Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [103]
Prefiguring Seinfeld, the premise of Apt. 2C featured an apartment-dwelling writer constantly distracted by the shenanigans of his eccentric friends and neighbors, who included McCormick, Goldthwait, stand-up comic Jeff Altman, and Lois Bromfield (whose sister, Valri, had appeared on the first SNL). Carlin’s daughter, Kelly, played a Girl Scout. Despite the writing talent rounded up for Apt. 2C, Rush could tell that the constraint of working with a writing team was unproductive for Carlin. “If you’re a gunfighter for twenty-five years, and all of a sudden they ask you to be a group leader in an advertising agency—you’re not good at working with people, you know?” says Rush, who had a part in the pilot but backed out. “I told him, ‘I see what you’re trying to do, but it’s falling short.’” At one point an HBO executive gave Carlin some notes on the network’s suggestions for improvement, including a recommendation to tone down the four-letter words. Not surprisingly, that pretty much sealed the show’s fate. Carlin had wanted to push the network on Rush’s own idea for a show, a mind-boggling conceptual thing he called Innertube. “After Apt. 2C lit a bomb,” says Rush, “that was the end of that.”
Not long after the pilot disappeared, Carlin called Rush in New York and told him to come by the Ritz-Carlton, where he was staying. After encouraging the younger comic to berate him for not taking his advice—with some reluctance, Rush launched into a private, foul-mouthed, one-man roast of his friend—Carlin, laughing, wrote out a check for $18,000. Write a movie, he said. The script that Rush eventually produced, a gag vehicle called Strange Days, went nowhere.
It had been a decade since Carlin had acted in Car Wash, nearly two since With Six You Get Eggroll. Despite the disappointing experience of the HBO pilot, he was warming to the idea of renewing his acting aspirations. Kelly, too, was thinking about pursuing a career in acting, and father and daughter enrolled together in a workshop class with Hollywood acting coach Stephen Book. “He thought it was time to become knowledgeable as an actor, to have technique and expertise,” says Book. Also in the class were the young actors Tate Donovan and Grant Heslov. In one class, Carlin and his daughter partnered to do a scene. Book gave them Somerset Maugham’s Rain, the story of a prostitute named Sadie Thompson, who arrives on an island in the South Pacific, and the zealous missionary who hopes to reform her. “I thought, This is going to be interesting,” says Book with a laugh.
The first acting that Carlin did after starting the class was in the brief noirish set pieces (“The Envelope”) at the beginning and end of his next HBO special, Playin’ with Your Head. The stand-up performance was taped over two nights in May 1986 at the Beverly Theater. Much as Moranis had spoofed Carlin’s habit of analyzing common turns of phrase, the real Carlin opened with a bit about the odd and annoying ways we say hello and good-bye to each other. He liked to mash them together, he joked: “Toodle-oo, go with God, and don’t take any wooden nickels.” He also did material on why there aren’t more variations on the notion of a moment of silence for the dearly departed (“How about a moment of muffled conversation for the treated and released?”) and, in a hint of the politically incorrect button-pushing that would partly define his later years in comedy, a crass joke about guys who wear earrings. “I’m better than that,” he began to apologize, then recanted: “No, I’m not!”
Playin’ with Your Head was Carlin’s first HBO special with a new director, Rocco Urbisci. Urbisci’s first job in Hollywood had been on the staff of Steve Allen’s last talk show, locally produced at the KTLA studio in Los Angeles and syndicated to several markets in 1970 and 1971. Urbisci had booked Carlin on Allen’s show a number of times during the comic’s transformative period, when bookings were uncertain. Later