Live From New York - James H. Miller [165]
I didn’t do it to mess with Dudley. It was in my stand-up, a really funny bit I used to do. But it was his own insecurity. The reason I came out with the bit was the same reason, the feeling that people were watching. It was like, even if I don’t do the joke, don’t people look at that boot on your foot and go, “Damn, that’s big”?
BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:
Brandon calls me up in April and says, “I’m going to cancel Saturday Night Live.” And by then, I have to admit, I was happy to hear it — you know, rather than see it suffer. I wasn’t in love with the persona of Saturday Night Live the way Lorne was.
So I go home that night and I said to my wife at the time, “Deb, they’re going to cancel the show.” She said, “You can’t let them bring Lorne back and then cancel it.” She got offended. And I said, “You know, sometimes you’ve got to hear it from someone else.” I call Brandon back and said no way, you’ve got to give him one more year. Brandon said to have Lorne come out, which he did. We all met, and that’s how it stayed on the air. It was that close, it was canceled. My wife knew nothing about show business, but she liked Lorne. She said you can’t let them do that, bring him back and then cancel him, that’s terrible. And she was right. Common sense.
WARREN LITTLEFIELD, NBC Executive:
Brandon was very involved in getting feedback to Lorne on the show and felt that it was struggling, and I do remember him saying, “It’s over.” I think many of us would, in our years as executives at broadcast networks, be in a meeting, focus on problems, sometimes lose sight of what had been accomplished and what we had. And that kind of piling on happens, and you push away from the table and you go, “That’s it, goddammit. We’re shutting it down. I’ll be the decision maker.” And God bless Brandon — in the light of day I think he woke up and went, “Oh God, am I really going to face Lorne today and tell this human being who I love and care about and believe in that I’m pulling the plug on him and the show?”
And that’s when that cold executive maneuver that you said the day before — “I’m going to take control and take action” — that’s when you finally realize, you know what, maybe I’ll just wait a little bit. And part of that is not wanting to be confrontative, and also in the light of day, forgetting the posturing for a moment, saying, “You know what? It may not be perfect. What is? But does that mean we throw it out — and what do we have to replace it with?” One of the questions you have to ask yourself is, “All right, kill it, but what’s your plan?” And sometimes faced with “what’s your plan,” you look at it in a different light.
ROBERT SMIGEL:
By the end of the season, the show was still a disaster. I had this idea to do a cliff-hanger like Dallas — one of those obnoxious cliff-hangers that really were new at the time — and I wrote one where Billy Martin sets the studio on fire and Lorne’s in there and he runs out and he just saves Lovitz, which infuriated a few people in the cast. And he leaves all these other people and it’s like, “Who will survive?” And then the whole credit crawl, everybody’s name had a question mark after it.
Once more Saturday Night Live had teetered on the brink and once more the program was spared the unseemly ignominy of cancellation. Now it was up to Lorne Michaels to reinvent the show one more time, and though he still disliked firing people, one of his first moves had to be to throw the “new” cast out and recruit a newer new cast, one that could help SNL win back America’s heart. Michaels had learned the lesson of casting people for their talent rather than for their names, and he set about rebuilding the show in much the way he had first constructed it — he and his staff searching comedy clubs and improv groups for bright young performers, especially those who could write sketches and create characters.
Even though the search would prove to be