I was credited as a STORY EDITOR but that's more of a title than an actual job description. I was in the writers' room pitching jokes and ideas for scripts. I got to work with some real-deal TV veteran writer geniuses who I learned a lot from. Oh! And in season 4 when Jeff Garlin sneaks through a second-story window, the group of people watching him from afar are all the writers in the writers room. THAT IS THE ONLY EASTER EGG THAT'S EVER EXISTED ON ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.
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Question: You come from a very affluent family – are you a reformed “rich dick” or are those characters informed by people you went to school with? Or both? Or neither?
Answer: All of my characters are informed by who I am and people that I've come into contact with, as well as everyone else involved in making the show - like in the case of Rich Dicks, John Daly and people that he knew.
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.
Each season has had its difficulties in producing them - and let me just say that I am really proud of the episodes in the second half of season three. I think they're super funny. There is a story to why I think they're a little inconsistent in production:
For season two, we wrote all 20 episodes before we started shooting, and we shot them all out of sequence. I think the christmas episode with Zach was one of the first ones we shot, and I know the Halloween ep with Pee-wee was in our second week. So we really got to figure out an order after the fact that made sense.
For season three, we had an earlier premiere date, but we started at the same time. So, even though we still wrote everyth...
Hannibal and I have very different approaches. I write stuff beforehand; he drifts in and out of consciousness.
Technically the debacle started before season 4 because one of the primary things I had intended to do was have Jeff Winger reunite with his Dad in season 3. The beginning of my firing, I think, was when I got a call from one of the compulsively unenjoyable personalities at NBC who just wanted to let me know that he had just had lunch with someone "very, very high up" [by the way, this is the kind of shit I will not miss about network television, why are you WITHHOLDING THE NAME of someone you're about to give me a note from] that was "concerned" because they had recently seen a little bit of Community and it had been Joel McHale attacking the study room table with an axe and so this anonymo...
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.
Her name was Tracy and I accidentally named Traci Reardon the same name - I came into the studio planning to name Traci Reardon Brittney Reardon and I just told Scott my name was Traci on accident! I did the original "tracy" again but changed her name to Amanda Calzone. You can hear her on the first Betsy Sodaro ep of WSGLL.
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Related posts tagged 'Inside baseball'
Q: Would you agree that this is the best time to be a nerd as the nerds are rising up while the jocks and bullies are pumping our gas?
A: i think nerds are on their way to greatness. im SUCH a nerd myself. #hollywoodhandbookref
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 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.
My favorite memory of the movie was Chris Farley, because we had him play a guy whose nose was bit off by a Saigon whore. So he did all the scenes with no nose, and he would improvise all his dialogue, he would ask first if it was alright, and I would say "sure," because he was just the funniest guy ever. It was really sad with Chris because he would always say he wanted to be as funny as John Belushi, and I would say that he funnier than John Belushi, but he never knew how funny he was. Sad.
You could never do it. You could never recreate these guys [The Marx Brothers]. Remember they did that Three Stooges movie? My manager, George Shapiro, says trying to get someone to act like a comedian is like trying to get them to act like a baseball player. It’s almost impossible. There’s so many tiny polished movements they have that the best actors struggle to replicate. I mean, Dustin Hoffman is a wonderful actor, I love him. But he can’t do stand-up. Because actors are acting. Comedians are talking to a group of people as if they are an individual. They are locked in on those people. They’re not really thinking about performing. The focus is who they’re talking to. There’s a certain ob...
Wow. There are so many Chris Farley stories to tell. I try not to overdo it, because they are very personal, but they are so funny, people should hear them. I just told one on Howard Stern this morning that was ridiculous. But I will say here's one: Me, Him and Adam Sandler were walking to dinner, during SNL, and this cute girl was getting in a cab, and we commented how pretty she was, so Chris ran over and climbed in the cab with her, and said "hey, you goin' downtown? Let's share a cab!" and she started yelling at him and kicking him. And he finally came back, and we said "Chris, if they don't know who you are, you are just a crazy fat guy trying to climb in a cab with them."
And then we ...
When you do a movie, and you use a song, or a band, or an image on a t-shirt of a band, there's a quiet clause stating that you can't say anything negative about them. And it's sort of just understood if they're selling you a song, or letting you use a t-shirt, you're going to be respectful. So that line was not in the script, but I asked Kid Rock to yell it to me when I ran off, so I could make an extra whimper, like that was a real dagger. And so when we did it, we couldn't put it in the movie yet until I talked to Def Leppard's manager to make sure that was okay. So I called someone, cuz we originally couldn't put it in, and said "hey, is there any way we can do this" and i had to explain...
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