Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy

by Apatow, Judd

  So I ran straight home and went to my room and wrote him a long, crazy letter, the spirit of which was: I have bought everything you’ve ever made, and you wouldn’t live in that house if it weren’t for people like me. And then I demanded an apology.

  I went back to his house a few days later and slipped the letter into his mailbox. (Notice that I didn’t mail it, for that extra stalker touch. Yes, Steve: I know where you live.) I’m pretty sure it was several pages long.

  About six months later, long after I stopped thinking about how I was wronged, I received a package in the mail, which contained two copies of Cruel Shoes, his seminal collection of essays and short stories. In one of the copies, he wrote: “This is for your friend. Steve Martin.” That friend, of course, was my brother, who did not appreciate Steve Martin on nearly the same level as I did, and has since turned into an Orthodox Jew and lives in Israel. I still have his book. The other one said, “To Judd: I’m sorry I didn’t realize I was speaking to the Judd Apatow. Your friend, Steve Martin.”

  This story always gets a laugh, but to me, it’s more meaningful than that: This moment with Steve made me think I must have made him laugh, or he wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of sending me that book. And if I could make Steve Martin laugh, maybe I was funny enough to go into this comedy business I’d always dreamed about, after all.

  Decades later, I met Steve Martin—formally, in a non-stalkish way—for the first time at a work-related meeting, to discuss a project he was kicking around. At the meeting, I was urged to tell that story, and so I did. When it was over, someone said to Steve, “Is that how you remember it?” And Steve responded, “Actually, I believe I was the one who knocked on Judd’s door.”

  Judd Apatow: It takes a lot to get up onstage and perform. What drove you to try it?

  Steve Martin: I didn’t even know what stand-up was in the beginning. I started off in magic so I liked the idea of performing onstage and stand-up—I kind of defaulted into it because, at some point, I realized the magic thing was a dead end and stand-up had a future. So I started to pare away the magic tricks. I fell into stand-up because it seemed like there was opportunity in it. It was the path of least resistance.

  Judd: What about before that? When you were a teenager, did you just want to get out of the house and be in front of people? For me, my parents got divorced. And so, as a teenager, I thought, These people are crazy. Whatever advice they’re giving me, I shouldn’t listen to. It made me ambitious. But it’s a big leap to get out of the house, isn’t it?

  Steve: I definitely wanted to get out of the house and I wanted to have a job. I don’t know why, but the idea of working at Disneyland—that was, you know, fantastic.

  Judd: You lived near there, as a kid, right?

  Steve: I lived two miles from there and I would ride my bike there. Two miles seemed like such a long way to a kid of ten.

  Judd: You did it at ten? Wow, times have changed. Most people today won’t let their kids leave the driveway until they’re seventeen years old.

  Steve: Yeah.

  Judd: My parents never knew where I was. My whole childhood, they would have no idea how to find me, from after school until seven at night.

  Steve: I had the same thing.

  Judd: What did your parents do?

  Steve: My dad was a Realtor, and my mom stayed home. She was fascinated with show business.

  Judd: So you had one parent who was fascinated by show business, and the other who—

  Steve: Oh, my dad wanted to be in show business, too.

  Judd: What did he want to do?

  Steve: He wanted to be an actor, but he gave it up for the family. He had to. He couldn’t earn money.

  Judd: Did he actually attempt it?

  Steve: Yeah. I have a photo somewhere of him in a play. He was very young. I also have a photo of him—a publicity photo—that I’m in with him. I was like four or five. I didn’t understand it as a kid. In the photo, the police are taking him away and I am the forlorn child.

  Judd: My dad quietly wished that he had pursued a career in comedy, but he never said that to me. He only told me decades later. But there were always a lot of comedy albums around the house. I would put on one of your albums when we were driving somewhere—like, we would drive to South Carolina on vacation—and he didn’t mind if I kept playing it for five hours straight. He would laugh his ass off. But he never told me he was interested in it. Did your dad resent your success at all?

  Steve: I think there was an element of that. There was almost a condemnation of the type of material, the type of act it was, yeah.

  Judd: Because it was the sixties and everything was changing?

  Steve: Yeah, everything was changing out from under him.

  Judd: Did he like any of the comedians that you were making fun of?

  Steve: I don’t think he perceived what I did as parody. I think he just—you know, he was critical. The first time I did Saturday Night Live, he thought that was a bad move, you know.

  Judd: That’s terrible show business advice. My dad, when my parents got divorced—and I’m just saying this because I think it’s so funny how men acted, pre-therapy and pre–the days of people talking about their feelings. When my parents got divorced, I lived with my dad. My mom moved out. And one day, he left out a book on the coffee table called Growing Up Divorced. He just left it there. He never asked me to read it. He never checked to see if I did read it. He just hoped I would find it. That was his child-rearing approach.

  Steve: I had the same. My dad said to me once—and this was after I’d grown up: “I didn’t teach you about sex because you learn about that on the school yard.”

  Judd: Oh, that’s funny. But what I found fascinating in Born Standing Up is when you wrote that you made a conscious choice at some point to spend time with your parents, and then you did it every week for fifteen years.

  Steve: Yeah.

  Judd: I was struck by that kind of commitment to healing or connecting. It’s difficult to do that.

  Steve: Well, part of it is selfish. I didn’t want my parents to die and then have all this guilt, you know.

  Judd: Their guilt or your guilt?

  Steve: My guilt. You know, they raised me. And now I’m raising them. That’s what it is when they get older. You can’t just strand somebody.

  Judd: When you were starting out in the early seventies, did you feel like you were a part of the comedy scene?

  Steve: There wasn’t really a comedy scene.

  Judd: What about when you were doing Saturday Night Live? Did you feel like you were part of it then, or did you still feel like you were visiting?

  Steve: I was always on the road, so I didn’t have that opportunity to feel like a part of SNL, but I really liked the people. I liked Danny Aykroyd. I had a few moments with Belushi, who was very sweet. He had just done Neighbors and was excited about acting. He was calm and well-spoken, very intelligent about what he wanted to do—and then he was dead a few months later, you know. I had this moment with him. I remember one night, this was after an SNL show, and we were in this caravan of cars. At one point he got out—this was on Seventy-second Street—and just started directing traffic. It was one of those crazy moments. And I just had the feeling he didn’t really want to direct traffic, but he felt that he had to for his persona. That he was doing something to fulfill others’ expectations of him rather than it was coming from his heart. I felt he was a little caught in a vise. And then when I saw him many years later in California, he was expressing this other side of himself. He seemed sober. I felt he had overcome that need to be the party guy.

  Judd: And then the other side won.

  Steve: You can do that for a while, and then—

  Judd: It seems like everyone has a kind of transitional moment in life. Adam Sandler and I tried to put it in Funny People, actually. There was this line we cut, where he said something like, “I’m not a young guy anymore. I’ve got to switch to my Walter Matthau period.” Bu
t for you, it feels like you’ve made an effortless transition across eras, from stand-up to—

  Steve: Did you ever do stand-up?

  Judd: I did it from the time I was seventeen until I was twenty-three or twenty-four.

  Steve: That’s a long time.

  Judd: But then I stopped because I was getting a lot of writing offers and not a lot of performing offers. I just thought, Oh, the universe is telling me not to perform live. But lately, I’ve been going out and performing again. Last summer, I went out and started performing a few times a week. And I just felt like, this is why I got into the business in the first place, for the fun part. I felt like I had lost sight of the fun part of working in comedy because, as a director, I spend all my time in small rooms with sweaty editors and everything’s so stressful. The whole time you’re thinking, Oh God, I hope it works. I don’t get that much fun out of it. I just feel like I escape humiliation.

  Steve: That’s the way I feel, too. I found it really hard to make a funny movie. Plus, in movies, the strikeout ratio is so against you.

  Judd: But your ratio, when you write, is like one hundred percent. You haven’t written that many movies in the last ten years or so, but do you like the writing part of it?

  Steve: It’s excruciating.

  Judd: Did you stop because it was exhausting, or because you had a bad experience?

  Steve: It’s just so frightening. The pain of it. And that first screening is so awful.

  Judd: We just had a great screening of a movie, and the numbers were fantastic. And then someone at the studio called and sounded disappointed. That haunts you.

  Steve: Yeah.

  Judd: It’s like, Oh my God, am I wrong?

  Steve: It’s like what Brian Grazer said to me once. He was giving me advice as an actor or as a deal maker or whatever. And he said, “Always be just a little bit disappointed.”

  Judd: Albert Brooks told me the reason he doesn’t make more movies is not about the difficulty of writing the movie or making the movie, it’s about the release. He said, It’s so painful. The press, the response—

  Steve: It’s hard.

  Judd: But isn’t that also why it’s so fun, that uncertainty and pain? Is that what you feel when you’re out making music now, touring with your band?

  Steve: It has been a joy to get those chops back. Get a new joke. Get a new thing, you know.

  Judd: How many years ago did you start performing live?

  Steve: Five years ago.

  Judd: Was that terrifying?

  Steve: It was. But doing those shows made me sharper on the talk shows, gave me more material. And it made me sharper in my stand-up career because the last ten years have been nothing but award shows—giving them and receiving them.

  Judd: But that’s a lot of appearances. And don’t you find that there’s a moment when you go, How much can we all honor each other?

  Steve: Absolutely.

  Judd: On the other hand, Martin Short’s speech about you at the Oscars for lifetime achievement was incredible.

  Steve: He was great.

  Judd: Was that as special a night as it seemed?

  Steve: It was a big deal for me, yeah. First, I never thought I would get an Oscar. Although, you know, Nora Ephron said once, I don’t care who you are, when you sit down to type the first page of your screenplay, in your head you’re also writing your Oscar acceptance speech. And when you’re an actor and you’re giving your performance you’re also thinking, You know, I think I can win an Oscar. I’m going to win an Oscar for this. And comedy gets the short end of the stick at the Oscars because nobody understands it. So I was honored to be acknowledged for a body of work, I really was.

  Judd: All those movies exist and they’re on all the time.

  Steve: Yeah. And, you know, I saved all the scripts. That’s the only thing I saved. I never got them autographed or anything but I had them bound in leather. Sometimes I look at them, look at the titles, and think, It’s all shit.

  Judd: All of them?

  Steve: All of them. But then sometimes I think, Well, that was pretty good, and that was pretty good, and that was good, and so I can get like eight out of forty that are pretty good. All it takes is eight to make a good career. Because no one has twenty.

  Judd: It’s like baseball.

  Steve: It’s hard to hit a lot of good movies. Very hard. I didn’t know that at the beginning. I thought every movie I did was going to be good. To me, there’s like three levels of knowing if a movie is good. One is when it comes out. Is it a hit? Then after five years. Where is it? Is it gone? Then again after ten–fifteen years if it’s still around. Are people still watching it? Does it have an afterlife? Like, Three Amigos! was a flop.

  Judd: But then it becomes the most beloved—

  Steve: Well, I don’t know if it’s beloved. They tell me it is, but I don’t know.

  Judd: When I was working for The Larry Sanders Show, Warren Beatty was on an episode and I had lunch with him. And he told me, “You don’t know for ten years if a movie is truly good, so don’t even think about it. At some point, you gradually realize, Oh, people are still amused by this.”

  Steve: Absolutely true. I find that the joke you put in that really shouldn’t have been in the movie because it was a personal favorite or something is the joke that stands out ten years later.

  Judd: Let’s talk about The Jerk. It made a hundred and eighty million dollars in 1980. That’s like the equivalent of making six hundred million today dollars or something. Did it feel that big when it came out?

  Steve: I didn’t have any way of comparing. It was my first movie. Everything I’d done had been a hit, so I just assumed that it’d be a hit, too. You know.

  Judd: It’s one of those movies that completely holds up.

  Steve: It’s held up for a long time, yeah.

  Judd: Would it be painful to sit and watch it now?

  Steve: Yeah. It would.

  Judd: What is the high point of your career, then? What film or moment do you instantly go to in your mind?

  Steve: You mean, in terms of movies that I’ve done? I can think of scenes that feel really funny to me, but I don’t resee a lot of my movies. I actually avoid it. Unless it’s by accident. In terms of movies, they are usually the ones done by somebody else—Planes, Trains and Automobiles; Father of the Bride; Parenthood.

  Judd: You should watch Planes, Trains and Automobiles again.

  Steve: I know that film pretty well. John Hughes was a special kind of genius.

  Judd: It is a masterwork, and I refer to it when I’m working with people because I think that movie has a lot to teach people who are trying to do comedy. That scene where you and John Candy have a fight in the hotel room is as perfect as, you know, Albert Brooks and Holly Hunter’s fight in Broadcast News.

  Steve: Why do you think that was? Because it turns around or because I realize that I hurt him?

  Judd: You go off on him so hard because you’re so frustrated and you’ve lost your sense of his humanity and then he stands up for himself and just says, “Well, I like me.” It goes from riotously funny to almost mean-spirited to truly sad. It can make you cry in an eighth of a second. It’s just your chemistry with him. How vulnerable he instantly becomes, and how you react to that, how it stops you in your tracks. Like, Oh my God, what have I done? How am I behaving? I don’t know if I’ve seen another movie with a sequence that works like that. Two actors in total sync.

  Steve: We really got along, John and I. There’s a scene in that movie that makes me laugh—we’re in a car going the wrong way, and then we pull over. John and I are just sitting on a suitcase talking, but we’re also scared, and we look at the car and it spontaneously bursts into flames. Poof. John Hughes was the master of those comic timing moments. That guy really knew something.

  Judd: Did you become close with him?

  Steve: It was funny. I did for a while, but then he just sort of stopped. He was a strange guy.

  Judd: The
re comes a moment when your kids start asking to see your movies. For a while, my daughter would give me a hard time because she wasn’t allowed to see my movies because they’re all R-rated. It’s hard to delay kids to fifteen, sixteen years old, especially when they have the movie on every gadget in the house. But I finally opened up the door. It was this big deal. I was like, “Okay, you can watch them now”—and then she had no interest in watching them. So now, anytime she watches a movie that’s not one of mine it’s an insult to me. “Why are you watching Schindler’s List? You haven’t seen Funny People! When are you going to watch it?” She’s like, “I don’t know, Dad.”

  Steve: I loved Funny People, by the way.

  Judd: Thank you. It was fun writing about comedians. Adam Sandler and I thought a lot about Rodney Dangerfield when we were making that movie. Rodney was someone who just seemed unhappy with the ride.

  Steve: I met him once in Vegas, in the seventies. And immediately, when we sat down, it was like, “So-and-so stole that joke from me.” I remember thinking, Well, that was fast. I liked him, though. He was great. You know who used to love Rodney? David Brenner.

  Judd: Brenner is so funny. I used to watch him on The Mike Douglas Show all the time.

  Steve: He actually helped my career quite a bit.

  Judd: How so?

  Steve: It was ’73 or ’74, and I went to see him somewhere in Washington, D.C. He was really hot at the time, hosting The Tonight Show, with a beautiful girlfriend. I remember after the show, they came out and they were both wearing full-length mink coats. Anyway, I wrote to him. I was living in Santa Fe at the time. I said, “I can’t make any money. I can get paid maybe three hundred dollars for a gig, but it costs me two hundred dollars to get there.” And he writes back and says, “Here’s what I do. I tell the club owner, ‘I’ll take the door, and you can have the bar, and I’ll have a guy stand at the door with a clicker.’ ” I couldn’t, you know, with my WASPy thing, I couldn’t ever say that, but I did ask the club owner to give me the door. That’s when I decided I would only be a headliner—and it changed my career. The opening act doesn’t get any traction and a headliner does.