Judd: You always hear that when Caddyshack was being made everybody was on drugs and partying during the shooting.
Harold: Everyone in the world of that age was on drugs and partying. It was the eighties in Florida. There were hotels literally built of pressed cocaine. They had so much cocaine, they just used it as construction material.
Judd: I’m always fascinated when you hear about people being on something when they’re making Saturday Night Live. I think we got drunk once in the Larry Sanders writers’ room, and then just went home and wrote nothing. So I’m just fascinated.
Harold: Well, one of the miracles of substance abuse—when you use something enough, it eventually loses its effect, whatever it is. That’s why addicts have to take more and more of it to get high. You’re not even high anymore. Eventually, John Belushi—people would come up to him at parties and just hand him drugs because they thought that was the way to John’s heart. They’d give him a little gram bottle of cocaine and go, “John, you want some coke?” He’d go, “Yeah, the whole bottle.” You become a glutton. It’s a form of gluttony. If you’re high all the time, that becomes your sober state. Eventually, all your judgments become relative to that state. That was the miracle of getting sober for me. It’s not different. It’s the same. I have the same problems, urges, desires, ideas, and thoughts. I don’t need to be high. Eventually getting high, I realized, just made me sick. I was sick.
Judd: How does it feel—I would assume you would become numb to it at some point—to have a body of work that…in a way, I guess it’s kind of like being the Beatles. Does it get boring dealing with the impact of your body of work on people, how much it means to people? Can you feel that anymore?
Harold: Grandiosity is the curse of what we do. There’s a great rabbinical motto that says you start each day with a note in each pocket. One note says, “The world was created for you today,” and the other note says, “I’m a speck of dust in a meaningless universe,” and you have to balance both things. I once did a public talk and told them that story, and I said, “I literally have a note in each pocket.” I took one out and said, “This one says, ‘You’re great,’ and this one says, ‘You’re great.’ ” The culture is what it is. I’m as much a product of our culture as I am a participant in it. It’s very gratifying on a personal level to know that people responded so much and cherish those films. Any of us who make films or work in any of the arts aspire to have a dialogue with the culture and with our audience. Our audience could be an audience of one, like when you grab your best friend and say, “Read this. What do you think?” Our little hearts pound as our friends read our poem, look at our painting, or read our script. If they like it, our spirits soar. It’s great. We can get grandiose from the approval of very few people.
Judd: If you look at the entire generation of people you began with, it seems that very few of them have continued to work at a high level. There are a lot of people that crashed, or their work crashed. Then you look at other people….Larry Gelbart is still a great writer after fifty years. Do you attribute that to anything?
Harold: What eventually happens in all our lives is that we’re faced with developmental challenges. It’s always, “Now what?” We all start to work for certain reasons, and I think most guys in the room would recognize that we work to meet girls. The last line of Caddyshack is, “Hey! We’re all going to get laid!” It was an improvised line I can’t even believe I edited into the movie. Getting laid is just a metaphor for getting all the things we’re supposed to want when we’re adolescent. We want to be rich, we want power, we want to be attractive to people, and we want all the perks of success. We’ll leave out of the discussion what happens when you don’t get it. But let’s say you’re Chevy Chase and you do get it. You’re getting all the perks, people offer you money, women are throwing themselves at you, and you’re famous. Now what? Now it becomes a measure of character, growth, and development. Who do you want to be from that point on? You’re rich and famous, so what do you have to say? You’ve got the stage. You’re on it. You’re there. Now what? Once you’ve got people’s attention, what do you want to do with it? Growth is hard. I’ve said this to Chevy. I see him. We bump into each other every couple of years. A few years ago, twenty years after Vacation, and after he’s already done Vegas Vacation, he says, “We’ve got to do something together.” I said, “Well, what are you thinking?” and he says, “ ‘Swiss Family Griswold.’ ” My first thought is, Do I need to do another Vacation movie? Does he need to do another Vacation movie? So I said, “Maybe it would be better to do something you’re actually interested in, like an issue in your life.” When you’re almost sixty years old there’s got to be something more going on. What are the challenges of being a grown-up in the world? Start with something that’s important or interesting to you, and that’s what you make movies out of. It’s like the rat in the experiment that just keeps going back and hitting the lever to get the same reward each time. It’s all about growth and development. I’ve tried to find meaning or create meaning in each of the films, a meaning that’s specific to me at that time in my life. All I can address is the sincerity and the meaningfulness for me. If I do a movie like Bedazzled, as broad as that is, or Multiplicity, or any of those films, I’m really examining those aspects of life that are portrayed in the film. If I had to do a Vegas film, I would be looking for what Vegas says about society. What does it mean to me? What does it say about the addiction to gambling? What does it represent? Everything means something, intended or not. Every story tells a big subtextual story. It’s all rich. It’s all subject to interpretation. That’s the fun, isn’t it? When we see generic work that has only one interpretation, so what? You might as well stay at home and watch another rerun of Friends than see another romantic comedy. And I don’t mean to be down on romantic comedy.