Michael McManus grew up in Minneapolis and attended the University of Minnesota to become a teacher. It didn’t happen. In 1964, he got his first professional job at Dudley Riggs’ Brave New Workshop, a satirical revue theatre in Minneapolis.
In 1975, Michael and three other Riggs performers headed to LA. The group started a small theatre called the Hollywood Canteen, where they performed as the Comedy Corporation. Michael’s first television role was as a woodsman in an episode of Mel Brooks’ When Things Were Rotten. Other shows followed: M*A*S*H, Columbo, Coach, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Night Court, Rhoda, Newhart, Baretta, According to Jim, Lewis and Clark with Gabe Kaplan, the first season of Baywatch, and Thicke of the Night. Michael has written for television: doing punch-up on Taxi and The Faculty, the Marie show, Night Wrap, and some Steve Martin variety shows. An NBC special, All Commercials, won a WGA Award.
Films include Mother, Jugs, and Speed; Kentucky Fried Movie; Smokey and the Bandit; and Poltergeist. Through all of this, Michael always finds time for his first love, improvisational comedy. He performed with the critically-acclaimed group Funny You Should Ask for fifteen years. Michael wrote a television pilot and feature for HBO called The Chameleon. He was associate producer and contributed to the writing of Hot Shots: Part Deux. He also co-produced and co-wrote the screenplay for Touchstone’s Mafia! (or its original, funnier title Jane Austin’s Mafia!).
Michael lives in LA with his beautiful wife, television writer/producer Nancy Steen, and handsome son, Lake, who is smarter than both of his parents. Michael continues to write, act, and even improvise a bit when a local group needs a warm body. He spends his summers on a picturesque lake in northern Minnesota where the fishing is pretty good. More at https://imdb.com/name/nm0573158.
My background was improvisational comedy and sketch comedy. I worked in a theatre in Minneapolis called the Dudley Riggs Brave New Workshop. I worked there a bunch of years. One of the guys moved out to LA—an actor/writer—and he encouraged me to come out. In ’75, myself and a few other people in the cast at the theatre packed our cars, drove out, rented an apartment near Hollywood High. The place was filled with hookers; we didn’t know! The apartments had a pool!
We took the stuff we had from Minneapolis—the sketches—and did the Comedy Store, Improv, Ice House, all those places. Eventually we found a place across the street from the Groundlings that at the time was a Country-slash-lesbian bar. There was a bar and a stage, we hung lights, we put in revolving doors that fit our comedy needs, we brought out a couple of guys that had worked with us in Minneapolis to do tech work. One guy made the place into a little restaurant, selling soup and sandwiches. And that lasted for two-and-a-half years. It was called Hollywood Canteen and our group was called the Comedy Corporation. There were four of us. It became a showcase. People would come to the show, we all got agents through that. This was in the days of variety shows.
We got really good reviews. One night, Jackie Cooper, who’d been doing a lot of directing, came on a Sunday night. It was a dead night. Nobody showed up. It was just Jackie and his wife that showed. We apologized and said, “Sorry. Have a sandwich on us.” And he said, “No, no. C’mon, do the show.” So, we did this for an hour and a half, basically for them. They laughed their asses off, had a great time, and he ended up casting us. I did a pilot for him.
When did you know you wanted to become an actor?
I had a wonderful English and Speech teacher in high school that directed plays. His son is Richard Dean Anderson, actually. So this is Steve Anderson—a great guy. He was the cool teacher. He was a World War II bomber pilot. He drove sports cars. At night he played in a jazz band. He was the cool guy and we all wanted to be him. He got me doing state speech contests and stuff. Then I did the school plays. I think I just wanted to do something—I didn’t know what.
Oh, before that, in junior high, there was a radio show—Top 40 kind of show—and the guy did a Dracula impression. He, as Dracula, and himself, as the disc jockey, would talk to each other. I would listen to this. I answered a contest question or something on the show. I hooked up with the guy and I would write jokes for him. I was about fourteen. I would call this guy up, tell him all these corny Dracula jokes, he’d use them on the air, and he’d send me movie tickets or albums. He never paid me, but I could go to the station and hang out.
Senior year of high school, we started going to Dudley Riggs and it was kind of in this hippie part of town—this was cool for us. My buddy and I would go and get espresso coffee—we’d never heard of that. There were cute girls on stage smoking and swearing. I liked hanging out there. So, later, another friend and myself, after starting at the University of Minnesota, went to another show at Dudley Riggs and they were doing parodies of Miss America and stuff. I started wondering how to get into these shows. So, I asked and was told, “Come backstage and read!” So, we did that and were told, “Okay, come back next Friday.” In the meantime, we both got cast in Romeo and Juliet at school. We had to choose. I chose this and my friend chose Romeo and Juliet. I stayed with Dudley Riggs for a couple of years and did shows. I never actually graduated college. I was going to be a teacher and then I started down this path.
How did you get your first agent?
A friend of mine was a writer on When Things Were Rotten—it was a Mel Brooks’ parody of Robin Hood—a pretty cute show. I got a shot on the show, so I did that. The guy who was playing the Sheriff of Nottingham was a pretty gregarious, nice guy. I said, “Gee, I need an agent. Do you know anybody?” He said, “Yeah, I’ll give you a number.” So, I went there—it was an agency called Jack Fields; it’s been gone for a while. I met them, they liked me, and I said, “Y’know I’m in this improv group.” And they said, “Bring ’em in!” So, I brought the other three people in and we all ended up with the same agent.
The next thing I got was a movie, because, when I was sitting on a couch at Paramount, waiting to see the casting guy for When Things Were Rotten, Mike Fenton walked by and said, “I think you’d be good for this thing.” I read for it and it was Mother, Jugs & Speed. I got that. I love Mike Fenton. He got me a lot of work. It’s about knowing somebody, almost seventy-five percent of the time.
How would you advise an actor on cultivating relationships in the industry?
Only get to know important people! Don’t talk to the little people! They can’t help you! They just want things. If you didn’t talk to them and they become important people, then talk to them. Grow a mustache—they won’t recognize you—and talk to them!
Ah, the guy I knew who was writing on When Things Were Rotten was a kid I went to high school with. In fact, when I did the show at Dudley Riggs and my friend went on to do Romeo and Juliet, we needed another person in the show and I asked my girlfriend: “Do you know anybody funny?” And the answer was, “Pat Proft,” this kid from ninth grade. So, I got Pat, who went to Dudley Riggs with me, and subsequently went on to write Police Academy and Naked Gun. And he’s still one of my good friends. It’s a small circle, but you meet somebody, which leads to meeting somebody else, which leads to meeting somebody else.
What is your favorite thing about being an actor?
Not having to work in a factory. My dad did that, so I saw that. I think I like creating, whether I’m writing or acting. I’m not a big sit-by-myself writer. I like to work in a room with a few other people, bouncing ideas off each other. One guy says one thing and I say something funny and the next guy adds to that and I add something and the next guy says something funny and we are writing. It’s very similar to my on-stage experience in improvisation.
What is your least favorite thing about being an actor?
I don’t like the waiting around. If you’ve done a job and it’s over with and something else isn’t right around the corner, the little guy in your stomach says, “This is it! They found out! You’re never going to work again!” I don’t like that guy. But, it’s been okay for me, I think. I’ve always worked. I’ve never had another kind of job—waiter or anything—in thirty years. Y’know I got out here and I got this job as the spokesman for Olympia Beer. They were going national at the time, so it was two years or so of those ads as the friendly bartender. That was a good start.
How do you handle the difference between improvisation and scripted work?
I think it really depends on who I’m working with and what my position is in the show. If I’m doing a guest shot on a show, I’m there to facilitate the show and they usually don’t have a lot of time for the guest-star to develop a great idea. I’ve also done a million pilots and series where they’ll have more time for me to come up with bits and ideas. It depends on who the writers are and the producers and the directors. I’ve been in situations where they don’t want you to stray from the script. I find in the movies that directors will give a little more room to an actor to be flexible and come up with things within the context of the scene.
When you do your best work is when you bring something to it, when you make it yourself—whatever that means. For me, it sometimes helps if I can fool around with the lines a little bit. If you’ve got another actor who’s comfortable with doing that, it’s great. I did a TV-movie called Dempsey—it was about Jack Dempsey, played by Treat Williams—and I played Babe Ruth. They were contemporaries. In one of the scenes, he was thinking about quitting boxing and he went to see Babe Ruth on the set of the movie Babe Ruth was shooting during the off-season. They had this conversation basically about what were they going to do with their lives. Pretty heavy stuff for these two fellows who weren’t real intellectual. They were having this conversation while walking through the studio lot. This was set in the ’20s so they had showgirls and all kinds of people going by in costumes. We realized, in doing that scene, that these guys would not have just discussed this heavy stuff. They were players. So, we kind of rewrote the whole thing and improvised a lot of stuff about what happened around us—women going by—talking about how we got to play around in these lives. It made the scene better.
How do you approach auditions?
They’re looking for people who are comfortable. If it’s something that you’re not going to get anyway, and you know that, you have to find a way to make them remember you. I remember a friend and I got called in for a Dockers ad and we were both like, “We’re not going to get a Dockers ad! We’re not those guys!” So, we went in for it, did the whole thing, and at the end of it, we mooned the camera. The casting director was laughing. You just have to do something to make it your own. How many actors do you know that just go in, do the words, do a really good job, and then that’s it—they still don’t get it? You’re not just there to please that guy, that camera guy, that director, that casting lady.
Do you ever feel like giving up?
No. That’s the nice thing about always doing a couple of different things. If I’m not acting, there is a writing gig I’ll book. Sometimes I have to push one side down in order to work on the other—like when I was writing on the Steve Martin specials or something and would take weeks where I wouldn’t act much—but that’s fine. I’ll come back. Writing helps a lot with acting. And I think so many years with improv helped while I was writing all the time. I would always have some place to go, every week. I think that’s a smart thing to do, by the way. Have some place to go every week to do something. For me, it was improv every Saturday night. No matter what the week was like, if I didn’t get an acting job that week, I could go and do my show and get a laugh. Another benefit to that was, if I got sick of the typecasting—if I got really tired of playing the dumb truck driver or whatever they saw me as—I could do this improv show and I could be the King of France, a waitress, a Thai valet parker. It was great. I could be whatever I wanted to be while keeping my chops up. Doing improvisation is like writing on your feet.
What impact has acting had on your personal life?
Maybe I’m special, but when I moved out here in ’75 with three other people, I married one of them: Nancy Steen. She’s a television writer/producer for sitcoms. We had worked at the Dudley Riggs show together and would do these college shows. We fell in love there. We’re real normal people. We’ve written together—she doesn’t like that, so we don’t do it much. She’s done a few different things than I have. I’ve been an actor a lot longer than she was one. She’s been writing sitcoms since Happy Days. We’ve been together thirty years. We like to blame the Midwest for us being together so long. We’re grounded. We still have a place back on the lake in Minnesota. We go fishing. We have a son who has no interest in the industry. He’s really smart: a brainiac.
Who are your favorite actors?
I’ve always liked Jack Lemmon’s work. He had that everyman quality. Jimmy Stewart too. As for people I’ve worked with, Lloyd Bridges was great. He managed to have this great career and kept his great family together. He was just a cool guy to work with—a nice man. Richard Crenna was a really good guy. I liked him a lot. But in this business, it’s not just the actors I like. It’s people like Jackie Cooper, who gave me a break. Sheila Manning, who gave me my commercial break. She’s great. Mike Fenton, of course, cast me in so many things.
What advice would you give to a performer starting out?
You can’t always do this, but for us—my group I came to LA with—we had something we were coming here with. We had an act. We had a tangible thing where we could say, “Hey, come look at me.” That was very helpful, I think. That, and having some place to be seen. Just have something. And find some truth in what you’re doing, whatever it is. Even the wackiest character in the world has to have a thread of truth and believability for the audience to care.
This interview was conducted on January 25, 2005, and it originally appeared in Acting Qs: Conversations with Working Actors by Bonnie Gillespie and Blake Robbins, available at Amazon.