Garry: That’s right.
Judd: We were all going, “Oh, maybe we should do that,” but we were just joking around and then we realized, “Wait, maybe that actually is enough.”
Garry: You allow the actor to be, as opposed to do. People are fascinating. They don’t really need to do much.
Judd: I’ve always thought that mentoring comes from being in a place where you want to learn. When you hired me at The Larry Sanders Show, you said, “Oh my God, you’re going to learn so much.” You didn’t say, “You’re going to be so helpful to me.” You said, “You’re going to learn so much.” And I took that seriously. I’m here to make as much of a contribution as I can, but it’s just as important for me to take as much from it as I can. Some writers struggled with this because it was all ego, like, What can I get on the show? Does Garry like me? Does Garry like my scripts? They didn’t approach it like, I’m going to get my own show by observing this process and learning from what Garry’s doing. I had fun because I didn’t feel that pressure. It wasn’t ego-driven. It was, Hopefully I can get some jokes in, but I just got to watch Garry re-outline that script. I knew that watching was helping me.
Garry: That’s the way I was when I was just starting out. I was really open to being taught. When I see talent, I want them to be all they can be. I really want to help—and by doing so, I am helped as well. Whenever I mentor, I notice I’m learning something myself. You are right that there were writers who were not willing to look deeper inside themselves to get the material we were talking about. It’s like being at a therapist and saying, “No. No more sessions.” Whereas you would keep going back in the room and rewriting until you just, I could see how successful you would be because that’s what it takes. It’s just, keep reworking and reworking—and man, you listened and you went back in and you ended up, of course, contributing enormously. I don’t know, I’m just interested in life and teaching. I care.
Judd: The bar was so high on that show, it was fun just to try to meet it. But I think for some people—when you struggle to get there, your self-esteem collapses. If you write a bad script and someone calls you out on it, you either go, “How can I make it better?” or you get mad about it.
Garry: You get defensive.
Judd: You get defensive. But I always thought, Oh, this is fun. The quest to make you happy, I enjoyed. It’s fascinating because I’ve had the same experience with Lena Dunham on Girls—here is a writer who is running a show, who stars in the show, and we know, based on how much work we get done each week, how much sleep Lena gets, and how sane she can be based on how much she’s sleeping or how stressed she is about upcoming episodes. It’s a very similar type of experience. And I think Lena benefits from my experience on The Larry Sanders Show in some ways because, for six years, I got to watch how the show was made—what helped you, and what didn’t. So when we built her show and figured out how to staff it and how to write it and how to pace ourselves, I was able to tell her about what happened at The Larry Sanders Show and maybe help her do it correctly.
Garry: It sounds like you are saying that it’s everything in the moment. On any given day, you can see everything that Lena brings to the stage, to the writers’ room, that day. So you start there and try to take her somewhere.
Judd: Yeah. It’s Lena’s show, and we’re all there to help her. Some weeks she may love our ideas, she may love our whole script. Other weeks, we’re just trying to feed her so she gets excited and goes off and writes a script without us.
Garry: So it’s not a discussion of ego, it’s actually a discussion of someone’s emotional life and where they are in the moment, which is incredibly usable for the writing and the shooting of the episode itself. That’s what we were teaching in the room at Larry Sanders: The answer isn’t on this piece of paper. It’s in this space right here.
Judd: Her insecurity about being a writer is what her show’s about, really—a lot like Larry’s insecurity about being a talk show host. The battle in the writers’ room, on some level, has all the same issues of the battle of trying to be a writer in New York.
Garry: So, as an example, if a writer came in and got defensive about a script he was going to rewrite for Larry Sanders, we might in fact find a scene where Larry’s saying, “You know, Phil’s just—he doesn’t want to rewrite these jokes, he’s just fighting with me.” Instead of getting caught up in this real-life theater that’s going on in the room, observe it. Because that may be what goes on the paper in the end.
Judd: It all becomes fodder for the show.
Garry: Translating experience to paper. That’s so hard to teach, isn’t it?
This interview was conducted by Mike Sager and originally appeared in Esquire in October 2014.
HAROLD RAMIS (2005)
Harold Ramis was the original cocky nerd. He was the guy, more than anyone else in this book, whom I secretly thought I could be like. He was tall and lanky and goofy, the guy standing next to Bill Murray who was, in his own quiet way, every bit as funny as Bill Murray. Harold Ramis had a hand in almost everything of note that happened in comedy over the last few decades. He wrote for Playboy and the National Lampoon; he was the first head writer for SCTV, as well as one of its stars; he co-wrote Animal House, Stripes, Meatballs, and Ghostbusters (which he also starred in); he directed National Lampoon’s Vacation, Ghostbusters, Analyze This, and God, the man co-wrote and directed Groundhog Day, which is in the running for greatest comedy of all time. Groundhog Day is hilarious and spiritually deep, a perfect encapsulation of the Ramis Worldview, and definitely one of those movies that people will be watching in a thousand years—if people are still here in a thousand years.
I first interviewed Harold when I was in high school, and he was thirty-nine years old, about to make Ghostbusters. “Why do you think so many people from Second City and National Lampoon have become famous in the field of comedy?” I asked, as if there was an easy way to answer this. And he very patiently said, “The same reason that all the doctors who graduated college when I graduated college are now taking over the medical profession. It’s our time, you know. Second City is great training. I won’t deny that it’s a great way to learn how to do comedy, but as far as us all coming into prominence, you know—it’s gonna happen to our generation soon. We’ll be the old guys.”
I was lucky enough to work with Harold on the film Year One, in 2009. Everyone who was involved in that movie was thrilled to have a reason to be associated with him and to have a chance to download his thoughts about life and his legendary career. Harold was very interested in Buddhism, and he had taken everything he liked about the religion and condensed it onto one folded piece of paper. He gave me a copy of it on the set of Year One, and I still have it at home. He once said to me, “Life is ridiculous, so why not be a good guy?” That may be the only religion I have to this day.
Judd Apatow: When you look back, not in terms of quality but in terms of a good time, what movie do you look back on and say, “That’s the one we had a great time making”?