Saturday Night Quotes

“Those who suffered Belushi’s abuses and still loved him did so mainly because it was hard to take them personally. There wasn’t any real malice behind it, they felt—it was just John. His good side would come out soon enough. It was also very hard to resist the magnetic force of Belushi’s personality. It was exciting to be around him, worth whatever price he made you pay. Tom Davis tells of a day he and John were riding on an NBC elevator together. John, upset about something involving his mother, started crying. Soon Davis found himself crying along with him. By the time they reached the 17th floor, people all around them in the elevator were teary-eyed too. Belushi, Davis says, had an amazing power to pull people into whatever emotional state he was in at the moment.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Baudelaire, William Blake, D. H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Ken Kesey, the Beatles, and Hunter S. Thompson were as much the fathers of Saturday Night as Kovacs, Carson, Benny, and Berle. Dan Aykroyd called it Gonzo Television. They were video guerrillas, he’d say. Every show was an assault mission.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Like the Beatles, Python not only had humor and style, they had nerve: They dared to break the rules and got away with it. Python was hip and smart, and they didn’t underestimate their audience. They turned traditional comedy inside out, making jokes in the middle of sketches about the sketches themselves, mixing film segments with videotape segments, ending sketches in the middle and moving on to something else, never stopping even as the credits rolled. “It was miraculous to me, a revelation,” Lorne said later. “It seemed that once again the winds of change were blowing from England.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Rock music carried the Woodstock Nation’s banner while television represented much of what the bands and their audience stood against. More than a wasteland, TV was the idiot engine of the Establishment, electronic opiate of the consumerist masses, and thus a favorite object of ridicule and contempt.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Kept on as head of NBC Entertainment by Fred Silverman’s successor, Grant Tinker, Tartikoff had more than justified Tinker’s faith in him by gradually putting together a string of hits such as Cheers, Hill Street Blues, Night Court, Miami Vice, The A Team, Family Ties, and The Cosby Show, hits that finally took NBC out of third place in the ratings. That most of those shows were of an unusual originality and quality was not an insignificant footnote, for it could be said that by succeeding with them Tartikoff and Tinker contributed more than anyone to a movement in network television away from the crassness of the programs that dominated the medium during the Fred Silverman era.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Lorne confessed that he hadn’t done as much as he might have to help John curb his appetite for drugs. “Part of the problem of my generation was a morality that said you don’t tell people how to live,” he said. “That was garbage. It was just a way to avoid taking responsibility.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Cocaine is also the drug of success and ambition, a tonic to those for whom doubt and introspection serve no purpose. No accident that it replaced psychedelics in the Woodstock Generation’s stash boxes as flower children turned into young professionals.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“The Nerds became so popular that the word nerd was added to some dictionaries.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“O’Donoghue’s attitude, his manager Barry Secunda said, was that if America liked Saturday Night, how good could it be?”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Jane Curtin was probably the most direct of the three about going in and talking to Lorne, calmly and rationally, about the parts or lack of parts she was getting on the show, although she sometimes confronted Lorne in anger. One friend described her as a smooth lake that occasionally roiled but quickly settled back down again. She was a member of a group within the show—assistant costume designer Karen Roston and associate producer Jean Doumanian were others—that one of the men called “the Smart Women.” The Smart Women would sit in the ninth-floor green room or, when she got one, in Curtin’s dressing room, sipping tea or wine and commenting wryly on the weirdness surrounding them. Curtin was so clearly the most responsible, normal cast member that for the first two contract renegotiations the players had with NBC they chose her as the representative for all of them. After discussing objectives with the cast, Curtin sat down with program executive Aaron Cohen (who would already have discussed parameters with Lorne) to present the cast’s proposals and take Cohen’s offers back to the 17th floor. One observer privy to this process believes another reason Jane was designated the cast’s representative was that she was the most suspicious of Lorne’s role in the negotiations and therefore would be likely to get them the best possible deal.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“How to deal with the chauvinism was something else again. Anne Beatts wanted to confront it directly, in unity, perhaps by forming a “coalition” to take their grievances to Lorne. Marilyn Miller didn’t go for that. The show was no different from any corporate environment, she said: You either put up quality work or shut up. Organized movements got you nowhere.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Danny’s affection for and casual familiarity with what some might consider the seamy underbelly of life gave him an outsider’s orientation that accounted in large part for the uniqueness of his genius in front of the camera. Belushi invented his madness from the stuff of legend, but Aykroyd just seemed to be there. Danny had webbed toes, a twist of nature he often pointed to with pride as proof he was a genuine mutant, and many of his friends share the conviction that he always had one ear tuned to frequencies from other planets. “You look at the floor and see the floor,” he said to a friend once. “I look at the floor and see molecules.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“There are some who side with Belushi in his disputes with Beatts and Shuster, saying the sketches they were writing, especially early on, simply weren’t that good and that he was right to reject them. Marilyn Miller is one who endorses that theory. Miller found that John would jump at parts that gave him a chance to act. “More than anything,” Miller says, “he wanted to succeed at that.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Jane was straight, intelligent, and cool, if not cold—qualities that brought out the worst in John. Jane’s most common response when John misbehaved was a sneer—she was an artist of the sarcastic putdown, and sneering was something she did extremely well—but sometimes he’d make a sexist remark to her and they’d end up in a shouting match in the hall.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“John Belushi embodied Gonzo in its rawest form. It was no accident that he had an intense friendship with the Prince of Gonzo himself, Hunter Thompson—Thompson once said that John was more fun in twenty minutes than most people were in twenty years. Neither was it a coincidence that Belushi did a superb imitation of Marlon Brando, the original Wild One. Like Brando, John didn’t seem to act his emotions onstage so much as exorcise them. Many of his strongest characters—the Samurai Warrior, Rasputin, the demon child Damien—spoke no words at all. Belushi breathed them to life on the power of sheer presence, and, strangely, it is the power of sheer presence that transmits best through the tubes and transistors of television.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Saturday Night was chaotic by design. From Lorne on down, the tenets of the show’s production philosophy were that inspiration, accident, and passion were of greater value than discipline, habit, and control.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“As Dick Ebersol put it, ruefully: “I was very sophisticated about business and not very sophisticated about people. Lorne was not very sophisticated about business and very sophisticated about people. And in the final analysis being sophisticated about people will win, every time.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Figuring out Lorne consequently became something of an obsession for many on the show. They talked about him for hours, sometimes catching themselves using Lorne’s favorite words or phrases, and an acknowledgment from him was enough to keep them motivated for weeks.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Tom Schiller recalls going in to ask Lorne about a new ending for a sketch he was working on. “Lorne would say, ‘Well, I like it for three reasons and I don’t like it for four reasons.’ And suddenly he’d whip off these four reasons, and you’d think to yourself, ‘How could he remember four reasons to talk about?’ But then you’d think that maybe he was thinking of the next one while he was saying the first one and he made it up. So you would be spellbound at the process, and you would leave sort of befuddled and enthusiastic at the same time, and sort of despondent that you had to rework your piece. That happened over and over again.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“It was, to those on the inside, a period of “mutual falling in love,” a bonding that went well beyond the usual backstage infatuation. It also spilled over, even those on the inside knew, into arrogance. Tom Schiller saw it as “the bringing together of Lorne Michaels’ chosen people…a traveling family circus, like an amoeba, a cell that started to grow.… We lived the show; we breathed the show; we slept with each other about the show. There was no private life. I would compare it exactly to living on a submarine.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“A shorthand quickly developed among them, almost their own language. Watching it happen thrilled Herb Sargent, who in all his years in the business had never seen anything like it. “It’s like musicians jamming,” he thought. “They can come from all over the country and immediately sit down and play together because the level of their art is in the same place.” Everyone always seemed to be laughing, and a rushing, manic sense of hilarity took over. There was a constant, competitive throwing out of lines, all of them showing what they had, looking for openings, and timing their licks. A giggling group from the show poured into a crowded NBC elevator one day, and as they rode down Chevy put his arm around a balding executive standing next to him, turned to the others, and asked, “Have you met my wife?”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Lorne’s bait for attracting that talent would be to offer them an honest chance to get their work across to a huge audience they all believed was out there, waiting. Lorne often said that in television creative people were usually given a great deal of money and no freedom. He promised to reverse that ratio. The money would come in time. The strength of the comedy underground also allowed Lorne the luxury of searching out what he called “disciplined shock troops”—people who could go in and get the job done. He wanted Saturday Night to be different and startling, but not for the wrong reasons. The sensibility should be fresh, even raw, but the execution smooth, if not seamless. He didn’t want people saying of the show, “They’re going to be great when they get it together.” Monty Python’s Eric Idle had once described Python as “the best comedy fighting team ever assembled,” and that’s what Lorne said he was after.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“style was “straight out of a managerial handbook: Divide and conquer, say what people want to hear, throw people bones.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“A key member of the show’s production staff found that she had to stop smoking pot when she worked on Saturday Night—ironically, since it was the first job she’d ever had where she could smoke pot—because it made her too sensitive, too soft in dealing with all the people calling in who wanted something. With cocaine she found she could tell them no very efficiently, very fast, with no emotion whatsoever. “Coke,” she said, “takes the heart out of people. It’s irrelevant if you’re hurting somebody. It’s all what you want to get across at the moment and who you want to listen to you.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“the sheen of novelty had worn off. Sometimes it seemed to the performers and writers that the only comment they heard was how Saturday Night had gone downhill—indeed, that it had been going downhill since about the fourth week it was on. The higher the ratings got, the more disdainful the criticism became. Anne Beatts grew fond of saying that you can only be avant-garde so long before you become garde.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“One of Lorne’s pet theories had always been that Saturday Night was not so much in the business of television as it was in the business of rock and roll. The audience, the sensibility, was the same, he said, the show had simply picked up where rock in the sixties left off.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Starting to think about the viewers “out there” as different from the people inside the show was one of the early signs of how far Saturday Night had begun to stray from its original identification with its audience.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Lorne would respond to those who griped about the repeats that they were being silly, that viewers liked these characters, and he made no apologies for giving the viewers what they liked. He once said if you do something one time it’s unique, two times it’s a runner, three times it’s an institution. Lorne also argued as the show’s ratings grew that the repeats were new to all the new viewers tuning in.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“Saturday Night was also founded on the notion that repetition and habit stifle true creativity, true originality.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

“One of the least appealing aspects of Belushi’s machismo was his misogyny. He believed, or pretended to believe, that women weren’t funny, and he said so all the time. He often urged Lorne to fire all the women writers, and although he undoubtedly would have been surprised if Lorne had taken him up on it, several times he threatened to resign if they weren’t. Anne Beatts and Rosie Shuster (whom Belushi called “the boss’s wife”) took much of his abuse. There’s a long list of parts they wrote, including the Todd part in the original Nerds sketch, that Belushi refused to play, simply because, Beatts and Shuster were sure, they wrote them.”
― Doug Hill, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live