Live From New York - James H. Miller [38]
When I say I wrote all the Samurais, what does that mean? It means I wrote all the stuff for Buck Henry or whoever did it that week and then I go, “John throws up a tomato and slices it,” and “John indicates in his gibberish whatever,” you know. I wrote no dialogue for John. The only time I wrote anything that looked like dialogue for him was when I had to indicate what the gibberish was meant to convey.
BUCK HENRY:
On the Samurai sketches that I did with John, one never knew where it was going because John’s dialogue could not be written. You never knew what was going to happen next. In “Samurai Stockbroker,” he cut my head open with the sword, but it was really my fault; I leaned in at the wrong time. And I bled all over the set. It was a very amusing moment. You would not believe how much blood from a forehead was on that floor. A commercial came on right after the sketch and someone shouted, “Is there a doctor around?” And John Belushi’s doctor was in the audience — which made me a little suspicious. So the guy came and put this clamp on my forehead. We went on with the show. It didn’t require stitches, darn it, but it required a clamp for the rest of the show.
When “Weekend Update” came on, which was about ten minutes later, Chevy appeared with a bandage on his face. Then Jane had her arm in a sling. They featured the moment when I got hit by the sword on “Update” like it was a hot news item. Only Saturday Night Live could do that. By the end of the show, when the camera pulls back, you see some of the crew are on crutches, others have bandages or their arms in slings. As if the whole show caught a virus. It was pretty funny. And the genius of Saturday Night Live, it seems to me, is encapsulated in that event.
John didn’t say anything to me right after it happened, but then we didn’t see each other for another half hour at least. I was in one place and he was in another. But it wasn’t John’s forte to apologize anyway.
NEIL LEVY:
When Buck Henry got nicked by the Samurai sword and everybody started wearing Band-Aids, they all bonded. I think it was the same show where Lorne had done that Beatles offer and they got a phone call that John Lennon was over at Paul McCartney’s house and they were both coming over. Lorne was thinking, “What are we going to do when they get here?” He had an idea, he said. “How about this, they get here and they want to play a song and I ask them where their guitars are and they say they didn’t bring their guitars and I say, ‘Oh. Well, then you can’t play, because there’s a union rule that you have to have your own guitar.’” His whole thing was to have the Beatles there and not let them play. I don’t know if he would have gone through with it. But they never made it, because they realized it was too late. Just the fact that they were on their way was good enough.
I was sent downstairs in case they showed up, because there was this old security guard who turned away everybody. He couldn’t tell a star, he didn’t know anybody. It didn’t matter who you were. Not all the stars brought their ID. “Don’t you know who I am?” “No!” And Lorne finally got him moved to another entranceway. But I had to go down and make sure that he recognized Lennon and McCartney and let them in. So I was waiting there with the security guard at like twelve forty-five.
TOM HANKS, Host:
I remember the first time I saw the show. I was working as a bellman in