Live From New York - James H. Miller [156]
Meanwhile there was the failure of The New Show. Not only did it sort of fail, noble failure though it was, but it was enormously costly, which I had to bear personally. This was the first time I was producing a show for a license fee. We were deficiting it, and I was losing $100,000 a week. We did eleven of them. When it was all over, what I was focused on was behaving well.
I felt I’d had such enormous success with Saturday Night that it was character building to have that kind of failure. I had won big — and now I was losing. The last thing I wanted to do was go back and do a television show, but there was a very strong financial reality. I won’t say I was completely broke, but I was pretty close to it. I wasn’t in any danger of going under, and I’d had lots of periods in my life when I didn’t have much money. It was more the dealing with the failure. And then I was getting divorced later on in that year.
By the spring of ’85, when Three Amigos started shooting, Brandon called me and asked me about coming back. Dick had just decided not to. I said I didn’t think so. I think he’d had discussions with Buddy Morra, Billy Crystal’s manager, about Billy being the sole host, at least for ten of them, or something like that. As with a lot of things with Brandon, I only know the part that I heard. Jobs like his are always about making sure you have options.
When I left in ’80, I just thought it would go away. I never really thought of it as having a life of its own, because I’d been there at the beginning of it. Someone very powerful told me, “You don’t want to do Saturday Night Live. Somebody who wants to be you wants to do Saturday Night Live.” I thought about that a lot. I promised Brandon that he and I would talk again. And then I think we got to a point in the conversation that he was going to pull the plug on the show. And for me, that was the swing vote.
ANNE BEATTS, Writer:
Lorne called and asked me if I wanted my old job back. It was a compliment, I guess. I said no. I’ve sometimes regretted that, but I was working on other stuff, and being in L.A. more. His first year back didn’t seem to go that well. I certainly wouldn’t pass judgment on what it represented that he returned.
TOM SCHILLER, Writer:
In the early days I was pretty much left alone. I could go into a meeting and say, “I want to do a thing with John Belushi as an old guy; he does this and that.” And then they’d say, “Great. Do it.” I’d write a script and go around and show it to people. Herb Sargent usually added a line or two to make it better. Then I just shot it, and in two weeks it would be on the air. It was a dream come true.
But later it became difficult. After the five-year gap, I went back and worked there a little bit, and it was murder. They assigned some young writer to work with me, and it was bad. They had more checks and balances, and that was bad. Somebody said Lorne had become the corporate person that he used to make fun of. It became more of a business. Suddenly there was a guy with a clipboard walking around while you were writing your sketches and stuff, making sure you were working.
When the show first started, no one knew what was going on, and there was a wonderful flux period, which was incredibly creative. We were more individuals in the early days. Then in ’85, the show had coalesced, and you found you were just an interchangeable part. Not that the drugs were good, but there were no more drugs. It was clean. It wasn’t as rambunctious — that’s the word.
ANDY BRECKMAN, Writer:
It had meant nothing for me to please Dick Ebersol or to have Dick Ebersol say, “That’s funny,” to get his seal of approval. He was a suit, more of an administrator. He never once made me laugh. So creatively, I didn’t respect the man. On the other hand, I was born in 1955. So in my early twenties, SNL was so influential, so big, and