. .		This story is a real heartbreaker. Back in the mid-1980's, I received a call from Harry Shearer, asking me to be a part of a project he was doing for HBO.
		For those who don't know Harry Shearer, he's probably best known these days for his voice work on The Simpsons.  But Harry is known in the comedy business as a comic's comic--a brilliant social commentator, writer and actor. You've seen Harry as the bass player Derek Smalls in the unforgettable This Is Spinal Tap, which Harry co-wrote. After spending his early years as a child movie star, Harry became a member of a 1960's comedy group called The Credibility Gap, which included Michael McKean and David Lander. The Gapsters collaborated on the pilot of Laverne & Shirley, in which Michael and David took the roles of Lenny and Squiggy.
		So one day Harry called me with an offer that was nothing short of heaven. We would produce live national political convention coverage for HBO. Comedy coverage! This was before Comedy Central had been invented. Harry and Allen Rucker would executive produce, Kevin Bright and I would produce. Allen Rucker had been executive producer of the brilliant series SCTV; Kevin Bright is now, with Marta Kauffman and David Crane, the enormously successful creator/executive producer of Friends.
		Imagine as convention floor reporters nothing short of an army of America's cleverest comics: Bill Murray, Martin Short, Penny Marshall, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and many more, including comic genius Albert Brooks.
		I worked with the team for months, in New York and LA, on news editorial, production flow, staffing, budgeting, etc. Nothing, of course, proved harder than getting credentials from the House Gallery, and winning the support of the two political parties. I was hacking away at this problem with help from HBO Washington lobbyist Rich Plepler, when suddenly the word came down from Bridget Potter, head of programming: Michael Fuchs was killing the project, unless it was scaled down from live gavel-to-gavel on-site coverage to late night, off-site coverage. Harry wouldn't have it. And there the project ended.
		This hurt and hurt bad, the more so because it was so similar to a 1981 project with an equally devastating demise. Harry Shearer had sold CBS on a Friday night 11:30 weekly comedy show, based on a radio series done for years by the Credibility Gap. The show would consist of sketches based on that week's news. The cast was essentially the same as the cast of the HBO convention coverage. I was named line producer.
		On the day before pre-production of the pilot, I got a phone call from Jennifer Alward, the CBS developer. The series was killed, she said, by Bill Paley, who had just found out about it and insisted that CBS would never mock American politicians.
		Harry, Christopher Guest and the other cast members then hooked up with Rob Reiner to create This Is Spinal Tap. It was less than a year later that I sat in a movie theater, on Spinal Tap's opening day, and cried my eyes out.

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