Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [78]
Though he meant it as a jab, I remember counting seven people in the room who would be great third leads on sitcoms and wondering if they were thinking what I was thinking: That would be unbelievable. Alas, he was right. When I left SNL, I became the third lead on The Jeff Foxworthy Show.
Most of us saw Lorne only on Mondays during the pitch meeting with the host, on Wednesdays at the table read-through, and on Saturdays during the rehearsals and the taping of the show. Unless you had a prescheduled meeting with him, any encounter was purely coincidental. Lorne wasn’t in the office as much as the rest of the SNL cast and crew, and when he was there, he was in seclusion. There weren’t any announcements when he entered the building either. The only time he gave me direct advice was after “Psychic Friends Network” was cut from the Shannen Doherty show. I told him that I was going to resubmit the sketch in two weeks when John Malkovich hosted, and he advised me: “No, do it this week. You have guilt and momentum on your side.”
My second season on the show, I had managed to schedule a one-on-one meeting with Lorne. It was more than halfway through the season, and I was so unhappy with my lack of screen time that I figured I was going to take my complaint right to the top. I had bitched and moaned for so long to so many people that it was my only remaining option.
I made a list of the shows I hadn’t been on. The list also contained all the sketches I had written that I felt should have made it on the air but had fallen into the department of dead letters. I was taking the meeting with Lorne Michaels seriously. I couldn’t have been more prepared. I had lists, for crying out loud.
At the appointed hour, I presented myself to one of his secretaries and she asked me to wait. So there I sat for the next half hour in front of his platoon of secretaries. None of them tried to engage me in any small talk. They just kept answering their telephones and typing at their computers. I went over my lists. I knew that I was probably going to get only one shot. There was no one above Lorne. I was on my final appeal.
Eventually one of the secretaries told me I could go in, but that proved tougher than it should have been. The door was closed, and when I tried to push it open, it felt unusually heavy. As I was opening it, it caught on the carpet on Lorne’s side. I had to either plow forward with the door or bend down and fold the carpet back down on the floor to get inside. Paranoid about knocking something over, I bent down, pulled the carpet out from under the door, and reassembled it so I could swing the door over it.
As I stood up after fixing the carpet, I saw Lorne sitting at his desk. He invited me in. I wasn’t sure if I should close the door behind me or not. Since I had gone to all the trouble of figuring out the door’s arc on the floor, I decided to close it. By the time I turned back around, Lorne had crossed to the front of his desk. The moment the door clicked shut, he put his hands in his pockets and told me that he wanted to apologize for the fact I had been used so infrequently. He went on to say how much I figured in the long-term plans of the show. “You are the future of the show,” he said.
It was incredible. By the time it was my turn to speak, the only thing left for me to say was thank you. He had completely disarmed me. I never got to my lists. He took them away from me. He stripped me of every possible complaint. He covered everything that I was going to bring up and addressed it with assurance—though somehow I didn’t feel particularly reassured.
Even though I was suffering from a serious drought of stage time, I never lost sight of the value of Saturday Night Live as a social chip.