Live From New York - James H. Miller [82]
To viewers raised on TV that was forever cajoling, importuning, and talking down to them, the blunt and gutsy approach was refreshing, a virtual reinvention of the medium. The stars of Saturday Night Live were saying, “We’re not coming to you, you have to come to us — or at least meet us halfway.” They produced television that commanded attention because it demanded attention. Everything wasn’t made easy and lazy and served up predigested.
The more sophisticated viewers were, the more they “got” the jokes, or so it seemed, and the more eagerly they embraced the show. That helped give the series a cachet that few other TV programs had enjoyed. Monty Python’s Flying Circus, imported from England by public TV, was among that tiny group, but its audience was incomparably smaller and, obviously, it was anything but indigenous. Regular SNL viewers felt like members of a special sort of club, one made up of lapsed or expatriated TV viewers bored by the corporate-approved banalities that most TV programs served up.
Of course, advertisers flocked to SNL just the same, and the number of NBC affiliates carrying the show swelled, and that meant it had won corporate approval too. If it hadn’t, it wouldn’t have stayed on the air. Nevertheless, for the first five years anyway, the gang at Saturday Night Live came across as wickedly irreverent and wonderfully subversive.
It could be argued that in time, Saturday Night Live became as eager to please as any other TV show — even the kind that its writers and actors despised and derided — and that, probably inevitably, it became what it belittled. But in that first burst of glory, there was still a captivating, rebellious purity to it. It was on a wavelength of its own, proudly above the fray, brash and brave and youthful and honest. Television without guilt that was still entertaining as all get-out.
BILL MURRAY:
It was Davey Wilson who didn’t want us ad-libbing more than Lorne didn’t want it. But the thing about the ad-libbing is that the camera cues, the camera cuts, are all on the script. They’re supposed to go from this person to that person on this line. So that was a technical thing that was sort of a limit that you had. You’d screw things up if you ad-libbed at the end of something.
Davey caught a lot of stuff because he was fast. If he could see in your eyes that something was coming, he’d hold on it. You’d hear him in the booth: “Oh Christ, where’s he going?” You learned that if you were going to fix something, the easiest way for everybody was to figure out how to fix it and still say the last line so they had the cuts right. You could actually watch them go, “Awgh!” You could hear six or seven people in the booth go “Awgh!” like he got it, and there’d be this glee as the technical director would push the camera button switch; there’d be this delight that you did it right, that you respected their technology and what they had to do. That was when you got good at it. It takes a while to learn how to do that. Not everybody did.
I shot off a flash camera into the lens one time during “Update.” Yeah, I burned out the TV camera. Oh and they were furious. God, they were angry. They thought, “Oh you fucking rookie, you idiot.” Well of course it turned out to be just a temporary thing. It burns a hole for a moment and then they have to redo the white balance or something, but they were so mad, because there was this bubble in the screen for the rest of the “Update.” The whole floor was like, “Did you hear what he did?” And people