TMCnet News
Stepping Out - Fritz unpluggedJan 20, 2010 (The Beach Reporter - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- It's been six years since weathercaster Fritz Coleman brought his one-man show, "The Reception," to the Hermosa Beach Playhouse. He returns this week with his new production, "On the Fritz -- Tonight at 11: An Evening with Fritz Coleman," which is a humorous look at life in general and his profession that he has been a part of for nearly 20 years in Los Angeles. Born in Pittsburgh, Coleman attended Temple University where he studied radio, television and film. He had various jobs as a stand-up, talk show host, disc jockey and as a radio personality in Buffalo before heading to the West Coast to work as a comedian 30 years ago. A few years later, in 1982, he was working at the Comedy Store when the NBC-4 boss saw him perform. He liked his act and asked him if he would like to audition for the weekend weatherman. In June 1984, he moved to weekdays and has been there ever since. He now can be seen on the 5, 6 and 11 p.m. broadcasts in L.A., and since June of last year, KNSD-TV in San Diego. Coleman began writing for the stage more than 15 years ago and had success with his one-man autobiographical show, "It's Me! Dad!," as well as "The Reception." The Beach Reporter recently talked to Coleman about his new show and the state of television news. What can you tell me about your new show? 'An Evening with Fritz Coleman' is a compilation of all the humorous pieces I've written over a period of time. It's just me on stage talking to the audience for an hour, hour and 15 minutes. Then there's a question-and-answer session. It's a whole evening of fun. I put this together because I thought it was the perfect time to go for ... lack of a better term, a baby boomer support group. I talk about aging a little bit. I talk about reflecting back on how much easier it was to be brought up when we were brought up. I talk about how our lives are being accelerated forward but our bodies are slowing down. It's really just a great evening to take my peers out of the troubles of their lives for a little bit and have a great time with it. I'm sure you reflect on the news business also? Oh, yeah, we do that. Why at this point did you feel you needed to do a show like this? I've written three plays, which have taken me 15 years to write and produce and perform. The natural life of them is two years writing and then a year or two for the performing, depending on how the market is doing. I wanted to have an opportunity to come out and not have a particular theme, just have a lot of themes and make it be all humor. Not try to make a theatrical point. Not try to make a metaphysical point, just to have fun. I started doing it in small theaters and the truth of the matter is people just reveled in it because we're in a real dark time in America with this economic downturn. I find it to be a great evening of escape for people. One of the fun parts of the night is the second act of the show, after the intermission, is all questions and answers. We do that for as long as people want to do it, as long as the patience of the audience holds out. They love to attack the media. They love to ask questions about what we do. Sometimes it launches off and turns out to be more hysterical than the show itself. What do you feel was the biggest challenge in putting the show together? It's the challenge of all humor, which is the mystical quality of humor. You can sit in your den and write a piece of material and put the pencil down and say, 'This is the most brilliant, the most funny thing I've ever written.' Then you go try it in front of an audience a couple of times and it goes nowhere. The challenge of comedy is hoping it's as amusing as you're writing it to be, but you never know until you try it. You try it and then you rework it and as Jerry Seinfeld said, 'The work of comedy is shaving syllables.' A joke could work or not work by a pause that was misplaced or timing that was done wrong. You go out and try it out. You work on it and in a general sense the hardest thing about it is making it all work. When it does, it's wonderful. What is the state of TV news at this time? It's in a state of transition. We have, I'll use the overused term, a perfect storm occurring right now. We have the downturn of the economy and the changing technology. All of those things are making our business really struggle right now. People under 30 tend not to watch television news. They get the news from other sources, the Internet. The newspaper industry and its business model are suffering, and is farther advanced than this thing that's going on than we are. We watch what's going on with the print media and realize that's what we're going through also. There is always the need for information. Whatever platform is going to be delivered is up for grabs right now and how that platform is commercially viable. Everybody is convinced it's the digital medium that's coming out and everybody is going to get their news off the Internet or it's mobile on their Blackberrys, but that business hasn't made itself viable yet. People like Rupert Murdoch are trying to decide whether they should charge 100 percent for content on the Web. All this stuff is being worked out right now. Newspapers are farther down that tunnel than we are. We're in the same direction at lightning speed change here. We don't know where we're headed but we're headed really quickly to a destination that we haven't been told about yet. Did you see the impact of 'The Jay Leno Show' coming? (This interview was prior to the announcement that Jay Leno was moving back to his old time slot and that Conan O'Brien was leaving NBC.) We are affected by it but fortunately in Los Angeles our station is doing pretty well following Jay. I think the West Coast stations are doing well. I think there's difficulty in the center and the eastern part of the United States. I don't know what that is. Viewing habits are different. Out here in warmer climates we can be outdoors and our lives aren't as centered on our home after dark as other parts of the United States are so I don't know. I don't know if they decided if this is a successful move or not. You're asking people to change their whole perception of prime time television and take a look at and get accustomed to a format that was proven at late night because it played during a time of the day that people were in bed or they were winding down their lives or they comment on the news they had just seen. People are in a different mindset. I'm sure it's cost-effective but whether or not they are going to stick with it or ride it out I honestly don't know. In the grand scheme of things I don't think they think 'The Jay Leno Show' is their biggest challenge. For instance, the network I work for, I think they consider themselves a cable company now. Their most viable products are all of the cable properties, CNBC, MSNBC, all of these extra cable channels. They bought USA, Bravo, Sci-Fi and Oxygen. All of those cable stations are their moneymakers. I think they are their moneymakers because cable has two revenue streams. You have the advertising revenue stream, which is all broadcasting has, but they also have the subscriber revenue stream where they are paid per viewer. So even in downturns of the economy at least there's a relatively constant safety net, which is the subscriber base. I think NBC is driving its product to cable and I think they are concerning themselves less and less with broadcast television, and more with the future of the cable platform and Internet platforms. That is my opinion. No one told me that. Did you have a comic hero or someone you admired growing up? Johnny Carson was always my big hero and the greatest treat in my life was to perform on his show eight times. But he was my guy because I grew up in a suburban community, sort of the classic post-World War II, optimistic, suburban development period. He sort of represented to me everybody that I was familiar with as my parents' friends, sort of the glib, personable, relatable adult male that I connected with. He reminded me of so many adult males that were in my life that were friends of my parents. I just love the guy for his speed, how he was interested in everything, how he could make people laugh instantaneously. He's the guy who sort of got me to want to be in the television business, the entertainment business. As far as the art of stand-up comedy, my greatest heroes were the typical ones. George Carlin and Robert Klein were the guys I closely emulated when I first started and whom I still have great respect for. What is your average workday? My average workday just expanded a great deal because for about the last six months, I've also been the weekday weathercaster at the NBC affiliate in San Diego as well. NBC San Diego has a separate set built at our Burbank facility on the second floor. So I go back and forth between doing Channel 4 and doing Channel 739 in San Diego all day long. They let go of their regular weekday weathercaster. This was simply a cost-cutting measure in the midst of the bad economy and the bad days of advertising. It's what they call hubbing. I think it's the future. The larger market weather forecasters may in fact be doing some presentations for the smaller markets. It's just cost-effective. With the digital technology and the satellite technology, it's easy to do and make it look like it's all organic. So my days are long. I go in about noon. I work until 6:30 p.m. I'm back at 8 o'clock and I work until midnight, which is why I'm taking a vacation to have fun in Hermosa Beach. Is there anything else you're writing about? I'm working on a couple of projects. I'm like your typical writer. I don't want to talk about it too much but I'm really excited about one I've been working on and off for over a year about blues music. I'm a huge fan of American roots music, blues music. I'm going to write a play, one that I won't act in and I won't perform in, which actually may give it a longer life, that will include the theme of African-American musical influences in the United States. This summer I might be going down to the delta region with my youngest son who's a guitar player. I'm going to wander around and do a little research. To see more of the Beach Reporter or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.tbrnews.com. Copyright (c) 2010, The Beach Reporter, Manhattan Beach, Calif. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. |