You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman by Mike Thomas Page B

that legally prevented the ninety-nine-seat space from opening to the public. Consequently, Austin’s growing gang performed in a number of venues, including the Improv on Melrose, where the group was in residency for several months, and the rickety White House theater on Pico Boulevard, where mushrooms sprouted from the carpet when it rained. Out of financial necessity Phil retained his position at Hartmann & Goodman, where on many Fridays Groundlings came to hang out with staffers and whichever rock stars happened to be on the premises. “It was pretty festive,” Goodman says. “The whole place was pretty much rockin’.”
    At some point during Phil’s first couple of years with the Groundlings, he became disillusioned or bored or both and (not atypically, other Groundlings say) dropped out. It’s been fun, he told Austin, but I don’t want to be an actor. (He’d have several more bouts with self-doubt before his tenure there was up.) Austin, though, was chagrined; he knew Phil’s potential. “We were all very disappointed,” he says. “Because we knew he was very, very good and he was getting better all the time.”
    Months went by during which Phil continued his graphic design work, began doing voice-overs for local radio spots and even recorded a comedy album, Flat TV, with the assistance of Small, musician pal Chad Stuart (of the musical duo Chad & Jeremy, John’s clients), and fellow Groundlings Phyllis Katz and Teresa Burton. According to Austin, he was lured back into the fold after participating in a cold-reading workshop that Austin held at his house to help actors hone their audition skills for television and film jobs. “It was the first time I had really ever seen an honest actor in Phil,” Austin says of the session. “And by that I mean he dealt with the truth of the moment, but there was no shtick and there were no broad characters. And he was just terrific.” Austin told him so and Phil was encouraged enough to rejoin the group.
    In late April 1979, the Groundlings finally opened its first show on Melrose in an intimate 99-seat room the actors had personally revamped and populated with secondhand folding chairs. The space had previously housed an array of disparate establishments, including a furniture showroom, a gay bar, and a massage parlor. By that point, Phil had undergone nearly four years of training—and it showed. Plus, as he later explained, “certain people had dropped out of the company and now I was one of the stars of the show. I had what every actor needs to get a leg up: a showcase. Casting directors would come, as they would to the Comedy Store or the Improv, and I started to get some work. It slowly evolved from there.”
    “The Groundlings on Melrose in Hollywood are something else,” wrote Gardner McKay, theater critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. “Their feet may be planted firmly on the ground, but their eyes are planted firmly on social decay (moral, media and religious) and sometimes even on the stars.” Others were equally upbeat. Among the two dozen sketches presented, McKay singled out Phil’s “extraterrestrial sage” named “Lightman” as one to watch. Flaunting his shirtless, surfing-buff torso (the ever body-conscious Phil then dabbled in weight-lifting as well), and wielding brightly beaming flashlights in both hands, he wore a headband, a white tennis visor, and a homemade cardboard mask with rectangular openings for the eyes that resembled something out of Star Trek. Tight black pants and a utility belt outfitted with several more upward-aiming flashlights completed the ensemble. His act: shining a beam of light on random audience members and answering questions they were merely thinking .
    The character also paid a visit to the offices of Hartmann & Goodman, leaving behind a cryptic missive that read: “This Office is Laser Ionized for Extra Hipness. Lightman.”
    That same year Phil made what was very likely his first television