Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (67 page)

ADAM SANDLER:

The guys at
SNL
protected me a lot. They didn’t tell me much. I really didn’t even know who Ohlmeyer was. I never met him, I don’t think. I just felt if Lorne likes me and if Downey likes me, I’m safe. And then I heard at the end that Lorne was having to fight for me to be on the show. This is what Sandy, my manager, would tell me, that NBC wasn’t happy with me. And I’d say, “What’s Lorne think?” “Oh, Lorne’s happy with you.” And I said, “Okay, all right, then we’re all set then, right?” And I think at the time Lorne was catching a little bit of flak from them, so he had to listen more than he had in the past.

See, I don’t even know if I was fired. I don’t know how it was handled. I just remember feeling like, “Did I quit, or did I get fired? I have no idea.” But all of a sudden I wasn’t on the show anymore. But I was friends with everyone at
Saturday Night Live
still. That’s all that counted to me. I never had a tight relationship with NBC. The guys who were important to me were Lorne and Downey and Smigel, of course Herlihy — who is an amazing guy — and a couple of the other writers. It really was creatively the best time of my life. I’m honored to be a member of that bunch of alumni, and I have my best friends from that show. It does feel like we went to war together, even though it was a positive thing. Nobody was scared for their lives, but we stuck it out together, and every Saturday night people were tuning in to laugh, and we wanted to make sure that we got the job done. And we all have a nice bond together.

DON OHLMEYER,
NBC Executive:

Well, I got into it very straightforward with Lorne. I mean, it’s not really my job to talk to Jim Downey. Actually, we would meet twice a year, and like I said, I was very straightforward. I think people pretty much knew where they stood with me in terms of what I felt. I wasn’t one of these kind of people that would glad-hand people and then talk behind their backs. I think Jim Downey is maybe as good a political satirist, writer, as there’s ever been in television. I think when Jim was the head writer, there were some issues on the show. When you have the talent that was assembled during that period and the shows were as flat as they were, there’s some issues somewhere. That was just my perception.

WARREN LITTLEFIELD:

There was one old writer — oh yeah, Jim Downey. Jim’s brilliant. He had a wonderful, wonderful career. But Jim, I think some would say, was a little burnt-out. He’d done it for a long time. And so finally for Ohlmeyer it became, “You know what? We will not accept anything less than excellence.”

JAMES DOWNEY:

I’ve only met Ohlmeyer three times. He’d been just relentlessly trying to get me fired for like nine months before he ever laid eyes on me. He had this theory that the problem was the show was flat — because we’d come off this gigantic ratings year, ’92–’93, which had to do with “Wayne’s World.” I thought, and most of the writers there thought, the show was clearly in decline. There was like a three-year lag between the ratings we got and the ratings we deserved. We thought it was more ’89–’90 that the show was creatively better and that by 1993 we were sort of coasting. We averaged like a 9.5 rating with the “Wayne’s World” heat. We haven’t seen that in many, many years.

My marriage was falling apart because I was spending way too much time at the show. I remember thinking it’s not worth it to do anything embarrassing to keep this job. So I’m not going out of my way to antagonize them, but I’m not going to kiss their ass. Because I could come home and say, “Honey, I was fired.” But I could not come home and say, “Honey, I quit. Aren’t you proud of me? Now I have to find a new job.” So that was the idea.

NORM MACDONALD:

I think Lorne even conceded that changes needed to be made and decided to overhaul. But I think also that nobody liked Jim at the network at that time. He’s not a very savvy office politician when it comes to talking to people or anything. He’s more like an artist guy who wants to be left alone. He’s really into comedy, so he’s not that good with the suits.

JAMES DOWNEY:

With the arrival of Ohlmeyer and then NBC doing so well, the basic personality of the network became more aggressive and confi-dent and notey. They were feeling their oats. They used to talk about
Friends
and often contrast
Friends
to
Seinfeld
by saying, “We cast
Friends
,” the implication being that’s why the people were more attractive. So they were very confident. It used to be that they would not offer anything except, “My God, you guys are great and we’re not here to tell you your job,” and then it became, “Just for what it’s worth, we loved that, just great,” and then it became, “I don’t know that this works,” and it finally reached a point where it became, “We don’t care that it’s popular, we don’t want you doing this because we don’t like it.” That’s not even a business value. They were so at peace with their own taste and worldview that they were willing to take an economic hit just to have something enacted. That reached its peak I would say in the ’94–’95 period.

One of the network’s ideas that they were very serious about was, why does it have to be live? And why do you need a guest host, when it’s the cast that brings the people back each week? And they bitched about how the live element made it much more expensive and complicated, and how you could go shoot all your
Jeopardy
sketches in one afternoon.

LORNE MICHAELS:

When it all hit, my son Eddie had just been born and there were some complications. It turned out to be nothing but there was a day and a half or two days of concern. Alice gave birth to him at twelve-thirty, I think, in the afternoon and I still managed to make read through back at 30 Rock. We had made elaborate preparations in case I couldn’t be there — altering the chain of command and all that stuff. But I got back to the office, and it was the week Sarah Jessica Parker hosted, and it was just around the time that we were just being hounded everywhere.

I don’t think I’d ever been as scared. You know, I was never scared in the seventies. I think because I was single then, I had already been through rough periods in my life and there was nothing really that was going to scare me — I mean, so what would happen? I would be broke and washed up, and I’d already had that a couple of times.

DON OHLMEYER:

Lorne and I used to have long involved conversations, almost psychoanalytical, about the problems. Sometimes identifying the problems is the most difficult thing. It’s very subjective. I would certainly never presume that I know more about doing
Saturday Night Live
than Lorne. I can watch the show and react as a viewer, or I can watch the show and react as somebody who is running the operation and has a vested interest in the success of the show. I can look at the numbers. I can do all these different things. But if you’re not there on a day-today basis, you don’t really know what the problem is.

Lorne knew that there was a problem, but I think he was unsure of exactly what the problem was. Objectively Lorne knew the show could be better. You had to look at what are the strengths and weaknesses of the cast, even though they’re very talented. Do we need some fresh blood? Do we need a fresh approach in the writing?

“Ultimatum” is a difficult word. No, I never gave Lorne an ultimatum. But what I basically said to him is, “The show has to get better.”

6

Still Crazy After All These Years: 1995–

It had been something of a
Saturday Night
massacre. Lorne Michaels was forced to fire Adam Sandler and Chris Farley (he was ordered to fire Tim Meadows too, but managed to stay that execution). Veteran Jim Downey was ousted as head writer, Mike Myers had gone to Hollywood to make movies and money.
Saturday Night Live
probably had nowhere to go but up, back up, rebounding as it had done so many times before. It didn’t hurt that the likes of Will Ferrell, Cheri Oteri, Darrell Hammond, Chris Kattan, Jimmy Fallon, Ana Gasteyer, Tracy Morgan, Molly Shannon, Horatio Sanz, and Tina Fey were waiting in the wings.

ALEC BALDWIN,
Host:

Some of the cast members and writers leave the show and do things that are elevated compared to what they’re asked to do on the show, but many of them — this is a terrible thing to say — leave there and become the very thing they made fun of on the show.

One of the oddest elements of the show is that you’re standing next to some guy one day doing the show and you think that they’re funny, but you turn around and five years later they’re getting paid $20 million a movie. There are people I worked with there who I never thought in my wildest dreams that they’d go on to become the apotheosis of movie comedy of their day. So now I’m nice to everybody on the show. No matter who I work with, no matter what a sniveling, drooling wuss they are, I embrace them all like they’re my dearest friend and my most respected colleague.

ROBERT WRIGHT,
NBC Chairman and CEO:

I haven’t made that many trips to the seventeenth floor. As a matter of fact, my one official trip to the seventeenth floor — I don’t remember the date — was when we had gone through a painful period of recasting, and it was the only time that I was really involved in it. Lorne was really being very good to me. He was humoring me along all the way. He was sending me audition tapes. I was getting really nervous that we were going to do something dumb, that there was so much pressure on Lorne that he would do something that he didn’t want to do because he thought the company wanted him to do it.

I was saying to myself, “I’ve seen this show probably more than anybody at NBC has. I know what’s funny on this show and what isn’t funny.” I really felt that way. So he was sending me tapes that summer, and then when the cast was picked, and I was in complete agreement with the people he’d picked, I marched up to the seventeenth floor, maybe it was just before the season began or just after, and I remember the cast then was Chris Farley, Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, Chris Kattan just arrived, and Ana and Cheri. I had seen all their tapes, so you kind of feel like you know these people. They didn’t know me, but I’d seen their tapes.

So I go up there and I’m very friendly and everything. “Hi, how you doing?” And — oop! They were standing there — Lorne had them all lined up, it was like a wedding, but there were no other people at the wedding except us and Lorne. And they were just like — umphf! “Hi!” “Umphf!” All of a sudden it wasn’t cozy at all. And Lorne would say, “No, you can talk! You can talk to him!” And to me, “You can talk to them.” So it took a while. We were there about fifteen minutes and I said, “Well, why don’t you just tell me how you feel about being on the show?” And Lorne is going, “Tell him what you really think, go ahead, you can say things.” I said to Lorne afterward, “I don’t think this is really a good idea, Lorne.” He said, “I don’t know why they did that. They’re very comfortable and everything. They’re very happy.”

LORNE MICHAELS,
Executive Producer:

I can be pretty savage about people here in terms of what I think their flaws are. I can get abusive. I don’t think that what I do between dress and air is terribly nurturing. It’s more military, like a drill. My notes tend to be to the point. I think there’s a real toughness with people who are funny in the way they’ve developed their own armor, but some of the people here are made of glass. They can be just very insensitive to other people and at the same time if you pointed out the same thing to them, most of them would be surprised or hurt.

There’s an enormous amount of pettiness in this place, on this floor. You have a lot of writers fighting for time on the show. There’s an old Hebrew proverb that if you have six Jews in a town, you have seven synagogues. And I think it’s about the same with writers. While they can acknowledge someone else’s talent or work, there’s always a qualifier.

It takes me a long time to understand why I don’t like people. I think it’s a problem I haven’t solved. The idea that people are dumb or not interested always comes as a surprise to me. I always thought I could talk to just about anybody and make myself understood. And when you realize that isn’t the case, that either they don’t get it or have no interest in it, it takes me a long time to figure that out. Because I go, “Why would you be here? Why would you pick this place to want to work?”

STEVE HIGGINS,
Producer:

We hear that “it isn’t as good as it used to be” thing constantly. I think it probably started on show two in 1975. It’s a matter of time before we’re going to read “Saturday Night Dead” in the papers again.

A funny thing happened when I got here — Lorne mapped the whole thing out. He told me, “Here’s what’s going to happen: Ohlmeyer’s going to be gone — he’s giving us grief now, but he’s going to be gone — and somebody else will come in, and by that time the show will be at its height again, but then two years later it’ll come down again because the avalanche will start. You’ll see ‘Saturday Night Dead,’ we’ll see that for a while, and then it’ll be, ‘The show is funnier than it’s ever been,’ and then it’ll be, ‘The show is worse than it’s ever been.’”

And it’s worked out exactly like that. And you go, okay, if you’re caught up in this historical cycle, you just try to stave off that “the show’s not as funny” crap. And the thing is, you wouldn’t go to a carpenter’s house and go, “Wow, what a crappy job you did on your shelves.” Or say to a doctor, “How many patients have you killed?” But people feel free to comment in ways that make you go, “Where do you think you get the nerve?” I think they think they own the show.

You know what? If you like everything in the show, then that’s not a good show. If you love every single thing, there’s something wrong. It’s like pushing the envelope, which is a horrible term, but it’s about making that tent big enough so that everybody’s included, so that there’s something for everybody in the show. You should like
most
of it. But there might be some performance piece that you go, “I just don’t get that,” and it killed and the audience loves it and you go, “I guess that worked.” And that’s one thing that Lorne is good at. He’ll put enough in that there’s always some plus side to it.

JAMES DOWNEY,
Writer:

Certainly the people at the network did not like the show at all in 1993, 1994, those seasons. When the new group came together in 1995, taking myself out of it, I think that, as much as innocent people were implicitly scapegoated, it was probably necessary that the word be out everywhere that, “No no no, they cleaned house. All the dead-wood’s gone. They have a whole new cast. It’s all new.”

Starting around ’95,
Saturday Night Live
became very much a performer’s show. There were new innovations limiting what writers could do. Writers had to write one piece for a character and then they could write a premise piece. It was enforcing the idea that “the cast isn’t here to bring to life the writers’ notions; the writers are there to supply material for the characters that the cast already does.” That was a big shift.

That’s the biggest way the show has changed: It’s come way back to the idea of being a performers’ show that features characters. You see the same characters a lot. Writers are the people who never want to repeat stuff. If you’re in a writers meeting and your quote-unquote idea for the week is, “I think we can do another Mango,” you would be groaned out of the room, whereas performers like repeating stuff and they don’t tend to hear, “Why do you guys keep doing Cheerleaders?” When they walk down the street, they get recognized as being on the show, and by and large the people who come up to them don’t come up to them to give them shit, they come up to say, “Hey, we love the show.”

If someone ran an analysis of the show, I would bet if you take everything in the history of the show that’s even been on three times and then from that master list figure out, of the repeat characters, which have racked up the most appearances on the show, I would be willing to bet that of the top ten, seven of them would be from this last period. Things like Mango, Cheerleaders, and so on, whereas in the entire history of the show, there were only four Czech brothers pieces. There were only, I think, seven Conehead sketches. But I promise you there were fifteen Cheerleaders. There had to be. If you said there were eighteen, it wouldn’t surprise me.

PAULA PELL,
Writer:

I got there in ’95. That was the year that a huge amount of people didn’t come back from the year before, and Lorne kind of cleaned house of everything and started anew. So it was really great because we all came in together. We also didn’t have any idea how to do the show. None of us had worked on the show before, and since it’s such a different beast than anything else, we all had that attitude that “We’re just going to try everything,” and it was pretty great. It almost felt like going away to college. Everyone was in all these little dorm rooms. In the hall everyone was getting to know each other. We went out all the time. We were all fairly young. Not many people were married or had kids yet. It was sort of one of those times when everyone was on the same wavelength. Creatively it’s hard to come in and figure out what it all is. We were just going forward. We were like, “Screw it,” and, “Let’s just try.” We were all energized, because everyone was thrilled to have this job.

We had one meeting with Lorne where he talked about, “We’re going to bring it up again and get it going again.” I was aware just as a viewer that they were coming off a bad year. I knew when I first came and met Lorne, before I got hired, he talked about the fact that the show has an arc to it and that it would come back up, a Phoenix rising many times, and this was one of those times we were hoping to bring it back up. It just seemed to have a lot of fatigue and no one was really clicking along together anymore in a creative way. So it seemed like it had a sort of natural death. And his attitude at the time was like, “I’ve seen it happen before, and I think this is a great new cast and new writers, and I think we can do it again.” It was pretty slow at first, and I remember the press at first, there’d be an article that says, “
Saturday Night Live
is great again,” and then the next week it would be, “Oh, I spoke too soon.”

Friction between
Saturday Night Live
and network executives continued into the second half of the 1990s. Although Jim Downey was held in awe by his peers and Norm Macdonald was Chevy Chase’s favorite among all those who succeeded him in the “Update” anchor chair, the team became the target of an essentially one-man crusade. NBC West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer had earlier declared war on Downey as program producer and got him thrown out early in 1995. Downey resurfaced thanks to artful maneuvering by Lorne Michaels, his duties limited mainly to the “Update” segment. That was fine with him but not with Ohlmeyer, who wanted him out of there too. By the 1997–98 season, Ohlmeyer was even more adamant about getting rid of Macdonald — it had turned into a veritable fixation.

Ironically, Macdonald had originally taken over “Update” with Ohlmeyer’s implicit blessing; he’d been adamant at that time that the position not be given to an
SNL
veteran who had long wanted it (and was an old pro at ruffling peacock feathers), Al Franken. That had all been private, but now Ohlmeyer’s interventions were loud and public. In the entire tumultuous history of the show, it had probably never been the focus of a more explicit conflict between the business and creative sides of the network. Nor had there been a more concentrated assault on the independence and integrity of Lorne Michaels.

Insiders and outsiders alike, meanwhile, saw it as something other than a coincidence that the Downey-Macdonald “Updates” were mirthfully merciless on the topic of O. J. Simpson, that well-known unconvicted murderer-about-town, who’d hosted the show in its third season and, more significantly, was a longtime golf-playing crony of none other than Don Ohlmeyer.

JAMES DOWNEY:

I don’t think anyone needed to tell me particularly — I mean, Lorne had been telling me for two years now — how unhappy Don Ohlmeyer was with me. Ohlmeyer was practically putting out memos saying, “Do not ask or accept advice from this clown.” Lorne was probably put in a weird bind when I was doing “Update” with Norm Macdonald, because I know he didn’t like that approach to “Update.” He thought it was too mean and cold and nasty. So he would have been in a strange position on principle, wanting to fight and run interference for us even though he actually didn’t like it that much more than the network did. I think I’m right about this just from knowing him.

NORM MACDONALD,
Cast Member:

Me and Jim were kind of like alone at
SNL
, you know, especially when the new bunch came in. In many ways they resented Jim, because he was much smarter and funnier than them. And he was like the old crew, you know what I mean? When he went over to “Update,” I think they would have been happier to have him gone. After Jim got fired as a producer, I think it shocked the new establishment there that I wanted him to come to do “Update” with me. It was weird for everybody.