by Apatow, Judd
Judd: Unless the guy’s never had sex for forty years.
Harold: That was a good one, though. That transcended romantic comedy.
Judd: You talk about how you enjoy the disasters and the difficult moments. I’m not like that. I usually end up on my back in surgery when something like that happens. I don’t get that, the enjoying-the-pain part. But maybe that’s because I’m in pain the whole time, and you’re not. When it gets even worse, it’s like, Can’t I just have my low-level hum of stress and suffering as we do this? When you think of the worst fights, or the worst kind of conflict making a film with Bill Murray, what’s the one that comes to mind, like, Wow, that was really ugly?
Harold: As my first job out of college, I worked in a mental institution for seven months. I learned how to deflect insanity, or how to deal with it, and how to speak to schizophrenics, catatonics, paranoids, and suicidal people. It sounds funny, but it really expanded my tolerance for the extremes of human behavior, which turns out to be great training for working with actors. They have an incredibly hard job, and most of them are already a little bent. That’s why they’re actors in the first place. They have a desperate need to get out there and reveal something about themselves. Even as a teenager, you’re in a room full of people and someone is acting out. God, that’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s always the person who’s in big trouble. The rest of the class sits there and goes, “Wow! Did you hear what he said to the teacher? That was great!” We all wish we’d said it, and we’re fascinated by the result: “He’s going to get in trouble!” Then you meet someone like Bill, who says things to people you can’t believe. Like a sociologist or a psychologist, you watch for the impact: “God, you can say that and get away with it?” I’ve seen a total stranger come up to Bill on the street in New York: “Bill, love you on Saturday Night!” He says, “You motherfucker, I’m going to bite your nose!” He wrestles him to the ground—total stranger—and bites his nose. I guess you can do that.
Judd: What is that? Is he having fun, or is he mad? Does it make it impossible to maintain a relationship with somebody like that?
Harold: It keeps you constantly alive to possibility. Anything can happen here. It’s great. It kind of frees your imagination. Actors are nothing if not self-revealing or at least self-presenting. It’s kind of remarkable. It almost seems like a cliché to say comedy comes from pain, but real comedy is connected to the deep pain and anguish we all feel. I worked with Robin Williams on an obscure film called Club Paradise. Peter O’Toole, Jimmy Cliff, and Twiggy are in it. It’s a wonderful mess, but it’s a wonderful movie in a lot of ways. Robin is one of the most deeply melancholy people you’ll ever meet. You can just see it all over him. It’s what makes him so human, and I love and respect him. Deep down, Bill is as serious as a person could be. He’s raging, angry, and full of grief and unresolved emotions. He’s volcanic. Comedy gives them a place to work out ideas and entertain—and these guys love to entertain—but they want you to know that they feel. I think that’s part of it. You go see Robin Williams do stand-up, and you can’t get more laughs than that. I’ve been onstage. I know what it feels like to have those waves of laughter. It’s like being bathed in love. Once you’ve had it, it’s like a drug. It wears off, and then you need something more. I want the audience to feel something more than that. I want them to feel my pain.
Judd: You always hear stories of conflict during Groundhog Day, but was there any conflict trying to rein Bill in and focus his energy?
Harold: Never a creative problem. Bill kind of passive-aggressively takes his anger out on the production itself, but never me. I’m too calm. I don’t offer him anything to go after. He would go after the producers, or the costumes….Whoever was around had to take it from him. Or he’d go back and trash his motor home. I’d say, “Well, now you’ve trashed your motor home. Good idea.” No one fights with me. I’m just a detached observer of this extreme behavior. One time, we were shooting Vacation, and it was 110 degrees in Arcadia. We’re shooting a scene where Chevy and his family have arrived at the amusement park, Wally World. They park a mile away so they can be the first ones out at the end of the day. They run across the parking lot to the tune of Chariots of Fire in a slow-motion shot. It’s 110, and the pavement’s about 130 because it’s been sunny all day in Arcadia. Everyone’s really angry. Anthony Michael Hall gets heatstroke and has to go to the hospital. We continue to shoot with Chevy, and he’s really irritated because it’s so hot, and he kind of blows a take. He’s loading luggage on top of the station wagon, and he’s holding this duffle bag. He screwed up, and he’s really mad. I’m sitting in my chair, and I think, He’s going to throw that bag at something. I see him look to his left. There’s a light stand. I know he’s processing, I can’t throw it at the light. There’s the sound cart. I can’t throw it at the Nagra [a professional audio recorder]. I can’t throw it at the camera. Then he looks at me, and I go, He’s going to throw that bag at me. All this takes place in a split second, and of course, he throws the bag. I was so ready that I just put my foot up and knocked it to the ground. Then I say, “Come here,” and I take him away from the set, but not so far that everyone won’t hear us. This is my opportunity. The whole crew can hear. I say, “You fucking asshole, everyone’s been out here all day. The crew’s been out here longer than you have. They’ve been here since six in the morning. We’re all tired, and we’re all hot, so if you can’t control yourself, why don’t you…” Blah, blah, blah. So the crew is ready to applaud me. I’ve both cooled Chevy and made allies with the crew. So I try to turn adversity into something positive.
Judd: At what time in your life did you get acquainted with or interested in Buddhism? It seems like it influences your approach.
Harold: My best friend in college, we went to San Francisco together and graduated college in ’66. The word hippie had not been coined yet. We called ourselves freaks and beatniks. We went to San Francisco. The Haight-Ashbury was flowering. Jimi Hendrix was playing, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, the whole thing. My roommate, David Cohen, was really stunned by it. We were both really powerfully affected by this radical energy that was going on. It was political, cultural, consciousness, religious…it was everything. David went back to San Francisco. He’d been in four years of psychoanalysis—all through college—formal, Freudian psychoanalysis. So when he got to San Francisco he made a methodical investigation of all the new religious and spiritual movements, from bioenergetics to yoga. He moved systematically through all these movements and finally came to the San Francisco Zen Center. Zen Buddhism is the cleanest, sparest, most rigorous religious practice there is. You sit for forty minutes in an extremely painful cross-legged position trying to keep your mind centered and focused. He became a full-fledged Zen monk and finally a Zen priest. He worked his way up through the Zen Center and stayed there more than twenty years. I so admired his practice and this amazing calm it brought to him. I started reading Buddhism and thinking about it. I don’t claim to be Buddhist. I’m too lazy. Then I met my wife. She’d spent her college years in a Buddhist meditation center in L.A., and her mother lived for thirty years in a Buddhist meditation center. Everything I’d heard and read about it so impressed me. I grew up Jewish, and then I found out that American Buddhists are less than five percent of the population, but thirty percent of them are Jews. It’s kind of an amazing statistic. It fit nicely with the Talmudic approach to life, which I’d been evolving. I’m so lazy that I just did a very superficial investigation of Buddhism and distilled it down to something the size of a Chinese takeout menu. It’s literally that size. It’s threefold, and I call it the “Five-Minute Buddhist.” It reminds me how to think—not what to think, but how to think. It’s a good response to existentialism, which is a psychology I embrace. There’s an actual school of existential psychology—a discipline—and that’s the one that makes the most sense to me. I wear Buddhist meditation beads. As Tony Hendra says in Spinal
Tap, “It’s an affectation.”
Judd: As someone who is an existentialist with a dash of Buddhism, if that’s your philosophy, you seem like a serene, happy person. How have you taken the darkest philosophy there is and found peace for yourself?
Harold: Serenity is an illusion, but if anything is possible and I can do anything, then there’s a limitless capacity to do good. That’s what Groundhog Day is about. In Groundhog Day, Bill destroys all meaning for himself. Buddhism says our self doesn’t even exist. The self is a convenient illusion that gives us ego. In conventional terms, of course, it exists. There’s a name and picture on your driver’s license, you have to get dressed in the morning, and your paycheck is addressed to somebody, so you have a self. But it’s really an illusion. I did a group exercise, and we were asked to face another person and describe ourselves in two minutes. I started describing myself, and from the very first statement started thinking, That’s not really true. That’s what I like to think about myself, but I’m not as good as I’m saying. It’s all a projection. So then we switched partners, and they said, “Now tell this person who you are.” So I did a corrective on the first, wrong view of myself, and as I’m talking I’m thinking, That’s not me, either. The whole point of the exercise is that we’re not who we think we are. We’re only occasionally who we want to be. We’re not what other people think we are. The self kind of evaporates as a concept. If you can take yourself out of these existential issues, life gets a little simpler. If life is full of possibility, and I stop thinking about myself, I end up where Bill ends up at the end of the movie: in the service of others. I called it the “Superman Syndrome.” By the end of the movie he has every moment scheduled so he can do some good. He’s always there to catch the kid. He’s always there when the old ladies get a flat tire. We even cut some things out where he’s always there to put his finger on a package someone is wrapping so they can tie the string. How the hell does Superman find the time to talk to Lois Lane when he could be stopping a dam from breaking? There’s always some good you can be doing, which can make you crazy, too. There’s a condition I call “altruistic panic,” where you feel like you have to do something for someone somewhere. If life only has the meaning you bring to it, we have the opportunity to bring rich meaning to our lives by the service we do for others. It’s a positive thing.
This interview originally took place as a panel at the Austin Film Festival in 2005.
HARRY ANDERSON
(1983)
Yes, I was a Harry Anderson fan, too.
When I sat down with him, he was a magician and stand-up comedian whom I’d seen on Saturday Night Live a few times, doing his bit, and on Cheers, where he had done some memorable guest spots as an actor. I interviewed him just before Night Court started airing, so to me he was just this demented, semi-famous magician whom I happened to find hilarious. We talked for a long time—much longer than a teenager with a high school radio show should ever have hoped for—and he went pretty deep. He talked about some very personal things with me. I remember being a little taken aback by how open he was about his life—his successes, his struggles, and his pain. I remember having this vague sense of being moved by it all, but in ways I didn’t fully understand yet, and am only coming to understand now. What I took away is a lesson that has proved absolutely vital in my career: Do not be afraid to share your story, or to be vulnerable and open when telling it.
Judd Apatow: On Cheers you play a con man—and it seems to be true, right?
Harry Anderson: If I were, I guess I would lie and say no.
Judd: No, but I saw you on Letterman the other day and you said you got in trouble in New Orleans for—
Harry: A shell game. I ran a shell game for about three years on the street.
Judd: Taking people’s money?
Harry: Yeah.
Judd: And living off that? Were you doing stand-up at the same time?
Harry: No, I didn’t do stand-up. I got into magic when I got my jaw broken doing the shell game, and I gave up gambling and then turned it around and did a comedic exposé of the shell game, which really wasn’t an exposé but it was more of—there was no gambling, I just passed my hat at the end of it. This is back before street performers were so common. I was on the street from the time I was fifteen until I was twenty-five.
Judd: When did you get into magic?
Harry: I’ve always done magic as a hobby. I’ve done it professionally, too. I played at amusement parks in Southern California when I was a kid, did birthday parties and things.
Judd: At fifteen you started hustling?
Harry: When I first went out at fifteen, I did a street act with linking rings, but I wasn’t very serious about it. I didn’t make much money at it. When I was twenty-one, I went to San Francisco and started hustling full-time with the shell game because the money was better that way.
Judd: You just had people bet and they thought they could beat you out? Just like the guys on Eighth Ave.—
Harry: And Seventh Ave. and Sixth Ave. and Fifth Ave….
Judd: And you made a lot of money doing that?
Harry: Well, no. I made better money but I didn’t—too dangerous. I wasn’t really cut out for it. I wasn’t tough enough and, if it comes right down to it, I wasn’t black enough to be doing that kind of work. Because the mobs that were running were black mobs, and I never had a mob. I never had shills. I did rough hustling, what they call playing against the wall. I just played myself with the players so I would pay, I would make them shill. I would pay certain players and then take from others. But it’s a real rough way to do it. Sometimes it’s called dumb hustling.
Judd: You were able to support yourself?
Harry: Well, yeah, I made a living, but then I got my jaw broken so—
Judd: How did that happen?
Harry: A guy didn’t like where he found the pea. And that was—
Judd: So was it a—
Harry: It was a fix. There’s no way to play the game fair. Because the pea won’t stay under the shell.
Judd: What kind of fix? How did you work that?
Harry: The pea was not under the same shell where it started. Obviously, I was cheating the man. It should have been under that shell.
Judd: So you just lift up the shells without him knowing?
Harry: I can’t explain the technique, you know. But it’s a cheat and the fellow didn’t like it. It was just one punch. I didn’t even see him coming. He just was there and I was down on the ground. Somebody else took my money and left. So after I had my mouth wired shut for six weeks, I had a lot of time to think about what I should be doing. I’d always been a reasonably funny guy, so I decided to take a less serious, more comic approach to things. I went back out and did the shell game but it became more of a lampoon—a parody of the shell game. I created this character that I still have of a guy who is a little bit of a nincompoop—I’m poking fun at street hustlers. I didn’t make quite as much money as one would gambling, but it was a lot safer.
Judd: You did this on the street?
Harry: Yeah.
Judd: So instead of people betting, you just passed around a hat?
Harry: I would demonstrate how the game is played and I’d fool them, and uh, I’d do the shell game and then a couple of card things and then just pass the hat.
Judd: And then how did the magic get into it?
Harry: If you do sleight of hand without trying to cheat someone, that’s what magic is. A card trick is what a gambler does, only you’re not cheating someone, you’re entertaining them. It’s the same technique, applied differently.
Judd: Did you have training from anybody?
Harry: Oh, from all sorts of people. I hung around these kinds of guys when I was a kid. But no formal training. I picked it up the same way most guys do. A lot of guys when they’re seven or eight, and they’re going through the variety of hobbies, will do magic for a while. Pretty much everybody starts around that age and then they stick with it or they d
on’t.
Judd: What kind of childhood did you have if you were out on the street at fifteen?
Harry: Fine. Fine. I was just anxious to make some money. We weren’t particularly rich.
Judd: Where was this?
Harry: I lived all over the country. We traveled. We never stayed anywhere much.
Judd: What did your parents do?
Harry: Well my mom and dad split when I was young and my mom hooked. She was a hooker, and that’s how I ended up meeting the people I did and learning what I learned.
Judd: When did your act move into a club atmosphere?
Harry: Oh, about four years ago. Ken Kragen asked me to open for Kenny Rogers in Las Vegas.
Judd: Just off the street?
Harry: Not off the street, I was playing the Magic Castle in L.A. He saw me there and asked me. I had not done much nightclub work. I was playing colleges in Texas, Arizona, and California. It was a lawn show—I would put up a tent and do a noon show and pass the hat. And then I would go to L.A. and play the Magic Castle. I haven’t played the streets since then.