Cut to the Monkey: A Hollywood Editor’s Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Making Hit Comedies

Introduction

A common thread in my work is a desire to find the humor in humanity. We are naturally ridiculous. Life is absurd. That is a message the universe is sending out every day. People who laugh live longer. And better. If you want to cheat death, laugh. A study in Norway found that cancer patients who laughed were 35 percent more likely to be alive several years later. Their explanation: Humor works like a shock absorber in a car, you appreciate a good shock absorber when you go over big bumps in life.¹

Why I edit or write or direct my projects the way I do is rooted in who I am. For me, creativity started as far back as I can remember. I partially credit my desire for creative expression to my mother. When I came home from kindergarten, my mother always praised my artwork. Wow! You are so creative! No matter what I drew or painted, it was celebrated. Was my art anything special? Hardly. But because my mother praised my creativity, she reinforced a way of thinking in my nascent brain. Today, when somebody critiques a project or dislikes my interior-design choice or writes a bad review, my first thought is not, I’m not good enough. Instead, I think, They don’t get it. And sometimes simultaneously, They’re idiots. I know I’m creative. That’s what my mother told me as my cerebral foundation was developing and hardening. And because that neural pathway is set, apparently for life, I have self-confidence in my creative endeavors. This (delusional?) belief is one reason I continue. I persist despite myriad failures.

Children want to please their parents. That is one reason it’s important to pay attention, praise their efforts, and support their desire to express themselves. Children have amazing, natural creativity. But around age seven, the maturing prefrontal cortex starts to put the brakes on some behaviors. Kids begin to realize they could be doing things wrong. A brushstroke here or an idea expressed there could generate criticism. The creative impulse begins to shut down, a defensive maneuver against negative attention.

Early artwork by Roger Nygard: acrylic on paper.

I grew up on the outskirts of Minneapolis, where the nearest house was a quarter mile away. The bus picked me up at the end of a long road. Initially, we didn’t even have a house number, simply Rural Route Box 443F, Long Lake, Minnesota. On the bus to third grade at Orono Elementary School, I became enchanted with a girl with a sunny smile and spirited, mischievous laughter. One day I asked if we could play after school. When she agreed, after the bus dropped me off, I raced back on my bicycle, two and a half miles to her house. We played all afternoon, full tilt, enjoying squirt gun fights, screaming and laughing. I can’t remember ever existing in such a blissful expression of pure happiness as that afternoon. Eventually her older sisters came home and put a stop to our fun, like older folks feel they must. As I biked home, my heart was so full of joy, I expressed myself, singing loudly to the trees, I’m happy! I’m happy! My overflowing emotions found expression in song. Suddenly I heard other voices. Two kids ran out of the woods, mocking my singing, laughing at me. I looked back, mortified. How did I not consider that other kids might hear me?! I turned forward and pedaled as fast as I could, away from ridicule, a painful lesson on the road to suppressing the expression of emotions.

Two of many competing motivations have been set in my framework since childhood: the desire to be boldly creative and the fear of criticism due to expressing myself. Luckily the need to create mostly wins out. There is no such thing as a bad lyric, a wrong brushstroke, or a weak line of poetry if it comes from the expression of a feeling. Any work of art is brilliant if it expresses an emotional perspective.

One reality I faced was that singing and music weren’t my strengths. All I had to do was pick up a trumpet when I was nine years old to realize I was not good at making it sound pleasant. But when I started messing around with photography, it was different. My father was an amateur photo buff. He had a Yashica 120mm, twin-lens reflex camera. To him, cameras were for family photos: wearing our Sunday best for church, or birthday parties, holiday gatherings, waterskiing, or proudly displaying a northern pike caught off the dock.

One winter day, when I was seven years old, my father drove to work in Minneapolis, where he was a grain buyer for General Mills, purchasing trainloads of oats or corn or wheat at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. He left the Yashica sitting out, with several unused shots. If something was unattended in the morning, I would have it disassembled before lunch. I constantly got in trouble for antics like blowing out the pilot light inside the furnace—I was curious to see how the mechanism would restart itself. Pro tip: It won’t. When Minnesota temperatures plummet in December, you notice quickly when the heat stops. I confessed. My action was not malicious. I was curious.

Photo by Roger Nygard, Sr.

Nygard children dressed up for church: Jay, Steven, Theresa, and Roger.

The day I borrowed my father’s camera, I walked down to the lake, where waves had crashed and sprayed upward, coating shoreline vegetation. I thought the ice formations looked pretty, like something out of a painting on a holiday card. I photographed these frozen stalactites, clicking and winding, until the roll ended.

I put the camera back and forgot about it. A few weeks later, when a package arrived from the photo finishers, I heard my father yell, Who wasted all this film on ice?! I was in trouble again. But my mother intervened. She thought the photos were creative. And because she did, so did I. She put the shots in the family album, a place of honor. I have been shooting film ever since. My mother produced a creative monster.

Early photography by Roger Nygard: Ice formations coating a winter shoreline.

A few years ago, my brother discovered a box of old color slides. I was amazed at how my father had expressed himself artistically, photographing with moody lighting. My dad died when I was thirteen years old; I never thought to ask him about his own impulse for creative expression. While making my documentary The Nature of Existence (2010), I interviewed Irvin Kershner, director of Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back (1980). When I asked about his thoughts on life after death, he said, The afterlife is what remains in the memory of the people you have known—in the work you have left behind. My father’s photos are part of what he left, part of how I know who he was.

Photo by Roger Nygard, Sr.

Genevieve Nygard, photographed with moody framing and lighting.

I remember discovering my love of movies, lying on the carpet in front of the television, watching films with my parents. My mom enjoyed such Alfred Hitchcock thrillers as Lifeboat (1944), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and The Birds (1963). I remember whirling clouds of birds and lots of bloody fingers.

My dad enjoyed sci-fi and action. We watched When Worlds Collide (1951), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), and Where Eagles Dare (1968), a movie so suspenseful that decades later I can still feel how my feet were tingling during the climax. The pacing builds to an incredible sprint. Richard Burton was matchless. The double and triple crosses were intense. And with Clint Eastwood wielding dual machine guns, how could anybody top that?

James Bond came close. It didn’t matter what I was doing, everything had to wait if there was a Bond film on television. I came to prefer the Roger Moore era, because I liked the emphasis on comedy. Many have criticized the comedic turn the Bond films took, but as an eleven-year-old, I ate it up with two spoons. And the stunts reached a spectacular zenith with Live and Let Die (1973). The speedboat chase has no peer, with boats skidding across lawns, past priceless reactions of distraught wedding guests. And to cap it off, they added the funny, southern Sheriff John W. Pepper (Clifton James), who narrowly dodges Bond’s speedboat as it jumps over him. And then another boat jumps and crashes into Pepper’s squad car.

Two Louisiana State Police troopers drive up to the aftermath, enjoying Pepper’s failure: Does that look like a boat stuck in the sheriff’s car there, Eddy?

Trooper Eddy responds, Boy, where you been all your life? That there is one of them new car-boats.

Author’s collection.

Sheriff Pepper is not happy that a boat dropped into his car. From Live and Let Die.

Jerry Lewis was my favorite comedian (with diversions to Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, and The Little Rascals). I would pass up a trip to the zoo anytime it was Jerry Lewis versus a ladder. Later I discovered Lewis’s predecessors, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd, but Jerry was my first.

I was also hooked on Minneapolis station KSTP’s locally produced creature-feature show, Horror, Incorporated. There was no host, only a corpse struggling to get out of a coffin and a disembodied voice introducing movies. I would set my alarm for midnight on Saturday to wake and watch Tarantula (1955), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), or The Monolith Monsters (1957), and of course the myriad wolfmen, Frankensteins, and Draculas. Afterward it was a long, scary, shadow-filled walk back to my bedroom.

On Saturday afternoons, my dad used to take me and my siblings to the matinee at the Wayzata Theater, where they would replay recent hits. Our imaginations were expanded by In Search of the Castaways (1962), Fantastic Voyage (1966), and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969). One afternoon, I went to the Heights Theater in Columbia Heights with my cousin Tony to see a G-rated matinee of Snoopy Come Home (1972). Afterward, we decided to wait for the next film. As a ten-year-old, I was amazed by Big Jake (1971). It was an R-rated film (now downgraded to PG-13 by modern standards) starring John Wayne. For the first time, I became aware of all the groovy stuff I was missing in the edited-for-television frauds. For months afterward, I recounted every detail of the plot to my friends. Big Jake is a Western with motorcycle stunts, machete fights, and shoot-outs, and the topper was Jake McCandle’s dog, named Dog. If somebody got the drop on Jake, he yelled Dog! and his black collie would rip the guy apart. That was pretty cool to a ten-year-old.

My motion picture endeavors started when I got my hands on my father’s 8mm Bell & Howell camera—a 1962 model similar to the one used by Abraham Zapruder when he filmed the Kennedy assassination; 8mm film was actually 16mm film, which you had to turn over in the camera halfway through, fumbling about in complete darkness. When you mailed the roll to a distant processing plant, they would split it down the middle and send it back for projection as one, spliced, 8mm roll.

My very first filmic project was to imitate the pixilation process of the Gumby cartoons I watched on Clancy and Carmen, a pair of Minneapolis children’s morning shows. I animated the adventures of my Charlie Brown and Linus dolls as they tightrope walked and fell off the couch. Most of my shorts were pursuit films, a chase being the easiest story to tell without sound. Early silent films emphasized chases, such as Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), with a posse chasing bandits, Charlie Chaplain’s The Adventurer (1917), which opens with a jailbird on the run, or anything featuring the Keystone Cops (1912–1917).

In high school my ambitions grew more sophisticated (though not much) as I upgraded to Super-8mm film, which added a magnetic sound stripe. I conscripted siblings and friends as actors and built stories around props and locations. My favorite prop was a semi-realistic dummy I built to prank-shock passersby. My friends and I thought it was hilarious when a suicidal dummy leaped off an overpass, causing panic. One school-bus driver didn’t appreciate our effort to provide him with a funny story to tell his wife. He swore nonstop as he drove off with our dummy. This was a brief setback.

Around that time, I discovered a British television series that changed my life. I was captivated. It was like nothing else available on American television. I watched episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–1974) religiously. Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Salad Days’ was the funniest sketch I had ever seen, a parody of director Sam Peckinpah’s penchant for violent, bloody movies such as Major Dundee (1965), The Wild Bunch (1969), and Straw Dogs (1971). It was over the top, sick, insane, and wonderful. It opened my eyes to possibilities I never knew existed in comedy.

In college I switched to the newest technology, a twenty-five-pound, portable three-quarter-inch videotape recorder, and non-linear, tape-to-tape editing. There was no such thing as undo. You had to get it right the first time. As film gave way to video, and video to digital, I never stopped playing with images—and comedic ideas. One of my early shorts, Poltercube, was a spoof of Poltergeist (1982). My film was about an unsuspecting chap who solves a Rubik’s cube while plagued by apparitions. Parody is a great place to get comedic filmmaking experience because the formula is simple: Copy an existing movie trope and exaggerate it wildly. Voila, you have comedy.

A still frame from Nygard’s early 8mm film.

After collecting a Bachelor of Arts in speech-communication (now called communication studies) from the University of Minnesota, I drove to Los Angeles in 1985 to apply to graduate school and look for a job. I didn’t know anybody in the film business. I found a tiny apartment and spent a week stuffing envelopes, sending out nearly one thousand résumés. This led to nine replies, three job interviews, and two job offers—a one-out-of-one-hundred response rate. I accepted my first job at a production-management company called Rollins, Joffe, Morra and Brezner. They managed such comedians as Woody Allen, David Letterman, Robin Williams, Martin Short, and Billy Crystal. I got the call because my résumé arrived the day their production assistant put in his notice to quit. Timing is everything. Larry Brezner interviewed me and thought I would work harder than the prior candidate, Jerry Lewis’s son. I had been in competition for the job with the son of the comedian I had most idolized growing up!

Roger Nygard editing with three-quarter-inch videotape in 1983.

Rollins, Joffe, Morra and Brezner produced movies such as Arthur (1981), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), and Throw Momma from the Train (1987). I started at the bottom as a messenger, but I endeavored to be the best they ever had. It’s hard to shine when you are delivering packages and fetching lunches. But the job led to unusual opportunities. On one errand, as I walked through the production office of the Billy Crystal HBO special Don’t Get Me Started (1986), I heard somebody yell, Hey you, go stand next to Billy! They were looking for a photo double, so Billy Crystal could play multiple characters as he acted with himself. It tuned out Billy and I were about the same height and build. I was a closer match than the other candidates. They put the character makeup and wardrobe on me, and I became Billy Crystal from behind. To this day, when I run into Billy Crystal, he still affectionately calls me Back of My Head.

Occasionally the assistants would call in sick or go on vacation, and I was the nearest warm body who could sit in and handle the phones. Buddy Morra noticed how organized I was and promoted me. I hadn’t intended to get Buddy’s assistant fired; I only had tried to do my best. Part of my expanded duties as assistant to a talent manager was to scout for new comedy talent. I loved hanging out in The Comedy Store sound booth with my pal Scott Nimerfro, who worked there for six months. Scott was the first of my University of Minnesota college buddies to follow me out to Los Angeles. Our favorite comic was Sam Kinison, who caused vein-popping, stroke-inducing reactions from the audience. Scott would tell me what time Kinison was scheduled so I could rush over, and we would laugh ourselves sick.

Another comic I saw at The Comedy Store was Steve Oedekerk. He was primarily a prop comic falling somewhere between The Amazing Jonathan and Joel Hodgson. One of his best bits was The Psychic Severed Head, which he would pull out of a bag and lay on the table. Then the head would tell him what items he was holding or what he was thinking. It was absurd, sick, and hilarious.

Steve Oedekerk was always writing scripts, and in 1989 he wrote Pissed (later titled High Strung) with Robert Kuhn. Steve had failed to raise the money to shoot the film himself. I asked Steve to let me try, with the understanding I would direct and Steve would star. I don’t think Steve expected me to pull it off, but hey, you never know.

While working for Buddy Morra, I made a short film called Warped (1990), which lead to my first paid directing job, on an episode of a syndicated television series called Monsters (1988–1990). My episode was called Small Blessing and starred Julie Brown, Kevin Nealon, and David Spade. Because of my comedy connections, I brought in comedians to read for parts.

At the same time, I sent Steve Oedekerk’s screenplay to everybody but got no bites. And then the composer I had hired for Warped read it and loved it. He knew a first-time movie investor from New York by way of Ukraine named Sergei Zholobetsky. Incredibly, Sergei’s checks didn’t bounce, and we started preproduction in the fall of 1990 on a $350,000 budget. (Years later, in 1996, Sergei Zholobetsky was indicted for defrauding New York hospitals out of millions of dollars for wheelchairs that he never delivered. He fled the United States and was finally apprehended in 2005 while hiding out in a Greek monastery. When you are a filmmaker, you are thrilled to have a budget. You don’t think to ask your investor if the money is legitimate.²)

We renamed the film High Strung (1991) because newspapers wouldn’t print Pissed or Pissed Off. The word piss is one of the taboo four-letter words you aren’t supposed to say on television or something terrible will happen.

Steve Oedekerk played the lead he had written for himself. Also cast were Thomas F. Wilson, Fred Willard, an unbilled Jim Carrey, Jani Lane (the lead singer from the rock band Warrant), and my future Trekkies (1997) partner Denise Crosby.

In the spring of 1991, I hired an editor named Tom Siiter. Apparently, High Strung was the first feature-length film to experiment with a digital, PC-based, non-linear editing-system called an EMC2, running on a 286 processor. The media was stored on optical discs and had a resolution so grainy that squinting actually helped. We had a total of 650 megabytes of footage—an absurdly low amount of data for an entire feature film by today’s standards.

We had only six weeks to cut the film, which meant long days and nights. After five weeks of looking over Tom Siiter’s shoulder, I absorbed the process. By week six I was editing the film myself when Tom collapsed or went home to sleep. I was anxious to step in because it felt like the time it took me to explain what I wanted for the next edit could have been used to try three new variations if I was pushing the buttons. After that experience, I learned to use a D/Vision Pro, Avid Media Composer, and Final Cut Pro. I found very little significant difference between editing technologies; they are all manipulators of image and sound. Does it matter whether you drive to Santa Monica in a Toyota or a Lexus? Does it matter whether you use Word or Pages to create a document? The end result is you arrive at the same place. The most important variable is the driver, or the writer, or the creativity of the person at the keyboard. Although I admit I quickly get used to the add-on comforts of a luxury model.

Roger Nygard, Jim Carrey, and Steve Oedekerk on the set of High Strung in 1991.

As a testament to how important early connections are, many of my most trusted friends are people I met the first year I arrived in Los Angeles. At the same time that I landed my messenger job, Luis Estrada was a clerk in the Paramount Pictures Motion Picture Production Finance Department. We had a lot in common and became fast friends. We worked to try to raise funds to get our projects off the ground. We came close, but never succeeded. While I was pursuing my directing ambitions, Luis Estrada rose through the ranks to vice president of Creative Services at TNT–Latin America.

After finishing High Strung, I discovered how difficult it is to make a second film. After two years of pitching scripts, I was broke, with $30,000 in credit-card debt. I was about ten minutes from getting a job as a taxi driver or a telemarketer. Then Luis Estrada called and asked if by chance I wanted to try writing and editing promos for TNT–Latin America. I cannot point to one job or project as being the most pivotal in my career, but this would be near the top. My philosophy is to say yes to opportunity, because each is a rare gift. Actors are often told, Work generates work. You do not know where a project will lead, but doing nothing leads nowhere. Saying yes to doing promos for Luis led to a two-year stint writing and editing advertisements for classic movie marathons. This experience was crucial to improving my editing skills because it taught me how to remove every inessential frame in a fifteen-second message. It was like practicing shooting layups all day long. I brought this editorial proficiency into my next project, my second film, an action picture called Back to Back: American Yakuza 2 (1996), and then to Trekkies (1997), a documentary about Star Trek fans. Both are fast-paced, with experiments in radical editing, as I was creating my own style of coloring outside the lines. Imagine if teachers let children color however they are inspired and praised them for expressing themselves. Who knows what they might come up with? In Back to Back, I played with jump cuts, wipes, and repeated action to maximize footage in gunplay and car-chase set-pieces. To shape Trekkies, I established what would become a signature documentary technique, asking the same thematic questions of all interviewees and assembling like with like, building sound-bite trains, where everybody answers the same question. I arranged their fractured responses so interviewees finished each other’s sentences.

Courtesy of Trekkies Productions.

Star Trek fans Brian Dellis and Paul Rudeen in 1996.

Courtesy of Trekkies Productions.

Denise Crosby with director of photography Harris Done, interviewing Star Trek fans in 1996.

As I continued to navigate the independent film world. I took my fourth film, Suckers (2001, a dramatic comedy about car salesmen) to film festivals. Comedian and filmmaker Mike Binder attended a screening of Suckers at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen. He noticed my editing style and offered me a job editing his HBO pilot The Mind of the Married Man (2001–2002), which became my first professional editing job, where I was editing somebody else’s project. That also led to working with a post-production supervisor named Gregg Glickman. Several years later, in 2007, I was in India shooting footage for my fourth documentary, The Nature of Existence—a humorous exploration of existentialism, if you can imagine that. Gregg Glickman, now a vice president supervising post-production at HBO, called to ask if I was available to meet with Seinfeld (1989–1998) co-creator Larry David, who was currently shooting season six of his HBO series, Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–TBD). They were about to lose an editor and needed a replacement. I replied that due to being in Mumbai, India, I was not available, but I would be back in three weeks if the position was still open.

Courtesy of Blink, Inc.

Roger Nygard interviews a Hindu sadhu and disciple for The Nature of Existence in 2007.

When I returned to Los Angeles, I was surprised to find the position was still