Live From New York - James H. Miller [100]
BARBARA GALLAGHER, NBC Vice President:
I said to Jean Doumanian, “Look, I think you can have it, but if I were you, I wouldn’t take it. First of all, the network is going to jump on you like a bad suit. They’ll want to cut the budget, I can tell you right now, and they’re going to cut it to the bone. They have been waiting all this time to get even with Lorne.”
I knew that because after they had squeezed Lorne at the beginning, he told me he was going to let them have it when it became a hit, and he did. He started demanding things. And when you’re a hit, you get them, especially when you have advertisers scrambling to be part of the show.
I remember telling Jean, “Any producer who comes in here now is doomed to fail. It’s not going to work.”
JEAN DOUMANIAN, Executive Producer:
I had to get an all-new cast and all new writers in two and a half months. When I took over the show, the first thing they did was cut my budget. The budget under Lorne had gotten up to a million dollars a show. They cut my budget to $350,000, as I recall. And I was supposed to do the same show for that amount of money.
I don’t know this for a fact, but it would seem to me that if a woman could actually mount a show and get it done in such a short time, it minimized the importance of those who preceded her. And nobody liked that. So I was attacked viciously. How dare I take this job? How dare I think I can do the show? Most of that was said by men. You have to remember, the show had been biased against women for a long time.
ALAN ZWEIBEL, Writer:
When we left, I remember Gilda would call me up on Tuesday nights at two in the morning and we’d still be up because our bodies for five years had been up all night on Tuesday, staying up and writing.
LORNE MICHAELS, Executive Producer:
I never watched Jean’s show. I didn’t watch it when Dick was running it either. I never watched it that whole time. Not once. It would have been too painful. I didn’t have anything to do with the show, so I didn’t feel compromised. To walk away clean is at least to have your honor intact, and I felt I’d taken the honorable way out.
The Jean Doumanian era — all ten months of it — marked the first but not last time Saturday Night Live’s very survival was at stake. After five years of enormous and trend-setting popularity — replete with break-out stars, iconic characters, and now-classic sketches — the show zapped back to square one in 1980 following the departures of Lorne Michaels, the cast he had assembled, and all the original writers.
Viewers may not have been immersed in the backstage politics, but they couldn’t help noticing that the quality of the show plummeted. Many in the business thought Doumanian lacked the experience and expertise necessary for the job. She was further beset by skullduggery among staff members who wanted the usurper ousted from the throne almost the instant she assumed it.
NBC was doing badly in prime time, and within weeks of Doumanian’s accession, Saturday Night Live was added to the network’s list of gaping wounds requiring medical attention. An audience that expected to see fresh new Gildas, Belushis, Chevys, and Aykroyds refused to settle for the paltry replacements that initially dominated Doumanian’s cast — Charles Rocket, Denny Dillon, Gail Matthius, Ann Risley.
Saturday Night Live fell apart in less time than it took to come together five years earlier. The show still had no real competition in its time period — “Our competition is sleep,” as one cast member put it — but its predicament was perhaps worse than if it had. Saturday Night Live was competing against the memory