Live From New York - James H. Miller [118]
I ended up liking working with him a lot, because he is an excellent producer. He really knows how to deal with the network more than anybody I’ve ever met. It’s just that he had a lot of shortcomings in knowing how to deal with creative people. Dick is a very strange animal.
ANDREW KURTZMAN:
The toughest it ever got between me and Dick was at one point he said, “You’re talking pretty big for a guy who was making $90 last week.” That’s sort of a Dickensian moment in my life. I had to get between Dick and a couple of people several times. With Dick there was always an element of fear. Like his argument with Andy Kaufman. I was standing there backstage where they screamed at each other. There was a certain amount of “fuck you” and screaming down the little entranceway leading into the studio there. It was a big confrontation. It was the show where Andy was voted off the air. I will say Dick was always in control. Even when Dick was out of control, Dick was perfectly in control.
ELLIOT WALD:
There was one piece I remember very well that Jim Downey wrote that we were falling off our chairs about. It was hilarious. It was an alien spaceship landing on Earth. The aliens come out and say, “We are superior, you shouldn’t even bother to oppose us,” and it becomes obvious as they talk that they stole the spaceship and haven’t really read the manual or anything and really don’t know how to run it very well. And in four minutes, it just had half a dozen wonderfully funny things. I remember that piece — and there were a million like it — where Dick just didn’t get it. The writers all got it. Dick didn’t.
TIM KAZURINSKY:
I had done this running thing called “I Married a Monkey,” where my wife was played by a live chimpanzee. And I did it because I knew that something would screw up and people would see that it was live. People would always ask me, “When do you tape the show?” No, it’s called Saturday Night Live. It’s live. It became so slick, people forgot that it was live. So I thought, “I’ll do this soap opera thing with a live chimp, and inadvertently I’ll get to improvise.” And it got to be very popular. And anything that took off, Ebersol wanted: “Let’s do that again,” you know. “Let’s do another monkey thing.” Even when you think it’s played out, you still have to do them. “We need a monkey for this week.” And I’d go, “Christ!”
And we used to hire these midget chimps Butch and Peppy, because they supposedly worked with Ronald Reagan in Bedtime for Bonzo. And the trainer told me one time, “Watch out for the chimps. When the hairs go up on their arms, they’re ready to attack.” So I was on the show one night, it was dress, and Madge, my “wife,” is in a hospital bed with amnesia. So I’m sitting there next to her and suddenly I see the hairs on her arm go up. And I make this dash trying to get out of there, and she grabs me and gets my head in a headlock that was like steel. Fortunately she was tethered by a chain at the back of the hospital bed and I was able to pull my head free before she crushed my skull. Then she went berserk and ripped off her leopard skin negligee and diaper and revealed to the audience that Madge was really a male chimp. So, standing there on the bed now, he grabs his monkey member and starts masturbating — as if to say, “I’m a guy.” Out in the audience, mothers are shielding their kids’ eyes, and I thought, “Oh God, if this ever happened on-air, I’d probably have stayed and wrestled with the chimp. But for a dress rehearsal, get the hell out of there.”
So they sedated the chimp for the air show. I look over and he’s just totally glassy-eyed. And the next time I worked with a chimp, its teeth had been removed. Then I found out from a production assistant that Ebersol was secretly taking out like massive amounts of insurance on me when I worked with the chimp! And that’s when I said, “No more. I’m not doing it anymore.” I