Live From New York - James H. Miller [52]
They couldn’t fully know it at the time, but the cast, writers, and producers of Saturday Night Live were living through the program’s golden age, from 1975 to 1979, the era of the original cast (with Bill Murray replacing the departed Chevy Chase), the founding writers, and occasional visits from such off-the-wall novelties as quixotic comic Andy Kaufman and Mr. Bill, a little clay man who each week would be mauled and mangled. This was a time of exuberance, adventurousness, and unbridled excess. It would become legendary and infamous and set standards by which every subsequent manifestation of the show, including all future casts, would be judged.
LARAINE NEWMAN, Cast Member:
There was one point in the second season where we were onstage rehearsing a Nerd sketch or something, and we were all talking about what we were naming our corporations. And I think it was Gilda who said, “Listen to us, for God’s sake. We’re talking about our corporations! What’s happened? We’ve joined the establishment.” And we were really kind of being hurled into all the trappings of a successful adult life at a young age.
TOM HANKS, Host:
It was the cultural phenomenon of the age. It was truly as big as the Beatles. It was this huge riotous thing and it was on every week and everybody gathered together on Saturday nights to watch it.
We would get together in college and then, later on when I was working in the theater, we would all get together after shows at a house and watch. Everybody from the theater that I was working at in Cleveland was in the living room of this rented house watching a ten-inch black-and-white television with a coat hanger for an antenna. And that’s just what you did every week — got together and had something to eat and sat around waiting for Saturday Night Live to come on.
BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY, Cast Member:
The show felt like it was the center of the universe. There was such a clamor about it. People at parties would stop and turn on the show and watch it. So it felt like the big high point of TV. Half your job seemed like arranging for tickets for people you knew.
JAMES SIGNORELLI, Director of Commercial Parodies:
By the autumn of the second year, I remember walking around with Gilda and not being able to go fifty feet down the street without people stopping us warmly and saying, “Hi,” “I love you,” and “I love your stuff,” and so on. At first Gilda was pleased and delighted, and then later — much later — felt kind of put-upon.
TOM SCHILLER, Writer:
There were all kinds of people like Mike Nichols who thought the show was hip, and Norman Mailer, and you’d see them at restaurants and they’d nod to you and stuff, and you thought you were so great. And then, some nights you would come out of the show and you would see these really strange geeky people with eight-by-tens and marking pens to have you sign your autograph, and they were like troglodytes, these people. They were strange people who were your fans. So it was hard to reconcile who really liked you.
ROBIN SHLIEN, Production Assistant:
You would look around and Jerome Robbins would be in the back of the control room one night, or Michael Bennett. It was this place where the toasts of the town would show up.
ALAN ZWEIBEL, Writer:
To this day, I look back on those first five years with incredible fondness. I tend to romanticize the experience, because it was way more good than bad. But when it was bad, it was very painful. It was very, very painful.
JANE CURTIN, Cast Member:
I loved doing the ninety minutes of the show, just loved it, but I couldn’t do the other stuff. I couldn’t be in the writers’ meetings; it was too frustrating. I just didn’t function well in that