A thousand years ago.  It started at Tuesdays @ 9 at Naked Angels (a reading series in New York).  I was host of the series at the time and the theme of the evening (I gave themes for writers occasionally) was “mommy”.  The first scene of the play was the scene I wrote for this evening.  It was read by Michael Leydon Campbell – whom I barely knew at the time, but who would play Bob in the biggest production in L.A. and in the film.  The brother role was read by the writer Kenny Lonergan.

 

I was working at a law firm at the time (word processing) and I went to lunch at some fast food dive on Fifth Avenue near 42^nd Street.  I was eating alone, watching people.  And I saw two men in cheap suits sitting with sandwiches in front of them.  Neither was eating, they both were staring at their sandwiches, looking very down.  For some reason, I thought they were brothers, so I imagined what they were talking about that would bum them out and… I figured being fired by your Mom was pretty bad news so…

 

Well, my mother is a school teacher and my dad a mechanical engineer.  Both alive, and I get along with them both fantastically.  You’ve met them.  They’re sweet, Indiana parents.  But I was a drinker, had a bad first marriage, and I was arrogant and lost.  And that part is the emotional truth of the piece.  The actual events are mostly made up.  Bob’s “patter” and the job was inspired by a mattress salesman who I met with my friend (writer) Andy Yerkes.  After we left the guy, who talked and talked big, I said to Andy, “That guy is an actual loser, like, someone who as really lost.”  Which I later put in the play.  The story of Bob’s father dying, additionally, is true.  My father’s father – Chester Carlisle – died in exactly that way, and my dad didn’t know the details until he was almost sixty.  I was there when he heard about it.  It was a very emotional situation, especially for a couple of Midwestern men, and that hit me.

 

I think that’s a good interpretation.  I’m not big on what something “means” – I feel like that’s more the role of the audience or reader.  At least, I don’t think about what a piece ultimately means when I’m writing it.  Maybe some in rewriting, which is usually when I start to understand what it is I’m writing “about”.  For me, I think the thing about the human condition that is interesting is our on-going desire to be included.  To feel like we’re on the inside looking out, not the other way around.  And I think Bob has found himself very much on the outside, and he’s trying to find his way back in.  I’m also drawn to people who are in between the stages of what they consider their “real lives”, but most of the time, our lives are actually made up of in-between moments.

 

 

Most of the jobs I had before I started making money as a writer scraped at my soul.  I wish I could be happy doing 9 to 5, I do.  But… it’s not my nature.  As for not wanting to lose a job… I had one job like that, which I really clung to, as a writer.  I made good money, and I lived in fear of losing the job, and in the end, it was miserable.  So I try to at least pretend I’m all Buddhist about things and not “cling” to anything.

 

Well, the play (as you can see) only has four characters.  So I had to write “outward”.  I had to create three-dimensional versions of people only seen through Bob’s lens in the play.  Also, the play (like most plays) is very talky-talk.  So I had to shift to action.  Show, not tell, and so forth.  My wife, Sonya Rokes, was a big help in that she’s a great editor and was very gentle about pointing out places where action should replace words.  Beyond that… it’s kind of a blur. 

The film came together very quickly, so I had a few weeks to cut about 30 pages and add characters and generally make it a film story.

 

I guess I was hoping to make THEM the therapist.  I wrote an early version with a character on stage, but it wasn’t as dramatically interesting.  I wrote a version of the screenplay where you didn’t see her, and it seemed silly, staged.  I hoped people would see that they were the confidant in the exchange.  And perhaps project the face of their own shrink into the mix.

 

Well, I was studying in undergraduate school to be an actor and it wasn’t enough for my enormous ego.  I wanted to create rather than interpret.  I took a class with a visiting artist named Lynn Siefert, who’s a great writer, and she encouraged me to keep at it.  I also had a great couple of classes with playwright Don Nigro, who was very encouraging.  So I kept at it, and ended up at NYU’s Dramatic Writing Program and here we are.

 

I guess I was influenced by the usual writers of my age cohort – Mamet, Landford Wilson, Sam Shepard, Wendy Wasserstein.  But I think I was more influenced by film writers, oddly enough, like the Coen Brothers and Woody Allen.  Their darkly comic and incisive view of people really resonated with me.  And even more than plays or films, I am a reader of novels.  I find Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem very inspiring and influential on me today.

 

Oy.  Um.  Oy.  History, maybe, something with history, but that would just be writing again, ultimately.  I used to want to be a psychologist, which is not dissimilar to writing, but really I just wanted to be Bob Newhart.  Boy, that’s tough.  Because I can’t imagine myself in any other life, really.  I guess the answer would be “living on a trust fund.”