Part 8 (1/2)
LARAINE NEWMAN:.
Lorne urged me to repeat characters. I refused to do it because I wanted to, you know, dazzle everybody with my versatility. And that kept me anonymous. That was the same pitfall for Danny. He was much more comfortable doing characters, and I think that it made him less recognizable than John, who was always John even when he was the Samurai. And Billy was always Billy. He did Todd in the Nerds but basically he was Billy. So even though I loved the kind of work that I did, and still do - I love the character work - I think it keeps you more anonymous than people who play themselves.
BUCK HENRY, Host: I never had a problem with repeating characters, saying, ”Oh, we've done enough Coneheads,” or that we had done enough of, you know, anything that worked. I thought, why not keep going and doing it? You would only stop it if you had a concept that didn't live up to the characters. Then you would say, ”Oh, this is not strong enough for the characters, and we can't do this.”
DON NOVELLO, Writer: I wrote the Greek restaurant sketch the second week I was there. It is like a hit song, I guess, in a way. The restaurant is called Billygoat's. I used to go down there all the time to this Billygoat Tavern - I worked in advertising then - just to hear these guys going, ”Cheese-burger cheeseburger cheeseburger.” It's still there. They've really played it up. They have a sign outside, ”Cheeseburger Cheeseburger.” It's on some Chicago tour, they drop by. And they opened a few other places. They sell them at the stadium, but it's always ”cheeseburger cheeseburger,” they play it up big. The people at the diner recognized it right away on the show.
It was a big thing to do at the time. We had a live grill there, a working grill, they were really making cheeseburgers. I'd say we did six, seven, eight of those sketches.
BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY:.
Don Novello and I came in at the same time, and we got put in a former storeroom that ab.u.t.ted the elevator shaft. You could barely hear because of the noise from the elevator shaft. There were no windows. That's where we started out. And they were trying to make us work together. And then when he wrote that ”cheeseburger cheese-burger” thing, he got a decent office. The next year I got a decent office after I did a series of like Knights of Columbus meetings, which introduced the character of Garrett Morris's Chico Esquela.
GARRETT MORRIS, Cast Member: Chico was my favorite, but I also really liked ”I'm going to get me a shotgun and kill all the whiteys I see.” Now that was when we were improvising. Lorne actually said, ”Look, I want to do a thing called the 'Death Row Follies.' You be a prisoner, you be so-and-so, you be so-and-so, go away and come back with something.” That's what we did. See I liked it when they did it like that, even though I was desperately learning the technique that these guys were masters at - John and Gilda particularly. I'm the kind of guy, ”Throw me out there, I don't give a s.h.i.+t.” I knew I could always react to your a.s.s.
A lot of stuff on Sat.u.r.day Night Live was really my kind of stuff, because I like to do stuff that's really new and exploratory. If stuff was on the line either racially or s.e.xually, I didn't give a d.a.m.n. If you want to try it, let's try it.
JAMES SIGNORELLI:.
If we gave every sketch that anybody ever complained about not having an ending an ending, the show would fail. I don't think people say that as a criticism. I think they just say it.
BILL MURRAY:.
Danny was the best at saving sketches, when things were really deadly, when things were really dying. When you're dying, you just play for yourself: ”Let's make ourselves laugh. If we're not making them laugh, let's start over again and just make ourselves laugh.” And that fearlessness would then turn the audience.
When people talk about the old cast versus the later casts, I think that was the one thing that our group had; we had that training, so there were more tricks. We'd learned working together as a group in a service way. Nowadays there's probably more stand-ups that end up on the show, sort of more individual guys, than there used to be, and they're individually good but they maybe don't have that particular skill or training or as much experience in that area.
I think the old cast made bad sketches work, or made sketches that were incomplete work. You were always in process, you were always in play. You weren't trying to get the laugh on that line. You were always seeing like a bigger movement of the whole sketch and the other characters in it, and you were watching them and trying to make them look good.
That was another thing we learned, that you make the other person look good and then you don't have to worry about how you come off. Make the other people look good and you'll be fine. Sometimes there'd be sketches that would be incomplete and the writers may have never found how to make it work. And maybe we didn't even figure out the literary resolution of the sketch precisely. But in the performance of it you managed to shape a roundness, a completeness, the wholeness of it. And if you were alert in the middle of the scene, you'd see: ”Okay, now these people are really fully developed as much as we're going to do, and now this character will drive the resolution of it and these characters will satisfy it enough.” That was what we did.
DAN AYKROYD:.
If you look at Carol Burnett or Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar, they rely on something to take you out of it, so that whenever you have a great ending, you've got a great piece. We struggled with the endings, yeah, and they were probably the hardest part of the sketch.
I think the ending to a movie is hard, the ending to a television show, the ending to anything is tough. You kind of want to wrap everything up with a bow and b.u.t.ton it all up and hark back to what you have done before and end on a high note or great joke. And that's not always possible.
JAMES SIGNORELLI:.
n.o.body really understood what Lorne's contribution was, which was integral to the whole thing, not only in selecting the people but in creating an atmosphere where people could endure the pressure and where the pressure was, in fact, a good thing - a c.u.mulative pressure with a release. And that rhythm, you know, that kind of - I don't know what to compare it to - but that rhythm is what kept the show going, because everybody could start, start, rush, rush, rush, rush, peak, and crash - and then start again.
DAN AYKROYD:.
Fred Garvin, Male Prost.i.tute was developed in the lab. That started with me doing guys I'd seen up in Canada - the local tire salesman, whatever. And then when I was living with Rosie, I used to do that at home with her, you know. As part of our love life, that character would emerge. And she said we have to do this, so we wrote it up. It started in the bedroom - you know, ”Come here, little lady.” I do that with my wife today and still get a laugh. No s.e.x, but a laugh. So that was definitely a laboratory-incubated character.
PAUL SHAFFER, Musician: I wrote a piece with Marilyn Miller about s.h.i.+rley Temple being named an amba.s.sador. And the idea of the sketch was s.h.i.+rley Temple bringing the leaders of two warring nations together by going into an old-fas.h.i.+oned s.h.i.+rley Temple song. And that worked, and Marilyn went to Lorne and said, ”Paul should have a position on the show as a guy who writes this kind of material.” Lorne agreed and put me on. But the credit was a problem, because the traditional credit is ”special musical material.” This worried us because it sounded, as we said then, ”too Carol Burnett.” We loved Carol Burnett, we respected her, but we were trying to be different than that.
DAN AYKROYD:.
On the ”Little Chocolate Doughnuts” parody - that was a Franken and Davis thing that John didn't want to do. His vanity sort of got in the way there, but ultimately, as with all of us, once the writers presented their concept, you could see the merit in it right away and sometimes you'd go, ”Well, it may not make me look great, or it is not my humor, but this is going to work and this is going to be funny.”
JAMES SIGNORELLI:.
Belus.h.i.+ had been a high school athlete and he didn't really want to do the sketch. The thing was not whether or not John thought he could do it; the thing was that John was in his recalcitrant stage. Anne Beatts was along on that ride too. At one point, John is supposed to jump over a bar like a track star. John insisted that he would do the ”stunt” himself. All we did was put some cardboard cartons with blankets over them on the other side of the bar and the bar was only a couple feet high. I got down as low as I could get with the camera, you know, the widest lens I could get, and so John jumped over this table and landed on the couch. Okay?
We did it once for practice and again to refine some element. The second time he did it, he screamed out in pain and he tensed up in his most melodramatic way, he clenched his knee to his chest, and everybody ran over and John goes, ”Get me an ambulance! Get me a medic!” John wanted to be taken to the hospital. He was absolutely not going to do this thing. He was, you know, ”crippled for life.” He was mad at all of us. And Anne went in and smoothed that over with him and got him to go back and finish. John at that point was just, you know, feeling his oats.
At the end of the spot he's at the breakfast table. John comes on the set wearing a green crewneck lamb's wool sweater and he's supposed to look like Bruce Jenner, right? And a s.h.i.+rt with a b.u.t.ton-down collar. He insisted that was how he should look. And there's a huge moth hole in the front of the sweater and a white s.h.i.+rt underneath. So I made him wear it backwards. If you look at it again, you'll see he's wearing the sweater backwards. And, of course, he wanted to smoke a cigarette, but he couldn't for the life of him figure out how to smoke and take a bite of the doughnut at the same time. So finally we came up with this awkward solution where John holds the cigarette in his hand, takes a puff, then - ”I like a good breakfast” - and picks up the doughnut and the cigarette in the same hand.
AL FRANKEN:.
”Julia Child” came from Tom Davis having seen her cut herself on the Today show. I had written the sketch for Walter Matthau, but it didn't get picked the week he hosted. So I had to convince Aykroyd to do it. We tried it once, but we didn't have the hose working properly the first week, so we held it until we got control of the blood spurting. And it's really a consummate Danny performance. I mean, it's live TV, and just the timing of the spurts, it's beautiful. I was so admiring of that performance. It was in the right hands. Walter Matthau wouldn't have been able to handle the technical aspect nearly as well.
Danny and I had a good relations.h.i.+p, and I always felt that if I cared about something enough, he would do it. You can only call those in so many times. You've got to be sure about something in order to say, ”Do it.” Or you've got to be thinking at least it's worth trying, worth the risk. That's when you feel good. When you make somebody do Julia Child and it turns out the way it did, then you've got some credibility for the next time you want to make him do something.
It's always a tug-and-pull of how much direction you can give somebody, how much they trust you, how much they don't, how much they trust their own instincts, the mood they're in. It depends on the cast member. You have to know each cast member to get the best work that you can out of them.
STEVE MARTIN:.
I think Lorne was reluctant to have me on. I was never reluctant. I wanted to be on the show from the first moment I saw it. But - it was one of those timing curves where, when the first show hit the air, I was not, you know, popular enough to really host it. Then there was a synchronicity in my rise to stand-up and records, and we sort of hit at the same moment.
In a strange way, I was new and old-fas.h.i.+oned at the same time. And maybe the irony of my performance hadn't reached Lorne yet. I really don't know. Lorne's been one of my oldest friends and oldest supporters, so whatever you feel about somebody at first really doesn't matter. I found that, in performers and sometimes movies, and especially art, that it takes a while to come to something that's new. And a lot of times when the resistance finally turns to acceptance, it makes you a greater supporter of it or them.
JEAN DOUMANIAN, a.s.sociate Producer: n.o.body wanted to put Steve Martin on the show. I'd seen him on The Tonight Show several times. And I kept trying to get them to let Steve do the show, because I thought he was so funny. But, you know, the writers also wanted to be on the show. They said, ”He's our same age. If he could do the show, we could do the show.” I remember somebody falling out. And I remember running into Lorne and saying. ”Lorne, give this guy a chance, he's really, really good.” Lorne was reluctant to have him on, but when he finally did, Steve's manager sent me a dozen roses. I was just so thrilled.
DAN AYKROYD:.
The Czech brothers were, I guess, a combination - a grafting of characters. Steve had this character, the continental guy, and I had the Czech expatriate, the ”swinging” Czech who was trying to talk like an American, trying to be an American, trying to have the inflection in the accent, the clothes. And so we took his continental guy and my Czech guy and we fused them into the Czech brothers. That's essentially what happened there.
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:.
I did something kind of different from other people. I started writing these things which they called in those days ”Marilyn pieces,” which were pieces about either men and women or dramatic pieces, the most notable one of which I did with Belus.h.i.+ and Sissy s.p.a.cek, for which I won the Emmy. The pieces were like dramatic and they came from the tradition of those Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin sketches that weren't about the jokes but were about the character builds and were often kind of bittersweet.
One day Danny came to me and said, ”Okay, you know those guys that come over and paw you and they used to be an engineer in Poland and now they drive a Camaro?” And I said, ”Yes!” So he and Steve Martin kind of talked like them and left, and then I wrote the sketch, including that patois they use - ”I will put my hands on your big American b.r.e.a.s.t.s.”
STEVE MARTIN:.
At that point I was doing ”I'm a wild and crazy guy,” and I said, ”That's the only act I have, wild and crazy guy,” so I did my thing that I was doing onstage. Danny's was actually the more authentic character. And it was funny, because when we rehea.r.s.ed it during the week it seemed so funny to us, so funny, and we went on with it and it seemed to go fine. It wasn't anything special. But we decided to do it again, and for some reason when we did it the second time, the audience was prepped. It stuck in their heads or something, and they were right there cheering and laughing and going overboard. Between the first time we did it and the second time we did it, something jelled or happened. The crazy walk was something that was supposed to indicate coolness.
BILL MURRAY:.
The original Nick the Lounge Singer sketch was one that I walked into the read-through. They'd read all the sketches for the week and I said, ”Oh, I have one more.” I had never written really anything, and I was just dying on the vine, because like I said, as the new guy I was pretty much the second cop through the door every week, the second FBI guy, whatever. Danny was always kind enough to write me in as the second something; no one else even bothered. That was my lifestyle. Then, I don't know, something happened and somebody gave me this shower soap thing in the shape of a microphone and I took off with it and wrote this sketch. But basically it wasn't even written; it was half-written. I started doing it at the read-through, and you're supposed to have a copy of the script for everyone - you're supposed to duplicate them for the entire crew - but I was the only one with a copy. I just started doing it, and I was getting huge laughs, and then I said, ”I haven't finished the ending yet.”
Well, there was this silence. This bone-crus.h.i.+ng silence. And Tom Davis said, ”I would love to help Bill finish writing that sketch, Lorne.” And it was the grandest gesture of like, ”This son of a b.i.t.c.h needs this badly, and you know I can make sure he gets it done.” At that point it had gotten a lot of laughs, so it was like okay. So Davis helped me finish that sketch, that was the shower-mike sketch, and then we started writing all the Nicks.
PAUL SHAFFER:.
Billy decided to do a version of the kind of character that he had been doing in Chicago: Nick the Lounge Singer. And of course I would be the pianist, but I also got to partic.i.p.ate in the writing of it with Billy, Tom Davis, and Danny. Danny would always make an appearance in it as an Indian guy. At ski resorts in Canada, there were always guys like that who operated the chair lift, and they always found a dead animal in the sewage system or something, and that was his appearance. Marilyn Miller was also instrumental in writing this.
Billy's performance was so over-the-top, it almost superseded the writing. We did five or six of them - I'm just guessing. They always had to come from Billy, and I never knew what his criteria were, but whatever he wanted to do was just right. ”Star Wars” of course was his idea, but then we would collaborate on the lyrics once he got the idea. Most of it came from him, though.