Upstairs, it had a ninety-nine-seat theater. Plus, it was named after Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jimmy Breslin, who had originally been slated to be one of the partners. Jimmy was an ultraliberal who’d recently run for president of the New York City Council alongside onetime independent mayoral candidate and author Norman Mailer.
Its lineage and aesthetics notwithstanding, the way I saw it, putting on a show that took direct aim at Nixon at a place named after a left-wing journalist—and run by two of Mayor Lindsay’s cronies—seemed like the perfect hook.
SID DAVIDOFF, lobbyist, attorney, and former co-owner of Jimmy’s restaurant:
Richard Aurelio and I were the two principal partners of Jimmy’s. Jimmy Breslin was supposed to be the other partner, but because of his contract with NBC they didn’t want him owning a bar even though he was there all the time. Richard and I took it over towards the end of the Lindsay administration.
How Budd first approached us I don’t really remember, but I’m sure he showed up one day with the idea of doing What’s a Nice Country Like You Doing in a State Like This?, The arrangement we had was that he licensed the room for two nights a week. It was great because the show was topical and anti-Nixon. I’m also sure that one of the reasons he came to us was because we came out of the Lindsay administration, and many of our best customers were high-profile liberal politicians like New York governor Hugh Carey, Ted Kennedy, and Mario Cuomo. The deal we had was that Budd took the cover charge and we took whatever was left over on the food and drinks we sold.
The logo for the show was a pregnant Statue of Liberty, which I purposely chose because it made a statement, although after I’d already bought an ad in the New York Times, they refused to run it because they thought it was too controversial. In retrospect, I should have sued them because of all the free publicity we’d have received, and What’s a Nice Country might have gotten a much longer shelf life if I had.
Still, we had a terrific run of nearly two years. It also received almost unanimously positive reviews, most notably from New York Magazine’s John Simon who called it “New York’s Most Necessary Musical.”
Though the show fizzled when it came to finding an audience in other cities—particularly Chicago where we closed after only a couple of months—after that, I continued to produce it elsewhere. One of those places was Los Angeles, where by mid-1974, I was also seriously contemplating opening a West Coast branch of the Improv.
PART THREE
TWENTY-FIVE
Expansion
Even though I was and will always consider myself a New Yorker, I’d been wanting to live in California ever since Easter weekend 1952, when six army buddies and I decided to drive down to Los Angeles from San Francisco while we were waiting to be deployed overseas during the Korean War.
I’m an avowed atheist Jew, but the thing that cinched it for me was when the USO invited us to attend Easter services at the Hollywood Bowl, and I heard the late actor Howard Keel—probably best remembered by younger generations for his role as Clayton Farlow on the 1980s TV soap opera Dallas—perform “Ave Maria” that evening. Howard’s rich bass-baritone voice was so awe-inspiring that it indirectly planted the seeds of my wanting to live in California. On top of his incredible set of pipes, what made the experience so special was the equally spectacular setting. In those days, the band shell of the amphitheater had a concentric bowl-shaped set of arches, which made for unbelievable acoustics. Then there was also the famous Hollywood sign towering in the distance. The combined effect swept me off of my feet, and from then on I instinctively knew that I wanted to live in California someday.
But what mainly motivated me to make the move, once I finally did nearly two decades later, was that most of the entertainment industry, especially movies and television, had moved to the West Coast. Of course, there would be obvious exceptions like Saturday Night Live, which not only originated from NBC’s New York headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, it also forever changed American comedy. However, at this point it hadn’t even been conceived, and while the residual impact of The Tonight Show moving to LA in the spring of 1972 hadn’t been nearly as bad as I thought and the club was doing better than ever, I could also no longer ignore the fact that many of my best comics were following suit.
But even as much as I wanted to make the move, I still had serious doubts about whether I really could. Moreover, I had never taken a single day off from the Improv in the entire time I ran it, plus everybody knew me, so the most pressing question was how it could survive without me. And shuttering the New York club and moving it lock, stock, and barrel to Los Angeles was completely out of the question, especially considering how hard I had worked to build it.
Fortunately, my answer would soon come in the form of an ambitious young man and future president of both HBO and Starz Entertainment named Chris Albrecht, whom I left in charge of the club for two weeks in the summer of 1974 while I took my first vacation to France.
At the time we first met, Chris was part of a two-man comedy team. Its formation came out of a chance encounter with a young radical named Bob Zmuda, who later went on to become Andy Kaufman’s writing partner and occasionally played his alter ego Tony Clifton onstage and in television appearances. In addition, Bob founded Comic Relief USA, an annual event that raised money for the homeless in the United States beginning in the mideighties. He also worked briefly as a bartender at the New York Improv in the early seventies. He and Chris first met in Pennsylvania during the summer of 1973 where they were both performing in a summer-stock theater company.
CHRIS ALBRECHT, president and CEO of Starz Entertainment and former New York Improv partner:
I met Bob Zmuda for the first time on the day we got to Mansfield, Pennsylvania. It was kind of a meet and greet, waiting for this guy who was supposed to be the main character in this play we were doing, which was Bob.
After a few minutes, he finally pulled up in a car with this woman who was driving. He gave her a kiss and said hello to us. The woman was very attractive, which I immediately took notice of, and I asked him who she was. That’s when he started telling us this story about how she had picked him up when he was hitchhiking and they’d been shacked up together for the past couple of days in a hotel where they had a wild, passionate love affair.
It turned out that she was his wife, Brenda, and he was lying, which Zmuda does habitually. However, we hit it off instantly anyway. There’s a state college there called Mansfield University that had a tent theater, and we were doing a season of a bunch of different plays. I can’t even remember them all, but Bob, who was graduating from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, had a comedy-magic act on the side. When I told him I wanted to pursue acting professionally, he told me that stand-up comedy was a great way to do it. A lot of comics like Freddie Prinze, Jimmie Walker, and Gabe Kaplan were getting sitcoms because they’d come out of clubs like the Improv and Catch A Rising Star. So Bob had this idea that we should move to New York—which he was already considering doing—and that we should be roommates so we could put together a comedy act that we could audition at these clubs.
I grew up in New York, so I liked the idea. But I also kind of filed it away for a while because at first I wasn’t sure if he was serious about it, which he was. Eventually, we got an apartment together, as well as jobs working in the scene shop at the theater at Riverside Church. And in our spare time, we wrote.
Back then, comedy was a whole new world for me and I didn’t have a better idea than Zmuda had, so I just followed his lead and we worked up some stuff in the living room—mostly bad advertising parodies. One of them was a takeoff on this TV commercial for some guy who had a hair replacement business where he said, “Hard to believe I’m bald. I know it is.”
Basically, we inverted the premise, so I would sit on Zmuda’s lap and he would put his arms through mine, pretending that I was a cadaver. Then I’d go, “It’s hard to believe I’m dead. I know it is.” It was just awful, but somehow we managed to get pass
ed at both the Improv and Catch A Rising Star.
BOB ZMUDA:
I started out as a kids’ magician, and then I went from that to being a ventriloquist and a stage hypnotist. I also put together my own theatrical troupe when I was sixteen or seventeen and then I hung out at Second City in Chicago. All of this is really important because the progression is totally relevant to Budd Friedman.
In the 1960s, I got caught up in politics with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. I was the Midwest head of the Yippie Party in Chicago where my politics were pretty much guerilla street theater and doing put-ons with protesters. I finally left Chicago for Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where one of my first jobs was in summer stock in Mansfield, Pennsylvania. I think the show we were doing was The Drunkard, which is how I met Chris, and we became fast buddies.
What drew us together was we were both pranksters. I always thought I was the Prankster King. When we first met, Chris was this great-looking guy who had a full head of hair. I showed up that day with my wife, but I didn’t want anybody to know about it because I was trying to get laid that summer. All of a sudden, Chris came up to me and said, “Bob, I don’t know much about you, but everyone is talking about what a great actor you are. I gotta tell you, you blew the roof off. You see that girl over there? She was just raving about your performance.”
About ten minutes later, I went up to this girl. I’d had a few drinks in me and when I tried talking to her, she just blew me off. She hadn’t even seen the show, and she thought I was just this obnoxious guy trying to hit on her, which I was. Chris had totally set me up and I was like, “You motherfucker!”
But we laughed our asses off about it and we became inseparable that summer. One of the things we talked about was our careers, acting-wise, although Chris still wasn’t sure this was what he wanted to do. I think his backup plan was to become an accountant. But I urged him to try acting anyway. I said, “Look, why don’t we pursue this acting dream of ours. We could go to LA and pursue it there, or we could go to New York.”
So we both left college and headed to New York, where we got an apartment and tried to become actors even though we were totally green, stupid young kids. We actually thought we could get on Broadway in six months even though we didn’t have Equity cards. The only things we could audition for were Off-Off-Off-Off-Broadway and our only saving grace was that we both had a little savings.
Meanwhile, there was this guy at Riverside Church, where we were working in the scene shop, who turned us on to this other guy named Dick Scanga, who was building a little dinner theater called the Little Hippodrome on the Upper East Side. It turned out to be the first dinner theater in America. It also turned out to be an ingenious idea because a night out on the town was so expensive between the cost of theater tickets, dinner, drinks, and a cab.
Dick’s concept was to have it all under one roof, and he hired us to do the construction. All of the sudden, Chris and I were learning about how to do Sheetrock and all this other stuff, which was great. But then the theater started going under because he’d overextended himself. Not long after, Chris and I got evicted from this shit-hole apartment where we were living because we couldn’t afford the rent, so we ended up living in the back of this theater where we were also waiters because Dick couldn’t afford to pay us.
Now, this is where Budd enters into the picture. While all of this was going on, we were still trying to keep our acting careers going by the skin of our teeth. And one day—I’m not sure why—I was walking through Hell’s Kitchen. I made a left instead of a right and that’s when I came across this little club called the Improvisation. I’d heard it was the first comedy club in America. As soon as I walked in, the first thing I thought to myself was: “What the fuck is this?”
Chris and Bob were so bad as a comedy team they were funny. But I knew Dick Scanga, who had started the Hippodrome, which reminded me a lot of my original concept for the Improv. I was also impressed by the fact that Chris knew how to build things, which I did also, and so I hired him to do some carpentry work.
Then I continued to let the pair do their god-awful comedy act against my better judgment. At the same time, I could tell Chris was a go-getter and that he seemed like he could handle responsibility. This proved correct when I hired him to work the door during our children’s cabaret on Sundays that Andy Kaufman hosted. So when my then wife Silver and I decided to go to France for three weeks for our first vacation in the summer of 1974, leaving Chris in charge seemed like a no-brainer.
CHRIS ALBRECHT:
I think Budd basically felt that if Scanga trusted us—and especially me—that he could let me run the club while he and Silver went away on vacation.
But it was also kind of awkward because Budd already had a young woman named Judy Orbach working the door. So there were people who were like, “Why is this guy coming in and why is Budd putting him in charge?” I think there was definitely a little resistance to me at first, although that smoothed out pretty quickly and we began to develop a rapport. I also listened to the people who worked there and everything ran fine during those three weeks. The waitresses didn’t necessarily want to hear from me, and it’s conceivable that most of my duties during this time were restricted to mixing drinks as the relief bartender.
Upbeat and confident by how well the Improv had done in my absence, I immediately began making plans to open a second location in Los Angeles not long after Silver and I returned from France. However, not everyone understood my reasons at first.
BOB ZMUDA:
Budd was looking to get rid of the New York Improv around then. He might tell you otherwise, but my take on it was that he thought he was going nowhere with this shitty little place he had in Hell’s Kitchen—despite all the success it had had, which was a total fucking accident.
The other thing was that he still wanted to be a Broadway producer, or at least an Off-Broadway producer, at this point. He was always leaving the club to have meetings to mount some Off-Broadway production. He had no idea that he was sitting on a gold mine with the Improv.
Contrary to what Bob and others may think, getting rid of the New York club never even entered my mind when I decided to expand. I have always prided myself on thinking things through from every angle when it comes to making a big decision and I didn’t do this hastily.
Nevertheless, as I began getting more and more serious about making the move, the person I had the most difficult time convincing was Silver. At the time, our marriage, which was never a happy one, was severely strained and we fought constantly. Beyond that, though, Silver was never a fan of Los Angeles the way I was—something that can be traced back years earlier when she struggled to find work as a young actor in Hollywood before we met—even though she now lives there with our daughter Zoe and her family.
Though this would ultimately spell the end of our troubled marriage, she reluctantly agreed to go. As I was starting to look for possible locations, the first person I called was my old friend Jack Knight, who eventually became a stockholder, and was then appearing opposite Dom DeLuise on the short-lived NBC sitcom Lotsa Luck.
JACK KNIGHT:
I don’t remember all that much about it except that Budd called me one day out of the blue in the fall of 1974 and told me he was planning to open up a second Improv out here. I did later become an investor, which I still am to this day, but there was never any talk about that at first.
Budd wanted me because he trusted my judgment and because of all the work I had done with him in New York. We looked at several places. One of them was on Third Street near Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The other one was a plumbing supply house on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. While neither of them was practical, directly across the street from the plumbing supply house was a former furniture factory that after that had been a folk music club called the Ash Grove. At the time we saw it, however, the current occupants were an improv troupe called the Pitchell Players.
One of the most important lessons I learned wit
h the New York club was that location is everything. So when I was scouting places for the LA club, one of my requirements was that it had to be on a centralized thoroughfare that was easy to get to from any part of the city. I also knew that because we were a comedy club it needed to be in Hollywood.
Those were my stipulations, and the Ash Grove met them. I was also intrigued by the Ash Grove’s lineage as I had been with the New York club. Located at 8162 Melrose Avenue, it had been steeped in show-business history ever since a UCLA alumnus named Ed Pearl opened it in 1958. Over the next decade and a half, it had become a folk and rock music club with acts including Pete Seeger, Taj Mahal, Roger McGuinn, Linda Ronstadt, Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters, and Country Joe McDonald. Most recently, it had been the home of the Pitchell Players improvisational troupe where Minnesota senator Al Franken—a soon-to-be junior writer on Saturday Night Live—had been performing with his writing partner Tom Davis. Al was the one who told me about it.
AL FRANKEN:
Don’t quote me on this, but it was probably around 1972. Tom and I would perform there with the Pitchell Players and another Improv troupe called The Credibility Gap, which is how we got to know guys like Michael McKean, David Lander, and Harry Shearer.
Anyway, eventually the owners of the Ash Grove were looking to sell and it just so happened that Tom and I were back in New York. When Budd told me that he was starting a club in LA, I said, “Well, the Ash Grove—the old Ash Grove—might be up for sale.” He didn’t know that until I told him. I also know he never paid me a finder’s fee.
They weren’t the actual landlords, but the lease to the building was controlled by Joe Roth, a film producer who had been part of a comedy team I’d worked with in New York, and an actor named Roger Bowen, who played the colonel in the film version of M*A*S*H. At the time, they managed both the Pitchell Players and the building; although it was dilapidated like the New York club was when I first found it, it had great bones.
The Improv Page 22
