Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  Out of Forsberg’s workshop and into the touring company, Murray came into regular contact with Del Close, its director. Unfortunately for Murray, his timing was off. Only a short time earlier, he would have caught Close at the peak of his enthusiasm, but as the high of returning to Second City wore off, Close’s improv addiction got the better of him. He needed more—attention, innovation, risk—than just directing could offer. “It was clear Del didn’t want to direct,” said touring company member Douglas Steckler. “He wanted to be up there onstage, but his time had passed.” His development of the Harold had stalled. He would leave workshops in medias res, coughing out excuses like “I gotta feed the cat” or “I gotta see a man about a horse,” before heading home for a fix of Valium, speed, or whatever he could find between couch cushions. If he returned, it would be to the Second City bar, where he had an open tab, to fill one snifter after the next and bark at the students who had elected to sit there and wait out his drug run. “Get the fuck out of here now. Now!” “You, you’re an idiot!” “You have nothing to give improvisation. Get out of my fucking class!” It took Bernie Sahlins longer than anyone to figure out why Second City’s whipped cream bills were so high (nitrous oxide).

  On the road with the touring company, some of Close seemed to have rubbed off on Murray. He was known to miss rehearsals and disappear in the evenings, returning to the performance space sometimes only moments before curtain, slipping in through the back door, into his first costume, and striding out on the stage with the authority of a man ahead of schedule. For Sloane, charged with corralling the touring company from her office at Second City, Murray conducted himself offstage pretty much the way he conducted himself in improvisations, as an irritant too charming to stay mad at. Those nights he went missing? Rumor placed him either at Saint Mary’s women’s college or a dive bar a short distance from the last place anyone had seen him, where it was said he treated the room to a round of drinks before jumping up on a table and crooning “Trouble in River City.” “You had to give Bill space,” Joe Flaherty said, speaking for many. “He could be volatile.”

  Workshopping a melodramatic parody of Long Day’s Journey into Night, Murray, seemingly unprovoked, physically attacked the troupe’s weakest improviser, a preppy button-down jokester reminiscent of the rich kids he knew, and hated, from his caddy days at Indian Hill. What’s more, the improviser conveyed no personal convictions, and took direction like a lapdog, and always literally. “Billy did not think he was doing his job,” Douglas Steckler said, “which in some invisible way provoked him.” Murray picked up the innocent, pushed him against the back wall, and started yelling at him. Steckler ran over. “Guys, no,” he said. “We can’t do this . . .” Murray wouldn’t drop him; the guy’s feet were dangling off the floor. All attempts to reason with Murray’s anger failed. If, on the other hand, he respected you, if you, unbeknownst to you, satisfied the requirements of his artistic and/or political code, Murray would be a dream to improvise with. His commitment and his willingness to support made him, at his best, pure fun to play with. To the others he could be violent. “Billy was quick to use his fists,” Flaherty said. “He didn’t know the value of a punch and got in fights a lot.” Close enabled the punk in him; it didn’t matter to whom he directed his volatility, or why. It seemed Murray sensed a calling higher than community, a moral superiority that lit him with arrogance. “Billy is angry, tough, bright,” Close said. “He’s got more rage beneath the surface than anyone I know.”

  But the recipient of Close’s highest praise was Bernie Sahlins’s mess to clean up, or have cleaned. Not one for confrontation, Sahlins enlisted Harold Ramis, a leader of the mainstage company, to speak to Bill about playing nice. “I think he respects you because you’re Brian’s friend,” Bernie said. “Talk to him.” They had met only once before, several summers earlier, just after Bill’s high school graduation, when Brian Murray brought Harold to visit his little brother’s ninth-hole snack bar, and then again that winter of 1968, outside the Treasure Island grocery store where Murray sold hot roasted chestnuts on the street. Since Ramis’s return from Europe, their relationship had been collegial. From afar, Murray respected Ramis’s intelligence and veteran standing, and Ramis ranked him with Belushi for fearlessness, and for interpersonal integrity, the care and patience he showed other improvisers in the scene—as opposed to the way he could treat them in real life—Ramis placed Billy Murray way up there in a league of his own. You would have to go back to Elaine May to find an improviser as whimsically inclusive. Why then Bill Murray seemed to turn around and punish people Ramis could only guess: “If he perceived someone as being too self-important or corrupt in some way that he couldn’t stomach, it was his job to straighten them out,” the satirical impulse improperly directed. He was the professor of a class no one knew they had enrolled in and every day was a pop quiz.

  “You know,” Ramis said, taking a seat beside Murray, “a lot of people in the cast are pissed off at you.”

  “Yeeee-eah.”

  “Do you care?”

  “Nnnn-o.”

  “Okay.” Ramis got up. “Good talk.”

  “Frank,” said Howard Koch to Paramount’s Frank Yablans, “I don’t believe what I heard.”

  Elaine May was coming back to Paramount to make Mikey and Nicky, the idea she’d been polishing since her Compass days. To star, she’d cast improvisers Peter Falk and John Cassavetes.

  “Howard, what happened to you happened to you; it’s not going to happen to me. We’ve got an ironclad deal.”

  Koch replied, “I don’t believe what I heard.”

  Disbelief would be the keynote of this production.

  On the first day of filming, Elaine informed David Picker, Paramount’s new head of motion picture production, that she wanted to move the white lines on a road.

  The crew did not know what to make of her.

  You would see her, on location in Philadelphia, in old shirt and blue jeans, ragged and talked-out after nights of no rest, hanging her head, and thin, like a Jules Feiffer cartoon. Then an idea would zap her back to life and she’d be off. Out sprayed a fireworks of creative possibilities, their coherence often obscured by May’s concurrency of thought and cognitive speed; many were impractical, unrealistic even, but as they fell to earth, a wrong look, or the hint of perceived incredulity from an onlooker, and she would suck hungrily on a cigar or apple core and vanish in dismay, off to recover her equilibrium with a new idea on her own. Raising his voice in passionate agreement or frustration, Cassavetes could shake her down from indecision or urge her back into it. “John lost patience with her a lot,” said cinematographer Victor Kemper. “‘Come on, we’re ready to go!’ he’d say, then she’d contradict him and he’d raise his voice and she’d back off. When he spoke to Elaine she listened. More than listened; she shut down, like flipping a switch.” So trusting were May and Cassavetes of each other’s improvisational instincts, they appeared to the crew like codirectors, or lovers, forever disappearing to the darkened sidelines to discuss, while everyone waited, and waited, the direction for the scene or, as was sometimes the case, an idea for a new one. From these conferences, she would return with a new face, physically changed all the way through to her fingers, which, while cameras rolled, curled in synchrony with the improvisations. “It’s because we respect [the script’s] tightness that we can play with it,” Cassavetes explained. “[May] would never ask that it always be done just the way she wrote it. Because something better might come out of it. A line, a quality, a mood. Like I say, filming the scene is like doing another draft.” The more drafts she shot, the more improvisational latitude Elaine would grant her future self in the cutting room. They would not stop. She shot rehearsals. On a single night, according to one observer, she shot 16,000 feet with two cameramen (a two-hour film is 10,800 feet).

  During one take, Falk and Cassavetes, absorbed in an improvisation, ambled out of the shot. The camera was now filming a dark and empty street.

&nbs
p; “Cut!” called out camera operator Ricky Bravo.

  Elaine went over to him, perplexed. “Why did you call ‘Cut’?”

  “There’s no one in the scene.”

  “But they might come back.”

  For the improvisers, May always consented. She gave them everything they could think of to get them to go at it again, maybe deeper this time. Spolin had her games to get there; May worked, as Del Close did, from the muse of leap and free fall. Lunch, most days, was at 1:00 a.m.

  Playing in the dark did in fact embolden the improvisers, like night swimming in the rain or trespassing, but their freedom, impossible to anticipate, and therefore impossible to light perfectly, was murder on May. Though they had rehearsed, Falk and Cassavetes were permitted to reinvent their blocking on film, but ignoring their marks, ducking in and out of the light—the little that existed—she couldn’t always see them. It further destabilized her.

  “Who’s gonna see that?” she asked Kemper. “I can hardly see them with my naked eye!”

  “Elaine, you have to trust me.”

  But she couldn’t be absolutely certain, not until dailies, and she couldn’t have faith. It was too risky. “Can we add more light?”

  “Elaine, we’ll have continuity problems—”

  Cassavetes appeared. “What’s your gripe, Elaine?”

  “Well, I can’t see anything!”

  Cassavetes turned to Kemper. They had worked together, quite well, years earlier, on Husbands, a film that drew comparisons, fairly and unfairly, to Mikey and Nicky. (“The guys improvised on Husbands,” Kemper said, “but everyone understood John and he didn’t shoot a lot.”) “What’s the scoop, Vic?”

  Kemper explained the situation to Cassavetes; Cassavetes, squinting through his cigarette smoke, listened, understood, agreed, and went off with May to further convey Kemper’s directive. The crew watched, waiting, again, for consensus, and the signal to proceed. It took time. It got later. “She never admitted that she didn’t know what she was going to do next,” Kemper said, “but at the same time she was always asking for help.” Instead of unifying the company in collaboration, as they would have the Compass Players, these complicated frays of power and communication troubled the crew. “She had no concept of the waste that went on,” Kemper said. “It was upsetting. It put everybody off.” The production moved at a slow frenzy.

  A focus-puller quit.

  A script supervisor was rumored to have been locked in a closet. Some believed it had happened.

  Once, an assistant tapped May on the shoulder and directed her attention to two women, citizens of Philadelphia, watching from the sidewalk. “These ladies want to know what’s happening.”

  May paused. “What is happening?”

  A gaffer who had worked with Nichols on his last film, The Day of the Dolphin, guarded his frustration. “[Nichols is] also improvisational,” he said, “but it’s more strict, more disciplined in the sense that there is a way he wanted it . . . He kept at it until the effect is achieved.”

  She was always running late. Working in a graveyard one long and heavy summer night, Elaine had two cameras rolling on Cassavetes and Falk. They were playing as usual, boldly shifting the fervor between them, sparking from the script and their own very real friendship multidimensional variations on the theme of Mikey and Nicky, standing there, at Nicky’s mother’s grave, laugh-crying like rundown wolves. “Elaine,” Kemper said, “was in her heaven,” in a sniper’s tube of focus, when Kemper got the signal from both assistants, one on each camera, saying she had only one minute of film left.

  Kemper tiptoed to her. “Elaine,” he whispered, “there’s only a minute left. If you can give them some kind of signal . . . to find a way to wrap it up . . . quickly—”

  “Don’t cut! Whatever you do, don’t—”

  “There isn’t any film left—”

  “If you cut, I’ll fire you.”

  Kemper’s assistants flashed him the thirty-second sign. He ran to the soundman. “Don’t cut your recorder.”

  “Huh?”

  He ran to the cameramen. “Keep rolling.”

  “Vic—”

  “Don’t cut!”

  And on they went, Falk and Cassavetes, riding the moment for empty machines, for another five minutes. Maybe ten. Then, on their own, the actors came to a natural end and the big wave of feeling dribbled to shore. Cut.

  “That was wonderful,” Elaine said to Kemper. “Thank you.”

  What could he say? “You’re welcome.”

  How could she, the director, get her collaborators to join her? If joined, how could she hold them there?

  With scrupulous attention to creating an interactive environment that would permit spontaneous life to occur on film, as dense and boundless as actual life. Before rehearsal, while the crew waited and the budget escalated, Elaine filled the fridge, shelved the dishes, added pillows to sofas and removed them. Nuts? Listen to this: they weren’t even shooting in the kitchen. For this scene, they were in the living room. Well, but what if—on that phrase the crew stopped breathing—what if they did move into the kitchen? The fridge couldn’t be empty! So: the fictional owner of this fridge: What would she eat? Why would she eat it? And why hadn’t she eaten it yet? Did she always buy too much? Did she just go shopping?—Could someone run downstairs and get a chicken? No, no—roast beef? Is anything open at 4:00 a.m.? Well, how far is the gas station?

  And then, prepping a short scene, a page and a half, wherein Peter Falk’s Mikey fights with the counterman at a coffee shop, her gaze latched on to a box of donuts sitting behind the counter. One at a time, Elaine examined the donuts. Those donuts she liked she kept in the box. Some she eliminated. Other donuts she separated into careful pieces, returned them to the box, arranged and rearranged them, and called over the prop man, Bob Visciglia, to inspect her work. Visciglia approved of some of it. Some he did not approve of. While the crew, failing to understand this, watched, Visciglia and May discussed the arrangement and decided to promote certain donuts from the pastry box to the donut display on the counter. They would be in the shot. Regarding the donuts in the display, they again analyzed their selections, reconsidered, and made the necessary adjustments. At last, they agreed. These were the right donuts. Quickly, May reordered them for maximum impact. Then, apparently satisfied, she excused herself from the counter display for other business, and a boy, someone’s son up way past his bedtime, lifted the cover and took a donut for himself. Returning, May noticed the change immediately, fixed the pile, lowered a cover over the arrangement, and stepped back behind the camera to preview the composition. Not quite right. Again she removed the cover and rearranged, then decided, finally, to strike the donut display entirely, and moved it out of the shot. In its place, she put the box of rejected donuts, took another moment behind the camera, and smiled. There.

  Tom Miller had observed this for about fifteen minutes. A publicist, he had been sent to the location and advised not to reveal his identity to May, who, he was told, hated publicists. “She’ll think you’re here to spy on her,” Mike Hausman warned. So Miller, incognito, asked Pete Scoppa, May’s assistant director, to explain the donut thing.

  “For Falk to work with,” Scoppa replied, “if he wants.”

  “How?”

  “However he wants. If he wants.”

  They were ready to shoot. The target of a last-minute decision, Scoppa would improvise as the counterman. Having witnessed Falk, a die-hard Method actor, tear up previous scenes, and improvisers, he was more than scared, but—

  May called action.

  Rabid, crazed, dangerous, Falk went at Scoppa with everything he had to give. He saved nothing for the next take. “He could kill a man,” Scoppa recalled, “and he wouldn’t know what he was doing.” Excess anger Falk directed to the innocent box of donuts, ripped open the pink lid, and tore every last one of them to bits. He threw plates. He burned the air. Screaming at Scoppa, terrifying him, he fired donuts against the wall, strangled
them in his fists, spat them to the floor. Falk lunged over the counter, grabbed Scoppa by the throat, jammed donuts in his own mouth, then Scoppa’s, lost his breath, collapsed in heaves, regained his strength, and went at Scoppa again—Miller resisted the impulse to leap into the shot and physically defend him—and by the end of the take, no donuts were left. Then a silent consensus: it worked. Falk was mesmerizing, more wildly alive for May than in life, a man in a state of truth. “Everyone was watching spellbound,” Miller recalled, “Elaine visibly ecstatic.” She shot that shot, a master shot, fourteen times before she went in for close-ups. “I couldn’t imagine anyone else having invented improv comedy,” Kemper concluded.