Live From New York - James H. Miller [110]
NEIL LEVY:
Dick told me that if I could get Catherine O’Hara to come to New York, he would let me stay on. It was sleazy. But I thought, “Well, I can do it.” So I went and asked Catherine O’Hara. She wasn’t really interested. But I talked to her and she came down. Then she saw the flaming Viking ship going under and she went, “Uh-oh, gotta run.”
DICK EBERSOL:
Meantime, I’d hired Catherine O’Hara. It had taken a lot to lure her, because live was not her style. So in that very first meeting with Michael, when he was telling everybody the show is shit, and spraying all over the writers’ wall the word DANGER, it really scared Catherine O’Hara — scared her right off the show. She packed up her stuff and went home to Canada that night.
TIM KAZURINSKY:
O’Donoghue had this vision of taking the show down. He wanted to destroy the show. His motto was “Viking Death Ship. Let’s all go down in the Viking Death Ship.” I grew up in the slums, you know, starving, and I’m thinking, “Can’t we like keep it afloat just until I can buy a condo?” Yeah, he wrote DANGER on the wall. It was like carefully orchestrated. He was a drama queen. But I loved Michael. He was great.
He did bring on Terry Southern. Terry had been one of America’s great writers. But he was not a sketch-comedy writer. It’s absurd. I don’t know if he ever wrote anything that actually got on the air. But he ran a fine wet bar out of his office. It was a really odd time, because it seemed like that first year, half of them really worked at trying to have it go up in smoke. In retrospect, maybe O’Donoghue had the right idea.
ROSIE SHUSTER, Writer:
I was having this big fight with Clotworthy about a sketch called “The Taboosters,” which is just a normal, regular family, and they have lots of rules and stuff, but no taboos. And I couldn’t win this argument. And then afterwards, when I showed the censor out of my office, I saw that Terry Southern, who was writing on the show at that time, had left a Hustler magazine sitting there with this big female pink genitalia flashing right in the censor’s face. I had no idea. That was Terry’s idea of being hilarious. It was pretty funny afterwards. I thought, “Oh my God, no wonder the censor was mad.”
BOB TISCHLER:
The day that Michael was going to do his DANGER thing, he actually asked me not to come into the room, because he knew he was putting on a show and was going to be very theatrical. He knew I wouldn’t have bought into it. It would have been very hard for me to sit through something like that. Michael lost a lot of people with that one. He was trying to shake everybody up, but there’s always a second agenda with Michael. I have to categorize it as his own combination of sadistic and masochistic tendencies. Michael loved to play those roles, and he loved to be the focus of everything.
There were certain periods where he would just break down and throw temper tantrums — breaking things, throwing things, screaming. And you just had to stay away from him. Michael really had something wrong with him, a chemical imbalance. He complained of migraine headaches all the time and would flip out occasionally.
He was most interested in shocking the audience. I don’t mind shocking the audience, but you have to make them laugh too, and entertain them. He was really just into the shock value, or doing something that was weird and boring.
PAM NORRIS:
After I left Saturday Night Live and came to Hollywood and went into the sitcom factory, I was really appalled at how joyless it was. As much as people said, “Oh boy, Saturday Night Live is a terrible place to work,” and, you know, chaos and sibling rivalry and dysfunctional family and everything, when I started working on sitcoms, they just seemed very flat — very vanilla, you might say.
When I was at Designing Women, the whole brouhaha with one of the actresses, Delta Burke, was