MATT
GROENINGMATT
GROENING
This page is too long to read on-line, so print it.
From his autobiography (Groening rhymes with complaining):
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I'd been drawing since the first day of school. I got to school, didn't like what the teacher was saying and retreated into my cartoons. I got in trouble for it quite a bit. In fact I knew that when a cartoon got confiscated by a teacher and crumpled up, the angrier the teacher, the better the cartoon. So I just continued that professionally and started drawing cartoons about the place I worked. My first job in Los Angeles was at a little copy place. I photocopied a lot of really bad screenplays and when people weren't looking I would draw my own comics and then xerox them and make up for my meagre salary. I grew up reading cartoons - my father was a cartoonist and we had stacks of magazines full of cartoons. I read Dr Seuss and all the dailys - Al Capp, Lou Adler, Charles Schultz and so on and I'd try to imitate them but I could never draw as well as those guys. I thought - jeez, I'm never gonna make it. But I enjoyed doing it so much that I continued to do it in my spare time and I thought well I'm gonna be loading tyres in a warehouse in years to come, drawing pictures of the boss when he's not looking and pinning them on the bulletin board. That's really what I thought the rest of my life would be like. The fact that now I get to sit in a magnificent set like this, based on my own doodles, it's just like a dream come true! Next...I came up with a comic strip called Life in Hell, based on my early experiences here in LA. I really wanted to be a writer so I looked in the Los Angeles Times in the classified section, under wanted writer. And there actually was one. It said Wanted writer/chauffeur. And I got the job. I was the chauffeur and ghost writer for an old B movie director. My job was to ride around during the day and he'd tell his stories about life in Hollywood and then at night I would condense these brilliant anecdotes into his ever-increasingly thick autobiography. I was merely the latest in a long, long line of chauffeurs. The problem with this guy was that he was losing it a bit towards the end. So he'd tell me stories and he'd get completely confused. We'd drive up into the Hollywood Hills and he'd say "ah, there's Cary Grant's mansion, I'll never forget that night with the big party." And then we'd drive past the same place and he'd say "ah, Laurel and Hardy's mansion". I don't think Laurel and Hardy actually lived together, nor did they live in the same mansion with Cary Grant, but he thought they did. And so when I got home from that job I'd sit down and draw in my little comic strip called Life in Hell.I developed the look for Life in Hell from drawing in school. I had an ability to draw while keeping my eye on the teacher, so that's how come my stuff looks like it does. All my cartoons have that look - big eyeballs, little noses and the huge over grown over-bite. All that's based on drawing while I'm not looking. It's worked for me anyway. Huh? Who? And what? ......I got a call from James Brookes who was starting the Tracey Ullman Show, to do some animation for the show. I decided to make up brand new characters and came up with the Simpsons very shortly before my big presentation. I was in such a hurry that I just drew 5 characters - Marge, Homer, Bart, Lisa and Maggie and just named them after my own family. Actually my mother's name is Margaret but Marge sounds funnier when being yelled by Homer. Lisa is my little sister and Maggie is my younger sister. There is no Bart. I'm not Bart and I'll stick to that story. Doing the show was a great turning point because I'd never done animation before. I'd done a little bit with books and I did make a movie when I was 12-years-old called The Humanoid versus the Other Humanoid. I took my sister Lisa's Barbie doll and I took Maggie's little Chatty Cathy doll and I took their heads off and just animated them, wrestling nude, for a few minutes. That was my introduction to animation.
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Hopefully some more Matt pics coming shortly.......... While I'm showing you pics of 'behind the scenes' people, click here to see some more. |
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All About Matt "Most grown-ups forget what it was like to be a kid. I vowed I would never forget," says the 40 year-old cartoonist. This is the very same man who reared The Simpsons and helped bring them to life. Although, he prefers to think of himself as "a writer who just happens to be a cartoonist." Matt Groening was born in
Portland, Oregon on 15th February, 1954. His father, a cartoonist himself,
encouraged his son’s In high school, Matt continued his frivolous ways. He drew cartoons in every class, even Physical Education, injuring himself severely while doodling on the parallel bars. Until he was kicked off the staff, Matt drew cartoons for the school newspaper. Feeling the revolutionary enthusiasm of the time, Matt and his hippie pals formed their own political party, the Teens for Decency. Responding to the campaign slogan, "If You’re Against Decency, Then What Are You For?", his confused classmates elected Matt Student Body President and immediately regretted it. Matt attended the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, taking full advantage of the school’s no-grade, no-required-courses policies. There he met fellow cartoonist Lynda Barry, who inspired Matt to keep plugging away at doing cartoons when he was unsure of himself. He graduated in 1977 and drove to Los Angeles to become a writer, where his car broke down in the fast lane of the Hollywood Freeway just above the Vine Street exit at 2 am, later inspiring "Life in Hell", Matt’s first cartoon series. But things didn’t happen quite as he planned. Instead of writing newspaper or magazine articles, he worked as a chauffeur and "biographer" for an 88-year-old director of really bad movies. Groening drove the man around and listened to his stories. In the evening, he typed up notes about the stories. This was not a very good start for a hopeful writer. He lived in a small apartment. The guy downstairs liked to play loud rock ‘n’ roll in the middle of the night. At first, Matt tried to get back at him by blasting reggae music. He finally got his point across by dropping a cinder block on the floor, which knocked out his noisy neighbour’s ceiling light. But this small victory didn’t make up for his other disappointments. Matt couldn’t stand the Los Angeles smog and unattractive vistas. And his lack of professional progress was a big letdown. So, for relief, he decided to send a message to his friends back home. It wasn’t a boring letter telling about his unhappiness. Instead, it was a comic book about life in Los Angeles. He called it "Life in Hell". The comic strip starred Binky, the lonely buck-toothed rabbit (In 1985, he told Los Angeles magazine that Binky was the "stupidest" name he could think of) and it soon became an underground success in L.A. Matt found himself making 500 copies instead of 20. In 1980, the strip started to appear in the Los Angeles Reader, a weekly paper where Matt worked as an editor/delivery man. But many readers were annoyed by Binky’s habit of yelling about hip slang like "boogie" and ambience." To stir more interest in the strip, Matt changed the rabbit from a grump to a victim. "The second my characters began to be tortured and alienated, the popularity began," he told Newsweek in 1987. "The more I tortured them, the more the readers loved me." The adventures of Binky - and his girlfriend Sheba and one-eared son Bongo - struck a chord. The strip isn’t the best-drawn in the world. That’s OK. The words are the real attraction. Groening often crams every spare bit of space around his drawings with text. The comic strip is still running and currently appears in about 250 newspapers around the world, much to Matt’s amazement. There have also been eight "Life in Hell" books published, all but one with the word "hell" in the title. The book Matt was recently working on in the series is titled "Binky’s Guide To Love", a cynical view of love and human relations, which is basically what the entire series is about. In 1985, renowned film and television producer James L. Brooks, who also founded Gracie Films, showed interest in Matt’s work and asked him if he would be interested in working on some animated projects in the future for his comedy series The Tracey Ullman Show. Matt accepted the offer and a meeting was set to discuss it further. 15 minutes before the meeting took place, he was told he had to come up with something new and original. As the legend goes, while waiting in Brook’s foyer he hurrily sketched a quirky looking family consisting of one father, one mother, two girls and one boy - and named them each after his own family members (with the exception of Bart). In the meeting, the executives liked what they saw, but they wanted to know a little more. Groening recalls: "They asked me: ‘What does the father do?’ and I answered, ‘He works at a nuclear plant.’ They laughed and then I knew we were in." Matt currently lives in Los Angeles with his radiant wife, Deborah Caplan; his sons Homer and Abe; and more pet ducks than you can shake a stick at. |
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"I have known Matt
Groening longer than I’d care to remember. - Jamie Angell |
| Matt: Question?
Jamie: Question? Matt: I’m waiting. Jamie: Oh! All right. I thought you were just... ummm... oh. Matt: I’m not gonna rant. Have to respond. Jamie: I’d rather you rant, but.....What do you hope The Simpsons does to people who watch it? Matt: Well, you know how irritating it is when other people try to change you? Jamie: Mmm-hmm. Matt: But trying to change other people - that is one of the greatest delights in the world. So I try to delight myself. Jamie: Can you change them? Matt: Irritate them. I mean change them. Jamie: Irritate and change them. Matt: It’s always fun - kids know this - to tell a joke that makes all the kids laugh but which confuses and annoys the teacher. And that’s what I try to do as a grown-up - entertain part of the audience and annoy the other part. I don’t want to get too scientific, but you can divide people into two groups: the Daffy Ducks and the Elmer Fudds. The Daffys are the people who laugh and annoy other people, and the Elmers are the ones who don’t laugh and get annoyed. And there’s plenty of ‘em. Jamie: That’s true. Matt: Which makes life very fun. ‘Cause if you’re a Daffy Duck, you must try to provoke the Elmer Fudds. The fact is, Elmers are annoying too, so if you can annoy them back, and also make the Daffys happy, then you not only feel entertained, you also feel... morally superior. Jamie: When did you first get an inkling of this Elmer/Daffy theory? Matt: It happened in the first grade, when kids are pretty innocent little creatures. We were all standing in a circle out on the playground, and Mrs. Hoover said, "Quiet, children," and I, in my youthful exuberance, let loose with this high-pitched shriek. And Mrs. Hoover said, "All right, who blew that whistle?" Well, there was no whistle, it was just me shrieking, so I clammed up, and Mrs. Hoover went crazy searching the kids for the whistle. It was quite amusing. She couldn’t believe that these little six-year-olds were denying they knew who had that whistle. But there was no whistle. That was the crafty part. Jamie: So you kind of stumbled into it. Matt: And the rest of my life has been blowing invisible whistles and making people wonder. Jamie: Did you find you had any allies, or were you pretty much blowing a whistle by yourself? Matt: Well, you were a co-conspirator, Jamie. And The Simpsons is staffed by a bunch of people who you can tell were wisenheimers when they were kids. Jamie: Was it more difficult to be a Daffy Duck when you were younger? Matt: Too many school rules are arbitrarily assigned just because grown-ups feel kids should be controlled. Most kids are creative and rambunctious enough to realise that these rules are stupid, but they instinctively humour adults. There are some great, dedicated teachers out there working under appalling conditions, and they need all the support they can get. But even the outstanding teachers often get engulfed by the edicts from above, which makes their good work that much more difficult. And over the years the good teachers and the kids are gradually forced to buckle down and comply with arbitrary authority. It seems the main rule that traditional schools teach us how to sit in rows quietly, which is perfect training for grown-up work in a dull office or factory, but not so good for education. And what a few of us did is realise, hey, that’s not the life for us - so we started trying to entertain ourselves. Sometimes that entertainment took the forms of pointless pranks and dim-witted wisecracking. But some of it was more creative. We did puppet shows, drew cartoons, wrote plays, made movies, drew comic books, and all the rest. Jamie: If, as a kid, most everyone has a sense that things are screwy, how is it that, as adults, we perpetuate the screwiness?
Jamie: Why is it that so many people think the Simpsons are bad role models? Matt: A lot of people believe that if everybody just did what they were told - obeyed - everything would be fine. But that’s not what life is all about. That’s not real. It’s never going to happen. Jamie: Then why do they believe it? Matt: I’m not sure. Psychologically, you know, as infants, we think we’re omnipotent. We think we’ve created the universe and that everything responds to our whims. Then lousy reality sets in. We find out that the world does not correspond to our vision, and some of us continue to fight back for the rest of our lives. I’m not saying that people on the other side are wrong. I just think theirs is not an attitude which brings any kind of profound happiness. In fact, if anything, it brings profound unhappiness. Jamie: It seems like they’re trying to live some idea of a correct life rather than living their own life. Matt: One of the things I like to do is make up stories that I would have enjoyed as a kid. So, if I’m thinking about an audience, it’s usually a younger version of myself. When I watch The Simpsons, I think, "Man, I would’ve really liked this cartoon when I was a kid." If I could speak from the future to my younger self, I’d say a couple of things: Keep your spirits up, because things are going to get a lot better when you get out of high school. You’re going to meet a lot more people who are interested in creative weirdness as a social activity. And: Save your work! No matter how stupid you think it is at the time. Keep a diary. Keep drawing. Save your art. Save your comic books. Especially save your comic books. Jamie: Yeah. Definitely. Boy. Matt: And put the stuff in a cardboard box and keep it in your closet. And when you go away to college, or to your job at the oyster-shucking factory, don’t let your mum throw it away - take it with you. And don’t touch any of the stuff in the box until you’ve washed the oyster juice off your hands. Jamie: What else do you do outside The Simpsons? Matt: I draw a weekly comic strip called Life in Hell, which is syndicated in about 250 newspapers. That’s what I did before The Simpsons, and what I plan to do for the rest of my life. Jamie: What do you use to draw with? Matt: I use Rotring Rapidograph pens, which come with easy-to-change ink cartridges. The pens are colour-coded - I use the blue one (.70) to draw the characters and dialogue, the brown one (.50) to draw very tiny lettering, and the orange one (2.0) to draw dialogue balloons and the edges of the frames. I draw it twice as large as it’s printed, on two-ply Bristol paper, and shrink it down. When you shrink things down, it reduces the wobbliness of the lines - and I need all the help I can get. I used to use a Koh-I-Noor Artpen, the one with a yellow barrel and a very flexible nib, but the company stopped making it, and didn’t respond to my desperate plea to buy any extras lying around the warehouse. If anyone out there knows how I can get this pen, or at least its nibs, please contact me. A frustrated cartoonist will be very grateful. Jamie: What did you draw with when you were a kid? Matt: Felt-tip pens, which are really fun to draw with, but I warn you: they fade. Eventually the ink will disappear. You’ve got to draw on good paper, too. Otherwise, the paper will turn as yellow as the Simpsons, and eventually crumble. Jamie: Did you plan to become a cartoonist? Matt: I never thought that I would, because all my friends could draw better than I could, except you. (Bemused laughter.) Jamie: And that’s the truth. (Frivolity continues.) Matt: I met Lynda Barry at The Evergreen State College - cool place, no grades - and she was drawing crazy cartoons at the time. Her cartoons were so wild, they inspired me to continue plugging away. Jamie: What other inspirations do you draw on? Matt: I love checking out just about everything that’s put out for entertainment and intellectual consumption: music, art, movies, TV, literature, advertising, pinball machines, bubblegum cards, cereal boxes, black velvet portraits of the Smurfs. I try not to let anything in our culture be either too high or too low for me. I have a little trouble with stuff at the very bottom of the pile, the mean, ugly stuff. And I also have real problems with 19th Century French art songs. Jamie: Clearly, you make a lot of references to popular culture, both high and low, in The Simpsons. Matt: That’s not just me. A lot of talented writers work on the show, half of them Harvard geeks. And you know, when you study the semiotics of Through the Looking Glass or watch every episode of Star Trek, you’ve got to make it pay off, so you throw a lot of study references into whatever you do later in life. Jamie: How do you feel about the magnitude of The Simpsons success? Matt: It’s impossible to keep in mind how many millions of people watch TV. The numbers continue to stagger me. Another staggering thing is the huge number of people who have jobs because of The Simpsons. It’s spun off into merchandising, books, syndication, advertising, law suits, and this magazine [Simpsons Illustrated]. These freakish little doodles keep a lot of people gainfully employed, at least part time. Jamie: Hallelujah. Matt: The Simpsons is an especially collaborative show. Jim Brooks, a true genius, gave me my first break on The Tracey Ullman Show. And he’s always fought to maintain a level of emotional realism in The Simpsons when the temptation is to just go wacky. I’m grateful to Mike Reiss and AI Jean, who are brilliantly funny workaholic writers, a rare combination. They pushed the show into more ambitious and complicated areas. And the writers, despite eating habits almost as grotesque as my own, have also been unbelievably great: Jon Vitti, George Meyer, Jeff Martin, John Swartzwelder, David Stem, Frank Mula, Conan O’Brien, Jay Kogen and Wally Wolodarsky. We’ve got a mostly new gang of writers/ producers for next season (currently screening here), and in general they have much healthier eating habits, so we’ll see if the show suffers. Jamie: Do you have the same appreciation for the show’s animation? Matt: Because good writing in a TV cartoon is so rare, I think the animation on The Simpsons is often overlooked. But the job the directors do - under a gruelling schedule - is always amazing. It’s easy to get complacent about the visuals on the show, since we don’t do a lot of dazzling animation effects that call attention to this goofy medium. But the acting, sense of place, and pacing are all top-notch. David Silverman and Wes Archer have been with Bart since the prehistoric days, and over the years they’ve been joined by Brad Bird, Rich Moore, Mark Kirkland, Jim Reardon, Jeff Lynch, and Carlos Baeza [and now Susan Dietter, their first female director], all of whom have distinctive styles and odd quirks that make the show unpredictable. But it’s not just the writers and animators. The actors ad-lib stuff that goes into the show. When you see Harry Shearer do both Mr. Burns and Smithers in the same scene, it’s frightening. And Hank Azaria, who does the voice of Apu and Moe, always cracks me up. Then there’s Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Yeardley Smith, and Nancy Cartwright, who are perfect. And of course there are the behind-the-scenes people who rarely get attention: Alf Clausen, our composer, who keeps knocking out fantastic scores; Mark McJimsey, who edits the show day and night; and casting director Bonnie Pietila, who lines up all the great guests we have. I’ll continue this list in my next interview. Jamie: Is there anything that you’re able to do with the magazine that you can’t do with the show? Matt: The thing that makes me happiest about Simpsons Illustrated are all the drawings that we get from readers. I wish we could print them all. They’re really imaginative. They show a lot of hard work. Steve and Cindy Vance, Peter Alexander and I look at every one of them and we can’t believe it. We just want to say to everyone who has sent in a drawing: "Thank you so much! You really make us happy." And again, save your work. Don’t throw them away. Jamie: Is there something you have yet to achieve that you want very badly? Matt: I think the world is almost ready for a Simpsons amusement park. We’ll call it Simpsons World, of course. The centrepiece will be Homer Mountain. You’ll enter Itchy & Scratchy Land at your own risk. And you’ll be able to eat heavily-salted snack treats in the head of the 600-foot-high statue of Bart Simpson. Jamie: Wow. Maybe his teeth could rotate. Matt: His whole head will rotate. We’ll build this in the centre of Los Angeles, and at night Bart’s jumbo spotlight eyes will shine into mansions in Beverly Hills. And we’ll have a blimp in the shape of Marge Simpson hovering over the city, making annoyed Marge murmurs through giant loudspeakers hidden in her hairdo. Jamie: What other stuff do you like? Matt: I love the work of Gary Panter, who does William & Percy, and John Kricfalusi, who created Ren & Stimpy. I’m really looking forward to seeing what he does next. I’m always intrigued by people who have a unique vision that they express musically. I’ve liked Frank Zappa since I was a kid. I also like a Jamaican screwball named Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Sun Ra and his Solar Myth Arkestra, Captain Beefheart, Daniel Johnston, Yma Sumac, Perez Prado, Olivier Messiaen, Holger Czukay, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Jamie: What books influenced you when you were a kid? Matt: As a little kid I loved Dr. Seuss. Later I got into Mark Twain, Catcher In The Rye, by J. Edgar Hoover, I mean J.D. Salinger. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. Who else? P.C. Wodehouse, James Thurber, S.J. Perelman, Robert Benchley, Jean Shepard. One of my main influences was Cartooning The Head And Figure by Jack Hamm, which demonstrated on page 3 that you can evoke all sorts of emotions with the crudest little ink squiggles. Jamie: What’s coming up? Matt: Simpsons Comics & Stories was a smash, so Steve and Cindy Vance, Bill Morrison and I are scheming to figure out how to do comic books on a regular schedule. Any interest out there for a Radioactive Man comic book? The next Life In Hell book will be Binky’s Guide To Love, a sequel to Love Is Hell, and someday I’d like to animate the rabbits and Akbar & Jeff for TV. A book called Bart’s Guide To Life will also be coming out next fall, and maybe someday we’ll do a Simpsons movie. Any more questions? Jamie: No, I think that’s pretty much it. Matt: This interview is gonna be very, like, especially towards the end, very, you know, rambling and discursive. Jamie: That’s okay. I mean - Matt: But
make it easy on yourself. You don’t have to type up
the stuff that you know is not Jamie: In conclusion, what do you want on your tombstone? Matt: I don’t want Bart Simpson. Jamie: How about a tombstone shaped like Bart Simpson? Matt: Uh-oh. Jamie: Little pointy head. With spikes. Matt: Ahh. My destiny. (Extracted from Simpsons Illustrated, Autumn 1993) |
BOOK, FILM, MUSIC, TELEVISION, 1.
Vietnamese spring rolls or sex. Thanks to The Simpsonian Institute. |
The Characters and what not...
Well,
I guess we paid an airline company to paint the characters on the side
of a plane, but it's not our plane. And the thing I always wonder is people
have bought their ticket and they walk out of the airport and they see
the Simpsons on the side of the plane. Would you get on that plane? I
wouldn't. 
primitive doodlings. Matt enjoyed drawing from an early
age, but felt a strong loathing for colouring books, mainly because he
was not able to stay inside the lines. In primary school, little left-handed
Matt drew cartoons when he should’ve been paying attention, which
left strange gaps in his education. To this day, he does not know his
state capitals, and don’t bother asking him to multiply any numbers
between 7 and 13. He’ll just stare at you blankly.
Matt: Well,
most grown-ups forget what it was like to be a kid. I
vowed that I would never forget. I also found
child’s play - stuff that was not considered
serious, but goofy - was the stuff I liked to do, so I
still do it as an adult. Living creatively is really
important to maintain throughout your life. And living
creatively doesn’t mean only artistic creativity,
although that’s part of it. It means being yourself,
not just complying with the wishes of other
people. The dismal reality is that a lot of people have
to work at crummy jobs that they don’t want to do.
But even if you have a crummy job, you have to save a
part of yourself, maybe a secret part, and do the things
you want, so that you can be yourself. I’d like to
think that’s one of the hidden messages of The
Simpsons. It’s a show about people who
don’t know that secret, but the making of the show
is an example of that secret. Sometimes people get mad at
The Simpsons’ subversive story
telling, but there’s another message in there, which
is a celebration of making wild, funny stories.
going to be in
there.