May 4, 2023 • 11 mins
Today, we’re bringing you a preview of a 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, exclusively on audio, now at https://www.pushkin.fm/audiobooks/so-many-steves-afternoons-with-steve-martin or wherever you get your audiobooks.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey everyone, this is Justin Richmond, host of Broken
Record and started from the bottom as a Pushkin listener.
You know, you get to hear from some of the
most talented and creative people around, but I have to
say there are some creative minds who feel a cut
above the rest, who are particularly fascinating. I'd put Steve
(00:36):
Martin in that category. He's an incredible actor, writer, comedic, performer, musician,
and it turns out even has an eye for art.
Steve Martin is a pure creative force. And now through Pushkin,
Steve has his own original audiobook that I'm excited to
share an excerpt of with you today. It's called So
(00:57):
Many Steves, and it's an exploration of Steve Martin's many
creative lives and conversation with his friend and New Yorker
writer Adam Gottnik. In this preview, you'll hear Steve Martin
and Adam talk about Steve's film career. Check out the
audiobook on Pushkin dot fm for the complete conversations, and
in the meantime, enjoy this excerpt of So Many Steves.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
By the way, it's a new law and now I
have to do this. I don't like to, but it
is by law all comedians must make a financial disclosure.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
This is a clip from Steve's second album, which was
released in nineteen seventy eight and was called A Wild
and Crazy Guy.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Then I figured out a potential concert income. If you
fill a three thousand seat haul at three dollars per ticket,
the grosses nine thousand dollars. If you fill a three
thousand seat hall at seven to fifty per ticket, the
gross is a twenty two thousand, five hundred dollars. And
just for fun, I figure out if you fill a
three thousand seat haul at eight hundred dollars a ticket,
(02:01):
gross's two million, four hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
And this is what I'm shooting for.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
One show.
Speaker 5 (02:09):
Goodbye what you've just heard, suit Jess.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
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 Vittenstein's particularism, in
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
(02:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
The strangest thing for me was in my latter days
of stand up. It was the least creative I have
ever been.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
At the same time, you were playing stadium.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
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 to move on and going and change the somebody.
But there every word was amplified on a mic. It
had to be solid, had to be heard, had to
be delivered.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
You were really at the end. They're doing rock concerts.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
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, you know, I want them to laugh,
not cheer.
Speaker 6 (03:49):
Right.
Speaker 4 (03:50):
I was just completely at a dead end.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
Chapter three 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
coming 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
(04:18):
still a working comedian, where he took that absurdist data 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 Bok there,
the new phone book here. I wish I could get
that excited about.
Speaker 4 (04:38):
Fucknatly, are you kidding?
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Hellions up?
Speaker 3 (04:41):
People look at this book every day. This is the
kind of spontaneous publicity, your name in print that makes people.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
I'm in print.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
That movie set the tone for wonderfully funny and I
think original films like Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and
The Man with Two Brains. In the late eighties, Steve
worked with one of the most successful directors of the
entire late twentieth century, John Hughes. Their collaboration, the movie Planes,
Trains and Automobiles still Delight's families year in and out,
(05:13):
and it stands as one of the few Thanksgiving movies.
In the Cannon, 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.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
You're not a very tolerant person. Held you like a
mouthful of teeth.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
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
La Story, both of them not coincidentally with scripts written
by Steve.
Speaker 6 (05:52):
You heard Me, Big Nose, flat Faced, Flat nosed, Flat Food.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Time, The Wacky Weekend Winner, And then, finally, the third
actdoor 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.
Speaker 6 (06:14):
Do you know mister Banks.
Speaker 5 (06:15):
Oh, you can call him George or Dad.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
George will find it.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
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 La Story aspired
to be. And I've always been puzzled, intrigued by Steve's
reluctance or inability to go forward in the movies in
(06:41):
that very personal and poetic direction. It's one of the
things I most want to talk to him about today.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
Well, when I first started in movies, I had one vision,
which was the jerk.
Speaker 6 (06:54):
You a bottle of yes, but no more nineteen sixty six,
Let's blurge, bring us some fresh wine, the freshest you've
got this year's no more of this old stuff way, monsieur.
He doesn't realize he's dealing with sophisticated people here.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Its vision was laughs, jokes, and the subsequent movies were
last jokes. That's what I wanted to laughs jokes. But
it wasn't the vision of a movie. It's a vision
of something else, of just putting comedy on screen. And
I'm you know, I'm learning how to act. And I
remember saying, you know, I think, oh, this is gonna
be an easy transition. I've done a million things on stage,
(07:32):
you know, I've done sketches, I've done Saturday Night Live,
I've done this is going to be a 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.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
That's the shot.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
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 day? And really you realize,
oh my god, this is this is more complex than
I thought.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
And it doesn't have a lot to do with being
a performer on stage right.
Speaker 4 (08:06):
No, it's just something else. And there's all the mechanics,
which I love so 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 forty because they're just unwieldy. You can't perfect. I
(08:29):
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.
Speaker 6 (08:39):
Good?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
It's something I want to say that's always been very
difficult for me to say.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
I slid the sheet, the sheet, I slid and on
the Slitted Sheet I Sit now.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
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 nineteen fifties
as a kind of all purpose straight man on the
legendary Marry Sid Caesar Your Show of Shows. He could
(09:12):
be seen interrogating Sid's mad German professors. And then he
became even more famous in the nineteen sixties as mel
Brooks straight man on those beautiful, astounding two thousand year
old Man records in two thousand years the greatest thing
mankind ever devised that I think, in my humble opinion,
it's Sarahan wrap. You equate this with Man's discovery of space.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
That was good, That was good.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
But Carl Reiner was far more comic mench 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 unwrapped in a deep well
of show business knowledge.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
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.
Now you're home and you're getting something out of your refrigerator,
and that's when.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
You laugh at it when you remember it, when.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
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?
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Mike is Mike Nichols, the immensely accomplished director behind The
Graduate and Carnal Knowledge and many other classics.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
I have found over time that those little moments when
you're thinking should be this is not very clear, that
those are the ones that people pick out and remember.
Like in Rock Sanne, it wasn't scripted, but it was
starting to be dusk, and I asked the director. I said, uh,
(10:54):
I said, I have an idea. There was a newspaper wreck,
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, getting.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
Closed to it, and that was improvised.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
On the it was improvised.
Speaker 4 (11:20):
Yeah, I didn't even te him what I was going
to do.
Pushkin. Hey everyone, this is Justin Richmond, host of Broken
Record and started from the bottom as a Pushkin listener.
You know, you get to hear from some of the
most talented and creative people around, but I have to
say there are some creative minds who feel a cut
above the rest, who are particularly fascinating. I'd put Steve
(00:36):
Martin in that category. He's an incredible actor, writer, comedic, performer, musician,
and it turns out even has an eye for art.
Steve Martin is a pure creative force. And now through Pushkin,
Steve has his own original audiobook that I'm excited to
share an excerpt of with you today. It's called So
(00:57):
Many Steves, and it's an exploration of Steve Martin's many
creative lives and conversation with his friend and New Yorker
writer Adam Gottnik. In this preview, you'll hear Steve Martin
and Adam talk about Steve's film career. Check out the
audiobook on Pushkin dot fm for the complete conversations, and
in the meantime, enjoy this excerpt of So Many Steves.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
By the way, it's a new law and now I
have to do this. I don't like to, but it
is by law all comedians must make a financial disclosure.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
This is a clip from Steve's second album, which was
released in nineteen seventy eight and was called A Wild
and Crazy Guy.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Then I figured out a potential concert income. If you
fill a three thousand seat haul at three dollars per ticket,
the grosses nine thousand dollars. If you fill a three
thousand seat hall at seven to fifty per ticket, the
gross is a twenty two thousand, five hundred dollars. And
just for fun, I figure out if you fill a
three thousand seat haul at eight hundred dollars a ticket,
(02:01):
gross's two million, four hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
And this is what I'm shooting for.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
One show.
Speaker 5 (02:09):
Goodbye what you've just heard, suit Jess.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
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 Vittenstein's particularism, in
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
(02:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
The strangest thing for me was in my latter days
of stand up. It was the least creative I have
ever been.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
At the same time, you were playing stadium.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
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 to move on and going and change the somebody.
But there every word was amplified on a mic. It
had to be solid, had to be heard, had to
be delivered.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
You were really at the end. They're doing rock concerts.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
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, you know, I want them to laugh,
not cheer.
Speaker 6 (03:49):
Right.
Speaker 4 (03:50):
I was just completely at a dead end.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
Chapter three 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
coming 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
(04:18):
still a working comedian, where he took that absurdist data 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 Bok there,
the new phone book here. I wish I could get
that excited about.
Speaker 4 (04:38):
Fucknatly, are you kidding?
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Hellions up?
Speaker 3 (04:41):
People look at this book every day. This is the
kind of spontaneous publicity, your name in print that makes people.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
I'm in print.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
That movie set the tone for wonderfully funny and I
think original films like Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and
The Man with Two Brains. In the late eighties, Steve
worked with one of the most successful directors of the
entire late twentieth century, John Hughes. Their collaboration, the movie Planes,
Trains and Automobiles still Delight's families year in and out,
(05:13):
and it stands as one of the few Thanksgiving movies.
In the Cannon, 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.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
You're not a very tolerant person. Held you like a
mouthful of teeth.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
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
La Story, both of them not coincidentally with scripts written
by Steve.
Speaker 6 (05:52):
You heard Me, Big Nose, flat Faced, Flat nosed, Flat Food.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Time, The Wacky Weekend Winner, And then, finally, the third
actdoor 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.
Speaker 6 (06:14):
Do you know mister Banks.
Speaker 5 (06:15):
Oh, you can call him George or Dad.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
George will find it.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
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 La Story aspired
to be. And I've always been puzzled, intrigued by Steve's
reluctance or inability to go forward in the movies in
(06:41):
that very personal and poetic direction. It's one of the
things I most want to talk to him about today.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
Well, when I first started in movies, I had one vision,
which was the jerk.
Speaker 6 (06:54):
You a bottle of yes, but no more nineteen sixty six,
Let's blurge, bring us some fresh wine, the freshest you've
got this year's no more of this old stuff way, monsieur.
He doesn't realize he's dealing with sophisticated people here.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Its vision was laughs, jokes, and the subsequent movies were
last jokes. That's what I wanted to laughs jokes. But
it wasn't the vision of a movie. It's a vision
of something else, of just putting comedy on screen. And
I'm you know, I'm learning how to act. And I
remember saying, you know, I think, oh, this is gonna
be an easy transition. I've done a million things on stage,
(07:32):
you know, I've done sketches, I've done Saturday Night Live,
I've done this is going to be a 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.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
That's the shot.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
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 day? And really you realize,
oh my god, this is this is more complex than
I thought.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
And it doesn't have a lot to do with being
a performer on stage right.
Speaker 4 (08:06):
No, it's just something else. And there's all the mechanics,
which I love so 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 forty because they're just unwieldy. You can't perfect. I
(08:29):
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.
Speaker 6 (08:39):
Good?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
It's something I want to say that's always been very
difficult for me to say.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
I slid the sheet, the sheet, I slid and on
the Slitted Sheet I Sit now.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
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 nineteen fifties
as a kind of all purpose straight man on the
legendary Marry Sid Caesar Your Show of Shows. He could
(09:12):
be seen interrogating Sid's mad German professors. And then he
became even more famous in the nineteen sixties as mel
Brooks straight man on those beautiful, astounding two thousand year
old Man records in two thousand years the greatest thing
mankind ever devised that I think, in my humble opinion,
it's Sarahan wrap. You equate this with Man's discovery of space.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
That was good, That was good.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
But Carl Reiner was far more comic mench 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 unwrapped in a deep well
of show business knowledge.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
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.
Now you're home and you're getting something out of your refrigerator,
and that's when.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
You laugh at it when you remember it, when.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
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?
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Mike is Mike Nichols, the immensely accomplished director behind The
Graduate and Carnal Knowledge and many other classics.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
I have found over time that those little moments when
you're thinking should be this is not very clear, that
those are the ones that people pick out and remember.
Like in Rock Sanne, it wasn't scripted, but it was
starting to be dusk, and I asked the director. I said, uh,
(10:54):
I said, I have an idea. There was a newspaper wreck,
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, getting.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
Closed to it, and that was improvised.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
On the it was improvised.
Speaker 4 (11:20):
Yeah, I didn't even te him what I was going
to do.
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