Live From New York Part 12

JAMES DOWNEY:.

Jean was like a fas.h.i.+on person. It was all about restaurants and clothes and stuff. She didn't seem to me to have much of a sense of humor. The only time I've gone to a party where I was kind of awestruck was when she called me and said, "Woody Allen's going to have a party," and Woody apparently never had parties. And when she called me she said, "Don't tell anybody else." It was like 1980, '81, and I went with my college girlfriend. It was in Woody's house, I thought it was his house, because it was a townhouse. You went upstairs. You actually met him at the door and he like stayed there the whole evening with Jean, who would a.s.sure him that whoever came through the door was not a dangerous or menacing person.

Walt Frazier was the first person I saw, then John Lindsay. It was a very New York thing, and the best collection of camera-shy, publicity-shy, retiring type people I'd ever seen. Paul Newman was there, Truman Capote, even Jackie Kennedy.

In one of the last sketches of Sat.u.r.day Night Live 's fifth season, Laraine Newman played a n.o.blewoman, Garrett Morris played a butler, writers Jim Downey and Tom Davis played Lords Worcesters.h.i.+re and Wilkinson - of sauce and razor-blade fame, respectively - Jane Curtin was Lady Wilkinson, Bill Murray played the Earl of Sandwich ("I'm afraid nothing has been named after a member of my family," he lamented), his brother Brian Doyle-Murray was a servant, and host Buck Henry joined Gilda Radner to play the princ.i.p.al characters of the sketch, Lord and Lady Douchebag. The setting was the manor of Lord Salisbury, whose steaks were served to the guests, and the year 1730. "My dear Sandwich," said Henry, in character, "Parliament has always had its share of Douchebags, and it always will."

And on this mildly satirical and intentionally ridiculous note, what was left of the original cast and creators of Sat.u.r.day Night Live would soon part, never to perform together again. The stakes were being pulled up and the circus was leaving town. It was May 24, 1980, the end of the fifth season but also of an era. Lorne ended the last show on a shot of theON AIRsign going off.

JEAN DOUMANIAN:.

I think Lorne would've stayed on, but NBC wouldn't give him the deal he wanted. So he went away. Lorne wasn't very happy about me getting the job. Because after all, it was Lorne's baby, and he wanted Franken and Davis to get it. But Silverman didn't want them, and Brandon didn't want them either. They thought that I could do it.

I had been in every writers meeting when Lorne was producing. I had seen how the writing was done. Besides, Lorne really wasn't writing, he was editing and selecting. I took the job because I thought it would be a challenge. There was no other woman doing a live ninety-minute television show, and I wanted to see if I could do it. I did want to keep several writers, but I think everybody was advised not to stay on. I don't know who advised them, but four writers said they would stay, and then they had a change of heart and came back and said they couldn't. In fact, everybody who said they would stay reneged once word got out.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

I had no problem with people staying with their jobs. That was not a problem for me. I think in the case of Franken, Davis, Downey, and a couple others who were the people I had nominated to succeed me, because they embodied the writing perspective, Jean didn't want them. What happened was, everyone got a memo from Jean to clear out their offices by July. Now this had been a group that had lived there for five years. That was what killed everything, when she made that one big mistake. It was a signal of, you know, "a new broom." I didn't get the memo, because I'd left. For guys like Franken and that, it was the first sign that they weren't even being considered to stay.

LARAINE NEWMAN:.

I was dying to go home. On the other hand, I knew, having grown up in Los Angeles, what it was like to have been on a series and to no longer be on one. I knew what it was that I was facing, to have been on a hit show and then be an unemployed actor. So I was a little worried about that. Mostly I was glad to be back in L.A., because I love New York for about five days, but after that it's just utter toil. I came from a car culture. Not to be able to drive myself around is like imprisonment to me.

JANE CURTIN:.

I was happy to move on, I was tired. You get very burned-out after doing something like that. And you get very jaded. It was very hard to deal with going from relative obscurity to everybody knowing who you are. I had to deal with what I had become. It was hard to deal with on the show, because you were busy doing the show - so I had to come to terms with what I had become and try to adjust to that. I needed time off.

HOWARD Sh.o.r.e:.

I have quite a fondness for that period, those first five years. You were doing something that you knew was something. You were creating something, and n.o.body had quite gone there before. And you were with a great creative group and you could sense it, you felt it. I particularly could feel it with the cast and with the writers. You just knew that you were part of a very special group.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:.

I left when Lorne left, in May of 1980, and I was there from day one, which was July '75. What had happened was the show changed. It stopped being fun the way it was originally. At the risk of sounding naive, this is what was going through our minds at the time, and it was only after all of us left that there was some perspective on it. We were all these neophytes that got together. You know, it was Marilyn Miller saying, "Hey kids, let's put on a show." Nothing was sacred, and we had fun.

ROBIN SHLIEN:.

I dream about those days, actually. I dream about those people a lot. When I was transitioning into my new career I had a lot of dreams from that old time. As a psychotherapist, I realize what an amazing and important life experience it was for me and I think for everybody else who worked during that time there. I now give talks on therapeutic humor, and I'm always thinking about the time that I was in a work situation where I had so much laughter in a day. Working on that show gave me great confidence in my own sense of humor, because I was able to make people like John Belus.h.i.+ laugh.

JAMES DOWNEY:.

We all left in 1980. The cast and the writers all sort of agreed we would leave and take the show with us.

In fairness you'd have to say that the only reason we're even talking about this, the only reason the show's still on the air, is because of what went on in the first five years. First, it gave it this tremendous momentum that it could survive anything, like the Jean Doumanian period or some other bad period. Then it reached the point where it was beyond good or bad. Gilbert Gottfried said a great thing one time; he said at this point "it's just a restaurant in a good location." But even so, it's a good location because of those first five years. It had been a blighted neighborhood. It was Sat.u.r.day night, when no one was watching TV and they were showing reruns of Johnny Carson. And so it was gentrified. People went in there and did the equivalent of cleaning up vacant lots and forming neighborhood watch committees and just spiffed it up and took a chance and turned it around.

ROSIE SHUSTER:.

I left at the end of year five - after the first five years that Lorne did. After that, the Ayatollah Doumanian came in.

ANNE BEATTS:.

Lorne sheltered us from the realities of show business. It's interesting, because while some people might have thought SNL was a dangerous world, I think in many ways it was a very safe world. We were protected. We were in this little coc.o.o.n in the RCA Building. We were pampered, and we got our way most of the time. When I got to Hollywood and found out the harsh truths, I wasn't really prepared.

BILL MURRAY:.

I was definitely going to go when everyone else left. I'd been at Second City when that sort of thing happened. I knew there was no point in being the one guy who knows how to do it. You've got to get the h.e.l.l out of there. It's a little like Lifeboat, you know. It was just time to go. I would never have wanted to start up with a whole new group.

It was really a great thing to be a part of it. The fact that it was live made it performance-driven. You were always pus.h.i.+ng yourself physically to keep your spirit going and get out there and do it. The writing had to be good too. It was great fun - and really hard work. That's the part n.o.body seems to know: how hard it was, what it was like to be young and exhausted all the time. Lorne did build in this great thing where we had every fourth week off. We all got a chance to blow off some steam and to rest. After three weeks, we'd be pretty beaten down. We'd come walking in there on our knuckles or our knees.

When the show ended, it was difficult for some of us in the outside world - difficult for each person relative to how much they'd already been working on the outside. None of us wanted any TV jobs, because we'd had the best TV jobs there were. Once you saw what the other jobs were like, you knew they were not half as much fun as Sat.u.r.day Night Live had been. On sitcoms, you're working on these little bitty scripts for hours and hours and hours. They just keep shooting and shooting and shooting. Ours was the best situation because you had the pressure of having to do it when the time came. Then at one o'clock in the morning, you were done. It was over. So n.o.body wanted regular TV or prime time. We'd all made more money than we needed in the short term, so we just went out there and got into the movie business.

KATE JACKSON:.

After I had hosted the show, we went to the bar that John and Dan owned. And Joni Mitch.e.l.l was there, and there were musicians and other writers, and it was a terrific group of people to be around in such a small room. But it got to be time for me to leave, because I had an early flight in the morning, and Billy Murray walked me out to the car. I got in and closed the door and as we were beginning to pull out, I turned around and looked behind me and there was Billy, standing in the street, waving. Snow was falling all around him - just the sweetest thing. I had been terrified of hosting. I was so afraid. But I knew that I had to do it, it was one of those things where you're really afraid to do something and you know you have to take the chance. You just have to push yourself and do it. And I remember saying to a friend of mine who went with me, "Well, I'll never do that again, because it will never get that good again. That was as good as it gets."

LORNE MICHAELS:.

I took my name off the show and I left.

3.

The Stars Come Out: 19801985.

PAM NORRIS, Writer: I have my personal conspiracy theory, which is that whoever came in after Lorne and the original cast was going to be killed - because, you know, you can't replace the Beatles. Somebody thought, "Well, we'll just let things get extremely bad, and then when we pull it back up a little bit afterward, it'll be considered a triumph."

DON NOVELLO, Writer: Lorne wanted to do the show again, he just didn't want to do it right away. He wanted to wait six months. It was really foolish of NBC to let him get away, because a lot of the cast members might have come back. John was burned out, he didn't want to do it, but you'd be surprised after three or four months, people change their minds. So I think a lot of them might have come back. But NBC didn't want to wait until January. They didn't want to take it off for six months.

BARBARA GALLAGHER, NBC Vice President: I said to Jean Doumanian, "Look, I think you can have it, but if I were you, I wouldn't take it. First of all, the network is going to jump on you like a bad suit. They'll want to cut the budget, I can tell you right now, and they're going to cut it to the bone. They have been waiting all this time to get even with Lorne."

I knew that because after they had squeezed Lorne at the beginning, he told me he was going to let them have it when it became a hit, and he did. He started demanding things. And when you're a hit, you get them, especially when you have advertisers scrambling to be part of the show.

I remember telling Jean, "Any producer who comes in here now is doomed to fail. It's not going to work."

JEAN DOUMANIAN, Executive Producer: I had to get an all-new cast and all new writers in two and a half months. When I took over the show, the first thing they did was cut my budget. The budget under Lorne had gotten up to a million dollars a show. They cut my budget to $350,000, as I recall. And I was supposed to do the same show for that amount of money.

I don't know this for a fact, but it would seem to me that if a woman could actually mount a show and get it done in such a short time, it minimized the importance of those who preceded her. And n.o.body liked that. So I was attacked viciously. How dare I take this job? How dare I think I can do the show? Most of that was said by men. You have to remember, the show had been biased against women for a long time.

ALAN ZWEIBEL, Writer: When we left, I remember Gilda would call me up on Tuesday nights at two in the morning and we'd still be up because our bodies for five years had been up all night on Tuesday, staying up and writing.

LORNE MICHAELS, Executive Producer: I never watched Jean's show. I didn't watch it when d.i.c.k was running it either. I never watched it that whole time. Not once. It would have been too painful. I didn't have anything to do with the show, so I didn't feel compromised. To walk away clean is at least to have your honor intact, and I felt I'd taken the honorable way out.

The Jean Doumanian era - all ten months of it - marked the first but not last time Sat.u.r.day Night Live's very survival was at stake. After five years of enormous and trend-setting popularity - replete with break-out stars, iconic characters, and now-cla.s.sic sketches - the show zapped back to square one in 1980 following the departures of Lorne Michaels, the cast he had a.s.sembled, and all the original writers.

Viewers may not have been immersed in the backstage politics, but they couldn't help noticing that the quality of the show plummeted. Many in the business thought Doumanian lacked the experience and expertise necessary for the job. She was further beset by skullduggery among staff members who wanted the usurper ousted from the throne almost the instant she a.s.sumed it.

NBC was doing badly in prime time, and within weeks of Doumanian's accession, Sat.u.r.day Night Live was added to the network's list of gaping wounds requiring medical attention. An audience that expected to see fresh new Gildas, Belus.h.i.+s, Chevys, and Aykroyds refused to settle for the paltry replacements that initially dominated Doumanian's cast - Charles Rocket, Denny Dillon, Gail Matthius, Ann Risley.

Sat.u.r.day Night Live fell apart in less time than it took to come together five years earlier. The show still had no real compet.i.tion in its time period - "Our compet.i.tion is sleep," as one cast member put it - but its predicament was perhaps worse than if it had. Sat.u.r.day Night Live was competing against the memory of itself. And losing.

JOE PISCOPO, Cast Member: When we came in - after Lorne and all the original guys had left - the offices were completely empty. They even cleaned all the desks out. The pencils were gone. And when I tell you pencils, I'm not exaggerating. The offices were all reconfigured. It was like somebody came up there and just kind of bombed out everything, man. It was pretty wild.

ANDREW KURTZMAN, Writer: I think we had the feeling of being a bit beside the point. Coming in the aftermath of this big cultural juggernaut - the first five years of the show - we were a little like the guy with the handcart behind the locomotive. Sat.u.r.day Night Live had its own mythology in place. The big show had left town. We had a certain cheese-ball feel. It was hard work to book guest hosts for a while. "Pamela Sue Martin's on the bubble, but she might say yes" - that kind of thing. You never really had the feeling that you could open your suit on the observation deck of the Empire State Building and yell, "I own this town," because people were always saying, "Yeah, but you weren't nearly as good as the original show."

BILL MURRAY, Cast Member: I knew Jean and liked her. I'd known her a long time. I'm not sure that she did the worst job in the world. They gave her no credit for trying. She had great connections in the music world and she got some great acts for the show. They didn't really give her a full shot.

She did find Eddie Murphy and a couple other people who were really talented; they just needed some confidence. She was struggling, and they were having a hard time getting quality hosts. So I called up and I said, "I can't get arrested. Is there any way I could work on your show?" So I went in there. It was a tough week. We worked really hard writing and rewriting, and the show turned out good, and I thought, "This could work."

The cast saw how hard you have to work to do that show. I don't think most of them ever worked that hard before. They were going through their first brush with fame, even at the level they were at. The world just wasn't ready for a brand-new group, so it was incredibly tough for them.

ANDREW SMITH, Writer: If you want to get philosophical about the problems of the subsequent years after the first five years, the actors were so cognizant of the success of the group that had gone before them - that Chevy and John and Gilda had broken out into these huge stars - that they began to have one eye on the audience and on the fact that Steven Spielberg might be watching, and only one eye on being funny. The first group that came through before me didn't know how big they were going to be, so they were much freer and much more open and thus, I thought, a lot funnier than the subsequent people.

As soon as SNL or the Not Ready for Prime Time Players became a launching pad, then it wasn't about just the comedy that was happening there. It was about future earnings or future career moves. And that's kind of the cancer that is always threatening to eat away at the comedy on the show, even to this day. G.o.d knows, if I was an actor, I would feel the same way. It's like a loss of innocence. You can't not think about the fact that if you make the right moves on Sat.u.r.day Night Live, you could become a huge, huge star. And so therefore when somebody wants you to play a turtle or something like that, you say, "Well, I don't know. I don't think that would look good." I bet if those original guys knew how big they were going to be, they probably wouldn't have done Killer Bees.

GILBERT GOTTFRIED, Cast Member: Back then it was a big deal that the cast was changing and the producer was changing. Before we even hit the air, there were already articles being written in every paper and every magazine saying disaster was coming and how dare they continue Sat.u.r.day Night Live with a different cast? And that this producer is not equipped to do the job and this cast is terrible.

DAVID SHEFFIELD, Writer: A friend of mine named Patrick was auditioning as an actor on the show. Patrick got his big break as a men's-room attendant at Studio 54. He worked the stalls there a bit. He knew everybody. I think he actually had an agent at that point. He got an audition and called me and said if I would write some material for him, he would see the producers got it. I wrote a couple of sketches, thinking nothing would come of it. He called back and said, "They love your stuff, man, they want to hire you." I said, "Who wants to hire me?" He said, "I don't know, some guy with gla.s.ses." That guy turned out to be Jean Doumanian's producer.

CHRIS ALBRECHT, Agent: I became an agent at ICM in 1980. My client list as an agent included people like Jim Carrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, Dana Carvey, Paul Rodriguez, Sandra Bernhard, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Joe Piscopo, and other people. I actually ended up putting a lot of people on that very ill fated Jean Doumanian one-year tenure.

One of my a.s.signments at ICM was, once we knew the people were all leaving and Lorne was leaving and they were going to recast the show, to be the liaison between ICM and Sat.u.r.day Night Live, so that was a very big opportunity for me. You'd go to the clubs and the network executives would come in and sit in the back. Jean would come in and you'd realize that something could happen that night that would change not only your client's life but your life as an agent or manager. The fact that there were new opportunities for Sat.u.r.day Night Live, that they were going to recast this quickly legendary show, made for very exciting times.

BARRY BLAUSTEIN, Writer: When I got there the first day and I was taking off my jacket, a writer from the office next door came in and said, "I want you to sign a pet.i.tion to get rid of Jean Doumanian." It was total turmoil already.

I think one of the reasons David Sheffield and I survived that year is we stayed away from the turmoil as much as possible. We just concentrated on the writing and not the politics. Everyone was b.i.t.c.hing and no one was writing.

Dave had worked in local television in Mississippi; I had worked on The Mike Douglas Show in L.A. We were hired separately. We met on the show. We were the last writers hired that year, as a matter of fact, and I think we both realized what a tremendous break and opportunity this was for us. We were surrounded by people going, "I don't need this job! I don't need this job! To h.e.l.l with this!" And I was thinking, "I do need this job. This is the big break. This is the big opportunity."

JEAN DOUMANIAN:.

I made Barry and David write together. Barry's Jewish humor was wonderful, and David's southern humor was great as well, but very different. And they were both very smart guys. I thought between the two of them, they'd come up with something that was really original. I think they're still together on things. I was also very lucky to have Pam Norris as one of my writers. She was a terrific writer, and quite an individual.

PAM NORRIS:.

I had been at the Harvard Lampoon, and this was before the Harvard Lampoon was a rocket - when the people working there were goofing off, basically, when you were supposed to be doing something else and instead you were goofing off with the Harvard Lampoon. But there was a writer on the original show, Jim Downey, who had seen some of my stuff in the Harvard Lampoon. And he encouraged me to think about going to the show, and he put in a good word for me with Jean Doumanian.

I was working on Wall Street that summer and had not finished Harvard. So I wrote a few sketches and sent them over there, got interviewed, and got the job. I finally finished college during the writers strike of 1981, when I went back to Harvard. Actually, my diploma was mailed to me. I didn't get my Harvard diploma handed to me in Harvard Yard; it was handed to me by a production a.s.sistant at Sat.u.r.day Night Live, with very little ceremony.

DAVID SHEFFIELD:.

I have mixed feelings about Jean. She gave me my first big break at the networks, and for that I'm eternally grateful, and she had an eye for talent - like finding Joe Piscopo. Her background was in talent, because she was the talent booker for the show, so you could see the network's logic. They were losing Lorne and they wanted to maintain continuity.

But Jean knew zilch about comedy. She didn't have a clue. It was almost a lesson in how not to run a comedy show. She had a knack for pitting people against each other that was just ant.i.thetical to comedy. I don't know why she thought that was a good way to work. She actually started rivalries where none existed before among the writers and cast, thinking somehow the strongest would prevail. That was not a formula for comedy.

JOE PISCOPO:.

I didn't want the job as a cast member on the show. And I told my agent at the time, Chris Albrecht, who is now an HBO executive, "I can't do the show, man." I'd be taking a pay cut, because I was making more money doing commercials - just being the working stiff - and I said, "I don't want to do this." But he said, "You've got to do it, it's Sat.u.r.day Night Live."

HARRY SHEARER, Cast Member: I went to Jean and said, "I know you're not a fan of Lorne's, and you know that I'm not a fan of Lorne's, so you're not going to have a loyalist sitting around saying, 'Lorne wouldn't have done it this way.'" I told her, "I'm willing to come work on your show. I think you really need to get some people around us, if you want me to come, who've got some experience, because you're not going to have the slack that Lorne had at the beginning. You're going to have to hit the ground running." I suggested Christopher Guest and a couple others as people who should come in, and she said, "I'm not really sure I want people who know what they're doing." At that point, I knew I wasn't coming back.

GILBERT GOTTFRIED:.

If they just did reviews of the show and said it sucked, they would have been right. But the articles were like a whole other thing. It became like, even though the writers going in were considered terrible writers because she hired them, the minute she'd fire them, all of a sudden they became great writers. There was even an article in People magazine about three writers as if, because they were fired, that made them great, and they talk about how terrible she was. It was a weird period.

JEAN DOUMANIAN:.

Even the censors became very, very tough on me. I couldn't say something like "rolling off a log." They thought there was an innuendo there. Then you think about what we got away with from '75 to '80. I mean, we were saying things like "golden shower" and they didn't do anything about it. But the censors really became so tough on us, it was incredible.

DON NOVELLO:.

I think Jean took some heat that wasn't deserved. She took the hit for some bad ratings, but there were times that Ebersol got just as bad ratings. They chose her because she had "producer" in her t.i.tle in the past, but she was more of a casting person. She found some good people that did well after her - Eddie Murphy, Joe Piscopo, a lot of them stayed on that she found. I never did a show when she was the producer, but I always liked her. She was a very nice woman.

PAM NORRIS:.

I think a lot of people were there saying, "Why couldn't I have been on the good show?" And it's like, why don't you make a good show yourself? One person has a tremendous amount of power at that show. At least they did when I was there. One person can write a great sketch. One person can write two great sketches. One person can write three great sketches. I mean, if you can sit down and write, you know, seventy minutes of pretty good material, you could have the whole show. So I just felt that when writers complained about things, they could have been writing something.

I think in a weird way it's a privilege to stand on your own feet and not coast on somebody else's reputation. The people who were working there had every chance to s.h.i.+ne if they did something that was even a little bit good. It stood out like a quasar.

GILBERT GOTTFRIED:.

Basically on that show they hire you as a performer and expect you to be an unpaid writer. They didn't use me that much. I think the low point of what the writers thought of me was in one sketch. It was a funeral scene, and they used me as the corpse.

BARRY BLAUSTEIN:.

Some people say Woody Allen was kind of a hidden producer of the show that year, because he was a friend of Jean's and he supposedly had an adviser role. But we never saw him.

JEAN DOUMANIAN:.

Woody Allen was not involved in the show in any way. I say that unequivocally. You can put that to rest. He was not involved at all, aside from the fact that he was a friend.

PAM NORRIS:.

I lived in those offices for a long time. They had a great shower. And they had a color TV and food and soda, and I found myself staying later and later every night, and finally I just said, "Oh, what the h.e.l.l," and I moved in. I don't think anybody knew that I was living there. What made it really great is that they had this bank of metal file cabinets - down next to where the secretaries typed the scripts - that had every sketch that had ever been written for the show filed away in them. And this is every sketch ever written, not just every sketch ever aired. So I had the access to what seemed like the Rosetta stone to me - every sketch written and rejected for the first show, every sketch written and rejected for the second show. It was all this very seminal material by the people who became, you know, G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses. And that was an amazing experience.

JEAN DOUMANIAN:.

My numbers weren't bad at all, considering it was a new show with a whole new cast. Some of them, I think, were higher than the last of Lorne's, because the last year of Lorne's regime was not as good as one would expect. They were all thinking about what the future was going to be.

BARRY BLAUSTEIN:.

One executive from the network called me and Dave into his office and said, "I want to show you something." And he shows us this footage of a boa constrictor eating a mouse. And he says, "This is exactly what we should be doing on the show." It was such a bizarre meeting.

JEAN DOUMANIAN:.