Cash & Comedy

Seated behind the blinking phones in his well-appointed padded cell of an office on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, Marty Klein, superagent, speaks of clients current and former. "I met Steve Martin when he was playing the Icehouse in Pasadena in the early Seventies. I saw essentially a magic act. The first time I saw Andy Kaufman, he didn't get one laugh, not one. The audience hated him. But when I saw him on stage, I thought, This is something; this is different. I told him, 'You're a great comedian.' He looked at me and said, 'I'm not a comedian, I'm an entertainer.' I said, 'Entertainer, great,' and offered my services. When I met Rodney Dangerfield, he said, 'All I want is twenty-five thousand dollars a week in Vegas.' I said, 'If that's all you want, I don't want to represent you.' Peewee Herman I saw playing with the Groundlings in L.A. I went to see him ten weeks in a row. When I saw Sam Kinison the first time, it was on an HBO special. I tracked him down over the phone to Colorado, and when I finally got him on the line, he said, 'I've been waiting for you to call me for ten years.'"

That's not surprising. As president of the Agency for the Performing Arts, Klein is one of the most powerful kingmakers in a booming comedy industry. His client list includes not only Steve Martin (who has been represented by Klein for 16 years) but a host of other comedy stars ranging from John Candy to Steven Wright to Martin Mull. "If you're really serious about comedy, you must be represented by Marty Klein," insists Winston Simone, who manages Emo Phillips and Judy Tenuta. "He's the Wayne Gretzky of comedy, the greatest."

OK, so Klein also represents Phillips and Tenuta. That's one of the funny things about the comedy business. You could fill half of Dodger Stadium with the young comics up at the mikes in the hundreds of clubs that have sprouted from coast to coast. But backstage, among the agents, managers, entertainment executives and major club owners, few are called and even fewer are chosen. Comedy is a very big business run by a very small group--about as many guys as it would take to provide pallbearers if, say, Bob Hope, Eddie Murphy and Bob Goldthwaite were all killed in the same plane crash.

These few men preside over a show-business explosion the likes of which have not been seen since the Beatles. In some ways, however, comedy is an even greater bonanza than rock and roll. "There's nobody you can make more money out of than a really hot comic," says one agent, "simply because he can do everything. Most rock-and-roll guys can do only one thing--sing. Who's gonna pay to go see Jon Bon Jovi try to act? And who's gonna pay to see Robert Redford belt out Gimme Shelter? But a Jay Leno can perform in concert, a Jay Leno can make records and videos and a Jay Leno can star in a movie or a sitcom, host his own TV talk show, endorse potato chips, make money doing anything up to and probably including going to the toilet."

All right, that's the goal. Now, how do you get there? Who plucks you from obscurity? Who gets you the job? Who makes sure this isn't your only $50,000 gig of the year? For the record, the following are the real kings of comedy.

Among agents: The aforementioned Marty Klein is the most powerful. Hot on his heels come Bob Williams and the voluble Geary Rindels--president and director of operations, respectively, of Spotlight, which represents such people as Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld. It specializes in concerts and clubs and drives the hardest deals in the business. Hildy Gottleib at International Creative (continued on page 162) Cash & Comedy (continued from page 144) Management (ICM) has made client Eddie Murphy very rich. Bill Gross at Triad Artists represents guys such as Richard Belzer and Sam Kinison. Finally, there's Debbie Miller, senior vice-president for oncamera talent at William Morris. Want your own TV series? You could do worse than to give Miller a call. The legendary Michael Ovitz of Creative Artists Agency represents many of the Mount Rushmore figures from the original Saturday Night Live.

Among managers: the Brillstein Company and the people at Rollins, Morra and Brezner are at the top. While the agencies concentrate on getting comics jobs, the management firms specialize in guiding entire careers, finding the right scripts, helping package the shows and often arranging financing for films or producing films outright. Brillstein does everything. For clients such as Dan Aykroyd, it produces movies such as Ghostbusters. For clients such as Garry Shandling, it produces television shows such as It's Garry Shandling's Show.

Rollins, Morra and Brezner does the same, though on a more intimate scale. Its client list is short but powerful. The company has guided Woody Allen's career since his days as a stand-up and has produced every one of his films. It also produces Late Night with David Letterman and has made movies for clients such as Robin Williams and Billy Crystal.

Among talk-show producers: The Tonight Show's Jim McCawley and Late Night with David Letterman's Bob Morton select talent for the two shows that can make a comedian's career in 90 seconds.

Among cable kings: Chris Albrecht of HBO and Steve Hewitt of Showtime are responsible for breaking more new comedy nationally than anybody else.

Among club owners: Budd Friedman started it all with The Improv. Mitzi Shore's Comedy Store in L.A. now has so many rooms and shows it's like a comedy mall. Richard Fields is continuing it all by franchising Catch a Rising Star comedy clubs faster than McDonald's.

So there they are. There are a few more, certainly. If somebody over at Shapiro-West in Beverly Hills says he wants to manage your career, listen to him. And if Warren Littlefield's secretary at NBC leaves a message on your machine, call back. But the people above are the heart of it. If just one of them sees you perform and, afterward, as you step from the stage, puts out his hand and says, "My son," your problems are over. For not only are they kingpins but almost all of them work together at some level.

"It's just an incredibly small world," says Klein. And who would know better than he? Klein is a deceptive power figure. No ice around the eyes. No $1600 sharkskin suit. He looks less like a showbiz mullah than like a genial golf pro who should drop ten pounds before the start of the next seniors' tour. "Young comics call me. They tell me where they're playing. I've never seen a comedian I didn't like."

That's a trait that has served Klein well. "The comedy world," he says, "has become what rock and roll used to be. Big comedians--a Steve Martin, a Jay Leno or a Robin Williams--have become like the Doors or Janice Joplin was twenty years ago."

Klein can remember those early days. He got his start as Shelley Berman's road manager in the early Sixties before becoming an agent--taking his young comics to strip joints. His big breaks came when he packaged Laugh-In in 1968 and when he helped launch the first wave of the comedy revolution with Steve Martin's outrageously successful HBO comedy special in 1976.

Klein got to be known quickly as a man with a near-infallible eye for new talent. Says Showtime vice-president Steve Hewitt, "Marty's one guy who if he says, 'I've found someone spectacular,' you get on an airplane that minute and fly to see that person perform."

Klein, whose walls are upholstered so that, if you were so inclined, you could literally bounce off them, explains, "Buddy Morra, Bernie Brillstein--we say: 'This guy's funny.' We put a stamp of approval on him, which is important. Right now, we're putting the stamp of approval on Robert Schimmel. We keep him working and we start the machinery rolling. The machinery is making people in the industry aware of him. It's all telephone." Klein picks his up. "I made a call yesterday to the Letterman show. OK, Bob Morton's going to go to see him Monday at Catch a Rising Star. That's the beginning."

Of course, it probably doesn't hurt that Klein also represents David Letterman.

•

There are those who'll tell you that avarice is on its way out, that greed is going the way of the granny dress. Still, it's hard not to get a little excited when you consider the kind of money you can make just for being funny.

Consider the short, happy career of Eddie Murphy. The first year he was on Saturday Night Live, in 1980, he made $750 a week. His salary the second year was $8700 a show; his take the third year was $300,000 for ten S.N.L. performances and ten pretaped scenes. For his first film effort, 48 Hours, he was awarded $200,000. Then his agent got him $15,000,000 for signing up for a five-picture deal at Paramount. But Murphy was not to be limited to the normal constraints of any simple package; his compensation for Beverly Hills Cop II was $8,000,000, plus a nice bite off the back end.

Last year, Murphy's take-home pay averaged $181,114 for each of his 28 concert appearances. Even a lesser light such as Howie Mandel walked away with an average of $73,970 per night for 61 concerts. Sam Kinison's concert take for the year brushed $3,000,000.

While Bob Hope is the only comedian who currently makes Forbes magazine's list of the 400 richest people in America, there are others who are not far behind. In addition to Murphy's mammoth windfalls, Martin's take-home pay last year was close to $12,000,000. Johnny Carson made $20,000,000. And then there is Bill Cosby. Last year, he made more than $6,000,000 from concerts, $10,800,000 from night clubs--his going rate for a one-night stand in Vegas is $250,000--$1,000,000-plus from videos and records, and when you throw in The Cosby Show itself, his over-all annual income approaches $60,000,000. He is also expected to make $400,000,000 from the sale of the show in syndication.

Still, before any comic hits it big, he plays to the really cheap seats. The dives. The strip joints. And he rarely has an agent or a manager. "The real nightmares," says Goldthwaite, "were before you had anyone to get you money. You'd do a gig and the guy would try to pay you in blow. Blow's not gonna pay my phone bill; I can't forward it to AT&T. I remember one gig: I went to cash a check and it bounced--and I was headlining! I called the guy up and he told me, 'Hey, I lost the money playing cards with Gabe Kaplan.' I said, 'You're tearin' my heart out.'"

In the old days, of course, there was only one club to make a big hit, and that was The Improv in New York City, run by Budd Friedman. Friedman, who now owns the L.A. Improv (his ex-wife has the New York club), did give a handful of people a start. Among them: Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, Robert Klein, J. J. Walker, Gabe Kaplan, Andy Kaufman, Jay Leno and Robin Williams, to name a proverbial few. And he remembers them all well.

"The night Lily Tomlin auditioned, she walked down to a nearby theater and paid a limo driver five dollars to drive her to my front door. I was very impressed. That was back in the early Sixties, when we started to attract all sorts of people. I'd heard about this new kid playing an East Side club. I expected a young Princeton type. How did I know Rodney Dangerfield was already working on his third career? One night, he staggered in drunk and bombed. But the next night, he came in sober and kicked ass."

Today, even with nine Improvs open across the country, Friedman has something less than a total lock on talent. As Bob Williams, president of Spotlight, says, "I can take you out on Route Forty-six to Jersey and you'll see comedy clubs as thick as gas stations. Vaudeville is back with a vengeance. That's all this comedy-club business is, Yuppie vaudeville. Ten years ago, there was almost no comedy-club scene in this country. Now there are four hundred to six hundred full-time comedy clubs and eleven hundred more clubs holding regular comedy nights. There are four headline comedy clubs in Cleveland alone." Williams' clients range from Jerry Seinfeld to Jay Leno to Sid Caesar, but he is still very much in touch with the grass roots. "We've got more than fifteen hundred comedians listed in our computer," he enthuses. "Guys you've never heard of are touring the country, club by club, and pulling down seventy-five thousand dollars a year."

A six-dollar cover and two-drink minimum can underwrite a lot of one-liners. And that's the beginning. "Making five thousand dollars a night in Vegas is nothing," explains Marty Klein. "Even ten thousand dollars is small money."

Jay Leno has been rumored to pull down $60,000 a night. "He tours two hundred and eighty nights a year, so you figure it out," says Williams. Well, six times eight is 48, carry the four....

Barry Weintraub, editor and publisher of Comedy USA Newswire, a trade publication, claims, "Right now, Spotlight is really the king of comedy. It was the one that realized fortunes were to be made out of Middle America, not just in L.A. and New York. Spotlight's the power that's out there in the trenches, developing the comedians who will be the big acts of the future."

New York's Catch a Rising Star plans to open 21 additional clubs across the country within a few years. "We're just beginning to tap the market," says Catch president Richard Fields, "because comedy is getting bigger and bigger. The baby boomers are getting older, and they aren't going to stand in line for two hours to getting older, and they aren't going to stand in line for two hours to get vomited on at a rock concert anymore. When we opened our club in Cambridge, we made a lot of other club owners in Boston--there were four of them--nervous. But we did about a million dollars our first year and business was better for everyone."

For comics such as Seinfeld, the clubs have proved to be money machines: "Last year, I made a quarter of what I made this year. The year before that, a tenth." And just what, exactly, does that pencil out to? "Well, let's just say I can buy any car I want. In fact, many of them. The nice thing about comedy is that once you get rolling, it keeps going. All the club owners know one another. Once word gets out that you can draw a crowd, your price goes through the roof. If you're a known quantity from TV, that really helps, because even if a club loses money on you, it boosts the club's reputation, so that crowds will be bigger for a month after you're gone."

Seinfeld's agent, Bob Williams, is quick to point out that the overhead is peanuts. "Touring costs are nothing. You're one guy on a seven-oh-seven and where's the mike and where's the light?"

Ok, six times 12 is 72, add the four....

If Leno is doing 280 live performances a year at 60 grand a pop, that's $16,800,000 a year. "Well," Williams concludes, "actually, he can be a little flexible on his price."

•

One of the ironies of the comedy boom is how inept the big, established Hollywood machinery has been in dealing with it. The major talent agencies and managers, people who handle the De Niros and the Streeps, the Willises and the Shepherds, are, with precious few exceptions, lost when they sign up a stand-up comic.

"When you sign with a big agent, you think you're finished with hustling, that he'll take care of everything--get you bookings, handle publicity, keep you working," says Seinfeld, who was represented early on by a major firm. "Well, I sat for a year waiting for this big, powerful agency to do something for me and it never happened. They were interested only in TV. Most agents are just a suit and a nice lunch. Forget that, I need bookings. The big agencies are the worst for comedy. They don't know how to build talent."

Another comedian, Wil Shriner, who was once represented by the enormous William Morris Agency, agrees. "I had good luck and was treated very well at the Morris agency. But I'm not sure I'd recommend a big agency to any new comic. Most of them are looking to make the really big score. You gotta be the new Eddie Murphy. You know they're not spending a lot of time at their weekly meetings trying to figure out 'What can we do for Mr. Young Comedian today?'They just don't have the time."

Few people understand the limitations better than Chris Albrecht, who has been one of comedy's Jacks-of-all-trades. A stand-up performer at one point in his career, he became manager and then coowner of the Improv in New York when Friedman moved West to open his L.A. club. In the early Eighties, Albrecht tried his hand at being an agent for mega-agency ICM.

"At ICM, they wanted someone to give them the next Freddie Prinze or Robin Williams," he recalls. "It was a pretty horrible experience. I ended up signing a lot of people: Eddie Murphy, Joe Piscopo, Whoopi Goldberg, Paul Rodriguez and Billy Crystal. I had to try to convince ICM that it could build multimillion-dollar careers for comics based on continuous series of big-club dates." Traditionally, large agencies aim at movie roles for comics rather than club tours.

The fact is that comedians take special care and handling, which Albrecht knew when he signed Bob Goldthwaite. Goldthwaite is hardly anyone's idea of a mainstream comic, and it often seems more like he's having a nervous breakdown on stage than doing an act. "I felt the same way about Bobcat that I felt about Sam Kinison," says Albrecht. "They made me really, really laugh--but being an agent, you say to yourself, 'This guy's brilliant, but what are we going to do with him?'"

The solution was to have Goldthwaite make his Hollywood debut as an opening act for Whoopi Goldberg at The Comedy Store in L.A. "It was a huge night for Whoopi, the main room was packed to the rafters with a Who's who in showbiz," enthuses Albrecht. "Bobcat really scored; he went through the roof--for people whom you wouldn't have been able to drag down to see him in the best-possible situation. All of a sudden, he was a cult hero. Something in a dark little club might have been scary, but in a party situation, they were much less likely to be afraid of him. That one night did as much for Bobcat as anything anybody's done since."

Albrecht's role as an agent was unusual--and short-lived. After five years, he quit ICM to become senior vice-president of original West Coast programing at HBO. "For a comic, an agent is basically just a phone caller and a job booker," maintains Seinfeld. "The manager is the architect of your whole career. For a comic, having the right manager is like having the right wife."

That makes Brad Grey the right wife to lots of top comic talent. The cherubic 31-year-old is president of the Brillstein Company. Remember Ghostbusters? That was a Brillstein Company picture that rewarded its producers a cool $230,000,000 at the box office and another quick $32,000,000 in video sales. ABC then paid $15,000,000 for the rights to show the film on television. Next, there were two Ghostbusters cartoon series and a merchandising campaign that included a Ghostbusters video game, a breakfast cereal, a computer game, various books, T-shirts, a board game, hats, cups, posters, records, you name it. Retail sales for Ghostbusters merchandise from Kenner Toys alone is said to be $90,000,000. And, of course, Ghostbusters II is likely to keep that streak alive.

The company produces ALF, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd (for cable), It's Garry Shandling's Show and has several pilots in production. That's more than some studios have. "We're also in motion pictures with our clients, and we manage much of the cast of Saturday Night Live, plus its producer, Lorne Michaels. And Letterman's producer, Robert Morton," says Grey.

Connections are important: The company's paterfamilias, Bernie Brillstein, not only oversees his management firm but also served as chairman of Lorimar Film Entertainment, leaving only when Lorimar was sold to Warner Bros.

"I started out in college," Grey says, "putting on rock-and-roll shows. But it was very linear and not very interesting. So I started managing comics."

Those comics included Dennis Miller and Jon Lovitz, and Grey began adding others. Finally, he came to Brillstein's attention. "I eventually had breakfast with him at the Beverly Hills Hotel," he says, "and gave him a twenty-minute pitch. My point was, I wanted to be in business with him." What had Grey brought to the table? "The next people." To wit, the core of the new Saturday Night Live. Brillstein signed him up. "Never in my life," Grey says with a smile, "did I think we'd be so successful so quickly."

His phone rings. He picks it up. "Hello. Hi, how are you? ... No, I understand.... I really doubt it....I'm thrilled to be in business with Coca-Cola. You're talking a million point five; that's what they need, and I don't want to do it otherwise...."

Here's the nub of Grey's world; He's the soul of vertical integration. He manages comedians, he produces comedians. He puts the talent together with the script and the director and the money guys. He provides the entire package.

•

Last year wasn't a bad year for Buddy Morra. Two of his firm's movies, Throw Momma from the Train and Good Morning, Vietnam, made truckfuls of money. The 'Burbs, with Tom Hanks, was released earlier this year. Both a manager and a producer, Morra, like Grey, is affable vertical integration personified. His firm, Rollins, Morra and Brezner, is one of comedy's most venerable institutions.

In simplest terms, Morra is a career planner. He is a man who makes, hustles or conjures opportunities for his clients. The best of those opportunities are now in films, specifically ones he can put together himself. Operating from a small treeshaded office on a back street in West Hollywood, he maintains the same kind of unbuttoned style as his friend and frequent partner Marty Klein. "Comedy movies are very big right now," he says. So the transition from comedy-career planner to comedy moviemaker was obvious. "Over the years, our clients have become more and more important; as a result, we've got ourselves into film production so our clients can be protected as much as possible. We'll find a property and we'll go to a studio and say, 'Hey, we've got this terrific film we'd love to develop,' and they'll say yes or no. We'll keep going somewhere until we can get a studio to underwrite the cost of the film."

Like all agents and managers, Morra works both ends of the comedy spectrum. In fact, his firm has recently launched its own comedy label, Blue Rose Records, in association with A&M. It'll feature the work of comedy's best ascending acts, such as Will Durst, Paula Poundstone and Diane Ford.

"We're constantly looking for new talent. We produced the HBO Young Comedians show and saw two hundred new comedians. Out of that, we found Jake Johannsen." The development of Jake Johannsen began forthwith: "When we brought him down here, I did not want him to play The Improv or The Comedy Store. If he was just going to work out, I wanted him away from where everyone else goes. So we put him in Hermosa Beach, put him in Pasadena, put him on the road for a week. When we felt he was confident, when we felt he was ready, we took over The Improv with enough advance notice for everybody--studio people, TV people. Out of that came a pilot for NBC. It was really very simple."

•

"We don't represent filth," Geary Rindels says, cradling a drink at one of the Riviera Hotel's many bars, his voice rising above the jangle of nearby slot machines. "Some of the finest acts in the business are, but we don't touch them. That's part of the reason Spotlight has the best comedy roster in the business."

White shirt. White coat. White slacks. A short beard. Rindels has Eric Clapton's face and Barry Manilow's nose and, dressed all in white, looks as if he might have just stepped off the top of Barry Gibb's wedding cake. But as director of operations for Spotlight, he's the man of the hour, here in Las Vegas to show the flag at Budd Friedman's shmoose-a-thon, The First Annual American Comedy Convention.

Drop a bomb on this place and the comedy explosion would probably be over. Rindels has spent the afternoon mingling with a zoo of club owners, managers, other agents and comedians. His counsel is much in demand because of Spotlight's success in breaking hundreds of new comedy acts.

Marty Klein is here, too, looking tan and chatting it up with young comics who trail behind him like chicks behind a momma hen. (One novice comic capped the mood of this gathering with the remark, "I don't want to sell out, but I want to come really close.") Chris Albrecht has just given a talk to some of the 300 comedians who've ponied up $300 apiece to mix it up with more than 50 club owners and booking agents who've flown in for this grand summit of comedy.

The TV czars are probably the biggest draws. The names Bob Morton and Jim McCawley may not mean anything to the public; in fact, they probably mean nothing to the heads of the major studios. But to comics, those names are nothing short of magic, since Morton produces Late Night with David Letterman and McCawley books comedians for The Tonight Show. They have the rapt attention of the crowd as they offer some advice. "It gets down to lines," says, McCawley. "The actual written material. Johnny is interested in the hard line, the joke. Perfect example: Rodney Dangerfield. He's incredibly disciplined. He'll get a laugh in the first fifteen seconds. In three minutes, he'll deliver twenty-five strong lines. During a six-minute set--including three minutes of talking with Johnny--he delivers fifty laughs. That's what you have to deliver."

"On Letterman, we look for specific things," adds Morton. "We try to stay on the cutting edge. No guys juggling chain saws. We look at all audition tapes, anybody who calls up, we try to see. We try to be as accessible as we can."

But McCawley issues a warning: "Before you call either one of us, be ready. If I see an act and it doesn't go over for me, I won't look at it again for at least a year."

HBO's Albrecht is a popular guy, too. Cable has become a powerful force in the comedy world, and it's a symbiotic relationship. Comics need exposure; cable needs low-cost original programing. "HBO is the one place where a comedian can televise his work in its purest form. If you look at an HBO comedy concert, it's a pure form of comedy that's done for a mass audience."

More and more comedians are making it on cable. HBO, for example, is now doing 50 hours a year of original comedy programing. "I talk to Buddy Morra three times a day, trying to get as many shows out of Robin and Billy as I can get," says Albrecht. "Buddy, meanwhile, is pitching me show ideas of his own."

"Chris Albrecht is a good friend," boasts Brad Grey, "and we do a lot of business with HBO. One advantage is creative freedom, which is a joy. Another is not having to worry about the ratings."

At Showtime, Steve Hewitt, Albrecht's counterpart, boasts, "Showtime is scrappier. We've hooked up forty comedy clubs to form Showtime's Comedy Club Network and taped more than ninety comedians in the first cycle already. I'll be damned if we're not going to discover the next wave, the new comedians of the Nineties."

•

"This is a great time to be in this business," says Spotlight's Bob Williams. "If a comedian is any good at all, we can get him a job. Nobody's starving in comedy now. A half-hot actress is lucky to do two films a year and make sixty thousand dollars so she doesn't have to wait tables. Some of these young comics are coming off the road making four times that."

Clubs are fighting over new acts; cable constantly needs new comic blood; comedy movies are dominating the box office; network executives haunt clubs looking for the next Roseanne Barr or Bill Cosby to perform ratings magic. And in typical show-business fashion, the sums of money being exchanged are phenomenal. No wonder the czars of comedy are laughing. They're getting richer and more powerful each day. As Klein puts it, "He who controls the talent controls the game."

"A boom like this has got to end," says Morra philosophically. "The problem is, I just don't see when."

"'The comedy world,' Klein says, 'has become what rock and roll used to be.'"