by Mohr, Jay
I was confused at first, then relieved. Maybe I had been moved to one of the larger dressing rooms. Most everyone else had the same dressing rooms as the year before, but some of the dressing rooms were reassigned to accommodate the new cast members. I was obviously one of the people that had to move to a new dressing room—though no one actually ever told me my dressing room would be moved. Just as in my rookie days, I found out by mistake. But because of the way the network had handled my option, I was happy just being back working on the seventeenth floor at 30 Rock—let alone being on camera, even if it was for only a few sentences at a time.
I went looking for Marci Klein to find out where I would be spending my next twenty Saturdays. I found her in the conference room outside of Lorne’s ninth-floor office. When I asked her where my new dressing room was, she told me it wasn’t ready yet. When I asked her when it would be ready, she told me she didn’t know.
Since you’re not supposed to be in wardrobe until Saturday, I didn’t really need a dressing room that night at all. On Thursdays and Fridays, it was more a place to hang out and wait around. You could excuse yourself from rewrites early and go down to your dressing room and read a book for an hour until your sketch came up. I didn’t have a book or a dressing room, so I wandered around the halls.
I noticed that there were new photos up from the previous year. Unlike in the past, the photos were memories, not devices for intimidation. I saw photos of Nicole Kidman with Mike Myers, Emilio Estevez with Rob Schneider, and Charlton Heston standing on stage during Good-nights. I remembered Sandler doing an impression behind closed doors of the way Charlton Heston shuffled his feet when he walked. We had to keep in mind Mr. Heston’s age when we submitted sketches that week. He was pretty old. There weren’t going to be any pratfalls on the air that show.
On the Heston show, a “Planet of the Apes” sketch was scheduled to run during the opening monologue. The show had hired fifty extras to play apes, and the wardrobe department had secured the actual uniforms from the Planet of the Apes movies. The basic premise of the sketch was that the show, to Charlton Heston’s horror, had been overrun by apes. The makeup department put several cast members and all the extras in perfect ape makeup. The process of being made up to look like an ape took five hours. I told anyone and everyone that there was no way I could be an ape, so I played a slave of the apes. (What if I had a panic attack under all that ape makeup?) Dave Attell had to be an ape. Attell was a chain smoker, but he couldn’t reach his lips with a cigarette through the ape mask. It was easy to know which ape was Dave because he was the only ape with a five-inch cigarette holder sticking out of his mouth. Christopher Walken was right, after all; ape suits are funny.
During rehearsal of the “Planet of the Apes” sketch, Heston slapped Farley down pretty good. Farley, along with Phil Hartman, Melanie Hutsell, and me, was playing a slave, and he was getting bored, so he started mumbling, “I’m a slave, I just beat my dick all day.” Then he whipped it out and actually started masturbating. Though we were all in a cage about forty feet from Heston, the man who will always be Moses to me saw what was happening and yelled in that biblical-sounding voice, “Knock it off!” Farley was so shocked that he quickly scooted it back into his pants. “I’m sorry, Mr. Heston,” Chris said sheepishly.
The night of the ape sketch, I stayed for Good-nights. The musical guest on that show was Paul Westerberg, who had been the lead singer of the Replacements, one of the truly great American bands. They had split up and now Westerberg was going it solo. We were all excited and honored to have him. It seemed as though everyone was a fan—except Mr. Heston. When we all gathered onstage at the end of the show, Charlton Heston announced: “I would like to thank Paul Westerfield!” Paul Westerberg leaned over and whispered a correction into Mr. Heston’s ear. Charlton Heston looked back into the camera and bellowed, “Excuse me. Paul Westerfield!” Like I said, he was pretty old.
I continued scanning the photos on the wall and slowly began to realize there was something missing from all the pictures: me. Photograph after photograph had cast members and hosts and musical guests for last season. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find myself in any of them—because I wasn’t in any of them.
Slightly baffled, I rode the elevator back up to the seventeenth floor to see if any new photos were hanging in the hallway. Sure enough, there were, but I wasn’t in any of them. There was no recorded history on the walls of my ever having been on Saturday Night Live. I even saw photos of sketches that had been cut and were never on the air hanging on the wall. I looked for me as Christopher Walken with Jeff Goldblum. I looked for me as Andrew McCarthy with Christian Slater. I looked for me as Sean Penn with Rosie O’Donnell. As far as the walls were concerned, none of it had ever happened.
By the time I returned to the studio, rehearsals had reached the midway point. They had started without me (as they should have). When asked where I had been, I replied that I was in the bathroom. I wasn’t going to start the first show of my second season complaining about not being represented on the walls. The only people who ever saw those photos were the host, the cast, and the writers. I decided to let it go and concentrate on putting my face where it meant a lot more to me—on television.
Dress rehearsals are a pretty boring affair. The cast assembles on the set and runs through each sketch from beginning to end to allow director Dave Wilson to choreograph the camera movements. There’s nothing artistic about it, because every few steps Dave’s voice booms out “Hold it!” over the loudspeaker system. The cast freezes and Dave pushes a different button in the control room and communicates over the headsets to all of his cameramen. He would tell which camera to shoot from what angle. Each step could take anywhere from five seconds to five minutes at a time.
The most amusing dress rehearsal was when the show installed new cameras. During the entire dress rehearsal, there were about fifty Japanese guys in suits watching the cameras operate. It was, Hey, look at our shiny new Toyotas doing laps around the speedway. It was surreal. Just when you are trying to find a groove, the audience is composed of fifty men who don’t speak English and have their backs to the stage.
Rehearsals, however, were always the best time to shoot the bull with the other cast members. During the breaks, everyone would crack jokes and tease one another. If your rehearsal had either Farley or Sandler in it, you were always in for a good time. Sandler would tell these incredible stories. One of my favorite Sandler stories was the one he told us about the time that Mr. Belvedere sat on his own balls.
Adam had a small guest part on the show Mr. Belvedere early in his career. On his first day, everyone was sitting at a huge table waiting to start the read-through of that week’s show. The old guy who played Mr. Belvedere hadn’t shown up yet, so everyone was drinking coffee and talking until he arrived. Finally Mr. Belvedere walked in, looking very gay in a sweatsuit and with a matching monogrammed attaché case. When the old guy took his seat, he sang out “Goooood morning, everybody!” like a British Ted Baxter. As he took a load off, he apparently sat on one of his testicles. With his nut scrunched under his leg, he screamed, “Ooooooohhhhhhh!” and had to be carried out on a stretcher.
Farley didn’t need any stories. Just being around him made you laugh. Even if he wasn’t saying anything, I would just stare at him. I was convinced that I was looking at the greatest entertainer in the world. But when he did speak, he always seemed to come up with something funny.
Take Farley’s background talk. Sometimes the beginning of a sketch called for some white noise background talk. If the sketch took place in an unruly courthouse or at a ball game, everyone would have to mutter fake dialogue until the camera settled on the first person with actual lines. Some of the extras were real actors with real training, and they would have scripted sentences that they had learned to say during this time. I always just looked at whoever was next to me and said, “So anyway, I was talking to Mathew and he…” I don’t know why or when I picked that particu
lar sentence, but it was my trademark blather. Farley would always belt out at the top of his lungs: “Murmur! Murmur! Spade’s gay! Murmur!” I would always piss my pants when he did that and end up forgetting what sketch I was in and what lines I had.
If rehearsals were running long, Phil Hartman had a standard funny line that he would always deliver at the exact time everyone felt things were dragging. He would look up at the ceiling of the studio and yell, “You got a lot of talent out here, Davy, and they’re baking in the sun!”
Phil Hartman was always nice to me. Though it was obvious that the show took a lot out of most of us, Phil didn’t seem affected by any of it. Sandler, too, was another guy who never seemed to be having any problems. During my first season, I was looking through a car magazine and came across of a photo of a beautiful red Corvette. I tore it out of the magazine and asked Phil to autograph it for me. In black Sharpie, Phil scrawled “Phil Hartman USA!” across the side of the Corvette. I hung it in my office above my desk for the rest of the year, and aside from a pile of notebooks, my backpack, and a few empty coffee cups, it was the only thing in my office.
At the end of the year when I was cleaning out my office, one of my best friends, Matt Frost, was with me. I hadn’t decorated the place much, so I spent most of the day throwing out old newspapers. When I reached for the Phil Hartman autograph to take it down, Matt stopped me. “You’re not going to throw that away, are you?” he said. I was planning on tossing it out along with everything else and just bring home my notebooks. Matt looked at me like I was crazy. “You can’t throw that away! It’s good luck. You have to save it and hang it next year when you come back.”
“Phil Hartman USA!” spent that entire summer in my sock drawer between two magazine pages to keep it in good shape. I brought it back to the show as my good luck charm, and this year I planned to hang it in my dressing room instead of my office. My dressing room was where I needed the most luck, because it was where I had really freaked out.
After dress rehearsal ended that first Thursday, I looked around for Marci Klein again. I was carrying the “Phil Hartman USA!” Corvette ad, which I had now been holding for a few hours. All I wanted to do was find my new dressing room and hang it on the wall for good luck. I found Marci in the conference room again and asked her if my dressing room was ready. She said it was, picked up a set of keys from the middle of the table, and led me away.
As we walked down the hall, I asked her if the reason it hadn’t been ready yet was because they were having it cleaned. She didn’t answer and continued walking very quickly in front of me. We reached a door that I had never noticed, and she found the corresponding key to open it. When she inserted the key to unlock the door, she cautioned, “Don’t get mad. Okay?”
My heart sank. Though I had never seen the door she was about to open, I must have walked past it a hundred times. As Marci opened the door and revealed the inside of my new dressing room, I thought I was the victim of a practical joke. The room was much smaller than my old one. It was literally no more than ten square feet. I stepped inside with a stupid grin on my face. When I turned back around, Marci had left and I was alone in the tiny room.
I examined the door, which said JAY MOHR on it. As I moved the door back and forth, it brushed against the recliner inside the room. There were old paint chips on the floor and the smell of new paint was nauseating. I slowly began to realize that this was no practical joke; this was my new dressing room.
I sat down in the recliner and shut the door with my foot. There was no television. There was no sink or closet. There wasn’t any room for anything except the worn-out recliner and the body sitting on it. I noticed one of the walls had a rectangle sunken into it. As I looked closer, I realized that it was an elevator door. The reason I smelled paint was because the elevator door had just been painted shut. There were paint chips on the floor because the door to my new dressing room had previously been painted shut as well. The room wasn’t ready yet because someone had to chip the paint off the door so it would open. And that’s why I had never seen the door before: It had been painted shut in the same color as the wall of the hallway.
My new dressing room was an old elevator shaft. I didn’t think that my little box room was a fitting place for my “Phil Hartman USA!” autograph, so I brought it back upstairs to my office and hung it above my desk, the same as last year.
The night of the live show, there wasn’t anywhere in the room to hang my costumes, so the wardrobe department had folded them and set them down across the recliner. I threw them on the floor and sat down. If anyone asked me why my clothes were wrinkled, I would tell them because my dressing room is a goddamn elevator shaft. I sat in the chair and stretched my arms out to see if I could touch both walls at the same time with my fingertips. I was a few inches short. I took two pencils and held them in my hands and stretched out again. With the pencils in my hands, I could write on both walls at once. So I sat there with my pencils, waiting for the show to begin, and scribbled parallel lines on the walls from my seat.
Since there was no television, I quickly grew bored with my cave drawings. I sat there in silence for a while and enjoyed the quiet. I assumed the tranquility was due to the fact that the room did not have an intercom box in it. Would someone come and get me when it was time for me to be onstage, or would I have to go outside every minute and check? As showtime grew closer and closer, my tension increased. I would always get an adrenaline rush before going onstage, but as Tom Petty once wrote, the waiting is the hardest part. So I sat in my tiny room on the recliner with my feet against the door. If anyone tried to come in unannounced, I would be able to block them from entering. Despite my surroundings, I felt fantastic. I knew that all the anxieties and nervousness I was feeling were appropriate. I was alone in the smallest room in the building with nothing except my thoughts, but at least I didn’t think I was going to die.
I approached the new dressing room as a desensitization exercise. A lot of people I knew would have gone bananas in such a little room. I was feeling just a little claustrophobic. My claustrophobia wasn’t what eventually drove me from the room. I don’t know how long I sat there (no clock or watch), but I started to get nervous that everyone had forgotten about me. No one had knocked or stuck a head in. I could hear people standing in the hallway right outside my door talking.
Occasionally I heard people run past. They were all doing something. Why wasn’t I? I had already been late for a rehearsal once that week, and knew that being late twice would make me look like a complete jackass. So I decided I would go down to the stage and see for myself what was going on. I stood up, sucked my stomach in so the doorknob wouldn’t graze it, and opened the door to find myself standing face-to-face with thirty strangers.
The moment the door opened, they all turned to see who was emerging, and I could see their faces register disappointment instantly when I stuck my head out. No one in the group looked familiar to me. In fact they all looked wide-eyed and out of place. As the line of people moved past my doorway, I spotted an NBC page in a blue blazer bringing up the rear. The people outside my door were in a tour group. They were walking through the hallowed halls of Saturday Night Live listening to tidbits of history about the show. I’m sure everyone in the tour group had been hoping from the moment they stepped inside the building to see one of the show’s stars. They got me instead. I felt like an animal in the zoo.
I stood there to see how many of the tourists recognized me. I still had the pencils in my hand, making me fully prepared in case any of them asked me for my autograph. I positioned myself directly underneath the JAY MOHR sign on the door and tried to make eye contact with all of them. Thirty pairs of eyes looked back at me, but none had a flicker of recognition. Instead, they were all craning their necks to see which room I had just come out of.
As I closed the door, I angled my body so they couldn’t see inside my dressing room. One by one, they went past. They all looked so expectant and hopeful, and I was trying to d
eliver by standing directly in front of them under a sign with my name on it. When the last of the tour group had passed, the NBC page in the blue blazer looked at me with a puzzled look on her face. She was trying to place me—or so I thought. Once she put one and one together and figured out who I was, she would probably point me out to the tour group and I would be stuck there all night signing autographs and answering questions about Farley. She pointed behind me, no doubt reading the name on the door and figuring it all out. “Has that door always been there?” she asked.
I told her it had been, and then tried to be as tiny as possible and just get away from all of them. I walked a few feet down the hallway and then turned back around. I ripped the sign with my name off the door. Why advertise that you have the smallest dressing room in the history of Saturday Night Live?
Later in the season, I learned that my dressing room crisis wasn’t the worst ever, because at least I had a dressing room. I was bitching and moaning to everyone about it one night when Mike Myers pulled me aside. Mike told me that the size of my dressing room was indeed bullshit, but he had it much worse when he was first hired on the show. He went on to tell me that for the first two years he was on the show, he didn’t have a dressing room or an office. Mike Shoemaker had informed him that they simply did not have any room for him, so for two years, Mike Myers sat on the floor across from the elevators with his notebooks spread out around him.
