Live From New York - James H. Miller [104]
BARRY BLAUSTEIN:
Some people say Woody Allen was kind of a hidden producer of the show that year, because he was a friend of Jean’s and he supposedly had an adviser role. But we never saw him.
JEAN DOUMANIAN:
Woody Allen was not involved in the show in any way. I say that unequivocally. You can put that to rest. He was not involved at all, aside from the fact that he was a friend.
PAM NORRIS:
I lived in those offices for a long time. They had a great shower. And they had a color TV and food and soda, and I found myself staying later and later every night, and finally I just said, “Oh, what the hell,” and I moved in. I don’t think anybody knew that I was living there. What made it really great is that they had this bank of metal file cabinets — down next to where the secretaries typed the scripts — that had every sketch that had ever been written for the show filed away in them. And this is every sketch ever written, not just every sketch ever aired. So I had the access to what seemed like the Rosetta stone to me — every sketch written and rejected for the first show, every sketch written and rejected for the second show. It was all this very seminal material by the people who became, you know, gods and goddesses. And that was an amazing experience.
JEAN DOUMANIAN:
My numbers weren’t bad at all, considering it was a new show with a whole new cast. Some of them, I think, were higher than the last of Lorne’s, because the last year of Lorne’s regime was not as good as one would expect. They were all thinking about what the future was going to be.
BARRY BLAUSTEIN:
One executive from the network called me and Dave into his office and said, “I want to show you something.” And he shows us this footage of a boa constrictor eating a mouse. And he says, “This is exactly what we should be doing on the show.” It was such a bizarre meeting.
JEAN DOUMANIAN:
I was so busy doing my job that I never saw any writing on the wall. I thought the shows were getting better. We were all working so hard. I was really not aware of anything going on behind the scenes. That’s how unaware I was. I was putting in eighteen hours a day, easy. I knew I could do it.
JOE PISCOPO:
I could never describe to you in words how painful those first ten months really were. You just knew that this was America’s favorite television show, and yet here we were, taking it right into the toilet.
Saturday night, after the show, it was pretty much like a funeral, like you were mourning. Oh my God, oh my God, did we really do this, oh my God — and then we had to turn it around on Monday all over again.
Hopeless as the situation seemed, Doumanian actually had a tremendous secret weapon in her arsenal — so secret that, sadly for her, even she didn’t realize it. This was a young, brash cast member who spent most of the season in small bit parts, except in the seventeenth-floor offices, where he kept coworkers continuously entertained. He was not a “great white hope.” Au contraire. Definitely great, however. His day would come, but not in time to save the very doomed Doumanian.
NEIL LEVY, Talent Coordinator:
Jean had cast an actor named Robert Townsend to be “the black guy” on the show. And then this guy Eddie Murphy started calling me — it sounded like from a pay phone — and I told him, “I’m sorry, we’re not auditioning anymore.” But he called again the next day, and he would go into this whole thing about how he had eighteen brothers and sisters and they were counting on him to get this job. And he would call every day for about a week. And I finally decided I would use him as an extra.
So I brought him in for an audition, and he did a four-minute piece of him acting out three characters up in Harlem — one guy was instigating the others to fight — and it was absolutely brilliant. The timing, the characterizations — talent was just shooting out of him. And I went, “Wow,” and I took him in to Jean and I said, “Jean, you’ve got to see this.” He did his audition for Jean, and she sent