Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (12 page)

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 Belushi’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 stitches, 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
Saturday 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
Saturday 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 Belushi’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 God, 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 button, 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 shit-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 Belushi, 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 participate 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 Belushi’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 BELUSHI:

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 SHORE:

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 nobody 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 shirts, 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 glass 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 constitutionally 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 tits!” 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.