by Sam Wasson
“We had no idea how long ninety minutes was when we first started,” Lorne Michaels said. By the afternoon of October 11, 1975, the day of the first show, there was no guarantee that they would be ready come eleven thirty, no guarantee that, loading up on last-minute alternatives in case of emergency, he hadn’t over overbooked the show (in addition to the cast and host, George Carlin, he had the Muppets, two musical guests, solo performances by Andy Kaufman, Valri Bromfield, Billy Crystal . . .), his engineers were still referencing the instruction manuals for the new audio equipment Lorne had squeezed out of NBC for Saturday Night, the set was still a work in progress, and the Friday rehearsal had been awful. The lighting director had disappeared, there weren’t enough people in the audience (warm bodies were being pulled in off the street), and the show ran two hours over. Writer Tom Schiller hid under the bleachers and tried to send out good vibes.
And Belushi still hadn’t signed his contract.
“There was a spirit very much in the first few years,” Michaels said, “that we were making it up as we went along.”
Of course there was a script, but the spirit of the show, what would be communicated to the live and home audiences, came through the rebel immediacy of the under-rehearsed. The brick basement set, the audience positioned directly in front of and around the stage (and sometimes in the shot), even the music of Saturday Night, under the direction of Howard Shore, conveyed the living intimacy of a nightclub. “I think Saturday Night is about the closest thing you’ll see on TV to Second City because it’s live,” Gilda Radner said, “and it’s not being sweetened, and it’s always under-rehearsed, and it’s always opening night.” Theoretically, home audiences would respond to that atmosphere. “Live” puts us in Studio 8H. “I think ‘Saturday Night Live,’” Michaels said, “is about a contact with another group of humans coming through this tube.” America is lost, Saturday Night said, but we have this: a show that is not a show, it’s not pretending, like Washington, but it’s really happening, and not in Hollywood, but a “real” place, New York, where things that shouldn’t be going on could go on, and live on TV, so if something that shouldn’t happen happened, nothing could be done about it.
About Gerald Ford, Jules Feiffer wrote that “he was the embodiment of the void left after the collapse of the American dream,” but Feiffer could have been writing about television. When Belushi, in his first interview with Lorne Michaels, bragged that his television was covered in spit, he unknowingly spoke for an entire generation freshly out of love with the medium that raised them. Saturday Night rekindled their love affair. The show told them up front it knew what they knew: TV lies to us. The inverse of Gerald Ford, Saturday Night so reveled in its own inauthenticity, it came off as the only honest show on television. To a country still smarting from the smoke and mirrors of Watergate, that sense of really happening was payback, and at its cathartic peak, tantamount to a national cleanse.
Loading his ensemble of Not Ready for Prime Time Players with improvisers—Belushi, Radner, Aykroyd from Second City, Laraine Newman from the Groundlings, and the splendid glinting Jane Curtin, late of Boston’s improv troupe, the Proposition—Michaels insured himself against catastrophe. Television executive Dick Ebersol said, “He had people who trusted in each other’s instincts enough to play with it on the air.” Chevy Chase and Garrett Morris, originally hired as writers, lacked their range. “I had much less of that Second City experience,” Chase confessed, “and they were all better actors than me, but one thing I could do was look into a camera lens and mug with impunity to a certain degree.” Chase’s brilliant solo turns would alienate him from the improvisers. And Morris, a playwright, couldn’t quite play with the majority. “Garrett didn’t do improv,” Curtin reflected. “Garrett, when he wrote things, he really concentrated on it and was methodical about it and so he did not come from that facile place that most of us came from.”
Still, Belushi would tease Laraine Newman. “What’s that group you’re from? That group in L.A.?” Homesick and lonely and only twenty-three, Laraine at least had Gilda and Jane, big sisters in New York. Together, they shared a dressing room, innocence, bravery, and delicious panic. “Nobody really knew what was going on,” Curtin recalled. “How could you? There was no template that we could follow.” That night of their first show, Carlin swung by with a rose for each. It momentarily put them at ease. “I just wanted you to know,” he told them, “I hope you have a lovely show. And good luck.”
Bromfield’s dressing room was already strewn with flowers—from lesbians. On her way past, Radner stopped at the door and stared at the pretty picture. “Wow!” she exclaimed. “I want to be a lesbian!”
Carlin coolly interrupted their conversation to ask Bromfield the question few would. “Are you a radical lesbian feminist?”
She looked to Gilda. “Yeah, honey, you are,” Radner said.
“I am?” Bromfield grinned. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
Carlin beamed back. Radical worked for him. “Have a great show.”
Despite Radner’s enthusiasm for Saturday Night, and Michaels’s enthusiasm for Radner (she was the first player he cast), she missed the freedom Second City had granted her imagination. Improvising, she had the power of whim to make the Fire Hall stage, in Toronto, into the pretend worlds of her childhood. Regression was Gilda’s asylum and furtive wellspring, the message of innocence she brought back to earth. But the invisible dolls and spontaneous playthings of Second City, the sudden tumbles, cartwheels, and spastic leaps Gilda so loved were not suited to the literal eye of the camera. “And you can’t change lines because they base camera shots on them,” she pointed out. On Saturday Night, then, she would recover her sandbox not in the transformation of studio space around her but in the changing worlds inside. Grabbing hold of an open moment, especially one between herself and Aykroyd or Curtin, Radner found she could push her concentration from the studio into the long tunnel of shared subjectivity, and be free. “When you look in their eyes onstage,” she said, “and you’re doing a live television show, there’s somebody home there, you know?”
For the tense hour between dress and air, as Lorne recalculated time against laughs against a feasible running order, Bromfield huddled with Kaufman and Crystal on the hallway floor outside the studio, praying her bit wasn’t going to get cut. “Everybody was pooing their pants,” she said. “It was so scary. It was diarrhea time. It was so frightening. Ninety minutes live!” When the verdict came—they were going to have to slim their acts by a couple of minutes—Crystal fled the studio and was bumped from the show. Fuck, Bromfield thought, I have to get ready, and started cutting.
Around then, Michaels’s manager, Bernie Brillstein, passed Bromfield on his way into Studio 8H. With only minutes left to air and the Crystal debacle quelled, Brillstein managed only seven or eight confident strides before he crashed into the middle of an escalating argument. Haggling with a producer, John Belushi, who had no agent, was already very much in costume for “Wolverines,” SNL’s first-ever sketch, still complaining about the contract he hadn’t yet signed.
Belushi dangled the papers in front of Brillstein, his boss’s manager. “He insists I sign this contract.”
“So sign it. What’s the big fucking deal?”
“What do you think? Would you sign it?”
Brillstein, who helped write the contract, urged Belushi that it was fair, and without twisting his arm, tried, politely, to get him to sign it immediately, before they counted him on . . .
“Tell you what,” Belushi returned. “If you manage me, I’ll sign . . .”
“You got a deal.”
The Brillstein-Belushi association would deliver considerable power to both men and win Brillstein, among other clients, the finest improvisers in comedy. Aykroyd, Radner, Martin Short . . . “I was the dad to this group of loonies,” Brillstein said proudly. His patrimony was sealed then, at that moment, with two minutes to air.
The next hour and a half of that Saturday night in
October, Valri Bromfield described as “a ninety-minute race in your brain, in your body, and the audience was right there, racing with us. In Studio 8H they were so close, you could reach out and touch their hands. But you didn’t need to. You could feel them from the stage. That’s what people think of when they say electricity. I’m not religious, but I think that’s what people feel when they go to church.”
Joe Flaherty, in the strip mall in Pasadena where he had set up yet another Second City outpost, his second, was taking intermission at the bar when Belushi appeared on TV. The whole bar quieted and looked up to watch.
“Man,” spoke a rocker on the stool next to Flaherty. “This show is really good.”
On-screen, Belushi was hard at it, attacking Saturday Night with his trademark scores and the old personalities Flaherty knew like members of his own family.
Yeah, that’s Second City, he thought. Belushi’s doing Second City.
Flaherty couldn’t watch the whole episode that night. Intermission ended and he went back onstage.
After the disappearance of the Mikey and Nicky reels, Barry Diller’s telephone started ringing with personal requests from Elaine May’s most influential friends, including Warren Beatty and Peter Bogdanovich, to please reconsider Paramount’s cold-turkey policy and write the movie one more tiny check, an oily olive branch that smelled to Diller—who could easily picture Elaine in a postproduction cellar somewhere with the “missing” reels, holding a gun to their heads—more than a little like extortion. “She is a brilliant woman and a wonderful woman,” Diller is reported to have said, “but she can go to jail or the madhouse for ten years before I will submit to blackmail!”
On grounds of criminal contempt, Paramount took Elaine back to court, in September 1976, whence some version of the truth emerged from Dr. David Rubinfine, Elaine May’s psychologist husband. According to Rubinfine’s deposition, on October 20, 1975, the very evening, a year earlier, that Paramount won its writ of seizure on all Mikey and Nicky film materials and the reels in question disappeared, Rubinfine hurried to the Carter studio in New York, where much of the film was being stored, removed about a dozen cartons, and hid them, overnight, in the trunk of his car. Who instructed him to do so? Paramount claimed Elaine May; she had been seen, an hour after the writ was issued, at Rubinfine’s apartment. (They kept separate addresses.) Arguing on her behalf, Bert Fields denied May’s involvement, describing instead a phone call placed to Dr. Rubinfine “from a person claiming to be speaking for May.” In either case, Rubinfine drove the film over state lines, out of New York jurisdiction, to the Connecticut home of Dr. Andrew Canzonetti, unloaded the cartons, and called Peter Falk, who instructed Rubinfine to tell Canzonetti that someone would be by to collect the goods. In his deposition, Falk, also a Fields client, neither confessed to nor denied making this statement, only acknowledging that he “might have said it.” It was Fields’s contention that Falk himself drove to Canzonetti’s the following morning, intending to transfer the film back to a safe storage facility, only to be told, upon his arrival, that an unidentified limousine driver claiming to be under Falk’s employ had beaten him to the punch and made off with the film. It was gone—a kidnapping.
Alyce Films, by the way, had been traced to Falk.
“Can you help us with Elaine?” Diller asked Paramount’s vice chairman, David Picker.
“Probably.”
A friend to executives and filmmakers alike, Picker had the imprimatur of fair dealings and strong credits that characterized the very best of United Artists, his former home. With total cool, he simply picked up the phone and called Bert Fields. “We talked in ‘what-ifs,’” Picker recalled. Like what if, no questions asked, the film were to materialize at Diller’s door? Would the studio consent to preview Elaine’s cut of Mikey and Nicky at picture-appropriate venues? From these and other hypotheticals, Picker and Fields found a comfortable middle ground and hung up satisfied. Several days later a package with Picker’s name on it arrived at a Connecticut post office and was delivered to Diller’s office in Los Angeles. Voilà: the missing reels.
And then, as agreed, Mikey and Nicky got its first preview at an appropriate venue. By the end of the screening, the audience reaction was loud and palpable.
“Are they cheering?”
“No,” Elaine said. “They’re booing.”
They had expected a comedy by Elaine May. Mikey and Nicky was not a comedy.
It was, however, a very funny tragedy and, I think, flecked with forces of real, rabid danger, as only a nighttime experiment can be. You should see it.
Elaine May wouldn’t direct another picture for ten years.
13
1977–1982
Joe Flaherty was directing a “best of” show at the Fire Hall when Bernie Sahlins and Andrew Alexander called him upstairs, to Alexander’s office, and explained the situation. As long as Second City couldn’t provide its improvisers with a larger platform for growth beyond its local theaters, Saturday Night would bleed them dry, poaching their stars from Chicago and Toronto. To keep them happy and at home, the bosses had struck a deal with Global Television, a local network, diminutive by any standards, a pebble to New York’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza, for seven half-hour episodes of Second City comedy, though no one had yet decided what exactly that would be. In fact, no one had decided anything, hence the summoning and questioning of Joe Flaherty, their oracle. What if, Sahlins proposed, they simply broadcast the stage show as is, bentwood chairs and all? That’s what they were good at, and anyway, at five thousand dollars an episode, they didn’t have the budget to do much more. Flaherty laughed: “I was thinking, What? We’re going to go up against Saturday Night Live? With that? Yeah right.” Lorne Michaels had known exactly what kind of television show he wanted; Sahlins and Alexander, theater producers, were making it up as they went along. So they passed the ball to Flaherty. Not like he had much experience with television either, but . . .
“Who do you want to work with?” they asked.
“Well,” he said, “I like the cast I’m directing.” It included Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, and Dave Thomas. Eugene Levy wasn’t in the current revue, but Flaherty, who gunned for Levy against Sahlins’s inclination as early as the Godspell days, wanted him—and John Candy—back and in the show, whatever it was. “And me,” Flaherty said, “I’d like to be in it too.”
“What about writing? We’re going to need some writers.”
“Harold. Harold Ramis.”
“I don’t think he’ll do it,” Sahlins said, reluctantly, knowing the last time he offered Ramis a job in Canada, in the first Toronto company, he turned it down. Moreover, Harold was busy. He was in L.A. working piecemeal with Christopher Guest, and Billy and Brian Doyle-Murray, all recently sprung from ABC’s failed Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, improvising comic journalism—documenting actual events, like the Oscars and the Super Bowl, tongue-in-cheek—for TVTV, a guerilla video collective heavy into broadcast satire; he was spotted in New York, writing with Doug Kenney and Chris Miller that Lampoon movie, National Lampoon’s Animal House, which, under Ivan Reitman’s supervision, would feature, they thought, a Second City ensemble of the Murray brothers, Aykroyd, John Candy, and Belushi as Bluto, the most animalistic of all the animals. Casting the first Lampoon movie with Second Citizens, they really could imagine Animal House would be the most successful comedy ever. “Our generation had broken into television with SNL,” Ramis said, “and this was going to be the first ‘new’ Hollywood comedy.”
“Okay, but let’s try to get Harold,” Flaherty urged Sahlins. “He’s easy to work with and such a funny guy. And he should be in the show, too.”
What Sahlins didn’t know was that, despite all his work, Ramis had only about forty dollars left in his bank account.
“Has it occurred to you that you might not be successful?” Ramis’s wife asked him moments before Sahlins called.
“Oh, man. It’s occurring to me right now.”
W
hich is when the phone rang. Sahlins made the offer—writer/producer of this incipient, ill-defined show—and Ramis said yes.
A short time later, Sahlins and Alexander convened their brain trust—Flaherty, Ramis, Sheldon Patinkin, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, and, up from Chicago, the fabled Del Close—in Alexander’s office to improvise a television idea to life.
Flaherty began. “I want to do television parodies,” he announced. “They always work on stage because everyone can relate to them. Everybody watches television.”
Everybody but Bernie Sahlins. “Are you sure you don’t want to put the camera in the theater—”
“No, no, parodies work.” Flaherty was thinking also of Saturday Night Live’s uncommonly reliable commercial parodies.
Del lit up. “What if we presented ourselves as the world’s smallest television broadcasting company?”
Harold could see it: they would be what they really were, an actual low-budget production, charming in their makeshift desperation. They could aim for bad, for cheap. Why hide? It would be funnier to run toward the problem. That’s what comedy was.
“We could play the people working at the studio,” Flaherty added, “and we can play the people in the parodies.”
“How about it’s a programming day?” Patinkin suggested. “We start off with the morning news . . .”
“Then a soap opera . . .”
“Maybe a movie . . .”
“End the day with a sermonette . . .”
“We could call it,” Flaherty said, “the Second City Television Network.”
“Too long.”
Flaherty tried again. “How about Second City Television?”
SCTV.
Typical of the laissez-faire policy he would master, Andrew Alexander did not deny the momentum, the spirit of consensus building in his office. He would not rule SCTV as Lorne Michaels did SNL; whatever aired would be, like a Second City improvisation, the collaborative outgrowth of the writer-performers. “How soon,” he asked the room, “can you get working?”
