Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (24 page)

Of course, advertisers flocked to
SNL
just the same, and the number of NBC affiliates carrying the show swelled, and that meant it had won corporate approval too. If it hadn’t, it wouldn’t have stayed on the air. Nevertheless, for the first five years anyway, the gang at
Saturday Night Live
came across as wickedly irreverent and wonderfully subversive.

It could be argued that in time
, Saturday Night Live
became as eager to please as any other TV show — even the kind that its writers and actors despised and derided — and that, probably inevitably, it became what it belittled. But in that first burst of glory, there was still a captivating, rebellious purity to it. It was on a wavelength of its own, proudly above the fray, brash and brave and youthful and honest. Television without guilt that was still entertaining as all get-out.

BILL MURRAY:

It was Davey Wilson who didn’t want us ad-libbing more than Lorne didn’t want it. But the thing about the ad-libbing is that the camera cues, the camera cuts, are all on the script. They’re supposed to go from this person to that person on this line. So that was a technical thing that was sort of a limit that you had. You’d screw things up if you ad-libbed at the end of something.

Davey caught a lot of stuff because he was fast. If he could see in your eyes that something was coming, he’d hold on it. You’d hear him in the booth: “Oh Christ, where’s he going?” You learned that if you were going to fix something, the easiest way for everybody was to figure out how to fix it and still say the last line so they had the cuts right. You could actually watch them go, “Awgh!” You could hear six or seven people in the booth go “Awgh!” like he got it, and there’d be this glee as the technical director would push the camera button switch; there’d be this delight that you did it right, that you respected their technology and what they had to do. That was when you got good at it. It takes a while to learn how to do that. Not everybody did.

I shot off a flash camera into the lens one time during “Update.” Yeah, I burned out the TV camera. Oh and they were furious. God, they were angry. They thought, “Oh you fucking rookie, you idiot.” Well of course it turned out to be just a temporary thing. It burns a hole for a moment and then they have to redo the white balance or something, but they were so mad, because there was this bubble in the screen for the rest of the “Update.” The whole floor was like, “Did you hear what he did?” And people were walking out of the booth going, “Do you know what he did?!” Of course — it’s on the screen and everyone sees it on the monitor anyway, the whole crew sees it, and people know.

The guys in the crew had been doing it forty years, they know you don’t shoot a flashbulb at a GE camera. Well — newborn baby, what was I going to do? There was plenty of volume. They screamed. There was always lots of volume.

JAMES SIGNORELLI:

With the exception of Don Novello, who had worked at Leo Burnett in Chicago, no one here had any background in advertising. My background was in documentary filmmaking and feature film cinematography, so I had passed through the world of low-budget commercials that everybody does at one point, and I knew the silliness of it and what some of the excesses were, and I knew how to do them from the production and visual points of view. One of the things about commercials is that they’re very good storytelling devices.

By the beginning of the third year, the typical short movie for
Saturday Night Live
cost between $10,000 and $13,000. It was kind of a watershed period because of what was going on in commercials in general. For one thing, money was no longer an object. Phenomenal sums were being spent on advertising. And new techniques were being born there. The other thing was that it was becoming acceptable — even with the most staid client — to use humor.

We at the show, of course, were on the cutting edge. So nobody could do what we did. And whatever we did in commercials, the attitudes that we took, the archness or the surrealist approach, was making a big impact on the creative people at the ad agencies. So they started pushing the wave further and further to the left. Editorially, we were doing things that were very sophisticated back then.

DAN AYKROYD:

I did “Update” for one season, I think, and I wasn’t comfortable in it. I didn’t like it. They only gave it to me because Chevy had gone. “Jane, you ignorant slut” really caught on — that was great — but delivering the jokes and being the newsreader was not something that I was comfortable with. I was very happy to be relieved of that.

LORNE MICHAELS:

In the seventies, I was much more proud of who I wouldn’t allow on the show — people who had just been all over Las Vegas and prime-time television. There were even people I always thought were really great but they were of that other generation. And now we were coming along, and we were shaped by a different set of things. And any association with the Rich Littles and the John Byners and the original
Tonight Show
guys like Dayton Allen would have been antithetical to what I was trying to do.

PAUL SHAFFER:

The idea that some of the things would not be necessarily accessible to everybody didn’t matter. As long as there were a few people out there who thought it was hilarious, that’s what mattered. I kind of learned that from this show, that concept. It was a show for our generation, which was, let’s face it, a sixties-style generation.

LORNE MICHAELS:

I taught at an art school in Toronto, I was teaching improvisations, the conceptual art movement which was being talked about and on the edge of things in the early seventies. Where that and entertainment met was what Andy Kaufman was doing. It wasn’t just that he lip-synched to “Mighty Mouse”; it was that he only did that one part in it, that one line, and stood around for the rest. It was very conceptual, and it instantly signaled to the brighter part of the audience that that was the kind of show we were going to do. And they weren’t getting that anywhere else on television. In the first couple years, Andy must have been on close to ten times. One night he even read from
The Great Gatsby
. In the beginning I had Penn and Teller on a few times, because that was the DNA, but I couldn’t do that now. The pure variety show part of it is over. It’s a straight comedy show now.

AL FRANKEN:

I heard Spiro Agnew was going to be on Tom Snyder’s show, so I just wanted to meet him and harass him a little bit. I brought a tape recorder and went down to their studios on six. Agnew was in the makeup room, so I sat down in the next makeup chair as he was getting made up and I said something like, “You called student protesters bums, and aren’t you the bum” — I think that’s what I said — “because you took money?” And he just said, “I never called them bums. That was Nixon.” It was like beneath his dignity to address this kid with long hair and to spend too much time on it.

I thought I’d pressed the button to start the tape recorder, but I didn’t. I’d had it on and turned it off or something. So I didn’t get it on tape. And then I also felt stupid because I checked it out and I was wrong: Nixon had called students bums. At least I did get to say to Agnew that he was a bum.

And then the producer of the Snyder show called me up and said, “Don’t do that. If there’s somebody on our show that you hate, don’t come down and harass them. That’s not good for our show.”

LORNE MICHAELS:

When Al went down to the fucking sixth floor to berate Spiro Agnew, Chevy and O’Donoghue and I were like, “Al, what the fuck are you doing?” Al took that “nattering nabob” speech personally. He was probably twenty-three when the show started, I was thirty. It has always seemed to me that the people who made the most noise about artistic integrity were the first people to buy a Mercedes, and the more people railed about things, when you examine their lives twenty-five years later — well, you know.

TOM DAVIS:

One day Henry Kissinger calls up, and the call is picked up at an NBC page’s desk. And the page goes, “Henry Kissinger’s on the phone. He wants tickets for his son.” And Al grabs the phone and yells into it, “You know, if it hadn’t been for the Christmas bombing in Cambodia, you could’ve had your fucking tickets!”

PAULA DAVIS,
Assistant:

My first official job was working for Michael O’Donoghue. I was dying to get into
SNL
. It was all I wanted to do. And I found that there was an assistant position open in the talent department, which I really wanted. So I had Michael write a reference letter to Lorne. He wrote me this long recommendation and then, at the end, he wrote, “P.S., I’d rather stick my dick in a blender than write another one of these letters.”

ROBIN SHLIEN:

As part of my job, I would have to do things like walk into the prop department or the costume department and say, “They just wrote in six Nazi extras.” Well, there would be big laughs, because it’s so crazy to tell people things like that. Or when I would tell them the creamed corn just wasn’t making it as vomit and they had to do something else to the vomit. A lot of these changes took place on Friday nights, and back then there was no FedEx, no faxes, no nothing, and a lot of the wardrobe houses were closed on Saturdays. I was often the messenger of bad news.

ROBERT KLEIN:

Rockefeller Center was one of the better-run office complexes, and it was beautiful. They don’t like you putting things on the wall or anything like that. Aykroyd and Belushi had a little corner office with barren walls, and they had nailed against the wall panties sent in by girls, some of them soiled, and many other odd things as well. And it was sort of like rebellion, you know, in these stodgy halls.

DAN AYKROYD:

I had one episode of rage. And that was when this guy — an accountant, a unit manager — billed me for a hundred and fifty bucks for some meals we were having when we were writing. “Wait a minute. These are expenses that should be picked up by the show.” But he kept sending me these bills. So finally I wrote a satanic message on the wall in lipstick — I think Michael O’Donoghue came in and saw it and approved of it — and it was something like, “Your relatives will all burn in hell forever.” It was very effective.

CARRIE FISHER:

Danny was always into weapons and cars and doing his little imitations. He was always hanging around with the person who does the autopsies — the coroner. That’s who he would hang around with. And of course he really took care of John. He loved him.

I was set up with Danny by John. John invited me over and then passed out. That was the setup. That was a blind date, John-style. Danny was adorable. He was lovely. He’s just your classic codepen-dent and caretaker. Once I almost choked on a brussels sprout and he did the Heimlich maneuver on me. He wound up saving my life. When he asked me to marry him, I thought, “Wow, I probably better.”

PENNY MARSHALL:

Yeah, Danny proposed to Carrie. Then she ran away and bought him some clothes. That’s how she handled that.

STEVE MARTIN:

Dan Aykroyd rode a motorcycle and wore leather clothes and everything. I was trying to be friendly and I said, “Hey, you want to go shopping for clothes over at Saks?” And he said, “Well, I’m really not into that.”

NEIL LEVY:

Aykroyd is great. He’s an atomic mutant — a web-toed atomic mutant. He actually had web toes, you know. He’s got web toes. I’ve seen them with my own eyes, at least one foot. I asked him about it and he said, “I’m an atomic mutant.” He’s also got a photographic memory and instant recall. He can take a book and once he’s read it, you could ask him any page and he could recall it. Unfortunately, I think the only book he’s actually memorized is like a 1974 meat packagers guide.

JAMES DOWNEY,
Writer:

My brother was an air force career guy, and when Aykroyd and I did a thing a long time ago that involved Napoleon having a B-52, Aykroyd supplied all the references for the armaments and the weaponry and stuff. In fact the term “daisy cutters” was probably first used on television in that piece. And my brother had been watching it in Thailand or something on the Armed Forces Channel and he called up and said, “My God! Who there knows what a C-130 is?” I said that was Aykroyd. He goes, “Wow, we were amazed, because you guys actually had the stuff right, and we’ve never seen that kind of thing.” Daisy cutters are those giant bombs that have this horizontal destructive capability. They’re just a superpowerful kind of bomb.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN,
Manager:

I think Lorne was the first guy ever to wear a Hawaiian shirt and think it was hip. And after he did it, it was.

JAMES SIGNORELLI:

Here in New York it was the brink of the big era of greed. It was the tail end of the bohemian period, and that morphed into Max’s Kansas City and other joints like it. It was art related — related to the world of Warhol and the abstract expressionists. There was a demi-world that these people lived in, but it was going away very rapidly toward the beginning of the seventies.

What
Saturday Night
did was tap into a whole new universe of people who didn’t even appear until eleven o’clock at night, because we never did either. We’d be in the building until ten, eleven, every night. And the reason that I can say that with such certainty is that we couldn’t go to dinner. There were only two places we could get fed in New York City after eleven at night in 1975, believe it or not. One was the Brasserie, which was a little uptown for our group, and the other was a place called Raoul’s, which served dinner until one o’clock in the morning.