SXSW 2020: FOR MADMEN ONLY dives into the mad genius of comedy legend Del Close

Few people outside of comedy circles are familiar with Del Close, but the eccentric improv instructor may have done more to shape the modern comedy sensibility than any other single performer or director. Close nurtured generations of incredible comedians over the years with his formative live improvisational structure known as the “Harold,” and with his wild and occasionally aggressive urgings for performers to push themselves and their craft further than they had ever thought possible.

Over the years Del Close taught future Saturday Night Live legends including Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, John Belushi, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and countless others. While his unpredictable and sometimes volatile teaching methods (Close was known to be verbally abusive and even throw chairs to make a point) helped generations of comedians unlock their potential, Close struggled with mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse, which only made him more unpleasant even as was influencing students who would go on to become the most-lauded names in the comedy world.

Director Heather Ross tackles Close’s complicated life and history with the new documentary For Madmen Only, which attempts to delve into Close’s psyche through a pastiche of art forms including the use of comic art from his 1980s Wasteland series from D.C., his own voice recordings, live-action reenactments starring James Urbaniak as Close (with improvised interactions with actors playing his collaborators), and new interviews with a huge cast of comic vets including Bob Odenkirk, Tina Fey, director Adam McKay, and many more.

We caught up with Ross to discuss how the film came together, its unique structure, and how Del continues to influence new generations of comedians more than two decades after his death. For Madmen Only was slated to premiere at this year’s SXSW, which was cancelled due to the ongoing threat of the coronavirus. Head to the film’s official site to sign up for release updates.

How did this film come about? What inspired you to want to tackle the life of Del Close and his influence?

Well, I think it came out of a very specific time in my life. I first heard about him when I was making my first feature doc. I had moved to Chicago, I knew nobody there, I was shooting a documentary [Girls on the Wall] in a teenage girl’s prison and I was kind of doing all of this for the first time. My days were spent hanging out with these girls who had these unspeakable lives, the worst situations you could imagine. But they were freaking hilarious, they were so funny. And anytime the guards left them alone, they were just so on-point with a quip or a one-liner, and they would freestyle these amazingly hilarious rhymes. I had always been a comedy fan, and I had taken this more hardcore vérité path with my career, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the sort of inter-weaving of those two things.

And at the same time, I’m living in this city, I don’t know anybody, I’m just pouring over The Reader, the weekly paper, and trying to find stuff to do, and I read this article about this guy Del Close, who lived on Wells street in a really shitty apartment, and was covered in roaches and smells bad, but he not only trained Gilda Radner and Bill Murray, who are my first loves from early childhood, but also Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. And that just seemed really odd. [Laughs] And it seemed like a story. I wanted to know what he knew. And there was again that hint of darkness combined with some very funny stuff. It took me a while to get to the point where I was making the doc, but I wouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t heard about him during this time I was exploring, kind of subconsciously, the connections between dark circumstances and humour.

How did you settle on the structure of the film? The comic sequences, the live-action reenactments, and the interviews all blend really well. 

Well, it took a lot of experimenting. I think we knew pretty early on that it couldn’t just be a standard talking-head documentary. If we were going to do something about Del we were going to have to channel some of Del, and part of his legacy was that he embraced risk, and he embraced the forming of new genres, and he embraced failure. [Laughs]

The comic book was sort of the first part of the structure that came into being. We had found some old copies of [Wasteland]  and were like, “This is really interesting.” I never knew that D.C. in the ’80s was doing stuff that would rival Drawn & Quarterly or Dark Horse Comics, it was pretty groundbreaking stuff. There’s a lot of breaking the mold in the comic book. And then we were also looking at it and thinking, it’s kind of interesting, here’s a guy, his life work was improv — he says it in the movie — it’s like fireworks, once it’s gone, it’s gone. It’s there for a moment then it’s gone. So there’s really very little of his work that is documented, and he’s an obscure figure, so there aren’t that many interviews with him or whatnot. So we thought the comic is a really good way to see him and be with him and be with the myths that he chose to discuss.

But then, comics are not unlike movies in that they have a visual element and a dialogue element and often those are at odds with each other and they lead to some greater understanding of the character. So we were particularly interested in the ways where the imagery of the comic wasn’t literal; it spoke to some impressionistic state of mind or some other event in his life that he was less comfortable talking about literally.

And with the scripted stuff, as we started laying out the story, I was saying, “Here’s the part where they’re trying to figure out what this comic would be, but obviously we can’t do that.” And my writing partner Adam [Goldman] was like, “Why not?” So we started exploring ways of showing the creation of Wasteland and the creative process behind it in a way that made sense in a documentary about Del Close. What we landed on was all of the lines of Del Close, played by James Urbaniak, would be stuff [Close] actually said, because we had all these hours and hours of tape recordings we didn’t know what to do with, and then everybody else would be someone who studied with Del or came through his lineage and they would all be able to improvise off of it. So we kind of created our own little improv form for the purpose of these scenes. And in a film that really explored the creative process, since that was sort of the heart and soul of what Del was interested in, it was another way to put the creative process on-screen.

Del Close inspired all kinds of reactions, even from the people in the film; did you want to create a balanced portrait of him? Or were you trying to get into his headspace as much as possible? 

I didn’t approach it journalistically. Early on, as I learned about him, I was pretty ambivalent about him as a person, you know? He is not what you’d call a nice person. He would throw chairs at people and humiliate them. He reminded me of friends I had in my 20s, who were a blast, but then end up face down in a pool of their own vomit and you have to clean them up, and after a while it just gets annoying. I was never in the camp of worshipping Del. So just to be true to my own experience of him, I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just 100% celebrating his breakthroughs and not exploring some of the weirder choices he made and some of the people that maybe got him at terrible times and didn’t see the genius and only saw the vomit, you know? [Laughs]

Was there one particular interview you were really excited to land or one that sticks out to you?

I was really excited to talk to Bob Odenkirk, because I heard that he had a Del story but that it was kind of untapped in the other little video tributes to Del, you never heard from Bob. And nobody on the face of it would even know that he was influenced by him because he’s not an improv guy. But I sat down with him and he was so funny and approachable and he had this great story that kind of encapsulated the whole thing about Del. [Laughs] He’s this guy that you wouldn’t want to be, but he inspired you to be you in a really good way.

And Tim Meadows, I had been pursuing him for years, and for some reason it never worked out until one of my co-producers — who happens to be his neighbour in Venice — saw him walking on the street, offered him a ride [Laughs] and said, “Hey, how come you never gave us an interview for our doc?” And we were basically locking the next day for SXSW and everyone was like, “Don’t do it, why are you going to open up your cut again?” And I was like, “It’s Tim Meadows and I think he’s going to have something good,” and he really clinched this thing about Del being this kind of pied piper of the eccentrics, and the sort of rueful way that he was both proud of his students and also…we can’t know what was in his mind, but there seems to be some regrets about not receiving a little more recognition in his lifetime.

What do you think it is about Del’s methods that still speaks to newer generations of improvisers?

Janet Coleman, who’s the improv historian that we talked to for the film, she said, and it didn’t make it into the film, a lot of artists aren’t celebrated in their lifetime because they’re working on it, you know? We don’t always see the results of art until 10, 20, 30, 100 years after a spark has been kicked off. And it’s a bummer for Del in some ways, but from talking to people who studied with him like Matt Besser, Matt Walsh and Adam Mackay, as he got older he was really interested in not adhering to the form that he had created, the Harold. He wasn’t like, “Oh, we figured it out, and it’s done.” He was always pushing people to see now what can we do with it, how can we fuck it up? He pushed his students, and his favourite students were the ones who did take it into places he never would’ve thought.

So, I think part of it is in the bravery, it’s like a legacy of boldness and braveness that he taught his first-generation students that they taught their students. So they’re empowered to follow their weirder, more troubling and more bizarre ideas, and they find success and liberation with that and then they pass that onto other students, and these theatres become hotbeds of people who are essentially competing for how far they can push the form. I think he said once, “Fall and figure out what to do on the way down.” It’s that premise of, “You have the answers, just go out and do it,” and I think that’s something that has empowered people to really get so much more experimental with comedy.

For Madmen Only was slated to premiere at this year’s SXSW, which was cancelled due to the ongoing threat of the coronavirus. Head to the film’s official site to sign up for release updates. 

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