Insulting the director who is making a documentary about you might not be the most diplomatic of choices. Then again, Chevy Chase has never been very diplomatic.
The comedian gets snarly at the top of filmmaker Marina Zenovich’s “I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not,” which airs Thursday on CNN. During their very first meeting, he warns her it isn’t going to be easy to figure him out. She asks him why.
“You’re not bright enough, how’s that?” he replies.
That the exchange made the film says a lot about Zenovich and also about Chase, a gifted physical comedian who starred in classic 1970s and ’80s comedies like “Fletch,” “Three Amigos,” “Caddyshack” and the National Lampoon’s “Vacation” franchise.
“He’s one of those people everybody thinks they know,” says Zenovich. “He has a reputation that precedes him and there’s something underneath that you want to get to. So it was a great challenge to try to get there.”
A complicated man
“I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not” follows Chase’s life and career, from his dark childhood to the dawn of “Saturday Night Live” and then Hollywood, ending with his messy time on the TV series “Community.” There are perspectives offered from Dan Aykroyd, Beverly D’Angelo, Goldie Hawn, Lorne Michaels, Ryan Reynolds, Martin Short, his wife Jayni Chase and three daughters, and brother Ned.
A portrait emerges of a sharp and often cutting comedian who has a deep fan base but can rub some people the wrong way with a blunt inelegance. “I’m complex and I’m deep and I can be hurt easily,” he tells the filmmaker.
The documentary shows footage of his film and TV work alongside home movies, cuddling a cat, playing a piano, playing chess, reading fan mail — including a birthday card from Bill Clinton — and visiting a flower shop.
The movie has the endorsement of a tough critic: Chase, himself. “It’s just like a massage. I think of it that way: I love the massage. Sometimes it hurts, but the massage is so lovely,” the comedian tells The Associated Press.
The key is childhood
Chase is just the latest profile by two-time Emmy-winner Zenovich, whose previous documentary subjects have included Roman Polanski, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams and Lance Armstrong.
“I make films about these complicated men,” she says. “I’m just fascinated by humans and their behavior and Chevy just seems to fit in my oeuvre.”
Zenovich points to Chase’s early years to help explain how he became who he became. Chase, as a boy, was locked in the basement for days, hit across the face and shut in a closet as punishment at the hands of his stepfather and mother.
“I think the whole key to Chevy is his childhood. I hate to use the word trauma, but I think he’s traumatized,” she says. “Humor is his way of dealing with it.”
Chase famously feuded with many comedians, including “Community” co-star Joel McHale, “SNL” castmate John Belushi and Bill Murray, who had replaced him at “SNL.” He left “Community” following reports he’d used a racist slur and directed insults at co-star Donald Glover. He had also quarreled with the show’s creator Dan Harmon , who was pushed out for a time.
“The old Chevy could make you laugh putting you down and there was a little bit of a wink there, so you were in on the joke,” writer and actor Alan Zweibel says in the film. “Now it just comes off as mean.”
The film argues that Chase’s darkness was amplified by his drug use. “In his mind he doesn’t think he’s mean,” says Zenovich, who interviewed Chase twice and then followed him around for a few days.
“What was really interesting about Chevy is that he really wants to try to figure himself out. He wanted to go there, but then something stops him,” she says. “He goes to a certain point, and then something stops him.”
“Hollywood stuff”
Chase, now 82, says he’s aware that there’s a long list of people who consider him contemptible, but insists he doesn’t care. “It’s just Hollywood stuff,” he says. “It never really bothered me.”
The movie digs into his short-lived TV talk show and his eye-opening first and only season at “Saturday Night Live.” He concedes leaving “SNL” was a mistake and shows how hurt he was not to be invited onstage when the show celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this year.
The documentary also shows him basking in the applause of fans as he attends a recent screening of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and it also reveals that his three daughters are insightful, funny and sweet.
“I think the one thing he really did was he was able to break that generational trauma,” says Zenovich. “There I go again, using the word. But that’s quite a feat, right?”
