AVC: Is there going to be a complete DVD set at some point?
CE: Right now, it's sort of tied up in legal matters that are more complicated than I thought they were. Adam and I actually did some commentary on the first season. Sony was supposed to be putting it out, but somebody else who will remain unnamed is halting the process. Hopefully we'll be able to get by that and get it out.
AVC: Why did you choose R.E.M.'s "Stand" as the theme music?
CE: Well, I liked that song, to begin with, just the tune. But the more I listened to it, the more the words sounded like what we had shot. At the time, R.E.M. was not... They were just about to become really big. And so they gave us the rights to use it on the series. We had to buy them, but they weren't expensive. I met Michael Stipe at a party at Saturday Night Live years later, and I told him that everybody associates that song with my show, and he said that it was, without a doubt, the stupidest song that R.E.M. had ever written. And I said I think that's ultimately why it appealed to me, because it was the stupidest show that I had ever been on. So it was a perfect match.
AVC: It's not such a stupid song. R.E.M. probably has one that's even stupider.
CE: Yeah. "Shiny Happy People." That would be a good sitcom theme, too.
AVC: You were on SNL—
CE: That's what people tell me. I have a vague memory, but that's about it.
AVC: That was sort of the disgruntled season.
CE: Yeah, it was just a hideous year. It was a year when there were so many cast members, and [Adam] Sandler and [Chris] Farley and [David] Spade were still there, but they were on their way out. I did the show because I'd always wanted to. They offered it to me and I was moving back, and I thought, "Okay, that's something I can do in New York." I think I was lazy. I had a hard time elbowing my way in amongst all the cast members. There were just so many people there. I can remember shows where I was dressed like a munchkin until 10 of 1 a.m., and then I'd be on and go home. It wasn't what I thought: that sort of fast-paced, "from one set change into something else" kind of thing, which, I guess when you only have five cast members, you have to do. It was also not a good year in terms of the tone of the show. There were a lot of unhappy people there, so I didn't have a particularly good time.
AVC: You only stayed for one season?
CE: Yeah, there was no question that I was gonna stay. Everybody there was unbelievably nice. In retrospect, I look back and I go, "Maybe if I would have stayed, maybe things would have changed," or whatever. But I think I was just too old to be doing the show. I mean, I was still only 32, but... If that had been my first job, if I hadn't spent eight years at Letterman and then done my own show, I think I would have had more of a hard-on for it. I think I was just kind of like, "Well, I've kind of done this already."
AVC: I went to a screening of Cabin Boy recently, and it was pretty crowded. Everyone was really happy to see it.
CE: Yeah, which is really cool for me and for Adam. It's still, I think, reviled in the general world of moviemaking. But in meetings, I'm coming across more and more people in the established Hollywood world that say it's one of their favorite movies. And you go, "Are you just saying that?" But [Cabin Boy] and Get A Life, people have really hooked onto.
AVC: People embrace how weird it is. It's pretty funny, too.
CE: Yeah, it's funny in sort of a nauseous way. It's like you're on Vicodin watching it. It's a strange kind of thing. You know, all the jokes are funny. Adam wrote a brilliant script. It's just sort of the pacing and execution that put it in this weird world compared to what's out there nowadays... or what was out there when it came out. But it is its own thing, and it looks like what it was: two guys that only half-knew what the hell they were doing.
AVC: Cabin Boy's actual look is really interesting.
CE: It was going to be Tim Burton directing it. He produced it and he was going to direct it, and so it was going to be a pretty—I don't know how many millions—but it was going to be a high-budget film, because there were all these special effects in it. But when he decided not to direct it, the budget dropped to basically nothing. But we never changed the script, so we still had all these special effects, and we had to figure out a way to do them. The special-effects people we got were great, but if you don't have enough money, what you come up with is something that looks like you decided to make it look cheap. But it really just was cheap.
AVC: That wasn't a conscious decision?
CE: No, there was no conscious decision. People actually point out that when I'm on the raft, they like seeing the seam in the sky in the background: "It's really cool that you guys didn't bother with that, that it's still there." I can remember in dailies going, "We don't have money to re-shoot this! Oh my God! It looks awful!" But now, usually we take credit for it and go, "Yes, we were trying to go for a very surreal kind of look."
AVC: You and Adam seemed very surprised by the response at the screening. But you weren't defensive about the movie at all.
CE: Well, Adam and I don't hate the movie. We hate what happened afterward, to our careers. We had a good time making the movie, and we had fun writing the movie, and we had fun thinking about it and the fact that we were gonna do it. So I don't hate it, and he doesn't. It's flawed, there's no doubt about it. But it was our first attempt at something, so I don't personally feel like it was this momentous failure. I don't defend it to any great degree. It wasn't great, but compared to all the other shit that was out at the time... It was put at the bottom of the shit list, and it should have been at the top of the shit list.
AVC: The response to it when it came out was certainly bad.
CE: Yeah, terrible. And I think that part of it was that people expected more. Or that it was a Tim Burton movie. And it was given this big release. There were lots of promos for it. It was not like a small, Rocky Horror Picture Show release that then caught on. It was a big thing. I think for some reason, it just pissed a lot of people off, and I think maybe that was one of the reasons, I don't know.
AVC: Why didn't Tim Burton direct the movie?
CE: He loved the script when it came in. He was the one that pursued us. We weren't even thinking of doing a movie after Get A Life. Actually, it was during Get A Life that he called, because he had seen the "Submarine" episode. I get stuck in a homemade submarine with my dad in our shower, and then oxygen starts to run out. He liked that and he wanted to do like a Pee-wee's Big Adventure, but for the '90s. And I think at the time our script came in, Ed Wood's script came in also, and he opted to do that, for whatever reason. And it was the right decision for him, I guess, instead of Cabin Boy. He was involved. That's the thing. I remember meeting with him quite a bit during the production and talking about things he drew, the way certain things should look ,and that kind of thing.
AVC: When it didn't go over well, what was the studio's response?
CE: They pretty much blamed it on Adam and me. I mean, it was pretty much "Here's what happens when you give two guys a movie. This is what happens." It was really bad for our careers. I had never really thought of what happens when you fail on a big scale like that, or when you are presumed to have failed. Because on Letterman, you could come out one week and do a great bit, and the next week you might come out and flop. But then you're always coming back the next week and trying again. I think that was sort of the rhythm that I was used to, in terms of trying stuff and experimenting and trying to find something funny. Even on Get A Life, there were some shows that were great and other shows that were terrible, and I think in my mind, I just thought, "Well, you do movies now. You're doing movies. Okay, so this one wasn't great, but you'll do another one." That kind of thing. I didn't realize that it doesn't work that way. That you're really sort of stigmatized once you fail momentously, or publicly, in the business. It actually took a long time for Adam and to get work. I mean, we got work, but it wasn't our kind of work. The idea of me and Adam going in and pitching another movie was just out of the question.
AVC: Some people still consider it a bad movie today, but do you think part of that is because of Letterman's references to his role in this bad movie, Cabin Boy?
CE: Well, I'm sure he's kept it in people's minds. But Dave does that because he thinks the joke is on him for being in it. I'm sure if I said, "That bothers me," he wouldn't do that. But it doesn't bother me.
AVC: He's not really making fun of the movie. He's making fun of himself.
CE: Yeah, in the movie. But if you take that a step further, then it comes back to he's making fun of himself being in that shitty movie. [Laughs.] You know, it really doesn't affect me in any way anymore. At the time, I think he may have thought that it was a nice thing to do. He was great in the movie, and it was nice that he did it, and he's always been unbelievably supportive of what both Adam and I do on the outside. Even today, whatever we write, even if we know Dave will never see it—or even read it, like this book—I imagine in my head whether Dave would think it's funny. He's like that first teacher who you try to impress a lot, and then all through your life, you're thinking of that relationship.
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