Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (32 page)

JOE PISCOPO:

They kept Eddie and me, and fired everybody else. O’Donoghue said to me, “Piscopo, I’m not crazy about you, but that Sinatra thing is not bad.” And in essence he told me, “You’re going to have to prove yourself to me.”

Then he put us all in a room. O’Donoghue came in, spray-painted
DANGER
on the wall, and said, “This is what the show lacks.”

PAM NORRIS:

I remember the day Michael was writing
DANGER
on that wall. The spray can stopped working halfway through. And I was like on my back laughing, because he’d just written DAN on the wall and the spray can temporarily stopped working. I thought, “Oh my God, this guy’s going to go down in history writing DAN on the wall.” But he shook it a few times and it started up again.

NEIL LEVY:

Dick told me that if I could get Catherine O’Hara to come to New York, he would let me stay on. It was sleazy. But I thought, “Well, I can do it.” So I went and asked Catherine O’Hara. She wasn’t really interested. But I talked to her and she came down. Then she saw the flaming Viking ship going under and she went, “Uh-oh, gotta run.”

DICK EBERSOL:

Meantime, I’d hired Catherine O’Hara. It had taken a lot to lure her, because live was not her style. So in that very first meeting with Michael, when he was telling everybody the show is shit, and spraying all over the writers’ wall the word DANGER, it really scared Catherine O’Hara — scared her right off the show. She packed up her stuff and went home to Canada that night.

TIM KAZURINSKY:

O’Donoghue had this vision of taking the show down. He wanted to destroy the show. His motto was “Viking Death Ship. Let’s all go down in the Viking Death Ship.” I grew up in the slums, you know, starving, and I’m thinking, “Can’t we like keep it afloat just until I can buy a condo?” Yeah, he wrote DANGER on the wall. It was like carefully orchestrated. He was a drama queen. But I loved Michael. He was great.

He did bring on Terry Southern. Terry had been one of America’s great writers. But he was not a sketch-comedy writer. It’s absurd. I don’t know if he ever wrote anything that actually got on the air. But he ran a fine wet bar out of his office. It was a really odd time, because it seemed like that first year, half of them really worked at trying to have it go up in smoke. In retrospect, maybe O’Donoghue had the right idea.

ROSIE SHUSTER,
Writer:

I was having this big fight with Clotworthy about a sketch called “The Taboosters,” which is just a normal, regular family, and they have lots of rules and stuff, but no taboos. And I couldn’t win this argument. And then afterwards, when I showed the censor out of my office, I saw that Terry Southern, who was writing on the show at that time, had left a
Hustler
magazine sitting there with this big female pink genitalia flashing right in the censor’s face. I had no idea. That was Terry’s idea of being hilarious. It
was
pretty funny afterwards. I thought, “Oh my God, no wonder the censor was mad.”

BOB TISCHLER:

The day that Michael was going to do his DANGER thing, he actually asked me not to come into the room, because he knew he was putting on a show and was going to be very theatrical. He knew I wouldn’t have bought into it. It would have been very hard for me to sit through something like that. Michael lost a lot of people with that one. He was trying to shake everybody up, but there’s always a second agenda with Michael. I have to categorize it as his own combination of sadistic and masochistic tendencies. Michael loved to play those roles, and he loved to be the focus of everything.

There were certain periods where he would just break down and throw temper tantrums — breaking things, throwing things, screaming. And you just had to stay away from him. Michael really had something wrong with him, a chemical imbalance. He complained of migraine headaches all the time and would flip out occasionally.

He was most interested in shocking the audience. I don’t mind shocking the audience, but you have to make them laugh too, and entertain them. He was really just into the shock value, or doing something that was weird and boring.

PAM NORRIS:

After I left
Saturday Night Live
and came to Hollywood and went into the sitcom factory, I was really appalled at how joyless it was. As much as people said, “Oh boy,
Saturday Night Live
is a terrible place to work,” and, you know, chaos and sibling rivalry and dysfunctional family and everything, when I started working on sitcoms, they just seemed very flat — very vanilla, you might say.

When I was at
Designing Women
, the whole brouhaha with one of the actresses, Delta Burke, was going down. And it was about people’s behavior, and I was going, “
This
is what you call bad behavior? This doesn’t even count.” I mean, when you think about what was considered bad behavior at my previous job.

BOB TISCHLER:

I never called myself a writer before
Saturday Night Live.
I produced a lot of comedy and I did writing, but I wasn’t a member of the union or anything and didn’t go sit down and write. And when I came to
Saturday Night Live
, I was all of a sudden brought in as head writer, and what happened was we did one show and the writers strike happened. So at that point it was an opportunity to basically clean house of the Jean Doumanian people that we didn’t want and come back the next year with our own staff. There was an opportunity to upright the death ship and let it sail again. I’ve never been one to work on anything with the intent of it failing. But Michael would not give up on this death ship thing. So Michael and I kind of disagreed on that, and that’s where we started to lose our friendship.

At one point Michael had been an incredible genius, an incredible writer. At a certain point, the panache and the desire to be recognized and to get the accoutrements of
Saturday Night Live
became more important than his craft. It was very sad for me to see this happen.

JAMES DOWNEY:

Lorne at that time was anxious to get into movies in a big way, and he had a deal with Paramount. And different writers and teams of writers — like Tom Schiller wrote a movie — each had movie ideas. Lorne was pushing Franken and Davis and myself the most to do a movie. But we didn’t really have an idea. We had the deal before we had the idea, which is not a good way to do anything. So from like the summer of 1980 on and off for the next two years, we just in a desultory way wrote the screenplay, which once we finished it Paramount was then able to officially reject. Then, like the summer of ’82 — Letterman had just started up in March, and he had asked me to come in when he was first putting his NBC late-night show together. I knew that I probably wouldn’t be able to do it, at least in the very beginning, because of the movie thing, but I went in to meet him because I was a big fan of his morning show. And then in August we had finished up the movie, so I went to the Letterman show. Later I became head writer for about a year and a quarter.

The biggest difference between writing for
Letterman
and writing for
Saturday Night Live
— well, obviously it would be the sketches, per se. I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious, but I think that the principle in operation at
Saturday Night Live
seemed to be that — I didn’t feel this way myself — but the principle was that we wanted to be hip. And at
Letterman
, we wanted to be smart. And I liked that much better.

It’s not like I can identify even a single person at
SNL
who would say that being hip was what was most important to them. It was just that what made
Saturday Night Live
distinctive was not that it was so smart or brainy in that sense; it was more that, when it appeared, television had been kind of middle-aged and square for a long time. And
Saturday Night Live
set a tone of being cool. And certainly it was pretty clear that that was never a concern of the Letterman show. I mean, a tremendous amount of attention and thought and care has always gone into like the social aspects of
Saturday Night Live
— the parties and who was booked to host and, you know, style aspects — but never, never was there any of that stuff at
Letterman. Letterman
was never a social kind of show, you know. And there were certain kinds of things that we did at
Letterman
that even, factoring in the differences between the two shows, the audience at
Saturday Night Live
would not have been interested in or liked.

Saturday Night Live
was always, I thought, more about performance. Most of the successful pieces to some extent involved a performer getting to look good doing it. Whereas at
Letterman
we did all kinds of things which were basically just an idea that Dave was communicating to the audience. In those days, he wasn’t that interested in performing either. So it was a lot of conceptual stuff and wiseass stuff like running over things with a steamroller.

BRAD HALL,
Cast Member:

I came in the second year of Ebersol, and we were there until the end of Ebersol. When Ebersol first started, he hired a bunch of people from Chicago — Mary Gross, Tim Kazurinsky, those guys — who we knew peripherally because we were from Chicago. And when we had the show in Chicago that we were doing next door to Second City, we shared the bar with Second City. And when Ebersol and Tischler came out to do their usual pilfering from Second City to get actors, they went to Second City, they saw the show, and the owner of Second City, who was sick of losing people to
Saturday Night Live
, said, “Hey, go next door, because we have a big hit show going on next door.” And they came over and saw our show. And that night, right after the show, they said “You’re all hired. You’re all coming to
Saturday Night Live
.” It was very exciting. It was crazy.

Julia and I were really lucky that we’d been going out for a while before that. We had a really solid relationship, and we came to the show together.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS,
Cast Member:

Audition? No, we didn’t do an audition, that’s the thing. We were just hired off the show we did in Chicago. And then when we came to New York, Dick wanted us to do some of the material we’d done onstage. It’s a real quirky show that we did. It was funny, but it was not straight-down-the-middle improvisation comedy, and they made us perform a rather substantial section from the show. Dick set it up so that everybody sat on folding chairs, and the four of us performed sketches from our show for these jaded writers. It was just grotesque. It couldn’t have been a more hostile crowd. It was so painful, I can’t even believe I’m talking about it. There was no team spirit.

BRAD HALL:

It’s a funny place to work, that seventeenth floor. People act as if it’s so important, that it’s the only thing in the world. And the hours are ridiculous. But at the end of the day, how about just being funny? Those of us who didn’t get so much material had a lot of time to hang out with the band. I spent a lot of time with the
SNL
band and with the guest bands. And when I look back, I think less about comedy and more about music, to tell you the truth. We got the Clash, we got Squeeze, we had Joe Jackson.

GRANT A. TINKER,
Former NBC Chairman:

I never visited their offices on the seventeenth floor, never went up there once. I didn’t want to go up there and fight my way through all that marijuana smoke, which I’d been led to believe was quite thick. So I felt, why cause trouble?

JACK HANDEY,
Writer:

I went over to this house one time for a Halloween party, and Cheryl Hardwick was playing the piano and they had a Poe reading, and then Michael O’Donoghue announced that he was going to unveil this painting by a new young artist that he had discovered. And so we were all sucked into it. Like here’s the artist, supposedly, and he’s standing there and looking kind of embarrassed. And the name of the painting is
Desi Arnaz as a Young Man.
There were, I don’t know, thirty or forty people there. So the painting is up on the wall and Michael pulls off the cover and he goes, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you
Desi Arnaz as a Young Man.
” And there’s the painting, big oil painting, and sure enough, it is Desi Arnaz as a young man, seated on a chair facing you, but with female genitalia instead of male. And there was just an audible gasp from the room. That was the kind of thing Michael liked to do.

JUDITH BELUSHI,
Writer:

I did a little writing, but only on one show, when Dick Ebersol came in. The first year there was a writers strike and we only did one show. John said to me, “Why would you ever want to write for
Saturday Night Live
?” And I said that I had been around it so much and sometimes had even participated — giving somebody a line or something. And I’d worked on the
National Lampoon Radio Hour
and other things. So I thought, “I can do that.” And I thought it would be interesting. But I really didn’t like it. I call it “My Week in Television.” It was actually three weeks of working.

Michael O’Donoghue had come back as head writer. He didn’t want to be there, and he was really miserable about it. He was saddled with it and he’d do what he could. I wrote a piece with Mitch Glazer that was a
Raging Bull
parody, a big piece. We were like an hour late handing it in, so Michael refused to look at it. It was just like school.