The Big Tobolowsky: Fanfare for the Character Actor

NOW DON’T TELL ME you don’t remember him, because he sure as heckfire remembers you.  How about this: “My voice is my passport… Verify me.” Or: “You idiots, you’ve captured their stunt doubles!” Getting warmer: “C’mon, ol’ buddy! Needlenose Ned, Ned the Head…” That’s right, it’s Stephen Tobolowsky…Bing!

As one of film’s most prolific and recognizable character actors, Stephen Tobolowsky has a still-thriving career that’s spanned over 30 years, accumulated 180 movie and TV appearances, and garnered a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor on Broadway. The lanky, bald, bespectacled Texan has written screenplays and directed films, played in bands and enjoyed worldwide acclaim. Either you’ve seen him in Deadwood as a weasely commissioner (“billiard ball-lookin’ cocksucker” was one character’s description), or as Captain of the Guard in Spaceballs, in Seinfeld as Kramer’s holistic healer buddy, or in Curb Your Enthusiasm as a right-winger who cheats at children’s games at a Seder; he’s even played the villain to Mel Gibson (Bird on a Wire), Lindsay Lohan (Freaky Friday), Thelma, Louise and a talking cat. (We assume he had no trouble dredging up the motivation for those particular roles.)

But more remarkable than all of that (which, truly, is only a fraction of “all of that”), the guy has a positively magnetic pull for amazing stories, strange encounters and unbelievable luck. A little band called Radiohead? Named after Stephen, by way of his buddy David Byrne (read on). Heard of a guitar god named Stevie Ray Vaughan? His first recording allegedly took place in Dallas when he was manning the axe in Tobolowsky’s high school garage band. The tales go on and on… And in fact, many of them are recounted in the heartwarming, literally titled and critically loved 2005 film, Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party, a feature-length documentary of Stephen, at his house, on his birthday, spinning yarns—all of them true. The true genius of this lies not in how odd this one man’s life has been—though he has been shut out of two different restaurants on two different continents within two years by former President Ronald Reagan—but in how easily we can relate the oddity of our own lives to his.

Which is also what we love about Stephen Tobolowsky, the actor. Even if one of his roles garners mere seconds of screen time, you’ll see him performing those rarest of actorly traits: thinking and feeling. Character actors may be relegated to the supporting roles—best friend to the star, federal agent trying to catch the star, the star’s principal— but they are the people we identify with most in a film because of their realness, their humanity, and their imperfect hair, teeth and speech. Quite simply, they are us. So, let’s join together to celebrate our own true stories and the uniqueness of our commonalities with our Captain of the Character Actors, our Seer of Seers, our Prognosticator of Prognosticators: Mr. Stephen Tobolowsky.

So I just saw Birthday Party, and I was up all night watching the bonus stories. I never thought a film composed entirely of one guy talking could be so entertaining.
It was one of the most awesome, awe-inspiring things I’ve ever tackled. About 20 years ago I was telling some stories at a party, and my friend Robert Brinkmann, the cinematographer, approached me and said, “This is amazing, why don’t we put a camera up in your living room and just have you tell stories?” I couldn’t think of anything duller. But I had just had a baby, and I thought that it might be cool for him someday to see his dad telling stories in his childhood home. It was kind of a toss-off gift. One of the people at that party became a producer for NPR, and about six years ago she approached me about doing one of my stories live on her radio show; there were writers and actors doing their own material, and could I write one down and perform it? I said sure. I was there with four other writers and actors, and my heart was in my throat. Because you’re not doing Shakespeare or Moliere or even a new writer; you’re doing you— doing your life. It must be what stand-ups feel: panic.

You had to write it down? You didn’t get to wing it?
I had to write it down so she could get editorial approval. And it worked, in a theatrical way. People laughed, people cried, people applauded like they weren’t gonna stop. I called Brinkmann and said, “I did one of my stories the other night and it really worked, maybe we should think about this movie thing again.” Of course, we forgot about it again. But about three years ago, Brinkman called me and said we could do the movie. Hi-definition had reached a stage where we could afford to do it ourselves, and for three months I went through my notes on all the stories I had compiled over my life, and I tried them out on Brinkmann. He’s German, so if he cracked a smile, the story made the final cut.

From the reviews I’ve seen, plenty of people have done more than cracked a smile.
One reviewer said, “The amazing thing about Birthday Party is that everybody’s life is filled with that kind of amazing stuff. And not everybody can stand in front of the camera and go. But all of us have it, and Birthday Party is a testament to people.” And that’s a testament not to Birthday Party or to Brinkmann or to me, but a testament to the uniqueness in each of us. I teach a class in improv, and since he’s said that, I make sure that I ask people about some of the amazing things that happened to them each week. We talk about them and we create improvs based on the things they say in class. And these things people say you would not believe; what miraculous beings we people are. It’s amazing that such miraculous people can come up with things as mundane as what ends up on TV and in movies half the time.

Is this a preoccupation of yours, then, this fanfare for the common person? Certainly Birthday Party is the culmination of this idea, but True Stories is also a series of vignettes from people’s lives, and even Groundhog Day, too, where Phil Connors lives each day as a This Is Your Life montage. Is this a conscious thing in your life?
It certainly is a conscious thing in my life to try to be more conscious. It’s so easy, what’s the song, to be “Comfortably Numb.” If you look at the arc of Groundhog Day, of what it started out as to what it ended up being, it is a lesson. It was a lesson to me. When I first saw the script, I didn’t want to do it. “Oh great, we need this out there?” The initial script was just a C-quality Bill Murray film. And then when we got on set, [director] Harold Ramis and [writer] Danny Rubin threw out half the script. They said, “What would really happen if you had to live every day over and over again and there were no consequences?” And it became this film that stunned us with how great it was. It really became about life. I remember Bill said in an interview, “Groundhog Day…it’ll never happen again. I’ll never be better; Ramis will never be better; the script will never be better. It was the perfect storm.” Bill Murray’s performance will stand up as one of the great comic performances in history. The pain, the despair he shows in that film—the joy, the love…

I’d assume “Ned Ryerson” is the role you get stopped on the street for most often.
I think it’s still the number one role, because the movie’s shown so much. Number two has changed. It used to be [Dr. Werner Brandes from] Sneakers or Sammy Jankis in Memento, but lately because of the enormous, well-founded popularity of Freaky Friday, it’s Mr. Bates. Every kid in the world has seen Freaky Friday; consequently half of their parents have, too. I’m recognized all over the world for that, and for Garfield. Here’s proof that I’ve become literally world famous: I was lost with my wife in Reykjavik, Iceland; somehow we ended up on a loading dock where the big ocean liners come in. We don’t know a word of Icelandic, there’s no phone nearby, we’re just deposited there and it’s deserted. This security guard comes up holding a flashlight and his gun, and he looks up and he goes, “Garfield! Garfield, Happy Chapman, ‘Be happy!’ Come, come!” and he took us back to his booth. He had hot soup and coffee for us. I wrote down the hotel where we were staying and he called it and had a car come out for us. He wanted an autographed picture; he wanted to see my other movies, so I wrote down IMDB.com for him. He didn’t speak much English at all, but for 20 minutes he was my best friend in the world. Reykjavik: that’s world famous.

How did you end up so prolific? Is that something every actor aspires to?
I think the demonic mechanism of this business is to put you into the ground, to put you in a box and bury it. If you do something, they’re gonna make you keep doing it until they’re tired of you doing it. I lucked out, because one of the first big things I did was Mississippi Burning, for which [director] Alan Parker never released the script. Alan himself had been very eclectic, doing films like Bugsy, Shoot the Moon, The Wall…everything he does is great, but you can’t put your finger on what he does. So when the business heard that he had cast me, they didn’t know what part I was playing, if it was comedy or drama, whatever, but the fact that I was cast by Alan gave me a stamp of approval. I was given five offers during that period of time before I shot Mississippi Burning, which itself was a really serious Oscar film: I had a drama, the goofy Great Balls of Fire, a couple family comedies, and an action film with Mel Gibson. So, nobody could put me into a box, and directors felt as comfortable casting me in a film like Single White Female as they did Groundhog Day.

So TV came next?
Groundhog Day was so big that I ended up doing three or four failed sitcoms right after it. That pays you a lot of money, you know—but again, another box. A pretty box, velvet-covered, but soon this business is going to be tired of casting you as a failed sitcom star. You have to know your place. I have to know that, being tall and bald, I’m gonna be somebody’s best friend in a movie and not somebody. Maybe I could someday have a Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, TX, or a Robert Duvall in The Apostle. But basically, I’m gonna be the attorney to the Godfather and not the Godfather. You have to change genres, and you have to have discipline. You’re gonna have to go to the theatre when all else fails, and then people go, “Where has this guy been? Oh, he’s been on Broadway. Let’s cast him again.”

But being on Broadway is a noble pursuit, right?
Yes. And one of the most worthwhile things I ever did in my life. One of the absolute defining things in my career was doing Mornings at Seven on Broadway. We were nominated for more Tony Awards than any straight play in history…and we lost them all. But it was such a beautiful show and a great experience. We were the toast of New York. More than Tony nominations or great reviews in the paper, I remember this: There was a couple at the show one night from Philadelphia, they had driven in to see the play and they wanted all of our autographs. The guy said to me, “It’s our 25th anniversary, and I proposed to my wife on top of the Empire State Building. And every year we drive in from Philadelphia for one night on our anniversary, we come to see a Broadway show, we kiss on top of the Empire State Building, we get a hotel room for the night, and we go home. When we came here we had never heard of your show, but we saw the cast and came.” He said, “We saw your show, and you made us realize why we fell in love.” I was so moved by this. It was worth being there nine months to have that kind of effect on people. And then I said to him, “You seem to have a ritual for everything”—and this was part of your question, asking people’s stories—“When you go back to the hotel room, do you have a ritual there too?” And he said, “Oh, yes we do. We have a specific hotel, and we go back to the room, we order up a cheesecake, and we lie in bed and eat it all.” Nobody would have a detail like that in a movie, it’s too whacked out; it’s too funny and too real.

There’s something to be said for walking out of the green room into that throng of—not necessarily admirers, but just people. It’s like clocking out and greeting the world again.
Theatre is the key to being prolific, because more and more you’re in situations on set where you have to improvise. They say, “We need 40 seconds of you walking down the hall before you get into the room to do your scene, can you make up something?” You have Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I did, where the whole thing’s made up… Theatre background is the key to longevity and the ability to play a lot of different characters other than yourself. That, and discipline.

Do you still have to audition?
It’s about 50-50. I love not auditioning, but there’s no rhyme or reason to when I have to and when I don’t. I’ve learned that when you don’t audition, when you’re just offered something, it puts your head on the chopping block. There was a certain negotiation that went down somewhere along the way, and the producers are very much on the set when you first show up, and they put a lot of pressure on. Whereas if you fight and win a part through an audition, you get to know how that director works. Everybody feels you’re on their team and you didn’t just crash their party. So I don’t really mind auditioning. I still think it’s a crapshoot, but what can you do.

As Ned Ryerson said, “It’s all one big crapshoot anyhoo!” Do all the casting directors know you by now?
Yeah. I get one of two reactions from casting directors: [happy voice] “Stephen Tobolowsky, you’re the guy who’s in everything!” Or: [annoyed voice] “Stephen Tobolowsky, you’re the guy who’s in everything.”

Harold Ramis calls the characters you play “unsavory.” I think that’s my favorite description of your roles.
That’s so funny. When I auditioned for Groundhog, I apologized to him before I even started; I said, “I’m just gonna do this…” Harold insisted on reading with the auditioners, and I was all over him as Ned Ryerson. It made him so uncomfortable.

I made a list of your characters, and unsavory might be applicable to most of them.
Let’s see… I don’t think Sammy Jankis was unsavory, he was a lost person, but…[sighs] I don’t know, maybe. Ranger Bob [Roadside Prophets] was not unsavory. Sneakers! Werner isn’t really that unsavory. Calendar Girl, I am; My Father the Hero, I’m not; Radioland Murders…yeah. Yeah, unsavory. I see it happening. Joe Weyburn [Bird on a Wire], yeah. Max in Thelma & Louise wasn’t, unless you want to be politically correct. O.K., maybe you understand this about Thelma & Louise: How is it that this movie has become an anthem for women? Here you have one woman who was raped in childhood, another woman is neglected by her husband and almost raped in a bar. They drive across the country, rob and try to kill innocent people and end up committing suicide. I don’t know what part of that story you want to latch onto, but everybody says to me, “You’re the bad guy in Thelma & Louise because you’re the federal agent who tries to catch them.” I think me trying to catch them is….

Savory?
Ha, savory!

Now, you wrote True Stories with [Crimes of the Heart playwright] Beth Henley, right?
That doesn’t characterize exactly what happened. Beth and I lived together. We were an item, and she had just won the Pulitzer Prize. We were both friends with [director] Jonathan Demme, and we had just come out of Pilates class when Jonathan drove by and said, “Hey, wanna come see the movie I just finished?” So we jumped in his car and drove over to the Academy, and oh my God, there’s David Byrne and the Talking Heads! It was them, Jonathan, Beth and me sitting in the huge Academy theater watching the initial cut of Stop Making Sense. And David Byrne had always scared me a lot, but God, they were good. And that movie—it’s one of the great concert movies of all time. Afterwards we go out to dinner, and David—his longevity is based on the fact that he’s incredibly honest, a very truthful guy—not even trying to bullshit at all, says, “Tell me what you like and what you didn’t like about the movie. And be hard on me.” We talked for a couple hours that night, but all I was saying was, “Uh, it was great, it’s all great, it was too short, I loved it!”

“The suit’s shoulders could be a little bigger.”
It’s an amazing movie. Right after that, David called Beth to ask if she could write True Stories. David happened to live about three blocks away from us, up in the Hollywood Hills. Beth went to meet with him, and came home and said, “I had no idea what he was talking about,” because Beth is character-oriented, narrative-oriented…sunny. And David is…on the modular. She said, “I told him he should talk to you, because you’re good at that kind of stuff.” Sure enough, David called me, and I went over to his house. There was no furniture except for a table and some folding chairs, this huge empty house. On the walls he had like 200 pencil drawings, he’s a great graphic artist, and he said [in a slow Byrne monotone], “I was thinking of a movie called True Stories and I saw these images…do you think we could turn these into a movie?” And so I sat on a chair and we didn’t talk, it felt like two hours of silence, while I looked at every picture. Finally he said, “The one thing I’ve written is this song, it’s called ‘Wild Wild Life’ and this is how it goes,” and he picked up his guitar and played: [sings] “It’s a wild wild life/On the way to the stock exchange/It’s a wild wild life.” I said, “I tell you what, let me go home and I’ll work on something. If you like it, you can hire me, and if not, keep what you want, throw away what you don’t.” And that night I wrote a 35-page treatment for True Stories. I went over to his house the next day and said, “We have to have a maguffin, an excuse to have a series of varied stories: What if we have a sesquicentennial in this little Texas town that brings in all these characters?” So he hired me, he offered me something like $4,000—he’s very cheap, but I thought it was an honor. What’s the line in King Lear, “To be mentioned is to be o’erpayed.”

And you naturally became best buddies, right?
We went on a tour of Texas together, I showed him some of the places I thought were really cool for the film, and he liked it. Then we came back, and the producer says, “What would you think if we hired Beth to write the screenplay with you?” I said great. Beth and I alternated scenes and we finished the entire screenplay in 19 days. We handed it to David…pause…we heard nothing. About a year later I see David jogging. He says, “Oh, Stephen, hi, I took out most of your stuff, I rewrote most of your script, that’s why you haven’t heard from me, but thanks anyway. Do you mind if I give you writing credit?” It was fine with me. Clearly True Stories is as clear a representation of David’s mind as exists. I was happy to work on it, and I do have one tribute in there: David wrote the song “Radio Head” about me. I had told him the true story that when I was in college, I made money from hearing tones from people’s heads to predict their future. He thought it was hysterical.

So one of the biggest bands in the world owes their name to you?
If they got it from that, then yes they did. [Editor’s Note: They did.]

Is there any music left over from your old band?
Yeah, we went to the studio and did four songs for what our bass player called The Get Laid Tape. It’s really good. Timmy, our lead guitarist, ended up being the official voice of Donald Duck. He was always doing that voice, and we said, “Man, you oughta send your tape to Disney.” So he was dealing coke, being in our band, and Disney called him back.

And Stevie Ray Vaughan was in your garage band in Texas?
In high school. One day our bass player said, “I got a real guitar player for us, Stevie Vaughan. His brother Jimmie plays guitar too.” A 14 year-old Stevie came into our group to play on our album, and it’s the first recording ever of Stevie Ray Vaughan. He’s smokin’. Brilliant. When I was in Memphis doing Great Balls of Fire, Jimmie Vaughan and I hung out together a lot, because he was in the movie and he was rehearsing in town with the Fabulous Thunderbirds. I was only working about every 12 days, so all I did in Memphis was smoke dope, go to parties and play golf. I would go out all night with Jimmie and one dawn we went to a diner, and there at the counter was Stevie Ray. And Jimmie and Stevie had been at odds for a couple years, they were on cold terms. So I went, “Stevie! Stephen Tobolowsky, man, Kimball High School!” and the three of us sat down and had breakfast together, and that’s where Jimmie and Stevie started talking: “Why don’t we put the past behind us and do a double album?” So they planned that at breakfast, and I’m eating my eggs, going, “This is good, this is good.”

Holy cow. You are just a magnet for these stories.
[Singing while pointing at himself] “Radio head/I’m picking up something good!”     F