Michael O'Donoghue

This film tells the story of a tribe of prehistoric "Mud People" who happen upon a deserted Gatsby-esque 1930s manor house.

The Mud People evolve into contemporary high-society types who enjoy a decadent weekend party at the manor before ultimately devolving back into Mud People.

Michael O'Donoghue (January 5, 1940 – November 8, 1994) was an American writer and performer.

He was known for his dark and destructive style of comedy and humor, and was a major contributor to National Lampoon magazine.

He was the first head writer of Saturday Night Live and the first performer to deliver a line on the series.

O'Donoghue was born Michael Henry Donohue in Sauquoit, New York.

His father, Michael, worked as an engineer, while his mother, Barbara, stayed home to raise him.

O'Donoghue's early career included work as a playwright and stage actor at the University of Rochester where he drifted in and out of school beginning in 1959.

His first published writing appeared in the school's humor magazine Ugh!

After a brief time working as a writer in San Francisco, California, O'Donoghue returned to Rochester and participated in regional theater.

During this period, he formed a group called Bread and Circuses specifically to perform his early plays which were of an experimental nature and often quite disturbing to the local audience.

Among these are an absurdist work exploring themes of sadism entitled "The Twilight Maelstrom of Cookie Lavagetto", a cycle of one-act plays called Le Theatre de Malaise and the 1964 dark satire The Death of JFK.

His first work of greater note was the picaresque feature "The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist", published as a serial in Evergreen Review.

This was an erotic satire of the comic book genre, later released in revised and expanded form as a book by that magazine's publisher, Grove Press.

Drawn by Frank Springer, the comic detailed the adventures of debutante Phoebe Zeit-Geist as she was variously kidnapped and rescued by a series of bizarre Inuit, Nazis, Chinese foot fetishists, lesbian assassins and other characters.

Doonesbury comic-strip creator Garry Trudeau cited the strip as an early inspiration, saying, "[A] very heavy influence was a serial in the Sixties called 'Phoebe Zeitgeist'. . . . It was an absolutely brilliant, deadpan send-up of adventure comics, but with a very edgy modernist kind of approach. To this day, I hold virtually every panel in my brain. It's very hard not to steal from it."

In 1968, O'Donoghue worked with illustrator and fellow Evergreen Review veteran Phil Wende to create the illustrated book The Incredible, Thrilling Adventures of the Rock.

Biographer Dennis Perrin described it as having "no plot. The same rock sits in the same spot in the same forest for thousands of years. Nothing much happens. Then, while two boys roam the wood in search of a Christmas tree, one sees the rock and is inspired."

Taking the idea to the publisher Random House, the pair sold the book to the young editor Christopher Cerf.

Cerf was a former member of the Harvard Lampoon, and O'Donoghue's first acquaintance from that group.

Through Cerf, O'Donoghue would meet George W. S. Trow and other former Lampoon writers looking to start a national comedy magazine.

In 1969, O'Donoghue and Trow co-wrote the script for the James Ivory / Ismail Merchant film Savages.

Savages was eventually released in 1972.

O'Donoghue was, along with Henry Beard and Doug Kenney, a founding writer and later an editor for the satiric National Lampoon magazine.

As one of many outstanding National Lampoon contributors, O'Donoghue created some of the distinctive black comedy which characterized the magazine's flavor for most of its first decade.

His most famous contributions include "The Vietnamese Baby Book", in which a baby's war wounds are cataloged in a keepsake; the "Ezra Taft Benson High School Yearbook", a precursor to the Lampoon's High School Yearbook Parody; the comic "Tarzan of the Cows"; and the continuing feature "Underwear for the Deaf".

Two of his parodies were reprinted in the anthology National Lampoon: This Side of Parodies (Warner Paperback Library, 1974).

He was also the editor and main contributor to the Lampoon's Encyclopedia of Humor. He co-wrote the album Radio Dinner with Tony Hendra, and because of the album's success, he was assigned to direct and act on The National Lampoon Radio Hour.

After 13 episodes, publisher Matty Simmons asked O'Donoghue to return to the magazine.

A week later, O'Donoghue and Simmons argued over what was later revealed to be a simple misunderstanding, and O'Donoghue left.

It was at the Lampoon that O'Donoghue met Anne Beatts, with whom he became romantically involved.

The two later moved on to work at Saturday Night Live together.

On the pioneering late-night sketch comedy program Saturday Night Live (originally called NBC's Saturday Night), creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels assigned him the position of head writer.

O'Donoghue appeared in the first show's opening sketch as an English-language teacher, instructing John Belushi to repeat phrases such as, "I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines," and, "We are out of badgers. Would you accept a wolverine in its place?"

before dropping dead of a heart attack.

He later made appearances in the persona of a Vegas-style "impressionist" who would pay great praise to showbiz mainstays such as talk show host Mike Douglas and singers Tony Orlando and Dawn—and then speculate how they would react if steel needles with real sharp points were plunged into their eyes.

The shrieking fits that followed are believed to be inspired by O'Donoghue's real-life agonies from chronic migraine headaches.

O'Donoghue, in reference to his refusal to write for Jim Henson's Land of Gorch sketches which appeared in the early years of SNL, quipped, "I won't write for felt."

Later, O'Donoghue cultivated the persona of the grim "Mr. Mike", a coldly decadent figure who favored viewers with comically dark "Least-Loved Bedtime Stories" such as "The Little Engine that Died".

One of his most notable SNL sketches is the Star Trek spoof "The Last Voyage of the Starship Enterprise" that was a tour-de-force for Belushi.