Live From New York - James H. Miller [34]
If you asked Lorne what I contributed to the show, what I think he would say is that during the development stage and the launch, I created an island on which he could exist and no one else could touch him.
LORNE MICHAELS:
Candy’s show, the fourth show, was the first show, I would say, that was a Saturday Night Live like the ones we have now. The week before, when Rob Reiner hosted, Andy Kaufman did a long piece, there was a long Albert Brooks film, and a long monologue by Rob. On the Candy show, we sort of hit our stride. We’d had our first week off, and we worked hard on the writing.
DICK EBERSOL:
Now comes week five. New York magazine comes out with Chevy Chase — on the cover. John is radically pissed off, because he sees Chevy running away with the show; now it’s going to be all about Chevy. Onstage, John had been the star, not Chevy.
We do show six, which is a wonderful week, Lily Tomlin’s come to do the show. Now we got Thanksgiving off. On Friday, we all get an advance copy of the Sunday New York Times. Major story: Saturday Night Live is called the most important and most exciting development in television comedy since Your Show of Shows. It’s this drop-dead blow job. It was just unbelievable. And this is the same New York Times that did not even review show one with George Carlin.
They also printed a review that John J. O’Connor wrote on the second show, where Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel got together again for the first time, and his review essentially was that the show was not very good, but he couldn’t be entirely fair in saying that because he missed connections on his way home from dinner on the subway, and so he missed forty minutes of the show. Can you believe that they fucking printed that thing?
LORNE MICHAELS:
It was humiliating that the critic thought it was a music show and reviewed it that way. He said, “Another Simon and Garfunkel reunion,” of which there hadn’t been one since 1968.
ROSIE SHUSTER:
One of the things we heard about the first four or five shows, while it was becoming the sensation that it would be, was that Chevy kind of jumped ahead of the pack, so to speak, and that started a kind of a resentment on the part of some people, particularly John, toward Chevy.
Chevy was writing his own segment using his own name — “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not” — plus doing the physical shtick at the beginning. He was easily identifiable, whereas it took people so many years to catch on to what Danny’s talent was, because he would disappear into characters. And Chevy just shot ahead. It wasn’t that surprising. It was going to take John a little while longer. He was used to being beloved on the stage of the Lampoon show and had a following of people, but to translate to television, especially if you have an attitude about television, takes a little while.
CHEVY CHASE:
I felt it was relatively easy. I’d come in and pick stuff up and learn stuff and simply walk through it, basically. I don’t remember it being particularly difficult. You know, I have to say that, going in, one of the things that made the show successful to begin with that first year and made me successful was this feeling of “I don’t give a crap.” And that came partially out of the belief that we were the top of the minors in late-night television and that we wouldn’t go anywhere anyway. So we had no set of aspirations in the sense that this would be a showcase to drive us to bigger and better things.
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
We worked on “Update” to the very last minute. Between dress and air on Saturday nights, I would go up to my office and I would watch the eleven o’clock news and if something hit me, I’d write it and it would be on television a half-hour later. You know, there were two shows where I was literally under the “Update” desk writing stuff and handing it up to Chevy while he was actually on the air.
ROBERT KLEIN: