Alan ALDA on InnerVIEWS with Ernie Manouse

as a TV star few if been as famous or have endured as long he spent 11 years starring on the TV hit mash where he was nominated for an astounding 21 Emmy Awards he directed the series two-and-a-half hour finale which is still the most watched show in television history but that's not the sum total of this man he has continued to find home both on TV on the west wing and on the silver screen working regularly with director Woody Allen he has been recognized for his work by the Tonys the Oscars the People's Choice Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild hello i'm ernie manouse coming up on interviews our conversation with Alan Alda what's the key to telling a good story oh that's an interesting question you know I grew up on the stage I grew up either standing in the wings watching stage performances or I was on the stage telling a story through action and that's action is what I think in my bones it makes a good story and by action I don't mean car chases it's the opposite of that it's it's not muscular action it's action inside the head what is a character trying to accomplish and how does that character go about getting it you know when I understood this in my bones and then when I got to college and I read Aristotle's Poetics I realized somebody had figured this out it wasn't and put it into words 2,400 years ago and it means a lot to me I go back to that I reread it a lot when I talked to two young writers and young actors I talk about this all the time and my friends who write plays and say you want to read this tell me what you think they after I they stopped giving it to me because I I always come up with the same ideas that I'm not sure that you've that you're you're keeping it active enough but you know a terrible moment in storytelling is when is when the writer thinks it's okay to do exposition it usually stops everything dead and exposition is at its worst when two characters are saying to each other things that they already know but the writer needs the audience to know you know it's almost impossible not to do it in a historical drama well mr. Lincoln the war has been on for three weeks now what is he supposed to say oh really three weeks jeez I don't get a paper here you know what I mean they don't people that doesn't happen and button rather than that you can you can do it the way Shakespeare usually did it which was to have people fighting about something arguing about something making a trying to convince one another of something and in the course of that to make their argument they they they make their argument through presenting the information to the other character that the audience needs to know but they don't do it because the author has to say it they do because the character has to say it right as doing doing making attempting or trying to achieve now you write that makes a story when you write a book as opposed to a script that yeah do you approach that differently or is it the same I well because I have this background in this kind of storytelling I think of all writing that way and it something's always going some places always think of it as a horse to ride you know what's once you once you run that horse and it's going someplace then then I think the listener or the reader or the audience is is with you one that they want to see well what's coming next they want to see if you're gonna make it if the if there's and there's there's kinetic energy in it I think everybody's mind responds to that but even you know even I remember reading a long time ago an example of a good descriptive passage maybe it was Robert Louis Stevenson I can't remember and he described a bay and he went and he compared the bay to a hook or something like that and he went around the bay like this even in that description of us of a still life seeing in a way there was action because he was making his way across it in your imagination it's a lower form of action but there was almost a kind of action as an actor that if you're given a script that isn't well written yeah how do you deal with that done I had this system I don't do it okay what if those you know went up when I was young and I couldn't avoid it when you had to take everything come to him by the way sometimes you make a mistake sometimes you think it's not as good as it could be maybe it'll get better maybe everybody working on it will find something richer in it and not that doesn't happen that still happens from time to time but I always look for I don't I don't add anything that's not there I mean I just try to find what's there what what clues are there to to what this person wants and you know I try to reach the point where I not only want what the character wants but I I feel like deserve to get it yeah if you if you deserve to get it nothing will stand in your way I mean I really wanted to win the election on West was real I wanted to win it so much when I was watching the episode where they had the vote coming in right up until the last minute I thought the vote might go my way and we had already shot it so where did this love of all of this come from well standing in the wings watching my father and watching burlesque comics and then watching vaudeville performers and watching my father on Broadway standing off on the side while he was making movies you can't watch for you know all those years I watched for 15 16 years from the almost from the time I was born you can't watch all that time without we're not wanting to get up and do it you also think you know something but you let you see it you see it at the best possible angle when you're off in the wings because you see it from the side they're creating an illusion for the audience the audience when they see it from the front are getting the benefit of the illusion but when you look at it from the side you're seeing a great deal of how they create the illusion but it's all aimed out that way and you hear you hear the vocal production you see the sweat flying you see the the the physical energy involved and you see them tossing it back and forth between them and when I watch The Blackstone the magician in vaudeville I saw where he hid the pigeons and the audience couldn't see that and I can see I could see all those years where the actors were hiding the pigeons what happens when the point comes that your mentors you surpass them how do you deal with that in many ways you never surpass your mentors because you're who you are and they're who they are and they can be the best them that they can be then anybody can be and you can be the best you so it's very hard to to compare talents I find that almost impossible I mean they're there for rewards although I love to get them are not really a measure of much nothing that seriously a measure of anything but I I thought I surpassed my father who was my earliest mentor I thought I surpassed him when I was 10 years old that's how arrogant I was yeah I was giving him line readings when I was 10 years old and he thought it was funny and I didn't know what he thought was so funny I thought that's a pretty good reading I'm giving it you talk about arrogance it must be hard to come off an event like the finale of mash when it is the most-watched television episode in the history of television yeah how do you then face the next day what does something like that do to your head to your idea of who you are in this whole world I don't know I I always was under the impression I had less of an understanding of how popular is successful I was then other people did I mean it was a shock to realize that so many people were watching the final episode of mash I knew it was a hit of course but I knew the show was a hit the series but I when we were coming home from watch you were going to a restaurant the cast we were we had watched the movie and on a big screen at the studio and we were driving to a restaurant and I suddenly realized the streets were almost deserted and I said to Loretta Swit Loretta look at within their home watching it that means like everybody it was like half the we was watching and that came as a surprise I don't think I got arrogant about the shows being successful part part of the reason for that is that I mean to the extent that that's true is that we all knew that it was bigger than all than us and all of us put together and certainly any of us singly yeah something happened there was some extra ingredient there was a an emergent property that happened as a result of these people coming together that was more than the sum of the parts and we all knew that we could we could see it happening we would be amazed at what we were coming up with that that we knew worked and and so it would be stupid to take you know for any anyone of us to act like he was what she was the one responsible for it right do we lose anything as a community not having moments like that anymore and what I mean by that is we've got DVRs and VCRs and things all the different choices so there's never a moment or never a time the whole country names see something in a single moment well let you know it may be that people are still hungry for that because I noticed that there are these programs where people call in and vote and you know Allan contests and things like that and then every once in while they have an election and some people even take part in that yeah phase you know not as many yeah as maybe they should have a dance contest be interested it'd be different yeah well not that different yeah how do you feel about the political system today how are you feeling happy about it disappointed in it you know I I was very active politically a long time ago 25 years ago 25 or 30 years ago and I campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment and I really worked hard at that and I and I feel now that I gave at the office and I don't I don't talk about politics in public yeah I mean I'm a citizen and I'm concerned and I read a couple of papers every day and they I write imaginary op-ed pieces in my head but I don't send them in yeah when you're doing the West Wing though well it was wonderful those people were very talented very knowledgeable about politics and I learned an enormous amount I mean I now when I read the paper and I and I see that the the White House is putting out a statement or there's a speech being done and I think of some of the read some of the key phrases in it I start to think about the scenes that would have taken place on West Wing West Wing leading up to that phrase being the one chosen you can't say that because you'll alienate these people can't say try this let's go for that now that kind of so it's I used to think of it more as a more spontaneous communication but I can see now why it wouldn't be yeah when you decide to sit down and write stories of your life yeah was it hard to pick what you were going to address were there things you said this is off guards this off limits I'm not sure well no except that I make a distinction between what's personal and what's private as a writer or as an act there's any kind of an artist I think you have to be personal certainly in the in in the kind of writing that I'm that I that I tend to all the writing I do I am as personal as I can be but I don't think I have to talk about things that I feel are private then there's a there's a distinction you know you've by personal I mean a real personal response to the things that have happened to me and and an honest accounting of that rather than some kind of general stereotypical response I mean the way you're supposed to feel when something happens mm-hmm how are you supposed to feel when your mother dies or how are you supposed to feel when you find actually psychotic and I found out my mother was psychotic very early in my life as a she tried to stab my father the first first sentence of my book is my mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six and and it's I don't consider that private but I have a personal response to to that and the other events in my life I tried to find out what the details were that that call that up that evoked that and and make it live again because I think if you can tell a human experience in enough detail that it takes place in the readers mind where the audience is mine and they for a moment through this act of imagination they can enter into it with you that that's an experience that we all want we all want to get warmed up to one another by virtue of understanding what the other person is going through because it's what we go through it's a way of getting more personal in our own lives when you talk about that experience though is there a private set of memories that go with it that you choose not to share well sometimes I'm sure there are yeah there are some things I sometimes the you know I talked about how with my father as much as I adored him I had a competitive relationship with him and I and I talk about that and I detail it but sometimes I I would there were one two times and always I thought harsh to my father like one of those times I have in the book and it seems okay to me there one or two other two times there would take too much to get into then I then I left that after that felt that was private or it was a couple of other things that I thought were not there's nothing that I was ashamed of or anything in fact something I would might be proud of how I cared for him certain specific ways but I left it out because it was too private yeah when you found out your mother was our I should ask it this way when did you realize your mother was mentally ill and it just wasn't mom's behavior yeah that's a really interesting question because nobody talked about mental illness when I was when I was young I mean it's hard for people now to believe that because people go on television and talk about her mental illnesses they talk about their sex lives it's there's there's almost nothing private now and in those days it was a great shame to have mental illness and family and it wasn't even identified as illness and my mother was schizophrenic and paranoid and later in her life had visual hallucinations she saw the devil and was convinced it was the devil and wouldn't go into the bedroom and sleep wouldn't go into the kitchen and cook she lived on pizza I mean it's really lucky that the delivery man wasn't the devil because she was starved to death and I mean she was she was really overcome by it and because my father and I never even talked about it I I didn't have a way to handle it I know I just I sometimes thought it was my fault that she was behaving zwey I didn't know it was it was illness and later on I started to understand and you know my teens probably when you started to realize that did then that give you the ability to forgive earlier behavior or doesn't it just go away because you understand you know there were waves of forgiveness and each time I thought I had forgiven her or and and and it needed forgiving because I was as a boy I didn't understand where this was coming from and I and I really I hated her for it you know there's an example of not you know I didn't write down what I was supposed to feel that I was supposed to feel compassion I wrote down what I felt I hated her and I had to get over that and understand her and have compassion for I was going to grow up and I thought I did accomplish that two or three times in my life and it wasn't until I was writing the book that I got a final wave of it that got to be much more internal and that was when I realized I had been avoiding learning about schizophrenia even though I have a very strong interest in science I would be learning about neutrinos and and and the genome and all kinds of things but I wouldn't be finding out more about about schizophrenia so I realized while I was writing it I had this I got it I got to do something about this I'm right I can't stay ignorant of this and so I started calling up scientists who I had interviewed my science program and and I started reading more and I came across this bit of information that really clicked for me it was that the scientists had found that the part of the brain that gets flooded with certain chemicals when a schizophrenic has a visual hallucination is the same part of the brain that gets flooded when we have nightmares so that we've experienced what they experience and I began to realize that the nightmares I've had were very much the terrifying experiences she had except I could wake up for mine and she couldn't write and I had I had because I knew I had the similar experience I had much more real compassion for yeah so it went to another level in me so can you close the chapter on that now can the forgiveness be done oh yeah there's not even a question of forgiveness now I mean forgiveness was a stage where I thought I there was something to forgive um I mean you don't have to forgive a child who spills a glass of milk you know it's it's just it's just part of what happens in the world when when things aren't in the kind of control that you wish they were yeah and a whole different note how then do you make a marriage work I can make a marriage work well I think you love each other yeah Arlene and I make our marriage work through spite and malice which is the name of a card game we play that almost every day and within within a hat takes an hour to play a game within 20 minutes we're cursing each other and laughing and because you you really are vicious with the other player and it's great fun and we like we love to laugh and and you know you know I get were married almost 50 years and so I get asked this question a lot well how do you man I have no idea how you make a marriage work well the only thing I can suggest is a being loved you know how people go about that I have no idea what was it that brought the two of you together that what was that clique that you knew it was right I was invited to somebody's house to hear chamber music and she was playing the Mozart clarinet quintet she was a clapper affectional clarinetist and I fell in love with her from afar and at that night and was too shy to talk to her and then we got invited to the same apartment a month or two later for dinner and then I had this sensational realization that she laughed at my jokes and the thing that cemented it was the the woman who had invited us to dinner who we eventually named our third child after she had made a rum cake for dessert and she put it up on top of the refrigerator to cool and it was an old Philco refrigerator with a sloping top that shook while it operated the motor was so old it shook and little by little during dinner the cake moved to the edge of the refrigerator and plopped onto the floor and Arlene and I were the only two people who got up from the table and ate the cake from the floor a woman like that okay learning over food is a big thing you know all right true or false time yes okay you're gonna tell me the truth if I ask you a question no you're gonna tell me the truth oh really for mash they were cast six hours before the series started no false okay never trust a you don't ever trust anything except unless you go to my website hello Alan all dead calm and we can trust everything and trust there because you can even read sections of the book and see if you want to if you want to go further with it yeah everything there is true and even the reviews that say how great the book is I didn't write those myself although that's getting to be a practice so what was this goal I have what whether I was yes no they asked me to be in mash while I was still in the Utah State Prison where I let's see what happened your face let's see how he got up to page two I I was making a movie in the Utah State Prison where they also held me hostage for a while truly held me hostage which was really a weird experience so I was glad to to do almost anything once I got out of prison however I needed to I needed to find out just a couple of things it was a great script written by Larry Gelbart but most of the shows that dealt with the the army or any of the services up until that time were things like McHale's Navy and I think maybe the F Troop and Hogan's Heroes things that made very light of any suffering that might take place during the war in fact there was no suffering it was like the war was just an excuse for soldiers to get together and have some fun and I just wanted to make sure that because we were dealing with a surgical hospital and people would be coming in wounded that these people were gonna get the respect of our treating that seriously and I realized that we've stayed up till 2:00 in the morning talking in a coffee shop the night before rehearsals began and that's that's that's the only time we could have the conversation because I've been in prison until then and I think you're the first guest that said that doing so oh you didn't have culture honor game so I mean we should clear very quickly that we all wanted to you know go after the same thing and then I felt great about it when the next morning we started rehearsing true-or-false than this that the entire run of mash your family have done the East Coast and you had to work on the Western almost almost true the we would we would for the first seven years of the eleven years of the show we lived in New Jersey and I went out to California to shoot and after a few months I realized that coming home every three weeks or so was not good enough I was I was talking on the on the phone to my my every day and then sometimes two or three times a day and when I get there after three weeks I find out that one of them was having trouble in English class and nobody had mentioned it you kind of have to be around to get pick up the little signals so any time then for about four or five months out of the year for seven years or so I would fly home anytime I had two days off there was one week when I flew home three times in open seven days it just didn't seem like the right thing to move them no I didn't want to move them because neither one of us one of the movement because they were just all entering their teams and we felt that was a time when they needed to break away from us and not to be taken into a new environment where they had to make new friends and we would have thrown them off their schedule I think about their development schedule how is it that you balance celebrity so well well I don't know how well I balance it I balance it as well as I do partly because my wife taught me then I'm a civilian and that I'm not you know I I grew up thinking that those of us on this side of the footlights were special and the people in the audience were the civilians and and we somehow knew something that they didn't know and we were we were part of a mystical Brotherhood and was very arrogant and and I and I had to learn all through my life then I if I was going to portray these people as an actor and write about them as a writer I had to learned that I not only was one of them but I had to learn how to function like what a normal person and and it's much more interesting to be normal it's sort of normal on that note I have to say thank you well thank wonderful conversation thank you I enjoyed talking with you Alan all fun to order a transcript call eight six six six five to 3378 or send 695 to the address on your screen please include the name of the guest

Channel: HoustonPBS

Views: 11,385

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Keywords: alan, alda, on, innerviews, with, ernie, manouse, interview, mash, 21, emmy, awards, the, west, wing, wood, allen, tony's, oscars, peoples, choice, golden, globes, screen, actors, guild, American, actor, director, screenwriter, and, author, hawkeye, pierce, M*A*S*H, houston, pbs, channel

Id: 3nV2ZtAaB5w

Length: 27min 28sec (1648 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 29 2011