Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy

by Apatow, Judd

  Judd: Yeah. It’s Lena’s show, and we’re all there to help her. Some weeks she may love our ideas, she may love our whole script. Other weeks, we’re just trying to feed her so she gets excited and goes off and writes a script without us.

  Garry: So it’s not a discussion of ego, it’s actually a discussion of someone’s emotional life and where they are in the moment, which is incredibly usable for the writing and the shooting of the episode itself. That’s what we were teaching in the room at Larry Sanders: The answer isn’t on this piece of paper. It’s in this space right here.

  Judd: Her insecurity about being a writer is what her show’s about, really—a lot like Larry’s insecurity about being a talk show host. The battle in the writers’ room, on some level, has all the same issues of the battle of trying to be a writer in New York.

  Garry: So, as an example, if a writer came in and got defensive about a script he was going to rewrite for Larry Sanders, we might in fact find a scene where Larry’s saying, “You know, Phil’s just—he doesn’t want to rewrite these jokes, he’s just fighting with me.” Instead of getting caught up in this real-life theater that’s going on in the room, observe it. Because that may be what goes on the paper in the end.

  Judd: It all becomes fodder for the show.

  Garry: Translating experience to paper. That’s so hard to teach, isn’t it?

  This interview was conducted by Mike Sager and originally appeared in Esquire in October 2014.

  HAROLD RAMIS

  (2005)

  Harold Ramis was the original cocky nerd. He was the guy, more than anyone else in this book, whom I secretly thought I could be like. He was tall and lanky and goofy, the guy standing next to Bill Murray who was, in his own quiet way, every bit as funny as Bill Murray. Harold Ramis had a hand in almost everything of note that happened in comedy over the last few decades. He wrote for Playboy and the National Lampoon; he was the first head writer for SCTV, as well as one of its stars; he co-wrote Animal House, Stripes, Meatballs, and Ghostbusters (which he also starred in); he directed National Lampoon’s Vacation, Ghostbusters, Analyze This, and God, the man co-wrote and directed Groundhog Day, which is in the running for greatest comedy of all time. Groundhog Day is hilarious and spiritually deep, a perfect encapsulation of the Ramis Worldview, and definitely one of those movies that people will be watching in a thousand years—if people are still here in a thousand years.

  I first interviewed Harold when I was in high school, and he was thirty-nine years old, about to make Ghostbusters. “Why do you think so many people from Second City and National Lampoon have become famous in the field of comedy?” I asked, as if there was an easy way to answer this. And he very patiently said, “The same reason that all the doctors who graduated college when I graduated college are now taking over the medical profession. It’s our time, you know. Second City is great training. I won’t deny that it’s a great way to learn how to do comedy, but as far as us all coming into prominence, you know—it’s gonna happen to our generation soon. We’ll be the old guys.”

  I was lucky enough to work with Harold on the film Year One, in 2009. Everyone who was involved in that movie was thrilled to have a reason to be associated with him and to have a chance to download his thoughts about life and his legendary career. Harold was very interested in Buddhism, and he had taken everything he liked about the religion and condensed it onto one folded piece of paper. He gave me a copy of it on the set of Year One, and I still have it at home. He once said to me, “Life is ridiculous, so why not be a good guy?” That may be the only religion I have to this day.

  Judd Apatow: When you look back, not in terms of quality but in terms of a good time, what movie do you look back on and say, “That’s the one we had a great time making”?

  Harold Ramis: The good-time movie for me has been every single one of them, without exception. I don’t say that as a Pollyanna, because there have been nightmare situations. I thrive on disaster. I’m very excited when things go wrong. I’m really attracted to outlandish and excessive human behavior. Any experience with Bill Murray is better than any other experience because he does things no one you know would ever do. Every ride with Bill is a potential adventure. I say this with love and considerable distance, because I don’t talk to him and I don’t see him, but the memories of doing those films with him or even doing a film like Vacation—it’s kind of the best of all possible worlds for a social person, which I am, because you assemble everyone you like, and if you’re lucky you pick a beautiful place to make a movie or a real interesting place, and then you’re with them for months with nothing else to do but focus on the work. It’s like an excuse: “Can’t drive the kids to school. Can’t help you with your homework. I’m working.” I know a director, Marty Brest—even when he was shooting in L.A., he’d move out of his house. He’d just say to his wife, “I’m not going to be any use to you anyway while I’m making this movie.”

  Judd: My wife is so onto that. She considers all work play. If I’m not working and I say, “I’d like to go to the movies with my friends,” she’s like, “You goof off with your friends all day long.”

  Harold: I had the same thing with my first wife. I said to her, “I’m working so hard for you….Blah, blah, blah…You don’t appreciate…” She said, “You love your work. Don’t ever claim this is hard for you.”

  Judd: What was the first movie you directed?

  Harold: Caddyshack.

  Judd: So you started at a very low level.

  Harold: It was a low level. We were already kind of corrupted by the initial success of Animal House, which I’d written. I had been professionalized for ten years before Animal House. I’d been paid for writing and performing starting in 1968. So 1978 was when Animal House came out, and I felt I could always support myself. I was through the job-struggle period, and things were happening just as I thought they should. I went from improv comedy on the stage to doing television stuff, and then the treatment for Animal House gets bought, the movie gets made, and it’s a huge hit. Producers literally waited outside screenings to meet me, Doug Kenney, and Chris Miller, and they asked, “What do you guys want to do next?” It was like a dream. So I said, “I want to direct the next thing I write.” Jon Peters, best known as the hairdresser who married Barbra Streisand and a fine producer in his own right, looked at me and said, “You look like a director.” I was wearing a safari jacket and aviator glasses at the time.

  Judd: Did you guys all get money from Animal House, or did you all get screwed?

  Harold: Well, we didn’t get rich. I got $2,500 for the treatments, and Chris, Doug, and I split $30,000 for the final product, $10,000 apiece. They slipped me another two grand because I did the final polish. We shared five net points of the movie, 1.6 each. There were no gross players in the film, and it was relatively low budget. When the movie came out, we did a quick calculation and thought, “We’re going to make some money.” I think we made in the under-$500,000 range, but in 1978 that seemed like a lot of money. I literally went to the bank in Santa Monica with the review and bought a house.

  Judd: Tell me a little about Doug Kenney, who is a National Lampoon legend, and also a little bit about your thoughts on having a group of people that’s doing a lot of work together but separates as the years pass. What was that social world like for those people?

  Harold: Having Second City as my first professional experience was great. Second City is so different from stand-up. In the world of stand-up you really talk about killing, not just killing the audience but killing the other comedian. It’s a competition every night. You want to be better than anyone else. But the whole thrust of Second City is to focus on making everyone else look good because in that process we all look good. It’s more than collaborative. Your life onstage depends on other people and on developing techniques for creating cooperative work. We have rules, guidelines, games, and techniques that teach that. It fosters a spirit that exists to this day. Anyone who’s ever worked at Second City ca
n run into any other generation of Second City players, and they instantly share a language and an approach to their work. John Belushi got hired from Second City. We were in a show together, and he got hired to do National Lampoon. They did a big Woodstock music festival parody called Lemmings—it was a big breakout show for John. Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest were discovered in that show. John was able to write his own ticket at the Lampoon, and when the Lampoon wanted to do a nationally distributed radio show, they let John be the producer. John brought me, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Brian Murray, and Joe Flaherty from Second City. We all moved to New York and had this great, cohesive Second City spirit. Doug Kenney was a really sweet guy, a hippie dropout from Harvard that started the National Lampoon and then took a year off to live in a teepee in Martha’s Vineyard. He’d written a book called Teenage Commies from Outer Space, and he was their resident adolescence and puberty expert. He did the High School Yearbook. He did “First Lay Comics” and “First High Comics.” So we did a stage show from Lampoon, John, Gilda, me, Bill, Brian, Joe. We took it on the road, then we did the Radio Hour for a while, and then Ivan Reitman saw us perform in Toronto. He wanted to do a movie with the Lampoon, so I said, “What about a college movie?” He said, “Who do you want to work with at the Lampoon?” I thought Doug was the smartest, funniest, nicest guy, so Doug and I teamed up, and then later we brought in Chris Miller. Doug was always really elegant. He wanted to be Cary Grant. He wanted to be Chevy Chase, basically, but he didn’t have the performing chops. He was as smart as could be. Doug used to do a thing where he would stand at my bookcase in my house, close his eyes, pick a book, randomly flip to a page, start reading from that page, and at some point start improvising. You wouldn’t know where the book ended and Doug’s improv began. He could do it with any book on the shelf, just his little parlor trick.

  Judd: So those were the salad days, socially, for that group? It wasn’t like, “Oh, no, the group broke up because…”?

  Harold: Not then. After Animal House was successful, Doug and I joined with Brian Murray and wrote Caddyshack. Doug produced it, I directed it, and Brian acted in it. We were so arrogant and deluded that we thought Caddyshack would be as big as Animal House, but to have your first movie be, what was then, the biggest comedy ever sets the bar a little high. Doug was already troubled, already wrestling with self-esteem issues because of family problems and substance abuse issues. We had a horrific press conference for Caddyshack. It was one of the worst public events I’ve ever attended, and it was kind of my fault. I said, “Wouldn’t it be great to get Chevy, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield, and Ted Knight on the stage to talk to the press?” Well, they scheduled it at nine-thirty in the morning. None of those four had ever been up at nine-thirty in the morning. Doug showed up at the press conference drunk, stoned, coked up, and sleepless. He hadn’t gone to bed the night before. Chevy was rude to the press. Rodney was totally out of it. Bill was crude and off-putting, and the press was hostile. At one point, Doug stands up and tells them all to fuck themselves, and then passes out at the table. Chevy concludes his last TV interview of the day with Brian Linehan from Toronto, and Brian says, “Chevy, what would you say about so-and-so?” Chevy says, “What would I say? Can I say, ‘Fuck you, Brian’? Could I just say, ‘Fuck you’?” This is a televised interview. The next day someone sends me a clipping that says, “If this is the new Hollywood, let’s have the old Hollywood back.” So Doug was depressed, and I get a call—I don’t know why I’m being so self-revealing. Doug says, “I’m going to Hawaii with Chevy for two weeks to clean up.” You do not go anywhere with Chevy to clean up. I thought, This is a potential disaster. I cannot go on this trip. Chevy came back. Doug did not. Doug fell from a high place on the island of Kauai, and his body was found a couple of days later. It was beyond tragic. I’d been in a room with this guy eight hours a day for two movies. He’s like my brother and best friend. And he’s much loved by a great number of people. It was sobering, but in a way it became like a Rorschach test for each member of our group. Some thought suicide: Doug was a victim of his own substance abuse, his own depression, whatever. Some thought accident: He was careless. It was just fate, an existential accident. Others thought he was murdered by drug dealers on Kauai. There was no evidence for any of it. It just depends on how you see the world. We eventually concluded that Doug slipped while looking for a place to jump. Same with John Belushi. John died two years later of an administered overdose, but it’s not suicide when you let a stranger shoot you up and you don’t know what’s in the needle. If you’ve even gotten to the point of putting a needle in your body, it’s a form of suicide. John Belushi—as a nice segue from Doug Kenney, just to really perk up your morning—was pulled twice from a burning bed. If it happens once, it’s kind of a wake-up call. If it happens twice, you start thinking, Maybe I have a problem.

  Judd: You always hear that when Caddyshack was being made everybody was on drugs and partying during the shooting.

  Harold: Everyone in the world of that age was on drugs and partying. It was the eighties in Florida. There were hotels literally built of pressed cocaine. They had so much cocaine, they just used it as construction material.

  Judd: I’m always fascinated when you hear about people being on something when they’re making Saturday Night Live. I think we got drunk once in the Larry Sanders writers’ room, and then just went home and wrote nothing. So I’m just fascinated.

  Harold: Well, one of the miracles of substance abuse—when you use something enough, it eventually loses its effect, whatever it is. That’s why addicts have to take more and more of it to get high. You’re not even high anymore. Eventually, John Belushi—people would come up to him at parties and just hand him drugs because they thought that was the way to John’s heart. They’d give him a little gram bottle of cocaine and go, “John, you want some coke?” He’d go, “Yeah, the whole bottle.” You become a glutton. It’s a form of gluttony. If you’re high all the time, that becomes your sober state. Eventually, all your judgments become relative to that state. That was the miracle of getting sober for me. It’s not different. It’s the same. I have the same problems, urges, desires, ideas, and thoughts. I don’t need to be high. Eventually getting high, I realized, just made me sick. I was sick.

  Judd: How does it feel—I would assume you would become numb to it at some point—to have a body of work that…in a way, I guess it’s kind of like being the Beatles. Does it get boring dealing with the impact of your body of work on people, how much it means to people? Can you feel that anymore?

  Harold: Grandiosity is the curse of what we do. There’s a great rabbinical motto that says you start each day with a note in each pocket. One note says, “The world was created for you today,” and the other note says, “I’m a speck of dust in a meaningless universe,” and you have to balance both things. I once did a public talk and told them that story, and I said, “I literally have a note in each pocket.” I took one out and said, “This one says, ‘You’re great,’ and this one says, ‘You’re great.’ ” The culture is what it is. I’m as much a product of our culture as I am a participant in it. It’s very gratifying on a personal level to know that people responded so much and cherish those films. Any of us who make films or work in any of the arts aspire to have a dialogue with the culture and with our audience. Our audience could be an audience of one, like when you grab your best friend and say, “Read this. What do you think?” Our little hearts pound as our friends read our poem, look at our painting, or read our script. If they like it, our spirits soar. It’s great. We can get grandiose from the approval of very few people.

  Judd: If you look at the entire generation of people you began with, it seems that very few of them have continued to work at a high level. There are a lot of people that crashed, or their work crashed. Then you look at other people….Larry Gelbart is still a great writer after fifty years. Do you attribute that to anything?

  Harold: What eventually happens in all our lives is that we
’re faced with developmental challenges. It’s always, “Now what?” We all start to work for certain reasons, and I think most guys in the room would recognize that we work to meet girls. The last line of Caddyshack is, “Hey! We’re all going to get laid!” It was an improvised line I can’t even believe I edited into the movie. Getting laid is just a metaphor for getting all the things we’re supposed to want when we’re adolescent. We want to be rich, we want power, we want to be attractive to people, and we want all the perks of success. We’ll leave out of the discussion what happens when you don’t get it. But let’s say you’re Chevy Chase and you do get it. You’re getting all the perks, people offer you money, women are throwing themselves at you, and you’re famous. Now what? Now it becomes a measure of character, growth, and development. Who do you want to be from that point on? You’re rich and famous, so what do you have to say? You’ve got the stage. You’re on it. You’re there. Now what? Once you’ve got people’s attention, what do you want to do with it? Growth is hard. I’ve said this to Chevy. I see him. We bump into each other every couple of years. A few years ago, twenty years after Vacation, and after he’s already done Vegas Vacation, he says, “We’ve got to do something together.” I said, “Well, what are you thinking?” and he says, “ ‘Swiss Family Griswold.’ ” My first thought is, Do I need to do another Vacation movie? Does he need to do another Vacation movie? So I said, “Maybe it would be better to do something you’re actually interested in, like an issue in your life.” When you’re almost sixty years old there’s got to be something more going on. What are the challenges of being a grown-up in the world? Start with something that’s important or interesting to you, and that’s what you make movies out of. It’s like the rat in the experiment that just keeps going back and hitting the lever to get the same reward each time. It’s all about growth and development. I’ve tried to find meaning or create meaning in each of the films, a meaning that’s specific to me at that time in my life. All I can address is the sincerity and the meaningfulness for me. If I do a movie like Bedazzled, as broad as that is, or Multiplicity, or any of those films, I’m really examining those aspects of life that are portrayed in the film. If I had to do a Vegas film, I would be looking for what Vegas says about society. What does it mean to me? What does it say about the addiction to gambling? What does it represent? Everything means something, intended or not. Every story tells a big subtextual story. It’s all rich. It’s all subject to interpretation. That’s the fun, isn’t it? When we see generic work that has only one interpretation, so what? You might as well stay at home and watch another rerun of Friends than see another romantic comedy. And I don’t mean to be down on romantic comedy.