Live From New York - James H. Miller [229]
We wanted “Update” to be good, but we didn’t think that we had to pander. If the rest of the show was pandering, then we thought we wouldn’t have to. So then I started getting the sense that they were unhappy. These people don’t come up and talk to you, you just get it third-hand and stuff like that. Ohlmeyer and his crew thought every joke in “Update” should kill, and the audience should be clapping and cheering and stuff. They thought Jay Leno did that every night with his monologues, so why couldn’t we do it one night for five minutes, where it would just be wall-to-wall laughter and applause?
My response was, I hate applause. I don’t like an audience applauding because to me that’s like a cheap kind of high. They kind of control you. They’re like, “Yeah, we agree.” That’s all they’re doing, saying they agree with your viewpoint. And while you can applaud voluntarily, you can’t laugh voluntarily — you have to laugh involuntarily — so I hate when an audience applauds. I don’t want to say things that an audience will agree with, I don’t want to say anything that an audience already thinks. And so the thing with “Update” was not to do these same jokes where you said that, you know, Pat Buchanan was a Nazi or some ridiculous thing that wasn’t true but that everyone would applaud because they’d already heard it somewhere else. “Update” was never a big pep rally when I was there. It was never a big party. So I think the network started going, “It doesn’t seem like as much fun as it should be.”
DON OHLMEYER:
What you had then was, you had people tuning out during “Update.” And that had never happened before. You never had dropout during “Update.”
WARREN LITTLEFIELD, NBC Executive:
I think Don wanted to exert control over Lorne in ways that Lorne didn’t want to be controlled. It was a battle of wills and egos. I think Norm Macdonald, ultimately, was a symbol. Don just didn’t get it. He didn’t get Norm Macdonald. Ohlmeyer could be the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. We said, “You know what? You’ve got to ask your kid.” We’d sit in a meeting and go, “Don, we disagree. It was funny. It wasn’t a perfect ninety minutes, but it was funny.” I don’t know; maybe he was watching it alone at eleven-thirty. It was also before Don was in rehab.
LORNE MICHAELS:
I remember one night Don and I were having dinner at Morton’s in L.A. — by the bar, where he can smoke — and he would have his cheeseburger and his glass of milk and his four packs of Marlboros. I sat there playing with my swordfish thinking, “If he outlives me and it turns out to be just about gene pool, I’m going to be furious about it.”
FRED WOLF, Writer:
Ohlmeyer was completely out of line. Norm Macdonald is one of the funniest guys I ever met, and Jim Downey is the funniest writer I’ve ever met. And so if those two guys get together and they put together “Update,” then I have faith that “Update” is a really funny thing coming from those two guys. I’ve been on a lot of shows that have been sort of faltering or whatever. The network decides to step in and alter the original, creative vision and sort of dabble with it — and it’s never worked. I’ve never seen them improve ratings on any show once they step in.
JAMES DOWNEY:
And the thing that used to drive the network crazy was, why does he just stare into the camera for a minute after the joke? And we did it as often as necessary for the audience to get the joke. And there’d often be a delayed reaction, because some things weren’t right there on the surface.
NORM MACDONALD:
Sometimes I would have to be in something. For a while I had to do Bob Dole, so I’d fucking have to put on some fucking mask and go do it, so that would get in the way. All I really cared about was “Update.” But that fucking Bob Dole, man, I wrote a couple of sketches that I thought were funny for