Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (39 page)

When I came back and did that first show in the second Saturday in April of ’82, the writers strike happened at midnight that night, and so I never produced another show that season. We got picked up based on the positive reaction to that one show that I did that night. And Eddie had been wonderful in that show, but not enough to show the outside world what he could do. I would say that in that next year, ’82–’83, he was at least a third or more of the draw of the show, so you could say he was worth a rating point and a half or two rating points.

During those two years, Eddie, Sheffield, and Blaustein had as much to do with keeping the show alive as anything or anyone. They were a wonderful marriage, the three of them. Eddie was clearly a genius then, at eighteen or nineteen years old. They were able to take his rough stuff, and they became his transmitters.

BARRY BLAUSTEIN:

What happened with our first Eddie Murphy piece was, my dad was always calling me up with ideas for sketches, and they were always terrible, but this was the one time he came up with an idea that was decent. He’d read this article about a high school basketball team in Cleveland, where the court ruled that there had to be at least one white player on the team. We wrote something for Eddie based on that, showed it to him, and worked with him on it. It was his first piece. And you could tell the first minute he was on the air that whatever “it” is, he had it. He completely connected with the audience. He just jumped off the screen.

And then we kept writing for him. I don’t know why other people didn’t write for him. They’d go, “You write for him a lot,” and we’d say, “Yeah, well, he’s the best guy there, why not write for him?” Basically we would just sit in a room and Eddie would start talking.

BOB TISCHLER:

One of the greatest things that happened to me on the show was meeting Barry and David, who are still my friends. We started writing together immediately. They had already been writing together as a result of being on Jean’s staff, and they were among the three people that we kept from Jean’s days. And I just started hitting it off with them, and we started writing for Eddie. We had this thing for Eddie, because Eddie could take what we wrote and make it better every single time. And he also would work with us by bringing in a character and improvising with us. It was just worth it to work with him to be on the show. I know he was a problem for a lot of people, but for us he was never a problem. We had a great relationship on the show.

PAM NORRIS:

The idea that Eddie got too much attention is hard for me to swallow, just because he earned it so much and he was ignored for the longest time. But he didn’t get bitter, and he didn’t quit. He kept writing, and he kept working with writers that would write for him. He kept coming up with new characters over and over again. I’m sure it’s frustrating to work with him, because he could do everything. I mean, he could write for himself, he could create characters for himself. How do you compete with that? That could be extremely frustrating. I just saw how dismissed he was for the longest time, so if he got a little special later, he certainly deserved that — and way more.

ELLIOT WALD:

My era never was lionized the way the people in the first years were. In that first show, those people were the toast of New York, and I don’t think anybody from my era was that way. Even when Eddie turned twenty-one, he held his own birthday party at Studio 54. It was well attended, but he still had to hold it for himself. No one really knew of us. They just knew of us as “the successors.”

BRAD HALL:

Eddie was the one guy that really stood up for us. And if we were light in the show he was always, “Come on, let’s give these guys something.” He was really a team player from that point of view and an easy guy to talk to and always funny and fun to have around. That’s definitely where the show was focused — on him. He’d had a big movie come out when we got there. And he was a big star. And that’s where they were going to hang their hat. And who can blame them? The guy was great. But it did make it frustrating for us.

DANA CARVEY,
Cast Member:

I was in New York stuck on a sitcom with Mickey Rooney, Nathan Lane, Meg Ryan, and Scatman Crothers called
One of the Boys.
Mickey Rooney was always talking — “I was the number one star in the
worrrrld
, you hear me? The
worrrrld
. Bang! The
worrrld!
Judy Garland never owned a car. They pumped her so full of drugs they killed her! How long has Robert Redford been in the business, ten years? I’ve been in the business sixty-one years!” He was sixty-two at the time. He would act out entire movies that he thought of, with lines like, “How are you, Mr. Fuck? I’m Mrs. Shit.”

We were taping in Letterman’s, now Conan’s, studio on the sixth floor at 30 Rock, and to clear my head, I would go up to the eighth floor and watch Eddie Murphy rehearse. He was great.

BARRY BLAUSTEIN:

Eddie would go full-out on all our stuff. I don’t think we ever wrote a sketch that didn’t make the air that we wanted, or had to say, “They should’ve used that.” The show’s at its very best when the writers and the actors are in a room together writing stuff, the way Eddie was with us. Eddie would come in and say, “Hey, what about this?” and then we’d just start writing together. You can’t write in a total vacuum. Pretty good rule of thumb: If you’re laughing when you’re writing it, it will be funny.

Eddie was up for everything. That was just one of the reasons for his success. In his stand-up, Eddie used to mention Buckwheat, from the old Our Gang comedies, and every time he did, he’d get a laugh. So we decided to do a tribute to Buckwheat — have Eddie impersonate him.

ROBIN SHLIEN:

I have a very specific memory of typing the first Buckwheat sketch and almost falling off my chair because it was so funny. Having been at the show and knowing what it took to have a great character and get a big response, I remember thinking, “They nailed it. This is going to be huge.” It was “Buckwheat Sings,” and they had bothered to put the mispronunciations in the script. So it was “Untz, tice, fee times a nady.” I was typing this and I couldn’t stop laughing. That was always a good sign.

DICK EBERSOL:

Eddie did Buckwheat for the first time in October of ’81, so I would guess it would’ve been just after the first of the year, January of ’83, that he came in to see me late one night in the office that’s now Lorne’s again and said, “I want to kill Buckwheat.” It was one of the hottest characters in late-night television at that time. But he said, “I can’t stand it anymore. Everywhere I go people say, ‘Do Buckwheat, do this, do that.’ I want to kill him.”

His instincts were so good. I said, “Go sit down with Barry and David.” They came back into my office about two, three o’clock in the morning, and it was a two-part thing: “The Assassination of Buckwheat.” It probably was the best piece of satire in the four or five years that I was there. The first part was the actual shooting, out in front of the building as he got out of the car. The assassin’s name was John David Studs, because they always have three names. Piscopo was funny in it too — he was too on-point for what a lot of
SNL
should be, but he was a brilliant Rich Little of his time.

They really wanted to do a satire on how far the media had gone. And that was to be the end of Buckwheat.

BARRY BLAUSTEIN:

Part one aired and went real well. And then we thought, “What if we do this: We take the next step, they catch the killer, and that will be like Lee Harvey Oswald getting killed.” The censors were kind of unhappy, there were problems upstairs. What? Well, “Grant Tinker is very sensitive on this. He doesn’t want to make fun of the Kennedy assassination.” And we were like, “Oh, come on.” The censor, Bill Clotworthy, was an old friend of Reagan’s. They had been in
GE Theater
together. He’s actually a really decent guy, Clotworthy, because he had a sense of humor about it. And I remember saying, “Goddammit, we always make fun of Reagan, why can’t we make fun of Kennedy?”

DAVID SHEFFIELD:

We staged it downstairs at Rockefeller Center. We shot it two ways on tape. We actually brought in a guy from special effects to place squibs on Eddie’s body so that we had blood gushing from each shot. But just as an afterthought we said, “Let’s shoot one without the blood, for safety’s sake.” And that’s the one we used. And it was lucky we had it, because the blood just looked too real to be funny.

DICK EBERSOL:

That sketch gave me my best battle ever with the censors. Part one airs on a Saturday night. The following Thursday, I’m summoned to the office of Corydon Dunham, who was then the corporation counsel to whom broadcast standards reported. I went to his office in jeans and a sweatshirt and he’s Savile Row to the nth degree — but a nice man. And he said, “Dick, I just have to tell you that we will not be able to air ‘The Assassination of Buckwheat, Part Two’ this weekend.” I said, “What are you talking about? It was read at read-through yesterday, it was a killer piece, there are no language problems, everybody loved it.” He said, “But there’s real violence implications here. Somebody gets shot in this piece.” I said, “Cory, that aired
last
week. Buckwheat was assassinated
last
week. Everybody laughed.” He said, “Yes, but do you realize that on Sunday night, the night after your show airs, we’re presenting your friend Don Ohlmeyer’s docudrama
Special Bulletin
, and we’re having real problems with that because people will think it’s real.” It won the Emmy that year as the best single program shown on television. It was about nuclear terrorists at Charleston Harbor. Cory was convinced it was going to be Orson Welles’s
War of the Worlds
all over again. He said, “People are just going to think we are out of our minds with all this violence.” I said, “Oh, come on — we’re on the night before, we’re finishing off a comedic premise, and you’re telling me I can’t air it?” And I had sworn I was never going to do something like this, but I told him, “In forty-five minutes I’m going to hold a press conference announcing that I’m not doing the show anymore.” I’d never done that; that was always Lorne’s trip, threatening to quit. But I said, “I’m leaving, and I’m going to make abundantly clear the height of insanity that went behind this bullshit decision.” And I said, “See you,” with a smile on my face and I left. Cory called Grant Tinker and Grant laughed in his face when he heard the story. And before the forty-five minutes were up, Cory called me and said, “Never mind.”