Nothing draws attention like a plane crash. Nothing burns more than someone cutting in line at the bank. Nothing stirs more than Wake Up And Smell The Coffee. Eric Bogosian makes his solo career soar in his screen adaptation of a show that started as a rant, but ends in truth. From playing Satan as a salesman to a movie producer trying to make a quick buck off some vulnerable plane crash victim via a made-for-TV movie, Bogosian is sure to keep you in the hot seat. Targeting post 9/11 themes that oddly enough were written before the World Trade Center bombing, Bogosian stirs emotion through fast satiric dialogue and uneven character structure that’s all too familiar. You may cross and uncross your legs several times or shift awkwardly in your sofa so that you make a farting sound from the leather, but your uncomfortable silence and spurts of laughter is all Bogosian needs to rile up more rant and reality.

I had the opportunity to talk to Actor and Writer (and sometimes Monologist) Eric Bogosian about Wake Up And Smell The Coffee, Starbucks and the art of writing damn good prose without burning your tongue.

When did this project start?

Eric Bogosian: This show was recorded in 2000 when the run ended. This show was actually the start; this is the sixth of six shows I did off-Broadway over 20 years so you can say it started in 1980. But toward the end with this particular show, Wake Up And Smell The Coffee, I was preparing it and rehearsing it for a couple of years before it appeared at the James Street Theater. Then we recorded it on DVD there. Now here it is.

On your website you confirm misconceptions about being classified as a comedian and a performance artist.

EB: Right.

How would you describe yourself?

EB: Well, I come from the theater. I’ve been in the theater since I was 15 and the first thing I ever did was Shakespeare. I’m a theater person. That’s what I’ve spent my whole life doing. For a while I intersected, doing this downtown loft scene in the late 1970s. That’s why people call me a performance artist. It doesn’t really make sense. It’s a form of theater just like the one-person performance shows off-Broadway and on-Broadway so that’s where all my shows have been is off-Broadway so I think of myself as an actor and a writer. You can call me a monologist if you want, if you need like a pigeon hole to put me in, but there’s a problem with all of these terms. Personally I think of a comedian as someone who gets up there and cracks jokes. And I think of a performance artist as someone who gets up there and cracks eggs on their head. It’s meant to be kind of bizarre. What I do rehearse is done in the theater and it’s done with an audience, but it’s funny you know? But if you say I’m a monologist it sounds even more boring, like you’ve got to go to school or something. It’s one of those things.

Where did this whole idea come from? You said in the extras that you use a tape recorder a lot just to do your rants.

EB: Yes. Originally I was trying to practice my voice. I was just trying to learn to use my voice better so I was making these tape recordings to hear how my voice sounded as an actor. But I always make things up and as I made them up I said to myself, ‘Who are these people who are sort of popping out of me whole? How do I know who these people are?’ So I sort of started collecting them, putting them together, making the monologues longer, seeing where they went putting them up in front of an audience. I was, at that time, performing in punk club. We’re talking about the late 70s here when people used to throw bottles at the stage and fights would break out. I did characters on stage and in clubs that were very nasty types of characters. I just thought I’d make a show of a whole group of these people. The original show was meant to be very energetic and kind of nuts and in your face. And that’s the way those first ones were. They were done in really small theaters downtown. I had no idea at the time there would be the success ratio that happened with them. And which kind of culminated in the early 90s with shows here in New York, make movies of them and things like that. It’s all been a strange kind of world of getting on the stage and doing this thing and having audiences laugh and it’s really not what I set out to do in the first place. I’ve always been an actor. I’ve acted in movies, television shows and on stage and I’ve always been a writer. I write plays and I’ve written novels and this particular thing that I do and I get up there and I’m in my own show that I write is, it isn’t like I got up and said ‘I have a one person show that I have to do.’ It’s just this is this thing that I do and people like it. I can’t explain it anymore.

Well, I liked it!

EB: Oh good!

One of the major themes I noticed was the airport.

EB: Oh yeah! I wanted to make a show about what was going on in my life at the time and I was spending a lot of time in airports and at that time I was touring quite a bit. A lot of people have to do this now and its really part of American culture and I think it’s much more now than it was 20 years ago. There’s this huge flock of human beings flying here and there everyday eating that food on the planes and staying in hotels, but we all know about them and some of us are these guys and I was one of them for a long time. I pretty much wound it down after 9/11 because it was getting too difficult, too much of a pain in the neck to fly. For a while there I was just like one of these business men who every other day, I get on a plane. The reason I put it in the show is because that’s the way things are these days. Everyone’s job is kind of wearing them out and there isn’t like a feeling, it’s either you’re commuting some long distance and it’s coming up in white. The whole 90s thing is Starbucks. In the 60s it was the dry martini, but in the 90s its coffee and burnout and for many of us I think you have to question that. That’s one of the reasons why the show is called Wake Up And Smell The Coffee. We’re in the age of coffee.

Can’t argue with that one! How do you form your prose so smoothly from scene to scene? I write a lot so I’m very interested to hear how you go about it.

EB: In this particular show more than any other show it was sort of an idea that started in it. I listened to some Jack Kerouac, who used to record his own stuff to music. I was very interested in that flow and looking how there could be a flow in the show in one piece or going from one piece to another. I love the idea of an actor turning from one character into another really quickly and you can’t completely tell from watching an edited DVD of how quickly I turn from one character to another because it appears to be a cut or something but in fact that’s how fast I do it. I like to do that I think its fun to do that and its fun to see that and I like to see other actors do it. It makes you realize that you’re looking at acting that this guy really isn’t that person, but he’s somebody else in fact so this is all performance. It makes it more fun to see it made up in that regard. As far as the writing itself, a lot of times it starts with an improv with a tape recorder and it just requires that I listen to it a lot. I think there are two components to writing: One is generating the writing and the other is being able to edit while you’re doing it. I’m big on throwing away stuff that I don’t like and I think for many writers there’s this feeling that I worked on this thing for six hours and I can’t throw it away and its like yeah, you can throw it away. This is a really important part of the writer, you have to be able to sit there and read it and hear it and be able to say, ‘Do I like it? Not because I put so much time on it, but is it any good?’ I use this very labor intensive approach to writing. It’s the hard way around, but this is the way I have to do it because I’m not really a natural born writer. I’ll go as far as finishing a monologue or almost finishing it then going back and throwing it all out. That’s the way I have to do it. It takes forever!

You satirize a lot, using Satan as a sleazy salesman, fluffing religion and the Starbucks craze. Where do you come up with it? How does it form so well because it all seems to fit very well together?

EB: Well, I guess in any writing project there’s always the thing that it’s supposedly about, the plot or whatever the themes are, but there’s always something behind that. But I guess what I’m trying to do with a show like this, because its in little chunks and pieces all over the place, is grab a hold of my whole mind set. The way I go about my business on a given day and if you ask me what I’m up to, like if one of my kids got sick last week or if I’m trying to go to the gym more, there’s always something more than that and that’s what I’m trying to get at. What is the thing that’s really driving me? Is there some fear, some ambition? Am I hungry for something or is there something missing in my life? And what I do is a lot of different bits and they’re not always big bits; some are little tiny fragments that I never really pick up again. Over the time I’m writing the show, and we’re talking about years, I will pick up and put down a lot of different themes and ideas and at a certain point I look over them and pick what’s interesting or what I haven’t done yet. And I may pick something interesting when I was 30 years old, masturbating or something, not really to the point here where I already covered it or everybody’s hearing too much about masturbating lately in shows so it’s done. Don’t do it anymore so drop that. Then look at something else about this fact that I stand in line at the bank, at the movie theater. There’s always someone cutting in front of me and I want to kill the person; I want to tear their eyes out. Where is that coming from? That’s kind of interesting. You get a little more torque to it than lets say, a couple minutes on Seinfeld or something like that. There are ideas in the air and we all share these things. It’s not totally original, but it’s like instead of dealing with the surface stuff, I collect the whole group of things around something. I can’t put it into words what that something might be, but that’s why I made the show. The whole thing being it’s sort of like some exorcism. In the case of Satan, in the show, in some ways he’s connected to my feeling deep down that I shouldn’t do wrong things and that I should only do right things without ever really thinking about what the right and wrong things might be. I spent way too much time thinking, ‘Oh my goodness. I ate at a fast food restaurant. I’m going to hell.’ Or I smoked a cigarette or whatever I did that I shouldn’t have done. I came up with this guy, Devil’s Advocate. This theme has showed up in my work over and over again because it happens to be something that I think about all the time. I’m very conservative, rigid, boring person so I have to sort of pretend and go exploring. The only place I’m not a boring person is when I’m on stage. Not just in my writing, but getting out there in front of people is fun. It’s like skiing the X-trails down the hill, the black trail or something. In that one place I get to cut loose.

You’ve been in various films besides doing theater. Which do you prefer and how do you make the transition?

EB: I don’t know if I can do films all the time because it’s kind of intense. That’s why I don’t do them all the time. For me I get to do a style of acting that’s way more deep and intense than what I would normally do because even stage acting is always kind of a little fake. It’s just what’s really intense about it is you’re with the audience. In a movie it’s almost like I’m becoming this guy. When I did Wonderland with Val Kilmer a couple of years ago we had scenes that didn’t even show up in the movie that you can get in the DVD or extras or something. And we’re sitting around smoking crack together and he’s the porn star and I’m supposed to be this notorious criminal and the two of us were just going crazy with this stuff. And it gets so intense and it was good like that. I just don’t think I could do that everyday. I think certain people like to be in that frame of mind and for me, also there’s just a little too much focus on, I don’t know, the whole fact that you’ve been in the movie or something then it becomes this kind of an ego thing and I don’t need too much of that in my life because I kind of become obnoxious with it. So, it’s better for me to have it in bits and pieces. How do I prepare for it? I prepare for every role the same way, it doesn’t make a difference if I’m doing a solo or if I’m doing a character on stage. I always start with script. I always sit and just keep working the lines over and over again until the character starts to float toward me and I get him and I just know who this guy is. And as a result sometimes I just don’t. I’ll be offered a role in something and I’ll say, ‘I just don’t know that guy, I don’t know how to do that guy. I don’t know who he is.’ When I play a bad guy, which I’ve done a number of times in TV and movies, the reason why I like to play these guys is I get to really stretch out and be a kind of person that I can’t normally be in my day to day life. I think De Niro said it once that you get to play the character without the consequences. And that’s true. In Wonderland I had something like eight people killed and I didn’t have to go to jail for it. Its fun. (laughs) I get killed in movies and I get killed in Talk Radio, but I’m not dead. So that’s also good! (laughs)

I’m glad that you acknowledged the whole ego thing in Hollywood because I think a lot of actors do it, but don’t acknowledge that they’re doing it. So that’s refreshing to hear.

EB: There’s a lot of ways to get your ego stroked in this world and it may come in the tiniest things. When you do something like a movie and people see you in it the egos go. There’s a number of actors in the city that do a number of movies and do seem to have their heads screwed on right. Phil Hoffman being kind of the king of the group, well, I shouldn’t say king, but someone we look toward as someone who has done a lot of film and has a very idealistic idea of what we’re doing on stage or in film. It’s good. We support each other in the city with this approach to it. I don’t know what other approach you could have. I mean if you do anything any other way you’re just asking for trouble. Maybe that’s L.A. I don’t know. I don’t know who this movie star would be, but whoever they are who are obnoxious about it, in a way, they’re their own worst enemy. They don’t get to have a good time. Lock themselves in their trailer or whatever they’re doing. Some silly shit. (laughs)

You’re known for never shying away from life’s “disturbing truths.” Is this something you want to be remembered for?

EB: Well I guess I’m modeling myself after the people I like who, in terms of writers and actors, I just like people that are a little bit more rigorous and unsentimental. I don’t like sentimental stuff. I do, but I don’t fall for it every time. I cry when I watch Forrest Gump for God sakes, which I make fun of it in the show, however, I don’t want to make stuff like that because I think its basically tricking the audience. It’s bologna, especially if you’re talking about life or death issues. It becomes kind of a political choice to say, ‘If we’re going to talk about this stuff let’s not be stupid about it. Keep our eyes open.’ There are guys like that who write that way. I also like actors with a great sense of humor. I was fortunate to know Frank Zappa before he passed away and he was the kind of guy who would sort of do this artsy stuff, but he’d have this great sense of humor behind it, too. There are comedians who have done great work in that vein, whether its Richard Pryor or Bill Hicks, someone like that who just sticks it to you. Chris Rock when he’s good. I really like that. It has to do with my heroes. In an ideal world I think any audience feels that they are, in some way having a conversation with other people, but also with your peers. In a way you’re kind of idealizing any of these guys because you don’t know whether they’ll like it. In a way you’re thinking, ‘Who would like this? Who do I wish would like this?’ So that’s how a style gets evolved. With what you were saying before, I don’t know whether I get up in the morning and say I’m only going to think about harsh things and certainly these days it’s hard for me to not think that way because sadly a lot of harsh things happened in the neighborhood where I’m sitting right now. It’s not something where I can just sit there and say I’m going to write about death. I just can’t do it today.

The show also points to a lot of post 9/11 issues and themes.

EB: It was written before 9/11. That’s the whole weird thing about it.

Yeah, definitely. It’s very strange!

EB: It is weird. It’s kind of scary.

So how do you work with such global material that’s so personal to everyone, especially seeing as how you wrote it before 9/11?

EB: You know, I guess like I said before there’s just ideas in the air, in my head. I’m not that concerned about making any kind of political statements, but I am interested in what I’m thinking about. What was kind of crazy about 9/11 is that what I was thinking, even in the name of the piece, Wake Up And Smell The Coffee, was like ‘Come on everybody, snap out of it.’ People are getting a little crazy here and terrorists are on my mind all the time and airplanes are on my mind all the time and I’m just going a little too fast and it feels like its getting a little out of control. So, I reach out for these topics because they fit into the way I’m thinking about this stuff, not like I feel I’ve got to tell anybody about any of these things because I’m assuming everybody who sees my stuff reads a newspaper or in some way are informing themselves. They don’t need me to give them a news report. I write about things that are on my mind and I do read the newspaper so a lot of this stuff is on my mind. And like you say, it’s a post 9/11 world in a pre 9/11 piece. The world was so much simpler then when I wrote that and it was easier to go dancing around a lot of these really scary themes which show up again and again in the show. It’s kind of uncanny. I don’t think I could do it today, actually. I don’t think I could write about all this stuff. It would be a little too painful. It’s a lot to handle.

- Danielle Henbest