Comedy Writer Mike Sacks Thinks Most Gen X Movies Were Bullshit...And Now He’s Written One

A Q&A with the NYTimes bestselling author

Good morning folks!

Today I am sharing an interview I recently did with comedy writer Mike Sacks. Sacks’ work has appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Esquire, Salon, Vanity Fair, and many more publications. He recently released a very funny new book, Slouchers, which I highly recommend.

Here’s the interview below!

Over the last few years, comedy writer Mike Sacks, author of NYTimes bestseller Poking a Dead Frog, has begun publishing comedic novelizations of fake movies. His 2017 release, Stinker Lets Loose!, was a novelization to a fake trucking movie from the ‘70s, in Passable In Pink, it was a John Hughes-esque movie from 1983. Now he’s releasing a novelization to a screenplay based on a fictional 1993 movie called Slouchers. The book both mocks and pays tribute to those early ‘90s Gen X movies such as Singles, Reality Bites, and Slacker that center around lost twenty-somethings rebelling, barely, against the establishment to which they already belong.

Sacks, a Gen Xer himself who’s interviewed some of the greatest comedy writers of all time, grew up when these movies were released and admits most of those films were movie studio cash grabs, with no bearing on reality; they romanticized the unromantic life of being a slacker, in itself no accomplishment to begin with.

I spoke with Sacks about writing his fake novelizations, his pre-internet days working in a record store, and what’s been keeping him sane during the pandemic. 

ALSO: Slouchers is out now! 

How have you been since the pandemic started? Has it shifted the way you’ve been writing?

Selfishly, it’s helped. I’m a homebody anyway and now that I’m forced to be home, I’m only writing and reading. And maybe watching some Orioles and some movies off Criterion Channel, which I love. Oh yeah, and parenting. That’s been a little more difficult, as my daughter is also home all day, but I love it. I’m just in charge of more pre-Algebra than I’d ever like to be. I told her that “Algebra means nothing,” so I think that’s a good start.

As far as writing, I have to write every day or I become anxious and depressed and my OCD goes through the roof—at just that right angle. If it doesn’t go through the roof at just that right angle, I have to do it over again. I’m a disaster if I don’t write every day. It’s good for the writing, but not so thrilling to be around.

I’ve heard from a lot of writers who can’t concentrate during this horrible time. One thing I’ve done is to turn off the news. I just can’t take it anymore. The election month was an exception but there’s only so much one can watch without losing one’s mind. I do miss socializing, but if I have to be home, there’s almost a feeling of knowing that I’m not missing out on anything exciting. We’re all in the same miserable, sinking boat. So I’m taking advantage of it.

Did you write Slouchers before the pandemic?  

I did. I’ve been working on it off and on over the past two years. Originally, I was going to write it as an audio movie, like I did for Stinker Lets Loose and Passable in Pink, but I decided to put it out as a book first, and then perhaps have it produced later as an “audio movie.” I just liked the fact that it’s a book supposedly out from 1992 or 1993, and only books existed then. Very few audio books, no internet, no podcasting obviously. Really the last gasp just before the internet blew up the world. A very non-digital world we lived in back then. We were so simple and so innocent and yet we didn’t know it! I long for those days. Wait. No I don’t.

In Stinker Lets Loose! you were re-releasing an out-of-print novelization from 1977 based on a forgotten trucking movie, in Passable In Pink, a John Hughes type movie from 1983. Now you’re releasing a novelization of a screenplay based on a novel called Slouchers. What’s been your motivation for writing in your layered novelization form, one in which you also hide your real identity? 

It’s just fun. And the margin of error is baked in. It doesn’t have to be “beautiful writing.” It can just tell a story. It’s basically a Trojan Horse method of getting across a story, as well as getting across jokes about that very specific time. I was working in a record store in New Orleans and then Maryland in the early to mid 90s. Very bad time in my life, actually. I was pretty unmoored. And all these movies that were coming out then about how great it was to be a slacker and to be without a job and without any goals really annoyed me. Now when I watch them, they annoy me even more. They remind me of the movies about hippies that the middle-aged writers and directors put out in the 60s. They just have no bearing on reality. They’re all about trying to make a quick buck. There were a few movies I did like in the early ‘90s, such as Clerks and SubUrbia and Slackers, both by the great Rick Linklater. All are well done and came from the heart. But the rest of that shit bothered me then and bothers me now. Just utter garbage. And very, very dated. Try watching these movies now. Just awful. Maybe the problem is that I don’t do drugs. And never have. Maybe that would help. Maybe that’s been my problem all along.

Age seems to play a big role in Slouchers. It’s important that our main characters have just graduated college, that Skip, the record store owner, is seemingly old at 29. How does writing about age factor in for you as a writer?   

Age meant so much when I was in my early twenties. Twenty-nine seemed ancient. Now, of course, it doesn’t. And so much was made about age in these movies. Someone had to still be a certain age to “get it.” Total bullshit. But it means something when you’re young, I guess. In the novelization I wrote about the 1980s, Passable in Pink, age plays a factor for the high school students. That the seniors seem so old and worn out and mature. That was played up quite a bit in John Hughes movies. I just find it funny that teenage characters care so much about things like this. When you get older, it becomes very clear there are many, many other, more important, things to worry about beyond if someone is two years older than you. I say that because I’m in my forties and dating a twenty year old.

Similar to your previous novelizations, you seem to be both paying tribute to and mocking the genre of which the books are based. What are your feelings toward this genre of work, does it tend to be more appreciation or disdain? 

I love novelizations. I find the writing incredible. No bullshit literary pretensions. It just is what it is. It’s a story with characters and then it’s over. I also love the fact that these books are written by authors who are out there hustling to make a living. No fake artistic conceits going on here. They pump out one book, and then the next, and they keep moving down that dusty road.

Novelizations were also important to me growing up. It was the only way to relive these movies before they came out on VHS a year later. I loved them. I remember buying the novelization to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I still have it. I now have more than a hundred or so. Just a big fan of them. They are what they are. No bullshit.

Slouchers resembles ‘90’s films like Reality Bites, Clerks and Singles. Were these the movies you had in mind when writing this? Any others? 

Oh yes, definitely. Also Pump Up the Volume and SubUrbia, and the worst of the bunch, Empire Records. I have to say I really liked Pump Up the Volume and SubUrbia, and still do. But Empire Records is just utter garbage. It was such a specific time in movie making. Very specific to an era, all looking now super dated. I mean, it’s been 30 years since Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was released. That’s a long time ago. I like movies and pop culture that’s stuck in amber. It never goes bad. Well, it does, terribly, but it can still be satirized.

I always notice similarities between your writing and Jack Handey’s. You’re both so quick and write confident, idiotic characters so well. And you both seem to have a joke in every line. You make it look easy, but is this kind of writing more time consuming than it seems/exhausting?

I love idiots. The world is run by idiots. And they’re always so confident. It’s always the geniuses who have no confidence. George W. Bush? Confident. Donald J. Trump? Super confident. That shy, gentle genius you knew in college? Not so confident. America is filled with super confident fucking morons. And I grew up with so many in Maryland and Virginia and then later in New Orleans. So I love writing that type of character. I do like to have a very densely packed style with a lot of jokes just so the reader won’t get bored and leave. I get bored very, very easily. And I figure I get bored, then everyone else will also. It does take time to write like this. I can’t just dash it off. But it’s still a lot easier than writing something serious or “real” or something not in my style. I couldn’t write a serious article on the economy if my life depended on it. Even if I had a thousand years, it’d be impossible. These types of books, the sorts of articles I write, that’s just the only style that I can put out. A writing style becomes what you’re not capable of writing. And I’m not capable of writing a lot.

One more thing: Jack Handey is a genius. Thank you for the comparison. I adore everything he writes. And he’s a hell of a nice guy! How rare is that? I’ll answer that for you. It’s very rare. David Sedaris, Bob Odenkirk, Merrill Markoe, Amy Sedaris, just all so brilliant and all so incredibly nice. There’s no better combination in my book.

What’s interesting is your focus privilege at points. Someone like Willow can afford to hang around and do nothing, act like a rebel, but she’s very privileged. How did writing privilege factor in the writing for you?   

Willow was based mostly on the Winona Ryder character in Reality Bites. I’ve run across a lot of these types. And I see them in movies. In John Hughes movies, the characters are always millionaires, even though they live in the “bad” part of town. I mean, look at that fucking house in Home Alone. It’s bigger than the goddamn White House. I worked retail for ten years or so. I guess I have a stick up my ass about people who were my age who were immediately on the right track to success. I wasn’t. I grew up very privileged, but I still have a problem with the rich. I’m an asshole, I guess. I just hate fake suffering and complaining about life when so many others have it so much worse. These movie characters in the early ‘90s only complained, that’s all they did. All the fucking time. At that age, that’s what people want to hear, I guess. Now that I’m older, it just annoys the shit out of me. Get on with your life, richie, and stop fucking with the whining.

There’s a similar theme as above with hypocrisy for characters like Willow and Topper, who never even read or watched the work they love to reference.

Right, Topper is one of the “Lost Boys” in Slouchers who only hangs around in the parking lot of the strip mall. He’s into skateboarding. There were so many tropes one had to follow in the early’ 90s, but I found that no one really knew much about the authors or the music or the movies they were always referencing. I worked in a record store and we made no money and we were treated like shit by the customers, so our way of getting back at them was to act superior culturally. “Oh, you haven’t heard of the new Hoodoo Gurus album? Well now …” A total dick move but that’s what we did.

This type of thing could later be seen in High Fidelity. By the way, I’m always asked by friends, “Was working for a record store for ten years like it was in High Fidelity?!”

Um, no, actually. It really sucked. I was horribly depressed. I was held up at gunpoint. My assistant manager was murdered at a party I was invited to. That was a triple murder. He was a great guy. I really liked him a lot. But I worked with a lot of morons. The customers were assholes. It was depressing and there was no light at the end of the tunnel. We were all miserable. So we took it out on the poor customers who would come in for their shitty cassette tapes of the soundtrack to The Bodyguard. It was a bad time for me.

With that said, I’d love work again in a record store. Maybe it wasn’t so miserable after all. Shit, maybe it was the best time of my life! It’s hard to tell at a certain point what sucked and what was awesome. In some ways, I preferred it to working at Washington Post and Vanity Fair. Don’t tell anyone. Actually, you can. Washington Post was awful.

You write in Slouchers: “The Greatest Generation had their earnestness. The Gen X’ers have something far better: studied insouciance.” Do you feel this way personally about the previous generations? 

We really had nothing. We didn’t even have the internet. We had no causes, no wars, just nothing. A bad economy. We were all miserable. I was anyway. But then the insouciance became too studied. Even that became studied and fake. And when that happens, your generation is really skimming the bottom. Once MTV took over the Slacker mentality, we were really doomed. We’re all creatures of time and place and we had no choice. But it really wasn’t a great time. At least for me. I always put so much pressure on myself anyway. Now, if I had known there was an end in sight for being a slacker, it might have been more bearable. As it was, I thought I’d be stuck in that position forever. And I didn’t want that. There’s nothing wrong with working retail. But I just saw people in their 40s and 50s still working retail and it was not a good sight. No insurance, eating lunch while standing, wearing name tags. A lot of creative people became stuck and could never be released.

How would these Gen X characters feel about today's Millennials and Gen Zers? 

Confused. Bewildered. Jealous. A lot of wasted energy and creativity that went nowhere for my generation. But that’s just the timing of it all. What can ya do?

I’ve always admired your ability to pursue the kind of projects you’ve wanted. Slouchers is another great example of it. Is there any advice you’d give writers at the moment who feel stuck/uninspired? 

Don’t wait for permission. Don’t wait for the go-ahead from an agent, or a producer, or an editor, or anyone. Just fucking do it. And do it the way you want to. Too many writers are still waiting for permission. You can do it now on your own and get it out there on your own. If someone doesn’t get it, that’s on them. Not on you. As John Waters so beautifully put it, “Some people get it, others are assholes.” Don’t hang with the assholes. And certainly don’t rely on the assholes to get your work out there!

Now go get ‘em, motherfuckers! Hell are you waiting for? What are you, a character in Slouchers, my new book out now?!