Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (29 page)

When the show ended, it was difficult for some of us in the outside world — difficult for each person relative to how much they’d already been working on the outside. None of us wanted any TV jobs, because we’d had the best TV jobs there were. Once you saw what the other jobs were like, you knew they were not half as much fun as
Saturday Night Live
had been. On sitcoms, you’re working on these little bitty scripts for hours and hours and hours. They just keep shooting and shooting and shooting. Ours was the best situation because you had the pressure of having to do it when the time came. Then at one o’clock in the morning, you were done. It was over. So nobody wanted regular TV or prime time. We’d all made more money than we needed in the short term, so we just went out there and got into the movie business.

KATE JACKSON:

After I had hosted the show, we went to the bar that John and Dan owned. And Joni Mitchell was there, and there were musicians and other writers, and it was a terrific group of people to be around in such a small room. But it got to be time for me to leave, because I had an early flight in the morning, and Billy Murray walked me out to the car. I got in and closed the door and as we were beginning to pull out, I turned around and looked behind me and there was Billy, standing in the street, waving. Snow was falling all around him — just the sweetest thing. I had been terrified of hosting. I was so afraid. But I knew that I had to do it, it was one of those things where you’re really afraid to do something and you know you have to take the chance. You just have to push yourself and do it. And I remember saying to a friend of mine who went with me, “Well, I’ll never do that again, because it will never get that good again. That was as good as it gets.”

LORNE MICHAELS:

I took my name off the show and I left.

3

The Stars Come Out: 1980–1985

PAM NORRIS,
Writer:

I have my personal conspiracy theory, which is that whoever came in after Lorne and the original cast was going to be killed — because, you know, you can’t replace the Beatles. Somebody thought, “Well, we’ll just let things get extremely bad, and then when we pull it back up a little bit afterward, it’ll be considered a triumph.”

DON NOVELLO,
Writer:

Lorne wanted to do the show again, he just didn’t want to do it right away. He wanted to wait six months. It was really foolish of NBC to let him get away, because a lot of the cast members might have come back. John was burned out, he didn’t want to do it, but you’d be surprised after three or four months, people change their minds. So I think a lot of them might have come back. But NBC didn’t want to wait until January. They didn’t want to take it off for six months.

BARBARA GALLAGHER,
NBC Vice President:

I said to Jean Doumanian, “Look, I think you can have it, but if I were you, I wouldn’t take it. First of all, the network is going to jump on you like a bad suit. They’ll want to cut the budget, I can tell you right now, and they’re going to cut it to the bone. They have been waiting all this time to get even with Lorne.”

I knew that because after they had squeezed Lorne at the beginning, he told me he was going to let them have it when it became a hit, and he did. He started demanding things. And when you’re a hit, you get them, especially when you have advertisers scrambling to be part of the show.

I remember telling Jean, “Any producer who comes in here now is doomed to fail. It’s not going to work.”

JEAN DOUMANIAN,
Executive Producer:

I had to get an all-new cast and all new writers in two and a half months. When I took over the show, the first thing they did was cut my budget. The budget under Lorne had gotten up to a million dollars a show. They cut my budget to $350,000, as I recall. And I was supposed to do the same show for that amount of money.

I don’t know this for a fact, but it would seem to me that if a woman could actually mount a show and get it done in such a short time, it minimized the importance of those who preceded her. And nobody liked that. So I was attacked viciously. How dare I take this job? How dare I think I can do the show? Most of that was said by men. You have to remember, the show had been biased against women for a long time.

ALAN ZWEIBEL,
Writer:

When we left, I remember Gilda would call me up on Tuesday nights at two in the morning and we’d still be up because our bodies for five years had been up all night on Tuesday, staying up and writing.

LORNE MICHAELS,
Executive Producer:

I never watched Jean’s show. I didn’t watch it when Dick was running it either. I never watched it that whole time. Not once. It would have been too painful. I didn’t have anything to do with the show, so I didn’t feel compromised. To walk away clean is at least to have your honor intact, and I felt I’d taken the honorable way out.

The Jean Doumanian era — all ten months of it — marked the first but not last time
Saturday Night Live
’s very survival was at stake. After five years of enormous and trend-setting popularity — replete with break-out stars, iconic characters, and now-classic sketches — the show zapped back to square one in 1980 following the departures of Lorne Michaels, the cast he had assembled, and all the original writers.

Viewers may not have been immersed in the backstage politics, but they couldn’t help noticing that the quality of the show plummeted. Many in the business thought Doumanian lacked the experience and expertise necessary for the job. She was further beset by skullduggery among staff members who wanted the usurper ousted from the throne almost the instant she assumed it.

NBC was doing badly in prime time, and within weeks of Doumanian’s accession
, Saturday Night Live
was added to the network’s list of gaping wounds requiring medical attention. An audience that expected to see fresh new Gildas, Belushis, Chevys, and Aykroyds refused to settle for the paltry replacements that initially dominated Doumanian’s cast — Charles Rocket, Denny Dillon, Gail Matthius, Ann Risley.

Saturday Night Live
fell apart in less time than it took to come together five years earlier. The show still had no real competition in its time period — “Our competition is sleep,” as one cast member put it — but its predicament was perhaps worse than if it had.
Saturday Night Live
was competing against the memory of itself. And losing.

JOE PISCOPO,
Cast Member:

When we came in — after Lorne and all the original guys had left — the offices were completely empty. They even cleaned all the desks out. The pencils were gone. And when I tell you pencils, I’m not exaggerating. The offices were all reconfigured. It was like somebody came up there and just kind of bombed out everything, man. It was pretty wild.

ANDREW KURTZMAN,
Writer:

I think we had the feeling of being a bit beside the point. Coming in the aftermath of this big cultural juggernaut — the first five years of the show — we were a little like the guy with the handcart behind the locomotive.
Saturday Night Live
had its own mythology in place. The big show had left town. We had a certain cheese-ball feel. It was hard work to book guest hosts for a while. “Pamela Sue Martin’s on the bubble, but she might say yes” — that kind of thing. You never really had the feeling that you could open your suit on the observation deck of the Empire State Building and yell, “I own this town,” because people were always saying, “Yeah, but you weren’t nearly as good as the original show.”

BILL MURRAY,
Cast Member:

I knew Jean and liked her. I’d known her a long time. I’m not sure that she did the worst job in the world. They gave her no credit for trying. She had great connections in the music world and she got some great acts for the show. They didn’t really give her a full shot.

She did find Eddie Murphy and a couple other people who were really talented; they just needed some confidence. She was struggling, and they were having a hard time getting quality hosts. So I called up and I said, “I can’t get arrested. Is there any way I could work on your show?” So I went in there. It was a tough week. We worked really hard writing and rewriting, and the show turned out good, and I thought, “This could work.”

The cast saw how hard you have to work to do that show. I don’t think most of them ever worked that hard before. They were going through their first brush with fame, even at the level they were at. The world just wasn’t ready for a brand-new group, so it was incredibly tough for them.

ANDREW SMITH,
Writer:

If you want to get philosophical about the problems of the subsequent years after the first five years, the actors were so cognizant of the success of the group that had gone before them — that Chevy and John and Gilda had broken out into these huge stars — that they began to have one eye on the audience and on the fact that Steven Spielberg might be watching, and only one eye on being funny. The first group that came through before me didn’t know how big they were going to be, so they were much freer and much more open and thus, I thought, a lot funnier than the subsequent people.

As soon as
SNL
or the Not Ready for Prime Time Players became a launching pad, then it wasn’t about just the comedy that was happening there. It was about future earnings or future career moves. And that’s kind of the cancer that is always threatening to eat away at the comedy on the show, even to this day. God knows, if I was an actor, I would feel the same way. It’s like a loss of innocence. You can’t not think about the fact that if you make the right moves on
Saturday Night Live
, you could become a huge, huge star. And so therefore when somebody wants you to play a turtle or something like that, you say, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t think that would look good.” I bet if those original guys knew how big they were going to be, they probably wouldn’t have done Killer Bees.

GILBERT GOTTFRIED,
Cast Member:

Back then it was a big deal that the cast was changing and the producer was changing. Before we even hit the air, there were already articles being written in every paper and every magazine saying disaster was coming and how dare they continue
Saturday Night Live
with a different cast? And that this producer is not equipped to do the job and this cast is terrible.

DAVID SHEFFIELD,
Writer:

A friend of mine named Patrick was auditioning as an actor on the show. Patrick got his big break as a men’s-room attendant at Studio 54. He worked the stalls there a bit. He knew everybody. I think he actually had an agent at that point. He got an audition and called me and said if I would write some material for him, he would see the producers got it. I wrote a couple of sketches, thinking nothing would come of it. He called back and said, “They love your stuff, man, they want to hire you.” I said, “
Who
wants to hire me?” He said, “I don’t know, some guy with glasses.” That guy turned out to be Jean Doumanian’s producer.

CHRIS ALBRECHT,
Agent:

I became an agent at ICM in 1980. My client list as an agent included people like Jim Carrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, Dana Carvey, Paul Rodriguez, Sandra Bernhard, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Joe Piscopo, and other people. I actually ended up putting a lot of people on that very ill fated Jean Doumanian one-year tenure.

One of my assignments at ICM was, once we knew the people were all leaving and Lorne was leaving and they were going to recast the show, to be the liaison between ICM and
Saturday Night Live
, so that was a very big opportunity for me. You’d go to the clubs and the network executives would come in and sit in the back. Jean would come in and you’d realize that something could happen that night that would change not only your client’s life but your life as an agent or manager. The fact that there were new opportunities for
Saturday Night Live
, that they were going to recast this quickly legendary show, made for very exciting times.

BARRY BLAUSTEIN,
Writer:

When I got there the first day and I was taking off my jacket, a writer from the office next door came in and said, “I want you to sign a petition to get rid of Jean Doumanian.” It was total turmoil already.

I think one of the reasons David Sheffield and I survived that year is we stayed away from the turmoil as much as possible. We just concentrated on the writing and not the politics. Everyone was bitching and no one was writing.

Dave had worked in local television in Mississippi; I had worked on
The Mike Douglas Show
in L.A. We were hired separately. We met on the show. We were the last writers hired that year, as a matter of fact, and I think we both realized what a tremendous break and opportunity this was for us. We were surrounded by people going, “I don’t need this job! I don’t need this job! To hell with this!” And I was thinking, “I
do
need this job. This is the big break. This is the big opportunity.”

JEAN DOUMANIAN:

I made Barry and David write together. Barry’s Jewish humor was wonderful, and David’s southern humor was great as well, but very different. And they were both very smart guys. I thought between the two of them, they’d come up with something that was really original. I think they’re still together on things. I was also very lucky to have Pam Norris as one of my writers. She was a terrific writer, and quite an individual.

PAM NORRIS:

I had been at the
Harvard Lampoon
, and this was before the
Harvard Lampoon
was a rocket — when the people working there were goofing off, basically, when you were supposed to be doing something else and instead you were goofing off with the
Harvard Lampoon
. But there was a writer on the original show, Jim Downey, who had seen some of my stuff in the
Harvard Lampoon
. And he encouraged me to think about going to the show, and he put in a good word for me with Jean Doumanian.

I was working on Wall Street that summer and had not finished Harvard. So I wrote a few sketches and sent them over there, got interviewed, and got the job. I finally finished college during the writers strike of 1981, when I went back to Harvard. Actually, my diploma was mailed to me. I didn’t get my Harvard diploma handed to me in Harvard Yard; it was handed to me by a production assistant at
Saturday Night Live
, with very little ceremony.

DAVID SHEFFIELD:

I have mixed feelings about Jean. She gave me my first big break at the networks, and for that I’m eternally grateful, and she had an eye for talent — like finding Joe Piscopo. Her background was in talent, because she was the talent booker for the show, so you could see the network’s logic. They were losing Lorne and they wanted to maintain continuity.

But Jean knew zilch about comedy. She didn’t have a clue. It was almost a lesson in how not to run a comedy show. She had a knack for pitting people against each other that was just antithetical to comedy. I don’t know why she thought that was a good way to work. She actually started rivalries where none existed before among the writers and cast, thinking somehow the strongest would prevail. That was
not
a formula for comedy.