Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (31 page)

He had sent me some wine when I got the job, as a congratulatory thing. But before I told anybody anything, I broke open about five bottles of wine and I said, “Everybody, come on in. I have something to tell you, and don’t be upset about it, because I’m not upset about it. I just want to tell you you’ve done a wonderful job. I think you’re all terrific. I want you all to go on and try to make the best of it, but they told me that I’ve served my purpose and that’s it for me.” And that was it. In retrospect, I think really they put me in there on purpose, because after a very successful show, the second guy usually fails and then the third guy comes in, takes over, and succeeds.

PAM NORRIS:

I’ve sort of learned, in the subsequent twenty years I’ve been in show business, that people just aren’t that clever, and sometimes things that look like clever schemes are just people stumbling over their own feet.

JEAN DOUMANIAN:

I must say, my friends were very happy that that part of my life had ended. Because they thought I was working so hard and I was so determined that they were concerned about my health. But I was really disappointed. I thought Brandon and the network were going to stick behind me, and they didn’t at all. If you read the newspapers, they didn’t support me at all. So that’s when I kind of discovered that I had been used. I don’t consider that show a failure for myself. I consider it truly an accomplishment.

GILBERT GOTTFRIED:

After I was fired from the show, I kind of was like walking around with this feeling that everybody was looking at me going, “Oh, that’s the guy who was on a bad season on
Saturday Night.
” The funny thing is, after time passes, people come up to you and go, “I really liked you in that sketch with John Belushi.” Or, “I liked you in that sketch you used to do with Gilda Radner and Molly Shannon.” It gets all mixed up together. I didn’t feel like I was a big star when I was on the show, and I didn’t feel like I was a nobody without it. But I walk around with that stigma. I hated it for the longest time when someone would recognize me from
Saturday Night.

CHRIS ALBRECHT:

In retrospect, what Jean did was just take the hit that was going to come to anybody who was going to try to recast that show with new stars. I liked Jean. I really did. She was very direct. She had bad press and not a lot of support from the network. I’m not so sure it’s not tough being a woman in that job.

Network chief Brandon Tartikoff felt an emotional attachment to the show and desperately wanted to keep it on the air, even when other network executives advocated cutting the umbilical and letting it float off into space. In his desperation, Tartikoff turned to old pal and fellow Yalie Dick Ebersol, a man who had never produced a comedy show or professionally written a sketch in his life and who, in fact, had not so long ago been fired from an NBC executive post by Tartikoff’s bellicose boss, Fred Silverman. But Brandon’s friend had also been present at, and instrumental in, the creation of
Saturday Night Live.
The embalming process was halted and shock therapy began.

Michaels and Ebersol had little in common when it came to style and personality, but they did have this: Each thought the other wanted too much credit for the creation of
Saturday Night Live.
It took both of them working together at the very outset to bring
Saturday Night Live
to life, but once it premiered, Michaels would have preferred Ebersol to have disappeared.

When Ebersol was asked to rescue the show after the Doumanian cliffhanger, he wisely sought Michaels’s approval and blessing before taking over. That meant that creative people loyal to Michaels wouldn’t feel they were committing heresy or poking him in the eye if they went to work on the Ebersol version — a problem that had reputedly helped sink Doumanian.

Though Michaels and Ebersol weren’t close, they were both close to Tartikoff, who felt the show represented more to the network than a profit center; it was a badge of honor too, and Tartikoff was one network executive who cared about prestige in addition to profits. For Ebersol, the situation was rife with irony. After helping create the show in 1974 and then being sentenced to a certain anonymity for his efforts, he would be called back to keep the show going by his old nemesis Fred Silverman, the guy who fired him. And Tartikoff, the longtime friend who did the actual recruitment of Ebersol, had become head of programming when Ebersol was passed over for the job.

What Ebersol lacked in imagination, he made up for in iron-willed determination. Swinging a baseball bat or just lugging it around like some swollen scepter, Ebersol pitched a ferocious battle to make
Saturday Night Live
a hit again. He would save the show, whatever it took.

DICK EBERSOL,
NBC Executive:

I remember Jean’s last show. It was just beset with problems. It was the night that Charlie Rocket said “fuck” on the air. And I stayed up with Brandon quite late, and he asked me again, “Would you consider fixing it?” I said I would come as long as I could hide inside 30 Rock, watching on the internal system how the show works, the camera blocking, watch to see if the talent is mature enough to save a piece, because I could think of a million pieces from the earliest days of the show which absolutely sucked on Wednesday and had at least an 80 percent life by the time they went on the air. The talent was that good, and some of the writers were good enough to fix it.

And I said, “Number one, only if it goes off the air. This is not something you can fix in a week. And number two, I get to pick what airs all the weeks it’s off the air.” I wanted to put on four or five of the greatest shows from the first five years, just to get people back in the sense of “this show was
about
something.” Actually, I think I said to take it off for two months.

So this meeting was set up in Fred Silverman’s apartment on a Sunday afternoon. And Fred is so uncomfortable to have me there, because there is no love lost between the two of us and I just did not respect him. So they go through this whole thing about will I do it, and I said, “Yeah, under certain circumstances.” And we argued and debated, and finally it became five weeks that the show would be off the air. I didn’t want a lot of money; I just wanted a guarantee that I would get series commitments for every year that we managed to keep the show alive, and this would be stuff I would develop myself. That’s how
Friday Night Videos
and the Bob Costas talk show
Later
came to be. And finally, I said, there was one last condition: “We don’t have a deal until I have a conversation with Lorne. I’m not doing this show unless Lorne wants it to survive.” And Fred felt like he had really been set up. He wasn’t happy, but he grudgingly said, “All right. But I want to know where this is tomorrow.”

I called Lorne and we went to dinner and wound up over at his apartment, and we sat there basically all night talking. And I honestly believe it’s one of the five or six most important nights in the history of the show, because I’d hired Lorne when we were first sitting in L.A. putting it all together back in the spring of ’75. I said, “Lorne, I’m willing to do this only if you’ll bless it.” He just had to put the word out. Anyway, around five or six in the morning he finally said, “I do want to see it go on. I won’t go back, but I will completely support it.”

And that word was out by the time Lorne woke up the next afternoon.

LORNE MICHAELS:

Michael O’Donoghue’s manager, a guy named Barry Secunda, explained to me the simple fact that Michael had no money. And Michael was very proud, but he really needed a job. Barry wanted to know if I would speak to Ebersol on his behalf, which I did. Of course, the very first thing Michael did was to meet with everyone and say, “We have to obliterate Lorne Michaels, we have to pour gasoline on him and set him afire.” And then he burned some picture of me. Pretty soon after, he was fired.

I love Michael. And I would have expected no less. It wasn’t as if I helped him thinking I’d get the thanks of a grateful nation. After all, it was Michael. Of the three of us — the senior three males in the first months of the show — Chevy went on to fame and stardom, I got what I got, and Michael wanted more performance time. The rewards for him weren’t as great as he felt he deserved.

DICK EBERSOL:

Lorne told me I should hire Michael. He persuaded me it would be a good idea. O’Donoghue thought the show was shit and he thought the people involved were shit. He wanted to give it a “Viking funeral.” He was going to be, quote, “in charge of the writing staff.”

Since Ebersol was determined that the show regain its lost luster as well as its lost ratings, it may seem odd for him to have installed O’Donoghue as head writer, especially since O’Donoghue was so fond of proclaiming
Saturday Night Live
dead. But what made him attractive to Ebersol is that he represented a link to Lorne Michaels and his era, and Ebersol was anxious to establish such links. Few were available, but O’Donoghue had been a very conspicuous and productive presence during those first five years. Ebersol wanted to be a member of that club, and O’Donoghue seemed one way — however risky — to gain acceptance. It would be a recurring theme of Ebersol’s stewardship.

NEIL LEVY:

Dick wanted to be Lorne, basically. The first words out of Dick’s mouth to the writers was, he broke them into two teams at the first meeting and said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. I have two ideas and we’re going to make short films. And half of you are going to do this one idea and the other half are going to do this idea about a bag lady.” I forget what the first idea was. And the writers kind of scratched their heads — a bag lady? What’s funny about that? But Dick said to go and do it.

So the team of writers for the bag lady did whatever their short film was and it was shot and Denny Dillon was in it and it came back and it was a disaster, totally unusable. And O’Donoghue was sitting there smoking one of those long brown cigarettes with his hat and sunglasses on and he said, “Well, it’s all there on the screen.” Something like that. It was a huge embarrassment to Dick, because it was the first thing he had asked for and it was his idea and it was horrible. So he says to Michael, “Is there anything we can do to make it work?” O’Donoghue says, “If you took out all the sound and used outtakes of Denny as the bag lady sitting there on a bench, maybe we could put some funny voice-overs or something — but I don’t think so.” And Ebersol jumped on it and he said, “Great, that’s great,” and he looked at me and he said, “Neil, get the writers together and tell them we want lines for passersby to say about a bag lady.” I didn’t realize I’d just been handed the bag. I went and told all the writers and came back and reported to Dick they were all working on it.

So now they’ve finished their lines and Dick sends me to collect them. I show them to him, he crosses a few off, he says, “Great. Now get the actors and get it done.” All right. So I told the actors what we had to do. Basically I didn’t want to do this, I was just following instructions on what Dick wanted. I didn’t realize I was suddenly producing this piece.

The night of Dick’s first show, Lorne comes. And it was like God visiting. You know, “Make way! Make way! He’s in the building!” Dick even let Lorne sit at his own desk on the ninth floor. And I come in and Dick looks at me and says, “Oh Lorne, your cousin made this great bag lady film.” And I was about to say something and he told me to leave the room. He said, “I need this list for tomorrow and I need this and that,” and I said, “But Lorne —” and Dick said, “Just go.” And of course the bag lady was just a total embarrassment. I don’t know why he even bothered showing it. It made it as far as dress rehearsal. That nearly killed me. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Lorne about it, actually. I don’t think I ever mentioned it to him — that I was set up and had nothing to do with it.

CHRIS ALBRECHT:

Dick can be very much a prick. But I think it comes from being a network guy who’s used to saying no. I always felt he was much more like a network executive running the show than he was an actual creative producer running the show. There was much less play in Dick. Jean was really excited about producing the show. I think she had a great passion for what she was doing. And I think Dick came in very much “there’s a job that has to be done and I need to be tough about it.” Dick was less interested in how adventurous the material was.

BOB TISCHLER,
Writer:

I was actually a record producer, had worked with the Blues Brothers and had worked with a lot of the people from
Saturday Night Live
on the
National Lampoon Radio Hour
, which I had produced. That’s how Michael O’Donoghue knew me. He said, “Come on to
Saturday Night Live.
” I said, “Well, you know, I kind of have this other career going.” And he said, “It’ll be fun, and by the way, the show is just going to go down anyway, so don’t worry about having to be stuck on the show.” And he actually described it as a “death ship.”

TIM KAZURINSKY,
Cast Member:

John Belushi pretty much got me hired and recommended me for
Saturday Night Live.
The evening that Dick Ebersol came to Chicago and hired me, I assumed I was being hired as a writer. I’d never thought of myself as an actor. And then, as he was wrapping up, he said, “You have your AFTRA card, right?” And I said, “Why do I need an AFTRA card if I’m going to write?” He said, “No, no, you’re going to be in the cast.” I said, “You want me to
act?!?
” He said, “Yeah, I didn’t even know you wrote.” I was completely stunned. I was driving home in my Volkswagen going, “That’s weird,” because I’d never really thought of myself as an actor.