Episode 653 - Lorne Michaels
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuckineers?
Marc:What the fuck tuckians?
Marc:How's it going?
Marc:I am Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my show, WTF.
Marc:Welcome.
Marc:Welcome to you newcomers, to you first timers, to you regular visitors.
Marc:Thank you for joining me today.
Marc:This is a big day.
Marc:It's a big day, people.
Marc:We've been leading up to this day for a while now.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Today is Lorne Michaels day.
Marc:Lorne Michaels is my guest on WTF today.
Marc:And then those of you who listen to this show know that's a pretty big deal.
Marc:Some of us, myself included, I didn't know if it was ever going to happen.
Marc:But it happened.
Marc:Oh, it fucking happened, people.
Marc:And also, I want to tell you this.
Marc:There is a companion piece to this episode.
Marc:If you have a Howl Premium account, you can get a special WTF episode called Lorne Stories.
Marc:It's available now, and it's two hours of stories from throughout the history of WTF with more than 20 past and current cast members of SNL telling their best stuff about Lorne to me.
Marc:Because I asked.
Marc:Why did I ask?
Marc:Because I have or had, I'm going to put it in the past tense now, a slight obsession with
Marc:with a meeting that I had with Lorne Michaels in 1995.
Marc:All right, so if you have a HAL subscription, you can get this special episode.
Marc:If you don't have a HAL subscription, go to HAL.FM and use the promo code WTF to sign up for like $3.99 a month, okay?
Marc:20 people from SNL over the years I talked to about Lorne.
Marc:Like, looking back on it, it's amazing, like...
Marc:How obsessed I was.
Marc:It ebbed and flowed over the years.
Marc:And this whole process of interviewing Lauren, it sort of came up.
Marc:I was in New York.
Marc:I was invited to see the first episode of this season.
Marc:I'd never been to a taping of SNL.
Marc:I would not go.
Marc:Not that I was ever invited, but I had a couple of opportunities over the last two decades to maybe tag along with somebody to go.
Marc:Maybe my old manager, Dave Beck, you're somebody.
Marc:But because I was resentful.
Marc:And I felt like I'd missed an opportunity to be on that show somehow.
Marc:I blame myself sometimes.
Marc:Sometimes I blame Lorne.
Marc:Sometimes I blame show business.
Marc:But anyway, I went to the show and it was it was sort of an amazing experience.
Marc:I waited.
Marc:You know, they sat us and it was, you know, Hillary Clinton was on and Miley Cyrus.
Marc:And but I'd never seen the sort of mechanics of it.
Marc:It's a fairly intimate space.
Marc:There's you know, there's chairs set up on the floor for the people that sit close to the stage.
Marc:It looked like an alternative comedy venue in that way.
Marc:And then there's all these sets and then you're up in the balcony and there's just it seemed like 50 people moving things around.
Marc:There's an electricity to live television.
Marc:But when it came right down to it, it was just funny people on the stage doing their shit, trying to get laughs in that room.
Marc:which was a much smaller room.
Marc:There was a humanness to the experience that I never really realized or noticed on TV.
Marc:Just because of the amount of people involved in the production and the pace of the production and Lauren is walking around from set to set doing things.
Marc:I saw Steven Spielberg was there that night just hanging out with his family.
Marc:Name dropping aside, the mechanics of it just on a human level is profound.
Marc:So many people involved.
Marc:There's nothing else like that.
Marc:It is its own thing that keeps operating in almost a theatrical fashion, like a community, like a town, a village, you know, for years, for decades.
Marc:It was touching to me.
Marc:It made me have a respect for the process.
Marc:It held a place in my mind once.
Marc:And the meeting with Lauren obviously held a profound place in my mind.
Oh.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:This is a cathartic thing for me.
Marc:As you know, if you listen to this show, I've been hung up on this meeting I had with Lorne Michaels for the 95 season for decades, for fucking decades.
Marc:It's evolved and morphed and changed its position in my mind and how I feel about it or how I see it.
Marc:I've talked to anyone who's been on SNL who comes into this garage.
Marc:I've talked about it because initially in my mind,
Marc:You know, not only had I failed at getting a gig on SNL, but I had assumed all kinds of things about the situation.
Marc:I, you know, I've had that, that memory in my mind for so long.
Marc:And when it was hot and new, I was like, you know, I got fucked or, you know, Lauren, you know, doesn't like me or Lauren, you know, is evil or Lauren is some sort of, you know, demonic puppet master.
Marc:I was used to pressure, you know, somebody else into doing something like it was just a rabbit hole.
Marc:an ever-flowing rabbit hole of possibilities of ways for me to either think I was fucked or that show business was fucked.
Marc:But as time went on and I talked to more people from SNL, my feelings about Lorne Michaels started to shift because I had talked to all these people that saw him as this human person, as this creative guy, this supportive guy, this guy who helps careers and shepherds people through things and also has a keen sense of comedy and television production.
Marc:As time went on and I talked to more people, my sense of what happened in that meeting became less about me.
Marc:And I didn't like that shift in my mind.
Marc:I liked keeping Lorne Michaels, this evil wizard who somehow shunned me and exiled me from a possibly much different career in show business.
Marc:That he had that kind of power.
Marc:And as time went on and I talked to people about it, I didn't know if it was even necessary to do it anymore.
Marc:I know a lot of you are like, it was the white whale.
Marc:Ahab doesn't catch the white whale.
Marc:And there were periods where I'm like, I didn't even pursue really interviewing him.
Marc:I made one phone call once a couple years ago to his assistant, Lauren, and said, does he know who I am?
Marc:Would he be interested in doing this?
Marc:And she said, he's out of the country.
Marc:We'll get back to you.
Marc:That was like a year or two ago.
Marc:And I didn't really follow up on it because I didn't know if I wanted to do it anymore.
Marc:I didn't know what I needed.
Marc:I didn't know what I needed when I did the audition.
Marc:I didn't know what I needed now.
Marc:It was emotional.
Marc:It wasn't professional, which I think played into it, into the reason why it didn't go well for me in the meeting.
Marc:And also now, what did I really expect from this guy?
Marc:What kind of closure was I going to get from Lorne Michaels about this thing that had been sitting like a benign tumor at the heart of my memory?
Marc:You know, for, what, two decades now.
Marc:But now I have my opportunity.
Marc:We talked about everything.
Marc:Let me just set the scene a little bit.
Marc:So on Monday, my interview was for Monday and we were to show up at six o'clock.
Marc:Lauren that day was getting pitches from the writers with the host who was Amy Schumer in a room.
Marc:And then he had to go meet Seth Meyers for dinner.
Marc:I was sitting in the same place I was in 1995 waiting to see him.
Marc:for my meeting with him to be on the show but it was completely different right out right out of the gate like there was the couch there was a table that was all in place but there were several desks and several people in the area outside of Lauren's office in my mind it was just a door there was a desk and that was it I think I may be confusing my real memory with that scene in King of Comedy where Rupert Pupkin is just sitting there with a woman waiting to see Jerry Lewis
Marc:And then there's Lauren.
Marc:I see Lauren.
Marc:And I'm struck immediately with this moment of like, oh, fuck.
Marc:He's just a guy.
Marc:He's just a guy.
Marc:He's a man.
Marc:And this is his job.
Marc:He works here.
Marc:He runs this place.
Marc:I walk up.
Marc:I say hi.
Marc:I say hi to Higgins.
Marc:He gives me a hug.
Marc:I've got my recorder on.
Marc:We walk into the office.
Marc:And Brendan's going to set up the boom with the cord.
Marc:And I'm standing there holding my recorder.
Marc:And Lauren is there.
Marc:And this was the first thing he said.
Marc:And I think this will set the tone of the interview you're about to hear.
Guest:Sorry to the lick.
Guest:It was a reasonable delay.
Guest:The scene of the crime.
Guest:You were here before.
Marc:You remember?
Marc:Of course I remember.
Okay, good.
Marc:what is established with that little soundbite is, you know, right off the bat, he was definitely aware of what was going on.
Marc:So now here is, uh, here's some time that I spent talking to Lauren Michaels.
Guest:Yeah, I remember because I saw you on stage.
Marc:You saw me.
Marc:Yeah, Marcy had seen me somewhere.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And I came in here.
Marc:It's a very loaded experience for me.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:I mean, people believe I'm obsessed with it, and I guess we can start with it.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:I came in here.
Marc:I waited an hour or so.
Marc:Tracy Morgan was out there waiting with me.
Guest:Do you know what day of the week it was where we were in production?
Marc:Maybe.
Marc:I wish I remembered that.
Marc:I decided before I got here, I was smoking a lot of pot at the time, but I thought maybe I shouldn't smoke too much.
Uh-huh.
Marc:And I got here, and Tracy Morgan was there, and his hair looked very shiny.
Marc:The hair was in very good shape.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:I waited a while, and I was reading a Bruce Wagner book, I remember, and I came in here.
Guest:Had he been on stage the night that you performed?
Guest:Who, Tracy?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't know if he was.
Marc:I mean, I know that we went to stand-up New York.
Guest:Right, I remember.
Marc:Anyways.
Marc:I come in here, in my recollection, there were books over here.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Was there?
Guest:It's probably pretty much the same as it has always been.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Steve Higgins was there.
Marc:I walk in, and you said, how was Conan last night?
Marc:Did they laugh?
Marc:Did they laugh at you?
Marc:It's better when they laugh.
Marc:and that was nice it was nice i was scared and you'd done and you'd done conan the night before right yes okay and then i sat down and then uh you you did you used a zoo analogy for comedians have you used that before monkeys and all that yes yeah yeah so that's a regular thing no it wasn't a regular thing it was just my sort of beginning to piece together where comedians stood in hollywood
Marc:Right.
Marc:The lions are scary.
Guest:When you go to the zoo, the first thing you want to see is the lion because the lion is the king of the jungle and it's regal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the second thing you want to see are the bears because they're the strongest and the fastest.
Guest:And the third, you want to see the monkeys because they're funny and occasionally one of them jerks off.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And what I said, I don't think you had added the jerk offline yet.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Marc:Because I said, as long as they're not throwing their shit at you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Got nothing.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Got no laugh from you.
Guest:Well, I would have gone softer, as you saw.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:And Steve Higgins was like, mm.
Marc:It's not going well already.
Marc:And did you know Steve before?
Marc:Kind of.
Marc:I met him once or twice.
Guest:Like on the scene.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then you just looked at me for a little while.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:And Steve actually went, Lauren, and you said, it's important to look in someone's eyes.
Marc:You can see a lot in someone's eyes.
Marc:And then I was trying to exude some star quality of some kind.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Which was not successful.
Marc:God, you really remember this.
Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I remember it.
Marc:And then in my recollection, there was a smaller bowl of candy.
Marc:And yeah, that's the Tootsie Roll one.
Marc:But it's a Jolly Rancher in my mind.
Guest:No, it would have been Tootsie Rolls.
Guest:Well, I remember I took one.
Marc:And at that moment, you shot a look at Steve.
Marc:And I thought I'd failed the candy test.
Marc:oh yeah no no there was no candy there was no no alternative candy there was just the one there was popcorn probably there right there no i didn't get popcorn yeah and that was sort of like um the my experience with it and then i waited and it and and nothing happened and i'd heard a couple of things over the years i'm not hung up on this no no no but where would where were we in 95 was this when when norm was about was renegotiating his contract
Marc:I believe.
Marc:And I'm not sure exactly who was on the cast.
Marc:I think I was being considered for an update commentator role.
Guest:Right.
Guest:No, I remember that.
Guest:But had we already made the transition to like Will Ferrell and Sherry?
Guest:Was it 95?
Guest:I think it was perhaps for the 96 season.
Marc:Right.
Guest:so so that cast was already in place i think so and then tracy was added in right right yeah well what happened what what i think that what happened was that it was a period in the show's history where uh the critical community and the network were on the same side which seldom happened uh
Guest:I think that Don Omar, who was running the network then, we were getting killed in the press.
Guest:We were in a transition away from the baby boom.
Guest:And you had people like Sandler and Farley and...
Guest:And Spade and Mike Myers was just leaving.
Guest:Dana had just left.
Guest:And so there was a sort of consensus.
Guest:New York Magazine ran a cover on Farley and why these people weren't funny.
Guest:I think Don Olmeyer felt it as well.
Guest:I kept saying they're not playing to you.
Guest:You know, they're playing pretty much to your kids.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That we were in the middle of a change.
Guest:But at the time, because the show was... Everything then was compared to the original cast.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was like, did they fit?
Guest:Did they measure up?
Guest:And of course, the idea that they were listening to different music, that they were from a different time, didn't get through.
Guest:And as I said, the critics were...
Guest:really fierce and Ratings were starting to suffer and by large it had begun and also the movies had begun to work here Tommy boy was right for I think where we shot in 94.
Guest:Yeah, so and I Don't think he was a fan of Norm Macdonald Mm-hmm, but I was sort of I'm always sort of looking for what I think are sort of original voices and I thought I wouldn't met with you if I didn't think you had one and
Marc:Well, that's good.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So there was no it was just not my year.
Guest:No, I think we were being pounded on a whole other level about which was really existential at that point.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The critics were Saturday Night Dead.
Guest:The network was you have to change.
Guest:You're too set in your ways.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the simple fact, which was that different generations come in and make the show their own and that they find their own way of doing it within the same tradition as opposed to blowing it up and starting over and all that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:and you know uh the thing about broadcast uh is that you're on in all 50 states right and you know in the way that the railroads united the country in the 19th century i think the networks did in this century okay and so you you know that the show plays differently in arkansas than it does in hawaii or differently maybe i wasn't right
Guest:No, no, no, no.
Guest:You were fine.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:You had a strong point of view and you were clear.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, no, no.
Guest:You were just part of a mix.
Guest:There was no idea of so much replacement because you can only do that gradually.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It was whether or not to bring you.
Marc:I think we still had A. Whitney Brown.
Marc:No, maybe he was gone.
Marc:I think Spade might have just left.
Marc:Right.
Marc:yeah but it was interesting because at that time remember we were doing alternative comedy very much downtown because because and i mean no offense but you said you you said one of the first things you said was like i don't know what you think you're doing down there below 14th street right but it doesn't matter right
Guest:I was trying to be helpful and save you a few years.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, well, I appreciate that.
Marc:No, I was just being playful.
Marc:I know.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, in retrospect, I don't know that I was necessarily ready for the show, and I came in here...
Guest:I don't think you're ever... You need to have spent a certain amount of time on stage to be ready for the show.
Guest:I think you were ready.
Guest:I think it was... I didn't have... I learned early on that if you bring people in and there's no real spot for them, Spade used to... I think when we did the debate with Bush, Clinton, and Perot, Dana did Bush and Perot, and David was on the wide shot filling in as Dana...
Guest:dressed as perot so if you see the three shot of them it's actually spade because dana can't be literally in both places but once we cut in yeah it's dana again right so uh it was just tough for david to catch a break because dana was the writers will always go to whatever whoever came through for them on the last show
Guest:And so they'll go with the performer that they know can deliver and it's just harder to, unless you have some, unless you play some other kind of part or unless you bring some other kind of voice that's clear and can withstand those first five or six shows when the audience is less than friendly.
Marc:Well, that's interesting because one of the things that I did say was how big of a fan I was of the first season.
Marc:And I obviously mythologized them in my mind, and they meant a lot to me as a kid.
Marc:First season or first five years?
Marc:Well, the first five years.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:And you said, well, we've had a lot of good casts.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like very quickly sort of dismissed the whole notion that that was it.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, when I came back in 85, I continually got beat up by the golden years.
Guest:And I've been there for all the golden years.
Guest:And I can tell you that they were not golden at the time because from the time Chevy left, which is the beginning of January of 77, Bill Murray and the young Jim Downey come in together.
Guest:um those were the first changes we made and and saturday night dead started around then right so we survived it and the idea that the show will continually reinvent itself and that you have to give it time the living through it is not fun if you're right me uh probably even less fun if you're the audience right um people have to be bad before they can be good dress rehearsal has to be bad before it
Marc:sure yeah well let me let's go back because i think it's important i mean you grew up in canada yeah and was was what was your family like what was your father do what did he do uh my father died when i was 14 yeah and uh my mother's parents owned a movie house so
Guest:I just started seeing movies at a very early age.
Guest:And around the kitchen table, if they were talking about movies or felt strongly about Jimmy Cagney or something, I wasn't aware at that point that they didn't actually know Jimmy Cagney.
Guest:But it was sort of in the air.
Guest:Were you brought up very Jewish?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Pretty Jewish.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:By and large, Jewish neighborhood.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because I have no sense of what the Canadian Jewish community was like.
Guest:Well, it's different in every city, I suppose.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But there was a lot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a strong theater community and a strong tradition of stuff.
Guest:This was in Toronto?
Guest:This was in Toronto, Canada.
Guest:And your name was Lipowitz?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:then yeah yeah well when i was first yeah not not once i began to perform right was it what was your full name lauren lauren libowitz yeah and when did you start is it true i heard this weird bit of information is lou jacobi your godfather um
Guest:I think my mother told me something about it once, yeah.
Guest:I mean, he and my uncle had, I think, written songs together.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was in Toronto, yeah.
Marc:He's a great character actor, that guy.
Guest:He's a funny guy.
Guest:Yeah, one of my first trips to New York when I came down...
Guest:uh by the bus from toronto i went uh one of the plays i saw was uh come blow your horn which was neil simon's first play and he was in it and i went my mother told me to go backstage and say hello and i did and he was nice to me and that's that that's that but were you taken with being backstage or with the idea of i
Guest:Theater?
Guest:Yeah, I think I just, in the most broadest sense of it, wanted to be in show business, I think.
Guest:But I also sort of wanted lots of other things, too.
Guest:So I didn't have any kind of single-mindedness about that.
Guest:I think...
Guest:By 1967, I was in that part of that generation that would have said what I want to do is direct.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Because you saw sort of The Graduate.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you went, well, I'd like to do that.
Guest:But you did some comedy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I performed and I did shows in high school and I did shows at university, wrote and direct.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Performed, you know, and performed with another guy, Howard Pomerantz.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Were you guys childhood buddies?
Guest:No.
Guest:No.
Guest:I did a show at the university called UC Follies, and he came to see me about his brother.
Guest:uh earl who went on to be a sort of very successful comedy writer uh who did stand up and uh what you know would i consider him for the show which i did and and for your college show college show yeah oh yeah yeah and that's how you and harpy came friends yeah and then well that's when we met and then when uh after college after i graduated i went to england for a while and then i came back uh what'd you do in england
Guest:avoid going to law school primarily but it was just London in 1966 was just a way more happening place than Toronto was at the time and it was the first time I'd been exposed to you know life outside of where I grew up
Marc:Drugs, rock and roll, excitement.
Guest:I suppose that was part of it, but it wasn't so much that.
Guest:It was just that I knew I didn't want to go to law school.
Guest:I wouldn't have had the confidence to say that I could succeed in show business.
Guest:And they weren't really recruiting from Toronto at that point.
Guest:In general.
Guest:Yeah, there was not a big trade ad.
Guest:We're the Canadians.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Guest:So I didn't know how you'd kind of get into it or do it.
Guest:And when I came back from Toronto, I came back to Toronto from London.
Guest:Howard Shore, who'd been with me in Toronto, and who's one of my oldest friends.
Guest:Musical director?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was a musical director.
Guest:Here's my friend with three Oscars.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He and I would write songs a little bit.
Guest:I tried a little bit of that.
Marc:Funny songs or real songs?
Marc:No, not real songs.
Guest:Did you sing?
Guest:No, I mean a little bit in junior high, but no, no.
Guest:I never thought of myself as a singer.
Guest:Hart and I started sort of improvising and doing a little bit of stand-up together.
Guest:And I worked a little bit in an advertising agency, just sort of copywriting.
Guest:And I was...
Guest:Just sort of looking around, and gradually we sort of began to earn... We started doing a radio show on the CBC, 15 minutes on Wednesday nights at 10.
Guest:You and Hart.
Guest:Yeah, which was sort of political in nature and satire, as it was then called.
Guest:We didn't know no one was listening.
Guest:We thought it was really important, and we were really proud of it.
Guest:We began performing sort of in clubs.
Guest:We had a sort of classic...
Guest:straight man comedy kind of you were the straight man i was yeah i was a straight man or the serious one or the tall good looking one whatever whichever way you want uh but definitely the straight man and um hart came to new york i think he either saw woody allen or he met with jack rollins in some way we ended up sort of uh
Guest:going down and to New York and writing for him.
Guest:For his clients?
Guest:No, no, for Woody.
Guest:No, for Woody.
Guest:Specifically, yeah.
Guest:And he was incredibly encouraging and generous.
Guest:And we would fly down, we'd meet with him for a few hours.
Guest:He was stand-up then.
Guest:And then we'd go back to Toronto.
Guest:Were you part of any of his classic bits?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:Contributed zero to his career, but he was really, really helpful in mine.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:What did he say?
Guest:I remember... Let me think it clearly.
Guest:I remember suggesting a joke.
Guest:This is from another time.
Guest:It had to do with...
Guest:Being obsessed by the idea that there was someone who was thinking the same thoughts at the same time and tracking down the doppelganger thing and tracking down that person and finding him, but every time he called the line was busy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Which no longer applies.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But he said, that's a brilliant joke.
Guest:And I think that probably kept me warm for a year and a half.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just the compliment.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It didn't do anything.
Guest:And then we wrote some stuff for Joan Rivers.
Guest:And then we did a little bit for Dick Cavett, which I don't remember.
Guest:These are all Rollins clients?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because I met with him when he was a very old man and I somehow insulted him.
Marc:He was a joy.
Marc:Yeah, I heard he was an amazing guy.
Guest:Yeah, and had worked going back to Nichols and May and Harry Belafonte.
Marc:Yeah, those guys were something.
Guest:And had worked with Woody, sort of nurturing him when he was a stand-up at the bitter end and all that.
Guest:Well, that went back when management did that.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:No, he had no interest in going to a meeting at a network.
Guest:No, that's right.
Guest:He was happy at 3 o'clock in the morning talking over the act, you know.
Guest:uh, and was kind of an inspiring figure.
Marc:And he, did they, he'd guide you into, how did the TV opportunity with, uh, with heart come around for the terrific.
Guest:What happened was we did, um, we signed with, uh, William Morris with a very young David Geffen was our agent, William Morris.
Guest:And then really then material that we had written for, uh, Joan Rivers got sent out.
Guest:And I think our agent on the West coast was Howard West.
Guest:Um,
Guest:And a guy from Toronto named Bernie Orenstein who maybe knew us a little bit, maybe knew Hart, and his partner Saul Turtletaub were producing a show with Phyllis Diller called The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show.
Guest:And we got offered to be writers on that show.
Guest:And we were there.
Guest:In L.A.
Guest:In L.A., which I could talk about that for an hour, but I'm not sure we want to spend that much time on it.
Marc:Your first trip to L.A.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, first job.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we were in Burbank, and there was the Tonight Show down the hall, and Dean Martin, and I believe Jerry Lewis had a show.
Guest:Burbank was like a sort of pub of activities.
Marc:Who were your primary influence?
Marc:Who did you like to watch?
Marc:I mean, what impressed you about performers?
Marc:Which ones?
Guest:Oh, when I was a kid?
Marc:Or just at this time, when you started working in show business?
Guest:Oh, I think that, you know, you knew that it was just the beginning of the change.
Guest:By 68, you know, I think...
Guest:uh bobby kennedy had been shot we were you know we were there and it was i think i was either 23 or 24 and i think the next oldest writer to me was 52. so we were working primarily with people who come up through radio and we're now had been in television for as long as television been going right
Guest:Bob Schiller, who was one of the I Love Lucy writers, was very, all of the writers were incredibly encouraging.
Guest:George Balzer, who'd written for Jack Benny, who was a huge hero of mine, gave me a bunch of Benny scripts to read, which were very thin because there was a lot of pauses.
Guest:They were radio shows.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So there was that generation was still very much in power.
Guest:And, you know, I had long hair and a headband.
Guest:You know, there was there was just and television couldn't have been farther removed from what was happening.
Guest:music and film and all those things were starting to turn and television was a little I think because it's the mass medium and whenever when movies were the mass medium they were very tightly controlled movies got freed by television then I think they began to loosen up and I think television up until really us in late night and then cable after that
Guest:were pretty much the way they'd always been.
Marc:Well, didn't it take the idea that the executives that were in charge at the time, not unlike the film executives, were like, we don't know what to do anymore.
Marc:So they had to open the door a little bit.
Guest:Yeah, except that we went from the Phyllis Diller show, which we were so young.
Guest:I remember asking how it was going.
Guest:They'd say it was going really well.
Guest:And then around show seven or eight,
Guest:Uh, on our very first show, which was just, uh, uh, uh, we were against Barbra Streisand in Central Park.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I thought we were going to get killed being from Toronto.
Guest:They didn't, if I remember right, I think they did an 18 or 19 chair and Phil Stilley did a 41 chair.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And that's when it began to understand how big a place America was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:people weren't following it as happily as i was and i think that around show seven or eight there were people in our offices measuring them you know like for we weren't in actual offices we were in trailers in the parking lot like which network was it nbc i've been in mbc most of my life and then did you like phyllis oh she was wonderful yeah just wonderful yeah
Guest:and really generous with the writers and and funny but we would go you know uh literally to a a a deli in in burbank uh called kosher rama which was i think on riverside we'd go with all the the older writers
Guest:and they just tell stories yeah you know and there's kind of keith fowler who'd written for the honeymooners uh schiller and wascoff had written for i love lucy uh george balser as i said so you had this sort of these people who'd made a life out of writing comedy and wrote jokes and wrote sketches and
Guest:And episodes and understood character.
Guest:So on one hand, I'm learning that and another hand the you know Everything's changing and you worked first water as well.
Guest:Yeah No, then when Phil still got cancelled we got a job on laughing Which was in its first season and that was the that was the turning point and that was the number one show, right?
Marc:But that was the counterculture starting to be integrated.
Guest:Yeah, but but think you think of this Yeah
Guest:laughing was on Monday at eight as was, here's Lucy.
Guest:And they were both often tied for number one, which meant half the country.
Guest:This was when 40 million people are watching something.
Guest:So 40 million people are watching Lucy and 40 million people are watching, uh, laughing, laughing.
Guest:So, uh,
Guest:There's always two Americas in that regard.
Guest:But you could feel that the creativity was shifting.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And I think that it wasn't a particularly fun show to work on for us.
Guest:We never went to the studio.
Guest:Why?
Guest:The writers worked at a motel.
Guest:In a sweat barrage?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:We were treated well and paid well, and George Schlatter was encouraging.
Guest:It's just that Paul Keyes, who was the head writer, the way it worked was not the way I was expecting it to.
Guest:I sort of thought it would be more, not quite Kauffman and Hart out of town, but some sense of, it was much more factory.
Marc:Right.
Guest:So we we would write things and then they would be rewritten and then They they'd do them and then I think Carolyn Raskin was her name would who was in the editing room She'd sort of put the shows together George kept the energy up in the studio and got performances out of everybody and it was very much
Guest:I'm sure his vision, but we were actually brought in by Rowan and Martin because we did two man comedy.
Guest:So we wrote a lot of monologues, you know, the team dynamic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they were funny.
Guest:They were funny, but it was also the sort of thing which was a little demoralizing because quite often they read them off the cards for the first time and there was no audience.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:oh really yeah so you kind of went oh right so it was entirely you couldn't get the satisfaction no i mean it wasn't writers were part of it but um you know and i think when i came here i wanted uh to sort of do it differently so i wanted the writers to follow their pieces right to the end right and that sort of became the template
Marc:So after Laugh-In, you went back to Canada and did the Hardin.
Guest:Went back to Canada, yeah.
Marc:Went back, did a couple years, yeah.
Marc:And learned that, do the TV yourself.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And the structure of that show was a variety show.
Guest:That was a variety show, but more probably influenced by Laugh-In.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was a different title every time.
Guest:One was called Today Makes Me Nervous.
Guest:There were like a lot of... Do you ever look at that now?
Guest:When was the last time you watched it?
Guest:I've been looking at shows I did a month ago.
Guest:So it isn't... Are you friends with Hart?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I talked to him oddly enough last week, I think.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:When I was first beginning here, he didn't like L.A.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It didn't work for his family, and he was older than me, and he had kids.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we did those shows, and Hart was way more of a performer than I was.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:So I noticed we were in the editing room.
Guest:I was learning how to do that.
Guest:And I'd see myself before the slate.
Guest:And I'd be preoccupied, checking lighting, checking things, making sure things were right.
Guest:And then the slate would happen.
Guest:I'd be smiling.
Guest:And I realized, oh, the other guy is more me than that guy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I knew you I don't think you can produce comedy unless you've been on a stage, you know, and I think for a lot of writers who come out of print or, you know, even even a lot of lampoon writers, they're much happier with animation.
Guest:oh really they have more freedom well the performers do exactly what they're told you know like you don't have to go through the medium of somebody who's popular for a whole other set of reasons right yeah and cater to his personality yeah or he doesn't like that right that was funny or he embellished that joke or right he got the timing wrong or he did it you know uh there's a human part of it yeah uh that that doesn't go along so well with right yeah
Marc:So what was the relationship in terms of putting that first cast together with the National Lampoon Radio Hour and the Canadian talent that you had?
Marc:I mean, I know you've probably covered that before.
Marc:Really?
Guest:You think?
Guest:Well, we don't even have to.
Guest:No, no, I'm good.
Guest:I can talk about anything.
Marc:Because it seems to me like your intentions...
Guest:were were fundamentally creative at that time that oh 100 100 no i i had done i was uh i had done three years in la before that i was living at the chateau marmont was it nice then no it was kind of run down but yeah but um in your 20s
Guest:yeah 27 8 9 i had my 30th birthday at the marmont in the lobby of the marmont which was one of the first parties they allowed uh really yeah it was kind of a deal but so that was changing too yeah and also maybe it was kind of played by month you had a fight for the party
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:It was just a it's a whole other set of stories.
Guest:But I think that they were it was just it ended up being a lot of people there because all of the people who were doing what what I was doing or attempting to do what I was doing.
Guest:were vaguely knew each other.
Guest:They ate at the same restaurant.
Marc:So the guys like from the committee maybe?
Guest:Yeah, I knew lots of people from the committee, Carol Androsky in particular.
Guest:But it was also, you sort of knew where, you knew what you were watching.
Guest:It was a small community.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I was writing for television, but the person who changed my life was Lily Tomlin, who... I was going to go back to Canada.
Guest:I'd come out... Bernie Bernstein started to be my manager.
Guest:I met with Lily Tomlin about doing a special.
Guest:I showed her some stuff I'd done in Canada that she liked.
Guest:And I think it was a period where I was probably more lost...
Guest:about whether I'd be able to do the kind of thing I wanted to do.
Guest:And she was very much a kindred spirit, braver than I was.
Guest:We had coffee or something, and then I got offered a job to work on a special, which, oddly enough, Herb Sargent was the producer of.
Guest:which was at CBS.
Guest:It was like 12 weeks.
Guest:And so I called the people from Canada and said, this was, I think, in the summer.
Guest:I won't be back till middle of November.
Guest:And it became, you have to make a choice.
Guest:Bernie was on...
Guest:i don't think he was happy that i was gonna work that long on something but with lily yeah and he had uh there was a mama cast special and a gleason carney reunion special and uh i remember thinking you know because i love the honeymooners uh but i did i i went with lily because she was
Guest:again just pushing it and also uh brave and i met well i met so i met richard prior through her and and we did that special and i wrote a couple things and it was nominated for an emmy the show did they used to do pilot specials then and the idea was if the pilot did well enough as a special then they would order it to series
Guest:And CBS didn't order it.
Guest:And then ABC approached us and she called me and Jane Wagner, who was also writing on that first show, she wanted the two of us to produce it.
Guest:And so she went to ABC and said, and put my name forward as, you know, a producer.
Guest:I'd done the job in Canada, but writer producer, but now I was going to be... In America for Lily Tomlin.
Guest:In America and approved.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that was huge.
Guest:And that show...
Guest:did win an emmy uh and probably was the reason i had the credibility at such a young age to be hired to do snl oh well that's amazing yeah and have you thanked lily for that yeah many times every time recently yeah yeah
Marc:all right so let's because we have somewhat limited time but when you bring when you brought together that first cast i guess my question is is that you know having i saw the show the other night i came as your guest and i'd never been to the show not because i was bitter or no no no it's tough to get tickets yeah it is you know even if i have friends yeah no no i know then yeah can't help me yeah exactly
Marc:But I was surprised that, you know, you're still very involved.
Marc:You're out there.
Marc:And I was amazed at how many people were involved in moving things around.
Marc:It was very exciting.
Marc:And, you know, I talked to Louis before I came.
Marc:He says, oh, it's going to be great.
Marc:It's always a great time to go to Saturday Night Live.
Marc:And I felt like, you know, I had missed something.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because at some point I was like, I'm not going to Saturday Night Live.
Marc:But.
Marc:The intimacy of it and the immediacy of it.
Marc:And it's still fundamentally exactly the same as it was the first show.
Guest:Yeah, and that's an interesting question.
Guest:Why did you keep it here?
Guest:I think that what happened for me was basically when I got here, it was 1975, and there were deer running through the hall at Rockefeller Center.
Guest:They were showing me potential offices, and they were on most floors.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I settled here on 17, but for the first few months, I was on the fourth floor in the office of a former programming guy named Larry White.
Guest:And when I got the office, there was a plant that was just...
Guest:bone dry with one leaf a big tall plant with one leaf left and inside the desk was like gelucil and maalox tablets and a couple of racing forms filled out and i thought this is not you know uh i'm not in california anymore but i knew and and fought for a lot of pre-production times so
Guest:I spent three months rounding up everybody who I thought would be good.
Guest:And I knew some.
Guest:I brought my friend Howard down to do the band.
Guest:Michael O'Donoghue said, why would you bring someone from Canada to New York City?
Guest:And I went, well, it was tough to explain.
Guest:And Marilyn Miller, who had worked on The Lily Show, said, when you get to New York, you should meet Michael O'Donoghue.
Guest:And he hadn't done television, but I used to listen to... I would drive in my car on Sunday nights when I was living at the Marmont and listen to the National Lampoon Radio Show, which...
Guest:uh i used to love and uh he'd been very involved in that and so he and i and and beats who he was living with we met at the uh they wanted to go to the oyster bar uh at grand central i talked down what i thought i was going to be doing i saw um candide on broadway guy named gary nardino who's an agent at uh icm said you should see this show because those designers are
Guest:And I went and saw it.
Guest:And that was Eugene and Frannie Lee.
Guest:And I met with them.
Guest:And I sort of described what I was going to do.
Guest:And they joined up.
Guest:And it was gradually sort of rounding people up.
Guest:Gilda, I had known from Toronto.
Guest:From Godspell or before?
Guest:Oh, I'd known them from that scene from Godspell.
Guest:But I kind of knew her more like even summer camp.
Guest:Oh, as a kid?
Guest:Yeah, well, not as a kid.
Guest:But we didn't go to the same camp.
Guest:But I had a friend who'd gone out with her and whatever.
Guest:and it's interesting to me how everyone kind of knows each other sometimes oh yeah no and also I think Chevy had spent summers in Canada and within and I think John Danny of course Danny I knew from Toronto he'd been on my show in Canada
Guest:Lorraine had been on Lily's show and I sort of began just and when I got here Herb Sargent called me and took me to dinner to Elaine's which I'd never been and
Guest:He was really nice and had lots of advice, but he was probably 25 years older than I was.
Guest:Had been the head writer on The Tonight Show with Steve Allen, you know, and was sort of the most elegant name in New York television.
Guest:and uh the next day he called he said i want to come talk to you and he came into this office and i said uh we talked and he said i want to do your show and i said herb you can't do my show one because the top money is 700 a week and two you know i just don't think and he said well i don't care i'm in he wanted to be part of something new he wanted to be part of something new yeah
Guest:And I didn't know then what couldn't be done.
Guest:And also because I was the same as I'd always been, which was I wanted to do this.
Guest:I wanted to do that.
Guest:I wanted to do music.
Guest:I wanted to do films.
Guest:I wanted to do the news.
Guest:I wanted...
Guest:As my father once said, my eyes were bigger than my stomach.
Guest:So he took me to a restaurant to learn that once.
Guest:He let me order everything that I said I wanted, and then it all arrived.
Guest:But I found that I was slowly beginning to, and I knew that doing it live, there wouldn't be a pilot.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Herb Schlosser, whose idea it really was to do a live show.
Guest:He was an NBC guy.
Guest:He was the NBC.
Guest:He was head of the network.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Dick Ebersole, who I'd met while I was doing Lily's show, who was out a little younger than I was and had worked for Ruin Oil at ABC and had just landed this job as head of Late Night at NBC.
Guest:I, by this point, had agreed to do a movie at Paramount.
Guest:I was going to write a screenplay.
Guest:So you were a writer guy.
Guest:I was a writer.
Guest:I earned my living as a writer by that point for like seven, eight years.
Guest:I had the meeting.
Guest:He described that he was going to do a bunch of pilots in late night, asked me if I'd do one.
Guest:I didn't really think it would get in the way.
Guest:And then one night I came home late to the Marmont, and there was a message from Dick to be at the Polo Lounge.
Guest:This was at 2 o'clock in the morning, to call him and then to be at the Polo Lounge at 7 in the morning for a breakfast meeting, which was not something I was in the habit of doing.
Guest:I did have breakfast, but not normally until about 9 o'clock.
Guest:I showed up, and Dick had briefed me a little bit before, was the head of programming and the head of talent, a guy named Dave Tevitt, who was a wonderful guy.
Guest:The head of research was a guy named Marvin Antonowski.
Guest:And I described the show I wanted to do, which was pretty much this show.
Guest:And research proved that the audience that I wanted wouldn't be there at that time because it was Saturday night and everybody would be out.
Guest:I think they just really wanted to look at me to realize that I wasn't crazy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was a sort of approval thing more than that.
Guest:And then I came in and Dick guided me through all of it.
Guest:It was a labyrinth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I sort of spoke to what I think was the board at NBC and explained what I was going to do again.
Guest:And it took me three months to find everybody.
Guest:And then we lived together for three months before we went on.
Guest:And I knew from being a writer that...
Guest:You always write your last hit until you're actively discouraged from writing it by the audience or the industry.
Guest:So I began to let gradually people would just keep writing and then out of boredom, they'd start writing with somebody else.
Guest:And then a kind of cross-pollinization began to happen and the material began to look like nothing else.
Guest:relationships were solidified and the the lamb you know michael when i when he met ackroyd well anyway what they were like why would you you know because it was they were all different cultures they were all the only thing they had in common was that i thought they were all talented and funny and funny yeah and
Marc:So this was a system that was put in place from day one.
Marc:You stay here because this is the place where SNL is.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:This is where it lives, and that's the end of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we're up here for three days, and then we do read through here on Wednesday, and then I move down to the studio.
Marc:And you just had the pitch meeting just today.
Marc:This is Monday.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Same Monday meeting at 5 o'clock, which has been there since the beginning.
Guest:With the host and with the cast and the writers.
Marc:I guess what I try to get out of people when I talk to them who's been here because of my own, you know,
Marc:mythologizing of you and of the show is that yeah i i somehow you know it's got to be awesome to be meeting me like this and oh no it's no i'm teasing no it's it's i'm happy that you know it's a very human conversation because you know whatever i experienced in 1995 right for whatever reason whatever happened it loomed large in my head not in oh no no and and also you can't really explain bad timing
Guest:to someone no no no what i mean by it is we were under assault no i got it and uh so we weren't you know everything we were doing was being scrutinized everything was and so it was like uh as i would with as i have with lots of people
Guest:You sort of bring them in because when I saw Bottle Rocket, I wanted to meet the guys who did it.
Guest:The Wilsons?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you sort of meet people you think have something.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You don't know.
Guest:But they're moving around in your head.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And sometimes there's a spot and sometimes there's not.
Guest:Right.
Marc:yeah i'm okay with it i'm happy no no no we're both here yeah and so the the but the creative system like because i know a lot of people and i've talked to a lot of people i've talked to people that have been on the show a year people who've not been on the show and people have been on the show for 10 years right so i think you got the i think the best thing that you could say about the show was the 40th anniversary
Guest:Not so much, you know, when you do live television, the one thing you can't expect is for it to be perfect.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But that night, for me, watching all of the people who created and built the show working together and also being the audience for each other was as close to perfect as I was ever going to get.
Guest:Because the feeling in the room was...
Guest:so warm and supportive and you realize that it's in the cliche sense it's a family and they're all they've all you can't explain that experience of doing it except to other people who have done it it's very intimate as well and Spielberg was hanging around for some reason I noticed yeah just he just dropped by
Guest:Yeah, he's been a fan of the show since probably when we did Jaws, which was the third or fourth show, but probably before that.
Guest:So he was just in town.
Guest:Hillary Clinton?
Guest:His premiere, yeah.
Guest:Well, she just didn't wander in.
Marc:No, I know.
Marc:I know what it takes to deliver a politician to a location.
Guest:Oh, that's right.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:I guess the transition from...
Marc:Being a guy who made SNL to being one of the most powerful men in television.
Marc:Right.
Marc:At some point, there's a bit in the book about Conan.
Marc:There's a bit where you talk to that guy, Erwin Siegelstein.
Marc:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:It seemed to me that that was when you were giving your resignation.
Marc:I was resigning, yeah.
Marc:And he said something to you that seemed to define how you feel and how you see show business.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a thing about broadcasters that you realize.
Guest:I was shooting a movie once in the western part of Virginia.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Not West Virginia, but the western part of the state of Virginia.
Guest:And we were at a Holiday Inn, and the only thing there was was a Pizza Hut for about 100 miles.
Guest:And in this Holiday Inn, they had a big screen television.
Mm-hmm.
Guest:and in the Pizza Hut, they had like a jar for black lung stuff.
Guest:I realized that people came in and drove in to watch Monday Night Football on the big screen, and then they told me they also come in on Saturdays to watch SNL.
Guest:And so I think, not to get grand about it, but I think that you sort of realize that when I was growing up in Toronto and there was shows coming out of New York, live shows...
Guest:i didn't know anything about that there was nothing like that in toronto but you sort of connect to a bigger world and you go oh i'd like to be part of that and i think for snl our our strength has always been in the middle of the country uh and people watch it and and identify with it and connect to it and so shutting them out because they're not qualified to watch or because uh we're going to just do things that uh
Guest:are so specific that they won't understand and also for me there's something about uh a variety show which is a variety of comedy styles never has there been a consensus as long as i've been here from the writing staff about other people's writing
Guest:The people who write dry stuff don't like the big, broad stuff.
Guest:We do physical comedy.
Guest:We do low comedy.
Guest:We do political satire.
Guest:Always, I hope, with some level of intelligence behind it.
Guest:But people get snobbish.
Guest:They go, well, I don't like slapstick.
Guest:whatever that means, and you go and you go, well, yeah, no, were you laughing?
Guest:Because I saw you laughing.
Guest:It's that variety of styles of big dumb comedy.
Guest:It's how I almost, at my peak seriousness, which was probably having won a couple of Emmys, I think at the end of the first season of SNL, which I thought of as kind of my championship season, because I'd written everything I ever wanted to write at least twice by that point,
Guest:uh i got three emmys uh one for writing and producing us two for snl and one for a lily tomlin show that had done the year before and i and uh we started being taken very seriously but also we none of us knew that the show was happening till that summer sure you know because we're always here and i think that there was some
Guest:sense that began of like oh well I'd always thought what we were doing was important but then you begin to be told it's important and your thing changes and when and because I've been working with Pryor and you saw the first season you know what that was
Guest:And when Steve Martin first showed up, and I'd known him a little bit as a writer, or was certainly aware of him, but he was a writer on Smothers Brothers when I was on Lafayette.
Guest:And I think there'd been a touch football game where the two shows, I caught a catch, that's why I remember it, from Dan Rowan.
Guest:But I think that what happened...
Guest:was what he was doing, which was so different than what we were doing, because we started to get dark.
Guest:Not even dark, but just serious, or beginning to take ourselves a little seriously.
Guest:And then you saw, and Bernie said, I think you should really think of Steve Martin.
Guest:And I went, ah, yeah, balloon animals and all that stuff.
Guest:But...
Guest:Then he came and he changed the show.
Guest:And that in a certain sense, that was the thing that that the first real big reinvention of the show after the 75, 76 season to make it a broader show.
Guest:No, just that it was another kind of sensibility that different sensibilities would come in with different people.
Guest:And you just let them fight it out.
Guest:No, it never gets to that because the thing about comedy people is if you actually laugh and give it up for somebody, kind of, we know it.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:It's not, it doesn't, whatever you've been arguing, once you start to laugh and you have to really love laughing.
Guest:You have to really be on the side of people who can make you laugh and you want to be around as many funny people as you can.
Guest:It, it,
Guest:gets a little isolating and sometimes you can drift off but it is a certain way of expressing yourself that that is just as powerful as any of the other forms and now you have the tonight show you brought the tonight show back to new yeah that was you're the first that that trip that i alluded to uh earlier when i came down by bus yeah uh
Guest:I had a friend who... Anyway, I got tickets to the... He knew a writer on the... He was working with an actress whose boyfriend was Dick Cavett and who... They later got married, but he was a writer on the Jack Parr show and it was the Christmas show and he met us downstairs online and gave us our two tickets and I went into what is now Jimmy's studio and...
Guest:uh betty white was on the show and it was so small you know it was i'd watched the jack power show at that point yeah it was uh through high school and it was like oh but it was also coming by the skating rink coming by the christmas tree coming into that building coming all that was just uh it was the same it's pretty much the same for me now as it was then
Marc:It's amazing to me that you've grown up and you've defined and created the medium that you've redefined.
Guest:When I was at University of Toronto, McLuhan was there.
Guest:But he did say that we were leaving the industrial age and coming into the information age.
Guest:That's mid-60s.
Guest:So all those ideas of what can be done and
Guest:How you can change the way people see things was sort of in the air and live being the oldest form, you know, because I'd grown up on all those Jimmy Durante, you know, Colgate Comedy Hour, Martin and Lewis, all that live television.
Guest:We didn't much know it was live, but it had a different quality.
Guest:And the idea that that would then be the way in a new wine and old bottles way, that that would be the way that you could carry on, that it wasn't going to be that it looked all shiny like what was happening in video and film.
Guest:It was going to look in a certain way primitive and more relatable.
Marc:And raw and exciting.
Marc:I like we ended on McLuhan.
Guest:Thanks for talking, Lauren.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:OK, and that that was the end of that conversation, because what happened was he ran out of time because he had to meet Seth Meyers for dinner.
Marc:And I didn't feel quite satisfied personally or otherwise, because there was still a lot to talk about, because, you know, with Lorne, there was my personal problems that needed to be addressed.
Marc:But he's also a great WTF guest in terms of the history of comedy, his influence on comedy, his life in show business.
Marc:So so I didn't think we got to all that we had to get to.
Marc:So we told the assistant in the front office there, you know, like, look, he said he would talk some more.
Marc:So is there time for that?
Marc:And, you know, if there is, you know, let us know.
Marc:I'm only in town for another day.
Marc:And apparently Lauren came out and said, make sure you set that up with with Mark.
Marc:And I went back the next night at 11 o'clock.
Marc:He had been out to dinner with Amy.
Marc:And this is something he does every week.
Marc:On Monday, he does the pitches with the host.
Marc:And then he goes out to dinner with the host.
Marc:And then that night on Tuesday, they write till like 2 or 3 in the morning.
Marc:So he came.
Marc:He met me at like 11 o'clock after he had dinner.
Marc:And we talked for a second hour.
Marc:And it was amazing.
Marc:And so this is that second hour.
Marc:Enjoy the rest of my conversation with Lorne Michaels.
Marc:This is our second conversation.
Marc:It's now Tuesday.
Marc:I talked to you Monday.
Marc:Monday was the pitch the host day down the hall.
Marc:What happens today?
Marc:This is Tuesday.
Guest:Tuesday is writing.
Guest:There's a host dinner, which I just came from, yeah.
Marc:Is that just you?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:It's her.
Guest:It was Amy, Amy's sister and cast.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And some writers.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And now they're writing.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Sketches.
Marc:And some of them writing.
Marc:While you're at dinner.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And before and last night and whatever.
Marc:And this is every week.
Guest:Every week.
Marc:So you do the show Saturday night.
Marc:You go to the party.
Marc:You get home at five.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You sleep till all day Sunday.
Marc:No, noon.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:And then Monday you come to work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Monday I have that meeting, which you came after, which is the host meeting the writing staff and and people from the various departments, music, design, etc.
Guest:And and the cast.
Guest:And I go around the room and ask people what they're working on or their idea or whatever.
Guest:And it's sometimes very productive and sometimes not at all.
Guest:But it's a signal that the week has started again and that we're not talking about last week's show anymore.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Every week for about 35 years.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, there's a few years off.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, we have a show next week, but then we have a week or two off.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:So I guess instead of going over stories that you've told a million times, let's start like this.
Marc:When you explained to me why my situation was difficult at the time, or I wasn't chosen, you said I didn't fit a slot in your head.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:I didn't say that.
Guest:Kind of.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:What I was saying was I saw something when I saw you and I talked to you.
Guest:And so you kind of put it in your head as when something opens or when something is, you know, it's just part of, you know, Louis said earlier today, we were talking about, he was talking about with Michael Jordan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The guy said, I don't want to tell his story, but
Guest:that he'd be thrilled the trailblazers didn't pick him up you know like in the draft and they said we weren't looking for power forward right I think you're just always looking for what you need to fill right well that's my question it wasn't a personal question is that I assume and you can correct me if I'm wrong uh-huh that after I will you know sure after the first five years of the show uh-huh
Marc:That whatever you learned or whatever heartbreak happened there or whatever worked or didn't work, that some sort of template was set in your mind about how the show works.
Guest:How it worked.
Guest:Who would be performing on it and who would be writing varied.
Guest:Right.
Marc:So in my mind, you have sort of a Lorne-based commedia della arte in your mind.
Marc:Certainly one way of putting it.
Marc:And these slots will be filled somehow or another.
Guest:Yeah, except that you never, it isn't that you're looking for something, it's that you recognize it when you see it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So and now that the and I assume that the lessons that were learned that season and we talked a bit about, you know, the production designer and the stage and the commitment to the space and there's a magic here for you.
Marc:And you seem to be somewhat of a creature of habit.
Marc:that this is your life, right?
Marc:Yeah, it was that.
Marc:But I keep coming back to that conversation you had with that executive who said, upon your resignation, said, look, the contract is for a show, good or bad, or moral judgments, and that's not our problem.
Guest:Yeah, he said, if you read your... I was outraged at somebody doing something and having been lied to and...
Guest:whatever and I thought I was doing working really hard and doing a good job and uh he said you you can resign uh and we will keep the show on and it will go on for as long as it goes on and inevitably the quality will go down and you'll see that uh the audience will at some point sense that and they will drift away and you
Guest:Inevitably, when there's nothing more and no time can be sold anymore, then we'll cancel it.
Guest:And he said, and the thing you really care about will be gone.
Guest:And he said, if you read your contract carefully, you'll see that we asked for the show to be 90 minutes in length for it to have this many commercial breaks, for it to be done for this budget.
Guest:But nowhere in the contract do we ask for it to be good.
Guest:uh if you are so i believe you said neurotic and driven that you feel you have to make it good well that's that's about that's a good thing for us but it isn't what we asked for what we asked for was for it to be 90 minutes in length and to cost that x amount
Guest:and it is a way of looking at things where you, you put into perspective what it is you do and how much of it is what's being asked for and what you feel you have to do.
Guest:And I think that was, uh, eyeopening because the show, uh, there was a, uh, um, a time when I wanted to do the ruttles, right?
Guest:Uh, because I, the pythons were big heroes of mine and, uh,
Guest:Eric Eidel and I were friends and he'd done a part of his Rutland weekend television which was like a three four minute thing about the Ruttles and I thought oh this could be like a longer thing and mock documentaries was a thing in Canada since 50% of programming was documentaries the comedy version of it was just part of the culture and I
Guest:He wrote it.
Guest:I thought it was really good.
Guest:And I wanted to do it in one of our empty time periods.
Guest:And it was going to cost like $275,000.
Guest:It's the 70s.
Guest:I went down.
Guest:to talk to Irwin and said, I really want to do this.
Guest:It's got the SNL people.
Guest:It's got some of the Python people.
Guest:It's got, you know, I think Mick Jagger will do it.
Guest:George Harrison is involved in helping Eric with the script.
Guest:And I think it'll be really, you know, I think it'll be good.
Guest:And I'd like to do it.
Guest:And he said, no.
Guest:And I was so taken aback because SNL was like, it was like 78 and we were like at this ratings peak and people were, I mean, we'd won Emmys every, it was just, and I was sort of, sort of stunned.
Guest:I went, I left my office.
Guest:I came back up to 17 and, uh,
Guest:and then i started to get angry like you know so i called and asked to come back down and he said uh okay i went well how how could you i said how could you say no to me on this and he said well then you can do it and i go why would you put me through it he said because when you're in my end of it
Guest:No is always the right answer.
Guest:You can only get hurt saying yes.
Guest:So if you say no 100% of the time, you're right 75% of the time.
Guest:If it's really, really important to you, then you'll come back, which you did.
Guest:And I went, really?
Guest:You made me jump...
Guest:But it was, they understood how they ran their world.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, and what programming was about.
Guest:And they would give you chapter and verse about how music was the lowest rated thing on television, a thing about music.
Guest:And I don't think it rated terribly highly.
Guest:I watched it.
Guest:Yeah, no one.
Guest:But the people who were already, I was trying to do what I thought was a sort of like sensibility, things that could be in our time period that were...
Guest:that the same audience would like, a sort of unity of taste.
Marc:And this was a night that SNL was off?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And so that was a lesson you learned about programmers and about that.
Guest:Well, also that they were, remember, in those days, you needed 40 million people.
Guest:At this hour?
Guest:No, no, not at late night.
Guest:In general.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Steve Martin called his company 40 Share because that was what you needed to stay on the air.
Guest:Isn't that amazing?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I mean, there were two big ones and one little network.
Guest:Right.
Yeah.
Guest:Do you miss those days?
Guest:Absolutely not.
Guest:No, it was... What that meant was that 11.30 at night replacing Tonight Show reruns was just a low... Which is what you did.
Guest:Yeah, which is what we did.
Guest:It was just low stakes.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it didn't count in prime time.
Guest:Therefore, it didn't impact anyone in the programming department.
Guest:The ratings didn't matter.
Guest:Right.
Guest:When we came on, they projected a four rating.
Guest:We came on higher, like a five rating, and then we sort of grew.
Guest:So it was just an unexplored time period of whether people would watch at 11.30.
Guest:And just as AM radio had turned into FM as the alternative, we were now the alternative to primetime, so much so that it's Herb Sargent's phrase, not ready for primetime players.
Guest:But it was the way we were defined.
Marc:And it was at that time, as we spoke of before, a little later maybe, that movies had already shifted into appropriating counterculture and youth values at the time.
Guest:The studios had collapsed in the late 60s.
Guest:And so...
Guest:Took another decade.
Guest:Yeah, and the movies, yeah.
Guest:We were the first, but it didn't really infect Prime.
Guest:I'm trying to think if you classify something with Mork and Mindy.
Marc:Yeah, I don't think so.
Marc:It was pretty mainstream.
Guest:New shows kept coming along, and they used the talent that...
Guest:We would have- Showed them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or that would have been part of what we were, the same sensibility.
Marc:But you guys were taking risks.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that was the difference and that was the freedom you had.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:So I guess in over time, as we talked about yesterday, you started to realize that the middle of the country-
Marc:And that affiliates and whatnot were really the crux of the business.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was holding an audience is really the crux of the business.
Marc:And that was a big audience.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So at some point, you knew to get away from more esoteric comedy.
Guest:No, I think we always led with whatever we thought was funniest.
Guest:As we began, I think it's like the third or fourth show, Chevy wants to do Gerald Ford because Gerald Ford had fallen.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:on a runway and it was sort of widely reported.
Guest:And Chevy, who one of the first things I knew about him way before we went on the air was he could fall and he could make you laugh falling.
Guest:It was just a part of what he did.
Guest:He'd do it in restaurants and on the street and it was always, always funny and it would always make me laugh.
Guest:And so...
Guest:The idea of fusing those two things, his ability to fall and his... He made no effort at all to look like Gerald Ford.
Guest:He just said he was, which I thought was both brave and new.
Guest:Because we now...
Guest:Again, I've gone back to demanding that people look like the person they're playing, but this was so confident and so, it was just, he was golden.
Guest:You sort of knew when he was out there that he could do anything.
Marc:I looked forward to it.
Marc:You waited for it.
Marc:When you were watching when I was 13 or 14, I was like, I waited for it.
Marc:And he had brilliant timing.
Marc:Oh, amazing.
Marc:And that electricity that came out of that group.
Marc:I mean, I think that in my mind, you must have realized something then, that there was a chemistry, there was a dynamic, there was an interplay between these performers, there was a rawness, there was an intensity, it was magic.
Guest:And also you had a writing staff and performers who all lived under the same roof.
Guest:There was no distinction.
Guest:And there was a closeness to it all.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:At that point.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You were very close to all of them.
Guest:All of them, but also everyone was pretty much... It was...
Guest:the thing about live is everyone needs everyone to the last minute.
Guest:In the movie business, you meet the writer before you start shooting and then you meet him again at the premiere.
Guest:And this was, you need the writer because if those changes don't get to the cards,
Guest:and you're going out and performing it, you're dead.
Guest:So that person is essential to you until even after you're on the air to tell you what the changes are and how it's going and to work with you on it.
Guest:The same thing with the prop guy.
Guest:If he's not putting it in your hand just before you walk out because you've been doing a quick change, then you don't have it when you come out.
Marc:It's like theater.
Guest:And the band has to come in on cue so everyone's necessary until goodnight.
Marc:And how is that not the biggest rush in the world?
Guest:It is the biggest rush in the world, yeah.
Marc:Every week.
Marc:And I imagine that on some level, whatever was planted in you, that feeling, must be something that's worth chasing for a lifetime.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, this, you know, last week was the first show, and Phil Himes, who's our 92-year-old lighting director, who's been, wasn't there the first year, but I think pretty soon thereafter, was having an argument...
Guest:About the shooting on the second Miley Cyrus number.
Guest:And he came to me to talk about it.
Guest:And the band was playing the warm-up songs.
Guest:Al Green was somewhere in the background.
Guest:And you kind of...
Guest:The audience was coming in.
Guest:Michael Che was on stage doing a warm-up before Keenan and the girls came out.
Guest:Yeah, I saw that.
Guest:And everyone still cares as much about getting it right.
Guest:And there's a level of excitement to it because...
Guest:You know how many times I've said it, but we don't go on because we're ready.
Guest:We go on because it's 11.30.
Guest:And that's the truth.
Guest:And it took me forever to realize it because there's just a point in which you have to stop.
Guest:You can't fix it anymore.
Guest:And then that becomes what that show was.
Guest:And there's nothing else.
Guest:I'm not...
Guest:This isn't a bragging statement.
Guest:There's nothing else like it because it just grew into that, and that's what it is.
Marc:It's amazing, too, and there is an intimacy to it, and it feels like theater.
Marc:It feels like there's a lot of risk still.
Marc:Oh, completely, yeah.
Guest:And when it doesn't work, it's like an earthquake.
Guest:It just is.
Guest:Everybody looks around at each other.
Guest:Everybody knows it kind of didn't happen.
Guest:It didn't ignite.
Guest:And it was a thing you cared about.
Guest:And then I'm sure every stand-up has the same thing, like the thing that had worked three nights in a row, and then it didn't kind of connect or...
Guest:But that's never a whole show.
Guest:No.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it feels like it's a whole show if you're in that sketch as it's going down.
Guest:And, you know, in the 70s when I was much more raw, certainly on Sundays because the amount of adrenaline that goes through you is a lot.
Guest:People would call me on Sunday and they'd say, and I really dreaded picking up the phone.
Guest:And they'd say, well, I saw the show.
Guest:And that would just like hang there.
Guest:And yeah, I thought it was good.
Guest:I thought that it was pretty good.
Guest:Listen, you know, the thing that you did, you know, did you think that was funny?
Guest:And you go, well, it was at dress rehearsal.
Guest:If you'd been there two hours earlier, you would have seen it be funny.
Guest:But...
Guest:Somebody came in on the wrong foot.
Guest:The camera cut was late.
Guest:Now the timing of the thing is off.
Guest:It's beginning to unravel.
Guest:And we didn't have the recovery skills then.
Guest:It would just start to unravel and then it would collapse.
Guest:And you go, oh, because it was all about energy and timing.
Guest:And when you didn't have either, you were in real trouble.
Guest:And so sometimes we'd get cut off.
Guest:We'd have...
Guest:Four minutes to do a seven-minute sketch and you could Dan Aykroyd and later Phil Hartman loved those because they could move that quickly and talk that fast and You know, I think it was am beats who after one of them said It was a blow for surrealism.
Guest:Yeah, it just is it didn't make much sense It was fun to watch you just didn't know what it was kind of getting at and
Guest:And so I think the audience learned that that was part of it.
Guest:And you'd see people at the beginnings of their career.
Guest:And if they stumbled or it didn't work, you were in some way still rooting for them.
Guest:It was forgivable.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And obviously in the first cast, as well as any other cast, there were performers that didn't show up as much, that were marginalized for one reason or another, or didn't perform to a certain level, but were still involved.
Marc:You sort of felt that, and that happens every cast.
Guest:Yeah, and there's a thing that you learn where if the audience loves someone,
Guest:the writers are really really lucky right you know uh you can't you can't stop them from liking that person they will go with that person they will follow them into dangerous territory the writers can use that because you have at the center of it movies call it a star we we call it whatever we call it here but it is that thing where the audience
Guest:some level of trust has been has happened between that artist and that audience and they will they'll show up and they will follow them and when it takes a long time for the artist to betray that trust if they make six movies in a row where they're not in any way that kind of they don't do the thing they don't bring the thing that the audience loved them for
Guest:then after a while.
Guest:But you have to really actively discourage them from coming after you've won their hearts.
Marc:And some people who start here evolved out of that and took a lot of chances, like Bill Murray.
Guest:Oh, yeah, no, and I think everybody here knows about taking chances.
Guest:I think it's about staying true to who you are, and if you're growing and evolving, I think the audience stays with you.
Guest:I think it's when you...
Guest:It's when you send a signal that what they loved you for here doesn't much matter to you anymore, then I think they feel like they made a mistake.
Marc:Yeah, there's something about Eddie Murphy at this juncture that's a little like that.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, he was probably, may well be the biggest star that ever came out of the show.
Guest:And I wasn't here for that, so it's easier for me to say.
Guest:But Dick was, and it was a phenomenon.
Guest:It's happened many times in the show.
Marc:And that guy, or that woman, has the power to energize the entire cast.
Absolutely.
Guest:And also to if that person is as connected as normally to the writing staff, they will find the person or persons who write for that voice and they will be able to soar.
Guest:They'll be able to take go into places that, you know, superstardom.
Guest:Yeah, and also... But Super Stardom in our world.
Guest:It's a different thing.
Guest:You can be a giant star on SNL and everyone you know watches it, so you... But you're leaving out like 98% of the country, you know?
Guest:So it's a certain kind of community.
Guest:And I think our rating... I think I mentioned this yesterday.
Guest:Our rating for last Saturday's show...
Guest:It's like, you know, six, seven million households, which is about where we were in the 70s.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:And it's always, what I mean by it is, it never was 40 million households.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's state level, give or take.
Guest:The people who are interested in it are generally...
Guest:educated, urban.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You want to see who are the new people.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So, okay.
Marc:So you talk about the writers a lot and you, you know, you respectfully and you include them in all this conversation.
Marc:Now, I've talked to a lot of people that have done well on this show.
Marc:And I've talked to a few that feel alienated or hurt by the show.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And none of them will say bad things about you.
Guest:Yeah, no, no, I wasn't worried about that part.
Guest:I think one of the reasons that the writers are so important, aside from the fact that they write things, is that they're just as involved, but they will never get credit.
Guest:They'll get careers and success, but there's something in the illusion of comedy that the people doing it are making it up as they go along.
Guest:That's true.
Guest:Even smart people think that.
Guest:You watch Bob Hope.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The smarter people, I mean, this is show business history, but guys like Jack Benny, Bob Hope, George Burns always mentioned their writers.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But most people didn't.
Guest:They couldn't bear the idea that they weren't their words.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And it wasn't happening right then.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:And so if you watched Red Skelton, you didn't think he didn't, it was all that, that was just Red being Red.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But the idea that it was scripted,
Marc:They didn't want to know.
Guest:No.
Marc:And smart people don't want to know.
Marc:Like, I noticed that during the writer's strike.
Marc:You know, when you saw all these monologists who would go out and clearly were doing 10-year-old jokes.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And then you really saw.
Guest:I always like the writer's guild strikes because when they're picketing, they want the metaphor to be that they're like teachers.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Guest:You know, like hardworking people who are doing something really valuable as opposed to very well-paid people in terms of the normal and more power to it, you know, like fight for everything you believe you deserve.
Guest:But there's something in the metaphor where you sort of see the line of them and you go, yeah.
Guest:You're still doing okay.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:You're not doing as well as.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Healthcare and that other stuff.
Marc:Yeah, yes, yeah.
Marc:But I guess the question I was leaning towards is that there is a competitive nature to the writing staff and who aligns themselves with stars.
Guest:To every part of the show.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And some people believe that it's fostered.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:And in talking to you, I see you as a person.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I see that some people, I imagine, would be hurt if they were excluded.
Marc:Every week.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Every week.
Marc:And you have to deal with that.
Marc:But I imagine the reason why you let it go on or maybe encourage it to any degree is that's where you get the best performance.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I think what it comes down to is if you're leading or you're in charge, then the moment that everybody believes that you don't want it to be the best show possible, that you're playing favorites or that you're not in control or trying to please another constituency or not just about making it great...
Guest:then you don't have the right to walk by them after you've cut their piece.
Guest:When I'm scrambling between dress and air, there are people I like more than other people, but that's not part of it.
Guest:It's just what's working.
Guest:If we move that later, did it get run over a dress because of where it was?
Guest:Are the rewrites good?
Guest:Can so-and-so tighten that performance and pick it up so that it plays?
Guest:And where should it play?
Guest:So all those are moving parts.
Guest:And I think the nature of it is people, even the most powerful people at any given point in terms of cast,
Guest:will all play by the same rules.
Guest:And there's a moment in my ninth floor office when people come through the door.
Guest:They always, and there's like 40, 50 people in there and it's smaller than this office.
Guest:And
Guest:Their eyes always go to the board, which is on the other wall.
Guest:And there's some people who just have that shrug of like, do you believe this?
Guest:I mean, how can that not be in?
Guest:It killed the dress.
Guest:And very few writers don't hear laughs.
Guest:address you know uh there can be silenced but they'll say i thought it played pretty well yeah yeah and and so you there's just and then there's the variable of the host because the show only works if the host looks good so you're got you're trying you're balancing a lot of things that you're never going to get it entirely right you are yeah i am yeah so you like you see your specific talent as being sort of the conductor i
Guest:No, no, I see my specific talent as moving it forward, getting the best out of everyone that I can, and encouraging a climate in which brighter ideas prevail and in which chance is part of it, and encouraging people and discouraging people.
Guest:If you tell me an idea and I think that's not going to play, I'll tell it to you.
Guest:If you're thinking, he just doesn't get it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I'm thinking, I wrote it three times.
Guest:I've read it and read through 12 times.
Guest:It has never worked.
Guest:And I know if I say it won't work, they'll say he doesn't get it.
Guest:And I have to fall back to, well, maybe this time is different.
Guest:Maybe it will.
Guest:So we read it, and then it flattens.
Guest:And you go, yeah, no.
Guest:Why were we thinking?
I'm right.
Guest:So you can't discourage people from writing something, but you can sort of let them experience it themselves and see why it doesn't work.
Marc:Do you feel that the people that had issues at the show or struggled at the show and eventually hit the wall, that they would maybe have those issues no matter where they were?
Guest:No, possibly, but I can't hide behind that.
Guest:I think that there is a projection because I've been in charge from the beginning.
Guest:I think there's a projection that all power stops with me.
Guest:So in times like the period when you showed up, when there's a whole other thing, when Burbank has suddenly noticed us, what are they doing there?
Guest:It's a little bit like Imperial Rome.
Guest:When there's trouble in Rome, which most of the time there is, they leave you alone.
Guest:they don't come to the provinces and we're like in the in the 70s we were like you want to cover snl you work six days a week and you give up every saturday night no one wanted that and you go to new york yeah but if you were even if you're in new york that was so i think that people think any decision that comes down is mine and so the idea that there's people i report to or still oh yeah yeah of course yeah really yeah
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's how it works.
Marc:But, I mean, you've made yourself and many others' fortunes.
Marc:You've redefined television.
Marc:You now have The Tonight Show.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You're telling me that there's a guy that can say, Lauren, what are you doing?
Guest:When a lot of stuff was going down in the 90s, Warren Littlefield, who was then running the network, running programming,
Guest:Gave an interview, and he said, we're going to make a lot of changes at SNL.
Guest:And Bill Carter, who was interviewing him in the Times, said, yeah, but not Lorne Michaels.
Guest:And he said, I said everything.
Guest:Right.
Guest:which was a signal to me obviously because I read the New York Times, that everything was up for grabs and they were not happy and they wanted to make a change.
Guest:They also had reams of research that proved that music didn't play on television and that we should be just doing comedy, just doing sketches.
Guest:I go, but it's pace.
Guest:You need something in between
Guest:particularly live, you know, a comedy sketch to a comedy sketch.
Guest:The people have to follow that.
Guest:They're not going to, the piece isn't going to work.
Marc:We're going to exhaust people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the live audience in particular.
Guest:And there was a reason why it worked.
Guest:And there's a quote from, attributed to Mr. Bulova, which was, if it's ticking, don't open the back.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and you sort of go, no, that isn't the part you want to fix.
Guest:If you have people they don't like,
Guest:on the show that you can fix but when you have people they like and and writing that they like and the host is good and everybody's happy yeah i think you know amy schumer this week with the weekend yeah uh who's you know i i think had has two songs that are number you know i mean
Guest:It will be a hot show, because it's also Amy at this moment.
Guest:And the audience will be there, I think.
Guest:There's a difference between numbers and influence.
Guest:And SNL always had that.
Guest:So the people who follow us, which is primarily from the beginning,
Guest:uh the industry uh hollywood yeah washington because we were always playing to them and um and hipsters yeah or whatever sometimes hipsters sometimes people who were no longer hipsters sure um sophisticated people yeah i mean tom davis said uh once i think in the 90s he said that the original audience
Guest:Wanted to stay up and watch the show.
Guest:They had kids now and they'd smoke a joint.
Guest:And when the show started, fall asleep.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that seems like Tom Davis's personal experience.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I think for sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:He devoted many hours to that.
Guest:But I think that there's everybody feels when people say to me what the best cast was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Almost invariably, I can tell when they went to high school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, if they say, Bill Hartman did a cover, you go, well, you, yeah.
Guest:And because in high school, you're, you have no power whatsoever.
Guest:You have no money.
Guest:You can't drive.
Guest:You, you know, just staying up late is exciting and having your friends over.
Guest:That's when I watch it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so you attach to a cast and, and you, you go those four or five years with them.
Marc:Well, you've been, you've been through about 150 cast members probably.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't keep stats.
Marc:And you've had amazing talent throughout all of it.
Marc:There was even a couple, as you said, in the years that you weren't here.
Guest:Oh, and also there were a lot of people.
Guest:I saw Robert Downey Jr.
Guest:this summer, and he was in the 85 cast.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:As was Joan Cusack.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They were brilliant.
Guest:It just wasn't right for here at that time.
Marc:But you got guys like Farrell, who is one of the funniest persons that ever lived for whatever reason.
Marc:For sure.
Marc:Innately.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Molly Shannon, who is a genius.
Marc:No question.
Marc:And it seems to me that throughout it, which is why we can't get into specific stories, Phil Hartman, Farley, all of them, that there have been, it seems to me that from the beginning, there's been this sort of current that you seem to have a feeling for, that you want to happen, that there's an electricity that can occur between people and with performers that you're kind of chasing.
Marc:And get out of the way of it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, you know, from the very beginning, I imagine that first cast was, as a young man, you were probably very close.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I imagine, you know, when you talked about living at the Chateau and knowing that Belushi passed away there, that it must have been like a devastating heartbreak to happen to somebody that you loved and was part of that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, as time goes on, some of those liabilities of the talented can be excess and self-destruction.
Marc:How do you handle that?
Marc:What are you willing to tolerate?
Guest:Well, I mean, it's a small point of pride that nobody's ever died doing the show.
Guest:It generally happens a couple years after they leave the show.
Guest:And that's, I think, because...
Guest:The intensity of it leads to that.
Guest:It leads to some kind of exhilaration and high, and maybe people want that to continue.
Guest:Is it your drug?
Guest:The show?
Guest:No.
Guest:Well, you know, my drug is...
Guest:Red wine?
Guest:It's not that.
Guest:There's something about the show that you know you're only going to get close.
Guest:You're never going to leave going that one was perfect.
Guest:Never?
Guest:Never, no.
Guest:Not once.
Guest:If you're from my side of things, you only see the mistakes.
Guest:You see somebody take off and magically, which you enjoy, isn't that?
Guest:But you sort of see that the camera cut was late or that that...
Guest:the guy was cued in too early or that that joke didn't make it to cards and there's a stumble all of that and but it's a snapshot of what happened at 11 30 to one sure and so it's a different it isn't like you go well now i'm i'm done my work is done there's just it's like a sport you play aside from that yeah
Marc:Over the years, you've become very adept at the politics of show business.
Marc:You've become powerful.
Guest:I might have been adept at the beginning.
Guest:Really?
Marc:But I imagine that learning when to pull back, when to be aggressive, when to let things happen.
Marc:And when I read the book about Conan, you seem like the Buddha of that book somehow.
Marc:Is there something you need to do?
Guest:you're a lifer you're a TV lifer yeah I think I've probably done 20 odd movies I was on the phone earlier with Tina Fey and Robert Carlock because we're shooting a retake you know reshoot of a scene in the movie that we all just did and movies are something whether it's as simple as Wayne's World or Mean Girls or whatever the only when I was off in the period I was off I wrote
Guest:with steve martin and brandy newman we wrote three amigos together which was um which was the better part of a year and which was one of the happiest periods of my life so i like that um and i like music i like um i like being around that i don't buddies with paul simon yeah yeah you guys just hang out
Guest:I saw him today, yeah.
Guest:But there are lots of... It's just being around... Creative people?
Guest:Yeah, I guess.
Guest:Being around funny people is important.
Guest:Being around people... It's the best.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I think...
Guest:You know, this is a way that I got to spend my life.
Guest:And the thing about talent is it has to, for lack of a better word, ripen.
Guest:It just needs whatever Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours are or whatever.
Guest:So you sort of see people here turn the corner.
Guest:There's that moment when something connects.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I've seen it.
Guest:And then the audience goes, oh, I always loved him.
Guest:right you know um no and you can point out with action with data that they didn't yeah uh it doesn't matter because that at that moment they're no longer who they were and that excites you well there's something about it if you believe that what the writing is about and if what you you can for me it's having a voice having uh
Guest:a seat at the table whether it's politics or music or comedy to be part of what's going on what's happening that week yeah that time if you don't have that do you find you're a sad person no i mean am i like the melancholy clown no i mean i mean like if you weren't being stimulated in the five years i didn't do the show yeah i never saw the show
Guest:Not because of any sort of defiant act.
Guest:I really just, I thought, well, I was there all those Saturdays.
Guest:Why would I want to stay home on a Saturday?
Guest:Now, it just is, there's a thing that's exciting and thrilling about doing it.
Guest:And then when I'm not doing it, there are lots of other things that interest me.
Marc:Do you know, I remember I worked for you at that internet show, This Is Not a Test, that Biederman ran.
Marc:I hosted that.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:That when we were doing internet show and no one had the internet.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That was pretty exciting.
Guest:Yeah, there's a thing about being there too early that's never good.
Guest:I just, I'm so close to one.
Guest:I do it all the time.
Guest:Yeah, no, no, no, I do it all the time.
Guest:You go like, oh, right, there's no one here.
Marc:Well, you know, coming back to that conversation again where the guy, he said basically that whether you're here or not, the network will be here.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And now it seems that you're going to be here.
Guest:Yeah, no, and the network might not.
Guest:But I think he said we will always be here because we are eternal.
Guest:And I think on some level, that level of power is always there, no matter who owns the network or who runs things.
Guest:And I think...
Guest:uh whether if you're michelangelo you had a pope and i'm certainly not michelangelo but do you know what i mean you there's always on some level of patron and uh under whose you know whatever blessing you work and so uh you still see yourself as an employee not as an i i never saw myself as an employee but i do believe that i work for someone yeah yeah yeah were you excited that you brought the tonight show back to new york i mean very
Marc:I mean, that's a pretty amazing thing.
Guest:Steve Burke and Brian Roberts and Bob Greenblatt, who are the Comcast people who came in, when I said about Jimmy that I thought he was, you know, we were doing Late Night, and I said to Steve Burke, I really want to do it in New York.
Guest:He said, do you believe he's the guy?
Guest:And I said, yeah, I do.
Guest:Thanks for the question.
Guest:And he went, okay, well then we'll do it.
Guest:And he flew out and he met with Jay on a Sunday.
Guest:No one knew about it.
Guest:And he talked to him and he said, I don't know that our shows will be any better in the fall next year, but I know that we have the Olympics and I think we could launch it.
Guest:And I'd like to do this the right way.
Guest:And of course, we'll take care of everybody on your staff and all that.
Guest:And it was done with such elegance.
Guest:Granted, he probably read the books from before.
Guest:But when we said, well, we need to get 6B into shape,
Guest:there was a complete redo of the studio and Eugene Lee who did that brilliant design of it looks like it was there from 1955 on but it's that the acoustics were done by you know people from Lincoln Center came in it was like a magical transformation into what the perfect television studio could be and there was a hundred you know like a hundred percent support they're really proud of it and it sent this signal that they believe in the future they're going to be in the business right staying
Guest:at a time when all the articles for the network business is over and you go, well, what's going to replace it?
Guest:Just more fragmented stuff?
Guest:You know, smaller and smaller audiences?
Guest:So we know that the pipes work.
Guest:People find Monday Night Football.
Guest:They find us every week.
Guest:They find the things they find.
Guest:And every now and then there's...
Guest:a new show like empire or or this year with uh blind spot the people everybody's talking about and that is that's what are called hits yeah and they don't happen that often yeah and when they don't happen for a while people go well i guess this is over it just means there haven't been hits for a while so you're you're you're a believer in 100 in the old model
Guest:Yeah, I'm a believer.
Guest:I don't know whether commercials is the answer.
Guest:I'd rather that they didn't try and do 26 shows a year.
Guest:I mean, Jack Benny did 39.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know, but there was a lower, less fewer choices.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And I think, you know, that sort of,
Guest:HBO model of 13 episodes of something, you can get anybody good to do it because you're not taking... Small commitment.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So you're just going to keep going until you can't see?
Marc:Or one day they find you wandering the halls looking for Chevy?
Guest:I decided to do the 40th two summers ago because it was August and my...
Guest:Cell phone rang, and it was Kenny Mong, who works here for years.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he called me to say Don Pardo had died.
Guest:And he was 95, maybe 96.
Guest:And Don had retired a couple times, and I said, that's just unacceptable.
Guest:So he moved to Tucson.
Guest:We would tape him there.
Guest:You know, that voice was so important.
Marc:That was an excellent voice.
Guest:Yeah, and the way that...
Guest:Derek Jeter to the end had Bob Shepard announce him as he was coming out to bat.
Guest:You go, those are just traditions that are part of things.
Guest:And I went, he was the first person from that time who, he began here in June 1944.
Guest:I'm not born.
Guest:And so I go, he'd been at NBC his whole life.
Guest:Not that that was my goal, but there was something about if I don't do this 40th show, this would be the last time that that founding generation will all be there.
Guest:And so I did it.
Guest:I doubt that I'll do another one, but it was...
Guest:It was an amazing night because you sort of looked around and you knew every face.
Marc:You know what was amazing is how quickly Dan and Lorraine dropped into those characters.
Marc:That was amazing to me.
Marc:That they were just beneath the surface.
Guest:Yeah, Dana Carvey used to say, tell me anyone who's been funnier than they were on SNL after.
Guest:I don't think it's true, because there's lots of great work after.
Guest:But I think for everyone, there's that period when they struggle, there's that period when they're finding their way, and then there's that great period where they're just, let me at them.
Guest:And whatever they got to do, they're going to destroy.
Guest:You know, Chris, once again, that cast of...
Guest:Kristen, Fred, Andy, Jason, Bill, Keenan.
Guest:And then six people leave because it's their time.
Guest:And then you have to introduce a whole new group of people.
Guest:And people go, well, they're not the ones we love.
Guest:And you go, trust me.
Guest:Wait.
Guest:Yeah, wait.
Guest:But it is painful because it's always painful.
Marc:And that's where you're at now.
Guest:Yeah, well, no, I think we moved past that last year.
Guest:I think we're solid now.
Guest:But I used to say that all babies are ugly unless they're your baby.
Guest:And then after a while, three, four months into it, people go, what a cute baby.
Guest:But when they first come out, they're not necessarily great looking.
Guest:And there's something to the audience's patience with us that they go, yeah.
Guest:Somebody who used to review said...
Guest:I'm not reviewing the new cast anymore, because she says, I always don't think they're good, and then three years later, they are.
Guest:And you go, sometimes it happens immediately.
Guest:Chevy was stunning how fast it happened.
Guest:And he knew it.
Guest:Believe me.
Guest:But, you know, he and I were very, very close.
Guest:He, I, and O'Donoghue, that first Christmas, because none of us knew where to go, we stayed here.
Guest:We stayed in this office, and we wrote, and we wrote,
Guest:The first show back, which was an Elliot Gould show, which won the Emmy that year.
Guest:And that level of, we were all about the same age.
Guest:Michael was a little older than us.
Guest:But John and Danny, Lorraine, Gilda, they were all much, much younger.
Guest:To us, it was like six or seven years when you're 30 and someone's 23.
Guest:A lot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:you know, Bill Murray's 22... That... You kind of go, right, well, you know, it's not your turn yet.
Guest:You know, it's like you're only in sixth grade.
Guest:When you get to eighth grade, you'll be able to... And I think that there was something...
Guest:about that time and the how deeply everyone cared about each other that is you're always trying to get back to yeah and we do and you know I have a family which is really you know as cliche as it sounds the most important thing in my life and you sort of
Guest:realize that you don't have this in lieu of a family you just have this and a family and it's it's a different feeling you know if you don't have one feeds the other if you can't care about the people you work with you probably are gonna have a hard time caring about the people you live with and I think the reason I was watching that Yankee game was because there's something about when you watch team sports
Guest:you understand if you follow baseball why you need a third baseman.
Guest:Because if somebody hits it in that area and you don't have anyone, you're going to be very embarrassed.
Guest:So there's something about knowing you need the others
Guest:that uh in order to be for you to be remarkable that's a that's a big deal that is a big deal and it's something you learned later in life or you always i think i always sort of knew it even when i was performing i was part of a two-man thing i was in plays or whatever i think what because the show was in new york and because theater is here there's some connection in live television to the theater sure and also to cameras yeah and uh
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I don't think this show could exist anywhere else.
Marc:It's beautiful.
Marc:It's a beautiful idea.
Marc:And you keep in touch with some guys.
Marc:You and Mike are friends.
Marc:And do you have relationships with a lot of the past cast?
Guest:Oh, yeah, of course.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:You still talk to, like, Dan and those guys?
Guest:Yeah, I talk to Dan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I may see Dan week after next.
Guest:And I did it with Christian the other night.
Guest:You love them?
Guest:Yeah, I do, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, and I think the...
Marc:i think the feeling is probably mutual it is i believe it is if you did it right it it turns out really well okay well that's beautiful it's great talking and i just want to say in closing because i i would be remiss if i didn't i'm ready to re-audition yeah uh you know i think that i'm at that place now i'm fully formed well again you know we're we're we're always on the lookout so
Guest:Well, you know, it's an interesting thing.
Guest:When Chris Rock told me about Leslie.
Marc:She did my show before.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I go, well, you know, she says she's the funniest person I know, funniest woman I know.
Guest:And I think, you know, and she's not going to work for you or she's going to work for AT&T.
Guest:But she's the real thing.
Guest:And I went, well, how old is she?
Guest:And I think she was 46.
Guest:And I went, well, that's.
Guest:Well, you know, have her come in.
Guest:But it is that thing of where that's not what you're looking for.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, our ideal is something else.
Guest:And then you see it and you fall in love and you go, she's great.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's what I mean by whatever it is you say you're looking for.
Guest:Is the brochure, you know, like what the real thing is, is when you see it and you're blown away by it, can you respond in the right way?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:Well, that's encouraging.
Marc:I'm going to take that as a maybe.
Guest:Yeah, no, no, no.
Guest:And, you know, there's always... There's parts floating around, you know.
Marc:Okay, good, good.
Marc:Because I have a lot of... And you'll leave your headshot, of course.
Marc:Yeah, no, I haven't.
Marc:I brought a bunch of them.
Guest:What do they do now?
Guest:They don't do headshots anymore.
Marc:Everyone knows everybody.
Marc:You just got to go online.
Marc:No, that's a guy.
Marc:There's no mystery to it anymore.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, how do you feel that now there's, like, generations of people that see this as a goal?
Marc:Well, that happened really in the 80s.
Guest:You realized that we were auditioning people who were...
Guest:wanted to get here yeah as opposed to rounding everybody up in the 70s where we got to find him yeah exactly and but now you your casts are huge yeah do you just is it just sort of like you have a farm team and uh and no i think it was because when everyone left in the 70s and you had to start all new it was better to
Guest:bring one or two people in every year uh and that cohort were sort of connected to each other and then they would learn from the others and then gradually you know john who started last week yeah who's you know bright and talented uh you know he's about the same age as peach right pizza 21 yeah yeah
Marc:All right, well, this has been a pleasure for me.
Marc:Also, I'm available to host.
Guest:Well, if this thing explodes, you never know.
Marc:Well, now I've got to get promotion behind it.
Marc:Thanks, Warren.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:So that's it.
Marc:That was it.
Marc:That was the experience.
Marc:And it was a great one, folks.
Marc:It was a great experience.
Marc:And... What are you going to do?
Marc:Not only did I get closure, not only, you know, by this point did... You know, I didn't even know if I needed it, but it was great to have it.
Marc:And also, what I came away with was...
Marc:Lorne Michaels is a good guy.
Marc:He's a great guy.
Marc:I loved hanging out with him.
Marc:He's got a job.
Marc:He loves his job.
Marc:He's been doing the job for 35 years.
Marc:You heard the history of it.
Marc:He's a creature of habit, but he loves what he's doing, and he's totally engaged with it every week.
Marc:He's in show business.
Marc:He's a producer of a show that's been on a long time and is very unique and done in a very specific way.
Marc:And it's his life.
Marc:It's his love.
Marc:And that's who Lorne Michaels is.
Marc:He's in show business.
Marc:And he's a guy.
Marc:And I had a great time talking to him.
Marc:I want to thank Lauren Roseman from NBC and Abigail Parsons from my booking team for making this happen.
Marc:Also, the photo used in the iTunes artwork on this episode is by Frank Okenfels at NBC.
Marc:That's all.
Marc:You know the deal.
Marc:No guitar today.
Marc:No guitar today.
Marc:Big day.
Marc:Boomer lives!
Boomer lives!
you