Rob Lowe Recounts Bombing at the 1989 Oscars

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Rob Lowe

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Rob Lowe is an actor, producer, and director. His new podcast "Literally! with Rob Lowe" is available on Spotify.

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Dude, I've bombed a lot. I just can't believe that. I had George Lopez on my podcast two days ago and he was talking about bombing, but you're a fucking Fred Rogan, you're a Joe Rogan, he's fucking George Lopez, what the fuck? How do you guys don't bomb? You have to come up with new material, and if you're going to come up with new material, some of them are going to be duds. That's just how it is. And also you have to take chances if you want to expand. The comedy is, there's a bunch of things going on, right? There's you relating to the audience, there's them liking you, there's these concepts you're trying to flesh out, especially in a workout room like the comedy store, you have to take chances. There's no way around it, and sometimes those chances fall flat on their face. The good thing is through those painful failures, those are like the biggest springboards to improvement and growth. Every time I've ever had a bad set, my next set has been amazing, because you just feel the sting and you prepare better. And also I think my past bombings have prepared me to not bomb again, because of the fact that I know what it feels like to suck. I always explain it that it's like, if someone says, what's bombing? It's like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother. Except there's probably someone out there that likes sucking a thousand dicks in front of their mother. No one likes bombing. You know, there's probably some guy who's just really into humiliation, but I don't think there's no one out there that's into bombing. Oh man, I just... Yeah. Well because it's like... Oh well listen, listen, what am I... I will bet you that no one has bombed harder than me. Oh that's not possible. I will... I need to come to the comedy store and open mic now. Bro. How is it possible that no one's bombed? By the way, your trustee, Savant, next to us... Young Jamie? Will pull up... Did you just stand up? He can pull up me bombing in front of a billion people. What did you do? The Academy Awards. Ooh, you hosted it? Well here's the thing. So... You talk about bombing. My dick's bigger than your dick about bombing. I'm 24? 24 years old. I'm doing my movies. The Academy Awards ask me to do a big opening number for them. I'm like holy fucking shit. Can we play it? Yeah, yeah. Will you get pulled off of YouTube? Yeah. God damn it. He's a motherfucker. I'll play it for us. So before you play it, I need to get a little context. A little context. Oh stop! Stop or I'll bomb again. I'll bomb right now. Again. They say to me, they go, we want you to do... And I'm like, what year is this? High honor, 86. Okay. High honor. High honor. Fucking Cadmorn. Yeah, sure. And I should have probably thought it through because the idea didn't sound great to me, but it's the Academy Awards. They know better than I do. It's their show. And the idea is it's going to be an homaged old time Hollywood. And one of the earliest stars in Hollywood was Snow White, the animated figure. So we're going to have a girl obviously playing Snow White and we're going to do a duet because it's a big opening musical number. The Oscars always used to open with musical numbers before there were monologues. Really? Yeah. Oh yeah. Yes. This ended it. It's ended it. So I'm like, okay. Snow White, great. And anyway, Marvin Hamlisch is going to write it. Marvin Hamlisch. I'm like, I know Marvin Hamlisch as he wrote the Sting. Well, Scott Joplin wrote the Sting, but Marvin Hamlisch won the Academy Award for that. He's double Oscar. He's a genius. And I'm not going to tell Marvin Hamlisch that I think that the lyrics are cheesy. I'm not going to do that. So when they get Ike and Tina Turner's Proud Mary and change the lyrics to, did a lot of work for Walt Disney. Ooh. Oh yeah. Oh no. It's like I'm saying, it's a bomb. Okay. You and I are going to watch this and we're going to pause for the people at home. If you need to watch this, YouTube, Jamie, what is it? What is it? It's on the Hollywood reporters website. I don't know why it's there. What is the title of the actual video? Rob Lowe Bombs? What is the title? Disastrous Open, I don't know. Rob Lowe and Snow White's Disastrous Oscar opening February 20th, 2016. That's actually the title for the people. It literally says disastrous. Okay. Folks at home, Google this, watch it, and then we're going to pick this up after Rob and I watch this. Is that Lily Tomlin at the end? Now that's a truncated version. Yeah, they didn't give you much of it. But can I tell you something? I, that was the year that Barry Levinson. I could tell just from the first bar. It was not good. That was going to be bad. Yeah. When you were saying, did you take singing lessons? No, fine. I found the whole thing. What's that? You found the whole thing? It's 11 minutes long. No, it's a lot of minutes of sheer terror. That's on YouTube if you want to look at it. Oh, okay. Of 11 minutes that ruined Hollywood producer Alan Carr's career forever. Hold on. We'll be right back. He's like, wait, just hang on. I need to, I need to. I get it. I get it. Okay. So I look out in the middle. I look out in the middle of the audience and I see Barry Levinson. So he's at this on this Oscars. He's about to win literally 11 Academy Awards as an actor. There's no one you would want to impress more than Barry Levinson. It's the year of Rain Man. And I look out Joe in the middle of this and I see his face. I'm not kidding. And he's, this is what he literally was going. What the fuck? You see him actually make this. I see him mouth the words, what the fuck? And so, don't about bombing. And I'm like, but you know, we have to have our, our, our actors denial. Like we can't get through a career without a healthy dose of denial. So I'm like, you know what? Fuck Barry Levinson. What does he know anyway? Fuck that guy. And I go backstage and it's in the green room and it's early because it's early in the show. And there's an older lady in the corner with like flaming red hair and I'm kind of looking at her and she sees me and she goes, young man, I didn't know you were such a good singer. Come sit down. It was Lucille Ball. And I went over and we sat down and she held my hand and we watched the Oscars together. And you know what? It made it all, made it all almost worthwhile. Almost. Here's why that's not as bad as bombing doing stand up. How is that not as bad? It's not as bad because even though a billion people watched it, A, you didn't write it and B, you knew where you were going. You could just sing the stupid song and get it over with. It's terrible. It's bombing. It's bad. But when you're bombing doing stand up, you are the writer. You are the creator. You are the performer. You put it together. You edited it. You prepared it. You got it ready. And then you're just up there eating shit. And people are angry at you. They're angry. They're angry because they can talk. They were angry. Oh, I'm sure. They were angry. Here's the other thing they did. They had never occurred to the Academy to maybe that they needed to license the likeness of Snow White. What? Oh, yeah. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. And you know how Disney is about likenesses. Oh, they're so easy going. Yeah, they're so generous. So generous. So that, see, I would have thought I would have got, I think I would have gotten away with it a little bit in terms of history had there not been massive lawsuits the next day over the likeness thing, which made. Also then people thought about it again. When people went back and went, wait a minute, that fucking sucked way worse than I thought it did. What was the next thing you did after that? I think, let's say, would it have been, I feel like it might have been bad influence with James Spader and one of my favorite movies. That's a great movie. I love that movie. That's a good way to bounce back. Yeah, it was a good one. Let's look at the bright side. Yeah. No, listen. And it is a. Did you consider saying no? No. A people pleasing Midwesterner at twenty four does not say no to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. They don't. And every year, every year I am treated to the honor, the high honor of being on the list of most embarrassing Oscar moments every fucking year. And my thing is this, is I go, hey, wait, guys, you couldn't figure out how to announce the best picture two years ago. And I'm the problem still. Well, it wasn't your fault. I mean, no one would have saved that. No one, no one, not a fucking human being could have jumped up there and saying that and had it made any sense. Maybe Jim Carrey. Yes, maybe Jim Carrey. Maybe Jim Carrey could have done it. But he would have gone full Ace Ventura over the top and people would have been just laughing hysterically at how crazy he is. It's one of my great career low light slash highlights. It actually it actually kind of makes me laugh with with with the onset of perspective in history. That's the beautiful thing about failures. They eventually become funny. And they can. Yes. Back at them. It only took 30 years. It's great.