Live From New York - James H. Miller [209]
ROBERT SMIGEL, Writer:
I left to do the Conan O’Brien show in ’93. That’s what got me to leave Saturday Night Live. I was always afraid to leave unless I had a really good job to go to.
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER
Al wrote his own stuff — Al Inc., you know, he was his own studio. He’d do whatever he did. I got very, very little on the air. The performers who were good wrote. I did do a great piece with John Goodman and Mike on a cruise ship, where Mike was doing Linda Richman and they were playing old Jewish people who could only discuss food on trips. So they just discussed the menus of all their previous cruises. And that was great.
It felt like it was a very hard match. It was like a closet full of clothes. The tops were size fourteen, the bottoms were size twelve.
ANDY BRECKMAN, Writer:
For a while in the late eighties and into the nineties, Lorne would bring back the golden oldies, writers from the first five years, for a week or two when their schedule permitted. And it was actually great to be a guest writer. Suzanne Miller I met that way. Anne Beatts I’d met, I don’t recall if she was officially on as a writer, but these people would come back for a season or for a show or two.
In those years when there were guest writers, I didn’t sense any tension, and it was actually a great system, because everyone came in knowing the show and knowing what Tuesday nights were like and what was expected after read-through and how Thursday nights worked and how rewriting worked. Lorne had a pool of these writers that were experienced, and for me it was great, because I was starting work on features, but if you give me fifty weeks and a year off I can come up with three great sketch ideas. Doing it every week is tough, but I kicked butt doing it for two weeks. If I had three weeks in a row, I’d run out of ideas — but I could always do it for one or two.
I never noticed any resentment from the younger writers until recently. I came back with my friend Norm Macdonald, and there was tension. He brought me and Sam Simon in and the situation had changed, it was like going back to your hometown and, hey, where’s the drugstore? I didn’t recognize any faces, and we were not welcomed back. I mean, if I was a young kid writing on Saturday Night Live, I would love to be in a room with Sam Simon and just hear how he thinks about putting a comedy sketch together.
TIM HERLIHY:
I definitely wanted to stay, you know, in New York, and had no interest in going to Los Angeles. And I hadn’t had my fill of it like maybe Adam and some of the other guys who left at that time did. They were sick of it. Oh, maybe not sick of it — but they just had done everything they wanted to do. And I still felt like I was learning the ropes.
For writers and performers alike, whether during one of SNL’s upswings or downturns, the experience of working on the show was singular in their lives and, for better or worse, unforgettable. Some of them look back on it the way marines look back on the torturous training they got on Parris Island: It was hell, it was horrible, it was mentally and physically excruciating — and they are extremely happy that they went through it and would do it again in a minute.
CHRIS ROCK:
I left first. I left to go to Living Color. It was actually more of a machine than SNL. SNL, they had little rules, like no one was going to write a “Wayne’s World” but Mike Myers; your character was your character. Lorne might say, “I need you to write a ‘Wayne’s World,’” or, “It would be very nice if we had a Church Lady this week,” or whatever it was, Opera Man, but it still was up to you. At In Living Color, if you had a hit character, they didn’t care who wrote it. Once it was a hit character, it was the show’s. It was weird that way. It