A new movie about comedian Robert Klein, “Robert Klein Still Can’t Stop His Leg,” will premier March 31 on Starz. What’s notable about this is that the film’s director, Marshall Fine, was an editor and writer for The Durango Herald in 1973-74.
I had a chance on Tuesday to pick Fine’s brain about the film and his friendship with Klein. (I also got to spend some time down in our newspaper morgue looking up his stories and photos from back in the day.)
Q: How were you guys able to gain such access?
A: I’ve been friends with Robert for 17 years, so really, this is the easiest time I’ll ever have making a documentary about another person just because I already had that sort of element of trust; that’s the hardest thing to get in anything like this, and we already had that. At this point, I’m reaching out trying to get a couple of other things off the ground, and that’s always the first big stumbling block, “These people don’t know me.” Robert and I were friends before we started doing this.
Q: He seems like such a cool guy.
A: He’s a lot of fun to hang out with.
Q: Tell me a little bit about your time in Durango. How did you end up here?
A: It’s sort of a funny story. I grew up in Minneapolis, I went to the University of Minnesota, I lived in Minneapolis, wrote freelance music reviews for The Minneapolis Star while I was in college. I wanted to be an entertainment writer. As I finished college in the summer of ’73 and started looking for work, there really weren’t any jobs. My parents had a friend who was a former news photographer who knew Arthur and Morley Ballantine of The Durango Herald, and got me an interview with them, and that’s how I wound up in Durango.
Q: So sports editor: Was that because it was what was available? Like you were saying, your background was pure A&E …
A: I had written a bunch of just about everything in college. I was always interested in entertainment; sports was the job that was open. It was the best possible education I could have had coming out of college and taking a job like that because basically, I was the entire sports staff: I had to write the stories, take the pictures, do the darkroom work, lay out the page, write the headline, write the captions and make sure it went through makeup and everything.
Q: Why Robert Klein? Was it because you guys are friends?
A: Partly, yeah. I’ve written three books and done one other documentary, and if there’s something that sort of ties them all together it’s my fascination with: a) the creative process, and b) what it is that pushes people to change their own world. Robert Klein, if you look at the end of the ’60s, there were three people who changed stand-up comedy: Robert Klein, George Carlin, Richard Pryor. And if you ask any of those guys in my movie which one of them was the most influential on them, they all say Robert Klein. And yet he’s the one that’s the least known to a younger generation now, and yet he’s the one who’s alive and still performing. I’ve been trying to make this movie for about 15 years, since I’ve known him, because I felt he was this pioneer who really changed the world he was working in, and so that’s why I wanted to do it.
Q: What were some of the challenges making the film?
A: There are always challenges: never having enough money or enough time. The challenges were getting through to some people, making schedules work mostly for the time that we were shooting with the people we wanted to interview. That summer we were doing the interviews, we had reached out to Joan Rivers, and “Well, she’s busy right now, but check back with us in the fall.” And by the fall, she was dead, unfortunately.
Q: What do you think the best part was?
A: The best part was getting to spend that much time with Robert. … Over the years, I’ve learned doing these various projects that ultimately, the most satisfaction, the most satisfying part of it is the doing, not waiting for the reviews, not waiting to see how its release … the actual doing of it is why you do it. So I really made a point of staying in the moment as I was doing this. I remember one evening, we shot three different shows that he did, and two of them were shows that we set up – one at the Improv in LA, and one in a little club near where Robert and I both lived. And I remember the night that we were shooting, it was a July night, I’m driving his car, we’re driving across the Tappan Zee Bridge. It’s sunset, I’m riding with the star of my movie to go film him on stage, and I thought, “This is what it’s all about.”
Q: Looking ahead, do you see any comedians like him coming up?
A: You look at the people I talked to in the film, the Jerry Seinfelds, the Bill Mahers, the Jon Stewarts, and now there’s a whole other generation behind them who are doing something a little different. People like Patton Oswalt, Zach Galifianakis and Amy Schumer – they’re the next generation, and they’re doing their own thing. In some ways, you can connect it to what Robert did, what George Carlin did, what Richard Pryor did in terms of changing comedy. Because what they did was change it for a generation – they took their parents’ comedy and reinterpreted it for the baby boom generation.
katie@durangoherald.com
Watch the movie
Check out “Robert Klein Still Can’t Stop His Leg” at 8 p.m. MDT March 31 on Starz.
