Traveling the Road of Albert Brooks

With his new Max documentary on Albert Brooks, Rob Reiner makes the case for his friend as uniquely brilliant comic mind. Who am I to disagree?

“I had a very famous agent and he said to me, ‘I don’t know why you always take the hard road.’ And my answer was, ‘You think I see two roads.’” — Albert Brooks, Defending My Life

I have three pop culture heroes: Martin Scorsese, Neil Young, and Albert Brooks. Of the three, I’ve only met Albert Brooks, but it turned out to be one of the more serendipitous moments of my career. At the time, Warner Independent Pictures—the most absurdly named of all the doomed boutique studio labels that came and went in the early 2000s—had carved out a piece of its minuscule marketing budget for Brooks’s Looking For Comedy in the Muslim World for a press tour and I got 20 minutes for The A.V. Club. (We stretched it past 30.) 

It was a wide-ranging interview, covering not just the new film, but Brooks’ legendary appearances on late-night television, his work as a character actor, and the guiding philosophy of Defending Your Life. At the end of the interview, Brooks graciously complimented me on my questions and I sheepishly mentioned to him that I had written an incomplete master’s thesis on his first five films as writer-director. He smiled at that, though he probably would not have smiled at the reason it was unfinished: I was poised to get a full-time position at The A.V. Club in Chicago, so I spent the summer of 1998 watching the World Cup on TV instead.

Cut to February 2017. Anna Thorngate, then the managing editor at the Criterion Collection, reached out to me to see if I’d like to write the essay for the Criterion version of Lost In America. She said that Brooks himself had suggested me, having appreciated what I’d written about him in the past—and he’d mentioned the master’s thesis, too. Needless to say, I was thrilled beyond words at the opportunity and thrilled again when the essay, “The $100,000 Box,” was published and Brooks himself reached out to thank me personally. (Criterion would later enlist me to write essays for Jabberwocky and I Wanna Hold Your Hand, so I owe him a karmic percentage on those, too.) One of the most exciting aspects of writing that Lost In America essay was getting the chance to assist in Brooks’ canonization as one of the great directors of American comedy. That’s why I’d chosen that thesis topic at the time: He’d made these five original, provocative, ingenious comedies that simply were not getting the attention they deserved.

The new Max documentary Albert Brooks: Defending My Life makes the argument for Brooks’ genius emphatically, albeit with a much larger scope than I had intended. It’s a little bit easier to defend the life of this comedian’s comedian when you look at the entire oeuvre—the late-night bits, the Saturday Night Live shorts, his work as an actor and voice talent, et al.—rather than five films that deserved far more attention than they got. (Especially when compared to another Jewish writer/director/star who turned out a movie per year for half a century.) The doc’s director, Rob Reiner, has been Brooks’ friend since high school 60 years earlier, when he was still using the audacious name his parents had given him, Albert Einstein. (Their classmates: Richard Dreyfuss and the children of Lee J. Cobb, Groucho Marx and Joey Bishop.) The core of Defending My Life is a simple sit-down interview between Reiner and Brooks, built out with clips and a vast array of talking heads.