Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (3 page)

People always point to those first years as the show’s best, but in fact the years that followed have maintained a standard as high as that of any long-running television show, whether Ed Sullivan’s or
The Simpsons
. MGM once boasted of “more stars than there are in the heavens,” and
Saturday Night Live
could make the same claim for its current stock company and all those illustrious graduates. Too many of them, alas, really are in heaven now.

With this book, we aspire to come close to doing them justice and celebrating the gifts they lavishly shared with the world. Most of them would balk at being sentimentalized or romanticized, but we have no problem with that, no problem at all. They reinvented the wheel and made it funny, and as Art Carney once said, “Make people laugh and they will love you forever.” Now, live, from New York — it’s
Saturday Night.

1

Exordium: 1975–1976

Like all show business successes
, Saturday Night Live
had many fathers. Several mothers too. There is still, so many years after the birth, disagreement over who the real father is. The show had a gestation period of more than a year, during which the concept took various forms, none identical to that of the show we know today. Adjustments and refinements continued after the premiere. Whatever the evolutionary variations in structure and format, however
, Saturday Night Live
was from the beginning a lone pioneer staking out virgin territory and finding its way in the night, its creative team determined to make it television’s antidote to television, to all the bad things — corrupt, artificial, plastic, facile — that TV entertainment had become.

CBS still ruled the ratings in the mid-1970s, but executives at RCA, which owned NBC, had high hopes for the network’s aggressive and competitive new president, Herbert Schlosser, a onetime Wall Street lawyer who took over in 1974. He was anxious to make his mark on television history. And he would.

ROSIE SHUSTER,
Writer:

Lorne Michaels arrived in my life before puberty, let’s put it that way. I swear to God. There was not a pubic hair in sight when he arrived on my doorstep. We were living in Toronto in the same neighborhood. I was with my girlfriend. We were jumping on boards, just letting go — we were just wild prepubescent kids, and Lorne observed me from the sidelines. And I guess he was struck by my mojo, or whatever, and he basically started following me around. We were inseparable after that.

HOWARD SHORE,
Music Director:

As kids, Lorne and I went to a coed summer camp in Canada. And that was really the beginning of our friendship. I was thirteen and Lorne must have been about fifteen. Rosie Shuster was there, too. We did shows you do at summer camp, like
Guys and Dolls, The Fantasticks
, things like that. And on Saturday nights, we did “The Fast Show,” a show Lorne and I put together quickly — hence the title. We did comedy, we did sketches, we had kind of a repertory company and some musicians. If you think about it, it was truly the beginning of
Saturday Night Live
, because it was a show we put on every Saturday night, and it was a live show, and it was somewhat improvisational, with comedy and music. We always had a bunch of people around us who were writers and actors even at that age. And that kind of progressed from summer camp to other things that Lorne and I wrote together.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

My dad really mentored Lorne in terms of comedy. Lorne had a partner and did radio shows just like my dad had done, and then did CBC specials just like my dad had done. I saw the whole thing unfold, and felt like
Saturday Night Live
was so much a part of something that grew from my home. Something about the show came from inside my family.

Lorne visited my dad inside his little showbiz pup tent where he shared his wild enthusiasms. Lorne was a very avid, eager sponge for all of it; he heard all of the names of everybody backstage at the
Ed Sullivan Show
, and all the ins and outs of the movies. My dad grew up watching the Marx Brothers and Chaplin. He was just spellbound by all of that, and he shared that love with me and with Lorne.

ORNE MICHAELS,
Executive Producer:

I grew up in Canada, where we had all three American networks and later a Canadian network. So I was watching CBS and ABC when I was eight or nine, and grew up on the same television that everybody else grew up with. I saw the same kind of movies, but my grandparents owned a movie house and my mother worked in it and my uncle had been a projectionist — the Playhouse on College Street. My mother, who died in 2001, could still play music from the silent movies, from the sheet music the movie companies sent around. My maternal grandmother, who was an enormous influence on me, and my aunts and uncles and my mother of course, all talked about movies and show business in whatever form, and books. That was all a part of my growing up. I don’t think I ever thought that’s what I’d be doing with my life, although when I was at my peak seriousness, at twenty-two or twenty-three, I thought I’d be a movie director.

In 1972 I had presented this pilot to the CBC. They said they were thinking about it, but the head of the CBC — whose name I am clearly blocking — said to me one afternoon when I was talking passionately about why this show would be a breakthrough show, he said, “If you’re that funny, why are you here?” And I thought, “Oh my God, it’s that Canadian thing of ‘If you’re good, you go to America.’”

SANDY WERNICK,
Agent:

When I met Lorne, he was in Canada, producing and starring in
The Hart and Lorne Hour
with his partner, Hart Pomerantz. I remember when I met him that I didn’t think he was that good. The other guy was the funny one, you know, which is typical in our industry. But I remember being impressed with the meeting. I had never met anybody who had a gift of gab like Lorne. He would just mesmerize me with what he was talking about. If you talked about comedy, all of a sudden he would just light up and turn on. I remember introducing him to Bernie because I knew that would be a marriage.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN,
Manager:

I met him when he was working on
Laugh-In
with his partner, who wound up going back to Canada. We were doing the Burns and Schreiber summer show with Jack Burns and Avery Schreiber, and there was a spot for a writer. Sandy Wernick from ICM told me Lorne was available. I said to bring him in to fill the last slot. And I fell in love with him. He wanted to know about old show business, and he had done a short film,
The Hockey Puck Crisis
, which was great: Hockey pucks grew on trees, and there was a blizzard that destroyed the crop, so they couldn’t play hockey in Canada that year. Being a hockey fan and a comedy fan, I thought it was hysterical.

LORNE MICHAELS:

Bernie’s a larger-than-life character. He was also an antidote, because I was deadly serious about everything I was doing in those days. Bernie had the gambler’s love of the sheer larceny of it, whether it was
Hee Haw
or whatever, it didn’t seem to matter. He knew the good stuff from the bad stuff, but it didn’t stop him from dealing with either — whereas I thought if I was involved with anything bad, it would destroy my life.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

I had done television shows with Lorne in Toronto and in Los Angeles. On one of Lily Tomlin’s specials we did “Arresting Fat People in Beverly Hills” together. Bernie Brillstein played one of the fat people. Vertical stripes, you know, only vertical stripes. It got nominated for an Emmy.

LILY TOMLIN,
Host:

Lorne was used to being a star back in Canada. We were quite close at that time. When Lorne worked with me on my specials, he would spend too much time editing and be too fanatical about everything. Jane Wagner would say, “You’re going too far and you’re spending too much money and the show needs to be rougher.” Lorne and I would get into the editing room and get too perfectionistic, you know. I must say I think some illegal substances had something to do with it.

ROBERT KLEIN,
Host:

I remember before there was any
Saturday Night Live
, an actually humble Lorne Michaels used to come to the office of my manager, Jack Rollins. Lorne was a kid from Canada married to Rosie Shuster, who was the daughter of Frank Shuster of Wayne and Shuster, the duo that used to be extremely unfunny on the Sullivan show years ago. Lorne was looking for some work, and Jack was very helpful to him.

TOM SCHILLER,
Writer:

My father, Bob Schiller, was working on this show called
The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show
in 1968, and he said there was a junior writer on the show that he’d love me to meet. And I said, “Why?” And he said, “Well, he knows all of the best restaurants in L.A.”

So one day Lorne comes over wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He seemed like a nice enough guy — a little nebbish, you know. What struck me though was that after my dad introduced me, Lorne lit up a joint right there in the house. I was scared — but I was impressed too, that he had the boldness to do that. We sort of became friends and I started hanging out with him at the Chateau Marmont.

DICK EBERSOL,
NBC Executive:

In the spring of 1974, I was approached by NBC to come over there and essentially run their sports department. At that time, I was Roone Arledge’s assistant at ABC. I said no. I think they were like in shock; how could somebody who was twenty-seven turn that down? But I felt they didn’t take sports seriously, that they wouldn’t put real resources into it, and besides, I didn’t want to compete against the best person who’d ever done it before or since: Roone.

My saying no apparently impressed Herbert Schlosser, the president of NBC. So, lo and behold, in the summer of 1974, Schlosser invited me to his place on Fire Island — along with Marvin Antonowsky, one of his programming executives — and essentially laid out the whole thing: how Johnny Carson had given them fair warning that he did not want weekend repeats of
The Tonight Show
to exist after the summer of 1975. They had begun to order up some specials. One had Burt Reynolds sort of hosting. It was talky and had some comedy bits. Herb said he was very much interested in finding some regular stuff for that time period. I was intrigued, even though I had no background whatsoever in late night. I’d been a sports kid since I dropped out of Yale to work for Roone in 1967.

I told Roone I was leaving the same morning Nixon resigned. I had a whole deal to come over to NBC as head of weekend late-night programming. I had one year to come up with a show to go into that time period, and if the show was creatively sound, I had Herb’s word it would get at least six months on the air.

I thought I’d negotiated every possible thing to protect myself, but I had neglected to ask for a secretary. So when I arrived at NBC, the biggest bureaucracy of the western world, I didn’t get a secretary for three months. I was answering my own phones and my office was a mess.

HERBERT SCHLOSSER,
NBC President:

I had played a role in hiring Ebersol. I can remember when I interviewed him, it was out on Fire Island on a weekend, and he was wearing a pair of pants where one leg was one color and the other leg was another color. Which I guess is what you wore in Connecticut.

Johnny Carson was the biggest star NBC had, unchallengeable in his time period. It wasn’t like Leno and Letterman fighting each other now. Johnny was very, very important to the network, and we were getting emanations that he was not pleased about the weekend repeats of his show. They’d been on for ten years, and we ourselves weren’t that thrilled, but it had been an easy thing for us to do — just put ’em on.

So I thought we should try something new.

FRED SILVERMAN,
NBC President:

When Herb looks back on his days at NBC, he’s the only guy that had worse days than I did. He really doesn’t have much of a positive nature to look back at. So I can see where he would remember the beginnings of the show so well.
Saturday Night Live
was a big deal for him. It was Herb’s biggest endeavor.

GRANT A. TINKER,
Former NBC Chairman:

I think Herb Schlosser gets credit for letting
Saturday Night Live
happen, or even causing it to happen for all I know, and I think that’s particularly important because Herb is such a tight-ass guy. And the fact that it started on his watch says a lot.

I’m not sure if it would have started on mine.

I give Herb credit because he’s the one who would take the heat when there was heat from the RCA directors or whatever. Those were very straight guys, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, on the fifty-third floor where RCA had its offices. There wasn’t a laugh in a carload up there.

DICK EBERSOL:

I spent September and October of 1974 roaming the West Coast, Canada, Chicago, and New York, looking for comics and comedy producers. I came to the conclusion rather quickly that the only way this show would work would be if the young embraced it — if it was a show for a younger audience. Johnny was the most brilliant person in the world but his show wasn’t for teenagers.

One piece of talent I thought would give us credibility was Richard Pryor. We had these meetings with Richard, and they went fairly well. He finally agreed to a deal. After that, Lily Tomlin agreed to fall in. So did George Carlin. Someone was trying to sell me Steve Martin and Linda Ronstadt as a twosome.

While all this was going on, Sandy Wernick at ICM, who had Lorne as a client, set up a meeting for us in L.A. I didn’t know Lorne but discovered he had substantial credits in specials and that he’d been involved in
Laugh-In
. Lorne pitched an idea based on Kentucky Fried Theater. I decided right away that it wasn’t for me. I just didn’t really dig it. But Lorne and I hit it off. Meantime, I’m buying up a lot of talent.

Just after Christmas of 1974 I get a phone call from a manager-lawyer in Atlanta, now dead, who says that he represents Richard Pryor and has convinced Richard that television is a disaster and whatever career he has, he’ll never be able to do what he does well on over-the-air television. He could not be himself. So the deal was off. I came back right after the first of January and told Schlosser that Pryor was out. Some day subsequent to that he wrote me a memo and said, “Why don’t you bring the show back to New York and even think about doing it in old Studio 8H?” So that part was his idea: “Use 8H.”