American: The Bill Hicks Story Page #7

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We started to come up with an idea

of, how do we evolve these characters?

The father character and the mother character.

It would make a good movie.

We were writing constantly,

pages and pages of scenes

and we knew these characters,

the voices were in our head.

He flew back from LA

to be the best man at my wedding.

He was always gonna be my best man

and we were gonna be there for each other

whenever those times were.

But he had to perform that night,

and so after the wedding

a bunch of people went down there

and, "Yeah, let's go see him. What the helll

Let's go down there, you know?"

I didn't know I had a funny brother.

That was the first I was aware

that that was what he wanted to do

as a serious profession.

He was hilarious.

The guy at William Morris said,

"We all want to meet with you."

He was a big frickin' agent in Hollywood.

He looked at us and he goes,

"You guys are 19?"And we go, "Yeah."

He goes, "How did you get in my office?"

So we kind of told him

the story of being stand-ups

and that we're just out of high school

and we're writing a script

about being from high school

and that really intrigued him.

He goes, "I want you to rewrite it.

It doesn't have much of an ending.

"And I really want to see

another script from you guys.

"After that, I want to talk

about representing you.

"You guys are gonna be good screenwriters."

And I was very excited too.

This was my first break.

Bill was just disappointed

because we'd put so much

into that script, obviously,

and he would have liked to hear

that it got bought.

And in the months that followed that,

he just lost interest in writing,

and I could not fire him up about,

"We have a ton of ideas about scripts.

"Let's just write another one. Let's get him

what he wants and see if we can do this. "

He just wasn't into it. He didn't want to.

He was through being a screenwriter.

He wanted to move on into being a comic.

Hello, this is Bill.

I just needed to talk with somebody and

this tape recorder is all I've got right now.

I haven't been funny in a long time.

I haven't come up with new material

in a long time,

and, I tell you what, there's nothing scarier,

especially for me out here, forsaking college

and an easier life, coming out here.

What happens if I am just not funny?

I have nothing. I am a bum.

I could be five years in the Store

and no one gives a sh*t there.

F*** doing this stuff.

LA wanted six minutes of clean

to do on the Tonight Show,

and, uh... that wasn't enough for Bill,

Bill wasn't growing enough.

The only way you could grow

was to get more stage time.

Bill had... you know, was a veteran.

For Christ's sake, he was 21 years old in 1982.

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