Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live Read Online Free PDF

has convinced Richard that television is a disaster and whatever career he has, he’ll never be able to do what he does well on over-the-air television. He could not be himself. So the deal was off. I came back right after the first of January and told Schlosser that Pryor was out. Some day subsequent to that he wrote me a memo and said, “Why don’t you bring the show back to New York and even think about doing it in old Studio 8H?” So that part was his idea: “Use 8H.”
    Then I got hold of Lorne, the closest contemporary to me I’d met in this whole process. He did not have an idea at this point. We goof now about the number of people who’ve talked about how “the idea” was “sold to NBC.” No idea was sold to NBC. I adore Bernie Brillstein, but anything in his book about selling an idea, it never happened. Get the lie detectors out; ask Lorne. It’s all bullshit. What did happen was that Lorne just took my breath away in the way he talked about things, how he wanted to have the first television show to speak the language of the time. He wanted the show to be the first show in the history of television to talk — absent expletives — the same language being talked on college campuses and streets and everywhere else. And I was very taken with that, among other things.
    So I told NBC there were two people I wanted to do the show, which would be a live comedy show from New York: I wanted this guy Lorne Michaels to produce it, and I wanted a guy named Don Ohlmeyer to direct it.
    BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:
    You know that at one point NBC suggested Rich Little as the host? I swear to God. We had a meeting with a guy named Larry White. He was head of NBC programming. And we went to see him with the first real pitch of Saturday Night Live ever. Lorne told him what he wanted to do, and Larry White said, “That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life.”
    DICK EBERSOL:
    The night Lorne picked me up at the Beverly Hills Hotel to go see Kentucky Fried Theater — he never said a word about being married — there was this really, really gorgeous dish who got out of the front seat and into the backseat. So we all went to this play, and Lorne and I sat together and this girl sat next to me. And they had introduced her as “Sue Denim,” because Rosie loved having these various names. And we finally got back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I’m thinking, “This girl is really a knockout and smart as hell, maybe I ought to ask her out.” Because I wasn’t anywhere near married in those days. And at some point, when we walked into the hotel to have a drink, it came out that she and Lorne were married, though they weren’t living together at that time. But I know they pulled the wool over my eyes for at least three hours.
    ROSIE SHUSTER:
    Dick thought that I was procured for his delight or something. There was a little fuzziness around my introduction.
    MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER, Writer:
    Other than Herb Sargent, I was the television veteran of Saturday Night Live , which is to say I had worked in TV for two and a half or three years, and I had started on The Mary Tyler Moore Show , having had the sort of Lana Turner-ish Schwab’s discovery made of me by Jim Brooks, aided and abetted by Garry Marshall. So I was writing Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda at twenty-two, and I was on the staff of The Odd Couple.
    I met Michael O’Donoghue and Anne Beatts through a friend when I was doing Rhoda and living in New York. When Lorne was putting the show together and asked me to be a part of it, I had an overactive thyroid and was living with this guy I really wanted to be with. So I told Lorne, “I can’t do the show because I want to get married, but you’ve got to hire this guy O’Donoghue, because he’s brilliant.” Lorne of course had his own access to the Second City people and already knew Chevy, which had nothing to do with Michael. So thanks to me, Michael O’Donoghue got hired.
    ANNE BEATTS, Writer:
    I was living a