Albert Brooks is one of the funniest people alive, an actor, director, writer, and standup comic. He made his name in the early ’70s as a prolific comedian, talk show guest and released two successful comedy albums. He wanted to direct and did six shorts on the inaugural season of Saturday Night Live.
Years later he directed the comedy classics Real Life, Modern Romance, and Lost in America, Defending Your Life, and Mother, among others. As an actor, he was nominated for best supporting actor for Broadcast News and as a voice actor he has done many guest spots on The Simpsons and lent his talents to the beloved Pixar film, Finding Nemo and its sequel, Finding Dory.
Rob Reiner has known Albert Brooks since they were in their teens. Like Brooks, Reiner has had a very prolific and successful career in film and TV. He has directed some of the best films of the past 40 years, including This Is Spinal Tap Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and many others.
Albert Brooks Defending My Life is Reiner’s first documentary. Bob Joyce has edited several films with Rob Reiner, including Being Charlie, LBJ, Shock and Awe, and the highly-anticipated upcoming sequel, This Is Spinal Tap 2. Joyce recently spoke to Immersive via Zoom about the Brooks documentary.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length]
I love Albert Brooks. He is a one-of-a-kind performer who can make awkwardness downright hilarious. I first saw this doc in a packed screening room and it played more like a comedy than straight-up non-fiction…
Rob was just thrilled about the screening because we had been sitting in the editing room for almost a year, and we couldn’t tell if an audience was going to like it. It’s really hard. Rob comes from a career in theatrical movies, and now, it’s hard to get a movie in the theater anymore. Rob said it played like a movie, like a story, and with the laughs at the right spots and the emotional parts at the right spots. I think it was nice to see Rob so happy seeing it with an audience.
How did you get involved in this? I know you have a history with Rob, so maybe go into that first meeting and then segue into how it led to this project.
I’ve been working with Rob since 2015, this is our fifth movie together. Around the time Covid hit, Rob told me he finally got Albert to agree to do a documentary and he wanted to bring me on. It was great because Rob had never directed a real documentary. I had done small-form documentaries and things like that, but I had never done a full feature-length documentary.
I think that it was fascinating because we approached it like a narrative movie. We’re telling a story and Albert’s the main character. He set me off to find every archival piece of footage I could find. That took about five months even before we started editing or doing interviews, which was, for me an extremely challenging thing because I learned later on that big documentaries have archival producers, which kind of do what I ended up doing.
Research is always fun…
It’s a lot of detective work, especially when you’re looking for footage from the late ’60s and early ’70s. We found out that a lot of Albert’s appearances, as in his early days stand-up and his conceptual comedy before 1972, these shows taped over everything. All these things were gone unless it was on The Best Of Carson, so a lot of Albert’s best bits were lost, but we found some of them. We found stuff from all these shows where we got the tapes and they hadn’t even been played since the sixties.
What were some of the great discoveries? There are some amazing rarely seen clips in this film, like the one where he has Groucho Marx tattooed on his chest.
It was one of Albert’s first appearances, so he made a print of it back then he had a 16-millimeter copy of it, and he would show it to people as his demo reel. I bugged him and bugged him, and he said, “Oh, I have a storage place in Lancaster.” I kept saying, “Please go and look.” And one day he came in with a film can, and he said, “Bob, I found it.”
Albert came in and we opened the film can and there was nothing in it. And then he went back and we finally found the 16 millimeter and we transferred it to 4K and that became the framework for the documentary. It opens and closes the documentary because it sets up everything. I don’t think if we hadn’t made this documentary, no one would’ve found that.
I love those discoveries. The stuff with Spielberg was phenomenal. The fact that he would just hang around Steven Spielberg and just randomly go up to people on the street, is one of his bits. What was that like to get a hold of? Who had that? Was that Albert or was that Steven?
Well, that was Steven Spielberg. Rob reached out to Spielberg and he has archived and transferred everything he ever shot from when he was a kid, super eight for everything. He has a team that handles all his archival. He sent us about 10 minutes of footage. I think there’s maybe a minute or two in the movie, but when we got that stuff, it was the greatest because you see early 1970s Los Angeles and Spielberg.
Spielberg was one of the first people to have a super eight sound camera with the sound stripe on it, so it was just so cool to see that. It was great just to watch that stuff and just see Spielberg sort of taking a backseat and letting Albert just go and just perform.
I always ask this of people who work with real-life stories, and in this case a documentary story, was there any part of it that was delicate or that you had to be sensitive about, or were they just completely open with in terms of just what you told of their past?
I think there were some things that Albert was a little sensitive about and when we screened the four-and-a-half-hour cut for him he would comment on all the things he didn’t like or thought were untruthful. For weeks at a time, we’d all be in the edit room you’d see their relationship onscreen and their relationship in person, there is a deep connection there.
What were some of the challenges on this?
One of the challenges I found was Albert’s early comedy bits because he would do these six conceptual minute bits. You kind of had to hear the whole bit in its entirety for it to work. So we would try to cut it down for a documentary and just get maybe a minute and a half, which represented set up and then the punchline, and then we think we’d have it, and then Albert would come in and go, you know what guys? You need this one more little piece and that will make it work.
Let’s talk a little bit about your editing suite.
Rob and I have been working with Adobe Premiere for the last four films. I think cutting Albert Brooks was good training for both of us to get back into the sort of documentary feel. We cut the Albert Brooks documentary in Adobe Premiere, which was probably the best format platform because of all the mixed media, because so much of the archives were all these different formats, and we could just drop it in the timeline and just cut away. I can’t imagine trying to cut a documentary without Adobe Premiere.
Was there anything that was surprising that you didn’t know about him?
I’m a huge fan of Albert Brooks. I knew the classic scenes from all of Albert’s movies to start the rough cut. I had watched these movies over and over again, so I knew all my favorite scenes. So having an extensive love of Albert’s films I think helped me a lot. The things that surprised me most were the stuff about his parents, which was great because finding all that archival stuff.
There’s a lot of home movies that we used in the documentary of his mom and dad that were on, some of them were from 1937, these 16-millimeter Kodak little things that we had transferred at 4K. So it was fascinating to watch this stuff and learn about both his parents, where his mother was an actress and a singer, and his father was a comedian, and that his father was in with all the great Milton Berle and all these great comedians, and I didn’t know any of that, so that was interesting.
The stuff about Carl Reiner was amazing.
Carl Reiner had passed away about a year before we started this, and it’s a shame I thought let me see if his audiobook mentions Albert, and it did. So we were able to use that.
Real Life is an absolute classic, so funny and prescient. The trailer is very unique as well.
That was another one that we got. Albert had a 35-millimeter copy of the trailer, and we were able to just transfer that. We have to transfer these at 4K. Not all the Saturday Night Live films are in the documentary, but I’m really happy that now they’re archived in 4K thanks to the documentary. That was so much fun to transfer and see it in really high quality, as good as quality.
That is excellent. That’s important stuff because that stuff should live on. Did you have any particular favorite scenes or favorite moments from the film?
It’s such a great moment in the documentary because it has what Albert and his films have, which is sort of a heartbreaking moment and a funny moment. The story is about how his father died on stage at the Friars Club. There’s a great moment when he describes how they were trying to revive his father. Milton Berle was trying to keep the event going and distract the audience and singer Tony Martin got up and sang his big hit at the time, “There Will Be No Tomorrow.” When we cut it, we were laughing in the cutting room. That got the biggest laugh, and the fact that it comes from this heartbreaking moment, his father dying is perfect.
What has the whole experience been like? This has been a very well-received documentary. What does it look like on the other end now?
Well, it’s so nice, to get such a huge positive response from people. You go on social media and type in the title and see if anyone’s talking about it. My favorite comment was that people said, “I smiled through it, or I haven’t laughed this hard at a documentary ever.” We spent almost a year making this thing, and you’re in a bubble. When you hear that the audience loves it, and when it gets nominated for an Emmy… The best thing about a film getting nominated is more people may see it.
Albert Brooks Defending Your Life is streaming on MAX.
