Live From New York - James H. Miller [157]
I was surrounded by writers who had come back to the show and were very cynical about him. They would always be telling “Lorne stories” — about his miscalculations, his posing for the press, his lying to the press, and Lorne supposedly taking credit for stuff that he might not have been entitled to. Clearly they didn’t feel the same way about working for Lorne that I did.
BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:
Lorne didn’t want to go back with the same type of show Ebersol had. There were no long discussions. Lorne just said, “Here’s what I’m going to do, here are the people I’m going after.” Robert Downey Jr. was one of the people he really wanted, and it wasn’t a terrible idea, but it wasn’t a good idea either, in retrospect. It just didn’t work. And there were a few problems among the cast; I mean alcohol and drugs and whatever. It wasn’t good. But Lorne was still young then, thirty-nine or forty, and he was trying something different.
JON LOVITZ, Cast Member:
I’d only had one job in seven years — doing The Paper Chase in its second year on cable, when I was twenty-five. So now I was twenty-eight. I mean, I just couldn’t believe I got the show, you know? Like you go, “You want me to do the Master Thespian?” I’d done it at the Groundlings, but originally when I was eighteen. I was like just goofing around, you know, saying, “I’m the Master Thespian.” And now they’ve built a whole set for it, you know. It just blew my mind.
Or doing the Pathological Liar. And next thing you know, every-body’s imitating it. It was just unreal, because I’d been working as a messenger. And then I finally started working and I got a movie and a series, then I got Saturday Night Live. I mean, I was broke, and then by the end of the year I got a deal to do a movie for half a million dollars. So that was just an amazing time for me, you know, amazing.
Well, everybody else went nuts. Everyone else started getting weird, and I was like, “What’s going on?” I got the job, you know, and then a friend of mine sent me a book of quotes, and he underlined a quote from Kirk Douglas, and it said, “When you become famous, you don’t change, everybody else does.” That’s what was happening in my life. Everybody had said no for seven years, and all of a sudden everybody was saying yes. And I couldn’t believe it.
ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL, Cast Member:
I grew up watching Eddie and Piscopo and that cast from that era. I was just a kid at the time, and I was just enjoying what was happening to me, working on the John Hughes films. And then all of a sudden I got a call from Lorne and, you know, I was in shock. I was such a huge fan of the show and so many of the actors and actresses that emerged from it. So it was really an honor.
Even after I had decided to do the show, I remember walking around the city, just baffled that I had taken this on. I couldn’t believe I was actually going to be a part of it. It really is one of the most creatively demanding mediums to work in, because it’s a blend of a lot of things — theater and rock and roll and everything else.
DICK EBERSOL, NBC Executive:
I think Lorne’s first year back in ’85 was very dark. It was a very dark year. It was the roughest season Lorne ever had doing the show, and everybody came out of the woodwork to attack. It was the first time he’d ever been subject to that “Saturday Night Dead” stuff. And that just reminded me that I had left of my own volition, because when I did the show, I’d never gone through a diatribe year like he went through then.
ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL
It was one of the most forgettable seasons of the show’s history. I certainly didn’t make a major impact on the show like a lot of people did. But just to be a part of it from my standpoint was amazing. It’s far and away the most competitive environment I’ve ever worked in. Some guy who was based in the West, a fan of the show, would send me tapes of selected sketches where it was