Live From New York - James H. Miller [68]
I wrote a piece with Marilyn Miller about Shirley Temple being named an ambassador. And the idea of the sketch was Shirley Temple bringing the leaders of two warring nations together by going into an old-fashioned Shirley Temple song. And that worked, and Marilyn went to Lorne and said, “Paul should have a position on the show as a guy who writes this kind of material.” Lorne agreed and put me on. But the credit was a problem, because the traditional credit is “special musical material.” This worried us because it sounded, as we said then, “too Carol Burnett.” We loved Carol Burnett, we respected her, but we were trying to be different than that.
DAN AYKROYD:
On the “Little Chocolate Doughnuts” parody — that was a Franken and Davis thing that John didn’t want to do. His vanity sort of got in the way there, but ultimately, as with all of us, once the writers presented their concept, you could see the merit in it right away and sometimes you’d go, “Well, it may not make me look great, or it is not my humor, but this is going to work and this is going to be funny.”
JAMES SIGNORELLI:
Belushi had been a high school athlete and he didn’t really want to do the sketch. The thing was not whether or not John thought he could do it; the thing was that John was in his recalcitrant stage. Anne Beatts was along on that ride too. At one point, John is supposed to jump over a bar like a track star. John insisted that he would do the “stunt” himself. All we did was put some cardboard cartons with blankets over them on the other side of the bar and the bar was only a couple feet high. I got down as low as I could get with the camera, you know, the widest lens I could get, and so John jumped over this table and landed on the couch. Okay?
We did it once for practice and again to refine some element. The second time he did it, he screamed out in pain and he tensed up in his most melodramatic way, he clenched his knee to his chest, and everybody ran over and John goes, “Get me an ambulance! Get me a medic!” John wanted to be taken to the hospital. He was absolutely not going to do this thing. He was, you know, “crippled for life.” He was mad at all of us. And Anne went in and smoothed that over with him and got him to go back and finish. John at that point was just, you know, feeling his oats.
At the end of the spot he’s at the breakfast table. John comes on the set wearing a green crewneck lamb’s wool sweater and he’s supposed to look like Bruce Jenner, right? And a shirt with a button-down collar. He insisted that was how he should look. And there’s a huge moth hole in the front of the sweater and a white shirt underneath. So I made him wear it backwards. If you look at it again, you’ll see he’s wearing the sweater backwards. And, of course, he wanted to smoke a cigarette, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to smoke and take a bite of the doughnut at the same time. So finally we came up with this awkward solution where John holds the cigarette in his hand, takes a puff, then — “I like a good breakfast” — and picks up the doughnut and the cigarette in the same hand.
AL FRANKEN:
“Julia Child” came from Tom Davis having seen her cut herself on the Today show. I had written the sketch for Walter Matthau, but it didn’t get picked the week he hosted. So I had to convince Aykroyd to do it. We tried it once, but we didn’t have the hose working properly the first week, so we held it until we got control of the blood spurting. And it’s really a consummate Danny performance. I mean, it’s live TV, and just the timing of the spurts, it’s beautiful. I was so admiring of that performance. It was in the right hands. Walter Matthau wouldn’t have been able to handle the technical aspect nearly as well.
Danny and I had a good relationship, and I always felt that if I cared about something enough, he would do it. You can only call those in so many times. You’ve got to be sure about something in order to say, “Do it.” Or you’ve got to be thinking at least it’s worth trying, worth the risk. That’s when you feel good. When you make somebody