The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History

by John Ortved

  And I got them in all these papers, I got quarter-page ads, which I otherwise never could have afforded. Eventually I quit the Reader, I went on unemployment, and I ran the business in my kitchen. And every time I’d get a new paper syndicated, I would negotiate ads, which started this feedback loop. The more papers I got the strip in, the more we did this mail-order business. And then I thought, Why not retail?

  There were places like the Soap Plant and Oz—it was like a precursor to Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie. There were a lot of concept stores starting, so I got this idea that these products could be distributed there. George DiCaprio, who is the father of Leonardo DiCaprio, was at the time a cartoonist, but mostly a promoter of underground cartoonists. He became our distributor. And then I did a calendar, a 1986 calendar. We had these events [at Oz, Book Soup, l.a. Eyeworks] that were technically book signings but they were really just happenings. [In Polaroids from these book signings, one can see a young Matt Groening looking svelte and handsome—more alternative artist than Comic Book Guy—before he began to cultivate his signature, paunchier look of Hawaiian shirts and baggy pants.]

  Matt was an amazing creative talent, and I got to—I wouldn’t say “exploit” it, but I got to make him famous, really.

  JAMES VOWELL: I actually helped Matt publish some of his Life in Hell books. I probably helped publish the first three, four, or five of them

  DEBORAH GROENING: We were cooking. That year Playboy called the book “Coffee Table Book of the Month.” We were starting to get incredible press. And then what happened is Pantheon came along. They found an article in Saturday Review about the Love Is Hell book, and they were intrigued.

  ART SPIEGELMAN: It was around the time Françoise and I were hanging with Matt and his wife, Deborah. It was well into the time where I’d been signed up for a book with Pantheon, which was eventually Maus, but it seemed to be churning along forever. And at that point Matt had already put out some self-published “Life Is Hell” kind of books, and was wondering if this would be a good idea, to work with a publisher. He was kind of skittish about it, I think. And I said, “Well, these people have been great. Every other publisher in America seems to have turned down Maus, and although Pantheon turned it down as well, they did take it on a back-door, secondary submission from the art director. And the people up in the office seem swell.” So they were interested, and I kind of showed it around at Pantheon, which had a very minimal relationship with visual books at the time. So it was really a matter of “Hey, did you see this?” There really wasn’t any reason for them to leap on it at that point, except they liked it. Matt wasn’t a household name.

  DEBORAH GROENING: Meanwhile, things were happening right and left. Finally, in 1986, Matt got into The Village Voice, which was a huge goal of his. And we got in more and more papers. We ended up being in 200 newspapers (now it’s more than 250) that all had from 50,000 to 500,000 readership. So there were like literally millions of fans.

  And we had these rep networks, and we negotiated to retain the nonbook rights, so we had gift stores, novelty stores, comic book stores. And it was amazing when I got the call from Pantheon. Then he was asked to do a computer drawing, a poster, for Apple Computers and it was just really exciting.

  Maneuvering to ensure that they retained the rights to Life in Hell merchandise was a smart and practical move, but more important, it was a decision that would foreshadow the Groenings’ insistence, when The Simpsons came along, that they do the same thing.

  DEBORAH GROENING: We started getting requests to license on other things, like calendars and so forth. And then we did a line of greeting cards for Paper & Graphics, which was the groovy card company at the time, so we were really diversifying.

  Between Groening’s creativity and Kaplan’s industriousness, they had managed to create a Life in Hell cottage industry. They moved to Venice Beach and there was no more digging in the carpets for spare change. Matt and Deborah would marry in 1987, handing over the management of their business to Pantheon (a part of Random House) in 1989 when Deborah became pregnant with their first child. Their union would last until 1999, when Deborah would file for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. She retained custody of their two children, Homer and Abe. She has become a licensed therapist and is using her considerable means to build a foundation for troubled families.

  JAMES VOWELL: I actually wrote the original business plan for Matt’s publishing operation, probably in 1987 or ’88—I still have a copy of it on my bookshelf at home. He was just trying to raise a little money to expand his operations. And on the last page on the business plan it talks about how “This may not go forward because Matt is talking with people at Fox Television about doing some cartoons for The Tracey Ullman Show”

  TWO

  The King of Comedy

  In which we meet James L. Brooks, Stalin, Hitler, and Rupert Murdoch … a billionaire tyrant is mocked by Brandon Tartikoff … Jim Brooks establishes Yaddo in La-La Land … and the real Waylon Smithers is universally feared and mocked.

  If he were a little dumber, he’d be a lot happier.

  —Shirley MacLaine

  In 1987, as much as it was anyone’s, Hollywood belonged to James L. Brooks. An unprecedented string of successes writing and producing for television in the seventies and eighties that included The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Lou Grant, and Taxi had proved he was a force. Terms of Endearment in 1983, which he produced, wrote, and directed, taking Oscars for each one, had made him a juggernaut. In 1987, he cemented his position among Hollywood’s elite with Broadcast News, starring longtime friend and collaborator Albert Brooks, another smash hit with critics and at the box office. Brooks’s ability to take the foibles, neuroses, and failings that make us human, and translate them into believable and beloved characters on screen would continue to entrance moviegoers with Big, The War of the Roses, and Say Anything, all of which he produced before the eighties were done. Whereas his sitcoms had projected heart and wit, his ability in films to draw laughter from the most tragic and awkward moments, and to infuse humor with the most dramatic poignancy, earned him the nickname “the Dark Prince of Comedy.”1 And yet, while his film career was rocketing forward in 1987, it was on The Tracey Ullman Show, a television program he was producing for Fox, that Brooks would lend his genius to a dysfunctional cartoon family who, more than anything, would make his fortune, his name, and his legacy.

  GAVIN POLONE, former agent for Conan O’Brien, Simpsons writers; executive producer, Curb Your Enthusiasm: He was the very top of the ladder. And in a weird way he was probably the writer held in the greatest respect back in the late eighties. [He] still [had] that track record that he had going back through Mary Tyler Moore and all the other shows that he’d done. But keep in mind that he was at the pinnacle of his movie career, too. I would just say, in terms of the people behind the camera of movies and TV, [at the time] he was not only the most successful but the most respected.

  Brooks did not have an easy time growing up in North Bergen, New Jersey. His father, Edward, whom Brooks has described as “a drinking man,” abandoned the family when Brooks’s mother was pregnant with him, later sending his wife, Deborah Brooks, a postcard that read, “If it’s a boy, name him Jim.”2

  Edward Brooks reappeared sporadically over the next decade, before finally disappearing when Jim was twelve, leaving the boy to be raised by Deborah and his sister, Diane, who was eight years his senior. (The Brooks family was Jewish, and their name was originally Bernstein—a fact Jim discovered when he went to visit his grandparents and saw the name on their doorbell.3 Brooks Sr. had changed the name and originally told Jim that they were Irish.) There was very little money; Deborah worked as a saleswoman at a children’s clothing store. Brooks has said that as a boy he would wake up in the middle of the night, terrified that his father had not sent the money the family would need to get through that week.4

  If there is a driving force to Jim Brooks, an event that informs his sensibilities as a writ
er, it is in his own unhappy childhood. “He loves funny,” one friend told me, “because funny makes you live through the pain.” Or, as Jim told the Los Angeles Times in 1993, “In my mind, if you write a comedy where human beings experience pain, you’re just being realistic.” Later, when critics praised the early Simpsons episodes for the real emotions found in their silly, cartoon world, they were praising the key contribution of James L. Brooks.

  POLLY PLATT, production designer, Terms of Endearment (to the Los Angeles Times, 1993): Jim feels it’s his lot in life to be unhappy and to suffer.

  JAMES L. BROOKS (to The New York Times, April 8, 1984): I’m very competitive about unhappy childhoods. But I’m not the champ. The champ is a girl I know who comes from a family of six children and they picked her to put in an orphanage …

  I had a crummy childhood. I didn’t want to have a crummy life. I was going to live on Riverside Drive and look at Jersey instead of vice versa.

  GARY ROSS, cowriter, Big; director, Pleasantville, Seabiscuit: He’s a very intense guy. You’re not gonna get involved in a working process with Jim and it’s breezy or casual. It was very, very intense, a lot of it pleasant, some of unpleasant, but ultimately all of it rewarding. And you could no more separate kind of the stormy part of Jim’s personality from the genius in Jim’s personality. It all comes together.

  Brooks attended NYU, but he dropped out, working menial labor before landing a job as a page at CBS in 1964, at the age of twenty-four. 5 He eventually got a job writing for the Nightly News; two years later, he was in LA, selling scripts to The Andy Griffith Show, My Mother the Car, and That Girl.6 A friend of Brooks intimated that during his earlier, leaner years in Hollywood, in meetings with execs, he would employ a strategy so quirky that it seems like it’s right out of one of his films. When Brooks entered a meeting, he would deliberately hurt himself physically—banging into a table or a chair—immediately winning sympathy and gaining what he saw as the upper hand.

  In 1969, he created a dramatic comedy set in a high school, called Room 222, which won him an Emmy. That year he also partnered with fellow TV writer Allan Burns, creating the sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77), which became one of the most acclaimed TV shows of all time, inspiring several Brooks-produced spin-offs, including Rhoda (1974–78) and Lou Grant (1977–82). In 1978, Brooks moved on to something slightly edgier, creating Taxi— a sitcom about small-time New York cabbies—starring Judd Hirsch, Tony Danza, Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, and Andy Kaufman. The idea for the show supposedly came from a 1975 article in New York magazine, passed along to Brooks by his best friend, Jerry Belson.

  KEN ESTIN, producer, Taxi, The Tracey Ullman Show: We would have a room full of writers—very expensive writers and the best in the business ’cause it was Taxi, and Taxi at the time was the top show on TV. And the scene wasn’t working and Jim just dictated an entire scene himself and nobody even butted in ’cause he was on a roll. I’ve never seen anybody else do that.

  JUDD HIRSCH, actor, Taxi (to Entertainment Weekly, 2004): He would go further than anybody. He would think of the most embarrassing situation you could imagine in human life, and allow it to happen onstage. He would dare to write it.

  KEN ESTIN: He seems to think in ways nobody else thinks. Most of us have to sit down and take a long time to put our thoughts together. When I was running Taxi, I would spend a long time coming up with story ideas for the coming episodes, and if I’d go to Jim and I’d pitch the idea, he’d think about it for a second and suddenly have the way to go with it. It’s like he had a sixth sense about situation comedy. Jim used to just be able to do it—like Mozart did music, I guess.

  I remember one episode we wrote. [Taxi writer/producer] Ed Weinberger didn’t like it at all and made us rewrite the whole thing. And then Jim Brooks got a copy of the script and called up and said it was perfect the way it was, and even Ed, who had great credits and confidence, immediately reneged on his objections and said, “Go back to the original script.” People just felt that way about Jim Brooks.

  GARY ROSS: I think that within a comic structure he investigated the nooks and crannies of character. He is relentless in examining all the nuances of that character and being incredibly thorough. It’s never glib. He inhabits and completely investigates a world. It’s very much about the examination of human behavior. And to him the nuance of the subtlety of human behavior is the movie moment, so to speak.

  Brooks was a brilliant writer, but he also had his mercurial side. People who work with him note that although he could be magnanimous, he was also sometimes difficult, narcissistic, and demanding, both on the set and off. Along with being brilliant, funny, and playful, he is often described as uncompromising, misanthropic, and fatalistic. “The glass was never full,” one longtime friend of Brooks told me. “It was always half empty. It was always less than half empty. The world was always ending.”

  ANNE SPIELBERG, cowriter, Big: He is very generous with his time. He really listens. He has a temper that I think explodes if he feels someone isn’t living up to what they should be doing. He made me feel, alternately, very talented and very stupid.

  KEN ESTIN: He was crazy. Sometimes he was very depressed and sometimes he was very excited. I don’t know if he was a manic-depressive, but he seemed to have his swings. Sometimes he’d get angry. One time when I was brand-new at running the show, David Lloyd wrote a script. [Lloyd had written for The Dick Cavett Show back in the day and was a writing colleague of Brooks’s and Weinberger’s from Mary Tyler Moore and its spin-offs, but not a staff writer on Taxi at the time.]

  Ed Weinberger told us, because of David’s years of success and his brilliance, “Don’t change anything because he doesn’t like the idea that you young guys are gonna fool around with his work.” Well, when we brought it to the table for the table reading, it didn’t work very well, and Jim Brooks, in front of the actors and the director, everybody, started screaming at me—that I should’ve been ashamed to bring a script like this to the table, that I shouldn’t call myself a producer. He just chewed the hell out of me in front of everybody. Yelling at me, yelling, not talking. That’s the kind of thing he would do, and he never waited to hear the explanation.

  I have enormous respect for him as a writer. As a person, he’s a little messed up, but maybe that’s because he’s a genius. Maybe geniuses are messed up. I don’t know. Jim didn’t yell a lot.

  By the time Taxi finished in 1983, Brooks had moved on to film, taking with him nine Emmys and two Peabody Awards (and these were just the awards Brooks himself received; collectively, his sitcoms earned sixty Emmys). While there were a few failures, like 1978’s Cindy, as well as a lawyer drama he’d concocted in 1979, called The Associates, they had barely blemished his résumé. His reputation in 1983 was strong enough for Paramount to let him write, direct, and produce his own feature, a film based on Larry McMurtry’s novel Terms of Endearment, the story of a domineering mother’s relationship with her free-spirited daughter.

  POLLY PLATT: Jim really didn’t know how to direct when he did Terms. He didn’t understand a lot about the camera and the technicalities of it. But he knew what he wanted, and he knew what he wanted to see.

  Albert Brooks has compared the risks taken in acting to jumping without a net. Working under Jim Brooks’s direction allowed him to take any risk, because he was certain that his best work would end up on the screen.

  In 1986, with help from 20th Century Fox, Brooks created his own production company, Gracie Films, named after the comedian Gracie Allen. Brooks established Gracie to provide real writers with a vehicle to get their movies made. As a filmmaker, Brooks was famous for undertaking a Herculean amount of research, casting, shooting, editing, and reshooting. Using the best actors, he would still do twenty, sometimes twenty-five takes for a single scene.7 This drive for perfection and strain for independence would underpin the early years of The Simpsons. Much of The Simpsons’ success can be traced to two main sources: an independence from network inter
ference and a complete dedication to the writing, no matter how many drafts, or how expensive that process became.

  In its early years, Gracie produced Big (written by Anne Spielberg and Gary Ross and directed by Penny Marshall), The War of the Roses (written by Michael Leeson and directed by Danny DeVito), and Say Anything (written and directed by Cameron Crowe). Later, Gracie was the company behind Riding in Cars with Boys, Jerry Maguire, and Bottle Rocket. Meanwhile, Brooks wrote, directed, and produced As Good as It Gets and the less acclaimed films I’ll Do Anything and Spanglish. ANNE SPIELBERG: Jim believed—and was the only person in town at that time, and maybe still now—that the writers were the center of the project, that it was a writer’s medium, and he operated Gracie with that premise.

  At one point the studio wanted us to work with a particular actor, and Gary [Ross] and I did not want to work with him, because we knew he brought his own writers in, and so we didn’t have to. The studio wanted to know who the hell we thought we were. We didn’t like the idea of somebody rewriting our script, and I believe it was Jim who was right behind us saying, “You don’t have to do what you don’t want to do.”