John Cassavetes is worshiped as an auteur by teeming masses of
cineastes. But few of his admirers realize that he established his
career not through his experimental cinema or even the theater, but
through good ol' commercial TV. How Sweet It Was!, a classic history
of early television published in 1966, wrote: "John Cassavetes was
practically unknown anywhere until he began making a name for himself
in live TV plays."
Cassavetes as an escaped convict in "You Got To Have Luck", a
first-season episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents
His IMDb filmography lists a number of live TV productions, his
breakthrough coming with his performance as a misunderstood juvenile
delinquent in Reginald Rose's Crime In The Streets (1955).
With Sal Mineo and fellow future director Mark Rydell in Don Siegel's
film version of Crime In The Streets.
He reprized the role in a film version the next year (post-Marty
Hollywood realizing they could film TV plays very cheaply), which
would lead to his starring in the film version of yet another live TV
play, Edge Of The City (note the noirish title for what is mostly a
character study about an AWOL GI becoming friends with a black
longshoreman).
Cassavetes was signed to a contract by MGM and cast opposite aging
matinee idol Robert Taylor in Saddle The Wind, a western written by
Rod Serling (?!). Saddle The Wind is notable, aside from the Serling
credit, for showcasing the old-vs-new acting style matchup between
Taylor and Cassavetes, in the tradition of Gielgud and Brando in
Julius Caesar and the infamous battlings of Raymond Massey and James
Dean in East Of Eden.
Cassavetes was seemingly on the threshold of a big movie career. But
when Edge Of The City was released he attacked it on Jean Shepherd's
radio show as typical Hollywood phoniness. He told the radio audience
-- Shepherd's legendary "Night People" -- that he wanted to make a
film that was real. He asked listeners to send in money to help him
achieve his goal.
And money came in.
Dropped by MGM, Cassavetes began taking any movie or TV part he was
offered to to fund his personal film project, called Shadows. After
two years of filming, editing, and scrounging for money, Cassavetes
still needed funds to complete the second version of Shadows (yes,
there are two versions of Shadows - but that's another story). So in
1959, to raise completion money he agreed to star in a TV series for
Universal.
Johnny Staccato is a Korean War vet, a Greenwich Village jazz pianist
who became a private eye to make ends meet. He uses a Village jazz
club (Waldo's) as his base where he not only meets clients but even
jams with the house band.
The pilot, "The Naked Truth", starts with a full two minutes of
dialogue-free music, as Johnny jams at with the combo at Waldo's.
(Like man, dig that smoke-filled basement nightclub set with the
abstract art -- must have been quite a sight to viewers accustomed to
Gunsmoke and Ozzie & Harriet.)
Eventually Johnny gets a phone call -- while making time with a hot
chick in a Waldo's booth -- and splits the scene, getting his gun from
the hat check girl. We hear Cassavetes in a voiceover (what would noir
be without them?):
"Why did I leave the Village that night? Because I put my musician's
union card in mothballs five years ago...when it dawned on me that my
talent was an octave lower than my ambition, while my heart is still
on the bandstand, I pay for the groceries away from the piano... and
when I get a business call these days even at two in the morning, I
answer it."
An old friend of Johnny's, a Col. Parkerish impresario called "The
Senator", has a problem. A Confidential-style scandal sheet is
blackmailing The Senator's client, a teen idol played by Michael
Landon (this episode has quite a cast -- I haven't even mentioned the
young Ruta Lee, or movie vet Eduardo Cianelli as clubowner/surrogate
father Waldo) in what may have been his last pre-Carwright role
(Bonanza would debut two days after Staccato premiered).
Johnny confronts the scandal sheet publisher (played by prolific radio
and Dragnet actor Stacy Harris) and ends up the target of Harris'
diminutive henchman, who is none other than Nick Cravat, Burt
Lancaster's old circus partner and sidekick in swashbucklers like The
Crimson Pirate (Cravat seldom spoke onscreen due to his thick Noo Yawk
accent, and is characteristically mute here). The episode's climax is
a tense, very noir shootout in a deserted parking garage.
Although the half-hour format does not allow for terribly deep
character development and occasionally forces hurried plot exposition,
Johnny Staccato is an excellent example of video noir, evocatively
shot in moody B&W, with some exteriors filmed (silent) on location in
New York (in between shooting Shadows? Or maybe the other way
around?).
The music is by the great Elmer Bernstein (Magnificent Seven, Great
Escape). The theme is reminiscent of his classic score for The Man
With The Golden Arm.
One of my favorite Staccato moments is the opening narration for "The
Poet's Touch". It's nighttime in the Village, and Johnny is on the
street, peering through the window of a beatnik cafe:
"It was chilly in Greenwich Village and most of the Beat Generation
activity was indoors. However the few who were not allergic to fresh
air were on the streets. Behind the beards and in front of the makeup
were mostly pretty nice kids. Right now they believe in abstract art
and poetry... Zen Buddhism -- faith or folly?... Dylan Thomas --
success or failure?... Is the Beat Generation really beat, or merely
deadbeat?... Later on they'll believe in shaving, money, women,
children and maybe station wagons."
The script for "The Poet's Touch" is co-credited to Hollis Alpert, a
well known journalist and film critic of the '60s. Perhaps the
observational-reportage tone comes from him.
An uncharacteristic light moment from "The Poet's Touch", as Johnny
has a laugh with an effete literary magazine editor, played against
type by dese, dem, and dose character actor Mike Kellin. The
black-clad beat chick is choreographer Sylvia Lewis.
If not quite a changing of the guard, Johnny Staccato is certainly a
cultural meeting ground as noir icons like Charles McGraw, Ted de
Corsia, Elisha Cook Jr, Marc Lawrence, and Paul Stewart appear
alongside aside Cassavetes cohorts such as Gena Rowlands (the real
life Mrs. Johnny C.), Val Avery, John Marley, Lelia Goldoni (yes, the
leading lady of Shadows, making a very rare TV appearance), and Rupert
Crosse (another Shadows alum).
"You're gonna listen to me sing and you're gonna like it"; Charles
McGraw croons to our hero in "Murder for Credit", directed by
Cassavetes.
With Elisha Cook Jr in the Cassavetes-helmed "Evil". John clearly
liked to cast noir vets when behind the camera.
Cassavetes himself directed five episodes, and if the frantic pace of
TV production did not allow for much experimentation, it at least
provided him with training in Hollywood-style filmmaking.
Cassavetes seeks out familiar territory in the shadows
Cassavetes only filmed 27 episodes of Johnny Staccato. He claimed he
quit, but I think it more likely that Universal and/or NBC simply
pulled the plug early. After directing commercially unsuccessful
features Too Late Blues (which bears a strong resemblance to Johnny
Staccato, but is unfortunately shot in garish color) and the Stanly
Kramer problem picture A Child Is Waiting, Cassavetes would continue
to work for Universal, appearing in another, unsold private eye pilot
with Rowlands and Jack Klugman in 1964. He tried to raise money for
his own films taking any jobs he could. Some of these worked, such as
his role in the classic Combat episode "S.I.W.", as a GI suspected of
a self inflicted wound. But there also gigs like his appearance in a
Virginian episode as the mountain man patriarch of a clan of Wyoming
hillbillies -- complete with Ulysses S. Grant's old beard. The only
rational explanation for this wonderfully absurd casting would be that
he owed Universal a commitment and this was the only project available
during his window.
However, within a few months of that fiasco Cassavetes would be cast
as the always-griping army prisoner Franko in The Dirty Dozen.
Director Robert Aldrich so loved his take on the character that he
built the role up, allowing Cassavetes to steal virtually all his
scenes. The Dirty Dozen was the megahit of 1967 and established
Casavetes once and for all as a character star. But true to form, he
would never fully commit himself to such a career, using his stardom
only to finance his directorial projects.
Johnny Staccato holds up pretty well today, making up part of the
great TV noir detective troika along with David Janssen's Richard
Diamond and Darren McGavin's Mike Hammer (perhaps more about those in
a future entry). I consider all three to be superior to Peter Gunn,
which aside from its Mancini music and occasional script touches from
Blake Edwards I find overrated.
As I said at the start, John Cassavetes is a veritable demigod among
many film aficionados. But for those of us who can respect but not
love his rather self-indulgent if trailblazing cinematic oeuvre, we
reserve our greatest affection for a modest little half-hour of
television entertainment called Johnny Staccato.
Interview with Director Oley Sassone, director of "The Fantastic Four" (1994)
Earlier this week I sat down with Oley Sassone, the director of "The Fantastic Four" 90's movie that was famously locked away and never show to the public after it was completed. This interview is split up into three parts. The first part is all about The Fantastic Four movie. The second part is about Xena: Warrior Princess The Bitter Suite: A Musical Odyssey. Lastly, the final interview is about Oley's current projects including a Louis Armstrong Biography.
INTERVIEW WITH SATURDAY NIGHT WRITER DAVID SHEFFIELD
BY
STEPHEN HOOVER
In honor of the 40th Anniversary of SATURDAY
NIGHT LIVE I decided to post my full interview with former Saturday Night Live head writer
David Sheffield. David wrote some of the most memorable sketches during the Eddie Murphy period of SNL. David went on to co-write COMING TO AMERICA and NUTTY
PROFESSOR, among other credits, and I was fortunate enough to take a Master Screenwriting course with him at the University of Southern Mississippi last year.
This
and other interviews will eventually be part of a book entitled
CONVERSATIONS WITH THE COMEDY MASTERS, but I wanted to share it here as
that book is still being written.
If you want insight on what it was like to be a head writer on Saturday Night Live during its heyday then you must read this interview. Interesting insights on Andy Kaufman, and well as the last project of Chris Farley.
Q. Okay. Primarily my blog is oriented for aspiring
comedy writers or, existing comedy writers. This book also is going to kind of reflect --
you know, I figure kind of the best place to start would be like your
background, like where were you born and --
A. Uh-huh.
Q. --
your education. Kind of, we'll start
there.
A. Well,
let's see now. I guess you could say I'm
from Biloxi. The family moved to Biloxi
from North Mississippi in 1960, so grew up on the Coast and went to Biloxi High
School, was president of the Thespian Club and editor of the school newspaper
and won the Quill & Scrolls Star Award and managed to make a D in English.
Q. That
has to be quite an accomplishment.
A. Yeah,
well, I wasn't the best student. I had
wanted to be a writer, knew I was going to be a writer, by age 15,
probably. And my first impulse was
comedic because I wrote sketch comedy with my brother Buddy Sheffield, who was
two years younger than me. We did put up
a show at Biloxi High School, sketches, and we mocked some of the teachers and
got into deep trouble for it.
Q. So
the school sketches were kind of the first -- first display you had --
A. First
--
Q. --
of the laughs you got.
A. That's
right. And then I wrote, I went on from
there to -- I was at Ole Miss for only one year and then transferred to USM
when I graduated. I worked my way
through school as a reporter for WDAM TV in Hattiesburg, and back in those days
I was what I called a reporter/producer/photographer/writer/editor.
Q. You
did it all.
A. We
were -- I was a one-man show with a camera.
And so I learned a lot about telling a story that way. And then I wrote plays at Southern. I wrote -- well, I was in a college play
called The Cinna Cycle, which
illuminated a minor character from Julius Caesar. It was a long one act, and that was produced
at the old Red Barn Theater at Southern Miss.
Q. All
right. Well, let's go back. On the background, like you're starting to
write comedy sketches. What were your
inspirations or your influences? Like
who, what comedians did you like --
A. Oh.
Q. --
or what shows inspired you?
A. I
always said that my brother Buddy and I actually grew up in the 40s, even
though we were --
Q. Right.
A. --
growing up in the 60s because we got -- we were addicted to afternoon
television.
Q. Uh-huh.
A. And
we got The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy -- mostly The Three Stooges and
Laurel and Hardy. We -- there was a
station that played them in the afternoon.
We memorized every one of them.
And we could do all the voices.
My brother and I both had a gift for mimicry, so we'd go around the
house doing funny voices, much to my father's consternation. My mother was an artistic type. She taught English and --
Q. Right.
A. --
wrote children's plays and was an accomplished pianist and was the -- she
played piano for the Baptist church, for example, and wrote little children's
plays. One was about the Biloxi and the
Pascagoula Indians. I remember when I
was a kid, she wrote this little saga of the Indians.
Q. Oh.
A. So
she, I guess you could say, was kind of a stage mother who encouraged us along
those lines. My dad was a football coach
and an outdoorsman and a -- I remember he came to one of our shows at Biloxi
High School and he came backstage afterwards, and his first words were, "I
sure did raise some strange boys."
Q. So
-- and then later you had the -- just recently, The Three Stooges/William
Faulkner tribute, so The Stooges have followed you all these years?
A. That's
true. I guess you're right. I hadn't thought of that. I did write "As I Lay Kvetching" --
Q. Right.
A. --
which was very -- the premise being that William Faulkner had written an
episode of The Three Stooges. It was
mostly, as you might imagine, a lot of tortured- -- description.
Q. Right.
A. And
then very shy on the dialogue end.
Q. Right. What about The Marx Brothers; did you have --
A. Oh,
The Marx Brothers, absolutely. Of
course, there was not as much to see, but we did love The Marx Brothers because
we did see their films on television.
And my brother Buddy does, for example, a brilliant Groucho. He does the best impression of Groucho you'll
ever see, and even dances like Groucho.
Q. Oh,
okay.
A. After
college, we formed a theater company called the Sheffield Ensemble Theater,
writing original children's plays and touring public schools. And our first tour went out in an old ice
cream truck. We bought a used ice cream
truck and painted over the ice cream sign and wrote Sheffield Ensemble Theater
on the side and went on the road. And
that touring company expanded over the years.
We did it to the point where it was playing about 20 states, and we were
opening our plays at The Kennedy Center and Wolf Trap, and we became
prestigious, so we decided to quit.
Q. As
far as sketch shows, was, like, Your Show
of Shows available? Had you seen
that show or --
A. I
went out of my way to find Your Show of
Shows later when I had access to it, because I had occasion to work with
Sid Caesar, who hosted Saturday Night
Live. And I'd always heard about Your Show of Shows. And it was one brilliant sketch show.
Q. Right.
A. And
I had the pleasure years later of meeting Howie Morris --
Q. Right.
A. --
one of the actors on Sid Caesar's show --
Q. Right.
A. --
and when I met him, I -- it was a party in Malibu, and I said, "Mr.
Morris, I just want to tell you that I think the sketch, the 'This Is Your
Life' sketch on Your Show of Shows is
the funniest single sketch that's ever been on television." And he said, "Yeah, I know." And that was the end of the interview.
Q. End
of the conversation. Well, that was a
great one where he's grabbing his leg and --
A. Yeah.
Q. --
Sid is walking around.
A. Yeah.
Q. So
the first, I guess, big break to the Saturday
Night Live job, how did that come about?
A. Well,
when Saturday Night Live hit, it was
just a phenomenon because it was -- it broke the rules of television as we knew
it. Somebody said it best that said it
felt like a bunch of hippies had broken into NBC and done a show without
permission, and that appealed to me. I
loved the show and quickly became a fan.
And then I started telling my friends I was going to write for the show
one day. And they'd all roll their eyes
and say, "Yeah, sure, Dave."
So
I bummed around writing local commercials, industrial films and worked in
politics writing speeches, and I wrote anything and everything to stay
alive. And then in 1980 I got a
call. I was in Ocean Springs, living in
Ocean Springs, Mississippi, with my wife, English teacher Cynthia Walker, and
--
Q. Y'all
had a child or two or --
A. We
have -- we have one -- one son. I had
two daughters by a previous marriage.
Q. Oh.
A. Anyway,
back to 1980 in Ocean Springs.
Q. Right.
A. I
got a call from a friend of mine named Patrick Weathers. Pat and I had known each other all through
college and bummed around together, and we entertained at parties. Pat was a singer/songwriter/comedian who did
great Dylan parody. He did a brilliant
Johnny Cash. I played harmonica. We did comedy at parties, mostly to try to
get girls.
And
so I out of the clear blue, Patrick called up and said, "Hey, Dave, I'm
getting ready to audition for Saturday
Night Live, and if you'll give me some material, I'll see that it gets to
the attention of the producers." I
didn't know how seriously to take it, but I knew that Patrick was very well
placed in New York because he was in the exalted position of men's room
attendant at Studio 54. He -- Pat met
people easily, and he gloms onto people, and he had found an agent to represent
him and met several -- he met Robin Williams.
He met -- you know -- Chevy.
Q. Right.
A. He
met a lot of people.
Q. In
the bathroom at Studio 54.
A. And
Belushi was in there often, I can imagine.
Q. Right.
A. Anyway,
Patrick called and said write this stuff, and so I did. I stayed up all night and wrote sketches and
put them in the mail overnight to New York.
And I didn't hear anything for about a week or so and then dismissed it
as just being part of Patrick's fervid imagination.
And
then Pat called back and said, "Hey, man.
They read your stuff, and they like it.
I think they want to hire you."
And
I said, "Really?"
"Yeah."
And
I said, "Well, now," you know, "who did you give it
to?"
And
Patrick said, "Uh, this producer guy."
And
I said, "Do you know his name?"
"Uh,
no, I don't know his name, but he wears glasses."
So
I start calling NBC and asking for Saturday
Night Live and asking if there's a producer there who wears glasses, and
they kept hanging up on me, just assumed it was a prank call, but -- I gave
up. And then a friend of mine took it on
herself to ferret out the truth, and she found the name of the producer, who
was Alan Stern, and he had indeed read my material.
I
got him on the phone, and he said, "Oh, yeah, I read your stuff. Yeah, it's good. Send me some more." So now I started writing sketches in earnest,
and I sat in Ocean Springs, and they kept wanting more and more. And I never got an offer for a job; they just
kept saying "write more sketches."
So
I sat in Ocean Springs and wrote sketches for five or six weeks, sending them
off in the mail to New York. Later when
I got to the show, I learned that they'd been putting my sketches into the
read-through with the actors along with the writing staff, so they were trying
my stuff out before they hired me.
Q. Right.
A. And
then I finally got a call, "Come on up.
We want to interview you."
And I flew up and met with the producer.
She was an interim producer, Jean Doumanian was -- began in 1980 and she
didn't last the season. She was canned
before the season ended. But --
Q. There
was a big transition going on --
A. Huge
transition. The original geniuses had
left the building --
Q. Right.
A. --
because the -- everyone had left the show, and NBC did a really dumb
thing. They fired every writer and every
actor on the show and started over.
Looking back on it, it was a strategic mistake because I was -- I was
brought in with a staff that was so green, we didn't have a clue what we were
doing. Most of the writers that Jean had
hired were Harvard types. They'd come by
way of the National -- the Harvard
Lampoon. And they were all very
young and inexperienced and cocksure.
And I, on the other hand, I was 31 years old when I got my first job at
NBC. So I had lived a bit. I'd been a reporter. I'd worked in the trenches, and I'd starved quite
a while; and I knew what a big shot it was to get a job like that.
Q. Right.
A. So
I was determined to make the most of the opportunity, and did. I remember when Jean finally called to tell
me I had the job, I was working in a little ad agency, Guice & Guice, in
Biloxi. We were upstairs in an old
building in downtown Biloxi. And when
she called to say I had the job, I yelled so loudly that I scared the bill
collector in the office next door, who called the police, thinking something
was --
Q. Oh,
my gosh. You yelled over his yelling.
A. So
here I am at Saturday Night Live and
hoping that I could just do well enough to keep up --
Q. So
this was --
A. --
with the others.
Q. --
a staff writer job that was to last how long?
Was there a contract?
A. Well,
there was a contract, yeah, I mean, but it was a minimal contract, and I was
paid the minimum. And I was paid
Writer's Guild minimum and was given, I think, a 13-week contract. I remember --
Q. Swim
or sink?
A. Hmm?
Q. Swim
or sink? Like, we'll see how it works
out?
A. Exactly. We'll see how you work out. So at the end of 13 weeks, my contract came
up for renewal. By then, there'd been a
massive coup at Saturday Night Live,
and Jean Doumanian's head had been placed on a pike outside 30 Rock, I believe,
for the vultures to pick at.
Q. Okay.
A. And
-- sorry, Jean -- and --
Q. You
had a new producer.
A. We
had a new producer. They brought in the
iron-fisted Dick Ebersol, who for many, many years reigned as the president of
NBC Sports, a job he was ideally suited for.
Q. The
comedy job, however --
A. Well,
Dick came in at a point where they were threatening to cancel the show.
Q. Ah.
A. And
he had been one of the executives who had -- who had nursed the show along
originally, along with Lorne Michaels who -- the creator. They went in -- he'd been one of the ones
who'd sold the show to NBC. So he had
some credibility in that department. And
they felt like after Jean's reign, they needed someone with a strong hand to
set it back on course, and so they brought in Dick. And the first thing Dick did was fire
everybody on the staff except for me and my then-writing partner, Barry
Blaustein; a writer named Pam Norris, who went on to be the producer and show runner
of Designing Women; The only actors
they kept were Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo.
Everybody else got the axe.
Q. Wow. That's a pretty big coup.
A. It
was a big coup, and I remember at the -- the time came to renew my contract, and
I was making Writer's Guild minimum. And
the show attorney, the guy who was in charge of making deals for the network
was a guy named Jim Henry. And I was up
there, and by this point, I was -- we were writing the bulk of the show, and
the show heavily depended on us. And Jim
Henry was walking down the hall. I stuck
my head out the door and at the top of my lungs, I yelled, "Henry, I want
more money."
Q. So,
well, let's go over what Barry -- Barry was just another writer at first --
A. Yeah,
Barry and I -- Barry had worked in the business before, but his credentials
were not sterling. He was an ambitious
young producer, writer/producer, graduate of NYU Film School, native New
Yorker, and he'd already worked in LA on a couple of shows. Circus
of the Stars was his first job. And
then he got a job on The Mike Douglas
Show and did very well at The Mike
Douglas Show, a show that was kind of a sketch comedy show in its
time. And so he had experience. And the prejudice against him was that he was
too mainstream because he'd come from The
Mike Douglas Show. But the truth is,
he had a vicious sense of humor. And we
had read-throughs, and I recognized some of his stuff as being especially dark
and bold.
One
of -- one of his sketches that we read, had read, was a group, a pro-life group
that was promoting, you know, the sanctity of life and how we should -- it was
anti-abortion PSA that included a little fetus puppet. But it was -- it became, here's the little
fetus, and it was a talking fetus, and "Hello, how are you" and all
that. And then the joke became,
"I'm now going to drink a glass of water while the fetus sings 'America
The Beautiful.'" I thought that was
funny. So Barry and I were eyeing each
other. And then Eddie -- Eddie Murphy
came along, and Eddie was hired as a featured player, not a member of the
regular cast. He was very young, 19.
Q. Like,
19.
A. 19
and fresh out of high school, and had been on -- he had been doing
standup. But Eddie only suffered for
about two weeks before he landed his first network job. And -- but he -- he didn't make a mark at
all. He wasn't in any sketches for the
first two or three shows. He was just
kind of hanging back and watching to see what was going on. And then one night he started just riffing on
a character that he was thinking of doing called Raheem Abdul Mohammad, a
militant film critic --
Q. Right.
A. --
who always went to the multiplex and saw the wrong movie. He'd get the movie wrong, so he'd always
review the wrong movie. For example --
Q. Right.
A. --
he said, "I went to see On Goldie Pond, and Goldie Hawn wasn't even in
it."
Q. Yeah.
A. So
we heard Eddie and decided he was very funny, so we wrote a sketch for him to
do on Update, the very first sketch he did on Update, and collaborated with
Eddie on it. And he just -- I remember
standing right off camera watching Eddie do this. It was a piece about how a judge somewhere
had ruled that a certain number of white kids had to be included on a
basketball team. And he wrote -- his was
a rebuttal.
Q. Right.
A. And
he was real hostile about the whole thing.
And we wrote this with him, and it was -- it just killed. And I was standing off camera watching Eddie,
and he had absolutely no anxiety. He was
not at all nervous. He didn't seem to
care about anything. He was so relaxed
out there that it instantly put the audience at ease, and he was really
funny. So then we just hooked up with
Eddie and started writing all his stuff.
And then we -- we just rode that Eddie Murphy train as long and far as
we could.
Q. Yeah. So let's go over a few of the more famous
sketches. The -- of course, the "Ebony and Ivory"
spoof.
A. Yeah.
Q. Did
you guys have like a -- I guess in your mind, you had a list of, okay, here are
impressions that this actor can do, that actor can do, try to put them
together?
A. We
absolutely did. And the writers who
worked best were the ones who sat down with the actors and found out what
characters they could do and who collaborated with them. There were a number of people who failed as
writers on the show, just tried to write sort of in a vacuum. They'd come back with these funny little
notions and they kept them to themselves, and they were okay, but the ones that
really worked were always done in collaboration with the actors.
And,
yeah, what characters can you do? Joe
Piscopo said he could do a great Frank Sinatra, so we did a great Frank Sinatra
sketch with him. And Eddie could do
Stevie Wonder and James Brown and all these great characters. And not just -- not just -- we collaborated not just on impressions
but --
Q. Right.
A. --
all kinds of ideas.
Q. Well,
it went beyond the impressions to get to, I guess like a whole parody of the
character of the James Brown sketch with --
A. Uh-huh.
Q. So
--
A. We
did several James Brown sketches. We did
one -- the last one we did was James Brown Celebrity Hot Tub.
Q. Right,
yeah.
A. And
that got a lot of attention. It was --
it was pretty funny, Eddie doing James Brown and sticking his toe in the water
and going "Oww!" It all
started from that one joke. Barry and I
were actually sitting in a hot tub in LA, and we started doing -- the floor was
a little slippery, so we both started doing our James Brown moves. And I stuck my toe in the water and went
"Oww!" And it went from there,
and that was the whole premise of the sketch.
Other than that, it had absolutely no meaning. And then we put him in the tub, the hot tub
at the end with Dr. Joyce Brothers. It
was Barry's idea to hire Dr. Joyce
Brothers. And I said, "Do you think
we can get her?" And he said,
"Only if we ask her."
Q. Um
--
A. If
you'd like to know some of the sketches we did, we -- we did all those
Buckwheat sketches --
Q. Right.
A. --
with Eddie.
Q. Now
let's talk about -- I guess that's a kind of a good transition to kind of talk
about, I guess, your experience, your background, growing up white in
Mississippi to winning the NAACP Image Award and also writing, you know,
primarily for African-American performers.
I guess what -- growing up, what were your experiences with blacks in
Mississippi kind of in a post-Jim Crow era?
A. Well,
yeah. It was hardly post-Jim Crow when I
grew up. I'm 65, and so I grew up in the
-- you know, came of age in the sixties, right at the height of the --
Q. Right.
A. --
Civil Rights Movement. My father went
back to school in 1960, I think it was, to Ole Miss to get his master's degree
to become a guidance counselor. We spent
several long months there while he finished his degree in a big old barn of a
rental house in Oxford. And we were so
poor, we lived next door to black people.
There -- there was actually a black orphanage right down the hill, and
we went down there because they had great toys.
They -- the wonderful old man who ran that orphanage -- it was -- it was
an ad hoc agency. It had no legal
authority, and it had no backing or anything.
He was just a good-hearted man who took in all these kids, and he
supported them and himself by taking in toys and refurbishing them and selling
them. And they sold barbecue, and they
sold sno-cones. And they had a group
that toured around to churches, singing, and the girls would sit down there and
we could hear them from up at the house.
They would sit in the swing set and sing, "Oh, Dinah's dead, oh how
she died, oh she died like this, oh she died like this." So we went down there and met those kids and
played with them and used their pogo stick, especially, I remember. And their names were all like Kenisha and
Menusha and K’Twain, and we just fell right in.
Q. Right.
A. And
I think -- I don't know -- you know, I was a liberal kid in school, and I was
paired -- when I worked at WDAM, I was paired with the first African-American
newscaster in Mississippi, a guy named Mack Hayes, and I spent -- he became a
good friend, and I went to a number of NAACP meetings with Mack and hung out
and was kind of around -- I can't say that I was a vocal part of the Civil
Rights movement, but I was involved as a reporter. I covered a lot of it. And I think probably being a Southerner, I
had a great affinity for Eddie's voice and sense of humor because, you know,
Eddie Murphy's grandparents were from the South. He grew up on Long Island, but they grew
tomatoes and okra in the back yard. And
speech patterns are similar. And I
always -- as I say, I always had a gift for mimicry, and I quickly figured out
how to write for Eddie. I knew his
voice, and I think that was one thing that made it work.
Q. Right.
A. And
then --
Q. What
were some of the other, I guess, more famous or infamous sketches that you guys
worked on? Oh, yeah, we were talking
about Buckwheat.
A. Buckwheat,
yes.
Q. And
the famous death of Buckwheat --
A. Yeah.
Q. --
that took place, the assassination attempt.
But Buckwheat in general, I guess he was kind of a holdover of racist
Hollywood, a pretty, you know, denigrated character on the show?
A. You
know, I -- I didn't see it that way, and Eddie didn't either. Let me tell you the genesis of Buckwheat, and
we can talk a little about the real Buckwheat.
If you think about it, The Little Rascals, the very idea that they
included a black kid in their circle of friends and that they were all playing
together was -- was way ahead of its time.
And, yeah, I mean, they did little jokes sometimes. I remember especially on the Little Rascals
that they all pretended to have the measles one time --
Q. Right.
A. --
and they all put dots on their faces so they'd look like they had --
Q. Right.
A. --
measles, and then it got to Buckwheat, and they put white dots on his face so
they would show up. But I guess, if you
want to say that was racist, then I guess it was, but here's how it
happened. Eddie was doing standup, and
he had in his standup a bit about The Little Rascals and how come they named
the only black kid Buckwheat; why was he the only one named after a breakfast
cereal, you know. And so we decided to
do Buckwheat. And we chose to do it as a
record commercial: Buckwheat sings. And then Eddie started doing the voice for
us, and we were just rolling on the floor because, you know, Buckwheat had a
speech impediment of some kind. But --
and to Eddie's ear, he talked "like dis'" and "henno, it's been
a nong time tince dem days. My name
Buckwheat."
Q. Right.
A. And
I -- I wrote in Buckwheat. I was the one
who had a good enough ear that I could sit --
Q. Okay.
A. --
at the keyboard and write phonetically for Buckwheat. And then we -- we did, during the commercial,
we -- commercial parody, we did, you know, superered the names of the songs
and all and they were written in
Buckwheatese also. Anyway, that commer-
-- for some reason, that just struck a -- that was a hugely popular sketch. I remember Ebersol coming to us afterwards
and saying that in that sketch Eddie had tested higher for likeability than any
performer they had at NBC at the time.
His likeability ratings just went straight through the roof when he did
Buckwheat. I don't know why. What does that say about white America? I don't know.
Q. Uh
--
A. So
then we decided to kill him. We did
about two or three Buckwheat sketches, and then Eddie came in one day on a
Monday and said, "Let's kill the bastard.
Everywhere I go, you have yelling 'Hey, Buckwheat, Buckwheat.' I don't want to be Buckwheat the rest of my
life. Let's kill him." So we said okay. So Barry and I wrote this, and we based it
all on -- it was a kind of compendium of a number of assassinations and
assassination attempts --
Q. Right.
A. --
but we staged it downstairs, and we kind of reproduced the Reagan assassination
attempt. He was standing at the door of
his limo and somebody yelled, "Hey, Mr. Wheat!" And then "Yes?" And pow-pow-pow, he gets shot. Interesting little sidebar, when we shot
that, we brought in a special effects guy to put the squibs on Eddie; blood
spurted.
Q. Right.
A. So
we shot one with the squibs, and it looked so gruesome, I said, you know what,
let's shoot another one without the squibs just --
Q. Right.
A. --
in case, and we did. And thank God,
because the one we wound up using was the one sans sang.
Q. Yeah. That kind of reminds me of like the John
Cleese conversation I was telling you I had where they did the dog without the
blood. If you see the blood, it hurts.
A. That's
right. It was a little too real with the
blood. Then we did -- there was a lot of
pressure to do another one, and they kept coming back saying you've got to do
another Buckwheat. And we said we killed
him, we can't, he's dead. And so then we
came up with the idea of doing Buckwheat's killer --
Q. Uh-huh.
A. --
also played by Eddie, a guy named John David Stutz, who killed Buckwheat
because his dog told him to do it in a dream.
Then he was killed, sort of like Lee Harvey Oswald --
Q. Right.
A. --
was killed. It was a grand statement about
violence and assassinations in America.
Q. And
a mass conspiracy, no doubt.
A. Yeah. The final sketch we did was Buckwheat
impersonators, so we staged it -- we -- we looked at a famous David Susskind
show with Elvis impersonators --
Q. Right.
A. --
and so we -- we did, we called David Susskind and asked him to come in, and he
did; and he hosted a Susskind show that was all
-- with a bunch of different Buckwheat impersonators. One of them was Eddie as Buckwheat.
Q. Right.
A. And
the others were like Tim Kazurinsky, a white guy who said his Buckwheat was
better because he sang better Buckwheat than…
It was pretty funny. That was the
end of the Buckwheat saga.
Q. Let's
talk about other writers on the show.
Michael O'Donoghue was a writer at that time?
A. Oh,
my God, Mr. Mike. I loved Mr. Mike's
sense of humor, and I loved Mr. Mike. He
was one of a kind, and he was a bad boy by nature and he saw to it that
everyone knew it constantly. He was a
dark angel. There was a writer of Animal House whose name I can't recall,
and we got word that that writer had been traveling with Chevy Chase in Hawaii
and had fallen off a cliff to his death.
Q. Oh,
my gosh.
A. And
we were in a room when somebody came -- just came in and said, you know,
"He died. He fell off a
cliff." And Michael, without
missing a beat, said, "I hope he was holding Chevy's hand." Michael -- Michael set out to be --
okay. It was right -- Ebersol brought
Michael in.
Q. Right.
A. After
Doumanian was fired, Michael came in and with a spray can of paint -- and he
wrote on the wall in giant letters, "Danger." He said that's what the show is missing,
danger.
Q. Right.
A. And
then he took a giant stack of scripts that had been written, and he said,
"I've been poring through these manuscripts of yours, and there's no
fucking diamonds here. In fact, there's
not even" -- what is that, what is that diamond --
Q. Zirconium?
A. Thank
you. That's the line. I blew Michael's line.
Q. Yeah. I'll correct it.
A. Maybe
you'll correct it. "There's not
even zirconium." And -- and -- and
then Michael called in all the writers, one by one, and fired them. And -- and Barry and I decided, well, he's
going to fire us too. But I've just --
there's enough redneck in me, I guess, that I decided I was going to go down
swinging. I went over to Barry's
parents' apartment in the East 30s and got drunk on his dad's bourbon, and I
went back to the network and I picked up a can of spray paint and I stuck it in
my pants. And I was drunk when I walked
in the room to be fired by O'Donoghue.
And I said, okay, here's the deal.
If that son of a bitch fires us, we're going to wrestle him to the floor. I'm going to spray paint that motherfucker
from one end to the other.
And
O'Donoghue could sense that I was a little hostile when I entered the room, and
he said, "You can put that way, Sheffield.
You and Blaustein are the only decent writers here. You guys are staying. I like your stuff." And then he critiqued a couple of things, and
then he fished out a sketch that Jean had not approved of called Drive For
America, and it was Joe Pi- -- and then we did it with Joe Piscopo as Frank
Sinatra doing a telethon for the Chrysler Corporation, which was being bailed
out at the time.
Q. Right.
A. But
it was all viciously anti-Japanese. It
was all aimed at the Japanese carmakers.
And I remember Frank singing at the end of it, you know, "Each time
I see those Nissan Ds, I want to punch out a Japanese. Go to hell, Toyota. Drop dead, Subaru. It's drive for America, that old, I'm talking
red, white and blue." My song and
lyric. So that was a hit. And we became suddenly the leading writers on
the show. And Michael was Peck's bad
boy. He -- Michael did a sketch that he
co-wrote with -- he brought in some unusual people. He brought in Terry Southern.
Q. Right.
A. Terry
was, of course, the cutting edge writer of the sixties.
Q. Dr. Strangelove.
A. Dr. Strangelove, he'd written -- and he
wrote the novel Candy, which was just
libelous and slanderous and salacious and all those wonderful things. And Terry and a guy named Nelson Lyon --
Nelson's greatest claim to fame is that he was in the room with Belushi when
Belushi OD'd. Terry and Michael, they
wrote -- those three got together and they wrote a sketch called Silverman's
Bunker. Fred Silverman was the president
of NBC at the time, and the network was in the tank.
Q. I
remember that.
A. The
network was completely in the tank; it was going downhill, downhill, downhill,
and so they -- they wrote this sketch where Silverman is in the bunker, you
know, like Hitler in the --
Q. Right.
A. --
final days in the -- and think, now, what do you think? Silverman was in -- in Hawaii because he was
trying to avoid the press because it was widely rumored that he was about to be
fired.
Q. Right.
A. But
he -- he called up and said, "I want to see that sketch." And they arranged to have Silverman see a
rehearsal at an NBC affiliate in Honolulu, live. They put the sketch up live so he could get a
taste of what this sketch was. And then
he saw it, and he came back and said, "Over my dead body will this sketch
appear on my network. Hell, no,"
which is all Michael needed --
Q. Right.
A. --
to quit with great fanfare because he had been -- he had been -- he had been
censored in an unfair way. And then that
was a long sketch, and all of this went down on Friday. So we now were looking at the prospect of
having about a 15-minute hole in the show.
And as it turned out, that week the -- the guest host was -- guys, help
me out; I'm an old man -- Dr. Frank N. Furter
from --
[Unknown]
- Tim Curry.
A. Tim
Curry. Thank you. We're sitting in the office, head in hands,
what the hell do we do now, there's this giant -- no kidding. I mean, it was like a 10-minute hole in the
show to fill. And I just said,
"Don't you do Mick Jagger?"
And he said, "Yes, I do," and he started doing Mick Jagger in
front of us, and it was hilariously funny.
So Barry and I went back to the office and stayed up all night writing a
sketch called the Mick Jagger Special.
Mick Jagger was going back on tour at that point, so our -- the point of
our sketch was Mick Jagger had gone mainstream and was doing one of those
really sappy NBC specials like, "Look, it's the lovely puppeteer, the beautifully
preserved Shari Lewis." --
Q. Right.
A. So
we wrote that overnight, and one of his -- one of the guests on there was Joe
doing Frank Sinatra. So we had Tim Curry
doing Mick Jagger next to Joe's Sinatra, and they did a duet, during which Frank
said stuff like, "You know one thing I've always thought, Mick. Rock singers suck, but I would love to sing
with you." And so they sing the
duets together. And it was -- it was a
huge hit. It got huge laughs. The sketch had tremendous energy, and it --
and it filled that vacant spot on the show so well, Michael became jealous of
us and decided he hated me. And because
I -- I guess I'd betrayed him by hopping to and filling that hole in the show
that he had blown apart by design. And
-- and so we didn't speak after that, which I thought was unfortunate, because
I really liked Michael.
Q. And
he passed away I believe from throat cancer.
A. No,
he died of a sudden brain aneurysm.
Q. Oh,
okay.
A. And
at his funeral, all his friends gathered, and you know how they always have a
picture of the late departed.
Q. Right.
A. They
had a brain scan of Michael's aneurysm, the one that killed him. I remember we went to a party after --
Michael brought in a punk act called Fear.
Q. Right. I remember.
A. And
it was right around Halloween, and so the entire set at SNL was decorated with
pumpkins. Fear started, and all their
fans came and they formed a giant mosh pit right there in the studio, and then
they all started hurling pumpkins. And
so they were smashing pumpkins and throwing them everywhere, and it was just a
melee. And Ebersol went nuts and called
in the NBC security guards and hugely overreacted to what was just normal punk
behavior.
Q. Right.
A. But,
God, Michael was so thrilled that he pulled that off, and he asked me to ride
with him in his limo to the party afterward.
And we stopped by his apartment so he could pick up a pair of shoes he'd
just found. They were real leopard skin,
and he said, "Wait till your liberal friends get a hold of these,
Sheffield."
Q. If
we're talking about memorable folks, we definitely need to go to Andy
Kaufman. He was a guest on the show and
the famous 1-900, the 1-900 vote which voted him off the show. How did that come about? Now, I guess, where did you first meet Andy
Kaufman?
A. He
came to the show. You know, he'd done
the show almost from the beginning. He
kind of broke out on the show.
Q. I
believe the first episode he did Mighty Mouse.
A. Did
he? Was it the very first episode?
Q. I
believe so.
A. When
Andy started doing comedy, his mom drove him in from New Jersey and then stayed
while he did the show and then took him home.
Andy kind of stood comedy on its head.
I always say it's sort of like he went away from the traditional concept
of someone standing up in the firelight making funny gestures and fart noises
and amusing the others to turning it around so that it was him laughing at the
audience. He didn't want to evoke
laughs; he wanted to anger his audience, if that makes any sense at all.
He
loved wrestling, and he patterned his comedy career after bad wrestlers,
villains, the ones who go out there and pull hair and cheat and -- while the
ref isn't looking, and the ones that everybody always hates. That's who he aspired to be, the bad wrestler. So he did -- he went out and he wrestled, and
he hung out with wrestlers. And one of
his big claims at the time was that he could -- he could pin any woman alive in
a wrestling match. And he could. Andy was anything but strong and anything but
physically fit, but he had figured out that any male torso could pin down any
female torso in a one-on-one wrestling match, so he went to Memphis and, you
know, he would taunt people.
He
showed us a video that he shot down in Memphis at one of those wrestling shows,
and he said, "You know, you people from the South, you're here with your
eats. You shell yo' peas, and you eat,
and you talk like you've got cornmeal mush in your mouth. And I can beat every -- any woman in the
South." And by now, they're screaming;
they want to rip his head off. And that
was, to his way of thinking, exactly what he -- the reaction he was after.
And
then Andy, when Andy showed up at the show, he was wearing a neck brace because
he had supposedly been injured in a wrestling match by a wrestler whose name
escapes me. I want to say Cowboy Bob
Kelly, but it was a different guy.
Anyway, the deal was that Andy was going around with a neck brace on because
he'd suffered this trauma in the wrestling arena. So when I met him, I was -- Barry and I were
in a swimming pool at Dick's place in -- actually, it was Susan St. James's
house in the Hollywood Hills.
[Unknown: Do you mean Jeffrey -- Jerry Lawler?]
A. Jerry
Lawler.
A. Jerry
Lawler was his wrestling partner, and Jerry Lawler had supposedly injured him
so badly he had to wear this neck brace.
Now, Andy showed us the videotape of that incident. And I looked at it real closely, and I could
see where -- it was very well done. It
was a kind of a head jam deal where Andy had his head between Jerry Lawler's
knees, and then Jerry Lawler leaps in the air and comes down on the mat, boom,
and supposedly fractured a vertebra, and now Andy has got to wear... But I could see, watching the video, where
Jerry Lawler was assisting. So I knew it
was phony, and I -- what else would it be?
Come on. Everything the guy did
was a joke, so why would you think this would be any different. And so I -- I called him on it. I said, "Andy, it looks to me like that
was a set-up deal." And he gave me
this kind of sly look and nodded and said, "Come with me."
Q. So
you were in.
A. I
was in the "in" group. Andy
was notorious at the time. He went on Fridays, our competition over there at
ABC --
Q. Right.
A. --
was a short-lived sketch show called Fridays. And on Fridays,
he had proposed marriage to some woman and then stood her up and then he got
into a fistfight on the show, just anything he could do --
Q. With
the cast, right?
A. Anything
he could do to stir up controversy.
Because in his world, he was not just up there entertaining the
audience. He wanted his jokes to be
repeated in all media; he wanted it to be a giant joke that was reported in the
press. And they were giant jokes. I don't know how else to put it. And he engineered these things, and he kept
people stirred up all the time.
This is what we worked out together in
advance, and here’s how we played it out:
He
came to the show and did an Elvis sketch that we cut between dress rehearsal
and air, and after that, Andy and I had a loud argument in the hallway about --
and he was saying, you know, "Why did you cut me?"
And
I said, "Well, we only did it because of time," you know.
And
he said, "No, it's not. You just
didn't like it. You don't think I'm
funny. You don't think I'm
funny."
And
finally I said, "You know something, Andy?
You're not funny. We don't even
want you here. Just get out of
here." This was exactly what Andy
wanted, because he was -- it was in all the papers, big fight, you know,
between Andy Kaufman --
Q. Yeah.
A. --
and SNL. And he -- he said, "Okay,
well, we'll come back and we'll see if they want me back on the show, and we'll
have a contest to see and we'll let the public vote." So we set up a 900 number, should Andy be
allowed back on the show or not. And to
our amazement -- it was one of the first 900 number call-in audience response
things ever done.
Q. Right.
A. And
the audience decided overwhelmingly that Andy should not come back to the
show. So we had to go over to his hotel
and tell him, and he said, "Okay."
He was hurt. He was hurt. I think he -- I think he kind of hoped that
he would -- they'd want him back on the show, but he was prepared in case they
didn't. And his idea was that he would
sneak back on the show as an extra. He
wanted to appear as an African-American woman in the background in a sketch and
then have somebody stop the show and say, "Wait a minute, that's Andy
Kaufman" and rip his face and his wig off and have it be another big
blowup episode; but Ebersol wouldn't let him do it because he said, no, you've
been voted off the show and that's just that.
And that was, I think, the end of his relationship with the show.
Q. And
then when you heard later about, I guess it's cancer and his treatment --
A. Well,
by then, Barry and I had left the show.
It was a couple of years later, and we saw a picture of Andy being in a
wheelchair, boarding a plane to Mexico to pursue some last resort effort to
cure him of cancer. So Barry and I fell
out laughing. We just -- there was no doubt in our minds it was
just Andy being Andy. And then the word
came that he'd died, and we still didn't believe it.
And
then it slowly dawned on us, we heard from other people who had been to his
funeral and -- that he actually had died.
So we were so convinced that he was going to come back from the dead any
minute that Barry and I wrote a sketch in tribute to him, and it was a bunch of
people close to him who just couldn't accept that he was dead. We had -- we wrote the doctor, who said, you
know, "I was his physician, and I was at his bedside when his heart
stopped beating and his brain was declared legally dead, and I declared him
dead." But something tells me he's
kidding.
And
then we ended it with the guy at the funeral home. He said, "Well, I embalmed Andy, and I
put his lifeless body into a corpse and then we buried him." But something tells me he's still kidding. And Dick Ebersol wouldn't do it, though; he
wouldn't put it on the air. I think he
thought it was tasteless, which, of course, it was.
Q. But
that was Andy.
A. That
was Andy.
Q. And
you had some other guests. I believe
Bill Murray guest starred a couple of times on the show.
A. Bill
Murray was -- is a generous man, and he came back to do the show at a point
where we sorely needed a boost. The show
was in trouble. And just the week
before, a guy on the cast had used the F-word on the air, supposedly the first
time the F-word had ever been uttered on national television.
Q. And
there was no delay --
A. Charlie
Rocket was his -- there was no delay, and it went out live on the East
Coast. And they bleeped it by the time
it got to the West Coast, but it went live.
And it was a stupid sketch somebody did, and Charlie Rocket was the guy
who said it at the end of the show, at the good-nights. He said, "I wish I knew who the fuck did
it." And so he -- it was all in the
press, and he had to apologize for saying it and all of that.
So
Billy came in, Bill Murray, came in with the attitude that he was going to --
he was going to get us in shape and straighten things out. Now, Bill is a member of a big Irish family
in Chicago. He grew up with lots of
brothers and sisters. And he was an
ensemble theater guy. He had worked with
Second City, I believe; I think I'm right in that.
Q. Yep.
A. And
he had a strong sense of let's do the show, and we're all in this
together. So I'm sitting in the office,
and I've never met Bill Murray. And it
was extremely cold, extremely cold night in New York. It was in the teens. I mean, it was -- the wind was howling; it
was cold outside.
So
we're all up there, and he comes -- Bill Murray walks in the office. And I start to get up to greet him, and he
didn't say a damn word. He just grabbed
me, slammed me down in the chair. I
said, "Hello?" you know, and "What the hell?" And then he goes over and he opens the
windows, open to the night air, and it's freezing. And he just sat down, and he's glaring across
the table at me. So I didn't do a damn
thing but get up and put on my coat and a muffler. I figured, if we were going to sit here in
the cold, at least I'll try to, you know, be comfortable, so I put on my
coat.
And
then he grabbed me and he dragged me down the hall. I don't know what he was trying to do to
me. I think -- I know what it was. His brother Brian Doyle-Murray had told him
that I was a smart ass, and of course I was.
What the hell? I mean, that's why
I was hired, isn't it?
Q. Right.
A. But
then Billy had it in his head that I needed straightening out or
something. And he started telling us how
he felt we should be doing comedy. And I
started hearing him. And, you know, the
man certainly knew what he was doing.
Then we got -- once we got past sort of that initial kerfuffle,
kerfluffle --
Q. Right.
A. --
we got along fine. And I never will
forget. This happened: We did a little -- it was around
Christmas. That's why it was so
cold. We did a little Christmas sketch,
and we hired some child actors to be in it.
It was Mary Gross talking about the wonders of Christmas, and she went
out and interviewed -- we hired all these little child actors to be real
cynical about Christmas. The joke was
that these kids were saying things like, "I wish it was over. God," you know. And so we hired a little kid, a little
red-headed kid, as one of the actors.
His name was Seth Green.
Q. Hmm.
A. Okay. You know who he is now, but at the time, Seth
was a little pint-sized little shit wearing cowboy boots, and he was -- and he
came with his mom, who was a stage mother, and he was just a horrible child and
really full of himself. And he was
coming in bugging all the writers while we were trying to work. And Bill Murray was out watching in the lobby
-- he was watching a Japanese game show on television. And we hear this ruckus down the hallway, and
here comes little Seth Green stomping down the hall in his cowboy boots. And he said, "Bill Murray just threw me
in the trash." And apparently Billy
had just picked him -- had enough of him.
Q. Right.
A. He
picked him up by his heels and dropped him headlong into a trash can. And I remember Seth saying, "Nobody
throws me in the trash, I don't care how big a star they are." We wrote -- and after that, Barry and I wrote
with Bill one of those Nick the Lounge Singer sketches.
Q. Right.
A. We
did Nick Rivers floating down the Mississippi on the Delta Queen with Billy,
and that was great fun to do one of those sketches. I really loved those sketches, and it was fun
doing it with him. And we had -- it
ended up with him saying, "It's up to you, New Or-leans, New
Or-leans."
Q. And
then Danny DeVito was on the show on a fateful night.
A. He
was. Danny came to do the show as host
right after ABC had summarily canceled Taxi
without giving the cast or even the producer advanced notice. They just pulled the rug right out from under
them, and they were never allowed to do a final episode. And so when Danny came to do the show, all of
the cast of Taxi came. Marilu Henner and all of them, and Judd --
Q. Yeah,
Judd Hirsch.
A. Judd
Hirsch.
Q. And
--
A. And
James L. Brooks came with them. And I
was so impressed with him. Just before
they all went on the air, they all gathered around James L. Brooks, and you
could just tell that they loved that man.
And he was so good at what he did. I learned a couple of things from him. Somebody was trying to write sketches for
Danny, and -- Danny DeVito -- and Danny was having a hard time with it. It was real wordy. And I remember Jim Brooks saying, "Don't
give him all those words. Just give him
an attitude. Give him an attitude to
play." That was kind of eye
opening. I learned something from Jim
Brooks. That's about all I can think of.
Q. Johnny
Cash was also a guest, I believe?
A. Johnny
Cash. Well, he wasn't. Johnny was a legend, of course, and when he
showed up, he fit the mold; he did not disappoint. Johnny came in, in a long black coat with
knee-high boots on and a cape, I think, and he sat down. And he and June were there, and we talked
about it. We talked about what kind of
sketches we were going to do. And they
had an apartment right on Central Park South.
I'm sure it was a huge suite of rooms.
So they came over, and June came in the room. She stuck her head in the door. Now, this is just the producers. By then, I was a supervising producer on the
show.
Q. Right.
A. So
it was just me and Barry, Bob Tischler and Dick Ebersol in the room. And June comes in; June Carter Cash sticks
her head in the door and says, "Hey, I just want y'all to know I'm really
good at comedy. I'm real funny. I worked with Jackie Gleason one time, and I
used to do comedy. I'm just real funny,
and you should definitely put me on the show."
And
Johnny said, "Yes, it's true. June
is a really funny comedienne." And
he's, "Bye, honey." He said,
"Go on back to the house. I need to
talk to these men about the show."
And so she left. The minute she
left, Johnny said, "Boys, whatever you do, don't put June on the
show." I think they're all safely
dead now, aren't they?
Q. Yeah. I believe Elton John was the musical guest
that night, so it would have been interesting if they'd have done a duet.
A. You
know, that's interesting. I'll tell you
the story -- I'll tell you the story of the after-party.
Q. Oh,
okay.
A. You
remember my telling you about this dark angel Nelson Lyon --
Q. Right.
A. --
who was a writer on the show? Nelson was
in charge that night of selecting the club we would go to after the show. Now, Johnny and I had gotten along famously
all week because -- I wrote a couple of sketches that he was in, and, you know,
we talked about the fact that I was the only Southerner on the staff. And we just got along fine.
And
then we show up for the party afterward, and as a joke -- as a very nasty joke
-- Nelson Lyon had chosen a gay leather club in Tribeca. So we walk into the party, and there was a
guy with nipple clips on and very little, like a leather jock strap, dancing in
a cage of barbed wire.
And
I look over, and there's Johnny sitting in the corner over there with June and
his daughter. And I walked over, and I
said, "Johnny, hey, good show."
And I said, "I don't know how in the world we wound up at this
place, but I apologize."
And
he said, "That's all right, son. I
guess they're trying to shock me, but I seen a lot worse than this."
Q. Folsom
Prison, you know, that'd be worse. And
now that, I guess, the transition from -- well, first of all, I wanted to go
over like the process of Saturday Night
Live. What was like a week at Saturday Night Live? How did you get the show together and --
A. Okay. Started on Monday morning, and we would meet
the host. It began with the host coming
in for a meeting with the entire writing staff and all the actors in the
producer's office. We all sat around and
pitched ideas to the host, whoever that was.
And then from there, we went off and wrote the show.
Now,
the show was essentially written on Monday and Tuesday nights, and the scripts
were due Wednesday morning. And so you
wrote the best stuff you could, and then you had this giant read-through with
the host and the rest of the cast on Wednesday.
And
from the Wednesday read-through, the producers would select the sketches they
wanted to mount for the show. You always
picked about -- you always tried to go in with about -- 10 or maybe even 15
minutes long with the idea that the sketches that didn't work would be cut
before air time.
They
built all the sets out in Brooklyn and hauled it in starting Thursday, and we
started camera blocking bright and early Thursday, and then blocked the show
Thursday and Friday.
And
then Saturday, my job when I became supervising producer was to edit all the
short films and commercial parodies. So
I would kill myself writing, and then I'd have to stay up all night long in the
edit room at NBC editing these things.
And so I would wrap it up about 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning on
Saturday. Then I'd go home and crash for
a few hours and then come back and do the show.
There's
a dress rehearsal. As I said, it's
always a little long. We had an audience
in for the dress rehearsal. And then
there -- between dress and air, you make cuts and revisions and changes and cut
it for time, and then you go on the air at 11:30, ready or not.
The
most panicked we were ever were was the time when we ran so long that we only
had a 45-minute break between dress rehearsal and air. But I'll tell you, to be in that pressure
cooker between dress rehearsal and air and to watch that crew -- and Davy
Wilson, the director -- we would sit there, and we would go around the
room. And at the time, there were four
of us making the decisions: Dick
Ebersol, Bob Tischler, Barry, and me; the director, Dave Wilson; and a
supervisor -- another producer, I think she was called an associate producer,
Audrey Peart Dickman, a lovely Englishwoman.
She was the keeper of the time.
And Audrey would sit there and time every sketch with a stopwatch. And she knew what the budget of the show was,
and so we would have to cut sketches to get it within time.
And
then we'd rearrange the show between dress rehearsal and air. We would recognize that the opening sketch
that we thought was going to work had not worked, was going to be cut, so we'd
have to put something else up front. And
every time you made a change like that, we would turn to Davy Wilson and say,
"Davy, can you do it?"
He'd
say, "Yeah, let's see. I'm going to
have to pull camera 3. We won't be able
to use the crane, so forget the crane shot.
And we'll have to go with a lavalier mic because I'm going to have to
use the boom down at the other end."
And he'd do all this in his head.
Q. God.
A. And
he'd say, "Yeah, we can do that."
And then we'd go on live. And
very often, you'd see that you were going to run long and you'd have to cut
parts of sketches during the show, and that was probably the toughest part of
my job as a producer because it fell to me to go tell the actors that their
sketches had been cut. And they very
often were not at all happy when they were
-- when I delivered this news.
Q. Right.
A. And
then there was a time I snatched a script out of Roger Ebert's hand, for
example. It was my idea to have Siskel
and Ebert on the show to review the show in progress. And so they did. They did a very funny job. The guys were very funny.
Q. Right.
A. And
they reviewed the show as it was going on, and then we had to cut their
segment.
Q. Oh,
no.
A. So
I went back and said, "Roger, we've got to cut a minute out of
this." And he said -- and so I
actually took the script out of his hand and started slashing his
dialogue. And I'll never forget the look
on his face.
He
said, "I cut my own copy, thank you."
Q. Ah.
A. And
I go, boy, there go my chances of ever getting a good review out of Roger
Ebert.
Q. So
much for the two thumbs up. So that's a
good transition. We go from TV to
Hollywood. How did that happen?
A. Do
you mind if I take a quick break?
Q. Oh,
sure thing.
[Recess]
A. When
Sid Caesar came in to host the show, he was looking to make a bit of a
comeback. He had just written a book
which he wanted to promote called Where
Have I Been? Sid apparently had a
long bout with alcoholism.
Q. Right.
A. And
he'd gotten himself physically fit to an almost alarming degree. He was powerful. And Sid had been working out, and he was, by
then, I'm sure in his sixties, but, man, he was strong as an ox. And he's flexing his muscles around. And he wanted to rehearse. So we wrote a sketch with him. He and Eddie were in it, and it was kind of a
longish sketch. And Sid wanted to rehearse. Of course, we didn't rehearse on Saturday Night Live; we just didn't.
Q. Right.
A. But
Sid did, and he wanted to rehearse. And
he wanted to get up -- put it on its feet, as he put it. "I want to put it on its
feet." Okay. So we -- I said, all right, we'll
rehearse. So we, up on the 17th floor,
we got out chairs and put them around to mark where the -- the sketch took
place in a hotel room. So I tried to set
it out, lay it out kind of like the set was going to be so Sid could rehearse
it. And the first thing he did was, he
went up there and he starts doing lines and walking around in circles, and he's
walking around; he gets very agitated, and all of a sudden, he picked up a
chair and hurled it. It slammed against
the wall right over my head. And he
immediately rushed to me said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you. You okay?
You okay?"
"I'm
fine, Mr. Caesar."
Then
Sid did the show, and I have to say, he wasn't good on the show. We didn't write well for him, and he came
from another era. Sid wanted to come
out, for example, and say, "Ladies and gentlemen, have you ever been in
this following situation."
And
I said, "Sid, we don't do that. We
don't come out and explain the joke. We
just do it," you know. He didn't
like that. He didn't like anything about
the experience. And then he bad-mouthed
us in the press. He went -- he was asked
by reporters what the experience was like, and he said, "They don’t know
what they're doing up there," you know.
"They're even worse than my original writers." Of course, his original writers --
Q. Some
of the best ever.
A. The
best ever. So then another bizarre
coincidence, Barry, my writing partner Barry and I were on a flight from LA to
New York, and -- excuse me, the other way around; it was New York to LA -- and
we got out, off the plane in LA, and there was Sid standing at the baggage
carousel with a limo driver, waiting for his bags to come out. And, boy, was he sheepish. Because he had just called us everything but
good comedy writers.
Q. Right.
A. And
he immediately, "I'm sorry, fellows.
They misquoted me, and I didn't mean to." He was almost -- he had two distinctly
different characters in his head at the same time. One was kind of, you know, apologized a lot and
was very sweet, and the other one would rip your head off.
Q. Okay. Yeah, so let's do the transition from New
York to Los Angeles.
A. Okay.
Q. How
did that come about?
A. Well,
we did the show for three years, and we decided that we had -- we were sort of
burned out. We'd been working long and
hard, and we decided we wanted to be screenwriters, so we got a very good agent
from the show. We were signed by John
Gaines, who was the most powerful comedy agent at that time. He represented just, Steve Martin and John
Candy and a bunch of the leading comedians of the day. And he signed us and promised us that he
would get us in to pitch movies immediately.
And he made good on that.
We
got off the plane, and the very day we got off the plane, we pitched our movie,
first movie idea to the president of Columbia, who passed. And then we went around town pitching ideas
all over town, and they passed. And we
were trying to do a comedy called, Barry and I were calling My Favorite
Charity. It was about a couple of guys,
couple of low-rent guys who set up a phony charity and put a kid in a
wheelchair and pretended -- then created a new disease so that they can rake
off all the money. No one in town would
do it because --
Q. It
was too dark or --
A. Well,
it was too dark I suppose for that time.
It was certainly dark. But,
actually, one of the studio execs we pitched it to said it best. He said, "You're never going to sell
that because we take our charity very seriously in this town."
Q. Ah.
A. So,
anyway, we're now in LA, and the money from the show is starting to run
out. And we haven't been able to sell
anything. And then they came to us and
said would you be interested in writing a sequel to this movie Police Academy. So they showed us the movie, which was not
yet in theaters, and asked us if we would write the sequel. And we said yes, because we desperately
needed money.
So
we flew to London, believe it or not, to meet with the producer, Paul Mazlansky,
and worked up a story with Paul in London and then came back and wrote it. We didn't have much time to do it, as I
recall. Seemed like they wanted to rush
it in production.
Q. Well,
the first movie hadn't been released at that point?
A. That's
right.
Q. And
so they must have gotten some good testing or --
A. Oh,
yeah. They knew they had a hit. They tested it.
Q. I've
heard that film has one of the distinctions of being one of the few to actually
get to net profits because they made it so cheaply, they actually got to get net
profits.
A. They
did. And I'll be honest with you. It's the only movie I've ever had a credit on
that actually paid profits. And every
year I look forward to the check from Warner Brothers. Because there were no big stars in it.
Q. Right.
A. There
was no star producer on it, and it was made so cheaply and made so much money,
it just came in over the transom. They
had no way to hide it.
Q. And
I heard the actors were signed on to a multiple, definitely two-picture deal,
so they kept the cost down for the sequel as well.
A. Yeah. Well, it was not a good experience. I hate writing sequels. There's really no reason to do a sequel
except for the money, and the notes you get from the studio are always the
same: They want you to make it exactly
the same as the original one, but different.
And every time you try to make it a little bit different, they all look
at each other say, "Yeah, but that's not what we did the first
time." So they kind of goad you
into --
Q. Right.
A. --
reproducing the original if you're not careful.
But, again, it made money. When
that movie came out, it opened to -- I remember they ran a double-wide ad in Daily Variety bragging that it had made,
I think, $14 million its opening weekend.
Check the figures, but that was, for that time, an extraordinary amount
of money.
And
so Barry and I went from couldn't get arrested to everyone in town pitching us
their comedy ideas. We became hot
writers; we were hot. The whole idea of
heat and who's hot and who's not is one of the most annoying aspects of the
business. But when it works in your
favor, it sure is nice because suddenly everybody in town wanted us to write
movies for them.
Q. And
some of those projects, or most of those projects, I guess, didn't -- weren't
eventually made, right, you worked on?
A. That's
the nature of the business. And, you
know, the truth is that, for every movie that gets made, there are probably at
least a dozen screenplays sitting on shelves that will never see the light of
day. Veal, I call it; they're veal
screenplays. They never see the light of
day.
Q. One
of those was interesting. You actually
worked with Carl Reiner was your writing partner on a script.
A. That
was a rewrite of a script of a -- it was actually a remake of an Ealing comedy
called Last Holiday. It had been written by Seaman and Price, and Carl
wanted a rewrite, and we met with him and we agreed to work with Carl on
it. It was for John Candy to star.
And
we had a great time working with Carl, wonderful time. I always said Carl was the Jewish grandfather
I never had. But that wasn't made. I can't recall -- I know John Candy died
right around that time, but I think he had already passed on it by that time. But we had a good time working with Carl.
Q. Had
Carl done much -- well, obviously collaborated with Mel Brooks --
A. Oh,
but Carl had done all the Steve Martin movies.
He did The Jerk.
Q. Right.
A. He
did Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. He did --
Q. Yeah,
let's talk about Steve Martin. He's sort
of -- of that era.
A. Yeah.
Q. And
Saturday Night Live, and you never
got the chance to work with him?
A. Never
did. I always wanted to. Pitched a couple of ideas to him over the
years. Met with him while he was
shooting Planes, Trains & Automobiles
in his trailer, and he was very funny.
He had just done the Cyrano movie.
Q. Right,
yeah, Roxanne.
A. Roxanne.
And I thought I was going to be clever, and so when I walked in -- no, I
was going to pay tribute to him, really; it was a genuine thing I said.
Q. Right.
A. I
said -- I came in saying, "Steve, I just saw Roxanne, and I want to tell you, I loved it. Of course, I was always such a huge fan of
the original de Bergerac story."
Q. Right.
A. And
he said, "de Bergerac was a bum. I
breathed life into it." And then he
laughed. He was very funny. He heard us out, and he told us on the spot
he didn't want to do our idea because it was too complicated; and I think he
was right. But as he was leaving, his
wife came in and brought some laundry by.
He was married to this blonde English actress that he had met on L.A. Story, I think.
Q. Uh-huh.
A. Whose
name I can't recall. But she came by,
and he was very sweet. And he said -- as
she left, he said, "Goodbye, Honey.
Don't fuck anybody."
Q. Let's
talk about this -- that's a good point on just personality of great comedians
that you've worked with. There's always
kind of a mix of brashness and kind of the balls to get out there and appear in
public, but also vulnerability and shyness and insecurity.
A. There
is always that combination. Some of them
are so good at concealing the insecurity, you wouldn't know it's there. But somebody said, if you scratch any actor,
you'll find an actress. And comedians as
a group, I think it's fair to say that most funny people got to be funny people
in response to something early in life, to overcome a shyness, or they're
overweight, or, you know, they came from the wrong side of the tracks, or they
felt inferior in some way, and so they used comedy to overcome that. I think that's generally true.
Q. Uh-huh.
A. Now,
I'm sure that there are plenty of comedians out there, perfectly normal, not at
all neurotic, good citizens who pay their taxes and are kind to their dogs, but
I've never met them.
Q. Uh
--
A. I'll
tell you, for example, yeah. I remember
when I first met Robin Williams. You
know, you see that antic personality of his, and so when you meet him, you're
ready for him to start cracking lines.
Instead, he was extremely shy and soft spoken. Well, what are we talking about?
Q. Also,
is there, I mean, kind of a hostility to comedy?
A. All
the words used to describe success in comedy are violent.
Q. Right.
A. You
say "I killed them," "I slayed them," "I had them
rolling in the aisles."
Q. Right. And Steve Martin was kind of, I guess, a
transitional figure in that you kind of had to have seen the comedians that
went before him to understand his act, kind of as a spoof on that. And, you know, with Saturday Night Live, we didn't talk about Monty Python, which I kind of think is something we should have
discussed --
A. Yes.
Q. --
especially since you had a chance to work with John Cleese and --
A. Wrote
--
Q. --
it really changed the nature of sketch comedy.
A. Yeah.
Q. Did
you guys catch SNL -- I mean, Python? I
mean, my first viewing of it was on public television back during that era.
A. Yeah. I was a devoted fan and have memorized most
of the Monty Python sketches. I just loved it. They were the first show to grab me. Before SNL, there was Monty Python. And then after
Monty Python, there was the Harvard
Lampoon Radio Hour, which I listened to on public radio. And Bill Murray was on that show, and
Belushi, and I think Billy -- Bill Murray was on the show. Those were really funny shows. And all sort of -- I think -- I think Monty Python was the boldest, most
innovative show ever, and I don't think anything has topped it since.
Q. During
your time, I believe Palin was a guest, correct?
A. Palin
was a guest. He was a guest. I didn't write anything for Palin that week, I
don't know why.
Q. And
then later you wrote something for John Cleese, whether it --
A. I
wrote a screenplay for Billy Crystal and John Cleese. They wanted -- Billy wanted to pay a New York
detective, and he wanted the story to have to do with the art world. So that's about all we had, but he wanted it
to be with him and Emma Thompson, and he wanted her to be a London detective
and Scotland Yard who comes to New York in pursuit of some famous painting
that's been stolen.
So
we thought it should be juicier than that.
The screenplay we wound up writing, Barry and I wrote for them, had John
Cleese as a deranged museum guard in the European gallery of The Metropolitan
Museum. And he was crazy and hell-bent
on killing every modern artist he could get within range. He was crazy, and he spoke to paintings. And as he walked through the gallery, famous
paintings would say, "Hello, how are you?" And he would say, "Hi there." And he was -- they'd flirt with him, and he
was -- in his mind, he was -- he was exacting revenge for modern art, which he
considered a travesty. And so it was a
series of murders of modern artists. And
then Billy Crystal was the New York police detective trying to solve this and
catch John.
I
like to think it was a good screenplay.
We met with Billy and John after the first draft. I was so in awe of John Cleese that for the
-- my knees were knocking before I went into that meeting. I just worshipped him, and still do. And so I was a little intimidated, but he was
very nice and put us at ease and was wildly enthusiastic about the part he had
to play because he had the juiciest part, the villain, and he liked it; he was
ready to go. "Let's do
it!" He kept saying, "Let's do
it!"
But
then we got a call saying that Billy was unhappy because he was in pursuit of
the John Cleese character, but he didn't have many scenes with John. So he said, "You've got to put me in
more scenes with John."
We
said, "Well, now, gee, Billy, that's going to be tough because you're
trying to" --
Q. That's
the killer.
A. "He's
the killer, and you're the detective.
And if we have too many scenes with him, we're going to be smacking our
heads saying how long before Billy figures out he's the killer?" So we had a bit of a disagreement about that,
to my regret, and it didn't go forward.
Looking back on it, I wish we had totally rewritten the script and found
characters for John and Billy together to play, just kind of thrown out our
script and started over because the opportunity to write for those two --
Q. Right.
A. --
was so rich, and I regret that it didn't go forward.
Q. Let's
talk about one that did go forward, Coming
to America. How did that come about?
A. Well,
that was a phone call from Eddie saying, "Hey, guys, I've got this
idea. Do you want to write
it?" And we said,
"Yeah." We didn't know what
the idea was yet. So we go in, and Eddie
-- it was a giant meeting at Paramount.
Eddie had just done Beverly Hills
Cop and had a multi-picture deal at Paramount. And so they were looking for his summer
movie, and they hadn't found anything that was to Eddie's liking.
So
Eddie came in and pitched to us and to all the execs in Paramount this idea,
which at the time he was calling The Quest.
He had about, oh, I guess a dozen yellow legal pad pages, the beginning
of the scene in the African country. And
he had the premise of a spoiled and pampered prince coming to America to find a
woman who would love him for herself.
And then they asked if we could write it, and then they said, "Now,
you're going to have to write this in five weeks because we're going to have to
go straight into production." So we
said, "Sure."
I
remember looking around the room, and it was like Mount Rushmore. Not only was the president of the studio
there, who was Ned Tanen at the time, but the chairman of the board was in that
room. And all the top executives from
the film division at Paramount were in the room. And Barry and I sat there, wide-eyed, while
this was discussed, and then one of them looked to us and said, "Will you
guys write it?" And we said,
"Yes." After the meeting, five
or six of the junior executives came up to us to tell us we were brilliant in the
meeting.
Q. That's
all you said.
A. All
we said, "Yeah."
Q. "Yes."
A. So
we went to New York and wrote it in five weeks.
They put us up at The Mayflower Hotel, a rock 'n roll hotel right off of
Columbus Circle. We stayed there for the
full five weeks and wrote the script with Eddie, and Arsenio coming in to help
us with the characters. We were up there
writing it. I remember we were writing
at The Mayflower, in our room at The Mayflower at night, and by day we'd meet
with Eddie and Arsenio sometimes at the Gulf & Western Building, which was
right next door. And we were all doing
the characters from the barbershop scenes in Coming to America. And you
talk in character when you -- we'd learned at Saturday Night Live that you write out loud. You -- when you're working with a group or a
partner, you don't write it down; you say it.
So we're sitting around goofing, as these characters, these old guys
from the barbershop.
So
we're over there, and we're all doing the voices, and we're all over there,
going, "Mother fucker, you know, pound for pound, Joe Lewis is the
greatest fighter ever lived." And
all that stuff. And Paul Schrader, the
screenwriter, who'd written Taxi Driver
was at the same office building, and he had an office next door. He was writing us a version of The Mosquito Coast. And he was so annoyed, he sent his assistant
over to us and asked if the cleaning crew could please hold it down.
Q. Well,
you're lucky he didn't come, because as I understand, he packs heat, so, yeah,
watch out for Mr. Schrader. So five
weeks and then --
A. Five
weeks --
Q. --
they're shooting it?
A. In
five weeks, we turned in the first draft screenplay. By then, John Landis had been attached as
director. And we turned it in on a
Friday, and Monday morning, they said, "It's green lit; let's go."
Q. Wow.
A. So
it went right into production. I mean,
there was not time --
Q. There
were no notes, there was no rewriting --
A. No,
there were notes; there were notes. You
get the usual notes, and sure enough, they sent down a sheaf of notes. And Landis, when they came in the door and
said "Here are the notes from the studio," he didn't even look at
them. He said, "What?" Grabbed them, went straight to the chairman
of the board's office, threw them out on the floor and said, "Don't you
ever give notes to my writers again."
Looking
back on it, we should have rewritten it because it needed some rewriting. It was a first draft. There were a couple of rough spots in the
script. But John just believed in, he
was so brilliant, he was just going to ease right through that, and did. He did a great job. And we were on the set -- we were on the set
for a good bit of the shooting in New York.
Q. Now,
what was it like working with John Landis?
A. Great
fun. John is an outlandish guy, and he
had a magnificent temper, and he loved to blow up in front of executives. But with the people he was working with, he
was kind and gracious and fun to be with and just dearly loved old movies and
comedies. And he'd find some obscure
comedy that he couldn't get his hands on, had been looking for, for years, and
we'd have, we'd order Chinese food and sit on the floor and watch it. And he had a -- we were special guests on the
set, which is highly unusual for writers.
You know, writers are usually banished from the set. They don't really want you around after
you've delivered the script. They don't
want you to see what they're about to do to your baby, you know.
Q. Right.
A. But
John was very inclusive, and he had us on the set. And when we came back to shoot the interiors
on the soundstages in Paramount, we were around. And he'd let you call
"action." And he put Barry and
me in a scene.
Q. Oh. Which one was that?
A. We're
extras, standing in line to go to the men's room at Madison Square Garden. My starring role. I'll tell you, I've never been better. But John put us there, and he said,
"Now, guys" -- the scene was that a -- Eddie was this prince from
Africa.
Q. Right.
A. And
he's recognized by one of his subjects --
Q. Right,
right.
A. --
from his --
Q. I
remember that.
A. --
from the mythical country of Zamunda, who drops down to his knees and says,
"Sir," you know, and pays homage to his prince. So all this happens in front of a bunch of
guys standing in line to go to the men's room at Madison Square Garden, and
Barry and I were prominently right behind him in the shot. And I remember John saying, "Hey,
David. I want you guys to all look to
the left and look to the right, in unison, just like that. Just like that."
And
I said, "No."
He
said, "What do you mean, no?"
And
I said, "I think that's a sucky idea.
I'm not going to do that."
And
he took me aside, and he said, "David, you misunderstand the
relationship. I'm the director. You're supposed to do what I say."
And
I said, "Well, what if I don't feel like doing what you say?"
Q. Did
the other actors know you were the writer or did they think --
A. Oh,
they did, and they -- you know, but John laughed it off. It wasn't a big conflict. It was just funny. And I was right, by the way.
Q. Right.
A. It
would have been goofy.
Q. What
about the first screening? Where was
that; where was the premiere for that?
A. Oh,
let's see. The first screening was in
Las Vegas. We had a test screening. Um, boy, was it rushed. Everything about that production was so
rushed. They were editing it as we shot,
and they had a rough assembly by the time we -- it was wrapped. And there was a test screening in Vegas, and
we all drove over, and it was met with huge laughter. And people liked it and it scored very
well. And they did a little tweaking,
and then John had us in for the sound mix.
We were interrupted by a Writers Guild strike. It was very frustrating because, as I told
you, we were always on the set.
Q. Right.
A. But
then we had to -- we had to drop out because as members of the Guild, we
couldn't cross the lines and we weren't allowed on the lot by Guild rules. So that was a little bit painful. But then John had us in off the lot when he
did the sound mix so that we could see the film. So the first time we saw it was a
black-and-white slop print, that's called, that you mix the sound to. And it did not look beautiful, but we could
see that it was -- that it hung together pretty well. And it opened to, I've
forgotten what the opening numbers were, but it was the number two box office
hit of 1987 --
Q. Right.
A. --
right behind Roger Rabbit, which was
number one.
Q. Uh-huh.
A. We
were neck and neck in the box office race.
I went to the screening with our agent, Stu Miller, from APA, and Stu
watched the movie with us. And Frank
Mancuso, the chairman of the company, of Paramount, came up to us afterwards
and hugged Barry and me and said, "Thank you, guys. It's a great entertainment."
And
then we went for pizza, and Stu Miller shrugged and said, "Well, it is
what it is. What are you going to do now?"
Q. Didn't
want to give you one night of glory?
A. No,
well --
Q. On
to the next task.
A. I
don't think -- I don't think he knew what -- that it was going to be the hit it
was, but it was certainly a big hit. And
then, based on that, we could pretty much write our own ticket.
Q. Let's
talk about one of those projects, I guess the -- I think this was back in Saturday Night Live, the Billy Liar opportunity, talking about
kind of false starts or --
A. A
lost opportunity. We were hot writers on
the show. In 1982, we got a call from
the agent saying that the British director John Schlesinger wants to meet with
you. He wants -- and we met with
Schlesinger at, I think, the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. He was there with his producer, and John
wanted to do an American remake of his film Billy
Liar and asked if we would consider writing it. And we told him we could and we would and
that we would get right to work on an adaptation.
But
we were lying, because we were doing Saturday
Night Live, and we didn't have a moment to think about that. And then we met a second time, not with John
Schlesinger but with the producer, and we had to admit to him that we had not
come up with a story; and so it just kind of died on the vine. I've always regretted that because it would
have made a huge difference. It was sort
of like, work with John Schlesinger, distinguished director of Midnight Cowboy, or write Police Academy 2. And, of course, we chose Police Academy 2, and it's a little bit like the Frost poem: Two roads diverged in Hollywood, and sorry I
could not travel both. We chose the
shitty sequel, and it has made all the difference.
Q. Right. And then there was a Chevy Chase movie that
was a script that was written.
A. Yeah. Well, we, that was also done during -- that
was done on hiatus in, I think, '83. We
came out, were going to write a screenplay during our summer off. We were babes in the woods to think that was
possible, and it took us all summer to get the deal in place. And we chose to write -- we were pitched this
idea for Chevy Chase, so we snapped at it.
And we did a very poor job. It
was our first screenplay, and we didn't -- we were distracted and had to go
back and do the show. We were trying to
write it during the show, on weekends, and we were exhausted. And more than anything, it was the suckiest
idea I've ever heard in my life, and why we chose -- and I found out later that
they had no intention of making it in Warner Brothers. They just were -- they had hired us to write
it just to placate Chevy, who was a huge star at the time.
It
was Chevy's idea. It was -- he wanted to
play a guy who got in shape with the aid of some brilliant trainer, and he
turns his life around and becomes Mr. Strong Man. It was -- Chevy had it in his head he wanted
to demonstrate his super-fast tennis stroke.
And it was bad, the script was bad, it was a lost cause, and we never
should have done it. But we did it, and
we were paid, and that was our introduction to Hollywood.
Q. Back
then, I guess the screenwriting guide was Sid Field? That's kind of what was the starting point on
learning screenwriting?
A. Well,
we learned, the same way I learned everything else, by doing it. From that first -- no, let me go back. After -- after Police Academy 2, we got an offer from Paramount to set up a
housekeeping deal, it's called in the business.
They gave us an office in the Dressing Room Building, a very prestigious
building on the Paramount lot, and they gave us an assistant and a golf cart
and an expense account.
Q. Nice.
A. And
the idea at the time was that they were going to nurture writers and see if
they could put together some of the best and brightest up and coming writers in
that building. And it was great. We'd see the executives by day, and they'd
say, "What are you working on?"
Well, we were thinking of doing this.
And I remember Seaman and Price had an office right down the hall. And another guy who had an office on that
floor at the same time was a very good screenwriter who adapted Get Shorty. We'll look up his name.
Q. Yeah,
okay.
A. We
were all there. And then within --
within a year or two of us all being there in the Dressing Room Building, we
all went on to success.
Q. Scott
Frank?
A. Scott
Frank proved to be an excellent screenwriter.
Q. Definitely.
A. One
of the best in the business. And Seaman
and Price wrote Roger Rabbit. And then we wrote Coming to America. And we
were all successful. So whoever was --
whoever was doling out those offices knew what they doing. While we were there, we had carte blanche to
write anything we wanted. Boy, it
wouldn't happen today --
Q. Right.
A. --
that way. But we wrote a script for
Eddie, in mind. Eddie Murphy came to us
and said, "I want to do something like The
Kid," the Chaplain film.
Q. Right.
A. And
something with a kid, so we said okay.
So we -- we came up with the idea of setting this story in the world of
black vaudeville, and we wrote a screenplay called The Butterscotch Kid that
took place on the road, and Eddie would have played a promoter and a road
manager of this company on the road of musicians and comedians and magic acts,
and it was just a funny, winning screenplay.
And Eddie read it and liked it, and it looked like it was going forward. And the executives at Paramount liked it, and
they sent us a fruit basket, "Congratulations," and oh boy.
Hardly
had the fruit wilted in the basket than it came back to us that Eddie had
changed his mind. His manager at the
time was a guy named Bob Wachs, W-A-C-H-S.
And Bob had what he called a saggy mattress theory. He said, "Eddie just did Beverly Hills Cop. We're getting ready to do Beverly Hills Cop 2. This is the movie in the middle, and it
shouldn't sag in the middle at the box office; it shouldn't be a saggy
mattress." So Eddie decided not to
do it and chose to do The Golden Child
instead.
The Golden Child was written by another
writer who was on that floor at the time.
We can look up his name. But it
was never written for Eddie. And it was
directed by --
Q. I
can look it up real quick. Golden Child was --
A. Dennis
Feldman?
Q. --
Dennis Feldman and directed by Michael Ritchie.
A. Michael
Ritchie.
Q. I
just remember it kind of tanked.
A. Yeah. It was in trouble, and they came back to us
when they were trying to edit The Golden
Child and said, look, this movie is in trouble, would you guys come in and
do a couple of weeks of work and write some additional scenes to try to make it
funny. So we met with Michael Ritchie,
and we met with Eddie, and we wrote some material. And they did go back and do some reshoots,
but it was not the plasma transfusion that would have been necessary to animate
this beast.
Q. And
that also happened with Pluto Nash,
correct?
A. We
did some rewriters on Pluto Nash, you
know. When they bring it to you and say,
hey, uh, we're going to do some reshoots, you know all of a sudden, you know,
they're trying to polish a turd. And
this particular turd was unpolishable.
This particular turd was not easily salvaged.
Q. Uh
--
A. Why
did I say that? That's an awful
phrase. Cut that.
Q. Yeah,
I'll cut it. Let's see. Let's go on to a couple of shows. What's
Alan Watching? which seems like a very unique concept for a TV --
A. Well,
I'll say. We had -- off the strength of
the box office numbers for Coming to
America, we announced that we were interested in doing television, and so
Bob Tischler came to us with the idea of doing the pilot for a series for Eddie
Murphy Productions at Paramount TV. And
they just let us do whatever we wanted to do.
They said, here, go make a pilot. And we wrote this pilot. Eddie didn't write it with us. We wrote -- he was going to make some cameo
appearances in it, but it wasn't really for Eddie. It was about a family, a dysfunctional
family, and this kid named Alan who watched entirely too much TV. But the premise was that he could mind meld
with characters on TV. He could step
right through the screen and go into the world of whatever television show he
was watching.
Q. A
Sherlock Jr.-type concept?
A. Yeah. And plus he turned and spoke directly to
camera, which was -- broke the fourth wall in a way that wasn't being done on
TV. And the other thing that was so
different about that pilot is that we started out -- I coined the phrase for
it: Form follows funny. We're going to shoot this in whatever form it
naturally takes. We were given a high
budget, and we were shooting the pilot on 35.
But our idea was that if Alan was watching a crummy wrestling match,
that we'd go in and shoot it on video and he'd be a part of the wrestling
match, and whatever -- whatever television came through Alan's screen is what
we used.
We
shot -- we had a very interesting look on that show, because we shot parts of
it on 35. I went to Scottsdale, Arizona,
and shot The Smothers Brothers for a
segment, and I shot them on 16. But the
DP was a very open-minded guy. We had --
we had short little sketches within the show.
One of them was called Pit Babies, and it was about the sick underworld
of wrestling babies and how there were people out there making money on, you
know, putting babies in pits and having them wrestle. And so we shot all of this -- all of this,
and the DP shot it handheld. And then he
went back and shot it with a camcorder.
And we decided we liked the look of the camcorder because it was what,
like surveillance video.
Q. Like
found footage, that kind of thing?
A. Yeah. It was like it was black and white, and it
was, you know, handheld, rough, grainy video.
So we're getting all of this together, and it's coming together; and
we're very proud of the show. And I'll
tell you, the director did a brilliant job.
He got it immediately. We got
along famously with him. And he was --
he was all for any kind of innovation we wanted to try. And that director's name was --
A. Tommy
Schlamme. Tommy is a great guy. We had a fun time making that show. And then we show it to the executives at
Paramount TV. They called us in and
said, "We refuse to put the Paramount name on this show."
"What's
the matter?"
"Well,
here you are, you're supposed to be shooting this film, single-camera film, 35,
and you're putting video in it. What's
that all about?"
We
said, "Well, form follows funny.
That's what we thought it should be."
"No." Well, uh --
"You're
going to cut it. You're going to reshoot
it, and you're going to make it look like a Paramount show, or we're not going
to air it."
And
I said, "Well" -- and I remember saying, "Well, look, why don't
you just kiss my ass?"
And
the guy who was in charge of Paramount TV said, "Where exactly would you
like me to kiss your ass, David?"
And
I said, "You know that trophy case where they have all the Oscars up by
the commissary? That would be an
excellent place for you to kiss my ass."
And, uh --
Q. That's
the end --
A. Then
they came back, and not surprisingly, we were all fired off of our own show,
and they brought in some hacks to do some rewrites.
Q. Oh,
God.
A. And
Tommy, to his everlasting credit, made nice and stayed on the show so he could
ward off some of their worst ideas. It
actually did air almost 99% of what we shot, and it was a hodgepodge of video
in 16 and 35 and all of that. And it was
so innovative, it got a double spread in the New York Times. Every newspaper,
every magazine in the country lit up with praise for this show. It was very different. And then they showed it to Mr. CBS, the guy
who owned CBS at the time, Lawrence Tish took a look at it and said, "I
don't get it." And so it never went
forward. It aired as a special --
Q. Right.
A. --
during the summer, and we won the National TV Critics Award. But we'll never get to do television like
that again. It was just a fluke.
And
then we made a two-year deal with NBC to create series. And coming off of that, we thought, man,
we're going to remake television. The
first thing they pitched us was a pet pig.
It wasn't a talking pig. They
kept making -- the network kept saying, "Now, it's about a pig, but it's
not a talking pig. He's just a regular
pig. Just a regular pig."
I
kept saying, "You know, if the mother fucker talked, it might work."
Q. So
did you go write the talking pig --
A. No,
we did not. We refused. We fought, fought, fought, fought, fought,
fought with those execs. And we finally
wrote a -- we pitched an idea that I was proud of, and it would have made a
great series. It was a bunch of
low-life, down-and-dirty, nasty slip-and-fall lawyers working out of the The
Bronx. So we actually flew to New York
and met with some of these guys, and went around and met with some of
them. They were hilarious; they were
hilarious. I mean, they were totally
without scruples. And the idea was to
show a law firm without scruples and to show these ambulance-chasing lawyers
and what was going on in their personal lives.
Q. Right.
A. I'm
convinced to this day, it would have made a hell of a series.
Q. Oh,
it would have been great.
A. And
the young executive on the show said, "Yeah, but you've got to put a kid
in it."
I
said, "What?"
"We
don't have any slots open except the 8:00 evening slots so you've got to put a
kid in it."
Q. Yeah. It doesn't work.
A. Horrible
idea, so we didn't do it. We spent two
years wasting our time bumping up against the television people at NBC and
never saw eye to eye on anything.
Q. What
about -- let's see. Let's go to Boomerang as far as another credit,
before we get to Nutty Professor, a
little Boomerang.
A. Do
we have to?
Q. So
that was --
A. Boomerang was from an idea by
Eddie. He hired -- he called us up and
told us the concept that he had, that he wanted to play an executive and that
he was a womanizer and that he was done in by a woman that he met. That's as much as he had. So Barry and I wrote the screenplay and
turned it in, and then they hired the Hudlin Brothers.
Q. Right. Coming off of House Party?
A. Yes. They had done House Party, and they were hot directors and pro- -- one directed,
and -- Reginald Hudlin directed, and his brother Warrington was the
producer. And they took it over, and
they pretty much didn't want us around after that. They wanted to go off and make the movie with
Eddie, and they just didn't want us around.
And
so they actually changed -- we went to New York to sit in on rehearsals, and
the Hudlins moved to another rehearsal hall and left no forwarding
address. We didn't even know how to find
them. We were -- we never saw the movie
until it came out, and then it was vastly changed by the time we got around to
it. The Hudlins' approach was, they took
the screenplay we wrote, and then they had the actors get up on their feet, and
they videotaped all the scenes. And
whatever the acts said, ad libbed, became the screenplay. So it had kind of a loosy-goosy style. And we had -- we had a good cast. We had Martin Lawrence --
Q. Right.
A. --
who is very funny. And, you know, I've
met people over the years who loved that movie.
I didn't, but --
Q. Not
when it came out.
A. Again,
it was -- it was a hit though. It was a hit. So here we have three movies with three up --
and every one of them has made a lot of money, which kept us steadily employed
all through the nineties.
Q. And
then it's Nutty Professor. We get to that, a remake of a classic. Were you a fan of Jerry Lewis growing up?
A. I
was a huge fan of Jerry's when I was a kid.
I remember being totally enthralled by CinderFella. Loved that.
Then that began, as was often the case, with Eddie calling up and saying
he had a way of doing the Nutty Professor
that was completely different. He said,
"I want to play him a big fat guy."
And we laughed out loud, and he told us the idea. And so we went off and wrote the screenplay,
did a first draft.
Q. Now,
was that the technology, or had he tested the suits to know that he could pull
that off convincingly, or --
A. He
had not tested it, and -- but he'd worked before with Rick Baker, the greatest
makeup artist in the history of the medium.
I say that without compunction.
Rick is in a separate category.
Rick had done, by then -- well, he did all the makeups in Coming to America --
Q. Oh,
right.
A. --
all the characters that Eddie had played in that. So we were confident that Rick could
transform Eddie into whoever he chose to do, to make him into. And so, yeah, he was going to play the fat
guy. We did due diligence. We went to a fat farm. We met with people who were struggling with
their weight. We were determined to make
it not insulting to overweight people; and, in fact, our hero was Sherman
Klump.
Q. Right.
A. And
he gets the girl, so.
Q. Right.
A. But
there was criticism of it before it even came out, people assuming that we were
going to be denigrating or making fun of overweight people.
Q. Well,
you know, people are so touchy about comedy, you know. It's like if you can't make fun of anything,
you need to get out of the comedy business.
A. Yeah.
It's so true. It's pretty hard to be
funny without offending somebody. We
wrote a first draft, and then Larry Gelbart was hired to do a draft. And he took a long time, like I think a
year. And then they chose not to do
Larry's draft. And then they -- Tom
Shadyac and Steve Oedekerk did a draft.
And then they brought in Seaman and Price to do a draft. We'd rewritten them earlier on a movie, so it
was payback. They rewrote us. We rewrite them. Where does it all stop, you know. Then we were called back to do another draft
later on in the -- as it neared production.
Q. Was
the rewriting from the studio, or was Eddie not happy with the script or was it
--
A. No,
it was the studio's choice to keep rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. That's the way they do business. It's just what they do. We kept going back, though. When we'd get off track with the story, we
would go back and think of the original Jerry Lewis movie and try to hew to
that simple story line. And when we got
in trouble, we'd go back and see what Jerry did, and it usually seemed to work.
Q. Well,
Jerry was quite an innovator, I mean, with the video --
A. He
invented video assist.
Q. --
monitor --
A. Yeah. And, so, yeah, we did that one. We shared credit with Tom Shadyac and Steve
Oedekerk. I have to say, I didn't know
that -- we -- Barry and I had already written a version of the scene around the
Klump family table.
Q. Right. The very infamous scene.
A. Yeah. But somewhere between rewrites, it turned
into a fart fest. And I was shocked when
I saw it screened the first time. I've
never liked scatological humor, and I'd always eschewed such humor. I'd always resisted it when somebody said
let's put in a shit joke or a fart joke.
Q. Right.
A. Just,
to me, it's just sort of asinine.
Q. Or
kind of an easy laugh.
A. Too
easy to get a laugh that way. That's
right. And so I didn't love those scenes,
but, God, the audiences did. But that's
the plight of a screenwriter because then, you know, you find yourself at a
party, and somebody says, "I'd like you to meet David Sheffield. He writes fart movies."
Q. Well,
let's talk about that, just the lack of respect for comedy in general. Why is it kind of viewed as a -- I guess a
lesser form?
A. It's
a lesser -- it's seen as a lesser form.
I mean, it's very, very rare that the Academy, for example, takes comedy
seriously. It's very rare for a comedy
to be nominated; even rarer for a comedy to win. I'm trying to think of ones that ever did
win, and Annie Hall was one.
Q. Right.
A. But
that was as much a drama as a comedy, probably.
No, when they get ready to pass out Oscars, it's like they either go to
a movie that's about the Holocaust or to some costume drama with a bunch of
twittery English actors. I mean, almost
always. Not almost always, but…
Q. And
yet it's extremely difficult to get a laugh and to tell a story that meets the
requirements of a story and structure and --
A. And
make it funny.
Q. And
make it funny.
A. Yeah,
that's so true. Of course, it does help
when you've got a star like Eddie Murphy who's going to take whatever you do
and make it ten times funnier.
Q. Let's
see. And then we get to, speaking of
remaking classics -- well, we have the Nutty
Professor sequel. You were involved
-- you did work on the screenplay on that --
A. Yeah.
Q. The
story.
A. Did
many drafts of that with Pete Segal, a great guy, who directed. Made a lot of money. Not particularly proud of it. Again, the only reason to do it was to make
money. When they told us they wanted a
sequel to the Nutty Professor, our
first -- my first response was, we did that already, and the Professor kind of
went through his change and came out the other end a better man, and I just
don't know what to do with him. We had a
bunch of different ideas. We wanted to
do Son of the Nutty Professor and have him and his wife have a little kid who
was a little tubby just like him and make sort of family comedy out of it.
Q. Right.
A. I
think that was a good idea, but it was shot down. And we fell into what I call
sequel-itis: You know, everything we
proposed, they would say, "Yeah, but that's not like the first
one." So we did a sort of 'nother
version of the original, and it wasn't as good.
And made a lot of money, and that's that.
Q. Right. And then who proposed the idea of The Honeymooners as a film?
A. I
refuse to speak --
Q. Okay.
A. --
on the subject of The Honeymooners --
Q. Okay.
A. --
except to say that we did it for the money.
Q. Okay.
A. No,
I'm kidding. It --
Q. Well,
I'm --
A. We
did -- we did two weeks of work on that script.
There was an impending writers strike, and they needed it
rewritten. So we had a deal to just work
on it for two weeks and then out. And
then it was -- we were rewritten after that, and almost nothing remained except
part of a story line that we contributed having to do with a greyhound, a dog
at a racetrack and --
Q. Right.
A. And
then when it came out, we had a credit on it.
And I felt like I hadn't written it at all, that I just had done a
little work on it here and then, but there was my name on it. And --
Q. Right.
A. --
it -- it ruined the perfect box score we had --
Q. Right.
A. --
because every film we'd done so far had made lots of money, and that one
tanked. When it was announced -- what's
the guy's name, the sports guy, Olbermann?
[Unknown: Keith Olbermann?]
Q. Yeah,
right.
A. Yeah. He announced that they're getting ready to do
an all-black version of The Honeymooners
at Paramount. He said, "Why don't
they just pile the money in a big, giant pile and set fire to it?" And I agreed with him. It was a lousy idea. It's always a bad idea to do a remake of a
classic --
Q. Right.
A. --
a classic anything, because it's never going to match the original. And you find yourself -- you find yourself
saying -- you know, you delude yourself into believing that you're going to do
something original, and it's going to be kinda/sorta like it but not
really. And so they came to us and said,
well, they're not going to really be doing Gleason and -- not really going to
be doing the characters. And I said,
well, then, why movie?
Q. Why
do it?
A. Why
movie? Most movies that fail, you could back
up looking at it and say that, ask that, why movie?
Q. Another
almost-happened project was you working with Chris Farley on a film, correct?
A. Well,
that was The Gelfin script that we
developed at Imagine for the producer Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, and it was
our original idea. We did about, oh,
God, over the years, I want to say -- I'm not kidding -- I think we did 14
drafts of it. And they kept paying us
over and over again. They'd make new
deals for us to write it again and write it again and write it again. Started out, it was for Tom Hanks, and Tom
Hanks was going to play a young man who was a potato farmer in Idaho. And then we rewrote it to make him a photojournalist
in New York. And then we rewrote it to
make him a guy who leaved in Seattle on a houseboat. And then we rewrote it again, and he was the
operator of the ferry that goes from Staten Island to New York. And then in the final draft, he was still a
photojournalist, but it was set in New York.
And
there were three or four different directors attached to it at various times,
and it just never -- never came together.
And the finally they called up and said we've got it cast, we're going
forward -- they sent us a fruit basket -- and it's going forward with Chris
Farley and -- oh, God, help me out. I
can remember everything but names. Vince
Vaughn.
Q. Vince
Vaughn?
A. Vince
Vaughn and Chris Farley were going to play -- do this movie, The Gelfin, and we were thrilled. And then Barry and I went to lunch at a
delicatessen in Studio City and came back out to Barry's car, turned on the
radio, and it was one of those improbable moments that you would not believe if
it were in a movie. We turned on the
radio, and the guy said, "Actor Chris Farley was found dead today in his
apartment." End of The Gelfin.
Q. The
fruit basket is the kiss of death, I think is what it was.
A. That's
the -- just don't -- if I wrote an autobiography, it would be called Please
Don't Send Me Fruit Baskets.
Q. And
then I guess the business changed from -- on a large number of projects in
development. The studios kind of backed
off, fewer projects, larger films.
A. They
seemed to want to make or remake things that are familiar or known already to
the audience, hence so many comic book movies, so many remakes. The studios have been overtaken by the
marketing department. When I started
out, a movie opened in 500 screens, and it was considered a broad release. Today they routinely open in 4500, 5000
screens. You've got all the
multiplexes.
The
release pattern is different, and they're all about making their money the
first and second and third weekends, so they want these things to open. And they don’t care that the movies have
legs, as we used to say in the business.
They just want to -- they just want to seduce the public to going there
the opening weekend. And then they --
the budgets have gotten so absurdly out of control that the studios have gotten
more and more prescriptive. They've --
they make a decision what the slate is going to be and they're going to make a
certain number of films, and then they try to force them into being --
Q. Right.
A. --
by hiring writer after writer after writer.
Q. Yeah. I recall the recent Robin Hood had like 19 writers on it.
A. Oh,
my God. I mean, I -- I pity the guys who
did the arbitration at the Guild.
Q. And
then comedy, you know, it's viewed that American comedy doesn't travel as well
as action, so it's become more difficult to get comedies made, especially
romantic comedies, which is what used to be a staple.
A. Yeah. There are a lot of fallacies in the
business. One is that romantic comedies
don't travel well. Another is that
African-American movies don't travel well or films with black casts don't
travel well. We gave a lie to that with Coming to America. I was actually on a panel one time, and there
was a young studio executive on the panel with us discussing state of the
business. And he made the flat-out
statement that he would never make a romantic comedy with an all-black cast
because it would never make money. And I
said, "Excuse me. We did a little
movie called Coming to America that
made about $450 million worldwide."
He
said, "That wasn't a romantic comedy."
Q. Yes,
it was.
A. And
I said, "Excuse me. We wrote it,
and I'm pretty damned sure it was a romantic comedy."
Q. Right.
A. But
-- I don't know. The rules change from
week to week, but there are definite rules.
There is a definite mindset about what will and won't work, what's
permissible and what is not permissible.
And all the non-creative people in the business are all agreed on that
at any given time.
Q. Right. So did you work on scripts solo? I guess we're kind of getting to like before
you came back from Mississippi, you were working solo. Are you still working --
A. Yeah.
Q. --
with Barry or --
A. No,
Barry became a director. He went off and
did a documentary called Beyond the Mat
about professional wrestling. He asked
me to produce it, and I told him that I'd rather slide down a razor blade into
a vat of alcohol than sit in an editing room listening to wrestlers for a
year. I just wanted no part of it.
Q. Right.
A. And
so he went off and made his film, and it did very well. And then he parlayed that into deals, direct
features. And then I did a rewrite with
him of a film he wound up directing called --
Q. Is
this The Ringer?
A. -- The Ringer, yeah. We were actually called back. After I left California, I sort of washed my
hands of the whole thing and said that's it, I'm going back and become a dirt
farmer in Mississippi. I got a
call. They want to do another sequel to
the Nutty Professor, and would we --
Q. Oh,
no.
A. --
consider writing it. So I went back,
wrote the script with Barry and turned it in.
And it's still sort of in limbo at Universal. They liked the script and wanted to go
forward, but they wanted to do it at a price.
And it's very difficult to make a movie, that movie, at a price because
Eddie plays all the characters.
Q. Right.
A. And
you're -- there's just no way you're going to shoot that on a lower
budget. It's not going to happen.
Q. Right.
A. It's
going to take a number of days to shoot that.
Q. With
the makeup and --
A. Yeah. You can only shoot one character a day. So if you have a scene with three Eddies --
Q. Right.
A. --
you're automatically shooting three days at least. And we couldn't make the execs understand
that.
Q. And
what about Coming to America; is
there remake of that in the work or a live-action version, perhaps?
A. God,
I hope not.
Q. Okay. And what about advice to the young comedy
writer?
A. Um
--
Q. As
we wrap things up.
A. Be
funny. Make yourself laugh with what you
offer. And have a tough hide. And learn to fight for what you think is
funny without completely pissing everybody off and making them fire you.
Q. Okay. And with that, we'll wrap it up. Thank you, David.
A. Sure.
(C) Hoover, 2015. All rights reserved. No portion of this interview may be reproduced without express permission.
