Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (66 page)

In the same years that he was getting the most grief from network executives that he’d ever received in his career, Lorne Michaels also got an exquisitely flattering offer. Howard Stringer, the CBS president who had lured David Letterman to the network partly by buying Letterman the Ed Sullivan Theater, and the office building above it, offered to do the same for Michaels. A great admirer, Stringer thought Michaels could put CBS in the Saturday late-night business the way Letterman had put CBS in the late-weeknight business for the first time in its history. He had a mock-up photo made of the Lorne Michaels Theater to tempt him.

But Michaels, even though under siege — really a constant barrage — turned Stringer down. He still felt a loyalty, if not to NBC, then to the show he had created.

CHRIS ROCK:

Was being on the show the greatest creative experience for me? No. But it’s still the biggest thing that ever happened to me in show business. The jump from broke to famous is the biggest jump. There’s no bigger jump than that. I could win five Oscars tomorrow, it wouldn’t be a bigger jump than
nothing
to
something.

Is Lorne arrogant? Yeah — but hey, man, I know arrogant cab drivers. I know arrogant hot dog guys. This guy produces
Saturday Night Live.
He made
The Rutles
, one of my favorites. So, you know, there’s arrogance with no reason to be, and there’s arrogance with plenty of reason to be.

TIM MEADOWS:

Lorne wrote me a couple of cold openings. Lorne can still write, you know. I guess he prefers not to, but he can. I forgot that he can write. I didn’t know that he was such a great writer. But then people mention names like Lily Tomlin and the Smothers Brothers, it’s obvious that he knows what he’s doing.

JULIA SWEENEY:

I think Lorne is a withholder of praise as a strategy and also because I think he personally feels uncomfortable with it. I remember him stopping me in the hallway and just saying, “I think you’re wonderful.” It’s not like he didn’t give me anything. It was more like an aura. It’s like in the air. It makes me understand cults. Because you just wanted his approval more, and that was your number one thing. You wanted him to approve of you. And he created an atmosphere that worked with that.

LORNE MICHAELS:

My bet is that Johnny and Ed don’t hang together so much now. I could be wrong. I used to say that you get only so many hours that you can be with someone in a lifetime, and you can kind of use it all up in a very intense four or five years or you can spread it over a lifetime. Friendship really needs distance and space. Not that we’re overcrowding like rats. But the schedule is built so that after three shows in a row, when people are really getting on each other’s nerves, there’s a hiatus and you get some distance on it and you appreciate what a good place it is to work.

Early in the nineties, NBC West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer and other executives had begun taking a more aggressive interest in the show, concerned about ratings and giving Michaels lots of unsolicited advice on such matters as who was funny, who wasn’t, who should be fired, and suggesting innumerable cosmetic changes. From the beginning, Michaels had resisted NBC’s attempts to use the show as a promotional tool — balking, for example, when the network implored him to book Erik Estrada, the star of NBC’s
CHiPs,
as a host. Ohlmeyer, whom Ebersol had tried to hire to direct
Saturday Night Live
back in the formative days, thought superstars Adam Sandler and Chris Farley were among those who should go. He didn’t “get” them and told Michaels they should be fired. NBC brass said the show had grown too costly and accused Michaels, in effect, of coasting. Ohlmeyer even said he thought Michaels spent too much time on the beach at St. Bart’s, one of his repertory of longtime haunts, and not enough time streamlining the show. Michaels theorized that one reason for the executives’ greater interest in the show was that they felt emboldened by the success they had with
Friends
in prime time; network executives gave themselves credit for putting that ensemble together and then wanted to take a stab at casting
Saturday Night Live
too. An executive with delusions of creativity, like a wounded pig, is a dangerous animal.

The show suffered a run of bad luck and bad timing. Dana Carvey’s departure at the end of the 1992–93 season had been particularly crucial because he took such a large collection of characters and impressions with him; he was a whole stock company himself. Phil Hartman left a year later and gave interviews in which he made nasty cracks about the quality of the show’s writing, even though he’d thrived in sketch after sketch. Rather suddenly and concurrently, the press turned hostile, dredging up the old “Saturday Night Dead” slurs to say the show was stale and giving
SNL
a relentless trouncing even when the cast was still stellar. Michaels experienced the worst reviews of his career and found some of the attacks distressingly and discouragingly personal. One reviewer wrote that the show had been “a lifeless, humorless corpse for two years, and now it’s starting to stink.” Others were similarly hostile, if not quite so inelegant: “
Saturday Night Live
is showing its age,” “about as amusing as a state funeral,” “the show needs a kick in the pants,” “Nobody’s laughing anymore. You watch it now and sullenly stare at the television.”

In addition to all that, there was dissent from within — crabby campers who joined the cast and almost immediately developed grievances and complaints. If
Saturday Night Live
was in yet another transitional phase, these particular growing pains were agonizing, and the more injured the show looked, the more network honchos stepped up their attack, even to the point of leaking to reporters that nothing about
Saturday Night Live
was sacrosanct or untouchable — Lorne Michaels pointedly included. Michaels may have begun to look back fondly even at 1985, the low-rated year he returned as executive producer; it probably looked good compared to 1994, for him the worst year in the show’s history.

For the moment, the fashionable thing was to knock
Saturday Night Live.
The sport became so popular that even certain members of the cast joined in.

LORNE MICHAELS:

Phil Hartman was here eight years. After most shows, he and I would sit together at the party, and there was just a sort of comfort level between the two of us. We obviously loved each other. And when Phil left, the separation was a hard and difficult thing. And then he gave some interview bad-mouthing the next cast, and he didn’t like Sandler or whatever, and then he went after me. And I went — Phil? But I think it’s how people separate. You suddenly get out of bed and you go, “I didn’t like this, I didn’t like that.” There isn’t anyone here who week after week doesn’t build their case on how unfairly they’ve been treated.

I think it’s the most natural thing, because they don’t have power over their own lives. They submit a piece, and once they’ve reached some level of fame, the whole world is telling them how good they are. But around here they’re dealing with the fact that the writers didn’t write anything for them that week, the fact that the writers got up in the morning thinking about themselves and not about them, the fact that the writers sometimes look as if they have more say about things than they do, and the fact that a piece they thought went very well in dress got cut. Just being one of eight or ten or whatever, is really hard after a while. For most of us in the beginning, and I think it’s true to this day, their office is nicer than their apartment, and so just about everything in the way they live becomes an improvement once they get here. And then, I think, a lot of people come here and it’s their first job, and then within weeks they have an agent, a manager, a publicist, a lawyer, a business manager, and it validates they’re actually in show business, because they’re talking to people about their career all the time. And after a while, there’s not enough money to be made just being here. There’s more money to be made by the people who influence them. My job is to hold it together. I hate giving up people, I just do. At the same time, whenever we’ve gone through big change it’s always been kind of intoxicating, and it’s kind of what makes the show. If I were still doing the show with the seventies group, I think we’d just all be fried.

AL FRANKEN:

I remember getting a call from someone at the
Philadelphia Inquirer:
“Why doesn’t the show take chances?” And I said, “Why don’t we take chances? I think we do.” And she said, “I’m talking about risky stuff like, you know how
Letterman
does the monkey cam? Now that’s risky.” And I go, “Okay, that’s not ‘risky,’ it’s just a great idea. It’s not a
risky
idea. You put a camera on a monkey’s head and the monkey runs around the studio. It’s great, but you don’t know what the word ‘risky’ means, lady.”

JAMES DOWNEY:

I do think the network stepped all over Leno, who they microman-aged to a crazy degree. They basically tried as much as they possibly could to make his show like
Saturday Night Live
. I remember at one point they asked us, “Do you guys have a problem if Phil Hartman is like Jay’s sidekick? He can do Clinton or Gorbachev or something.” And I remember going, “Actually, yeah, we do. He’s in our cast, and if you’ve seen him three nights or even two nights, it just makes it that much less special.”

I remember being mad. I always felt that performers who weren’t stand-ups but the type who were very much dependent on writing really should run stuff by us, because they really are representing the show. The only reason Phil could walk on Leno as Bill Clinton without any explanation is that he did Clinton on
Saturday Night Live
. Once you’re in that situation, if it’s not well written or if it’s offensive or stupid or otherwise problematic, it hurts us. It’s the reason Disney doesn’t let people dress up as Mickey Mouse and do car shows and stuff.

I think Lorne did say, “No, you can’t do that.” Lorne did object to that stuff, but they were very aggressive about it. They sort of looked to the show for ideas, like we were a chop shop or something. Like, “Hey, we saw you do that thing. That’s good. Jay could do that.” I guess they felt like, “We might need to borrow some things from you guys to really nail down Jay’s emerging superiority.”

ROBERT WRIGHT:

Quite frankly, the show is always in a period where people are saying, “Oh my God, what are we going to do? The cast is not going to be here next year or the year after, what are we going to do?” I’ve gone through at least three or four of those since I’ve been here. The worst one was when Don decided he was going to take a big position on the show. I didn’t know about it in advance.

What happened is, those nonaggression pacts that Lorne had signed were wearing thin and Don was not willing to be a bystander on
SNL.
Don also didn’t travel, so he wouldn’t come to New York except under extreme circumstances, and he liked to see his producers in person. He’s a very across-the-table kind of guy. And Lorne wasn’t out there that much and wasn’t interested in having long sessions with Don about details of the show. And I think quite frankly, initially Don was less interested in the talent than he was about the fact that the show wasn’t as profitable as he had thought it would be. He thought it could be fixed rather easily, that the show should be and could be a great deal more profitable for NBC. He’d been led to believe that by some of the finance people and some of the other production people on the West Coast. There’s always a West Coast–East Coast angle on these sorts of things. He was sending sort of coded messages to Lorne about this, that, and the other thing, and Lorne was doing his own dance around those issues. It was either, “Didn’t know that, I’ll get on it,” or “He’s not available, he’s gone to Hungary, won’t be back for three months.” And I think Don just made it a point of writing down every day, “I’m going to catch him on this, we’re going to get this done.”

WARREN LITTLEFIELD:

We felt that Lorne was isolating himself, and we were looking at a new generation of writer-producer talent that had come up with a show like
Seinfeld.
They hadn’t been grown and nurtured in comedy camp. They hadn’t worked on
Diff’rent Strokes
and then done
Seinfeld.
These were original voices. We would suggest names and people to Lorne. We didn’t know how open he was. Our intent was not to take it away from Lorne. Our intent was to be able to say to Lorne, “Look, they’re out there. Their lifelong dream would be to go to New York and work on
SNL
. Maybe you’ve got to start looking at some of these other kinds of people.” Believe me, these were not prime-time situation comedy. They were alternative, unique voices who had put their toe in the water of television and hadn’t found out quite what their outlet was.

I think Don was much more focused on, “There’s so much wrong.” And so those were very, very tough sessions with Lorne. Ultimately what emerged was what we wanted to emerge: Lorne engaged more actively, more time and more energy, a more aggressive pursuit of reinventing the show. I don’t think Lorne surrendered control. I think he surrendered to a process that was painful. We were able to keep the show running and the market turned around, and it became a profitable entity again. It became an asset not only creatively but it also became a financial asset as well. Nothing wrong with that.

LORNE MICHAELS:

The network was on a certain level completely justified in saying we’re cleaning house, because you couldn’t read anywhere anybody saying, “
Saturday Night Live
is doing what it’s supposed to be doing,” or “These people are funny.” We had to let Adam Sandler go with two years on his contract, and Farley with a year. Chris Rock had gone on to
In Living Color.
Spade was allowed to come back in a sort of “David Spade moment” kind of thing. But it was basically, you know, you pull away to turn this all around and just say, “Here we are with a brand-new cast.” And Downey couldn’t be producer, Downey couldn’t be here, and even Herb Sargent was let go. It was just, everybody was let go.