 Basic Instincts
All Garry Shandling needs is a little editing, a hint of a laugh track, and a reminder to always trust his gut.
By Bryan Reesman
Garry Shandling’s long and varied career has seen him go from ’70s sitcom writer (Sanford and Son and Welcome Back, Kotter) to stand-up comedian and talk-show host to ’80s sitcom star (It’s Garry Shandling’s Show). But starring as the insecure protagonist of The Larry Sanders Show, which ran from 1992 to 1998 on HBO and for which Shandling also wrote, is how he really made his mark.
The off-the-cuff, laugh-track-free, documentary-style comedy centered on the backstage shenanigans of Shandling’s talk-show host and coworkers, among whom were his sidekick (Jeffrey Tambor) and his loyal executive producer (Rip Torn). While it was successful at the time, The Larry Sanders Show is even more relevant now, having set the stage for series like The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, My Name Is Earl, and Extras. The new Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show (Sony Pictures, $50) DVD collection includes 23 top episodes handpicked by Shandling, plus loads of extras, including documentaries and interviews. The most intriguing of the bonuses are spontaneous sit-downs with his close friends — Sharon Stone, Tom Petty, and Jerry Seinfeld, among others. The interviews are a little awkward and a perfect accompaniment to a show that often made us squirm as it exposed the egos, ridiculousness, and illusions behind showbiz.
After watching the “Mr. Sharon Stone” episode, in which she and Larry go on dates, and the DVD feature, where you’re chatting with Sharon herself, it seems obvious that there was a real-life backstory involved in creating the episode. I’ve known Sharon since acting class, for 22 years or something like that. Those personal interviews are meant only as a special feature on a DVD. They’re supposed to be underperformed and unrehearsed and not always entertaining, except for being real. That was the experiment — but also I think that those personal visits are the purest form of what The Larry Sanders Show was about, which is just people being, and then seeing what conflicts come up naturally. As a television series on HBO, we had to find a story and give it some pace. But certainly the distilled version would be these things, and I think these are progressed to a more awkward and voyeuristic form of The Larry Sanders Show. I think they’re something odd to watch.
That chat with Sharon, though awkward, is engaging, and it made me realize that you guys had dated before the Sanders episode was created. Isn’t this fascinating? I don’t think it’s quite clear by the dialogue what all the circumstances and the baggage of our relationship is, other than that we’ve known each other a long time and that it’s very deep because it ties in to [our teacher] Roy London’s acting class. It ties in to a real, personal affection, and it ties in to an array of energies that people have when they’re together. I mean to be that ambiguous because it’s never clear exactly what that is, and yet it’s interesting to watch. That’s why I always say that subtext is more interesting to watch if it’s not verbalized. I think all those elements are not clear. When you asked me about the episode, I’m trying to remember how it came to mind. I’m not sure that the episode wouldn’t have been prompted by the fact that it’s a good story for Larry to have to date someone more famous than he is, not necessarily coming off any real-life event. I think that was the impetus for the story.
I got the vibe that you two had dated and that that particular episode was a good way for you to work through things, even if nobody else on the set or in the audience knew about that. I’m going to be very coy, and purposely so, about what she said and what she indicated, other than to be thrilled that it makes you wonder, because that’s a stronger tack to take than to get more specific.
I love the episode with Carol Burnett, where you guys go to commercials and you’re all just sitting there, saying nothing. That’s taken right out of what happens on these talk shows. I’ve been there as a guest, I’ve been there as the host, and that’s often exactly what happens. I think it’s one of the strangest circumstances in the world, because it says everything about what a talk show is. You’ve built up this chemistry with a person, but when the camera goes off, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the chemistry continues. You’re doing a job. Certainly that was well revealed on Larry Sanders. That doesn’t mean they’re bad people or anything — that’s just a professional job circumstance. Sometimes you don’t want to keep up the talking because you want to get it all on TV and want it to be fresh. Sometimes you don’t have anything to say other than what’s on the notes.
Are you pleased, as a comedian, to see comedy shows that don’t program viewers with a laugh track to tell them what’s funny? I don’t have the objectivity or perspective to feel one way or the other. I know that in real life I’ve often been in situations where I’ve wished there were a laugh track — and I’ve never said that before, I promise you.
When did you want to have that laugh track? About 10 minutes ago. [Chuckles] Oh, I’m sure in real life I’ve said a few things that I thought were funny that weren’t, and it would’ve been great. I could use some editing in my life too. A little editing, a little laugh track.
Editing is my job. And a little more advice from you.
And what advice can I give you? I’m open to all advice. You should tell me what advice you would give me, without thinking about what’s appropriate, because you may have something to say. What advice do you have to give me?
I used to joke that you should trust nobody, including yourself. But that’s bad advice. I would say trust nobody but yourself. Learn to trust your instincts more, and don’t let people make you second-guess yourself. I think you’ve stumbled on — and I’m not kidding — a core issue that I’ve worked on my whole life, which is trusting my instincts. The only time I get in trouble is when I have an instinct and don’t follow it, and that has gotten me into trouble every time. It’s like being a spiritual warrior, which is a warrior who makes decisions based on his heart. I’ve made plenty of decisions that were incorrect because somebody talked me into it and I didn’t trust myself. I don’t blame them. It’s hard to stick to your own instincts. That would be my advice to you, too: Trust your instincts. Calm your mind, don’t listen to all the chatter, and see what you feel, and make a decision based on that.
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 Heart of Glass
Can Ira Glass’s quirky radio show This American Life make the transition to Showtime?
By Ken Parish Perkins
As geeks go, Ira Glass is a beaut, a bespectacled connoisseur of hipster nerdology who doesn’t come close to thinking like you and me, simply because he isn’t like you and me. His brain flows along a different wavelength in some other parallel universe and, usually, at a much quirkier clip.
For instance, stories filed for This American Life, the exquisitely offbeat and popular public-radio program that he co-owns with Chicago Public Radio and hosts with acerbic dryness, wit, and humor, are nuggets of ordinary simplicity made extraordinary by how they’re thought through, approached, reported, delivered, and agonized over. Whether it’s presenting the story of a 70-year-old bungee jumper or of a five-year-old uncle, This American Life has proven to be an anomaly of creative freshness, even on public radio, where there’s far more wiggle room than on commercial radio to unearth and nurture an authoritatively original, if a bit crackly, voice.
With a splendid body of work, he’s mastered this tiny part of the radio universe, so the fact that a restless Glass, now 48, is looking for a wider playground shouldn’t come as a jolt. What might be a surprise is that the playground is television, a parasite of a medium with a proven ability to suck the creative juices right out of your skull. Some radio purists are already whispering, “Is he crossing to the dark side?”
“We’ve certainly pondered that quagmire,” confesses Glass, who works out of Chicago’s public radio station, WBEZ. “Yet here we are, with our brains intact.”
Indeed, This American Life, which aired last month on Showtime, is a lot like its radio version, but with pictures. It offers a cinematic style that’s a throwback to old-school television; it’s as if contemporary documentary style hooked up with The Twilight Zone. Narrator Glass is heard and seen at the beginning of each story, when he appears in some unnamed place, sitting at a desk, a microphone on his right and a coffee mug on his left. It could be that he’s in a cow pasture or in the salt flats of Utah or near nuclear cooling towers in Pennsylvania or on top of a snowcapped mountain in Colorado — it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the story. Or does it?
Symbolism and impressionism are what This American Life thrives on and what Glass, who majored in semiotics (the study of signs and symbols and of how meaning is constructed and understood, if you’re wondering) at Brown University, is about, too, which is what makes him so irresistible to both the part of the intelligentsia who are convinced he’s wacky and the part who fancy him as an honorary member of their genius clique.
Nearly 1.7 million listeners on more than 500 stations tune in to the radio show each week, hoping to get their fill of unusual stories that often orbit themes like reality checks and growth spurts. It’s this loyal group that’s unsure of whether This American Life should birth a TV baby — and if it does, what should it look like? Glass wasn’t certain either.
“Part of the power of radio comes from the invisibility,” says Glass, dressed in a black suit, a black tie, a white shirt, and dark horn-rimmed glasses, as though he’s just arrived from a funeral. “There’s just something more powerful about hearing somebody talk in that radio darkness, where you don’t see them. They can be a sort of numinous, mythic figure in a way that they can never really be on television. And we have to give that up.”
Glass and Chris Wilcha, his director and coexecutive producer, wanted the photography on the TV version to be as intriguing as the show’s sound, music, and voices. They shot with one camera, as opposed to 10, to allow a certain level of intimacy. Having sounded different from everything else on the radio, This American Life now needed to look different. It does.
“To turn the radio show into a television show, we could have just put people into a studio and filmed them telling their stories,” says Wilcha, a filmmaker whose documentary The Target Shoots First was a festival-circuit hit. “But it felt like that wasn’t ambitious enough. It felt like that wouldn’t be exploiting everything you can do with pictures to the degree we wanted. We wanted pictures to be part of telling the story.”
Some stories prove more difficult to do with visuals, like the interesting short story about a girl who peed on the bus in grade school. Yet others, including one about a senior citizen trying to get her film into the Sundance Film Festival, one about a cloned bull and the man who tried to love him, and one about people offering their organs via Craigslist, fit right in.
Still other stories, like the one in which a man buys a tombstone to announce the “deaths” of his living sons after having a fight with them over money, were initially produced for television but then were shifted to radio. The cemetery wouldn’t let them film, and the tombstone buyer refused to be on camera. (The man, says Glass, was sure that he would “pull a Jerry Springer.”)
Whether the TV version will win over radio loyalists is unknown, though not for Glass, who is convinced that “they’ll see that we’re not doing this because we thought we would get rich or famous, but that we just thought it would be cool to work with pictures — to see if we could come up with something visual that has the same emotional appeal of the stories we love.”
As for the purists who are upset that their hero has crossed over to the dark side, “I wish that I could engender that kind of hate,” Glass says, laughing. “That would be so flattering.”
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 Great American Billboards: 100 Years of History by the Side of the Road
By Fred E. Basten (Ten Speed Press, $20)
“Neolithic cave paintings in Spain and France bear the unmistakable images of animals standing, running, alone or in herds. What was the message? Were they a warning to alert early humans to the dangers lurking outside, or an announcement of the riches waiting beyond the cave walls?” So begins the introduction to Fred Basten’s illustrated history Great American Billboards. Basten’s brief but illuminative opening essay traces the development of the form from its prehistoric roots to its use as a propaganda tool by the ancient Greeks to its explosion in the late 1800s, which birthed the modern-day billboard industry. The rest of the book, however, is dedicated specifically to the art (and frequently, the artifice) of American billboards of the past 100 years. The nearly 200 sumptuous images here document a collection curated by the late Joe Blackstock and taken from the archives of the United States’ first and most prominent billboard company, Foster and Kleiser (whose current incarnation is outdoor advertising monolith Clear Channel Outdoor). Divided into chapters covering roughly 10-year increments, this fascinating book follows the art form through the Victorian era, the two World Wars, the cold-war boom years, and to the increasingly postmodern billboards of today. Focusing on both commercial and political advertising, the book is a testimony to both the sublime and the ridiculous, including everything from a somber black-and-white image marking the assassination of John F. Kennedy to a gaudy ad trumpeting a Liberace stage show. It’s strange to think that a type of mass advertising could serve as such an illuminating guide to a country, its culture, and its people, but the images here bear witness to that history while offering a fun-house-mirror reflection of us and of our dreams. Basten, who’s written and edited numerous books documenting the art of Hollywood and the architecture of Los Angeles, has a gift for choosing the most vivid examples, but his captions and annotations place the images in their broader context. Moreover, you come to understand the billboard’s unmistakable influence not just on pop art and modern photography but also on a shared understanding of our national identity. — Bob Bozorgmehr
 Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America Eats
By Steve Ettlinger (Hudson Street Press, $24)
At a family picnic, Steve Ettlinger was perusing the label of an ice-cream bar. “Whatcha reading, daddy?” asked his then six-year-old daughter. His son, in sixth grade, chimed in, reciting some of the ingredients: high-fructose corn syrup, polysorbate 60 …, when his daughter asked, “Where does polysorbate 60 come from, Daddy?” Ettlinger felt chagrined that he had no idea.
Hence, Twinkie, Deconstructed. The guts of the book consist of 24 chapters that tie in each Twinkie snack-food ingredient — not only polysorbate 60 and corn-derived sweeteners but also sodium stearoyl lactylate, monocalcium phosphate, and cellulose gum, to name a small sampling. Ettlinger is not picking on the Twinkie snack cake; he could have chosen numerous other food products that contain similar processed ingredients. He settled on Twinkies partly because they are so well known and have spawned so many legends, such as that of their alleged shelf life of 25 years, even when unwrapped from their protective packaging. Although not trained as an investigative journalist, Ettlinger digs deep. He does not, however, adopt a prosecutorial or moral tone. He accepts that most modern foods available in supermarkets contain processed ingredients that find life in laboratories as well as in the soil.
The original Twinkie snack lacked many of today’s ingredients. But it also spoiled on the shelf within a week. The contemporary Twinkie does not spoil as quickly, and it’s still pleasing lots of palates and is not causing much harm when consumed in moderation. At the end of the book, Ettlinger can proudly make the statement, “At least now you know what you’re eating.” — S.W.
 The Remarkable Millard Fillmore: The Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President
By George Pendle
(Three Rivers Press, $10)
In real life, Millard Fillmore served as the 13th president of the United States. Today Fillmore is thought of mostly as a joke, if he is thought of at all. Part of the reason is his name — it sounds funny in 2007. Another part of the reason is that Fillmore was affiliated with the Whig political party, which expired soon after his presidency ended (1853). Other reasons for his lack of popularity include: (1) Fillmore is usually evaluated in the shadow of President Zachary Taylor, who died in office during 1850, nearly halfway through his term. Elected as Taylor’s vice president, Fillmore, a Buffalo, New York, politician-lawyer, became president via the president’s death, not through the ballot box. (2) Although personally opposed to slavery, Fillmore tolerated it politically because he feared a civil war if Northerners forced abolition on Southerners. As a result, he is viewed, in retrospect, as something of an unprincipled politician. (3) He ran for United States president in 1856 on the American Party ticket, a movement unfortunately nicknamed the Know-Nothing Party. He lost.
George Pendle uses the facts of Fillmore’s life to write an imagined biography, turning the dead president into a hero of American history. Although Pendle’s motivation for writing the send-up is unclear, his book is a scathing satire of revisionist history in general, and of presidential biography in particular. Some readers are quite likely to chuckle or even to laugh out loud. Others, who take American history and presidential biography at face value, might puzzle about why an author would prick either. In any case, the satire might have the effect — unintended or intended — of driving readers to learn more about the real-life career of Fillmore. — Steve Weinberg
 UnSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation
By Brooks Jackson and
Kathleen Hall Jamieson
(Random House, $13)
Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson serve as guides to seekers of truth and accuracy. They are involved with a website, FactCheck.org, that aims to help. The site is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, where Jamieson, a professor of communication, serves as director. Jackson is a veteran investigative journalist (Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, CNN).
Given all the misinformation available via the Internet, it is, perhaps, surprising that Jackson and Jamieson, the authors of UnSpun, offer it as the main solution to misinformation — “if you use it very carefully.” Jackson and Jamieson explain the tactics of liars, describe the psychological traps that lots of people fall into and which lead them to believe the lies, and offer an approachable lecture about how to distinguish credible evidence from misleading random anecdotes.
Among the tips the authors give about using online information wisely:
• Always assume anonymous/untraceable claims are untrue until they’re proven otherwise.
• Seek out more-or-less objective federal government websites (such as those listing census data or offering accurate transcripts of speeches).
• Rely on organizations such as the Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, that are not beholden to advertisers or to special interests.
After all, you have to trust someone. — S.W.
 Easy beach reading? Forget that. You’ve got a month or so to get ready for Ye Olde Sum’er o’ Shaxper.
By J.D. Reid
Ask any flat-topped, gum-smacking 11th grader whether he would rather (a) read William Shakespeare or (b) die, and it’s likely he will give both sides a fair shake. On the one hand, his eyes would have to glaze — I’m sorry, gaze — over countless e’ens, o’ers, dosts, and thous and lines like, “They doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.” On the other, he would die. “Fine,” he’ll say. “Kill me.”
We can sympathize; 400 years ago, the language was different, spelling and letters were different, and things like “Love’s Labor’s Lost” looked like “Loues Labours Loft.” Writers these days are spoiled with dictionaries and erasers; when Shakespeare was chiseling Romeo and Juliet into his cave wall, he didn’t have the luxury of Office Depot. It was hard enough to compose canonical drama while keeping dragons at bay with a torch. Nonetheless, Shakes managed, even in those dark ages. Surely if his drama could entertain his illiterate, pox-friendly contemporaries, our standardized-tested, antibacterial brains can stomach what I’m calling Ye Olde Sum’er o’ Shaxper.
Start with a bang by picking up Hamlet, which should be a refresher reading for you. (If you made it through school without having read it, odds are you didn’t make it through school.) Hamlet is so classic and so comfortable that it’s like warm apple cider on Chriftmas Eve. Moral of the story: Poison goes in the ear, not in wine, where it is susceptible to glass confusion.
While we are still in violent moods, we’ll hit Macbeth, the Fargo of Shakespearean plays. And bloody? You betcha: Stabbings, beheadings, suicide — even the witches use blood as a sort of heavy broth in their soup cauldron. Moral: When in doubt, kill everyone.
Ooh, and Titus Andronicus. Have you been looking for more gore in your classic literature? Then this one’s for you. Hands, tongues, and heads are lopped off all over the place, which leads the story to one grand question: How do we taste in pie form? Moral: Actually, I don’t think there is a moral in this one.
So those should kick off Ye Olde Sum’er o’ Shaxper. Where to find them? Easy: This month Modern Library releases the monster William Shakespeare Complete Works ($65), certain to devour all those too-heavy, two-point-font, onionskin anthologies that you would never actually read. All you need now is a lamp. Oh, and, of course, silence.
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