The Muse of Albert

Albert Brooks’ movies contain speeches of mad comic indignation that hold up like Shakespearean soliloquies. There is, for instance, the Nest Egg Principle speech from “Lost in America.” In the 1985 film, Brooks plays a yuppie advertising executive who quits his job, buys a Winnebago and drops out of society only to see his wife lose all of their money--their “nest egg”--in a Las Vegas casino.

“Please do me a favor,” he tells her. “Don’t use the word. You may not use that word--it’s off-limits to you. Only those in this house who understand nest egg may use it. And don’t use any part of it either. Don’t use ‘nest,’ don’t use ‘egg.’ If you’re out in the forest you can point. The bird lives in a round stick. And you have things over easy with toast.”

In his latest film, “The Muse,” which opens Friday, Brooks once again mines life’s comic possibilities--this time as a Hollywood screenwriter, Steven Phillips, whose career is as limp as yesterday’s toast. In one scene, Phillips arrives at the studio gate for a meeting with Steven Spielberg only to discover that he has a walk-on pass, not a drive-on pass.

“Is that the worst a person can get,” Phillips asks the guard, “or is there like a crawl-on?”

Brooks is something of a deity among his peers, in part because he quit a thriving stand-up career in the 1970s to spend the next two decades making personal, uniquely funny films that require his name (they are not movies, they are “Albert Brooks movies”) as a modifier.

“The Muse” is the sixth and most commercially ambitious of the Albert Brooks movies, co-starring Sharon Stone, Jeff Bridges and Andie MacDowell. But Brooks, 52, says he doesn’t find that getting one of his movies to the public is much easier now than it was in 1979, the year he made his first feature film, the mock documentary “Real Life.”

In fact, given Brooks’ track record in Hollywood, his office has a fittingly unlived-in look. There’s a desk and a couch and some framed posters of his movies on the walls, a snapshot of Brooks and Elton John on an otherwise empty bulletin board. Brooks, in jeans and an untucked shirt, apologizes a little for the couch (“That’s the couch they gave me. I couldn’t get a better one”) and explains that the bulletin board used to have more pictures on it, when he was in the middle of casting “The Muse.” The office is on the Universal lot, but in the way these things seem to go in Brooks’ relationship with studios, it’s a home that’s not really his. October Films, which produced “The Muse,” used to be owned by Universal but is no longer, and Brooks had no deal at Universal anyway, no relationship even--there is just nothing, as one of his characters might say.

Such is life for a filmmaker who, by listening to his own muse and steadfastly turning down more commercial offers, has earned a kind of literary respect but little of the clout that a hit would afford him. Brooks made “Real Life” for $500,000, getting the money from Jonathan Kovler, then-owner of the Chicago Bulls and a connection via Brooks’ girlfriend at the time, Linda Ronstadt, and her manager, Norman Epstein. Since then, Brooks has had the assistance of some heavy hitters, including mega-producers David Geffen (“Lost in America” and “Defending Your Life”) and Scott Rudin (“Mother”), but he’s still apparently in need of a benefactor--someone to endow the Albert Brooks Fund for Better Comedy at the Movies.

“If somebody’s reading this paper that owns 2 million shares of Microsoft stock and they feel they don’t know what to do with their money, and they want to make the next 10 Albert Brooks movies, they can call,” he says.

An Albert Brooks interview isn’t much different, at times, from an Albert Brooks movie. That is to say, he has a way of taking an everyday human interaction and making it, well, Brooksian. In an initial 90-minute discussion, Brooks spends a lot of time talking about the financing problems he’s confronted throughout his career, then agrees to a follow-up interview to cover happier subjects. And there are happier subjects: He’s married now, to multimedia artist Kimberly Shlain, 33, and the couple have a 10-month-old son, Jacob.

A few days after the happy discussion, Brooks phones to see if there are more questions. After all, he has pointed out, the Los Angeles Times has never done a substantial profile of him and, despite his general sense that talking about his work gets him nowhere, ultimately he cares. You might have more questions, you tell him, but then again you’re wondering whether this article should be for the casual reader who might not otherwise see “The Muse” or the die-hard fan who already knows a great deal about his work.

There is silence on the phone. “What are my choices again?” he asks.

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James L. Brooks (no relation), the writer-director who has been both a friend and an employer, using Albert as an actor in “Broadcast News” and “I’ll Do Anything,” hears about Brooks’ plea for a benefactor and calls it “Albert’s ‘Sunset Boulevard’ fantasy.”

“Treating a unique career, which Albert is having, as some mild tragedy is a big mistake,” James L. Brooks adds. “ . . . Some pictures don’t reach the audience they might deserve. But the big deal is they let you do it. Everything else is hubris.”

Albert Brooks’ hubris has tended to be linked to his on-screen personality. The supposition is that “Real Life” and “Modern Romance” and “Lost in America,” though important, even seminal comedies, featured too smothering and self-involved a character for mainstream audiences, who mostly heard a guy whining about his problems. Brooks has begun of late to agree--or at least to try to agree. In his last three movies, he has receded from view, giving what are essentially co-starring roles to big-name females--Meryl Streep in “Defending Your Life,” Debbie Reynolds in “Mother” and now Stone in “The Muse.”

“I think the earlier characters sort of ran into walls with their head down like a ram. And I think maybe the later characters recognized that there was a wall,” Brooks says. “In the very early movies, I had no concept of audiences liking or disliking a character. I was very naive. I thought audiences would always know that these were written or prepared. But they don’t, they just take it at face value. As fun as it [was] to play, I would say the amount of people who hated the guy in ‘Real Life’ and ‘Modern Romance,’ it would be tough to keep doing that film after film, to get any financing. It doesn’t mean you have to play a big lovable sop, but you have to find a way to let more people in.”

Brooks did try, in his own way, to go “Hollywood.” He agreed to rewrite the Andrew Bergman script for “The Scout” and to star in the 1994 film about a New York Yankees scout who discovers a phenom pitcher in the Mexican leagues. But the studio, Fox, made him tack on a happy ending, Brooks says, and, predictably, the experience ended badly.

Hoping to Connect With Large Audience

It remains to be seen how sympathetic audiences will find Brooks’ screenwriter in “The Muse.” When we meet him, Phillips is so lacking in edge that the town gives him a humanitarian award. In desperation, he finds Stone, who plays a real-life Muse, the Greek goddess of inspiration secretly on retainer all over Hollywood, counseling screenwriters and directors on how to orchestrate their next hits.

All of this may sound “too inside,” industry-speak for a film that won’t resonate beyond the 310 and 323 area codes, but to Brooks “The Muse” is more a domestic comedy: big and fun and accessible, with 65 laughs (he counted at a preview screening) and a bankable female star. In addition, USA Films is releasing “The Muse” into 1,200 theaters, far from the Paramount release of “Mother,” which hit six theaters on opening day in 1996.

Stone, who says she’d been wanting to segue into comedy for some time, agreed to do “The Muse” without reading the script, and at a reduced fee. She does not appear to be joking when she calls Brooks “the living Kubrick” and says he had only one major request as a director: “You’re not going to play [the Muse] like Zsa Zsa Gabor, are you?”

Brooks says “The Muse” wasn’t supposed to be his latest film. Instead, he was working on a script that harkens back to “Albert Brooks’ Famous School for Comedians,” a short film he did for PBS in 1971 about a fictitious school that trained people in various comedic skills, including the spit take. The new movie was going to involve a branch of the school, one that trained comedians to go into hospitals and heal people with their jokes. But then Brooks saw a blurb about a movie called “Patch Adams,” and he changed his mind.

Image From the Movies: West Coast Woody Allen

In any Albert Brooks movie, it’s the little scenes that resonate: In “Lost in America,” it’s when Brooks’ yuppie, then broke, walks into a pharmacy in the middle of nowhere and asks the druggist if there are any high-paying jobs in the immediate area (“No, not in the immediate area,” the druggist replies). In “Modern Romance,” it’s when film editor Robert Cole, newly single, makes a date with a woman only to pick her up, drive a few blocks, then return her to the sidewalk in front of her apartment, apologizing that he’s dating too soon.

The movies project the long-held image of Brooks as the West Coast Woody Allen, a bundle of self-indulgent neuroses. But “the person Albert Brooks,” says writer Monica Johnson, “can laugh at the character Albert Brooks. He isn’t living that. He isn’t some weird, isolated, neurotic guy.”

Johnson met Brooks in 1975, when the two shared an office. Brooks was working on the short films he made for the first season of “Saturday Night Live,” and Johnson, the younger sister of comedy writer Jerry Belson, was a writer on “Laverne & Shirley.” The two hit it off and, in the 25 years since then, they’ve co-written every Brooks film except “Defending Your Life,” generally relying on each other’s eccentricities. The Las Vegas sequence in “Lost in America,” Johnson says, was inspired by a trip the two took--Brooks to see Neil Diamond, Johnson to gamble. She lost all of her money, then went to a pawn shop to sell her mother’s ring.

Brooks didn’t want to be in “Lost in America.” In 1983, he says, he tried to get Bill Murray to star in the film. Murray was interested, but with one caveat: He wouldn’t be available for 2 1/2 years.

“I think somebody could play the parts that I write,” Brooks says, asked if Albert Brooks has to be in an Albert Brooks movie. “Nicolas Cage I think could be funny in an Albert Brooks movie. . . . I can very easily see writing a movie where my character would not be in at all, or a small part, like one or two scenes. I’ve wanted to do that. I’ve talked about it. But people still keep saying to me, ‘You’re the only chance we get to see you. Don’t do that.’ ”

Brooks wants to continue to act more in the coming years and has signed on to star with Leelee Sobieski in “My First Mister” about the relationship between an 18-year-old girl and an emotionally shut-down older man.

In the past, Brooks has expanded his range, playing an alcoholic head doctor in the horrible “Critical Care” and a millionaire convict in last year’s “Out of Sight,” but he’s also thrown a lot of fish back, never again gaining the attention or acclaim of “Broadcast News” (the image of Brooks as reporter Aaron Altman, sweating profusely on-camera, is probably the closest Brooks has come to mass sympathy in his career).

You can listen to Brooks and longtime manager Herb Nanas reel off all the roles Brooks has turned down (“Dragnet,” “The ‘burbs,” “When Harry Met Sally . . . ,” “Midnight Run,” “Sgt. Bilko”) and wonder why it would have killed him to take a few of them.

“You look at Tom Hanks or Robin Williams, and they’re the perfect examples of that,” he says. “Tom Hanks has won 18 Academy Awards, you could not be more respected, and I swear to God I turned down ‘Dragnet’ and ‘The ‘burbs’ because I thought they were not good projects. But he just did it and went on and did another film. . . . If I started to do that tomorrow, I’d probably get a few people that would go, ‘Oh, what’s he doing?’ And then I’d probably get to do it too. Who really cares? You don’t care, you’ve got your own problems.”

But later, Brooks adds: “Maybe part of me feels that I’m still trying to get people to understand what my real work is.”

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Brooks didn’t set out to be a comedian, though his father was one--the late Harry Einstein, a dialect comedian who worked with Eddie Cantor and had the nickname “Parkyakarkus.” Einstein died of a heart attack onstage at a Friars Club testimonial for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Albert Brooks (ne Albert Einstein) was 11.

“My dad had the Jack Benny sense of timing--the pause, the patient line, the sort of look Benny would do to provoke a laugh,” says Cliff Einstein, one of Brooks’ three older brothers. He is creative director and chairman of Dailey & Associates, an L.A. advertising firm. “Albert has adopted many of those teachings, and they came out of the classic vaudevillian teachings that my dad had.”

At 19, Brooks dropped out of Carnegie Tech and returned to Los Angeles to become an actor. He met with an agent, who drew him a diagram--20 stick figures standing in line outside a casting office. The agent pointed to the diagram and told Brooks if he wanted to be the first stick figure in line he should forget about being an actor and become a comedian. Brooks obliged, and immediately found himself on television, doing his conceptual comedy bits (most famously Danny and Dave, the world’s worst ventriloquist act) on “The Tonight Show.”

This led to two albums (“Comedy Minus One” and “A Star Is Bought”), but Brooks hated doing stand-up comedy, hated waiting around all day, just to be funny in front of people at night.

“It’s unnatural to even wait until 11:30 at night to be funny,” he says. “I didn’t like my second and third shows in clubs. They were too late for me. It didn’t feel natural.”

For this reason, Brooks says, he turned down a shot to be the permanent host of “Saturday Night Live” when NBC launched the show in 1975. Instead, he did a series of short films during the first season of “SNL,” work that proved the training ground for his first feature, “Real Life.” In the film, a parody of the PBS documentary on a real-life family, Brooks plays a nettlesome documentary filmmaker who brings bubble-headed cameramen into the home of an all-American family and proceeds to ruin their lives.

As a commentary on media intrusiveness, “Real Life” beat “The Truman Show” and “EdTV” by two decades. It also anticipated Brooks’ career: cherished by some, unknown to most. None of Brooks’ films has grossed more than about $20 million domestically, which is what it cost to make “The Muse.” At a Writers Guild of America-sponsored symposium on comedy last June, comedian Norm Macdonald turned to Brooks and said: “You’re my favorite comedian, but you’re not America’s favorite comedian.” It was the kind of platitude Brooks has heard over the years--high praise from Hollywood’s popular people. Meanwhile, he wouldn’t mind a little of the popular people’s power. If nothing else, it would make the day go easier.

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“If somebody’s reading this paper that owns 2 million shares of Microsoft stock and they feel they don’t know what to do with their money, and they want to make the next 10 Albert Brooks movies, they can call.” ALBERT BROOKS