Dead to Me: AnnE Beatts

I loved her work on the 70s Lily Tomlin specials.

She was a talented writer.

That sucks. I really liked her.

I hate when they don't release the cause of death. Then I can't imagine an open casket with any certainty.

I saw her on FB and sent her a friend request. She didn't post a lot, but once she liked one of my comments. Terry Sweeny did too

Has SJP volunteered to pull the funeral wagon?

She looked older than 74. Also, that's fairly young-ish kinda sorta. I wonder if it was THE BIG C? All those bitches smoked to stay skinny back then.

I also hate it when they don't release the cause of death. Why be so coy? What's left that would be embarrassing? We don't have privacy any longer in this world, so don't clam up on us now.

no idea what her Cause Of death Kould havE been.

I really liked her. Loved her dark humor. Also found this interesting, from her Wikipedia page:

“It was at McGill University where Beatts discovered the darkly tragic humor of Jewish writers J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth, and Bruce Jay Friedman.[1] At this time, Beatts converted to Judaism.[1]“

What was her reputation? I had a friend who claimed she ripped off his play for a failed television pilot.

I admired her. :(

Her former live-in Michael O'Donoghue cannot be reached for comment because he bit the dirt 27 years ago.

Well look who neighed in...

Struggling, even, just to avoid repeating words.

me, me, me,

While Samantha was driving the square peg into her round hole, across town I just had to ask myself: if I admitted I did that part when I was seventeen, will people send me to the glue factory?

She never got over SNL canning her or Tracey Ullman turning down the horrible script she submitted. She seems to be one of those people who people either liked or loathed. She seemed like a bit much. She really loved complaining and blaming.

Can't even breath(e)...

It was the concept of the show that Tracey (rightly) turned down via her agent. Not just the script. From Wiki

A deal was immediately struck with CBS. I Love New York, a show about a "slightly wacky" British woman working in New York, was written by Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts.[11] Unhappy with the direction the network wanted to take the show, Ulman's agent decided to contact producer James L. Brooks.[43][44] Brooks felt that a sketch show would best suit her. "Why would you do something with Tracey playing a single character on TV when her talent requires variety? You can't categorize Tracey, so it's silly to come up with a show that attempted to

The pilot my friend says she plagiarized is from the same period. It also never got made.

One size does NOT fit all...

I was the target audience for this show in 1982.

She wrote and appeared in this, one of my faves from the old SNL.

She also wrote the Nerds, starring Gilda Radner as Lisa Loopner and Bill Murray as her boyfriend Todd.

[quote] The pilot my friend says she plagiarized is from the same period. It also never got made.

Stealing is wrong.

She looked 80 when she was 60.

Cocaine is not a beauty drug.

Hope she had fun all the way to the end. Somehow I doubt it.

[quote]She never got over SNL canning her

SNL didn't can her. She left with the original cast and writing staff in 1980.

She was fired as executive producer from A Different World after the first season, and her replacement (Debbie Allen) and the remaining cast dissed her to high heaven, which was probably unfair and a justifiable reason to be bitter.

She wrote and produced a 1992 CBS sitcom pilot for Elvira that was a lot of fun and should have been picked up. (It would have been a hit on Fox.)

It had a fun premise, costarred DL fave Katherine Helmond, and featured a talking cat that Sabrina the Teenage Witch later stole.

She was truly a ground-breaker for women. RIP.

This is a really fun profile of her from the Square Pegs era. All the cast members make appearances, and a CBS exec speaks frankly.

[quote]Other Beatts projects – a TV show based on Titters, a movie update of The Women, a murder-mystery comedy – were all in various holding patterns when Square Pegs was bought by CBS. “There was a point during the filming of the pilot,” LeMasters recalls, “when I would have been perfectly willing to fire Anne Beatts. I began to think Anne was the best of Square Pegs and, simultaneously, the worst of Square Pegs. There are definite problems with her as a producer. She has a desire, for instance, not to tell a story, to just have interesting characters who tell clever jokes.

[quote]“The show, then, becomes overly hip and difficult to follow unless you are a regular viewer. If a viewer hasn’t seen prior episodes or isn’t familiar with the characters, he will get lost and turn the dial. But CBS cannot write the scripts. All we can do is send notes, and if Anne, as the producer, chooses to ignore them, there’s very little we can do. Finally, Anne Beatts is this show.”

I don't think the cause of death is anyone's business. Would you want people to know you died of anal cancer? gonorrhea? dementia? complications from AIDS? It's a personal, private affair no one needs to know about.

R29, first, I would be dead, so what would it matter what I wanted. And second of all, why would anyone feel bad about anyone knowing you had any of those maladies? Most people do not consider those diseases to be anything shameful.