I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (36 page)

The week after Lubetkin’s death, Shore appeared exhausted and on edge during a set-the-record-straight interview with the
Los Angeles Times.
“I loved Steve Lubetkin, and I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt him ever,” she said. In her view, Lubetkin was the victim of the agreement “that was forced on me by the CFC.” The agreement had compelled her to cut back time slots at Westwood, and Steve was among the comics affected. It was as simple as that. There was no retaliation; it was merely “arith-metic.” She said she would gladly renegotiate the agreement “because this one is not working. I knew it wouldn’t.”

The subject of the CFC quickly set her off. “I’m getting pissed off that I’m being blamed for someone else’s inadequacies,” she 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 251

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said, banging her desktop for emphasis. “This system works. If you’ve got it, then you’ll make it and become a star. Not everyone is going to become a star, and those people who are angry and blaming me are probably aware that they are not going to become a star. So, they can’t lay that on me or the Store. It’s totally unjust and unfair. You’re dealing with a bunch of children.

“Steve was a clever writer, but he had trouble as a performer,”

she said, softening slightly. “He was a person who wanted to be a superstar and didn’t have the ingredients. He killed himself because he could not handle his life.” While there was undeniable truth to her words, in the end, of all the people who knew and loved Steve Lubetkin, only Mitzi Shore denied any responsibility for what happened to him.

Ten days after his best friend’s death, Richard Lewis looked wan and disheveled as he sat with a reporter who had covered the strike from the beginning. The reporter had come armed with a list of questions, which became superfluous the second Lewis started talking.

“I think it got him off the hook,” he said of Lubetkin’s suicide.

“After trying so desperately and so hard and so long for some kind of recognition in this business, I think he was exhausted, tired of expecting rewards.

“No one should ever chalk this man up as just another crazy performer. I’m not defending his final act—I am bitterly angry and will feel his loss forever. But he was Steve Lubetkin to the end and only the last second seems crazy. In his head, he was giving at the end, just like he had thousands of times before in front of thousands of people. Only this time he wanted nothing in return—no laughs, no applause, no promises of gigs, no auditions.

He purely just wanted to leave a message that things should be fair. To point a finger seems to demean what that moment meant to him. To point to some situation or person and blame them is the very nature of the sickness that’s in this town. It makes them bigger than life. And it’s the thing that killed Steve.

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“I feel sorry for all the Steve Lubetkins who are not thinking past that one night at the Comedy Store, that particular night when they are indeed making people laugh and being an entertainer in the grandest sense. But they shouldn’t make the Comedy Store bigger than it is. Don’t make it Vegas, because it isn’t.

Don’t make it a series or a tour or a screenplay, because it isn’t.

It’s just tables and chairs and a stage where you can go work and be seen and maybe make some pocket money. Mitzi Shore is not a psychiatrist. Neither is she their mother. I never wanted to give her that much responsibility for me.

“People in this business give too much power to those who judge them, and it is so damned destructive. It keeps you from doing what you can do. Granted, it’s a bitch to work for free and be a piece of meat, which is generally what you are in this business.

But it’s a choice that actors and comedians have made, and the best way to deal with it is to work on your craft, surround yourself with good friends, be able to love people and get love back, and keep your fingers crossed.

“But if you depend on the business people—the agents, managers, producers, the Improvs, the Comedy Stores, the Budd Friedmans and the Mitzi Shores—to give you credence and suste-nance, then you are in big trouble. I think Steve Lubetkin was in this kind of trouble for a long time. Perhaps it was in his nature to have this happen to him. He thought these people cared more than they do.”

He sighed. “The business, by and large, is made up of wallets, not hearts.”

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Epilogue:

The Prisoner of Memory

For the stand-up comedians who migrated to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s and participated in the strike, Steve Lubetkin’s suicide serves as a sad signpost, like a classmate’s fatal car crash on graduation night, marking an end to their innocence.

“We were just young kids trying to be funny, and all of a sudden, it wasn’t about making people laugh anymore,” Tom Dreesen recalled nearly thirty years later. “It wasn’t even about making a living. There was something deep and dark and scary, and all the fun was out of it.”

“It colored everything,” said Dottie Archibald. “It made it bigger than it was, bigger than just a bunch of people trying to get paid. It made people reflect more on what happened.”

“After Steve’s suicide, it was never the same,” said Jay Leno.

Lubetkin’s desperate last act did not accomplish what he had hoped. There was no coming together of the two sides in its wake, no fairness finally codified. The strike settlement agreement didn’t last the summer. The Comedians for Compensation renamed them selves the more union-sounding American Federation of Comedians (AFC) and filed charges of unfair labor practices against 253

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the Comedy Store with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Mitzi Shore responded by rescinding the contract and reducing the per-set payment to $10 on weeknights. The AFC sued to force her into arbitration; she countersued, challenging the AFC’s right to act as a collective bargaining agent. The comics turned to SAG and AFTRA for help and were told there was nothing that could be done unless they affiliated with AGVA, which had jurisdiction in nightclubs. So, in January 1980, the AFC reversed its previous stance and voted unanimously and ap-prehensively to affiliate with AGVA, which, sure enough, did little more than collect dues for the next two years. After months of hearings, the NLRB finally ruled in January 1982 that the comedians who worked at the Comedy Store were independent contractors rather than employees and, as such, were “not qualified for NLRB protection.” By that time, the AFC was broke and owed its lawyers nearly $40,000. It struggled on for more than a year after that, with Chairman Susan Sweetzer and a handful of other unpaid officers spending the bulk of their time dealing with grievances and complaints from a dwindling and increasingly unappreciative membership. But the movement to unionize the stand-up comics of America ultimately proved to be an insurrection of the moment, and on some unremembered date in 1984, the organization that Steve Lubetkin died trying to save simply ceased to exist.

The principal lasting effect of the 1979 strike is that it ended the era of comedians working for free. Even though Mitzi Shore repudiated the contract and reduced the amount per set, she continued to pay the comics who performed on her stages, to the extent that a regular could earn as much as $200 to $300 a week.

Budd Friedman and the owners of Catch a Rising Star and the Comic Strip in New York grudgingly went along with the new reality, and purely “showcase” clubs disappeared from the entertainment landscape.

The end of the strike coincided with an explosion in the popularity of live comedy around the country. By the dawn of the 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 255

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new decade, new comedy clubs had opened in San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Boston, Toronto, Vancouver, and Edmonton. Southern California soon boasted a total of sixteen paying clubs, including the Laugh Factory, located less than half a mile down Sunset Strip from the Comedy Store. The Laugh Factory was launched shortly after the strike by a nineteen-year-old wannabe comic named Jamie Masada, who had walked the picket line. On the club’s opening night, Masada charged fifty cents at the door and divided up the proceeds among the performers. But the first performer to take the stage, Richard Pryor, refused his share and instead handed Masada a $100 bill and said,

“Pay your rent.”

Within a couple of years of the strike, there were an estimated three hundred comedy clubs in the United States. Seventeen of those were branches of the Improv, licensed by Budd Friedman and his new one-third partner Mark Lonow. That many clubs created an unprecedented demand for talent, which put comics with diplomas from the Comedy Store and the Los Angeles Improv in a previously unimaginable position of power, able to command what they started calling “stupid money.” As Lonow explained,

“A new club would open with a neophyte owner that the comics knew didn’t know anything, and a comic making $2,500 a week would ask for $10,000, and they’d settle for $8,000, and six months later the club would be out of business.”

“The strike was a great lesson for how to conduct your career, in terms of being a business person and learning how things work, and getting a little gumption to stand up for yourself and knowing what things are worth, and how to put a contract together and negotiate,” said Elayne Boosler. “It was sort of a jumping off point.”

It wasn’t just the headliners who did well. Lesser-knowns such as Jo Anne Astrow, Dottie Archibald, Susan Sweetzer, Jimmy Aleck, Ollie Joe Prater, and Lue Deck joined the legion of standup “road warriors” who spent the 1980s making a damn good living telling jokes in water-tank towns across America.

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It wasn’t all good times, of course. Some of the new club owners made Mitzi and Budd seem cuddly in comparison. “There was a club in Tempe, Arizona, where the owners were all drug dealers, and no one ever got paid because their checks always bounced,”

recalled Elayne Boosler. “I was determined to get paid, so when the guy said, ‘I’m going to announce you now,’ I said, ‘But I haven’t been paid yet.’ He said ‘later,’ and I said, ‘No, now, or I don’t go on. Or maybe I’ll just go out there and tell them
why
I’m not going on and what you do to comics, and I sure hope you have fire insurance.’ He said, ‘Just a minute,’ and he came running back in a few minutes with a vial of cocaine and said, ‘Can I pay you with this?’ I said, ‘Only if you buy it back from me after my set.’ He said, ‘I don’t have the cash.’ I said, ‘Well, go get it.’

And he got it and gave it to me, and then he said, ‘Don’t you want me to put that in the safe while you go on?’ I said, ‘How stupid do I look?’

“I realized then why Henny Youngman always stood with his hand on his side—to make sure the money was still there,” she laughed. “I became notorious for not going on stage without first getting paid in full in cash. It all went back to the strike.”

The major downside of the strike was that it killed the camaraderie that had characterized the LA stand-up community for at least half a decade. “That was all gone,” said Argus Hamilton.

Tom Dreesen never went back to performing at the Comedy Store. Neither did Elayne Boosler, Dottie Archibald, Jo Anne Astrow, Marsha Warfield, Bill Kirchenbauer, or Murray Langston, the Unknown Comic. In some cases, the choice was theirs; in others, it was Shore’s. For Richard Lewis, the idea of returning to the ground where Steve died was just too painful. George Miller went back only once: He stopped in for a drink on Halloween night 1979, and Shore immediately dispatched Ollie Joe Prater to throw him out. David Letterman, who had been performing at Sunset sporadically, never returned after that. Jay Leno continued 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 257

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to work at Sunset for some months after the strike, but it wasn’t like the old days. “I just go in, do my job, get my money, say thank you, and leave,” he told the
Los Angeles Times
in February 1980. “I used to hang out, but I don’t anymore. I try not to associate.” The
Times
quoted a “source close to Shore” as saying, “David and all those people are missed. They all used to hang out in the hallway, and Mitzi would sit back there talking with them. It used to be a lot of fun to come to work. But it’s so different now. It’s really a shame. This used to be the greatest place in town.”

The Improv became the hangout of choice for the comics who had sided with the CFC, and the two clubs turned into mutually exclusive encampments. The strikebreakers were not welcome at the Improv; the same held for the strike leaders at the Comedy Store. Only Robin Williams and Andy Kaufman felt free to float between stages without fear of offending either Budd or Mitzi, whose animus toward one another increased after the strike.

Shore bitterly resented that Friedman had managed to come off as a hero to the striking comics at her expense. “I don’t like the man,” she told the
Los Angeles Times
in 1982, at the same time admitting that they had never even spoken. “I don’t think we are potential friends,” he responded dryly.*

Shore was also rankled by the fact that Friedman and Lonow had leapfrogged her by launching the successful cable series
An
Eve ning at the Improv
in 1980 (it would run for eleven years and help make both men rich). Despite her early jump into the medium—via her consulting deal with ABC and the club’s hosting of HBO’s
Young Comedians
specials in 1979 and 1980—in the decade following the strike, Shore had a hand in producing only two Comedy Store “anniversary” specials (the eleventh and fifteenth)

*“Did You Hear the One About Budd and Mitzi? ”
Los Angeles Times
, October 31, 1982.

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