Over unpaid gas bills L.A. Mom Cut Down By Cops By Corky Hubbert Southern California will forever inspire in the American mind an image of a forever sunny, fast world of fast cars, fast foods and fast women; the land of sunglasses and convertibles; the domain of the bronzed Adonis and stunning starlet; home of the hot tub and sensitivity group. At the heart of this kingdom is its Camelot—Los Angeles, City of Angels, where dwell the image-makers themselves. To us, L.A. is a fantasyland playground of sandy beaches and Hollywood parties. It is the cradle of the movie and television industries, surrounded as they are with a myriad collection of candy- coated success stories, honed to an artform by the proverbial press agent. Beneath this finely crafted veneer, however, is the real L.A.: a city of racism and violence. The papers are full of beatings, rape and murder, but everyone stays mellow until they’ve managed to forget about it. Still, with every killing there is a killer. Maybe you think you know your killers, but think again. It’s hard here to tell the players without a program; because in L.A., the killer may carry a badge. The killer cop. You will never see his story on Dragnet or Adam 12. At story’s end, no voice will be heard from off-camera to inform us that, “ In a moment, the results of that trial,” because there will not be a trial. In L.A. a killer can walk free, even collect a paycheck for his “ work” —no matter how dirty that work might be—thanks to a piece of tin and a blue uniform that somehow elevates him above the law that he is there to enforce on others. And what of the victim? Eula Love was her name. Black and a welfare mother, all she was missing was a bright red target across her chest. Ludicrously enough, her murder was over an unpaid 20-dollar gas bill. A man from the gas company had come to turn off Eula’s gas. She whopped him upside the head with a shovel. He ran and got the police. By the time the cops arrived, Eula decided to pay the bill, and she told them that her welfare check had just come in the day’s mail. But it was no dice. The police let it be known they intended to accompany the gasman inside so that he could disconnect the gas. Frustrated and enraged, Eula grabbed a butcher knife and threw it through the doorway. It missed the cops and stuck in the dirt. Danger past, the cops took no chances. They both drew their guns and together fired 12 shots at Eula, emptying their guns. Eight of those shots hit her. After the seventh had torn into her, the bloodied, frightened animal that she had been reduced to tried dumbly to stand, only to be kicked back down (“ Get down there, you bitch!” ), prone, to receive the eighth and fatal bullet that ended her tortuous life. Through the screen door, her children watched their mother spew out her blood at the pigs’ feet. The black community met to discuss a response to the growing incidence of police violence. LAPD Police Chief Daryl Gates had everyone that attended the meeting placed under surveillance by the LAPD intelligence goon squad. Sometime in May, a man had an altercation with a waitress at a cafe here. He was asked to leave. As he left, he was followed out by a plainclothes, off-duty cop, who pulled a concealed weapon from his coat and shot the man in the back of the head. A bill that would have given public access to the records of cops who may have such violent tendencies was killed in committee. It was just one more killing. But that’s life—and the taking of life—in L.A. FLASH! I was just putting this in an envelope when—swear to God— the anchor man of Channel 13, 2:00 p.m. news (June 25) announced that a 28-year-old “ good Samaritan” who had helped a 65-year-old assault victim was killed with a shot to the neck by a deputy sheriff who arrived on the scene. Comedy Store Strike No Joke Comedy is what’s happening. There are more comedy movies being prepared even as you read this; and television’s highest-rated programs are its comedies. Johnny Carson has even made the goddamn headlines recently! Suddenly, everyone sees “ gold in them there hills,” and the race is on. Steve Martin, John Belushi and Robin Williams are a departure from the Shecky Greene of yesteryear, and are the role models of virtually thousands of young Americans from every corner of the empire. New showcases are popping up, then going broke every other week while the three major clubs just keep growing: Bud Friedman’s Improvisation, Pasadena’s The Ice House, an d—with three loca tions—The Comedy Store. In the late ’60s not many people saw the coming comedy boom. But Sammy Shore did. So in the early ’70s he put his money together and started The Comedy Store. Comics would play there for free to showcase for industry people and work out new material; the Store would sell drinks. It was successful. Mitzi Shore, Sammy’s wife, filed for divorce and won the Store in the settlement. Under her guidance, the Store has grown to the three-location, million-dollar business that it is today. More than a business, the Store always had a family feeling, a certain camaraderie to it, that set it apart from the other clubs. There were few nights that there wasn’t a good-sized audience.. .and, of course, a good- sized take at the door. Not long after the New Year’s Eve catered “ dinner” that Mitzi had for her performers, things began to change. Comedy Store regulars (who were on the Comedy Store basketball team that played such teams as Paramount’s Happy Days crew or some Valley high school), Tom Dreeson, George Miller and Jay Leno formed Comics For Comics (CFC) and formed a strike against the Store. Comics would no longer be taken advantage of, they said, and all would be paid for their work. It was a sorry thing when Mitzi refused to even talk with the strikers. And it was a sorry thing when CFC rejected her compromise: to pay 25 dollars to those comics that played prime-time spots on Friday and Saturday nights. A ll comics should be paid for all spots, they said. Finally, after two months, Mitzi gave in and everyone was happy. Happy, that is, until it became apparent that if Mitzi was going to have to pay, why not pay the best? The Comedy Store is now a pros-only game; it is less and less a workshop, every day. Comics that used to receive regular spots no longer do, while some comics who already have some recognition are getting more and more. Mitzi decided to branch out into improvisation, which is—thanks to Robin Williams—enjoying a rise in popularity. She has turned one of the rooms of her Sunset club into an improvisation-only room where dozens of new groups play several times weekly. At the top of the roster is the Store’s own housegroup, The Comedy Store Players. They were getting pretty good, too, until tragedy struck. The strike brought in the watchful eye of other union organizations. Equity, the theater union, noticed that four of The Comedy Store Players were not being paid Equity scale (which would cost Mitzi over a thousand dollars weekly), and barred them from performances. A couple of weeks ago, Comedy Store “ regular” Steve Lubetkin noticed that he was getting no time spots for several weeks in a row. Believing that this was because of his involvement with the strike committee, Steve became depressed. So he jumped 15 stories off the Continental Hyatt House next door to The Comedy Store one Friday night. Someone then broke into Mitzi’s office and put Steve’s suicide note on her desk. Steve’s parents put a full-page ad in Variety composed of Steve’s writings on the need for a strike, while The Herald Examiner quickly put out an article that intoned that Steve killed himself because he was a loser. The folks over at WKRP in Cincinnati who knew Steve wrote a letter in response that said that, at 26, Steve was hardly a loser, but a few years away from success. The Examiner had a cute headline for the letter: “ No Laughing Matter.” The other night, 1went over to The Improvisation for a beer when I spied a Comedy Store waitress in her Comedy Store T-shirt sitting at the bar, nursing her drink. “ I just want everything to be all right again, the way it used to be,” she said. “ It won’t be,” I told her. 29
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