Word: friendlys
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...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't sit still...
...Budd Friedman, who was just as much of a tightwad as Mitzi Shore and had struggled for years to keep his club afloat in New York, didn't pay his comedians either - in New York or L.A. - but he smartly positioned himself as a friend to the strikers. His L.A. club had been severely damaged in a fire just before the strike began, but he set up a makeshift performance space in the bar area of the club and continued to operate, promising to abide by whatever agreement the comics reached with Mitzi. Meanwhile, with most of her talent...
...Lubetkin's troubles clearly went beyond Mitzi Shore and the strike. "He obviously had some deep-rooted psychological problems," says Richard Lewis, a friend since their days together at the Improv in New York. "Also an unbearably bad run of luck." Lubetkin had missed out on several TV opportunities, including a heartbreaking mishap with The Tonight Show. After he had been booked to make his first appearance on Carson's show, Lubetkin was cutting up onstage late one night at the Comedy Store when a Tonight producer happened to be in the audience. The producer didn't like what...
...down; Mitzi was upset because he had stopped off first at the Sunset club to walk the picket line. But after his death, she angrily denied any implication that she bore some responsibility. "I was very close with Steve Lubetkin," she says. "I loved him. He was my best friend. I was in La Jolla at the Comedy Store and when I got the message [of his suicide], I threw glasses around. I had a fit, that he would do a thing like that." She claims Lubetkin was under too much pressure because of the organizing duties he had inherited...
...prime minister and Sarkozy archrival Dominique de Villepin lashed out at the "hysteria characteristic of how this crisis has been handled," and warned against "the search for a scapegoat" as an easy response to it. Michel Marchet, an official with the Communist-affiliated CGT labor union and thus no friend to de Villepin or to big capital in general, stressed that his organization "does not want Daniel Bouton to leave...