Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (20 page)

At the end of the spot he’s at the breakfast table. John comes on the set wearing a green crewneck lamb’s wool sweater and he’s supposed to look like Bruce Jenner, right? And a shirt with a button-down collar. He insisted that was how he should look. And there’s a huge moth hole in the front of the sweater and a white shirt underneath. So I made him wear it backwards. If you look at it again, you’ll see he’s wearing the sweater backwards. And, of course, he wanted to smoke a cigarette, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to smoke and take a bite of the doughnut at the same time. So finally we came up with this awkward solution where John holds the cigarette in his hand, takes a puff, then — “I like a good breakfast” — and picks up the doughnut and the cigarette in the same hand.

AL FRANKEN:

“Julia Child” came from Tom Davis having seen her cut herself on the
Today
show. I had written the sketch for Walter Matthau, but it didn’t get picked the week he hosted. So I had to convince Aykroyd to do it. We tried it once, but we didn’t have the hose working properly the first week, so we held it until we got control of the blood spurting. And it’s really a consummate Danny performance. I mean, it’s live TV, and just the timing of the spurts, it’s beautiful. I was so admiring of that performance. It was in the right hands. Walter Matthau wouldn’t have been able to handle the technical aspect nearly as well.

Danny and I had a good relationship, and I always felt that if I cared about something enough, he would do it. You can only call those in so many times. You’ve got to be sure about something in order to say, “Do it.” Or you’ve got to be thinking at least it’s worth trying, worth the risk. That’s when you feel good. When you make somebody do Julia Child and it turns out the way it did, then you’ve got some credibility for the next time you want to make him do something.

It’s always a tug-and-pull of how much direction you can give somebody, how much they trust you, how much they don’t, how much they trust their own instincts, the mood they’re in. It depends on the cast member. You have to know each cast member to get the best work that you can out of them.

STEVE MARTIN:

I think Lorne was reluctant to have me on. I was never reluctant. I wanted to be on the show from the first moment I saw it. But — it was one of those timing curves where, when the first show hit the air, I was not, you know, popular enough to really host it. Then there was a synchronicity in my rise to stand-up and records, and we sort of hit at the same moment.

In a strange way, I was new and old-fashioned at the same time. And maybe the irony of my performance hadn’t reached Lorne yet. I really don’t know. Lorne’s been one of my oldest friends and oldest supporters, so whatever you feel about somebody at first really doesn’t matter. I found that, in performers and sometimes movies, and especially art, that it takes a while to come to something that’s new. And a lot of times when the resistance finally turns to acceptance, it makes you a greater supporter of it or them.

JEAN DOUMANIAN,
Associate Producer:

Nobody wanted to put Steve Martin on the show. I’d seen him on
The Tonight Show
several times. And I kept trying to get them to let Steve do the show, because I thought he was so funny. But, you know, the writers also wanted to be on the show. They said, “He’s our same age. If he could do the show, we could do the show.” I remember somebody falling out. And I remember running into Lorne and saying. “Lorne, give this guy a chance, he’s really, really good.” Lorne was reluctant to have him on, but when he finally did, Steve’s manager sent me a dozen roses. I was just so thrilled.

DAN AYKROYD:

The Czech brothers were, I guess, a combination — a grafting of characters. Steve had this character, the continental guy, and I had the Czech expatriate, the “swinging” Czech who was trying to talk like an American, trying to be an American, trying to have the inflection in the accent, the clothes. And so we took his continental guy and my Czech guy and we fused them into the Czech brothers. That’s essentially what happened there.

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:

I did something kind of different from other people. I started writing these things which they called in those days “Marilyn pieces,” which were pieces about either men and women or dramatic pieces, the most notable one of which I did with Belushi and Sissy Spacek, for which I won the Emmy. The pieces were like dramatic and they came from the tradition of those Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin sketches that weren’t about the jokes but were about the character builds and were often kind of bittersweet.

One day Danny came to me and said, “Okay, you know those guys that come over and paw you and they used to be an engineer in Poland and now they drive a Camaro?” And I said, “Yes!” So he and Steve Martin kind of talked like them and left, and then I wrote the sketch, including that patois they use — “I will put my hands on your big American breasts.”

STEVE MARTIN:

At that point I was doing “I’m a wild and crazy guy,” and I said, “That’s the only act I have, wild and crazy guy,” so I did my thing that I was doing onstage. Danny’s was actually the more authentic character. And it was funny, because when we rehearsed it during the week it seemed so funny to us,
so
funny, and we went on with it and it seemed to go fine. It wasn’t anything special. But we decided to do it again, and for some reason when we did it the second time, the audience was prepped. It stuck in their heads or something, and they were right there cheering and laughing and going overboard. Between the first time we did it and the second time we did it, something jelled or happened. The crazy walk was something that was supposed to indicate coolness.

BILL MURRAY:

The original Nick the Lounge Singer sketch was one that I walked into the read-through. They’d read all the sketches for the week and I said, “Oh, I have one more.” I had never written really anything, and I was just dying on the vine, because like I said, as the new guy I was pretty much the second cop through the door every week, the second FBI guy, whatever. Danny was always kind enough to write me in as the second something; no one else even bothered. That was my lifestyle. Then, I don’t know, something happened and somebody gave me this shower soap thing in the shape of a microphone and I took off with it and wrote this sketch. But basically it wasn’t even written; it was half-written. I started doing it at the read-through, and you’re supposed to have a copy of the script for everyone — you’re supposed to duplicate them for the entire crew — but I was the only one with a copy. I just started doing it, and I was getting huge laughs, and then I said, “I haven’t finished the ending yet.”

Well, there was this silence. This bone-crushing silence. And Tom Davis said, “I would love to help Bill finish writing that sketch, Lorne.” And it was the grandest gesture of like, “This son of a bitch needs this badly, and you know I can make sure he gets it done.” At that point it had gotten a lot of laughs, so it was like okay. So Davis helped me finish that sketch, that was the shower-mike sketch, and then we started writing all the Nicks.

PAUL SHAFFER:

Billy decided to do a version of the kind of character that he had been doing in Chicago: Nick the Lounge Singer. And of course I would be the pianist, but I also got to participate in the writing of it with Billy, Tom Davis, and Danny. Danny would always make an appearance in it as an Indian guy. At ski resorts in Canada, there were always guys like that who operated the chair lift, and they always found a dead animal in the sewage system or something, and that was his appearance. Marilyn Miller was also instrumental in writing this.

Billy’s performance was so over-the-top, it almost superseded the writing. We did five or six of them — I’m just guessing. They always had to come from Billy, and I never knew what his criteria were, but whatever he wanted to do was just right. “Star Wars” of course was his idea, but then we would collaborate on the lyrics once he got the idea. Most of it came from him, though.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

I wrote a lot of Gilda’s first sketches. Like I did the first Emily Litella. I did the first Roseanne Roseannadanna before she had a name. I did a lot of the Baba Wawas. And I did all the Todd and Lisas. I watched every one of those on the live show because I loved it so much, and it just didn’t seem like it had been done the same way at dress or even, you know, a couple times before. It just seemed so amazingly live and raw.

PENNY MARSHALL:

Gilda went with Paul Simon. She also went out with Billy. One night I was about to see Billy and he said, “I’m no good, ask Gilda.” He was drinking, you know. Everyone went through their periods of bad behavior.

LARAINE NEWMAN:

Billy and Gilda’s relationship didn’t really affect me, except that I can remember them coming to read-through and fighting. And she was furious with him and she’d just told him not to talk to her and he’d be begging her — and this would be acted out in front of all of us.

JANE CURTIN:

Billy and Gilda? When you’re changing clothes backstage right next to two people who are involved, oh yeah, you know what’s going on between those two people.

BILL MURRAY:

Lisa Loopner was a great character for Gilda because she could actually laugh inside of it. That sketch was all about making her laugh. There was a lot of extra in that. Those sketches were always tragically overwritten. They couldn’t edit worth a damn, and they wouldn’t edit. It was a turn for both of us, because she had this thing that was so extreme that you could throw anything at it and it would hit the mark, partly because she was such a bright target and partly because of the way she reacted to it.

You never saw nerds enjoying themselves before. No one ever saw nerds enjoy themselves, really get funny. You never saw what really tickled them. This was before the
Revenge of the Nerds
movies. I played a nerd and Gilda played a nerd and I was going after her, personally, whatever it was, and it made her laugh and it made all the stuff so incredibly stupid — the fact that even nerds had stupid humor — it was a blast. It was really a blast to do.

But they would never edit the stuff, never cut the stuff. And I’d say, “Look, the sketch is running eight minutes, it’s never going to go, can’t we just cut some stuff?” And they’d never cut it. And finally between dress and air, Lorne would say, “You’ve got to take two minutes and fifteen seconds out of that sketch.” And we’d already figured out what was wrong with it so we’d never even committed to the stuff we didn’t like, so they’d be there doing all these cue card things and saying, “Here, I’ve got the new changes,” and we’re like, “Yeah, sure. Whatever.” We already knew what the hell was going to go. Both Gil and I knew what was working and what wasn’t, so we never got attached to the garbage part of the sketch, the thing that was going to be gone, but we still had to rehearse the damn thing for hours and hours and hours.

Pulling my pants up as Todd — that was my skill. I remember guys that I knew that were like that. You stick your belly out through your pants, your belt’s over your belly, it’s sort of like you have your emotional armor in your belly and it’s like you’re banging at people with your armor. You go at people with that emotional armor. You lead with it. Rather than being attacked first, you sort of lead with that belly. And it was great to have it with Gilda, because her body was this other thing with these crazy goofy shoulders and stuff, and she was like almost getting hit from behind all the time in the back of the neck. You’d get the feeling like somebody was thudding her with a mallet or something.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

Todd and Lisa also became a medium for Gilda and Billy to work something through on television. There was definitely some of that going on. They went through different permutations where they were together, they weren’t together, you know. You could probably track what was going on by seeing how they related to each other on the air. Beatts and I would really write for them with a mind to letting them take off. We thought we had a sense of how the chemistry was operating. And sometimes, when our foreknowledge of that came together at a particularly juicy point in their relationship, you could see the results on-screen. On the “Prom Night” sketch, they were really present. They were both really playing and they were both really good. And they just took off. The best of that was fab, just to see them together like that.

CARRIE FISHER:

There was a time when Gilda had gotten a very big crush on Paul and then I went out with Paul and then there was sort of a drama and I didn’t want to be in a drama and somehow I remember being on the phone with Gilda and there was crying. I was just twenty-one. I didn’t know how I got into this thing. But it was sort of a fun drama, I suppose.

I couldn’t figure Gilda out. The thing that happened, whatever that was with Paul, kind of estranged us. The horrible thing was, years and years later I went to this stomach doctor, and he had treated Gilda when she was very, very ill, and she had talked about this thing that had happened with Paul and myself and her.

NEIL LEVY:

There was a profound sadness inside Gilda. At the same time there was this boundless joy and energy. She fluctuated. It wasn’t like bipolar. She didn’t go on periods of horrible depression and then elation. They existed side by side. And sometimes she’d just disappear. She would just go away, and maybe that’s when she was sad.

I remember somebody was coming to town, somebody very important to her, she said, because she had tried to kill herself and this guy had saved her. I remember her telling me that.

I loved Gilda, that’s the thing. If I ever had a problem, I could talk to her. She was totally accessible and one of the wisest women I ever met. She had an understanding of human nature that most people don’t have. That cute Gilda on TV is not the Gilda I saw — although she was incredibly cute in real life. She had that quality, but she was also incredibly bright.