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By
Suzanne

Interview with Louis CK of "Louie" on
FX 6/27/12
It's always a pleasure to interview Louis because he's
just so kind, funny, and professional. I enjoy his show, even
though I think it should be funnier. He tries to make the show a lot
like real life, only slightly funnier, and the humor comes from the life
situations, as well as from his stand-up act. So it's more of a drama
with some funny parts. I would rather see more funny parts. Still,
it clearly is very successful and works for him.
FX NETWORK: Louie
June 27, 2012/10:00 a.m. PDT
SPEAKERS
Louis C.K.
John Solberg
PRESENTATION
Moderator: Welcome to the Louie conference call. At this time, all
participants are in a listen-only mode. I will now turn the conference
over to John Solberg. Please go ahead.
John: Hello everybody. Thanks for being on today’s call to talk about
season three of Louie, which kicks off tomorrow at 10:30. We’ve ordered
13 episodes for the upcoming season, and from what we’ve seen, it’s just
magnificent. Louis is going to be on the cover of Entertainment Weekly
tomorrow, and they actually call him the world’s greatest comedian.
We’ve got a couple of notes. Season two of Louie is on sale on DVD and
Blu-Ray now. Also, Louis is going to launch a 39-city tour of his
standup in October, and the tickets are all priced at $45, and they can
only be purchased through Louieck.net.
So with that, I would like to turn it over to our creator, executive
producer, writer, and star of Louie, Louis C.K. We’ll open it up for
questions.
Louis: Hello.
Moderator: Our first question is going to come from the line of Scott
King from ChicagoNOW.
Scott: I want to ask you about your standup. What was it a few years ago
that clicked for you and kind of gave your standup new life? And also,
what were some of the technical things you’ve forced yourself to work on
over the years?
Louis: Well, standup-wise, I mean, I think it’s just time spent onstage.
I had been doing it for about 20 years when I sort of figured it out.
That’s just kind of how long it takes. And also, you grow up. I have
kids now, and that puts real, actual-life pressure on you rather than
just some guy kicking around with a show-business career. There’s not
much to draw from there. So I think that made a difference.
And technically, I’ve learned that being in—having good legs and wind is
good for being onstage—if you’re in shape and have endurance. I just
learned some things from guys. Chris Rock taught me to always look up;
you don’t look down at your feet. A lot of comedians want to look down
at their feet. You break contact with the audience. So he told me just a
really simple fact of the whole thing, which is just look at the back of
the room. Don’t look at the front row; look at the back row.
Scott: Also, I realized you kind of make an effort to put a lot of
younger, especially New York, comics on your show, and last year in
Chicago you had a couple of sold-out shows with some of the older comics
who influenced you when you were starting. Can you talk about why it’s
important for you to do stuff like that?
Louis: Well, I do love standup. I love comedians. They’re my community.
And also, I guess, because I know so many of them, I know the value of
them. I know what they can do.
Comedians work great as actors because they’re good under pressure. A
lot of actors you have to sort of make them feel like everything’s going
really well to get a good performance out of them. But if you have a
comedian on the set, you can tell them, “Hey, you really are screwing
this up,” and then they just get better. So they’re valuable that way.
And I loved, yeah, I loved bringing Steven Wright and Richard Lewis to
my show in Chicago. That was really fun to do. They paid me a lot for
the show, so I figured, “I don’t need all this money. I’d rather have a
great, great bunch of opening acts.”
Moderator: Now we’ll go to the line of Jamie Ruby with SciFiVision.com.
Jamie: You write, direct, you act—you do everything on this show. Is that
hard? I mean, is that a lot more work doing all of that together? How do
you have time for all of that?
Louis: Well, I love doing all of it. It’s all stuff that I really enjoy.
It is really hard, but it’s not too hard to do. I like it. I like being
full every day with stuff I have to do. And also, I’ve learned about
management of time and brain, so it’s just something I—you got to get
good at it, at doing a bunch of things at once and not thinking about
things you’re not doing while you’re doing other things. You have to be
disciplined about not trying to do everything all at the same time. But
yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard and fun.
Jamie: Can you talk about how the show started in the very beginning—how
it came to be?
Louis: Well, I was doing just my standup, and I was in L.A. and taking
some meetings about doing a T.V. show, and FX approached me about doing
a show cheaply and with a lot of freedom. So we tried the pilot that
way. I told them if they could just give me the money and let me try to
do the pilot my way, it would be worth it. So they gave me a very small
amount of money, and I made a show with it that they liked. So that’s
it. That was the model we’ve been working on since then.
Moderator: Now we’ll go to the line of Kristyn Clarke with Pop Culture
Madness.
Kristyn: Are there any guest stars in particular that you’re looking
forward to that we’ll see this season?
Louis: I got a lot of great people this year. I won’t tell you all of
them, but Melissa Leo is in the second episode. Hold on one second.
Sorry. Hi, sorry about that. I’m trying to get breakfast, and it’s
taking me all day.
Okay, so Melissa Leo—F. Murray Abraham comes back; he’s one of my
favorite guys ever. Robin Williams does a thing on the show later in the
season. Jerry Seinfeld is on the show. There are a lot of guest stars
that are piling up, and I’m excited about it.
Kristyn: That’s awesome. And for you personally, do you feel that there’s
a particular formula that works for good comedic T.V.?
Louis: I think you just have to be new all the time, and different. You
can’t do the same thing all the time.
Moderator: Now we can go to the line of Ernie Estrella with BuzzFocus.com.
Ernie: I wanted to ask about the third episode of the season in Miami.
There’s a lot of happiness in that episode, and it’s a nice contrast to
what we’ve seen in the past where you’re in misery the whole time. So
can you talk about doing that particular episode?
Louis: The Miami episode was so fun for our whole crew. We all got a trip
to Miami, but it was very hard work because we went all over the city.
But yeah, I loved celebrating Miami. All the music is original. That’s
all music that we made with our musicians.
A lot went into creating the colors and the energy of Miami, and we have
this young actor who had never really acted, and he did a really great
job. But yeah, I spend enough time onscreen looking hangdog and
depressed, so I think it was okay to let me smile and chase a chicken
for a minute.
Ernie: Also, you put in scenes with your ex-wife now who was kind of a
silent character in the past. Can you talk about that choice to bring
her out into the show now?
Louis: Well, the show needs to keep going, and so I’m introducing new
elements each year. I try to do something new that’s new to the show.
The stories that I wrote really led me to her. The show has really
broken off into fiction much more in the last year and this year, and so
it’s really not drawing from my life so much anymore.
This ex-wife character is completely not anything like my real ex-wife.
When I was drawing from my own life, I didn’t want to have the story be
about an ex-husband and ex-wife. That relationship wasn’t what I wanted
to write about. But I arrived at a version of it for this character that
I thought was really good, this woman who’s well put together and kind
of an added pressure to his life.
And the actress was so good. A lot of the stuff that we do on the show,
I’m not sure I’m going to do it until I see who’s playing it. It’s part
of having the freedom without a network, that you don’t have to run all
the scripts and casting by people. I wrote a script with her in it, and
I had the casting people go look for someone, and I told them open it
way up and just bring anybody. And I really liked what this woman did,
so I decided to stick with the character.
Moderator: Now we’ll go to the line of April MacIntyre from Monsters and
Critics.
April: So we talked last night, and I really love the episode with Allan
Havey and Melissa Leo, and I wanted to know if Robert Kelly would be
returning as your brother and if we’ll see more Allan Havey in future
scenes—and Pam Adlon is going to be coming back as well?
Louis: Allan is not in any other episodes this year, although I really
liked what he did. I was very happy with him, so, yeah, I may bring him
back. Robert is not in any of season three, but I always think about
bringing him back, so maybe season four. Pamela is not in this year. Her
story kind of ended in that airport—and that’s not to say she may not
come back some other time.
April: There’s a romantic wistfulness about this season. We really sense
kind of like you’re ready for—you’re ready to reclaim your family and
have peace, you know? I mean, the Miami episode, especially that whole
scene when you were with his family and it was like you were not only
just hungry for male friendship, you were hunger for the whole
familiar—you know, being around people that loved you.
I just got a sense of watching the five episodes that you’re just
ready—your character is ready to commit to something. Am I wrong?
Louis: No, that’s a really good observation. I think that’s what I felt
like writing this one was that this guy—let him try, let’s say, take a
little bit bigger swings at being with somebody is kind of like what I
feel like was going on too.
I never have, like, a defining sense of it exactly, but I’d say that
that’s definitely true of this year, and it gets to be more so. Yeah,
I’m definitely trying to—it’s more about family and missing being in a
family and being in a relationship and that kind of stuff. That keeps
happening.
Moderator: Now we’ll go to the line of Rachel Stein with Television
Without Pity.
Rachel: So your standup obviously informs the show, but has the show
affected your standup at all? Do you find yourself wanting to make jokes
about things behind the scenes or anything?
Louis: Jokes about things behind the scenes? You mean about the show?
Rachel: Right. Or just in your experiences on the actual T.V. show.
Louis: Oh, not really. I always think that’s kind of boring when
comedians start getting T.V. and movie jobs and then they talk about
being on sets and movies and stuff. I think that there’s something
disappointing about that. It would be like a novelist writing a novel,
and in one of the chapters he says, “Oh, I did a book reading at Barnes
& Noble the other day.” Yeah, you don’t want to hear that. You want to
hear stories. You want to be told stories.
When I’m on the set, I’m telling stories that way, and onstage I’m
telling stories that way, but they all should draw—I mean, on the show I
play a comedian, so the stories can be about comedy, but that’s
different.
Moderator: Now we’ll go to the line of Dave Walker from the New Orleans
Times.
Dave: Tell me how Melissa Leo got cast; she’s not well known for comic
parts. Tell me her casting and what she brought to the role, please.
Louis: I love Melissa Leo very much as an actor, and so she was in my
head. When I wrote the thing that she’s in, I wrote it in my head for
the kind of women I knew in Boston growing up, and then it just hit me
Melissa Leo would be amazing. It was very simple: we sent it to her
reps, and in a few days she said yes. She just really responded to the
material, and she showed up and took it very seriously. She really
approached it the way I wanted her to as an actress, you know?
On my show, there’s not really a comedy muscle you have to use. We play
most of the scenes kind of real or to—we play them straight for comedy
rather than—you know, our eyebrows don’t all go up like they do on most
sitcoms, so somebody like her is perfect for my show.
Dave: And she didn’t have any hesitation at all about the material
itself? Was all that scripted, or was some of it improvised?
Louis: It’s all strictly scripted. We don’t really improvise on my show.
I guess if she would’ve had any problems, she wouldn’t have shown up.
But she was eager to—I mean, it was hard for her to get into our set.
She was shooting something in New Orleans, so we flew her in for a quick
two days, and we had to sort of jam everything into two days. But that’s
how much she wanted it. She really wanted to do it.
Moderator: Now to the line of Adam Buckman with XfinityTV.com.
Adam: My question is about the scene in the truck with Melissa. It’s
certainly extreme, adult material, especially for commercial-supported
television. What are the restrictions, if any, that you work under with
FX? Is there nothing out-of-bounds anymore?
Louis: Well, there is. I mean, you can’t show sex, and you can’t show
people’s parts, and you can’t really explicitly—there’s words you can’t
say. But you can discuss things. You can discuss sexual acts with
somebody and negotiate about them. I think that—
Adam: Yeah, I mean, the language in which you did that is language that
up until recently we didn’t hear on commercial television.
Louis: Oh, definitely. I mean, the people at FX that do standards and
practices are very smart, and I trust them. So what I do is I don’t—I
never argue with them. I mean, when they tell me that it’s too far, I
believe them. I don’t think if they’re not—they don’t act as an
authority; they act as a safeguard for me because for me I will do
whatever.
But they try to keep me within the place where it’s really not—on pay
cable it’s about getting—I mean, not pay cable, but basic cable—because
it’s not an FCC-thing. It’s about where they’re going to get their phone
calls from and who’s going to bug them.
Also, my show has more of a fan base now, so the people who—the first
season, more people probably sampled it that then went, “That’s not for
me.” And most people watching it now know what they’re going to get.
Moderator: Now we’ll go to the line of Nathan MacLeod from TV Guide
Canada.
Nathan: I was wondering, with all the critical praise that’s being heaped
on you and your show right now—and congratulations for all of that—how
do you stay sort of—are you able to stay out of your comfort zone and
stay hungry in terms of your comedy and the show?
Louis: Well, yes. And one way I do that is to make it harder. I mean,
this season was a lot harder than last season. It’s just that the
production was more difficult, and I did stuff—more things that I wasn’t
sure I would be able to pull off. So I always kind of keep the bar ahead
of myself; I keep moving it up. I mean, that’s the intention anyway. I
don’t know if I pull that off.
But, yeah, if you’re doing something that gets really easy, make it
harder because then that’ll be easy if you do it right.
Nathan: I also wanted to ask you about the joke your daughter tells in
the second episode where you mention that you get this feeling where you
love it because you don’t know where it’s going to go already when she
starts it.
Louis: Yes.
Nathan: I feel that way when I watch your show, but the scenes—and I mean
this in the most kiss-ass way possible—is that a feeling that you’re
trying to get out of your viewers, where they don’t know where the scene
is going to go, and they just trust you that it’s going to be funny?
Louis: Yeah, I think that’s a great thing to be able to do if you can is
take people down a road that they’re really unsure of, and have
something down that road happen that they like what they saw. There’s
definitely well-worn paths to laughter, and everybody knows where they
are, and one way to do it is just to walk down those paths cheerfully
and everybody laughs.
But it’s really fun to go into territory where they’re not sure how
to—that’s what I enjoy. It’s just what I like. I like when I’m watching
something and I kind of feel like I’m in a wilderness. I don’t know
where it’s headed, and then I get somewhere and I go, “Wow, that’s what
he was doing.”
Moderator: Now to the line of Dan Hyman with RollingStone.com.
Dan: My question was more about this DIY concept that you’ve had for a
lot of your standup, whether it’s the tour, or last time it was your
release. This time you just announced you’re selling tickets directly to
your—to your tour directly through your site. Just tell me how difficult
that was to pull off, what was involved, and kind of, I guess, your
motivation for going that route?
Louis: It was really hard, but it was really fun. I’m a very curious
person, and so whenever I get into a new facet of what I do, I like to
learn about it, and then when I learn about it, I start asking
questions, like, “Why does it have to be this way,” you know? So as I’ve
toured over the last couple of years in the big theaters and found out
how it works, and I get angry e-mails from fans of how much they’re
paying that’s not even part of the ticket price, and I start to
understand the economics of promotion and ticket sales and all that
stuff, I got really curious about could we do what I did with Live at
the Beacon on the Road.
So my agent, Mike Berkowitz, and I started to go around the country
with—it was a lot of work. But something I learned from the show, from
Louie, is that whenever we’re going to do something that’s really
difficult, we do it much later in the season, and we just spend a lot of
deliberate, careful time preparing it.
So in this case with the theaters, we had to go to every city, and any
city that we couldn’t play the usual venue because of how the ticket
companies have it set up—they sort of have these places locked down or
they own a lot of them—we had to find places that were willing to do it
our way. And it was kind of a risk. I felt like it was a bigger risk
than Live at the Beacon because if that didn’t work out, it was just
going to be this pile sitting there that nobody wanted. But in this
case, these are shows in 25 or so cities that it would’ve been empty.
Anyway, it worked. I mean, as of today we’ve sold 92,000 tickets, and
the tour has grossed $4.1 million. That’s not all money that I get, but
that’s how much is in our box office. We’ve sold out, I think, 20 shows
now, added the show in about 10 cities. So it worked. That’s really fun
when you do something like that and it works. It’s worth the hard work.
Dan: It’s pretty inspirational. I think it’s great, and hopefully other
comedians who have that liberty can take your lead and run with it. So
congratulations on that, and thanks again for the call.
Louis: Thank you.
John: Just real quick, if anybody on the call needs the press release
about the tour, let us know, and we’ll be happy to send it to you.
Moderator: Now we can go to the line of Emily Cheever with Ology.com.
Emily: You said a little bit earlier that the show this year has a bit
more fiction in it, but in the past, how has your family felt about the
inspiration that they’ve had on your show?
Louis: Well, my daughters have seen parts of the show, and, like, the
first episode, the first pilot episode, had a whole disaster on a school
bus that came from—it came from a jumping-off point of a real thing that
happened with my daughter. So she enjoyed watching that. This isn’t on
HBO, so there are some scenes my kids can watch.
But the kids on my show are vastly different than my kids in real life.
They’re really not even close as characters, so it’s really, like, just
a different life. There isn’t so much of a parallel anymore.
Emily: Okay. You’ve also really embraced the socialness of the Internet
with Reddit and Twitter and all the stuff through your Website. You just
mentioned that it’s about learning. Where do you want to go next with
the socialness and sharing of the Internet?
Louis: Well, I guess as long as those tools are out there, I’ll keep
trying to use them for future, but I don’t know when I’m going to—right
now I’m doing standup, and I’m doing this show, so that’s a lot. Next
time I try something, I’ll probably keep trying to find these ways of
doing it, yeah.
John: Operator, if we can jump in, we have 15 minutes remaining on the
call.
Moderator: Now we can go to the line of Jason Matthews with
ScreenJunkies.com.
Jason: My question was about the new editor that you brought on. Having
handled everything yourself previously, was it hard to give up that sort
of control when for the first two seasons you did it all by yourself?
Was it hard to let that go, or did you find it freed you up to
concentrate on more important things?
Louis: It’s been pretty great working with Susan. The editing was the one
thing that was really starting to suffer with my overload. I feel like I
was turning in episodes that could’ve been cut better towards the end of
last season—more like the middle of last season. There’s a part of the
season where I’m, like, shooting and cutting at the same time, and
that’s really difficult. But this year, I spaced everything out. I wrote
all the shows ahead of time, which I hadn’t done before either. So I
kind of tried to make three sections of production.
Susan is a great editor. She edited all these Woody Allen movies that I
loved. So, to me, if I could get somebody who could improve what I do
and bring a new perspective—that was the goal. She’s done that. She cuts
differently than I do. I’m still editing. I’m still in there with her,
and I usually do a cut after she does, but she has a great eye.
Jason: Just one last follow-up just with you with your popularity kind of
blowing up over the last three years, has it been—I imagine you’re
exposed to a lot more people, and you have probably a lot more fans than
you did even just before the show came on. Have there been any negative
consequences from that, or has it all been pretty enjoyable for the most
part?
Louis: Well, it’s like anything else in life that it brings a pretty
steady ratio of good and bad, and I don’t know, probably bad to good
about 60-40, something like that. You know, that’s most of life. So
becoming more well known presented some challenges like I get recognized
on the street a lot, and it’s kind of awkward to eat alone in a
restaurant because everybody’s looking at me, and they know who I
am—sometimes. But there’s some times where nobody knows who I am.
But it’s like anything else; I have to think about how to deal with it.
So how do I cope with being recognized and being asked to take pictures
and all of this kind of stuff that was new to me? I’m used to it now.
It’s no big deal. It’s just part of the job.
Moderator: Now to the line of Rick Porter with Zap2It.
Rick: I saw you on Jimmy Kimmel last night talking a little bit about the
ex-wife character. Can you just talk a little bit more about why you
decided to have her be African-American, which I think maybe is a little
surprise given the—
Louis: It’s just with the actress being as good as she was, and the
character feeling right. And I guess I didn’t care. I guess to me the
racial thing is like—I think when people probably first see her, their
brains do a little bit of DNA math and go, “I’m not sure I get how that
would happen.” And then I think with my show, most people, they go, “Oh,
alright. Just go ahead,” and then they watch the scene. The thing that’s
important is what’s getting said.
I think that her performances are really compelling and I just like
that. I like what that character brings out in the stories and in me on
the show, so to me that trumped whatever logistical notion.
Rick: What was it about her that made you say, “Okay, she’s the one?”
Louis: She’s really direct, and she’s very self-possessed, and she has
got a great demeanor for somebody who has moved on in life. That’s what
she feels like to me—like she has moved on in life, and she’s on a good
new chapter. And I think she looks like she’s in a better new chapter
than me as far as us having shared a chapter earlier, so I think that is
a good contrast.
Rick: Alright. Just real quickly, can you talk any about what Jerry
Seinfeld will be doing on the show? Will he be playing himself, or?
Louis: Jerry is in—not the last three, but the tenth, eleventh, and
twelfth episodes of this season are going to be a whole story of their
own. It’s going to be basically a three-part story, and it’s kind of the
biggest—it’s what we put the most effort into, and Jerry is in that. I
don’t want to say anything about any of it because it’s got a lot of
guest stars, and a lot happens. It’s a big turn for the character and
for the—it’s a cool, fun story. I just don’t want to talk about it. But
Jerry did a part in that, and what he did was very different than what
you’re used to seeing Jerry do. Jerry turned in a really, really great
performance. I was really happy.
Moderator: Now we’ll go to the line of Cat Edison from ScreenInvasion.com.
Cat: I’m constantly trying to get across to my friends who don’t have
kids how much funnier you are when you do have kids. I think I’m trying
to encourage people to have kids just so they get it.
Louis: That’s a bad reason to have a kid.
Cat: That being said, I know you talked about this just a little bit, but
have your daughters ever come across a scene maybe you don’t want them
to see in relation to them or, you know, how do they react to stuff like
that? Or do you keep them pretty shielded from some of the—
Louis: Well, you know, there’s nothing—I don’t think there’s any scenes
with my kids in them in the show that I wouldn’t want my kids not to
see. I mean, there’s nothing that I would film with actual children in
it that—
Cat: Well, no, no, no. I guess what I’m thinking of particularly is maybe
like the scene where you’re, like, flipping off your daughter behind her
back.
Louis: Oh. Well yeah, they don’t know what that means yet, but I don’t
think that they’re far from understanding it. I mean, we’re all friends,
me and my kids. They’re my best friends, and therefore I talk to—I spend
more time with them than anybody else in the world, and so we all know
each other, and we laugh about the same stuff.
My show is an adult version of the same humor that I share with my
children. They know whenever they see me on the show or onstage acting
really angry, they just think it’s hilarious because I’m not really like
that. If I was an angry, detached, jerk of a father, then my show would
probably be some kind of a nightmare for my kids, but they just think
it’s funny because Daddy’s not like that.
I mean, I get mad like anybody else does, but being able to laugh about
getting mad is very healthy, and my kids know that. We share a lot. And
really, I can only speak for them to a limit. They are my kids, but when
they turn 18, you can ask them.
Moderator: We can now go to the line of Ryan Schwartz from
TheVoiceofTV.com
Ryan: My question is—one of the most interesting and unique aspects of
the show is the way that the story is told. Some episodes feature
multiple stories, while others tell a single story that spreads across
an entire episode. So when you begin writing an episode, are you aware
of whether you’ll be writing either one or multiple stories, or does
that decision formulate as you’re further along in the writing process?
Louis: Well, to me that’s the whole reason the show has worked for me as
a format is that I don’t have—it’s kind of crazy to think that every
story you ever tell should take exactly 22 minutes to tell. I mean,
imagine telling somebody a story of a great, funny thing that happened
in your life, and then you’re done with the details and you look at your
watch and go,”Shit, I gotta keep talking about this for 22 minutes, so I
gotta come up with other reasons to talk about it, introduce other
people.” And then you’re looking at a whole lot of—whenever you’re
watching something on television that was created because it was
necessary, because they needed it, it’s not fun to watch.
So when I start writing a story, I have zero—to me, it’s like if this is
over, it’s the end of the page. I’m shooting it if it’s good because it
could be just the one scene. And if it sprawls and just keep going, then
I’ll shoot all of that and just cram it into as much of the show as just
thirteen 22-minute segments, and I just put the pieces in wherever they
fit. This year is unique because there’s more than one story that took
more than one episode to tell. That’s new for this show. There’s still a
lot of short stories, a lot of two part—you know, like, two-story
episodes.
I also like that when people are watching the show, they don’t know how
long they’re going to be told a story for. I think that makes it
exciting. I think it makes it more compelling to know, because whenever
you give people a show where their brain knows what the pattern is going
to be and the brain sets itself—and I think, actually, one reason TV
like that has always done well is because there is something comforting
where you kind of know what you’re going to be taken through.
But it’s just a different group of people who would rather—and probably
a smaller group of people—who would rather watch a show where they don’t
know how long this is going to go on for. They don’t know if they’re
going to see this character’s face ever again. This character might be
in the rest of the season, or who knows? I think it’s more organic that
way. Life is built that way. You stick with things that are compelling,
and you drift away from things that aren’t.
John: We’re going to go ahead and take the last question now.
Moderator: Now we’ll go to the line of Suzanne Lanoue from the TV MegaSite.
Suzanne: I think last time you said that FX was really good about letting you
do whatever you wanted on the show pretty much. Are they still really
hands-off like that?
Louis: Oh yeah. I mean, I get nice e-mails from these guys. They’re
really nice people. I mean, they’re my friends now, the FX people, but
just personally. Like, I get a nice e-mail from John Landgraf or Eric
Schrier or John Solberg—you know, “Happy Father’s Day, hope your kids
are good.” That’s my contact with FX. Occasionally they’re curious how
the show is going, but, yeah, we stay away from each other mostly. I’m
over here; we live 3,000 miles apart.
When they come to town, if the FX executives come to town, I always
invite them to the set. I’m not afraid of them. They come sometimes, and
they’ll eat up our cut-up cantaloupe and hang out for a while, and then
they go. But I think they like—they enjoy that they get to be viewers of
the shows. I think it can be very tedious as a network executive that
you read a—you get a script pitched to you as an idea, and then you read
it, then you read a second and third draft, and then you watch a
run-through and you watch a rehearsal, you see dailies. By the time it’s
cut together, there’s no enjoyment in it.
But these guys, they get to be the first people to watch my show, and
they have no idea what they’re going to see. So I think as long as I’m
doing good shows, I’m going to keep this. If I turn in four stinkers
next season, they’re going to come calling. I’m aware of that.
Suzanne: I was wondering what other TV shows, comedies, you like—in
particular Curb Your Enthusiasm because I’ve been watching that on DVD
and I noticed quite a few similarities—good ones—between the shows?
Louis: I love Curb. I haven’t seen it in an awfully long time. I mean, I
watched it early on. I don’t know how long—it’s been on the air for a
while, I think.
Suzanne: Like, seven seasons, I think.
Louis: Yeah, so I think I watched—I remember I watched the first ones,
and then I watched it once in a while then, and I watched—when J.B.
Smoove came on the show, I watched more because I love him. But I don’t
watch a whole lot of TV, and comedy—I don’t usually watch comedy. I
usually would like to watch drama or sports. That’s more my thing. I
like watching boxing, and I like watching people get shot and looking
angry and stuff.
John: Well, on that note, Louis, I’d say for everybody at the network
that it’s a joy to be along on the ride for this show. It’s just
magnificent, and thank you very much, and thanks for being on the call.
Louis: Thanks to everyone, and thanks everybody who came on. I appreciate
it. Thanks a lot everybody.
John: Thanks. Season three premieres tomorrow night at 10:30, and thank
you very much. Bye.
Moderator Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our … and for using
AT&T Executive Teleconference.
Louie
Season Three – Episode
Descriptions
Episode 1 – “Something
Is Wrong” (Airs June 28, 10:30 pm e/p) –
Louie has a challenging day. Written and directed by Louis C.K.
Episode 2 – “Telling Jokes/Set Up” (Airs
July 5, 10:30 pm e/p) –
Louie has dinner at a friend’s house. Written and directed by Louis C.K.
Episode 3 – “Miami” (Airs July 12, 10:30 pm e/p)
– Louie
goes to Miami. Written and directed by Louis C.K.
Episode 4 – “Daddy's Girlfriend Part 1” (Airs
July 19, 10:30 pm e/p)
– Louie
is looking for a mate. Story by Louis C.K. & Pamela Adlon; Teleplay by
Louis C.K. Directed
by Louis C.K.
Episode 5 – “Daddy's Girlfriend Part 2” (Airs July 26, 10:30
pm e/p) –
Louie goes on a date. Written and directed by Louis C.K.
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