by John Ortved
Matt said in a recent interview that he found the colors used for human beings in previous cartoons “freakish,” so with The Simpsons Gyorgyi Peluce chose yellow skin. In the same interview he noted that she has never received proper credit.2 This could be because until the date of the quotation above, June 2007, Matt never gave her any. In all my research for this book, which spanned twenty years of interviews and feature stories where Groening was quoted, this was the only time he mentioned Ms. Peluce.
GYORGYI PELUCE, color designer, The Simpsons: I knew Gabor from Hungary. We worked together at the Hungarian Film Studio, and when he needed some color design, I did it for him on a freelance basis.
I love color a lot. I knew the show was going to be very quick fillers, so I wanted to do something very different, something that was really going to pop, and something that would be a lot of fun. If you look at those drawings, they have a tendency to look a little crude, or primitive, if you will. They’re not cartoony. I think they’re a category of their own, because it didn’t look like anything that was done before. And that’s why I wanted to give them a color that didn’t look like anything else that had come before.
What is the first thing that comes to people’s minds about the Simpsons? Yellow skin and the blue hair.
MARGOT PIPKIN, animation producer, The Simpsons: Gyorgyi came up with the colors, and at first everyone balked at it over at Gracie Films, and then Gabor kinda talked them into it, that it was such a funky design. They really needed funky color design too.
GYORGYI PELUCE: Gabor liked it. He knew it was good. He knew it was different. He knew there was nothing like it before.
MARGOT PIPKIN: Gyorgyi brought that crazy coloring style, which Matt would not have chosen on his own. And then when he saw it, Matt had the good design sense to say, “You know what? That works.”
GYORGYI PELUCE: I’ve seen The Simpsons Movie. It’s very nicely done colorwise—but that’s not exactly a direction I would have taken with it. It looks a little bit too normal. I like to do weird colors. I had Asian people with slightly green colors at the beginning; I had black people with purplish colors—I don’t think it really lasted—but what does it matter what color you are? We are universal.
For the voices of Homer and Marge, the producers used Dan Castellaneta and Julie Kavner, actors who were already regulars on The Tracey Ullman Show. (Marge’s rasp is Kavner’s normal voice, almost uninflected.)
Bonnie Pietila, the Ullman casting director, remembered that Yeardley Smith had a funny voice and asked her to read for Bart. When that didn’t work out, she tried Lisa on for size, taking her voice up a few octaves. Conversely, Nancy Cartwright was brought in to try for Lisa. When she saw a picture of Bart and a description of his character, she let out a “Whoa, man, yeah!” in a voice that was just a small variation of one she’d done on The Snorks. Matt Groening instantly said, “That’s it! That’s him. That’s Bart.”3 Hank Azaria was in a play no one was coming to see at the time. When Matt and Sam called him in to try for Moe, he used “a bad Al Pacino impression.” After Azaria made his voice more gravelly, The Simpsons had their Moe (and the hundreds of other characters that came with Azaria).
Harry Shearer came on board because Sam asked him to. Shearer initially balked, but Sam promised it would be only an hour a week. “He lied,” Shearer has joked.4
The Ullman bumper episodes were amusing snippets of the dysfunctional family’s daily life, focusing mostly on the kids being kids, and the grief they caused their parents: Bart and Lisa engage in a burping contest; the parents unintentionally terrify Bart, Lisa, and Maggie with bedtime stories, resulting in loss of sleep for all; Bart directs the pallbearers at a funeral as if he were the foreman on a construction site; Bart tries to catch a football from Homer and in the process runs into a wall, runs off a cliff, and catches it in his mouth—then they all go out for frosty chocolate milk shakes. Without a ton of personality (Homer was an angry, moody dad, Marge a traditionally doting TV mom; Bart and Lisa were bratty kids who fought and played pretend), the edgy, nontraditional feel of Groening’s Life in Hell had bled into the cartoon spots, with the rampant anti-conservative statement left behind. The bumpers were indeed different, but the show’s comedy was basic—the Cro-Magnon version of The Simpsons man who would evolve, become civilized, and build empires. Here you can see some of the DNA of the show’s earliest themes: Homer as the grumbling, stumbling father, trying hopelessly to keep his kids in line while not providing much of an example; the parents’ well-intended behavior toward their kids going awry; Bart’s contempt for authority causing havoc but it all turning out all right, or for the better, in the end. Yet many of these themes could be found in any sitcom, going back to Leave It to Beaver, whereas the special characterization, smart, subversive humor, and tender emotionality that would become hallmarks of the series were at this point almost entirely absent.
WESLEY ARCHER, director, The Simpsons (1987–97): At the time, there wasn’t really much out there, so I knew people would like it. Matt’s little scripts were very funny, and his design style was attractive to look at; it commanded your attention.
MICHAEL MENDEL, postproduction supervisor, The Tracey Ullman Show, The Simpsons (1989–92, 1994–99): Matt would just show up with a two-page script and go, “Here it is. This is the cartoon we’re doing this week.” It was sort of guerrilla-style animation. We would hang out on the stage of Tracey Ullman, and in between block and rehearsal, we would grab the actors and record their lines. It was me and Matt and the animators and a couple directors—a really small group of people working on this little one-minute cartoon every week.
WALLACE WOLODARSKY writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): We knew Matt’s work from Life in Hell, just as fans. So when we saw the bumpers, we saw a lot of those ideas being reflected in an animated forum and we really connected to it because so much of Matt’s work at that time was about childhood—the trials and travails of being a kid. So that was something we really responded to.
GABOR CSUPO: Every week we had to do a minute and a half of animation. And Matt turned in the script on, let’s say Thursday, and on Monday we started with a new show. And then we had to finish by Friday, so it was really a lot of work. We stayed around the clock.
GARTH ANCIER: Tracey Ullman just didn’t quite … as good as the show was, and as much work as Jim and a really great team put into it, we never quite cracked that show, even though it was a critical darling.
Julie Kavner, for her part, has said that she did the best work of her life on The Tracey Ullman Show.5
WALLACE WOLODARSKY: The Simpsons was viewed as poor relations by the writing staff of The Tracey Ullman Show, and we secretly always felt that [it] was the funniest part of the show.
Groening would ask Tracey Ullman to do guest voices on the bumpers, but the show’s producers said she was “too busy.”
MICHAEL MENDEL: We started putting all these one-minute episodes together on a tape. Seeing these cartoons play, one right after the other, in front of a live audience, that’s when it dawned on me that this was something special.
Jim Brooks later explained to Charlie Rose that because Tracey Ullman could spend up to three hours in makeup, the audience would get incredibly restless. To quell their hostility, the crew would string together a number of Simpsons bumpers, which ended up getting the biggest laughs of the entire show.
Another important factor in helping Brooks imagine The Simpsons as its own series was the cheerleading of David Silverman, the director of many of the bumpers, as well as of the series’ early episodes, and who had approached Brooks with the idea at a Christmas party. Although Silverman had been drunk at the time, and quite young, Brooks had never had anyone speak to him so passionately about what it would mean for the world of animation to get an animated series on prime time.
Meanwhile, back at Fox, some at the studio (headed by John Dolgen) were looking to kill the Simpsons spots, because they were costing something like $15,000 per spot and were
the lowest-testing part of the show.
BARRY DILLER: We all thought the Simpsons were really cute, but their shorts weren’t making any noise, nor was The Tracey Ullman Show, for that matter, which was unfortunate. I never saw The Simpsons as a series. What made the difference was Jim Brooks.
No one would argue with the above. But Brooks didn’t do it alone. Far from it. Brooks and Groening make up only two-thirds of the holy trinity responsible for The Simpsons genesis. There was also a veteran TV writer who had worked with Jim Brooks since Taxi: the cigar-smoking, hard-gambling, brilliant Sam Simon.
FOUR
Sam “Sayonara” Simon
In which The Simpsons hosts a war … Matt Groening is called a “fat fuck” …the Emmys become a scene of rivalry and petty resentments … and Roland Barthes lets everyone off the hook.
The man James L. Brooks chose to partner with Groening in developing the series was Sam Simon, a veteran writer/producer who had worked with Brooks on Taxi and Ullman and had written for Cheers. It was Simon who assembled the original Simpsons writing room, which has become the stuff of legend. Credited by many as the chief architect of The Simpsons, he took the one-minute shorts from Ullman and transformed them into the hysterical half-hour episodes that America fell in love with.
Simon would depart from The Simpsons after its fourth season, leaving behind much acrimony with Matt Groening over creative differences and compensation. Simon’s lawyers negotiated a lucrative deal for him; he left without much severance but retained a piece of the show (which earns him between $20 and $30 million annually to this day). While many of the early staff, particularly the writers, remain loyal to Simon, calling him an “unsung hero,” it is clear that Simon was difficult to work with and not an ideal collaborator for Groening, whose reputation as a “nice guy” and genuinely easygoing still holds up today.
Simon told 60 Minutes in 2007, “Any show I’ve ever worked on, it turns me into a monster. I go crazy; I hate myself.”1 For his part, Groening has said, “I think Sam Simon is brilliantly funny and one of the smartest writers I’ve ever worked with, although unpleasant and mentally unbalanced.”2 BRIAN ROBERTS, editor, The Simpsons (1989–92): Sam personally assembled the writing staff: John Swartzwelder, Jon Vitti, George Meyer, Jeff Martin, Mike Reiss, Al Jean, and eventually Rob Cohen. He handpicked Jay Kogen and Wallace Wolodarsky, whom he pulled over from The Tracey Ullman Show. So here you have this guy who personally assembled the equivalent of the Manhattan Project, or the 1924 Yankees [as the original Simpsons writers room would come to be regarded by TV writers]. The greatest testament to Sam’s impact on the show is that even after his departure that writing team stayed together and continued the pattern and the template that Sam set up.
JOSH WEINSTEIN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1991–97): [Weinstein was among the first outsiders to join the original room.] It was like walking into the pantheon of comedy gods.
JAY KOGEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): He was a tough critic. So if you pitched something he didn’t like, he’d let you know it right away. You couldn’t have a thin skin.
CONAN O’BRIEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1991–93): I remember Sam coming into the room, and pitching to him, and initially being really intimidated. He’s hilarious. It was fun to try and make him laugh. If I could make Sam laugh, I was excited.
DARIA PARIS, assistant to Sam Simon, The Simpsons (1989–93): Sam’s basically an asshole—whom I adore. As crazy as Sam could be—and he could be extremely crazy—he’s brilliant. He’s one of the funniest people I have ever known. I found that the staff, the producers, the writers—most of them were very intimidated by Sam, so I wound up being the go-between. They would come to me to talk to him because there are very few people I’m intimidated by, and I wasn’t intimidated by Sam. I mean, he could be scary. He can have a bad temper. And he could get very passionate about things. And people were afraid to approach him.
WALLACE WOLODARSKY: writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): Of any of the people [on The Simpsons], Sam was the person I was most involved with and learned the most from at that time. He was the person who sat in the room with us day after day.
Sam opened our eyes to the possibilities of what an animated show could be, which is to say we could go anywhere in the world, we could do anything, and that was incredibly liberating, coming from live action, because you were obviously limited by so much.
BRAD BIRD, executive consultant, The Simpsons (1989–97); director, The Incredibles, Ratatouille: I think the unsung hero has always been Sam. I was in the room when he took some pretty mediocre scripts and just sat there in his chair, with all the writers in the room and a cigar, and went through it, line by line. He would get people to pitch lines, but nine times out of ten he came up with the best line. And if someone came up with a genuinely better line, he’d put that in.
BRIAN ROBERTS: When you see the opening credits and all those characters go by, they’re all right out of Sam Simon’s imagination. I think The Simpsons was, in a way, the perfect storm for Sam in that he’s a pretty accomplished cartoonist himself. I remember him drawing a lot of the characters out on cocktail napkins. I wished I’d kept ’em; they’d be worth a fortune now.
Sam is said to have actually defined the look of Mr. Burns, Dr. Hibbert, Chief Wiggum and the cops, and nearly all the early characters voiced by guest stars. But in a different way Simon shaped many, if not all, of the citizens of Springfield from the first four seasons by developing their characters. For example, Krusty the Clown was inspired by Rusty Nails, a pathetic clown Matt Groening as a kid had seen on TV, but Sam turned him into the chain-smoking, hacking, shamelessly self-promoting character who took advantage of kids.
DARIA PARIS: He’s a very smart guy. He went to Stanford. He got his first job I think when he was twenty-three, and he started in animation.
COLIN A.B.V. LEWIS, postproduction supervisor, The Simpsons (1989–97); producer, The Simpsons (1989–97): Those first two seasons, those first two quote unquote “brilliant” seasons, that’s Sam. Sam put together the models.f Sam was the head writer. If you like The Simpsons, you like Sam Simon’s work. He was the one who was able to take a sitcom format and make an animated sitcom rather than a cartoon that’s adult. That comes from Sam and Jim.
DARIA PARIS: Whenever I was the angriest at Sam (and there were many occasions), my way to get back at him was not to laugh when we were in the writers room and he’d pitch a joke to me. But he always got me. There was something he would say that just did it. He’s a very funny man. And he was really very good-hearted.
The most public airing of the ill will between Simon and Groening happened in the pages of The Washington Post, just months after the show had debuted. “My contribution to the writing of the show should not be minimized,” Matt said. “I’m involved in every creative aspect, from conception of ideas to writing scripts to directing voices to designing characters.” Sam retorted, “He’s doing a lot of other stuff for the show, merchandising and things like that. He’s the show’s ambassador.” “That’s a little bit condescending,” Matt shot back. “There’s definitely a power struggle here,”3 he added.
BRIAN ROBERTS: I was a big fan of Life in Hell—I read it every week—and, sure, The Simpsons and Life in Hell emulate each other. Life in Hell is funny, but Sam created the biting sarcasm and the dysfunctional family. It was based on Matt’s thing, but still, it’s an awful long ways from taking a twenty-second interstitial cartoon on The Tracey Ullman Show and turning it into an actual series that’s run for eighteen years. So this concept of Matt as the creative driving force behind The Simpsons is just plain bullshit.
JAY KOGEN: I love Matt. As a person, Matt is fantastic. He’s funny. He’s smart. He’s witty. He’s pleasant. If anybody I knew was going to become a gazillionaire, just for being a nice guy, why not Matt Groening?
WALLACE WOLODARSKY: The thing about Matt is that he did supply the template for the show. And that’s undeniable. Sam was able to take
that template and make it into an even bigger world and really flesh it out with characters. He brought a broader perspective to it. He made it bigger than just the family. What’s such an important part of The Simpsons is the world of characters it exists in.
JAY KOGEN: Matt wasn’t always in the room. So it’s hard to fight with everybody and have a real say if you’re not there. He’s also a very pleasant, easygoing guy, and the writers room can be a tough place. But, you know, ultimately Matt got what he wanted. When he pitched stuff, he got what he wanted. [Many sources from the early days disagree with this last statement.]