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Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live
Saturday Night is the intimate history of the original Saturday Night Live, from its beginnings as an outlaw program produced by an unruly band of renegades from the comedy underground to a TV institution that made stars of John Belushi, Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy. This is the book that...more
ebook, 368 pages
Published
December 15th 2011
by Untreed Reads
(first published March 12th 1987)
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Fascinating "backstage" look at a singular comedy show. Covers the first ten years of the show focusing primarily on the first five or six seasons. The book is full of strange and embarrassing tales of the cast and crew. Pride, racism, sexism, serious drug abuse, eating disorders, angry outbursts, self-centeredness, backstabbing, and manipulation were just a few of the things found on a weekly basis (1975-1985) in Studio 8H and Floor 17 of 30 Rock. Prepare to look at your favorite "early years"...more
I am still looking for the Saturday Night Live episode that contained the following jokes, terrible though they are:
Diana Ross, the famous Mexican chef, created her first dish immediately after she quit her former music group. The name of the dish? Nacho Supreme.
The board of directors at American Greetings didn't like my idea of marketing and distributing a Strawberry Shortcake home pregnancy test.
As the son of a wedding caterer I can tell you that my favorite family driving game was "Which Pean...more
Diana Ross, the famous Mexican chef, created her first dish immediately after she quit her former music group. The name of the dish? Nacho Supreme.
The board of directors at American Greetings didn't like my idea of marketing and distributing a Strawberry Shortcake home pregnancy test.
As the son of a wedding caterer I can tell you that my favorite family driving game was "Which Pean...more
i am in a major original snl mood right now, so i loved this. even with all of the difficulties, arguing, madness, i still wish i could have been there during the first few seasons of snl. when it was fresh and brand new and exciting and nobody had any idea what exactly they were doing or what was going to happen. it's pretty amazing how lorne michaels pulled it all together.
lots of good stories in here and info about who was responsible for what sketches (i love knowing things like that). and,...more
lots of good stories in here and info about who was responsible for what sketches (i love knowing things like that). and,...more
view all 7 comments
Jun 15, 2013
Tlingit
rated it
4 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
non-fiction,
history
I grew up on Playboy, Hustler, Mad Magazine, The Three Stooges, The Little Rascals, Buster Keaton, The Keystone Cops, Harold Lloyd, Laugh In, Hee Haw, Love American Style and The Monkees. I wasn't yet 10 when Saturday Night Live first showed on television and still i was watching it regularly every weekend. Since it was on Saturday my parents didn't have a problem with my sister and I watching it at Midnight. We still were forced to get up for church the next morning.
Reading about the actors, or...more
Reading about the actors, or...more
Although my enthusiasm for watching Saturday Night Live has waxed and waned over the years -- I'm still fascinated by the politics, gossip and often outrageous backstage dynamics of the show. I had high hopes for this book but found it very dry. I far prefer and highly recommend Tom Shales & James Andrew Miller's "Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live." I re-read it for the third time directly after finishing this book and found it as zippy and entertaining as ever...more
Loved this history of Saturday Night Live which ends just at Lorne Michaels returns. Seems to paint him as washed up and something of a failure but ends before Mike Meyers, Adam Sandler, Larry David, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Justin Timberlake ever wrote for or appeared on the show.
It's got great stuff about Louise Lasser and Milton Berle being horrible guests, makes Chevy Chase seem more sympathetic than I recalled
Does a good job of showing time and again how celebrity seems to eat...more
It's got great stuff about Louise Lasser and Milton Berle being horrible guests, makes Chevy Chase seem more sympathetic than I recalled
Does a good job of showing time and again how celebrity seems to eat...more
An in depth look at the first five years of Saturday Night Live. Very inside look and lots of funny and interesting anecdotes from behind the scenes. The book gives you a good idea of all the personalities in the show from the actors to the writers. However, the writing wasn't great. If you really love Saturday Night Live you will probably like this book a lot. Otherwise, its a good, but not great, read.
Too much about the sketches, way too much about Lorne and a bunch of guys I don't give two good damns about getting the show on the air, all at the expense of deeper looks at the cast. We get that the show is very important (and the analysis of the sketches does, I must say, help with that), and we get that Belushi is very charismatic and energetic, that Aykroyd is brilliant both as a writer and performer, that Chevy Chase is very cool in a certain way, but these guys go from team players to ins...more
Read this when it came out in the late eighties and had to re-read it when the Kindle edition was released.
Great book for people who remember watching Glida, Dan and John when Saturday Night Live was still finding it's feet.
Interesting time piece considering the show's place in the cultural landscape. You could almost say it became what it used to rebel against.
Great book for people who remember watching Glida, Dan and John when Saturday Night Live was still finding it's feet.
Interesting time piece considering the show's place in the cultural landscape. You could almost say it became what it used to rebel against.
A very good book about the early history of SNL. The only reason I'm giving it 4 stars in stead of 5 is that I thought it would cover a bit more of the history. This book was written in 1985, so it only covers the first 10 years of a show that has been on for going on 38 years. And even though this is a newer edition, they still don't update anything on the history.
A great book if you want to know about SNL between 1975 and 1985, though.
A great book if you want to know about SNL between 1975 and 1985, though.
Fascinating, though perhaps a little too in-depths at times: I think "And then more drama happened" could have replaced a hundred or so pages. If you want more ammunition to support the suggestion that highly creative types in groups are occasionally become out-of-control prima donnas, this book would provide it for you.
Loved this book. And it was exceedingly interesting, covering the first ten years of the landmark show wonderfully. Plus, unlike the Shales book, it's written in a narrative format. Only complaint is that, even for the 2011 digital edition/reissue, several easily verifiable factual errors are found throughout. Of course, in1985, the authors can't be faulted for relying on people's memories of certain episodes. But today one can more easily go back and see that certain sketches did indeed air or...more
Good writing, fun to read. A nice bit of escapist time-traveling that made me feel like a fly-on-the-wall in the '70s and '80s in the writer's room.
I couldn't put it down. Now I am watching the old episodes on Hulu. It's great watching them having all the background information.
Great on the first and second season... then the focus begins to fade. But fantastic insights into the backstage politics.
Wow. fact filled insight into a world we though we were familiar with.
Well written history of the early years of Saturday Night Live.
I read this one back when I was in high school in Germany.
A great look at the early years of SNL, especially the many backstage tensions between the stars. If you became a fan during the Belushi/Ayckroyd/Gilda/Bill Murray years, then wondered how the show could so completely fall apart in the early '80s, it's explained here in great detail.
One disappointment is that the death of John Belushi, which happened after he left SNL, is treated almost as an afterthought. Maybe I'm wrong, but I would have thought his death would have had more of an effect on th...more
One disappointment is that the death of John Belushi, which happened after he left SNL, is treated almost as an afterthought. Maybe I'm wrong, but I would have thought his death would have had more of an effect on th...more
Unlike the recent Tom Shales version, this is a more journalistic account of the classic show, and in some ways is a more engaging read for benefiting from the authors' interpretations and observations. It also has a far, far more detailed account than the Shales book of the disastrous Jean Doumanian year, which Shales finesses to the extent of devoting only around two cursory pages to it. For that reason as well as others, I think this book is superior to the Shales one, at least for an account...more
De corte más profesional, sigue el detrás de bambalinas de los productores del programa y dinámicas de trabajo. Muy bien investigado pero que en ocasiones incurre en redundancias y se hace demasiado largo.
I read this because of my love for Sorkin's "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" and I found it fascinating. While "Saturday Night Live" is a pretty ordinary show most of the time, understanding what goes on behind the scenes has now made SNL all that more endearing to me, despite most of the original cast and crew being horrible, egocentric people. A really insightful read!
This was a thorough, very-informative book that offered more than just a glimpse at the beginnings of what has proved to be one of the true lasting institutions of and major influences on American entertainment. Well worth the time.
The prose is inelegant and the structure is occasionally clunky, but the details about SNL's early years are SO GOOD.
May 05, 2012
Sheryl
added it
Very In-depth story of SNL.
It's really a four and a half star book. A fun, terrifying and insightful Look into the creation and early existence of one of the most influential comedy shows ever. I only wish it was longer and covered even more history.
Extremely gossipy backstage history of SNL starting with the original cast and continuing through the Eddie Murphy and Billy Crystal years, including the disastrous 1980 season which almost got the series cancelled.
Good view of the early years. Funny to think that Al Franken's a senator.
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