Live From New York Part 16

JIM BELUs.h.i.+:.

I trust Bernie Brillstein. I don't think he's the bad guy. I'm going to tell you a little something about my brother. I don't care how strong-willed you are, after twenty minutes, you'd be doing whatever he wanted you to do. And you'd love it. He'd have you dancing on a cigarette machine in two hours. And loving it. He was just that powerful.

Did Bernie "enable" him? You know, we all enabled him, because we never knew what it was. Everybody was getting high. It was not a big deal. And then you turn around and say, "Did they enable Chris Farley?" No. They sent him into rehab seventeen times. That disease comes into your life, comes into your family's life, and it slowly strangles until someone dies. If Bernie was an enabler, so were we all, because we were all under the spell of John's charm, and none of us knew any better. We just didn't know better. Remember, the Betty Ford Center started in 1982. It wasn't popular to get cleaned out until after John died. He led us in comedy, he led us in film, and he led us into rehab. He was before all of us.

John ate up all his adrenaline. He ate it all up. He lived three lives. He lived to ninety-nine.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

Bernie had to stop one of John's cousins from taking a picture of John's body naked. It was a fifteen-grand thing, to sell the picture. The guy's argument was that John wouldn't have cared.

BILL MURRAY:.

John never gets enough credit from the world. John made that show possible in a way, because he brought all the people out from Chicago to do the National Lampoon Show and then the Radio Hour. I got the job from him on the Radio Hour. He brought all these people out. He was responsible for bringing a lot of those people to the party.

He was the best stage actor I've ever seen. He walked on the stage and you couldn't look at anyone else. People that only knew him from television really missed something. Onstage he was a monster. He was an absolute bear. And he was brilliant. He had the ability to see what an improvisational sketch needed. He would enter scenes and "solve" them in ninety seconds. He was really gifted, really gifted. And obviously he lived life hard, but he lived well. You could have more fun with him - and as time went on, you had less of those moments with him because he was sort of spun out there in the world - but he could have more fun in the simplest situations than any person I've ever met of my ilk, you know - any entertainer type.

He ended his life like a rock-and-roller and an enormous celebrity, a big star, but in the simplest situations, he really shone. He really could find the essential in a moment and in an experience. He was something.

BOB TISCHLER:.

It was horrible. John had been a really close friend of mine for years. He picked me to produce The Blues Brothers. He was horrible to a lot of people, but he had many sides to him, and he was always a great friend to me. When he died, it devastated me. I wasn't surprised by it, because I had been with him through a lot. I used cocaine like everybody else used it. It was not a problem for me, but it was a real problem for him, and during the Blues Brothers years he would take just a little hit of cocaine and become an animal. And that was horrible.

When John died, it changed me. I gave up doing drugs. And I haven't done any since.

TOM DAVIS, Writer: I was very open about smoking pot. I got away with it until Belus.h.i.+ died. That was the end of that. I couldn't smoke in the office openly anymore. No more of that s.h.i.+t. As long as we were a hot show, I felt I could get away with it. But when Belus.h.i.+ died, and then everyone started having babies, that was the end.

JOE PISCOPO:.

When Belus.h.i.+ died, rest his soul, everybody stopped. All the drugs stopped. I always got such a kick out of that.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

John got back into drugs the weekend Lorne married Susan. John's movie Continental Divide had come out around Labor Day of 1981 with Blair Brown, and there were two diametrically opposed reviews. I can't remember who was which. But either Time or Newsweek wrote that he was the new Spencer Tracy, and the other one wrote that the movie was a ma.s.sive disappointment to all of John's fans. And the box office showed the latter. And it was only a day later that John fell back into everything else; he had been clean for two or three years at that point. And it was pretty much downhill from there.

Lorne got married the weekend after Labor Day, and I remember John was out of control at Lorne's wedding, which was held out at Lorne's house in the Hamptons. And n.o.body knew what to do. n.o.body would handle it. And I remember pleading with Bernie Brillstein to help me with John and he wouldn't. And then finally I grabbed John and literally dragged him out of the reception, across Lorne's lawn, into the downstairs bedroom, where I laid him down and he fell asleep. That was mid-September.

TIM KAZURINSKY:.

Bob Tischler called to tell me John was dead. I ran into the office to help make calls and try to contact everybody in his family that I knew, and also get the Second City tribute going. I think Judy Belus.h.i.+ kept John alive maybe longer than he would've been. She had bodyguards. She had him watched, and her life became keeping drugs away from John, until she began to shrivel. How much can you do? Can you really watch somebody twenty-four hours a day? I think Judy fought the good fight. I don't know that his agents, managers, and producers and bosses did as much as they could. At some point, you have to represent reality to the person in trouble.

JANE CURTIN:.

It was very sad. But it wasn't shocking.

CARRIE FISHER, Host: When we heard he had died, we were all waiting to find out what he had done. We didn't know. And everyone was hoping it wasn't their drug of choice. It was horrible. What I recall happening was, we were all in the room and we heard that it was heroin and it had been injected, and that was just farther than this group went. So everyone kind of breathed a sigh of relief - not because you weren't distraught over his death, but because he had gone farther than anybody else went. One always hopes that things like that are cautionary tales, and they are not. I think I overdosed two years later.

BILL MURRAY:.

When John died, it was like, "Oh G.o.d, what a drag this is going to be. What a drag this is." And when they said he died of an overdose, my brother Brian said, "He died from four beers." The guy was a real short hitter behind the bar. Really, four beers would put him into like an absolute delirium. He didn't have a high threshold in some ways. Because he was a finely tuned instrument, it didn't take much to set him a-kilter. The fact that he died was like, "Oh Christ, why'd you go and do that?"

When you're with somebody who does stuff which is either incredibly pleasing, incredibly amusing, or incredibly disappointing in some way, you're sort of glad it's not you that did it, because it could have been any one of us goofing off somehow. We've all been through stuff, and we've pushed limits and crossed lines in order to establish where the line was, sort of, or to reestablish the line. So when he died, I think it was, "Okay, now someone has crossed this line here; where does that put us? Where does that leave us? What does that say?" Because he really was the icebreaker in so many ways. He was the first one to come to New York from Chicago of our group. He was the first one to do a lot of things. He really was a leader in so many ways that the idea that he was the first to die was probably not surprising. That he was the first to do anything was not a surprise. That's really the truth.

John's funeral was great theater. It was our first funeral together, and there were TV cameras, and it's like, "Whoa. There's nothing funny going to happen and these cameras are here." And Danny did the motorcycle thing, and the night before I think we'd gone out on John's property and fired shotguns at the moon and stuff and tried to do something sort of epic that involved howling and sort of displaced rage.

G.o.d, the song James Taylor sang - chills. "Walk Down That Lonesome Road," you know that one? It's chilling. He sang it with his brothers and a sister, I think. All the press and everything were at a fencepost like a hundred yards away. When he sang that song, it was just, "Ooooh okay. That is the lesson, I guess."

Whenever I hear it, I'm right back there at John's grave.

EDIE BASKIN, Photographer: Right after John died, People magazine called me and asked, "Do you have some pictures of John when he was doing the sketch with the powdered sugar doughnuts?" They wanted me to give them pictures of John with powdered sugar all over his nose so it looked like he was doing c.o.ke. I said, "You're sick. Good-bye."

GARRETT MORRIS, Cast Member: One time I saw his picture in People magazine, and he was like a balloon. I thought, "Oh my G.o.d." I couldn't believe it. I was worried about his heart or his circulatory system. During the previous two years or so, I was thinking he personally didn't like me, because he was saying a lot of things that just were uncharacteristic. And then when I saw the picture in People, I began to realize what had happened.

The way I found out he died was an L.A. Times lady got my number and had the nerve to call me and tell me he was dead and then try to elicit a response. She didn't take into account at all that it broke me up. I said to her, "Look, I don't want anything about drugs or anything." And she said, "Well, I don't let people put restrictions on my interviews." And of course I hung up, because I didn't want to have AT&T sue me for using words like - well, "motherf.u.c.ker" is not a four-letter word, it's a twelve-letter word, but I was going to call her a motherf.u.c.ker at least twelve times.

TIM KAZURINSKY:.

The day Belus.h.i.+ died, I went in to help out with making calls, because I was very good friends with the Belus.h.i.+ family. John and I were supposed to have had dinner on March third, to celebrate my birthday, and he was in L.A., and he killed himself March fifth. So there were a bunch of us up there, and guys were crying, and I was going to call Second City to get hold of Jim so they could get a medical unit over to John's mother, because she had a bad heart. They wanted somebody that knew CPR to be there with defibrillator panels when she was told the news.

So I'm off making calls trying to find Jim Belus.h.i.+. I run back into one of the executive's offices on the floor and the executive's on the phone making arrangements for funeral stuff and he has tears in his eyes - and he is leaning over his desk snorting c.o.ke! And I went, "What the f.u.c.k are you doing?! Jesus! You're making funeral arrangements for a dead man and -" You know, it was almost laughable. I get sick when I think about it.

PENNY MARSHALL, Guest Performer: None of us knew about the other life he had, if he had that life - or if he was just starting or experimenting. All of us were smoking gra.s.s and doing c.o.ke once in a while. We did what we did, but it wasn't like he was more abusive than anyone else. We knew there were drugs, but he had a whole different set of friends, I think, that none of his good friends knew about. He didn't do any more than anybody else unless a fan came up and he wanted to be bold. Fans would just come up and hand him a gram. He represented that to them, a wild person. My fans wrote with crayon on lined paper; I had different fans. But we never saw needles, we never saw heroin, we never saw any of that s.h.i.+t.

LARAINE NEWMAN, Cast Member: I was at my house in Los Angeles when I heard that John had died. A friend of mine called me on the phone and said, "Hey, did you know that guy John Bell-utchee?" And I said, "Yeah." "Well, he's dead." And I remember being annoyed that the guy didn't even know how to p.r.o.nounce John's name and then hanging up and turning on the TV and seeing all the coverage and it being so unreal. This was the first time that someone I was close to had died. And unfortunately it wasn't going to be the last. So it was unreal to me. I just couldn't believe it - the sight of a covered body being carried out of the Chateau Marmont, and me knowing that that shape had to be him. And the sordid image that the details elicited in my mind, you know, of probably all the shades being drawn and here was this woman giving him a fix and letting him die. Whether she knew he'd OD'd before she left or not, it's just so hideous.

CARRIE FISHER:.

John had offered me some drugs once, and I said, "John, should you be doing this?" and he said, "Do you want some or not?!" And I just thought, "You know what? I can't do this. I am not a cop, and he is three times bigger than I am." Danny was always trying to get him to stop. We all were. But you couldn't stop him, you couldn't stop him. You couldn't have stopped me. I always think about people who say, "We should have blah, blah, blah." You can't. As much as you'd like to think so, you can't.

The thing I regretted about John was that he hadn't had a scare, he hadn't had some sort of overdose, or hospitalization or something, some warning. He just went straight to death.

TIM KAZURINSKY:.

Having grown up in the sixties, I was kind of done with my drugs by the seventies. And so here it was the eighties, and I particularly hated cocaine. And whenever a new s.h.i.+pment arrived on the floor, I would come in and see everybody grinding their teeth. I came in one day and pretty much the whole floor was just craving it heavily, and I went, "Oh, this is not good. I'm going to write at home." Because everybody was running into my office with gigantic pupils and grinding teeth saying, "I've got an idea." And you know, I've always found that cocaine causes constipation of the brain and diarrhea of the mouth. In the time it would take to sit and listen to people's idiot ideas while they were c.o.ked up to the t.i.ts, I could get more work done at home. It seemed like the secretaries, the PA's, everybody, was tooted that particular day, so I just took off. A couple of friends of mine who were Chicago writers, I called their wives and said, "I got your husbands hired on the show and I really don't want to send them home in body bags. You have to come to New York and stop them, because they are doing way too much c.o.ke." And they did. They came and took care of their guys.

JIM BELUs.h.i.+:.

John would have been happy that I made it onto Sat.u.r.day Night Live, but he actually wanted me to be a dramatic actor. When I started at Second City, I called him and said, "I got in at Second City." There was a long pause on the phone. He goes, "Uh, shouldn't you be at Goodman Theater or something, be more like a dramatic actor?" I said, "I'm really enjoying this here." He said, "You're a better actor than me, don't you think you should be, like, doing drama?" I said, "I can probably do both, John." He goes, "Okay." That was it.

BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY:.

John and I were quite close. He had replaced me at Second City when I left initially. I lived on his couch in New York City for six months. He was bigger than life. No matter what he did, he didn't think he would die. When he died, Lorne asked me to say something at the end of the show, because we had been together a long time. I recounted this one incident: He and I were walking down Bleecker Street and it was snowing and he had one of those hood things up. And a truck hit him and it flipped him into the air and he rolled up against the curb. And he just jumped right back up. An ambulance came and took him to the hospital. And he was fine. I mean, he got hit hard by a truck. And no problem. So I thought he was pretty indestructible.

DAVID SHEFFIELD:.

I did go to a party one time at the Blues Bar. It was 1980. Belus.h.i.+ had done a guest spot on the show. We walked in. Robin Williams was behind the bar pa.s.sing out beers. And Belus.h.i.+ stood at the door as we walked in and looked me up and down and said, "Who the f.u.c.k are you? I don't recognize you." He said, "Did you bring any beer?" I said, "No, but I got a J." "Oh, all right, come on in."

LORNE MICHAELS:.

When I got the call from Bernie, I was at Broadway Video. I had lost my father suddenly when I was fourteen - he was only fifty. It was a big surprise. So I feel like since then I've always been prepared for the worst. It was easier for me to go into a withholding mode. I dealt with John's family, and Judy and I arranged for airplanes to get everybody there. It was the first time in my life I had ever chartered airplanes. When I walked out of my office, there were cameras and lights everywhere.

Bernie flew in with John in a body bag on the Warner corporate plane. Danny and some other guys were waiting at the airport on motorcycles to salute him. The plane landed. And then they took off. Bernie had to take the body to the mortuary.

I didn't deal with anything until I saw John in the coffin. I had seen him look worse, but it was awful. Standing at the grave, we all just sobbed.

TIM KAZURINSKY:.

When we made the movie Neighbors, that was probably the most fun I had. We would work on Staten Island on the movie in the daytime and then every night go back to John's house and order in food and hang out and watch old movies. And John would do impersonations of Brando as the G.o.dfather and make us howl until our sides hurt. He was the greatest guy to hang with. Half of him was this poor peasant Albanian kid from this small town where he'd been much looked down upon. And he said to me once, "f.u.c.k them, I'm going to go out and become the most famous guy in the world just to spite them." And he did that, and he could be that person, but the other half of John was that he was just this really lovable guy who did go out and become the most famous guy in the world and that wasn't the answer. And he would go out on what I call that three A.M. to six A.M. club crawl in New York, where I don't imagine he was the same person around Mick Jagger and Robert De Niro and Francis Ford Coppola as he was around Tim Kazurinsky. He had this old homebody self, but then he felt he also had to play the role of King of New York. It was really a schizophrenic way to live.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

John, as I've said many times, lived his life in three eight-hour s.h.i.+fts. And if you spent eight hours with him and then you went to bed, you thought he did too. But he just went on to the second s.h.i.+ft. And there, waiting, was a whole other group of people who knew John.

TIM KAZURINSKY:.

My theory on Bob Woodward and John Belus.h.i.+ goes like this: They're both from the same town. Woodward, he's like Salieri. No matter what the f.u.c.k he did - All the President's Men, winning the Pulitzer, whatever - unfortunately he grew up in the same town where John Belus.h.i.+ grew up. And so he's always going to be number two. And that's why he wrote Wired.

PENNY MARSHALL:.

We got sort of duped into that one.

DAN AYKROYD, Cast Member: I wasn't happy, because I think Woodward just gave up on it and handed it over to his researcher. Plus there were certain things that he just got patently wrong. He painted a portrait of John that was really inaccurate - certain stories in there that just weren't true and never happened. So no, I wasn't happy. This was my friend that was being besmirched. That's the posture I took, and I live by it today. The book didn't fill John out to the measure that he could've been appreciated. He just overlooked a lot. It was all about the drugs and the excess, not about the quality of work and the background in theater and the preparation and the respect that John's friends had for him.

JIM BELUs.h.i.+:.

Woodward - that c.o.c.ksucker! That motherf.u.c.ker. Hey, Bob, what's with the girl who won the Pulitzer Prize, what's with the eight-year-old junkie? "Oh, that just got right by us." Bob! You're the f.u.c.king editor, Bob! How did that f.u.c.king get by you? You check your f.u.c.king sources? My a.s.s! Yeah, Woodward did a really nice job of making John look like a Bluto junkie. I don't think Woodward's capable of understanding what love is, or compa.s.sion, or relations.h.i.+ps. He is one cold fish.

DAN AYKROYD:.

I had eight years with John, and we had a ball every second, we had a ball. I mean, we had our disagreements, naturally, but we sure made each other laugh.

In any group you're going to have people who precede the others. I just hope he's waiting for me on the other side. I'm sure he will be.

Many stars were created by Sat.u.r.day Night Live, but many talented people also pa.s.sed through the show little noticed and little utilized. Billy Crystal might have hit it big ten years sooner if he hadn't been b.u.mped from the premiere back in 1975. Eddie Murphy was all but ignored during his first year in the cast. Jim Carrey failed an audition and wasn't hired. Lisa Kudrow and Jennifer Aniston, both later stars of Friends, were pa.s.sed over.

With Eddie Murphy having ascended to movie superstardom, Joe Piscopo's services were no longer in great demand in Studio 8H, and he was not invited back after 198384. Other cast members who'd failed to make much of an impression also departed, and SNL was looking severely talent deprived. The show had the blahs and needed a new direction. The remedy decided upon was simple and yet, considering the show's traditions, theoretically heretical: Instead of spending time and effort looking for new talent to introduce and nurture, the producers would turn the show over to established comedy stars - fairly well known performers who could generate their own material. The remedy didn't come cheap: Crystal, acclaimed for his portrayal of a gay son on the ABC sitcom Soap, finally signed on as an SNL regular, at $25,000 per show. Revenge was sweet.

Martin Short, a stunningly imaginative comic actor who'd played a wide, wild range of characters on the SCTV satire series, got $5,000 less per show, but only because he waited until the last minute to say yes. They were joined by writer-comedians Christopher Guest and a returning Harry Shearer and given the daunting a.s.signment of bringing Sat.u.r.day Night Live back to life. It wouldn't be the show Lorne Michaels had daringly envisioned half a decade earlier, populated by virtual unknowns, but at least it would exist.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

I went to Brandon and said, "I have an idea for next year." By then I'd had Billy Crystal come back to host the show, and subsequent to that, he did a couple other cameos. And I said, "Just grant me the notion that, if we stop this whole process of believing everybody we hire has to be unknown, we can really build a h.e.l.l of a cast." And he said, "Who do you have in mind?" And I said, "Well, I think I can get Billy, Marty Short, probably could talk Chris Guest into it." Others ultimately fell into the mix. But those were the names. And also Andrea Martin, who subsequently we chose not to get, because the guys I was hiring fell in love with Pamela Stephenson. And so we didn't make Andrea the offer. But Brandon said yes, and that represented the first time in the history of the show, and I don't know if it's true anymore, that we broke favored nations among the cast. Everybody received the same thing except for Billy, and Billy got a deal at a higher level.

BOB TISCHLER:.

It was really my call at that point. I said to d.i.c.k, "You know, this is really going to be our last year here," because d.i.c.k had already decided to leave, and we had a chance to leave after one more year. And I said, "Let's bring in funny people - let's bring in people that we know are funny on-camera and off-camera and who can work together." And I basically suggested bringing in some big names, including Chris Guest, the person who actually was responsible for me getting into show business. d.i.c.k did suggest bringing Billy in.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

There's a very interesting story there that I've never told publicly, which is, having gotten Brandon's okay to do all this, I went out to California in May of '84 and sat down with Billy's management. And Buddy Morra was one of the managers at the time; I can't remember who the other ones were. But we had a lunch and they explained to me that Billy moving back to New York to be a cast member of Sat.u.r.day Night Live was a nonstarter. They didn't think it would be good for his career at that stage. He'd had a few movies, and Soap had been on the air and had a lot of notoriety and was, by that point, off the air. And they were adamant and told me no at lunch. And I went upstairs to my room at the Beverly Hills Hotel and, without hesitation, called his house to talk to his wife, Janice, who I heard say in New York when Billy had hosted, "I'd love to bring my daughter back to New York for one year at some point in her life." She wasn't talking about Sat.u.r.day Night Live, but I just overheard her say that. And I said, "Janice, look, here's what's happened. This is a great opportunity, at least I think, for Billy to come back. He'll certainly be well paid, and I'm not going to get you into that. But he could come back to New York, be a cast member on Sat.u.r.day Night Live, do what he really loves - which is all of his characters, where he'll be free to write them and do all of that - and you'd have a wonderful year before you lose a daughter to college, and so on, and have everybody living under the same roof." Well, how she did it or what she did, I don't know, but by that night, Billy called me back on the phone and said, "Forget whatever you've been told by my managers. Provided we can make the right business deal, I want to come to New York." And that deal was made in about the next twenty-four hours.

I knew Janice at that point maybe about a decade, from the time I'd first seen Billy in the clubs in New York in the midseventies, when I was roaming around that year before - or those months before I knew Lorne. In any case, Billy helped me get Chris and Marty and subsequently Harry Shearer, who, sadly, didn't work out for me any better than he did for Lorne. There were just too many problems behind the scenes. He's a gifted performer but a pain in the b.u.t.t, unfortunately. He's just so demanding on the preciseness of things and he's very, very hard on the working people, you know, whether it's the makeup people or the prop people, or the engineering people. He's intolerant of other people's issues. He's just a nightmare-to-deal-with person.

BILLY CRYSTAL, Cast Member: I wasn't having the career I always envisioned myself having. I wasn't doing the work I should actually say I really always wanted to do and felt I could do after doing Soap for four years. And my own variety series was short-lived, and I was headlining clubs and concerts all across the country. That two hours onstage was always satisfying. But as a whole I wasn't where I wanted to be, I wasn't doing movies, I wasn't doing other things, but more importantly I don't think I was showing the country what I felt I had in myself, what I could do.

I think when I came to the show, I was sort of a pinata of ideas and thoughts and characters, and all kinds of things happened. Every day I was excited at the discovery of what we could do. I never put a time limit on how long I would be there or what it would give me or get me. I didn't approach it like that. I just felt personally as a performer and as a creative person I had to give it my shot. I was thirty-seven years old, I was looking at the chance to finally say to everybody, "This is what I can do." That's why I said yes to come in and do the show after hosting it twice the season before. It was everything I wanted it to be.

LILY TARTIKOFF:.

Billy didn't have an apartment when he was first on Sat.u.r.day Night Live. We just gave him our apartment for like a month, until they got settled, and he and his wife and his girls used it. It seemed to work out okay. And it helped save the show.

HARRY SHEARER:.

Spinal Tap appeared on the show as a musical guest in the spring of '84. We got treated so well. I didn't realize that guests are treated better than the regulars. So it was my own stupidity; smart people do dumb things. So I really thought, because we'd been treated pretty well as the guests, hmmm, this might be a better situation. d.i.c.k basically extended the offer to all three of us; Michael McKean pa.s.sed, Chris and I accepted. I knew Marty Short by reputation; he was a friend of Paul Shaffer's and Paul just raved about him, and I'd seen a little bit of his work on SCTV. We had not been told, I don't think, that Jimmy Belus.h.i.+ was coming back. That came as a surprise.

d.i.c.k put on a pretty elaborate show. He got Chris, Marty, Billy, and I together and said, "Now guys, you know Mary Gross and Julia are coming back, and I want a third girl for that slot and I want you guys to help choose her." Well, we went through this elaborate process of meeting people. Geena Davis met with us in the lobby of the Century Plaza Hotel. And Geena had just been on a couple of sitcoms and it was all quite awkward and uncomfortable for everybody involved. But it boiled down to Andrea Martin and Pamela Stephenson. And Marty, of course, had a number of ties with Andrea and really wanted Andrea there, and I thought, after we saw her tapes, that Pamela was an incredibly versatile actress and just brought something really different, so we tossed it back and forth and finally Pamela got it. To her everlasting dismay.

MARTIN SHORT, Cast Member: I had a one-year contract. I certainly approached that show not as someone who was going to be around, obviously, for more than one year. So I felt that I had to do a lot and be in as many interesting things as possible, because it was only a limited time.

I never wanted to leave SCTV, and I had to find out for sure SCTV was officially gone, which it was. I'd been asked for my last two years there to join Sat.u.r.day Night Live, but I didn't want a change.

It was important to me. I had already done SCTV for three years and I had a new child. But I never figured out how to do SNL particularly. After the third show, I still hadn't cashed any checks, because I was not happy there at all. And I went in to talk to d.i.c.k and said, "I want to leave the show." And he thought I was kind of insane, of course. But he figured out how to keep me there, which was to say, "Look, if by Christmas you're still unhappy, kid, you can go free of that contract." I think he figured out that, by that time, I'd figure out how to do the show.

ANDREW SMITH:.

I always say the "kings of comedy" came in to deign to do the show. It was my third year, and I became part-time because they took me down in order to pay for them. Or maybe it wasn't the money. Anyway, they said, "You can come and write on the show, you can be on the staff, but you can't be head writer anymore with these guys." And of course I got on my high horse - which was a bad, bad mistake - and said, "I don't think so," and left. But then I did come in and do freelance on, I don't know, ten shows.

Because these guys were coming in as stars to do their year in New York - stopping by to do Sat.u.r.day Night Live - and even though some great comedy came out of it, I don't think it was the best thing for the show. Because it was not home-grown talent - finding new people and making them stars. These were sort-of-stars coming in for a year. I think it affected the style of comedy, to tell you the truth. The comedy after them became much more about characters and star turns, so that a sketch, instead of being an ensemble piece, became one of these character pieces - a Brimley or a Grimley or whatever his name was.

The show before that was much more of an ensemble piece and a lot more democratic. In their year, because they were stars, the sketches were about a central character doing his sort of turn, regardless of anybody else in the sketch. I think there was a little s.h.i.+ft. And since then, the thing seems to be driven much more by these sorts of characters that the actors come up with. Then they sort of build a situation around this person to do this character, rather than a situation sketch.

ANDREW KURTZMAN:.

The resentment directed at d.i.c.k's big stars was never about money. The resentment was simply that they were a little clannish, and that they leaned toward a certain style of their own. We'd had Joe Piscopo doing Reagan, but suddenly here comes Harry Shearer, and he felt very proprietary about his Reagan. "Well, sorry, but I don't think we have to check out every joke with you, Harry. He's president of the United States. We've got to do stuff on this guy." I have not had much contact with Harry recently. I understand he's much more relaxed now. He was a bit depressed then. He had the office next to mine, and sometimes he would be in there alone playing ba.s.s late at night. It was a real dorm-room kind of thing. You'd hear these depressed ba.s.s lines thudding through the walls next door.

ELLIOT WALD:.

Harry's impossible - impossible to get along with. And if he wasn't as bright and talented as he is, n.o.body would put up with him for one minute. But the fact is that he is one of the smartest guys doing this stuff, and I'm always impressed by him.

BILLY CRYSTAL:.

d.i.c.k Ebersol was a great producer for all of us in that way. It was an awkward situation where Harry, Marty, and Chris and I came in and yet there were still some remaining cast members from the year before - Jim Belus.h.i.+, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Mary Gross, Gary Kroeger. So it wasn't Us versus Them, but there was definitely the sense that they were veterans with perhaps different sensibilities. This had been their turf, and here we come in. And there had to be a melding of the two. We had very specific ideas about what was to be the tone of that year after coming off some bad times for the show.

Setting the tone began that summer when we filmed some of the pieces that would become the strongest things for us during the year - the 60 Minutes piece we did that introduced the Minkman character and Nathan Thurm, and Harry as a great Mike Wallace; the two black ballplayers that Chris and I did - that was one of the finer pieces that we did that year; "Relatives of the Rich and Famous" had a really different tone to it. So matching all the tones was d.i.c.k's job that year - and keeping everybody happy.

MARTIN SHORT:.

They certainly paid us a lot of money, much more than what other people had ever been paid on the show. And gave us one-year contracts, so all of it was rare. I guess they didn't a.s.sume there was a tremendous future to the show. They had lost Eddie Murphy and then Joe Piscopo within, I guess, half a season of each other. And there was a tremendous concern that the show had become a star vehicle, and that without stars, the show would falter.