by Sam Wasson
The Next Generation set out to emulate the show playing out in real life and regain its authenticity. From the audience, they selected a jury and brought them onstage. “Ladies and gentlemen,” began their introduction, “we take you now to Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom. Please rise for the Honorable Judge . . .” Lights up. Sitting there, on the bench, in a choir robe snatched from wardrobe, was . . . Abbie Hoffman? At first the audience did not react. Abbie Hoffman and Harold Ramis had the same hair, so it was likely . . . probable . . . Out came the defendants, the seven members of the Next Generation, including Harold Ramis, to play the Chicago Seven. From there, Abbie Hoffman—it was him—presided over an improvised conspiracy trial, opening statements, cross-examinations, objections—the works. “Abbie,” Fisher recalled, “was so into it, acting like a real asshole to get back at Judge [Julius] Hoffman.” As insane as Abbie got (he brought a noose onstage and wasn’t afraid to use it) their improvisation, being a counterpoint to judicial despotism, was closer to justice than the stuff Hoffman and his guerilla ensemble were getting by daylight. The good feeling generated by the show amazed Ramis. The whole theater, 350 strong, converged by means of a shared intensity of focus as liberation swallowed anger, and for as long as Abbie Hoffman could—the Illinois Bureau of Investigation, expecting trouble, was trailing him—he vindicated the house in buffoonery. When someone out there heard the bad guys were on their way, the Next Generation would smuggle their guest offstage, down the stairs, and out the back door. The nights he got through the entire trial, to a verdict, Judge Hoffman pronounced the Next Generation guilty, every time.
That spark charged through their next show, Justice Is Done; or, Oh Cal Coolidge, which opened in March 1970, only weeks after the actual guilty verdict, to the reviews they had been hoping for. Much of their material was trial-related, but their attitude wasn’t. “They are not as astringent as of yore,” went the Tribune. “They’re somewhat naive. In fact, they’re almost charming. And, in a corny way, perhaps they’re more fun.” With July’s Cooler Near the Lake, which the Tribune ranked with the finest Second City revues ever, the ensemble parlayed the fun into freedom.
In “PTA,” a ten-minute sketch in which concerned parents and one harried moderator discuss sex ed, Ramis rises out of the audience and, in an uncharacteristically gruff voice, introduces himself. “I’m not speaking to you tonight in my professional capacity as a teamster”—big, surprised laugh—“only speaking as a concerned parent of the community. Now it seems to me to introduce sex education into the schools is going to encourage, uh, a certain amount of doin’ it among the kids. I got a young daughter. She’s sixteen years old. A lovely girl. She’s a beautiful girl”—here a deep breath—“and I cannot stand the thought of some young punk spreading her creamy white thighs and violating her flowery pubescence. I’m tortured by that vision night and day . . .” In the tradition of the best satirical acting, Ramis works his character into a disturbed frenzy as credible as it is absurd, climaxing in an anguished hailstorm of pleas to save his daughter and himself, embarrassing everyone. Other impassioned parents jump in, and the temperature rises. “I blame the parents,” asserts the moderator, “certainly those children weren’t born ignorant.” Only gradually does this well-intended discussion about the welfare of children devolve into a sexual free-for-all fired by the parents’ libidos. One mother confesses to loving sex and hating her children, asking aloud “if Mr. Levin”—“Levine!”—“Levine, has a way for me to have fun without having babies, then I’m for Mr. Levine.” Flaherty as Levine: “Call me Russ”—blackout. A crack at town hall culture rich in suburban personality, full of polemical feeling but stripped of dogma, and a rather informed debate to boot, “PTA” is one of the Next Generation’s finest ensemble pieces, their first of several permanent contributions to the Second City repertoire. Shows were selling out.
And yet, despite his development as an improviser, Harold Ramis could sooner see himself as a full-time tumbleweed than a professional funny person. “I loved writing and performing,” he said, “but the idea of doing it for a living seemed so remote”—especially when the lodestars of his generation, rock musicians, conveyed limited, if any, satirical inclination. The children of Altamont did not share their parents’ taste for dialogue and criticism. As the events of the Chicago convention had borne out, debate had failed them. Now, protest was lived. Instead of satirize, hippies dropped out. Instead of engage, they disengaged. You can see their point. What said Fuck this better than orgies, acid, Charles Manson, and a Hells Angel in a knife fight? Not the Smothers Brothers, not Laugh-In, and, despite their popularity, very little at Second City. There was more challenging, more pressing improvisation happening out there in real life, on the streets. In the fall of 1970, Ramis and his wife, Anne, took off for Europe.
“Why are you leaving, Harold?” Flaherty asked.
“Eh,” he shrugged. “I ran out of jokes.”
Well before the lights came up on the sneak-preview screening of MASH, which Mike Nichols and his producer, John Calley, had basically loved, Nichols knew they were fucked. Their carefully tweezered, labored-over production of Catch-22, only months away from its release, was many things—good, bad, funny, unfunny—yet, they conceded in that screening room, it stumbled far from the spirit of sustained, coherent anarchy Robert Altman spun out of his script and actors, many drawn from Second City and the Committee. He let them loose. “I almost passed out when I saw the movie,” Nichols said, “because it was the first time Altman went nuts and improvised the hell out of the whole thing. It was brilliant and alive and it put us to shame. Certainly everybody else thought so and I secretly did, too. In terms of improvised comedy.” Too holy a novel to play with and too intricate a script, by Buck Henry, to disobey, Catch-22 would have disintegrated under Altman. But it froze under Nichols. Next to MASH, it looked old. In his satire, Altman captures the ant colony of self-absorbed American strivers obsessed with their busy little projects, disconnected in pairs, but in the wide shot, seen as a social whole, the bugs add up to a little world of their own, a freak culture as good and dumb as any other. Indeed, the act of watching a film like MASH becomes an improvisational venture for the viewer. Where to look? What to hear? Altman’s epic wide shots and multilayered audio tracks leave it up to you. “Everything that Catch couldn’t have,” Nichols said, “the freedom and the wildness and the half-assed improvised quality, made us seem even more stately.”
What was happening? Had Robert Altman become the filmmaker Mike Nichols should have been? Nichols himself wondered.
Finishing Catch-22 in Los Angeles, Buck Henry knew Nichols was grasping. Their film was “not about human behavior,” he admitted. “That’s one of the things that drove Mike crazy. He had no behavior to work with, just attitudes.” Hence Nichols’s relief when, midway into cutting the picture, he received a new play by Jules Feiffer, then called True Confessions, a darkly feminist and chauvinist work delivered to Nichols smack in the upswing of the women’s movement, “about the fact that heterosexual men don’t like women,” Feiffer said. Confessions “startled me,” Nichols said, “because it really was like an extended Nichols and May sketch in a lot of ways.” Reading the play, Nichols kept thinking, to his shame and disgust, Yes, this is true, this is true, and passed the manuscript to Henry for a second opinion.
“Well, you’ve got to do this,” was Henry’s take.
“Yes, I think so.”
The next day, Feiffer’s phone rang.
“I want to do it,” Nichols said. “But I don’t think it’s a play. It’s a movie.” True Confessions became Carnal Knowledge.
You could imagine why Paul Sills was distrustful of money—and Mike Nichols—and why, swayed by an alloy of survivor’s guilt and admiration, and longing in his own right for the freedom and familiarity of a repertory company, Mike Nichols urged his pal Sills to come to New York and make a theater, again, with him and Elaine. Think of the old days, he said, and don’t worry about the money; t
he names “Mike and Elaine” guaranteed the attention of all of New York, and if, ultimately, they wanted to return to independence, Nichols pledged to buy them away from their investors. “But Paul didn’t think theater could happen in New York,” said Carol Sills. “His experience was Chicago first, then New York.” Sills spoke of his allegiance to Chicago, but Nichols heard the self-destructive—at best, regenerative—impulse Sills conflated with creativity. The commercial strictures of Broadway equaled paralysis; an improviser, Sills required transformation to live. Nichols saw Sills’s point, somewhat, so he wrote Sills a check and wished him only the very best. With the money, Sills moved Story Theater into the Body Politic, an arts complex on Lincoln Avenue two blocks from the new Second City Theater, where, in October 1969, with Ovid’s Metamorphoses added to his repertoire, Sills resumed his lasting excavation of human goodness.
He invited Del Close—rotting on the vine at the University of Texas at Austin, where, after shedding the Committee, he had attempted to form a theater company—to return to Chicago and join Story Theater. In the decade since their last collaboration, at Second City, much had changed for Del and Sills, but they still shared, and always would, a lust for experimentation. “So I took a leave of absence from guerrilla theater,” Del said, “I was suffering from a broken shoulder anyway . . . broke it in a trust exercise.” (“I knew the sixties were coming to an end when they dropped me,” Del added.)
Joe Flaherty came by the Body Politic to check out Del Close at work. What he had heard of the master comedian bore no semblance to the Story Theater improviser before him, “jumping around like a chicken,” Flaherty said. “I remember thinking, Is this satisfying to him? Is it fulfilling? I thought it was a waste of talent but I never said anything because it was Sills and Sills was a god.” Word got back to Second City that Del, the genius manqué, had returned to Chicago, and, with Bernie Sahlins conveniently out of town, the improv comedians pulled him, after hours, into workshops, where he introduced students to advanced techniques, theories of mind expansion, Compass lore (“What a ball buster Elaine was,” he’d growl wistfully), and whatever he was then calling the Harold. When Sahlins returned, he discovered in Close, in his popular workshops, a bridge between generations, and asked him to return to Second City. To direct.
The whole Hollywood equation runs counter to improvisation. If, say, the screenwriter hadn’t decided on the exact details of his or her story, the studio, or any other entity responsible for financing and producing a film from the screenplay, would be unable to set a budget, sign a cast, secure locations—stay with me here—schedule the shoot, keep a crew, conceptualize a marketing and release strategy, or actually shoot the picture. How then could anyone responsible for any of the above do their job? Be accountable? Justify their professional existence? With many millions of dollars at stake, the reply “I don’t know” is unthinkable; it hemorrhages liability. In the realm of independent filmmaking, however, where so many variables cannot be anticipated, “I don’t know” or “Let’s see what happens” are pronounced with courageous luster; they are a maverick’s mottos, and in the case of their first king, John Cassavetes, said by men with modest crews and budgets.
But Elaine May was in Hollywood—where there are millions of dollars and thousands of personalities on the line, and the improviser’s attachment to the undecided, so crucial to their success onstage, is widely taken for callousness, indulgence, ego, pathological ignorance, sadism, masochism, sadomasochism, and/or madness—and she was not a man. In 1968.
“I never wanted to be a director,” she said. But she had written a script, A New Leaf, and Paramount wouldn’t give her director approval, but they would, however oddly, buy the script and allow Elaine to direct, and star, for a relatively modest fifty thousand dollars—a good deal for them. “I pitched very hard,” her manager, Hilly Elkins said, “on the fact that having a woman director would be of consequence.” She had slipped into the contract a clause that would award her an additional two hundred thousand if she, a first-time filmmaker, were fired from the project. Which is about when producer Howard Koch got nervous. Why was she already digging her tunnel to safety? On their dime?
“Listen,” Koch said to his boss, Gulf & Western chairman Charles Bluhdorn, “I don’t know if I can handle her.”
“Sure you can.”
Happily, Paramount agreed to Elaine’s terms. The price was good and so was the publicity: no one could remember the last time a woman wrote, directed, and starred in a studio film. And a woman, it was understood, would be easy to control.
When the script arrived at Walter Matthau’s apartment, he thought, Why not?
After the first shot the very first day of filming A New Leaf, Elaine May called “Cut!” for the first time.
Producer Howard Koch rejoiced. Yes, he thought, she is wonderful, a natural. The scene had gone beautifully. They would be moving on.
“No,” she said to Koch, “I want to do it again.”
He didn’t understand.
It was best, she’d decided, not to say too much too soon. Wait to see if the actor will get there himself. No director wants to say, “Do this,” and no actor wants to hear it. Best to wait. So: “Do it again.”
And then again.
Wow, Koch thought. What the hell?
A brave someone led May from the camera and warned, “You make the crew nervous.”
She didn’t want to scare them. In fact, she wanted them to like her, and for a time, she got them to. But, of course, docile Elaine May was not the only Elaine May. She was a shape-shifter, an improviser. “And when they found this out,” she realized, “they hated me all the more. And I think that’s what really happens.” Being a woman, “they think [you] want to show that [you’re] a nice person . . . And in the end, when it comes down to it, you’re just as rotten as any guy. You’ll fight just as hard to get your way. So I think the real trick for women is they should start out tough . . . In that way I think I did have trouble. But only because I seemed so pleasant.”
“The first day,” Koch recalled, “we did the scene five times. We thought, Tomorrow, we’ll start again, but it went on and on and on.”
Some thought she was lost. Others knew not knowing was May’s way to the best laugh. It had to be discovered alive, like everything else. “Elaine does [all those takes] because she’s looking for something other than that which is presented,” said costume designer Anthea Sylbert. “She’s not very fond of having an actor doing the scene exactly the same over and over again. I’ve seen her fire an actor because each of these takes was exactly the same as the one before.”
Walter Matthau had countless opportunities to observe this person, Elaine May. He would see her out in front of the camera, guardedly looking about as if that very day was her first on a movie set, or earth. He dubbed her, lovingly, Mrs. Hitler. Sometimes as many as twenty takes wore him out—to fantastic results. “She’s basically improvisational,” Hilly Elkins assured the press, “but a genius, and she’s not unconcerned about the economics.” Maybe, but A New Leaf went forty days over—double the intended schedule and budget. Koch begged Paramount to remove May from the picture, but they didn’t. They wouldn’t. Per May’s foresight, firing her would cost them two hundred grand.
After a year abroad, writing through Europe, Harold Ramis returned to Second City early in 1972, bounded into an improvisation, made straight for his power spot upstage, and stopped. A puff-haired two-legged brick, looking like an electrocuted plumber from a third world country, was already, and quite comfortably, there. So this was his replacement, the little Albanian Flaherty had written him about. Impressive. After only a couple of months, the brick had already found the power spot. Harold took an obliging step to the side and, along with the audience, waited to see what his replacement would do with his power. Incredibly, he did nothing. That also was impressive. Most beginners, afraid of the silence, would rush to fill it, firing blindly until they hit. The Albanian—summoning a poise such a runty-lo
oking guy should not have had—sat in silence like it was his throne. Doing nothing, he seemed complete. And the audience, Ramis sensed, sensed it, too. And sensing them back, the Albanian turned his head slowly, unnaturally slowly, and wiggled his eyebrows at them. They flew out of their seats.
John Belushi.
Ramis said, “He made us all look good.”
Not since Elaine May had an improviser so quickly accrued so much myth and speculation. There was no explaining his power, but as with that of any prodigy, Belushi’s was too strange a force to accept on faith. Faced with the mystery, his fans and friends—he accumulated them wherever he went—traded theories like baseball cards. They said John’s parents, Adam and Agnes, were remote, frustrated, depressed, “too lost in their own dramas,” according to John’s brother Jim, to convey much more than their own needs, making them more like an older brother and sister than the mother and father of two children. “Look, Mom and Dad are irresponsible parents,” John said to his younger brother one night. “Just eat and sleep here. Go out for football, for track, for wrestling. Go out for chess club. I don’t care what you go out for, but for your own good just stay out of here.” Too young, John became, in his mother’s words, her little man. For his independence and industry, she rewarded him. “By the time he was four,” Agnes beamed, “he’d just wander up the street, walk into a neighbor’s house, sit down and strike up a conversation.” He needed company. Whenever dinnertime got tense—Adam carried home his repeated failures in the restaurant business—John would go for a laugh, turning his eyelids inside out or doing an impression, anything to bring his family back. Harold Ramis had been there. Well versed in clown psychology, he could personally vouch for the formative, painful absurdity of being parent to one’s parent. “When I was a little boy,” Ramis explained, “I acted like a man.” If Second City was the Juilliard of comedy, depressed mothers were Exeter.
