The first time we did it, Fred just starting doing that voice ("Whaaaaaat are you doing here?!") and Kristen and I were like "What?" It was so funny. I hadn't heard him do it before. Man o man it made me laugh. Then it became a game of who could stretch out the vowels in their sentences the most. It got crazy.
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90% improvised and about 10% scripted. we sort of write out a storyline, and then we do our own dialogue.
The pin really did slip from my fingers and catch on my sweater. That was not something that was planned. But what we didn't show in the episode is that I had a second backup pin taped behind my ear with a band aid (skin color so you couldn't really see it). In practicing, the pin was really easy to drop, so I wanted a backup. If the pin hit the ground, I would have gone for my backup pin.
That was the most fun I ever had. The coolest part of that episode, that you couldn't see, was the head of the secret service explaining to me what was going to happen if someone started shooting at us. What they would do to the president and where they were going to throw me in the back of a van. That was really exciting Bourne Identity stuff.
The audition process for Drake and Josh was very extensive. Three auditions and a screen test. I KID! I auditioned at the Nickelodeon Studios and like every actor's first onscreen role, I shared a scene with a watermelon lamp that my character built for a science fair.
Question: How on earth were you able to gain the incredible amount of authorial control that you have over Louie? Have you had to battle with FX over any particular jokes/concepts/creative choices?
Answer: I got it by demanding it and refusing to do the show any other way at all and by having the leverage that I was completely willing to walk away without doing the show and by agreeing to an extremely low budget so that they could offset the risk of giving me this freedom becuase they are risking less money.
I have had conversations with them about very few moments in the show but zero battles.
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The funny thing about the sandwich bit, is it is only getting recognized now on Youtube. It was basically a throwaway bit that many people never saw until now. We actually used to do that when we were kids. Skating and hungry we would get three meals for the price of one by simply piling on tomatoes and pickles forever. Watch all the old bits on tomgreen.com
It comes to me. Part of my leaving the media on all day is a way of…my mind has trained itself to have a very sensitive system of radar about certain words, expressions, topics, and areas of discussion that come up. There are things that interest me more than others, and then there are things that jump out. There’s one thing I learned about the mind as a young man, when I quit school. I read a book - half of it, anyway - called Psycho-Cybernetics. The author said that the brain is a goal-seeking and problem-solving machine, and if you put into it the parameters of what it is you need or want or expect, and you feed it, it will do a lot of work without you even noticing. Because the brain doe...
I tend to assume vodka and I know it seems unlikely that Rick wouldn't use sci-fi tech to somehow augment whatever he drinks but I think in rick's mind part of the "addiction" to the flask of good old fashioned booze is that it anchors his identity, and I think he knows that if he augmented the booze or the flask, then why not just whip up a very rudimentary nanobiotic alcohol dispenser in his body or inject himself with a plasma component that just amounts to always having a certain blood alcohol level, and I think the reason he doesn't do that is because he's a little afraid he'll lose sight of who he is
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Larry David and I discovered that we were both obsessed with superman and admired him and also found him very funny at the same time, so that is why he came up a lot. Are you related to the hot dog Kobayashi in Coney Island?
sort of answered above, but PFT and i discussed, and i really wanted the show not to be so impenetrable, you know? Like, this is the first time people are listening, so why can't I show them the difficulty involved in putting together this show, so they can appreciate it? It's like how Bernie Brillstein advised bob and david to come out as themselves at the top of Mr. Show - then people could appreciate how they were doing all the characters.
The Joe Dirt wig was itchy. And one time, I walked away from the set at a TV studio when we were doing some Dennis Miller stuff, and I got lost, and I had my janitor's uniform on, and the security guard wouldn't let me back into where I was supposed to go, and I didn't have a cell phone, so I had to sit there for 15 minutes until some PA came to look for me, and I had to explain to them that I was dressed as a janitor with a wig on, and that was an actual story, that sounds fake but it was funny to me. Long story short: I loved the wig, I thought it was hilarious, it was hard to wear all summer but it cracks me up. I think it's in some vault somewhere in the Smithsonian right now, surrounded...
I thought it was really funny. They flagged our cutaway setups, which had been getting a little fast and loose at the time. Props for that. RE: the cutaways themselves, though, they were off the mark a bit. The cutaways are actually the hardest things to write on the show. Story-centric jokes come a little easier, but when you have to conceive and invent a whole independent little sequence several times in a episode, it's challenging as hell. Like doing a Far Side cartoon 10-12 times an episode.
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It was the first sketch I ever did. I got confused with stage direction, and literally did not know what color I was on the cue cards, so I just froze! Hey people, it's live TV, and the experience has made me a better performer. AND took away the fear of being in sketches!
99% of the time, David and I agreed on what should go on, and why, and what was good. That's one reason the show was so great. I never just wrote off a sketch and thought "You don't like it, but I do..we'll put it on." However, the sketch about the waiter dropping food in the guy's lap and offering to pay for half the dry-cleaning never really worked and everyone agreed "Date With the Queen" was a huge clusterfuck of incomplete thinking. Those two sketches were real stinkers. Some writers hated "Hunger Strike," which i loved. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTdyMBtuDYI . I'm not sure everyone liked "The Story of Everest." That's a sketch that divides people. It's probably my favorite, though....
The sketch I was the most proud of was probably one called Do You Go Runnin Round Re Ro and it was a take on British Gangster movies and how we Americans can't understand what the actors are saying with those thick Yorkshire accents and all.
Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer is amazing. Probably my favorite sketch. There's another Jack Handy one called "Deerheads" with Harvey Keitel that's sublime.
Well, here's what I did, Victoria. Any sketch I would write, I would call my character "Stan Hooper" and he didn't really do anything, you know? And I would be very careful to name him Stan Hooper, and then have someone in the sketch say "Hey Stan Hooper" and one time I read a list of recurring characters and Stan Hooper was way up there. And of all the characters he had no real qualities of any kind. Just a bland empty vessel of a man.
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