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But by the fifth season, the show had serious career implications for anybody who was involved in it, obviously. I overestimated my ability to put my mark on it.

AL FRANKEN:

I had sort of recommended Harry, so Lorne held that against me. And Harry did too. That’s the wonderful part about Harry. Harry actually held it against me that I had recommended him for the show.

LORNE MICHAELS:

Harry’s working style was just so completely different. I think he was also less innocent than we were — much more experienced. He’d been a child actor. He’d been around. And whereas Chevy with Gerald Ford would make no effort whatsoever to look like him, if Harry was doing Reagan it took twenty minutes of prosthetics. Now we do that. Then we didn’t. So I think Harry is obviously very talented, but his comedy was mostly industry.

HARRY SHEARER:

I would say that when the first words that a guy says to you when he’s offering you a job are, quote, “I’ve never really hired a male Jew for the company before. I’ve always gone for the Chicago Catholic thing,” unquote, that puts you on a certain notice that the relationship is going to be interesting. It was said fairly seriously as, like, “I’m changing my strategy.” I was filling basically two slots, because John and Danny had left and he was bringing in only me. So I don’t know if Lorne remembers that or would choose to remember it. I sure remember it, because it was remarkable that he said that.

I had also worked with Albert Brooks on most of his films in the first season, and had seen the relationship between Lorne and Albert, and while I’m perfectly familiar with the difficulties of working with Albert, because I’ve done so myself, I empathized with what Albert experienced at his end. I knew what I was getting into — or I thought I did, let’s put it that way. I was fully prepared for a difficult situation. I wasn’t prepared for how difficult.

I was pretty fucking miserable for virtually the entire season. I was explicitly hired as a member of the cast as well as a writer. That was pretty much the sine qua non of my taking the job. So I began to be a little curious when I was not included in the opening montage of the cast. There was some talk about, oh, you know, deadlines, and blah, blah, blah. I don’t believe I was in there in the montage in the early part of the season. I couldn’t be sure. But I don’t think so. I’d have to go look at the tapes. I have the tapes.

What I do know was that, about five or six weeks into the season, Billy Murray invited me to go to a Knicks game. Billy was telling me about the difficulties he’d had in his early days of the show and how basically the rest of the cast treated him like shit. And I said, “Yeah, but there’s something else going on. I can’t figure out exactly what it is. I’m getting this weird vibe from the other members of the cast when I read my pieces at read-through.” And Billy says, “Well, a lot of people think it’s not really appropriate for a new writer to come in and write himself into a lot of the pieces.” And I said, “But I’m a cast member as well.” And he says, “Oh? That’s a little piece of information Lorne hasn’t shared with the other members of the cast.” Now I know that I’m in for a really interesting ride.

The first big piece I wrote that got on the air was a piece I quite dearly liked. I wrote it with Paul Shaffer, and it was a backers’ audition for a rock musical about Charles Manson. At the party after that show, Lorne called me over and said, “That moment at the end of that sketch when you were mouthing the words to the final song silently, that was the moment that you became a star on this show.” And, of course, the very next week I was not on the show at all. So much for stardom. The whole place was just full of the most insidious mind games.

LORNE MICHAELS:

The amount of things that have to come together for something to be good is just staggering. And the fact that there’s anything good at all is just amazing. When you’re young, you assume that