Sunday, November 6, 2022

Saturday Night Live Reflections, Part 2: The Free Agent Year, The 'Disaster' and the end of Radical Experimentation

 

In the spring of 1984, SNL faced a crisis. Eddie Murphy, who had just accomplished the back to back smashes of 48 Hours and Trading Places, was leaving the series to pursue his film career.  Facing this problem, Dick Ebersol did something that I don’t think even Lorne Michaels would have tried.

He went to Billy Crystal and essentially made him an offer. You work on SNL for one season and we will pay you whatever you want.. Crystal had hosted the show that spring and clearly demonstrated a gift for it. He signed on for those terms. Ebersol than made similar offers to some of the greatest sketch comedians in history: Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer, who the previous year had more or less created the mockumentary with This is Spinal Tap and Martin Short, who had already proven his mettle on SCTV earlier in the decade. (John Candy, Joe Flaherty, and Dave Thomas had all hosted the show during the Ebersol years, so he was going that far.) Combined with the talents of Jim Belushi, who had joined the cast the previous year, and the returns of Mary Gross and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, SNL went into 1984 with arguably its greatest assemblage of talent since the show premiered.

From the beginning, the show was a rocket. Crystal ended up delivering the opening monologue and absolutely brought the house down when he brought up the fact that the show was ten years old, and how much had changed in that period. There were brilliant jokes about age groups in bank lines, dealing with your children’s taste (“Is it true Paul McCartney was in a group before ‘Wings’ he claimed his daughter asked him?) and the wonders of childbirth. It was perfect from beginning to end and a sign of how great the show would be that year.

In keeping with the general theme of experimentation throughout the previous seasons, many of the segments that year were filmed. While there were mixed reception to that from some of the cast and critics at the time  - was it justified still calling the ‘show’ life – given how much energy is now given to sketches by Funny or Die in the 2000s and movie trailers that proceed to this, it was clear that everybody was worried about nothing. Besides, these segments were hysterical. There were segments called ‘Lifestyles of the Relatives of the Rich and Famous’, basically an excuse for the cast to do impression. (Martin Short still does a mean Katherine Hepburn by the way.) There were incredible filmed segments including ‘Male Synchronized Swimming’ which for understandable reasons has gone down in comedy history. (Please YouTube it. Description does it no justice.) And when Eddie Murphy returned he did a provocative segment that in retrospect looks like it was the best Chappelle’s Show sketch we never got: “White Like Me.” Murphy, in order to see if there were two Americas, one black, one white, donned makeup, watched Dallas and Dynasty and read a lot of Hallmark cards. Then Mr. White went out to society – and learned the bitter – but still hysterical – truth.

The lion’s share of the best recurring characters were, to little surprise, done by Crystal himself and still have spots in history. Everybody thought Hernando was ‘Mahvelous’ but there were also little bits he did that were perfect. I don’t know if anyone who could have gotten away with his impression of Ali (Ali himself never minded) and I seriously think the only reason we remember Joe Franklin today was because of the sketches he did. Then there were the bits he would do with Christopher Guest where the two played security guards or night watchmen, who would end up discussing body manipulation and mutilation that sounds like they were things Jigsaw would reject. “I hate when that happens,” made it all worthwhile. Martin Short brought Ed Grimley to SNL stage, where among other things he would dance with Tina Turner and Rich Hall would occasionally grace with spot on impressions of eighties celebs like Paul Harvey and Doug Hemming.

The guest hosts were somewhat less significant than they were in other years, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be brilliant. Christopher Reeve hosted and showed us his real audition for Superman. Turns out he was actually the second choice. He read well for the role, but he couldn’t catch a bullet in his teeth or turn coal into a diamond as well as his biggest rival. Jessie Jackson brought some brilliant laughter (as I mentioned before) Ringo Starr wasn’t able to get a bid at an auction for Beatles memorabilia, and George Carlin came on ten years later and did a routine just as memorable as his one on God.

And then, the next year everybody had moved on. It was inevitable that the next season was going to be a disappointment; I don’t think anybody could have expected that it would be so disastrous. Many of the cast members at the time thought that the 1985-1986 season would be the last one, based on the vehemence of the reviews and the drop in the ratings.

This is kind of astonishing when you consider who the replacements were Joan Cusack, Anthony Michael Hall and Randy Quaid had joined the cast, along with a complete unknown named Robert Downey. Future stalwarts for the series Nora Dunn, Jon Lovitz and Dennis Miller joined the cast and they even found a place in for a featured player named Damon Wayans. You’d think the sketches for the shows would have to be genuinely horrible for all of this talent to be wasted, and while I think much of the material for that season was inferior, I also genuinely believe that there was more gold there than anyone – maybe even the cast itself – wants to give credit for.

For one thing, Ron Reagan Jr. hosted the show and created an opening number that has also earned a place in history. Reagan and Nancy (Quaid and Terry Sweeney) are at Camp David and had left Ron in charge of the White House. After carefully giving him instructions, we next see Ron only wearing a shirt and sunglasses and doing the exact dance that Tom Cruise had shot the stardom on in Risky Business for to ‘That Old’ Time Rock and Roll.” The audience went into hysterics I’ve rarely heard from beginning to end. Nor indeed was this the only good sketch from that episode. In a Back to the Future parody, Ronald Reagan is an out of work actor in 1985 and he and Nancy have a troubled marriage. Ron ends up going back in time on to the set of Hellcats of the Navy’ and interrupts his parents wooing. In order to get them back together, he tells his younger father (who is a dyed in the wool liberal) that in order to get Nancy he has to say he’s more conservative and pro-business. I won’t go into more detail, except to say that even Ron’s surprised when he ends up back where he used to live.

Now to be clear, not all the hosts and sketches were this good. But just as in the years previous you got a sense the show was trying just as hard to be experimental as it had in the Dick Ebersol years. Penn and Teller, who were just starting out their act, did several bits for the show, including the world’s most expensive card trick and a plan to kill Teller live on stage.  Guest hosts like Jay Leno and John Lithgow had individual sketches that were memorable and genuinely funny. Paul Simon started the show with “You Can Call Me Al’ instead of an opening sketch and then ended up in a Twilight Zone parody where young versions of himself and Garfunkel made a deal with the Devil for superstardom – and then later on a much older Simon ended up in the perfect version of Hell. . Geri Hall hosted the show and told Jon Lovitz’s ‘Liar’ that she was married to a rock star – and then Mick Jagger showed up. And the show did a meta-level that was still at the time very radical. During a Star Search parody, Joan Cusack and Dennis Miller did a deliberately painful reenactment of the famous ‘Cheeseburger’ sketch.  Dennis Miller interrupted the news for a bit that he said was ‘only good when SNL was still on the air’ And Jon Lovitz opened the show as his liar character – playing the owner of NBC, assuring the audience that SNL was doing great, everybody was watching it, the cast was perfect – but was unable to tell a lie about just what the reviews were.

And in the middle of the season at their absolute popular nadir, SNL did what might very well have been the most experimental thing they ever did. The show opens with the cast discussing that to help the show Francis Ford Coppola has been called into direct. The cast is unnerved and asks what changes will he makes? Will the show still open the same way? And instead of the ‘Live From New York’, the show fades to opening credits of Saturday Night Live a Francis Ford Coppola production with Godfather type theme music playing.

George Wendt comes out to do his monologue but he doesn’t get far before Coppola calls cut, asks Wendt if he’s sure he’s reading the line right, and then starts directs the audience as to how to react properly. Wendt does the exact same line again. After the monologue ends, Terry Sweeney introduces himself. During the cold open he had doubts, now he throws himself on Coppola and cries: “Only you can save this sinking ship!”

The show than proceeds entire askew. Coppola wants a new image for a That Black Girl sketch that is ‘edgier’. He goes into the control room to personally supervise the camera work on a mystery parody and his angles completely obscure every single revelation. A worried Lorne asks Francis if he knows what he’s doing and he says been getting assurances from Grant Tinker – Lovitz’s liar character. The climax comes in a military sketch when Hall ends up getting shot and injured because Coppola has been using real bullets. Everybody breaks character and starts walking out, berating Coppola: “The Godfather never worked!” Hall yells as he’s carried out on a stretcher. And Wendt abandons his job. Coppola wanders off the set, wondering if he’s actually a hack. Only to be reassured by the Devil there is still hope before he tries one climatic effort. The show ends with Wendt watching the sketch from a bar, saying the show is ruined.

I’m not sure anybody, not the critics, the viewers, and definitely not the audience on set, who spend the entire episode laughing uneasily when they do at all, ever really appreciated what Coppola and the writers were trying to do: the whole thing basically plays as if Andy Kaufman was running every aspect of the show instead of just making a bizarre appearance. It was daring – probably too daring for comedy audiences at the time. It seems more like the kind of thing that some comedy shows might be able to get away with now – IFC’s Documentary Now operates almost fundamentally on this principle and a decade after the fact rival sketch show Mad TV would try variations on this to some effect. But not even the original cast had ever been willing to take its audience this far out on a limb before, full blast. I don’t pretend it was perfect, nor do I understand what the writers were trying to do with it. Was it a Hail Mary to get critics and audiences talking about the show again? Something that the cast members want to cross off their bucket list before the cancellation they all thought was inevitable. Whatever the reason, SNL never tried anything that radical again.

When the season ended, the show did one last radical thing. The cast was in the middle of an end-of-season party celebrating. Lorne was seen backstage starting a fire on the set of 30 Rock. Before he walked off, he told Lovitz to come with him. The season ended with fake flames all around and every one of the ending credits with a question make next to it. The final shot of the show was a giant question mark.

The next season opened with Madonna, who had hosted the season premiere before. She said: ‘The producers asked me to tell you this.” She took out a piece of paper and read out: “Last season was a dream. A horrible, horrible dream.” There was immense laughter and cheers. The new season – and  a new era – began, and with it the true end of Saturday Night Live’s trying to be radically different. I’m not saying they weren’t brilliant – the next article in this series will illustrate just how incredibly funny the next five years were – but after that they never tried to test the boundaries of sketch comedy or the medium they were performing in the same way that they had done the first decade they were on the air.

I don’t pretend that everything that SNL did during the Dick Ebersol era was genius, but a lot of it truly was. You don’t launch Billy Crystal and Eddie Murphy into the stratosphere without truly remarkable comedy. And I think that at times the show was trying even it was considered its absolute popular nadir (for a while) that it was still trying to swing for the fences. But they were done with being experimental. A new approach and a new breed of comics would have to lead the show for the rest of the decade.

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