-Our next guest is
an Emmy and Academy Award-winning writer,
producer, and director behind movies like "Vice,"
"The Big Short," and "Anchorman."
His podcast, "Death at the Wing: How Drugs, Tragedy,
and the Reagan Revolution Defined a Decade of Basketball"
is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Please welcome back to the show Adam McKay.
How are you, Adam? -Mr. Meyers, how are you, sir?
-I'm doing very well.
It's always nice to speak to you.
We had the same job, different times.
We were head writers at "SNL."
But I wanted to ask you about a different title you had,
which you were the only person ever to have that title.
I think you know what I'm talking about.
Give us the backstory. -Yeah.
So, I was head writer at "SNL" for a couple years.
Had a wonderful time, very challenging job.
And I kind of thought, "Maybe it's time to move on,"
and, you know, in a very friendly way,
and my manager at the time,
a guy by the name of Jimmy Miller said, you know,
"If you're gonna quit, make an unreasonable demand."
And I said, "Well, I really want to direct films,
so I would love to have a budget to do short films.
And I really don't like going to all these production meetings,
so I don't want to go to the meetings,
and I want a pay raise, and I want to name my own credit.
And even Jimmy was, like, "That's a lot."
And Lorne was like, "Okay. You got it."
And so my credit for my last two years
was "Coordinator of Falconry."
[ Laughter ]
And if you look at it, they ran it towards
the end of the credits. -Sure.
-But a friend of mine got a frame grab of it
that I have framed, but as far as I know --
and we'd have to dig through the archives --
I believe I'm the only Coordinator of Falconry
the show has ever had.
So, any time there were loose falcons
that were gonna fly in the studio...
-Yeah. -...bring back prey to someone
with that leather glove on, they called me.
Now, unfortunately, that never happened in the two years.
I never got that call. -Right.
-But I was ready and trained, and I was ready to support "SNL"
in any way possible.
-So, this podcast about basketball,
specifically basketball in the '80s and how it sort of
intertwined the politics of that era with the excess of that era,
and how, for a lot of players in the league at the time,
it had very tragic outcomes.
-Yeah. It's a story that I've been tracking.
I've been an NBA fan or decades,
and through talking to my friends,
we were always doing the "what if" game.
We're like, "What if Len Bias had played?
What if Drazen Petrovic had played?"
And it was all these great talents
that all died very young.
Benji Wilson, Terry Furlow, Hank Gathers --
it's an incredibly long list.
And at a certain point, like, seven, eight years ago,
it was like, "Wait a minute.
Why did all these guys die in this period?
I can't find this in any other sport."
So the fun of, you know, a podcast is,
you can kind of dive into it with the question intact.
You know, if you sold this as a TV series,
you'd have to already answer the question.
But I was lucky enough, I got these incredible producers,
and we just dove in, and what ended up happening was,
it became this portrait of the '80s,
of the explosion of the NBA, media, the Reagan Revolution,
and all these kind of amazing stories of these players.
-One of the things that I think people who are hyper-aware of
what professional athletes get paid today
might be surprised to know is how many athletes of that era
in the '70s and '80s had second jobs.
-Yeah. It's weird. Like, you think of basketball
as this giant sport, but in the '60s and '70s,
it was like the seventh sport.
It was like, football, baseball, like, even to some degree,
bowling, boxing, hockey, college basketball.
So, Jerry West -- we interviewed the great Jerry West,
and he told me that he made $16,000 a year
after he was drafted, and he was like the number-two draft pick.
And I learned from Jackie MacMullan,
the great sportswriter, that Bob Cousy
was a driving instructor during the off season.
And for people who don't know, Cousy was, like,
a transformative point guard, you know, Hall of Famer.
And then, Tommy Heinsohn, who was a forward
for the Celtics' great teams,
he was a waiter during the off season,
but he would chain smoke.
So he would come over to the table with a Caesar salad,
and he would just reek of Pall Malls,
and so they had to boot Tommy Heinsohn.
And it kind of went on and on.
Bill Walton worked at the ASPCA.
He was neutering animals, and -- all right.
That's clearly made up, but the other ones are true.
[ Laughter ]
-Hey, one thing, you know, as we talk about, you know,
legends of days gone by.
So, I'm coming up in Chicago as an improviser
sort of in the era right after you.
And I would always hear tell -- it was of legendary status --
the shows that you and your --
you know, your fellow improvisers at the time
would do, not in theaters, but out on the streets of Chicago.
Do you have any memories of the street shows
you were doing as improvisers? -Yeah.
It was The Upright Citizens Brigade,
which was our mangy little group in Chicago,
and it was Horatio Sanz, it was Matt Besser,
it was Ian Roberts. Amy Poehler joined us.
We had Rich Fulcher, all these different people,
and there was one show we did that was called
"The Conference on the Future of Happiness."
And, essentially, we were all these self-help gurus
who had promised that, at the end of the show that,
you know, the fiction was, every audience member
had paid $5,000 to come to this conference,
and we had one sentence that, if you heard it,
you would get eternal happiness.
And at one point, my character stole the sentence, and run --
ran out into the streets through the real streets of Chicago,
and little did the audience know, my apartment was nearby,
and it was a first-floor apartment.
So they chased me to the apartment.
I busted into it like it wasn't my apartment
and proceeded to murder Horatio Sanz, who was watching,
like, you know, "Matlock" on his TV
and still had the sentence, and then came out the other end
of the walkway, and there was a car waiting for us
with bikini models on it, and it was playing
"Everything is Beautiful" blaring from the car.
And all of us -- Besser, Ian, Horatio --
got on the car and said,
"Do you want the sentence of happiness?"
And the whole crowd yelled, "Yes!"
And we opened up a box, and it was full of dough,
and then we whipped dough at the audience,
called them a bunch of suckers. And I'll never forget
the main critic from "The Chicago Reader,"
which you remember, Seth, that was, like,
one of the big places to get reviewed in.
-Yes. -I think Jack Helbig
was his name. -He was the guy.
-And I hit him dead center right on his chest
with a big hunk of dough.
And then we drove away with the bikini models,
leaving the audience, like, on some strange street
and just ending the show. -And how was Helbig's review?
-It was mixed. [ Laughter ]
-That's fair. That's fair.
Hey, thank you. It's always great to see you, Adam.
"Death at the Wing" is available on Apple Podcasts,
Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.