Live From New York - James H. Miller [37]
CANDICE BERGEN:
I remember the terror. You know, the total exhilaration of it. I just didn’t know you could have that much fun after thirty. It was like the inmates taking over the asylum. Totally.
On the Christmas show, we did a skating routine, a sort of Sonja Henie Bee-Capades skating routine. We went down to shoot the BeeCapades after Rockefeller Center had closed, after the rink had closed, so we were in the elevators at midnight and I was dressed in a red velvet skating outfit with an ermine muff and then Belushi and Aykroyd and Chevy and everybody were dressed like bees. And the elevator operators, who still, after two months of the show, didn’t know how to deal with it, just never looked at any of us, never said a word. I think it was like that for a long time. You just couldn’t understand how they took control of a place like NBC.
LORNE MICHAELS:
The Candy Bergen Christmas show was not as good as the other Candy show, so I went into a tailspin. Chevy and I and Michael went into the office and worked over the holidays, and that’s when we wrote the Elliott Gould show, which later won the Emmy for writing that first season. We wrote a sketch where the Godfather goes to the shrink, and we were in a “let’s just blow it out” state of mind. By that point, I’d hit stride, we all had, and everyone was focused. The Gould show was our first big show which wasn’t about the host. Gould was just a big goofy guy who’d been in M*A*S*H.
BARBARA GALLAGHER:
I hated my job, hated it with a passion. I couldn’t handle it. I had one meeting with a unit manager and he made me cry. Lorne found out about it and he was furious. He was very protective. Later on, that guy ends up being indicted in a big unit-manager scandal, and sent to prison for embezzling. And Lorne sent me the article with a note that said, “The wheel turns. It turns slowly, but it turns.”
At the end of the first year, in December, I finally said to Lorne, “I have to leave.” I told Lorne, “It’s not that I don’t love you guys and the show.” It was more complicated than that for me at the time. And he said, “But we’re a hit now. Why don’t you just take a sabbatical?” I said, “Would that be fair to the other people? It’s just that I don’t fit here now.” He kept saying, “But we’re a hit,” and I said, “I know, and that’s why I feel confident about going. I know you’re on the map here.”
ELLIOTT GOULD, Host:
The first show I ever hosted was a very good show. One of the sketches was written by Michael O’Donoghue. It was a psycho group therapy session, with Belushi as the Godfather in it. I heard it replayed on the radio recently and it was so funny, it even worked on radio. Laraine Newman being in group therapy with Vito Corleone. I was the psychiatrist. My contribution was that I smoked a pipe. At this point I don’t think I would, but then I needed a prop. Also I think it was the first show that I was the head of the Killer Bees, which was very, very funny.
Through the show there was a thread where Gilda Radner had a crush on me and at the end of this first show that I did, we married; Gilda Radner and I had a wedding ceremony, and Madeline Kahn’s mother was cast as Gilda’s mother and Michael O’Donoghue married us at the end of the show. And that was the representative show they submitted, and it won them their first Emmy. I was really pleased to be a part of it.
BUCK HENRY, Host:
On the first show I hosted, I made a suggestion for an ending for a sketch, because I came up in the school that says you end a sketch with an ending. And I heard one of the writers behind me say to the others, “Hmm, 1945.” And I nodded inwardly. “I see. I get it.” It was considered really corny to go for a joke. They thought somehow it was like Carol Burnett.
LORNE MICHAELS:
Buck Henry came in to host and taught me a whole other level of things. Buck so totally got it. When he got there he said, “Do you want to do the Samurai again?” And we had never thought of repeating things until that moment.
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
I wrote all the Samurais with the exception