by Marc Maron
I had rented a tuxedo with tails. I had a hat, a cane maybe. I was just like a clown. A classic type of clown person. She invited me over and said, “This is Davia,” and then she walked away. Davia started telling me that she was casting for this movie and would I like to audition. I said, “Well, I’m a drummer, I’m not an actor.” She said, “Well, but Sofia said that you were in her play and that you might have some things in common with this character.” But also I had a little bit of drummer mentality in full effect at this time, which is “Are you sure you don’t want to talk to the lead singer?”
She says, “No, no, I think you should audition.”
I said, “I’m not an actor, I never auditioned. It’s silly that I would even do this.”
She says, “What’s your address? We’ll send you the script.” This was on a weekend.
I got home and on Monday this manila envelope arrived with Rushmore. I remember reading it, thinking, holy shit, this is everything that I love. At that time I hadn’t really seen a lot of movies that were what I was into. I had never seen a movie that got me the way music did. That kind of fuzzy feeling. It was everything that I think about. I really connected to it.
I go in to audition and Wes Anderson was sitting in there. He’s twenty-seven. I remember instantly seeing he had Converse sandals, which I had never seen before, and started talking about those. It was 1997. In 1996, Pinkerton came out. The Weezer record. That was a huge record when it came out. Pinkerton was it for me. So I started talking to Wes about Pinkerton for twenty minutes. It took my mind totally off the audition and then he said, “Shall we read it?” and I think I might have said, “Let’s not. This was so good, it was so nice meeting you, let’s just leave it at that.”
He said, “No, let’s read.” Anyway we read it, and because it was my first audition, I didn’t know if it was good or bad. Then we started to improvise and then he said, “Why don’t you stick around for a little bit, I’m going to read some other people.” Then he actually had me come in and be Bill Murray and audition people to play Bill Murray’s kids.
I went home, my mom asked, “How’d it go?”
I was like, “I think it was good. I spent a few hours there.”
“A few hours? That’s good.”
Then I guess it got narrowed down to me and a few other people. Because I was unknown, I had to do a screen test. I did a screen test and I got the part. It all happened pretty quickly. They were saying, “Yeah, you’re going to be in this movie with Bill Murray.”
It just felt like a dream. I started my senior year of high school thinking I was going to finish my record, which I did. But I did not expect to be in Houston with Bill Murray at the start of the school year.
MICHAEL KEATON—ACTOR, COMEDIAN, PRODUCER, DIRECTOR
David Geffen came to me and said, “I want you to meet this guy named Tim Burton.” Tim had done this thing called Frankenweenie that people really took notice of, and they said this guy’s got something. He’s a comer.
He created something else. I forget. Oh, he did Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.
I met him about this movie he was working on, and I didn’t really understand what he was talking about. I didn’t understand his concept. He was trying to explain a character he had thought of, and he had this script that a guy gave him called Beetlejuice, but he couldn’t really describe the guy.
It was a fine meeting and I told David, “You know, I don’t know how to do this and I don’t know what it is. He was a really nice guy, but I don’t know how to do it.” They said, “No, no, no. Just hang in there.”
They talked me into meeting again. Still didn’t get it. He had the conceit of the thing, but it wasn’t even a guy. It was a concept of something. After two or three meetings or something, I said, “I really like this guy. He’s really imaginative, but I don’t know.”
Then he said something that took hold. It was something like, “He probably lives in all times. He’s from no time. He’s from every time. He’s lived in all time periods or something.” I don’t know why that stuck with me. I thought, “Maybe I should think about this.” I said to him, “Okay, you know what, let me at least go home and think about it.”
I had this idea. I called the wardrobe department, I forget what studio, and I said, “Hey, would you do me a favor? Can I get clothes from every time period, all kinds of different things?” I got a rack of them.
I’m home by myself, and I’m thinking about this, and I start to do this walk and this voice and I thought, “You know what? I’d like to have teeth.” You can’t tell, but the teeth were not only fucked-up. They were a tiny bit larger. I want to put these things in that were a tiny bit larger. Because there was something about him being goofy that made it even more dangerous. If you run into some guy who’s nuts and then he’s kind of goofy too, that’s getting really scary. I wanted him to be kind of dangerous but funny, and I thought, “You know what? I’m just going to pull everything out here.”
I walk around my house and I said, “I’m going to create a walk.” I look at these different pieces and put that little hat on that said GUIDE on it. I thought, oh, this is kind of out there. Guide to what?
Then I talked to Tim and I said, “I want hair.” He should be like, every day, he gets up and sticks his hand in a socket and just goes “tzzzzzzt.” That’s how he works. I said, “Let’s make hair that sticks out.” Tim must have said something that made me get this idea of mold. So this great makeup artist and I started to put together mold. I said, “I want mold down my neck.” I had never done it all together until the first day of shooting. I didn’t know if it was going to work.
I showed up on the set, and this is really interesting. The crew saw me, and I have no idea why, because they didn’t know what I was going to do. I wasn’t even sure what I was going to do and if I could make it work. They started going, “Juice. Juice. Juice. Juice.” It was this really funny thing.
I just fully committed. I said, “This is going to die or this is going to work,” and Tim’s so great because when he saw it, he went, “Yes.” And then he explained to me, “Your head’s going to shrink. It’s going to spin around.” I said, “Okay, now I get what this guy’s doing. I get it.” I mean, I started really getting it, and that’s when I went, “Oh, man, this is out there.”
It rocked, and it was so fun. There was nothing that’s ever been like it. There’s just nothing comparable.
A little bit of time goes by after Beetlejuice, and Tim comes to me and says, “I want to talk to you about something.” This was gutsy on his part. He said, “I’m doing Batman. Would you read the script? I don’t want to talk about it too much, but just read it. I want to talk to you after.”
I’m reading it, and I didn’t have a concept of what Batman was. Tim said, “Read this one,” which was the Frank Miller thing, Dark Knight Returns. I went, “Whoa, this is interesting. The look and the colors.” But I thought, “This ain’t going to work.”
I read it and I said, “Let’s go have coffee.” I said, “You want me to just talk to you about what I think?” I think this is going to be over in ten, fifteen minutes, because he’s going to say, “Well, I don’t know about that.” But everything I said, his head was nodding.
I said, “This guy’s ridiculously depressed. He’s a vigilante. He’s got these issues. It’s so obvious. And nobody’s going to make that movie.”
He says, “That’s what I want to do. That’s exactly what I want to do.”
I thought, “Oh, really? Oh. Whoa.” So we started doing it and he just had such a clear take on it.
That movie really changed everything. If you look at the colors and the look of those kinds of big movies now. It was like an opera.
MEL BROOKS—COMEDIAN, WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, ACTOR, MUSICIAN
I’m ready to do Blazing Saddles, and there’s too much hubris and too much arrogance in me then, really. I admit it. Not now. Now I’m humble.
I asked John Wayne to play The Waco Kid, a
nd he read it. He loved The Producers, so he said sure, I’m glad to read it. He read it, and he gave it to me back, and he said, “I can’t do this. My fans wouldn’t allow it, but I swear to God, Mel, I’ll be the first one on line to see it. It’s hysterical.”
Then I had a brilliant idea. I’d just seen a movie called They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? with a guy who was supposed to be a comic, and he was brilliant, and he won the Academy Award. Gig Young, who later went crazy, shot himself, shot his young wife.
I asked him to do it, and he said fine. We got on the set. We rehearsed for a week or two. We’re shooting his first scene. He’s upside down in the jail. I say action. The black sheriff comes over, Cleavon Little. Cleavon says, “Are we awake?” and he says, “Are we black?” Then he starts spitting a little green stuff, and I said to my assistant director, “This fucking guy is incredible. Look, he’s playing a recovered alcoholic. Look!”
Then it became The Exorcist. He never stopped. He’s spewing green stuff all over Cleavon, all over the jail, just a lot of green stuff is spewing. He was having the DTs or something. He had cleaned up for one day to come in and do the part, and they took him away in an ambulance, and I was crushed.
Then I go right to the phone. As soon as the ambulance took him away, I went to my office, said, “Oh my God,” and I called Gene Wilder. I told him what happened. He was hysterical. He said, “You’re kidding!” I said, “No, I thought I was getting Academy Award acting, and I was just getting green vomit!”
Gene said, “All right. Relax.” I was half crying, half laughing. Gene Wilder says, “I’ll see you at noon tomorrow.” He was in New York, and he flew out.
He was the only one to do it. What a bounce. I got Gene Wilder to play the part, my buddy and my soul mate, and the true genius of my career.
I lucked out.
TOM KENNY—COMEDIAN, ACTOR
I had done a show called Rocko’s Modern Life in the early 1990s. That was my first cartoon. Steve Hillenburg, who created SpongeBob later, was artistic director on that show.
A couple years later when it came time for him to pitch his own animated show, he remembered me well, and remembered a voice that I had done in a Rocko’s Modern Life episode that was almost like a throwaway two-line voice.
It was based on—and Nickelodeon does not like it when I tell this story, so here’s the story—I was in an audition for on-camera commercial stuff. It’s the worst. You think you have little control over your destiny in show business doing what we do. When you’re the commercial guy and you show up trying to look like preppy dad or priest or chef. You walk into a room and there’s eighty guys that look vaguely like you. It’s really horrible, debilitating.
I finally told my agent I can’t do that anymore. Send me out for voice-overs. I think maybe I have an aptitude for that. I never really did much of it. They said, “What makes you think you can do that?” I say, “I don’t have proof, but I will drive anywhere. I will do any voice-over audition for anything.” I think that’s a pretty good path for me and a good basket to put my eggs in. That turned out to be, luckily for me, true.
I was in the same studio where they were auditioning for a TV commercial that involved Christmas elves, like a holiday commercial. It was all these little people hanging around. A lot of them had their own elf costumes because that’s what they do. If you’re a fat guy with a white beard, you go out for the Santa stuff. If you’re a little person with curly-toed shoes you go out for those auditions.
There was one guy at the audition. He was in a different part of the corridor. He was hanging with a couple of his buds and was just the most bitter, ticked-off little person in an elf outfit you’ve ever seen.
“If it wasn’t for the Christmas shit I wouldn’t fucking work! This is the only time of the year that I fucking work! It pisses me off. It’s like I’m glad to have it, knock on wood, but motherfucker!”
I was like, “Wow.”
I told Steve Hillenburg that story. Years, years go by and he remembered that story. I totally forgot the story. He said, “Remember that guy?”
That’s where SpongeBob came from. So he’s sort of a munchkin without the negativity.
Someday I’m going to run into that guy. He’s going to be standing outside my house like Mark David Chapman. “Hey, Kenny! I got a bone to pick with you!”
ROB MCELHENNY—ACTOR, WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER
I was living in this garage in West Hollywood. Behind someone’s house.
I just had this idea for a short film about two incredibly self-centered almost sociopaths. I wrote this scene where one of them comes over to the other one’s house for sugar for this coffee that he had made. It’s a guy he kind of knows but doesn’t really know that well. While he’s there he says, “I just found out I have cancer.” The other guy, all he’s trying to do is just get the sugar and get out of the room. The last thing he wants to hear is that this guy’s got cancer. I thought, that’s really fucking dark and that’s a really dramatic scene. I wonder if I told if from the guy’s point of view who’s just trying to get out of the room, could we make it really funny?
I just wrote it and then I thought it was kind of funny, so I wrote a script for it that night. I just worked all night until I wrote this script. I thought it would be funny if there was a third character when this guy comes out of that scene with the sugar. When he gets home to his roommate he says, “Hey, by the way, did you know that Charlie has cancer?” The third roommate, the guy’s roommate, realized that Charlie didn’t tell him, and why wouldn’t he confide in him when he confided in you? He becomes obsessed with the fact that you must be better friends with Charlie. I thought, “Well, that’s an interesting dynamic.” Something I hadn’t seen before.
I thought that was a level of neurosis I hadn’t seen in a comedy before, where the characters were just total assholes, like completely the antithesis of what a network note would be, which is to try to make them more likable.
I wanted to make something where, as writers, you’re almost actively trying to get people to root against them. I brought it to Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day. They’re my friends and they thought it was really funny. They got it and we just started making it. Nobody really understood why it was funny, but I knew Glenn and Charlie would. Then we got a couple of cameras together and learned Final Cut and figured it out from there.
It was a short film. We never thought of it as a TV show. It was just a short film, and I did it mostly because I wanted to see it all the way through to the end. I just wanted to have it be a DVD in my hand at the end and I fully realized that. Charlie Has Cancer was the name of it.
We made that and then we thought, “This is pretty funny, but let’s do another one.” We think this may be a TV series, and we know the first thing that people are going to ask is, “Well, okay. This is episode one. What’s episode two?” More important, “We see that you executed this, could you execute this again?” So we did a second episode. That was about me falling in love with a beautiful transgender woman.
We had both of them and that’s what we went out with. We shopped it. We had an agent set up two days of pitching and we went to all the networks. We didn’t go to places like CBS or ABC where we knew it wouldn’t quite work.
We went to FOX. We went to FX, Comedy Central, HBO, Showtime. VH-1 was doing original content then, MTV. Everybody liked it except for FOX. FOX just sat there stone-faced and I think they were just run by morons at the time. They were looking for this exact kind of show, like, they told me, “This is the kind of show we’re looking for,” and then they just didn’t get it at all. They did not get it.
Most of the places said, “Well, we have conditions. We want to buy it, but we have some conditions.” We were like, “Well, what are the conditions?” They’re like, “Well, we want to bring in a director and we want to bring in a show runner.” Our feeling was, “Well, do you like it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well then, why do you want to change it?”
“Well, it’s not that we want to change it. We want to make sure that you can continue it.”
I’m like, “But we just did two of them. If you liked it and we did two of them, why would you not believe that we could do a third and a fourth?”
FX was the only one that said, “Do whatever you want.”
We had our own conditions, which was we’re not going to do it unless I’m the show runner and Charlie and Glenn are executive producers, and we write the show and we act in the show. Then FX commissioned a pilot. I didn’t quit my job at the restaurant, so I was waiting tables while I was shooting. I had just seen so many things fall apart.
I only quit after we got picked up for the first season. Once we got picked up for the first season, I felt more comfortable then.
JIMMY FALLON—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR, PRODUCER, TALK SHOW HOST
I met Lorne Michaels on the Paramount lot and I waited in the waiting room for three hours. He has an office on the Paramount lot, which is a really cool studio lot.
Three hours later I walk in, everything’s white. I walk into a totally white room, so clearly I died or something happened. He’s got his feet up on the desk, he was chilling. He says, “Jimmy, do you ever wear wigs?”
At the time my hair was kind of spiked up and I say, “Oh, I just do this myself to my hair.”
He says, “No, I’m saying for different characters because we want you for the show.”
The rest was like slow motion. I just said, “Sure, do you want me to wear wigs? I’m going to work so hard for you, I’m telling you I won’t let you down. I will be a good cast choice. I’m going to really work hard.”
I left there and I had just planned my trip back to New York, back to my family, back to my friends, I mean, it was crazy.
