Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [102]
The hour was interspersed with several minutes of completed material from the work he had done with animator Bob Kurtz and his staff for The Illustrated George Carlin. “It’s No Bullshit” was a cartoon parody on amazing-facts features like Ripley’s Believe It or Not, with fake news items and a compendium of fanciful sporting events, like a blind golf tournament. The music over the end credits was provided by Kurtz’s friend Joe Siracusa, a veteran of Spike Jones’s anarchic orchestra, who, much to Carlin’s delight, improvised a one-man band of cuckoo sounds—bells and whistles and hiccups and washboard percussion.
Kurtz entered the short film, packaged as Drawing on My Mind, in several festivals, and it won first prize in its category at an animation festival in Canada. In New York a woman asked the director whether he felt the “Blind Golf ” bit was offensive to blind people. “Not anybody who saw it,” he replied. At another festival in France, the print with the French translation didn’t arrive in time, so the audience watched it in English. Despite the language barrier, “People were laughing so hard they thought they were going to die,” Kurtz recalls. “For five days, people would yell at me, ‘It’s No Bullshit!’ We didn’t win an award, but it was the hit of the festival.”
As had Kurtz, comedian Chris Rush got a call out of the blue to help Carlin work on a script for his proposed HBO series Apt. 2C. Rush, a motor-mouthed, high-IQ Brooklynite whose comedy has always reflected the peculiar mix of his instinctive perversity with his clinical training as a molecular biologist, says he got started in comedy while still a toddler, performing ersatz opera with made-up dirty lyrics at family gatherings. He was Carlin’s kind of guy. In fact, though, it was Brenda who turned her husband on to the shaved-headed, philosophically inquisitive potty-mouth. She was the first of the two to hear Rush’s headlong debut album, First Rush, recorded for Atlantic in 1973 while Rush was writing for the fledgling National Lampoon. One day Carlin called his fellow New Yorker and asked him to fly to LA for a meeting. “It was a stunning fucking thing,” says Rush. “Here was a guy I idolized. . . . He was the guy that softened the beach for the rest of us.”
They hit it off and began writing together. At one point Rush stayed at Carlin’s house in Brentwood for the better part of a week while Brenda was away. Officially, Carlin was also writing with his good friend Pat McCormick, a longtime Tonight Show contributor whose association with the show went back to the Paar years. McCormick was a hulking, anything-goes comic presence who had recently starred as Big Enos in the Smokey and the Bandit films. Also involved were the British-Canadian comedy writing duo of Andrew Nicholls and Darrell Vickers, who later became Johnny Carson’s head writers, until his retirement in 1992. They were introduced to Carlin by his brother Pat, who met the writing team while all three were working under the table for Alan Thicke on his short-lived late-night show, Thicke of the Night. (Carlin sometimes helped set up his older brother with writing work, once calling the office of Hustler magazine to get someone to read a submission from Patrick. Pat Carlin kept an office in the same building as Carlin’s for a while, before quitting Hollywood and moving to upstate New York with his wife.)
“George was very healthy at this time—bottled water all around and tofu salads,” says Nicholls. “He used to hug everyone when they got to work and hug them all good-bye at the end of the day. Pretty