Live From New York Part 26

But Michaels, even though under siege - really a constant barrage - turned Stringer down. He still felt a loyalty, if not to NBC, then to the show he had created.

CHRIS ROCK:.

Was being on the show the greatest creative experience for me? No. But it's still the biggest thing that ever happened to me in show business. The jump from broke to famous is the biggest jump. There's no bigger jump than that. I could win five Oscars tomorrow, it wouldn't be a bigger jump than nothing to something.

Is Lorne arrogant? Yeah - but hey, man, I know arrogant cab drivers. I know arrogant hot dog guys. This guy produces Sat.u.r.day Night Live. He made The Rutles, one of my favorites. So, you know, there's arrogance with no reason to be, and there's arrogance with plenty of reason to be.

TIM MEADOWS:.

Lorne wrote me a couple of cold openings. Lorne can still write, you know. I guess he prefers not to, but he can. I forgot that he can write. I didn't know that he was such a great writer. But then people mention names like Lily Tomlin and the Smothers Brothers, it's obvious that he knows what he's doing.

JULIA SWEENEY:.

I think Lorne is a withholder of praise as a strategy and also because I think he personally feels uncomfortable with it. I remember him stopping me in the hallway and just saying, "I think you're wonderful." It's not like he didn't give me anything. It was more like an aura. It's like in the air. It makes me understand cults. Because you just wanted his approval more, and that was your number one thing. You wanted him to approve of you. And he created an atmosphere that worked with that.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

My bet is that Johnny and Ed don't hang together so much now. I could be wrong. I used to say that you get only so many hours that you can be with someone in a lifetime, and you can kind of use it all up in a very intense four or five years or you can spread it over a lifetime. Friends.h.i.+p really needs distance and s.p.a.ce. Not that we're overcrowding like rats. But the schedule is built so that after three shows in a row, when people are really getting on each other's nerves, there's a hiatus and you get some distance on it and you appreciate what a good place it is to work.

Early in the nineties, NBC West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer and other executives had begun taking a more aggressive interest in the show, concerned about ratings and giving Michaels lots of unsolicited advice on such matters as who was funny, who wasn't, who should be fired, and suggesting innumerable cosmetic changes. From the beginning, Michaels had resisted NBC's attempts to use the show as a promotional tool - balking, for example, when the network implored him to book Erik Estrada, the star of NBC's CHiPs, as a host. Ohlmeyer, whom Ebersol had tried to hire to direct Sat.u.r.day Night Live back in the formative days, thought superstars Adam Sandler and Chris Farley were among those who should go. He didn't "get" them and told Michaels they should be fired. NBC bra.s.s said the show had grown too costly and accused Michaels, in effect, of coasting. Ohlmeyer even said he thought Michaels spent too much time on the beach at St. Bart's, one of his repertory of longtime haunts, and not enough time streamlining the show. Michaels theorized that one reason for the executives' greater interest in the show was that they felt emboldened by the success they had with Friends in prime time; network executives gave themselves credit for putting that ensemble together and then wanted to take a stab at casting Sat.u.r.day Night Live too. An executive with delusions of creativity, like a wounded pig, is a dangerous animal.

The show suffered a run of bad luck and bad timing. Dana Carvey's departure at the end of the 199293 season had been particularly crucial because he took such a large collection of characters and impressions with him; he was a whole stock company himself. Phil Hartman left a year later and gave interviews in which he made nasty cracks about the quality of the show's writing, even though he'd thrived in sketch after sketch. Rather suddenly and concurrently, the press turned hostile, dredging up the old "Sat.u.r.day Night Dead" slurs to say the show was stale and giving SNL a relentless trouncing even when the cast was still stellar. Michaels experienced the worst reviews of his career and found some of the attacks distressingly and discouragingly personal. One reviewer wrote that the show had been "a lifeless, humorless corpse for two years, and now it's starting to stink." Others were similarly hostile, if not quite so inelegant: "Sat.u.r.day Night Live is showing its age," "about as amusing as a state funeral," "the show needs a kick in the pants," "n.o.body's laughing anymore. You watch it now and sullenly stare at the television."

In addition to all that, there was dissent from within - crabby campers who joined the cast and almost immediately developed grievances and complaints. If Sat.u.r.day Night Live was in yet another transitional phase, these particular growing pains were agonizing, and the more injured the show looked, the more network honchos stepped up their attack, even to the point of leaking to reporters that nothing about Sat.u.r.day Night Live was sacrosanct or untouchable - Lorne Michaels pointedly included. Michaels may have begun to look back fondly even at 1985, the low-rated year he returned as executive producer; it probably looked good compared to 1994, for him the worst year in the show's history.

For the moment, the fas.h.i.+onable thing was to knock Sat.u.r.day Night Live. The sport became so popular that even certain members of the cast joined in.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

Phil Hartman was here eight years. After most shows, he and I would sit together at the party, and there was just a sort of comfort level between the two of us. We obviously loved each other. And when Phil left, the separation was a hard and difficult thing. And then he gave some interview bad-mouthing the next cast, and he didn't like Sandler or whatever, and then he went after me. And I went - Phil? But I think it's how people separate. You suddenly get out of bed and you go, "I didn't like this, I didn't like that." There isn't anyone here who week after week doesn't build their case on how unfairly they've been treated.

I think it's the most natural thing, because they don't have power over their own lives. They submit a piece, and once they've reached some level of fame, the whole world is telling them how good they are. But around here they're dealing with the fact that the writers didn't write anything for them that week, the fact that the writers got up in the morning thinking about themselves and not about them, the fact that the writers sometimes look as if they have more say about things than they do, and the fact that a piece they thought went very well in dress got cut. Just being one of eight or ten or whatever, is really hard after a while. For most of us in the beginning, and I think it's true to this day, their office is nicer than their apartment, and so just about everything in the way they live becomes an improvement once they get here. And then, I think, a lot of people come here and it's their first job, and then within weeks they have an agent, a manager, a publicist, a lawyer, a business manager, and it validates they're actually in show business, because they're talking to people about their career all the time. And after a while, there's not enough money to be made just being here. There's more money to be made by the people who influence them. My job is to hold it together. I hate giving up people, I just do. At the same time, whenever we've gone through big change it's always been kind of intoxicating, and it's kind of what makes the show. If I were still doing the show with the seventies group, I think we'd just all be fried.

AL FRANKEN:.

I remember getting a call from someone at the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Why doesn't the show take chances?" And I said, "Why don't we take chances? I think we do." And she said, "I'm talking about risky stuff like, you know how Letterman does the monkey cam? Now that's risky." And I go, "Okay, that's not 'risky,' it's just a great idea. It's not a risky idea. You put a camera on a monkey's head and the monkey runs around the studio. It's great, but you don't know what the word 'risky' means, lady."

JAMES DOWNEY:.

I do think the network stepped all over Leno, who they microman-aged to a crazy degree. They basically tried as much as they possibly could to make his show like Sat.u.r.day Night Live. I remember at one point they asked us, "Do you guys have a problem if Phil Hartman is like Jay's sidekick? He can do Clinton or Gorbachev or something." And I remember going, "Actually, yeah, we do. He's in our cast, and if you've seen him three nights or even two nights, it just makes it that much less special."

I remember being mad. I always felt that performers who weren't stand-ups but the type who were very much dependent on writing really should run stuff by us, because they really are representing the show. The only reason Phil could walk on Leno as Bill Clinton without any explanation is that he did Clinton on Sat.u.r.day Night Live. Once you're in that situation, if it's not well written or if it's offensive or stupid or otherwise problematic, it hurts us. It's the reason Disney doesn't let people dress up as Mickey Mouse and do car shows and stuff.

I think Lorne did say, "No, you can't do that." Lorne did object to that stuff, but they were very aggressive about it. They sort of looked to the show for ideas, like we were a chop shop or something. Like, "Hey, we saw you do that thing. That's good. Jay could do that." I guess they felt like, "We might need to borrow some things from you guys to really nail down Jay's emerging superiority."

ROBERT WRIGHT:.

Quite frankly, the show is always in a period where people are saying, "Oh my G.o.d, what are we going to do? The cast is not going to be here next year or the year after, what are we going to do?" I've gone through at least three or four of those since I've been here. The worst one was when Don decided he was going to take a big position on the show. I didn't know about it in advance.

What happened is, those nonaggression pacts that Lorne had signed were wearing thin and Don was not willing to be a bystander on SNL. Don also didn't travel, so he wouldn't come to New York except under extreme circ.u.mstances, and he liked to see his producers in person. He's a very across-the-table kind of guy. And Lorne wasn't out there that much and wasn't interested in having long sessions with Don about details of the show. And I think quite frankly, initially Don was less interested in the talent than he was about the fact that the show wasn't as profitable as he had thought it would be. He thought it could be fixed rather easily, that the show should be and could be a great deal more profitable for NBC. He'd been led to believe that by some of the finance people and some of the other production people on the West Coast. There's always a West CoastEast Coast angle on these sorts of things. He was sending sort of coded messages to Lorne about this, that, and the other thing, and Lorne was doing his own dance around those issues. It was either, "Didn't know that, I'll get on it," or "He's not available, he's gone to Hungary, won't be back for three months." And I think Don just made it a point of writing down every day, "I'm going to catch him on this, we're going to get this done."

WARREN LITTLEFIELD:.

We felt that Lorne was isolating himself, and we were looking at a new generation of writer-producer talent that had come up with a show like Seinfeld. They hadn't been grown and nurtured in comedy camp. They hadn't worked on Diff'rent Strokes and then done Seinfeld. These were original voices. We would suggest names and people to Lorne. We didn't know how open he was. Our intent was not to take it away from Lorne. Our intent was to be able to say to Lorne, "Look, they're out there. Their lifelong dream would be to go to New York and work on SNL. Maybe you've got to start looking at some of these other kinds of people." Believe me, these were not prime-time situation comedy. They were alternative, unique voices who had put their toe in the water of television and hadn't found out quite what their outlet was.

I think Don was much more focused on, "There's so much wrong." And so those were very, very tough sessions with Lorne. Ultimately what emerged was what we wanted to emerge: Lorne engaged more actively, more time and more energy, a more aggressive pursuit of reinventing the show. I don't think Lorne surrendered control. I think he surrendered to a process that was painful. We were able to keep the show running and the market turned around, and it became a profitable ent.i.ty again. It became an a.s.set not only creatively but it also became a financial a.s.set as well. Nothing wrong with that.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

The network was on a certain level completely justified in saying we're cleaning house, because you couldn't read anywhere anybody saying, "Sat.u.r.day Night Live is doing what it's supposed to be doing," or "These people are funny." We had to let Adam Sandler go with two years on his contract, and Farley with a year. Chris Rock had gone on to In Living Color. Spade was allowed to come back in a sort of "David Spade moment" kind of thing. But it was basically, you know, you pull away to turn this all around and just say, "Here we are with a brand-new cast." And Downey couldn't be producer, Downey couldn't be here, and even Herb Sargent was let go. It was just, everybody was let go.

ADAM SANDLER:.

The guys at SNL protected me a lot. They didn't tell me much. I really didn't even know who Ohlmeyer was. I never met him, I don't think. I just felt if Lorne likes me and if Downey likes me, I'm safe. And then I heard at the end that Lorne was having to fight for me to be on the show. This is what Sandy, my manager, would tell me, that NBC wasn't happy with me. And I'd say, "What's Lorne think?" "Oh, Lorne's happy with you." And I said, "Okay, all right, then we're all set then, right?" And I think at the time Lorne was catching a little bit of flak from them, so he had to listen more than he had in the past.

See, I don't even know if I was fired. I don't know how it was handled. I just remember feeling like, "Did I quit, or did I get fired? I have no idea." But all of a sudden I wasn't on the show anymore. But I was friends with everyone at Sat.u.r.day Night Live still. That's all that counted to me. I never had a tight relations.h.i.+p with NBC. The guys who were important to me were Lorne and Downey and Smigel, of course Herlihy - who is an amazing guy - and a couple of the other writers. It really was creatively the best time of my life. I'm honored to be a member of that bunch of alumni, and I have my best friends from that show. It does feel like we went to war together, even though it was a positive thing. n.o.body was scared for their lives, but we stuck it out together, and every Sat.u.r.day night people were tuning in to laugh, and we wanted to make sure that we got the job done. And we all have a nice bond together.

DON OHLMEYER, NBC Executive: Well, I got into it very straightforward with Lorne. I mean, it's not really my job to talk to Jim Downey. Actually, we would meet twice a year, and like I said, I was very straightforward. I think people pretty much knew where they stood with me in terms of what I felt. I wasn't one of these kind of people that would glad-hand people and then talk behind their backs. I think Jim Downey is maybe as good a political satirist, writer, as there's ever been in television. I think when Jim was the head writer, there were some issues on the show. When you have the talent that was a.s.sembled during that period and the shows were as flat as they were, there's some issues somewhere. That was just my perception.

WARREN LITTLEFIELD:.

There was one old writer - oh yeah, Jim Downey. Jim's brilliant. He had a wonderful, wonderful career. But Jim, I think some would say, was a little burnt-out. He'd done it for a long time. And so finally for Ohlmeyer it became, "You know what? We will not accept anything less than excellence."

JAMES DOWNEY:.

I've only met Ohlmeyer three times. He'd been just relentlessly trying to get me fired for like nine months before he ever laid eyes on me. He had this theory that the problem was the show was flat - because we'd come off this gigantic ratings year, '92'93, which had to do with "Wayne's World." I thought, and most of the writers there thought, the show was clearly in decline. There was like a three-year lag between the ratings we got and the ratings we deserved. We thought it was more '89'90 that the show was creatively better and that by 1993 we were sort of coasting. We averaged like a 9.5 rating with the "Wayne's World" heat. We haven't seen that in many, many years.

My marriage was falling apart because I was spending way too much time at the show. I remember thinking it's not worth it to do anything embarra.s.sing to keep this job. So I'm not going out of my way to antagonize them, but I'm not going to kiss their a.s.s. Because I could come home and say, "Honey, I was fired." But I could not come home and say, "Honey, I quit. Aren't you proud of me? Now I have to find a new job." So that was the idea.

NORM MACDONALD:.

I think Lorne even conceded that changes needed to be made and decided to overhaul. But I think also that n.o.body liked Jim at the network at that time. He's not a very savvy office politician when it comes to talking to people or anything. He's more like an artist guy who wants to be left alone. He's really into comedy, so he's not that good with the suits.

JAMES DOWNEY:.

With the arrival of Ohlmeyer and then NBC doing so well, the basic personality of the network became more aggressive and confi-dent and notey. They were feeling their oats. They used to talk about Friends and often contrast Friends to Seinfeld by saying, "We cast Friends," the implication being that's why the people were more attractive. So they were very confident. It used to be that they would not offer anything except, "My G.o.d, you guys are great and we're not here to tell you your job," and then it became, "Just for what it's worth, we loved that, just great," and then it became, "I don't know that this works," and it finally reached a point where it became, "We don't care that it's popular, we don't want you doing this because we don't like it." That's not even a business value. They were so at peace with their own taste and worldview that they were willing to take an economic hit just to have something enacted. That reached its peak I would say in the '94'95 period.

One of the network's ideas that they were very serious about was, why does it have to be live? And why do you need a guest host, when it's the cast that brings the people back each week? And they b.i.t.c.hed about how the live element made it much more expensive and complicated, and how you could go shoot all your Jeopardy sketches in one afternoon.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

When it all hit, my son Eddie had just been born and there were some complications. It turned out to be nothing but there was a day and a half or two days of concern. Alice gave birth to him at twelve-thirty, I think, in the afternoon and I still managed to make read through back at 30 Rock. We had made elaborate preparations in case I couldn't be there - altering the chain of command and all that stuff. But I got back to the office, and it was the week Sarah Jessica Parker hosted, and it was just around the time that we were just being hounded everywhere.

I don't think I'd ever been as scared. You know, I was never scared in the seventies. I think because I was single then, I had already been through rough periods in my life and there was nothing really that was going to scare me - I mean, so what would happen? I would be broke and washed up, and I'd already had that a couple of times.

DON OHLMEYER:.

Lorne and I used to have long involved conversations, almost psychoa.n.a.lytical, about the problems. Sometimes identifying the problems is the most difficult thing. It's very subjective. I would certainly never presume that I know more about doing Sat.u.r.day Night Live than Lorne. I can watch the show and react as a viewer, or I can watch the show and react as somebody who is running the operation and has a vested interest in the success of the show. I can look at the numbers. I can do all these different things. But if you're not there on a day-today basis, you don't really know what the problem is.

Lorne knew that there was a problem, but I think he was unsure of exactly what the problem was. Objectively Lorne knew the show could be better. You had to look at what are the strengths and weaknesses of the cast, even though they're very talented. Do we need some fresh blood? Do we need a fresh approach in the writing?

"Ultimatum" is a difficult word. No, I never gave Lorne an ultimatum. But what I basically said to him is, "The show has to get better."

6.

Still Crazy After All These Years: 1995.

It had been something of a Sat.u.r.day Night ma.s.sacre. Lorne Michaels was forced to fire Adam Sandler and Chris Farley (he was ordered to fire Tim Meadows too, but managed to stay that execution). Veteran Jim Downey was ousted as head writer, Mike Myers had gone to Hollywood to make movies and money. Sat.u.r.day Night Live probably had nowhere to go but up, back up, rebounding as it had done so many times before. It didn't hurt that the likes of Will Ferrell, Cheri Oteri, Darrell Hammond, Chris Kattan, Jimmy Fallon, Ana Gasteyer, Tracy Morgan, Molly Shannon, Horatio Sanz, and Tina Fey were waiting in the wings.

ALEC BALDWIN, Host: Some of the cast members and writers leave the show and do things that are elevated compared to what they're asked to do on the show, but many of them - this is a terrible thing to say - leave there and become the very thing they made fun of on the show.

One of the oddest elements of the show is that you're standing next to some guy one day doing the show and you think that they're funny, but you turn around and five years later they're getting paid $20 million a movie. There are people I worked with there who I never thought in my wildest dreams that they'd go on to become the apotheosis of movie comedy of their day. So now I'm nice to everybody on the show. No matter who I work with, no matter what a sniveling, drooling wuss they are, I embrace them all like they're my dearest friend and my most respected colleague.

ROBERT WRIGHT, NBC Chairman and CEO: I haven't made that many trips to the seventeenth floor. As a matter of fact, my one official trip to the seventeenth floor - I don't remember the date - was when we had gone through a painful period of recasting, and it was the only time that I was really involved in it. Lorne was really being very good to me. He was humoring me along all the way. He was sending me audition tapes. I was getting really nervous that we were going to do something dumb, that there was so much pressure on Lorne that he would do something that he didn't want to do because he thought the company wanted him to do it.

I was saying to myself, "I've seen this show probably more than anybody at NBC has. I know what's funny on this show and what isn't funny." I really felt that way. So he was sending me tapes that summer, and then when the cast was picked, and I was in complete agreement with the people he'd picked, I marched up to the seventeenth floor, maybe it was just before the season began or just after, and I remember the cast then was Chris Farley, Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, Chris Kattan just arrived, and Ana and Cheri. I had seen all their tapes, so you kind of feel like you know these people. They didn't know me, but I'd seen their tapes.

So I go up there and I'm very friendly and everything. "Hi, how you doing?" And - oop! They were standing there - Lorne had them all lined up, it was like a wedding, but there were no other people at the wedding except us and Lorne. And they were just like - umphf! "Hi!" "Umphf!" All of a sudden it wasn't cozy at all. And Lorne would say, "No, you can talk! You can talk to him!" And to me, "You can talk to them." So it took a while. We were there about fifteen minutes and I said, "Well, why don't you just tell me how you feel about being on the show?" And Lorne is going, "Tell him what you really think, go ahead, you can say things." I said to Lorne afterward, "I don't think this is really a good idea, Lorne." He said, "I don't know why they did that. They're very comfortable and everything. They're very happy."

LORNE MICHAELS, Executive Producer: I can be pretty savage about people here in terms of what I think their flaws are. I can get abusive. I don't think that what I do between dress and air is terribly nurturing. It's more military, like a drill. My notes tend to be to the point. I think there's a real toughness with people who are funny in the way they've developed their own armor, but some of the people here are made of gla.s.s. They can be just very insensitive to other people and at the same time if you pointed out the same thing to them, most of them would be surprised or hurt.

There's an enormous amount of pettiness in this place, on this floor. You have a lot of writers fighting for time on the show. There's an old Hebrew proverb that if you have six Jews in a town, you have seven synagogues. And I think it's about the same with writers. While they can acknowledge someone else's talent or work, there's always a qualifier.

It takes me a long time to understand why I don't like people. I think it's a problem I haven't solved. The idea that people are dumb or not interested always comes as a surprise to me. I always thought I could talk to just about anybody and make myself understood. And when you realize that isn't the case, that either they don't get it or have no interest in it, it takes me a long time to figure that out. Because I go, "Why would you be here? Why would you pick this place to want to work?"

STEVE HIGGINS, Producer: We hear that "it isn't as good as it used to be" thing constantly. I think it probably started on show two in 1975. It's a matter of time before we're going to read "Sat.u.r.day Night Dead" in the papers again.

A funny thing happened when I got here - Lorne mapped the whole thing out. He told me, "Here's what's going to happen: Ohlmeyer's going to be gone - he's giving us grief now, but he's going to be gone - and somebody else will come in, and by that time the show will be at its height again, but then two years later it'll come down again because the avalanche will start. You'll see 'Sat.u.r.day Night Dead,' we'll see that for a while, and then it'll be, 'The show is funnier than it's ever been,' and then it'll be, 'The show is worse than it's ever been.'"

And it's worked out exactly like that. And you go, okay, if you're caught up in this historical cycle, you just try to stave off that "the show's not as funny" c.r.a.p. And the thing is, you wouldn't go to a carpenter's house and go, "Wow, what a c.r.a.ppy job you did on your shelves." Or say to a doctor, "How many patients have you killed?" But people feel free to comment in ways that make you go, "Where do you think you get the nerve?" I think they think they own the show.

You know what? If you like everything in the show, then that's not a good show. If you love every single thing, there's something wrong. It's like pus.h.i.+ng the envelope, which is a horrible term, but it's about making that tent big enough so that everybody's included, so that there's something for everybody in the show. You should like most of it. But there might be some performance piece that you go, "I just don't get that," and it killed and the audience loves it and you go, "I guess that worked." And that's one thing that Lorne is good at. He'll put enough in that there's always some plus side to it.

JAMES DOWNEY, Writer: Certainly the people at the network did not like the show at all in 1993, 1994, those seasons. When the new group came together in 1995, taking myself out of it, I think that, as much as innocent people were implicitly scapegoated, it was probably necessary that the word be out everywhere that, "No no no, they cleaned house. All the dead-wood's gone. They have a whole new cast. It's all new."

Starting around '95, Sat.u.r.day Night Live became very much a performer's show. There were new innovations limiting what writers could do. Writers had to write one piece for a character and then they could write a premise piece. It was enforcing the idea that "the cast isn't here to bring to life the writers' notions; the writers are there to supply material for the characters that the cast already does." That was a big s.h.i.+ft.

That's the biggest way the show has changed: It's come way back to the idea of being a performers' show that features characters. You see the same characters a lot. Writers are the people who never want to repeat stuff. If you're in a writers meeting and your quote-unquote idea for the week is, "I think we can do another Mango," you would be groaned out of the room, whereas performers like repeating stuff and they don't tend to hear, "Why do you guys keep doing Cheerleaders?" When they walk down the street, they get recognized as being on the show, and by and large the people who come up to them don't come up to them to give them s.h.i.+t, they come up to say, "Hey, we love the show."

If someone ran an a.n.a.lysis of the show, I would bet if you take everything in the history of the show that's even been on three times and then from that master list figure out, of the repeat characters, which have racked up the most appearances on the show, I would be willing to bet that of the top ten, seven of them would be from this last period. Things like Mango, Cheerleaders, and so on, whereas in the entire history of the show, there were only four Czech brothers pieces. There were only, I think, seven Conehead sketches. But I promise you there were fifteen Cheerleaders. There had to be. If you said there were eighteen, it wouldn't surprise me.

PAULA PELL, Writer: I got there in '95. That was the year that a huge amount of people didn't come back from the year before, and Lorne kind of cleaned house of everything and started anew. So it was really great because we all came in together. We also didn't have any idea how to do the show. None of us had worked on the show before, and since it's such a different beast than anything else, we all had that att.i.tude that "We're just going to try everything," and it was pretty great. It almost felt like going away to college. Everyone was in all these little dorm rooms. In the hall everyone was getting to know each other. We went out all the time. We were all fairly young. Not many people were married or had kids yet. It was sort of one of those times when everyone was on the same wavelength. Creatively it's hard to come in and figure out what it all is. We were just going forward. We were like, "Screw it," and, "Let's just try." We were all energized, because everyone was thrilled to have this job.

We had one meeting with Lorne where he talked about, "We're going to bring it up again and get it going again." I was aware just as a viewer that they were coming off a bad year. I knew when I first came and met Lorne, before I got hired, he talked about the fact that the show has an arc to it and that it would come back up, a Phoenix rising many times, and this was one of those times we were hoping to bring it back up. It just seemed to have a lot of fatigue and no one was really clicking along together anymore in a creative way. So it seemed like it had a sort of natural death. And his att.i.tude at the time was like, "I've seen it happen before, and I think this is a great new cast and new writers, and I think we can do it again." It was pretty slow at first, and I remember the press at first, there'd be an article that says, "Sat.u.r.day Night Live is great again," and then the next week it would be, "Oh, I spoke too soon."

Friction between Sat.u.r.day Night Live and network executives continued into the second half of the 1990s. Although Jim Downey was held in awe by his peers and Norm Macdonald was Chevy Chase's favorite among all those who succeeded him in the "Update" anchor chair, the team became the target of an essentially one-man crusade. NBC West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer had earlier declared war on Downey as program producer and got him thrown out early in 1995. Downey resurfaced thanks to artful maneuvering by Lorne Michaels, his duties limited mainly to the "Update" segment. That was fine with him but not with Ohlmeyer, who wanted him out of there too. By the 199798 season, Ohlmeyer was even more adamant about getting rid of Macdonald - it had turned into a veritable fixation.

Ironically, Macdonald had originally taken over "Update" with Ohlmeyer's implicit blessing; he'd been adamant at that time that the position not be given to an SNL veteran who had long wanted it (and was an old pro at ruffling peac.o.c.k feathers), Al Franken. That had all been private, but now Ohlmeyer's interventions were loud and public. In the entire tumultuous history of the show, it had probably never been the focus of a more explicit conflict between the business and creative sides of the network. Nor had there been a more concentrated a.s.sault on the independence and integrity of Lorne Michaels.

Insiders and outsiders alike, meanwhile, saw it as something other than a coincidence that the Downey-Macdonald "Updates" were mirthfully merciless on the topic of O. J. Simpson, that well-known unconvicted murderer-about-town, who'd hosted the show in its third season and, more significantly, was a longtime golf-playing crony of none other than Don Ohlmeyer.

JAMES DOWNEY:.

I don't think anyone needed to tell me particularly - I mean, Lorne had been telling me for two years now - how unhappy Don Ohlmeyer was with me. Ohlmeyer was practically putting out memos saying, "Do not ask or accept advice from this clown." Lorne was probably put in a weird bind when I was doing "Update" with Norm Macdonald, because I know he didn't like that approach to "Update." He thought it was too mean and cold and nasty. So he would have been in a strange position on principle, wanting to fight and run interference for us even though he actually didn't like it that much more than the network did. I think I'm right about this just from knowing him.

NORM MACDONALD, Cast Member: Me and Jim were kind of like alone at SNL, you know, especially when the new bunch came in. In many ways they resented Jim, because he was much smarter and funnier than them. And he was like the old crew, you know what I mean? When he went over to "Update," I think they would have been happier to have him gone. After Jim got fired as a producer, I think it shocked the new establishment there that I wanted him to come to do "Update" with me. It was weird for everybody.

Jim liked just doing "Update," because we figured it wasn't that important to the show, you know, and we could just do whatever and they'd leave us alone. I didn't even want to go to dress rehearsal, because I didn't care about the audience reaction at all. It would have been fine with me if we'd never rehea.r.s.ed it and I could just do the jokes that I thought were funny, because I have more faith in me and Jim than I did in any audience. I just like doing jokes I like, and if the audience doesn't like them, then they're wrong, not me.

DON OHLMEYER, NBC Executive: That was part of the problem. Not part of the problem; that was the whole problem. I think what you have there, in Norm's statement, is the quintessential issue. When Sat.u.r.day Night Live is really good, they do care what the audience thinks. And when Sat.u.r.day Night Live is not really good, they're kind of doing it for themselves and their pals. That was what I felt was the weakness of "Weekend Update" at that time, which was that they were doing it for themselves. There were a lot of inside references. There were times when you would go an entire "Update" with nothing more than a t.i.tter. You can pull out the tapes. I've looked at them - ten times. And looked at them and looked at them and looked at them, because I wanted to make sure I wasn't being an a.s.shole in this.

CHEVY CHASE, Cast Member: Norm said he didn't care if the audience laughed? What's shocking about that? That's sort of the way I felt - that as long as six guys on a couch behind that camera that I was looking into laughed, and I knew those guys, then I was there.

One has to do that, you know, and one has to figure what's going to work and what isn't. Of all the other "Update" guys, the one who was the funniest to me was Norm. Because he just came out and said it. Perhaps that's the writing - Jim Downey and those guys' writing. But it's also Norm's quality of "I don't care." You can take that too far in your life as an entertainer-performer and maybe it would affect - in a negative way - other things that you do. I'm just suggesting that that's a quality that lends itself to being successful, as an "Update" guy and as an actor on Sat.u.r.day Night Live, which is not caring whether people say you're good or not, only that you have your integrity, and that you think it's good.

NORM MACDONALD:.

I said "f.u.c.k" one time during "Update." Something got caught in my throat and I went, "What the f.u.c.k was that?" If I hadn't brought attention to it, I don't think anybody would have even heard it. I pointed it out, because I couldn't believe I said it - although I'm usually shocked that I didn't say it, you know what I mean? It takes a lot of discipline not to say "f.u.c.k." In sketches you've got to say what's on the cards, but in "Update" I would do the joke and then say whatever I wanted afterwards. So when you're just talking like that, you can easily say "f.u.c.k." I like to say it a lot in real life. Anyway, Ohlmeyer said it was cool. He was good about it. He said he knew I didn't do it on purpose. Ohlmeyer should have fired me then, but he was cool.

As for Lorne, he left us alone for the most part. That's what I liked about Lorne. Sometimes he would say, "You don't want to do a joke like that, because you want to avoid a lawsuit," you know? He'd always say, "You don't want to be sued." But he'd let us do the jokes, sometimes even about his friends. He has friends that are super famous and stuff. He was cool about that. I probably wouldn't let people do jokes about friends of mine.

We wanted "Update" to be good, but we didn't think that we had to pander. If the rest of the show was pandering, then we thought we wouldn't have to. So then I started getting the sense that they were unhappy. These people don't come up and talk to you, you just get it third-hand and stuff like that. Ohlmeyer and his crew thought every joke in "Update" should kill, and the audience should be clapping and cheering and stuff. They thought Jay Leno did that every night with his monologues, so why couldn't we do it one night for five minutes, where it would just be wall-to-wall laughter and applause?

My response was, I hate applause. I don't like an audience applauding because to me that's like a cheap kind of high. They kind of control you. They're like, "Yeah, we agree." That's all they're doing, saying they agree with your viewpoint. And while you can applaud voluntarily, you can't laugh voluntarily - you have to laugh involuntarily - so I hate when an audience applauds. I don't want to say things that an audience will agree with, I don't want to say anything that an audience already thinks. And so the thing with "Update" was not to do these same jokes where you said that, you know, Pat Buchanan was a n.a.z.i or some ridiculous thing that wasn't true but that everyone would applaud because they'd already heard it somewhere else. "Update" was never a big pep rally when I was there. It was never a big party. So I think the network started going, "It doesn't seem like as much fun as it should be."

DON OHLMEYER:.

What you had then was, you had people tuning out during "Update." And that had never happened before. You never had dropout during "Update."

WARREN LITTLEFIELD, NBC Executive: I think Don wanted to exert control over Lorne in ways that Lorne didn't want to be controlled. It was a battle of wills and egos. I think Norm Macdonald, ultimately, was a symbol. Don just didn't get it. He didn't get Norm Macdonald. Ohlmeyer could be the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. We said, "You know what? You've got to ask your kid." We'd sit in a meeting and go, "Don, we disagree. It was funny. It wasn't a perfect ninety minutes, but it was funny." I don't know; maybe he was watching it alone at eleven-thirty. It was also before Don was in rehab.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

I remember one night Don and I were having dinner at Morton's in L.A. - by the bar, where he can smoke - and he would have his cheeseburger and his gla.s.s of milk and his four packs of Marlboros. I sat there playing with my swordfish thinking, "If he outlives me and it turns out to be just about gene pool, I'm going to be furious about it."

FRED WOLF, Writer: Ohlmeyer was completely out of line. Norm Macdonald is one of the funniest guys I ever met, and Jim Downey is the funniest writer I've ever met. And so if those two guys get together and they put together "Update," then I have faith that "Update" is a really funny thing coming from those two guys. I've been on a lot of shows that have been sort of faltering or whatever. The network decides to step in and alter the original, creative vision and sort of dabble with it - and it's never worked. I've never seen them improve ratings on any show once they step in.

JAMES DOWNEY:.

And the thing that used to drive the network crazy was, why does he just stare into the camera for a minute after the joke? And we did it as often as necessary for the audience to get the joke. And there'd often be a delayed reaction, because some things weren't right there on the surface.

NORM MACDONALD:.