Stephen Tobolowsky – Life of the Party

Q.  What are some of the current projects that you’re working on?

A.  Well, currently I am about to start Tim Allen’s new movie called Wild Hogs and it shoots in Santa Fe this summer. I think I go in the beginning of June, I play a sheriff from a small town who is attacked by a motorcycle gang.  Tim Allen, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence and Bill Macy play these biker dads who are doing a cross country trip.  They kind of come to our town and they try to save the town from the bikers and I’m like the sheriff of the town.

Q.  How did you come up with the idea for your movie Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party?

A.  It’s kind of like my life, we’re all like the lead characters of our own little movie.  Only in Hollywood am I a character actor but in my own movie I’m a star.  I think about seventeen years ago I was telling stories in my kitchen and tons of people were laughing.  Robert Brinkmann, who is a cinematographer, said we ought to do a movie where you just sit in your living room and tell stories.  I was thinking, “Hmm, that sounds a little on the dull side, but hey, that wouldn’t be a bad idea.”  My son was just about to be born and I thought here would be a picture of him and his dad and it would be a nice legacy.  Both of us though forgot about it for about fifteen years.  We just blew it off completely.  Then a couple of years ago, Robert and I were taking a break near the end of the year. He called me up and said, “Remember that idea we talked about a long time ago about telling stories?”  It had crossed my mind because coincidentally one of the people that was in that kitchen grew up to be a producer for national public radio.  She asked me if I would do one of those stories that I did in the kitchen on her radio show.  I hiked up my jeans and my belt and I performed one of my stories live on the radio.  There is an entirely different expectation when you’re drinking in someone’s kitchen and when people pay twenty-five dollars a person to hear somebody perform a story.  You expect something more and I was thrilled that the story worked. The people in the coffee house and on the radio loved the story.  That inspired me to think that Robert Brinkmann’s idea wasn’t terrible.  So, when he called me up and said hey let’s do the story and the movie of you telling your stories, I thought it could work.  So, I spent about three months putting together groups of stories from my life with two qualifications.  One is that all the stories had to be true and secondly they all had to happen to me directly.  It wasn’t like a story that happened to a friend of my cousin.  Those stories always get elaborate; the only thing that we had going for us was that I was there and that the stories were true.  So, that was kind of where we started and then I think we shot something about four hours of stories over two days, I never talked so much in my life. Robert put together a rough cut and it was like the Lord of the Rings: Director’s Version, it was so long.  I thought this is a great movie, it’s me, it’s fabulous.  He said well we had to cut out most of it and I said no, we can’t do that.  He and Andy (Andrew Putschoegl) fortunately took on editing the entire film on a computer and they cut it down to ninety minutes. They took another hour and a half of the other stories and put it on the supplemental material on the DVD. Stories that were funny stories, but had to be cut from the movie for one reason or another.  The interesting thing is when you have that many stories is that when you start putting some stories in and other stories in, it changes the rhythm of the film drastically.  If one story is really funny and the next story is really funny, it won’t work.  Because maybe the audience wants a chance to just relax and think about something else for a while.  They are all kind of laughed out so you really have to switch gears and rhythm.  If there were too many stories from when I was in a rock and roll band it would kind of play like a Cheech and Chong movie, it didn’t work.  If there were too many stories with sexual content, it was Howard Stern like.  So, we had to have a balance.  If it was all stories from my childhood it’d be like “The Waltons.”  It was very tricky as to what stories ended up in the body of the movie.  It had to have a nice balance of film stories, life stories, happy stories, sad stories and I thought in the end Robert did a great job of balancing that out.

Q.  The DVD release will coincide with your birthday, how will you be celebrating both?

A.  I think we’re going to have a big party in Beverly Hills, at some Beverly Hills night club.  It’s either Agua, which is water, or Aqua, which is water.  Bentley is going to sponsor it so I am going to go to the party in a Bentley.  I’m very thrilled, I’m going to wear a tuxedo, I’m going to have a lot of my friends there.  A lot of people who were at the birthday party in the movie, a lot of friends form my past,  a lot of people I did movies with will be there. We’re going to have a splendid time.

Q.  How was getting to work with Robert Brinkmann on the film?

A.  That turned out to be much better than I had anticipated.  Robert is German and he’s very strict.  He’s very tight lipped and very health conscious.  He hates it when you put Sweet ‘N Low in your coffee.  He’ll tell you all of the terrible things Sweet ‘N Low will do to your body.  He doesn’t want you to have certain kinds of fruit.  He doesn’t want you to have certain kinds of meat.  He just raises this one eyebrow in judgment at you constantly when you abuse your body.  So, I was a little scared but Robert was so easy to work with, he’s so generous.  What’s great about Robert is, he’s as good a cameraman as there is, he had a really good crew and the quality of the film was really good. Considering it’s like a picture of one guy talking on the beach and in his living room.

Q.  Do you have a most memorable moment from filming?

A.  One of the most memorable moments is the first story.  I’m talking about when I had to swim in the ocean and I swam in the ocean where I couldn’t touch the bottom anymore.  I was feeling really brave and I wanted to see what that was really like.  I swam out so far and so deep and then a fin came out and stopped about ten feet from me.  I went, “Oh no!”  I thought of Jaws and everything.  I thought I was going to die.  It turned out to be a dolphin and it came and swam over to me and looked me right in the face.  His whole family came up behind him.  He kept checking me out for like forty-five minutes and while I’m telling this story in the movie, and everything in the movie is the first take, there’s no script or rehearsal, it’s all off the cuff. While I’m telling the story I kid you not, a dolphin swam up behind me.  Robert Brinkmann, being a stealthy cameraman, out of the corner of one eye sees the dolphin and is trying to get my attention to be aware that this dolphin is swimming behind me.  When I saw the dolphin out of the corner of my eye I swung around and said “Oh my God, a dolphin!”  What are the odds you’re telling a story about dolphins and a dolphin swims up behind you?  Robert Brinkmann was able to catch that in one shot because if you had a cut away of the dolphin swimming, it would work.  But, the fact that Robert was able to keep us in focus, me and the dolphin in one shot, that’s just the kind of great cameraman he is.

Q.  Why should viewers take the time to check out Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party?

A.  I think because it is extremely entertaining, it’s very entertaining that we premiered this at HBO’s comedy festival in Aspen and we didn’t submit it.  They saw it and asked us to go to Aspen.  Since then, this film has played in London, Montreal, Buenas Aires, New York, Milwaukee, San Francisco.  Basically you could say film festivals across the country and the world now.  We had three sold out shows in London, two sold out shows in Buenas Aires and everywhere people laugh, they cry, they have a wonderful time.  So, they respond the same way everywhere in the world.  Everywhere people laugh at the same places, they cry at the same places.  It is just a very satisfying movie to watch.  For me, personally, a reason for people to watch this movie is that I think that people love stories a lot more than they think.  People hate special effects a lot more than they would anticipate.  A lot of times you go to a movie with a lot of action and special effects and you just kind of yawn.  But, when Eugene Levy saw it in Aspen, he was going to go see another movie. I said, “Eugene come on and see my movie!”  He saw it and at the end of the film he turned around with tears in his eyes and hugged me.  He said, “Thank you for one of the most wonderful hour and a half’s I’ve ever spent.”  One thing about the movie is that people don’t listen anymore, people don’t listen to the spoken word anymore.  There is nothing to look at but me, that gets tiring pretty quickly.  This film does not survive on momentum.  You have to sit and watch it. People watch it and they sit and relax and it’s all one take. They end up laughing and experiencing it and they remember it for a long time.  They leave thinking this is time well spent.