The Point Radio: DOONESBURY’s Secret Origin

Award winning cartoonist, writer and producer, Garry Trudeau talks about his hit Amazon series ALPHA HOUSE and how DOONESBURY was born. Plus we begin our visit with the cast of the FXX Comedy THE LEAGUE, including talking to Jon LaJoie about how his character has become more grounded this season, Mark Duplass on making sensitive films and Nick Kroll on why the show gets hotter every year.

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Transcript

The Point Radio. Hey, it's Mike Raub. We start our visit with the cast of the League, asking the big question right up front, have they finally gone a little bit too far? And we meet with Gary Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury and the new hit streaming comedy

Alpha House. What's next for him and where did it all get started? Let's get to The Point. This is The Point, The Point Radio. Get The Point Radio.

It's another season of the Outrageous League on FXX and this year, well, there's a few changes for some of the mainstay characters, including Jean Le Joie's character, Taco, who I thought seemed a little more grounded this season. Starting a website that has to do with tracking who everyone, all of your sexual partners are is absurdly more grounded, very grounded in reality.

That's not even a far-fetched idea for Taco. That's pretty sensible. I don't know. I think having Rafi in the League helps ground my character, really ground my character. What I'm up to is always sort of, I'm not having sex with wild animals.

So it's like, oh, Taco is kind of a normal thing. He's just shaving people's pubes in his van. Whatever, just like a normal person. Taco's also become a millionaire of late, so how's that affect your things? I don't know.

I don't think necessarily much has changed for Taco. He's very wealthy, but he's been wealthy before. He's been rich before. It kind of doesn't faze him. I'm just with very high-profile entrepreneurs and business people.

It's not a big change for him. Last year's biggest change was he wasn't high for a few minutes, and that kind of threw him off completely. So I think as long as he's high, things will be sort of normal. Still terrible at fantasy football.

If he were to get good at fantasy football, that would be crazy for Taco. That part of the league for John so far has been playing a different side of Taco. I had so much fun playing a not-stone Taco. I would really love that. Speaking French, actually it's sort of like, because when I do, when I get on set, like

when we're shooting a scene, I really like, I sort of, you know, I have to like do a thing to my eyes where I'm like, okay, just pretend you're not listening to someone when they're talking to you. And that's the way I act like the entire time. I'm like, yeah, yeah, why?

I'm not like consciously listening. So I was like, oh, like as an actor, I was like, oh, I'm allowed to listen to you in this scene and to respond rationally and go back and forth. It was really kind of exciting and fun. So yeah, I would love for a not-stone Taco to come back.

Clark Dubla's plays Pete, a bachelor who lives a life that a lot of friends would envy, but not necessarily these friends. Yeah, you know, I mean, I would say that in a normal group of friends, you're absolutely right. And they would.

This is not a normal group of friends. And I think what they try to do is just make fun of him for how pathetic his dating life is, which I think generally speaking it is. But of course they simultaneously are jealous that Pete gets to sleep with multiple women, which is, I guess in the end, not that it was similar to a lot of male friends.

Mark, of course, is a very successful producer, director and writer. And along with his brother, has a lot of irons in the fire right now. I've got a whole bunch of stuff going right now. I have my first TV show that I created with my brother is called Togetherness. And that airs on HBO in January.

And I'm in that show with Melanie Lynsby and Amanda Pete and our friend Steve Zisses. My brother and I wrote and directed almost all the episodes. It's really one of our babies. And then there's a movie called The One I Love that is in theaters and on VOD right now.

It starts with me and Elizabeth Moss. And also there's a film called The Skeletal Twins. It stars Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig that I produced that's in theaters right now. So yeah, there's a lot of stuff around. I'm making a trilogy for the Weinstein Company called Creep that I star in.

It's sort of a digging up and retrenching of the found footage genre and trying to make it interesting and different. And so all three of those will come out next year. I was doing them all in a big package. I produced a movie for Nick called Adult Beginners that he stars in with Rose Byrne and Bobby

Kennevalley. And it became a great Nick. It's really funny, but he's got a lot of heart in it too. It's kind of Nick stepping into my world a little bit. It's more of the sweet, sensitive stuff.

He said I'm a douchey ruckson. So it was cool. Along with the comedy, part of the success of the league is its connection to the red hot fantasy football craze. And something Nick Kroll agrees with.

Obviously, fantasy football is such a good entry point because so many people are playing it. But it still feels like something that you do specifically with your friends. And so there's something versus like a show about a bunch of guys who hang out at a bar. It's like, yeah, that feels so general.

And we know everybody hangs out at a bar. Like fantasy, there's something about it. But really, I think that just becomes an entry point. And then it becomes about like, obviously, a group of buddies. And then beyond that, it's not like Jeff and Jackie coming from, Jeff coming from Seinfeld

and Curb. I think he just he created such a, he has such a good ability to create like terms and language and things that people then relate to and can assume within their own league or within their own group of friends. So I think that that, you know, and I feel like there's a lot of like, it's what's crazy

is that I have like 12 year old kids coming up to me like I'm a big fan of the show because they play fantasy football or whatever. And then I have like my siblings friends who were in their 40s and 50s being like, love the show, because everybody works from like parents to kids pretty effectively. At some point, it'll all come to an end.

So how do you bring the curtain down on a show that's been this consistently outrageous? Mark Doopla's comments, you know, we're six seasons in showing no signs of settling or personal growth in any way, shape or form. Who knows, you know, we're not, we're not sure how much longer the show is gonna last. And I'm sure, sure something calamitous will happen towards the end.

So we'll see. We've got more with the cast of the league coming up. Meanwhile, new episodes every Wednesday on FXX. See more on the FFX now. And of course, you can also see other episodes in this season on Hulu Plus.

And if you want to binge watch a little bit, well, there's five seasons of the league waiting for you right now on Netflix. Let's catch up on the latest in pop culture. It seems like Marvel has found its Dr. Strange and this time it's Benedict Cumberbatch, the deal with Joaquin Phoenix, who was attached to the new Marvel movie, fell apart just about

three weeks ago. Now it looks like Cumberbatch will step in front of the cameras in the spring when Dr. Strange begins production. CBS is jumping into social media in a big way with an Instagram takeover that pretty much makes them the first network to ever try something like this.

Performers from all 21 of the network's prime time shows are participating in a week long event that ends on Sunday with each of the shows adding photos and videos from their sets. If you want to follow it on Instagram, hashtag CBS Instagram takeover is where you go. First casualty of the new TV season is ABC's Manhattan Love Story.

The Tuesday night comedy had a fairly low rating of about one with just about 3.3 million viewers in total. In its place, ABC is going to run back to back episodes of Selfie for the time being. And on a related note, TLC has canceled Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, this due to some rather serious backstage drama.

No word on whether or not any of the previous episodes will be shown, but the current season which has been filmed and was set to air in a few weeks will not be televised. A couple of days ago we told you about Toys R Us pulling the Breaking Bad figures from their shelves and their online store, all due to a petition from Change.org. Now a new petition from collectors are asking the stores to rethink this and to put the

toys back on the shelves. The new petition by the way has just about three times the number of signatures as the original one did. By the way, interestingly enough, actor Aaron Paul, who played Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad, was among those signatures on the new petition and he's also gone to Twitter to

try and get more folks to join in the cause as saying that Toys R Us needs to rethink this position. Todd McFarlane has been using his Facebook page to throw up a couple of images that might lead to a new Spawn animated series. The images are again on his page and they have a couple of characters, Sam and tWitch

and some backgrounds as well. McFarlane has indicated the art samples were only a small sample of what is a larger art trope in his words for the possible upcoming project. Spawn of course was an animated series on HBO, won a couple of Emmys too for three seasons and of course a live action feature back in 1997.

There's been nothing done in those mediums with Spawn over the past few years. WWE fans are thrilled about the fact that Edge and Christian might be together again and this time in a whole new place. Of course Adam Copeland, known as Edge in the wrestling world, has been an ongoing character in the sci-fi series Haven and now J.Riso, also known as WWE Superstar Christian, will

reunite with his lifelong friend and former tag team partner on a series of episodes that will begin on Haven on the 28th of November and the arc will continue into other episodes early in 2015. Gary True Girl holds the honor of being the first comic strip artist to ever be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.

His Dunesbury still appears in 1400 newspapers around the US and abroad and the hardcover and paperback collections have sold more than 7 million copies worldwide. I was curious as to how the concept of Dunesbury actually began. Well I was doing it in college. When I was a junior there was this miraculous football team led by a guy named Brian Dowling

that just kept winning game after game after game and it became a kind of national story and he became very well known in New England. And so I just thought I'd ride his coattails and I created this character BD and it was supposed to be a one off, a sports trip that would come to a close at the end of the football season.

But I was scouted and recruited by these two young guys who were just starting their own syndicate called Universal Press Syndicate and so I became their first feature upon graduating from college and I've had the same job ever since. So over the decades has the strip changed at all? That's really what I have to say because I'm so in the moment when I'm doing it.

It's a very pleasant orient and undertaking. I never think more than a few days out. The strip has a 10 day deadline so when I started it was six weeks and I had to be a little bit more strategic but now I'm just trying to get the week out the door. What you've figured out pretty early in this business is whether you're built for that,

whether by temperament you can put up with those deadlines year after year. I don't really have, I've never had the luxury to look back and see where I've been and how it contrasts with where I am. It's a little bit like mountaineering, you're looking for the next handhold and it's not actually about how I've productive to look down.

And so I can't really describe that journey other than it being kind of a journey of my interests and of my life. And I've tried to be a good noticer. I think that's the number one thing, quality that you have to have to succeed in writing comedies.

You have to notice the world around you and how it works and how people interact. So I wish I could give you a big picture answer but I'm very much anchored in the present. Gary is also an award-winning screenwriter and producer too. His latest venture, the Amazon streaming comedy Alpha House, which began its second season

a few days ago. Doing a political show with Gary is a no-brainer but why did he choose to do it for streaming? Well I didn't even know that expression two years ago. I didn't know anything about streaming TV beyond webisodes so it was a horrifying idea to me.

It was brought to me by John Alser who is my partner and co-executive producer. He said Amazon has set up a studio, a pop-up studio and they're serious and they want to compete directly with the big boys and that they're prepared to resource shows at an HBO level for that level of quality. And I was skeptical at first but they stepped right up to it.

They gave us what we needed to do a quality show and obviously I was thrilled and delighted when Netflix showed us that the world was changing. They were out of the gate a little earlier than Amazon was but now I think it's pretty clear to everybody that video content hereafter is headed for the cloud where it can be accessed by all at any time.

While this year Alpha House is tying closely to the midterm elections, next year's post-election madness should give the show a lot to work with. Only in the most general terms. There is that sort of political armature in place. We know what's going to be happening in the political world structurally and so by the

end of season two, two of our candidates have positioned themselves to make a run at 2016. So yeah, that's of great help in trying to imagine what the show looks like two years out. Catch Dunes very daily in your newspaper. In the meantime, Alpha House continues with new episodes you can binge all at once.

Grab the whole second season right now at Amazon Prime Video. That's it for now. We're back in a few days with more on the league and a visit with comic fan and award-winning author of course Brad Meltzer. What's next for him?

You'll find out right here on websites like ComicMigs.com, MichaelDavisWorld.com, give the point radio.com and in the iTunes 5 guest directory. All places to stay in touch with us just like you can on social media too with the point radio on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. See you right back here.