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Naked Animals and Sacred Cows: Buck Henry: The Unabridged Interview
The Unabridged Interview
Buck Henry
Courtesy of Movieweb.com
Thursday, April 29, 2004
By Tim Sheridan
One of the things that makes Buck Henry such a consistently compelling artist is that half the population typically doesn?t know when he?s kidding, and the other half think he?s kidding when he?s actually not. His script for The Graduate (1967) is revered as a comic masterpiece, though Henry considered it a romantic melodrama, and his participation in what he thought to be an obvious practical joke stirred the wrath of none other than Walter Cronkite. Such confusion is attributable to a brilliantly wry perspective that views all things as a little suspect and more than a little ridiculous. It?s a subtle sardonic flavor that imbues much of his best work.
Aside from his legendary scriptwriting on such films as The Graduate, Catch-22 (1970), and To Die For (1995), Henry also turned in countless memorable acting performances, both on film and as a frequent guest host during the Golden Age of Saturday Night Live. With Mel Brooks he also created the spy-spoof series Get Smart, and even adapted a clunky political novel into the terse and witty script for The Day of the Dolphin (1973), now available in a fun DVD edition (though the film is considered by some to be a camp classic and Henry dreads frequent requests to squeak the dolphin?s signature line, ?Fa love Pa!?). But it was early in his career that Henry helped hatch a pioneering media prank, posing as G. Clifford Prout, Jr., the president of SINA, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. Prout suggested that nudity in the animal kingdom was responsible for the decline of morality in humans and made numerous television and newspaper appearances pleading his case. STOP SMILING sat down with Henry to discuss this legendary prank, and other career highlights.
Stop Smiling: How did SINA come about? Was it your idea?
Buck Henry: No, a friend of mine named Alan Abel came up with it and engaged me in this fraud because I had nothing else to do. Then it just kept reawakening itself every couple of years. He would call and say, ?They want us at the San Francisco Zoo.? And because I didn?t really have much to do at the time, I would go. But then it got to the point where I said, ?Alan, this is it, this is the last time I do G. Clifford Prout, Jr.? As it happened I did an interview at the Griffin Park Zoo in L.A. for a very well known CBS newsman who passed it on to New York and put it at the end of the Cronkite show. I had no idea that was going to happen.
SS: You were playing this fairly straight, right?
BH: Yeah, but if you listened to this geek standing in the middle of a zoo, playing the ukulele and singing the SINA marching song, if you?re going to take that seriously there is something wrong with you. But it never occurred to me that Cronkite would put it on. And I didn?t see it. I didn?t know it was on. The next day I was driving to New York from L.A. with a friend of mine. We took about five days. And by the time I got there I heard that Walter Cronkite was very angry with me. And I thought, ?Jesus Christ, I love Walter Cronkite!? I would never have done anything to upset him in the slightest. I hear from people now and then that the mention of my name is not a good thing with him.
SS: Would SINA members appear at these various media events?
BH: Well, it was all television, except for this one week when Alan Abel and I, with Alan Abel posing as Bruce Spencer, vice president of SINA. He was the Great Oz behind the scenes manipulating everything. So the San Francisco Chronicle took us out for a week, put us up, and put a [reporter] on us. He followed us around. And we went to like five places to further my work in convincing America of the immorality in the presence of naked animals. Now the zoo was the main one, which I had previously condemned as the burlesque show of the animal world. And there were lots of pictures every day on the front page of me trying to put a pair of shorts on a baby elephant, that sort of thing. It was the week the cosmonauts went up, and we were getting equal play in the paper. This was not a good thing. And the great thing was the writer who did these pieces never broke, never smiled, kept a straight face through it all. And a great number of people wrote in, either saying we should be strung up or that they thought it was an interesting concept and they wanted to join the organization, and that their son had been unduly influenced by a well-hung dachshund. It was ridiculous.
SS: But other than Walter Cronkite getting pissed, there was no real backlash?
BH: There was a backlash that I had nothing to do with later on that?s so complicated I can?t describe it. I had already said to Alan Abel, ?Leave me out of this.? So he put a bunch of phone lines into an office that was really just a drop with the SINA telephone numbers and a bunch of weird messages. And people started calling it in such large numbers that the lines burnt out. The telephone company refused to replace the lines saying it was his fault. Then he got a bunch of hippies down in Greenwich Village ? nasty looking people ? he had them picket AT&T or whatever it was then. And he had them carry these signs that said things like, ?Let?s not ask how many drunks and child molesters there are at the AT&T main office, what about so-and-so who has been accused in some circles of making off with hundreds of thousands of dollars?? So AT&T got pretty angry and they got a giant court order out against him and against G. Clifford Prout. So I?m sitting in the Gary Moore writers? room in what is now the David Letterman theater, waiting for a show to start one day and this guy comes in and sits around for a while and he lays down a half-a-million-dollar injunction against me. And I was not happy. So that was the end.
SS: What was the lifespan of SINA?
BH: SINA had to start in the late ?50s, and it ended in ?62 or ?63.
SS: And whatever happened to Alan Abel?
BH: He was a drummer and also lecturer and went on to write a number of books on practical jokes. He finally managed to have his obituary printed in The New York Times even though he wasn?t dead. And I didn?t know about it and I read it out on the west coast and I felt terrible about it. But I should have known. I just didn?t think you could con The New York Times.
SS: Did SINA have any effect on your work on Day of the Dolphin?
BH: Possibly, sub-consciously. But I never, ever attempted to dress a dolphin. A hat, yes, but that was it.
SS: If I?ve got my info right, your father was an air force general?
BH: Sometimes.
SS: And a sometime stockbroker.
BH: Yeah.
SS: Is that why you went into comedy?
BH: Um, it was in spite of that.
SS: Who was the biggest influence on your sense of humor?
BH: Oh everybody. My father, my mother, particularly my grandfather, Norm Taylor.
SS: Tell me more about him.
BH: He was a tall, eccentric ne?er-do-well who did all sorts of things. He owned a liquor store on the Strip most of my early life, but he also ran a pool hall, he had a restaurant, he was a shoe salesman. He was an American character.
SS: Your work is so varied in terms of theme and subject and genre, but I might go out on a limb to divine a theme of the absurdity of social norms. The protagonist in so many of your movies has to deal with a system that?s crazy, from Benjamin in The Graduate to Yossarian in Catch-22 to Suzanne Stone in To Die For. Even in Heaven Can Wait, where you have someone who is facing a reality that defies his understanding. Would you say that?s a fair statement?
BH: Well, I?m not sure if it?s about making your way through a system that?s crazy so much as the perception, the feeling, the notion at certain ages that what you?re doing isn?t what people say you?re doing. And that what you?re subscribing to ? that the products aren?t really what they say they are. That at a certain age, and it doesn?t happen to everyone and it doesn?t stay with everyone. But I think The Graduate resonates because a large percentage of people, at least in my generation, felt that they had spent four years studying for something that no longer existed or pertained. That Maxwell Smart works for a system that makes no more sense than the enemy?s system. That Suzanne Stone tries to negotiate a ladder that will take her to fame and fortune under completely false pretenses, and for no good reasons except that it?s there. I guess it?s about questioning values mostly. And the difference between them is that Benjamin Braddock is aware that he?s questioning values and he doesn?t get what they tell him, whereas Maxwell Smart and Suzanne Stone aren?t. I can?t fit Heaven Can Wait into that at all. Number one, I don?t believe in the afterlife or reincarnation ? at all. But a lot of projects are just an exercise in possible expertise, a puzzle to be put together by writers, directors and actors that may or may not work. And about half the things I do are that. Well, maybe not half, but a reasonable percentage of things I do is because there?s an interesting challenge of some kind here: a challenge of story, a challenge of comedy, a challenge of tone.
SS: Did you work with another writer on The Graduate?
BH: I did not.
SS: But there?s another writer credited?
BH: I never met Calder Willingham. He wrote a version of it before I did and the Writer?s Guild determines credits.
SS: You spent time in the military. Did that inform your work on Catch-22?
BH: Oh, totally. Because I know what it feels like, I know what it smells like, I know what it sounds like. I mean, I did four years of military school, and two years in the actual Army during a time of combat. I think there is a difference, a palpable difference, between films that are made by people who know what it?s like and people who sort of know what it?s like. If you haven?t been there, it?s harder. It?s like anything else, really. You can make a movie about China and shoot it in the back lot, but it?s not quite the same. You can use your imagination, but the military is a very specific experience. It?s like being in jail.
SS: You say that with such authority. Have you ever been to jail?
BH: Not yet. I?m planning to be.
SS: And how did Get Smart get started?
BH: Dan Melnick, who had been a programmer for ABC when he was about 12 years old, I mean he had this meteoric career in television, and he said to Mel and he said to me separately, ?The two big movies out there are Bond and Clouseau. See what you can make of that.?
SS: Was that an enjoyable experience?
BH: Yeah. It was a long time ago and I don?t remember much. Mel and I hung out together, we played a lot of pool, and after that it was hard work. I did two seasons of that. I had to stay in an office for long periods of time. I only worked with Mel on the pilot.
SS: Now to my knowledge you haven?t worked too much in that straight send-up of genres, whereas Mel Brooks pretty much dedicated his career to that.
BH: Yeah, I don?t like parody. I mean, I like it but I don?t do it. I am interested in satire. But in television I did quite a bit of parody. On The Gary Moore Show there was very often a movie parody and that was a specialty of mine, having done a thousand of them in The Premise [a New York improv group featuring George Segal] in the early years. So that?s fun to do in a five- to seven-minute set-up. But doing a parody for an hour or hour and a half would seem to me unnecessary.
SS: Do you think there?s a subject that can?t be satirized?
BH: No, I don?t.
SS: Nothing is too sacred?
BH: Someday 9/11 will be made fun of. If you had been around in the 17th Century and had been in the Napoleonic War, you would never have imagined that someone could get a laugh from sticking their hand in their vest and strutting around doing a Napoleon joke.
SS: Did you consider To Die For a comedy?
BH: No, but I don?t think of The Graduate as a comedy.
SS: Why?
BH: I think it?s a love story and a melodrama with some funny things in it.
SS: Did it surprise you that people came to talk of it in that way?
BH: I never thought of its category. But making something funny isn?t really hard. Making something work is hard. And I can rewrite something and make it funny or funnier. But if somebody says we want to make a comedy, I wouldn?t know how to respond to that. You mean you have a story that isn?t funny and you want to make it funny? It?s irrelevant. If I had handed in the script to Day of the Dolphin and they had said, ?Jesus, we thought you were going to write a comedy.? Well, then, I might have said OK. Give me some more money first, but I would be thrilled to make a comedy out of it, because I know the funny things about dolphins. But you could also write a deep, serious, scary story about a guy who graduates from college and has a scary, deep dramatic affair with the mother of a girl that he then falls in love with and the mother threatens him. It could be Hitchcockian; it could be Bunuelian, depending on what you?re aiming for.
SS: In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud suggested that when someone tells a joke, they are trying to win someone over to their way of thinking. Do you think that?s true?
BH: Yes, but that?s true of tragedy as well. It purges, if you follow your Aristotle. But imagine having been able to ? and here comes the pretentious part ? been able to go to the theater a couple of thousand years ago and see a Sophocles play and have everybody weeping all over you. Then you get a comedy, a satire by Aristophanes. So that?s the big campfire, sure. It underscores the major thesis of the tribe, really good theater, or film or television. It says things to people in a way that makes them understand something they thought they knew about, but didn?t quite.