Live From New York - James H. Miller [182]
DANNY DEVITO, Host:
They pitch lots of stories to you. You do the read-through, which is really cool. You read everything and everybody sits around the table. I was used to that kind of work on Taxi, because we were trying to get the show ready on Friday every week and we did a lot of table readings. So it’s less shocking, I think, for an actor who comes to it after having had the experience of a table reading and trying to get a show in shape for seven o’clock on a Friday night, which is what we would do on Taxi.
When Jon Lovitz was on the show, he was hysterically funny. There was one incident where I think I shoot him like in the foot and he says, “Ya shot me.” The way he said it was just so off the charts that nobody could keep a straight face. It was just one of those things where every time he said, “Ya shot me,” I went crazy. “Ya shottttt me.” And of course once you go, he just did it more and more and more and more to throw it out into the stratosphere. Even to this day, when we see each other we say, “Ya shot me.”
JON LOVITZ:
The sketch was kind of dying so I said it a lot. Like about ten extra times more than I was supposed to, just to get a laugh.
JOHN GOODMAN, Host:
I was scared to death. I mean, I was petrified. It was something I always wanted to do. I remember stalking NBC when I first moved up here in 1975, you know, I would walk around after auditions and everything. I would always come through here just to see if I could see any of the cast members and stuff. And then I auditioned for the show in 1980 when they replaced everybody. It’s something I’ve always loved, because I was a big fan of the National Lampoon and the Radio Hour and Michael O’Donoghue. So when I finally did do it, I was so damn scared I just wanted to disappear, fall through a manhole cover — anything.
I like the day on Friday. Saturday it’s just too nuts. I’m getting to be an older man now, and all the running around and changing you’ve got to do, ugh. I’ve got to be rested and fit for that, so physically it’s a little draining. But on Fridays I just like being there, I feel like I’m at home.
JAN HOOKS:
I loved Dolly Parton. She came in and said, “Look, okay, here’s the deal. I won’t use any cuss words and I won’t make fun of Jesus.” Those were her two demands. And anything else was carte blanche.
GREG DANIELS:
Mel Gibson did the show, and he has a pretty strong sense of humor. But I’m not sure if it’s really the same sense of humor of the show. I remember him trying to pitch us doing a parody of Brideshead Revisited that he called “Bird’s Head Regurgitated.” He’s like pitching that really strongly, and we were kind of politely nodding and thinking how do we not do “Bird’s Head Regurgitated.”
DANA CARVEY:
Robert Mitchum hosted once and I did a sketch with him, and he was like out-of-body. I think he had like half a gallon of whiskey in his room. He was of the old school.
TOM HANKS:
The second time you’re back, you think you know how things are going. The second time I was on the show, Randy Travis was the musical guest. It was around the Winter Olympics in 1988. So by that time I had done it already once and the gee-whiz-bang aspect of being in the room was a little bit different. You fancy yourself a seasoned professional now. And you’re just kind of in the middle of the show, middle of a season. Everybody’s exhausted. Always a couple people around with the flu and just kind of like bang through it. I felt honored to be invited back, like I was in some sort of quasi-select club, but I don’t think the show was all that great.
BOB ODENKIRK:
They have a pool of names of potential hosts. They have a few that are anchored down for one reason or another — they have a movie coming out or whatever — and famous enough. But then, outside of that, for a normal show, two weeks ahead of time they’ve got a pool of names, two or three people, and