Jim: For a long, long time. Extraordinary generosity. He sent out love, he did. And the most acerbic wit. Don’t ever be chopped up by Mike Nichols. You’ll just never recover from it.
Judd: What do you think it is that he did for actors? Why did they love him so much?
Jim: I know what he did for them, because I’ve asked so many of them. The bottom line is, it was never put better than: When you do something wrong, he says it’s his fault; when you do something right, it’s the most glorious thing God ever created. Richard Burton, who—I mean, drunk, mean guy—once said, “It’s not like he’s directing you. It’s like he’s conspiring to make you your best.” Mike was a great director of actors. I don’t have that tenderness and generosity.
Judd: Did he read your scripts? Was he one of the people you would go to?
Jim: He was. I was talking to him a lot about the one I’m writing now. He was very there for it. I didn’t want him to read it yet, but he had heard me talking about it and it was special, the way he told me he wanted to “be there” for it. It’s so important who your buddy is. He was like, Let me be your buddy on this.
Judd: There’s very few people in life who you feel like you can talk about this type of work with.
Jim: Yeah. By the way, here’s a question. Tell me who else holds up like Mike and Elaine, where the work is still so vital and vivid, and doesn’t lose anything.
Judd: It’s very different, but I think a lot of what George Carlin was talking about in the last five years of his life will hold up for a long time, when he got really angry and cut right to the heart of how he felt about everything. And I’ve been listening to the old Pryor stuff, and although it is of its time—I mean, if you listen to Pryor 1976, as the bicentennial is coming, talking about what’s wrong with America? I forgot how militant he was. I don’t think anyone talks about politics like that now. No one has the guts to do it that way anymore.
Jim: Yeah.
Judd: What do you think Mike’s purpose was in his work, and how does it relate to yours?
Jim: Oh, I don’t think like that. There really is a word for what he did: inspirational. It just is good for your internal ethos. Anyway. How did you get started interviewing comedians?
Judd: When I was a kid, a high school kid, I had a radio show and I just started talking to all these people. I interviewed fifty people. Leno and Seinfeld, but back when they were just guys on The Merv Griffin Show. Paul Reiser, Howard Stern, John Candy—
Jim: (Whistles)
Judd: I even interviewed Lorenzo Music and Jim Parker, writers from Mary Tyler Moore and The Bob Newhart Show.
Jim: (Laughs) It’s funny because I did that with my student newspaper, too. Not with comedians, though.
Judd: You interviewed Louis Armstrong, right?
Jim: Yes. I talk about that all the time, Louis Armstrong, because I asked him a great question. I said, “How do you keep your lips going?” And the answer was at least nineteen minutes long. And he showed me his lip ointments and the process for when they go in. It was great.
Judd: (Laughs) Who else did you interview?
Jim: Singers. Some of them were big names. I was nobody. But my picture was in the high school paper every week, standing there with the person I was interviewing.
Judd: (Laughs) Yeah, the kids at your high school hated you.
Jim: They loathed me.
Judd: (Laughs) They turned on you. That’s funny. The funniest thing, to me, is when a kid thinks, I’ve got to get out of here. I had that sense.
Jim: You knew you would get out? Did you feel like you had the power to get out?
Judd: Well, yeah. I thought, These comedians are all from Long Island, and I’m from Long Island. I’m not that different from them. I’d just sit with Seinfeld and go, “How do you write a joke?” And he’d walk me through a routine.
Jim: Wow. Wow. That was back when?
Judd: Nineteen eighty-four. Anyway, I think so much of why people get into comedy is out of some sense of feeling abandoned. When I was a kid, my parents got divorced. My mom left—
Jim: Your mom left, not your father?
Judd: Yeah. She moved out, and that was the thing. As a kid I thought, No one’s mom leaves. The dad always leaves. Why would she leave?
Jim: You were how old?
Judd: Thirteen. But then the rest of your life, on some level, you feel that sense of inadequacy.
Jim: Did your mom maintain contact with you?
Judd: Yeah. But she had a bit of a mental break after the divorce. She claimed that she thought she was going to leave and come right back, and my dad immediately moved his girlfriend in. Right before she died, she told me, “I always thought I was going to come right back. I always thought it was going to be a couple of weeks.”
Jim: Wow.
Judd: She called one day and asked me to read her the number on my dad’s credit card, because she needed it for something. But really, she was just angry—and she blew thirty thousand dollars that they didn’t have. It all went downhill from there.
Jim: Jesus Christ, Judd.
Judd: So I figured I needed to get a job. And that made me want to get into comedy, and to get to know comedians. It made me think, If I start five years before everyone else, I’m going to be safe. So, a lot of the need to be productive is the terror of things falling apart. Do you feel like that’s a part of your thing?
Jim: I’m staggered by your story.
Judd: (Laughs)
Jim: You drop that and then turn it into a question? Are you kidding? It’s a life experience here, that story.
Judd: As I said to someone recently, I’m trying to fuck my kids up just enough so they’ll want to get a job.
Jim: (Laughs)
Judd: I’ll tell you another funny thing. I lived alone with my dad. My sister lived with my mom, and then my sister and my brother both moved in with my grandparents in California. So, I’m alone with my dad, and when I left for college, on the way to the airport—I was on my way to USC film school, which was a big achievement for me—my dad tried to convince me not to go. He was begging me to open up a video and CD store with him. Which is the worst business. It’s like—
Jim: It’s been eradicated from the earth.
Judd: My dad almost ended my entire career and life. He begged me to stay and open this store with him.
Jim: Jesus. Jesus.
Judd: But that’s the drive, I think. It’s fear. I don’t know how you feel about this, but I always say, when a movie comes out, I don’t get that much satisfaction when it goes well. I feel comfortable in process, but when it’s over, I don’t actually get—I enjoy being in the middle, working towards something, because there’s a feeling of safety. I feel like I’m doing something.
Jim: When I’m writing, and I go through all the stuff you go through, the one thing I got is: It’s worth it. Writing is worth it.
Judd: Yeah.
Jim: You know? Someone says, “What do you do for a living?” and it takes you so long to say, “I’m a writer.” I’m working as a writer, and so I always—that really calms me. Even when I’m going nuts with it, even when it’s impossible, I say, Boy, this is a legitimate thing to be. This is worth going nuts about.