James L. Brooks had his first encounter with showbiz royalty as a student journalist at Weehawken High School in New Jersey in the 1950s, when he managed to wrangle a one-on-one interview with legendary jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong.
“I asked him a question that nobody had asked him up to that time. I said, ‘How do you take care of your lips?’” recalls Brooks, who conducted the interview at Armstrong’s house in Queens. “And the answer was a 45-minute show where he’s taking out more creams and things, because he really had an elaborate routine for taking care of his lips.”
And what was his reward for this precocious celebrity get?
“I was loathed,” says Brooks. “The fact that I was an unpopular kid whose picture was on the front page of the school paper [with a celebrity] … Actually, it made me be bullied.”
Today, Brooks is showbiz royalty in his own right. Should he ever need to prove his exalted status to those long-ago bullies, he can send them a link to his IMDb page, where they’ll find an extensive list of credits stretching back to the mid-1960s. He’s created or co-created TV series including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (1970-1977), “Lou Grant” (1977-1982) and “Taxi” (1978-83), written and directed the Academy Award-winning films “Terms of Endearment” (1983), “Broadcast News” (1987) and “As Good as It Gets” (1997), and developed and executive produced the animated series “The Simpsons,” which is currently in its 37th season.
If that doesn’t do the trick, he can casually drop the fact he’s been honored with nine Emmys and three Oscars (for best picture, best director and adapted screenplay, all for “Terms of Endearment”) and, as of this week, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which will be unveiled in a ceremony of Dec. 11.
The Walk of Fame honor comes on the eve of the release of his first feature in 15 years, “Ella McKay,” a dramedy about an idealistic 34-year-old lieutenant governor (Emma Mackey) thrust into the governor’s job when her mentor (Albert Brooks) is appointed U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
She must juggle the logistical and political challenges of her new position while trying to contain the chaos and distraction caused by a pair of selfish, impulsive men in her life — her husband (played by Jack Lowden) and her father (Woody Harrelson) — with a little help from her aunt (Jamie Lee Curtis).
Ella is the latest in a long line of strong-willed female protagonists in Brooks’ oeuvre, from TV news people Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore in the eponymously title sitcom) and Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) in “Broadcast News” to Flor Moreno (Paz Vega) in “Spanglish” (2004) and Lisa (Reese Witherspoon) in “How Do You Know” (2010), whose refusal to compromise their standards defies society’s expectations and sometimes puts them at odds with others.
“I think the key to [Ella], her dirty secret that comes out when she’s loaded, is ‘I can help people. I can make their lives better,’” observes Brooks. “That’s the driving
force of her.”
Although there’s nothing explicitly autobiographical about the movie, “a lot of this touched home base for me more than usual,” according to Brooks. “My father was an errant husband, and so certainly that’s there. And my sister, who’s eight years older than I am and helped raise me, is in there someplace.”
The Brooklyn-born Brooks has said that he never knew his father, who abandoned the family before he reached consciousness. Brooks lived the life of a latchkey kid, while his mother, Dorothy, held a variety of jobs to support the family, working in stores selling women’s clothing and sewing machines by day and sometimes hawking magazine subscriptions by phone at night.
Although he wrote to celebrities asking for autographs and, eventually, interviews, he insists he had no dreams of taking Hollywood by storm.
“My dream was to survive … and somehow be able to fend for myself,” says Brooks.
Brooks started his showbiz career working as a page for CBS in New York City. “When the next grade up took a vacation, you filled in for them for two weeks, and the one I filled in for was a copy boy at CBS News, when CBS News was the Bible,” he explains. “You’re supposed to be a college graduate for the page staff, which I wasn’t, and certainly for this job at CBS News, for God’s sakes, but the guy I replaced never came back from vacation, and that was my break. I had a foothold. That led to me eventually becoming a news writer.”
Brooks was tasked with writing copy for a radio station, where he met a man who went out to Los Angeles to work as an executive for David L. Wolper Prods. When the man offered him a job, he left his secure union position at CBS and moved west, where he was put to work on scripts for the documentaries “Men in Crisis” and “October Madness: The World Series” (both 1965). Six months in, he was laid off, but fate intervened when he met a man named Allan Burns at a party.
“We were a grubby group of documentarians, and then, in the middle of that, Allan Burns walked in in a tuxedo,” recalls Brooks. “He was a handsome, tall, big guy with a wonderful wife, Joanie. He said, ‘At last, I’m with real people,’ because he had come from one of those parties that Mike Nichols used to call ‘rat fucks.’
He asked me what I was doing, and I said, ‘writer,’ and he got me a shot. He was a guy with just immediate and constant kindness in him.”
Brooks made his sitcom-writing debut penning two episodes of Burns’ series “My Mother the Car” and went on to co-create “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and several other series with the writer-producer, who died in 2021 at the age of 85. On his own, he created the groundbreaking “Room 222” (1969-1974), set in a Los Angeles high school, which was one of the first TV series with a Black lead, Lloyd Haines, who played history teacher Pete Dixon.
Brooks turned 88 back in May. His mind is still sharp, his voice strong and vital, but it’s impossible to get around the fact that he is in an age group where very few filmmakers (notably Clint Eastwood, Ridley Scott, Roman Polanski) have the energy or the nerve to plot their next project. But his desire to create has not dimmed.
“It’s not like I’m not aware of [my age], but … I’m working and I’m thinking, and I know what I hope will be my next job,” he says.
Is there already a script?
Brooks answers, “I haven’t used that word to myself, but I think there’s papers on a desk, yeah.”
Tipsheet
WHAT James L. Brooks receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
WHEN Dec. 11, 1 p.m.
WHERE 6910 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, CA
WEB http://www.walkoffame.com