Live From New York - James H. Miller [18]
LORNE MICHAELS:
I had worked in television for eight years, so I was bored with people who go, “I don’t do television.” I had no patience for it, for people putting it down. They say, “I’m not doing television,” and then I go, “Well, then, there’s no point to us talking.” I told John, “I hear what you’re doing is great, but I don’t want you to have to do something that you don’t want to do.” My instinct was that he was going to be trouble.
JUDITH BELUSHI:
John went to talk to Lorne because, he said, “Well, if he’s hiring O’Donoghue and Anne Beatts and Gilda” — they were people John liked working with, and so he figured the show was going to be something different.
ANNE BEATTS:
They had been paying us the same amount, which was a big $750 a week. You can imagine, if we were happy to accept free restaurant meals from the Village Voice, $750 a week represented a considerable sum to us in those days. I mean, our rent was $675 a month, which everyone thought was just horrendously high for what Belushi called “the Winter Palace” on Sixteenth Street.
And then NBC told me, “Oh, we’re not supposed to be paying you as much as Michael. We’ve been paying you $750 a week, but that’s a mistake. And we want the money back.” They said it had been a bookkeeping error. And I basically said, “Go fuck yourself.” You know, “The money’s gone and you’re not getting it back. Furthermore, you better start paying me $750 a week.” Why shouldn’t I make the same as him? I don’t know. Because he had more credits or something. Or because he had a penis.
DICK EBERSOL:
Some of the auditions took place in a Steinway rehearsal hall on West Fifty-seventh Street. When we came back over to 30 Rock, even after John’s incredible audition, Lorne was really troubled about how one could discipline him. John was always the best person available in New York, bar none. But he always made it perfectly clear that he thought television was shit. Everything about television was shit. And yet he kept showing up for all these meetings and auditions. And Lorne was very worried about it. Finally, on the day the decision was made, the three of us — Michael, Anne Beatts, and I — really argued for John in a big way. And I think Lorne said at the time, the thing that finally turned his mind was I said I would take responsibility for him. I made a vow to Lorne that if he’s the nightmare some people think he’ll be, I’ll take care of him. I’ll be the minder of Belushi — which led to some awfully fun stuff for me, including him almost burning my house down. He did the same thing to Lorne’s place in New York.
JUDITH BELUSHI:
Just before John and I were married, I kicked him out of the house for this or that, and he went and stayed at Lorne’s place. He fell asleep with a cigarette going, and the mattress caught on fire. He didn’t burn the whole place down, but I’m sure it caused some damage. Lorne called me afterward and said, “Can I send him home now?”
BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:
I went down there after the fire, and there were odors I had never smelled before in my life. I mean, it was terrible. I was an old guy. I was used to comedians in tuxedos and ties.
CHEVY CHASE:
John was wonderful. He was trouble later on for me. Jesus, oh God, was he trouble.
GARRETT MORRIS, Cast Member:
I’d been a licensed schoolteacher, taught two years at PS 71 in New York plus five years at the projects with drug-addicted kids. And you know what, I hadn’t worked in like a fucking year and a half. I’d done Cooley High and that was it. I left the school system to go back into a thing called Hallelujah Baby. My license had even expired.
I didn’t have a job. I was starving. So Lorne offered me a job. I won’t tell you how much it was, but it was good money.
LARAINE NEWMAN, Cast Member:
I worked for Lorne the first time on a Lily Tomlin