Woody Allen

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32:43When you lived in Brooklyn, did you dream of living in Manhattan? Interestingly, people always associate my films and things, my concept of Manhattan. But the Manhattan that I was crazy about was the Manhattan that I had seen in movies. The movies were all made in Hollywood, and those were all sets, and nobody in Manhattan lived like that. In the movies, they all lived in these duplex penthouses with terraces and, you know, white telephones and things you ring for a butler with. And nobody in New York really lived like that. But I thought about that. Once I move into New York, I'll get a place like that.

33:27And it'll be on a few levels. I'll have a bar. I'll come in. And, you know, the way they all came in. And the first thing they did, they walked over to the bar. They opened the decanter. They took a drink. No one I knew ever in my life walked in and took a drink. They'd pour the scotch or the sherry or whatever it was, and they'd drink. And someone else would. And people walked around smoking and drinking and dressing for dinner. The women and the men would dress for dinner at home like if you were going to a Buckingham Palace now. And I thought, well, gee, this is great. I'm going to get out of Brooklyn.

34:03I'm going to live like that. But it didn't happen because that was the Manhattan that I wanted to move into only existed up on the screen. Were you disappointed by that? Well, gradually I got to realize, it took years, I got to realize that, gee, maybe it never really existed. Some of it, a small amount of it did exist. When I got into Manhattan, you'd go to the theater at 8.40. It was a civilized hour. You could have dinner first. Afterward, you'd go to a supper club maybe for something to eat, you know, a little snack or something. And, you know, you lived more, you know, there were nightclubs, I mean, in New York, the Latin Quarter and the Copacabana.

34:49There was a touch of that in New York, but nothing like what you would see when you went to a movie or nothing like what we imagined. There were three levels for us. The first level was actual reality, which was grim, and you lived in Brooklyn, and your house was nothing special, and you had linoleum and oilcloth tablecloths. Then there was those people who lived in the movies, and they lived in these houses, and they were always going around Manhattan in cars, and everything was just great for them. Then there was a third level of we were aware, but not firsthand, of movie stars in Hollywood.

35:38And we figured, hey, you know, Humphrey Bogart lives next to Jennifer Jones, and then Gregory Peck lives next to Betty Grable, and all these people live out there. And in the evenings, they're going to Ciro's and the Macombo, and Humphrey Bogart is going over to Dick Powell's house and Gene Kelly's, they're gathered around his piano singing. And, you know, there was this fantasy of life in Hollywood, in real life in Hollywood. They had swimming pools and they were all beautiful people who actually existed flesh and blood. And then there were the movie people that had their own life. I mean, from movie to movie, Esther Williams would swim and Van Johnson would pursue her.

36:28And we'd see this character actor. We got familiar with them. And then there was our life, grim and grungy and realistic and sad. So these were three levels. And I always had hoped to graduate into a better level. but so much of it was just fantasy and wishful thinking and stimulated by both Hollywood movies and the Hollywood fan magazines and gossip columns that wrote about these stars. Fantasy seems to play into many of your movies. Magic happens in your movies. Yeah, fantasy, you wish that life was like that. More fantasy, less real. Reality is a bone crusher. You know, and in the fantasy world, there is always a loveliness and charm and unreality is a very beautiful place.

37:24Yeah. Can you escape into that in the real world as well? Or is it only in art and only in movies that you get to experience that? You could escape to some degree, varying degrees. When I was a kid, I would go into a movie house, and you walk into a dark theater, and the terrible world is out there, and suddenly you're in the dark, and big on the screen is, you know, June Allison and all these wonderful people, and they're beautiful, and the guy's never at a loss for a witty remark or a brave action. And it's great. So you could, for an hour and a half, get the reality out of your way. Then when I got older, I found I could make movies.

38:12And in making movies, I could wake up in the morning and go off to the set. And there would be some beautiful actress and some wonderful, handsome leading man who is funny and charming. And they would have costumes. And I knew music was going to come in here. and there were great sets, and now we're in the 1920s where we're in Paris. And so I could live my life out avoiding reality as much as possible. But you can't, unfortunately, get away from it. I mean, it kind of oozes in like some kind of toxic ichor. Did you always have a dream to make films from childhood? Not really. I wanted to be in show business.

38:57I knew that, but not films necessarily. necessarily. I started out as a writer, and I was happy in my little isolated room writing, and then I wrote for some television shows, and I kind of accidentally got into movies. I became a comedian, and they thought I did funny stuff, so they thought, wanted to give them a chance to write a movie, maybe write a funny movie. In spite of my incompetence, kept succeeding. Everything I did, I succeeded. I didn't thought I was good at it. It was, I got a million lucky breaks. I worked hard and everything fell my way. So even if I did something wrong or bad, which I did all the time, I succeeded.

39:44When I became a comedian, I was petrified. I didn't, I was stage fright. I didn't know what to do. I got on stage, but I succeeded. When I came off the stage. All the nightclubs wanted me. When I was a kid and I wrote for a television show, I was just a teenager. I wrote for a television show. Next year, I had a reputation and all the writers wanted me to work on, you know, so it's like I could do no wrong at that time. It's not that I was so good. I wasn't. I was, you know, competent, but not great by any means. But I got a million breaks. When I wrote a movie script, I had no credentials to direct a movie.

40:27But just when I finished my script, a new company formed called Palomar Pictures. And they couldn't entice John Huston and William Wyler and these people to make movies for them. So they turned to me, people like me. And I was one of the people most like me. They gave me$1 million budget, and I made Take the Money and Run. And I made all kinds of mistakes on the picture and did the best. I knew nothing about filmmaking. And it opened, and it was a big success. And then I followed it with Bananas, with some improvement in my technique, but not much. I was still pretty rotten. Also a very big success.

41:14It was like I kept failing, not failing, but stumbling upward. Yeah. It sounds like the fantasy in real life, you got to experience the fantasy that way. Yeah. It just happened. Yeah. I had some talent. Yeah. But not proportionate. I combined that small talent that I had with very hard work, a lot of ambition, and a lot of luck. How did you get your first writing job? My first writing job, I was in high school. I was 16. And all the other kids around me were making their college choices. This one was going to be a doctor and this one was going to be an architect and that one was going to be a journalist.

41:55I had fantasies. I thought I'd be, sounds crazy, I thought I'd be a cowboy. You know, I wanted to be a cowboy. I wanted to be what I had seen in the movies. I wanted to be a private detective. I looked at the yellow pages and looked up the names of private detectives, asked them if I could come in and follow what they did. So it was complete fantasy. I was always amusing. And some friends of mine said, why don't you write some of those jokes out? And I'd write them out. And then somebody said, you should send them in. there were many Broadway columnists then running the newspapers. Why don't you send them in?

42:33Because they always publish jokes. So I typed them up after school and sent them in to some of the Broadway columnists, Earl Wilson, Walter Winchell, the various ones. And after a very short time, a month maybe, I saw my name in print with a joke. So I started doing it more, and my name started appearing all the time in the columns. An advertising company called up Earl Wilson and said, who is this guy, Woody Allen, who's always appearing? And they said, hey, some kid in Brooklyn. He sends us the jokes. And they called me up. They got my name and phone number. They called me up and they said, do you want a job coming in and writing jokes first?

43:20And I said, yeah, I'd love it. At that time, they paid me$40 a week, which was huge because, you know, the jobs that I got in the neighborhood delivering for the tailor, for the butcher, you know, you got 35 cents an hour and tips and you made no money. $40, my parents made that working eight hours a day in an office as a bookkeeper. So I would go in, I'd go to school. My school hours were eight in the morning till one at Midwood High School. and I'd finish at 1, get on the BMT subway, ride into Manhattan. And on the way in, it was a 40-minute trip or so, I'd write jokes, jokes, jokes, get in there, go into a little cubby, type out more jokes.

44:06And I'd give them, I know it sounds hard to believe, I would give them 50 jokes every day. Amazing. And they were topical jokes, jokes about the president, jokes about inane jokes about parking spaces and mother-in-laws, and I had the job. And then someone heard that I was a good joke writer and they wanted to know if I would supply jokes for their radio show. And of course I did. And one thing led to another. And before long, I had a good reputation. And I flourished. I mean, I kept, I did radio shows. And then I did what they called at that time simulcasts. It was part radio, part television at the same time.

44:49Then I did television shows. Then by the time I was about 20 or 21 or so, I got a job with the Sid Caesar show, which was the jewel of comedy. I mean, everybody would be like at the epitome of the Saturday Night Live show or something. Everybody wanted to be a writer and I wanted to be on, everyone wanted to be on the Sid Caesar show. And they hired me, and I worked on the show, and I worked with all these great writers, Danny and Doc Simon, Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks, you know what I mean? And they were all very nice to me. They all liked me, and I was legitimately in awe of them and respectful of them, and they liked me.

45:38And I wrote funny jokes, and they liked that. So I just kept succeeding. Yeah, I had a charmed life. And when I made my first movie, I didn't direct it. They asked me to write the script for What's New Pussycat. And they said to me, can you write this thing? Charlie Feldman, the producer, said, well, we can all go to Paris. And we have Warren Beatty. And we'll have a great time in Paris. And write yourself a little part in it. And meanwhile, Beatty dropped out. And through Feldman's production genius, they got Peter O'Toole. They got Peter Sellers. They got Capucine and all these hot actresses for it, Romy Schneider.

46:26And they made this movie of my script. Well, it was the most terrible movie. They ruined it completely. I had a miserable experience in Paris, apart from loving Paris. But I had a terrible experience, and yet I was failing upward. The picture became a gigantic success. It was probably the biggest money-earning comedy to its time. You know, it's like I could do no wrong. And I hated the picture. I mean, I hate it to this day, and I hated it then. And then I wrote a script, and I vowed I would not do the script unless I could be the director and control it. And as I said before, a young company started out, Palomar Pictures, and they took a chance on me because they couldn't get better than me.

47:20And that picture, I ran into all kinds of problems in the editing room and yet it opened and it was a very big success. And Bananas was a big success. And then I wrote Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, which was a film that was not so well received, but a tremendous success financially and with the public. Then I did Love and Death, which was a success. And then I decided to take a chance and make a film that wasn't so broadly funny. I would do more characters, more realistic, and I would sacrifice some laughs. And a lot of people around me said, you're making a big mistake and all that.

48:07I wrote Annie Hall with Marshall Brickman, and we decided this was going to be a more serious picture, more serious than, you know, bananas. And we sacrificed laughs for the story. What do you think brought that on, that idea to do that? It was a big step. I was always ambitious. Yeah. And I always wanted to do it in the same senses. When that succeeded, I followed it with interiors because I didn't want to just make comic films. So I was always trying to be ambitious and try more than I had the ability to do. I was always punching upward, failing artistically, but being saved by my luck. Yeah.

48:55Did it keep it interesting for you by making a different kind of movie than you had made before? Yes. It always was interesting to have some rather than just turning out the same thing. You know, I felt, for instance, I was a great fan of the Marx Brothers. Yeah. But I felt they made the same picture time after time. And, of course, they were brilliant. Yes. But it was the same film. So eventually, once you see five of them or seven of them, they waned their popularity. And this has gone on to my 50th picture, the last picture I made, to keep the sense of challenge going, I made in French. I don't speak French, but I made it in French because I wanted to challenge myself.

49:39I had always admired French movies, and I wanted to work in another language to keep me awake on the set. So I wasn't just, yes, I've made 50 films. I'll go through the mechanical motions. I can do it and do it again. So that's always been a provocative stimulator for me. Tell me a little bit about making a movie in French. Did you have a translator at your side at all times? No, I had so many of them spoke English. I wrote the film in English, of course, and somebody translated it into French. I see. And then I would do it, and I would, the actors could speak English, at least part English, or they could speak better English than me.

50:24They were very good at it. And I would speak to them. They would do it. And I could tell, they were speaking in French, but I wrote, I knew what they were saying because I wrote the dialogue. And you can tell, if you go see a Kurosawa film, you know who the great Japanese actors are. You're stunned by Mifune or something because he's a great actor. You know nothing of Japanese, probably. That wasn't the problem. The problem's always with that film or with any film I've ever done. The problem is always in the writing. If the writing is good, you don't have a problem making the film. You know, there are many wonderful actors around, great cameramen.

51:05It's common sense where to put the camera and what to do. You always are screwed up in films and have agonizing times. when you finally come to the realization that what you wrote doesn't work or only the first half works or you run into trouble on a character somewhere or a plot point. It's always a problem in the plot. And when that happens, do you only get to see it when you're making the film? Is that the only time you would know that? It's the only time I ever saw it. I mean, I mean, I didn't know of anybody that can read a script all the time and just anticipate the problems. I couldn't tell until I shot the whole film, put the whole film together, put the music in and look at it.

51:55And I said, oh, God, the whole second half doesn't work. And then I'd go back and reshoot and I would re-edit and struggle. and many of my films were made in the reshooting and the re-editing, including Annie Hall. That's why I noticed it was so much more pleasurable to write a novel because in the film when I called them up and said, I've got to reshoot, they're thunderstruck because it's going to cost$250 ,000 a day to reshoot something. But with a novel, when it's terrible, I reread it. I tear it up and throw it away. It doesn't cost a penny, you know. So it was nicer artistically.

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54:19Tell me about What's With Baum? It's a book that I wrote, a novel, and I thought it would be amusing. and it was fun to work on. I started it between films and between films I wrote a little more and a little more and finally I finished it and gave it a quick rewrite and truce it up a little bit and then put it out. How long has it been in the works? Well, on and off sporadically, you know, for, you know, I would say a year. But that's not long. Well, but only in small doses. Yeah, but still, a year for a novel is quick. You know, it's a small novel. I mean, but on the other hand, it is as long as The Great Gatsby, and it's not as good, but it's as long.

55:07And it's, you know, longer than Joseph Conrad's novels. And so it's a respectable length, but it's not as big as War and Peace. Well, I don't think there's any rule about that, right? It just has to be good, no? You know, but hopefully it's more amusing. Yeah. There's a story in the book where a character is accused of not being able to speak from the heart. And I wanted to ask you, do you feel like you've always been able to speak from the heart? Well, most of the time, yeah. Every once in a while, something comes up where you don't speak from the heart because you can't, because it would hurt somebody's feelings or betray a confidence of someone.

55:50But most of the time, you can speak from the heart. You know, I don't live in a hostile society or where there's problems and if I have to watch what I say. So I always, you know, was always free. I grew up in Brooklyn. People spoke what they felt and it was never so radical what they felt or so dangerous. Was this the first time you've written a novel? I tried one maybe 30 years ago and I brought it to my editor at the New Yorker, Roger Angel. and he read it and he said it's very funny and very, the word he used, warming, but it doesn't come to any climax. It's like all foreplay and no climax.

56:35And I said, okay, then I don't want anybody else to see it. Yeah. And I put it in my drawer and I never took it out again. I mean, I left it there and I went on. I figured, well, maybe novel's not my thing. But, you know, 25, 30 years later, I need to come back to that one. You know, another couple of months, not even, I'll be 90. And I thought to myself, I want to, you know, write a couple of novels. How often do you start projects and feel like, this one isn't going to work, I'm going to move on to something else? Often. I've started some books that way. I've started film scripts. You know, when I was younger, I didn't realize that you had to know where you were going.

57:27You had to know the ending and be satisfied with that ending. So I get an idea, and it would dazzle me. I think, this is great. It's so funny. It's so brilliant. And I start to write it, and I get up to page 50, and I'm out. It goes no place. I've got 50 wonderful pages of imagination and dialogue, and it goes nowhere. It's wasted. So then I decided you've got to know where you're going with the thing. And once I knew that, I fell into the trap less of starting projects that came to nothing. But before that, and even somewhat after, I'd start projects and realize on page 10 or page 80 that this has not worked.

58:20It's not working. It appeared to be tantalizing and delectable, but not working out. Do you remember what the first film was where you knew the ending before you got there? Yeah, but it's a good question because I'm going through all my films now. I'm past already interiors and I didn't know. I didn't know in Manhattan. My God, you know, I can only say this. I can't remember them all, but I knew where I was going with Match Point. Wow, that's deep into the library. Yes, yes. I thought to myself, a guy kills somebody, but he kills the next door neighbor. So you think, you know, that he killed the next door neighbor and he ran into the other person and had to kill them.

59:21So all the suspicions deflected on the other person and there's no motive in there. You know, so I knew I was going there. That I knew. But I guess the pictures since then, I kind of knew. I mean, everything since then I did know. Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Midnight in Paris I knew. Yeah, in the later films, I knew all the endings. I didn't get to the end and flounder around on any of that. Do you remember the first time you went to Hollywood? Yes, I was flown out there with a group of writers. NBC had something called the Writer Development Program. They picked out a number of writers, young writers, to develop as writers because they wanted us to mature as writers and work for their television shows.

1:00:20And they were very careful in their selection, but it didn't work because most of the people they picked did not wind up as writers. They went into other businesses. I was one of their success stories because I was so dedicated. I was so disciplined and ambitious. And they flew us out there. There was a failing television show called Colgate Comedy Hour. They flew about six of us out there to apprentice on the show, hoping that we could make a contribution and help the show. And also we would learn something from the more experienced writers who had written the show into trouble. Anyhow, nobody knew what they were doing.

1:01:07And when I got out to Hollywood, of course, I was walking on clouds. I thought to myself, my God, this is where Bob Hope lives. And I just didn't believe it. And even years later, when I went out to Hollywood briefly, Dick Cavett was out there. Cavett and I used to go and look at the homes of W.C. Fields and we were just awestruck. But when I went out, I was alone. I was a teenager and I was thunderstruck by Hollywood. I was thunderstruck by the sunsets and by the fact that movie stars lived there and that I would be standing on a Saturday night at Hollywood and Vine, which I had only known because of listening to Jack Benny.

1:01:57And then I was overcome with the fact that they referred to Danish pastries as sweet rolls. I couldn't get my mind around that. And that, when you sat down to get coffee and orange juice and a toasted English muffin, they put the coffee down first. I couldn't get used to that because it was always cold by the time the muffin came. These are my impressions of Hollywood. But I loved it when I first went out there. Then, as I got older and got more experience living in Manhattan... I much preferred the noisy excitement and energy of Manhattan to the softer life of California. How did you go from being a writer to the first time getting on stage as a comedian?

1:02:51Because I was a writer, and in the writer development program, they said to me, I'd like you to go down to the Blue Angel. There's a comic down there called Mort Saul, and I'd like you to take a look at him because we're thinking of developing him at NBC. And I went down there, and I was knocked for a loop. I'd never seen anything like that. I mean, it just changed my life in one second. I came back and I thought to myself, what am I doing? Everything I'm doing is so terrible. The comparison is, I still feel that way to this day. And I was just stunned. And I thought to myself, I'd like to write for this guy.

1:03:38I'd like to listen to this guy. I'd like to be this guy. And I mentioned, just mentioned it to my then manager, Jack Rollins, that I've had a thought maybe of writing something for myself and doing it. And he seized on that and would not let it go. He saw in me, which I did not see, a stand-up comedian. And he wouldn't let it go. And despite the fact I said, I don't really want to do this. I don't like it. I don't know. And he said to me, just trust me. Do this for a year or two and let me worry about it and make all the decisions. You just show up and work. And I did. I was nervous every show.

1:04:27I hated it. But again, I succeeded in spite of myself. The first night I went on at the Blue Angel in New York was a Sunday night. It was the night that they put amateurs on. And Shelley Berman was the stand-up comedian there. He was the star. And he gave me a wonderful introduction, really lovely. And I went on. I was frozen. And I worked. When I came off, I thought, God, I was awful and awful and awful. But the next day, the offers came pouring in. This nightclub, that nightclub, this television show. And Jack Rollins said no to all of them. He said, now you've got to buckle down and work, get up in the cabarets and work every night.

1:05:19And that's what I did. I quit. I was a writer on the Gary Moore show, and I was making, you know, good money at that time. I mean, it was like a few thousand dollars a week. And I quit to be a stand-up comedian, making zero, making no money at all, just to go in and work at a place called the Duplex downtown and then the Bitter End, no salary at all. And I worked and worked night after night after night. And then I, you know, I didn't get better at it, but I got more relaxed maybe, never totally relaxed. I was never great at it. In retrospect, I'm overrated. I was a decent comic, but not a great one.

1:06:07But I'm always thought of as, oh, you were a wonderful stand-up comedian. But compared to someone like Mort Saul, I mean, if I had my life to live over again, which I'm counting on, I would be a different kind of stand-up comedian. Sometimes I even get the urge now, you know, it's not too late to atone for the rotten comic I was then. I should get back up on stage and do what I really feel I could do and be very strong as a stand-up comedian. And then the impetus wanes, and I think, oh, am I going to go to St. Louis and Chicago and Boston and work nightclubs at one in the morning? And so I come to my senses.

1:07:01But I did work as a comedian, and I was very successful. And that led to the movies and stuff. But I was never, I don't say this with false modesty, I was overrated. The idea of you going back to stand-up is a very beautiful idea. I would love to do it, but, you know, it would take me about a year to write enough material. The way I worked, I would practice it at home alone first and then go into some club at night and do it. And I always, unlike other comedians, they always advised me, when you have new material, throw it in to the second show at night so if it dies. I never felt that was a good test of material.

1:07:48I always felt you had to do it Saturday night prime show. And if you died with it, you died. I never died with any of it because I wrote funny and the jokes were funny. And when you're on stage, you have a survival instinct. So if I wrote a routine and I was doing a routine talking to the audience, I was getting my laughs and I sensed the next joke is not going to work. And you just sense it like, you know, it's instinctive. I would edit right there and go to the joke after it. So I never really died. I always edited on my feet and cut out the junk while I was working. So they always got good jokes, the best that I could write at the time, when I was a good joke writer.

1:08:38Do you think that had you not done stand-up, the rest of your whole life would be different? Yes, it was a key piece. And Jack Rollins, my manager, who was the best of all managers, a legend in the business, pointed out to me accurately, I was a writer for years, and you go from show to show, you know, and it's fine on your reputation. The minute I did a stand-up routine on Jack Pa or something like that and scored, my whole life changed. It dwarfed the excitement and the amount of offers I got as a writer. Wow. You know, to say, well, he wrote the Sid Caesar show on the Sid Caesar show or he wrote, you know, on this show or that show.

1:09:29Okay, we'll hire him on our show. But as soon as they say, oh, is he the guy on the Ed Sullivan show Sunday night? Did that? The offers came in. I got more writing offers doing one stand-up routine. The visibility and the impact of life performing is so more intense than what you get to the passivity of being an isolated writer. When you saw Mort Sahl that first time, tell me what it was about him that was so great. Well, I, of course, misperceived. I thought, oh, this guy's jokes are so great. They were great. They were the greatest I've ever seen. And I didn't realize that it was his persona that was so great so that he could say anything and it would be wonderful.

1:10:27And the jokes were superb. His persona was legitimately a kind of, he had a sort of canine intelligence, coruscating wit. you were in the presence of an overwhelmingly witty, brilliant character. And I thought it was the jokes. And I even remember saying to Jack Rollins, my manager, why can't I just go out there and read the jokes? You know, it's a joke. And Jack used to say it's not the jokes. You don't realize it. It's the persona. It's the human being. That's what they're responding to. You're responding to the persona of Mozart. Yes, his jokes are brilliant and very different than other people's, much superior.

1:11:21But it's him. And I couldn't grasp that for years. Finally, it occurred to me, it came over me, that it was the guy. It was such a dazzling experience to watch him and to speak. Now, someone listening to me now can go back and see a tape or listen to a record. They won't get the impact. This is truly an experience. You know, someone once said to me years ago, we were talking baseball. I'm talking about Babe Ruth. And they said, you really had to be there. Yeah. Same with Mort. You had to be there. Yes, you can get some taste of what he was like from a clip or from a record album. But at that time, it was electrifying.

1:12:13And of course, when he burst on the scene, they did a profile in the New Yorker on him. He was on the cover of Time magazine. He was hired to work the White House all day. And he wasn't just the guy doing, let's say, political jokes. His political jokes, to me, I wish he had done less of them and more of his human relationship jokes. Every subject he turned to, from his relationships with women and human relations to special subjects, sports cars and high fidelity and going into Brooks Brothers to buy a suit and people that lived and worked on Madison Avenue advertising agencies. And politics was part of that.

1:12:58But, you know, to me, only one part. It was so amazing to hear him speak. And I didn't realize that it was him. It was what I was responding to was the person in the same way that if you see a movie, you respond to Marlon Brando or Frank Sinatra or something. It's the persona. I was thick. I couldn't grasp that. I kept thinking, oh, this guy's jokes are so brilliant. He's really a brilliant writer. And people used to say to me at the time, other comics would say to me, this is before I became a comic. They would say, what are you seeing, Moritzel? He just comes out and talks. I could come out and talk, but he just, he was so skillful that it never sounded like a comedian talking to you.

1:13:55It sounded like a scintillating intellectual talking to you. an amazingly witty, funny, scintillating intellectual talking to you. And it just knocked me for a loop at the time. Was he the first comedian who didn't just do jokes? No, there were others who just didn't do jokes. For example, W.C. Fields didn't just do jokes. He didn't do jokes. He was just a hysterical personality, funny beyond belief. Jonathan Winters didn't do jokes. He had a special thing. Elaine May, someone who could read the phone book and you would laugh. Great comedians, do they all have that persona that is what you fall in love with?

1:14:49Yes, it's all the great comedians. You know, a million comedians do those one-liner jokes. Yeah. But for some reason, when Groucho did them, they have something special to them. It's in the voice and the mystical area of genius that you can never quantify. And you never, it's just there. It's like when a musician, you know, I pick up the clarinet and play a tune on it. It's one thing. But somebody else picks it up and they blow into it. Same thing. And it just oozes with feeling. And you can't figure out why. You know, you do all the same things. You use the same number read. You use a good clarinet.

1:15:40You hunch your shoulders and close your eyes. You're straining. And it's fine. But when the person really has it. Yeah. And you can never get to what that thing is. That's the part that the AIs are never going to duplicate. They'll always match something, but they're never going to get that impossible to capture thing that makes Bud Powell play the piano and somebody else play it. It's just a different instrument. Did you ever get to meet Groucho? Oh, I knew him well. I mean, I met him, Cavett introduced me to him at Lindy's, and I got friendly with him. I had correspondence with him. Yes, I spent a good deal of time with him when he came to New York, and when I went out to California, I always visited him.

1:16:37I was at his house any number of times. Dan Keaton and I spent Christmas Eve with him. Yeah, I did, and he was, you know, he could say anything, and it would sound funny. Yeah. You know, he just, where somebody else, it wouldn't. But with him, it was magic. It sounded funny. Would you get the sense that he was trying to be funny or he couldn't help it? Both. He was frequently trying to be funny, and he was funny. Not like the boorish person who tries to be funny and doesn't make it. But he also, if he would say, you know, anything, it would sound funny because it just came from Groucho. Yeah. You can't really get your mind around what it is.

1:17:23Because so many comics do those one-liner jokes like he used to do and make those remarks like the delivery of Bob Hope. Bob Hope had an amazing delivery. It was just amazing. He could say those one-liners and everybody else saying them sounds thick and heavy-handed and he does them and they come across like, you know, little poems. Did you get to meet Bob Hope as well? I met him briefly. I was never as friendly with him. I mean, I loved him, but I was never as close with him. Yeah, I met him briefly. Cavett and I did a little documentary on him that was played at Lincoln Center the night they honored him.

1:18:12So we got to pick out a lot of stuff that we liked of his little moments. He just had a great delivery. I copied his—I wouldn't copy Groucho's delivery because it's too special. But Hope was more of a human being, more of an average human being, less broad than Groucho. When I first started, I leaned on Mort Sahl. And one columnist wrote, if Woody Allen could ever get rid of those Mort Saul mannerisms, he'd be a really good comic. And I sounded like Mort Saul, you know, the same way any musician who starts and plays jazz, the piano, will start playing like Thelonious Monk or, you know, whoever influences him, whoever he loves.

1:19:01And so I sounded like Mort Saw when I first started, a grade B version, a grade D version. And then I started to lean more on Bob Bobbitt. So you could, when I see myself ever in a movie, you know, you can see that I'm copying this great master. When you do jokes in front of an audience, you get an immediate feedback. You know what works and what doesn't. How is it different when you're making a movie, there's no audience, nobody's laughing? How do you know when it's funny? If you're a professional comedian or you're a professional comedy worker or a writer or director, you know. I know in my room by myself before I go out in the world that this routine I've done is going to get laughs.

1:19:54I'm going to get laughs with this. Not that long ago, I had to. I didn't want to do what I had to because I love her, go out to California and do some stand-up because they honored Diane Keaton. And I had to go on stage at the American Film Institute or something, one of those things. I could stay in my room alone beforehand and say the thing and with complete professional confidence that I'm going to get laughs with these things. And I did, because if you're a professional, that's a gift that you have, that you can make up funny stuff and you know it's funny. Whereas an average guy that doesn't have that odd gift can't do that.

1:20:40When you newly write something funny, do you laugh or do you just think it's funny? No, no, I laugh. People think that you make up something and then you say it, but it proceeds from your unconscious completely. When I'm writing something, it surprises me. I don't think of it and say it. It comes from the person inside you. So all of a sudden, it says its thing. It surprises me when I say something funny and I laugh at it. Yeah. It's great. You know? It's a great feeling, no? Yeah, to laugh is always a good feeling. Yeah. How much of the work is intellectual versus something else? You experience it as intellectual.

1:21:30You sit down, you're thinking, you're using a rational mentality to put something together logically. But then the thing pops in inspirationally. It's a combination of working at it, and then the inspiration comes. You have no part in the inspiration. That proceeds from inside you. Has there ever been a time where inspiration didn't come? Yeah, sure. You sit there, and you think, and you think, and you use your intellect, and you try this, and you try that, and you try a million things, and it doesn't come. And then you move on to something else because you never got it. how much of the writing comes from real life?

1:22:18Do you see something and then think that's funny and then it works its way into a script? Both. I mean, a portion of the stuff you write comes from real life. You see something and you think that would be funny or that is funny and it would make a good comic situation. And some of it is just, you know, when I wrote for television shows, you got locked into a room on Monday morning and the show would be live on Saturday night or something and you had to write and you couldn't just wait for the inspiration. If it didn't come, it didn't come, but you had to manufacture the best you could. It wouldn't be the best stuff you could come up with if you could wait to be inspired.

1:23:08But you had no choice. So some of it is from real life, and some of it is you manufacture. On the Sid Caesar show, The Writer's Room, were those, would you say that was the funniest group of people you've ever been around? They were wonderful writers. I mean, you know now the work of Larry Gelbart and Doc Simon and Mel Brooks, of course. They were great professional comedy writers. Yeah, I would say probably the funniest group. And not just funny, they were funny, but they knew how to write. Yeah. They were more than funny. They were intelligent men, and they knew how to write. They knew when a joke would be holding up the progress of the skit.

1:23:59You know, the Sid Caesar show, even before I joined it, did foreign movies and operas. And, you know, there's great scope. You know, when I wrote a special, it wasn't for Sid. I think we wrote a special for Art Carney once. And we were able on that same special to do a Tennessee Williams satire, Ingmar Bergman satire, you know. The stuff was not that common in television at the time. Would you all work in a room together? At the Sid Caesar show you did, yeah. And would you finish each other's jokes or add on to each other's jokes? Yeah, yeah. They were all very nice people. You'd add on or top a joke.

1:24:46Yeah, it was what you would expect. People wandering around aimlessly and doing jokes and each one building on a joke or making a better joke. and sometimes fighting for your joke. I've written very often with just one other writer, with like Larry Gelbart or something, or Mel Brooks and one other writer, Mel Tolkien, or just with Marshall Brickman, who I collaborated with, Mickey Rose, and it's easier with two people. For me, it's easiest by myself, But with two people, if you're friendly, and I was friendly with those people, it was easier. Once you get more people in the room, it becomes, you know, a little more chaotic.

1:25:39On the Caesar show, you know, Sid was always in the room as a major contributor. I mean, he just wasn't the comic that you gave stuff to. He contributed. What was he like, Sid Caesar? Grandiose. He was large, generous, very brilliant, hilariously funny. Everybody and his brother today is called a comic genius. But Sid really was a genius. And he had a very large personality, very big. And, you know, he was not shy. He was, I can only say large and hilariously funny and very generous. When you were younger, who were the other comedians that you looked up to? Who were the greats from childhood? Well, Sid, because when he came along, I was only, you know, like 12 years old or something.

1:26:31W.C. Fields, Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, of course. These were my idols. And I loved Mike Nichols and Elaine Ray and Jonathan Winters and Mort Sahl, of course. There were some other comedians that I thought, you know, were quite funny. I mean, I thought Henny Youngman was hilariously funny. Milt Kamen was very funny. Not well-known, but very funny. And all of those guys were kind of funny in a certain way. All those Borschtvelt guys, Phil Foster and Jackie Leonard, you know, they all had a certain funniest. But the ones that really knocked me out were the ones I mentioned. Bob Hope, Felicity Fields, Groucho Marx.

1:27:18Those were the ones that I grew up with that I thought were hilarious. Did you ever meet Jerry Lewis? Yeah, I knew Jerry Lewis pretty well. Jerry Lewis I found to be an enormous talent, but the films didn't add up. You know, he squandered it, I thought, so much of it. He was such a talented guy. You know, when he danced like Fred Astaire, you could say, oh, God, that's Fred Astaire he's doing. And he looked like him. If he sang, whatever he did, when he'd do his nightclub act and do stuff, his typewriter thing, he'd throw that cane way up in the air and spin around, he'd catch it. He could dance a little.

1:28:05What he needed was somebody disciplining him. He was like an atomic bomb. You had to use him right, and nobody ever did. You know, he did those silly movies, and they're all silly, and within those silly movies, you could see how gifted he was, and you wished that somebody had used him for a good movie. Now, years later, Scorsese did, but it was a serious movie, but you wish Jerry had just given himself over to somebody and trusted him. It could have turned out a brilliant comedy with him.

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