Live From New York - James H. Miller [93]
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER
Lorne died with the show. If things didn’t go well, he torpedoed. They’d go up there in those first years immediately after the air show and watch the tape within seconds. In the earliest years, they were together night and day, day and night. At night it’s the party; the next morning you’d go to the Russian Tea Room and have brunch. And it was always about, “We will try harder.” Everybody was this animatronic personality who was going to do better, and it was all for the show, and giving up things for the show. The emotional component was so great for everyone involved.
DAN AYKROYD:
It’s too stressful, because you worry about quality, you want things to be so right, and that really weighs heavily — plus the adrenaline pump, it’s like being in combat or a cop or something. You can’t take that week after week. It’s a young man’s game, there’s no doubt about it. It is satisfying when you pull something off, and it is tremendously debilitating and anxiety-producing when you don’t.
PAULA DAVIS:
There’s something about SNL. I’ve worked at other places. It’s unlike working anywhere else, and it’s a great place to learn because you are so instilled with paranoia. Everything you say is double- and triple-checked. Where did you hear that? Where did you go with it? Does anybody else know? I have that so ingrained in me that when I get information, I won’t divulge it until I know that it’s absolutely okay. There’s also this kind of snobby thing that’s just inbred up there, like you’re the only people working in showbiz. I feel like when I was there, I was kind of snotty and dismissive of other people. I just thought, “If you don’t work at SNL, you don’t know what showbiz is,” you know?
RODNEY DANGERFIELD:
It’s tough to produce that show every week, are you kiddin’? It’s difficult. My father was in vaudeville, and he went on the road for ten months to break in an eight-minute act. So to do something every week — I mean, people do sitcoms and stuff like that, which I’m not that fond of, because I can’t sit there and laugh at typed-in laughter, that is not my cup of tea. But Saturday Night Live, that’s unusual. They’re all so great there too. Jeez, every year they come up with such winners, you know?
BILL MURRAY:
I only became sort of important to the show after Danny and John went to do The Blues Brothers and quit. When they were doing The Blues Brothers, all of a sudden I started getting a lot to do, and when they were gone, then I really got a lot to do. Then I was in lots and lots and lots and lots of sketches.
When you have this celebrity thing, different things change, your vision is different, and I was sort of like in the wake of all these people. I didn’t have as many famous friends and I didn’t necessarily work certain parts of town. So I was just doing what I was doing and happy enough to do that. I was still trying to be not-famous on some level — and I still was not-famous on some level — so I was able to enjoy that part of it and see that the famous part of it had its down side. I was busy mining the parts of my life where I was not famous, because I saw that those were not going to last forever.
Professionally, I just kept doing my job because I was pretty good at it, and I became valuable those last couple years, and I was proud of the work I did. I thought I worked hard. I was a little late sometimes, but I thought I worked pretty well and I never had like brawls or feuds with the girls or anything.
Even network executives became embroiled in backstage melodrama — especially toward the end of SNL’s raucous infancy, when NBC was getting a double drubbing: terrible