The Comedians by Kliph Nesteroff

Author:Kliph Nesteroff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2015-10-14T19:50:27+00:00

In a business where charm is often essential, it’s amazing that Mason’s career has endured. Another comedian was not so lucky. While Mason blamed Ed Sullivan for his career problems, Shelley Berman did the same regarding a remarkable 1963 cinema vérité documentary called Comedian Backstage. It was a compelling look at a comic at the height of his stardom, but Berman says it cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars in canceled bookings and destroyed his career. However, as with Mason, there is a scapegoat at play. If anything hampered the career of Berman it was, according to contemporaries, Berman’s own doing.

Maynard Sloate booked Berman for his first Los Angeles engagement in 1957. “Shelley was impossible and not easy to get along with. He was extremely temperamental. From the stage he’d yell, ‘Maynard! Maynard! What’s that noise?’ This goes on for his entire act. ‘Maynard! There it is again! Maynard! It’s the refrigerator in the kitchen!’ He was stopping his act to complain about the refrigerator. Putting up with him was difficult, and that temperament cost him his career.”

Berman was riding high in 1963. Time said he was “the wealthiest of the new comics.” He was one of the biggest stars in show business and a logical subject for a news profile. Comedian Backstage was inspired by the stunning black-and-white “direct cinema” that put documentarians Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles and D. A. Pennebaker on the map. (Primary and Crisis are among the best examples of the genre.) Working under director Robert Drew, they revolutionized the look of television news.

Cinematographer Doug Downs emulated the vérité style, following Berman around the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. The film opens with Berman in his hotel room, sitting in a silk robe, discussing performance specifications with his manager:

No service on the floor in the front. Not because I don’t want the people to be served, but I don’t want any part of the show to be hurt. They can serve delicately, cleanly, but I don’t want to hear waiters in the back shouting their orders. I don’t want them to hurt the show. You tell the maître d’ down here . . . worry him. Please, Marty. Tell him I am the most temperamental human being you ever saw. Tell him this afternoon that I am a monster. Tell him that I walked off the stage at the Waldorf Astoria four times in the middle of the show. Tell him they had to refund money. Tell him that I am being sued! Tell him that I am terrible.

Berman saunters through the lobby, signing autographs, greeting the press, pensively worrying about the show. The camera closes in on his eyes as Comedian Backstage builds up to his nighttime performance. In the final minutes we see Berman onstage. He performs a monologue in which an elderly father addresses his son. It is constructed as a poignant moment, and Berman accentuates dramatics rather than laughs. And then in a moment that has since been mentioned many times in comedy lore—the loud ringing of a telephone offstage interrupts the flow of his routine.

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