Live From New York Part 15

ELLIOT WALD:.

To his credit - and I think d.i.c.k deserves credit for certain things - they made some good hires. Doumanian hired Eddie, but it was Ebersol who immediately realized that he was going to be a star. d.i.c.k saw Eddie's potential right away. He sort of picked Piscopo out of the mix; I am not a huge fan of Joe's, but he stuck in people's minds, which gave them kind of a peg.

MARGARET OBERMAN, Writer: All you had to do with Eddie at that time was be a real good stenographer. Because you'd get him in the office and he'd have the character down, and he'd have the voice down and then if you had a good ear, you could kind of figure it out and give him the stuff right back, and he would just kick a.s.s.

I likened him a lot to Bill Murray. I think Billy and Eddie are probably the most talented people to ever come out of the show. There's a drive that they both have. I think they're both really unique talents.

NEIL LEVY:.

One time Eddie asked me if I'd be his manager, and I said no, I wasn't interested in doing that. Like a f.u.c.king idiot!

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

When I came back and did that first show in the second Sat.u.r.day in April of '82, the writers strike happened at midnight that night, and so I never produced another show that season. We got picked up based on the positive reaction to that one show that I did that night. And Eddie had been wonderful in that show, but not enough to show the outside world what he could do. I would say that in that next year, '82'83, he was at least a third or more of the draw of the show, so you could say he was worth a rating point and a half or two rating points.

During those two years, Eddie, Sheffield, and Blaustein had as much to do with keeping the show alive as anything or anyone. They were a wonderful marriage, the three of them. Eddie was clearly a genius then, at eighteen or nineteen years old. They were able to take his rough stuff, and they became his transmitters.

BARRY BLAUSTEIN:.

What happened with our first Eddie Murphy piece was, my dad was always calling me up with ideas for sketches, and they were always terrible, but this was the one time he came up with an idea that was decent. He'd read this article about a high school basketball team in Cleveland, where the court ruled that there had to be at least one white player on the team. We wrote something for Eddie based on that, showed it to him, and worked with him on it. It was his first piece. And you could tell the first minute he was on the air that whatever "it" is, he had it. He completely connected with the audience. He just jumped off the screen.

And then we kept writing for him. I don't know why other people didn't write for him. They'd go, "You write for him a lot," and we'd say, "Yeah, well, he's the best guy there, why not write for him?" Basically we would just sit in a room and Eddie would start talking.

BOB TISCHLER:.

One of the greatest things that happened to me on the show was meeting Barry and David, who are still my friends. We started writing together immediately. They had already been writing together as a result of being on Jean's staff, and they were among the three people that we kept from Jean's days. And I just started hitting it off with them, and we started writing for Eddie. We had this thing for Eddie, because Eddie could take what we wrote and make it better every single time. And he also would work with us by bringing in a character and improvising with us. It was just worth it to work with him to be on the show. I know he was a problem for a lot of people, but for us he was never a problem. We had a great relationship on the show.

PAM NORRIS:.

The idea that Eddie got too much attention is hard for me to swallow, just because he earned it so much and he was ignored for the longest time. But he didn't get bitter, and he didn't quit. He kept writing, and he kept working with writers that would write for him. He kept coming up with new characters over and over again. I'm sure it's frustrating to work with him, because he could do everything. I mean, he could write for himself, he could create characters for himself. How do you compete with that? That could be extremely frustrating. I just saw how dismissed he was for the longest time, so if he got a little special later, he certainly deserved that - and way more.

ELLIOT WALD:.

My era never was lionized the way the people in the first years were. In that first show, those people were the toast of New York, and I don't think anybody from my era was that way. Even when Eddie turned twenty-one, he held his own birthday party at Studio 54. It was well attended, but he still had to hold it for himself. No one really knew of us. They just knew of us as "the successors."

BRAD HALL:.

Eddie was the one guy that really stood up for us. And if we were light in the show he was always, "Come on, let's give these guys something." He was really a team player from that point of view and an easy guy to talk to and always funny and fun to have around. That's definitely where the show was focused - on him. He'd had a big movie come out when we got there. And he was a big star. And that's where they were going to hang their hat. And who can blame them? The guy was great. But it did make it frustrating for us.

DANA CARVEY, Cast Member: I was in New York stuck on a sitcom with Mickey Rooney, Nathan Lane, Meg Ryan, and Scatman Crothers called One of the Boys. Mickey Rooney was always talking - "I was the number one star in the worrrrld, you hear me? The worrrrld. Bang! The worrrld! Judy Garland never owned a car. They pumped her so full of drugs they killed her! How long has Robert Redford been in the business, ten years? I've been in the business sixty-one years!" He was sixty-two at the time. He would act out entire movies that he thought of, with lines like, "How are you, Mr. f.u.c.k? I'm Mrs. s.h.i.t."

We were taping in Letterman's, now Conan's, studio on the sixth floor at 30 Rock, and to clear my head, I would go up to the eighth floor and watch Eddie Murphy rehea.r.s.e. He was great.

BARRY BLAUSTEIN:.

Eddie would go full-out on all our stuff. I don't think we ever wrote a sketch that didn't make the air that we wanted, or had to say, "They should've used that." The show's at its very best when the writers and the actors are in a room together writing stuff, the way Eddie was with us. Eddie would come in and say, "Hey, what about this?" and then we'd just start writing together. You can't write in a total vacuum. Pretty good rule of thumb: If you're laughing when you're writing it, it will be funny.

Eddie was up for everything. That was just one of the reasons for his success. In his stand-up, Eddie used to mention Buckwheat, from the old Our Gang comedies, and every time he did, he'd get a laugh. So we decided to do a tribute to Buckwheat - have Eddie impersonate him.

ROBIN SHLIEN:.

I have a very specific memory of typing the first Buckwheat sketch and almost falling off my chair because it was so funny. Having been at the show and knowing what it took to have a great character and get a big response, I remember thinking, "They nailed it. This is going to be huge." It was "Buckwheat Sings," and they had bothered to put the misp.r.o.nunciations in the script. So it was "Untz, tice, fee times a nady." I was typing this and I couldn't stop laughing. That was always a good sign.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

Eddie did Buckwheat for the first time in October of '81, so I would guess it would've been just after the first of the year, January of '83, that he came in to see me late one night in the office that's now Lorne's again and said, "I want to kill Buckwheat." It was one of the hottest characters in late-night television at that time. But he said, "I can't stand it anymore. Everywhere I go people say, 'Do Buckwheat, do this, do that.' I want to kill him."

His instincts were so good. I said, "Go sit down with Barry and David." They came back into my office about two, three o'clock in the morning, and it was a two-part thing: "The a.s.sa.s.sination of Buckwheat." It probably was the best piece of satire in the four or five years that I was there. The first part was the actual shooting, out in front of the building as he got out of the car. The a.s.sa.s.sin's name was John David Studs, because they always have three names. Piscopo was funny in it too - he was too on-point for what a lot of SNL should be, but he was a brilliant Rich Little of his time.

They really wanted to do a satire on how far the media had gone. And that was to be the end of Buckwheat.

BARRY BLAUSTEIN:.

Part one aired and went real well. And then we thought, "What if we do this: We take the next step, they catch the killer, and that will be like Lee Harvey Oswald getting killed." The censors were kind of unhappy, there were problems upstairs. What? Well, "Grant Tinker is very sensitive on this. He doesn't want to make fun of the Kennedy a.s.sa.s.sination." And we were like, "Oh, come on." The censor, Bill Clotworthy, was an old friend of Reagan's. They had been in GE Theater together. He's actually a really decent guy, Clotworthy, because he had a sense of humor about it. And I remember saying, "G.o.ddammit, we always make fun of Reagan, why can't we make fun of Kennedy?"

DAVID SHEFFIELD:.

We staged it downstairs at Rockefeller Center. We shot it two ways on tape. We actually brought in a guy from special effects to place squibs on Eddie's body so that we had blood gushing from each shot. But just as an afterthought we said, "Let's shoot one without the blood, for safety's sake." And that's the one we used. And it was lucky we had it, because the blood just looked too real to be funny.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

That sketch gave me my best battle ever with the censors. Part one airs on a Sat.u.r.day night. The following Thursday, I'm summoned to the office of Corydon Dunham, who was then the corporation counsel to whom broadcast standards reported. I went to his office in jeans and a sweatshirt and he's Savile Row to the nth degree - but a nice man. And he said, "d.i.c.k, I just have to tell you that we will not be able to air 'The a.s.sa.s.sination of Buckwheat, Part Two' this weekend." I said, "What are you talking about? It was read at read-through yesterday, it was a killer piece, there are no language problems, everybody loved it." He said, "But there's real violence implications here. Somebody gets shot in this piece." I said, "Cory, that aired last week. Buckwheat was a.s.sa.s.sinated last week. Everybody laughed." He said, "Yes, but do you realize that on Sunday night, the night after your show airs, we're presenting your friend Don Ohlmeyer's docudrama Special Bulletin, and we're having real problems with that because people will think it's real." It won the Emmy that year as the best single program shown on television. It was about nuclear terrorists at Charleston Harbor. Cory was convinced it was going to be Orson Welles's War of the Worlds all over again. He said, "People are just going to think we are out of our minds with all this violence." I said, "Oh, come on - we're on the night before, we're finishing off a comedic premise, and you're telling me I can't air it?" And I had sworn I was never going to do something like this, but I told him, "In forty-five minutes I'm going to hold a press conference announcing that I'm not doing the show anymore." I'd never done that; that was always Lorne's trip, threatening to quit. But I said, "I'm leaving, and I'm going to make abundantly clear the height of insanity that went behind this bulls.h.i.t decision." And I said, "See you," with a smile on my face and I left. Cory called Grant Tinker and Grant laughed in his face when he heard the story. And before the forty-five minutes were up, Cory called me and said, "Never mind."

ANDY BRECKMAN, Writer: There was this rumor circulating that over the summer Ebersol was on a private NBC plane talking to the network bra.s.s about how badly they needed Eddie Murphy to come back in the fall - and I think at the time Joe Piscopo was also a linchpin - but they needed Eddie Murphy or they didn't have a show. There would be no show without him. And they said, "We have to pay them whatever it takes." You know - bend over backwards as far as scheduling and pay. And the rumor that we heard was that this phone call was picked up by a ham radio operator somewhere in the Midwest, and he recorded it, and that tape somehow got back to Eddie Murphy. And so he went into negotiations knowing that he had them over a barrel. It's a great rumor, and I remember it circulating. Unfortunately, I don't know if it's true.

JOHN LANDIS, Film Director: After the accident, the tragedy of The Twilight Zone, I was so freaked out I just said to my agent, "I'll take any job offered. I just want to work." So Jeff Katzenberg sent me this script of Black or White - later changed to Trading Places - and I said that Pryor would be brilliant in it. But Katzenberg said, "What do you think of Eddie Murphy?" and I had to say, "Who?" And he said, "We've made this picture called 48 Hrs. and it just previewed." They tried to fire Eddie off of 48 Hrs., but Walter Hill saved his job. When it previewed, Eddie tested through the roof. So they gave me a tape of all his things he'd done on Sat.u.r.day Night Live, and I said, "Kind of young, but he's funny. I especially love the James Brown Hot Tub. I'll meet him." So I fly to New York to meet with Eddie, who's a baby, like nineteen, whatever, and we come down onto Fifth Avenue and he said, "You have to get the cab, because they won't stop for me."

MARGARET OBERMAN:.

We always had to go down and get cabs for him at two in the morning, because no cab drivers would stop for a young black man. Not even him.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

By the end of the '82'83 season, Eddie already had had 48 Hrs. It had come out at Christmas of '82, and then all through that winter, late '82'83, early '83, he was making Trading Places. It became really apparent that, just on the launch of 48 Hrs., which had those glorious reviews for him, he was a movie star. I remember the Times in particular saying that his scene in that country-western bar was maybe the greatest scene an actor ever had in his debut movie. That, coupled with the fact that Paramount had already signed him, upon seeing the dailies before the film came out successfully, to a long-term deal that guaranteed him millions of dollars and had signed him and had him shooting Trading Places in Philadelphia and New York through that winter. It was going to be pretty hard to hold on to him. We had him for one more year, but they were making all the noises of, you know, being very resistant about it, and it could have been kind of a legal thing.

So I came up with this idea that, for the '83'84 season, which would be his last, he had to appear in ten shows, and I think that year we were committed to doing twenty. He had to appear in ten of the twenty and we would be done with him by March. And we also had the right to tape up to, oh, I think it was fifteen sketches to put in the other shows. We weren't going to hide that he wasn't physically there. That wasn't the intent. But this was just to keep him available. They jumped at it and signed the deal. We kept ourselves from losing him, which would have hit us pretty hard.

ROBIN WILLIAMS, Host: The first time I did the show was when Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo were on. Eddie had done a lot of great characters. I think he had just started to kick in the movies, but he was still on the show, which was great. It was an interesting time, because it was the new regime, not Lorne.

CHRIS ALBRECHT:.

One thing for sure was that Eddie and Joe had a great chemistry together and they did a lot of stuff together, and it would be completely correct to say that Joe took Eddie under his wing at the very beginning. Eddie was a kid who hadn't really done much, and Joe not only really, really loved this guy and was enamored of his talent but also was very protective of him. It wasn't as if Joe was trying to latch on to any coattails; no one knew that he was going to become "Eddie Murphy."

So Joe looked after this kid from the moment he showed up. And more than a couple people noticed that when there was an opportunity to return the support, none came. Eddie never helped Joe later on. Never gave Joe a part in a movie, never did anything. Never, ever helped Joe. Why not? I couldn't answer that.

PAM NORRIS:.

Before the beginning of the season, we knew that Eddie was going to be away a lot of the time doing movies. So what we wanted was a backlog of Eddie taped sketches. I wrote a lot of those. We basically just did a private show that was one Eddie sketch after another that we taped with a studio audience. And then those were later put into the shows.

ANDREW KURTZMAN:.

I will say that the grumbling about that was to an extent about the star trip just as much as it was about the violation of the ethos of the thing. We do this live. It's not supposed to be bigger than any single player - but here was an exception.

ANDY BRECKMAN:.

For the live shows, they didn't make any announcement that Eddie wasn't really there, but he certainly didn't show up to wave good night at the end.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

It would have been very difficult, I think, to have kept the show on the air without Eddie. The show would absolutely have launched for the '83'84 season, but he was still the main draw. And it would have been pretty hard, I think, to keep up the show long enough to get to the next year - which Brandon labeled my Steinbrenner era in the spring of '84.

MARGARET OBERMAN:.

I remember when Eddie was really starting to make the big money. One night Jeffrey Katzenberg came up to the offices - 48 Hrs. had just opened - and he was sitting in the writers' room on the ninth floor, waiting for Eddie. And when Eddie came in, Katzenberg gave him a check for a million dollars. And none of us had ever seen a check for a million dollars before.

That kind of stuff going on was just totally fascinating. And when Eddie wasn't at read-through, we'd have to go find him; he'd be downstairs buying jewelry in the jewelry store.

HERB SARGENT, Writer: Eddie came to me one day and said, "I don't know who my friends are anymore." And he was frightened, you know. He said that people would patronize him or compliment him, and he wasn't sure that they were serious. Maybe it was only because he was on television. And he was scared. It wasn't showing up in his work, but it was a real personal fear that he had. And so I got Harry Belafonte to come and talk to him. Because the same thing had happened to him when he was young.

Harry came up, and I put him in a room with Eddie and let them talk. I think it worked out okay.

ANDY BRECKMAN:.

I remember he got a million dollars for appearing in just a few scenes of a Dudley Moore movie. Eddie framed that million-dollar check and put it on his wall. It was one million dollars for a few weeks' work. Oh yeah, he cashed the check; the one on the wall was a copy.

JOE PISCOPO:.

Eddie got death threats and - I don't think he'll mind me telling you - he was upset with that. That was as insane as it got. And I remember saying, "Eddie, these are just jealous creeps that don't know what they're doing, don't even worry about it." He was upset about it and in retrospect rightly so. Just think about it, a brilliant talent like that. I hate to even bring it up now, because there's always a nut out there. Even after he left Sat.u.r.day Night Live, I remember him being pulled over a lot by cops in Los Angeles. He was thrown against the car once. That is really sad.

BARRY BLAUSTEIN:.

I think it was hard for Eddie. It was hard for both of them. I think when Joe saw Eddie eclipsing him tremendously, it was hard. The relationship changes. They're no longer equals. Joe was a really good impressionist. He worked really hard on mannerisms, to get an impression down. And Eddie would then just be able to do that same impression - boom - like that.

ANDREW KURTZMAN:.

People thought that there was a big blowup between Eddie and Joey. They drifted apart. We all heard later that there were some Sinatra-like moments between them. It was that period where Joe was going on talk shows and talking about being friends with Eddie a lot - all that talk-show stuff about things he did with Eddie. And I remember someone saying that Eddie got really ticked about that.

ELLIOT WALD:.

It was really hard to get hosts the first year I was there. We lost Nick Nolte the first night. He supposedly went into rehab, but he was seen preparing for rehab at Studio 54. But Eddie came in and took over as host and of course did great. That was the year Eddie was half there and half not.

ANDREW KURTZMAN:.

I got along fine with Eddie. It's this weird thing in show business where you kind of lock into the relationship with the person at the point when you meet them. For people who knew Eddie as he was becoming Eddie, it was always easier to get along with him after that. There were entourage jokes and stuff like that among people on the staff, but I liked a lot of the guys in the entourage. The complaint about Eddie was that occasionally he'd flare up and say something snide. But listen - I met people who were much, much larger a.s.s-holes on much less talent. The nice thing about the show was it was pretty democratic that way, which is that the ability to make people laugh generally won the respect of your colleagues, and that was all it needed.

TIM KAZURINSKY:.

Ebersol was not a writer and he's got cheap tastes. So - this is the frustrating thing - all the good scripts went into the wastebasket on Wednesday. And you'd stay up, and people were fueling themselves with cocaine from Monday through Wednesday, because Wednesday morning we had the read-through at eleven. And you literally had that fifty hours to get a show written. So you would kill yourself to get good scripts done. Ebersol was looking for scripts that would make Eddie and Joe bigger stars. He was looking for impersonations of s...o...b..z people. Anything that had an idea or a political notion or that he thought was a little too smart - bang, dead, into the waste-basket. And so the writers would get more depressed, they'd do more drugs, and pretty soon most of the scripts were written for Eddie and Joe. It was like publish or perish - you had to get a piece on the air, so everybody wrote thinking, "If I don't do a piece for Eddie, it won't get on, and I'll get fired" - which people often did. It was really f.u.c.king crazy.

Second City is the ideal. You can do and say anything you want. See it in the paper that day, do a bit on it that night. You didn't have that luxury at Sat.u.r.day Night Live. In fact, sometimes the smarter it was, the quicker Ebersol would kill it.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

John Belushi had become convinced that Fear, which was this punk kind of rock group, were on the verge of breaking out and convinced me that I ought to book them and personally vouched that they were terrific and so on. Anyway, their musical number - in the last fifteen or twenty minutes of the show - was so dark. They had films in it showing pumpkins that, as you carved the pumpkin, blood came out of each carving. It was just like O'Donoghue at his darkest. And I, quite frankly, had given him too much freedom. But now here I am with Fear itself. We're on the air. And all of a sudden they're out of control and there are dancers around them - including John, who you can't see on television - and they're slam-dancing, that's what it was called, banging off each other, banging into the audience, banging into cameramen. None of this was really foreseen. And things got really, completely, and totally out of hand. And so you're sitting at home and you're watching this, and you don't really have the total sense of what we could see, because Davey Wilson in the booth was not shooting what was breaking out in the lower areas of the audience, where people sit on those movable chairs.

And I think probably, for the only time in the history of the show, I had been worried about it enough to have told Davey to at least have a film standing by. It was a sensational film that had aired in the first show, four weeks before, on October third, with Eddie playing a black inmate who wrote poetry in iambic pentameter or something like that. It was a takeoff on whoever Norman Mailer loved at the time, who was a wronged guy in prison, and a wonderful piece of character. And so I told them to roll it. And so we just rolled the film.

We let Fear finish in the studio, and I don't think they knew until they were back in their dressing room that the last half of their song had gone away. Anyway, the total damage that was done in the studio was about $2,500. But the New York Post headline on Monday was, "Sat.u.r.day Night Live Riot Destroys $250,000."

DAVE WILSON:.

It was like mosh pit kind of stuff, with people diving off the stage into the audience. And all I remember is d.i.c.k Ebersol actually running around, ducking underneath the cameras, trying to quiet it all down.

The death of John Belushi on March 5, 1982, at the age of thirty-three, brought the festivities to a sorrowful, traumatized halt. No matter how many people might have predicted a premature demise for this ebullient man of vast and varied appet.i.tes and legendary overindulgence, the death came as a dark, cold shock. It told his friends at Sat.u.r.day Night Live not only that John was mortal, but that they were too. It had the sobering impact of a biblical warning: Your parents were right after all, dammit - drugs can destroy a life, excess can be fatal, self-abuse can have severe consequences, there's no free lunch, and all that other anti-hedonistic claptrap.

Belushi's death seemed tragic on many different levels. That his death was linked to drug abuse only reinforced the mistaken public perception that Belushi was some childish party animal, undisciplined and wild - much like the s...o...b..sh Bluto whom he played in his triumphant movie hit Animal House. But those who knew Belushi even superficially knew him as tender, sensitive, painfully vulnerable, and lovable. The only time Belushi and Bluto really resembled each other was during a scene in which Bluto tries to cheer up a despondent fellow frat boy. He romps, he mugs, he cracks a bottle over his head, and then he pantomimes a big happy grin, propping up the corners of his mouth with his fingers. The gesture recalls the sweet innocence of Harpo Marx.

Sat.u.r.day Night Live's resident ensemble had been called the Beat-les of comedy, and now they had their own dead Lennon. They could never go back, never regroup, never be together again. It would never be just like it was.

In Don't Look Back in Anger, a famous short film made by Tom Schiller for the show in 1977 and set sometime in the distant future, an elderly but dapper Belushi visits the wintry graves of fellow alumni and explains that though some predicted he'd be the first to go, it was in fact he alone who survived the intervening decades. And the reason? "I'm - a dancer!" he exclaims, just before launching into some sort of Greek-Albanian folk stomp. John's death came well after the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players had disbanded, and yet it seemed to shut down this exclusive club once and for all.

ANNE BEATTS, Writer: I had a friend who was in Vietnam. We were talking about our experiences - his in the war, mine on the show. And it seemed somewhat equivalent. Then I said, "Well, but n.o.body died in mine." And he said, "Yes, they did." I thought about it for a second. "Oh. You're right. They did."

BARBARA GALLAGHER:.

I ran into John at a restaurant in Los Angeles, where I'd moved. I didn't want to go over to his table because I didn't know what to expect. I hadn't seen him in years. But he was really sweet. He came over to me and said, "You know what? I'm clean." I said, "John, I'm so happy for you." He said, "I am too. I'm on the right road again. Danny's been my savior." And then two months later, he was dead.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

I'd lived at the Chateau Marmont for three years, so the irony of John dying there was, well, whatever. About two weeks before he died, I was out in L.A. for a movie meeting, and Buck Henry invited me to go with him to the Playboy Mansion. I had only been there once, and that was to ask Hefner to host the show. Buck said, "He shows his Sat.u.r.day Night Live show every Sat.u.r.day night in the screening room." So I went there with Buck, and John was there. He was a little f.u.c.ked-up but not crazy-man f.u.c.ked-up, just a little f.u.c.ked-up. And we were sitting in the screening room watching an Armand a.s.sante movie. Hefner sat in the front row on the aisle and there was a little table with a bowl of popcorn on it next to his seat. I was sitting in the back with Buck. And John, to make us laugh, crept down the aisle and started taking popcorn out of Hefner's bowl. So when Hefner would reach over, there would be less and less each time, because he wasn't looking at it. It was a nice visual.

Later, in the game room, John and I talked. He was enormously effusive about n.o.ble Rot, the script that Don Novello was writing for him, and how hilarious it was. It was very warm between us. Lots of hugs. It was good. It was the last time I saw him.

NEIL LEVY:.

Exactly one week before John died, I was trying to get into the Ritz to see Mink DeVille, and I had forgotten my Sat.u.r.day Night Live ID and the guy at the door would not let me in. And Belushi came by and says to the guy, "Do you know who this is?!" And the guy backed up in horror, because Belushi was really on a rant about his not letting me in. Then John grabbed me and took me in and took me right to the dressing room. I thanked him and then afterwards I wanted to thank him again, and Judy was sitting there and I asked her how he was and she said, "Not good." I think this was just before he flew to L.A.

ROBIN WILLIAMS:.

A friend came over and said, "Your friend John died." I said, "Excuse me?" The night before, I had been told by a guy at a bar called On the Rocks that "John wants to see you over at the Mar-mont." I went, "Okay, that's weird."

The next morning, they say he's dead. And I had to go testify in front of a grand jury about what I'd seen - which was nothing. It was wild. I could never find that guy to ask why I was sent there. He had said that De Niro and John wanted to see us. When I got there I called Bob and he was like, "Not right now. I'm busy, okay?" Okay, great. It was weird - maybe a setup, maybe not. Maybe someone was trying to set up a big bust. Who the f.u.c.k knows?

The sadness is that John could have done anything. He loved music, but the fact is he could have acted and done some really great drama. Kind of like almost Elvis on that level. He was like a comic Brando. He had "the thing." They just started to pull him out, because he started out doing those great comedies. He kicked a.s.s in Animal House. Even in 1941, you remember him as being this life force.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN, Manager: I was one of the last people to see him alive. I gave him $1,800, but it wasn't for drugs, it was for Bill Haley's guitar. I owed him a birthday present and he said, "I just found out what you could get me," because I didn't know what to get him, his birthday had already pa.s.sed, and he said, "I saw Bill Haley's guitar at the Guitar Factory," whatever it was, and I said, "How much is it? I'll give you a check." And he said, "Eighteen hundred dollars, but they only take cash." And me being a moron, I gave it to him. He bought drugs with it that night. I always felt responsible, but he would have gotten it someplace else.

He used to come and say, "Give me a hundred dollars," and I'd say, "I'm not going to give you a hundred dollars." And he said, "It's my money, I'll call my business manager." Okay. Because I used to get all his checks. So you see, there was no way to stop it.