Live From New York - James H. Miller [96]
But he has been cool to me now for a long time. I think he feels I betrayed him, and I didn’t. I truly didn’t. I was walking a fine line, and I was ready for a loony bin. It was horrible. I saw what was happening to Fred too. And if Lorne didn’t take time off, Lorne would have been in a loony bin as well. He was hanging by a string, he was so tired. I frankly worried about him too. Both of them.
AL FRANKEN:
“Limo for a Lame-O” maybe had implications for what happened that next year, because I think it ruptured the relationship between Silverman and Lorne. Fred knew Lorne was leaving, but instead of going to Lorne and asking him who would be a good successor, Fred relied, I think, on Barbara Gallagher, who was a friend of Jean Doumanian’s. So it sort of led to Jean’s selection.
LORNE MICHAELS:
I’d given so much energy to holding things together all those years; I had been truly drained, just spent. I was just burnt out and emotionally very vulnerable. So I told Brandon I couldn’t do another year. He didn’t try and change my mind, and I said to myself, “All right, I guess that’s it. I’ve done my five years.” It was very hard for me. In retrospect, to be relieved of the show was an emotional withdrawal that took me, truly, years to get a perspective on.
I began looking at studio deals and went back and forth between Paramount and Warner Brothers. And I met with Jean Doumanian about it and I said, “If I go to Paramount, I’d love you to come with me.” And she implied yes — that’s what I came away with. Several weeks later, I was on my way to the opening of Urban Cowboy when I got a phone call from Brandon saying, “I’m going to name Jean Doumanian as the next producer of the show.” I go, “Really. That’s an interesting choice.” I was startled because I always think of the show as a writer-based show, and you have to be a writer to say what is funny or not funny. To control that many people in comedy without having any credits yourself in comedy is impossible.
Jean called me five minutes after Brandon did. I asked her, “When did they talk to you?” and she said, “Six weeks ago.” That was the part where I went, “Wha —?” And then she said, “They made me promise not to talk to you.” That was the very first moment of my growing up: “They asked me not to talk to you.”
And this was when I’d been talking to her about coming to Paramount with me. Now Brandon was not an innocent in all of this. I don’t mean that meanly. I mean it in the sense that I had thought, because he and I were friendly, that he would at least listen to me about my replacement. I had told him I would use some combination of Jim Downey and Al Franken and Tom Davis, because it had to be someone with writing credentials who understood how the show really worked. Jean wasn’t even there for meetings between dress and air.
BARBARA GALLAGHER:
It wasn’t a conspiracy to do Lorne in. Lorne was leaving. He wanted Al, Fred wasn’t buying it, so there we were. They also didn’t want to leak it to the press, they didn’t want anyone to know yet, and if Lorne knew, it would have been all over the town. So that was the reason for not telling him. It wasn’t a conspiracy to do anything to Lorne.
FRED SILVERMAN:
The decision to hire Jean Doumanian was made by Brandon Tartikoff based on a recommendation from Barbara Gallagher. I didn’t know Jean. I knew she had worked with Woody Allen. I said, “If you recommend her, fine.”
BARBARA GALLAGHER:
Lorne didn’t want Jean Doumanian in there for some reason, probably because she’s not a writer. But Fred Silverman did not want an outsider coming in. He wanted someone from the show, who’d been with the show. And Jean had been there forever, worked with the talent, and Jean wanted the job. I said, “Jean, I’ll talk to Fred about it.” Lorne wanted Al Franken and Tom Davis to produce the show, and Fred said no, he didn’t want Al, because of what they’d gone through.
Brandon was there at the time, and I said the only other person down there who knows how to run the show because