Live From New York - James H. Miller [136]
JIM BELUSHI:
John would have been happy that I made it onto Saturday Night Live, but he actually wanted me to be a dramatic actor. When I started at Second City, I called him and said, “I got in at Second City.” There was a long pause on the phone. He goes, “Uh, shouldn’t you be at Goodman Theater or something, be more like a dramatic actor?” I said, “I’m really enjoying this here.” He said, “You’re a better actor than me, don’t you think you should be, like, doing drama?” I said, “I can probably do both, John.” He goes, “Okay.” That was it.
BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY:
John and I were quite close. He had replaced me at Second City when I left initially. I lived on his couch in New York City for six months. He was bigger than life. No matter what he did, he didn’t think he would die. When he died, Lorne asked me to say something at the end of the show, because we had been together a long time. I recounted this one incident: He and I were walking down Bleecker Street and it was snowing and he had one of those hood things up. And a truck hit him and it flipped him into the air and he rolled up against the curb. And he just jumped right back up. An ambulance came and took him to the hospital. And he was fine. I mean, he got hit hard by a truck. And no problem. So I thought he was pretty indestructible.
DAVID SHEFFIELD:
I did go to a party one time at the Blues Bar. It was 1980. Belushi had done a guest spot on the show. We walked in. Robin Williams was behind the bar passing out beers. And Belushi stood at the door as we walked in and looked me up and down and said, “Who the fuck are you? I don’t recognize you.” He said, “Did you bring any beer?” I said, “No, but I got a J.” “Oh, all right, come on in.”
LORNE MICHAELS:
When I got the call from Bernie, I was at Broadway Video. I had lost my father suddenly when I was fourteen — he was only fifty. It was a big surprise. So I feel like since then I’ve always been prepared for the worst. It was easier for me to go into a withholding mode. I dealt with John’s family, and Judy and I arranged for airplanes to get everybody there. It was the first time in my life I had ever chartered airplanes. When I walked out of my office, there were cameras and lights everywhere.
Bernie flew in with John in a body bag on the Warner corporate plane. Danny and some other guys were waiting at the airport on motorcycles to salute him. The plane landed. And then they took off. Bernie had to take the body to the mortuary.
I didn’t deal with anything until I saw John in the coffin. I had seen him look worse, but it was awful. Standing at the grave, we all just sobbed.
TIM KAZURINSKY:
When we made the movie Neighbors, that was probably the most fun I had. We would work on Staten Island on the movie in the daytime and then every night go back to John’s house and order in food and hang out and watch old movies. And John would do impersonations of Brando as the Godfather and make us howl until our sides hurt. He was the greatest guy to hang with. Half of him was this poor peasant Albanian kid from this small town where he’d been much looked down upon. And he said to me once, “Fuck them, I’m going to go out and become the most famous guy in the world just to spite them.” And he did that, and he could be that person, but the other half of John was that he was just this really lovable guy who did go out and become the most famous guy in the world and that wasn’t the answer. And he would go out on what I call that three A.M. to six A.M. club crawl in New York, where I don’t imagine he was the same person around Mick Jagger and Robert De Niro and Francis Ford Coppola as he was around Tim Kazurinsky. He had this old homebody self, but then he felt he also had to play the role of King of New York. It was really a schizophrenic way to live.
LORNE MICHAELS:
John, as I’ve said many times, lived