Word: mitzi
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...early 1979 the comics were growing restive. For one thing, Mitzi Shore's little artists' colony was the center of a growing comedy empire. Along with her two clubs in the L.A. area and another one down the coast in La Jolla, she had started a college concert tour featuring comics from the Comedy Store and signed a creative-consultant deal with ABC to develop TV projects. She had expanded her original club as well, opening a second showroom, dubbed the Main Room, where she intended to feature (and pay for) top comics from Vegas...
...many of the big-name comics she tried to hire for the Main Room turned her down, and the ones who did work there weren't doing much business. "Mitzi was just crestfallen," says Argus Hamilton, the young comic from Oklahoma who was her errand boy and confidant at the time. "She had built that room for Buddy Hackett, Don Rickles, Shecky Greene, Bob Newhart - all those guys, her ex-husband's generation, who were ruling the roost in Vegas at the time. They refused to play the Main Room because they thought it would hurt their Las Vegas draw...
...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 the toilets. Why don't you at least pay the comedians?" Many of the struggling kids who were helping her clubs thrive, he argued, couldn't even afford...
...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," he says. "He was behaving like a hyperactive child. Jumping up and down, being funny and distracting...
...Mitzi was willing to relent on the comedians' most reasonable demand, the one that had sparked the whole uprising, agreeing to pay the comics who performed in the Main Room one half of the cover charges. But while that was fine for the top tier of comics big enough to play the Main Room, it meant the vast majority of lesser names would still be working for nothing in the Original Room. So the comics turned it down and dug in for a fight...