Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (5 page)

To me Johnny Carson was as live as you want to get. If you were bad, you were bad; nobody did it over again. But you did it earlier. You didn’t have to stay up until eleven-thirty. So what happens when you stay up until eleven-thirty? Guys like Belushi do nine gallons of coke to make it up that late. I know from being a stand-up, the late show, the midnight show, was the one I hated the most. So my suggestion was, tape a show without stopping tape, do one at four, do one at six-thirty, put the best of those two together, and show me that at eleven-thirty. I’m in California; nothing’s live.

DICK EBERSOL:

So now we get to early April, and we’re summoned back to New York to make a presentation to the then–NBC program board, a fine group that I don’t think made it out of that year. And when it’s time to make the presentation, a guy whose name is Bob Howard, then president of the network under Schlosser, tells me a few hours before the meeting, “You can’t bring Michaels to the meeting because he’s not an NBC employee, he’s a freelance producer. We want to hear about the show from you.” I said, “What?!?!” So here’s this presentation, which is largely Lorne’s, and they won’t let him in the room. Schlosser does sit in on it. I outlined the whole thing and finished and got stunned silence. Nobody says a word. Nothing. Herb finally says to Bill, “What do you think of it?” Bill Rudin was head of research, and he never wanted to have an opinion in his life until he heard the lay of the land, but he then uttered the famous words, “I don’t think it’ll ever work because the audience for which it’s designed will never come home on Saturday night to watch it.”

I went back and told Lorne how it had gone, and tried to keep him from being completely in a snit. Two weeks later, Dave Tebet, the network’s head of talent, tells me, “You’ve got to go to Burbank right away. Carson wants to see you.” Neither of us — Lorne or me — had a relationship with Johnny. We’re both thinking our lives with this whole thing may be over, because this man, not only is he a genius but our show is going to exist only because he doesn’t want his repeats airing on the weekend.

So we get to Burbank and we’re taken to Johnny’s office. He’s there with his producer, Fred DeCordova, who’s dressed like Mr. Hollywood, and there’s Johnny in a dirty undershirt, sweat stains under each arm, gray slacks. It’s maybe one-thirty in the afternoon. Johnny said very little at the meeting, he just wanted to know a few things about the show. Then Fred DeCordova started into this thing about separation. They were talking about guests. We said we didn’t have guests, but they said yes you do, you have these hosts. So we worked out this thing that nobody could be booked on the show for a month before a
Tonight Show
appearance and we couldn’t have them for a week or two weeks after. We were scared to death the whole time. So when we got out of there, we just went, “Whew.”

TOM SCHILLER:

The hip thing to do in those days was to go to the desert and eat hallucinogenic mushrooms. So we went to Joshua Tree and Lorne did the mushrooms. I don’t think I really took them myself; it just seems like I did. He was talking a blue streak about this television show he was going to do; he would just never stop. I was really surprised that he could still take phone calls from New York at the pool after he had ingested those mushrooms. He never becomes noticeably different under any circumstances. You can’t get through the glaze of brown eyes. You can’t go behind them.

I didn’t want to work in television; I wanted to be a great director, but I said yes to Lorne because I hated L.A. so much. When I first arrived in New York, I slept on the couch in Lorne’s apartment. He would entertain people like Mick Jagger at the apartment, and Jagger would be sitting on the very couch that I was going to go to sleep on. I just couldn’t wait for him to leave, because the second he got up, I would go to sleep.

HERBERT SCHLOSSER:

No matter what anyone else tells you, the guy who created the show, and made it what it is, is Lorne Michaels.

LORNE MICHAELS:

So much of what
Saturday Night Live
wanted to be, or I wanted it to be when it began, was cool. Which was something television wasn’t, except in a retro way. Not that there weren’t cool TV shows, but this was taking the sensibilities that were in music, stage, and the movies and bringing them to television.

Michaels continued his search for talent, listening to suggestions from network executives that he never for a moment considered, protected to some degree by Ebersol from direct interference. Some performers had to be pursued, others threw themselves at Michaels. He also relied on the many contacts he’d made as a performer and writer in Canada and on talent gleaned from improvisational groups like Chicago’s and Toronto’s Second City and the Groundlings in Los Angeles.

DAVE WILSON,
Director:

I got involved because I was editing a show called
A Salute to Sir Lew Grade
. British television decided to salute him on his eightieth birthday or whatever it was, and they did an all-star show at the New York Hilton. Gary Smith and Dwight Hemion were actually the producers, but they couldn’t stay so they left it all in my hands to get edited. And while I was editing, the production assistant on the show said she was going for an interview, there was a new show starting at NBC, some late-night thing that a Canadian kid was going to be producing. And I said, “Oh, what’s it called?” And she said, “I don’t know. I think it’s called
Saturday Night.
” I said, “Isn’t that Howard Cosell and Roone Arledge at ABC?” And she said, “Oh no, that’s the prime-time
Saturday Night
. This is the late-night
Saturday Night.
”

I called my manager and said I was interested and could he get me an interview. The funny thing about it was, I had to fight with my manager. He kept saying, “Oh, you don’t want to get involved with a late-night thing, you want to be involved with a prime-time show.” I said, “No, I don’t want to be involved with a prime-time show, this late-night show looks like it’s got some very interesting people involved.”

I got an interview in a weird way too, because Lorne wasn’t seeing anybody. I guess he had just had it with people being forced down his throat. But luckily my manager was a very good friend of Bernie Brillstein, and I had worked with Bernie on a Muppet show, “Sex and Violence with the Muppets.” And Bernie said, “I know Dave Wilson, he gets along great with Jim Henson. And if he can get along great with Jim Henson, he can get along great with anybody.” So he put in the word to Lorne that maybe I was somebody he’d be interested in seeing.

HOWARD SHORE:

I actually had to find the band. I’m an avid collector of music and of jazz and R&B, and I just called people I’d listened to on records. I got in touch with as many people as I could that I was interested in. I knew they were in New York. I started to put the band together, started to write original music for the show, themes and original music for the band itself. The Carson show was big-band music. Although I sort of grew up in that a bit in the fifties — Glenn Miller and Ellington and Basie I listened to — the big-band thing was not really my generation. My generation was more R&B and rock and roll.

PAUL SHAFFER,
Musician and Performer:

Howard Shore called me to be in his new band for
Saturday Night Live
. Howard had worked for me in a theatrical show in Toronto on saxophone. I was conducting
Godspell
, the Toronto company. We had a wonderfully talented cast. Gilda was in the cast. Also Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, Marty Short, and Dave Thomas, among others. These were the funniest people I’d ever come in contact with.

I met Lorne up in his seventeenth-floor office. For some reason I have this recollection of him looking at two pots of coffee brewing and saying, “Which one of these coffees is fresher?” And I’ll always remember that. I thought, “This is a guy who speaks in comedic pentameter.” I remember that and the fact that his skin was all broken out, because he was nervous. He was putting this show together from scratch, and he hadn’t hired anybody yet.

DAVE WILSON:

I first met with Lorne up on seventeen in his office, back in the days when he was wearing a T-shirt that said “Dracula Sucks” and jeans and a ponytail. I was there in my interview suit. I remember coming home from the interview and telling my wife, “Well, I guess I didn’t get that job,” because Lorne kept saying things like, “This is a young person’s medium” and “I’m going to go off in a new direction.” Luckily, by happenstance he also said, “For example, our first host is going to be George Carlin. Do you think you and he could understand each other?”

What he didn’t know, and what I wasn’t even sure that George would remember, is that George and I went to camp together as kids. So I said, “Of course, George Carlin and I are old friends — old,
old
friends, from when we were like little kids.” And he said, “I’m going out to the coast to meet with him, I’ll say hello for you.” I kept praying, “I hope George Carlin remembers me after this whole thing.” Turns out he did, and Lorne, I guess, was sort of impressed by that. Then I went for a second interview and got the job.

DICK EBERSOL:

We were walking through the rain one night after dinner, sort of going from awning to awning, and Chevy ran ahead. A couple hundred feet away, he goes into a pothole, does a complete ass over teakettle into this immense pothole, and comes out of this thing just soaked. And he walks back and he and Lorne look at me and say, “Now how could you say no to somebody who was crazy enough to do that?” So Chevy became a cast member. And he ended up with a magnificent loophole, since he already had a signed one-year contract as head writer. From the time the show launched, every time the performer contract was put in front of him, it never got signed.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:

I had to call Gilda Radner in Vancouver and urge her not to do the David Steinberg show, a syndicated show. It was an offer she’d been considering. I had never met Gilda. That’s how I got to know her — over the phone. I made her laugh, you know. Lorne, of course, wouldn’t make the call himself, so I had to do it. Even then, there was no direct route. Why it’s that way with him I don’t know. Fear of rejection, I guess. And clean hands — you know, it’s like, “I have nothing to do with it.”

DICK EBERSOL:

Late April, early May, Lorne started laying out the cast. One day he’s got this really bizarre guy with smoked glasses, Michael O’Donoghue, and I’m thinking, “Oh God, what have we gotten into here?”

And then one day he told me, “This girl is the funniest thing and just a super human being, you’re going to be crazy about her,” because I had okay over these people. So this thin young woman shows up with a kid who says hello and excuses himself. But the woman is Gilda. And here I am talking to this young comedic actress, and I’m absolutely mesmerized by her. So she’s the first person signed to do the show after Lorne.

DAN AYKROYD,
Cast Member:

I went through so many auditions. Live auditions, tape auditions. After the first one, I thought, “I’m not going to get hired,” and I ended up driving across country with John Candy to do Second City in Pasadena. We went from Toronto to L.A. in thirty-eight hours in a big old Mercury Cougar with me and him switching off driving. And then we got to Pasadena and I started my first week of rehearsals and Lorne called and said, “Well, come back out.” So at my own expense, I got on a fucking plane, flew back to New York, and had this other series of tape auditions. I think I did like newscaster guy, announcer guy type of thing, and if anything got me on the show it was that type of fast-rap announcer, the Ron Popeil sort of thing.

There was one audition in the summer, a live thing, a cattle call. I came down with a friend from Toronto. We had a song prepared, but then I saw all the people lined up, waiting outside in the hall there. There were a hundred people waiting to get in, and I was at the end of the line. And I thought, “Boy, it’s three o’clock now, it’s going to be seven o’clock at night when we get on. This song ain’t going to go over too well.”

So I just kind of cut through the line and busted into the room — because I knew Lorne from Canada — and walked up. “Hey, how are you boss, what’re you doing, nice to see you.” I said, “Well, I’m here,” and I did a sort of quick five-minute kind of fast rap and then got out of there. And I think they were impressed. After that audition, it was clear I had the job. I went home to Canada, got my motorcycle, and drove down into the city for the first season in ’75. I had just turned twenty-three.

PAUL SHAFFER:

Gilda and I had both worked on the
National Lampoon Radio Hour
here in New York, so we became friendly with John Belushi and Doug Kenney and this cast of characters associated with the
Lampoon
. I remember Gilda was trying to get Belushi hired for
Saturday Night Live
. A lot of people were telling Lorne he had to hire Belushi. And I remember seeing Gilda with Belushi one day, and she said, “We’re sitting shiva because Lorne won’t hire John.”

CHEVY CHASE,
Cast Member:

In fact, Belushi was an afterthought. I mean, he had told Lorne at some point that he was not enchanted with TV per se and he didn’t want to do TV. And Lorne didn’t particularly care if he saw him or didn’t see him. Then John did an audition and Lorne said, “Well, he’s funny, and we could use somebody who looks like him.”

DAN AYKROYD:

Lorne was concerned that Belushi and I would be a duo that would give him a lot of trouble. He thought, “Oh, get these guys together and their strength will be my weakness, because they’ll be rebels.” And you know, in a way, he was right. Certainly there was an energy around us.