Smash Notes
#2564 - Chuck Lorre
Chuck Lorre is a writer, producer, and director behind numerous hit television series, including "The Big Bang Theory," "Two and a Half Men," "Young Sheldon," and "Stuart Fails to Save the Universe." He is an inductee of the Television Academy Hall of Fame, has a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and has received multiple Golden Globe Awards, the PGA…
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Notes
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Joe Rogan called The Big Bang Theory unusual, and he called the lead a genius. Chuck Lorre said that was not his way in. He is a college dropout, not a physicist, and not a genius, so the science was never the part he recognized.
Chuck Lorre said the characters were outliers, people who had not figured out how to behave in the real world. Being on the outside and looking in was the part he understood. He said the general attitude was that every episode had to kick ass.
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Chuck Lorre said Young Sheldon worked on Netflix. A whole generation of kids watched Young Sheldon and had never seen The Big Bang Theory. When he talks to them, they do not know what CBS is. He called the standalone run the dream come true. Young Sheldon was not standing on the shoulders of The Big Bang Theory. It was its own show.
Joe Rogan said they binged Young Sheldon after The Big Bang Theory, and the two shows play differently because Young Sheldon is single camera. He said a multicam puts a crowd in the room, so the viewer is in on the performance, like watching a play as much as a comedy. Chuck Lorre agreed. A multicam is a play.
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Chuck Lorre said the shows have never used a laugh track. For 40 years they have been accused of one, and he said they never used it. A reporter came to the set of The Big Bang Theory, sat in the audience, and watched the cast tape a show in front of a live studio audience. The taping takes three hours to three and a half hours. The reporter then wrote an article complaining about the laugh track. Chuck Lorre said the reporter sat in the stands with 200 people laughing and still wrote about an annoying laugh track.
Chuck Lorre said the article diminishes the show, and that the people behind it want to diminish the show. Chuck Lorre said he thinks he made that point clear in his book.
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Chuck Lorre said The Big Bang Theory was a huge hit in Germany, in Mexico, and in Brazil. He set Brentwood apart from that response. He said the show was dismissed, and Hollywood dismissed it.
He was working on a sitcom and dating an unemployed actress. She told him she would not do a sitcom, because she wanted to do film. Chuck Lorre said putting on a play every week is really hard. The week is full of anxiety and stress, and it does not always go well. When a joke fails at the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank and the audience does not respond, he said you can hear the 134 freeway. The silence is crickets. He called a dead joke a teaching device, because it teaches humility. He thought the joke was great, and the joke died. Then everyone has to fix it. He said he has spent many decades rushing around trying to fix the jokes that died.
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Chuck Lorre tells a story from his book about an early Comic-Con for The Big Bang Theory. Thousands of people camped overnight to see the panel. He sat beside Jim Parsons at an autograph line, where fans brought a cast picture to be signed. A girl walked up with shaking hands, handed Jim Parsons the picture, and cried from joy at being close to him.
Chuck Lorre said he had been doing the work a while. People were always happy to see Jon Cryer and Charlie. Nobody ever cried, and nobody cried when they saw Roseanne. The girl was crying from sheer joy. He realized something was happening with the characters that the writers did not plan and had no way to plan. The characters had hit a nerve.
Chuck Lorre said the misfit bond is a giant part of it. The characters become a surrogate family. They support one another and hold each other up. They are losers in a life raft, odd in a way he called endearing.
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Chuck Lorre said Young Sheldon became a show about the family around an odd child with normal parents. The father is a football coach. The mother is deeply religious. A twin sister is just a kid, and an older brother is a knucklehead who means well. The story turned into how they accommodate a remarkable child, and how much love and protectiveness went toward a little boy who did not see how caustic he was.
Chuck Lorre said the grown Sheldon treated his friends horribly. An eight-year-old acting the same way is not acceptable, while a 25 or 30 year old Jim Parsons can be caustic. The same lines are not pleasant coming from a child. The show shifted to how the parents, the brother, the sister, and the grandmother took care of him, excused him, and let him be the person he was. Chuck Lorre called it a love story, and a story different from The Big Bang Theory. On Young Sheldon the focus is the family and the extraordinary kid.
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Joe Rogan said Chuck Lorre has worked with some of the craziest people of all time. He said Charlie Sheen came on the podcast and talked about the Two and a Half Men years, and he asked how anyone shows up to make a sitcom while living like that. Joe Rogan said it is amazing Charlie Sheen kept it together, and that he deserves credit for doing good work while he was out of his mind.
Chuck Lorre said they had six or seven years in the clear before it all went to hell, and about 150 or 160 episodes before it started to go down. Joe Rogan asked whether Charlie Sheen was using heavily in the early years. Chuck Lorre said Charlie was managing it and keeping it to himself. As far as Chuck Lorre was concerned, they had a great partnership, the work was fun, and the show was insanely successful. He thought they were on the same road, keeping it clean and staying sober. The show was killing it.
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Chuck Lorre said the success of Two and a Half Men granted him the freedom to take a couple of tries at getting The Big Bang Theory right. He said they failed at first and made a lot of mistakes.
Two and a Half Men was so successful that CBS gave him unbelievable leeway to make decisions and to do the work over again, including the pilot. He said nobody gets a do-over. They got a do-over on The Big Bang Theory pilot. He said it never happens. They got one, and it worked out.
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Joe Rogan said he had not known that Charlie Sheen was supposedly sober for most of the early run. Chuck Lorre said that as far as he knew, Charlie was. Joe Rogan said the two are friends now. Chuck Lorre said Charlie Sheen wrote a blurb on the back of his book. In that account, the beginning was sober, and then it went off the rails.
Chuck Lorre said the trouble was clear in the eighth season of Two and a Half Men. Charlie Sheen's manager called and said Charlie was not coming to the run-through, because a Bic lighter blew up and he had no eyebrows. Chuck Lorre said he is somewhat naive about that world, and he knows Bic lighters do not blow up. He said maybe the lighter story came from cooking cocaine. The behavior got more erratic, and a lot was missed. He said the sad part on his side was a determination to stay in denial. He did not want to know. He wanted to believe it was all okay, because the show was doing so well and the work was fun.
Chuck Lorre and his partner Lee Aronsohn were ruthless about the standard. Every second had to kick ass. They were determined to make the best possible show, and to have no bad shows.
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Joe Rogan said the miraculous chemistry of All in the Family was gone, and the same thing happened with Joey from Friends. The chemistry of that cast did not travel. He said not to think a hit travels.
Joe Rogan called Young Sheldon impressive because it is a kind of spinoff and it is not one. Everyone is new. The only inkling of The Big Bang Theory is Jim Parsons narrating. You never see him. He tells the story of a child in East Texas, and that narration was the only link. Joe Rogan said Chuck Lorre pulled off the chemistry in two completely different environments about the same character. He called the result a roll of the dice, and it worked.
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After Chuck Lorre left Roseanne, the owners of that show brought an idea that was strangely like Roseanne: a heavyset unhappy housewife, a domineering husband, and problems with her kids. They took it to his boss, Bob Meyer, who saw a rip-off of Roseanne and said no. They then came to Chuck Lorre. He knew it was a rip-off of Roseanne and took it anyway. The two people who owned The Cosby Show and Roseanne were gigantic in television, and he wanted to work for them.
He worked with the British actress Miriam Margolyes, who tried hard to play an unhappy American housewife from Staten Island. Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner were powerful enough that the network did not pass. It ordered six episodes and put the series on at 8 o'clock Saturday night. Chuck Lorre called that the worst slot on network television, like making a show and using it for landfill. The network aired five episodes and did not air the sixth. He thought his career was over. A few days after the cancellation, Tom Werner came into the office, called the series the noble failure, and said to try again. Chuck Lorre had never put noble and failure in the same sentence.
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Chuck Lorre said the next assignment was a show about a single mom. On Frannie's Turn he had wanted the lead to leave her husband and live with her daughter. The network said she had to stay married, because Cosby was married and Roseanne was married, and they wanted another married show. ABC then went looking for a single-mom show. He asked what sensibility he had to bring to it. They sent him to Elgin, Illinois. The chamber of commerce took him to a women's shelter, the YWCA, and hospitals, where women were on welfare or working two jobs and raising children with no safety net.
The single mom on television then was Murphy Brown, who had endless nannies and went about her life with a child in the picture. Chuck Lorre came back calling the women in Elgin heroes in a Greek tragedy. He wanted to write the sitcom, four cameras in front of a live audience, as a hero's journey: a woman after a horrible divorce, working to feed her children. He said it went a little south when they cast Brett Butler. She was unhappy from day one. The show followed Home Improvement with Tim Allen, became an instant hit, and put her on magazine covers and talk shows. He said she was a truly funny woman with a great stand-up act, and she took to acting immediately. It did not go well for him.
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Chuck Lorre said actors and comics can be damaged in a certain way, succeed, and still learn a horrible truth at two o'clock in the morning. He is still unhappy. He is still not whole. Success was supposed to make him happy and whole and solve his problems. As a boy he was taught that making something of yourself means you will be good, people will like you and admire you, and you will be a man of substance, a mensch. He said the horrible truth can only arrive with success. He is still a miserable fuck. Now what?
Chuck Lorre said the prize does not close the hole inside. Drugs come in at that point, the same pattern he names with rock stars, along with sex, drinking, and gambling. You cannot fuck, drink, drug, or gamble a way out. The relief works temporarily, and then it stops working. When it stops, the person is truly fucked. He is looking for a solution, and the best he understands is that nothing on the outside is going to heal the inside.
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Chuck Lorre said Grace Under Fire was in 1993, when there were only four channels and cable was not where people watched sitcoms. He put the number of famous people then at maybe a hundred. Brett Butler, on a show that was number two, became one of the most recognizable people in the world. The show was huge, and she was on every magazine. He said that pressure can be devastating for a person who is already struggling to keep it together. He thinks she fell apart after the show. He had heard she was homeless at one point, and he does not think she still is. He said he does not know whether the stories are true.
He said people wanted to love her and were rooting for her while the show was on. She was a spokeswoman for millions of women, and men loved her too, because she suffered no fools. On Grace Under Fire she worked in an oil refinery.
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Chuck Lorre said the first page of the book is that if he had been able to be better, he would have. The selfish version of himself was the best he had early on. Writing the book turned into a look back at that man. He asked who the guy was, called him an idiot and a horrible human being, and remembered leaving a woman without saying thank you. He said that man was him. Held to what he said in 1969, it would not go well for him.
He said writing about his life had a therapeutic, cathartic quality. He wanted the book funny, because a straight account of his life would be boring and nobody would care. He said if he can make the reader laugh, then maybe the life is worth reading. The book begins with his childhood, including the years he worked for his dad. He reads the audiobook himself. He joked in the book that he had asked Idris Elba or Brian Cox to read it and they passed. He made that request up. He did not see a way for someone else to read his memoir.
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Chuck Lorre said he bought Dianetics on a late-night television commercial and did not know what the book was. He did not understand the book was Scientology. He thought it was just a self-help book. Joe Rogan described it as a kind of psychotherapy: digging up past trauma, releasing the trauma, and freeing up life force. Chuck Lorre said that description was not far off the charts, and that releasing the trauma of past experiences was what L. Ron Hubbard did for the most part.
Chuck Lorre and Joe Rogan said L. Ron Hubbard was a science fiction writer who wrote more fiction than any human being that has ever lived, because he never wrote a second draft. They said everything was a first draft, and it was horrible. They said the Battlefield Earth movie is fantastic because it is so goofy, terrible, and amazingly bad, good-bad, bad to the point of asking what you are watching.
Chuck Lorre said that at 21 or 22 he was scared to death. The world was big and the world was threatening. He did not know what was going on. He wanted to be in music and have a career as a songwriter. People promised they knew a way for him to do that. He was vulnerable to the promise.
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Joe Rogan said the worst thing a million years ago in a tribe was getting thrown out. A person who gets kicked out dies. He said he does not know what misbehavior looked like back then. Joe Rogan said Whitney Cummings told him people have stage fright and a fear of public speaking because speaking in front of the public meant defending yourself. He said that idea is probably very true. A person who had to speak was probably going to get kicked out of the tribe, and kicking someone out was a sentence of death. He said people are desperately in need of one another. The need is not good, bad, or indifferent. It is just the way people are.
Joe Rogan said that need is what makes people prone to ideologies, religious cults, and all sorts of different things. People want to be part of a group. Right or wrong is irrelevant. Even a wrong group still counts, because the group brings friends. People will do wrong things to defend the group, fight to the death, and go to war over groups. He said for a lot of people the task is finding a good group: a spiritual path that works, gives some peace of mind, and does not hurt others.
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Chuck Lorre said a belief works as a tent pole. Civilizations and cultures that took God out of the picture replaced God with the Communist Party or a fascist dictator. The pitch is organize around me, and it does not matter whether the claim is right. Take the pole away and people get angry. Call the belief bullshit and everything else a person believes is in fair play, so the tent collapses. He said people will fight to the death to keep the tent pole up, true or not.
Chuck Lorre said a friend who grew up Mormon left the Mormon church and told him she was susceptible to believing anything. She had believed everything they told her for so long that she did not critically think, and spiritual people and healers led her to believe everything. He said growing up left him a vacuum, wide open, stupid and fragile like most people, with nothing to show about how to get out of a frightening world, so the answer was to go along.
Chuck Lorre said the fragility, the emotion, and the chaos come out in creativity. Scientology held an added benefit over everybody else because of successful celebrities. Back in the day, the draw was the sense that they knew something unavailable to outsiders. He said versions of the beliefs had already circulated, and only Lawrence Wright's book Going Clear showed the scale and how big a part secrets played. Institutionally held secrets glue a person in. Stick around and the secret comes out. People are looking for a secret, for the knowing.
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Chuck Lorre said that when he started The Big Bang Theory he was barely keeping up with Two and a Half Men, at 60 hours a week, and he was about to have a second show. He cold-called Norman Lear's office. He said he was Chuck Lorre, he had a show on CBS, and he was about to have another. At one point Norman Lear had seven shows on television at the same time. He invited Chuck Lorre over. Chuck Lorre said he was about to start production on a second show, he was barely doing the one, and he asked what Norman Lear had to tell him.
Norman Lear said Chuck Lorre was not going to like the answer. It came down to going where the fire burns brightest and trying to put it out. The fires were the bad ones: a script that did not work, a miscast role, a director who was not working, a second act that failed, someone was ill, with the question of whether to shut down or wait a week and miss an air date. Some problems were small and some were huge. The method was to gauge the response, leave the small fires alone, and go to the crisis.
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Joe Rogan asked whether running both shows at once ever felt like too much. Chuck Lorre said it did, always, the entire time. Around the third season of Two and a Half Men, in a moment he has written about, he sat with great comedy writers arguing over a scene. A sharp realization landed. He trusted himself.
The room was yelling for a different scene. Chuck Lorre felt calm. He decided he knew how to do the scene and told them they were going to do it, without an angry defense. If the scene was wrong, they would fix it. Nobody was going to die, and they were not going to get drummed out of show business. It was a joke in a scene. He realized he would survive being wrong. Joe Rogan called the calm a benefit of being very successful.
The moment was a turning point. Chuck Lorre still loved a room full of writers, but he was no longer bound by consensus. He trusted intuition, a feeling rather than a thought. In comedy the feeling is hard to put into words, and it grows with the episodes already made. The same sense tells him when he is bullshitting himself. A bit can be lazy. The room can do better. The version on the table will work, and it is only okay. Okay is where he stops the room. He asks why they are doing the piece if it is only okay, and he tells them to try for great. If they fail, they tried for great. If they fail while aiming only at okay, he tells them to go home. He summed the standard up as shoot for the moon, and settle for a low orbit.