Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (62 page)

If you stepped out of line presswise, you would hear about it, and if they didn’t appreciate what you said in the press, there would be Xerox copies of it for other people to read. It was the tactics of intimidation. There was so much pressure not to complain. If anybody got anti–fan mail or a disparaging note, it would be posted. I didn’t understand that. It was another tactic of breaking you. Lorne enjoys the house divided syndrome. I think he
prefers
the house divided.

I learned that I made the experience even worse than it should have been. I was defeated. I was weak. I drank too much. I will go with the Eleanor Roosevelt quote, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” I gave my consent freely. And every time I waited for Lorne for five hours — luckily, I didn’t do it more than once or twice — but once I did it the first time, I gave my consent to feel inferior. I gave my consent to Marci Klein to feel inferior because I was intimidated by her. I gave my consent to the other writers and my coworkers that I was just weak, you know? I was a loser. And so I definitely learned from that experience. Other than that, I don’t know what I took away from it. But I guess that’s pretty significant.

FRED WOLF:

Janeane Garofalo was awful on the show. She had it completely and totally wrong. She’s a very, very insecure person. She was my friend. I helped get her on the show. And she’s a very insecure person and she’s unwilling to sort of stand on her own body of work and ride on that talent. Instead, what she does is sort of tears everything down around her, (a) to make her feel better about what she’s doing, and (b) so she doesn’t have to really actually attempt anything upon which she could fail.

And so she was an infection in that show in that she was going to the press — at that point she was a darling of the press because she was sort of an articulate female — and going on about how it’s a men’s club at “Saturday Night Lifeless.” And that’s just bullshit. It’s an absolute total bullshit label. It just so happens that men are wildly more successful than women at
Saturday Night Live
, but not by design. It’s just genetic makeup, in my opinion.

Janeane Garofalo never spent an all-nighter. The writers and performers that went on to do very well never missed an all-nighter session. Janeane Garofalo never got with the writers and wrote sketches that she was dying to perform and would do anything that she could to get on the air. What she did instead was glom onto the host and just tear the show apart for the whole week, about how it’s a boys club there, and how they don’t let creativity flourish, and if they see certain initials on sketches they won’t laugh at them at read-through. All these negative things that were just patently ridiculous. And then she was a spectacular failure on the show.

CHRIS ELLIOTT:

Janeane and I hung out a lot that year, because in a way she was in the same boat as I. But she was a lot more capable in that arena than I was. And I guess she had the whole female issue to deal with there, which was a big issue, especially with guys like Sandler and stuff who were at their peak. So a lot of the humor was not up her alley.

PAUL SIMON,
Host:

Janeane Garofalo has no case. She wanted to be on the show. She came on. It was during one of the show’s low points. She signed on for, you know, whatever — for the year. And she had a miserable time. And she asked to be released and Lorne released her.

You know, she messed him up. In the middle of his season, he had to go replace her. She could’ve had some aesthetic disagreement with the show, which she did. I mean, no doubt about it. I mean, she vocalized it. She actually said it in public. He didn’t say in public anything about her. What harm did
SNL
do to Janeane Garofalo? Any harm that she was on
Saturday Night Live
for, you know, five months? Did anybody ever say, “Except for stuff you did on
Saturday Night Live
, what a great career you’ve had”? And nobody there bad-mouthed her either.

FRED WOLF:

It was all just such a crock of shit.

I had this one sketch. It was about five idiot guys who were working on oil rigs in North Dakota. And they’re drilling a hole deep into the earth and out of the hole pops sort of a subterranean human — some crazy alien person. And it’s Janeane Garofalo. And these five idiots see her come out of the hole and she tells them that she lives in an underground kingdom, that they’ve been watching earth’s progress over millions of years and they have all the answers to any question that we might have about life on earth. And that she has five minutes until exposure to the air will kill her. “Ask any question you’d like.”

Well, when she first pops out of the hole, Chris Farley screams a really high-pitched scream, so after she gives her speech about how they could ask any question they want, the next thing out of Adam Sandler’s mouth is, he turns to Farley and says, “What the hell kind of scream was that? When you saw the fish lady pop out of the hole, you screamed like a girl.” And then they proceed to spend one minute of her last remaining time on earth arguing over how he didn’t scream like a woman, he screamed like a man. And back and forth. The point of the sketch was that these guys were idiots and that they were blowing their chance at, you know, at great knowledge.

Janeane Garofalo raised hell with three or four people before I got wind of it that I was being “disrespectful to women” in that it is a fault of a guy to scream like a girl, that because Farley screaming like a girl would bring chastisement, she said that meant that women therefore are deserving to be chastised for the way they scream. It was one of the most convoluted, strangest, most ridiculous reasons I’ve ever heard to dislike a sketch.

JANEANE GAROFALO:

There were nights where I had a really nice time. Actually, I had a great night the night Alec Baldwin hosted. My family was in the audience. It was super fun. It was the Christmas show. The party afterwards was incredibly enjoyable. The Beastie Boys were the musical guests. It was just like I had fantasized it would be. I actually had things to do in the sketches. It was very exciting. My family was really pleased.

But I was usually embarrassed. My family did not like the show that season. My father felt that his intelligence was being insulted, and I was always embarrassed by that too at that time.

JAMES DOWNEY,
Writer:

The fact is that for all the people who talk about what a nightmare this place is, there’ve been remarkably few true assholes. People can be difficult, and artists are always difficult one way or another. But it’s a trade-off and worth it for what you get. There are a few people where everyone agrees that nothing they give us is worth the pain they give.

I wouldn’t consider Janeane one of those. In her case, I think she’s a very good actress. She’s smart and does great nuance. But to me, the most frustrating thing about her is her whole thing about how straight-ahead and honest she is, and “it’s all about the work.” I’ve never encountered anyone who’s more into the whole working-the-press thing. Someone said she had her first press agent when she was like twenty, and I can believe it. The year she was here, she spent the entire year on the phone with the press, giving them searching, candid interviews about the show. That’s fine, but then don’t play like “I don’t know the system.”

CHRIS ELLIOTT:

My kids watch reruns on Comedy Central, and they’ll come to me and say, “I just saw you half-naked doing this thing where you’re walking into an alien spaceship and you’re supposed to be naked.” And I’m thinking, “Fuck, did I ever do that?” I seriously have no memory of it. And I think it was just such a miserable experience that I have sort of blacked out a lot of these things. That whole year I was just embarrassed.

I think I tried to quit once and, you know, Lorne said no, I’m the type of thing that the show needs. That kind of stuff, you know, blah, blah, blah. I was amazed Janeane actually got out. She had a movie offer and she was just incredibly miserable. And I guess somehow she got out of it. I think I was with Brillstein-Grey, who of course represented Lorne at the time, so there was more pressure on me to stay.

JANEANE GAROFALO:

Although I wanted out after the first week, it took — for whatever reason — until March to make it happen. I talked to my agent and I would talk to other people and then, finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I just couldn’t take it. And I walked into Lorne’s office and I basically told him I was leaving. It wasn’t like a debate or a discussion. Plus, I did not sign a five-year contract, because I had a feeling it would come in handy, and I fought and I fought against signing for five years.

I think when I quit, it was the first time Lorne ever respected me, to be quite honest. It was the nicest he ever was to me, even though he was generally nice to me. The nicest he was was after I quit, and I think he had a bizarre respect and then also, in some way, he hated me, you know? He despised me and was pleased that I quit — pleased that I was leaving and pleased that I had shown some kind of backbone.

LORNE MICHAELS:

Some people, their whole lives, are just injustice collectors. They’re going to find new injustices every day. That’s what they do, and that’s what they are.

There were disgruntled writers too. Tensions that had existed virtually from the beginning between writers and performers — and between performers who were also writers and those who weren’t — flared up anew, perhaps because in the early nineties
, SNL
had seemed so much more a performers’ program than a writers’ showcase. Writers may also have been dismayed at the fortunes amassed by some performers once they left the show and went to Hollywood (in one or two cases taking favored
SNL
writers with them), while the less fortunate stayed behind in New York.
Saturday Night Live
was apparently being looked upon even by some of its cast and creative team the way the network regarded it — as an ATM rather than as a learning experience or a creative challenge.

TERRY TURNER:

Bonnie and I had done comedy writing before. We had written sketches before.
Saturday Night
did a great thing for us. It knocked all the rough edges off of us very fast — that, you know, you didn’t go for certain jokes. You tried to stay smart. You tried to stay current. And if it didn’t work, it was really an abrasive situation.

I remember one time at the end of one particular piece, Lorne got to the end of it, and he said, “And what did we learn from this?” Then everybody snickered and put our piece to one side. I thought, “I’m glad I’m not near the window; I would jump out right now.” It’s a tough environment. It’s a good environment. I’m glad that Bonnie and I had each other to lean on.

JACK HANDEY:

Jim Downey likes to laugh. It seems to amuse him to think that I was fired from the show. He thinks I’m a really good writer, and so it amuses him to think that the show was so stupid that they would fire me. But I sort of decided I’d had enough of the show and they weren’t going to put my “Deep Thoughts” on, and so I went to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and just did some writing there. And then, finally, toward the end of that next season they said, “Hey, come back and do some guest writing.” I did, and everybody really liked what I did, and so they said, well, come back — come back and work on the show some more.

I’d written some “Deep Thoughts” for the
National Lampoon
, and there was a college magazine called
Ampersand
, and I just knew that getting them on television was sort of a key to promoting them. And I felt like it was really important. I did a book of them and that was the main point. I knew that to get a popular book of them, television promotion was important. But I think my worth as a sketch writer finally overcame the resistance to putting my name on it. And they proved to be pretty popular. And also they have a utilitarian purpose on the show which I didn’t foresee, which was that a lot of times they need, you know, thirty seconds to move the cameras from one set to another, so they can just drop in something like that, and so it was helpful in that regard. I probably did more than two hundred of them.

JAMES DOWNEY:

To me it was always, number one, to do comedy about things that are going on in politics or the culture, and do it without confusing or offending the smarter people. I always thought that if comedy is going to confuse anybody, by rights it should be the stupider people. You shouldn’t be punished for knowing more. Sometimes there are things on the show that really annoy me. The more you know about the target of the satire, the more you go, “But wait a minute. That’s not right. He’s precisely the opposite of that.” But for people who only have a passing acquaintance with it, it just feels, “Yeah, that’s right.”

One time there was a Willard Scott thing on the show, and the basic idea was that he was a big, dumb buffoon, and it just made me crazy — and I was the producer at the time and I could have killed it, but of course it got big laughs from the audience. But my point was, “Wait a minute — he knows he’s a big buffoon. That’s his act. So for us to skewer him by having someone do an impression the point of which is that he’s a buffoon makes us look like idiots.” And if I were Willard Scott I would call up on Monday and go, “Hey, morons. I was joking, and you took me seriously.”

ROBERT SMIGEL,
Writer:

I left to do the Conan O’Brien show in ’93. That’s what got me to leave
Saturday Night Live.
I was always afraid to leave unless I had a really good job to go to.

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER

Al wrote his own stuff — Al Inc., you know, he was his own studio. He’d do whatever he did. I got very, very little on the air. The performers who were good wrote. I did do a great piece with John Goodman and Mike on a cruise ship, where Mike was doing Linda Richman and they were playing old Jewish people who could only discuss food on trips. So they just discussed the menus of all their previous cruises. And that was great.