Live From New York - James H. Miller [5]
Lorne Michaels propelled TV forward partly by returning to its origins — his philosophy tidily embodied in the seven words that exuberantly, and somehow threateningly, open each edition: “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” Though it blazed new trails in the areas of what could be said and done on TV, and initially made censors batty and sponsors skittish, Saturday Night Live always had its roots showing: the early golden days of live TV from New York — the days of Studio One and, more relevantly, Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour with Sid Caesar and his troupe. The audience at home watched and laughed, thrillingly aware that “this is happening now” and that there was thus an element of daring and peril to what otherwise amounted to mere entertainment.
Television is not itself an art form, but it provides a showcase for many art forms, and the one plied and perfected by Saturday Night Live is the comedy sketch, a vaudeville and burlesque staple that is the theatrical equivalent of the American short story. Over nearly three decades, Saturday Night Live has attracted and developed the best sketch-comedy writers in the business — the best when they left if not when they entered. These men and women are a breed unto themselves, a subspecies of comedy writers in general. Neurotic in their own particular ways, most of them have been by nature reclusive, peculiar, and proudly idiosyncratic. That’s not to say the writers who’ve passed through SNL have all been of the same temperament or outlook; politically, culturally, socioeconomically, and intellectually they’ve been all over the map. They’re all attitude incarnate, but not the same attitude.
The story of Saturday Night Live is the story of the people who made it work — people there at, and before, the beginning; people who passed through as if attending some rarefied college of comedic arts; craftspeople and technicians as well as actors and comics and musicians. They and the show weathered many a storm along the way: the tragic premature deaths of cast members, drug abuse among the performers and writers, temper tantrums, office romances, and a near-fatal stumble when, five years into the run, someone underqualified took over as producer. There was also Michaels’s own pratfall when he returned after a long absence with a casting concept that largely bombed and, in more recent times, an anthrax scare that had the entire cast evacuating 30 Rockefeller Center, the show’s longtime home, on a frightening Friday in the terrorist year of 2001.
As executive producer for most of its nearly three decades, Michaels has had to contend with virtually every sin the flesh is heir to among his cast members as well as with his own fallibilities. He was a father figure even at the beginning, when he was only a wee bit older than the rest of them, and that continues now that he is twice the age of many of those who work for him and plays host to surviving members of the original cast who bring teenage sons and daughters to see the show in person. He watched as two of his brightest comedy stars died of drug abuse, saw others come perilously close, and has had to deal with the grimness of a disproportionately high mortality rate overall.
There have been cast members who drank too much, snorted coke too much, freebased too much, God-knows-what-else’d too much. A writer recalls walking into an office and finding three members of one of the world’s most famous rock bands shooting heroin into their veins before a show. One brilliant but insecure member of a recent cast slashed himself with razor blades during bouts of severe depression.