Live From New York - James H. Miller [174]
No matter what happens to me now — I’ve just been through so much and I am still thrilled by many things that happened in my career — when I think back to that big Art Deco lobby and the first time being in 30 Rockefeller Center and the first time you hear that “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night,” and you’re standing there and your sketch is about to come up and your heart’s going, I can see why it affects people so much.
The magic to me is, it’s show business. It’s ostrich costumes, people dressed as Civil War soldiers smoking cigarettes out in the hall, dance numbers. I want to be in show business. I want there to be a crowd. I want there to be high highs and low lows. That’s supposed to be what it’s all about, and Saturday Night Live — it’s not going to get more intense than that.
KEVIN NEALON:
I didn’t know Dennis Miller was leaving, and then Dennis left, and Lorne offered the “Update” spot to me. I said, “Let me think about it over the weekend.” I was kidding. Because, you know, it had always been something I felt that I could do pretty well.
I’d been on the show for I think five years at that point, and so it was a welcome change, a different kind of job description. But it wasn’t going to work well, and it took me more out of the sketches and into writing for myself. It was just more of a workload. Tuesday night was rewrite and then Wednesday is the table read and then Thursday I started reading like five or six different newspapers every day.
My approach to it was more like Chevy Chase — you know, keep it dry and more of a straight newscaster, and as far as the audience laughing, I think everybody wants the audience to laugh, but if you think it’s funny yourself — even if it doesn’t get a laugh at dress — you leave it in there because to people at home it’s funny. I’m not from the school of like broad comedy, throw-it-in-your-face stuff. I think the broadest thing I ever did was “Hans and Franz.” You know, mine is just put it on the plate; if they want it, they’ll take it.
Many SNL cast members were discovered while working with a satirical improv group called the Groundlings. In the late eighties, one of the greatest Groundlings of all joined the cast: Phil Hartman, the man of a thousand characters — or so. In his eight seasons on the show, he played virtually every type, impersonated innumerable celebrities, and endeared himself to Michaels with his unflappable versatility.
JON LOVITZ:
I’ll tell you a story about Phil. You know, we do that sketch Jim Downey wrote, “Tarzan, Tonto, and Frankenstein.” So they did it once where it was like a talk show and Nora Dunn was doing the “Pat Stevens Show” with Tarzan, Tonto, and Frankenstein. And Phil is Frankenstein and all of a sudden he starts laughing, right, like he just completely broke up — ha, ha, you know, he laughed out loud. And then he stopped.
And then about fifteen seconds later, he just completely lost it. So then of course we all started laughing, because he’s just losing it. And I’m thinking, “What is he doing? We’re on live television. It’s not the Groundlings.” And he’s just laughing. And so I had like my face in my arms, trying to hide it, trying not to laugh, but I was laughing, of course. I was just laughing hysterically. I mean, he just completely lost it. And it was just hysterically laughing. So afterward I asked him, I said, “What happened? What was so funny?” So he said, well, he was thinking of himself sitting there as Frankenstein and something happened, and thinking about how silly the sketch was, you know, just the idea of it made him laugh all of a sudden. So he started laughing. And then he stopped, right? And then, he said, he was sitting there thinking how funny it must have looked to see Frankenstein laugh like that. And then that just made him like lose it.
VICTORIA JACKSON:
I was married. Phil was married. Lovitz was single. Dana was married. Nora was married. Dennis Miller was married the second half, and no, I never got the impression they were having a wild time. I think our job took up like everything —