Judd Apatow Grills Albert Brooks and Rob Reiner on ‘Defending My Life’
Anne Thompson
It all started when Rob Reiner tried to convince Albert Brooks to let him film his own version of “My Dinner with Andre” titled “My Lunch with Albert Brooks.” His high school chum refused. After someone else came to Brooks wanting to make a documentary about him, the financing fell through. Then the men decided to combine the two things.
“There’s about 4000 documentaries now,” said Brooks at an FYC event with Reiner and moderator Judd Apatow this week at the Academy of Motion Pictures. “It’s the way they’re willing to spend money without spending real money. Everyone has a story and 99 out of 100 are done pretty much the same way. Either the person’s no longer living, or they’re being talked about from an off-stage voice. So to be able to do that this way…that’s what makes it special. Because it’s Rob and me for a lot of it.”
For Reiner, the trick on his HBO documentary “Defending My Life” was “to blend this properly,” he said, “to communicate to people, and a lot of young people, how funny you are, how brilliant you are. But at the same time, we have to know who you are as a person. So we found a way to do it. And Albert was willing to go to places that he might not have gone to with somebody he was not as comfortable with.”
Reiner’s warm portrait of Brooks is a hilarious and welcome reminder of how rare a bird he is. More than most folks in comedy, he has pursued his own brand of smart humor, without relying on live standup comedy. He opened for various music acts, guested on over 100 variety shows, and was a constant on late-night television. But mostly he’s known for writing, directing, and starring in his own movies (“Defending Your Life,” “Lost in America”). And putting in some strong performances for other directors as well (he landed a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for James L. Brooks’ “Broadcast News,” and voiced the Dad in “Finding Nemo”). At the end of “Defending My Life,” David Letterman says with all sincerity, “I’d rather have Albert’s career than my career.”
Both Reiner and Brooks were seeing “Defending My Life” with an audience for the first time, and enjoyed the response. “He makes me laugh,” said Reiner. “And it’s great to see that he makes everybody laugh. I love that.”
The friends met in high school, and after Brooks lost his father early, Carl Reiner became a surrogate dad to him. Reiner lived in a Beverly Hills household surrounded by his father’s friends, from Mel Brooks and Sid Caesar to Norman Lear. “There was a lot of laughs,” said Reiner, “and you don’t know because you’re growing up in that milieu and you figure ‘well, that’s that’s what you do. And that’s what home life is.’ Then you go to your friend Steve Raven’s house. It’s not funny over there. It’s funny in my house.”
Apatow pulled out some great stories. Back in the day, Brooks, who lived in Benedict Canyon, would hitchhike to and from school. “A lot of times people would go up on Sunset,” said Brooks, “and I would get out at the Beverly Hills Hotel. And I lived about a mile and a half up from that. And one day I was in the candy shop after school. And there was Jonathan Winters all by himself, talking to the woman who works at the candy shop, doing characters. And I said, ‘Do you want to come home with me?’ ‘Where do you live? I’ll go home with you. Let’s go home.’ So I got in a cab with him. And I came in, called to my mother, and he did 40 minutes for us. Just the two of us in the kitchen. We were crying.”
Brooks studied to be an actor but left Carnegie Mellon early when his favorite teacher was leaving and told him, “I think you should go do this for real.” When he got back to LA, “I couldn’t get acting work to save my life,” Brooks said. “But I had the one bit that I came up with in a dorm, which was Danny and Dave, this ventriloquist who could make Russians laugh. Everybody laughed at this.” Brooks used to go down to the big LA radio station KMPC 710, where disc jockey Gary Owen invited him to do bits. Brooks took the kinescope of Danny and Dave to an agent, who landed him an appearance on the Steve Allen show. He was off.
He wasn’t acting, but he was performing bits on variety shows like Dean Martin’s TV series “The Golddiggers.” “I would think up these bits at home,” Brooks said. “I’d sit in the bathroom because it was like a stage. I could see somebody. Even if it was me laughing, at least I was getting a laugh. And I would come up with bits and go down and do them on the show. It was that simple.”
Reiner has long admired Brooks for sticking to his guns, he said. When Brooks told Reiner he was going to do his mime bit for Johnny Carson, Reiner reminded him that the first time he performed it, he didn’t get any laughs. “But it’s funny,” Brooks said. He took it on “The Tonight Show” and because Carson thought it was funny, so did the audience. “He taught me a lesson,” said Reiner. “If it’s fun, you stick with it, stay with it. Eventually the audience will come around.”
When Brooks appeared live on “The Ed Sullivan Show” before and after The Temptations, their performance was pre-empted by the 1967 Apollo 1 spacecraft blowing up on the launchpad. “And I ran around backstage going, ‘the show’s off, there’s been an explosion!,'” he said. “And one of the larger humans I’ve ever met, who managed The Temptations, took me aside and said, ‘Don’t say a word. Don’t tell the boys. Just be quiet.’ They cut about 20 minutes of the show. But my two bits were on. The Temptations never made it, but I didn’t tell them.”
“If any of those Temptations are still alive, they just found out,” said Apatow.
The transition to film started with shorts. “First, you have to find out if you’re a person who’s funny, if you can translate it to film,” Brooks said. “You have to assume, ‘well, I’m going to point the camera here.’ And that seems like it’s funny and you see it work, and then you start to gain a little bit of confidence. I made seven shorts by the time I made my first feature. So you never know. ‘Real Life’ was a lot like the early bits where people didn’t get it. I still remember Rex Reed’s review of ‘Real Life’: ‘Why would Paramount give this fool all the money for such an important experiment?’ And I’m going, ‘Is this ever going to change?'”
Brooks had the last laugh.
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