Live From New York - James H. Miller [126]
I was in New York stuck on a sitcom with Mickey Rooney, Nathan Lane, Meg Ryan, and Scatman Crothers called One of the Boys. Mickey Rooney was always talking — “I was the number one star in the worrrrld, you hear me? The worrrrld. Bang! The worrrld! Judy Garland never owned a car. They pumped her so full of drugs they killed her! How long has Robert Redford been in the business, ten years? I’ve been in the business sixty-one years!” He was sixty-two at the time. He would act out entire movies that he thought of, with lines like, “How are you, Mr. Fuck? I’m Mrs. Shit.”
We were taping in Letterman’s, now Conan’s, studio on the sixth floor at 30 Rock, and to clear my head, I would go up to the eighth floor and watch Eddie Murphy rehearse. He was great.
BARRY BLAUSTEIN:
Eddie would go full-out on all our stuff. I don’t think we ever wrote a sketch that didn’t make the air that we wanted, or had to say, “They should’ve used that.” The show’s at its very best when the writers and the actors are in a room together writing stuff, the way Eddie was with us. Eddie would come in and say, “Hey, what about this?” and then we’d just start writing together. You can’t write in a total vacuum. Pretty good rule of thumb: If you’re laughing when you’re writing it, it will be funny.
Eddie was up for everything. That was just one of the reasons for his success. In his stand-up, Eddie used to mention Buckwheat, from the old Our Gang comedies, and every time he did, he’d get a laugh. So we decided to do a tribute to Buckwheat — have Eddie impersonate him.
ROBIN SHLIEN:
I have a very specific memory of typing the first Buckwheat sketch and almost falling off my chair because it was so funny. Having been at the show and knowing what it took to have a great character and get a big response, I remember thinking, “They nailed it. This is going to be huge.” It was “Buckwheat Sings,” and they had bothered to put the mispronunciations in the script. So it was “Untz, tice, fee times a nady.” I was typing this and I couldn’t stop laughing. That was always a good sign.
DICK EBERSOL:
Eddie did Buckwheat for the first time in October of ’81, so I would guess it would’ve been just after the first of the year, January of ’83, that he came in to see me late one night in the office that’s now Lorne’s again and said, “I want to kill Buckwheat.” It was one of the hottest characters in late-night television at that time. But he said, “I can’t stand it anymore. Everywhere I go people say, ‘Do Buckwheat, do this, do that.’ I want to kill him.”
His instincts were so good. I said, “Go sit down with Barry and David.” They came back into my office about two, three o’clock in the morning, and it was a two-part thing: “The Assassination of Buckwheat.” It probably was the best piece of satire in the four or five years that I was there. The first part was the actual shooting, out in front of the building as he got out of the car. The assassin’s name was John David Studs, because they always have three names. Piscopo was funny in it too — he was too on-point for what a lot of SNL should be, but he was a brilliant Rich Little of his time.
They really wanted to do a satire on how far the media had gone. And that was to be the end of Buckwheat.
BARRY BLAUSTEIN:
Part one aired and went real well. And then we thought, “What if we do this: We take the next step, they catch the killer, and that will be like Lee Harvey Oswald getting killed.” The censors were kind of unhappy, there were problems upstairs. What? Well, “Grant Tinker is very sensitive on this. He doesn’t want to make fun of the Kennedy assassination.” And we were like, “Oh, come on.” The censor, Bill Clotworthy, was an old friend of Reagan’s. They had been in GE Theater together. He’s actually a really decent guy, Clotworthy, because he had a sense of humor about it. And I remember saying, “Goddammit, we always make fun of Reagan, why can’t we make fun of Kennedy?”
DAVID SHEFFIELD:
We staged it downstairs at Rockefeller Center. We shot it two ways on tape. We actually brought in a guy from special effects