Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (50 page)

TOM HANKS:

Hosting the first time is a very, very milli-close second to the first time you appear on the Johnny Carson show. You’re that combination of absolutely petrified but also kind of dizzy. The whirlwind preparation that goes into that first week, if you’ve never done it before, is kind of mesmerizing. It honestly looks as though nothing is happening at first. You know, you’re the host and you’re just kind of escorted around and around and around, and you’re getting your picture taken, you’re getting fitted for something, and people come up to you and pitch ideas that you might or might not understand. And then, on Wednesday, you have that big long read-through that, for some reason, starts a full hour and a half late and then goes for about three hours and then, from that, they cull all these things. You read twenty-five, thirty, forty, fifty, six hundred pieces. I can’t even remember. Then you go into this room and they have them all up there on cards posted to a bulletin board, and the next thing you know, you decide what’s going to be on the show. So that by the time you get through that — that moment which, by the way, is after the full dress rehearsal — you’ve sort of done it already, but now you know that it’s live. I mean, it’s horrifying. And yet it’s the most exhilarating thing, like being strapped inside of a huge explosive rocket ship and you’re waiting for the countdown to go and it just might blow you to kingdom come or it might take you to the moon.

The thing that happens the first time you do the show is you’re just completely swept away with the history of the place. I think there’s still stuff tacked up onto bulletin boards that hasn’t moved in seventeen years or so. So you’re reading these things that have been up forever in hallways lined with all those photographs. But when you go down and you’re actually on in Studio 8H, you’re thinking you sort of recognize this place, but you can’t believe it’s as small or as crowded or as dark as it is, and that the band is actually playing as loud as it is.

The first time I did it, it was just the beginning of the Christmas season, so it was December and they were lighting the Christmas tree there in Rockefeller Center. And the offices of
Saturday Night Live
were like one extremely big and confusing family. Everybody who had kids brought them in, and everybody was staring out the windows of the seventeenth floor looking down at the big tree and watching it all on TV at the same time.

The show was, of course, a history of entrances and exits. Sometimes the entrance was momentous and the exit ignoble, sometimes the exits were en masse. Many of the show’s stars left only to return sporadically in cameo roles; they were like alumni revisiting the campus of their youth. No one ever actually quit on the air, while the show was actually in progress — or, not quite. Damon Wayans came close, with one of the most memorable exits in the annals of exiting.

ANDY BRECKMAN:

I wrote a sketch for Jon Lovitz called “Mr. Monopoly.” The idea was he was a lawyer. And you know the character from the Monopoly board, the character that they draw on the Monopoly game, the little man with the hat? The idea for the sketch was Jon Lovitz was that man, Mr. Monopoly, and he was a very successful lawyer because he had all these “get out of jail free” cards. His clients would go to jail and he would come in with these cards and the cops would hate him: “Damn you, Mr. Monopoly!” And that was the idea for the sketch. And Lovitz was very funny. And Damon Wayans I wrote as a cop who had one line. He would say, “Hey Larry, your lawyer is here to see you.” That was it.

Dress rehearsal went fine. I didn’t know any of the political bull-shit that was going on, but I did know Damon had been angry about various things, including something apparently that was cut at dress rehearsal, and he was furious and he decided between dress and air he was going to quit
Saturday Night Live
right then and there, he was fed up. And this is how he quit. During the live show, he made his entrance in the sketch not as a cop but as his flamboyant queen gay character that he later did on
In Living Color.
He came in prancing and delivered “Your lawyer’s here to see you” very swishy. He totally derailed the sketch, derailed the sketch completely. The audience was completely thrown: What’s a gay cop doing in there? Is it about the cop or is it about Lovitz? It was just stunning. I was with Lorne watching, and Lorne turned to me and said, “That’s it. I’ve got to fire him.” Lorne had no choice. Damon had sabotaged a sketch live on-air and Lorne fired him that night, which is what I think Damon wanted anyway.

I was just sitting in the corner, thinking, “I’m sorry. I supplied the bullets.” And then I was going to disappear at one o’clock forever. I remember Tom Davis, who I guess was also a guest writer or was just hanging out there, saying, “I’ll bet anyone in this room that within three years, we will all be standing in line to see a Damon Wayans movie. This is not the end of his career.” And he was right. That was the start of his career.

DAMON WAYANS:

What was I supposed to do? I was supposed to just be a cop. But I was frustrated, because I think Lorne Michaels thought he was protecting me by not putting me out there, letting me do my thing. So I started walking around wearing dark shades. When they asked me what was wrong, I said, “It’s too white in here, it hurts my eyes.” I was really on the verge of a nervous breakdown, or just taking a gun and killing everybody. The night in question, the “Mr. Monopoly” sketch, I didn’t think the sketch was that funny. I thought it was a one-joke premise. I was supposed to play a cop and we were doing a takeoff on like
Miami Vice
— this was the hot show at the time — and I was supposed to be Tubbs and Randy Quaid was playing the other guy. So between dress and air, they pushed that button. I wore a suit, so I thought, “At least I’ll look good in the sketch.” And then between dress and air Lorne Michaels comes to me and goes, “The sketch is not working. You look like a pimp.” It was because of me the sketch wasn’t working! He wanted me to wear a uniform.

So I just got angry. Because I didn’t think the sketch was funny. I had a bunch of straight-man lines. It was the fact that Lorne blamed me for the sketch not being funny when I had told him before that it was a one-joke premise. The guy’s waiting to get out of jail and Mr. Monopoly comes in and gives him a “get out of jail free” card — that was the big joke. It’s like twelve minutes until Mr. Monopoly finally walks in. And then they say the reason it wasn’t working was that I looked like a pimp at dress rehearsal. And I just said, “Fuck it.”

I was like, okay, I’ll be a cop in uniform but I’m going to find a character. And it would’ve been funny if I had not done it with such anger. I was so angry, I basically wanted them to fire me. I wanted to quit, but I thought they would sue me. It was the Brillstein-Grey management company trying to manage everything at one time as opposed to getting on with my needs. They were representing Lorne. Lorne was the big dog.

LORNE MICHAELS:

Damon broke the big rule. I went berserk. The whole business of trust when you’re in an ensemble — the whole deal with the network, in my mind, is that we operate on the level of trust. We have live air, we’re not just going to go up there and say, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.” And I think Damon, in his defense, he didn’t get a big enough laugh with what he was doing. And he went back to a character that he’d done in
Beverly Hills Cop.

DAMON WAYANS:

I’d never seen Lorne lose his cool. He had always been very logical and reasonable and we could talk about anything. But he came backstage and he was like, “Get the fuck out of here, who the fuck, what the fuck” — it was like talking to friends up in Harlem. He was cussing. He was like, “John Belushi never did anything like that.” “You’ll never work in show business” — he said that one to me. Or never work again in New York, whatever.

I didn’t even say good-bye. I went home, gladly. It was the same management, so they were basically telling me, “You fucked up, this is it, word is going to spread,” and all that. In hindsight I understand that, but I was a young kid. I didn’t understand politics or how tough it was for Lorne Michaels coming back for his first year and how he wanted to be right and be the guru of comedy. I didn’t understand any of that. All I understood was I wasn’t funny and they wanted me to hold a spear.

TERRY SWEENEY:

I think the writers came to think of me as just the gay guy. They’d go like, “Oh well, he’s a hilarious gay guy, so if we want a gay guy, we’ll just put him in this sketch where the guy can be really effeminate — the guy’s
really
gay. But if it’s a regular role, let’s give it to Jon Lovitz or Randy Quaid” — who were very talented, but it’s just a question where I would feel like, “Hey, I can do this too.” So I think I felt the brunt of some prejudice.

Later on, I came to realize — as one matures, one realizes it’s not always the homophobia; it’s a lot of times just that’s not your world. If you’re straight, you’re thinking about a straight guy and a husband, and it’s not — it’s just not something you’re thinking about. You think that you find a gay guy over there, and a straight guy’s over here, and it doesn’t occur to people that they’re ever in the same place.

CAROL LEIFER:

I really don’t think during the season Lorne said much of anything to me. I never requested to speak with him by myself. I’m different now; if I’m getting the cold shoulder from somebody — at that time I’d stay out of your way — but now I’d want to investigate more to see how I could help the situation.

I do remember a very valuable Lorne lesson that I still use today. I remember him really clearly in one meeting saying he always hated the funny-name joke, you know, when a character had a funny name, like a punny name. That kind of thing. It’s such an indicator of an amateur.

DAMON WAYANS:

I was so glad to be off the show. I was so relieved. I finally felt like I lived on the edge. My problem with that show is, and I used to say it all the time, we’re so rehearsed, where’s the thrill of being on live? I had an improv background, hung out with Robert Townsend and my brother and Eddie Murphy. We’d go onstage and play around, and I didn’t feel we were doing that on
SNL
. And the group of actors that they had — great actors, but they weren’t improvisational actors. You say a different line during rehearsals and they go, “Cut!” What about playing around? So when I got fired, I was thrilled, I was relieved, I had knots in my stomach, I was angry, and I would cry when I got home.

But you know, to Lorne’s credit, he’s never spoken bad of me. I think in his mind he respected me or something. He’s actually given recommendations for me in films and stuff like that. And that was right after this happened.

TERRY SWEENEY:

I’m really happy. I’m still with my lover that I was with back then, who was a writer on the show. I have a great personal life and I actually was a writer too, you know. I went back to television writing and movie writing, and so I’ve made money and done well, so I’m really actually happy I had the experience. The training is invaluable and I’ve used it, you know. I’ve just used it in everything I’ve ever done since then.

DAMON WAYANS:

I was brought back for the last show of the season. There’s a sick side of Lorne Michaels; he loves the rebel. Once he got over his own ego — what I did on the show that time was basically a “fuck you” move — he sat back and said, “Well, the guy’s talented. I just don’t think he’s ready to be a Prime Time Player.”

It was great except Dudley Moore was the host and I was doing this joke about — I was born with a clubfoot, and so I used to do this whole routine about when I was young, how I used to wear orthopedic shoes and I had a shoe with like a five-inch heel and I used to walk with a limp. And I did me walking with the limp and said people that knew me thought I was cool. Thank God I was in the ghetto. I did this thing about how I wasn’t a fighter at the time, I was just a very passive kid, and I said you don’t find many handicapped bullies, and I did, you know, “Imagine some crippled dude coming up to you, ‘Gimme your lunch money!’”

But Dudley Moore walked with a limp too. When I started doing the guy walking with the limp, he walked over to Lorne and like, “You’re not going to let him do it?” So Lorne also killed that bit. But then at the end, he let me do it. Dudley saw it at dress rehearsal. I was looking at Lorne like, “You know this is a live show and I’m going to do shit anyway.” Dudley was just like, “I can’t go on. My foot.”

I didn’t do it to mess with Dudley. It was in my stand-up, a really funny bit I used to do. But it was his own insecurity. The reason I came out with the bit was the same reason, the feeling that people were watching. It was like, even if I don’t do the joke, don’t people look at that boot on your foot and go, “Damn, that’s big”?

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:

Brandon calls me up in April and says, “I’m going to cancel
Saturday Night Live.
” And by then, I have to admit, I was happy to hear it — you know, rather than see it suffer. I wasn’t in love with the persona of
Saturday Night Live
the way Lorne was.

So I go home that night and I said to my wife at the time, “Deb, they’re going to cancel the show.” She said, “You can’t let them bring Lorne back and then cancel it.” She got offended. And I said, “You know, sometimes you’ve got to hear it from someone else.” I call Brandon back and said no way, you’ve got to give him one more year. Brandon said to have Lorne come out, which he did. We all met, and that’s how it stayed on the air. It was that close, it was canceled. My wife knew nothing about show business, but she liked Lorne. She said you can’t let them do that, bring him back and then cancel him, that’s terrible. And she was right. Common sense.

WARREN LITTLEFIELD,
NBC Executive: