I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era
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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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on HBO and one four-episode series, The Girls of the Comedy Store, for the Playboy Channel. Associates blame her difficult personality and “control issues” for the fact that she was not able to capitalize further on her access to the world’s best stand-up comics. “She wanted to produce, but the networks didn’t want her to produce because they saw her as a nightclub owner,” said Mike Binder. “So instead of becoming a great nightclub owner, she became a really pissed off failed producer.”
Binder’s own experience is indicative. In 1985, when he was still working as a regular at Sunset, he made an independent film called The Detroit Comedy Jam, which he sold to HBO. Shore was
“livid” that he hadn’t involved her or the club, he said. “She thought I had no right doing that. She wanted to control me. So she fired me from the club, even threatened to call the police if I didn’t leave immediately.” And so ended their relationship.
“Mitzi’s talent was creating an environment that nourished this new comedy, but she wasn’t able to adapt and let [the comedians]
go and not own them,” Binder said. “She felt like she wasn’t getting her piece.”
Although the Westwood Comedy Store closed on January 1, 1984, the Sunset club continued as the dominant venue for stand-up comedy in the Los Angeles area into the early 1990s, helping launch the careers of Louis Anderson, Jim Carrey, Rose -
anne Barr, Paul Rodriguez, “Bobcat” Goldwaith, Pee Wee Herman, Whoopi Goldberg, Andrew “Dice” Clay, Sam Kinison, and, of course, Pauly Shore.
Meanwhile, success, the road, and time gradually took a toll on the club’s 1970s graduates. Letterman and Leno remained friends for a dozen years after the strike, albeit at a distance since the old gang didn’t go to Canter’s anymore, and Dave had moved out to Malibu for a couple of years before relocating to New York to host Late Night on NBC. Prior to The Tonight Show imbroglio in 1991, their get-togethers were pretty much confined to Leno’s appearances on Letterman’s show, which were notable for their 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 259
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apparent mutual affection. If they have talked since, none of their friends are aware of it.
Richard Pryor nearly burned to death while free-basing cocaine in June 1980, suffering third-degree burns over 50 percent of his body. He made a triumphant return to the stage in 1982 in a performance filmed at the Hollywood Palladium and released on video (and later DVD) as Richard Pryor Live on Sunset Strip, but he never again reached his previous creative heights. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1996, he gave a handful of alternately brilliant and heart-wrenching performances at the Comedy Store in the late 1990s and died in 2005.
Robin Williams’s drug use became public in 1982 when it was revealed, in the course of a police investigation, that he had visited John Belushi’s bungalow at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Strip the night the Saturday Night Live star died of an overdose.
Williams was not accused of any wrongdoing, but the incident was a major personal and professional embarrassment for the then star of a PG-rated network TV series. He later admitted that he was addicted to cocaine and alcohol during those years and went through twenty years of so-called white knuckle sobriety (meaning without professional help) before entering rehab for treatment of alcoholism in 2006.
Several other regulars in the late-night parties at Mitzi’s house subsequently saw their lives and careers affected by substance abuse, including Mike Binder, Biff Maynard, Ollie Joe Prater, and Argus Hamilton. Following the strike, Hamilton commenced a three-year romantic relationship with Shore that Comedy Store insiders characterized as volatile due to drug and alcohol use.
Shore eventually helped him get sober, and in 1998 she announced the foundation of the Comedian’s Drug and Alcohol Abuse Foundation, “a nonprofit charitable corporation formed to provide counseling, medical care and financial assistance to aspir-ing young comedians who are trying to overcome drug and alcohol abuse problems.” Shore and Hamilton were on the board of 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 260
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directors, and among the twenty-five members of the “honorary committee” were, ironically, George Miller and Ollie Joe Prater.
The latter died of a massive stroke in 1992 at the age of forty-four and weighing a reported four hundred–plus pounds. A joke often repeated by his fellow comics and attributed to Charlie Hill goes,
“What did Ollie Joe die from? Room service.”
As the 1980s wore on, the vibe at the Sunset Store grew louder, darker, druggier, and more dangerous, thanks in no small part to the influence of the club’s resident muse, Sam Kinison, whose appetite for guns and cocaine led to instances of shots being fired in the Main Room, the lobby, and the comics’ house on Crest Hill Drive. Kinison was famously quoted as saying of his favorite drug, “There is no happy ending to cocaine. You either die, go to jail, or else you run out.” In April 1992, he was driving his supercharged Pontiac Trans Am to a sold-out gig in Laughlin, Nevada, when he was killed in a head-on collision with a pickup truck. He reportedly had cocaine, prescription tranquilizers, and codeine in his system when he died.
Kinison was the last big star born at the Comedy Store. After his death, the club went into a long, slow decline artistically and financially. According to the Los Angeles Times, in recent years, Shore has borrowed money against the club as well as her house to meet operating expenses, and she has experienced “persistent problems with delinquency on tax and mortgage payments.”*
Today, the Laugh Factory stands in stark contrast to Mitzi Shore’s crumbled comedy empire. The West Hollywood club is a favorite among comics because owner Jamie Masada pays far more than anyone else—$60 per set, compared to the Improv’s $17.50 and the Comedy Store’s $12.50—and claims no credit for any comic’s success. “For me to say that someone wouldn’t have
*“Echo of Laughter,” Los Angeles Times, June 22, 2003.
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made it if not for me would be like saying that if I hadn’t given you this pencil then you would never have been able to write,”
he said. “I haven’t ‘made’ anyone. I’ve made money from them.
“Most of what I learned from Mitzi about being a club owner was what not to do, and one thing you cannot do is hold the talent down,” he said. “I think the reason so many people did not want to go back there is that she tried too much to control it. She wanted them to be her comics.”
The Laugh Factory was George Miller’s principal performing home during the final years of his life, so it was fitting that his memorial was held there. Many of the comics present had attended the sixtieth birthday party Elayne Boosler threw for him the year before. (George didn’t show up for that gathering either, but he did call Elayne in the middle of it to see how things were going.) Some, however, had not been in the same room together since before the picket lines went up, and there was some initial uneasiness as former strike leaders and strikebreakers paid their respects to Miller, if not to one another.
After the memorial, Mike Binder acknowledged the hard feelings some still held. “Crossing the picket line is definitely a dark mark on my life,” he said. “I never should have done that.” He has tried to make amends. A few years ago, he ran into Tom Dreesen in a club, and according to both men, they went outside to talk. “I said, ‘Tommy, I was wrong. I made a mistake. I should have been in your corner.’ I saw on his face it was over at that moment. I’ve said the same thing to Jay, but I think he still harbors some resent-ment. We’re friendly, but we’ve never been good buddies again. I used to be good friends with Elayne Boosler, too, and we haven’t said five words to one another since.”
“I have no problem with Mike because he came to me like a man and said he made a mistake,” said Dreesen. Nor does he hold a grudge against Argus Hamilton “because he was always a gentleman, and he was in love with the woman, so what was he going to 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 262
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do.” Regarding Garry Shandling, the only strikebreaker who went on to achieve bona fide stardom, Dreesen said, “I wish him all the success in the world. He’s a funny guy and a good writer, but as a human being, as a man, I don’t have any respect for him.”
For Richard Lewis, the scene at the Laugh Factory called to mind the memorial for Steve Lubetkin at Humperdinck’s in June 1979. “If it makes Steve’s soul feel any better, his last act wasn’t heroic, but what he stood for was unbelievably heroic because he believed so deeply in the journey of an artist,” he said. “And he is now forever linked to us as a symbol for this struggle. It’s bigger than any three-year sitcom run he might have gotten. Steve sym-bolizes the journey of an artist and how hard it is for everybody.
Steve is forever linked to us who knew him in a more powerful and important way than he ever dreamed he would be.”
And, of course, the Miller memorial sparked considerable conversation among his peers about the owner of the club down the street who once had him escorted off the premises and banished.
“I don’t hold any bad feelings, just disappointment and sadness,”
said Jay Leno. “And I don’t dislike Mitzi. I just don’t understand what made it go bad. It wouldn’t have taken much to hold everybody’s heart. I would have loved to be able to go back to the Comedy Store, but it’s like that old saying, ‘You can do anything for the person you used to love except love them again.’”
“In retrospect, as much as I think Mitzi mishandled it, she did say, ‘Money is going to fuck everything up for you guys,’ and she was truly not wrong,” said Mike Binder, who has written and directed several critically acclaimed feature films, including The Upside of Anger, starring Kevin Costner and Joan Allen. “When we were working for free because we loved it and wanted to be good, it was wonderful. It wasn’t until we realized that she was making a lot of money and we could, too, that everything changed.”
Not everything. After a recent taping of The Late Show, David Letterman was eating pizza in his lawyer’s office and reminiscing with Tom Dreesen, who had appeared as he does frequently, not 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 263
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as a stand-up guest but rather as an “old friend of the show,”
much the way Leno did in the 1980s. Dreesen was still dressed in the elegant gray suit and tie he’d worn on camera, while Letterman had changed into a baggy sweatshirt, gym shorts, and sneakers with no socks. Notoriously press shy, Dave had agreed to sit for his second press interview in nearly a decade only because Tom had asked him to.
“How long has it been since we’ve seen each other, Bill? ” he inquired of the interviewer.
“Twenty-eight years, Dave,” came the reply.
Another old friend from the Comedy Store days, Johnny Dark, had stopped by the Ed Sullivan Theater earlier to tape a comedy segment for an upcoming Late Show, on which he appears frequently in the character of “the oldest CBS page,” a dim-wit whose career spans thirty-nine years. “You know, if George were here, he’d have left fifteen minutes ago,” Dave joked.
Even though Letterman is now the alpha dog careerwise by dint of hosting a network show continuously since 1982, his relationship with Dreesen remains remarkably the same as when they were young pups shooting hoops at the San Fernando Valley YMCA, with Dave still deferring to Tom as a kind of wiser big brother. At one point in the discussion, they disagreed about an incident during the strike.
“With all due respect, I don’t think that happened,” Letterman said.
“I swear on my children it did,” Dreesen responded.
“Well, I don’t recall it exactly that way,” Letterman said to the interviewer, grinning sheepishly and only half joking, “but I’ll go with whatever Tom says .”
Dreesen looks back on the comedian’s strike as perhaps his greatest career achievement, his professional legacy. “I’m proud of what we accomplished,” he said. “Young comics have come up to me over the years and said, ‘Somebody told me you used to work for free. Is that right?’ I say, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ And they say, 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 264
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‘Man, the first time I ever went on stage I got paid.’ I say, ‘Really?
That’s great.’ And they don’t know what happened.”
Letterman, typically, downplays his own role in the events. “I wanted to do what my friends were doing,” he said. “I thought my friendships were more important than the other issues, so I could not not support the strike. I thought this is what you do. It’s part of being an adult. You see the way the landscape is, and you embrace it.”
As for Mitzi Shore, “I was in awe of her and still am to this day by virtue of the operation she ran, the fact that she could build this machine, this retail comedy establishment,” he said. “If I were to put together a list of the people who have helped me, it would be a very long list, but she would certainly be at the top of it. But as good as she was to all of us, the world is a two-way street, and I would hope that she doesn’t harbor any bad feelings.
“I have undying affection for those times and for all those people,” he said, “because the older I get, the more I realize that they were the best times of my adult life.”
It’s a sentiment shared by nearly all the people who were interviewed for this book. In the rosy glow of remembrance, they see the latter part of the 1970s in Los Angeles as their version of Paris in the 1920s, a time of astonishing creativity and unprecedented camaraderie in the singular world of stand-up comedy.
“People helped each other,” recalled Jamie Masada. “I remember working at the Blah Blah Café with Robin Williams and David Letterman, and when I came off the stage, Robin sat
me down and gave some notes, and Letterman started fixing my jokes. You don’t see that anymore.”
As TV, movie, and nightclub performers in the latter part of the twentieth century, they have traveled the world performing in front of untold millions of people and lived, by most accounts, colorful, eventful lives. And yet, an odd little woman who ran a dark little nightclub on Sunset Strip when they were young re-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 265
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mains perhaps the most indelible character in their collective memory bank.
Why? The answer may be buried deep in the sixty-page National Labor Relations Board ruling that sounded the death knell for the comedian’s union. Noting the Comedy Store’s “dominant position as the best-known purveyor of comedic talent” at the time and Shore’s personal control over “the greatest number of performance opportunities” in the marketplace, the administra-tive law judge in the case cited as “persuasively descriptive” the testimony of hearing witness Mark Lonow:
When you are beginning a career in which every fiber of your ego, your self-esteem, your entire fantasy life of who you are and who you are going to become is involved, and there is only one path—one way—to make it, in your mind, and that is through the Comedy Store, then the person who owns the Comedy Store becomes an all-encompassing dictator. Whether or not it is true is almost irrelevant to a person trying to become a regular at the Comedy Store to fulfill their fantasy of being a great star. What Mitzi Shore says is the law. It isn’t that she requests or indicates.
The mere fact that the thought passes through her mind, in ninety-nine percent of the cases, becomes the law in your life. It is very hard to explain what an entertainer goes through; what an artist whose emotional life is totally involved with the need for success, what goes through their being when someone who they believe controls their destiny says something to them.
Apparently, once you are placed at the mercy of that level of personal power, it is difficult, if not impossible, to forget it.
If it’s any comfort to comics who labored in her service those many years ago, Mitzi Shore is the prisoner of her own memories.