Word: mitzi
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...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...
...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...
...crushed the night Letterman - one of her favorites, the kid from Indiana whom she took under her wing and, she claimed, had talked into staying when he wanted to go back home - showed up on the picket line. "I watched him in the bay window here," Mitzi would recall years later. "I was taken aback. I was crying. Three and a half years working with him, every night. I called him that night at his apartment. I was totally choked up. And he said, 'Those comedians are my friends. And they'll be my friends for the rest...
...twenty-five dollars per set in the Original Room. She rejected it flat out. "She was so hurt over David Letterman that she continued to dig her heels in," he says. "She just absolutely refused. It cost her her greatest strength: her cool rationality." As the strike dragged on, Mitzi tried to lure the comics back with a promise to pay them twenty-five dollars per set on weekends only. Garry Shandling, one of the club's top acts at the time, thought it was a reasonable offer and went back to work...
...Shandling's decision to cross the picket line came as a 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...