Thomas Fuchs
I met my first Bud Wiser some time near the end of 1965, when I went to work in the research department of Wolper Productions, a company specializing in documentaries for television. I was 23 years old, fresh out of college. Bud, a writer-producer I sometimes reported to, was, despite his seniority, an easy-going, thoroughly likable guy. We soon became friends. I can’t say how long I’d known him, not too long, before I broached the subject of his name. Yes, they had Budweiser beer when and where (Rochester, New York) he grew up. And yes, he’d always been called Bud. His given name was Bernard (accent on the first syllable. “My name is not berNARD”). He didn’t seem interested in discussing the matter further. I probably was not the first person he’d met who brought it up.
“Bud” was more than a nickname. He used it, not Bernard, for all his screen credits, at Wolper and throughout the following years, including a long career writing and producing sitcoms. You can look him up on the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB).
IMDB will also put you on to the other Bud Wiser, the actor, born in 1903, twenty six years before my Bud Wiser. It wasn’t IMDB browsing that led me to him, though. Recently, that is to say about fifty years after I met my first Bud Wiser, I was leafing through a book about the films of Cary Grant when Bud’s name caught my eye. He was the last entry in the cast list for Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948).
My Bud Wiser had never mentioned being in a picture with Cary Grant. When I asked about him about this, his immediate response was “Who is this imposter?” Then he said he was surprised he hadn’t heard about this before. At Wolper we’d made a lot of shows about the movies. Just about everybody in the place was an old movie nut to some degree. The stand-out expert and champion in this regard was one of the bosses, Jack Haley, Jr., son of the Jack Haley whose most famous role was that of the Tin Woodsman in The Wizard of Oz. But even he had never said anything about the other Bud Wiser.
It was after seeing Bud Wiser in the Cary Grant book that I looked him up on IMDB and discovered that his movie career had been very thin, with roles in only ten films, some better known than others, produced over a period of ten years. He made his debut appearance in 1938, as a bailiff, in Career Woman. His last appearance was in 1948, as Policeman #10 in Force of Evil. Most of his roles were as a policeman, although sometimes he was Bodyguard. In Mr. Blandings he was Customer. All ten of his appearances are listed as “uncredited,” meaning that you won’t see his name on the film. I became curious. Did he bear any resemblance to my Bud Wiser?
I ordered Blandings from Netflix and watched it attentively. It opens with a montage about the frantic pace of life in Manhattan, a sequence made up almost entirely of stock footage. There is one brief shot of three men at a lunch counter. Is one of them Bud? Other than that, there is no Customer in the movie .
Maybe he did have a larger part and it got cut out. According to IMDB, Dan Tobin, an actor with a long career in movies and television, plays a character named Bunny Funkhauser. In the movie’s shooting script, which I found with a Google search, Bunny has a scene with Grant and Myrna Loy, but it was cut out from the finished film, so Tobin’s name is omitted from the on-screen credits Maybe Bud suffered the same fate. (Bunny Funkhauser is a name that may keep coming back at you, like a tune you can’t get out of your head. It troubled me for some time – Bunny Funkhauser, Bunny Funkhauser, Bunny…)
I went over to the wonderful library maintained by the Motion Picture Academy (the Oscars people) and with the kind and patient help of the staff there found Bud Wiser mentioned in a few old copies of the trade paper, Daily Variety, reporting him cast in some of those roles which turned out to be uncredited. Browsing beyond show business records, into Census and Military, we discovered that when he enlisted in the Army in 1942, he was six feet tall, 235 pounds. (The Bud I know is about 5’8”, 160). No wonder he played cops and bodyguards. What did he do with his time and how did he make a living for all the long periods when he wasn’t working in the movies? The 1930 census reports that he was a buyer for a machine shop. The 1940 census simply reports that he was “privately employed”. He was married, apparently had no children, died in Los Angeles on January 6, 1971, and now lies in Forest Lawn’s Glendale cemetery.
My Bud Wiser seemed interested when I reported all this to him. “I came out here in 1956, so our time in L.A. overlapped quite a bit,” he said, “but I never ran into him, never heard of him.”
“Well, it was a big town even back then.”
“And I’m pretty sure he wasn’t any kind of a relative. I would have heard about that. I know all the Bud Wisers I’m related to.”
“There are others?”
“Oh, sure,” says Bud. “My father was called Bud and so were my two uncles, his brothers.”
“Wait, all three kids were called Bud?”
“When their wives got together and they were talking about their husbands, they’d say, ‘Well, my Bud…’”
Bud can be a pretty funny guy. After all, he did write comedy for all those years. Is he kidding? Yes, he must be. “That doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “How did they know who was talking to who when they were all still kids and living with their parents?”
“You know,” says Bud, “George Foreman named all his sons George, Jr.” Maybe he’s not kidding about the three Bud brothers. The only thing missing from this story is a dog. Sure enough, Bud tells me, without my mentioning the possibility, “My parents had a dog named Buddy before I was born.” He laughs with what I would characterize as an embarrassed laugh. “They called me Buddy when I was little. But they didn’t have the dog then. It ran away or something before I was born.”
“Maybe it ran away to get away from all the Bud stuff.”
“Maybe,” says Bud.
Bud is married, to a lovely woman named Chris, who had her own career in television documentary production. They have a son, Mike, grown up now and living in Boston, producing shows for Frontline. He is identified in the credits as Mike, not Michael.
“You never called him Bud?”
“No,” says Bud. “We never discussed it or anything. We just never did. I suppose it is a little odd, now that you mention it.”
Some time after this, over lunch, Bud tells me a disturbing story. An old colleague of ours had to be moved into a care facility a few months ago, suffering from dementia, probably Alzheimer’s. Recently, Bud ran into his wife and she asked that he visit him. She thought he enjoyed visits.
“You went? I ask.
Bud nods yes.
“How’s he doing?”
Bud twists in his chair, something I’ve never seen him do before.
“Was it bad?”
“It’s a nice place,” he says. “Clean. Cheerful. The staff are cheerful. There’s things to do.”
“So he’s okay?”
“He seemed happy to see me but after a little while, I realized he had no idea who I was. One of the attendants there, a nurse, I guess, tried to prompt him. She said, ‘It’s your friend Bud Wiser.’ He laughed! He laughed like she was making some kind of a joke. He said, ‘Oh, sure, yes, of course, Bud Wiser. Of course I know Bud Wiser. Everyone knows Bud Wiser.’ I think he recognized the name, you know, all those Budweiser ads, but he didn’t really remember me at all.”
Thomas Fuchs has spent much of his career writing television documentaries and some print non-fiction. Over the past few years, he has discovered the joy of imagining and inventing afforded by the writing of fiction. He can be reached at fuchsfoxxx@cs.com and has a website, thomasfuchswrites.com