Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hi, I'm Malcolm Gladwell, just kidding. It's Steve Martin.
Speaker 1: But like Malcolm, I love audiobook so much so that
Speaker 1: I wanted to make one myself. My audio original, recorded
Speaker 1: with New Yorker writer and my longtime friend Adam Gopnik.
Speaker 1: In it, you'll hear a series of conversations about my
Speaker 1: career and creative life, starting with magic. Get your copy
Speaker 1: of So Many Steve's Afternoons with Steve Martin at Audible.
Speaker 1: By the way, it's a new law now I have
Speaker 1: to do this. I don't like to, but it is
Speaker 1: my law. All comedians must make a financial disclosure.
Speaker 2: This is a clip from Steve's second album, which was
Speaker 2: released in nineteen seventy eight and was called A Wild
Speaker 2: and Crazy Guy.
Speaker 1: Then I figured out a potential concert income. If you
Speaker 1: fill a three thousand seat haul at three dollars per ticket,
Speaker 1: the grosses nine thousand dollars. If you fill a three
Speaker 1: thousand seat hall at seven to fifty per ticket, the
Speaker 1: gross is twenty two five hundred dollars. And just for fun,
Speaker 1: I figure out if you fill a three thousand seat
Speaker 1: haul at eight hundred dollars, a ticket grosses two million.
Speaker 1: Four hundred thousand dollars and this is what I'm shooting
Speaker 1: for one show.
Speaker 2: Goodbye what you've just heard, suit Jess. What was happening
Speaker 2: to Steve? He went from working in small clubs where
Speaker 2: he could achieve a happy fulfillment of his absurdist manifesto
Speaker 2: with its roots in Vichtenstein's particularism, in Lewis Carroll's logic
Speaker 2: and all the rest, to becoming a kind of rock
Speaker 2: star of comedy in many ways, the first rock star
Speaker 2: of comedy. That was a doubly uncomfortable position for him
Speaker 2: to find himself in, first, because that kind of fame
Speaker 2: is always alienating whomever it falls on, and because Steve's
Speaker 2: natural insularity and somewhat stifled emotions left him doubly alone
Speaker 2: at a time when his fame was peaking.
Speaker 1: The strangest thing for me was in my latter days
Speaker 1: of stand up. It was the least creative I have
Speaker 1: ever been.
Speaker 2: At the same time you were playing stadium.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, to come up with something new and try
Speaker 1: to work it in. There was no vehicle for it
Speaker 1: to get it in, to try it, to try a
Speaker 1: little thing. When you're in a club, you could try
Speaker 1: something to move on and going and change the subody.
Speaker 1: But there every word was amplified on a mic. It
Speaker 1: had to be solid, had to be heard, had to
Speaker 1: be delivered.
Speaker 2: You were really at the end. They're doing rock concerts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was. Yeah. If I had under stood that,
Speaker 1: I would have been better off, because I kept thinking,
Speaker 1: I'm doing a comedy show, you know, I want them
Speaker 1: to laugh, not cheer. Right, I was just completely at
Speaker 1: a dead end.
Speaker 2: Chapter three movie star. Steve's career as an actor in
Speaker 2: the movies took three very distinct and different paths. I
Speaker 2: guess I'd been aware of them over the years, but
Speaker 2: becoming closer to Steve in the course of these conversations
Speaker 2: gave me a different kind of insight into them. The
Speaker 2: first path involved the movies he made while he was
Speaker 2: still a working comedian, where he took that absurdist data persona,
Speaker 2: the one that had made him famous on stage, and
Speaker 2: he took it to the screen in The Jerk, his
Speaker 2: first film, It's all about the rise of a naive
Speaker 2: idiot to wealth and fame. The new Phone got there,
Speaker 2: the new phone Book there.
Speaker 1: I wish I could get that excited about Fuck are
Speaker 1: you kidding?
Speaker 2: Pillions of people look at this book every day.
Speaker 1: This is the kind of spontaneous publicity, your name in
Speaker 1: print that makes people I'm in print.
Speaker 2: That movie set the tone for wonderfully funny and I
Speaker 2: think original films like Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and
Speaker 2: The Man with Two Brains. In the late eighties, Steve
Speaker 2: worked with one of the most successful directors of the
Speaker 2: entire late twentieth century, John Hughes. Their collaboration, the movie Planes,
Speaker 2: Trains and Automobiles still delights families year in and out,
Speaker 2: and it stands as one of the few Thanksgiving movies.
Speaker 2: In the Cannon, Steve plays a wonderful grump trying to
Speaker 2: get home for the holiday. His unwanted companion in this
Speaker 2: adventure is played by the late and incomparable John Candy.
Speaker 1: You're not a very tolerant person. Held you like a
Speaker 1: mouthful of teeth.
Speaker 2: But to me, this middle period of Steve's film career
Speaker 2: is best defined by his attempts to create peronal comedies,
Speaker 2: and that effort produced what, to my mind were by
Speaker 2: far the two best films he ever made, Roxanne and
Speaker 2: La Story, both of them not coincidentally with scripts written
Speaker 2: by Steve.
Speaker 1: You heard me, Big nose, flat faced, flat nosed, flat food, Weekend.
Speaker 2: Winter, and then finally the third actdoor path of his
Speaker 2: movie career involved some giant, obviously commercial and blockbuster films,
Speaker 2: the Father of the Bride series and then the Cheaper
Speaker 2: by the Dozen series.
Speaker 1: Do You Night, mister Banks?
Speaker 2: Oh, you can call him George or Dad.
Speaker 1: George will be fine.
Speaker 2: I should add at once that I do not mean
Speaker 2: to condescend to those films. They gave my kids a
Speaker 2: huge delight when they were younger, but they were clearly
Speaker 2: not the works of art that Roxanne and La Story
Speaker 2: aspired to be. And I've always been puzzled, intrigued by
Speaker 2: Steve's reluctance or inability to go forward in the movies
Speaker 2: in that very personal and poetic direction. It's one of
Speaker 2: the things I most want to talk to him about today.
Speaker 1: Well, when I first started in movies, I had one vision,
Speaker 1: which was the jerk.
Speaker 2: You another bottle of.
Speaker 1: Yes, but no more nineteen sixty six, let's blurge, bring
Speaker 1: us some fresh wine, the precious you've got this year's
Speaker 1: no more.
Speaker 2: Of this old stuff, we monsieur.
Speaker 1: He doesn't realize he's dealing with sophisticated people here, its
Speaker 1: vision was laughs, jokes, and the subsequent movies were last jokes.
Speaker 1: That's what I wanted to last joke. But it wasn't
Speaker 1: the vision of a movie. It's a vision of something else,
Speaker 1: of just putting comedy on screen. And I'm you know,
Speaker 1: I'm learning how to act. And I remember saying, you know,
Speaker 1: I think, oh, this is gonna be an easy transition.
Speaker 1: I've done a million things on stage, you know, I've
Speaker 1: done sketches, I've done Saturday Night Live, I've done. This
Speaker 1: is going to be a natural. And then the first
Speaker 1: thing has to do is sit down with the glass
Speaker 1: in your hand and put it on a table.
Speaker 2: That's the shot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, so do I sit first and then
Speaker 1: put the glass over it? Or do I put it
Speaker 1: down as I'm putting the day? And really you realize,
Speaker 1: oh my god, this is this is more complex than
Speaker 1: I thought.
Speaker 2: And it doesn't have a lot to do with being
Speaker 2: a performer on stage, right.
Speaker 1: No, it's just something else. And there's all the mechanics,
Speaker 1: which I love, mechanics of not putting the glass down
Speaker 1: while someone else is talking because you hear a clunk
Speaker 1: on their line and then they have to loop it.
Speaker 1: But my goal make a lot of movies. And here's
Speaker 1: the reason. In order to get five good movies, you
Speaker 1: have to make forty because they're just unwieldy. You can't perfect.
Speaker 1: I couldn't perfect a movie from the get go. You
Speaker 1: can't say this is going to be wonderful. I thought
Speaker 1: every movie was going to be wonderful. Are you awake good?
Speaker 1: It's something I want to say that's always been very
Speaker 1: difficult for me to say. I slid the sheet, the sheet,
Speaker 1: I slid, and on the slitted sheet, I sit now.
Speaker 2: Steve's first movie, The Jerk, was directed by Carl Reiner,
Speaker 2: an American comic master of a significantly older generation than Steve's.
Speaker 2: Carl Reiner had first become famous in the nineteen fifties
Speaker 2: as a kind of all purpose straight man on the
Speaker 2: legendary Sid Caesar Your Show of Shows. He could be
Speaker 2: seen interrogating Sid's mad German professors, and then he became
Speaker 2: even more famous in the nineteen sixties as mel Brooks
Speaker 2: straight man on those beautiful, astounding two thousand year old
Speaker 2: Man records. In two thousand years the greatest thing mankind
Speaker 2: ever devised that I think, in my humble opinion, it's
Speaker 2: Sarahan Rapper. You equate this with Man's discovery of space.
Speaker 2: That was good, that was good. But Carl Reiner was
Speaker 2: far more comic mench and master than just a straight man.
Speaker 2: He had everyone agreed an absolute knowledge of how to
Speaker 2: set off a comic riff. He was universally respected for
Speaker 2: his unique mix of comedy, savvy and personal generosity, all
Speaker 2: unwrapped in a deep well of show business knowledge.
Speaker 1: Carl Reiner, he told me this. He said, I think
Speaker 1: it's important to have refrigerator laughs. And I said, what's
Speaker 1: a refrigerator laugh? He says, well, you see the movie.
Speaker 1: Now you're home and you're getting something out of your refrigerator.
Speaker 2: And that's when you laugh at it when you remember it, when.
Speaker 1: You remember it. And I've always found that, you know.
Speaker 1: Mike told me once he said, I always think we
Speaker 1: should have one thing in our movies where we say,
Speaker 1: can we do that?
Speaker 2: Mike is Mike Nichols, the immensely accomplished director behind the
Speaker 2: Graduate and Carnal Knowledge and many other classics.
Speaker 1: I have found over time that those little moments when
Speaker 1: you're thinking should be this is not very clear that
Speaker 1: those are the ones that people pick out and remember,
Speaker 1: like in Rock Sane, it wasn't scripted, but it was
Speaker 1: starting to be dusk and I asked the director. I said, uh,
Speaker 1: I said, I have an idea. There was a newspaper wreck,
Speaker 1: and so I went over to it was just one shot.
Speaker 1: I went over to it, put the quarter in, pulled
Speaker 1: out the newspaper, started to walk away, read the headline,
Speaker 1: started screaming. Went back to the thing, put another quarter in,
Speaker 1: and through the newspaper, getting closed it.
Speaker 2: And that was improvised. On the it was improvised.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't even tell him what I was going
Speaker 1: to do.