Live From New York - James H. Miller [85]
PENNY MARSHALL:
Yeah, Danny proposed to Carrie. Then she ran away and bought him some clothes. That’s how she handled that.
STEVE MARTIN:
Dan Aykroyd rode a motorcycle and wore leather clothes and everything. I was trying to be friendly and I said, “Hey, you want to go shopping for clothes over at Saks?” And he said, “Well, I’m really not into that.”
NEIL LEVY:
Aykroyd is great. He’s an atomic mutant — a web-toed atomic mutant. He actually had web toes, you know. He’s got web toes. I’ve seen them with my own eyes, at least one foot. I asked him about it and he said, “I’m an atomic mutant.” He’s also got a photographic memory and instant recall. He can take a book and once he’s read it, you could ask him any page and he could recall it. Unfortunately, I think the only book he’s actually memorized is like a 1974 meat packagers guide.
JAMES DOWNEY, Writer:
My brother was an air force career guy, and when Aykroyd and I did a thing a long time ago that involved Napoleon having a B-52, Aykroyd supplied all the references for the armaments and the weaponry and stuff. In fact the term “daisy cutters” was probably first used on television in that piece. And my brother had been watching it in Thailand or something on the Armed Forces Channel and he called up and said, “My God! Who there knows what a C-130 is?” I said that was Aykroyd. He goes, “Wow, we were amazed, because you guys actually had the stuff right, and we’ve never seen that kind of thing.” Daisy cutters are those giant bombs that have this horizontal destructive capability. They’re just a superpowerful kind of bomb.
BERNIE BRILLSTEIN, Manager:
I think Lorne was the first guy ever to wear a Hawaiian shirt and think it was hip. And after he did it, it was.
JAMES SIGNORELLI:
Here in New York it was the brink of the big era of greed. It was the tail end of the bohemian period, and that morphed into Max’s Kansas City and other joints like it. It was art related — related to the world of Warhol and the abstract expressionists. There was a demi-world that these people lived in, but it was going away very rapidly toward the beginning of the seventies.
What Saturday Night did was tap into a whole new universe of people who didn’t even appear until eleven o’clock at night, because we never did either. We’d be in the building until ten, eleven, every night. And the reason that I can say that with such certainty is that we couldn’t go to dinner. There were only two places we could get fed in New York City after eleven at night in 1975, believe it or not. One was the Brasserie, which was a little uptown for our group, and the other was a place called Raoul’s, which served dinner until one o’clock in the morning.
During the first five years, the show changed a lot of stuff that you don’t think about. It changed this business of dinner at eight into dinner at ten or dinner at midnight. The way Franne Lee, our costume designer, dressed Lorne for the show suddenly became the way everybody in New York was dressing. Lorne used to come out onstage wearing a shirt, jacket, and blue jeans. Nobody had ever seen it. But before you knew it, everybody was sitting around in Levi’s and a jacket.
Riding a tsunami of success and acclaim, Lorne Michaels proposed sending the entire show on location to New Orleans for the 1977 Mardi Gras. Since NBC figured the production cost of that to be at least $700,000, executives decided to put the show in prime time on a Sunday night, stretching it to two hours and making it an entry in a weekly anthology called The Big Event. Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams were among the guest stars. But this was one big event that went busto, and in a spectacular way — a live show in a city full of drunks and near-naked revelers