Live From New York - James H. Miller [223]
See, I don’t even know if I was fired. I don’t know how it was handled. I just remember feeling like, “Did I quit, or did I get fired? I have no idea.” But all of a sudden I wasn’t on the show anymore. But I was friends with everyone at Saturday Night Live still. That’s all that counted to me. I never had a tight relationship with NBC. The guys who were important to me were Lorne and Downey and Smigel, of course Herlihy — who is an amazing guy — and a couple of the other writers. It really was creatively the best time of my life. I’m honored to be a member of that bunch of alumni, and I have my best friends from that show. It does feel like we went to war together, even though it was a positive thing. Nobody was scared for their lives, but we stuck it out together, and every Saturday night people were tuning in to laugh, and we wanted to make sure that we got the job done. And we all have a nice bond together.
DON OHLMEYER, NBC Executive:
Well, I got into it very straightforward with Lorne. I mean, it’s not really my job to talk to Jim Downey. Actually, we would meet twice a year, and like I said, I was very straightforward. I think people pretty much knew where they stood with me in terms of what I felt. I wasn’t one of these kind of people that would glad-hand people and then talk behind their backs. I think Jim Downey is maybe as good a political satirist, writer, as there’s ever been in television. I think when Jim was the head writer, there were some issues on the show. When you have the talent that was assembled during that period and the shows were as flat as they were, there’s some issues somewhere. That was just my perception.
WARREN LITTLEFIELD:
There was one old writer — oh yeah, Jim Downey. Jim’s brilliant. He had a wonderful, wonderful career. But Jim, I think some would say, was a little burnt-out. He’d done it for a long time. And so finally for Ohlmeyer it became, “You know what? We will not accept anything less than excellence.”
JAMES DOWNEY:
I’ve only met Ohlmeyer three times. He’d been just relentlessly trying to get me fired for like nine months before he ever laid eyes on me. He had this theory that the problem was the show was flat — because we’d come off this gigantic ratings year, ’92–’93, which had to do with “Wayne’s World.” I thought, and most of the writers there thought, the show was clearly in decline. There was like a three-year lag between the ratings we got and the ratings we deserved. We thought it was more ’89–’90 that the show was creatively better and that by 1993 we were sort of coasting. We averaged like a 9.5 rating with the “Wayne’s World” heat. We haven’t seen that in many, many years.
My marriage was falling apart because I was spending way too much time at the show. I remember thinking it’s not worth it to do anything embarrassing to keep this job. So I’m not going out of my way to antagonize them, but I’m not going to kiss their ass. Because I could come home and say, “Honey, I was fired.” But I could not come home and say, “Honey, I quit. Aren’t you proud of me? Now I have to find a new job.” So that was the idea.
NORM MACDONALD:
I think Lorne even conceded that changes needed to be made and decided to overhaul. But I think also that nobody liked Jim at the network at that time. He’s not a very savvy office politician when it comes to talking to people or anything. He’s more like an artist guy who wants to be left alone. He’s really into comedy, so he’s not that good with the suits.
JAMES DOWNEY:
With the arrival of Ohlmeyer and then NBC doing so well, the basic personality of the network became more aggressive and confi-dent and notey. They were feeling their oats. They used to talk about Friends