Somehow, I’ve become the improv archivist. Always had a healthy stash of vintage memorabilia, as a result of my friendship with David Shepherd. The basement of his country house in Armonk,
New York, was a shrine to Compass; posters, flyers, scenario plays, press
articles and pictures, neatly preserved in albums and file folders. Unfortunately, a flood in the early 1980s
took out nearly a third of his collection, including some reel-to-reel
recordings of Compass.
Shortly after the 2009 Canadian Improv Games National
Festival (inspired by David’s Improv Olympics), Willie Wyllie, co-founder of
the format, recruited me and Mike Fly, an improviser and filmmaker from Toronto
(Sexy Nerd Girl, Versus Valerie and Space Janitors)
to shoot a series of interviews with David on his fifty-plus year career in
improv. Originally intended as a web
series, Mike Fly had a vision that resulted in us making a full-length documentary,
much to the chagrin of Willie, who was financing the project. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a director
who was more confident, versatile and innovative than Mike, which is why I was
surprised when he confessed one night that this was his first feature-length
project.
Mike Fly and I spent four days filming David at his home in
Belchertown, Massachusetts. When it came
time to get digital shots of his pictures, I was shocked when David came out of
his office with a box, and dumped the contents onto the floor. Gone were the days of his meticulous file
keeping system. Mike set up the borders for the pictures, and one by one I
handed him a photo to be digitized.
This process took us close to two hours - six, if Mike didn’t stop me from commenting
on every shot (“Holy shit! Do you know what this is? It’s the holy grail of
improv pictures!”).
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| Compass cast: Severn Darden, Larry Arrick, Elaine May, Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols, Rose Arrick & Barbara Harris - 1955. |
Back home in Los Angeles, I plowed through the pictures on
my laptop that Mike emailed me from Toronto.
We categorized them into files (Playwrights Theatre Club, Compass,
Second City, Improv Olympics, etc.). The
largest was our miscellaneous file - great shots, but not relevant for the
documentary.
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| Little known Shepherd format. Unfortunately, not enough material to cover in documentary. |
Despite the vast collection David gave us, there were still
gaps in the timeline. We managed to fill
some of those in with pictures from the archive department at the University of
Chicago. David had donated a great deal
of his memorabilia to the university. I
procured several discs from the department, which included a healthy selection
of shots from the early days of Second City.
Again, many were not relevant for the documentary, but still spectacular
in terms of improv history. Those found
a special home in my laptop.
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| Robert Klein & Fred Willard, Second City 1965 |
I started scouring the internet for pictures I knew existed,
but weren’t in David’s or the University of Chicago’s collection. Image search from Google and Bing were
helpful, but the biggest finds came from magazine and newspaper articles from
the late 1950s and early 1960s. Maybe one or two found their way into the documentary.
Others, yep, express lane into my laptop.
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| Paul Sand, Severn Darden & Melinda Dillon in an ad selling advertising to liquor companies. |
Shortly after we made the documentary available on YouTube,
I realized that the hundreds of pictures nestling in my laptop weren’t doing
anyone any good by remaining there. So,
I decided to share them with the improv community, mostly through various
Facebook improv pages. The response was
immediate, unexpected and gratifying.
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| Alan Arkin, Paul Sills and Anthony Holland at Second City, 1961 |
First person I heard from was Aretha Sills, who told me that
her father Paul was not great at holding onto things from the early days. So, it was a pleasure to send her shots from Playwrights Theatre Club and Compass. Sheldon Patinkin, with his incredible memory,
was able to recall touching, personal anecdotes that provided a wonderful
background to the pictures I was posting on a Chicago Theatre site. A group picture from Jo Forsberg’s Player’s
Workshop evoked a warm memory from George Wendt about an improviser he was
enamored with.
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| George Wendt in Jo Forsberg's Player's workshop - 1973 |
When Bernie Sahlins
passed away earlier in the year, I realized that I had a picture of him from my
miscellaneous file in front of Second City on their opening night in 1959. That became the most re-posted photo from my
collection on Facebook.
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| Bernie Sahlins |
Soon, people were coming to me with requests. Charna Halpern was moving i.O. to a different
location in Chicago. Did I have any unique shots of Del Close? Yes, I do.
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| Joan Rivers & Del Close at Second City, 1961. |
The curator of the Viola Spolin library
exhibit at Northwestern University inquired if I was willing to clarify some
photos and documents? More than happy
to. A director from Second City in Chicago contacts me about submitting pictures
for their upcoming celebration of the Playwrights Theatre Club. Done. There is a Compass Improv Festival in St.
Louis, Missouri. Do I have shots from
the original St. Louis Compass? Sure do.
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| Playwrights Theatre Club brochure - 1953. |
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| Jerry Stiller, Nancy Ponder & Alan Arkin at the St. Louis Compass, 1959. |
These days, I’m trying to convince David Shepherd that a book
of his vintage shots would be of enormous interest to the improv
community. Aside from the documentary,
many have appeared in Jeffery Sweet’s Something Wonderful Right Away and Janet
Coleman’s The Compass. But believe me my
improv brothers and sisters, there are scores of other pictures that have not
been viewed by the public for many decades.
It’s time they found their way back into the light.
Michael Golding is a writer, director and improv teacher. He can be contacted for workshops, festivals and private consultations at migaluch@yahoo.com. Michael participated in the evolution of the Improv Olympics & Canadian Improv Games. Artistic director of the Comic Strip Improv Group in New York & created the Insight Theatre Company for Planned Parenthood, Ottawa. He is a faculty member at El Camino College in Los Angeles, working with at-risk teens and traditional students. His screenplay credits include "Celebrity Pet" for the Disney Channel and the documentary "David Shepherd: A Lifetime of Improvisational Theatre." His book, Listen Harder, a collection of essays, curriculum and memorabilia on improvisation and educational theatre, is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and CreateSpace. Michael holds a BFA degree in Drama from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts & an MA degree in Educational Theatre from NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education & Human Development.
I was mentored by David, and worked with him for several decades performing, coaching, video editing, booking venues, casting a NYC Compass, and designing the live satellite feed format for when Canada played NYC, adding the coin toss, commentators, huddles w/ voice overs talking about the players acting, life experiences or silly stuff), and editing the two cities (shot in both cities respectively, to look like a live simultaneous sporting event).
ReplyDeleteI directed the Canadian shoot at Ottawa Cablevision. It was great staying with Willy Willie in Ottawa during the Winterfest, when the river was frozen and we slid down huge ice sculptures. I saw Curling for the first time and went with Jack who worked w/ Willy on the HS Olympix raing cars on the frozen lake. I was able to work with Howard in Le Teatro Portatif. Canada took such good care of their artists & filmmakers.
(>>>years and years of stories).
One experience that stands out in my mind. As you know, or have learned , David liked to train teams of amateurs and put together interesting combos. Rabbis (the God Squad), Cops (Magnum Farce) etc. "everyone is an actor" he professed, and set out on a path repeatedly proving that to be true, and oh the fun we had in Washington Square Park, grabbing strangers, getting them to improvise, and many of them continued as part of his ad hoc misfit posse for years experimenting with David's various new formats.
He also worked a regular job in prison system to bring in a living.
He sent me to the Brooklyn House of Detention. When I got there, I was locked in. I coached 2 teams to play eachother; the inmates, and the correction officers; HOWEVER, the COs played as inmates, and the inmates, as COs. What came out of that was a warm and wonderful experience for all involved. The inmates realized what a horribly difficult job that the COs had, and the COs were astonished and thrilled to see how brilliant the prisoners were! as they also played cops & lawyers.
Part 2: That was the thing about the Improv Olympix (we had to change it to 'pix' for trademark reasons, but also, we filmed so PIX fit.
ReplyDeleteYou ended up with outcomes that you never expected. Chicago challenged NY to a scene (Character Relay game") between a black man and an old lady on the NYC subway. What Canada expected was a mugging. What NY gave them was a touching scene between a black guy who recognized his old teacher! It was warm and brilliant.
These inter-city challenges had the unintended benefit of being a cultural exchange.
We also experimented with mixing teams. A player from one team would fo an 'EVENT'(thats what each game was called), with a player from the other team. Each player was scored individually towards their team's totals. The key to good improv is supporting the other player to make the scene work, so it was a nice collaborative rather than cut-throat competition.
When High School played each other, and we used the mixed teams format, yes each school had their competitive school pride, but they weren't really playing AGAINST each other as their school sports teams did; they were playing WITH each other, and many cross pollinating friendships were made.
That is one of the the gifts of improvisation. Teamwork. Non-athletic kids in schools gained the wonderful experiences commonly attributed to athletic teams. Experiencing the skills gained by being ON a TEAM; collaborating together; supporting each other towards a common outcome; traveling to the 'match' together at another location; making lasting friendships with students they may not have sought out to spend time with nor to learn about their lives, under ordinary circumstances. The differences between each other become a celebrated enrichment and no longer see as 'separate, different, no pre-judging. WONDERFUL.
Part 3: RE: The Improv Olympix EVENTS, each game, focused on another skill and value. It was seriously like a scientific method, to build the skills that developed the talents of individuals to improvise, fly w/o a net. Each had a pre-designed timeframe to accomplish its goal.
ReplyDeleteDavid called me back from LA where I was working with Le Cirque du Soleil, to help him David cast an incarnation of The COMPASS in NYC. I brought my friend Anthony Pisano, a roofer, who despite being a tough 'hitter' from Canarsie, Brooklyn, as a hobby, was also a talented visual artist (something he pretty much kept to himself). He also had an innate sense of humor called 'goofing', and would exercise that in the where folks hung out; on the paddleball courts, street corners, parks and the schoolyard. Still he never thought of himself as an actor, nor conceived that he would be on a stage.
When I bought him to Manhattan to audition for COMPASS, he was uncharacteristically shy, and did not want to go into the room.
I asked him, "what are you afraid of, that you will fall on your face?" and he nodded yes indeed.
So I said to him, when then let's get it over with an do that right now, and we so we both fell on our faces. After that, he was emboldened to go into the room to audition, and he was cast in the show. David just LOVED him, and he David! more more more years of tales :)
RIP #DavidShepherd my dear friend & teacher (and employer who I earned a few buck from over the years. I'd be doing work with David and editing videotape (prehistoric machine-to-machine edits) in a room in their apartment in Washington Square Village, and his wife Connie (Constance Carr-Shepherd), who was a shrink/marriage counselor would do her counseling work in another She used to snark/joke that she would be taking in money in one room, and David would then be handing it to me in another.
He never cracked the nut on how to make a living off of improv. We tried when the format CUBE TV came out, thinking it would lend itself perfectly to audience participation...pitched it, and board games, and...well
Not until "Whose Line Is It Anyway" became a primetime network show. It featured some of the Santa Monica Second City cast, who also broke into various TV sitcoms, (as they were well situated in Hollyweird), but that branch of the Second City was not long-lived, but was fun while it lasted.
#HowardJerome #1980 Improve Olympics -vs-Joe Whos? Blues -V-NYC Subway Stars. #MERC/YoungFilmmakers #OttawaCablevision #LeTeatroPortatif #1984SummerOlympicLosAngeles #SantaMonicaPier #WashingtoSquarePark