Live From New York - James H. Miller [277]
DARRELL HAMMOND:
I try to improve myself every week. It’s the only hope I have of making it in show business is to improve. I have to be better than I was. That’s the way I look at it, because I’m not a glamour person. If that’s what it was all about, then I would just be glamorous. You know, I would love to be a glamour boy, but I’m not.
DAN AYKROYD:
Oh listen, I’m a big fan of the show today. I look at Second City as the B.A. program in comedy and improv and writing, and I look at Saturday Night Live as the masters program. And then after that point in life, you get your Ph.D. in whatever you go into. So I would say I probably have enough knowledge to teach a graduate-level course in film production now.
But definitely Saturday Night Live is the masters program, and I look at it as my alma mater, and I love going back. When I’m in New York, I love to go to the show and sit with Lorne and watch it. I love associating with the new writers, and I’m a big fan of the current cast. You’ve got some outstanding players there.
Every era has its great, great moments. I think in our time if you look at Roseanne Roseannadanna and the Coneheads and the Blues Brothers, and other things that we did. And then if you look at Eddie Murphy’s time, you know, his Gumby and his Buckwheat and just some of the things that he did that were outstanding. And then you have Dana Carvey with the Church Lady, which was an amazing amalgam of everything you’d ever want in a scene or sketch — accent, voice, walk, attitude, dialogue, delivery, all that was there. And now Chris’s Mr. Peepers, you know, that monkeylike creature that he does, and everything that Will Ferrell does is fantastic, and Horatio is wonderful as well. He’s a little undiscovered, I think.
So every year has its breakthrough moments. The tradition’s being carried on in a grand way. It’s an institution.
AMY POEHLER:
We did a show with Queen Latifah as guest host. In one sketch, she and Maya and I were playing this kind of doo-wop group, these sixties girls, and we rehearsed the songs for a couple days beforehand. It was kind of a “Behind the Music” thing. So during the live show, with ten seconds to go before the sketch, we could hear Jena Rositano, the stage manager, talking into her headset saying, “Wait. What? What?? Do you want me to tell them that? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?”
MAYA RUDOLPH:
We kept hearing her say into her headset, “Do you want me to tell them that?” Then she said, “Okay.” And it was like eight seconds to go, and she looks up and says to us, “You’re going to be singing with no music. Five, four, three —” And we had four songs to sing! And you just go, “Ugh.” The show goes so smoothly most of the time, we don’t realize when it fucks up how bad things can be. We had dance moves and costume changes and songs and harmonies. We had rehearsed it to death and then it just blew up in our faces because there was no music track. That was scary. It was horrible. It was really, really horrible.
AMY POEHLER:
I loved it. We just sang it without the music. And it was one of those things like, “Oh my God, the fuckin’ show is live. It really is.” Of course there’s some poor person who screwed up the music who’s getting screamed at, but I loved it. I thought it was super exciting. I used to love that about watching the show. I loved being reminded that anything could happen. I loved the screwups. I loved being reminded that it was live.
AL GORE:
The timing of my hosting Saturday Night Live was driven mainly by the timing of our book tour, and the timing of my decision to run or not run was driven by the end of the calendar year. And the two just began to converge. It’s really interesting the way they fell together, two nights in a row. That was not part of a master plan; it just happened that way. I taped 60 Minutes on Sunday, just a few hours before it was shown. I didn’t make the final decision really until that week-end. What I had intended to do was to wait until the Christmas vacation period, when all of my family was going to be together. And