Anne Beatts dies: Original SNL writer and creator of Square Pegs was 74

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https://deadline.com/2021/04/anne-be...74-1234730339/

Original Saturday Night Live cast member Laraine Newman announced the news of Beatts' death on Twitter. "Our Anne- an OG SNL writer passed away yesterday," she tweeted. No further details were released. Beatts won an Emmy and was nominated five times for her work on SNL. "Along with her writing partner Rosie Shuster, Beatts created such foundational SNL characters as Todd and Lisa (played by Bill Murray and Gilda Radnor), Laraine Newman’s Shirley Temple-like Child Psychiatrist, the lecherous Uncle Roy (Buck Henry) and two of Dan Aykroyd’s greatest hits: the cartoonishly sleazy salesman Irwin Mainway and Fred Garvin, the unlikely male prostitute," says Deadline's Greg Evans. Beatts also wrote the 1979 one-woman show Gilda Radnor – Live. Beatts went on to create the one-season 1982-1983 cult CBS teen sitcom Square Pegs, starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Jami Gertz. In a 2020 Vulture essay titled, "Anne Beatts Was Always More Interesting Than John Hughes," Jen Chaney wrote: "In conversations about portraits of teenage life from the 1980s, the first name that invariably gets mentioned is John Hughes. That makes sense. The filmmaker’s coming-of-age canon — which includes Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — was enormously influential and is still actively referenced in today’s high-school movies and TV shows. But there’s another name that doesn’t come up nearly as often and definitely should: Anne Beatts." As Chaney points out, "Square Pegs arrived on TV a month after Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High hit theaters, and it aired its final episode more than a year before Hughes’s Sixteen Candles was released. Those and other more obvious touchstones of the era have overshadowed the importance of the show she created. But whether they realize it or not, every teen series and movie that followed Square Pegs owes it, and Anne Beatts, a debt of total gratitude. Totally."

Sarah Jessica Parker calls Square Pegs creator Anne Beatts a pioneer, an original and a life changer

Parker, who was 17 when she starred in Beatts' short-lived CBS comedy about a group of awkward teenage girls that only lasted one season, paid tribute to its creator Beatts, who died Wednesday at age 74. In response to a tweet to a 2020 Vulture essay saying that proclaimed, "Whether they realize it or not, every teen series and movie that followed Square Pegs owes it, and Anne Beatts, a debt of total gratitude," Parker tweeted: "Yep. As do I. Struggling to find adequate and appropriate descriptive words to describe her singular self. I need time. Cause I'm coming up short. Gosh, she was really something. RIP Anne. Thank you. For memories very few 17/18 yr olds get to make. X, SJ." Parker also paid tribute to Beatts on Instagram, calling her a "Pioneer" and "An original" and a "Life Changer." "I loved Patty Greene," she wrote of her character. "I love my Square Pegs memories. And I loved Anne Beatts." ALSO: SNL stars remember "true legend" Anne Beatts.

Anne Beatts was interviewed about writing for early SNL a week before her death

Vulture's Dan Reilly had a 50-minute conversation last week with Beatts, who was teaching sketch-comedy at Chapman University in Southern California. Beatts, one of the original SNL writers who went on to create Square Pegs, died Wednesday at age 74. "It was a lifeboat situation," Beatts says of being a writer on the first years of Saturday Night Live. "You were forced to get along. But I mean, everybody kind of did get along and was protective. It was competitive, of course. But if your sketch got cut between dress and air or something, people wouldn’t go, 'Nyah, nyah, your sketch was cut!' They’d say, 'Oh, too bad. It’ll probably be in next week’s show.' It was competitive, but supportive. Like a family. We had a sort of rough relationship with John (Belushi). He would often refuse to be in sketches that we had written, and would tell Lorne to 'fire the girls' and things like that. He wasn’t really a sexist kind of person. Away from the show, I had a perfectly good relationship with him. But I don’t know … I was working on a book with his wife, Judy Belushi, who was not his wife at the time, but his girlfriend. We were doing this book Titters, the first collection of humor by women, and that was the first year of the show and it was a massive task. I think he was upset that it took Judy’s attention away from him, even though he kind of wanted her to have her own career. But I just think it made him sort of jealous, and I think that may have been part of the root of his difficulties with (my writing partner) Rosie (Shuster) and me."

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Rest in peace.