Eric, Golf, Cycling and SNL
Eric, I do not know how you get enough time to play golf with all your posting on SI or are you using a wireless internet connection on your Q phone <ggg>
Eric, I cycle a lot during the summer, I went out to admire the beautiful red maple leaves and the yellow birch leaves of the autumn rhapsody in the Gatineau Park this morning for a short 45 mile cycle. I have gone over 4000 miles this summer on my 24 speed bike and hope next year to get over 7000 miles in a year.
Eric, I found an interesting article re: SNL from the Canadian born creator / producer of SNL, Lorne Michaels in the Globe and Mail. I thought that you needed some reading material when you got back from your Golf game <ggg>, David
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The heart of Saturday Night
Lorne Michaels, the man whose pioneering show launched
some of the greatest comic stars of the past quarter century,
concedes it's a hit-and-miss formula.
SIMON HOUPT
The Globe and Mail
Saturday, October 2, 1999
New York -- 'I think I began to get grey at the end of the very first season," says Lorne Michaels, talking about the shock of grey hair he sports today. "I was 31."
Working on Saturday Night Live has a way of doing that to people, of making them old before their time, and though Michaels has been executive producer of the show for 20 years, he still takes its burdens personally.
Last weekend, SNL celebrated its 25th anniversary with an irreverent three-hour clip-fest. "There was incredible pressure leading up to it, most of it self-imposed," he explains. Each of the montages featured on the show was edited into three different versions of 8, 9 and 11 minutes. Depending on how much overtime the show was running, Michaels had to decide on the fly which version to run. He knew a bad decision could offend a former cast member invited to the black-tie affair. "If you cut it wrong," he says, still pinched with the memory, "you can leave out somebody's entire body of work. And they're there in a tuxedo, staring at you."
They were staring at him because Michaels and Saturday Night Live have always been inextricably linked. The Canadian-born Michaels isn't just the show's leader, he's also its very public face.
In a move that prefigured the current age of celebrity television producers, such as David E. Kelley and Steven Bochco, Michaels always put himself front and centre as an element of the show's identity and comedic content. The anniversary special showed a classic 1976 clip of Michaels offering the Beatles $3,000 to reunite. "You divide it any way you want," said the 31-year-old producer. "You want to give Ringo less, that's up to you." The special also featured Mike Myers trying to assuage the suspicions of his former boss that the Austin Powers character Dr. Evil was based on Michaels. The audience around North America understood the joke because, for the last quarter century, the only semi-constant behind the scenes and on the SNL screen has been Lorne Michaels.
When he left in the spring of 1980 after five seasons, along with the original cast, the show's ratings plummeted. The new executive producer, Jean Doumanian (who was a former Woody Allen love interest and is now the producer of his films), was fired after less than a year. So, after Michaels dallied with other producing duties, including the creation of The New Show, an NBC Friday night sketch-comedy show that lasted four months in 1984, he returned to SNL in 1985 and administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Seventeen storeys above Rockefeller Plaza, Michaels settles slowly into a big leather chair in the spacious corner office that he has called home for two decades of work. A sideboard is stuffed to overflowing with tapes of previous shows. Above it, a small plaque on the wall declares, "The captain's word is law," but the name plate over on Michaels's desk bears remarkably tiny letters. (Does he even need a nameplate?) A large tank of tropical fish bathes one corner of the room in a blue, watery glow, offset by a green lawyer's lamp on the desk. Except for the Three Amigos and Wayne's World posters on the wall, the room has a feel of Establishment, the very thing SNL was designed to tweak.
It's almost midnight on Tuesday and even though the corkboard behind Michaels is still filled with index cards listing the anniversary show's running order ("70s montage/ Belushi tribute/ Eurythmics/ commercial"), the next show looms less than 100 hours away. One of his three personal assistants sits outside the office, fielding incoming late-night calls. Jerry Seinfeld is in the next room, discussing a skit with the writers he has brought in to help out with his guest-hosting spot this week. Elsewhere on the floor, the show's staff writers are working on skits. They might be up until daylight breaks across the East River. Michaels will be here, too, supervising it all.
Against the odds, Michaels finally found time for a family seven years ago, at age 47. He and his wife now have three children, two sons and a 19-month-old daughter, which is why he's wearing a fresh-pressed white shirt and conservative tie tonight. Earlier in the evening, after spending some postdinner time wrestling with his five-year-old son, it was off to a parent-teacher night at his eldest's school.
"They're so clearly my first priority," Michaels says, referring to his family. "I just think it's a function of age. . . . Now, of the things I can screw up, I'd rather it be a show than the kids."
In fact, Michaels has always seemed the paternal figure, watching over his brood. Cast members former and present hail him as the single most important person in their professional lives.
"He completely gave me a career and I'm so grateful to him. I can't say enough nice things about him," gushed SNL cast member Molly Shannon as she signed posters for the upcoming Michaels-produced movie Superstar, based on her armpit-smelling Catholic schoolgirl character Mary Catherine Gallagher. (The film is directed by Bruce McCulloch, a former Kids in the Hall member who first got U.S. exposure when Michaels produced the Kids show for HBO.) "He's very involved in every aspect of the show, but he's been doing it long enough that . . . he hires people he believes in and then lets them run free."
It's a rough training ground that has launched dozens of careers. Former cast member Chris Rock recently called SNL "the Harvard of comedy," though the show hasn't graduated only Ivy League-worthy talent. Opening the 25th-anniversary show, Rock welcomed the audience of former and current cast members by declaring, "As I look around this room, look at the star power, look at the comedic genius, I'm looking at some of the most overrated people in the history of comedy! Some of the worst movies ever made were made by people in this room!"
True, in one way or another, SNL is culpable for such cultural abominations as the movies It's Pat, Stuart Saves His Family, and A Night at the Roxbury. But from The Blues Brothers through Wayne's World it has also had an undeniable and unparalleled influence on pop culture.
Some of last summer's biggest movies were driven by SNL alumni, including Adam Sandler, Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and frequent guest host Steve Martin. Other notable alumni include Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, David Spade, Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Norm Macdonald, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller and Robert Downey Jr.
While many former cast members became superstars, some disappeared from the business altogether, and some have died. Comedy and music -- the tentpoles of Saturday Night Live -- are the two most ephemeral forms of pop culture, not to mention its two most destructive, and by including Stevie Ray Vaughan, Kurt Cobain, Freddie Mercury and John Belushi, the anniversary special quietly emphasized that many give their lives for their art.
"Nobody's ever died doing the show," Michaels says quietly. "It's a totally confusing time when people get famous . . . and people can get overwhelmed by it and get lost in it."
The destructive forces that kill some comedians are also the ones that fuel their comedy, Michaels observes. "In the moth-to-the-flame image, you want to fly close enough to the light and the heat, and not so close that you get, you know, burnt to a crisp." Michaels is choosing his words slowly and seems to be still affected by the deaths of the four former cast members. "With John Belushi [who died of a heroin overdose in 1982], he went from making, I don't know, $500 or $600 a week to making millions, and he was on the cover of national magazines, and everyone in the world wanted to meet him. And he lived his life in, like, three eight-hour shifts, and if you were with him for eight hours and were exhausted and wanted to go to sleep, there was another group of people who were desperate to hang out with him."
"It's rare that anybody becomes famous and it leaves them untouched. Some people recover from it, but most people don't actually come back. Most people get shot into space and prefer the company of other people in orbit."
Michaels recognizes he's in orbit, too, and waves it away like a minor fact of life. He wears his rarefied status lightly, though occasionally seems to feel it necessary to reassert his position. ("I had dinner last night with two friends of mine, both of whom were at the reunion special," he says at one point, adding "and I don't want to go into names," though, actually, no one has asked him for said names.) Perhaps it is SNL's seemingly continual struggle that keeps Michaels in what seems like low orbit, if not humble. The anniversary special scored superb ratings, but that doesn't mean anything going forward. In live television, you're only as good as your last sketch, and SNL has always been a hit-and-miss show.
"Comedy is really, really hard," says Michaels. "Uneven is the way the show is always described. It's what it is. And because some things don't work and we don't get a chance to fix them and polish them up, it's high risk. When it works, it's magic and when it doesn't, it's embarrassing." There's a slight smile here, tempered by the knowledge that no one show is do-or-die for Michaels any more. He's earned the right to make mistakes and keep on experimenting.
"If I knew what worked, I'd just put that on."
THIS SATURDAY NIGHT HAS SIX DAYS
"With the shows I'd done at the CBC there was, like, three months preproduction for them," explains Canadian-born SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels, harking back almost 30 years to the variety shows he produced in Toronto. "You had to get everything in on time and you had to estimate six weeks in front and how many carpentry hours for the sets that you were building, and it was very well organized, and there was an order to it. . . . So, in 1974, when I was trying to get [the production schedule for SNL] down, I got it down to two weeks [per show]. That's the best I could do. I realized we had six days in each week, so we just put two days (worth of work) on each day, and that's pretty much the way it's stayed."
Here's the rundown of the week's schedule for SNL.
Monday afternoon: Guest host arrives. Writers pitch skit ideas to host and producers.
Tuesday: As writers work on skits to be performed live on Saturday night, host might pretape a skit out in the field. Tonight's episode is scheduled to feature a pretaped parody of the HBO/Showcase series Oz with Jerry Seinfeld. Shooting began 8 a.m. and wrapped about 10 p.m.
Tuesday night: Writers work through the night creating 40 to 50 skits. Some trickle out at 6 a.m., last ones leave about 9 a.m.
Wednesday 3 p.m.: The Table Read. Guest host, cast, writers, producers, director and department heads (lighting design, set design, etc.) gather to read through the 40 to 50 skits. About 16 are chosen and put into production for the week, which means sets are designed and built and lighting and sound is designed.
Thursday: Cast rehearsals followed by camera rehearsals so camera operators can begin learning their positions for each skit.
Thursday night: Rewrites.
Friday: Rehearsal in studio with sets as they arrive from carpentry shop. Sets are dressed (decorated with finishing touches).
Friday night: Script (theoretically) set.
Saturday afternoon: Rehearsal. More changes and rewrites.
Saturday 8 p.m.: Dress rehearsal in front of live studio audience. All 16 (or so) skits are performed. Full running time of rehearsal just over two hours.
Saturday 10:15 p.m.: In frenzied final meeting, the show's running time is whittled down to 90 minutes by producers and writers choosing best 12 skits based on audience response to dress rehearsal.
Saturday 11:30 p.m.: Show goes live to air on East Coast. |
