Live From New York - James H. Miller [269]
WILL FERRELL:
I have a hard time figuring out what the viewpoint of the 9/11 show was. I guess in the final analysis you can’t critique it the way you would any other show. Some people said to me, “Great job, it was wonderful,” and other people said, “That was lame,” because we didn’t do really tough sketches. It was a benign show, and maybe that was the best thing to do under the circumstances. The biggest thing I’ll take away from it was after the show — talking to firemen and policemen. They just kept thanking us and saying, “Thanks for the break, we really needed it,” and we were going, “What?! We should be thanking you.” I did get a little bit emotional toward the end, but I still had my hard hat on.
RUDOLPH GIULIANI:
I think they’ve been unerring in their sensitivity and the way in which they’ve handled September 11. I was at the show when they did the open with Will Ferrell playing President Bush offering the Bush-Cheney plan for dealing with the suicide bombers, in which they would offer telephone sex as opposed to the seventy-two virgins, and I thought it was hilarious. And I think the night of that show they did the whole thing with Jesse Jackson calling up the Taliban and wanting to go over there and be the one to be called upon to settle it, which was very, very funny.
MARCI KLEIN:
I live downtown near the World Trade Center, and after the tragedy occurred on September 11th, I couldn’t get back to my apartment. Like everyone else, I was incredibly upset. I couldn’t believe what was happening.
We had been in the midst of planning our first show of the season, which was scheduled to air on September 29th. A couple days after the attack, I told Lorne, “The first show cannot happen. This is not a time to be funny. There is no way we can do a show in two weeks.” Lorne told me he thought I was right, but he didn’t want to cancel just yet. It was too early. Given that Mayor Giuliani wound up telling us he wanted us to go ahead and do the show, Lorne was right not to have immediately canceled it.
Reese Witherspoon was scheduled to host, and her agent called me and said, “What are you doing, what is going to happen?” I said, “Well, we are going to try and do what we can.” Obviously none of us had ever been faced with doing the show under such circumstances, but you can’t call it a hardship. We were all lucky enough to be alive and have our families intact. So many people in New York weren’t in the same position. I was really proud of the way everyone on the show kept that perspective.
I’ll never forget how remarkable Reese wound up being as host. She just did a terrific job and never let the pressure get to her. Reese was a total pro. She showed up with her baby and worked really hard. Everybody was impressed. I will always be grateful for the way she acted. It was such a difficult time for everybody, maybe the most diffi-cult time ever in the history of the show.
But when Mayor Giuliani stood there with the firemen, it was one of the most stirring moments I’d experienced since becoming part of the show. Everyone in the studio audience was just transfixed by it — the Paul Simon song, the firemen and the mayor standing silently and listening. I couldn’t help wondering how many of the people watching at home that night had lost someone they loved on September 11, and were perhaps finding some comfort in the way it was done.
Meanwhile, Ben Stiller was supposed to host the following week. Ben was a member of the cast, briefly, back in 1989. We had booked him the previous year because we knew he had a movie coming out in September. He had actually been booked eight months in advance. Now I didn’t even know this, but someone in my office had been getting e-mails from Ben Stiller’s office in early