Live From New York - James H. Miller [88]
But you also get the feeling that people are there because, first and foremost, it’s their launching pad or stepping-stone or way station or whatever, not as a destination in itself. They all know that it’s a franchise which leads to making bad movies.
DON NOVELLO:
As I see it, the main star of the show is really the format. Look at other comedy shows — the Smothers Brothers, Laugh-In, any of them, with the stars out front, the cast out front, they never last. Like popular music. As you look at television history, the old things that stay on are maybe the Today show, the Tonight Show and 60 Minutes. That has stayed on all the time. The Tonight Show went through Jack Paar and Johnny Carson. So why did Saturday Night stay on? I think because of that format, and that is a genius who came up with that — the idea of having a guest host, music, the news, and so on. From the very beginning, one of the first shows, they set up that format. And that really is why they’ve stayed on that long, plus having exciting performers. The format of the show is the main reason for its longevity.
HERBERT SCHLOSSER, NBC President:
Once I invited the whole cast to come up and have lunch in this big dining room that the chairman and I shared. And the cooking was not nouvelle cuisine. We were used to having heavy stuff, so we had roast beef with all the trimmings. And I said, “Bake an extra batch of chocolate chip cookies.” Well, you’ve never seen people eat like this — second portions of roast beef and so on. And then the cook gave each of them a little bunch of these cookies, tied up in paper napkins so they could take them with them. And I remember Bill Murray told me, “I’ve heard you’re a good guy and I’m going to give you a noogie.” And he came over and rubbed his knuckles into my head. My God, they really were wild.
HARRY SHEARER, Cast Member:
Three years into the show, I got an offer to join the writing staff, and I sent back a fairly brusque letter to the effect that, if I wanted to write for television, I could do that very well in Los Angeles, I didn’t have to move to New York — the implicit message being that I’m a writer-performer and I don’t take writing jobs. So two years further on, I’m in Washington, D.C., being interviewed to be the host for what ended up being Morning Edition on NPR, and I got a message to come up to New York; Lorne wanted to meet with me. And I came up and the meeting was in the darkened auditorium of the Wintergarden Theater, where Gilda was doing Gilda Live, and there Lorne offered me a job as a member of the cast and as a writer.
LORNE MICHAELS:
In 1979 I was doing Gilda Radner’s show on Broadway, which I was directing. Belushi was definitely leaving Saturday Night Live, and Aykroyd was coming back as a performer only and not going to write. We all thought we’d do just one more season. So we made some additions to the writing staff. We hadn’t added any cast. That was the plan.
Just before Gilda’s show opened, I got a call first from Bernie Brillstein and then from Dan Aykroyd saying they had a chance to make the Blues Brothers movie in November and that Danny wouldn’t be coming back after all. That happened in July. Now I didn’t have a plan. Al Franken was a big fan of Harry’s from the Credibility Gap, which we all were, and it seemed like yeah, that would work.
HARRY SHEARER:
I thought fairly early on that the show betrayed a certain desperation to try to repeat anything that got a laugh — which I thought was, given the show’s advertised adventurousness, a little puzzling. The times they ran “News for the Hard of Hearing” in the first season probably numbered in the double digits, and it seemed to me a tip-off that the show’s agenda was to develop running bits and running characters as quickly