NEW YORK (AP) — Judd Apatow likes to keep things. He even goes so far as to say that he is a hoarder. But unlike the average hoarder, he insists that all the things he stores are stunning and neatly collected.
“I save everything, but I don’t have it in a pile in the middle of the house,” says the writer-director. “I'm the Felix Unger of hoarding. Everything was taken care of very well.”
Apatow fans—and comedy fans in general—will capitalize on this personality quirk with the release Tuesday of “Comedy Nerd,” a massive, 570-page, photo-filled memoir about every chapter of his storied career.
It's filled with behind-the-scenes footage, script snippets, notes from network bosses, essays, movie posters and mini-profiles of his fellow comedians. Here's his late-night ideas for “Knocked Up,” typed out on a BlackBerry, and a photo of Adam Sandler's old fake ID.
“I feel like making this book justifies the accumulation,” laughs Apatow. “I saved it for a reason. I wasn't wrong to throw away the photograph of Billie Jean King taken when I was 10 years old.”
Online notes and emails
The producer, director and writer of This Is 40 and The 40 Year Old Virgin was inspired to create the book based on similar memorabilia from The Marx Brothers and Saturday Night Live.
He spent a year going through his photographs (there were 400,000 of them), mementos and clippings, then scanned everything into his computer and laid out the entire book in its raw form. He spent the next year writing essays and captions.
“The idea was that the experience of looking at the book would be as if I was over your shoulder, explaining what it is and telling you stories,” he says.
Apatow includes notes he obtained from network standards—”Just a reminder that Ben's twirling dance is not meant to be sexy,” one reads about “The Ben Stiller Show”—as well as Garry Shandling's note-filled edit for the script from “The Larry Sanders Show” and a page from an unproduced script written by Owen Wilson. Apatow reveals that Paul Rudd had a pretty funny but wasted cameo in Bridesmaids.
It includes an increasingly acrimonious 2001 email exchange between himself and writer Mark Brazil arguing over a long-forgotten comedy sketch, as well as an alternate original setting of “Anchorman” – a group of emcees during a plane crash into a snowy mountain that becomes a parody of the film “Alive.”
Andy Ward, Apatow's editor and Random House's executive vice president and publisher, said this book could only have been written by Apatow – he was a visual thinker, an avid collector and an obsession with comedy.
“There's a photographic element to it. It's sort of like something found in a sketchbook. It has advice about life in comedy,” Ward says. “If you know him at all, it's very true to who he is and I think how he approaches what he does.”
Apatow isn't even afraid to show the times when he was stupid. “I think a lot about all the people I've worked with and how magical those times were. So I'm really excited to show where I was an idiot or terrible, because that's part of the journey,” he says.
“It's always an experiment”
There are pages dedicated to TV shows that were never made, such as North Hollywood, about three friends trying to break into show business, which would have starred Amy Poehler, Kevin Hart, Jason Segel, January Jones and Judge Reinhold.
It seemed funny, at least judging by the photos at the party during the filming of the pilot, which showed people getting high. “People want me to show pictures of them smoking huge joints in 2002?” asks Apatow. Answer: yes.
Failures fill the pages of Nerd Comedy, despite the writer's money-making instincts that brought us “Freaks and Geeks” and “Girls” on TV, as well as the Oscar-nominated films “Bridesmaids” and “The Big Sick.”
“The hardest thing about comedy is that it's always an experiment. And everyone has completely different opinions about how the story should be told and what works and what doesn't,” he says.
“So a big part of being in this business is learning how to have those conversations that I wasn't good at. I was very emotional and intense for years. That led to a lot of cancellations.”
Making people laugh
Apatow's rise coincided with the emergence of new voices that became part of his troupe – Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Rudd and Segel. “I really think there was a new type of comedy brewing, and it took a few steps for the business to catch up,” Apatow says.
Apatow doesn't think the comedy business is much easier these days, despite the huge appetite of numerous streaming services.
“I don't think it's better, it's just as weird in a different way,” he says. “It's just an experiment and no one knows if anything will work. That's why we keep bumping into each other.”
Apatow is donating all proceeds from the book to those affected by the Los Angeles wildfires. He lost his old home in Pacific Palisades; its ruins are one of the first images in the book. Turning it into a charity also helped streamline Comedy Nerd, as magazines and photographers allowed Apatow to use their work for free.
“Everything in the book was donated. Usually you have to pay for all these photographs and reprints of articles. But when I told people where the money was going, everyone gave me everything for free.”
