Live From New York - James H. Miller [7]
This book tells the Saturday Night Live story for the first time almost entirely in the words of the people who made it and lived it — the performers who found glory or agony there, the writers and producers who stayed for decades or only a year or two, and many stars who served as hosts. Elated or disgruntled, they talk with abandon and candor and represent a wide array of views about the show, what makes it tick, whether indeed it still does tick, how it has lasted, and whether Lorne Michaels is a comedy genius or a cunning con man.
Although Saturday Night Live spans four decades, some of the newness and even the nihilism of the early years survives and bursts forth every week. New talent is always coming in and shaking things up. To them, Studio 8H is not a hallowed hall because Arturo Toscanini once conducted the NBC Orchestra there (in fact, the studio was built for him) but because John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Laraine Newman, Bill Murray, and Garrett Morris reinvented television there; because the place echoes with the inspired hilarity of Belushi’s mad Samurai, Aykroyd’s fusty male prostitute, Radner’s loopy Loopner, Chase’s stumble-bumbling Gerald Ford, Murray’s capricious Oscar-picker, Morris’s shouted headlines for the hearing impaired, Newman’s curiously sexy portrayal of young Connie Conehead, teenager from outer space.
People always point to those first years as the show’s best, but in fact the years that followed have maintained a standard as high as that of any long-running television show, whether Ed Sullivan’s or The Simpsons. MGM once boasted of “more stars than there are in the heavens,” and Saturday Night Live could make the same claim for its current stock company and all those illustrious graduates. Too many of them, alas, really are in heaven now.
With this book, we aspire to come close to doing them justice and celebrating the gifts they lavishly shared with the world. Most of them would balk at being sentimentalized or romanticized, but we have no problem with that, no problem at all. They reinvented the wheel and made it funny, and as Art Carney once said, “Make people laugh and they will love you forever.” Now, live, from New York — it’s Saturday Night.
1
Exordium: 1975–1976
Like all show business successes, Saturday Night Live had many fathers. Several mothers too. There is still, so many years after the birth, disagreement over who the real father is. The show had a gestation period of more than a year, during which the concept took various forms, none identical to that of the show we know today. Adjustments and refinements continued after the premiere. Whatever the evolutionary variations in structure and format, however, Saturday Night Live was from the beginning a lone pioneer staking out virgin territory and finding its way in the night, its creative team determined to make it television’s antidote to television, to all the bad things — corrupt, artificial, plastic, facile — that TV entertainment had become.
CBS still ruled the ratings in the mid-1970s, but executives at RCA, which owned NBC, had high hopes for the network’s aggressive and competitive new president, Herbert Schlosser, a onetime Wall Street lawyer who took over in 1974. He was anxious to make his mark on television history. And he would.
ROSIE SHUSTER, Writer:
Lorne Michaels arrived in my life before puberty, let’s put it that way. I swear to God. There was not a pubic hair in sight when he arrived on my doorstep. We were living in Toronto in the same neighborhood. I was with my girlfriend. We were jumping on boards, just letting go — we were just wild prepubescent kids, and Lorne observed me from the sidelines. And I guess he was struck by my mojo, or whatever, and he basically started following me around. We were inseparable after