Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers by Mike Sacks Page B
Authors: Mike Sacks
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Lampoon
in Hollywood was Doug Kenney. Doug was a naturally funny writer of print. In retrospect, and I didn’t realize it at the time, he was also a gifted writer of movie comedy. Doug just had a great, natural comic instinct, which could be applied to anything. When he got the opportunity to do
Animal House
[in the mid-seventies], it was clear that that was what he was really meant to do.
It was mostly because Doug had a fundamentally cinematic sort of sensibility and he was quite relentless in his pursuit of projects he cared about. It takes a profound sort of focus and determination to get anything done in the movie world, and he had both. He was also a very, very good collaborator with everyone he worked with.
Over the years, there’s been much discussion about Kenney’s death in Hawaii in 1980 at the age of thirty-three. According to some, he jumped off a cliff. According to others, he slipped or was pushed off a cliff. What do you think happened?
I don’t know. Honestly, I just don’t know. I think it’s possible that he killed himself. The whole thing is so murky. Doug had his ups and downs; there’s no question about it. I guess it comes with the territory. Years before, Doug had gone to visit friends in the Caribbean, and he was caught with marijuana in his luggage. It wasn’t very serious. He knew people who had good political connections, and he got off. But he would never travel with drugs again. So I think he was out in Hawaii and he may have tried to score some drugs. This might have been a drug deal gone bad, and he might have been killed. But I honestly don’t know.
There are stories about Doug being unhappy with the way Caddyshack turned out. Do you think he was unhappy with the movie or unhappy with his life?
I think a little of both. When
Caddyshack
was released [in 1980], he was kind of depressed. He said, “Oh, well. It wasn’t another
Animal House
.” And I said to him, “Man, give it time.” It was one of the funniest movies I think I’d ever seen. But he was comparing it to the great success that
Animal House
achieved, and that wasn’t fair.
You collaborated with Doug on Bored of the Rings . Can you tell me how that came about?
I convinced Doug, who had not read
Lord of the Rings
, and who had correctly thought it was kind of a stupid thing, that we should write a parody of it. We were able to sell the idea to Ballantine, the publisher that originally put out the paperback edition of
The
Lord of the Rings
. And again being careful, we sent a letter to J. R. R. Tolkien saying, “We’re thinking of parodying your books. What do you think?” And he sent back this sweet, very quirky letter that said, in essence, “Well, I don’t really know why you’d want to bother, but if you’re silly enough to want to do it then that’s okay with me. Go ahead.”
After we managed to get a small advance from a publisher, Doug speed-read
Lord of the Rings
in one day and ended up writing probably three-quarters of the parody. I remember sitting across from him at a sort of double desk in a Harvard library, each of us with a portable typewriter, and I sat there fussing over a paragraph, and he was writing
pages
as fast as he could type. It was unbelievable. He wrote thirty-five or forty words per minute. And it was hysterical. I mean, it was just unbelievable. That was Doug—that was pure Doug.
When we turned it in, the head of Ballantine, Ian Ballantine [who published
The Lord of the Rings
], basically picked up the manuscript with a pair of fireplace tongs. It was noxious to him. He wasn’t thrilled about it. Meanwhile, over the years, that book [published in 1969 by Signet] has helped support the
Harvard Lampoon
. Simon & Schuster published yet another edition in the fall of 2012.
The National Lampoon ’s style of print humor was very dense, and not wedded to one cookie-cutter premise. There were many different types of genres that were parodied, from comic books to game instructions
in Hollywood was Doug Kenney. Doug was a naturally funny writer of print. In retrospect, and I didn’t realize it at the time, he was also a gifted writer of movie comedy. Doug just had a great, natural comic instinct, which could be applied to anything. When he got the opportunity to do
Animal House
[in the mid-seventies], it was clear that that was what he was really meant to do.
It was mostly because Doug had a fundamentally cinematic sort of sensibility and he was quite relentless in his pursuit of projects he cared about. It takes a profound sort of focus and determination to get anything done in the movie world, and he had both. He was also a very, very good collaborator with everyone he worked with.
Over the years, there’s been much discussion about Kenney’s death in Hawaii in 1980 at the age of thirty-three. According to some, he jumped off a cliff. According to others, he slipped or was pushed off a cliff. What do you think happened?
I don’t know. Honestly, I just don’t know. I think it’s possible that he killed himself. The whole thing is so murky. Doug had his ups and downs; there’s no question about it. I guess it comes with the territory. Years before, Doug had gone to visit friends in the Caribbean, and he was caught with marijuana in his luggage. It wasn’t very serious. He knew people who had good political connections, and he got off. But he would never travel with drugs again. So I think he was out in Hawaii and he may have tried to score some drugs. This might have been a drug deal gone bad, and he might have been killed. But I honestly don’t know.
There are stories about Doug being unhappy with the way Caddyshack turned out. Do you think he was unhappy with the movie or unhappy with his life?
I think a little of both. When
Caddyshack
was released [in 1980], he was kind of depressed. He said, “Oh, well. It wasn’t another
Animal House
.” And I said to him, “Man, give it time.” It was one of the funniest movies I think I’d ever seen. But he was comparing it to the great success that
Animal House
achieved, and that wasn’t fair.
You collaborated with Doug on Bored of the Rings . Can you tell me how that came about?
I convinced Doug, who had not read
Lord of the Rings
, and who had correctly thought it was kind of a stupid thing, that we should write a parody of it. We were able to sell the idea to Ballantine, the publisher that originally put out the paperback edition of
The
Lord of the Rings
. And again being careful, we sent a letter to J. R. R. Tolkien saying, “We’re thinking of parodying your books. What do you think?” And he sent back this sweet, very quirky letter that said, in essence, “Well, I don’t really know why you’d want to bother, but if you’re silly enough to want to do it then that’s okay with me. Go ahead.”
After we managed to get a small advance from a publisher, Doug speed-read
Lord of the Rings
in one day and ended up writing probably three-quarters of the parody. I remember sitting across from him at a sort of double desk in a Harvard library, each of us with a portable typewriter, and I sat there fussing over a paragraph, and he was writing
pages
as fast as he could type. It was unbelievable. He wrote thirty-five or forty words per minute. And it was hysterical. I mean, it was just unbelievable. That was Doug—that was pure Doug.
When we turned it in, the head of Ballantine, Ian Ballantine [who published
The Lord of the Rings
], basically picked up the manuscript with a pair of fireplace tongs. It was noxious to him. He wasn’t thrilled about it. Meanwhile, over the years, that book [published in 1969 by Signet] has helped support the
Harvard Lampoon
. Simon & Schuster published yet another edition in the fall of 2012.
The National Lampoon ’s style of print humor was very dense, and not wedded to one cookie-cutter premise. There were many different types of genres that were parodied, from comic books to game instructions
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