Phil Hartman Days IX: Fortune Cookie

My favorite dance partner


I loved my office but I loved the VP office more. It was empty when I started working for Bob and for a short while I considered just moving in there one day, kind of like a sly cuckoo, and hoping that the desk made the woman. But it was not to be.

I was rudely pulled out of my reverie a short time later when Bob announced that he was interviewing an experienced development exec for the senior position. Apparently it had been a tough negotiation because she had insisted on getting the title of VP, Production & Development, the hot title de jour, which stretched the limits of credibility since she'd never actually been on a film set. However she prevailed and the deal was done. I was crestfallen but still, I did have an office and I wasn't typing anyone's memos.

Sharon arrived shortly afterward, a beautiful, polished blonde with an impressive resume and a gigantic rolodex (these were the days of the huge paper wheels that spun around and took up a quarter of your desk). Not a hair out of place, perfectly manicured nails, and $300.00 silettos. As she was being introduced she shook my hand warmly and smiled.

I was horrified.

Standing before me was the very development executive I had been assigned to on that awful day when I trudged out of the secretarial pool into her office at MGM. Tell me it wasn't so!! I scanned her face for any sign of recognition and when only a blank, friendly look was forthcoming, breathed a sigh of relief. Slowly I turned (step by step) and went back to my office and sat there wondering if it would continue to haunt me, this fear that one day she would see me in a certain light, glimpse a certain shrug of my shoulders, or the sound of my voice, say, answering the phone, and recognition would slowly, ever so painfully, ever so delightfully dawn. Get those phones working girlfriend!! It would all over town that I was just an imposter, not really one of them. Let's just say D-Girls were a clubby lot.

I had to get over it and focus on feathering my own career nest. I took in an inordinate amount of (script) reading for Sharon, sharpening my analytical skills and writing some pretty nifty coverage. Although plowing your way through the hundreds of scripts making their way to any development director's office can be tedious, it is a necessary evil and I got to be really good at it. Coverage is a kind of Reader's Digest version of the script that starts with a log line ("Mysterious chemical turns man into a hybrid monster who kills all of Chicago before being captured by aliens"), followed by a paragraph summary of the story line, then a longer version in case the first two items piqued the interest of the boss. The last part was always the most fun - the Siskel and Ebert moment where you got to decide the fate of the poor screenwriter who had poured his heart, soul and sweat into the masterpiece, whose life is now hanging in the balance based on your recommendation. Pass or Recommend. Yay or Nay. Thumbs up or thumbs down. Oh, the power!

The best readers were obviously frustrated writers because this was where you put your personality into the coverage (and showed your boss how much brighter you were than the screenwriter). There were many clever ways to skewer bad material and it was kind of like riffing off an idea in a comedy routine. Or, conversely, proving how invaluable you were by demonstrating your sophisticated grasp of character development, story arc, and ratio of connectivity to audience demographics if you were actually going to recommend the material be read by your boss (which was a rare occurance). It was expected that I would read 30 scripts for every recommendation, which meant about one a week would make it up the chain of command.

So while I was having lunch all over town, reading scripts, napping on my office couch (reading is very tiring), and paying very little attention to my marriage we got word that Phil was coming to town and wanted to have dinner. We promptly invited him for a home-cooked meal and he left a message saying he would be delighted and would it be okay to bring his fiancee.

We were a little taken aback because until then we hadn't heard of any fiancee. It was just another indication of the distance that had grown since Phil had left and virtually disappeared from our lives. It was odd to see him reappear again first on our television, a familiar face amongst an ever-changing sea of celebrity guest hosts, doing all the same schtick he did at our dinner parties. Except now he was becoming a television star, a recognizable face, a beloved object of admiration, desire, and envy. Our Phil had made it!

I remember that evening very well. At night our house, an old, polished Craftsman bungalow, mellowed into a rich amber glow as the candlelight reflected off the cherry, mahogany, and oak walls that lined every room. It made for intimate spaces created by the pools of light from lamps and the old chandelier hanging over our dining room table. I'd picked a huge bouquet of mixed summer roses from our garden (half of which the cat ate before we shooed him off the table....but hey this isn't a Martha Stewart commercial). Back then I liked to have white linens and silver napkin rings, and we spared no expense on the wine or the food that night, hoping to impress the woman who was about to claim our friend. It hadn't been that long since Phil had been a daily fixture in our lives and I still felt very attached to him, and very protective too.

At first Brynn looked no different than the string of attractive blondes Phil had been dating. She was requisitely cool to the touch, thin, wearing a simple, elegant outfit and hanging on to Phil's arm. It was then that I realized she was quite nervous. Insecure, even. She stood a little apart in our kitchen, an old-fashioned butter & mint colored room with a huge old gas range and a cook's table around which we always gathered to open and drink our first glass of wine. At first I took her stonyiness for shyness - after all, she was a stranger in a home full of west-coast film people and she was....well at that point I knew nothing about her except that she was an aspiring actress. I'm sure it felt a bit intimidating.

We sat down to dinner and Phil most of the talking. We were amazed to discover that despite his burgeoning celebrityhood he was taking the bus and subway home from taping the show every week. "The kind of people you see on the bus at two o'clock in the morning are not watching Saturday Night Live," he explained with a grin, "So they don't know who I am." He was also still the same old Phil, talking about scripts that he was writing (which would never be finished), and glancing with shy admiration over to where Brynn sat, solemn and watchful.

In recent weeks I've read as much as I could find about what people said about Brynn. Grim fascination, I suppose, about what makes a person do what she did. Oddly, I couldn't find much more than the typical "she seemed nice" observations. But the fact that it is hard to reconcile the "sweet and normal" personna with what happened is telling.

I can only give you my own observations and they are based on two evenings with her. That's all. Two meals, both lasting about three hours, including drinks in the kitchen beforehand and the lingering send-off afterwards. But I have that woman's intuition going for me, and I wasn't someone Brynn needed to impress or get along with. As much as I had come to love Phil he was moving out of our lives and we all knew it. This night we were in the slow and painful process of letting go and perhaps for that reason I saw a true glimpse of all that she was.

I saw a woman who watched me with the concentration of a street cat. She was polite but just this shy of nice, and although I cut her some slack on the first meeting, it didn't improve the second time and by then I was getting the message loud and clear: don't!

Don't come near, don't try to come between Phil and I (who's trying?), don't be try to be my friend, don't, don't, don't.

The second time we saw Phil and Brynn they were married and came to dinner toting their infant son, Sean. Phil was clearly a doting father and most of his attention was focused on the baby which seemed to both annoy and satisfy Brynn. I learned later that she'd gotten pregnant on their third date.

We said goodbye at the door and I was dismayed to see that Phil had that look again, abashed, embarassed, and a little like someone who wasn't sure what was coming next. Then the heavy oak front door closed and they were gone.

Next: Our lives finally separate for good

Phil Hartman Days VIII: In the Playhouse

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Photo: Fireplace Series #1

When I sat down with Bob Shapiro to discuss my new job everyone was on a high. He had his first bonafied hit after stepping down as President of Warner Brothers a year earlier and we creative types were in that happy place one lands in when their film is a big hit. It wasn't just the healthy box office numbers but the fact that Pee-wee was a cult phenomenon, a truly original creation. The pastels and 50's style visuals of the film were high fashion back then, they helped further define the cultural pallete of the decade. Lots of people wanted to touch the cloth, so to speak, to perhaps get a little of the magic for their entertainment conglomerates. Soon the principals were in bookend meetings around town and it wasn't long before they accepted a job to create a new kid's television series for CBS, Pee-Wee's Playhouse.

For my part, although I'd had very little to do with the success of the film, I was feeling pretty cocky. I suppose it came from being everyone in Hollywood's new best friend. I was set up in in the WB Bungalow, clearly the nicest one on the lot. When Bob stepped down as Studio Chief he knew which one to put dibs on - a beautiful, spacious cottage that had once been the dressing room of 30's movie star, Marion Davies (also the mistress of Randolph Hearst). Each office had been fashioned from rooms in the house and all were different, some with fireplaces, whitewashed walls, glass-fronted bookcases & iron mullioned windows. It didn't get any better. I felt like Tess triumphant at the end of Working Girl, because it had been only months earlier when I'd been forced by arcane Studio-union policy to join the secretarial pool between jobs as a production coordinator. During one hiatus, I was asked to report to the office of a development executive, one of the elite Turks in the business, who proceeded to dump a bunch of typing assignments on my desk with barely a glance in my direction before going back into her office, getting on the phone and turning to the business of film development. Which, if you don't know this already, consists of 20% actual script development and 80% gossip.

In those days they were called D-Girls because almost all of them were women or gay men and boy were they vicious! Information passed through them at lightening speed, getting more exaggerated and vitriolic with every telling. Their stock in trade was the ever-changing list of creatives (directors & actors), their box office value (real or potential), and no tidbit was too small to pass up. They were hungry for ways to beg, borrow or steal these commodities before someone else did, and they loved to share in the daily grist of who was hot and who was not. What happened to the projects they oversaw is another story because D-Girls were famous for "can't say yes, won't say no." They had no real power to get a greenlight for a project - they were more like the shadowy politicians behind the King's throne, whispering their way into favor.

I remembered the humiliation of that day so clearly. My face to the wall staring at the typewriter, gulping down tears every time I had to answer the phone for the development executive, trying to disappear from the room. I swore then and there that I'd do anything, clean toilets, wait tables, put out a tin cup, before I ever, ever sank to typing up someone's memos again.

How quickly fortunes change: Here I was now a few short months later with my own office, someone to answer my phone, and the requisite announcement of my appointment on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter. But Bob hedged at actually making me his Development V.P. so he had me doing 'special projects'. They were varied, odd, and sometimes interesting. One day he asked me to translate an old film from French into English - I had to watch it on a movieola, kind of a personal viewer in the pre-DVD days. I also started doing a round of lunches, something expected of anyone who wanted a future in the film business. Some people wanted to get to Michael through me so the meet-and-greets were not difficult.

These were halcyon days for me although Michael wasn't faring as well in his new job as part of a large team of writers for Pee-wee's Playhouse. Most of them were Paul's cronies and they came from stand-up comedy. Worse still, most of them were actors in the series so they were very possessive of the jokes, the style of humor, and just about everything else. Phil fit in well in this environment but Michael, who was trying to interject order into the pandemonium was soon tagged as a sourpus and eventually shut out. As far as Michael's stalling career was concerned I was in denial and focused instead on the rounds of parties and events we were still privy to, and for many of them we double-dated with Phil. By now he was escorting a variety of attractive women, some of them nice, some of them not-so-nice. He seemed to have trouble getting away from the cool blondes he found so compelling. I suppose they were the yin to his yang, because Phil remained the same affable, vulnerable, and always transparent nice-guy even as his career started to really take off.

Phil's character on Playhouse was Captian Carl, a loud, barnacled sea-captian with very bushy eyebrows and blustery way. The burr in Capt'n Carl's side was his a secret crush on fellow Playhouse regular, Miss Yvonne, and yar matey would be reduced to a blubbering idiot when she was around. All comedians reach for those vulnerabilities most personal to them and usually that's when their humor is the truest.

When the series debuted we had a party for friends at the house and watched with amazement as adults and children alike screamed with laughter. It was a totally new thing, the idea of parents and kids watching Saturday morning television together and CBS was very happy. As Emmy season rolled around we got word the show had been nominated in several categories, including the writing. Another opportunity to dress up in some outlandish tulle concoction and make for the limos.

The show did win a couple of Emmy's but the writers lost out to Sesame Street, which was on a 10 year winning-streak. We were bitterly disappointed. The Emmys were beautiful and would have looked really, really nice on the mantelpiece.

By this time we'd purchased a craftsman house in the West Adams district and we stayed busy. Phil continued to come to our weekly dinner parties, often solo, and we began to think of him as a member of our family. Then one day, he got word that he and Jan were going to be in the new SNL season and within weeks he had moved to New York. The hardest part of working on a show or a film is when it ends and everybody moves on. It's a bitter pill to swallow, one I never got used to.

Next: Phil becomes a bonified star and we meet Brynn

Phil Hartman: Redefined

To those of you who have already read the last installment I have to apologize for a mix up in dates. Blame it on faulty memory (and since my memory isn't that great, sloppy research). Phil didn't actually get into SNL until after he worked on the first season of Pee-wee's Playhouse so I've altered the end of the last post to reflect the correct order of events. It will also give me a chance to talk a little about this series before moving on to timeframe surrounding Phil's move to New York and his marriage to Brynn.

I also finally made the time to plow through a gigantic box of old photos (thanks, Bob!) and other assorted memorabilia (including a hand-drawn Christmas card from Tim Burton) and they helped to fill in some of the blanks (which got me thinking about the dates). I found several photos of Phil. Some I'd forgotten about, and a couple of them were hard to look at, even after all this time.

I'll publish them bit by bit as the series finishes up.

Big Picture Article

For those who want to read the article in Fade In Magazine about The Big Picture and other films that suffered in the hands of studio executives, a portion of the article is now available online at: http://www.fadeinonline.com

Phil Hartman VII: When Jupiter Aligns with Mars

Every morning when I came to the Big Adventure production offices at Warner Brothers I had to contend with Evil Pee-wee before my morning coffee. Evil Pee-wee was a life-sized Pee-wee Herman doll some fan had sent to Paul, a spooky stuffed mannequin complete with too-small grey pinstriped suit, red bow-tie and the famous Bob's Big Boy dollop of hair in front. It was one of those "Ew, yuck," kind of gifts but fascinating in a scary way. And since we didn't know what to do with it we draped it over the top of the refrigerator in the office kitchen. With its staring eyes and manic smile it was an overwhelming presence in the small room - we especially disliked the fake fingernails and eyelashes - and it lay sideways with shod feet in red striped socks sticking over the end like the Wicked Witch of the West. You had to manoeuver around it to get to the coffee machine and inevitably there were comments: "Get any last night, Pee-wee?" "Come on, we know you come to life at night and party with the shoemaker's elves." We didn't want the thing in the building but no-one seemed willing to throw it in the trash. We were afraid some crazed fan would use it for a voo-doo ritual or a personal sex toy.

One thing about being famous: if you can help it, don't be. I tried to explain to my family back home in Canada when I started working at MGM that it was an awful life, but I think most of them were skeptical. We were raised to worship movie stars, after all, and they looked so goooood.

But I knew better. I remember being at the premiere party for Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, a very clever film starring Steve Martin that overlaid a faux film-noir murder mystery with footage from old films so that actors like Bogie appeared to be talking to Martin and vice-versa (Woody Allen used the same technique later in Zelig). By then I was social friends with Bill McEuen, who was Steve's long time manager from his stand-up days. More recently Bill had gone into business with Michael and Rich, so at this party we were part of the inner circle of guests. I was kind of naive back then: I fancied myself a bit of a clothes dandy and had designed a plaid dress for the premiere and I'm sure I looked fresh in a back-home kind of way, or maybe I just looked like a hick, who knows. I was fairly new at the business but I knew my way around a television set and was privy to the inner workings of the studio system so I was comfortable in this melieu.

While the boys were chatting at the table over stuffed mushrooms and tuna sushi (around this time sushi was considered the coolest food on the planet and just about as exotic) I decided I would introduce myself to Steve Martin, who was standing nearby in a beautiful silver-grey suit and starched shirt. He had a drink in his hand and was talking earnestly to someone from the film crew. I came from his blind spot and thought nothing of it until I touched his arm to get his attention. He must have leapt back a foot, spilling his drink, and the look of pure terror on his face was shocking. So shocking that for some bizarre reason I felt the urge to pretend I was someone I wasn't. Okay this is very odd (and even odder to recall) but as he stood there, stock-still, face frozen in an expression between fear and distaste, I started gabbling on about how I had won a contest to the film premiere and I was from Oklahoma and I was just absolutely thrilled to be there and the people in charge had said it was okay to come over and shake his hand.

You know, I haven't thought about this incident for 20 years. Buried it, I suppose, out of sheer embarassement because to this day I have no idea what possessed me to lie the way I did. The only thing I can imagine is that I felt humiliated to be reduced by his very look into some kind of stalker, and all my carefully cultivated sense of belonging to this protective and pretentious inner circle disappeared in a hole of insecurity.

But it was the look of terror that I remembered long after I forgot about my bizarre reaction. This man had truly been afraid of me. Despite my one-degree separation from him I really was no different than the millions of people who felt as if they knew him, had made an intimate connection in a darkened theater and felt entitled to seek him out as if to an old friend. In reality I was an unknown entity, perhaps a potential threat, at best a total stranger who wanted a piece of him even if he didn't want to give it. When I touched him I also think I broke some kind of personal taboo, which is why he looked like he wanted to wipe off the spot where I'd put my hand.

I don't know what Steve Martin was like before he signed his life over to the fans but I do know what Phil Hartman was like, and because they were both comedians, I suspect that there were some similarities. Phil had a quiet, shy side to him, in later paparazzi photographs of his walks through the park wearing baggy farmer overalls and pushing his toddler in a stroller were always an endearing reminder of this.

I wanted Phil to succeed but as we were nearing the end of production on Pee-wee's Big Adventure I wasn't sure it would happen for him. He was getting offers to write but I knew that he was better in a pitch meeting than creating a viable story structure and feared the scripts would end up in a development pile somewhere before he faded back into obscurity. His two-second cameo at the end of the movie was eclipsed by the strange apparition of still-hunky James Brolin squeezed into a little grey suit, red-bow tie and short pants for his role as Pee-wee in the movie within the movie (that was an eyeful). Phil was trying out for everything his manager could get him, from crappy cable shows to bit parts in B movies.

The boys didn't seem inclined to stay together as a writing team so there wasn't much energy in that direction, in the end it looked like Paul and Tim Burton were going to come out on top. But as fate would have it, there were a few surprises in store for the gang.

We were preparing to organize the end of film activities when we got news that both Phil and Jan Hooks were auditioning to become part of the new cast for Saturday Night Live. Neither of them had more than The Groundlings and the equivalent of regional theatre going for them at that point but everyone knew they were both very talented. And funny. Still, this was the big leagues and I honestly didn't hold out much hope they would make it to the finals.

The wrap party was held at an old Vaudeville Club in downtown Los Angeles where Milton Berle had once performed (he also had a bit part Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Phil swore he'd heard from the secret inner circle of comedians that that he had a humongous piece of equipment and libido to match). We were about to head into post-production and I had taken a job as a development executive with Bob Shapiro's company.

I was feeling pretty good despite the fact that days before I'd been on Bob's couch crying when he told me that the only credit I'd get on the film was as his assistant. "But I wasn't your assistant! Those guys get coffee and kiss ass," I wailed, humiliated. "I don't want any credit if that's all you can offer!" We had a face-off: Bob had been a former uber-agent for stars like Barbara Streisand and his negotiating skills were far superior to mine - He was dangling a job offer as a reward for cooperating. And I knew he wanted to have an assistant listed in the credits because his producing partners, Rich Abramson, Bill McEuen and even Paul had one, and it was all about keeping face. So in the end I folded like a sissy girl.

Once again the writers and I herded together during post-production, hanging around the scoring sessions, editing sessions, watching rough cuts and test screenings, and the momentum began to build. By the time we were putting the premiere arrangements together I was fending off desperate calls from every important person in Hollywood who simply had to be there.
Even my little project, the fake yearbook, The Adventurer, was in such high demand that I could have sold my copy for hundreds of dollars and I had to keep the box of remaining copies for the crew hidden away to prevent pilfering.

The night of the premiere arrived. I had my hair styled into a lot of moussed-up spikes and wore a black sequined dress and chandelier earrings that weighed a pound a piece. Phil came over to our apartment with his date, bleached blonde, very tanned and also spiky haired. We were all giddy and when we came out of the limo I heard people yelling, "Look over here!" and cameras flashing. Someone said "I know her!" as we made our way down the red carpet at Mann's Chinese Theatre. It was silly and funny and exhilarating. The wrap party was a huge circus created on the top floor of a nearby parking lot and I was in heaven because I could play all the midway games for free.

In the weeks that followed Pee-wee's Big Adventure became a cult phenomenon. And in the midst of it all we heard that both Phil and Jan had won fianlist spots for the cast of SNL. I was overjoyed. I knew that Phil had finally pulled himself out of the little house in Encino and was about to find a national stage for his enormous talent.

Shortly afterward we got word that CBS had decided to hire Paul and friends to write and produce a new Saturday morning television show loosely modeled after his successful stage act, which included a group of oddball characters including Phil's Capt'n Carl and a genie who lived in a box, was obviously gay, and started every appearance with the chant, "mecka, lecka, hay, mecka hiney ho!". Paul, Phil, and Michael (who for some reason doesn't have credit in IMDB for his contribution in the first season) joined up with several other writers to crank out the first 13 episodes and we thought we could ride the Pee-wee train for years to come. It wasn't long afterward that the happy group began to unravel.


Next: Pee-wee's Playhouse debuts and redefines children's television

Phil Hartman VI: Sidelined

When Pee-wee's Big Adventure began shooting I was working as a freelance production coordinator. I had just finished an episode of a new comedy series on PBS and ours was directed by Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs, The Manchurian Candidate) and featured the acting debut of the very strange David Byrne of The Talking Heads. This was a low-rent production typical of public television and we had no money for a wrap party so I volunteered to have it at our house. The two clearest memories of that night were one of Byrne standing perplexed before a tray of iced petit-fours ("What are these?", he asked wide-eyed before turning back to study them intently). The other was sitting cross-legged on the floor of our study, knee-to-knee and eye-to-eye with Byrne, who could outstare a cat, discussing the reliability of technique for an actor. Since he was considering a career change from musical superstar to serious actor and I was a recent graduate of theatre school and could spout theory from Michael Chekov and Stanislavski, he was mine, all mine for the night.

My husband was equally busy. With great excitement the Pee-wee Gang moved into the very spacious production bungalow on the Warner Brothers lot occupied by one of the film's producers (and former studio head) Bob Shapiro. It was a first-class ride and we were all a little giddy, even those of us who were attached to the whole thing only by the thread of marriage. Although I'd worked at MGM on several television shows this was my first close encounter with a major feature film and I wanted in really badly. Something. Anything. But I didn't have the clout to get an Associate Producer's job (and was stalemated by Michael's producing partner who despised me at this point....long story some other time) so I started hanging around the set trying to figure out how I could be helpful. Michael and Phil were both sidelined to crew chairs, the fate of most film writers before they start directing or producing their own material, so we spent a lot of time inside Paul's trailer doing pretty much nothing. He had a very handsome massage therapist/personal trainer at the time so he was always around as well.

One day Paul, who was a huge fan of the old high-school yearbooks that were strewn around his trailer, asked me if I wanted to take on a job producing a crew gift for him. I heard the word "producing" and jumped in with both feet, brain last. Finally feeling useful, off I went tra la, tra la to make a faux 60's style yearbook about the film, aptly named "The Adventurer", to be limited edition printed and distributed to cast and crew at the wrap party.

What was I doing, you may ask? One thing about me is that I'll take on just about anything even if I've never, ever done it or anything remotely like it before. Like the 3 tiered wedding cake I made for a friend's wedding (they had no back-up plan in case I failed). I had to go to culinary school part-time to figure out how to make the damn thing but in the end it was a thing of butter-icing beauty. So when Paul gave me a job (a paid job at that) I jumped at it.

Turned out to be a lot of fun. I had a 35MM camera and access to everyone on the film, including the studio executives on the picture (Mark Canton and Lisa Henson, who had yet to ascend to Studio Chiefs of Warner Brothers and Columbia pictures respectively). It was a shmoozers dream and I made the most of it, chatting up everyone from top to bottom. I was busy and happy. Michael and Phil were still hanging around the set doing nothing.

And that's what I remember about the weeks we were shooting. Phil kind of disappeared at this stage of the production. He was there, but like Michael, overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the creative process, now dominated by Paul and director Tim Burton. Tim was always aloof from the OG - he was already on his own star track and I often felt annoyed with him for not really giving credit to the writers for the extraordinary imagination and vision they'd provided in the material. I knew the script backwards and forwards and Pee-wee's Big Adventure came to him almost fully formed, story, characters, costume and production design, rythmn, humor. In later reviews I would be incensed at how much they attributed to Burton. I mean the guy is a genius to be sure, but he doesn't get the creative credit for this film - and I said as much in a couple of letters to the newspapers after the reviews came out in which they barely mentioned the writers. Tim was the luckiest guy on earth to have been tapped for the job because it greased the wheels for his truly meteoric rise. That's my opinion.

I didn't see much of Phil during the first weeks, so busy was I with my little project, but he was always on set, standing a little apart during the general hubub that surrounds a set, and I would always seek him out when I could. We were both a little introverted when out of our element and besides that I could always count on him to be happy to see me. We often ate lunch together when Paul and Tim were conferring, and he told me he was really trying to get more auditions to capitalize on the Pee-wee buzz. He wanted to continue writing but I knew that his real talent was as a performer.

One day, he confided in me that he really wanted a part in the film but had been too shy to really press Paul and too intimidated by Tim. The film was populated by many comedic character actors, some of them friends of Paul's (like Jan Hooks, who gives a memorable performance as the tour guide at The Alamo). But Phil didn't fit anywhere so he resigned himself to making hay while the sun shone. He started looking for work in earnest: I remember him auditioning to be the host of a talk show, and then came the audition for SNL, which no-one thought he would get, genius as he was.

Finally they came down to casting some bit parts and found something for Michael, Phil, and even Bob Shapiro, who appears as a hobo at the end of the film. The scene where Pee-wee becomes a hero after his life story is made into a film is where you'll see Phil for a second, posing as a reporter, hovering around Paul, a second-banana on film as in life. Michael is even more invisible, he gets out from behind Paul for a
split second before putting a flash camera in front of his face.

The film was almost finished. Despite the euphoria this wacky production was in uncharted territory and we were heading who knows where. We'd heard the studio had tested Pee-wee's name and it came last on the list after Burt Reynolds and even Debbie Reynolds for all I know. We were all praying the ride didn't come to a screeching halt.

Next: Phil does the impossible and lands a job on Saturday Night Live