Live From New York - James H. Miller [143]
I had people in the hideaway crack up on the air. Mr. T and Hulk Hogan. When I show clips of highlights, that’s one of the big ones. The two of them just go. I said to Hulk Hogan, one of his pecs was heaving with laughter and he was wearing a tank top, and I said, “Look at your chest, it looks like Dorothy Lamour from behind walking to the commissary.” They just went, and when that happened the audience went wild, because it was live and it was right in front of them. Once they saw the cue card guy sit back and they just saw me talking to the camera, they knew I wasn’t reading anything, and that made a big difference.
MARTIN SHORT:
When I did Ed Grimley on SNL, it moved into a kind of live energy. What I did love about Ed on SNL, particularly, was the pure joy when the phone would ring and before he’d answer it he’d say, “Gee, I love the phone. There’s always such a sense of mystery.” I remember one time years ago, my sister-in-law was flying to California, and she had never flown before, or at least not that much. And she said to me, “I got dressed four different times. I couldn’t decide what to wear for the plane.” And I thought, “How seductive is that? To be that unjaded that you’re still that enthusiastic?”
HARRY SHEARER:
I watched the synchronized swimming on television in August. In late August we were already assembling in New York, and as we were talking, I was just fulminating about the outrage of these people, you know, getting the same medals as real athletes. And Chris and Marty and I were, I guess, in my office, and I don’t know whose idea it was to do the sketch, but we just started writing it. Dick said, “You know, by the time we go on the air in mid-September, nobody will remember the Olympics,” and I said, “We’ll make ’em remember.” Marty and I got to go to the pool every day to rehearse for a week, you know, devising a routine. I had brought tapes of all the synchronized swimming routines with me from L.A., so we just sat and watched the tapes. “Oh, we can do those. Oh, we can do that, we can do that.” And sort of put together our own routine. We didn’t have a choreographer, so we just did it ourselves. And then I think I selected the music, and we just sort of devised these routines and then went out and shot it.
ANDY BRECKMAN:
I was there when Larry David wrote for Saturday Night Live. He was there for one season and he did not get one sketch on the air. Not one. And then he went on to do Seinfeld and be Mr. NBC. It was a Dick Ebersol year, and I’m sure Larry has nothing good to say about Dick Ebersol, but of the sketches that Larry David didn’t get on, some of them made it to dress rehearsal and some became the seeds of Seinfeld episodes. The other writers would love Larry David pieces, because you just admire the work, but they were very subtle pieces and the audiences were never into them. There were never audible laughs. One sketch was about a guy who left a message on his girl-friend’s answering machine that he regretted leaving, and he broke into his girlfriend’s house to retrieve the answering machine tape. And I believe, if I recall the sketch correctly, that it ended with the girlfriend coming home and the boyfriend killing her.
LARRY DAVID, Writer:
No no no. No murder. I haven’t dealt with murder yet. I can’t believe that I would write that. I think it was a courtroom sketch. Because my guess is he’d been arrested. But yes, I finally wound up using that on Seinfeld — the guy who wants to get back a message he left on a girl’s answering machine.
I did get one sketch on the show that season. Just one. It was a sketch about — let’s see, the host was Ed Begley Jr. The sketch got on at five to one in the morning. And this is for the entire season. Ed Begley played an architect, and Harry Shearer was the developer, and he was looking at the plans for a new building. And Harry Shearer noticed something in the blueprint.