Live From New York Part 4

CHEVY CHASE:.

I felt it was relatively easy. I'd come in and pick stuff up and learn stuff and simply walk through it, basically. I don't remember it being particularly difficult. You know, I have to say that, going in, one of the things that made the show successful to begin with that first year and made me successful was this feeling of "I don't give a c.r.a.p." And that came partially out of the belief that we were the top of the minors in late-night television and that we wouldn't go anywhere anyway. So we had no set of aspirations in the sense that this would be a showcase to drive us to bigger and better things.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:.

We worked on "Update" to the very last minute. Between dress and air on Sat.u.r.day nights, I would go up to my office and I would watch the eleven o'clock news and if something hit me, I'd write it and it would be on television a half-hour later. You know, there were two shows where I was literally under the "Update" desk writing stuff and handing it up to Chevy while he was actually on the air.

ROBERT KLEIN:.

Everyone was quite terrified about the live television aspect of the show. Most of the people in that building at NBC in New York hadn't done a live show since Howdy Doody. As a matter of fact, one of the first SNL shows had a blank gray screen for forty-five seconds. A network show and nothing but gray for forty-five seconds because of the improvising and screwups of doing it live.

NEIL LEVY:.

Lorne quit on the Robert Klein show. They took away his lighting man and his sound man. Lorne had promised his guests the best sound and the best lighting. That was one of his promises to the people he'd gotten to do the first ten shows. He was furious that NBC had taken away his people. I think he realized at the time that if he didn't make a stand, they'd be stepping all over him. So he told NBC that he would walk unless they returned his lighting guy and his sound guy.

And he walked. He was not there. He left. He went back to his apartment and stayed there most of the week playing poker. Robert Klein showed up and said, "Where's the producer?" And we said, "Oh, he's around. He'll be here soon." And the whole week went by and he wasn't there. But Lorne won. It was a victory. I think he came back Friday or Sat.u.r.day. A lot of people would have said, "We'll make do with this sound guy and this lighting guy," and he said, "No, I've got to have the best." And that philosophy has served him well.

HOWARD Sh.o.r.e:.

We were really kind of subversive in a number of ways. O'Donoghue and I were always trying to book acts on the show and then do things to them. They were so happy to be on the show, they didn't really notice. I remember when Robert Klein hosted, O'Donoghue put Abba on a t.i.tanic set and tried to drown them. He thought Abba was kitsch.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

Abba was the first and only act that lip-synched. And that was d.i.c.k. d.i.c.k was Abba. That was all he cared about; he left the rest of the music to me and Howard. But with Abba, he just wouldn't take no for an answer.

DAVE WILSON:.

Lorne did not like lip-synching, and Lorne did not like - and I always thought it was a tribute to him - Lorne did not like close-ups of fingers on instruments. He always said, "We're not giving music lessons." Because you want to see the man's or woman's face; it was their inner feelings in creating this music that was worth seeing, not where their fingers were placed on the strings.

LILY TOMLIN:.

I don't remember entirely the first time I saw the show. I think I just thought it was a good, young comedy show. What do you think I should have thought?

I think Belus.h.i.+ always thought he was so cutting-edge or so ahead in some ways, or he thought he was a rebel. Even though we liked him, we couldn't get him to come on our special. Jane had seen a lot of the Lampoon kids, and we tried to get some of them for our show.

Live TV was old, basically, but this was like new because they were doing it in a different time frame. Jane Wagner and I had always wanted to do a live TV show because we had to spend all our money editing anyway. A live show is great, but you're always going to have rough spots, and there's always the chance of something happening. Having been on Laugh-In, and I guess just doing comedy for a long time, I thought it was hip, probably - hip and current like that.

I don't think that I thought it was something I'd never seen before.

CHRIS ALBRECHT, Agent, Comedy Club Manager: I ran the Improv in New York from 1975 to the very end of '79. Everybody came through there. Especially in the first year, several of the performers from Sat.u.r.day Night Live would come in to the Improv on a semiregular basis to go up on stage and try out characters and work out stuff. Belus.h.i.+ would come in a lot, Laraine came in a few times, Gilda came in at least once. Belus.h.i.+ also came in to buy quaaludes from his dealer every other week.

On Sat.u.r.day nights, we would always watch the show from the bar. At 11:30, we were just starting our second show at the Improv. So it was funny people watching funny people. I was impressed that Sat.u.r.day Night Live was on the air at all. Because we worked in a New York nightclub, all of us had this kind of sn.o.bby opinion that the New York comedy sensibility was the best that there was. The fact that this was a show in New York was always particularly pleasing to us.

HOWARD Sh.o.r.e:.

By the time Lily Tomlin hosted, Lorne was sending the host over to the music department, which essentially was me in an office with a desk. NBC had a wonderful record library - phenomenal. When NBC started, I believe they actually filed every recording ever released. I couldn't believe I had access to this library. I found this old blues recording of "St. James Infirmary" there and thought of doing an arrangement for the band. And I played that song for Lily and she liked it.

And O'Donoghue said, "Have the band dress as nurses to do it." So we did. And I sang it with Lily. We did another show at Christmas where we all dressed as angels. It's just something that we got into - we've got these ten guys and one girl and what could we do with them that would be funny?

CRAIG KELLEM:.

Lorne had us working hard to induce Richard Pryor to host the show. Richard had a lot of questions and was playing very hard to get. We went to a jai alai arena in Miami where he was performing; that was the beginning of the Richard Pryor saga in terms of trying to get him to do the show. He wanted his ex-wife on the show, he wanted a couple of writers, performers on the show, and he wanted a tremendous number of tickets - which was an issue, really, because it wound up being the majority of the seats in the studio. So it was tough going. With Richard, as wonderful and as adorable as he was, it was also very tense being around him. Lorne loved Richard. He thought he was quote-unquote the funniest man on the planet. But it took so much work and effort to go through this process of booking him that Lorne, in a moment of extreme stress, sort of candidly looked around and said, "He better be funny."

Once he was booked, Herb Sargent and I were a.s.signed to go to his Park Avenue hotel and greet him and hold his hand. He was there in a suite with his guys, and the first thing he wanted to know was, where was the script. What we couldn't tell him was, there was no script. Everyone was just recovering from the last show, and there was the usual chaos. So we were in this uncomfortable situation. Now Herb is a very gentle and sensitive guy, and in the course of this meeting, the pressure became so intense that Herb suddenly said he was going back to the office to get the "script." He left the suite - and never came back. And guess who was stuck there with seven or eight very angry guys? Richard knew there was a certain amount of bulls.h.i.+t going down. He was saying, "Where is that guy? What happened to him?"

That was the beginning of the host game, which is, "There is no script. Try to make them feel comfortable and quote-unquote trust me."

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:.

When Richard Pryor hosted, NBC wanted a five-second delay because they thought Pryor might say something filthy. We ended up with a three-second delay, I think. But it was a new negotiation every week.

DAVE WILSON:.

You know what? I don't think we ever really went on a "delay." They tried to go on a delay the first time we had Richard Pryor on. And the Standards people couldn't make up their minds fast enough so that something got erased or bleeped. It was like a ten-second delay, and by the time they decided whether what he said was okay or not, it had gone past.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

I resigned in preproduction over Richard Pryor in December. It was like an absolute "you can't have him" from the network. And I said, "I can't do a contemporary comedy show without Richard Pryor." And so I walked off. There was a lot of me walking off in those days.

Richard did wind up hosting, of course. But he wouldn't come into the office until we started rehearsing, so I brought John over to his hotel to see him. John had done his Tos.h.i.+ro Mifune for his audition, and he did it for Richard, who thought it was funny. Richard wanted to do it on the show, and so we wrote "Samurai Hotel."

CANDICE BERGEN:.

I remember the terror. You know, the total exhilaration of it. I just didn't know you could have that much fun after thirty. It was like the inmates taking over the asylum. Totally.

On the Christmas show, we did a skating routine, a sort of Sonja Henie Bee-Capades skating routine. We went down to shoot the BeeCapades after Rockefeller Center had closed, after the rink had closed, so we were in the elevators at midnight and I was dressed in a red velvet skating outfit with an ermine m.u.f.f and then Belus.h.i.+ and Aykroyd and Chevy and everybody were dressed like bees. And the elevator operators, who still, after two months of the show, didn't know how to deal with it, just never looked at any of us, never said a word. I think it was like that for a long time. You just couldn't understand how they took control of a place like NBC.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

The Candy Bergen Christmas show was not as good as the other Candy show, so I went into a tailspin. Chevy and I and Michael went into the office and worked over the holidays, and that's when we wrote the Elliott Gould show, which later won the Emmy for writing that first season. We wrote a sketch where the G.o.dfather goes to the shrink, and we were in a "let's just blow it out" state of mind. By that point, I'd hit stride, we all had, and everyone was focused. The Gould show was our first big show which wasn't about the host. Gould was just a big goofy guy who'd been in M*A*S*H.

BARBARA GALLAGHER:.

I hated my job, hated it with a pa.s.sion. I couldn't handle it. I had one meeting with a unit manager and he made me cry. Lorne found out about it and he was furious. He was very protective. Later on, that guy ends up being indicted in a big unit-manager scandal, and sent to prison for embezzling. And Lorne sent me the article with a note that said, "The wheel turns. It turns slowly, but it turns."

At the end of the first year, in December, I finally said to Lorne, "I have to leave." I told Lorne, "It's not that I don't love you guys and the show." It was more complicated than that for me at the time. And he said, "But we're a hit now. Why don't you just take a sabbatical?" I said, "Would that be fair to the other people? It's just that I don't fit here now." He kept saying, "But we're a hit," and I said, "I know, and that's why I feel confident about going. I know you're on the map here."

ELLIOTT GOULD, Host: The first show I ever hosted was a very good show. One of the sketches was written by Michael O'Donoghue. It was a psycho group therapy session, with Belus.h.i.+ as the G.o.dfather in it. I heard it replayed on the radio recently and it was so funny, it even worked on radio. Laraine Newman being in group therapy with Vito Corleone. I was the psychiatrist. My contribution was that I smoked a pipe. At this point I don't think I would, but then I needed a prop. Also I think it was the first show that I was the head of the Killer Bees, which was very, very funny.

Through the show there was a thread where Gilda Radner had a crush on me and at the end of this first show that I did, we married; Gilda Radner and I had a wedding ceremony, and Madeline Kahn's mother was cast as Gilda's mother and Michael O'Donoghue married us at the end of the show. And that was the representative show they submitted, and it won them their first Emmy. I was really pleased to be a part of it.

BUCK HENRY, Host: On the first show I hosted, I made a suggestion for an ending for a sketch, because I came up in the school that says you end a sketch with an ending. And I heard one of the writers behind me say to the others, "Hmm, 1945." And I nodded inwardly. "I see. I get it." It was considered really corny to go for a joke. They thought somehow it was like Carol Burnett.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

Buck Henry came in to host and taught me a whole other level of things. Buck so totally got it. When he got there he said, "Do you want to do the Samurai again?" And we had never thought of repeating things until that moment.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:.

I wrote all the Samurais with the exception of one. Belus.h.i.+ auditioned for the show with the Samurai character. On the Richard Pryor show, Tom Schiller wrote a piece called "Samurai Hotel," about a two-minute piece or so, and that was that. That was like the seventh show we ever did. The eleventh show we ever did, Buck Henry was hosting. Lorne came by my desk and said, "You used to work in a deli, didn't you?" I said, "You name it, I sliced it." Lorne said, "You would be perfect to write 'Samurai Delicatessen.'" I said sure. I had no idea what he was talking about. But I wrote "Samurai Deli" and all the other Samurais after that. What started as that one two-minute sketch ended up being a franchise.

When I say I wrote all the Samurais, what does that mean? It means I wrote all the stuff for Buck Henry or whoever did it that week and then I go, "John throws up a tomato and slices it," and "John indicates in his gibberish whatever," you know. I wrote no dialogue for John. The only time I wrote anything that looked like dialogue for him was when I had to indicate what the gibberish was meant to convey.

BUCK HENRY:.

On the Samurai sketches that I did with John, one never knew where it was going because John's dialogue could not be written. You never knew what was going to happen next. In "Samurai Stockbroker," he cut my head open with the sword, but it was really my fault; I leaned in at the wrong time. And I bled all over the set. It was a very amusing moment. You would not believe how much blood from a forehead was on that floor. A commercial came on right after the sketch and someone shouted, "Is there a doctor around?" And John Belus.h.i.+'s doctor was in the audience - which made me a little suspicious. So the guy came and put this clamp on my forehead. We went on with the show. It didn't require st.i.tches, darn it, but it required a clamp for the rest of the show.

When "Weekend Update" came on, which was about ten minutes later, Chevy appeared with a bandage on his face. Then Jane had her arm in a sling. They featured the moment when I got hit by the sword on "Update" like it was a hot news item. Only Sat.u.r.day Night Live could do that. By the end of the show, when the camera pulls back, you see some of the crew are on crutches, others have bandages or their arms in slings. As if the whole show caught a virus. It was pretty funny. And the genius of Sat.u.r.day Night Live, it seems to me, is encapsulated in that event.

John didn't say anything to me right after it happened, but then we didn't see each other for another half hour at least. I was in one place and he was in another. But it wasn't John's forte to apologize anyway.

NEIL LEVY:.

When Buck Henry got nicked by the Samurai sword and everybody started wearing Band-Aids, they all bonded. I think it was the same show where Lorne had done that Beatles offer and they got a phone call that John Lennon was over at Paul McCartney's house and they were both coming over. Lorne was thinking, "What are we going to do when they get here?" He had an idea, he said. "How about this, they get here and they want to play a song and I ask them where their guitars are and they say they didn't bring their guitars and I say, 'Oh. Well, then you can't play, because there's a union rule that you have to have your own guitar.'" His whole thing was to have the Beatles there and not let them play. I don't know if he would have gone through with it. But they never made it, because they realized it was too late. Just the fact that they were on their way was good enough.

I was sent downstairs in case they showed up, because there was this old security guard who turned away everybody. He couldn't tell a star, he didn't know anybody. It didn't matter who you were. Not all the stars brought their ID. "Don't you know who I am?" "No!" And Lorne finally got him moved to another entranceway. But I had to go down and make sure that he recognized Lennon and McCartney and let them in. So I was waiting there with the security guard at like twelve forty-five.

TOM HANKS, Host: I remember the first time I saw the show. I was working as a bellman in a hotel and got off late and came home. And one of the first things I saw was a parody of a razor blade commercial. Remember the one? It was in the first season, and it showed this cartoon of here's how it works, the triple-header. And they'd be yanking out this hair and doing this very painful thing. And I honestly couldn't figure out what I was looking at. Who would sell such a ridiculous product? And then I saw the first time they were in their bee costumes, and I could not figure what was going on.

I just thought, "Wow, okay, we're into the undiscovered country here, if they're doing this kind of stuff on TV."

LORNE MICHAELS:.

We wanted to redefine comedy the way the Beatles redefined what being a pop star was. That required not pandering, and it also required removing neediness, the need to please. It was like, we're only going to please those people who are like us. The presumption was there were a lot of people like us. And that turned out to be so.

In its first weeks, the show looked little like it does today - different even from the episodes that aired mere months later. The repertory players got relatively little time at first, but that grew along with their popularity. Albert Brooks's films didn't turn out as Michaels had hoped, and there were frequent arguments over the fact that they weren't short enough.

Brooks was angry - and is still irked to this day - that in its first review of the show, Newsweek gave credit for some of the clever parodies of network shows included in his short film not to him but to the show's writers and performers. In fact, Brooks was working in a virtual vacuum on the other side of the country. He went on to a brilliant career as comic and filmmaker. The Muppets didn't starve either; soon after being dumped, they were signed by England's Lew Grade to star in The Muppet Show, a hugely profitable, globally syndicated half hour that made Jim Henson a millionaire many times over.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:.

Whoever drew the short straw that week had to write the Muppet sketch. The first time I met O'Donoghue, I walked into Lorne's office, and Belus.h.i.+'s there, Aykroyd's there, people the likes of which had never crossed my path before, and I look in a corner of the room and there's a guy I learned was Michael O'Donoghue. What was he doing, you ask? He had taken Big Bird, a stuffed toy of Big Bird, and the cord from the venetian blinds, and he wrapped the cord around Big Bird's neck. He was lynching Big Bird. And that's how we all felt about the Muppets.

Franken and Davis and I were the rookie writers, and the others always rigged it so we were the ones who wrote the Muppet sketches. So I went over to Jim Henson's townhouse on like Sixty-eighth Street with a sketch I had written. There was one character named Skred, and I remember we're reading the sketch, Jim Henson's reading the pages, and he gets to a line and he says, "Oh, Skred wouldn't say this."

And I look, and on a table over there is this cloth thing that is folded over like laundry, and it's Skred. "Oh, but he wouldn't say this." Oh, sorry. It's like when I was doing Garry Shandling's first series, we wanted to have Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop on. I said, "Of course we'll fly you out," and she said, "Well, what about Lamb Chop?" What about Lamb Chop?!? She says that Lamb Chop gets a seat. I swear to G.o.d, I almost threw my back out giving her the benefit of the doubt that she wasn't insane. I laughed and she said, "Lamb Chop doesn't sit in the back." I said, "If I'm not mistaken, are we talking about the same Lamb Chop? Because, you know, it's a sock! It's a sock with a b.u.t.ton, okay?!?"

And it ended up we didn't use her because it was too insane.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:.

O'Donoghue had the best line about the Muppets. He used to say, "I won't write for felt."

CRAIG KELLEM:.

There was this s.h.i.+t-or-get-off-the-pot moment when Lorne turned and looked at me and he said, "How do you fire the Muppets?"

HERBERT SCHLOSSER:.

I remember being at one of the tapings of the show live on more than one occasion when the Muppets were on. Some of the pieces were very good, but the cast was so good you wanted to see Belus.h.i.+, and Gilda, and Garrett Morris doing news for the hard of hearing. As a matter of fact, we had to take that off because we got protests from organizations that felt this was not fair to the handicapped. And then after we took it off, we started to get letters from people who were hard of hearing saying they loved it, why were we doing that, why didn't we have the guts to keep that on?!

GARRETT MORRIS:.

A lot of people are very patronizing toward so-called handicapped people. They can take care of themselves. One thing about the kind of comedy we do is that it's a deeper realization of the fact that with all comedy, with all jokes, somebody's on the bottom.

ALBERT BROOKS:.

I think Lorne resented the fact that I was in Los Angeles. But the very reason that I set it up that way was so I could function and do what I knew I could do, and I didn't want to partic.i.p.ate in the New York thing. And once the cast made it, then these little helper things like my films became, in Lorne's mind, less important, and the reasons for getting me were pretty much over. Because what function did I provide for him? I made him something that got him great attention and great reviews. And, more importantly, I did the publicity for them.

After those six films, that was it. Because I don't think Lorne Michaels would ever, ever again, do anything outside of New York. I think that really was something that he never wanted. He didn't like not having control over all of the product.

DAN AYKROYD:.

At first I stayed at Belus.h.i.+'s house - living with him and his wife, sleeping at the foot of their bed, having their cats attack me. I lived there for two months. Finally - finally - I said, "I gotta get out of here." John loved having me there, and Judy was very sweet. But I met a guy who worked in the graphics department at NBC, and we had a loft downtown for a while. Had some great parties there.

JUDITH BELUs.h.i.+:.

John and Danny had met much earlier and they liked each other instantly. Danny had come in at one point and stayed at our house for a couple nights. I know he says he slept at the foot of the bed. It wasn't literally the foot of the bed. Actually, it was another room. He remembers it that way, though. It seemed like the foot of the bed to him.

HOWARD Sh.o.r.e:.

Our apartments were dismal, horrible sorts of sublets. And Rockefeller Center was really much nicer than where we were living, and we were spending seventeen, eighteen hours a day with our friends there, working. So for the few hours that we would crawl back to our dingy apartments, it was always so depressing, sometimes we'd just stay at the office. We were kids and the party was sort of going on all the time. Dan had bunk beds because we had no money, we were paid so relatively little money, really, by NBC. I think they were paying me $500 per show, not per week. I think the first year I made $10,000 when we actually created the show. So we had no real lives.

PAUL SHAFFER:.

We were young, and n.o.body had much else to do. We used to be there all night writing. Lorne was a night owl and he encouraged this; those were the kind of hours he wanted to keep. So that was his schedule, that Monday night would be the first meeting pitching ideas, Tuesday he'd start after dinner and just stay up until you had some stuff written, and then you'd drag yourself out of bed Wednesday and come in for the first read-through of the material, which used to start, theoretically, at one. Not only was it weird hours, but it was long hours. People were really devoted to the show. There was not necessarily much social life. Our whole life was the show.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

The thing I was worried about the most in those days was the dry cleaners, and getting my clothes back. I probably only owned two or three pairs of jeans and four or five s.h.i.+rts, so you could get in a jam where there were no clean clothes. I lived above a Chock Full of Nuts at Fifty-seventh and Seventh, so I could always go down in the morning and have coffee and a whole wheat sugar doughnut.

When Buck Henry came to the show he carried the New York Times around with him the whole day, and he would read it A-1, A-2, A-3 - all in sequence. He didn't consider himself done until he'd read the whole paper. And I went, "Wow." I certainly didn't think of myself as unsophisticated, but you could make up a whole world out of what I didn't know back then. But there was no time for anything but the show.

Around the offices, I think early on I realized that if I looked like Henny-Penny, then pretty much that would be infectious. So when I was really frightened - when I was young, thirty, when I began - I would hold a gla.s.s of wine and people would go, "Well, he seems pretty cool and relaxed."

BUCK HENRY:.

One problem was, Lorne couldn't fire anybody. He was const.i.tutionally unable to do it, at least early on. Once hired, it was sinecure. I think Lorne felt it was an admission of failure if you have to fire somebody you've hired.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:.

You know, Lorne did a thing which was really, really, really brilliant, and I don't know how long it lasted, it might have just been the first year. He wanted the public to know the cast as people beyond the roles that they played, so he would have a cast member just say, "Hi, I'm Dan Aykroyd, dah dah dah dah dah," just a little personality thing. With Gilda, she would sit on the edge of the stage, and she only did it twice maybe, and it was called "What Gilda Ate," and she would tell what she ate during the week. There weren't jokes in it, it was mostly personality things.

ROSIE SHUSTER:.

Beatts and I were sort of thrown together to write, and we were the first two females there. Marilyn Suzanne Miller wasn't there at the very, very beginning. We sort of circled each other suspiciously for a short amount of time. I was always romantic about the idea of feminism, but the first time she saw me she exclaimed really loud, "Jesus, look at those t.i.ts!" So it got a laugh in the room and that was sort of unsettling, you know. But we were thrown together and then we definitely bonded, because there was a lot of testosterone around there. There was a lot of energy and it was combustible and it was exciting.

It was hard to be female; it always was, you know. Gilda had a good coping device for that somehow, because she could just be charming and darling. When you're actually pus.h.i.+ng your own material, when you're in the trenches with the guys, it's a little harder. We were in the front lines, like Vietnam nurses. It was intense. It was very, very intense.