Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (45 page)

LARRY DAVID:

I think Dick Ebersol did the best he could for what he wanted to get out of the show. What’s he going to do? He doesn’t have a comedy background. He was a good guy, a decent guy, and I don’t have any problem with him. I do remember this, though: It was the day before read-through, which was, let’s see, Tuesday, around seven o’clock, and I’d been there maybe three weeks to write material. And so for that first read-through I had already written maybe two or three sketches and maybe two news pieces for the “Update” thing. So I was all set.

So I’m waiting for the elevator to go home, and I remember Dick came out of the elevator, and I said, “Good night,” and he said,
“What are you doing?!?”
I said, “Oh, I’m going home.” And he looked at me like I was out of my mind. He said, “What do you mean, going home?” I said, “Well, I’ve written three sketches and two news pieces and that’s it, you know.” And he goes, “But we stay up all night.” I go, “What for?” He says, “To write the show. That’s when we write the show.” I said, “But I’ve already written three pieces.” And he goes, “Well, we stay here all night.” I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. And I said, “I’m not staying up all night. For what? What am I going to do — just walk around? I’m all done.” So we kind of looked at each other and I said, you know, “Good luck,” and I got into the elevator and left. I think that was the beginning of the end for me.

It was frustrating, yes, not getting pieces on the air. One Saturday night, five minutes before air, after getting probably six or seven sketches cut from the show, I went up to Dick right before we were going to go on and I said, “That’s it. I’m done. I’ve had it. I quit. It’s over.” And I walked out and started walking home, and it was freezing out and I was in the middle of walking home going, “Oh my God, what did I just do? I just cost myself like sixty thousand dollars!” I’m adding up the money from the reruns and all this. At that time I needed every penny I could get my hands on. So yes, I went back the next week and pretended I hadn’t quit — which I also used later in a
Seinfeld
episode. I went in on Monday morning and just pretended the whole thing never happened. And Dick never mentioned it. I think maybe he said, “Is that Larry David down at the end of the table?” But that was it. The writers were looking at me, that’s for sure. I was getting some very strange looks from the writers — like, “What the hell are
you
doing here?”

ANDREW KURTZMAN:

Whether or not you were getting stuff on the air affected your life, but I don’t think anyone ever thought Larry David was anything but sensational — and comically, a bad fit with Ebersol. Neither us nor Julia Louis-Dreyfus ever figured out really what to do with her on TV, but Larry did. We were all there. She was the same person. But what Larry saw was that peculiar force of hers.

ANDY BRECKMAN:

Larry didn’t even want the typists in the typing pool — it used to be all typewriters — to type his scripts up. He would type them himself. He was always finicky — George Costanza finicky, you know.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS:

Larry was just miserable there. And he almost came to blows with Dick Ebersol. I forget what, I’m sure it had to do with a sketch. I think Dick told him that something he’d written wasn’t funny, and Larry went berserk. There was a lot of tension on that floor, and people were always sort of threatening each other. Brad got mad once too. He went crazy. That’s one of the reasons I liked Larry so much — because he lost his temper. Somebody threw a chair through a wall too. I think that was Jim Belushi.

LARRY DAVID:

I did meet Julia there. Yes I did. And obviously that had some impact. I didn’t really write for her then. I didn’t really write for anyone in particular. I would cast after I wrote. But I remember thinking that she was terrific — and underused.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS:

I did a couple of things that for some reason are still played in gay bars around the country — like “Spit-Take Talk Show.” A bunch of my friends who’ve been in gay bars say they’ve seen that played a lot. Mary and I once did a parody of
The Rink
, a Broadway show with Liza Minnelli. Our parody was called “The Womb,” and it’s also playing in gay bars. I have no idea why. I guess it has a certain campiness to it.

BRAD HALL:

It was particularly frustrating as a writer. We’d have these massive read-throughs of thirty sketches or something. That everybody had just sort of vomited up all these sketches, with no real focus as to what the show was going to be about that week. And there was a lot of news going on, Reagan era. There was stuff we could’ve been parodying. I don’t think Ebersol wanted that. And I don’t think NBC did. Some-one’s taste did not run toward satire. And so the very thing that originally made the show popular was really resisted. We had people that could do good impressions of all the right people. You look back, it’s kind of bizarre, the election in 1984, there’s almost no political humor during an entire political election. Nothing. And for me, doing the news, it was really frustrating. My brilliant idea was that I should’ve been a real news guy. I should’ve gone out and covered real news stories from the
SNL
perspective. That’s what I wanted to do. But they were much more keen on doing “President Reagan had his hand stuck to his head today” and show a picture.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS:

It wasn’t a particularly happy experience for me. To begin with, I will take responsibility for some of it, because I was extremely young. I hadn’t graduated college and I was very naive about how things work in real show business. So I went into it very green. I had been in their audience. I was a teenager when the show was sort of at its height. So then to be plucked out of Chicago between my junior and senior year of college to go on the show was head-spinning, to say the very least.

I thought it was going to be a congenial experience; my head was in the clouds. I wasn’t aware of the politicking one had to do, and I think there were a lot of drugs going on at the time, but I was unaware of that as well, to tell you the truth. I was always surprised at read-through, though, when certain writers’ sketches were eighteen pages long and they were laughing and laughing, and I was so confused as to how they could possibly have found it so funny — and made it so long! Everybody was doing a lot of coke and smoking dope. Everybody would stay up late. All the work was done between eleven o’clock at night and six o’clock in the morning; that’s when everybody was functioning. And that wasn’t, in my view, conducive to comedy.

Doing
Seinfeld
was, of course, just the opposite experience. It was pure joy from beginning to end. I thought, “No one will ever get this, because we’re having too much fun.”

MARGARET OBERMAN:

There are certain people who really go after
Saturday Night Live
because of that “boys club” business. I think that element certainly existed, but I think it was like anything else: You had to be a survivor to make that show work for you, and that was true of men and women. There was a certain political kind of thing that went on there, and you had to know that and function within those rules. And if you didn’t know that, then maybe you weren’t as happy as some other people were.

ELLIOT WALD:

Herb Sargent said at the end of one season, “Our biggest fuckup this year is we did not find stuff for Julia to do. She is really talented.” A lot of people didn’t see that, but the fact is, Herb was right and we wrong. Not that I thought she wasn’t talented, but I thought she was limited and hard to write for. It was my own inability to write for her, and obviously not any lack of talent on her part, that was the problem.

MARGARET OBERMAN:

Julia is one of the people who doesn’t like to talk about the show. It’s my opinion that she shouldn’t be so negative about it. I love Julia, but I just feel like that show really helped her. It got her out there, and she met Larry David. So how bad could it have been? It complicated things for her that Brad Hall, her boyfriend — who joined the show when she did — didn’t stay the full time with the show, and there was a lot of acrimony. He was very, very unhappy, so that complicated things for her. But I just feel like she’d be better off not saying how horrible she thought it was. I don’t know what she’s going to gain from that. She’s had so many great things happen to her.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS:

Dick Ebersol was always wielding a baseball bat. He would always hold this bat when he would have these meetings. The writers and the actors would be there, and he would have the bat in hand. It was really very Al Capone-y. And he always wanted me to straighten my hair. He was always trying to get me to straighten my hair. Well — he’s in sports now.

ANDREW KURTZMAN:

To this day, I miss working live. There is nothing quite like that. There was a sketch we did in which Chris Guest dropped his script. He was doing a voiceover from the announcer’s booth, but he dropped the script and couldn’t retrieve it right away. And so we just went dark for a while. We stayed on a title card or something and Chris was pawing around the bottom of the booth, looking for this lost piece of script and unaware that he was being cued. He’d just dropped it, and to reach it he had to take off his headphones and thus missed his cue. So we just stopped TV for a while. It’s like stopping time.

ANDY BRECKMAN:

I mostly wrote for the “B” cast — like Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Gary Kroeger — and my sketches were usually on at twelve-fifty. That used to be the time for high-concept stuff — the “writers’ sketches.”

MARTIN SHORT:

If you’re just a performer, you were at the mercy of what they would hand you. You had more control of your fate as a writer-performer. If you were just an actor on the show, it was not as gratifying as if you were an actor-writer. I love that control, you know, making it actually funny. Other people did write for me. Jim Downey was there that year, and Andy Breckman — two strong writers. But there was a tendency to write for yourself, particularly if you were perceived as someone who did strange material. People would sometimes feel like they wouldn’t know how to write for that.

I must admit, when the live stuff would work, there was a great excitement that you could never capture anywhere else.

DICK EBERSOL:

Billy and Chris and Marty, and Harry for that matter, were writers. And they were a pleasure. Billy’s contribution on the writing side was so enormous. He was writing two, three, some weeks four pieces a show. In the history of the show up to that point, only Chevy in the first two or three months was ever that prolific.

BILLY CRYSTAL:

I think maybe in a way we represented the age group that stayed with the show from beginning to end. We were, let’s see, nine years later. The audience that started with the show was now thirty-seven, thirty-eight also — so we hit a big chord with those people. And that was good. Some of our pieces were really funny and inventive. And you had people who could play characters and do voices. Marty and I did “Kate and Ali,” where I played Muhammad Ali and he played Katharine Hepburn.

And bringing Grimley, and bringing Fernando, and finding “I hate when that happens,” which is something Chris Guest and I used to do as friends, and that being a big hit, was another part of the success of the show.

JIM BELUSHI:

Ebersol fired me the first week of December in my second season. I wasn’t on the Christmas show. I begged for my job back, and I came back in January. I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke pot, I didn’t do anything, and that was probably, that second half of my sophomore year, when I was starting to get into it. I might have been an asshole, really, because of my own frustration and being in the middle-child syndrome.

Why did he fire me? Because I was uncontrollable — throwing things down halls and angry and disruptive. Then he let me back and I stopped drinking, because every time I’d gotten upset, I went down to Hurley’s bar and shot some whiskey. So then you have behavior you’re not proud of. I don’t regret any of it, though. I’ve taken all those experiences and learned from them. I got more serious about my work and my craft after that. So in a way I thank him. It was the best firing that ever happened to me.

Hosting had become a hip, chic thing to do in the first years of
Saturday Night Live,
and the list of hosts was audacious and eclectic. During the Doumanian and early Ebersol years, that gig lost luster, but with the rise of Eddie Murphy, and then the year that starred Billy Crystal and Martin Short, hosting status rose again.

Brandon Tartikoff, the seemingly ever-youthful NBC programmer who survived the Fred Silverman regime and went on to success and acclaim under Grant Tinker, felt protective and brotherly toward
Saturday Night Live,
even though at least once during his reign he actually canceled it — then about twenty-four hours later gave it a reprieve. He believed
SNL
was one of the network’s signature shows and that to kill it would be almost sacrilegious. When in New York and not at his office in Burbank, Tartikoff liked to drop by the eighth-floor studios and seventeenth-floor offices of the show — and a dream of his came true when his old friend Ebersol invited him to host.

Tartikoff was involved in his own far more dramatic and consequential life-and-death struggle, having been diagnosed years earlier with Hodgkin’s disease. Through it all he showed an unflappable resiliency. He hosted right after an exhausting round of chemotherapy, wearing a toupee to hide the attendant hair loss.

DICK EBERSOL: