Live From New York - James H. Miller [250]
You know that nightmare when you didn’t study for the exam or you’re naked onstage or something? I knew I was really producing the show when I started having dreams about hosts and musical guests not being there. Sometimes I’ll be talking to Lorne and I’ll go, “How are you not nervous?” I absorb. One host in particular was really nervous. I almost threw up during the monologue because I was so nervous for him.
Gwyneth Paltrow gets more people coming up to her saying, “You were so funny when you hosted Saturday Night Live” than there are saying, “You were amazing in Shakespeare in Love and congratulations on your Oscar.” People recognize when people are good.
GWYNETH PALTROW, Host:
For someone like me, who’s usually relegated to corsets and British accents, it’s really fun to get to do something like hosting. It’s great fun for me to play a white girl who wants to talk like a ghetto chick. I never get to do stuff like that otherwise.
The first time I hosted, I felt incredibly nervous — not only about how it would come off but if I would make it through the night, because I adrenalize so much in those situations. When I was walking out to do the monologue, I couldn’t feel my hands and feet. But the last time I hosted, I wasn’t nervous. I really knew what to expect, and I just felt very free and very lucky to have an opportunity to be ridiculous. I’ve had experiences where I’ve been under extreme pressure, an awards show or something like that, but it’s very finite. This whole experience lasts for an hour and a half of live television. When you do a play, there’s three hundred people sitting there. Not millions.
My mom hosted once in the eighties. She just told me, “It’s going to be great,” as opposed to kind of chronicling what it was going to be like. She said, “Make sure you do this kind of accent,” that type of stuff, and, “Make sure they stretch you as much as possible and do things that you never get to do ordinarily,” because this is such a great chance to do that.
In one sketch I played Sharon Stone and got in all kinds of trouble. She was very offended by it. She kind of talked about it a lot in the press and stuff. I think she was very unhappy with it and she felt it was mean-spirited. But then she proceeded to go on TV and stuff and say I was disrespecting all the women that came before me, and stuff like that. She waged a press campaign against me. I look at it like it’s a rite of passage to be lampooned on that show. If people are making fun of you on that show, that means you’ve made it and you’re in the cultural lexicon, and it’s flattering. I suppose some people are less game for that sort of thing.
ELLEN DEGENERES:
To be honest, there was a time that I was scared of them, because as you know everybody is fodder. They’d made fun of me, especially the whole situation when I met Anne Heche, that whole situation was on a lot. I’m way too sensitive and my feelings got hurt and it was hard. Now I have perspective on it, and they were right to do so, you know?
CAMERON DIAZ, Host:
I don’t like making fun of other people. I like making fun of myself. I really don’t like playing other celebrities and making fun of them. This program is about current events and parodies, which are fun, but I don’t want to participate as the person who’s doing a parody of a person who’s possibly at that moment being humiliated publicly.
GWYNETH PALTROW:
The nicest thing Lorne ever said to me was after the first time I hosted. There was a sketch at the very end of the show where I was supposed to say, “I’m Gwyneth Paltrow and you may know me from Emma and all this stuff but what I really like is hard-core