Matt Groening

September 27, 2009 World Screen

October 2009

Matt Groening is the creator and executive producer of The Simpsons. If you haven’t heard of Homer, Bart or the rest of the gang from Springfield, clearly you have been living under a rock for the last two decades. Here’s what you’ve been missing: The Simpsons celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. It has been distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution in nearly 200 territories, airs regularly in over 100 individual countries and is the most successfully licensed U.S. series of all time by any Hollywood studio. Starting its 21st season on FOX in the U.S., The Simpsons is now the longest-running prime-time scripted series and the longest-running prime-time animated series in the history of television. It is also the world’s most-watched U.S. series, with an average weekly viewership of over 30 million people in the top 25 territories alone. Matt Groening talks to World Screen about 20 years of unprecedented success and fun.
 
WS: Would you ever have imagined that the show would be so successful and would run for so long?
GROENING: I thought it would be a smash hit from the very beginning; I was that naïve! But I did not know what that really meant and certainly didn’t think that it would last 20 years. On one hand, I’m not surprised by the success 20 years ago, because there was nothing else like it on TV and I thought this was the kind of show I would have liked to watch when I was a kid. So again, naïveté, arrogance, I don’t know. But I didn’t think how that would extend over the years. That aspect of it is very surprising.
 
WS: What is it about Springfield and the characters of the show that have made the series so successful internationally?
GROENING: I think that stupidity is a universal character trait. Everybody enjoys seeing somebody make mistakes and act in a completely misguided way. There may be some laughing at American culture, which is fully intentional on our part, so maybe there is a little bit of superiority in the laughter. At heart, The Simpsons is a family show, and even though the escapades the characters get into are fairly outlandish, there is a core emotional reality to the show, which has made it last as long as it has.
 
WS: How would you describe the Simpsons’ family values?
GROENING: Well, they drive each other crazy, but they really love each other as well. We have the characters behave in very unkind and insensitive ways, but there are certain things that we don’t do or very rarely do. We don’t really have the characters say hateful things. They say insensitive things, but they don’t say really, really sadistic things. And Marge, for unknown reasons, really loves Homer [laughs]. I think the audience senses that, even though we don’t say it out loud, that she really is in love with Homer, and maybe that is wish fulfillment on the part of the men who work on the show, that they can be oafs and still be loved!
 
WS: Can you tell us about the creative process of getting one episode made?
GROENING: It takes about eight months to do a single episode, so we do many episodes simultaneously. One of the many problems we face is just keeping the many episodes separate and trying to remember which joke is in each episode. One of the members of the staff comes up with an idea and then sits down and writes an outline and brings it in and then everybody adds jokes to the script. Then the actors read it out loud in front of the writers and a small group of people. And all the writers are sitting there with pens making checks over which lines got laughs and what didn’t work. A heavy rewrite process is going on at the same time as the animators start making storyboards and then from the recorded voices and the storyboards, something called an animatic is produced. An animatic is basically a very crude animated version of the show, with very little movement but a soundtrack and the pictures placed where they will be in the final show. We look at that, then we change things around again, then the animators animate it. All the creative work is done here in Los Angeles, and then it is electronically sent to South Korea and the animators there digitally ink and paint the whole thing and send it back to us. And then we tinker with it some more and edit it, add some new lines and change jokes and eventually it gets on the air. The last thing done is the music and the sound effects.
In this process I just outlined, the word that I would emphasize again and again is revision. We’re always changing things. In fact, that was unusual in television animation before The Simpsons came along. The budgets are generally lower than feature animation, so in television, once the writing was done, the [episode] was locked in. But in The Simpsons’ case, we didn’t know the rules because we had never done animation before, so we kept changing things, and now that’s our style.
WS: Where do you get ideas for the episodes?
GROENING: The ideas come from anywhere—from articles in newspapers, from childhood memories that a writer has. One of my favorite episodes was when Homer builds Bart a bed in the shape of Krusty the Clown. That was actually based on a real memory of one of the original Simpsons writers, Mike Reiss, whose father had built him a horrible bed shaped like a clown that he had to sleep in and he was frightened of the bed [laughs] and it gave him nightmares! So that was the beginning of a great bit of comedy.
 
WS: The show has so many levels of humor, from what the characters say, to the sign outside the church, to what Bart writes on the blackboard at the beginning of the episode, that it’s almost impossible to catch all the jokes and cultural references just by watching the episode once. How did all that multilayering come about?
GROENING: The density of the scripts on the show are due partly to insecurity and just thinking maybe this joke doesn’t work, but if we throw three more jokes in there, that will help, and partly because that just became our signature—we tried to do jokes for everybody watching. That is, there are jokes that are very broad and silly for kids, a lot of physical humor, which we like, going back to silent comedy like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. And we love animation, and with animation you take advantage of exaggeration and mayhem. And then we put in really smart jokes for people who have read a few books and seen a few films. And it turns out that it doesn’t matter if you don’t get every joke. You can still enjoy the jokes that you do understand. There is a secret goal in all of this, which is to make the show watchable more than one time. By having so many things going on on-screen at the same time, and so many things go by so quickly, there is no way you can get every single joke in one viewing. So the show holds up to repeats, and what I really love (and this was not completely thought out, but it turns out to have been true), we have an audience that has grown up watching the show, and they understood the show on one level when they were younger. And then they grow up and go to college and they read some books and take some classes and understand some of the references to literature or history—and now they understand the show on a completely different level, and that’s very satisfying.
 
WS: That doesn’t hurt DVD sales, does it?
GROENING: When we work on these shows, we’re sometimes watching the same scene 30 or 40 times—again and again. When we are trying to fix it or make the animation better, or mix the sound, there are so many little things that we in the room are the only ones who are seeing the show the way it should be seen!
Ultimately, the secret of the show is we don’t try to make other people laugh, we’re trying to make ourselves laugh. The show is designed to amuse the people who work on the show. We try to make the actors laugh at their own lines. We try to make the animators laugh at the scripts. Animators try to make the writers laugh at the way their words are visualized, and it is the most amazing, gratifying, collaborative process. When things click and everybody’s adding to the final product, it’s just magic.
 

WS: Why haven’t you aged the characters? Bart and Lisa as teenagers would provide a million different ideas, as would Homer having a midlife crisis.
GROENING: Well, but Bart is 10 years old and if he aged in real life Bart would be 30 by now, and it would be very sad. We decided that Bart was charming because he had not really experienced the kind of trouble that he would get into as a teenager, because ultimately there is something sad underneath Bart’s disobedience and brattiness. And so by keeping them in this ageless world, it’s just more fun.
The other thing is that in animation, you don’t have to age the characters, so that’s a plus, and if you think what The Simpsons is about, it’s about children and parents and not so much about teenagers and young adults. It’s people locked into their roles and either being frustrated like Homer, who is irritated with his job and his reaction is to just do it badly, and kids who are chasing the limits that are placed on them as children. It’s harder to write for teenage characters. It’s more fun to keep them young.

WS: Are there plans for another movie?
 GROENING: No plans at the moment. The reason why it took the first movie so long to be made is that we were always working on the series. We work on The Simpsons TV show year round. There are no breaks; the whole show is always in production. And when we decided to do the movie, we just had to work twice as hard for four years and everybody who worked on the movie is still recovering! So if we get enough rest, maybe we’ll take a run at another movie, but as of this moment, there are no plans.

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WS: What involvement do you have with the merchandising connected to the show?
GROENING: There are so many toys and talking pens and [other products] that I can’t see them all. Every time I go into a store, I see a piece of Simpsons merchandise. I try to keep my eye on it. I try to make stuff funny and fun, but there is so much, I’m always surprised.

WS: We have the bottle opener at home—
GROENING: The talking bottle opener? That one I love. I saw that for the first time at a car wash. It was in the gift shop at a car wash, and I said, Hey what’s this? And I thought, Oh my God, this is brilliant! 

WS: The show has often poked fun at the absurdities and hypocrisies of our culture. Twenty years in, are there still issues you feel need to be brought to the public’s attention?
GROENING: I would say that our number one goal is always to entertain. We slip in little messages here and there, but it’s not the reason for the show’s existence. We just figure we have a forum so we might as well do it. What we try to stay away from is preaching our point of view. In fact, sometimes we make jokes that seem to disagree with our own point of view because we can be funny that way. It’s one of the reasons people still like the show—they don’t want moral lessons, which I feel a lot of animation [writers] try because they understand that children are watching. For instance, we had a whole controversy back at the very beginning of the show, because Homer didn’t wear his seat belt. Now, the point was that everyone else in the family did wear theirs and Homer didn’t. We were not saying don’t wear your seat belt; we’re just saying the idiot who is the hero of our show doesn’t wear his seat belt. We also depict people smoking on the show from time to time, but it’s never glamorized—it’s always unsympathetic characters— but at least in the U.S., people are sometimes bothered by that. You draw the world as you see it, not as you wish it were. I think it’s better this way.
 
WS: The show has had an incredible range of guest stars. Do you reach out to them, or do some celebrities approach you?
GROENING: We have a long list of people who we hear want to do the show, and then there are people we would like to get on the show and they almost always say yes! It’s great. Sometimes we just get rock stars on the show so we can have an excuse to meet them: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and U2!
 
WS: Do you see another 20 years of The Simpsons?
 GROENING: I don’t see any reason for the show to end. It’s going strong. Every year I think, OK, we’ve had our biggest year yet and it’s all downhill from here. But then something amazing happens. This year there are five U.S. postage stamps with the Simpsons on them—in a way the ultimate honor for a cartoon. Last year we had The Simpsons ride at Universal in Hollywood and in Florida, and the year before that was The Simpsons movie. This year we are working on a documentary special directed by Morgan Spurlock, who did Super Size Me. So it just seems there is always something new and exciting around the corner.