Live From New York - James H. Miller [158]
TOM HANKS:
It was a sort of cobbled-together cast. Lorne put it together in like six weeks. Franken and Davis were back as writer-producers. I think they’d been gone. So it was definitely a sense that the whole staff was either finding their bearings for the first time or trying to refind their bearings after an extreme absence. But in some ways it was one of those years that Saturday Night Live showed itself to be this enduring show business tradition — this entity, this classic thing. Because you could easily say it should have been off the air; that’s what everybody wanted it to be. You know — “Saturday Night Dead.” How often did you read that by the time I was on the show for the first time?
AL FRANKEN, Writer:
The ’85–’86 season was difficult for a number of reasons, one of which was that Tom Davis and I were nominally the producers but didn’t have that much authority. The second was we had a cast that didn’t gel, and it was very hard to write in the same way as for a cast that had worked. I don’t know what was happening in Lorne’s head when he put that cast together, but I think he was consciously going after youth. We didn’t have enough people to play middle-aged males. It was impossible to write a Senate hearing.
I liked Danitra Vance very much, but it turned out she was dyslexic and couldn’t read cue cards on the air. I remember her agent or manager coming to us and saying, “You wrote for Eddie Murphy, why aren’t you writing for her?” And I said, “Eddie Murphy’s Eddie Murphy and Danitra’s Danitra. Just because they’re black doesn’t mean they’re the same thing.” It was a little out of control.
But we had Lovitz, who was great, and Dennis Miller started coming in and doing “Update,” so the building blocks were definitely there, but it was a tough year. Youthful problems, attitude, absence of skills, not to mention what may be a case of talent lack — that confluence made it very, very hard for a talented group of writers to find stuff to do. When the show is doing well, it’s usually overpraised, and when it’s not doing so well, it’s overcriticized.
LORNE MICHAELS:
Jim Carrey never auditioned for me personally. There is an audition tape which we almost played on the twenty-fifth-anniversary show — if he had come that night, we would have. We have all the audition tapes. Carrey, I think, auditioned for Al Franken the year I was executive producer and Tom Davis and Al were the producers along with Jim Downey. In ’85, when Brandon got me to come back, his whole argument was I had to learn how to delegate. Dick had run it successfully that way, and so Tom, Al, and Jim did their stuff and I sort of approved things. But later that season, when Brandon was again thinking about canceling the show, he told me, “You have to completely take charge of everything again.”
CAROL LEIFER, Writer:
Jim Downey and Al Franken were really the people who hired me. Jim had seen me doing Letterman pretty regularly around that time, and he came in and saw me at the Comic Strip and then just asked me if I wanted to join the staff. Of course I had to meet Lorne, to officially be hired. The meeting was like thirty seconds. I walked in — it wasn’t even a sit-down meeting — and he said, “Jim and Al said some really good things about you. Are you familiar with what kind of goes on with the writers? It gets pretty intense. Are you prepared for that kind of thing?” I said, “Yeah, I’m down with it.” And that was about it. What I realized later was, having been Jim and Al’s person coming in, I was never going to be in the inner circle, because Lorne wasn’t the one who found me.
TERRY SWEENEY, Cast Member:
I think Lorne hired me because I was funny. I don’t think he hired me as a gay guy. I don’t find Lorne homophobic at all. I think he deserves credit. He was the first. When he told me he was going to hire me, I said, “You know I’m