Live From New York Part 3

Buddy was a strong advocate for Billy, and I think what I objected to was him telling me what I should cut as opposed to just making the pro-Billy case. He made the who-was-funnier case, which was not a good thing to do. He said I should cut Andy Kaufman.

I probably didn't have the nerve to cut Carlin. One, he was our host, and two, he'd lent his name to the show, which was, at the time, a big deal. I think Andy, because he was surreal and there was nothing else like him on the show, had the edge. Albert had submitted his first film, which was thirteen minutes long. Fortunately he also submitted his second one, which was a lot shorter, and that was the one we ran.

I thought Billy was really funny, or else I wouldn't have put him on the show. But I also thought that he was the one thing we could hold, the one thing we had the most of - stand-up comedy, because of Carlin. Buddy turned everything into high drama. It became very heated.

BUDDY MORRA:.

We took him off the show Sat.u.r.day because they weren't living up to what we had agreed to. Jack Rollins and I decided if we couldn't get what we were promised early on, we would take Billy off the show. Earlier in the week, I had said just that to Barbara Gallagher, who was the a.s.sociate producer. The piece was supposed to run about six minutes or five and a half minutes, and it just wouldn't work in any less time. You could shave a few seconds off, but that would be about it.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

Buddy had no idea what was going on. I don't think Bernie did either. They were from another time of show business. We were eating vegetables; they were eating doughnuts. It was a different world. We were much more like a crusade. It was a very pa.s.sionate group of people. Billy was sort of one of us - but now suddenly it went into this other kind of mode.

The talk with Buddy was of another time. And it made Billy not one of us. And I think that was unfortunate for all of us, because he had been.

BILLY CRYSTAL:.

I was waiting in the lobby with Gilda for the dress rehearsal to take place at eight o'clock while my managers talked to Lorne. We had asked for five minutes in the first hour which, given what we had been through with Lorne in the preparations, didn't seem like an outlandish request. About seven o'clock, my manager, Buddy Morra, and Jack Rollins come out and suddenly said, "Okay, we're going, that's it." I said, "What happened?" They said, "Lorne went, 'I can't do it, I can't do it, I can't do it. I can't promise anything.'" So Buddy said, "We're going to go, there's no time, you're being b.u.mped, and that's it." I had my makeup on! Gilda got all upset and angry. I was totally confused about the whole thing.

BUDDY MORRA:.

It comes down to a matter of what they thought was most important. I know how bad Billy felt for a long time. I'm talking about several years after that. It still always bothered him. And it bothered me too. We walked out of NBC that night, and I can tell you my stomach was not in great shape, and it wasn't for several days after that. It wasn't an easy thing to do, but we felt it was the right thing to do.

BILLY CRYSTAL:.

I was upset - mad, I guess - because I had wanted to be there. I was mad at my own managers, because I wanted to do the show. And I didn't want it to look like I was the guy who stormed off the show. That wasn't the truth. But my managers were protecting me, and Lorne was protecting his show, which I respect.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

We were all under enormous pressure. None of us had done this before. It was a big night for an enormous number of people, Billy included. To be cut was I'm sure terribly hurtful for Billy, but there was no implication at all that it was about his not being good enough or of not wanting him on the show. This was straight confrontation. It was Buddy; it wasn't Billy.

BARBARA GALLAGHER:.

It was a mistake when you look back on it. Billy was hysterical during dress. Very funny.

BILLY CRYSTAL:.

I was friendly with John and especially with Gilda. They were always confused and blamed my managers. Especially John; he used to say, "They screwed you, man!"

And then after that, things weren't great for me for a while. I felt bad. I did come back the next year when Ron Nessen hosted the show and I did a routine and that was great. But after that, there was eight years when I didn't do the show.

CRAIG KELLEM:.

At that time the power was on the network side. We had the power in terms of our spirit and our determination, but they had the money and it was their show. So we were constantly being pressured. One of the things the network wanted was for the cast to sign their talent contracts. I got the dubious job of chasing these guys around to get them to sign, which became like a running joke. Like, what is the next excuse going to be for somebody not signing their contract?

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:.

Five minutes before the first show, I came through the back door where the food and coffee was and there was Belushi, sitting on a bench with Craig Kellem, who was the a.s.sociate producer, and Craig was saying, "John, you've just got to sign your contract. NBC won't allow you on the air until you do." And I just happened to walk by at the time, and I didn't really know John well at all. I couldn't believe NBC in its stupidity was pressuring him at such a time. So John said to me, "Should I sign this contract?" and I said, "Of course you should sign this contract." He said, "Why?" I said, "Because I wrote it" - which, by the way, wasn't true. But I knew I had to get him to sign it. He said, "Okay, I'll sign the contract if you manage me." I swear to G.o.d, it was five minutes before showtime.

Belushi knew I managed Lorne. So why shouldn't he be managed by the same guy who is managing the boss, right? At that time, I didn't know how great Belushi was, so I just said yes to get him to sign the G.o.dd.a.m.ned contract. It worked out great, and he turned out, obviously, to be one of my best friends.

TOM SCHILLER:.

Before the offices on seventeen were filled up with furniture and stuff, I somehow got the key and went up there one night, and I was still enough of a hippie or a spiritual person that I lit a candle in each office as a sort of general mantra or prayer that the show would be successful and that it wouldn't hurt anybody. So at least that part came true.

And then on the first night of the show, still in my hippie phase, I went to every point underneath the bleachers and every point around the studio to try and send out good vibrations to the home viewing audience. Knowing we were sending out a signal across the ether that would be received all across the country, I wanted us to be sending it out with good wishes.

HERB SARGENT, Writer: The very first night of the show, between dress and air, Chevy and I went down and had a cup of coffee at Hurley's bar downstairs. And Chevy said, "What's going to happen to me?" Because it was a big moment, you know, for all those people. He says, "Where am I going to go from here?" I said, "You'll probably end up hosting a talk show." I was kidding. But it's strange, you know. He wasn't frightened - but he was very curious. And it was like an empty vista out there. The interesting part of that for me is that even before the first live show, he was already thinking about what the next step was.

NEIL LEVY:.

There was a feeling even before it started that something important was happening. It was almost like all the leftover spirit of the sixties found its way into this show - that spirit of rebellion, of breaking through whatever boundaries were left. There was something so special about being there that you knew from the moment you got there that this was going to work.

Of course, some writers weren't so sure. Even Dan Aykroyd - he had a bag all packed. He said, "Neil, this show could fold in a second, and I got a nice little spot picked out on the 401, and I'm going to open a truck stop." He had a whole plan! There were people who thought every paycheck was their last. At the same time, there was this infectiousness. It was a joyous thing, really. Everybody had been fired up with this concept of the inmates running the asylum, and the idea that the writers were the most important aspect of the show, and how we'd be able to do whatever we wanted - all the stuff that Lorne talked about. You could see that everyone there was on fire.

It seems in retrospect that everything was perfect - that it was this perfect, amazing, hilarious show, but even back then it was. .h.i.tand-miss. They had a lot of clinkers. But the thing of it was, it had never been done before. And it was just the times. Nixon had just resigned, the Vietnam War had just finished - and we lost it - and America wasn't laughing. And this show came along and said it's okay to laugh, even to laugh at all the bad stuff. It was like a huge release.

CRAIG KELLEM:.

We almost didn't get on the air, because dress rehearsal went so poorly. I remember Lorne seriously asking the network people - or having me ask them - to have a movie ready to go, just in case. And I don't think he was kidding.

George Carlin was the host when the show - then called NBC's Sat.u.r.day Night - premiered, on October 11, 1975. Only about two-thirds of NBC's affiliated stations carried the show, which had received very little advance publicity from the network. Over the course of its ninety minutes, Carlin - "stoned out of his mind," according to observers - delivered three separate comedy monologues, probably two too many. Iconoclastic comic Andy Kaufman lip-synched the Mighty Mouse theme song, a seminal and now legendary moment. There were also several numbers by musical guests Janis Ian and Billy Preston, an appearance from a new group of "adult" Muppets invented for the show by Jim Henson, and a short film by Albert Brooks.

The Not Ready for Prime Time Players - so named, by writer Herb Sargent, because Sat.u.r.day Night Live with Howard Cosell over on ABC at eightP.M.had a small comedy ensemble known as the Prime Time Players (one of whom was Bill Murray) - actually appeared very little on that first night. When they did, they were dressed as bees. The young performers were supplemented by an older Broadway actor named George Coe, who helped with narrations and commercial parodies and stayed around for one season only. The format was more like that of a traditional variety show, with nearly as much music as comedy and the repertory players there as laugh insurance, even filler.

Among the consistent elements from the beginning was the "cold open" prior to veteran announcer Don Pardo's recitation of the bill of fare and the opening credits. Many a modern movie had started this way, with a "grabber" or "teaser" scene prior to the credits, but it was something new for a TV show. The very first cold open was new, too: an absurdist encounter between bad-boy writer Michael O'Donoghue, playing a teacher of English, and bad-boy actor John Belushi as a semi-literate immigrant who repeats everything O'Donoghue says - including, "I would like - to feed your fingertips - to the wolverines." When O'Donoghue suddenly keels over with a heart attack, Belushi's character dutifully does the same, falling to the floor. Thus did John Belushi feign death within the first three minutes of the very first show.

Then, Chevy Chase as the floor manager, wearing a headset and carrying a clipboard, sticks his head in, sees the seemingly dead bodies, smiles broadly in that phony-television way, and says - for the first of more than five hundred times that it would be said in years to come -"Live from New York, it's Sat.u.r.day Night!"

LORNE MICHAELS:.

I made the decision Thursday to open cold with "Wolverines." It seemed to me that, whatever else happened, there would never have been anything like this on television. No one would know what kind of show this is from seeing that.

EDIE BASKIN, Photographer: For the t.i.tle sequence, I just went around and photographed New York at night. Actually, the first t.i.tles had no pictures of the cast, only pictures of New York. Lorne had loved some pictures I'd done of Las Vegas and some of my other work, which was very different for that time.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

The major focus of the night, weirdly enough, was over a directive we got that Carlin had to wear a suit on the show. He wanted to wear a T-shirt. The directive came from Dave Tebet; he was head of talent and very supportive of the show, but he was also trying to antic.i.p.ate. The fear was that if George was in a T-shirt and it looked like the wrong kind of show, we would lose affiliates, and we weren't anywhere near 100 percent as it was. And the compromise was a suit with a T-shirt instead of a tie. That was a much greater distraction than can possibly be understood right now.

CRAIG KELLEM:.

Tebet was the Don Corleone of network executives. And at that time I didn't look all that good - people dressed pretty sloppily there - and I went up and Tebet was reading the riot act about the prerequisites for Carlin's performance. And they included, "He's going to have to get his hair cut and have it look neat." And he went through this whole diatribe about what Carlin was not going to do, and it was uncomfortably close to the way I looked in the office. He went through the list - suit, tie, hair - and then he looks down at my bare ankles and says, "Socks!"

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

If you go back and look at the first show on the air, the two people by far who had the most to do on the show were Chevy and Jane. There were only four or five sketches. The rest of it was four songs, six monologues - three by Carlin, one by Andy Kaufman, his Mighty Mouse bit, and one by what's-her-face, a comedienne who ended up in the show instead of Billy Crystal - Valri Bromfeld, from Canada.

ROSIE SHUSTER:.

We were buzzed. I don't think we had any clue what kind of phenomenon was going to happen. Carlin later confessed that he was pretty loaded. Andy Kaufman was on that show. There were a lot of featured guests - there wasn't a lot of comedy on that show. But there was the live buzz you just got from that studio audience and it was pretty upbeat. I think everybody knew there had to be a lot more comedy sketches and that the cast had to be used more.

CRAIG KELLEM:.

I was involved with booking Carlin for the first show. I've often wondered about it. Carlin was my first client as an agent. He has had a wonderful career and is still, in my opinion, a comedy icon. But it's interesting that he has never been invited back to Sat.u.r.day Night Live. I remember that from the first show, you always knew when Lorne wasn't that thrilled about having a particular host, and Carlin was obviously somebody he just wasn't high on.

STEVE MARTIN, Host: I do remember when I first saw the show. I was living in Aspen, and it came on and I thought, "They've done it!" They did the zeitgeist, they did what was out there, what we all had in our heads, this kind of new comedy. And I thought, "Well, someone's done it on television now." I didn't know Lorne at the time. I didn't know anyone.

HERBERT SCHLOSSER:.

I can remember the first time I saw it. I was in Boston staying at the Ritz for the CincinnatiRed Sox World Series and I had been with Bowie Kuhn. You always sit with the commissioner if you're president of the company. That was a truly great World Series. We had dinner, and I asked if he'd like to see a new show we were putting on. And that was the first show in October of 1975, with George Carlin. Neither of us knew what to expect. Now Bowie is a nice man but very straitlaced, very proper, and a religious man. I sat on a chair, and he and his wife sat on the couch. He didn't laugh. And I thought, "Well, that's Bowie."

And then after a while, he started to chuckle. And then he'd actually laugh. And I figured, "Well, if he likes it, it's going to have a wider audience than most people think."

AL FRANKEN:.

I felt very confident that the show was going to work. It was youthful arrogance, I guess. I looked around and I thought, "This has never been on TV before, and this will work, this should work, and of course it's going to be a hit" - which is an att.i.tude I've never actually had since.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

The only note we got from the network on the first show was, "Cut the bees." And so I made sure to put them in the next show. I had them come out and talk to Paul Simon. He says, "It didn't work last week. It's cut." And they go, "Oh," and just walk off.

PAUL SIMON, Host: I was up for doing the very first show. It didn't seem like there was much downside risk. Then Lorne said, "No, let me just work out the kinks on the first show." But I would've been happy to do the first show. It would've been more historical. But he went with George Carlin, and I did the second one.

EDIE BASKIN:.

They had used publicity pictures of Carlin for the first show. I already had pictures of Paul Simon, so my pictures of Paul became the b.u.mpers. And then Lorne said to me, "I think you should photograph next week's host instead of using publicity pictures." And that's how it all started.

PENNY MARSHALL, Guest Performer: I met Lorne when he came out and talked to Rob about hosting the third show. I wasn't anybody; I'd been on The Odd Couple, but Laverne and Shirley didn't go on until four months later. Rob was on All in the Family. I listened to Lorne talk to Rob at Lorne's apartment, and I kept my mouth shut. At the end, Lorne said to me, "Penny, what do you think?" And I said, "I think you're the most manipulative human being I've ever met, and you do it beautifully." And we've been friends ever since.

NEIL LEVY:.

Rob Reiner refused to go on after dress rehearsal. I was in his dressing room. It was hilarious because it was like a monologue, him going, "I can't do this show, I can't do this show! It's bad, it's horrible, I'm going to make mistakes, I don't know the lines, I can't do it, I'm not doing it, I'm sorry, that's it!" And it was like he was not going to do it. And Lorne just talked him through it. And of course Rob did a good show.

ALBERT BROOKS:.

We had agreed on how I would make these movies, and certainly I wasn't going to make a living off of it. If I remember correctly, we agreed on a budget of like a thousand dollars a minute, which I bring up because it's funny that I was actually able to do that. I think all six films probably cost, you know, fifty grand. Most of the films were four minutes, but one - the open-heart surgery movie - ran thirteen minutes, and Lorne refused to air it. But then Rob Reiner, who is my close friend, hosted the show and insisted on showing it. Otherwise, it would have never been seen.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

My agreement with Albert had been for films of three to five minutes. I'd wanted three, he wanted five. Because the heart surgery one was thirteen minutes, it necessitated commercials in the middle and on either end - which meant we were away from the live show for close to twenty minutes.

CRAIG KELLEM:.

One of Albert's films got lost at the Grand Central Station post office and he went completely apes.h.i.t. No one could find it. So Albert, long-distance, through his willpower and his endless energy, managed to actually find the specific postal clerk who had handled it. It was like a whole investigation conducted by Albert Brooks to find the lost film, which he eventually did.

BARBARA GALLAGHER:.

I was in an office with Eugene Lee and Franne Lee, they were married at the time and had this little baby. Also in the office was Craig Kellem, the talent coordinator, and Gary Weis, the film guy, and then Howard Sh.o.r.e's office was next door. So you'd try to have a conversation on the phone with anybody, doing business, and Eugene and Franne were always fighting and she was always crying, always crying. They were in a bad way. Craig was always screaming at somebody, and Gary was in his own world. And I was dealing with Albert Brooks and Penelope Spheeris, because Penelope was producing Albert's films. She shot them too.

Albert was always wanting more money. Lorne only needed like tiny pieces and we were getting ten- and twelve-minute pieces. And he'd be on the phone complaining and I'd say, "Albert, we have a whole show here, you can't do those things, we don't have the time." He was good about it, but it was constant, constant, "You can't do this, Albert." Finally Penelope would sit on him and get him to cut the film.

HERBERT SCHLOSSER:.

The Albert Brooks films never appealed to me, to be honest with you. They slowed the show down. I think he's a brilliant guy, but I just didn't find him that funny.

JUDITH BELUSHI:.

In the first three shows, John was the opening scene of the first show and I don't think he had a good scene again for three shows. Something that made a break of sorts was the third or fourth bee scene, when he went off on "I hate being a bee" and this whole "bee" thing, and he had his antennae swinging around his head in some special way. It was really the first time he got to show his personality and show that there was more to him, and he got a great response. But it took a while. It was slow to grow.

CANDICE BERGEN, Host: After the first couple shows, the dynamics of everything became so complicated and so loaded. People were learning things. They realized that you couldn't do the show stoned, because they were missing their costume changes. A live show was not compatible with gra.s.s. And then the burnout rate was so high, especially for the writers, because they were really just putting in all-nighters routinely.

CHEVY CHASE:.

On "Weekend Update," I was being a newscaster; I was being Roger Grimsby, actually. You know, it came out of that: "Good evening, I'm Roger Grimsby, and here now the news." One of the strangest pieces of syntax I've ever heard in my life: "And here now the news." But I knew I should say something. And on the fourth show, it just came out: "Good evening. I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not." And that was it.

CRAIG KELLEM:.

There was a momentum from the beginning, but what was interesting was that, even though I don't remember the ratings being unbelievable after the first couple of shows, Lorne - ever the decider of what was what - decided the show was a hit right from the beginning and acted out of that belief, and it was infectious. I remember what he said. He said, quote, "I guess we're a hit." I thought, "Where's that coming from?" But it was vintage Lorne Michaels. He believed it was a hit. He felt good about it. It got on the air. He looked on the bright side of the numbers and the bright side of the reviews. He certainly got good feedback from friends and family. And that was it. It was a hit show. It's wonderful, the strength of his belief in how he sees things in this world.

He's also not the type of guy who's going to humbly share credit for something when he feels and thinks that it's his baby, and why should he share, particularly with d.i.c.k Ebersol? Ebersol came from ABC, where he worked for Roone Arledge, and Roone managed to work his way into being executive producer and was also the network guy. So I think Ebersol kind of wanted to follow in Roone's path and had a sort of stage-door-Johnny aspect to his persona and wanted to be part of it and wanted to be one of the gang. But he wasn't one of the gang. He was d.i.c.k Ebersol from NBC.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

Lorne and I never had any real disagreements between us until the fourth show, the first time Candice Bergen did the show. There was a complete f.u.c.kup that night with NBC, where they made this enormous electronic mistake. They basically cued real commercials off of fake commercials. Somebody wasn't paying attention in broadcast control. And Lorne went nuts.

If you asked Lorne what I contributed to the show, what I think he would say is that during the development stage and the launch, I created an island on which he could exist and no one else could touch him.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

Candy's show, the fourth show, was the first show, I would say, that was a Sat.u.r.day Night Live like the ones we have now. The week before, when Rob Reiner hosted, Andy Kaufman did a long piece, there was a long Albert Brooks film, and a long monologue by Rob. On the Candy show, we sort of hit our stride. We'd had our first week off, and we worked hard on the writing.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

Now comes week five. New York magazine comes out with Chevy Chase - on the cover. John is radically p.i.s.sed off, because he sees Chevy running away with the show; now it's going to be all about Chevy. Onstage, John had been the star, not Chevy.

We do show six, which is a wonderful week, Lily Tomlin's come to do the show. Now we got Thanksgiving off. On Friday, we all get an advance copy of the Sunday New York Times. Major story: Sat.u.r.day Night Live is called the most important and most exciting development in television comedy since Your Show of Shows. It's this drop-dead b.l.o.w. .j.o.b. It was just unbelievable. And this is the same New York Times that did not even review show one with George Carlin.

They also printed a review that John J. O'Connor wrote on the second show, where Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel got together again for the first time, and his review essentially was that the show was not very good, but he couldn't be entirely fair in saying that because he missed connections on his way home from dinner on the subway, and so he missed forty minutes of the show. Can you believe that they f.u.c.king printed that thing?

LORNE MICHAELS:.

It was humiliating that the critic thought it was a music show and reviewed it that way. He said, "Another Simon and Garfunkel reunion," of which there hadn't been one since 1968.

ROSIE SHUSTER:.

One of the things we heard about the first four or five shows, while it was becoming the sensation that it would be, was that Chevy kind of jumped ahead of the pack, so to speak, and that started a kind of a resentment on the part of some people, particularly John, toward Chevy.

Chevy was writing his own segment using his own name - "I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not" - plus doing the physical shtick at the beginning. He was easily identifiable, whereas it took people so many years to catch on to what Danny's talent was, because he would disappear into characters. And Chevy just shot ahead. It wasn't that surprising. It was going to take John a little while longer. He was used to being beloved on the stage of the Lampoon show and had a following of people, but to translate to television, especially if you have an att.i.tude about television, takes a little while.