Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

Among the basic principles of Morse’s instruction, which were used to construct comedic as well as dramatic scenes, was the improv imperative of the “yes and”: the directive to always affirm the choices made by your onstage partners and build upon them rather than negate them. As Paul Tepper, another friend who studied with Robin in Morse’s class, explained, “It’s actually quite a good life theory. When someone says something to you—‘When did you get here from Mars?’—you don’t say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never been to Mars.’ You say, ‘Yes, and.’ You say, ‘Wow, I just got here three days ago, and I’ve been drunk ever since I arrived.’”

.comedy .robin_williams .persuasion .communciation

Robin’s theatrical training had given him a voice loud enough that he did not need a microphone to project himself, and he used this to his advantage. “If people started heckling you, you just wade over into the audience and go near their table,” he said. “Or move away from them, and use the other side of the room, and fuck the loud people over here, the drunks at the bar.” Sometimes he would wander into his audience, establishing a trademark move that helped distinguish him from his competitors. “If you were on mike, you did the standard thing where people could kind of lose track,” he said. “So if I didn’t go on mike, they were immediately listening.”

.comedy .robin_williams .public_speaking .confrontation

Comedy, Leno said, is an unusual discipline where “the affirmation of strangers is more important than that of friends or family members. No comic wants his friends or his family in the audience. They’re either going to laugh too hard or they’re not going to laugh at all. You want complete strangers. They’re the only ones that count.”

.comedy .jay_leno

The idea that his stand-up set was a body of work that needed to be updated and refined simply had not occurred to him. “There are people who have their eye on their career and making it,” Papush said, “and then there are true artists who just do their art, and what happens, happens. When I said to him, ‘You’re a big star,’ he looked at me like, what are you talking about?”

.robin_williams .art .creativity

Robin was so attracted to this immersive character work, and why he sought opportunities to create entirely new identities, just as he had done in his stand-up act: it was so much easier for him to be other people than it was to be himself. “He’s really very modest,” the director said. “He really hates talking about himself or his background. He doesn’t like strangers to get too close. He protects himself by adopting this disguise.”

.robin_williams

Hansen, who had studied acting at some of New York’s prestigious studio schools, recalled that when the reading was over, Robin strode right up to him and shook his hand “even though clearly he didn’t need to.” “He was like, ‘We have a lot in common,’” Hansen said. “I was like, ‘There’s no way we have anything in common’—I didn’t say that, but that’s what I’m thinking. I was serving hot meals yesterday. And he was like, ‘You studied with Sandy Meisner, I studied with John Houseman at Juilliard. We both come from the same background.’ He did that with each boy. He had that one thing to make you identify with him. It was so smart to go, ‘You can trust me. We can play.’”

.robin_williams .meeting

Weir himself played the role of a teacher he called Mr. Quern, requiring the boys to report, in costume, to his classroom (a rehearsal space that had been outfitted with desks), where he addressed them as their characters and instructed them to organize a school play. “It was a way of deconstructing my own position as director, to relax everything,” he said. “I made a fool of myself. I became an actor myself.”

.directing

Weir often played music on his set before the cameras rolled, to establish atmosphere and to get his actors in the corresponding frame of mind.

.directing

Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society won him two Best Actor nominations. But they didn’t lead to Oscars because the Academy won’t give them to actors who are playing themselves.

.acting .directing

“He’s a comic, and all comics want to be Hamlet, come on. You want to show that you’re not just a clown—that inside that clown is a profundity, a deepness, a darkness. You suffer. And I think all comics always end up writing their autobiography, and trying to show how much pain they went through in their life.”

.robin_williams .comedy

“You have to meet people outside the movies—there’s a whole other world. Not everybody is promoting a script. Not everybody is worrying about grosses and points.” When you’re immersed in the entertainment industry, he said, “you’re confronted by your career every five minutes.” But when you’re living real life, he said, “you’re confronted by other things—like no heating. The furnace breaks, and I become Father Man, the man who goes down and changes the fuse, and it still fucks up.”

.robin_williams .escape

“Some actors see themselves doing what they refer to as, ‘one for them, one for me.’ That place actors get where they’re stuck between the opportunity to make millions of dollars doing a commercial film, and wanting to do meaningful work, but realizing that the stuff that pays them the big bucks doesn’t get them Oscars.”

.acting .filmmaking

It was how Robin had been taught to live since childhood: nothing is permanent, transition is constant. Anywhere can be home and anyone can be family, and you can always start over again in new places, with new people. Though it might seem a strange, even insensitive attitude to some, it reflected the essential way Robin saw the world. Reality was a medium that he could shape and manipulate, not some fixed and rigid thing; the temperament that made him spontaneous and capable of astonishing comic insight also made him unconcerned with traditional boundaries and accepted norms.

.robin_williams .change

“Robin was a genius, and genius doesn’t produce normal men next door who are good family men and look after their wives and children. Genius requires its own way of looking at and living in the world, and it isn’t always compatible with conventional ways of living.”

.robin_williams .genius

What these reports documented for the first time was the presence of a devastating brain disorder that likely accounted for much of what Robin had been experiencing in his final years, and which had never been fully diagnosed in his lifetime. Lewy body disease, a dementia believed to affect more than 1.3 million people in America—and far more men than women—results from a buildup of protein deposits in the brain. “There’s a protein that is normally useful in the brain, and it starts to accumulate abnormally, and it’s toxic,” said the neurologist Douglas Scharre of the Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University. “Where it builds up it can cause cell loss and cell death, and therefore that contributes to certain conditions.”

.robin_williams .neuroscience .dementia

What this meant in plain English was that Robin had bequeathed all of his distinguishing qualities—what he looked like; what he sounded like; his signature; his name—to a charitable organization, set up by his attorneys, which would not be allowed to profit off them in any form for twenty-five years. It was an unusually forward-thinking way to contemplate how technology and entertainment might evolve over the next quarter century, optimistic and dystopian in equal proportions.

.robin_williams .deepfakes .cgi

When they parted ways for the last time, on a darkened stretch of Los Angeles, Robin turned to the writer and offered this admonition before walking off into the night: “Go, young man, and write your story. In a thousand years, roaches will crawl over your words, their little feelers waving, and say: ‘Come on, let’s keep crawling.’”

.robin_williams .death