![]() ![]() I’m always like, ‘Eh, he would have liked me though.’ We would have had a couple of drinks and he’d be like, ‘You know what, Jew? You’re alright. “But yeah, I mean I’m able to overlook it. “That’s always a rough day in the life of a Jewish reader,” he says. As both a “lifelong Roald Dahl fan” and a Jew, he tells me that he has somehow managed to see past his favorite author’s infamous antisemitism. Next up, Rich is adapting his pandemic-inspired story “Everyday Parenting Tips” into a film starring Ryan Reynolds and working behind the scenes on Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka prequel. And weirdly what happens, I find, is when you write from a naive perspective, you can sometimes be more emotionally raw than you can when the characters are super witty and smart.” There’s all these characters that are really just trying to make sense of a world that the reader already knows. There’s a baby detective, there’s a fading mutant half monkey-half man superhero who is trying to figure out what to do now that there are no aliens for him to kill and smash anymore. “And then it’s a laser disc machine who is gradually becoming aware of his obsolescence. “So, in New Teeth, an illiterate pirate starts off the tale,” he continues. “Those are the characters that I try to write about.” “From Homer Simpson to WALL-E, I love characters that are wildly misinformed, naive, confused,” Rich explains. I always feel like it’s just more fun to have a spaceship land or have an animal talk or set something on fire.”īut if the characters he writes have one thing in common, it’s their fundamental lack of knowledge about the world around them. “I basically forgot everything that I had learned and was just like, let’s go for it, who cares? Screw it!” he says. Rich slowly figured out how to scale back his comedic vision during his four years at SNL, but by the time he got the opportunity to create his own scripted series based on his writing- Man Seeking Woman and then Miracle Workers-he decided to go for broke. They’ve been doing SNL for months and you just walk right in fresh.” He still returns to SNL every time his old writing partner John Mulaney hosts the show. Which of these do you think have the best shot of getting on TV?” Meyers would reply, “Well, certainly not these eight, but maybe this ninth one.” ![]() He recalls going to then-head writer Seth Meyers and saying, “Here’s a bunch of premises. I never felt like, ‘Oh, I’m so young, you’re not going to listen to me.’ Because the way it works is, the sketches go up in front of people and they have no idea who wrote it and then they’re picked or not based on the audience reaction.” He says he never worried about the “politics” of whether Lorne Michaels liked him “because Lorne doesn’t know who you are when you’re a first-year writer, he’s worried about much bigger things.”Īt SNL, he would constantly be pitching ideas that were way too elaborate to work within the confines of a live television show. It’s been just about 14 years since Rich joined the writing staff at SNL straight out of college, an experience he now says was “definitely scary” but also “thrilling.” Once you’re there, he says, “It’s really meritocratic. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |