I had actually pitched Nathan for You to Comedy Central before I started working on Jon Benjamin Has a Van. It was inspired by segments I did for a Canadian series called "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" where I'd interact with real people in an interview setting. I first began doing these segments in 2007. But it's always interesting to watch different approaches to dealing with real people, and it was very educational to work with Jon and see how he operated. You Can't Shoot Here is one of my all time favorite comedy bits.
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I had very strong opinions about Andy's wardrobe! I felt it needed to be a combination of Northeastern, yacht-club preppy and Southern District Attorney showing up for the Kentucky Derby. I loved Michael Scott's description in one episode where he said Andy "dresses like an Easter egg."
Orville Wright, yes. I was reading the David McCullough biography of the Wright brothers while I was writing the pilot, and early on there seemed to be some depiction of Orville as the "beta" brother. Seemed like a good fit for our midlevel craft.
Dan had the idea. He liked the idea of a guy who took the time to look ridiculous and then having the guy hating being called ridiculous.
Best job ever. The excitement of starting a whole new show to replace my hero Letterman's, of doing it with one of my best friends hosting it, and working with hilarious young writers, it far outweighed how hard it was and how many people tore into it. Too many memories to list but Louis CK used to throw shit out the 30 Rock window a lot. He would throw money, and attach a note to it - stuff like "You fucking pathetic moron." So we got to watch people scurry to pick up dollar bills and the read the note. Even though they were ant-sized, their body language was enough to have us laughing for hours.
I wanted to do an episodic, non-serialized show. There's no real interest in that kind of storytelling on the Netflixes out there - they like continuing stories you can binge-watch. So the network made sense.
No, no. It was never mentioned. I never thought of it. Jerry never thought of it - furthest thing from my mind. And by the way, I couldn't have done it anyway. There's no way that I could have. First of all, they wouldn't have let me do it (laughter). But even had they let me do it, there's no way that I could have done that and also been the executive producer of the show. It would have been way too hard. I mean I had a 24/7 job just on the writing end of it and the producing end. So there's no way I could have been in it.
It's a reference to the utterly haphazard nature of old variety shows. You'd do a sketch and then cut to a musical number with zero segue. So... basically Family Guy.
You know, they just didn't like the direction of the show - for example, the Chinese restaurant episode.
They hated - they hate - they hated that show. They didn't even want to air it. And you know, there was a big meeting about the kind of shows they liked and the kind of shows they didn't like. And you know, I just said, well, I'm not going be able to do that. So I just thought that I would quit. But then I learned another lesson - that when you say no, you invariably get your way. And it's a wonderful feeling to...
I can't believe I never did it before.
You just say no. And then they go, OK, OK, well, you don't have to.
the poker scene in season 1 was very written but then i let the guys go off and fuck around. i used some of that. I don't generally let people improvise though. That works for shows where you have two cameras that are just sort of following the action. i shoot my show like a movie and it would be all fucked up if folks just said things.
We had a writer's summit where for 2 weeks we had Weird Al, Emo Phillips, Maja Da Oust, Jason Louv, Johnny Pemberton, Brendon Walsh (Gawd I hope i'm not forgetting someone), come up with ways the world could end. Then we broke the apocalypses we liked best into beats and "hung" the podcast dialogue on that framework. It was REALLY challenging because too much animated plot distracts from the conversation but if a GIANT ZOMBIE is eating the white house you can't just keep talking about weed so we had to figure out ways to pin the dialogue to the animation using VO we recorded after we had pieced together the animatics enough to know where it needed it.
Related posts tagged 'Reflecting on own work'
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I have to say that the only good reviews I've gotten in my movie life were for The Emperor's New Groove. I really, really liked that movie. It was very hard to do (which sounds crazy, because it's only the voice) but the backstory was, it was originally called Empire of the Sun. And it was myself and Owen Wilson as sort of a prince and a pauper trading places type thing. And we got a year and a half into it, and Michael Eisner from Disney looked at a rough cut and said "I don't like it." And they got rid of everybody but Spade, and they had this dopey llama idea. It sounds like they just made it up on the spot, and he liked it, and somehow those guys put together a whole new idea, and it was...
I agree with Justin Kirk who played Andy on Weeds..."I don't feel things when they are happening." At the time I was fine with it and looking forward to moving on to other things in life but now I am becoming a little nostalgic for it. We would have begun taping Season 9 this week. I have certain years that were my favorite on that run. I think when any show runs that long you are going to have some years that are stronger than others. I ran into Chevy Chase once and he said that with SNL a lot of people don't remember this but only one out of two SNL shows in the original years were good.
I've interviewed almost 60,000 people. It's impossible to pick one out.
I've interviewed 7 Presidents, Marlon Brando, to Frank Sinatra, to Nelson Mandela, to Martin Luther King, it's impossible.
The only movie I watch end to end over and over again is Walk Hard. It just makes me laugh and relaxes me. the rest I will watch pieces of when they are on cable. I have so many emotions tied to every scene it’s hard for me to be a normal audience to any of it. Except Dewey Cox. And Zohan. And Popstar. I guess the sillier ones draw me in.
My favorite part of working on Community was getting to work with Chris McKenna, and learning from him (and from Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan) how to start transitioning from sealed-off, alienated writer guy into connected collaborator guy. Talking to other writers about how to tell a story the best way possible, sharing personal experiences and mining them for premises, and just generally being holed up in a room somewhere on a movie lot with a bunch of smart, funny people working together to try to make a perfect show, I always miss that feeling and it changed my life.
It's very hard to choose.
Because I've enjoyed all of them, really!
There's a movie that never really did big in terms of its receipts, but it was called "Funny Farm," and in some ways, it may be my best performance. It was very real and very fun. I think it's because also it had the great director George Roy Hill. He directed me in that.
I had a great time on that show. That was a really fun time in my life. I left Saturday Night Live, and was happy after about 2 years of that show, I realized we were going to stick around, and it was happy to have the monkey off your back, when you leave SNL it doesn't mean you're not going to do anything else in your life in show business. So to leave it, and then get something else that kind of clicked, and I could make money at, and was really fun to do, was great. So if I didn't have Just Shoot Me, I wouldn't have had a lot of stuff. I would have never gotten a cover of Rolling Stone, I never would have gotten the house I had, and I got to work with fun people and do a show that I was p...
Ok you want the truth? The Cavalcade of Comedy. I didn't feel like I had the time to put into it that it required. I thought it suffered as a result.
Yes. I think it was a really great final episode, and I love that the final episode acknowledged the impact that the documentary crew had on everyone's lives, and also continued the story with the characters. And on a personal level I loved that Ryan literally ran off into the sunset with Kelly -- but abandoned a baby in order to do so. So funny and dark and happy perfect. Greg Daniels deserves all the credit in the world for wrapping up the series the way he started it out.
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