Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (7 page)

He takes the phone book of jokes, opens it, reads the first joke, and goes, “Uh huh.” And closes it. And he says, “How much money do you need to live?” I said, “Well, I’m making $2.75 an hour at the deli — match it.” So he said to tell him more about myself. He figured before he’d commit to that kind of money, he wanted to know what he was buying. I said, well, Woody Allen’s my idol, I love
Monty Python
, and maybe my career will go like Albert Brooks’s — you know, short films and then bigger ones. “But,” I said, “if there’s one fucking mime on the show, I’m outta there.” And he gives me the job.

The joke that I had as the number one joke in this compilation of jokes was, just to show you how long ago this was — because of the reference in it — was that the post office was about to issue a stamp commemorating prostitution in the United States. It’s a ten-cent stamp, but if you want to lick it, it’s a quarter.

We even did it on the show. I remember we were short on jokes. Chevy might have done it. Yeah, I think he did. I think that was my one contribution to the first show, the one that George Carlin hosted.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

I read Alan Zweibel’s book of one-liners that came to the Marmont and discussed it with Lorne. I remember talking a lot about Chevy as a writer. Marilyn Miller we knew from Lily Tomlin. Anne Beatts and Michael O’Donoghue were celebrities, especially O’Donoghue, who was, you know, the darling of the
Lampoon
, so they came presold. O’Donoghue had a lot of charisma and he was very dark. He was an exciting character in his subversiveness. Al Franken and Tom Davis were a two-for-one kind of bargain basement. They were just starting and anxious to get into the business — you know, let’s give them a tryout. I was definitely in the conversations about all that stuff.

ANNE BEATTS:

I truly think you can say that without Michael O’Donoghue, there wouldn’t have been a
Saturday Night Live
, and I think it’s important to remember that. I think Lorne would probably be generous enough to acknowledge that. Because I always said Michael was Cardinal Richelieu. He wasn’t very good at being the king. He was much better at being either the person plotting revolution or the power behind the throne, telling the king what to do and think. I’m not saying he was manipulating Lorne. It doesn’t always have to be about manipulation. It could be about actual helpful guidance.

AL FRANKEN,
Writer:

Tom Davis and I had known each other since high school in Minnesota. In 1974 we were a comedy team out in L.A. We were the only writers hired by Lorne who he didn’t meet. We always thought that if he had met us, we wouldn’t have gotten the job. We weren’t making money at the time, and the only variety shows around were Johnny Carson’s — and we’re not joke writers, so we couldn’t do that — and Carol Burnett’s, which was a good show but not our territory. Oh, and I think
Sonny and Cher
was on, which was a piece of shit.

Actually, we wrote a perfect submission for
Saturday Night Live
, a package of things we’d like to see on TV — a news parody, commercial parody, and a couple sketches. Basically from that, we were hired. We heard that Dick Ebersol wanted to hire a team from New York instead of us so he could save on the airfare, but Lorne insisted on us.

Michaels was aghast at the condition of NBC’s historic Studio 8H, which despite its noble traditions was technically primitive and had been allowed to deteriorate. He didn’t think it had hosted a weekly live TV show since
Your Hit Parade
succumbed to rock and roll and left NBC in 1958.

Meanwhile, NBC brass were consumed with nervousness about the content of the show — about giving ninety minutes of network time a week to Lorne Michaels and his left-wing loonies. On the first show, with sometimes-racy comic George Carlin hosting, the network planned to use a six-second delay so that anything unexpected and obscene could be edited out by an observer from the Department of Standards and Practices (the censor), who would theoretically flip a switch in the control room and bleep the offending material before it went out naked onto the American airwaves. Over the coming months and years, various hosts or musical acts would make NBC executives more nervous than usual, and the notion of making the show not quite precisely literally live kept coming up.

JANE CURTIN:

NBC sent me out on a limited publicity tour weeks before we went on the air. I didn’t really know what the show was going to be like, but I was the only one in the cast that they weren’t afraid of. They knew I wouldn’t throw my food.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:

In the first six months, Lorne threatened not to come in to work a lot. He had no way of dealing with these network people. Because Lorne had a vision, and they didn’t understand his vision. This was a new show at that time. He made them rebuild the goddamn studio, and they didn’t understand that. And he made them get great sound in the studio because they were going to have rock acts, and they didn’t understand that.

HOWARD SHORE:

What we were going to be doing was really quite technically complicated, but the studio hadn’t been kept up to the standards of broadcasting. It was stuck in the late fifties. They hadn’t refitted the technology of it over the years. I remember going for that first tour of the studio, and they had game show sets in there and they were doing very low-tech productions in there because it didn’t have any of the technology that was really needed to do a live broadcast.

I remember feeling like you were still in Toscanini’s studio. It’s incredible to think that in the 1950s NBC, this great American broadcast network, hired an Italian conductor and gave him his own orchestra, the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and his own studio and his own elevator for the maestro to get up to the eighth floor. When I asked for a music stand to put my scores on, an old stagehand went back into props and brought out Toscanini’s music stand — this huge, black, ornate, five-foot-high carved wooden monstrosity. It came up to about my chin. And they said, “You can put your scores on that.” That was the only thing of Toscanini’s I’d actually seen. It was wonderful. You felt the history of the place.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:

When Lorne told NBC they had to spend like three hundred grand to rebuild that studio, they nearly had a breakdown.

BARBARA GALLAGHER:

Dick Ebersol was really the buffer. He’d worked very hard to get the show on the air. And the NBC guys all thought we were from Mars. The bureaucracy at NBC was terrible. They thought we were a joke at the beginning. Trying to get through the red tape really took a lot of time. We couldn’t even get stationery with the show’s name printed on it. They clearly thought we were the Lizard People walking around. They had no faith in us at all.

I know Herb Schlosser must have had some faith, though, because Dick really ran interference for him. Still, we couldn’t get anything we needed. It was pulling teeth to get an ounce of money. You get nickel-and-dimed to death, and you build up such an animosity. The network really irked Lorne at the beginning, big-time.

CRAIG KELLEM,
Associate Producer:

He was in a constant battle with the network as it pertained to the economics, particularly about the set. Lorne wanted the set to be like almost this architectural prototype. The argument was, “Hey, you can’t even see that on camera,” and Lorne’s attitude was, “Yes, but I want it. I want it anyway.”

EUGENE LEE:

They hired Dave Wilson to be the director. He’d done a lot of TV. Dave was a nice man, but he had very strong opinions about things and said them. And there was a lot of incredible feuding about the layout of the studio. All I remember is, we worked on it and worked on it. Dave and I fought tooth and nail about how it would be laid out. I laid it out my way — longways. There was a lot of muttering about how there wouldn’t be enough space. I said, “The cameras are on wheels, let the cameras roll to the scenery and not the other way.”

One day just out of the blue, Lorne comes by and says, “Hey, we’ve got to go upstairs.” And I went with him, and we took the model of the set up to whoever — I think it was Herb Schlosser. We laid it on the coffee table. And Lorne hadn’t said much about any of this. But he explained it perfectly to Schlosser. He was like brilliant! I mean really, no kidding. I was knocked out. He said, “This thing goes here, and the camera moves here, and it all stretches around this great big environment.” And after that, money didn’t seem to be a problem.

DAVE WILSON:

The idea of having part of the audience sitting around home base was not that new. I’m sure that kind of thing had been done many times. But the idea of putting an audience in front of those side stages was a little different. It worked well because it gave performers more of an intimate feeling of audience, that they were performing not just for cameras but for a live audience.

HOWARD SHORE:

It’s true — there is no theme song for
Saturday Night Live
in the traditional sense. This is inherent in the nature of the show. I wanted the theme music for the show to have an improvisational feel, like the show itself, and I wanted it to grow and change from year to year. And that’s why when I listen to the show now after twenty-five, twenty-six years, it still sounds fresh to me and sort of classic, and it wouldn’t have if you kept hearing the same hummable melody over and over. Because the nature of the music on the show was interplay between the ten musicians, which is completely different than what you have in a big band or the Carson sound, which is very formalized arrangements written very specifically, and everybody plays what is written on the page. So with the ten musicians I wanted to create interplay like jazz musicians have amongst themselves, and R&B musicians.

It’s the same thing as the cast. You have to think of the musicians in the band the same as you think of the cast and how they would play off each other and kind of riff off each other. That was the same feeling that I wanted to create in the music. So it had to have an improvisational nature. The saxophone was just a thing that I loved, and I am a saxophone player, so it was inherent in my soul that it be the predominant voice. Instead of a band playing a piece with a melody, it was an improvisation by a great blues soloist.

On September 17, 1975, only a few weeks before the first live broadcast of what was then called
NBC’s Saturday Night,
Lorne Michaels and several of his cast members got together in a rented midtown studio for forty-five minutes of “screen tests” to see how the performers looked on-camera.

Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, Garrett Morris, Bill Murray, token older actor George Coe, John Belushi, guest Andy Kaufman, and musical director Howard Shore took turns before the camera, most of them improvising material or summoning up routines they’d done in stage shows like the National Lampoon’s or at comedy clubs in the United States and Canada.

The tape is a hot underground item but has never been shown on network television, though Michaels considered using parts of it in the fifteenth- and twenty-fifth-anniversary specials. What is Bill Murray doing there? Michaels had hoped to sign him for that first crop of Not Ready for Prime Time Players, but at nearly the last minute he learned from NBC bean counters that the budget would not allow him to hire Murray, at least not now. He instead became a member of the repertory company known as the Prime Time Players on Howard Cosell’s short-lived ABC Saturday-night variety show.

The tape shows the young performers at the tender and relatively innocent moment before they burst onto the American scene. Aykroyd, leading off, goes through a series of wacky riffs, starting with his recitation of mangled lyrics from the song “Till There Was You” from
The Music Man
: “‘There were birds in the sky, but I never sore
[sic]
them winging, till there was you.’ And ‘you,’ of course, is the Mashimilov UT-1 rocket that Russia has just developed.” In a Walter Cronkite voice he reports on “troop movements across the demilitarized zone into North Korea today,” then does a mock commercial for “Lloyd Manganaro Deltoid Spray… made from the extracted liquid from the spleens of perfumed sheep.” Then he turns into a Louisiana swamp farmer who claims to have been briefly abducted by aliens in business suits: “Now you can believe it if you want to or you can just say that I’m making up this story, but to me it was very, very important, because it killed all the crabs in the area, and my livelihood is threatened, and I’d like somebody to do something about it.” Then he assumes the voice of a man narrating a documentary and talks about “shale and the influence of shale on the topography of the world and how shale was superimposed and brought down by the glacial formations.” This evolves into a discussion of glaciers, which ends with, “We have a lot of things to thank the glacier for — but who do we write to?”

To offscreen director Dave Wilson in the control booth, Aykroyd asks obligingly, “More characters? More accents? Cleaner look?” But he’s dismissed to be replaced in front of the camera by Laraine Newman, who instantly becomes a chirpy and perky airline attendant: “Hi, my name is Sherry and I was made to fly…. When I was first thinking about becoming a stewardess, all my friends were really bugging me. They were coming up to me and saying things like, ‘Well, God, Sherry, why do you want to be a stewardess,’ you know? And I had to just sit down with myself and get super-reflective and ask myself, ‘Well, gosh, Sherry, why do you want to be a stewardess,’ you know? And I really realized that it’s because I love people. I really do. I love to serve ’em and try to help ’em fall asleep sitting up, you know?