Judd: Definitely.
Adam: You know what was great? The subject matter of being sick—we both saw each other go through it with people we love and it was just very deep to us, this movie. Also we both work hard and respect each other’s work and, like, at the end of the day when I’d say good night to Apatow, I would tear up. I’d say, “All right, I love you, buddy.”
Judd: Are you serious?
Adam: Absolutely. Because it was, I couldn’t believe that we’ve known each other so long, that we’re both getting to do what we wanted. We would talk late at night. He wasn’t so sure on what he was going to do. I was like, “I’m going to be a movie star. That’s a guarantee and no one’s going to stop me.” Judd wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he was writing away all the time. I’d walk by his bedroom, see him typing away. I would go, “What are you doing in there, Apatow?” “Oh, I’m just writing some skit.” And I was like, “For what?” He’d be like, “I don’t know.” What the hell’s the matter with this guy? It’s just neat that we’ve known each other this long and then got to make a movie together. Of course I want to do it again.
ALBERT BROOKS (2012)
There are certain people I always figured I would never get the chance to work with in my career. Albert Brooks was one of those people. Comedy-wise, he was simply out of my league. He was on Mount Olympus. At a certain point, I resigned myself to never knowing him like I wanted to.
When I was writing for The Larry Sanders Show, I had the opportunity to have dinner a few times with him and Garry Shandling, and I sat there, terrified and practically mute, for the entire meal. Should I have said something? Should I have tried to be funny? When I got home, I would run to my computer and write down everything he’d said.
Then, when I was writing This Is 40, I decided to write a part for Albert, thinking I would maybe ask him, if it ever got to that point, if he’d be interested in playing it. I never thought he would actually accept it, and when he did, I was completely paralyzed by fear. Oh, God. What if the movie is terrible? What if I pull him down into the muck with me? But the truth is, he was as brilliant and creative as one could ever hope Albert Brooks would be. The night before we would shoot a scene, he’d send me this stream of emails, filled with jokes that topped my jokes, and ideas that topped my ideas, all offered in a generous and collaborative way. I was just in awe. In your dreams as a young guy, you imagine your heroes to be one thing, and then you get a chance to work with one of them and he’s actually even better. Down deep, all comedy nerds hope that, at the end of our lives, we will have made one movie as good and true as Albert Brooks’s best movies.
Judd Apatow: Didn’t you write jokes for Michael Dukakis?
Albert Brooks: Yeah. I was asked to go on the airplane and go to different events. And I actually spoke at a few. I was so disenchanted with him. I thought, I pray he doesn’t win. I mean, there were arguments on the plane, and the guys hated him. “Can I ask him a question?” “Nobody can talk to him now!” So I’m thinking, What if there’s a war?
Judd: Was that the first campaign you got involved in?
Albert: Yeah. I wrote a big joke for him at the Al Smith Dinner, in New York, which is a big political event. George Bush’s slogan was “It’s time to give the country back to the little guy,” and all I was trying to do was to get Dukakis to try to be self-deprecating. I said, “They love that.” So Dukakis is, like, four foot three, and he said, “George Bush says it’s time to give the country back to the little guy. Well, here I am!” And it got written about: Dukakis makes fun of himself. But I think he took it too far, with the tank.
Judd: And the helmet.
Albert: I wasn’t there for that. I would have disapproved of that.
Judd: I always think when someone’s elected president they take them into a room and say, “Here’s what really goes on on this planet.”
Albert: Well, that was in my book. That’s the two-week period where you go from thinking you can change the world to being scared out of your mind. You get the list of the nine people who run everything. I’m sure that’s the way it is.
Judd: You’ve always been a bit of a futurist.
Albert: My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode way ahead of the herd and was sort of the lookout. Now you don’t have to be that, to be an artist. You can be right smack-dab in the middle of the herd. If you are, you’ll be the richest.
Judd: And so Real Life and even the Saturday Night Live sketches were—
Albert: Well, the first thing I ever did was The Famous School for Comedians, for PBS. I had written this fictitious article in Esquire, with a test, and they got like three thousand real responses, because mockumentary things weren’t really there yet. “Oh, it’s a joke? Why would it be a joke? There’s pictures of the school!” So Bob Shanks, a lovely man, was a producer at The Great American Dream Machine, and he said, “Why don’t you make this into a commercial?” That was the first time I ever picked up a camera and found out that, well, if I aim it here, and this person says that, and I think it’s funny, hey, you think it’s funny, too.
Judd: Then Lorne Michaels wanted you as permanent host for SNL, which was just starting.
Albert: Instead of hosting, which I didn’t want to do, I was able to sort of dictate what I wanted to do, because they wanted my name. And so I made six films [for SNL] in five months. That was really a film school.
Judd: Before that, did you have any sense you would go into filmmaking?
Albert: No. But my comedy bits were like scenes. I would bring props and chairs and tape recorders. I was fleshing out fifteen characters, with different voices, and it would have been better if I had hired fourteen people.
Judd: Was it almost a combination of a modern style of stand-up comedy and the previous style? This idea of doing characters and creating situations, but in a new way?
Albert: Well, my roots were in acting. That’s all I wanted to be. Even though my father was a radio comedian, it wasn’t cool to say, at a young age, “I want to be a comedian.”
Judd: Did your dad do stand-up?
Albert: My dad played a character on the radio called “Parkyakarkus.” A Greek-dialect comedian. He did Friars’ roasts and wrote material and made people laugh that way.
Judd: What was the character like?
Albert: The character was a Greek immigrant who couldn’t speak very well, so there was a lot of dialect humor. He owned a restaurant. And the show was called Meet Me at Parky’s. My dad died right after performing at the Friars’ roast for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. I have that tape somewhere. There’s still a lot of good jokes in there. I mean, that was 1958.
Judd: How old were you when that happened?
Albert: Eleven and a half.
Judd: So that’s just an earth-shattering…
Albert: Well, he was so sick before that that I—
Judd: Heart problems?
Albert: Yeah. And he couldn’t walk. He had a spinal operation. Then he could walk slowly, like Frankenstein. And so he gained weight. Nothing about him was healthy. Every time we were alone and he called me, I thought he was dying. So when it happened, it wasn’t like, hey, he was the second baseman and he woke up and died.