Television
HBO’S Robin Williams documentary attempts to capture his explosive talent. There’s probably no bottle big enough, but this comes pretty close
A Robin Williams Documentary
on june 11, 2004, billy crystal was watching Ronald Reagan’s funeral on TV. His phone rang.
“Bill,” the voice on the other end said. “Hi. It’s Ron Reagan.” It sounded just like the 40th president—the friendly voice, the folksy affect. “I wanted to tell you that I’m in heaven now. I’m having a wonderful time.” Crystal played along: “Oh, really? What’s heaven like?” “Well,” the voice replied, “it’s a lot hotter than I thought it would be.”
Crystal tells this story in the new HBO documentary Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, about one of the many prank calls from his longtime friend. It was classic Williams: a riotous gag from a man with an insatiable desire to make people laugh. Williams took his life on August 11, 2014, and the new film, by director Marina Zenovich, is a reminder of just how singular his talent was.
The documentary takes its ambiguously naughty title from an early Williams routine, a typically manic bit in which he mimics the panicky brain of a comedian struggling to land a joke. He winds up flailing around in distress, like a shipwrecked sea captain: “Mayday! Mayday!” The subtext: For Williams, landing a joke was a function of survival. “That laugh is a drug,” Crystal says in the film, and “really hard to replace with anything else.”
Williams made comedy out of his battles with alcohol and drug addiction, which began during his stand-up years in ’70s San Francisco. After his friend John Belushi fatally overdosed in 1982, “it sobered the shit out of me,” Williams says in the film. The two had been partying together just hours before. (In a 1992 interview with Lawrence Grobel for Playboy— audio that Zenovich tracked down for the
film—williams describes his ’80s drug use as a form of madness: “It was kind of like my head was in a bell jar.”)
He would relapse with drinking again and again, and Zenovich— whose 2013 documentary, Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic, captured another troubled and radical comic— has a theory. “Robin had to have that little moment of connection with everyone. I think that got exhausting.”
The film “doesn’t focus on this end,” his death, Zenovich says. Nor does it try to explain what caused it. Rather, it captures the breadth of his rubberfaced, rapid-fire, man-child comedy, with its persistent compassion and vulnerability. Judd Apatow once said there was no such thing as “a Robin Williams rip-off,” and Zenovich does a good job of deconstructing a talent described more than once as otherworldly. (It’s fitting that Williams became a superstar playing an alien on the ABC sitcom Mork & Mindy.)
His improvisational skills were peerless. A clip from his 1986 stand-up special at the Metropolitan Opera House, considered to be the pinnacle of his live comedy, shows a hilarious riff on the virtues of a female president (frighteningly relevant in 2018). His manager reveals that it was largely unrehearsed.
Just before that gig, Williams appeared on the cover of this magazine. Photojournalist Arthur Grace (who appears in the film) went on tour with him, then became his lifelong friend and personal photographer. “He thought of funny things faster than anybody I’ve ever met in my life,” Grace tells Newsweek 32 years later. But, he adds, “you had to understand when he wanted to be quiet.”
Other insights come courtesy of family, comedy friends (Crystal, Steve Martin, Whoopi Goldberg, David Letterman) and Williams himself—footage and audio Zenovich spliced together from talk show appearances, raw footage and reporters’ tapes, giving the spooky impression that he is narrating his own story. There’s also rare archival footage of early stand-up and clips from his films— 30-plus years of credits that include the comedy blockbuster Mrs. Doubtfire (he is arguably the funniest man to nail both raunchy stand-up and family-friendly movie roles), and the later dramas that would earn him four Academy Award nominations (he won for 1997’s Good Will Hunting).
One of the film’s sadder moments
“He thought of funny things faster than anybody I’ve ever met in my life.”
involves his divorce from first wife Valerie Velardi, which the media grossly sensationalized. A People magazine cover accused Williams of leaving her for their son’s nanny (his soon-to-be second wife, Marsha Garces). In fact, Velardi and Williams had mutually separated well before he got involved with Garces. There’s no trace of bitterness from Velardi, who appears in the film, as does their son, Zak. (Garces and third wife Susan Schneider declined to participate, says Zenovich: “I think for them it was too soon.”)
Towards the end of the documentary, Crystal recalls a poignant final encounter with Williams, when he revealed he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and started to cry. “I never heard Robin be afraid, except that moment.”
His death prompted an extraordinary outpouring of grief and admiration, which Zenovich felt keenly at the documentary’s Sundance Film Festival premiere in January. “I knew people loved him, but I didn’t know how much,” she says. “Everybody felt like he belonged to them.”