Live From New York - James H. Miller [255]
RICK LUDWIN, NBC Vice President for Late Night:
There have been a couple of times where I had to play Judge Wapner in a dispute between broadcast standards and the writers or performers. There was some line in a David Spade “Hollywood Minute,” I forget exactly what it was, where broadcast standards said “absolutely unacceptable” and David Spade said, “Well, I’m doing it,” and it went back and forth, a ping-pong thing, and finally broadcast standards said, “If you do it, we’re going to drop audio.” And he said, “Well then, drop audio, but I’m doing it. I’m saying the line.” And so he did it. He said the line, and broadcast standards dropped the audio.
Robert Smigel, who pushes the envelope about as far as you can push it on broadcast television, has had a number of dustups. The first time I met Smigel, he and Conan O’Brien were writing partners on Saturday Night Live. Conan denies this, but my recollection is they had written the famous penis sketch for Matthew Broderick, with broadcast standards saying, “There’s a tonnage issue here. We’ll let you say it three times, but we won’t let you say it ten times.” So there’s this odd debate back and forth: “We’ll give up this penis but we want to keep that penis.”
Another week Smigel did a cartoon about global businesses, GE being one of them, and their connection to Ted Kaczynski, the serial bomber. The notion that global businesses were running the world was basically the theme of the piece. It was a very clever sketch. When I saw it, I immediately passed it on up the line, to whoever was in charge, because I wanted everyone to know what was going on. Standards tentatively okayed it, and we put it on, and it aired once. But then it got pulled from the repeats. And Smigel, I remember, was all upset about it being taken out of the repeats. I said, “Robert, it got on the air. You were not censored. It got on the first time.” It got on once — but never again.
ROBERT WRIGHT:
Lorne and I had a couple of issues one time with Smigel on one of his pieces, which I think neither Lorne nor I thought was funny. It was just kind of a GE shot without any point to it. If it had been funnier — there was one done on Jack Welch that was a little funnier that we did run. We didn’t stop it. The other one ran, but I think it didn’t get repeated. It seemed like it was too pointed without being funny.
ROBERT SMIGEL, Writer:
I do raunchy and sometimes nasty stuff, I guess, and I get a lot of attention because Lorne puts my name on the cartoon — but it’s embarrassing because there’s a million funny people here. I have mixed feelings, because sketch writers in general don’t get enough credit. It’s a thankless position. You get pretty well paid if you hang out for a while, but there are guys here who are just brilliant that I’ve worked with and people don’t know who they are. One great thing about my cartoons is that people know I wrote them. It’s a great thing right there for people to know what you wrote specifically. On this kind of show you’re just at the end of a long crawl, and sometimes they don’t even have time to run the crawl. I mean, a guy writes one play and everybody knows who he is, even if it’s a lousy play, but you can write a hundred great sketches and still be anonymous. I feel lucky to have found a venue that was interesting where I could get this kind of freedom and a little bit of attention.
TOM DAVIS, Writer:
Every once in a while, I’ll show up and be a guest writer on a show if the coffers are getting low out here. Lorne will let me come back and appear on the show and make