For this summer's special animation issue cover story, Written By editor in chief Richard Stayton enjoyed a conversation with Matt Groening, creator of the most popular family sitcom on television, The Simpsons. The two former underground freelance journalists covered a lot of territory. The resulting feature story in the magazine could only contain a small portion of their free-associative conversation. Here's a sampling of what got left out of the cover story for the summer animation issue of Written By:

Richard Stayton [turning on the tape-recorder]: I'm always afraid these won't record.  

Matt Groening: I never had a problem until I interviewed David Byrne.

Somebody you cared about.

And it was the most amazing interview for me, personally, because I got him to talk about visiting Indonesia. He had just gotten back from a trip and was talking about Balinese Gamelan music and all this crazy stuff that I found fascinating. And because I was recording it, I didn't feel I needed to commit what he was saying to memory.

And at the end I saw that the tape had broken. And Byrne said, “I hope you have a good memory”. And I said, “I hope so too.” And I wrote it up as a very short article because I couldn't remember much.

Well, you were really young then.

Photo: The Simpsons™ / © 2008 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.All Rights Reserved.

Until they fired you over your Life in Hell comic strip.

So I went to the LA Weekly.

You've said doing that comic “grounded you,” that you will never stop drawing it.

There's something wrong with me because every week I go, “Oh no, it's due again!” Like it's some big surprise.

Then you do them overnight?

No, I think about them through the week, and then I sit down and knock it out, generally in an afternoon. But often I just write myself into a corner and then try to jump out of the corner with the punch-line. And it is really fun to construct a comic strip, because it has its own rules that are completely different from movies or television or any other art form. If anything, it's closest to poetry. They're very simple, concise moments in time, and they're handmade, and you just want to hold people's attention as a distraction from the rest of the stuff in the newspaper. I enjoy it.

Do you still enjoy animation?

I love the medium of animation. I think it's amazing, from the short little bits of animation that you see on the Internet, all the way to the extravagant Pixar masterpieces. And I like it in part because it's a form of storytelling which is still very aware of its own history, going back to the early days of Out of the Inkwell and Gerdy the Dinosaur and Mickey Mouse and all those, and Felix the Cat, that there is a through-line that I find fascinating. And because you control every aspect of the viewing experience, from the writing to the drawings to the composition and the sound, it's incredibly enticing as a medium. I contemplate working in live action, but I'm confounded by the idea that I can't control the actors. And there's something very dreamlike about cartoons at their best, because they offer a universe that doesn't really exist. And they make you believe, while you're in it, that you're actually in this dream-world.

You told me the other day on the phone that you're a writer who happens to draw.

 When I was growing up I loved to draw whenever I could. I doodled in class constantly. From the very first day of the First Grade I can remember drawing when I was supposed to be paying attention. I think in part because I was bored. And in part because it was just fun to make little creatures that I could pretend were real. And I was very much inspired by my father, Homer, who was a cartoonist.

 Was he drawing a single panel in the newspaper?

He did single panel cartoons. And he illustrated articles and made short movies and did advertising. He did everything. In fact, although I try to think of myself as being completely different from him, in many ways I'm like him. 

Your original ambition was to be a journalist.

My two writing heroes, back in those days, were Joseph Heller because of Catch 22, and his Something Happened. And I loved the exuberance of the writing of Tom Wolfe: Electric Kool-aid Acid Test, The Pump House Gang. And Kurt Vonnegut and Zap comics. And then I came to LA and I hit a wall. I didn't know where to begin. I walked into the offices of the LA Free Press when I got to LA, and the receptionist was sitting there crying. I said, “Do you have any job openings?” IAnd she said, “Don't work for these bastards.”  And the next day Larry Flynt bought the LA Free Press.  This was after the Free Press had done an article denouncing Larry Flynt in anticipation of his purchase of the newspaper, and then he bought it. And then the following week, the front page was, “An Apology to Larry Flint.”

The Free Press had a great political cartoonist, Ron Cobb.

Ron Cobb was brilliant.  In fact, the reason why Life in Hell is square is because of the square cartoons that Ron Cobb did in the Free Press. Anyway, I realized I couldn't work there. So I used to take the bus over to UCLA and hop the stile in the Student Employment Center and look at job offerings… and do anything. And I naively looked in the Los Angeles Times classifieds for a writing position. And there was one ad that said “Wanted: Writer/Chauffer.”

Who could pass that up?

And I called up. I got the job. I was mostly a chauffer. I drove an old guy around who was a location scout. And he would go around with a Polaroid camera and shoot the exteriors of houses. I don't know if he actually made any money doing it. And he had been in Hollywood since the 1930s and had sort of done peripheral work. And he was writing his memoirs-or he was having people ghostwrite his memoirs, who were his chauffeurs. And we would drive around during the day, he would tell me stories-or whoever was driving-and then in the evening, you'd sit in his living room and type up the manuscript. But the manuscript was like two feet high. And it was not very good. The job felt very much like the movie, Sunset Boulevard, that I was somehow in the inside of a guy's weird fantasy world about what his life was like, and about what his life in Hollywood was like. The job lasted only a few months. It drove me crazy.

You're lucky you didn't end face-down in a swimming pool, shot in the back.

After driving him around all day, listening to his addled anecdotes about Hollywood, we'd go to The Gourmet Chalet, on the corner of Fairfax and Sunset, and my job was to push the shopping cart and pick out his gigantic steak, which cost more than I was being paid. And then in the evening I would sit at his dining room table and sort of organize his thoughts. But, like I said, the manuscript was already a foot high. So I lasted a little while. He didn't like the fact that I questioned his memory about Laurel and Hardy, you know, and other stars of the day. 

After being a chauffeur, what was your next job in L.A.?

I was also a movie extra. And that was short lived. I was in a TV movie called When Everyday- I wasn't really in the movie; I was in the crowd, in the background of a movie called When Every Day was Fourth of July, which I believe starred Dean Jones. I met a movie extra later at Farmers Market on Third and Fairfax and he was talking his acting career. And he actually had me going, leading me to believe that he was an actor. It turned out he was an extra and he had this rich fantasy life. But the funniest thing was, he said this, “I was at a movie last week directed by Francis Ford Coppola. And, you know, at one point the director actually spoke to me.” I said, “Really, what did he say?” He said, “Stop playing with that yo-yo.”

That's pretty funny. Was he aware it was funny?

No.  So the early days were a struggle. And I wanted to be a writer. I went to a series of meetings with low-level executives and agents, all of which were a waste of time, very much like an unfunny version of The Day of the Locust. And then I got an apartment across the street from Paramount Pictures, on Valentino Place. And I somehow got a meeting with some low-level executive at Paramount to pitch movie ideas. And so, because I was a block away, I walked over to the lot from my meeting. And because I didn't have a car, the security guard thought there was something wrong with me. That I had to be a lunatic. And I said, “But I live right there.”  Anyway, I got into the meeting and the guy sat down and he said, “First off, I want to tell you, I'm a completely duplicitous asshole and nothing I say can be believed. Now, what are your ideas?” So that was my big introduction to screenwriting. 

So what was your pitch?

Paramount was looking for Eddie Murphy movies. And I pitched my idea: How about Eddie Murphy being a lover of movies in the South, in the 1920s, but he's a janitor at a movie theater and he wants to be a movie star and he moves to Los Angeles around the beginning of the sound era because he's got fantasies of being Valentino or some leading man. And then the reality of the racism of the time would be that the only parts that he could get are as chefs, in Three Stooges shorts and as African natives in King Kong. You take Eddie Murphy's outgoing personality and put him in that situation, it would be really funny. And I was told that I was an idiot because there were two things very wrong with what I was talking about. One, I was pitching Eddie Murphy as a Black Man and I was wrong to think of that. He's not a Black Man-he's a funny man. And then I was told that audiences did not understand the difference between silent movies and sound movies and they would be utterly confused. 

Well, the guy said he was a duplicitous asshole.

With that kind of experience, I thought, Oh, this [screenwriting] isn't for me. I'll just do journalism and cartoons. 

You once said in an interview that when you were a kid, you were so deeply unhappy that you vowed you would never forget how unhappy you were after you became an adult.

Oh, yeah. To me the best humor comes out of fear and anxiety. If you do any kind of psychoanalysis of humor, it's all about anxiety and hostility. And what's funny to me is that many people who make their livings being funny are ruled by unconscious impulses and you can see it over and over again in the kinds of jokes that they tell. You could see exactly what pushes their own buttons. 

Where do you see animation going?

For me personally, I'm in conflict with myself, because I love the medium of animation. But as I get older I'm less interested in fantasy and I'm more interested in real emotion and that's what I gravitate to as a reader and as a movie watcher and TV watcher. I'm interested more in real things, real emotions. And yet, if you're going to work in animation, you have to take advantage of the fantasy element, I think. So I'm trying to figure out what it is that I can do next that would be both more emotionally real and wild visually. I'm about to go to the Annecy Animation Festival in France to be judge. And the reason is to do research about what's going on in animation and be inspired. Because I've been watching a lot of independent animation and I'm so fascinated by what they're able to do with a camera. They move the camera around in a very free, casual way that most animation doesn't do, certainly on television. And I want to see if I can figure out how to, again, use this conflict of real emotion with contemporary filmmaking technique and put them together. I don't know if it's going to work.