Most adults would rather not revisit the humiliations of high school. Larry Doyle revels in them.
Inside the jacket of his first novel, “I Love You, Beth Cooper,” you won’t find a stylish, dignified photo of Doyle, 48, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and a former writer for “The Simpsons.” Instead, there’s a 1976 photo of the shaggy-haired, 17-year-old Doyle from the Buffalo Grove High School yearbook.
And on his Web site, Doyle has posted a clip of his graduation speech, delivered in the sweltering gymnasium at the suburban Chicago school, which provides the setting for the opening scene of “I Love You, Beth Cooper.”
Comfortable as he is in his own skin, Doyle can only take so much humiliation. He didn’t listen to the entire speech – just enough to digitize an old recording.
“It apparently is asking people to never grow up,” Doyle said. “I’ve accomplished that, pretty much. I found out that’s pretty much what being a guy is about – is never, never, never maturing.”
Especially if you’re a comedy writer.
“It’s helpful,” Doyle said. “It gives you access to those parts of your brain where the ridiculous things are.”
In “Beth Cooper,” Doyle imagines a braver, if far nerdier, version of himself: Denis Cooverman, social misfit and valedictorian of the class of 2007, who veers from his carefully scripted graduation speech to utter the stunning sentence that provides the book’s title. Beth Cooper is the head cheerleader at Buffalo Grove, and she’s hardly ever spoken to Denis.
The geek’s declaration of love kicks off a wild graduation night. Denis spends more time with the object of his crush than he ever thought possible – when he’s not running from her very large, very angry boyfriend.
The book celebrates and satirizes classics of teen cinema – each chapter begins with an epigraph, spoken by immortal characters like Lloyd Dobler of “Say Anything” and Cher Horowitz of “Clueless” – and Doyle enriches his seemingly cliched characters with surprising depth.
Plus, as he proved even in his graduation speech, Doyle knows how to get a laugh. And he’s versatile enough to tailor his comic sensibility to his audience – the erudite readers of The New Yorker, the suburban teens who idolized “Beavis and Butt-head,” the passionate and polyglot fans of “The Simpsons.”
Then again, his stint on the venerable animated series, from 1998 to 2001, caused some carping. Many fans and critics singled out those years, under executive producer Mike Scully, as the period when the show began its irretrievable decline.
Doyle is noncommittal.
“I don’t know if it’s gone off the tracks or when it went off the tracks,” he said, although he acknowledges that characters have evolved over the years, and not always for the better. Homer used to be a little dim; now he’s scary stupid. Lisa used to be smart; now she’s a genius.
Doyle left “The Simpsons” after selling his first screenplay. Thus began his misadventures in Hollywood.
The author is candid about the two colossal flops – “Duplex” and “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” both released in 2003 – that carry the credit “Written by Larry Doyle.”
“Duplex,” starring Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore as the new owners of a charming Brooklyn apartment with a nutty old lady living upstairs, began as a personal project for Doyle about an apartment he bought with his wife. He developed the script with Stiller, Barrymore and director Greg Mottola.
“And then Greg had to leave, because of things that were never fully explained to me,” Doyle said. “And he was replaced by Danny DeVito, who did not want me around. I had one conversation with him, a really nice conversation in his very nice house, and I’ve never talked to him again. He took the script, threw out most of it, changed it in ways that nobody seemed to want him to change it, and shot that.”
The movie received mixed reviews and grossed less than $10 million domestically. “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” a big-budget animation-live action hybrid, was an even bigger disaster. That one, Doyle said, was doomed because it was fast-tracked into production before it was ready.
Given that Doyle left Los Angeles and wrote a novel, you might think he’s given up on Hollywood. (He moved almost two years ago with his wife, Becky Lichtenstein, and their three young children to the stately north Baltimore home where Lichtenstein grew up.) But he’s working on a new screenplay, again holding out hope that it might emerge as a solid, funny movie.
And while he’d always wanted to write a novel, “I Love You, Beth Cooper” had its genesis as a movie treatment that wasn’t going anywhere. A literary agent read it and suggested that Doyle turn it into a book.
He signed a contract with Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, that forced him to write the book fast – a good thing, Doyle said.
“Unlike most first novels, it does not contain everything I know about everything,” he said. “Most first novelists have that tendency of wanting every opinion they’ve ever had or any observation they’ve ever made about the human condition, just sort of jammed in there – and then whatever they studied in grad school.”
Plus, he wasn’t burdened by the need to create a literary masterwork.
“The only reason why I didn’t write a novel when I was 20, is because I determined that it had to be as good as Thomas Pynchon’s ‘V.,’” said Doyle, “and then, later, it had to be as good as (Don DeLillo’s) ‘White Noise,’ and that will prevent you from writing much of anything.”
Despite his more modest expectations, Doyle has gotten plenty of ecstatic reviews – although not from Publisher’s Weekly, which complained that the “overly rapid pacing, unlikely turns of events and quirky, funny dialogue reveal Doyle’s TV roots.”
Doyle isn’t sure why funny dialogue is a bad thing in a comic novel. “Their criticisms of it were all of the things that I intentionally did,” he said.
The book has fared respectably so far, although it hasn’t cracked any best-seller lists. It had an initial printing of 40,000, and HarperCollins has ordered two subsequent printings, although the publisher won’t say how big those were.
As for the film executives who rejected the “Beth Cooper” idea – well, now they’re interested. Fox Atomic has bought the rights to the novel. But will movie audiences embrace the ultra-nerdy Denis Cooverman?
“We’ve already had discussions with the movie people about whether he’s going to be likable or not,” Doyle said. “But for me, that’s mostly a casting decision. You just pick some adorable kid to play him, and it won’t really matter how geeky he is.”
More about Larry Doyle and the book at www.iloveyoubethcooper.com.
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