American Splendor chronicles in multiple formats the existence of a file clerk named Harvey Pekar. He is a real person, shown in documentary footage, and he’s best known for documenting his life in the comic book of the same name. He achieved notoriety in the late 1980s for a series of appearances on David Letterman, which ultimately climaxed with Harvey being banned from the show after making allegations about NBC’s parent company General Electric. He’s now retired and lives with his wife and writing partner Joyce Brabner and their adopted daughter Danielle.

The movie was directed by the husband and wife team of Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, best known for documentaries like Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s. This is their first dramatic feature, though it does incorporate documentary footage and cartoons, and it has already won awards at both The Sundance Film Festival and at Cannes.

I sat down in New York recently with Harvey, Joyce, Robert and Shari, as well as Toby Radloff, Harvey’s former co-worker, and Judah Friedlander who plays Toby in the dramatic segments. And of course, Paul Giamatti, who's already generating Oscar buzz for his portrayal of Harvey. Below are a series of random quotes.

HARVEY PEKAR

“I wanted him to see it. One of the things I felt pretty good about this movie was that it showed Crumb at his best. In the Terry Zwigoff film biography – I thought the film biography was excellent – but Crumb can be a real nice guy. And not just to me. Although he was super-nice to me. I’m forever beholden to him. I just wanted to show what he was like when he was younger. I’m pleased that I was able to do that, cause I feel it was an accurate representation of him.”

“It was sort of a calculated thing, and the reason that I did it was that after having been on the Letterman show 3 times – seeing that all he wanted me to do was just a parody of myself – he got upset if I wanted to do something else. I figured, I got nothing to lose by just doing whatever I feel like doing. I wasn’t selling more comics. I wasn’t making any kind of money I could speak of. I was just going on there and being a buffoon. I don’t mind getting laughs. I don’t even mind playing the buffoon for a while. But there’s more to me than that aspect of my personality.”

“I can’t understand what people will put up with, with Bush. I’m certainly against what he did in Iraq. Just his handling of the economy alone is enough to just make me wanna have a recall. He’s been awful! He doesn’t know what he’s doing. I don’t think he has much interest in the economy either. He has the wrong people advising him. It’s terrible.”

PAUL GIAMATTI

“I don’t think anybody goes for a beer with Harvey. I don’t think Harvey drinks to begin with. We went to a bookstore once.”

“He was an easier guy to deal with than some of the real people I’ve played. Some of the people I’ve played have been a little too – understandably – invested in the thing. Not necessarily in a healthy way. They get very neurotic about how you’re gonna depict ‘em, which is understandable. He didn’t have any problems with that. Like I said, he seemed like he couldn’t have cared less.”

“Like I said, it was all about the free donuts for him.”

“He watched one scene that I did with Hope. He said afterwards, ‘It’s great. I understand how they changed it for comic effect, but I never would’ve yelled at my wife like that. I’m scared of my wife.’”

“I love Philip K. Dick, but they turn them into these big-budget action things. There’s like no action in those books! You know? And the main character’s always like – in the movie it’s Tom Cruise or Ben Affleck – but it should be like Steve Buscemi or somebody like that. It’s never these action-packed guys, it’s these dweeby, geeky-type guys who are telephone repairmen.”

TOBY RADLOFF

“It makes me feel very good. Because I’m a character in Harvey’s film and Harvey’s comic books, and to have a character actor playing me is an honor. Because I will be part of cinematic history. Just for playing myself. Judah Friedlander did an excellent job with this. He had my mannerisms down pat. Looks down pat. He had my voice down pat.”

“I appeared on MTV about a dozen times between 1987 and 1989 as The Genuine Nerd. And I called myself The Genuine Nerd because I’m just that genuine.”

“I appeared in a bunch of movies back in the early-90s. Some couple of forgettable films called Killer Nerd and Bride of Killer Nerd. Which are both still in print with Troma. And a third film which I did that’s available through Lurid.com called Townies, where I play an eccentric bum who finds a dead woman’s body in a Dumpster. And I make love to the corpse. I do it in a tasteful manner.”

“I’d say Revenge of the Nerds… I was inspired by the movie. I saw the movie advertised in an out-of-town newspaper. It hadn’t opened in Cleveland, yet. And I just had to see it. So I drove a 240-mile roundtrip to Toledo to see the movie for the very first time. I just felt so inspired by the story that I saw the movie like another 40 times. The sequels are only so-so. They get worse and worse. The second sequel was not as good as the first. But it was still good on its own merits. The third and fourth ones, which are both made for TV films, they weren’t good at all. Because 1, the storylines looks very contrived, and 2, the original actors are starting to outgrow their rolls.”

JUDAH FRIEDLANDER

“In the stand-up scene there’s a lot of ass-kissing. Sometimes you think it’s a really supportive scene, sometimes you think everybody’s out just trying to screw themselves and everybody’s fake. I have a couple of friends. Just a couple of people I consider friends in the business. The business is a very messed up business. The business is doing well. The clubs are doing well. In New York certainly. I’ve lived in New York 15 years. The last year I’ve been living in L.A. The 2 cities are very different. Better comedy scene in New York. But there’s some good comics out there. A lot of bad. There’s a lot of thievery. Joke stealing. Stuff like that. Attitude stealing.”

JOYCE BRABNER

“Fans thought Dennis Franz should play Harvey cause that’s the only bald actor they know. I thought of Shelley Duval – I don’t know what she looks like now – playing me.”

“He can’t stand to be bored. As I know from having attended different social functions with him, he’ll just overturn the apple cart to make things interesting for himself.”

“I think people are more ready to hear about GE now than they were 20 years ago. But what was interesting was we were getting all these prank phone calls whenever he was on TV. Some drunk frat boys were calling him on our answering machine. The first calls were insulting Harvey’s appearance. He’s balding or his shirt isn’t cool. But in the end they called back, very chastened, very sobered up, cause they were apologizing: “Geez, Harvey! I didn’t know all that stuff. You’ve got stones. I’m sorry I called earlier.’ These are people who were real assholes before, and they’re now calling to say they’re sorry.”

“They came to us and they said it was something like Howard the Duck’s birthday. This is a duck that smokes cigars and wears pants and comes ostensibly from Cleveland – pre-Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Cleveland. They offered him incredible money. He could not even conceive of a story. I said, ‘Look, give it to me! I’ll write it!’”

ROBERT PULCINI

“It’s weird, you know? It’s like with documentaries the actual shoot is a crazy adventure. You know you’re always going to miss something. You’re running around. With features the shoot is making sure – there’s a lot of thought that goes into it before – you kinda make sure everything’s on track while you’re on the set. But…you get a lot more attention with a narrative film than you do with a documentary.”

“I think there are skills that we’ve acquired as documentarians that really helped with this project. Cause you have this story which is about these comics which are just mundane moments. They don’t really add up to much dramatically. It’s like having tons of documentary footage and you’ve gotta find a way to craft it and make connections between unrelated things. Make a story out of it. I do think it was an asset for us.”

“We got a bootleg copy of the (restricted) Letterman footage. We initially edited with that footage. Nobody understood it cause they’re really screaming over each other. Harvey names a lot of names up the corporate ladder.”

SHARI SPRINGER BERMAN

“It’s surprisingly close to the screenplay in structure. We knew pretty early on that we wanted to do something where we had multiple Harvey Pekars. We looked at the comics and we saw how different people draw Harvey. He looks different, yet you know it’s still Harvey. It has this Pekar essence.”

“Actually, in documentaries, which is where we came out of, it was easier because we had multiple cameras. There’s always so much chaos going on. One of us would go off with one camera, then the other would go off with the other camera. Sometimes we wouldn’t see each other’s footage until we got back into the editing room. With this it was different. I worked or focused a little bit more on the acting. Bob was stationed with the cinematographer and the camera – the look of the film. But I have to say, we switched back and forth and shared our opinions on the subject.”

“I feel like Hollywood tries to limit people in so many ways. Limit you to genre. Limit the people you can cast in your movies to say, 5 people. They want everything to be so easily and readily identifiable. It makes them extremely nervous if you try to do something different. Coming from documentaries you don’t have to worry about box office, cause you know you’re not going to make any box office.”

“No, we haven’t heard anything from David Letterman. It was a long process. Actually, apparently Letterman never licenses any of his footage. He’s very strict about licensing his footage. So we were really lucky that they gave us the footage they gave us. The last 2 episodes where Harvey and Letterman fight were restricted. There was no discussing it. Restricted by NBC right after broadcast.”

“If you don’t fight for what you believe in, when it comes out and it’s bad you have no one to blame but yourself.”

-Copyright 2003 by Jamie Stuart


 

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