Pod Insights Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin Woody Allen About this episode Woody Allen is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker, writer, and comedian. Beginning in stand-up and television before turning to film, Allen became a defining voice of 1970s cinema with Annie Hall, the romantic comedy that earned him four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director. Over his six decade career, he has written and directed more than 50 films exploring themes of love, irony, and existential doubt, from Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters to Midnight in Paris.
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Transcript 12,964 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Speaker 00 Tetragrammaton.
0:21 Speaker 01 The big question is, this was my theory about belief in God. Proof of God would lie in jokes. Not quality of jokes or anything, but we all know there are one-liners. They're for the nightclub acts, and we know what's written for the television shows and the sitcoms and the dialogue and all that. But then there are those jokes that are long jokes. And they're, some of them are quite funny and quite brilliant. But they take, you know, a long story, a guy walks in here and then he comes back. Two weeks later, now the guru is doing this and he goes, and he goes that. And then finally, the punchline is very funny.
1:06 Speaker 01 And you think, who writes those jokes? They seem to appear on Earth, but there's no percentage in writing them. They can't be used for anything. They can't use them in films, on television, on radio, in nightclubs. They're jokes, and they're good jokes. But there's no reason for any human being to create them. I know of no comedy writer, I've known so many comedy writers, that ever wrote a joke like that or took time to write an actual story joke. That wasn't, you know, a crack, a remark, a one-liner, or banter.
1:51 Speaker 01 And yet brilliant, funny jokes appear all the time on the Earth.
1:58 Speaker 01 So where do they come from? Now, I'm an atheist, so I don't really believe. But one could make a case that it's God's way of telling us that he's up there and he's spending a lot of time doing these jokes and sending them down. Because I see no other reason for them to appear anyplace. They're not useful except as jokes. And so no one ever spends any time writing them.
2:31 Rick Rubin? Do you think that the fact that it takes longer before getting to the punchline changes the way we digest the material? Is it different to hear five quick jokes in a row versus hearing one story over that same time that ends with a punchline? How are those different?
2:52 Speaker 01 Well, they're different in the fact that, you know, when you hear a comedian, any young one comes out and tells jokes. Rodney Dangerfield, Funny Man, comes out and tells jokes. And they're snapping off one after the other. In a movie, Bob Hope is snapping off funny dialogue. On television, whoever's doing the thing is doing it in the context of a rhythm of banter. But nobody sits down to make up a joke. There are two rabbis in Jerusalem. And the first rabbi, you know, and he goes on for a little bit and then it comes to a very funny punchline.
3:31 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
3:33 Speaker 01 That joke doesn't serve any commercial purpose anywhere. So no one writes that joke. No comedy writer I ever met in my life would have written that joke. Or there's no market for it.
3:47 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
3:48 Speaker 01 And yet, many of them appear, and quite wonderful ones.
3:52 Rick Rubin? Yes.
3:53 Speaker 01 It's a different experience, but the laugh is there at the end. To be entertained, you need more jokes at a quicker rhythm. Although there were some guys, you know, like Myron Cohen, would come out and tell those kind of stories. Where he got those stories, I don't know. He heard them places. But I guarantee you, he did not have a comedy writer who sat in a room and wrote the kind of jokes he did. It was a jokes he heard from someone.
4:29 Rick Rubin? What do you recall about making Sleeper?
4:32 Speaker 01 Sleeper was the first movie that I made with some plot to it. It came about, I had this brilliant idea, because everyone is making movies at intermissions, that I would make a big movie. And the first part of it would be New York City in contemporary times. And it would be very, very funny and, you know, relationships and all that. And then at the end of the hour and a half movie, or an hour, the protagonist would fall into a vat of cryogenic sauce of some sort. And he'd fall asleep. And you'd go out to the intermission and buy your popcorn
5:16 Speaker 01 or smoke your cigarette. Then you'd come back in, and the second part would come on. And suddenly, you were in the future. And it was all white, or whatever the cliche of the future would be, it would all look like the future. So I mentioned that idea to United Artists. They loved it. They said, "Go ahead and do that." So I started to do it with Marshall Brickman. And we couldn't seem to get it going. So after a while, we just settled for the future part of it. We decided to forget the two-part movie. And we just did a guy who woke up in the future.
5:54 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
5:55 Speaker 01 And then we did, you know, the best we could with futuristic jokes, some of them being really contemporary jokes, using the future just as a gimmick.
6:09 Rick Rubin? It felt like a revolutionary movie at the time.
6:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was a different kind of a movie, different for me. I haven't seen it in 50 years. So I'm sure our anticipation of the future.
6:22 Speaker 01 Was weak compared to where the future's really gone.
6:26 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
6:27 Speaker 01 Because a couple of weeks ago, a couple of months ago, I was in Los Angeles and I was in a driverless car. Now in sleeper, we drove cars. They were strange looking cars, but we drove them. In reality now, soon, there's gonna be a lot more driverless cars.
6:46 Rick Rubin? When you made Annie Hall, that was the first movie that was not a joke movie.
6:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:52 Rick Rubin? And were there any movies that you would say were inspirational to you to wanna make that movie?
7:01 Speaker 01 No, that was strictly my inspiration completely.
7:04 Rick Rubin? Just to do something different.
7:05 Speaker 01 I had always wanted to face the audience and talk to them.
7:10 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
7:11 Speaker 01 And bring them into my, you know, I wanted to make that movie free association.
7:19 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
7:20 Speaker 01 And I tried that, it didn't work. I had to reassemble it in the editing room. But that was strictly my thought. It didn't come from anything. And at the time, that was a surprising movie to people.
7:37 Rick Rubin? For sure. Was Manhattan your first black and white movie?
7:41 Speaker 01 Yes. I was out in Long Island shooting interiors with Gordon Willis. And we used to have dinner together all the time. And we're talking about dinner. And we both wanted to make a black and white movie. And he was dying to make a Panavision movie.
8:00 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
8:01 Speaker 01 And I thought to myself, it'd be interesting to go against the cliche. The cliche always was when you had Panavision, it was a war movie and a big cattle stampede or something. And I thought, it'd be interesting to make an intimate movie, a relationship movie with a widescreen. And so we decided we would do that. We did it. You know, I always had artistic freedom to do what I wanted because I worked for very little money. And everything I seemed to do succeeded. The combination of the films were.
8:39 Speaker 01 Good enough without being great and they were cheaply made. So the film companies let me do what I wanted to do.
8:50 Rick Rubin? Do you remember where the idea for the fireworks over the skyline?
8:54 Speaker 01 That was spontaneous, spontaneous. We were out shooting in Central Park and someone said, you know, tonight there's going to be a fantastic.
9:02 Rick Rubin? Really?
9:02 Speaker 01 Firework show, yeah.
9:04 Rick Rubin? That's amazing.
9:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, we didn't plan that and there's going to be a big fireworks show. So we quickly, one of the guys in the crew said, I have a friend who's got an apartment on the west side of Central Park West and he would let us go up there. And we went up there and we waited and the fireworks show came on and we filmed it. And I had no idea that was going to be in the front of the movie in any way. That was just completely unplanned.
9:34 Rick Rubin? It's one of the most beautiful openings of any movie I've ever seen.
9:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's good, it worked well first.
9:39 Rick Rubin? It really worked?
9:39 Speaker 01 But it was, you know, again, the luck. I mean, I, it was just good luck.
9:44 Rick Rubin? Do you allow actors to ad lib on the set or no?
9:50 Speaker 01 I encourage ad libbing all the time. I'm always saying, you don't have to do any of the lines from the script if you don't want. If you have to go into the room and theoretically you have to ask your wife for divorce, you can use my lines or you can ask, just get the job done. You can do it in your own way in any way. And the funny part of the phenomenon is actors always say, oh, thank you. Thank you so much. It's so great to be that free and that. And then when I shoot, they go right into the script. They immediately start to, and I say to them, forget the script, you know, ad lib the scene
10:34 Speaker 01 and don't worry about mistakes. If you cough, if you throw up in the middle of the scene, you know, just do it. And sometimes I can get them to, but I encourage ad libbing. And any time anyone reads a script and says to me, I don't like this line, or I don't like this, or I don't want to wear this costume, or I don't want to... I say, "Fine, you know, wear what you want, you know, make yourself happy." You know, if the person then comes back to me and it's terrible, where they don't want to say what I wrote, they want to say something else, and it's just awful, then I'll say, you know, "Can you change it a little?" But most of the time, it's not. It's as good as what I wrote or better.
11:17 Rick Rubin? When you're writing a script, do you imagine what the characters look like?
11:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, I imagine what I'd like them to be. And sometimes I may even be thinking of an actor, an actor who eventually will play that, or an actor who I'm never gonna get, won't play it, can't play it, but I'm using that person as a model.
11:39 Rick Rubin? Yeah. Do you ever write for an actor who's passed away?
11:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, sure. I'd be writing something and I'll be thinking to myself, you know, I mean, not this specifically, but that, oh, you know, a John Wayne character. He comes in with that swagger and bravado. And yeah, John Wayne would have been great to play this if he was alive.
11:58 Rick Rubin? Almost like archetypes.
11:59 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
12:00 Rick Rubin? Would you say all of your movies on some level are autobiographical?
12:05 Speaker 01 That happens automatically. You don't do that on purpose. But if I wrote a film about making cheese in an Italian village, you'd find after the film came out that some aspect of it you could trace to your own life or personal experience. You can't help that.
12:25 Rick Rubin? Tell me a little bit about Stardust Memories. That's one of my favorite of your films.
12:29 Speaker 01 Oh, I'm glad.
12:30 Rick Rubin? Yeah, I love it.
12:31 Speaker 01 I wanted to make a movie again. I kept trying to make that same movie of being in a guy's mind, that he's got everything. He's rich, he's successful. And at the beginning of the movie, his housekeeper puts a dead rabbit on the thing. And as soon as he sees the dead rabbit, the concept of death goes into his mind. And the rest of the picture is kind of in his mind. And everything else after that is in his mind and it's got a baroque quality to it. And I filmed the best I could.
13:16 Speaker 01 Someone had said to me, how could you have that character? How could he complain? He has everything, he has everything. And I was trying to explain to that person complaining to me that, first of all, I'm not complaining for myself. I'm complaining for the human race. You know, yes, that character was lucky. He had money, he had some talent. The lead in that movie, the character I played, he had Rolls Royce. He had all of those things. So I'm not complaining for him. He was a lucky guy who avoided a lot of things. But people are not so lucky, for the most part.
14:00 Speaker 01 And in the end, even with all that luck, he's going to die sooner or later. You know, get ill and die. But they couldn't explain it. What they came away with from that movie was, oh, you have contempt for your audience. But I didn't have contempt for my audience. If I had contempt, I actually did not have contempt. But if I had contempt, I was too smart to show it. I would not have, I would not have shown the audience contempt. But I never felt contempt for them. I always felt the audience was a little smarter than me. I never undersold an audience. I never wrote down to them.
14:42 Speaker 01 I always assumed this movie is dedicated to people who are sharper than me, smarter. They're gonna get the best jokes, they're gonna get the references. I'm gonna have to, you know, struggle to seduce them. But people didn't come away with that. They felt, oh, you have contempt for your audience. But I didn't, you know? So either I failed artistically to convey...
15:07 Speaker 01 My intentions, or the audience was making a mistake, or... But the mistake is rarely in the audience. The mistake is almost always in the artist. It's hard to blame an audience. If people pay their money and come in, they do it because they like you, and they're on your side, then you disappoint them, and they get angry.
15:31 Rick Rubin? I was the audience for that movie, and I absolutely loved it. Absolutely loved it.
15:36 Speaker 01 I'm glad. There were some people that loved it, you know, but there were many people that felt you're too critical of the people that watch your movies. You think they're dumb, or you think... And the exact opposite was true. And either I failed to, you know, convey it, or I did convey it, and a number of people got it. But the audience let me down. But usually, it's the artist who lets the audience down.
16:03 Rick Rubin? I felt like it was so original and different, and I hadn't seen a movie like that before. I felt like it expanded my mind, so, thank you.
16:11 Speaker 01 Well, I'm glad.
16:15 Rick Rubin? How has success felt different for you than you would have imagined it to be?
16:24 Speaker 01 I imagined it better. I thought, you know, that it would be great, and everything would be great, and I would succeed in show business, and be socially adept, and go to glamorous parties with beautiful women and scintillatingly witty men, and my life would be a pleasure. But it wasn't. It was, you know, I still got toothaches, and I still had the same problems everybody had, but I could get a better table at a restaurant. There were some perks. That's how I summed it up years ago. I said, being famous, being successful, on balance, it's better than not.
17:08 Speaker 01 It's not what you think it is. It's not what it's cracked up to be. But it's a little better than not being. You know, I can get better tickets to a show, or... There were some perks. Now, there are some downsides. You know, they hound you, they hound your personal life and all that. But on balance, the perks slightly outweigh the downside.
17:32 Rick Rubin? Where is the line between art and entertainment?
17:36 Speaker 01 Not necessarily. I mean, I always felt someone like Ingmar Bergman and Fellini or Sawa. What's great about them is that they're tremendously entertaining. When you see those Bergman films, it's not like homework. It's not like you're getting religious or philosophical lessons in homework. You're being entertained. You watch While Strawberries and it opens, you're on the edge of the seat. Your mouth is open, it's so tense. And those movies are full of entertainment. I think the obligation of the artist first is to entertain. If he doesn't entertain, then it's a bore and it's homework and people don't want
18:21 Speaker 01 to sit through it and they're right.
18:24 Rick Rubin? When you made both Zelig and Purple Rose of Cairo, they both have technical innovation that maybe couldn't have happened earlier. I don't know if you could have made Zelig 20 years earlier.
18:38 Speaker 01 When I first started to make film, my very first film, Take the Money and Run, I wanted to make a documentary comedy. No one had done that. And I did. Take the Money and Run was documentary style. It had Jackson Beck narrating it. There were interviews with people and it set the style. There had been no documentary comedies before that. But I wanted to make one very authentically, but I couldn't. I didn't have the clout or know how to do it. I couldn't have made a black and white film. Years later, when I was more established, I could make Zelig. And there I wanted to do strictly, I had total artistic freedom.
19:23 Speaker 01 I could make a documentary start to finish and a period documentary, also about an odd character. And yes, I loved making that film. It's hard to see now. They don't play it much on television. I don't know why, but it's one of my best films.
19:41 Rick Rubin? It is.
19:41 Speaker 01 But they don't play it a lot on television. But it is one of the best films that I've done. And then Purple Rose, I struggled over. I thought, you know, this girl is going to the movies all the time. And then I had the inspiration. Of the guy steps off the screen. And I thought, gee, that is gonna make a great movie. And that's a good example of I went months with it and couldn't come up with, okay, you got a few scenes, and then what? And I couldn't finish it. I had half of it done. And I put it aside for months. I just didn't know where it went. And then one day it occurred to me.
20:23 Speaker 01 The actor, playing the actor who steps off the screen, comes to town and there's the two of them. And it gave me the whole second half of the picture.
20:34 Rick Rubin? Great idea.
20:34 Speaker 01 But a pure luck that it came to me. I mean, it just snapped into my head in one day, months later, after I had failed just having half a movie.
20:46 Rick Rubin? Do you ever get ideas based on a new technology? Of, oh, I could do something funny with this technique?
20:53 Speaker 01 I don't, because I'm not a technology person. Just never been technologically interested or adept or interested.
21:02 Rick Rubin? How is writing stand-up different than writing a movie?
21:05 Speaker 01 Oh, it's a completely different thing. It's much harder to write stand-up. You know, a movie, you know, you have characters and a story and you... Stand-up is the very essence. You've got to have almost an hour of one laugh after another. There can be no breathing room for people. You can't stand out there and talk to people because it's boring. They're paying money to be made to laugh. And you come out on stage and you open and it's funny. Then you continue talking and you're talking, you know, whatever. Some comics talk an hour, some talk 45 minutes, whatever. But it's laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh.
21:48 Speaker 01 I mean, you can't have one of those things die because then they go out saying, yeah, it was pretty good, but not everything was great.
21:57 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
21:58 Speaker 01 Because one out of 100 jokes wasn't. That's what they come away with. It's very hard, the stand-up comedy. I think it was the hardest thing I ever had to do to really score as a stand-up comedian. There are millions of them around and many of them much better than I ever was. But there's also a million of them around that are not very good.
22:21 Rick Rubin? Do you think of yourself primarily as a writer?
22:25 Speaker 01 I always thought of myself as a writer, yeah, because it's what I enjoy the most.
22:29 Rick Rubin? I see.
22:30 Speaker 01 So I always thought of myself as a writer. I was, you know, an actor too, and a stand-up comic, and but.
22:37 Rick Rubin? And a director.
22:38 Speaker 01 And a director, yeah, but I thought of myself, I only directed because I wanted my written material done properly.
22:44 Rick Rubin? I see.
22:45 Speaker 01 I wasn't interested in directing as a director. I was interested in getting that story, of course, to the people in a way that's most effective for them.
22:56 Rick Rubin? Did you ever feel like you were part of a, either a group of filmmakers? Or would you think of yourself like a Mel Brooks or like a Martin Scorsese or?
23:08 Speaker 01 Well, I came up with those guys. I came up with Robert Altman and Francis Coppola and all my betters and Scorsese and and Spielberg and I came up alongside of them. I'm not suggesting for a second that I had rate with them. I'm just saying chronologically, I came up with them. We were all working the same time and so I would think of them as contemporaries of mine.
23:37 Rick Rubin? Would you feel kinship with them or no?
23:39 Speaker 01 I mean, I like all their work and those of them that I've met, I like very much. I mean, I like Marty and Francis Coppola and.
23:48 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
23:48 Speaker 01 Met Spielberg very briefly, but he was very nice, you know. Sidney Lumet, I knew, I liked him very much and Arthur Penn. I knew them, I liked them and to the best of my knowledge, they liked me.
24:02 Rick Rubin? Besides Zelig, what are some other that you particularly like of your films?
24:06 Speaker 01 Midnight in Paris, I liked Match Point, I liked Bullets Over Broadway and and Purple Rose of Cairo. I would say Zelig, Bullets Over Broadway, Purple Rose of Cairo, and Midnight in Paris, the three period ones, and Zelig, four period ones, and Match Point, I like. And I have a soft spot in my heart for Broadway Danny Rose. Fantastic. But you can't go by me because I, you know, when you make a film, you start on me. You start out thinking, this is going to be Citizen Kane. This is the greatest thing I've ever written. It's going to be brilliant.
24:50 Speaker 01 And then in the end, you're reshuffling the material in the editing room to save embarrassment. You just don't want to be embarrassed by it. It's not Citizen Kane. It's not even, it's nothing. They're not even the three studios. So I don't have a good view of my work. To me, my work is, oh, I screwed up. Here I failed, here I, look how terrible this is. I blew this joke, I blew this sequence, I should have done this. You know, I once was with Sidney Lumet, and I admired him very much as a director. I think he made some wonderful movies. And he invited a group of us, you know, about 50 people, to a screening of one of his movies. And they watched the movie.
25:34 Speaker 01 As usual, a very good movie. It might have been Dog Day, or... He made good movies, really good movies. When it was over, people were saying, oh, Sidney, that was great, and this is... And he was saying, yeah, wasn't that wonderful? Wasn't that scene, wasn't that scene between the two people great? Didn't you love that? You know, and I could never have that enjoyment from my work. I envied him, that he got that genuine... He wasn't a braggart, he wasn't arrogant. He got genuine enjoyment from his work. I never got that. All I got was, ah, I really wrecked this. Or, boy, I ruined that scene completely.
26:15 Speaker 01 Or, God, I'd love to do this movie over if I had $10 million or something. But, you know, so I envy that. So I don't ever see my movies after I do them, and I don't want to see them. And I, if I'm on the treadmill and suddenly a movie flashes up and it's one of mine, I quickly... Go like a shot to the ad for something else.
26:39 Rick Rubin? How is it different watching a movie on a small screen versus in a theater on a big screen?
26:44 Speaker 01 Oh, I miss the movie houses. I miss the cinema experience. Not just the size of the screen, although that's, you know, to see Katharine Hepburn up there in a big screen or Judy Garland in a big screen. It's powerful and it's tremendous. And to see it on a small screen, yes, you digest the material and it's pleasurable, but it's not the same thing. And I miss seeing movies with five, six, seven hundred other people.
27:13 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
27:13 Speaker 01 The phenomenon, the presentation adds to the enjoyment. I like to go into the movie and a lot of people are around me. We all see it together. And when it's over, we've experienced something communally. It's a different taste in your mouth than if you're sitting on your sofa and you see it with your wife or your friend. And you enjoy it, but it's a different enjoyment. To me, it's not as enjoyable.
27:40 Rick Rubin? For you, the first time you get to see one of your movies with an audience, what's that like?
27:47 Speaker 01 Well, it's usually painful. I mean, like a cold shower. You finish your movie, you cut it together, you put the music in.
27:54 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
27:55 Speaker 01 And then you have a screening to see, get some idea of how, what's working, what's boring people. And you stand in the back of the theater and it's, you know, like taking a cold shower. You see all the stuff you thought was so good and moving so rapidly and so exciting is not good, rapid or exciting. It's tedious and empty. And you have to run back to the drawing board and fix it up. And sometimes you can and sometimes you can't.
28:31 Rick Rubin? Have you ever had your heart broken?
28:33 Speaker 01 God, many times, many, many times, many ways. But personally and cinematically and musically and, yes, sure.
28:46 Rick Rubin? If you could speak to your young self when you were a child, if you could tell him something, what would you tell him?
28:53 Speaker 01 I would probably say, go in a different direction than you went. You came into film wanting to make people laugh. Don't go in thinking of yourself more as a more profound artist. Aim for that. Don't aim for Groucho Marx and Bob Hope and those kind of movies. Go and see Vittorio De Sica and Kurosawa. See those movies and do that. Aim for that. Strike out trying to do those things rather than making people laugh.
29:36 Rick Rubin? When you lived in Brooklyn, did you dream of living in Manhattan?
29:39 Speaker 01 Interestingly, people always associate my films and things, my concept of Manhattan. But the Manhattan that I was crazy about was the Manhattan that I had seen in movies. The movies were all made in Hollywood and they were all set and nobody in Manhattan lived like that. In the movies, they all lived in these duplex penthouses with terraces and with, you know, white telephones and things you rang for a butler with. And nobody in New York really lived like that. But I thought, once I move into New York, I'll get a place like that and it'll be on a few levels. I'll have a bar, I'll come in.
30:23 Speaker 01 And you know, the way they all came in and the first thing they did, they walked over to the bar, they opened a decanter, they took a drink. No one I knew ever in my life walked in and took a drink. They'd pour the scotch or the sherry, whatever it was. And they'd drink and someone else would. People walked around smoking and drinking and dressing for dinner. The women and the men would dress for dinner at home like if you were going to Buckingham Palace now. And I thought, well, gee, this is great. I'm going to get out of Brooklyn, I'm going to live. Live like that. But it didn't happen because that was the Manhattan that I wanted to move into only existed up on the screen.
31:06 Rick Rubin? Were you disappointed by that?
31:07 Speaker 01 Oh, gradually I got to realize, it took years. I got to realize that gee, maybe it never really existed. Some of it, a small amount of it, did exist. When I got into Manhattan, you'd go to the theater at eight forty. It was a civilized hour. You could have dinner first. Afterward, you'd go to a supper club, maybe for something to eat. You know, a little snack or something. And, you know, you lived more. You know, there were nightclubs, I mean, in New York, the Latin Quarter and the Copacabana. There was a touch of that in New York, but nothing like what you would see when you went to a movie or nothing what we imagined. There were three levels for us.
31:52 Speaker 01 The first level was actual reality.
31:56 Rick Rubin? Yes.
31:56 Speaker 01 Which was grim and you lived in Brooklyn and your house was nothing special. And you had linoleum and oilcloth, tablecloth. And it was, then there was those people who lived in the movies. And they lived in these houses. And they were always going around Manhattan in cars and everything was just great for them. Then there was a third level of we were aware, but not firsthand, of movie stars in Hollywood. And we figured, hey, you know, Humphrey Bogart lives next to Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck lives next to Betty Grable.
32:40 Speaker 01 And all these people live out there. And in the evenings, they're going to Ciro's and the McCombo. And Humphrey Bogart is going over to Dick Powell's house. And they're Gene Kelly's, they're gathered around his piano singing. And, you know, there was this fantasy of life in Hollywood. In real life in Hollywood, they had swimming pools and they were all beautiful people. Who actually existed flesh and blood. And then there were the movie people that had their own life. I mean, from movie to movie, Esther Williams would swim and Van Johnson would pursue her. And we'd see this character actor, we'd get familiar with them.
33:24 Speaker 01 And then there was our life, grim and grungy and realistic and sad. So these were three levels, and I always had hoped to graduate into a better level. But so much of it was just fantasy and wishful thinking. And stimulated by both Hollywood movies and the Hollywood fan magazines and gossip columns that wrote about these stars.
33:50 Rick Rubin? Fantasy seems to play into many of your movies. Magic happens in your movies.
33:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, fantasy, you wish that life was like that, more fantasy, less real. Reality is a bone crusher, you know. And in the fantasy world, there is always a loveliness and charm. And unreality is a very beautiful place.
34:16 Rick Rubin? Yeah. Can you escape into that in the real world as well? Or is it only in art and only in movies that you get to experience that?
34:24 Speaker 01 You could escape to some degree, varying degrees. When I was a kid, I would go into a movie house. And you walk into a dark theater and the terrible world is out there. And suddenly, you're in the dark. And big on the screen is, you know, June Allison and all these wonderful people. And they're beautiful. And the guys never had a loss for witty remark or a brave action. It's great. So you could, for an hour and a half, get the reality out of your way. Then when I got older, I found I could make movies. And in making movies...
35:07 Speaker 01 I could wake up in the morning and go off to the set and there would be some beautiful actress and some wonderful handsome leading man who was funny and charming and they would have costumes and I knew music was gonna come in here and there were great sets and now we're in the 1920s, we're in Paris and so I could live my life out avoiding reality as much as possible but you can't unfortunately get away from it I mean it kind of oozed in like some kind of toxic ick.
35:42 Rick Rubin? Did you always have a dream to make films from childhood?
35:45 Speaker 01 Not really, I wanted to be in show business, I knew that but not films necessarily. I started out as a writer and I was happy in my little isolated room writing and then I wrote for some television shows and I kind of accidentally got into movies. I became a comedian and they thought I did funny stuff so they thought, why don't you give them a chance to write a movie, maybe write a funny movie? In spite of my incompetence, kept succeeding. Everything I did, I succeeded. It's not that I was good at it. It was, I got a million lucky breaks, I worked hard and everything fell my way
36:29 Speaker 01 so even if I did something wrong or bad, which I did all the time, I succeeded. When I became a comedian, I was petrified. I didn't, I was stage frightened, I didn't know what to do. I got on stage, but I succeeded. When I came off the stage, all the nightclubs wanted me. When I was a kid and I wrote for a television show, I was just a teenager. I wrote for a television show. Next year, I had a reputation and all the writers wanted me to work on, you know, so it's like I could do no wrong at that time. It's not that I was so good, I wasn't. I was, you know, competent, but not great by any means. But I got a million breaks.
37:14 Speaker 01 When I wrote a movie script... I had no credentials to direct a movie. But just when I finished my script, a new company formed called Palomar Pictures. And they couldn't entice John Huston and William Wyler and these people to make movies for them. So they turned to me, people like me.
37:36 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
37:37 Speaker 01 And I was one of the people most like me. They gave me $1 million budget. And I made, take the money and run. And I made all kinds of mistakes on the picture and did the best I could. I knew nothing about filmmaking. And it opened, and it was a big success. And then I followed it with bananas, with some improvement in my technique, but not much. I was still pretty rotten. Also, a very big success. It was like I kept failing, not failing, but stumbling upward.
38:09 Rick Rubin? Yeah, it sounds like the fantasy in real life, you got to experience the fantasy that way.
38:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:15 Rick Rubin? Again, it just happened.
38:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, I had some talent.
38:19 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
38:19 Speaker 01 But not proportionate. I combined that small talent that I had with very hard work, a lot of ambition, and a lot of luck.
38:32 Rick Rubin? How did you get your first writing job?
38:34 Speaker 01 My first writing job, I was in high school. I was 16. And all the other kids around me were making their college choices. This one was going to be a doctor, and this one was going to be an architect, and that one was going to be a journalist. I had fantasies. I thought I'd be, it sounds crazy. I thought I'd be a cowboy. You know, I wanted to be a cowboy. I wanted to be what I had seen in the movies. I wanted to be a private detective. I looked at the Yellow Pages and looked up the names of private detectives, asked them if I could come in and follow what they did. I was complete fantasy. I was always amusing. And some friends of mine said, why don't you write some of those jokes out? And I'd write them out.
39:17 Speaker 01 And then somebody said, you should send them in. There were many Broadway columnists then, writing in the newspapers. Why don't you send them in? Because they always publish jokes. So I typed them up after school and sent them in to some of the Broadway columnists, Earl Wilson, Walter Winchell, the various ones. And after a very short time, a month maybe, I saw my name in print with a joke. So I started doing it more and my name started appearing all the time in the columns. An advertising company called up Earl Wilson and said, who is this guy, Woody Allen, who's always appearing? And they said, oh, he's some kid in Brooklyn. He sends us the jokes.
40:02 Speaker 01 And they called me up. They got my name and phone number. They called me up and they said, do you want a job coming in and writing jokes for us? And I said, yeah, I'd love it. At that time, they paid me forty dollars a week, which was huge because, you know, the jobs that I got in the neighborhood, delivering for the tailor, for the butcher, you know, you got thirty five cents an hour and tips and you made no money. Forty dollars, my parents made that working eight hours a day in an office as a bookkeeper. So I would go in, I'd go to school. My school hours were eight in the morning till one at Midwood High School.
40:44 Speaker 01 And I'd finish at one, get on the B M T subway, ride into Manhattan. And on the way in, it was a forty minute trip or so, I'd write jokes, jokes, jokes, get in there, go into a little cubby, type out more jokes. And I'd give them, I know it sounds hard to believe, I would give them fifty jokes every day.
41:03 Rick Rubin? Amazing.
41:04 Speaker 01 And they were topical jokes, jokes about the president, jokes about, inane jokes about parking spaces and mother in laws and I had the job. And then someone heard that I was a good joke writer and they wanted to know if I would supply jokes for their radio show. And of course I did and one thing led to another. And before long, I had a good reputation and I flourished. I mean, I kept, I did radio shows and then I did what they called at that time simulcasts. It was part radio, part television at the same time. Then I did television shows.
41:43 Speaker 01 Then by the time I was about twenty or twenty one or so, I got a job with the Sid Caesar Show, which was the jewel of comedy. I mean, everybody, it would be like at the epitome of the Saturday Night Live show or something. Everybody wanted to be a writer and I wanted to be on, everyone wanted to be on the Sid Caesar Show. And they hired me and I worked on the show and I worked with all these great writers, Danny and Doc Simon, Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks, you know what I mean? And they were all very nice to me. They were all, they all liked me and I was legitimately
42:26 Speaker 01 in all of them and respectful of them, so, and they liked me. And I wrote funny jokes and they liked that, so I just kept succeeding. Yeah, I had a charmed life. And when I made my first movie, I didn't direct it. They asked me to write this script for What's New, Pussycat? And they said to me, can you write this thing? Well, Charlie Feldman, the producer, said, well, we can all go to Paris and we have Warren Beatty and we'll have a great time in Paris and write yourself a little part in it. And meanwhile, Beatty dropped out and through Feldman's production genius, they got Peter O'Toole, they got Peter Sellers. Wow.
43:11 Speaker 01 They got Tessa Sein and, and all these hot actresses for it, Romy Schneider. And they made this movie of my script. Well, it was the most terrible movie. They ruined it completely. I had a miserable experience in Paris, apart from loving Paris. But I had a terrible experience and yet I was failing upward. The picture became a gigantic success. It was probably the biggest money-earning comedy to its time. You know, it's like I could do no wrong. And I hated the picture. I mean, I hate it to this day and I hated it then.
43:52 Speaker 01 And then I wrote a script and I vowed I would not do the script unless I could be the director and control it. And as I said before, a young company started out, Palomar Pictures, and they took a chance on me and, you know, because they couldn't get better than me. They, they couldn't, you know? And that picture, you know, I ran into all kinds of problems in the editing room and, and the edit opened and it was a very big success. And Bananas was a big success. And then I wrote Everything You Always Want to Know About Sex, which was a film that was not so well received, but a tremendous success financially and with the public.
44:37 Speaker 01 Then I did Love and Death, which was a success. And then I decided to take a chance and make a film that wasn't so broadly funny. I would do it more characters, more realistic, and I would sacrifice some laughs. And a lot of people around me said, you're making a big mistake and all that. I wrote Annie Hall with Marshall Brickman. And we decided this is going to be a more serious picture, more serious than, you know, Bananas.
45:11 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
45:11 Speaker 01 And we sacrificed laughs for the story.
45:15 Rick Rubin? What do you think brought that on, that idea to do that? It was a big step.
45:20 Speaker 01 I was always ambitious.
45:22 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
45:22 Speaker 01 And I always wanted to do it. In the same sense as when that succeeded, I followed it with interiors, because I didn't want to just make comic films. So I was always trying to be ambitious and try more than I had the ability to do. I was always punching upward, failing artistically, but being saved by my luck.
45:47 Rick Rubin? Yeah. Did it keep it interesting for you by making a different kind of movie than you had made before?
45:52 Speaker 01 Yes, it always was interesting to have some, rather than just turning out the same thing. You know, I felt, for instance, I was a great fan of the Marx Brothers.
46:01 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
46:02 Speaker 01 But I felt they made the same picture time after time. And of course, they were brilliant, but
46:07 Rick Rubin? Yes.
46:07 Speaker 01 it was the same film. So eventually, once you see five of them or seven of them, they waned their popularity. And this has gone on to my 50th picture, the last picture I made, to keep the sense of challenge going. I made it in French. I don't speak French. But I made it in French because I wanted to challenge myself. I had always admired French movies.
46:33 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
46:33 Speaker 01 And I wanted to work in another language to keep me awake on the set. So, so I wasn't just, yes, I've made fifty films. I'll go through the mechanical motions. I can do it and do it again. So that's always been a provocative stimulator for me.
46:54 Rick Rubin? Tell me a little bit about making a movie in French. Did you have a translator at your side at all times?
46:59 Speaker 01 No, I, I, I had so many of them spoke English. I wrote the film in English, of course, and somebody translated into French.
47:06 Rick Rubin? I see.
47:07 Speaker 01 And then I would do it and I would, the actors could speak English, at least part English, or they could speak better English than me. They were very good at it. And I would speak to them. They would do it and, and I could tell they were speaking in French, but I wrote, I knew what they were saying because I wrote the dialogue. And you can tell, if you go see a Cora Sauer film.
47:29 Rick Rubin? Yes.
47:30 Speaker 01 You know who the great Japanese actors are. You're stunned by Mefuni or something because he's a great actor. You know nothing of Japanese, probably. That wasn't the problem. The problem's always with that film or with any film I've ever done, the problem is always in the writing. If the writing is good, you don't have a problem making the film. You know, there are many wonderful actors around, great cameramen. It's common sense where to put the camera and what to do. You always are screwed up in films and have agonizing times when you finally come to the
48:09 Speaker 01 realization that what you wrote doesn't work or only the first half works, or you run into trouble on a character somewhere or a plot point. It's always a problem in the plot.
48:24 Rick Rubin? And when that happens, do you only get to see it when you're making the film? Is that the only time you would know that?
48:29 Speaker 01 It's the only time I ever saw it. I mean, I didn't know of anybody that can read a script all the time and just anticipate the problems. I couldn't tell till I shot the whole film.
48:42 Rick Rubin? I see.
48:43 Speaker 01 Put the whole film together, put the music in.
48:45 Rick Rubin? Wow.
48:46 Speaker 01 And look at it and it's, oh, God, the whole second half doesn't work. And then I'd go back and reshoot and I would re-edit and struggle. And many of my films were made in the reshooting and the re-editing, including Annie Hall. That's why I noticed it was so much more pleasurable to write a novel. Because in the film, when I called them up and say, I've got to reshoot, they're thunderstruck because it's going to cost $250,000 a day to reshoot something. But with a novel, and when it's terrible, I reread it, I tear it up and throw it away. It doesn't cost a penny, you know?
49:30 Speaker 01 So it was nicer artistically.
49:36 Rick Rubin? Tell me about What's With Bound?
49:39 Speaker 01 It's a book that I wrote, a novel, and I thought it'd be amusing. And it was fun to work on. I started it between films. And between films, I wrote a little more and a little more. And finally, I finished it and gave it a quick rewrite and twisted up a little bit and then put it out.
50:00 Rick Rubin? How long has it been in the works?
50:02 Speaker 01 Well, on and off sporadically, you know, for, you know, I would say a year.
50:08 Rick Rubin? But that's not long.
50:10 Speaker 01 Well, but only in small doses.
50:13 Rick Rubin? Yeah, but still, a year for a novel is quick.
50:15 Speaker 01 You know, it's a small novel. I mean, but on the other hand, it is as long as The Great Gatsby. And it's not as good, but it's as long and it's, you know, longer than Joseph Conrad's novels. And so it's a respectable length, but it's not, it's not as big as War and Peace.
50:34 Rick Rubin? Well, I don't think there's any rule about that, right? It just has to be good, no?
50:37 Speaker 01 You know, but hopefully it's more amusing.
50:43 Rick Rubin? There's a story in the book where a character is accused of not being able to speak from the heart. And I wanted to ask you, do you feel like you've always been able to speak from the heart?
50:54 Speaker 01 Well, most of the time, yeah. Every once in a while, something comes up where you don't speak from the heart because you can't, because it would hurt somebody's feelings or betray a confidence of someone. But most of the time, you can speak from the heart. You know, I don't live in a hostile society or with these problems, and if I have to watch what I say. So I always, you know, was always free. I grew up in Brooklyn. People spoke what they felt, and it was never so radical what they felt or so dangerous.
51:27 Rick Rubin? Was this the first time you've written a novel?
51:29 Speaker 01 I tried one maybe 30 years ago, and I brought it to my editor at The New Yorker, Roger Angel. And he read it, and he said, "It's very funny," and very, the word he used, "warming," but it doesn't come to any climax. It's like all foreplay and no climax. And I said, "Okay, then I don't want anybody else to see it."
51:57 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
51:58 Speaker 01 And I put it in my drawer, and I never took it out again. I mean, I left it there, and I went on. I figured, well, maybe novel's not my thing. But, you know, 25, 30 years later, I didn't come back to that one. You know, another couple of months, not even, I'll be 90. And I thought to myself, "I wanna, you know, write a couple of novels."
52:23 Rick Rubin? How often do you start projects and feel like, "This one isn't gonna work. I'm gonna move on to something else?"
52:29 Speaker 01 Often. I've started some books that way. I've started film scripts. You know, when I was younger, I didn't realize that you had to know where you were going. You had to know the ending and be satisfied with that ending. So I get an idea and it would be, it would dazzle me, thinking this is great. It's so funny, it's so brilliant. And I start to write and I get up to page fifty and I'm out. It goes no place. I've got fifty wonderful pages of imagination and dialogue and it goes nowhere. It's wasted.
53:09 Speaker 01 So then I decided you've got to know where you're going with the thing. And once I knew that, I fell into the trap less of starting projects that came to nothing. But before that, and even somewhat after, I'd start projects and realize on page ten or page eighty that this has not worked, it's not working. It appeared to be tantalizing and delectable, but not working out.
53:45 Rick Rubin? Do you remember what the first film was, where you knew the ending before you got there?
53:51 Speaker 01 Good question, because I've been going through all my films now. I'm past already interiors and I didn't know, I didn't know in Manhattan. My god, you know, I can only say this, I can't remember them all, but I, I knew where I was going with Match Point.
54:16 Rick Rubin? Wow, that's deep into the library.
54:18 Speaker 01 Yes, yes. I thought to myself, a guy kills somebody, but he kills the next door neighbor. So you think, you know, that he killed the next door neighbor and he ran into the other person and had to kill them. So all the suspicions deflected on the other person and there's no motive in there, you know. So I knew I was going there, that I, that I knew. But I, I guess the pictures since then, I kind of knew. I mean, everything since then, I did know.
54:58 Speaker 01 Vicky Christina Barcelona and Midnight in Paris, I knew. Yeah, in the later films, I know, I knew all the endings. I didn't get to the end and flounder around on any of that.
55:15 Rick Rubin? Do you remember the first time you went to Hollywood?
55:18 Speaker 01 Yes, I was flown out there with a group of writers. NBC had something called the Writer Development Program. They picked out a number of writers, young writers, to develop as writers because they wanted us to mature as writers and work for their television shows. And they were very careful in their selection, but it didn't work because most of the people they picked did not wind up as writers. They went to other businesses. I was one of their success stories because I was so dedicated. I was so disciplined and ambitious. And they flew us out there.
55:59 Speaker 01 There was a failing television show called the Colgate Comedy Hour. They flew about six of us out there. Two apprentice on the show, hoping that we could make a contribution and help the show. And also, we would learn something from the more experienced writers, who had written the show into trouble anyhow. Nobody knew what they were doing. And when I got out to Hollywood, of course, I was walking on clouds. I thought to myself, my God, this is where Bob Hope lives. And I just didn't believe it. And even years later, when I went out to Hollywood briefly, Dick Cavett was out there.
56:43 Speaker 01 Cavett and I used to go and look at the homes of W C Fields. And we were just awestruck. But when I went out, I was alone. I was a teenager. And I was thunderstruck by Hollywood. I was thunderstruck by the sunsets and by the fact that movie stars lived there and that I would be standing on a Saturday night at Hollywood and Vine, which I had only known because of listening to Jack Benny. And then I... Was overcome with the fact that they referred to Danish pastries as sweet rolls. I couldn't get my mind around that.
57:25 Speaker 01 And that, when you sat down to get coffee and orange juice and a toasted English muffin, they put the coffee down first. I couldn't get used to that because it was always cold by the time the muffin came. These are my impressions of Hollywood. But I loved it when I first went out there. Then, as I got older and got more experienced living in Manhattan, I much preferred the noisy excitement and energy of Manhattan to the softer life of California.
58:03 Rick Rubin? How did you go from being a writer to the first time getting on stage as a comedian?
58:08 Speaker 01 Because I was a writer and in the writer development program, they said to me, I'd like you to go down to the Blue Angel. There's a comic down there called Mort Saul. And I'd like you to take a look at him because we're thinking of developing him at NBC. And I went down there and I was not for a loop. I'd never seen anything like that. I mean, it just changed my life in one second. I came back and I thought to myself, what am I doing? Everything I'm doing is so terrible. The comparison is, I still feel that way to this day. And I was just stunned.
58:51 Speaker 01 And I thought to myself, I'd like to write for this guy. I'd like to listen to this guy. I'd like to be this guy. And I mentioned, just mentioned it to my then manager, Jack Rollins, that I've had a thought maybe of writing something for myself and doing it. And he seized on that and would not let it go. He saw in me, which I did not see, a stand-up comedian. And he wouldn't let it go. And despite the fact I said, ah, I don't really want to do this. I don't like it. I don't. He said to me, just trust me.
59:32 Speaker 01 Do this for a year or two and let me worry about it and make all the decisions. You just show up and work. And I did, I was nervous every show, I hated it. But again, I succeeded in spite of myself. The first night I went on at the Blue Angel in New York was a Sunday night. It was the night that they put amateurs on. And Shelley Berman was the stand-up comedian there. He was the star. And he gave me a wonderful introduction, really lovely. And I went on, I was frozen. And I worked.
1:00:15 Speaker 01 When I came off, I thought, God, I was awful and awful and awful. But the next day, the offers came pouring in. This nightclub, that nightclub, this television show. And Jack Rollins said no to all them. He said, now you gotta buckle down and work. Get up in the cabarets and work every night. And that's what I did. I quit. I was a writer on the Gary Moore Show. And I was making, you know, good money at that time. I mean, it was like a few thousand dollars a week. And I quit to be a stand-up comedian, making zero, making no money at all,
1:00:56 Speaker 01 just to go in and work at a place called The Duplex Downtown and then The Bitter End. No salary at all. And I worked and worked night after night after night. And then I, you know, I didn't get better at it, but I, I got more relaxed, maybe. Never, never totally relaxed. I was never great at it. In retrospect, I'm overrated. I was a decent comic, but not a great one. But I'm always thought of as, oh, you were a wonderful stand-up comedian. But compared to someone like Mort Saul, I mean, if I had my life to live over again, which I'm counting on.
1:01:38 Speaker 01 I would be a different kind of stand-up comedian. Sometimes I even get the urge now. You know, it's not too late to atone for the rotten comic I was then. I should get back up on stage and do what I really feel I could do and be very strong as a stand-up comedian. And then the impetus wanes and I think, oh, I'm gonna, am I gonna go to St. Louis and Chicago and Boston and work nightclubs at one in the morning, you know? And so I come to my senses. But I did work as a comedian and I was very successful.
1:02:22 Speaker 01 And that led to the movies and stuff. But I was never, I don't say this with false modesty, I was overrated.
1:02:30 Rick Rubin? The idea of you going back to stand-up is a very beautiful idea.
1:02:34 Speaker 01 I would love to do it, but, you know, it would take me about a year to write enough material. The way I worked, I would practice it at home alone first and then go into some club at night and do it. And I always, unlike other comedians, they always advised me, when you have new material, throw it in to the second show at night. So if it dies, you know, no. I never felt that was a good test of material. I always thought you had to do it Saturday night, prime show. And if you died with it, you die. I never died with any of it. Because I wrote funny and the jokes are funny.
1:03:16 Speaker 01 And when you're on stage, you have a survival instinct. So if I wrote a routine and I was doing routine, talking to the audience, I was getting my laughs and I sensed the next joke is not gonna work. And you just sense it like you, you know, it's instinctive. I would edit right there
1:03:37 Rick Rubin? Wow.
1:03:38 Speaker 01 and go to the joke after it. So I never really died. I always edited on my feet and cut out the junk while I was working. So they always got good jokes, the best that I could write at the time. And I was a good joke writer.
1:03:55 Rick Rubin? Do you think that had you not done stand-up? The rest of your whole life would be different?
1:04:01 Speaker 01 Yes, it was a key piece and Jack Rollins, my manager, who was the best of all managers, a legend in the business, pointed out to me, and accurately, I was a writer for years and you go from show to show, you know, and it's fine on your reputation. The minute I did a stand-up routine on Jack Parr or something like that and scored, my whole life changed. It dwarfed the excitement and the amount of offers I got as a writer.
1:04:37 Rick Rubin? Wow.
1:04:38 Speaker 01 You know, to say, well, he wrote the Sid Caesar Show on the Sid Caesar Show, or he wrote, you know, on this show or that show. Okay, we'll hire him on our show. But as soon as they say, oh, was he the guy on the Ed Sullivan Show Sunday night? Did that? The offers came in, I got more writing offers doing one stand-up routine. The visibility and the impact of life performing is so more intense
1:05:06 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:05:07 Speaker 01 than what you get to the passivity of being an isolated writer.
1:05:13 Rick Rubin? When you saw Mort Saul that first time, tell me what it was about him that was so great?
1:05:20 Speaker 01 Well, I, of course, misperceived. I thought, oh, this guy's jokes are so great. They were great, they were the greatest I've ever seen. And I didn't realize that it was his persona that was so great. So that he could say anything and it would be wonderful. And the jokes were superb. His persona was legitimately a kind of...
1:05:53 Speaker 01 He had a sort of canine intelligence, coruscating wit. You were in the presence of an overwhelmingly witty, brilliant character. And I thought it was the jokes. And I even remember saying to Jack Rollins, my manager, "Why can't I just go out there and read the jokes?" You know, it's a joke. And Jack used to say, "It's not the jokes. You don't realize it. It's the persona, it's the human being. That's what they're responding to. You're responding to the persona of Mort Saul. Yes, his jokes are brilliant and very different than other people's,
1:06:37 Speaker 01 much superior, but it's him." And I couldn't grasp that for years. Finally, it occurred to me, it came over me, that it was the guy. It was such a dazzling experience to watch him and to speak. Now, someone listening to me now can go back and see a tape or listen to a record, they won't get the impact. This is truly an experience. You know, someone once said to me years ago, we were talking baseball, I'm talking about Babe Ruth, and they said, "You really had to be there." Yeah. Same with Mort. You had to be there. Yes, you can get some taste of what he was like
1:07:21 Speaker 01 from a clip or from a record album, but at that time, it was electrifying. And of course, when he burst on the scene, they did a profile in The New Yorker on him. He was on the cover of Time magazine. He was hired to work the White House all day. And he wasn't just a guy doing, let's say, political jokes. His political jokes, to me, I wished he had done less of them and more of his human relationship jokes. Every subject he turned to, from his relationships with women and human relations to special subjects, sports cars and high fidelity
1:08:04 Speaker 01 and going into Brooks Brothers to buy a suit and people that lived and worked on Madison Avenue, advertising agencies, and politics was part of that, but...
1:08:16 Speaker 01 You know, to me, only one part. It was so amazing to hear him speak. And I didn't realize that it was him. It was what I was responding to was the person. In the same way that if you see a movie, you respond to Marlon Brando or Frank Sinatra or something. It's the persona. I was thick. I couldn't grasp that. I kept thinking, oh, this guy's jokes are so brilliant. Or he's really a brilliant writer. So and people used to say to me at the time, other comics would say to me, this before I became a comic. They would say, what are you seeing in Mortal?
1:08:59 Speaker 01 He just comes out and talks. I could come out and talk, but he was so skillful that it never sounded like a comedian talking to you. It sounded like a scintillating intellectual talking to you. An amazingly witty, funny, scintillating intellectual talking to you. And it just knocked me for a loop at the time.
1:09:31 Rick Rubin? Was he the first comedian who didn't just do jokes?
1:09:35 Speaker 01 No, there were others who just didn't do jokes. For example, W.C. Fields didn't just do jokes. He didn't do jokes. He was just a hysterical personality, funny beyond belief. Jonathan Winters didn't do jokes. He had a special thing. Elaine May, someone who could read the phone book and you would laugh.
1:10:00 Rick Rubin? Great comedians, do they all have that persona? That is what you fall in love with?
1:10:06 Speaker 01 Yes, it's all the great comedians. You know, a million comedians do those one liner jokes.
1:10:14 Speaker 01 But for some reason, when Groucho did them.
1:10:17 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:10:18 Speaker 01 They have something special to them. It's in the, the voice and the mystical area of genius that you can never quantify and you never, it's just there. It's like when a musician, you know, I, I pick up the clarinet and play a tune on it. It's one thing, but somebody else picks it up and, and they blow into it. Same thing. And it just oozes with feeling and you can't figure out why. You know, you do all the same things. You, you use the same number read, you use a good clarinet.
1:10:56 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:10:58 Speaker 01 You hunch your shoulders and close your eyes. You, you're straining and it's fine. But when the person really has it.
1:11:08 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:11:08 Speaker 01 And you can never get to what that thing is. That, that's the part that the AIs are never gonna duplicate. They, they'll always match something, but they're never gonna, they're never gonna get that impossible to capture thing that makes Bud Powell play the piano and somebody else play it. And it's just a different instrument.
1:11:35 Rick Rubin? Did you ever get to meet Groucho?
1:11:37 Speaker 01 Oh, I knew him well. I mean, I met him, Cabot introduced me to him at Lindy's and we, I got friendly with him, I corresponded with him. Yes, I spent a good deal of time with him when he came to New York. And when I went out to California, I always visited him. I was at his house any number of times. Dan Keaton and I spent Christmas Eve with him. Yeah, I, I did. And he was, you know, he could, he could say anything and it would sound funny.
1:12:08 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:12:08 Speaker 01 You know, he just, where somebody else, it wouldn't. But with him, it, it was magic. It sounded funny.
1:12:15 Rick Rubin? Would you get the sense that he was trying to be funny or he couldn't help it?
1:12:19 Speaker 01 Both. He was frequently trying to be funny, and he was funny, not like the boorish person who tries to be funny and doesn't make it.
1:12:28 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:12:28 Speaker 01 But he also, if he would say, you know, anything, it would sound funny because it just came from Groucho.
1:12:36 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:12:37 Speaker 01 You can't really get your mind around what it is, but because so many comics do those one-liner jokes like he used to do and make those remarks. Like the delivery Bob Hope. Bob Hope had an amazing delivery. It was just amazing. He could say those one-liners, and everybody else saying them sounds thick and heavy-handed, and he does them, and they come across like, you know, little poems.
1:13:08 Rick Rubin? Did you get to meet Bob Hope as well?
1:13:10 Speaker 01 I met him briefly. Not, not, I was never friending with him. I mean, I loved him, but I was never close with him as well.
1:13:18 Rick Rubin? Yeah, yeah.
1:13:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, I met him briefly. Cavett and I did a little documentary on him that was played at Lincoln Center the night they honored him. So we got to pick out a lot of stuff that we liked of his little moments. He just had a great delivery. I copied his, I wouldn't copy Groucho's delivery because it's too
1:13:43 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:13:43 Speaker 01 special, but Hope was more of a human being, of an average human being, less broad than Groucho. When I first started, I leaned on Mort Saul. And one columnist wrote, if Woody Allen could ever get rid of those Mort Saul mannerisms, he'd be a really good comic. And I sounded like Mort Saul, you know, the same way any musician who starts and plays jazz, the piano, start playing like Thelonious Monk or, you know, whoever influences him, whoever he loves. And so I sounded like Mort Saul when I first started, a grade B version, a grade D version.
1:14:26 Speaker 01 And then I started to lean more on Bob Hope. So you could, when I see myself ever in a movie, you know, you can see that I'm copying this great master.
1:14:41 Rick Rubin? When you do jokes in front of an audience, you get an immediate feedback. You know what works and what doesn't. How is it different when you're making a movie? There's no audience, nobody's laughing. How do you know when it's funny?
1:14:53 Speaker 01 If you're a professional comedian or you're a professional comedy worker or now writer or director, you know. I know in my room by myself before I go out in the world that this routine I've done is going to get laughs. I'm gonna get laughs with this. Not that long ago, I had to, I didn't want to, but I had to because I love her, go out to California and do some stand-up because they honored Diane Keaton. And I had to go onstage at the American Film Institute or something, one of those things. I could stay in my room alone beforehand and say the thing
1:15:37 Speaker 01 and with complete professional confidence that I'm gonna get laughs with these things. And I did. Because if you're a professional, that's a gift that you have, that you can make up funny stuff and you know it's funny. Whereas an average guy that doesn't have that odd gift, can't do that.
1:15:57 Rick Rubin? When you newly write something funny, do you laugh? Or do you just think it's funny?
1:16:03 Speaker 01 No, no, I laugh. People think that you make up something and then you say it. But it proceeds from your unconscious completely. When I'm writing something, it surprises me. I don't think of it and say it. It comes from the person inside you. So all of a sudden, it says its thing. It surprises me when I say something funny and I laugh at it.
1:16:30 Rick Rubin? Yeah, it's great.
1:16:32 Speaker 01 You know?
1:16:33 Rick Rubin? It's a great feeling, no?
1:16:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, to laugh is always a good feeling.
1:16:37 Rick Rubin? Yeah. How much of the work is intellectual versus something else?
1:16:44 Speaker 01 You experience it as intellectual. You sit down, you're thinking, you're using your rational mentality to put something together logically. But... Then the thing pops in inspirationally. It's a combination of working at it and then the inspiration comes. You have no part in the inspiration that proceeds from inside you.
1:17:13 Rick Rubin? Has there ever been a time where inspiration didn't come?
1:17:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, sure. You sit there and you think and you think and you use your intellect and you try this and you try that and you try a million things and it doesn't come. And then you move on to something else because you never got it.
1:17:32 Rick Rubin? How much of the writing comes from real life? Do you see something and then think that's funny and then it works its way into a script?
1:17:40 Speaker 01 Both. I mean, a portion of the stuff you write comes from real life. You see something and you think that would be funny or that is funny and it would make a good comic situation. And some of it is just, you know, when you, when I wrote for television shows, you got locked into a room on Monday morning and the show would be live on Saturday night or something. And you had to write and you couldn't just wait for the inspiration. If it didn't come, it didn't come. But you had to manufacture the best you could.
1:18:19 Speaker 01 It wouldn't be the best stuff you could come up with if you could wait to be inspired. But you had no choice. So some of it is from real life and some of it is you manufacture.
1:18:34 Rick Rubin? On the Sid Caesar Show, The Writer's Room, were those, would you say that was the funniest group of people you've ever been around?
1:18:40 Speaker 01 They were wonderful writers. I mean, you know, now the work of Larry Gelbart and Doc Simon and Mel Brooks, of course. They were great professional comedy writers. Yeah, I would say probably the funniest group. And not just funny, they were funny, but they, they knew how to write. They were more than funny. They were intelligent men and they knew how to write. They knew when a joke would be holding up the progress of the skit. You know, the Sid Caesar Show, even before I joined it, did foreign movies and operas and, you know, there's great scope.
1:19:26 Speaker 01 You know, when I, when I wrote a special, it wasn't for Sid. I think we wrote a special for Art Carney once. And we were able, on that same special, to do a Tennessee Williams satire, an Ingmar Bergman satire, you know. This stuff was not that common in television at the time.
1:19:47 Rick Rubin? Would you all work in a room together?
1:19:49 Speaker 01 At the Sid Caesar Show, you did, yeah.
1:19:52 Rick Rubin? And would you finish each other's jokes or add on to each other's?
1:19:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were all very nice people. You'd add on or top a joke, yeah. It was what you would expect. People wandering around aimlessly and doing jokes and each one building on a joke or, or making a better joke. And sometimes fighting for your joke, you know. I've written very often with just one other writer, you know, with like Larry Yelbart or something, or Mel Brooks and one other writer, Mel Tolkien, or just with Marshall Brickman, who I collaborated with, Mickey Rose. And it's easier with two people.
1:20:40 Speaker 01 For me, it's easiest by myself. But with two people, if you're friendly, and I was friendly with those people, it was, it was easier. Once you get more people in the room, it becomes, you know, a little more chaotic.
1:20:55 Rick Rubin? I understand.
1:20:56 Speaker 01 On The Caesar Show, you know, Sid was always in the room as a major contributor. I mean, you just wasn't the comic that you gave stuff to. He contributed.
1:21:07 Rick Rubin? What was he like, Sid Caesar?
1:21:09 Speaker 01 Grandios. He was large, generous, very brilliant, hilariously funny. Everybody and his brother today is called a comic genius. But Sid really was a genius. And he had a very large personality, very big and, you know, he was not shy. It was, I can only say, large and hilariously funny and very generous.
1:21:37 Rick Rubin? When you were younger, who were the other comedians that you looked up to? Who were the greats from childhood?
1:21:43 Speaker 01 Well, Sid, because when he came along, I was only, you know, like 12 years old or something. W.C. Fields, Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, of course.
1:21:53 Speaker 01 These were my idols and I loved Mike Nichols and Elaine May and Jonathan Winters and Mort Saul, of course. There were some other comedians that I thought, you know, were quite funny. I mean, I thought Henry Youngman was hilariously funny. Mel Kamen was very funny, not well-known, but very funny. And all of those guys were kind of funny in a certain way. All those Borshboat guys, Phil Foster and Jackie Leonard. You know, they all had a certain funniest, but the ones that really knocked me out were the ones I mentioned, Bob Hope, Lucy Fields, Garth O'Marks.
1:22:35 Speaker 01 Those were the ones that I grew up with, that I thought were hilarious.
1:22:40 Rick Rubin? Did you ever meet Jerry Lewis?
1:22:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, I knew Jerry Lewis pretty well. Jerry Lewis, I found to be an enormous talent. But the films didn't add up. You know, he squandered it, I thought, so much of it. He was such a talented guy. You know, when he danced like Fred Astaire.
1:23:01 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:23:02 Speaker 01 You could see, oh, God, that's Fred Astaire he's doing. And he looked like him. If he sang, whatever he did, when he'd do his nightclub act and do stuff, his typewriter thing, throw that cane way up in the air and spin around and catch it. He could dance a little. What he needed was somebody disciplining him. He was like an atomic bomb. You had to use him right. And nobody ever did. You know, he did those silly movies and they're all silly. And within those silly movies, you could see how gifted he was. And you wished that somebody had used him for a good movie.
1:23:47 Speaker 01 Now, years later, Scorsese did, but it was a serious movie. But you wished Jerry had just given himself over to somebody and trusted him. Then you could have turned out a brilliant comedy with him.
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