Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy

by Apatow, Judd

  John Francis Daley: Flying from New York to shoot the pilot, Samm Levine came up to me and said, “Hey, are you on the show as well? Come up to my row at some point and we’ll chat.” Who talks like that at that age? We told each other jokes for a couple hours and became friends. Martin was the exact opposite, very mischievous, liked to get a rise out of people. Samm was more the Vegas comedian with the puns and the quips. They got on each other’s nerves immediately, but were friends at the same time. It was a very odd, bickering-family kind of friendship. That I got a lot of enjoyment out of.

  (The pilot is completed by early spring of 1999. In May, NBC picks up Freaks and Geeks for thirteen episodes.)

  Paul Feig: I remember I had looked at Judd right before we showed the kids to the network and said to him, “Are we about to ruin these kids’ lives? What do we do to not let that happen?”

  Joe Flaherty (actor, “Harold Weir,” Lindsay and Sam’s dad): Early on, Judd held a cast meeting. It was something like “This is your chance right now as actors, but you have to concentrate on the show, and don’t get caught up in any of this Hollywood stuff. Don’t start using drugs, because we still have a show to do here. I don’t want to see you guys on E! True Hollywood Story.”

  (The producers assemble a writing staff.)

  Mike White (writer, “Kim Kelly Is My Friend,” “We’ve Got Spirit”): I had done two years on Dawson’s Creek and was trying to never do TV again. But I took a meeting with Shelley McCrory at NBC, and she pops in the pilot of Freaks and Geeks, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is exactly what I told them you could do on Dawson’s Creek, but everyone had said you can’t”—the unmannered way that the characters spoke, the idiosyncratic way they all looked.

  Paul Feig: We did our infamous two weeks with the writers locking ourselves in a room and telling personal stories. I wrote a list of questions for everybody to answer: “What was the best thing that happened to you in high school? What was the worst thing that happened to you in high school? Who were you in love with and why?”

  Judd: “What was your worst drug experience? Who was your first girlfriend? What’s the first sexual thing you ever did? What’s the most humiliating thing that ever happened to you during high school?”

  Paul Feig: That’s where most of our stories came from. Weirder stuff happens to people in real life than it does on TV. It was a personal show for me and I wanted it to be personal for everybody else.

  Gabe Sachs (writer, “I’m with the Band,” “The Garage Door”): We thought the questionnaires were a private thing between us and Judd and Paul, so we wrote really honest. And the next day at work we get them all bound together. We’re laughing with everyone but going, “Oh, man!”

  Jeff Judah (writer, “I’m with the Band,” “The Garage Door”): A lot of people kept going, “Hey, I read your questionnaire—sorry about that.”

  Patty Lin (writer, “Girlfriends and Boyfriends,” “The Garage Door”): You could bring up the most embarrassing thing and it was accepted as “You’re a great person.”

  J. Elvis Weinstein: Paul was the heart of the show, I always felt. I think everyone wanted Paul to be the heart of the show.

  Steve Bannos (actor, “Mr. Kowchevski”; also writer, “Smooching and Mooching”): So many of the characters, so many of their voices, are Paul at some point. The freaks and the geeks.

  Judd: Paul remembered every detail of everything that had happened to him in high school: every happy moment, every humiliation. The running gag in the writers’ room was that Paul would tell a horrible story and I would say, “How old were you when that happened?” Implying probably twelve, and it was always seventeen. I had seen him as this cool comedian. I hadn’t realized he had all these incredibly funny, dark stories. He was the guy who wore the “Parisian night suit” to school [as Sam does in the episode “Looks and Books”].

  Paul Feig: There was a store I used to shop in during high school, a disco-flavored men’s clothing store. One day one of the salesmen drags me over. He goes, “This is the hottest thing, man,” and shows me this big denim jumpsuit with the flare pants and the big collar. To this day if I get a new piece of clothing I can’t wait to wear it. So I could not be stopped from wearing it to school, and the minute I walked in the front door I knew I had made a huge mistake. It was fun, on the show, re-creating the most horrific moments of my past.

  Jake Kasdan: From the beginning, we thought that everything about the show should be painfully, painstakingly real. We were going to separate it from all of the other high school shows by being radically unglamorous.

  Miguel Arteta (director, “Chokin’ and Tokin’ ”): It felt a little more organic and handmade than the television I had seen.

  Russ Alsobrook (director of photography): Paul and Judd had a very specific aesthetic they wanted. No crazy gratuitous camera moves. No elaborate, precious lighting. They said, “This is Michigan in the fall and winter—pretend it’s overcast all the time. Strip away all the turbocharged cinematography and get back to the basics of good storytelling.”

  Busy Philipps: Paul and Judd awkwardly tried to talk to Linda and me about how, now that we’re on a TV show, we shouldn’t think about losing weight, which had never even occurred to me. They were like, “Don’t get crazy now—don’t think you have to be an actress that’s really skinny.” And I was reading things in the press about how we were the anti–Dawson’s Creek. There was one quote I remember very clearly, like, “You won’t find any pretty people on Freaks and Geeks.” That was interesting as a nineteen-year-old girl to read.

  Linda Cardellini: They didn’t want us to look like people in other shows—which you don’t really know how to take. It was comforting on one hand, and not so much on the other.

  John Francis Daley: Paul talked to me about the fact that I was basically playing him, but he didn’t try to steer me in any direction. They encouraged your true personality to shine through and shape your character. The way Sam is so amused by his dad was totally because I thought Joe Flaherty was the funniest guy in the world.

  Bryan Gordon (director, “Tricks and Treats,” “The Garage Door”): When we first began, Joe Flaherty was the star in everybody’s mind. He was the SCTV hero. He was the comedy rock star.

  Jason Segel: I just watched and learned, doing scenes with him. He’s so fast. There’s a lot of improv on all the stuff we do with Judd. When you’re young, you kind of think, I don’t know if the old man can keep up. And then you’re like, Oh, shit—this is the guy who created this style.

  (Between NBC’s making the pilot and picking up the show, Garth Ancier arrives from the WB network—home of Dawson’s Creek—to become president of NBC Entertainment.)

  Dan McDermott: I remember getting the call that said, “Garth doesn’t get the show. He went to boarding school and Princeton—he doesn’t understand public school.” And that was the first flag that went up.

  Paul Feig: We flew to New York for the up-fronts [annual presentations of new shows to potential advertisers]. I go to this NBC party at “21” and Garth’s there. And I go, “Hey, Garth, thank you so much for picking up the show.” And he’s talking to some guy and looks at me and goes, “Deliver the goods, man. Just deliver the goods.” And he points to the guy with his thumb and goes, “Don’t end up like this guy.” I don’t know who that guy was, but he gave this sort of sad laugh. And I walked away going, “We’re dead.”

  (The show gets a time slot, Saturdays at 8 P.M., and a premiere date, September 25, 1999.)

  Justin Falvey: You hear “Saturdays at eight” and you think, Who’s home Saturday watching television? But we also thought it was an opportunity—the bar’s really low. It was like coming in second or third place—it was qualifying for the next round.

  Judd: We were up against the tenth season of Cops. I thought, If we can’t beat the tenth season of Cops, we don’t deserve to be on the air. And, of course, Cops kicked our ass.

  Seth Rogen: You just have to conclude that people would rather wa
tch shirtless dudes get tackled than a TV show about emotional shit that’s funny.

  Paul Feig: The reviews were great, and the premiere had a really high rating. The first Monday back I stood on a table and read the ratings and everybody cheered. And the next week we just dropped huge. And Joe Flaherty was quoted as saying, “Yeah, Paul never came back in and read the ratings to us again after that first week.”

  Joe Flaherty: I never got my hopes up. I’d gone through something similar with SCTV. My daughter had a poster of the front page of the Soho Weekly News with a sketch of me that said, “Is SCTV too good for TV?” and once again I thought, I’m living on shows that are too good for TV.

  Paul Feig: We were the lowest-rated show on NBC several weeks in a row.

  (Despite the ratings, the cast and crew continue to refine and improve their show.)

  James Franco: I remember Judd saying, “You guys are acting too cool. You’re acting like young guys who just got cast in a TV show. We need dudes that are a little insecure.” He said, “We’re going to show you your audition, because this is what we liked.” So I watched it and I’m like, Oh, man, I’m horrible. It was so goofy. But I think what I didn’t like is one of the better aspects of Daniel. I maybe took myself too seriously when I was a young actor.

  Busy Philipps: Judd and Paul early on said they liked the weird physicality between James and me. Presumably both of our characters come from abusive households, and you parrot what your family does. In the pilot, James did all of that stuff. Kicking me and all sorts of rough behavior. But I would always go back at him. We had a real intense thing when we worked together.

  Sarah Hagan (actress, “Millie Kentner,” Lindsay’s old mathlete friend): James is kind of a flirty guy. He gets really close and smiles that James smile. So that made me a bit nervous. I remember drawing him on one of my scripts, wearing a beanie on his head. I still have it.

  James Franco: I always wanted to wear the beanie, and the network didn’t like it. They were all about “We need to see his hair. He needs to look handsome.”

  Seth Rogen: James would do stuff at times just to push people’s buttons. I think he threw milk in someone’s face as an improv, and I remember thinking, That’s not the best improv.

  Judd: We used to say, “Two out of ten of Franco’s improvs are good, but those two are just historic.”

  Natasha Melnick (actress, “Cindy Sanders”): There’s a certain responsibility you feel when you’re shooting on film. Every second you’re goofing off is just, like, money.

  Russ Alsobrook: It wasn’t wasted: We were trying to find these comedic nuggets of gold that might be scattered throughout a ten-minute take. At one point Eastman Kodak gave me a lot of swag because we’d shot a million feet of film.

  Judd: There were moments when I would say to the actors, “We’re going to do the long version of this. I don’t care about the words—I just want it to be truthful.” In “The Little Things,” the episode where Seth finds out his girlfriend has “ambiguous genitalia,” it was important to us that it was legitimate and thoughtful. I took him into my office with Jessica Campbell [who played the girlfriend] and asked, “How would this go down if she was telling you this information?”

  Seth Rogen: He had us improvise and rewrote them to what we improvised. That was the first time I saw you can make weird moments work if you treat them totally honestly.

  Judd: That story came about because I was listening to Howard Stern and there was a doctor on, talking about ambiguous genitalia. I thought, There’s a way to do that that’s real and sweet and compassionate. A lot of the writing staff thought it was going to be sentimental or in bad taste.

  Jon Kasdan (writer, “The Little Things”): I remember Judd and Mike White and I sitting in Judd’s office discussing it. It was not my idea. At first I thought they were just kidding. But it became clear that they weren’t.

  Judd: It became one of our favorite episodes. In a way, it was a fuck-you to NBC, like, “Now we’re going to get really ambitious and aggressive with story lines that you would never approve if the show had a chance of surviving.”

  Jake Kasdan: There was this sense that it wasn’t going to last, so the network wasn’t really going to try to fix it. I’m not sure you could get away with those things on a show that isn’t about to be canceled.

  (As with the improvised scene between Rogen and Campbell, the series’s depth and nuance owes much to the chemistry of the cast.)

  Paul Feig: John and Linda would do this thing where they would talk to each other like brother and sister, just on the set when they were waiting around. They kind of got on each other’s nerves, but it was their game. That’s when I was like, God, this cast is so good.

  Miguel Arteta: Judd knew how to get into the heads of these kids. He really knew their psychology. He made them bring what was happening in their real life into the performances.

  John Francis Daley: Over the course of the show, Martin and I would hang out, and Samm would be the odd one out, and then Martin and Samm would hang out, and I’d be the odd man out. There were scenes when we had to act all lovey-dovey with each other and felt exactly the opposite.

  Jeff Judah: Seth was stuck studying for his GED and wasn’t happy about that, because he wanted to hang out with Franco and Jason and Martin.

  Seth Rogen: I dropped out of high school when I started doing the show. I told them I was doing correspondence school from Canada and just wrote Superbad all day.

  James Franco: I was interested in the writing, so after hounding Judd and Paul they said, “You want to see how it’s written?” They took me into Judd’s office, and they wrote a scene right in front of me, just improvising as the characters out loud. That was really important for me.

  Judd: There’s that moment early in your career when you will work harder than any other point afterward. And you can see that in Freaks and Geeks. Just total commitment in every frame of the entire series.

  Linda Cardellini: Everybody was so talented and nobody knew it yet. People would hang out with each other and practice and play and think of things.

  Jason Segel: We would get the script on a Friday, and Seth and James and I would get together at my house every Sunday, without fail, and do the scenes over and over and improve them and really think about them. We loved the show. And we took the opportunity really, really seriously.

  Seth Rogen: We felt if we made the scenes better on the weekend, if we came in with better jokes, they would film it. And they would! And we didn’t know it at the time, but that was completely unindicative of probably every other show that was on television.

  (Ratings remain low as the series becomes hard even for fans to find.)

  Paul Feig: We were on for two weeks, off for four weeks because of the World Series, on for another six and then off for two months, moved, put up against Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And then the nail in our coffin was definitely the Mary and Rhoda reunion show [an ABC TV-movie sequel to The Mary Tyler Moore Show that ran opposite the tenth aired episode of Freaks and Geeks].

  Judd: We started a website, but NBC refused to let us put the address on any of our ads because they didn’t want people to know the Internet existed. They were worried about losing viewers to it.

  Becky Ann Baker (actress, “Jean Weir,” Lindsay and Sam’s mom): They sent four of us to do the Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was a really cold, windy, icy day, and at one point we were on a street corner and the float was stopped and someone yelled up to us, “Who are you?!”

  Scott Sassa: We had this constant battle with Judd about making things more upbeat. He thought we were going to put ponies and unicorns in, and we just wanted some wins for the characters—without losing the essence of the show.

  Judd: There were tough episodes. The toughest was probably when Jason Segel tried to be a drummer, and he went out and auditioned, and he was horrible. And we really played that moment out there, when he realizes he’s not good enough to do the thing he dreams of doing.

  L
inda Cardellini: Life is filled with moments where you have to sit alone with yourself, and I think this show let our characters do that in a way that wasn’t normal at the time. You don’t really know what to say or do, so you just have to sit there in the uncomfortableness.

  Bryan Gordon: The show played silences, and television is afraid of silences. But silences just speak to so much about teenagers.

  (A series finale is shot as the last episode of the initial thirteen-episode order, in case of cancellation.)

  Paul Feig: Judd came to me and was like, “This thing could be dead, so you should write the series finale now.” And then it was going to be the one I got to direct. It was terrifying, but it came out really well. Then the network ordered five more.

  Judd: Paul was supposed to direct one of the first episodes, and at the last second I pulled him off it because we weren’t in a groove with the staff writing the show yet, and it was so much Paul’s vision that he couldn’t disappear. Then when I realized the show was probably going to get canceled, I said to Paul, “You should write and direct this finale.” And it’s clearly the best episode of the entire series.

  Linda Cardellini: To do the last episode in the middle felt rebellious, like we were part of dictating our own fate.

  Becky Ann Baker: In the finale I’m putting Lindsay on the bus, where she was supposedly going off to a summer college experience. “I miss you already” was the last thing I said to her. And that was all so unfortunately true.

  Samm Levine: We’d be out on location. Judd’s phone would ring, and he would walk twenty feet away, and he’d be pacing on the phone for forty minutes. And I remember thinking, That can’t be a good phone call.

  Judd: We were saying to the network, We need a full season [twenty-two episodes] to attract an audience. And the order wouldn’t come, and I would just rant and rave. It was like begging your parents not to get divorced, trying to save the show. And then they did order one episode.