![]() “Once I got in the room it was up to me.” If they wanted to use my ideas they’d have to deal with me,” she said. ![]() “They would discuss issues and I would come up with ideas. She would attend his dinner meetings with National Lampoon’s founders, who she said had a distaste for women. She got the job at National Lampoon as a result of a blind date with Michel Choquette, a comedy writer and performer who traveled between New York and Montreal. At the same time, gaining entry into the comedy world required a guy. “I was attracted to people who were funny because I wanted to be in that world,” she said. In her early years of comedy writing, Beatts said her boyfriends helped her get comedy writing jobs. Still, when she left “A Different World,” it was the second highest-rated TV show.īefore SNL, she was the first female contributing editor at National Lampoon, a humor magazine founded by Harvard graduates and former Harvard Lampoon staff that had its heyday in the 1970s. Bonet was in her rebellious phase, Beatts said. She also had a difficult relationship with one of the stars, Lisa Bonet. After the first season, the show went in a different direction. She co-executive produced “A Different World,” a spinoff of “The Cosby Show,” but was fired after a year. She wrote several TV pilots that never aired. It’s much easier to raise a child in Los Angeles than New York, where the subways and the snow add an extra challenge to parenting, she said.Īlong with success, she’s had misses. “I’m no longer bicoastal.” She’s raising a young daughter now. “I used to say I worked in California, but I lived in New York,” she said. “It was kind of like lightning striking.” The show lasted only a year.īeatts never wanted to leave New York but moved to Los Angeles for “Square Pegs” and stayed. She also wrote for the show, along with Andy Borowitz, Deanne Stillman and others, and she thought to herself: “This is easy.”īut she learned it wasn’t so easy. The show was based on Beatts’ high school experience.ĬBS bought “Square Pegs,” which landed Beatts a producing job. The first TV pilot she ever wrote was for the 1980s sitcom about misfit teens in high school called “Square Pegs,” which starred Sarah Jessica Parker, Amy Linker and Jami Gertz. ![]() Shuster is the daughter of Frank Shuster, who was part of the comedy duo Wayne and Shuster who frequented “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Beatts and Shuster are still friends.Īfter SNL, Beatts went on to do longer-form comedy – 30-minute sitcoms. She and Shuster were two of three women writers out of the 15 to 20 writers during her time at SNL. It was also when the women’s liberation movement, which paved the way for equal employment and other rights, was at its peak. “Mom Jeans” is a recent example of SNL commercial parodies, and probably one of the best known.īeatts was working in comedy at a time when comedy was primarily a man’s world. “When other people were off, we were doing parody commercials in the weeks where there was no show.” With a background as an advertising copywriter, her first two years at SNL included doing parodies of commercials. ![]() “You write it and it gets on television and people are talking about it at brunch on Sunday,” she said. “Your work could be cut right up until air,” she said.īut when a skit made it to air, it was gratifying, she said. Writers could spend a week writing for the show without knowing if their sketches would air on Saturday night. “We were mini-producers of our piece of the show,” she said. As a writer, she was responsible for the sketch from beginning to end – coming up with the idea, writing it, working with actors, staging the skit with the director, figuring out costumes and props. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |