Live From New York - James H. Miller [198]
Johnny liked some of the sketches we did. The one that was called “Carsenio” he liked because he saw we were poking fun at Arsenio Hall as much as at him. There was one that I thought was kind of mean. It portrayed Johnny as senile and out of touch, and that one I just regret, because it wasn’t my intent. When you play Carson, when I was in the moment with Phil, what really comes through you is sort of just charm, just incredible likability and charm. He never really patronized a guest, and that’s why he could sit out there with a five-year-old or a hundred-year-old and really make it work.
JAN HOOKS, Cast Member:
I remember during the Gulf War, when we were all so terrified. They had security guys with earphones in the studio who were packing lead and all this stuff. There were even bomb threats. Phil and I had a sketch and I just looked at him and said, “I’m not doing it, I’m not going out there, I can’t go out there.” And Bonnie Turner came up and said, “Now come on, you’re with Phil.” Phil just offered his arm and I went out with him.
DANA CARVEY:
One night that was a breakthrough for me is, I’d done enough of the show that the audience knew me, and I’d done enough George Bush cold openings that I was comfortable, and I remember right before I went to air, I just said to myself, “The cue cards are suggestions.” Because Lorne doesn’t like ad-libbing. I thought I’d be in trouble when I went off the script, but that didn’t happen. Lorne always likes it when the room is full of laughter.
DAVID SPADE:
One of the bummers was, we did a prime-time presidential special, an election special, and it was a debate among Bush, Perot, and Clinton. So they said, “You’re going to play Perot.” I wasn’t on the show a lot. It was kind of exciting. Phil was going to play Clinton, and Dana was going to do Bush. I thought, “It’ll be perfect. I’ll do a funny accent; it’ll be a lot of fun. So we did the special and we filmed the debate ahead of time. I got in the Perot makeup, Dana got into his Bush, Phil got into Clinton. We did the wide shot, and we all walked in. Clinton did his speaking first, then Bush did his. When it got time for Perot, they have me step out, they have Dana redo his makeup as Perot, and then he comes back in and does the close-up.
It was humiliating. It was me just walking out, and it was Dana doing the fun stuff. So I was basically an extra — after forty-five minutes of makeup. It was just that Dana is really good, and they want a cast member doing that, and I thought they were over a barrel because he couldn’t do both. It was a special with all three of them, and they would all be in the same shot sometimes, so I was going to win. And I didn’t. And I was like, are they finding new ways to humiliate me?
Michaels always looked for SNL characters to be spun off into movies that he would produce and that would be box-office blockbusters. He’d seen how the Blues Brothers movie struck it rich and longed to make a movie that hit as big. The right character never seemed to come along — but that would finally change with Wayne’s World, costarring Mike Myers as Wayne and Dana Carvey as his friend Garth, two cute goofs who ran a no-budget cable-access show in Aurora, Illinois. A gigantically successful movie (followed by a gigantically anticlimactic sequel), it would be the only film derived from an SNL sketch to gross over $100 million. It was Michaels’s biggest coup as a movie producer. Myers would go on to make many other films — most successfully the Austin Powers sixties spy spoofs, which contain a wicked but apparently friendly homage: the character of Dr. Evil, one of several played by Myers, has the unmistakable speech patterns and