Fired! by Annabelle Gurwitch

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on January 2nd, 2007


“Fired!: Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized and Dismissed,” is a collection of humorous essays about getting canned from Tim Allen, Harry Shearer, Bob Saget, Paul F. Tompkins, Dana Gould and others. The book was inspired by Gurwitch’s own experience of being layed off by Woody Allen.

The book will be a movie– after a short theatrical run, it will pop up on Showtime. (See the trailer here.) Variety describes it as “A free-wheeling, first-person documentary.” Who doesn’t enjoy a delicious story about getting shitcanned?! (Of course, it must be told long after the sting of termination has subsided. Otherwise, it gets scary and the folks listening to the story start to make sure they have a clear shot to the emergency exits!)

Below is an excerpt from Bill Maher.

When I was twenty-nine, I was hired to do a talk show. I had just done a series called Sara with Geena Davis and Alfre Woodard, and by then I had done some Tonight Shows and so I had some heat on me, as agents and managers say, so King World and Motown (now there’s an axis of evil if I ever heard one) called me in and they said, “You’re the guy.” I remember vividly in the meeting they said, “We want someone fresh and new. We don’t want Robert Klein or David Brenner.”

We worked for a few weeks writing sketches, some of which were pretty good, but they put me with Dinah Shore’s producer, and I didn’t have the clout to fight it. I didn’t even know what a producer did. I figured his name was Fred and Johnny’s producer’s name was Fred–well, I guess you gotta have a guy named Fred.

We never shot the show. We did a test shoot, one test shoot. We should have been doing a hundred test shows–that’s what we did when we started Politically Incorrect– but you take a twenty-nine kid, and yeah, he’s not that good.

After they canned me, I turned on the TV one night and there was Billy Preston, who I had rehearsed with as my bandleader, with none other than David Brenner. I just thought, “Oh, they kept the bandleader.”

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