Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (53 page)

Many writers got their starts, or their first major professional gigs, on
Saturday Night Live
and then went on to write sitcoms or movies, hits and flops. The show truly was a talent processing plant and the most influential comedy academy in TV history. Among those who went through the process was a young, tall Irish American with skin as fair as Snow White’s.

CONAN O’BRIEN,
Writer:

I was always a nervous
Saturday Night Live
writer. I found being a writer on
Saturday Night Live
more nerve-wracking than being the host of
Late Night
and replacing Letterman.

GREG DANIELS,
Writer:

Conan O’Brien and I were a writing team at one point on this HBO show called
Not Necessarily the News.
And we did a packet of material for
Saturday Night Live
and then we didn’t really hear anything for about a year. And in the intervening time we had gone on to a different show and then that show had failed.

We had an interview with Lorne. I remember when we went into the interview, he offered us wine and we said no and then he asked us some question, like, “How do I know you’ll succeed here at the show?” And we said, “You don’t, we might not.” So we left the interview and Jim Downey, who was the guy that had brought us in, came up to us and said, “How can you answer questions like that? It was terrible.” Eventually, I don’t know why, we ended up getting the job. I think that they had said about ten minutes later that it was okay.

This was more like big-time showbiz stuff, and we didn’t really know the rules of that kind of behavior. So we were still kind of rubes. I think we should’ve accepted the wine at least.

CONAN O’BRIEN:

Lorne kind of throws you into the pool. I remember, very early on, him bringing me into a room and — not that my view of him has changed at all — but when I was twenty-six years old, which I was then, and you put a gun to my head and said, “Who’s the funniest person ever in the world?” I would probably say Woody Allen, Steve Martin, Peter Sellers, one of those three. But definitely Steve Martin was like a towering figure in my comic worldview. And I remember Lorne pulling me into a room early on. Like, “Conan, what do you think? Steve and I are trying to figure out this thing. What do you think?” He’s not afraid to just throw you in there with those people. And he’s not afraid like, “I don’t know, this kid might embarrass me,” or “This kid might be an idiot.” He’s not afraid to go, “Let’s get Conan in here and maybe he’ll have an idea.”

GREG DANIELS:

Carl Weathers was the host the first week we got there. And he’d just been doing this movie,
Action Jackson.
And so our introduction to everybody was they had a screening of
Action Jackson
and we went and all the cast sat in the back and made cracks. I remember Kevin Nealon being very funny, sitting in the back.

It was intimidating, because we were the new guys and we were younger than most of the writers. And we did this thing where we’d close the door and go, “Okay, on three, we’re going to laugh like crazy.” Then — one, two, three,
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!
And people would hear out in the hall and they’d come by and say, “You got something good?” We’d go, “Oh yeah, oh yeah.” So that kept our spirits up.

CONAN O’BRIEN:

I think my favorite host, other than like a Steve Martin, is Tom Hanks. I remember he’d stay up all night and he’d write with you. I mean, literally there was the walk-through that some hosts did where they clearly were just being paraded around and pretending to listen to your ideas but they just couldn’t wait to get back to the hotel room and let these idiots hash it out. But Tom Hanks would actually roll up his sleeves. Sometimes you’d pass him and it’s like four in the morning, and he’s in the corner scribbling away on something, just constantly trying to make it better. That’s what always impressed me, people who looked upon it as, “I can make this better right up until the moment we go on the air.”

A really difficult guy was George Steinbrenner. There was some idea that Lorne wanted him to do and he sent Odenkirk and me in there to talk to him. So Odenkirk and I go into this room and it’s George Steinbrenner. He’s got like the giant World Series rings and he’s in a bad mood. He had just been banned from ever setting foot in Yankee Stadium, so he was really gruff. So these two nerds come in the room. I remember, like, “Mr. Steinbrenner, we just think, you know, this sketch is funny,” and, “Yeah, yeah, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t think I’m going to do that sketch.” And we were like not taking no for an answer. And he just wheeled on us. He was like, “Hey, not happening! Out!” And he just threw us out of the room.

GREG DANIELS:

I met my wife, because she was one of Lorne’s assistants, at the first party there. She was very briefly a Lornette and then she moved over and became a development exec at Broadway Video. So Lorne was very happy in kind of a weird way that we had this office romance. And I don’t remember exactly when he realized it was going on, but he was saying that there hadn’t been a real good office romance since Gilda Radner and G. E. Smith.

CONAN O’BRIEN:

I think one of the reasons
Saturday Night Live
has been so successful is that it’s almost brutally unsentimental about its past. It just keeps trying to find who’s the next person. Let’s get him in here. What’s the new thing? Let’s do it. You always get the sense that the show is almost like a shark that’s constantly on a mission to find what’s new, what’s hot, what are people into now? And chomp its teeth into it.

GREG DANIELS:

I remember one time Conan and I had a sketch that was supposed to be the cold opening and it was cut between the dress and the air. And we were kind of moping around, and then about twelve-fifteen they realized that the show was running long and they didn’t have time for this other big sketch. So they came to us and said, all right, your sketch is back in. And we were so excited and then we realized that it ended with “Live from New York, it’s
Saturday Night!
” from being the cold opening. And so we ran down there and the music was on, the musical guest was playing, and then right after the musical guest the sketch was going to start. And we ran down to the cue cards and we wrote a new ending directly onto the cue cards. And basically it was like from
Broadcast News
, we just kind of gave the cue card to the cue card guy and he ran out and the music ended and they started the sketch. But it was really one of the most exciting showbiz experiences I ever had.

CONAN O’BRIEN:

It definitely for me has a “my favorite year” quality to it. I’ll never be that young and naive again. There’s something about it; it’s like going off to war.
Saturday Night Live
tends to get you when you’re real young, you haven’t seen a lot, and it throws you into this world of lots of pressure, big-name stars, crazy situations — and you can’t get that combination again.

No matter what happens to me now — I’ve just been through so much and I am still thrilled by many things that happened in my career — when I think back to that big Art Deco lobby and the first time being in 30 Rockefeller Center and the first time you hear that “Live from New York, it’s
Saturday Night
,” and you’re standing there and your sketch is about to come up and your heart’s going, I can see why it affects people so much.

The magic to me is, it’s show business. It’s ostrich costumes, people dressed as Civil War soldiers smoking cigarettes out in the hall, dance numbers. I want to be in show business. I want there to be a crowd. I want there to be high highs and low lows. That’s supposed to be what it’s all about, and
Saturday Night Live
— it’s not going to get more intense than that.

KEVIN NEALON:

I didn’t know Dennis Miller was leaving, and then Dennis left, and Lorne offered the “Update” spot to me. I said, “Let me think about it over the weekend.” I was kidding. Because, you know, it had always been something I felt that I could do pretty well.

I’d been on the show for I think five years at that point, and so it was a welcome change, a different kind of job description. But it wasn’t going to work well, and it took me more out of the sketches and into writing for myself. It was just more of a workload. Tuesday night was rewrite and then Wednesday is the table read and then Thursday I started reading like five or six different newspapers every day.

My approach to it was more like Chevy Chase — you know, keep it dry and more of a straight newscaster, and as far as the audience laughing, I think everybody wants the audience to laugh, but if
you
think it’s funny yourself — even if it doesn’t get a laugh at dress — you leave it in there because to people at home it’s funny. I’m not from the school of like broad comedy, throw-it-in-your-face stuff. I think the broadest thing I ever did was “Hans and Franz.” You know, mine is just put it on the plate; if they want it, they’ll take it.

Many
SNL
cast members were discovered while working with a satirical improv group called the Groundlings. In the late eighties, one of the greatest Groundlings of all joined the cast: Phil Hartman, the man of a thousand characters — or so. In his eight seasons on the show, he played virtually every type, impersonated innumerable celebrities, and endeared himself to Michaels with his unflappable versatility.

JON LOVITZ:

I’ll tell you a story about Phil. You know, we do that sketch Jim Downey wrote, “Tarzan, Tonto, and Frankenstein.” So they did it once where it was like a talk show and Nora Dunn was doing the “Pat Stevens Show” with Tarzan, Tonto, and Frankenstein. And Phil is Frankenstein and all of a sudden he starts laughing, right, like he just completely broke up — ha, ha, you know, he laughed out loud. And then he stopped.

And then about fifteen seconds later, he just completely lost it. So then of course we all started laughing, because he’s just losing it. And I’m thinking, “What is he doing? We’re on live television. It’s not the Groundlings.” And he’s just laughing. And so I had like my face in my arms, trying to hide it, trying not to laugh, but I was laughing, of course. I was just laughing hysterically. I mean, he just completely lost it. And it was just hysterically laughing. So afterward I asked him, I said, “What happened? What was so funny?” So he said, well, he was thinking of himself sitting there as Frankenstein and something happened, and thinking about how silly the sketch was, you know, just the idea of it made him laugh all of a sudden. So he started laughing. And then he stopped, right? And then, he said, he was sitting there thinking how funny it must have looked to see Frankenstein laugh like that. And then that just made him like lose it.

VICTORIA JACKSON:

I was married. Phil was married. Lovitz was single. Dana was married. Nora was married. Dennis Miller was married the second half, and no, I never got the impression they were having a wild time. I think our job took up like everything — like 200 percent of our being. And I don’t know, maybe they were having fun. I think the Belushi era was way different than ours, because in ours, nobody was doing — well, okay, I know one person who was doing drugs. But I mean, in our era, it was the “Just Say No” thing, and our cast was not full of drugs or drinking or anything.

JACK HANDEY:

Phil was a guy that I really loved to write for. I wrote so many pieces for him — like “Frozen Caveman Lawyer.” I think that the show tended to become more performance-oriented than idea-oriented. And maybe that annoyed Phil.

JOE PISCOPO,
Cast Member:

The Sinatra family was not happy with the impression Phil was doing at all, again rest his soul. To this day I’ll go out and do these Sinatra tributes with a seventeen-piece band — which is a riot, by the way. It’s all tongue-in-cheek, because they know me from the
SNL
thing. But I always check with Tina and the family to make sure it’s okay. When we did the Brisk Lipton Iced Tea campaign, they had me do the voice.

There was a meanness there to the Hartman thing. That was Lorne too, man. And I think there’s some kind of law: Don’t even attempt to do Sinatra unless you’re Italian.

BOB ODENKIRK:

Phil Hartman was amazing. He just delivered every time. He had amazing timing and great power and just — I don’t know what to say about Phil, because he was a very genial guy and he seemed to have a great work ethic. He was an older guy when he got the show, which might have helped him, you know, be more of a steady personality while he did it. But when I got there, he’d been on the show I think for like two years or maybe three, and he just came in every day and it was like an office job for him, and he was very good at it. I don’t think he ever again got caught up in the whole stay-up-all-night routine or worrying about status all the time. He was more sure of himself and he just came in, did his work, and churned out the sketches, and if they didn’t get on, he didn’t get too upset — he just delivered. And he seemed to have a good time doing it.

JAN HOOKS:

We were doing “Beauty and the Beast” with Demi Moore and Jon Lovitz, a sketch about the two beasts, you know, going out on a blind date. Phil and I were in the backseat of a car making out; he was the Beast, I was the Beauty. I just have to tell you this about Phil. At the end of it, they cut to the commercial, and Phil had to rush off and be, you know, whoever. But first Phil said to me, “You gave me a huge boner. Oh God. I’ve got to run!” So there’s like this mountain of manhood, and he had to go on and, you know, make a quick change with a big old boner.