And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft Read online

  Everyone's been through it. Me especially. Every guy in my generation who went to college and had ambivalent relationships with his parents. Every guy who stood around talking with his parents' friends, who were perfectly nice but who were people you'd have paid to not have to stand around with … well, we've all been through that. Everybody in the middle class, anyway.

  What was the audience's reaction at the first screening of The Graduate? Did you know right away that you had a hit on your hands?

  Actually, I had been out of the country for a few months when it opened, so I didn't see it until it had been running for a while. In those days, as you probably don't recall, movies ran in theaters for months as opposed to weeks.

  When I returned to New York, the movie was still running at a theater on 57th Street. And it was still packed. There were kids sitting on the steps of the balcony. And the audience knew all of the lines, which really appalled me.

  Why?

  It doesn't help your experience, particularly if you've written the movie, or even if you haven't written the movie, to be sitting in the theater and hearing this sort of giggle and chatter preceding the “plastics” line. I heard throughout the theater, “Plastics, plastics, plastics, plastics, plastics, plastics.”

  I knew where that sort of thing was coming from. It was out of a love for the movie, and I could appreciate that, so I guess I was equally thrilled and mortified.

  I found a copy of the original script and noticed that the beginning of the movie was different from what eventually ended up on the screen.

  That's right. The original beginning was going to show a graduation scene that Mike Nichols and I had talked about. It was a terrific idea. Dustin [Hoffman] gives a valedictory speech at his graduation ceremony, but it's a windy day. As he's reading the speech, which mostly concerned “What was the point of all of these years at college?,” his papers keep blowing away. Dustin's character becomes more and more frantic, and he's unable to improvise a new speech.

  Mike and I cribbed this idea from an incident that actually happened at President Kennedy's 1961 inauguration, when Robert Frost gave a poetic benediction. It's an incredible piece of American cultural history. Frost, who was quite old at the time, was standing at the podium, about to read one of his poems, and it was a freezing day in Washington, and the sun was in his eyes and he was unable to read the poem he had written for the occasion. And a few men, including L.B.J., moved to the podium to help Frost. Jesus Christ, I'm going to cry just thinking about it.

  It was an image that I never forgot, and I thought it would be fitting for the movie.

  Why didn't that scene make the final cut?

  I think we saved the scene for the end of the shoot, for technical reasons, at which point Mike said, “Well, wait a minute. We've got a whole film here. What do we need to go with that for?”

  I'll sometimes start a movie with a scene that's a teeny, teeny capsule version of the movie's sensibility. And this was an example. The movie was about a bright kid who is incapable of dealing with the niceties of social behavior. The elements are against him, and he's going to have to struggle. And that graduation scene captured that essence.

  But the movie's sensibility was also captured with the second scene that ended up in the movie, when Dustin is traveling along on the airport's moving sidewalk. It became just as good, if not better, than the graduation scene.

  Is that a lesson for screenwriters — that you can sometimes achieve just as much through simplicity?

  You bet it is. Absolutely. Less is more; it just works for everything. In the end, who needed that more elaborate scene?

  I was struck by how detailed the stage directions were in the shooting script for The Graduate and how a lot of these descriptions ended up on the screen just as you imagined them. Here's one example: “Ben walks quickly into Elaine's room, crosses to the bed and puts the purse down. As he starts to turn back, he looks up at Elaine's portrait. There is a movement reflected in the glass of the portrait. He turns quickly. Mrs. Robinson, naked, is shutting the door to the bedroom behind her.”

  Directors encourage you to not write anything that has to do with the camera's movement, and I usually try not to do that; it's really up to the director to shoot the way they see fit. With Nichols, though, we were on the same wavelength. There were quite a few descriptions in the Graduate script where I was amazed at how closely they resembled what was shot for the movie.

  Which other scenes, in particular, made the successful transition from the page to the screen?

  Just after Benjamin tells Elaine about the affair with her mother. In the script, I put in a description of how the camera should focus on Mrs. Robinson as she watches Benjamin walk away. And Nichols made it look exactly as I had written it.

  Now, there really is a big jump from putting a description on a page to putting it on film, but Mike was able to do it to the point where I later thought, Ah, yes. That's my exact vision up on the screen. As a writer, this made me feel very good, whether it was true or not.

  Mike and I just had an understanding. We came from the same time and place; we had the same cultural references. But later on, I sometimes didn't have quite the same relationship with directors or actors. Words and phrases were misinterpreted or sometimes completely misunderstood. I was encouraged by a couple of producers to overexplain everything in the scripts. They wanted me to insert those terrible adverbs and phrases, like “succinctly,” or “with a smile,” or “meaningfully, but not pretentiously.” I sometimes had to put in all that junk description, because very often studio readers couldn't get a sense of the dialogue without them. I hate those signposts. I'd rather leave it to the actors' imaginations.

  One of the descriptions not in your Graduate script was Benjamin's and Elaine's facial expressions as they sat in the back of the bus just having escaped from the church. The only description you wrote was: “They are breathing heavily.”

  The expressions on both Dustin's and Katharine Ross's faces were not planned, at least to my knowledge. Mike simply let the camera focus on these two people, who were a little lost and a little confused about what had just happened.

  Over the years, those expressions have been interpreted as being very meaningful.

  They are meaningful, but not in the sense of “Now we can predict what their next ten years are going to be like.” But it is meaningful in the sense of “This is very much like life.” Movies in Hollywood usually end with two characters, hand in hand, saying, “We're okay. Let's go home. Everything's swell.”

  In the case of The Graduate, these two characters had just busted up a wedding, they're on the lam, they don't have any money. Where the hell are they going to go? They've made a huge leap into an unknown future, and that's what the ending becomes.

  I actually wrote a couple of lines of dialogue that we never shot. Something like “Well, what do we do now?” And the other responds: “I don't know.” But we didn't need it. Dustin gives that funny little laugh and a handclap, and then both he and Elaine look at all these dopey-looking people on the bus. It's sort of like life. I think it's a terrific end moment.

  Are you as happy with Catch-22 as you are with The Graduate?

  I love the way that the film looks, and I think Alan Arkin, who played Yossarian, gave a great performance. But it was very difficult. It doesn't have the same tone as the book; it has its own interesting kind of tone, which is surrealistic. The book isn't about surrealism. The book is a black comedy of another kind, but it was hard to figure out how to translate that.

  We wanted the movie to be like a dream, and we wanted to have a lot of dreamlike segues. Actually, I always thought of the movie as a fever. Yossarian's fever.

  Do comedies work well within that surreal and dreamlike format?

  I think it's possible to pull off a comedy that's dreamlike, but it's not easy. I wanted to find a style equivalent to the book, and I thought that that was what the book did so brilliantly, which was to take the reader — almos
t from midsentence — from one place to another. I tried to find interesting ways to do that on film. Most of the scenes worked; a few didn't. The few that didn't, though, were harmful to the rest of the movie.

  Which scenes do you think didn't work?

  One in particular. It's the scene in which Yossarian takes the place of the soldier who's dying in a hospital bed. The dying soldier's family comes in, and they have this weird pretense that Yossarian is their son. I think it's one of the most powerful sequences I've ever seen in my life. It makes me cry. But when we screened Catch-22, the reaction to this moment was shocking. The first two audiences, back-to-back, laughed during it. And that completely destroyed what I thought we had intended.

  Why do you think they laughed?

  They lost their emotional bearings. Or we lost it for them, and that's always bothered me.

  The Sopranos, or even a movie like Brazil, has dream sequences that are just as feverish as Catch-22. Were seventies audiences not yet ready for something like that?

  With something like The Sopranos, the dream sequences are clearly out of the context of a real waking life. And all of Terry Gilliam's films are surrealistic; you know the whole thing is a dream. In Catch-22, it may have been too jarring.

  In retrospect, what would you have done differently?

  I don't know what I would have done. I probably would have tried to make it all more accessible. Also, I know I screwed up where the actual plot is concerned. I had read the book ten times, but the audience hadn't. Maybe I knew the book too well. I knew which character was running away from which character; I knew which character stabbed which character. The audience might not have known that, but they really should have known or else the point is gone.

  It's one of the most beautiful comedies I think I've ever seen. It's gorgeous to look at.

  It is great to look at. David Watkin was the cinematographer, and I love the Watkin look. He also did Chariots of Fire and Out of Africa. It's very beautiful and very moving in its own way. But maybe it was moving in the wrong way for a comedy. I don't think you can do laugh-out-loud comedy that is beautifully backlit.

  That's an interesting point — early comedies aren't necessarily beautiful.

  Not at all. No one gives a shit. If you look at those early films, such as Laurel and Hardy or Chaplin movies, you can see shadows where there shouldn't be shadows. God knows what the light sources were. The comedies looked terrible. But at least you could make out facial expressions — you can't when a scene is lit from behind. And that's true in films up into the late fifties, actually.

  Did Joseph Heller ever comment on the movie?

  He did. He was very nice about it. He apparently had written a different version of Catch-22 at some point, and he said that our movie was similar to that earlier version. I didn't believe him when he said that, but I think he meant it in the best possible way. I once heard him on a radio show in L.A., and the host tried to bait him into insulting the movie. He wouldn't do it; he wouldn't fall for it.

  Did your years in military school, and later in the Army, prove helpful when you wrote the screenplay to Catch-22?

  Oh, absolutely. I knew what the military felt like, what it sounded like. Some war films get it right, and some don't. Some writers who were never in the military could capture that by osmosis, I suppose. It depends on how you, as a writer, process things.

  A lot of films are made by filmmakers who know nothing except other films. All the great filmmakers from the past knew something about real life.

  Do you think that filmmakers today don't know enough about life?

  Maybe not. It used to be that writers wanted to experience the world and write the Great American Novel, but that stopped a long time ago. Then they wanted to write for Carson or Letterman. And that lasted about fifteen years, until they thought, No, wait a minute — the real money is in sitcoms or hour-long shows. And that's what they now do.

  By the way, there are a lot of writers nowadays doing something that I find really interesting.

  Which is what?

  They write for other writers. They write for the owners, and the owner finishes the script. There's a whole bunch of these shows now.

  What do you mean by “the owner”?

  Well, I mean … take [screenwriter and producer] Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin writes all those scripts, but there are other writers writing for him. It's like writing for a soap opera — you write for him and he's got the skill and the ingenuity to sit down and put together all that material into a finished product. At least that's the way I understand it. But I think that's great, actually. I think it's a great way to go. It's like the old studio system in a way. I would do a TV series if I had four or six clever people writing ideas, stories, and outlines.

  That's something you'd like to do — create a TV series?

  I would, I would. I wouldn't mind doing it in that context, because I can't think up stories. I'm not that prolific when it comes to writing plot.

  Actually, we used to do something like this for Get Smart. Leonard Stern, a writer and an executive producer for the show, was brilliant at plot, and he would just feed me the plot, and I would write the dialogue. I can write dialogue forever. There were three teams of writers coming up with stories, and I'd add jokes — or maybe just add a beginning or an end. It was very easy for me.

  Is it true that ABC turned down Get Smart, which eventually ran on NBC and CBS from 1965 to 1970, because they considered it un-American?

  Yes. Well, that was their excuse, anyway. I mean, in the pilot, here was this dopey hero. And here was this woman who the hero didn't even know was a woman until she took off her cap and let her hair down. And the show also featured a cowardly dog.

  All of this is un-American?

  Who knows. There was a joke in the pilot about rubber garbage. Maxwell Smart solves a mystery, because he realizes that the garbage is made out of rubber. Oh, it was complicated. Anyway, the executives thought that people shouldn't be eating dinner and be faced with rubber garbage. They thought it was creepy and smarmy.

  Mel Brooks was the co-creator of that show. What was it like to work with him? Did you feel that it was a good pairing?

  It was, but we took much too long on the script. It took forever to write the pilot, something like four or five months.

  Why?

  Because we were lazy, and we fucked off a lot and played pool. And we're both no good at plot.

  How did you eventually bang it out?

  We just beat it to death until it was there. We knew that we had the ending, and we had the beginning, and we had some in-between pieces. So we just hammered it out, eventually.

  Get Smart was a good experience. I enjoyed writing for that show. But after two years, I didn't enjoy it any more. So I left.

  Do you have any regrets about specific jokes from any of your movies or TV shows? Jokes that you believe have not held up well?

  I loved What's Up, Doc? I think everything came together so beautifully in that movie. It rattles along, and it has a great mechanism. I think the chase scenes are great. But I think there was one joke in the last scene that didn't work. I wrote a joke that was a parody of the famous line in Erich Segal's Love Story — “Love means never having to say you're sorry.” I had a character say that line, and another character respond with, “That's the dumbest thing I ever heard.” The joke was okay for about ten minutes, but I should have been able to find something that would have had an impact ten, twenty years later.

  One of your movies, To Die For, still has an impact all these years later. The deep hunger for fame and celebrity has only grown more intense since the movie was released in 1995. As one of the characters says, “You're not anybody in America unless you're on TV.”

  That's an American disease. And it's only become truer now than it was when the movie came out. You know, it's that mentality of, “Get me on the show, humiliate me, beat me with a stick!” I can give a show like that five minutes, and then that's it. I find it completel
y revolting. God almighty, the reality shows alone!

  You've said that to accurately reflect the characters' lack of intelligence in To Die For, you took great care in writing carefully structured grammatical errors.

  That's true. That sort of thing drives me crazy. Nobody can speak proper English anymore. The kids in that movie, and even Nicole Kidman's character, say lines or words that are purposely wrong.

  Most of the characters in that movie aren't very bright, but I'm very fond of them. You can't write characters and not be fond of them, I think.

  Were you fond of Nicole Kidman's character, Suzanne? She was a murderer.

  Oh, totally. I'm crazy about her. Victims are interesting to me, but even more interesting are the victimizers. Don't we all love the girls who do bad things, who break guys out of jail?

  Well, I married one.

  Has she got a sister?

  Let's talk about Saturday Night Live. You hosted the show ten times, starting in its first season, 1975 to 1976. You were forty-four when the show first aired and quite a bit older than the cast at the time. What do you think Lorne Michaels saw in you?

  I think Lorne was a big fan of The Graduate, and he couldn't get Mike Nichols. That may be a little bit unfair, I suppose, but I was an actor. And I was a performer. I had done loads and loads of variety shows. And it was different in the early years. The hosts for the show were people you wouldn't think of as being hosts. They weren't just actors plugging famous movies. They were people like Desi Arnaz or Broderick Crawford, from All the King's Men [1949]. They were peculiar hosts, almost punch lines.

  What did you think of the show when you were asked to host? Were you a fan?