and says, “Please, please give him up. You’re ruining his career, he’s not gonna get the post he hoped for.” And she decides to do it. But the only way she can do it is to go to the man that she’s most afraid of, the guy who used to own her, who she worked for full-time, which is what courtesans did. There was somebody who owned them and kept them very fancy. So she goes back to him, and—Armand is his name—he goes away unhappy. Then he comes back and there’s a scene where they run into each other in the casino. And what I want you to watch for is the moment, right at the end, where she thinks,
Oh my God, look at me, I’m a cliché.
Let’s look at it.

(Clip from
Camille:
Armand runs into Marguerite at the casino.)

Judd:
We’ve come a long way, we really have.

Mike:
We have. When you think that, right around this time, the whole idea of acting in a movie was being invented by Garbo and Barbara Stanwyck
and Bette Davis and a lot of people—they were doing less and less. What’s interesting is that being inexpressive becomes the big deal. The most famous line in the history of movies is somebody saying something wrong. It’s the line, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” But Bogart actually says, “He’s looking at you, kid.” That little inexpressive nothing became a classic thing. And the big stuff sort of went away. That’s my first point and probably my last.

Judd:
You started in improv. What was that transition like, from improv to acting and directing? Who taught you how to do this?

Mike:
Improv taught me how to do it. Elaine and I were very lucky because our pals that we started with at this improv place had no particular idea. I mean, there were big talks about socialism and stuff, but nothing you could act. So we had to go out there and learn through horrible trial and error what you need to do to make an audience happy. And slowly, we discovered a principle. Elaine used to say, “When in doubt, seduce.” Because seduction is immediately a scene. And, of course, so is conflict. If you say black, I say white, and we have a fight. There only is one other kind of scene, I discovered—there are fights, seductions, and negotiations. Most of Shakespeare turns out to be a negotiation because it’s all about power and rulers and so on. When you’re making it up, you learn what has to happen to keep an audience interested and excited but, most of all, laughing. And then it becomes part of you. For instance, when I started to direct my first Broadway play, which was
Barefoot
, I had them doing so much business onstage that Dick Benjamin—who replaced Redford—said, “I can’t. I can’t learn all the business and the lines.” And that’s the thing. If you keep them very busy, they’re too busy to act. And then it looks like life.

Judd:
The first things you did, right out of the gate, were ridiculously successful. Your comedy team, your first play,
Barefoot in the Park
, your first movie,
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
How did that happen?

Mike:
Well,
Barefoot in the Park
was somebody else’s idea. There was a nice producer who said, “How’d you like to”—after Elaine and I broke up, I was sort of the leftover half of a comedy team—and he said, “How’d you like to direct a play?” And I said, “Well, let’s try. Let’s go somewhere
in summer stock and see if the play’s any good. If I’m any good.” I said, “I’d like to see if we can get that blond guy I saw last week—Redfield, Redford, something.” And we had no time because we’re going for summer stock. We had five days, so I just threw it all in and we figured it out. I felt like I’d come home because all this time I’d been thinking about it and working at it, I didn’t really want to be an actor.

Judd:
Why did you give up acting?

Mike:
I didn’t like it. I’m too good of a director to like me as an actor. I can get better people. So I did. And I just liked it more. I liked being there much more than being here. I still do.

Judd:
And you did
Death of a Salesman
recently. I mean, if you started with
Virginia Woolf
, what did you learn in the middle if you—could you have done
Death of a Salesman
back then?

Mike:
No, I don’t think so. I think
Virginia Woolf
—I was unbelievably lucky because
Virginia Woolf
, among many, many other things, is possibly the only play that is entirely in the present. Have you noticed how plays are always somebody endlessly yammering about the past? That never happens in
Virginia Woolf.
The past is brought up but when it’s brought up, it’s part of a trap that’s being set. Then the trap is sprung and there are terrible consequences as a result—all in the present. The present was my bag, you know. And so we just did it all in the present. It was good. Now, you: Did you start with funny?

Judd:
I was a stand-up comedian. I was like you—a stand-up comedian who realized I could get better people to act. At some point, I realized my friends were way funnier than I was as a performer. So I started writing. I would write for them. And then slowly they would give me jobs, which turned into punch-ups and screenplays. But I really wanted to be Jerry Seinfeld. That was my only intention when I was younger.

Mike:
What did Seinfeld mean to you?

Judd:
In terms of what comedy meant to me, I liked Seinfeld, but I liked that comedians were pissed off. I liked that they said everything wasn’t fair. People like George Carlin would talk about the injustices of the
world. Richard Pryor and Monty Python mocked how society worked—class systems and government. I was just attracted. I must have been very hostile as a kid. I didn’t know why, but I liked that people were telling everybody to fuck off. But I found that I didn’t have very strong opinions when I was a stand-up comedian. I didn’t have the anger to do it. So I wrote.

Mike:
You saved yourself, you know. Because the one thing I understood the minute we were all comedians in this group—and I saw what happened to some people and less to others—is that it’s very, very corrupting to the spirit, doing comedy. You have to be almost a saint like Jack Benny was, like Steve Martin is, to avoid being corrupted by it. There’s very little work where the work and the reward are simultaneous, and comedy is that. And you can see it doing terrible things to people because it’s constant, instant gratification. There are people who can resist it, like Chris Rock. People of a certain character and high intelligence know how to avoid it. Were you aware of having to build certain things in to protect yourself from that happening?

Judd:
I would always get post-stand-up shame. If I was really funny, when I got home, it wasn’t that I thought,
Oh, I need to do it again
, I was just so embarrassed that I had been so arrogant to feel the need to do that. Is that how you felt when you were doing the Nichols and May show? How did it feel for you?

Mike:
I never told this to anybody, because it’s so sort of depressing and pointless, but I had a sadist fantasy onstage. I figured each laugh was me cracking a whip. But there’s this weird thing that happens to you when you’re out there, dressed funny. You can wear better pants and stuff because you’re not a character. You can feel like you’re even sexy in everything because you’re up there and the audience is doing what you want. I didn’t love it but I also didn’t suffer from it as Elaine did. We closed the show while we were still sold out because she couldn’t take it anymore. I kept saying, “Take
what?
It’s an hour and a half and all we do is talk!” But it took something out of her. She’s a better actor than I am, for one thing, so she really went through stuff that I was faking. But it’s also something else. It
cost
her something. It didn’t cost me anything because I didn’t
really like it. To risk everything on a play, I mean, your feelings and ideas and secrets and everything, is, to me, much riskier than laugh, laugh, laugh. But the greatest comic writers, like Noël Coward, always had contempt for the funny stuff. They liked the prefaced boring stuff because that was so meaningful. I hate boring stuff and I like laughs, but I don’t wanna do it.

Judd:
Who’s the funniest in person that you’ve collaborated with? Neil Simon?

Mike:
Neil was very, very funny. I think the most difficult person to work with, because we were in such pain all the time, was Robin Williams. You just pray he’ll stop because you might get in real trouble if you don’t stop laughing soon. While they were lighting a scene, he would do these improvs that I can’t begin to describe. Once there was an astounding one that lasted about twenty minutes—we were all begging him to stop. The next day I said, “How much of that could you do again today?” And he said, “Oh, none. It’s gone.” It was all unconscious.