Now it’s sort of the grown-up version where you know what limits to things are and there’s a ceiling because you either ran into it or you built it for yourself.”īy the same token, Paul Block, who served as a talent coordinator and segment producer on “The Tonight Show” from 1973 until 1978, approves of the verisimilitude of “I’m Dying Up Here.” “From the ambiance of the 1970s right down to the feel of how comedy was being done back then, for the most part they got it right,” he says. And it isn’t all possibilities for a kid with kid-sized dreams. “The bittersweet part is that it isn’t 1973 anymore, where the series begins. “It was very exciting, bittersweet and nostalgic for me,” he says. Similarly, for veteran comedian, actor and screenwriter Rick Overton, who started performing stand-up in New York in the mid-’70s, it was as if no time had passed as he prepared for his role on the series playing “Tonight Show” talent coordinator Mitch Bombadier in six episodes. “It’s about comedians, many of whom come from dark places, and ‘I’m Dying Up Here’ really gets to the heart of that.” Though she admits she’s glad that she doesn’t play a comedian on the show, she says she still enjoyed her role, adding the way the lives and struggles of most young comedians are portrayed is accurate. “It was very surreal to be involved with this because of the hunger that’s evident and the experiences that some of these comics go through on the show is all in my past,” says comedian Cathy Ladman, who plays entertainment journalist Tish Norman in three episodes. Whether or not it’s art directly imitating their own lives, even the comedians who don’t appear as comics on “I’m Dying Up Here” said they found themselves identifying with many of its universal themes. It was all about having the premise be a little more basic, but the beats are all the same.” “I’m very proud of the bits I wrote from that era. “It doesn’t matter what the generation is or when this series takes place because we’re all bonded by the same war stories as comedians,” he says. On the show he plays loose cannon Latino comic Edgar Martinez, and says he was “right at home with his character.” Madrigal’s been doing stand-up for nearly two decades. Others who took part in the Showtime series, like former “Daily Show” correspondent Al Madrigal, feel the same way. “Even though the role I play is much older than I was when I was starting out, I could easily relate to her,” says Gold, who first began performing stand-up in the mid-’80s and won two Daytime Emmy Awards for her work as a writer and producer on “The Rosie O’Donnell Show.” “I literally felt like I was transported back to another time, but my character could have just as easily been about somebody doing stand-up in 2017.” Gold, a Comedy Store alumnus who still performs there today, agrees but says that when it comes to her own character on the new show, it instantly reminded her of her struggles as a young performer in New York, more than a decade after the series takes place. “What was interesting to all of us when we were reading the book was the idea of a woman running a really hot nightclub on the Sunset Strip in the 1970s, but that’s really where the similarities start and stop,” says co-executive producer Michael Aguilar. Loosely adapted from journalist William Knoedelseder’s non-fiction book of the same name, the series also stars Ari Graynor, Michael Angarano, Clarke Duke and Andrew Santino, as some of the fledgling young comics with big dreams and often equally large appetites for drugs, sex and alcohol. Yet “I’m Dying Up Here” co-creator and executive producer Dave Flebotti says “Goldie has an entirely different energy from Mitzi’s.”
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