by Sam Wasson
At the back of one of Napier’s theaters, he hung a sign, in glorious cursive: THEATER SUCKS.
The Annoyance attitude really was an attitude. You could feel it onstage (Manson: The Musical) and at their after-parties, where Annoyance players, like most beginning revolutionaries, made no effort to hide their superiority, turning up their noses at improvisers who didn’t share their sense of anarchy. It was a different version of the same territorialism you saw in iO or Second City improvisers; we are the real thing, you’re not. “The Annoyance,” Napier conceded, “was mean and contentious when it started out. I took full accountability for that.” He woke up. He saw, clearly, absurd contention across the entire improv community, and realized, true to the spirit of improvisation, the more iO, Second City, and the Annoyance played together, the stronger the whole of Chicago improv—and every improviser in it—would become. So he called a meeting. “It was very important to me to get Charna and Andrew and Kelly [Leonard] and myself together,” he said, “and we did and we agreed to stop being contentious with each other and promote healthier, more collaborative relationships between the theaters.” In the wake of their détente, it was not uncommon to see the same improviser, in the space of a single evening, appear onstage, say, in Second City’s first show, iO’s second, and a midnight show at the Annoyance.
As the theaters, and their improvisers, cross-pollinated, Kelly Leonard invited Napier back to Second City to direct his first show on the mainstage; it would be Second City’s follow-up to Adam McKay’s magnum opus. “Don’t worry, Mick,” they kept telling him. “It doesn’t have to be as good as Piñata.”
Napier, casting his show, took Second City improviser Scott Allman out for a drink. “Who’s good?”
“This girl Tina. She’s great. She’s . . .” and on he went.
Napier, who had never seen Tina Fey before, caught up with her in a five-minute clip and was sold. He got Alexander and Leonard’s approval, and Fey went into Napier’s company—with Rachel Dratch and Jenna Jolovitz, they made it Second City’s first gender-equal opening night cast.
Napier was Fey’s only director on the Second City mainstage, “a more palatable Del,” she called him, intent on breaking improvisers out of their emotional comfort zones. “Second City,” Fey said, “was a place where you could easily settle into a role unlike you were in real life, like, ‘Honey, we’ve got to get to the mall!’ [Napier] could loosen you out of that. He would do a thing called Taboo Day where you had to come in and present the most upsetting, inappropriate idea for a sketch you can think of.” For one scene, he asked Rachel Dratch to fly into an angry rage (“She wasn’t commenting on it,” Fey said. “She was actually doing it”) and, for another, allowed Jenna Jolovitz the time to disintegrate, slowly, silently; it was as raw and intricate a nervous breakdown as anyone had ever seen in a sketch show. But Napier and his company weren’t out to provoke; their version of Second City showed Napier’s dedication to three-dimensional characters. “I like a kind of disconcerted feeling for a scene,” Napier said. A chance to explore personality, to push psychologies beyond the limitations of sketch, the longform, for Napier, was a telescope he expanded, scene by scene, to peer deeper into uncomfortable truths. “We knew that he was bringing the longform sensibility,” Fey said, “continuing what McKay had started, to what was feeling like a too-venerable institution.”
Offstage, in rehearsal, he worked much the same way, bringing improvisers out of themselves the way he would characters out of the improvisers. Having never written a Second City show, Fey, for all her experience, was not quick to share her ideas. Only after Mick called lunch, and everyone left, would she approach him.
“I think I have a good idea for a scene.”
“Bring it up in rehearsal.”
“Oh. Okay.”
She did.
Fey would say, “It’s easy to lose [your courage] when you’re trying to write a show and trying to be topical, to dive in with abandon. But Mick encouraged that.” At the Golden Apple Diner, where her company, a favorite of the waitstaff, would gather after hours for cheap eats and prolonged deliberations on the nature of comedy, she gained a leader’s confidence. “She expects as much professionalism from others that she expects from herself,” Adsit said, “which is a very tall order because she is one of the hardest-working people in show business. And so she knows enough to also give people the benefit of the doubt, or give them a little wiggle room, or cut them some slack. But in her perfect world everyone would be working as hard as she is.” Mad courage showed in Citizen Gates, the show they evolved, Second City’s eighty-first, and one of its best ever. It was every bit as good as Piñata, polished where McKay’s was raw, uncomfortably human where it was political. Napier’s vision of sketch comedy pulsed with the visual rhythms of a musical. Painting his stage with coordinated colors, moody (not comic) lighting effects, elegant transitions, and dance-like choreography, he leavened Citizen Gates into a fluid dramatic creation, and a new benchmark for sketch comedy. It was as if Second City, the theater, was dreaming. “I want a Second City show to be very very funny,” Napier said, “and very very beautiful.”
17
1995–2001
“Hello?”
“Eugene?”
“Yes . . .”
“This is Christopher Guest.”
The call was unexpected. Strange even. Eugene Levy had met Guest a couple of times, but they had no professional or even personal relationship. Now, out of the blue, Guest was calling Levy—at home.
“I’m putting together a movie,” Guest explained. “I’m wondering if you want to work on it with me.”
Levy didn’t know this was how Guest worked, by intuition. His hunch about Levy—that they shared a sensibility—Guest based exclusively on Levy’s work on SCTV, one sketch in particular, “Perry Como: Still Alive,” in which Levy, as the titular king of relaxation, crooned the disco anthem “I Love the Nightlife” from bed, tucked cozily under a blanket, half-asleep, as a lively gaggle of dancers and backup singers rocked the stage around him. The sketch was unforgettable based on the premise alone—Guest was calling Levy some fifteen years after it first aired—but it was Levy’s performance, far more sophisticated than a mere impersonation, that made it a classic. The effect was the product of “real” acting, seasoned with minutely observed behavioral touches, like a single finger, which Levy, seemingly not asking for laughs, tapped laconically, in time to the beat. Guest’s sensibility dwelled in this kind of naturalism, on the scarcely satirical hairline separating editorial and reportage. SCTV, he thought, was the funniest show of all time.
Levy, meanwhile, was just as big a fan of Guest’s Radio Hour pieces, and like everyone else in comedy, worshipped Spinal Tap.
But all this admiration went unspoken. Guest, never one for effusion, kept conversation tidy, and Levy was too flummoxed to ask Guest what Levy was really thinking, which was, How many people had to turn you down before you decided to call me? A hundred?
Guest’s movie idea didn’t have a story yet, but he told Levy he was interested in setting it around a community theater. There was an SCTV flavor in that: show business small-timers, a provincial setting. “I suppose I’ve always been interested in behavior that’s obsessive and unaware of the outside world,” Guest said. “Everyone has their own version of that in their lives.” And like Tap, Guest’s film would be improvised. But Guest didn’t want it to feel improv-y. The manic quality of bad improv didn’t carry the awkward rhythms of real life, a pause held too long, the sadly absurd things people think but don’t say. “Uncomfortable to the point of poetry,” Guest would explain. “That’s what I was going for.”
“You want to come to my cabin in Idaho for a few days?” he asked Levy. “We can talk more.”
Levy hesitated. Did he want to hang out with this guy? “Chris was very reserved,” Levy would say. “You never got a gauge of what he thinks of you. You got some strange reactions if you said good morning. He’s made people cry and
he won’t know or understand why.”
Why not give it a shot? If it wasn’t working out, Levy could always leave.
Guest picked him up at the airport. Almost as soon as they drove away, they had each other laughing, “and that’s the way it stayed,” Levy said.
Back at the cabin, Guest manned the legal pad, taking note of the good ideas they laughed out of one another. Guest hadn’t fully cast the movie—about an ensemble of untalented amateurs putting on a musical—but knowing he and Eugene would have parts, and hoping to get Catherine O’Hara and Fred Willard, they had enough familiar faces and personalities to focus their conversation.
“What if the guy”—Levy’s character, Dr. Pearl—“takes off his glasses and his eyes are crossed?”
Guest laughed. “Good.”
Good? Levy was joking. “You really want me to do that? I’m not going to do that.”
“Why?”
“I’m not going to cross my eyes on the big screen.”
“Why? It’s funny.”
“A lot of things are funny.”
“Is it because you don’t want to get a laugh?”
“I do, but I just think it’s like, you know, cheap . . .”
They kept a fairly regular working schedule, a few hours in the morning, a long break—fly-fishing for Guest; some golf for Levy—a few more hours in the afternoon, then dinner. In two weeks’ time, they had their characters.
Leaving Idaho for L.A., Guest and Levy arranged their brainstorm into an outline, a few descriptive paragraphs for each scene, and scouted the Second City and the Groundlings present and past for their cast. “We weren’t looking for the Robin Williams type,” Levy said. “You had to know when to speak and when not to speak.” The camera, Guest knew, craved the pace of real life, the looks that did for empty silence what Robin Williams could do with language. Guest said, “There’s always been something more interesting to me about normal conversation, as opposed to something that’s supposed to be enlightened or clever.” He wanted listeners.
“We’re doing this movie,” Guest told Fred Willard. They went back thirty years, to Arkin’s revival of Feiffer’s Little Murders. “I think it’s going to be called Waiting for Guffman.”
“That’s a strange title!”
“Other than Eugene, you’re the first person I’ve asked to be in it. There’s no script.”
“I’m in!”
“I ran the idea by Marty Short,” Guest continued, “and he loved it. Marty said, ‘Let’s do,’ but I had to tell Marty, ‘No. We want people who aren’t well known.’”
That Parker Posey was not an improviser didn’t trouble Guest. All instinct, he cast her after one meeting. Most of the others—Brian Doyle-Murray, Paul Dooley, Linda Kash, Dawn Lake, Deborah Theaker—came from Second City. Michael Hitchcock was Groundlings. Lewis Arquette came via the Committee and Sills and Company.
Once assembled, the improvisers were left alone to work out the specifics of their characters. Wardrobe, personality, mannerisms, props—everything except the story they were provided in the outline—were not preapproved by Guest; he would see their choices at the same time as the rest of the company, on set. Catherine O’Hara’s preparation consisted largely of interior work, questions she asked herself, notes she made about her character’s relationships and goals, all of which, she knew, could change in an instant; Fred Willard, playing the part of her husband, used a real-life model to frame his character; Levy developed Dr. Pearl from the outside in, the way he worked at Second City, beginning with those big glasses. “You kind of need one thing,” he said, “and the rest falls into place. For me, it usually happens pretty quickly. But that was the toughest part, locking in your character, because that’s the guy you’re going to be improvising with for four or five weeks.” This degree of freedom was most unusual, even for an improvised film. On Caddyshack, on Mikey and Nicky, dialogue had been written, characters agreed upon; on Spinal Tap, Reiner’s ensemble was already familiar with each other’s characters; but on Waiting for Guffman, the director actually knew less about his movie than his improvisers.
Levy’s first day of filming:
“I think we’re pretty much ready to go,” Guest said to his cowriter. They were in Lockhart, Texas.
“Where do you want to go over it?” Levy asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the scene. You want to talk it through?”
“We’re ready to go.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re ready to shoot.”
“So we’re not going to even—oh, okay. Interesting.”
There would be no rehearsal on Waiting for Guffman. Save for the film’s musical numbers, what happened in front of the camera would be happening for everyone for the first time. Even the dialogue of the film’s “interview” scenes, in which the characters, as if in a documentary, appear to be speaking to an unseen filmmaker, were a surprise to Guest. There were no questions from off-camera; he called action and they just started talking, or rather, thinking. “I want a lot of this to be unspoken,” he told the cast. “I don’t want you to articulate everything.” Otherwise, Guest kept his influence to a minimum, directing gently. From take to take—rarely more than three of a given scene—he might ask an improviser to develop a certain strain he liked in a previous take (“Let’s do that part again where you talk about the foot”), but it was more common for him to stay quiet. He laughed infrequently, and smiled less. In fact, it was not always clear if his opacity was a real personality trait or a directing technique intended to further reduce his influence. At times, his remove could be disconcerting to an improviser hungry to know how he was coming off. Then again, perhaps that was their own anxiety projected onto Guest’s blank stares. “You’re directed by the outline,” O’Hara said, “and everyone else around you.”
In O’Hara’s case, she got certain cues from Fred Willard, her screen husband. Before takes, he was given to enthusiastically telling O’Hara how to react on camera.
“I’m going to go on about this,” he told her on one occasion, “and you’re going to get really mad—”
“Do I have to get mad? Can I just react the way it feels right to react?”
“Sure! Yes, of course!”
“Yes, anding” the whole of Fred Willard, O’Hara decided his penchant for directing them off-camera would form the basis of their characters’ marriage, his strength and her suppression. “I am grateful for Fred being so strong,” she reflected, “because I love playing argumentative women and I probably would have gone that way.” (“He taught me to ignore my instincts,” she improvised in one “interview” scene.) Simply, he would be the talker; she would be the listener. What her character could never say aloud, O’Hara conveyed through those awkward, silent moments Guest sought out at every turn.
Fittingly, O’Hara imagined her character’s lifetime of suppression would one day erupt, probably inappropriately. The opportunity would come in a late-addition scene at a Chinese restaurant. It started as Willard’s idea. “Fred thought it would be a good idea if we went on a double date [with Dr. and Mrs. Pearl],” she said, “and Chris agreed, so I thought, okay, on this date, if I’m drunk, I can be someone who lets the truth come out.” In the scene, O’Hara achieved the sort of poetic discomfort that would make her Christopher Guest’s ideal conduit and one of the most fluid improvisers of her generation. Others may be crazier; none were as elegantly at ease. O’Hara fit anywhere she landed because she always created to meet the needs of the scene, and when she created, she did so in full, with characters whose most vulnerable secrets reached all the way to the present moment. It was never sketch-comedy acting for O’Hara. “To me,” she said, “the most rewarding improvising is having agreed on an idea beforehand, where the scene might go, who your character is, or what might be possibly funny about your character, and at the same time be completely open to the other people because you’re not alone.”
After twenty-six days of improvisi
ng, Guest returned to L.A. to watch his footage. The daunting task of reducing fifty-eight hours of raw material to a ninety-minute feature would have stymied a less disciplined editor, but Guest, unlike Elaine May on Mikey and Nicky, was not out to explore his bounty; his task, he knew, was to cut abstemiously, to the original outline. Certain lessons he had learned from Spinal Tap. Shooting Guffman in a documentary style allowed Guest to cut the movie like a documentary; it was an enormous advantage he had over the likes of a Harold Ramis or Ivan Reitman, who had to keep their Hollywood product looking smooth, free of jump cuts, jerky camera movements, and haphazard compositions. Working in “documentary,” by contrast, allowed Guest to preserve choice footage that would have been unusable to others, and legitimize the slipshod style of the final cut. It was, he understood, the ideal venue for an improvised feature film.
Cutting took a year and a half.
When Guest finally called in Eugene Levy to look at his rough cut, virtually all of Guest’s greatest scenes, as the wildly closeted Corky St. Clair, were missing.
“What happened?” Levy asked. “Where did all your stuff go?”
“I don’t know if it stands up.”
This was preposterous. Guest’s improvisations were easily the funniest in the movie.
“Chris, can I just tell you how far off the mark you are?”
“There’s a lot of me already in it.”
“Can you do me a favor? Give me a couple of days with this, okay?”
Guest excused himself from the cutting room, and with the editor at his side, Levy went back through the footage, found all of Guest’s best stuff, mainly from Guffman’s rehearsal scenes—“scenes,” Levy said, “that would pay off when you saw them later in the show”—and put them back in the movie.
