Live From New York Part 24

My frustration was half that, and the other half like the black comedy boom was happening and I wasn't part of it. In Living Color was a big show, and Def Comedy Jam was on HBO, and Martin Lawrence was on. So there was all this stuff happening, and I was over here in this weird world, this weird, Waspy world. But the things I learned there - there'd be no Chris Rock Show, I never would have had the success that I had with that, if I hadn't been on SNL learning how to run a show. I didn't go to college. So it was all school to me. Everyone was a professor - Professor Al Franken, Professor Phil Hartman.

NORM MACDONALD, Cast Member: I always hear about how Chris Rock was underutilized and stuff. That's not really true. I mean, they let you do whatever you want on that show. So you can't blame anybody. It's just that Chris is a great stand-up comedian, a great voice. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean he's a great sketch-comedy comedian.

CHRIS ROCK:.

"Can't compete with white people, man. You'll lose your mind." My mother told me that a long time ago. "Just find your spot. Find your spot, work within that spot." Okay, everybody's writing sketches for the host. They've got to do something without the host, let me write something without the host. I was a separate thing.

With Tim Meadows being on the show, you know somewhere in your mind that if there's two nonwhite, pretty good sketches, they probably won't both get on. And they'll never go back-to-back, even if they have nothing to do with each other. One could be about medieval times and one could be a drag-racing thing, but you're never going to see this sketch with a bunch of black people, and this other sketch with a bunch of black people, back-to-back. One might go near the top of the show and the other would be at the end of the show.

That's how it was in comedy clubs too. One black comic goes on at nine o'clock, they will not be putting me on at nine-fifteen. Same goes with women. It was just men in power overreacting, overthinking things.

FRED WOLF:.

The one thing I will say is that while Chris was on the show, I would walk somewhere with him and everyone was recognizing him. Everyone out there knew who he was, and typically he'd have more of a black slant to some of the stuff he was doing. And I think he felt like his audience wasn't really watching Sat.u.r.day Night Live, and that may be the case. But I also think he's been able to cross over quite a bit, and I think some of the stuff he learned at Sat.u.r.day Night Live or was able to sort of do at Sat.u.r.day Night Live probably helped him prepare for that.

If he had started at In Living Color, maybe he would have jump-started much faster than he did at Sat.u.r.day Night Live. My observation was, yeah, he was having a rough time. But I don't think Sat.u.r.day Night Live hurt him in any way.

CHRIS ROCK:.

Maybe I could have worked harder. As I think back on it, I worked just as hard as anybody else, but as my father raised me, "You've got to work harder than the white man. You can't work as hard; you're not going to get anywhere." I don't want to say anything bad about the place. They're good people.

It's not the place for a black guy, it's not the hippest place, man. We used to always get the black acts the year they were finished. Like the music acts. So we got Hammer when he did "Too Legit to Quit," when he did The Addams Family theme song, on his way out. We get Whitney Houston on the way out. I'm just telling the truth, man.

Who wrote for me? Me, man. Just me. No black writers and no one really got into that side of the culture. Half the culture's into some form of hip-hop sensibility, half of the white culture, it's not just a black thing, but the show's never really dealt with that part of the culture. Even now.

DAVID MANDEL:.

I was a fan of Rock's from before I got there, and I had his original stand-up alb.u.m. He's a genius, obviously. And his stand-up acts are as close as it gets to perfection. At the time, I just don't think what he was doing was just exactly right. I mean, even now, when you see the success he's having in the movies and stuff, he's basically still playing variations on Chris Rock. At the time, on the show, people were trying to write characters for him and things like that. And I just don't think that's what he does, and so it was sort of a bad match at the time. I don't think anybody was saying that was genius and it wasn't getting on. I just think it wasn't a good match.

Chris seemed incredibly frustrated. So were a lot of people.

CHRIS ROCK:.

It was the best time of my life. The show, that's one thing. But then there's the hang. The hang was the best time of my life. I honestly tell you, I made friends.h.i.+ps that will last for the rest of my life. Most people had to share, they had a partner in their office. I had a four-person office: me, Sandler, Farley, and Spade, we shared an office. And those are my boys for life. For life. I love those guys.

ADAM SANDLER:.

Backstage with Chris Rock, Farley, Spade, was the best. Nothing was better than having a read-through. You stayed up all Tuesday night - all of us did that - and then we'd do the read-through and you wouldn't know what was getting on the show but you'd have an hour or so while those guys were figuring it out. So we'd all go to China Regency up on Fifty-fifth, and we'd eat and watch Farley eat more than us. Farley was so happy; I think we went there the most because they had a lazy susan. It's easier that way. That's all we did, we just talked about comedy - what we just heard in the read-through, what was funny, what we didn't like, what we thought was going to get on, what was going to get past dress, that kind of stuff. We lived for comedy. We still do. Every one of us - sadly, I think. The women and the other people in our lives have to deal with the fact that we think of our comedy first. I'm not saying that when something important comes up we can't drop it, but it's on our minds more than you would think. We wake up thinking about jokes, we go to lunch together and that's all we talk about. I think we've become pretty obsessive with it. "Obsessed" or "obsessive"? I don't f.u.c.king know.

JANEANE GAROFALO:.

I was on from September '94 to March of '95. Less than a year. I'd been a longtime fan of SNL. I mean, it certainly has had its highs and lows - lows being the Jean Doumanian era and then another low being the brief time that I was on it. Those are the two lowest of the lows. The season that I was on it, the system was geared toward failure. The prevailing comedy tastes were certainly none that I could support or get behind. I did not think we were doing a quality show, and if you mentioned that, you found you were an extremely unwelcome guest. You're a very unwelcome family member if you do not wholeheartedly accept whatever the level of comedy is at the time.

CHRIS ELLIOTT, Cast Member: All the performers there are required to write. That was another thing that bugged me when I got there, was that there was this pressure that, if you wanted to get on the air, you had to write some material for yourself. And I had stopped doing that. I was at a point now where people were writing for me, and when I did write, I was getting paid for that. But at SNL performers are sort of just expected to write. For nothing. It's not a separate sort of deal. I remember mentioning that to Herb Sargent once while he was urinating. And he sort of, you know, blew me off. How does this show get away with having these guys write stuff and not pay them through the writers guild? And I guess there's just some loophole about performers writing their own material that gets away from the guild.

The only thing I can remember actually enjoying doing on that show was something that was very Lettermanesque, where I just started a skit that was really lame and then, you know, broke in and just told everybody, "That's it for me. I'm leaving SNL. Good-bye." And walked out of the studio. And as soon as I went through the studio doors, it turned black and white and it was kind of obvious - it looked a lot like, you know, Lee Harvey Oswald being brought down the hallway at the Dallas precinct, and then I get shot at the end. Anything else that I did on that show, I didn't do very well.

JANEANE GAROFALO:.

I had desperately wanted to live in New York City and do a live comedy show from that building - 30 Rock. I just thought it would be the greatest job in the world, and I had friends who had done it and friends who were on it - even though, oddly enough, I had been warned by everyone who had been on it not to do it. I had friends who were writers who had left and a couple of cast members who had left who I was friendly with who said, "You're not going to like it." They just felt it would not be a place where I would thrive, especially coming off of Larry Sanders and Ben Stiller's show, which were very progressive, intelligent, and collaborative television programs.

CHRIS ELLIOTT:.

I think people just thought I would go there and do my own thing and, you know, be great on the show. And I was thinking the total opposite - that I would go there and everybody else would write for me and I'd have an easy walk through the show. And neither happened.

JANEANE GAROFALO:.

I can still remember one sketch in particular, where aliens had taken some of the male cast members on the s.h.i.+p and had a.n.a.lly probed them and written "b.i.t.c.h" in lipstick on their chests. Is that funny? It was a Maalox moment every five minutes. I had irritable bowel syndrome every day. My drinking just got out of hand. I would credit SNL with being very instrumental to some bad habits that certainly increased.

I wanted to quit after the first week. I phoned my agent and said, "This is not a good fit. There's something wrong here." There is a tangible, almost palpable - perhaps the word is "visceral" - feeling of bad karma when you walk into the writers room. There is something rotten in Denmark.

CHRIS ELLIOTT:.

There were so many people in the cast. There was no reason for there to be so many people. There were times when I'd get in my Munchkin makeup and sit until, you know, five to one and come out and do one sketch. There was no reason. When the show first started and there was a smaller cast, it was funny to see, like, Belus.h.i.+ doing Marlon Brando and then having to run and change and be in some other sketch back-to-back. And that never happened with us.

JANEANE GAROFALO:.

Every Wednesday there was always a great show in there. There were always funny sketches on Wednesday. Just somehow, I don't know why, writers were doing some really great, funny stuff that was not getting on the air. I don't know. For whatever reason, that season seemed to be the year of f.a.g-bas.h.i.+ng and using the words "b.i.t.c.h" and "wh.o.r.e" in a sketch. Just my luck. I was always surprised that a chapter of ACT UP never showed up to protest - honestly.

If you stepped out of line presswise, you would hear about it, and if they didn't appreciate what you said in the press, there would be Xerox copies of it for other people to read. It was the tactics of intimidation. There was so much pressure not to complain. If anybody got antifan mail or a disparaging note, it would be posted. I didn't understand that. It was another tactic of breaking you. Lorne enjoys the house divided syndrome. I think he prefers the house divided.

I learned that I made the experience even worse than it should have been. I was defeated. I was weak. I drank too much. I will go with the Eleanor Roosevelt quote, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." I gave my consent freely. And every time I waited for Lorne for five hours - luckily, I didn't do it more than once or twice - but once I did it the first time, I gave my consent to feel inferior. I gave my consent to Marci Klein to feel inferior because I was intimidated by her. I gave my consent to the other writers and my coworkers that I was just weak, you know? I was a loser. And so I definitely learned from that experience. Other than that, I don't know what I took away from it. But I guess that's pretty significant.

FRED WOLF:.

Janeane Garofalo was awful on the show. She had it completely and totally wrong. She's a very, very insecure person. She was my friend. I helped get her on the show. And she's a very insecure person and she's unwilling to sort of stand on her own body of work and ride on that talent. Instead, what she does is sort of tears everything down around her, (a) to make her feel better about what she's doing, and (b) so she doesn't have to really actually attempt anything upon which she could fail.

And so she was an infection in that show in that she was going to the press - at that point she was a darling of the press because she was sort of an articulate female - and going on about how it's a men's club at "Sat.u.r.day Night Lifeless." And that's just bulls.h.i.+t. It's an absolute total bulls.h.i.+t label. It just so happens that men are wildly more successful than women at Sat.u.r.day Night Live, but not by design. It's just genetic makeup, in my opinion.

Janeane Garofalo never spent an all-nighter. The writers and performers that went on to do very well never missed an all-nighter session. Janeane Garofalo never got with the writers and wrote sketches that she was dying to perform and would do anything that she could to get on the air. What she did instead was glom onto the host and just tear the show apart for the whole week, about how it's a boys club there, and how they don't let creativity flourish, and if they see certain initials on sketches they won't laugh at them at read-through. All these negative things that were just patently ridiculous. And then she was a spectacular failure on the show.

CHRIS ELLIOTT:.

Janeane and I hung out a lot that year, because in a way she was in the same boat as I. But she was a lot more capable in that arena than I was. And I guess she had the whole female issue to deal with there, which was a big issue, especially with guys like Sandler and stuff who were at their peak. So a lot of the humor was not up her alley.

PAUL SIMON, Host: Janeane Garofalo has no case. She wanted to be on the show. She came on. It was during one of the show's low points. She signed on for, you know, whatever - for the year. And she had a miserable time. And she asked to be released and Lorne released her.

You know, she messed him up. In the middle of his season, he had to go replace her. She could've had some aesthetic disagreement with the show, which she did. I mean, no doubt about it. I mean, she vocalized it. She actually said it in public. He didn't say in public anything about her. What harm did SNL do to Janeane Garofalo? Any harm that she was on Sat.u.r.day Night Live for, you know, five months? Did anybody ever say, "Except for stuff you did on Sat.u.r.day Night Live, what a great career you've had"? And n.o.body there bad-mouthed her either.

FRED WOLF:.

It was all just such a crock of s.h.i.+t.

I had this one sketch. It was about five idiot guys who were working on oil rigs in North Dakota. And they're drilling a hole deep into the earth and out of the hole pops sort of a subterranean human - some crazy alien person. And it's Janeane Garofalo. And these five idiots see her come out of the hole and she tells them that she lives in an underground kingdom, that they've been watching earth's progress over millions of years and they have all the answers to any question that we might have about life on earth. And that she has five minutes until exposure to the air will kill her. "Ask any question you'd like."

Well, when she first pops out of the hole, Chris Farley screams a really high-pitched scream, so after she gives her speech about how they could ask any question they want, the next thing out of Adam Sandler's mouth is, he turns to Farley and says, "What the h.e.l.l kind of scream was that? When you saw the fish lady pop out of the hole, you screamed like a girl." And then they proceed to spend one minute of her last remaining time on earth arguing over how he didn't scream like a woman, he screamed like a man. And back and forth. The point of the sketch was that these guys were idiots and that they were blowing their chance at, you know, at great knowledge.

Janeane Garofalo raised h.e.l.l with three or four people before I got wind of it that I was being "disrespectful to women" in that it is a fault of a guy to scream like a girl, that because Farley screaming like a girl would bring chastis.e.m.e.nt, she said that meant that women therefore are deserving to be chastised for the way they scream. It was one of the most convoluted, strangest, most ridiculous reasons I've ever heard to dislike a sketch.

JANEANE GAROFALO:.

There were nights where I had a really nice time. Actually, I had a great night the night Alec Baldwin hosted. My family was in the audience. It was super fun. It was the Christmas show. The party afterwards was incredibly enjoyable. The Beastie Boys were the musical guests. It was just like I had fantasized it would be. I actually had things to do in the sketches. It was very exciting. My family was really pleased.

But I was usually embarra.s.sed. My family did not like the show that season. My father felt that his intelligence was being insulted, and I was always embarra.s.sed by that too at that time.

JAMES DOWNEY, Writer: The fact is that for all the people who talk about what a nightmare this place is, there've been remarkably few true a.s.sholes. People can be difficult, and artists are always difficult one way or another. But it's a trade-off and worth it for what you get. There are a few people where everyone agrees that nothing they give us is worth the pain they give.

I wouldn't consider Janeane one of those. In her case, I think she's a very good actress. She's smart and does great nuance. But to me, the most frustrating thing about her is her whole thing about how straight-ahead and honest she is, and "it's all about the work." I've never encountered anyone who's more into the whole working-the-press thing. Someone said she had her first press agent when she was like twenty, and I can believe it. The year she was here, she spent the entire year on the phone with the press, giving them searching, candid interviews about the show. That's fine, but then don't play like "I don't know the system."

CHRIS ELLIOTT:.

My kids watch reruns on Comedy Central, and they'll come to me and say, "I just saw you half-naked doing this thing where you're walking into an alien s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p and you're supposed to be naked." And I'm thinking, "f.u.c.k, did I ever do that?" I seriously have no memory of it. And I think it was just such a miserable experience that I have sort of blacked out a lot of these things. That whole year I was just embarra.s.sed.

I think I tried to quit once and, you know, Lorne said no, I'm the type of thing that the show needs. That kind of stuff, you know, blah, blah, blah. I was amazed Janeane actually got out. She had a movie offer and she was just incredibly miserable. And I guess somehow she got out of it. I think I was with Brillstein-Grey, who of course represented Lorne at the time, so there was more pressure on me to stay.

JANEANE GAROFALO:.

Although I wanted out after the first week, it took - for whatever reason - until March to make it happen. I talked to my agent and I would talk to other people and then, finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I just couldn't take it. And I walked into Lorne's office and I basically told him I was leaving. It wasn't like a debate or a discussion. Plus, I did not sign a five-year contract, because I had a feeling it would come in handy, and I fought and I fought against signing for five years.

I think when I quit, it was the first time Lorne ever respected me, to be quite honest. It was the nicest he ever was to me, even though he was generally nice to me. The nicest he was was after I quit, and I think he had a bizarre respect and then also, in some way, he hated me, you know? He despised me and was pleased that I quit - pleased that I was leaving and pleased that I had shown some kind of backbone.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

Some people, their whole lives, are just injustice collectors. They're going to find new injustices every day. That's what they do, and that's what they are.

There were disgruntled writers too. Tensions that had existed virtually from the beginning between writers and performers - and between performers who were also writers and those who weren't - flared up anew, perhaps because in the early nineties, SNL had seemed so much more a performers' program than a writers' showcase. Writers may also have been dismayed at the fortunes ama.s.sed by some performers once they left the show and went to Hollywood (in one or two cases taking favored SNL writers with them), while the less fortunate stayed behind in New York. Sat.u.r.day Night Live was apparently being looked upon even by some of its cast and creative team the way the network regarded it - as an ATM rather than as a learning experience or a creative challenge.

TERRY TURNER:.

Bonnie and I had done comedy writing before. We had written sketches before. Sat.u.r.day Night did a great thing for us. It knocked all the rough edges off of us very fast - that, you know, you didn't go for certain jokes. You tried to stay smart. You tried to stay current. And if it didn't work, it was really an abrasive situation.

I remember one time at the end of one particular piece, Lorne got to the end of it, and he said, "And what did we learn from this?" Then everybody snickered and put our piece to one side. I thought, "I'm glad I'm not near the window; I would jump out right now." It's a tough environment. It's a good environment. I'm glad that Bonnie and I had each other to lean on.

JACK HANDEY:.

Jim Downey likes to laugh. It seems to amuse him to think that I was fired from the show. He thinks I'm a really good writer, and so it amuses him to think that the show was so stupid that they would fire me. But I sort of decided I'd had enough of the show and they weren't going to put my "Deep Thoughts" on, and so I went to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and just did some writing there. And then, finally, toward the end of that next season they said, "Hey, come back and do some guest writing." I did, and everybody really liked what I did, and so they said, well, come back - come back and work on the show some more.

I'd written some "Deep Thoughts" for the National Lampoon, and there was a college magazine called Ampersand, and I just knew that getting them on television was sort of a key to promoting them. And I felt like it was really important. I did a book of them and that was the main point. I knew that to get a popular book of them, television promotion was important. But I think my worth as a sketch writer finally overcame the resistance to putting my name on it. And they proved to be pretty popular. And also they have a utilitarian purpose on the show which I didn't foresee, which was that a lot of times they need, you know, thirty seconds to move the cameras from one set to another, so they can just drop in something like that, and so it was helpful in that regard. I probably did more than two hundred of them.

JAMES DOWNEY:.

To me it was always, number one, to do comedy about things that are going on in politics or the culture, and do it without confusing or offending the smarter people. I always thought that if comedy is going to confuse anybody, by rights it should be the stupider people. You shouldn't be punished for knowing more. Sometimes there are things on the show that really annoy me. The more you know about the target of the satire, the more you go, "But wait a minute. That's not right. He's precisely the opposite of that." But for people who only have a pa.s.sing acquaintance with it, it just feels, "Yeah, that's right."

One time there was a Willard Scott thing on the show, and the basic idea was that he was a big, dumb buffoon, and it just made me crazy - and I was the producer at the time and I could have killed it, but of course it got big laughs from the audience. But my point was, "Wait a minute - he knows he's a big buffoon. That's his act. So for us to skewer him by having someone do an impression the point of which is that he's a buffoon makes us look like idiots." And if I were Willard Scott I would call up on Monday and go, "Hey, morons. I was joking, and you took me seriously."

ROBERT SMIGEL, Writer: I left to do the Conan O'Brien show in '93. That's what got me to leave Sat.u.r.day Night Live. I was always afraid to leave unless I had a really good job to go to.

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER.

Al wrote his own stuff - Al Inc., you know, he was his own studio. He'd do whatever he did. I got very, very little on the air. The performers who were good wrote. I did do a great piece with John Goodman and Mike on a cruise s.h.i.+p, where Mike was doing Linda Richman and they were playing old Jewish people who could only discuss food on trips. So they just discussed the menus of all their previous cruises. And that was great.

It felt like it was a very hard match. It was like a closet full of clothes. The tops were size fourteen, the bottoms were size twelve.

ANDY BRECKMAN, Writer: For a while in the late eighties and into the nineties, Lorne would bring back the golden oldies, writers from the first five years, for a week or two when their schedule permitted. And it was actually great to be a guest writer. Suzanne Miller I met that way. Anne Beatts I'd met, I don't recall if she was officially on as a writer, but these people would come back for a season or for a show or two.

In those years when there were guest writers, I didn't sense any tension, and it was actually a great system, because everyone came in knowing the show and knowing what Tuesday nights were like and what was expected after read-through and how Thursday nights worked and how rewriting worked. Lorne had a pool of these writers that were experienced, and for me it was great, because I was starting work on features, but if you give me fifty weeks and a year off I can come up with three great sketch ideas. Doing it every week is tough, but I kicked b.u.t.t doing it for two weeks. If I had three weeks in a row, I'd run out of ideas - but I could always do it for one or two.

I never noticed any resentment from the younger writers until recently. I came back with my friend Norm Macdonald, and there was tension. He brought me and Sam Simon in and the situation had changed, it was like going back to your hometown and, hey, where's the drugstore? I didn't recognize any faces, and we were not welcomed back. I mean, if I was a young kid writing on Sat.u.r.day Night Live, I would love to be in a room with Sam Simon and just hear how he thinks about putting a comedy sketch together.

TIM HERLIHY:.

I definitely wanted to stay, you know, in New York, and had no interest in going to Los Angeles. And I hadn't had my fill of it like maybe Adam and some of the other guys who left at that time did. They were sick of it. Oh, maybe not sick of it - but they just had done everything they wanted to do. And I still felt like I was learning the ropes.

For writers and performers alike, whether during one of SNL's upswings or downturns, the experience of working on the show was singular in their lives and, for better or worse, unforgettable. Some of them look back on it the way marines look back on the torturous training they got on Parris Island: It was h.e.l.l, it was horrible, it was mentally and physically excruciating - and they are extremely happy that they went through it and would do it again in a minute.

CHRIS ROCK:.

I left first. I left to go to Living Color. It was actually more of a machine than SNL. SNL, they had little rules, like no one was going to write a "Wayne's World" but Mike Myers; your character was your character. Lorne might say, "I need you to write a 'Wayne's World,'" or, "It would be very nice if we had a Church Lady this week," or whatever it was, Opera Man, but it still was up to you. At In Living Color, if you had a hit character, they didn't care who wrote it. Once it was a hit character, it was the show's. It was weird that way. It's not a better way, to tell you the truth.

The good thing about me being on Living Color, I got things on that had nothing to do with race. On SNL, I either had to play a militant or a hip-hop guy. If you watch my stand-up, race is ten minutes of an hour-long show. I talk about relations.h.i.+ps, whatever. And Living Color allowed me to talk about other s.h.i.+t. I could do sketches about, you know, funny stores I was in.

DAVID SPADE:.

It was weird when I left there, because when you are around Lorne and Jim Downey and some cast members and writers that you think are really funny, you are with some truly sharp, fast people. And I didn't realize it, but when you leave, and you do movies or TV, or whatever I've done since, it's not always the case. And that kind of b.u.mmed me out. I did a few movies after, and I did a few smaller parts in them, and I thought, "Wow. I didn't mind taking orders from guys I looked up to, but there is no one in this room that I think is that hysterical, and now they are telling me what to do." And that started to drive me crazy.

FRED WOLF:.

There's no reason for me to kiss anybody's a.s.s at Sat.u.r.day Night Live, including Lorne Michaels, who I'm talking about. But he set it up so brilliantly in that it's like this enormous pool of talent, and they all have egos, and they have to have egos to survive the situation at Sat.u.r.day Night Live, and it's almost set up like sports teams - a university and a varsity. I always thought that that was a great way to do it. And that you had your varsity, your first-string guy, out there doing these sketches in the first half hour or the first half of the show. And you'd have second-stringers that were so hungry to get on the air that they would do anything they could to make that happen. So they'd write sketches for themselves and they'd write sketches for the star that they could be included in.

And it just kept everybody sort of working as hard as they could to take advantage of the place. Because one of the things I loved about SNL is that it's one of the only showcases left on TV where you can actually vault into star status. Back in the days when Johnny Carson was hosting The Tonight Show, when he had a comic on, that meant a lot, and that comic generally would get a lot of attention in the industry. Those days of that being one of the best showcases for any comedian are gone.

Sat.u.r.day Night Live is still the main place where you could actually say, "If I did three or four years of Sat.u.r.day Night Live, I would become a star if I'm ever going to become a star." I think it's the case to this day. So anyway, these guys come in and they're so hungry to get on the air and there's like twenty-five, you know, very talented people and egos walking around there - I mean the writing staff and the performing staff. It's such a big mix, and I don't think there's ever been a show like that, really, where you just have a bunch of people out there vying to get on the air and trying to do their best once they do. It's a remarkable place, because if you survive that process, you're probably going to be able to survive the next ten years of your career.

DAVID MANDEL:.

We were sort of trapped there. There was a bunker mentality. You know, there was the siege of putting the show up each week. And that ultimately meant you were sort of eating and drinking and, in some cases, sleeping with these people, the same group of people, and going to the bathroom with them and, you know, seeing them at their best and their worst. And so ultimately, it was very collegiate. I guess that's the best word. It was a lot like freshman year rooming experiences, where you don't necessarily get to pick your roommates but you ultimately have to try and get along. And then you think back and go, "Well, there were some bad times, but there were some really good parties too."

FRED WOLF:.

There are definitely internecine rivalries and fighting and all that sort of stuff. But ultimately I don't feel that that's a bad thing. I mean, I think it's bad if you go in there in a fragile sort of psychological state. I don't think you're going to get cured by spending five years on Sat.u.r.day Night Live. That's what I say about Hollywood: No one goes to Hollywood for the right reasons. No one goes to Hollywood to meet their future husband or wife and buy a house and have kids. They all go to Hollywood because they're kind of damaged and there's something they're searching for.

I think it's the same with SNL. You have a collection of twenty-five sort of damaged people - thirteen writers, you know, twelve performers - and they're all trying to get on the air. And the best way to do it is to be compet.i.tive and to work really hard and stay up all night and just make sure that you're in the right sketches and trying to get writers to write for you or write for yourself and figure out how to suck up to the host and do whatever it takes to get on the air.

And the people who lost that sort of battle are sort of bitter about it, because it really is one of the greatest showcases on TV. When I was going out to Sat.u.r.day Night Live the first time, when I got hired, I had like a couple months to prepare for it. And I ran into an old cast member who was there from the original season and, I shouldn't tell you who it was, but she says to me, "I heard you're going out to Sat.u.r.day Night Live." And I said, yeah. And she said, "I just want to tell you: That place is evil." And you know, her experience wasn't that great. But she was one of the few cast members that never went on to do anything beyond that show.

DAVID MANDEL:.

If a guy comes out to Los Angeles and becomes a writer, let's say he becomes a staff writer, and has never worked at a show before or anything, he can rise up, you know, from staff writer probably to like practically coexecutive producer or maybe an executive producer of a show and conceivably not ever talk much to the director, wardrobe people, lighting people, and never have been in an editing room. By the end of my three years at Sat.u.r.day Night Live, don't tell the union, but they used to let me call my own edit session. I could film things. I could do small film shoots. I had had three years of experience talking to Dave Wilson about how to turn my comedy notes into notes that would work for him as the director. You learn how to talk to stars. You learn how to calm egos. You learn how to play to egos. You learn that the key to everything is the wardrobe people - get on their good side and everything gets smoother. And you learn how to make sure that you can talk to the design people.