Judd Apatow likes to keep stuff. He even goes as far as to say he’s a hoarder. But unlike a regular hoarder, he insists all the things he keeps are awesome — and neatly collected.
“I save everything, but I don’t have it in a mound in the middle of the house,” the writer-director says. “I’m the Felix Unger of hoarding. Everything is taken care of very well.”
Fans of Apatow — and fans of comedy in general — get the benefit of this personality quirk with the Tuesday publication of “Comedy Nerd,” a bulging, 570-page, photo-filled memoir from every chapter of his storied career.
It’s packed with behind-the-scenes snapshots from sets, script fragments, notes from network bosses, essays, movie posters and miniprofiles of his fellow comedians. There’s his late-night ideas for “Knocked Up” typed into a BlackBerry and a photo of Adam Sandler’s old fake ID.
“I feel like just making this book justifies the hoarding,” Apatow says with a laugh. “I did save it for a reason. I wasn’t wrong to not throw out my photograph of Billie Jean King from when I was 10 years old.”
Network notes and emails
The producer, director and writer behind the movies “This is 40” and “The 40-Year-Old-Virgin,” was inspired to make the book from similar memorabilia-filled offerings from the Marx Brothers and “Saturday Night Live.”
He spent a year going through his photos — 400,000 of them — keepsakes and clippings, then scanned everything into his computer and laid out the entire book in a raw way. He spent the next year writing essays and captions.
“The idea was that the experience of looking at the book would be as if I was over your shoulder explaining what things were and telling you stories,” he says.
Apatow includes memos he got from network standards — “Just a reminder that Ben’s gyrating dance not be sexual,” one reads about “The Ben Stiller Show” — as well as Garry Shandling’s note-filled revision to a script from “The Larry Sanders Show” and a page from an unproduced screenplay written by Owen Wilson. Apatow reveals Paul Rudd had a pretty funny but lost cameo from “Bridesmaids.”
He includes the increasingly snarky email exchanges in 2001 between him and writer Mark Brazill beefing over a long forgotten comedy sketch, and there’s an alternate initial setup for “Anchorman” — a group of anchors on a plane crash into a snowy mountain that becomes a parody of the movie “Alive.”
Andy Ward, Apatow’s editor and executive vice president and publisher of Random House, said it was a book only Apatow could make — he being a visual thinker, a loving collector and a comedy obsessive.
“There’s a photographic element to this. There’s a sort of scrapbook-found object element. There’s advice in it about a life in comedy,” says Ward. “If you know him at all, it is very true to who he is and I think how he approaches what he does.”
Apatow is even not afraid to show times where he was foolish. “I think a lot about all the people I got a chance to collaborate with and how magical a bunch of those times were. So I’m very happy to also show where I was an idiot or awful because that is part of the journey,” he says.
“It’s always an experiment”
There are pages dedicated to TV shows that never got made, like “North Hollywood,” about three friends trying to break into show business that would have starred Amy Poehler, Kevin Hart, Jason Segel, January Jones and Judge Reinhold.
It seemed fun, at least judging from the photos at a party during the shooting of the pilot that shows folks getting stoned. “Do people want me to show the photos of them smoking enormous joints in the year 2002?” asks Apatow. The answer is yes.
Failures litter the pages of “Comedy Nerd” despite the author’s bankable instincts, which have given us “Freaks and Geeks” and “Girls” on TV and the Oscar-nominated films “Bridesmaids” and “The Big Sick.”
“The hard part about comedy is it’s always an experiment. And everybody has a completely different opinion about how the story should be told and what’s working and what not working,” he says.
“So a lot of having a career in this business is learning how to have those conversations that I didn’t do well. For many years, I got very emotional and resistant. It led to a lot of cancellations.”
Making people laugh
Apatow’s rise coincided with fresh new voices popping up that became part of his troupe — Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Rudd and Segel. “I do think a new type of comedy was brewing, and it took the business a couple of beats to catch up to it,” Apatow says.
Apatow doesn’t think the business of comedy has gotten much easier these days, despite the vast appetite of multiple streaming services.
“I don’t think it’s better, it’s just as weird in a different way,” he says. “It’s just all an experiment, and there’s no way for anyone to know if anything will work. That’s why we’re all banging into each other all the time.”
Apatow is donating all proceeds from the book to those affected by the Los Angeles wildfires. He lost his old home in Pacific Palisades; its ruins are one of the first images in the book. Making it into a charity work also helped make “Comedy Nerd” easier since magazines and photographers allowed Apatow to use their work without cost.
“Everything in the book was donated. Normally you have to pay for all of these photos and reprints of articles. But when I told people where the money was going, everyone gave me everything for free.”
