FERRIS BUTLER
Creator, writer and producer of Waste Meat News
4-7-79
Every Saturday at 11:30 p.m., millions of Americans tune in to what is indisputably the boldest, the most innovative, and frequently the most tasteless comedy show on television — NBC's Saturday Night Live. But for the 400,000 residents of Manhattan who have cable TV, there is another program — also aired at 11:30, but on Sunday evening — that is, in its own way, even more offbeat.
Known as Waste Meat News, the half-hour satiric revue has been a regular feature of Channel D since April, 1976, when a young Westsider named Ferris Butler decided that he had the talent to write, direct, and produce his own comedy series, even without money and film equipment. Time has proven him right: last year, TV World magazine discovered, in a poll of viewers, that Waste Meat News is the most popular comedy program on cable, out of 150 public access shows.
A tall, willowy, 27-year-old with a quizzical expression permanently fixed on his face, Ferris once worked as a part-time office boy at Channel 7's Eyewitness News, and there he came to the conclusion that "TV news is nothing but throwaway scraps, like sausages or hot dogs. … Very little protein, like waste meat."
Many of the skits he conceives have the same format as "straight" news items, but have been twisted by his imagination into something outrageous. In place of the standard weather reports, for example, there is Ferris' "Leather Weather Girl," in which a girl is tied to a table, her body representing a map of the world.
The weather reporter, while telling about an impending onslaught of rain and snow, dramatizes his points by pouring a pitcher of water over the girl, smothering her with shaving cream, and finally applying a blow dryer to evaporate the messes while explaining that a warm air front will follow. Other skits include "Swedish Grease," "Music to Eat Rice By," and "The Adversaries," in which two actors wearing grotesque masks debate the question: should monsters be allowed to kill people, or just frighten them?
Ideas for skits, says Ferris, come to him any time of night or day, now that he has "stopped working at any legitimate job. I watch a lot of television. But most of the time, I meander around the streets and just think.
"I remember when I got the idea for the foreign language cursing detector. I was sitting on a bench in the park, smoking grass, when some foreign tourists came and sat down, and started talking about me in German like I was a bum. And I thought, why not have a portable siren that goes off whenever a swear word is spoken in any language?"
He describes himself as "a very unregimented person who can't jive with the mainstream industry." This accounts for much of the spontaneity in Waste Meat News. The performers sometimes don't see the scripts until the taping session. Each segment requires several run-throughs before it is smooth enough to be filmed. Frequently the filming goes on far into the night. Although the show is done with a single camera and half-inch videotape, the final result makes up in charm what it lacks in professional gloss.
"Maybe I'm a little rough in the way I produce it," says Ferris, "but I'm being a pioneer and I'm not worried about perfection as long as the audience has a positive reaction."
His cast is an irregular group of about 15 unpaid actors and actresses, most of them young. Two current stars of Waste Meat News are Pat Profito, a master of comedy who injects an infectious vitality into all of his performances, and Laura Suarez, a Strassberg-trained actress and former Playboy Bunny who frequently portrays the naive sexpot who crops up in many of Ferris' sketches.
Most of the filming is done on the Upper West Side — usually on the street or in someone's apartment, but also in such diverse places as stores, restaurants, the waterfront, boiler rooms and lobbies. A recent skit was shot at a Westside swimming pool; it features Pat Profito as a swimming instructor who teaches three bikini-clad beauties his "jump-in-and-swim" method, in which he pushes them into the pool and expects them to swim instinctively, or drown.
Ferris, who grew up in Queens and Brooklyn "and departed as soon as was possible," studied filmmaking at New York University under Martin Scorsese and was encouraged to pursue comedy writing. For the past five years he has been married to Beverly Ross, a composer with many hits to her credit including "Lollipop."
It's 10 seconds before midnight on Sunday evening. Time once again for Ferris to bid his viewers goodnight. "And remember: stay alienated, stay wiped out, and stay wasted."