Live From New York - James H. Miller [125]
During those two years, Eddie, Sheffield, and Blaustein had as much to do with keeping the show alive as anything or anyone. They were a wonderful marriage, the three of them. Eddie was clearly a genius then, at eighteen or nineteen years old. They were able to take his rough stuff, and they became his transmitters.
BARRY BLAUSTEIN:
What happened with our first Eddie Murphy piece was, my dad was always calling me up with ideas for sketches, and they were always terrible, but this was the one time he came up with an idea that was decent. He’d read this article about a high school basketball team in Cleveland, where the court ruled that there had to be at least one white player on the team. We wrote something for Eddie based on that, showed it to him, and worked with him on it. It was his first piece. And you could tell the first minute he was on the air that whatever “it” is, he had it. He completely connected with the audience. He just jumped off the screen.
And then we kept writing for him. I don’t know why other people didn’t write for him. They’d go, “You write for him a lot,” and we’d say, “Yeah, well, he’s the best guy there, why not write for him?” Basically we would just sit in a room and Eddie would start talking.
BOB TISCHLER:
One of the greatest things that happened to me on the show was meeting Barry and David, who are still my friends. We started writing together immediately. They had already been writing together as a result of being on Jean’s staff, and they were among the three people that we kept from Jean’s days. And I just started hitting it off with them, and we started writing for Eddie. We had this thing for Eddie, because Eddie could take what we wrote and make it better every single time. And he also would work with us by bringing in a character and improvising with us. It was just worth it to work with him to be on the show. I know he was a problem for a lot of people, but for us he was never a problem. We had a great relationship on the show.
PAM NORRIS:
The idea that Eddie got too much attention is hard for me to swallow, just because he earned it so much and he was ignored for the longest time. But he didn’t get bitter, and he didn’t quit. He kept writing, and he kept working with writers that would write for him. He kept coming up with new characters over and over again. I’m sure it’s frustrating to work with him, because he could do everything. I mean, he could write for himself, he could create characters for himself. How do you compete with that? That could be extremely frustrating. I just saw how dismissed he was for the longest time, so if he got a little special later, he certainly deserved that — and way more.
ELLIOT WALD:
My era never was lionized the way the people in the first years were. In that first show, those people were the toast of New York, and I don’t think anybody from my era was that way. Even when Eddie turned twenty-one, he held his own birthday party at Studio 54. It was well attended, but he still had to hold it for himself. No one really knew of us. They just knew of us as “the successors.”
BRAD HALL:
Eddie was the one guy that really stood up for us. And if we were light in the show he was always, “Come on, let’s give these guys something.” He was really a team player from that point of view and an easy guy to talk to and always funny and fun to have around. That’s definitely where the show was focused — on him. He’d had a big movie come out when we got there. And he was a big star. And that’s where they were going to hang their hat. And who can blame them? The guy was great. But it did make it frustrating for us.
DANA CARVEY, Cast Member: