Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (19 page)

ALAN ZWEIBEL:

There had come a point in the first season where Chevy wasn’t writing for the show as much as he was writing for Chevy. And that didn’t help things. I can’t put it in the degree of who was despised more or whatever. I know that when he left the show and he did the specials, there were some interviews with him where he was talking about the future of
Saturday Night Live
, the show that he had just left. And I seem to remember him being quoted as saying things like, “I’ve used that show for everything I can, that show has no future other than to get weirder as opposed to smarter.” As if the first year we’d just shot our wad. Those were the kinds of things that were coming back to us, and so those of us who were still in the coal mines shoveling seven days a week had to ask, “Why are you doing this? We worked really hard with you and for you. That made no sense.”

I remember Chevy coming back after one of his specials and talking about it or raving about it, you know, proud of something he just did, and I remember Al Franken saying something like, “That’s good, Chevy, but we do one of those every week.” So there were some ill feelings, I think.

In those first five years
, Saturday Night Live
not only had probably its best cast ever, but also the best and ballsiest collection of writers. The sketch form was older than television itself, but the way they approached it, bent it and shaped it, was their own, and it resulted in sketches that are remembered vividly to this day by the first generation of
SNL
viewers — such recurring classics as the Coneheads, the swinging immigrant Czech brothers, romantic nerds Lisa and Todd, the Greek diner where all one could order was “cheeseburger cheeseburger” — and such beloved or notorious sketches as Danny Aykroyd’s hemorrhaging Julia Child, his virtuoso performance as the immortal “Bass-OMatic” pitchman, the violent and controversial “Stunt Baby,” Buck Henry as pedophilic baby-sitter Uncle Roy, and the hilariously businesslike comportment of Aykroyd as Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute.

STEVE MARTIN:

When you’re young, you have way fewer taboo topics, and then as you go through life and you have experiences with people getting cancer and dying and all the things you would have made fun of, then you don’t make fun of them anymore. So rebelliousness really is the province of young people — that kind of iconoclasm.

DAN AYKROYD:

Michael O’Donoghue was one of the really great writers on the show, and he really taught me how to write for television. He taught me to have the confidence, he taught me to go with the concept, to embrace the absurdity. He taught me structure, he was meticulous in the way he laid out structure bits, he taught me the discipline of writing for television.

LILY TOMLIN,
Host:

I enjoyed hosting. At least I think I did. I do remember that after the show got to be such a big hit, I hosted it again. By that time, I just remember everybody — not everybody, but people like Michael O’Donoghue — was a little bit manic. The dress rehearsal did not go well. And Michael was so eccentric and he must have been so angry with me, he was like putting the evil eye on me or something. And it was so kind of ludicrous that I burst out laughing.

It was so important to them at that point, because they were creating that show and getting it off the ground and everything, so that was their identity, and I can understand their intensity — their wanting it to be this or that or great or whatever, and being put out with someone. I think I was forgiven.

CARRIE FISHER:

I was around Michael O’Donoghue until he was deeply offended that I married Paul and his ex-girlfriend was maid of honor and he wasn’t in the wedding, and he never spoke to me again. I went up to him again at some point and said, “Can’t we put this aside?” He just screamed at me. It was horrible. But I loved Michael. Michael and I had gone to Ireland together, and I think we were actually the first people to do ’ludes and mead. I was shooting the
Star Wars
movies, and John and Danny wanted to be in them as space creatures or something. I think it was mostly John.

DAN AYKROYD:

I was never proprietary about pieces. Look, if a piece didn’t work, you know, please get it out and let’s do what works for the show, let’s put someone else’s piece in there. But I had a lot of strength behind me, because I had Franken and Davis and Downey and O’Donoghue as my cowriters, and oftentimes we’d come in, and there’d be three or four of us real strong writers, and so we knew we were going to get on. The goods had been created.

LARAINE NEWMAN:

Lorne urged me to repeat characters. I refused to do it because I wanted to, you know, dazzle everybody with my versatility. And that kept me anonymous. That was the same pitfall for Danny. He was much more comfortable doing characters, and I think that it made him less recognizable than John, who was always John even when he was the Samurai. And Billy was always Billy. He did Todd in the Nerds but basically he was Billy. So even though I loved the kind of work that I did, and still do — I love the character work — I think it keeps you more anonymous than people who play themselves.

BUCK HENRY,
Host:

I never had a problem with repeating characters, saying, “Oh, we’ve done enough Coneheads,” or that we had done enough of, you know, anything that worked. I thought, why not keep going and doing it? You would only stop it if you had a concept that didn’t live up to the characters. Then you would say, “Oh, this is not strong enough for the characters, and we can’t do this.”

DON NOVELLO,
Writer:

I wrote the Greek restaurant sketch the second week I was there. It is like a hit song, I guess, in a way. The restaurant is called Billygoat’s. I used to go down there all the time to this Billygoat Tavern — I worked in advertising then — just to hear these guys going, “Cheese-burger cheeseburger cheeseburger.” It’s still there. They’ve really played it up. They have a sign outside, “Cheeseburger Cheeseburger.” It’s on some Chicago tour, they drop by. And they opened a few other places. They sell them at the stadium, but it’s always “cheeseburger cheeseburger,” they play it up big. The people at the diner recognized it right away on the show.

It was a big thing to do at the time. We had a live grill there, a working grill, they were really making cheeseburgers. I’d say we did six, seven, eight of those sketches.

BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY:

Don Novello and I came in at the same time, and we got put in a former storeroom that abutted the elevator shaft. You could barely hear because of the noise from the elevator shaft. There were no windows. That’s where we started out. And they were trying to make us work together. And then when he wrote that “cheeseburger cheese-burger” thing, he got a decent office. The next year I got a decent office after I did a series of like Knights of Columbus meetings, which introduced the character of Garrett Morris’s Chico Esquela.

GARRETT MORRIS,
Cast Member:

Chico was my favorite, but I also really liked “I’m going to get me a shotgun and kill all the whiteys I see.” Now that was when we were improvising. Lorne actually said, “Look, I want to do a thing called the ‘Death Row Follies.’ You be a prisoner, you be so-and-so, you be so-and-so, go away and come back with something.” That’s what we did. See I liked it when they did it like that, even though I was desperately learning the technique that these guys were masters at — John and Gilda particularly. I’m the kind of guy, “Throw me out there, I don’t give a shit.” I knew I could always react to your ass.

A lot of stuff on
Saturday Night Live
was really my kind of stuff, because I like to do stuff that’s really new and exploratory. If stuff was on the line either racially or sexually, I didn’t give a damn. If you want to try it, let’s try it.

JAMES SIGNORELLI:

If we gave every sketch that anybody ever complained about not having an ending an ending, the show would fail. I don’t think people say that as a criticism. I think they just say it.

BILL MURRAY:

Danny was the best at saving sketches, when things were really deadly, when things were really dying. When you’re dying, you just play for yourself: “Let’s make ourselves laugh. If we’re not making
them
laugh, let’s start over again and just make ourselves laugh.” And that fearlessness would then turn the audience.

When people talk about the old cast versus the later casts, I think that was the one thing that our group had; we had that training, so there were more tricks. We’d learned working together as a group in a service way. Nowadays there’s probably more stand-ups that end up on the show, sort of more individual guys, than there used to be, and they’re individually good but they maybe don’t have that particular skill or training or as much experience in that area.

I think the old cast made bad sketches work, or made sketches that were incomplete work. You were always in process, you were always in play. You weren’t trying to get the laugh on that line. You were always seeing like a bigger movement of the whole sketch and the other characters in it, and you were watching them and trying to make them look good.

That was another thing we learned, that you make the other person look good and then you don’t have to worry about how you come off. Make the other people look good and you’ll be fine. Sometimes there’d be sketches that would be incomplete and the writers may have never found how to make it work. And maybe we didn’t even figure out the literary resolution of the sketch precisely. But in the performance of it you managed to shape a roundness, a completeness, the wholeness of it. And if you were alert in the middle of the scene, you’d see: “Okay, now these people are really fully developed as much as we’re going to do, and now this character will drive the resolution of it and these characters will satisfy it enough.” That was what we did.

DAN AYKROYD:

If you look at Carol Burnett or
Your Show of Shows
with Sid Caesar, they rely on something to take you out of it, so that whenever you have a great ending, you’ve got a great piece. We struggled with the endings, yeah, and they were probably the hardest part of the sketch.

I think the ending to a movie is hard, the ending to a television show, the ending to anything is tough. You kind of want to wrap everything up with a bow and button it all up and hark back to what you have done before and end on a high note or great joke. And that’s not always possible.

JAMES SIGNORELLI:

Nobody really understood what Lorne’s contribution was, which was integral to the whole thing, not only in selecting the people but in creating an atmosphere where people could endure the pressure and where the pressure was, in fact, a good thing — a cumulative pressure with a release. And that rhythm, you know, that kind of — I don’t know what to compare it to — but that rhythm is what kept the show going, because everybody could start, start, rush, rush, rush, rush, peak, and crash — and then start again.

DAN AYKROYD:

Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute was developed in the lab. That started with me doing guys I’d seen up in Canada — the local tire salesman, whatever. And then when I was living with Rosie, I used to do that at home with her, you know. As part of our love life, that character would emerge. And she said we have to do this, so we wrote it up. It started in the bedroom — you know, “Come here, little lady.” I do that with my wife today and still get a laugh. No sex, but a laugh. So that was definitely a laboratory-incubated character.

PAUL SHAFFER,
Musician:

I wrote a piece with Marilyn Miller about Shirley Temple being named an ambassador. And the idea of the sketch was Shirley Temple bringing the leaders of two warring nations together by going into an old-fashioned Shirley Temple song. And that worked, and Marilyn went to Lorne and said, “Paul should have a position on the show as a guy who writes this kind of material.” Lorne agreed and put me on. But the credit was a problem, because the traditional credit is “special musical material.” This worried us because it sounded, as we said then, “too Carol Burnett.” We loved Carol Burnett, we respected her, but we were trying to be different than that.

DAN AYKROYD:

On the “Little Chocolate Doughnuts” parody — that was a Franken and Davis thing that John didn’t want to do. His vanity sort of got in the way there, but ultimately, as with all of us, once the writers presented their concept, you could see the merit in it right away and sometimes you’d go, “Well, it may not make me look great, or it is not my humor, but this is going to work and this is going to be funny.”

JAMES SIGNORELLI:

Belushi had been a high school athlete and he didn’t really want to do the sketch. The thing was not whether or not John thought he could do it; the thing was that John was in his recalcitrant stage. Anne Beatts was along on that ride too. At one point, John is supposed to jump over a bar like a track star. John insisted that he would do the “stunt” himself. All we did was put some cardboard cartons with blankets over them on the other side of the bar and the bar was only a couple feet high. I got down as low as I could get with the camera, you know, the widest lens I could get, and so John jumped over this table and landed on the couch. Okay?

We did it once for practice and again to refine some element. The second time he did it, he screamed out in pain and he tensed up in his most melodramatic way, he clenched his knee to his chest, and everybody ran over and John goes, “Get me an ambulance! Get me a medic!” John wanted to be taken to the hospital. He was absolutely not going to do this thing. He was, you know, “crippled for life.” He was mad at all of us. And Anne went in and smoothed that over with him and got him to go back and finish. John at that point was just, you know, feeling his oats.