Live From New York - James H. Miller [99]
ROSIE SHUSTER:
I left at the end of year five — after the first five years that Lorne did. After that, the Ayatollah Doumanian came in.
ANNE BEATTS:
Lorne sheltered us from the realities of show business. It’s interesting, because while some people might have thought SNL was a dangerous world, I think in many ways it was a very safe world. We were protected. We were in this little cocoon in the RCA Building. We were pampered, and we got our way most of the time. When I got to Hollywood and found out the harsh truths, I wasn’t really prepared.
BILL MURRAY:
I was definitely going to go when everyone else left. I’d been at Second City when that sort of thing happened. I knew there was no point in being the one guy who knows how to do it. You’ve got to get the hell out of there. It’s a little like Lifeboat, you know. It was just time to go. I would never have wanted to start up with a whole new group.
It was really a great thing to be a part of it. The fact that it was live made it performance-driven. You were always pushing yourself physically to keep your spirit going and get out there and do it. The writing had to be good too. It was great fun — and really hard work. That’s the part nobody seems to know: how hard it was, what it was like to be young and exhausted all the time. Lorne did build in this great thing where we had every fourth week off. We all got a chance to blow off some steam and to rest. After three weeks, we’d be pretty beaten down. We’d come walking in there on our knuckles or our knees.
When the show ended, it was difficult for some of us in the outside world — difficult for each person relative to how much they’d already been working on the outside. None of us wanted any TV jobs, because we’d had the best TV jobs there were. Once you saw what the other jobs were like, you knew they were not half as much fun as Saturday Night Live had been. On sitcoms, you’re working on these little bitty scripts for hours and hours and hours. They just keep shooting and shooting and shooting. Ours was the best situation because you had the pressure of having to do it when the time came. Then at one o’clock in the morning, you were done. It was over. So nobody wanted regular TV or prime time. We’d all made more money than we needed in the short term, so we just went out there and got into the movie business.
KATE JACKSON:
After I had hosted the show, we went to the bar that John and Dan owned. And Joni Mitchell was there, and there were musicians and other writers, and it was a terrific group of people to be around in such a small room. But it got to be time for me to leave, because I had an early flight in the morning, and Billy Murray walked me out to the car. I got in and closed the door and as we were beginning to pull out, I turned around and looked behind me and there was Billy, standing in the street, waving. Snow was falling all around him — just the sweetest thing. I had been terrified of hosting. I was so afraid. But I knew that I had to do it, it was one of those things where you’re really afraid to do something and you know you have to take the chance. You just have to push yourself and do it. And I remember saying to a friend of mine who went with me, “Well, I’ll never do that again, because it will never get that good again. That was as good as it gets.”
LORNE MICHAELS:
I took my name off the show and I left.
3
The Stars Come Out: 1980–1985
PAM NORRIS, Writer:
I have my personal conspiracy theory, which is that whoever came in after Lorne and the original cast was going to be killed — because, you know, you can’t replace the Beatles. Somebody thought, “Well, we’ll just let things get extremely bad, and then when we pull it back up a little bit afterward, it’ll be considered a triumph.”
DON NOVELLO, Writer:
Lorne wanted to