Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  That season, SCTV earned its first Emmy nominations—four of the five in a single category, Outstanding Writing for a Variety or Music Program—ultimately winning for their “Moral Majority Show,” an ornate and eloquent exposé of the sort of network hypocrisies they nearly suffered under NBC. When presenter Milton Berle announced the winner, the episode’s eighteen writers and performers—all credited writers on SCTV—took the stage to accept the award, and Berle, baffled by the size of the company, turned back and asked, “Who’s gonna make the speech?”

  “Me.”

  “Which one?”

  “Me,” said Flaherty, trying to get to the podium.

  “Oh?” Berle scoffed. “You?”

  “Yes.”

  Berle, milking his last moments before an audience, gave a hurry-it-up sign to Flaherty and won a round of strong laughter from the room. “No, I’m kidding,” Berle said, and repeated the hurry-up signal to even more laughter.

  Flaherty had to push past Berle to begin his acceptance speech. “I can’t believe that we’ve got something up here bigger than the cast of Hill Street Blues, which—”

  “That’s funny,” inserted Berle with considerable sarcasm.

  “Sorry, Uncle Miltie,” Flaherty improvised. “Go to sleep”—a rag on ­Berle’s famous Texaco Star Theatre sendoff, and a typically Flahertian reference to boot, as knowingly inside as SCTV’s best stuff.

  With that, Joe Flaherty, on behalf of his writers, won back the audience. Berle scrambled to riposte, but came out stammering.

  This time SCTV’s cast and crew knew they’d be back for another season.

  Dustin Hoffman had been developing Tootsie for years. The script had gone through several writers, most recently Larry Gelbart, who, heeding a brilliant assist from Hoffman’s partner, the writer Murray Schisgal, elevated what could have been a routine cross-dressing comedy into a story for the modern feminist man, about an actor, Michael Dorsey, who becomes a better man by being a woman. Running with Schisgal’s insight, Gelbart and Hoffman holed up in Malibu for hours and hours of improvisations, some of which, like Dorsey’s “Nobody does vegetables like me!” rant would make their way to the film. But drafts later, the director, Sydney Pollack, was still unsatisfied, and Gelbart was released. They needed a new writer.

  “You haven’t tried a woman,” Hoffman’s lawyer, Bert Fields, pointed out. “Why don’t you try Elaine May?”

  May reviewed the script, and in short order, Hoffman, Pollack, and Schisgal met her in her apartment for the verdict. She was, Hoffman noted, an avid reader of mysteries. “You have the complete works of Agatha Christie?”

  “She’s a great structuralist.”

  With mathematic elegance, May proceeded to tell them exactly what the script needed.

  “Your character needs a roommate.”

  “I’m forty years old. I don’t want a roommate. They’re going to think he’s gay.”

  “Michael needs a shadow, someone he can tell his feelings to. For the audience. And he has to have a girlfriend. And I’m telling you right now, I’m writing the part for Teri Garr. But the girl he’s in love with should be having a relationship with a guy who’s a real asshole. And she should drink. And she should have a kid, so you see she needs somebody like Michael. And she should have a father and he should fall in love with Michael.”

  Early in 1982 she was hired. “It’s a tilt,” May said of her Tootsie revision. “The movie, when it started, the hero didn’t like being a woman, and he couldn’t stand his clothes, and he just wanted to see women naked, but Dustin himself just loved his part. He would come in during a script conference and say, ‘I hate my dress! This is a horrible wig and my makeup is . . .’ and I thought: He loves this part! He’s a true Method actor!” She re-dressed Tootsie’s soap opera scenes, wrote Hoffman’s climactic confessional monologue, deepened the female parts, and built up the farcical avalanche of lies and cover-ups to collapse just on schedule, when Michael’s professional success is at its apex. (“Some of these changes may be useful, some may not,” May scribbled on Pollack’s script. “At this point I only care if they’re legible.”) She gave Jessica Lange, Michael’s love interest, a tender monologue—the wallpaper speech, whispered to Michael-as-Dorothy, in bed beside her—“so she’ll get nominated” (she didn’t), and, as was her policy on rewrites, she refused screen credit. “Elaine is the one who made the movie work,” Hoffman concluded. Mike Nichols deemed the work “Elaine’s most spectacular save.” She completed her revision in three weeks.

  On a hunch, Columbia president Frank Price, the first studio head to bet on Bill Murray, sat Murray next to Pollack. “I didn’t know what would come of it,” Price said. They were two of the eighteen Price had invited to Christ Cella, the renowned New York steakhouse, to celebrate his wife, Katherine’s, birthday. Dustin Hoffman and his wife, Lisa, two of the others, were seated on Murray’s other side, inadvertently drawing Murray into their conversation about Tootsie. Price watched them from across the table. “At the party,” he said, “Dustin really got onto Bill and was recruiting him.” He was thinking of Murray for the character of Jeff, his roommate.

  That night, throughout the dinner, as Hoffman thought of Murray for his roommate, Murray thought of being asked. Even a small part playing second banana to Dustin Hoffman, Murray knew, would showcase a different side of his talent, the “real” actor side he hoped would come through in The Razor’s Edge—if he ever got it made. “Playing number two makes you more free,” Murray explained. “You don’t have as much responsibility and you’re free to look different.” At the end of the meal, he presented Katherine with her gift—earrings—and the party said their goodnights.

  Outside the restaurant, Hoffman pulled Pollack aside. “Gee,” he said, “I think he’d be a great roommate for my character.”

  Pollack had enjoyed Murray’s company that evening, and admired him as a sketch comedian, but did he have an actor’s range? He wasn’t sure.

  But Hoffman was. “Whoever we get has to feel like my best friend,” he argued, “the sort of guy I can just have dinner with and not feel like I have to talk to. Billy’s that guy.”

  Murray led the Hoffmans to his Volkswagen and drove them back to their apartment. He and Dustin stayed up that night until two in the morning, just talking, hanging out. Like roommates. “We fit, Billy and I,” Hoffman said. Yes, he decided the next day, I would live with Bill Murray.

  Hoffman called his new friend, and over the next few days, over the phone, started to tell Murray the story of Tootsie, and “like that,” Hoffman said, Murray agreed.

  Pollack, however, was still unconvinced. “He was in Meatballs!”

  Hoffman stood firm. “Sydney, Sydney. There’s an actor under there.”

  Soon after, the director came around. “It wasn’t until I screened [Murray’s] films at Dustin’s urging,” he said, “that I saw what a satisfying actor he could be.” Still, he’d have to read him with Hoffman.

  At the audition, Bill Murray exercised Second City technique, “where you can make the other person look good,” he said, “which is my training. We did it and we did it again, then a third time, and each time I made it more his scene.” The fourth time, Hoffman locked eyes with Murray. “Okay,” he began, “let’s do it one more time,” and this round, Hoffman, recal­ibrating, found moments to give back to Murray. Neither trying to upstage the other, star and support found themselves playing together, taking and giving. “When it was over,” Murray recalled, “both of us looked at each other like that’s right. And from that moment on, anything was okay.”

  Murray got the part, his first opposite a major actor.

  Somewhere between a Tab and vodka and a jolt of cocaine, nearing four in the morning on February 17, 1982, Belushi moseyed through someone’s mansion a short distance from the Chateau Marmont, leading his new friend, UCLA student Jeffrey Jolson-Colburn, away from the after-party crowd, from the bar into the kitchen, where they could begin the impromptu interview that
would be Belushi’s last.

  Why had so many original Saturday Night Live players become stars? “You couldn’t help it,” Belushi explained. “We learned to play off each other. I don’t give a bleep how many tickets Stripes, Modern Problems, or even Neighbors sold. We were best together. We worked better as a whole than as individuals.” What did Belushi make of the new Saturday Night Live? “It sucks,” he replied. “A group has to develop a good rapport, and it takes at least six months to do that.” Six seasons in, the departure of Lorne Michaels, an expert in team building, left the show to a cast of talented individuals unversed in ensemble, a far way from the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players. Jean Doumanian, Michaels’s replacement, summoned Del Close to Studio 8H, Del said, “to come in and try to give a semblance of a feeling of a company.” Christening himself “house metaphysician,” Close led the company through workshops and had them improvise for the writers to results that earned him the respect of Dick Ebersol, Doumanian’s replacement. Entering season seven, Ebersol, with Close and Belushi’s guidance, swept through Chicago and Toronto and hired a slew of Second Citizens—Robin Duke, Mary Gross, Tim Kazurinsky, and Tony Rosato—in an effort to restore SNL to its improvisational roots. And yet, as Belushi observed to Jolson-Colburn that night in the kitchen, the company still lacked “emotional affinity.”

  Throughout their conversation, Belushi waved away girls and joints, saving what remained of his attention for punk rockers, expressing his admiration for Dan Aykroyd, and excusing himself, erratically, to re-up on coke.

  “Do you always take drugs?”

  “Whenever I can,” he joked.

  If Saturday Night sucked, and Fridays—ABC’s answer to Saturday Night—sucked for the same reason, Belushi said, because the ensemble showed “a typical L.A. comedy style—everybody out for themselves,” then what show, Jolson-Colburn wanted to know, didn’t?

  “SCTV is a great show,” Belushi answered. “But in the wrong time slot.”

  He was scheduled to appear, as himself, on the first episode of SCTV’s 1982 season, in a series of sketches called “Box Office Poison”—Belushi’s last pictures, Continental Divide and Neighbors had bombed—begging Guy Caballero, played by his mentor, Joe Flaherty, to save him from further humiliation in Hollywood and give him another shot, this time back in the ensemble, as a regular player on the show. “We all loved that guy,” John Candy would say. “He was so loyal.”

  Dan Aykroyd was in New York, at his desk in Phantom-Black Rhino, the company he shared with Belushi, working on Ghostbusters, the script he was writing for the two of them. Midway into typing a line of dialogue for Belushi’s character, Peter Venkman, the phone rang. It was Bernie Brillstein in L.A.

  “Danny,” he said, “sit down . . .”

  Bob Dolman heard the wailing coming from another room at SCTV’s writing offices and someone said Belushi was dead. He went toward the wailing and found John Candy, still wearing his massive winter coat, bent forward over his desk, staring down at a hung-up telephone. “His whole giant body,” Dolman said, “was seething with sobs.”

  Doug Steckler appeared as Candy, emerging from his office, was repeating, over and over, “It’s starting! It’s starting! It’s starting!”

  “What’s starting, Johnny?”

  “The deaths. The deaths. It’s all starting.”

  Steckler put his arms around as much of Candy as anyone could, but Candy was “beyond human consolation,” Steckler recalled. “I never felt so helpless, nor ever again saw him in such wretched, mournful despair.”

  The avalanche of Candy’s grief was compounded by the sudden picture he saw of his own demise, a death also driven by unappeasable appetites, the addictions of so many in the business of—whether one was aware of it or not—turning rage into laughs, mistaking those laughs for love, and gorging oneself on the placebo relief they gave the hunger. “I found it an incredible high,” Robin Williams said. “Performing is a drug, and you’ve O.D.’d. It’s like body surfing on big waves. If you catch a big wave and get through it alive, you get the same rush.”

  There are kinds of laughter. One is an exorcism; it frees the mind of injustice, and if one laughs hard enough, the body too. The other, shoving down the demons, kills so slowly it can be mistaken for happiness.

  What’s starting, Johnny? As he held his friend, Steckler interpreted Candy’s refrain to mean that “the harvesting of keen talents, driven by an excess of earthly temptations, had begun.”

  The afternoon of Belushi’s memorial, Del Close threw his hypodermic needle into the street. He would keep the cigarettes, the pot, and sundry psychedelics, but from that day forward, Close swore off injectables and cocaine.

  To aid in his recovery, he joined, in Toronto, a coven of witches. At his banishment ceremony, Close, donning the pentacle, took in each fist a rock and a candle, and backed by the ensemble concentration of an all-female Wiccan collective, transferred to those objects the anima of all he wanted to banish—invoking “the images of the universe of the pagans,” he said—hurled the totems into a great fire, and danced in and out of the flames until he collapsed.

  It—or something in it—worked. Sampling a gram or two a few weeks later, Del got horrifically ill.

  Amazed at the effectiveness of the ritual, he called the collective’s high priestess in Canada. “Is this the way it’s supposed to work?”

  “Well, yeah, it takes about three weeks for it to work its way through your unconscious. It took me that long to get off heroin.”

  Back at Second City Chicago, where rumors of devil worship swirled through his workshops, Del experimented with an improvisational exercise he called the Invocation.

  Around midnight, some days after John died, Judy Belushi was startled by a knock at her apartment door.

  It was Bill Murray. He should have been at home with Homer, his new baby boy.

  Inviting him in, Judy could see he was restless. Over tea in the living room, she waited for Murray’s self-assurance to return, but he remained oddly distracted, surely searching himself for a certain way to talk to her about John. As he thought, his eyes interrogated the living room, the shelves, the ceiling, the furniture, then he stood up and began wandering silently, like a detective in a museum.

  Murray turned to face her. “Have you felt John around here?”

  “No. I haven’t felt him at all.”

  “Yeah,” he conceded. “I don’t feel him at all.”

  14

  1982–1984

  In his senior year, 1982, Chris Farley was unexpelled from Edgewood High School. That was Farley: you couldn’t stay angry with him. Even his basest, most disruptive pranks, like mooning the whole of Colonel McGovern’s geometry class (to incredible laughter), won him the embarrassed affection of deans and principals and his parents, who couldn’t help but see, beneath the attention-starved troublemaker, a pure-hearted Catholic boy sincerely terrified of offending anyone, even the girl in typing class, who looked down at her workspace to find a message typed out by Farley’s penis, which is how he got expelled from Edgewood midway into his junior year. “When he got in trouble, even as a kid,” Farley’s brother Kevin explained, “it was like something would take control of him that he couldn’t help but cut up and make people laugh, even though he knew he’d get in trouble for it.” Regaining some kind of consciousness after the laugh, he’d be the first to whip himself with a “Fuck! Idiot! Can’t believe I did that.” But his expulsion from Edgewood changed nothing; wherever he went, he kept pranking. He had to. When Chris Farley made you laugh, no matter how much the laugh debased him (“Dance, fatty, dance!”), his eyes said, Thank you, thank you, friend, for laughing.

  His best nights—family nights—two parents, three brothers, and a sister—Farley spent in front of the television, swallowing into his memory Animal House, Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes, and The Blues Brothers, drawing inspiration he didn’t need from Murray, Ramis, and especially John Belushi—his idol, his north star. Here the paradi
gm shifted. The children of improvisation’s third decade—the stars Farley fell in love with—came of age in an entertainment culture diversified by all manner of comedy; their influences ranged from the Marx Brothers to Nichols and May to Lenny Bruce and beyond, and rarely esteemed above them the improvisers of Second City. Murray and Ramis had come to improvisation accidentally. Many, like Joe Flaherty, arrived with no knowledge of their predecessors. In the 1970s, when they started out, Second City was still only a job, not a calling.

  But Saturday Night Live coupled with the box-office triumphs of Animal House and its progeny focused the generation that would follow them on the work of this talented handful. They were something like the Beatles, and by the power vested in the new blockbuster Hollywood, they were cross-platformed, franchised, and merchandized directly to kids like Farley.

  This was teenage comedy, boys mostly. Heavy on the underdog, heavy on the physical, Farley’s favorite movies had the populist (some would say gross-out) appeal absent from the work of older Second Citizens. “I’m a zit!” Bluto announces in Animal House, before expelling the mashed potatoes in his mouth with his fists. “Get it?” You could grow up on Meatballs, on Bill Murray; how many American adolescents knew Nichols and May’s “Adultery”? Time and technology were not on Mike and Elaine’s side. In their brief reign, they produced only a handful of albums, and their films, before the VCR, could be adored but would be gradually unremembered. Unless you had seen The Graduate fifteen times in the theater, in 1967, you couldn’t memorize—as Farley’s generation did Caddyshack—your favorite bits. You couldn’t do them with your friends. You couldn’t easily fetishize and deify your comedians. Moreover, in 1967, you wouldn’t want to: young Americans, hippies, dreamed in revolutions. Entering the 1970s, the disillusioned young began to dream in Easy Rider, in the movies, in show business. After Animal House, some dreamed—for the first time—in improv comedy.