By Thom Fowler
August 8, 2003
Harvey Pekar became more notorious for his appearances on LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN than for his comic book AMERICAN SPLENDOR. Inspired by his friend R. Crumb, Harvey began writing a comic based on his every day “salt of the earth” life. R. Crumb liked the stories and began illustrating them, thus becoming the first of several illustrators for the underground classic, AMERICAN SPLENDOR.
Harvey Pekar’s life has now been turned into a movie starring Paul Giametti as Harvey and Hope Davis as his wife, Joyce Brabner. Harvey Pekar’s colorful stable of characters come right out his own life and at least one of them, Toby Radloff, had his own burst of five minutes of media exploitation on MTV back in the ‘80s as “The Real Nerd.” While Harvey doesn’t come across as a very “industry” guy, his adopted daughter Danielle kept a journal of her trip to Comic-Con 2003 where she spent a lot of time with Elijah Wood learning about the movie business.
I didn’t see the AMERICAN SPLENDOR crew at Comic Con but I did see them at the Writer’s Guild Theatre in Los Angeles for a screening and Q and A after the film and Harvey was good enough to give me some interview time when his harried press tour began the following day. I had never heard of Harvey Pekar prior to this film but after the interview I was glad I got the chance to meet and talk with him and only wished I had more time.
Thom: How does it feel to have a movie about your life and see a version of yourself played by someone else?
Harvey: It’s okay. I feel good about getting paid for it, too.
Thom: Is that a new thing, getting paid?
Harvey: Getting paid the amounts of money that I’m getting paid for this. It certainly beats 25 dollars a record review.
Thom: Did the process of doing this comic book make you a more observant person or did it just give you an outlet to comment on what you saw every day?
Harvey: It may have made me more observant actually. I had this definite reason now to watch people and observe their behavior and think about it. I had done that before but I think this may have made me more systematic about it. I’m not sure.
Thom: When you walk into a situation do you see the story? When do you know when you have that moment that’s going to be a frame in the story?
Harvey: I don’t know. It just sort of hits me when I see something that I think would make a great story. Sometimes I just come into a situation and the situation looks like an interesting situation for a story. A lot of times it takes a lot of sweat to get it to be a good comic book story. To shape the dialogue and everything like that to make it come out right.
Thom: AMERICAN SPLENDOR is published by an independent publisher?
Harvey: Yeah, I used to publish them myself for 15 years.
Thom: What was it like to self-publish?
Harvey: It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of physical work. I had a regular day job anyway and this was a lot more work than I had. First of all, I wasn’t losing money on it most of the time and I had to be hauling, it wasn’t, one printer didn’t do all the work. The set-up, the best deal I could get was one guy used to take the negatives and print the insides of the books and another guy prints the cover and then the covers go over to the guy with the insides and they bind and trim them. I had to be involved with some of that transportation process, dragging around boxes of stuff like that and dragging them and storing them in my basement and stuff like that.
Thom: You self-distributed also?
Harvey: No. There were some distributors around that I could deal with.
Thom: In the movie your character shows an interest in political issues, like the worker solidarity with the striking NBC employees. Does your politics come out in your work at all or is that more in your private life?
Harvey: It comes out in the work. I’ve talked about political issues from time to time. It’s not a regular feature of the comic but once in a while I’ll get on a soap-box.
Thom: What kinds of issues are you interested in?
Harvey: Oh, economic issues like. I’ve always had a hard time getting a full-time job until I started working for the federal government getting full time work and all that, when I got a steady job, I never forgot where I came from and I was always looking at the unemployment figures of the country and stuff. I was really pretty, I’m really pretty upset by the way Bush is running the country and how screwed up it is and the economy.
Thom: What is it that you don’t like about what Bush is doing?
Harvey: He doesn’t have any plan. He’s not doing anything. The only thing he’s doing is he wants to give tax cuts to rich people and stuff like that. He says that’s going to spur the economy. That’s what they’ve been doing. After a while they’re going to stop spending the money. They’ve got so God damned much money anyway.
Thom: So what would you like to see happen that would shift the distribution of wealth in the American economic system.
Harvey: I think that now, wealthy people, through tax breaks and stuff like that, get a much better deal then they used to. We are supposed to have a graduated income tax but actually you find out that with all the tax breaks that have been written into the code since, going back to maybe Kennedy, I’d like to see some of the preferential treatment given to rich people eliminated so that people at the lower end would truly have more disposable income. I’d like to see more emphasis put on environmental issues. We just got a finite amount of resources in a lot of areas and we are using them up. This is not only in this country, but throughout the world. We’re not using these things wisely. We are wasting them and pretty soon there’s not going to be anything left to throw around. It’s a waste.
I’d like to see more emphasis put on putting a safety net under people where the pensions are better when they retire, we have a national health care system, stuff like that. We are one of the few industrialized countries that doesn’t have one and I’d like to see that happen. A lot of things like that. I’m in favor more of a planned economy then the current Republicans in office are.
Thom: How much do think is enough. How much do people need in their lives to keep going day to day?
Harvey: You need to pay rent or the house payment. They need enough to have food. I’m noticing more and more people are eating out just about every meal. I don’t know if I go along with kind of lifestyle. That can really take a hell of a lot out of your income. I think they should have some disposable income for going to see movies and stuff like that or buying books or whatever. I don’t think every house should have a swimming pool.
Thom: What frugality tricks have you learned over the years trying to manage a limited income?
Harvey: I just stopped spending money on myself. My wife spends more and more money. And I can’t control that unless I get into a huge fight with her, stuff like that. I’m not going to win anyway so I just sort of like, try and … like I say, I’m not hardly spending anything on myself.
Thom: What kind of an influence has your wife been on you?
Harvey: She’s kept me on my toes. She’s, you know, I mean, I’m kinda technologically, I’m like a technophobe and stuff like that and she’s gotten me to overcome some of that stuff. I can now, I used to use a word processor with a floppy disk to write articles and stuff because I do a lot of prose work. I used to write the articles on a floppy disk and she would take the floppy disk and send them to my publisher. The word processor, after about 12 years, finally came apart at the seams. We couldn’t find any word processors on the market that we could buy to replace them so I had to, she got a laptop computer for me to work on. So now I’m starting to learn how to use that. That stuff screws me up, technology and stuff. It messes me up but I gotta do it.
And she’s gotten me to do things that I needed to like buy a house, which I really needed and left to myself I’d probably still be laying around in my apartment with piles and piles and piles of books and stuff laying around on the ground.
Thom: Do you still read a lot? Are you reading anything now?
Harvey: Not now, I just got through reviewing a couple of books.
Thom: What books?
Harvey: One is called THE TRAIN by a guy named Pete Dexter. It’s like an L.A. noir crime novel that takes place in 1953. It’s not the kind of stuff I read for fun. I don’t particularly go for that.
Thom: Who did you write the review for?
Harvey: A magazine called BOOK in New York. For the Village Voice I wrote a review of an expanded version of an avant-garde novel by Michael Brodsky called DETOUR that he originally published in 1977 and that’s a very dense, difficult book but its very rewarding.
Thom: Do you write a lot for the Village Voice?
Harvey: I have written for The Voice. I’m hoping I get back with them. I’ve had my differences with their editors which have kept me from writing for them for some time. I’m hoping now I can get in with the guys who are heads of individual departments. If I’m okay with them then the top bosses won’t mess around.
Thom: What’s it like to jump to the other side of the table and be the subject rather than the documenter.
Harvey: You mean like now? I’m just trying to think about doing the best job for you that I can so I can get the best article written about myself, well, not myself, but the movie in this case, and stuff like that. Give you the honest information and try to give you as full an idea or answer the questions that you’re asking me. In the long run that’s in my best interest.
Thom: Have you had any dealings with the David Letterman show since your last appearance?
Harvey: No.
Thom: Have you watched the show since then?
Harvey: I never watched the show.
Thom: I had never seen those episodes with you on them. I just thought it was an interesting about you showing solidarity for the striking NBC workers. Dave wanted it to be show business and you tried to bring up some tangentially important issues.
Harvey: I was trying to do what was best for me as well as what was best for the national interest. I wasn’t getting anywhere with Letterman. All he wanted me to do was this bit that I had done where I do a parody of a working man or something like that.
Thom: Just be the grump.
Harvey: Yeah, or something like that. He ate that up, that was very successful. I got tired of doing that.
Thom: You aren’t a clown, you are a little more complex then that.
Harvey: Well, yeah. I just think and I think in the long run, if you go to the well too often people are going to get tired of you. I wouldn’t mind being a regular on his show but I don’t think I could have served my purposes by just being “Harvey the grumpy Cleveland file clerk” every time out. So I definitely did have concerns about General Electric owning NBC. I thought there was a serious conflict of interest there.
Thom: They eventually got out of the nuclear power business.
Harvey: They made nuclear reactors. I just thought I wanted to try and still get laughs but try and you know, expand my range of topics and stuff like that. Those guys were dead set against it, you know. I wasn’t getting anything out of it. So I go on the Letterman show, so big deal. The idea that I go on TV doesn’t mean shit to me. I have to come away with something. And if it’s not furthering my career or anything like that or selling anything, I just went ahead and did what I wanted to and sort of dared them to do anything about it. I went on, they kept me on for a pretty long time. That wasn’t the last appearance you saw me on in the movie. I was on a few more times.
Thom: They brought you back after that?
Harvey: Yeah, I was on as late as 1995.
Thom: That was mighty gentlemanly of them.
Harvey: Yeah, given Letterman’s prejudice against controversy and dealing with anything that was significant politically.
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