Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (40 page)

ANDY BRECKMAN,
Writer:

There was this rumor circulating that over the summer Ebersol was on a private NBC plane talking to the network brass about how badly they needed Eddie Murphy to come back in the fall — and I think at the time Joe Piscopo was also a linchpin — but they needed Eddie Murphy or they didn’t have a show. There would be no show without him. And they said, “We have to pay them whatever it takes.” You know — bend over backwards as far as scheduling and pay. And the rumor that we heard was that this phone call was picked up by a ham radio operator somewhere in the Midwest, and he recorded it, and that tape somehow got back to Eddie Murphy. And so he went into negotiations knowing that he had them over a barrel. It’s a great rumor, and I remember it circulating. Unfortunately, I don’t know if it’s true.

JOHN LANDIS,
Film Director:

After the accident, the tragedy of
The Twilight Zone
, I was so freaked out I just said to my agent, “I’ll take any job offered. I just want to work.” So Jeff Katzenberg sent me this script of
Black or White
— later changed to
Trading Places
— and I said that Pryor would be brilliant in it. But Katzenberg said, “What do you think of Eddie Murphy?” and I had to say, “Who?” And he said, “We’ve made this picture called
48 Hrs.
and it just previewed.” They tried to fire Eddie off of
48 Hrs.
, but Walter Hill saved his job. When it previewed, Eddie tested through the roof. So they gave me a tape of all his things he’d done on
Saturday Night Live
, and I said, “Kind of young, but he’s funny. I especially love the James Brown Hot Tub. I’ll meet him.” So I fly to New York to meet with Eddie, who’s a baby, like nineteen, whatever, and we come down onto Fifth Avenue and he said, “You have to get the cab, because they won’t stop for me.”

MARGARET OBERMAN:

We always had to go down and get cabs for him at two in the morning, because no cab drivers would stop for a young black man. Not even him.

DICK EBERSOL:

By the end of the ’82–’83 season, Eddie already had had
48 Hrs.
It had come out at Christmas of ’82, and then all through that winter, late ’82–’83, early ’83, he was making
Trading Places.
It became really apparent that, just on the launch of
48 Hrs.
, which had those glorious reviews for him, he was a movie star. I remember the
Times
in particular saying that his scene in that country-western bar was maybe the greatest scene an actor ever had in his debut movie. That, coupled with the fact that Paramount had already signed him, upon seeing the dailies before the film came out successfully, to a long-term deal that guaranteed him millions of dollars and had signed him and had him shooting
Trading Places
in Philadelphia and New York through that winter. It was going to be pretty hard to hold on to him. We had him for one more year, but they were making all the noises of, you know, being very resistant about it, and it could have been kind of a legal thing.

So I came up with this idea that, for the ’83–’84 season, which would be his last, he had to appear in ten shows, and I think that year we were committed to doing twenty. He had to appear in ten of the twenty and we would be done with him by March. And we also had the right to tape up to, oh, I think it was fifteen sketches to put in the other shows. We weren’t going to hide that he wasn’t physically there. That wasn’t the intent. But this was just to keep him available. They jumped at it and signed the deal. We kept ourselves from losing him, which would have hit us pretty hard.

ROBIN WILLIAMS,
Host:

The first time I did the show was when Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo were on. Eddie had done a lot of great characters. I think he had just started to kick in the movies, but he was still on the show, which was great. It was an interesting time, because it was the new regime, not Lorne.

CHRIS ALBRECHT:

One thing for sure was that Eddie and Joe had a great chemistry together and they did a lot of stuff together, and it would be completely correct to say that Joe took Eddie under his wing at the very beginning. Eddie was a kid who hadn’t really done much, and Joe not only really, really loved this guy and was enamored of his talent but also was very protective of him. It wasn’t as if Joe was trying to latch on to any coattails; no one knew that he was going to become “Eddie Murphy.”

So Joe looked after this kid from the moment he showed up. And more than a couple people noticed that when there was an opportunity to return the support, none came. Eddie never helped Joe later on. Never gave Joe a part in a movie, never did anything. Never, ever helped Joe. Why not? I couldn’t answer that.

PAM NORRIS:

Before the beginning of the season, we knew that Eddie was going to be away a lot of the time doing movies. So what we wanted was a backlog of Eddie taped sketches. I wrote a lot of those. We basically just did a private show that was one Eddie sketch after another that we taped with a studio audience. And then those were later put into the shows.

ANDREW KURTZMAN:

I will say that the grumbling about that was to an extent about the star trip just as much as it was about the violation of the ethos of the thing. We do this live. It’s not supposed to be bigger than any single player — but here was an exception.

ANDY BRECKMAN:

For the live shows, they didn’t make any announcement that Eddie wasn’t really there, but he certainly didn’t show up to wave good night at the end.

DICK EBERSOL:

It would have been very difficult, I think, to have kept the show on the air without Eddie. The show would absolutely have launched for the ’83–’84 season, but he was still the main draw. And it would have been pretty hard, I think, to keep up the show long enough to get to the next year — which Brandon labeled my Steinbrenner era in the spring of ’84.

MARGARET OBERMAN:

I remember when Eddie was really starting to make the big money. One night Jeffrey Katzenberg came up to the offices —
48 Hrs.
had just opened — and he was sitting in the writers’ room on the ninth floor, waiting for Eddie. And when Eddie came in, Katzenberg gave him a check for a million dollars. And none of us had ever seen a check for a million dollars before.

That kind of stuff going on was just totally fascinating. And when Eddie wasn’t at read-through, we’d have to go find him; he’d be downstairs buying jewelry in the jewelry store.

HERB SARGENT,
Writer:

Eddie came to me one day and said, “I don’t know who my friends are anymore.” And he was frightened, you know. He said that people would patronize him or compliment him, and he wasn’t sure that they were serious. Maybe it was only because he was on television. And he was scared. It wasn’t showing up in his work, but it was a real personal fear that he had. And so I got Harry Belafonte to come and talk to him. Because the same thing had happened to him when he was young.

Harry came up, and I put him in a room with Eddie and let them talk. I think it worked out okay.

ANDY BRECKMAN:

I remember he got a million dollars for appearing in just a few scenes of a Dudley Moore movie. Eddie framed that million-dollar check and put it on his wall. It was one million dollars for a few weeks’ work. Oh yeah, he cashed the check; the one on the wall was a copy.

JOE PISCOPO:

Eddie got death threats and — I don’t think he’ll mind me telling you — he was upset with that. That was as insane as it got. And I remember saying, “Eddie, these are just jealous creeps that don’t know what they’re doing, don’t even worry about it.” He was upset about it and in retrospect rightly so. Just think about it, a brilliant talent like that. I hate to even bring it up now, because there’s always a nut out there. Even after he left
Saturday Night Live
, I remember him being pulled over a lot by cops in Los Angeles. He was thrown against the car once. That is really sad.

BARRY BLAUSTEIN:

I think it was hard for Eddie. It was hard for both of them. I think when Joe saw Eddie eclipsing him tremendously, it was hard. The relationship changes. They’re no longer equals. Joe was a really good impressionist. He worked really hard on mannerisms, to get an impression down. And Eddie would then just be able to do that same impression — boom — like that.

ANDREW KURTZMAN:

People thought that there was a big blowup between Eddie and Joey. They drifted apart. We all heard later that there were some Sinatra-like moments between them. It was that period where Joe was going on talk shows and talking about being friends with Eddie a lot — all that talk-show stuff about things he did with Eddie. And I remember someone saying that Eddie got really ticked about that.

ELLIOT WALD:

It was really hard to get hosts the first year I was there. We lost Nick Nolte the first night. He supposedly went into rehab, but he was seen preparing for rehab at Studio 54. But Eddie came in and took over as host and of course did great. That was the year Eddie was half there and half not.

ANDREW KURTZMAN:

I got along fine with Eddie. It’s this weird thing in show business where you kind of lock into the relationship with the person at the point when you meet them. For people who knew Eddie as he was becoming
Eddie
, it was always easier to get along with him after that. There were entourage jokes and stuff like that among people on the staff, but I liked a lot of the guys in the entourage. The complaint about Eddie was that occasionally he’d flare up and say something snide. But listen — I met people who were much, much larger ass-holes on much less talent. The nice thing about the show was it was pretty democratic that way, which is that the ability to make people laugh generally won the respect of your colleagues, and that was all it needed.

TIM KAZURINSKY:

Ebersol was not a writer and he’s got cheap tastes. So — this is the frustrating thing — all the good scripts went into the wastebasket on Wednesday. And you’d stay up, and people were fueling themselves with cocaine from Monday through Wednesday, because Wednesday morning we had the read-through at eleven. And you literally had that fifty hours to get a show written. So you would kill yourself to get good scripts done. Ebersol was looking for scripts that would make Eddie and Joe bigger stars. He was looking for impersonations of showbiz people. Anything that had an idea or a political notion or that he thought was a little too smart — bang, dead, into the waste-basket. And so the writers would get more depressed, they’d do more drugs, and pretty soon most of the scripts were written for Eddie and Joe. It was like publish or perish — you had to get a piece on the air, so everybody wrote thinking, “If I don’t do a piece for Eddie, it won’t get on, and I’ll get fired” — which people often did. It was really fucking crazy.

Second City is the ideal. You can do and say anything you want. See it in the paper that day, do a bit on it that night. You didn’t have that luxury at
Saturday Night Live.
In fact, sometimes the smarter it was, the quicker Ebersol would kill it.

DICK EBERSOL:

John Belushi had become convinced that Fear, which was this punk kind of rock group, were on the verge of breaking out and convinced me that I ought to book them and personally vouched that they were terrific and so on. Anyway, their musical number — in the last fifteen or twenty minutes of the show — was so dark. They had films in it showing pumpkins that, as you carved the pumpkin, blood came out of each carving. It was just like O’Donoghue at his darkest. And I, quite frankly, had given him too much freedom. But now here I am with Fear itself. We’re on the air. And all of a sudden they’re out of control and there are dancers around them — including John, who you can’t see on television — and they’re slam-dancing, that’s what it was called, banging off each other, banging into the audience, banging into cameramen. None of this was really foreseen. And things got really, completely, and totally out of hand. And so you’re sitting at home and you’re watching this, and you don’t really have the total sense of what we could see, because Davey Wilson in the booth was not shooting what was breaking out in the lower areas of the audience, where people sit on those movable chairs.

And I think probably, for the only time in the history of the show, I had been worried about it enough to have told Davey to at least have a film standing by. It was a sensational film that had aired in the first show, four weeks before, on October third, with Eddie playing a black inmate who wrote poetry in iambic pentameter or something like that. It was a takeoff on whoever Norman Mailer loved at the time, who was a wronged guy in prison, and a wonderful piece of character. And so I told them to roll it. And so we just rolled the film.

We let Fear finish in the studio, and I don’t think they knew until they were back in their dressing room that the last half of their song had gone away. Anyway, the total damage that was done in the studio was about $2,500. But the
New York Post
headline on Monday was, “Saturday Night Live Riot Destroys $250,000.”

DAVE WILSON:

It was like mosh pit kind of stuff, with people diving off the stage into the audience. And all I remember is Dick Ebersol actually running around, ducking underneath the cameras, trying to quiet it all down.

The death of John Belushi on March 5, 1982, at the age of thirty-three, brought the festivities to a sorrowful, traumatized halt. No matter how many people might have predicted a premature demise for this ebullient man of vast and varied appetites and legendary overindulgence, the death came as a dark, cold shock. It told his friends at
Saturday Night Live
not only that John was mortal, but that they were too. It had the sobering impact of a biblical warning: Your parents were right after all, dammit — drugs can destroy a life, excess can be fatal, self-abuse can have severe consequences, there’s no free lunch, and all that other anti-hedonistic claptrap.