Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (60 page)

Myers did not suffer from an inferiority complex. Brandon Tartikoff loved to tell the story of the time when, having moved on from NBC to the presidency of Paramount Pictures, he was trying to convince Myers, in the wake of the
Wayne’s World
success, to agree to make a sequel. To sweeten the pot, Tartikoff asked Myers who he’d always wanted to work with. “I have a big Rolodex,” Brandon said. “Give me the name and whoever it is, they’re only a phone call away.” Myers thought for a moment and then said, “Fellini.” Tartikoff didn’t believe his ears. Who? “Federico Fellini,” Myers replied. “I have always considered him a great artist.” He looked at a flabbergasted Tartikoff, waiting for his response, or maybe expecting him to pick up the phone and dial Italy. “That’s when I realized,” Tartikoff said, “that he was completely serious. He really thought he was in that league now.” Tartikoff felt that even for Hollywood, this was one of the great chutzpah stories of all time.

DANA CARVEY:

Lorne said Mike needed a sidekick for the “Wayne’s World” sketches. Basically I just showed up at read-through and there was this sketch and I was just in there. I don’t think Mike resented it. It’s so infamous that it’s hard to talk around this — but obviously the show was fine, and then once we got into feature-film territory, defining the roles was a little harder. That’s as delicately as I can put it. When it was just a sketch, I would just be reactive and laugh really hard and support him.

I remember I always thought, “Aren’t we just doing
Bill and Ted
?” I thought we’d be nailed as doing a
Bill and Ted
ripoff. But I think Mike’s a clever writer, and he put his own stamp on “excellent” and “way, no way.”
Bill and Ted
did precede us, but I guess it didn’t matter.

TERRY TURNER,
Writer:

Mike was interested in us writing
Wayne’s World
with him because we’d done some of the sketches with him and the collaboration seemed to work. And then Lorne came to us one day and asked us if we would like to write the movie with Mike. And we said, “Sure, absolutely. We definitely would love it.” Because it was an opportunity. So we took it.

Oddly enough, Lorne’s advice on the movie was don’t make anyone angry at each other, because it will remind the audience too much of home, and we want them to have a good time in the theater. In a way, his light touch worked, because he only said about two or three things about the movie. And sometimes he made us a little crazy, because he didn’t keep up with the dailies as much as he should have and we had to go back and then reshoot things which could have been done sooner. But I can’t complain about it, because it certainly was a great opportunity for us.

I’m sure I’m not speaking out of school here when everyone knows that there was a problem with Mike and Dana on the set. I’m pretty sure everybody knows that. So there was some hostility and then some friendly hostility, and then people would band together and it spilled over into the show. I remember once, Lovitz said to Dana, he was just absolutely killing in a sketch, but when Dana came off the stage, Lovitz said to him, “Dana, Dana! You’re coming off gay” — just to undermine every bit of confidence he had. Just like, you know, a jerk. They’d pick at each other, but everybody knew it was kind of a joke, and yet sometimes it wasn’t so jokey.

DAVID SPADE:

I think the breakthrough for me was probably when I did that sketch as the receptionist saying, “… and you are?” and that kind of thing, which kind of worked. It was a little dry attitude, and it caught on fast, which was nice. That didn’t really solidify me there, but the following year I did my first “Hollywood Minute,” and that’s the one Lorne liked.

I was just basically sitting at the table in the writers room, bored, reading
People
magazine, commenting out loud about what was going on in the world, and just making fun of everyone. Someone was like, “Why don’t you just do that on the show? That’s what you’re good at.” And that was Lorne’s opinion too. He said, “You’ve finally found a unique voice, just do that.” And then about two weeks later, he said, “Why don’t you write up another ‘Hollywood Minute’?” And he had never asked me to do something like that, which basically meant it would probably be on the show. And I thought, “Great!” So I was such a whore doing that. I probably wouldn’t have done it as much as I did, but it was actually getting in the back of my head that I might get fired at that point — because it was three years in, and I hadn’t made much of a dent.

And I did it every couple of weeks. It was crazy, I didn’t care who I took out, I was just an unknown guy making fun of million-dollar celebrities for no reason, just to take their legs out. A year or two later, it was less interesting, because I had turned into one of them.

FRED WOLF:

I would actually beg Spade to not hit the people that probably couldn’t take a hit. It just drove me crazy to make fun of some of the celebrities that were already having their own troubles. I used to tell him, “Who knows where you’ll be one day when you’re turning on the TV and you’ll see somebody say something as nasty about you as what you’re saying about them, and it’s going to just send you into a free fall?” And, you know, he listened to me somewhat. If you hit Madonna, she’ll take it. If you hit Michael Jackson, he’ll take it. But you can’t hit the real easy targets.

AL FRANKEN:

I originally wrote Stuart Smalley for Mike Myers. But when he did it in read-through, it didn’t work, because it was so specifically in my head and in my ear, and I think Smigel said I should do it, and I did it, and it worked. I felt while I was doing it that I had such good reactions that I did another one. And then, in the room between dress and air, I would of course demand that they cut other people’s sketches so Stuart could be in the show.

One day, when I was picking up tickets for
The Producers
, the guy I got the tickets from asked me, “When are you going to do a Stuart sequel?” And I said, “Well, the movie lost about $15 million, and I’ve discovered that when you lose money for a studio, they don’t want to make a sequel. Now if that doesn’t tell you what this business is about, I don’t know what does.” This is my standard answer.

DAVID SPADE:

I thought “buh-bye” was good, and the good thing about it was that we only did it twice, and yet I still hear it. I used to think that you had to do something twenty-five times and beat it into their heads to get some catchphrase going, but “buh-bye” and the receptionist’s “… and you are?” were just kind of stumbled into. We probably should have just left it at one — although it’s never been the case, in any sketch that’s worked in history, to leave it at one. It’s usually “leave it at thirty.”

ADAM SANDLER:

Before I was on the show, I didn’t really know what I was doing quite yet. But once I was in a room with like Jim Downey — who if you wrote a skit and Jim liked it, you were high for a week — and Robert Smigel, the same thing, it was always about impressing those guys. If you had just one line in the skit that they would comment on, you felt like you were doing something special. It was just sitting in a room with the guys you idolized, and I guess after a little while you developed what you think was the kind of comedy you wanted to do — and the kind that those guys would disapprove of.

BOB ODENKIRK:

I think Sandler really seemed to take everybody by surprise. I mean, the things that Adam was doing were so sort of inconsequential — silly songs and just like basically dicking around, you know. I’d been there for a couple years, and I really believe in good sketch comedy and great sketches, really solid sketches, and yet I thought that Sandler brought a really great breath of fresh air to the show and relaxed the show when it was getting kind of uptight and formulaic. So I liked what Adam did. But I think his fame or his success did surprise maybe everybody.

ADAM SANDLER:

I remember in the beginning when I would be on-camera, Lorne would hear, “What are you using that guy for?” I remember one time they did a Q rating, and I happened to be on the show that they evaluated. They got all this stuff on who’s likable on the show and who’s not. It was like the second or third thing I ever did, and I guess whoever did the Q thing, they said I sucked and I was not fun to watch. And so I remember Lorne caught some flak from NBC saying, “Don’t use that guy. People don’t like him.” But Lorne and Downey and Smigel, they kind of looked past that. Lorne always said, “When you first get on the show, it’s going to take time for the audience to like you, because they’re used to seeing Dana and Nealon and Hartman and guys that they’re comfortable laughing with.” Sure enough, they cut to one of us young buffoons and they go, “Who’s that guy? How did this idiot get a chance?” But after a few times of being on the show, the audience grew a little more comfortable with you and they said, “Okay, this guy I guess is on
Saturday Night Live
,” and then you get more confidence as a performer.

JACK HANDEY:

I was in a fraternity in college, and I thought I had heard some pretty graphic sex stories, but Sandler would just go into detail about some of his sexual adventures to the point where you would just be crying and laughing, it was so embarrassing — just the details he would go into. But very funny. Sandler was always a sweet guy to me and I think to most people on the staff.

ADAM SANDLER:

I remember actually my first skit. I was in a thing that Smigel wrote and that I helped write a little bit. And it was Tom Hanks and Dana Carvey, and I just came on, I just had two lines, and I remember that countdown. I remember telling Hanks right before, “Hoo, I’m nervous,” and he goes, “Hey, it’s going to be all right.” I said, “Man, I feel like I’m going to faint or something.” He goes, “Well, don’t.”

I wasn’t always funny on the show. I remember sometimes I would be funny at dress rehearsal, because I felt loose and like, “Well, no one’s really going to see this, just this couple hundred people,” and I was used to doing stand-up in clubs and I felt pretty confident in front of a crowd of two hundred or so. But then the live show would come on — and this happened to me the first couple of years — I’d hear the countdown, and I’d be like, “Oh no, oh no, everyone’s going to see this. I’d better do as well as I did in dress.” And then I would choke and my mind would be spinning out. And right after I would get off I would say, “Is there any way you could run dress for the West Coast?”

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER,
Writer:

It was a boutique aspect. Each one was their own boutique. There was the Adam Sandler boutique, which presented writing and acting and music and lyrics by Adam. Which was not the way it was when I was at the original show; we were the writers, they were the actors. And indeed they were a different generation than me. Adam I loved. It was a whole other sensibility than mine, but I loved it.

CHRIS ROCK:

The live show was incredible. It was incredible to meet these famous people every week and see these great musical acts and see this whole show form around you and how they built it. The best thing about the show was that when you did write a piece, you were responsible for it. You were in charge of the casting. You were in charge of the costumes. You produced the piece. I wouldn’t know what the fuck I was doing if I hadn’t been on
Saturday Night Live.
It’s the absolute best training you can have in show business.

JANEANE GAROFALO,
Cast Member:

The only thing you could count on in my day, when I was there, was if it was a Sandler or Farley sketch, it was on. That was the only thing you could ever bank on.

ADAM SANDLER:

Herlihy and I wrote a movie,
Billy Madison
, and we said, “This could be pretty funny, maybe we could do this.” And I showed it to Lorne, and he read it and told me, “There’s some funny stuff” but that maybe this shouldn’t be my first vehicle. And I remember saying, “Oh, okay, all right, I guess I’ll just write something else.” I didn’t have my feelings hurt at all. I just thought that’s okay, that’s how he feels, and he picks what skits I do also. If I write a skit and it doesn’t get on the show, I don’t sit and cry about it, I just say I’ll write another one next week. So that’s how I felt about
Billy Madison.
I said, “Okay, Herlihy, he doesn’t like this one. Let’s write another one.”

CHRIS ROCK:

I got hired because
In Living Color
was on.
SNL
hadn’t had a black guy in eight years or something.
In Living Color
was hot, so they had to hire a black guy. Trust me, there was no black guys for eight years, man. Let’s put it this way: It didn’t hurt. I’m trying to help you with the backdrop of the time.

No black guy for eight years, and Eddie Murphy was under Dick Ebersol. So there was never really a black guy — a star anyway. Damon Wayans was on like six months or whatever and then he got fired.

Eddie was the biggest star. Anybody who says different is making a racist argument. Eddie Murphy has the biggest numbers in the history of movies. Grosses are people; it’s not dollars marching in, those are people. Belushi didn’t have a movie as big as
Trading Places
, and that’s not even Eddie’s biggest movie.

Blues Brothers
is not as big as
48 Hrs.
It’s not.
Animal House
had a cultural impact, but Belushi’s not the star of
Animal House
, he’s the breakout guy. It was still an ensemble; he was the best of the ensemble. Eddie Murphy’s a
star
, man. He’s probably the only guy of the
SNL
posse to embrace stardom — its Elvis.