Michael Showalter plays an average guy in The Baxter… a really average guy. In honor of that film’s off-kilter delights, as well as his 37th birthday today, here’s a reposting of an interview with him from the fall of 2005, on occasion of the movie’s original theatrical release. To wit:
For someone whose comedic resumé includes inspired absurdist
fare like Wet Hot American Summer and
the new Comedy Central show Stella,
Michael Showalter is remarkably relaxed and low key in person, cycling through
bottled water and fiddling with the string on a hooded sweatshirt as he
discusses his feature film directorial debut, The Baxter. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise, though, since
guilelessness is always the leavening ingredient in his often willfully incongruous
comedic collaborations.
Showalter, of course, got his start as part of the sprawling
comedy collective The State, which achieved a cultish following in the 1990s
via an eponymous sketch show on MTV. Showalter and his cohorts — including Stella and The Baxter costars David Wain and Michael Ian Black — met as
freshmen in college at
in the late 1980s. “It was just one of those things — a large group of people
all in the same place at the same time with exactly the same goals,” Showalter
recalls.
he characterizes as a deadpan cartoon in which “all the characters are
participating in the same drawn reality,” marks Showalter’s film debut as a writer-director,
though he has plenty of experience helming sketches.
He also stars in it, playing Elliot Sherman, the very
embodiment of romantic compromise. If George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone”
announces swaggering screen bad boys and exotically flavored orchestral scores
herald the arrival of cinema’s most sensitive heartthrobs, Death Cab for
Cutie’s “The Sound of Settling” would serve as the putative theme song for
Elliot, a dowdy but sincere accountant who finds himself caught between
well-heeled fiancée Caroline Swann (The 40-Year-Old Virgin’s Elizabeth Banks) and Cecil Mills (Michelle Williams),
a bookish temp who seems on the surface a much better geek match. (Both she and
Elliot read the dictionary as a book.)
The film’s story finds Elliot awkwardly attempting to assert
himself. Though he’s not a 40-year-old virgin, he is a man-child whose
politeness has metamorphosed into serial acquiescence. When Caroline’s dashing
ex-boyfriend
(Justin Theroux) arrives, Elliot recognizes the familiar warning signs of an
impending dumping.
Showalter’s leaping off point for The Baxter was the great screwball romantic comedies of the 1930s
and ’40s, films in which second male leads like Ralph Bellamy and John Howard
took it squarely on the chin when the Cary Grants of the world swept in and
relieved them of their women. (For a modern day comparison, think of Bill
Pullman’s jettisoned character from Nora Ephron’s Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan romantic
comedy Sleepless in Seattle.)
It wasn’t a role that Showalter originally wrote with
himself in mind (Edward Norton’s name was bandied about at one point), but when
it became clear that it made the film financially feasible he rose to the
challenge. “Well, my attitude was that I wanted to do what was best for the
film,” Showalter says, “and at that time I saw myself playing Elliot as being
in service of the larger good.”
Like many comedians, Showalter seems to blanch a bit when
discussing the roots of his own inspiration. “I haven’t given it a lot of
thought. I like smart, fast, tight and clean,” he says. “I definitely like
tension, that’s something I like to try to find. And I think that I like
awkwardness. That’s something I find funny — human awkwardness. The Office is the funniest thing that
I’ve seen in a long time, and that’s basically because it’s just non-stop awkward
tension between all these characters, that constant sense of wanting to crawl
inside your own skin and die. But I really couldn’t define it beyond that. I
don’t think I have a formula.”
Showalter — who says he devoured all types and sub-genres of
comedy growing up — may not have a set creative formula, but he does have a
distinctive voice. His comedy is very mannered, driven by a sense of
playfulness. If there’s a tension, it’s never malicious, but rather balanced
perfectly between earnestness and silliness.
concedes — comedy of protocol and words that isn’t built for breakout
mainstream success. “Probably not,” says Showalter when asked if he could ever envision
transitioning to more overt, studio-friendly fare. “I think The Baxter is a very independent film. I
think that it’s accessible in a way that some of my other stuff isn’t, but I
[also] think that it will not and cannot possibly be appreciated in the same
way that Wedding Crashers is. It’s
too stylized, it’s too specific.”
“I don’t have a good sense of what the bigger audience
likes,” Showalter continues, “and that’s partly why I think I exist in the
margins in my career. But I know what I like and what appeals to the
sensibilities of people I know.”
screen home as that of Cops spoof
fellow ex-Staters. “We’re flying blind,” says Showalter of his show with Wain
and Black, a piquant staple of VH-1’s I
Love the ’90s specials. “It’s about these three guys who get into utterly
insane misadventures. We just take something small and take past the point
where it’s at all logical.” He’s not kidding. A recent episode found the guys
growing their own vegetables (indoors, naturally) to save money ($50 a year!) only
to become itinerant farmhands for the very crew boss whose agricultural advice
they failed to heed.
If Stella doesn’t
stick, Showalter won’t be gloomy for long. “It took me until when I started
doing The Baxter to really feel like
I was ready to step out on my own,” says Showalter. “And I’m grateful for
having had the opportunity to sort of stay inside the bubble for so long. What
I want to do now is sort of bounce back and forth between the collaboration and
working as an individual.”
That means, given his druthers, definitely more writing, and
almost certainly more directing. “I don’t think I could give up writing, but I
think I could give up acting,” says Showalter, who’s also a big sports fan who
likes to play poker and chess. “I would never in a million years tell you that
I’m an actor. …I just think doing this and getting paid at all seems like such
a novelty and farce that I never got too hung up on the money. If you’re paying
me to write this stuff that feels so much like my own, I’m just so lucky, so I
never got too up in arms over it.” For a review of The Baxter, click here; to purchase The Baxter via Amazon, click here.