Allison Jones
speaker
268 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Allison Jones’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard · Allison Jones (Award-Winning Casting Director) · 18 Dec 2024
podcast
Other than the comic who's not that Sam Harris.
Oh, no, I knew that her name was Sam. I think the reason she got into writing was because she had to support Sam. Yeah, she's a single mother. Yeah, she said, I can do that stuff, and she wrote a spec script for one of their shows at the time, and then she just got huge. She created Soap, and she was a very, very important person, not just female, very important person in comedy.
And then she and Paul Witt made the greatest comedies in the 80s and 90s. Wow. the third floor on Sunset Gower.
All the time. It's almost the rule, not the exception.
Oh, we're keeping that in our heads.
Seeing every movie and every TV show and memorizing every actor. Anytime I'd go to a movie, this was before Internet Movie Database, I have a ton of little notebooks. I stay at the end and I would write down all the cast. I noted like Roseanne Barr. Her first bit was on Johnny Carson and I wrote Roseanne Carr. And then I wrote Riding Vacuum Cleaner. That was her bit.
So I remember her bit was writing down. And then I ended up seeing her at the comedy store. Anyway, everything was handwritten those days. So I had tons of writing down everybody. Ellen De-something. I didn't think I could spell her name, but I wrote it down. DeGeneres? Yeah. Oh, this is so funny. Yeah, so I have all kinds of little notebooks.
I would say that most of the folks I started out with, Sally Steiner and Meg Lieberman and Donald, who started in casting, we just had scraps of paper everywhere.
Later, I would get Time Out New York when that started, and I would rip things out about the comedy people that they would talk about. That's how I remembered people like Rory Scovel and Ben Schwartz. I still have their little things ripped out of the Time Out New York.
Oh, God.
Yeah, they have the Archie Bunker's chair.
But it was all scrap paper. Our walls were covered with little thumbtacks with somebody's name. Names.
No, it doesn't ruin it for me because I still love it. But at those days, you had to stay. Sometimes I'd have to see a movie twice because you can't go to IMDb and I'd have to look at the- And it's going fast.
Yes, exactly. So I would have to go sometimes twice. And there's many people who I would bring in the next week and they got a part.
No, all the time. That was then you had to do it on your feet. You had to go into the comedy store. When I was working for Judith, she let me do some sort of new, which never really aired, late night comedy show that NBC wanted to put on. adjacent or after SNL at the time, talking 1980s. That was my first flat out comedy thing.
I had to learn comics like I learned my multiplication tables in the 60s. I went to the comedy store and improv every single night for weeks. I'd park up above the comedy store. I never went to the main room because those were the acts that everybody knew, Robin Williams. But I would go to the back room and sit there from like eight o'clock to two in the morning.
And I would see always like a 19-year-old, 20-year-old Jim Carrey. It was the same lineup half the time I went there. It was like Jim Carrey, and then it was Jeff Altman, Damon Wayans, who was very young at the time, as I recall. I just sat in the back. I had to have a two-drink minimum, no comps back then, and I was just a casting assistant. So I would sit there, and I would sit until the end.
And usually, I think it was Sunday night. I forget when Sam Kinison would come on at two in the morning and be screaming.
And then I would... leave and go home and do it the next night. I just made a point to do it solid for like two or three weeks so I could learn comics. You had to do the legwork then. And I have very fond memories of that kind of stuff.
No, they're hard. It's more rough. And that was the days preceding you, maybe not, where the goal of a comic was to get a deal at a network. Right. First of all, to get a spot on Johnny Carson.
Showing 81–100 of 268 · page 5 of 14
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