"I'm a writer who just happens to draw"

BIOGRAPHY

Matt Groening has always been a doodler.

His father, a cartoonist as well, encouraged his son’s primitive drawings. Groening was born in Portland, Oregon on Feb. 15, 1954. It is said that Groening (pronounced like "braining") enjoyed drawing from an early age, but felt a strong loathing for coloring books, mainly because he was not able to stay inside the lines.

Groening was a good student and a school leader at his Oregon high school. He excelled at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Matt took full advantage of the school’s policy of no grades and no required courses. There he met fellow cartoonist Lynda Barry, who inspired Matt to keep plugging away at doing cartoons.

He graduated in 1977 and drove to Los Angeles to become a writer. He suffered a series of driving mishaps en route: Groening worked in a sewage treatment plant and as a chauffeur to an aging movie director; he then served as ghostwriter on the aging movie director's memoirs.

But the unfortunate experiences turned out to be a blessing. In the mid-1980' s, Matt Groening moved to Los Angeles and started drawing a comic strip named "Life in Hell",  which featured two rabbits (selected because Groening says rabbits are easy to draw) named Binky and Sheba, and two fez-wearing entrepreneurs, Akbar and Jeff, who are "brothers or lovers or both."  It eventually became published in the newspaper where he worked.  This first cartoon series, which still runs in more than 250 alternative newspapers around the country.

In 1985, film and television producer James L. Brooks, asked Matt Groening to assist with an animated project for his comedy series, "The Tracey Ullman Show." Fifteen minutes before their first meeting, Matt was told to come up with something new and original. As the legend goes -which Matt Groening himself confirmed years later in an Oprah Winfrey show-, while waiting in Brook’s foyer he hastily sketched a quirky-looking family consisting of one father, one mother, two girls and one boy -- and named, but didn't base, each after his own family members: Matt's father (a former cartoonist) and son are named Homer, his other son is named Abraham, his mother is Marge, and he has two sisters, Lisa and Maggie. Bart, however, is the only exception: it is an anagram of "brat."

In the meeting, the executives liked what they saw, but they wanted to know a little more about the sketched family.

Groening recalls, "They asked me, ‘What does the father do?’ and I answered, ‘He works at a nuclear plant.’ They laughed and then I knew we were in."

Groening is famous for his vow not to forget what it was like to be a kid.  Strong from the huge and lasting of The Simpsons ("the biggest surprise is we don't stink yet!"), he launched another animated series, Futurama: "I love Star Trek and Star Wars and all the variations on them. But, I wanted to do a show in which the problems of the universe are not solved by militarism guided by New Age spirituality.  It's not a knock on the optimism of those shows. I just have a slightly more subversive take. I thought it would be really neat to take some of the conventions of science-fiction and have fun with them in a Simpsons way."

THE ORIGINS OF THE SIMPSONS

In 1986, James L. Brooks, looking for a filler in the television show "The Tracy Ullman show", turned towards a framed "Life in Hell" strip on his wall and contacted Groening.  While waiting in the foyer to James L. Brooks' office, Matt Groening created in less than 15 minutes the concept and early drawings for animated shorts called "The Simpsons".

A group of impish friends and the "perfect" television families of the 1960s inspired Matt Groening to create The Simpsons.  The celebrated cartoonist, who began his working life as a journalist freelancing for rock 'n' roll magazines, said he used to only doodle on the side.

"In school, I'd draw when I was supposed to be paying attention to my life. And I spent way to much time watching television. I had to become a cartoonist.  He (Bart) is a combination of me and all my boyhood friends ... at our worst, all together. We really were that bad. I wasn't bad myself. I was pretty good. But if you put me at my worst with my friends at their worst, I guess you'd come up with Bart.  And the Simpson family, is a combination of my family, and the families I grew up with, watching on TV."

It was a time when television families were all cookies and milk, no fights, no divorces. "The families on TV were how I wished families would act.  But in life, no one's ever measured up. I had this theory that if you made a family people would feel superior to, they would feel better. Married With Children seems far worse that The Simpsons though. They really seem to hate each other. When I watch, it's mainly in awe that they can get away with it."

But there were other inspirations for the cartoonist. "When I was a kid, there were no cartoons on at night. I thought if I had a chance of getting an animated TV show on at night, I knew kids would watch, especially if it was even mildly funny."

The Simpsons began as a series of interstitals for The Tracey Ullman Show on April 19, 1987, and premiered as a series on December 17, 1989 in the 8PM time slot -Fox, a fledgling outfit with nothing to lose, put the first animated prime time series in 20 years against The Cosby Show, then the No. 1 program in America.  The amazing, lasting success we all know is well deserved -while the Tracey Ullman shorts only took a couple of weeks to produce, each episode now takes in average 6 months to complete.

Matt Groening revealed in a March 2003 interview that he was working on the much-rumoured Simpsons feature film. "We're talking about doing it. We just want to make sure, if we do, it doesn't follow in the dismal footsteps of other currently-running TV shows turned into movies. I can only think of one that worked and that was South Park. You want to honour the fans of the show, but you want to give them a little more. With the TV show, every week it's like a little movie. There are certainly enough incidents to fill a regular movie comedy. Whether people could stand it for an hour and a half, I don't know."
 

Some signposts along The Simpsons' invasion of popular culture, compiled by the L.A. Times in February 2003:

1988: Cartoonist Matt Groening's characters are unveiled in a series of vignettes on Fox's The Tracey Ullman Show.

1989: The Simpsons debuts as its own series, climbing into the top 15 in weekly ratings in its first year.

1990: Newspapers begin convening therapists to ask them whether Homer and Marge are good parents. Fox signs licensing agreement with Mattel.

1992: Fox moves the show from Sundays to Thursdays to go head-to-head with NBC's The Cosby Show and soon beats it in the ratings. Making fun of Vice President Dan Quayle's spelling gaffe, Bart scrawls on the blackboard during the show's opening credits: "Potato, not potatoe." Two month later, the first President Bush, kicking off his reelection campaign, proclaims American families should be "a lot more like 'The Waltons' and a lot less like 'The Simpsons.' "

1994: Residents in a rural South Carolina school district, upset by the show, protest naming a new school "Springfield," even though the suggestion came from a child who innocently wrote "the school is being built on a field and spring is a happy season." The school board holds firm in Springfield's favor.

1997: With its 167th episode, the show passes The Flintstones to become the longest-running prime-time animated show.

1998: The week of the show's 200th episode, a reporter walks into the national Academic Decathalon and asks the assembled 400 competitors if they watch "The Simpsons." Nearly everybody raises their hands.

1999: In its end-of-the-century issue, Time magazine proclaims The Simpsons the best show in the history of television.

2001: Homer's "D'oh" is added to the Oxford English Dictionary ("expressing frustration at the realizations that things have turned out badly...").

2002: The show is named Britain's favorite TV show.

2003: Fox announces a deal to renew the cartoon for two more seasons, taking it through May 2005—its 16th season, when it would become the longest-running comedy series, moving past The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, which ran 15 years and filmed 435 episodes. (Still in the lead for all scripted shows: Gunsmoke, which ran for 21 years, 1955-75, filming 635 episodes.)
 
 
 

2000 INTERVIEW

Q: After all this time, why does The Simpsons still work?

It really delivers the goods. It's a funny show. The characters are surprisingly likable, given how ugly they are. We've got this huge cast of characters that we can move around. And over the last few seasons, we've explored some of the secondary characters' personal lives a bit more.
 

Q: The series has become such a TV staple it's easy to forget how groundbreaking it was in the early days.

When The Simpsons came around, there really was nothing else like it on TV. It's hard to imagine, but when Fox first took the plunge with it, it was considered controversial to put animation on prime time.
 

Q: It's also different because it never aims for the lowest common denominator.

Everybody doesn't have to get every joke. People really appreciate not being condescended to. The history of TV has traditionally been not to do anything that would scandalize grandma or upset junior. Our solution on The Simpsons is to do jokes that people who have an education and some frame of reference can get. And the ones who don't, it doesn't matter, because we have Homer banging his head and saying, "D'oh!"

I love the idea that we put in jokes the kids don't get. And that later, when they grow up and read a few books and go to college and watch the show again, they can get it on a completely different level.
 

Q: You've also managed to create a series that makes the VCR an almost mandatory viewing aid.

Most TV shows don't reward you for paying attention. But on The Simpsons, if you really do that, there's stuff hidden in the backgrounds. We have what we call freeze-frame gags, which you can't get unless you videotape the show, go back and freeze frame it.
 

Q: Do you still keep close tabs on every episode?

Yes. Since I was there in the very beginning, I know the history of the characters. So, I make comments about the tone and sometimes remind the writers that we've done that before. And we change things up till the last minute. It's amazing how many times we've changed a joke even though it was funny the first 50 times we heard it. The 51st time, somebody says, "Oh, we can do that better..."

A lot of our writers, like Conan O'Brien, moved on to other things. In fact, some of them have gone on to do shows on other networks, and they've tried things they've done on The Simpsons, and the people at the other networks say, "No, you can't do that." And they say, "We did it on The Simpsons." And they're told, "We would never have The Simpsons on our network."

We've got a bunch of new writers now who tell me they grew up watching The Simpsons. It's bizarre, and they're writing some very funny stuff.
 

Q: How much longer can it go on?

It has surprised me that it's gone on this long. I love the show and the coming season is as good as any we've ever done--or better. The writers led by Mike Scully are fantastic. And they're creating original stories that not only don't repeat what we've already done, they also don't repeat anything I've seen on television. I want it to go on, but I want us to go out on top.
 

Q: Now that you've got money, fame and success, how have things changed for you?

The stacks of comic books, CDs and toasters are a lot deeper.
 

Q: Anything else?

My life changed when I was able to not only get seated in nice restaurants, I was given free appetizers. That was like, "Oh, my God, I've arrived."