Gary Austin - Part 2 - 2/19/07
JF: Could you give your impressions of Del Close as a teacher?
GA: Yeah, the main thing about Del was: he sought the truth. He demanded the truth on stage, and any bullshit was completely destroyed. He didn’t tolerate bullshit. Have you read ‘Guru,’ the book?
JF: No, I haven’t.
GA: Oh God, you’ve got to read it. It just came out about a year ago or less. It’s called ‘Guru: My Days with Del Close,’ by Jeff Griggs. A feature film’s being made of it. It’s about the last few years of Del’s life. It’s very accurate. I knew Del very well. It really captures who he was, both as a teacher and an actor and as a person, one of the most interesting people who ever lived on this planet. He did some outrageous things to demand honesty on stage. And he got what he wanted. When he didn’t get what he wanted, that person was not allowed to be in his presence. He often had me and the two biggest guys in the room, I’m not big, they would pick up a guy who was giving him a hard time, have me lead the way. I would open the doors as we went through the to the lobby of the theater, then out on Sunset Boulevard he would order the two guys to dump the guy on the sidewalk. I would be the door opener. He would say to the guy who they had just dumped on the sidewalk ‘And don’t ever come back.’ He would always start the sentence with ‘And.’ That’s all he would say to the guy. He would lock the door, and the guy would never be allowed back.
JF: Why would he do something like that?
GA: Because the person was being dishonest, on stage or off in the discussion. And if he wouldn’t conquer his dishonesty, Del was done with him. That was it. You’re gone. Forever. Don’t ever talk to me again.
JF: Did some people wind up hating Del Close?
GA: Sure, I had people hating me as a director.
JF: Why? Were you as demanding as that?
GA: Well, yes, I didn’t do some of the things Del did. I did other things. Some people hated me because I didn’t put them in the show at The Groundlings. I had one simple thing, which I told everybody up front ‘The best stuff goes in the show.’ ‘Well, who decides what’s best?’ ‘Me. I’m the director.’ [laughs] And people who thought they should be in the show or should have more to do in the show, you know, some of them did end up hating me. Some of them left. Ok, go create your own company if you don’t like it, which is basically what Paul Sills said to Alan [Meyerson] at Second City. He said ‘If you don’t like what I’m doing here, leave and create your own company.’ Alan said ok, went to San Francisco and created The Committee.
JF: So what was your experience like performing with The Committee Main Stage? It sounds like you guys had a theater. You were doing thirteen shows a week, right?
GA: Umhm.
JF: So what was it like performing thirteen shows a week?
GA: It was incredibly good. The training is irreplaceable. I always had the feeling that I was onstage more waking hours than I was off stage. [I did] two shows Sunday night, two shows Tuesday through Friday night, three shows Saturday night. And I was always so wired after the shows that I wouldn’t get to sleep until 4 or 5 in the morning. Sleep until 11, 12, or 1, get up, sort of do my day, then go to the theater and do it all over again. It was really a sense of always being on stage, under tremendous pressure, in front of 350 people, who paid a lot of money to see us. And having nights where we bombed, or me personally having a night where I bombed. Or having nights where we succeeded or me having nights where I succeeded. Or sometimes I would go home some nights and want to commit suicide after a bad night, come back the next night and have the greatest night of my life and think ‘wow, this is terrific.’ The ups and downs were huge.
JF: How would audiences react to the improv that you guys were doing?
GA: When we improvised, don’t forget the first show wasn’t improvised, the second show was improvised, the audience understood that’s what we were doing. So, they had a different expectation than they did than when they watched the first show. In the first show, they knew that the first show was, you know, material. We had decided it was good stuff and they expected a slick, good, solid show. In the second show, there expectations were ‘Ok, they’re probably going to fuck up a lot,’ but what the audience loved about it was, even when we fucked up, was the risk that we took. Since they knew we gave ourselves permission to fuck up, they too gave us permission to fuck up. So what you would see is brilliant improvisers fucking up. You would also see them succeeding. A scene works or it doesn’t work. Some scenes don’t work and the lights go out. And everyone goes ‘Is that it?’ There’s a smattering of applause and so on.
The skills of the performers were always good even when they weren’t doing a scene that worked. That’s what the audience dug. If it had been bad work, they wouldn’t have. So, it was good work in things that didn’t work, which doesn’t mean we didn’t make mistakes and do bad work sometimes. We didn’t do bad work on purpose. Our intent was to do good work, but sometimes we would do bad work and fix it the next night, or throw it out and never do it again. Usually, if we had a scene that we liked and seemed to be working, or had a scene that we liked and wasn’t working but we wanted it to work, we would stick with it for six months until it got good. That would go in [the next show]. Every six months there was an opening of the new show, the early show. The place would be packed with press. I remember The Committee in San Francisco most of the audience, hundreds of people would be press. It was amazing. Every six months, two times a year we would open a new show. But you would have all that material being created. It was really exciting, then once it was ready for the show we would put it all together and open a show.
JF: So what took you from San Francisco when you were doing The Committee Main Stage down to Los Angeles?
GA: I got fired.
JF: Oh.
GA: [laughs] About five of us got fired one night. It was the year before it closed, 1971. And there was this guy there named Bill Love. He made up his name by the way. Now this guy was anything but love. It’s ironic that’s the name he chose. He was the accountant for The Committee I think the whole ten years, and Alan Meyerson’s best friend, or certainly one of his best friends. Well, this guy, as far as I know, had no skills as an artist, Bill Love. He had no experience. He had never directed, never acted, never improvised. He’d never done anything as far as I know. Maybe he had done a couple workshops with some improvisers, but I never saw him. But he was always there every night. He hated my work. Absolutely hated it and made no secret of it.
We did a show opening in which I got the best reviews of any actor in the company. The San Francisco Examiner said ‘This is the best Committee show ever done,’ and he basically implied that I did the best work in the show. It was a rave review. Everybody else who came that night raved about my work. So, I was glowing. I walked into the theater the next night with all this press behind me, all these incredible reviews and the whole cast was sitting there in the green room, including Bill Love who hung out with us, and Bill Love said when I walked in the room, so that everyone could hear, ‘Well, Austin, you can fool the press, but you can’t fool us.’ Not one person came to my defense. Not one person said ‘Bill, you’re an asshole for saying that.’ Not one person said ‘Gary, he’s wrong.’ Not one person said ‘Shut up Bill.’ They just looked at me. Ok?
So, what happened was in 71 Alan said to Bill, because Bill had been begging for years to direct, Alan finally said ‘I’m going to let you direct. You can pick your cast.’ He always said that to whoever directed. So, Bill decided that four or five of us had to go out of about eight or nine of us, and they brought in some of the old Committee people who weren’t around then to replace us. And they told me a lie, which, well, I’ve forgiven them, but I know they lied to me. They called us in one at a time while we were getting notes at the end. I think they called me in last. I didn’t know what was going on. ‘Why do they keep calling people out of the room to have a meeting with Alan while we’re talking about what went on in the show?’
They called me in there and said ‘We’re letting you go and we’re letting three or four other people go. We’re letting you go because of seniority. You don’t have seniority. Bill’s taking over. He wants certain people to come back so we’re getting rid of the four or five people who have less seniority.’ Well, in fact, there was a guy there named David Booty, who had less seniority than me. So, I knew that was a lie. Bill just didn’t want me around, and he didn’t want the other four around either.
So, I left and went back to L.A. I started improvising at The Comedy Store, started teaching. I had never taught in my life but I started teaching, that was 72 when I started teaching.
JF: What was it like at The Comedy Store? Who were you improvising with?
GA: The Comedy Store had just opened a week earlier when I discovered it. The reason I discovered it was because there were two Committee people, Valerie Curtain and Archie Hahn, who had started a group the first week it opened called The Comedy Store Players. Valerie called me up. She was a very close friend of mine. She said ‘Why don’t you come over and improvise with us at The Comedy Store?’ I went over there. Don’t forget it had only been open a week. They only had one room then. Sammy Shore was the owner. His wife Mitzy Shore was the cashier.
I watched The Comedy Store Players. They had this guy named Sid, who was a friend of the other three, but didn’t want to be an actor. He was a techie, but he was filling in. They needed somebody because it had just started. He came to me and said ‘Take my place. I don’t really want to do this,’ so they invited me in. So, I became a member of that, which I was for a year and a half, six nights a week at The Comedy Store with The Comedy Store Players. Robin Williams became a member of The Comedy Store players many years I left The Comedy Store. As far as I know, The Comedy Store Players still exists. I don’t know, but it certainly existed for many years.
We improvised with the biggest stars in show business. Red Foxx would come in. Flip Wilson would come in from his NBC show taping. He was the number one show in the country nationally. Every star in the business came in and either sat in the audience or went on stage. It was an amazing time. Richard Pryor was creating his act. Gabe Kaplan was creating his act. The Unknown Comic was creating his act. Rodney Dangerfield would come in and do stuff. The Smothers Brothers would come in. It was incredible. I also did stand-up and MC’ed. This was before Letterman came in. Long after I left, Letterman came in and did stand-up and became the MC there. Nobody knew who he was yet.
And um, so, …what did you ask me? [laughs]
JF: [laughs] Uh…
GA: Oh, I know, about improvising there. The four of us would improvise there and if someone like Flip Wilson or Red Foxx would come in we’d ask them to improvise with us.
JF: Ok, so how did The Groundlings start?
GA: Well, I was teaching at The Comedy Store about four nights a week and I was also teaching at a theater I rented, so I was teaching a lot. After teaching for a year, I had some amazing people. There were only two improv teachers in town at the time, actually three I think. Howard Strong from The Committee, me and a woman who’s name I can’t remember right now. I think that was it. Improv hadn’t really caught on in the way it has since then. There were tons of people who became giant stars who were coming to my workshops. After a year of incredible work, I said to the group ‘Let’s do a show. The work is so incredible here.’ We would do, not just improvs, we would do scenes from plays. We would do Shakespeare, Moliere, Tennessee Williams. We would do all kind of things in addition to improv games, scenes and monologues. So, we did a show at this place I was teaching called The Cellar Theater. We packed about 75 people into a 50 seat theater, including Mitzy Shore, the cashier from The Comedy Store, who now of course the owner of The Comedy Store. I’m sure you know that. She won it in the divorce.
The show was incredibly successful and we did everything we were doing in class: music, Moliere, Harold Pinter, improv games, improv scenes, characters. It was so cool that we kept doing it and it was called ‘The Gary Austin Workshop.’ It was not called The Groundlings. After a year of doing shows, now we’re talking about 1974, I gathered about four or five people who were very close to me there, and were very active, committed students of mine and friends at a restaurant in Santa Monica and I said ‘Let’s have a meeting.’ After they got there they said ‘What’s the meeting about?’ I said ‘I want to start a company.’ They said ‘What do you mean?’ So, I told them and one of the guys who I brought there was also an attorney for CBS, who was also one of my students, because I wanted a legal mind there. I said ‘How do we do this?’ This guy said ‘Why don’t you go non-Profit. That way you can get donations for your theater and do all the things you want to do.’ So, I said ‘Ok,’ and he said ‘Ok,’ and we created a non-profit company called The Groundlings. That was 1974. I named the company The Groundlings.
JF: What was the process of its growth like? How quickly did it grow?
GA: I had 90 Groundlings at one point, right after we formed the company. I had so many students that it eventually became 90 Groundlings. In the early days, you didn’t have to audition. The way you got in The Groundlings in the early days was you paid $25 a month for workshops and you were a Groundling. We did shows, but only about 25 people out of the 90 did the shows. If you were good enough, you got in the shows. Phil Hartman joined The Groundlings in 1974 and it took him two years to be good enough to be in the shows. That’s how stiff the competition was. And that’s how much he had to learn. He was in the workshops for two years before he was invited into the shows by me.
GA: Yeah, the main thing about Del was: he sought the truth. He demanded the truth on stage, and any bullshit was completely destroyed. He didn’t tolerate bullshit. Have you read ‘Guru,’ the book?
JF: No, I haven’t.
GA: Oh God, you’ve got to read it. It just came out about a year ago or less. It’s called ‘Guru: My Days with Del Close,’ by Jeff Griggs. A feature film’s being made of it. It’s about the last few years of Del’s life. It’s very accurate. I knew Del very well. It really captures who he was, both as a teacher and an actor and as a person, one of the most interesting people who ever lived on this planet. He did some outrageous things to demand honesty on stage. And he got what he wanted. When he didn’t get what he wanted, that person was not allowed to be in his presence. He often had me and the two biggest guys in the room, I’m not big, they would pick up a guy who was giving him a hard time, have me lead the way. I would open the doors as we went through the to the lobby of the theater, then out on Sunset Boulevard he would order the two guys to dump the guy on the sidewalk. I would be the door opener. He would say to the guy who they had just dumped on the sidewalk ‘And don’t ever come back.’ He would always start the sentence with ‘And.’ That’s all he would say to the guy. He would lock the door, and the guy would never be allowed back.
JF: Why would he do something like that?
GA: Because the person was being dishonest, on stage or off in the discussion. And if he wouldn’t conquer his dishonesty, Del was done with him. That was it. You’re gone. Forever. Don’t ever talk to me again.
JF: Did some people wind up hating Del Close?
GA: Sure, I had people hating me as a director.
JF: Why? Were you as demanding as that?
GA: Well, yes, I didn’t do some of the things Del did. I did other things. Some people hated me because I didn’t put them in the show at The Groundlings. I had one simple thing, which I told everybody up front ‘The best stuff goes in the show.’ ‘Well, who decides what’s best?’ ‘Me. I’m the director.’ [laughs] And people who thought they should be in the show or should have more to do in the show, you know, some of them did end up hating me. Some of them left. Ok, go create your own company if you don’t like it, which is basically what Paul Sills said to Alan [Meyerson] at Second City. He said ‘If you don’t like what I’m doing here, leave and create your own company.’ Alan said ok, went to San Francisco and created The Committee.
JF: So what was your experience like performing with The Committee Main Stage? It sounds like you guys had a theater. You were doing thirteen shows a week, right?
GA: Umhm.
JF: So what was it like performing thirteen shows a week?
GA: It was incredibly good. The training is irreplaceable. I always had the feeling that I was onstage more waking hours than I was off stage. [I did] two shows Sunday night, two shows Tuesday through Friday night, three shows Saturday night. And I was always so wired after the shows that I wouldn’t get to sleep until 4 or 5 in the morning. Sleep until 11, 12, or 1, get up, sort of do my day, then go to the theater and do it all over again. It was really a sense of always being on stage, under tremendous pressure, in front of 350 people, who paid a lot of money to see us. And having nights where we bombed, or me personally having a night where I bombed. Or having nights where we succeeded or me having nights where I succeeded. Or sometimes I would go home some nights and want to commit suicide after a bad night, come back the next night and have the greatest night of my life and think ‘wow, this is terrific.’ The ups and downs were huge.
JF: How would audiences react to the improv that you guys were doing?
GA: When we improvised, don’t forget the first show wasn’t improvised, the second show was improvised, the audience understood that’s what we were doing. So, they had a different expectation than they did than when they watched the first show. In the first show, they knew that the first show was, you know, material. We had decided it was good stuff and they expected a slick, good, solid show. In the second show, there expectations were ‘Ok, they’re probably going to fuck up a lot,’ but what the audience loved about it was, even when we fucked up, was the risk that we took. Since they knew we gave ourselves permission to fuck up, they too gave us permission to fuck up. So what you would see is brilliant improvisers fucking up. You would also see them succeeding. A scene works or it doesn’t work. Some scenes don’t work and the lights go out. And everyone goes ‘Is that it?’ There’s a smattering of applause and so on.
The skills of the performers were always good even when they weren’t doing a scene that worked. That’s what the audience dug. If it had been bad work, they wouldn’t have. So, it was good work in things that didn’t work, which doesn’t mean we didn’t make mistakes and do bad work sometimes. We didn’t do bad work on purpose. Our intent was to do good work, but sometimes we would do bad work and fix it the next night, or throw it out and never do it again. Usually, if we had a scene that we liked and seemed to be working, or had a scene that we liked and wasn’t working but we wanted it to work, we would stick with it for six months until it got good. That would go in [the next show]. Every six months there was an opening of the new show, the early show. The place would be packed with press. I remember The Committee in San Francisco most of the audience, hundreds of people would be press. It was amazing. Every six months, two times a year we would open a new show. But you would have all that material being created. It was really exciting, then once it was ready for the show we would put it all together and open a show.
JF: So what took you from San Francisco when you were doing The Committee Main Stage down to Los Angeles?
GA: I got fired.
JF: Oh.
GA: [laughs] About five of us got fired one night. It was the year before it closed, 1971. And there was this guy there named Bill Love. He made up his name by the way. Now this guy was anything but love. It’s ironic that’s the name he chose. He was the accountant for The Committee I think the whole ten years, and Alan Meyerson’s best friend, or certainly one of his best friends. Well, this guy, as far as I know, had no skills as an artist, Bill Love. He had no experience. He had never directed, never acted, never improvised. He’d never done anything as far as I know. Maybe he had done a couple workshops with some improvisers, but I never saw him. But he was always there every night. He hated my work. Absolutely hated it and made no secret of it.
We did a show opening in which I got the best reviews of any actor in the company. The San Francisco Examiner said ‘This is the best Committee show ever done,’ and he basically implied that I did the best work in the show. It was a rave review. Everybody else who came that night raved about my work. So, I was glowing. I walked into the theater the next night with all this press behind me, all these incredible reviews and the whole cast was sitting there in the green room, including Bill Love who hung out with us, and Bill Love said when I walked in the room, so that everyone could hear, ‘Well, Austin, you can fool the press, but you can’t fool us.’ Not one person came to my defense. Not one person said ‘Bill, you’re an asshole for saying that.’ Not one person said ‘Gary, he’s wrong.’ Not one person said ‘Shut up Bill.’ They just looked at me. Ok?
So, what happened was in 71 Alan said to Bill, because Bill had been begging for years to direct, Alan finally said ‘I’m going to let you direct. You can pick your cast.’ He always said that to whoever directed. So, Bill decided that four or five of us had to go out of about eight or nine of us, and they brought in some of the old Committee people who weren’t around then to replace us. And they told me a lie, which, well, I’ve forgiven them, but I know they lied to me. They called us in one at a time while we were getting notes at the end. I think they called me in last. I didn’t know what was going on. ‘Why do they keep calling people out of the room to have a meeting with Alan while we’re talking about what went on in the show?’
They called me in there and said ‘We’re letting you go and we’re letting three or four other people go. We’re letting you go because of seniority. You don’t have seniority. Bill’s taking over. He wants certain people to come back so we’re getting rid of the four or five people who have less seniority.’ Well, in fact, there was a guy there named David Booty, who had less seniority than me. So, I knew that was a lie. Bill just didn’t want me around, and he didn’t want the other four around either.
So, I left and went back to L.A. I started improvising at The Comedy Store, started teaching. I had never taught in my life but I started teaching, that was 72 when I started teaching.
JF: What was it like at The Comedy Store? Who were you improvising with?
GA: The Comedy Store had just opened a week earlier when I discovered it. The reason I discovered it was because there were two Committee people, Valerie Curtain and Archie Hahn, who had started a group the first week it opened called The Comedy Store Players. Valerie called me up. She was a very close friend of mine. She said ‘Why don’t you come over and improvise with us at The Comedy Store?’ I went over there. Don’t forget it had only been open a week. They only had one room then. Sammy Shore was the owner. His wife Mitzy Shore was the cashier.
I watched The Comedy Store Players. They had this guy named Sid, who was a friend of the other three, but didn’t want to be an actor. He was a techie, but he was filling in. They needed somebody because it had just started. He came to me and said ‘Take my place. I don’t really want to do this,’ so they invited me in. So, I became a member of that, which I was for a year and a half, six nights a week at The Comedy Store with The Comedy Store Players. Robin Williams became a member of The Comedy Store players many years I left The Comedy Store. As far as I know, The Comedy Store Players still exists. I don’t know, but it certainly existed for many years.
We improvised with the biggest stars in show business. Red Foxx would come in. Flip Wilson would come in from his NBC show taping. He was the number one show in the country nationally. Every star in the business came in and either sat in the audience or went on stage. It was an amazing time. Richard Pryor was creating his act. Gabe Kaplan was creating his act. The Unknown Comic was creating his act. Rodney Dangerfield would come in and do stuff. The Smothers Brothers would come in. It was incredible. I also did stand-up and MC’ed. This was before Letterman came in. Long after I left, Letterman came in and did stand-up and became the MC there. Nobody knew who he was yet.
And um, so, …what did you ask me? [laughs]
JF: [laughs] Uh…
GA: Oh, I know, about improvising there. The four of us would improvise there and if someone like Flip Wilson or Red Foxx would come in we’d ask them to improvise with us.
JF: Ok, so how did The Groundlings start?
GA: Well, I was teaching at The Comedy Store about four nights a week and I was also teaching at a theater I rented, so I was teaching a lot. After teaching for a year, I had some amazing people. There were only two improv teachers in town at the time, actually three I think. Howard Strong from The Committee, me and a woman who’s name I can’t remember right now. I think that was it. Improv hadn’t really caught on in the way it has since then. There were tons of people who became giant stars who were coming to my workshops. After a year of incredible work, I said to the group ‘Let’s do a show. The work is so incredible here.’ We would do, not just improvs, we would do scenes from plays. We would do Shakespeare, Moliere, Tennessee Williams. We would do all kind of things in addition to improv games, scenes and monologues. So, we did a show at this place I was teaching called The Cellar Theater. We packed about 75 people into a 50 seat theater, including Mitzy Shore, the cashier from The Comedy Store, who now of course the owner of The Comedy Store. I’m sure you know that. She won it in the divorce.
The show was incredibly successful and we did everything we were doing in class: music, Moliere, Harold Pinter, improv games, improv scenes, characters. It was so cool that we kept doing it and it was called ‘The Gary Austin Workshop.’ It was not called The Groundlings. After a year of doing shows, now we’re talking about 1974, I gathered about four or five people who were very close to me there, and were very active, committed students of mine and friends at a restaurant in Santa Monica and I said ‘Let’s have a meeting.’ After they got there they said ‘What’s the meeting about?’ I said ‘I want to start a company.’ They said ‘What do you mean?’ So, I told them and one of the guys who I brought there was also an attorney for CBS, who was also one of my students, because I wanted a legal mind there. I said ‘How do we do this?’ This guy said ‘Why don’t you go non-Profit. That way you can get donations for your theater and do all the things you want to do.’ So, I said ‘Ok,’ and he said ‘Ok,’ and we created a non-profit company called The Groundlings. That was 1974. I named the company The Groundlings.
JF: What was the process of its growth like? How quickly did it grow?
GA: I had 90 Groundlings at one point, right after we formed the company. I had so many students that it eventually became 90 Groundlings. In the early days, you didn’t have to audition. The way you got in The Groundlings in the early days was you paid $25 a month for workshops and you were a Groundling. We did shows, but only about 25 people out of the 90 did the shows. If you were good enough, you got in the shows. Phil Hartman joined The Groundlings in 1974 and it took him two years to be good enough to be in the shows. That’s how stiff the competition was. And that’s how much he had to learn. He was in the workshops for two years before he was invited into the shows by me.
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