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SIU Alum Bob Odenkirk:
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Nightlife caught up with Odenkirk just after he awoke late in the afternoon. He spent the previous night at The Other Network, a program in Los Angeles that screens never-aired television pilots. A pilot, as Sam Jackson explains in Pulp Fiction, is a trial episode of a television show filmed and shown to test audiences. If the marketing department, the executives, and the test audiences all agree that the pilot is good enough, the show becomes a recurring program on television. If not, the network passes, the show never airs, and the pilot may as well never have existed.
"They showed some of the pilots I've done that never aired," says Odenkirk, a little dispirited. "They didn't even show all of them. They showed three shows.
"It sucks when your pilot doesn't get on," Odenkirk says. "You worked really hard and no one will ever see it. If you write a novel or you make an indie film, you can get it out there on your own. But if you make a pilot and it comes close to getting on, and maybe everyone likes it but it doesn't test well and doesn't quite get on... then it will never be seen. That just sucks. People don't even get to see it and say 'no.'"
Even getting a pilot rejected by a major network would have seemed like a major coup for Odenkirk at a younger age, when he was mostly directionless and had only "a talent for getting attention." Born in Naperville, Illinois, into a family with six other children, Odenkirk says he didn't quite know his niche. He attended Marquette University for a year but found the experience less than thrilling. With a little encouragement from a friend, he decided to try SIU instead, a school more suited to his mindset.
I loved SIU," he says. "The teachers [at Marquette] were excellent, but the students were a fucking drag. They were so uptight and bland and uninteresting. They were like dopey rich kids.
"SIU was like a college experience to me," Odenkirk elaborates. "It was just more laid back and people [were] pursuing a different variety of experience. There was more freedom to pursue what I wanted to do. I just liked the atmosphere. The academics weren't as good as Marquette, but an academic experience is made up of more than just teachers. College is class, what you learn, what you do when you're hanging out with people, what you do when you're alone."
At SIU Odenkirk would begin exploring his comedic talents through a number of venues, even taking his jokes onto the street. He sometimes appeared in the Free Forum Area near the Student Center under the guise of a brimstone-spouting preacher shouting praises for his own institution, the Church of Bob.
"Oh, yeah, that," he chuckles. "There would be preachers speaking to students... and that was always funny and annoying to us. We made up a crazy little church and made up our spiel. Just made up a religion. I don't know what it was. Made up a bunch of bullshit. I'm sure there was a concept. I think it's just as good as what they were saying. I'm sorry to say that, but I think it was.
"Sorry religious folks. Sorry."
One of Odenkirk's principal outlets was his radio show on WIDB. There he was allowed the leeway and creative freedom to work out his own comedic voice-- although it didn't at first occur to him that he was a comedian.
"You know the big cement building that looks like a prison?" he asks, referring to Faner Hall. "I used to go in there and write comedy for my radio show for like an hour and a half. After I did that show for about five or six months, it occurred to me as I was sitting there that, wow, this is probably what a comedy writer does.
"My whole family has nothing to do with show business," he says. "I was so far removed from this world that it didn't seem like a possibility at all. The closest I could get in my head was maybe I could be a DJ. Then it occurred to me where we did this comedy show that we did every week... after I'd written a lot of this comedy, that I was making up comedy, and that on some level it was working. That's when I started looking into it as a career."
After graduating from SIU, Odenkirk moved to Chicago, where he hit the standup circuit for several years. He describes this as spending evenings in basements doing comedy, mostly alone, which, as anyone who knows the Chicago comedy scene can say, is a painfully accurate description. His unique style and standup material helped land him his next gig, however, the one that would win him an Emmy Award and put him on the map: writer at Saturday Night Live.
It was a job most comedians would kill for, but the experience wasn't all Odenkirk hoped it would be.
"It was a fucking drag," he says.
Mincing words is not one of his talents.
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Despite Odenkirk's dissatisfaction with the job, he certainly made his mark on the show. Not only was he a writer during an Emmy winning year, he also created and wrote one of the most memorable characters in recent Saturday Night Live history, the motivational speaker Matt Foley. The character who so notably resides "in a van down by the river" occurred to Odenkirk as more of a concept than a reference to anyone he had known or seen. He wrote it specifically for Chris Farley, with whom he would also work in Second City during a summer break at Saturday Night Live. "It was magical in a way," he says.
Still, the Saturday Night Live experience was not positive, allowing for his departure not long after his arrival and early success. "I don't think [Saturday Night Live] is very well run," Odenkirk says, pausing to reconsider. "It's partly me," he says, then reconsiders again. "Lorne Michaels. He makes people's lives unpleasant."
Odenkirk digresses briefly to explain his working relationship with Michaels. A desire to punch the infamously demanding and overbearing producer comes up. After trying to describe Michaels a few different ways, he settles for saying, "All the things you read about Lorne, they're true. When you work for somebody you learn that they have a system or a theory. His theory is keep everybody off-balance emotionally. It's not a ludicrous notion that if you keep everybody off-balance they'll work really hard, but it's not true, either. It's true in the short term, but it's not true in the long term."
The long term is another problem for the legendary late-night show which, in his estimation, has kept some of its legends around a little too long.
"I think there should be a rule you only get to be there five years," says Odenkirk. If they did that everybody would do a better job. Other people coming up would feel they wouldn't have to compete so crazily. SNL shouldn't be no-turnover. It should be for the generation that's coming up. When I was there... the show didn't know what it was, and it wanted to appeal to twenty-year-olds and fifty-year-olds. It should only appeal to high-school and college kids."
Odenkirk left Saturday Night Live to write a short-lived sitcom for SNL alum Chris Elliott, Get a Life. The show didn't make it through a single season, but soon he was back on Fox cowriting and costarring in The Ben Stiller Show. The series was a critical hit, but Fox cancelled it; not long after the cancellation, the show was awarded an Emmy for writing, Odenkirk's second. He went on to write for The Conan O'Brien Show, having met O'Brien back in his Saturday Night Live days when the lanky giant of a talk show host was also working behind the scenes.
Odenkirk abandoned O'Brien to work on a new project for HBO with David Cross, another writer on The Ben Stiller Show. The two conceived a sketch comedy show not quite like any other. Each show had a loose narrative thread that ran throughout the sketches, although the sketches themselves were linked only by a single idea from the previous sketch, which would then vanish in favor of a different idea to carry over for the next bit. After that, they had music videos.
Mr. Show with Bob and David was one of TV's most bizarre comedy shows, a mad blend of laugh-in, standard improv-comedy games, and what would appear to be massive amounts of hallucinogens. The show, following the unique but inexplicably similar comedy styles of Cross and Odenkirk, constantly shifted between brilliance, stupidity, and absurdity. The Mr. Show experience was a vastly better one for Odenkirk.
"Mostly HBO is great," Odenkirk says of his tenure at the premium cable network. "They let you do your show. They don't fuck around with you. It's the best. The only thing is, it doesn't get that many viewers."
Mr. Show was short-lived but fondly remembered. The series is being issued on DVD and features several cultural milestones-- like the first major television appearance of Tenacious D doing songs like "Jeepers Creepers, The Stoner God."
The other major bit of fallout from Mr. Show was a major motion picture, which was to be a pseudo Mr. Show movie. Odenkirk and Cross took one of their classic characters, the irrepressible (but often oppressed) redneck Ronnie Dobbs, and parlayed his sketches into a full-length movie, Run Ronnie Run. The film was completed and featured appearances by talents like Jeff Goldblum, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Dave Foley, Scott Thompson, Patton Oswalt, Mandy Patkinin, Andy Richter, Jack Black, and Rebecca Romeijn-Stamos and her Full House hubby John.
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Run Ronnie Run became a sort of legend among Mr. Show fans. It was done, after all, complete and full of stars, yet no one could see it. Internet pirates began spreading copies of the film, the quality of which ranges from pretty decent to terrible. Despite never receiving a screening outside a festival or two, it has become a minor cult classic.
So what happened to Run Ronnie Run?
"I'm so sick of hearing about it," says Odenkirk, although he concedes that he understands why people want to know about the project, a partial failure that clearly still bothers him. "I think it's not very good. It's uneven. It has a lack of consistency in tone.
"If I could compare it to another movie, let's say, Austin Powers. People love Austin Powers. If you ask people while they love it, people will tell you the parts they love. If you read a review, you'll read about the parts people hate. We made a movie with parts people love. But the difference between the two movies is, when Goldmember sucks, it's still Goldmember. You know the character himself, the Goldmember character? Nobody liked that character. I don't think I've ever heard one person that actually liked the Goldmember guy, but they don't care. When the jokes don't work they say, "Okay, whatever, next joke," and they move on. You remember the parts that you like."
"In Run Ronnie Run," he explains, "the parts that didn't work-- which I will justifiably attribute to Troy Miller, the director-- they drag you down. You're like, what the fuck? He has no sense of tone or touch. David and I killed ourselves to put funny things in and we cleared up a lot of shit. There's still a lot of shit."
Odenkirk fared much better in his last cinematic effort ,as the director of Melvin Goes to Dinner, an independent film greatly distanced from the absurdity of Mr. Show. Melvin Goes to Dinner was originally a play, Phyro-Giants, that Odenkirk's wife took him to see. He enjoyed it enough to attach himself to the project and help bring it to the screen. The film, which takes place largely over the course of a dinner party, stars writer Michael Blieden and features appearances from Odenkirk as well as David Cross, Laura Kightlinger, Maura Tierney, and Melora Walters, and features a score from Michael Penn (Magnolia).
"Melvin Goes to Dinner is going really, really well," he says. "We're self-distributing in Austin, Houston, Boston. We're hopefully going to get into the Chicago Film Festival. It was written by Michael Blieden. He's a great writer and the cast was amazing. I think we made a great indie film."
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"I don't know if there's been a golden age of TV where everything has been fucking great. It's the same as its always been. There are some good sitcoms. Everybody Loves Raymond, Curb Your Enthusiasm, King of Queens. Um, I think I just named them all.
"I'm always amazed to hear that Six Feet Under is doing well," he digresses suddenly. "I don't like that show. Do you? I think it's really bad."
That's the nature of the TV business, though, says Odenkirk. Your fate often rests on the judgment call of someone who may be in a bad mood, or rather just an idiot.
Odenkirk remains outside the dominant trends in comedy. Despite his Saturday Night Live stint, every TV show for which he has written has been a fringe culture hit. Get a Life, Mr. Show, and The Ben Stiller Show all experienced brief but well-remembered runs. Thus, Odenkirk remains a working comedian rather than rising to the level of full-blown TV star. If he wasn't so goddamn weird, he'd be an everyman. Instead he's the savant of the comedy heap, cranking out scripts and bits and gags that people realize are hilarious two years after the fact. Despite two Emmys and appearances in several films, he's still best known as one of Elaine's boyfriends from Seinfeld.
"When people recognize me, it's usually from that," he says. "I don't get recognized much." He pauses, rethinking his statement, then adds, "But I don't get out much."
For more about Bob Odenkirk, log on to <http://www.BobAndDavid.com/>.