Monday, October 28, 1996
FILM:
Actress glad to be working with Bill Murray, using
improvisationBy Cecily Feltham
Daily Bruin Contributor
When actress Janeane Garofalo was in college she was voted the
"Funniest Person in Rhode Island." But as popular as she was in
America’s smallest state, the rest of the country hasn’t
necessarily clued in to the comedienne’s talents.
"A lot of people would go, ‘Well, what movies have you been in?’
’cause most people think I’ve been in one movie," says Garofalo,
the queen of comic self-deprecation. "Actually, I’ve been in 12 or
13, but you wouldn’t know that."
Most people do know that she was in "The Truth About Cats and
Dogs," in which she starred as Abby, the quick-witted animal talk
show host thwarted by low self-esteem.
Now Garofalo is on the big screen again, this time with slightly
bigger co-stars. She plays an elephant specialist with Bill Murray
in the upcoming "Larger than Life." For her work on the small
screen, she has recently received an Emmy nomination for Paula, the
cranky, wise-cracking talent booker on HBO’s "The Larry Sanders
Show."
The thing is, she doesn’t even consider herself funny. "No one
would ever describe me as a particularly funny person," she
explains. "The only thing I have going for me, I would have to say,
is that I get it. Like, I see that ‘Spinal Tap’ is funny. I am
attracted to funny people and funny things and repelled by not
funny things, even though I’ve participated in many of them."
Maybe that’s why she was so attracted to the prospect of working
with Bill Murray, a man who unquestionably falls into the
universally funny category and the only reason she agreed to do
"Larger Than Life." Note that this is an elephant movie, starring
the same pachyderm, Tai, who spearheaded the cast of "Operation
Dumbo Drop." Also note that elephant movies wouldn’t normally rank
with "Annie Hall," one of Garofalo’s personal favorites, when it
comes to what’s funny. But acting with Murray was an opportunity
not to be missed for Garofalo, who says that the elephants weren’t
all that much of a deterrent. "What the hell  I was dressed
in khaki," she says with a shrug.
Garofalo has been a Murray fan for over a decade. As a freshman
at Providence College in 1982, she named him the person she most
admired  she filled an entire blue book on the genius of
comedy that was Bill. What she didn’t even imagine at the time was
that she would one day meet him, as she did during her infamous
stint on "Saturday Night Live."
"I saw him by the craft service table. I was dressed as Dorothy
for a horrendously bad Wizard of Oz sketch, and I went and
pretended that I had something to do by the coffee machine,"
recalls Garofalo. "I stood there and stood there and it was like
waiting to get into a jump rope game, like, when do you say hi? And
then I went up and stood extra near him and then conjured up some
question to ask someone near him and said, ‘Hello,’ and shook his
hand."
She’s not sure whether it was that incident that got her the
elephant gig or not. "I think he was impressed when I quit (SNL),
actually, was what it was. He was impressed with the balls it took
to quit the show, and that’s what made him ask me to do this movie.
‘Cause it couldn’t have been my work on the show."
As to her hell-raising decision to leave the cast, she says, "I
just happened to hit the worst possible time you could go. It just
didn’t work out. (But) I can actually say, in my life, on my
deathbed, ‘I was on "Saturday Night Live," the longest-running
sketch comedy show in history.’ And without it, I wouldn’t have met
Bill."
One of most thrilling things about Murray for Garofalo is that
he’s an improviser. "Bill’s whole thing, like Garry Shandling’s
whole thing, is, ‘Change it. Throw me a curve ball. Don’t say the
same thing twice,’ and that’s what I love. When that happens, it’s
rare."
She thinks that a lot more sets could use the kind of
spontaneity that Murray created for "Larger than Life." "’The Truth
About Cats and Dogs,’ unfortunately, was not a set that was open to
improv, which I think it could have used," she says. "And that is
not a slam on Audrey Wells, who I love, who wrote the script. But I
think a lot of movies could use that freedom. I think it can make a
better scene."
In the end, Garofalo found the final cut of "Cats and Dogs" a
little too "soft" for her tastes, which is why she usually avoids
seeing her work after it’s wrapped.
"It’s embarrassing," she says. "I wind up seeing them sometimes,
like on a plane or on HBO or something. I just hate my acting when
I look at it and I hate the way I look, and all the normal stuff
that anybody would hate seeing themselves blown up on a screen.
"You sit there and you look at it and you think, ‘That’s not
what it’s supposed to be,’ or, ‘Why do we have to cater to the
lowest common denominator?’"
Control over the end product is one of the reasons that,
creatively, Garofalo prefers stand-up.
"Acting, you don’t write your material," says Garofalo. "You
have to do it the way your director wants you to do it, which can
be painful."
But in stand-up comedy she gets to do it all. It was her very
first routine, developed in her senior year of college, that won
her that title of "Funniest Person in Rhode Island," something she
says was not hard to do. She explains that it’s not as if the other
comedians weren’t funny, or that they didn’t get it, but that they
didn’t know how to bring that with them onstage.
"That’s the weird thing about a lot of stand-ups," she says.
"They are very funny offstage, and they do know why ‘Annie Hall’
was so funny, and they do know why ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors’ is the
most perfect movie in the world. Yet you put them on the stage and
it all flies out the window, because they have the wrong ideas
about their persona, and the choices that they make. They are not
being themselves. It only gets you in trouble not to be
yourself."
Garofalo, by contrast, knows who she is. Raised in Madison,
N.J., she wanted to be a secretary like her mom. Even after she’d
seen Woody Allen’s "Take the Money and Run" at the age of 8, a kind
of comic catalyst that made her laugh more than she thought humanly
possible, she still planned on going to college and being a
businessperson of some sort.
"I didn’t know anyone who was involved in show business," she
explains, "nor anyone who thought about going into show business."
She memorized Cheech and Chong albums, obsessed about Albert Brooks
and Monty Python, but didn’t even consider professional comedy an
option.
When she finally did reach college, though, she realized that it
was possible to do what it was that she had loved for so long. Her
years at Providence provided her with a lot of the material that
she started performing with during her fourth year, including an
aborted attempt to snag a 3-foot diameter roll of toilet paper from
a Rhode Island McDonald’s. "I was in college, and you steal toilet
paper in college because then you don’t need to buy it," she says.
"So my roommate and I saw the huge one that they have at roadside
bathrooms, and we thought, ‘nirvana.’ Of course, we didn’t make it,
because it’s so cumbersome you couldn’t really get it out of there.
I was so humiliated, although I still continue to pilfer toilet
paper every now and again."
Garofalo is currently filming the tentatively titled, "Untitled
Irish Love Story." The film’s script is one that, for once, she
likes without reservation. Already wrapped and ready for release
are "Touch," with Bridget Fonda, and "Romy and Michele’s High
School Reunion." Both were working experiences that Garofalo
thoroughly enjoyed. But she says that she can only talk about the
on-set experience, because one never knows how the finished product
will end up.
"As an actor, a lot of times, unless you’re huge, you’re a hired
gun," says Garofalo. "You take a movie and you’re in it and you
light a candle and pray to St. Jude that it’s not gonna be
embarrassing."
FILM: "Larger Than Life" opens Nov. 1.
20th Century Fox
Janeane Garofalo appeared as Abby in "The Truth About Cats &
Dogs."