Live From New York - James H. Miller [142]
Now you’re a star on Saturday night, but if forty-eight hours later you haven’t come up with an idea, you’re a failure. Billy Crystal and I were always the ones who would leave at six fifty-nine A.M. after handing in last scripts. Oh, it was terrible. And then the read-through was at eleven, which I think Lorne made it later for that reason. So you went home, slept for a couple hours, and came back. I remember on my wife’s birthday — it was a Tuesday night, and that was always the worst night — stopping off at an all-night market and picking up a cake. It was just so pathetic. You know, you have no life. But I didn’t know how else to do the show. You would think they would make some adjustments when they had big stars doing it.
I always thought it was like final exams. I was always exhausted and never home. But then the more I did it, the more I was able to figure out how to do it and not work so insanely.
BILLY CRYSTAL:
One thing you learn on the stage is, you’ve got to cover your ass, because nobody else is going to. I remember one week there were eleven comedy sketches in the show and our “group,” I’ll call it, did nine of them. The pressure was always on that way. Some were good, some were bad, that was the nature of the beast. The time you have to do the show is so short. We just filled up the time as much as we could and tried to integrate the other cast members as much as we could, but certain teams just grew. Chris and I did tons of stuff together that year, and Marty had Ed Grimley. We all had our things. And so when it got light Dick would come to us and go, “I need a Grimley.” And he’d look at me and go, “I need a Fernando.”
BOB TISCHLER:
Billy started becoming very popular and doing characters like Fernando and other characters. Dick, who is a whore, would try to get him to do the same characters over and over. And Billy, who loves attention, would feel no compunction about doing Fernando every week, even though a lot of us were tired of it. Harry Shearer looked at Billy as selling out and made no bones about it. Where other people might see the audience laughing at what Billy was doing — they may not have liked it themselves, but they weren’t abrasive or abusive about it — Harry was just vocal and insulting. He could be insulting to anybody at any time, but he especially picked Billy to mistreat. He was just horrible to him.
MARTIN SHORT:
As a performer, you only found the repetition of a character boring if you had nothing else to say comedically about it. But in the case of Ed Grimley, it was totally interesting to do because Ed Grimley on SCTV is an actor who works for the network and is in different movies, and that’s the way we use Ed. Now suddenly we saw him in his apartment. We saw where he lived. We saw him musing about life. So this is all different.
BILLY CRYSTAL:
We could always say, “No, we don’t have it.” And if it got really desperate, you’d try and do one. I don’t remember ever being forced to do anything, but Dick would come to us with a plea: “Please.”
What was great about the “Fernando’s Hideaway”s was they were all improvised, so nobody had to write anything. That’s what I loved most about him. The danger of it was doing it in the dress rehearsal and getting screams and then trying to re-create it three hours later. But the danger was intoxicating too. Once the set was rolled out, the hideaway, the audience started to get excited, because it was the first sketch they would see where there were no cue cards. And they knew it. They knew it was dangerous. It was a talk show within the show. A whole different energy hit the studio when it happened. I loved seeing