Live From New York - James H. Miller [111]
BOB TISCHLER:
I never called myself a writer before Saturday Night Live. I produced a lot of comedy and I did writing, but I wasn’t a member of the union or anything and didn’t go sit down and write. And when I came to Saturday Night Live, I was all of a sudden brought in as head writer, and what happened was we did one show and the writers strike happened. So at that point it was an opportunity to basically clean house of the Jean Doumanian people that we didn’t want and come back the next year with our own staff. There was an opportunity to upright the death ship and let it sail again. I’ve never been one to work on anything with the intent of it failing. But Michael would not give up on this death ship thing. So Michael and I kind of disagreed on that, and that’s where we started to lose our friendship.
At one point Michael had been an incredible genius, an incredible writer. At a certain point, the panache and the desire to be recognized and to get the accoutrements of Saturday Night Live became more important than his craft. It was very sad for me to see this happen.
JAMES DOWNEY:
Lorne at that time was anxious to get into movies in a big way, and he had a deal with Paramount. And different writers and teams of writers — like Tom Schiller wrote a movie — each had movie ideas. Lorne was pushing Franken and Davis and myself the most to do a movie. But we didn’t really have an idea. We had the deal before we had the idea, which is not a good way to do anything. So from like the summer of 1980 on and off for the next two years, we just in a desultory way wrote the screenplay, which once we finished it Paramount was then able to officially reject. Then, like the summer of ’82 — Letterman had just started up in March, and he had asked me to come in when he was first putting his NBC late-night show together. I knew that I probably wouldn’t be able to do it, at least in the very beginning, because of the movie thing, but I went in to meet him because I was a big fan of his morning show. And then in August we had finished up the movie, so I went to the Letterman show. Later I became head writer for about a year and a quarter.
The biggest difference between writing for Letterman and writing for Saturday Night Live — well, obviously it would be the sketches, per se. I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious, but I think that the principle in operation at Saturday Night Live seemed to be that — I didn’t feel this way myself — but the principle was that we wanted to be hip. And at Letterman, we wanted to be smart. And I liked that much better.
It’s not like I can identify even a single person at SNL who would say that being hip was what was most important to them. It was just that what made Saturday Night Live distinctive was not that it was so smart or brainy in that sense; it was more that, when it appeared, television had been kind of middle-aged and square for a long time. And Saturday Night Live set a tone of being cool. And certainly it was pretty clear that that was never a concern of the Letterman show. I mean, a tremendous amount of attention and thought and care has always gone into like the social aspects of Saturday Night Live — the parties and who was booked to host and, you know, style aspects — but never, never was there any of that stuff at Letterman. Letterman was never a social kind of show, you know. And there were certain kinds of things that we did at Letterman that even, factoring in the differences between the two shows, the audience at Saturday Night Live would not have been interested in or liked.
Saturday Night Live was always, I thought, more about performance. Most of the successful pieces to some extent involved a performer getting to look good doing it. Whereas at Letterman we did all kinds of things which were basically just an idea that Dave was communicating to the audience. In those