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By Root 1187 0

about five or six times on The Tonight Show; his first appearance was with Steve Allen, who filled in for Johnny Carson; Steve Allen has a great appreciation of Andy’s talent. He was one of the first people to discover him. Other people who have discovered him besides the aforementioned Carl Reiner, who was very quiet about his discovery, are Alan King and Dick Ebersol, who is truly way up front in discovering him. Dick Ebersol is an NBC executive at this time; by the time anyone listens to this tape, I don’t know where he will be—you know how it is with network executives. They go from one network to another network to independent productions to a third network, then starting all over at the first network again. Dick Ebersol brought him to the attention of Lorne Michaels, who is the producer of Saturday Night Live. And that started that part of his career. He also appeared about four times on The Midnight Special. Soon after I met Andy, I brought him to the Dick Van Dyke series, which I think was a quality series that was short-lived. The producers were Allan Blye and Bob Einstein and they truly appreciated Andy’s talent and used him to great advantage on the show. He did only the Foreign Man characterization on the Dick Van Dyke show, from which he sprung into his imitations. He did Elvis Presley to great success on that show.

Following the Van Dyke series, he did a pilot for ABC, a half-hour situation comedy entitled Stick Around, in which he played a humanoid, a domestic robot, who did the chores and maid services around the house. Andy scored quite well on it, but the pilot did not sell. And as a tie-in to the deal, on his behalf, I received a payment of $25,000 for him to write a pilot script, which he later did with his friend Bob Zmuda. This was called Fingers and Knuckles and was presented to ABC, whose executives felt that the character Andy portrayed, Knuckles (short for Knucklehead), was a little bit too slow, too retarded, for a television series. They said that a man who couldn’t find his way to an elevator is a little slow for our network and turned down the pilot script, which was written quite well by Andy and Bob. I have to admit this character was quite slow, but he had a certain appeal. Well, we’ll see. I predict that somewhere in the future we will hear from Knuckles.

In addition to the guarantee of the pilot script, I had also negotiated for Andy six guest appearances on ABC within one year at $5,000 each, for a total of $30,000. He ended up doing only one appearance, on the Redd Foxx variety show, and he ended up earning $30,000. That was very nice for Andy. I also negotiated on Andy’s behalf a ninety-minute late night special for ABC. He received $110,000 for the production and we formed a production company called KSW Productions, for Kaufman, Shapiro, and my partner Howard West. We did the special, although it looked like we were going to go way over budget, but we were able to bring it in so that we didn’t go into a loss position. ABC didn’t react real hot for this special. As a matter of fact, they refuse to telecast it. It was a little bit unusual. Andy did part of his act, which was very powerful, at the opening of the show, and he also had Cindy Williams on the show. Her spot was rather controversial because he had her come on pretending that she didn’t know a song she was going to sing and Andy sort of pushed her on the stage to do the song anyway. Not what you would call one of your “commercial” spots … My opinion of the special was that it was very different and there were some things redeeming about it and some things that were a little slow. Hopefully this special will be telecast someday….

Anyway, the last time Andy appeared in the Main Room of the Comedy Store, Ed. Weinberger came in with his associates who were about to write a script for a new series entitled Taxi. Ed. Weinberger’s associates were Jim Brooks and Dave Davis and Stan Daniels. They asked Andy if he would go into the series. My feeling was it would be a nice boost for his career because it was a guaranteed “on-the-air