Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (11 page)

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 crap.” 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 Saturday 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 Saturday. 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 SHORE:

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
Titanic
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 Dick. Dick 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 Belushi 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
Saturday 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. Belushi would come in a lot, Laraine came in a few times, Gilda came in at least once. Belushi also came in to buy quaaludes from his dealer every other week.

On Saturday 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
Saturday Night Live
was on the air at all. Because we worked in a New York nightclub, all of us had this kind of snobby 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 SHORE:

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 assigned 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 bullshit 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 Toshiro 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 muff and then Belushi 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 Godfather 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 passion. 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 Belushi as the Godfather 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. Belushi 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.