Live From New York - James H. Miller [46]
Suddenly this figure comes roaring through the room. Unbeknownst to us at the time, he had a straw in his hand. He gets to the table, and he has half of that stuff up his nose by the time they knew who it was: Belushi. They didn’t know whether to be thrilled that Belushi had just done this to their coke or be absolutely decimated, because that represented about half the money they had in the world at that time.
The drugs didn’t bother me, yet I knew they could be the end of the world for the show. And when I found out there was a partially available space on the seventeenth floor I said to Lorne that’s where we’re going. It’s the best place because of the elevators. One elevator bank says fourteen and up, the other elevator bank one through sixteen in the old NBC. That’s where everybody was, every executive was on that side, from the head of the network to the chief lawyers, between the first and the sixteenth floor. You could go up either elevator bank to the sixteenth floor, but if you got on the other elevator bank you only had three floors in common. Fourteen and fifteen were sports and press, sixteen was personnel and I figured, “Fuck them.” But if they were on the other elevator, they’d be on the same elevator with Schlosser. And so we were somewhat insulated, but initially in an area that was too small.
EUGENE LEE:
That was a mistake, choosing the seventeenth floor, because we never thought that we’d have to wait for elevators. The elevator door used to be full of big dents where people had kicked it. They couldn’t bear waiting.
EDIE BASKIN:
Drugs were definitely part of the times, but I just think if you wanted to do it, you did it, and if you didn’t want to do it, you didn’t do it. It didn’t have anything to do with pressure. I didn’t think anybody was cool because they did drugs, and I didn’t think anybody was cool because they didn’t. People just made their own choices.
NEIL LEVY:
Franken and Davis I think shared an apartment, and they threw a party so we could get together to watch Howard Cosell’s Saturday Night Live. It came on before us, which is why we weren’t allowed to call our show Saturday Night Live at first. We wanted to see this other Saturday Night. All the writers showed up, Michael O’Donoghue, Dan Aykroyd. They were passing around these joints. I had never smoked before, or not really gotten stoned, and I didn’t want to seem like “the kid,” so I started smoking. This pot was from Africa or something. You didn’t even have to smoke it; you just looked at the joint and you were unconscious. It kept coming around and around to me, and then I just got so incredibly paranoid. Never in my life had I been that bad before. I locked myself in their only bathroom, and I was terrified, and I kept praying to God that it would stop. Every once in a while someone would come to use the bathroom and I’d flush the toilet and go, “I’ll be out in a minute!” And I just got worse and worse, because people had to know I was in the bathroom and something was going wrong.
Finally Dan Aykroyd knocked on the door and he said, “Neil, this is Dan. You probably smoked some of that weed, you’re probably paranoid, and you probably think you’re the only one. Let me tell you, my friend, you’re not the only one. We’re all paranoid, we’re all stoned.” And he talked me out of the bathroom into the bedroom. And he started making me laugh. One of the things he did was he pulled his pants a little of the way down and pretended he was fixing the radiator as a radiator repairman. And later I remember he used that as a refrigerator repairman in a Nerds sketch. I think I saw it first.
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:
Alan and I were so young when we did that show, and we had so much extra fuel that after being up all night writing, we still had to think of other stuff to do. So one night we went into Franken and Davis’s office and took out all the furniture — all the desks,