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By Root 1489 0

you’re like, “Wow, really?” But now there’s not too much unhealthiness. Everyone’s really healthy. I mean, we all have our neuroses, obviously, or we wouldn’t be here, and we wouldn’t have characters that are so crazy. That’s where our neurosis pops out most likely. I wonder — in the old days, you know, did they perform high? I’m sure I’ve heard that Belushi was all coked-up when he did this or that — you know, blah, blah, blah. But I just wouldn’t be able to function. And I would not want, twenty years from now, to look back and go, “God, I was so coked-up doing Monkey Boy, I forgot what it was like.” I’m glad I’ve done everything sober.

JIMMY FALLON:

I’m twenty-seven and I look thirty. Because I don’t sleep anymore. I feel like I’m getting older fast. That’s one thing they don’t tell you about the job. You hear stories from other cast members, like, “Hey man, good luck. Hang in there, ’cause this place will kill you. One time I got so angry that I threw a phone out the window.” And I’m thinking, I’d have to be mad at the phone company or the phone or something to throw a phone out the window. I’m on the seventeenth floor. Why would I throw anything out the window? I think I’m more humble than that. I’m like, “At least I have a phone!” What made anyone that angry that they got that mad?

JANEANE GAROFALO, Cast Member:

The show is so good now, and the cast is so strong, I’m assuming somebody has come in and done an exorcism of some kind.

ANDY BRECKMAN:

Reruns of the show are syndicated. And what happens is, every time a show is run, you get a little less money. The first time it’s rerun, you get I guess close to half your salary — a nice check. And then the second time it’s rerun, you get a little less and a little less, and now it’s on Comedy Central so often that what me and other writers get is — is just insane. What we get in the mail are piles of checks for seven cents. Just piles of checks. And by the time you write your account number on the back of it and sign each one, your hand hurts. It’s an ordeal. And that’s what my career at SNL is down to now — cramps in the hands and seven-cent checks.

JAMES DOWNEY:

One thing that has definitely changed — and this smells like the network to me — is that in the early years of Saturday Night Live, the show would very admirably use its clout when booking music acts. It was like, “We’re doing very well, we don’t need to book a music act that’s going to bring in huge numbers.” So we would have some obscure, relatively obscure, or at least interesting choice. Like Sun Ra was on once. Nowadays the choice of the music seems, to me at least, entirely about getting kids to watch or earning a big rating. I think they’ve had like the Backstreet Boys on two or three times. And in the old days, that’s the kind of thing that would have prompted a full-scale staff revolt. As far as the hosts — I have to admit there have been some in recent years whose names I did not recognize. I just didn’t know who they were.

JOHN ZONARS, Music Coordinator:

I think the musical philosophy has always been to try to balance established, very famous, and well-known acts like the Rolling Stones with a sort of cutting-edge, not necessarily breaking act, but an act that is sort of avant-garde. The idea of having an avant-garde act is always important I think to Lorne. And essentially no matter who tells you what about the different bookers that were in place and the bookers that are in place now, it’s Lorne who books the show.

LORNE MICHAELS:

We’re at a place generationally where you can do Britney Spears, where enough people are baby boomers who have kids. And you can put an eighteen-year-old host on, and it will hold the viewers and actually increase the audience.

I would know enough to book Eminem, but I wouldn’t presume to pick the song he would sing. Whereas in 1975, I would have been, “What do you mean, you’re not doing” this or that song, you know. I think you have to step back and find your role.

ALEC BALDWIN:

I asked Lorne once, “Is there any way the host can very innocently try