Live From New York Part 31

It was a period of time in which I knew I couldn't move people back to normal, but maybe we could at least get them to start doing the things they normally did, to be able to deal with some of the pain they were going through. One of the ways you get through a horrible catastrophic event - like if you lose your mother or your father or a loved one - is you grieve, you mourn, and then you try to get back into your normal way of life. So I pushed them to go ahead with the show.

I thought the show made a tremendous contribution, and I thought the way they handled it - I've seen that tape maybe two or three times since then - was absolutely magnificent. It's hard to watch it and not have a tear in your eye.

I'll tell you what happened the night of the show. I was operating at that point on like two or three hours' sleep per night, and I was going to go home immediately after the opening. I was going to leave after the beginning and not stay for the whole show. And Fire Commissioner Von Essen and I went upstairs to Lorne's office to get our stuff - and we couldn't leave.

And I don't know if that was the funniest Sat.u.r.day Night ever, but to me it was, because it was like I literally hadn't laughed from September 11th up to that point. So it was a little bit like when you go to a restaurant and you're very hungry and the food tastes terrific; you're not sure if the food really is terrific or you're just very hungry.

But we just spent the next hour and a half in Lorne's office just laughing. We couldn't leave. And it was like a release. There were a number of the police officers and firefighters who remained as guests; I could see it was like a release for them too. It was like, "I can laugh now. This is terrific." And I thought they really rose to the occasion. It was a very funny show and a very sensitively done show, because you could easily have made a terrible mistake with a show like that.

WILL FERRELL:.

I have a hard time figuring out what the viewpoint of the 9/11 show was. I guess in the final a.n.a.lysis you can't critique it the way you would any other show. Some people said to me, "Great job, it was wonderful," and other people said, "That was lame," because we didn't do really tough sketches. It was a benign show, and maybe that was the best thing to do under the circ.u.mstances. The biggest thing I'll take away from it was after the show - talking to firemen and policemen. They just kept thanking us and saying, "Thanks for the break, we really needed it," and we were going, "What?! We should be thanking you." I did get a little bit emotional toward the end, but I still had my hard hat on.

RUDOLPH GIULIANI:.

I think they've been unerring in their sensitivity and the way in which they've handled September 11. I was at the show when they did the open with Will Ferrell playing President Bush offering the Bush-Cheney plan for dealing with the suicide bombers, in which they would offer telephone s.e.x as opposed to the seventy-two virgins, and I thought it was hilarious. And I think the night of that show they did the whole thing with Jesse Jackson calling up the Taliban and wanting to go over there and be the one to be called upon to settle it, which was very, very funny.

MARCI KLEIN:.

I live downtown near the World Trade Center, and after the tragedy occurred on September 11th, I couldn't get back to my apartment. Like everyone else, I was incredibly upset. I couldn't believe what was happening.

We had been in the midst of planning our first show of the season, which was scheduled to air on September 29th. A couple days after the attack, I told Lorne, "The first show cannot happen. This is not a time to be funny. There is no way we can do a show in two weeks." Lorne told me he thought I was right, but he didn't want to cancel just yet. It was too early. Given that Mayor Giuliani wound up telling us he wanted us to go ahead and do the show, Lorne was right not to have immediately canceled it.

Reese Witherspoon was scheduled to host, and her agent called me and said, "What are you doing, what is going to happen?" I said, "Well, we are going to try and do what we can." Obviously none of us had ever been faced with doing the show under such circ.u.mstances, but you can't call it a hardship. We were all lucky enough to be alive and have our families intact. So many people in New York weren't in the same position. I was really proud of the way everyone on the show kept that perspective.

I'll never forget how remarkable Reese wound up being as host. She just did a terrific job and never let the pressure get to her. Reese was a total pro. She showed up with her baby and worked really hard. Everybody was impressed. I will always be grateful for the way she acted. It was such a difficult time for everybody, maybe the most diffi-cult time ever in the history of the show.

But when Mayor Giuliani stood there with the firemen, it was one of the most stirring moments I'd experienced since becoming part of the show. Everyone in the studio audience was just transfixed by it - the Paul Simon song, the firemen and the mayor standing silently and listening. I couldn't help wondering how many of the people watching at home that night had lost someone they loved on September 11, and were perhaps finding some comfort in the way it was done.

Meanwhile, Ben Stiller was supposed to host the following week. Ben was a member of the cast, briefly, back in 1989. We had booked him the previous year because we knew he had a movie coming out in September. He had actually been booked eight months in advance. Now I didn't even know this, but someone in my office had been getting e-mails from Ben Stiller's office in early September with a lot of special requests for him while he was hosting - things like "a groomer," and other stuff. The Friday before Reese hosted, I got a call at 6:30 P.M. from Ben Stiller's publicist. Without the hint of an apology, she just announced that "Ben is dropping out of the show."

Now I will admit that I was still very shaken about September 11, in part because I lived so close to the towers, and I was scared out of my mind, so maybe that helps explain why I just went crazy. I said, "How dare you call and cancel like this? Ben is from New York. He should be f.u.c.king showing up with bells on to help the city through this! Haven't you heard what the mayor said?" She started saying he was canceling because of September 11th, and I said, "Wait a second. Reese Witherspoon, who has never done the show, who doesn't even really know if she can handle this - and, unlike Ben, was never even a cast member - is doing the first show. Don't you think Ben ought to maybe rethink it for a second?" And she said to me, "I can't believe you would be so insensitive." I said to her, "Listen, let's just be clear about one thing: The world isn't going to come to an end because Ben Stiller doesn't host Sat.u.r.day Night Live. On the grand scale of things, I just saw three thousand people die out my kitchen window. That's what matters."

I was freaking out. I just said, "Fine. If that's the way he feels, I'm happy to let it go." I think she was surprised. I couldn't believe he would cancel like that. And then I hung up. Someone in my office who had overheard the conversation then said to me, "You don't understand. I think he's dropping out because we were saying no to a lot of stuff that he had wanted while he was hosting." I told her I thought it was more than that: "He's just scared of not being funny."

With that, I call Lorne and tell him what happened. I said, "I dis-invited him," and Lorne said, "Fine. We'll get someone else." We were just dumbstruck. Ben never called Lorne, he never called me, he never wrote a letter to the show, nothing. Then, I turn on the f.u.c.king TV a couple days later and who do I see but Ben Stiller. He's on The View, the Today show, he's on every show doing press for his movie. I said to Lorne, "Something's not right here." Turns out they had moved his movie up a week because, they said, the world needed comedy. So what really happened was, Ben's people wanted me to move Ben to the first show and reschedule Reese, you know? I just think it is so wrong what he did.

On the day of the anthrax discovery at 30 Rock, I was at home, and when I called my office after hearing the news, a lot of people there were obviously hysterical. Drew Barrymore was the guest host for that week's show, and she said, "I am going to leave, calm myself down, and go back to my hotel." I completely understood. Then I made sure to tell everyone that if they didn't feel comfortable staying in the building, they should go home. Some people did say, "I am getting out of here, and I will come back when it is fine." It was a very scary situation. Just horrible.

STEVE HIGGINS:.

Marci was in control on the anthrax crisis, and so it's one of those things where you go, "Too many cooks spoil the broth. If they need me, they'll call me." I did talk to Drew about it after she talked to the doctor. She was freaked out in the beginning, but then in the end she put on that game face and went ahead with it.

MARCI KLEIN:.

I calmed Drew down, but I felt bad for her. Everyone thought she had left town and she didn't. She stayed and she did the show. And this show is really scary to do under the best of circ.u.mstances.

ANA GASTEYER:.

When I found out I was pregnant, I tried to keep it secret. I was really paranoid. I was a wreck. I just didn't really know how my being pregnant was going to go over. I had a good feeling about it, but I didn't know if they would want me to leave or what. Tom, in wardrobe, I told right away, because he knows my body so well with the weekly fittings - a nightmare, by the way - but I also knew it would be our challenge to keep this kind of under wraps as best we possibly could. Fortunately everyone I work with is such a narcissist, they don't have time to worry about what other people are doing. James, my writer, who I shared an office with, said, "You had gained some weight but you weren't b.i.t.c.hing about it, so I kind of knew." You know, it flashed on him: There's an actress in my midst who's not screaming about how fat she is.

When I told Lorne, he didn't seem surprised, but he never really seems surprised about anything. He was fantastic about it, actually. He's a father; he was very supportive. I think he was afraid I was coming in to say I was sick or something had happened. I think he was glad to hear it was good news. He was really cool about making it clear that it wasn't going to impact me in a negative way. Then again, he didn't throw his arms around me, or plant a kiss on me.

My husband and I tried to plan it in such a way that it would work for my career, but you can't really predict conception. It actually happened exactly as I wanted it to. I got pregnant in September, I showed halfway through the season, and I'm due five weeks after the last show of the season. I think Lorne was pleased that my biology had agreed with the format of the show.

In some ways the denial, not telling people, really helped me, because I just had to kind of plow through. I remember when I first started here thinking, "There is no way I'm going to be able to pull an all-nighter." And it's such a routine part of my life now that I think pregnancy fatigue is nothing compared to what we normally go through in a week.

It's worse in the first trimester, and I managed to get through it. I was very careful. I probably had more caffeine than most pregnant women do - not a lot. In a lot of ways it was nice, because it gave me perspective, it gave me like an outside life. This show means so much to people who work here. It's a lifestyle, it's a fraternity, it's a part of everything that you are, so sometimes that's dangerous, because you're in the well and you can't get out of it. It's nice to have something that's also meaningful.

It was really important to me that my work stay consistent. I'm proud that I was able to keep working at the pace that I did. I'm well represented on the show. I have been the entire time I've been here. There are weeks I've been in a s.h.i.tty mood and say I wish my thing got picked. But I can always figure out the logic; there's always something that makes sense as to why things happen. It's emotional, and I have plenty of moments when I think, "I can't believe my thing got cut," but I just feel that Lorne's predominantly fair with people, and I think he's handled my pregnancy in kind.

The other people in the cast are all completely cute about it. I feel like they're practically going to ask me where babies come from, like, "How's it going to come out?" They're all so young and it's just not really in their sphere. A lot of them touch my belly. I had my dukes up about being written out or not being acknowledged, and I remember being pleasantly surprised that a fair number - especially of the male writers - aren't even really hung up on it. Sometimes I'm pregnant in a sketch, and sometimes I'm not. Sometimes it's just me in a scene, which is really nice, because they can use it as a joke or they don't have to. I made that really clear, because I'm not uptight about it. It's much cuter than I expected.

MAYA RUDOLPH:.

My first year here they had a Mother's Day special. I wasn't sure how I was going to deal with it. I have to say being here during that and hearing everybody have fun with their moms and doing funny bits, I was very jealous because my bit was very somber and serious. But in the end I was very happy to share that with my family, not only with my father but with my stepfather too. Because it isn't something you see very often on television. I have a j.a.panese stepmother and my dad is Jewish and I'm mixed. We are like this motley crew.

Molly Shannon and I both lost our moms when we were really little. You're certainly kind of alone in that when you're growing up, and it's rare to find people, let alone women, who have lost their mothers so young. It's kind of like belonging to a club when you find each other. Molly and I have a similar path that we followed, and it's very interesting to both of us.

I was planning on doing this when I grew up when my mom was still alive, but there's definitely no question that comedy got me through a lot of horrible stuff that I went through as a kid. If my mom didn't have a natural gift to be a singer, I think she would have been a comedian. That's nice to know.

All television shows obviously live or die by ratings. Fortunately for Sat.u.r.day Night Live, its ratings built steadily from its first year - already successful - to 1978, a peak year in terms of creativity and Nielsens as well. For that season, SNL averaged a 12.6 rating and powerhouse 39 share (a rating is a percentage of all TV homes, and a share is a percentage of TV homes with their sets on at that time). By contrast, for the 200001 season, SNL averaged a 5.4 rating and 15 share, but the drop isn't nearly as dramatic as it sounds, because when the show began it had virtually no compet.i.tion but old movies on local stations. There weren't hundreds of cable channels; cable was mostly recycled movies, with little original programming.

Jean Doumanian's experiment in failure, the 198081 season, scored the lowest SNL ratings in four years, even though the number of NBC affiliates carrying the show had grown. d.i.c.k Ebersol's first year scored a lower average than Doumanian's, but arguably the audience had been chased away and needed to be lured back by positive word-of-mouth. Ebersol kept the audience from slipping away further but did not equal the best ratings of the first five-year period.

Lorne Michaels's return to the show in 1985 didn't electrify the nation either, and the ratings remained virtually the same as in Ebersol's last year. They rose during the rest of the decade as Michaels rea.s.serted himself and the show regained its status. Throughout the run, of course, the show has been treasured by the network for the demographic profile of its viewers - youngish and affluent, the advertisers' favorites - and today networks read demographic tea leaves more religiously than they do the numbers of total viewers and households. Sat.u.r.day Night Live, for better or worse, was instrumental in bringing this about.

Through good times and bad, Sat.u.r.day Night Live has remained NBC's highest-rated late-night show, and once it was established, it became responsible for hundreds of millions in annual profits. It has never lost money, though some network executives claim it came close.

Today's seasonal averages of a 5.4 rating and 15 share may seem low compared to the 12.6 and 39 of 197879, but Sat.u.r.day Night Live's ratings are still considered excellent and its demographics exemplary. An attempt by ABC to imitate the show in 1980 with a shrill Los Angeles based series called Fridays lasted only two seasons, but at one point in its first season it briefly outrated Doumanian's version of SNL. In recent years, SNL has handily b.u.mped off such wannabe compet.i.tors as a Howard Stern comedy show aired by CBS affiliates, and it easily out-paces, in ratings and virtually every other way, Mad TV on Fox.

WARREN LITTLEFIELD, NBC Executive: What's truly amazing is that it's reinvented itself so many, many, many times. And what's equally amazing is that I was a viewer when it first premiered, and I'm a viewer now. I spent a lot of years at NBC - it was part of the crown jewels of the network - but just as a pure come-to-the-set-for-the-joy-of-it experience, I've been there through all those eras. I've been there and watched my children now come there. And there's precious few things in television that have accomplished that.

JAMES DOWNEY:.

I think these days Lorne probably takes the network's calls more. I think Lorne's personal tastes are probably much closer to performers than to pure writers. To the extent that the network doesn't agree with the writing staff, Lorne probably agrees on the whole more with the network.

ANDY BRECKMAN:.

The problem now is in that room. It's who is or isn't standing up to Lorne, who is maybe taking him on when his instincts are a little low-brow or, you know, too middle-of-the-road, or too safe - who is defending the conceptual writers' pieces in that room. You can almost see by looking at the show what's happening in that room, the room where they do the read-through on Wednesday nights. You can just see it. What's happening, from the little I've seen of the show, is that n.o.body is defending the smarter pieces, because there always are smarter pieces being written. The read-throughs, by and large, have a great variety. They are, all of them, fifty sketches long. And there's a lot of sketches that are great ideas but could use a little work to make them better, and with a little nurturing over the course of Thursday rewrite could be very strong. But there has to be somebody in the room championing those pieces. And I can just tell, just looking at the show now, that there's n.o.body standing up to Lorne.

CHRIS PARNELL:.

We find out each summer around the first of July if we're coming back or not. So in the summer of 2001, when July first rolled around, SNL asked the actors waiting for news about their contracts if they could hold out for a couple more weeks because Lorne's mom had pa.s.sed away, and they asked for time for him to deal with that. And we're all like, okay, fine, whatever. So two weeks go by and then they ask for another extension of another week. Meanwhile, I find out they're auditioning new people for the cast, so I got in touch with the other people who were on the chopping block - Horatio, Maya, and Rachel - and then I heard Maya got brought back and Rachel and Horatio also. And then finally I talked to my manager, and he said, "Lorne's not bringing you back." So it was a pretty big shock. I thought I was doing all right there. I really thought we'd all come back, but it was me that didn't.

I gave up my apartment in New York and moved back to L.A. I kept hearing that I might be coming back, and finally I just told my manager to quit telling me these tales, because he would talk to Lorne and he'd say to me, "Lorne says he might be bringing you back," and I'd get my hopes up and nothing would happen and I'd be disappointed and depressed again. So I said, "Don't tell me anything else unless they want to bring me back for real."

Finally, around the end of February 2002, I was about to test for this pilot and found out that day that SNL wanted me to come back for the rest of the season. We were hoping to get a guarantee for the next season too, but we couldn't get that. So I just finally decided that I love the job and I didn't feel ready to go when I was let go. Lorne apologized for putting me through this waiting thing and this sort of limbo situation. He said he wasn't trying to cause me any more pain. The only reference he made was to the budget, that it was a budget issue, and that they'd hired four new cast members. He just blamed it on the budget.

One of the things that made being fired bearable was that there was such a collective outpouring of shock from the writers and other cast members that seemed really sincere. It made me feel like I wasn't just sort of living in some fairyland where I thought everything was okay and it wasn't.

JON STEWART:.

As much as I'd like to think I understand television production and understand what it takes to put on a show, I was absolutely knocked out by how they put that show on, just knocked out. The ability of each fiefdom to know their s.h.i.t, do their s.h.i.t, and execute at the level they execute was remarkable - really, really impressive to watch. It's unprecedented, it really is.

You don't really think about what effect your presence on the show is going to have. The s.h.i.t comes all so fast, you don't have time to think about reactions, and if you start thinking about it, about the effect, you're sunk. All you can think about intuitively is, "That looks good, yeah, that's funny, I'll go with that, or that seems a little too didactic." You've got to be into the thing. If you start thinking like, "Maybe that'll get picked up by the wire services," then you're f.u.c.ked.

MAYA RUDOLPH:.

I have a hard time sleeping. I drive myself crazy with worry and I make myself sick with fear from everything in the world. There are certain weeks where I'm frustrated here and certain weeks that I'm mad at myself because I didn't write what I should have written or I've shot myself in the foot. I think if anything, my biggest thing here and my hardest job to get through is just my own personal fear of not being funny and trying to learn how to write. I never really aspired to be a writer, and here I am writing every week on my favorite show in the world. I make myself sick with worry every week about my writing.

But if I start to take any of this stuff personally or worry about how this is working or how much I'm on, I'm going to drive myself nuts. I have to be here far too many years of my life for that. I don't want to be unhappy here.

I'm such a people pleaser that I'm sure I wouldn't let anybody see all the things that are going on in my brain.

I say pretty nasty things in private. I'm a very foul-mouthed young lady. I have a really wonderfully dirty sense of humor. I love really dirty things. You can ask anyone and they'll tell you the same. I get p.i.s.sed off, but I'm such a Chatty Kathy that everyone ends up hearing about it. I get mad when I'm not in the show or when I f.u.c.k up. If I f.u.c.k up, I shake and I get embarra.s.sed. For whatever reason, I get nervous here but I don't get that nervous. I get nervous like if my dad's here or if there's a guy I think is cute and is watching the show. I don't get nervous because it's Sat.u.r.day Night Live. I get excited because it's Sat.u.r.day Night Live.

AMY POEHLER:.

I'm much too egotistical and insular about my own performance to be able to look at the show as a whole. I do know that everybody who writes and performs here I find really, really talented. I've learned that this show belongs to everybody, and everybody feels very ent.i.tled to talk about when they don't like it and when they do. And everybody likes different things.

Whether the show is doing well or not is the last thing I try to think of, because it just gets too much in your head when you're trying to write. I've never watched old repeats of SNL because I can't bear it. I mean reruns of older seasons of stuff, because if the scene's funny I'm jealous that I didn't think of it. It's too intimidating. I just can't compare myself. I love it so much I can't even watch it.

May 18, 2002, marked the final show of Sat.u.r.day Night Live's twenty-seventh season. Winona Ryder was the host, using SNL as her "coming out" after being largely reclusive following an arrest for shoplifting. She had been a good soldier throughout the week of rehearsals; she didn't throw any fits, stage any walkouts, or complain about the sketches. If it weren't for some whispers amongst the staff that she had set her sights on Jimmy Fallon, her hosting week would have been almost boring.

Overshadowing Ryder's appearance was the fact that this was to be the last show for Will Ferrell as a cast member. After seven years, he had decided it was time to move on, despite the fact that Michaels and the rest of the producers and cast wanted him to stay. Much of the show was being designed as a final tribute to Will and his many characters - Alex Trebek, the professor in the "Lovers" sketch, even Neil Diamond.

An hour before dress rehearsal, Neil Diamond called on Michaels's line, and when the a.s.sistant said there was a guy on the phone claiming to be Neil Diamond, those sitting around shouted in unison, "Hang up," believing it to be a crank call. Minutes later, when coproducer Marci Klein entered, it turned out she'd been trying to reach him, and it had been the real Neil returning her call. Klein called Diamond back at his hotel and talked him into making an appearance on the show while Will was doing his Diamond parody. To listen to her pitch was to listen to someone who clearly had done this many times before. "It'll be great," she told him. "We'll send a car for you, and you can spend a few minutes with Will figuring out what you want to do." Klein, along with producer Steve Higgins and Michaels, had already decided they didn't want to surprise Ferrell; besides, he already knew that the real Alex Trebek was coming in to help finish out the Jeopardy sketch. Diamond agreed, and Klein directed her staff to pick him up and gather Will and anyone else involved in the Diamond number at home base at ten-thirty, between dress and air.

With videotaped good-byes from the cast closing out the show, all that remained for the night was the season-ending party, held downstairs at 30 Rock. There was the usual ma.s.s gathering of New York chic, and the traditional more private room for Michaels, the cast, writers, and VIP's. Donald Trump stood around and watched, while Yankees pitcher David Wells and his wife hung out with former Yankee ace David Cone. Music blared, many danced, but most of all, people seemed to be taking a deep breath. There would be no pressures Monday to invent material for another host, just the promise of summer. Ana Gasteyer would be having a baby, Jimmy Fallon was running off to do a movie for Woody Allen, Tina Fey was writing a movie for Paramount, and so forth.

WILL FERRELL:.

We can't use the word "graduated." I said that to Lorne once and he said, "I hate that word." On my last night, the biggest overriding feeling really was that of it being very surreal. It was emotional at times and then strange in the sense that I had so much to do, and was moving around so much from sketch to sketch that it didn't even really hit me until the very end. And even then I tended to focus on how something played better at dress than it did on air, like I did every week. It got to me more after the show; it was sort of a "retirement party meets a wedding reception." There was a sense of accomplishment but a sense of I was glad it was over. I will miss most the obvious things - the personal relationships and the people. I'll miss most the moments you'll never see: the goofing around during the blocking of sketches on Thursday and Friday. Those were the parts of the week that were the most fun for me. That seventeenth floor has the same feeling of living in a dorm, except that everybody is doing comedy, and I liked that feeling.

What I'll miss the least for sure is the crazy hours, especially Tuesday night. There really is no reason why we have to come in late on Tuesday and work late and write sketches until seven A.M. It's a remnant of the c.o.ke days, I think. It was fun at first in a weird sort of way, but after seven years of doing it, you have to say, "Wait a minute - why do we do it that way?"

What I hope to do now is establish a career in features; that would be great. My dream of all dreams would be to do what Tom Hanks and Jim Carrey have been able to do: make the transition somewhere down the line from doing comedy to dramatic parts in the movies.

On May 21, 2002 - a few days after that final show of the season - about 150 members of the Sat.u.r.day Night Live family, past and present, gathered in Studio 8H to pay tribute to Audrey Peart d.i.c.kman, one of the show's producers from its beginnings in 1975 to 1993, who had died the previous summer. d.i.c.kman occupied a special place in the hearts of the show's cast and crew for more than two decades; thus the occasion became a rare moment when the show's past and present met in the show's home studio.

Chevy Chase chatted amicably with Bill Murray, old animosities gone with the wind, or rather with the pa.s.sing years. Old-timer Dan Aykroyd joked with new-timers Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey and Horatio Sanz. Such veteran writers as Rosie Shuster, Marilyn Suzanne Miller, Ann Beatts, Herb Sargent, and Alan Zweibel showed up, like graduates at homecoming.

Lorne welcomed everyone to 8H, made very brief remarks, said he had difficulty speaking about Audrey, and left the stage. Murray, among those memoralizing d.i.c.kman, recalled how he used to pick her up in the air and spin her over his head. "She was very light," he said.

Murray said the date marked another milestone, the thirteenth anniversary of Gilda Radner's death. "Audrey's gone, Gilda's gone, Belushi's gone," Murray said, "and there's so many other people that should have gone first. A lot of them are in this room today." Much laughter from the crowd. "Anybody here that wants to admit that they should have died ahead of Audrey?" The question was rhetorical and facetious, but a few people raised their hands.

Michaels stood at the back of the room during the speeches, inescapably and perpetually, if remotely, patriarchal. It is a family, after all - a family of gifted misfits and brilliant oddb.a.l.l.s - and it comes together now and then to remember, to celebrate, to mourn - and, no matter how solemn the occasion, to laugh.

ALAN ZWEIBEL, Writer: Emotions are things that I've never really seen Lorne easily verbalize. I was hoping, hoping that there would be something emotional that he would say at Audrey's memorial. Brad Grey, like many others, said it's too bad he has so much trouble emoting. You just a.s.sume over the course of years, especially when people have kids, that there's a softening, that there's some sort of emotional acknowledgment, you know. I guess some people it doesn't work with. I can't speak about Lorne authoritatively, I just don't know anymore.

I live in California, so I hadn't seen a lot of those people and combinations of people in many years, and I was affected by it in a very, very profound way. In a wonderful way. I was happy that I had these kinds of feelings. My mind immediately went to, "Jesus, if Lorne dies, are we still going to be able to get together like this? Who's going to throw the party?"

DON OHLMEYER:.

I've always admired what Lorne's been able to do for so long. When you think of all the different sketches that have gone into SNL since, what, 1975 - when you think of all the things that they've done, there's a lot of chaff among the wheat. But G.o.d, the wheat is spectacular.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

I tend to think that the most interesting work done each week gets on the air. I think that's what an editor's supposed to do, bring out the best in writers. Do we get the best writers? I think people who want to do this kind of work find us. Now there's Mad TV, and on cable there's a bunch of these kinds of shows. Conan O'Brien, Leno, do all these sketches. Most of the writers who have been on The Simpsons are people who pa.s.sed through here. Seinfeld too.

I've never left here on any Sat.u.r.day night thinking, "Well, that was a great one." I tend to see only the mistakes. That hasn't changed. Neither has the amount of adrenaline that you produce to get through the show. What has changed is that the hangover of it is generally gone by sometime Sunday, whereas it used to be that a show that didn't work could ruin a whole month. You'd go back and obsess about it. It's like at the beginning you just worry all the time, and when you get older you know when to worry.

Now on the weekend I have kids jumping on me. You can't get out of it with "Daddy worked really, really hard," or "Daddy was up till four-thirty in the morning." The worst thing is when you find that you still have the taste of beer in your mouth and you're getting up and being a dad and it's only been four or five hours since you went to bed.

GWYNETH PALTROW:.

Fame is such a weird and distorting thing. I've thought a lot about it, and my theory is that you kind of stop growing at the age you are when you become famous. Because what happens is, people start removing all your obstacles, and if you have no obstacles you don't know who you are. You don't have real perspective on the problems that face you in life, how to surmount them, and what kind of character you have. When you're in the public eye, people project things onto you, and if you take them on yourself, they're very scattering and they can alienate you. Being famous can be very damaging in lots of ways. Sat.u.r.day Night Live is proof of that.

DARRELL HAMMOND:.

I try to improve myself every week. It's the only hope I have of making it in show business is to improve. I have to be better than I was. That's the way I look at it, because I'm not a glamour person. If that's what it was all about, then I would just be glamorous. You know, I would love to be a glamour boy, but I'm not.

DAN AYKROYD:.

Oh listen, I'm a big fan of the show today. I look at Second City as the B.A. program in comedy and improv and writing, and I look at Sat.u.r.day Night Live as the masters program. And then after that point in life, you get your Ph.D. in whatever you go into. So I would say I probably have enough knowledge to teach a graduate-level course in film production now.

But definitely Sat.u.r.day Night Live is the masters program, and I look at it as my alma mater, and I love going back. When I'm in New York, I love to go to the show and sit with Lorne and watch it. I love a.s.sociating with the new writers, and I'm a big fan of the current cast. You've got some outstanding players there.

Every era has its great, great moments. I think in our time if you look at Roseanne Roseannadanna and the Coneheads and the Blues Brothers, and other things that we did. And then if you look at Eddie Murphy's time, you know, his Gumby and his Buckwheat and just some of the things that he did that were outstanding. And then you have Dana Carvey with the Church Lady, which was an amazing amalgam of everything you'd ever want in a scene or sketch - accent, voice, walk, att.i.tude, dialogue, delivery, all that was there. And now Chris's Mr. Peepers, you know, that monkeylike creature that he does, and everything that Will Ferrell does is fantastic, and Horatio is wonderful as well. He's a little undiscovered, I think.

So every year has its breakthrough moments. The tradition's being carried on in a grand way. It's an inst.i.tution.

AMY POEHLER:.

We did a show with Queen Latifah as guest host. In one sketch, she and Maya and I were playing this kind of doo-wop group, these sixties girls, and we rehea.r.s.ed the songs for a couple days beforehand. It was kind of a "Behind the Music" thing. So during the live show, with ten seconds to go before the sketch, we could hear Jena Rositano, the stage manager, talking into her headset saying, "Wait. What? What?? Do you want me to tell them that? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?"

MAYA RUDOLPH:.

We kept hearing her say into her headset, "Do you want me to tell them that?" Then she said, "Okay." And it was like eight seconds to go, and she looks up and says to us, "You're going to be singing with no music. Five, four, three -" And we had four songs to sing! And you just go, "Ugh." The show goes so smoothly most of the time, we don't realize when it f.u.c.ks up how bad things can be. We had dance moves and costume changes and songs and harmonies. We had rehea.r.s.ed it to death and then it just blew up in our faces because there was no music track. That was scary. It was horrible. It was really, really horrible.

AMY POEHLER:.

I loved it. We just sang it without the music. And it was one of those things like, "Oh my G.o.d, the f.u.c.kin' show is live. It really is." Of course there's some poor person who screwed up the music who's getting screamed at, but I loved it. I thought it was super exciting. I used to love that about watching the show. I loved being reminded that anything could happen. I loved the screwups. I loved being reminded that it was live.

AL GORE:.

The timing of my hosting Sat.u.r.day Night Live was driven mainly by the timing of our book tour, and the timing of my decision to run or not run was driven by the end of the calendar year. And the two just began to converge. It's really interesting the way they fell together, two nights in a row. That was not part of a master plan; it just happened that way. I taped 60 Minutes on Sunday, just a few hours before it was shown. I didn't make the final decision really until that week-end. What I had intended to do was to wait until the Christmas vacation period, when all of my family was going to be together. And we were going to take a number of days away from everything and everybody, and I was just going to think it through with them and get their feedback. And because of the week of rehearsals, it ended up with the entire family converging in New York that week.