Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (9 page)

Lorne sent in notes after the Friday night run-through and he said to me, “I need two minutes.” And I said, “Cut two minutes?” And he said, “No, I need two minutes. All you get is two minutes.” So it was a drastic cut in the piece, and frankly as a new performer then I didn’t have a little hunk like Andy Kaufman’s Mighty Mouse. I didn’t have a two-minute thing that I could plug into the show, and I didn’t have a stand-up piece that felt like what the show should be that I could have scored in two or three minutes. So we had a big dilemma. And after being involved with Lorne and the show for so long, we were all kind of confused as to what to do. And then when we saw the rundown, they had put me on at five to one. The last five minutes of the show, how can you score? This wasn’t what we had talked about. So my representatives said they were going to come in on Saturday and talk to Lorne.

BARBARA GALLAGHER:

Lorne said to me, “We have to cut Billy,” after dress rehearsal. “Why don’t you go tell Buddy?” I said, “Me? Me tell Buddy? What’re you, crazy?” He said, “Yeah, you’ve got to tell him.” Lorne didn’t like confrontation. He hated it. So I went and told Buddy. I said, “I think it’s a mistake, I know Lorne feels terrible that he has to do this.” I said, “Buddy, don’t kill the messenger. I love Billy.”

LORNE MICHAELS:

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 Saturday 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 associate 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 passionate 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 bumped, 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 associate 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 God, 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 goddamned 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 hitand-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 Saturday 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
Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell
over on ABC at eight
P.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
Saturday 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 title sequence, I just went around and photographed New York at night. Actually, the first titles 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 anticipate. 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.