Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (26 page)

LORNE MICHAELS:

Harry’s working style was just so completely different. I think he was also less innocent than we were — much more experienced. He’d been a child actor. He’d been around. And whereas Chevy with Gerald Ford would make no effort whatsoever to look like him, if Harry was doing Reagan it took twenty minutes of prosthetics.
Now
we do that.
Then
we didn’t. So I think Harry is obviously very talented, but his comedy was mostly industry.

HARRY SHEARER:

I would say that when the first words that a guy says to you when he’s offering you a job are, quote, “I’ve never really hired a male Jew for the company before. I’ve always gone for the Chicago Catholic thing,” unquote, that puts you on a certain notice that the relationship is going to be interesting. It was said fairly seriously as, like, “I’m changing my strategy.” I was filling basically two slots, because John and Danny had left and he was bringing in only me. So I don’t know if Lorne remembers that or would choose to remember it. I sure remember it, because it was remarkable that he said that.

I had also worked with Albert Brooks on most of his films in the first season, and had seen the relationship between Lorne and Albert, and while I’m perfectly familiar with the difficulties of working with Albert, because I’ve done so myself, I empathized with what Albert experienced at his end. I knew what I was getting into — or I thought I did, let’s put it that way. I was fully prepared for a difficult situation. I wasn’t prepared for how difficult.

I was pretty fucking miserable for virtually the entire season. I was explicitly hired as a member of the cast as well as a writer. That was pretty much the sine qua non of my taking the job. So I began to be a little curious when I was not included in the opening montage of the cast. There was some talk about, oh, you know, deadlines, and blah, blah, blah. I don’t believe I was in there in the montage in the early part of the season. I couldn’t be sure. But I don’t think so. I’d have to go look at the tapes. I have the tapes.

What I do know was that, about five or six weeks into the season, Billy Murray invited me to go to a Knicks game. Billy was telling me about the difficulties he’d had in his early days of the show and how basically the rest of the cast treated him like shit. And I said, “Yeah, but there’s something else going on. I can’t figure out exactly what it is. I’m getting this weird vibe from the other members of the cast when I read my pieces at read-through.” And Billy says, “Well, a lot of people think it’s not really appropriate for a new writer to come in and write himself into a lot of the pieces.” And I said, “But I’m a cast member as well.” And he says, “Oh? That’s a little piece of information Lorne hasn’t shared with the other members of the cast.” Now I know that I’m in for a really interesting ride.

The first big piece I wrote that got on the air was a piece I quite dearly liked. I wrote it with Paul Shaffer, and it was a backers’ audition for a rock musical about Charles Manson. At the party after that show, Lorne called me over and said, “That moment at the end of that sketch when you were mouthing the words to the final song silently, that was the moment that you became a star on this show.” And, of course, the very next week I was not on the show at all. So much for stardom. The whole place was just full of the most insidious mind games.

LORNE MICHAELS:

The amount of things that have to come together for something to be good is just staggering. And the fact that there’s anything good at all is just amazing. When you’re young, you assume that just knowing the difference between good and bad is enough: “I’ll just do good work, because I prefer it to bad work.” I think what distinguishes great work for me is — I remember when I saw
The Graduate
in 1968. I thought, “I won’t be doing anything like that.” It so got you and moved you, and it was smart. And I think when you see the real stuff it’s always an elevating thing. It may make you question where you are and the kind of work you’re doing. And if we weren’t fans of it we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing.

HARRY SHEARER:

Late in the season, February or March, there was this sketch in which Garrett Morris played Anwar Sadat. And the year before, on ABC, Billy Crystal and I were in a show in which Billy played Begin and I played Sadat. And I thought to myself, “I was a great Sadat. Garrett is a truly mediocre Sadat. I’m here. I’m going to go over to Lorne and say why shouldn’t I do this?” So I went over to Lorne’s apartment on a Friday night, and he was the soul of friendliness to the extent of inviting me to have a sauna with him. So there we are in the sauna and I said, “Lorne, I do a great Anwar Sadat, and Garrett really does a pretty shitty one, and I really think I should be doing Sadat in this sketch. It’s sort of infuriating to me to watch.” And Lorne goes, “All right, you know what, I’m going to call Al.” And he gets out of the sauna in front of me, calls Al Franken, and says, “Al, I’ve been thinking and blah, blah, blah, and Harry should be Anwar Sadat.” I go home.

The next day I show up for the show, open the script to see what changes have been made. And Garrett is still playing Sadat. I mean, it just was insoluble. I could not figure it out. I have no idea. All I know is, we’re on the set twenty seconds before going live, and Garrett turns to me and says, “Hey, man, you do Sadat — how did he sound again?”

ANNE BEATTS:

I remember asking Lorne once about somebody that I felt had really done me dirt and saying, you know, what should I do about it? And Lorne said, “Be perfectly friendly and civil to them, but just never work with them again.” So I would guess that that would be more his style.

HARRY SHEARER:

My three friends at the show were Shaffer, Anne Beatts, and Marilyn Miller. I’d known Al Franken when Al was hanging around the Credibility Gap, which was my old comedy group. And I thought that Al would be kind of a friend. And he was sort of the quintessential writer, trying to get his own stuff on the air, and in no mood to be writing for me or help me get my stuff on. And also I was sort of shocked — I was used to collaborative writing going faster than writing by yourself. And I walked into the Franken and Davis office and entered a twilight zone where collaborative writing was so much slower than writing by myself. Because I’ve been with people who have been high and worked very fast, very scintillating, really, but it wasn’t that way in there. I wouldn’t blame the weed for that. It was really like working underwater. I couldn’t do that. That was just deadening to me.

FRED SILVERMAN,
NBC President:

At that point in time,
Saturday Night Live
was doing very well in the ratings. Which is why although occasionally it would annoy me, I never let it annoy me too much, because it was like an oasis in the schedule. It was extremely profitable — it and
The Tonight Show
brought in hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

But then we began very serious conversations about giving Gilda Radner her own variety hour in prime time. That was very, very much a part of my planning for midseason. I think it was 1978, the first mid-season I was there for. And, you know, she was doing it, she was doing it, she was doing it, and then we had a lunch — just Gilda and Lorne and myself — and I found out at that lunch that she decided with Lorne that they weren’t going to do it after all. And that was an enormous disappointment on several levels. On a personal level, but also because I thought she would have been an absolute smash doing the kind of show that Carol Burnett used to do. It would have been great. When you’re running a network, you search for a signature program. And in the days of
BJ and the Bear
and
Sheriff Lobo
, to put on a smart variety show with Gilda Radner, coming out of the studios in New York, would have been a home run. So that was an enormous disappointment. It certainly didn’t help my relationship with Lorne at that point in time.

LORNE MICHAELS:

Somewhere around the time she did the Broadway show, Gilda decided she did not want to do the variety hour. And somewhere in that time, Bernie Brillstein claims, he conveyed to NBC that Gilda did not want to do this prime-time hour. So imagine my surprise when I was summoned to Fred’s office and shown the board and there on Wednesday nights is Gilda’s show. So I say, “Fred, that’s not happening, she said no.” Well, it got very heated between the two of us. He said some unpleasant things about her. I defended her. We stood toe to toe and had a very deep exchange. I think he thought I wasn’t delivering Gilda as promised.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:

By the fifth year there was a mass burnout. There was the thought, for me personally, “Gee, I’d like to try to do something else.”

MAX PROSS,
Writer:

When Tom Gammill and I worked for Lorne, I thought, “Oh my God, this is the best job I’ll ever have in my life.” Coming out of college, it just seemed like, oh, this is great, you know. It was 1979 and we were, what, twenty-two, and probably the two funniest people in the world for me were Bill Murray and Steve Martin. And I got to meet them both my first day of work. How cool was that? Not only met them, I got to, like, work with them.

TOM GAMMILL,
Writer:

And you had all these amazing bands. I mean, the Grateful Dead hung out there for like a week. We went out to restaurants all the time. Plus you only worked twenty-two weeks out of the year, because the weeks that the show wasn’t in production, people didn’t come in to the office. Although Max and I used to come in just because we wanted someplace to go.

MAX PROSS:

We got such a skewed idea of what the working world was like. We get this job where people act like college kids, staying up all night and smoking pot and drinking beer all the time. Boy, were we in for a let-down when we saw the way the rest of the world operated.

TOM GAMMILL:

Our next big job was at Letterman, where it’s like, “Wait, where are the parties?” “You’ll get a party if we last a year.” There wasn’t any beer.

HARRY SHEARER:

Chevy was back as the host of the show, and it was the first of many occasions when Lorne assured the cast that, I don’t know, “Chevy’s cleaned up.” I learned that wasn’t exactly true when I saw the sweat on his brow when we were actually doing the show on the air. But anyway, we were doing this talk show bit and Garrett’s not there, we’re doing camera blocking and Garrett Morris is nowhere on the floor. And then I heard the euphemism — “Garrett’s on seventeen.”

That meant that Garrett was up on the seventeenth floor where the offices were and that he would be indulging in some substance, rather than being down at the stage on eight where he was expected.

GARRETT MORRIS:

I’ve been described as being the worst person in the world in terms of drugs. Now we know that that turned out not to be so. My attitude toward drugs has been indifferent. I’m not saying that excuses it. I don’t know why marijuana is still illegal. It has never killed one single individual in all the time we’ve known about it, yet tobacco kills 300,000 each year, alcohol kills 250,000 each year, and they are legal. The laws, the whole thing has been the right wing trying to get back at the civil rights movement: “What can we do to reverse it? If we can put them in the fucking buses we would, but we can’t do that.” As far as I’m concerned, that’s all I see.

JANE CURTIN:

Garrett was treated horribly, horribly — by the writers, by some of the performers, and Lorne. They just dismissed him. I used to have conversations on the set with Garrett about, “Why do you put up with this?” And he said, “I can’t pass up the money. I’m going to make the money and get out and go on and do something else.” I found it amazing that he let it go on for as long as it did, but it took its toll, it clearly took its toll on Garrett.

GARRETT MORRIS:

I got so many years of Uncle Tom letters, especially when I did the monkey in
The Wiz
. I like to do stuff that’s out of line. Nobody tells me how to think, not even black people, so that’s why I did the monkey. The rest of them can kiss my ass. Now the same people who criticized me for doing the monkey in
The Wiz
are doing donkeys in
Shrek
and making millions of dollars. I guess that’s what I get for being ahead of my time.

I had five years of building what everybody knows is a chair there, the only nonwhite chair in that whole thing, and I shed the blood for that. So at least if people don’t want to say something good, they should not say anything at all, because I’ve done nothing to deserve anybody to come after me saying a lot of bullshit.

HARRY SHEARER:

I knew that everybody in the original cast had a five-year contract. And this was the fifth year. So I knew that, despite Billy and Gilda — you know, poor Gilda, but I called her up and went over to her place because I was trying to find some advice from everybody there as to what the fuck I should do. And Gilda just said, “Do whatever Lorne says” — which I understood, coming from her, but which was of no use to me. I knew that at the end of this season drastic change was afoot. There were rumors that Lorne was going to leave and that the rest of the cast was going to try to follow John and Danny into Hollywood. I was in a hurry. I knew I had one season to make my mark and that would be it, because whatever was going to follow quite likely did not include me. So I just felt like I was in hell and I had to push as hard as possible and try to figure this thing out.

FRED SILVERMAN:

Saturday Night Live
was an enormous hit and a major profit center. It was the only show on the network that was reaching that particular demographic. I looked at
Saturday Night Live
and said, “Thank God it’s here.” And I really tried my best just to stay out of their way. And if they wanted to take some shots at me — fine, let them do it. I didn’t care.