Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [19]
One of the sketches involved Goldblum playing a father who is a dog. The man has a wife and kids and looks like a dad, but he’s really a dog. He walks like a human and talks like one, but he speaks lines of dialogue a dog would say. He would say things like “I know better. I shouldn’t have eaten that,” and his kids would respond, “That’s okay, we still love you, Daddy.” Whenever he sat on the couch, his wife would whack him with a newspaper. The idea was that the viewers don’t know he’s a dog in the beginning, but about a fourth of the way through, it hits them. Kids: “Why did you bring fleas into the house?” Dad: “I didn’t mean to. I’m wearing my collar.” But about two pages into the read-through, I realized that there weren’t two funny lines in the whole thing and it might have been better had I discovered that at the pitch meeting on Monday so I could have avoided embarrassment at read-through.
When read-through was over, the host, Jim Downey, and two or three of the producers would meet with Lorne in his office and begin assembling that week’s show. This process was behind closed doors and not to be interrupted. After a couple of hours, the cast and writers would be allowed into Lorne’s office to see which sketches had been chosen. There was no announcement, you simply looked at the corkboard on Lorne’s wall.
On that corkboard was your future. The board had three columns running down it; within those columns was that week’s show. Pinned to the top of the first column was a colored index card that read “Cold Open.” A few inches under it was a white index card reading “Commercial One.” In the middle of the second column was another index card reading “Weekend Update.” At the end of the last column was an orange card that read “Good-nights,” the ritual of the host, cast, and musical guest standing onstage together bidding the world adieu. The only thing missing from the corkboard were the index cards with the sketches that would be on that week’s show.
When the doors to Lorne’s office opened, you walked in, hoping that there would be a colored index card on the corkboard with the name of your sketch on it. If your sketch wasn’t on the board, it wasn’t on the air. Period. If you felt like bitching, there was no one to bitch at except whoever else was in the room with you. And quite frankly, if your sketch was on the board, what did you care if someone else’s wasn’t?
The times I walked into Lorne’s office and spotted an index card with my sketch on it, I experienced a feeling nothing short of euphoria, knowing that what I wrote was going to be on television with me in it! The hallways got a little wider. The show once again became my life’s work. Everything was fine.
But as the weeks went by, I began to imagine that the orange card with “Good-nights” on it was my sketch. Every week it would be there, like a franchise. Most shows, Good-nights was the only time I was on camera—until I stopped showing up for Good-nights.
Things got started on Tuesday nights around 9:00 P.M. With Wednesday’s read-through looming, each tick of the clock represented time wasted to me. Instead of writing the show Tuesday mornings and into the evening, everyone was running around panicked that they wouldn’t meet this self-imposed deadline. Many of us slept in our offices, if at all. You were always at the mercy