Comedy is an essential tool of humanity — it reaches places within us that can often be too scary to face on our own. And, especially when it is a shared experience, it can create a world where we feel safe, together.
I had the pleasure of speaking with producer, story editor, and originator Julie Seabaugh on the new documentary “Are We Good?” about comic and podcast pioneer Marc Maron. After covering Marc Maron many times in major news outlets, she was struck by his loss and honesty when his partner Lynn Shelton died unexpectedly in 2020. Seabaugh says the continuing Instagram videos voicing his grief was some of “the most touching stuff I’d ever seen publicly coming from a comedian,” and she knew the next stand-up material he created would be the most powerful he’d done to date and that someone ought to be documenting the next period in his life and career. She quickly realized that someone was her, and she sprung into action.
She produced the first “Are We Good?” shoot on May 7, 2021 at the Comedy Store, the night of Maron’s first time back on stage since the start of the Covid pandemic.’
Julie Seabaugh and Jeff Siegel
I’ll start by asking: ‘Why Marc?’
Yeah, always been a giant fan of his. We’ve kind of known each other 10, 15 years, just professionally. I’d previously written about him for either solo pieces or different group theme pieces for Village voice, then Vulture, Huffington Post, GQ, and most recently L.A. Times last fall, talking about how Trump shouldn’t be going on comedy podcasts. And he was also in my 2021 film, “Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11.” He’s kind of one of the heroes of that story. But yeah, he was always someone who really struck me as such a unique perspective and palate? within the world of stand-up. A very id kind of performer — he definitely channels exactly what’s going on in his mind, his heart, his soul, you know? In the moment on stage, which is kind of his way of writing, a lot of comedians will pore over notebooks and get everything worded, just right. And for him, it’s more about being in the moment with that audience connection. I just found that fascinating. And when the pandemic struck, I was immediately glued to the Instagram lives that he started doing, and him and his partner, Lynn Shelton, the filmmaker, at that time, they were kind of hunkering down, preparing for what was going to be ahead, and two months later, she just passes away, very unexpectedly, very suddenly. He didn’t even know what it was.
Turned out it was an undiagnosed form of leukemia. And he kept doing the Instagram lives, between those and his podcast episode where he broke the news and was remembering her. It was just some of the most brutal but beautiful and honest stuff I’d ever seen a comic putting out, you know? And as he’s going through this grieving process in front of the only people he could connect with at that time, which was online, because we couldn’t do this stuff in person, I was realizing, ‘Oh, the next material he puts out is just going to be the best stuff he’s ever done.’ I was like, somebody should document this and follow his path. And also this could be an opportunity for the career retrospective, to see how he got there in the first place of kind of a checkered past, personally and professionally, but it was pretty clear that Lynn had changed him for the better in a lot of ways.
And the question was mostly, is he going to continue carrying her with him and stay this new version of Maron that’s very different than the one we’ve known in the past? And I was thinking about all this and I realized, ‘Oh, I should document this!’ So I immediately started writing and developing everything. The title was, like, day one. I instantly thought it was going to be “Are We Good?” I went back through all the books, all his clips, and made the master timeline of his life; I started figuring out how different threads could be, the back and forth structure.
Director Steven Feinartz
I talked to a few other people and then took it to Director Steven Feinartz, who was known for doing specials, but he also directed “The Bitter Buddha” documentary which Maron had been in, and they had had sort of a prickly relationship because of that. But I kind of saw that as an advantage where I knew, again, sort of instinctively, that Maron would yell at him through the camera. And that would be fascinating to watch — it reveals a lot about him in that process. So that was late 2020 when we first started talking as a team about that. We had a couple Zoom calls with Maron, and he was completely noncommittal. He was actually saying he was going to quit comedy at that time, which I again, knew that’s not going to happen.
When venues started reopening in May of 2021, including the Comedy Store, his home club in LA, they did about a week of programming before he said on Instagram that he was jealous of seeing all these other people going on stage, and he was going up that night, that Friday. So I told Steven Feinartz to show up with a camera. And we basically said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna do this now.’ And he went with it. For better and worse. There isn’t necessarily footage from that first night because we were still figuring things out, but there’s a ton from the Comedy Store that’s very similar. You see him with the very curtails? of what his new material is going to become. And we just kind of followed that process from there.
After SXSW, I saw a writeup that called him an unwilling participant, which I liked a lot. I thought that was pretty accurate. We were following him from LA, Denver, Austin, New York a couple of different times, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Montreal — just really capturing him going through this process of turning tragedy into comedy, which you can see a thread of in all of my work. I’m really attracted to the dark side of comedy. I think it’s the most vital art form there is and this is just another example of that, and hopefully it’ll resonate the same way with other people.
I love that. And you touched on it a little bit, but you said he was noncommittal at the beginning — did you tell him we’re showing up with this camera?
No. [laughs]
What do you think it was that got him to say, OK, let’s do it?
He’s known both myself and Feinartz in different ways over the years. I hope my reputation helped in that case. I’m not sure anyone else would have been trusted in that sense. But it wasn’t supposed to be, you know, controversial at all. It was really following that grief process the whole time and anything else was a bit extraneous to that. So I think without that press? there, this could have been something very different.
How did you go about picking the team that you wanted to embark on this with?
I mostly just approached Feinartz. I had worked with an executive producer, Dan Baglio, on “Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11.” And he was working at Anchor Entertainment at the time. So that was kind of my first idea to take it there. I’m more traditionally a journalist than filmmaker. This is now my second of three films that’ll be out. But others are on the way. Steven Feinartz has a deep team of people he’s worked with for years. They’re all super happy, [ready to] jump on board, like our Consulting Producer, Danielle Lee — she’s fantastic. One of the other producers, Jeff Siegel, is who I’m working on the Hedberg documentary with. So these are the people who get it. Who understand Maron. Nobody was just coming to this cold because it is such an important story and, again, could be handled wrong — with the wrong team — but I think we fully pulled it together, especially with the editors. They were tremendous, for sure.
What I found fascinating is how he was so honest and raw about Lynn and his time with her and how she changed him and how he’s a changed person. Do you see that in him? When he’s not on stage?
I even ran into him Tuesday night at the Comedy Store, this week. He’s much more serene now, much more calm. I think he’s reached a level of enlightenment that he maybe didn’t even have before the film. He didn’t see a cut of it until about a week before the SXSW version was locked. And he said he learned a lot in an email that he sent me after he watched it. He’s never really thought he was that successful or influential. And that’s certainly part of the film, kind of showing how he is. So I think he’s now kind of finally accepting that, especially with the question of if he’s going to be sort of carrying Lynn with him through the rest of his life. It’s left slightly open-ended in the film, but there are little context clues like his new relationship with his father [and in] dealing with his dad’s dementia. And that’s a person who’s kind of ostensibly been like the villain and his reason he went into comedy — the person he tries for approval of more than ever. Now the tables are turned. He’s definitely a different Maron than the one we previously knew.
Talk to me about the graphics and the illustrations, specifically when you started to talk about his podcast. How did that evolve?
For sure. And he even says in the film, like, ‘Ugh, this is going to be terrible.’ I mean, you can see a lot of animation done poorly in a lot of other films. So it was a matter of making it unique and figuring out a way to kind of capture that energy of different “WTF” episodes. And kind of his mindset and the moment of all of them. I laugh every single time when Gallagher walks out of the garage. So, yeah, definitely shout out with the animation. It’s definitely become kind of a talking point because it is that sort of meta experience of Maron’s perspective on all of it as intertwined. The film’s narrative itself is a little bit meta.
Something I wrote down the first time I watched it and I just kept underlining it last night was, ‘How do you really love someone when you can’t love yourself?’
That is like my favorite line in the world. That’s probably something we’re all struggling with. If you also kind of look back at his upbringing, his drug use could have affected all of that for sure. I think it’s an ongoing struggle of trying to be the best person you can be for yourself, showing up for yourself — which is something he’s doing newly for the first time; I’ve been kind of struggling with this question myself. In a lot of ways, he’s sort of a figurehead for this grief. I think he’s also representative for a lot of people of: How do I be human? It’s so hard. It is so hard. I’m not sure there’s an actual answer to that question. But I love the fact that we pose it.
It’s powerful. That line and then at the end, during the credits where Caroline Ray says, ‘He was repulsive, he was repugnant, and we couldn’t stop making out in the car.’ Those are my two very favorite lines. On different ends of the gamut, this one’s impossibly sad and this one cracked?.
I want to talk about comedy and dark comedy especially. This was right after COVID and things were still going on with it obviously, which was unprecedented. And now we’re in this unprecedented political climate. What do you do with all of that as a journalist, as a comedian, and as a filmmaker?
I think about live stand up, particularly. There’s something about being in that room, in the moment where you have all these different people, who knows what their backgrounds are, diversities, that are laughing at the same thing as one group, and it’s never going to be recreated again. I’ll sit in the back and just kind of watch this and see what people are laughing at. And for me, that really gives me a little bit more optimism that people can get along more than anything else.
Comedy itself has probably saved my life on several occasions. I discovered it through Dave Attell and realized the treasure trove that’s there when you learn other people’s perspectives, other things that they’ve been through, and how they’re trying to turn that into something good that can be overcome. I think that’s hugely inspirational, and reads? a lot of empathy for other people. So I think there should be more comedy live again?, because it’s very different than seeing comedy not live or when it’s a recorded special. Just generally, there is the science that it is healthy for you on a neurological level; but socially as well, I think it’s a massive tool for seeing humans in a better light.
Absolutely. I love that you said that, too, because that’s something that theaters are still struggling with now that so many people stream. Getting people to come out to watch things together, to have that experience.
Absolutely right. It’s the same thing with comedy, with streaming and watching this stuff by ourselves. That particularly happened during the pandemic when there was nothing else to do. It was a gateway for a lot of new comedy fans that were are? seeing live comedy and it has never been bigger than it is now. And it is a direct result of the pandemic. So, yeah, go see live comedy. You’re so invested in the moment, and it’s something that’s never going to be recreated in the same way. It’s impossible to replicate the energy in any room on any given night. You never know what you’re going to get.
You had two decades of straight journalism and then you moved into documentary filmmaking: Do you see yourself sticking with this route?
Yeah, well, you’re well aware journalism is in an interesting place. Those two decades were a lot of struggle and poverty and all that good stuff, but it was always telling those stories that kind of kept me going through. So I guess because of the work I’ve done, these new opportunities have come up. There’s going to be a book next year with Byron Bowers — I’m doing a memoir of his early life and growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, with Grand Central Publishing. I have another book with them that I can’t quite talk about yet. And then there is the Mitch Hedberg documentary next year. I’m so excited and already gearing up for some more projects. It’s great because you can really dive in and think about them as opposed to just: I’m on deadline. I have to set up my nut graf. But yeah — it’s all comedy [for me]. Capturing the dark side of it and how it turns into the light side of it.
You mentioned that Dave Atell is how you really discovered comedy — were you into any growing up?
I grew up on a farm outside of Cape Girardeau in Gordonville. No cable TV. I knew Letterman was a thing, but I was never awake late enough to understand comedy. We watched “The Cosby Show” in my household, but I had no idea he was a stand up comedian. I was reading books. They might say a Gifted Reader — you know, every winner of all the Pizza Hut programs. I was way ahead of my age range. And so that translated into [my] love for writing initially. So writing came first, and then comedy was what I was supposed to write about.
What do you hope will happen with audiences at Tribeca? Congratulations on that, by the way! What do you want people to walk away with from this?
I will interject a side note about Tribeca. When I first moved to New York from the University of Missouri, I was looking for work on Craigslist and found that they needed people to make popcorn at the Tribeca Film Festival. I had worked at the theater in Columbia, so I knew how to make popcorn. And I made popcorn at Tribeca from about 2003 to 2006. And now I’m making a triumphant return. So that’s a little something I’m looking forward to. I’ll definitely find some popcorn and critique it.
But yeah, we had a great reception with SXSW, so I hope that at Tribeca it hits on all levels. Again, it’s funny, it’s deeply sad. People really like the cats in it. Yeah. I’m going to be wearing a cat shirt. That’s how you’ll know it’s me. And just really kind of understanding that we all go through grief. It’s unavoidable, it’s inevitable. Here’s the story of how one guy has done it. And through comedy, we can tackle all of it and hopefully feel a little bit better, especially now, this insane world we’re forced into.
Any advice for female filmmakers?
Advice. That’s a good one. Anytime anyone asks me for advice, I always say, if there’s anything else you can do besides art, you should do that. Because it’s hard. There’s definitely a lot of automatic bias against women. I even told Chris Rock this: One night before his Oscars’ hosting, he was working out his material at the Comedy Store and talking about how his daughter wants to be a journalist. And I said, “Chris Rock, don’t let your daughter do that.” So you have to have the absolute — not only love and drive for it, but somewhere deep inside of you — it has to be the only thing that you can do. I believe that for sure. There’s nothing else I can do. I have no [other] skills. And I, more and more all the time, think it’s really just about following your gut instincts and trying to appeal to your artistic instincts rather than any business rules that are foisted upon you. Putting the business side first is never going to result in great art. Ever. And it’s very hard to find that balance, but if you can kind of start trusting yourself more, I find that other people respond to that and the opportunities open up more and more.
