Live From New York - James H. Miller [263]
Tom Hanks did the opening monologue, Bill Murray and Paul Shaffer revived Murray’s old lounge-singer routine, there were touching tributes to the show’s many fallen comrades, and Robert Smigel contributed a cartoon mocking Lorne Michaels, who privately lamented that if he had eliminated Smigel’s animated mugging from the show, “Page Six” of the New York Post would have reported it. Asked about the cartoon later, Smigel insisted it was a labor not of revenge but of admiration, another example of the curious love-hate relationship common to Michaels’s professional progeny. America had sometimes hated — well, disliked — Saturday Night Live over its fitfully hallowed haul as well, but this was a night to forget all failings, real or imagined — a night to commemorate all the good times and anticipate more to come.
BILL MURRAY, Cast Member:
The old days? I don’t really reflect on them. What are the old days — working real hard, sort of that new excitement of having made it, going to the party after the show, and really just sort of competing. It was a competitive time. You threw out there what you had and you saw how it stacked up. Whenever I get together with a few of those guys it sort of comes back.
We spent so much time together so intensely that I guess it’s like war buddies or something. You don’t have to see them to remember. I don’t see the players much at all. I live in the Northeast; most of them live in California. I don’t see them very often at all, but when I see them it’s great. Like at the twenty-fifth anniversary, we were all there so it was great. Everything they do is fine with me. Anything that happens with them is fine and will always be fine. We just went through too much for me not to wish them well.
You talk about friends for life and stuff, and that’s what it is. We’ll always be connected; we’re sort of working together. I don’t know if it’s just the reruns, but we’re always sort of working together all the time. We sort of went to school together and we’re sort of carrying that stuff out into the world. We all have that experience and we’re affected by it and we carry it out there. When I see them, I feel like they’re doing the same thing I am — they’re out there and they have that history and that experience that only the players had, and only they could ever know what it was like. It’s sort of a secret in a way. It’s like a talisman. It’s something we walked away with. We got to walk away not just with the side effect of success, but with the experience. Having the experience was probably the greatest thing.
When I did the twenty-fifth-anniversary show, there was a very warm feeling, a great feeling of like we were all in the same fraternity or sorority, we all like went to the same school somehow, and it was a really small school. I enjoyed people more than I ever did — other guys from other generations and casts and so forth. I felt no feeling like “ugh.” Because you always used to feel that this could have been different, or you could have done that a little better or something. But there was none of that feeling at all when we got together again. It was just, “Hey, look at this group.” I was able to enjoy everyone so much. I had the best time. It was really delightful.
Tom Davis and I and Paul Shaffer and Marilyn Miller got together to work on something for the show. We went to Paul’s apartment and spent like a couple days doing it. Danny came over. It was like a party. Paul opened some really good wine. Somebody rolled a joint. It was hysterical. We just started telling stories — all the time thinking, “We don’t want this part of it to end. We don’t want this part of it to stop.” We were in no rush to write the sketch. I wanted to do a Bruce Springsteen song. I just thought “Badlands” was the right song. And I was arguing with Marilyn. It’s great to argue with Marilyn. In the old days, I didn’t get Marilyn at first. She used to argue so vociferously, I used to think, “What