What working on The Graduate, Get Smart, SNL, and more taught him about making timeless humor.
Buck Henry is going to be missed for many reasons, not least of which are his brilliant script of The Graduate, the creation of Get Smart, and the ahead-of-its-time but short-lived TV sci-fi satire Quark, as well as his SNL characters, a lot of whom (as the saying goes) would never get anywhere close to airtime these days — such as his version of Charles Lindbergh, who, on his first solo flight across the Atlantic, anxiously passes the time by jerking off to the pornographic magazines he brought with him.
With Buck’s passing on Wednesday at the age of 89, I’d love for you to read the extended version of the interview I conducted with him back in 2009, before it was cut down for inclusion in my book.
There’s a Heaven Can Wait reference I could use right now, but I’ll save you the time and agony. Instead, I’ll just say this:
Plastics.
Is there a more prophetic line in all of comedy?
Buck Henry seemed destined for a life in show business from an early age. At just sixteen, he was performing as one of the sons in the touring production of the mega-hit Life with Father (1947). A few years later, stationed in Germany and maintaining helicopters and aircraft, he found time to write, direct, and star in a cheerful (if somewhat unorthodox) musical review called Beyond the Moon, in which two GIs are accidentally rocketed to a distant planet, where they find a race of “weird but gorgeous women.”
The sixties were, by all accounts, a golden era for Henry. In 1965, he and Mel Brooks co-created the Emmy Award–winning sitcom Get Smart, which ran until 1970. Though fans and critics adored its obvious spoofing of the James Bond spy genre, Get Smart was also a satire of government incompetence (and possible menace), a topic Henry revisited in his Oscar-nominated adaptation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1970). But, arguably, Henry’s biggest cultural impact was the screenplay for The Graduate (1967), the Mike Nichols–directed comedy about alienation, plastics, and MILFs, which would soon come to define the baby-boomer generation. (...)
You’ve mentioned in the past that you have a voyeur nature. Is this an example?
I think all writers should have a voyeur nature. You have to look and listen. That’s why some writers might run out of material; they’re not looking, they’re not listening.
How do you achieve this? Where do you look and when do you listen?
I think the problem is that, if you live in California — and especially if you live in Hollywood — you aren’t connected to what the rest of the world thinks of as real life. Your observations are based on what you see on television and not what is going on in reality.
If you ride in limos for too long, you tend to forget what cabs, buses, and subways are like. You lose contact. I think it’s important to stay in contact with the outside world. (...)
Did you always gravitate toward comedy rather than other genres? Did it always come easily to you?
Yes, but I’m actually more a fan of other genres than I am of comedy. I rarely go to comedies. I just don’t find comedy as interesting as the forms that I don’t do myself. It’s harder to make me laugh than it is to make me cry.
You once said that comedy covers a lot of faults.
It is defensive in nature. With comedy, you deflect danger. You cover up emotion. You engage your enemy without getting your face smashed in.
Comedy is also harder to write. Things are either funny or they’re not. If you were writing, say, a story about Jesus getting married and having children, you can go for a long period of time faking it before you have to do anything even pretending to be meaningful. You can’t fake it with comedy. (...)
Did you see the potential right away in the Charles Webb book The Graduate when you were asked to write the screenplay?
Yes, but I don’t think I read the book until Mike Nichols gave it to me. Once I did, my feeling was, This is going to make a very good movie. There were strong characters and a good story.
The book is dialogue-heavy. Did that make the process of translating it to the screen easier for you?
Sure. The more there is to steal, the easier the job — although, in some cases, it isn’t. In fact, sometimes it’s just the opposite, because you can’t figure out what to get rid of.
I was going to ask if you had any idea whether The Graduate would become such a phenomenon, but does anyone ever really know?
Oh, absolutely not. You never really know.
With The Graduate, nobody expected that what happened was going to happen. I mean, I thought the movie was going to be a hit, but I didn’t know it was going to be that kind of hit.
How about specific lines and jokes? As a screenwriter, do you ever really know if a line or joke will break through?
I can usually tell if a joke will work, but I can’t predict if a joke or a line will become iconic.
Such as the famous “plastics” line?
Right. I had no idea what would happen with that line. I just thought that the line was good as a passing moment. Everything about that scene appealed to me, and the “plastics” line was only a part of it.
The line was not in the book. What made you want to write it into the movie?
I had a professor of philosophy at Dartmouth, and he would rail against the “plastic world.” I always remembered that phrase. The party scene needed something, just a little something, and “plastics” seemed to be the right word to use. I could have used “mohair” or another word, and if the actors had done it right, it still would have received a laugh. But “plastics” was just perfect. It captured something in that scene that another word never could have.
Everyone’s been through it. Me especially. Every guy in my generation who went to college and had ambivalent relationships with his parents. Every guy who stood around talking with his parents’ friends, who were perfectly nice but who were people you’d have paid to not have to stand around with … Well, we’ve all been through that. Everybody in the middle class, anyway.
Buck Henry is going to be missed for many reasons, not least of which are his brilliant script of The Graduate, the creation of Get Smart, and the ahead-of-its-time but short-lived TV sci-fi satire Quark, as well as his SNL characters, a lot of whom (as the saying goes) would never get anywhere close to airtime these days — such as his version of Charles Lindbergh, who, on his first solo flight across the Atlantic, anxiously passes the time by jerking off to the pornographic magazines he brought with him.
With Buck’s passing on Wednesday at the age of 89, I’d love for you to read the extended version of the interview I conducted with him back in 2009, before it was cut down for inclusion in my book.
There’s a Heaven Can Wait reference I could use right now, but I’ll save you the time and agony. Instead, I’ll just say this:Plastics.
Is there a more prophetic line in all of comedy?
Buck Henry seemed destined for a life in show business from an early age. At just sixteen, he was performing as one of the sons in the touring production of the mega-hit Life with Father (1947). A few years later, stationed in Germany and maintaining helicopters and aircraft, he found time to write, direct, and star in a cheerful (if somewhat unorthodox) musical review called Beyond the Moon, in which two GIs are accidentally rocketed to a distant planet, where they find a race of “weird but gorgeous women.”
The sixties were, by all accounts, a golden era for Henry. In 1965, he and Mel Brooks co-created the Emmy Award–winning sitcom Get Smart, which ran until 1970. Though fans and critics adored its obvious spoofing of the James Bond spy genre, Get Smart was also a satire of government incompetence (and possible menace), a topic Henry revisited in his Oscar-nominated adaptation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1970). But, arguably, Henry’s biggest cultural impact was the screenplay for The Graduate (1967), the Mike Nichols–directed comedy about alienation, plastics, and MILFs, which would soon come to define the baby-boomer generation. (...)
You’ve mentioned in the past that you have a voyeur nature. Is this an example?
I think all writers should have a voyeur nature. You have to look and listen. That’s why some writers might run out of material; they’re not looking, they’re not listening.
How do you achieve this? Where do you look and when do you listen?
I think the problem is that, if you live in California — and especially if you live in Hollywood — you aren’t connected to what the rest of the world thinks of as real life. Your observations are based on what you see on television and not what is going on in reality.
If you ride in limos for too long, you tend to forget what cabs, buses, and subways are like. You lose contact. I think it’s important to stay in contact with the outside world. (...)
Did you always gravitate toward comedy rather than other genres? Did it always come easily to you?
Yes, but I’m actually more a fan of other genres than I am of comedy. I rarely go to comedies. I just don’t find comedy as interesting as the forms that I don’t do myself. It’s harder to make me laugh than it is to make me cry.
You once said that comedy covers a lot of faults.
It is defensive in nature. With comedy, you deflect danger. You cover up emotion. You engage your enemy without getting your face smashed in.
Comedy is also harder to write. Things are either funny or they’re not. If you were writing, say, a story about Jesus getting married and having children, you can go for a long period of time faking it before you have to do anything even pretending to be meaningful. You can’t fake it with comedy. (...)
Did you see the potential right away in the Charles Webb book The Graduate when you were asked to write the screenplay?
Yes, but I don’t think I read the book until Mike Nichols gave it to me. Once I did, my feeling was, This is going to make a very good movie. There were strong characters and a good story.
The book is dialogue-heavy. Did that make the process of translating it to the screen easier for you?
Sure. The more there is to steal, the easier the job — although, in some cases, it isn’t. In fact, sometimes it’s just the opposite, because you can’t figure out what to get rid of.
I was going to ask if you had any idea whether The Graduate would become such a phenomenon, but does anyone ever really know?
Oh, absolutely not. You never really know.
With The Graduate, nobody expected that what happened was going to happen. I mean, I thought the movie was going to be a hit, but I didn’t know it was going to be that kind of hit.
How about specific lines and jokes? As a screenwriter, do you ever really know if a line or joke will break through?
I can usually tell if a joke will work, but I can’t predict if a joke or a line will become iconic.
Such as the famous “plastics” line?
Right. I had no idea what would happen with that line. I just thought that the line was good as a passing moment. Everything about that scene appealed to me, and the “plastics” line was only a part of it.
The line was not in the book. What made you want to write it into the movie?
I had a professor of philosophy at Dartmouth, and he would rail against the “plastic world.” I always remembered that phrase. The party scene needed something, just a little something, and “plastics” seemed to be the right word to use. I could have used “mohair” or another word, and if the actors had done it right, it still would have received a laugh. But “plastics” was just perfect. It captured something in that scene that another word never could have.
Everyone’s been through it. Me especially. Every guy in my generation who went to college and had ambivalent relationships with his parents. Every guy who stood around talking with his parents’ friends, who were perfectly nice but who were people you’d have paid to not have to stand around with … Well, we’ve all been through that. Everybody in the middle class, anyway.
by Mike Sacks, Vulture | Read more:
Image: NBC/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
