Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (4 page)

Then I got hold of Lorne, the closest contemporary to me I’d met in this whole process. He did not have an idea at this point. We goof now about the number of people who’ve talked about how “the idea” was “sold to NBC.” No idea was sold to NBC. I adore Bernie Brillstein, but anything in his book about selling an idea, it never happened. Get the lie detectors out; ask Lorne. It’s all bullshit. What did happen was that Lorne just took my breath away in the way he talked about things, how he wanted to have the first television show to speak the language of the time. He wanted the show to be the first show in the history of television to talk — absent expletives — the same language being talked on college campuses and streets and everywhere else. And I was very taken with that, among other things.

So I told NBC there were two people I wanted to do the show, which would be a live comedy show from New York: I wanted this guy Lorne Michaels to produce it, and I wanted a guy named Don Ohlmeyer to direct it.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:

You know that at one point NBC suggested Rich Little as the host? I swear to God. We had a meeting with a guy named Larry White. He was head of NBC programming. And we went to see him with the first real pitch of
Saturday Night Live
ever. Lorne told him what he wanted to do, and Larry White said, “That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life.”

DICK EBERSOL:

The night Lorne picked me up at the Beverly Hills Hotel to go see Kentucky Fried Theater — he never said a word about being married — there was this really, really gorgeous dish who got out of the front seat and into the backseat. So we all went to this play, and Lorne and I sat together and this girl sat next to me. And they had introduced her as “Sue Denim,” because Rosie loved having these various names. And we finally got back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I’m thinking, “This girl is really a knockout and smart as hell, maybe I ought to ask her out.” Because I wasn’t anywhere near married in those days. And at some point, when we walked into the hotel to have a drink, it came out that she and Lorne were married, though they weren’t living together at that time. But I know they pulled the wool over my eyes for at least three hours.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

Dick thought that I was procured for his delight or something. There was a little fuzziness around my introduction.

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER,
Writer:

Other than Herb Sargent, I was the television veteran of
Saturday Night Live
, which is to say I had worked in TV for two and a half or three years, and I had started on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, having had the sort of Lana Turner-ish Schwab’s discovery made of me by Jim Brooks, aided and abetted by Garry Marshall. So I was writing
Mary Tyler Moore
and
Rhoda
at twenty-two, and I was on the staff of
The Odd Couple.

I met Michael O’Donoghue and Anne Beatts through a friend when I was doing
Rhoda
and living in New York. When Lorne was putting the show together and asked me to be a part of it, I had an overactive thyroid and was living with this guy I really wanted to be with. So I told Lorne, “I can’t do the show because I want to get married, but you’ve got to hire this guy O’Donoghue, because he’s brilliant.” Lorne of course had his own access to the Second City people and already knew Chevy, which had nothing to do with Michael. So thanks to me, Michael O’Donoghue got hired.

ANNE BEATTS,
Writer:

I was living a very sort of style-based existence with Michael O’Donoghue, which was severely crimped by the fact that he’d quit the
Lampoon
and we were completely broke. Michael was rather laid low by the whole experience. At one point I had achieved this thing where we had a gig doing restaurant reviews for the
Village Voice
— every reporter’s dream, right? And free meals. And it was Christmas-time and Michael and I cowrote a review of Luchow’s, this restaurant where Diamond Jim Brady had gone to romance Lillian Russell. It was very Christmassy because it had a giant Christmas tree in the middle of it. Anyway, Michael insisted on putting some reference to Hiroshima and the Nazis into the review. The
Village Voice
did not go for this, especially in a restaurant review. Michael quit in a huff and we lost the gig. And I was like, “Oh, no.” We were at the bail-out point when Lorne showed up and offered first Michael and then me jobs on
Saturday Night Live
. And I turned it down because I had sold a book:
Titters
, the first collection of humor by women. I said, “I can’t do this stupid television show.” And then a friend of mine was like, “Are you crazy? You have to do it.” And thank goodness I did. So then Michael and I were working on it together.

DICK EBERSOL:

NBC set up a meeting for eight o’clock in the morning. And Lorne said, “Dick, eight o’clock?!? You know I can’t function at that hour.” I said, “Lorne, it’s breakfast. We’ve got to do it.”

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:

Lorne said, “I can’t get up.” I said, “Lorne, this is the one time I’ll call you and get you up.”

DICK EBERSOL:

So he came to this breakfast, I don’t know if he’d even been to bed, and he’s sitting with these two guys who, despite whatever nice things they did for me, I have to give the title of “stiffs.” They’re basically asking if Connie Stevens is going to do the show. Lorne goes into his best BS. When it’s over they say, “Well, he’s awfully young. But okay — you can have him.” The next morning I bring in Ohlmeyer, who’s more akin to their world, and they liked him very much. But Roone would not let Don out of his contract at ABC, and it would be almost two years before NBC got Don away from them.

HERBERT SCHLOSSER:

I wanted to do the show live if possible, and I wanted to do it in New York City, because New York had lost all of its entertainment shows. Everything had moved to Burbank. Even Carson had moved to Burbank. Which left a void in 30 Rock. I originally thought it should be two hours and so forth. But the research department was very conservative. Nobody seemed to be enthusiastic at the meeting.

Now I’d had an experience with the
Tomorrow
show, which I didn’t want to repeat. I had wanted to put it on, and we went through the procedure as you should of having a financial analysis and a research analysis and so forth, but I never could get an answer from my own network people.

So I was talking to Julian Goodman, who was the chairman of NBC, about my frustration with my ideas for Saturday night, and he said to me, “You should just call Les Brown” — the reporter from
Variety
. “Have lunch with him and just tell him you’re putting the show on.” So I did. And it was in
Variety
a couple days later. Sure enough, the wheels started moving more rapidly.

DICK EBERSOL:

I would go to the Chateau Marmont, where Lorne lived, and basically for nine or ten days, between going out to dinner and all this stuff, we worked out a loose thing of what this show is going to be. It’s going to be a repertory company of seven, and a writing staff and fake commercials and all that.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:

About this time, Lorne invited me to his birthday party — his thirtieth, I think — the only party ever held in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont, where they all used to stay. So the party supposedly starts at nine. I was the old man of the group, so I arrive at nine-thirty. And there’s not a soul there. Not one. And finally Lorne comes down in slacks and pajama tops, just waking up or something. He said people would be there in a while. This is so Lorne. And about eleven o’clock, here’s who walks in: Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, George Carlin — the entire underground of Hollywood comedy. And that’s when I knew Lorne was a real somebody.

NEIL LEVY,
Production Assistant:

Lorne’s a cousin of mine, and he had brought Paul Simon up to a cottage where I was staying. I didn’t actually know who he really was. That’s what an idiot I was. I asked him if he was from Simon and Garfunkel. He said, “Yeah, used to be.” They had broken up four years earlier, I didn’t even know. I did some magic tricks for Paul Simon. I think that impressed Lorne. After that he took me down on the dock and asked me if I wanted to be his assistant on this new show. Oh man, I think my bag was already packed. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I was nineteen when I first came on the show — the youngest person on the staff. I just watched the whole thing come together with all these famous people slowly gravitating toward the show.

I slept on Lorne’s couch for a couple of weeks, long before the show ever started, and one day I came in and Mick Jagger was sitting there — in Lorne’s apartment, on the couch. I don’t know how Lorne knew Mick Jagger, because at that point he wasn’t even “Lorne Michaels.” But people were drawn to him.

ROBERT KLEIN:

Some time had passed between when I met Lorne and the formation of this show. Next thing I know, I was immediately sought out as the host. Lorne came down to see me with Chevy Chase, who’d been in
Lemmings
, and checked me out at the Bitter End on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. And I remember Lorne suggesting — he was no longer humble — that I should be more “vulnerable” in my act. He said this not directly to me, but through my manager, Jack Rollins. Anyway, it was definitely agreed that I had too big a reputation already to be, quote, “one of the kids,” but that I should host the show.

ALBERT BROOKS,
Filmmaker:

Here’s how
Saturday Night Live
came about. I was doing clubs and performing a lot, and Lorne used to come a lot to the shows. I knew that he was a fan. And something was brewing. They decided, I think around September of 1974, that they were, in fact, going to open up eleven-thirty on Saturday. I was first approached in the late fall, early winter of 1974. I was sort of asked by Dick Ebersol if I wanted to have a show — be the permanent host every week. Lorne Michaels was around. I mean, you know, it was both of them. I think I met with Ebersol alone, and Lorne alone, and then both of them together. But that was the first time I heard, “Do you want to host your own show?” And I actually had just done a short film. I wrote this article in1971 for
Esquire:
“The Famous School for Comedians.” PBS had that
Great American Dream Machine
, which was a show of short films, so I made the “Famous School for Comedians” into like a fake infomercial, and it was hugely successful. The PBS stations ran it during pledge drives, and it just turned out to be a great experience for me. So this is what I wanted to do. But in any case, I knew I didn’t want to do television, and I told that to Ebersol and Michaels.

And then, you know, a month later, they come back: “This is going to be a big thing. Why don’t you do it?” Now, as I did with everything — every time I said no to someone in my life — I always felt compelled to come up with an alternative idea so I didn’t sound like an asshole. So I swear to God on my own life, I said to them, “You don’t want a permanent host anyway. Every show does that. Why don’t you get a different host every week?” And so I really have to tell you, when I said that, they both went, “Oh, okay!” So that was
my
suggestion.

LORNE MICHAELS:

Wait a minute. I made the presentation to NBC on April first, and I didn’t talk to Albert until June, so what do you think was in the proposal? But Albert felt, as did a ton of other people in that first year, that they had a big part in the creative effort of the show. It was a big part of their identity.

ALBERT BROOKS:

Then November, December, January, I get another call. They had not really done anything. They hadn’t proceeded in any one direction. So what was said to me was, “We want you involved.” And at that time there were no cast members. There was nothing. I think serious auditions started in the late spring. So I said, “I want to get into the film business. I want to make short films. What if I make a short film for you?” They all liked the idea and they all said yes, but they didn’t have a show yet. So, you know, no one had thought far enough ahead to think, “Well, gee, okay, so then this show is going to have at least a short film.”

Now, in turn for that, what I did for them is that in February or early March, there was a junket at the Sheraton Universal for the affiliates about the new season. You know, you’d walk in and the guy from New Orleans would put a palm tree and a bottle of booze there, and you’d stand in front of it and he’d say, “Welcome to New Orleans, Albert.” I was there standing with Lorne, and the day was filled with people asking the same question: “So, what’s this new show going to be about, Albert?” And I said, “I’m going to do some short films, but I don’t really know anything other than that.” Then Lorne said, “Well, we’re not sure but, you know, we’re going to do cutting-edge comedy.”

So I am positive that I was the first person brought on. Because I never saw anybody else, and nobody else was ever mentioned.

DICK EBERSOL:

Long before anyone else, Albert had signed on to do those short films. They were inordinately important, because if you look at the early shows it’s not really until show ten or eleven, with the exception maybe of Candy Bergen, show four, that you see anything roughly akin to what the show evolved into. So Albert’s stuff from the beginning was wildly important. And it came from just running into him one day on Sunset Boulevard.

ALBERT BROOKS:

I always said one thing to these guys — and they didn’t take my advice, and in this case I’m sure it’s good they didn’t — but I said, “This ‘live’ stuff, it’s absolutely meaningless to me. I grew up on the West Coast. I didn’t see anything live. It was always tape-delayed. If Ed Sullivan takes his pants down, I’m not going to see him.”