Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  “NBC doesn’t expect it to work,” Michaels explained to Austin at the Chateau Marmont. “I know everything’s stacked against this. What’s the worst night for television? Saturday. I know that. What’s the worst time? Prime time. What’s the worst cast? Unknowns.”

  Incredibly, this was how Michaels began his pitch. He had called Austin to his hotel to tell him he wanted Newman for his cast and Austin for a director, but not the sort that sat up in the booth cutting between cameras; Michaels wanted him to direct the Saturday Night ensemble as if he were directing the Groundlings. The show would be scripted, but unlike Laugh-In, Smothers Brothers, or any of the other variety shows of the recent past, this one would convey the anarchic, anything-can-happen spirit of improvisational comedy. Even if, on air, everything went according to plan, the mere fact of knowing that it might not lent the proceedings an air of danger, like watching a high-wire act. Such an anxious atmosphere would require a certain kind of dexterity in a performer, one that required a certain kind of director—a position for which Lorne Michaels, the producer, didn’t have a title. But he wanted Austin for the job. Would he consider coming to New York?

  No, thank you. Austin was going to stay in L.A. At the Groundlings.

  “Look,” Michaels continued, “they expect it to lose, but it’s going to be a hit. Because it’s going to be live.”

  The day Ivan Reitman showed up for the first Lampoon rehearsal in New York—in time to witness an argument between Belushi and Murray—he volunteered a resolution from the seat he had carefully selected in the back of the theater. “They’re like soldiers together,” he said, “who knew that each of them had their back and they were very mistrusting of anybody who was going to walk in.” His presence was not appreciated. Bill Murray descended the stage, walked over to Reitman, and swung an arm around him like he was one of the family.

  “Ivan, is this your coat?”

  “Yes.”

  Deliberately, piece by savory piece, Murray re-dressed Reitman in his winter gear—coat, scarf, hat, gloves—and walked him to the door.

  “Thanks for stopping by.”

  Reitman loved it. Undaunted, he came back to rehearsal the next day, and then the next, and by giving wide berth to their process, never questioning its apparent contradictions and mysteries, Reitman won their respect. “Finally, they realized I wasn’t doing any harm. I had a great laugh and I’m very enthusiastic and they needed somebody in the audience to say, ‘Well, how about . . . ?’” Basically, Belushi ran the show from the inside; Reitman, meanwhile, was warming to the paradox of improvisational directing. “Watching the process,” he said, “I learned how these formidable comedians worked. I would never dare pitch a comedic line, but I think I had a better understanding of what makes a story and a character, and I sort of saw how we could do that together”—how it could work onscreen, how Reitman, if the off-Broadway show were a hit, could produce and direct them in the first Lampoon movie, especially now that, respecting their process, they respected him. As ever, Murray was the hardest get. “He lives his life to his standard,” Reitman learned, “even though sometimes he’s lazy and sometimes he’s eccentric, and he’s frustrating to other creative people and, frankly, unfair, because everything has to go on his clock. But he’s worth it.”

  Rehearsal, for Murray, never ended; causing trouble was how he played, and play was for Murray, as early as Second City, indistinguishable from regular life. “He was always doing characters,” improviser Dick Blasucci said. “We’d be driving around Chicago and suddenly . . . there he goes.” Improvising offstage, in restaurants and on the street, Murray’s characters interacted freely with unsuspecting civilians—just like real people. “He would play with anyone,” Doug Steckler said, “but if people were confused by his launching into something, he would drop it. He didn’t like confusing the innocent.” Fellow improvisers didn’t have to think twice; Murray was their movable playground. Jump on. “He had such an influence on all of us at Second City,” said Aykroyd, who met Murray in Chicago months earlier, in the summer of 1974. “Just his boldness, his style. His character the Honker that he sort of does in Caddyshack—all of us at Second City were doing the Honker onstage and off.”

  Crossing the street with Reitman during Lampoon rehearsals in New York, the Honker—a playful, seemingly brain-damaged oaf—emerged, out of nowhere, at full volume.

  “Watch out! There’s a lobster loose!”

  People’s reactions!

  “Hey, get some hot butter, it’s the only way to get ’em!”

  The revised National Lampoon Show opened at the New Palladium in March 1975, and Harold Ramis left the show a month later, Reitman’s cue to draw him into his big plan, a Lampoon movie. Was Harold interested? Could he write a treatment for a script somehow tying together these and other Lampoon sketches? Yes, but how to transform a revue into a single, feature-length narrative? Based on the most successful publication in the Lampoon’s history, the 1964 High School Yearbook, Reitman suggested they go with a high school movie. A few false starts later, Ramis went to his wife, Anne. “Your college experience was so funny,” she said, “and you’ve always wanted to write about it, so why not shape the material into a college movie?”

  12

  1975–1976

  Their friends—Danny and Gilda—were leaving them for American television. None among them were certain that Danny and Gilda’s decision to take on a job as risky and perverse as Lorne Michaels’s Saturday Night was a sure thing, or even a good idea. Recalled one who was there, “they were saying, ‘Oh, God. I hope we didn’t make a mistake. We’ve got everything here,’” a loving, creative kinship they might lose in the dispersive fray of New York. To say goodbye, a band of 505ers lifted Gilda and a freight of bootleg liquor onto a streetcar and rode her up and down College Street in sad celebration.

  Elaine could tap-dance, and did, for an impressively long time considering, but she knew, at some point, she would have to reckon with Barry Diller, person to person. At this late stage—three trimesters into cutting Mikey and Nicky—Paramount’s new chief was entitled to a progress report, a screening of a rough cut, no matter how rough, and a terminal, do-or-die deadline she would stick to or else. So in May 1975—two years after filming began—Elaine came up with a plan. She consented to meet her boss, not on the lot, where he was sure to make full use of his home-court advantage, but somewhere in downtown L.A., not among the city’s most comfortable neighborhoods, but at one of those unsavory, broken-down diners tailor-made to Diller’s discomfort. She picked him up in a tiny rented Pinto. Diller had to squeeze into the backseat.

  Elaine emerged from their détente with a new delivery date, September 15, 1975. Or else.

  Then she returned to the editing room.

  “I can’t get this to work,” she confessed to Kemper.

  He surveyed the reels upon reels of cut and uncut film encircling her. “Elaine,” he began, “are you trying to put everything we shot into the film?”

  “Yes,” she smiled. “That’s why I shot it.”

  Fretful assistants looked up from their whirring spools to watch her, unbelieving. She was so happy. Too happy, some said, to ever finish it.

  Upstairs, on the restaurant level of the Fire Hall, Sheldon Patinkin was directing “in the spirit” of the long-defunct Playwrights at Second City a production of Elaine May’s one-act, Not Enough Rope, starring Andrea Martin as a suicidal girl without a noose, and Martin Short as her down-the-hall neighbor with twine only. Throughout, Patinkin marveled at their offstage chemistry. “Here were two of the funniest people ever, apart,” he said, “but together . . . together . . .” Patinkin begged them to join the Second City company downstairs, but neither saw themselves in sketch or improv. Short, despite his prodigious ability, for all the support he won from his friends improvising in restaurants and living rooms, was “subconsciously afraid,” he said, as anyone would be, facing the pressure to be funny on demand. “I should have been wanting it,” he said, a
nd though in a way he wanted it more than anything else—hence the terror—Short declined the offer and stayed the course as an actor. “I didn’t see myself as a comedian,” he said. Andrea Martin, who dreamed in musical comedy, was also unsure. Though Patinkin saw in her the potential to be “one of the funniest we had ever had, Chicago or Toronto,” she was, like Short, only comfortable with a script. Granted, she knew she could be funny, sometimes really, really funny, but Martin owned none of it. At best, she attributed the good fortune everyone else called genius to some extrasensory groove that by the grace of God happened to her, and at worst, the recycled antics of a dancing chimp. Nevertheless, Martin assented—she loved the cast, her friends—and into the company she went, terrified to pieces.

  It’s easy to forget that despite the traffic jam of genius—Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Dave Thomas, and others—appearing, throughout 1975, in some formation, most every night at the Fire Hall, Andrew Alexander struggled to keep the theater above water. “I was bouncing checks on them regularly, every week,” he said. “Generally the first six who got to the bank would get paid.” For the price of a sandwich and a drink, he brought in a posse of telemarketers from all walks of life—whomever he could find, he hired—to an office on the third floor of the Fire Hall. He charged them with selling dinner packages to CEOs—of McDonald’s, condom factories, anyone—to fill the seats of the little theater. Bob Sprot, a silver-tongued salesman with a permanent hangover, came in every morning with a bottle of vodka, pulled the phone to his mouth and a trench coat over his head and, to Alexander’s astonishment, sold hundreds and hundreds of dinner-theater packages—good for sales, but bad for improv. The Fire Hall went to corporate working stiffs given to general, barroom disrespect and uninspired suggestions (“Stripper!” “Toilet!”). Audiences talked throughout the show; others heckled; McDonald’s employees threw money and crumpled Egg McMuffin coupons at the improvisers.

  “Is there any point to this?” Thomas asked O’Hara amid the mayhem.

  “Yeah,” she said. “They paid their money.”

  Playing mostly to expressionless faces of their parents’ generation—and sometimes only five or six of them a night—appreciators were scarce. Alexander tried pulling young people, the drunks and rock fans loitering on the street outside the Fire Hall, inside, bribing them with tickets and free beer if only to fill the seats. “We tried every plausible marketing strategy,” Alexander said. “I even came up with something called the Oyster Moister, which was red wine and ground beef with an oyster in the center.” But fifteen minutes after the show started, Alexander said, “there was, almost in unison, the sound of retching.” Some guy threw up on Dave Thomas’s shoe. He was only the first. Alexander said, “I’ll never forget the sight of paramedics wheeling sick customers past the horrified patrons who were waiting for the second seating.” Calamities such as these informed the work. “Second City Chicago grew out of academic roots and Second City Toronto grew out of bar roots,” said Dave Thomas. “That defines the difference between the two theaters far more than the cultural sensibilities of the U.S. and Canada. Our audiences wanted a faster, coarser type of comedy.”

  Bernie Sahlins, when he appeared, could not compel them toward the topical, the prescient, the satirical Right Now. What about a political song, guys? The kind they did in Chicago? “He brought that tradition into Toronto,” Thomas said, “and we hated it because we thought [those songs] were stupid and didn’t give us a chance to play characters.” Flaherty, their director—returned from his Lampoon stint in New York—stood with them. He reveled in characters, the Mitchums, Joan Crawfords, Barrymores, and B-movie types that rolled out of his movie-made unconscious. “I just wanted to get away from the politics stuff,” he said. “I was tired of the politics. Eventually it was pandering.” Respectfully nudging Sahlins aside, the improvisers, also weaned on television, slipped right into Flaherty’s sweet spot. None among them had come to Second City with satirical, or even comedic, dreams; they were, like Flaherty, actors first. Performers. Fans of film and theater, their lifelong marinade, bubbling with the Canadian predilection for the gargantuan they inherited from the English. “Whenever we did a commercial parody or something involving television it would get the biggest response from the audience,” Flaherty said, “because everybody knew that stuff, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” The emphasis on laughs—opposed to the Spolin method—edged them toward a broader, though equally nuanced style than their midwestern brethren. Even if their sketches and improvisations weren’t always about show business—the sort of genre mashups Flaherty loved—their well-rehearsed gift for exaggeration, for exploding the already-exploded personalities of American entertainment, spilled over into their everyday civilian characters. Entertainment, for many in that group, was as much content as it was style.

  For instance: Andrea Martin’s Edith Prickley, improvised to life in the Fire Hall late in 1975.

  In the tiny dressing room the cast shared backstage, and in the twenty minutes they had to cast the evening’s every improvisation, the improvisers chewed over a flurry of audience suggestions, one of which, “Parent Teacher Conference,” was quickly disseminated among them: O’Hara would be the teacher and the rest of the cast, including Martin, the parents. Frantically, the company grabbed for hats and props and glasses and wigs—whatever struck a chord—amassed secondhand over the years from vintage clothing stores and hand-me-downs, undressed and dressed with no attention paid to privacy, or why they were drawn to what was drawing them. O’Hara, reacting as the straight man, reached for a prim cardigan and pinned her hair in a twist, the men went for ties and glasses, and Andrea Martin, already laughing at a 1950s leopard-print jacket and matching hat once belonging to O’Hara’s mother, snatched them off the rack, and riffing on the leopard theme of loud and garish, went for a pair of rhinestone glasses and the reddest shade of lipstick she could find. From the look, came the person. “The posture, the voice, the intonation, the laugh, the volume, the name Edith all came together the minute I entered the scene and Catherine christened me Mrs. Prickley,” Martin wrote. What followed was automatic.

  “It is very important that we all get involved with our children’s schooling and help them with their homework,” teacher O’Hara says. “What about you, Mrs. Prickley?”

  “Oh sure, dear,” Prickley blasted. “I help Sebastian all the time. I say the family who plays together, stays together. I do his homework. And he pours the drinks”—then that laugh—“Pa-HA!!!”

  It wasn’t until she discovered Prickley, who said everything she thought and feared nothing, that Martin discovered the indomitable feeling of freedom that comes to those who improvise out of their nervous selves and into their alter egos—the forgotten people they really are.

  By September 25, ten days after Elaine’s drop-dead deadline, Mikey and Nicky’s original budget, estimated at $1.8 million, had more than doubled, to $4.3 million. The next day, September 26, Elaine asked Paramount for an additional $180,000 to finish cutting the picture. The studio refused. “We offered her all of the support possible to make the film she and we originally wanted,” explained Arthur N. Ryan, Paramount’s senior vice president. “But we were unable to get her to deliver the picture.”

  Paramount pulled the plug, but that didn’t mean Elaine was going to pour her film down the drain. She remembered A New Leaf. Rather than stand by in impotent rage all over again, while the studio kicked down her door and recut her work, she turned around and, before anyone could steal her movie away from her, sold a $90,000 interest in Mikey and Nicky to Alyce Films, a company no one had heard of. With those completion finances in hand, she began to finish cutting Mikey and Nicky as fast as anyone possibly could, speeding through scenes, a film fugitive with the border in sight, hurdling executives on all sides, ignoring phone calls, locking her doors, drawing curtains against daylight and the moon to buy herself just one more moment’s improvisation to set in stone a definiti
ve record of the film, her version, that, after all the drafts, all the miles of exposed film, negotiations, refused compromises, samurai schemes, and mad evasions, the two decades it had taken her, from the University of Chicago to today, to get Mikey and Nicky, two living humans, on film, she would at last turn over to the studio for release, posthaste, before—

  Paramount sued. It was their picture. Alyce Films?

  Then—this is wonderful—Elaine countersued, contending that she was only within a few days of completing Mikey and Nicky. Hold on, she would have it in time for a Christmas release, she said. Isn’t that what they wanted? Or were they now trying to sabotage her? “In total bad faith,” argued May’s lawyer, Bert Fields, “Paramount refused to put up more money. The studio apparently wants to take over the film, which we are looking forward to fighting.”

  In October 1975, a New York judge ruled that Mikey and Nicky did indeed belong to Paramount and issued a writ of seizure granting the studio immediate possession of all pertinent film materials. A phalanx of New York sheriffs set out for the film labs of Manhattan to claim Paramount’s lawful property, which they recovered in short order—minus two crucial reels. They were missing.