Revisionist History - Introducing: So Many Steves, A New Audiobook from Steve Martin and Pushkin

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

Today, we’re bringing you a preview of Pushkin's new audiobook, “So Many Steves.” Steve Martin is more candid than he’s ever been about his creative life in this engrossing audio-biography centered around a series of conversations recorded over many afternoons at home with his friend and neighbor, writer Adam Gopnik. You can get “So Many Steves,” an audio-exclusive, now at Audible: http://audible.com/stevemartinSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. I wanted to make one myself, my audio original recorded with New Yorker writer and my longtime friend, Adam Gopnik. In it, you'll hear a series of conversations about my career and creative life, starting with magic. Get your copy of So Many Steves, Afternoons with Steve Martin, at Audible. By the way, it's a new law now. I have to do this. I don't like to, but it is by law. All comedians must make a financial disclosure. This is a clip from Steve's second album, which was released in 1978

and was called A Wild and Crazy Guy. Then I figured out potential concert income. If you fill a 3,000-seat hall at $3 per ticket, the gross is $9,000. If you fill a 3,000-seat hall at $7.50 per ticket, the gross is $22,500. And just for fun, I figured out if you fill a 3,000-seat hall at $800 a ticket, the gross is $2,400,000. And this is what I'm shooting for. One show, goodbye.

What you've just heard suggests what was happening to Steve. He went from working in small clubs where he could achieve a happy fulfillment of his absurdist manifesto, with its roots in Wittgenstein's particularism and Lewis Carroll's logic and all the rest, to becoming a kind of rock star of comedy, in many ways the first rock star of comedy. That was a doubly uncomfortable position for him to find himself in. First, because that kind of fame is always alienating whomever it falls on, and because Steve's natural insularity and somewhat stifled emotions

left him doubly alone at a time when his fame was peaking. The strangest thing for me was in my latter days of stand-up, it was the least creative I have ever been. At the same time you were playing stadiums. Yeah, right. To come up with something new and try to work it in, there was no vehicle for it, to get it in, to try it, to try a little thing.

When you're in a club, you could try something and move on and keep going and change the subject. But there, every word was amplified on a mic. It had to be solid, had to be heard, had to be delivered. You were really at the end there doing rock concerts. Yeah, it was. Yeah. If I had understood that, I would have been better off because I kept thinking, I'm doing a comedy show. I want them to laugh, not cheer. I was just completely at a dead end. Chapter 3. Movie Star. Steve's career as an actor in the movies took three very distinct and different paths.

I guess I'd been aware of them over the years, but becoming closer to Steve in the course of these conversations gave me a different kind of insight into them. The first path involved the movies he made while he was still a working comedian, where he took that absurdist Dada persona, the one that had made him famous on stage, and he took it to the screen. In The Jerk, his first film, it's all about the rise of a naive idiot to wealth and fame.

The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here! Well, I wish I could get that excited about that. Nothing! Are you kidding? Millions of people look at this book every day! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity, your name in print, that makes people. I'm in print. That movie set the tone for a wonderfully funny, and I think original films like Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and The Man with Two Brains. In the late 80s, Steve worked with one of the most successful directors of the entire late 20th century, John Hughes.

Their collaboration, the movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, still delights families year in and out, and it stands as one of the few Thanksgiving movies in the canon. Steve plays a wonderful grump trying to get home for the holiday. His unwanted companion in this adventure is played by the late and incomparable John Candy. You're not a very tolerant person. How'd you like a mouthful of teeth? But to me, this middle period of Steve's film career

is best defined by his attempts to create personal comedies. And that effort produced what, to my mind, were by far the two best films he ever made, Roxanne and L.A. Story. Both of them, not coincidentally, with scripts written by Steve. You heard me, big nose, flat-faced, flat-nosed, flathead. Hey, hey, hey, it's time for the Wacky Weekend Brother! And then finally, the third act or path of his movie career involves some giant, obviously commercial and blockbuster films. The Father of the Bride series and then the Cheaper by the Dozen series.

Good night, Mr. Banks. Oh, you can call him George. Or Dad. George will be fine. I should add at once that I do not mean to condescend to those films. They gave my kids huge delight when they were younger, but they were clearly not the works of art that Roxanne and L.A.'s story aspired to be. And I've always been puzzled, intrigued by Steve's reluctance or inability to go forward in the movies in that very personal and poetic direction. It's one of the things I most want to talk to him about today.

Well, when I first started in movies, I had one vision, which was the jerk. Monsieur, can I have another bottle of Chateau Latour? Yes, but no more 1966. Let's splurge. Bring us some fresh wine, the freshest you've got. This year, no more this old stuff oui monsieur he doesn't realize he's dealing with sophisticated people here its vision was

laughs jokes and the subsequent movies were laughs jokes that's what i wanted laughs jokes but it wasn't the vision of a movie it's's a vision of something else, of just putting comedy on screen and I'm learning how to act. And I remember saying, you know, I think, oh, this is going to be an easy transition. I've done a million things on stage. You know, I've done sketches. I've done Saturday Night Live. I've done this. It's going to be natural.

And then the first thing you're asked to do is sit down with a glass in your hand and put it on a table. That's the shot. Yeah. And I think, so do I sit first and then put the glass over it? Or do I put it down as I'm putting the thing? And it was really, you realize, oh my god, this is more complex than I thought. And it doesn't have a lot to do with being a performer on stage or even right no it's just something else and there's all the mechanics

which i love mechanics of not putting the glass down while someone else is talking because you hear a clunk on their line and then they have to loop it but my goal make a lot of movies and here's the reason in order to get five good movies, you have to make 40. Because they're just unwieldy. You can't perfect. I couldn't perfect a movie from the get-go. You can't say, this is going to be wonderful. I thought every movie was going to be wonderful.

Are you awake? Good. There's something I want to say that's always been very difficult for me to say. I slit the sheet, the sheet I slit, and on the slitted sheet I sit. Now, Steve's first movie, The Jerk, was directed by Carl Reiner, an American comic master of a significantly older generation than Steve's. Carl Reiner had first become famous in the 1950s as a kind of all-purpose straight man on the legendary Sid Caesar, Your Show of Shows.

He could be seen interrogating Sid's mad German professors. And then he became even more famous in the 1960s as Mel Brooks' straight man on those beautiful, astounding 2,000-year-old man records. In 2,000 years, the greatest thing mankind ever devised, I think, in my humble opinion, is Saran Wrap. You equate this with man's discovery of space? That was good. That was good.

But Carl Reiner was far more comic mensch and master than just a straight man. He had, everyone agreed, an absolute knowledge of how to set off a comic riff. He was universally respected for his unique mix of comedy savvy and personal generosity, all enwrapped in a deep well of show business knowledge. Carl Reiner, he told me this. He said, I think it's important to have refrigerator laughs. And I said, what's a refrigerator laugh? He says, well, you see the movie, and now you're home, and you're getting something out of your refrigerator,

and that's when you laugh at it. When you remember the thing. Yeah, when you remember it. And I've always found that. You know, Mike told me once, he said, I always think we should have one thing in our movies where we say, can we do that? Mike is Mike Nichols, the immensely accomplished director behind The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge and many other classics. I have found over time that those little moments when you're thinking, should we, this is not very clear. Those are the ones that people pick out and remember. Like in Roxanne, it wasn't scripted, but it was starting to be dusk.

And I asked the director, I said, I have an idea. There was a newspaper rack. And so I went over to, it was just one shot. I went over to it, put the quarter in, pulled out the newspaper, started to walk away, read the headline, started screaming, went back to the thing, put another quarter in and threw the newspaper back in and closed it. And that was improvised on the... It was improvised, yeah. I didn't even tell him what I was going to do.