Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (48 page)

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Behemiel Rising: 1985–1990

Lorne Michaels had wanted to take six months off at the end of the 1979–80 season of
Saturday Night Live
so he could rethink and recast the show. Instead, as things turned out, Lorne’s half-year hiatus turned into a five-year exile. Unfortunately, the creator’s return was not an immediate raise-the-roof triumph. He had an act to follow for a change — the Billy Crystal–Martin Short
Saturday Night Live,
which had been a populist hit. Instead of scouring comedy clubs and improv groups for fresh young talent as he and his cohorts had done the first time, Michaels, as if borrowing a page from the Ebersol playbook, stocked the show with the known and near-known: veteran actor Randy Quaid, teenage star Anthony Michael Hall (who had played Chevy Chase’s son in
National Lampoon’s Vacation
), young actors Robert Downey Jr. and Joan Cusack, newcomers Terry Sweeney and Danitra Vance.

It was a more peculiar than colorful group, one that writers found it difficult to write sketches for. Among the saving graces, though, were eccentric newcomer Jon Lovitz, a male diva who popularized original characters like his Pathological Liar and Master Thespian; performer Nora Dunn, whose
SNL
stint would end in public acrimony; and snide Dennis Miller, who turned “Weekend Update” into his own fitfully amusing soapbox, replete with cranky ranting, girlish giggling, and a hailstorm of obscure references — one of his favorite and more accessible being the character Boo played silently by Robert Duvall in
To Kill a Mockingbird.

Michaels was not completely bedecked in glory. His much-ballyhooed foray into prime-time TV, a tastefully inert variety hour called
The New Show,
was apparently not new enough; it lasted fewer than thirteen weeks in the 1984–85 TV season. Not only were the ratings puny, but Michaels experienced his first true trouncing from the critics. He also lost, by his estimate, more than $1 million of his own money. In addition, what had been envisioned as a prestigious and productive movie career — first, abortively, at Warner Brothers and then at Paramount — fell short of expectations and momentarily threatened his reputation as king of the comedy impresarios.

Now Michaels had to build a new mountain and didn’t have much raw material to do it with. He was in somewhat the predicament that Jean Doumanian had been, except he had all those connections and a keen eye for talent. All that was on the line were his personal and professional reputation, his livelihood, and the fate of his life’s most important creation.

TOM HANKS,
Host:

I did the show for the first time in 1985, the year Lorne came back after being away for five years, and I asked him, “So, why did you come back?” And he just said, “I missed it.”

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN,
Manager:

Lorne Michaels loves a lot of things. He’s not
in love
with anything but
Saturday Night Live.
That’s it. It’s that simple. That’s why he came back.

HERB SARGENT,
Writer:

The season before Lorne’s return, Brandon called me. And he said he was on the fence between Dick and Lorne — between Dick staying and Lorne coming back. I said, “If you have Ebersol, you have a solid professional show. If you have Lorne, you have something unexpected — which is much more fun than anything.”

LORNE MICHAELS,
Executive Producer:

The reality hit me that I needed a job. I wasn’t really focused on much other than
Three Amigos.
I’d spent the better part of 1984 writing it with Randy Newman and Steve Martin, and it was about to go into production, with John Landis directing.

Meanwhile there was the failure of
The New Show.
Not only did it sort of fail, noble failure though it was, but it was enormously costly, which I had to bear personally. This was the first time I was producing a show for a license fee. We were deficiting it, and I was losing $100,000 a week. We did eleven of them. When it was all over, what I was focused on was behaving well.

I felt I’d had such enormous success with
Saturday Night
that it was character building to have that kind of failure. I had won big — and now I was losing. The last thing I wanted to do was go back and do a television show, but there was a very strong financial reality. I won’t say I was completely broke, but I was pretty close to it. I wasn’t in any danger of going under, and I’d had lots of periods in my life when I didn’t have much money. It was more the dealing with the failure. And then I was getting divorced later on in that year.

By the spring of ’85, when
Three Amigos
started shooting, Brandon called me and asked me about coming back. Dick had just decided not to. I said I didn’t think so. I think he’d had discussions with Buddy Morra, Billy Crystal’s manager, about Billy being the sole host, at least for ten of them, or something like that. As with a lot of things with Brandon, I only know the part that I heard. Jobs like his are always about making sure you have options.

When I left in ’80, I just thought it would go away. I never really thought of it as having a life of its own, because I’d been there at the beginning of it. Someone very powerful told me, “You don’t want to do
Saturday Night Live.
Somebody who wants to be you wants to do
Saturday Night Live.
” I thought about that a lot. I promised Brandon that he and I would talk again. And then I think we got to a point in the conversation that he was going to pull the plug on the show. And for me, that was the swing vote.

ANNE BEATTS,
Writer:

Lorne called and asked me if I wanted my old job back. It was a compliment, I guess. I said no. I’ve sometimes regretted that, but I was working on other stuff, and being in L.A. more. His first year back didn’t seem to go that well. I certainly wouldn’t pass judgment on what it represented that he returned.

TOM SCHILLER,
Writer:

In the early days I was pretty much left alone. I could go into a meeting and say, “I want to do a thing with John Belushi as an old guy; he does this and that.” And then they’d say, “Great. Do it.” I’d write a script and go around and show it to people. Herb Sargent usually added a line or two to make it better. Then I just shot it, and in two weeks it would be on the air. It was a dream come true.

But later it became difficult. After the five-year gap, I went back and worked there a little bit, and it was murder. They assigned some young writer to work with me, and it was bad. They had more checks and balances, and that was bad. Somebody said Lorne had become the corporate person that he used to make fun of. It became more of a business. Suddenly there was a guy with a clipboard walking around while you were writing your sketches and stuff, making sure you were working.

When the show first started, no one knew what was going on, and there was a wonderful flux period, which was incredibly creative. We were more individuals in the early days. Then in ’85, the show had coalesced, and you found you were just an interchangeable part. Not that the drugs were good, but there were no more drugs. It was clean. It wasn’t as rambunctious — that’s the word.

ANDY BRECKMAN,
Writer:

It had meant nothing for me to please Dick Ebersol or to have Dick Ebersol say, “That’s funny,” to get his seal of approval. He was a suit, more of an administrator. He never once made me laugh. So creatively, I didn’t respect the man. On the other hand, I was born in 1955. So in my early twenties,
SNL
was so influential, so big, and Lorne Michaels was this mythical, legendary figure, that when I started working for him, making him laugh and having a pat on the back from him meant a great deal to me.

I was surrounded by writers who had come back to the show and were very cynical about him. They would always be telling “Lorne stories” — about his miscalculations, his posing for the press, his lying to the press, and Lorne supposedly taking credit for stuff that he might not have been entitled to. Clearly they didn’t feel the same way about working for Lorne that I did.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:

Lorne didn’t want to go back with the same type of show Ebersol had. There were no long discussions. Lorne just said, “Here’s what I’m going to do, here are the people I’m going after.” Robert Downey Jr. was one of the people he really wanted, and it wasn’t a terrible idea, but it wasn’t a good idea either, in retrospect. It just didn’t work. And there were a few problems among the cast; I mean alcohol and drugs and whatever. It wasn’t good. But Lorne was still young then, thirty-nine or forty, and he was trying something different.

JON LOVITZ,
Cast Member:

I’d only had one job in seven years — doing
The Paper Chase
in its second year on cable, when I was twenty-five. So now I was twenty-eight. I mean, I just couldn’t believe I got the show, you know? Like you go, “You want me to do the Master Thespian?” I’d done it at the Groundlings, but originally when I was eighteen. I was like just goofing around, you know, saying, “I’m the Master Thespian.” And now they’ve built a whole set for it, you know. It just blew my mind.

Or doing the Pathological Liar. And next thing you know, every-body’s imitating it. It was just unreal, because I’d been working as a messenger. And then I finally started working and I got a movie and a series, then I got
Saturday Night Live
. I mean, I was broke, and then by the end of the year I got a deal to do a movie for half a million dollars. So that was just an amazing time for me, you know, amazing.

Well, everybody else went nuts. Everyone else started getting weird, and I was like, “What’s going on?” I got the job, you know, and then a friend of mine sent me a book of quotes, and he underlined a quote from Kirk Douglas, and it said, “When you become famous, you don’t change, everybody else does.” That’s what was happening in my life. Everybody had said no for seven years, and all of a sudden everybody was saying yes. And I couldn’t believe it.

ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL,
Cast Member:

I grew up watching Eddie and Piscopo and that cast from that era. I was just a kid at the time, and I was just enjoying what was happening to me, working on the John Hughes films. And then all of a sudden I got a call from Lorne and, you know, I was in shock. I was such a huge fan of the show and so many of the actors and actresses that emerged from it. So it was really an honor.

Even after I had decided to do the show, I remember walking around the city, just baffled that I had taken this on. I couldn’t believe I was actually going to be a part of it. It really is one of the most creatively demanding mediums to work in, because it’s a blend of a lot of things — theater and rock and roll and everything else.

DICK EBERSOL,
NBC Executive:

I think Lorne’s first year back in ’85 was very dark. It was a very dark year. It was the roughest season Lorne ever had doing the show, and everybody came out of the woodwork to attack. It was the first time he’d ever been subject to that “Saturday Night Dead” stuff. And that just reminded me that I had left of my own volition, because when I did the show, I’d never gone through a diatribe year like he went through then.

ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL

It was one of the most forgettable seasons of the show’s history. I certainly didn’t make a major impact on the show like a lot of people did. But just to be a part of it from my standpoint was amazing. It’s far and away the most competitive environment I’ve ever worked in. Some guy who was based in the West, a fan of the show, would send me tapes of selected sketches where it was so blatantly obvious that I was reading cue cards. He had time to do an edited version of, like, my worst cue card readings, the ones that were most blatant. It didn’t bother me; I thought it was hilarious.

TOM HANKS:

It was a sort of cobbled-together cast. Lorne put it together in like six weeks. Franken and Davis were back as writer-producers. I think they’d been gone. So it was definitely a sense that the whole staff was either finding their bearings for the first time or trying to refind their bearings after an extreme absence. But in some ways it was one of those years that
Saturday Night Live
showed itself to be this enduring show business tradition — this entity, this classic thing. Because you could easily say it should have been off the air; that’s what everybody wanted it to be. You know — “Saturday Night Dead.” How often did you read that by the time I was on the show for the first time?

AL FRANKEN,
Writer:

The ’85–’86 season was difficult for a number of reasons, one of which was that Tom Davis and I were nominally the producers but didn’t have that much authority. The second was we had a cast that didn’t gel, and it was very hard to write in the same way as for a cast that had worked. I don’t know what was happening in Lorne’s head when he put that cast together, but I think he was consciously going after youth. We didn’t have enough people to play middle-aged males. It was impossible to write a Senate hearing.

I liked Danitra Vance very much, but it turned out she was dyslexic and couldn’t read cue cards on the air. I remember her agent or manager coming to us and saying, “You wrote for Eddie Murphy, why aren’t you writing for her?” And I said, “Eddie Murphy’s Eddie Murphy and Danitra’s Danitra. Just because they’re black doesn’t mean they’re the same thing.” It was a little out of control.