Judd: I used to watch the Jacksons’ variety show.
Eddie: That was after the cartoon and all that, right?
Judd: Yeah, the cartoon. What was the animal he had in the cartoon? Did he have a mouse or—
Eddie: They had a snake and two mice. I show my kids that thing.
Judd: You have those shows on video?
Eddie: No, sixteen-millimeter film. We like to watch films on the wall.
Judd: Oh, wow.
Eddie: It’s a part of their Amish upbringing.
This interview took place at the Pearl Jam offices and rehearsal space.
FREAKS AND GEEKS ORAL HISTORY (2013)
I was given the chance to guest-edit the comedy issue of Vanity Fair a few years ago, and one of the first articles I assigned was an oral history of Freaks and Geeks. Why? Well, beyond blatant self-promotion, I figured: I’ve been so fortunate to work with a lot of talented people and we’ve done a lot of things I am proud of, but at the end of the day, Freaks and Geeks was our Revolver. That show was the moment where I think we got it right, and I don’t say that in a cocky way, because really, it wasn’t me. It was the success of a hundred people simultaneously. It was our magical moment, and this is the story of how it went down. If it never happens again, I’m okay with that. At least it happened once.
Judd Apatow: I first met Paul [Feig] in the mid-eighties, hanging around “the Ranch,” this incredibly cheap house a bunch of comedians rented really deep in the boonies in the San Fernando Valley. It was all these guys who had come out to L.A. from the Midwest, and all they did was smoke cigarettes and watch infomercials. I also used to see Paul in comedy clubs and thought he was really funny.
Paul Feig: We would go out and do our stand-up shows and reconvene at the Ranch and play poker and drink coffee until the sun came up. That was our routine every night for years. Judd was younger than everyone else—he was really considered to be just a kid. At the same time, he was booking his own stand-up night at some club, working for Comic Relief. I would say, “This guy is really smart. Everybody should be nice to him because he could be running the town someday.” He was the most mature seventeen-year-old I’d ever met in my life.
Judd: By the late nineties, Paul’s acting career wasn’t going anywhere, so he started trying to write. One day I bumped into him and said, “If you have any ideas for TV, let me know.” I didn’t think he would hand me a finished script a few months later, and I certainly didn’t expect it to be the best thing I have ever worked on. That just never happens.
Paul Feig: I had just come off of a year of trying to promote this movie I’d written, directed, produced, and paid for, and I had lost a good-paying acting job before that on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Everything had kind of hit the rocks; I was really at my lowest point. But I’d always wanted to write a high school show. I’d seen so many where it was like, Who are these people? I felt like they weren’t honest at all. I kicked the thing out really fast—I think it had just been gestating for so long in my brain—cleaned it up and gave it to my wife, and she told me to send it to Judd. He called about twelve hours after I sent him the script. He was like, “I love this. I’m going to have DreamWorks buy it.” It was that moment when you go, Wow, my life’s just changed.
Dan McDermott (then head of DreamWorks Television): Within twenty-four hours, I’d say, we got a pass from Fox, from CBS, from ABC. A day or two later, we heard from Shelley McCrory, a development exec at NBC. She said, “If we don’t make this show, I’m quitting the television business.” Scott Sassa had come in as president of NBC West Coast, and Scott wasn’t a content guy [he was previously in charge of NBC’s owned-and-operated stations], so he was deferring to his people more than other network heads do.
Scott Sassa: Networks then programmed towards something called “least objectionable programming,” which meant the show that would suck the least so people wouldn’t change the channel. Freaks and Geeks wasn’t one of those least objectionable shows.
Paul Feig: We went over to NBC, and I remember feeling that “new person in the industry” kind of indignation, like, “If they want to change this at all, I’m not going to do the show.” So I start to make that speech and Shelley goes, “Don’t change a thing.” It was like, This is not at all what I’ve always heard network development is like.
Dan McDermott: Judd and Paul said, “We want to try to cast real kids—we don’t want to cast TV kids.” And, again, Scott basically said, “Sounds good to me!”
Paul Feig: My friends and I weren’t popular in high school, we weren’t dating all the time, and we were just trying to get through our lives. It was important to me to show that side. I wanted to leave a chronicle—to make people who had gone through it laugh, but also as a primer for kids going in, to say, “Here’s what you can expect. It’s horrifying but all you should really care about is getting through it. Get your friends, have your support group. And learn to be able to laugh at it.”
Judd: The pilot had a very daring existential idea, which was that a young, really smart girl sits with her dying grandmother and asks her if she sees “the light,” and her grandma says no. And all the rules go out the window. The girl decides to have a more experimental high school experience, because she doesn’t know if she believes anymore. I was always surprised that the network didn’t notice that that’s what our pilot was about.
Paul Feig: I also really wanted the show to be about the fear of sex. I got tired of every teenager being portrayed as horny and completely cool with sex, because that was not my experience.
Judd: Paul felt like most kids are not trying to get sex, but trying to avoid that moment. You could split them into kids who are constantly trying to get older and kids that are desperately trying to hold on to their immaturity.
Paul Feig: First day of prep, we get into the office, and Judd’s like, “Let’s tear the script apart.” And I said, “What do you mean? They don’t want us to.” And he said, “Yeah, I know, but let’s see if we can make it better.” And it was this stripping away of the old Paul Feig, who was a complete control freak, who wouldn’t let people change a word of anything he wrote.
Judd: Paul showed up when we started production with this bible he’d written about the show, hundreds of pages long, with every character in detail—what they wore, their favorite songs. I asked him to write another few episodes to explore the world, and he banged out two more. We took a lot of moments from them and put them into the pilot.
(Jake Kasdan, twenty-four, is hired to direct the pilot; he will stick around for the run of the series, directing nearly a third of the episodes and helping edit the rest.)
Judd: Jake and I had the same agent, so I was always hearing a lot about this amazing young director. He had made a detective movie called Zero Effect, which, for some reason, I didn’t bother to watch until the day after I hired him. Thank God it turned out to be good.
(Casting begins.)
Judd: In Paul’s pilot, he really understood the geeks, but you could tell he didn’t hang out with the freaks because it wasn’t as specific. So I said we should just try to cast unique characters and rewrite the pilot to their personalities.