within the comedy community of the anarcho/dick joke ilk (The Unbookables, see "Jesus Loves Doug Stanhope") there is a general disdain for Kevin Booth, and it's spreading. Kevin Booth is generally seen as a great friend of Bill's who used his death to make money. "Hey, I knew Bill Hicks, want to buy some merchandise that I've licensed?" But I'd still like to see this.
i guess i can sort of see that but i don't know that i buy it...i think he's done a respectful job in releasing material, i don't see bill hicks socks or remasters every few years. they grew up together and he recorded a ton of his stuff, i don't think he goes overboard in it. like that dvd they released a few years ago had a lot on it for a normal priced dvd. 3 comedy specials plus the sane man biography and trust me, i searched for dvds of his years before that and in the us there were just none to be had, at least nothing official and wasn't a video cd or something. until i see some cheesy bill hicks product a him rehashing the same stuff i think he's doing a pretty good job.
he's done other stuff unrelated to bill hicks, like his documentary american drug war, which is really good http://americandrugwar.com/
don't compete; coexist
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
Finally got to see this last night. What a well-crafted doc....
The world could have used a lot more of the laughs and wisdom this guy brought us...I look at what great work Carlin did right into his 70's, and it just magnifies the loss. Thanks and RIP BH
Did they hire Dennis Leary to fill in on any lost footage?
I thought DL was a genius comedian for years...No Cure for Cancer IS hilarious....but I wonder how hard I'd have laughed if I'd been familiar with BH's work before seeing it. He rips SO much Hicks material...right down to the insults (whining fucking maggots)...in fact, soulsinging calling out DL for plagiarism on the board years ago was the first time I heard the name Bill Hicks (or at least took any interest).
Did they hire Dennis Leary to fill in on any lost footage?
I thought DL was a genius comedian for years...No Cure for Cancer IS hilarious....but I wonder how hard I'd have laughed if I'd been familiar with BH's work before seeing it. He rips SO much Hicks material...right down to the insults (whining fucking maggots)...in fact, soulsinging calling out DL for plagiarism on the board years ago was the first time I heard the name Bill Hicks (or at least took any interest).
I had no idea either and I always loved No Cure for Cancer as well.
One other strange Bill Hicks fun fact is that his portrait is in the Tool album Ænima . . . and even more strange is the fact that Maynard James Keenon started his career as a stand-up comic! :shock: :shock: What's next, will I find out Dick Cheaney was somehow involved and that the three of them ran an animal rescue shelter back in the early 80's???
Did they hire Dennis Leary to fill in on any lost footage?
I thought DL was a genius comedian for years...No Cure for Cancer IS hilarious....but I wonder how hard I'd have laughed if I'd been familiar with BH's work before seeing it. He rips SO much Hicks material...right down to the insults (whining fucking maggots)...in fact, soulsinging calling out DL for plagiarism on the board years ago was the first time I heard the name Bill Hicks (or at least took any interest).
I had no idea either and I always loved No Cure for Cancer as well.
One other strange Bill Hicks fun fact is that his portrait is in the Tool album Ænima . . . and even more strange is the fact that Maynard James Keenon started his career as a stand-up comic! :shock: :shock: What's next, will I find out Dick Cheaney was somehow involved and that the three of them ran an animal rescue shelter back in the early 80's???
one's in lateralus, too
don't compete; coexist
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
Did they hire Dennis Leary to fill in on any lost footage?
I thought DL was a genius comedian for years...No Cure for Cancer IS hilarious....but I wonder how hard I'd have laughed if I'd been familiar with BH's work before seeing it. He rips SO much Hicks material...right down to the insults (whining fucking maggots)...in fact, soulsinging calling out DL for plagiarism on the board years ago was the first time I heard the name Bill Hicks (or at least took any interest).
I never could respect DL, but that is only because I knew of Bill hicks first.
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Did they hire Dennis Leary to fill in on any lost footage?
I thought DL was a genius comedian for years...No Cure for Cancer IS hilarious....but I wonder how hard I'd have laughed if I'd been familiar with BH's work before seeing it. He rips SO much Hicks material...right down to the insults (whining fucking maggots)...in fact, soulsinging calling out DL for plagiarism on the board years ago was the first time I heard the name Bill Hicks (or at least took any interest).
I never could respect DL, but that is only because I knew of Bill hicks first.
Ditto, and that has nothing to do with my dad's name being Dennis O'Leary. If i have a grip, it's that punk ass dropped the big fuckin O from his name. Calls himself Irish ::::shakes head::::
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esZzS0jFFcc
My Wife got this for me for Christmas!!!
I'm not suppossed to know, but there hasn't been wrapping paper invented yet i cannot undo and do back.
:twisted: :twisted: :twisted:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esZzS0jFFcc
My Wife got this for me for Christmas!!!
I'm not suppossed to know, but there hasn't been wrapping paper invented yet i cannot undo and do back.
:twisted: :twisted: :twisted:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esZzS0jFFcc
My Wife got this for me for Christmas!!!
I'm not suppossed to know, but there hasn't been wrapping paper invented yet i cannot undo and do back.
:twisted: :twisted: :twisted:
he doesn't make me laugh like other comedians I like...:? He makes me think more than laugh...he's like this manic self-help preacher guy....awesome.
I agree.I saw Bill live in Edinburgh 91 ... he was unbelievable but there were times I was left feeling uncomfortable at how real he was ... vitriolic ... I'd be laughing one minute then his story would turn very very dark and I'd be left with a feeling of "fuck should I be laughing?" ... that was what made his genius ... he could completely disarm the audience then just when they were comfortable the comedy would turn and the audience would be left thinking ... genius comedy should do that ... never make us feel complacent ... he was a true maverick and I had the utmost respect for the man
The film is great ... see it.
“There should be a place where only the things you want to happen, happen”
I jumped the gun, i saw Bill Hicks under the wrapping paper and assumed, my wife got me the Essentials Collection, which is good also, but i wanted this, now i have to wait until Valentine's day.
great to see him when he was like 19, he's not as bitter and angry but you can see it coming.
Please enjoy my talk with Matt Harlock, Paul Thomas, and Mary & Steve Hicks…
Matt Harlock: Hello, Steve.
Capone: It’s good to meet you.
Paul Thomas: Hello.
Capone: I guess let’s just start at the beginning with you two. What was your first exposure to Bill’s comedy? I’m guessing you came at this as fans primarily and then kind of turned it into a project.
MH: Yeah, in some ways. I was, like a lot of people in the UK, I was very aware of Bill in the late '80s and early '90s when he was performing. Unfortunately, I never got to see him, but he was the kind of person where the tapes were being passed around from person to person; it was very much a sort of fifth-generation VHS copied tape cassettes, and then he was someone who was just very much in the cultural awareness in the UK at that time. So, I’ve been aware of him ever since then and then Paul was actually working in TV comedy.
PT: Yeah, I was making TV comedy shows that were very much about finding the next wave of new comedians in Britain and I had been doing that for quite a while before someone gave me a tape of Bill, and suddenly here’s this guy and it’s “How did I not know about him?,” and obviously someone of such incredible stature in terms of comedy. It really influenced what we were doing in terms of what we were searching for the next generation of British comedians. There was already very much that flavor there in terms of finding people who were doing things and keeping it real. I just remember distinctly wondering, “How on Earth have I not seen this person at all?” What you see is you see that he’s playing concerts to 2,000 people, yet somehow, even in the UK, there’s a huge cross section of people that don’t know him, and when they do it’s like “How did I not?”
Capone: What was it about his comedy that seemed to speak to the UK audiences? In Canada, too. Did anyone ever figure that out exactly?
MH: And Australia as well. He was very big, and that’s something that Steve gets asked a lot, and I think you’ve got a really good take on that Steve.
Steve Hicks: Well, I asked Bill that, and he told me. What it was specifically in the UK--but I’m assuming that might have been in Canada and Australia as well--they played his entire show in primetime unedited, and so they got to see him weaving his story and his perspective and all of that and not just five minutes of punch lines watered down on a late night TV show, which was his exposure over here for the most part. That’s what he attributed so much of his success and connection over there in the UK.
Plus at the time there were only four channels, BBC 1, 2, 3, and 4 I guess, so any given night 25 percent of the country might have been seeing him, and they're a lot more open over there on that culture as well and wouldn’t be offended by words and would look beyond that and listen to what was being said. I was struck by that when I was over there last year and just turning on normal primetime TV, and they just use all sorts of language and everything, and it just doesn’t bother anybody. I think Bill fought that over here sometimes, but over there, it just didn’t matter what words he was using; it mattered what he was saying. I think that’s what built him over there.
MH: But there’s also the perspective, the fact that he was an American coming to another country talking about America. Clearly, he was an American in America, and in the UK, we have a very packaged version of America. We get America TV, and suddenly here is this guy who is completely different talking very honestly about his country.
Capone: With that accent, too. That’s the American accent for a lot of people in other countries.
PT: And also, a lot of the comedians that you see in the UK--obviously you're working in your own country and doing your own clubs and you have to build your way up--Bill came over to the UK fully formed. He'd been on the road for 15 years, and so he came over completely formed as a performer and as someone with a very strong world view, and I think people were just kind of blown away a little bit by the whole package really, the attitude, the performance, the technical skill, and the profanity. [Laughs]
Capone: Talk a little bit then about the early stages of pulling this film together, contacting the family and so on. Clearly the draw here is the background information: the mind-opening drug "trials" that he did, and of course, all of this footage and photographs. Talk to me about collecting that. How long of a process was this?
MH: Well, I was doing stuff for TV in the UK and I had also on the side been putting on these little tribute nights, where we had on the 10th anniversary of Bill’s death comedians came down, we showed some of that footage, and as a part of that process, I found that there was a lot of footage out there as hadn’t seen, and we'd also had a bit of contact with the family. So that’s when I was lucky enough to hook up with Paul, and we started trying to put together something which might form a proposal, some way of maybe communicating what we felt hadn’t yet been told in terms of Bill’s story. There had been one documentary which had come out very soon after Bill had died in the UK, but it was only about 40 minutes long and it kind of based on two or three main performances and I think what we realized was that there was just a huge amount of unseen material out there, and that Bill’s life story was just much more complex than a half-hour or 40-minute thing, that maybe there was more to be told, so that was kind of the first time that we had contact and then we started developing an idea.
PT: And it’s a complex equation then. What I was doing was finding new forms, new ways to do things, and a lot of that was just late at night adventurous, it was never going to be prime time. That’s always been what attracted me, doing things in different ways and knowing the comedy commissioners, and so that bit was relatively easy. The [family is] being pitched Bill Hicks all of the time, and it was a case of saying, “Well, let’s look at it. Let’s try this equation.” They asked us to do a few tests with the photographs and very quickly it was like, “Okay, this could be the way to now do this story.” And it was a case of going back to the family and introducing that idea to them, because obviously the family was being approached all of the time as well. It was just a slow, organic process I think.
MH: It was over a couple of years.
PT: Yeah, two years.
MH: Obviously, we were very mindful of the fact that the family had been approached a lot by lots of different people, some of whose motivations were clear and some of which maybe weren’t, and so I think that we had quite a big job to do in just proving that we were the right people to take the job on, and they were mindful of Bill’s legacy and Bill’s work and wanted to make sure that his story was told honestly and truthfully, but with respect as well.
Mary Hicks: That is exactly what I felt, and we had had a lot of requests and still do for people who want to do things, but because of Matt’s contact doing the tributes, he seemed like an upright, honest person. [Everyone Laughs] So we were glad to meet them, he and Paul, and go forward.
Capone: Now if you had to guess and put a number on it, how many times do you think you have been approached either for…
Mary Hicks: …a movie or a documentary?
Capone: Yes.
SH: Multiple dozens probably.
Capone: Wow, I can imagine.
SH: We just got another one yesterday, so you guys better make it work.
[Everyone Laughs]
Mary Hicks: One of the first ones we got though I thought was hilarious. This young man wanted write a book, and he said he would have to come live with us for two years to get the information.
[Everyone Laughs]
SH: We can’t even stand each other that long, but you know I’ll tell you something and how I like to interject in this too, because I think it says something about the character of these guys. A lot of the people we get approached by say what a feather it would be in their cap, how it would with their portfolio, how much money there is to be made, and that’s not at all what Bill’s legacy is about. We would love to be rolling in money, but we are not, no do we ever approach it that way, and these guys never mentioned that you know. It was just a story worth telling that they got very committed to and got behind. We felt like that was the right thing to do. Now we know it was the right thing to do. They just had the right motivation in mind just to get the story out there. That’s why we're here with them today.
Capone: Talk about the visual style of the film and the use of photographs. It’s almost like a shadow puppet show. You put these photos together to make it look like two people are having a conversation. Where did that idea come from? I have never seen anything like that in a documentary.
PT: Again, it evolves. The initial idea was that with a lot of documentaries you're seeing talking heads and clips. Already we're 15 years on, so you're seeing people in their 40s talking about when they were kids, so obviously there’s already a mismatch there. So the idea came “Okay, let’s take the viewer back into the story,” so that was the initial seed of using photographs. Then what happens is we did interviews for several days with each person and then you get the real story, the entire story, and at that point the simple idea we had thought of, and it was obvious it wasn’t going to work, because there weren’t photos of Bill sneaking out to the comedy clubs. There weren’t photos of him playing [music] with Dwight [Slade]. There were just he school photos and the picture photos, so pretty early on we realized we had a huge job to do in terms of starting to create scenes and just the background really. A lot of documentaries you have seen have flat photos, one after the other, but I think just instinctively we thought “Well no, you shoot it in the round, like you're shooting a film and you use cutting to create a very immersive dramatic experience.” I think that was something that was just naturally in both of us as filmmakers, and so it is a very dramatic narrative. It’s not like you are watching a documentary and it’s very practical. You get immersed into a story.
The other factor is that Bill’s family members are all great storytellers. He didn’t come from nowhere; he came from a family that is very communicative with each other and always discussing ideas. His fellow comedians are also obviously great storytellers, and the people who chose to be his best lifelong friends are also very special people, so you couldn’t just do this with any group of people. There are 10 fantastic storytellers telling the story. You don’t need initial voiceover to help. There is no additional scripting, it’s just a real story and people ask us “Well, you must have gone back to get bits of scripted stuff” and we didn’t. It’s just because they are such great storytellers, and that created a bed of a very powerful story, and then the technique had to live up to that.
MH: And as Paul said, it would only really have worked if the people who knew Bill were like that, because they all carry this like DNA imprint, like you’ve got Dwight doing an impression of Bill doing an impression of his mom, and then he’s doing him and then he’s doing Bill’s dad, and he’s doing three of the voices in the conversation. So, that is very personal and very intimate in terms a of a recollection and the technique, because you're not seeing the person’s face talking, there’s a danger that it could become distancing, and it was only because of the interviews were able to sustain that level of intimacy that I think it worked in the way that it has.
PT: But that scene’s unique where Dwight is doing all three voices… well four. He’s doing Bill’s parents, Bill, and himself; who could do that? Very few people, and it’s kind of invisible. You don’t realize when he’s doing it, but that’s how he did it on camera. The original footage is incredibly. Now, that’s happening through out the 90-minute film though, everyone is doing that. I think you are not really aware of it when you are watching it, but I think it’s quite unique. You couldn’t do it again with another set of 10 people, because they don’t tell stories in the same way.
MH: And just the last thing to add is the sneaking out story, you came to Bill sort of fairly new to the film, which is great, because that’s how the film is designed, but that sneaking out story of quite a well-known bit of folklore. If you had read a book or two, then it’s like “Will he sneak out?” What we did was we wanted to make it feel as it had as much authenticity as possible, so the house that you see in that sequence is Bill’s real childhood home. We went back to the real childhood home and according to one person used our British accents to talk our way in and photograph.
[Everyone Laughs]
So, that’s actually Bill’s real bedroom window. It’s the real roof. It’s the real backyard and that also applies to other sections in the film, for example, the window that he looks out of in LA, that’s his real bedroom window. We found the apartment, #25 when Bill was 21, and so are were parts of the film which hopefully get as close as possible in terms of authenticity the technique could lay itself open to, "Aw, they just made all of that up." So we have been very careful to make sure that we've been as authentic as possible in terms of what we have shown on the screen.
PT: So it is a correct historical document, and that’s what documentaries are about. It’s very easy to come to something with an agenda. You can direct your questions in certain ways and once you’ve got interviews, you can then craft those interviews, and it’s very easy to abuse and manipulate people, but what true documentarians do is you come with no preconceptions and you find out who these people really are. Your friends probably say, "Steve, that’s exactly you. That sounds like you.”
It's our job to find out through these sequences who Bill really was, because people have said this wasn’t dark enough, because they had their own preconceptions of Bill, and we could have gone down that route and crafted a story that we had already written and made everything fit to that, the documentary approach is to cast all of that aside and really investigate the story and go, “Okay, what is the real story?” and to dig deep and gather a lot of bits of the story. I think that’s the power that people now get, because we are kind of like a conduit as filmmakers and it’s the case of capturing their oral history of Bill and distilling it down to it’s pure essence.
Capone: Right. Mary, was there any footage in this film that you had never seen before?
Mary Hicks: I've been working with this ever since Bill passed away and so I’m pretty much all… If you are talking about his material, no. I’ve pretty much seen it all. I had tons of it. I’m passing it on to Steve now, but yes and because of having put some CDs and DVDs out since his death, I’ve had to listen to all of it, so I’ve listened to it. You want to know what I think about it? [Everyone Laughs] Bill knew what I thought about it, and I’d rather him not have used all of the “F words” or some of those very graphic descriptions, but he did and I wouldn’t let it be censored. So yeah, I’ve listened to it, but I loved my son, and he really had something to say and I thought he got it out there in a way that if you overlook the words, you get the message.
SH: Well and he had enough respect. He didn’t talk that way around the family, you know.
Mary Hicks: Oh no, no, no.
SH: He was very articulate and not so profane. He was just doing what he did on stage.
Mary Hicks: No, he was a perfect gentleman, really.
Capone: I wonder also about some of the material that he was doing when he was in high school, which was really just about the family. That had to be pretty eye opening, too.
Mary Hicks: Well, I didn’t see that until Bill was sick and was back at home, and we talked and I said, “You know, Bill, I never did see you do me. I know you did.” So, he got up and did one of his routines, and really it was hilarious. I mean, it was what he did, and I knew he did the family, and I had heard everybody but me, and then I heard me, and he had me down pat really, so all I could do was laugh. But no, I listened to it, and it’s okay.
Capone: I like the choice that you don’t interview any comedians that were influenced by him, and that’s kind of how I discovered him, from other people talking about him. I remember seeing him on Letterman a few times. You probably could have gotten those people to talk.
PT: Yeah, and we were asked to as well by the BBC.
MH: I think there was a point at which we made a tentative list of people that we knew who we thought maybe we should go and talk to, but I think after we went and interviewed the family and friends that we kind of realized that they were a little bit superfluous. We had seen another documentary where there were some talking heads in it and it just seemed that they all valued things that could be said about Bill as a performer and as a comedian. People who know Bill have very strong opinions about him, and they feel a very personal connection to him and he spoke to them directly about things that were important to them in their lives. That’s why he still continues to resonate, so I think that the recollections of some of the comedians who could have admire him as a stage performer and his craft and his style could have been interesting, but I don’t think that they would have been as informative and as emotive as the recollections of the people who knew him for 25-30 years.
Capone: Because they are not part of his story.
PT: Exactly, those would have been observations from outside the story, whereas the way it’s told, those people were there at that time giving firsthand accounts. Even some of Bill’s girlfriends aren’t really explored because they have other lives now, and some have passed, and no one was happy talking on their behalf, because they weren’t in those scenes. So everything literally is a first-hand, eyewitness account, and that goes for every single scene in this story. So yes, these names would have been not only in the story, but would have been quite distant observations, but certainly would have been lots of interesting stuff, but it wouldn’t have worked. It would have jarred and it wouldn’t have felt the same as if you were suddenly no longer been in that scene; you would have stepped back a layer and been with the commentator.
Capone: I would imagine there was some pressure or someone saying, “Can we get some faces in here that people might recognize?”
PT: Yeah, a lot of pressure.
Capone: Excellent choice. It makes much more sense to do it this way, because we are getting the real story. I realize it’s a fairly recent event, but it was last year when David Letterman aired the edited footage of Bill, and you were on the show, right?
Mary Hicks: Yes.
Capone: Was there an attempt to get that or use that in this film? That would be an interesting footnote to everything. Were they contacted at all about using it?
PT: Yes, and they have seen the film. It comes down to the price of NBC’s material. We couldn’t afford it. It’s extremely expensive and it’s a low budget film, so yeah there were bits we would like to have used, but the price placed on them prevented it.
MH: Well if we had actually used three minutes of their material, which would probably have covered David gets him explaining why he was showing the Bill clip again and then a bit of Mary and then a bit of Bill, that would have been equivalent to our entire archive budget. [Laughs] So yes we did contact them and then explored.
PT: And they've seen us.
MH: And they've seen us, but at the moment it isn't there.
PT: We were hoping their hearts would allow us to, but it’s the lawyers and the accountants. It’s a different set of people we talked to.
MH: But there’s a reason to thinking that that might have been the case, because obviously David Letterman was somebody who championed Bill while he was a performer. He had him on 11 times on the show and obviously the incident that surrounded the 12th appearance, as he himself said became much more important, because it happened when it did in relation to Bill’s illness. So in terms of him having Mary on the show and drawing a line, he said he could imagine him doing that, because he wanted to make amends for something that he did in the past, and it’s something that we would have liked to have been able to have examined, but financially it wasn’t viable.
Capone: Mary, what was that moment like for you, going to New York and being on that show?
Mary Hicks: It was different. I never expected to be asked to be on the show, but it was fun. I liked being treated as a VIP. [Everyone Laughs] David was very nice, and I’m glad that that was done before his exposure the other way, but he was very nice. All of them were on the show, and it was a good experience. We had fun, and my son and daughter went with me, so we enjoyed a few days in New York, yeah.
Capone: Did David talk to you off the air about Bill?
Mary Hicks: No. It is a very scripted show.
SH: Very scripted, down to the second, and you didn’t talk to him until you walked out there, right?
Mary Hicks: No, he came over and talked before I went out, yes, and what he said I don’t know.
[Everyone Laughs]
SH: But he doesn’t come backstage and say “Hi” with other people.
Capone: I’ve heard that.
SH: That was sort of strange I thought.
Mary Hicks: But I was standing with Biff, and he pushed me out, and I wondered why, but I’m sure Dave had asked him to, because he walked over and then as soon as we spoke, David left and he pulled me back behind the thing. But he did come over and speak a little bit.
Capone: That’s nice.
Mary Hicks: Yeah, he was very nice.
Capone: It was a great moment. Nothing like that has ever happened on his show before, as far as I can remember. First of all, David just apologizing for anything. Well that was the first of many at that point, but yeah that was kind of unbelievable.
MH: It was unprecedented. I think it does say something about the significance in which Bill is held, within the comedy and entertainment community.
PT: Those in the know, yeah.
MH: People that know know that that was something, which made sense.
Capone: Did David ever explain why it was happening at that particular moment?
Mary Hicks: No. It came as a complete surprise when one of his producers called me, and I said “No” that I would not go. Then I suggested Steve or Lynn, and she said “No,” that Dave had wanted me. I’ve talked to David Letterman over the years for different things, so I was not uncomfortable at all going, because of that. I don’t know how it would have felt had I never had any contact with him, but she said, “No, he needs you.”
SH: Well, it had to be the mother. It wouldn’t have made sense being one of us.
Mary Hicks: So a couple of weeks later, I agreed to go.
Capone: This came up during the Q&A, can you talk a little bit about the title? You're pretty much setting the standard as high as it can go with “AMERICAN.”
PT: Well, we had a list of thirty titles. Right from the start, we were writing about titles, and I think we got to 40 different things, and it was “AMERICAN this” or “AMERICAN COMIC,” and then one day you just suddenly said “What about…?”
MH: Well, I think we were thinking it was the job of the film not just to please Bill’s fans who are already in existence and are a diehard and voracious bunch and will seek it out. It’s also to try and get the film to go wider than that to people who don’t really know him. So I think that we felt that the film title should have “THE BILL HICK’S STORY” as a subtitle, so that you would know what is was even if it said “KETCHUP AND MAYONAISE: THE BILL HICKS STORY,” you would still know it’s about Bill. And then it was like, “Well what’s the 'KETCHUP AND MAYONAISE' going to be?” So we were thinking about shorter titles and trying to come up with something that sort of summed up a very difficult thing to sum up, which is not only somebody’s life and career, but also somebody who had a huge amount to say about the world in general.
So I think that the term “American” we liked it for a couple of reasons, one was that there has never been a film called AMERICAN. We checked on IMDB, there has never been a film called that, so we are the first film called that, and in some small way Bill gets to kind of own that word, and then the other reason was that because we would be unknown to certain numbers of people that came to contact with either the poster or whatever it was that if they didn’t know him, then the word “American” in conjunction with his image maybe would be enough to get them to ask a question, which would be “Who is this person who's American or The American or archetypically American?” So we thought that was potentially useful as a device for communicating what we had to do with the film as a job, which was to get people to ask and try and find out more about who this person was. You might have seen the image hat we have been using, which is the American flag.
Capone: Sure, it’s been all over the place.
MH: And that I think in conjunction with the title, we hoped would raise a question for people who maybe have heard of him, but didn’t quite no why. So yeah, it was just a nice big word.
[Everyone Laughs]
PT: That kind of secondary reason, the main essence of what it is is the idea of America and what America is and why America was created. It was created as a reaction to the way things were in Britain, and the original Bill of Rights, it's astonishing when you read back and that came together pretty quickly. It was a template of how a country should be, astonishing, and Bill was born in a period where a lot of American ideals still existed, and they started to be subverted and the corporations were starting to subvert them. That’s the essence of who he was. It’s a great template for the world and for humanity, and the best bits of American culture do roll out around the world, but unfortunately they are followed by the big commercial machine as well, which tends to win over. But you know he made a choice in life never to do the sitcoms, to just stick to the inner core of who he was, and so also the American ideal is an ideal for humanity. It’s a very big ideal.
Capone: Somebody brings it up in the film, how Bill is a classic definition of a patriot, which is someone who is questioning and challenging the establishment, and not someone who’s just marching ahead and falling in line. To me, that’s where the title made sense in my head.
PT: Yeah and the government are of the people, but the other half of that is the people have to remain vigilant and know what’s going on in the government, and we all have a responsibility to not just let this group get on with things, because it’s going to go wrong.
MH: Also, at the beginning of the film, Dwight does that wonderful summing up of the last 20 years of America--it was just a very nice way for us to introduce the topic gently of what the film’s theme was going to be and to sort of say, “Well, this is going to be an examination, and you might also be lucky and get a few dick jokes thrown in along the way.” Sorry Mary. [laughs] I can’t believe I’m swearing in front of Bill’s mom, again it’s something I should be more careful about.
Mary Hicks: You be careful!
MH: I know, I should watch it.
Capone: I love that this a film about a performer who got better when he got clean and sober. There are some comparisons you could make between what Bill did and what Lenny Bruce did, and obviously Lenny never got better. But I love that story that he got clean and got great.
SH: I think about drunk driving, you are impaired, whether you realize you are or not, and when you aren’t driving after having been drinking, then you can drive better. It’s an obvious analogy. His mind was able to focus more and it got sharper, much sharper.
MH: I think that Dwight said a really nice thing as well, because obviously Dwight was one of Bill’s longest friends, and they had as kids a sort of secret code together which they used to whisper to each other at keg parties, which they didn’t stay at for very long, which was WDPS, which is “Why Do People Smoke?” They were quite pious about the fact that they didn’t drink and smoke. So then when Bill came back from LA and had turned into this like black-jacket-wearing hard drinking, hard smoking kind of guy, Dwight was a little bit unsure about what to make of it.
Dwight says something very touching about Bill in terms of his darker period, his drug use and drinking, which was that Bill kind of felt a little bit embarrassed to talk about it with Dwight, because he felt he had let Dwight down, because they had had this kind of pact which was that, “We are not going to be that silly,” and Dwight said he never really spoke that much about it, but he just said “That stuff is sticky. You can try a little bit of it, but it’s sticky.”
Dwight just expressed I think what everybody expressed about it was that it was fortunate and that Bill was strong enough to come back from that place and report, because obviously as you have seen from the film his act was very much about absolute honestly and absolute openness, so saying, “I’ve had a drinking problem. I’ve had a drug problem,” did exactly what Bill’s act as a whole did, which was it made people think, “I’m not alone. I thought I was the only one who was feeling bad about this and I’m not, because this guy up on the stage is saying ‘It’s okay, I went through it too.” That applies to lots of other subjects that Bill covered. So that was one of the things that Bill really saw as his job, to make people feel that they weren’t alone.
PT: But also that period, when he went back to Houston, was born in frustration in L.A. that his comedy was stagnating and went back and here was this group of guys who, like him, weren’t chasing the big TV deals, they were wanting to explore what comedy could be and the craft, and the way that they did it was to push the extreme in terms of what they could do on stage and alcohol and the drugs come to deal with that. So, they did go to places they wouldn’t have gone without those things, though then Bill would realize it was getting to a point where it was no longer healthy, and I think he realized, then a lot of those other guys kept drinking for years, and thankfully they are all clean now, because they would be dead if it hadn’t been. Bill came back and was then able to bring all of that experience, but then harness it and control it and use it at will on stage.
MH: I think it’s really an interesting point that you picked up on and I’m not sure if anyone else has really quite identified it in that way, because normally people expect the biography story to be, “Right, he goes down through drinking and drugs.” Someone was saying they were waiting for a horrible sort of tragic ending to the film and no, it actually gets better and he becomes successful, so that’s a rally interesting point that you picked up on, because it does make Bill’s story unique in that way.
Mary Hicks: A lady came up to me after the show on Monday, and she said that she just wanted to tell me about what Bill had done for her. During his dark period, they were somewhere in Houston and some men started trying to hit on her, and she was trying to get away from them and she said Bill stepped in between them and took her back up to the Houston house until she could calm down. She had her teenage daughter with her [on Monday], and she said “I wanted my daughter to know Bill,” so she brought her to the show.
Capone: Wow, that’s great. That was at the screening at the Paramount?
Mary Hicks: Yes.
Capone: That’s the one I saw. I didn’t see the first one.
MH: I’m so glad that you were at that screening, though. It was very special.
Capone: It was. I wish it had been the place that they let you show it first.
MH: We do to. [Laughs]
PT: We think the first screening really set that up though, don’t we? The first screening was on opening night, and a lot of people saw it and then started talking and that really made sure that second screening was full, so I think maybe they got it right.
MH: And that’s the other thing too about the Paramount screening that normally they have badge holders and then you have people who have reserved a ticket through the festival, and then you have public tickets, cash tickets. Our screening on Monday we were told by the theater manager there they had sold the largest number or cash tickets to the public, nothing to do with the festival, than any film that has been there so far.
Capone: Wow, that’s great.
MH: It’s great for us, yes, because obviously you want the film community to see it, but one of the big things about this film and in some ways the reason that the film was made particularly with the title and it was basically brining Bill back to America.
PT: And back here to Texas too, yeah. To Austin.
Capone: Where else could you premiere it?
MH: I think I said, “Bill was from Austin,” and then realized what I had just said a lot of people in the room were like “Hmm…” I was like “No no, he was from Houston, but he was embraced by Austin. I know there’s a lot of knowledgeable people in the room.” The point is, although Bill grew up in Houston, he very much was embraced here and had a huge following here. One of the questions in the Q&A was “Weren’t you worried about bringing a film called AMERICAN about Bill by you two British people back to Texas?” and we were a little bit I guess, but at the same time we were just more excited than anything, because we knew that this was the reason that we were making the film.
PT: I had a moment were I was absolutely terrified, because we screened secretly a few weeks about in Colombia, Missouri, with the permission of SXSW at a festival called True/False.
Capone: Yes, sure the documentary festival.
PT: We had a secret screening there, but the first screening there, we were sitting right in the heart of the crowd, and it was the point when Bill was in Montreal where he starts talking out about America. He was just being very honest about the state of things, and I just suddenly realized, “I don’t know how these people are going to react,” and had a glimmer of what it must have been like for him, but it was fine. It was absolutely fine ,and now we've gone from sitting in British audiences watching this story about “over there” and suddenly we are ‘over there’ and it’s really scary.
MH: But it’s a very interesting twist, isn’t it though, because you’ve got British audiences waiting for the bit where Bill comes and is a great big success over in the UK, and then you’ve got the American audiences going, “Well, here he is trudging along in the states and then he goes off to another country.” Bill always described it as he was hoping he was going to “pull a Hendrix.” He was going to go over to the UK, and that would follow him back over to the states. So yeah, it’s been a fascinating experience for us with American audiences, and we have been absolutely thrilled by what we have been given here at SXSW. It’s a great festival.
PT: At the screening at the Paramount, I just went and stood at the back. I just watched the room. It was just incredible.
Capone: It was a great crowd.
MH: It’s a beautiful theater, too. It’s so tall and you’ve got the opera boxes and yeah it’s a great place.
Capone: I have a really good friend back in Chicago who's a huge Bill Hicks fan, and he’s pretty much been the reason I knew what I knew about Bill going into this movie. And every so often, in the past 10 years, he grits his teeth and goes, “Man, Bill Hicks would have some great material about what’s going on in this country today.” Is that something any of you ever think about? What would Bill have to say about George W. Bush? Katrina? September 11?
[Everyone Laughs]
MH: Steve’s going to answer this one.
SH: How I always answer that one is what I think about is just Bill and the family. He didn’t get to see my kids graduate from high school, he never saw PULP FICTION. He would have love PULP FICTION. I think of Bill as the brother and the son and the uncle, and I’m sure he’d be saying inappropriate things out there. I don’t think he would have compromised anything at all, but my thoughts are always just that he’s not in our lives any more.
MH: But I think that the big thing about that and we get asked that a lot, “What would Bill say about 9-11?” “What would Bill say about George Bush?” and you can imagine him having some wonderful material. But the important thing I think is since Bill was around in the late '80s and early '90s, there was no internet at that time, and since then you’ve just got Steven Colbert and John Stewart and even Michael Moore asking hard questions about essentially the government and the responsibility of citizens and government and essentially what America’s role is in world policy and foreign policy
So, I think that Bill would have had some very interesting things to say if he had still been doing it in that way, but you can imagine because of Bill’s desire to get his work out there and having to do 300 club nights a year, who knows, maybe he would have been a crazy internet guru and sort of reaching millions every day. I think that he probably would have wanted to just carry on reaching people. How he would have done that, who knows? Yeah, I think the landscape has changed a little bit and I think that we are really counting on that, because I think that we feel Bill has a rightful place in the cultural timeline, and now maybe the landscape has changed to the extent that he will be able to fulfill that place in America.
PT: We are finding that with college kids especially and that generation. They do now all know, so if someone said to us in the same way they would say, “We do know about the Beatles and John Lennon," they also say, "Now we all know about Bill Hicks.”
SH: I’m just going to say that out on YouTube, people have put up clips, and there are three of Bill’s with over a million hits out there, many of them were hundred of thousands of hits and so that certainly helping with exposing him.
MH: Let me tell you a little story about Steve, so basically he had put some clips of Bill’s up on YouTube just to sort of test it. He was basically just doing it to test the water for unreleased rare footage, so their lawyer got in touch with us saying, “We think you have a leak in your organization.” “Turn off the documentary, it’s up on the web!” and we are like “Yeah, I think it was your client.”
[Everyone Laughs]
Capone: Always let the lawyers know first.
MH: Exactly, it’s important to keep them in the loop.
Capone: So what is the release plan? Is there one at this point?
MH: Obviously, we've been absolutely flabbergasted by the attention that we got here at SXSW, and what we are looking to do is to do what we need to do as a responsibility to Bill and to the film, which is get the film out in the way that not so much creates attention, but makes sure that Bill is given this rightful place on the timeline. So we are exploring a number of ways to do that and we've had some very interesting conversations while we have been here and there’s a lot of interest, so we have just been trying to capitalize on this buzz. People were going “You know you guys are the buzz film at the festival, right?” And this English filmmaker was right there and goes, “I hate to tell you this, because I’m a jealous guy, but yours is the film that everyone is talking about.” What we hope to be able to do is to try and translate that into finding someone who can essentially get the film, see what it’s audience potential is, and then help us spin that out, because as you said you know there are these Bill fans who are out there who are a diehard bunch and they're going to be the ones that help us start the conversation and that conversation is hopefully going to continue and expand. This is essentially the reason we took on the film, and it’s our responsibility to Bill and to the family, because this work I think is important historically.
PT: It’s putting him back on the map is what it’s doing. where he should belong anyways.
MH: So we are having conversations, and we would love to keep you updated.
Capone: Please do. Well thank you all so very much for doing this. This was great.
PT: Thank you.
MH: Thanks so much.
-- Capone <!-- e --><a href="mailto:capone@aintitcool.com">capone@aintitcool.com</a><!-- e -->
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I dig Hicks but haven't read this entire thread (yet) so forgive me if it's been stated before...but (and being cognizant of the origin) I always thought that his AZ Bay rant - through to the end with the guitar strumming - would have been a beautiful lead-in to Aenima.
Comments
This looks like it might be the kind of film that should be mandatory for all 12th graders to view and discuss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzpUXIF6kYA
i guess i can sort of see that but i don't know that i buy it...i think he's done a respectful job in releasing material, i don't see bill hicks socks or remasters every few years. they grew up together and he recorded a ton of his stuff, i don't think he goes overboard in it. like that dvd they released a few years ago had a lot on it for a normal priced dvd. 3 comedy specials plus the sane man biography and trust me, i searched for dvds of his years before that and in the us there were just none to be had, at least nothing official and wasn't a video cd or something. until i see some cheesy bill hicks product a him rehashing the same stuff i think he's doing a pretty good job.
he's done other stuff unrelated to bill hicks, like his documentary american drug war, which is really good
http://americandrugwar.com/
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
The world could have used a lot more of the laughs and wisdom this guy brought us...I look at what great work Carlin did right into his 70's, and it just magnifies the loss. Thanks and RIP BH
One other strange Bill Hicks fun fact is that his portrait is in the Tool album Ænima
one's in lateralus, too
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
I never could respect DL, but that is only because I knew of Bill hicks first.
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Ditto, and that has nothing to do with my dad's name being Dennis O'Leary. If i have a grip, it's that punk ass dropped the big fuckin O from his name. Calls himself Irish ::::shakes head::::
Why would they hire that fake?
its not that strange
not to mention worked in a pet store. and lets be honest... maynard is a funny bastard.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
My Wife got this for me for Christmas!!!
I'm not suppossed to know, but there hasn't been wrapping paper invented yet i cannot undo and do back.
:twisted: :twisted: :twisted:
naughty list! :P
:thumbup:
I agree.I saw Bill live in Edinburgh 91 ... he was unbelievable but there were times I was left feeling uncomfortable at how real he was ... vitriolic ... I'd be laughing one minute then his story would turn very very dark and I'd be left with a feeling of "fuck should I be laughing?" ... that was what made his genius ... he could completely disarm the audience then just when they were comfortable the comedy would turn and the audience would be left thinking ... genius comedy should do that ... never make us feel complacent ... he was a true maverick and I had the utmost respect for the man
The film is great ... see it.
great to see him when he was like 19, he's not as bitter and angry but you can see it coming.
It was UpLoaded on YouTube!!!
Matt Harlock: Hello, Steve.
Capone: It’s good to meet you.
Paul Thomas: Hello.
Capone: I guess let’s just start at the beginning with you two. What was your first exposure to Bill’s comedy? I’m guessing you came at this as fans primarily and then kind of turned it into a project.
MH: Yeah, in some ways. I was, like a lot of people in the UK, I was very aware of Bill in the late '80s and early '90s when he was performing. Unfortunately, I never got to see him, but he was the kind of person where the tapes were being passed around from person to person; it was very much a sort of fifth-generation VHS copied tape cassettes, and then he was someone who was just very much in the cultural awareness in the UK at that time. So, I’ve been aware of him ever since then and then Paul was actually working in TV comedy.
PT: Yeah, I was making TV comedy shows that were very much about finding the next wave of new comedians in Britain and I had been doing that for quite a while before someone gave me a tape of Bill, and suddenly here’s this guy and it’s “How did I not know about him?,” and obviously someone of such incredible stature in terms of comedy. It really influenced what we were doing in terms of what we were searching for the next generation of British comedians. There was already very much that flavor there in terms of finding people who were doing things and keeping it real. I just remember distinctly wondering, “How on Earth have I not seen this person at all?” What you see is you see that he’s playing concerts to 2,000 people, yet somehow, even in the UK, there’s a huge cross section of people that don’t know him, and when they do it’s like “How did I not?”
Capone: What was it about his comedy that seemed to speak to the UK audiences? In Canada, too. Did anyone ever figure that out exactly?
MH: And Australia as well. He was very big, and that’s something that Steve gets asked a lot, and I think you’ve got a really good take on that Steve.
Steve Hicks: Well, I asked Bill that, and he told me. What it was specifically in the UK--but I’m assuming that might have been in Canada and Australia as well--they played his entire show in primetime unedited, and so they got to see him weaving his story and his perspective and all of that and not just five minutes of punch lines watered down on a late night TV show, which was his exposure over here for the most part. That’s what he attributed so much of his success and connection over there in the UK.
Plus at the time there were only four channels, BBC 1, 2, 3, and 4 I guess, so any given night 25 percent of the country might have been seeing him, and they're a lot more open over there on that culture as well and wouldn’t be offended by words and would look beyond that and listen to what was being said. I was struck by that when I was over there last year and just turning on normal primetime TV, and they just use all sorts of language and everything, and it just doesn’t bother anybody. I think Bill fought that over here sometimes, but over there, it just didn’t matter what words he was using; it mattered what he was saying. I think that’s what built him over there.
MH: But there’s also the perspective, the fact that he was an American coming to another country talking about America. Clearly, he was an American in America, and in the UK, we have a very packaged version of America. We get America TV, and suddenly here is this guy who is completely different talking very honestly about his country.
Capone: With that accent, too. That’s the American accent for a lot of people in other countries.
PT: And also, a lot of the comedians that you see in the UK--obviously you're working in your own country and doing your own clubs and you have to build your way up--Bill came over to the UK fully formed. He'd been on the road for 15 years, and so he came over completely formed as a performer and as someone with a very strong world view, and I think people were just kind of blown away a little bit by the whole package really, the attitude, the performance, the technical skill, and the profanity. [Laughs]
Capone: Talk a little bit then about the early stages of pulling this film together, contacting the family and so on. Clearly the draw here is the background information: the mind-opening drug "trials" that he did, and of course, all of this footage and photographs. Talk to me about collecting that. How long of a process was this?
MH: Well, I was doing stuff for TV in the UK and I had also on the side been putting on these little tribute nights, where we had on the 10th anniversary of Bill’s death comedians came down, we showed some of that footage, and as a part of that process, I found that there was a lot of footage out there as hadn’t seen, and we'd also had a bit of contact with the family. So that’s when I was lucky enough to hook up with Paul, and we started trying to put together something which might form a proposal, some way of maybe communicating what we felt hadn’t yet been told in terms of Bill’s story. There had been one documentary which had come out very soon after Bill had died in the UK, but it was only about 40 minutes long and it kind of based on two or three main performances and I think what we realized was that there was just a huge amount of unseen material out there, and that Bill’s life story was just much more complex than a half-hour or 40-minute thing, that maybe there was more to be told, so that was kind of the first time that we had contact and then we started developing an idea.
PT: And it’s a complex equation then. What I was doing was finding new forms, new ways to do things, and a lot of that was just late at night adventurous, it was never going to be prime time. That’s always been what attracted me, doing things in different ways and knowing the comedy commissioners, and so that bit was relatively easy. The [family is] being pitched Bill Hicks all of the time, and it was a case of saying, “Well, let’s look at it. Let’s try this equation.” They asked us to do a few tests with the photographs and very quickly it was like, “Okay, this could be the way to now do this story.” And it was a case of going back to the family and introducing that idea to them, because obviously the family was being approached all of the time as well. It was just a slow, organic process I think.
MH: It was over a couple of years.
PT: Yeah, two years.
MH: Obviously, we were very mindful of the fact that the family had been approached a lot by lots of different people, some of whose motivations were clear and some of which maybe weren’t, and so I think that we had quite a big job to do in just proving that we were the right people to take the job on, and they were mindful of Bill’s legacy and Bill’s work and wanted to make sure that his story was told honestly and truthfully, but with respect as well.
Mary Hicks: That is exactly what I felt, and we had had a lot of requests and still do for people who want to do things, but because of Matt’s contact doing the tributes, he seemed like an upright, honest person. [Everyone Laughs] So we were glad to meet them, he and Paul, and go forward.
Capone: Now if you had to guess and put a number on it, how many times do you think you have been approached either for…
Mary Hicks: …a movie or a documentary?
Capone: Yes.
SH: Multiple dozens probably.
Capone: Wow, I can imagine.
SH: We just got another one yesterday, so you guys better make it work.
[Everyone Laughs]
Mary Hicks: One of the first ones we got though I thought was hilarious. This young man wanted write a book, and he said he would have to come live with us for two years to get the information.
[Everyone Laughs]
SH: We can’t even stand each other that long, but you know I’ll tell you something and how I like to interject in this too, because I think it says something about the character of these guys. A lot of the people we get approached by say what a feather it would be in their cap, how it would with their portfolio, how much money there is to be made, and that’s not at all what Bill’s legacy is about. We would love to be rolling in money, but we are not, no do we ever approach it that way, and these guys never mentioned that you know. It was just a story worth telling that they got very committed to and got behind. We felt like that was the right thing to do. Now we know it was the right thing to do. They just had the right motivation in mind just to get the story out there. That’s why we're here with them today.
Capone: Talk about the visual style of the film and the use of photographs. It’s almost like a shadow puppet show. You put these photos together to make it look like two people are having a conversation. Where did that idea come from? I have never seen anything like that in a documentary.
PT: Again, it evolves. The initial idea was that with a lot of documentaries you're seeing talking heads and clips. Already we're 15 years on, so you're seeing people in their 40s talking about when they were kids, so obviously there’s already a mismatch there. So the idea came “Okay, let’s take the viewer back into the story,” so that was the initial seed of using photographs. Then what happens is we did interviews for several days with each person and then you get the real story, the entire story, and at that point the simple idea we had thought of, and it was obvious it wasn’t going to work, because there weren’t photos of Bill sneaking out to the comedy clubs. There weren’t photos of him playing [music] with Dwight [Slade]. There were just he school photos and the picture photos, so pretty early on we realized we had a huge job to do in terms of starting to create scenes and just the background really. A lot of documentaries you have seen have flat photos, one after the other, but I think just instinctively we thought “Well no, you shoot it in the round, like you're shooting a film and you use cutting to create a very immersive dramatic experience.” I think that was something that was just naturally in both of us as filmmakers, and so it is a very dramatic narrative. It’s not like you are watching a documentary and it’s very practical. You get immersed into a story.
The other factor is that Bill’s family members are all great storytellers. He didn’t come from nowhere; he came from a family that is very communicative with each other and always discussing ideas. His fellow comedians are also obviously great storytellers, and the people who chose to be his best lifelong friends are also very special people, so you couldn’t just do this with any group of people. There are 10 fantastic storytellers telling the story. You don’t need initial voiceover to help. There is no additional scripting, it’s just a real story and people ask us “Well, you must have gone back to get bits of scripted stuff” and we didn’t. It’s just because they are such great storytellers, and that created a bed of a very powerful story, and then the technique had to live up to that.
MH: And as Paul said, it would only really have worked if the people who knew Bill were like that, because they all carry this like DNA imprint, like you’ve got Dwight doing an impression of Bill doing an impression of his mom, and then he’s doing him and then he’s doing Bill’s dad, and he’s doing three of the voices in the conversation. So, that is very personal and very intimate in terms a of a recollection and the technique, because you're not seeing the person’s face talking, there’s a danger that it could become distancing, and it was only because of the interviews were able to sustain that level of intimacy that I think it worked in the way that it has.
PT: But that scene’s unique where Dwight is doing all three voices… well four. He’s doing Bill’s parents, Bill, and himself; who could do that? Very few people, and it’s kind of invisible. You don’t realize when he’s doing it, but that’s how he did it on camera. The original footage is incredibly. Now, that’s happening through out the 90-minute film though, everyone is doing that. I think you are not really aware of it when you are watching it, but I think it’s quite unique. You couldn’t do it again with another set of 10 people, because they don’t tell stories in the same way.
MH: And just the last thing to add is the sneaking out story, you came to Bill sort of fairly new to the film, which is great, because that’s how the film is designed, but that sneaking out story of quite a well-known bit of folklore. If you had read a book or two, then it’s like “Will he sneak out?” What we did was we wanted to make it feel as it had as much authenticity as possible, so the house that you see in that sequence is Bill’s real childhood home. We went back to the real childhood home and according to one person used our British accents to talk our way in and photograph.
[Everyone Laughs]
So, that’s actually Bill’s real bedroom window. It’s the real roof. It’s the real backyard and that also applies to other sections in the film, for example, the window that he looks out of in LA, that’s his real bedroom window. We found the apartment, #25 when Bill was 21, and so are were parts of the film which hopefully get as close as possible in terms of authenticity the technique could lay itself open to, "Aw, they just made all of that up." So we have been very careful to make sure that we've been as authentic as possible in terms of what we have shown on the screen.
PT: So it is a correct historical document, and that’s what documentaries are about. It’s very easy to come to something with an agenda. You can direct your questions in certain ways and once you’ve got interviews, you can then craft those interviews, and it’s very easy to abuse and manipulate people, but what true documentarians do is you come with no preconceptions and you find out who these people really are. Your friends probably say, "Steve, that’s exactly you. That sounds like you.”
It's our job to find out through these sequences who Bill really was, because people have said this wasn’t dark enough, because they had their own preconceptions of Bill, and we could have gone down that route and crafted a story that we had already written and made everything fit to that, the documentary approach is to cast all of that aside and really investigate the story and go, “Okay, what is the real story?” and to dig deep and gather a lot of bits of the story. I think that’s the power that people now get, because we are kind of like a conduit as filmmakers and it’s the case of capturing their oral history of Bill and distilling it down to it’s pure essence.
Capone: Right. Mary, was there any footage in this film that you had never seen before?
Mary Hicks: I've been working with this ever since Bill passed away and so I’m pretty much all… If you are talking about his material, no. I’ve pretty much seen it all. I had tons of it. I’m passing it on to Steve now, but yes and because of having put some CDs and DVDs out since his death, I’ve had to listen to all of it, so I’ve listened to it. You want to know what I think about it? [Everyone Laughs] Bill knew what I thought about it, and I’d rather him not have used all of the “F words” or some of those very graphic descriptions, but he did and I wouldn’t let it be censored. So yeah, I’ve listened to it, but I loved my son, and he really had something to say and I thought he got it out there in a way that if you overlook the words, you get the message.
SH: Well and he had enough respect. He didn’t talk that way around the family, you know.
Mary Hicks: Oh no, no, no.
SH: He was very articulate and not so profane. He was just doing what he did on stage.
Mary Hicks: No, he was a perfect gentleman, really.
Capone: I wonder also about some of the material that he was doing when he was in high school, which was really just about the family. That had to be pretty eye opening, too.
Mary Hicks: Well, I didn’t see that until Bill was sick and was back at home, and we talked and I said, “You know, Bill, I never did see you do me. I know you did.” So, he got up and did one of his routines, and really it was hilarious. I mean, it was what he did, and I knew he did the family, and I had heard everybody but me, and then I heard me, and he had me down pat really, so all I could do was laugh. But no, I listened to it, and it’s okay.
Capone: I like the choice that you don’t interview any comedians that were influenced by him, and that’s kind of how I discovered him, from other people talking about him. I remember seeing him on Letterman a few times. You probably could have gotten those people to talk.
PT: Yeah, and we were asked to as well by the BBC.
MH: I think there was a point at which we made a tentative list of people that we knew who we thought maybe we should go and talk to, but I think after we went and interviewed the family and friends that we kind of realized that they were a little bit superfluous. We had seen another documentary where there were some talking heads in it and it just seemed that they all valued things that could be said about Bill as a performer and as a comedian. People who know Bill have very strong opinions about him, and they feel a very personal connection to him and he spoke to them directly about things that were important to them in their lives. That’s why he still continues to resonate, so I think that the recollections of some of the comedians who could have admire him as a stage performer and his craft and his style could have been interesting, but I don’t think that they would have been as informative and as emotive as the recollections of the people who knew him for 25-30 years.
Capone: Because they are not part of his story.
PT: Exactly, those would have been observations from outside the story, whereas the way it’s told, those people were there at that time giving firsthand accounts. Even some of Bill’s girlfriends aren’t really explored because they have other lives now, and some have passed, and no one was happy talking on their behalf, because they weren’t in those scenes. So everything literally is a first-hand, eyewitness account, and that goes for every single scene in this story. So yes, these names would have been not only in the story, but would have been quite distant observations, but certainly would have been lots of interesting stuff, but it wouldn’t have worked. It would have jarred and it wouldn’t have felt the same as if you were suddenly no longer been in that scene; you would have stepped back a layer and been with the commentator.
Capone: I would imagine there was some pressure or someone saying, “Can we get some faces in here that people might recognize?”
PT: Yeah, a lot of pressure.
Capone: Excellent choice. It makes much more sense to do it this way, because we are getting the real story. I realize it’s a fairly recent event, but it was last year when David Letterman aired the edited footage of Bill, and you were on the show, right?
Mary Hicks: Yes.
Capone: Was there an attempt to get that or use that in this film? That would be an interesting footnote to everything. Were they contacted at all about using it?
PT: Yes, and they have seen the film. It comes down to the price of NBC’s material. We couldn’t afford it. It’s extremely expensive and it’s a low budget film, so yeah there were bits we would like to have used, but the price placed on them prevented it.
MH: Well if we had actually used three minutes of their material, which would probably have covered David gets him explaining why he was showing the Bill clip again and then a bit of Mary and then a bit of Bill, that would have been equivalent to our entire archive budget. [Laughs] So yes we did contact them and then explored.
PT: And they've seen us.
MH: And they've seen us, but at the moment it isn't there.
PT: We were hoping their hearts would allow us to, but it’s the lawyers and the accountants. It’s a different set of people we talked to.
MH: But there’s a reason to thinking that that might have been the case, because obviously David Letterman was somebody who championed Bill while he was a performer. He had him on 11 times on the show and obviously the incident that surrounded the 12th appearance, as he himself said became much more important, because it happened when it did in relation to Bill’s illness. So in terms of him having Mary on the show and drawing a line, he said he could imagine him doing that, because he wanted to make amends for something that he did in the past, and it’s something that we would have liked to have been able to have examined, but financially it wasn’t viable.
Capone: Mary, what was that moment like for you, going to New York and being on that show?
Mary Hicks: It was different. I never expected to be asked to be on the show, but it was fun. I liked being treated as a VIP. [Everyone Laughs] David was very nice, and I’m glad that that was done before his exposure the other way, but he was very nice. All of them were on the show, and it was a good experience. We had fun, and my son and daughter went with me, so we enjoyed a few days in New York, yeah.
Capone: Did David talk to you off the air about Bill?
Mary Hicks: No. It is a very scripted show.
SH: Very scripted, down to the second, and you didn’t talk to him until you walked out there, right?
Mary Hicks: No, he came over and talked before I went out, yes, and what he said I don’t know.
[Everyone Laughs]
SH: But he doesn’t come backstage and say “Hi” with other people.
Capone: I’ve heard that.
SH: That was sort of strange I thought.
Mary Hicks: But I was standing with Biff, and he pushed me out, and I wondered why, but I’m sure Dave had asked him to, because he walked over and then as soon as we spoke, David left and he pulled me back behind the thing. But he did come over and speak a little bit.
Capone: That’s nice.
Mary Hicks: Yeah, he was very nice.
Capone: It was a great moment. Nothing like that has ever happened on his show before, as far as I can remember. First of all, David just apologizing for anything. Well that was the first of many at that point, but yeah that was kind of unbelievable.
MH: It was unprecedented. I think it does say something about the significance in which Bill is held, within the comedy and entertainment community.
PT: Those in the know, yeah.
MH: People that know know that that was something, which made sense.
Capone: Did David ever explain why it was happening at that particular moment?
Mary Hicks: No. It came as a complete surprise when one of his producers called me, and I said “No” that I would not go. Then I suggested Steve or Lynn, and she said “No,” that Dave had wanted me. I’ve talked to David Letterman over the years for different things, so I was not uncomfortable at all going, because of that. I don’t know how it would have felt had I never had any contact with him, but she said, “No, he needs you.”
SH: Well, it had to be the mother. It wouldn’t have made sense being one of us.
Mary Hicks: So a couple of weeks later, I agreed to go.
Capone: This came up during the Q&A, can you talk a little bit about the title? You're pretty much setting the standard as high as it can go with “AMERICAN.”
PT: Well, we had a list of thirty titles. Right from the start, we were writing about titles, and I think we got to 40 different things, and it was “AMERICAN this” or “AMERICAN COMIC,” and then one day you just suddenly said “What about…?”
MH: Well, I think we were thinking it was the job of the film not just to please Bill’s fans who are already in existence and are a diehard and voracious bunch and will seek it out. It’s also to try and get the film to go wider than that to people who don’t really know him. So I think that we felt that the film title should have “THE BILL HICK’S STORY” as a subtitle, so that you would know what is was even if it said “KETCHUP AND MAYONAISE: THE BILL HICKS STORY,” you would still know it’s about Bill. And then it was like, “Well what’s the 'KETCHUP AND MAYONAISE' going to be?” So we were thinking about shorter titles and trying to come up with something that sort of summed up a very difficult thing to sum up, which is not only somebody’s life and career, but also somebody who had a huge amount to say about the world in general.
So I think that the term “American” we liked it for a couple of reasons, one was that there has never been a film called AMERICAN. We checked on IMDB, there has never been a film called that, so we are the first film called that, and in some small way Bill gets to kind of own that word, and then the other reason was that because we would be unknown to certain numbers of people that came to contact with either the poster or whatever it was that if they didn’t know him, then the word “American” in conjunction with his image maybe would be enough to get them to ask a question, which would be “Who is this person who's American or The American or archetypically American?” So we thought that was potentially useful as a device for communicating what we had to do with the film as a job, which was to get people to ask and try and find out more about who this person was. You might have seen the image hat we have been using, which is the American flag.
Capone: Sure, it’s been all over the place.
MH: And that I think in conjunction with the title, we hoped would raise a question for people who maybe have heard of him, but didn’t quite no why. So yeah, it was just a nice big word.
[Everyone Laughs]
PT: That kind of secondary reason, the main essence of what it is is the idea of America and what America is and why America was created. It was created as a reaction to the way things were in Britain, and the original Bill of Rights, it's astonishing when you read back and that came together pretty quickly. It was a template of how a country should be, astonishing, and Bill was born in a period where a lot of American ideals still existed, and they started to be subverted and the corporations were starting to subvert them. That’s the essence of who he was. It’s a great template for the world and for humanity, and the best bits of American culture do roll out around the world, but unfortunately they are followed by the big commercial machine as well, which tends to win over. But you know he made a choice in life never to do the sitcoms, to just stick to the inner core of who he was, and so also the American ideal is an ideal for humanity. It’s a very big ideal.
Capone: Somebody brings it up in the film, how Bill is a classic definition of a patriot, which is someone who is questioning and challenging the establishment, and not someone who’s just marching ahead and falling in line. To me, that’s where the title made sense in my head.
PT: Yeah and the government are of the people, but the other half of that is the people have to remain vigilant and know what’s going on in the government, and we all have a responsibility to not just let this group get on with things, because it’s going to go wrong.
MH: Also, at the beginning of the film, Dwight does that wonderful summing up of the last 20 years of America--it was just a very nice way for us to introduce the topic gently of what the film’s theme was going to be and to sort of say, “Well, this is going to be an examination, and you might also be lucky and get a few dick jokes thrown in along the way.” Sorry Mary. [laughs] I can’t believe I’m swearing in front of Bill’s mom, again it’s something I should be more careful about.
Mary Hicks: You be careful!
MH: I know, I should watch it.
Capone: I love that this a film about a performer who got better when he got clean and sober. There are some comparisons you could make between what Bill did and what Lenny Bruce did, and obviously Lenny never got better. But I love that story that he got clean and got great.
SH: I think about drunk driving, you are impaired, whether you realize you are or not, and when you aren’t driving after having been drinking, then you can drive better. It’s an obvious analogy. His mind was able to focus more and it got sharper, much sharper.
MH: I think that Dwight said a really nice thing as well, because obviously Dwight was one of Bill’s longest friends, and they had as kids a sort of secret code together which they used to whisper to each other at keg parties, which they didn’t stay at for very long, which was WDPS, which is “Why Do People Smoke?” They were quite pious about the fact that they didn’t drink and smoke. So then when Bill came back from LA and had turned into this like black-jacket-wearing hard drinking, hard smoking kind of guy, Dwight was a little bit unsure about what to make of it.
Dwight says something very touching about Bill in terms of his darker period, his drug use and drinking, which was that Bill kind of felt a little bit embarrassed to talk about it with Dwight, because he felt he had let Dwight down, because they had had this kind of pact which was that, “We are not going to be that silly,” and Dwight said he never really spoke that much about it, but he just said “That stuff is sticky. You can try a little bit of it, but it’s sticky.”
Dwight just expressed I think what everybody expressed about it was that it was fortunate and that Bill was strong enough to come back from that place and report, because obviously as you have seen from the film his act was very much about absolute honestly and absolute openness, so saying, “I’ve had a drinking problem. I’ve had a drug problem,” did exactly what Bill’s act as a whole did, which was it made people think, “I’m not alone. I thought I was the only one who was feeling bad about this and I’m not, because this guy up on the stage is saying ‘It’s okay, I went through it too.” That applies to lots of other subjects that Bill covered. So that was one of the things that Bill really saw as his job, to make people feel that they weren’t alone.
PT: But also that period, when he went back to Houston, was born in frustration in L.A. that his comedy was stagnating and went back and here was this group of guys who, like him, weren’t chasing the big TV deals, they were wanting to explore what comedy could be and the craft, and the way that they did it was to push the extreme in terms of what they could do on stage and alcohol and the drugs come to deal with that. So, they did go to places they wouldn’t have gone without those things, though then Bill would realize it was getting to a point where it was no longer healthy, and I think he realized, then a lot of those other guys kept drinking for years, and thankfully they are all clean now, because they would be dead if it hadn’t been. Bill came back and was then able to bring all of that experience, but then harness it and control it and use it at will on stage.
MH: I think it’s really an interesting point that you picked up on and I’m not sure if anyone else has really quite identified it in that way, because normally people expect the biography story to be, “Right, he goes down through drinking and drugs.” Someone was saying they were waiting for a horrible sort of tragic ending to the film and no, it actually gets better and he becomes successful, so that’s a rally interesting point that you picked up on, because it does make Bill’s story unique in that way.
Mary Hicks: A lady came up to me after the show on Monday, and she said that she just wanted to tell me about what Bill had done for her. During his dark period, they were somewhere in Houston and some men started trying to hit on her, and she was trying to get away from them and she said Bill stepped in between them and took her back up to the Houston house until she could calm down. She had her teenage daughter with her [on Monday], and she said “I wanted my daughter to know Bill,” so she brought her to the show.
Capone: Wow, that’s great. That was at the screening at the Paramount?
Mary Hicks: Yes.
Capone: That’s the one I saw. I didn’t see the first one.
MH: I’m so glad that you were at that screening, though. It was very special.
Capone: It was. I wish it had been the place that they let you show it first.
MH: We do to. [Laughs]
PT: We think the first screening really set that up though, don’t we? The first screening was on opening night, and a lot of people saw it and then started talking and that really made sure that second screening was full, so I think maybe they got it right.
MH: And that’s the other thing too about the Paramount screening that normally they have badge holders and then you have people who have reserved a ticket through the festival, and then you have public tickets, cash tickets. Our screening on Monday we were told by the theater manager there they had sold the largest number or cash tickets to the public, nothing to do with the festival, than any film that has been there so far.
Capone: Wow, that’s great.
MH: It’s great for us, yes, because obviously you want the film community to see it, but one of the big things about this film and in some ways the reason that the film was made particularly with the title and it was basically brining Bill back to America.
PT: And back here to Texas too, yeah. To Austin.
Capone: Where else could you premiere it?
MH: I think I said, “Bill was from Austin,” and then realized what I had just said a lot of people in the room were like “Hmm…” I was like “No no, he was from Houston, but he was embraced by Austin. I know there’s a lot of knowledgeable people in the room.” The point is, although Bill grew up in Houston, he very much was embraced here and had a huge following here. One of the questions in the Q&A was “Weren’t you worried about bringing a film called AMERICAN about Bill by you two British people back to Texas?” and we were a little bit I guess, but at the same time we were just more excited than anything, because we knew that this was the reason that we were making the film.
PT: I had a moment were I was absolutely terrified, because we screened secretly a few weeks about in Colombia, Missouri, with the permission of SXSW at a festival called True/False.
Capone: Yes, sure the documentary festival.
PT: We had a secret screening there, but the first screening there, we were sitting right in the heart of the crowd, and it was the point when Bill was in Montreal where he starts talking out about America. He was just being very honest about the state of things, and I just suddenly realized, “I don’t know how these people are going to react,” and had a glimmer of what it must have been like for him, but it was fine. It was absolutely fine ,and now we've gone from sitting in British audiences watching this story about “over there” and suddenly we are ‘over there’ and it’s really scary.
MH: But it’s a very interesting twist, isn’t it though, because you’ve got British audiences waiting for the bit where Bill comes and is a great big success over in the UK, and then you’ve got the American audiences going, “Well, here he is trudging along in the states and then he goes off to another country.” Bill always described it as he was hoping he was going to “pull a Hendrix.” He was going to go over to the UK, and that would follow him back over to the states. So yeah, it’s been a fascinating experience for us with American audiences, and we have been absolutely thrilled by what we have been given here at SXSW. It’s a great festival.
PT: At the screening at the Paramount, I just went and stood at the back. I just watched the room. It was just incredible.
Capone: It was a great crowd.
MH: It’s a beautiful theater, too. It’s so tall and you’ve got the opera boxes and yeah it’s a great place.
Capone: I have a really good friend back in Chicago who's a huge Bill Hicks fan, and he’s pretty much been the reason I knew what I knew about Bill going into this movie. And every so often, in the past 10 years, he grits his teeth and goes, “Man, Bill Hicks would have some great material about what’s going on in this country today.” Is that something any of you ever think about? What would Bill have to say about George W. Bush? Katrina? September 11?
[Everyone Laughs]
MH: Steve’s going to answer this one.
SH: How I always answer that one is what I think about is just Bill and the family. He didn’t get to see my kids graduate from high school, he never saw PULP FICTION. He would have love PULP FICTION. I think of Bill as the brother and the son and the uncle, and I’m sure he’d be saying inappropriate things out there. I don’t think he would have compromised anything at all, but my thoughts are always just that he’s not in our lives any more.
MH: But I think that the big thing about that and we get asked that a lot, “What would Bill say about 9-11?” “What would Bill say about George Bush?” and you can imagine him having some wonderful material. But the important thing I think is since Bill was around in the late '80s and early '90s, there was no internet at that time, and since then you’ve just got Steven Colbert and John Stewart and even Michael Moore asking hard questions about essentially the government and the responsibility of citizens and government and essentially what America’s role is in world policy and foreign policy
So, I think that Bill would have had some very interesting things to say if he had still been doing it in that way, but you can imagine because of Bill’s desire to get his work out there and having to do 300 club nights a year, who knows, maybe he would have been a crazy internet guru and sort of reaching millions every day. I think that he probably would have wanted to just carry on reaching people. How he would have done that, who knows? Yeah, I think the landscape has changed a little bit and I think that we are really counting on that, because I think that we feel Bill has a rightful place in the cultural timeline, and now maybe the landscape has changed to the extent that he will be able to fulfill that place in America.
PT: We are finding that with college kids especially and that generation. They do now all know, so if someone said to us in the same way they would say, “We do know about the Beatles and John Lennon," they also say, "Now we all know about Bill Hicks.”
SH: I’m just going to say that out on YouTube, people have put up clips, and there are three of Bill’s with over a million hits out there, many of them were hundred of thousands of hits and so that certainly helping with exposing him.
MH: Let me tell you a little story about Steve, so basically he had put some clips of Bill’s up on YouTube just to sort of test it. He was basically just doing it to test the water for unreleased rare footage, so their lawyer got in touch with us saying, “We think you have a leak in your organization.” “Turn off the documentary, it’s up on the web!” and we are like “Yeah, I think it was your client.”
[Everyone Laughs]
Capone: Always let the lawyers know first.
MH: Exactly, it’s important to keep them in the loop.
Capone: So what is the release plan? Is there one at this point?
MH: Obviously, we've been absolutely flabbergasted by the attention that we got here at SXSW, and what we are looking to do is to do what we need to do as a responsibility to Bill and to the film, which is get the film out in the way that not so much creates attention, but makes sure that Bill is given this rightful place on the timeline. So we are exploring a number of ways to do that and we've had some very interesting conversations while we have been here and there’s a lot of interest, so we have just been trying to capitalize on this buzz. People were going “You know you guys are the buzz film at the festival, right?” And this English filmmaker was right there and goes, “I hate to tell you this, because I’m a jealous guy, but yours is the film that everyone is talking about.” What we hope to be able to do is to try and translate that into finding someone who can essentially get the film, see what it’s audience potential is, and then help us spin that out, because as you said you know there are these Bill fans who are out there who are a diehard bunch and they're going to be the ones that help us start the conversation and that conversation is hopefully going to continue and expand. This is essentially the reason we took on the film, and it’s our responsibility to Bill and to the family, because this work I think is important historically.
PT: It’s putting him back on the map is what it’s doing. where he should belong anyways.
MH: So we are having conversations, and we would love to keep you updated.
Capone: Please do. Well thank you all so very much for doing this. This was great.
PT: Thank you.
MH: Thanks so much.
-- Capone <!-- e --><a href="mailto:capone@aintitcool.com">capone@aintitcool.com</a><!-- e -->
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