Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (78 page)

When you’re getting $6 million a movie, as one of them said, you can buy a lot of new friends overnight. And he did.

AL FRANKEN,
Writer:

With Belushi we did not know that you died that way. We didn’t understand what addiction does and what was going on. With Farley we understood it, he understood it, because he went to rehab about twelve times. He honestly, honestly struggled and tried. He was a wonderful, sweet, loving guy. He was a fan of other people. He loved his family. I don’t know what it was. That was really sad.

ROBERT SMIGEL:

After Chris died and I thought about the things that could have been done and talked to people who were close to him, I came to realize that no matter what I felt, no matter how frustrated I was, I hadn’t seen a lot of Chris in those last few years. He’d been on the West Coast doing his movies, and every now and then I would hear something or see something and get frustrated and make judgments and confront people — but then I would retreat back into my own problems. So when it came time to talk at Chris’s memorial service in New York, there was a part of me that wanted to address my frustration without placing blame on any individuals, because I didn’t feel like I was involved enough to make those kind of judgments. So when I spoke, I talked about the disappointment I felt in what had happened, but from my own perspective, and just apologized to Chris personally for whatever I hadn’t done. I felt like if anyone heard something in what I said that struck a chord with them, then good, then I could speak for them a little bit too. But at the end of the day, I felt like I could only really speak for my own feelings of letting him down.

Saturday Night Live
had celebrated, in restrained ways, its fifteenth and twentieth anniversaries. There’d been no fifth-anniversary party, of course, because in its fifth year the show had gone all to hell. But it was nothing if not resilient, and that resilience was commemorated in the show’s biggest-ever blowout, a three-hour prime-time twenty-fifth-anniversary party on September 26, 1999. Of those still living who’d ever been part of the
SNL
family, Eddie Murphy was probably the only major graduate who stayed away, reputedly out of some ill-defined animosity toward the show that had made him first famous, then rich, then a movie star. Otherwise it was as gala as galas get, with expatriates and former foes burying hatchets to join in the celebration and more than 22 million viewers watching from their homes. Highlights and oddities from a quarter-century of salutary troublemaking passed in review.

Tom Hanks did the opening monologue, Bill Murray and Paul Shaffer revived Murray’s old lounge-singer routine, there were touching tributes to the show’s many fallen comrades, and Robert Smigel contributed a cartoon mocking Lorne Michaels, who privately lamented that if he had eliminated Smigel’s animated mugging from the show, “Page Six” of the
New York Post
would have reported it. Asked about the cartoon later, Smigel insisted it was a labor not of revenge but of admiration, another example of the curious love-hate relationship common to Michaels’s professional progeny. America had sometimes hated — well, disliked —
Saturday Night Live
over its fitfully hallowed haul as well, but this was a night to forget all failings, real or imagined — a night to commemorate all the good times and anticipate more to come.

BILL MURRAY,
Cast Member:

The old days? I don’t really reflect on them. What are the old days — working real hard, sort of that new excitement of having made it, going to the party after the show, and really just sort of competing. It was a competitive time. You threw out there what you had and you saw how it stacked up. Whenever I get together with a few of those guys it sort of comes back.

We spent so much time together so intensely that I guess it’s like war buddies or something. You don’t have to see them to remember. I don’t see the players much at all. I live in the Northeast; most of them live in California. I don’t see them very often at all, but when I see them it’s great. Like at the twenty-fifth anniversary, we were all there so it was great. Everything they do is fine with me. Anything that happens with them is fine and will always be fine. We just went through too much for me not to wish them well.

You talk about friends for life and stuff, and that’s what it is. We’ll always be connected; we’re sort of working together. I don’t know if it’s just the reruns, but we’re always sort of working together all the time. We sort of went to school together and we’re sort of carrying that stuff out into the world. We all have that experience and we’re affected by it and we carry it out there. When I see them, I feel like they’re doing the same thing I am — they’re out there and they have that history and that experience that only the players had, and only they could ever know what it was like. It’s sort of a secret in a way. It’s like a talisman. It’s something we walked away with. We got to walk away not just with the side effect of success, but with the experience. Having the experience was probably the greatest thing.

When I did the twenty-fifth-anniversary show, there was a very warm feeling, a great feeling of like we were all in the same fraternity or sorority, we all like went to the same school somehow, and it was a really small school. I enjoyed people more than I ever did — other guys from other generations and casts and so forth. I felt no feeling like “ugh.” Because you always used to feel that this could have been different, or you could have done that a little better or something. But there was none of that feeling at all when we got together again. It was just, “Hey, look at this group.” I was able to enjoy everyone so much. I had the best time. It was really delightful.

Tom Davis and I and Paul Shaffer and Marilyn Miller got together to work on something for the show. We went to Paul’s apartment and spent like a couple days doing it. Danny came over. It was like a party. Paul opened some really good wine. Somebody rolled a joint. It was hysterical. We just started telling stories — all the time thinking, “We don’t want this part of it to end. We don’t want this part of it to stop.” We were in no rush to write the sketch. I wanted to do a Bruce Springsteen song. I just thought “Badlands” was the right song. And I was arguing with Marilyn. It’s great to argue with Marilyn. In the old days, I didn’t get Marilyn at first. She used to argue so vociferously, I used to think, “What a bitch this woman is.” She’s sort of this Jewish princess with a literary bent, and it was always like, “I don’t even know how to talk to someone like this.” I would just say stuff like, “Marilyn, come on, you’re wearing thigh-high boots. How the fuck am I supposed to take you seriously?” That’s all I could say to her in my head. I couldn’t really argue with her about the point of it, because she didn’t get my point of view. She didn’t get me at that point. The mistake was always to argue with her about the thing. The right thing to do was always make her laugh. If you could make her laugh, then she could see that you knew what you were talking about, because if you were good enough to make her laugh, you must be funny. And it took me years to figure that out.

So anyway we were arguing about “Badlands.” There’s some lyric in “Badlands” that’s really appropriate for what we did, for what we’d done. It wasn’t “Born to Run” and just doing a classic song, which is what we always used to do; “Badlands” was more about what our experience had been. It was really about us. And Paul was like, “‘Badlands’?” And when we started singing the song, his eyes lit up and he got it. He looked at me and he got it. Marilyn was still arguing and Paul said, “It’s going to be ‘Badlands.’” Paul will listen to everything, he’s a fantastic listener, but when he actually speaks, he’s speaking because he knows the right answer. So when he got it, it was like, “Great. Now we’re there.” The writing of it and doing that as a group was really fun. I think we took five or six days to finish it.

Singing the harmony part with Paul to “Badlands” on that show was one of the high points of my entire career. We hit the notes. We pushed the hell out of it. We even put more lyrics in. They wanted to cut lyrics and cut the time and we said, “No, this is what we’re going to do,” and everybody just got out of the way. And when we did it and we nailed it, I thought, “Bruce Springsteen’s got to be liking this.”

It was sort of an honor to have the first sketch on that show, I thought. And I thought we just killed. We had a blast. And to really just go out there, cold, and to show them that we still had it, that we can go out there and kill, no warm-up, just walk out there, the show opens up and kills from the first minute — that was great. And then the show just sort of cruised from there on. Everybody was funny, everybody was loose. The show was a success from the first sketch. If the first sketch had died, there would have been tension, there would have been anxiety, people would have pushed a little too hard. God, they did a great show. Everybody did great. Everybody was funny. The party was great; the party went on and on.

TOM HANKS:

At the twenty-fifth-reunion show, I remember thinking, “Why did I get saddled with the monologue again? Why am I always the guy with the monologue?” I did the monologue in the fifteenth-anniversary show too, and actually made a joke about it: “I’ve been elected to come out with what is traditionally the funniest part of the show, the monologue, the host monologue.” It’s a terrible job. But then again, to go up there and do it on the twenty-fifth-anniversary show, come on, that’s a thrill. And an honor.

I think a lot of people who leave go away saying they’re never going to come back. They feel just devoured by the experience of doing the show. But as time goes by, I think they realize that, hey, they were part of something that is singular and that there’s still nothing else like on TV. I think it’s interesting that there have been many, many attempts to try to re-create whatever
Saturday Night Live
does, and they all fail. That’s why I found the twenty-fifth-anniversary reunion so emotional, because all these people from different eras who had gone through this quagmire and had been in the trenches and everything, they just forgot about it and were feeling real celebra-tory. It was a nice evening. Lord knows, it was star-studded as well.

AL FRANKEN:

Saturday Night Live
was a very positive experience for all of us. It was like really just a wonderful fucking thing for everybody. There were pressures and there were some people who didn’t succeed with the show as much as they would like and may have some feelings about that. But like this last anniversary show was a wonderful experience. Maybe it’s just from being older, but everybody sort of didn’t care. Like it didn’t matter whether you had become a $20 million a movie performer or you were Laraine. Everybody was sort of like, “We did this thing.” They might have felt differently ten years ago or something. But it was a great experience. The more people have experience with other things, the more they appreciate what we had.

Of course, I’m sure you’ve heard some very bitter things too.

ANDY BRECKMAN:

Downey hates the way that Lorne recently has had guest stars in as sort of stunts. He’d turn around and there’s Joe Pesci or Robert De Niro or Jack Nicholson. Who can we get, who’s in town, who can pump this up? My kid brother, David, eleven years younger, he wrote for one year on
Saturday Night Live
, back whenever the Pesci– De Niro thing was, and he was struggling. Because he writes kind of smart, writerly pieces, and they were just looking for stuff to feed characters. He was not getting material on that he could sell at all.

And the first sketch that he officially got on the show survived the cut between dress and air and was slated for the last slot of the show. And Lorne lately has been cutting sketches even during the show, so even being on the final rundown is a little tenuous. But he was officially on and he was thrilled, and it was his first sketch on — and then when Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, in the middle of that show, made their surprise appearance, the recognition applause in the studio — I didn’t have a stopwatch, but it seemed to go on over sixty seconds, it seemed to never end, like a full minute or ninety seconds of recognition applause. And my brother was watching and knew that because of that, his sketch would be bumped. And that just killed him.

MAYA RUDOLPH:

I passed on my first audition because I’d gotten another job offer. But I didn’t really want it. This is all I ever really wanted to do. I waited my whole life to be on
Saturday Night Live.
And then when they said come and audition, I’d just been offered a job on a hospital drama called
City of Angels
, a new Steven Bochco series. So I passed on the audition and I was miserable for a month. I was shooting this drama during the week and doing comedy on Sundays. And Steve Higgins came to the theater and he said, “If you don’t get picked up for your show, would you be interested in coming back to New York?” And I said, “Yes, please.” I never wanted to make that mistake again. So I ended up meeting with Lorne. If interviews are based on how you think you did, I did horribly and should not have gotten the job. I was quite convinced he was not going to give me the job. I didn’t feel very secure in the meeting and I was terrified, and I think I ate a piece of popcorn and I was afraid I was going to choke. I just remember being quiet. I’m not a very loud comedian when I’m in one-on-one, and I remember walking back to my hotel thinking, “I will never enter that building again.” It was the worst interview of my life. I was an idiot. I was horrible and not convincing.

They brought me in at the end of the twenty-fifth season for the last three shows of that season. I don’t think a lot of people had much fair warning that I was coming, as far as what I’ve been told from the cast. I think I was sort of dropped on them a couple days before I came: “Oh, by the way, this new girl’s coming, Maya Rudolph.” And I think it definitely made a lot of the women feel, “What does this mean for us? Are we being replaced?” A lot of people were sort of like, “What the hell? We had no idea you were hiring a new cast member at the end of the season.”