Live From New York Part 13

I was so busy doing my job that I never saw any writing on the wall. I thought the shows were getting better. We were all working so hard. I was really not aware of anything going on behind the scenes. That's how unaware I was. I was putting in eighteen hours a day, easy. I knew I could do it.

JOE PISCOPO:.

I could never describe to you in words how painful those first ten months really were. You just knew that this was America's favorite television show, and yet here we were, taking it right into the toilet.

Sat.u.r.day night, after the show, it was pretty much like a funeral, like you were mourning. Oh my G.o.d, oh my G.o.d, did we really do this, oh my G.o.d - and then we had to turn it around on Monday all over again.

Hopeless as the situation seemed, Doumanian actually had a tremendous secret weapon in her a.r.s.enal - so secret that, sadly for her, even she didn't realize it. This was a young, brash cast member who spent most of the season in small bit parts, except in the seventeenth-floor offices, where he kept coworkers continuously entertained. He was not a "great white hope." Au contraire. Definitely great, however. His day would come, but not in time to save the very doomed Doumanian.

NEIL LEVY, Talent Coordinator: Jean had cast an actor named Robert Townsend to be "the black guy" on the show. And then this guy Eddie Murphy started calling me - it sounded like from a pay phone - and I told him, "I'm sorry, we're not auditioning anymore." But he called again the next day, and he would go into this whole thing about how he had eighteen brothers and sisters and they were counting on him to get this job. And he would call every day for about a week. And I finally decided I would use him as an extra.

So I brought him in for an audition, and he did a four-minute piece of him acting out three characters up in Harlem - one guy was instigating the others to fight - and it was absolutely brilliant. The timing, the characterizations - talent was just shooting out of him. And I went, "Wow," and I took him in to Jean and I said, "Jean, you've got to see this." He did his audition for Jean, and she sent him out of the room and she said to me, "Well, he's good, but I like Robert Townsend better." And I went nuts, you know. I threatened to quit. At that point there were so many mistakes, I was actually heartbroken, because I'd been on the original show, and it went beyond mistakes for me. It was like there was a spirit that I knew that existed in that show and she had no idea what that was, and she was missing it. She would choose Robert Townsend over Eddie Murphy - not that Robert Townsend isn't great, a good actor, but the difference in terms of what was right for that show was so obvious, and compounded with all the other c.r.a.p that was going on, I couldn't take it.

So she hired Eddie as a featured player just to spite me. He was the only featured player that year. He should've been a regular. She hired him only because I pressured her, and then to spite me she wouldn't make him a regular. She only wanted to hire one black actor and Townsend hadn't signed his contract yet, so she signed Eddie.

The point of it is that she didn't want him, and she's been claiming that she discovered him for years. Now Ebersol I heard is claiming he discovered him, and Ebersol wasn't even on the show when Eddie came. But Ebersol used to take credit for all the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, so that doesn't surprise me.

JAMES DOWNEY, Writer: When I first met Eddie Murphy, I was up there visiting Jean - I'd recommended a couple of writers to her - and Eddie was hanging around. He'd been hired as a featured player, but he would just go around to everyone's office and make everybody laugh. He made me laugh the first day I met him. And he was just so clearly the funniest person on the floor. I remember saying to Jean Doumanian, "You've got to use this kid Eddie Murphy, you've got to put him on." And I remember her going, "He's not ready."

JEAN DOUMANIAN:.

I didn't have enough of a budget to put Eddie on as a member of the cast, because I had already selected the cast when I auditioned him. So I let him be a featured player. They said okay. After the first two shows, I said to the administration, "Listen, you have to make this guy a member of the cast, you just have to, he's so great." He was eighteen when I found him. They finally said okay. And then I found out from Eddie that a network vice president was trying to tell him to leave the show and that he'd get him a sitcom on NBC. But Eddie wouldn't do it.

NEIL LEVY:.

One night Jean was five minutes short in the show. She had nothing, whereas Lorne always had something in the bag, a short film, something so you go over instead of under. If you're under you're left with nothing, and she had nothing. This is fifteen minutes before the end of the show when Audrey d.i.c.kman, who was timing it, realized it was going to run short. Dave Wilson was sitting there saying, "What are we going to do, Jean?" And she was pacing and she didn't know what to do. And I remembered Eddie's monologue from his audition like three months earlier. So I said, "Why don't you see if Eddie can do the monologue that he did for his audition?" And she said, "Oh no, that won't work." And then about a minute later, she said, "Why don't we get Eddie and he'll do the audition piece?" And they laughed in the booth, and I said, "Yeah, okay, great."

And I ran up and I found Eddie and I asked him. And his face lit up like he'd been waiting for this moment his whole life, and he said, "Yeah!" So we rushed him downstairs and he did that piece. And in another week or two, I think, he was made a regular.

Doumanian's fate was sealed on a night in late February 1981. Charlie Rocket was playing the victim of a shooting in a show-length spoof of the then-popular prime-time soap opera Dallas and its famous "Who shot J.R.?" cliffhanger. Mere minutes before the oneA.M. closing time, Rocket, in a wheelchair ostensibly because of injuries suffered in the a.s.sa.s.sination attempt, complained about having been shot and said - for all those watching at home and in the studio to hear - "I'd like to know who the f.u.c.k did it."

FRED SILVERMAN, NBC President: Doumanian got out of control. I think the thing that really did it was that there was a kid on the show by the name of Charlie Rocket, and one night he did the unpardonable: He said the f.u.c.k-word on live television, and it went out to the whole network. And that was it. I said, "Who needs this aggravation?" I think we'd made the decision even before then that we had to get rid of her. This woman was a train wreck, and the shows were just not watchable.

GILBERT GOTTFRIED:.

I was sitting in the offices talking to Eddie one day, when all of a sudden some woman comes in and says, "Eddie, somebody from NBC wants to speak to you." And he gets on the phone and he goes, "Yes, yeah, okay, no. No, I won't tell anybody." And he hangs up. Before the phone even hits the cradle, he tells me, "Jean Doumanian's been fired."

The next day or so, Jean Doumanian was going to make this announcement to the cast and crew that she'd been fired, but by then everyone knew it. And it was weird, because they had this improv teacher named Del Close hired there for some reason, and so she calls everyone into her office, and everyone's sitting there, and she's tearfully telling everyone that she's been fired and everything but that she wishes everyone the best and whatnot. And, in the midst of all this, all of a sudden they walk in with a cake, singing "Happy Birthday," and it's put in front of this Del Close guy. It was a very surreal situation.

DAVID SHEFFIELD:.

It was clearly coming and she knew it.

JEAN DOUMANIAN:.

I was down in Irwin Segelstein's office for maybe four hours, trying to convince him to please give us more money for the show, but I also found out that some of the people on my show, that I'd hired and helped, were going downstairs and talking to the bra.s.s behind my back. I don't know this for a fact, but I was told. They were really sabotaging the show and me.

He had sent me some wine when I got the job, as a congratulatory thing. But before I told anybody anything, I broke open about five bottles of wine and I said, "Everybody, come on in. I have something to tell you, and don't be upset about it, because I'm not upset about it. I just want to tell you you've done a wonderful job. I think you're all terrific. I want you all to go on and try to make the best of it, but they told me that I've served my purpose and that's it for me." And that was it. In retrospect, I think really they put me in there on purpose, because after a very successful show, the second guy usually fails and then the third guy comes in, takes over, and succeeds.

PAM NORRIS:.

I've sort of learned, in the subsequent twenty years I've been in show business, that people just aren't that clever, and sometimes things that look like clever schemes are just people stumbling over their own feet.

JEAN DOUMANIAN:.

I must say, my friends were very happy that that part of my life had ended. Because they thought I was working so hard and I was so determined that they were concerned about my health. But I was really disappointed. I thought Brandon and the network were going to stick behind me, and they didn't at all. If you read the newspapers, they didn't support me at all. So that's when I kind of discovered that I had been used. I don't consider that show a failure for myself. I consider it truly an accomplishment.

GILBERT GOTTFRIED:.

After I was fired from the show, I kind of was like walking around with this feeling that everybody was looking at me going, "Oh, that's the guy who was on a bad season on Sat.u.r.day Night." The funny thing is, after time pa.s.ses, people come up to you and go, "I really liked you in that sketch with John Belushi." Or, "I liked you in that sketch you used to do with Gilda Radner and Molly Shannon." It gets all mixed up together. I didn't feel like I was a big star when I was on the show, and I didn't feel like I was a n.o.body without it. But I walk around with that stigma. I hated it for the longest time when someone would recognize me from Sat.u.r.day Night.

CHRIS ALBRECHT:.

In retrospect, what Jean did was just take the hit that was going to come to anybody who was going to try to recast that show with new stars. I liked Jean. I really did. She was very direct. She had bad press and not a lot of support from the network. I'm not so sure it's not tough being a woman in that job.

Network chief Brandon Tartikoff felt an emotional attachment to the show and desperately wanted to keep it on the air, even when other network executives advocated cutting the umbilical and letting it float off into s.p.a.ce. In his desperation, Tartikoff turned to old pal and fellow Yalie d.i.c.k Ebersol, a man who had never produced a comedy show or professionally written a sketch in his life and who, in fact, had not so long ago been fired from an NBC executive post by Tartikoff's bellicose boss, Fred Silverman. But Brandon's friend had also been present at, and instrumental in, the creation of Sat.u.r.day Night Live. The embalming process was halted and shock therapy began.

Michaels and Ebersol had little in common when it came to style and personality, but they did have this: Each thought the other wanted too much credit for the creation of Sat.u.r.day Night Live. It took both of them working together at the very outset to bring Sat.u.r.day Night Live to life, but once it premiered, Michaels would have preferred Ebersol to have disappeared.

When Ebersol was asked to rescue the show after the Doumanian cliffhanger, he wisely sought Michaels's approval and blessing before taking over. That meant that creative people loyal to Michaels wouldn't feel they were committing heresy or poking him in the eye if they went to work on the Ebersol version - a problem that had reputedly helped sink Doumanian.

Though Michaels and Ebersol weren't close, they were both close to Tartikoff, who felt the show represented more to the network than a profit center; it was a badge of honor too, and Tartikoff was one network executive who cared about prestige in addition to profits. For Ebersol, the situation was rife with irony. After helping create the show in 1974 and then being sentenced to a certain anonymity for his efforts, he would be called back to keep the show going by his old nemesis Fred Silverman, the guy who fired him. And Tartikoff, the longtime friend who did the actual recruitment of Ebersol, had become head of programming when Ebersol was pa.s.sed over for the job.

What Ebersol lacked in imagination, he made up for in iron-willed determination. Swinging a baseball bat or just lugging it around like some swollen scepter, Ebersol pitched a ferocious battle to make Sat.u.r.day Night Live a hit again. He would save the show, whatever it took.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL, NBC Executive: I remember Jean's last show. It was just beset with problems. It was the night that Charlie Rocket said "f.u.c.k" on the air. And I stayed up with Brandon quite late, and he asked me again, "Would you consider fixing it?" I said I would come as long as I could hide inside 30 Rock, watching on the internal system how the show works, the camera blocking, watch to see if the talent is mature enough to save a piece, because I could think of a million pieces from the earliest days of the show which absolutely sucked on Wednesday and had at least an 80 percent life by the time they went on the air. The talent was that good, and some of the writers were good enough to fix it.

And I said, "Number one, only if it goes off the air. This is not something you can fix in a week. And number two, I get to pick what airs all the weeks it's off the air." I wanted to put on four or five of the greatest shows from the first five years, just to get people back in the sense of "this show was about something." Actually, I think I said to take it off for two months.

So this meeting was set up in Fred Silverman's apartment on a Sunday afternoon. And Fred is so uncomfortable to have me there, because there is no love lost between the two of us and I just did not respect him. So they go through this whole thing about will I do it, and I said, "Yeah, under certain circ.u.mstances." And we argued and debated, and finally it became five weeks that the show would be off the air. I didn't want a lot of money; I just wanted a guarantee that I would get series commitments for every year that we managed to keep the show alive, and this would be stuff I would develop myself. That's how Friday Night Videos and the Bob Costas talk show Later came to be. And finally, I said, there was one last condition: "We don't have a deal until I have a conversation with Lorne. I'm not doing this show unless Lorne wants it to survive." And Fred felt like he had really been set up. He wasn't happy, but he grudgingly said, "All right. But I want to know where this is tomorrow."

I called Lorne and we went to dinner and wound up over at his apartment, and we sat there basically all night talking. And I honestly believe it's one of the five or six most important nights in the history of the show, because I'd hired Lorne when we were first sitting in L.A. putting it all together back in the spring of '75. I said, "Lorne, I'm willing to do this only if you'll bless it." He just had to put the word out. Anyway, around five or six in the morning he finally said, "I do want to see it go on. I won't go back, but I will completely support it."

And that word was out by the time Lorne woke up the next afternoon.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

Michael O'Donoghue's manager, a guy named Barry Secunda, explained to me the simple fact that Michael had no money. And Michael was very proud, but he really needed a job. Barry wanted to know if I would speak to Ebersol on his behalf, which I did. Of course, the very first thing Michael did was to meet with everyone and say, "We have to obliterate Lorne Michaels, we have to pour gasoline on him and set him afire." And then he burned some picture of me. Pretty soon after, he was fired.

I love Michael. And I would have expected no less. It wasn't as if I helped him thinking I'd get the thanks of a grateful nation. After all, it was Michael. Of the three of us - the senior three males in the first months of the show - Chevy went on to fame and stardom, I got what I got, and Michael wanted more performance time. The rewards for him weren't as great as he felt he deserved.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

Lorne told me I should hire Michael. He persuaded me it would be a good idea. O'Donoghue thought the show was s.h.i.t and he thought the people involved were s.h.i.t. He wanted to give it a "Viking funeral." He was going to be, quote, "in charge of the writing staff."

Since Ebersol was determined that the show regain its lost l.u.s.ter as well as its lost ratings, it may seem odd for him to have installed O'Donoghue as head writer, especially since O'Donoghue was so fond of proclaiming Sat.u.r.day Night Live dead. But what made him attractive to Ebersol is that he represented a link to Lorne Michaels and his era, and Ebersol was anxious to establish such links. Few were available, but O'Donoghue had been a very conspicuous and productive presence during those first five years. Ebersol wanted to be a member of that club, and O'Donoghue seemed one way - however risky - to gain acceptance. It would be a recurring theme of Ebersol's stewardship.

NEIL LEVY:.

d.i.c.k wanted to be Lorne, basically. The first words out of d.i.c.k's mouth to the writers was, he broke them into two teams at the first meeting and said, "Here's what we're going to do. I have two ideas and we're going to make short films. And half of you are going to do this one idea and the other half are going to do this idea about a bag lady." I forget what the first idea was. And the writers kind of scratched their heads - a bag lady? What's funny about that? But d.i.c.k said to go and do it.

So the team of writers for the bag lady did whatever their short film was and it was shot and Denny Dillon was in it and it came back and it was a disaster, totally unusable. And O'Donoghue was sitting there smoking one of those long brown cigarettes with his hat and sungla.s.ses on and he said, "Well, it's all there on the screen." Something like that. It was a huge embarra.s.sment to d.i.c.k, because it was the first thing he had asked for and it was his idea and it was horrible. So he says to Michael, "Is there anything we can do to make it work?" O'Donoghue says, "If you took out all the sound and used outtakes of Denny as the bag lady sitting there on a bench, maybe we could put some funny voice-overs or something - but I don't think so." And Ebersol jumped on it and he said, "Great, that's great," and he looked at me and he said, "Neil, get the writers together and tell them we want lines for pa.s.sersby to say about a bag lady." I didn't realize I'd just been handed the bag. I went and told all the writers and came back and reported to d.i.c.k they were all working on it.

So now they've finished their lines and d.i.c.k sends me to collect them. I show them to him, he crosses a few off, he says, "Great. Now get the actors and get it done." All right. So I told the actors what we had to do. Basically I didn't want to do this, I was just following instructions on what d.i.c.k wanted. I didn't realize I was suddenly producing this piece.

The night of d.i.c.k's first show, Lorne comes. And it was like G.o.d visiting. You know, "Make way! Make way! He's in the building!" d.i.c.k even let Lorne sit at his own desk on the ninth floor. And I come in and d.i.c.k looks at me and says, "Oh Lorne, your cousin made this great bag lady film." And I was about to say something and he told me to leave the room. He said, "I need this list for tomorrow and I need this and that," and I said, "But Lorne -" and d.i.c.k said, "Just go." And of course the bag lady was just a total embarra.s.sment. I don't know why he even bothered showing it. It made it as far as dress rehearsal. That nearly killed me. I didn't get a chance to talk to Lorne about it, actually. I don't think I ever mentioned it to him - that I was set up and had nothing to do with it.

CHRIS ALBRECHT:.

d.i.c.k can be very much a p.r.i.c.k. But I think it comes from being a network guy who's used to saying no. I always felt he was much more like a network executive running the show than he was an actual creative producer running the show. There was much less play in d.i.c.k. Jean was really excited about producing the show. I think she had a great pa.s.sion for what she was doing. And I think d.i.c.k came in very much "there's a job that has to be done and I need to be tough about it." d.i.c.k was less interested in how adventurous the material was.

BOB TISCHLER, Writer: I was actually a record producer, had worked with the Blues Brothers and had worked with a lot of the people from Sat.u.r.day Night Live on the National Lampoon Radio Hour, which I had produced. That's how Michael O'Donoghue knew me. He said, "Come on to Sat.u.r.day Night Live." I said, "Well, you know, I kind of have this other career going." And he said, "It'll be fun, and by the way, the show is just going to go down anyway, so don't worry about having to be stuck on the show." And he actually described it as a "death ship."

TIM KAZURINSKY, Cast Member: John Belushi pretty much got me hired and recommended me for Sat.u.r.day Night Live. The evening that d.i.c.k Ebersol came to Chicago and hired me, I a.s.sumed I was being hired as a writer. I'd never thought of myself as an actor. And then, as he was wrapping up, he said, "You have your AFTRA card, right?" And I said, "Why do I need an AFTRA card if I'm going to write?" He said, "No, no, you're going to be in the cast." I said, "You want me to act?!?" He said, "Yeah, I didn't even know you wrote." I was completely stunned. I was driving home in my Volkswagen going, "That's weird," because I'd never really thought of myself as an actor.

JOE PISCOPO:.

They kept Eddie and me, and fired everybody else. O'Donoghue said to me, "Piscopo, I'm not crazy about you, but that Sinatra thing is not bad." And in essence he told me, "You're going to have to prove yourself to me."

Then he put us all in a room. O'Donoghue came in, spray-painted DANGER on the wall, and said, "This is what the show lacks."

PAM NORRIS:.

I remember the day Michael was writing DANGER on that wall. The spray can stopped working halfway through. And I was like on my back laughing, because he'd just written DAN on the wall and the spray can temporarily stopped working. I thought, "Oh my G.o.d, this guy's going to go down in history writing DAN on the wall." But he shook it a few times and it started up again.

NEIL LEVY:.

d.i.c.k told me that if I could get Catherine O'Hara to come to New York, he would let me stay on. It was sleazy. But I thought, "Well, I can do it." So I went and asked Catherine O'Hara. She wasn't really interested. But I talked to her and she came down. Then she saw the flaming Viking ship going under and she went, "Uh-oh, gotta run."

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

Meantime, I'd hired Catherine O'Hara. It had taken a lot to lure her, because live was not her style. So in that very first meeting with Michael, when he was telling everybody the show is s.h.i.t, and spraying all over the writers' wall the word DANGER, it really scared Catherine O'Hara - scared her right off the show. She packed up her stuff and went home to Canada that night.

TIM KAZURINSKY:.

O'Donoghue had this vision of taking the show down. He wanted to destroy the show. His motto was "Viking Death Ship. Let's all go down in the Viking Death Ship." I grew up in the slums, you know, starving, and I'm thinking, "Can't we like keep it afloat just until I can buy a condo?" Yeah, he wrote DANGER on the wall. It was like carefully orchestrated. He was a drama queen. But I loved Michael. He was great.

He did bring on Terry Southern. Terry had been one of America's great writers. But he was not a sketch-comedy writer. It's absurd. I don't know if he ever wrote anything that actually got on the air. But he ran a fine wet bar out of his office. It was a really odd time, because it seemed like that first year, half of them really worked at trying to have it go up in smoke. In retrospect, maybe O'Donoghue had the right idea.

ROSIE SHUSTER, Writer: I was having this big fight with Clotworthy about a sketch called "The Taboosters," which is just a normal, regular family, and they have lots of rules and stuff, but no taboos. And I couldn't win this argument. And then afterwards, when I showed the censor out of my office, I saw that Terry Southern, who was writing on the show at that time, had left a Hustler magazine sitting there with this big female pink genitalia flashing right in the censor's face. I had no idea. That was Terry's idea of being hilarious. It was pretty funny afterwards. I thought, "Oh my G.o.d, no wonder the censor was mad."

BOB TISCHLER:.

The day that Michael was going to do his DANGER thing, he actually asked me not to come into the room, because he knew he was putting on a show and was going to be very theatrical. He knew I wouldn't have bought into it. It would have been very hard for me to sit through something like that. Michael lost a lot of people with that one. He was trying to shake everybody up, but there's always a second agenda with Michael. I have to categorize it as his own combination of s.a.d.i.s.tic and m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic tendencies. Michael loved to play those roles, and he loved to be the focus of everything.

There were certain periods where he would just break down and throw temper tantrums - breaking things, throwing things, screaming. And you just had to stay away from him. Michael really had something wrong with him, a chemical imbalance. He complained of migraine headaches all the time and would flip out occasionally.

He was most interested in shocking the audience. I don't mind shocking the audience, but you have to make them laugh too, and entertain them. He was really just into the shock value, or doing something that was weird and boring.

PAM NORRIS:.

After I left Sat.u.r.day Night Live and came to Hollywood and went into the sitcom factory, I was really appalled at how joyless it was. As much as people said, "Oh boy, Sat.u.r.day Night Live is a terrible place to work," and, you know, chaos and sibling rivalry and dysfunctional family and everything, when I started working on sitcoms, they just seemed very flat - very vanilla, you might say.

When I was at Designing Women, the whole brouhaha with one of the actresses, Delta Burke, was going down. And it was about people's behavior, and I was going, "This is what you call bad behavior? This doesn't even count." I mean, when you think about what was considered bad behavior at my previous job.

BOB TISCHLER:.

I never called myself a writer before Sat.u.r.day Night Live. I produced a lot of comedy and I did writing, but I wasn't a member of the union or anything and didn't go sit down and write. And when I came to Sat.u.r.day Night Live, I was all of a sudden brought in as head writer, and what happened was we did one show and the writers strike happened. So at that point it was an opportunity to basically clean house of the Jean Doumanian people that we didn't want and come back the next year with our own staff. There was an opportunity to upright the death ship and let it sail again. I've never been one to work on anything with the intent of it failing. But Michael would not give up on this death ship thing. So Michael and I kind of disagreed on that, and that's where we started to lose our friendship.

At one point Michael had been an incredible genius, an incredible writer. At a certain point, the panache and the desire to be recognized and to get the accoutrements of Sat.u.r.day Night Live became more important than his craft. It was very sad for me to see this happen.

JAMES DOWNEY:.

Lorne at that time was anxious to get into movies in a big way, and he had a deal with Paramount. And different writers and teams of writers - like Tom Schiller wrote a movie - each had movie ideas. Lorne was pushing Franken and Davis and myself the most to do a movie. But we didn't really have an idea. We had the deal before we had the idea, which is not a good way to do anything. So from like the summer of 1980 on and off for the next two years, we just in a desultory way wrote the screenplay, which once we finished it Paramount was then able to officially reject. Then, like the summer of '82 - Letterman had just started up in March, and he had asked me to come in when he was first putting his NBC late-night show together. I knew that I probably wouldn't be able to do it, at least in the very beginning, because of the movie thing, but I went in to meet him because I was a big fan of his morning show. And then in August we had finished up the movie, so I went to the Letterman show. Later I became head writer for about a year and a quarter.

The biggest difference between writing for Letterman and writing for Sat.u.r.day Night Live - well, obviously it would be the sketches, per se. I hope this doesn't sound pretentious, but I think that the principle in operation at Sat.u.r.day Night Live seemed to be that - I didn't feel this way myself - but the principle was that we wanted to be hip. And at Letterman, we wanted to be smart. And I liked that much better.

It's not like I can identify even a single person at SNL who would say that being hip was what was most important to them. It was just that what made Sat.u.r.day Night Live distinctive was not that it was so smart or brainy in that sense; it was more that, when it appeared, television had been kind of middle-aged and square for a long time. And Sat.u.r.day Night Live set a tone of being cool. And certainly it was pretty clear that that was never a concern of the Letterman show. I mean, a tremendous amount of attention and thought and care has always gone into like the social aspects of Sat.u.r.day Night Live - the parties and who was booked to host and, you know, style aspects - but never, never was there any of that stuff at Letterman. Letterman was never a social kind of show, you know. And there were certain kinds of things that we did at Letterman that even, factoring in the differences between the two shows, the audience at Sat.u.r.day Night Live would not have been interested in or liked.

Sat.u.r.day Night Live was always, I thought, more about performance. Most of the successful pieces to some extent involved a performer getting to look good doing it. Whereas at Letterman we did all kinds of things which were basically just an idea that Dave was communicating to the audience. In those days, he wasn't that interested in performing either. So it was a lot of conceptual stuff and wisea.s.s stuff like running over things with a steamroller.

BRAD HALL, Cast Member: I came in the second year of Ebersol, and we were there until the end of Ebersol. When Ebersol first started, he hired a bunch of people from Chicago - Mary Gross, Tim Kazurinsky, those guys - who we knew peripherally because we were from Chicago. And when we had the show in Chicago that we were doing next door to Second City, we shared the bar with Second City. And when Ebersol and Tischler came out to do their usual pilfering from Second City to get actors, they went to Second City, they saw the show, and the owner of Second City, who was sick of losing people to Sat.u.r.day Night Live, said, "Hey, go next door, because we have a big hit show going on next door." And they came over and saw our show. And that night, right after the show, they said "You're all hired. You're all coming to Sat.u.r.day Night Live." It was very exciting. It was crazy.

Julia and I were really lucky that we'd been going out for a while before that. We had a really solid relationship, and we came to the show together.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS, Cast Member: Audition? No, we didn't do an audition, that's the thing. We were just hired off the show we did in Chicago. And then when we came to New York, d.i.c.k wanted us to do some of the material we'd done onstage. It's a real quirky show that we did. It was funny, but it was not straight-down-the-middle improvisation comedy, and they made us perform a rather substantial section from the show. d.i.c.k set it up so that everybody sat on folding chairs, and the four of us performed sketches from our show for these jaded writers. It was just grotesque. It couldn't have been a more hostile crowd. It was so painful, I can't even believe I'm talking about it. There was no team spirit.

BRAD HALL:.

It's a funny place to work, that seventeenth floor. People act as if it's so important, that it's the only thing in the world. And the hours are ridiculous. But at the end of the day, how about just being funny? Those of us who didn't get so much material had a lot of time to hang out with the band. I spent a lot of time with the SNL band and with the guest bands. And when I look back, I think less about comedy and more about music, to tell you the truth. We got the Clash, we got Squeeze, we had Joe Jackson.

GRANT A. TINKER, Former NBC Chairman: I never visited their offices on the seventeenth floor, never went up there once. I didn't want to go up there and fight my way through all that marijuana smoke, which I'd been led to believe was quite thick. So I felt, why cause trouble?

JACK HANDEY, Writer: I went over to this house one time for a Halloween party, and Cheryl Hardwick was playing the piano and they had a Poe reading, and then Michael O'Donoghue announced that he was going to unveil this painting by a new young artist that he had discovered. And so we were all sucked into it. Like here's the artist, supposedly, and he's standing there and looking kind of embarra.s.sed. And the name of the painting is Desi Arnaz as a Young Man. There were, I don't know, thirty or forty people there. So the painting is up on the wall and Michael pulls off the cover and he goes, "Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Desi Arnaz as a Young Man." And there's the painting, big oil painting, and sure enough, it is Desi Arnaz as a young man, seated on a chair facing you, but with female genitalia instead of male. And there was just an audible gasp from the room. That was the kind of thing Michael liked to do.

JUDITH BELUSHI, Writer: I did a little writing, but only on one show, when d.i.c.k Ebersol came in. The first year there was a writers strike and we only did one show. John said to me, "Why would you ever want to write for Sat.u.r.day Night Live?" And I said that I had been around it so much and sometimes had even partic.i.p.ated - giving somebody a line or something. And I'd worked on the National Lampoon Radio Hour and other things. So I thought, "I can do that." And I thought it would be interesting. But I really didn't like it. I call it "My Week in Television." It was actually three weeks of working.

Michael O'Donoghue had come back as head writer. He didn't want to be there, and he was really miserable about it. He was saddled with it and he'd do what he could. I wrote a piece with Mitch Glazer that was a Raging Bull parody, a big piece. We were like an hour late handing it in, so Michael refused to look at it. It was just like school.

TIM KAZURINSKY:.

It was too crazy. Everyone was out of control. Finally, I decided to quit the show. I called John Belushi and said, "I'm going home. I'm flying back to Chicago tonight. I quit." Pam Norris, Blaustein, a few others, and I were pretty much coming up with the show almost every week. O'Donoghue's writers were hopeless. They did nothing. When they did do something, it was horrible. But I didn't get to quit - because John said, "Okay, Judy and I will drive you to the airport." They came by my house, got my bags, and, instead of taking me to the airport, they took me to a psychiatrist. John said, "If you want to quit that show, you've got to be crazy." He told me, "Here's the thing you can't lose sight of: It gets bad, it gets ugly, but you're an improviser, you're a writer, you have access to network airwaves. You have a chance to reach some hearts and minds out there. You have a chance to say something. You cannot walk away from this." And he sent me in to this psychiatrist, who I saw every week for the next year and who kept me healthy enough to stay on the show.

BOB TISCHLER:.

There was a lot of lying going on, a lot of deception. And it became furious between O'Donoghue and Ebersol. I kept on trying to defend him; Ebersol really wanted to get rid of him a long time before he did. I had known Michael for years before the show. He and I were great friends and actually ended up not remaining friends as a result of our experience on Sat.u.r.day Night Live together. Michael had this history with everybody. Anybody who really got close to him ended up being on his enemies list at a certain point.

ELLIOT WALD, Writer: I hit it off badly with Michael. He pa.s.sed judgment on things. He and my first partner, Nate Herman - he didn't like Nate too much, and since Nate was a performer, he was always hilarious in meetings. So it was hard for him to fire on Nate, but Nate's quiet partner was easier to pick on. I was afraid to speak up at meetings in the first half of the season. He had made life difficult for me. He almost got me fired - "Just get him out of here" - because he was trying to get somebody else hired. But before that could be executed, he got himself fired over the "Silverman in the Bunker" piece. This was a piece he wrote, with Silverman as. .h.i.tler in the last days. The sketch didn't make it to air, and that's why Michael quit - or put himself in the position to be fired. He talked to somebody in the press about what a bunch of morons everybody up there was, how they couldn't see the brilliance of this piece. And the network said, "Well, you do have a clause in your contract about doing things like that," so they fired him. He was asking for it. He was, in essence, quitting.