NEW YORK – Anne Beatts, a groundbreaking comedy writer with a taste for sweetness and the macabre who was on the original staff of ‘Saturday Night Live’ and later created the cult sitcom ‘Square Pegs’, has died. She was 74.
Beatts died Wednesday at her home in West Hollywood, California, according to her good friend Rona Kennedy. Kennedy, a film producer and a fellow faculty member at Chapman University, did not immediately know the cause of death.
From 1975 and for five seasons, Beatts was among a team of talented writers, including Rosie Shuster, Alan Zweibel, Marilyn Suzanne Miller and cast members such as Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase who helped make ‘Saturday Night Live’ a cultural phenomenon. to make. NBC. With Shuster, she would invent the beloved young nerds – the nose, Marvin Hamlisch-adoring Lisa Loopner (played by Gilda Radner) and the high-waisted goofball Todd DiLaMuca (Bill Murray), and help coined such keywords as Lisa’s, ‘It’s so funny I forgot to laugh. ‘
Beatts would later use her own recognized background as an outsider in high school for her own series “Square Pegs”.
“If you look at the nerds, she knew that world,” Zweibel told The Associated Press. “She and Rosie treated those characters with love. She knew the world. If you look at ‘Square Pegs,’ the title speaks volumes only.”
With its premiere in 1982, ‘Square Pegs’ was then a rare sitcom centered on teenage girls, and Sarah Jessica Parker in an early role as a first-year high school student tried to fit in. “Square Pegs” lasted only one season, but was loved by critics and was later praised for anticipating and adding the teen comedies that would soon make John Hughes famous.
“The program was also just cool, talking to teens with a shared interest in their interests that made young people feel like they would be seen before the Hughes movies had a similar effect,” New York Magazine said. Jen Chaney wrote in 2020. “No other program on TV at the time would have focused an entire episode on an addiction to Pac-Man or a bat-mitswa with a New Wave theme in which the real band Devo performed ‘That’s Good’. ‘
Parker tweeted on Thursday: “Struggling to find adequate and appropriate descriptive words to describe her singular. I need time. Because I’m short. Okay, she was really something. RIP Anne. Thank you. For very few memories Older 17 / 18 years. ”
Beatts ‘later credits included writing’ Murphy Brown ‘and’ The Belles of Bleeker Street ‘,’ producing ‘A Different World’ and contributing to the stage musical ‘Leader of the Pack’. She is survived by her daughter, Jaylene; sister Barbara Resucha; and nieces Jennifer and Kate Dreger.
Beatts was a native of Buffalo, New York, and eventually settled with her family further down in the Summers country. She grew up among readers and jokes and talked about sharpening her own wit, even if it was just to keep up.
After attending McGill University, she got an early break writing comedy for National Lampoon magazine, where numerous future artists and writers of “Saturday Night Live” worked. In the mid-1970s, she left the magazine, out of frustration because she was mostly overlooked by men. But while she was there, she dated co-writer Michael O’Donoghue, who was hired by producer Lorne Michaels for ‘Saturday Night Live’.
“I’ve never been a real Lampoon reader,” Michaels told Rolling Stone in 1983, “but Anne was recommended to me by Michael O’Donoghue. She thought I was hiring her for the wrong reasons – because O’Donoghue was her boyfriend back then – and when we met, she was a combination of friendly and careful. She was a little combative. But it was 1975. Everyone was a little combative in 1975. “
Beatts, who initially rejected Michaels in part because she disliked television, was already known for an unusual sense of humor shared by many on “Saturday Night Live.” In a mock Volkswagen ad presented in Lampoon, she provided a notorious slogan referring to Senator Ted Kennedy’s 1969 car accident on Chappaquiddick Island: ‘If Ted Kennedy was driving a Volkswagen, he would be president today. ‘
In an email to The Associated Press, Laraine Newman, cast of Saturday Night Live, writes that Beatts’ brought about the toughness of National Lampoon when she wrote in our program. But she did not learn it from Lampoon. Such a contradiction because she was a very sweet person. ‘