Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (28 page)

I was right in the middle of all this. And if you know me, I hate confrontation. I’m worse than Lorne. I will run 3,000 miles the other direction or get a root canal before I have a confrontation. I hate it. And I really like Lorne. We’d gotten along great.

But he has been cool to me now for a long time. I think he feels I betrayed him, and I didn’t. I truly didn’t. I was walking a fine line, and I was ready for a loony bin. It was horrible. I saw what was happening to Fred too. And if Lorne didn’t take time off, Lorne would have been in a loony bin as well. He was hanging by a string, he was so tired. I frankly worried about him too. Both of them.

AL FRANKEN:

“Limo for a Lame-O” maybe had implications for what happened that next year, because I think it ruptured the relationship between Silverman and Lorne. Fred knew Lorne was leaving, but instead of going to Lorne and asking him who would be a good successor, Fred relied, I think, on Barbara Gallagher, who was a friend of Jean Doumanian’s. So it sort of led to Jean’s selection.

LORNE MICHAELS:

I’d given so much energy to holding things together all those years; I had been truly drained, just spent. I was just burnt out and emotionally very vulnerable. So I told Brandon I couldn’t do another year. He didn’t try and change my mind, and I said to myself, “All right, I guess that’s it. I’ve done my five years.” It was very hard for me. In retrospect, to be relieved of the show was an emotional withdrawal that took me, truly, years to get a perspective on.

I began looking at studio deals and went back and forth between Paramount and Warner Brothers. And I met with Jean Doumanian about it and I said, “If I go to Paramount, I’d love you to come with me.” And she implied yes — that’s what I came away with. Several weeks later, I was on my way to the opening of
Urban Cowboy
when I got a phone call from Brandon saying, “I’m going to name Jean Doumanian as the next producer of the show.” I go, “Really. That’s an interesting choice.” I was startled because I always think of the show as a writer-based show, and you have to be a writer to say what is funny or not funny. To control that many people in comedy without having any credits yourself in comedy is impossible.

Jean called me five minutes after Brandon did. I asked her, “When did they talk to you?” and she said, “Six weeks ago.” That was the part where I went,
“Wha —?”
And then she said, “They made me promise not to talk to you.” That was the very first moment of my growing up: “They asked me not to talk to you.”

And this was when I’d been talking to her about coming to Paramount with me. Now Brandon was not an innocent in all of this. I don’t mean that meanly. I mean it in the sense that I had thought, because he and I were friendly, that he would at least listen to me about my replacement. I had told him I would use some combination of Jim Downey and Al Franken and Tom Davis, because it had to be someone with writing credentials who understood how the show really worked. Jean wasn’t even there for meetings between dress and air.

BARBARA GALLAGHER:

It wasn’t a conspiracy to do Lorne in. Lorne was leaving. He wanted Al, Fred wasn’t buying it, so there we were. They also didn’t want to leak it to the press, they didn’t want anyone to know yet, and if Lorne knew, it would have been all over the town. So that was the reason for not telling him. It wasn’t a conspiracy to do anything to Lorne.

FRED SILVERMAN:

The decision to hire Jean Doumanian was made by Brandon Tartikoff based on a recommendation from Barbara Gallagher. I didn’t know Jean. I knew she had worked with Woody Allen. I said, “If you recommend her, fine.”

BARBARA GALLAGHER:

Lorne didn’t want Jean Doumanian in there for some reason, probably because she’s not a writer. But Fred Silverman did not want an outsider coming in. He wanted someone from the show, who’d been with the show. And Jean had been there forever, worked with the talent, and Jean wanted the job. I said, “Jean, I’ll talk to Fred about it.” Lorne wanted Al Franken and Tom Davis to produce the show, and Fred said no, he didn’t want Al, because of what they’d gone through.

Brandon was there at the time, and I said the only other person down there who knows how to run the show because she’s been sitting there all the time, although she’s not a writer, is Jean. And he said, “Oh, all right, let’s run it by Fred.” I said, “I know Lorne doesn’t want her, so if you tell Lorne, you’re going to have a big craziness going on.” Fred said, “Well, if that’s the only person down there and you think she’ll be all right.” And I said, “Everyone likes her, they all know her, what problem could it be?”

ROBIN SHLIEN:

Woody Allen was best friends with Jean Doumanian, who was the associate producer when I was there, and he would call the control room constantly and talk to her. Woody Allen would always call as “Mo Golden.” And the second day I was there, I got this call for Jean Doumanian and had to say, “Jean, it’s Mo Golden calling.” We always had to answer the control room phone. I didn’t think anything of it, and then somebody said, “It’s Woody Allen.”

We never knew if she knew that we knew. We had to pretend that we all thought this guy calling her was Mo Golden and not Woody Allen. He called all the time. Sometimes it was like every five minutes. And we were just like, “What the fuck?”

JAMES DOWNEY:

Jean was like a fashion person. It was all about restaurants and clothes and stuff. She didn’t seem to me to have much of a sense of humor. The only time I’ve gone to a party where I was kind of awestruck was when she called me and said, “Woody Allen’s going to have a party,” and Woody apparently never had parties. And when she called me she said, “Don’t tell anybody else.” It was like 1980, ’81, and I went with my college girlfriend. It was in Woody’s house, I thought it was his house, because it was a townhouse. You went upstairs. You actually met him at the door and he like stayed there the whole evening with Jean, who would assure him that whoever came through the door was not a dangerous or menacing person.

Walt Frazier was the first person I saw, then John Lindsay. It was a very New York thing, and the best collection of camera-shy, publicity-shy, retiring type people I’d ever seen. Paul Newman was there, Truman Capote, even Jackie Kennedy.

In one of the last sketches of
Saturday Night Live
’s fifth season, Laraine Newman played a noblewoman, Garrett Morris played a butler, writers Jim Downey and Tom Davis played Lords Worcestershire and Wilkinson — of sauce and razor-blade fame, respectively — Jane Curtin was Lady Wilkinson, Bill Murray played the Earl of Sandwich (“I’m afraid nothing has been named after a member of my family,” he lamented), his brother Brian Doyle-Murray was a servant, and host Buck Henry joined Gilda Radner to play the principal characters of the sketch, Lord and Lady Douchebag. The setting was the manor of Lord Salisbury, whose steaks were served to the guests, and the year 1730. “My dear Sandwich,” said Henry, in character, “Parliament has always had its share of Douchebags, and it always will.”

And on this mildly satirical and intentionally ridiculous note, what was left of the original cast and creators of
Saturday Night Live
would soon part, never to perform together again. The stakes were being pulled up and the circus was leaving town. It was May 24, 1980, the end of the fifth season but also of an era. Lorne ended the last show on a shot of theON AIRsign going off.

JEAN DOUMANIAN:

I think Lorne would’ve stayed on, but NBC wouldn’t give him the deal he wanted. So he went away. Lorne wasn’t very happy about me getting the job. Because after all, it was Lorne’s baby, and he wanted Franken and Davis to get it. But Silverman didn’t want them, and Brandon didn’t want them either. They thought that I could do it.

I had been in every writers meeting when Lorne was producing. I had seen how the writing was done. Besides, Lorne really wasn’t writing, he was editing and selecting. I took the job because I thought it would be a challenge. There was no other woman doing a live ninety-minute television show, and I wanted to see if I could do it. I did want to keep several writers, but I think everybody was advised not to stay on. I don’t know who advised them, but four writers said they would stay, and then they had a change of heart and came back and said they couldn’t. In fact, everybody who said they would stay reneged once word got out.

LORNE MICHAELS:

I had no problem with people staying with their jobs. That was not a problem for me. I think in the case of Franken, Davis, Downey, and a couple others who were the people I had nominated to succeed me, because they embodied the writing perspective, Jean didn’t want them. What happened was, everyone got a memo from Jean to clear out their offices by July. Now this had been a group that had lived there for five years. That was what killed everything, when she made that one big mistake. It was a signal of, you know, “a new broom.” I didn’t get the memo, because I’d left. For guys like Franken and that, it was the first sign that they weren’t even being considered to stay.

LARAINE NEWMAN:

I was dying to go home. On the other hand, I knew, having grown up in Los Angeles, what it was like to have been on a series and to no longer be on one. I knew what it was that I was facing, to have been on a hit show and then be an unemployed actor. So I was a little worried about that. Mostly I was glad to be back in L.A., because I love New York for about five days, but after that it’s just utter toil. I came from a car culture. Not to be able to drive myself around is like imprisonment to me.

JANE CURTIN:

I was happy to move on, I was tired. You get very burned-out after doing something like that. And you get very jaded. It was very hard to deal with going from relative obscurity to everybody knowing who you are. I had to deal with what I had become. It was hard to deal with on the show, because you were busy doing the show — so I had to come to terms with what I had become and try to adjust to that. I needed time off.

HOWARD SHORE:

I have quite a fondness for that period, those first five years. You were doing something that you knew was
something.
You were creating something, and nobody had quite gone there before. And you were with a great creative group and you could sense it, you felt it. I particularly could feel it with the cast and with the writers. You just knew that you were part of a very special group.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:

I left when Lorne left, in May of 1980, and I was there from day one, which was July ’75. What had happened was the show changed. It stopped being fun the way it was originally. At the risk of sounding naive, this is what was going through our minds at the time, and it was only after all of us left that there was some perspective on it. We were all these neophytes that got together. You know, it was Marilyn Miller saying, “Hey kids, let’s put on a show.” Nothing was sacred, and we had fun.

ROBIN SHLIEN:

I dream about those days, actually. I dream about those people a lot. When I was transitioning into my new career I had a lot of dreams from that old time. As a psychotherapist, I realize what an amazing and important life experience it was for me and I think for everybody else who worked during that time there. I now give talks on therapeutic humor, and I’m always thinking about the time that I was in a work situation where I had so much laughter in a day. Working on that show gave me great confidence in my own sense of humor, because I was able to make people like John Belushi laugh.

JAMES DOWNEY:

We all left in 1980. The cast and the writers all sort of agreed we would leave and take the show with us.

In fairness you’d have to say that the only reason we’re even talking about this, the only reason the show’s still on the air, is because of what went on in the first five years. First, it gave it this tremendous momentum that it could survive anything, like the Jean Doumanian period or some other bad period. Then it reached the point where it was beyond good or bad. Gilbert Gottfried said a great thing one time; he said at this point “it’s just a restaurant in a good location.” But even so, it’s a good location because of those first five years. It had been a blighted neighborhood. It was Saturday night, when no one was watching TV and they were showing reruns of Johnny Carson. And so it was gentrified. People went in there and did the equivalent of cleaning up vacant lots and forming neighborhood watch committees and just spiffed it up and took a chance and turned it around.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

I left at the end of year five — after the first five years that Lorne did. After that, the Ayatollah Doumanian came in.

ANNE BEATTS:

Lorne sheltered us from the realities of show business. It’s interesting, because while some people might have thought
SNL
was a dangerous world, I think in many ways it was a very safe world. We were protected. We were in this little cocoon in the RCA Building. We were pampered, and we got our way most of the time. When I got to Hollywood and found out the harsh truths, I wasn’t really prepared.

BILL MURRAY:

I was definitely going to go when everyone else left. I’d been at Second City when that sort of thing happened. I knew there was no point in being the one guy who knows how to do it. You’ve got to get the hell out of there. It’s a little like
Lifeboat
, you know. It was just time to go. I would never have wanted to start up with a whole new group.

It was really a great thing to be a part of it. The fact that it was live made it performance-driven. You were always pushing yourself physically to keep your spirit going and get out there and do it. The writing had to be good too. It was great fun — and really hard work. That’s the part nobody seems to know: how hard it was, what it was like to be young and exhausted all the time. Lorne did build in this great thing where we had every fourth week off. We all got a chance to blow off some steam and to rest. After three weeks, we’d be pretty beaten down. We’d come walking in there on our knuckles or our knees.