Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (76 page)

ROBERT WRIGHT:

Lorne and I had a couple of issues one time with Smigel on one of his pieces, which I think neither Lorne nor I thought was funny. It was just kind of a GE shot without any point to it. If it had been funnier — there was one done on Jack Welch that was a little funnier that we did run. We didn’t stop it. The other one ran, but I think it didn’t get repeated. It seemed like it was too pointed without being funny.

ROBERT SMIGEL,
Writer:

I do raunchy and sometimes nasty stuff, I guess, and I get a lot of attention because Lorne puts my name on the cartoon — but it’s embarrassing because there’s a million funny people here. I have mixed feelings, because sketch writers in general don’t get enough credit. It’s a thankless position. You get pretty well paid if you hang out for a while, but there are guys here who are just brilliant that I’ve worked with and people don’t know who they are. One great thing about my cartoons is that people know I wrote them. It’s a great thing right there for people to know what you wrote specifically. On this kind of show you’re just at the end of a long crawl, and sometimes they don’t even have time to run the crawl. I mean, a guy writes one play and everybody knows who he is, even if it’s a lousy play, but you can write a hundred great sketches and still be anonymous. I feel lucky to have found a venue that was interesting where I could get this kind of freedom and a little bit of attention.

TOM DAVIS,
Writer:

Every once in a while, I’ll show up and be a guest writer on a show if the coffers are getting low out here. Lorne will let me come back and appear on the show and make some money right away. It’s not because they need me or that Lorne particularly was going, “Jeez, I wish Tom Davis would come back to the business.” Although the cast and the writers all tell me that they’re glad to see me, and I believe them.

Things aren’t going well, but I’m a happy guy. I’ve been separated from my wife for just about three years now. She’s still my best friend and I speak to her on a daily basis. My ex-wife is a veterinarian, a really good one. And we have all these animals between us. And they’re all getting old now. When she leaves town, I go to her house and all the animals stay there. When I leave town she gets my animals. All my parenting instincts have gone into just a couple of cats and dogs. I think I made the right decision not to have kids. I seem to be a bachelor, ’til the results are in now. I don’t mind it. I kind of like living up in the woods, with a couple dogs and cats. And I can go into the city occasionally. That’s my life. I live rather modestly, and that’s fine with me.

JACK HANDEY:

Lorne has always been very kind about saying there’s an open door there, and I think when the show got in trouble with the critics and the ratings about ’94, ’95, they thought to bring in some of the old guns. And so they brought me in, and I think they brought Robert Smigel back. Lorne and Jim Downey, I think, would encourage me or ask me to come back.

CHRIS KATTAN:

We do all love each other, and we all get along great, but there is a little generalization of casting people just in the sense of like, “Well, this character’s tall and skinny, get Jimmy.” Or, “He’s the dad or somebody, get Will.” And, you know, “He’s gay, get Chris.” I would be the guy who would dress up in drag or dance or something.

I know some people do think I’m gay. I’ve had people ask me if I’m bi more than gay. And I’m okay with it, and I like it, because I’m not gay, so actually, for women, it means I’m not threatening. It doesn’t bother me too much. I think there’s femininity, something feminine, in my characters that’s easy for me. The way I move my body and my rhythm — it comes out a little gayish.

The character of Mango was actually kind of based on an ex-girlfriend. There was a manipulation to her that was incredibly charming. You could nail it like, “Oh, don’t you see, you’re doing that thing again where it’s the whole ‘come here, go away’ kind of thing, and it’s charming and coy and really, really mean.” And the joke was that she was a bad dancer but for some ungodly reason, men just fell for her. It’s very much like the
Blue Angel
thing too. I don’t think I was conscious of it, but it’s very
Blue Angel
, you know. I mean, men aren’t turning into chickens, but yeah, there is that
Blue Angel
quality. It’s really a frightening movie, and in the end the poor guy, I remember him being a chicken.

Monica Lewinsky was going to be revealed as Mango’s wife on one show, but Cuba Gooding, who was the host, didn’t want to do that. On another show, Mango had a crush on Matt Damon, and then Ben Affleck pretended to be Matt Damon so he could get Mango for himself.

JAMES DOWNEY:

There has been a big trend lately where we do an impression of someone and sooner or later you know the real guy is going to do a surprise walk-on and startle the cast. And it’s always played as if it’s supposed to be threatening: “Oh my God, this is going to be awful, here’s the real Alex Trebek, he is going to be bullshit.” That kind of makes sense if it’s, you know, Mike Tyson, but why is it “dangerous” that the real Tony Danza shows up in our
Who’s the Boss?
parody?

At the very least it says that whatever we did, it didn’t offend them in any way. I guess it depends on if you really feel strongly that a certain person is so malicious and such a menace that it’s important that they really be taken seriously, and here we are with the kid gloves, and the proof that we’re not really laying a glove on them is that they’ll happily appear on the show.

A thing that actually kind of shocked and stunned me was when Monica Lewinsky was on the show. I guess I can understand the reasons to have her. I don’t think she’s evil, but it seemed a little trashy. I felt that if you had her, you should at least acknowledge that you were not proud of it.

If I were producing the show, I would have said no to Monica coming on, but I wouldn’t say no to Bill Clinton, because he was the president of the United States. But it’s something that could never happen. He might agree to do something taped — although if I were him I would like to think that if we called, he would go, “After the shit you assholes have done about me, you have a lot of nerve asking me to do something for you.”

I registered my dissent about Monica coming on by writing a couple of sketches, neither of which got on the air. One was about Monica winning “the presidential kneepads,” and the history of the kneepads and that kind of thing. I wrote it and called Lorne and said, “Let me try this, it’s like painless,” because it involved nothing live other than Jimmy Fallon playing Kenny G and Monica Lewinsky standing there and a little bit of voice-over.

Anyway, Monica Lewinsky’s publicist read the sketch — I actually watched the guy read it — and after he flipped through it he just went, “Uh-uh. Not interested.” And it was like, “Oh, I’m sorry, does she have some long glorious resumé of achievement — or did she blow the president?” There was this attitude like, “Monica Lewinsky does not do kneepad stuff.” I thought if I were Monica Lewinsky, I would have a little more sense of humor. I don’t remember people forcing her out onstage at gunpoint. It seemed to me she enjoyed the celebrity.

When Gore and Bush did that special, it was different. I don’t think by agreeing to appear they were betraying weakness or humiliating themselves or anything, because I think we’d stuck to basically fair commentary on them. I didn’t think they’d do it, though, just because I assumed they’d have teams of advisers who would say, “You’re nuts to go on a comedy show when you’re running for president. It just makes you look altogether too unserious.” But I’m glad they did.

Bill Clinton, I think, would be a whole other thing, because a lot of the nature of what we’ve done about Clinton was about his personal life. And I would like to think that he was really offended by it. Not that the show shouldn’t have done it, because he was president and it was all fair game. And I think down the road they will ask him to do something. I would think he wouldn’t do it. I’m sure he’ll come to a party, though. That’s a different thing. Clinton still makes me laugh — though not in a way that I think he would appreciate.

I’m sure there were times especially in the past few years when someone called up and said, “I saw you guys took a shot at me on the show, I’ll come on.” For the most part, whether they’d put them on is entirely a matter of would it help the show. It can’t be a ratings thing in the sense that people heard a rumor that Alex Trebek’s going to do a walk-on so everybody tunes in. I guess it’s the idea that you have to watch the show every week, because you never know which TV or movie personality is going to show up. I have no way of quantifying it, but I know there’s just been an awful lot more in recent years than in the years I was producing.

DARRELL HAMMOND:

I’m probably on less than anyone else in the cast. I don’t know. I would like to be able to fit in more, but I sit out entire shows sometimes. If I’m in the show usually it’s in the opening. It’s my understanding that Lorne hired me to be able to learn voices fast and to do topical material, and it turned out when it came time to pull material, the big story for weeks and weeks and weeks was Clinton, so I ended up doing mostly him. I had to follow Phil Hartman’s Clinton, yeah, but I wonder if mine is actually an impression. I wonder if mine isn’t just a
characterization.

You know, sometimes when you get out there you become aware that you’ll be funnier if you let the voice slip a little bit and cheat. For instance in “Jeopardy,” when I first did Sean Connery, I had a really accurate Sean Connery. Now what I do is really a bastardization of who he is, because it just seems funnier to me and it’s funnier to the writers and it gets more of an audience response. Sometimes they just don’t want to see accuracy, they just want it to be funny.

JOHN GOODMAN,
Host:

I was in town doing a movie — I can’t remember if I was hosting the show, I don’t think I was — but they needed a Linda Tripp for the cold opening one week. And they called me. Like, I guess there’s a resemblance. And then of course I did it a few more times after that.

You know, I always felt a little bad about that. For one thing, after the scandal was over, it was kind of beating a dead horse. I certainly don’t like her politics or agree with what she did, but after a while, I felt like I was picking on her.

ALEC BALDWIN:

One time we did an opening with John Goodman, and he blew his lines and he fucked up the biggest joke in our opening and I almost called him an asshole. I think if you watch the tape, I mutter it under my breath. Because he walks away during this Christmas show where he was like the Ghost of Christmas Present, I think I’m literally mumbling the word “asshole” under my breath, because he’s bungled the lines and ruined the whole sketch.

The live aspect of the show is to me the most important aspect of the show. It’s a challenge. If I was not doing what I’m doing now, I would try to get on the show regularly. It’s like getting high, it’s like being stoned out of your mind, it’s like being shot out of a cannon.

CHRIS PARNELL,
Cast Member:

I introduced myself to Tom Brokaw in the NBC gym locker room one day. I said, “I’m the guy from
SNL
who does an impression of you.” He said, “Oh, right, I’ve heard of that.” We had a pleasant conversation, actually. He told me about the old days of the show, when Belushi and those guys were on and he used to come and watch it with his daughters. And he talked about his daughter having gone to Marci Klein’s sweet sixteen birthday party at Studio 54.

He was not naked, no. I think I waited until he was getting into his gym clothes to talk to him. It’s a beautiful body, though. Glorious.

Although the
Saturday Night Live
casts of the eighties and nineties hardly had the reputation for sybaritic self-indulgence of the original seventies cast, the show’s mortality rate continued to be distressingly high. Among the most shocking deaths in the history of the series was that of Phil Hartman, who’d been with the show from the mideighties to the midnineties playing a whole chorus of characters and perfecting particularly deft impressions of Bill Clinton, Ed McMahon, and Frank Sinatra. Hartman was shot to death by his wife, Brynn, who then killed herself.

Far less unexpected but obviously as tragic was the death of Chris Farley, the tubby and childlike cutup who had tried — too hard and too successfully — to pattern his life and career after John Belushi’s. Farley died at the same age, thirty-three, and of essentially the same cause: heedless and delirious excess.

JON LOVITZ:

Because Phil could do anything, he had more stuff. He’d be in like eight sketches, you know. He used to go, “God, it’s too much,” because I’d have like five sketches, which was great, but he’d be in like eight or ten every week. But he loved doing the show, you know. He did.

The first time Phil was offered the show, he turned it down. And then later on he said yes. I said, “So did you say yes, Phil, because I said you’ve got to come on and do this?” He said, “Well, no.” I said, “Well, why did you say yes?” He said, “Because Joel Silver called me and told me I’d be crazy not to take the job and do it.”

I’ll say this about missing him: He was my favorite person to work with. He was my older brother. I loved him. I idolized him. I liked him and yet he was like my grandmother — he’d be so excited to see me he just made me feel great about myself. He could do anything. He would just get into something and learn everything about it and go on to the next. The last acting job he had was on a pilot that I did. That was the last job and three weeks later he was killed. It was awful; it was so horrible. In my life there is just a huge gap that will never be filled and part of me just feels lost.