Live From New York

TOM SHALES and JAMES ANDREW MILLER.

LIVE FROM NEW YORK.

With undying love to my children, Zachary, Sophie, and Chloe.

- J.A.M.

To John Carmody - distinguished colleague, irreplaceable friend.

- T.S.

QUIS SUPERABIT?.

Who Shall Excel Them?

Opening frames, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Warner Bros., 1936.

Acknowledgments.

From the beginning Sat.u.r.day Night Live has been a showcase for cutting-edge music as well as cutting-edge comedy. To keep this book at manageable length, the authors concentrated on the comedy. All the music and great musicians may one day get a book of their own. G.o.dspeed.

If some of the tales told herein have the ring of familiarity, so be it. Much about Sat.u.r.day Night Live, especially its early years, has pa.s.sed into legend. While not every story can be called previously unpublished, many are being told for the first time in the words and voices of the actual partic.i.p.ants. Certain key figures in the show"s history who did not speak on the record to other chroniclers did speak to us, and to them we are especially indebted.

Edie Baskin, Mary Ellen Matthews, and Norman Ng, along with Amber Noland, Aisha Aeyers, and Hillary Ripps, made it possible to include a splendid collection of photographs. Bob Peck of Reelin" in the Years made an important contribution to the paperback edition.

We also wish to express our heartfelt thanks to Brooke Posch, Jennifer Guinier, and Lyle Jackson in Lorne Michaels"s office. No matter how crazed their days, they always made time to be of help. We adore them.

Sean Smith, John Maynard, Harriet Schnitzer, Peter Rose, and Jenna Singer labored tirelessly on transcripts and interview logistics. Liz Nagle and Peggy Leith Anderson, at Little, Brown, graciously helped navigate the production labyrinth. Heather Fain and Marlena Bittner, publicists without peer, woke the town and told the people with vigor and flair.

Our brilliant editor, Geoff Shandler, was an enthusiastic and invaluable voice.

Sloan Harris, our agent and hero, fought the good fights and never gave up - on the book or us. It was a privilege and pleasure to work with him.

Finally, the beautiful Jackie Miller gave her grateful husband unconditional love, and his friend and colleague unconditional support.

- JAMES ANDREW MILLER, TOM SHALES.

Preface to the Paperback Edition.

Live from New York is the book Lorne Michaels asked us to write and then refused to read. He may not have read it even yet - or he may just be claiming not to have read it. The man most responsible for the creation, shape, and longevity of Sat.u.r.day Night Live wanted a complete history in book form that took the show from the beginning up to the present - but then, when it was published, he said he feared the contents would be too "personal" and affect him emotionally, and so he put off reading it himself.

Except for being interviewed like everybody else, if at greater length, Michaels had no input whatever into the content of the book. And never asked for any.

Though Michaels is the most important person in the life of the program, television is nothing if not a collaborative process, perhaps to an even greater degree than motion pictures. Sat.u.r.day Night Live represents the work of an almost innumerable collection of contributors - so many over the twenty-eight years of the show"s existence that making our book an oral history, rather than an encyclopedic narrative, was a sometimes frustrating challenge. We couldn"t talk to everybody, dammit.

The goal was to get a cross section of writers, actors, writer-actors, performance people and idea people, major forces and supporting players, household names and behind-the-scenes unknowns, theoretically creating as textured and detailed a mosaic of the program and the process as possible.

Talent, need it be said, doesn"t make a person nice, and may in fact have the opposite effect. We dealt with plenty of ego-driven contrariness over the years of preparing the book, but to our relief, maybe even surprise, there were very few substantive complaints about the book from those quoted in it; thus few changes were necessitated for this edition.

Director John Landis was amused at the notion he would ever use the adjective "trippy," and in fact insisted he"d never said it in his life, even though that"s what it sounds like on the tape. Out of respect and grat.i.tude to him, his "trippy" has been ripped.

Of all the reactions that the book elicited, the ones we feel guiltiest about are those that saw it as an attack on Chevy Chase. When the hardcover edition was published, some reviewers seized on the reminiscences of people who felt wronged by Chevy over the years, even though there are many positive words and stories about him throughout the book. "And They All Hated Chevy" read the headline over one representative review.

They didn"t "all" hate Chevy, and his importance to the show in its formative stages and earliest outings is immense. His cool, knowing flippancy was something new on television, and viewers took to him even though he did anything but mewl for approval on the air. It"s quite possible that without his telegenic smarts, Sat.u.r.day Night Live might not have won the attention and the plaudits it received in its first months on the air, might not even have survived to become the fabled inst.i.tution it is today.

We have another big fat regret. Despite countless requests submitted through a wide variety of contacts, we couldn"t induce Eddie Murphy to be interviewed for the book. We tried again several more times for this edition, but he still wouldn"t budge. Apparently his bittersweet memories of working on the show are more bitter than sweet. But, Eddie! Everybody"s memories are mixed! We don"t take it personally, though, because despite pleading from Michaels and others, Murphy also refused to take part in SNL"s fifteenth reunion and twenty-fifth-anniversary prime-time special. You"ll find the reason why within the pages of this paperback edition, which contains material from a number of interviews not included in the hardcover.

Though the reviews of the hardcover edition, we are grateful to say, were overwhelmingly positive, some critics thought we were too reverential toward the program. The purpose, however, was always to celebrate Sat.u.r.day Night Live, not to deconstruct or debunk it. Because it is, at the end of the day - which is when it airs, and at the end of the week too - truly a TV show like none other, in the extent of its influence and the canny flexibility that keeps it alive. Not just alive but fresh and, every now and then, once again the most talked-about show on the air - once again the craziest kid on the block.

That said, we are grateful to every last one of its veterans, the bright new breed as well as the savvy battle-scarred, whether expansive or relatively tight-lipped. We love them for their brilliance as well as for their tolerance of us as we crept around the wings, the green-room, Lorne"s offices, performers" dressing rooms, and beneath the bleachers, all under the guise of doing research. But then it"s a kick just to hang around at Sat.u.r.day Night Live, even as outsiders, and we enjoyed the luxury of having an excellent excuse to be there.

We wish only the best to the next team of cultural anthropologists and gossips who try to excavate the intricate origins and trace the phenomenal progress of Sat.u.r.day Night Live. For us, the journey was at times a hilarious pleasure and at other times a maddening ordeal - but always, more than anything else, an honor.

- Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller.

Prologue.

Sat.u.r.day Night Live is more than a television show. Since its premiere in 1975, it has served as a trendsetter in American humor and had a remarkable effect on American mores, manners, music, politics, and even fashion. It can"t be said that there"d never been anything like it in TV history, because one of its bold strokes was reviving a format as old as television itself - in fact, older: the variety show, with music and comedy sketches intermixed. Though the basic form wasn"t entirely new, the content was, and so were the show"s att.i.tude and approach and collective mind-set. Tea had been around for centuries, after all, but the notion of throwing ma.s.s quant.i.ties into Boston Harbor was new. It was revolutionary. So was Sat.u.r.day Night Live.

The people who own and run commercial television networks don"t put a show on the air because they imagine it will break bravely with tradition or set grand new aesthetic standards or stretch the boundaries of the medium - or for any reason whatsoever other than to make money. Sat.u.r.day Night Live wasn"t created because NBC executives yearned to introduce something new and bold into the television bloodstream or the American mainstream. It came to be because Johnny Carson wanted the network to stop airing reruns of his Tonight Show on weekends. For years, NBC"s affiliated stations had been given the choice of slotting The Best of Carson late on Sat.u.r.day or Sunday nights, or neither. One fine day in 1974, Carson told NBC to yank them altogether; he wanted to air reruns on weeknights to give himself more time off. NBC bra.s.s had the choice of returning the weekend time to local stations - and thereby kissing a chunk of ad revenue good-bye - or trying to fill the time slot with other programming. And so the word went forth from network president Herbert Schlosser: Develop a new late-night show for Sat.u.r.day.

In 1974, when the decision to annex late Sat.u.r.day nights was made, n.o.body knew what was coming. Ideas that circulated among NBC executives included a weekly variety show hosted by impressionist Rich Little, then under contract to the network. Somebody suggested Linda Ronstadt as costar. Even bland Bert Convy, actor and game-show host, was considered. But all those c.o.c.keyed notions were trashed when a brilliant and ambitious young writer from Canada born Lorne Lipowitz was named executive producer of the new show. He"d made a name for himself with his work on Rowan and Martin"s Laugh-In and a few Lily Tomlin specials and, before leaving Canada, with a fanciful film about a failure in the annual hockey puck crop. His vision would turn TV on its head, turn TV on itself, and prevail for decades to come, even during a few years in which he himself was in absentia.

The man Herb Schlosser took a chance on, Lorne Michaels - then crossing the Great Divide into thirty - gave NBC much, much more than it had bargained for, probably more than it wanted: an adventurous "live" topical satire series that, had executives and advertisers known of its form and content in advance, might never have seen the light of night.

NBC"s Sat.u.r.day Night, as it was originally called, would be the television generation"s own television show - its first. Except in superficial ways, it was unlike anything else then on the air, and it would be years before flummoxed rivals would even try to imitate it. From the ground up it was built to be new, unusual, arresting, surprising, and attractive to baby boomers, the largest generation in American history.

In the decades to come, the success of Sat.u.r.day Night Live sparked a renaissance in topical, satirical, and political humor both on television and off it; launched the careers of innumerable new talents who might otherwise have had little hope of appearing on network TV, including some who"d had little interest in it; hugely expanded the parameters of what was "acceptable" material on the air, bringing it much closer to the realities of everyday American life; and helped bestow upon the comedy elite the hip-mythic status that rock stars had long enjoyed.

And it made a nation laugh - laugh, even when it hurt.

During its earliest weeks on the air, celebrity hosts and musical acts were the essence of the program. As weeks went by, the show"s repertory company of young comedy players, recruited mostly from improvisational troupes in a few major cities, got more time on the air. Even before the original cast left, the show itself had become the star and a new American inst.i.tution - a kind of keepsake to be handed down from generation to generation, both by the performers who served time in its stock company and by the audience that is perpetually replenished as new legions of viewers come of age.

All that and more because Johnny wanted additional time off. At first skeptical about the new show, he was later openly appalled by some of its more outrageous gags (foremost example: An aged comic known as Professor Backwards drowned in the ocean, Chevy Chase reported on SNL"s "Weekend Update," because onlookers ignored his desperate cries of "pleh, pleh"). But the King of Late Night, quite the icon himself, eventually came to terms with the show (and friendly terms with Chase). Michaels said he annually invited Carson to guest-host as a goodwill gesture but was just as annually turned down.

Lorne Michaels propelled TV forward partly by returning to its origins - his philosophy tidily embodied in the seven words that exuberantly, and somehow threateningly, open each edition: "Live from New York, it"s Sat.u.r.day Night!" Though it blazed new trails in the areas of what could be said and done on TV, and initially made censors batty and sponsors skittish, Sat.u.r.day Night Live always had its roots showing: the early golden days of live TV from New York - the days of Studio One and, more relevantly, Your Show of Shows and Caesar"s Hour with Sid Caesar and his troupe. The audience at home watched and laughed, thrillingly aware that "this is happening now" and that there was thus an element of daring and peril to what otherwise amounted to mere entertainment.

Television is not itself an art form, but it provides a showcase for many art forms, and the one plied and perfected by Sat.u.r.day Night Live is the comedy sketch, a vaudeville and burlesque staple that is the theatrical equivalent of the American short story. Over nearly three decades, Sat.u.r.day Night Live has attracted and developed the best sketch-comedy writers in the business - the best when they left if not when they entered. These men and women are a breed unto themselves, a subspecies of comedy writers in general. Neurotic in their own particular ways, most of them have been by nature reclusive, peculiar, and proudly idiosyncratic. That"s not to say the writers who"ve pa.s.sed through SNL have all been of the same temperament or outlook; politically, culturally, socioeconomically, and intellectually they"ve been all over the map. They"re all att.i.tude incarnate, but not the same att.i.tude.

The story of Sat.u.r.day Night Live is the story of the people who made it work - people there at, and before, the beginning; people who pa.s.sed through as if attending some rarefied college of comedic arts; craftspeople and technicians as well as actors and comics and musicians. They and the show weathered many a storm along the way: the tragic premature deaths of cast members, drug abuse among the performers and writers, temper tantrums, office romances, and a near-fatal stumble when, five years into the run, someone underqualified took over as producer. There was also Michaels"s own pratfall when he returned after a long absence with a casting concept that largely bombed and, in more recent times, an anthrax scare that had the entire cast evacuating 30 Rockefeller Center, the show"s longtime home, on a frightening Friday in the terrorist year of 2001.

As executive producer for most of its nearly three decades, Michaels has had to contend with virtually every sin the flesh is heir to among his cast members as well as with his own fallibilities. He was a father figure even at the beginning, when he was only a wee bit older than the rest of them, and that continues now that he is twice the age of many of those who work for him and plays host to surviving members of the original cast who bring teenage sons and daughters to see the show in person. He watched as two of his brightest comedy stars died of drug abuse, saw others come perilously close, and has had to deal with the grimness of a disproportionately high mortality rate overall.

There have been cast members who drank too much, snorted c.o.ke too much, freebased too much, G.o.d-knows-what-else"d too much. A writer recalls walking into an office and finding three members of one of the world"s most famous rock bands shooting heroin into their veins before a show. One brilliant but insecure member of a recent cast slashed himself with razor blades during bouts of severe depression. Talent may itself be a form of neurosis; it usually comes with troubles attached.

To those who work on the show, success and failure become close to matters of life and death. It"s all there in the argot; a good joke "kills," while a bad sketch "dies." Having an audience "crushed" by material is devoutly to be wished. Many a sketch will "kill at dress" - meaning get big laughs at the dress rehearsal staged in front of a separate audience a few hours before the real show - only to "die on-air" when it"s the show for real.

Among Michaels"s nemeses over the years have been network censors, less conspicuous now but a constant source of friction at the outset; network executives who hated the program or wanted to produce it themselves; hosts who panicked at the last minute and wanted to bolt, or who canceled just before their week"s exhilarating ordeal was about to begin; and an uncountable number of protests and condemnations from special interest groups offended by this sketch or that portrayal or a news item on "Weekend Update" - or the way a seemingly imperiled pig squealed during a sketch about a TV animal show.

Even in its maturity, if that state was ever actually reached, the show remained a troubled child. Brandon Tartikoff, for years NBC"s much-loved uber-programmer, reluctantly canceled the series in the mid-1980s, only to give it an eleventh-hour reprieve. Essentially, the warden made the fateful last-minute phone call to himself.

The show made stars of unknowns and superstars of stars. There were also those who entered anonymous and left the same way. Some were made famous, some were made bitter, some were made rich. Some found nirvana and others a living h.e.l.l. They never really knew, going through those portals, how or if they would be changed as a result. But they virtually all had one thing in common, even if they had joined the show simply because they needed work and liked to eat: It was much more than a job. They were the chosen because it was the chosen. They could look down on people working even on the most successful prime-time sitcoms or dramas because Sat.u.r.day Night Live was something entirely unto itself, a towering edifice on the landscape, a place of wonder and magic, a sociopolitical phenomenon.

With the arrival of SNL, the TV generation, at least for ninety minutes a week, could see television not just as a window on the past or a display case for the fading fantasy figures of their fathers and mothers, but as a mirror - a warped fun-house mirror perhaps, but a mirror just the same, one reflecting their own sensibilities, values, and philosophies. Television, which had shown them the world, had heretofore neglected to show them themselves.

Amazingly, the show continues to rejuvenate itself. In the early 1990s, all the old "Sat.u.r.day Night Dead" gags were revived as the series suffered a drastic artistic setback. Critics and compet.i.tors rushed forward to declare it antiquated, unfunny, and, worst of all, unhip - and this was the show that had made it hip to watch television in the first place. But by the end of the decade, the century, and millennium, Lorne Michaels and his cast and crew had managed another fantastic resurrection, helped by the exploitable absurdities of politics. In the election years of 1996 and 2000, a cast of young, fresh writing and performing talent proved it knew where the laughs were, and found them.

When Sat.u.r.day Night Live began, its compet.i.tion was mostly local programming - syndicated shows and old movies - since ABC and CBS, then the only other networks, went dark late Sat.u.r.day nights. Today SNL faces an onslaught of compet.i.tion in its time period from dozens of channels, including many cable networks and broadcasters fighting for the same demographically desirable, youngish audience that SNL helped define. And yet, though the compet.i.tion has multiplied exponentially, SNL still dominates. Its viewership now includes parents who have children as old as the parents were when they first watched the show. Or older. They may say it isn"t as good as it was then - but they still tune in. They may go to bed much earlier than they did in the seventies - but they"ll still try to stay up at least through "Weekend Update." Or they tape it or TiVo it and watch it the next morning, an option not available when SNL first appeared.

This book tells the Sat.u.r.day Night Live story for the first time almost entirely in the words of the people who made it and lived it - the performers who found glory or agony there, the writers and producers who stayed for decades or only a year or two, and many stars who served as hosts. Elated or disgruntled, they talk with abandon and candor and represent a wide array of views about the show, what makes it tick, whether indeed it still does tick, how it has lasted, and whether Lorne Michaels is a comedy genius or a cunning con man.

Although Sat.u.r.day Night Live spans four decades, some of the newness and even the nihilism of the early years survives and bursts forth every week. New talent is always coming in and shaking things up. To them, Studio 8H is not a hallowed hall because Arturo Toscanini once conducted the NBC Orchestra there (in fact, the studio was built for him) but because John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Laraine Newman, Bill Murray, and Garrett Morris reinvented television there; because the place echoes with the inspired hilarity of Belushi"s mad Samurai, Aykroyd"s fusty male prost.i.tute, Radner"s loopy Loopner, Chase"s stumble-b.u.mbling Gerald Ford, Murray"s capricious Oscar-picker, Morris"s shouted headlines for the hearing impaired, Newman"s curiously s.e.xy portrayal of young Connie Conehead, teenager from outer s.p.a.ce.

People always point to those first years as the show"s best, but in fact the years that followed have maintained a standard as high as that of any long-running television show, whether Ed Sullivan"s or The Simpsons. MGM once boasted of "more stars than there are in the heavens," and Sat.u.r.day Night Live could make the same claim for its current stock company and all those ill.u.s.trious graduates. Too many of them, alas, really are in heaven now.

With this book, we aspire to come close to doing them justice and celebrating the gifts they lavishly shared with the world. Most of them would balk at being sentimentalized or romanticized, but we have no problem with that, no problem at all. They reinvented the wheel and made it funny, and as Art Carney once said, "Make people laugh and they will love you forever." Now, live, from New York - it"s Sat.u.r.day Night.

1.

Exordium: 19751976.

Like all show business successes, Sat.u.r.day Night Live had many fathers. Several mothers too. There is still, so many years after the birth, disagreement over who the real father is. The show had a gestation period of more than a year, during which the concept took various forms, none identical to that of the show we know today. Adjustments and refinements continued after the premiere. Whatever the evolutionary variations in structure and format, however, Sat.u.r.day Night Live was from the beginning a lone pioneer staking out virgin territory and finding its way in the night, its creative team determined to make it television"s antidote to television, to all the bad things - corrupt, artificial, plastic, facile - that TV entertainment had become.

CBS still ruled the ratings in the mid-1970s, but executives at RCA, which owned NBC, had high hopes for the network"s aggressive and compet.i.tive new president, Herbert Schlosser, a onetime Wall Street lawyer who took over in 1974. He was anxious to make his mark on television history. And he would.

ROSIE SHUSTER, Writer: Lorne Michaels arrived in my life before p.u.b.erty, let"s put it that way. I swear to G.o.d. There was not a pubic hair in sight when he arrived on my doorstep. We were living in Toronto in the same neighborhood. I was with my girlfriend. We were jumping on boards, just letting go - we were just wild prep.u.b.escent kids, and Lorne observed me from the sidelines. And I guess he was struck by my mojo, or whatever, and he basically started following me around. We were inseparable after that.

HOWARD Sh.o.r.e, Music Director: As kids, Lorne and I went to a coed summer camp in Canada. And that was really the beginning of our friendship. I was thirteen and Lorne must have been about fifteen. Rosie Shuster was there, too. We did shows you do at summer camp, like Guys and Dolls, The Fantasticks, things like that. And on Sat.u.r.day nights, we did "The Fast Show," a show Lorne and I put together quickly - hence the t.i.tle. We did comedy, we did sketches, we had kind of a repertory company and some musicians. If you think about it, it was truly the beginning of Sat.u.r.day Night Live, because it was a show we put on every Sat.u.r.day night, and it was a live show, and it was somewhat improvisational, with comedy and music. We always had a bunch of people around us who were writers and actors even at that age. And that kind of progressed from summer camp to other things that Lorne and I wrote together.

ROSIE SHUSTER:.

My dad really mentored Lorne in terms of comedy. Lorne had a partner and did radio shows just like my dad had done, and then did CBC specials just like my dad had done. I saw the whole thing unfold, and felt like Sat.u.r.day Night Live was so much a part of something that grew from my home. Something about the show came from inside my family.

Lorne visited my dad inside his little s...o...b..z pup tent where he shared his wild enthusiasms. Lorne was a very avid, eager sponge for all of it; he heard all of the names of everybody backstage at the Ed Sullivan Show, and all the ins and outs of the movies. My dad grew up watching the Marx Brothers and Chaplin. He was just spellbound by all of that, and he shared that love with me and with Lorne.

ORNE MICHAELS, Executive Producer: I grew up in Canada, where we had all three American networks and later a Canadian network. So I was watching CBS and ABC when I was eight or nine, and grew up on the same television that everybody else grew up with. I saw the same kind of movies, but my grandparents owned a movie house and my mother worked in it and my uncle had been a projectionist - the Playhouse on College Street. My mother, who died in 2001, could still play music from the silent movies, from the sheet music the movie companies sent around. My maternal grandmother, who was an enormous influence on me, and my aunts and uncles and my mother of course, all talked about movies and show business in whatever form, and books. That was all a part of my growing up. I don"t think I ever thought that"s what I"d be doing with my life, although when I was at my peak seriousness, at twenty-two or twenty-three, I thought I"d be a movie director.

In 1972 I had presented this pilot to the CBC. They said they were thinking about it, but the head of the CBC - whose name I am clearly blocking - said to me one afternoon when I was talking pa.s.sionately about why this show would be a breakthrough show, he said, "If you"re that funny, why are you here?" And I thought, "Oh my G.o.d, it"s that Canadian thing of "If you"re good, you go to America.""

SANDY WERNICK, Agent: When I met Lorne, he was in Canada, producing and starring in The Hart and Lorne Hour with his partner, Hart Pomerantz. I remember when I met him that I didn"t think he was that good. The other guy was the funny one, you know, which is typical in our industry. But I remember being impressed with the meeting. I had never met anybody who had a gift of gab like Lorne. He would just mesmerize me with what he was talking about. If you talked about comedy, all of a sudden he would just light up and turn on. I remember introducing him to Bernie because I knew that would be a marriage.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN, Manager: I met him when he was working on Laugh-In with his partner, who wound up going back to Canada. We were doing the Burns and Schreiber summer show with Jack Burns and Avery Schreiber, and there was a spot for a writer. Sandy Wernick from ICM told me Lorne was available. I said to bring him in to fill the last slot. And I fell in love with him. He wanted to know about old show business, and he had done a short film, The Hockey Puck Crisis, which was great: Hockey pucks grew on trees, and there was a blizzard that destroyed the crop, so they couldn"t play hockey in Canada that year. Being a hockey fan and a comedy fan, I thought it was hysterical.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

Bernie"s a larger-than-life character. He was also an antidote, because I was deadly serious about everything I was doing in those days. Bernie had the gambler"s love of the sheer larceny of it, whether it was Hee Haw or whatever, it didn"t seem to matter. He knew the good stuff from the bad stuff, but it didn"t stop him from dealing with either - whereas I thought if I was involved with anything bad, it would destroy my life.

ROSIE SHUSTER:.

I had done television shows with Lorne in Toronto and in Los Angeles. On one of Lily Tomlin"s specials we did "Arresting Fat People in Beverly Hills" together. Bernie Brillstein played one of the fat people. Vertical stripes, you know, only vertical stripes. It got nominated for an Emmy.

LILY TOMLIN, Host: Lorne was used to being a star back in Canada. We were quite close at that time. When Lorne worked with me on my specials, he would spend too much time editing and be too fanatical about everything. Jane Wagner would say, "You"re going too far and you"re spending too much money and the show needs to be rougher." Lorne and I would get into the editing room and get too perfectionistic, you know. I must say I think some illegal substances had something to do with it.

ROBERT KLEIN, Host: I remember before there was any Sat.u.r.day Night Live, an actually humble Lorne Michaels used to come to the office of my manager, Jack Rollins. Lorne was a kid from Canada married to Rosie Shuster, who was the daughter of Frank Shuster of Wayne and Shuster, the duo that used to be extremely unfunny on the Sullivan show years ago. Lorne was looking for some work, and Jack was very helpful to him.

TOM SCHILLER, Writer: My father, Bob Schiller, was working on this show called The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show in 1968, and he said there was a junior writer on the show that he"d love me to meet. And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Well, he knows all of the best restaurants in L.A."

So one day Lorne comes over wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He seemed like a nice enough guy - a little nebbish, you know. What struck me though was that after my dad introduced me, Lorne lit up a joint right there in the house. I was scared - but I was impressed too, that he had the boldness to do that. We sort of became friends and I started hanging out with him at the Chateau Marmont.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL, NBC Executive: In the spring of 1974, I was approached by NBC to come over there and essentially run their sports department. At that time, I was Roone Arledge"s a.s.sistant at ABC. I said no. I think they were like in shock; how could somebody who was twenty-seven turn that down? But I felt they didn"t take sports seriously, that they wouldn"t put real resources into it, and besides, I didn"t want to compete against the best person who"d ever done it before or since: Roone.

My saying no apparently impressed Herbert Schlosser, the president of NBC. So, lo and behold, in the summer of 1974, Schlosser invited me to his place on Fire Island - along with Marvin Antonowsky, one of his programming executives - and essentially laid out the whole thing: how Johnny Carson had given them fair warning that he did not want weekend repeats of The Tonight Show to exist after the summer of 1975. They had begun to order up some specials. One had Burt Reynolds sort of hosting. It was talky and had some comedy bits. Herb said he was very much interested in finding some regular stuff for that time period. I was intrigued, even though I had no background whatsoever in late night. I"d been a sports kid since I dropped out of Yale to work for Roone in 1967.

I told Roone I was leaving the same morning Nixon resigned. I had a whole deal to come over to NBC as head of weekend late-night programming. I had one year to come up with a show to go into that time period, and if the show was creatively sound, I had Herb"s word it would get at least six months on the air.

I thought I"d negotiated every possible thing to protect myself, but I had neglected to ask for a secretary. So when I arrived at NBC, the biggest bureaucracy of the western world, I didn"t get a secretary for three months. I was answering my own phones and my office was a mess.

HERBERT SCHLOSSER, NBC President: I had played a role in hiring Ebersol. I can remember when I interviewed him, it was out on Fire Island on a weekend, and he was wearing a pair of pants where one leg was one color and the other leg was another color. Which I guess is what you wore in Connecticut.

Johnny Carson was the biggest star NBC had, unchallengeable in his time period. It wasn"t like Leno and Letterman fighting each other now. Johnny was very, very important to the network, and we were getting emanations that he was not pleased about the weekend repeats of his show. They"d been on for ten years, and we ourselves weren"t that thrilled, but it had been an easy thing for us to do - just put "em on.

So I thought we should try something new.

FRED SILVERMAN, NBC President: When Herb looks back on his days at NBC, he"s the only guy that had worse days than I did. He really doesn"t have much of a positive nature to look back at. So I can see where he would remember the beginnings of the show so well. Sat.u.r.day Night Live was a big deal for him. It was Herb"s biggest endeavor.

GRANT A. TINKER, Former NBC Chairman: I think Herb Schlosser gets credit for letting Sat.u.r.day Night Live happen, or even causing it to happen for all I know, and I think that"s particularly important because Herb is such a tight-a.s.s guy. And the fact that it started on his watch says a lot.

I"m not sure if it would have started on mine.