Jim: When I just saw Tootsie—you know, I understand it’s genuine and deeply felt, but it’s a mountain of a picture. It’s one of the greatest films ever. And the fact that people walk away not all feeling wonderful shows how tough it is all the time. Almost everything we’re discussing here is about indelible character. I don’t think there’s been a clip where that hasn’t been true. I think the relationship, when it’s allowed to happen, between writers and actors is just—it’s what we’re all there for.
Judd: How much do you think of the audience when you’re writing—or do you primarily write for yourself and not worry about what they’ll get?
Larry: I don’t worry about what they’ll get. I write for myself on the assumption that there are a number of people who have similar sensibilities and will appreciate what it is that I thought was good enough to present, not to them but to me.
Jim: Well, on the ride to the preview, any thought of writing for yourself leaves me. Let me tell you the greatest story about people who genuinely work for themselves: John Cassavetes did a picture called Husbands and Time magazine called it the greatest film ever made, and you can certainly make the argument for it. They had a scene that took place in a john, which maybe was twenty minutes long. It was Peter Falk, and Cassavetes and—
Larry: Ben Gazzara.
Jim: Ben Gazzara. They were pals and they basically started independent film. They were standing at the back of an audience—and I heard this from Cassavetes, this story—and people started leaving the theater during that scene, considering it so awful. And they clapped each other on the back and said, “We did it.” That’s a true story.
Larry: That’s wonderful.
Jim: That’s as pure as it is.
Judd: Larry, can you talk a little about your time working on Your Show of Shows?
Jim: And can you say who was on staff, too, Larry?
Larry: The truth is, I was never on Your Show of Shows. I was on Caesar’s Hour, which was the next thing that Sid Caesar did after Your Show of Shows. At that time, among the writers were Mel Brooks, Mel Tolkin, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen later on. Carl Reiner sat with us every minute. Sid was there, too. What was it like? It was like being in a great jazz band and having these other guys to bounce off and, uh, knowing that you were with the best, knowing you were on the New York Yankees.
Judd: So you could feel it every day, that this was an all-star team?
Larry: The individual successes came later, but we just knew that we were the best around. Fame and celebrity were not part of it. It was just knowing you were with a great bunch of guys. There was one woman—Selma Diamond on Your Show of Shows, and a woman named Lucille Kallen, who was one of the original writers—but basically it was a boys’ club and it was thrilling but it was tough. I mean, the show was broadcast every Saturday night. We had Sunday off, and Monday morning we said, “What do we do next week?” A season back then was thirty-nine weeks, not twenty-two.
Judd: How long was the show?
Larry: Too long. It was an hour live, in front of an audience, of course—no laugh track, no sweetening.
Judd: Was that the most fun of all the experiences that you had?
Larry: Well, it was the most fun of that kind of fun.
Judd: What’s your writing schedule like? How do you work?
Jim: Why do I experience every question as if I have to confess to something? It’s, uh, I have an erratic daily routine. I always hope for three hours in the morning. I rarely get it.
Larry: I get up very early, four, five o’clock in the morning. It’s just a sneakier way of living longer, really. And I just sit down at the keyboard and work on several things. It’s probably better to work on one thing at a time, but you have to keep feeding the beast and hopefully, an outline—yes, I have to outline. I may deviate, you know, find myself inventing a dozen off-ramps, but I have to have a map to start with.
Judd: I haven’t figured it out. Before I had children I would get up about noon and watch the Real World: Vegas marathon and then I would eat some chicken marsala with pasta and then I’d get in this really weird, like almost-high kind of funk from it. And then slowly I’d pull out of it and I’d get like the greatest forty-five minutes of writing done.
Larry: Things like peeing with a boner?
Judd: Yeah, all the pride I feel. Let’s go to another clip. We’re closing in on the end of the night so we’re going to go to a clip right now from As Good as It Gets. Any introduction?
Jim: This is a very odd clip, and Mark Andrus, who wrote it with me—Mark wrote the original screenplay and it brought me into a kind of situation that I would never have brought myself into. And this scene is very odd because when you see it you’re not sure if you want any laughs. I hope there are jokes in there, but I’m not necessarily going for that.
(Clip from As Good as It Gets: Melvin tells Simon the only reason the dog prefers him is because he keeps bacon in his pocket.)
Judd: At the time, I heard you did a lot of research on OCD but you also did a lot of work with the idea of the dog and the dog’s personality. Would you like to speak to that?
Jim: I’m a nut on research. I get very obsessive about it.
Judd: How do you know when you’ve accomplished everything you set out to accomplish in a film?
Jim: I don’t know if that’s happened to me yet.
Judd: Larry, what about you?
Larry: Now we get into the writer-writer as opposed to the writer-director. As the writer, I’m rarely around at the end of the picture, including the wrap party.
Jim: Have you seen pictures of yours without wanting to fix something?
Judd: Well, I shoot an enormous amount of film, and when I’m shooting what I think to myself is, If I hated this scene in editing, what would I wish I had? And so as I’m shooting, I’m shooting many permutations of the scene. It might be different lines or alts. If it’s too mean, let me get something a little less mean. If it seems sentimental, I might get something edgy. I usually have like a million feet of film that in my head—I’ve edited every permutation and I’m just flipping things in and out so at the end of it I’m reasonably happy. But I have to say, when I watch it a year or two later, I start seeing issues that haunt me. I don’t think anyone’s ever completely satisfied. Have you ever been completely satisfied? Is there an episode of a show where you think—
Jim: Sometimes in Taxi, yeah.
Judd: When you watch Terms of Endearment now, what bugs you?
Jim: I haven’t seen it in a long time, but I get knocked out by actors. The thing that keeps me from really hating the experience of seeing these pictures again is that I get lost in the acting.
This interview originally took place as a panel hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
LENA DUNHAM (2014)
I remember the day someone handed me a DVD of a movie called Tiny Furniture. This was during a phase of my life when I was beating myself up for being bad about watching things that people said were important to watch, so I went home and watched it right away, not knowing that the woman in this movie had also written it, directed it, produced it, and shot most of it in her parents’ apartment for forty-five thousand dollars. The movie was hilarious and heartfelt and weird in all the right ways.