Live From New York - James H. Miller [40]
GARRETT MORRIS:
A lot of people are very patronizing toward so-called handicapped people. They can take care of themselves. One thing about the kind of comedy we do is that it’s a deeper realization of the fact that with all comedy, with all jokes, somebody’s on the bottom.
ALBERT BROOKS:
I think Lorne resented the fact that I was in Los Angeles. But the very reason that I set it up that way was so I could function and do what I knew I could do, and I didn’t want to participate in the New York thing. And once the cast made it, then these little helper things like my films became, in Lorne’s mind, less important, and the reasons for getting me were pretty much over. Because what function did I provide for him? I made him something that got him great attention and great reviews. And, more importantly, I did the publicity for them.
After those six films, that was it. Because I don’t think Lorne Michaels would ever, ever again, do anything outside of New York. I think that really was something that he never wanted. He didn’t like not having control over all of the product.
DAN AYKROYD:
At first I stayed at Belushi’s house — living with him and his wife, sleeping at the foot of their bed, having their cats attack me. I lived there for two months. Finally — finally — I said, “I gotta get out of here.” John loved having me there, and Judy was very sweet. But I met a guy who worked in the graphics department at NBC, and we had a loft downtown for a while. Had some great parties there.
JUDITH BELUSHI:
John and Danny had met much earlier and they liked each other instantly. Danny had come in at one point and stayed at our house for a couple nights. I know he says he slept at the foot of the bed. It wasn’t literally the foot of the bed. Actually, it was another room. He remembers it that way, though. It seemed like the foot of the bed to him.
HOWARD SHORE:
Our apartments were dismal, horrible sorts of sublets. And Rockefeller Center was really much nicer than where we were living, and we were spending seventeen, eighteen hours a day with our friends there, working. So for the few hours that we would crawl back to our dingy apartments, it was always so depressing, sometimes we’d just stay at the office. We were kids and the party was sort of going on all the time. Dan had bunk beds because we had no money, we were paid so relatively little money, really, by NBC. I think they were paying me $500 per show, not per week. I think the first year I made $10,000 when we actually created the show. So we had no real lives.
PAUL SHAFFER:
We were young, and nobody had much else to do. We used to be there all night writing. Lorne was a night owl and he encouraged this; those were the kind of hours he wanted to keep. So that was his schedule, that Monday night would be the first meeting pitching ideas, Tuesday he’d start after dinner and just stay up until you had some stuff written, and then you’d drag yourself out of bed Wednesday and come in for the first read-through of the material, which used to start, theoretically, at one. Not only was it weird hours, but it was long hours. People were really devoted to the show. There was not necessarily much social life. Our whole life was the show.
LORNE MICHAELS:
The thing I was worried about the most in those days was the dry cleaners, and getting my clothes back. I probably only owned two or three pairs of jeans and four or five shirts, so you could get in a jam where there were no clean clothes. I lived above a Chock Full of Nuts at Fifty-seventh and Seventh, so I could always go down in the morning and have coffee and a