Larry Doyle can seem a little obsessed with high school. He is 48, and the winner of two Emmy Awards for his writing on The Simpsons, but his resume still lists this achievement: National Merit Scholar, Buffalo Grove High School, 1976.
Doyle would also like you to know that he graduated 13th in his class of 513, but that some of the people above him took easy classes. He wrote for the school paper, acted in student plays and was on the speech team (but not debate: he had his limits). It goes without saying that he still has dreams set at his alma mater.
In one that occurred two years ago, he found himself giving a speech at his high school graduation and, in front of everyone, declaring his love for a classmate. The dream became a book, I Love You, Beth Cooper, published this month. And the book has been optioned for a movie.
Holding onto high school, then, has been good to Larry Doyle. But what about the rest of us? Why can't we shake those formative years?
"It seems like most people have one of two experiences in high school," says Doyle, who lives in Baltimore with his wife and three young children. "They either come out of it with a lot of bitter resentment at all the people they need to get back at or it's like the glory days that they can never revisit."
In Doyle's book, names were changed to protect the innocent (he did love a Beth, but his publisher wouldn't let him use her last name). Many of the experiences of the characters, though, are his own: Doyle told scary stories about teenagers, with hooks for hands, who haunted a favorite makeout spot. He raced down a dark country road with the headlights off. And he once had to stop kissing a girl because mosquitoes were ravaging his face.
"I let them bite for a long time before I gave up," he says with a touch of pride.
Doyle's career has been marked by such persistence. As a medical reporter for United Press International in the '80s, he wrote 1,200 stories one year. He kept writing short stories and humor pieces despite continued rejections from magazines like Playboy and The New Yorker (which now publishes his work regularly). He's written more than a dozen screenplays, although only two were made into movies, and they both bombed.
While an editor at Spy in 1992, Doyle suggested the magazine run 1,000 reasons not to vote for George H.W. Bush for re-election.
"I thought that was interesting," says Kurt Andersen, who was editor of Spy at the time. "But he actually wrote a thousand very distinct, specifically researched reasons. ... He works insanely hard."
Doyle first wrote I Love You, Beth Cooper as a screenplay, but his agent couldn't sell it in Hollywood. Studio executives said it was either "execution dependent," meaning that if it's not done well, it won't succeed, or "not castable." Doyle explains, "This means there's no part for Will Ferrell."
So he decided to write it as a novel. He wrote a hundred pages and shopped it around New York. HarperCollins bit. And suddenly, Hollywood was interested. Doyle wasn't surprised that the movie executives had changed their minds.
"Hollywood runs on fear," he says. "And the biggest fear is that you would make a decision based on your own feelings about something and therefore be culpable. ... They don't respect writers much out there. They don't respect ideas at all. Ideas don't have any value. But a book is an object they can point to: 'I didn't buy this idea. I bought this real thing.'"
This is Doyle's first book, but he says he much prefers the experience to screenwriting. When you write a book, he says, you have creative control. But as a screenwriter, you lose control. And no one cares who you are anyway.
Doyle learned that when he went to the set of his first screenplay to be made into a movie, Duplex, starring Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore. He dropped by the office of the initial director, Greg Mottola, and said to the assistant there, "Hi, I'm Larry Doyle." And the assistant said, "You are?"
"I wrote the movie," Doyle said, assuming that would get him in the door.
"Do you have an appointment?" the assistant asked.
Doyle was stunned. "There were hundreds of people walking around, and not to be egotistical but to be literal, who were employed because of me, because I had an idea and wrote it. They're building sets that I instructed them to build and they have no idea who I am! And once they find out who I am, they don't care."
In making the transition to being an author, though, Doyle has had some surprises. The biggest, he says, is how "rinky dink" the publishing world is. "The scale of everything is so small," he says.
His movie Duplex, for instance, was considered a failure because only 1 million people saw it on opening weekend. "But if a million people bought my book, I'd be the king of New York," he says. "And to be a modest success, I only need to sell, like, 20,000."
Low-key lifestyle
Doyle doesn't know how his book is faring, but it's received enthusiastic reviews from Entertainment Weekly and New York magazine. And the people at Doyle's publisher seem happy.
"They get excited when they hear that some store in Texas has put a display of the book up," he says. "So everything is just much more low-key" than Hollywood.
But part of the reason he left Los Angeles was for a more low-key lifestyle. Doyle's wife, Becky, grew up in Mount Washington in Baltimore, and when her parents put the family house on the market in 2005, Doyle and Becky decided they wanted to buy it. They had a 6-year-old son and 1-year-old twins.
"It suddenly occurred to my wife that L.A. is the sort of place where our children will become drug dealers if we stay," he says. And not in Baltimore? "They have a sense of humor about themselves here. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said: 'Baltimore: Not That Bad.'"
Doyle now works out of a study in a sprawling, brown-shingled house. He keeps in his office one of his Emmy awards from The Simpsons (his parents have the other) as well as two trophies from high school speech contests.
"Probably one of the strengths of a good comedy writer is that you're still a teenager," says Mike Scully, an executive producer of The Simpsons who hired Doyle in 1997. "Basically, you get to go to work every day and wear a T-shirt and jeans and put your feet up on the table and be disrespectful to authority. The only difference is now you get paid for it."
Doyle's skill on The Simpsons (he no longer writes for the show) was his strong sense of each character's individual voice, Scully says. He showed a compassion that has translated to his fiction writing.
"He comes across initially as deeply cynical, but underneath that is a layer of sarcasm and pessimism," Scully says. "But then, if you dig even further under that, there's a great heart."
Real people
Indeed, Doyle is mostly sympathetic to the characters in Beth Cooper, making them into real people rather than teen movie cutouts. The nerdy protagonist, Denis Cooverman, who declares his love for Beth at graduation, turns out to be more complex (and brave) than stereotypes would dictate. Likewise, Beth Cooper, the beautiful head cheerleader, has a job at Payless Shoes and is neither as ditzy nor as big-hearted as readers might expect.
Denis' problem, Doyle writes, is that he "knew too much about biology and not enough about women."
Andersen, author of the recent novel Heyday, has teenage children of his own and says Doyle accurately captured "that kind of crazed adolescent sensibility." But that wasn't surprising. "He's not tall," Andersen says of Doyle, "so I think of him as younger than he is."
While Doyle spent some time researching the habits and speech patterns of modern teenagers, he believes they haven't changed fundamentally since he was one of them, in the '70s.
"I realized that they have all the exact same concerns," he says. "You can still get a bad reputation, and that's not a good thing. You can still be mortified by your body and all those sort of things. So the props change but the basic attitudes are the same.
"And they still tell that stupid story about the guy with the hook!"
stephen.kiehl@baltsun.com
Larry Doyle
Born:
Nov 13, 1958, Camden, N.J.
Resides:
Baltimore
Education:
Buffalo Grove High School, Illinois, graduated 1976, GPA 3.9 ("on a 4-point scale"); bachelor's degree in biology and psychology, University of Illinois, 1980; master's degree in journalism, University of Illinois, 1982
Writing credits:
Beavis and Butt-head, several episodes, 1991-1994; The Simpsons, supervising producer and writer for four seasons, 1997-2001; Duplex, writer and co-producer, 2003; Looney Tunes: Back in Action, writer and executive producer, 2003; author of I Love You, Beth Cooper, 2007
Experience:
United Press International, medical and science reporter, 1983-1989; writer of the syndicated comic strip "Pogo," 1989-1991; editor at National Lampoon, 1991; deputy editor of Spy magazine, 1992-1993; deputy editor of New York magazine, 1994-1997
Family:
Wife, Becky; three children: Ben, 8; Joe, 3; Alice, 3