The last thing that Bruce Kimmel said to the beloved actress Cindy Williams when bidding her goodbye after wrapping shooting on Kimmel’s 10-part short-form musical comedy series “Sami” (currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video was, “We’ll probably be doing this (together) when we’re 100.” Kimmel had every reason to believe it would be the truth. The two had been friends for 58 years, ever since being in the performing arts program at Los Angeles City College in 1965 and ’66. But then Kimmel got word that Williams unexpectedly died at 75 on January 25 of this year of unknown causes. There was certainly no indication of Williams’ being ill. She had been energetic and lively in her performance in September and October of last year during production. “Our publicist heard a rumor that she had died,” Kimmel recalls, “then we didn’t hear anything for five days, so I said thank God it’s just a rumor. Then came the announcement. It was a complete shock.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.
“Sami” follows the adventures of Sami Sherman (played by newcomer Sami Staitman, a young lady trying to make it as a stage actress and singer in New York City. Kerry O’Malley portrays her mother, Williams her grandmother. As Grandma, Williams doesn’t just sit around in the 10 episodes that averaged 12 minutes apiece. In one, she’s playing a vigorous game of tennis. In another, she belts out a tune entitled “I Married a Schnook” in which she rhymes “toilet” with “spoil it” and notes, “He sits on his ass, his teeth in a glass.” It’s one of 14 original tunes that Kimmel, as the project’s composer as well as writer and director, wrote in a series that cost less than $100,000 all told.
“I wrote the character for Cindy, and we had so much fun doing it,” Kimmel says. It would be Williams’ final project, which broke his heart.
Kimmel and Williams stayed close throughout their adult lives. She of course co-starred with Penny Marshall in the 1970s’ and ’80s comedy hit “Laverne & Shirley” (a “Happy Days” spinoff), also having prominent roles in the films “American Graffiti” (directed by George Lucas) and “The Conversation” (directed by Francis Ford Coppola). Kimmel guest starred in three episodes of “Laverne & Shirley” and cast Williams in a pair of film projects he wrote and directed: “The First Nudie Musical” in 1976 and “The Creature Wasn’t Nice” in 1981. “I’d never known a time when we hadn’t been close,” Kimmel shares, “Cindy was incredible to work with and had great ideas, and I loved her forever.”
In terms of “Sami,” Kimmel designed its tone and pace to emulate the laughs, physical comedy and heart of the 1970s sitcoms he loved and appeared in as a young actor. “That was the era when I came of age,” he notes. “I wanted something genuinely funny but also warm where you actually like the characters, the leads. I didn’t want any putdown humor, and no over-the-tops. I watch stuff today and don’t respond to it at all. Actors today are taught to by very mumbly and small. I had to teach our actors in ‘Sami’ what comic energy was.”
Part of that energy was focusing on the physical. And in Kimmel’s mind, that meant a pie fight. So in the second “Sami” episode, an epic pie fight breaks out. “It was the first thing I wanted to do and wrote,” he points out proudly. “We had 50 pies and 50 willing recipients, especially Sami herself. What was different about our pie fight is I’d always heard the Three Stooges and Soupy Sales used shaving cream in their pies. Not us. We used good stuff, real pie crust and pudding and Cool Whip. And it worked out great. I mean, you don’t want to be eating shaving cream when a pie hits you.”
In other words, most of the slim “Sami” budget went to pie. Kimmel considers it money well spent, and so did Williams.
“Sami” streams on Amazon Prime Video.
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