”Smart people hire friends not because they are friends,” says Singer,
”but because they feel they know them and know they can deliver.”
This is especially true of the Second City comedy mafia, more than a dozen actors and writers who live way west of Wells Street now, people like Jim Stahl, Shelley Long, Miriam Flynn, Eric Boardman, Ann Ryerson and many others who work in Los Angeles but always take time to get together. Right now, Wallyball–volleyball played off the walls in a handball court–is the game of choice.
”They create a community where there is no community,” says Second City`s current producer, Joyce Sloane. ”Lee Ryan did `Cheers` because George Wendt and Shelley Long said something, and Danny Breen got `Not Necessarily the News` because Audrey Neenan called, and now she`s off the series and he`s still working. You know, the whole improv thing is based on trust. The Chicago people really trust each other.”
They even have their own Chicago-style hangout, says Jim Stahl, who has been busy lately writing a movie. It`s called Coronet Pub on La Cienega Boulevard, a look-alike for a Lincoln Avenue bar. ”It`s right across the street from `Trashy Lingerie,”` he says, ”and if people want to hook up with other Chicagoans, that`s the place to go. They have Blatz beer, hoagie sandwiches and the Cubs games on cable.”
The Cubs! Everyone says they`re part of the glue, too. Chris Coyle, who moved out to L.A. from Chicago with ad man-entrepreneur Dick Orkin a few years ago, gets 20 to 30 Chicagoans together for two or three Cubs-Dodgers games every year.
”We all take a big block of seats and drink beer and eat Dodger Dogs and cheer wildly for the Cubs,” she says. One particularly depressing year, she says, Jim Stahl led 25 of them in a tearful, grandstand version of ”To Dream the Impossible Dream.” ”The Dodger fans think we`re nuts,” says Coyle.
”Larry Einhorn is so crazy about the Cubs he sent out sympathy cards when the team didn`t make it last year,” says Al Schwartz, another transplanted Chicagoan, now vice-president, television production, for the Dick Clark Co. and producer of ”TV Bloopers and Practical Jokes.”
Einhorn, producer of ”The Mrs. America Pageant” and the ”Easter Seal Telethon” is an old pal of Schwartz` who used to be a director at WLS. ”He`s such a Cubs fan,” says Schwartz, ”his license plate says `Next Year` on it.”
This year in L.A., Chicago talents have never been hotter, and that helps them survive as a distinct group too, says Barbara Romen. For many Chicagoans, for many years, Romen was the Chicago Connection, the agent (she got her start as a secretary at the William Morris Agency in Chicago) who specialized in representing Chicago and Second City talents. ”Whoever came to L.A. seemed to find me,” she says. Now, Romen is director of TV comedy development for Universal, working on new series ideas for prime time. Indeed, one of those ideas just came to her in grand Chicago-networking style from her parents in Lincolnwood, Mary and Dan Romen.
”They went to Stuart Gordon`s production of `Angry Housewives,` and told me I had to go see it. They`re always looking for ideas for me,” she laughs. ”Four middle-aged housewives who form a rock band? It sounded hilarious, so I went to see it, fell in love with it, optioned it, and now I`m developing it as a series for ABC. If it goes to pilot, Stuart Gordon will be a producer,” says Romen, who worked at Chicago`s JAM Productions in 1975-76.
”There`s a real, open, matter-of-factness about them (Chicagoans) that is just the opposite of the Hollywood types.”
Stefanie Staffin Kowal used to produce the WLS ”A.M. Chicago” show when Steve Edwards and Sandi Freeman were hosts; she now produces TV series (”Four Seasons” and ”Code Name: Foxfire” are her latest) at Universal. Indeed, Kowal`s story is a Chicago Connection classic and features perhaps the biggest success story of all, Brandon Tartikoff, now president of NBC Entertainment.
”Brandon was part of my family at WLS,” says Kowal, who won a local Emmy for her work before leaving the station in April, 1977. ”He was an unstoppable compulsive in some wonderfully goofy ways, and people either adored him or hated him. I adored him.
”Brandon was also the first to leave our little group to go to the network. We were all miffed because we thought Steve (Edwards) would be the first to go.”
Tartikoff took off for California (at the invitation of Fred Silverman, who spent his early days packaging movies at WGN and went on to control entertainment programming at all three networks) to take an executive job with ABC, and he and Kowal kept in close touch. During one phone conversation, Tartikoff happened to mention that another executive at ABC, Steve Gentry, mentioned Kowal`s name to him as a hot prospect for the network. Tartikoff told Gentry that Kowal was happily married in Chicago and probably not available. ”Brandon!” Kowal remembers shrieking, ”I was divorced four months ago! Get down the hall and tell him that!”
Tartikoff did, and 20 minutes later, Gentry called. After they hung up, Kowal recalls jumping up on a desk, screaming, ”Hollywood is calling! I`m your person!”
A few months later, ABC offered her a programming job in Los Angeles, but Kowal wound up at Universal instead because, as she puts it, ”I wanted a crack at being Fred Silverman.” She`s not sorry.
Not everyone who testifies to a Chicago Connection got his or her start in TV or theater here. Take Deborah Aal, for instance, who taught literature at Jefferson Junior High in suburban Woodridge, for seven years. She left in 1977, landed a couple of years later with Leonard Goldberg Productions in Hollywood and today is president of the company. She was the prime mover behind the award-winning ”Something About Amelia.”
”There is a Chicago sensibility,” Aal says. ”People from Chicago are energetic, interested, not provincial . . . but wide-eyed. I haven`t done a project there yet, but every movie we do, I try. Anything to come back!”
One Chicago booster who did come back is Greg Hoblit, co-executive producer of ”Hill Street Blues.” ”Hill Street” wouldn`t look like ”Hill Street” if Hoblit hadn`t spent 1968-1972 living on $150 a week and producing ”Benzaquin” and ”The Bob Kennedy Show” at WLS, he says.
”When Steven Bochco sent me the original script for `Hill Street,` I knew from my experience there I could go to Chicago and get exactly what I needed for the look, the ambience of the show,” he says.
The Hill itself comes from a ghetto in Pittsburgh, but the cars are patterned after Chicago police cars (”We put Metro Police where it says Chicago Police”), and that great shot of the garage door opening comes from the Maxwell Street police station at Maxwell and Morgan Streets.
”We shot lots of stock in Chicago,” says Hoblit, ”and one day a small miracle happened. It was March, the temperature plummeted and it began to snow. We shot our brains out that day. I loved it! I knew I was getting weather you couldn`t pay for.”
Indeed, it was the weather that propelled him to move his career elsewhere. ”Chicago has everything,” he says. ”And everything is accessible . . . But at some point, I decided I had to move out here. I`d rather die in a California earthquake than freeze in another Chicago winter.”
For some, Chicago will always be the winter of their discontent. They represent the Chicago Dis-Connection, a minority opinion, it seems, but a valid one all the same.
”Chicago is Chicago. I lived there 30 years and I was happy to leave,”
says Mike Filerman, executive producer of ”Falcon Crest,” ”Knots Landing,” ”Flamingo Road” and ”Emerald Point.”
”Chicago is my hometown, my grandparents are buried there, I still have lots of cousins and aunts there . . . but I can`t say Chicago taught me anything,” he says. ”I learned from Fred Silverman, who happened to be in Chicago. I got my start there, but WGN didn`t do it, Fred did.”
Filerman doesn`t see Silverman anymore. He also doesn`t like to see sons, daughters or friends of friends who are in Hollywood in need of a helping hand. ”Sorry,” he says. ”I hate to sound cold-blooded about that, but people do take advantage.”
”I`m surprised that more Chicagoans haven`t called,” says Hoblit, who just finished his final season with ”Hill Street.” ”I go out of my way to be available.”
Ken Ehrlich`s available, too, but better than that, this former producer of ”Soundstage” has a dream about making the Chicago Connection some sort of staged reality. He wants to mount a show, a showcase, where all those brave Chicago people who have made the big, blind leap toward fame and fortune could come to land on their feet.
”I talked to Bruce Vilanch about it,” says Ehrlich, displaying the primal urge of the true Chicago networker. ”It`s not a book show but an ongoing stage review, put together by people who came from Chicago and have done well and feel something special for the city . . . .
”I`m thinking of something like a continuing musical showcase for other Chicagoans who are just getting started out here,” he says. ”It`s nowhere now, but I think it`s a terrific idea . . . Like proteges! Something to keep the whole thing going.”
