Laugh Lines: Conversations With Comedians

by Corey Andrew

  Corey: How did you go from ‘Freaks and Geeks’ to ‘Undeclared’?

  Judd: We were so devastated when ‘Freaks and Geeks’ ended. We were trying to figure out a way to do another show with a similar spirit to ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ and being incredibly lazy, I just thought the easiest thing to do would be do a show about college, because by the time I got it up, all these kids would be old enough to go to college. There was some goodwill out there from other networks. The Fox network gave us six episodes without even shooting the pilot. At the time they needed a new show. By the time we shot six episodes, ‘American Idol’ was a big hit. They didn’t need a new show.

  But they allowed us to have some of the ‘Freaks and Geeks’ people on the show. Seth Rogen was a regular. Jason Segal played Nick, Lizzy’s long-distance boyfriend. We forced on Samm Levine and Busy Phillips and Martin Starr. I was also able to hire a lot of the production staff and some writers and directors from ‘Freaks and Geeks.’ The intention was to do a show that was more of a comedy than ‘Freaks and Geeks’ but still has the sweet side of that show. At the time I thought I would do a show that wouldn’t be that personal, that would just be funny, because it was a half-hour it would be easier to produce than ‘Freaks and Geeks.’ But it turns out a half-hour is way harder than an hour. Especially if it’s a comedy, everything has to be funny. If it’s not, you have to find a way to make it be funny.

  When we did ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ it was fun to do because it was a given that the kids weren’t that funny. So we could make them tell corny jokes or the occasional funny joke, but you could say it was drama when the comedy failed. With a comedy, if it sucks, it sucks, and it makes it a lot harder. The more shows we shot, the more I realized it had become very personal and it was very similar to my college experience which was trying to pretend that I was cool because I had a fresh start in college—to forget I was a nerd in high school.

  Corey: So that was one of the delusions you had going into college?

  Judd: I really thought, ‘Wow, I can be anybody when I arrive here.’ It took everyone about half a day to sniff me out.

  Corey: What did you try to do to alter yourself?

  Judd: I remember doing shots with guys on the football team, trying to drink them under the table. Of course, I wound up vomiting, and all the kids took pictures of me as I vomited. It was like a press conference. The next day, everyone showed me pictures of what looked like an octopus trying to jump out of my mouth. I never drank heavily again. Luckily I got that over with first semester freshman year.

  Corey: So, the Steven character you based on yourself? Was there anything in the show that actually happened to you?

  Judd: At the time I didn’t think I was basing the character on myself. It’s impossible to write without mining your own life. Before I knew it, he was so similar to me it was pathetic. Then I found a picture of me, and I could not look more like Jay Baruchel. I do not mean that as a compliment to Jay Baruchel. I had a long-distance relationship during that first year. A lot of what is crazy about Eric, the boyfriend, is taken from my neediness during that first year of school.

  I always thought if I became best friends with the girl I liked, eventually she would want to be my girlfriend. That never, ever happened. It was a theory: ‘I’ll be such a good friend, she’ll realize I’m the perfect guy!’ It always resulted with a long wait and pain at the end of the road.

  Corey: It seems like you have a good knack for casting interesting faces to fill the screen. How did you end up with Seth Rogen?

  Judd: I met Seth Rogen in Vancouver. They did some casting for ‘Freaks and Geeks’ in Canada. He had this funny, froggy voice, with a much thicker Canadian accent back then. He was 16. I just thought, ‘That kid sounds hilarious. What is goin’ on there? We gotta meet him in person.’ When we went to Canada, he read for us, and he made me laugh so hard. I didn’t know anything about him, but I knew he was interesting. I wanted people on the show that were unique. Paul Feig would rewrite the pilot based on these actors we found. There was no part for Seth Rogen. We just made one up.

  Every group of potheads needs an obnoxious, funny guy. I was thrilled at the work he did. As the season went along we did more and more episodes about his character, which is one of the sad things about that show ending. We were doing interesting things with the supporting characters. Ken Miller, he had a girlfriend who was born with ambiguous genitalia, by the way.

  When we were doing ‘Undeclared,’ we needed writers who remembered what it was like to be young. Seth was good at improvising and showed me some themes he had written for a spec episode of ‘Freaks and Geeks.’ At the time, he was 18 and hadn’t gone to college, but he knew how people that age would talk. He was such a good writer that it became embarrassing to give him so much to do. He’s one of the stars of ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin.’ He has a very big part. I made him the co-producer so he could sit on the set all day and pitch me jokes.

  Corey: Did any of his stuff make it into the film?

  Judd: Tons of his jokes made it into the film, so many jokes it’s ridiculous that I will take credit for every one. Tell everyone what a good writer I am.

  Corey: You really put a lot of work into your DVD sets. The ‘Freaks and Geeks’ yearbook was one of the best DVD packages ever created, and now this ‘Undeclared’ set has a lot of extra material for a show that only lasted one season.

  Judd: We spend way too much time on these DVDs. Part of the fun of making these DVDs is I don’t get paid for it. I can beg, borrow and steal and tell everyone, ‘Oh, but I don’t get paid for it. Help me out.’ Because I got paid so well to do those shows, and everyone who made those shows lost so much money, they don’t feel the need to pay me now. I like it because it becomes pro-bono work. These are real passion projects. Where some people will spend a few months on these, we will spend a year on it. We get fans. It’s not like we have a few bloopers from the old days. We literally re-watch millions of feet of film and look at everything and cut new things together.

  There was an episode where the studio made us re-shoot half of, where Steven goes out on a real date with the girl he likes, Lizzie. He takes her to see Ted Nugent speak on campus. And it’s hilarious, but the studio thought it was too obscure. So we reached out and had them go watch an outdoor screening of the movie ‘American Pie,’ and that’s the one that aired. So no one has seen the Ted Nugent version, and that’s what ended up on the DVD. Paul Feig directed that episode, the creator of ‘Freaks and Geeks.’ We also videotaped a few Loudon Wainwright concerts. He’s a real American treasure. He’s this hilarious, bittersweet folk singer. He’s been a big inspiration for me for a long time because he’s real and he lays it all out there. So we put a half-hour concert on the DVD which I think is worth the price of admission right there.

  We just hunted down every funny outtake. I put raw footage on the DVDs, just so you see how we shot the show. We put on a Q&A at the Museum of Television and Radio. I always seem to do a Q&A at the Museum of Television and Radio either two days before or two days after I’m being cancelled. They’re fun to watch because everyone is really angry and desperate and willing to say things that could hurt their career. We put those on. I’m a pack rat. I keep all the rehearsal and auditions. I make everyone improvise a lot.

  Corey: My friend Jason and I are waiting for the special edition of ‘Heavyweights.’ We happened to catch it, you know how you are waiting for a movie to start and you sneak into another? It’s been a favorite ever since.

  Judd: There are a ton of funny, deleted scenes from ‘Heavyweights.’ We shot so many scenes with Ben Stiller as the crazed head of this summer camp for overweight boys. We would have just loved to have made that movie. There’s a long monologue at a fire at night, where he’s throwing wood in fire, saying ‘You’re like this fire. You need wood to eat, but if you have too much wood, it will burn out of control.’ I’d love to have that out one day, but I’m not sure if it will happen. Disney certainly isn’t calling. They didn
’t even call to say they were putting the DVD out in any form. I just saw it out there one day. We’re also trying to put out ‘The Cable Guy.’ There are a lot of deleted scenes. One of the reasons we haven’t put that out is Ben and I sat down and recorded the commentary track, and then we both listened to it and couldn’t have disliked it more, and said, ‘We have to do this differently somehow.’ The entire commentary track was Ben sounding depressed and me saying, ‘I think this is funny.’

  Corey: That’s always been confusing to me, especially from Jim Carrey fans, who say they don’t like that one. It’s a dark comedy, people.

  Judd: We did do a lot of funny stuff back then, and there are a lot of extra scenes that are a little crazier. There are some scenes of Jim actually trying to kill Matthew Broderick, but those are scary for people.

  Corey: How did you come up with ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin?’

  Judd: When we were doing ‘Anchorman’ and Steve was clearly stealing the movie whenever he spoke, I said to him, ‘Let’s come up with an idea for you to do.’ He brought me a few ideas, and that was one of them. It’s based on a sketch he did at Second City where a bunch of guys are sitting around telling sex stories, and one guy is telling a story and clearly, his is made up. He’s saying, ‘You know how when you touch a girl’s breast, it feels like a bag of sand?’ ‘It doesn’t feel like bag of sand.’ ‘You know how it feels like bag of marbles?’ ‘You know how when you take off a girl’s panties and there’s all that baby powder down there.’ They’re saying, ‘What are you talking about?’ That was the original idea.

  We started to build a world around that. What it turned into was a very dirty but also very sweet movie about a fairly normal guy who let it get past him. He’s not some nerdy Pee-wee Herman guy. He’s a little bit of a hermit. At about 25 he decided it was too embarrassing to try anymore, and he gave up. Now his friends figure it out, and they force him to try again.

  I think it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve never worked on something that gets this many laughs. It’s also a sweet, human movie that works as a story. When you do a movie called ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin,’ the bar is pretty low. People aren’t expecting much. It really does play like a really great, filthy episode of ‘Freaks and Geeks’ or ‘Undeclared.’

  Corey: Was this always an R-rated movie?

  Judd: We pitched it as an R-rated movie. We knew it would be pretty hard to do with PG-13, but that was fun because the studio wants you to earn your R. If you’re going to make it R, you have to make it really R. You don’t want just barely R. Then you can be more honest about what happens in these situations. People are so happy that it’s honest or not watered down.

  Corey: What’s something that helped make it an R?

  Judd: There’s a really funny scene, where they tell him his chest is too hairy and that he should wax it. Steve says, ‘Let’s really wax my chest on camera.’ We get four cameras, and we hire an actress who also waxes for a living. And we literally wax his chest on camera. It’s like a snuff film for a few minutes. Every time they rip off a hunk of hair, Steve curses out the woman in the dirtiest terms possible—then apologizes immediately. Then when she rips the next one, he does it again. There’s a three-and-a-half minute sequence of him cursing a blue steak and then feeling really bad about it. It gets monster laughs. People go crazy because they can’t believe we’re really ripping his hair out. It became clear this is more than a scene in the movie. We’re actually tearing his chest off onscreen.

  Corey: Have you already submitted to the MPAA? Do you have the R?

  Judd: We’re all locked, and we have our R. Even though there’s a lot of talking about sex because it’s that guy, nothing really happens to him.

  Corey: Even though you’re putting the finishing touches on it, have you started figuring out what’s going to be on the DVD?

  Judd: They make you do it at the same time. So when you hand in the movie you have to hand in the DVD at the same time. We already cut a version of the movie that’s 17 minutes longer. What happens that is kind of odd, more people will buy the extended version of the movie rather than the original version because people like the dirtier version of the movie, but you are stuck with this weird new reality. If 70 percent of the people see only the extended version of the movie, are you ruining your movie by making it too long, destroying whatever flow you have for your theatrical release?

  Yet there is a lot of funny stuff that you didn’t have time to put in, and the movie is already 110 minutes. Does anyone want a two-hour-and-seven-minute version of ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin?’ Right now I’m debating how many scenes to put back in the movie and how many should just be deleted scenes. I’m a DVD freak, and I videotape everything so there will be a little documentary about the making of the waxing sequence. I kept a video diary which is actually way funnier than I thought it would be—showing the ups and downs of when I was exhausted, when I was crying. There was a big karaoke sequence we cut out of the movie; so we’ll put on some of the songs. Then there’s some weird stuff. There was a scene in the movie with a porn star in it. So we shot Seth Rogen hanging out with a porn star. Seth’s lunch with a porn star—that’s kind of disturbing.

  Corey: Paul Feig just came out with a book where he talks about being a virgin later in life than some might expect. Is this a new trend?

  Judd: It shows why Paul and I were perfect partners, why we understand each other. It’s a weird bit of kismet that we both have virgin projects coming out together. Paul’s book is hysterical. I will tell you something amazing about that book. I spent a year and a half alone in a room with that guy milking every horrifying story he has from his youth. Then he has this book, and it has none of the stories he told me. I don’t know if he held back the good ones or he had so many, we just didn’t get to these! I’m just in awe of his memory. Who can remember all that stuff in such detail? It’s so painful. That book is a riot. Read the first two chapters; your jaw will drop.

  Corey: ‘Anchorman’ was probably the funniest movie to come out last year. What kind of things did you have your hand in with that?

  Judd: It’s funny you mention that because when we were shooting ‘Undeclared,’ I knew it was gonna get canceled at some point soon so I started developing a few movies, and one of those was ‘Anchorman.’ At the time, Will Ferrell was on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ and Adam McKay was a former writer on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ So Will used to come to the office with Adam, and we’d kick around ‘Anchorman.’ I produced it, and they wrote it, and Adam directed it. Will was nice enough to do an episode of ‘Undeclared’ where he played a methamphetamine addict who would write your term paper for 50 bucks. It was one of my favorite episodes.

  I remember when we shot it, Jake Kasden, who directed the pilot of ‘Undeclared and ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ said, ‘Oh my God, Will Ferrell is a huge star,’ and this is before Will became a huge star. ‘He can do anything!’ I remember that moment so clearly. I would just challenge them with issues on the script. The one contribution I made that I am proud of is we had all the anchormen talking tough and threatening to beat each other up. I did put a little note on the draft, ‘Maybe you should have them really fight.’ So then they wrote the funniest fight sequence of all time. So I am glad I nudged them in that direction.

  Corey: You’ve had the opportunity to work with a lot of people before they exploded. Who is on the horizon that you would like to work with before they get too big and are doing huge studio pictures?

  Judd: I think Seth Rogen is gonna be a big star. He’s 23 years old; he has such a funny persona. He can be really mean, funny and also sweet. I just think the guy is as good as anyone I have come across. I wrote a movie with him and his partner, Adam Goldberg. It’s called ‘The Long D.’ It’s about a guy and girl who are going to go to college together, and the guy doesn’t get in. So they go to different colleges, and it’s about their four years apart. You cut back and forth between the different schools, and it’s a romantic comedy about
whether they will survive the separation. I think we might shoot it next year. If they allow us, Seth will be the big star. I think he might break really big off ‘Virgin,’ because he gets such big laughs; you can tell the audience really likes him. We’d like to see more of him.

  Bruce Vilanch

  Bruce Vilanch was once one of the best-kept secrets in Hollywood. A-list stars like Bette Midler, Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg kept the comedy writer on speed dial, in case they needed a quick pun or one-liner.

  Vilanch pepped up awards shows like the Tonys and Oscars with well-timed zingers for hosts and presenters alike and was content as a funnyman in the shadows. In fact, his good friend and composer Marc Shaiman once wrote a song for Vilanch’s one-man show titled, “The Queens Behind the Scenes.”

  But once the blonde-bearded, comical-T-shirt-sporting Vilanch ended up as a regular on the revamped “Hollywood Squares,” his notoriety level jumped up a few pegs.

  I caught up with Vilanch while he was T-shirt shopping in Chicago during his run as doting mother Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray” the musical.