Live From New York - James H. Miller [83]
The guys in the crew had been doing it forty years, they know you don’t shoot a flashbulb at a GE camera. Well — newborn baby, what was I going to do? There was plenty of volume. They screamed. There was always lots of volume.
JAMES SIGNORELLI:
With the exception of Don Novello, who had worked at Leo Burnett in Chicago, no one here had any background in advertising. My background was in documentary filmmaking and feature film cinematography, so I had passed through the world of low-budget commercials that everybody does at one point, and I knew the silliness of it and what some of the excesses were, and I knew how to do them from the production and visual points of view. One of the things about commercials is that they’re very good storytelling devices.
By the beginning of the third year, the typical short movie for Saturday Night Live cost between $10,000 and $13,000. It was kind of a watershed period because of what was going on in commercials in general. For one thing, money was no longer an object. Phenomenal sums were being spent on advertising. And new techniques were being born there. The other thing was that it was becoming acceptable — even with the most staid client — to use humor.
We at the show, of course, were on the cutting edge. So nobody could do what we did. And whatever we did in commercials, the attitudes that we took, the archness or the surrealist approach, was making a big impact on the creative people at the ad agencies. So they started pushing the wave further and further to the left. Editorially, we were doing things that were very sophisticated back then.
DAN AYKROYD:
I did “Update” for one season, I think, and I wasn’t comfortable in it. I didn’t like it. They only gave it to me because Chevy had gone. “Jane, you ignorant slut” really caught on — that was great — but delivering the jokes and being the newsreader was not something that I was comfortable with. I was very happy to be relieved of that.
LORNE MICHAELS:
In the seventies, I was much more proud of who I wouldn’t allow on the show — people who had just been all over Las Vegas and prime-time television. There were even people I always thought were really great but they were of that other generation. And now we were coming along, and we were shaped by a different set of things. And any association with the Rich Littles and the John Byners and the original Tonight Show guys like Dayton Allen would have been antithetical to what I was trying to do.
PAUL SHAFFER:
The idea that some of the things would not be necessarily accessible to everybody didn’t matter. As long as there were a few people out there who thought it was hilarious, that’s what mattered. I kind of learned that from this show, that concept. It was a show for our generation, which was, let’s face it, a sixties-style generation.
LORNE MICHAELS:
I taught at an art school in Toronto, I was teaching improvisations, the conceptual art movement which was being talked about and on the edge of things in the early seventies. Where that and entertainment met was what Andy Kaufman was doing. It wasn’t just that he lip-synched to “Mighty Mouse”; it was that he only did that one part in it, that one line, and stood around for the rest. It was very conceptual, and it instantly signaled to the brighter part of the audience that that was the kind of show we were going to do. And they weren’t getting that anywhere else on television. In the first couple years, Andy must have been on close to ten times. One night he even read from The Great Gatsby. In the beginning I had Penn and Teller on a few times, because that was the DNA, but I couldn’t do that now. The pure variety show part of it is over. It’s a straight comedy show now.
AL FRANKEN:
I heard Spiro Agnew was going to be on Tom Snyder’s show, so I just wanted to meet him and harass him a little bit. I brought a tape recorder and went down to