Andy Dick

Spotlight By: Michael Dance
michaelmdance@gmail.com

“I jumped on my mini trampoline for about forty-five minutes, and I’m feeling great,” Andy Dick tells TheCinemaSource at the beginning of our interview. “I’m in a really good phase in my life right now – that’s how I get ready for my day in general. I do a lot of really weird health things that people probably don’t think are natural or normal. Like, I start with a dry-brushing. It’s called a dry-brush massage. You take this horse hair brush and you brush yourself and you have to go in the same direction that your lymphatic section drains. Doing that for five minutes is almost like you’ve worked out for half an hour.”

Dick then jumps into a long discussion about the body’s lymphatic system, followed by an explanation of a homemade health shake he’s drinking. “This shake. It’s the most nutritionally comprehensive shake, that I created. It has everything you could ever want. From fish oil to blue-green algae — it looks like you’re drinking swamp water, and yet it tastes like a dark chocolate bar.”

Forgive the actor for seeming offbeat – he’s had a remarkably strange trip through Hollywood over his nearly twenty-year career. Thanks to persistent problems with drug use, notably a 1999 under-the-influence car accident, and some odd public behavior – his appearance in Comedy Central’s Roast of William Shatner consisted of licking the faces of Farrah Fawcett and Carrie Fisher – might make it easy for him to be the butt of Hollywood jokes.

The reality, however, is that Dick has been getting steady work for years, with two years-long TV shows – Newsradio and Less Than Perfect – under his belt, as well as supporting roles in movies like Employee of the Month and Road Trip. He got his big comedic break on the short-lived Ben Stiller Show, and still counts

Stiller as a friend – in fact, he was able to get him to do a cameo appearance in Danny Roane: First Time Director, which Dick wrote, directed, and stars in. It’s just now out on DVD.

“Everybody did it as a favor, and everybody was so gracious. From Jack Black to Ben Stiller, Bob Odenkirk — I know I wanted to have the Jacks and the Bens to pull in the audience, but my favorites were the Bob Odenkirks, the Kevin Farleys – you know, that’s Chris Farley’s brother. Those people, the Jamie Browns, and that big 400-pound guy, Paul Henderson, a good friend of mine, those were like my golden nuggets of comedy, my untapped comedy gold vane, if you will. They were there every day – Ben would pop in, and we were done with him in an hour. Jack Black, he was there probably three hours. In and out.”

The film is about a down-and-out television actor who gets blackballed from the industry thanks to his alcohol problems. For a comeback, he decides to direct his own movie, but his alcoholism leads him to drunkenly turn the film into a bizarre musical. Hm, some of that sounds familiar.

“I describe it as very semi-autobiographical,” Dick says. “Like, yes, I left my friend’s house one time, and I was so drunk, I said, ‘I’ll see you later,’ I’m leaving, I’ve just gotta go home — and then the next thing I know I’m behind the shrubs in his front lawn waking up to the sprinklers. I wasn’t naked, but I wound up naked — I have worse naked stories than I put in the movie.”

Oh really? “I have this one story where my dad caught me and a friend of mine, not only naked, but on top of each other doing some Greco-Roman wrestling or something. And my friend’s puking.

And we’re naked. And my dad’s standing in the doorway, and it’s the wee hours of the morning, and he’s getting ready for work, right? And he just turned and walked away. And we never addressed the situation, ever again.”

Not all the situations in the movie stem from truth, however. “I’ve never pissed on people like I did with Jimmy Kimmel [in the film],” he says, then pauses to think “I’ve pissed on people, yes, but not like in the movie where I’m literally trying to hit him–”

He stops himself again. “You know what? I take that back. I did try to hit Steve-O with a stream of whiz on the Tom Green internet show. You can see it online. I’m chasing him around with my dick waving in the wind trying to get it in his face. I don’t feel bad doing it to him, because he would probably like it.” He laughs loudly, almost as a way to stop himself from saying anything further. “Oh God, I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

The film? Oh yeah. Dick’s favorite part seems to be the musical sequences. “Two years to write it, and believe it or not, I started writing the music first,” he says. “I started writing this messed-up music that was really odd, and I knew that it was going to be part of the movie-within-the-movie, once it turns into a musical.” The structure of the film was such that it didn’t matter what the songs were about: “I knew that they would be easy to insert, because it doesn’t matter, because the story can be as F-ed up as it needs to be, because by then the wheels have come off and my character’s out of his mind.

“All of the music in Danny Roane’s movie set dream was written by me and my friends.

I work with all these great musicians – Andrew Sherman, Kim Walsh – and they do the music and I usually write the lyrics, and the melodies. If everything went as planned, on the DVD, you should have the full-length feature videos of some of those songs, so you can hear all the lyrics, and see the whole song. Because they’re fucking funny songs. In the movie we were only able to put like, thirty seconds of each song. Ten to thirty seconds.”

Danny Roane also gave Dick a chance to collaborate further with Marshall Cook, an actor and director who produced the film. The two have worked together on a few short films, two of which – Adcorp, Inc. and Division III – have quite coincidentally won TheCinemaSource’s Emerging Filmmakers award.

“I work with Marshall a lot…he’s doing another movie called Division III, it’s a football movie, and he wrote that one and he’s going to direct that. I play the lead coach, the psychotic coach who’s kind of like a Mr. Woodcock. Which sucks! Because he wrote it, and then Mr. Woodcock came out, but it’s completely different, but people will think oh, that’s like Mr. Woodcock, when it’s really not. But yeah, he’s great. That guy…

“What it is, he’s so young and hungry, and I’m more like, I don’t give a shit anymore. So he’s like, ‘No, you don’t understand, you’ve got to do this and this’ and he gets me going and I go, you’re right! Danny Roane would not have been made if it wasn’t for Marshall Cook. He just lit a fire under my ass.”

Although his work is steady, Dick says he could be doing a lot more if he still had the energy. “Marshall, and Bob Odenkirk and Ben Stiller…those people are just workaholic machines, man. I’m just not, I’m not gonna lie.

I’d probably had a much more massive career if I just had that kind of drive. I did in the beginning, but then I got Newsradio, and just a lot of shit hit the fan, and I just kind of — you know, maybe I don’t want all this. Maybe I want to sit here and drink my health shake.”