Live From New York Part 18

One little test I used to do was on a Monday morning when we'd meet the host, I would ask the host if he would be interested in doing a sketch called "The William Holden Drinking Helmet." I would always gauge by their reaction, because poor Bill Holden had fallen and cracked his head open and bled to death. So I always thought, if they laughed at that at least, I knew it would be a good week. And if they went, "What?! Aw, no, that's sick," then I thought, "Aw-oh, we're d.i.c.ked." That was my little running gag to see if they had a sense of humor or if they were going to be a d.i.c.khead like Robert Blake.

MARGARET OBERMAN:.

Jerry Lewis hosted the show when I was there. That was a total trip. It was so out there, so insane. We had one writer who was just out of Harvard, he was twenty-one, and Jerry Lewis literally said to him, "I've got ties older than you." He just was such an odd guy. It was his second marriage to a woman he's still married to. I remember so vividly him taking the gum out of his mouth and her holding her hand out and him putting the gum in her hand. He told me some outrageously foul story about how he'd just done h.e.l.lzapoppin' with Lynn Redgrave and somebody asked him what he thought of Lynn Redgrave and he'd said, "I'd like to take my c.o.c.k out and p.i.s.s all over her." It was just insane.

DAVID SHEFFIELD:.

My vote for worst host is Robert Blake. He was sitting in a room and a sketch was handed to him by Gary Kroeger, who was a writer-actor - a sketch called "Breezy Philosopher," a one-premise sketch about a lofty teacher who's kind of a biker tough guy, talking about Kierkegaard. Students kept asking questions while he combed his hair and he'd say, "Hey, I don't know." Blake sat there and read that, with his gla.s.ses down his nose, then wadded it up, turned to Kroeger, and said, "I hope you got a tough a.s.shole, pal, 'cause you're going to have to wipe your a.s.s with that one." And he threw it and bounced it off Gary's face.

MARTIN SHORT:.

Jack Palance was on once and no one laughed at the sketch, and it was so strange. Jim Downey wrote it, it was just the strangest scene, and it got cut at dress. I remember that some of those scenes that didn't make it to air are just kind of cla.s.sically funny to me in their way. This scene was something like, "What would you do if I told you Jack Palance was standing behind that door?" That was it, and then he would come out. And it died at dress. I remember I said, "Isn't there an applause sign someone could have turned on or something?" And Billy Crystal said, "They were flas.h.i.+ng the applause sign. The audience still wouldn't clap."

To me, Ed Grimley's most memorable encounter was with Jesse Jackson - two people you just don't expect to see in the same sketch - when Jesse hosted the show. We were supposed to be sitting next to each other on an airplane. They kept saying, "Now when you climb over Jesse, you mustn't actually fall on him," although it was in the script. I never did fall on him at rehearsal; I just did it for the live show. They didn't want me to do anything that made him look silly or foolish. But he was terrific about it. He was great. He loved it.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

About eight shows into that season, just before Christmas of '84, we did a show which Ringo Starr came to host. And everybody was exhausted. I think it was the second of three in a row or something. But everybody was just worn-out. And the Wednesday night read-through was a travesty. And I took Ringo and Barbara Bach, his wife, and walked, as you can from NBC, almost underground all the way back to the Berks.h.i.+re Hotel over on East Fifty-second Street and kept saying, "Don't worry," to them, which you often tell a host. Lorne used to say - maybe he still does - you're basically bluffing the host from Monday 'til Friday.

In this case, I leveled with Ringo. I said, "What you saw today won't be the show," and I went back with Billy and Chris and about ten people on the writing staff. I think this may be the only time it happened in the history of the show. I said, "We have nothing. I know everybody is exhausted. But let's take all of our best characters and let's write a show around them. And let's break the rule that you go three or four shows between great characters," whether it be Fernando at that point with Billy, or whether it was Marty doing Grimley. I said everything's fair game. We just have to show this guy a great show. We've got nothing now.

And that night, with no sleep for two days, each one of them wrote a piece, and it turned out to be a pretty good show. I offer all that as evidence of the fact that here you have mature adult stars, as they were in the world of comedy - all of them - and they easily accepted, with no complaint, starting completely from scratch that late in the week, which up to that point never happened in the history of the show. They were pros.

MARTIN SHORT:.

When Ringo hosted, that was exciting. I remember my wife coming in on a Friday, and when she saw Ringo, she got so fl.u.s.tered she was shaking. I said, "I can't believe you're shaking," and she said, "That is a Beatle!" She was totally overwhelmed. That part of Sat.u.r.day Night Live was always the most fun - meeting the celebrities and going to the parties.

ANDREW KURTZMAN:.

Sid Caesar came in and was absolutely stunned at the way we did things. And I was given the task of working with Sid. He had a rather elaborate parody of, I think it was Tootsie and Rocky combined. I wasn't quite hip enough to know I was writing the vanity piece that wouldn't get on the air, because I knew Your Show of Shows and I guess Sid kind of locked onto me; they made me Sid's boy for the week. He took me to a dinner at some hotel, not the Algonquin, but one of these faded-glory places where they knew him when he was the TV G.o.d of the fifties. The carpet was getting a little tatty but they still had the overpriced Italian dining room.

And he ate the strangest meal I've ever seen. Sid claimed to eat one meal a day. He starts with a veal chop as big as a baby's head. The thing is oozing cheese, and he eats his and then eats half of mine, because I couldn't get near it. He eats both our portions of spaghetti. As we're gasping after all this food, he says, "Wait - they do me a special dessert. You won't like it. It's just for me. It's this health thing." They bring to the table a salad bowl, a large-sized box of Shredded Wheat - the ones where the biscuits are the size of Brillo pads - and it's a full box, not your little individual serving packs. Then comes a thirty-two-ounce container of yogurt, an enormous bowl of berries, and an equally large bowl of raisins and nuts. I would say there were probably four pounds of food there. And he proceeds to combine this into a mash in the big salad bowl and then drops it on top of this Italian pasta we'd just been eating. It was the strangest thing I'd ever seen. And all the time he's talking about the sketch we were going to do - a sketch that never got on the air.

What astonished Sid, what he could not believe, is that we wrote thirty sketches to get nine. He was absolutely baffled by that. Because that's not the way they did it in his day. He said all of these things should be one line in a meeting. You kill it right there or you decide it's perfect, it's the right thing, and then you go work on it until it's great. He just didn't agree with the system. I don't know if it was Lorne's invention or what.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

I met Susan St. James when she came to host the show that was the second show of the next full season. At midnight the writers went on strike and we couldn't go back on the air. She was pus.h.i.+ng the movie Carbon Copy. She does the show on Sat.u.r.day, and five weeks after that show we were married.

ROBIN SHLIEN:.

This is a very d.i.c.k story: When Susan St. James hosted the show, that's how they met - I guess it was immediate attraction - and he ended up with her at Xenon, a big dis...o...b..ck then. And they were like making out at Xenon and someone from some paper caught them and it was in the paper the next day. Now most people would be embarra.s.sed about this, right? d.i.c.k put the clipping up on the wall of his office.

DAVID SHEFFIELD:.

Favorite hosts included Stevie Wonder, who was a terrific host. It was an interesting week because cue cards were right out. He had a little earpiece, and someone was feeding the lines to him off-camera, his brother. He was just a great host.

There was one host who came on, he was drunk and senile. He kept going, "Where's Gilda? When's Gilda showing up?" He was so arrogant; he basically just did a monologue. Donald Pleasence.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

The first three shows of the '82'83 season - the first show was hosted by n.o.body. That was the one where Jimmy Caan's sister had bone marrow cancer and he pulled out, so we did the show with no host. And Rod Stewart was the musical guest. And Tina Turner was in New York, and I suggested to whoever was managing Rod at the time, why don't they get together, and they had a memorable duet.

With John Madden, it was really about the closest I ever came to having a heart attack before I had a real one in February of '96. In the last half hour of dress, John had, in effect, a second monologue, and basically it was bringing him out to tell some stories that he told normally about various crazy football players who had played for him on the Raiders. But it was so funny, we had helped him shape it into like a two- or three-minute monologue about an hour and ten minutes into the show.

So we were in a break and John was up on home base to do the second monologue when he said, in a booming voice, "Ebersol, Ebersol." And I'm under the bleachers in approximately the same area that Lorne works at today. I stuck my head around the corner so he could see me. He said, "Come here a minute." I came to about halfway to the stage area with a full house, whatever it is, three hundredplus for dress. And he said, "I just want to tell you now I'm going to finish this dress rehearsal and then I'm going to leave. I'm not happy with how things have been going, and I'm enough of a trouper to finish it for this audience, but then I'm outta here. This is just the pits."

I'm standing there and I'm dying. And he lets about two or three seconds go and then he gets the biggest smile on his face in the world and he said, "You know I'm a practical joker, don't you?" The place went nuts. But in the meantime, I had just about had a heart attack.

ANDY BRECKMAN:.

When Sam Kinison hosted, I don't think I've ever laughed harder. He did a little bit of his act for the staff about necrophilia. There was an article in the paper about a guy who was caught having s.e.x with a dead guy in a funeral home. The question was whether Sam could do the joke on the show. It was in the air all week whether or not it was something he would be allowed to do, and I guess they eventually decided he couldn't.

DANNY DEVITO, Host: The first time I did it was when Taxi had just gotten a bunch of Emmys and they then promptly canceled the show. And we did a whole thing on Sat.u.r.day Night Live where we blew up the ABC Building in the cold opening, and the taxi drove off the bridge.

The weird thing is that the show goes by so quick when you do it. They pull you from one spot to the next. You're putting a wig on or a mustache and going, "Oh, this is the skit we're doing, oh, I remember this is what we're doing." They're in tune to it. They lead you around by the nose, basically. And it's over before it seems like you started it. You have to go with the flow. And you can't sit there and think about it too much, you have to just accept a lot of things in trust and go for it.

MARGARET OBERMAN:.

There were scenes. There were definitely scenes. One was particularly nasty. It involved Michael Keaton, who was a friend of mine who had come to do the show and who was very hot off Night s.h.i.+ft. And between the Monday when Michael came in and the read-through, d.i.c.k decided he didn't like him and brought in Michael Palin, who was a real friend of the show and would come in occasionally to do things and who everybody loved. And d.i.c.k sort of inched Keaton out and moved Palin in. And it was pretty nasty.

Keaton was really hurt and angry and never really understood it. It was aberrant behavior on d.i.c.k's part. Keaton was one of those guys who as an actor in read-through was very laid-back and wouldn't really give you too much, and d.i.c.k was convinced he was just bad and just lost all confidence in him. Palin didn't know what was going on. He was oblivious. It was really awkward, one of those yucky, strange things that leaves a really bad taste in your mouth.

HARRY SHEARER:.

I had been writing this series of Reagan sketches called "h.e.l.lcats in the White House," none of which got on the air. And the last one, they had me in Reagan makeup from dress straight through air. So I spent eight straight hours in Reagan makeup, and I think Bob Tischler finally told me at twelve fifty-three the sketch was cut, and I said to him, "I kind of figured that out." So for three straight weeks, I wasn't on the air, and I just at that point decided I had better things to do with my time. I'm not the tantrum type, although I think I'm better at hiding my feelings than I am. I'm told that when I'm unhappy in a situation, people know it just by the cloud that gathers over me. So on January 13 at one forty-three A.M., d.i.c.k said, "You know, we should stop this." And I said, "Well, I do too, but I think you have to pay me for the rest of the year." He said okay and then I left. I had said to Bob Tischler early on, "Why is Billy Crystal getting all this exposure on the show?" And he said, "Billy's stuff is more commercial than yours." And I said, "But this is a late-night show. Why is that the calculation?"

When I left, d.i.c.k issued a press release saying "creative differences." And the first person who called me for a comment on it read that to me and I blurted out, "Yeah, I was creative and they were different."

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

There weren't many ego problems to deal with there - none at all, other than with Harry Shearer, who just got out of control. So by the end of January, I let him go. I had talked to each cast member before I did, and for the most part they were okay with it. A couple of them, who should go nameless, were sad, but they had to admit that the problem had gotten out of hand.

MARTIN SHORT:.

Harry wanted to be creative and d.i.c.k wanted something else. Harry's very smart and very prolific, and I think that he felt his voice should be represented on the show. When he wouldn't get a chance, it made him very upset. If someone had said, "Harry, here's eight minutes of show, do whatever you want, and the rest of the show will be what it is," I think he felt there was an audience out there that would be interested to hear what he had to say. So that was a source of huge frustration between the two of them.

JAMES DOWNEY:.

I used to walk down the street with Bill Murray and have to stand there patiently for twenty minutes of like drooling and a.s.s-kissing by people who would come up to him. And Murray would point to me and say, "Well, he's the guy who writes the stuff," but they would continue to ooh and ahh over him. Murray can be a real a.s.shole, but the thing that keeps bringing me back to defend him is I've seen him be an a.s.shole to people who could affect his career way more often than to people who couldn't. Harry Shearer will s.h.i.+t on you to the precise degree that it's cost-free; he's a total a.s.s-kisser with important people.

Back when neither of us was making much money, Murray and I would take these cheap flights to Hawaii. We had to stop in Chicago, and at the airport there'd be these baggage handlers just screaming at the sight of him, and he would take enormous amounts of time with them, and even get into like riffs with them. I enjoyed it, because it was really entertaining. We went down to see Audrey Peart d.i.c.kman once, and the toll guy on the Jersey turnpike looked in and recognized Murray and went crazy. We stopped and people were honking and Bill was doing autographs for the guy and his family.

I've yet to meet the celebrity who was universally nice to everyone. But the best at it is Murray - even to people who had nothing to do with career or the business.

TIM KAZURINSKY:.

It got really, really depressing, and there was also the notion, I think from Ebersol - from Yale Business School, or wherever the freak he came from - of divide and conquer. I was like tops of the group. I was the old guy that people would come to for life advice and medical questions; I was Mom and Pop. And I noticed that Ebersol would keep the cast off balance. He would try and keep it divisive and pit people against each other, because if we were united, if we were unionized, he was f.u.c.ked. And he always did everything he could to keep the cast from being cohesive. I remember my last year there, they offered me "Weekend Update" about three-quarters of the way through the season. And I said, that's really f.u.c.ked. Brad Hall would feel horrible. I mean, that's just like yanking him in the middle of the season. Everybody's ego was f.u.c.ked-up enough. If you're going to do something like that, do it at the end of the season. And I just said no. I didn't have the stomach for it.

BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY:.

I got along with Ebersol. He was kind of goofy, but he's basically a likable guy.

MARGARET OBERMAN:.

I think d.i.c.k was made fun of by Lorne. They used to call him "Patches." He was the NBC guy, kind of a suit. But I think that in a funny way he knew what he was doing. Look what he did. It was trial-and-error. He didn't pretend to be a creative genius, and he did some really low-rent things. It was not at that time a very hip show to be on in a certain way. The first year I was there, the hosts were like - we used to call them "the Bobs" - Robert Culp, Robert Conrad. It was such a weird array of people.

But you know, d.i.c.k kept it afloat, and all these people came out of it, and there were some great moments. It wasn't consistently wonderful - but then I don't know if it was ever consistently wonderful since the original show, and even that wasn't consistent, but the level of talent was so high you just didn't care.

ELLIOT WALD:.

I was always one of those people who stayed up late and loved to watch the sun coming up. By the time I left Sat.u.r.day Night Live, I was phobic about watching the sun rise. I couldn't stand to watch it getting light, because it meant time was running out and the pressure was on. So that changed in my life.

From a distance, they were wonderful years, and it was a good experience. But the closer in I focus, the more I remember exhaustion, disappointment, and pressure. The individual days of those years were so hard.

Those four years took about ten years off my life. Just the number of hours, the amount of pressure. The fact is that it's enormous pressure to be funny, and beyond that it's enormous pressure to be funny at a particular time. You're funny on Monday and Tuesday. Being funny on Thursday just isn't the same thing. So you've got from noon Monday 'til read-through on Wednesday.

JAMES DOWNEY:.

That last season d.i.c.k had, when Eddie Murphy had left, he had Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Chris Guest - that was one of the best years of the show ever. They did some really wonderful, original stuff. A lot of it sort of broke up the form of the show - a lot of it was on film and really had nothing to do with "live." But it was really good stuff.

MARTIN SHORT:.

SCTV was different. I did it for longer and it was in my hometown and it was the first show of that kind that I did, so there's obviously a special place in my heart. But I have a great fondness for Sat.u.r.day Night Live and that year. I think of it as more like an event than a working job. It was like putting out a paper or something.

MARGARET OBERMAN:.

At one point I was asked to write for SCTV and I was p.i.s.sed off at d.i.c.k about something, so I thought I'd go to Toronto and do that. I knew a lot of those people at SCTV, but once I went and thought hard and long about taking that job I decided not to and went back to Sat.u.r.day Night. Because Sat.u.r.day Night was really a writer's show and SCTV was really a performer's show. And there was a big difference. As a writer, it was a better place to be.

For five years Sat.u.r.day Night Live had gone through highs and lows, sometimes seeming like the distressed damsel in a silent-movie serial, tied to railroad tracks and then being plucked up just before the train roared through. But what had Ebersol and his stars saved - the show or merely the t.i.tle? Glorious tradition or mere commercial franchise? To some of the purists present at the creation of the precedent-shattering show, it seemed to have strayed far from its original mission and looked like it couldn't shatter a precedent with a pickax. And yet anything that lasts has to change - and Ebersol's final year, the one that starred Billy Crystal and Martin Short, is widely considered one of the funniest in the history of the show. The laughs were there, if not the heart.

BILLY CRYSTAL:.

Here's a story I never really told before: I got a movie out of my year on Sat.u.r.day Night Live, with Gregory Hines, called Running Scared. But right before that was to start, Brandon Tartikoff called me and asked me would I consider becoming the permanent host of the show. At this point I was in California, the night before the screen test for the movie - which was a formality, because I knew I'd gotten the part, but the studio wanted to see me on film. It was actually a test to see if I could be convincing throwing a punch, which is most of what I ended up doing in the test. I was staying at Rob Reiner's house because I had rented my house out; people were still living in it. I felt weird. I came home and couldn't go home.

Brandon calls me at Rob's and says, "Listen, this is what I'm thinking about. Would you be interested?" This is May or June, right after the season had ended. I said, "Of course I'd be interested, but let me know, because then I won't test for the movie. I'll turn the movie down, because I'll have to come right back to New York and start planning." Clearly I could not possibly do both the movie and the show. And he said, "Let me call you back."

And I was ecstatic, because I felt I was ready for it. I can't describe enough how comfortable I was on that show. And then we didn't get a call. And what had happened was - this is all within twenty-four hours - d.i.c.k Ebersol decided not to come back, Lorne decided to come back, and not only was I not going to get what Brandon was envisioning, I was also not going to be a part of the show. Lorne wanted to start fresh and start with a whole new group of people. So the decision was sort of made for me. I would have come back, I would have liked that to happen. I've loved my career since then, but that would have been an interesting time if that had worked out. It may not have been the right thing. It may be that the show is great because it has guest hosts. Even thirty years later, it's still fun to watch people do things you wouldn't expect them to do.

I look at my year on Sat.u.r.day Night Live fondly, as my favorite year in my career. It was an exhausting, euphoric, creative, explosive kind of feeling working with Marty, Chris, and Harry. And all of this on a show I started out to be on back in 1975 and then got b.u.mped from the first show as a guest comedian because of time. To come back and have this show set my career in motion, even though I always wanted it to be nine years earlier, was a great personal satisfaction.

ANDREW SMITH:.

Lorne rules the reruns now. Any clips or anything like that, it's as if the Ebersol years didn't exist. Once in a while he'll throw in an Eddie Murphy, but whenever there's a clip show, it's like those years of Ebersol's just disappear. It's as if Lorne still has some kind of hard-on about d.i.c.k.

4.

Behemiel Rising: 19851990.

Lorne Michaels had wanted to take six months off at the end of the 197980 season of Sat.u.r.day Night Live so he could rethink and recast the show. Instead, as things turned out, Lorne's half-year hiatus turned into a five-year exile. Unfortunately, the creator's return was not an immediate raise-the-roof triumph. He had an act to follow for a change - the Billy CrystalMartin Short Sat.u.r.day Night Live, which had been a populist hit. Instead of scouring comedy clubs and improv groups for fresh young talent as he and his cohorts had done the first time, Michaels, as if borrowing a page from the Ebersol playbook, stocked the show with the known and near-known: veteran actor Randy Quaid, teenage star Anthony Michael Hall (who had played Chevy Chase's son in National Lampoon's Vacation), young actors Robert Downey Jr. and Joan Cusack, newcomers Terry Sweeney and Danitra Vance.

It was a more peculiar than colorful group, one that writers found it difficult to write sketches for. Among the saving graces, though, were eccentric newcomer Jon Lovitz, a male diva who popularized original characters like his Pathological Liar and Master Thespian; performer Nora Dunn, whose SNL stint would end in public acrimony; and snide Dennis Miller, who turned "Weekend Update" into his own fitfully amusing soapbox, replete with cranky ranting, girlish giggling, and a hailstorm of obscure references - one of his favorite and more accessible being the character Boo played silently by Robert Duvall in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Michaels was not completely bedecked in glory. His much-ballyhooed foray into prime-time TV, a tastefully inert variety hour called The New Show, was apparently not new enough; it lasted fewer than thirteen weeks in the 198485 TV season. Not only were the ratings puny, but Michaels experienced his first true trouncing from the critics. He also lost, by his estimate, more than $1 million of his own money. In addition, what had been envisioned as a prestigious and productive movie career - first, abortively, at Warner Brothers and then at Paramount - fell short of expectations and momentarily threatened his reputation as king of the comedy impresarios.

Now Michaels had to build a new mountain and didn't have much raw material to do it with. He was in somewhat the predicament that Jean Doumanian had been, except he had all those connections and a keen eye for talent. All that was on the line were his personal and professional reputation, his livelihood, and the fate of his life's most important creation.

TOM HANKS, Host: I did the show for the first time in 1985, the year Lorne came back after being away for five years, and I asked him, "So, why did you come back?" And he just said, "I missed it."

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN, Manager: Lorne Michaels loves a lot of things. He's not in love with anything but Sat.u.r.day Night Live. That's it. It's that simple. That's why he came back.

HERB SARGENT, Writer: The season before Lorne's return, Brandon called me. And he said he was on the fence between d.i.c.k and Lorne - between d.i.c.k staying and Lorne coming back. I said, "If you have Ebersol, you have a solid professional show. If you have Lorne, you have something unexpected - which is much more fun than anything."

LORNE MICHAELS, Executive Producer: The reality hit me that I needed a job. I wasn't really focused on much other than Three Amigos. I'd spent the better part of 1984 writing it with Randy Newman and Steve Martin, and it was about to go into production, with John Landis directing.

Meanwhile there was the failure of The New Show. Not only did it sort of fail, n.o.ble failure though it was, but it was enormously costly, which I had to bear personally. This was the first time I was producing a show for a license fee. We were deficiting it, and I was losing $100,000 a week. We did eleven of them. When it was all over, what I was focused on was behaving well.

I felt I'd had such enormous success with Sat.u.r.day Night that it was character building to have that kind of failure. I had won big - and now I was losing. The last thing I wanted to do was go back and do a television show, but there was a very strong financial reality. I won't say I was completely broke, but I was pretty close to it. I wasn't in any danger of going under, and I'd had lots of periods in my life when I didn't have much money. It was more the dealing with the failure. And then I was getting divorced later on in that year.

By the spring of '85, when Three Amigos started shooting, Brandon called me and asked me about coming back. d.i.c.k had just decided not to. I said I didn't think so. I think he'd had discussions with Buddy Morra, Billy Crystal's manager, about Billy being the sole host, at least for ten of them, or something like that. As with a lot of things with Brandon, I only know the part that I heard. Jobs like his are always about making sure you have options.

When I left in '80, I just thought it would go away. I never really thought of it as having a life of its own, because I'd been there at the beginning of it. Someone very powerful told me, "You don't want to do Sat.u.r.day Night Live. Somebody who wants to be you wants to do Sat.u.r.day Night Live." I thought about that a lot. I promised Brandon that he and I would talk again. And then I think we got to a point in the conversation that he was going to pull the plug on the show. And for me, that was the swing vote.

ANNE BEATTS, Writer: Lorne called and asked me if I wanted my old job back. It was a compliment, I guess. I said no. I've sometimes regretted that, but I was working on other stuff, and being in L.A. more. His first year back didn't seem to go that well. I certainly wouldn't pa.s.s judgment on what it represented that he returned.

TOM SCHILLER, Writer: In the early days I was pretty much left alone. I could go into a meeting and say, "I want to do a thing with John Belus.h.i.+ as an old guy; he does this and that." And then they'd say, "Great. Do it." I'd write a script and go around and show it to people. Herb Sargent usually added a line or two to make it better. Then I just shot it, and in two weeks it would be on the air. It was a dream come true.

But later it became difficult. After the five-year gap, I went back and worked there a little bit, and it was murder. They a.s.signed some young writer to work with me, and it was bad. They had more checks and balances, and that was bad. Somebody said Lorne had become the corporate person that he used to make fun of. It became more of a business. Suddenly there was a guy with a clipboard walking around while you were writing your sketches and stuff, making sure you were working.

When the show first started, no one knew what was going on, and there was a wonderful flux period, which was incredibly creative. We were more individuals in the early days. Then in '85, the show had coalesced, and you found you were just an interchangeable part. Not that the drugs were good, but there were no more drugs. It was clean. It wasn't as rambunctious - that's the word.

ANDY BRECKMAN, Writer: It had meant nothing for me to please d.i.c.k Ebersol or to have d.i.c.k Ebersol say, "That's funny," to get his seal of approval. He was a suit, more of an administrator. He never once made me laugh. So creatively, I didn't respect the man. On the other hand, I was born in 1955. So in my early twenties, SNL was so influential, so big, and Lorne Michaels was this mythical, legendary figure, that when I started working for him, making him laugh and having a pat on the back from him meant a great deal to me.

I was surrounded by writers who had come back to the show and were very cynical about him. They would always be telling "Lorne stories" - about his miscalculations, his posing for the press, his lying to the press, and Lorne supposedly taking credit for stuff that he might not have been ent.i.tled to. Clearly they didn't feel the same way about working for Lorne that I did.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:.

Lorne didn't want to go back with the same type of show Ebersol had. There were no long discussions. Lorne just said, "Here's what I'm going to do, here are the people I'm going after." Robert Downey Jr. was one of the people he really wanted, and it wasn't a terrible idea, but it wasn't a good idea either, in retrospect. It just didn't work. And there were a few problems among the cast; I mean alcohol and drugs and whatever. It wasn't good. But Lorne was still young then, thirty-nine or forty, and he was trying something different.

JON LOVITZ, Cast Member: I'd only had one job in seven years - doing The Paper Chase in its second year on cable, when I was twenty-five. So now I was twenty-eight. I mean, I just couldn't believe I got the show, you know? Like you go, "You want me to do the Master Thespian?" I'd done it at the Groundlings, but originally when I was eighteen. I was like just goofing around, you know, saying, "I'm the Master Thespian." And now they've built a whole set for it, you know. It just blew my mind.

Or doing the Pathological Liar. And next thing you know, every-body's imitating it. It was just unreal, because I'd been working as a messenger. And then I finally started working and I got a movie and a series, then I got Sat.u.r.day Night Live. I mean, I was broke, and then by the end of the year I got a deal to do a movie for half a million dollars. So that was just an amazing time for me, you know, amazing.