Live From New York - James H. Miller [112]
BRAD HALL, Cast Member:
I came in the second year of Ebersol, and we were there until the end of Ebersol. When Ebersol first started, he hired a bunch of people from Chicago — Mary Gross, Tim Kazurinsky, those guys — who we knew peripherally because we were from Chicago. And when we had the show in Chicago that we were doing next door to Second City, we shared the bar with Second City. And when Ebersol and Tischler came out to do their usual pilfering from Second City to get actors, they went to Second City, they saw the show, and the owner of Second City, who was sick of losing people to Saturday Night Live, said, “Hey, go next door, because we have a big hit show going on next door.” And they came over and saw our show. And that night, right after the show, they said “You’re all hired. You’re all coming to Saturday Night Live.” It was very exciting. It was crazy.
Julia and I were really lucky that we’d been going out for a while before that. We had a really solid relationship, and we came to the show together.
JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS, Cast Member:
Audition? No, we didn’t do an audition, that’s the thing. We were just hired off the show we did in Chicago. And then when we came to New York, Dick wanted us to do some of the material we’d done onstage. It’s a real quirky show that we did. It was funny, but it was not straight-down-the-middle improvisation comedy, and they made us perform a rather substantial section from the show. Dick set it up so that everybody sat on folding chairs, and the four of us performed sketches from our show for these jaded writers. It was just grotesque. It couldn’t have been a more hostile crowd. It was so painful, I can’t even believe I’m talking about it. There was no team spirit.
BRAD HALL:
It’s a funny place to work, that seventeenth floor. People act as if it’s so important, that it’s the only thing in the world. And the hours are ridiculous. But at the end of the day, how about just being funny? Those of us who didn’t get so much material had a lot of time to hang out with the band. I spent a lot of time with the SNL band and with the guest bands. And when I look back, I think less about comedy and more about music, to tell you the truth. We got the Clash, we got Squeeze, we had Joe Jackson.
GRANT A. TINKER, Former NBC Chairman:
I never visited their offices on the seventeenth floor, never went up there once. I didn’t want to go up there and fight my way through all that marijuana smoke, which I’d been led to believe was quite thick. So I felt, why cause trouble?
JACK HANDEY, Writer:
I went over to this house one time for a Halloween party, and Cheryl Hardwick was playing the piano and they had a Poe reading, and then Michael O’Donoghue announced that he was going to unveil this painting by a new young artist that he had discovered. And so we were all sucked into it. Like here’s the artist, supposedly, and he’s standing there and looking kind of embarrassed. And the name of the painting is Desi Arnaz as a Young Man. There were, I don’t know, thirty or forty people there. So the painting is up on the wall and Michael pulls off the cover and he goes, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Desi Arnaz as a Young Man.” And there’s the painting, big oil painting, and sure enough, it is Desi Arnaz as a young man, seated on a chair facing you, but with female genitalia instead of male. And there was just an audible gasp from the room. That was the kind of thing Michael liked to do.
JUDITH BELUSHI, Writer:
I did a little writing, but only on one show, when Dick Ebersol came in. The first year there was a writers strike and we only did one show. John said to me, “Why would you ever want to write for Saturday Night Live?” And I said that I had been around it so much and sometimes had even participated — giving somebody a line or something. And I’d worked on the National Lampoon Radio Hour and other things. So I thought, “I can do that.”