(continued)

IN THE FLESH Kaufman, seen here in a live interview, helped blacklisted fellow screenwriter Dalton Trumbo by taking credit for one of his scripts in 1950

Your book indicts our celebrity-obsessed culture. Is that something you've always felt, or do you find it's gotten worse in recent years?
As far as I know, it's always been like this. I was around a lot of stars that I'd always been slightly dubious about. Some of them became very close, good friends.

Such as?
Monty Clift, a lot of them. They were nice people.

You have a youthful sensibility in the book, and use a lot of slang, like "asswipe." How have you kept current with the lingo of younger generations?
This was thought to be a deviation from the way I speak and act. I've always been like that. I didn't realize I was talking "youth-speak" or anything like that in the voice of the book. This is the way I am. What seems to surprise people is that I am this way and I'm 90 years old. And I can't help that, either.

Let's talk about legendarily myopic cartoon character Mr. Magoo, whom you cocreated.
I did it with a guy named John Hubley, a wonderful animation director. Magoo was based on my uncle, who didn't wear glasses, but he had this subjectivity in which he adamantly refused to see any interpretation of anything except his own. It came about by my saying to John, "Why don't we do something about"—I described the character. [Ed.: Hubley has claimed Magoo is based on his uncle.] At that time, all animated cartoons were seen in a feature picture and ran about six minutes. And they were full of what used to be called "hurt time," in which you had some protagonist bumped all over the screen by his antagonist, like Bugs Bunny and whoever the hell was beating the hell out of him. And at the end he would triumph. It was just a series of one guy ganging up one another and hurting him. So I said to John one day, "We've got six minutes—we can do a story, cartoon or not." And along came Magoo. ... Where are you calling from?

I CAN'T SEE SO GOOD Kaufman based the myopic, wealthy, refuses-to-admit-error Mr. Magoo on his uncle

New York.
My son [Frederick Kaufman] is in New York. He's a hell of a good writer, you ought to talk to him. He has a book coming out in February. It's about eating habits. It's called A Short History of the American Stomach.

Any chance of a father-son book tour?
Somebody at McSweeney's was talking about getting us together, but I'm in no condition to go on a national tour.

Speaking of which, why did you send the book to McSweeney's?
I didn't know anything about them. My agent had died about a month earlier. A friend of mine who's an editor read the book and gave it to a friend of hers, who gave it to McSweeney's. My son, who's a hell of a good writer, told me how hot and how good McSweeney's was. I didn't know a goddamn thing about them. They're a very competent outfit, especially in my interactions with my editor there, Eli Horowitz.

Do you ever read the McSweeney's website?
I don't know anything about websites. I bought a computer about a year ago. I still don't know how to use it, it scares the hell out of me.

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