Boston Comedy Interview: Tony V on being roasted and World's Greatest Dad

Yesterday’s post of my interview with Bobcat Goldthwait covered Goldthwait’s friendship with Tony V, and how they work together. Goldthwait is in town tonight for the Roast of Tony V as part of the Boston Comedy Festival, and he cast Tony in his new film, World’s Greatest Dad, which opens at the Kendall Square Cinema tonight, as well. Tony, who was working towards his masters in social work at UMAss before he started stand-up comedy, plays Dr. Pentola in the film, a high school guidance counselor in his glory when a tragedy hits his school. It’s a great role for Tony (he doesn’t get strangled to death like he did in Showtime’s Brotherhood), and the film is a wonderfully dark consideration of kindness and lost civility. [Warning -- some of this material may be a bit of a spoiler, if you want to be surprised when you see the film, you may want to skip ahead in the interview a bit].

Tonight at the Hard Rock, though, kindness and civility will most probably be tossed out the window as Tony is roasted by Goldthwait, Lenny Clarke, Steve Calechman, Joey Carroll, Artie Januario, BCF founder Jim McCue, Kenny Rogerson, Frank Santorelli, and Sean Sullivan. I caught up with Tony by phone last week about the film, the Festival, and the roast [see also this story from the Boston Globe].

So was it fun for you, getting back to being a social worker for a bit?

Yeah, it was. In all seriousness, a little bit, I think that’s what made Goldthwait think of me. You know what I mean? Because he knew that part of my life and everything. And although it’s not completely necessary for that role, like anything else, it does help. When we were talking about Kubler-Ross, I had actually done papers on it. You know what I mean? [I had] an understanding of that. And the other part is how cutthroat those people are, too, how somebody like that would actually want to ride the coattails of the guy. Because other than that, he’s stuck in broom closets in schools. That’s his life, going from school to school to patch up something that doesn’t need to be patched up.

One of my favorite parts is when your characters tells Robin Williams’ character, “It’s great, the kids are starting to come to me again.” He’s so happy because people are starting to talk to him.

Right, about misery. About their life, about their misery, and he’s gaining as much from it – he’s afraid the tap’s going to be turned off and there’s a genuine panic in him. I don’t know how closely you remember it, but in the first scene, he’s like, “No one comes to see me. Did he have any friends? Cuz I’m just sitting here.” It’s like an empty office. It’s like, finally I get to do my work. Let’s not put our foot through this.

It’s an interesting issue that the film brings up, because there is some good that comes out of this lie.

Well, some good. If you take it to its absurd logical conclusion, the world is so much better without this kid and with the lie. You know what I mean? The football player comes out, he’s going to live his life. Robin’s getting published, he’s getting laid. The school is a better place. Everybody’s happier. And that ultimately is the dilemma – do you keep the lie going because it made fro a better place but it’s eating you up. Or do you have to live with yourself.

Did you consult on any of this stuff with Bobcat when he was writing any of this?

I consult with him on everything. I can’t say specifically he called me in for my expertise or anything – this came out of his head. But whenever he writes, he constantly calls me with, “Ah, what do you think about this scene,” and “how did you like this.” Even when we were shooting, he works very collaboratively, which is one of the things I like about him a lot. But this came out of his experience and his dark head. We did talk about some of the finer points and stuff.

And as a matter of fact that scene, the one you were just referencing, didn’t come out exactly as it was written on the page. Because we discovered this, his motivation as we did it, and I have to credit Robin with a lot of that. Because that was a bear of a scene for me. You know what I mean? I understood the intent and stuff but Robin being the only reason the film got made, he’s the guy, he said, “This is Tony’s scene, let’s shoot me out first,” and so by the time it came to my coverage, I had done the scene seventeen different times at different angles, getting Robin’s coverage. I know the scene, but, as they say in the acting lingo, you’re discovering it. You know, something happened, and we did one and we got it and Bob goes, “We got it, as a safety do you want to do something that’s in your head?” And I said yeah, let’s do that while it’s fresh. And then we did this take, and that’s what it became. But he pushed it that way the whole time. Both of them, Bob and Robin were so gracious and knew I understood what the point of the scene was.

So how did you come to be roasted this year at the Festival?

I think everyone else was sick. I think that’s really what it came down to. No, I’v eknown Jim McCue for a long time, and I think he’s a good buddy and I think he enjoys what I do. And it’s like a lot of things around here, some of the old guard, or dinosaurs, as they call us, or whatever, are not as in touch with everybody else as I am. I still make it a point to sort of be around and I go to open mics and I see what’s happening, and I’ve not just gone off to make a living and forgotten where my roots are. I’m still here. This is it. I made a decision. So I just think he thought it would be fun. And I think there’s a fair amount of people who’d like to take a swipe at me.

Anybody you’re particularly worried about?

I would think Goldthwait’s got most of the dirt. We’ve been really good friends for many years, and if there’s any coattail riding I could be accused of it would certainly be his, although they’re very short coattails.

When did the two of you meet?

His first night in Boston – and I think it’s 1982, I’m putting it, it might have been late ’81, but certainly the spring of ’82 is what memory serves – his first night in Boston was my first night onstage. He had come down from Syracuse or wherever, Upstate New York. Him and [Barry] Crimmins were friends. Him, Tom Kenny, they were doing improv up there or they had a comedy troupe. “Ducks” was in the title, if I remember correctly.

Then he had come down to start doing stand-up, and he was the new guy, and I was brand new, and we were sitting at the Comedy Connection and no one would talk to either one of us, and we were both nervous as hell, and we started chatting and he said, are you a comedian, and I said, well, it’s my first night, and he said, well, I’ve been doing this up in New York and I go, oh, great. And then he went on, and our styles are completely different and stuff. And we sort of stayed friendly ever since.

What’s your memory of that show?

I was petrified and I think I was doing some sort of bastardized Gallagher act, smacking stuff. I had props and balloons and all of that. The whole Tony V. thing came about because [host] Mike Moto wouldn’t take the time to learn my name.

What do you think brought you and Goldthwait together and kept you friends through the years?

I think we share a very similar sense of humor, certainly not delivery or temperament. I think he’s much more intense than I am. But we can crack each other up without thinking about it and that, on a comic’s level, that’s what you gravitate to. You know what I mean? You can say almost anything to him and it doesn’t matter and he back to me, and it doesn’t. As friends, it’s a comforting thing to not sort of be on guard all the time, or worry.

And then I opened for him on the tour that would never end. I think we were on and off the road for like five years together. We’d go on the road and then we’d come back, and then we just got to be real good friends, even more friendly then. As I say, he’s a little younger than us, but we share a very same sensibility and cynicism towards life.

What is special about playing or coming up here?

For me, it’s home. If anything was a career choice for me, it was to make my home still in Boston. I’ve wandered in New York and L.A. but I’ve never felt more at home anywhere than here. I always wanted my quality of life to be as important to me as anything else I did. This is home and this is where I feel the most at ease.

What local comedians influenced you?

When I was coming up, one of my biggest joys was to watch Jack Gallagher work. I credit him with a lot of keeping me in the business early on. That being said, Lenny Clarke, although we do nothing that’s similar, our attitudes, our politics, our styles, I never laugh as much personally as when I’m with that man. He is one of the funniest guys on the planet as far as I’m concerned. To this day. I’m going to work with him on the Vineyard on Wednesday, and the show will almost get in the way of our good time. And Goldthwait has always made me laugh, on top of everything else. You can’t be friends with someone for almost thirty years and not find them funny. It’s just impossible.

How do you feel Boston fits into the national scene?

What it was, it certainly is not. But the legacy if anything is, it continues to give people just starting out a chance to get onstage and work. And that’s what I think makes this place special. It’s still a place where, if you don’t mind working out of your comfort zone and going to VFW or a Sons of Italy somewhere and trying your jokes, you can work a lot. The only advice I ever give people, other than to say don’t ask my advice because if I knew anything else, I wouldn’t be standing in the same club you were, ours is not a job you do in theory. You’ve got to do it. Get onstage any way you can and to suffer sucking as much as the ego will allow.

What do you think this Festival will mean for you or to your career?

I think it keeps something going. It reminds people that we’re still here, that there is a vibrant scene, still. That although it’s gone through changes and it’s certainly not what it was, it’s still a good place and there’s still a lot of people.

What do you see in the near future for Boston comedy?

I think it’s going to keep morphing into whatever it becomes, and I think as long as there are colleges… I think the best thing it’s got going for it now is Emerson and Harvard and B.U. to a certain extent. For better or worse, we live in a country where nothing’s being made anymore and you’ve got to find a living doing something abstract. It will keep becoming a place where you can try to do that. It constantly feeds itself because of geography and temperament. It’s always going to come back. I always going to be a place where people thing, well, there’s something going on there because there are smart people who want to be funny.

The Boston Comedy Interview: Bobcat Goldthwait talks Tony V and World's Greatest Dad

Bobcat Goldthwait first met Tony V. the very first night Tony tried comedy. Goldthwait was new in town, and had done comedy in Syracuse before moving out to Boston, and the two hit it off. That was in 1982, and the two have been friends ever since. Goldthwait cast Tony in his new film, World’s Greatest Dad starring Robin Williams, which opens at the Kendall Square Cinema this weekend. And Goldthwait will also be in town to give Tony a spin over the coals for Friday’s Roast of Tony V. as part of the Boston Comedy Festival. A bit further down the line, you can catch him at the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre December 12.

I caught up with him be phone last week to talk about World’s Greatest Dad, Tony V, stand-up comedy, and his previous work as a writer and director.

Where is the movie playing now?

It opens in Boston I think, in Cambridge this weekend or next weekend. It’s slowly coming out. We’ll see how it goes. It’s funny, I say it’s an R-rated movie where I didn’t aim for teenagers, but I do think a young audience, hopefully, will enjoy this movie. Trying to reach out to them is hard. When I say a young audience, I mean young adults.

Was there a particular audience you had in mind when you were writing it and putting it together?

No, not at all. When I’m making stuff, I’m not really thinking about any of that kind of stuff. It’s just really the kind of thing that comes out of me. In the last five or six years I’ve tried to stop second-guessing what I should be doing or what people would like and just started making stuff to make it.

What was the inspiration World’s Greatest Dad?

You know, it’s about a middle-aged dude finally learning to grow up and say no to unhealthy relationships. And I think if I had written a movie that was just about a series of failed female relationships it would have been kind of misogynistic. You can have a lot of people in your life who don’t treat you right and not necessarily just be the opposite sex that does it.

It has something in common with Sleeping Dogs Lie wherein there’s the one event that seems to be somewhat atrocious that might take a bit for people to get past.

Right.

Is that something that you’re conscious of, putting an event like that in there as a breaking point when you’re writing a script?

No, it’s just he way it comes out. But you know, I think it’s funny. Most of these events are something that could happen on an episode of House. The only difference is, like, in a movie, people can watch a movie and people get shot through the whole movie. This is like, somewhat got shot and then you explored, how did that affect his family and his wife and the people around him, you know what I mean? That’s the only difference. Because these events I don’t think are all that startling, it’s just that I kind of play them as realistic instead of as just a footnote.

How has the reaction been?

No, you know, there were a couple of people who hadn’t seen the movie who were complaining, but that’s pretty typical. Which is pretty funny, because they were actually doing what the movie parodied, they were trying to make something that had nothing to do with them all about them.

In America, every product is supposed to be aimed at everybody, and I don’t think people can wrap their brain around this idea of, I’m not trying to play every mall in America. I mean, I certainly hope I reach an audience. Everybody’s got to make everything about themselves.

Which is what playing every mall in America would be, as well.

Yeah, definitely.

It’s strange that in a society where we increasingly have boutique marketing aimed seemingly directly at each individual, everything is so segmented, but everything’s supposed to be for a general audience. But we’ve carved you all into all of these little bits already.

I think it’s funny, too, now, because of the Web, everybody weighs in with their opinion. I read a review for Twilight. I would never weigh in on Twilight. I would never write a review or post a comment. It’s not made for me. A bunch of ‘tween Jesus vampires? I know to stay away from that.

The other thing that the two films seem to have in common, to me, they both seem to have a lot to do with forgiveness and civility. Two things that seem to be somewhat lost or overlooked.

Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know what that’s such a big issue with me, but I would agree with that. That seems to show up in all the things I write, you know. It gets boring if you’re my girlfriend and you keep reading screenplays with that same theme in them. You know, who are we now, man? Where’s common sense and kindness and all these things, they’ve gone by the wayside.

Do you look at that as elements of a story or do you see it as a general societal problem?

Oh, no, I do… that, to me, is the biggest problem with the world right now.

The civility is the other problem, why we just can’t seem to leave people alone.

And also all these things that we do to justify our crappy behavior. It’s not just me pointing my finger at the world, it’s also my own crappy behavior I constantly examine, too.

Is there any of your own crappy behavior that made it into this film?

[laughs] Yeah, I think so. I think this idea of this guy kind of perceiving himself as a victim and then at the same time not taking any of the courageous steps you have to do to change that.

I saw Lakeview Terrace, what made the movie sort of unbearable was, I could see the original idea was a worthy one, but the starting point was so solvable and unrealistic that the characters wouldn’t have done it. Because it started there, the rest of the movie…

It didn’t ring true.

Right. But in both Sleeping Dogs Lie and World’s Greatest Dad, all those events did ring true, even if they seemed like they’d be more unusual. That was kind of clumsy, but….

No, that’s what I hope. I treat the events very straight and realistic and then I approach, too, the way the characters act as mostly realistic. In this movie, it’s a little bit more of a satire and there’s a lot of kooky, flaky one-dimensional characters that start showing up, but I still think of these things more as little tiny stories, like little fables or something. I do treat the events and the characters as realistic as possible. But in my mind, I don’t think of them as real stories, I don’t treat them as real stories at the end of the day.

Did you write Tony V’s part specifically for him?

No, I just wrote the part. But the reason I cast Tony in there is, people hire Tony because of his girth, and if you saw him, you’d think of him as this palooka. So he tends to get hired to play palookas. And the reality is, Tony actually did work with kids and stuff, and that is who he is. But I did think it was kind of funny to even have Tony be kind of corrupt in the movie.

I know his past as a social worker, and I didn’t know if you’d thought of the character with him in mind.

When I thought of it, I thought, I know that in the Hollywood system you wouldn’t have him. But it was funny, we were talking about how he should let his hair grow out and he should be this guy whose still clinging to 60s and 70s ideology and stuff.

A lot of people in this movie seem to be people who are in your circle of friends – Robin Williams and Tony V. and Tom Kenny. How important is it to have people like that in your films?

Robin says working with me is a combination of working with John Cassavetes meets Ed Wood. Everybody;s offended. And it they’re not, they’re like people that become friends and I work with. I like the comfort level of knowing people’s strengths and I mean, I’m middle-aged. Life’s too short. I don’t want to show up in a work environment that’s tense. Tom Kenny says I have a very juvenile approach to all of it. He says I act like a kids that’s like, “Someday I’m gonna make a movie and all my friends are gonna be in it! You’re gonna be in it, and you’re gonna be in it…” And I do think that’s true. He was laughing the other day, he said, “The only difference is, you actually do go back and hire all [of them].”

The newest script I’m writing, I have a cast of a lot… it’ll be the biggest cast I’ve written. So I’m hoping to bring back everybody from Sleeping Dogs and this movie and Shakes. Everybody will work.

What’s the new project?

I’m trying to finish up a spree killer movie right now. But I also, I don’t know if it’ll get going, but I got Ray Davies’ thumbs up to make a movie around the Kinks album Schoolboys in Disgrace.

What was the first one? You faded in and out a bit.

A spree killer movie. Again, it’s about the same themes you were just talking about. The same themes that you brought up. But the idea is, I thought, what if an irrational man were disturbed by the lack of civility in our culture. That was the genesis of the new screenplay. People go, when I describe it to them, they say, well, is it a comedy. I don’t know. Honestly, when I write these movies I don’t really sit down and make them a comedy. I just assume that’ll probably come out. It’s more of a challenge to me to write movies that connect with people. That’s what I’m interested in.

I don’t know if you’d call World’s Greatest Dad a comedy. It’s definitely a funny movie, but every funny moment has this sort of weight attached to it, this sort of undertow.

I remember watching American Beauty. I really liked that movie, and I was cackling all through it. I’m sure that came off as Max Cady in the Cape Fear remake where he was laughing in the theater like a lunatic.

But all of these movies I do go back to, is that a comedy? I don’t know. Like Boogie Nights or any Wes Anderson movie, I don’t know where those movies live. I mean, I think mine are probably more uncomfortable, but I don’t know where these movies all live.

It reminded me a bit of Heathers as well.

I didn’t think of that until after I finished it, and then my girlfriend goes, “You know, it’s got a little Heathers to it.” And then I just ran right into the train and named the goth girl Heather. Like, yeah, I get it.

Did you come to Boston with Tom Kenny? Or did the two of you arrive around the same time?

I came first. I followed Barry Crimmins. Then Tommy came down and then he kind of moved there permanently around the same time I left. That’s another story I’ve been trying to get started, too, about some of the events in Barry Crimmins’ life. I hope I get that going someday, also.

I consider Barry a mentor and also like a family member. And when I get in touch with him sometimes, he’s still always going to be like a big brother to me. Sometimes he calls me on my shit.

I remember at the Ding Ho reunion show you talked about him calling you at three in the morning.

And telling me that I suck. The last time I saw him I picked him up at his house and drove to Western Mass to see Billy Bragg together, which was a lot of fun.

Are you doing stand-up again soon?

I went out on the road and I shot eight cities in ten days and I thought I was going to make a movie about how morning radio teams are douchebags and how club owners are thieves and how opening acts are always bitter. But we were filming it, and I was going, we’re getting none of that. Everybody was really nice. And I go, why do I still hate this? And I was like, oh, I hate this character. It was really clear to me, having the cameras just magnified it. I have to jettison this character if I’m ever going to enjoy doing stand-up, and I did in the middle of it.

And some of the shows went really well and some of the shows, you know, I’m in Des Moines with people going, “Do the voice!” But I had to stick to my guns because if I didn’t, I really should just retire completely if I hadn’t stuck to my guns. So I found myself kind of enjoying stand-up again and even writing stand-up again for the first time in probably seventeen years. I was very lazy, I would write onstage, but now I’m interested in it again.

I keep doing stand-up when I need to to support my filmmaking habit. I’m pretty lucky that I have that choice, you know?

Can you play where you want to or because you’ve been away from it for a while do you have to fight your way back?

No, it’s like, I took six years off. When I go back on the road, things have really changed. It used to be a big deal if you were on HBO or if you had some talk show appearances under your belt. But that doesn’t mean shit anymore. It’s all about how many hits your YouTube video has. So grandpa has to start posting material again on the Web. I’m so out of the loop.

Do people know you more as a filmmaker now than a comedian?

I don’t think folks know me as a filmmaker. I don’t know. It cracked me up the other day. I was getting interviewed and I was like, “You know, the persona people know me for, the character, and I’m trying to stretch, blah blah blah,” and this girl goes, “Hey, I’m nineteen. I don’t know who the fuck you are.” I was like, oh, yeah, that’s a good point. [laughs]

Are you looking forward to the Tony V roast?

Yes, I’m certainly looking forward to it. I changed my schedule around. There was no way I was going to miss that.

Is there anything in particular that you have on him that you’ll be revealing?

I’m sure there’s a lot, but I also see it as an opportunity to say all the things I would say at his funeral.