Last week marked the passing of one of the most important behind-the-scenes figures in American comedy of the last forty years, Bernie Brillstein. Brillstein, who was 77, had a rare combination of taste, people skills, and bulldozing smarts, all of which he applied to his job as an agent and manager. (He was also, not incidentally, one of the best interview subjects on the West Coast.) Eager to embody every cliche of the classic talent-agent success story, Brillstein worked his way up from the mail room at the William Morris Agency, after anti-Semitism kept him from entering advertising in the
Mad Men era. ("I loved them," he later said of the WASP agency heads who advised him that he was wasting his time trying to break in, "for being honest.") While he was still at William Morris, Brillstein met his first meal ticket in the form of a gangling, painfully shy young puppeteer from the Washington, D. C. area: Jim Henson. The two were quick to recognize what each could do for the other, and after Brillstein set himself up in private practice in 1970, Henson and the Muppets were his first steady star clients. Another was Lorne Michaels, which explains not only how the Muppets came to be regular cast members during the first season of
Saturday Night Live--an arrangement probably best remembered for having inspired Michael O'Donoghue's remark, "I don't write for felt."--but how Brillstein came to guide the careers of many of
SNL's stars and to score producing credits on some of their biggest movie successes, including the
Ghostbusters films. In 1990, he joined forces with producer Brad Grey. As packagers of talent, their TV credits would include
The Larry Sanders Show, The Dana Carvey Show, NewsRadio, Mr. Show, Politically Incorrect, The Steve Harvey Show, Primetime Glick, and the Tea Leone vehicle
The Naked Truth, which would go some way to balancing out the fact that Brillstein also had a hand in
Alf. (Once you've made a few bucks off puppets, it's hard to go cold turkey.) He also wrote a book called
Where Did I Go Right?
On Monday, clients and well-wishers got together for a memorial service honoring Brillstein, and from the sound of it, it was a suitable testimonial to a man who sounds a lot like Santa Claus if Santa would have
cut your throat with a broken bottle if it were, you know, in the best interests of the talent. Describing the action, Michael Cieply reports that "Martin Short, master of ceremonies for the event at Royce Hall on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, set the tone when he described a man who had no enemies and always spoke well of others. 'It would be so much easier tonight,' Mr. Short said, 'if we were memorializing someone like that.'” Getting into the spirit of things, Jon Lovitz "got in his own jab at a former manager when he prayed, 'Why, why, why couldn’t it have been Marc Gurvitz?' Mr. Short, on taking back the stage, noted that the well-tanned but still portly Mr. Lovitz did not look bad 'for someone who let himself go.'”