Live From New York - James H. Miller [161]
My parents probably were not thrilled that I was going to be doing something that would inevitably poke some fun at them. I don’t think my dad really cared. But Nancy tends to get a little nervous about that sort of thing.
TERRY SWEENEY:
Ron said his mother did not care for my impression of her. But he thought I was eerily accurate. Ron thought I was more like his mother than his mother was. So I thought that’s the highest compliment one can ever have. He was great. He used to call to me, “Hi, Mom,” in the halls. Imagine how freaky it must have been for him. There’s a man coming down the hall dressed as your mother, in the same red Adolfo suit, going, “Hello, dear. Hello, son.”
RON REAGAN:
Later on I was in New York for something completely unrelated. And I dropped by the Saturday Night Live offices to just say hi, and they were in the midst of doing a show where Oprah was guest host. And they were having their first cast meeting with her in Lorne’s office when I happened to knock on the door. I didn’t know what was going on. I just came in to say hi. “Oh, come on in, come on in. Sit in on the meeting.” So I did. I turned around and said hi to Oprah, who I really didn’t know at the time. She wasn’t as humongous as she is now. And I could tell she was really displeased I was there. It was like I’d really stepped into her thing. So I stayed just a few minutes and politely left.
AL FRANKEN:
We had some good things that season, like when Ronald Reagan Jr. did the show. And Pee-wee Herman did a funny show. Lovitz started doing the Pathological Liar. And Joan Cusack was tremendously talented. They were bright spots. It’s just that nothing else went right.
CAROL LEIFER:
I wrote a sketch about a husband and wife having an anniversary dinner. It’s just basically, “We love each other so much, it’s so great, our anniversary.” And you know, “Isn’t it wonderful we can just tell each other anything, that’s how close we are.” And at that point the husband goes, “That’s so true. Here’s something: Sometimes I have this fantasy that you die.” Tom Hanks eventually did it. But it literally went through every read-through of every male host and got cut. When Tom Hanks did it, it was so great.
Otherwise, it was a terrible year. That was, I think, maybe the only year where at the end of the season, the show certainly was not guaranteed to come back. It seemed genuinely in danger of being canceled.
TERRY SWEENEY:
It was an unhappy time during that period for a lot of the actors and actresses involved, but I’ve heard from future casts that they were not so happy either. There was a lot of Al and Tom, definitely. Al Franken and Tom Davis were very much involved in the show and very hands-on and very opinionated. So I think that they had their own version of things. I think they had felt like, “We’re back,” and rolled up their sleeves. And I think Al very much wanted to be on the show, and now he’s found his little niche, which is wonderful for him, but I think he was still looking then for what his niche was — what was his claim to fame and how could he move from being a writer to being on-camera, being up front.
TOM HANKS:
Hosting the first time is a very, very milli-close second to the first time you appear on the Johnny Carson show. You’re that combination of absolutely petrified but also kind of dizzy. The whirlwind preparation that goes into that first week, if you’ve never done it before, is kind of mesmerizing. It honestly looks as though nothing is happening at first. You know, you’re the host and you