Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Malcolm Gladwell, just kidding. It's Steve Martin. But
Speaker 2: like Malcolm, I love audiobook so much so that I
Speaker 2: wanted to make one myself. My audio original, recorded with
Speaker 2: New Yorker writer and my longtime friend Adam Gotnik. In it,
Speaker 2: you'll hear a series of conversations about my career and
Speaker 2: creative life, starting with magic. Get your copy of So
Speaker 2: Many Steve's Afternoons with Steve Martin at Audible. By the way,
Speaker 2: it's a new law now I have to do this.
Speaker 3: I don't like to, but it is my law.
Speaker 2: All comedians must make a financial disclosure.
Speaker 4: This is a clip from Steve's second album, which was
Speaker 4: released in nineteen seventy eight and was called A Wild
Speaker 4: and Crazy Guy.
Speaker 2: Then I figured out a potential concert income.
Speaker 3: If you fill a three thousand seat hall at three
Speaker 3: dollars per ticket, the grosses nine thousand dollars. If you
Speaker 3: fill a three thousand seat hall at seven to fifty
Speaker 3: per ticket, the gross is twenty two thousand, five hundred dollars.
Speaker 3: And just for fun, I figure out if you fill
Speaker 3: a three thousand seat haul at eight hundred dollars a ticket,
Speaker 3: gross's two million, four hundred thousand dollars and this is
Speaker 3: what I'm shooting for.
Speaker 5: One show.
Speaker 1: Goodbye what you've just heard, see Jess.
Speaker 5: What was happening to Steve?
Speaker 4: He went from working in small clubs where he could
Speaker 4: achieve a happy fulfillment of his absurdist manifesto with its
Speaker 4: roots in Vichtenstein's particularism, in Lewis Carroll's logic and all
Speaker 4: the rest, to becoming a kind of rock star of
Speaker 4: comedy in many ways, the first rock star of comedy.
Speaker 4: That was a doubly uncomfortable position for him to find
Speaker 4: himself in, first, because that kind of fame is always
Speaker 4: alienating whomever it falls on, and because Steve's natural insularity
Speaker 4: and somewhat stifled emotions left him doubly alone at a
Speaker 4: time when his fame was peaking.
Speaker 2: The strangest thing for me was in my latter days
Speaker 2: of stand up. It was the least creative I have
Speaker 2: ever been.
Speaker 5: At the same time you were playing stadium.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, to come up with something new and try
Speaker 2: to work it in. There was no vehicle for it
Speaker 2: to get it in, to try it, to try a
Speaker 2: little thing. When you're in a club, you could try
Speaker 2: something to move on and going and change the subody.
Speaker 2: But there every word was amplified on a mic. It
Speaker 2: had to be solid, had to be heard, had to
Speaker 2: be delivered.
Speaker 5: You were really at the end. They're doing rock concerts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was. Yeah. If I had under stood that,
Speaker 2: I would have been better off, because I kept thinking,
Speaker 2: I'm doing a comedy show, you know, I want them
Speaker 2: to laugh, not cheer. Right, I was just completely at
Speaker 2: a dead end.
Speaker 5: Chapter three movie star.
Speaker 4: Steve's career as an actor in the movies took three
Speaker 4: very distinct and different paths. I guess I'd been aware
Speaker 4: of them over the years, but becoming closer to Steve
Speaker 4: in the course of these conversations gave me a different
Speaker 4: kind of insight into them. The first path involved the
Speaker 4: movies he made while he was still a working comedian,
Speaker 4: where he took that absurdist data persona, the one that
Speaker 4: had made him famous on stage, and he took it
Speaker 4: to the screen in The Jerk, his first film, It's
Speaker 4: all about the rise of a naive idiot to wealth
Speaker 4: and fame.
Speaker 5: The new phone look.
Speaker 4: There, the new phone bok there.
Speaker 2: I wish I could get that excited about fucking are
Speaker 2: you kidding?
Speaker 4: Billions of people look at this book every day.
Speaker 2: This is the kind of spontaneous.
Speaker 4: Publicity, your name in print that makes.
Speaker 2: People I'm in print.
Speaker 4: That movie set the tone for wonderfully funny and I
Speaker 4: think original films like Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and
Speaker 4: The Man with Two Brains. In the late eighties, Steve
Speaker 4: worked with one of the most successful directors of the
Speaker 4: entire late twentieth century, John Hughes. Their collaboration, the movie Planes,
Speaker 4: Trains and Automobiles still delights families year in and out,
Speaker 4: and it stands as one of the few Thanksgiving movies.
Speaker 4: In the Cannon, Steve plays a wonderful grump trying to
Speaker 4: get home for the holiday. His unwanted companion in this
Speaker 4: adventure is played by the late and incomparable John Candy.
Speaker 5: You're not a very tolerant person.
Speaker 2: Held you like a mouthful of teeth.
Speaker 4: But to me, this middle period of Steve's film career
Speaker 4: is best defined by his attempts to create person comedies,
Speaker 4: and that effort produced what, to my mind, were by
Speaker 4: far the two best films he ever made, Roxanne and
Speaker 4: La Story, both of them not coincidentally with scripts written
Speaker 4: by Steve.
Speaker 2: You heard me, big nose, flat faced, flat nosed, flat.
Speaker 4: Food, the wacky Weekend Winner. And then finally, the third
Speaker 4: act or path of his movie career involved some giant,
Speaker 4: obviously commercial and blockbuster films, The Father of the Bride
Speaker 4: series and then the Cheaper by the Dozen series.
Speaker 2: Do You Night, mister Banks.
Speaker 1: Oh, you can call him George or Dad. George will
Speaker 1: defind me.
Speaker 4: I should add at once that I do not mean
Speaker 4: to condescend to those films. They gave my kids a
Speaker 4: huge delight when they were younger, but they were clearly
Speaker 4: not the works of art that Roxanne and La Story
Speaker 4: aspired to be. And I've always been puzzled, intrigued by
Speaker 4: Steve's reluctance or inability to go forward in the movies
Speaker 4: in that very personal and poetic direction. It's one of
Speaker 4: the things I most want to talk.
Speaker 5: To him about today.
Speaker 2: Well, when I first started in movies, I had one vision, which.
Speaker 1: Was the jerk.
Speaker 2: Let's you another bottle of yes, but no more nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty six.
Speaker 5: Let's blurge.
Speaker 2: Bring us some fresh wine, the freshest you've got this
Speaker 2: Year's no more.
Speaker 1: Of this old stuff.
Speaker 5: Wait, monsieur.
Speaker 2: He doesn't realize he's dealing with sophisticated people.
Speaker 5: Here.
Speaker 2: Its vision was last Jokes, and the subsequent movies were
Speaker 2: last jokes. That's what I wanted to last joke. But
Speaker 2: it wasn't the vision of a movie. It's a vision
Speaker 2: of something else, of just putting comedy on screen. And
Speaker 2: I'm you know, I'm learning how to act. And I
Speaker 2: remember saying, you know, I think, oh, this is gonna
Speaker 2: be an easy transition. I've done a million things on stage,
Speaker 2: you know, I've done sketches, I've done Saturday Night Live,
Speaker 2: I've done. This is going to be a natural. And
Speaker 2: then the first thing he has to do is sit
Speaker 2: down with a glass in your hand and put it
Speaker 2: on a table.
Speaker 5: That's the shot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, so do I sit first and then
Speaker 2: put the glass over it? Or do I put it
Speaker 2: down as I'm putting the day? And really you realize,
Speaker 2: oh my god, this is this is more complex than
Speaker 2: I thought.
Speaker 5: And it doesn't have a lot to do with being
Speaker 5: a performer on stage.
Speaker 2: Right, No, it's just something else. And there's all the mechanics,
Speaker 2: which I love, mechanics of not putting the glass down
Speaker 2: while someone else is talking because you hear a clunk
Speaker 2: on their line and then they have to loop it.
Speaker 2: But my goal make a lot of movies. And here's
Speaker 2: the reason. In order to get five good movies, you
Speaker 2: have to make forty because they're just unwieldy. You can't perfect.
Speaker 2: I couldn't perfect a movie from the get go. You
Speaker 2: can't say this is going to be wonderful. I thought
Speaker 2: every movie was going to be wonderful.
Speaker 3: Are you awake.
Speaker 5: Good?
Speaker 3: It's something I want to say that's always been very
Speaker 3: difficult for me to say.
Speaker 2: I slid the sheet, the sheet, I slid, and on
Speaker 2: the slitted sheet, I said now.
Speaker 4: Steve's first movie, The Jerk, was directed by Carl Reiner,
Speaker 4: an American comic master of a significantly older generation than Steve's.
Speaker 4: Carl Reiner had first become famous in the nineteen fifties
Speaker 4: as a kind of all purpose straight man on the
Speaker 4: legendary Sid Caesar Your Show of Shows. He could be
Speaker 4: seen interrogating Sid's mad German professors, and then he became
Speaker 4: even more famous in the nineteen sixties as mel Brooks
Speaker 4: straight man on those beautiful, astounding two thousand year old
Speaker 4: Man records.
Speaker 3: In two thousand years, the greatest thing mankind ever devised
Speaker 3: that I think, in my humble opinion, it's Sarahan rap.
Speaker 5: You equate this with Man's discovery of space. That was good,
Speaker 5: that was good.
Speaker 4: But Carl Reiner was far more comic mench and master
Speaker 4: than just a straight man. He had everyone agreed an
Speaker 4: absolute knowledge of how to set off a comic riff.
Speaker 4: He was universally respected for his unique mix of comedy,
Speaker 4: savvy and personal generosity, all unwrapped in a deep well
Speaker 4: of show business knowledge.
Speaker 2: Carl Reiner he told me this. He said, I think
Speaker 2: it's important to have refrigerator laughs. And I said, what's
Speaker 2: a refrigerator laugh? He says, well, you see the movie,
Speaker 2: and now you're home and you're getting something out of
Speaker 2: your refrigerator.
Speaker 4: And that's when you laughed at it when you remember it,
Speaker 4: when you remember it.
Speaker 2: And I've always found that, you know, Mike told me once,
Speaker 2: he said, I always think we should have one thing
Speaker 2: in our movies where we say, can we do that?
Speaker 4: Mike is Mike Nichols, the immensely accomplished director behind The
Speaker 4: Graduate and Carnal Knowledge and many other classics.
Speaker 2: I have found over time that those little moments when
Speaker 2: you're thinking should be this is not very clear that
Speaker 2: those are the ones that people pick out and remember.
Speaker 2: Like in Rock Sane, it wasn't scripted, but it was
Speaker 2: starting to be dusk, and I asked the director. I said, uh,
Speaker 2: I said, I have an idea. There was a newspaper wreck,
Speaker 2: and so I went over to it was just one shot.
Speaker 2: I went over to it, put the quarter in, pulled
Speaker 2: out the newspaper, started to walk away, read the headline,
Speaker 2: started screaming, went back to the thing, put another quarter
Speaker 2: in and through the newspaper.
Speaker 5: And closed it. And that was improvised. On the it
Speaker 5: was improvised.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't evenell him what I was gonna do.