I thought fairly early on that the show betrayed a certain desperation to try to repeat anything that got a laugh - which I thought was, given the show"s advertised adventurousness, a little puzzling. The times they ran "News for the Hard of Hearing" in the first season probably numbered in the double digits, and it seemed to me a tip-off that the show"s agenda was to develop running bits and running characters as quickly and as determinedly as possible, whether or not they really had legs.
But by the fifth season, the show had serious career implications for anybody who was involved in it, obviously. I overestimated my ability to put my mark on it.
AL FRANKEN:.
I had sort of recommended Harry, so Lorne held that against me. And Harry did too. That"s the wonderful part about Harry. Harry actually held it against me that I had recommended him for the show.
LORNE MICHAELS:.
Harry"s working style was just so completely different. I think he was also less innocent than we were - much more experienced. He"d been a child actor. He"d been around. And whereas Chevy with Gerald Ford would make no effort whatsoever to look like him, if Harry was doing Reagan it took twenty minutes of prosthetics. Now we do that. Then we didn"t. So I think Harry is obviously very talented, but his comedy was mostly industry.
HARRY SHEARER:.
I would say that when the first words that a guy says to you when he"s offering you a job are, quote, "I"ve never really hired a male Jew for the company before. I"ve always gone for the Chicago Catholic thing," unquote, that puts you on a certain notice that the relationship is going to be interesting. It was said fairly seriously as, like, "I"m changing my strategy." I was filling basically two slots, because John and Danny had left and he was bringing in only me. So I don"t know if Lorne remembers that or would choose to remember it. I sure remember it, because it was remarkable that he said that.
I had also worked with Albert Brooks on most of his films in the first season, and had seen the relationship between Lorne and Albert, and while I"m perfectly familiar with the difficulties of working with Albert, because I"ve done so myself, I empathized with what Albert experienced at his end. I knew what I was getting into - or I thought I did, let"s put it that way. I was fully prepared for a difficult situation. I wasn"t prepared for how difficult.
I was pretty f.u.c.king miserable for virtually the entire season. I was explicitly hired as a member of the cast as well as a writer. That was pretty much the sine qua non of my taking the job. So I began to be a little curious when I was not included in the opening montage of the cast. There was some talk about, oh, you know, deadlines, and blah, blah, blah. I don"t believe I was in there in the montage in the early part of the season. I couldn"t be sure. But I don"t think so. I"d have to go look at the tapes. I have the tapes.
What I do know was that, about five or six weeks into the season, Billy Murray invited me to go to a Knicks game. Billy was telling me about the difficulties he"d had in his early days of the show and how basically the rest of the cast treated him like s.h.i.t. And I said, "Yeah, but there"s something else going on. I can"t figure out exactly what it is. I"m getting this weird vibe from the other members of the cast when I read my pieces at read-through." And Billy says, "Well, a lot of people think it"s not really appropriate for a new writer to come in and write himself into a lot of the pieces." And I said, "But I"m a cast member as well." And he says, "Oh? That"s a little piece of information Lorne hasn"t shared with the other members of the cast." Now I know that I"m in for a really interesting ride.
The first big piece I wrote that got on the air was a piece I quite dearly liked. I wrote it with Paul Shaffer, and it was a backers" audition for a rock musical about Charles Manson. At the party after that show, Lorne called me over and said, "That moment at the end of that sketch when you were mouthing the words to the final song silently, that was the moment that you became a star on this show." And, of course, the very next week I was not on the show at all. So much for stardom. The whole place was just full of the most insidious mind games.
LORNE MICHAELS:.
The amount of things that have to come together for something to be good is just staggering. And the fact that there"s anything good at all is just amazing. When you"re young, you a.s.sume that just knowing the difference between good and bad is enough: "I"ll just do good work, because I prefer it to bad work." I think what distinguishes great work for me is - I remember when I saw The Graduate in 1968. I thought, "I won"t be doing anything like that." It so got you and moved you, and it was smart. And I think when you see the real stuff it"s always an elevating thing. It may make you question where you are and the kind of work you"re doing. And if we weren"t fans of it we wouldn"t be doing what we"re doing.
HARRY SHEARER:.
Late in the season, February or March, there was this sketch in which Garrett Morris played Anwar Sadat. And the year before, on ABC, Billy Crystal and I were in a show in which Billy played Begin and I played Sadat. And I thought to myself, "I was a great Sadat. Garrett is a truly mediocre Sadat. I"m here. I"m going to go over to Lorne and say why shouldn"t I do this?" So I went over to Lorne"s apartment on a Friday night, and he was the soul of friendliness to the extent of inviting me to have a sauna with him. So there we are in the sauna and I said, "Lorne, I do a great Anwar Sadat, and Garrett really does a pretty s.h.i.tty one, and I really think I should be doing Sadat in this sketch. It"s sort of infuriating to me to watch." And Lorne goes, "All right, you know what, I"m going to call Al." And he gets out of the sauna in front of me, calls Al Franken, and says, "Al, I"ve been thinking and blah, blah, blah, and Harry should be Anwar Sadat." I go home.
The next day I show up for the show, open the script to see what changes have been made. And Garrett is still playing Sadat. I mean, it just was insoluble. I could not figure it out. I have no idea. All I know is, we"re on the set twenty seconds before going live, and Garrett turns to me and says, "Hey, man, you do Sadat - how did he sound again?"
ANNE BEATTS:.
I remember asking Lorne once about somebody that I felt had really done me dirt and saying, you know, what should I do about it? And Lorne said, "Be perfectly friendly and civil to them, but just never work with them again." So I would guess that that would be more his style.
HARRY SHEARER:.
My three friends at the show were Shaffer, Anne Beatts, and Marilyn Miller. I"d known Al Franken when Al was hanging around the Credibility Gap, which was my old comedy group. And I thought that Al would be kind of a friend. And he was sort of the quintessential writer, trying to get his own stuff on the air, and in no mood to be writing for me or help me get my stuff on. And also I was sort of shocked - I was used to collaborative writing going faster than writing by yourself. And I walked into the Franken and Davis office and entered a twilight zone where collaborative writing was so much slower than writing by myself. Because I"ve been with people who have been high and worked very fast, very scintillating, really, but it wasn"t that way in there. I wouldn"t blame the weed for that. It was really like working underwater. I couldn"t do that. That was just deadening to me.
FRED SILVERMAN, NBC President: At that point in time, Sat.u.r.day Night Live was doing very well in the ratings. Which is why although occasionally it would annoy me, I never let it annoy me too much, because it was like an oasis in the schedule. It was extremely profitable - it and The Tonight Show brought in hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
But then we began very serious conversations about giving Gilda Radner her own variety hour in prime time. That was very, very much a part of my planning for midseason. I think it was 1978, the first mid-season I was there for. And, you know, she was doing it, she was doing it, she was doing it, and then we had a lunch - just Gilda and Lorne and myself - and I found out at that lunch that she decided with Lorne that they weren"t going to do it after all. And that was an enormous disappointment on several levels. On a personal level, but also because I thought she would have been an absolute smash doing the kind of show that Carol Burnett used to do. It would have been great. When you"re running a network, you search for a signature program. And in the days of BJ and the Bear and Sheriff Lobo, to put on a smart variety show with Gilda Radner, coming out of the studios in New York, would have been a home run. So that was an enormous disappointment. It certainly didn"t help my relationship with Lorne at that point in time.
LORNE MICHAELS:.
Somewhere around the time she did the Broadway show, Gilda decided she did not want to do the variety hour. And somewhere in that time, Bernie Brillstein claims, he conveyed to NBC that Gilda did not want to do this prime-time hour. So imagine my surprise when I was summoned to Fred"s office and shown the board and there on Wednesday nights is Gilda"s show. So I say, "Fred, that"s not happening, she said no." Well, it got very heated between the two of us. He said some unpleasant things about her. I defended her. We stood toe to toe and had a very deep exchange. I think he thought I wasn"t delivering Gilda as promised.
ALAN ZWEIBEL:.
By the fifth year there was a ma.s.s burnout. There was the thought, for me personally, "Gee, I"d like to try to do something else."
MAX PROSS, Writer: When Tom Gammill and I worked for Lorne, I thought, "Oh my G.o.d, this is the best job I"ll ever have in my life." Coming out of college, it just seemed like, oh, this is great, you know. It was 1979 and we were, what, twenty-two, and probably the two funniest people in the world for me were Bill Murray and Steve Martin. And I got to meet them both my first day of work. How cool was that? Not only met them, I got to, like, work with them.
TOM GAMMILL, Writer: And you had all these amazing bands. I mean, the Grateful Dead hung out there for like a week. We went out to restaurants all the time. Plus you only worked twenty-two weeks out of the year, because the weeks that the show wasn"t in production, people didn"t come in to the office. Although Max and I used to come in just because we wanted someplace to go.
MAX PROSS:.
We got such a skewed idea of what the working world was like. We get this job where people act like college kids, staying up all night and smoking pot and drinking beer all the time. Boy, were we in for a let-down when we saw the way the rest of the world operated.
TOM GAMMILL:.
Our next big job was at Letterman, where it"s like, "Wait, where are the parties?" "You"ll get a party if we last a year." There wasn"t any beer.
HARRY SHEARER:.
Chevy was back as the host of the show, and it was the first of many occasions when Lorne a.s.sured the cast that, I don"t know, "Chevy"s cleaned up." I learned that wasn"t exactly true when I saw the sweat on his brow when we were actually doing the show on the air. But anyway, we were doing this talk show bit and Garrett"s not there, we"re doing camera blocking and Garrett Morris is nowhere on the floor. And then I heard the euphemism - "Garrett"s on seventeen."
That meant that Garrett was up on the seventeenth floor where the offices were and that he would be indulging in some substance, rather than being down at the stage on eight where he was expected.
GARRETT MORRIS:.
I"ve been described as being the worst person in the world in terms of drugs. Now we know that that turned out not to be so. My att.i.tude toward drugs has been indifferent. I"m not saying that excuses it. I don"t know why marijuana is still illegal. It has never killed one single individual in all the time we"ve known about it, yet tobacco kills 300,000 each year, alcohol kills 250,000 each year, and they are legal. The laws, the whole thing has been the right wing trying to get back at the civil rights movement: "What can we do to reverse it? If we can put them in the f.u.c.king buses we would, but we can"t do that." As far as I"m concerned, that"s all I see.
JANE CURTIN:.
Garrett was treated horribly, horribly - by the writers, by some of the performers, and Lorne. They just dismissed him. I used to have conversations on the set with Garrett about, "Why do you put up with this?" And he said, "I can"t pa.s.s up the money. I"m going to make the money and get out and go on and do something else." I found it amazing that he let it go on for as long as it did, but it took its toll, it clearly took its toll on Garrett.
GARRETT MORRIS:.
I got so many years of Uncle Tom letters, especially when I did the monkey in The Wiz. I like to do stuff that"s out of line. n.o.body tells me how to think, not even black people, so that"s why I did the monkey. The rest of them can kiss my a.s.s. Now the same people who criticized me for doing the monkey in The Wiz are doing donkeys in Shrek and making millions of dollars. I guess that"s what I get for being ahead of my time.
I had five years of building what everybody knows is a chair there, the only nonwhite chair in that whole thing, and I shed the blood for that. So at least if people don"t want to say something good, they should not say anything at all, because I"ve done nothing to deserve anybody to come after me saying a lot of bulls.h.i.t.
HARRY SHEARER:.
I knew that everybody in the original cast had a five-year contract. And this was the fifth year. So I knew that, despite Billy and Gilda - you know, poor Gilda, but I called her up and went over to her place because I was trying to find some advice from everybody there as to what the f.u.c.k I should do. And Gilda just said, "Do whatever Lorne says" - which I understood, coming from her, but which was of no use to me. I knew that at the end of this season drastic change was afoot. There were rumors that Lorne was going to leave and that the rest of the cast was going to try to follow John and Danny into Hollywood. I was in a hurry. I knew I had one season to make my mark and that would be it, because whatever was going to follow quite likely did not include me. So I just felt like I was in h.e.l.l and I had to push as hard as possible and try to figure this thing out.
FRED SILVERMAN:.
Sat.u.r.day Night Live was an enormous. .h.i.t and a major profit center. It was the only show on the network that was reaching that particular demographic. I looked at Sat.u.r.day Night Live and said, "Thank G.o.d it"s here." And I really tried my best just to stay out of their way. And if they wanted to take some shots at me - fine, let them do it. I didn"t care.
d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.
Fred fired me in 1979, although he did not have the guts to do it himself. He had a triumvirate of folks do it. I was running comedy, variety, and specials at the time. Brandon and I were each other"s absolute best friend on the face of the earth. He had once been my a.s.sistant. And, if you recall, Fred, in one fell swoop, and correctly - in one of the great moves of Fred"s career - promoted Brandon above me, so that I became an executive reporting to Brandon for the last six months that I worked at NBC, which Brandon and I handled beautifully.
ALAN ZWEIBEL:.
John was on the cover of Newsweek by himself when Animal House came out, and there wasn"t anyone from the rest of the cast there with him. I think if there was a demarcation point, as far as I was concerned, that may have been it. Things changed. All of a sudden there was a world that was dangling temptations. John"s a star now by himself, John"s getting a million dollars or whatever it was, by himself. Gilda was given a one-woman show on Broadway. Billy did Meatb.a.l.l.s. John did Goin" South, and he and Danny did the Blues Brothers movie. And I think those last few years that I was there, one of Lorne"s greatest tasks was to keep everybody together. So it wasn"t just, "Let"s put on a fun show," it was, "Let"s keep this together." And what happened was, there was a compet.i.tion. There were studio executives starting to hang out in 8H during blocking asking, "Who wrote that sketch?" They were looking for sitcom writers or movie writers.
Don"t forget, these guys were starting to go into movies. Someone was going to have to write John"s movies, someone was going to have to write Gilda"s movies. And within the cast itself, the Tuesday night writing sessions became all-nighters, which was not the case at the very beginning.
What had happened was, the politicking of the situation almost made it necessary for people to lobby. They"d think, "Gee, if I go home early and I"m not here to hang out or to sit in a room and inject myself into a sketch, I might not have that much to do this week." Writers felt that if they weren"t there to get their names on the tops of the paper, or if they didn"t get Gilda or John or somebody who was a little bit more front-and-center at the time to do their sketch, it might not get on.
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER.
Lorne died with the show. If things didn"t go well, he torpedoed. They"d go up there in those first years immediately after the air show and watch the tape within seconds. In the earliest years, they were together night and day, day and night. At night it"s the party; the next morning you"d go to the Russian Tea Room and have brunch. And it was always about, "We will try harder." Everybody was this animatronic personality who was going to do better, and it was all for the show, and giving up things for the show. The emotional component was so great for everyone involved.
DAN AYKROYD:.
It"s too stressful, because you worry about quality, you want things to be so right, and that really weighs heavily - plus the adrenaline pump, it"s like being in combat or a cop or something. You can"t take that week after week. It"s a young man"s game, there"s no doubt about it. It is satisfying when you pull something off, and it is tremendously debilitating and anxiety-producing when you don"t.
PAULA DAVIS:.
There"s something about SNL. I"ve worked at other places. It"s unlike working anywhere else, and it"s a great place to learn because you are so instilled with paranoia. Everything you say is double- and triple-checked. Where did you hear that? Where did you go with it? Does anybody else know? I have that so ingrained in me that when I get information, I won"t divulge it until I know that it"s absolutely okay. There"s also this kind of sn.o.bby thing that"s just inbred up there, like you"re the only people working in s...o...b..z. I feel like when I was there, I was kind of snotty and dismissive of other people. I just thought, "If you don"t work at SNL, you don"t know what s...o...b..z is," you know?
RODNEY DANGERFIELD:.
It"s tough to produce that show every week, are you kiddin"? It"s difficult. My father was in vaudeville, and he went on the road for ten months to break in an eight-minute act. So to do something every week - I mean, people do sitcoms and stuff like that, which I"m not that fond of, because I can"t sit there and laugh at typed-in laughter, that is not my cup of tea. But Sat.u.r.day Night Live, that"s unusual. They"re all so great there too. Jeez, every year they come up with such winners, you know?
BILL MURRAY:.
I only became sort of important to the show after Danny and John went to do The Blues Brothers and quit. When they were doing The Blues Brothers, all of a sudden I started getting a lot to do, and when they were gone, then I really got a lot to do. Then I was in lots and lots and lots and lots of sketches.
When you have this celebrity thing, different things change, your vision is different, and I was sort of like in the wake of all these people. I didn"t have as many famous friends and I didn"t necessarily work certain parts of town. So I was just doing what I was doing and happy enough to do that. I was still trying to be not-famous on some level - and I still was not-famous on some level - so I was able to enjoy that part of it and see that the famous part of it had its down side. I was busy mining the parts of my life where I was not famous, because I saw that those were not going to last forever.
Professionally, I just kept doing my job because I was pretty good at it, and I became valuable those last couple years, and I was proud of the work I did. I thought I worked hard. I was a little late sometimes, but I thought I worked pretty well and I never had like brawls or feuds with the girls or anything.
Even network executives became embroiled in backstage melodrama - especially toward the end of SNL"s raucous infancy, when NBC was getting a double drubbing: terrible ratings in prime time and even worse press. Fred Silverman, having a spectacularly stormy reign as network president and already feeling under siege, saw Sat.u.r.day Night Live graduate from being a source of occasional irritation to being a major, gaping trouble spot. Al Franken picked this painful moment to compose a savage piece of satire called "Limo for a Lame-O," one of the meanest acts of character a.s.sa.s.sination in the history of - well, in the history of mean acts of character a.s.sa.s.sination. Franken, addressing the camera, told viewers Silverman had done a lousy job running the network and didn"t deserve the limousine that was one of his lavish perks, whereas Franken, star of a hit show, did. He invited viewers to write to Silverman demanding that Franken be given the use of a limo. More than five thousand letters - nastily addressed to "The Lame-O" - deluged an infuriated Silverman"s office.
Already incensed about losing the Gilda Radner variety hour that he thought would rescue his regime, and a.s.suming the Franken sketch to have been part of a staff conspiracy at Sat.u.r.day Night Live, Silverman broke off communication with Michaels and never consulted him about who his replacement as executive producer should be. Michaels wanted Franken. The "Limo" sketch certainly put the kibosh on that.
LORNE MICHAELS:.
I was going back and forth about whether to come back or not. All I really wanted was time. Since the election was coming up in the fall and they always threw us out of 8H for election coverage in those days, I was looking for some downtime after the season ended. I"d worked the summer before on Gilda"s Broadway show, and I wanted this summer off, plus just a month or two of recovery time. So basically, I wanted to start up again after the 1980 election. That was what I wanted creatively. The business questions of what I wanted, or of what I have to this day, had been solved at the end of the third season, when my contract was first up. So it wasn"t a money issue at all.
And that fifth season, Fred Silverman was running a Best of Sat.u.r.day Night Live in prime time for thirteen weeks, so in every way we were at the peak of being exploited - or to put it another way, the peak of overexposure. We were limping to the finish line.
Gilda had said she would stay with me. There were a couple people I knew would still be there. But the big piece of information was that I was going to have to really recast and reinvent the show. I was going to have to fire some people, many of whom had lived up to the top of their talent, but the mistake was made five years earlier in the hiring. Quite often the least talented are the ones who most want you to know how loyal they are. And if I did return, I"d have to give up all thoughts of directing movies or whatever else I thought I might want to do with my life.
Brandon Tartikoff had been given the task of either trying to get me to come back or getting a replacement. I think he had more than enough problems with Silverman as it was. And Freddie was a screamer. I was supposed to have met with Fred, but he had stayed out late the night before and canceled the meeting. Bernie took this as a sign of lack of respect. I did know they were making Tom Snyder"s new deal and Johnny Carson"s new deal, so the emphasis seemed to be on on-air talent as opposed to dealing with a producer, which they weren"t used to. It just wasn"t a priority. I don"t think they understood the part a producer played in that kind of a show.
Anyway, Fred apologized profusely and our meeting was rescheduled for the following Monday. That weekend, Al Franken does "Limo for a Lame-O," which is a direct f.u.c.king a.s.sault on Fred Silverman. I see it for the first time, as I do with "Update," at dress rehearsal. Brandon Tartikoff comes over to me, and he"s laughing at it because it"s very funny and it killed with the audience. I say to Brandon and Barbara Gallagher, who worked directly for Fred, "You should let Fred know. Don"t blindside him on this. You don"t want to be sitting in your house and suddenly Al Franken is attacking Fred." But neither Brandon nor Barbara made the call - I think because, at the time, they were both frightened of him.
So what happens is, Fred Silverman is blindsided by this thing at home and goes into a complete rage. He thinks that I"m responding to his canceling the meeting with me by calling him a lame-o on national television. And what are you going to say - that it wasn"t me? Then he"d think I"m such a wuss that I allow Al Franken to just steamroll me against my own better career instincts. Anyway, it all blows up and that"s that. And then his hurt feelings lead to my hurt feelings. It all seemed to be end-of-season emotions, which are just end-of-season emotions - that time when you never want to see anybody again ever. The upshot of it all was that Fred took it personally, and that put a further strain between him and me, and we never did meet.
FRED SILVERMAN:.
I never liked Al Franken to begin with. You don"t mind it if somebody like John Belushi gets up there and makes jokes about you, because I respected his talent and he was funny. But I thought this piece that Franken did was just very mean-spirited and not very funny. I don"t think I called Lorne about it. I think I sent a letter, a note or something, to Franken and said in no uncertain terms that I thought he was way off base and that I wasn"t going to forget it. And I believe he left the show shortly thereafter. I don"t believe he stayed on the show very long. I don"t think Lorne put the sketch in there to be mean. He never did a sketch to be mean. That was not his style. I never blamed Lorne personally.
WARREN LITTLEFIELD, NBC Executive: Brandon was sitting in the audience and they had just done the "Limo" sketch and a page comes over and says, "Mr. Tartikoff, you have a phone call." And he says, "Who is it?" And the page goes, "A screaming Mr. Silverman." Brandon stopped for a second and then asked, "Did you tell him that you knew where I was?" The page said, "No, we were just told to find you." Brandon said, "Okay then, tell him you can"t find me."
Brandon just couldn"t take it. Here it was, midnight on Sat.u.r.day night, and he just couldn"t take Fred screaming at him at that hour. We always thought that was a wonderful lesson that Brandon was imparting to us about survival in the executive ranks.
BARBARA GALLAGHER, NBC Vice President: I went to Lorne when I saw the "Limo for a Lame-O" sketch in rehearsal. He said, "Too much, huh?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Go talk to Franken." So I go over to Al, and Al goes, "Wasn"t that the greatest?! Didn"t you love it?!" I said, "Al, I"m not going to censor you, it"s not my job. I"m just telling you it"s pretty dicey right now. Fred"s in a bad way, and this is really going to hurt him." And Al said, "Good, because he hurt Lorne." So I went back to Lorne, and Lorne said, "I"ll take care of it."
Well, the bit was worse when it came on the air. I was home watching the show. The phone rang; it was Fred. When he couldn"t get Brandon, he called me. He said, "Did you know about this?" I said, "I did." He said, "And you didn"t do anything about it?" I said that I"d told Al we weren"t going to censor him but that it was too much. Fred said, "You call Lorne and tell him how hurt I am and how could he do that, how could he let that go on at this time?" Fred had offered Lorne the world to stay on at Sat.u.r.day Night Live. He wanted him to stay. He"d said, "Whatever you need, whatever you want - just stay."
So I call over to Lorne and Al gets on the phone and says, "So, Fred"s p.i.s.sed at me?" I said, "No, Al, he"s not mad at you." Al said, "Well, it"s not Lorne"s fault." I said, "Yeah, it is. He"s the producer." Al said, "Lorne lets us do what we want to do." I said, "Fred is really hurt. If you heard his voice, he is really hurting." So Lorne gets on the phone. He says, "Is he mad?" I said, "No, he"s hurt, and he"s blaming you."
I was right in the middle of all this. And if you know me, I hate confrontation. I"m worse than Lorne. I will run 3,000 miles the other direction or get a root ca.n.a.l before I have a confrontation. I hate it. And I really like Lorne. We"d gotten along great.
But he has been cool to me now for a long time. I think he feels I betrayed him, and I didn"t. I truly didn"t. I was walking a fine line, and I was ready for a loony bin. It was horrible. I saw what was happening to Fred too. And if Lorne didn"t take time off, Lorne would have been in a loony bin as well. He was hanging by a string, he was so tired. I frankly worried about him too. Both of them.
AL FRANKEN:.
"Limo for a Lame-O" maybe had implications for what happened that next year, because I think it ruptured the relationship between Silverman and Lorne. Fred knew Lorne was leaving, but instead of going to Lorne and asking him who would be a good successor, Fred relied, I think, on Barbara Gallagher, who was a friend of Jean Doumanian"s. So it sort of led to Jean"s selection.
LORNE MICHAELS:.
I"d given so much energy to holding things together all those years; I had been truly drained, just spent. I was just burnt out and emotionally very vulnerable. So I told Brandon I couldn"t do another year. He didn"t try and change my mind, and I said to myself, "All right, I guess that"s it. I"ve done my five years." It was very hard for me. In retrospect, to be relieved of the show was an emotional withdrawal that took me, truly, years to get a perspective on.
I began looking at studio deals and went back and forth between Paramount and Warner Brothers. And I met with Jean Doumanian about it and I said, "If I go to Paramount, I"d love you to come with me." And she implied yes - that"s what I came away with. Several weeks later, I was on my way to the opening of Urban Cowboy when I got a phone call from Brandon saying, "I"m going to name Jean Doumanian as the next producer of the show." I go, "Really. That"s an interesting choice." I was startled because I always think of the show as a writer-based show, and you have to be a writer to say what is funny or not funny. To control that many people in comedy without having any credits yourself in comedy is impossible.
Jean called me five minutes after Brandon did. I asked her, "When did they talk to you?" and she said, "Six weeks ago." That was the part where I went, "Wha -?" And then she said, "They made me promise not to talk to you." That was the very first moment of my growing up: "They asked me not to talk to you."
And this was when I"d been talking to her about coming to Paramount with me. Now Brandon was not an innocent in all of this. I don"t mean that meanly. I mean it in the sense that I had thought, because he and I were friendly, that he would at least listen to me about my replacement. I had told him I would use some combination of Jim Downey and Al Franken and Tom Davis, because it had to be someone with writing credentials who understood how the show really worked. Jean wasn"t even there for meetings between dress and air.
BARBARA GALLAGHER:.
It wasn"t a conspiracy to do Lorne in. Lorne was leaving. He wanted Al, Fred wasn"t buying it, so there we were. They also didn"t want to leak it to the press, they didn"t want anyone to know yet, and if Lorne knew, it would have been all over the town. So that was the reason for not telling him. It wasn"t a conspiracy to do anything to Lorne.
FRED SILVERMAN:.
The decision to hire Jean Doumanian was made by Brandon Tartikoff based on a recommendation from Barbara Gallagher. I didn"t know Jean. I knew she had worked with Woody Allen. I said, "If you recommend her, fine."
BARBARA GALLAGHER:.
Lorne didn"t want Jean Doumanian in there for some reason, probably because she"s not a writer. But Fred Silverman did not want an outsider coming in. He wanted someone from the show, who"d been with the show. And Jean had been there forever, worked with the talent, and Jean wanted the job. I said, "Jean, I"ll talk to Fred about it." Lorne wanted Al Franken and Tom Davis to produce the show, and Fred said no, he didn"t want Al, because of what they"d gone through.
Brandon was there at the time, and I said the only other person down there who knows how to run the show because she"s been sitting there all the time, although she"s not a writer, is Jean. And he said, "Oh, all right, let"s run it by Fred." I said, "I know Lorne doesn"t want her, so if you tell Lorne, you"re going to have a big craziness going on." Fred said, "Well, if that"s the only person down there and you think she"ll be all right." And I said, "Everyone likes her, they all know her, what problem could it be?"
ROBIN SHLIEN:.
Woody Allen was best friends with Jean Doumanian, who was the a.s.sociate producer when I was there, and he would call the control room constantly and talk to her. Woody Allen would always call as "Mo Golden." And the second day I was there, I got this call for Jean Doumanian and had to say, "Jean, it"s Mo Golden calling." We always had to answer the control room phone. I didn"t think anything of it, and then somebody said, "It"s Woody Allen."
We never knew if she knew that we knew. We had to pretend that we all thought this guy calling her was Mo Golden and not Woody Allen. He called all the time. Sometimes it was like every five minutes. And we were just like, "What the f.u.c.k?"