Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (2 page)

Prologue

Saturday Night Live
is more than a television show. Since its premiere in 1975, it has served as a trendsetter in American humor and had a remarkable effect on American mores, manners, music, politics, and even fashion. It can’t be said that there’d never been anything like it in TV history, because one of its bold strokes was reviving a format as old as television itself — in fact, older: the variety show, with music and comedy sketches intermixed. Though the basic form wasn’t entirely new, the content was, and so were the show’s attitude and approach and collective mind-set. Tea had been around for centuries, after all, but the notion of throwing mass quantities into Boston Harbor was new. It was revolutionary. So was
Saturday Night Live
.

The people who own and run commercial television networks don’t put a show on the air because they imagine it will break bravely with tradition or set grand new aesthetic standards or stretch the boundaries of the medium — or for any reason whatsoever other than to make money.
Saturday Night Live
wasn’t created because NBC executives yearned to introduce something new and bold into the television bloodstream or the American mainstream. It came to be because Johnny Carson wanted the network to stop airing reruns of his
Tonight Show
on weekends. For years, NBC’s affiliated stations had been given the choice of slotting
The Best of Carson
late on Saturday or Sunday nights, or neither. One fine day in 1974, Carson told NBC to yank them altogether; he wanted to air reruns on weeknights to give himself more time off. NBC brass had the choice of returning the weekend time to local stations — and thereby kissing a chunk of ad revenue good-bye — or trying to fill the time slot with other programming. And so the word went forth from network president Herbert Schlosser: Develop a new late-night show for Saturday.

In 1974, when the decision to annex late Saturday nights was made, nobody knew what was coming. Ideas that circulated among NBC executives included a weekly variety show hosted by impressionist Rich Little, then under contract to the network. Somebody suggested Linda Ronstadt as costar. Even bland Bert Convy, actor and game-show host, was considered. But all those cockeyed notions were trashed when a brilliant and ambitious young writer from Canada born Lorne Lipowitz was named executive producer of the new show. He’d made a name for himself with his work on
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
and a few Lily Tomlin specials and, before leaving Canada, with a fanciful film about a failure in the annual hockey puck crop. His vision would turn TV on its head, turn TV on itself, and prevail for decades to come, even during a few years in which he himself was
in absentia
.

The man Herb Schlosser took a chance on, Lorne Michaels — then crossing the Great Divide into thirty — gave NBC much, much more than it had bargained for, probably more than it wanted: an adventurous “live” topical satire series that, had executives and advertisers known of its form and content in advance, might never have seen the light of night.

NBC’s Saturday Night
, as it was originally called, would be the television generation’s own television show — its first. Except in superficial ways, it was unlike anything else then on the air, and it would be years before flummoxed rivals would even try to imitate it. From the ground up it was built to be new, unusual, arresting, surprising, and attractive to baby boomers, the largest generation in American history.

In the decades to come, the success of
Saturday Night Live
sparked a renaissance in topical, satirical, and political humor both on television and off it; launched the careers of innumerable new talents who might otherwise have had little hope of appearing on network TV, including some who’d had little interest in it; hugely expanded the parameters of what was “acceptable” material on the air, bringing it much closer to the realities of everyday American life; and helped bestow upon the comedy elite the hip-mythic status that rock stars had long enjoyed.

And it made a nation laugh — laugh, even when it hurt.

During its earliest weeks on the air, celebrity hosts and musical acts were the essence of the program. As weeks went by, the show’s repertory company of young comedy players, recruited mostly from improvisational troupes in a few major cities, got more time on the air. Even before the original cast left, the show itself had become the star and a new American institution — a kind of keepsake to be handed down from generation to generation, both by the performers who served time in its stock company and by the audience that is perpetually replenished as new legions of viewers come of age.

All that and more because Johnny wanted additional time off. At first skeptical about the new show, he was later openly appalled by some of its more outrageous gags (foremost example: An aged comic known as Professor Backwards drowned in the ocean, Chevy Chase reported on
SNL
’s “Weekend Update,” because onlookers ignored his desperate cries of “pleh, pleh”). But the King of Late Night, quite the icon himself, eventually came to terms with the show (and friendly terms with Chase). Michaels said he annually invited Carson to guest-host as a goodwill gesture but was just as annually turned down.

Lorne Michaels propelled TV forward partly by returning to its origins — his philosophy tidily embodied in the seven words that exuberantly, and somehow threateningly, open each edition: “Live from New York, it’s
Saturday Night!
” Though it blazed new trails in the areas of what could be said and done on TV, and initially made censors batty and sponsors skittish,
Saturday Night Live
always had its roots showing: the early golden days of live TV from New York — the days of
Studio One
and, more relevantly,
Your Show of Shows
and
Caesar’s Hour
with Sid Caesar and his troupe. The audience at home watched and laughed, thrillingly aware that “this is happening now” and that there was thus an element of daring and peril to what otherwise amounted to mere entertainment.

Television is not itself an art form, but it provides a showcase for many art forms, and the one plied and perfected by
Saturday Night Live
is the comedy sketch, a vaudeville and burlesque staple that is the theatrical equivalent of the American short story. Over nearly three decades,
Saturday Night Live
has attracted and developed the best sketch-comedy writers in the business — the best when they left if not when they entered. These men and women are a breed unto themselves, a subspecies of comedy writers in general. Neurotic in their own particular ways, most of them have been by nature reclusive, peculiar, and proudly idiosyncratic. That’s not to say the writers who’ve passed through
SNL
have all been of the same temperament or outlook; politically, culturally, socioeconomically, and intellectually they’ve been all over the map. They’re all attitude incarnate, but not the
same
attitude.

The story of
Saturday Night Live
is the story of the people who made it work — people there at, and before, the beginning; people who passed through as if attending some rarefied college of comedic arts; craftspeople and technicians as well as actors and comics and musicians. They and the show weathered many a storm along the way: the tragic premature deaths of cast members, drug abuse among the performers and writers, temper tantrums, office romances, and a near-fatal stumble when, five years into the run, someone underqualified took over as producer. There was also Michaels’s own pratfall when he returned after a long absence with a casting concept that largely bombed and, in more recent times, an anthrax scare that had the entire cast evacuating 30 Rockefeller Center, the show’s longtime home, on a frightening Friday in the terrorist year of 2001.

As executive producer for most of its nearly three decades, Michaels has had to contend with virtually every sin the flesh is heir to among his cast members as well as with his own fallibilities. He was a father figure even at the beginning, when he was only a wee bit older than the rest of them, and that continues now that he is twice the age of many of those who work for him and plays host to surviving members of the original cast who bring teenage sons and daughters to see the show in person. He watched as two of his brightest comedy stars died of drug abuse, saw others come perilously close, and has had to deal with the grimness of a disproportionately high mortality rate overall.

There have been cast members who drank too much, snorted coke too much, freebased too much, God-knows-what-else’d too much. A writer recalls walking into an office and finding three members of one of the world’s most famous rock bands shooting heroin into their veins before a show. One brilliant but insecure member of a recent cast slashed himself with razor blades during bouts of severe depression. Talent may itself be a form of neurosis; it usually comes with troubles attached.

To those who work on the show, success and failure become close to matters of life and death. It’s all there in the argot; a good joke “kills,” while a bad sketch “dies.” Having an audience “crushed” by material is devoutly to be wished. Many a sketch will “kill at dress” — meaning get big laughs at the dress rehearsal staged in front of a separate audience a few hours before the real show — only to “die on-air” when it’s the show for real.

Among Michaels’s nemeses over the years have been network censors, less conspicuous now but a constant source of friction at the outset; network executives who hated the program or wanted to produce it themselves; hosts who panicked at the last minute and wanted to bolt, or who canceled just before their week’s exhilarating ordeal was about to begin; and an uncountable number of protests and condemnations from special interest groups offended by this sketch or that portrayal or a news item on “Weekend Update” — or the way a seemingly imperiled pig squealed during a sketch about a TV animal show.

Even in its maturity, if that state was ever actually reached, the show remained a troubled child. Brandon Tartikoff, for years NBC’s much-loved uber-programmer, reluctantly canceled the series in the mid-1980s, only to give it an eleventh-hour reprieve. Essentially, the warden made the fateful last-minute phone call to himself.

The show made stars of unknowns and superstars of stars. There were also those who entered anonymous and left the same way. Some were made famous, some were made bitter, some were made rich. Some found nirvana and others a living hell. They never really knew, going through those portals, how or if they would be changed as a result. But they virtually all had one thing in common, even if they had joined the show simply because they needed work and liked to eat: It was much more than a job. They were the chosen because it was the chosen. They could look down on people working even on the most successful prime-time sitcoms or dramas because
Saturday Night Live
was something entirely unto itself, a towering edifice on the landscape, a place of wonder and magic, a sociopolitical phenomenon.

With the arrival of
SNL
, the TV generation, at least for ninety minutes a week, could see television not just as a window on the past or a display case for the fading fantasy figures of their fathers and mothers, but as a mirror — a warped fun-house mirror perhaps, but a mirror just the same, one reflecting their own sensibilities, values, and philosophies. Television, which had shown them the world, had heretofore neglected to show them themselves.

Amazingly, the show continues to rejuvenate itself. In the early 1990s, all the old “Saturday Night Dead” gags were revived as the series suffered a drastic artistic setback. Critics and competitors rushed forward to declare it antiquated, unfunny, and, worst of all, unhip — and this was the show that had made it hip to watch television in the first place. But by the end of the decade, the century, and millennium, Lorne Michaels and his cast and crew had managed another fantastic resurrection, helped by the exploitable absurdities of politics. In the election years of 1996 and 2000, a cast of young, fresh writing and performing talent proved it knew where the laughs were, and found them.

When
Saturday Night Live
began, its competition was mostly local programming — syndicated shows and old movies — since ABC and CBS, then the only other networks, went dark late Saturday nights. Today
SNL
faces an onslaught of competition in its time period from dozens of channels, including many cable networks and broadcasters fighting for the same demographically desirable, youngish audience that
SNL
helped define. And yet, though the competition has multiplied exponentially,
SNL
still dominates. Its viewership now includes parents who have children as old as the parents were when they first watched the show. Or older. They may say it isn’t as good as it was then — but they still tune in. They may go to bed much earlier than they did in the seventies — but they’ll still try to stay up at least through “Weekend Update.” Or they tape it or TiVo it and watch it the next morning, an option not available when
SNL
first appeared.

This book tells the
Saturday Night Live
story for the first time almost entirely in the words of the people who made it and lived it — the performers who found glory or agony there, the writers and producers who stayed for decades or only a year or two, and many stars who served as hosts. Elated or disgruntled, they talk with abandon and candor and represent a wide array of views about the show, what makes it tick, whether indeed it still does tick, how it has lasted, and whether Lorne Michaels is a comedy genius or a cunning con man.

Although
Saturday Night Live
spans four decades, some of the newness and even the nihilism of the early years survives and bursts forth every week. New talent is always coming in and shaking things up. To them, Studio 8H is not a hallowed hall because Arturo Toscanini once conducted the NBC Orchestra there (in fact, the studio was built for him) but because John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Laraine Newman, Bill Murray, and Garrett Morris reinvented television there; because the place echoes with the inspired hilarity of Belushi’s mad Samurai, Aykroyd’s fusty male prostitute, Radner’s loopy Loopner, Chase’s stumble-bumbling Gerald Ford, Murray’s capricious Oscar-picker, Morris’s shouted headlines for the hearing impaired, Newman’s curiously sexy portrayal of young Connie Conehead, teenager from outer space.