Then I had a brilliant idea. I’d just seen a movie called They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? with a guy who was supposed to be a comic, and he was brilliant, and he won the Academy Award. Gig Young, who later went crazy, shot himself, shot his young wife.
I asked him to do it, and he said fine. We got on the set. We rehearsed for a week or two. We’re shooting his first scene. He’s upside down in the jail. I say action. The black sheriff comes over, Cleavon Little. Cleavon says, “Are we awake?” and he says, “Are we black?” Then he starts spitting a little green stuff, and I said to my assistant director, “This fucking guy is incredible. Look, he’s playing a recovered alcoholic. Look!”
Then it became The Exorcist. He never stopped. He’s spewing green stuff all over Cleavon, all over the jail, just a lot of green stuff is spewing. He was having the DTs or something. He had cleaned up for one day to come in and do the part, and they took him away in an ambulance, and I was crushed.
Then I go right to the phone. As soon as the ambulance took him away, I went to my office, said, “Oh my God,” and I called Gene Wilder. I told him what happened. He was hysterical. He said, “You’re kidding!” I said, “No, I thought I was getting Academy Award acting, and I was just getting green vomit!”
Gene said, “All right. Relax.” I was half crying, half laughing. Gene Wilder says, “I’ll see you at noon tomorrow.” He was in New York, and he flew out.
He was the only one to do it. What a bounce. I got Gene Wilder to play the part, my buddy and my soul mate, and the true genius of my career.
I lucked out.
TOM KENNY—COMEDIAN, ACTOR
I had done a show called Rocko’s Modern Life in the early 1990s. That was my first cartoon. Steve Hillenburg, who created SpongeBob later, was artistic director on that show.
A couple years later when it came time for him to pitch his own animated show, he remembered me well, and remembered a voice that I had done in a Rocko’s Modern Life episode that was almost like a throwaway two-line voice.
It was based on—and Nickelodeon does not like it when I tell this story, so here’s the story—I was in an audition for on-camera commercial stuff. It’s the worst. You think you have little control over your destiny in show business doing what we do. When you’re the commercial guy and you show up trying to look like preppy dad or priest or chef. You walk into a room and there’s eighty guys that look vaguely like you. It’s really horrible, debilitating.
I finally told my agent I can’t do that anymore. Send me out for voice-overs. I think maybe I have an aptitude for that. I never really did much of it. They said, “What makes you think you can do that?” I say, “I don’t have proof, but I will drive anywhere. I will do any voice-over audition for anything.” I think that’s a pretty good path for me and a good basket to put my eggs in. That turned out to be, luckily for me, true.
I was in the same studio where they were auditioning for a TV commercial that involved Christmas elves, like a holiday commercial. It was all these little people hanging around. A lot of them had their own elf costumes because that’s what they do. If you’re a fat guy with a white beard, you go out for the Santa stuff. If you’re a little person with curly-toed shoes you go out for those auditions.
There was one guy at the audition. He was in a different part of the corridor. He was hanging with a couple of his buds and was just the most bitter, ticked-off little person in an elf outfit you’ve ever seen.
“If it wasn’t for the Christmas shit I wouldn’t fucking work! This is the only time of the year that I fucking work! It pisses me off. It’s like I’m glad to have it, knock on wood, but motherfucker!”
I was like, “Wow.”
I told Steve Hillenburg that story. Years, years go by and he remembered that story. I totally forgot the story. He said, “Remember that guy?”
That’s where SpongeBob came from. So he’s sort of a munchkin without the negativity.
Someday I’m going to run into that guy. He’s going to be standing outside my house like Mark David Chapman. “Hey, Kenny! I got a bone to pick with you!”
ROB MCELHENNY—ACTOR, WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER
I was living in this garage in West Hollywood. Behind someone’s house.
I just had this idea for a short film about two incredibly self-centered almost sociopaths. I wrote this scene where one of them comes over to the other one’s house for sugar for this coffee that he had made. It’s a guy he kind of knows but doesn’t really know that well. While he’s there he says, “I just found out I have cancer.” The other guy, all he’s trying to do is just get the sugar and get out of the room. The last thing he wants to hear is that this guy’s got cancer. I thought, that’s really fucking dark and that’s a really dramatic scene. I wonder if I told if from the guy’s point of view who’s just trying to get out of the room, could we make it really funny?
I just wrote it and then I thought it was kind of funny, so I wrote a script for it that night. I just worked all night until I wrote this script. I thought it would be funny if there was a third character when this guy comes out of that scene with the sugar. When he gets home to his roommate he says, “Hey, by the way, did you know that Charlie has cancer?” The third roommate, the guy’s roommate, realized that Charlie didn’t tell him, and why wouldn’t he confide in him when he confided in you? He becomes obsessed with the fact that you must be better friends with Charlie. I thought, “Well, that’s an interesting dynamic.” Something I hadn’t seen before.
I thought that was a level of neurosis I hadn’t seen in a comedy before, where the characters were just total assholes, like completely the antithesis of what a network note would be, which is to try to make them more likable.
I wanted to make something where, as writers, you’re almost actively trying to get people to root against them. I brought it to Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day. They’re my friends and they thought it was really funny. They got it and we just started making it. Nobody really understood why it was funny, but I knew Glenn and Charlie would. Then we got a couple of cameras together and learned Final Cut and figured it out from there.
It was a short film. We never thought of it as a TV show. It was just a short film, and I did it mostly because I wanted to see it all the way through to the end. I just wanted to have it be a DVD in my hand at the end and I fully realized that. Charlie Has Cancer was the name of it.
We made that and then we thought, “This is pretty funny, but let’s do another one.” We think this may be a TV series, and we know the first thing that people are going to ask is, “Well, okay. This is episode one. What’s episode two?” More important, “We see that you executed this, could you execute this again?” So we did a second episode. That was about me falling in love with a beautiful transgender woman.