Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (5 page)

Judd:
Are you serious?

Adam:
Absolutely. Because it was, I couldn’t believe that we’ve known each other so long, that we’re both getting to do what we wanted. We would talk late at night. He wasn’t so sure on what he was going to do. I was like, “I’m going to be a movie star. That’s a guarantee and no one’s going to stop me.” Judd wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he was writing away all the time. I’d walk by his bedroom, see him typing away. I would go, “What are you doing in there, Apatow?” “Oh, I’m just writing some skit.” And I was like, “For what?” He’d be like, “I don’t know.”
What the hell’s the matter with this guy?
It’s just neat that we’ve known each other this long and then got to make a movie together. Of course I want to do it again.

There are certain people I always figured I would never get the chance to work with in my career. Albert Brooks was one of those people. Comedy-wise, he was simply out of my league. He was on Mount Olympus. At a certain point, I resigned myself to never knowing him like I wanted to.

When I was writing for
The Larry Sanders Show
, I had the opportunity to have dinner a few times with him and Garry Shandling, and I sat there, terrified and practically mute, for the entire meal. Should I have said something? Should I have tried to be funny? When I got home, I would run to my computer and write down everything he’d said.

Then, when I was writing
This Is 40
, I decided to write a part for Albert, thinking I would maybe ask him, if it ever got to that point, if he’d be interested in playing it. I never thought he would actually accept it, and when he did, I was completely paralyzed by fear.
Oh, God. What if the movie is terrible? What if I pull him down into the muck with me?
But the truth is, he was as brilliant and creative as one could ever hope Albert Brooks would be. The night before we would shoot a scene, he’d send me this stream of emails, filled with jokes that topped my jokes, and ideas that topped my ideas, all offered in a generous and collaborative way. I was just in awe. In your dreams as a young guy, you imagine your heroes to be one thing, and then you get a chance to work with one of them and he’s actually even better. Down deep, all comedy nerds hope that, at the end of our lives, we will have made one movie as good and true as Albert Brooks’s best movies.

Judd Apatow:
Didn’t you write jokes for Michael Dukakis?

Albert Brooks:
Yeah. I was asked to go on the airplane and go to different events. And I actually spoke at a few. I was so disenchanted with him. I thought,
I pray he doesn’t win.
I mean, there were arguments on the plane, and the guys hated him. “Can I ask him a question?” “Nobody can talk to him now!” So I’m thinking,
What if there’s a war?

Judd:
Was that the first campaign you got involved in?

Albert:
Yeah. I wrote a big joke for him at the Al Smith Dinner, in New York, which is a big political event. George Bush’s slogan was “It’s time to give the country back to the little guy,” and all I was trying to do was to get Dukakis to try to be self-deprecating. I said, “They love that.” So Dukakis is, like, four foot three, and he said, “George Bush says it’s time to give the country back to the little guy. Well, here I am!” And it got written about: Dukakis makes fun of himself. But I think he took it too far, with the tank.

Judd:
And the helmet.

Albert:
I wasn’t there for that. I would have disapproved of that.

Judd:
I always think when someone’s elected president they take them into a room and say, “Here’s what really goes on on this planet.”

Albert:
Well, that was in my book. That’s the two-week period where you go from thinking you can change the world to being scared out of your mind. You get the list of the nine people who run everything. I’m sure that’s the way it is.

Judd:
You’ve always been a bit of a futurist.

Albert:
My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode way ahead of the herd and was sort of the lookout. Now you don’t have to be that, to be an artist. You can be right smack-dab in the middle of the herd. If you are, you’ll be the richest.

Judd:
And so
Real Life
and even the
Saturday Night Live
sketches were—

Albert:
Well, the first thing I ever did was
The Famous School for Comedians
, for PBS. I had written this fictitious article in
Esquire
, with a test, and they got like three thousand real responses, because mockumentary things
weren’t really there yet. “Oh, it’s a joke? Why would it be a joke? There’s pictures of the school!” So Bob Shanks, a lovely man, was a producer at
The Great American Dream Machine
, and he said, “Why don’t you make this into a commercial?” That was the first time I ever picked up a camera and found out that, well, if I aim it here, and this person says that, and I think it’s funny, hey, you think it’s funny, too.

Judd:
Then Lorne Michaels wanted you as permanent host for
SNL
, which was just starting.

Albert:
Instead of hosting, which I didn’t want to do, I was able to sort of dictate what I wanted to do, because they wanted my name. And so I made six films [for
SNL
] in five months. That was really a film school.

Judd:
Before that, did you have any sense you would go into filmmaking?

Albert:
No. But my comedy bits were like scenes. I would bring props and chairs and tape recorders. I was fleshing out fifteen characters, with different voices, and it would have been better if I had hired fourteen people.

Judd:
Was it almost a combination of a modern style of stand-up comedy and the previous style? This idea of doing characters and creating situations, but in a new way?

Albert:
Well, my roots were in acting. That’s all I wanted to be. Even though my father was a radio comedian, it wasn’t cool to say, at a young age, “I want to be a comedian.”

Judd:
Did your dad do stand-up?

Albert:
My dad played a character on the radio called “Parkyakarkus.” A Greek-dialect comedian. He did Friars’ roasts and wrote material and made people laugh that way.

Judd:
What was the character like?

Albert:
The character was a Greek immigrant who couldn’t speak very well, so there was a lot of dialect humor. He owned a restaurant. And the show was called
Meet Me at Parky’s.
My dad died right after performing at the Friars’ roast for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. I have that tape somewhere. There’s still a lot of good jokes in there. I mean, that was 1958.

Judd:
How old were you when that happened?

Albert:
Eleven and a half.

Judd:
So that’s just an earth-shattering…

Albert:
Well, he was so sick before that that I—

Judd:
Heart problems?

Albert:
Yeah. And he couldn’t walk. He had a spinal operation. Then he could walk slowly, like Frankenstein. And so he gained weight. Nothing about him was healthy. Every time we were alone and he called me, I thought he was dying. So when it happened, it wasn’t like, hey, he was the second baseman and he woke up and died.

Judd:
How did having a sick dad imprint you?

Albert:
I think when you’re very, very, very young and you get a sense of the end before the beginning, it imprints you. In all possible ways.

Judd:
What did your mom do?

Albert:
My dad and mom met each other in a movie called
New Faces of 1937.
My mom went under the name Thelma Leeds, and she did a few movies, and she was really a great singer, and when she married my dad and started to have a family, she sang at parties. She didn’t continue, and my dad, he was working, saved his money, so we—

Judd:
You were okay.

Albert:
We were okay. And then my mom remarried, a lovely man in the shoe business.

Judd:
You always hear this legend of Carl Reiner going on
The Tonight Show
saying, “The funniest person I know is my son’s friend.” Why did he think you were so funny?

Albert:
This bit that I did, he said it was the hardest he’s ever laughed in his whole life. I don’t think it was the greatest bit. It was me pretending to be a terrible escape artist who gasped for air and begged for help.

Judd:
Who were you developing it for?

Albert:
Well, we all go to the area of strength in school, so we can be liked by girls. And if you’re not going to be a quarterback and you’re not going to be a biology honors student…so I was funny. At Beverly Hills High, there was a parent-student talent show. A big event once a year. Now, Beverly High, a lot of the parents were famous. So you had Tony Curtis, you had Carl Reiner….

Judd:
You had competition.

Albert:
That’s right. Rod Serling. So I was the host of the evening—and I was this kid. I wrote jokes and made comments. I still remember a joke that I told. One of the kids, for their talent portion, did those batons—you twirl them around and around—and I still remember, because it was an ad lib. I was like, “Wasn’t she wonderful? Do you know, in practice, a 707 accidentally landed on the football field.” People roared.

Judd:
So you weren’t like the class clown that couldn’t get a girlfriend?

Albert:
Humor-wise, I was confident. I mean, my two best friends were Larry Bishop, who’s Joey Bishop’s son, and Rob Reiner, who is Carl Reiner’s son.

Judd:
It was a world of comedy. Did you think at that point you would go into film?

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 Hawn–Chevy 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 Guantánamo.

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.