Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (47 page)

It sounds like you really enjoyed your time there. What made you eventually move on?

I didn’t consciously decide it was time to go, but I had been there five years and was starting to feel like I wanted to do more long-form writing. I guess I was thinking about trying to write screenplays. I was definitely not interested in sitcoms. The thing about working for Dave, at least for me, was that it was such a great experience—a somewhat sheltered world—that it made it hard to leave the nest. And I think there was a little fear and a bit of contempt for what was on the other coast.

How did the opportunity to create TV’s
Get a Life
occur?

Around 1990, Fox offered Chris a deal to create his own show, so he asked me if I’d write it with him, and because it was Chris, I thought maybe it could be something interesting. But I honestly never thought it would get past the script stage. We’d just write it and that would be that.

We started batting some ideas around, including a show where Marlon Brando moves in with a family and becomes a nanny. That was probably more for our own amusement; I don’t think we actually considered it. But it was the launching point of something—the idea of doing something like an old sitcom. Then Chris started talking about a weird version of Dennis the Menace, where Dennis was a thirty-year-old man, and it grew from there—he still lives at home with his parents, he’s a paperboy, all that.

We were talking earlier about how you don’t necessarily enjoy comedies that feature characters who refuse to grow up. But wouldn’t
Get a Life
be an example of just that?

Get a Life
was about a guy who was a lunatic. We made Fox
think
it was about a guy who refused to grow up. At the time, in 1990, when we pitched it to the network, they were puzzled by the idea of an adult man still living at home. Wouldn’t that just make him pathetic? Or mentally ill? I remember, later, Chris pitching an episode about his character getting his driver’s license, and they were instantly all over that: “What thirty-year-old wouldn’t have his driver’s license?” Chris told them he was actually in the process of getting his. [Laughs] It was true. He was thirty-one, but he’d lived in New York his whole life and never learned to drive. His wife had to take him for the test. She was standing with the other moms.

If you could do it again, would you make Chris’s character on
Get a Life
less weird? The character, over the course of thirty-five episodes, manages to set himself on fire in order to join a gang, hears children’s voices in his head, and suffers hallucinations involving a roller-skating monkey who wears a gold sequined vest. Not typical prime-time fare.

I guess for the time, it was a little more acid-trippy than other sitcoms. Sometimes Fox would complain and try to shoehorn different elements into the show to make it more normal, like doing more stories about Chris teaching his buttoned-down best friend to “loosen up.” But Chris’s character was pretty much identical to the one he played on
Late Night
, living in the same strange reality. And we weren’t going to change that. As far as some of the surreal bits on the show, maybe it got to be too much at times. I didn’t love everything we did. Sometimes going weird is just the lazy way out. But, by and large, I don’t think we would have changed too much of that.

In retrospect, would you have changed anything on
Get a Life
?

Well, I absolutely hated the pilot. That was all about trying to make Fox feel comfortable so they’d pick up the show. It just kept getting further and further away from what Chris and I wanted. Lots of cutesy moments in that first episode. I remember thinking, If that’s what the series was going to be, I didn’t want to do it. And I always hated the hot laugh track. A lot of people thought that was by design—part of the sitcom parody—but it was just shitty mixing. Way too loud. I don’t know why it stayed that way. Generally, as proud as I am of
Get a Life
, I just never felt it was as smart as it could have been. A lot of the episodes are uneven. It never reached a real level of greatness, in my opinion. Maybe we were too distracted by the network beating us up or whatever. It really wasn’t a good time in general. Chris and I had a lot of creative differences with certain people and weren’t equipped to deal with all the politics that went into it. Again, this goes back to what I was saying about feeling insulated and protected back at
Letterman
. We were rubes and the show got away from us.

What sort of notes did you receive from the Fox executives to “improve”
Get a Life
?

Essentially, it was always about making it more grounded. I just never understood it. They knew what they were getting into with Chris. They gave him a show based on what he had done on
Letterman
. Why they thought he should be in something more grounded is strange. The whole purpose of the show was to satirize traditional sitcoms, not become another one.

I remember one of the executives being perplexed by the ending of the male model script [“The Prettiest Week of My Life,” September 30, 1990], which was fairly silly and straightforward—Chris wins a runway contest. But the executive’s reaction was, “I don’t get it. What happens? So he becomes a fag?” [Laughs] Yes, that’s what happens. He becomes a fag. Sort of like Lon Chaney Jr. turning into the wolfman. So, I mean, how do you even react to something like that?

There were also things like Fox saying Chris can’t just be a paperboy, he should be the
head
paperboy. Their thinking being, a thirty-year-old paperboy, well, that’s just an imbecile, but if he runs the whole outfit—hey, that guy’s going places!

Have you ever, as a TV and movie writer, been saved by executives’ notes?

I’ve had plenty of great notes from executives and producers over the years, and I’ve also had some bad ones. Like any writer. But with
Get a Life
, there were literally no good notes. There was too much of a creative disconnect.

An entire generation of comedy fans speak about the show in reverential tones, claiming that it was a huge influence. How do you feel about the cult status of
Get a Life
?

It’s gratifying. When we were doing the show, there was no sense that anyone was watching. There was no buzz about it. It felt like a failure on every level. Coming from
Late Night
, I knew what it was like to work on a show that people were talking about. That feeling didn’t exist with
Get a Life
. So the fact that it’s had something of an afterlife is a nice thing. Most of that is due to Chris’s fan base, I think. And I don’t mean to sound so down on it. We did some good work on the show. We had a lot of good writers. Spent a lot of late nights eating ravioli out of Styrofoam take-out containers. Then I’d drive the forty-five minutes back home, from Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood to my apartment in Santa Monica, at three in the morning, taking Sunset the whole way because I didn’t know the freeways yet. Cherished memories.

Cabin Boy
is another so-called “cult classic.” Can you tell me how that movie, released in 1994, came about?

Tim Burton was a big fan of Chris’s. He knew his work from Letterman and had seen
Get a Life
and wanted to meet with him. So Chris brought me along. It was a fateful moment for both of us. Like when the guys in
Deliverance
pull the canoe over to take a rest. In a nutshell, Tim was about to shoot the first Batman movie, and he decided that for his next movie, he wanted to go back to a simpler time and direct a small comedy like he had done with
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure
. So we batted around a few things and somewhere in the process of talks and various meetings Chris and I pitched a movie that would be a cross between [the 1937 movie]
Captains Courageous
and the Ray Harryhausen films, like [1963’s]
Jason and the Argonauts
.

We specifically were trying to come up with “Tim Burton–type ideas” and that one stuck. Tim loved it. So Chris and I were very excited; this was a nice little gig after the emotional toll of
Get a Life
—Chris starring in a Tim Burton movie and me writing it. Writing features had been my goal all along, and even though this wasn’t something I personally would have written if I were pitching or writing a spec, it was for Tim Burton. After this, I’d be able to write my own ticket! So Chris and I broke the story and I went off to write the script. When I was done, Tim and his producers went crazy for it. I’d never been showered with so many compliments in my life. They sent a gigantic fruit basket with a note that literally said, GREAT
JOB
!
YOU
DID
IT
!
I was so emboldened by the prospects of
Cabin Boy
, I immediately sat down and started writing my next script—a 1950s period drama about an incestuous brother and sister that takes place down south on a worm farm. That’s not a joke; that was a real project.

Anyway, everything was moving along just fine, and then I got a call one day saying Tim had changed his mind about
Cabin Boy
. He no longer wanted to direct it; he wanted to produce it. He felt it was more of a “Chris and Adam thing.” In fact, in an incredible moment of generosity and wrongheadedness, he’d decided that
I
should direct it. Now for the record, as if anyone gives a shit, I was absolutely against that idea. My plan was to sit back and watch my stock rise after writing the smash-hit, Tim Burton–directed
Cabin Boy
, and then collect on that by directing my indie worm farm drama. Anyway, the more I resisted directing it, the more Tim’s producers and my agents pushed me to do it: “How often does an opportunity like this come up? You’ll regret it for the rest of your life!”

I have to say, that
does
sound like an opportunity that does not come along often.

Right. And I started to become paranoid that I was sabotaging myself and that I never made the right decisions and that I was a coward and my own worst enemy. And if I didn’t do it, everyone would lose faith in me and they’d never want to work with me again. That’s basically my brain all day long. So in the spirit of self-improvement, I started to believe what they were saying. Maybe this
was
the right thing for me to do. Maybe Jesus himself was speaking through these Hollywood people, gently leading me down the right path. So Chris and I talked about it—he was always supportive of me directing the movie—and suddenly I was on board.

What was the shoot for
Cabin Boy
like?

Well, an interesting thing happened—it actually occurred during preproduction but continued throughout the process. I realized I didn’t like directing. See, I don’t really like being around people, and that phenomenon tends to come into play when you’re directing a movie. The endless meetings and questions, I just have no stomach for that. And this was a technical movie to a degree, with
special effects
. Shitty effects, but still, I was sitting in three-hour meetings to determine the scale of a stop-motion ice monster. I have zero fascination for stuff like that. I was not one of those kids who took their toys apart to see how they worked. I could not have cared less. Look, the whole thing was doomed from the start. It was done for the wrong reasons—by everybody. And it was a valuable lesson—never do anything just for the opportunity. Always go with your gut—your original instinct. But then again, my gut fails me constantly, so maybe there is no lesson.

Do you think if it had been a script that you specifically wrote for yourself to direct, you would have enjoyed it more?

Probably so. A smaller movie. With a much smaller ice monster.

I was going through some of the newspaper reviews for
Cabin Boy
from that time, and I couldn’t quite believe the headlines. Criminals who murder their families don’t receive this level of hatred. “Ugly Cabin Boy Should Be Forced to Walk the Plank,”
Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
. “Cabin Boy Drowns in Nonsense,”
The Oregonian
. And my personal favorite: “Who Gave These Morons a Camera?” from
The
Fresno Bee
.
12

[Laughs] Well, who am I to argue with that? Chris and I will never understand why it pissed people off so much. If it were just a simple case of a B movie coming out that bombed and got shitty reviews, fine. I’m pretty sure that happens all the fucking time. But this was something different; this was supernatural. [Tom Green’s 2001]
Freddy Got Fingered
will be gone and forgotten one day, but
Cabin Boy
will be infuriating people for generations.

It really put both Chris and me in a dark, awful place for a long time. Our mental states were really off. It was so confusing—why was this silly little movie even on anyone’s radar? Why would critics put so much effort and passion into destroying it? It’s not like the world was clamoring for this thing and then felt burned.

The day
Cabin Boy
came out, reviews started coming through my fax machine, sent from the Disney publicity department—Disney had produced the movie. It got to the point that whenever I heard the fax machine click on I’d run out of the room. All day long, the reviews would slowly roll out. How many times could I read the headline, “Cabin Boy Sinks”? For days, I was too embarrassed to leave the apartment. And when I did, it felt like my neighbors and everyone on the street averted their eyes when they saw me. I mean, I actually felt I was seeing that happen. I was gone.

And yet, here we are, years later, and
Cabin Boy
has a cult following.

With
Get a Life
, the cult became apparent not too long after it stopped airing.
Cabin Boy
took a lot longer. I think the best thing that’s happened is, Chris and I finally feel okay with it. For a long time we disowned it. If everyone was saying it was that bad, it had to be that bad. But as time went on, more and more people started telling me how much they liked it. Here in New York, Cinema Village and the Ninety-second Street Y did some
Cabin Boy
screenings a while ago, and they invited Chris and me to do a Q&A afterward. And we realized that a lot of the audience had been really young when it came out and had no idea about the bad reviews and all that. So when we talked about that stuff, they didn’t really understand what all the drama was about. I’ll never forget this nice girl came up to me and looked me in the eyes and said, “Stop being so hard on yourself.” [Laughs] It was probably the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.