Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (10 page)

CRAIG KELLEM:

Tebet was the Don Corleone of network executives. And at that time I didn’t look all that good — people dressed pretty sloppily there — and I went up and Tebet was reading the riot act about the prerequisites for Carlin’s performance. And they included, “He’s going to have to get his hair cut and have it look neat.” And he went through this whole diatribe about what Carlin was not going to do, and it was uncomfortably close to the way I looked in the office. He went through the list — suit, tie, hair — and then he looks down at my bare ankles and says, “Socks!”

DICK EBERSOL:

If you go back and look at the first show on the air, the two people by far who had the most to do on the show were Chevy and Jane. There were only four or five sketches. The rest of it was four songs, six monologues — three by Carlin, one by Andy Kaufman, his Mighty Mouse bit, and one by what’s-her-face, a comedienne who ended up in the show instead of Billy Crystal — Valri Bromfeld, from Canada.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

We were buzzed. I don’t think we had any clue what kind of phenomenon was going to happen. Carlin later confessed that he was pretty loaded. Andy Kaufman was on that show. There were a lot of featured guests — there wasn’t a lot of comedy on that show. But there was the live buzz you just got from that studio audience and it was pretty upbeat. I think everybody knew there had to be a lot more comedy sketches and that the cast had to be used more.

CRAIG KELLEM:

I was involved with booking Carlin for the first show. I’ve often wondered about it. Carlin was my first client as an agent. He has had a wonderful career and is still, in my opinion, a comedy icon. But it’s interesting that he has never been invited back to
Saturday Night Live.
I remember that from the first show, you always knew when Lorne wasn’t that thrilled about having a particular host, and Carlin was obviously somebody he just wasn’t high on.

STEVE MARTIN,
Host:

I do remember when I first saw the show. I was living in Aspen, and it came on and I thought, “They’ve done it!” They did the zeitgeist, they did what was out there, what we all had in our heads, this kind of new comedy. And I thought, “Well, someone’s done it on television now.” I didn’t know Lorne at the time. I didn’t know anyone.

HERBERT SCHLOSSER:

I can remember the first time I saw it. I was in Boston staying at the Ritz for the Cincinnati–Red Sox World Series and I had been with Bowie Kuhn. You always sit with the commissioner if you’re president of the company. That was a truly great World Series. We had dinner, and I asked if he’d like to see a new show we were putting on. And that was the first show in October of 1975, with George Carlin. Neither of us knew what to expect. Now Bowie is a nice man but very straitlaced, very proper, and a religious man. I sat on a chair, and he and his wife sat on the couch. He didn’t laugh. And I thought, “Well, that’s Bowie.”

And then after a while, he started to chuckle. And then he’d actually laugh. And I figured, “Well, if he likes it, it’s going to have a wider audience than most people think.”

AL FRANKEN:

I felt very confident that the show was going to work. It was youthful arrogance, I guess. I looked around and I thought, “This has never been on TV before, and this will work, this should work, and of course it’s going to be a hit” — which is an attitude I’ve never actually had since.

LORNE MICHAELS:

The only note we got from the network on the first show was, “Cut the bees.” And so I made sure to put them in the next show. I had them come out and talk to Paul Simon. He says, “It didn’t work last week. It’s cut.” And they go, “Oh,” and just walk off.

PAUL SIMON,
Host:

I was up for doing the very first show. It didn’t seem like there was much downside risk. Then Lorne said, “No, let me just work out the kinks on the first show.” But I would’ve been happy to do the first show. It would’ve been more historical. But he went with George Carlin, and I did the second one.

EDIE BASKIN:

They had used publicity pictures of Carlin for the first show. I already had pictures of Paul Simon, so my pictures of Paul became the bumpers. And then Lorne said to me, “I think you should photograph next week’s host instead of using publicity pictures.” And that’s how it all started.

PENNY MARSHALL,
Guest Performer:

I met Lorne when he came out and talked to Rob about hosting the third show. I wasn’t anybody; I’d been on
The Odd Couple
, but
Laverne and Shirley
didn’t go on until four months later. Rob was on
All in the Family.
I listened to Lorne talk to Rob at Lorne’s apartment, and I kept my mouth shut. At the end, Lorne said to me, “Penny, what do you think?” And I said, “I think you’re the most manipulative human being I’ve ever met, and you do it beautifully.” And we’ve been friends ever since.

NEIL LEVY:

Rob Reiner refused to go on after dress rehearsal. I was in his dressing room. It was hilarious because it was like a monologue, him going, “I can’t do this show, I can’t do this show! It’s bad, it’s horrible, I’m going to make mistakes, I don’t know the lines, I can’t do it, I’m not doing it, I’m sorry, that’s it!” And it was like he was not going to do it. And Lorne just talked him through it. And of course Rob did a good show.

ALBERT BROOKS:

We had agreed on how I would make these movies, and certainly I wasn’t going to make a living off of it. If I remember correctly, we agreed on a budget of like a thousand dollars a minute, which I bring up because it’s funny that I was actually able to do that. I think all six films probably cost, you know, fifty grand. Most of the films were four minutes, but one — the open-heart surgery movie — ran thirteen minutes, and Lorne refused to air it. But then Rob Reiner, who is my close friend, hosted the show and insisted on showing it. Otherwise, it would have never been seen.

LORNE MICHAELS:

My agreement with Albert had been for films of three to five minutes. I’d wanted three, he wanted five. Because the heart surgery one was thirteen minutes, it necessitated commercials in the middle and on either end — which meant we were away from the live show for close to twenty minutes.

CRAIG KELLEM:

One of Albert’s films got lost at the Grand Central Station post office and he went completely apeshit. No one could find it. So Albert, long-distance, through his willpower and his endless energy, managed to actually find the specific postal clerk who had handled it. It was like a whole investigation conducted by Albert Brooks to find the lost film, which he eventually did.

BARBARA GALLAGHER:

I was in an office with Eugene Lee and Franne Lee, they were married at the time and had this little baby. Also in the office was Craig Kellem, the talent coordinator, and Gary Weis, the film guy, and then Howard Shore’s office was next door. So you’d try to have a conversation on the phone with anybody, doing business, and Eugene and Franne were always fighting and she was always crying, always crying. They were in a bad way. Craig was always screaming at somebody, and Gary was in his own world. And I was dealing with Albert Brooks and Penelope Spheeris, because Penelope was producing Albert’s films. She shot them too.

Albert was always wanting more money. Lorne only needed like tiny pieces and we were getting ten- and twelve-minute pieces. And he’d be on the phone complaining and I’d say, “Albert, we have a whole show here, you can’t do those things, we don’t have the time.” He was good about it, but it was constant, constant, “You can’t do this, Albert.” Finally Penelope would sit on him and get him to cut the film.

HERBERT SCHLOSSER:

The Albert Brooks films never appealed to me, to be honest with you. They slowed the show down. I think he’s a brilliant guy, but I just didn’t find him that funny.

JUDITH BELUSHI:

In the first three shows, John was the opening scene of the first show and I don’t think he had a good scene again for three shows. Something that made a break of sorts was the third or fourth bee scene, when he went off on “I hate being a bee” and this whole “bee” thing, and he had his antennae swinging around his head in some special way. It was really the first time he got to show his personality and show that there was more to him, and he got a great response. But it took a while. It was slow to grow.

CANDICE BERGEN,
Host:

After the first couple shows, the dynamics of everything became so complicated and so loaded. People were learning things. They realized that you couldn’t do the show stoned, because they were missing their costume changes. A live show was not compatible with grass. And then the burnout rate was so high, especially for the writers, because they were really just putting in all-nighters routinely.

CHEVY CHASE:

On “Weekend Update,” I was being a newscaster; I was being Roger Grimsby, actually. You know, it came out of that: “Good evening, I’m Roger Grimsby, and here now the news.” One of the strangest pieces of syntax I’ve ever heard in my life: “And here now the news.” But I knew I should say
something
. And on the fourth show, it just came out: “Good evening. I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not.” And that was it.

CRAIG KELLEM:

There was a momentum from the beginning, but what was interesting was that, even though I don’t remember the ratings being unbelievable after the first couple of shows, Lorne — ever the decider of what was what — decided the show was a hit right from the beginning and acted out of that belief, and it was infectious. I remember what he said. He said, quote, “I guess we’re a hit.” I thought, “Where’s that coming from?” But it was vintage Lorne Michaels. He believed it was a hit. He felt good about it. It got on the air. He looked on the bright side of the numbers and the bright side of the reviews. He certainly got good feedback from friends and family. And that was it. It was a hit show. It’s wonderful, the strength of his belief in how he sees things in this world.

He’s also not the type of guy who’s going to humbly share credit for something when he feels and thinks that it’s his baby, and why should he share, particularly with Dick Ebersol? Ebersol came from ABC, where he worked for Roone Arledge, and Roone managed to work his way into being executive producer and was also the network guy. So I think Ebersol kind of wanted to follow in Roone’s path and had a sort of stage-door-Johnny aspect to his persona and wanted to be part of it and wanted to be one of the gang. But he wasn’t one of the gang. He was Dick Ebersol from NBC.

DICK EBERSOL:

Lorne and I never had any real disagreements between us until the fourth show, the first time Candice Bergen did the show. There was a complete fuckup that night with NBC, where they made this enormous electronic mistake. They basically cued real commercials off of fake commercials. Somebody wasn’t paying attention in broadcast control. And Lorne went nuts.

If you asked Lorne what I contributed to the show, what I think he would say is that during the development stage and the launch, I created an island on which he could exist and no one else could touch him.

LORNE MICHAELS:

Candy’s show, the fourth show, was the first show, I would say, that was a
Saturday Night Live
like the ones we have now. The week before, when Rob Reiner hosted, Andy Kaufman did a long piece, there was a long Albert Brooks film, and a long monologue by Rob. On the Candy show, we sort of hit our stride. We’d had our first week off, and we worked hard on the writing.

DICK EBERSOL:

Now comes week five.
New York
magazine comes out with Chevy Chase — on the cover. John is radically pissed off, because he sees Chevy running away with the show; now it’s going to be all about Chevy. Onstage, John had been the star, not Chevy.

We do show six, which is a wonderful week, Lily Tomlin’s come to do the show. Now we got Thanksgiving off. On Friday, we all get an advance copy of the Sunday
New York Times
. Major story:
Saturday Night Live
is called the most important and most exciting development in television comedy since
Your Show of Shows.
It’s this drop-dead blow job. It was just unbelievable. And this is the same
New York Times
that did not even review show one with George Carlin.

They also printed a review that John J. O’Connor wrote on the second show, where Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel got together again for the first time, and his review essentially was that the show was not very good, but he couldn’t be entirely fair in saying that because he missed connections on his way home from dinner on the subway, and so he missed forty minutes of the show. Can you believe that they fucking printed that thing?

LORNE MICHAELS:

It was humiliating that the critic thought it was a music show and reviewed it that way. He said, “Another Simon and Garfunkel reunion,” of which there hadn’t been one since 1968.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

One of the things we heard about the first four or five shows, while it was becoming the sensation that it would be, was that Chevy kind of jumped ahead of the pack, so to speak, and that started a kind of a resentment on the part of some people, particularly John, toward Chevy.

Chevy was writing his own segment using his own name — “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not” — plus doing the physical shtick at the beginning. He was easily identifiable, whereas it took people so many years to catch on to what Danny’s talent was, because he would disappear into characters. And Chevy just shot ahead. It wasn’t that surprising. It was going to take John a little while longer. He was used to being beloved on the stage of the Lampoon show and had a following of people, but to translate to television, especially if you have an attitude about television, takes a little while.