Life ‘Sessions’ : Billy Crystal turns his anxieties and remembrances into HBO comedy series

Billy Crystal’s most vivid early memory, the death of an aunt when he was 5, has stayed with him all his life. He remembers her body, silent and cold, stretched out in the coffin before him, the soft funeral home music playing in the background, the room filled with relatives, cousins and uncles, his parents, his brother.

He remembers standing there, in front of the casket, and giggling, the only response his 5-year-old emotions could muster in the face of his panic and his fear. A week before she had been alive, laughing, pinching him on the cheek. And now, Aunt Rose was dead.

“If my life were a movie,” Billy Crystal was saying, sitting in his bungalow office at the Culver Studios one Saturday morning, “this is the scene where you’d fade in, with this old woman in a box and me staring at her.

“I was so frightened. I remember looking at her hands and realizing, all at once, that, at some point this is what happens to you.”

Faced with his own mortality, 5-year-old Billy found himself practicing deathbed scenes in the upstairs bedroom of his Long Island home, pretending to say goodby to his family, one by one, calling out their names, a slow and deliberate roll call that only ended when Billy’s brother, trying to sleep in the next bed, sat up to shout, “Will you shut up!”

Flash forward now to the summer of 1991, to another bedroom and another little boy. This time, though, the bedroom is really a stage set in a Culver City warehouse. The boy is an actor named David Toms, about to shoot a scene for a new HBO series called “Sessions,” created by, produced by and chiefly written by Billy Crystal.

Even though he surrounded himself with talented people--including co-executive producer Fred Barron (with whom Crystal co-wrote most of the six “Sessions” episodes), lead actors Elliott Gould and Michael McKean and director Tom Schlamme--Crystal found himself on the set for almost every scene. He was there for editing and music scoring, and practically every phase of the production, in spite of the fact that one reason he’d given for not wanting to star in the series himself was that his schedule was filled with feature film commitments.

“Well, you know,” Crystal says, admitting that he was on the set more as producer than if he’d been the star, “you don’t want to see somebody else raise your kids.”

But on the day the scene was shot where the little boy practices his deathbed farewells, Crystal found himself pulling back. “Sessions” is filled with moments based on Crystal’s own life, everything from the night of his daughter’s first date to the way he deals with the inevitable aging of his parents. But this scene--the first clear memory of his life--suddenly seemed too personal to film, a moment too sad to share. But Barron convinced Crystal that the scene was too powerful, too universal to leave out.

“Death is a frightening thing,” Crystal says, recalling the scene, almost whispering, the emotion still strong enough to subdue his voice. “And the way this kid plays it ...

“Midway through the first take, I had to leave. I was overcome. Because I felt bad for that little kid who basically started his life that way. I felt bad for me.”

Then Crystal’s voice lightens, returns to its usual, more confident, pitch. “But after that, once we had it on film, it was OK,” he says. “It was freeing.”

Crystal wrote the pilot script for “Sessions” 13 years ago, a poignant comedy about a man who’s in therapy, trying to make sense of his life.

Crystal was 30 when he wrote the first draft, just begining to be recognized for his work in the soap opera sitcom “Soap.” As the years passed and his star rose--from stand-up comedy specials and “Saturday Night Live” to hosting the Oscars and becoming a bona fide movie star, Crystal kept waiting for the right time and place to bring “Sessions” to life. This year, finally, HBO gave him the freedom he felt the show required, a setting where he could tell adult stories and deal with adult problems, unfettered by the restrictions of network television.

“When I first wrote this, there really wasn’t a place where I felt the show could be done properly,” Crystal says. “I’ve had a relationship with HBO for 12 years and I said to (HBO programming executive) Chris Albrecht, HBO is the place where we can really do this the right way. We’re not talking about gratuitous nudity; it’s not gonna be the topless woman of the week, but we’re gonna talk about adult things. It’ll be touching, as real as we can make it and as innovative as you want to get.”

The show revolves around the sessions between 42-year-old attorney Dan Carver (played by McKean) and his gently sympathetic psychiatrist, Dr. Sidney Bookman (Gould). Although the shows touch on a number of Carver’s anxieties and problems--from impotence and masturbation to how he can get along better with his parents, his wife and his kids--Crystal wants the audience to understand that the show is not just a litany of neuroses. “Sessions” is, after all, a comedy.

“This is not a show about therapy; it’s a show about conversations and remembrances,” says Crystal, who at a recent press conference bristled when a TV critic who hadn’t seen any completed episodes offered the opinion that a show focusing on a man’s personal problems might be “depressing.”

“Of course there are problems. That’s the essential element of drama--conflict,” Crystal says, clearly still bothered by some of the resistance he sensed among the critics that afternoon. “Without that it’s hard to be dramatic or funny. If it’s all going to be hunky-dory, you might as well be watching ‘Father Knows Best.’ ”

Which “Sessions” definitely isn’t. Among the scenes screened for the critics was a moment when Dan Carver, opening the door to meet his daughter’s first-ever date, finds himself face to face with a 5-foot-tall talking penis. When the foam-rubber organ appeared, the critics laughed loudly and Crystal, standing in the back of the room, turned to Fred Barron, wiped mock sweat from his brow and said, “Phew. They bought it.”

“I mean, that’s every father’s nightmare, I don’t care who he is,” Crystal says, explaining the scene and why he was so worried about the audience’s reaction. “We just decided to go for it.”

The rhythms of Dan Carver’s dialogue, even filtered through McKean’s delivery, are unmistakably Crystal’s. (“Why the hell do you get Graham crackers? I hate Graham crackers. It’s not a cookie. It’s not a cracker. What is it?”) so much so that even McKean, thrilled as he was to get the part, asked Crystal why he wasn’t playing Dan Carver himself.

“I never wanted to be in it. Even when I wrote it, I wanted to see somebody else do it,” Crystal says. “Part of it is scheduling, I’m having some success in movies and I’m directing now (in November, Crystal will direct and star in the feature film “Mr. Saturday Night,” which he also wrote) and that’s where I want to go.

“But I have had in my life some great stories, amazing coincidences, a family that went through a lot of tragedy but survived because we laugh about it.

“But I can only tell so many stories to Oprah, so many at a card table. So the challenge was to make the experiences someone else’s and to make them interesting, to get rid of some of my suitcases which are getting heavy. So why didn’t I want to play myself? I’ve been playing this part for 43 years. I don’t have to do it in a show.”

Instead, Crystal turned to McKean, whose life has remarkable parallels to his own. McKean, like Crystal, grew up on Long Island and, like Crystal, his father was in the record business. “Billy’s the only person I know who’s been married longer than I have,” says McKean, probaby best known for his roles in “This Is Spinal Tap” and “Laverne and Shirley.” “Billy’s been married 21 years, it’ll be 21 for me and Susan in October. He has two kids. I have two kids. So what’s happened is there’s now this third guy named Dan Carver, who’s partly me and partly Billy. And the truth is, this character is more like me than any part I’ve ever played.”

But Crystal believes the most important role may be the part of Dr. Bookman. In the role, Elliott Gould is a throw pillow of a therapist, soft and comfortable, always asking the right question at the right moment. “Billy and (casting director) Pam Dixon said they wanted the character to be likable and I’m glad they felt that way about me,” says Gould, who has been quite public about the many years he’s spent in analysis and the good it’s done him. “It’s important that the character not be a wise guy.”

“They’re like a trapeze act, these two guys,” Crystal says of his stars. “Michael does all the spins, but Elliott catches.”

Crystal fully expects that HBO will order more episodes of “Sessions” for next year, which means that as soon as he’s finished with “Mr. Saturday Night,” he’ll be right back in the saddle again, sitting down with Barron for the mock therapy sessions (in which Barron plays Bookman and Crystal plays Carver) from which “Sessions” scripts are born. There’s a part of him that would like to take a break, to relax for just a little while. But not now. Not yet.

“I feel right now that I’m seeing the ball real good,” Crystal says, using a baseball metaphor to explain. “I feel more open creatively than I ever have. I feel trusting of how to express myself, and it also helps that people are embracing that.

“I’m not in a rush to crank out a lot of movies and wear out my welcome,” he says, explaining why he didn’t leap immediately into a feature film that could have capitalized on the success of “City Slickers.” “I really have to care about what I’m doing. And people are letting me do it. It’s dizzying sometimes. I feel little dizzy. But it’s OK. It feels right.”

“Sessions” premieres tonight at 10:10 on HBO.