Crafted as a love letter to underground comics and the pursuit of art-making, Owen Kline’s Funny Pages is a fantastically fucked-up coming-of-age story about Robert, a young cartoonist who will go to any lengths to reach success. Ever the dark comedy, Funny Pages was produced by Josh and Benny Safdie, esteemed masters of gonzo discomfort. It should be noted, however, that for all of the laugh-out-loud shocks the film delivers, Kline has created a story that still manages to be genuinely touching and earnest at its core. Infusing central New Jersey with Robert Crumb’s strange overtones, Funny Pages is ultimately about finding one’s artistic voice—and what it takes to be true to that voice.
While this is his debut feature, Owen Kline is no stranger to show business. The son of actors Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, he broke out as the younger brother in Noah Baumbach’s 2005 film The Squid And The Whale, and he’s since found a home for himself in the DIY underground scene, with roles in films by the Safdies and Michael Bilandic. Kline is an expert of the obscure, able to rattle off facts and stories about anything to do with classic comedy, underground comics, and old-school showbiz. These affections come through in his early shorts—like Jazzy for Joe (2014), co-directed with Andrew Lampert, which stars talk-show inventor Joe Franklin—and his crate-digging online radio show for KPISS.fm, “Run ’Em Off.”
A few days after taking in a “Mystery Reel” of celluloid gags and rarities Kline had assembled for a screening at Lincoln Center—something he referred to in our conversation as a “movie orgy,” a phrase that felt perfectly in tune with the perverse humor of his film—I got together with him over Zoom to discuss the formative time he spent at the comic book store of his youth, the warm critical reception to Funny Pages, and the vast array of oddball legends that make up its cast.
NOTEBOOK: Funny Pages is your first feature film. Can you explain loosely what the film is about?
OWEN KLINE: It’s about a teenage cartoonist trapped in the suburbs and trying to strive for truth, and in doing so, kind of ridiculously uprooting his own life. That’s a pretty cheap reduction of it, but at least it came from me.
NOTEBOOK: What was the film’s Cannes premiere like?
KLINE: Unexpected. I never had high expectations for this movie; I really thought this would just be a movie for a couple of people. That was not the intention, but because of that, it liberated it in certain ways. I’m really proud it landed where it did. But I’m still making heads or tails of it.
NOTEBOOK: When you say it liberated it, what do you mean?
KLINE: Well, I think if George Kuchar had strived for his work to play at a Loews theater, then the work wouldn’t be as free, would it?
NOTEBOOK: You programmed a “Mystery Reel” the other night at Lincoln Center. Can you talk about putting that together?
KLINE: The Mystery Reel was sort of an excuse to rummage through the incredible collection of Jerry Lewis’s archivist, Bob Furmanek. Jerry was very generous with Bob—they met on one of his open sets of Cracking Up in New York—and Bob was very generous with me. All through Bob’s recreated Jerry Lewis Cinema in his basement are these astonishing set posters from different Jerry Lewis productions from the ’60s saying, “This is an open set, everyone is invited.” All of Jerry’s movies were open to the public, for them to come watch him put these things together.
Bob was very generous letting me in there. We ran so much film. Ads and clips and old cartoons and Jerry Lewis rarities and Three Stooges rarities. We landed on a really strange program that we spliced together. Kind of our own movie orgy. It had a focus on out-of-context American slapstick as—I don’t know, surrealism? Is that lofty? Wouldn’t you say so? That Wally Vernon short where the frog legs were hopping off the plate…and these ugly, ugly men! You’ve never seen men like that at such a high-society party in tuxedos.
NOTEBOOK: The frog legs gag was almost Eraserhead-esque.
KLINE: Yeah! So Joe Besser, who replaced Shemp in The Three Stooges, we showed some of his solo shorts. Columbia was very invested in Joe Besser at the time. Those are really funny. He’s usually someone’s annoying, dandy butcher…annoying some army guy who says “Oh, if you were in my army”…and then the draft calls up and he has to join the army…things like that. Stupid things. But didn’t you find the Jerry Lewis clips at the beginning pretty compelling?
NOTEBOOK: Yeah, were those bloopers?
KLINE: Those were outtakes of him doing sort of theatrical snipes for the Jerry Lewis Cinemas that would be distributed across the country, just being funny, pretending to hurt his hand on the slate and playing the boom mic, and yelling cut when it’s not working… He must have directed those himself. That was the whole concept of the Jerry Lewis Cinema. He thought that one man could rip the tickets and do everything—project the movies, make the popcorn. Turned out he was wrong.
NOTEBOOK: Funny Pages reminded me of going to Midtown Comics when I was younger, and it was always overwhelming. There’d be so many variants and storylines and I had no idea where to start. I was wondering if you had a similar feeling when you were younger.
KLINE: Yeah, superhero comics didn’t alienate me, but there were very few that I could get into. There were very few storylines…very few comics that I followed in that way. What’s interesting about independent comics is, even the classic titles, sometimes they’d miss an issue. A couple months would go by between number two and number three. They weren’t in such an assembly line. It was just one person with a life and probably a job that actually supports him. In terms of comics, like movies, and auteurism or what have you, I look for voices. Singular voices. You don’t get a lot of that in superhero comics.
NOTEBOOK: So what were the voices that spoke to you?
KLINE: Early on, that was Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts. And then I tried again to get into superhero comics during an awkward period, and I discovered the underground comics box that said “adults only” behind the counter at the very generic superhero comic store I grew up with, Alex’s MVP Cards and Comics. But it wasn’t generic enough that they didn’t have this box of undergrounds. I was the only kid going in there and rummaging through the old back issues, dusting off the ’60s and ’70s comics—Archie, and MAD—just picking up that stuff while people were picking up the new stuff. And eventually I made my way over to R. Crumb, and he was the person who showed you can take your whole childhood and all your interests and put it into comics the way that great personal films do in that medium.
NOTEBOOK: Funny Pages feels like what a “comic book movie” should be. The cast is filled with actors that have very real, unique looks to them. Like Mitchell Wenig…and you see cartoonified versions of some of those faces…was that something you were specifically thinking about? People with a particular look?
KLINE: I was thinking about trying to create a world that this kid could exist in that all existed in a hermetic seal. So New Jersey was a piece of that, isolating it in a way, but there’s all these hermetic seals within that hermetic seal of New Jersey. You have a basement apartment where it doesn’t seem like anyone’s left it in many years; there’s a kind of vacuum-sealed fallout shelter thing that I love in movies and I love in life. I love sealing off in my think tank. I love to disappear into my own world. I love when someone can escape to some attic space and they have their posters and records and it’s frozen in a universe of their own. It’s like hiding away in their own diorama. The comic book store is its own thing… All of these places invite their own kinds of people.
NOTEBOOK: The basement apartment…I love that scene. Barry, the landlord, so to speak, is this vaguely perverted old guy, like a lot of the older men in the film. Where did you find the actor who plays him, Michael Townsend Wright?
KLINE: I think he’s just brilliant. I’d used him in a bunch of short films. I had done Jazzy for Joe with Joe Franklin, the first talk show host. He was from the world of low-rent, old show business. He had this talk show, he had a door open to the public in Times Square. And Drew Friedman, the cartoonist, was sued by Joe Franklin for forty million dollars for The Incredible Shrinking Joe Franklin in Heavy Metal Magazine. He later made amends with Joe, who of course lost the lawsuit because of parody law. Years later, he brought me to Joe’s office in Times Square. It was open to the public.
Michael Townsend Wright followed us there. He had known Joe since he was eleven years old and had been going into that office since he was a kid. He’s kind of doing a slight Joe Franklin impression [in the film]. He’s also doing his friend Tiny Tim a little bit, calling everyone “Mister.” His performance was a composite of a couple of different people, including Michael himself. His old-timey dapperness I think is really funny. The character is very sweaty, but he has a kind of class that counters the slobbishness of his surroundings. His dapperness shines through the sweat in a funny way. [Another actor in the film,] Cleveland Thomas, Jr., was Joe Franklin’s assistant. Franklin’s office was psychotic and cluttered. It was an amazing office. And a lot of the vacuum-seal of that office is incorporated into that film, especially in the basement apartment.
NOTEBOOK: Josh and Benny Safdie produced this film and it shares some bit players from their films, Mitchell Wenig, Buddy Duress... I was wondering about these other people. It seems like this Joe Franklin world you’ve just described, you’re calling upon people you’ve met there in order to populate your film.
KLINE: Every character was pretty customized. I wrote this for a lot of these people. I had a lot of voices in mind. Some of the characters you create, and you realize, oh, that could be this person. And once you have them, you can elaborate on that in the script and imbue it with personal details that capture their essence in a way that does something for the scene narratively. Thinking about that, and those points of views and perspectives…once you personalize it for them, then nobody else can play those people.
NOTEBOOK: There’s a quote in the film that stuck out to me, from the character Wallace, who serves as a twisted mentor figure to the protagonist, Robert. “You don’t just get to be an artist.” What does that line mean to you?
KLINE: Yeah, he says, “Nobody in this room is an artist. You’re not an artist, I’m not an artist. You don’t just get to be an artist.” I think Wallace is just threatened by these kids. His idea of an artist is a professional artist. A commercial artist. A lot of the great underground cartoonists who sold a lot of comics, people would argue that their artwork is pretty crude, and this guy wants to draw superhero comics. He obviously has a chip on his shoulder and is threatened by Robert’s confidence and freedom of expression.
I think I wanted to bookend the movie with opposing drawing lessons. To me, part of my coming-of-age… I was very encouraged by teachers and family and everything, and then you get into art school and they really kick your ass. That’s sort of what the Art School Confidential comic strip by Daniel Clowes is about. All these bitter art teachers that wish they still had a career, ragging on their students and their work because they see them as competition. Artists are very bitter…people are very bitter. Everyone has a different idea of what art is and what it means to be an artist. When you’re a kid and you listen to someone who’s crazy… Madness requires a certain level of conviction. It’s probably more traumatic coming from someone mentally ill than a teacher at Pratt.
NOTEBOOK: But there’s a glint of inspiration in there.
KLINE: In that line? What do you mean?
NOTEBOOK: Yeah, in that line. Because art takes work.
KLINE: Yeah, well, when you sweat and bleed for it, there’s an exorcism that goes on sometimes. If you’re lucky, that can feel divine. Crumb, and certain people that really go the distance, are really willing to sacrifice their personal existential woes and air them in a way that is more than just compelling. It’s compelling because it’s honest.