Live From New York - James H. Miller [139]
I think when I came to the show, I was sort of a piñata of ideas and thoughts and characters, and all kinds of things happened. Every day I was excited at the discovery of what we could do. I never put a time limit on how long I would be there or what it would give me or get me. I didn’t approach it like that. I just felt personally as a performer and as a creative person I had to give it my shot. I was thirty-seven years old, I was looking at the chance to finally say to everybody, “This is what I can do.” That’s why I said yes to come in and do the show after hosting it twice the season before. It was everything I wanted it to be.
LILY TARTIKOFF:
Billy didn’t have an apartment when he was first on Saturday Night Live. We just gave him our apartment for like a month, until they got settled, and he and his wife and his girls used it. It seemed to work out okay. And it helped save the show.
HARRY SHEARER:
Spinal Tap appeared on the show as a musical guest in the spring of ’84. We got treated so well. I didn’t realize that guests are treated better than the regulars. So it was my own stupidity; smart people do dumb things. So I really thought, because we’d been treated pretty well as the guests, hmmm, this might be a better situation. Dick basically extended the offer to all three of us; Michael McKean passed, Chris and I accepted. I knew Marty Short by reputation; he was a friend of Paul Shaffer’s and Paul just raved about him, and I’d seen a little bit of his work on SCTV. We had not been told, I don’t think, that Jimmy Belushi was coming back. That came as a surprise.
Dick put on a pretty elaborate show. He got Chris, Marty, Billy, and I together and said, “Now guys, you know Mary Gross and Julia are coming back, and I want a third girl for that slot and I want you guys to help choose her.” Well, we went through this elaborate process of meeting people. Geena Davis met with us in the lobby of the Century Plaza Hotel. And Geena had just been on a couple of sitcoms and it was all quite awkward and uncomfortable for everybody involved. But it boiled down to Andrea Martin and Pamela Stephenson. And Marty, of course, had a number of ties with Andrea and really wanted Andrea there, and I thought, after we saw her tapes, that Pamela was an incredibly versatile actress and just brought something really different, so we tossed it back and forth and finally Pamela got it. To her everlasting dismay.
MARTIN SHORT, Cast Member:
I had a one-year contract. I certainly approached that show not as someone who was going to be around, obviously, for more than one year. So I felt that I had to do a lot and be in as many interesting things as possible, because it was only a limited time.
I never wanted to leave SCTV, and I had to find out for sure SCTV was officially gone, which it was. I’d been asked for my last two years there to join Saturday Night Live, but I didn’t want a change.
It was important to me. I had already done SCTV for three years and I had a new child. But I never figured out how to do SNL particularly. After the third show, I still hadn’t cashed any checks, because I was not happy there at all. And I went in to talk to Dick and said, “I want to leave the show.” And he thought I was kind of insane, of course. But he figured out how to keep me there, which was to say, “Look, if by Christmas you’re still unhappy, kid, you can go free of that contract.” I think he figured out that, by that time, I’d figure out how to do the show.
ANDREW SMITH:
I always say the “kings of comedy” came in to deign