Mr. Media Interviews by Bob Andelman
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Michael Uslan, THE DARK KNIGHT, THE SPIRIT executive producer: Mr. Media Audio Interview
Kids, if you want to grow up to be a successful executive producer of movies like Michael Uslan ("YOU-slin") did, the key is education – and patience. Lots and lots of patience.
Uslan secured the rights to make Batman movies years before Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, and Jack Nicholson dreamed of working together.
And he couldn’t give away the rights to Will Eisner’s The Spirit.
But his patience and determination paid off. This year, the sixth Batman movie – The Dark Knight – and first Spirit movie will come to a multiplex near you, joining previous Uslan productions such as Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman and Robin, Batman Begins, Catwoman, Constantine, National Treasure, Swamp Thing – well, you get the idea.
And he’s not one to rest on his laurels, either. Uslan’s current projects in development include Shazam!, The Shadow, and Constantine 2.
If you love comic books, and especially movies made from comic books, please welcome Michael Uslan to Mr. Media.
You can LISTEN to this interview by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!
Open in your default player
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© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Uslan secured the rights to make Batman movies years before Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, and Jack Nicholson dreamed of working together.
And he couldn’t give away the rights to Will Eisner’s The Spirit.
But his patience and determination paid off. This year, the sixth Batman movie – The Dark Knight – and first Spirit movie will come to a multiplex near you, joining previous Uslan productions such as Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman and Robin, Batman Begins, Catwoman, Constantine, National Treasure, Swamp Thing – well, you get the idea.
And he’s not one to rest on his laurels, either. Uslan’s current projects in development include Shazam!, The Shadow, and Constantine 2.
If you love comic books, and especially movies made from comic books, please welcome Michael Uslan to Mr. Media.
You can LISTEN to this interview by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!
Detach into a separate window
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Batman, Chris Nolan, comic books, Constantine 2, DC Comics, Frank Miller, Heath Ledger, In the Shadow of the Moon, Michael Uslan, National Treasure, Shazam, Will Eisner's The Spirit movie
¶ 7:56 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Raging Debate Over Frank Miller's "Interpretation" of Will Eisner's The Spirit
We hear a lot of whispering about Frank Miller's upcoming cinematic take on Will Eisner's "The Spirit." And with the first trailer due to be released in just a few days at New York Comic-Con, the whispering is picking up steam, especially as the first green screen images were leaked to the fan press a few days ago.
Of course, if you're old enough to remember the brouhaha about Michael Keaton as "Batman," you know it's too early to accurately judge.
On the other hand Brandon Routh as "Superman"? Terribly miscast, poor guy.
Anyway, if you'd like to keep up with the debate - or participate in the conversation - check out this message board over at The Comics Journal. You can also see green screen shots there of Gabriel Macht as The Spirit, Samuel L. Jackson as The Octopus, and several more, including a hot shot of Eva Mendes.
We hear a lot of whispering about Frank Miller's upcoming cinematic take on Will Eisner's "The Spirit." And with the first trailer due to be released in just a few days at New York Comic-Con, the whispering is picking up steam, especially as the first green screen images were leaked to the fan press a few days ago.
Of course, if you're old enough to remember the brouhaha about Michael Keaton as "Batman," you know it's too early to accurately judge.
On the other hand Brandon Routh as "Superman"? Terribly miscast, poor guy.
Anyway, if you'd like to keep up with the debate - or participate in the conversation - check out this message board over at The Comics Journal. You can also see green screen shots there of Gabriel Macht as The Spirit, Samuel L. Jackson as The Octopus, and several more, including a hot shot of Eva Mendes.
Labels: Batman, Eva Mendes, Frank Miller, Gabriel Macht, Lionsgate, Odd Lot Entertainment, Samuel L. Jackson, The Comics Journal, The Spirit movie, Will Eisner
¶ 9:51 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Monday, March 31, 2008
Danny Fingeroth, DISGUISED AS CLARK KENT, SUPERMAN ON THE COUCH, author, comics editor: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2
Return to Part 1!
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I’ve lived in Florida now for 30 years. I think probably just about the same time you got to Marvel I was coming to Florida, and I’ve been hearing ever since that we need to lock down the state, we need to close the exits, not let anymore people in here to spoil what we’ve got. Good luck with that. You got a state surrounded by water. Good luck locking it up. Tell me a little bit about Superman on the Couch. And I’m gonna be perfectly honest. I think you already know this. I have not read the book, but I love the title, and I love what I’ve read about it. What was the driving force in that book?
DANNY FINGEROTH: That was the idea of taking my experience as a comics professional. I’m trying to sort out a lot of different answers to that. There’ve been a lot of books, obviously, written about comics and comics history, but as far as I can tell, since Dr. Frederic Wertham, there has been no psychiatrist or even psychologist who has written a complete book about comics. They’ve written about everything else and every other pop culture movies and TV and the Internet and theater and painting, but no psychiatrist ever found it worthy. I’m not a psychiatrist nor do I play one on TV, but I thought taking a psychologically-oriented look at superheroes and why people love them. And also the added thing of me having been someone who wrote and edited comics for decades, specifically superhero comics, I thought I would bring -- as I do to Disguised as Clark Kent -- a point of view of an insider that, as good as a critic or an academic may be, they don’t have that insider knowledge.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Right, right.
FINGEROTH: And by the same token, everybody knows and loves those characters. If you have a society where there’s people really with masks and advanced technology going around taking the law into their own hands, you just have to look at the news to see societies like that are in really big trouble. You don’t want to live in a society like that, and yet even people who may regard themselves as pacifists or just completely opposed to violence, “Oh yeah, Spider-Man, he’s so cool.” “Wonder Woman, she’s a role model for me.” So that was really what Superman on the Couch was about. Why it was that people had such warm, fuzzy feelings about what were essentially vigilante fantasy figures.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: This is gonna be a strange connection, but I was listening to Howard Stern this morning, and he had another DJ on there, Jay Thomas. And Thomas was in quite a mood, and he was talking about how what he’d really like to do is get somebody who could just go out on the streets and collect up all the scum, give them an injection, and be done with them. And then Robin Quivers said to him, “But Jay, why is it you should be the one to make the decision about who is scum and who is not?” But that’s exactly what we’re talking about, right?
FINGEROTH: The fantasy of the superhero really is less about the superpowers than about that ability to wield power wisely - the idea that Superman will just knock somebody out and that Spider-Man will web somebody up and leave them for the police. There was that darkening of the superhero that started in the wake of Watchmen and Dark Knight that sort of took the surface veneer of those stories without really investigating the subtleties of them, and suddenly you had characters like the Punisher, who goes out and kills people.
I’m not sure how many of your listeners read comics currently, but that’s the whole sort of dialect, if you’ll pardon the expression, in comics now. How realistic do you want your superhero to be? Yes, if they really were superheroes, they probably would be crazy and probably would be sadistic and probably would do horrendous things, whether on purpose or by accident. But then it’s not really the same fantasy anymore, is it? It’s a bleaker fantasy. It’s not something that’s inspiring or uplifting.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I was going to ask you about this later in a different way, but let’s go ahead and touch it now. I was one of those kids who grew up reading comics all the time who loved comics. I had to have my comics fix. And then you grow up, and you move on to other things. And then when I had my kid, I started looking again cause I thought, “Hey, great chance to go back and start reading them and introduce my kid to all these great times I had.” But I look at them the last couple years, talk about dark, just the covers, the images, the colors that are being used. It’s all dark. It completely turns me off. I don’t know. I guess it’s just the day and age, or maybe I’m just old.
FINGEROTH: You’re preaching to the choir here, because I agree with you. I think it’s a couple of different things. An online columnist, I forget, and he’s phrased it much better than I will, but we’re sort of at the point now where no matter what you do or what your interests are, you know who Spider-Man is. Spider-Man – Peter Parker, Superman – Clark Kent, Batman – Bruce Wayne. You know all those basic things even if you haven’t picked up a comic for 25 years, but those are not really the characters so much in the comics anymore. Many of them in the comics have darkened in attitude and become more “realistic.” I think it was Tom Spurgeon, if I’m quoting him correctly, but the idea we’re at this point now where what do you end up with when you take a child fantasy and incorporate adult sensibilities? What if Huckleberry Hound suddenly became a dark, gritty vigilante? What if Babar suddenly kicked butt and took names? It really is what happens.
I gave a talk up at a college in Westchester a couple years ago, and a student there named Carl Wadley, I always like to give him credit, he encapsulated the entire kind of argument in comics for the past 30 years. He said, “I’d rather read stories about noble people screwing up than about messed up people doing messed up things.” And that’s really sort of the two sides of the argument in comic books today. When people go to the movies, you’re seeing basically the Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, John Romita Spider-Man. You see the Lee and Kirby Fantastic Four. Those are the aspects of superheroes that are still most appealing to the widest range of people.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Danny, speaking of Jews in comics, how long did you work for Marvel as a writer and an editor?
FINGEROTH: I was there from 1977 till 1995.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Wow! That’s a long time.
FINGEROTH: That is a long time.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Tell me what it was like when you got there and tell me what it was like when you left. How different was it?
FINGEROTH: Boy. When I got there, I sort of had an interesting perspective. I was working in what was called the British department where we prepared reprint comics in black and white to compete in the British market with the British weeklies, and we were also putting out the only original material was something called “Captain Britain.” And I was working for Larry Lieber who, of course, is Stan Lee’s brother, and Larry wrote a lot of the early Marvel… He scripted the first issue of Thor and, I think, of Iron Man. He was there at the creation.
At that point in comics history, I think we all had the feeling that we were sort of there at the tail end of this kind of quaint folk art, and we should just enjoy it while it lasted, and then the last person out be sure to turn off the lights. And it wasn’t even depressing in that sense. It’s just like sort of it was just a fact of life. It’s like okay, we had a pretty good run for 40, 50 years, and now kids are into other stuff, and let’s enjoy it while we can.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: And a generation later -- 18 years passes -- and then what was it like?
FINGEROTH: Well, obviously, the business did not die in the late ‘70s. There were several key creators as well as the creation and the expansion of the direct market system of comics distribution, which is also, ironically, as we like to say in comics, is part of the problem with the comics now because…If you want, we can get into that. But, basically, the system that saved comics was also endangering it, but in between, there were a couple of booms and busts. There was a great speculator boom in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. And then a lot of stuff went on that became somewhat unpleasant at the company. Plus, I had an offer from Byron Preiss to go work for him, if you know that name.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I know Byron, yeah. I knew Byron. Very sad, really.
FINGEROTH: It was really tragic. He died in a car crash. So we came off this incredible high of these huge sales, which were largely but not completely fueled by speculators. So we had these record-breaking, all-time high sales, and then there was when the business kind of imploded in ’93, ’94, ’95. Believe it or not, nobody actually needs comic books. If you don’t have comic books, you can probably have a quality life.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: What? What are you saying, man?
FINGEROTH: A highly diminished quality of life, but I’ve heard you can live without them. So it’s always fan-driven and habit-driven. Again, if you want to talk about the ‘90s, we can do that, but that certainly was the state when I left there. And as I say, there was all sorts of strangeness going on at the company and in the industry in general at that point.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Hi, is there a call there for Danny?
COLLEEN: Yes. It’s me. It’s Colleen here.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Hey, Colleen. How are ya?
COLLEEN: Fine, thank you. I’ve got one question, and I was gonna ask a second one, but I think you answered it. The second one was do you find comics now being superimposed by online comic and the online media? I guess nobody buys comics anymore. The second question then was, do you really think that there isn’t a need for comics anymore cause I remember reading all these comics that you’ve mentioned like Superman and Batman as well? I guess it’s sort of like you look forward to seeing it on the TV. So what do you reckon is going to happen to comics?
FINGEROTH: If I knew that, I’d be a rich man today, but there’s a few different answers. If you go to your local Barnes and Noble or Borders, and you go to the manga section, you’ll find yourself tripping over actual children and teenagers reading comics. So that is a big part of the future. Whether that future will include Spandex-clad superheroes is another story.
But there certainly is a generation of young people who are learning the pleasures of reading comics. And when I said nobody is buying comics, I mean certainly Marvel and DC still have very profitable publishing divisions. It’s just people aren’t buying them the way they did, say, 30 years ago. There’s a whole trade paperback market and a collectibles market. And also there’s a whole other world that I’m sort of learning about myself in this Rough Guide to Graphic Novels I’m writing. That is the literary graphic novel, sort of Maus and its descendants, the kind of the next generation or two after the underground - comics as an expression of personal experience or history or journalism or fantasy, but comics or sequential art or graphic novels that, again, aren’t about superheroes.
I think the art form is alive and well. I think superheroes, I’ve heard them, and I’ve likened them myself, say, to jazz, whereas jazz was once the mainstream pop music of America, now it’s a strong niche but a niche nonetheless. I think superhero comics has gotten to that point where there’s still an audience, and there definitely is a whole world online. That is really unknown territory, and there’s a million comics online, some better than others, like anything else. The riddle that no one has solved yet is how do you make money off it? Even the most popular web cartoonists seem to make the bulk of their income from collected print editions or from T-shirts or toys or all kinds of merchandising. So I think the idea of comics dying out is not happening, but it is transforming in several different directions.
COLLEEN: Because you also mention the superheroes, and it’s going to be after my first question. That was my first question. That was, as I watch all the comic strips as I’ve mentioned before, did the characters come about, aren’t they representative of the superhero role models that we hope children follow? But the thing about that is, aren’t comic representatives, aren’t they sort of like representing a kind of type of behavior in I’ll say the ‘80s and the ‘90s rather than now? Are comics really appropriate for today’s modern children who know about computers and about all different types of remedies and illnesses and so more than we do, more than I did when I was a child?
FINGEROTH: Do you mean the medium itself or the content?
COLLEEN: The content, yes.
FINGEROTH: Look, if you’re going to read a superhero comic book, you have to have a certain suspension or disbelief, as it’s called, in a lot of ways. If you really, truly believe that they are role models for solving problems simply through punching somebody or shooting somebody, then clearly you may want to keep your children away from them.
If you think they’re metaphors for reaching in and finding the best in yourself and that the physical conflict is more symbolic of inner and psychological conflict, then, as fairy tales are or as certain children’s books or children’s movies are, then I think properly-guided or even minimally-guided, I think especially the older comics, which they’re reprinting in low-priced editions, are very appropriate for kids. It has to do, really, with parental oversight and responsibility. A kid will buy the bright, shiny thing or the thing he thinks is cool or the thing he thinks is forbidden or she thinks is forbidden. I think the thing with comics always was that they were slightly disreputable so that your parents might disapprove but not so terrible that they would forbid them outright. It’s a tough thing.
When you deal in creating popular culture as a profession, it’s a question you ask yourself all the time. What is my responsibility here, if any, and where do I fit in on the whole continuum of the pop culture stew that people are exposed to? And I don’t claim to know the answer. I feel like I read superhero comics growing up, and I know the difference between real violence and comic book style action, and I like to think that most people can tell that difference as well.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Colleen, thank you very much for calling.
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© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I’ve lived in Florida now for 30 years. I think probably just about the same time you got to Marvel I was coming to Florida, and I’ve been hearing ever since that we need to lock down the state, we need to close the exits, not let anymore people in here to spoil what we’ve got. Good luck with that. You got a state surrounded by water. Good luck locking it up. Tell me a little bit about Superman on the Couch. And I’m gonna be perfectly honest. I think you already know this. I have not read the book, but I love the title, and I love what I’ve read about it. What was the driving force in that book?
DANNY FINGEROTH: That was the idea of taking my experience as a comics professional. I’m trying to sort out a lot of different answers to that. There’ve been a lot of books, obviously, written about comics and comics history, but as far as I can tell, since Dr. Frederic Wertham, there has been no psychiatrist or even psychologist who has written a complete book about comics. They’ve written about everything else and every other pop culture movies and TV and the Internet and theater and painting, but no psychiatrist ever found it worthy. I’m not a psychiatrist nor do I play one on TV, but I thought taking a psychologically-oriented look at superheroes and why people love them. And also the added thing of me having been someone who wrote and edited comics for decades, specifically superhero comics, I thought I would bring -- as I do to Disguised as Clark Kent -- a point of view of an insider that, as good as a critic or an academic may be, they don’t have that insider knowledge.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Right, right.
FINGEROTH: And by the same token, everybody knows and loves those characters. If you have a society where there’s people really with masks and advanced technology going around taking the law into their own hands, you just have to look at the news to see societies like that are in really big trouble. You don’t want to live in a society like that, and yet even people who may regard themselves as pacifists or just completely opposed to violence, “Oh yeah, Spider-Man, he’s so cool.” “Wonder Woman, she’s a role model for me.” So that was really what Superman on the Couch was about. Why it was that people had such warm, fuzzy feelings about what were essentially vigilante fantasy figures.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: This is gonna be a strange connection, but I was listening to Howard Stern this morning, and he had another DJ on there, Jay Thomas. And Thomas was in quite a mood, and he was talking about how what he’d really like to do is get somebody who could just go out on the streets and collect up all the scum, give them an injection, and be done with them. And then Robin Quivers said to him, “But Jay, why is it you should be the one to make the decision about who is scum and who is not?” But that’s exactly what we’re talking about, right?
FINGEROTH: The fantasy of the superhero really is less about the superpowers than about that ability to wield power wisely - the idea that Superman will just knock somebody out and that Spider-Man will web somebody up and leave them for the police. There was that darkening of the superhero that started in the wake of Watchmen and Dark Knight that sort of took the surface veneer of those stories without really investigating the subtleties of them, and suddenly you had characters like the Punisher, who goes out and kills people.
I’m not sure how many of your listeners read comics currently, but that’s the whole sort of dialect, if you’ll pardon the expression, in comics now. How realistic do you want your superhero to be? Yes, if they really were superheroes, they probably would be crazy and probably would be sadistic and probably would do horrendous things, whether on purpose or by accident. But then it’s not really the same fantasy anymore, is it? It’s a bleaker fantasy. It’s not something that’s inspiring or uplifting.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I was going to ask you about this later in a different way, but let’s go ahead and touch it now. I was one of those kids who grew up reading comics all the time who loved comics. I had to have my comics fix. And then you grow up, and you move on to other things. And then when I had my kid, I started looking again cause I thought, “Hey, great chance to go back and start reading them and introduce my kid to all these great times I had.” But I look at them the last couple years, talk about dark, just the covers, the images, the colors that are being used. It’s all dark. It completely turns me off. I don’t know. I guess it’s just the day and age, or maybe I’m just old.
FINGEROTH: You’re preaching to the choir here, because I agree with you. I think it’s a couple of different things. An online columnist, I forget, and he’s phrased it much better than I will, but we’re sort of at the point now where no matter what you do or what your interests are, you know who Spider-Man is. Spider-Man – Peter Parker, Superman – Clark Kent, Batman – Bruce Wayne. You know all those basic things even if you haven’t picked up a comic for 25 years, but those are not really the characters so much in the comics anymore. Many of them in the comics have darkened in attitude and become more “realistic.” I think it was Tom Spurgeon, if I’m quoting him correctly, but the idea we’re at this point now where what do you end up with when you take a child fantasy and incorporate adult sensibilities? What if Huckleberry Hound suddenly became a dark, gritty vigilante? What if Babar suddenly kicked butt and took names? It really is what happens.
I gave a talk up at a college in Westchester a couple years ago, and a student there named Carl Wadley, I always like to give him credit, he encapsulated the entire kind of argument in comics for the past 30 years. He said, “I’d rather read stories about noble people screwing up than about messed up people doing messed up things.” And that’s really sort of the two sides of the argument in comic books today. When people go to the movies, you’re seeing basically the Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, John Romita Spider-Man. You see the Lee and Kirby Fantastic Four. Those are the aspects of superheroes that are still most appealing to the widest range of people.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Danny, speaking of Jews in comics, how long did you work for Marvel as a writer and an editor?
FINGEROTH: I was there from 1977 till 1995.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Wow! That’s a long time.
FINGEROTH: That is a long time.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Tell me what it was like when you got there and tell me what it was like when you left. How different was it?
FINGEROTH: Boy. When I got there, I sort of had an interesting perspective. I was working in what was called the British department where we prepared reprint comics in black and white to compete in the British market with the British weeklies, and we were also putting out the only original material was something called “Captain Britain.” And I was working for Larry Lieber who, of course, is Stan Lee’s brother, and Larry wrote a lot of the early Marvel… He scripted the first issue of Thor and, I think, of Iron Man. He was there at the creation.
At that point in comics history, I think we all had the feeling that we were sort of there at the tail end of this kind of quaint folk art, and we should just enjoy it while it lasted, and then the last person out be sure to turn off the lights. And it wasn’t even depressing in that sense. It’s just like sort of it was just a fact of life. It’s like okay, we had a pretty good run for 40, 50 years, and now kids are into other stuff, and let’s enjoy it while we can.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: And a generation later -- 18 years passes -- and then what was it like?
FINGEROTH: Well, obviously, the business did not die in the late ‘70s. There were several key creators as well as the creation and the expansion of the direct market system of comics distribution, which is also, ironically, as we like to say in comics, is part of the problem with the comics now because…If you want, we can get into that. But, basically, the system that saved comics was also endangering it, but in between, there were a couple of booms and busts. There was a great speculator boom in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. And then a lot of stuff went on that became somewhat unpleasant at the company. Plus, I had an offer from Byron Preiss to go work for him, if you know that name.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I know Byron, yeah. I knew Byron. Very sad, really.
FINGEROTH: It was really tragic. He died in a car crash. So we came off this incredible high of these huge sales, which were largely but not completely fueled by speculators. So we had these record-breaking, all-time high sales, and then there was when the business kind of imploded in ’93, ’94, ’95. Believe it or not, nobody actually needs comic books. If you don’t have comic books, you can probably have a quality life.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: What? What are you saying, man?
FINGEROTH: A highly diminished quality of life, but I’ve heard you can live without them. So it’s always fan-driven and habit-driven. Again, if you want to talk about the ‘90s, we can do that, but that certainly was the state when I left there. And as I say, there was all sorts of strangeness going on at the company and in the industry in general at that point.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Hi, is there a call there for Danny?
COLLEEN: Yes. It’s me. It’s Colleen here.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Hey, Colleen. How are ya?
COLLEEN: Fine, thank you. I’ve got one question, and I was gonna ask a second one, but I think you answered it. The second one was do you find comics now being superimposed by online comic and the online media? I guess nobody buys comics anymore. The second question then was, do you really think that there isn’t a need for comics anymore cause I remember reading all these comics that you’ve mentioned like Superman and Batman as well? I guess it’s sort of like you look forward to seeing it on the TV. So what do you reckon is going to happen to comics?
FINGEROTH: If I knew that, I’d be a rich man today, but there’s a few different answers. If you go to your local Barnes and Noble or Borders, and you go to the manga section, you’ll find yourself tripping over actual children and teenagers reading comics. So that is a big part of the future. Whether that future will include Spandex-clad superheroes is another story.
But there certainly is a generation of young people who are learning the pleasures of reading comics. And when I said nobody is buying comics, I mean certainly Marvel and DC still have very profitable publishing divisions. It’s just people aren’t buying them the way they did, say, 30 years ago. There’s a whole trade paperback market and a collectibles market. And also there’s a whole other world that I’m sort of learning about myself in this Rough Guide to Graphic Novels I’m writing. That is the literary graphic novel, sort of Maus and its descendants, the kind of the next generation or two after the underground - comics as an expression of personal experience or history or journalism or fantasy, but comics or sequential art or graphic novels that, again, aren’t about superheroes.
I think the art form is alive and well. I think superheroes, I’ve heard them, and I’ve likened them myself, say, to jazz, whereas jazz was once the mainstream pop music of America, now it’s a strong niche but a niche nonetheless. I think superhero comics has gotten to that point where there’s still an audience, and there definitely is a whole world online. That is really unknown territory, and there’s a million comics online, some better than others, like anything else. The riddle that no one has solved yet is how do you make money off it? Even the most popular web cartoonists seem to make the bulk of their income from collected print editions or from T-shirts or toys or all kinds of merchandising. So I think the idea of comics dying out is not happening, but it is transforming in several different directions.
COLLEEN: Because you also mention the superheroes, and it’s going to be after my first question. That was my first question. That was, as I watch all the comic strips as I’ve mentioned before, did the characters come about, aren’t they representative of the superhero role models that we hope children follow? But the thing about that is, aren’t comic representatives, aren’t they sort of like representing a kind of type of behavior in I’ll say the ‘80s and the ‘90s rather than now? Are comics really appropriate for today’s modern children who know about computers and about all different types of remedies and illnesses and so more than we do, more than I did when I was a child?
FINGEROTH: Do you mean the medium itself or the content?
COLLEEN: The content, yes.
FINGEROTH: Look, if you’re going to read a superhero comic book, you have to have a certain suspension or disbelief, as it’s called, in a lot of ways. If you really, truly believe that they are role models for solving problems simply through punching somebody or shooting somebody, then clearly you may want to keep your children away from them.
If you think they’re metaphors for reaching in and finding the best in yourself and that the physical conflict is more symbolic of inner and psychological conflict, then, as fairy tales are or as certain children’s books or children’s movies are, then I think properly-guided or even minimally-guided, I think especially the older comics, which they’re reprinting in low-priced editions, are very appropriate for kids. It has to do, really, with parental oversight and responsibility. A kid will buy the bright, shiny thing or the thing he thinks is cool or the thing he thinks is forbidden or she thinks is forbidden. I think the thing with comics always was that they were slightly disreputable so that your parents might disapprove but not so terrible that they would forbid them outright. It’s a tough thing.
When you deal in creating popular culture as a profession, it’s a question you ask yourself all the time. What is my responsibility here, if any, and where do I fit in on the whole continuum of the pop culture stew that people are exposed to? And I don’t claim to know the answer. I feel like I read superhero comics growing up, and I know the difference between real violence and comic book style action, and I like to think that most people can tell that difference as well.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Colleen, thank you very much for calling.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Babar, Batman, Byron Preiss, Captain Britain, Danny Fingeroth, Dark Knight, Disguised as Clark Kent, Dr. Frederic Wertham, Huckleberry Hound, Jews, Larry Lieber, manga, Marvel Comics, Maus, Spandex, Spider-Man, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, superheroes, Thor, vigilante, Watchmen, Wonder Woman
¶ 10:32 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Dennis O'Neil, "Batman" comic book writer/editor: Mr. Media Interview Classic (1997)
Originally Published March 10, 1997
Is it fair to speak the word "Batman" in the same breath as Hamlet?
"There is no one right way to do this character any more than there is one right way to do Hamlet," insists Dennis O'Neil, editor of nine Batman and Batman-related titles for DC Comics. "I realize I'm beginning to sound pretentious, but there are a lot of ways to play Hamlet; there are a lot of ways to play Philip Marlowe to get more contemporary. These characters last because something in them strikes a responsive chord in a lot of people."
Bob Kane may have created Batman, but that was 57 years ago -- ironically, the same month, May, and year, 1939, O'Neil himself was born. "Enough to make you believe in astrology," he jokes. For the last 11 years, the caped crusader's care and feeding has rested with O'Neil.
O'Neil knows this character pretty well, too, having written more than 120 of his adventures since 1968. One of the modern deans of his medium, O'Neil wrote the "Bat-bible" which all Bat-writers have followed for the past decade, whether in comics, animation or film. He also authored the comic book adaptation of the upcoming Bat-film, Batman & Robin, due in theaters this summer.
Also on O'Neil's resume: he has been a guiding force in introducing social issues to comic books, from writing the now classic "Green Lantern-Green Arrow" series on drug abuse 25 years ago to shepherding this month's focus on date rape in the pages of "Robin."
The name of Hamlet came up when O'Neil was asked about the current condition of the Dark Knight, who has weathered permutations ranging from the campy Adam West TV show of the 1960s to the dark and dreary Tim Burton movies of the 1980s. A very different Batman appears in the current cartoon series, "Batman, The Animated Series."
"Any time you take something from one language to another or from one medium to another, you have to really rethink it," O'Neil says. "The Batman cartoon universe is different from the comic books and our Batman is different from the movie universe. I think if I were a disinterested observer, I would find it interesting to see diverse interpretations of this same idea."
O'Neil first spun the character in the months following the cancellation of the ABC "Batman" series in 1968. Since then, Batman and Bruce Wayne's world has been a dark and tortured place.
"We gave the book psychological underpinnings," O'Neil recalls. "They were always implied in the whole idea of Batman, but what we did was bring it to the foreground and put emphasis on them."
The Caped Crusader turned completely humorless and bleak in 1993 when a bad guy named Bane broke his back and nearly killed him in a year-long story called "Knightfall." That incident led to the arrival of a violent new Batman named "Azrael" and an updated costume outlined by sharp edges and an arsenal of high tech new Bat-gadgets, all of which were roundly booed by readers.
O'Neil says that trying out someone other than Bruce Wayne as Batman was a product of the times in which we live.
"We wondered if our notion of hero was outmoded," he says. "Looking at other media, not only comics but popular movies, heroes seemed to be not a whole lot different than the villains in that sometimes the only qualification for heroism that the hero seemed to posses was the ability to commit wholesale slaughter and wisecrack about it. Which is antithetical to my idea of hero. I've always thought physical prowess has to be balanced by some kind of soul.
"We'd been wondering for a long, long time, with his stricture against killing and his Boy Scout morality, if our hero was outmoded," O'Neil continues. "So instead of continuing to avoid the question, we decided to confront it and put out there a Batman who was as genuinely nuts as our Batman was sometimes accused of being."
Throughout that stunt, O'Neil's greatest fear was that readers would actually like the Azrael Batman. "I don't know what exactly we would have done," he admits. "I might have schemed myself out of a job."
But readers hated Azrael in the role.
The storyline consumed 1,164 pages by O'Neil's count -- more than a year in real time -- before Bruce Wayne once more donned his traditional cowl.
"It validated the kind of heroic ideal that Batman has always represented," O'Neil says. "And it told me that at least as far as our audience is concerned, although they may applaud and enjoy the bloodletting, slaughter-type characters at the movies, they could still appreciate an older, nobler idea of what a hero is."
That's why Batman keeps coming back, stronger and ever more intriguing, while his friend Superman struggles through marriage, a ponytail and an electric-blue new costume and powers.
"I think Batman attracted more really good talent over the years," O'Neil says of a perceived creative disparity between the two characters. "Having written both characters, it was that invincible thing that made it difficult for me to handle Superman -- both to identify with him and to write dramatic stories. The nature of melodrama is that the hero has to be in really bad trouble once in a while. There must be conflict and conflict implies that he goes against equals. That's simple, Basic Writing 101. I always found it easier to fulfill those requirements with Batman.
"One of things you heard as an undergraduate 40 years ago was 'Write what you know,' " he says. "Well, I've never stood on a rooftop at 3 a.m., waiting for a grotesque maniac to show up. If I had, the New York Post would have covered it. I think the germ of truth (in Batman stories) is implied."
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Is it fair to speak the word "Batman" in the same breath as Hamlet?
"There is no one right way to do this character any more than there is one right way to do Hamlet," insists Dennis O'Neil, editor of nine Batman and Batman-related titles for DC Comics. "I realize I'm beginning to sound pretentious, but there are a lot of ways to play Hamlet; there are a lot of ways to play Philip Marlowe to get more contemporary. These characters last because something in them strikes a responsive chord in a lot of people."
Bob Kane may have created Batman, but that was 57 years ago -- ironically, the same month, May, and year, 1939, O'Neil himself was born. "Enough to make you believe in astrology," he jokes. For the last 11 years, the caped crusader's care and feeding has rested with O'Neil.
O'Neil knows this character pretty well, too, having written more than 120 of his adventures since 1968. One of the modern deans of his medium, O'Neil wrote the "Bat-bible" which all Bat-writers have followed for the past decade, whether in comics, animation or film. He also authored the comic book adaptation of the upcoming Bat-film, Batman & Robin, due in theaters this summer.
Also on O'Neil's resume: he has been a guiding force in introducing social issues to comic books, from writing the now classic "Green Lantern-Green Arrow" series on drug abuse 25 years ago to shepherding this month's focus on date rape in the pages of "Robin."
The name of Hamlet came up when O'Neil was asked about the current condition of the Dark Knight, who has weathered permutations ranging from the campy Adam West TV show of the 1960s to the dark and dreary Tim Burton movies of the 1980s. A very different Batman appears in the current cartoon series, "Batman, The Animated Series."
"Any time you take something from one language to another or from one medium to another, you have to really rethink it," O'Neil says. "The Batman cartoon universe is different from the comic books and our Batman is different from the movie universe. I think if I were a disinterested observer, I would find it interesting to see diverse interpretations of this same idea."
O'Neil first spun the character in the months following the cancellation of the ABC "Batman" series in 1968. Since then, Batman and Bruce Wayne's world has been a dark and tortured place.
"We gave the book psychological underpinnings," O'Neil recalls. "They were always implied in the whole idea of Batman, but what we did was bring it to the foreground and put emphasis on them."
The Caped Crusader turned completely humorless and bleak in 1993 when a bad guy named Bane broke his back and nearly killed him in a year-long story called "Knightfall." That incident led to the arrival of a violent new Batman named "Azrael" and an updated costume outlined by sharp edges and an arsenal of high tech new Bat-gadgets, all of which were roundly booed by readers.
O'Neil says that trying out someone other than Bruce Wayne as Batman was a product of the times in which we live.
"We wondered if our notion of hero was outmoded," he says. "Looking at other media, not only comics but popular movies, heroes seemed to be not a whole lot different than the villains in that sometimes the only qualification for heroism that the hero seemed to posses was the ability to commit wholesale slaughter and wisecrack about it. Which is antithetical to my idea of hero. I've always thought physical prowess has to be balanced by some kind of soul.
"We'd been wondering for a long, long time, with his stricture against killing and his Boy Scout morality, if our hero was outmoded," O'Neil continues. "So instead of continuing to avoid the question, we decided to confront it and put out there a Batman who was as genuinely nuts as our Batman was sometimes accused of being."
Throughout that stunt, O'Neil's greatest fear was that readers would actually like the Azrael Batman. "I don't know what exactly we would have done," he admits. "I might have schemed myself out of a job."
But readers hated Azrael in the role.
The storyline consumed 1,164 pages by O'Neil's count -- more than a year in real time -- before Bruce Wayne once more donned his traditional cowl.
"It validated the kind of heroic ideal that Batman has always represented," O'Neil says. "And it told me that at least as far as our audience is concerned, although they may applaud and enjoy the bloodletting, slaughter-type characters at the movies, they could still appreciate an older, nobler idea of what a hero is."
That's why Batman keeps coming back, stronger and ever more intriguing, while his friend Superman struggles through marriage, a ponytail and an electric-blue new costume and powers.
"I think Batman attracted more really good talent over the years," O'Neil says of a perceived creative disparity between the two characters. "Having written both characters, it was that invincible thing that made it difficult for me to handle Superman -- both to identify with him and to write dramatic stories. The nature of melodrama is that the hero has to be in really bad trouble once in a while. There must be conflict and conflict implies that he goes against equals. That's simple, Basic Writing 101. I always found it easier to fulfill those requirements with Batman.
"One of things you heard as an undergraduate 40 years ago was 'Write what you know,' " he says. "Well, I've never stood on a rooftop at 3 a.m., waiting for a grotesque maniac to show up. If I had, the New York Post would have covered it. I think the germ of truth (in Batman stories) is implied."
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Adam West, Azrael, Batman, Batman-The Animated Series, Bob Kane, Bruce Wayne, comic books, Dennis O'Neil, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Knightfall
¶ 9:55 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Chuck Dixon, "The Simpsons" comic book writer: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1
One of the most anticipated movies of this summer -- no, not Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix -- and no, Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer -- is The Simpsons Movie.
And while Matt Groening couldn’t make it to join us today, we are lucky enough to welcome a member of the extended "Simpsons" creative family, frequent Simpsons comic book writer, Chuck Dixon.
Dixon is a prolific comics writer, easily shifting between the in-jokes and low humor of Bart and Homer for Bongo Comics to the high drama of DC’s caped crusader, Batman.
DOWNLOAD THE MP3;
LISTEN HERE.
ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST
ON iTUNES.
Mr. Media Interviews Chuck Dixon
Video Clip 1
Video Clip 2
BOB ANDELMAN: Please complete this sentence, Chuck: "I’m Bart Simpson..."
CHUCK DIXON: And you’re not.
ANDELMAN: There you go. All right. Now we’ve confirmed the identity of today’s guest. Chuck, I’m guessing that writing for <The Simpsons comic is either your toughest gig or the most fun, but there’s probably no in-between.
DIXON: Actually, there is. Well, like any writing, it’s fun when it’s going well and living hell when it’s not, but it is a hard gig because there are a lot of demands and a lot of expectations. You expect a level of humor from The Simpsons that you don’t expect from any other property, so you’ve got to get those “laugh out loud” moments in every story, which, that’s tough.
ANDELMAN: Do you have to do anything to psych yourself up or to get in the mood to write a Simpsons script that maybe you don’t have to for Grifter or Batman or Nightmare on Elm Street?
DIXON: Well, I have to cogitate more on it. It sort of has to percolate, and once I’ve got two or three scenes in my head, then I go to work right then and work to tie them together into the plot, but it’s a much slower process for The Simpsons. It takes two or three times longer to write a Simpsons script than it would be to write anything else. There’s that pressure. I probably put more pressure on myself than I need to, but I like to be the guy who hands in the problem-free script, so I don’t send it out. The Simpsons script out until it’s -- to my mind -- perfect.
ANDELMAN: Have any of the stories that you’ve written come from your own life or your own family?
DIXON: Recently, I wrote one: “Marge Simpson, Forensic Homemaker,” in which she comes home from grocery shopping to find the kitchen in an unholy mess, even messier than usual, and her suspects are Maggie, Bart, and Homer. She uses forensics to figure out who made the mess. She traces it back. She figures it all started with somebody trying to make a smoothie in a blender, and it’s very much from my own life. I thought I had cleaned up a mess, and my wife traced it back to the blender and even knew the ingredients, and that astounded me. I thought, well, this is a Marge Simpson story.
ANDELMAN: Your wife deserves a comic book if she figured that out.
DIXON: Absolutely, absolutely.
ANDELMAN: How did you get the job?
DIXON: They do their annual “Treehouse of Horror” comic, and it’s invitation only. It’s like Augusta! I wanted to do it, but you don’t go and say, hey, I want to be in the “Treehouse of Horror” comic, so I sort of waited until I was invited, and once I had my foot in the door, a couple of months later, I came up with another Simpsons idea for a full issue. I said, “Would you be open to this?” And they bought it, and slowly over time, I’d do a couple a year, but recently, I’ve stepped up. I’m doing quite a few stories for them, for the various comics.
ANDELMAN: Who’s harder to put words in their mouth, Bart, Homer, Maggie?
DIXON: Well, Maggie’s easy. Homer can be tough, but the toughest one is Ralph Wiggum, because he’s… So much of The Simpsons humor comes from surprise at what they say, because it’s always a reversal. It’s always something you’d never think they were going to say, and Ralph is the king of that. I mean, he says things that no one’s ever said and no one will ever say again and only he can say. So The Simpsons is great, because every character has a voice. It’s not like “Friends” or some other sit com where the lines are interchangeable and anyone can read them. Everything is specific, and Ralph is the most specific of them all. Lenny and Carl jokes are tough to come up with, too, because they have raised the bar so high on the show.
ANDELMAN: What about Comic Book Guy and….
DIXON: Comic Book Guy is easy. I’ve taken to have him come in when the characters are saying, “That never happened,” or “I don’t remember that.” I’ll have Comic Book Guy simply show up in the background and remind people of continuity.
ANDELMAN: He’s kind of the Greek chorus?
DIXON: Yeah, exactly. And he’s easy to write, because anybody who’s interested in comics has met that guy a million times or is that guy.
ANDELMAN: You don’t write these comics in a vacuum. There are a lot of people back, I guess back on the west coast that look over everything you do. Do you get comments back from them?
DIXON: It depends. Some stories are tougher than others. Some stories sail through with no problem, maybe a little change here or whatever, and they always let me make the changes, which is nice, and they’ll have suggestions. They’ll call, and they’ll have a problem, and they’ll have a possible solution to it, which is great, instead of just, “You’re the writer, you figure it out.” But yeah, I deal with Terry Dellajean, and I deal with Bill Morrison, who are directly involved in the offices. And then from my understanding, Matt Groening oversees everything. So I’m dealing with the core people, and I’ve been dealing with the same people from the beginning, which is great, because when you write licensed properties in comics, generally you are dealing with some entry-level guy who’s only had the job a few weeks, because he’s going to move up to be producer or something, and those guys are always trying to prove real hard that they are doing their job, so they ask for a million re-writes, but The Simpsons, the Bongo guys, they are terrific. They are helpful.
ANDELMAN: Can you give us an example of notes you’ve gotten about scripts?
DIXON: Mostly just make it funnier, or this could be funnier, or the ending could be snappier. The worst one is when they don’t get a joke. I did a joke in a comic -- I had Homer arrested by the police, and they put him in the back of the squad car, and he’s shouting, “I’m innocent, I’m innocent, I didn’t do it,” and the cop says, that’s what everybody says. And Homer says, “I bless the rains down in Africa. Does everyone say that?” See, you got it. They didn’t get it, and this was one… I know when to walk away from a joke that’s not working, because it’s like, okay, only I thought it was funny, and if you have to explain a joke, it’s dead, but this one I fought for, and it went all the way up the chain, and no one there got it.
ANDELMAN: Really?
DIXON: But everyone I’ve ever told it to thought it was funny.
ANDELMAN: Nobody gets the Toto reference.
DIXON: Well, they got the reference, they just didn’t see why it was funny, and I thought, well, isn’t that something no one would ever say? But I’ve learned since then if they don’t get it to walk away. I’ve got a “Rock and Roll Heaven” joke, script I haven’t handed in yet that I’m terrified they won’t get. But we’ll see.
ANDELMAN: How different is it to write for The Simpsons than for super heroes? I mean, Batman, not the funniest guy on earth.
DIXON: Well, drama’s just easier because pathos is easier to go for. I mean, the hardest thing about Batman is suspense, but basically once you’ve got that down, once you’ve seen two Hitchcock movies, if you didn’t get it by then, you’re never going to get it.
ANDELMAN: I think you’re supposed to make it seem harder, Chuck. I don’t think you want to make it seem that easy for people to do.
DIXON: Well, maybe it isn’t! I don’t know. I look at things, and I go, why didn’t they get this? This isn’t hard. How do you make a lousy Shadow movie? I mean, how do you make a lousy Tarzan movie? How do you screw that up? So yeah, you’ve got the suspense elements. You can dazzle them with clever dialogue exchanges and meanness. Cruelty is a big thing in comics now. It’s like Quentin Tarantino. It is like, what’s the plot of a Quentin Tarantino movie? Well, there really isn’t one, but all that dialogue is kind of cool, and the characters look great.
ANDELMAN: Kind of like Ocean’s Thirteen.
DIXON: Yeah. Well, I don’t know. I don’t know. I saw Ocean’s Twelve. I can’t figure that one out. What I can’t figure out is why they made another one. But yeah, it’s just easier, but writing funny stuff is harder. An Archie writer recently told me that superheroes are easier because it’s half the work, because they don’t have to be funny, so you can some up with a plot, and that’s it. Just plot.
ANDELMAN: Is it painful when you get a script back and someone says, it’s not funny, or it’s not funny enough?
DIXON: I really have a thick skin on that stuff. It’s like you throw it against the wall, and it works, or it doesn’t work. If it didn’t make you laugh, then yeah, I’m glad you pointed it out. I’d rather fail here in the script stage than somebody read the comic and go, that wasn’t funny, or he didn’t get it. I mean, if they are not getting the jokes, or it’s not funny to them, then obviously it’s not going to be funny to the reader, that my timing didn’t work, or the reference didn’t work.
ANDELMAN: I know you haven’t seen The Simpsons Movie yet as we sit and have this conversation, but you’re looking forward to it, I guess, and I guess there are multiple reasons why you’d like it to be a big hit.
DIXON: Yeah. I’m really looking forward to it. It’s been a long time coming and lots of reasons why it wasn’t made before, and yeah, I’d like it to do well. It would be a huge shot in the arm, but if this thing performs the way I think it’s going to perform, it’s going to re-invigorate the franchise all over again and also for its worldwide audience. “The Simpsons” has an enormous worldwide audience. The Simpsons comics are the number one best-selling comics in most European countries, Germany and Holland. I think they like the perverse view of America, and it’s a lot of the reason why we keep the comic franchise going is for foreign audiences, but yeah, the movie is going to help all of that.
ANDELMAN: Do you benefit if the comic sells more copies?
DIXON: No. They pay very well up front. It’s a work for hire situation. They pay better than any other comic, which I probably shouldn’t say that. I don’t want my job taken away by some Englishman! But they pay well up front, and they pay quickly, which is really important for comic book writer.
ANDELMAN: Very important to a freelance writer, absolutely.
DIXON: Very important. Sometimes, it’s not how much you make, it’s how often you make it.
ANDELMAN: How did you get started in comics?
DIXON: I just can’t do anything else well. I’ve always wanted to do comics, and like most comic book writers, I thought I was going to be an artist, but I simply don’t have the discipline to be an artist, so I became a writer, which doesn’t need any discipline at all. When I realized I couldn’t do the art as well as writing, I just kept hammering away at the companies, and I started going up for interviews in the 1970s, which was the worst time. It was like the Great Depression for comics. It was horrible. Sales were awful. They were laying people off left and right, so I didn’t really get to writing full-time until I was 30. The rest of the time, I did children’s books for a while, hated that, and I drove an ice cream truck, I worked at a 7-Eleven, I did every donkey job imaginable, because I simply wasn’t good at anything else, and there was really no point in pursuing a doctorate!
ANDELMAN: It’s nice to meet someone else who has that attitude. I’ve been writing since I was 13 or 14, and people say, “Why?” I say, “I can’t seem to be able to do anything else.” I’m not even sure I do this well.
DIXON: I mean, yeah, that’s the paranoia is, gee, am I a big fraud, and I don’t have any talent at all? But I can’t hammer a nail to a board straight, so I better do something.
ANDELMAN: Okay, I can do that, for the record. I just want it on the record. I can hammer a nail, so….
DIXON: Well, I used to roof for a living, still can’t hammer a nail.
ANDELMAN: You said you worked on some children’s books, but your focus was always that you wanted to write comics?
DIXON: Always comics, never anything else. I’m not one of these guys who’s in comics until my novel gets sold or until I sell a screen play. I honestly don’t care about any of that. If you ever see me writing a novel or writing a screenplay, it’s because I couldn’t get comic work. I’ve done some prose work recently, and I’ve written some movie treatments simply to expand my horizons, because I like to think a year or two years down the road, but if I wrote comics until the very day I died, and that’s all I ever wrote, then I’d be the happiest guy on earth. I really like it.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All Rights Reserved.
And while Matt Groening couldn’t make it to join us today, we are lucky enough to welcome a member of the extended "Simpsons" creative family, frequent Simpsons comic book writer, Chuck Dixon.
Dixon is a prolific comics writer, easily shifting between the in-jokes and low humor of Bart and Homer for Bongo Comics to the high drama of DC’s caped crusader, Batman.
LISTEN HERE.
ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST
ON iTUNES.
Mr. Media Interviews Chuck Dixon
Video Clip 1
Video Clip 2
BOB ANDELMAN: Please complete this sentence, Chuck: "I’m Bart Simpson..."
CHUCK DIXON: And you’re not.
ANDELMAN: There you go. All right. Now we’ve confirmed the identity of today’s guest. Chuck, I’m guessing that writing for <The Simpsons comic is either your toughest gig or the most fun, but there’s probably no in-between.
DIXON: Actually, there is. Well, like any writing, it’s fun when it’s going well and living hell when it’s not, but it is a hard gig because there are a lot of demands and a lot of expectations. You expect a level of humor from The Simpsons that you don’t expect from any other property, so you’ve got to get those “laugh out loud” moments in every story, which, that’s tough.
ANDELMAN: Do you have to do anything to psych yourself up or to get in the mood to write a Simpsons script that maybe you don’t have to for Grifter or Batman or Nightmare on Elm Street?
DIXON: Well, I have to cogitate more on it. It sort of has to percolate, and once I’ve got two or three scenes in my head, then I go to work right then and work to tie them together into the plot, but it’s a much slower process for The Simpsons. It takes two or three times longer to write a Simpsons script than it would be to write anything else. There’s that pressure. I probably put more pressure on myself than I need to, but I like to be the guy who hands in the problem-free script, so I don’t send it out. The Simpsons script out until it’s -- to my mind -- perfect.
ANDELMAN: Have any of the stories that you’ve written come from your own life or your own family?
DIXON: Recently, I wrote one: “Marge Simpson, Forensic Homemaker,” in which she comes home from grocery shopping to find the kitchen in an unholy mess, even messier than usual, and her suspects are Maggie, Bart, and Homer. She uses forensics to figure out who made the mess. She traces it back. She figures it all started with somebody trying to make a smoothie in a blender, and it’s very much from my own life. I thought I had cleaned up a mess, and my wife traced it back to the blender and even knew the ingredients, and that astounded me. I thought, well, this is a Marge Simpson story.
ANDELMAN: Your wife deserves a comic book if she figured that out.
DIXON: Absolutely, absolutely.
ANDELMAN: How did you get the job?
DIXON: They do their annual “Treehouse of Horror” comic, and it’s invitation only. It’s like Augusta! I wanted to do it, but you don’t go and say, hey, I want to be in the “Treehouse of Horror” comic, so I sort of waited until I was invited, and once I had my foot in the door, a couple of months later, I came up with another Simpsons idea for a full issue. I said, “Would you be open to this?” And they bought it, and slowly over time, I’d do a couple a year, but recently, I’ve stepped up. I’m doing quite a few stories for them, for the various comics.
ANDELMAN: Who’s harder to put words in their mouth, Bart, Homer, Maggie?
DIXON: Well, Maggie’s easy. Homer can be tough, but the toughest one is Ralph Wiggum, because he’s… So much of The Simpsons humor comes from surprise at what they say, because it’s always a reversal. It’s always something you’d never think they were going to say, and Ralph is the king of that. I mean, he says things that no one’s ever said and no one will ever say again and only he can say. So The Simpsons is great, because every character has a voice. It’s not like “Friends” or some other sit com where the lines are interchangeable and anyone can read them. Everything is specific, and Ralph is the most specific of them all. Lenny and Carl jokes are tough to come up with, too, because they have raised the bar so high on the show.
ANDELMAN: What about Comic Book Guy and….
DIXON: Comic Book Guy is easy. I’ve taken to have him come in when the characters are saying, “That never happened,” or “I don’t remember that.” I’ll have Comic Book Guy simply show up in the background and remind people of continuity.
ANDELMAN: He’s kind of the Greek chorus?
DIXON: Yeah, exactly. And he’s easy to write, because anybody who’s interested in comics has met that guy a million times or is that guy.
ANDELMAN: You don’t write these comics in a vacuum. There are a lot of people back, I guess back on the west coast that look over everything you do. Do you get comments back from them?
DIXON: It depends. Some stories are tougher than others. Some stories sail through with no problem, maybe a little change here or whatever, and they always let me make the changes, which is nice, and they’ll have suggestions. They’ll call, and they’ll have a problem, and they’ll have a possible solution to it, which is great, instead of just, “You’re the writer, you figure it out.” But yeah, I deal with Terry Dellajean, and I deal with Bill Morrison, who are directly involved in the offices. And then from my understanding, Matt Groening oversees everything. So I’m dealing with the core people, and I’ve been dealing with the same people from the beginning, which is great, because when you write licensed properties in comics, generally you are dealing with some entry-level guy who’s only had the job a few weeks, because he’s going to move up to be producer or something, and those guys are always trying to prove real hard that they are doing their job, so they ask for a million re-writes, but The Simpsons, the Bongo guys, they are terrific. They are helpful.
ANDELMAN: Can you give us an example of notes you’ve gotten about scripts?
DIXON: Mostly just make it funnier, or this could be funnier, or the ending could be snappier. The worst one is when they don’t get a joke. I did a joke in a comic -- I had Homer arrested by the police, and they put him in the back of the squad car, and he’s shouting, “I’m innocent, I’m innocent, I didn’t do it,” and the cop says, that’s what everybody says. And Homer says, “I bless the rains down in Africa. Does everyone say that?” See, you got it. They didn’t get it, and this was one… I know when to walk away from a joke that’s not working, because it’s like, okay, only I thought it was funny, and if you have to explain a joke, it’s dead, but this one I fought for, and it went all the way up the chain, and no one there got it.
ANDELMAN: Really?
DIXON: But everyone I’ve ever told it to thought it was funny.
ANDELMAN: Nobody gets the Toto reference.
DIXON: Well, they got the reference, they just didn’t see why it was funny, and I thought, well, isn’t that something no one would ever say? But I’ve learned since then if they don’t get it to walk away. I’ve got a “Rock and Roll Heaven” joke, script I haven’t handed in yet that I’m terrified they won’t get. But we’ll see.
ANDELMAN: How different is it to write for The Simpsons than for super heroes? I mean, Batman, not the funniest guy on earth.
DIXON: Well, drama’s just easier because pathos is easier to go for. I mean, the hardest thing about Batman is suspense, but basically once you’ve got that down, once you’ve seen two Hitchcock movies, if you didn’t get it by then, you’re never going to get it.
ANDELMAN: I think you’re supposed to make it seem harder, Chuck. I don’t think you want to make it seem that easy for people to do.
DIXON: Well, maybe it isn’t! I don’t know. I look at things, and I go, why didn’t they get this? This isn’t hard. How do you make a lousy Shadow movie? I mean, how do you make a lousy Tarzan movie? How do you screw that up? So yeah, you’ve got the suspense elements. You can dazzle them with clever dialogue exchanges and meanness. Cruelty is a big thing in comics now. It’s like Quentin Tarantino. It is like, what’s the plot of a Quentin Tarantino movie? Well, there really isn’t one, but all that dialogue is kind of cool, and the characters look great.
ANDELMAN: Kind of like Ocean’s Thirteen.
DIXON: Yeah. Well, I don’t know. I don’t know. I saw Ocean’s Twelve. I can’t figure that one out. What I can’t figure out is why they made another one. But yeah, it’s just easier, but writing funny stuff is harder. An Archie writer recently told me that superheroes are easier because it’s half the work, because they don’t have to be funny, so you can some up with a plot, and that’s it. Just plot.
ANDELMAN: Is it painful when you get a script back and someone says, it’s not funny, or it’s not funny enough?
DIXON: I really have a thick skin on that stuff. It’s like you throw it against the wall, and it works, or it doesn’t work. If it didn’t make you laugh, then yeah, I’m glad you pointed it out. I’d rather fail here in the script stage than somebody read the comic and go, that wasn’t funny, or he didn’t get it. I mean, if they are not getting the jokes, or it’s not funny to them, then obviously it’s not going to be funny to the reader, that my timing didn’t work, or the reference didn’t work.
ANDELMAN: I know you haven’t seen The Simpsons Movie yet as we sit and have this conversation, but you’re looking forward to it, I guess, and I guess there are multiple reasons why you’d like it to be a big hit.
DIXON: Yeah. I’m really looking forward to it. It’s been a long time coming and lots of reasons why it wasn’t made before, and yeah, I’d like it to do well. It would be a huge shot in the arm, but if this thing performs the way I think it’s going to perform, it’s going to re-invigorate the franchise all over again and also for its worldwide audience. “The Simpsons” has an enormous worldwide audience. The Simpsons comics are the number one best-selling comics in most European countries, Germany and Holland. I think they like the perverse view of America, and it’s a lot of the reason why we keep the comic franchise going is for foreign audiences, but yeah, the movie is going to help all of that.
ANDELMAN: Do you benefit if the comic sells more copies?
DIXON: No. They pay very well up front. It’s a work for hire situation. They pay better than any other comic, which I probably shouldn’t say that. I don’t want my job taken away by some Englishman! But they pay well up front, and they pay quickly, which is really important for comic book writer.
ANDELMAN: Very important to a freelance writer, absolutely.
DIXON: Very important. Sometimes, it’s not how much you make, it’s how often you make it.
ANDELMAN: How did you get started in comics?
DIXON: I just can’t do anything else well. I’ve always wanted to do comics, and like most comic book writers, I thought I was going to be an artist, but I simply don’t have the discipline to be an artist, so I became a writer, which doesn’t need any discipline at all. When I realized I couldn’t do the art as well as writing, I just kept hammering away at the companies, and I started going up for interviews in the 1970s, which was the worst time. It was like the Great Depression for comics. It was horrible. Sales were awful. They were laying people off left and right, so I didn’t really get to writing full-time until I was 30. The rest of the time, I did children’s books for a while, hated that, and I drove an ice cream truck, I worked at a 7-Eleven, I did every donkey job imaginable, because I simply wasn’t good at anything else, and there was really no point in pursuing a doctorate!
ANDELMAN: It’s nice to meet someone else who has that attitude. I’ve been writing since I was 13 or 14, and people say, “Why?” I say, “I can’t seem to be able to do anything else.” I’m not even sure I do this well.
DIXON: I mean, yeah, that’s the paranoia is, gee, am I a big fraud, and I don’t have any talent at all? But I can’t hammer a nail to a board straight, so I better do something.
ANDELMAN: Okay, I can do that, for the record. I just want it on the record. I can hammer a nail, so….
DIXON: Well, I used to roof for a living, still can’t hammer a nail.
ANDELMAN: You said you worked on some children’s books, but your focus was always that you wanted to write comics?
DIXON: Always comics, never anything else. I’m not one of these guys who’s in comics until my novel gets sold or until I sell a screen play. I honestly don’t care about any of that. If you ever see me writing a novel or writing a screenplay, it’s because I couldn’t get comic work. I’ve done some prose work recently, and I’ve written some movie treatments simply to expand my horizons, because I like to think a year or two years down the road, but if I wrote comics until the very day I died, and that’s all I ever wrote, then I’d be the happiest guy on earth. I really like it.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All Rights Reserved.
Labels: Bart Simpson, Batman, Bongo Comics, Chuck Dixon, Comic Book Guy, Grifter, Homer Simpson, Marge Simpson, Matt Groening, Nightmare on Elm Street, Ralph Wiggum, The Simpsons movie, Treehouse of Horror
¶ 10:41 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Chuck Dixon, "The Simpsons" comic book writer: Mr. Media Video Interview, Pt. 1
Labels: Bart Simpson, Batman, Bongo Comics, Chuck Dixon, Comic Book Guy, Grifter, Homer Simpson, Marge Simpson, Matt Groening, Nightmare on Elm Street, Ralph Wiggum, The Simpsons movie, Treehouse of Horror
¶ 10:19 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Robert Wuhl, "Assume The Position/Arli$$/Hollywood Knights" actor: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1
Robert Wuhl cracks me up. Always has, always will.
His HBO series, “Arli$$," about an over-ambitious Hollywood sports agent, was must-see TV in my house for years, and I’ve seen his first movie, Hollywood Knights, hundreds of times. Really, hundreds. If you haven’t seen it, buy it.
In terms of media experience, Wuhl played reporters in Batman and Cobb and a disc jockey in Good Morning, Vietnam. And when Billy Crystal hosted the Academy Awards in 1990, 1991, and 1992, Wuhl contributed a good many of Crystal’s best lines. This, I’m sure of.
It doesn’t hurt that we share a birthday, October 9th, and we’re both New Jersey natives.
This month, Wuhl returns to HBO with his second “Assume the Position” special. It’s a raucous run through history in which Professor Wuhl takes charge of a class of college students and shares “more stories that made America and the stories that America made up.”
DOWNLOAD THE MP3;
LISTEN HERE.
ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST
ON iTUNES.
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: What attracts you to history so much?
ROBERT WUHL: Well, I like storytelling. I mean, that’s basically it. I just like storytelling, and that’s all history is is storytelling. Of course,
ANDELMAN: When did you become skeptical of the way history is told?
WUHL: I think by nature I’m just skeptical. You know, not cynical. I don’t like the idea of being cynical, because as (Oscar) Wilde said, “A cynic knows the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.” But I am skeptical. I always want to know who’s telling the story, and I just question. And then, there was a great quote from (Paddy) Chayefsky in “The Americanization of Emily” where he said, “I don’t know what is good or bad or true. I let God worry about the truth. I only want to know the momentary facts of things.” And I think that’s a pretty good line.
ANDELMAN: How much do you read? My sense is that you must read a lot.
WUHL: I do a lot of reading. I read mostly non-fiction, obviously. The Internet is a godsend for research. But I do read; not as much as my wife. My wife reads fiction, and she reads a book a day. She used to work for Simon and Shuster, so she just devours fiction. I read nonfiction.
ANDELMAN: What have you read recently?
WUHL: What did I read recently that’s really good? You know what I just read that was terrific was Katherine Graham’s book, which was wonderful, Personal History. That was a great book. And then I just read a novel by Frank Deford, The Entitled, which was a nice read.
ANDELMAN: What made you want to get in front of a classroom of college kids and talk history? It is one thing, it seems to me, to read history and to study history, but you really put a lot on the line by getting in front of kids who have nothing to lose by challenging and heckling. But you get up there in these specials, and you just turn it on.
WUHL: I thought there was a way to do this. I just thought there was a way to make history more entertaining in front of a classroom. I’m very pro-student. The beauty of Chris Albrecht, the genius of Chris Albrecht, is that when I pitched him the idea, he said, “Okay, the one thing I know about what you’re talking about is that we have to commit to shooting it. You can’t have a script and develop it. It’s like developing a stand-up act. You just have to shoot it.” These things are pretty labor-intensive, so it takes a while, then we workshop it in the classrooms for a couple of months, and then we go and shoot it in New York.
ANDELMAN: The presentation is very stand-up style. I don’t know, I’m just going to ask you: have you done a lot of stand-up?
WUHL: Oh, sure. I started out as stand-up.
ANDELMAN: Yeah, I wasn’t sure about that. And are you doing stand-up now?
WUHL: I don’t do much of it. No. I really don’t do much of it any more. I’ll do some corporate dates, and I do a lot of hosting at charity events. Occasionally, I’ll go and do a stand-up gig but not too often.
ANDELMAN: What can a high school teacher or college history professor learn from stand-up comedy about presenting their material?
WUHL: I don’t know if they can learn anything.
ANDELMAN: Really?
WUHL: You know, I’m fortunate in that I can workshop it out, and I do have a background, and I don’t know if it’s fair to ask any other teachers to do that. That’s not their job. Remember, first and foremost, it is a piece of entertainment. It’s an HBO entertainment special, and it is a comedy special. I would always say to use context. That would be the biggest thing I would say to teachers, explain context of why and how these things happened rather than just giving names, dates, and places, because that means nothing. That, they will memorize for a test and forget the next day. If you put a face on it, understand the characters involved and what their motivations were for doing something, then that would be my only thing to say.
ANDELMAN: Who do you most admire from American history?
WUHL: Probably the common man, probably the working man.
ANDELMAN: Oh, that sounds like a Time magazine answer, Robert. “The Man of the Year is YOU.”
WUHL: It’s true, though. I admire the people who have to, as we say in the show, get through it. The people of power make decisions that affect usually not them, you know, but usually the people who work and live under them, so I really do respect the working man, the working woman, the family guy, the woman who’s keeping a family together in the obstacles of society, whether it be present-day or the past. It’s all present-day family, I mean, no matter when it takes place. History takes place in the present. It doesn’t take place in the past. That’s who I most admire. I mean, there are figures, just like any other kid, sports figures or scientific figures or stuff like that, people who accomplish. Anybody who accomplishes, gets through the workday and does their job, I’m a fan of them, the working men.
ANDELMAN: One of the things you say is that when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
WUHL: Right. That came out of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
ANDELMAN: Right. What does that mean, exactly? How would you explain that to someone who didn’t see the show.
WUHL: Well, that’s exactly what I think a lot of history is is that the stories are passed down, and then they become accepted as fact, and then people print them. They take it that way. That’s just the nature, and that one, it was pop culture, of culture. You know, when you get a story long enough, you do believe it, especially when it becomes accepted.
ANDELMAN: Robert, you make a point in both “Assume the Position” specials, the first one from a year ago and this new one: You say that your dad was a Republican, your mom a Democrat, your wife is to the left of Lenin.
WUHL: Yep.
ANDELMAN: Now, you’ve been interviewed and gone toe-to-toe with Bill O’Reilly, but is it intentionally difficult to get a fix on your politics?
WUHL: My politics are, I look at each individual issue. I think you have to take everything into consideration. Because my dad was a businessman, he had a family business, so when you do that, your view on how government affects you is different than somebody who doesn’t, and so it just gives you a different point of view. I grew up in the Northeast, in New Jersey, and I went to school down in Texas There you are exposed to a whole different culture and whole different points of view. I think that’s really good. Basically, however, in this country, social issues and stuff like that can change, but you are dealing in a capitalistic system, so the one party is the capitalist party. The other stuff I really don’t think matters a whole hell of lot. Again, social issues, individual issues, yes, but as far as other things, not that much.
ANDELMAN: You made a very strong case for Hedy Lamar’s post-Hollywood accomplishments, so I need to ask you, how will American history look back on Paris Hilton?
WUHL: Oh, God, I don’t even think about Paris Hilton. I’m probably the only person in the world. I think she won’t be remembered, basically. She’ll be a footnote, unless she creates something great. As of right now, I don’t know what the future holds.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
His HBO series, “Arli$$," about an over-ambitious Hollywood sports agent, was must-see TV in my house for years, and I’ve seen his first movie, Hollywood Knights, hundreds of times. Really, hundreds. If you haven’t seen it, buy it.
In terms of media experience, Wuhl played reporters in Batman and Cobb and a disc jockey in Good Morning, Vietnam. And when Billy Crystal hosted the Academy Awards in 1990, 1991, and 1992, Wuhl contributed a good many of Crystal’s best lines. This, I’m sure of.
It doesn’t hurt that we share a birthday, October 9th, and we’re both New Jersey natives.
This month, Wuhl returns to HBO with his second “Assume the Position” special. It’s a raucous run through history in which Professor Wuhl takes charge of a class of college students and shares “more stories that made America and the stories that America made up.”
LISTEN HERE.
ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST
ON iTUNES.
ROBERT WUHL: Well, I like storytelling. I mean, that’s basically it. I just like storytelling, and that’s all history is is storytelling. Of course,
the thing to always remember is you have to keep in mind who’s telling the story. What’s their agenda? What gain do they have? What point of view are they saying?And I just like storytelling, so history lends itself, because it has characters in it.
ANDELMAN: When did you become skeptical of the way history is told?
WUHL: I think by nature I’m just skeptical. You know, not cynical. I don’t like the idea of being cynical, because as (Oscar) Wilde said, “A cynic knows the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.” But I am skeptical. I always want to know who’s telling the story, and I just question. And then, there was a great quote from (Paddy) Chayefsky in “The Americanization of Emily” where he said, “I don’t know what is good or bad or true. I let God worry about the truth. I only want to know the momentary facts of things.” And I think that’s a pretty good line.
ANDELMAN: How much do you read? My sense is that you must read a lot.
WUHL: I do a lot of reading. I read mostly non-fiction, obviously. The Internet is a godsend for research. But I do read; not as much as my wife. My wife reads fiction, and she reads a book a day. She used to work for Simon and Shuster, so she just devours fiction. I read nonfiction.
ANDELMAN: What have you read recently?
WUHL: What did I read recently that’s really good? You know what I just read that was terrific was Katherine Graham’s book, which was wonderful, Personal History. That was a great book. And then I just read a novel by Frank Deford, The Entitled, which was a nice read.
ANDELMAN: What made you want to get in front of a classroom of college kids and talk history? It is one thing, it seems to me, to read history and to study history, but you really put a lot on the line by getting in front of kids who have nothing to lose by challenging and heckling. But you get up there in these specials, and you just turn it on.
WUHL: I thought there was a way to do this. I just thought there was a way to make history more entertaining in front of a classroom. I’m very pro-student. The beauty of Chris Albrecht, the genius of Chris Albrecht, is that when I pitched him the idea, he said, “Okay, the one thing I know about what you’re talking about is that we have to commit to shooting it. You can’t have a script and develop it. It’s like developing a stand-up act. You just have to shoot it.” These things are pretty labor-intensive, so it takes a while, then we workshop it in the classrooms for a couple of months, and then we go and shoot it in New York.
Robert Wuhl on YouTube
Clip 1: 2007 Writers Guild Awards
Clip 2: Real Time with Bill Maher
Clip 1: 2007 Writers Guild Awards
Clip 2: Real Time with Bill Maher
ANDELMAN: The presentation is very stand-up style. I don’t know, I’m just going to ask you: have you done a lot of stand-up?
WUHL: Oh, sure. I started out as stand-up.
ANDELMAN: Yeah, I wasn’t sure about that. And are you doing stand-up now?
WUHL: I don’t do much of it. No. I really don’t do much of it any more. I’ll do some corporate dates, and I do a lot of hosting at charity events. Occasionally, I’ll go and do a stand-up gig but not too often.
ANDELMAN: What can a high school teacher or college history professor learn from stand-up comedy about presenting their material?
WUHL: I don’t know if they can learn anything.
ANDELMAN: Really?
WUHL: You know, I’m fortunate in that I can workshop it out, and I do have a background, and I don’t know if it’s fair to ask any other teachers to do that. That’s not their job. Remember, first and foremost, it is a piece of entertainment. It’s an HBO entertainment special, and it is a comedy special. I would always say to use context. That would be the biggest thing I would say to teachers, explain context of why and how these things happened rather than just giving names, dates, and places, because that means nothing. That, they will memorize for a test and forget the next day. If you put a face on it, understand the characters involved and what their motivations were for doing something, then that would be my only thing to say.
ANDELMAN: Who do you most admire from American history?
WUHL: Probably the common man, probably the working man.
ANDELMAN: Oh, that sounds like a Time magazine answer, Robert. “The Man of the Year is YOU.”
WUHL: It’s true, though. I admire the people who have to, as we say in the show, get through it. The people of power make decisions that affect usually not them, you know, but usually the people who work and live under them, so I really do respect the working man, the working woman, the family guy, the woman who’s keeping a family together in the obstacles of society, whether it be present-day or the past. It’s all present-day family, I mean, no matter when it takes place. History takes place in the present. It doesn’t take place in the past. That’s who I most admire. I mean, there are figures, just like any other kid, sports figures or scientific figures or stuff like that, people who accomplish. Anybody who accomplishes, gets through the workday and does their job, I’m a fan of them, the working men.
ANDELMAN: One of the things you say is that when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
WUHL: Right. That came out of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
ANDELMAN: Right. What does that mean, exactly? How would you explain that to someone who didn’t see the show.
WUHL: Well, that’s exactly what I think a lot of history is is that the stories are passed down, and then they become accepted as fact, and then people print them. They take it that way. That’s just the nature, and that one, it was pop culture, of culture. You know, when you get a story long enough, you do believe it, especially when it becomes accepted.
ANDELMAN: Robert, you make a point in both “Assume the Position” specials, the first one from a year ago and this new one: You say that your dad was a Republican, your mom a Democrat, your wife is to the left of Lenin.
WUHL: Yep.
ANDELMAN: Now, you’ve been interviewed and gone toe-to-toe with Bill O’Reilly, but is it intentionally difficult to get a fix on your politics?
WUHL: My politics are, I look at each individual issue. I think you have to take everything into consideration. Because my dad was a businessman, he had a family business, so when you do that, your view on how government affects you is different than somebody who doesn’t, and so it just gives you a different point of view. I grew up in the Northeast, in New Jersey, and I went to school down in Texas There you are exposed to a whole different culture and whole different points of view. I think that’s really good. Basically, however, in this country, social issues and stuff like that can change, but you are dealing in a capitalistic system, so the one party is the capitalist party. The other stuff I really don’t think matters a whole hell of lot. Again, social issues, individual issues, yes, but as far as other things, not that much.
ANDELMAN: You made a very strong case for Hedy Lamar’s post-Hollywood accomplishments, so I need to ask you, how will American history look back on Paris Hilton?
WUHL: Oh, God, I don’t even think about Paris Hilton. I’m probably the only person in the world. I think she won’t be remembered, basically. She’ll be a footnote, unless she creates something great. As of right now, I don’t know what the future holds.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Arli$$, Assume The Position, Batman, Bull Durham, Cobb, Floyd Mutrux, Fran Drescher, Hollywood Knights, Howard Stern, Lauren Graham, New Bomb Turks, Newbomb Turk, Robert Wuhl, Sandra Oh
¶ 5:49 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Monday, July 02, 2007
Robert Wuhl, "Assume The Position/Arli$$/Hollywood Knights" actor: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2
ANDELMAN: My buddies will kill me if I let you get away without asking about Newbomb Turk and Hollywood Knights. What do you remember about getting that film made? I don’t know that we’ll ever get a DVD commentary on that, but…
WUHL: There is a commentary on it.
ANDELMAN: Is there really?
WUHL: Yeah, there’s one out. Did I do it, or did Floyd (Mutrux) do it? I think maybe Floyd did it.
ANDELMAN: I’ve had my copy so long I didn’t even know that. If you could tell a story about that movie, what might it be?
WUHL: It was my first gig. It came out in 1979. I just got out to L.A., and within about three months, I’m handed the lead in this movie, and within another two months, we’re shooting it. What I remember most about it is the anarchy involved in the shooting of it and a lot of good times and a couple of friends who I still talk to, am still close with to this day. I’m stopped more for Newbomb Turk than anything, I would say, with the exception probably of “Arli$$,” because that was a TV series. But outside of that, including Batman, including Bull Durham, including anything, I’m probably stopped more, I’m sure I’m stopped more for Hollywood Knights.
ANDELMAN: That movie just had such an anti-American Graffiti feel to it, which may have made it that much funnier.
WUHL: Well, the pitch was, I remember, the way they sold it to the studio was “American Graffiti meets Animal House.” And as good as the movie was, the early cuts I thought were even better.
ANDELMAN: Really?
WUHL: Yeah, I thought it was a much better movie before they went to do all the preview screenings and chopped it down and stuff. But, that said, Hollywood Knights also coincided, believe it or not, with the birth of HBO, because when HBO first started, that was one of the movies that they ran over and over and over about 1981. They ran this thing, and people would watch it, and it’s amazing that I’d hear about fathers watching it with their sons, and now those sons have grown up, and now they’re watching it with their kids. So, it’s kind of fun -- now.
ANDELMAN: I said in the introduction that I had seen it hundreds of times. I wasn’t kidding. It just cracks me up every time I see it. I love that movie. I don’t know why. It must say something for my level of maturity, I guess, I don’t know. It’s interesting, though, looking at the “Assume the Position” specials and then Hollywood Knights, maybe it’s the wonder of the camera, but you don’t look like you’ve aged 25 years in that time.
WUHL: It’s more than that. It’s 27 years.
ANDELMAN: Yeah.
WUHL: Well – I have!
ANDELMAN: Fran Drescher, who was in that movie…
WUHL: A lot of good talent in that movie. Floyd was great at picking young talent. That’s Michele Pfeiffer’s first film.
ANDELMAN: Tony Danza was in there.
WUHL: Tony Danza’s first film.
ANDELMAN: Richard Schaal…
WUHL: Dick Schaal did work before, but the talent! Fran’s in it, a guy named P. R. Paul, Gailard Sartain, Stuart Pankin, a lot of good people in that movie.
ANDELMAN: Pankin was great. Fran was on Howard Stern’s radio show recently talking about her interest in running for Congress. Now, unfortunately, she couldn’t name the three branches of government when questioned, and I just wondered, knowing your interest in history, if she would get your vote?
WUHL: I must say, I’m a big believer in loyalty, so probably. I’m a believer in voting for your friends. I think that’s a good thing.
ANDELMAN: Are you very political?
WUHL: No.
ANDELMAN: You’re not.
WUHL: No. But I believe in voting for your friends in anything, whether it’s the Oscars, the President, your high school buddy running for junior class president. Why not vote for your friends?
ANDELMAN: Another actress who you started with or started with you, Sandra Oh, of course now a very big star on “Grey’s Anatomy” and made a name for herself though first as your secretary on “Arli$$.” She won the Academy Award, of course. How much credit can you take for her success?
WUHL: She did not win.
ANDELMAN: Did she not win?
WUHL: No, no.
ANDELMAN: My apology. She was nominated.
WUHL: No, she wasn’t.
ANDELMAN: She wasn’t even nominated?
WUHL: No.
ANDELMAN: She deserved it. Anyway, I’m embarrassed. How much credit, nonetheless, can you take for her success?
WUHL: I gave her a job.
ANDELMAN: There you go.
WUHL: I just gave her a job.
ANDELMAN: It all came from there.
WUHL: Well, I had seen her work. I had seen her do a movie called Double Happiness from Toronto, where she’s from, and I thought she was really good in that. The part came down to two actresses. It came down to her and a girl named Lauren Graham.
ANDELMAN: Oh, really?
WUHL: Yes, and either one would have been great. I just took a flyer on Sandra, and I’m not surprised at all at the huge success of both of them.
ANDELMAN: Very different actresses.
WUHL: They’re both terrific. I mean, those are two terrific actresses.
ANDELMAN: So what’s next for you? I know when you did the first “Assume the Position,” there was talk of it becoming a regular thing, but it’s been a year now until the second one. Will it get a regular spot, or….
WUHL: It’s very hard to do. That’s the one thing. These things are pretty labor-intensive between the research, the writing, the editing, the workshopping. But yeah, I enjoy doing them a whole hell of a lot. It’s different. There’s nothing like it. I really love watching the students and working with them, so hopefully it continues.
ANDELMAN: Do you have other things scheduled at this point?
WUHL: There is a film project I’m looking to direct that I’ve been working on for a while called Pick Six, which was about the three ex-frat kids in 2002, I think it was, or 2003, who hacked into the OTB and won the Breeder’s Cup. It’s a funny story about growing up and coming of age, a different type of coming of age story that I really like a lot.
ANDELMAN: Well, Robert, I want to thank you so much for joining us on Mr. Media and, of course, for making me a big hero among my college buddies, who worshiped at the altar of Newbomb Turk and the Pie Wagon.
WUHL: Do you know there was a band named The New Bomb Turks?
ANDELMAN: No, really?
WUHL: They had a rock band for about 15 years -- I never met the guys -- named The New Bomb Turks.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
ANDELMAN: My buddies will kill me if I let you get away without asking about Newbomb Turk and Hollywood Knights. What do you remember about getting that film made? I don’t know that we’ll ever get a DVD commentary on that, but…
WUHL: There is a commentary on it.
ANDELMAN: Is there really?
WUHL: Yeah, there’s one out. Did I do it, or did Floyd (Mutrux) do it? I think maybe Floyd did it.
ANDELMAN: I’ve had my copy so long I didn’t even know that. If you could tell a story about that movie, what might it be?
WUHL: It was my first gig. It came out in 1979. I just got out to L.A., and within about three months, I’m handed the lead in this movie, and within another two months, we’re shooting it. What I remember most about it is the anarchy involved in the shooting of it and a lot of good times and a couple of friends who I still talk to, am still close with to this day. I’m stopped more for Newbomb Turk than anything, I would say, with the exception probably of “Arli$$,” because that was a TV series. But outside of that, including Batman, including Bull Durham, including anything, I’m probably stopped more, I’m sure I’m stopped more for Hollywood Knights.
Hollywood Knights on YouTube
Clip 1: Tubby's Drive-In
Clip 2: Newbomb Turk Farting to "Volare"
Clip 1: Tubby's Drive-In
Clip 2: Newbomb Turk Farting to "Volare"
ANDELMAN: That movie just had such an anti-American Graffiti feel to it, which may have made it that much funnier.
WUHL: Well, the pitch was, I remember, the way they sold it to the studio was “American Graffiti meets Animal House.” And as good as the movie was, the early cuts I thought were even better.
ANDELMAN: Really?
WUHL: Yeah, I thought it was a much better movie before they went to do all the preview screenings and chopped it down and stuff. But, that said, Hollywood Knights also coincided, believe it or not, with the birth of HBO, because when HBO first started, that was one of the movies that they ran over and over and over about 1981. They ran this thing, and people would watch it, and it’s amazing that I’d hear about fathers watching it with their sons, and now those sons have grown up, and now they’re watching it with their kids. So, it’s kind of fun -- now.
ANDELMAN: I said in the introduction that I had seen it hundreds of times. I wasn’t kidding. It just cracks me up every time I see it. I love that movie. I don’t know why. It must say something for my level of maturity, I guess, I don’t know. It’s interesting, though, looking at the “Assume the Position” specials and then Hollywood Knights, maybe it’s the wonder of the camera, but you don’t look like you’ve aged 25 years in that time.
WUHL: It’s more than that. It’s 27 years.
ANDELMAN: Yeah.
WUHL: Well – I have!
ANDELMAN: Fran Drescher, who was in that movie…
WUHL: A lot of good talent in that movie. Floyd was great at picking young talent. That’s Michele Pfeiffer’s first film.
ANDELMAN: Tony Danza was in there.
WUHL: Tony Danza’s first film.
ANDELMAN: Richard Schaal…
WUHL: Dick Schaal did work before, but the talent! Fran’s in it, a guy named P. R. Paul, Gailard Sartain, Stuart Pankin, a lot of good people in that movie.
ANDELMAN: Pankin was great. Fran was on Howard Stern’s radio show recently talking about her interest in running for Congress. Now, unfortunately, she couldn’t name the three branches of government when questioned, and I just wondered, knowing your interest in history, if she would get your vote?
WUHL: I must say, I’m a big believer in loyalty, so probably. I’m a believer in voting for your friends. I think that’s a good thing.
ANDELMAN: Are you very political?
WUHL: No.
ANDELMAN: You’re not.
WUHL: No. But I believe in voting for your friends in anything, whether it’s the Oscars, the President, your high school buddy running for junior class president. Why not vote for your friends?
ANDELMAN: Another actress who you started with or started with you, Sandra Oh, of course now a very big star on “Grey’s Anatomy” and made a name for herself though first as your secretary on “Arli$$.” She won the Academy Award, of course. How much credit can you take for her success?
WUHL: She did not win.
ANDELMAN: Did she not win?
WUHL: No, no.
ANDELMAN: My apology. She was nominated.
WUHL: No, she wasn’t.
ANDELMAN: She wasn’t even nominated?
WUHL: No.
ANDELMAN: She deserved it. Anyway, I’m embarrassed. How much credit, nonetheless, can you take for her success?
WUHL: I gave her a job.
ANDELMAN: There you go.
WUHL: I just gave her a job.
ANDELMAN: It all came from there.
WUHL: Well, I had seen her work. I had seen her do a movie called Double Happiness from Toronto, where she’s from, and I thought she was really good in that. The part came down to two actresses. It came down to her and a girl named Lauren Graham.
ANDELMAN: Oh, really?
WUHL: Yes, and either one would have been great. I just took a flyer on Sandra, and I’m not surprised at all at the huge success of both of them.
ANDELMAN: Very different actresses.
WUHL: They’re both terrific. I mean, those are two terrific actresses.
ANDELMAN: So what’s next for you? I know when you did the first “Assume the Position,” there was talk of it becoming a regular thing, but it’s been a year now until the second one. Will it get a regular spot, or….
WUHL: It’s very hard to do. That’s the one thing. These things are pretty labor-intensive between the research, the writing, the editing, the workshopping. But yeah, I enjoy doing them a whole hell of a lot. It’s different. There’s nothing like it. I really love watching the students and working with them, so hopefully it continues.
ANDELMAN: Do you have other things scheduled at this point?
WUHL: There is a film project I’m looking to direct that I’ve been working on for a while called Pick Six, which was about the three ex-frat kids in 2002, I think it was, or 2003, who hacked into the OTB and won the Breeder’s Cup. It’s a funny story about growing up and coming of age, a different type of coming of age story that I really like a lot.
ANDELMAN: Well, Robert, I want to thank you so much for joining us on Mr. Media and, of course, for making me a big hero among my college buddies, who worshiped at the altar of Newbomb Turk and the Pie Wagon.
WUHL: Do you know there was a band named The New Bomb Turks?
ANDELMAN: No, really?
WUHL: They had a rock band for about 15 years -- I never met the guys -- named The New Bomb Turks.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Arli$$, Assume The Position, Batman, Bull Durham, Cobb, Floyd Mutrux, Fran Drescher, Hollywood Knights, Howard Stern, Lauren Graham, New Bomb Turks, Newbomb Turk, Robert Wuhl, Sandra Oh
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