Live From New York - James H. Miller [79]
TOM SCHILLER:
“La Dolce Gilda” was an attempt to capture the sadness of Gilda when she was at parties and all these sycophants would come around her, done in the style of Federico Fellini, my favorite director. We shot it in black and white after the show, at a place where we had our parties sometimes. For the end of the film, where she says, “Go away, leave me alone,” we stayed up all night in order to get the real feeling of dawn coming up. Then I realized you could shoot that at dusk and it looks the same. So I was learning filmmaking at the same time.
I eventually got to show the film to Fellini himself. I went to Cinecittà Studios in Rome and said I was a friend of Henry Miller’s and Paul Mazursky’s, which was true, and they let me in to watch Fellini direct one of his pictures there. I met him and said, “Look, I made this homage to you, I’d love to show you.” He said, “We must arrange a screening.” So they showed him the movie, and he said it was “very sweet” and “it had the feeling of some of my work.” Oh, I was in heaven when I saw him there. And he was so welcoming and supportive and everything. He was a neat guy.
ROSIE SHUSTER:
I really enjoyed doing the “Perfume for One-Night Stands” commercial parody. That one I really had a great fondness for, because it brought together a lot of what was going on at the time in terms of casual sex and waking up next to somebody whose name you didn’t remember and hobbling out in the morning in last night’s dress. It was a great character for Gilda. I mean, I can’t imagine Jane Curtin doing that one.
LARAINE NEWMAN:
I had a situation involving Gilda when Christopher Lee was host. I was the one who wanted him to host. I’m a big horror movie fan and I just knew his work from that. And he turned out to be an excellent host, even though he dropped a bomb on us the first day. He walked in and said he refused to do Dracula on the show.
I know there is a story about me threatening to quit over that show, but I would like to set the record straight on that. They had written the sketch “Dr. Death” for a couple of shows before that, and I knew it was Gilda’s sketch but I’m thinking, “Fuck!” This is the conversation I had with Lorne: “Why does she get to do that sketch? She gets so much airtime. This is a character that I could do. Why can’t I do that sketch?” So it got turned into this big thing that I had threatened to quit unless I got that sketch, which I never did. Lorne said, “If you really feel that way, you should quit,” and I said, “I’m not going to do that. I’m just saying that this is really difficult for me. This is very hurtful and unfair.” So I don’t know who told who what, but that is really what happened.
The day of read-through, when we went in there, Danny was furious with me, because he had heard I’d threatened to quit. I only found out years later that Gilda had partially written that sketch. Now if I had known that, I would never have asked to do it, because my sense of fair play would never have allowed me to want to do something that someone else wrote. She wrote it with Alan Zweibel, but no one told me at the time. I just thought it was something that Alan wrote that I could have easily done — and what hardship would it have been on Gilda, when she had so much to do in the show? Especially with Christopher Lee, who was the host that I wanted?
And as it happened, I was cast as the little girl. And the sketch turned out okay.
NEIL LEVY:
I had to go fish stars out of bars all the time, especially the first and second seasons. Oh God — Broderick Crawford was completely drunk all the time. He actually disappeared. He’d always try to get to the elevator. I’d say, “Where are you going?” He’d say, “I gotta go find my script, I left my script downstairs.” I’d say, “I’ll go with you.” “No, you don’t need to come with me.” But Lorne had given me very explicit instructions: “You have to stay with