The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History

by John Ortved

  Perhaps it was the show’s complacency that spurred Jim Brooks et al. to bring The Simpsons to the big screen in 2007. The producers had discussed the possibility of doing a film with the “Kamp Krusty” episode, back in 1992, but had eventually canned the idea. Groening had also expressed interest in creating a Simpsons musical tribute to Fantasia, called “Simptasia,” which never came to fruition. “We probably could put out just about anything and some people would come,” Groening told Newsweek in 2001. “But we want to honor the fans.”10

  JAMES L. BROOKS (to Jim Lehrer on the NewsHour, July 27, 2007): Well, the idea of doing a movie had always been there, and we’d always said no. And then, about four years ago, we didn’t say no. We had a weird contract negotiation.

  After Fox Filmed Entertainment brought in Tom Rothman as chairman in 2000, Brooks and the other producers were able to arrange a deal where their film was basically green-lit in perpetuity. Fox would pay them to write the script, and they could take as long as they wanted to complete the writing. And if they weren’t happy with the result, they could bail on the film altogether without the studio saying, “Wait a minute, you owe us a movie.” Helping things along was a new contract, signed by the actors after their holdout in 2001, in which they pledged to do three features.11

  In 2003, work on the actual script began, with a “dream team” of writers assembled by Brooks (including John Swartzwelder, George Meyer, Al Jean, Mike Reiss, Jon Vitti, Ian Maxtone-Graham, David Mirkin, Mike Scully, and Matt Selman), with each writer taking responsibility for approximately twenty pages of the first draft.12 Over the next four years, the script went through more than one hundred rewrites,13 with noises emanating from the writers room suggesting there was more than a little discontent. The writers didn’t work together as well as they once had, especially under Brooks, who it appears inserted himself into the writing process and by all accounts no longer really understood The Simpsons. The reason Marge is such a focus of the film (when, in the best Simpsons material from the past, she usually took a backseat to the other characters, especially Homer) has to come down to Jim Brooks’s influence. He had often been the one to insist on finding an emotional center in the scripts, though now it felt forced.

  Ultimately, the result of all the disagreements was a long, drawnout process that wasn’t even much fun. The film was neither funnier nor more coherent than an above-average current episode (the plot’s cliff-hanger involves a literal ticking time bomb; that this room could not come up with a more creative trope is stupefying). The Simpsons Movie, which cost less than a $100 million to make, grossed over $526 million worldwide.

  But why do a film now? It was a question posed to Brooks and Groening with every interview they did. One answer they gave is that a number of factors came together: they finally had the time, Fox had agreed to their conditions, and they managed to get the team of writers together. All this might be true, but there is also Jim Brooks’s ego to consider. Spanglish, his previous effort as a writer/director, had not been a success, commercially or critically. Costing nearly $100 million and reaping just $55 million worldwide, Variety called it “a problematic attempt at contempo social comedy from an insular point of view … short on real drama and incident and long on tedium … Spanglish actually feels like the work of someone trying to escape the Bel-Air bubble in an academic way but remaining trapped within it all the same.”14 Before this, his only real bomb was I’ll Do Anything in 1994. Someone close to the legendary writer/director made the suggestion that after Spanglish, Jim Brooks—being called old and out of touch, and feeling it—desperately wanted a hit film. And how could The Simpsons Movie not be a hit?

  The Simpsons Movie’s writers had been working on the script for some time when Spanglish tanked, at which point it appears that Jim Brooks decided to rededicate himself to the film. According to sources close to these events, the feeling in the writing room was, What? What do you mean? We’ve been fine without you. Brooks launched himself back into The Simpsons Movie with gusto, which disconcerted his dream team. He had new drafts written every week, threw out entire acts, and changed scenes right up to the final minute before the movie’s release. It was described to me as “chaos.”

  If the writing process frustrated Al Jean, he certainly didn’t let on. “It was vital for James Brooks to be involved,” he told the press upon the film’s release, paying full lip service to the man who’d kept him in charge for the past decade. “He has that movie-making experience which is so vital for a project like this.”

  The marketing for The Simpsons Movie was an event in itself. All over America, and in one location in Canada, 7-Eleven stores were converted into Quick-E-Marts, while most of 7-Eleven’s sixthousand-plus locations sold the movie’s patented pink-glazed donut with sprinkles, alongside Squishees, Krusty O’s, and Buzz Cola (some converted stores saw a 30 percent lift in sales). 15 In New Zealand, in the tiny town of Springfield (pop. 219), Fox erected an enormous pink-glazed donut, measuring nearly twenty feet in diameter. In Dorset, England, next to the location of the Cerne Abbas Giant (a 180-foot-tall hill figure from the seventeenth century, cut into the bedrock so that his formidable body, phallus, and club are outlined by the underlying chalk), a similarly massive Homer Simpson, holding a donut, was painted on the same hill. The Pagan Federation, which worships what they see as a fertility symbol, was not amused. On top of this, Todd MacFarlane designed action figures; a game was released for Xbox 360; Homer made an appearance on Jay Leno; Burger King had The Simpsons in their commercials and released a new line of Simpsons toys. Even Ben and Jerry’s got in on the act, marketing the beer and donut ice cream flavor Duff & D’oh! Nuts. Perhaps the most clever piece of advertising took place online, where fans could go to The Simpsons Movie website and, with a collection of heads, bodies, noses, and accessories provided by Simpsons artists, make their own Simpsons avatar. You could finally see yourself as a Simpsons character; it was Simpsons dork heaven.

  The movie was greeted warmly by critics and audiences, but no one was over the moon. Even with The Simpsons’ top dogs in the writing room, and all the time in the world, they could not approach the brilliance they had achieved nearly two decades earlier. The movie is ninety minutes of (occasionally very funny) throwaway jokes, some forced and schmaltzy emotional scenes (Marge leaves Homer, for good, again), and a plot that is more zany than captivating. A longtime associate of Brooks’s told me that he avoided him for weeks after the film was released—so he would not have to tell Brooks what he thought. Unlike the golden age episodes, there is practically zero replay value (my only repeat laughs involved Homer and his pig). Brooks and company were obviously out of touch with what had once made the show great. Symbolic of this, for bigger, glitzier, more expensive additions, the producers ditched longtime Simpsons composer Alf Clausen in favor of Hans Zimmer to compose the film’s score. Of the decision, Clausen said, “Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.”16

  The altogether satisfactory The Simpsons Movie should be the nail in coffin, if for no other reason than it was just satisfactory. But maybe for Jim Brooks, Matt Groening, and Al Jean, satisfactory is more than enough (purposely left off this list David Silverman—the film’s director—because the animation of The Simpsons Movie was nothing short of brilliant). Why keep The Simpsons going?

  BILL SAVAGE, editor, Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture: Well, here’s an interesting question about the nature of creative people. Why, why don’t they stop? They don’t stop ’cause it’s just the compulsion of creativity. Well, maybe they can’t stop. We didn’t ask, you know, why didn’t the impressionists stop. Some of those guys did a lot of paintings that were, “Oh, another set of water lilies, great.”

  And they’re making a ton of money.

  No one except Fox knows exactly how much money The Simpsons has made, but a fair guess is around $3 billion. The Simpsons is seen in over ninety countries and, since 1996, has engaged in a marketing rel
aunch that has placed Homer on everything from talking bottle-cap openers to KFC packaging in the UK. In 2002, Burger King launched a new promotion with The Simpsons, marking the longest fast-food-chain tie-in of all time.17 Merchandising revenue for 2004 alone was $1.65 billion (actual gains for Fox, probably 8–10 percent of that). Renewed through its twenty-first season, with reruns syndicated in nearly every television market in North America, commercially, The Simpsons is more than just a show, it’s an empire, justifying current producer Tim Long’s statement that Matt Groening is “kind of the Walt Disney of our time.”

  Even if The Simpsons ended its run tomorrow, the show wouldn’t die. The Simpsons is by now so deeply entrenched in our pop culture that its brand is akin to that of Disney’s Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and whatever that cretinous mutant Goofy might be. Though there aren’t any plans for Simpsonsland, an entire theme park dedicated to The Simpsons is not difficult to visualize.ab The resonance of The Simpsons brand is so strong that it’s easy to imagine Fox and Gracie continuing with Simpsons products long after the death of the series, and even after its creators are long gone.

  MATT GROENING (to LA Weekly, July 19, 2007): Sometimes, you know, I go, “Is my work redundant? … [But] I get to be on the scene where these brilliant people are making this amazing show, and, Oh, yeah—I created it!

  If all The Simpsons needs to do to be enormously successful is produce moderately well-written material, within a paradigm (as one could argue it does now), there is no reason it can’t keep going. And that is both a tribute and a slight to Groening and Brooks. Very few people ever get to see their creation reach the masses, and no one, except perhaps DJ Kool Herc, has lived to see something he invented reach an audience the size of The Simpsons’. For that to continue, especially past its point of relevance, is a remarkable achievement—for a brand. If The Simpsons is something more than a brand, if its goals are genuinely about more than making money, then its creators should have retired it, triumphantly, some time ago.

  And yet for all this, can Groening and The Simpsons really ever be accused of selling out? While subversive in tone, the series has rarely pretended to be about anything more than humor and constantly pokes fun at itself for being a shill for their giant, bottomfeeding corporate overlord, News Corp. Maybe Groening made his point fifteen years ago, inserting his worldview, his malicious frivolity, into the culture at large. Why shouldn’t he sit back and enjoy the fruits of his victory?

  MATT GROENING (to LA Weekly, July 19, 2007): I’m one of those people who gets more credit than I deserve … So do I feel guilty? Yes. Do I admit it? Yes. And then I move on.

  EIGHTEEN

  Under the Influence of Duff

  In which I cut and paste the dictionary … Bart and Nietzsche make peace with the Christians … The Simpsons are the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Nirvana … and Homer suffers the fate of Ouranus, Cronus, and many lesser gods.

  CONAN O’BRIEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1991–93): For the last fourteen years of doing my show, I’ve been working hard on this comedy, but it’s pretty disposable. I could light my arms on fire on the show tonight and you might see it for a couple of days on YouTube, but then it’s gone. I’m constantly, no matter where I go in the world, running into people who know which episodes of The Simpsons I worked on, and they’re quoting lines to me. I think long after my Late Night show is gone, the Simpsons episodes I worked on will always be in the ether. People will be watching them on some space station, like, two hundred years from now. That’s a nice feeling.

  The Simpsons has been hugely influential in television, but the show’s reach has gone so much farther than just that medium. If you look around, you can see the evidence, but as with any truly powerful cultural force, you can never see it all—it’s buried too deep. There are the obvious examples, shows like King of the Hill, Family Guy, and South Park. And then there are those entities which, over the years, have been developed and staffed by Simpsons alumni, shows like The Office, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Frasier, and the digitally animated films of Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille). But there is also the show’s less direct influence to consider, how it revolutionized television comedy, how Jon Stewart speaks Simpsons, as have the writers of Seinfeld and Saturday Night Live.

  Moreover, examples of the show’s profound influence abound outside the cable box, from “doh” becoming officially part of the English language to the use of Simpsons phrases on the cover of the New York Post and New York Daily News.ac As Chris Turner put it in Planet Simpson, “The Simpsons has become the new repository of the West’s common metaphors, the wellspring of its most resonant quotes, the progenitor of its default tone … the parlance of our times.”

  That parlance, at times, can be quite literal. In 2005, Verbatim: The Language Quarterly published an article about the embiggening of our language by Simpsons words, such as “cromulent,” “surrender monkey,” “yoink,” and of course, “D’oh!” Added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2001, along with “Bollywood,” “clubbing,” “full monty,” “six-pack,” “street cred,” and “mullet,” the entry of this Fox trademark reads:

  Doh, int.

  colloq.

  Expressing frustration at the realization that things have turned out badly or not as planned, or that one has just said or done something foolish. Also (usu. mildly derogatory): implying that another person has said or done something foolish (cf. DUH int.).

  BRAD BIRD, executive consultant, The Simpsons (1989–97); director, The Incredibles, Ratatouille: I think that the show encourages people to know more about the world around them. The show refers to things. And it’s very facile about it. But it refers not just to the pop hit of the last two or three years, but to Kubrick films and Orson Welles. It gets into jokes about Russian literature, and it encourages you to go out and know more about the world and experience more in terms of art and culture, because the writers are so smart and well read.

  JONATHAN GRAY, author, Watching with The Simpsons; lecturer on media, Fordham University: Parody and satire are inherently forms that ask you to examine the underside of things. They’re about taking the clothes off the emperor and showing you what’s underneath. And so when you engage in good parody and satire you are always going to be requiring that your audience think about the world.

  BRENT FORRESTER, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1993–97); writer/producer, King of the Hill, The Office: I well remember somebody pitching a joke that I just didn’t get. You know, unfortunately, I only went to Columbia University, not Harvard. And so when somebody pitched “Monticello, I thought you said ‘Montebello,’”Irealized: I don’t know what that means. You know, that kind of stuff. And so there were a lot of smart references, and a feeling of like, Oh, it’s cool to be smart. That’s the great legacy of the show.

  MATT STONE, cocreator, South Park: It’s probably too big a statement to say it’s made us smarter, but The Simpsons doesn’t ever promise to do anything more than make you laugh. There’s social satire in it, social commentary, deeper themes in it, but what’s great about The Simpsons is it says up front, “All we’re gonna do is make you laugh.” That’s a purely noble cause, I think. It somehow doesn’t make you totally dumber by doing that. Most things that promise just to make you laugh don’t have any other redeeming qualities, and The Simpsons seems to.

  GARY PANTER, friend of Matt Groening’s; cartoonist: The Simpsons and Life in Hell speak to your average Joe, but at a really high level that makes your average Joe agree with it and share values with it. And it’s a lot more of a liberal slant than what the average Joe probably thinks he’d agree with. So I think it’s persuasive and it’s humanistic and enlightened, and psychologically aware. Americans aren’t as stupid as they would like to pretend to be. And you see that in its embrace of The Simpsons.

  DEBORAH GROENING, Matt Groening’s ex-wife: Well, that’s the genius of their humor—they’re socially aware. We’re all products of the sixties in our age group, and I think we
haven’t forgotten that idealism. It’s just that there’s a kind of cynicism attached to it, so it’s idealistic without being naïve. To quote Matt, we’re “sneakily subversive.”

  One group that has accepted The Simpsons as an eye from which to see the world is academia. The Simpsons as a cultural critique and as an institution has been endorsed by professors and schools all around the globe. Aside from the hundreds of papers and theses with the Simpsons as their topic, there are collections of essays, including Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture (Lisa as feminist) and The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’Oh! of Homer (Bart as Nietzsche). There is also What’s Science Ever Done for Us? What The Simpsons Can Teach Us About Physics, Robots, Life and the Universe.

  At Berkeley, in 2003, a philosophy course (student led, but for credit), The Simpsons and Philosophy, was offered.