Maybe We'll Have You Back: The Life of a Perennial TV Guest Star (5 page)

But the most exciting moments of my life were the bits that they hired me to perform. First, we filmed the “Thrill Seeker” video. It was a minute routine in which, wearing a silly jumpsuit and a crash helmet, I stepped onto an escalator and bravely raised my arms in the air. Then, I entered a bar after I had counted that it had exceeded the safe occupancy limit. And on panel, I did more Thrill Seeker jokes that would end up becoming a mainstay in my stand-up act: “I did the
TV Guide
crossword puzzle with a pen!”

Once, I actually took bandleader Billy Preston’s place and sang the theme song to the show. Later in the bit, Billy crawled out from the side of the stage where it was revealed that I had him tied up. And once, while playing an usher, I interrupted Brenner’s monologue by crossing in front of him and seating a few people coming in late to the show.

Performing on the show was thrilling. For the first time, I felt closest to what I was about in my showbiz career. I felt my persona was utilized the best in these quirky situations that I had created. One day, Mike Wilson came into my office and told me that his father had worked on
Saturday Night Live
with John Belushi, Steve Martin, and Bill Murray and said that I had that special something those actors had. I was psyched. When Wilson left my office, I remember popping in a tape of Peter Gabriel’s song “Big Time” and singing along, jazzed that I, too, was on the way to making it big time.

The only problem was what was going on behind the scenes. I was about to learn the basic showbiz lesson that everyone’s first priority is rarely about making the best show possible, but rather advancing themselves.

Working on the show was also the first job for this scared little twenty-four-year-old redheaded writer. He had made up this point system he was sure was used for determining if a writer would be kept or not. He said that a joke in the monologue was worth one point, a whole set bit was worth five, and if you came up with a bit that could be a recurring desk piece, that was worth twenty points. He also deducted points if jokes didn’t work. This demented point system he devised probably contributed to a mood disorder he might already have had. Some days he’d bust into my office with the bravado of a high school student who had just slept with a movie star, bragging about how many points he had scored. And some days, he’d be wailing in the halls, quivering about how he was going to be fired. And he’d always fight about who came up with what jokes and who should get the points for them.

For me to pitch an idea, I had to go though the head writer, who was a burly, scruffy man who’d had a brief stint doing stand-up comedy in the San Francisco Bay area some years before. After my first few pieces with Brenner had gone over, whenever I told him I had an idea he’d harshly ask, “For who!? Who’s it for? For you again? We need topical jokes. All your bits you pitch are for you.” It made no sense. Even when I tried going directly to Tischler to pitch an idea, he too said, “Who’s the idea for? For you?”

I was relegated to my office with stacks of newspapers, where I tried to be a team player and write topical jokes, but those jokes got trounced in the point system while the head writer green-lit a few bits he wrote that he got to perform. Very quickly, the show was in shambles. The ratings were horrible. There were rumors that Motown Productions (which produced it) wasn’t happy with Brenner and were looking to replace him.

By then, my thirteen-week contract was up, and I was let go. Shortly after, the redheaded kid was let go, and soon the plug was pulled on the whole show.

But I did manage to use the status of being on Brenner’s show to be one of several New Yorkers who signed that year with the venerable William Morris Agency. Someone I knew set up a meeting with an agent, who had seen my act at several of the comedy clubs. He said he might be able to get the other higher-level agents to approve me because I was on staff on Brenner’s show. I didn’t tell him that I had just been let go a few days earlier. One of their West Coast agents asked if I would be out there for pilot season because they’d be able to set me up on many auditions. Finally, I felt it was my time. After ten years in New York, I had the “in” I was looking for in Hollywood. I was ready for my big break. Perhaps soon some vendor would be handing out free preview tickets to one of
my
pilots.

4

WELCOME TO L.A.

S
oon after I first moved to L.A., I found myself at the Improv comedy club being complimented by one of the stars who had inspired me. Billy Crystal was hanging out with a friend and remembered my act from seeing it years earlier in New York. Still scared about having made the big move West, I was amazed to hear Crystal telling his friend how funny I was. He asked if I was going to perform that night. I explained that I didn’t have a spot, that getting stage time was very difficult in Hollywood. I was so excited that such a big talent was a fan of mine, I felt his support could perhaps turn into something very big. I knew he was good friends with Rob Reiner, the very successful film director. I felt I wasn’t so out of line when I volunteered, “I have a demo tape. Can I give you that?”

Suddenly Crystal’s whole mood shifted. “You pushed it,” he said as he turned his head away from me. I sheepishly slunk away from him.

That experience was exactly the sort of novice mistake I dreaded—and was destined to make in those first few months after arriving in Hollywood. I couldn’t help but be desperate and anxious. The pressure of being a relocated actor in L.A. is enormous. In New York, no matter how dissatisfied I felt with my life or career, I always knew that there was the possibility of Hollywood up ahead. But once you actually move to Hollywood, it means you’ve finally broken the piggy bank of hope and exhausted all possible resources. If it doesn’t work, where do you go? Some people put off that scary last stop as long as possible. When I finally made the move I was already thirty.

Getting stage time at the comedy clubs was a lot tougher than in New York. On any given night the likes of Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, or Robin Williams would pop in and bump us unknowns off the show. My
Letterman
and Brenner credits really didn’t mean much. Also, a lot of club owners became managers of comics, and if you weren’t managed by one of them, it made it that much more difficult. I wasn’t able to make a living on the outskirts of town like I did in New York, so to be able to afford to stay in L.A., I had to leave town and work on the road. William Morris did have a department for road work, but that agent never helped me that much. When I’d call and tell him I needed work he’d say, “Look, no one’s knocking on your door.”

“Well, isn’t it your job to knock for me? Build me up? Tell them I’ve been on
Letterman
and cable?” I was trying to restrain myself from smashing my phone against the table with the frustration of the stupidity I was dealing with. I’d soon regret pushing him to earn his 10 percent and actually do some work. I’d work at comedy clubs across the country where crowds would stare at me sometimes as if to say, “I didn’t know Hinckley escaped.”

When you headline on the road, you need nearly an entire hour of material, and I quickly realized my style and cadence didn’t lend itself to keeping an drunk audience’s attention for an hour. The breaking point for me came at Laff’s Comedy Club in Tucson. The job started off horribly when the club’s cook, who was supposed to pick me up at the airport, forgot. The phone number of the club was 97-FUNNY, which made it all the more unsettling to be seething mad spelling out the word “funny” on the pay phone every ten minutes, badgering him to come get me. I was practically pushing the keys through the phone.

I already knew that my first show didn’t go well. I didn’t need the owner to show me all of the negative remarks from the patrons who’d been encouraged to voice their opinions on the comment cards at their tables. “Wasn’t fast enough.” “He sucked.” “Didn’t make me laugh and I hated him.”

The worst part after bombing that first night was having to go back to the depressing “comedy condo.” Like most comedy condos, it was in a section of town nowhere near walking distance to anything except perhaps a 7-Eleven. The club owners bought these condos so they didn’t have to put the comedians up in a hotel. On only a few rare exceptions would the place be cleaned up from the comedian who had stayed there the week before. There were still food containers on the floor, dirty sheets on the bed, and in this case, even the comedian from the week before on the couch. He was a road comic with nowhere to go until his next gig and hoped I wouldn’t mind if he crashed for another few days.

I shut myself in my room, let the pushy intruding comic have the couch and TV, and I vowed not to spend my career being a miserable comedian, getting vilified by club owners and humiliated by negative comment cards. Acting classes would be my way out! Becoming a committed trained actor would be my edge!

5

THE CRAFT

M
y first acting teacher had us read scenes while another student would shove us repeatedly. I wasn’t quite sure of the point of that exercise. I found it peculiar but no one else in class seemed to question it and I was too intimidated by the teacher to ask why. Paul, the know-it-all doorman at the Improv comedy club had highly recommended him so I trusted that there must be a strong benefit to learning how to recite material without being tipped over.

The teacher was an ex-actor (no surprise) who was shamelessly trying to use his students to break into a writing career. Once, a student in my class announced he got a small guest role on
Saved by the Bell
. The teacher’s chubby red face started twitching with nervous excitement as he got up and headed toward the student. “Tell them about me, will you? I got a really great idea for a show about a high school!”

After quitting that class, I hooked up with a teacher recommended by comedian Rob Schneider who would later be on
Saturday Night Live
(and give me a part as a reporter in his film
The Animal
). For $275 a month, about forty of us sat in the cramped bleachers while he pushed each student’s personal buttons: “Sarah, you’re overweight, not a beauty queen, and still alone. Use that torment in the scene!” When I hinted that I was going to quit the class, he suddenly began praising my progress.

He would assign each student a scene and another student to do the scene with him. Since these classes were stuffed to capacity, you would only do your scene maybe once a month, but according to the disciples in the class, it was just as fulfilling to watch the teacher give his brilliant notes to the others as it would be to actually go up and perform yourself.

We’d have to rehearse with our partner a few times a week outside of class, and if my partner was a woman, that usually was the high point of my social life. Just her showing up at my place, or me going to hers made me feel I was with someone, even for just a short while. I was even assigned a few scenes where kissing was involved. Looking back, I’m suspicious if that was another ploy to keep lonely people paying the big bucks for the classes.

Once I was with my partner in my apartment rehearsing a scene from
Annie Hall
. She was a nice-looking woman from Germany. At the end of the scene we were supposed to kiss. So we get to the end of the scene and she French kissed me. She initiated it, I swear! We continued to kiss for about thirty seconds. After that I kept rehearsing and rehearsing, talking faster than my usual droll self to get to the kissing. And each time, we would make out. Finally I had to say something. “Can we kiss without the scene?” She looked at me, horrified. “What!? I am married!” So I nodded, rehearsed the scene again, and made out some more at the end of it. Sounds like a good scam, but for all the years and money I put into class, it wasn’t worth the cheap thrills. Not only was I taking a class, but I was also shelling out $60 an hour, sometimes three times a week, for sessions with a private acting coach, something I was scared into doing every time I had an audition. The private coach was an attractive, forceful woman in her early forties who kept in great shape and was a bit rough around the edges. I’ll call her “Claudette.” Claudette was a cross between Mrs. Robinson and Kathleen Turner. She had a strange hold on me. She would warn me in pretty harsh terms of the irreparable harm I could do to my career if I messed up even one audition, but reassured me that she had gotten to me in time and could help me take advantage of the avenues I hadn’t yet damaged.

Acting class may have taught me some things, but I’m glad eventually I got out and didn’t become another one of its permanent students. For me at least, I started getting booked for acting jobs when I stopped with the classes. Nowhere else in real life did I beat myself up as much, analyze everything to death, and feel so inadequate as I was encouraged to do in acting class. Even though I already beat myself up and analyzed myself to death, acting lessons brought this art to a whole new self-destructive level. But it took me a long time to figure that out. Of course the parts I auditioned for never had anything to do with all that deep stuff I did in class: all the crying, the pretending you’re slipping on ice, the screaming and shoving matches, or remembering the pain the time Uncle Larry threw a book of stamps at you. And in the end I would get parts the way most comedians do, by reenacting my stand-up persona. But it would take a lot of auditioning to get there.

6

AUDITIONS

M
y first audition was for a TV pilot in 1988 that never aired. All I remember was that it was about two buddies and I had to do a sinister laugh. I got to the lot early, found a pay phone, and called my friend Joel in Brooklyn. I practiced my laugh for Joel a few times so he could reassure me that it was, in fact, maniacal and authentic. If that wasn’t enough confirmation, I only had to look at the man standing behind me who had been waiting to use the phone. The look on his face assured me I seemed like quite the lunatic.

In the waiting room, I recognized Michael Cole, the star of the sixties hit classic
The Mod Squad
. He sensed that I was freaking out, and although I knew he hadn’t worked much since
Mod Squad
, he was kind enough to offer help by running my lines with me before I went in. That was the first of a very few times I’d get unsolicited help from a competing actor.

My first two years out West, I stumbled through most of my auditions without a clue as to why I could never book anything. Here’s how it goes: The first step is usually the call from the agent informing me of the appointment, and then I’d get faxed the sides, the extracted section of the script with the lines I’d be doing at the audition. Back in 1988 when I came out for my first pilot season, I didn’t have a fax machine, so I had to drive a half hour to the William Morris Agency in Beverly Hills to pick up my sides.

My agent was not very inspiring. Once I found myself being put up for the part of a southern redneck.