TV comedy legend Norman Lear keeps pushing all the right buttons.
Documentary delves into life and times of TV comedy legend
In an election year, especially this election year, a ridiculous amount of crazy stuff happens in three months.
Think back to May 17, 2016, all those outrages and new-lows ago. That was the night the Republican presidential contender (and now, the party’s nominee) sat down for a flattering chat with Fox News star Megyn Kelly, and the softballs commenced, and everybody came out smelling like artificial roses, i.e., like nothing at all.
Norman Lear, the TV comedy legend, the creator of “All in the Family” and so much more, missed that interview. He TiVo’d it back home in Brentwood, the tony L.A. neighborhood where he lives, when he’s not in New York visiting one wing of his family, or on the road.
That night in May he was in Chicago promoting the new documentary “Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You,” a genial, engaging chronicle of Lear’s life thus far, from “Jesus Camp” co-directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. The Lear film premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival and has been touring the festival circuit all year. It plays at 14 Pews this Saturday and is scheduled to air on the PBS “American Masters” series this fall, followed by Netflix availability after that.
In his heyday, no one was bigger, or a bigger buttonpusher, than Lear. Since our interview, the famously liberal creator of “All in the Family,” “Maude,” “The Jeffersons,” “Good Times,” “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and the writer of such acidic, puckery screen comedies as “Divorce American Style” and “Cold Turkey” celebrated his 94th birthday.
At the Sundance screening, Lear told me, “I had 16, 18 family members, and I really didn’t see it, if you know what I mean.” Enough of Lear’s complicated, starry, turbulent life — three marriages, six kids, career highs and lows, even a case of plagiarism regarding an oft-repeated anecdote allegedly about his own family but borrowed from someone else’s — make it into the picture to cause some discomfort for its subject. Yet the tone of “Just Another Version of You,” according to Ewing, is that of “a love letter, not a valentine.” And Lear admires the results.
The documentary serves as an unofficial companion piece to Lear’s own memoir, “Even This I Get to Experience,” published two years ago. Since that publication, Lear has been all over the place, in support of the book and now the film. “It felt great to write it. This whole new life started. It was, I don’t know … it was great to realize people wanted to hear from me.”
His career is a great one, both in breadth and impact. He started humbly, writing sketches and monologues in the early days of live television.
For the “Colgate Comedy Hour” he contributed work for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, the latter maniacally devoted to hijacking the scene at hand. From the start, Lear (a World War II veteran and the son of a man who did jail time for selling fake bonds during the Depression) had a nose for topical humor and just how far to push a controversial subject, which was typically a little over the line for whoever was paying for the show itself.
He recalled one Colgate sketch in particular, “the one where we had Dean running a movie theater nobody was in, because everybody was home watching television. Marilyn Maxwell, the singer, just beautiful, was the guest star, and she played the usherette and cashier. Dean was the manager, and they were trying to get someone, anyone, into the theater.” Jerry, bouncing a basketball, played the would-be customer.
Lear explained: “Now, the motion picture industry, the studios, had a big campaign at the time: ‘Movies Are Better Than Ever!’ with marquees everywhere. It was their way of fighting off television and holding onto their audience. We were satirizing that campaign with this sketch. I was upset because Jerry Lewis went off script and carried on, but the audience roared, and the show was a giant hit. Anyway. The motion picture exhibitors forced Dean and Jerry to take out an ad of apology for that sketch. Only later did I realize that we were always after something serious, or potentially controversial, whatever the show, whatever the piece of comedy.”
In those days, especially, Lear coped with writer’s block, “I remember on ‘The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show’ in the late ’50s, I’d write the opening monologue, three and a half pages long, if that. It was due Monday morning for a table reading. And sometimes I was on the phone at 1 o’clock in the morning with a shrink. … Whatever he told me, it got me through it, and I’d go to bed around 4, having written what everybody roared at around the table a few hours later. It’s not hard to talk about it now, but it was so hard to live it.”
He went on: “I don’t know what got me through it. Actually, I do. I remember this: In somebody’s office, a therapist said to me, ‘You’re sitting at your typewriter, you got a million ideas … think about this instead. There’s 50 people in a room with one small door. Somebody yells “Fire!” Everybody runs to the door, but they can’t all get out. It’s chaos. You have to think of your ideas the same way. Let ’em all out the door, and organize them later.’ So I started to dictate everything I wrote into a machine, and then organize it, and leave (the script) next to my telephone, and go to bed. My secretary typed it up when she got in at 9.”
This being 2016 in America, the subject of Donald Trump came up in our conversation. “It was easier to think this some months ago,” he said. “But I still think it: Trump is the middle finger of the American right hand. I’m not down on the American people, or even the people voting for Trump, but clearly we don’t do the work to understand them. If we did, we’d find out just how much we’ve let them down.”
He asked me if I’ve seen “Hamilton,” the musical. I said I hoped to see it when the Chicago production opens this fall. “Oh, my God. Are you in for a treat! That and ‘The Book of Mormon’ are two of the great gifts of sanity we have.”
A few more opinions, a few more laughs, a story about weekends in Palm Springs with Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner and Larry Gelbart and Dom DeLuise. Then our time was up. I thanked him for it.
“I took exactly as much time of yours,” he said, smiling. “So we’re even.”