LORNESTOWN:

Group Think (Malcolm Gladwell, 2002-12-02, The New Yorker)

Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live,” was married to one of the show’s writers, Rosie Shuster. One day when the show was still young, an assistant named Paula Davis went to Shuster’s apartment in New York and found Dan Aykroyd getting out of her bed—which was puzzling, not just because Shuster was married to Michaels but because Aykroyd was supposedly seeing another member of the original “S.N.L.” cast, Laraine Newman. Aykroyd and Gilda Radner had also been an item, back when the two of them worked for the Second City comedy troupe in Toronto, although by the time they got to New York they were just friends, in the way that everyone was friends with Radner. Second City was also where Aykroyd met John Belushi, because Belushi, who was a product of the Second City troupe in Chicago, came to Toronto to recruit for the “National Lampoon Radio Hour,” which he starred in along with Radner and Bill Murray (who were also an item for a while). The writer Michael O’Donoghue (who famously voiced his aversion to the appearance of the Muppets on “S.N.L.” by saying, “I don’t write for felt”) also came from The National Lampoon, as did another of the original writers, Anne Beatts (who was, in the impeccably ingrown logic of “S.N.L.,” living with O’Donoghue). Chevy Chase came from a National Lampoon spinoff called “Lemmings,” which also starred Belushi, doing his legendary Joe Cocker impersonation. Lorne Michaels hired Belushi after Radner, among others, insisted on it, and he hired Newman because he had worked with her on a Lily Tomlin special, and he hired Aykroyd because Michaels was also from Canada and knew him from the comedy scene there. When Aykroyd got the word, he came down from Toronto on his Harley.

In the early days of “S.N.L.,” as Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller tell us in “Live from New York” (Little, Brown; $25.95), everyone knew everyone and everyone was always in everyone else’s business, and that fact goes a long way toward explaining the extraordinary chemistry among the show’s cast. Belushi would stay overnight at people’s apartments, and he was notorious for getting hungry in the middle of the night and leaving spaghetti-sauce imprints all over the kitchen, or setting fires by falling asleep with a lit joint. Radner would go to Jane Curtin’s house and sit and watch Curtin and her husband, as if they were some strange species of mammal, and say things like “Oh, now you are going to turn the TV on together. How will you decide what to watch?” Newman would hang out at Radner’s house, and Radner would be eating a gallon of ice cream and Newman would be snorting heroin. Then Radner would go to the bathroom to make herself vomit, and say, “I’m so full, I can’t hear.” And they would laugh. “There we were,” Newman recalls, “practicing our illnesses together.”

The place where they all really lived, though, was the “S.N.L.” office, on the seventeenth floor of NBC headquarters, at Rockefeller Center. The staff turned it into a giant dormitory, installing bunk beds and fooling around in the dressing rooms and staying up all night. Monday night was the first meeting, where ideas were pitched. On Tuesday, the writing started after dinner and continued straight through the night. The first read-through took place on Wednesday at three in the afternoon. And then came blocking and rehearsals and revisions. “It was emotional,” the writer Alan Zweibel tells Shales and Miller. “We were a colony. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but we were Guyana on the seventeenth floor. We didn’t go out. We stayed there. It was a stalag of some sort.”

Which would go a long way to explaining why a 90-minute show was funny for about ten minutes each episode.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 8, 2003 12:22 PM