Word: dreesen
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...labor movement was born. Tom Dreesen, who had been in the Teamsters Union when he worked on the loading docks in Chicago, became the comedians' chief organizer and spokesman. A former G.I. who was a few years older than most of the youngsters at the Comedy Store, Dreesen had little affection for the college kids who had protested the Vietnam War, but he provided an articulate voice for their working stiffs' complaints. He tried to appeal to Mitzi's sense of fair play. "I told Mitzi, you pay the waiters, you pay the waitresses, you pay the guy who cleans...
...comics formed a quasi-union, the Comedians for Compensation, and held meetings. The first one was mass chaos, says Dreesen, "Everybody's talking at the same time. Gallagher's yelling, 'Why don't we burn the fucking place down!' It was insanity." David Letterman was there, along with his good friend George Miller, who was particularly outraged because his mother used to work as a bookkeeper for Mitzi Shore - and thus knew how much money she was socking away. Leno came too, though Letterman thought he made something of a spectacle of himself. "Jay, bless his heart, couldn...
...Dreesen went back to Mitzi and tried to negotiate a plan for paying all the comics, not just the Main Room elite. He suggested what he thought would be a painless solution: simply add $1 to the $4.50 cover Mitzi was charging at the time, and split that extra dollar among the comedians. If a couple hundred people were in the club on a given night, that meant $200 split among the comics; it wasn't much, but it was a start, and even those few bucks could mean a lot. But Mitzi turned him down flat. "She said...
...blow to the strikers. The other comics who had kept working were mostly close friends of Mitzi's or young kids who didn't know any better. Shandling was different. "This wasn't a hick off the street," says Letterman. "You could tell that Garry was a real talent." Dreesen calls his move "unconscionable." Shandling says he felt the strike had simply dragged on too long, and claims he got private support for his position from other striking comics, who felt the same way but were afraid to cross the picket line. "I called up Dave Letterman - I didn...
...Tensions between the strikers and nonstrikers grew. Dreesen and John Witherspoon - a stand-up who also worked as a doorman and sometime manager of the club - acted as marshals on the picket line, protecting the strikers from harassment by Mitzi loyalists. One night, the bad blood got out of hand, as one of the antistrike comics tried to drive a car through the picket line, brushing some of the comics and knocking Jay Leno to the pavement with a loud thud. Dreesen ran over to him, panicked that Leno had been seriously injured. Leno gave him a wink...