Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (44 page)

Now when Billy Crystal comes in your office and pitches a funny idea, I will guarantee you it’s funnier than when Elliot Wald walks into your office and pitches a funny idea. And I think the producers fell a little in love with being performed for. Marty and Billy and Chris
are
incredibly funny. But we found ourselves at the back of the bus virtually overnight.

Chris Guest is impossible to talk to. As Eugene Levy said in a piece about him, “Chris brings new meaning to the word ‘dry.’” The man is an emotional desert. He will not break his deadpan for any force on earth, so it’s very hard to interact with him in a friendly way. On the other hand, Marty is very nice, Billy is very nice — they were all great, but they knew what they wanted to do.

Billy Crystal is the only star-actor I ever saw at the show who wrote stuff for other people, for sketches he wasn’t even in. Billy is really a sweet guy in a lot of ways. I don’t hang around with him, so I don’t see the negative side at all. I’m sure there is one. In fact, they were all a pleasure to work with, but we were very much out of the limelight, and I think after the little speech, and after being on the show for three years, it was a bit of an emotional trauma. It was psychologically more difficult because a lot of times theirs were really good pieces. We couldn’t even say, “Look at that crap you’re putting on the air.” They were good pieces. Those guys know themselves and they’re good writers. There was probably a higher schmaltz level, because both Marty and Billy were just born to it. You know, Billy’s dad owned a nightclub, I think in Brooklyn, and Marty was like a boy singer who was on the CBC when he was seven years old, singing “The Impossible Dream.” They’re real show business kids, and so a lot of their stuff revolves around the conventions of show business.

ANDREW SMITH:

Billy Crystal was probably the most insatiable performer I have ever worked with. Once I saw him sitting on the stairs looking very, very depressed. It was the day before a show and I asked him what the matter was. He said that he felt he “just had to do more” on that week’s show. I told him he was in six out of eight sketches and that seemed a heavy load, but he was not to be soothed. He kept repeating that he had to do more.

I remember hearing him say on more than one occasion, “I think the kids need another Sammy,” meaning he thought it was time again for him to do his Sammy Davis Jr. turn — which would indicate he maybe suffered slightly from the Piscopo-Sinatra syndrome. I think it was Billy who turned to Martin Short in the middle of a large ensemble sketch and said, “It’s been three minutes since either of us has had anything to say. Maybe we should leave.”

MARTIN SHORT:

I was so conditioned from
SCTV
to be doing the same kind of work but just having endless fun. And this was different pressure. I think for me it was mainly tied to the writing. At
SCTV
, you would write for six weeks, then you would shoot for six weeks, then you would edit as you were writing again. So it meant that if for two weeks you didn’t have an idea, it was okay. Maybe the third week you’d make up for the first two weeks.

Now you’re a star on Saturday night, but if forty-eight hours later you haven’t come up with an idea, you’re a failure. Billy Crystal and I were always the ones who would leave at six fifty-nine A.M. after handing in last scripts. Oh, it was terrible. And then the read-through was at eleven, which I think Lorne made it later for that reason. So you went home, slept for a couple hours, and came back. I remember on my wife’s birthday — it was a Tuesday night, and that was always the worst night — stopping off at an all-night market and picking up a cake. It was just so pathetic. You know, you have no life. But I didn’t know how else to do the show. You would think they would make some adjustments when they had big stars doing it.

I always thought it was like final exams. I was always exhausted and never home. But then the more I did it, the more I was able to figure out how to do it and not work so insanely.

BILLY CRYSTAL:

One thing you learn on the stage is, you’ve got to cover your ass, because nobody else is going to. I remember one week there were eleven comedy sketches in the show and our “group,” I’ll call it, did nine of them. The pressure was always on that way. Some were good, some were bad, that was the nature of the beast. The time you have to do the show is so short. We just filled up the time as much as we could and tried to integrate the other cast members as much as we could, but certain teams just grew. Chris and I did tons of stuff together that year, and Marty had Ed Grimley. We all had our things. And so when it got light Dick would come to us and go, “I need a Grimley.” And he’d look at me and go, “I need a Fernando.”

BOB TISCHLER:

Billy started becoming very popular and doing characters like Fernando and other characters. Dick, who is a whore, would try to get him to do the same characters over and over. And Billy, who loves attention, would feel no compunction about doing Fernando every week, even though a lot of us were tired of it. Harry Shearer looked at Billy as selling out and made no bones about it. Where other people might see the audience laughing at what Billy was doing — they may not have liked it themselves, but they weren’t abrasive or abusive about it — Harry was just vocal and insulting. He could be insulting to anybody at any time, but he especially picked Billy to mistreat. He was just horrible to him.

MARTIN SHORT:

As a performer, you only found the repetition of a character boring if you had nothing else to say comedically about it. But in the case of Ed Grimley, it was totally interesting to do because Ed Grimley on
SCTV
is an actor who works for the network and is in different movies, and that’s the way we use Ed. Now suddenly we saw him in his apartment. We saw where he lived. We saw him musing about life. So this is all different.

BILLY CRYSTAL:

We could always say, “No, we don’t have it.” And if it got really desperate, you’d try and do one. I don’t remember ever being forced to do anything, but Dick would come to us with a plea: “Please.”

What was great about the “Fernando’s Hideaway”s was they were all improvised, so nobody had to write anything. That’s what I loved most about him. The danger of it was doing it in the dress rehearsal and getting screams and then trying to re-create it three hours later. But the danger was intoxicating too. Once the set was rolled out, the hideaway, the audience started to get excited, because it was the first sketch they would see where there were no cue cards. And they knew it. They knew it was dangerous. It was a talk show within the show. A whole different energy hit the studio when it happened. I loved seeing the host squirm a little bit, because it was, “What’s he going to say to me now?” Because I had to switch off from the dress show to the air show, otherwise it would be flat.

I had people in the hideaway crack up on the air. Mr. T and Hulk Hogan. When I show clips of highlights, that’s one of the big ones. The two of them just go. I said to Hulk Hogan, one of his pecs was heaving with laughter and he was wearing a tank top, and I said, “Look at your chest, it looks like Dorothy Lamour from behind walking to the commissary.” They just went, and when that happened the audience went wild, because it was live and it was right in front of them. Once they saw the cue card guy sit back and they just saw me talking to the camera, they knew I wasn’t reading anything, and that made a big difference.

MARTIN SHORT:

When I did Ed Grimley on
SNL
, it moved into a kind of live energy. What I did love about Ed on
SNL
, particularly, was the pure joy when the phone would ring and before he’d answer it he’d say, “Gee, I love the phone. There’s always such a sense of mystery.” I remember one time years ago, my sister-in-law was flying to California, and she had never flown before, or at least not that much. And she said to me, “I got dressed four different times. I couldn’t decide what to wear for the plane.” And I thought, “How seductive is that? To be that unjaded that you’re still that enthusiastic?”

HARRY SHEARER:

I watched the synchronized swimming on television in August. In late August we were already assembling in New York, and as we were talking, I was just fulminating about the outrage of these people, you know, getting the same medals as real athletes. And Chris and Marty and I were, I guess, in my office, and I don’t know whose idea it was to do the sketch, but we just started writing it. Dick said, “You know, by the time we go on the air in mid-September, nobody will remember the Olympics,” and I said, “We’ll make ’em remember.” Marty and I got to go to the pool every day to rehearse for a week, you know, devising a routine. I had brought tapes of all the synchronized swimming routines with me from L.A., so we just sat and watched the tapes. “Oh, we can do those. Oh, we can do that, we can do that.” And sort of put together our own routine. We didn’t have a choreographer, so we just did it ourselves. And then I think I selected the music, and we just sort of devised these routines and then went out and shot it.

ANDY BRECKMAN:

I was there when Larry David wrote for
Saturday Night Live.
He was there for one season and he did not get one sketch on the air. Not one. And then he went on to do
Seinfeld
and be Mr. NBC. It was a Dick Ebersol year, and I’m sure Larry has nothing good to say about Dick Ebersol, but of the sketches that Larry David didn’t get on, some of them made it to dress rehearsal and some became the seeds of
Seinfeld
episodes. The other writers would love Larry David pieces, because you just admire the work, but they were very subtle pieces and the audiences were never into them. There were never audible laughs. One sketch was about a guy who left a message on his girl-friend’s answering machine that he regretted leaving, and he broke into his girlfriend’s house to retrieve the answering machine tape. And I believe, if I recall the sketch correctly, that it ended with the girlfriend coming home and the boyfriend killing her.

LARRY DAVID,
Writer:

No no no. No murder. I haven’t dealt with murder yet. I can’t believe that I would write that. I think it was a courtroom sketch. Because my guess is he’d been arrested. But yes, I finally wound up using that on
Seinfeld
— the guy who wants to get back a message he left on a girl’s answering machine.

I did get one sketch on the show that season. Just one. It was a sketch about — let’s see, the host was Ed Begley Jr. The sketch got on at five to one in the morning. And this is for the entire season. Ed Begley played an architect, and Harry Shearer was the developer, and he was looking at the plans for a new building. And Harry Shearer noticed something in the blueprint. He says, “What’s this?” And Ed Begley Jr. says, “That’s an elevator.” Harry goes, “No, what’s this little thing?” And Ed Begley Jr. says, “That’s a stool for the elevator man.” And then Harry Shearer kind of pauses and goes, “Well, I don’t want the elevator men sitting on stools.” And then Ed Begley tries to explain: “Well, they won’t be sitting on stools all the time, only when there’s nobody in the elevator.” And then it just deteriorated into this fight about whether they should be sitting or standing. This too showed up on a
Seinfeld
episode but was changed to a security guard in a clothing store.

BILLY CRYSTAL:

There was another thing Larry got on which he’s forgetting. We wrote a thing that became a running character which was a big hit named Lou Goldman, a weatherman. He was an old crazy Jewish weatherman who would give the forecast only for where his family lived. It was very funny. And the forecasts were, “Monday is
feh
, Tuesday continued
feh
, Thursday and Friday — don’t be a big shot, take a jacket.” Then he’d do “Miami, where my sister Rose is —” And then he just went off on rants. And we did that two or three times. Larry and I did those.

BOB TISCHLER:

We let the new cast members read the new writers that were coming in, and I remember Chris Guest, in particular, not getting Larry’s stuff at all. I liked his stuff; I don’t remember what Dick’s position was. But he came on. It wasn’t a total unanimous decision to put him on. He came on, and because of who Larry is — and one thing Larry is is always true to himself — he did not compromise. Even though you could tell immediately that he was a really good writer, it was more stuff about him than it was about stuff that the cast members could do as characters. Some people are just not meant to write for
Saturday Night Live.
Larry was one of them.

He was certainly not meant to work for Dick Ebersol. They locked horns immediately, and their relationship was just horrible. I think some of Larry’s sketches were prejudged. Some of the sketches I wanted to put on, but Dick didn’t want to put on, and Dick won out. It got to be almost a personal thing between the two of them. If it just had the name Larry David on it, Dick shied away from it. These are two people who were very far apart. I felt sorry for Larry. Everybody — but Dick — did.

ELLIOT WALD:

Part of my job that year was going to Larry David and trying to explain to him why his pieces didn’t get in. Larry’s and Dick’s senses of humor were just completely different. Larry would write pieces that, you know, we’d just be falling on the floor over. Some of those became great
Seinfeld
episodes. The one about trying to get some-one’s apartment at a wake? Elaine did that in
Seinfeld
, but Larry wrote it first as a sketch. And we were falling down laughing. And Dick would say, “That’s not going on the air; that’s not funny.” And it’s like, Whoa! So we were what —
faking
our laughter? And so my job became commiserating with Larry. And he’s so smart and so funny.