Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (35 page)

TIM KAZURINSKY:

I always said I would love to have done
SCTV
. There were smarter producers and smarter people involved. Watching the talent wither on
Saturday Night Live
, that was painful. You had really good writers trying to dumb down — and getting depressed about it and turning to drugs.

Good performers — Mary Gross, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Robin Duke — were given so little to do on the show that their confidence eroded. Robin Duke was hysterical in shows at Second City. And they gave her nothing. And the less they give somebody — well, you know what they say: If you have one line it’s harder than if you have a big part. The confidence erodes week by week, and it can just destroy people. And that was a hard thing to watch. The Second City environment was much more nurturing back then, and to come from that into the
Saturday Night Live
snake pit was not pleasant.

I always thought back to Aykroyd, who did Jimmy Carter with dark hair and a mustache, to the way it got prosthetically when I was there. I remember that at one point Joe Piscopo was whining to Ebersol that Gary Kroeger was going to use his foam prosthetic pieces to play Ed McMahon and that he thought those were his property, you know? When did it become about the prostheses? And isn’t the parody in the writing and the wit, rather than the Rick Baker makeup?

ANDREW SMITH:

If Joe thought he’d done a bad show — well, I remember one time sitting in Ebersol’s office, and Joe went around the corner into Ebersol’s bathroom and started banging his head against the wall in the shower, and there was this
thud
as, you know, he’s thumping his head against the wall. And his wife, his first wife — this long-suffering, very sweet, mild girl — turned to us and said, “Joe is such a perfectionist. Poor Joe, he’s such a perfectionist.” What?
Thud, thud, thud….

Lorne Michaels, executive producer of
Saturday Night Live
, in the year of its birth, 1975. NBC president Herb Schlosser said, “No matter what anyone else tells you, the guy who created the show, and made it what it is, is Lorne Michaels.”©
EDIE BASKIN

Magnificent Seven. The original Not Ready for Prime Time Players (from left, clockwise): Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Garrett Morris, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman.©
EDIE BASKIN

Gilda Radner and John Belushi in the makeup room. Gilda “sat shiva” for John because Lorne Michaels didn’t want to hire him for the show. Michaels changed his mind.©
EDIE BASKIN

The
Star Trek
sketch, a pivotal ensemble production from the first season (May 29, 1976), began a long
SNL
tradition of biting the network that fed it. Dan Aykroyd played Dr. McCoy, John Belushi was Captain James T. Kirk, and Chevy Chase played Mr. Spock, who vainly tried to prevent a network executive (host Elliott Gould) from canceling the series.©
EDIE BASKIN

We, the women: Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, and Gilda Radner. Laraine shot up heroin, Gilda binged and vomited, and Jane went home each night to her husband and dog.©
EDIE BASKIN

Lorne, Chevy, Dan, and John clown around at the Lincoln Memorial during a trip to Washington in 1976. John forgot his ID, but guards let him into the White House anyway.© 1976
THE WASHINGTON POST. PHOTOGRAPH BY GERALD MARTINEAU
. Reprinted with permission.

Jane Curtin emcees “Mr. U.S.A.,” a male beauty pageant that flip-flopped gender roles.©
EDIE BASKIN

“Samurai Hotel,” with Belushi taunting host Richard Pryor. The network was so nervous over Pryor’s appearance that executives ordered a five-second delay to catch obscene ad-libs before they aired. But director Dave Wilson says nobody was ever able to make a “delay” work anyway.©
EDIE BASKIN

L
EFT
: Two insatiably wild and crazy guys: Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd as those swinging would-be babe magnets, the Festrunk brothers, not-so-fresh off the boat from Czechoslovakia and perpetually in search of “foxes” with “big American breasts.”©
EDIE BASKIN

R
IGHT
: Jane, Dan, and Laraine as the Coneheads, beer-guzzling visitors from another planet. Aykroyd originally conceived the characters as Pinhead Lawyers from France while smoking a joint — but there were worries that encephalitics in the viewing audience might be offended.©
EDIE BASKIN