Live From New York - James H. Miller [65]
LORNE MICHAELS:
Billy Joel, the musical guest, was out there singing his heart out while all this was going on backstage.
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
There had come a point in the first season where Chevy wasn’t writing for the show as much as he was writing for Chevy. And that didn’t help things. I can’t put it in the degree of who was despised more or whatever. I know that when he left the show and he did the specials, there were some interviews with him where he was talking about the future of Saturday Night Live, the show that he had just left. And I seem to remember him being quoted as saying things like, “I’ve used that show for everything I can, that show has no future other than to get weirder as opposed to smarter.” As if the first year we’d just shot our wad. Those were the kinds of things that were coming back to us, and so those of us who were still in the coal mines shoveling seven days a week had to ask, “Why are you doing this? We worked really hard with you and for you. That made no sense.”
I remember Chevy coming back after one of his specials and talking about it or raving about it, you know, proud of something he just did, and I remember Al Franken saying something like, “That’s good, Chevy, but we do one of those every week.” So there were some ill feelings, I think.
In those first five years, Saturday Night Live not only had probably its best cast ever, but also the best and ballsiest collection of writers. The sketch form was older than television itself, but the way they approached it, bent it and shaped it, was their own, and it resulted in sketches that are remembered vividly to this day by the first generation of SNL viewers — such recurring classics as the Coneheads, the swinging immigrant Czech brothers, romantic nerds Lisa and Todd, the Greek diner where all one could order was “cheeseburger cheeseburger” — and such beloved or notorious sketches as Danny Aykroyd’s hemorrhaging Julia Child, his virtuoso performance as the immortal “Bass-OMatic” pitchman, the violent and controversial “Stunt Baby,” Buck Henry as pedophilic baby-sitter Uncle Roy, and the hilariously businesslike comportment of Aykroyd as Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute.
STEVE MARTIN:
When you’re young, you have way fewer taboo topics, and then as you go through life and you have experiences with people getting cancer and dying and all the things you would have made fun of, then you don’t make fun of them anymore. So rebelliousness really is the province of young people — that kind of iconoclasm.
DAN AYKROYD:
Michael O’Donoghue was one of the really great writers on the show, and he really taught me how to write for television. He taught me to have the confidence, he taught me to go with the concept, to embrace the absurdity. He taught me structure, he was meticulous in the way he laid out structure bits, he taught me the discipline of writing for television.
LILY TOMLIN, Host:
I enjoyed hosting. At least I think I did. I do remember that after the show got to be such a big hit, I hosted it again. By that time, I just remember everybody — not everybody, but people like Michael O’Donoghue — was a little bit manic. The dress rehearsal did not go well. And Michael was so eccentric and he must have been so angry with me, he was like putting the evil eye on me or something. And it was so kind of ludicrous that I burst out laughing.
It was so important to them at that point, because they were creating that show and getting it off the ground and everything, so that was their identity, and I can understand their intensity — their wanting it to be this or that or great