Part 10 (1/2)
I tell Milton, ”I'll talk to you later,” closed the door, and left.
LORNE MICHAELS:.
I had resisted having Berle on, but Jean Doumanian talked me into it on the basis of ”How could we not?” I knew we were heading for disaster from minute one. The sketch in the old folks home was supposed to be sentimental, but during rehearsal, when Gilda would feed Milton, he was letting the food dribble out and all over his face. So I go, ”Milton, she's giving a speech here and you're completely upstaging her with the mashed potatoes coming down your chin.” And he'd say, ”Now you're getting two laughs instead of one.” And I'd say, ”Well, no,” and then he'd pat me on the shoulder and go, ”I know, I know - 'satire.'” He'd say that whenever I'd say anything.
Just before the close of the live show - and it's not a very good show - he said to me, ”Don't worry about a thing, the standing ovation is all arranged.” He was singing ”September Song,” and I swear to G.o.d there were ten people, which was the number of seats he had, who stood up in the balcony. The only time it's ever happened. I was quite clear in the booth about not cutting to it. We don't do that.
I have great affection for old-time show business. But it had become corrupt. It wasn't what it had been. The show was trying to get away from that.
Sat.u.r.day Night Live invigorated viewers because it represented so many departures from the safe, the sane, and the expected. One of Michaels's rules was, no groveling to the audience either in the studio or at home. In those first five years especially, SNL writers were not pleased when a studio audience applauded some social sentiment or political opinion in a sketch or ”Weekend Update” item. The writers wanted laughs, not consensus.
In its earliest days, the SNL company exuded a contempt not for the medium but for the bad habits it had developed over the years - and the innocuousness that infected virtually every genre, including sketch-comedy shows. Pandering to ”the folks at home,” a near-sacred TV tradition, was anathema to the original SNL writers and performers, who felt it was better to aim high and miss than aim low and get a cheap laugh. The collective approach of the show's creators could be seen as a kind of arrogance, a stance of defiance that said in effect, ”We think this is funny, and if you don't, you're wrong.” The show reflected and projected writers and performers who strove first to please themselves - to put on television the kinds of things they'd always yearned to see but that others lacked the guts to present.
To viewers raised on TV that was forever cajoling, importuning, and talking down to them, the blunt and gutsy approach was refres.h.i.+ng, a virtual reinvention of the medium. The stars of Sat.u.r.day Night Live were saying, ”We're not coming to you, you have to come to us - or at least meet us halfway.” They produced television that commanded attention because it demanded attention. Everything wasn't made easy and lazy and served up predigested.
The more sophisticated viewers were, the more they ”got” the jokes, or so it seemed, and the more eagerly they embraced the show. That helped give the series a cachet that few other TV programs had enjoyed. Monty Python's Flying Circus, imported from England by public TV, was among that tiny group, but its audience was incomparably smaller and, obviously, it was anything but indigenous. Regular SNL viewers felt like members of a special sort of club, one made up of lapsed or expatriated TV viewers bored by the corporate-approved ba.n.a.lities that most TV programs served up.
Of course, advertisers flocked to SNL just the same, and the number of NBC affiliates carrying the show swelled, and that meant it had won corporate approval too. If it hadn't, it wouldn't have stayed on the air. Nevertheless, for the first five years anyway, the gang at Sat.u.r.day Night Live came across as wickedly irreverent and wonderfully subversive.
It could be argued that in time, Sat.u.r.day Night Live became as eager to please as any other TV show - even the kind that its writers and actors despised and derided - and that, probably inevitably, it became what it belittled. But in that first burst of glory, there was still a captivating, rebellious purity to it. It was on a wavelength of its own, proudly above the fray, brash and brave and youthful and honest. Television without guilt that was still entertaining as all get-out.
BILL MURRAY:.
It was Davey Wilson who didn't want us ad-libbing more than Lorne didn't want it. But the thing about the ad-libbing is that the camera cues, the camera cuts, are all on the script. They're supposed to go from this person to that person on this line. So that was a technical thing that was sort of a limit that you had. You'd screw things up if you ad-libbed at the end of something.
Davey caught a lot of stuff because he was fast. If he could see in your eyes that something was coming, he'd hold on it. You'd hear him in the booth: ”Oh Christ, where's he going?” You learned that if you were going to fix something, the easiest way for everybody was to figure out how to fix it and still say the last line so they had the cuts right. You could actually watch them go, ”Awgh!” You could hear six or seven people in the booth go ”Awgh!” like he got it, and there'd be this glee as the technical director would push the camera b.u.t.ton switch; there'd be this delight that you did it right, that you respected their technology and what they had to do. That was when you got good at it. It takes a while to learn how to do that. Not everybody did.
I shot off a flash camera into the lens one time during ”Update.” Yeah, I burned out the TV camera. Oh and they were furious. G.o.d, they were angry. They thought, ”Oh you f.u.c.king rookie, you idiot.” Well of course it turned out to be just a temporary thing. It burns a hole for a moment and then they have to redo the white balance or something, but they were so mad, because there was this bubble in the screen for the rest of the ”Update.” The whole floor was like, ”Did you hear what he did?” And people were walking out of the booth going, ”Do you know what he did?!” Of course - it's on the screen and everyone sees it on the monitor anyway, the whole crew sees it, and people know.
The guys in the crew had been doing it forty years, they know you don't shoot a flashbulb at a GE camera. Well - newborn baby, what was I going to do? There was plenty of volume. They screamed. There was always lots of volume.
JAMES SIGNORELLI:.
With the exception of Don Novello, who had worked at Leo Burnett in Chicago, no one here had any background in advertising. My background was in doc.u.mentary filmmaking and feature film cinematography, so I had pa.s.sed through the world of low-budget commercials that everybody does at one point, and I knew the silliness of it and what some of the excesses were, and I knew how to do them from the production and visual points of view. One of the things about commercials is that they're very good storytelling devices.
By the beginning of the third year, the typical short movie for Sat.u.r.day Night Live cost between $10,000 and $13,000. It was kind of a watershed period because of what was going on in commercials in general. For one thing, money was no longer an object. Phenomenal sums were being spent on advertising. And new techniques were being born there. The other thing was that it was becoming acceptable - even with the most staid client - to use humor.
We at the show, of course, were on the cutting edge. So n.o.body could do what we did. And whatever we did in commercials, the att.i.tudes that we took, the archness or the surrealist approach, was making a big impact on the creative people at the ad agencies. So they started pus.h.i.+ng the wave further and further to the left. Editorially, we were doing things that were very sophisticated back then.
DAN AYKROYD:.
I did ”Update” for one season, I think, and I wasn't comfortable in it. I didn't like it. They only gave it to me because Chevy had gone. ”Jane, you ignorant s.l.u.t” really caught on - that was great - but delivering the jokes and being the newsreader was not something that I was comfortable with. I was very happy to be relieved of that.
LORNE MICHAELS:.
In the seventies, I was much more proud of who I wouldn't allow on the show - people who had just been all over Las Vegas and prime-time television. There were even people I always thought were really great but they were of that other generation. And now we were coming along, and we were shaped by a different set of things. And any a.s.sociation with the Rich Littles and the John Byners and the original Tonight Show guys like Dayton Allen would have been ant.i.thetical to what I was trying to do.
PAUL SHAFFER:.
The idea that some of the things would not be necessarily accessible to everybody didn't matter. As long as there were a few people out there who thought it was hilarious, that's what mattered. I kind of learned that from this show, that concept. It was a show for our generation, which was, let's face it, a sixties-style generation.
LORNE MICHAELS:.
I taught at an art school in Toronto, I was teaching improvisations, the conceptual art movement which was being talked about and on the edge of things in the early seventies. Where that and entertainment met was what Andy Kaufman was doing. It wasn't just that he lip-synched to ”Mighty Mouse”; it was that he only did that one part in it, that one line, and stood around for the rest. It was very conceptual, and it instantly signaled to the brighter part of the audience that that was the kind of show we were going to do. And they weren't getting that anywhere else on television. In the first couple years, Andy must have been on close to ten times. One night he even read from The Great Gatsby. In the beginning I had Penn and Teller on a few times, because that was the DNA, but I couldn't do that now. The pure variety show part of it is over. It's a straight comedy show now.
AL FRANKEN:.
I heard Spiro Agnew was going to be on Tom Snyder's show, so I just wanted to meet him and hara.s.s him a little bit. I brought a tape recorder and went down to their studios on six. Agnew was in the makeup room, so I sat down in the next makeup chair as he was getting made up and I said something like, ”You called student protesters b.u.ms, and aren't you the b.u.m” - I think that's what I said - ”because you took money?” And he just said, ”I never called them b.u.ms. That was Nixon.” It was like beneath his dignity to address this kid with long hair and to spend too much time on it.
I thought I'd pressed the b.u.t.ton to start the tape recorder, but I didn't. I'd had it on and turned it off or something. So I didn't get it on tape. And then I also felt stupid because I checked it out and I was wrong: Nixon had called students b.u.ms. At least I did get to say to Agnew that he was a b.u.m.
And then the producer of the Snyder show called me up and said, ”Don't do that. If there's somebody on our show that you hate, don't come down and hara.s.s them. That's not good for our show.”
LORNE MICHAELS:.
When Al went down to the f.u.c.king sixth floor to berate Spiro Agnew, Chevy and O'Donoghue and I were like, ”Al, what the f.u.c.k are you doing?” Al took that ”nattering nabob” speech personally. He was probably twenty-three when the show started, I was thirty. It has always seemed to me that the people who made the most noise about artistic integrity were the first people to buy a Mercedes, and the more people railed about things, when you examine their lives twenty-five years later - well, you know.
TOM DAVIS:.
One day Henry Kissinger calls up, and the call is picked up at an NBC page's desk. And the page goes, ”Henry Kissinger's on the phone. He wants tickets for his son.” And Al grabs the phone and yells into it, ”You know, if it hadn't been for the Christmas bombing in Cambodia, you could've had your f.u.c.king tickets!”
PAULA DAVIS, a.s.sistant: My first official job was working for Michael O'Donoghue. I was dying to get into SNL. It was all I wanted to do. And I found that there was an a.s.sistant position open in the talent department, which I really wanted. So I had Michael write a reference letter to Lorne. He wrote me this long recommendation and then, at the end, he wrote, ”P.S., I'd rather stick my d.i.c.k in a blender than write another one of these letters.”
ROBIN SHLIEN:.
As part of my job, I would have to do things like walk into the prop department or the costume department and say, ”They just wrote in six n.a.z.i extras.” Well, there would be big laughs, because it's so crazy to tell people things like that. Or when I would tell them the creamed corn just wasn't making it as vomit and they had to do something else to the vomit. A lot of these changes took place on Friday nights, and back then there was no FedEx, no faxes, no nothing, and a lot of the wardrobe houses were closed on Sat.u.r.days. I was often the messenger of bad news.
ROBERT KLEIN:.
Rockefeller Center was one of the better-run office complexes, and it was beautiful. They don't like you putting things on the wall or anything like that. Aykroyd and Belus.h.i.+ had a little corner office with barren walls, and they had nailed against the wall panties sent in by girls, some of them soiled, and many other odd things as well. And it was sort of like rebellion, you know, in these stodgy halls.
DAN AYKROYD:.
I had one episode of rage. And that was when this guy - an accountant, a unit manager - billed me for a hundred and fifty bucks for some meals we were having when we were writing. ”Wait a minute. These are expenses that should be picked up by the show.” But he kept sending me these bills. So finally I wrote a satanic message on the wall in lipstick - I think Michael O'Donoghue came in and saw it and approved of it - and it was something like, ”Your relatives will all burn in h.e.l.l forever.” It was very effective.
CARRIE FISHER:.
Danny was always into weapons and cars and doing his little imitations. He was always hanging around with the person who does the autopsies - the coroner. That's who he would hang around with. And of course he really took care of John. He loved him.
I was set up with Danny by John. John invited me over and then pa.s.sed out. That was the setup. That was a blind date, John-style. Danny was adorable. He was lovely. He's just your cla.s.sic codepen-dent and caretaker. Once I almost choked on a brussels sprout and he did the Heimlich maneuver on me. He wound up saving my life. When he asked me to marry him, I thought, ”Wow, I probably better.”
PENNY MARSHALL:.
Yeah, Danny proposed to Carrie. Then she ran away and bought him some clothes. That's how she handled that.
STEVE MARTIN:.
Dan Aykroyd rode a motorcycle and wore leather clothes and everything. I was trying to be friendly and I said, ”Hey, you want to go shopping for clothes over at Saks?” And he said, ”Well, I'm really not into that.”
NEIL LEVY:.