Live From New York - James H. Miller [98]
LORNE MICHAELS:
I had no problem with people staying with their jobs. That was not a problem for me. I think in the case of Franken, Davis, Downey, and a couple others who were the people I had nominated to succeed me, because they embodied the writing perspective, Jean didn’t want them. What happened was, everyone got a memo from Jean to clear out their offices by July. Now this had been a group that had lived there for five years. That was what killed everything, when she made that one big mistake. It was a signal of, you know, “a new broom.” I didn’t get the memo, because I’d left. For guys like Franken and that, it was the first sign that they weren’t even being considered to stay.
LARAINE NEWMAN:
I was dying to go home. On the other hand, I knew, having grown up in Los Angeles, what it was like to have been on a series and to no longer be on one. I knew what it was that I was facing, to have been on a hit show and then be an unemployed actor. So I was a little worried about that. Mostly I was glad to be back in L.A., because I love New York for about five days, but after that it’s just utter toil. I came from a car culture. Not to be able to drive myself around is like imprisonment to me.
JANE CURTIN:
I was happy to move on, I was tired. You get very burned-out after doing something like that. And you get very jaded. It was very hard to deal with going from relative obscurity to everybody knowing who you are. I had to deal with what I had become. It was hard to deal with on the show, because you were busy doing the show — so I had to come to terms with what I had become and try to adjust to that. I needed time off.
HOWARD SHORE:
I have quite a fondness for that period, those first five years. You were doing something that you knew was something. You were creating something, and nobody had quite gone there before. And you were with a great creative group and you could sense it, you felt it. I particularly could feel it with the cast and with the writers. You just knew that you were part of a very special group.
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
I left when Lorne left, in May of 1980, and I was there from day one, which was July ’75. What had happened was the show changed. It stopped being fun the way it was originally. At the risk of sounding naive, this is what was going through our minds at the time, and it was only after all of us left that there was some perspective on it. We were all these neophytes that got together. You know, it was Marilyn Miller saying, “Hey kids, let’s put on a show.” Nothing was sacred, and we had fun.
ROBIN SHLIEN:
I dream about those days, actually. I dream about those people a lot. When I was transitioning into my new career I had a lot of dreams from that old time. As a psychotherapist, I realize what an amazing and important life experience it was for me and I think for everybody else who worked during that time there. I now give talks on therapeutic humor, and I’m always thinking about the time that I was in a work situation where I had so much laughter in a day. Working on that show gave me great confidence in my own sense of humor, because I was able to make people like John Belushi laugh.
JAMES DOWNEY:
We all left in 1980. The cast and the writers all sort of agreed we would leave and take the show with us.
In fairness you’d have to say that the only reason we’re even talking about this, the only reason the show’s still on the air, is because of what went on in the first five years. First, it gave it this tremendous momentum that it could survive anything, like the Jean Doumanian period or some other bad period. Then it reached the point where it was beyond good or bad. Gilbert Gottfried said a great thing one time; he said at this point “it’s just a restaurant in a good location.” But even so, it’s a good location because of those first five years. It had been a blighted neighborhood. It was Saturday night, when no one was