Live From New York Part 19

Well, everybody else went nuts. Everyone else started getting weird, and I was like, "What's going on?" I got the job, you know, and then a friend of mine sent me a book of quotes, and he underlined a quote from Kirk Douglas, and it said, "When you become famous, you don't change, everybody else does." That's what was happening in my life. Everybody had said no for seven years, and all of a sudden everybody was saying yes. And I couldn't believe it.

ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL, Cast Member: I grew up watching Eddie and Piscopo and that cast from that era. I was just a kid at the time, and I was just enjoying what was happening to me, working on the John Hughes films. And then all of a sudden I got a call from Lorne and, you know, I was in shock. I was such a huge fan of the show and so many of the actors and actresses that emerged from it. So it was really an honor.

Even after I had decided to do the show, I remember walking around the city, just baffled that I had taken this on. I couldn't believe I was actually going to be a part of it. It really is one of the most creatively demanding mediums to work in, because it's a blend of a lot of things - theater and rock and roll and everything else.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL, NBC Executive: I think Lorne's first year back in '85 was very dark. It was a very dark year. It was the roughest season Lorne ever had doing the show, and everybody came out of the woodwork to attack. It was the first time he'd ever been subject to that "Sat.u.r.day Night Dead" stuff. And that just reminded me that I had left of my own volition, because when I did the show, I'd never gone through a diatribe year like he went through then.

ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL.

It was one of the most forgettable seasons of the show's history. I certainly didn't make a major impact on the show like a lot of people did. But just to be a part of it from my standpoint was amazing. It's far and away the most compet.i.tive environment I've ever worked in. Some guy who was based in the West, a fan of the show, would send me tapes of selected sketches where it was so blatantly obvious that I was reading cue cards. He had time to do an edited version of, like, my worst cue card readings, the ones that were most blatant. It didn't bother me; I thought it was hilarious.

TOM HANKS:.

It was a sort of cobbled-together cast. Lorne put it together in like six weeks. Franken and Davis were back as writer-producers. I think they'd been gone. So it was definitely a sense that the whole staff was either finding their bearings for the first time or trying to refind their bearings after an extreme absence. But in some ways it was one of those years that Sat.u.r.day Night Live showed itself to be this enduring show business tradition - this ent.i.ty, this cla.s.sic thing. Because you could easily say it should have been off the air; that's what everybody wanted it to be. You know - "Sat.u.r.day Night Dead." How often did you read that by the time I was on the show for the first time?

AL FRANKEN, Writer: The '85'86 season was difficult for a number of reasons, one of which was that Tom Davis and I were nominally the producers but didn't have that much authority. The second was we had a cast that didn't gel, and it was very hard to write in the same way as for a cast that had worked. I don't know what was happening in Lorne's head when he put that cast together, but I think he was consciously going after youth. We didn't have enough people to play middle-aged males. It was impossible to write a Senate hearing.

I liked Danitra Vance very much, but it turned out she was dyslexic and couldn't read cue cards on the air. I remember her agent or manager coming to us and saying, "You wrote for Eddie Murphy, why aren't you writing for her?" And I said, "Eddie Murphy's Eddie Murphy and Danitra's Danitra. Just because they're black doesn't mean they're the same thing." It was a little out of control.

But we had Lovitz, who was great, and Dennis Miller started coming in and doing "Update," so the building blocks were definitely there, but it was a tough year. Youthful problems, att.i.tude, absence of skills, not to mention what may be a case of talent lack - that confluence made it very, very hard for a talented group of writers to find stuff to do. When the show is doing well, it's usually overpraised, and when it's not doing so well, it's overcriticized.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

Jim Carrey never auditioned for me personally. There is an audition tape which we almost played on the twenty-fifth-anniversary show - if he had come that night, we would have. We have all the audition tapes. Carrey, I think, auditioned for Al Franken the year I was executive producer and Tom Davis and Al were the producers along with Jim Downey. In '85, when Brandon got me to come back, his whole argument was I had to learn how to delegate. d.i.c.k had run it successfully that way, and so Tom, Al, and Jim did their stuff and I sort of approved things. But later that season, when Brandon was again thinking about canceling the show, he told me, "You have to completely take charge of everything again."

CAROL LEIFER, Writer: Jim Downey and Al Franken were really the people who hired me. Jim had seen me doing Letterman pretty regularly around that time, and he came in and saw me at the Comic Strip and then just asked me if I wanted to join the staff. Of course I had to meet Lorne, to officially be hired. The meeting was like thirty seconds. I walked in - it wasn't even a sit-down meeting - and he said, "Jim and Al said some really good things about you. Are you familiar with what kind of goes on with the writers? It gets pretty intense. Are you prepared for that kind of thing?" I said, "Yeah, I'm down with it." And that was about it. What I realized later was, having been Jim and Al's person coming in, I was never going to be in the inner circle, because Lorne wasn't the one who found me.

TERRY SWEENEY, Cast Member: I think Lorne hired me because I was funny. I don't think he hired me as a gay guy. I don't find Lorne h.o.m.ophobic at all. I think he deserves credit. He was the first. When he told me he was going to hire me, I said, "You know I'm going to be openly gay, I'm not going to hide it or pretend I'm not." And he was totally fine with that. I never got the vibe from him that he was h.o.m.ophobic in the least.

JAMES DOWNEY, Writer: We opened the season with Madonna hosting the show, and there was tremendous hype. It was an offensive, dreadful show. I don't know how many shows there've been - more than five hundred. I would say the Madonna show has got to be considered one of the top five - I mean in an entirely negative way. It really crippled the season from the get-go, particularly since there were a lot of people anxious to see that new group of actors fail. That first show was like an albatross for us. Years later people would still say, "I haven't watched the show since that Madonna thing." It did so much long-lasting damage.

When we left in May of 1980, we averaged something like a 12 rating and a 36 share - something pretty high like that. And then after Jean Doumanian's third show, it was consistently halved. So it was like a 7 rating or something. When Ebersol did the show, he stabilized it and solidified it and kept it on the air, which I think he deserves a lot of credit for, but the numbers were never really huge. That Madonna show got like a 10 rating. That was big.

It was almost like, "The bad news is, a lot of people were watching."

ROBERT SMIGEL, Writer: I wrote a song for Madonna to do in a Spanish talk-show sketch and it was surreal, because she was the biggest star in the world and I was just stepping into this show for the first time. I'd half-written this sort of medley for her to sing, and I was one of the backup singers in the sketch. It was a very, very strange way to start.

Then I didn't get anything on for four weeks and I was worried about getting fired, because the show was such a disaster. George Meyer was a great writer who took me under his wing, and he told me, "Don't worry, no matter what, Lorne doesn't fire people, he gives them a chance." But after about five shows, people started telling me, "Things are tough and the network's clamping down."

ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL.

Madonna moves like a train. Everything is forward and she is very focused and very intent upon getting it all done right.

DAMON WAYANS, Cast Member: But the thing about Madonna was, she was terrified. She had never done this before. They were doing the "five... four... three" count-down for the show to come on live. And I looked over at Madonna and she had the biggest facial tic, like her skin was jumping off. One of her eyes was like jumping off her face. She was a wreck.

Do you remember when that light fell on Madonna? Was it seen in the frame? I think you can see it. A light fell, yeah. Actually it was a sketch where I played a gay actor in the closet. I was acting really supermacho. But when the light fell, I screamed a really high-pitched scream, because the light actually fell. So you see a lot of realism in that scene.

Madonna's not the friendliest person in town but she was very, very professional, and throughout the week she kept saying, "Let's do it again, let's rehea.r.s.e it again, let's rehea.r.s.e it again." She worked her a.s.s off.

JACK HANDEY, Writer: The Madonna show was considered in bad taste. It was viciously attacked and the ratings started going down. We were actually worried. That was one year, I think, that people wondered whether the show was going to get canceled. But we had a good writing staff then, with people like George Meyer and Jim Downey and Franken and Davis.

TERRY SWEENEY:.

Chevy hosted the second show, and we were all so excited because, to us, Chevy was like a G.o.d. This was someone returning who'd been one of the original people and was this legendary figure. And we were just excited to work with him. And when he got there, he was a monster. I mean, he insulted everybody. He said to Robert Downey Jr., "Didn't your father used to be a successful director? Whatever happened to him? Boy, he sure died, you know, he sure went to h.e.l.l." Downey turned ashen. And then Chevy turned to me and he said, "Oh, you're the gay guy, right?" And he goes, "I've got an idea for a sketch for you. How about we say you have AIDS and we weigh you every week?" It was out of place. So then he ended up having to apologize and actually coming to my office. He was really furious that he had to apologize to me. He was just beside himself. And it was just awful. He acted horribly to me. He acted horribly to everyone. When he got on the elevator at the end of the night - you know, we all go to the party afterwards - and everybody saw him coming, we hid. We wouldn't be on the elevator with him. We were all hiding. We were plastered against the wall going, "Oh, he's getting on the elevator, he's almost gone. Oh, he's gone." No one wanted to be near him. I don't know what he was on or what was happening to him mentally, but he was just crazy.

JON LOVITZ:.

When Chevy Chase was hosting, there was a meeting of the writers and staff. So Chevy looks at Terry Sweeney and goes, "You're gay, right?" Terry goes, "Yes, what would you like me to do for you?" Chevy goes, "Well, you can start by licking my b.a.l.l.s."

ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL.

I never knew that side of Chevy. Then again, to Chevy I was probably always the kid who played his fourteen-year-old son in National Lampoon's Vacation. He was always nice to me. I really had a good experience.

RON REAGAN, Host: I went and saw Lorne at the Chateau Marmont, where he was staying. He was getting ready to go to some award show. We sat and talked for about a half an hour or so about me hosting the show. Initially, I was really just doing him a courtesy of telling him no to his face. They'd called before to ask if I wanted to host the show and I'd said no. And then he was going to be in L.A., and he said, "Why don't you come over and talk?" I said, "Well okay, fine." I just expressed my concern about I didn't want to be taken advantage of in some way and didn't want to see my family hurt because of my stupidity - going onto a show where it was really an opportunity to make fun of them - and in a cruel way, not a fun way. And Lorne just said, "We don't want to do that. That's not what we're about," and he promised I'd have final say over things. Nothing too awful was going to get by me. And that pretty much addressed my concern. Once I'd realized I'd have control, that was it. I said okay. It just seemed like a fun thing to do. Who at that age wouldn't want to host Sat.u.r.day Night Live?

ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL.

People were pretty impressed by the job Ron Reagan did hosting the show. He was very willing to throw it up there to see what stuck, you know. He was quite fearless as an actor, I thought. And he really had a good sense of humor about his upbringing and his family and everything. I thought it was really cool.

RON REAGAN:.

I think that once they got to know me a little bit, everybody was being fairly careful about not being cruel. To have family members sitting there, it takes a little bit of the edge off. You can't be too mean. I'm probably as far or farther left than anybody on that cast. So in terms of personal politics, n.o.body was going to out-left me. There's always a little bit of weirdness. I've discovered in my life, having been my father's son for years and years, that people have preconceptions about you. And you try to disabuse them of those pretty soon.

We actually rehea.r.s.ed one sketch that had been my idea. When we were sitting around the table earlier in the week, I said to everybody that I thought it would be funny if Terry Sweeney and I did a kind of screaming-queen sketch. And we wrote one up and kind of put it together and did it in the dress rehearsal. And you could kind of see the audience was really just sort of confused by it, didn't really see the point.

TERRY SWEENEY:.

In one sketch, Ron and I played these gay guys who were house-sitting for Nora Dunn in her apartment - and we just change everything around and redecorate, and do all this stuff. And he played the really flamingest queen in the world. But they cut the sketch. His manager made him cut it. But he was still a great host.

RON REAGAN:.

The Risky Business sketch seemed like an obvious one. I got a little note from Tom Cruise afterwards - just saying that he enjoyed the sketch and thought it was really funny, and ha ha. A little polite note. And yet there were some people who were upset by it. I don't really understand why. I guess it was just the Jockey shorts. I was actually wearing three pairs of Jockey shorts. Every time we rehea.r.s.ed, and right after the dress rehearsal, Standards and Practices would come back and say, "Could we put another pair on him?"

My parents probably were not thrilled that I was going to be doing something that would inevitably poke some fun at them. I don't think my dad really cared. But Nancy tends to get a little nervous about that sort of thing.

TERRY SWEENEY:.

Ron said his mother did not care for my impression of her. But he thought I was eerily accurate. Ron thought I was more like his mother than his mother was. So I thought that's the highest compliment one can ever have. He was great. He used to call to me, "Hi, Mom," in the halls. Imagine how freaky it must have been for him. There's a man coming down the hall dressed as your mother, in the same red Adolfo suit, going, "h.e.l.lo, dear. h.e.l.lo, son."

RON REAGAN:.

Later on I was in New York for something completely unrelated. And I dropped by the Sat.u.r.day Night Live offices to just say hi, and they were in the midst of doing a show where Oprah was guest host. And they were having their first cast meeting with her in Lorne's office when I happened to knock on the door. I didn't know what was going on. I just came in to say hi. "Oh, come on in, come on in. Sit in on the meeting." So I did. I turned around and said hi to Oprah, who I really didn't know at the time. She wasn't as humongous as she is now. And I could tell she was really displeased I was there. It was like I'd really stepped into her thing. So I stayed just a few minutes and politely left.

AL FRANKEN:.

We had some good things that season, like when Ronald Reagan Jr. did the show. And Pee-wee Herman did a funny show. Lovitz started doing the Pathological Liar. And Joan Cusack was tremendously talented. They were bright spots. It's just that nothing else went right.

CAROL LEIFER:.

I wrote a sketch about a husband and wife having an anniversary dinner. It's just basically, "We love each other so much, it's so great, our anniversary." And you know, "Isn't it wonderful we can just tell each other anything, that's how close we are." And at that point the husband goes, "That's so true. Here's something: Sometimes I have this fantasy that you die." Tom Hanks eventually did it. But it literally went through every read-through of every male host and got cut. When Tom Hanks did it, it was so great.

Otherwise, it was a terrible year. That was, I think, maybe the only year where at the end of the season, the show certainly was not guaranteed to come back. It seemed genuinely in danger of being canceled.

TERRY SWEENEY:.

It was an unhappy time during that period for a lot of the actors and actresses involved, but I've heard from future casts that they were not so happy either. There was a lot of Al and Tom, definitely. Al Franken and Tom Davis were very much involved in the show and very hands-on and very opinionated. So I think that they had their own version of things. I think they had felt like, "We're back," and rolled up their sleeves. And I think Al very much wanted to be on the show, and now he's found his little niche, which is wonderful for him, but I think he was still looking then for what his niche was - what was his claim to fame and how could he move from being a writer to being on-camera, being up front.

TOM HANKS:.

Hosting the first time is a very, very milli-close second to the first time you appear on the Johnny Carson show. You're that combination of absolutely petrified but also kind of dizzy. The whirlwind preparation that goes into that first week, if you've never done it before, is kind of mesmerizing. It honestly looks as though nothing is happening at first. You know, you're the host and you're just kind of escorted around and around and around, and you're getting your picture taken, you're getting fitted for something, and people come up to you and pitch ideas that you might or might not understand. And then, on Wednesday, you have that big long read-through that, for some reason, starts a full hour and a half late and then goes for about three hours and then, from that, they cull all these things. You read twenty-five, thirty, forty, fifty, six hundred pieces. I can't even remember. Then you go into this room and they have them all up there on cards posted to a bulletin board, and the next thing you know, you decide what's going to be on the show. So that by the time you get through that - that moment which, by the way, is after the full dress rehearsal - you've sort of done it already, but now you know that it's live. I mean, it's horrifying. And yet it's the most exhilarating thing, like being strapped inside of a huge explosive rocket s.h.i.+p and you're waiting for the countdown to go and it just might blow you to kingdom come or it might take you to the moon.

The thing that happens the first time you do the show is you're just completely swept away with the history of the place. I think there's still stuff tacked up onto bulletin boards that hasn't moved in seventeen years or so. So you're reading these things that have been up forever in hallways lined with all those photographs. But when you go down and you're actually on in Studio 8H, you're thinking you sort of recognize this place, but you can't believe it's as small or as crowded or as dark as it is, and that the band is actually playing as loud as it is.

The first time I did it, it was just the beginning of the Christmas season, so it was December and they were lighting the Christmas tree there in Rockefeller Center. And the offices of Sat.u.r.day Night Live were like one extremely big and confusing family. Everybody who had kids brought them in, and everybody was staring out the windows of the seventeenth floor looking down at the big tree and watching it all on TV at the same time.

The show was, of course, a history of entrances and exits. Sometimes the entrance was momentous and the exit ign.o.ble, sometimes the exits were en ma.s.se. Many of the show's stars left only to return sporadically in cameo roles; they were like alumni revisiting the campus of their youth. No one ever actually quit on the air, while the show was actually in progress - or, not quite. Damon Wayans came close, with one of the most memorable exits in the annals of exiting.

ANDY BRECKMAN:.

I wrote a sketch for Jon Lovitz called "Mr. Monopoly." The idea was he was a lawyer. And you know the character from the Monopoly board, the character that they draw on the Monopoly game, the little man with the hat? The idea for the sketch was Jon Lovitz was that man, Mr. Monopoly, and he was a very successful lawyer because he had all these "get out of jail free" cards. His clients would go to jail and he would come in with these cards and the cops would hate him: "d.a.m.n you, Mr. Monopoly!" And that was the idea for the sketch. And Lovitz was very funny. And Damon Wayans I wrote as a cop who had one line. He would say, "Hey Larry, your lawyer is here to see you." That was it.

Dress rehearsal went fine. I didn't know any of the political bull-s.h.i.+t that was going on, but I did know Damon had been angry about various things, including something apparently that was cut at dress rehearsal, and he was furious and he decided between dress and air he was going to quit Sat.u.r.day Night Live right then and there, he was fed up. And this is how he quit. During the live show, he made his entrance in the sketch not as a cop but as his flamboyant queen gay character that he later did on In Living Color. He came in prancing and delivered "Your lawyer's here to see you" very swishy. He totally derailed the sketch, derailed the sketch completely. The audience was completely thrown: What's a gay cop doing in there? Is it about the cop or is it about Lovitz? It was just stunning. I was with Lorne watching, and Lorne turned to me and said, "That's it. I've got to fire him." Lorne had no choice. Damon had sabotaged a sketch live on-air and Lorne fired him that night, which is what I think Damon wanted anyway.

I was just sitting in the corner, thinking, "I'm sorry. I supplied the bullets." And then I was going to disappear at one o'clock forever. I remember Tom Davis, who I guess was also a guest writer or was just hanging out there, saying, "I'll bet anyone in this room that within three years, we will all be standing in line to see a Damon Wayans movie. This is not the end of his career." And he was right. That was the start of his career.

DAMON WAYANS:.

What was I supposed to do? I was supposed to just be a cop. But I was frustrated, because I think Lorne Michaels thought he was protecting me by not putting me out there, letting me do my thing. So I started walking around wearing dark shades. When they asked me what was wrong, I said, "It's too white in here, it hurts my eyes." I was really on the verge of a nervous breakdown, or just taking a gun and killing everybody. The night in question, the "Mr. Monopoly" sketch, I didn't think the sketch was that funny. I thought it was a one-joke premise. I was supposed to play a cop and we were doing a takeoff on like Miami Vice - this was the hot show at the time - and I was supposed to be Tubbs and Randy Quaid was playing the other guy. So between dress and air, they pushed that b.u.t.ton. I wore a suit, so I thought, "At least I'll look good in the sketch." And then between dress and air Lorne Michaels comes to me and goes, "The sketch is not working. You look like a pimp." It was because of me the sketch wasn't working! He wanted me to wear a uniform.

So I just got angry. Because I didn't think the sketch was funny. I had a bunch of straight-man lines. It was the fact that Lorne blamed me for the sketch not being funny when I had told him before that it was a one-joke premise. The guy's waiting to get out of jail and Mr. Monopoly comes in and gives him a "get out of jail free" card - that was the big joke. It's like twelve minutes until Mr. Monopoly finally walks in. And then they say the reason it wasn't working was that I looked like a pimp at dress rehearsal. And I just said, "f.u.c.k it."

I was like, okay, I'll be a cop in uniform but I'm going to find a character. And it would've been funny if I had not done it with such anger. I was so angry, I basically wanted them to fire me. I wanted to quit, but I thought they would sue me. It was the Brillstein-Grey management company trying to manage everything at one time as opposed to getting on with my needs. They were representing Lorne. Lorne was the big dog.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

Damon broke the big rule. I went berserk. The whole business of trust when you're in an ensemble - the whole deal with the network, in my mind, is that we operate on the level of trust. We have live air, we're not just going to go up there and say, "f.u.c.k f.u.c.k f.u.c.k f.u.c.k f.u.c.k." And I think Damon, in his defense, he didn't get a big enough laugh with what he was doing. And he went back to a character that he'd done in Beverly Hills Cop.

DAMON WAYANS:.

I'd never seen Lorne lose his cool. He had always been very logical and reasonable and we could talk about anything. But he came backstage and he was like, "Get the f.u.c.k out of here, who the f.u.c.k, what the f.u.c.k" - it was like talking to friends up in Harlem. He was cussing. He was like, "John Belus.h.i.+ never did anything like that." "You'll never work in show business" - he said that one to me. Or never work again in New York, whatever.

I didn't even say good-bye. I went home, gladly. It was the same management, so they were basically telling me, "You f.u.c.ked up, this is it, word is going to spread," and all that. In hindsight I understand that, but I was a young kid. I didn't understand politics or how tough it was for Lorne Michaels coming back for his first year and how he wanted to be right and be the guru of comedy. I didn't understand any of that. All I understood was I wasn't funny and they wanted me to hold a spear.

TERRY SWEENEY:.

I think the writers came to think of me as just the gay guy. They'd go like, "Oh well, he's a hilarious gay guy, so if we want a gay guy, we'll just put him in this sketch where the guy can be really effeminate - the guy's really gay. But if it's a regular role, let's give it to Jon Lovitz or Randy Quaid" - who were very talented, but it's just a question where I would feel like, "Hey, I can do this too." So I think I felt the brunt of some prejudice.

Later on, I came to realize - as one matures, one realizes it's not always the h.o.m.ophobia; it's a lot of times just that's not your world. If you're straight, you're thinking about a straight guy and a husband, and it's not - it's just not something you're thinking about. You think that you find a gay guy over there, and a straight guy's over here, and it doesn't occur to people that they're ever in the same place.

CAROL LEIFER:.

I really don't think during the season Lorne said much of anything to me. I never requested to speak with him by myself. I'm different now; if I'm getting the cold shoulder from somebody - at that time I'd stay out of your way - but now I'd want to investigate more to see how I could help the situation.

I do remember a very valuable Lorne lesson that I still use today. I remember him really clearly in one meeting saying he always hated the funny-name joke, you know, when a character had a funny name, like a punny name. That kind of thing. It's such an indicator of an amateur.

DAMON WAYANS:.

I was so glad to be off the show. I was so relieved. I finally felt like I lived on the edge. My problem with that show is, and I used to say it all the time, we're so rehea.r.s.ed, where's the thrill of being on live? I had an improv background, hung out with Robert Townsend and my brother and Eddie Murphy. We'd go onstage and play around, and I didn't feel we were doing that on SNL. And the group of actors that they had - great actors, but they weren't improvisational actors. You say a different line during rehearsals and they go, "Cut!" What about playing around? So when I got fired, I was thrilled, I was relieved, I had knots in my stomach, I was angry, and I would cry when I got home.

But you know, to Lorne's credit, he's never spoken bad of me. I think in his mind he respected me or something. He's actually given recommendations for me in films and stuff like that. And that was right after this happened.

TERRY SWEENEY:.

I'm really happy. I'm still with my lover that I was with back then, who was a writer on the show. I have a great personal life and I actually was a writer too, you know. I went back to television writing and movie writing, and so I've made money and done well, so I'm really actually happy I had the experience. The training is invaluable and I've used it, you know. I've just used it in everything I've ever done since then.

DAMON WAYANS:.

I was brought back for the last show of the season. There's a sick side of Lorne Michaels; he loves the rebel. Once he got over his own ego - what I did on the show that time was basically a "f.u.c.k you" move - he sat back and said, "Well, the guy's talented. I just don't think he's ready to be a Prime Time Player."

It was great except Dudley Moore was the host and I was doing this joke about - I was born with a clubfoot, and so I used to do this whole routine about when I was young, how I used to wear orthopedic shoes and I had a shoe with like a five-inch heel and I used to walk with a limp. And I did me walking with the limp and said people that knew me thought I was cool. Thank G.o.d I was in the ghetto. I did this thing about how I wasn't a fighter at the time, I was just a very pa.s.sive kid, and I said you don't find many handicapped bullies, and I did, you know, "Imagine some crippled dude coming up to you, 'Gimme your lunch money!'"

But Dudley Moore walked with a limp too. When I started doing the guy walking with the limp, he walked over to Lorne and like, "You're not going to let him do it?" So Lorne also killed that bit. But then at the end, he let me do it. Dudley saw it at dress rehearsal. I was looking at Lorne like, "You know this is a live show and I'm going to do s.h.i.+t anyway." Dudley was just like, "I can't go on. My foot."

I didn't do it to mess with Dudley. It was in my stand-up, a really funny bit I used to do. But it was his own insecurity. The reason I came out with the bit was the same reason, the feeling that people were watching. It was like, even if I don't do the joke, don't people look at that boot on your foot and go, "d.a.m.n, that's big"?

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:.

Brandon calls me up in April and says, "I'm going to cancel Sat.u.r.day Night Live." And by then, I have to admit, I was happy to hear it - you know, rather than see it suffer. I wasn't in love with the persona of Sat.u.r.day Night Live the way Lorne was.

So I go home that night and I said to my wife at the time, "Deb, they're going to cancel the show." She said, "You can't let them bring Lorne back and then cancel it." She got offended. And I said, "You know, sometimes you've got to hear it from someone else." I call Brandon back and said no way, you've got to give him one more year. Brandon said to have Lorne come out, which he did. We all met, and that's how it stayed on the air. It was that close, it was canceled. My wife knew nothing about show business, but she liked Lorne. She said you can't let them do that, bring him back and then cancel him, that's terrible. And she was right. Common sense.

WARREN LITTLEFIELD, NBC Executive: Brandon was very involved in getting feedback to Lorne on the show and felt that it was struggling, and I do remember him saying, "It's over." I think many of us would, in our years as executives at broadcast networks, be in a meeting, focus on problems, sometimes lose sight of what had been accomplished and what we had. And that kind of piling on happens, and you push away from the table and you go, "That's it, G.o.ddammit. We're shutting it down. I'll be the decision maker." And G.o.d bless Brandon - in the light of day I think he woke up and went, "Oh G.o.d, am I really going to face Lorne today and tell this human being who I love and care about and believe in that I'm pulling the plug on him and the show?"

And that's when that cold executive maneuver that you said the day before - "I'm going to take control and take action" - that's when you finally realize, you know what, maybe I'll just wait a little bit. And part of that is not wanting to be confrontative, and also in the light of day, forgetting the posturing for a moment, saying, "You know what? It may not be perfect. What is? But does that mean we throw it out - and what do we have to replace it with?" One of the questions you have to ask yourself is, "All right, kill it, but what's your plan?" And sometimes faced with "what's your plan," you look at it in a different light.

ROBERT SMIGEL:.

By the end of the season, the show was still a disaster. I had this idea to do a cliff-hanger like Dallas - one of those obnoxious cliff-hangers that really were new at the time - and I wrote one where Billy Martin sets the studio on fire and Lorne's in there and he runs out and he just saves Lovitz, which infuriated a few people in the cast. And he leaves all these other people and it's like, "Who will survive?" And then the whole credit crawl, everybody's name had a question mark after it.

Once more Sat.u.r.day Night Live had teetered on the brink and once more the program was spared the unseemly ignominy of cancellation. Now it was up to Lorne Michaels to reinvent the show one more time, and though he still disliked firing people, one of his first moves had to be to throw the "new" cast out and recruit a newer new cast, one that could help SNL win back America's heart. Michaels had learned the lesson of casting people for their talent rather than for their names, and he set about rebuilding the show in much the way he had first constructed it - he and his staff searching comedy clubs and improv groups for bright young performers, especially those who could write sketches and create characters.

Even though the search would prove to be successful, Sat.u.r.day Night Live still faced a future that was anything but certain. For the first time in its history, the show was renewed for only thirteen weeks, not a full twenty-week season.

BRAD GREY, Manager: I thought Dana Carvey was really special, and I wanted Lorne to see him. We all went to the Comedy Store - Bernie, myself, Cher, and Lorne. It turned out to be one of those silly circ.u.mstances where the moment Dana went onstage, Lorne had to go to the men's room. So I was sitting there and I knew that Dana would just kill, which he did. And just as he was finis.h.i.+ng, Lorne returned from the men's room. So Dana didn't get the show then; we waited until the next go-round.

DANA CARVEY, Cast Member: I'd auditioned twice before. This time, I went on at midnight at the Comedy Store, after Sam Kinison. I always had my own equivalency of the dumb blonde in my career, especially back then. I really looked like an innocent midwestern guy with blonde bangs, I just didn't look like a comedian, and it kind of threw people sometimes. But this guy had a little club on the West Side and Lorne saw me there. Rosie O'Donnell was headlining, and she let me come in and do forty minutes before her. And Lorne showed up with Brandon Tartikoff and Cher - just so we would be a little more nervous. And that's where I got the show.

My wife didn't even move out to New York. I said, "This will probably fail." I went out there early because Lorne said, "You could come out and, you know, just hang." So I came out in August and Lorne turns to me and says, "Paul and Linda are coming over tonight." I said, "Excuse me?" "Oh - Paul. McCartney. Over here." And literally the blood drained from my face. And I went into a room that Lorne called "Jack's Room" because it's where Nicholson would stay, and I called my friends back in the Bay Area and said, "I'm going to meet Paul McCartney tonight." And Paul and Linda came over for four nights in a row and we listened to demo tracks, we heard all about them. Being a Beatle fanatic, that experience was just absolutely mind-blowing.