Live From New York - James H. Miller [51]
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
It was emotional. We were a colony. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but we were Guyana on the seventeenth floor. We didn’t go out. We stayed there. It was a stalag of some sort.
LORNE MICHAELS:
No one thought we’d have a summer holiday, because nobody at the network thought they could rerun these shows. I said, “No, we’re going to put on reruns.” And when we put on the Richard Pryor show, it rated higher than it had originally. And I won the case.
Some of us spent the summer together. We went to Joshua Tree in California. I’d been there many times before. It was a spiritual place for me, and so I was showing them this place that had a lot of meaning for me. We stayed at the Joshua Tree Inn, a motel with a pool in the center. John and Danny were in the room next to mine.
One night we had a barbecue. Chevy, who came with his girlfriend, cooked. I remember it was a very beautiful night, and we were all sort of grateful for each other and just beginning to soak up whatever that first season was. This was late June or early July, and we were just beginning to understand what being on a hit show was like, the full throttle of that.
We drank a lot and stayed up really late. Then at about five o’clock in the morning, the sun was way too bright and woke me up. There was some sort of noise outside, so I staggered to the door. When I opened it, I saw Danny standing in the archway just a few feet away, and he’s in the same shape I’m in, and we look out and there’s John, on the diving board, doing these cannonballs. He goes straight up, hits the board, comes down, and then flips over into the pool. This was just for our benefit, Danny’s and mine, because there was nobody else awake or watching it. And we were like completely wrecked, the two of us, and just barely conscious, and Danny looked at me and he said, “Albanian oak.”
And that’s what we believed. We believed this guy was absolutely indestructible. He was like an animal. You couldn’t have been through the night we’d just been through and be up at five o’clock doing cannonballs — neither of us could live that hard — but there was John.
The beauty of all that for me is that we were comrades-in-arms in the way that, growing up after World War II, you’d hear people talk about army buddies, or say the only people they could talk to were people who had been through it with them. A year earlier, we hadn’t been in any way linked or close, and now we were suddenly on a holiday together. All this stuff was swirling around in the press and we were together at the center of it. We’d gone all the way to the finals and we’d won the Emmys and here we were on the road. We all liked each other. We had more in common with one another than with any other group of people.
To me, our first season was “that championship season.” That said, I’m not sure it was the best season in terms of quality, but the freedom was intoxicating. And so was the success.
2
Heyday: 1976–1980
By the beginning of its second season, Saturday Night Live was the talk of television, a national sensation both hot and cool, and the first hit any network ever had at eleven-thirty on Saturday night. Chevy Chase had become a star and flown the coop, though he would continue to make the occasional cameo appearance. Some cast members and writers saw his leap into greener pastures as tantamount to treason, but it kept SNL from turning into “The Chevy Chase Show” and cleared the way for John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, and others to become the kind of household name that Chevy had managed virtually overnight.
The Muppets were gone. Short films by Gary Weis and Tom Schiller would replace those of Albert Brooks. NBC censors were virtually forced by the program’s surging popularity to become less strict — this was well before people could say “pissed off” or “that sucks” on television — and as other programs took advantage of the liberation, a new candor and a new realism came to American TV — for better