A fantasy, a what-if, a path not taken.
One thing I can be certain of: the old movie dream wasn’t dead. It was just deferred. When my comedy exploded, I saw that by putting the movies aside, I’d make room for the comedy to become what it did. At the same time, the movie thing still had its appeal. Acting had a different set of rewards. For one thing, an outsider longing to be on the inside is the same as the soloist longing to work in an ensemble. I equate them because I get great satisfaction in being a part of the proper—for me—community. I’m uncomfortable with various social groupings and clusterings. But when I’m in the right group, doing the right thing, I get as much satisfaction out of that as anyone who does it all the time. Maybe more.
I had misgivings. There was no way a long-haired, bearded person with a hippie immediate past could just suddenly play a salesman or a clerk, let alone a leading man. I would be typecast immediately, and that’s exactly what happened. Those were the kind of offers I got.
I did play a cabdriver in Car Wash. It was one day’s work and they let me write the scene myself: I played a modified, lightened version of my old Upper West Side character. But I had no illusions—surprising, given how confused I was—that this would lead to a flood of offers from the studios, begging me to be in their movies.
Much better to pour my creative juices into producing, financing, writing and starring in my own movie. And along with the juices, all my savings. Yeah. That’ll show the fucking mainstream and the studio system!
Among the quasi-gurus—charismatic people around the AA on the West Side that Brenda attended—was Artie Warner. Artie got into Brenda’s circle and found out she was Mrs. George Carlin and Artie saw an opportunity.
Well before Richard Pryor came out with his great Live in Concert in ’79 I thought it would be great to make a concert movie. Take the second HBO show, do it live in the round so it could be shot imaginatively, record it on tape. We’d use part of the concert for HBO, parts of it we’d transfer to film (which wasn’t commonly done at the time), and we’d have our concert movie. Of course the themes I would be exploring were the mundane micro-world I was into at the time: teeth, fingernails, dogs and cats, how your sneakers smell when you get up, shit like that.
But … in the middle of talking about dogs or cats we cut to a live-action sketch that relates to the topic we’re talking about on stage. We cut from George talking about training his dog to a vignette about a man training a dog. Some combination of concert footage, live-action vignettes. And, hey, why not throw in some animation? Good idea. (We actually commissioned the animation and as an independent piece it won awards in festivals like Tokyo.)
Artie Warner will become producer of all this, because he’s a friend of Brenda’s and he calls himself a producer and I want to stay outside of the mainstream. To make things more interesting I also make Artie my manager but without leaving Monte Kay or even informing him of his new shared duties. So now I’m paying two men management fees. The movie will be called The Illustrated George Carlin. (Because we’re illustrating my monologues by showing vignettes of them.)
So this is my new departure, my novel approach, my step beyond stand-up. Something no one had done before (probably for good reasons). The movie dream part of me was being satisfied by these notions. I think this was why I was able to accept whatever fall from grace, whatever fall back into the mainstream, this whole period represented. I could accept that, because I saw myself as having taken an innovative step that was going to end-run the studio system and dazzle everybody with a new idea.
The plan was to sell the distribution rights, the TV, cable and airlines rights and so on. Whatever ancillary there was we’d raise enough money from to make the movie. That was the theory. The reality was that, having assembled a full preproduction staff with an impressive payroll, Artie took that crucial step all film producers must take on the first day of preproduction: he leased a new Cadillac.
For a while we looked like we were coming close. We had distributors. We had an office on Robertson Boulevard. I went around to advertising agencies that specialized in movies and interviewed them about their campaigns. I sat with casting ladies behind beat-up wooden tables and actors would come by to audition for the vignettes. We rented a theater to screen Norman … Is That You?, the Redd Foxx movie, because it had been shot on tape and transferred to film. We discussed the 525 lines of data on the screen as opposed to the 600 lines of data in the European format … All on my dime.
I had to walk away from The Illustrated George Carlin. I just ran out of money, although—because I never opened those monthly statements from Brown and Kraft—I had no clue just how much money I’d run out of. Years later I looked at the material. It was horrible! I’d been writing better ten years earlier for Buddy Greco. Some of the vignettes might have been improved by being performed. Most of it was just mortifying and empty. He may not exist, but God saved me from making The Illustrated George Carlin.
But then a new area of concern appeared on my radar which I was even less well equipped to deal with than how many Teamsters we’d need for the second unit. And from a totally unexpected quarter: Kelly.
It wasn’t about drugs—the usual do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do-or-did hypocrisy Boomer parents grapple with. Kelly began smoking pot when she was thirteen, stealing roaches from my office. I figured it out after a while and rather than being Big Bad Dad—I did make a living being against all forms of authority—I let it go.
Brenda was aware of Kelly’s smoking too. You might think it odd considering what we’d been through, but neither of us stopped her. In fact I split ounces with her when I was home. I preferred the approach: “If it’s in our house and you’re not driving around, at least you’re semisafe.” What I didn’t know was from that point on Kelly smoked almost continuously. She went to school stoned. She functioned throughout high school stoned. She got straight A’s stoned. The bud doesn’t fall far from the plant.
At fifteen she started attending Crossroads—an arts and science high school. Full of celebrity kids but a real brain factory. If you were smart you could really learn there. If you just wanted to take dope and float through, I guess you could do that too.
There were different cliques, a lot of kids who learned everything they could and stayed out of trouble. Then there were celebrity kids who did nothing but drugs. Kelly had a foot in both camps. Great grades, and a celebrity clique who smoked a lot of dope. Kelly’s group eventually caused problems, but at the time I was completely star-struck. I loved it when Kelly would come home and say, “You know who I go to school with? Mahatma Gandhi!”
These kids would hang out at our house and occasionally steal things from me. (They told me about this later so it’s not a blind accusation.) But what could I do? Like the drug situation, I could hardly bitch about it, having been a dedicated felon myself at their age.
They were okay kids. Core good. Different sets of problems at home or in themselves, but they weren’t bad. But then Kelly got into a relationship with one of them, who began treating her bad. He beat her up as well as abusing her emotionally. She began to spiral out of control, cutting school, ramping up her drug use with cocaine and Quaaludes; there was depression, ulcers, even pregnancy.
I didn’t know about any of this. We’d always kept our distance when it came to talking about her problems and her feelings. It was: “Kelly, I won’t ask you any questions.” “Dad, I won’t volunteer any information to you.” “Okay?” “Okay.” Right or wrong, my understanding of life was if my daughter needs me she will come and tell me that there is something on her mind. It’s not my place to be constantly saying to her: “Is everything all right? You don’t look well. Are you okay?” I didn’t want to be an intrusive parent. My own parent’s fearsome need to control me scared me off any behavior like that. Don’t be like Mary. The old, old story.
So I assumed there were no bad feelings. No bad stuff happening. We coexisted like that. What I never considered was the degree to which sh
e’d been hurt from the drugs and drinking and fighting Brenda and I did when she was a kid.
When it came to Kelly’s problems—especially pregnancy—I really abdicated my responsibilities. And yet it was all directed at me, all designed to get my attention. I just took an emotional walk on that. What I should have done was to be more aware; intervened, opened up. But I was afraid of what lay behind that door; afraid of what might come out. One of my biggest fears—the most difficult area of my existence—has always been unleashing my feelings.
I did come through in the end. Kind of. She finally told me about everything the kid was doing—his physical and verbal abuse of her, getting pregnant, everything. I went to his father: “First, you’re footing the bill for all this. Second, I don’t want him near her anymore.”
To make sure the kid got the point, when he came around anyway, I got my baseball bat. I showed him the bat and said: “I don’t play baseball. Neighborhood I come from, we use bats a different way. To change a person’s behavior.” Without actually threatening the kid, I made it clear that if I ever found him on my property again I’d beat his fucking head in.
He got the point. Never came near Kelly again. Later she told me it was the first time in her life she felt I’d done a real traditional fatherly thing. She was shocked, she said. And very proud.
At some point in 1980 I left Monte—Artie was already out of the picture—and drifted without management for a time. My career was really flat. I was out all the time on the road, and I was still drawing people, but there was no new, inventive, exciting direction, and the number of empty seats I saw over the footlights each night was growing.
To make matters worse, it was a time when there was an enormous amount of activity going on all around me in the world of comedy. SNL had gotten huge, a continuing hit and a cultural phenomenon; its cast members—Belushi, Chase, Aykroyd—were moving on to movie stardom, and other future comedy stars were taking their places. Animal House—the biggest-grossing comedy to date—was being imitated all over Hollywood. Monty Python had done Holy Grail and was about to release Life of Brian. Comedy was coming out of the walls.
Brick walls. Comedy clubs had been appearing everywhere for the last few years, like an infectious rash. A whole new generation of stand-ups were competing to appear in them. Some of them possibly inspired by my success. Some who might soon be competing with me. Most important, and closest to home, there was a new phenomenon sweeping comedy concerts nationwide. A wild and crazy guy who was doing unheard-of things for a comedian, packing fifteen- and twenty-thousand-seat arenas as if he were a rock supergroup. Steve Martin was not only white-hot, he was sucking up all the live-appearance comedy business there was.
And I was regressing, spinning my wheels, stagnating.
I began to get ominous signals. National Lampoon ran something in their letters column where it was done in their style—as a letter to the editors supposedly from me. It read: “Dear Editors, Hey man, like you guys, wow man, do you think man, like there is such a thing as, well, man, like self-parody?”
It stung, but I realized what they were talking about. They weren’t wrong. There were other signs.
On the Road had a piece about peas (which happen to be my favorite vegetable). The ending was “Give peas a chance. I ask everybody, please, give peas a chance.” Rick Moranis of SCTV used this to do a satire of me that went to devastating lengths. (I could make an intellectual argument that if you can take something as mundane as peas and turn it into a minor oratorio, that’s not nothing.) But again I had to admit there was a certain truth to it. I did too much of that kind of shit. I was over some kind of limit.
In an article in Rolling Stone, Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong picked up on this. Cheech said, “George Carlin is irrelevant. George Carlin is obsolete. He’s talking about peas now. If all you can talk about is peas, you’re obsolete. What about the issues of the day?”
This from Cheech and Chong, masters of cutting-edge, state-of-the-art political and social satire.
Finally, in the last days of 1979, somebody wrote a column in a paper I admired (and when I say admired, it wasn’t just some mainstream newspaper—on the other hand, I’ve completely blocked who it was). He wrote:
Well, the ’70s are over. Say goodbye to lava lamps. Say goodbye to wide lapels. Say goodbye to disco. Say goodbye to platform shoes with goldfish in them. Say goodbye to studio 54. Say goodbye to CB radios …
… And say goodbye to George Carlin.
14
DEATH AND TAXES
George onstage performing It’s Bad For Ya
(Courtesy of Main sequence, Ltd.)
It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of Jerry Hamza in my career and life. Without Jerry I don’t think I would’ve escaped from the financial and creative swamp that bad choices and drugs had landed me in by the late seventies. Without his support and unerring instincts I would’ve never had the confidence to go beyond stand-up and begin to explore comedy as art. Along the way he also became something I’d never allowed myself before: my best friend.
Jerry’s father was one of the biggest country music promoters in America. He worked out of Rochester, New York; from there he’d promote appearances all over the Northeast, the Midwest and Canada, and he’d been doing it since the Hank Williams days. Later it was with country superstars like Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette and Porter Wagoner. From a young age Jerry worked for his father, selling programs at the front or helping out backstage, gradually learning the business. By the time I met him, Jerry knew concert promotion inside out.
But he wasn’t happy. His father was a tough man to work with, and Jerry wasn’t wild about the lifestyle of country music stars—“road-rats” he called them—who thought nothing of clocking up hundreds of thousands of miles a year on the road, a lifestyle their promoters were expected to share. So he quit, and for a year or so, resisted his father’s efforts to get him back into the business.
In 1977 I entered the picture. A friend of Jerry’s father had promoted a couple of dates I’d done in Ohio, selling out both. (In 1977 I still had enough heat from the four gold albums to sell out in a market where I hadn’t yet appeared.) Jerry’s father was impressed that a comedian could sell out concerts and suggested to Jerry he promote some dates with me in Syracuse.
Jerry had no idea who I was and no familiarity at all with drugs or my on-the-road lifestyle, which basically consisted of trying to score coke from any local with a vague connection to show business and a beard. But there wasn’t much driving involved—Syracuse is only eighty miles up the road from Rochester—and when he caught my show he liked what he saw. He thought I had something special. Just as important, I sold out four shows in two nights. From then on, Jerry promoted more and more of my concerts until by 1980 he was handling them all.
Of course, in promoting me, Jerry was making a break with his father, striking out on his own, establishing his independence. His father didn’t get me at all. He told Jerry once: “I’ve been calling people cocksuckers all my life, and I never made a quarter with it!”
But by 1980 I was not only creatively at sea, I was no longer selling out two-thousand-seat houses. In venues I’d once sold out easily, we often saw only a few hundred faces. Sometimes we barely made expenses. And the audiences were showing definite signs of wear and tear. Aging hippie about covers it.
To stop the rot I needed new management. I checked out a couple of L.A. managers—in particular Bernie Brillstein, who managed Lorne Michaels and therefore several of the stars of SNL, like Belushi. I’d always liked Bernie, a funny guy in his own right, and he was hot. Bernie wasn’t interested. He told me my problem was that I was too worried about managers stealing from me. Up front of him.
I mentioned my search to Jerry because the first thing a new manager would have to do would be to get people back into the concert seats. And he said: “What about me?”
I’d never thought about that; I had no idea he’d be interested. But he
was, and he’d thought about it. His plan was to take over all aspects of my career. I would be his only act. He wasn’t interested in managing talent and becoming a Hollywood schmuck. He was interested in an association with me based on friendship. He would move out to California, bringing his second family with him from Rochester. A major, life-changing move for him and, as things turned out, for me too. All it took was a handshake.
Jerry nursed me at first. He didn’t tell me the awful truth. His perception of where my career was didn’t match mine. He was more realistic. I still thought I was sustaining and maintaining myself at a certain place and forget about posterity: “Am I famous? Am I making any money? Am I at least out there? Do they know my name?” An awful lot of self-delusion, self-deception about how frightful the prospects were for anything further happening to me. I’ve always been good at seeing the brightest side of things; but I was bullshitting myself.
Jerry summed up his management strategy in two words: “hot” and “big.” Hot meant getting me hot again, coming up with new projects, new departures, new material, news about George Carlin, that I was back, that I hadn’t just faded away with disco and lava lamps. Big meant he believed I had the potential to achieve a permanent place in comedy. He wasn’t in this for some quick commissions. He had long-range goals. He said that if we built things together, made certain moves and took certain steps—and if I was able to pull out the material—I could be one of the names that would be remembered from this era of the twentieth century.
That resonated. I knew deep down I had unfinished business. Things to be said, territories to be explored. I didn’t know yet what they were or how to say them, but the negativity of the late seventies had given me an inner resolve to be terrific again, to go to a new level, to fucking show the world what was inside of me. It took Jerry to put his finger on it. And just in time.
Last Words Page 20