Live From New York - James H. Miller [244]
MAYA RUDOLPH, Cast Member:
We’re certainly a much cleaner, healthier generation than past generations. Everybody goes to the gym now — except for me. People are eating right and taking care of themselves and not smoking and not doing drugs. I’m being very general, but it’s definitely a reflection of the time and the culture we’re living in. To me, it’s certainly boring compared to the Saturday Night Live of yore. We always make jokes about “I would have died if I’d been here in the ’70s. I just wouldn’t have made it.” And then I also sometimes wish for those days, because I wish I was around when everybody was sleeping with each other. It just sounds like a lot more fun.
CHERI OTERI:
I think some people in the cast have fun crushes on other people, but nothing serious. I guess we’re kind of boring — no romances, no drugs. I had an audition once with somebody who used to work here. He’s very, very big in the business now. And as soon as I went in for the audition, he went, “Hey, you guys still doing coke over at SNL?” Because back when he was here, he was doing it. What are we doing, for crying out loud? Oh yeah. Thinking up characters.
Believe me, we’re not catered to here. You go to L.A., you walk into offices for a meeting or something and they ask, “Would you like a Snapple?” Here we have our refrigerators locked. They lock our refrigerators or they cut back on our beverage consumption. And a lot of us just wait until they have to make popcorn for Lorne and then we all go in like scavengers and eat the popcorn.
KEN AYMONG, Supervising Producer:
Actually it was probably me — not some network executive — who gave the order to cut down on the food consumption. There’s no question about it: I always look at the financial perspective of the show. I want it to go on forever. I look at the show from a variety of perspectives, and budgetary is certainly one of them. And every so often you sit down and look at it — like, how are you spending your money? It had to do with dinners. Where it became an issue was where I went to the writers and said, “One of the nights has to go away where the entire writing staff is being fed.” Or something along those lines. “One of them has to go, and you have to make a choice.” And it turned out to be Wednesday. So I’m going to plead guilty to that.
WARREN LITTLEFIELD:
Literally, there was one analysis where somebody said, “You know, villages could survive for quite some time on the weekly food budget for this show.” Just insane amounts of stuff. We’d say, “Well, maybe you don’t need that after-show party,” and they’d go, “We can’t do the show if we can’t have the party.” What everyone goes through that week — I think part of the richness of the experience that everyone feels they are doing something so great, so special, so wonderful, that bonds everybody together, is those after-hour parties.
But the food budget was a problem. Okay? Contrast this to Dick Wolf on Law and Order. In order to secure a renewal of Law and Order, Dick Wolf finally came in and said to me, “We no longer have soda cans on the set.” And I go, “Who gives a shit?” And Dick says, “No, no, you have to understand. We’ve been through every budget item, and a can of soda is more expensive than the half-gallon jugs of soda. Now a glass of Diet Coke is poured from the jug by the glass because it’s cheaper than cans of soda. That’s how aggressive we’ve been in order to make this new deal to renew Law and Order to continue on NBC.”
That was the kind of rigorous financial battle that had gone on for a prime-time asset. Now we had this asset in SNL, but the dollars were spiraling out of control and we were losing money on it.
CHRIS KATTAN:
This is a really healthy cast. There are no drug problems. Maybe some people occasionally smoke pot, but there’s no heavy drug use, and no heavy drinkers either. When I came here, I heard a lot of Chris Farley stories and stuff like that. And