by Mike Thomas
Phil had been at his H&G drafting table for only a couple of years, though, when he began to grow creatively if silently restless. He was constantly under the gun to meet deadlines and cooped up inside when he preferred to be out. Consequently, as stir-craziness worsened, he began searching for what he later termed a “psychological release.” As luck or fate would have it, one awaited him just minutes down the road.
Chapter 5
Phil as Lightman, Groundlings, late 1970s. (Photo by John H. Mayer)
By the mid-1970s Phil had established himself as a top-notch graphic designer and was making a decent living at it. He’d conjured fanciful album art for Poco, America, and Crosby, Stills & Nash. He’d even bought himself a little house on Norwich Avenue in Sherman Oaks, where he hung John Wayne’s first studio portrait on his bedroom wall and planted azalea bushes that never grew quite right. Besides his work for Hartmann & Goodman, he began tinkering around with ideas for a comic strip based on the exploits of a masked aviation hero named “Don Patrol.”
But the long and solitary artist’s hours wore on him. Despite his introspective nature, Phil craved more frequent human contact and feedback from a live audience, be it on a beach or in a theater. He also yearned for creative diversion—“a social outlet” that would enable him to expand his artistic horizons, ideally while meeting available females. And if it led to bigger things professionally, that was all the better. “I didn’t want to wake up at sixty and discover that life had passed me by and I was still doing the same thing,” he later said. “What’s the good of having big dreams if you’re afraid to see where they lead?”
And so he searched and finally found. One weekend night in 1975, his future was made clearer during a birthday party for Phil’s friend Steve Small in East Hollywood. Revelers packed all thirty basement-level seats of the Oxford Theatre, a tiny and rather run-down venue that housed a nascent improvisation group called the Groundlings—a nod to those cretins in Shakespeare’s Hamlet “who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise.” Having begun life as the Gary Austin Workshop in 1972, the Groundlings was officially established as a nonprofit in early 1974 and quickly became known as a training ground for up-and-coming talents—and a poaching ground for showbiz scouts from Hollywood and New York. Prior to launching Saturday Night Live in October 1975, the show’s executive producer Lorne Michaels hired Groundlings member Laraine Newman for his first cast. Besides Phil, the many others who followed in decades to come included Jon Lovitz, Julia Sweeney, Will Ferrell, Chris Kattan, Cheri Oteri, Will Forte, Chris Parnell, Maya Rudolph, and Kristen Wiig.
Before the birthday show, Austin was backstage prepping for the performance when laughter wafted in from out front. Curious as to who might be causing it, particularly since the show hadn’t started, a couple of his associates went to find out. Their reconnaissance report: a guy from the audience, whom they later learned was Phil, had hopped onstage to tell jokes and do impressions. Granted, the crowd was comprised of friendly faces, but Austin sensed that Phil was garnering genuine guffaws. And Phil surely knew it, for the sensation was by now a familiar one after his many gut-busting shtick sessions on Malibu beaches and elsewhere.
Right after the show, Phil approached Austin and asked how to join the troupe. It wasn’t difficult. At that point, and for the next few years (until the Groundlings School of Improvisation was formed in 1978), just about anyone could participate in workshops as long as they paid the $25 monthly dues. “We even had two hookers who joined and then got into a fight,” Austin says. “They left and never came back, so it was a crazy, bizarre circus.”
Singer and actress Jaye P. Morgan accompanied Phil to the birthday show and ended up joining the company as well. “It wasn’t an audition, per se,” she says of the tryout process. “They wanted you to come in and just riff on an idea and see how far you could go, so we both did that. It wasn’t that hard for me, and so it was amazingly easy for him.” Tracy Newman was wowed as well with Phil’s early improv acumen and self-assuredness. He was one of those people “who walked into the Groundlings ready,” she says. But there were still plenty of rough edges to smooth, so Phil happily immersed himself in weekday workshops while dutifully dressing stages or cleaning up after weekend revues at various venues around town.
“Laraine Newman was in the performing company and I was just dazzled by it,” Phil recalled of his first Groundlings experience. “I couldn’t believe the intellectual challenge of making something up as you went along. And I thought: ‘I’ve got to join that workshop.’ Also, I knew it was a way to meet ladies—I had taken acting class in high school for the same reason. So I joined.” He redesigned the Groundlings, logo, he said, in lieu of paying tuition.
Although the Groundlings had relocated in 1975 to bigger and better digs at 7307 Melrose Avenue, across the street from a porno theater, it took four conflict-laden years to resolve parking and building code issues with the city—issues that legally prevented the ninety-nine-seat space from opening to the public. Consequently, Austin’s growing gang performed in a number of venues, including the Improv on Melrose, where the group was in residency for several months, and the rickety White House theater on Pico Boulevard, where mushrooms sprouted from the carpet when it rained. Out of financial necessity Phil retained his position at Hartmann & Goodman, where on many Fridays Groundlings came to hang out with staffers and whichever rock stars happened to be on the premises. “It was pretty festive,” Goodman says. “The whole place was pretty much rockin’.”
At some point during Phil’s first couple of years with the Groundlings, he became disillusioned or bored or both and (not atypically, other Groundlings say) dropped out. It’s been fun, he told Austin, but I don’t want to be an actor. (He’d have several more bouts with self-doubt before his tenure there was up.) Austin, though, was chagrined; he knew Phil’s potential. “We were all very disappointed,” he says. “Because we knew he was very, very good and he was getting better all the time.”
Months went by during which Phil continued his graphic design work, began doing voice-overs for local radio spots and even recorded a comedy album, Flat TV, with the assistance of Small, musician pal Chad Stuart (of the musical duo Chad & Jeremy, John’s clients), and fellow Groundlings Phyllis Katz and Teresa Burton. According to Austin, he was lured back into the fold after participating in a cold-reading workshop that Austin held at his house to help actors hone their audition skills for television and film jobs. “It was the first time I had really ever seen an honest actor in Phil,” Austin says of the session. “And by that I mean he dealt with the truth of the moment, but there was no shtick and there were no broad characters. And he was just terrific.” Austin told him so and Phil was encouraged enough to rejoin the group.
In late April 1979, the Groundlings finally opened its first show on Melrose in an intimate 99-seat room the actors had personally revamped and populated with secondhand folding chairs. The space had previously housed an array of disparate establishments, including a furniture showroom, a gay bar, and a massage parlor. By that point, Phil had undergone nearly four years of training—and it showed. Plus, as he later explained, “certain people had dropped out of the company and now I was one of the stars of the show. I had what every actor needs to get a leg up: a showcase. Casting directors would come, as they would to the Comedy Store or the Improv, and I started to get some work. It slowly evolved from there.”
“The Groundlings on Melrose in Hollywood are something else,” wrote Gardner McKay, theater critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. “Their feet may be planted firmly on the ground, but their eyes are planted firmly on social decay (moral, media and religious) and sometimes even on the stars.” Others were equally upbeat. Among the two dozen sketches presented, McKay singled out Phil’s “extraterrestrial sage” named “Lightman” as one to watch. Flaunting his shirtless, surfing-buff torso (the ever body-conscious Phil then dabbled in weight-lifting as well), and wielding brightly beaming
flashlights in both hands, he wore a headband, a white tennis visor, and a homemade cardboard mask with rectangular openings for the eyes that resembled something out of Star Trek. Tight black pants and a utility belt outfitted with several more upward-aiming flashlights completed the ensemble. His act: shining a beam of light on random audience members and answering questions they were merely thinking.
The character also paid a visit to the offices of Hartmann & Goodman, leaving behind a cryptic missive that read: “This Office is Laser Ionized for Extra Hipness. Lightman.”
That same year Phil made what was very likely his first television appearance since The Lloyd Thaxton Show thirteen years earlier—on ABC’s The Dating Game. Fellow Groundlings Jaye P. Morgan and Paul Reubens scored future spots on the program as well, Reubens several months later and Morgan in 1980. Phil’s episode—hosted by Jim Lange and originating from the Chuck Barris Stages in Hollywood—presented him thusly: “Bachelor number three has actually designed the covers for over twenty-five bestselling record albums. He has appeared on over one hundred radio commercials. And they say he makes the best avocado sandwich in the world.” Phil’s competition for the potential affections of a singer-actor bachelorette from Texas—“the sensuous Gina Russell”—included a swinging dude in an orange shirt who made throat-clearing noises when asked what sound best described his love life. The other contestant, ring-a-ding-dinging in a black shirt accessorized with gold chains, made grunting noises to describe his appetite. When asked what sound best described his bank account, Phil responded, “Ooooooooh, baby.” Incidentally, he wore a tasteful (for the time) ensemble that included an ecru Hawaiian shirt under a tan blazer and brown slacks with matching shoes. His neatly coiffed light brown hair was wavy and full.
Gina: What road sign should I heed while dating you and why?
Phil: Uh, slippery when wet. (Audience cheers lasciviously.) No, no, no. They’ve got the wrong idea. I like to swim, and sometimes I get slippery.
Gina: Are you real athletic?
Phil: Very athletic.
Gina: So you’re real versatile.
Phil: Yes, and built something like a Greek god.
In the end, Gina chose “good ol’ number three”—Phil—saying that they seemed to have some things in common. But the pairing wasn’t to be. As Phil later revealed, Gina stood him up for their getaway to the Monterey Peninsula, “where the simplistic beauty of nature stands waiting, the ubiquitous vistas to awaken your romantic energy.…”
Regardless, it was good national exposure, and throughout Phil’s Groundlings tenure he landed small parts in mostly forgettable television commercials, shows, and in films: as a frenetic customer in an ad for Ice Hockey by ActiVision; as himself in director Brian Trenchard-Smith’s music-and-mayhem flick Stunt Rock (“a deathwish at 120 decibels!”); as various characters in Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo; as “man at airport with gun” on Chuck Barris’s The Gong Show Movie; in an unknown role on a short-lived sitcom called The Six O’Clock Follies (with Laurence Fishburne and Bill Paxton). Most prominently, Phil’s Chick Hazard made his first billed onscreen debut in the July 1980 sequel Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie. Voice-over work mounted as well, thanks in part to guidance from and associations with actor and Firesign Theatre co-founder Phil Proctor (the cover for his troupe’s 1980 musical album, Fighting Clowns, bears Phil’s handiwork) and popular radio personality Shadoe Stevens. One of Phil’s commercial characters during his short but intense stint with Stevens was a man named “Mr. Bimble,” whose voice Phil created by pulling his cheeks out while he spoke. “I’d never seen anybody do anything like that before,” Stevens says. “He looked like Plastic Man.” The late Kip King, a former Groundling and father of SNL alum Chris Kattan, reportedly was instrumental in getting Phil bit parts on Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon The Smurfs, which in 1981 began its nearly decade-long reign on NBC.
More than any of his other ventures, however, the Groundlings provided a creative sanctuary where Phil could try out new characters and premises to see what worked and what tanked. His experiences there proved psychologically insightful too, bringing out emotions that Phil had long surpressed—particularly ones from his sometimes puzzling and neglect-filled childhood, which he began to regard less rosily than before. As he later revealed, this period was the worst of his life—mentally, financially, and otherwise. Thankfully there was improv, an integral component of which is self-examination. For many practitioners it’s a form of public therapy. To some extent, Phil saw it that way, too. “I noticed in the beginning that a lot of my characters had a tremendous amount of rage,” he told interviewer Stanley Moss in 1991. “I had never had any therapeutic experience, but it was all welling up and coming out of me because I was in an environment where it was OK to do that … There’s something about rage: we all have it [but] too many of us don’t have a healthful way to express it. Mr. Henderson suddenly murders a guy in a bar, and he was the last guy you would have expected to do that. I’m convinced, from my therapeutic experiences recently, that we need wholesome ways of expressing our rage, or we suffer the effects of disease that are incumbent upon repression.”
Groundlings co-founder Tracy Newman—who went on to write for Cheers and Ellen, and co-create ABC’s sitcom According to Jim—was especially taken with Phil’s unwavering commitment to the work. He had those qualities right from the start, she says, even when his skills were raw. “I don’t know if he understood it intellectually, but maybe he understood what he wanted to see, so he knew how to do it,” she says. “There’s nothing that makes an audience more comfortable than a committed performer, and he was the most extreme committed performer. It also made him really desirable in terms of being onstage with him … Because it didn’t really matter what you did. He never said ‘no’ onstage and he always made you look good.”
Although Phil was no genius in Newman’s eyes, nor was he especially original in his approach or characters, his utter commitment begat brilliance. Groundlings cast member and teacher Phyllis Katz talks of Phil going “to his own planet” while performing, during the process of which there was “no room for monitoring himself.” Onstage, she says, his normally reserved personality was turbo-charged. An uncanny ability to exist in the moment and an instinct for knowing when to remain still or underplay a part also helped Phil’s sketches shine. Audiences quickly took note.
But offstage, some observed, Phil’s magnetism diminished. “There was no there, there,” Tracy Newman says, though not pejoratively, of Phil’s search for his own identity. Moreover, he often seemed preoccupied and could come across as distant or disconnected. “The first time I saw him onstage it was obvious that he was a star. But as a person, no.” Former Groundling John Paragon attributes some of that distance to the fact that Phil led a separate and in ways more grown-up life outside the theater. He had a full-time job doing important and nationally regarded work when most of his compatriots were laboring at temp gigs or waiting tables.
And Phil was always immersing himself in various books or practicing other disciplines—sailing, guitar playing, and whatever else piqued his interest. “He’d have a character, and he’d also have this wealth of technical knowledge [about that character],” Katz says. “Or, if he didn’t know and was making it up, you couldn’t be sure.” When it came to his beloved sailing, however, Phil never had to fake it. “Sometimes on weekends he’d just go to the beach and rent a boat,” Katz remembers. “It was cheap, and he said it brought him peace.”
Because everyone at the Groundlings regularly participated in workshops, Phil learned from those who came before him such as Austin, (Tracy) Newman, Katz, and Maxwell. “They may be competitive but they’re also very supportive,” Paul Reubens (aka Pee-wee Herman) has said of his former troupe. “The opposite of that was the Comedy Store, where everyone’s out for themselves. The Groundlings was a workshop with people who wanted everyone else to succeed.” Impressively for Phil’s lack of experience, characters and sketch ideas generally cam
e easily though rarely performance-ready.
And no matter what scene he was in, you could always count on Phil to make it sing. Alan Cranis, who managed the box office, recalls Maxwell’s quipping about Phil’s indispensability. If he could put Phil in a concrete box to keep him safe from accidents or illness, Maxwell said, he would. That value as a utility player, someone who could be counted on in all scenarios, would eventually serve Phil well in other professional endeavors. “He really belonged in England, where even the butler character is worked out in detail,” Tracy Newman says. “It didn’t matter what role Phil was playing, he would get out there and do it to the best of his ability and with a great deal of depth.”
One of the funniest pieces Dozier saw Phil perform had its debut during a so-called “scene night,” when material was showcased for an invite-only audience. This was pre-1979, when the theater had yet to be approved for paid public consumption. As a result, attendees were asked to sign waivers releasing the group from any liability should they become injured while on the premises—by, say, a crazed sniper named Norman Garrison. Played by Phil as a sweaty, twitchy, sleep-deprived nutcase clutching a vintage World War II carbine and wearing authentic soldier’s garb, the jarring and offbeat Garrison nearly caused hemorrhaging. “I remember laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe,” Dozier says. “It’s the first time I saw people actually rolling in the aisles.”
As Phil began to shine onstage, John Hartmann talked up his younger brother to contacts around town. “It was our mission to get Phil discovered,” John’s ex-wife Lexie Slavich says. “And so we would [meet with] every agent and producer that we could get our hands on, we’d wine and dine them, then we’d go to the Groundlings and watch the show. And afterwards, we’d take them to meet Phil.”