411 Movies Interview: Zane Buzby of Up in Smoke Posted by Tony Farinella on 05.12.2008
411's Tony Farinella sits down with the veteran actress for an exclusive interview about her career!
Zane Buzby is one big ball of fun. And not only is she a lot of fun, but she's also very sweet and very nice. After our interview was completed, she said to me, "Tell me about you." Needless to say, it's not every day that I get asked a question! I'm usually the one asking the questions. It goes without saying that she is nothing like her character in the film, Up in Smoke, which is a cult classic. In my interview with Zane Buzby, we talked about her directing career, Up in Smoke, Jerry Lewis, John Ritter, and a whole lot more. For more information on Zane Buzby, please visit the following websites: http://www.survivormitzvah.org/ and http://www.stomptherun.com/
TONY: For those who are familiar with you from Up in Smoke, why don't you update on us what you have been up to since the film was released. What projects have you been working on?
Zane Buzby: Well, since Up in Smoke, I became a television director, and I directed over 200 situation comedies, including everything from Married With Children to Newhart and Golden Girls and Blossom and Sister and Sister and a zillion more. So that's what I've been doing. And then I started producing them, and now I'm doing a new media project called Stomp the Run, which is going to be the absolute first fully interactive show of its kind on the Internet and the mobile phone.
TONY: When you first started out in Hollywood, what kind of expectations did you have, and as you look back on your career, are you satisfied with how it turned out?
Zane Buzby: Well, I've done just about everything I wanted to do except Broadway, so that's always a dream. That's in the future. I was a film editor first, I studied as an actress, and I came out here in a rock and roll band, so I have a very checkered past. (laughs) And then I started acting again when I got a role in Oh God and then Up in Smoke and then Americathon, and then I went into directing and writing and producing. So it followed a very strange path, but I got it all in.
TONY: You just mentioned how you have done a little bit of everything in your career, so I have to ask you, how did you get interested in entertainment? Were you born with it?
Zane Buzby: I think it's the way you're wired, and you're born with it. It's like comedy. For me, comedy is like having curly hair or throwing a left hook in bowling. You're either funny or you're not. And I think people who are creative, it's just in their blood somehow. My father was a writer in early TV and my grandfather was in theater way back in Russia, but I just think it's in your blood somehow. There are those who are doing that kind of stuff, and then there are the civilians who aren't.
TONY: Of course we have to devote a good portion of this interview to your role in Up in Smoke, so let's start at the beginning. How did you end up getting involved in the film?
Zane Buzby: I was sent to an audition when I had just gotten off the boat from New York, and they sent me to Malibu to audition, taking these various canyons and various streets, and I think I was hours late, because I didn't know where the hell I was going. I really didn't. And I got there, and there was a big table with all these guys with beards and long hair, and I didn't know who was who, and they handed me like a four-paged, single-spaced typed audition scene, which was just a monologue. And they said, "OK, GO!" And I hadn't even read it, so I didn't even know what it was about. (laughs) And I went, "Whoa." And they were like, "No, just go." So I started realizing as I was reading it aloud that this was something that I could definitely relate to, and when I got lost on the pages, I just started making stuff up about people I knew in New York and sounds that I heard coming through the walls of my loft, and it all ended up in the movie, so they were really great. They just laughed a lot, and that was it. I got the part right there.
TONY: You also just mentioned how you added a lot of unique traits to this character. Talk to me a little bit about that. What was the research process like?
Zane Buzby: With Up in Smoke, it was really interesting, because it was based around, of course, Cheech and Tommy's routines that they had been doing for quite a while, and they built the movie around some of those really well-known and fabulously funny bits. And when I got the part of this Valley girl, I didn't even know where the Valley was, and I didn't know what they were talking about. And they suggested to me, "Just go to the Rainbow on Sunset or the Roxy and hang out, and you'll see what we're talking about."
So they had lingo and stuff in there that I wasn't familiar with, coming from the streets of New York, and my first foray into the ladies room at the Roxy, which is a famous club on the strip, I walked in with a little tape recorder and my glasses on, just like a normal person, and this room full of crazy girls emptied out immediately. I think they thought I was a narc or something. So I went, "Oh, this isn't gonna work. I can't do any research. I'm gonna have to go home and get in costume." So I went home, and I put on all this make-up and hair pieces and feathers and all this stuff, and I called up a girlfriend and said, "You gotta come with me." So we went back that same night with a little tape recorder in my purse, and you walk into the ladies room, and this has been recreated in the movie, actually ... almost everything I did was recreated in the movie, and there were a hundred girls who looked exactly like me, with crazy red hair and motor-mouths, all putting on make-up and doing this and doing that. So I said, "Oh, I get it. I get my character."
And a couple of really crazy things happened in that ladies room. There was a phone that was in the ladies room, a payphone right on the wall, so this girl comes in .... First of all, I thought everybody was much older than me. I thought everybody was like 35, and there I was in my early twenties. And then I found out through listening and trading make-up with these girls that they were like 18, 17, 16, 13, and their mothers were 30, and they would drop them off at the club while the mothers went out to party. So there I am, I'm in the ladies room, and this girl comes in, and she's like, "Oh, my god, I'm so late. My mom's gonna kill me." And I thought, "Well, here goes the biggest lie in the world." So she dials the phone, and I'm waiting to hear what kind of excuse she's gonna give her mother for being late, and she goes, "Hi, mom, I'm really sorry I'm late, but we ran into some great Blow, and we got you some." And I went, "Oh, my god."
So that was my introduction into the Valley girls of L.A. But I loved that they were all red heads, and they had all dyed their hair this crazy color. When I was designing my character, and I usually start with drawing the character, I start from the outside in, and I said, "I have to have this color hair." But I didn't want to ruin my own hair, so I went to the hardware store and got some magic marker spray paint, which was the perfect color. So I sprayed my hair with that and got a partial wig and sprayed that, and I thought, "This is just absolutely fantastic." We did a couple of scenes from the movie, and then months later, we did a scene at the Rainbow with all these extras at the end of the movie, and this girl comes up to me, and she says, "Man, I love your hair. Is that the type of stuff where you go to the beauty parlor and they paint it in?" And I go, "No, no, you go to the hardware store, and you spray it on." And she goes, "Oh, it can't be too good for your hair." And I said, "No, I don't think it's too good for your hair." So about a month later, I see the same girl at another scene, and she's got short red hair that's all broken off, and she comes up to me and goes, "Oh, you were right. It's really not good for your hair." So art imitates life.
TONY: Are you surprised that people still talk about the film to this day?
Zane Buzby: No, because it was definitely the first really stoner movie and the first movie that was really outside the studio system, although it was originally made for Paramount, that was marketed in a rock and roll way. Lou Adler, who directed the movie, had produced all of Cheech and Chong's records, and he was very smart in that he took that movie and he previewed it across the country in college towns and towns where people knew Cheech and Chong, and he looked at it, saw where they laughed, where they didn't, and he kind of tweaked it a lot, which was amazing. What was even more amazing was that Paramount, at the time, didn't know what they had. They didn't know they had a big hit, because they saw the movie and went, "What is this?" They didn't understand any of it, because they were, what can I say, dinosaurs. So we had a screening at Paramount, and the studio heads were like, "What the hell is this? We don't want to put this out. This is terrible." So Lou Adler took out his checkbook, and I think he wrote them a check right then and there for a million dollars and bought the back movie. And it went on to gross a lot of money, even in that day, so they made a big mistake.
TONY: The film also received a positive review from film critic Pauline Kael. What do you remember about that?
Zane Buzby: Well, this was like the greatest moment in a young actor's life. I mean, you open the New Yorker, which I was reading my whole life growing up, and there Pauline Kael, the biggest film critic ever, writes a love letter to the film and to me. And based on that review, where she just went ga-ga over it and said some really great things about me, it was so incredibly encouraging. And it was so encouraging, in fact, that a friend of mine prompted me to call her up, and I was like, "Oh, I can't call Pauline Kael. She's Pauline Kael." And he kept saying, "No, no, call her." So I called her, and she said, "In all my years of reviewing film, no one has ever called me." I got to know her well after that, and she was very, very nice.
TONY: The film also has been very influential to films such as Harold and Kumar. How does that make you feel?
Zane Buzby: It's great, because it's a whole new generation of people. It's a wonderful thing. As long as there's something culturally funny, I think it's wonderful.
TONY: What was your career like after the film came out? Did it open up a lot of doors?
Zane Buzby: What was so insane about this particular part and then the part I did immediately following that, where I played a half-Vietnamese rock and roll singer from Mars, was that people didn't know that those weren't the real people. In other words, they just thought, "Oh, they must have gotten this crazy chick to be in the Up in Smoke movie, and they must have just picked her up on the street." And then in Americathon, they just thought I was some crazy Vietnamese chick. So, in a way, you kind of do your job too well, because people would say, "Oh, my god, she was so funny in that movie, but, I mean, she talks like that, she looks like that." And I'm sitting there unemployed as an actress going, "But the wig is hanging in the closet, and I don't really talk like that." So, in a way, it was insane. One place wanted to put me in some movie, but they wanted to send me to language school, so I could learn English better, and it was like, "Guys, it's acting." So it did and it didn't. There are so few great women's parts, and I was lucky to get those two, because there are a lot of boring women's parts too.
TONY: How did you get involved in directing, and do you consider yourself an actress first and foremost?
Zane Buzby: I always wanted to be a filmmaker and a film editor, but acting was my number one thing. And when I started directing, what was great was that by the time I had started directing, I had already been an actress, so I knew the actor's point of view. I had already designed sets, I had already been a film editor, I had done make-up and hair and wardrobe, so all of these jobs I knew, and by the time I started directing, I knew the editing room already and I knew what to shoot. And I also knew enough so people couldn't bullshit me about certain things that were possible and not possible. So it was all a really good basis for directing, because, as a director, you're really in charge of all the heads of those departments. So when I first started directing, I was one of the few, and I was told this again and again and again, directors they ever had who spoke to the actors, which I just thought was insane. A, the first thing to know about actors is that they're petrified at all times, so you have to talk to them. B, most of the time, because sitcom is such a fast form, you have two days of rehearsal and then you're shooting, that most people come in, they know the camera's really well and they just let go, "OK, you stand here, you stand there." And they don't get into the acting part of it. So the casts of different shows fell in love with me, because I spoke their language.
TONY: When you were directing Blossom, did you get a chance to meet or work with Bill Bixby?
Zane Buzby: He came on after me, and he was very sick at the time. He had cancer. Actually, he observed me when I was finishing my run there. I did two years on that show, and then he came in at the end of the second year to watch me in the booth to learn how to do multi-camera, which he didn't know. I visited that set a couple of times the following year, and then he passed away.
TONY: As you look back on your career in television as a director, what are you really proud of?
Zane Buzby: I would say the rockumentary version of Blossom, which was a black and white special that we did based on Madonna's Truth or Dare. And then also just doing shows like Newhart and Golden Girls and being with those four women on Golden Girls, who are certainly, what I like to call, four horses who can really run the race. I mean, they're icons and legends, so those kinds of things were just amazing to meet the people and actually work with the people and direct the people you grew up watching. Because even though we're looking back now, I'm not that old. (laughs)
TONY: I want to take this time to get your thoughts on two comedy legends that you worked with in your career. First of all, John Ritter.
Zane Buzby: He was the greatest. First of all, the nicest guy in the world. We had an absolute ball on that film, and that was a much better film in the shooting and in the script than what was in the movie theater, because somewhere between the time we shot it and between the time it came out, I think Animal House or something came out for a totally young audience. It was an adult black comedy ... kind of like a Mel Brooks type of thing. And the studio got scared, and they cut the entire first half of the movie out, which was Peter Riegert, who played a guy who taught sitcom at UCLA, which, now, is actually the truth. And all these intelligent and wonderful things were cut out of that movie. But working with John Ritter was great. He was generous, he was funny, and we just clicked.
TONY: How about Jerry Lewis?
Zane Buzby: I'll tell you a funny story about this: I was sent this script, and there were all these different vignettes of different characters, so the casting director said something like, "Pick three or four and come in prepared to do them all." So I picked the sexy nurse, I picked this, and I picked that. So I go in, and I sit down with this guy called Bill Richmond. Now, Bill Richmond co-wrote most of Jerry Lewis' movies with him, and it turns out that Bill Richmond ended up working on Blossom. So, I walked in there, and I said, "Oh, I'd like to read for the sexy nurse" And he goes, "No, no, that's gonna be a six-foot-tall amazon blonde." So, I said, "OK, then I'd like to do this part." He goes, "No, no, that's gonna be a male." Then I go, "Well about this part?" He said, "No, no, that's an old man." I said, "So, what do I have?" He said, "What about the waitress?" So I look at the waitress, and it's pages and pages and pages of food. So I immediately hooked into the fact that the key to this character was an annoying voice. It had to be like a needle in the eye of Jerry Lewis, and I just went for it with the most annoying voice I could think of.
And Bill Richmond was over the moon about this audition, because he had written it, and he was a drummer, and I got all the rhythms right. So he said to me, "You know, I've been casting Jerry's movies for forty years, he never sees the people, he lets me cast them, but you're so funny that I'm gonna have Jerry see you." So, I thought, "Oh, no." Here I am, I got the part, and now I'm gonna lose the part and be the only one in history who got the part and then has to do it in front of Jerry Lewis. So after about two months, they call me when Jerry Lewis is in town, and they want me to come back. So by now I totally forgot what I did that was so great in the audition. I didn't have the script, so I go in there, and I meet Jerry Lewis, who is the icon of icons, and I did just about everything in that audition but walk around the room on my ankles. He was hysterical. People say, "Oh, Jerry Lewis, he's hard to work with, he's this, he's that." And I gotta tell you, he was the most generous, brilliant, wonderful director to work with. And then you learn that he invented two-camera shootings for comedy, so that in case someone does something funny, you get the master and the close-up in the same moment. He's had the same crew for over forty movies. And he was just unbelievable to work with. I loved him.
And the funniest thing about him was he called my home after I did my scene with him, and he spoke to my partner, Conan Berkley, and he said, "This is Jerry Lewis, and I'd like to speak with Zane Buzby." And Conan said, "Oh, come on." And Jerry goes, "No, this is Jerry Lewis." And Conan goes, "Aw, come on, Rip. We know who you are." He thought it was his friend. Then he goes, "No, really, it's Jerry Lewis." He said, "Aw, come on, it's Larry, right?" Jerry goes, "No, it's not Larry, it's Jerry Lewis." So he wouldn't let Jerry Lewis talk to me, because he thought it was one of our friends. So finally Jerry Lewis gets on the phone, and he says, "It really is me, and I just wanted to tell you how funny you were. The crew's been doing your scene ever since."
TONY: How do you feel about the current state of Hollywood? What's changed?
Zane Buzby: I think the biggest change is that everything is run by a corporation. It used to be whether you liked the person or not, we can go back to Samuel Goldwyn or others, whether they were great or a bastard or whoever they were, it was one guy and one guy's opinion. Now, everything is corporate and by committee. So to get anything through the system, a million people look at it and give you notes, and these are people who may not have ever seen a play, read a script, or know anything about what they're doing. So it's very destructive to the creative process. And it used to be that you had big-time producers, like Edgar J. Scherick, who was my mentor, and they would protect the creative people and be the buffer between the studio or the network and the creators and just tell the network or studio, "Hey, these guys are funny. They know what they're doing, so let's let them just write the script." Right now, everything is by committee, so everything gets watered down and nothing is of one voice. I think what everybody who's creative misses the most is the fact that it's run by corporate America, so we're really not making creative shows anymore ...we're making the best pair of shoes that's the cheapest to make.
TONY: One aspect of the business that has also changed is celebrity. Now, everything that you do is recorded and talked about in the media. How do you feel about that aspect of the business?
Zane Buzby: I think it's terrible, because it's made our culture a trash culture. And that permeates everything. It permeates the way little girls and little boys, who are growing up, view what they're supposed to be when they grow up. It sets a very bad example, and it also doesn't let people who just happen to be actors have a life. And then they have these incredible breakdowns in public. No one has any privacy anymore, and I think it's a terrible thing, I really do. There's no respect for anyone anymore, and there's no privacy. Everyone's got a camera in their cell phone, and you can't even have a meal in a restaurant without someone taking a picture of you with food falling out of your mouth.
TONY: Finally, if a young actress is reading our interview, what's the best advice you can give them?
Zane Buzby: The best advice I can give them is to do your homework, work hard, and follow your dream. A lot of people, and this is crucial for anyone in show business to know, think that they will get discovered or get an agent, and they will make them a star. And this couldn't be farther from the truth. Everything and everyone in Hollywood or any of the arts is self-generated. You have to make your own breaks. You have to do it yourself. Even if you get an agent, you have to dictate to your agent how you want your career to run, and you have to be in the driver's seat of your own career. No one is gonna do anything for you, and if they do, it will probably be done wrong. If you want this, you have to go out and get it. Every single month or at the end of the year, Hollywood is flooded with the best graduates of every high school, drama club, and college, and they all come out here to make it, and you have to be better than them and more hard-working than them to get ahead.
When I wanted to direct, the first thing I did was look at television and go, "The best comedy director out there is James Burrows." I wrote a letter and I said, "I want to learn from the best. Can I come observe you?" And he said, "Yes." I observed, it was Cheers, and we didn't know it was gonna be a big hit then. After I observed Cheers for x amount of episodes, I said, "Now what?" He said, "Now, tell everyone in the world you want to be a director and see what happens." Which is what I did.
Then someone told me that they hire directors from soap operas, and I thought, "Soap operas? I've never even watched a soap opera." They said, "Well, there's one shooting in L.A., and you should see what it is." So I went over there, and I sat there every day, and I watched in the booth. I was there at six in the morning, and I was the last one to leave at night. And finally the producer turned around and said to me, "You know, we've had hundreds of people come and observe, and they come for a day, get bored, and they leave and they don't stay. You're the only one we've ever had who came before everyone else came and left after everybody else left, and you've been here consistently. Would you like to do a show?" That was my first one. So that's what it takes. You cannot skate by. You have to work, and there's no free ride.
