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" 'Jezebel' with Bette Davis was my favorite," Sweeney said, "and 'Gone with the Wind.' "
He joked that he was at least "born and raised in southern Long Island" and was a fan of Southern architecture "and the Spanish moss, so dramatic. There's a dreamy, surreal quality about the South."
He grew up to have a career as a writer and performer (much of it spent in Southern California, he noted), and just a few years ago ended up a real Southern gentleman at last in Beaufort, where he combines his loves for the South, showmanship and wine into a job as wine director at the newly re-opened Breakwater restaurant.
Sweeney took a circuitous route to get here, though.
The joker in him
A former "class wit" and natural joker, Sweeney was a language major at Middlebury College in Vermont. "My parents wanted me to go to the U.N. to work," he said, but he was a liberal arts major, who "actually didn't know what I wanted to do. You don't go to school to be a comedy writer."
He watched "Saturday Night Live" a lot and wrote sketches on his own whenever he got ideas. While working in New York, he heard from a friend that the show was hiring new writers, so he locked himself in his apartment with a giant pot of coffee and "wrote sketch after sketch of all the ideas I had been saving."
The next day, heinvited himself into SNL's offices, bypassing "all kinds of security" by showing all the lunches he'd picked up at the deli downstairs. He ended up in front of a show producer who told him they hadn't ordered lunch.
"I know," he confessed. "It's on me. I want to be a writer on your show. Here are my sketches. Please read them."
Two weeks later, he was hired.
He worked for SNL for two seasons, most memorably impersonating Nancy Reagan. During that time, he met his partner, Lanier Laney, a genuine Southerner (from Spartanburg) who took him to Myrtle Beach and Pawley's Island.
"He was interested in writing about … 'beach music' and a dance called 'shag.' I didn't know anything about it," Sweeney said.
But the he wound up helping Laney write a 1989 movie, which became an independent hit and led Sweeney and Laney to Los Angeles, where they wrote and produced for the series "Mad TV," creating characters like Miss Swan over four years with the show. They also did the pilot for "The Wayne Brady Show," which ended up winning an Emmy and worked on some other programs, including a science fiction series.
Though they were successful in Hollywood, Laney grew homesick.
Sweeney said they used to send "funny e-mails to our friend, Doug Marlette," the Pulitzer prize-winning editorialcartoonist. "He thought our e-mails were so funny that, unbeknownst to us, he had been forwarding them to Pat Conroy."
The novelist and current resident of Fripp Island told Marlette he wanted to meet Sweeney and Laney if they ever came to Charleston. They did, and at dinner, Conroy asked them if they'd ever been to Beaufort. They hadn't, so "the next day, he gave us his own personal tour of Beaufort. … It was a very special and memorable introduction to Beaufort."
Welcome to Beaufort
Sweeney and Laney considered a move to Charleston, "but there was something about Beaufort. Lanier says it's like Charleston was 15 or 20 years ago."
Among the factors that led to their decision were the people of Beaufort.
"People had grown up here and stayed here. I think people here are smart and funny and sophisticated. ... It was nothing like what our friends in L.A. were thinking."
In 2001, they bought a house built in 1792 and started fixing it up as a project while still living in Los Angeles. "We went back and forth," Sweeney said, "but when I'd leave my Beaufort house to go back to L.A., I would get tears in my eyes."
Sweeney would regale friends at Los Angeles dinner parties with tales of the folks back in Beaufort, but people there would ask, "When are you going to sell that house in North Carolina?"
Instead, they sold the house in Los Angeles and moved to Beaufort.
Sweeney believed he could continue to write movies and comedy from here, but with the long writers' strike and the advent of reality television, networks "started doing fewer and fewer comedies, and everyone was hurting. "
Sweeney wanted to learn more about wine, so he hired a wine tutor from Charleston. He also was hanging out a lot at Breakwater's old West Street location and decided when it reopened, it might be a good place to work, too.
"I thought they were the nicest people and had such pride in their food and in service," Sweeney said, so, since he'd been an actor/waiter for five years in New York restaurants he called co-owner Donna Lang "and shocked her by saying I wanted a job."
Sweeney and Laney write a wine column for a local entertainment publication, and at Breakwater, Sweeney has helped create a list of 75 wines available by the glass. The restaurant's state-of-the-art preservation system lets them open even expensive bottles and save them.
Sweeney is settling into life in Beaufort, too.
"Sometimes you'll have to wait on the (Woods) bridge when it's open," he said, "and I think, 'At least I'm not in the Midtown Tunnel.' You're looking at something so beautiful, and it makes you stop and take a breath and just go, 'Wow, what a beautiful place.' It's always different. The marsh grass is changing to gold now. It's a constant panorama."
And Beaufort's residents continue to amuse and impress Sweeney.
"I think Beaufort is really a magnet for very unusual types of people. It always has been," he said. "When people ask you what you do in L.A., they're trying to figure out where you are in the food chain, wondering if they should waste another minute with you. ... They don't do that here. People here can have a ton of money, and you wouldn't know it. They're as nice as can be. Everyone rubs shoulders, and that's something else I love about Beaufort."
