The movie Albert Brooks wants to delete from history: “I can’t stand the way it ends”
Sometimes, the men and women who stand a little more in the background, the original influencers, who tried out new ideas and did things first, allowing others to come and take a lot of the plaudits and the cash, don’t quite get the recognition they deserve, and that could be said of Albert Brooks, a stand-up comic and actor who ran so the likes of Steve Martin and Andy Kaufman could walk.
Although Brooks is much more of a household name in the States than elsewhere and a familiar face thanks to his regular appearances on chat shows like David Letterman’s, he was a pioneer of confessional, self-deprecating stand-up and even made the SNL blueprint for Lonely Island and Please Don’t Destroy by making short video clips for the show in its early seasons.
He started directing his own comedy movies late in the 1970s, writing with This is Spinal Tap’s Harry Shearer, making several critically acclaimed, but not hugely successful films over the next decade, like 1985’s road movie Lost in America. He did find a moderate amount of fame and an Oscar nomination in front of the camera through James L Brooks’ Broadcast News in 1987, the hit romantic comedy about a TV news team who have regular breakdowns on- and off-camera.
Brooks’ reputation was strong enough that he was able to entice Meryl Streep to star opposite him in 1991’s heaven-based fantasy Defending Your Life, which again critics enjoyed but struggled to break even at the box office, and three years later he made a film that looking back on he has major issues with, mainly about the way it was directed and edited, against his wishes.
He told Vanity Fair, “I wrote this movie with Monica Johnson called The Scout that Michael Ritchie directed. I can’t stand the way it ends, and it was a fight that I lost. I yelled so loud at [producer and TV exec] Peter Chernin, I never worked at Fox again. I lost my temper.”
The Scout starred Brooks and Brendan Fraser in an early role and was about an up-and-coming baseball star who flops, causing the New York Yankees scout who discovered him to be punished by being sent to Mexico to find the next best thing instead.
It was not a cheap film to make by any means, with a production budget of some $20million, a fortune more than 30 years ago, but it only brought back just over $2m in gate receipts, a disaster for 20th Century Fox.
Brooks added: “ I went crazy, and I said [to Chernin], ‘Look, you’re not the one in the paper getting… ‘ And, sure enough, The New York Times, it was like the reviewer was listening. She said, ‘I’m so surprised that Albert Brooks would end a movie this way’. And I’m going, ‘Albert Brooks didn’t end a movie this way!’”
Brooks took a step back and then went on to do a considerable amount of voiceover work, not least as Marlin in Pixar’s Finding Nemo in 2003. He then found himself in demand as a hero of Judd Apatow’s and appeared in movies like Paul Rudd’s This is 40, as well as receiving a raft of awards for his performance in the Ryan Gosling thriller Drive in 2011 as the vicious gangster Bernie Rose.
