Live From New York - James H. Miller [72]
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:
You know the legendary story of Gilda going over to Jane’s house to look at Jane and Patrick being married? And just watch them? That’s what it was like. Gilda would just watch them and say, “Oh, now you’re going to turn the TV on together, how will you decide what to watch?”
Gilda projected the most extreme vulnerability, and it translated into whatever she did. And when she did physical comedy, you could feel her fall.
JANE CURTIN:
I’d invite her over for dinner. She’d come and sort of sit there while I was cooking. My husband would be there. And she wouldn’t participate, wouldn’t carry on a conversation; she just wanted to watch us live. It was off-putting in the beginning, but after a while it got to be very funny. You know — it was Gilda, so it was okay.
RICHARD DREYFUSS:
I thought Gilda was fantastic. She was like a combination of Judy Garland and Martha Raye. She was an extraordinary creature. Of course no one could see the future, and I certainly didn’t. She wasn’t walking around with a cloud of doom over her head. She was just a hysterically funny and sweet person.
DAN AYKROYD:
The Coneheads started out as the Pinhead Lawyers of France. I had been looking at TV — I guess I’d smoked a “J” or something — and I thought, “Everybody’s heads don’t really reach the top of the screen. Wouldn’t it be great if you added four inches to everybody?” So I drew up this design. And we would be the Pinhead Lawyers of France. But then people were afraid that we’d be disparaging encephalitic people or retarded people with that, so we changed it to the Coneheads. And Lorne said, “Why don’t you put it in an alien setting, aliens coming to work?” So we tried it out in a comedy workshop downtown, and that’s where that came out of. It evolved in the writing.
ROBIN SHLIEN:
The production assistants used to play a game. We’d get the sketches and then it would be like, “Hmm, what drug were they on when they wrote this one?” The pot sketches were all a certain way. That was one of the funny things about getting all those handwritten pages that we had to type up.
A lot of the pot smoking went on when people were writing. Like the Coneheads, that was a total pothead sketch — the quintessential pot sketch. Here they are, these really weird people with things on their heads, and they say they’re from France — you know.
BUCK HENRY:
Uncle Roy was an idea written by Rosie Shuster and Anne Beatts that I like to think was inspired by my own tawdry life. The thing I wanted to do, which we did the second time, was to have the setup be something about the uniqueness of Uncle Roy — Jane and Danny as Mom and Dad, after coming home and almost catching us doing something really disgusting, would say, “Oh Roy, you’re so wonderful. You are unique. There’s only one like you.” And I look into the camera and say, “Oh, no, no. There are hundreds of thousands of Uncle Roys.” Or something like that. My assumption being, of course, that in a huge number of families across North America, children would be casting a sidelong glance at their uncles or their mother’s boyfriends or their stepfathers or whatever. In other words, I talked myself into the fact that we were performing — or that I was performing — a public service.
ROSIE SHUSTER:
Uncle Roy came from — I had a baby-sitter that I just adored, though he was not touchy-feely. However, I did used to ask him all the time, “And what else did you do that was bad?” And he would just fill me full of lurid tales, and then I sort of put that together with Buck’s natural salaciousness. I think Dan was sort of pissed that I didn’t do Uncle Roy for him. Because I used to call him Uncle Roy sometimes, and then that kind of got grafted onto Buck because Buck had that special thing.
The way we