Loading summary
Transcript162 lines
- [00:02]
Larry Charles
You're listening to DraftKings Network. Now more than ever, Lowes knows you don't just want a low price, you want the lowest price. And with our lowest price guarantee, you can count on us for competitive prices on all your home improvement projects. If you find a qualifying lower price somewhere else on the same item, we'll match it Lowe's. We help you save price match applies to same item current price at qualifying retailers. Exclusions and terms apply. Learn how we'll match price@lowe's.com lowest price.
- [00:39]
Sponsor
Guarantee this episode is brought to you by TikTok. Summer tastes like Tic Tac. Tantalize your taste buds this sunny season with Citrus Adventure and Orange, two everyday flavors that bring summer in every Tic Tac Citrus Adventure is a yummy, vibrant medley of lemon, lime and mandarin. And Tic Tac Orange is the perfect mix of tangy and sweet. Visit us at TikTac USA on social to refresh your summer with TikTok.
- [01:28]
Interviewer
Welcome to South Beach Sessions. This man here in the cowboy hat, one of the things that I wanted to do with this project in general is talk to the creatives who make the creatives and find out a little more about creativity. So Larry Charles, if you're not familiar, necessarily, because this is a behind the scenes person, but what he's made. Curb youb Enthusiasm has directed many episodes. You wrote for Seinfeld. Mad about you. The. The Borat movies, Religulous.
- [01:59]
Larry Charles
You have work entourage with all of the crazies.
- [02:03]
Interviewer
Yes, all of the creative crazies and some of the best. I didn't even mention Kanye West. I haven't mentioned yet.
- [02:09]
Larry Charles
Nick Cage, Bob Dylan.
- [02:11]
Interviewer
Bob Dylan. So you gravitate. Thank you for being with us. You gravitate toward the eccentrics.
- [02:16]
Larry Charles
That's why I'm here.
- [02:19]
Interviewer
What is it like? What is the magnet for you like? How did this start your trip to. Toward laughter? Where did it start?
- [02:28]
Larry Charles
My father was a failed comedian and he was funny around the house all the time, always doing shtick, always doing impressions, always doing material. His professional name was Psycho, the Exotic Neurotic. And very early in his career, he realized he wasn't gonna make it and gave it up reluctantly and I think regretted it his entire life. But I would find in his closet, I would find old material from the army and he would make me watch movies with him and test me and quiz me on stuff. And he would make me learn. Instead of like learning math or science, I would learn bits from the Marx Brothers or from other movies like White Heat and weird James Cagney kind of stuff. And I think he kind of. And then he had friends. He went to drama school. And a lot of the people that he went to drama school with stayed in the business in one form or another. Not always his actors. And he would take me to visit them. One of his best friends was the production manager of the Ed Sullivan Show. So when I was a little kid, he would take me to the rehearsals of the Ed Sullivan Show. And he, of course, was into the glitter and the glamour, but I was fascinated by how the show was done. And he would stop celebrities in the street. Didn't matter. He had no shame. And he would stop them and talk to them. I remember many times he was friends with the lighting director at the Craft Music hall, where Don Rickles would be and all those people. And we lived across the street from a place called Cookies in Brooklyn, under the train station near that NBC place where Groucho Marx would hang out. And he apparently put me on his lap, so I was kind of surrounded. And as it turned out, that part of Brooklyn was like the golden triangle of comedy. Mel Brooks is from there, Larry David is from there. Letty Bruce, Woody Allen. It has this kind of weird pedigree. That part that's the X factor that I can't explain.
- [04:27]
Interviewer
So you didn't have a choice. This is like from childhood. Your father. Did your father get to see much of your success?
- [04:35]
Larry Charles
He saw some of it, yeah. Yeah, up to a certain point. He definitely did. Yeah. At first, I think, unfortunately, he was kind of maybe jealous or competitive. Didn't really want to acknowledge it or kept his pride very close to the vest. But I think towards the end of his life, he was able to sort of express it.
- [04:53]
Interviewer
Jealousy would make sense there, right? If your formative years are filled with. It was the exotic neurotic, right? Not the erotic neurotic. Would have been funnier.
- [05:05]
Larry Charles
Yes, he was the exotic neurotic psycho. Yeah. Yeah. And the thing was that for me, when I made the decision to kind of just go out to California and see what I could do, because I didn't really have a plan. My plan was, he's my anti role model. Where he gave up. I will not, you know, I will become a bum rather than wind up doing something with my life that I don't want to do. And that was kind of my driving force as a young man.
- [05:34]
Interviewer
Well, you said that you think that your father always regretted giving it up. And my guess is that, you know, he did because you felt it in your Household.
- [05:43]
Larry Charles
You're correct. You're correct. He was unhappy. He was a very unhappy person. And he was seeking for the rest of his life the fulfillment that he'd gotten on stage or in a scene, those kind of things. He never was able to recreate that in his so called civilian life.
- [05:58]
Interviewer
It would make sense. And you would not be met necessarily with just support and love upon. I don't know what the first couple of successes were for you or things that would have landed that way on him.
- [06:08]
Larry Charles
Well, right. I mean, I started. I used to go in front of right here. I used to go stand. I didn't know how to get started, honestly. And so I would write jokes by hand. In the late 70s, I came out here, I quit school and drove out here, wrote jokes by hand on a yellow piece of paper. And then I would go to the Comedy Store and literally stand in front of the Comedy Store till I saw a comedian I recognized. And then I would approach them and go, hey, you want to buy a joke? And eventually I had good jokes and people started buying the jokes. I would get $10 if the joke did well on stage, and Jay Leno and people like that started buying my jokes.
- [06:45]
Interviewer
Well, tell me about that. Tell me about the decision to come out here. How much risk was involved in it and how little you had in terms of plan or details, but how much you had in terms of dreams.
- [07:02]
Larry Charles
Well, the truth is, first of all, I still don't have a plan. I've always just wanted to do cool things. I didn't think, oh, I'm going to build a career or a legacy. I had no intentions about those things. I had no illusions about those things. But when I came out here, I came out here thinking, I'm gonna do something. I had no idea I would be a writer or a director. Those ideas were like, ideas that I kept to myself. Because in Brooklyn you couldn't say out loud, I want to be an actor or I want to be a director. You sound like an asshole. So I didn't share those thoughts with anybody, but in my heart and in my mind, I visualized it. And eventually I went to Rutgers for a year. And then I went to NYU Film school for like one semester. And while I was in film school, which I was amazed I got, but once I was in, I realized, I'm past school already, you know, I don't want to be in school anymore. I want to do it. And so I got a driveway car, which they used to have, for 50 bucks you could drive across country. It was in a white Cadillac. It was great. And I drove with a friend of mine and his girlfriend, who eventually became my girlfriend, who eventually became my wife and the mother of my children. And then we got divorced and that's the whole story. But. But we drove out here and then I started kind of, you know, writing and doing that kind of stuff without a typewriter even, you know. And to give you one quick story that sort of illustrates it, I think my father in the army was friends with a guy named Stan Burns who wrote some of this material that I would find in his suitcase. And he said, when you go out to California, see Stan Burns, it's like, how do you do that? You know? But I came out here, it was like 76, 77. And I looked in the phone book. In those days there were phone books and Stan Burns was listed. You know, he didn't even have an unlisted number. So I called him, I cold called him and I said, hey, Stan, I'm Lefty's son. My father was known as Lefty at that time. I want to be a comedy writer. And this Stan Burns, who had left the army and actually stuck with it himself, wrote for the Steve Allen show, wrote for Get Smart, wrote for Laughing, wrote for the Carol Burnett show, became a veteran successful comedy wr. He was so sweet to me. He said, meet me at Dupars in Studio City. We'll have breakfast and we'll talk. So I met him, he was the sweetest guy in the world. And he said, write me some jokes. So I wrote him some jokes. And he was working on Dean Martin's Gold Diggers Celebrity Roast. And I wrote jokes for that, like insult jokes for the guys. And he started to use them on the show when I was like 18, 19 years old. And he. I was ghost writing jokes for that show and I did that for about six months. I'd meet him at Dupars, give him jokes, he would take the jokes back. And some of those jokes wound up on these shows. One day we had breakfast and he said to me, you know, I gotta tell you something. And I said, oh my God, what? And he said, I have no idea who your father is. And he said, you just seem like a nice kid.
- [10:06]
Interviewer
And he didn't know who the exotic neurotic was. He didn't know Lefty.
- [10:11]
Larry Charles
He had no memory of it at all. With my father, it's like a defining moment. But for Stan, he probably met so many people over the years, it didn't have any meaning to him, you know, And I Never told my father that. I didn't want to break his heart.
- [10:24]
Interviewer
How much were the jokes selling for? It doesn't sound like a career selling jokes outside of the Comedy Store.
- [10:30]
Larry Charles
Correct. I was getting, as I said, like 10 bucks. If they scored on a good day, though, you're making what, 20, 30, 50, maybe. But I was working as a car valet. That was my main job. And one of the people I parked cars for was David Steinberg. And David Steinberg was a really big comedian at that time. And I used to park his car and he would leave for whatever reason, big roaches in his ashtray. And the parking valets, we would steal his roaches, smoke the roaches. But I would always talk to him when I was getting his car. I would insist on getting his car, and I would talk to him and say, hey, I want to be a writer or whatever. And eventually I wound up writing for David Steinberg. Also.
- [11:07]
Interviewer
I should tell people I failed to do this off the top. He's got a new book that's coming out. It'll be available June 17. Comedy Samurai, 40 Years of Blood, Guts and Laughter. Where do you go from there? How do you get a break from there that turns into you working with some of the most eccentric personalities that there are in funning?
- [11:29]
Larry Charles
Well, I was working as a car valet in Marina del Rey, and I was living in Venice, and I would walk home from Marina del Rey to Venice every day in my black and whites. I worked a night shift, so I'd be getting off work about 6am and I'd walk, maybe stop for a hamburger. And I'd walk along the beach. And one day I saw this tall, angular, very handsome, very striking black man dressed all in white walking on the beach with his little dog. And I recognized him as Darrell Igus. Because I used to. One of the things my father did for me was he would have me memorize credits. So I got into the habit of memorizing credits. And this Darrell Igus was in a movie called Car Wash. And I remembered his name from the credits. And I walked up to him, as my father would have done, and I said, hey, you're Darrow Igus. And he was thrilled that I recognized him. And I told him, I'm an aspiring comedy writer. And he said, write some material. Because all these. This was a great golden era in Los Angeles for comedy. Robin Williams and Richard Pryor were performing at the Comedy Store. It was great. Letterman and Leto were both like the big comedians at the Comedy Store. So you could really see vintage great Classic comedians in their prime at that time, which I was very lucky to do. So he was looking for material. I started writing for him. And after a while, everything kind of started falling apart in LA for many different reasons. I went back to New York and never said goodbye to him. And I came back a year later, called his wife, who was an editor at we magazine and Chic magazine. She worked for Larry Flint. And I thought, oh, maybe I'll write some porno humor. Because I'd written for Screw magazine, also freelance pieces. And I called her up, thinking, that's how I'll make money. And Darrell was in the office that day, and he said, hey, what happened to you? And I said, I went back to New York. It's a long story kind of thing. And he said, well, I got cast on the show Fridays, and I told them about you, and they want to meet you. They want to read your material. So I gathered my material really fast, wrote some new pieces, even handwritten, and hitchhiked to this interview at ABC and met the producers. And I said to Jack Burns, who was one of the producers, who was in Burns and Schreiber, which was a classic comedy team. I said to him, you know, look, I understand I may not get this job. That's the way show business works. I'm cool with that. All I ask is, don't hang me up. Let me know one way or the other whether I have the gig or not. I could take it. I appreciate the time. I felt it was a good sign that I even got that far. And I got back to my apartment. I was sharing an apartment on Cherokee at that time with a friend of mine in Hollywood. Phone was ringing. I picked it up. It was Jack Burns that said, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is I'm getting back to you quickly. My heart sunk. He said, the bad news is you're hired. So I got hired on Fridays. And that's where I met Larry David and Michael Richards. And Larry David became my mentor almost immediately. And he's from that neighborhood, hitchhiked. You were broke, had no money. Yeah, I mean, like, the kind of cash you'd make parking cars. Was selling a couple of jokes. I could not afford a car.
- [14:39]
Interviewer
Your dad, some of the other things he foisted on you, that would have been unusual. What are some of the others? That would be the things that are making you not really have a choice. You're gonna go to where the laughter is.
- [14:50]
Larry Charles
Well, he was a. You know, I swore to myself, and I Get into this in the book, because the book starts really with me. I originally wrote a thousand page book that has my entire childhood. And they just said, you can't put out a thousand page book. So rather than trying to cut it or, you know, somehow, Bridget, I decided, okay, I'll make it into two books. And so the first book, it starts with my career, basically on Fridays and goes to the present. He was a. And so I didn't want to be anything like him in any way because he was so unhappy. And one of the ways he kind of manifested his unhappiness was that he was a serial philanderer, you know, and he really made my mother just miserable and unhappy. And she was, like, broken, you know, And I saw that. I saw how much pain she was in. And she would have women calling the house late at night going, do you know where your husband is? And stuff like that. And that was, like, haunting to me. I had a younger brother, and so I was the older brother, and I felt very responsible. And then when they finally broke up, my grandfather was trying to push. And my mother's a beautiful woman, you know, but my grandfather would try to push these loser men on her because he felt she could not survive without getting married. So she never really found herself. She had been broken by the men in her life to some degree. And I felt like, God, that just really. It was a pain that I carried with me my whole life, really, you know. And then, of course, I found myself repeating many of those patterns and hating myself for repeating those patterns as well.
- [16:33]
Interviewer
And you couldn't control it with an awareness of not wanting to be that the same way you had in other places?
- [16:39]
Larry Charles
Eventually, yes. Therapy, you know, pain that I caused other people, a lot of things, finally led me to have my epiphany. My epiphany that I was just causing pain. I had children, you know, at some point, I'm hurting them the way my father hurt me. You know, it's like I was walking around with that burden that I created myself and that I laid on all these people, these innocent people around me. So eventually I had to get out of my marriage as well, free myself of that. And then I wound up meeting somebody who showed me that I can be myself and I don't have to fill that. That hole will fill itself with love if you let it. And I kind of was able to walk a different path at that point.
- [17:28]
Interviewer
Have you gotten to a better place with everything that happened there with your mother? Because you said you've carried it for A long time. Where do you. How do you find your forgiveness there?
- [17:39]
Larry Charles
Well, unfortunately, my mother finally found happiness late in life. She was living in Boynton beach in a condo. She married a man who she didn't really love. He was a sweet guy, but I don't think she really loved her. I don't think she loved my father. I think she was pushed into all these things and she finally was. My stepfather died and she was like free and she suddenly blossomed. Her wings came out and she was living a great life. And then she was in a car accident and was killed in the car accident. So all the beauty and the light that she was finally able to feel and appreciate and kind of savor it was short lived, unfortunately.
- [18:28]
Interviewer
How the fuck am I supposed to segue out of that?
- [18:31]
Larry Charles
See, that's the thing. There is humor in it because it was such an absurdity, you know, it was an absurdity that and that. So that's what haunts me today was my mother doesn't get a chance to really, you know, enjoy my children, my grand. I have grandchildren now, you know, she was like a healthy, vital saint. And she doesn't get a chance to really. She'll never know about the book, at least not in terms of the corporal world. Hopefully somehow she does. But neither of them will ever be able to know that I actually was able to write a book. They would be shocked to know that I've reached a point where it was worthy of writing a book.
- [19:14]
Interviewer
Two books, thousand pages. Because you're so self involved that you can't be contained to a mere 900 pages.
- [19:21]
Larry Charles
Well, the first part of the book is more like a Charles Bukowski book because it's about growing up, up in the rough streets of Brooklyn, you know, so. And the second part is what is coming out in June is the showbiz memoir, which is also a lot of blood and guts and also.
- [19:35]
Interviewer
LAUGHTER well, you meet Larry David. Where is the Arsenio hall show on this timeline?
- [19:41]
Larry Charles
The Fridays is from about 1980-81 or 82. And I don't do. I don't work really. I come out of Fridays thinking, oh, wow, I'm a star. You know, I'm never gonna have. I'm gonna always have great jobs. And it was such a cool job for me. I was like, literally went from being a parking valet and a bellhop also in the Catskills, to being a comedy writer. And I thought, oh, this is it, I'm set. And then I couldn't, didn't work for like seven Years. And so then seven years.
- [20:11]
Interviewer
What's happening in those seven years?
- [20:13]
Larry Charles
I'm being very picky. People are coming to me going, you want to do this? You want to do that? I'm going, that sounds terrible. No, I'm waiting for the. I want to write a movie. I wanted. You know, I want to do these things now. Being very ambitious.
- [20:23]
Interviewer
But seven years of no work, from.
- [20:26]
Larry Charles
Like, 82 to 88, I would say, what are you doing? My wife was a copywriter at a successful. She was a successful copywriter at an ad agency. And I was doing little things here and there. I wrote for David Steinberg, I wrote for people, but it was just like kind of little gigs. No tv, no movies, no career, no career. I hadn't thought about a career until after Fridays, and I realized, wow, if I don't think about it, nobody else is going to think about it either. And then one of the other guys from Fridays, a guy named Brian Gordon, who was the first writer from Fridays to actually direct something, he recommended me somehow for the Arsenio Hall Show. And I went in and met with Arsenio. We hit it off, and I got hired, and I worked for him. That's like 88, 89.
- [21:11]
Interviewer
But that. That was or wasn't fun, because it looked fun on television, but it also would have been pressurized because he show.
- [21:19]
Larry Charles
Yeah, the show was great. The show was really fun. The musical guests, the action, the energy of that show was unsurpassed. But writing jokes for Arsenio, I was, like, writing edgy, controversial material. And because he was a black host of a TV show, that was enough for him. In those days, before the Internet, he would get reams, stacks, rooms full of hate mail just for being a black person on tv. If a white woman came on the show and he shook her hand, the switchboard would light up. So he couldn't do, after a while, the controversial material. So he had to stay safe. I couldn't write those kind of jokes. So I worked for him. And we. We were friends. And he loved my. He would come into my room, office and say, I love this material, but I can't do it. And after a year, he fired me. And in fact, the day before I got fired, I was feeling like. Because I knew my contract was coming up, and I went out. It was at Paramount, and I stood outside of Paramount, and I was smoking a cigarette and just kind of hanging out, trying to. I had a baby. I didn't know what to do. And I had heard that Jack Nicholson was on the lot. He was editing the Two Jakes, which he had directed. And I said, gee, what am I going to do with my life? My life is over. This is it. I had this shot, and I blew it. And suddenly I saw him in his Mercedes with the Laker cap, kind of sauntering along. And as he came past me, he's wearing his sunglasses. As he comes past me, he just. I look at him. I'm wearing my sunglasses, and we look at each other, and we both crack up. We both start laughing. And he goes, yeah, it's funny. And he just keeps going. And I kind of interpreted that as a sign, like it's a game, you know? This is a game, you know? And it's not. It's an absurdity, not to be taken so seriously. Relax, you know, have fun, and everything will fall into place. And the next day, Larry David called me and said, hey, you want to work on the. This little pilot that I did, you know, Seinfeld? And I was, like, out of work. And it was, like, perfect.
- [23:31]
Interviewer
So I thought, it's easy to say, though, you're the one who was fired. He's Jack Nicholson.
- [23:36]
Larry Charles
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But I felt like. And as I talk about in the book, I have these inadvertent oracles who come along and share some piece of wisdom. And of course, it's up to me to interpret that wisdom, but that's how I interpreted that. Yeah, it's funny. It's like, yeah, this is show business, man. It's ridiculous. There's no security. There's no logic. You know, it's random to a large degree. What is talent? What is good? What is bad? Who's making these judgments? It's not like sports, where you can judge people by their statistics. There's no statistics here. They really don't work. So that level of absurdity kind of liberated me to some degree.
- [24:17]
Interviewer
Did you deserve to get fired by Arsenio?
- [24:20]
Larry Charles
I was not contributing. I was trying my hardest. And like I said, we remain friends to this day.
- [24:25]
Interviewer
But you were trying to write edgy jokes for a show that was ahead of its time.
- [24:30]
Larry Charles
He could not risk his life enough. We used to have metal detectors in the audience because people would come into the audience with weapons, you know, so he didn't want to take that kind of risk, and he was flying high at that time. Why take the risk? So I understood completely, and I couldn't. If I could have written what he wanted, I would have done it. I just couldn't seem to be able to do it. I Could not do it.
- [24:52]
Interviewer
I saw Seinfeld Comedians in Cars. He was talking outside with Garry Shandling. And it was a moment that stuck with me because they both made it look very easy. But neither of those things were easy, and they were totally consuming. So what were the early years of Seinfeld like?
- [25:12]
Larry Charles
It was great in a lot of ways, but it was also a challenge. The early years of Seinfeld were Larry, first of all, before he tried to hire me right from the beginning, and Castle Rock and NBC said, no, you can't hire this guy because he's never done a sitcom before and you've never done a sitcom before. So we had to wait till they did a pilot, then they did four episodes. Then it finally got picked up for 13. And at that point, for the 13, he was then made the showrunner, if you could believe it. The first few shows, there was somebody over him, kind of supervising him, who was kind of a more traditional sitcom person. But that person left, and then he was in charge, and that's when he hired me. So it was really, at first, just the three of us and Jerry, Larry and myself. There was a guy named Matt who also wrote, for a short time, sweetest person in the world. Too sweet to write for a show like Seinfeld. He could not get in touch with his inner prick. Am I allowed to curse? Yes, of course he was not.
- [26:14]
Interviewer
Let your inner prick fly, sir.
- [26:16]
Larry Charles
Yes, he could not get in touch with his inner prick. He was more a traditional sitcom writer, and he could not write the darkness that was required to do a Seinfeld.
- [26:26]
Interviewer
No problem for you, by the way.
- [26:27]
Larry Charles
No, I was very in touch with it. Far too in touch with it, maybe. But he. The show was. What was it? We didn't know what it was. But Larry said to me, come on, do the show. We'll do 13 episodes. Well, make a little money. Because he'd also been in and out of work and not really done anything of note. He worked on Saturday Night Live for a season as a writer and didn't get any sketches on, which is part of the lore of Larry David. And he said, come on the show. We'll make a little money. The show will get canceled and we'll move on. That was the mandate. That was the mission statement. And because of that, again, talk about liberation. We all felt, let's just do what we think is funny. And that's what we did. We hit a lot of walls. NBC, Castle Rock, they didn't know what the hell this was. Larry was writing episodes about people Waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant. No plots. And they were like, you need plot, you need story, you need three acts, you need people hugging at the end. And a moral. And we were not doing any of those things. And we were on Wednesday nights. In fact, our first episode was preempted by the Gulf War. So we thought, well, that's a bad sign. You know, you get preempted by a war, you know, But. But it was, for some reason, even though it was not to. We were losing to a show, I don't know if you remember, called Jake and the Fat Man.
- [27:50]
Interviewer
Yes, I do remember Jake and the Fat Man.
- [27:53]
Larry Charles
It was. What a great premise. You know, it was about a cop who's overweight. That was the whole thing, you know.
- [27:59]
Interviewer
And yet it had more plot than what you guys were doing.
- [28:01]
Larry Charles
Way more plot and far more success. More successful. And we were like, really down at the bottom of the ratings. But NBC didn't have anything better to replace it with. And they liked what they were seeing in terms of the demographic. Like there were people watching our show that didn't normally watch TV and didn't normally watch other kinds of shows. So they kept with it. And then eventually, after a season or two, I don't remember anymore, they said, we want to put you on Thursday night on Must See TV following Cheers. Cheers was still out at that time. And Larry said, and I'll never forget. And nowadays he cleans up the story. But I was there when he said it, which was, if they didn't watch us on Wednesday, they can go fuck themselves. And everybody went, no, we have to do this. This is it. And he finally relented. The show went on Thursdays and immediately exploded.
- [28:55]
Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Stay Farm. Knowing you could be saving money for the things you really want is a great feeling. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. Summer is coming right to your door with Target Circle360 get all the season go to's at home with same day delivery snacks for the pool party delivered sun lotion and towels for a beach day delivered Pillows and lights to deck out the deck that too delivered just when you want them summer your way quick and easy. Join now and get all the summer fun delivered right to your Home with Target Circle360 membership required, subject to terms and conditions. Applies to orders over $35.
- [29:50]
Interviewer
Which of your collaborations do you recall as being the most fun.
- [29:56]
Larry Charles
In terms of a Seinfeld?
- [29:58]
Interviewer
The doing of it? No, I'm talking about the people you're working with anywhere along the line because I don't know the different experiences, what they look like, but just enjoying making. I would imagine that making something just with Larry and Jerry can be fun, but also have maybe some perfectionism with Jerry that Larry doesn't have.
- [30:22]
Larry Charles
They both could be tough. I often felt like the George Harrison of Seinfeld. I was working with John and Paul. I was working with these two geniuses and it was their thing and I was trying to find my way within their thing. That's why I gravitated to Kramer, because he was the most unattended to character, you know, And I could relate to Kramer in a lot of ways, but getting a show on the air with those two guys, writing the other episodes was really, really tough. However, my collaboration with them, as it was with almost anybody we could talk about, Sasha, Bill Maher, Bob Dylan, any of the great people that I work with. Nick Cage. There were moments of incredible exhilaration. Exhilaration beyond my wildest dreams, beyond my expectations. Those were the things that I would cling to and those were the things that sustained me. All of those relationships also had their dark sides. All of those relationships had a price to pay, but you had to pay that price if you wanted that exhilaration. And I learned that that dichotomy was something I had to accept if I wanted to have those experiences.
- [31:30]
Interviewer
Who do you regard as the person collecting the largest tax on those prices?
- [31:36]
Larry Charles
Wow. I would say probably Sasha, only because the initial experience was almost pure exhilaration. And then slowly over time, because we worked on three movies together, it evolved to something that was no longer enjoyable and that I didn't want to do anymore. And I didn't usually feel that way about things. I didn't feel that way about Seinfeld. I left because I felt I hit my creative wall and I didn't feel like there was anything. I didn't want to write any more Seinfeld episodes because again, I didn't go into this to have security or to have a long term job. I wanted to do cool stuff. And I did seinfeld for like 80 episodes. Four seasons or five seasons, whatever it was. And I wanted to try something else. I wanted to touch tap into another part of. So I did Mad about yout, which was much More emotional and more like, you know, kind of analogous to my marriage. And I wanted to explore that. You know, I want to explore different things and do cool stuff. That made me excited, you know. But with Sasha, our relationship just kind of. With Bob Dylan, it was like, you know, you sit. You were sitting with like a guru, a master, like somebody who transcends labels. He's not a songwriter or a singer or a musician or an artist. He's Bob Dylan, you know, he's Shakespeare of our time. And so I would just. I just absorbed everything. But that relationship lasted about a year, and then we did this movie and then we moved on. You know, people would say, well, are you friends with Bob Dylan? And I would go, no, I just amused him for a little while, you know, because he doesn't really have friends. You can't really be friends. He doesn't hang out, you know. But Sasha, I was extremely close to. And over the course of time, we just kind of drifted apart and had a lot of conflict to the point that I was not. I was no longer happy. I was kind of in a miserable state working on the Dictator.
- [33:38]
Interviewer
Tell me if I have this right, because I've heard a story before about how Hollywood works and Sacha Baron Cohen, with and around Borat would have gotten an opportunity to do whatever it is that he wanted to do, but you get a couple of chances, actually. And I was told that an executive that he had, he was gonna have three movies that he could make around Borat, but then ended up in a fight because the Dictator wasn't what it was supposed to be. And then he didn't get those three movies. And so I'm assuming without knowing what's in the book or what you experience, that the pressure ratcheted so high around the expectations for whatever came after Borat that they weren't gonna be possible for those to be met.
- [34:23]
Larry Charles
Well, again, that part of it I don't really know personally. I mean, he wound up making some kind of deal during the Dictator, which was made for Paramount. The Paramount executives would call me every day going, you're doing a great job. We know he's impossible to deal with. We're so grateful for you. But when the movie was over, I got nothing. And he got a three picture deal because they still felt that he was a possible moneymaker. And that's the bottom line with a lot of this st. You know, then the Dictator did not perform up to what their expectations. And maybe things changed. There's a lot of things that go into it and I don't want to necessarily paint myself as a saint again. I had plenty of darkness, and I had plenty of anger, and a lot of that anger was coming out. A lot of his anger was coming out, and a lot of trust issues between us. You know, our collaboration started to strain as other things pulled us and separate directions. He'd gotten married. He had had children. He no longer wanted to go out there and risk his life, you know, for a joke, which is really after Borat, where people were very patient with him. Bruno was a very different experience. Bruno, the rampant homophobia around the world, including the United States, was so clear. The violence towards him was so blatant. You underestimated it very much so. To the point that we were getting depressed making the movie because, wow, people are being so mean, and they're being nasty and hateful. And we were meeting, like, murderous white supremacists who wound up literally murdering people and winding up in prison. And you would meet these people, and they were just, like, sucking your soul. You know, they were sucking your soul. And it was hard every day to get excited. Whereas at the end of scenes on Borat, we'd jump in the van, we'd all be laughing, giddy, like we robbed a bank and got away with it. So there was, like, the circumstances and the environment changed. And then by the time of the Dictator, Dictator was a scripted movie. And so he had to now learn lines. He had to now create a character quickly, as opposed to Borat he'd been doing for years. And Bruno, he had done those characters for years. Now he's got to quickly come up with a character. He's got to lock into stuff. He just never got comfortable in that mode, you know? And so I think fear, anger, insecurity, you know, he was not able to let go and enjoy the experience. And instead, he substituted kind of a control thing, where he felt he needed to control every. These papers are not in the right place here. That's better, you know, and he would waste a lot of time on nonsense instead of focusing on the character and the humor.
- [37:10]
Interviewer
Bill Maher seems like he would be difficult to work with.
- [37:14]
Larry Charles
Ironically, now, Bill Maher seems more crotchety these days, I admit. But when I work with him, when we did that movie together, we had a great time. That was one of my best film experiences, was doing Religionless. He was easy to work with. We laughed all the time. We were really in sync on the sensibility of the movie. We had a great kind of situation where we were able to just go out, shoot Whatever we wanted for as long as we wanted. You know, there was not the kind of pressure that you have in Borat or Bruno. We would work 16 hour days, six days a week. And Sasha could never break character because he was sitting this close to people. He had to be. He couldn't start laughing or lose his accent or do something that felt out of character. It was a lot of pressure to stay in it for everybody. But with Bill, Bill could just be Bill. And we put him in situations that were perfect for him. And we had a chance to shoot in really cool places. I used a crew that were friends of mine from Borat and Bruno, and we had a great time and he was loose and that was great. I had a really, really good. And he also. He didn't like traveling, so we would shoot our stuff and then he would go back to the hotel and then we would keep shooting. So I had a lot of fun on religious, actually.
- [38:33]
Interviewer
Borat was more fun or more pressure or did the pressure just escalate and then in the doing of all of. Just became less and less fun. Started as fun and then the pressure of it became too much and then everything blows apart.
- [38:49]
Larry Charles
Borat was more fun. Borat was more fun because the character. It was easier for people to be patient with Borat, even though he was a rapist and an anti Semite. People liked him for some reason. They just liked him. There was a.
- [39:05]
Interviewer
A funny mortifying sentence, right?
- [39:07]
Larry Charles
I mean, it is. And I understood that too, but I inherently. He was. He was. People were very patient with him and he was indulged and. But with. But so that. So. So I saw things happen, you know, these sociological. We had a lot of this. A six and a half hour cut of that movie, you know, because a lot of the scenes are not necessarily funny, but just like mind blowing, you know, like he was in a Civil War reenactment and the soldier would get killed in the Civil War and he would start raping the soldier and say, that's what we did in Kazakhstan. You know, stuff like that. That didn't make the movie, but was hilarious to me. And jaw dropping. Or he. I don't know if you remember in the movie, he gets healed by. In a church, people doing glossolalia and they're speaking in tongues and they heal him, you know, And I would be watching this going, I can't believe it. They're healing Boris. You know, it went just as we hoped it would go even better, you know, so we were having a great time. We really had a Lot of fun. Yes. There were some conflicts along the way, but overall. And then, of course, you can't minimize success. You know, Bora was a phenomena. It did so well around the world. People still say, very nice, and, you know, it's, like, still popular to this day. Whereas Bruno, I found genius, the character's genius, and it just connected also. It, like, connected with the Zeitgeist, which, like the Beatles or like Seinfeld. You can't really predict that part of it. There's an X factor. Why does an audience connect to certain things and other things which might be equally great? They just don't feel, you know, there's a kind of a mystery to that, which is cool. That's art, you know, and I love that. But it's frustrating when it doesn't work. But in the case of Borat, it worked beyond our wildest dreams, you know, and with Bruno, which in some ways is a more radical piece, people. A lot of people know Borat. They could quote Borat and never saw Bruno. You know, Bruno in some cases is actually funnier, but it's also much darker.
- [41:09]
Interviewer
Does that surprise you?
- [41:11]
Larry Charles
I've learned now that you cannot underestimate people's homophobia, people's anger, people's hatred. And it kind of came along at a time when there was a lot of anger towards gay people. And even gay people were angry about the movie because they felt like there's a bunch of straight white guys making fun of a gay guy, and straight people going, I don't want to see him get it up the ass. So there was, like, there was nobody who was really pleased, even though actually, if you watch the movie, it's hilarious, I would imagine.
- [41:48]
Interviewer
Let me not speak for you here, but your experiences with underestimating homophobia on Bruno, underestimating racism on Arsenia. Are you someone who's surprised by the state of division in America right now, having seen that, or did you get a glimpse and you're like, yes, of course. This is what it is?
- [42:08]
Larry Charles
Well, as I told you before we started, I grew up in Trump Village, so I've been aware of Trump since I was a little kid. And his father, too, who was really kind of like Satan. If you ever saw a picture of his father, like, someday Google a picture of his father. His father looks like Satan from a movie. You know, just like an evil. You could just feel the evil kind of exuding from him.
- [42:34]
Interviewer
So I think Gavin Newsom looks a little bit like that, maybe.
- [42:37]
Larry Charles
Yes, he does. He's got a kind of twinkle. In his eye, that seems wrong. But I was also an avid reader. I read Man Child in the Promised Land. I read down these Mean Streets. When I was, like, in elementary school, I didn't know any better. And I. Because there weren't a lot of black kids where I was busing had just begun when I was in elementary school. And so I didn't know a lot of black kids, excepted in class, there'd be, like, one black kid in the class. But reading these books, I started to get a sense of, like, wow, there's this incredible division in society. I didn't understand it, but I knew that it existed. So I've been watching that my entire life. Get better, get worse, get more extreme this way, get more extreme that way, with some hope that things were moving in the right direction, and now feeling like, wow, they're moving in such a wrong direction that I don't know if we could pull out of it.
- [43:33]
Interviewer
One of the things that I have in Miami that leaves me alone in my community. When you say. Because I didn't grow up in a diverse environment either. I had a lot of Hispanics, but not a lot of other ethnicities. It was actually the University of Miami football team of the late 80s and 90s. And being on campus at that time, that sort of. Sort of introduced me to an entirely different way of thinking. But I think in a lot of these instances, when you're a white man running Arsenio's show, you're not giving a lot of thought to what kind of this opportunity this is as a first for Arsenio and how much pressure there would be on that to not tell your jokes that, you know, are good enough to make the show really different.
- [44:17]
Larry Charles
I did get that. I did get that. I was. One of the things that I really. I was really happy to have worked on Arsenio on that sociological level, because I was the minority on that show. You know, white people were the minority on that show. And it's good to put yourself in that position sometimes. You know, I did a show called Larry Charles Dangerous World of Comedy on Netflix, where I went to Nigeria, and I went to Liberia, and I went to Somalia.
- [44:43]
Interviewer
That sounds, by the way, like a terrible idea. I'm just.
- [44:46]
Larry Charles
I just thought so, too, to try.
- [44:49]
Interviewer
Try to find the funny amid, like, real legitimate danger.
- [44:52]
Larry Charles
Yes. And I found it. There were always comedians in all these countries. There were always comedians. Sometimes they were assassinated afterwards. Some comedians were assassinated before or arrested, but there are always comedians in all these places. But I walked down the street in Lagos. And I was the only, literally the only white person in crowded, crowded streets. And it's like interesting experience to have that shoe on the other foot and on Arsenio, because most of the staff was black. You would see we tend to look at it like a block, but it's not a block at all. There's so many different subtle nuances to the black community. You know, from education, from regionalism. All these different things went into play amongst black people on that show. It meant something different to be from the south and to be from the north, to go to this college rather than that college. Even skin tones were judged by different people. And it was interesting to me to learn that there was nuance to that community, that we tend to go, oh, black people. And generalize about them when that's really incorrect.
- [45:58]
Interviewer
Two things that you have spent time on with eccentrics who people want to know more about, have your projects, your documentary with Larry David and the work that you did with Kanye West. Are people going to be able to see that?
- [46:14]
Larry Charles
Those things, The Kanye west thing, somebody. I put it on like my Vimeo account to sort of have it there. It was safe and somebody was able to rip it and show it. And there's a comedian who's in the show named Wyatt, really great guy. And he was showing it in Brooklyn for a while, like on at his comedy show.
- [46:34]
Interviewer
Wyatt's an act.
- [46:35]
Larry Charles
Wyatt's an act, exactly. And he's one of the co stars and he would show it with some commentary. So I think I'm going to put it on my YouTube channel at some point. Point. So it is something you can see. Eventually the Larry David thing's a little trickier. There's more legal ramifications to it. I can't just show it. Hopefully someday I'll be able to show it. There's also like longer cuts of Borat. There's a much longer cut of the Bob Dylan movie that I made that I would love to have come out. One of the things that kind of is emblematic of my career is I have not had final cut cut on most things. So when I'm done with something and it's the way I want it to be, somebody else has come along, whether it's Bob Weinstein or somebody else, taken it and recut it and ruined it a lot of the times. Now I'm not saying that all those things got ruined, but they were altered, you know, in a way that I did not approve of, you know. So I would love for a lot of that stuff to come out and be seen the way it was supposed.
- [47:33]
Interviewer
To be seen, that seems crushing.
- [47:36]
Larry Charles
It's been crushing. Crushing. It's been crushing at times, yes.
- [47:39]
Interviewer
I mean, to have things that you've made that you care about that are your voice, that you're powerless to keep power from.
- [47:45]
Larry Charles
Well, that's one of the reasons I started the YouTube channel was so I can make my own stuff. It reaches a smaller audience. It's made on a much more minuscule budget. But I don't answer to anybody. So it gives me a kind of a satisfaction and a purity that is hard to get in commercial cinema.
- [48:01]
Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by ebay. We all have that piece, the one that's so you. You've basically become known for it. And if you don't, fashionistas, you'll find it on ebay. That Miu Miu red leather bomber, the cousteau Barcelona cowboy top. Or that Patagonia fleece in the 2017 colorway. All these finds are all on ebay, along with millions of more main character pieces backed by authenticity guarantee. Ebay is the place for pre loved and vintage fashion. EBay.
- [48:28]
Interviewer
Things people love among these people, because Nic Cage is another one. We haven't talked about anything. But who would you regard as the most unusual?
- [48:38]
Larry Charles
Wow. Bob Dylan. I would say. Bob Dylan is a singular person. He doesn't march to anyone else's drummer the way, you know, an example we were writing, we wrote this movie together. I sat in a room like this. Smaller, like a cubicle. And he would chain smoke all day and like 12 hours. And we would write this. What eventually became that movie. And one day he had a line, I'm not a pig without a wig. And I was like, I reached the point where I felt I could be honest with him. And I said, Bob, you know, I have to say, no one's going to understand that line. That is a crazy line. No one's going to understand it. And he said, what's so bad about being misunderstood? And I was like, wow. He could say that he's been understood. He's done that. He's interested now in the process of how people are misunderstand things. So he just saw things or he would. People would say to him, well, what were you thinking when you played electric guitar in the Newport Jazz Festival? He's like, what were you thinking? You know? And so he was always keeping everybody on their toes without even trying. He just had a different point of view. And he and Larry David, I compare to each other Quite a bit, because they're the kind of guys, and who knows, maybe they're on the spectrum and they haven't been diagnosed, but. But they're the kind of guys that if they were at a bus stop, they'd be doing exactly the same thing that they're doing now.
- [50:04]
Interviewer
Well, what is it about you, though? Because the people in sports that I've gravitated toward, Ricky Williams, John Amici, Terrell Owens, I gravitate toward the eccentrics. I really like people who are shaking the establishment. You do too, obviously. This is an incredible collection of weirdos assembled like some all time hall of fame weirdos.
- [50:33]
Larry Charles
Yeah.
- [50:33]
Interviewer
And the creativity is there as well, because they're counterculture. What's happening there? Why are you a magnet toward these things?
- [50:40]
Larry Charles
Well, again, I go back to Brooklyn. I was surrounded. I grew up in Trump Village, which was all these kids moved in at the same time in 1964. And so it was a demographic explosion. And amongst those kids there were a lot of Mad Men and geniuses. And some of them were scary and some of them were really cool. But if I wanted to go downstairs and play basketball or do something in the park, I would have to interact with these people. Often older boys who were really rough. It was like Lord of the Flies to a large degree. And learning how to navigate those kids and survive, not get my ass kicked, but survive and even be respected. I think that I learned how to interact. It interested me in interacting with the offbeat, you know, and then the things that I read, the movies that I liked, were always about outsiders and always about strange people. My father was an eccentric guy, you know, and I think I just. And maybe I've never even thought about this before, but maybe like trying to recreate a whole relationship with the one that I didn't have with my father, with these other people, maybe that because they were all older men to a large degree too. Larry David, Bob Dylan, Michael Richards, these were all guys who were older than me and took me in as a mentor, mentored me inadvertently quite often.
- [52:09]
Interviewer
Well, this one's interesting because if you're doing something there that you haven't thought about with your parents. I don't know the answer to the question I'm about to ask you. How many of these people would you say are happy?
- [52:21]
Larry Charles
None. None.
- [52:23]
Interviewer
So you are doing that with your father?
- [52:25]
Larry Charles
Yeah, yeah, they're all. I mean, Bob Dylan, who might be the most brilliant, also might be the most unhappy. You know, he never. But he's. I think what's important is he's okay with it, it seemed to me he learned to navigate it, he learned to balance it. He learned to let go of it. You know, he learned to let go of the things that were plaguing him and just be. And not worry about it. And totally, my father totally did not trust his instincts. He wanted to be a comedian, he wanted to be an actor. He wanted to be in show business so badly. And he went against that and dropped it and left it behind and never went back to it. Bob Dylan didn't do that. And then would have been. And Larry David, even more so, had so many opportunities to quit because he was failing, failing miserably, you know. And also, these are guys who are not from. As many people today are. They're not from extraordinary parents. They're from very mundane people. Where do they come from, these savants that sort of suddenly kind of emerge. It's very interesting to me as a process also, when you meet Bob Dylan's parents or you meet Larry David's parents. Parents, they are completely plain people, you know, just regular people. Appliance salesmans and haberdashers and people like that. So they don't come from any kind of Mel Brooks, too. You know, all these people come from very, very regular people. And where does this genius. Even. Their brothers are not geniuses the way they are. You know, their brothers are regular people, but they somehow exploded out of these family units. And people would say to me also, I can't believe you're the child of your parents. You know, so there's something to that kind of explosion that drags you out that I think can't be fully explained. You know, it's kind of, again, part of this mystery.
- [54:24]
Interviewer
What an interesting thing, though, for you to both choose and learn, that you chose, that you're trying to recreate with older comedians a connection you didn't have with your father, who also was the one who provided for you. Hey, kid, come over here. It's nice to be near the laughter, but it's not going to be necessarily happy to be around the laughter. That's crazy.
- [54:45]
Larry Charles
Yeah, yeah.
- [54:46]
Interviewer
That each of them would be that. That you would just keep sort of ending up there.
- [54:50]
Larry Charles
You know, I have to write another book because I never thought about that. I think that's true. I call them inadvertent oracles, inadvertent mentors, because they all were kind of like fatherly paternal to me in some way or another. And I gravitated to that, for sure, and felt comfortable in that kind of womb, like Environment.
- [55:11]
Interviewer
They also seem, and I don't know if of course it contributes to the unhappiness. This is presumptuous of me, but the group seemed to be a little bit lonely with their genius as well.
- [55:22]
Larry Charles
Yes, well, Larry David has evolved in many good ways to be a more generous soul that he maybe started out to be be. You know, @ a certain point he would get angry with people when people go, are you happy now? You're happy now? When Seinfeld was a success, people were constantly bugging him about that and he'd go, no, I'm not happy now. You know, I'm not any happier than I was before. You know what I mean? But he is now, I believe, I believe he's a happier person than he was.
- [55:49]
Interviewer
I'd argue, seeing the evolution of that, just watching what they've televised of it, the relationship with Conan or whatever it is that I've seen of it, I'm guessing that the communal community of those particular people sharing that success with them, that they've, that you forced it on him like that. He, he has to absorb, hey, this was a pretty cool thing we did together.
- [56:12]
Larry Charles
Yes, right?
- [56:14]
Interviewer
Two ridiculous runs on television.
- [56:16]
Larry Charles
Absolutely unprecedented by the way, in my opinion. When you look at it, you look at the great television creators, I don't think any of them could really point to things like Seifeld and Curve, you know, Norman Lear, James Brooks, all amazing geniuses in their own way. But they didn't create too culture changing things too like Larry David did. And I think Larry David now in his older years, appreciates that much more. He has a perspective on that that maybe he didn't have when he was forced to write episodes every week. You know, he's loose that he's loosened up a little bit.
- [56:54]
Interviewer
Oh, but I mean, what kind of. I mean, I'm not even gonna call it a purgatory. I'm saying what kind of hell would it be to have that kind of success around the specifics of laughter and not learn at any point while you're living to enjoy it?
- [57:07]
Larry Charles
Yes, well, for a long time, I would say he didn't for a long time. He just sort, he would threaten to quit all the time. I mean, maybe that was part of his, you know, mechanism to survive. But he was, he was pretty unhappy for a long time, I would think.
- [57:23]
Interviewer
I don't know what else is going on, but I would think that the burden of expectation of always having to top yourself when you're making a seminal thing, I mean, that seems like it could Be a suffering. If you're not somebody who's entirely consciously self aware and introspective enough to know to try and go about removing your blind spots.
- [57:45]
Larry Charles
Well, I think you also touched on a word that's very important also, which is suffering. Suffering, we're taught to some degree, especially Jews, especially Jews from Brooklyn, but Bob Dylan's a Jew as well. There's a certain degree of suffering that goes along with the equation and that you need to come to grips with that in some way. You need to have a personal relationship with your suffering. Either it's going to consume you or you're going to learn to live with it. The shadow, whatever you want to call that. The first noble truth of Buddhism is life is suffering. Suffering, you know, so if you don't come to grips with that, come to terms with that, then you are going to suffer. And I think it took Larry David a long time to come to terms with his suffering, to balance it and to be able to bring some joy into his life and balance it out.
- [58:33]
Interviewer
Have you?
- [58:33]
Larry Charles
I think so too, yes. I think so too.
- [58:36]
Interviewer
How?
- [58:37]
Larry Charles
I think that I, you know, I think the end of my first marriage, you know, that was kind of like a bottom for me. That was like I hit bottom during that time. And I think that meeting somebody who kind of injected joy back into my life, I was like desperately open to it. And she kind of freed me from a lot of the burdens that I was carrying with me. And I felt like liberated by that love. I really felt, see to some degree by that love. And it kind of freed me in terms of my work, in terms of my approach to work. I'm very intense person when I work particularly, but I was able to balance it. So I wasn't going over the deep end all the time. And I still go over the deep end, believe me. I just did it today.
- [59:30]
Interviewer
No, I'd like to learn from this because I've got someone next to me who is a source of great strength and support and has done a great deal to teach me how to love myself better. But this, this is a bit of a struggle for me.
- [59:45]
Larry Charles
Yeah, well, it still is for me as well, and it probably always will be. But I know that I'm in a much better place to. For enjoyment, for joy, for perspective, you know, for. I think a lot of it had to do with me. My father was a very selfish person. You know, like when we moved into Trump Village, just to give you an illustration, there was a. It was a two bedroom apartment. My brother and I shared a room our entire life, you know, and that my parents had their bedroom and there was a big walk in closet in the bedroom and then there was a hall closet. And my father said, I'm not moving into this apartment unless I get the walk in closet. You know, normally a woman would be getting that. My father took that closet. You know, he was a selfish person and a lot. I was just talking to my brother today. We were talking about how selfish we've been in our lives at times, you know, and I think we're both, now that we're in our 60s, I think we're both able to go, wow, we could be generous. Finally we've learned generosity. And I think my wife Keely has helped me learn generosity. She's kind of forced me to see generosity and embrace it and enjoy it. Enjoy the benefits of generosity.
- [61:01]
Interviewer
When you're talking about the end of your first marriage, you're blaming yourself there. When you're doing rock bottom on that, it's not just that it's your fault. There's also the shame and guilt of it being your fault. And so it becomes just a spiral.
- [61:17]
Larry Charles
Yeah. I don't think I was good to any of the people in my first marriage. I don't think I was good to my kids. I don't think I was good to my ex wife.
- [61:26]
Interviewer
Because you were selfish the way your father was.
- [61:28]
Larry Charles
Yes. Yeah. I felt like I wanted what I wanted and I wasn't going to let anything. Maybe I made a mistake in even going down that road. I wasn't ready to go down that road. Why did I even go down that road? And of course then I wound up loving. I have a great relationship with my kids today and my grandchildren, you know, But I think at that time I was unhappy and I was desperate and I was hungry and I couldn't. I was like. In Buddhism they call it the hungry ghost. You could feed it and feed it and feed and you can never fill the hole. And that's how I was. It's like there wasn't enough and I didn't know what I wanted. And that's how my father was. He wanted and wanted and wanted, but he didn't know what he wanted and never gave him any satisfaction, you know? And I think that's how I was too. And I couldn't believe how much I wound up being like my father.
- [62:18]
Interviewer
That one's a mind fuck, right? Like when I. When I see God. This happened to me the other day. I'm throwing blueberries in a smoothie and my wife, ever so gently, is telling me to wash them. And for some reason, I've just got some aversion to learning there. That's just ugly. And when I see my father in the mirror on that one, because I see it in childhood, I'm like, how the fuck did that happen? How did that one escape my attention?
- [62:45]
Larry Charles
There's a genetic thing going on that we don't get. And you can have therapy. I had a great therapist for many years. He was amazing. And in fact, the day that I was. I'd finally gotten the courage, because I was a coward, also an emotional coward. And the day that I'd finally gotten the courage to go see my wife and say, it's over, you know, I was going to see my therapist first to kind of almost rehearse. And I went to see him. It was a Monday night in Santa Monica. And I went to the door and I went to open the door, and the door was locked. And I was like, wow, that's weird. Maybe am I in the right place? And I was like, no, the door is locked. I knocked, there was no answer. And then there was a message on my phone. And I listened to the message towards my psychiatrist. And he was Italian, and he was like, larry, I'm sorry to tell you that I was diagnosed with terminal cancer today, and I've had to close down the practice and I can't come back ever again. And I wish you the best of luck, you know? And again, the absurdity of that and the tragedy of that, right? And I was left on my own to do this. And, you know, I had to finally screw up the courage to have this talk with my wife, with my kids, you know, and in hearing that, it was a very Tony Soprano kind of life I was living, you know, where I could have just continued to do what I was doing. Because Tony Soprano was a miserable guy also, you know, he was an unhappy person. And he was like, you know, a kind of a. You know, such a symbolic person at that time. And I felt like, wow, I could have a Tony Soprano life, but that's not what I want. I don't want it to just go to black at the end, you know, I want something more, you know? And that was my selfishness, was in wanting happiness in some way, in some form, some temporal version of it. To taste it, to feel it, to feel emotional satisfaction.
- [64:44]
Interviewer
Roughly what age does that arrive?
- [64:47]
Larry Charles
Late 40s. Late 40s.
- [64:50]
Interviewer
A lot of people go straight to the grave without ever getting there, without ever examining any of it, seeing Any of it. And they just. They never see it.
- [64:58]
Larry Charles
I would say that's my dad. My dad lived to 91, and I don't think he. He got married a second time and was equally unhappy the second time he got married and just didn't. I don't think he had the energy to make a change again, you know?
- [65:12]
Interviewer
And so you then go and you feel rescued, you feel saved by a woman's love.
- [65:19]
Larry Charles
I do. I do. I did. Yes. I really did. I felt like I had somebody. And my first wife was great in many ways, and I'm not at all criticizing her. Her. I think we had just kind of reached the point where we were no longer connected, you know, it was like a business, you know, I used to say, and I think I say it in the book, my life is perfect, except that I was in it. You know, I lived in Bel Air. I was making a lot of money at that time. My kids all went to the best schools, we had friends, we had social life, we had all those kind of things. And I was miserable, you know, And I finally met somebody who. Who had my back, didn't care about anything except me and us. And I was very humbled by that, I think.
- [66:06]
Interviewer
What is the work that you consider the most fulfilling?
- [66:11]
Larry Charles
Well, I could look at this commercial work that's really dealt with in the book, and I know that I'm proud of almost everything that I talk about in the book. All of those things have had some impact, which is something I'm always looking for. I don't want it to just be good or just be successful. I want people to walk away, remember it, to see it again and again, like they listen to a great record. So I'm proud of all of that stuff, all my commercial stuff. But the thing that kind of gives me great pleasure these days is doing shows that I make up myself for this YouTube channel where I'm just like, on my own. I have an editor and I use my own money and I don't get notes and I don't have to run it by anybody. And I think it's, you know, something that's a good idea doesn't reach as many people, but it's out there, it's made. And that's the coup for me is like, I've actually made things that I wanted to make the way I wanted to make it.
- [67:04]
Interviewer
Finally, art for art's sake.
- [67:06]
Larry Charles
Exactly.
- [67:07]
Interviewer
It's not about commercial. There's lesson in there in terms of the superficiality of success or what might happen. Look like Happiness to others versus you're making what you want, when you want, how you want now.
- [67:18]
Larry Charles
Still, lessons will be learned.
- [67:20]
Interviewer
One of those things is the book we're talking about. And June 17th is, when it's available, Comedy Samurai, 40 Years of Blood, Guts and Laughter. Larry, a pleasure. It's been a pleasure to watch.
- [67:33]
Larry Charles
My brother's name is Dan, by the way.
- [67:34]
Interviewer
Okay, well, there you go. That doesn't mean anything to me, Larry.
- [67:37]
Larry Charles
There's nothing to me. But I'm very happy to meet you.
- [67:42]
Interviewer
Likewise. And I feel like I just ruined everything we just did because of that. As my punctuation. By insulting you, by not caring.
- [67:49]
Larry Charles
You have to go.
- [67:50]
Interviewer
Brother's name is Dan.
- [67:51]
Larry Charles
You have to go for it. Well, because you're also right in a way. It doesn't matter, you know? I mean, I happened. I wanted to share that with you, and so I shared.
- [67:57]
Interviewer
Well, you wanted to share it, and then I just.
- [67:59]
Larry Charles
Rejected.
- [68:01]
Interviewer
Just ruined everything at the end. It was intimate. It was vulnerable. It was a lovely conversation. And I'm like, I don't care about your brother, Dan.
- [68:09]
Larry Charles
Cut it out.
- [68:09]
Interviewer
No, leave it in. I insist you leave it in. The more awkward, the better.
- [68:13]
Larry Charles
Good. I think you're right. More awkward makes sense.
- [68:15]
Interviewer
I mean, I'm talking to Borat. I'm talking to the guy who made Bora. Awkward's good. That works.
- [68:21]
Larry Charles
Good. Yes. There's a truth in awkwardness.
- [68:23]
Interviewer
Thank you, sir.
- [68:24]
Larry Charles
My pleasure. Thank you.