During that time I saw a stripper who was her dead ringer. It was during the summer break. In light of her drug problems, maybe it was actually her and I bought a glass of “champagne” for Laraine Newman! :eek:
LOL, and I thought Bert was evil.
In a podcast Andy Dick said that Joe Rogan was a giant asshole on NewsRadio, at least to him.
Well, if that ain’t the pot calling the kettle black. (Or, perhaps, the pot calling the porcelain teacup black. I’d have to hear someone other than Dick complaining about Rogan to take it as true that he was a jerk.)
According to Dick he drove several of the female cast members to tears on more than one occasion. I have no idea if they have written on the subject.
God thats got to be the worst !
Its bad for a star to lose their popularity, and it must be heart rending to know that.
But its a double Whammy when at the same time you find out that your movies are popular in France.
Talk about kicking a man when he’s down .
By this point, Jerry was a multi-millionaire from patenting video assist, never mind the millions he made when his films were still making money. He wrote, directed, produced, and starred in most of them. Jerry’s no dope.
One movie that was legendary for having lots of tension on the set, as well as being truly awful, was “Myra Breckinridge” in 1970. The studio hired a 28 year old director named Michael Sarne and gave him all kinds of control. He would spend hours “thinking”, wasting time and trying people patience, as well as lots of time filming food that ultimately appeared on screen briefly. They gave Mae West all kinds of input on writing her lines while Raquel Welch, the star, was desperate to break out of her cheesecake reputation, got little control. She and West didn’t get along and to prevent Sarne from making a film that would cast her badly, Welch locked herself in her dressing room for hours. Hiring a film critic, Rex Reed, to play the male Breckinridge, may not have been a good idea, although if Reed was responsible for tension, he didn’t mention it when he wrote an article for “Playboy” detailing the problems before its release.
I doubt if the other actors and film crew appreciated having a novice in a big role.
Reed said he was looking forward to spending time with legendary director, John Huston, who was an actor in the film. But because Sarne trashed Huston in an interview, Huston was not a happy camper, doing only what his contract required.
I wonder if Buddy Ebsen and Nancy Kulp got along when they were on “Beverly Hillbillies”. In 1984, 15 years after the show ended, Kulp ran for Congress in Pennsylvania as a liberal Democrat. Ebsen campaigned for her opponent, saying Kulp was too liberal, exploited her celebrity status and did not have a full grasp of the issues.
Andy Dick deserves every bad thing that happens to him. And a few things that haven’t happened but should.
Close. I was working there at the time.
First off, the term is “featured player.” They get listed alphabetically at the top of the show after the full cast members are listed alphabetically. Garrett was never a featured player.
Anyway, Eddie didn’t appear on camera until several weeks into the season. His first piece was a feature during SNL News (we couldn’t use the name “Weekend Update” because Lorne owns it) in which he played a high school basketball player, Kareem Abdul Muhammed, commenting on a then-recent court ruling in Ohio or somewhere that the high school basketball team had to have the same percentage of white players as the student body had as a whole. When it ended, he got, as I remember it, close to a full minute of applause. It was clear from the beginning he was a star.
Eddie continued appearing on the news and in sketches as a featured player for several more weeks. I have no idea if people were trying to get him promoted and Jean refused; I wouldn’t have been privy to that. (And I have no idea where the “we already have a black guy” line came from; Garrett left before Eddie was hired. We had no other black guy.)
One night, the show ran really short. The people running things in the studio are serious professionals, and that rarely happens. (Last week, October 29, 2012, they had to cut to commercial before the last sketch ended. It happens, but very seldom.) As 12:58 grew near, it was clear the show would be something like 2 or 3 full minutes short. So Jean sent Eddie out to do 3 minutes of his standup act. He killed, the show ended on time, and on Monday Eddie was promoted to cast member.
There’s a truncated version of it available for free on the Internet; I’ve only had a chance to read parts of it.
I don’t remember the name of the other black guy (somebody stole my copy of the book ten years ago), but he was an established comic considerably older than Murphy. From what you say, it sounds as if Doumanian was ready to hire him but was persuaded at the last minute to take Murphy instead.
I’m pretty sure “Apprentice” was Garrett’s original title, but as you say, he was indeed soon promoted to a Featured Player. I don’t recall if that was Murphy’s original title as well, but Doumanian and most of the cast members certainly treated him as an apprentice at first.
It’s available at YouTube:
It looks like it was performed live on TV and is less than an hour long.
EDIT: Sorry, I misread your post. If Garrett was NOT a Featured Player, what was he? 
Another thing I remember from the book: Eddie’s first appearance on network TV was in a sketch called “Hunting the Rare Black Republican,” or something like that. It was a spoof of “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.”
Eddie was an extra in the background at a cocktail party, and didn’t even have a spoken line.
According to Hill and Weingrad (see the book link above), Lorraine was zonked out by the beginning of the fifth season, while Garrett was just stark raving mad and often wildly paranoid.
That was also the start of SNLs trend to hire stand-up comedians instead of improv people. Big mistake in the long run, but Eddie, Martin Short, and Billy Crystal pretty much kept the show alive at that point.
And yes, Robert Townsend, David Allen Grier, The Wayans boys would all have been sought after around that time, just a few years before “In Living Colour” debuted.
Back to “Myra Breckinridge”…it was in her contract that only Mae West could wear black-and-white. Raquel Welch wanted to wear a black dress with a white ruffle. Solution? They took off the white and sewed on a pale blue ruffle that was so light, it looked white (but was technically blue).
During the first season, cast members were not given individual credits — just the host and the musical guest, and then Don Pardo would say “The Not Ready for Prime Time Players” as a list of their names, in alphabetical order, appeared on the screen. (Actually, I think it was broken into two lists of four names each — Michael O’Donoghue was listed with the cast for at least part of that season.)
My point is that, as far as I know, there were no featured players in the beginning, just cast members. And Garrett was always a cast member.
I remember it as “In Search of the Negro Republican,” but it was a long time ago, so I could be mistaken.
And yeah, Eddie was probably in that and may have had a line or two, and it may have been before his first Raheem piece. He was surely an extra in numerous scenes before he was given anything real. But that high school basketball commentary was the first time he was given the chance to show what he could do.