Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (63 page)

It felt like it was a very hard match. It was like a closet full of clothes. The tops were size fourteen, the bottoms were size twelve.

ANDY BRECKMAN,
Writer:

For a while in the late eighties and into the nineties, Lorne would bring back the golden oldies, writers from the first five years, for a week or two when their schedule permitted. And it was actually great to be a guest writer. Suzanne Miller I met that way. Anne Beatts I’d met, I don’t recall if she was officially on as a writer, but these people would come back for a season or for a show or two.

In those years when there were guest writers, I didn’t sense any tension, and it was actually a great system, because everyone came in knowing the show and knowing what Tuesday nights were like and what was expected after read-through and how Thursday nights worked and how rewriting worked. Lorne had a pool of these writers that were experienced, and for me it was great, because I was starting work on features, but if you give me fifty weeks and a year off I can come up with three great sketch ideas. Doing it every week is tough, but I kicked butt doing it for two weeks. If I had three weeks in a row, I’d run out of ideas — but I could always do it for one or two.

I never noticed any resentment from the younger writers until recently. I came back with my friend Norm Macdonald, and there was tension. He brought me and Sam Simon in and the situation had changed, it was like going back to your hometown and, hey, where’s the drugstore? I didn’t recognize any faces, and we were not welcomed back. I mean, if I was a young kid writing on
Saturday Night Live
, I would love to be in a room with Sam Simon and just hear how he thinks about putting a comedy sketch together.

TIM HERLIHY:

I definitely wanted to stay, you know, in New York, and had no interest in going to Los Angeles. And I hadn’t had my fill of it like maybe Adam and some of the other guys who left at that time did. They were sick of it. Oh, maybe not sick of it — but they just had done everything they wanted to do. And I still felt like I was learning the ropes.

For writers and performers alike, whether during one of
SNL
’s upswings or downturns, the experience of working on the show was singular in their lives and, for better or worse, unforgettable. Some of them look back on it the way marines look back on the torturous training they got on Parris Island: It was hell, it was horrible, it was mentally and physically excruciating — and they are extremely happy that they went through it and would do it again in a minute.

CHRIS ROCK:

I left first. I left to go to
Living Color.
It was actually more of a machine than
SNL
.
SNL
, they had little rules, like no one was going to write a “Wayne’s World” but Mike Myers; your character was your character. Lorne might say, “I need you to write a ‘Wayne’s World,’” or, “It would be very nice if we had a Church Lady this week,” or whatever it was, Opera Man, but it still was up to you. At
In Living Color
, if you had a hit character, they didn’t care who wrote it. Once it was a hit character, it was the show’s. It was weird that way. It’s not a better way, to tell you the truth.

The good thing about me being on
Living Color
, I got things on that had nothing to do with race. On
SNL
, I either had to play a militant or a hip-hop guy. If you watch my stand-up, race is ten minutes of an hour-long show. I talk about relationships, whatever. And
Living Color
allowed me to talk about other shit. I could do sketches about, you know, funny stores I was in.

DAVID SPADE:

It was weird when I left there, because when you are around Lorne and Jim Downey and some cast members and writers that you think are really funny, you are with some truly sharp, fast people. And I didn’t realize it, but when you leave, and you do movies or TV, or whatever I’ve done since, it’s not always the case. And that kind of bummed me out. I did a few movies after, and I did a few smaller parts in them, and I thought, “Wow. I didn’t mind taking orders from guys I looked up to, but there is no one in this room that I think is that hysterical, and now they are telling me what to do.” And that started to drive me crazy.

FRED WOLF:

There’s no reason for me to kiss anybody’s ass at
Saturday Night Live
, including Lorne Michaels, who I’m talking about. But he set it up so brilliantly in that it’s like this enormous pool of talent, and they all have egos, and they have to have egos to survive the situation at
Saturday Night Live
, and it’s almost set up like sports teams — a university and a varsity. I always thought that that was a great way to do it. And that you had your varsity, your first-string guy, out there doing these sketches in the first half hour or the first half of the show. And you’d have second-stringers that were so hungry to get on the air that they would do anything they could to make that happen. So they’d write sketches for themselves and they’d write sketches for the star that they could be included in.

And it just kept everybody sort of working as hard as they could to take advantage of the place. Because one of the things I loved about
SNL
is that it’s one of the only showcases left on TV where you can actually vault into star status. Back in the days when Johnny Carson was hosting
The Tonight Show
, when he had a comic on, that meant a lot, and that comic generally would get a lot of attention in the industry. Those days of that being one of the best showcases for any comedian are gone.

Saturday Night Live
is still the main place where you could actually say, “If I did three or four years of
Saturday Night Live
, I would become a star if I’m ever going to become a star.” I think it’s the case to this day. So anyway, these guys come in and they’re so hungry to get on the air and there’s like twenty-five, you know, very talented people and egos walking around there — I mean the writing staff and the performing staff. It’s such a big mix, and I don’t think there’s ever been a show like that, really, where you just have a bunch of people out there vying to get on the air and trying to do their best once they do. It’s a remarkable place, because if you survive that process, you’re probably going to be able to survive the next ten years of your career.

DAVID MANDEL:

We were sort of trapped there. There was a bunker mentality. You know, there was the siege of putting the show up each week. And that ultimately meant you were sort of eating and drinking and, in some cases, sleeping with these people, the same group of people, and going to the bathroom with them and, you know, seeing them at their best and their worst. And so ultimately, it was very collegiate. I guess that’s the best word. It was a lot like freshman year rooming experiences, where you don’t necessarily get to pick your roommates but you ultimately have to try and get along. And then you think back and go, “Well, there were some bad times, but there were some really good parties too.”

FRED WOLF:

There are definitely internecine rivalries and fighting and all that sort of stuff. But ultimately I don’t feel that that’s a bad thing. I mean, I think it’s bad if you go in there in a fragile sort of psychological state. I don’t think you’re going to get cured by spending five years on
Saturday Night Live.
That’s what I say about Hollywood: No one goes to Hollywood for the right reasons. No one goes to Hollywood to meet their future husband or wife and buy a house and have kids. They all go to Hollywood because they’re kind of damaged and there’s something they’re searching for.

I think it’s the same with
SNL
. You have a collection of twenty-five sort of damaged people — thirteen writers, you know, twelve performers — and they’re all trying to get on the air. And the best way to do it is to be competitive and to work really hard and stay up all night and just make sure that you’re in the right sketches and trying to get writers to write for you or write for yourself and figure out how to suck up to the host and do whatever it takes to get on the air.

And the people who lost that sort of battle are sort of bitter about it, because it really is one of the greatest showcases on TV. When I was going out to
Saturday Night Live
the first time, when I got hired, I had like a couple months to prepare for it. And I ran into an old cast member who was there from the original season and, I shouldn’t tell you who it was, but she says to me, “I heard you’re going out to
Saturday Night Live.
” And I said, yeah. And she said, “I just want to tell you: That place is evil.” And you know, her experience wasn’t that great. But she was one of the few cast members that never went on to do anything beyond that show.

DAVID MANDEL:

If a guy comes out to Los Angeles and becomes a writer, let’s say he becomes a staff writer, and has never worked at a show before or anything, he can rise up, you know, from staff writer probably to like practically coexecutive producer or maybe an executive producer of a show and conceivably not ever talk much to the director, wardrobe people, lighting people, and never have been in an editing room. By the end of my three years at
Saturday Night Live
, don’t tell the union, but they used to let me call my own edit session. I could film things. I could do small film shoots. I had had three years of experience talking to Dave Wilson about how to turn my comedy notes into notes that would work for him as the director. You learn how to talk to stars. You learn how to calm egos. You learn how to play to egos. You learn that the key to everything is the wardrobe people — get on their good side and everything gets smoother. And you learn how to make sure that you can talk to the design people.

I cannot tell you how important that was — getting to a show and having just some of these skills that (a) no one expects you to have and (b) no one teaches you to have. I can remember being in my first edit session on my first episode of
Seinfeld
, and you were sort of invited into the editing room to come in and take a look. And I was able to say things and solve some problems that helped cut some time out of the episode, because we were always long on
Seinfeld.

DAVID SPADE:

It’s kind of like surgery —
Saturday Night Live
— where you’re glad afterwards, but it’s hard during. And you say you would never do it again. But it was the reason I got everything else, it’s what started me, and it was really the best thing that I could have done.

DANA CARVEY:

It’s terrifying, and I can still be scared thinking about it. It’s just when you’re sitting there at eleven-fifteen and you’re getting your makeup and, man, you’re so tired you can’t even possibly imagine having the strength to do the show. Just very, very, very stimulating. And nothing will ever be quite the same. So you do create sort of a bond, almost like war buddies, with people who were on the show with you. Kind of an instant bond.

CHRIS ROCK:

Saturday Night Live
brands you as professional. No matter what is written about me to this day,
SNL
comes up. It’s the Harvard of Comedy, you know. Everybody passed through it. You bump into people. I saw Randy Quaid the other day; he’s like a frat brother. I never met him before, but we’re frat brothers. I did a movie one time, it was an extra part, damn near. It was
Sgt. Bilko.
I had a little part, man, nothing big at all, but Dan Aykroyd let me use his trailer when he left for the day. Because I’m a frat brother. It was incredible — big-ass TV and a stereo system, a place I could relax. You know, frat brother. It will be with me — the fact that I was on the show and had any success — will be with me forever. And that’s an important thing.

FRED WOLF:

Saturday Night Live
is the rock and roll of comedy. All comedians envy rock and rollers, and the show has that mystique about it. I’ve written on a lot of TV shows and never really came close to seeing anything like it. There’s something about that show that’s phenomenal.

I don’t know of anyone who was on
Saturday Night Live
as a performer who clicked — I’m talking about the Lorne Michaels years — and then years later didn’t click in another capacity as a performer. If you’ve been there five years and you’re not able to do a movie or star in your own TV show, then I think you probably failed ultimately in your career.

LORNE MICHAELS:

Very often the least talented people are the very first to declare undying loyalty. Because the other people have more choices. To me it isn’t that people shouldn’t leave or that it’s a betrayal to leave, because I think people have an obligation to their own talent and to express it. The more artistic they are, generally the more restless they are anyway.

When people come up to me at the party at the end of their first year and say, “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, and I’m so grateful for this opportunity,” I always go, “Well, let’s talk about this in year six, because that’s when it will actually matter. Because now all the power is on my side and you have no power.” The test of character is how people behave when they’re successful and they have more power. Some people handle it really well.

On
Saturday Night Live,
guest and host are one and the same. Hundreds of celebrities, not all of them from show business, some more notorious than famous, have filled that double role. Some ingratiated themselves with the
SNL
regulars, and vice versa, while others proved uncomfortable, antagonistic, and even, in one or two cases, sexually predatory.

TIM MEADOWS: