Live From New York - James H. Miller [221]
I think it’s the most natural thing, because they don’t have power over their own lives. They submit a piece, and once they’ve reached some level of fame, the whole world is telling them how good they are. But around here they’re dealing with the fact that the writers didn’t write anything for them that week, the fact that the writers got up in the morning thinking about themselves and not about them, the fact that the writers sometimes look as if they have more say about things than they do, and the fact that a piece they thought went very well in dress got cut. Just being one of eight or ten or whatever, is really hard after a while. For most of us in the beginning, and I think it’s true to this day, their office is nicer than their apartment, and so just about everything in the way they live becomes an improvement once they get here. And then, I think, a lot of people come here and it’s their first job, and then within weeks they have an agent, a manager, a publicist, a lawyer, a business manager, and it validates they’re actually in show business, because they’re talking to people about their career all the time. And after a while, there’s not enough money to be made just being here. There’s more money to be made by the people who influence them. My job is to hold it together. I hate giving up people, I just do. At the same time, whenever we’ve gone through big change it’s always been kind of intoxicating, and it’s kind of what makes the show. If I were still doing the show with the seventies group, I think we’d just all be fried.
AL FRANKEN:
I remember getting a call from someone at the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Why doesn’t the show take chances?” And I said, “Why don’t we take chances? I think we do.” And she said, “I’m talking about risky stuff like, you know how Letterman does the monkey cam? Now that’s risky.” And I go, “Okay, that’s not ‘risky,’ it’s just a great idea. It’s not a risky idea. You put a camera on a monkey’s head and the monkey runs around the studio. It’s great, but you don’t know what the word ‘risky’ means, lady.”
JAMES DOWNEY:
I do think the network stepped all over Leno, who they microman-aged to a crazy degree. They basically tried as much as they possibly could to make his show like Saturday Night Live. I remember at one point they asked us, “Do you guys have a problem if Phil Hartman is like Jay’s sidekick? He can do Clinton or Gorbachev or something.” And I remember going, “Actually, yeah, we do. He’s in our cast, and if you’ve seen him three nights or even two nights, it just makes it that much less special.”
I remember being mad. I always felt that performers who weren’t stand-ups but the type who were very much dependent on writing really should run stuff by us, because they really are representing the show. The only reason Phil could walk on Leno as Bill Clinton without any explanation is that he did Clinton on Saturday Night Live. Once you’re in that situation, if it’s not well written or if it’s offensive or stupid or otherwise problematic, it hurts us. It’s the reason Disney doesn’t let people dress up as Mickey Mouse and do car shows and stuff.
I think Lorne did say, “No, you can’t do that.” Lorne did object to that stuff, but they were very aggressive about it. They sort of looked to the show for ideas, like we were a chop shop or something. Like, “Hey, we saw you do that thing. That’s good. Jay could do that.” I guess they felt like, “We might need to borrow some things from you guys to really nail down Jay’s emerging superiority.”
ROBERT WRIGHT:
Quite