Live From New York - James H. Miller [92]
GARRETT MORRIS:
I got so many years of Uncle Tom letters, especially when I did the monkey in The Wiz. I like to do stuff that’s out of line. Nobody tells me how to think, not even black people, so that’s why I did the monkey. The rest of them can kiss my ass. Now the same people who criticized me for doing the monkey in The Wiz are doing donkeys in Shrek and making millions of dollars. I guess that’s what I get for being ahead of my time.
I had five years of building what everybody knows is a chair there, the only nonwhite chair in that whole thing, and I shed the blood for that. So at least if people don’t want to say something good, they should not say anything at all, because I’ve done nothing to deserve anybody to come after me saying a lot of bullshit.
HARRY SHEARER:
I knew that everybody in the original cast had a five-year contract. And this was the fifth year. So I knew that, despite Billy and Gilda — you know, poor Gilda, but I called her up and went over to her place because I was trying to find some advice from everybody there as to what the fuck I should do. And Gilda just said, “Do whatever Lorne says” — which I understood, coming from her, but which was of no use to me. I knew that at the end of this season drastic change was afoot. There were rumors that Lorne was going to leave and that the rest of the cast was going to try to follow John and Danny into Hollywood. I was in a hurry. I knew I had one season to make my mark and that would be it, because whatever was going to follow quite likely did not include me. So I just felt like I was in hell and I had to push as hard as possible and try to figure this thing out.
FRED SILVERMAN:
Saturday Night Live was an enormous hit and a major profit center. It was the only show on the network that was reaching that particular demographic. I looked at Saturday Night Live and said, “Thank God it’s here.” And I really tried my best just to stay out of their way. And if they wanted to take some shots at me — fine, let them do it. I didn’t care.
DICK EBERSOL:
Fred fired me in 1979, although he did not have the guts to do it himself. He had a triumvirate of folks do it. I was running comedy, variety, and specials at the time. Brandon and I were each other’s absolute best friend on the face of the earth. He had once been my assistant. And, if you recall, Fred, in one fell swoop, and correctly — in one of the great moves of Fred’s career — promoted Brandon above me, so that I became an executive reporting to Brandon for the last six months that I worked at NBC, which Brandon and I handled beautifully.
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
John was on the cover of Newsweek by himself when Animal House came out, and there wasn’t anyone from the rest of the cast there with him. I think if there was a demarcation point, as far as I was concerned, that may have been it. Things changed. All of a sudden there was a world that was dangling temptations. John’s a star now by himself, John’s getting a million dollars or whatever it was, by himself. Gilda was given a one-woman show on Broadway. Billy did Meatballs. John did Goin’ South, and he and Danny did the Blues Brothers movie. And I think those last few years that I was there, one of Lorne’s greatest tasks was to keep everybody together. So it wasn’t just, “Let’s put on a fun show,” it was, “Let’s keep this together.” And what happened was, there was a competition. There were studio executives starting to hang out in 8H during blocking asking, “Who wrote that sketch?” They were looking for sitcom writers or movie writers.
Don’t forget, these guys were starting to go into movies. Someone was going to have to write John’s movies, someone was going to have to write Gilda’s movies. And within the cast itself, the Tuesday night writing sessions became all-nighters, which was not the case at the very beginning.
What had happened was, the politicking of the situation almost made it