Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (49 page)

But we had Lovitz, who was great, and Dennis Miller started coming in and doing “Update,” so the building blocks were definitely there, but it was a tough year. Youthful problems, attitude, absence of skills, not to mention what may be a case of talent lack — that confluence made it very, very hard for a talented group of writers to find stuff to do. When the show is doing well, it’s usually overpraised, and when it’s not doing so well, it’s overcriticized.

LORNE MICHAELS:

Jim Carrey never auditioned for me personally. There is an audition tape which we almost played on the twenty-fifth-anniversary show — if he had come that night, we would have. We have all the audition tapes. Carrey, I think, auditioned for Al Franken the year I was executive producer and Tom Davis and Al were the producers along with Jim Downey. In ’85, when Brandon got me to come back, his whole argument was I had to learn how to delegate. Dick had run it successfully that way, and so Tom, Al, and Jim did their stuff and I sort of approved things. But later that season, when Brandon was again thinking about canceling the show, he told me, “You have to completely take charge of everything again.”

CAROL LEIFER,
Writer:

Jim Downey and Al Franken were really the people who hired me. Jim had seen me doing
Letterman
pretty regularly around that time, and he came in and saw me at the Comic Strip and then just asked me if I wanted to join the staff. Of course I had to meet Lorne, to officially be hired. The meeting was like thirty seconds. I walked in — it wasn’t even a sit-down meeting — and he said, “Jim and Al said some really good things about you. Are you familiar with what kind of goes on with the writers? It gets pretty intense. Are you prepared for that kind of thing?” I said, “Yeah, I’m down with it.” And that was about it. What I realized later was, having been Jim and Al’s person coming in, I was never going to be in the inner circle, because Lorne wasn’t the one who found me.

TERRY SWEENEY,
Cast Member:

I think Lorne hired me because I was funny. I don’t think he hired me as a gay guy. I don’t find Lorne homophobic at all. I think he deserves credit. He was the first. When he told me he was going to hire me, I said, “You know I’m going to be openly gay, I’m not going to hide it or pretend I’m not.” And he was totally fine with that. I never got the vibe from him that he was homophobic in the least.

JAMES DOWNEY,
Writer:

We opened the season with Madonna hosting the show, and there was tremendous hype. It was an offensive, dreadful show. I don’t know how many shows there’ve been — more than five hundred. I would say the Madonna show has got to be considered one of the top five — I mean in an entirely negative way. It really crippled the season from the get-go, particularly since there were a lot of people anxious to see that new group of actors fail. That first show was like an albatross for us. Years later people would still say, “I haven’t watched the show since that Madonna thing.” It did so much long-lasting damage.

When we left in May of 1980, we averaged something like a 12 rating and a 36 share — something pretty high like that. And then after Jean Doumanian’s third show, it was consistently halved. So it was like a 7 rating or something. When Ebersol did the show, he stabilized it and solidified it and kept it on the air, which I think he deserves a lot of credit for, but the numbers were never really huge. That Madonna show got like a 10 rating. That was big.

It was almost like, “The bad news is, a lot of people were watching.”

ROBERT SMIGEL,
Writer:

I wrote a song for Madonna to do in a Spanish talk-show sketch and it was surreal, because she was the biggest star in the world and I was just stepping into this show for the first time. I’d half-written this sort of medley for her to sing, and I was one of the backup singers in the sketch. It was a very, very strange way to start.

Then I didn’t get anything on for four weeks and I was worried about getting fired, because the show was such a disaster. George Meyer was a great writer who took me under his wing, and he told me, “Don’t worry, no matter what, Lorne doesn’t fire people, he gives them a chance.” But after about five shows, people started telling me, “Things are tough and the network’s clamping down.”

ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL

Madonna moves like a train. Everything is forward and she is very focused and very intent upon getting it all done right.

DAMON WAYANS,
Cast Member:

But the thing about Madonna was, she was terrified. She had never done this before. They were doing the “five… four… three” count-down for the show to come on live. And I looked over at Madonna and she had the biggest facial tic, like her skin was jumping off. One of her eyes was like jumping off her face. She was a wreck.

Do you remember when that light fell on Madonna? Was it seen in the frame? I think you can see it. A light fell, yeah. Actually it was a sketch where I played a gay actor in the closet. I was acting really supermacho. But when the light fell, I screamed a really high-pitched scream, because the light actually fell. So you see a lot of realism in that scene.

Madonna’s not the friendliest person in town but she was very, very professional, and throughout the week she kept saying, “Let’s do it again, let’s rehearse it again, let’s rehearse it again.” She worked her ass off.

JACK HANDEY,
Writer:

The Madonna show was considered in bad taste. It was viciously attacked and the ratings started going down. We were actually worried. That was one year, I think, that people wondered whether the show was going to get canceled. But we had a good writing staff then, with people like George Meyer and Jim Downey and Franken and Davis.

TERRY SWEENEY:

Chevy hosted the second show, and we were all so excited because, to us, Chevy was like a god. This was someone returning who’d been one of the original people and was this legendary figure. And we were just excited to work with him. And when he got there, he was a
monster
. I mean, he insulted
everybody
. He said to Robert Downey Jr., “Didn’t your father used to be a successful director? Whatever happened to him? Boy, he sure died, you know, he sure went to hell.” Downey turned ashen. And then Chevy turned to me and he said, “Oh, you’re the gay guy, right?” And he goes, “I’ve got an idea for a sketch for you. How about we say you have AIDS and we weigh you every week?” It was out of place. So then he ended up having to apologize and actually coming to my office. He was really furious that he had to apologize to me. He was just beside himself. And it was just awful. He acted horribly to me. He acted horribly to everyone. When he got on the elevator at the end of the night — you know, we all go to the party afterwards — and everybody saw him coming, we hid. We wouldn’t be on the elevator with him. We were all hiding. We were plastered against the wall going, “Oh, he’s getting on the elevator, he’s almost gone. Oh, he’s gone.” No one wanted to be near him. I don’t know what he was on or what was happening to him mentally, but he was just crazy.

JON LOVITZ:

When Chevy Chase was hosting, there was a meeting of the writers and staff. So Chevy looks at Terry Sweeney and goes, “You’re gay, right?” Terry goes, “Yes, what would you like me to do for you?” Chevy goes, “Well, you can start by licking my balls.”

ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL

I never knew that side of Chevy. Then again, to Chevy I was probably always the kid who played his fourteen-year-old son in
National Lampoon’s Vacation.
He was always nice to me. I really had a good experience.

RON REAGAN,
Host:

I went and saw Lorne at the Chateau Marmont, where he was staying. He was getting ready to go to some award show. We sat and talked for about a half an hour or so about me hosting the show. Initially, I was really just doing him a courtesy of telling him no to his face. They’d called before to ask if I wanted to host the show and I’d said no. And then he was going to be in L.A., and he said, “Why don’t you come over and talk?” I said, “Well okay, fine.” I just expressed my concern about I didn’t want to be taken advantage of in some way and didn’t want to see my family hurt because of my stupidity — going onto a show where it was really an opportunity to make fun of them — and in a cruel way, not a fun way. And Lorne just said, “We don’t want to do that. That’s not what we’re about,” and he promised I’d have final say over things. Nothing too awful was going to get by me. And that pretty much addressed my concern. Once I’d realized I’d have control, that was it. I said okay. It just seemed like a fun thing to do. Who at that age wouldn’t want to host
Saturday Night Live?

ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL

People were pretty impressed by the job Ron Reagan did hosting the show. He was very willing to throw it up there to see what stuck, you know. He was quite fearless as an actor, I thought. And he really had a good sense of humor about his upbringing and his family and everything. I thought it was really cool.

RON REAGAN:

I think that once they got to know me a little bit, everybody was being fairly careful about not being cruel. To have family members sitting there, it takes a little bit of the edge off. You can’t be too mean. I’m probably as far or farther left than anybody on that cast. So in terms of personal politics, nobody was going to out-left me. There’s always a little bit of weirdness. I’ve discovered in my life, having been my father’s son for years and years, that people have preconceptions about you. And you try to disabuse them of those pretty soon.

We actually rehearsed one sketch that had been my idea. When we were sitting around the table earlier in the week, I said to everybody that I thought it would be funny if Terry Sweeney and I did a kind of screaming-queen sketch. And we wrote one up and kind of put it together and did it in the dress rehearsal. And you could kind of see the audience was really just sort of confused by it, didn’t really see the point.

TERRY SWEENEY:

In one sketch, Ron and I played these gay guys who were house-sitting for Nora Dunn in her apartment — and we just change everything around and redecorate, and do all this stuff. And he played the really flamingest queen in the world. But they cut the sketch. His manager made him cut it. But he was still a great host.

RON REAGAN:

The
Risky Business
sketch seemed like an obvious one. I got a little note from Tom Cruise afterwards — just saying that he enjoyed the sketch and thought it was really funny, and ha ha. A little polite note. And yet there were some people who were upset by it. I don’t really understand why. I guess it was just the Jockey shorts. I was actually wearing three pairs of Jockey shorts. Every time we rehearsed, and right after the dress rehearsal, Standards and Practices would come back and say, “Could we put another pair on him?”

My parents probably were not thrilled that I was going to be doing something that would inevitably poke some fun at them. I don’t think my dad really cared. But Nancy tends to get a little nervous about that sort of thing.

TERRY SWEENEY:

Ron said his mother did not care for my impression of her. But
he
thought I was eerily accurate. Ron thought I was more like his mother than his mother was. So I thought that’s the highest compliment one can ever have. He was great. He used to call to me, “Hi, Mom,” in the halls. Imagine how freaky it must have been for him. There’s a man coming down the hall dressed as your mother, in the same red Adolfo suit, going, “Hello, dear. Hello, son.”

RON REAGAN:

Later on I was in New York for something completely unrelated. And I dropped by the
Saturday Night Live
offices to just say hi, and they were in the midst of doing a show where Oprah was guest host. And they were having their first cast meeting with her in Lorne’s office when I happened to knock on the door. I didn’t know what was going on. I just came in to say hi. “Oh, come on in, come on in. Sit in on the meeting.” So I did. I turned around and said hi to Oprah, who I really didn’t know at the time. She wasn’t as humongous as she is now. And I could tell she was really displeased I was there. It was like I’d really stepped into her thing. So I stayed just a few minutes and politely left.

AL FRANKEN:

We had some good things that season, like when Ronald Reagan Jr. did the show. And Pee-wee Herman did a funny show. Lovitz started doing the Pathological Liar. And Joan Cusack was tremendously talented. They were bright spots. It’s just that nothing else went right.

CAROL LEIFER:

I wrote a sketch about a husband and wife having an anniversary dinner. It’s just basically, “We love each other so much, it’s so great, our anniversary.” And you know, “Isn’t it wonderful we can just tell each other anything, that’s how close we are.” And at that point the husband goes, “That’s so true. Here’s something: Sometimes I have this fantasy that you die.” Tom Hanks eventually did it. But it literally went through every read-through of every male host and got cut. When Tom Hanks did it, it was so great.

Otherwise, it was a terrible year. That was, I think, maybe the only year where at the end of the season, the show certainly was not guaranteed to come back. It seemed genuinely in danger of being canceled.

TERRY SWEENEY:

It was an unhappy time during that period for a lot of the actors and actresses involved, but I’ve heard from future casts that they were not so happy either. There was a lot of Al and Tom, definitely. Al Franken and Tom Davis were very much involved in the show and very hands-on and very opinionated. So I think that they had their own version of things. I think they had felt like, “We’re back,” and rolled up their sleeves. And I think Al very much wanted to be on the show, and now he’s found his little niche, which is wonderful for him, but I think he was still looking then for what his niche was — what was his claim to fame and how could he move from being a writer to being on-camera, being up front.