Al Jean, "THE SIMPSONS" executive producer: Mr. Media Audio Interview

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Here’s math that even Bart Simpson won’t need a chalkboard to figure out:

“The Simpsons” is > “Gunsmoke.”

That’s right: thanks to a new two-year renewal, “The Simpsons” is about to blow past the ancient western as the longest-running primetime series in American television history.

And my guest today, “Simpsons” executive producer Al Jean, has been there for every episode—plus a feature-length movie.

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You can LISTEN to this interview with AL JEAN, executive producer of "THE SIMPSONS," by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player above!

Copyright 2009 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chuck Dixon, "The Simpsons" comic book writer: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

One of the most anticipated movies of this summer -- no, not Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix -- and no, Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer -- is The Simpsons Movie.

And while Matt Groening couldn’t make it to join us today, we are lucky enough to welcome a member of the extended "Simpsons" creative family, frequent Simpsons comic book writer, Chuck Dixon.

Dixon is a prolific comics writer, easily shifting between the in-jokes and low humor of Bart and Homer for Bongo Comics to the high drama of DC’s caped crusader, Batman.



Mr. Media Interviews Chuck Dixon
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BOB ANDELMAN: Please complete this sentence, Chuck: "I’m Bart Simpson..."

CHUCK DIXON: And you’re not.

ANDELMAN: There you go. All right. Now we’ve confirmed the identity of today’s guest. Chuck, I’m guessing that writing for <The Simpsons comic is either your toughest gig or the most fun, but there’s probably no in-between.

DIXON: Actually, there is. Well, like any writing, it’s fun when it’s going well and living hell when it’s not, but it is a hard gig because there are a lot of demands and a lot of expectations. You expect a level of humor from The Simpsons that you don’t expect from any other property, so you’ve got to get those “laugh out loud” moments in every story, which, that’s tough.

ANDELMAN: Do you have to do anything to psych yourself up or to get in the mood to write a Simpsons script that maybe you don’t have to for Grifter or Batman or Nightmare on Elm Street?

DIXON: Well, I have to cogitate more on it. It sort of has to percolate, and once I’ve got two or three scenes in my head, then I go to work right then and work to tie them together into the plot, but it’s a much slower process for The Simpsons. It takes two or three times longer to write a Simpsons script than it would be to write anything else. There’s that pressure. I probably put more pressure on myself than I need to, but I like to be the guy who hands in the problem-free script, so I don’t send it out. The Simpsons script out until it’s -- to my mind -- perfect.







ANDELMAN: Have any of the stories that you’ve written come from your own life or your own family?

DIXON: Recently, I wrote one: “Marge Simpson, Forensic Homemaker,” in which she comes home from grocery shopping to find the kitchen in an unholy mess, even messier than usual, and her suspects are Maggie, Bart, and Homer. She uses forensics to figure out who made the mess. She traces it back. She figures it all started with somebody trying to make a smoothie in a blender, and it’s very much from my own life. I thought I had cleaned up a mess, and my wife traced it back to the blender and even knew the ingredients, and that astounded me. I thought, well, this is a Marge Simpson story.

ANDELMAN: Your wife deserves a comic book if she figured that out.

DIXON: Absolutely, absolutely.

ANDELMAN: How did you get the job?

DIXON: They do their annual “Treehouse of Horror” comic, and it’s invitation only. It’s like Augusta! I wanted to do it, but you don’t go and say, hey, I want to be in the “Treehouse of Horror” comic, so I sort of waited until I was invited, and once I had my foot in the door, a couple of months later, I came up with another Simpsons idea for a full issue. I said, “Would you be open to this?” And they bought it, and slowly over time, I’d do a couple a year, but recently, I’ve stepped up. I’m doing quite a few stories for them, for the various comics.

ANDELMAN: Who’s harder to put words in their mouth, Bart, Homer, Maggie?

DIXON: Well, Maggie’s easy. Homer can be tough, but the toughest one is Ralph Wiggum, because he’s… So much of The Simpsons humor comes from surprise at what they say, because it’s always a reversal. It’s always something you’d never think they were going to say, and Ralph is the king of that. I mean, he says things that no one’s ever said and no one will ever say again and only he can say. So The Simpsons is great, because every character has a voice. It’s not like “Friends” or some other sit com where the lines are interchangeable and anyone can read them. Everything is specific, and Ralph is the most specific of them all. Lenny and Carl jokes are tough to come up with, too, because they have raised the bar so high on the show.

ANDELMAN: What about Comic Book Guy and….

DIXON: Comic Book Guy is easy. I’ve taken to have him come in when the characters are saying, “That never happened,” or “I don’t remember that.” I’ll have Comic Book Guy simply show up in the background and remind people of continuity.

ANDELMAN: He’s kind of the Greek chorus?

DIXON: Yeah, exactly. And he’s easy to write, because anybody who’s interested in comics has met that guy a million times or is that guy.

ANDELMAN: You don’t write these comics in a vacuum. There are a lot of people back, I guess back on the west coast that look over everything you do. Do you get comments back from them?

DIXON: It depends. Some stories are tougher than others. Some stories sail through with no problem, maybe a little change here or whatever, and they always let me make the changes, which is nice, and they’ll have suggestions. They’ll call, and they’ll have a problem, and they’ll have a possible solution to it, which is great, instead of just, “You’re the writer, you figure it out.” But yeah, I deal with Terry Dellajean, and I deal with Bill Morrison, who are directly involved in the offices. And then from my understanding, Matt Groening oversees everything. So I’m dealing with the core people, and I’ve been dealing with the same people from the beginning, which is great, because when you write licensed properties in comics, generally you are dealing with some entry-level guy who’s only had the job a few weeks, because he’s going to move up to be producer or something, and those guys are always trying to prove real hard that they are doing their job, so they ask for a million re-writes, but The Simpsons, the Bongo guys, they are terrific. They are helpful.






ANDELMAN: Can you give us an example of notes you’ve gotten about scripts?

DIXON: Mostly just make it funnier, or this could be funnier, or the ending could be snappier. The worst one is when they don’t get a joke. I did a joke in a comic -- I had Homer arrested by the police, and they put him in the back of the squad car, and he’s shouting, “I’m innocent, I’m innocent, I didn’t do it,” and the cop says, that’s what everybody says. And Homer says, “I bless the rains down in Africa. Does everyone say that?” See, you got it. They didn’t get it, and this was one… I know when to walk away from a joke that’s not working, because it’s like, okay, only I thought it was funny, and if you have to explain a joke, it’s dead, but this one I fought for, and it went all the way up the chain, and no one there got it.

ANDELMAN: Really?

DIXON: But everyone I’ve ever told it to thought it was funny.

ANDELMAN: Nobody gets the Toto reference.

DIXON: Well, they got the reference, they just didn’t see why it was funny, and I thought, well, isn’t that something no one would ever say? But I’ve learned since then if they don’t get it to walk away. I’ve got a “Rock and Roll Heaven” joke, script I haven’t handed in yet that I’m terrified they won’t get. But we’ll see.

ANDELMAN: How different is it to write for The Simpsons than for super heroes? I mean, Batman, not the funniest guy on earth.

DIXON: Well, drama’s just easier because pathos is easier to go for. I mean, the hardest thing about Batman is suspense, but basically once you’ve got that down, once you’ve seen two Hitchcock movies, if you didn’t get it by then, you’re never going to get it.

ANDELMAN: I think you’re supposed to make it seem harder, Chuck. I don’t think you want to make it seem that easy for people to do.

DIXON: Well, maybe it isn’t! I don’t know. I look at things, and I go, why didn’t they get this? This isn’t hard. How do you make a lousy Shadow movie? I mean, how do you make a lousy Tarzan movie? How do you screw that up? So yeah, you’ve got the suspense elements. You can dazzle them with clever dialogue exchanges and meanness. Cruelty is a big thing in comics now. It’s like Quentin Tarantino. It is like, what’s the plot of a Quentin Tarantino movie? Well, there really isn’t one, but all that dialogue is kind of cool, and the characters look great.

ANDELMAN: Kind of like Ocean’s Thirteen.

DIXON: Yeah. Well, I don’t know. I don’t know. I saw Ocean’s Twelve. I can’t figure that one out. What I can’t figure out is why they made another one. But yeah, it’s just easier, but writing funny stuff is harder. An Archie writer recently told me that superheroes are easier because it’s half the work, because they don’t have to be funny, so you can some up with a plot, and that’s it. Just plot.

ANDELMAN: Is it painful when you get a script back and someone says, it’s not funny, or it’s not funny enough?

DIXON: I really have a thick skin on that stuff. It’s like you throw it against the wall, and it works, or it doesn’t work. If it didn’t make you laugh, then yeah, I’m glad you pointed it out. I’d rather fail here in the script stage than somebody read the comic and go, that wasn’t funny, or he didn’t get it. I mean, if they are not getting the jokes, or it’s not funny to them, then obviously it’s not going to be funny to the reader, that my timing didn’t work, or the reference didn’t work.

ANDELMAN: I know you haven’t seen The Simpsons Movie yet as we sit and have this conversation, but you’re looking forward to it, I guess, and I guess there are multiple reasons why you’d like it to be a big hit.

DIXON: Yeah. I’m really looking forward to it. It’s been a long time coming and lots of reasons why it wasn’t made before, and yeah, I’d like it to do well. It would be a huge shot in the arm, but if this thing performs the way I think it’s going to perform, it’s going to re-invigorate the franchise all over again and also for its worldwide audience. “The Simpsons” has an enormous worldwide audience. The Simpsons comics are the number one best-selling comics in most European countries, Germany and Holland. I think they like the perverse view of America, and it’s a lot of the reason why we keep the comic franchise going is for foreign audiences, but yeah, the movie is going to help all of that.







ANDELMAN: Do you benefit if the comic sells more copies?

DIXON: No. They pay very well up front. It’s a work for hire situation. They pay better than any other comic, which I probably shouldn’t say that. I don’t want my job taken away by some Englishman! But they pay well up front, and they pay quickly, which is really important for comic book writer.

ANDELMAN: Very important to a freelance writer, absolutely.

DIXON: Very important. Sometimes, it’s not how much you make, it’s how often you make it.

ANDELMAN: How did you get started in comics?

DIXON: I just can’t do anything else well. I’ve always wanted to do comics, and like most comic book writers, I thought I was going to be an artist, but I simply don’t have the discipline to be an artist, so I became a writer, which doesn’t need any discipline at all. When I realized I couldn’t do the art as well as writing, I just kept hammering away at the companies, and I started going up for interviews in the 1970s, which was the worst time. It was like the Great Depression for comics. It was horrible. Sales were awful. They were laying people off left and right, so I didn’t really get to writing full-time until I was 30. The rest of the time, I did children’s books for a while, hated that, and I drove an ice cream truck, I worked at a 7-Eleven, I did every donkey job imaginable, because I simply wasn’t good at anything else, and there was really no point in pursuing a doctorate!

ANDELMAN: It’s nice to meet someone else who has that attitude. I’ve been writing since I was 13 or 14, and people say, “Why?” I say, “I can’t seem to be able to do anything else.” I’m not even sure I do this well.

DIXON: I mean, yeah, that’s the paranoia is, gee, am I a big fraud, and I don’t have any talent at all? But I can’t hammer a nail to a board straight, so I better do something.

ANDELMAN: Okay, I can do that, for the record. I just want it on the record. I can hammer a nail, so….

DIXON: Well, I used to roof for a living, still can’t hammer a nail.

ANDELMAN: You said you worked on some children’s books, but your focus was always that you wanted to write comics?

DIXON: Always comics, never anything else. I’m not one of these guys who’s in comics until my novel gets sold or until I sell a screen play. I honestly don’t care about any of that. If you ever see me writing a novel or writing a screenplay, it’s because I couldn’t get comic work. I’ve done some prose work recently, and I’ve written some movie treatments simply to expand my horizons, because I like to think a year or two years down the road, but if I wrote comics until the very day I died, and that’s all I ever wrote, then I’d be the happiest guy on earth. I really like it.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All Rights Reserved.

Chuck Dixon, "The Simpsons" comic book writer: Mr. Media Video Interview, Pt. 1

Mr. Media Interviews Chuck Dixon
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