A co-worker and I recently had to pre-record some presentations. Thankfully, mine played first, but we both, independently of each other, described our jobs with a “Help me help you,” styled to Tom’s line reading. Then I paused and was like, “Wait, where does that come from? Oh, yeah, Jerry Maguire.” Then, because of that, I started quoting Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous. That “Help me help you,” said in such a way, is something people might be quoting and they don’t even realize it.
Wow. That makes me really, really happy. I tend to love the random stuff, like when Tom asks Cuba Gooding Jr., “You need a towel?” And he says, “No, I air dry.” But, also, there’s a line in Jerry Maguire that Bonnie Hunt has, which is, “Don’t cry at the beginning of the day, cry at the end of the day. Like I do,” which is her improv. I asked her not to do it, actually. Then in dailies, people were saying to me, “That’s the best line you ever wrote.” I told her not to say it, but it ended up great.
She took Jerry Cantrell’s advice.
[Laughs] Totally! That’s how you become great.
Speaking of line readings, Philip Seymour Hoffman, my God, what he does on the phone as Lester Bangs. When you wrote his scenes many years later, was any part of your jaded older self informing Bangs as he talked to your younger self?
Thank you. I loved both of them, and they’re so important to me, and I want to make sure I say this correctly. I was kind of a gnat that [Bangs] would shoo away because of some of my musical tastes. I don’t know that he would have loved me, at the time [Almost Famous] came out, as much as he would have loved Philip Seymour Hoffman’s version of himself. He would have probably thanked me for that, then sent me away, so he could spend more time with Philip Seymour Hoffman, bro-ing down in a huge way.
So, I feel really good when I think about what Philip Seymour Hoffman did with the Bangs character. I get that feeling that he met Lester on some distant horizon, and they are probably together now, bro-ing out, and I love that.
