One of my motivating factors for doing the film, along with all the other ones, was that I love toys and games. And so I figured, gee, I could start a kind of a store that sold comic art, and sold 78 records, or old rock & roll records that I like, and antique toys and a lot of things that I am really into; stuff that you can’t buy in regular stores. I also like to create games and things, so that was part of the movie, to be able to generate toys and things. Also, I figured the merchandising along with the sequels would give me enough income over a period of time so that I could retire from professional filmmaking and go into making my own kind of movies, my own sort of abstract, weird, experimental stuff.
So now you want to sell toys and games, and make esoteric films?
Yes. The film is a success and I think the sequels will be a success. I want to be able to have a store where I can sell all the great things that I want. I’m also a diabetic and can’t eat sugar and I want to have a little store that sells good hamburgers and sugarless ice cream because all the people who can’t eat sugar deserve it. You need the time just to be able to retire and do those things, and you need to have an income.
‘Star Wars’ is sci-fi that taps into an epic and heroic tradition.
It has always been the same thing and it is the most significant kind of fiction as far as I am concerned. It’s too bad that it has gotten that sleazy comic-book reputation, which I think we outgrew a long time ago. I think science fiction still has a tendency to react against that image and try to make itself so pious and serious, which is what I tried to knock out in making Star Wars. Buck Rogers is just as valid as Arthur C. Clarke in his own way; I mean, they are both sides of the same thing. Kubrick did the strongest thing in film in terms of the rational side of things, and I’ve tried to do the most in the irrational side of things because I think we need it. Again we are going to go with Stanley’s ships but hopefully we are going to be carrying my laser sword and have the Wookie at our side.
So now you have made your bid.
So I made my bid to try to make everything a little more romantic. Jesus, I’m hoping that if the film accomplishes anything, it takes some ten-year-old kid and turns him on so much to outer space and the possibilities of romance and adventure. Not so much an influence that would create more Wernher von Brauns or Einsteins, but just infusing them into serious exploration of outer space and convincing them that it’s important. Not for any rational reason, but a totally irrational and romantic reason.
I would feel very good if someday they colonize Mars when I am ninety-three years old or whatever, and the leader of the first colony says: “I really did it because I was hoping there would be a Wookie up here.”
JOHNNY CARSON
by Timothy White
March 22, 1979
I think that one of the things that is the most innovative about ‘The Tonight Show’ is the way that you work with the camera. The camera and, as a result, the audience become accomplices or conspirators with you, to where we feel a sense of intimacy.
Well, television is an intimate medium. I’m not conscious when I use the camera. I know it’s there. I use it like another person and do a reaction at it—lift an eyebrow or shrug or whatever. I’m conscious of it, but I’m not conscious of it.
There is a real sense of . . . naturalness in the way you work with the camera that makes the air of intimacy so convincing.
The Tonight Show is one of the few places on television where one can see stars, prominent people, and you’ll get a glimpse behind their public personas.
Sometimes you cannot penetrate them. You know they will do what they want to do. You try to break through and get them maybe a little off guard and have some fun, because otherwise it becomes [stiffly], “Tell us about your latest movie,” and all of those obligatory questions you have to ask occasionally.
It’s easy to be socially relevant. I could go in at five tonight and say, “Give me four guests, give me the heads of the prisons of California and give me a politician and give me some psychiatrists and we’ll just discuss what happened in Guyana.” And you can sit there and discuss people in cults and get very heavy, and everybody will say, “Oh, that’s very socially relevant.”
That’s a talk show, but that’s not what I do. I’m an entertainer, and I always look at myself as an entertainer. So it has bothered me for a while when we would get a little flak from the critics saying we’re not doing anything “deep.” That’s not the idea.
Yet, there is a topicality to your show. You’ll come up with witty jokes—not gags—about Watergate, Camp David, drugs, changing sexual mores . . .
I think some of the material we’ve done on political things is some of the best material on the air. And it does get a strong reaction—especially in the political arena. We sense the mood of the country very quickly.
For example, I remember when Agnew was first selected as vice president, it was easy to do jokes about him; nobody knew who he was, and he was good fodder for material. Then, when Agnew became the voice of so-called Middle America, all of a sudden the jokes were not particularly funny. When he fell into disfavor, then again you found out that the people would buy the caustic material. Same thing with Nixon.
Has there ever been a joke you felt uncomfortable doing, either at the time or in retrospect?
NBC used to come to me years ago. They wanted to see the monologue before the show, and I said, “No, I can’t do that.” I can’t have somebody sitting up in an office and making capricious judgments on what he thinks is funny or not funny. I said, “You’re going to have to trust my judgment,” and they have. And nobody sees the monologue outside of the writers and myself; they give me the stuff, and I add to it or edit it, and put it together. Nobody sees it until it’s done. And I don’t think in seventeen years there have been more than one or two instances where something might have been cut.
You’ve always had a kind of iconoclastic flair in your humor, even going back to when you were working on the radio in Omaha. In Kenneth Tynan’s [1978] piece in the ‘New Yorker,’ he wrote about these formatted, prerecorded interviews you would receive at the station and then mischievously distort.
I know what you’re talking about, and I loved that. In the old radio days, the record companies would send out these prepared interviews and they would send you a script so you could interview the recording artist. You’d play the Patti Page tape and say, “Gee, it’s nice to have you here today, Patti,” and she’d say, “Thank you for inviting me tonight; it’s nice to be here.” Then the next question would be, “When did you first start singing?” And the taped reply would be, “Well, I think I was about ten years old, and I was in a church play or something.”
So I just wrote my own questions, and I’d say, “I understand that you hit the juice pretty good and you’ve been known to really get drunk pretty often. When did that start?” Then they’d play the cut, and she’d say, “Well, I think I was about ten years old, and I was in a church play . . .” and it was wonderful. Just these insane, wild, provocative questions, and then the engineer would play this innocent track with the prerecorded reply. They quit sending them to us very soon. I’ve always liked irreverence.
You’ve talked to me in the past about “pure television.” What is pure television?
To me, it’s still the performance on TV that is most important. The personality is more important than all of the dance numbers and the big production things. I always thought those things have been kind of lost on television, because they ignore the automatic focus that TV provides.
But I got the feeling, even if you take all that glitter away and pare it down to a spare sitcom or variety format, it’s still not the kind of pure television that you were talking about.
Well, pure television to me is also immediacy. That’s why I don’t like to do The Tonight Show a week or two in advance, like a lot of shows do. I like to be able to go out tonight and talk about what’s happening today. So the immediacy of doing this kind of show, I thin
k, has a certain value in it. People know it’s happening right now.
Sure, we’re delayed on tape, but we don’t edit the show; we don’t shoot two hours and edit it down. When Saturday Night Live says, “Live, from New York!” it’s live in the East but it’s not live out here. Doing it the same day on tape is exactly the same thing as doing it live.
In both programs there’s also the element of risk.
And I think that’s a part of pure television. We don’t know on any given night how it’s going to go. You get an immediate feedback from the audience on what you’ve done, and if it all falls together, it’s a great feeling. If you’ve had troubles, you say, “Okay, there’s tomorrow night.” Every night cannot be a winner.
You don’t stop the tape even when people are being off-color or whatever. You might bleep it out, but people can see that things were getting out of hand.
Yeah, I think there’s that aura of “What’s going to happen? How are they going to get out of this? This is not going well.” That, to me, is what television started out to be. Now, mainly, it’s a device for screening movies or situation comedies with canned laughter. And The Tonight Show, or shows like it, I think—if they all went off the air, it would be too bad for television.
Critics have said that you have a schoolboy quality, a puckishness that isn’t seen too often on TV.
[Intrigued] I suppose that’s only because of the face. I’ve never had a particularly old-looking face. Even when I was thirty or thirty-five, I looked like I was twenty-five. That may be changing rapidly now. But if I looked different, you probably wouldn’t have that attitude. Or maybe it’s because I was born in the Midwest; you know, Mel Brooks calls me “SuperGentile,” “SuperWASP,” and maybe it’s that particular look, but that’s just what I am.
You have become—and this is just a fact—so much a part of this culture. If you weren’t there, I suspect there would be a real gap.
[Long pause] That’s flattering. I think one of the things is that we’re about the only show that does day-to-day humor. There’s no other show that does it. Saturday Night Live is on three times a month; they do sketches. The monologue, for example, to me is a very integral part of the show. Being out there every night, it’s the only show that I know of on television where anybody is commenting on what’s going on in the country every single day.
But why do you think people feel so comfortable with you?
I can’t analyze that. I really can’t. I just do what I do. People ask me, “How do you analyze that you’ve stayed on seventeen years and the competition has dropped off?” See, either way you answer that, you end up sounding like a schmuck.
If you say, “Well, obviously I do a much better job than they do,” or say, “I’m more talented,” then people say, “You egotistical bastard!”
If, on the other hand, you play Harry Humble and say, “Gee, I don’t know,” then that sounds idiotic, too. So no matter what you say, people say, “Aw, come on now.”
I don’t try to shoot for an average audience. I do the things I like to do, and I think I’ve learned what people will accept from me. That’s just an intuitive thing.
There’s an axiom that most comedians—a variation on the sad clown thing—are very intense and self-absorbed.
There’s a certain amount of truth in that. A lot of comedians are introspective, not the “sad clown” syndrome exactly; it’s more like the myth “to be funny, you must have suffered.” You must have been raised on the Lower East Side, and you must have fought your way out of this deprivation to be funny. That’s not really true. Do you have to starve, be deprived, to be a great writer?
But I think there’s a certain thing in creative people—and I’m not a psychiatrist—but I have found that people who are in the creative end of entertainment are not normal by most standards, whatever “normal” means. That is, as Margaret Sullavan said, “It’s not normal to walk out and bare your soul to a bunch of strangers, that’s not a normal thing for someone to do.” Most people find that very awkward, and entertainers do it. I find that most comedians are a little cynical, as well they should be.
And I am cynical about certain things. And people sometimes mistake the cynicism for being abrupt or cold. I think it’s just the way you perceive things around you. You’ve seen the silliness, the absurdity, the craziness that goes on in the world and you jump on that and expand it. You look at things in a different light. That’s what makes comedy.
Comedians are highly competitive, many of them. I think it was Lenny Bruce who said, “Comedians hate to see other comedians get laughs.” There are certain guys who really suffer when they see other comedians really scoring. I don’t. But I know a lot of guys where the competition among them is just ferocious. They talk about friendship and so forth, but a lot of them would kill each other. There’s something bizarre about guys who do comedy.
I find an intensity there.
[Nodding] And a certain amount of hostility.
In a book called ‘The Human Comedy’ by William Saroyan, he writes about how people make transitions in their lives; you just presume everything is there and will take care of itself, and then there’s that transitional period in everyone’s life when they realize if they are going to be happy for the rest of their lives, if they’re going to enjoy life and fight off the boredom that’s probably the big enemy of life, they are going to have to make a conscious effort to make themselves happy. I’ve wondered if there was a certain point in your life, a certain moment of self-esteem and self-worth upon which you built every other experience.
I know what Saroyan’s saying. There comes a time or a moment, I don’t know whether you can say it precisely, when you know in which direction you’re going to go. Even when you’re young. But you don’t know why exactly. I know it happened to me when I was quite young.
You go through those phases—“I’ll be a doctor or I’ll be . . .”—the standard things. But I think it’s when you find out, at least for me, that you can get in front of an audience and be in control. I think that probably happened in grade school, fifth or sixth grade, where I could get attention by being different, by getting up in front of an audience or even a group of kids and calling the attention to myself by what I did or said or how I acted. And I said, “Hey, I like that feeling.”
When I was a kid, I was shy. And I think I did that because it was a device to get attention. And to get that reaction is a strange feeling, it is a high that I don’t think you can get from drugs. I don’t think you could get it from anything else. The mind starts to do things that you didn’t even realize it could do. It’s hard to explain.
And you walk off and you’re just, everything is such a high, and it’s a great feeling, and that’s why many performers have big highs and very big lows. Most of them that I know. I know I do.
People don’t understand that. They put you down as being standoffish or cool or so forth. It’s not that.
I suppose it’s the manipulation, I suppose it’s the sense of power, the center of attention and the me-ism. And performers have to have that. You see, that’s one of the things that goes against the grain of being brought up; you should be modest, you should be humble, you shouldn’t draw attention to yourself. Well, to be an entertainer, you must.
You gotta be a little gutsy, a little egotistical, so you have to pull back sometimes when people say, “Well, he’s stuck-up.” “Stuck-up” is only another word for self-conscious. You aren’t stuck-up. You are aloof, because you aren’t very comfortable so you put up this barrier.
Do you recall the specific moment—a spelling bee or a class recitation or a play or something—when you crossed over that barrier?
I think it was in a play. A Christmas play, as a matter of fact—Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. My classmate Dorothy Ward played the Ghost of Christmas Present. I played the little boy who went to fetch the turkey, and this man, Scrooge, gave me a shilling to do it. And I realized that I was the center of attention. I realized that peo
ple were saying, “Hey, look, he’s in a play.” That makes you different right off, you see. You’re stepping out of here, and you’re stepping into a make-believe world, and all of a sudden people are looking at you. You like that, but at the same time, you find that you have an ambivalent feeling.
So you had a shyness and an awkwardness that you had to conquer?
[Sheepish] Yeah, oh yeah. I just felt uncomfortable. I still feel uncomfortable in large groups of people. Not audiences, mind you. With audiences, I’m fine. I can go out in front of 20,000 people because I’m in charge. See, most entertainers feel that way. When you walk into a large group of people, you’re not in charge, and all of a sudden I sometimes feel uncomfortable.
It’s hard to find a focus.
That’s right. You see, when you’re on the stage all the focus comes here. They’re watching you and you’re in control. Now you walk into a reception or a cocktail party full of two hundred people, I find that unsettling. I know a lot of people who are entertainers, they, you know, get up against the wall at these times or sit in a corner. If they’re up in front, they’re fine. So there are two ambivalent things at work there. David Susskind’s favorite word, “dichotomy”; which he loves to use—there is that in performers.
The Rolling Stone interviews Page 16