Everyone laughs

Like Woody Allen but darker and weirder and usually funnier, Albert Brooks makes a living acting out his neuroses on the screen. He admits the process is therapeutic, especially in his new film, the Freudian grab bag of gags with the loaded title of Mother.

"I find that before you make them you have to work through the problems," he says. "So that is the therapeutic part. I had to reach a point with my mother years ago where I got it, I figured out why she is who she is and why our relationship was the way it was. Then I could make a movie about it."

Still, he believes the film is more universal than personal. "It's autobiographical in that my mother represented a great many women who grew up at a certain time. She sort of gave up a career to raise children. She freezes everything that can be frozen. If you open up her refrigerator, you won't recognize any real brand of food. It looks like real food -- the cookies are black with creme in the middle, but they're called something like `Sorreos.' Not the real name. And she certainly can't operate anything that comes with a telephone. I think all the mothers I've ever met are like that.

"Years ago whenever she'd fly -- I'm a big stereo buff -- she thought she was doing me a favor by stealing the headphones. But they're the kind with the holes in it. I said, unless you take the whole seat it doesn't fit. She just doesn't get it."

Has he ever toyed with the idea of moving back in with her?

" I guess people are really moving back in with their parents. I saw Time magazine calling it a trend, but more for financial reasons. For psychological reasons it's a funny idea to really do it. I don't want to move back in with my mother, but I could. The characters carry out that fantasy for real."

Comedy and filmmaking, Brooks believes, embody that process, a way of casting one's desires before an indifferent world. "Who doesn't struggle with the world? Chaplin fought the world too. It's sort of what comedy is. Trying literally to pursue a dream instead of just dreaming it. You buy the motor home. You hit the bus and die."

The world Brooks struggles most against is the Hollywood industry. Although critically acclaimed, his films bewilder the studios that market them.

"I would like more people to see my films. Who wouldn't? But I can't make that happen. Greater people than myself have attempted it; I don't think van Gogh was selling well. I wish I were mainstream and Tommy Boy were the oddity. What a wonderful world it would be to live in if my sensibility were mainstream.

"The lowest point was with Modern Romance. In order to finish, I had to show it to preview audiences. They didn't like it. The studio called in. They said, `Read these cards.' I said I didn't want to. So they read them to me. `He's got a good-looking girl, a Porsche, what's his problem?' I said, `I don't know what his problem is.' They said, have a psychiatrist scene -- explain his problem or you won't have a second week.

"I was so depressed I slept for two weeks. I didn't want to make movies again. Then Stanley Kubrick called me out of the blue. He said, `This film could have made $50 million if they wanted it to. These decisions have nothing to do with you. They are decided by the studio. Do not take it seriously. It's happened to me. A Clockwork Orange -- they hated it.' The call helped me a lot."

Mother, however, is a film Brooks thinks everyone can love. "This movie plays pretty well everywhere. There's no prerequisite. You don't have to have a college education. You have to have a mother. I've seen it: that ice cream is in everyone's freezer in America. That colorless ice cream -- I've seen Japanese people laugh at that."

-- Peter Keough