Live From New York - James H. Miller [225]
ROBERT WRIGHT, NBC Chairman and CEO:
I haven’t made that many trips to the seventeenth floor. As a matter of fact, my one official trip to the seventeenth floor — I don’t remember the date — was when we had gone through a painful period of recasting, and it was the only time that I was really involved in it. Lorne was really being very good to me. He was humoring me along all the way. He was sending me audition tapes. I was getting really nervous that we were going to do something dumb, that there was so much pressure on Lorne that he would do something that he didn’t want to do because he thought the company wanted him to do it.
I was saying to myself, “I’ve seen this show probably more than anybody at NBC has. I know what’s funny on this show and what isn’t funny.” I really felt that way. So he was sending me tapes that summer, and then when the cast was picked, and I was in complete agreement with the people he’d picked, I marched up to the seventeenth floor, maybe it was just before the season began or just after, and I remember the cast then was Chris Farley, Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, Chris Kattan just arrived, and Ana and Cheri. I had seen all their tapes, so you kind of feel like you know these people. They didn’t know me, but I’d seen their tapes.
So I go up there and I’m very friendly and everything. “Hi, how you doing?” And — oop! They were standing there — Lorne had them all lined up, it was like a wedding, but there were no other people at the wedding except us and Lorne. And they were just like — umphf! “Hi!” “Umphf!” All of a sudden it wasn’t cozy at all. And Lorne would say, “No, you can talk! You can talk to him!” And to me, “You can talk to them.” So it took a while. We were there about fifteen minutes and I said, “Well, why don’t you just tell me how you feel about being on the show?” And Lorne is going, “Tell him what you really think, go ahead, you can say things.” I said to Lorne afterward, “I don’t think this is really a good idea, Lorne.” He said, “I don’t know why they did that. They’re very comfortable and everything. They’re very happy.”
LORNE MICHAELS, Executive Producer:
I can be pretty savage about people here in terms of what I think their flaws are. I can get abusive. I don’t think that what I do between dress and air is terribly nurturing. It’s more military, like a drill. My notes tend to be to the point. I think there’s a real toughness with people who are funny in the way they’ve developed their own armor, but some of the people here are made of glass. They can be just very insensitive to other people and at the same time if you pointed out the same thing to them, most of them would be surprised or hurt.
There’s an enormous amount of pettiness in this place, on this floor. You have a lot of writers fighting for time on the show. There’s an old Hebrew proverb that if you have six Jews in a town, you have seven synagogues. And I think it’s about the same with writers. While they can acknowledge someone else’s talent or work, there’s always a qualifier.
It takes me a long time to understand why I don’t like people. I think it’s a problem I haven’t solved. The idea that people are dumb or not interested always comes as a surprise to me. I always thought I could talk to just about anybody and make myself understood. And when you realize that isn’t the case, that either they don’t get it or have no interest in it, it takes me a long time to figure that out. Because I go, “Why would you be here? Why would you pick this place to want to