Live From New York - James H. Miller [258]
JOHN GOODMAN, Host:
I was in town doing a movie — I can’t remember if I was hosting the show, I don’t think I was — but they needed a Linda Tripp for the cold opening one week. And they called me. Like, I guess there’s a resemblance. And then of course I did it a few more times after that.
You know, I always felt a little bad about that. For one thing, after the scandal was over, it was kind of beating a dead horse. I certainly don’t like her politics or agree with what she did, but after a while, I felt like I was picking on her.
ALEC BALDWIN:
One time we did an opening with John Goodman, and he blew his lines and he fucked up the biggest joke in our opening and I almost called him an asshole. I think if you watch the tape, I mutter it under my breath. Because he walks away during this Christmas show where he was like the Ghost of Christmas Present, I think I’m literally mumbling the word “asshole” under my breath, because he’s bungled the lines and ruined the whole sketch.
The live aspect of the show is to me the most important aspect of the show. It’s a challenge. If I was not doing what I’m doing now, I would try to get on the show regularly. It’s like getting high, it’s like being stoned out of your mind, it’s like being shot out of a cannon.
CHRIS PARNELL, Cast Member:
I introduced myself to Tom Brokaw in the NBC gym locker room one day. I said, “I’m the guy from SNL who does an impression of you.” He said, “Oh, right, I’ve heard of that.” We had a pleasant conversation, actually. He told me about the old days of the show, when Belushi and those guys were on and he used to come and watch it with his daughters. And he talked about his daughter having gone to Marci Klein’s sweet sixteen birthday party at Studio 54.
He was not naked, no. I think I waited until he was getting into his gym clothes to talk to him. It’s a beautiful body, though. Glorious.
Although the Saturday Night Live casts of the eighties and nineties hardly had the reputation for sybaritic self-indulgence of the original seventies cast, the show’s mortality rate continued to be distressingly high. Among the most shocking deaths in the history of the series was that of Phil Hartman, who’d been with the show from the mideighties to the midnineties playing a whole chorus of characters and perfecting particularly deft impressions of Bill Clinton, Ed McMahon, and Frank Sinatra. Hartman was shot to death by his wife, Brynn, who then killed herself.
Far less unexpected but obviously as tragic was the death of Chris Farley, the tubby and childlike cutup who had tried — too hard and too successfully — to pattern his life and career after John Belushi’s. Farley died at the same age, thirty-three, and of essentially the same cause: heedless and delirious excess.
JON LOVITZ:
Because Phil could do anything, he had more stuff. He’d be in like eight sketches, you know. He used to go, “God, it’s too much,” because I’d have like five sketches, which was great, but he’d be in like eight or ten every week. But he loved doing the show, you know. He did.
The first time Phil was offered the show, he turned it down. And then later on he said yes. I said, “So did you say yes, Phil, because I said you’ve got to come on and do this?” He said, “Well, no.” I said, “Well, why did you say yes?” He said, “Because Joel Silver called me and told me I’d be crazy not to take the job and do it.”
I’ll say this about missing him: He was my favorite person to work with. He was my older brother. I loved him. I idolized him. I liked him and yet he was like my grandmother — he’d be so excited to see me he just made me feel great about myself. He could do anything. He would just get into something and learn everything about it and go on to the next. The last acting job he had was on a pilot that I did. That was the last job and