Tod Lippy: You were born here, weren’t you?

Buck Henry: So I’ve been told. There’s a family myth that my father, who had a lot of friends in politics, and who was a member of what was then called “café society,” was running the riding board of a police car to take my mother at two in the morning down one-way streets the wrong way, sirens blaring, to Doctor’s Hospital. But then, many years ago, I found out that Doctor’s Hospital didn’t exist in the year of my birth—it was built afterwards. So I’m angry, because my mother and father are long-deceased, and I don’t have anyone to ask. But yes, I’m pretty certain I was born here.

Your mother was an actress, right? I read that she had been a Mack Sennett girl.

She was, among other things, a Mack Sennett girl—a Mack Sennett “Bathing Beauty,” as they called them. So her affairs were followed rather closely in the late twenties and early thirties, up until she quit—totally, cold—when she got married. So cold, in fact, that I always had to remind myself that she’d done it. She’d ask me what was going on, and I’d tell her some dopey show-biz story, and think, “Wait a minute, she probably knows more about this than I do...”

Didn’t she date Howard Hughes?

She did. She was a California girl—actually, a Portland, Oregon girl—who went to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood, and found a certain amount of both. Then she went on a publicity tour for a movie and came to New York, where she met my father. They were married three weeks later, and that was it.

You were in New York exclusively up until you were eleven or twelve, weren’t you?

Not exclusively. We went to California a lot, because my mother’s family was there. And my parents would vacation there. I started going to L.A when I was about two. Some of my earliest memories are of the Chief, one of the last great American trains. One took the Twentieth Century Limited from Grand Central to Chicago, and then it was out to the Coast on the Chief. It was an extraordinary two-and-a­-half, three-day train ride into the West, where everything, especially in those days, really opened up. You could stand on the rear platform of the train, which I usually did alone, and watch the country spread out behind you. It was a great, great adventure, always. So L.A. is built into me almost as much as New York is.

They’re both “in your blood.”

Yeah. I’ve always understood both places, so none of that stuff that comes as a great surprise to people who go there was ever a surprise to me. It’s like a language. There are certain people who want to be in the film business, and you know they’re going to have a struggle because they don’t get the language out there, which is radically different from the language in New York. Los Angeles behavior blends more easily with other cultures and subcultures. But New York has a much more specific, jagged and idiosyncratic sound to it, which reflects the personality of the place.

Did you pick up on these fundamental distinctions between New York and L.A. as a kid?

It never occurred to me; I never thought about it until later in life. Because I knew them both, and I had family in both places, they were both home. L.A. maybe not so much as New York, but I was an only child and I was very mischievous—or as they like to say in films today, “mischeeveous.” In the opening scene of a film I saw recently—made by a really interesting filmmaker whose name will go unmentioned—a guy playing a teacher pronounces it “mischeeveous.” Whether that was a choice on the part of the actor or not I don’t know, but it just rattled me—for fifteen minutes I couldn’t concentrate on the film. “Heineeous” is another one that seems to be making the rounds. In To Die For, I had everybody making carefully structured‑on my part‑grammatical errors. Like the “I”/“me” thing. It’s tricky, though, because every time I do it in a script I think it’s going to make somebody talk that way—somebody else will think it’s all right, and the next time it crops up it will be an English professor in a film saying, “Me and my sister went to the movies last night,” and I’ll want to just slash the screen. I have only a small handful of friends now who are able to make the distinction between the nominative and the objective. In California it’s meaningless.
   To a lot of people, of course, this seems like petty dreck. But if you are interested in the language being part of what we laughingly refer to as our “art form,” then you damn well better attend to it. It’s hard for me to think that film writers can get to be as famous and well-paid as they are without ever having thought about, or read about, the language.

Why do you think that is?

Because the business attracts a lot of facile but skilled intelligences that have a certain amount of contempt for the nuts and bolts of what they deal with.

Would you say New York is a more literate film culture?

Oh, there’s no question about it. It’s a more literate film culture because it’s a more literate culture. There are people here who do care about what things mean. There’s not a lot of care about meaning in L.A.. In the last few years, the Valley has spawned some enormous talent—Paul Thomas Anderson, for example—but for the most part, New Yorkers train themselves in a kind of dialogue with the city that isn’t available to people who live in California.
   I think it’s because of all of that time spent in cars in L.A.—at least two hours in the course of a typical day—time you would be spending talking to somebody, or listening to someone talk, or something, in New York. This is a cliché that Californians deplore, but it’s a cliché because it’s true. One trip on the subway is worth a hundred limousine rides.

Do you find that a ride like that will get your juices flowing as far as writing is concerned?

Oh, no. That’s personal—I’m totally lazy and operate out of desperation and anxiety, wherever I am. Actually, I probably work better in L.A. because I’m not tempted to go to the theater, or this museum, or that concert, or any of the one hundred thousand things you can do here every day. I was just cutting things out of the Sunday New York Times section for stuff that’s coming up this summer. Unbelievable. The music section alone—I mean, Los Angeles prides itself on its music, but in the course of one day here you can find more than six months’ worth of stuff in L.A.
   There are millions of people here, all the time, moving towards things that have ideas in them. In Los Angeles, most of the time, there are hundreds of thousands of people moving towards things that have success or failure written in neon above them. Trying to find the right door. It isn’t to say you can’t talk about ideas in Hollywood—you can. But it’s on a vastly different level. It’s all keyed to marketability. Again, it’s a different language.

You split your time pretty much fifty-fifty between the two places, right?

Yep.

It’s surprising to me, judging from what you’ve said, that you’re not spending ninety per cent of your time here.

Well, I really like L.A.—I’m happy there in a different way. I have a great house, great friends and I love to drive, so it doesn’t bother me the way it bothers other New Yorkers. And I do know book readers and theatergoers there—you know, it’s not a desert. It’s just different.
   My theory is that it all had to do with the stock exchange. Los Angeles was founded first by rich farmers and then by industrialists and media people, who made their money the same way all Americans of wealth did—off the stock market. The stock market opened at nine in the morning, which meant that people in California had to get up at six—which meant that they really got up at five so they could play a little golf before they attended to the business aspect of their lives. Which meant, of course, that they had to go to sleep at ten. So they couldn’t go to operas and theater and stuff. Only by the grace of a few extremely wealthy people out there were some theaters built, but it’s minimal for a city of that size. You can find more theater in Minneapolis, for instance.

You went off to military school in L.A. for several years when you were a teenager, didn’t you?

Correct. From around eleven or twelve to fifteen, I think. During the Second World War.

In a piece you wrote several years ago, you talked about your experiences as a kid, mixing with the personalities of the time at places like the Garden of Allah bungalows in L.A., or at the Palm Springs Racquet Club. You know, watching Chico Marx cavort at the pool, or Jack Warner playing tennis while Bogart offered encouragement from the sidelines...

Well, I was aware of all this stuff because I’d grown up around actors and writers. They spoke a language that seemed relatively normal to me. What was perceived of even then as glamour, and now as kind of iconic, was not that unusual for me—I saw both the upstairs and the downstairs. But I was still aware of the “larger­-than-life” way in which they lived—and they did live in a more interesting style than they do today.
   Also, back then, the public didn’t know things. Now, the public knows everything, including all the false things—the bad stuff about you that never happened. Back then, the public knew all the good things that didn’t really happen. It was like under Stalin—the information was really carefully controlled, and only a few people controlled it. The dark side of things was very rarely made public.

My impression is that the Louella Parsons and Hedda Hoppers of the world ran the show—not like now, when celebrities, through their publicists and other “handlers,” seem to hold so much leverage.

Yeah, sure. But the weird thing is that now it sometimes seems that everyone just rises on this tide of scum. It’s very interesting. There were reputations for incredibly bad behavior in the celebrity world out there when I was a kid, but it was kept in the family, except for the more dramatic examples, like when somebody really ran afoul of the law. Gossip is always interesting—we can’t live without it, and history is built on it—but the gossip is radically different today when no holds are barred.

In that same piece you talk about seeing Louella Parsons at the Palm Springs Racquet Club late in her life. You described a steady stream of celebrities approaching her, kissing her hand, and then you noticed when she finally got up to leave that she’d left a puddle of urine in her chair. Such an arresting image...

It’s an ugly image. She was—as all doyennes are—closely watched and petted by her intimates all her life. And she did monstrous, awful things—all of them did. I’m not being entirely fair. I didn’t know her well, I only knew her through my mother. I’d listen in on their conversations, and I have to say I never heard her say anything interesting. But in those last few years, the couple of times I saw her, it wasn’t a pretty sight.
   Hedda Hopper also did her damage, but. she was a much more interesting, articulate woman, who had been a good actress. She had to dig in the same dirt in order to compete. There was another guy who’s totally forgotten now, named Jimmie Fiddler, who had a daily or weekly fifteen-minute show about the business.

And then Walter Winchell in New York.

And of course Winchell, to whom everyone was beholden. I met him when I was about fifteen at Toots Shor’s. It was right out of Sweet Smell of Success: he was holding court at a table, and there were a couple other famous people around—you know, somebody like DiMaggio, and somebody like Gleason. I really can’t remember, because I was so fascinated by Winchell. I wasn’t aware, until much later, of his politics, or his peculiar, twisted journey through the American experience of the forties and fifties.

So when you returned to New York as a teenager, you were already getting into show business?

I joined Equity when I was fifteen, I think. I toured with Life with Father one summer during high school.

What did your mother think about that?

I think she thought it was swell. Nobody in my family ever tried to discourage me from any of this. Although I think my father hoped I would turn to something more serious than show business, even though he was very good friends with a lot of actors, as well as an inveterate filmgoer and theater-lover. I don’t think he had a lot of admiration for it as a life choice. Also, I think he was concerned about how difficult and “iffy” the whole thing was.

And your acting at the time was all in the theater?

All theater. It never occurred to me that I would have anything to do with film. I’d been going to the theater since my fourth birthday, so by the time I was fifteen I’d seen every famous actor in the work of every famous playwright of our time, and that obviously fed more of my sensibilities than other art forms. I love film, but I have a feeling about the theater that’s different, which is not shared with most of my compatriots—including a lot of directors I know who have been very successful in the theater but cannot sit through a play.

When did you first begin writing?

I was writing when I was a kid. Writing stories, playlets, things like that. And when I got out of the Army, in ’54, I was trying to write for television here in New York. I was turning out scripts that I hoped would become material for GE Theater, Studio 90, that kind of thing. I’d acted in a few of them—I actually did some small parts on them even before I went into the service. So I was basically making just a scrape-though living as an actor for a number of years during the fifties—I’d go on tour with a show, do summer stock. Do just enough to live without having to take a real job. And I lived cheap in Greenwich Village, Got free tickets to plays from Equity. Or snuck in, which one used to be able to do. New Yorkers who live on the edge know how to do an awful lot for free. And then, free was a lot cheaper than free is now. [Laughs.]
   Anyway, I was trying to write, but l never sold anything. I was very young, and I wasn’t that good at what I was doing. But there were a few story editors on those shows who were very kind to me, and encouraging, even though I could never sell anything. Finally, I got a job in an improvisational theater which was famous for a few years.

This was The Premise?

Yeah. And that led, step by step, to everything else.

Around this time weren’t you also involved in something called the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals?

Right. A lunatic friend of mine named Alan Abel, who is a drummer, a lecturer and a kind of comedy writer, was also a professional trickster—he became famous later on for several other stunts, including having his own obituary published in The New York Times. Anyway, he invented this “organization,” and then we kind of refined it together. I became the front man for it: G. Clifford Prout, Jr, President of SINA. It never made us any money, but we got trips and accommodations to various places.

And people swallowed this? The title is so absurd—

The title makes no sense at all. But I guess it was hard for people to find fault with this pair of earnest men. Alan was the vice-president—Bruce something. We spent a week in San Francisco under the auspices of the San Francisco Chronicle, whose reporter followed us around for a week as we tried to put underwear on the animals in the San Francisco Zoo, or picketed the city dog pound, condemning various animal exhibits as being prurient and part of the downfall of American youth, leading them ultimately to alcoholism, juvenile delinquency and suicide. A lot of people bought it, including some people on the television shows that covered us.

The story goes that even Walter Cronkite was duped.

The last piece I ever did for SINA was at the zoo in Los Angeles, and I talked to a very well-known reporter for CBS. Robert something—he had been a very good foreign correspondent for them, and then somehow got stuck doing things like this. Anyway, he interviewed me at the zoo there, and I talked to him about indecency, and sang the SINA marching song while accompanying myself on a ukulele. They put it at the end of one of the fifteen-minute CBS newscasts, and someone at the network recognized me. By that time, I’d been around for a while. And according to rumor, Cronkite was very annoyed about being conned.

I was wondering if the kind of improvisation you, George Segal and other members of The Premise were doing was similar to the Second City model.

It was less open-ended than Second City. If Second City was doing something they thought was going interestingly, they’d go on for twenty minutes. And sometimes the magic happened, and that twenty minutes was breathtaking. We’d do a lot of improvisation, but we’d be very careful to limit ourselves to five to seven minutes. The point was to get an idea that would come around and finish itself. Then, if things were really interesting, we’d work on it as a piece. So half the show would be pieces that we’d already refined, and half of it would be improvisation. It was great for anyone who needs to think on their feet. And it opens up areas that are hard to get open in other ways. Every night, something strange happened. In truth, something strange hap­pens every night on stage, in anything. Otherwise actors would have nothing to talk about. There’s always a conversation after a performance where somebody says, “Did you see what happened in Act Two?!” But in the case of improvisation theater, it’s filled with that.

What do you think attracted you to comedy, as an actor and as a writer?

In college, I always had this problem: if l had a part in a serious play, the audience would come and always be deeply disturbed, because they weren’t getting a barrel of laughs. I remember in my third year—by then I’d been in a lot of plays—we did The Lady’s Not for Burning, and I played the Richard Burton part. The curtain goes up on me cleaning the floor of the lead’s study, and the audience began to laugh in expectation of these fabulous, hilarious things that would happen while I was cleaning the floor. And, of course, nothing fabulous happened.
   I don’t know why I gravitated to comedy. Maybe it’s because it covers a lot of faults. You can be superficial in a much more interesting way if you can write comedy. If you’re writing serious stuff, you’re either good or you’re boring.

Same with acting?

I’d like to think it’s a gift, but most serious actors can also do comedy. And I don’t think it’s true that most comic actors can do serious stuff. I don’t know, maybe it’s fifty-fifty.

What happened after your time with The Premise?

After about six months with them, I was asked to come out to L.A. and write for Steve Allen’s show. I lived in an apartment so appalling that when I drive by it these days I am immediately depressed. It was the loneliest place I’ve ever lived in. To a certain extent, I lived the kind of life New Yorkers who hate Los Angeles think they have to endure if they live out there. I don’t really know why. I wasn’t making a lot of money—well, I was making a lot of money for me, because I’d come out of off-Broadway, but I wasn’t really happy in the job. Part of the fact was that I thought it was going to be an ideal situation—the one person I wanted to work for on television was Steve Allen. But I didn’t think I was successful on the show, except for meeting my partner, Stan Burns, who was a great, great comedy writer.

So you didn’t actually own a house out there until later on?

I had a house when I was doing Get Smart, but I didn’t own it. And then I bought a house sometime between Get Smart and The Graduate. I wrote The Graduate in that house. And I didn’t come back to New York to live—except for renting places occasionally, like when I did Taking Off—until the early eighties, when I did The New Show.

Why did you decide to come back here and buy a place?

Well, I was always going back and forth, and I’d rented various apartments in the building I’m in now for a long time. Actually, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t live in L.A. and New York. I knew I’d be going out there to work, and always will. And I like running away from the weather in either place. The rain in Los Angeles drives me nuts, by the way. I find nothing romantic about it—it’s just a total pain in the ass. If it isn’t seventy-five to eighty-three degrees, and the sun isn’t out, I see no excuse for Los Angeles at all.

You made another taxi vs. limo reference in an interview from some years back, where you said, “You can’t just take taxis or limousines or you forget what the streets are like. You’ve got to take a bus or subway now and then.” Was that meant to be a metaphor for the Los Angeles/New York thing, or were you being more specific?

What I always meant by that was that I do believe that a lot of directors, and writers, and sometimes producers just lose their edge because they haven’t seen anybody or talked to anybody or been with anybody who isn’t a kind of replica of themselves for a long period of time. If you’re massively talented, you can intuit the way people think and behave who have absolutely nothing to do with your life. But you have to be pretty damned talented to do it. In the kiddie movies that are made today—I am being condescending—almost everyone talks like everyone else all the time. There are some distinctions to be made, but for the most part, everyone has the same language and the same approach to life situations. So the differences between people and between voices just gets wiped out, unless you’re there to hear them. We’re always bemoaning the fact that there are great directors around who haven’t made a decent film in twenty years, or writers who have run out of stuff, but I don’t think it’s that so much as they simply lose their ear—or maybe their eye—because they haven’t been looking and listening. You know, we’re voyeurs and eavesdroppers, and if everyone is voyeuring and eavesdropping on what’s being said at Spago, you’re not going to get a lot of really good material.

Your mention of voyeurism reminds me of the scene in The Owl and the Pussycat where George Segal is spying on Streisand with his pair of binoculars—

Yes, indeed. [Laughs.] The voyeurism thing is a part of my life that I’ve managed to put into a couple of films.

The work you’re doing at the moment is almost a distillation of your bicoastal existence. You’ve been involved for the last several years in the highly publicized rewrite process for Town & Country—whose budget, at last count, was estimated as having doubled (some say it’s near one hundred million dollars) since production began. But you’re also developing a project with GreeneStreet Films—one of a number of smaller independent production companies here in New York. How did you get involved with both of those?

I came into the Hollywood situation because they started shooting, and two or three months in, they felt like they needed some new material. And it’s one of these peculiar situations, which had never happened before in my experience, but I’m sure it’s happened in a lot of other writers’ experiences, where the direction of the film had changed as they were shooting—things didn’t seem to go together—so I came in as yet another writer. They’d been through two or three people already, I think. And for one reason or another, this film staggered over—well, I like to think of the fact that it’s been shot over two separate centuries. A Film That Spans the Millennia—I think that’s a fine selling point. It’s been a long, difficult road, with a lot of problems. But I was just a hired hand. I mean, almost everyone in Hollywood has had a job like that.

Have you had them yourself?

Never one quite like this. I’ve done rewrites very infrequently.

Mostly uncredited?

All uncredited, as a matter of fact, until this one. They can’t uncredit me on this one because I’ve been there for the better part of two-and-a-half years. But I feel spooky having a credit on it, because it wasn’t any of my sensibilities or ideas that generated the story, so I’m potshotting kind of from the outside.

And how did Bathing Suits, the script for GreeneStreet Films, come about?

Charles Webb, who wrote the novel of The Graduate, wrote a script and sent it to me. Charles and I have conducted an epistolary relationship for almost thirty-five years. Until last year, I had not seen him since before we started shooting The Graduate. But we did correspond all of that time, and I’ve always felt a debt to him. He, in turn, always says the same thing about me. But in truth, without Charles Webb there would be no Graduate, and my career would have gone in a different direction. So he sent me this script, which I thought was terrific, and had great possibilities. I spent a year or so trying to convince several producers in L.A. of that fact, who were unable to go another step with it for one reason or another. Then I acted in a short film that was directed by Curtis Clayton, longtime editor of Gus Van Sant, and produced by a woman named Cathy Main, who is an independent producer in California. They were looking for a feature, so l showed Charles’s script to them. They fell in love with it, and then, a few steps later, they asked me to rewrite it for them, and I did. I didn’t want to get in this far, but I thought it was worth doing, because I think it will make a wonderful film, and also because of my feelings for the Webbs. So I did the rewrite, and it took them some months to set it up at GreeneStreet, and then I came on it as a co-producer in order to help push it along.
   If I were a producer somewhere, I personally would not be particularly thrilled to hear “Buck’s going to be a co-producer.” “Wow! Let’s move!” Anyway, that’s where it is. We’re looking for a cast as we speak. Actors with names, basically, to help us get the money.

So it’s sort of a tinier version of what you would be dealing with in Hollywood.

It’s a smaller, more eccentric version. We’re talking about a three-to-five-million-dollar film. But those are just as hard to make.

Is one world more pleasant to work in than the other?

It depends. As an actor, I like the independent film process better. It’s quicker, it’s leaner. I like being on location, too. I’ve never had to be in a really bad place for a long time. And the really bad places are often bearable and sometimes really interesting for a few weeks. I like the idea that people are moving fast. In an ideal world, you’d always take a crew of six out to make a film, which kids are doing these days. That’s pretty great.
   On the other hand, I understand and admire the system. I love crews—I think the professionalism of real Hollywood or New York crews is just terrific. If they’re working well, it’s a dream to watch. When we were making Gloria, John Cassavetes had a lot of women in the top spots on the crew—something I’ve missed recently. I think it fundamentally changed the atmosphere of the shoot. I was only there for a week or so, but there was a lowering of the temperature. Not physically, because we were shooting in a boiling summer in an abandoned apartment in the Bronx. But it lowered the temperature of the temperament of the set in a really interesting way.
   Actually, in a truly ideal world, I’d like to go out on location with six very beautiful female crew members. Beautiful, powerful grips, beautiful camera operators, gorgeous cinematographers...

Looking over your filmography as an actor, I would say that a majority of films you’ve appeared in would be classified as independent, ranging from things like Eating Raoul in the early eighties all the way up to 1999 or I’m Losing You last year.

Oh, absolutely. Even from Taking Off, if you want to characterize that as an independent film.

Is it simply that the Grumpy Old Men parts aren’t as interesting to play?

Oh, no. They don’t ask me. All of the films I’ve been in are either because somebody connected to the company is a friend of mine or because someone involved knows me, and has a weird idea for casting a part. Usually, it’s because another actor has said, “What about Buck?” Or a director has happened to see something I’ve done, which was the case in Grumpy Old Men. Donald Petrie had this idea to cast me; nobody else did. They’re all kind of accidents. I think I’ve gotten maybe one acting job in my life through an agency.
   Even with the films I’ve written, l never really wrote a part for myself. They all happened after the fact. Like in To Die For, somebody at some point said to me, “So which part do you want to play?” They’re all accidents. I’ve never made any money at all acting in film. And I like it, but not nearly as much as I like acting on stage.

You’ve written a number of unproduced scripts. Didn’t you do an adaptation of Vonnegut’s novel Jailbird some years back?

Oh, yeah. It’s pretty heavy, because I tried to be as faithful to the book as I could, which means a lot of locations and a lot of actors. It’s complicated, with lots of great characters, and it would need a heavyweight director. I wrote it for an old friend of mine, the Danish filmmaker Henning Carlsen, who made the world-famous film The Hunger in the sixties, and who has made a lot of films since that haven’t been seen in the United States. He came to me and said he loved the book, and asked me to adapt it.
   If I’d thought about it for five minutes I would have realized it had about an eight per cent chance of being made. Because it needed big money, and it had a foreign director attached, all this stuff. So it’s never been made. Every couple of years, some director asks me about it, and wants to know if I’d be willing to sit down and do some rewrites on it. And I’ll give them a half-hearted “yes,” because I think it’s less likely than more that it will ever get going. And it’s political—all the things the audience doesn’t want. Literary, political, poetic.

You also adapted Elmore Leonard’s La Brava a while ago. Whatever happened with that?

I don’t know what happened.

You’d think with the relative successes of several of the other recent Leonard adaptations...

There have been several unsuccessful adaptations of his as well, though, so it balances out. It needs two or three heavyweight actors to get it going. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that someone’s rewriting it, which is okay.

What about your screenplay from the early seventies, Cells?

It’s funny you mention it—I’m working on that as we speak. I wrote it originally in 1970. Somebody got interested in it again a couple of years ago, and I went back and read it. It needed to be rewritten, which I’m in the process of doing. It was written not only before there was an Internet, but before anyone had a computer, and it needs to be startlingly brought up to date. And the dialogue is weirdly old­fashioned.

You can’t do it as a period thriller?

No.

It sounds like it would be something along the lines of The Matrix.

No, it’s not quite that. It’s more a kind of an—oh, God, I hate to use this term—existential thriller. It’s a mystery that doesn’t reveal itself very easily.

What’s it like to go back to material you wrote almost thirty years ago?

It’s awful. I just read it for the first time a couple of months ago. And as I read along, I’ll say to myself, “What was I thinking there? What was I trying to do?” It’s like someone else wrote it. I know the intention of it, and I know why I wrote sequences, but there are moments where I’m really wondering, you know, what the characters are talking about. And it also has to be pumped up, because the rules of language have really changed. I used to have to really struggle to put what we’d refer to as “bad language” into a script. I remember when I was writing Catch-22, and I was looking at the page—we looked at pages then, not screens—for a long time before I wrote “prick.” You know, Yossarian yells, “Milo, you prick.” It was unthinkable. Nobody had ever used that word in a film. Now, it’s on every television show.

You co-directed Heaven Can Wait with Warren Beatty, but I believe your only other directing credit is for the 1980 political satire First Family.

That was a long road. I wrote the original script for that right after Nixon left office, and that’s what it was meant to be about. Then the years went by. Among other things, I had written a third act which caused a threatened copyright lawsuit to take place. To my horror, I didn’t understand the copyright laws in the area of satire and parody I went into, and was completely vulnerable. So I had to completely rewrite the last third of the film. The studio gave me an actual A, B, and C actor list—the only time that’s ever happened. A one-, two-, and three­-point list—put ten points together and you’ve got a “go.” And then I just lost control of it.

There’s a very funny sight-gag scene near the beginning—Richard Benjamin, the press secretary, and Rip Torn, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are having a policy discussion in an office in the White House. Through the window behind them, Gilda Radner, who plays the president’s nymphomaniac/virgin daughter, scales down the side of the building and attacks the White House gardener, finally being apprehended by the Secret Service.

There are some good things in it. You know, we were talking earlier about audience expectations—they can sometimes really put a crimp in your plans. That happened on Catch-22, also. Because of M*A*S*H, erroneous expectations were made about Catch-22; that it was going to be this laugh riot. But they are simply not alike in any way. And this happened, I think, to a certain extent with First Family. What it was supposed to be about on a serious level I couldn’t dig out of what it was; I just couldn’t find a way to make it come to life.

Was that your last experience directing?

I’ve done some television. Frankly, I don’t much like the procedure. I’m not good getting up early in the morning—l’m an insomniac. I don’t really like answering questions all day. I don’t like thinking about one thing all the time. I don’t like looking at dailies. So it’s tough for me. And I don’t think I’m good enough to handle heavy stuff. If I ever do it again, I want to do it with a small crew on location. I just don’t like being responsible for 110 people.

Do you find that you’re often recognized on the street here in New York?

I’m much more recognizable in Los Angeles, because in Los Angeles, you go to places where people are used to recognizing other people. Here, I get recognized when I go to the theater, or at certain restaurants. But for the most part, no. I can walk down Broadway and not a soul will take a second look.

And you prefer that?

I do. It’s nice because it allows me to—well, this isn’t so true anymore, but it used to allow me to go into peep shows without people yelling at me. In the Saturday Night Live days, I used to get it here a lot—“Hey, Uncle Roy!” as I was slipping into some place in Times Square.

There is something weirdly appropriate about that whole scenario.

Yeah, there is. In those days, when I did more television guest appearances, you know, on Carson, or Letterman, or Saturday Night Live, I’d get it more. But I like anonymity, except when I want to get a table at a restaurant or a ticket to a theater.

You once said, “Certain things that are funny in California are just not funny in New York.”

Well, you know, you could take out the city names and substitute thousands of others. For that matter, countries. I think it’s more true the other way around, though. There are things that are funny in New York that are not funny in California. It has to do with recognition. Milos Forman used to say that when he was a kid, they sat in the cafes and read Kafka out loud and laughed and laughed, just fell on the floor. They read it in the way one here would read Catch-22 or Portnoy’s Complaint. So yeah, comedy doesn’t always carry. What would a Russian in the fifties or sixties have conceivably made of The Graduate? This guy who lives in this house with a swimming pool, and has a problem communicating. They’d get laughs out of it? I don’t think so.

Well, I think of Woody Allen’s films as being quintessentially “New York” in their sense of humor, but don’t they play well in L.A., too?

Not as well as they play in New York, because their core audiences aren’t the same. Fairly well-educated, middle-class white Jewish boys and girls do not go to the theater en masse in Los Angeles the way they do in New York. And the core audience makes things happen.
   By the way, Woody Allen is just about the only person left who makes New York movies. Or for that matter, city movies. I hope that the sensibilities of all the new good writers and directors—and there are a whole bunch of them, like Alan Ball, or Alexander Payne, Todd Solondz, among others—can be tuned to an urban environment, and they can get something going that isn’t just about the suburbs. Because America is still very urban—there are a lot of large cities here.

You mentioned the scarcity of peep shows these days, due in large part to the Giuliani administration’s “cleaning up” of the city. What’s your opinion about all of that?

Oh, it’s not only Giuliani. It’s the real-estate powers, too. I go at it from two sides. l think it’s great that the theaters are coming back to life, but I hate to see 42nd Street changed quite so radically. To try to stamp out that quality of life—the raffishness, which is a polite word for it—of New York is not only pompous, but injurious to a sense of what the city is, and of what it can do. It’s New York—it’s a place where people with radically different dispositions and temperaments live together, and always have, in a wonderful way. It’s sort of like going to Paris and finding out that the food police were in every restaurant and issued a dictum that you can’t cook with butter.