I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (31 page)

Inside the club, Argus Hamilton watched as Mitzi looked out the window and took it all in. Her shoulders sagged, and her chin dropped to her chest. Emotionally devastated by what she could only interpret as an act of personal betrayal, she looked so small he thought she might disappear.

“
This page left intentionally blank.
”

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 211

The Union Forever?

The next morning, Mitzi Shore blinked.

In a hastily arranged interview with the
Los Angeles Times
, she announced, “Against my better judgment, I have conceded to pay the comics in the Original Room. It is my third and final offer to them.”

Her offer was $25 per set, except for the first three acts Tuesday through Thursday nights, which would feature “beginners,” who would therefore work for free. Performers in the Main Room would be paid $35 per set on Friday and Saturday nights. At Westwood, all comics would work for free except one featured performer per week, who would be paid $200.

The offer far exceeded what any of the comics had imagined back in January. For regulars, it would mean not only gas money but also a car payment, with maybe a little left over for part of the rent, a veritable windfall. But things had changed since that first New Year’s morning bitch session. After hours spent together on the picket line and in CFC meetings and strategy sessions, the comics of the Comedy Store had bonded in a way that they hadn’t from smoking dope in the parking lot and shooting the shit all night at Canter’s deli. A group conscience had taken root, 211

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 212

212

William Knoedelseder

a sense of common purpose beyond being funny and making it in Hollywood.

Some of them saw Mitzi’s offer as potentially divisive because paying certain performers in the Original Room and not others would ratchet up the tension and jealousy already inherent in the competition for good time slots. By the same token, the whole vibe at Westwood would likely change if one act was designated as the star and all the others were just bit players. You could kiss camaraderie good-bye. As for Shore’s proposal for the Main Room, $35 a set seemed like a pittance. A full house brought in more than $2,000 in cover charges, so she was offering less than 10 percent of the door on a good night.

The CFC leaders saw something else in Shore’s offer, a chink in her armor, a sign that she was weakening, maybe even scared. So, they decided to push that perceived advantage at a CFC meeting at the Improv that evening. With the media in attendance, Tom Dreesen chose not to put discussion of Shore’s proposal at the top of the agenda. Instead, members first heard from a business representative from the American Guild of Variety Artists. AGVA claimed jurisdiction in the employment of nightclub performers, but since the days that Buddy Hackett referred to on
The Tonight
Show
, the union’s paying membership had comprised mostly performers at theme parks, ice shows, and circuses. Floyd Ackerman made a pitch for CFC affiliation with his union, noting that such an alliance would lend the support of the Associated Actors and Artists of America, or 4A, unions, which included the Screen Actors Guild, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the American Federation of Musicians Local 47, the International Alliance of Theater and Stage Employees Local 33, the Screen Extras Guild, and the Actors Equity Association. He boasted that an alliance with AGVA would also lend Teamster support to their picket line. “A club can’t sell liquor that isn’t delivered,” he said.

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 213

I’m Dying Up Here

213

The room did not warm to Ackerman, however, partly because of AGVA’s reputation for putting small clubs out of business in the past and partly because Ackerman came off as an old-line union hack from Central Casting. As he spoke, you could see noses turning up all around the room as if they smelled feet. After Ackerman got into a particularly heated exchange with comedian Kip Addotta, who all but called him and his union a bunch of goons, the comics voted almost unanimously against affiliation with AGVA. (Ackerman lived up to AGVA’s reputation the next day when he sent a note to Dreesen that said,

“You might advise Mr. Addotta that he has awakened a sleeping dragon and therein I will watch with great interest any engagement of his that is not covered by an AGVA contract.”) After Ackerman, Dreesen introduced a labor-relations attorney named Frederic Richman, who got a much better reception when he told the group, “Believe it or not, you have greater strength than Mitzi Shore does.” Dreesen then read another telegram of support from Bob Hope:

Dear Fellow Comedians,

Really, you want to be paid for your services? Hey, I don’t mind working for nothing. . . . I also don’t mind root canal work.

The tired old line elicited a loud groan from the crowd. Comedian Jerry Van Dyke drew a much more enthusiastic response when he stood up and pledged 100 percent of the cover charges at his recently opened club in Encino.

The meeting was two hours old before Shore’s proposal came up for discussion and voting, and by that time, more than a dozen comics had left. Much of the discussion centered on Mitzi and her presumed millions, with one comic describing the Comedy Store as “a huge conglomerate bringing in tons and tons of money.”

Emily Levine defended Shore. “I’m in favor of a comedians’ union, 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 214

214

William Knoedelseder

of comics owning their own product and getting paid for what they do, but I will not join the picket line because the Comedy Store is not a target I would pick as my main enemy,” she said. “It seems to me that there is an element here that looks at it as a win-lose situation, and the only victory is to bring her to her knees. Well, I can’t ally with that. She’s done marvelous things for comedians, and I think her true commitment is there.”

“I don’t think she cares about the comics at all,” countered Murray Langston, a club owner himself.

Steve Bluestein replied, “I don’t know. When I was in the hospital, she sent me flowers, and no one else did.”

In the end, despite some dissent, the comedians rejected Shore’s final offer by a strong majority. Elayne Boosler summed it all up with the dramatic pronouncement, “The power has been broken” (a line George Miller would tease her about for the next twenty years).

In speaking to a reporter after the meeting, Dreesen made it sound as if the CFC had already moved beyond the strike. “The Comedy Store settlement is the least important thing,” he said.

“The organization of the CFC is the most important. What we plan to do will last forever and ever.”

Among the plans he ticked off were a single booking agency for comics at all clubs in the Los Angeles area, a Hall of Fame for stand-up comedy, a comedy advisory board for the television networks, acting classes for comics, and “a central office to record and protect our material and to run charitable projects.”

Of course, the whole evening—the media presence, the stack-ing of the agenda, the CFC plans for “forever and ever”—was part of a performance that he had choreographed to play to an audience of one: Mitzi Shore. He wanted her to read about it in the
Los Angeles Times
the next morning and conclude that the tables finally had turned and she now needed them more than they needed her. “This group of comedians has the power to make any club owner a millionaire,” he said. “We did it for her, and if necessary, we can do it for someone else.”

1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 215

I’m Dying Up Here

215

In fact, aside from the picketing, lining up new venues where members could perform was the CFC’s primary endeavor. It was the comedy equivalent of keeping the kids off the street and out of trouble. The Improv was a great alternative to the Sunset Store, but it could not satisfy the demand for stage time created by the ever-growing number of comics and would-be comics. As David Letterman joked, “We now have an overload in this field. We should put some sort of patrol at the Arizona border to keep more from coming.” But seriously, it was a big problem for the CFC

membership committee, which was grappling with the question, How do we decide who can be a member and who can’t? What if, for example, some kid fresh from Akron was the next Robin Williams just waiting to happen? Did they want him auditioning for Mitzi on Monday night?

Fortunately, the CFC’s “new club committee” was having some success hooking up its idled labor force with entrepreneurs who realized that comedy was about the cheapest form of live entertainment to produce. As Jay Leno often said, “All you really need is a comic, a microphone, and a few tables and chairs. And people like to laugh as much as they do anything else. It’s not like you’re making them watch jai alai.”

The CFC signed up the Plaza Four restaurant in Century City, which agreed to let the comics keep 100 percent of the cover charges in its newly anointed Comedians’ Room. Humperdinck’s in Santa Monica also pledged 100 percent of the door. Comedian Jackie Mason committed to splitting the cover charges and bar revenue on a fifty-fifty basis at a new club he was planning to open. The Continental Hyatt House, the Comedy Store’s next door neighbor on Sunset, announced that it would begin featuring paid comics in the hotel’s lounge on weeknights.

Jerry Van Dyke was hoping that Mitzi’s problems would save him from having to shut down his San Fernando Valley club, which was featuring “name” entertainment at a cost of $8,000 a week and losing money as a result. He agreed to let the CFC set 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 216

216

William Knoedelseder

the price of admission. He asked in return only that the comics sign an exclusivity agreement not to perform at any other club within a one-mile radius. The exclusivity agreement was not aimed at Shore but rather at Michael Callie, owner of the Laff Stop in Newport Beach, who had invested $300,000 in a new club scheduled to open right next door to his in October. “So he won’t have any comics, which is fine with me,” said Van Dyke.

The strike was already having an unintended negative effect at one paying club in the area, the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, whose owner, Mike Lacey, was particularly well-liked by the comics. But Lacey had been experiencing a falloff in business since the strike began, and the only explanation he could come up with was that the public, seeing comics on the news complaining about not getting paid, assumed that he was not paying them either. “I wouldn’t have been losing money for months if I hadn’t been paying my comics,” Lacey said in a newspaper interview. “But I don’t feel you can charge a cover and not pay the performers.”

Laff Stop owner Michael Callie worried about the future of clubs like his if the comics succeeded in breaking Mitzi because he used the Comedy Store and the Improv as his farm club. “I don’t let anyone perform here unless I’ve seen them at one of those clubs first,” he would tell new comics looking for a spot. “I don’t like disasters on stage.”

Callie counseled the comics who worked for him to be careful what they wished for, saying of the CFC, “I’m afraid they are opening up a can of worms. The idea of showcase acts being paid is an idea whose time has come, but if Mitzi has to pay all those acts, then she is going to have to run that club as a business. Before, she didn’t. And if they thought she had too much power before, just wait ’til they see how much she has now. Once Mitzi has to start paying, she’ll have to figure, Why should I pay some kid who has ten minutes of material? It’s going to cut off the kids at the bottom, the ones that really need to work. They won’t get the 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 217

I’m Dying Up Here

217

time slots, and they won’t develop.” His words would prove prophetic in the weeks to come.

In its search for new venues, the CFC approached Shore’s former partners in the original Comedy Store in the San Diego area.

Wayne Blackman and T. D. Hayes had operated a Comedy Store branch in the basement of their Pacific Beach restaurant from 1976 to 1978, after which they parted ways with Shore because of disagreements over admission prices and expenses. Blackman and Hayes then opened another small club, featuring one paid comic a night along with singers and magicians. Shore promptly opened the La Jolla Store and launched a campaign to run Blackman and Hayes out of business. All the comics who had signed on with them suddenly backed out, telling Blackman and Hayes that Mitzi had decreed if they worked for them, then they couldn’t work for her. Shore dispatched her comics to the competitors’

parking lot on opening night to hand out Comedy Store fliers.

The new club quickly failed for lack of professional-grade comics.

So, when the CFC asked Blackman if he would reopen the club if they got 150 comics to work there, he replied, “Only one way: If Mitzi Shore wasn’t operating in San Diego, and if she wrote me a letter giving her blessings. I don’t want to compete with her,” he said, “because she is tough, and we’re not that tough. She is the law—judge, jury and legislature.”

Shore may have blinked in her fight with the CFC, but she didn’t buckle. Upon receiving the news that the comics had rejected her offer, she went to court and obtained an injunction limiting the picketing outside the club to twenty people, with no more than two picketers allowed within ten feet of the entrance.

The following day, the CFC presented her with a counterpro-posal to her “final offer.” As announced simultaneously by Ken Browning, it went along with Shore’s proposed $25 per set in the Original Room but called for equal payment at Westwood, with a guaranteed eighteen paid spots and two unpaid newcomer spots on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday nights and eleven 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 218

218

William Knoedelseder

paid sets (and no unpaid sets) on Friday and Saturday nights. In addition, the comics wanted a guarantee of eight $25-sets per night in the Belly Room and 50 percent of cover charges in the Main Room. Browning said the proposal represented a “substantial reduction” compared to the comics’ previous demands. For Shore, it represented a substantial increase in labor costs, from nothing to at least $3,500 a week. She wasted little time rejecting the comics’ proposal. In a letter addressed to Dreesen and Leno (whom she perceived to be the strike’s ringleaders) and posted on the Comedy Store bulletin board, she announced a new pay policy at Westwood and Sunset. The clubs “will remain workshops and showcases during the week,” she said, but on weekends, “because of the professional levels the Stores have attained, all performers will be paid.” The pay would be $25 per set. In the Belly Room, one featured act would be paid for two sets per night on the weekend, while all other performances would be unpaid.