Live From New York - James H. Miller [2]
QUIS SUPERABIT?
Who Shall Excel Them?
Opening frames,
The Charge of the Light Brigade,
Warner Bros., 1936
Acknowledgments
From the beginning Saturday Night Live has been a showcase for cutting-edge music as well as cutting-edge comedy. To keep this book at manageable length, the authors concentrated on the comedy. All the music and great musicians may one day get a book of their own. Godspeed.
If some of the tales told herein have the ring of familiarity, so be it. Much about Saturday Night Live, especially its early years, has passed into legend. While not every story can be called previously unpublished, many are being told for the first time in the words and voices of the actual participants. Certain key figures in the show’s history who did not speak on the record to other chroniclers did speak to us, and to them we are especially indebted.
Edie Baskin, Mary Ellen Matthews, and Norman Ng, along with Amber Noland, Aisha Aeyers, and Hillary Ripps, made it possible to include a splendid collection of photographs. Bob Peck of Reelin’ in the Years made an important contribution to the paperback edition.
We also wish to express our heartfelt thanks to Brooke Posch, Jennifer Guinier, and Lyle Jackson in Lorne Michaels’s office. No matter how crazed their days, they always made time to be of help. We adore them.
Sean Smith, John Maynard, Harriet Schnitzer, Peter Rose, and Jenna Singer labored tirelessly on transcripts and interview logistics. Liz Nagle and Peggy Leith Anderson, at Little, Brown, graciously helped navigate the production labyrinth. Heather Fain and Marlena Bittner, publicists without peer, woke the town and told the people with vigor and flair.
Our brilliant editor, Geoff Shandler, was an enthusiastic and invaluable voice.
Sloan Harris, our agent and hero, fought the good fights and never gave up — on the book or us. It was a privilege and pleasure to work with him.
Finally, the beautiful Jackie Miller gave her grateful husband unconditional love, and his friend and colleague unconditional support.
— JAMES ANDREW MILLER, TOM SHALES
Preface to the Paperback Edition
Live from New York is the book Lorne Michaels asked us to write and then refused to read. He may not have read it even yet — or he may just be claiming not to have read it. The man most responsible for the creation, shape, and longevity of Saturday Night Live wanted a complete history in book form that took the show from the beginning up to the present — but then, when it was published, he said he feared the contents would be too “personal” and affect him emotionally, and so he put off reading it himself.
Except for being interviewed like everybody else, if at greater length, Michaels had no input whatever into the content of the book. And never asked for any.
Though Michaels is the most important person in the life of the program, television is nothing if not a collaborative process, perhaps to an even greater degree than motion pictures. Saturday Night Live represents the work of an almost innumerable collection of contributors — so many over the twenty-eight years of the show’s existence that making our book an oral history, rather than an encyclopedic narrative, was a sometimes frustrating challenge. We couldn’t talk to everybody, dammit.
The goal was to get a cross section of writers, actors, writer-actors, performance people and idea people, major forces and supporting players, household names and behind-the-scenes unknowns, theoretically creating as textured and detailed a mosaic of the program and the process as possible.
Talent, need it be said, doesn’t make a person nice, and may in fact have the opposite effect. We dealt with plenty of ego-driven contrariness over the years of preparing the book, but to our relief, maybe even surprise, there were very few substantive complaints about the book from those quoted in it; thus few changes were necessitated for this edition.
Director John Landis was amused at the notion he would ever use the adjective “trippy,” and in fact insisted he’d never said it in his life,