I’d spent a few years away from The Simpsons, dabbling in different projects, and in that time I had the pleasure of watching the show each week, as a fan. I no longer knew what was coming in every episode, which was a treat. Most importantly, it solidified what I had believed all along: The Simpsons was great! In fact, it may have been better without me.
Then, in season 12, the wonderful showrunner, Mike Scully, called and asked if I wanted to return to the series one day a week, as a consultant. I jumped at the chance. Scully had been the Henry Ford of the series, streamlining production, delegating authority, and turning The Simpsons into something it had never been before: a nine-to-five job. Up to that point, the show’s hours had always been insane, and writers quit the second they had a chance.
It was great to be working with Al Jean again—he’d gone back to The Simpsons in 1997, right after the cancellation of Teen Angel. But for the most part, I was working with a roomful of strangers. These were all very talented writers, but they weren’t a group of old friends, like the original staff. It was no longer collegial—it was like . . . high school. There was gossip, cliques, and an awful lot of backbiting.
At times, this nastiness would leach into the show. Like when Bart strangled Homer with a phone cord and beat him unconscious with the receiver. Or when Milhouse’s father had his arm cut off by a piano wire. Or when Mr. Burns threw fish guts at orphans on Christmas. The shows were always funny, but they also could get pretty dark.
I wasn’t having fun and thought about quitting. But eventually, things straightened themselves out. The malcontents quit and the jerks got fired. Everyone else mellowed—the show has that effect on people. It’s such a great job, it’s hard to be bitter. And I loved working one day a week. I moved to New York City twelve years ago, but I still fly to L.A. every Wednesday, put in a day’s work at The Simpsons, and then get the hell out of town.
And then a project came along that sucked me back full time . . .
. . . The Simpsons Movie
In 1992, we screened rough animation—the animatic—of “Kamp Krusty” for James L. Brooks: Jim got very excited. “This is it! This could be The Simpsons Movie! You just need to stretch it a little!”
A movie? “Kamp Krusty” was barely an episode! At seventeen minutes long it was several minutes too short to air. The song “Hail to Thee, Kamp Krusty” was added later just to reach minimum length.
But the idea of doing a Simpsons movie kept coming up over the next decade. The producers always fought it. Why would anyone pay to see a show they get for free on TV every day?
And what could we show people that they hadn’t seen already?
The answer: Bart’s wiener. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
One day, fifteen seasons into the series, Fox showed us market research that said people wanted a Simpsons movie more than anything else. More than another Harry Potter. More than another Star Wars.
So we sat down for a writers’ meeting to discuss the movie we’d been avoiding for a dozen years. We cracked the plot in three hours. The whole movie came out of that meeting: Homer gets a pig; Springfield gets polluted by pig crap; the government puts Springfield under a dome; the Simpsons flee to Alaska. It was that easy.
At the end of the meeting, Matt Groening said, “Remember—all of this is a secret.”
I thought he meant the plot of the movie.
A few weeks later, I was speaking at a college in Oklahoma. A student asked if we were ever going to do a Simpsons movie. “Yes, we are,” I said coyly, “but I can’t tell you the plot. That’s a secret!”
That night, I was in my hotel room watching CNN. A crawl went by at the bottom: MIKE REISS ANNOUNCES SIMPSONS MOVIE.
That’s when I realized that the plot wasn’t a secret. The whole damn movie was!
When I went back to work the next day, everyone at Fox was mad at me. A whole multinational corporation wanted to kill me. Matt Groening’s first words to me were “Well, you just had to tell everybody . . .”
The studio had planned an elaborate teaser campaign to promote the film. For two years, you were going to see cryptic yellow billboards with the message “It’s Coming . . .” Instead, I had blown the secret at Oklahoma State University.
It is a tribute to the kindness of Matt Groening and Jim Brooks that I didn’t lose my job. That incident should have gotten me fired.
Instead, this book will get me fired.
Jim and Matt assembled an amazing staff to write the movie: two of our most prolific writers (John Swartzwelder and Jon Vitti); one of our most esteemed (George Meyer); and four guys who had run the show in the past (Mike Scully, David Mirkin, Al Jean, and me). It was the most focused, talented roomful of writers I’d ever worked with. We started work every morning at ten A.M. sharp, no stragglers. And everyone concentrated on the job—the writers never went off on time-wasting tangents, no matter how hard I pushed them. We worked out the film’s story, scene by scene, then divided it into seven sections. Each of us went home to write one twenty-page chunk.
We met up again two weeks later to lash together this 140-page Frankenstein of a script. To everyone’s amazement, it read well—the movie worked. We got together as a group, polishing the script. I thought we had something perfect by our fifth draft.
What you saw in theaters was our 166th draft. It seems to be a rule of filmmaking that you never stop working till you run out of time. Almost every day we’d produce a new draft and shred a hundred copies of the old one. To write a film with an environmental message, we must have killed every tree in British Columbia.
And yet, for all that hard work, what’s the only thing anyone remembers from The Simpsons Movie?
Spider-Pig, Spider-Pig
Does whatever a spider-pig does . . .
That’s the kind of joke you write when you’re high.
And we did.
As simple and dumb as it is, somehow it caught the public’s fancy. It even became the number one ringtone in France! (“Spider-cochon, spider-cochon . . .”)
I wrote another song for the film—a rousing tribute to the state of Alaska. I got the job because I was the only one on staff who’d actually been to Alaska. (I hated the place—the people are surly and the mosquitoes are enormous. And vice versa.)
Here’s my Alaska song, available to the public for the first time:
HOMER (sing-speaking):
New Englanders are snobby twerps
And southerners are lazy
Midwesterners are toothless jerks
The whole West Coast is crazy . . .
Delaware, you’re well aware,
Is sucky as Kentucky . . .
BART: Uh, Homer? The song?
HOMER (rousing singing):
There is no state so great
In the lower forty-eight
As Alaska!
BARFLIES:
As Alaska!
HOMER:
You can cruise, drink brews,
And even meet some Jews
In Alaska!
JEWISH COUPLE (THE ICEBERGS):
In Elaskeh!
HOMER:
We can make our home in Fairbanks or Nome
It sure beats being trapped in a dome
BART/LISA:
Homer, we are friggin’ bored
HOMER:
Duly noted and ignored!
I spell it A-L-A-S-S
K-A-H . . .
LISA:
Well, more or less . . .
HOMER:
This is the land I love the best
Oklahooooo-ma! (BEAT)
I mean Alasss-ka!
That song got cut from the movie. But then a lot of stuff got cut: the real Erin Brockovich recorded a guest voice. And we’d written cameos for Al Gore, Sean Penn, Russell Crowe, and the cast of The View. None of it’s in the final film.
One of my favorite jokes got changed—I think it was George Meyer’s line. Bart has been arrested for skateboarding naked, at Homer’s goading. Homer shows up to get him and brings only a shirt. “You didn’t bring my pants!” Bart cries.
Homer replies, “Who am I, Bill Blass?”
I loved that joke because it shows how blissfully out of touch Homer is. It’s like when he guessed that Bart’s favorite movie star was Steve McQueen.
Years later I was watching The Simpsons Movie on an airplane—it was showing on a little monitor mounted on an inch-wide stalk. They got to my favorite line, where Bart demands Homer give him pants.
Homer replies, “Who am I, Tommy Bahama?”
Tommy Bahama?
It may be a better joke—certainly it’s hipper. But I missed Bill Blass. I didn’t realize how angry I was until my wife caught me strangling the stalk the monitor was on.
Here’s my best contribution to The Simpsons Movie. It’s a sight gag: As the giant dome is being lowered over Springfield, it looks like the end of the world. Some people run out of a bar into a church. Others run out of a church into a bar.
All right, it doesn’t read funny. But many people say it’s their favorite thing in the movie (after that stupid Spider-Pig . . .). Film critic David Edelstein called it a joke so rich in meaning you could write a master’s thesis on it. And you know how funny master’s theses are.
One day, I met Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury, one of my comedy heroes. He mentioned how much he loved that joke.
“I wrote that,” I said.
Trudeau looked at me with deep respect. “That’s the greatest three seconds in comedy history,” he said.
“That’s what my wife called our wedding night,” I cracked.
And suddenly he lost all respect for me.
The Simpsons Movie came out in 2007 and became the second-most successful 2-D animated film in history, after The Lion King (up yours, Simba). The critics were happy and, more amazingly, the fans were happy, and we all agreed, “Let’s never, ever do that again.”
But just as couples have a second baby once they forget what a miserable time-suck the first one was, I’m sure we’ll make another Simpsons movie. And then another one. And then another one.
I think we’ll keep making Simpsons movies until we make a really rotten one.
Then we’ll make two more.
You know, like Shrek.
My pitch, not that anyone asked, is to make the next Simpsons movie live-action. For example, we’ve looked all over to find an actor as bald as Homer Simpson and just as stupid. And then God gave us Vin Diesel.
For Flanders, I recommend Fargo’s William H. Macy. In fact, one of our writers met Macy at a party. When he heard my friend worked for The Simpsons, Macy apparently said, “If one more goddamn person tells me I should play Ned Flanders, I’m gonna strangle him.”
William H. Macy, check.
And Tom Cruise would be surprisingly good as Smithers. Not that I’m calling Tom gay . . .