When “Mr. Saturday Night,” a film directed by and starring Billy Crystal, was released in 1992, it flopped. Now it’s poised for an encore as a Tony-nominated Broadway musical.
Show biz: it’ll build you up and it’ll knock you down. Take Buddy Young, Jr., a Borscht Belt comic of a certain age , once a star of golden-age variety TV, now a wrinkled has-been plotting his comeback. Problem is, he’s not real. Buddy is the title character of “Mr. Saturday Night,” the 1992 film directed by and starring Billy Crystal, who played the geriatric entertainer in gobs of age makeup. The movie flopped.
Crystal modelled Buddy on the generation of Catskills comics he grew up watching on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” like King and Buddy Hackett. At the Friars, he would see them roaming the dining rooms, like wisecracking dinosaurs. One was Gene Baylos, who died in 2005, at ninety-eight. Like Buddy, Baylos didn’t have Sid Caesar’s name recognition, but he was “perhaps one of the funniest people I’ve ever met,” Crystal said.
For the movie, Crystal re-created the Friars Club on a set in Culver City, and Jerry Lewis made a cameo as himself. The shoot was gruelling. “Seventy-two days, which ismovies now. Fifty-four of the days I was in the old-age makeup,” Crystal said. “The crew started calling me Iron Balls, because it was so hard.” He had met Paymer, a nebbishy character actor, while filming “City Slickers,” and used him as a prototype for Stan in the screenplay before offering him the part.
Before the film came out, a focus-group guy told Crystal that it would make ten or eleven million dollars on opening weekend. It made less than five. “It was crushing,” Crystal said. He was passed over at the Oscars, but Paymer, playing the overlooked brother, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. His competition was Jack Nicholson , Al Pacino , Jaye Davidson , and the eventual winner, Gene Hackman . “The first thing my publicist said was ‘You’re not going to win.
“I would have fired her right away!” Crystal said. He hosted the ceremony that year, and, from the stage, he said, “You were robbed, Dave.” In “Mr. Saturday Night,” Buddy tells jokes that draw blood, but Crystal’s rule for comedy, Oscars hosting included, is “You gotta come to the edge, but you can’t jump over it.” Of the Chris Rock joke that provoked Will Smith, he said, “It wasn’t even that great a joke. It certainly did not warrant the physical assault.
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