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Louis C.K. Reveals His "Terrible" Stoned Ideas For <em>Louie</em>

Jen Carlson

Published Apr 17, 2015

Modified Apr 17, 2015

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Jen Carlson

Published Apr 17, 2015

Modified Apr 17, 2015

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Recently, I was commenting to a friend that I was excited about the return of Louie, and that hopefully this season wouldn't be all depressing and all in black & white. I was told: "Last season wasn't in black & white."

My friend was correct, it was in full color. My mind must have just filtered it through an extra level of melancholy, making everything come out in black & white by the time it hit my brain. That is probably a testament to just how talented Louis C.K. is. Even though I wasn't a huge fan of season 4 (many were!), he really managed to transport me to that side of the sadness spectrum.

Season 5 already feels lighter, but Louis recently discussed how it could have gone in a... different direction. He told Opie and Jim Norton about his "really bad" ideas that he wrote down while stoned:

I wanted to take a year off again, I wanted to not start shooting until the fall, and [FX] agreed. So then a couple months went by—this is after I finished last season, I was really tired. A couple months went by, and one night, I got high, I smoked pot. And I got excited about a whole idea for the next season. I was like, I think I figured out next season. I've got an amazing idea for next season. I started writing it. I was like, This is gonna be so great, I wanna do this now.

I wrote to the President of FX, because the next morning he was going to announce that we were taking a year off. So I said, Hold the announcement, can I come back after all? In the spring? And he said, Shit, okay, I got to talk to everybody. So he went and talked to everybody, and then he wrote me back and said, You have to say what you're doing now, because we have to announce this. And he said, We already spent the money for a full season, but you can do a partial season, if you want to come back soon. And I was like, Totally!

So he announced that the next morning, and then I woke up, and I looked at all the shit I wrote when I was high, and I was like, This is terrible. This is terrible stuff! I didn't use a single idea. I had like 10 pages written. Ten stoned pages.

The whole plot was that Doug Stanhope—who was on the show a few years ago as Eddie, this suicidal comic—I run into him in New York, and he's wearing a suit and tie and he's just cleaned up his act and he's making money. He's like an investment banker or something like that. We end up opening a comedy club together. I had this idea, I open a comedy club. And I become a club owner, and I thought, That's such a cool idea. And I wrote all these ideas about young comics coming and stuff like that. It just stunk, it was really bad.

I made a huge decision that had impacts on my and a lot of other people's lives—because a lot of people work for me—and I was stoned at the time.

I do very little [pot], it's like every couple weeks. I'm very paranoid about drug use. If I get high like twice in a week, I'm like, I have a problem, and I stop. Because I don't think it's good for comics—getting high, it takes your will away and it makes you too comfortable. So I don't do it a lot, and I got kids, I can't be fucking around with that shit. But once every couple weeks, smoke a little marijuana. I bought a big thing of marijuana like 10 years ago, so I smoke very old marijuana. It's really old and dusty.

[via Vulture]

Tagged

louie

louis c.k.

season 5

Jen Carlson

Jen Carlson is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.

Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations

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