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The History Channel original podcast.
Hey History This Week listeners, it's Sally here.
We are bringing you an extra episode this week for the 50th anniversary of one of the longest running TV shows in history, Saturday Night Live.
And to take you through this story, we are welcoming a special guest host, Dave Holmes.
It is a great conversation that you will not want to miss.
History This Week, October 11th, 1975.
I'm Dave Holmes. Writers, prop masters and stagehands scramble behind the scenes as George Carlin, pretty much the preeminent standup comedian of the time, waits in the wings.
He's preparing to deliver a monologue from Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Center in New York City.
Now this is not his usual gig, Carlin is hosting a TV show, emceeing something brand new in the world of live television, NBC's Saturday Night.
Now if this monologue doesn't go great for Carlin, he can just go back to the standup circuit.
Saturday Night's showrunner, Lorne Michaels, has a lot more on the line.
He's only 30 years old, and many NBC executives don't think he has what it takes to pull off what he's proposed.
Brand new concept for TV, a late night live comedy show that airs on the weekend.
He's trying to produce a different kind of show, and a big part of his job is managing a different kind of cast.
A collection of young comedians who are not exactly the most stable bunch.
This is, after all, the 1970s.
The concept of just say no hadn't been invented yet.
But somehow, at the stroke of 1130 Eastern time, the first sketch is underway.
Good evening. Good evening.
John Belushi plays an immigrant, learning English from writer Michael O 'Donohue.
Phrases like, I want to feed your fingertips to the Wolverines.
The sketch is pretty weird if you watch it now, but if you were watching it then, when comedy on television meant Bob Hope and Milton Burrow, it must have looked like it came from another planet.
O 'Donohue's character collapses from a heart attack.
Belushi's character mimics him.
And then Chevy Chase walks onto the stage and starts a tradition that will last for 50 years.
Live from New York, it's Saturday night!
Today, I'm talking with James Andrew Miller, the author of Live from New York, an uncensored history of Saturday Night Live.
To find out, how did Lorne Michaels defy the old guard of executives and pull together a cast, crew and writing staff to execute his uncompromising vision for the next generation of American television viewers?
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Hello, everyone. My name is Wesley Louisay from the History of the Second World War podcast.
Join me on a journey to the most destructive conflict in human history.
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As we try and answer not just the questions of what and where, but how and why.
You can find History of the Second World War on all major podcast platforms or at historyofthesecondworldwar .com.
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Enchored by NCOA. James Andrew Miller, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
I wonder if you can set the scene for us.
It's 1975. You turn the knob on your one enormous console television that sits in the living room, and after it's had three to 10 minutes to warm up, what are you what are you seeing on television in the months before Saturday Night Live?
Well, what you're seeing on Saturday nights is a repeat of Johnny Carson's show.
Right. A lot of people had their TVs on at 11 o 'clock at night on a Saturday.
You know, the idea of, quote unquote, late night television was really not a late night like we know it now.
A thing that happened when you and I were both human beings is that TV at a certain hour would just end.
You would get to the end of the programming day.
You'd see an American flag and hear Kate Smith singing the national anthem, and then there was just no television until the next morning.
Exactly. Even HBO, which went on the air in 1972, they used to shut off at midnight with a homage to the flag and a rendition.
But on NBC, you'd normally have Johnny Carson reruns on Saturday nights until Johnny decides to take Friday nights off.
So now they're running the reruns on Fridays, which leaves Saturday nights open.
Who were some of the people there who decided what to do with that real estate?
Well, Dick Eversol was assigned by NBC to develop something for that space at 1130.
And he reached out to a young Canadian named Lorne Michaels, who had done work on Smothers Brothers and Louis Tomlin, some other things in Canada before he came to himself.
And the two of them worked on the development of the show.
What was Lorne Michaels' background before television?
Well, I mean, he'd always been involved in comedy, both in Canada and then when he came to the United States.
He'd been part of a comedy duo.
He was always involved in television, but certainly hadn't, quote unquote, made his bark yet.
What was comedy like on television in the mid 70s?
It seems like it was sort of the tone of comedy was changing.
I think that comedy was straddling two errors.
You still had a lot of the old world, Milton Berle, red skeleton, red buttons, Jerry Lewis, everybody from the past.
And then you did have some highly inventive, Monty Python, sketch players, SCTV, some of those things were going on in the 70s as well.
But it was interesting because I think that for the majority of the audience, they still were very, very familiar and comfortable with the, quote unquote, old world.
And one of the things that Lorne does with Sunday Night Live beginning in 1975 is to finally bring comedy to a whole new place.
How did how did Lauren's vision for sort of a new guard inform the spirit of the Saturday Night Live?
Well, I think the best way to answer that question is to first discuss what he wasn't going to do.
And what he wasn't going to do was he wasn't going to pander to the audience.
Now, that sounds like a rather banal statement and quite obvious one at that.
But it's huge. It's so important and it's such a fundamental paradigm shift.
And so what he decided was, and this is evidenced by the very, very first sketch, the very first night of SNL, which is they are going to do things that they think are funny and cool and appeal to them.
And if the audience doesn't like it, tough luck.
So you see your 1975 to 1936 is this incredibly embryonic organic process that you really don't see nowadays because everybody has to be so plugged into the buyers have to be so plugged into what they're getting.
What are we getting?
Where's the show Bible?
Where's the, you know, I mean, now they would have asked for the first 20 sketches.
Where did the casting take place?
Where were kind of the feeder institutions into the first cast of Saturday Night Live?
Well, you know, there were the growlings and SC TV and there were all sorts of underground or you know, off Broadway, so to speak, comedy clubs.
But remember, the other thing is that so HBO goes on in the air in 1972.
One of the things that HBO figures that they can do very well is live comedy.
And in fact, their value proposition to comedians is, listen, you're going to spend all your life trying to get on like Johnny Carson Joe, and you're going to get four minutes.
And the first person you're going to meet is the network's sensor.
Welcome to HBO. We're going to give you an hour special and you can say whatever the f*** you want.
And so all of a sudden there's this amazing, amazing growth of stand up comedy specials on HBO, which then translates into a burgeoning, I mean, just a blowout of comedy clubs across the country.
You can see that the number of comedy clubs in 1970, 71, 72 is, you know, like a couple dozen or whatever.
And there's hundreds within five years.
It just is part of that explosion.
And so SNL is also able to take advantage of that by scouting a lot of comedians in comedy clubs.
So Lorraine Newman came from Ground Mikes, Gilda, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi from Second City.
Yep. Garrett Morris had a pretty decent television career before Saturday Night Live.
What were the qualities that Lauren was looking for in a cast?
So I think that if you look at the seven of them, I think what Lauren has done is he's picked a bunch of talented people who don't replicate each other and can make sketches seem bigger than they are because it's a water swath of performers and sensibilities.
Yeah, they get this nickname, the not ready for primetime players.
I mean, look, this is one of the things that a producer called them because they're a little rough around the edges.
They don't have the level of experience that a lot of people did who appeared on network sitcoms.
And so in a way, it was kind of like a dig, but it also became this kind of badge of honor, like, you know, we're not ready for primetime.
And guess what? We don't want to be in primetime because all the things that we're going to be doing now, we can't do in primetime.
Lauren enabled them to develop this mindset where they weren't looking for approval.
They weren't looking over their shoulder.
And thank God the NBC executives figured out who they were dealing with because they put the SNL offices on a totally different elevator bank.
So you don't run into anybody from SNL.
And these people were smoking weed and doing lines and all this stuff.
And so they just let them have their own world.
It was like a biosphere.
There's also there's a collection of writers.
You know, we pay a lot of attention to the cast.
But like Alan Zweibel is like slicing deli meat and selling jokes for five to $10 to comedians.
So what about the writers?
What kind of voice do you think he was going for?
They're very sardonic.
They're very right.
They're very willing to take on the establishment.
They don't want to just do set up, set a punchline.
They will come up with characters that are so off beat that you can't up but wonder whether or not you're laughing at them or with them.
These are people who think differently.
That's when you know that sometimes you're on to something because you're dealing with the misfit toys.
And these people are able to go to great lengths to come up with stuff that we haven't seen before.
Can I give you an example?
Please do. They're all sitting around the office and someone walks in like hash in the face and says, Oh my God, Elvis just died.
And Michael Adani without skipping a beat goes good career move.
Which of course turned out to be true, but that aside the point like that he had that off the top of his head that he was able to that sardonic, wry, irreverent, caustic, but still terribly funny take on.
I mean, he could have a hundred people in that room and nobody would come up with that.
When we return the first episode and all the backstage drama that played out on that fateful Saturday night.
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What was the first of these Saturday nights between dress and live like?
Like, who was feeling the pressure the most?
What'd you say? Well, theoretically, it should have been Lauren, but it doesn't.
He's a very unusual man.
He's a very unusual man.
And you don't know whether he's being himself or whether he's decided to create the character of Lauren and he's playing that character.
But he doesn't really panic.
And I think that there is a lot of times when you can't help but make a decision between dress and show and, you know, a cast member is going to be pissed off or a writer is going to be pissed off or whatever.
But he holds it together.
And generally speaking, sticks with his instincts, even though he gets a lot of input from other people.
It's a lot harder than it sounds.
Aside from Lauren, were there any other NBC executives who felt like their necks were on the line with this project?
You know, obviously, a lot of people, a lot of people at NBC had a big stake in the success of this show, even though it started in a very modest way.
There was little marketing for this show, even though it was a brand new show, the premiere.
There wasn't let's just say that there wasn't a lot of attention being paid to it.
In fact, only two thirds of NBC's affiliates even ran the show.
You know, it's hard for us to think about because it became such an institution.
But there wasn't this sense of inevitability.
In fact, it was wasn't even ordered for a full season.
It was the old like, you know, we'll trust you, but we want to see what you really come up with and see how long it lasts.
And there were people within SNL that didn't think it was going to last long.
There were certainly people on the card is of NBC who didn't give it a wing in a prayer.
You don't want to let go of that kind of real estate.
Saturday night, you know, given the fact that the audience was used to watching Johnny's reruns, you don't want to let it just evaporate.
I mean, Dick Ersault, you know, the vice president for late night, who's charged your development.
I mean, he put his ass on the line to pick Lauren, and he was the goo between.
And I think there were some tough times between Lauren and Dick, but they worked through it.
I mean, Lauren almost quit a couple of times over things, even once about lighting, you know, budgets, all this stuff.
There was a lot to navigate through.
Yeah, even even with this huge break on network television at the age of 30, he was not afraid to quit and say, I'm not coming in because, you know, I have to stick to my guns about this lighting director.
Yeah. He's like, I got to do it my way.
This is what I need to do.
You got to give Lauren a lot of credit because he was obviously willing to, you know, walk away from it or get fired if he couldn't do it the way he wanted.
And as a result, by not creating an ecosystem where, you know, you're trying to predict what the audience wants or you're trying to go after the tried and true formulas that have worked in the past, it was fundamentally different.
And I think that's part of what made SNL so cool.
So take me into the lead up right before air.
Things are still a little uneasy, to say the least, right?
Yes. Yes. Chevy Chase says to one of the producers, what do you think I should do next?
Because it was clear in his mind that this thing was going to crash and burn.
Like 15 minutes before the show, Bernie Brelstein says to Lauren, hey, I'm looking at the band and they're not there to succeed as yet.
And like Lauren looks like like, what do you mean, man?
We're rejecting the old.
This is new. And so when you start off with that sketch, it's almost like doubling down right to the beginning.
It's as raw as raw can be.
You got John Belushi using this crazy, crazy accent.
Talking about the Wolverines.
You got Michael O 'Donohue, who is a senior writer on the show, doing a fake heart attack.
So you really don't even understand what's going on.
I'm glad you brought up that first sketch, because even now you turn it on and it's it's not it's not quite clear what they're doing at first.
And in fact, there's even laughter from the studio studio audience before anything really happens.
It already, even for the people there, feels unfamiliar.
You know, I've always appreciated the fact that they decided to go also the walls right from the beginning and show their reveal their DNA, reveal their ethos, reveal their strategy, which was we're going to do what we want.
The other thing is there isn't this grand plan.
The DNA of SNL is not it's not woven tightly.
There's almost like a grunge quality to it.
And then, of course, Chevy pops out and says fly for New York.
It's Saturday night.
None of this that I've ever been seen before.
It's it's it's astonishing to me that the the first few minutes of the first episode of the show are as strange and difficult to identify as they are.
And NBC allowed that to happen.
But a major sticking point was the idea of George Carlin as the host wearing a T -shirt rather than a colored shirt.
It was funny because the paradox of them being able to start the show with a guy having a heart attack, a guy you can barely understand with a thick accent.
Yada, yada, yada. But then they're so worried about Carlin and whether or not he's wearing a jacket.
Of course, they they compromise.
He's got a T -shirt underneath the jacket stoned out of his freaking mind while he's doing the show.
But that's beside the point.
In episode one, another thing that really jumps out is how little the not ready for primetime players have to do.
There's a lot going on and a lot of it doesn't involve the cast at all.
I mean, just think about this.
The Muppets, filled by Albert Brooks, Janice Ian, Billy Preston, and then Andy Kaufman, of course, you mentioned the Muppets and it's it's it's strange that they're there, obviously, in the first place.
But it's it's also strange that for this project, Jim Henson gave the power to write for Muppets to the Saturday Night Live writing staff.
I never thought of anyone other than Jim Henson's people writing for the Muppets.
But in this instance, you're trying it's a laboratory, right?
You throw in a lot of the wall.
Why not? Let's try this.
Let's try that. And so when something doesn't work, you say, OK, it doesn't work.
Something like the Muppets.
You think, OK, it's a diminishing marginal returns.
It's really hard when you're doing a show like this to kind of keep a gauge on that.
Right. I mean, because it's not quantum mechanics.
There isn't like a chalkboard with this definitive equation.
I mean, nothing's for sure.
But when you're trying to develop a show and you're really building the DNA of the show, you got to be careful.
And I think it's a pretty amazing track record.
And, you know, the ratings were decent and the reviews were mixed.
But Lauren said, I guess we're a hit, which I can't decide whether that's great producing or whether that is an early use of The Secret or, you know, was he manifesting?
It's the best. What would become?
It's the best. It's like ESPN is like in Bristol, Connecticut.
Right. And they're in the middle of nowhere.
They're not anywhere close to what NBC, CBS and ABC Sports is like.
And they decide one year we're going to call ourselves the worldwide leader in sports.
I mean, why not? You know, and Lauren decides because people were so remember, there was no security.
They didn't have like a two year order or a whole full season order.
So Lauren decides he's going to proffer the opinion.
We're ahead. So I think it's an audacious, particularly outstanding move because it gives people these youngsters on the show, both in front of the camera and behind the sense that, hey, you know what?
We're going to make it.
Yeah, I guess we're ahead.
You know, we're ahead.
It's like it's like why not own it before anything?
And by the way, I'm so glad you brought this up because when he when he said that, it like permeates into like the drywall in the building.
You can't argue, you know, has a real kinetic effect on the cast and the show.
And by the way, the NBC executives, too.
What was the audience reaction to the first show?
I've talked to people who are in the audience.
They were there for the ride.
This was a great ride.
This was something we had not seen before.
Just the mixture, the combination, this cocktail of music and comedy and a film and sketches and all this other stuff, the reference of it all.
We've not seen anything like it.
Now, of course, the other thing that happens after first show is people.
I think a couple of people said to me, well, how are we going to ever do that again?
You know, because there's a part of you that feels like it was such a mammoth undertaking and there were so many disparate parts to it.
The idea of doing it again next week is like climbing Everest on a cold day in your shorts.
I mean, it's like, wait a second, we're going to like, how are we going to do that?
But that's part of, you know, what Lauren instills, which is OK.
Great. See everybody Monday.
Of course, Lauren Michaels and the revolving door of immensely talented cast, crew and riders would put their shorts on and climb Everest week after week for another 49 years and counting.
It's clear Michaels had a vision.
But in these tense moments before they first went live, the arguments with NBC executives wrangling a cast of 20 somethings, finding riders behind deli counters.
It's hard to imagine that he ever would have expected that this was the start of a TV dynasty.
And whether you're a fan of Saturday Night Live or not, the fact that people still debate the show's merits today is a testament to its longevity.
And you have to admit what started on October 11, 1975 is a little more exciting than hearing the national anthem watching a flag wave.
Hey, it's Sally again.
Thanks for listening to History This Week, a back pocket studios production in partnership with the History Channel to stay updated on all things history.
This week, sign up at history this week podcast dot com.
And if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email at history this week at history .com.
Special thanks today to our guest James Andrew Miller, author of Live from New York, an uncensored history of Saturday Night Live.
This episode was hosted by Dave Holmes, Esquire's L .A.
based editor at large.
His memoir Party of One is out now.
This episode was produced by David Weissborg and sound designed by Ben Dixitin.
For Back Pocket Studios, our executive producers are Ben Dixitin and David Weissborg.
From the History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fidler.
Don't forget to follow Rate and Review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts, and we will see you next week.
Hey, listeners, we just want to let you know that as we head into the holidays, History This Week is not going anywhere.
You have plenty of new stories to share with family and friends.
So when you're showing off everything you learned, make sure to tell them you got it from History This Week.
