Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (80 page)

MARCI KLEIN:

I live downtown near the World Trade Center, and after the tragedy occurred on September 11th, I couldn’t get back to my apartment. Like everyone else, I was incredibly upset. I couldn’t believe what was happening.

We had been in the midst of planning our first show of the season, which was scheduled to air on September 29th. A couple days after the attack, I told Lorne, “The first show cannot happen. This is not a time to be funny. There is no way we can do a show in two weeks.” Lorne told me he thought I was right, but he didn’t want to cancel just yet. It was too early. Given that Mayor Giuliani wound up telling us he wanted us to go ahead and do the show, Lorne was right not to have immediately canceled it.

Reese Witherspoon was scheduled to host, and her agent called me and said, “What are you doing, what is going to happen?” I said, “Well, we are going to try and do what we can.” Obviously none of us had ever been faced with doing the show under such circumstances, but you can’t call it a hardship. We were all lucky enough to be alive and have our families intact. So many people in New York weren’t in the same position. I was really proud of the way everyone on the show kept that perspective.

I’ll never forget how remarkable Reese wound up being as host. She just did a terrific job and never let the pressure get to her. Reese was a total pro. She showed up with her baby and worked really hard. Everybody was impressed. I will always be grateful for the way she acted. It was such a difficult time for everybody, maybe the most diffi-cult time ever in the history of the show.

But when Mayor Giuliani stood there with the firemen, it was one of the most stirring moments I’d experienced since becoming part of the show. Everyone in the studio audience was just transfixed by it — the Paul Simon song, the firemen and the mayor standing silently and listening. I couldn’t help wondering how many of the people watching at home that night had lost someone they loved on September 11, and were perhaps finding some comfort in the way it was done.

Meanwhile, Ben Stiller was supposed to host the following week. Ben was a member of the cast, briefly, back in 1989. We had booked him the previous year because we knew he had a movie coming out in September. He had actually been booked eight months in advance. Now I didn’t even know this, but someone in my office had been getting e-mails from Ben Stiller’s office in early September with a lot of special requests for him while he was hosting — things like “a groomer,” and other stuff. The Friday before Reese hosted, I got a call at 6:30
P.M.
from Ben Stiller’s publicist. Without the hint of an apology, she just announced that “Ben is dropping out of the show.”

Now I will admit that I was still very shaken about September 11, in part because I lived so close to the towers, and I was scared out of my mind, so maybe that helps explain why I just went crazy. I said, “How dare you call and cancel like this? Ben is from New York. He should be fucking showing up with bells on to help the city through this! Haven’t you heard what the mayor said?” She started saying he was canceling because of September 11th, and I said, “Wait a second. Reese Witherspoon, who has never done the show, who doesn’t even really know if she can handle this — and, unlike Ben, was never even a cast member — is doing the first show. Don’t you think Ben ought to maybe rethink it for a second?” And she said to me, “I can’t believe you would be so insensitive.” I said to her, “Listen, let’s just be clear about one thing: The world isn’t going to come to an end because Ben Stiller doesn’t host
Saturday Night Live.
On the grand scale of things, I just saw three thousand people die out my kitchen window. That’s what matters.”

I was freaking out. I just said, “Fine. If that’s the way he feels, I’m happy to let it go.” I think she was surprised. I couldn’t believe he would cancel like that. And then I hung up. Someone in my office who had overheard the conversation then said to me, “You don’t understand. I think he’s dropping out because we were saying no to a lot of stuff that he had wanted while he was hosting.” I told her I thought it was more than that: “He’s just scared of not being funny.”

With that, I call Lorne and tell him what happened. I said, “I dis-invited him,” and Lorne said, “Fine. We’ll get someone else.” We were just dumbstruck. Ben never called Lorne, he never called me, he never wrote a letter to the show, nothing. Then, I turn on the fucking TV a couple days later and who do I see but Ben Stiller. He’s on
The View
, the
Today
show, he’s on every show doing press for his movie. I said to Lorne, “Something’s not right here.” Turns out they had moved his movie up a week because, they said, the world needed comedy. So what really happened was, Ben’s people wanted me to move Ben to the first show and reschedule Reese, you know? I just think it is so wrong what he did.

On the day of the anthrax discovery at 30 Rock, I was at home, and when I called my office after hearing the news, a lot of people there were obviously hysterical. Drew Barrymore was the guest host for that week’s show, and she said, “I am going to leave, calm myself down, and go back to my hotel.” I completely understood. Then I made sure to tell everyone that if they didn’t feel comfortable staying in the building, they should go home. Some people did say, “I am getting out of here, and I will come back when it is fine.” It was a very scary situation. Just horrible.

STEVE HIGGINS:

Marci was in control on the anthrax crisis, and so it’s one of those things where you go, “Too many cooks spoil the broth. If they need me, they’ll call me.” I did talk to Drew about it after she talked to the doctor. She was freaked out in the beginning, but then in the end she put on that game face and went ahead with it.

MARCI KLEIN:

I calmed Drew down, but I felt bad for her. Everyone thought she had left town and she didn’t. She stayed and she did the show. And this show is really scary to do under the best of circumstances.

ANA GASTEYER:

When I found out I was pregnant, I tried to keep it secret. I was really paranoid. I was a wreck. I just didn’t really know how my being pregnant was going to go over. I had a good feeling about it, but I didn’t know if they would want me to leave or what. Tom, in wardrobe, I told right away, because he knows my body so well with the weekly fittings — a nightmare, by the way — but I also knew it would be our challenge to keep this kind of under wraps as best we possibly could. Fortunately everyone I work with is such a narcissist, they don’t have time to worry about what other people are doing. James, my writer, who I shared an office with, said, “You had gained some weight but you weren’t bitching about it, so I kind of knew.” You know, it flashed on him: There’s an actress in my midst who’s not screaming about how fat she is.

When I told Lorne, he didn’t seem surprised, but he never really seems surprised about anything. He was fantastic about it, actually. He’s a father; he was very supportive. I think he was afraid I was coming in to say I was sick or something had happened. I think he was glad to hear it was good news. He was really cool about making it clear that it wasn’t going to impact me in a negative way. Then again, he didn’t throw his arms around me, or plant a kiss on me.

My husband and I tried to plan it in such a way that it would work for my career, but you can’t really predict conception. It actually happened exactly as I wanted it to. I got pregnant in September, I showed halfway through the season, and I’m due five weeks after the last show of the season. I think Lorne was pleased that my biology had agreed with the format of the show.

In some ways the denial, not telling people, really helped me, because I just had to kind of plow through. I remember when I first started here thinking, “There is no way I’m going to be able to pull an all-nighter.” And it’s such a routine part of my life now that I think pregnancy fatigue is nothing compared to what we normally go through in a week.

It’s worse in the first trimester, and I managed to get through it. I was very careful. I probably had more caffeine than most pregnant women do — not a lot. In a lot of ways it was nice, because it gave me perspective, it gave me like an outside life. This show means so much to people who work here. It’s a lifestyle, it’s a fraternity, it’s a part of everything that you are, so sometimes that’s dangerous, because you’re in the well and you can’t get out of it. It’s nice to have something that’s also meaningful.

It was really important to me that my work stay consistent. I’m proud that I was able to keep working at the pace that I did. I’m well represented on the show. I have been the entire time I’ve been here. There are weeks I’ve been in a shitty mood and say I wish my thing got picked. But I can always figure out the logic; there’s always something that makes sense as to why things happen. It’s emotional, and I have plenty of moments when I think, “I can’t believe my thing got cut,” but I just feel that Lorne’s predominantly fair with people, and I think he’s handled my pregnancy in kind.

The other people in the cast are all completely cute about it. I feel like they’re practically going to ask me where babies come from, like, “How’s it going to come out?” They’re all so young and it’s just not really in their sphere. A lot of them touch my belly. I had my dukes up about being written out or not being acknowledged, and I remember being pleasantly surprised that a fair number — especially of the male writers — aren’t even really hung up on it. Sometimes I’m pregnant in a sketch, and sometimes I’m not. Sometimes it’s just me in a scene, which is really nice, because they can use it as a joke or they don’t have to. I made that really clear, because I’m not uptight about it. It’s much cuter than I expected.

MAYA RUDOLPH:

My first year here they had a Mother’s Day special. I wasn’t sure how I was going to deal with it. I have to say being here during that and hearing everybody have fun with their moms and doing funny bits, I was very jealous because my bit was very somber and serious. But in the end I was very happy to share that with my family, not only with my father but with my stepfather too. Because it isn’t something you see very often on television. I have a Japanese stepmother and my dad is Jewish and I’m mixed. We are like this motley crew.

Molly Shannon and I both lost our moms when we were really little. You’re certainly kind of alone in that when you’re growing up, and it’s rare to find people, let alone women, who have lost their mothers so young. It’s kind of like belonging to a club when you find each other. Molly and I have a similar path that we followed, and it’s very interesting to both of us.

I was planning on doing this when I grew up when my mom was still alive, but there’s definitely no question that comedy got me through a lot of horrible stuff that I went through as a kid. If my mom didn’t have a natural gift to be a singer, I think she would have been a comedian. That’s nice to know.

All television shows obviously live or die by ratings. Fortunately for
Saturday Night Live,
its ratings built steadily from its first year — already successful — to 1978, a peak year in terms of creativity and Nielsens as well. For that season
, SNL
averaged a 12.6 rating and powerhouse 39 share (a rating is a percentage of all TV homes, and a share is a percentage of TV homes with their sets on at that time). By contrast, for the 2000–01 season
, SNL
averaged a 5.4 rating and 15 share, but the drop isn’t nearly as dramatic as it sounds, because when the show began it had virtually no competition but old movies on local stations. There weren’t hundreds of cable channels; cable was mostly recycled movies, with little original programming.

Jean Doumanian’s experiment in failure, the 1980–81 season, scored the lowest
SNL
ratings in four years, even though the number of NBC affiliates carrying the show had grown. Dick Ebersol’s first year scored a lower average than Doumanian’s, but arguably the audience had been chased away and needed to be lured back by positive word-of-mouth. Ebersol kept the audience from slipping away further but did not equal the best ratings of the first five-year period.

Lorne Michaels’s return to the show in 1985 didn’t electrify the nation either, and the ratings remained virtually the same as in Ebersol’s last year. They rose during the rest of the decade as Michaels reasserted himself and the show regained its status. Throughout the run, of course, the show has been treasured by the network for the demographic profile of its viewers — youngish and affluent, the advertisers’ favorites — and today networks read demographic tea leaves more religiously than they do the numbers of total viewers and households.
Saturday Night Live,
for better or worse, was instrumental in bringing this about.

Through good times and bad
, Saturday Night Live
has remained NBC’s highest-rated late-night show, and once it was established, it became responsible for hundreds of millions in annual profits. It has never lost money, though some network executives claim it came close.

Today’s seasonal averages of a 5.4 rating and 15 share may seem low compared to the 12.6 and 39 of 1978–79, but
Saturday Night Live
’s ratings are still considered excellent and its demographics exemplary. An attempt by ABC to imitate the show in 1980 with a shrill Los Angeles– based series called
Fridays
lasted only two seasons, but at one point in its first season it briefly outrated Doumanian’s version of
SNL.
In recent years
, SNL
has handily bumped off such wannabe competitors as a Howard Stern comedy show aired by CBS affiliates, and it easily out-paces, in ratings and virtually every other way
, Mad TV
on Fox.

WARREN LITTLEFIELD,
NBC Executive:

What’s truly amazing is that it’s reinvented itself so many, many, many times. And what’s equally amazing is that I was a viewer when it first premiered, and I’m a viewer now. I spent a lot of years at NBC — it was part of the crown jewels of the network — but just as a pure come-to-the-set-for-the-joy-of-it experience, I’ve been there through all those eras. I’ve been there and watched my children now come there. And there’s precious few things in television that have accomplished that.