Live From New York - James H. Miller [146]
JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS:
It wasn’t a particularly happy experience for me. To begin with, I will take responsibility for some of it, because I was extremely young. I hadn’t graduated college and I was very naive about how things work in real show business. So I went into it very green. I had been in their audience. I was a teenager when the show was sort of at its height. So then to be plucked out of Chicago between my junior and senior year of college to go on the show was head-spinning, to say the very least.
I thought it was going to be a congenial experience; my head was in the clouds. I wasn’t aware of the politicking one had to do, and I think there were a lot of drugs going on at the time, but I was unaware of that as well, to tell you the truth. I was always surprised at read-through, though, when certain writers’ sketches were eighteen pages long and they were laughing and laughing, and I was so confused as to how they could possibly have found it so funny — and made it so long! Everybody was doing a lot of coke and smoking dope. Everybody would stay up late. All the work was done between eleven o’clock at night and six o’clock in the morning; that’s when everybody was functioning. And that wasn’t, in my view, conducive to comedy.
Doing Seinfeld was, of course, just the opposite experience. It was pure joy from beginning to end. I thought, “No one will ever get this, because we’re having too much fun.”
MARGARET OBERMAN:
There are certain people who really go after Saturday Night Live because of that “boys club” business. I think that element certainly existed, but I think it was like anything else: You had to be a survivor to make that show work for you, and that was true of men and women. There was a certain political kind of thing that went on there, and you had to know that and function within those rules. And if you didn’t know that, then maybe you weren’t as happy as some other people were.
ELLIOT WALD:
Herb Sargent said at the end of one season, “Our biggest fuckup this year is we did not find stuff for Julia to do. She is really talented.” A lot of people didn’t see that, but the fact is, Herb was right and we wrong. Not that I thought she wasn’t talented, but I thought she was limited and hard to write for. It was my own inability to write for her, and obviously not any lack of talent on her part, that was the problem.
MARGARET OBERMAN:
Julia is one of the people who doesn’t like to talk about the show. It’s my opinion that she shouldn’t be so negative about it. I love Julia, but I just feel like that show really helped her. It got her out there, and she met Larry David. So how bad could it have been? It complicated things for her that Brad Hall, her boyfriend — who joined the show when she did — didn’t stay the full time with the show, and there was a lot of acrimony. He was very, very unhappy, so that complicated things for her. But I just feel like she’d be better off not saying how horrible she thought it was. I don’t know what she’s going to gain from that. She’s had so many great things happen to her.
JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS:
Dick Ebersol was always wielding a baseball bat. He would always hold this bat when he would have these meetings. The writers and the actors would be there, and he would have the bat in hand. It was really very Al Capone-y. And he always wanted me to straighten my hair. He was always trying to get me to straighten my hair. Well — he’s in sports now.
ANDREW KURTZMAN:
To this day, I miss working live. There is nothing quite like that. There was a sketch we did in which Chris Guest dropped his script. He was doing a voiceover from the announcer’s booth, but he dropped the script and couldn’t retrieve it right away. And so we just went dark for a while. We stayed on a title card or something and Chris was pawing