Live From New York - James H. Miller [222]
What happened is, those nonaggression pacts that Lorne had signed were wearing thin and Don was not willing to be a bystander on SNL. Don also didn’t travel, so he wouldn’t come to New York except under extreme circumstances, and he liked to see his producers in person. He’s a very across-the-table kind of guy. And Lorne wasn’t out there that much and wasn’t interested in having long sessions with Don about details of the show. And I think quite frankly, initially Don was less interested in the talent than he was about the fact that the show wasn’t as profitable as he had thought it would be. He thought it could be fixed rather easily, that the show should be and could be a great deal more profitable for NBC. He’d been led to believe that by some of the finance people and some of the other production people on the West Coast. There’s always a West Coast–East Coast angle on these sorts of things. He was sending sort of coded messages to Lorne about this, that, and the other thing, and Lorne was doing his own dance around those issues. It was either, “Didn’t know that, I’ll get on it,” or “He’s not available, he’s gone to Hungary, won’t be back for three months.” And I think Don just made it a point of writing down every day, “I’m going to catch him on this, we’re going to get this done.”
WARREN LITTLEFIELD:
We felt that Lorne was isolating himself, and we were looking at a new generation of writer-producer talent that had come up with a show like Seinfeld. They hadn’t been grown and nurtured in comedy camp. They hadn’t worked on Diff’rent Strokes and then done Seinfeld. These were original voices. We would suggest names and people to Lorne. We didn’t know how open he was. Our intent was not to take it away from Lorne. Our intent was to be able to say to Lorne, “Look, they’re out there. Their lifelong dream would be to go to New York and work on SNL. Maybe you’ve got to start looking at some of these other kinds of people.” Believe me, these were not prime-time situation comedy. They were alternative, unique voices who had put their toe in the water of television and hadn’t found out quite what their outlet was.
I think Don was much more focused on, “There’s so much wrong.” And so those were very, very tough sessions with Lorne. Ultimately what emerged was what we wanted to emerge: Lorne engaged more actively, more time and more energy, a more aggressive pursuit of reinventing the show. I don’t think Lorne surrendered control. I think he surrendered to a process that was painful. We were able to keep the show running and the market turned around, and it became a profitable entity again. It became an asset not only creatively but it also became a financial asset as well. Nothing wrong with that.
LORNE MICHAELS:
The network was on a certain level completely justified in saying we’re cleaning house, because you couldn’t read anywhere anybody saying, “Saturday Night Live is doing what it’s supposed to be doing,” or “These people are funny.” We had to let Adam Sandler go with two years on his contract, and Farley with a year. Chris Rock had gone on to In Living Color. Spade was allowed to come back in a sort of “David Spade moment” kind of thing. But it was basically, you know, you pull away to turn this all around and just say, “Here we are with a brand-new cast.” And Downey couldn’t be producer, Downey couldn’t be here, and even Herb Sargent was let go. It was just, everybody was let go.
ADAM SANDLER:
The guys at SNL protected me a lot. They didn’t tell me much. I really didn’t even know who Ohlmeyer was. I never met him, I don’t think. I just felt if Lorne likes me and if Downey likes me, I’m safe. And then I heard at the end that Lorne was