Last week I headed to Los Angeles to cover the Over the Hedge press junket. Garry Shandling stars in that film as Vern the Turtle, and he showed up for the roundtables, seeming incredibly uncomfortable. At the end of the interview his yellow felt tip pen exploded in his pants. Later I got my starfucker thrills listening to Bruce Willis and Shandling hang out in the hallway. Shandling remained uncomfortable.
One of the things I needed to ask Shandling about was the fate of his TV shows on DVD. The first season of Larry Sanders, his genius deconstruction of talk shows, hit DVD years ago, but there was never a follow-up. And his Garry Shandling Show, a genius deconstruction of sitcoms, has never seen the laser light of DVD. The good news is that they’ll soon be spinning in your players.
Q: Are we ever going to see more Larry Sanders on DVD?
Shandling: This is so important to me. All during this [making Over the Hedge] what I was working on was putting the Larry Sanders DVDs together. They’re supposed to be out in the fall, in November. That was all consuming. I’m so proud of… God knows until you see them. They said ‘What kind of special features do you want to do?’ First of all, I’m not the kind of guy that likes to rehash the show and so forth and so on. I’m still learning about the show and what happened and the process is revealed. I said, ‘Just get me two hand held cameras and I’ll visit people I want to visit, that I want to catch up with, that I don’t get to talk to because I’ve been so busy and during the show I didn’t get to talk to them, without any preparation.
It’s very hard to describe. It is so real and unedited, so there’s these sections where I talk to Sharon Stone that is real life, that goes on for thirty minutes, that’s a private, intimate track. Then I talk to Tom Petty. I can’t explain it other than you cannot see it coming – it’s not an interview situation. I go over to his studio, I hadn’t seen him in a long time. It’s the core of what Larry Sanders is about, which is about being. It’s a very interesting, private little track. Seinfeld – I walked through Central Park with Seinfeld, we shot four hours. That one I’ll have to cut down a little bit, but it’s great insight. It’ll feel unedited and raw.
Q: What about the Garry Shandling Show?
Shandling: I was doing that simultaneously. They’re working on that too.