MONDAY

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Blogs
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

RELATED LINKS

• Q & A with Mr. McKean
• Mr. McKean's bio
• Hopeless Pictures

E-mail a friend

Tavis: Michael McKean has enjoyed a terrific career in show business, dating back to his days on 'Laverne & Shirley.' Remember Lenny and Squiggy? Of course you do. Later, 'Saturday Night Live.' His notable movies include the cult classic, 'This is Spinal Tap,' 'Best in Show,' and 'A Mighty Wind,' the latter earning him an Oscar nomination for best song. His latest project is a new animated series for IFC called 'Hopeless Pictures.' The show kicked off earlier this month. Michael McKean, nice to see you.

Michael McKean: Hello, Tavis. Nice to see you.

Tavis: Glad to have you on the program.

McKean: Just to clear things up, he's talking to his shrink there.

Tavis: Talking to his shrink.

McKean: Yes, played by Jonathan Katz, who is America's favorite animated shrink, as we all know.

Tavis: Please tell me about the show. There are so many things I want to talk to you about in these 13 minutes I have here, but since we're here with 'Hopeless Pictures,' tell me about the premise of the series.

McKean: Bob Balaban has, had this idea, had this bee in his tiny bonnet for--years now to do an animated film about the movie business. And every time he tried it, it fell just this short. And he finally found the right animator, a guy that can work at the right speed, and this is what we have. And it's great because it varies. It's not half an hour every time. Sometimes it's 20 minutes, sometimes it's 10. You know, and it shares an hour with two other shows, with 'Greg the Bunny' and 'Festival.'

Tavis: So you play Mel Wax, who is a dysfunctional, can I say dysfunctional?

McKean: You may. I know you can.

Tavis: Dysfunctional studio head.

McKean: Yeah, I guess you'd call him that. Yeah. He's at the mercy of the business as well as wielding his one little tiny part of it. It's, he's kind of an independent guy with aspirations to major studiohood, and so he's disappointed twice every day.

Tavis: Yeah. This thing really isn't that far off right about now, because I can only imagine the studio heads in this city are losing their minds, what with the box office numbers not being what they're...

McKean: I know. And the fact that every movie costs 150 million. So you're already in deep doo-doo before you have a bad opening weekend. And then you have one, and then it really sucks.

Tavis: Yeah. So, have you gotten any email yet from studio heads?

McKean: No. No. I try and stay, keep a low profile. I don't need to hear from them.

Tavis: Well, you keep doing good work like this, funny stuff like this, you won't be low--profile for long with a series like that. When you walked into the studio and sat down, I welcomed you and told you how nice it was to meet you. And you were starting to tell me, and I told you to hold that story, I wanted to hear it on the air. You were starting to tell me that your TV career started on this lot.

McKean: I was part of a group called "The Credibility Gap," which was a radio outfit. We did satire on the news. It was Harry Shearer, David L. Lander, who was later my partner on 'Laverne & Shirley' and who had been my friend at college, a guy named Richard Bebe, and myself. And we were hired by KCET to do some sketches and some songs for a big three hour, a three hour special about the economy, called 'Economic Love-In.' Now, this was 1973 or four, maybe.

Tavis: Love that title, 'Economic Love-In.'

McKean: 'Economic Love-In' really dates it pretty well. And there was a wage and price freeze at the time. It was Nixon who made the freeze, so it had to be before '74, obviously. And that's, this is, and the director? Taylor Hackford.

Tavis: The guy who did 'Ray.'

McKean: The guy who did 'Ray' and many other fine films. And he was a staff director here.

Tavis: He went to USC and then came to work over here. Yeah, I remember.

McKean: Yeah, that's right.

Tavis: Amazing. And it just, KCET, your career just took off from there.

McKean: No. Went back to the radio, as a matter of fact.

Tavis: Please don't say that. Is that what I have to look--well, I do radio anyway.

McKean: Hey, radio's great.

Tavis: Yeah, I love radio. I do it every year.

McKean: Listen, 'Hopeless Pictures' is a radio show. It just happens to have pictures. You know? But that's how we do it. It's all improvised or largely improvised. I work with some of the best improvisational actors in the world. Jennifer Coolidge and Lisa Kudrow, and Balaban and the whole gang. It's really fun.

Tavis: You've done so much stuff in your career, starting here at KCET. I wonder if I can just throw a few things at you and just pick your brain.

McKean: Okay.

Tavis: Penny Marshall was here, I guess, a few months ago. Of course, from 'Laverne & Shirley' and so many other things since then. Take me back; I don't even want to ask a question. Just tell me about 'Laverne & Shirley.'

McKean: Well, Penny and her then-husband Rob Reiner were big fans of these characters that David Lander and myself did. And we had done those characters forever. And so when Penny sold her show, which her brother and, Lowell Ganz and Mark Rothman had created, they had no characters, they had one extra character. They had Laverne, they had Shirley, and they had Eddie Mekka as Carmine. So they needed some more characters and they needed some writers.

So they hired us as apprentice writers, paid us, can't say under the table, 'cause that would be libelous, but they didn't pay us very well, let's put it that way. Wherever the table was located. And Penny said, "Look, we'll try and write, work those characters in.' So we worked them into the first script and every other script we worked on for the first season. And then we just, we did every show for the first five years, and then, you know, kind of took it a little easy on the sixth and seventh seasons, because we were doing other things.

Tavis: Yeah. What made that show work then?

McKean: I think that we really wanted the show to be funny. Everyone wanted the show to be funny. Lowell Ganz is a very funny writer, and he kind of had a vision about the show, I think. And we were all, you know, we were kind of a little on the wild side, you know. There weren't a lot of directors who loved working with us, because we were, you know, it was a little breakneck until, you know, we froze it. And we liked to change the script a lot, and we liked to fix.

And we were always called upon to write our own stuff. David and I were always called upon to write scenes for ourselves, and stuff for ourselves. So it wasn't always easy, but it was very important to us to make the studio audience laugh. Because we did it like a play. It wasn't like now when you shoot things six and seven times in front of an audience, and bore them to tears. You have to pay an audience now to stay past 10:00. We did it one time in front of an audience, and that was it. And if we got it, we got it, so.

Tavis: Yeah. We were talking earlier before we came on the air about your wife, Annette O'Toole, who's on 'Smallville,' now in its fifth season which as I said, that ain't 'Smallville.' Five seasons. That's 'Bigville'...

McKean: Yes, indeed.

Tavis: ...after five seasons. I wonder whether or not back in the day on 'Laverne & Shirley,' since you guys went five seasons plus, whether or not you were ever thinking then in the context of your long-term career, about being typecast in that role.

McKean: I was very lucky. My philosophy goes like this. It's not your first job that typecasts you. It's the second job. If the second job you do, the second high-profile thing you do is exactly like the first, you're dead. So the next two things people saw me in after 'Laverne & Shirley'--were a movie called 'Young Doctors in Love' where I played this white-bred doctor, and I was basically the straight man through an insane movie. I was very straight. And then 'This is Spinal Tap.' So even if my career had ended then, no one could have said, 'Well, he only does one thing.' So I think that's the key. I think that people who, you know, I was offered a lot of goofy next door neighbor jobs after 'Laverne & Shirley,' and I, why would I do that? I did that.

Tavis: Been there, done that.

McKean: Yeah. And it's, it's one of the best things about this job is you get to be different people. If you're the same one every time, then you should be Cary Grant, or not.

Tavis: Yeah. (laughs)

McKean: People like that can get away with it.

Tavis: Yeah. But some people find that--territory that they're comfortable in and they feel uncomfortable breaking outside of that box, out of that mold.

McKean: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of people love working in sitcom because it's the easiest job for an actor. You never have to be there before 9:00 in the morning, and you're never there past, you know, 10:00 or 11:00. So, you know, I think that there's an attraction to that. But the smart ones, like Ted Danson, for example, who does reappear in sitcoms from time to time, he has a little different take on it, you know, to keep himself interested. I mean, there are a lot of others, but that's just one example.

Tavis: All right, you mentioned it, I gotta ask about 'This is Spinal Tap.'

McKean: Yeah.

Tavis: Yeah. Tell me about it.

McKean: Well, we had done a sketch. Rob Reiner had had a pilot for, it was a special, a stand alone special, that was kind of what you call a back-door pilot. If enough people watched it, we'll make it into a series.

Tavis: Pick it up, yeah.

McKean: And it was a guy sitting there with a remote just going through a day of TV programming. It was called 'The TV Show.' And there was a show a while back hosted by Wolfman Jack called 'Midnight Special.' So we did 'Midnight Special,' did a parody of 'Midnight Special' as part of this thing, and we made up this English group called 'Spinal Tap.' And we had a lot of fun doing this kind of bad music video type performance thing.

And then later, when Rob was looking for a way to begin his--feature directing career, he said, 'Let's do this.' And so we monkeyed around with it, decided writing a script was no fun at all, so we'd improvise it. We charted out the tour on a big map of the United States, and we made up a lot of background, and a lot of back story, and a lot of lunatic characters, and hired all our friends. And we had a party every day. It was a lot of fun.

Tavis: How difficult is improvising? And maybe it's not difficult if it is your gift and your talent, obviously, and it comes to you. Maybe it's a stupid question. Maybe it isn't difficult at all. But I look at people who improvise, and I have such respect for them, because it doesn't come better than improvising every single day, and giving an organic performance.

McKean: Well, that's exactly it. It's not that far outside the day to day realm of human existence. I mean, you and I are improvising right now. We listen to each other, and that's the key thing. I mean, in Chris Guest's films, for example, and in 'Spinal Tap,' you trusted those around you. You knew that everyone around you could do the job. So it wasn't a frantic rush for a punch line in a blackout. 'Cause it's not blackouts. It's more like, just existence. And the scenes are all laid out as far as what roughly occurs. And the dialogue is really just a way to get what your character is after.

Tavis: But what--we're improvising now, Michael, but I don't have to be funny, though. I mean, that's where...

McKean: And yet, you are.

Tavis: (laughs) Thank you. I appreciate that. That's the part that kills me, that you're improvising and you're funny.

McKean: Yeah. Well, a lot of it, it helps to have someone like Fred Willard or Jennifer Coolidge on your set who is clinically insane, but creatively so. I mean, Jennifer, I think she really is a window to another universe altogether. And Fred is just, you know, he's just, whatever he is. He's just a very strange, lovely human being who's just very funny.

Tavis: Yeah. So how does one guy get blessed with all this talent? Because on top of all of this, then you write music with your wife. And you get, you win Grammys, and you get Academy Award...

McKean: A Grammy. A nomination. Let's not overstate it here.

Tavis: I was trying to pump it up a little bit, you know? But you win a Grammy, you get an Oscar nomination. That's heady stuff for people who every day just write because they love writing, but, you...

McKean: Well, that's why we write anyway. Annette and I have written a lot of songs now. We didn't start until 'A Mighty Wind.' We started writing songs together and we wrote three of the songs that are in the film, and I wrote, worked with other people, you know, with Eugene and Christopher and CJ Vanston, on a lot of other pieces in the film. But we'd write if there's no market, and, believe me, it may happen. But we write because we love it. We write because we read something in the paper, and, or someone we know has something happen to them. And it's just, it's just a way of expressing what you're feeling. That's all.

Tavis: Tell me quickly what the writing of music does for you, versus the writing of other work.

McKean: The writing of music is done after three minutes, if you--have something. It's not like writing a novel, which I've never done, or writing a screenplay by myself, which I've never done. I've worked on screenplays. The great thing about a song is that, "We're done. Let's run it up the flag pole.' And you know right away. It's like a joke, in a sense.

Tavis: Yeah. Well, speaking of done, we are done, and you know right away after 13 minutes, it was a great conversation.

McKean: I had a lovely time.

Tavis: I had a lovely time as well. Nice to meet you.

McKean: Nice to meet you, too.

Tavis: Glad to have you on. Michael McKean. Glad to have him here. That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching, and keep the faith.