Live From New York - James H. Miller [35]
Everyone was quite terrified about the live television aspect of the show. Most of the people in that building at NBC in New York hadn’t done a live show since Howdy Doody. As a matter of fact, one of the first SNL shows had a blank gray screen for forty-five seconds. A network show and nothing but gray for forty-five seconds because of the improvising and screwups of doing it live.
NEIL LEVY:
Lorne quit on the Robert Klein show. They took away his lighting man and his sound man. Lorne had promised his guests the best sound and the best lighting. That was one of his promises to the people he’d gotten to do the first ten shows. He was furious that NBC had taken away his people. I think he realized at the time that if he didn’t make a stand, they’d be stepping all over him. So he told NBC that he would walk unless they returned his lighting guy and his sound guy.
And he walked. He was not there. He left. He went back to his apartment and stayed there most of the week playing poker. Robert Klein showed up and said, “Where’s the producer?” And we said, “Oh, he’s around. He’ll be here soon.” And the whole week went by and he wasn’t there. But Lorne won. It was a victory. I think he came back Friday or Saturday. A lot of people would have said, “We’ll make do with this sound guy and this lighting guy,” and he said, “No, I’ve got to have the best.” And that philosophy has served him well.
HOWARD SHORE:
We were really kind of subversive in a number of ways. O’Donoghue and I were always trying to book acts on the show and then do things to them. They were so happy to be on the show, they didn’t really notice. I remember when Robert Klein hosted, O’Donoghue put Abba on a Titanic set and tried to drown them. He thought Abba was kitsch.
LORNE MICHAELS:
Abba was the first and only act that lip-synched. And that was Dick. Dick was Abba. That was all he cared about; he left the rest of the music to me and Howard. But with Abba, he just wouldn’t take no for an answer.
DAVE WILSON:
Lorne did not like lip-synching, and Lorne did not like — and I always thought it was a tribute to him — Lorne did not like close-ups of fingers on instruments. He always said, “We’re not giving music lessons.” Because you want to see the man’s or woman’s face; it was their inner feelings in creating this music that was worth seeing, not where their fingers were placed on the strings.
LILY TOMLIN:
I don’t remember entirely the first time I saw the show. I think I just thought it was a good, young comedy show. What do you think I should have thought?
I think Belushi always thought he was so cutting-edge or so ahead in some ways, or he thought he was a rebel. Even though we liked him, we couldn’t get him to come on our special. Jane had seen a lot of the Lampoon kids, and we tried to get some of them for our show.
Live TV was old, basically, but this was like new because they were doing it in a different time frame. Jane Wagner and I had always wanted to do a live TV show because we had to spend all our money editing anyway. A live show is great, but you’re always going to have rough spots, and there’s always the chance of something happening. Having been on Laugh-In, and I guess just doing comedy for a long time, I thought it was hip, probably — hip and current like that.
I don’t think that I thought it was something I’d never seen before.
CHRIS ALBRECHT, Agent, Comedy Club Manager:
I ran the Improv in New York from 1975 to the very end of ’79. Everybody came through there. Especially in the first year, several of the performers from Saturday Night Live would come in to the Improv on a semiregular basis to go up on stage and try out characters and work out stuff. Belushi would come in a lot, Laraine came in a few times, Gilda came in at least once. Belushi also came in to buy quaaludes from his dealer every other week.
On Saturday nights, we would always watch the show from the bar. At 11:30, we were just starting our second show at the Improv. So it was funny people watching funny people. I was impressed that Saturday Night Live was on the