Live From New York Book Excerpt-

Oct. 28 -- Continue reading chapter one of Live From New York: An Oral History of Saturday Night Live, by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller.

Chapter One Continued:

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:In the first six months, Lorne threatened not to come in to work a lot. He had no way of dealing with these network people. Because Lorne had a vision, and they didn't understand his vision. This was a new show at that time. He made them rebuild the goddamn studio, and they didn't understand that. And he made them get great sound in the studio because they were going to have rock acts, and they didn't understand that.

HOWARD SHORE:What we were going to be doing was really quite technically complicated, but the studio hadn't been kept up to the standards of broadcasting. It was stuck in the late fifties. They hadn't refitted the technology of it over the years. I remember going for that first tour of the studio, and they had game show sets in there and they were doing very low-tech productions in there because it didn't have any of the technology that was really needed to do a live broadcast. I remember feeling like you were still in Toscanini's studio. It's incredible to think that in the 1950s NBC, this great American broadcast network, hired an Italian conductor and gave him his own orchestra, the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and his own studio and his own elevator for the maestro to get up to the eighth floor. When I asked for a music stand to put my scores on, an old stagehand went back into props and brought out Toscanini's music stand - this huge, black, ornate, five-foot-high carved wooden monstrosity. It came up to about my chin. And they said, "You can put your scores on that." That was the only thing of Toscanini's I'd actually seen. It was wonderful. You felt the history of the place.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:When Lorne told NBC they had to spend like three hundred grand to rebuild that studio, they nearly had a breakdown.

CRAIG KELLEM, Associate Producer:He was in a constant battle with the network as it pertained to the economics, particularly about the set. Lorne wanted the set to be like almost this architectural prototype. The argument was, "Hey, you can't even see that on camera," and Lorne's attitude was, "Yes, but I want it. I want it anyway."

EUGENE LEE:They hired Dave Wilson to be the director. He'd done a lot of TV. Dave was a nice man, but he had very strong opinions about things and said them. And there was a lot of incredible feuding about the layout of the studio. All I remember is, we worked on it and worked on it. Dave and I fought tooth and nail about how it would be laid out. I laid it out my way?longways. There was a lot of muttering about how there wouldn't be enough space. I said, "The cameras are on wheels, let the cameras roll to the scenery and not the other way." One day just out of the blue, Lorne comes by and says, "Hey, we've got to go upstairs." And I went with him, and we took the model of the set up to whoever - I think it was Herb Schlosser. We laid it on the coffee table. And Lorne hadn't said much about any of this. But he explained it perfectly to Schlosser. He was like brilliant! I mean really, no kidding. I was knocked out. He said, "This thing goes here, and the camera moves here, and it all stretches around this great big environment." And after that, money didn't seem to be a problem.

DAVE WILSON:The idea of having part of the audience sitting around home base was not that new. I'm sure that kind of thing had been done many times. But the idea of putting an audience in front of those side stages was a little different. It worked well because it gave performers more of an intimate feeling of audience, that they were performing not just for cameras but for a live audience.

HOWARD SHORE:It's true - there is no theme song for Saturday Night Live in the traditional sense. This is inherent in the nature of the show. I wanted the theme music for the show to have an improvisational feel, like the show itself, and I wanted it to grow and change from year to year. And that's why when I listen to the show now after twenty-five, twenty-six years, it still sounds fresh to me and sort of classic, and it wouldn't have if you kept hearing the same hummable melody over and over. Because the nature of the music on the show was interplay between the ten musicians, which is completely different than what you have in a big band or the Carson sound, which is very formalized arrangements written very specifically, and everybody plays what is written on the page. So with the ten musicians I wanted to create interplay like jazz musicians have amongst themselves, and R&B musicians.

It's the same thing as the cast. You have to think of the musicians in the band the same as you think of the cast and how they would play off each other and kind of riff off each other. That was the same feeling that I wanted to create in the music. So it had to have an improvisational nature. The saxophone was just a thing that I loved, and I am a saxophone player, so it was inherent in my soul that it be the predominant voice. Instead of a band playing a piece with a melody, it was an improvisation by a great blues soloist.

BRAD GREY, Manager:Bernie was there for the first dress rehearsal. He looked out and he saw the band rehearsing. And it was getting close to starting time. So he turned to Lorne and he said, "Hey, Lorne, you know the band doesn't have their tuxedos on yet. Better get them into wardrobe." That always made me laugh, because it was so honest of Bernie. Tuxedos! And that's sort of, I guess, the merging of two generations.

DICK EBERSOL:Lorne's telling me every day that Chevy's got this great idea to open every show with a fall, and I am absolutely opposed. But Chevy was the only one who was funny and could write television for television. We were reading scripts in those early days where people would have a three-or four-minute sketch take place on five sets, and it didn't take a real scholar to know you couldn't do that if we were going to do a live television show in a box the size of 8H.

DAVE WILSON:Many of them had written for magazines or the National Lampoon Radio Hour or that kind of thing, so it wasn't as if they were brandnew to writing, it's just that they weren't familiar with the medium of television. So of course we'd always go through things where you'd read their script and it says, "We start with a flooded studio." And you'd say, "Well, you better rethink that."

JANE CURTIN:Before the show went on the air, we would all have to hang out on the seventeenth floor with the writers and pitch ideas and do all of that kind of stuff, and Lorne would call us all into his office for whatever reason, and he would always end up by telling us what "stars" we were. And I'm thinking, "Hey, we haven't earned it yet," not understanding the machine - the PR and all this stuff that was going to happen and that they were going to make happen. I think Lorne was trying to pump up the arrogance and the adrenaline in the room- which wasn't hard - and I understand now that in order to do that kind of a show or any kind of a comedy show, you have to have arrogance and you have to have adrenaline. And by telling people they're stars, maybe that's one way of doing that. But sadly, a couple of days later, I think some poor elevator operator was punched because he dared to ask somebody in the cast for an ID. I just kept fighting that kind of thing. I just kept thinking, "No no no no no, it's just a TV show. It'll be okay, and I'm fine."

BILLY CRYSTAL, Cast Member:Three months before the show was supposed to debut, Lorne had found me in a club called Catch a Rising Star. I went, "This is a television producer?" He sounded like David Steinberg the comedian because he was from Canada. He was very appealing, he was very smart, and he was funny in a different way than I envisioned television producers to be. He asked me if I was interested in being a resident in the company. He felt I would do six appearances on the show, and then he saw me becoming a host of the show, among all the other hosts, in two years. They'd be grooming me to be one of the main guys. That's how it came down prior to the show.

BUDDY MORRA, Manager:Billy turned down a Bill Cosby special, who was the hottest thing in the country at that time, to take Saturday Night Live, because they said, "If you do the Cosby show, we're not interested in having you do this." And so we opted to do Saturday Night Live. We had agreed in advance for Billy to do his special piece on the first show, and that the piece required a certain amount of time; it wouldn't work in less time. So Billy was coming in every day from Long Island, and he just sat around all day long. They never spoke to him, they never got to him, they never said anything to him. He'd leave at the end of the day, after spending eight or nine hours waiting around, and then come back the next morning again. This went on for pretty much the entire week.

BILLY CRYSTAL:Then we get to the Friday night. We had a run-through for a live audience and some NBC executives. Now my routine was an audience participation piece and it utilized Don Pardo and it was this African safari thing with sound effects. I played Victor Mature - it's not going to sound funny - walking across the camp in Africa to knock the tarantula spider off Rita Hayworth's chest. So that was the setup. Don Pardo, who we never saw on camera, had his hands in a big bowl of potato chips, and every time I took a step, Don would crunch the potato chips so it was like this whole sound effects thing. It was really funny on Friday night. And it ran six, six and a half minutes, because it took a long time to explain it. But there were laughs in the explanation and then the piece just sort of went on its own. And Friday night, it was the comedy highlight of the night, and I thought, "I'm in great shape here." George Carlin's hosting this new show and I knew everybody in the show and this is going to be sensational. 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.

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.

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 sang along with a recording of 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 semiliterate 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!" Cue music, cue announcer, cue flashing applause sign - cue America to a seismic change in television comedy, in the whole notion of What's Funny, and especially in what you can say, and do, on television.

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.

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!"

DICK 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.