SPEAKER_06: People are excited about what AI will do for them. At IBM, we're excited about what AI will do for business. Your business. Introducing Watson X. A platform designed to multiply output by training AI with your data. When you Watson X your business, you can build AI to help coders code faster, customer service respond quicker, and employees handle repetitive tasks in less time. Let's create AI that transforms business with Watson X. Learn more at ibm.com slash Watson X. IBM. Let's create.
SPEAKER_07: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new show about humanity's struggle against the world's tiniest villains, viruses. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and on this show, you'll hear how viruses attack us, how we fight back, and what we've learned in the course of those fights. Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_02: Malcolm Gladwell here. Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze while providing your employees with a streamlined world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got you back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits.
SPEAKER_02: Pushkin.
SPEAKER_03: By the way, it's a new law now. I have to do this. I don't like to, but it is by law. All comedians must make a financial disclosure. This is a clip from Steve's second album, which was released in 1978 and was called A Wild and Crazy Guy. I'm Steve Martin, and I'm here to tell you about the new law, the new law of the United States.
SPEAKER_08: It's a new law. It's a new law. It's a new law. It's a new law. It's a new law. It's a new law. It's a new law. A wild and crazy guy.
SPEAKER_03: Then I figured out a potential concert income. If you fill a 3,000 seat hall at $3 per ticket, the gross is $9,000. If you fill a 3,000 seat hall at $7.50 per ticket, the gross is $22,500. And just for fun, I figured out if you fill a 3,000 seat hall at $800 a ticket, the gross is $2,400,000. And this is what I'm shooting for. One show, goodbye. What you've just heard suggests what was happening to Steve.
SPEAKER_08: He went from working in small clubs where he could achieve a happy fulfillment of his absurdist manifesto with its roots in Wittgenstein's particularism and Lewis Carroll's logic and all the rest to becoming a kind of rock star of comedy, in many ways the first rock star of comedy. That was a doubly uncomfortable position for him to find himself in. First, because that kind of fame is always alienating, whomever it falls on, and because Steve's natural insularity and somewhat stifled emotions left him doubly alone at a time when his fame was peaking. The strangest thing for me was in my latter days of standup,
SPEAKER_03: it was the least creative I have ever been.
SPEAKER_08: At the same time you were playing stadiums. Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_03: To come up with something new and try to work it in, there was no vehicle for it to get it in, to try it, to try a little thing. When you're in a club, you could try something and move on and keep going and change the subject. But there, every word was amplified on a mic. It had to be solid, had to be heard, had to be delivered.
SPEAKER_08: You were really at the end there doing rock concerts.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it was. Yeah, if I had understood that, I would have been better off, because I kept thinking, I'm doing a comedy show. You know, I want them to laugh, not cheer. Right. I was just completely at a dead end.
SPEAKER_08: Chapter three, movie star. Steve's career as an actor in the movies took three very distinct and different paths. I guess I'd been aware of them over the years, but becoming closer to Steve in the course of these conversations gave me a different kind of insight into them. The first path involved the movies he made while he was still a working comedian, where he took that absurdist dada persona, the one that had made him famous on stage, and he took it to the screen. In The Jerk, his first film, it's all about the rise of a naive idiot to wealth and fame. The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here!
SPEAKER_04: Well, I wish I could get that excited about that. Nothing! Are you kidding? Millions of people look at this book every day! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity, your name in print, that makes people. I'm in print! That movie set the tone for wonderfully funny,
SPEAKER_08: and I think original films like that, In the late 80s, Steve worked with one of the most successful directors of the entire late 20th century, John Hughes. Their collaboration, the movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, still delights families year in and out, and it stands as one of the few Thanksgiving movies in the canon. Steve plays a wonderful grump trying to get home for the holiday. His unwanted companion in the series is Steve's friend, the man who's His unwanted companion in this adventure is played by the late and incomparable John Candy. You're not a very tolerant person.
SPEAKER_03: How would you like a mouthful of teeth? But to me, this middle period of Steve's film career
SPEAKER_08: is best defined by his attempts to create personal comedies, and that effort produced what, to my mind, were by far the two best films he ever made, Roxanne and L.A. Story. Both of them, not coincidentally, with scripts written by Steve.
SPEAKER_03: You heard me. Big nose, flat-faced, flat-nosed flat-head. Hey, hey, hey!
SPEAKER_04: It's time for the wack, half of the wacky, half of the wacky, weekend weather!
SPEAKER_08: And then finally, the third act or path of his movie career involves some giant, obviously commercial and blockbuster films. The Father of the Bride series and then the Cheaper by the Dozen series. Good night, Mr. Banks.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, you can call him George. Or Dad!
SPEAKER_08: George will be fine. I should add at once that I do not mean to condescend to those films. They gave my kids huge delight when they were younger. But they were clearly not the works of art that Roxanne and L.A. Story aspired to be. And I've always been puzzled, intrigued by Steve's reluctance or inability to go forward in the movies in that very personal and poetic direction. It's one of the things I most want to talk to him about today.
SPEAKER_03: Well, when I first started in movies, I had one vision, which was the jerk. Would you care for another bottle of Chateau Latour?
SPEAKER_03: Ah, yes, but no more 1966. Let's splurge. Bring us some fresh wine. The freshest you've got this year. No more of this old stuff. Oui, monsieur? He doesn't realize he's dealing with sophisticated people here. Its vision was laughs, jokes. And the subsequent movies were laughs, jokes. That's what I wanted, laughs, jokes. It's a vision of a movie. It's a vision of something else, of just putting comedy on screen and I'm learning how to act. And I remember saying, I think, oh, this is going to be an easy transition. I've done a million things on stage. I've done sketches, I've done Saturday Night Live, I've done this, it's going to be a natural. And then the first thing you're asked to do is sit down with a glass in your hand and put it on a table. That's the shot. And I think, so, do I sit first and then put the glass over it? Or do I put it down as I'm putting the glass? And it really, you realize, oh my god, this is more complex than I thought.
SPEAKER_08: And it doesn't have a lot to do with being a performer on stage. Right, no, it's just something else.
SPEAKER_03: And there's all the mechanics, which I love, mechanics of not putting the glass down while someone else is talking because you hear a clunk on their line and then they have to loop it. Make a lot of movies. And here's the reason. In order to get five good movies, you have to make 40. Because they're just unwieldy. You can't perfect, I couldn't, perfect a movie from the get-go. You can't say, this is going to be wonderful. I thought every movie was going to be wonderful. Are you awake? Good. There's something I want to say that's always been very difficult for me to say. I slit the sheet, the sheet I slit, and on the slitted sheet I sit. Now, Steve's first movie, The Jerk,
SPEAKER_08: was directed by Carl Reiner, an American comic master of a significantly older generation than Steve's. Carl Reiner had first become famous in the 1950s as a kind of all-purpose straight man on the legendary Sid Caesar, Your Show of Shows. He could be seen interrogating Sid's mad German professor and then he became even more famous in the 1960s as Mel Brooks' straight man on those beautiful, astounding 2,000-year-old man records. In 2,000 years,
SPEAKER_00: the greatest thing mankind ever devised, that I think, in my humble opinion, is Saran Wrap. You equate this with man's discovery of space? That was good.
SPEAKER_08: But Carl Reiner was far more comic mench and master than just a straight man. He had, everyone agreed, an absolute knowledge of how to set off a comic riff. He was universally respected for his unique mix of comedy savvy and personal generosity all enwrapped in a deep well of show business knowledge. Carl Reiner, he told me this,
SPEAKER_03: he said, I think it's important to have refrigerator laughs. And I said, what's a refrigerator laugh? He says, well, you see the movie and now you're home and you're getting something out of your refrigerator and that's when you laugh at it. When you remember the thing. And I've always found that, you know, Mike told me once, he said, I always think we should have one thing in our movies where we say, can we do that?
SPEAKER_08: Mike is Mike Nichols, the immensely accomplished director behind the graduate and carnal knowledge and many other classics.
SPEAKER_03: I have found over time that those little moments when you're thinking, should we, those are the ones that people pick out and remember. Like in Roxanne, it wasn't scripted but it was starting to be dusk and I asked the director and I said, I have an idea, there was a newspaper rack and so I went over to it, it was just one shot, I went over to it put the quarter in pulled out the newspaper started to walk away, read the headline started screaming went back to the thing, put another quarter in and threw the newspaper back in and closed it.
SPEAKER_08: And that was improvised on the
SPEAKER_03: It was improvised, yeah. I didn't even tell him what I was going to do.
SPEAKER_02: Malcolm Gladwell here. Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences while providing your employees with a streamlined world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got your back. Learn more at the Hartford.com slash benefits.
SPEAKER_01: Get all that curl types and directions for your desired look and five temperature options for all hair types. And don't worry about tangles. Our anti-tangle tech and ceramic barrel keep hair smooth and protected. Hair goes in, curl comes out, just like magic. Get effortless curls with the new Curl Secret by Conair, exclusively at Ulta.
SPEAKER_05: New episodes, new episodes, new episodes, new episodes, and epic adventures. No place, no one, no story is off limits. And you'll always learn something new. It's time for 60 Minutes. New episode airs Sunday, September 24th on CBS and streaming on Paramount Plus.
