Live From New York - James H. Miller [219]
I sat in a room with him once when John Malkovich hosted. We did a Menendez brothers sketch, if you can remember, where Rob Schneider and John Malkovich played the brothers, and their testimony was that there were two other Menendez brothers — their twin brothers — who were responsible for the killing and were waiting in the bathroom, and then they would get up and go get the other Menendez brothers and come in. They would switch sides and sit down and pretend to be two other Menendez brothers. They would then be asked where the first two Menendez brothers were and be told that they were in the bathroom.
And this kept going on until then one left and never came back. I sat in the room at like six in the morning with Jim lying on a couch and basically, a couple of us got a few jokes in, but this came fully formed out of Jim’s head. And to this day I’ve never seen anything like that.
JAMES DOWNEY:
That summer I never heard from Lorne or anybody from the date of the last show in May of 1995. The phone never rang, which I thought was kind of insulting. Finally Dana called me and said, “I can’t believe those fucking assholes haven’t even talked to you.” And he said, “Do you want to come to work for my show?” I said, “That’s very nice of you.” And then like five minutes later Mike Shoemaker called and then Lorne got on the phone and said, “Hey, you want to write for the show?” And that’s when I said I would only do it if I could just do “Update.”
In the same years that he was getting the most grief from network executives that he’d ever received in his career, Lorne Michaels also got an exquisitely flattering offer. Howard Stringer, the CBS president who had lured David Letterman to the network partly by buying Letterman the Ed Sullivan Theater, and the office building above it, offered to do the same for Michaels. A great admirer, Stringer thought Michaels could put CBS in the Saturday late-night business the way Letterman had put CBS in the late-weeknight business for the first time in its history. He had a mock-up photo made of the Lorne Michaels Theater to tempt him.
But Michaels, even though under siege — really a constant barrage — turned Stringer down. He still felt a loyalty, if not to NBC, then to the show he had created.
CHRIS ROCK:
Was being on the show the greatest creative experience for me? No. But it’s still the biggest thing that ever happened to me in show business. The jump from broke to famous is the biggest jump. There’s no bigger jump than that. I could win five Oscars tomorrow, it wouldn’t be a bigger jump than nothing to something.
Is Lorne arrogant? Yeah — but hey, man, I know arrogant cab drivers. I know arrogant hot dog guys. This guy produces Saturday Night Live. He made The Rutles, one of my favorites. So, you know, there’s arrogance with no reason to be, and there’s arrogance with plenty of reason to be.
TIM MEADOWS:
Lorne wrote me a couple of cold openings. Lorne can still write, you know. I guess he prefers not to, but he can. I forgot that he can write. I didn’t know that he was such a great writer. But then people mention names like Lily Tomlin and the Smothers Brothers, it’s obvious that he knows what he’s doing.
JULIA SWEENEY:
I think Lorne is a withholder of praise as a strategy and also because I think he personally feels uncomfortable with it. I remember him stopping me in the hallway and just saying, “I think you’re wonderful.” It’s not like he didn’t give me anything. It was more like an aura. It’s like in the air. It makes me understand cults. Because you just wanted his approval more, and that was your number one thing. You wanted him to approve of you. And he created an atmosphere that worked with that.
LORNE MICHAELS:
My bet is that Johnny and