Gary Austin, interviewed by David Razowsky.
Our friend David Razowsky just posted his latest A.D.D. Comedy podcast, which features an interview with Committee member and Groundlings founder Gary Austin. Download or stream on iTunes. Listen.
Author: The Committee Movie
Mickey Mouse in Vietnam
This ain’t a Committee piece, but it’s of the time, and pretty great. Milton Glaser’s 1968 short Mickey Mouse in Vietnam. So good.
We Tweet.
We are also on Twitter. Please follow us: @CommitteeMovie.
Cranna
Hard to choose which of Sam Willard’s portraits to post. We decided on this picture of Jim Cranna. Jim was a major fixture of the SF improv scene long after The Committee’s final days. His weekly workshops lasted into the 21st century. Jim this is for you!
“We’re all in the same boat and it’s leaking. We’re all accomplices in a hypocritical world: our job is to walk through it, pointing.” – Alan Myerson
Playbill Bio, 1964
From the October 1964 Playbill for The Committee’s Broadway run: Irene Riordan’s bio (she would later be known as, Jessica Myerson, and now is Austin’s own Latifah Taormina).
The Committee: Raise Your Social Awareness (and Funds for the Doc!)
Since the 50th Anniversary event that we produced in April, we’ve been focusing on growing our social media presence for The Committee: A Secret History of American Comedy. We’re looking to use Facebook and Twitter to corral folks interested in the project, to better keep everyone in the loop as we go.
Maintaining a social media presence is a dedicated skill in and of itself, but we have a ton of material to share, and a fairly rational and utterly joyous belief that this project has widespread appeal. As such, the aforementioned social media outlets will be updated most often – even more so than this blog.
We are setting up a queue of interviews in advance of the San Francisco Improv Festival (September 12th – 21st), which will require the bulk of our focus for the month of September. We just had an amazing interview with John Magnuson, producer of Lenny Bruce’s Thank You Mask Man and The Lenny Bruce Performance Film, and a man who passed along numerous commercial projects to Committee members in the ’60s. We have a few more interviews the works this Summer, including a planned trip to Los Angeles in August.
Our Kickstarter campaign is scheduled for a September launch. This will give us some time to make final tweaks on our trailer (which will live on the Kickstarter page only during the life of the campaign) and finalize preparations for the fundraising campaign. Conventional wisdom from Sam’s experience as a non-profit fundraiser suggests that these efforts are most effective after Labor Day.
A September launch will also benefit from the captive sketch- & improv-loving audiences that will congregate at the San Francisco Improv Festival, where we’ll be promoting and pitching the documentary.
Our plan is to keep the Kickstarter goal manageable and achievable. The funds that we crowdsource will support further interviews – flights, hotels, rentals, etc., as well as a grant writer. Since the bulk of this project’s further budget will go towards securing the rights for various copyrighted material, we plan to address that issue with support from foundation grants, and hopefully an “angel” investor or two.
So that is where the plan for the documentary project stands. We plan to have the bulk of our interviews completed and most funding secured by the summer of 2014. To keep regular tabs, visit us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or shoot us an email. And remember, in September we will be asking for your support. We hope you consider backing this exciting project…!
WKRP Live-Tweet
While his son naps, “Secret History” co-producer Sam Shaw will live-tweet episode 4 of WKRP in Cincinatti, which features a mini-Committee reunion with Hamilton Camp, Garry Goodrow, and Howard Hessemen. Check out @CommitteeMovie on Twitter to watch it unfold. Starting in five mins.