Live From New York - James H. Miller [113]
Michael O’Donoghue had come back as head writer. He didn’t want to be there, and he was really miserable about it. He was saddled with it and he’d do what he could. I wrote a piece with Mitch Glazer that was a Raging Bull parody, a big piece. We were like an hour late handing it in, so Michael refused to look at it. It was just like school.
TIM KAZURINSKY:
It was too crazy. Everyone was out of control. Finally, I decided to quit the show. I called John Belushi and said, “I’m going home. I’m flying back to Chicago tonight. I quit.” Pam Norris, Blaustein, a few others, and I were pretty much coming up with the show almost every week. O’Donoghue’s writers were hopeless. They did nothing. When they did do something, it was horrible. But I didn’t get to quit — because John said, “Okay, Judy and I will drive you to the airport.” They came by my house, got my bags, and, instead of taking me to the airport, they took me to a psychiatrist. John said, “If you want to quit that show, you’ve got to be crazy.” He told me, “Here’s the thing you can’t lose sight of: It gets bad, it gets ugly, but you’re an improviser, you’re a writer, you have access to network airwaves. You have a chance to reach some hearts and minds out there. You have a chance to say something. You cannot walk away from this.” And he sent me in to this psychiatrist, who I saw every week for the next year and who kept me healthy enough to stay on the show.
BOB TISCHLER:
There was a lot of lying going on, a lot of deception. And it became furious between O’Donoghue and Ebersol. I kept on trying to defend him; Ebersol really wanted to get rid of him a long time before he did. I had known Michael for years before the show. He and I were great friends and actually ended up not remaining friends as a result of our experience on Saturday Night Live together. Michael had this history with everybody. Anybody who really got close to him ended up being on his enemies list at a certain point.
ELLIOT WALD, Writer:
I hit it off badly with Michael. He passed judgment on things. He and my first partner, Nate Herman — he didn’t like Nate too much, and since Nate was a performer, he was always hilarious in meetings. So it was hard for him to fire on Nate, but Nate’s quiet partner was easier to pick on. I was afraid to speak up at meetings in the first half of the season. He had made life difficult for me. He almost got me fired — “Just get him out of here” — because he was trying to get somebody else hired. But before that could be executed, he got himself fired over the “Silverman in the Bunker” piece. This was a piece he wrote, with Silverman as Hitler in the last days. The sketch didn’t make it to air, and that’s why Michael quit — or put himself in the position to be fired. He talked to somebody in the press about what a bunch of morons everybody up there was, how they couldn’t see the brilliance of this piece. And the network said, “Well, you do have a clause in your contract about doing things like that,” so they fired him. He was asking for it. He was, in essence, quitting.
But Michael and I made our peace after the show. We did a couple of panels together at the Museum of Television and Radio and actually were on pretty pleasant terms. Then the shock came, when he died.
ROBIN SHLIEN, Production Assistant:
When Michael O’Donoghue got fired, he left this amazing note: “I was fired by Dick Ebersol. I did not leave the show, and if he should claim otherwise, he is, to steal a phrase from Louisa May Alcott, a lying cunt.” It’s very Michael. He posted it on the wall. Dick wasn’t in yet, so those of us who were there immediately took it off and Xeroxed it and made copies, knowing that Dick would rip it down, which he did. But it survived.
BOB TISCHLER:
There were two wakes for Michael. The one on the East Coast was the original, official wake, and they actually had the graph of his aneurysm from the MRI. And then they had a