Live From New York - James H. Miller [114]
JACK HANDEY:
I went to Michael’s wake. There was food and drink, and his wife, Cheryl, was there, and toward the end of the evening, people got up and sort of talked — telling stories about Michael. They had put the X rays of his head up as decorations so people could see where he had his massive stroke or something like that.
There was some controversy after Lorne and Chevy Chase spoke. Buck Henry got up and said something to the effect that it was interesting that they got up to speak “when I think we all know what Michael thought of them.”
LORNE MICHAELS:
That’s the blackest period for me. Buck later wrote me one of the most beautiful notes I ever received in my life in which he said, a year or two later, that at the time there were attack dogs running at me and he had joined the pack, and he apologized.
What happened was, Michael died on a Tuesday. He’d gone into St. Vincent’s Hospital on Monday. My son, Eddie, was born on Wednesday before read-through in the same hospital. Friday night was a wake that I helped organize at Cheryl’s. After visiting at the hospital and going to the studio around eleven o’clock, I went to the wake — with Chevy Chase. He and John were not on the best of terms but on another level really loved each other. Meanwhile, John was considered the real deal in Hollywood and Chevy was — well, you know. I remembered a time before all these people had joined the Belushi camp, they had been professionally in the John Belushi business. Then they switched over to the Michael O’Donoghue business. And somebody in their remarks took a shot at Chevy, as if you had to make a choice between loving Michael and loving Chevy.
JANE CURTIN, Cast Member:
The fact that here we all were, our lives forever intertwined, and you had these love-hate relationships with people, and things got said that were just so incredibly perfect and mean and funny and honest. Some people laughed, some people gasped. It was pretty cool.
ANDREW KURTZMAN:
I came into the show through Tim Kazurinsky. He brought in several of us. My father had been a creative director at Leo Burnett in Chicago, and Tim had been in his creative group along with Jeff Price, who went on to be a screenwriter. A couple of playwrights and a lot of odd people came out of that agency. I was an accidental hire. I wrote Tim a funny letter asking for tickets to the show. Tim said, “This is quite funny. You should write a couple of sample sketches.” And I won’t say I dashed them off, but I wrote a bunch of sketches and then went back to a $90-a-week job at Barnes and Noble. I forgot the whole thing for about two months, and then I began to get these strange phone calls at odd hours in the middle of the night from Kaz, saying things like “Blaustein loved the stuff.” Shortly thereafter I was brought in.
BRAD HALL:
Dick didn’t really have a lot to say about the comedy. He would sort of go into the room and pick the sketches. It was much more like he was a judge than he was involved in the process at all. I noticed very quickly that on Wednesdays when we had these gigantic read-throughs that the very funniest sketch at the table would almost always get in the show. But so would the worst sketch. And it was a little bit like, oh God. And I think there was a strange moment when we would sit outside the door and wait for the great word or what was going to be chosen. And then you’d come in and there was always an explanation of some kind as to why things were chosen. But it never made any sense to us, because we just thought, “How about using the funniest stuff or the smartest stuff?”
DICK EBERSOL:
The sets were made in Brooklyn in those days. And then they had to