Real Life: A Young, Honest Guy Like Himself

Albert Brooks’s first feature film, the sharp satire Real Life, is laser-focused on what at the time of its release, in the spring of 1979, must have seemed an unlikely target: An American Family, the PBS documentary series that had premiered six years earlier. Regarded by some as the first reality-television show, the series follows an upper-middle-class family, the Louds of Santa Barbara, California, through twelve hour-long episodes that were shot over seven months.

An American Family garnered a great deal of attention, not so much for its form as for the revelations of dysfunction in this enviable family who had been singled out for documentary scrutiny on TV. During its run, Pat Loud announced to her husband, Bill, that she wanted a divorce. One of their sons, twenty-year-old Lance, was openly gay, a first for television.

More than ten million people a week watched the series. Brooks, then a young comedian, was one of them, and an article in TV Guide about the show, written by anthropologist Margaret Mead, caught his eye. An American Family, Mead wrote, was “as new and significant as the invention of drama or the novel . . . a new way in which people can learn to look at life, by seeing the real life of others interpreted by the camera.” Reading her pronouncement caused something to click. Brooks includes the quote on-screen in his movie’s precredits opening, where he also promises that Real Life will be “the next step” in this evolutionary process, by documenting not only a real family but also the people who have come to film them.

This opening scroll then gives way to a town-hall meeting in Phoenix with an “expensive buffet—two grand!” Here, Brooks—who stars in the film as a self-regarding comedian and fledgling documentary filmmaker who just happens to be named Albert Brooks—further explains, through the medium of song, his high-minded intentions, as a roomful of participants in his dubious project eagerly applaud him.

The best satire transcends its time, replacing what it mocked with its own version. That is exactly what Real Life does. Brooks’s movie effaces its origins as a parody and stands on its own, clear in its intentions even to viewers who have never seen the PBS series. The film, with which Brooks effectively invented the mockumentary as we know it, survives—thrives—as a unique comedy masterstroke. Real Life does to its source what Brooks, as a version of himself in the film, does to his version of the Louds, something between a steamrolling and a dissection.

In fact, Brooks presents one sequence in Real Life as “a chance to show the French what a montage was all about.” He films the Yeagers happily romping through a department store (Goldwater’s—this is Arizona) and a local zoo, where he encourages Eric to toss a rock at a turtle, and has Warren and Jeanette kiss at the dry cleaner. These contrived scenes of ordinary happiness come at a point in Real Life when the on-screen Brooks knows his film has gone awry. Jeanette has developed a crush on him, which he has deflected by noting his charisma is misleadingly skin-deep, and he has offended one of the psychologists, who is Black, by noting that his equally skin-deep understanding of the Black experience “shouldn’t stand in the way of this film.”

After that, we are witness to one of the most daringly unsettling scenes in 1970s cinema: Warren’s botched operation on a horse. That would be a risky scene even in a noncomedy, delicate to make work in any context. Here, it illustrates a Frederick Wiseman–esque but utterly misguided commitment to vérité. It brings the film to an uh-oh level we could not have guessed it would reach.

“I was dating Linda Ronstadt” sounds more like a bit than reality, but Brooks’s relationship with the singer is where the story of the making of Real Life begins. As he explains to his lifelong friend Rob Reiner in Reiner’s 2023 documentary Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, he and Ronstadt had been together for a little while when “one of her managers” introduced him to a cousin who was a part owner of the Chicago Bulls.

Jonathan Kovler, an investor and liquor heir the same age as Brooks who later signed Michael Jordan to the Bulls, fronted the comedian $500,000 for Real Life. The deal came with the stipulation that Brooks sign a letter of credit and not go a penny over budget. Brooks joked about the arrangement on one of his Tonight Show appearances, swearing on Johnny Carson’s desk that he would pay Kovler back. His ambition is reflected backward in the fun-house mirror of the film, where the other Albert Brooks begins with a grand plan to shoot the Yeagers for a full year before his producers realize that things are not working out the way he pitched them.

A totally independent production, Real Life took three years from writing to completion, including seven months of editing. Kovler and his associates got back their investment when Brooks sold the film to Paramount. Studio executives knew Brooks had made a splash on TV, that he was a hip commodity, and they saw something in Real Life. They just weren’t sure what. Paramount’s resulting theatrical rollout was lackluster and commercially underwhelming. Critics did see Real Life, though, finding it nervy and original. For some of them, that was not a good thing. In her positive review in the New York Times, Janet Maslin worried that Real Life’s “manner is . . . so sly that some viewers may not find it comic at all.”

The son of radio comedian Harry Einstein, who performed under the name Parkyakarkus, young Albert Einstein was referred to as one of the two funniest people in America by Carl Reiner on The Tonight Show in 1963, the other being Reiner’s former comedy partner, Mel Brooks. Who is this funny Albert Einstein? Johnny Carson wanted to know. Reiner explained that he was a high-school kid, a friend of his son’s.

Since having the same name as the Nobel-laureate physicist would not work for a comedian, Albert tellingly risked comparison to that other genius: when he went pro, he chose Brooks as his last name. If Brooks’s career seemed fated, the pressure must have been enormous. His shtick can be read as pitting low self-esteem and an innate desire for love against an insistent demand for stardom. This comes to the fore in Real Life, in which Brooks presents show business at its most needy and off-putting.

Getting to that point was a process of accumulation that started with his absurd, go-for-broke television variety- and talk-show appearances in the late 1960s. It continued through his polished stand-up act and his conceptual comedy albums. One of those, Comedy Minus One, from 1973, prefigured his interest in the subject of the average man. It positioned Brooks as half of a comedy team with you-the-listener, and came with a follow-along script inside and a mirror on the back cover.

Brooks’s lean, ludicrous short films for Saturday Night Live (and one for PBS), in which no moment was wasted (despite Lorne Michaels’s objections that they ran long), trained him in a kind of documentary economy, and included tropes and gags he would return to in Real Life: doctors, veterinarians, scientific experts in human behavior, TV news, eggs (always eggs or the word egg in his films), and the presence of “Jack from Cincinnati,” a fictional Brooks fan.

But it’s not just because Real Life is so trenchantly funny that the film still works so beautifully. Nor is it that it’s the first full-length cinematic product of a high-level comic mind, one with a unique, even startling sensibility. It’s also because, in 1979, Brooks was telling us something about a world of dubious entertainment yet to come, the world of ethically compromised reality “docuseries” that we inhabit today, in which cheap entertainment and sociological experiment have become entwined with and choke each other.

More than a quarter century after Real Life, a new kind of fake reality began to take over the televisual pop-culture landscape. Series including 17 Kids and Counting and Jon & Kate Plus 8 mixed documentary and sitcom to exploit voyeuristic interest in the bizarre dynamics of suburban families with large, growing broods. Celebrities inserted themselves into the genre when The Osbournes and Keeping Up with the Kardashians made the claim that name recognition gave the families of semifamous people as much documentary interest as the Louds in 1973, but with added entertainment value. Real Life predicted this burgeoning new cheesiness, placing it at a crossroads where the “average” family meets a showbiz gargoyle.

The film is also a kind of comedic manifesto that sets up Brooks’s further work. Not for nothing does Defending Your Life, his 1991 romantic comedy about what happens when you die, present the sum total of life as a movie that will be reviewed and judged after death. Supposedly, an early version of the screenplay brought things full circle in his oeuvre, ending with Brooks’s character reincarnated as a farm animal.

Years ago, a friend of mine was working on a Hollywood movie set on location in a house in New Hampshire. The owners of the house had a pet monkey. Everything in the house seemed tidy and spotless, brand-new. She asked the owners how they kept things so neat, adding that the monkey must make that harder. It turned out the house was in fact new. The year before, a plumber had been working under the kitchen sink and had set a lit blowtorch down on the floor. The monkey rushed in, grabbed the blowtorch, and started a fire, burning the whole place down. The lesson is: don’t invite a showbiz monkey into your house.

Real Life’s ending also happens to involve a house going up in flames, as the desperate Brooks puts on a clown suit and resorts to arson after riffling through his memory for famous movie endings. One of the films that comes up is Star Wars—“How did it end?” “They blew up a planet!”—and, as it happens, many of the initial reviews of Real Life mention George Lucas’s blockbuster. The on-screen camera operators in Brooks’s film—in their white, one-eyed helmets—reminded critics of Stormtroopers or R2-D2 as they recorded the action in the Yeagers’ house. The critics were referring to the fictional Ettinauer 226XL camera rigs, which come from Holland and, presciently, use “no film . . . All picture and sound information is recorded digitally, on . . . integrated circuit chips, some no larger than a child’s fingernail.” Why Holland? Why a child’s fingernail? Because it’s funny, that’s why.

Real Life: A Young, Honest Guy Like Himself

More: Essays

Funny Girl: A Feeling Deep in Your Soul

Scarface: Gangster Style

Gummo: It Feels Like Home

Demon Pond: Here Comes the Flood

Search