Live From New York - James H. Miller [171]
JON LOVITZ:
You’re always competing. I mean, it’s not like you want the other people to do bad, but it’s just the way it’s set up because, you know, you write all Tuesday night and then they pick like three of the forty sketches at read-through, and then they whittle that down to fourteen of them, then six would get cut. Only about eight or nine make it to air. It was competitive. I mean, it just was the way it worked. And when I was there anyway, it was almost like the writers against the cast, and if you got a lot of stuff on one week, the next week there’d hardly be anything written for you. I also think that the writers would just write for themselves really a lot of times. And just whatever they happened to think of, that’s what they thought of. So certain writers you ended up hooking up with because, you know, your humor was more like theirs. I worked a lot with A.Whitney Brown doing the Liar character the first year. And then Al Franken would write for me a lot.
When I was on the show, like just say from ’86 to ’90, that group stayed the same for four years. You know, the eight of us. And it was very competitive but everybody was working really, really hard and really wanted the sketches to be great. And also I think our group was into saying let’s do this sketch but also try to do great acting, like the best as actors. And play it really, you know, funny, but also trying to make it really real and believable.
My first year, I was doing well, so they pushed me a lot. And I got everything on. And then my second year, I got less. Lorne said, “You’re going to have a lot of competition this year.” And then, I don’t know, I was supposed to do a Liar movie and it didn’t work out. And so that caused problems between Lorne and me. So I would say stuff about him and it would get back to him, because I was angry about it. So it would get tougher for me to get pieces on. And then, you know, he was mad at me. I mean he just was. He was mad at me for the next four years. And then he was mad at me for leaving the show for six or seven years. Because I left. What happened was, he was mad. I mean, everybody would talk about him, but for some reason, everything I said got back to him. I wasn’t saying anything different than anybody else. I would never say it in public and I still won’t, because — because the guy hired me, you know, and he gave me the opportunity of a lifetime. So my beef with him was more about, I thought we were friends and I heard he said stuff about me. So I was hurt by that.
I was supposed to do two movies that summer and then come back to the show. So I was just thrilled, you know. And then one of the movies didn’t happen. And the other movie, I would’ve had to miss two shows to do it, and Lorne said you can’t miss shows. So I had to choose. Personally, I didn’t think it was fair, because my contract was up and I thought, you know, I did a really good job for five years and I just asked him to miss the first two shows. But his opinion was, well, you know, this show is really important. If I let you miss shows, I have to let everybody else miss shows. And, you know, Belushi and Aykroyd do movies and fly back and forth. And so I asked the producer could I do that, and he said we can’t — you can’t do that. It wouldn’t work out. Lorne was getting a lot of pressure too, from NBC executives who didn’t like — especially Ohlmeyer — didn’t like the idea of people running off to make movies, which to me was stupid. I’d say, “Look, I’ll miss the first two shows and then you don’t have to pay me, of course, or I’ll make ’em up.” If he’d said, “You can do the show, but if you get movies, you can do those too,” I would’ve said, “Fine. Sign me up for the next five years.” Because then what you would’ve had, from my point of view, is a cast full of movie stars. Wouldn’t that have been something?
Of course Lorne