Live From New York - James H. Miller [109]
So now they’ve finished their lines and Dick sends me to collect them. I show them to him, he crosses a few off, he says, “Great. Now get the actors and get it done.” All right. So I told the actors what we had to do. Basically I didn’t want to do this, I was just following instructions on what Dick wanted. I didn’t realize I was suddenly producing this piece.
The night of Dick’s first show, Lorne comes. And it was like God visiting. You know, “Make way! Make way! He’s in the building!” Dick even let Lorne sit at his own desk on the ninth floor. And I come in and Dick looks at me and says, “Oh Lorne, your cousin made this great bag lady film.” And I was about to say something and he told me to leave the room. He said, “I need this list for tomorrow and I need this and that,” and I said, “But Lorne —” and Dick said, “Just go.” And of course the bag lady was just a total embarrassment. I don’t know why he even bothered showing it. It made it as far as dress rehearsal. That nearly killed me. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Lorne about it, actually. I don’t think I ever mentioned it to him — that I was set up and had nothing to do with it.
CHRIS ALBRECHT:
Dick can be very much a prick. But I think it comes from being a network guy who’s used to saying no. I always felt he was much more like a network executive running the show than he was an actual creative producer running the show. There was much less play in Dick. Jean was really excited about producing the show. I think she had a great passion for what she was doing. And I think Dick came in very much “there’s a job that has to be done and I need to be tough about it.” Dick was less interested in how adventurous the material was.
BOB TISCHLER, Writer:
I was actually a record producer, had worked with the Blues Brothers and had worked with a lot of the people from Saturday Night Live on the National Lampoon Radio Hour, which I had produced. That’s how Michael O’Donoghue knew me. He said, “Come on to Saturday Night Live.” I said, “Well, you know, I kind of have this other career going.” And he said, “It’ll be fun, and by the way, the show is just going to go down anyway, so don’t worry about having to be stuck on the show.” And he actually described it as a “death ship.”
TIM KAZURINSKY, Cast Member:
John Belushi pretty much got me hired and recommended me for Saturday Night Live. The evening that Dick Ebersol came to Chicago and hired me, I assumed I was being hired as a writer. I’d never thought of myself as an actor. And then, as he was wrapping up, he said, “You have your AFTRA card, right?” And I said, “Why do I need an AFTRA card if I’m going to write?” He said, “No, no, you’re going to be in the cast.” I said, “You want me to act?!?” He said, “Yeah, I didn’t even know you wrote.” I was completely stunned. I was driving home in my Volkswagen going, “That’s weird,” because I’d never really thought of myself as an actor.
JOE PISCOPO:
They kept Eddie and me, and fired everybody else. O’Donoghue said to me, “Piscopo, I’m not crazy about you, but that Sinatra thing is not bad.” And in essence he told me, “You’re going to have to prove yourself to me.”
Then he put us all in a room. O’Donoghue came in, spray-painted DANGER on the wall, and said, “This is what the show lacks.”
PAM NORRIS:
I remember the day Michael was writing DANGER on that wall. The spray can stopped working halfway through. And I was like on my back laughing, because he’d just written