Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (82 page)

DON OHLMEYER:

I’ve always admired what Lorne’s been able to do for so long. When you think of all the different sketches that have gone into
SNL
since, what, 1975 — when you think of all the things that they’ve done, there’s a lot of chaff among the wheat. But God, the wheat is spectacular.

LORNE MICHAELS:

I tend to think that the most interesting work done each week gets on the air. I think that’s what an editor’s supposed to do, bring out the best in writers. Do we get the best writers? I think people who want to do this kind of work find us. Now there’s
Mad TV
, and on cable there’s a bunch of these kinds of shows. Conan O’Brien, Leno, do all these sketches. Most of the writers who have been on
The Simpsons
are people who passed through here.
Seinfeld
too.

I’ve never left here on any Saturday night thinking, “Well, that was a great one.” I tend to see only the mistakes. That hasn’t changed. Neither has the amount of adrenaline that you produce to get through the show. What has changed is that the hangover of it is generally gone by sometime Sunday, whereas it used to be that a show that didn’t work could ruin a whole month. You’d go back and obsess about it. It’s like at the beginning you just worry all the time, and when you get older you know when to worry.

Now on the weekend I have kids jumping on me. You can’t get out of it with “Daddy worked really, really hard,” or “Daddy was up till four-thirty in the morning.” The worst thing is when you find that you still have the taste of beer in your mouth and you’re getting up and being a dad and it’s only been four or five hours since you went to bed.

GWYNETH PALTROW:

Fame is such a weird and distorting thing. I’ve thought a lot about it, and my theory is that you kind of stop growing at the age you are when you become famous. Because what happens is, people start removing all your obstacles, and if you have no obstacles you don’t know who you are. You don’t have real perspective on the problems that face you in life, how to surmount them, and what kind of character you have. When you’re in the public eye, people project things onto you, and if you take them on yourself, they’re very scattering and they can alienate you. Being famous can be very damaging in lots of ways.
Saturday Night Live
is proof of that.

DARRELL HAMMOND:

I try to improve myself every week. It’s the only hope I have of making it in show business is to improve. I have to be better than I was. That’s the way I look at it, because I’m not a glamour person. If that’s what it was all about, then I would just be glamorous. You know, I would love to be a glamour boy, but I’m not.

DAN AYKROYD:

Oh listen, I’m a big fan of the show today. I look at Second City as the B.A. program in comedy and improv and writing, and I look at
Saturday Night Live
as the masters program. And then after that point in life, you get your Ph.D. in whatever you go into. So I would say I probably have enough knowledge to teach a graduate-level course in film production now.

But definitely
Saturday Night Live
is the masters program, and I look at it as my alma mater, and I love going back. When I’m in New York, I love to go to the show and sit with Lorne and watch it. I love associating with the new writers, and I’m a big fan of the current cast. You’ve got some outstanding players there.

Every era has its great, great moments. I think in our time if you look at Roseanne Roseannadanna and the Coneheads and the Blues Brothers, and other things that we did. And then if you look at Eddie Murphy’s time, you know, his Gumby and his Buckwheat and just some of the things that he did that were outstanding. And then you have Dana Carvey with the Church Lady, which was an amazing amalgam of everything you’d ever want in a scene or sketch — accent, voice, walk, attitude, dialogue, delivery, all that was there. And now Chris’s Mr. Peepers, you know, that monkeylike creature that he does, and everything that Will Ferrell does is fantastic, and Horatio is wonderful as well. He’s a little undiscovered, I think.

So every year has its breakthrough moments. The tradition’s being carried on in a grand way. It’s an institution.

AMY POEHLER:

We did a show with Queen Latifah as guest host. In one sketch, she and Maya and I were playing this kind of doo-wop group, these sixties girls, and we rehearsed the songs for a couple days beforehand. It was kind of a “Behind the Music” thing. So during the live show, with ten seconds to go before the sketch, we could hear Jena Rositano, the stage manager, talking into her headset saying, “Wait. What? What?? Do you want me to tell them that? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?”

MAYA RUDOLPH:

We kept hearing her say into her headset, “Do you want me to tell them that?” Then she said, “Okay.” And it was like eight seconds to go, and she looks up and says to us, “You’re going to be singing with no music. Five, four, three —” And we had four songs to sing! And you just go, “Ugh.” The show goes so smoothly most of the time, we don’t realize when it fucks up how bad things can be. We had dance moves and costume changes and songs and harmonies. We had rehearsed it to death and then it just blew up in our faces because there was no music track. That was scary. It was horrible. It was really, really horrible.

AMY POEHLER:

I loved it. We just sang it without the music. And it was one of those things like, “Oh my God, the fuckin’ show
is
live. It really is.” Of course there’s some poor person who screwed up the music who’s getting screamed at, but I loved it. I thought it was super exciting. I used to love that about watching the show. I loved being reminded that anything could happen. I loved the screwups. I loved being reminded that it was live.

AL GORE:

The timing of my hosting
Saturday Night Live
was driven mainly by the timing of our book tour, and the timing of my decision to run or not run was driven by the end of the calendar year. And the two just began to converge. It’s really interesting the way they fell together, two nights in a row. That was not part of a master plan; it just happened that way. I taped
60 Minutes
on Sunday, just a few hours before it was shown. I didn’t make the final decision really until that week-end. What I had intended to do was to wait until the Christmas vacation period, when all of my family was going to be together. And we were going to take a number of days away from everything and everybody, and I was just going to think it through with them and get their feedback. And because of the week of rehearsals, it ended up with the entire family converging in New York that week.

Most of the time when I was not in rehearsals, I was sitting around the suite in the hotel with my family. And the process that I had expected to take place over the Christmas break spontaneously occurred that week because we were all together. I hadn’t realized it would happen that way. I knew that once I reached a conclusion one way or the other, I was going to announce it pretty quickly, because I just didn’t want to be out there saying disingenuously, “I don’t know if I’m going to run,” when I really knew that I was or wasn’t. So when the family process just emerged, it catalyzed the endgame in my thinking sooner than I expected.

And so midway through that week, I began to lean toward not running. And I tried that idea on for size. And by Saturday I had pretty much decided yeah, I’m not going to do it. But by then the impending performance was a welcome distraction, because you just give yourself over to the vortex of the live performance, and I just put it all on hold until the following day. It actually turned out to be a pretty healthy way to do it, although I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody. It just happened.

Absolutely I would have done the sketches I did if I had decided to run for president. I didn’t see anything wrong with them. And yes, Tipper and I were really kissing during the opening. Absolutely. I think it was even longer than at the convention.

For me, doing the show was similar to the reason why I love downhill skiing. I am not very good at it, so it takes every ounce of concentration I have in order to avoid killing myself on the way down the mountain, and when I get to the bottom, I feel refreshed because I have not thought about anything other than surviving. And that’s pretty much the way that Saturday was.

Oh, it was great fun hosting. I had a blast and so did Tipper. We really enjoyed it a lot. And all of our kids had fun. Our second oldest daughter, Kristin, is a comedy writer working in Hollywood, and she has a number of friends who are on the writing staff at
SNL
that she knew from the
Harvard Lampoon
days, so they invited her to come and participate during that week. So we had a little inside track in getting into the minds of what was coming up. That made it even more fun, because we got to hear about a lot of skits that didn’t get as far as us.

I’m embarrassed to tell you that before I was there on Monday of that week, I really didn’t even know that they did the whole thing twice on Saturday night. That’s such an elementary thing not to know, but I did not know it. I’d never stood in line for tickets or anything like that. I just always watch it on TV. I don’t think they had any sense that they were breaking it to me as a news flash when they told me, and I tried not to let them know that I didn’t know it.

I remember actually when I first began to try and master the voice and mannerisms of Trent Lott. I watched a bunch of videotapes and I figured, “You know, I just really don’t know how to do this.” But I kept at it and ended up faking it pretty well. It was what it was.

I had to say no to a few things. If you don’t, you’re not doing your job as a host. They depend on that. But I didn’t say no to very much. I thought they had a tremendous number of good ideas. Now there were some that I thought were funny as hell that I nevertheless wasn’t comfortable doing, because I wasn’t comfortable saying the words. But I’m sure that’s par for the course.

I thought the reaction was really heartening. I still have people come up to me to this day saying, “Hey, really liked you and Tipper on
Saturday Night Live.
” That’s just a lot of fun. We had great fun doing it. The show is such a wonderful part of American culture.

JAMES DOWNEY:

If the show were ever canceled, you could never get something like it on again. The idea that the best way to improve it is to cancel it and start over is bullshit. They should definitely keep it on. I don’t think a little ratings pressure is the worst thing in the world, but it’s probably better not to go crazy over that and give things time. If the show is bad, everyone knows instantly that it’s bad. But if it starts to get good again, it seems to take like four years for the word to get around.

I think if Lorne were to step down, the show would very quickly be canceled. I’m absolutely convinced of that — especially at this point. The moment he’s replaced, then there’s no argument against replacing “that guy.” And once that starts to happen, the network will pick that show to pieces. It will get worse and worse and worse, and they will never acknowledge that it was their meddling that made it worse. Besides, I can only imagine the kind of person he’d be replaced with. Believe me, they would not pick some bold young cutting-edge thinker who would startle everyone with his ideas. It would be someone who would make the show much more like the rest of the network.

JEFF ZUCKER,
President, NBC Entertainment:

I’ve been watching the show since I was a little kid. What I remember the most is probably Gilda and Roseanne Roseannadanna.

Having been a producer of the
Today
show for almost ten years, I had a lot of respect for what Lorne does as a producer. And I think the biggest thing an executive can do in those kinds of roles is just support the producers and let their vision speak. There was nothing broken at
Saturday Night Live.
People are fond of saying certain years are better than other years, but at the end of the day, it’s all pretty good and pretty special.

I actually think that one of the biggest things I wanted to do when I got my job was address the fact that Lorne and this cast have been totally underutilized by NBC. I can’t speak to what happened in relationships before me, but obviously I had a relationship with Lorne from being here in New York, at the
Today
show, and having grown up in New York. I think that that has helped. It’s not an accident that we’ve had a pilot with Lorne each of the last two years, that Tracy Morgan is going to do a show for us, and that we have a development deal with Tina Fey. One of the things that I’m most proud of is that we’re tapping into this.

ROBERT WRIGHT:

The show has always been a magnet for criticism, but I would say honestly less so in the last number of years. I don’t think it’s because the show isn’t daring; I think it’s because there is so much material on television that offends groups one way or the other that they don’t have enough time in a day to write letters to us and the other two hundred shows that they’re unhappy about. Today it has to survive not on outrageousness but on extremely good performances and great writing, because in terms of the outrageous aspect — there’s just too many places you can go for that.

KEN AYMONG:

I love seeing new people start on this show. A couple years ago I started giving them tickets from their first show that they worked on. I always wish I had had that myself. It’s more important, though, for a writer, because that is what this show is; it’s a celebration of writing — enhanced by performers, obviously, and the director and Lorne and everybody else who works here. The biggest part of the show to me is the celebration of ideas. That’s what I love most about it.