A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin Read online

  First of all, Marcel Marceau was not there all the time, because he was touring. He came to do Master Classes, where he would lecture about telling stories visually — creating something that makes the invisible visible. Then there were two or three other mime teachers. One taught Commedia Dell’Arte, which is old Italian comedy. We learned how to perform different types of characters: Pierrot, Columbina, Harlequin, etc.

  I also learned what they call the basic grammar of mime, from Etienne Decroux. Etienne Decroux was considered the father of mime. He taught Marcel Marceau and Jean-Louis Barrault. What he did was show us how to break the body down, and to look at the body as separate parts that could all move independently — the head separate from the neck, the neck separate from the chest, the chest separate from the hips. It was like a pianist learning scales. Once you understood the basics of how to move, then you could artistically express yourself. Using those basic techniques, you can make yourself louder. Even though you’re working in silence, you can be louder because of the way you use your body.

  If you really study Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd or Charlie Chaplin, you recognize their ability to convey a lot with very small gestures. Keaton, for example, was great at keeping his eyes completely separate from his head. He was expressive in the simplest ways. For example, he would release a huge explosion of energy when he took a fall, and then maximize the silence and stillness when he stopped. He’d just sit there blinking, like, What just happened? The extreme contrast is comic. That’s what we were learning — how to think of the entire body as an instrument, and figure out what it’s capable of.

  I got completely immersed in the world of performing arts, studying fencing and acrobatics and mask work and classical dance and modern dance…And there was a cinema across the street from my hotel that changed movies three times a day, so I was going to the movies as much as possible. I got to see so many classic foreign films and silent movies that I wouldn’t have been able to see in Los Angeles. Then I went to the Louvre and Rodin’s Museum to study the sculptures and paintings, and see how all those artists expressed things without words. And because I couldn’t speak French, I was completely voyeuristic. I would sit in a café and watch people, and I became a student of human behavior. All of that was part of my education for almost a full year.

  When I got back to America, I thought, Alright, now what do I do with this? I have all the corporeal training. Now I have to find a way to make a living, using my body as my instrument. That means no more crazy stunts, no more riding motorcycles, no more of anything that could possibly hurt any part of my body. I had no car, no money…and my girlfriend, who I’d been holding a candle for during my time in Paris, had moved on. I was starting from ground zero, on a new road to God knows where.

  Strange as it sounds, I remember having a dream one night where I was backstage and I heard a voice say, “Ladies and gentlemen…Tommy.” Maybe it was the influence of The Who’s rock opera Tommy. Regardless, it was that crazy dream that made me say: “Okay I’m no longer Tom McLoughlin, I’m Tommy.” I knew I had to reinvent myself.

  Where did you find work in L.A. as a mime?

  I started performing anywhere I could — at Joan Rivers’s comedy club, The Comedy Store, a blues club called The Ash Grove, which is now The Improv. I did my mime routines as an opening act for Bo Diddley, Big Mama Thornton, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker. At first, I was a solo performer. Then I put together an act with a girl I met at the Renaissance Faire named Katee McClure, who I eventually married. I founded a comedy troupe called the L.A. Mime Company, with Katee, Mitchel Young-Evans, Tina Lenert and Albert Ash. We performed at theaters, clubs, festivals, and on TV shows. I kept making my canvas — and the mime stories that I was writing and directing — bigger and bigger.

  What were the main influences on your mime work?

  I created my own comic character. I learned I naturally walk at an angle and have a bit of a lope, and a number of Parisians called me Hulot. I didn’t understand what that meant, because I didn’t speak French. Later somebody explained to me that Jacques Tati had created a character named Mr. Hulot, and they thought I walked like him. When I finally saw his movies, I realized this guy was doing exactly what I wanted to do. He was doing silent comedy that showed the influences of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle, but he was also satirizing the modern world in movies like Playtime and Trafic. So he became my new hero, because he was writing, directing, and starring…and that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a one-man operation like Tati.

  So my character — who I called Dufus — was a modern guy who just doesn’t belong in the modern world. People on the street would say that he looks like something out of a silent movie. He always had the same kind of stupid look on his face. And I threw him into simple situations that were way over his head.

  I started making short films on video because that was the only medium I could afford. Those were the days when video cameras were gigantic. You used reel-to-reel tape, or you could only play back the footage on the same camera you shot on, so it was very limiting. But I was happy to be storytelling in that medium…All I wanted to do at that time was make the world laugh. I felt like, if I could be responsible for making people laugh, I was doing a good thing.

  For about the next ten years, I would do anything that came along that had some aspect of mime to it. I did about fifty commercials — for Heinz, Bob’s Big Boy, McDonald’s, Kodak, Honda, you name it. I put together a circus for the opening of the Bonaventure Hotel, with elephants and giraffes and stunt performers. I was sort of the ringleader of the whole thing, and my father was the fire-eater. I did promotional appearances for department stores. One time, I dressed up as Harold Lloyd and Nancy (my future wife) was Mary Pickford, and our other friends played Chaplin and Keaton. So many weird gigs…I poured the wine when Orson Welles spoke for Paul Masson. I was the hand model for Winchell Donuts. It was crazy shit, but it paid the rent.

  I couldn’t bring myself to take a regular job. I only took jobs that had to do with show business. There was too much of a performer’s ego in me to do anything else.

  It was during that time period that I decided I really wanted to be a film director. Of course this is the great cliché: “What I really want to do is direct.” My first big break in film came right after I got back from Paris. I got a call saying, “Woody Allen is looking for mimes for a new comedy that he’s doing, and he wants to interview you.” I was a huge fan of Woody Allen’s early movies — Take the Money and Run, What’s Up Tiger Lily?, and Bananas — so I went down to the old Desilu Studios and met Woody Allen.

  Woody wouldn’t really make eye contact with me. There was a pool table in the room, and he’d glance up from the table for a second and then look back down again, and he was pushing these billiard balls around as he talked. I don’t do a very good Woody Allen impression, but he was like, [in frantic but halting speech] “I don’t know what I’m thinking, I just…I-I-I’m gonna do this physical comedy, but I’m not Chaplin…I-I-I can’t do this.” He was doing his self-deprecating Woody Allen schtick, and he said, “I’m hiring mimes because I’m gonna do robots and I want to imitate one, and…it doesn’t even sound funny does it?” And I found myself going, “No, no, no, it sounds great!” Here I was, this kid in my early twenties trying to encourage one of my idols. Ultimately I showed him what I did, and he said, “Well, if you do that, what if I do this?” And he did his hysterical staccato robot moves, and we talked about that. So, three of my friends and I ended up getting roles in Sleeper.

  My best memories of the experience are of watching how Woody Allen directed in those days. Of course I wanted to be a director, so I watched him very closely. What he would do is go up to his A.D. [Assistant Director] and give instructions, and then the A.D. would talk to the actors…Woody had a real hard time telling an actor what to do. Obviously he’s gotten past that, but at that time he seemed intimidated by the process. And then they would roll the
camera and he would just riff. He would deliver his scripted lines, and then he would keep adding asides. At a certain point he would stop and say, “Okay that’s enough.”

  What was so incredible about that was seeing him give himself all these options for later [in the edit].

  Sleeper was what got me my SAG [Screen Actors Guild] card, and got me into the union. After that I was in a documentary called The Incredible Machine, made for National Geographic. [8] It was a film about how the body worked. I came in and they painted every single muscle in my body, using different colors for the different types of muscles. It must have been a five-hour paint job. And then I had to move and they shot close-ups to demonstrate how the muscles work. Very tedious. But again, it was a job that used my mime training.

  While working on Sleeper, I also met Joel Schumacher (who was the production designer). A few years later, he directed me in Lily Tomlin’s The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981). He called me up and said, “Would you like to come work with these guys who have to act like toys?” There’s a scene in the movie where Lily opens a closet door and there’s all these toys in there…I don’t even remember what toy I played…I think I might have been the bear…But that was another one of those crazy jobs that came after I got my SAG card. The funny thing is I’m still getting [residual] checks — usually for about two cents — from all those different jobs.

  Your big break was on the variety show Van Dyke and Company?

  Yes. In 1974 or ’75, the L.A. Mime Company was performing at a theater in Hollywood called Las Palmas. Dick Van Dyke came and saw us one night and he said, “I’m going to be doing this variety show, or a pilot for a variety show, and I’d love to have you kids on.” We were floored because this was Dick Van Dyke! Dick is probably the single greatest actor/performer who I have ever met. He is so accessible, so humble, and so honest.

  Andy Kaufman auditioned for the pilot too, so we got to watch Andy perform for the writers and do all the material he had at that point. I was already a fan of Andy because I’d seen him perform at The Comedy Store. For the producers, it came down to featuring Andy or us, and they chose Andy as the more important act. But Dick was more excited to work with us. He wanted to us as an extension of his performance. He literally said, “I want to be the sixth member of the L.A. Mime Company.” And he always added something to every sketch I wrote. He understood the mime world so well that he could come up with things that made it so much better. He loved the sketches, and it was a great experience for us to be able to bond with such a major comedy hero.

  It took a while before the pilot was picked up and turned into a series — maybe a year or more. There was a period where we were wondering if it was really going to happen. When it finally happened, the producers said to me, “We want you to write these sketches and, in turn, we’ll let the mime company perform on the show.” We had our own spot just like Andy Kaufman had his spot. Even though they had top writers on that show — I think Steve Martin wrote on the pilot — I wrote all the physical comedy stuff each week. It was an incredible honor for a twenty-six-yearold mime who hadn’t really done much else.

  Each week they’d say something like, “Okay, Freddie Prinze is going to be the guest star this week, so we need something for Freddie. And this is our Thanksgiving show, so come up with something that is Thanksgiving themed.” That was the challenge. Or “Lucille Ball’s gonna be on this episode, so write something great that Lucy and Dick can do together.” Or Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman, Tommy Smothers, Sid Caesar…Each sketch had to be tailored to the guest star, and then I’d choreograph with them what I had written.

  I tried to write around their comedic skills. With Tommy Smothers, I didn’t know how good he would be with slapstick comedy, so we did a chiropractor sketch where it looked like he was bending Dick in half and pulling him apart. Then we built a “squash suit,” like from a cartoon, so Dick’s head and hands extended upward and outward but the bottom half of his body looked like an accordion. Dick would walk with his legs bent, and it looked like he’d been hit with a hammer and squished down. Then it was up to Dick and Tommy and Katee from the Mime Company to react to what they had done to this guy.

  Tell me about working with Lucille Ball.

  Lucy was amazing. I’ve never seen a woman — or a man — create such fear on the set. She was such a perfectionist and had been doing it for so long that she automatically took over. She wouldn’t do anything without knowing everything about it. “Is that my key light? That’s my fill light? How long am I going to be sitting here before something happens?” If I was pantomiming handing an object to her, she’d say, “Don’t just show me the size. How heavy is it?” I said, “Well, it’s about a half a pound.” And she’d say, “Okay and…is it plastic?” She focused on details that nobody else would ever think to ask about. That was her process. She would question you to see if you had an answer. And if you didn’t, she would let you have it. She’d say, “If you don’t know, who’s supposed to know?”

  One day, there was a very uncomfortable moment where Dick and Lucy were waiting while the crew took care of some technical detail. And Lucy was getting impatient. Finally she turns to Dick and says, “What are they doing?” And he says, “I don’t really know.” And she just glared at him and said, “You don’t know? This is your show and you don’t know what’s going on?” It was rude, but that was Lucy — she was a “go for the throat” person.

  I learned very quickly that all of these great working professionals — Sid Caesar, Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman — were excited to do a mime sketch. They had a lot of experience and enthusiasm because they were getting to do something they don’t get to do as much anymore. That’s how I knew that these people truly loved what they were doing.

  As great as it was working with people like that, I started to get frustrated with the show because the Mime Company sketches kept getting cut. On the day of taping, the producers would cut it. Or, if it did get taped, Andy’s bit would end up being fifteen minutes instead of five minutes, and they’d say there wasn’t enough room on the show. So I was writing all these sketches for the celebrity guests, but I wasn’t getting paid or credited because I wasn’t in the Writer’s Guild. My payment was supposed to be the time that the L.A. Mime Company was featured on the show. That was the carrot they dangled in front of me…but it kept getting further and further away. When the show was nominated for an Emmy, I finally went to the Writer’s Guild and fought to get my name put on the show as a writer. I had two routines in the nominated episode.

  What happened to the series?

  NBC kept changing the time slot. Usually when that happens you start to lose your audience, because they just don’t know where to find the show. One day, Dick was driving up to the NBC lot and the guard at the gate said, “Oh, so sorry about your show, Mr. Van Dyke.” He goes, “What?” “Well, about the show being cancelled…” “The show was cancelled?” That’s how he found out. It’s a great example of how callous our industry can be. He was devastated. I felt really bad for him.

  Possibly the reason it was cancelled was that the world of comedy was changing. Saturday Night Live had just come on, and it was the beginning of a new age. The old variety shows were a dying breed. Van Dyke and Company came along during that transition, and the show was not given a fair shake. The network kept moving it around and the public moved on to other things. Its failure had nothing to do with Dick. His talent remains unsurpassed even today.

  How did you move from television into film?

  I was twenty-six or twenty-seven years old when Van Dyke and Company was cancelled. And I remember thinking that Orson Welles had directed Citizen Kane at twenty-six and Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel at twenty-six. I felt that if I was going to “make it,” this was when it was supposed to happen. But I wasn’t where I wanted to be. I wanted to be a comedy filmmaker, not just a mime on a TV show. So I felt like I had to turn what I was doing into what I really wanted to do…but I didn’t know how.


  So I started attending filmmaking classes at the Sherwood Oaks Experimental College on Hollywood Boulevard. I took classes in directing, editing, and production. While I was there, I saw Rocky for the first time before it was released. Sylvester Stallone came to talk to us about it. Then John Cassavettes came in with A Woman Under the Influence — a cut that was maybe an hour longer than the released version. Martin Scorsese came with Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. He asked us to give him feedback, because he felt that he was working in a genre that he had no business being in. He was so open about it. He kept saying, “Talk to me, tell me what’s wrong.” Of course, nobody would say anything. We were all too shy, too inhibited. What is a bunch of nobodies supposed to say to Marty Scorsese?

  I was blessed to have Rod Serling as a writing teacher for six weeks. I took extensive notes on everything that came out of his mouth. Not only was everything that came out of his mouth fascinating, but what didn’t come out of his mouth was also fascinating. He smoked these non-filtered cigarettes, and he would take a huge drag and suck the smoke in through his nose and into his mouth. Then he would begin to talk. And I’d watch him, waiting for him to exhale the smoke. Over time, the smoke had to be coming out…but you could not see it.

  Truffaut came and talked to us about Small Change…John Badham came and talked about WarGames…I took Syd Field’s screenwriting class when Syd Field was still a fledgling screenwriter himself…Irving Kirshner taught one of my directing classes…Dan O’Bannon was my editing teacher…I’d have to look at my notes. There were so many people. I planned every day of my life around going to see films, auditing film classes as USC and UCLA, and attending seminars at Sherwood Oaks Experimental College, where I got the benefit of meeting all these industry insiders.