Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (33 page)

TIM KAZURINSKY:

It was too crazy. Everyone was out of control. Finally, I decided to quit the show. I called John Belushi and said, “I’m going home. I’m flying back to Chicago tonight. I quit.” Pam Norris, Blaustein, a few others, and I were pretty much coming up with the show almost every week. O’Donoghue’s writers were hopeless. They did nothing. When they did do something, it was horrible. But I didn’t get to quit — because John said, “Okay, Judy and I will drive you to the airport.” They came by my house, got my bags, and, instead of taking me to the airport, they took me to a psychiatrist. John said, “If you want to quit that show, you’ve got to be crazy.” He told me, “Here’s the thing you can’t lose sight of: It gets bad, it gets ugly, but you’re an improviser, you’re a writer, you have access to network airwaves. You have a chance to reach some hearts and minds out there. You have a chance to say something. You cannot walk away from this.” And he sent me in to this psychiatrist, who I saw every week for the next year and who kept me healthy enough to stay on the show.

BOB TISCHLER:

There was a lot of lying going on, a lot of deception. And it became furious between O’Donoghue and Ebersol. I kept on trying to defend him; Ebersol really wanted to get rid of him a long time before he did. I had known Michael for years before the show. He and I were great friends and actually ended up not remaining friends as a result of our experience on
Saturday Night Live
together. Michael had this history with everybody. Anybody who really got close to him ended up being on his enemies list at a certain point.

ELLIOT WALD,
Writer:

I hit it off badly with Michael. He passed judgment on things. He and my first partner, Nate Herman — he didn’t like Nate too much, and since Nate was a performer, he was always hilarious in meetings. So it was hard for him to fire on Nate, but Nate’s quiet partner was easier to pick on. I was afraid to speak up at meetings in the first half of the season. He had made life difficult for me. He almost got me fired — “Just get him out of here” — because he was trying to get somebody else hired. But before that could be executed, he got himself fired over the “Silverman in the Bunker” piece. This was a piece he wrote, with Silverman as Hitler in the last days. The sketch didn’t make it to air, and that’s why Michael quit — or put himself in the position to be fired. He talked to somebody in the press about what a bunch of morons everybody up there was, how they couldn’t see the brilliance of this piece. And the network said, “Well, you do have a clause in your contract about doing things like that,” so they fired him. He was asking for it. He was, in essence, quitting.

But Michael and I made our peace after the show. We did a couple of panels together at the Museum of Television and Radio and actually were on pretty pleasant terms. Then the shock came, when he died.

ROBIN SHLIEN,
Production Assistant:

When Michael O’Donoghue got fired, he left this amazing note: “I was fired by Dick Ebersol. I did not leave the show, and if he should claim otherwise, he is, to steal a phrase from Louisa May Alcott, a lying cunt.” It’s very Michael. He posted it on the wall. Dick wasn’t in yet, so those of us who were there immediately took it off and Xeroxed it and made copies, knowing that Dick would rip it down, which he did. But it survived.

BOB TISCHLER:

There were two wakes for Michael. The one on the East Coast was the original, official wake, and they actually had the graph of his aneurysm from the MRI. And then they had a second wake at the Café Formosa in Los Angeles. You have to realize that a lot of people who were once friends or who once worked together — who had lots of issues between them — were suddenly in a room together. When anybody dies, everybody gets pulled together whether they like to or not. At Michael’s wake, there were a lot of egos flying. A lot of people needed to be the center of attention.

JACK HANDEY:

I went to Michael’s wake. There was food and drink, and his wife, Cheryl, was there, and toward the end of the evening, people got up and sort of talked — telling stories about Michael. They had put the X rays of his head up as decorations so people could see where he had his massive stroke or something like that.

There was some controversy after Lorne and Chevy Chase spoke. Buck Henry got up and said something to the effect that it was interesting that they got up to speak “when I think we all know what Michael thought of them.”

LORNE MICHAELS:

That’s the blackest period for me. Buck later wrote me one of the most beautiful notes I ever received in my life in which he said, a year or two later, that at the time there were attack dogs running at me and he had joined the pack, and he apologized.

What happened was, Michael died on a Tuesday. He’d gone into St. Vincent’s Hospital on Monday. My son, Eddie, was born on Wednesday before read-through in the same hospital. Friday night was a wake that I helped organize at Cheryl’s. After visiting at the hospital and going to the studio around eleven o’clock, I went to the wake — with Chevy Chase. He and John were not on the best of terms but on another level really loved each other. Meanwhile, John was considered the real deal in Hollywood and Chevy was — well, you know. I remembered a time before all these people had joined the Belushi camp, they had been professionally in the John Belushi business. Then they switched over to the Michael O’Donoghue business. And somebody in their remarks took a shot at Chevy, as if you had to make a choice between loving Michael and loving Chevy.

JANE CURTIN,
Cast Member:

The fact that here we all were, our lives forever intertwined, and you had these love-hate relationships with people, and things got said that were just so incredibly perfect and mean and funny and honest. Some people laughed, some people gasped. It was pretty cool.

ANDREW KURTZMAN:

I came into the show through Tim Kazurinsky. He brought in several of us. My father had been a creative director at Leo Burnett in Chicago, and Tim had been in his creative group along with Jeff Price, who went on to be a screenwriter. A couple of playwrights and a lot of odd people came out of that agency. I was an accidental hire. I wrote Tim a funny letter asking for tickets to the show. Tim said, “This is quite funny. You should write a couple of sample sketches.” And I won’t say I dashed them off, but I wrote a bunch of sketches and then went back to a $90-a-week job at Barnes and Noble. I forgot the whole thing for about two months, and then I began to get these strange phone calls at odd hours in the middle of the night from Kaz, saying things like “Blaustein loved the stuff.” Shortly thereafter I was brought in.

BRAD HALL:

Dick didn’t really have a lot to say about the comedy. He would sort of go into the room and pick the sketches. It was much more like he was a judge than he was involved in the process at all. I noticed very quickly that on Wednesdays when we had these gigantic read-throughs that the very funniest sketch at the table would almost always get in the show. But so would the worst sketch. And it was a little bit like, oh God. And I think there was a strange moment when we would sit outside the door and wait for the great word or what was going to be chosen. And then you’d come in and there was always an explanation of some kind as to why things were chosen. But it never made any sense to us, because we just thought, “How about using the funniest stuff or the smartest stuff?”

DICK EBERSOL:

The sets were made in Brooklyn in those days. And then they had to be broken down so they could fit on an elevator, whereas, you know, everything in the West Coast is horizontal. I mean, the big studios. They make the sets in one end of the building; they can be as big as you want. You push them down the hallway. The studio doors open up; they’re thirty or forty feet high, and the thing wheels in. With
Saturday Night Live
, everything has to fit into one of those small Rockefeller Center elevators. And so not only does it take a while to build the set, you have to then build it in such a way it can be broken down and then reassembled. So, from the end of read-through, you go back in a room and pick the elements of the show you want to take to dress.

I think one difference between Lorne and me was that I never wanted to go to dress more than three sketches too long. He has stronger feelings about the ability to repair things late. So he often-times will go to dress much longer than that. I mean he’ll go a half hour or forty minutes longer going to dress, and obviously it’s worked for him for a quarter of a century. I was more comfortable being about three long. But that’s the big thing that you’re facing, that Wednesday night deadline because of the sets.

DON NOVELLO:

This was an amazing thing. I’m not sure of the year, but I would say early eighties. Bill Murray was hosting, I was a guest as a performer, and I really was like a writer for him. And at the end of the show, everyone’s going up on stage to say good night, and there’s a commercial break — two minutes, four minutes, whatever — and during the break, Ebersol suddenly comes running up and says, “It’s on the news, Russia’s invading Poland, and you should announce it.” Bill said, “What should I do?” And I told him, wisely as it turns out, “That’s a news thing. This is a comedy show. Why would you want to do it?” Ebersol says, “Come on, we’ve got thirty seconds, you’re going to do it.” Well, I was not going to stand there when he announced it, so I went and stood way in the back, even though I was one of the main guests. So Bill announced it to America that Russia had invaded Poland and “the poor people of Poland, our hearts go out to them.” It was really almost teary-eyed. And it didn’t happen. The “invasion” didn’t happen, at least not that night. But I guess Ebersol wanted this to be the comedy show that broke it to America that Russia invaded Poland.

ANDREW SMITH:

Dick was tremendously successful with the network. He could get anything out of the network, whether it was money or one thing or another. He understands network politics and that side of it, you know, better than anybody else. And, of course, his best friend was Brandon Tartikoff, which didn’t hurt. He was brilliant at that side of being an executive producer. But he obviously wasn’t a comedy writer and was somewhat foreign to comedy, although I guess there are some issues as to whether he invented the show with Lorne or not.

FRED SILVERMAN:

There are very few people who can produce that show. I never got along particularly well with Ebersol, but I think he did a pretty good job, actually. He walked into a real mess and kept it going, to his credit. The show had had its ups and downs, but he managed to hang in there.

DICK EBERSOL:

It was like a war, and most of it was about the fact that Fred just didn’t like having a show that had that level of freedom that was attacking Fred.
Saturday Night Live
does not work if it censors itself about its own company. You have to attack. I made a point the very first show I did by myself, in April of ’81, of letting Franken do a piece on “Update.” We were friends, but deep inside he thought he should produce the show, and I let him do a piece on “Update” the sum of which was that “Dick doesn’t know dick.”

DAVID SHEFFIELD:

Ebersol is a guy who walks the halls slapping a baseball bat into his palm. He is not easily intimidated. We were at a meeting one time, twenty minutes until air, and this pipsqueak guy from the network says “I just think we really ought to —” and Dick turned around and said to him, “Just shut the fuck up and sit in the corner.”

He ran defense between us and the network. He kept the wolves away while we did the show. This is a good executive strategy. His great strength as producer of the show is he didn’t try to do comedy. He left that up to us.

BRAD HALL:

My big run-in with Dick came when there was this very funny sketch that got cut for time and he said, “Don’t worry, we’ll do it next week.” And then, of course, it wasn’t on the board the next week, and so I said, “You said we’d do it ‘next week.’” And he denied having said it, of course. I’m a very even-tempered guy, but once in a while I’ll get mad. I was absolutely in offense, because it just wasn’t true. And good old Mary Gross, to her credit, goes, “We were all there, we all heard it.” It was typical. I think everybody had things like that.

GRANT A. TINKER:

I had so many larger problems that had to be dealt with that I just didn’t get around to
Saturday Night Live
, and no one was the worse for wear as the result. The show went on, and I did what I did, and just because the twain never met, it wasn’t advertent on my part. I guess you could say it was inadvertent.

PAM NORRIS:

I did not find Dick difficult to work for. I did not agree with a lot of his decisions, but he had what to me is a magical quality in a boss in that I felt like I could say anything to him. And I really quite often said very harsh things. He was okay with that. I never felt like he was going to be angry with me if I told him something he didn’t like. I really am glad in a lot of ways to have dealt with Dick, because I never felt like he was some kind of royalty and that I needed to curry his favor somehow.

TIM KAZURINSKY:

Somebody pointed out to me at read-throughs that Ebersol didn’t really know what was funny. He would look over to Davey Wilson, the director, for some sort of indication. And, of course, Davey had done the show for so long that he was very tired. He only cared if it was easy to shoot. If it was difficult, he would just move his head from side to side and Ebersol would kill it. So he took a lot of lead from Davey.