Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (30 page)

JOE PISCOPO:

I didn’t want the job as a cast member on the show. And I told my agent at the time, Chris Albrecht, who is now an HBO executive, “I can’t do the show, man.” I’d be taking a pay cut, because I was making more money doing commercials — just being the working stiff — and I said, “I don’t want to do this.” But he said, “You’ve got to do it, it’s
Saturday Night Live.
”

HARRY SHEARER,
Cast Member:

I went to Jean and said, “I know you’re not a fan of Lorne’s, and you know that I’m not a fan of Lorne’s, so you’re not going to have a loyalist sitting around saying, ‘Lorne wouldn’t have done it this way.’” I told her, “I’m willing to come work on your show. I think you really need to get some people around us, if you want me to come, who’ve got some experience, because you’re not going to have the slack that Lorne had at the beginning. You’re going to have to hit the ground running.” I suggested Christopher Guest and a couple others as people who should come in, and she said, “I’m not really sure I want people who know what they’re doing.” At that point, I knew I wasn’t coming back.

GILBERT GOTTFRIED:

If they just did reviews of the show and said it sucked, they would have been right. But the articles were like a whole other thing. It became like, even though the writers going in were considered terrible writers because she hired them, the minute she’d fire them, all of a sudden they became great writers. There was even an article in
People
magazine about three writers as if, because they were fired, that made them great, and they talk about how terrible she was. It was a weird period.

JEAN DOUMANIAN:

Even the censors became very, very tough on me. I couldn’t say something like “rolling off a log.” They thought there was an innuendo there. Then you think about what we got away with from ’75 to ’80. I mean, we were saying things like “golden shower” and they didn’t do anything about it. But the censors really became so tough on us, it was incredible.

DON NOVELLO:

I think Jean took some heat that wasn’t deserved. She took the hit for some bad ratings, but there were times that Ebersol got just as bad ratings. They chose her because she had “producer” in her title in the past, but she was more of a casting person. She found some good people that did well after her — Eddie Murphy, Joe Piscopo, a lot of them stayed on that she found. I never did a show when she was the producer, but I always liked her. She was a very nice woman.

PAM NORRIS:

I think a lot of people were there saying, “Why couldn’t I have been on the
good
show?” And it’s like, why don’t you make a good show yourself? One person has a tremendous amount of power at that show. At least they did when I was there. One person can write a great sketch. One person can write two great sketches. One person can write three great sketches. I mean, if you can sit down and write, you know, seventy minutes of pretty good material, you could have the whole show. So I just felt that when writers complained about things, they could have been writing something.

I think in a weird way it’s a privilege to stand on your own feet and not coast on somebody else’s reputation. The people who were working there had every chance to shine if they did something that was even a little bit good. It stood out like a quasar.

GILBERT GOTTFRIED:

Basically on that show they hire you as a performer and expect you to be an unpaid writer. They didn’t use me that much. I think the low point of what the writers thought of me was in one sketch. It was a funeral scene, and they used me as the corpse.

BARRY BLAUSTEIN:

Some people say Woody Allen was kind of a hidden producer of the show that year, because he was a friend of Jean’s and he supposedly had an adviser role. But we never saw him.

JEAN DOUMANIAN:

Woody Allen was not involved in the show in any way. I say that unequivocally. You can put that to rest. He was not involved at all, aside from the fact that he was a friend.

PAM NORRIS:

I lived in those offices for a long time. They had a great shower. And they had a color TV and food and soda, and I found myself staying later and later every night, and finally I just said, “Oh, what the hell,” and I moved in. I don’t think anybody knew that I was living there. What made it really great is that they had this bank of metal file cabinets — down next to where the secretaries typed the scripts — that had every sketch that had ever been written for the show filed away in them. And this is every sketch ever
written
, not just every sketch ever aired. So I had the access to what seemed like the Rosetta stone to me — every sketch written and rejected for the first show, every sketch written and rejected for the second show. It was all this very seminal material by the people who became, you know, gods and goddesses. And that was an amazing experience.

JEAN DOUMANIAN:

My numbers weren’t bad at all, considering it was a new show with a whole new cast. Some of them, I think, were higher than the last of Lorne’s, because the last year of Lorne’s regime was not as good as one would expect. They were all thinking about what the future was going to be.

BARRY BLAUSTEIN:

One executive from the network called me and Dave into his office and said, “I want to show you something.” And he shows us this footage of a boa constrictor eating a mouse. And he says, “This is exactly what we should be doing on the show.” It was such a bizarre meeting.

JEAN DOUMANIAN:

I was so busy doing my job that I never saw any writing on the wall. I thought the shows were getting better. We were all working so hard. I was really not aware of anything going on behind the scenes. That’s how unaware I was. I was putting in eighteen hours a day, easy. I knew I could do it.

JOE PISCOPO:

I could never describe to you in words how painful those first ten months really were. You just knew that this was America’s favorite television show, and yet here we were, taking it right into the toilet.

Saturday night, after the show, it was pretty much like a funeral, like you were mourning. Oh my God, oh my God, did we really do this, oh my God — and then we had to turn it around on Monday all over again.

Hopeless as the situation seemed, Doumanian actually had a tremendous secret weapon in her arsenal — so secret that, sadly for her, even she didn’t realize it. This was a young, brash cast member who spent most of the season in small bit parts, except in the seventeenth-floor offices, where he kept coworkers continuously entertained. He was not a “great white hope.”
Au contraire
. Definitely great, however. His day would come, but not in time to save the very doomed Doumanian.

NEIL LEVY,
Talent Coordinator:

Jean had cast an actor named Robert Townsend to be “the black guy” on the show. And then this guy Eddie Murphy started calling me — it sounded like from a pay phone — and I told him, “I’m sorry, we’re not auditioning anymore.” But he called again the next day, and he would go into this whole thing about how he had eighteen brothers and sisters and they were counting on him to get this job. And he would call every day for about a week. And I finally decided I would use him as an extra.

So I brought him in for an audition, and he did a four-minute piece of him acting out three characters up in Harlem — one guy was instigating the others to fight — and it was absolutely brilliant. The timing, the characterizations — talent was just shooting out of him. And I went, “Wow,” and I took him in to Jean and I said, “Jean, you’ve got to see this.” He did his audition for Jean, and she sent him out of the room and she said to me, “Well, he’s good, but I like Robert Townsend better.” And I went nuts, you know. I threatened to quit. At that point there were so many mistakes, I was actually heartbroken, because I’d been on the original show, and it went beyond mistakes for me. It was like there was a spirit that I knew that existed in that show and she had no idea what that was, and she was missing it. She would choose Robert Townsend over Eddie Murphy — not that Robert Townsend isn’t great, a good actor, but the difference in terms of what was right for that show was so obvious, and compounded with all the other crap that was going on, I couldn’t take it.

So she hired Eddie as a featured player just to spite me. He was the only featured player that year. He should’ve been a regular. She hired him only because I pressured her, and then to spite me she wouldn’t make him a regular. She only wanted to hire one black actor and Townsend hadn’t signed his contract yet, so she signed Eddie.

The point of it is that she didn’t want him, and she’s been claiming that she discovered him for years. Now Ebersol I heard is claiming he discovered him, and Ebersol wasn’t even on the show when Eddie came. But Ebersol used to take credit for all the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, so that doesn’t surprise me.

JAMES DOWNEY,
Writer:

When I first met Eddie Murphy, I was up there visiting Jean — I’d recommended a couple of writers to her — and Eddie was hanging around. He’d been hired as a featured player, but he would just go around to everyone’s office and make everybody laugh. He made me laugh the first day I met him. And he was just so clearly the funniest person on the floor. I remember saying to Jean Doumanian, “You’ve got to use this kid Eddie Murphy, you’ve
got
to put him on.” And I remember her going, “He’s not ready.”

JEAN DOUMANIAN:

I didn’t have enough of a budget to put Eddie on as a member of the cast, because I had already selected the cast when I auditioned him. So I let him be a featured player. They said okay. After the first two shows, I said to the administration, “Listen, you have to make this guy a member of the cast, you just have to, he’s so great.” He was eighteen when I found him. They finally said okay. And then I found out from Eddie that a network vice president was trying to tell him to leave the show and that he’d get him a sitcom on NBC. But Eddie wouldn’t do it.

NEIL LEVY:

One night Jean was five minutes short in the show. She had nothing, whereas Lorne always had something in the bag, a short film, something so you go over instead of under. If you’re under you’re left with nothing, and she had nothing. This is fifteen minutes before the end of the show when Audrey Dickman, who was timing it, realized it was going to run short. Dave Wilson was sitting there saying, “What are we going to do, Jean?” And she was pacing and she didn’t know what to do. And I remembered Eddie’s monologue from his audition like three months earlier. So I said, “Why don’t you see if Eddie can do the monologue that he did for his audition?” And she said, “Oh no, that won’t work.” And then about a minute later, she said, “Why don’t we get Eddie and he’ll do the audition piece?” And they laughed in the booth, and I said, “Yeah, okay, great.”

And I ran up and I found Eddie and I asked him. And his face lit up like he’d been waiting for this moment his whole life, and he said, “Yeah!” So we rushed him downstairs and he did that piece. And in another week or two, I think, he was made a regular.

Doumanian’s fate was sealed on a night in late February 1981. Charlie Rocket was playing the victim of a shooting in a show-length spoof of the then-popular prime-time soap opera
Dallas
and its famous “Who shot J.R.?” cliffhanger. Mere minutes before the oneA.M. closing time, Rocket, in a wheelchair ostensibly because of injuries suffered in the assassination attempt, complained about having been shot and said — for all those watching at home and in the studio to hear — “I’d like to know who the fuck did it.”

FRED SILVERMAN,
NBC President:

Doumanian got out of control. I think the thing that really did it was that there was a kid on the show by the name of Charlie Rocket, and one night he did the unpardonable: He said the fuck-word on live television, and it went out to the whole network. And that was it. I said, “Who needs this aggravation?” I think we’d made the decision even before then that we had to get rid of her. This woman was a train wreck, and the shows were just not watchable.

GILBERT GOTTFRIED:

I was sitting in the offices talking to Eddie one day, when all of a sudden some woman comes in and says, “Eddie, somebody from NBC wants to speak to you.” And he gets on the phone and he goes, “Yes, yeah, okay, no. No, I won’t tell anybody.” And he hangs up. Before the phone even hits the cradle, he tells me, “Jean Doumanian’s been fired.”

The next day or so, Jean Doumanian was going to make this announcement to the cast and crew that she’d been fired, but by then everyone knew it. And it was weird, because they had this improv teacher named Del Close hired there for some reason, and so she calls everyone into her office, and everyone’s sitting there, and she’s tearfully telling everyone that she’s been fired and everything but that she wishes everyone the best and whatnot. And, in the midst of all this, all of a sudden they walk in with a cake, singing “Happy Birthday,” and it’s put in front of this Del Close guy. It was a very surreal situation.

DAVID SHEFFIELD:

It was clearly coming and she knew it.

JEAN DOUMANIAN:

I was down in Irwin Segelstein’s office for maybe four hours, trying to convince him to please give us more money for the show, but I also found out that some of the people on my show, that I’d hired and helped, were going downstairs and talking to the brass behind my back. I don’t know this for a fact, but I was told. They were really sabotaging the show and me.