Live From New York - James H. Miller [147]
ANDY BRECKMAN:
I mostly wrote for the “B” cast — like Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Gary Kroeger — and my sketches were usually on at twelve-fifty. That used to be the time for high-concept stuff — the “writers’ sketches.”
MARTIN SHORT:
If you’re just a performer, you were at the mercy of what they would hand you. You had more control of your fate as a writer-performer. If you were just an actor on the show, it was not as gratifying as if you were an actor-writer. I love that control, you know, making it actually funny. Other people did write for me. Jim Downey was there that year, and Andy Breckman — two strong writers. But there was a tendency to write for yourself, particularly if you were perceived as someone who did strange material. People would sometimes feel like they wouldn’t know how to write for that.
I must admit, when the live stuff would work, there was a great excitement that you could never capture anywhere else.
DICK EBERSOL:
Billy and Chris and Marty, and Harry for that matter, were writers. And they were a pleasure. Billy’s contribution on the writing side was so enormous. He was writing two, three, some weeks four pieces a show. In the history of the show up to that point, only Chevy in the first two or three months was ever that prolific.
BILLY CRYSTAL:
I think maybe in a way we represented the age group that stayed with the show from beginning to end. We were, let’s see, nine years later. The audience that started with the show was now thirty-seven, thirty-eight also — so we hit a big chord with those people. And that was good. Some of our pieces were really funny and inventive. And you had people who could play characters and do voices. Marty and I did “Kate and Ali,” where I played Muhammad Ali and he played Katharine Hepburn.
And bringing Grimley, and bringing Fernando, and finding “I hate when that happens,” which is something Chris Guest and I used to do as friends, and that being a big hit, was another part of the success of the show.
JIM BELUSHI:
Ebersol fired me the first week of December in my second season. I wasn’t on the Christmas show. I begged for my job back, and I came back in January. I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke pot, I didn’t do anything, and that was probably, that second half of my sophomore year, when I was starting to get into it. I might have been an asshole, really, because of my own frustration and being in the middle-child syndrome.
Why did he fire me? Because I was uncontrollable — throwing things down halls and angry and disruptive. Then he let me back and I stopped drinking, because every time I’d gotten upset, I went down to Hurley’s bar and shot some whiskey. So then you have behavior you’re not proud of. I don’t regret any of it, though. I’ve taken all those experiences and learned from them. I got more serious about my work and my craft after that. So in a way I thank him. It was the best firing that ever happened to me.
Hosting had become a hip, chic thing to do in the first years of Saturday Night Live, and the list of hosts was audacious and eclectic. During the Doumanian and early Ebersol years, that gig lost luster, but with the rise of Eddie Murphy, and then the year that starred Billy Crystal and Martin Short, hosting status rose again.
Brandon Tartikoff, the seemingly ever-youthful NBC programmer who survived the Fred Silverman regime and went on to success and acclaim under Grant Tinker, felt protective and brotherly toward Saturday Night Live, even though at least once during his reign he actually canceled it — then about twenty-four hours later gave it a reprieve. He believed SNL was one of the network’s signature shows and that to kill it would be almost sacrilegious. When in New York and not at his office in Burbank, Tartikoff liked to drop by the eighth-floor studios and seventeenth-floor