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In 2009, I put out a book of interviews I conducted with my favorite comedy writers.
It was calledAnd Heres the Kicker.
Theres aHeaven Can Waitreference I could use right now, but Ill save you the time and agony.
Instead, Ill just say this:
Plastics.
Is there a more prophetic line in all of comedy?
Buck Henry seemed destined for a life in show business from an early age.
The sixties were, by all accounts, a golden era for Henry.
In 1965, he and Mel Brooks co-created the Emmy Awardwinning sitcomGet Smart, which ran until 1970.
But it wasSaturday Night Livethat turned Henry into a household name.
Its just common sense.
True?All true.
Youve mentioned in the past that you have a voyeur nature.
Is this an example?I think all writers should have a voyeur nature.
You have to look and listen.
Thats why some writers might run out of material; theyre not looking, theyre not listening.
How do you achieve this?
Your observations are based on what you see on television and not what is going on in reality.
I think its important to stay in contact with the outside world.
How early did you begin writing?Early.
What was the twist?I dont remember.
This was in a military school, the Harvard School for Boys, in California.
Did your teachers ever find that metaphor and successfully prove the plagiarism charge?No, they didnt.
There wasnt a lot of need for the student body to be doing creative writing.
You had a dichotomous childhood military on one hand, Hollywood and show business on the other.Thats true.
My mother was an actress who had left Portland, Oregon, to make it in Hollywood.
Did you always gravitate toward comedy rather than other genres?
I rarely go to comedies.
I just dont find comedy as interesting as the forms that I dont do myself.
Its harder to make me laugh than it is to make me cry.
You once said that comedy covers a lot of faults.It is defensive in nature.
With comedy, you deflect danger.
You cover up emotion.
You engage your enemy without getting your face smashed in.
Comedy is also harder to write.
Things are either funny or theyre not.
You cant fake it with comedy.
How did you first get involved in show business?
Improv came easily to me, and it didnt seem like a special art form in and of itself.
Not everyone was capable of doing it, though.
Its sort of like sight-reading.
Some actors can do it, and some cant.
And that in no way suggests whether you have real talent or not.
That job really led to everything else.
After The Premise, I got a job writing forThe Steve Allen Showin the early sixties.
What was it like writing for Steve Allen?He was one of the most interesting comedians working.
He was great with language, and he was really more contemporary than anyone else.
He also had a good eye for talent.
Those who first appeared on that one short-lived show included me, the Smothers Brothers, and Tim Conway.
Steve was also one of the first hosts to have Lenny Bruce on his show.
Steve was genial and funny, and he had a lot of interests, including jazz piano.
He wrote a lot of songs, which still bring in money.
People only remember This Could Be the Start of Something Big, but he wrote literally thousands of others.
He was very influential with talk-show hosts that came after him.
I know that David Letterman was a big fan.Not just with hosts, but with comedy writers.
Why do you think that was?It was the key in of humor that he performed.
There were never any sitcom-bang out jokes written for Steve, ever.
We mostly wrote parodies and satires of politicians and political events, and also pop-culture situations.
Garry Moore is a talent one doesnt hear about much anymore.
Who was he?He was an actor and a comedian.
He had a huge following in the forties and fifties among normal people.
There was nothing hip or contemporary or modern or pretentious in any way about him.
He was just the nicest, most straightforward guy.
As opposed toThe Steve Allen Show,Garrys show was very conventional.
He did a lot of strict parodies and that sort of thing.
One week it would be George Gobel; the next week, someone else.
And I would write a parody of a movie or a play or maybe a political event.
Do you prefer one form to the other?
Youre better known for satire than parody.One is a child of the other.
Satire is usually more political, parody is usually more cultural.
But onThe Garry Moore Show,parody was what was called for.
With Steve Allen, we did all sorts of different things.
Steve was really ahead of his time.
All of the man in the street bits originated with Steve.
Also, Steve fooled around with language.
He was a smart man.
When we rehearsed the show, we never used real punch lines.
We substituted nonsense words for the punch lines.
Just dummy text, like Hutsut rawlston on the rillaw.
Why?So that the band wouldnt know what the punch lines were.
It was important to Steve that the band laugh during the show; it meant more to him.
There were eight takes, but once the first take was over, everyone knew what the joke was.
I then quit listening.
Once I did, my feeling was,This is going to make a very good movie.
There were strong characters and a good story.
The book is dialogue-heavy.
Did that make the process of translating it to the screen easier for you?Sure.
The more there is to steal, the easier the job although, in some cases, it isnt.
In fact, sometimes its just the opposite, because you cant figure out what to get rid of.
You never really know.
WithThe Graduate,nobody expected that what happened was going to happen.
How about specific lines and jokes?
Such as the famous plastics line?Right.
I had no idea what would happen with that line.
I just thought that the line was good as a passing moment.
Everything about that scene appealed to me, and the plastics line was only a part of it.
The line was not in the book.
I always remembered that phrase.
But plastics was just perfect.
It captured something in that scene that another word never could have.
Everyones been through it.
Every guy in my generation who went to college and had ambivalent relationships with his parents.
Everybody in the middle class, anyway.
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 its a windy day.
his papers keep blowing away.
Dustins character becomes more and more frantic, and hes unable to improvise a new speech.
Its an incredible piece of American cultural history.
And a few men, including L.B.J., moved to the podium to help Frost.
Jesus Christ, Im 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.
Weve got a whole film here.
What do we need to go with that for?
Ill sometimes start a movie with a scene thats a teeny, teeny capsule version of the movies 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 hes going to have to struggle.
And that graduation scene captured that essence.
It became just as good, if not better, than the graduation scene.
Less is more; it just works for everything.
In the end, who needed that more elaborate scene?
As he starts to turn back, he looks up at Elaines portrait.
There is a movement reflected in the glass of the portrait.
With Nichols, though, we were on the same wavelength.
And Nichols made it look exactly as I had written it.
Thats 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 didnt 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.
I hate those signposts.
Id rather leave it to the actors imaginations.
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, Were okay.
Where the hell are they going to go?
Theyve made a huge leap into an unknown future, and thats 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 dont know.
But we didnt need it.
Its sort of like life.
I think its a terrific end moment.
Its the happiest ending I ever wrote.
But it was very difficult.
The book isnt about surrealism.
Actually, I always thought of the movie as a fever.
I tried to find interesting ways to do that on film.
Most of the scenes worked; a few didnt.
The few that didnt, though, were harmful to the rest of the movie.
Which scenes do you think didnt work?One in particular.
Its the scene in which Yossarian takes the place of the soldier whos dying in a hospital bed.
The dying soldiers family comes in, and they have this weird pretense that Yossarian is their son.
I think its one of the most powerful sequences Ive ever seen in my life.
It makes me cry.
But when we screenedCatch-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 thats always bothered me.
In retrospect, what would you have done differently?I dont 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 hadnt.
Maybe I knew the book too well.
I knew which character was running away from which character; I knew which character stabbed which character.
Its one of the most beautiful comedies I think Ive ever seen.
Its gorgeous to look at.It is great to look at.
David Watkin was the cinematographer, and I love the Watkin look.
He also didChariots of FireandOut of Africa.Its very beautiful and very moving in its own way.
But maybe it was moving in the wrong way for a comedy.
I dont think you’re free to do laugh-out-loud comedy that is beautifully backlit.
Thats an interesting point early comedies arent necessarily beautiful.Not at all.
No one gives a shit.
God knows what the light sources were.
The comedies looked terrible.
But at least you could make out facial expressions you cant when a scene is lit from behind.
And thats 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 wouldnt do it; he wouldnt fall for it.
I knew what the military felt like, what it sounded like.
Some war films get it right, and some dont.
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 dont know enough about life?Maybe not.
Then they wanted to write for Carson or Letterman.
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.
Theres a whole bunch of these shows now.
Sorkin writes all those scripts, but there are other writers writing for him.
At least thats the way I understand it.
But I think thats great, actually.
I think its a great way to go.
Its like the old studio system in a way.
Thats something youd like to do create a TV series?I would, I would.
I wouldnt mind doing it in that context, because I cant think up stories.
Im not that prolific when it comes to writing plot.
I can write dialogue forever.
It was very easy for me.
Well, that was their excuse, anyway.
I mean, in the pilot, here was this dopey hero.
And the show also featured a cowardlydog.
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 shouldnt 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?
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 were both no good at plot.
Do you have any regrets about specific jokes from any of your movies or TV shows?
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 didnt work.
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, Youre not anybody in America unless youre on TV.Thats an American disease.
And its only become truer now than it was when the movie came out.
God almighty, the reality shows alone!
I can give a show like that five minutes, and then thats it.
I find it completely revolting.
That sort of thing drives me crazy.
Nobody can speak proper English anymore.
Most of the characters in that movie arent very bright, but Im very fond of them.
You cant write characters and not be fond of them, I think.
Were you fond of Nicole Kidmans character, Suzanne?
She was a murderer.Oh, totally.
Im crazy about her.
Victims are interesting to me, but even more interesting are the victimizers.
Dont we all love the girls who do bad things, who break guys out of jail?
Well, I married one.Has she got a sister?
You were forty-four when the show first aired and quite a bit older than the cast at the time.
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 wouldnt think of as being hosts.
They werent just actors plugging famous movies.
They were people like Desi Arnaz or Broderick Crawford, fromAll the Kings Men[1949].
They were peculiar hosts, almost punch lines.
I said, God yes.
Where else could you ever do something like that?
What was the sketch about?It was a little odd.
ODonoghue came into the office, and he did this routine about being an impressionist.
It was pure Dada.
I laughed so hard I fell on the floor.
He would say, He doesnt soundanythinglike the guy!
Hes not doing Mike Douglas.
Why would Mike Douglas put his eyes out?
Why not do the samurai character in different situations over and over again?
The repetition is funny in and of itself.
John Belushis samurai character had been done before I got there; I think it was Samurai Hotel.
When I came on the show, I said, Lets do Samurai Delicatessen or something like that.
And then came Samurai Tailor and Samurai Stockbroker and Samurai Optometrist, and on and on.
What was it like to work so closely withJohn Belushi?
Theres been a lot written about his genius.
They were all highly original minds.
All of them had a wealth of characters they could do, and they were wonderful to work with.
In particular, Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase were two of the funniest humans I have ever known.
I dont know what it was about John that made him so good.
It was a great contrast and enjoyable to watch.
What do you think madeGilda Radnerso good?
But it wasnt as if she was working off sentiment.
Theres a difference between sentiment and affection.
She had affection for all of those characters she played, and it showed.
But she also had a sadness to her.
I would find her crying from time to time during shows and after shows.
Im not sure why, really.
When she was happy, she was wildly happy, but she had her down times.
Its amazing to look back at those early shows and see how young the cast was.
You gain a confidence.
Most of theSNLcast members came from that background.
I played Charles Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic and jerking off to a pornographic magazine.
I welcomed the weirdness of that sketch and others.
I dont think you could do a sketch like Uncle Roy these days.
The games they play are great fun to them.
Anne and Rosie were better at convincing the shows censor than two male writers would have been.
We only did a few of those Uncle Roy sketches.
I looked at the camera and said, Oh, thats not true.
I bet theres an Uncle Roy ineveryfamily.
I thought,This is going to be interesting.
He put a real gash in it, and I needed a bandage.
I mean, to have the freedom and imagination to do that, it was just great.
We turned off the lights and left.
The next year a new cast was brought onto the show, and I never returned.
Youve said that luck plays a big part in any creative career.
Do you think it played a part in your career?Oh, sure.
In what sense?Timing is when a movie comes out.
Timing is what the countrys political disposition is when a movie is released.
Its what people are thinking about what they want to see.
You really cant control that as a writer.
But if youre talented, itll all work out in the end.
I mean, not all the talented writers will make it, of course.
But, for the most part, if youre talented, I think somebody will find you.
Any last words?In this life?
These were my last words.
