Live From New York - James H. Miller [227]
I got there in ’95. That was the year that a huge amount of people didn’t come back from the year before, and Lorne kind of cleaned house of everything and started anew. So it was really great because we all came in together. We also didn’t have any idea how to do the show. None of us had worked on the show before, and since it’s such a different beast than anything else, we all had that attitude that “We’re just going to try everything,” and it was pretty great. It almost felt like going away to college. Everyone was in all these little dorm rooms. In the hall everyone was getting to know each other. We went out all the time. We were all fairly young. Not many people were married or had kids yet. It was sort of one of those times when everyone was on the same wavelength. Creatively it’s hard to come in and figure out what it all is. We were just going forward. We were like, “Screw it,” and, “Let’s just try.” We were all energized, because everyone was thrilled to have this job.
We had one meeting with Lorne where he talked about, “We’re going to bring it up again and get it going again.” I was aware just as a viewer that they were coming off a bad year. I knew when I first came and met Lorne, before I got hired, he talked about the fact that the show has an arc to it and that it would come back up, a Phoenix rising many times, and this was one of those times we were hoping to bring it back up. It just seemed to have a lot of fatigue and no one was really clicking along together anymore in a creative way. So it seemed like it had a sort of natural death. And his attitude at the time was like, “I’ve seen it happen before, and I think this is a great new cast and new writers, and I think we can do it again.” It was pretty slow at first, and I remember the press at first, there’d be an article that says, “Saturday Night Live is great again,” and then the next week it would be, “Oh, I spoke too soon.”
Friction between Saturday Night Live and network executives continued into the second half of the 1990s. Although Jim Downey was held in awe by his peers and Norm Macdonald was Chevy Chase’s favorite among all those who succeeded him in the “Update” anchor chair, the team became the target of an essentially one-man crusade. NBC West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer had earlier declared war on Downey as program producer and got him thrown out early in 1995. Downey resurfaced thanks to artful maneuvering by Lorne Michaels, his duties limited mainly to the “Update” segment. That was fine with him but not with Ohlmeyer, who wanted him out of there too. By the 1997–98 season, Ohlmeyer was even more adamant about getting rid of Macdonald — it had turned into a veritable fixation.
Ironically, Macdonald had originally taken over “Update” with Ohlmeyer’s implicit blessing; he’d been adamant at that time that the position not be given to an SNL veteran who had long wanted it (and was an old pro at ruffling peacock feathers), Al Franken. That had all been private, but now Ohlmeyer’s interventions were loud and public. In the entire tumultuous history of the show, it had probably never been the focus of a more explicit conflict between the business and creative sides of the network. Nor had there been a more concentrated assault on the independence and integrity of Lorne Michaels.
Insiders and outsiders alike, meanwhile, saw it as something other than a coincidence that the Downey-Macdonald “Updates” were mirthfully merciless on the topic of O. J. Simpson, that well-known unconvicted murderer-about-town, who’d hosted the show in its third season and, more significantly, was a longtime golf-playing crony of none other than Don Ohlmeyer.
JAMES DOWNEY:
I don’t think anyone needed to tell me particularly — I mean, Lorne had been telling me for two years now — how unhappy Don Ohlmeyer was with me. Ohlmeyer was practically putting out memos saying, “Do not ask or accept advice from this clown.” Lorne was probably put in a weird bind when I was doing “Update” with Norm Macdonald, because I know he didn’t like that approach to “Update.