Live From New York - James H. Miller [90]
HARRY SHEARER:
Late in the season, February or March, there was this sketch in which Garrett Morris played Anwar Sadat. And the year before, on ABC, Billy Crystal and I were in a show in which Billy played Begin and I played Sadat. And I thought to myself, “I was a great Sadat. Garrett is a truly mediocre Sadat. I’m here. I’m going to go over to Lorne and say why shouldn’t I do this?” So I went over to Lorne’s apartment on a Friday night, and he was the soul of friendliness to the extent of inviting me to have a sauna with him. So there we are in the sauna and I said, “Lorne, I do a great Anwar Sadat, and Garrett really does a pretty shitty one, and I really think I should be doing Sadat in this sketch. It’s sort of infuriating to me to watch.” And Lorne goes, “All right, you know what, I’m going to call Al.” And he gets out of the sauna in front of me, calls Al Franken, and says, “Al, I’ve been thinking and blah, blah, blah, and Harry should be Anwar Sadat.” I go home.
The next day I show up for the show, open the script to see what changes have been made. And Garrett is still playing Sadat. I mean, it just was insoluble. I could not figure it out. I have no idea. All I know is, we’re on the set twenty seconds before going live, and Garrett turns to me and says, “Hey, man, you do Sadat — how did he sound again?”
ANNE BEATTS:
I remember asking Lorne once about somebody that I felt had really done me dirt and saying, you know, what should I do about it? And Lorne said, “Be perfectly friendly and civil to them, but just never work with them again.” So I would guess that that would be more his style.
HARRY SHEARER:
My three friends at the show were Shaffer, Anne Beatts, and Marilyn Miller. I’d known Al Franken when Al was hanging around the Credibility Gap, which was my old comedy group. And I thought that Al would be kind of a friend. And he was sort of the quintessential writer, trying to get his own stuff on the air, and in no mood to be writing for me or help me get my stuff on. And also I was sort of shocked — I was used to collaborative writing going faster than writing by yourself. And I walked into the Franken and Davis office and entered a twilight zone where collaborative writing was so much slower than writing by myself. Because I’ve been with people who have been high and worked very fast, very scintillating, really, but it wasn’t that way in there. I wouldn’t blame the weed for that. It was really like working underwater. I couldn’t do that. That was just deadening to me.
FRED SILVERMAN, NBC President:
At that point in time, Saturday Night Live was doing very well in the ratings. Which is why although occasionally it would annoy me, I never let it annoy me too much, because it was like an oasis in the schedule. It was extremely profitable — it and The Tonight Show brought in hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
But then we began very serious conversations about giving Gilda Radner her own variety hour in prime time. That was very, very much a part of my planning for midseason. I think it was 1978, the first mid-season I was there for. And, you know, she was doing it, she was doing it, she was doing it, and then we had a lunch — just Gilda and Lorne and myself — and I found out at that lunch that she decided with Lorne that they weren’t going to do it after all. And that was an enormous disappointment on several levels. On a personal level, but also because I thought she would have been an absolute smash doing the kind of show that Carol Burnett used to do. It would have been great.