Live From New York - James H. Miller [119]
JIM BELUSHI:
Ebersol’s an executive network manager. He’s one of the tops in that field. I think he knew what worked, and what didn’t work, and I think he really knew how to program the first thirty minutes to be the most successful. He knew the first thirty minutes of the show was the most-watched, so he really kind of messed around with the commercials to try to hold them back. As far as being a writer or a comic and telling you, “Why don’t you try this gag,” he was a little dry that way. Ebersol is like a lot of people in our industry; they’re heat-seeking missiles. What they’re looking for is the heat. He put that heat up there in the first thirty minutes. Sometimes, though, people like that don’t know how to nurture something.
JOE PISCOPO:
The Sinatra stuff was early on, and they had to talk me into that too, because I didn’t want to disrespect my hero. When I first started doing him, I wrote him a letter and I sent him an album through his attorney — we put out this “I Love Rock and Roll, Sinatra Sings the Rock Tunes” kind of thing. I was a North Jersey Italian American just like the Old Man, as we affectionately referred to Mr. S., and he couldn’t have been nicer. Matter of fact, he sent out cease-and-desist letters to anybody who’d even think of doing him and he never sent me a letter. And he used to call me Jusep, which was Italian for Joseph. He would invite me to everything. He just liked it. And when I look at it now, it had a real edge to it, you know?
But he couldn’t have been nicer, and I have the fondest memories, rest his soul, of the Old Man. He was just the greatest. When I first did him on SNL, he was at Caesar’s Palace in Atlantic City and he was about to step onstage — the opening act was an old comic named Charlie Callas — and everybody was waiting for the Old Man, and at eleven-thirty for the first time it was me doing him, and everybody stopped in the room, and I heard this from everybody, and they just said, “How is this guy crazy enough to do Sinatra?” And Callas breaks his silence and says to the Old Man, “What do you think, Captain?” And Sinatra looks at me doing him and he says, “He’s pretty good — the little prick.”
And when I met him, he said, “Hey Joe, baby, come here.” I felt so comfortable, I said, “Can I call you Frank?” He said, “No.” It was great, you know? He was just a wonderful, wonderful guy.
BOB TISCHLER:
We had a piece on one show where people were jumping off a building, and in the sketch Frank Sinatra was supposed to jump, as was Mayor Koch, who played himself, and Joe says, “Frank wouldn’t jump off a building.” And Eddie turns to him and says, “Oh yeah — and Mayor Koch would?” That was one of many “Frank wouldn’t do that” stories. There was another time where Billy Crystal was going to play Sammy Davis Jr. — Billy and I wrote this piece — and Joe was supposed to play Frank, and it was supposed to start in the Carnegie Deli and end up where Sammy would break-dance in front of the NBC studios, which we did. But when we told Joe that we wanted to start in the Carnegie Deli, he said that Frank would never eat in the Carnegie Deli, and he refused to do it until we put Frank in a limo.
Then there’s the Stevie Wonder story. It was a sketch called “Ebony and Ivory,” and it was supposed to be Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder — Joe and Eddie. In the sketch, which Barry and David wrote, Frank was supposed to be waiting for Stevie Wonder to show up at the recording studio, and Joe said, “Frank wouldn’t wait for Stevie. Stevie would have to wait for Frank.” And refused to do it that way.
It was sick.
ANDREW SMITH:
Joe needed to think he was Frank Sinatra. All that stuff about Frank. And we wanted to write a sketch called “Frank Wouldn’t Do That,” because we’d pitch a sketch or something, and Joe would say, “No, no, Frank wouldn’t do that.” I once wrote a sketch — “The Gay Frank Sinatra Club.” And, “No, not that, Frank wouldn’t do