Live From New York - James H. Miller [91]
LORNE MICHAELS:
Somewhere around the time she did the Broadway show, Gilda decided she did not want to do the variety hour. And somewhere in that time, Bernie Brillstein claims, he conveyed to NBC that Gilda did not want to do this prime-time hour. So imagine my surprise when I was summoned to Fred’s office and shown the board and there on Wednesday nights is Gilda’s show. So I say, “Fred, that’s not happening, she said no.” Well, it got very heated between the two of us. He said some unpleasant things about her. I defended her. We stood toe to toe and had a very deep exchange. I think he thought I wasn’t delivering Gilda as promised.
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
By the fifth year there was a mass burnout. There was the thought, for me personally, “Gee, I’d like to try to do something else.”
MAX PROSS, Writer:
When Tom Gammill and I worked for Lorne, I thought, “Oh my God, this is the best job I’ll ever have in my life.” Coming out of college, it just seemed like, oh, this is great, you know. It was 1979 and we were, what, twenty-two, and probably the two funniest people in the world for me were Bill Murray and Steve Martin. And I got to meet them both my first day of work. How cool was that? Not only met them, I got to, like, work with them.
TOM GAMMILL, Writer:
And you had all these amazing bands. I mean, the Grateful Dead hung out there for like a week. We went out to restaurants all the time. Plus you only worked twenty-two weeks out of the year, because the weeks that the show wasn’t in production, people didn’t come in to the office. Although Max and I used to come in just because we wanted someplace to go.
MAX PROSS:
We got such a skewed idea of what the working world was like. We get this job where people act like college kids, staying up all night and smoking pot and drinking beer all the time. Boy, were we in for a let-down when we saw the way the rest of the world operated.
TOM GAMMILL:
Our next big job was at Letterman, where it’s like, “Wait, where are the parties?” “You’ll get a party if we last a year.” There wasn’t any beer.
HARRY SHEARER:
Chevy was back as the host of the show, and it was the first of many occasions when Lorne assured the cast that, I don’t know, “Chevy’s cleaned up.” I learned that wasn’t exactly true when I saw the sweat on his brow when we were actually doing the show on the air. But anyway, we were doing this talk show bit and Garrett’s not there, we’re doing camera blocking and Garrett Morris is nowhere on the floor. And then I heard the euphemism — “Garrett’s on seventeen.”
That meant that Garrett was up on the seventeenth floor where the offices were and that he would be indulging in some substance, rather than being down at the stage on eight where he was expected.
GARRETT MORRIS:
I’ve been described as being the worst person in the world in terms of drugs. Now we know that that turned out not to be so. My attitude toward drugs has been indifferent. I’m not saying that excuses it. I don’t know why marijuana is still illegal. It has never killed one single individual in all the time we’ve known about it, yet tobacco kills 300,000 each year, alcohol kills 250,000 each year, and they are legal. The laws, the whole thing has been the right wing trying to get back at the civil rights movement: “What can we do to reverse it? If we can put them in the fucking buses we would, but we can’t do that.” As far as I’m concerned, that’s all I see.
JANE CURTIN:
Garrett was treated horribly, horribly — by the writers, by some of the performers, and Lorne. They just dismissed him. I used to have conversations on the set with Garrett about, “Why do you put up with this?” And he said, “I can’t pass up the money. I’m going to make the money and