Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (43 page)

Martin Short, a stunningly imaginative comic actor who’d played a wide, wild range of characters on the
SCTV
satire series, got $5,000 less per show, but only because he waited until the last minute to say yes. They were joined by writer-comedians Christopher Guest and a returning Harry Shearer and given the daunting assignment of bringing
Saturday Night Live
back to life. It wouldn’t be the show Lorne Michaels had daringly envisioned half a decade earlier, populated by virtual unknowns, but at least it would exist.

DICK EBERSOL:

I went to Brandon and said, “I have an idea for next year.” By then I’d had Billy Crystal come back to host the show, and subsequent to that, he did a couple other cameos. And I said, “Just grant me the notion that, if we stop this whole process of believing everybody we hire has to be unknown, we can really build a hell of a cast.” And he said, “Who do you have in mind?” And I said, “Well, I think I can get Billy, Marty Short, probably could talk Chris Guest into it.” Others ultimately fell into the mix. But those were the names. And also Andrea Martin, who subsequently we chose not to get, because the guys I was hiring fell in love with Pamela Stephenson. And so we didn’t make Andrea the offer. But Brandon said yes, and that represented the first time in the history of the show, and I don’t know if it’s true anymore, that we broke favored nations among the cast. Everybody received the same thing except for Billy, and Billy got a deal at a higher level.

BOB TISCHLER:

It was really my call at that point. I said to Dick, “You know, this is really going to be our last year here,” because Dick had already decided to leave, and we had a chance to leave after one more year. And I said, “Let’s bring in funny people — let’s bring in people that we know are funny on-camera and off-camera and who can work together.” And I basically suggested bringing in some big names, including Chris Guest, the person who actually was responsible for me getting into show business. Dick did suggest bringing Billy in.

DICK EBERSOL:

There’s a very interesting story there that I’ve never told publicly, which is, having gotten Brandon’s okay to do all this, I went out to California in May of ’84 and sat down with Billy’s management. And Buddy Morra was one of the managers at the time; I can’t remember who the other ones were. But we had a lunch and they explained to me that Billy moving back to New York to be a cast member of
Saturday Night Live
was a nonstarter. They didn’t think it would be good for his career at that stage. He’d had a few movies, and
Soap
had been on the air and had a lot of notoriety and was, by that point, off the air. And they were adamant and told me no at lunch. And I went upstairs to my room at the Beverly Hills Hotel and, without hesitation, called his house to talk to his wife, Janice, who I heard say in New York when Billy had hosted, “I’d love to bring my daughter back to New York for one year at some point in her life.” She wasn’t talking about
Saturday Night Live
, but I just overheard her say that. And I said, “Janice, look, here’s what’s happened. This is a great opportunity, at least I think, for Billy to come back. He’ll certainly be well paid, and I’m not going to get you into that. But he could come back to New York, be a cast member on
Saturday Night Live
, do what he really loves — which is all of his characters, where he’ll be free to write them and do all of that — and you’d have a wonderful year before you lose a daughter to college, and so on, and have everybody living under the same roof.” Well, how she did it or what she did, I don’t know, but by that night, Billy called me back on the phone and said, “Forget whatever you’ve been told by my managers. Provided we can make the right business deal, I want to come to New York.” And that deal was made in about the next twenty-four hours.

I knew Janice at that point maybe about a decade, from the time I’d first seen Billy in the clubs in New York in the midseventies, when I was roaming around that year before — or those months before I knew Lorne. In any case, Billy helped me get Chris and Marty and subsequently Harry Shearer, who, sadly, didn’t work out for me any better than he did for Lorne. There were just too many problems behind the scenes. He’s a gifted performer but a pain in the butt, unfortunately. He’s just so demanding on the preciseness of things and he’s very, very hard on the working people, you know, whether it’s the makeup people or the prop people, or the engineering people. He’s intolerant of other people’s issues. He’s just a nightmare-to-deal-with person.

BILLY CRYSTAL,
Cast Member:

I wasn’t having the career I always envisioned myself having. I wasn’t doing the work I should actually say I really always wanted to do and felt I could do after doing
Soap
for four years. And my own variety series was short-lived, and I was headlining clubs and concerts all across the country. That two hours onstage was always satisfying. But as a whole I wasn’t where I wanted to be, I wasn’t doing movies, I wasn’t doing other things, but more importantly I don’t think I was showing the country what I felt I had in myself, what I could do.

I think when I came to the show, I was sort of a piñata of ideas and thoughts and characters, and all kinds of things happened. Every day I was excited at the discovery of what we could do. I never put a time limit on how long I would be there or what it would give me or get me. I didn’t approach it like that. I just felt personally as a performer and as a creative person I had to give it my shot. I was thirty-seven years old, I was looking at the chance to finally say to everybody, “This is what I can do.” That’s why I said yes to come in and do the show after hosting it twice the season before. It was everything I wanted it to be.

LILY TARTIKOFF:

Billy didn’t have an apartment when he was first on
Saturday Night Live.
We just gave him our apartment for like a month, until they got settled, and he and his wife and his girls used it. It seemed to work out okay. And it helped save the show.

HARRY SHEARER:

Spinal Tap appeared on the show as a musical guest in the spring of ’84. We got treated so well. I didn’t realize that guests are treated better than the regulars. So it was my own stupidity; smart people do dumb things. So I really thought, because we’d been treated pretty well as the guests, hmmm, this might be a better situation. Dick basically extended the offer to all three of us; Michael McKean passed, Chris and I accepted. I knew Marty Short by reputation; he was a friend of Paul Shaffer’s and Paul just raved about him, and I’d seen a little bit of his work on
SCTV
. We had not been told, I don’t think, that Jimmy Belushi was coming back. That came as a surprise.

Dick put on a pretty elaborate show. He got Chris, Marty, Billy, and I together and said, “Now guys, you know Mary Gross and Julia are coming back, and I want a third girl for that slot and I want you guys to help choose her.” Well, we went through this elaborate process of meeting people. Geena Davis met with us in the lobby of the Century Plaza Hotel. And Geena had just been on a couple of sitcoms and it was all quite awkward and uncomfortable for everybody involved. But it boiled down to Andrea Martin and Pamela Stephenson. And Marty, of course, had a number of ties with Andrea and really wanted Andrea there, and I thought, after we saw her tapes, that Pamela was an incredibly versatile actress and just brought something really different, so we tossed it back and forth and finally Pamela got it. To her everlasting dismay.

MARTIN SHORT,
Cast Member:

I had a one-year contract. I certainly approached that show not as someone who was going to be around, obviously, for more than one year. So I felt that I had to do a lot and be in as many interesting things as possible, because it was only a limited time.

I never wanted to leave
SCTV
, and I had to find out for sure
SCTV
was officially gone, which it was. I’d been asked for my last two years there to join
Saturday Night Live
, but I didn’t want a change.

It was important to me. I had already done
SCTV
for three years and I had a new child. But I never figured out how to do
SNL
particularly. After the third show, I still hadn’t cashed any checks, because I was not happy there at all. And I went in to talk to Dick and said, “I want to leave the show.” And he thought I was kind of insane, of course. But he figured out how to keep me there, which was to say, “Look, if by Christmas you’re still unhappy, kid, you can go free of that contract.” I think he figured out that, by that time, I’d figure out how to do the show.

ANDREW SMITH:

I always say the “kings of comedy” came in to deign to do the show. It was my third year, and I became part-time because they took me down in order to pay for them. Or maybe it wasn’t the money. Anyway, they said, “You can come and write on the show, you can be on the staff, but you can’t be head writer anymore with these guys.” And of course I got on my high horse — which was a bad, bad mistake — and said, “I don’t think so,” and left. But then I did come in and do freelance on, I don’t know, ten shows.

Because these guys were coming in as stars to do their year in New York — stopping by to do
Saturday Night Live
— and even though some great comedy came out of it, I don’t think it was the best thing for the show. Because it was not home-grown talent — finding new people and making them stars. These were sort-of-stars coming in for a year. I think it affected the style of comedy, to tell you the truth. The comedy after them became much more about characters and star turns, so that a sketch, instead of being an ensemble piece, became one of these character pieces — a Brimley or a Grimley or whatever his name was.

The show before that was much more of an ensemble piece and a lot more democratic. In their year, because they were stars, the sketches were about a central character doing his sort of turn, regardless of anybody else in the sketch. I think there was a little shift. And since then, the thing seems to be driven much more by these sorts of characters that the actors come up with. Then they sort of build a situation around this person to do this character, rather than a situation sketch.

ANDREW KURTZMAN:

The resentment directed at Dick’s big stars was never about money. The resentment was simply that they were a little clannish, and that they leaned toward a certain style of their own. We’d had Joe Piscopo doing Reagan, but suddenly here comes Harry Shearer, and he felt very proprietary about his Reagan. “Well, sorry, but I don’t think we have to check out every joke with you, Harry. He’s president of the United States. We’ve got to do stuff on this guy.” I have not had much contact with Harry recently. I understand he’s much more relaxed now. He was a bit depressed then. He had the office next to mine, and sometimes he would be in there alone playing bass late at night. It was a real dorm-room kind of thing. You’d hear these depressed bass lines thudding through the walls next door.

ELLIOT WALD:

Harry’s impossible — impossible to get along with. And if he wasn’t as bright and talented as he is, nobody would put up with him for one minute. But the fact is that he is one of the smartest guys doing this stuff, and I’m always impressed by him.

BILLY CRYSTAL:

Dick Ebersol was a great producer for all of us in that way. It was an awkward situation where Harry, Marty, and Chris and I came in and yet there were still some remaining cast members from the year before — Jim Belushi, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Mary Gross, Gary Kroeger. So it wasn’t Us versus Them, but there was definitely the sense that they were veterans with perhaps different sensibilities. This had been their turf, and here we come in. And there had to be a melding of the two. We had very specific ideas about what was to be the tone of that year after coming off some bad times for the show.

Setting the tone began that summer when we filmed some of the pieces that would become the strongest things for us during the year — the
60 Minutes
piece we did that introduced the Minkman character and Nathan Thurm, and Harry as a great Mike Wallace; the two black ballplayers that Chris and I did — that was one of the finer pieces that we did that year; “Relatives of the Rich and Famous” had a really different tone to it. So matching all the tones was Dick’s job that year — and keeping everybody happy.

MARTIN SHORT:

They certainly paid us a lot of money, much more than what other people had ever been paid on the show. And gave us one-year contracts, so all of it was rare. I guess they didn’t assume there was a tremendous future to the show. They had lost Eddie Murphy and then Joe Piscopo within, I guess, half a season of each other. And there was a tremendous concern that the show had become a star vehicle, and that without stars, the show would falter.

JIM BELUSHI:

You bring an all-star in, you’ve got to pay him, and these guys were all-stars. I didn’t consider myself equal to Billy. I was not prolific. He’d write all night and he’d come up with these great things. He understood the medium. But anyway, I think I was making like fifteen grand myself, writing and acting — it wasn’t
that
far off. That show was not about money; that show was about launch.

ELLIOT WALD:

It was tough for the writers, especially since at the end of the season before, Brandon Tartikoff came down and said, just to the writers, “You guys have really carried the show. No, we have not had the stars that we used to have” — at that point Eddie had been off the show for a year — “but the show has gone on, the ratings have gone up, and it’s because of you guys. And you guys should be very proud of yourselves.” And then we come back in July or August and here are the new guys, and they all write for themselves, they all fit as a group, they’ve already been working together, and it’s like, “Well, if we need a piece, we’ll give you guys a ring.” It wasn’t, “We’ve got this brilliant new cast, and you guys should really learn to work with them.”