Live From New York - James H. Miller [117]
TIM KAZURINSKY:
The thing with Ebersol was that he was always looking for the lowest common denominator. The moral majority was really big then, and he didn’t want to do anything to piss anybody off or do anything controversial. I had just come out of Second City, and he tells me, “I don’t want to do political things. I don’t want to do controversial things. Who do you do impersonations of? Can you do Mickey Rooney?” I was like, “Fuck off!” I remember John Candy’s saying that was like the bottom of the comedy barrel. Mickey Rooney!
BARRY BLAUSTEIN:
Reagan’s election set the tone. There was a kind of impending doom hanging over the country, and there was palpably a move toward conservatism at the network. We tried ideas for sketches that the network would shoot down. The censors would say, “You can’t do that.” We’d point out they did something similar with Aykroyd three years earlier, and the censor would say, “Yeah, but that was then, this is now. Things are different.” There was to be no mention of the Iran hostage crisis. Ironically, when the crisis was over, we did a whole show with every hostage sketch we could think of.
DAVID SHEFFIELD:
Barry had an idea for a great hostage sketch, which was, a guy knows this woman’s husband is being held hostage, and he goes over to console her and winds up hitting on her. The network said no. It was a strange time.
JAMES DOWNEY:
I liked Dick Ebersol a lot. He gets a bad rap. He developed a play-book to run the show which I would argue they are definitely using these days. The way the show works now is Ebersol’s formula: the popular characters in heavy rotation, the kind of pieces they pick. It’s not a writer’s show. Ebersol made no bones: “I’m pushing Eddie Murphy, there’s going to be a ‘Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood’ or a Buckwheat every other show in alternation. I’m going to pretend ‘The Whiners’ are popular characters whether the audience thinks so or not, and we’re going to keep doing it. It’s going to be about the performers. The sets are going to be very simple.”
The show has the feel of one- and two-person sketches, not the kind of things like Franken and Davis and I would write — complicated, plotty sorts of scenes — or like Jack Handey’s stuff. I would argue that the show right now resembles the Ebersol show more than it resembles the old show. I think Ebersol kept the show on the air at a point where it might have been canceled. It’s like Sam Houston holding the Texas army together long enough to hang on.
ANDREW KURTZMAN:
Tim Kazurinsky, who came from a business environment, sort of clued me in by saying, “Watch Ebersol. Watch how he leaves the door opened or closed during a meeting. Watch who he has in his office.” What was it they said about Lyndon Johnson? He never had a telephone conversation without needing to win a point. Even when Dick was yelling, he was subtly turning things so that the argument would go his way.
ELLIOT WALD:
I don’t remember who said the line — I’ve said it so much that someone said they thought I said it originally, but I didn’t — but one of the writers said, “Every time somebody in the world lies, Dick Ebersol gets a royalty.”
Dick and I would go head-to-head in meetings, but he would just ignore me, and I didn’t particularly love that. I was always interested in who would fight him and who wouldn’t. And I’m a confronter, so we got on very bad terms. I haven’t seen him or looked in his direction since.
BOB TISCHLER:
I had one big run-in with Dick before our last year. I said, “I know you’re a publicity hog and you can’t control yourself, but at least give me some kind of credit for this. I’m doing all the work. I think you should be much more in the background.” He was dealing with the network and dealing with a lot of the nuts and bolts, and I was really running the show much more from the creative point of view, because he really did not have a good rapport with the writers. So I would do all the rewriting, and that would be a hell of a lot of work. But he would just take all the credit, and I was very troubled