• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1417 0

the wastebasket on Wednesday. And you’d stay up, and people were fueling themselves with cocaine from Monday through Wednesday, because Wednesday morning we had the read-through at eleven. And you literally had that fifty hours to get a show written. So you would kill yourself to get good scripts done. Ebersol was looking for scripts that would make Eddie and Joe bigger stars. He was looking for impersonations of showbiz people. Anything that had an idea or a political notion or that he thought was a little too smart — bang, dead, into the waste-basket. And so the writers would get more depressed, they’d do more drugs, and pretty soon most of the scripts were written for Eddie and Joe. It was like publish or perish — you had to get a piece on the air, so everybody wrote thinking, “If I don’t do a piece for Eddie, it won’t get on, and I’ll get fired” — which people often did. It was really fucking crazy.

Second City is the ideal. You can do and say anything you want. See it in the paper that day, do a bit on it that night. You didn’t have that luxury at Saturday Night Live. In fact, sometimes the smarter it was, the quicker Ebersol would kill it.

DICK EBERSOL:

John Belushi had become convinced that Fear, which was this punk kind of rock group, were on the verge of breaking out and convinced me that I ought to book them and personally vouched that they were terrific and so on. Anyway, their musical number — in the last fifteen or twenty minutes of the show — was so dark. They had films in it showing pumpkins that, as you carved the pumpkin, blood came out of each carving. It was just like O’Donoghue at his darkest. And I, quite frankly, had given him too much freedom. But now here I am with Fear itself. We’re on the air. And all of a sudden they’re out of control and there are dancers around them — including John, who you can’t see on television — and they’re slam-dancing, that’s what it was called, banging off each other, banging into the audience, banging into cameramen. None of this was really foreseen. And things got really, completely, and totally out of hand. And so you’re sitting at home and you’re watching this, and you don’t really have the total sense of what we could see, because Davey Wilson in the booth was not shooting what was breaking out in the lower areas of the audience, where people sit on those movable chairs.

And I think probably, for the only time in the history of the show, I had been worried about it enough to have told Davey to at least have a film standing by. It was a sensational film that had aired in the first show, four weeks before, on October third, with Eddie playing a black inmate who wrote poetry in iambic pentameter or something like that. It was a takeoff on whoever Norman Mailer loved at the time, who was a wronged guy in prison, and a wonderful piece of character. And so I told them to roll it. And so we just rolled the film.

We let Fear finish in the studio, and I don’t think they knew until they were back in their dressing room that the last half of their song had gone away. Anyway, the total damage that was done in the studio was about $2,500. But the New York Post headline on Monday was, “Saturday Night Live Riot Destroys $250,000.”

DAVE WILSON:

It was like mosh pit kind of stuff, with people diving off the stage into the audience. And all I remember is Dick Ebersol actually running around, ducking underneath the cameras, trying to quiet it all down.

The death of John Belushi on March 5, 1982, at the age of thirty-three, brought the festivities to a sorrowful, traumatized halt. No matter how many people might have predicted a premature demise for this ebullient man of vast and varied appetites and legendary overindulgence, the death came as a dark, cold shock. It told his friends at Saturday Night Live not only that John was mortal, but that they were too. It had the sobering impact of a biblical warning: Your parents were right after all, dammit — drugs can destroy a life, excess can be fatal, self-abuse can have severe consequences, there’s no free lunch, and all that