Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (11 page)

Judd:
How much Disney Channel are your kids making you watch?

Eddie:
I don’t want to say anything, you know, because there are certain good things about Disney.

Judd:
Yes.

Eddie:
But that channel is not one of them. I challenge you to find a single character, if not just even a single line in a half-hour show, that has anything of value and that isn’t said with an attitude other than, you know, being snarky.

Judd:
Yeah.

Eddie:
And it rubs off, you know. It’s a bad influence. I probably sound like my parents. I mean, I was listening to Country Joe and the Fish and George Carlin and, you know, Jimi Hendrix and all of that. We were pretty excited about this stuff.

Judd:
You never went with the Shaun Cassidy records?

Eddie:
Mmm, no.

Judd:
No Partridge Family period?

Eddie:
No. But Michael Jackson? Yeah.

Judd:
I read somewhere that you could sing like Michael Jackson for a short period, a short prepubescent period.

Eddie:
He’s an amazing singer.

Judd:
Oh, absolutely.

Eddie:
I had this period in Chicago where we lived with some foster brothers—it was like a home for boys kind of thing—and there was a basement and we had a lot of Motown records, Sly and the Family Stone and
James Brown, and we had kids of all races and all—it was a really good upbringing in that way. It made you grow up and toughen up a little bit, even though I was only like seven or eight. But man, Michael Jackson was an anomaly. The stuff coming off of that record player. That wasn’t kitsch. He could really sing.

Judd:
I used to watch the Jacksons’ variety show.

Eddie:
That was after the cartoon and all that, right?

Judd:
Yeah, the cartoon. What was the animal he had in the cartoon? Did he have a mouse or—

Eddie:
They had a snake and two mice. I show my kids that thing.

Judd:
You have those shows on video?

Eddie:
No, sixteen-millimeter film. We like to watch films on the wall.

Judd:
Oh, wow.

Eddie:
It’s a part of their Amish upbringing.

This interview took place at the Pearl Jam offices and rehearsal space.

I was given the chance to guest-edit the comedy issue of
Vanity Fair
a few years ago, and one of the first articles I assigned was an oral history of
Freaks and Geeks.
Why? Well, beyond blatant self-promotion, I figured: I’ve been so fortunate to work with a lot of talented people and we’ve done a lot of things I am proud of, but at the end of the day,
Freaks and Geeks
was our
Revolver.
That show was the moment where I think we got it right, and I don’t say that in a cocky way, because really, it wasn’t me. It was the success of a hundred people simultaneously. It was our magical moment, and this is the story of how it went down. If it never happens again, I’m okay with that. At least it happened once.

Judd Apatow:
I first met Paul [Feig] in the mid-eighties, hanging around “the Ranch,” this incredibly cheap house a bunch of comedians rented really deep in the boonies in the San Fernando Valley. It was all these guys who had come out to L.A. from the Midwest, and all they did was smoke cigarettes and watch infomercials. I also used to see Paul in comedy clubs and thought he was really funny.

Paul Feig:
We would go out and do our stand-up shows and reconvene at the Ranch and play poker and drink coffee until the sun came up. That
was our routine every night for years. Judd was younger than everyone else—he was really considered to be just a kid. At the same time, he was booking his own stand-up night at some club, working for Comic Relief. I would say, “This guy is really smart. Everybody should be nice to him because he could be running the town someday.” He was the most mature seventeen-year-old I’d ever met in my life.

Judd:
By the late nineties, Paul’s acting career wasn’t going anywhere, so he started trying to write. One day I bumped into him and said, “If you have any ideas for TV, let me know.” I didn’t think he would hand me a finished script a few months later, and I certainly didn’t expect it to be the best thing I have ever worked on. That just
never
happens.

Paul Feig:
I had just come off of a year of trying to promote this movie I’d written, directed, produced, and paid for, and I had lost a good-paying acting job before that on
Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.
Everything had kind of hit the rocks; I was really at my lowest point. But I’d always wanted to write a high school show. I’d seen so many where it was like,
Who
are
these people
? I felt like they weren’t honest at all. I kicked the thing out really fast—I think it had just been gestating for so long in my brain—cleaned it up and gave it to my wife, and she told me to send it to Judd. He called about twelve hours after I sent him the script. He was like, “I love this. I’m going to have DreamWorks buy it.” It was that moment when you go,
Wow, my life’s just changed.

Dan McDermott (
then head of DreamWorks Television
):
Within twenty-four hours, I’d say, we got a pass from Fox, from CBS, from ABC. A day or two later, we heard from Shelley McCrory, a development exec at NBC. She said, “If we don’t make this show, I’m quitting the television business.” Scott Sassa had come in as president of NBC West Coast, and Scott wasn’t a content guy [he was previously in charge of NBC’s owned-and-operated stations], so he was deferring to his people more than other network heads do.

Scott Sassa:
Networks then programmed towards something called “least objectionable programming,” which meant the show that would suck the least so people wouldn’t change the channel.
Freaks and Geeks
wasn’t one of those least objectionable shows.

Paul Feig:
We went over to NBC, and I remember feeling that “new person in the industry” kind of indignation, like, “If they want to change this at all, I’m not going to do the show.” So I start to make that speech and Shelley goes, “Don’t change a thing.” It was like,
This is not at all what I’ve always heard network development is like.

Dan McDermott:
Judd and Paul said, “We want to try to cast real kids—we don’t want to cast TV kids.” And, again, Scott basically said, “Sounds good to me!”

Paul Feig:
My friends and I weren’t popular in high school, we weren’t dating all the time, and we were just trying to get through our lives. It was important to me to show that side. I wanted to leave a chronicle—to make people who had gone through it laugh, but also as a primer for kids going in, to say, “Here’s what you can expect. It’s horrifying but all you should really care about is getting through it. Get your friends, have your support group. And learn to be able to laugh at it.”

Judd:
The pilot had a very daring existential idea, which was that a young, really smart girl sits with her dying grandmother and asks her if she sees “the light,” and her grandma says no. And all the rules go out the window. The girl decides to have a more experimental high school experience, because she doesn’t know if she believes anymore. I was always surprised that the network didn’t notice that that’s what our pilot was about.

Paul Feig:
I also really wanted the show to be about the fear of sex. I got tired of every teenager being portrayed as horny and completely cool with sex, because that was not my experience.

Judd:
Paul felt like most kids are not trying to get sex, but trying to avoid that moment. You could split them into kids who are constantly trying to get older and kids that are desperately trying to hold on to their immaturity.

Paul Feig:
First day of prep, we get into the office, and Judd’s like, “Let’s tear the script apart.” And I said, “What do you mean? They don’t want us to.” And he said, “Yeah, I know, but let’s see if we can make it better.” And it was this stripping away of the old Paul Feig, who was a complete control freak, who wouldn’t let people change a word of anything he wrote.

Judd:
Paul showed up when we started production with this bible he’d written about the show, hundreds of pages long, with every character in detail—what they wore, their favorite songs. I asked him to write another few episodes to explore the world, and he banged out two more. We took a lot of moments from them and put them into the pilot.

(Jake Kasdan, twenty-four, is hired to direct the pilot; he will stick around for the run of the series, directing nearly a third of the episodes and helping edit the rest.)

Judd:
Jake and I had the same agent, so I was always hearing a lot about this amazing young director. He had made a detective movie called
Zero Effect
, which, for some reason, I didn’t bother to watch until the day after I hired him. Thank God it turned out to be good.

(Casting begins.)

Judd:
In Paul’s pilot, he really understood the geeks, but you could tell he didn’t hang out with the freaks because it wasn’t as specific. So I said we should just try to cast unique characters and rewrite the pilot to their personalities.

Allison Jones (
casting director and winner of the show’s one Emmy
):
I had never had any experience like that before—inventing while casting. It had always been about trying to fit the person to read the lines correctly.

Justin Falvey (
DreamWorks development executive
):
From the moment the actor walks into what is usually the sterile, anxiety-ridden room of casting, Judd’s applauding and everybody’s got great energy. Judd and Paul created a carnival atmosphere.

(Linda Cardellini, then twenty-three, is cast in the lead as sixteen-year-old Lindsay Weir.)

Linda Cardellini:
Here’s this girl [Lindsay] who desperately wants to be away from her parents and what they know her as, but at the same time truly does not want to disappoint or rebel against them and really loves them. It was a more interesting approach than all the other teenagers I was reading, who just hated their parents.

Paul Feig:
Lindsay was the only character not based on somebody I knew. But Linda was the exact person I had in my head. When she walked in, it was just, like, “She’s alive!”

Jake Kasdan:
We used to say in editing that you could always cut to Linda and she’s doing the right thing.

(After a long search, John Francis Daley, thirteen, gets the role of Lindsay’s younger brother, Sam.)

John Francis Daley:
I was really sick when I auditioned. And I think that helped me ultimately, because it let me put my guard down. I was just focused on not throwing up.

Linda Cardellini:
John was so natural. One day on the set I was sitting thinking about my part, and John was shoving his spaghetti in his mouth that we were supposed to eat in the dinner scene, going, “It’s so great! All we have to do is act! It’s, like, the easiest job in the world.” I thought,
My God, he totally has it right.

(James Franco, twenty, is cast as freak Daniel Desario, a slightly goofy bad boy.)

Jake Kasdan:
The first impression was “This guy’s going to be an enormous movie star. We should grab him immediately.”

Judd:
We didn’t think of him as handsome. We thought his mouth was too big for his face and he seemed perfect to be a small-town cool guy who wasn’t as cool as he thought he was. When all the women in our office started talking about how gorgeous he was, me and Feig started laughing because we just didn’t see it.

John Francis Daley:
Franco went to Michigan for two weeks to get into character, and we were joking that he lived under an overpass for a few nights. He was always the one that had a Camus novel, heavily dog-eared, and his car was so full of junk that it looked like he lived out of it.

James Franco:
I knew that Paul had grown up just outside of Detroit, and I found his high school. I ran into his audio/video teacher, who showed me where Paul used to sit in the AV room. I saw all the kids at summer
school, and there was this guy the teacher pointed out to me, this kind of rough-around-the-edges-looking kid. He had a kind face, but he looked like he’d been in a little bit of trouble. And I remember thinking,
Ah, there’s Daniel.

(Jason Segel, nineteen, is cast as pothead drummer Nick Andopolis.)

Jake Kasdan:
The actors would walk in and we’d be like, “Hey, how’s it going?” A little casual kibitzing to get some sense of who this person is. Jason walked in, and he said, “I’d like to just get into this, if I could.” And we were like, “Let’s do it!” and he was just hilarious and endlessly charismatic. Judd connected to him immediately and deeply.

Judd:
I loved writing for Jason. That’s what
I
felt like in high school. I felt goofy and ambitious and not sure if I had any talent, and I would be in love with these women and didn’t actually know if they liked me that much. I’d never know if I was being charming or a stalker. Jason really captured that desperation.

(Seth Rogen, sixteen, who will play acerbic freak Ken Miller, is found on a casting trip to Vancouver.)

Judd:
Everything he said made us laugh. The smart, sweet, grounded person we now know him to be seemed impossible back then. He seemed like a mad, troublemaking Canadian lunatic who was quiet and angry and might kill you.

Seth Rogen:
At the time, I kind of had a chip on my shoulder, you know, because I hadn’t gotten any girls to sleep with me yet. I was incredibly angry and repressed, and I think they saw me as this kind of weird, sarcastic guy and started writing towards that. But then they got to know me and saw me as a nice guy, and that revealed itself as the show progressed.

J. Elvis Weinstein (
writer, “Noshing and Moshing”; co-writer, “Beers and Weirs”
):
It was clear that Judd had a mission to make this kid a star. There were some kids that Judd thought were immensely special and was going to beat that into them until they believed it.

(Busy Philipps, nineteen, is cast as Daniel’s tough blond girlfriend, Kim Kelly—initially Lindsay’s antagonist, but eventually a friend.)

Seth Rogen:
Busy scared me at first. She’s just kind of intimidating. She’s a little loud and she’s kind of physical. She’ll punch you and smack you if she doesn’t like what you did, as an exclamation.

Busy Philipps:
I ran into Linda, who I knew peripherally. And she said, “Hey, are you going to do that thing? You have to do it—it’d be so fun to do together.” So I decided, against my agent’s better judgment, to do what essentially at the beginning was a guest-starring role.

(Martin Starr, sixteen, is cast as Sam’s friend Bill Haverchuck. Gangly, shuffling, bespectacled, he is the most outwardly strange and inwardly deep of the central geeks.)

Paul Feig:
You’re seeing hundreds of kids, so every person you see you’re like,
Yeah, he could do it.
But then you have these moments when somebody walks in and it’s like,
Okay, everyone else is out of my head now.

Martin Starr:
I probably more than anything was focused on what came after that audition in my life. Like going to get food or going to a friend’s house. My life wasn’t focused entirely on whatever this audition was.

Jake Kasdan:
The blank stare and the way Martin’s doing those affects, mouth hanging open—it’s just this incredibly subtle, inspired comic character. We figured out how to write to it and play to it, but it was not on the page initially and it wasn’t him playing himself, either. He could make you cry laughing by doing almost nothing. Then it turned out he could do anything.

Thomas F. Wilson (
actor, “Coach Fredricks”
):
The slightly sad seriousness with which Martin approached his role, to me, is the fulcrum of the whole show. It was really acting of a very high order.

Debra McGuire (
costume designer
):
That first fitting, Martin went into the dressing room and every change was like twenty minutes. I’d knock on the door: “You okay in there?” And to this day I don’t know if he was busting my chops or if it was for real.