The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History

by John Ortved

  GARTH ANCIER: Basically, I went to Jim and said, “Look, I know you’re a big movie producer now.” I mean, I knew him before Terms of Endearment [Ancier had been an exec on Taxi], and he had a movie deal at 20th Century Fox. I went to him literally on bended knee, something I was very used to doing at Fox in the early days, and said, “Look, is there any way I can entice you back into television? Is there any project that you feel passionately about enough to do it for this start-up network?” And he said, “Well, there’s one thing with this woman named Tracey Ullman whom I’m kind of intrigued with to do a sketch show,” and that’s where Tracey Ullman came from.

  KEN ESTIN: I worked with Jim Brooks and Heide Perlman and Jerry Belson, and created a pilot. At first Jim didn’t know what he wanted to do. We considered doing a sitcom with [Tracey], but because of her versatility we decided to do a variety show, which nobody had done for a long time and the networks wouldn’t do. But Fox wanted to be in business with Jim Brooks and the rest of us on this project and said we could do it any way we wanted.

  Jim had just finished Terms of Endearment and I think he had finished Broadcast News by then, and he said I could do a movie with him if I would come to do The Tracey Ullman Show.

  ANNE SPIELBERG: Tracey had done a special that Jim had seen, and he wanted to talk about doing a series featuring her. She was new to the States at the time. He had a couple of people coming in to shoot ideas around and wanted to know if I wanted to be part of the group. It was Jerry Belson, Heide Perlman, Jim, and myself. And I felt, especially in the presence of Belson—they could come up with ideas so quickly—rather intimidated.

  To accompany Tracey’s outlandish characters, the producers needed to find a supporting cast that could keep up with the talented performer. Jim Brooks convinced his old friend and Rhoda cast member Julie Kavner (whose spouse was David Davis, the cocreator of Taxi), to join the cast. Kavner, who would eventually provide the voice of Marge Simpson, accepted on the condition that she would have no contract and hence would be free to do other projects, including Woody Allen’s movies. For Dan Castellaneta, the future Homer Simpson, producers Tracey Ullman and Heide Perlman went to Chicago, where they met a casting agent who took them to see Castellaneta perform at Second City. Castellaneta stood out, and Tracey loved him immediately. She thought he had the face of a clown.

  With the producers and talent lined up, and the structure of the show in place, all that was left to do was fill in the content. Jim Brooks, Barry Diller, and Tracey Ullman were about to meet the Simpson family.

  THREE

  When Bart Met Tracey

  In which The Simpsons is almost a show about a talking bear … someone shows James L. Brooks how to die in LA … and Matt Groening unwittingly outwits a Fox.

  I breast-fed those little devils.

  —Tracey Ullman

  KEN ESTIN, producer, Taxi, The Tracey Ullman Show: Jim Brooks had us all go to Ojai, California, and stay at a country club there and decide what to do with the Tracey Ullman variety show. At the time, Heide Perlman and I wrote the pilot for The Tracey Ullman Show with Jim’s supervision and Jerry Belson’s help.

  Since each sketch involved several scenes, we didn’t know how to separate the sketches from the scenes. When the sketch was over and something else started, we wanted to make it clear that that was not a cut to another scene of the same sketch.

  We sat there in a suite at the Ojai Country Club—Heide, Jim, Jerry, and Richard Sakai—and we said, “How are we gonna separate that?” We thought of different things. The one that we almost agreed on: we were gonna have talking animals. At one point we decided on a talking bear. I don’t know why we were so into a bear. Nobody was in love with that idea, but we just couldn’t think of how else to do it. In most variety shows it was just sketches that were so short that they didn’t have to worry about going from one to the next. Nobody had ever really done this before.

  Richard Sakai had given me a drawing made by Matt Groening from Life in Hell. He gave it to me as a gift for my birthday or for a holiday some time before we had this meeting, and for some reason it occurred to me—as long as we’re thinking about animating a bear’s lips or even doing an animated bear—“This cartoon that I saw from a guy named Matt Groening for something he calls Life in Hell was really funny.”

  It was very different. It was smart. It was unusual. It was drawn poorly, which I thought added to the charm, with his overbites and things. And I said, “What if we have this guy do these little cartoons in between the scenes? Is that possible? Does anybody like that idea?” They all said they liked the idea. This is how Matt ended up being our guy.

  POLLY PLATT, production designer, Terms of Endearment: I was nominated for an Academy Award for Terms of Endearment and I wanted to give Jim a thank-you gift. Matt did a cartoon called “Success and Failure in Hollywood.” So I called Matt and I bought the original.

  [Jim] was thrilled! First of all, he loves to get presents. He really does. He just laughed and laughed and hung it on his wall in his office. It was a brilliant cartoon. Success and failure come out to exactly the same thing in the cartoon [i.e., death].

  My suggestion to Jim: I thought it would be great to do a TV special on the characters that he [Matt] had already drawn. I never envisioned anything like The Simpsons.

  DEBORAH GROENING, Matt Groening’s ex-wife: We got a call from Polly Platt’s assistant, so I brought over a big portfolio of Matt’s original art, which I would sell for cheap (though at that time we didn’t think so). She said, “I want to give it as a birthday present to James L. Brooks, who doesn’t know about Matt.” So I sold it to her, and I sold one to Richard Sakai. The one that she got for James Brooks was “Los Angeles Way of Death,” and the point was, even if you’re successful, or if you’re not successful, you’re still miserable.

  GARY PANTER, friend of Groening’s, cartoonist: I saw Matt going to a lot of meetings. I went to a lot of pitch meetings when I lived in LA, but he probably went to, like, hundreds of pitch meetings.

  Panter’s “Rozz Tox Manifesto,” published in the 1980s and influenced by Groening, was a post-Marxian theory of art, which rejected the idea of the artists working against the system. Instead, it encouraged artists to effect change by working within the capitalist environment, thereby attracting larger audiences to their causes. “Popular media are bigger than fine art media. Aesthetic mediums must infiltrate popular mediums. We are building a business-based art movement. This is not new. Admitting it is,” reads Item 10. “Capitalism good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim and stocks the supermarket,” the essay concludes.1

  DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, media critic: The way you look at it from the beginning, the way Gary Panter would’ve explained it to Matt Groening—when they were starting out and when he was trying to sell out in this way—was an argument that I’ve made very often: “Fuck it.” These corporations aren’t alive anyway. There’s nobody at home; they don’t know what they’re doing. Let’s use that fact to push media through their tubes and they have no idea what it is. In other words, we can be subversive because they don’t know what’s going on.

  KEN ESTIN: Now, the story that Jim’s associate producer, Polly Platt, gave Jim a cartoon of Matt’s years [before] is probably true, and she may have even given one to Richard, which is maybe why Richard gave it to me. But the idea of ever incorporating Matt into The Tracey Ullman Show was entirely my idea. It did not come from Polly. It did not come from Richard.

  Both Estin’s and Platt’s accounts fit with Deb Groening’s account of selling several drawings to Platt, one of which was intended for Sakai. Whose “idea” it was to incorporate Matt’s drawings into the show is up for debate—if both accounts are true, it could be that Platt suggested his drawings for some kind of TV special, while Estin suggested incorporating them into Ullman’s show.

  KEN ESTIN: When we met with Matt Groening, my concern was that Matt was an artist, and kind of bohemian, and I didn’t think he would do it. I said, “The
re’s a possibility he’s gonna say, ‘It’s too commercial and I can’t do tiny sketches at less than a minute in total.’”

  We figured we’d have four moments to throw his cartoon in. So we said, “Could you possibly do a one-minute segment and break it up into three or four pieces for us?” I really thought Matt would say no. Matt said, “Of course. Sure. No problem.”

  So Matt goes away, and meanwhile Heide Perlman finds a woman named M. K. Brown. She was also an artist who was not well known who did a character, a woman psychiatrist, and Heide liked her better. So we met with her too and she agreed to do the same thing. When we were ready to go into series, both of them submitted stuff. And then Matt disappeared and all we’re doing is meeting with this woman.

  I was one of the creators and runners of the show, so we’re busy writing scripts and sketches and we’re getting stuff from this woman, but we’re not hearing anything from Matt. So I went to Richard Sakai one day and I said, “What ever happened to the Matt Groening idea? I like his stuff better.” He told me Fox wanted to take over merchandising Life in Hell as part of the deal and Matt had passed. He’d been making a living, not a good one, but he’d been surviving by merchandising those characters through small papers and by selling items through the mail. And he didn’t wanna give up his full share of the merchandising for Life in Hell for just a piece of it.

  So I said to Richard Sakai—and this is the truth, and I don’t know if they remember it or they don’t wanna remember it or what—but I said, “Well, why don’t you ask him if he has some characters that he’s willing to allow Fox to merchandise for him?” So Richard goes away and comes back and says, “Yeah. I talked to him and he says he does have other characters and he would be willing to do it, so he’ll send us a drawing of the characters and see if we like them.”

  GARTH ANCIER, former president of entertainment, Fox Broadcasting: Richard had sent me Matt’s books ’cause he was excited about the Work Is Hell series that Matt had done. We talked about it and he said, “I’d love to do either Binky or some of the characters from Life Is Hell and Work Is Hell, etc.” And the problem they had was that the publisher would not allow us to use those characters on a TV show without Matt getting a large percentage of the revenues. So Richard said to Matt, “Can you go home and draw new characters that we don’t have to pay the publisher for?” And the story is that Matt went home and came back the next day with—drawn out on a piece of paper—the Simpsons, the family.

  PHIL ROMAN, former president of Film Roman; animation executive producer, The Simpsons: Matt didn’t want to give up [Life in Hell]. Valerie Kavanaugh [a Gracie Films executive] told me this story: they picked Matt up, and they were going to go talk to Fox, and they asked him, “Do you have anything yet?” And he said no. And they said, “Well, we’re having the meeting.” So, on the way over there, he started making some sketches. He created that show on the drive to Fox.

  Groening has said that he made up the characters while in the waiting area of Brooks’s office. Regardless of the exact location, the idea that the Simpson family was created moments before the meeting with Brooks is probably a myth. For some time Jay Kennedy, Groening’s friend and the editor in chief of King Features Syndicate, had encouraged him to move away from his rabbits and to draw more marketable, human forms. Speaking at Kennedy’s funeral in 2007, Groening credited him with helping him to develop the Simpsons. While Groening named the family after his own—a father named Homer, mother named Marge (Marjorie), sisters Lisa and Maggie—he created Homer’s middle name, Jay, as an acknowledgment of Jay Kennedy’s contribution.

  KEN ESTIN: Well, two, maybe three days after I spoke to Richard, Matt sends us a drawing of the Simpsons exactly as—well, not exactly—almost exactly as they are. Anyhow, everybody said, “Fine. That’s fine. We like them.” And Matt made his deal with Fox.

  We went into production, and for the first half of the season we used both cartoons. All of us except [Ullman producer] Heide Perlman liked Matt much better—she continually fought for the woman to be the sole drawer and to get rid of Matt. The rest of us wanted Matt, and eventually Heide gave in and we let the woman disappear.

  Other early Ullman staff remember it differently: Heide Perlman had liked both M. K. Brown’s work for the National Lampoon and Matt’s Life in Hell in the LA Weekly. While Perlman promoted Brown’s work early on, it eventually became clear that Matt’s material was working better, and it was never a case of Perlman promoting Brown’s work over Matt’s.

  The deal Matt struck with Fox would prove extremely lucrative, particularly because he retained such a large portion of revenues from merchandising, which became ubiquitous. To this day, Groening signs off on every piece of Simpsons merchandise that goes on the market—and gets a piece of the proceeds.

  KEN ESTIN: Fox gave Matt a much bigger piece than anybody will ever get again ’cause they had no idea. At that point no sitcom other than M*A*S*H had ever merchandised, and the merchandising for M*A*S*H, although far greater than for anything else, was still insignificant. So they were just playing hardball with Matt wanting to merchandise the characters ’cause that’s what they do. They screw everybody they can. What they did is give him a much bigger piece than they thought would ever matter [by giving Matt a bigger share of future merchandising, they could pay him less for his cartoons appearing on the show]. Now Matt’s probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars because of that.

  ART SPIEGELMAN, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist, Maus: I pleaded with Matt and advised him strongly from my elder-statesman position to not work with Fox. “Whatever you do, don’t work with those guys! They’re gangsters! They’re gonna take your rights away!” I told him. He’s never let me forget it.

  POLLY PLATT: What’s funny now, because he’s so rich, is that I was driving home from my office at Paramount very shortly after that, and I saw Matt sitting at the bus stop. He didn’t even have a car. I had no idea he was so poor.

  Turning Groening’s drawings into animated cartoons, something Brooks and company were clueless about, would require an animation studio. They settled on a tiny company in Hollywood called Klasky-Csupo, run by an eccentric Hungarian immigrant, Gabor Csupo, and his wife, Arlene Klasky.

  KENT BUTTERWORTH, director of first Simpsons episode: Klasky-Csupo’s studio was located on the second floor in the Bob Clampett building on Seward Street in Hollywood. This used to be the animation studio where the Beany & Cecil show was produced in the sixties. It was an old Hollywood building from the twenties or thirties with old hardwood floors and lots of character.

  Gabor had escaped from the Iron Curtain with a couple of his animator friends, Steve and Tibor. He was into a lot of the Eastern European graphics of the eighties.

  PHIL ROMAN: When I was directing the Peanuts specials, way back in the late seventies, Gabor came by. He had just come over from Hungary, and he showed me his reel that he had compiled in Hungary, and I kind of liked him and what he’d done, so I said, “Okay, I’ll give you some work to do, some scenes to animate.” I might have given him some of the first work that he did.

  GABOR CSUPO, animation executive producer, The Simpsons (1987–92): My partner and I had a small animation studio doing commercials and music videos and all kinds of stuff. And we got a call one day from Gracie Films, saying, “We looking for an animation company that could animate one-minute cartoons for this new show for Fox.” So we went in there, meet the producers, and found out we were one of roughly two hundred companies they were looking at, so we were thinking, We’re never gonna get this gig. But apparently our reputation was good, and they were telling us, “Listen, if you guys give us a good bid, the job is yours.” So we gave them a price that they thought was pretty reasonable, but they said they actually got a better price from somebody else, which we thought was impossible.

  When Jim Brooks originally saw Matt Groening’s drawings on his wall it was just a clipping from a magazine, just the line drawing, no color or anything, and that’s how he wan
ted to do the show. And we said, “Well, you know, it’s not going to be very, how can I say it, accessible for people to watch, especially if you want to tell little stories, with just line drawings.” So we offered them color for the same price, and all of a sudden their eyes lit up and he said, “Okay, you guys are on.”

  The characters were so beautiful but, let’s face it, primitively designed, so we thought that we could counterbalance that design with shocking colors. That’s why we came up with the yellow skin and the blue hair for Marge. We colored it in and we created the whole look for the show. Even for the backgrounds we used the same kind of flat-cel paintings, which no one ever used before. And at that time we didn’t have computers, so everything was done by hand.

  MARGOT PIPKIN, animation producer, The Simpsons: Klasky-Csupo was a really tiny little place. We had three animators on it—Bill Kopp, Wes Archer, and David Silverman—three young guys. Everyone was freelance at Klasky because it was so tiny. The only full-time people were Gabor, the receptionist, and Arlene. We hired those three guys to animate The Simpsons’ bumpers [“bumpers” or “interstitials” are the names given to the short, one-minute cartoons that Gracie used to fill space between Tracey Ullman’s sketches]. So they did the layout. They did the animation. They did the in-between. They did everything. And then Gyorgyi Peluce did the color design.