Live From New York Part 10

I tell Milton, "I'll talk to you later," closed the door, and left.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

I had resisted having Berle on, but Jean Doumanian talked me into it on the basis of "How could we not?" I knew we were heading for disaster from minute one. The sketch in the old folks home was supposed to be sentimental, but during rehearsal, when Gilda would feed Milton, he was letting the food dribble out and all over his face. So I go, "Milton, she's giving a speech here and you're completely upstaging her with the mashed potatoes coming down your chin." And he'd say, "Now you're getting two laughs instead of one." And I'd say, "Well, no," and then he'd pat me on the shoulder and go, "I know, I know - 'satire.'" He'd say that whenever I'd say anything.

Just before the close of the live show - and it's not a very good show - he said to me, "Don't worry about a thing, the standing ovation is all arranged." He was singing "September Song," and I swear to G.o.d there were ten people, which was the number of seats he had, who stood up in the balcony. The only time it's ever happened. I was quite clear in the booth about not cutting to it. We don't do that.

I have great affection for old-time show business. But it had become corrupt. It wasn't what it had been. The show was trying to get away from that.

Sat.u.r.day Night Live invigorated viewers because it represented so many departures from the safe, the sane, and the expected. One of Michaels's rules was, no groveling to the audience either in the studio or at home. In those first five years especially, SNL writers were not pleased when a studio audience applauded some social sentiment or political opinion in a sketch or "Weekend Update" item. The writers wanted laughs, not consensus.

In its earliest days, the SNL company exuded a contempt not for the medium but for the bad habits it had developed over the years - and the innocuousness that infected virtually every genre, including sketch-comedy shows. Pandering to "the folks at home," a near-sacred TV tradition, was anathema to the original SNL writers and performers, who felt it was better to aim high and miss than aim low and get a cheap laugh. The collective approach of the show's creators could be seen as a kind of arrogance, a stance of defiance that said in effect, "We think this is funny, and if you don't, you're wrong." The show reflected and projected writers and performers who strove first to please themselves - to put on television the kinds of things they'd always yearned to see but that others lacked the guts to present.

To viewers raised on TV that was forever cajoling, importuning, and talking down to them, the blunt and gutsy approach was refres.h.i.+ng, a virtual reinvention of the medium. The stars of Sat.u.r.day Night Live were saying, "We're not coming to you, you have to come to us - or at least meet us halfway." They produced television that commanded attention because it demanded attention. Everything wasn't made easy and lazy and served up predigested.

The more sophisticated viewers were, the more they "got" the jokes, or so it seemed, and the more eagerly they embraced the show. That helped give the series a cachet that few other TV programs had enjoyed. Monty Python's Flying Circus, imported from England by public TV, was among that tiny group, but its audience was incomparably smaller and, obviously, it was anything but indigenous. Regular SNL viewers felt like members of a special sort of club, one made up of lapsed or expatriated TV viewers bored by the corporate-approved ba.n.a.lities that most TV programs served up.

Of course, advertisers flocked to SNL just the same, and the number of NBC affiliates carrying the show swelled, and that meant it had won corporate approval too. If it hadn't, it wouldn't have stayed on the air. Nevertheless, for the first five years anyway, the gang at Sat.u.r.day Night Live came across as wickedly irreverent and wonderfully subversive.

It could be argued that in time, Sat.u.r.day Night Live became as eager to please as any other TV show - even the kind that its writers and actors despised and derided - and that, probably inevitably, it became what it belittled. But in that first burst of glory, there was still a captivating, rebellious purity to it. It was on a wavelength of its own, proudly above the fray, brash and brave and youthful and honest. Television without guilt that was still entertaining as all get-out.

BILL MURRAY:.

It was Davey Wilson who didn't want us ad-libbing more than Lorne didn't want it. But the thing about the ad-libbing is that the camera cues, the camera cuts, are all on the script. They're supposed to go from this person to that person on this line. So that was a technical thing that was sort of a limit that you had. You'd screw things up if you ad-libbed at the end of something.

Davey caught a lot of stuff because he was fast. If he could see in your eyes that something was coming, he'd hold on it. You'd hear him in the booth: "Oh Christ, where's he going?" You learned that if you were going to fix something, the easiest way for everybody was to figure out how to fix it and still say the last line so they had the cuts right. You could actually watch them go, "Awgh!" You could hear six or seven people in the booth go "Awgh!" like he got it, and there'd be this glee as the technical director would push the camera b.u.t.ton switch; there'd be this delight that you did it right, that you respected their technology and what they had to do. That was when you got good at it. It takes a while to learn how to do that. Not everybody did.

I shot off a flash camera into the lens one time during "Update." Yeah, I burned out the TV camera. Oh and they were furious. G.o.d, they were angry. They thought, "Oh you f.u.c.king rookie, you idiot." Well of course it turned out to be just a temporary thing. It burns a hole for a moment and then they have to redo the white balance or something, but they were so mad, because there was this bubble in the screen for the rest of the "Update." The whole floor was like, "Did you hear what he did?" And people were walking out of the booth going, "Do you know what he did?!" Of course - it's on the screen and everyone sees it on the monitor anyway, the whole crew sees it, and people know.

The guys in the crew had been doing it forty years, they know you don't shoot a flashbulb at a GE camera. Well - newborn baby, what was I going to do? There was plenty of volume. They screamed. There was always lots of volume.

JAMES SIGNORELLI:.

With the exception of Don Novello, who had worked at Leo Burnett in Chicago, no one here had any background in advertising. My background was in doc.u.mentary filmmaking and feature film cinematography, so I had pa.s.sed through the world of low-budget commercials that everybody does at one point, and I knew the silliness of it and what some of the excesses were, and I knew how to do them from the production and visual points of view. One of the things about commercials is that they're very good storytelling devices.

By the beginning of the third year, the typical short movie for Sat.u.r.day Night Live cost between $10,000 and $13,000. It was kind of a watershed period because of what was going on in commercials in general. For one thing, money was no longer an object. Phenomenal sums were being spent on advertising. And new techniques were being born there. The other thing was that it was becoming acceptable - even with the most staid client - to use humor.

We at the show, of course, were on the cutting edge. So n.o.body could do what we did. And whatever we did in commercials, the att.i.tudes that we took, the archness or the surrealist approach, was making a big impact on the creative people at the ad agencies. So they started pus.h.i.+ng the wave further and further to the left. Editorially, we were doing things that were very sophisticated back then.

DAN AYKROYD:.

I did "Update" for one season, I think, and I wasn't comfortable in it. I didn't like it. They only gave it to me because Chevy had gone. "Jane, you ignorant s.l.u.t" really caught on - that was great - but delivering the jokes and being the newsreader was not something that I was comfortable with. I was very happy to be relieved of that.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

In the seventies, I was much more proud of who I wouldn't allow on the show - people who had just been all over Las Vegas and prime-time television. There were even people I always thought were really great but they were of that other generation. And now we were coming along, and we were shaped by a different set of things. And any a.s.sociation with the Rich Littles and the John Byners and the original Tonight Show guys like Dayton Allen would have been ant.i.thetical to what I was trying to do.

PAUL SHAFFER:.

The idea that some of the things would not be necessarily accessible to everybody didn't matter. As long as there were a few people out there who thought it was hilarious, that's what mattered. I kind of learned that from this show, that concept. It was a show for our generation, which was, let's face it, a sixties-style generation.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

I taught at an art school in Toronto, I was teaching improvisations, the conceptual art movement which was being talked about and on the edge of things in the early seventies. Where that and entertainment met was what Andy Kaufman was doing. It wasn't just that he lip-synched to "Mighty Mouse"; it was that he only did that one part in it, that one line, and stood around for the rest. It was very conceptual, and it instantly signaled to the brighter part of the audience that that was the kind of show we were going to do. And they weren't getting that anywhere else on television. In the first couple years, Andy must have been on close to ten times. One night he even read from The Great Gatsby. In the beginning I had Penn and Teller on a few times, because that was the DNA, but I couldn't do that now. The pure variety show part of it is over. It's a straight comedy show now.

AL FRANKEN:.

I heard Spiro Agnew was going to be on Tom Snyder's show, so I just wanted to meet him and hara.s.s him a little bit. I brought a tape recorder and went down to their studios on six. Agnew was in the makeup room, so I sat down in the next makeup chair as he was getting made up and I said something like, "You called student protesters b.u.ms, and aren't you the b.u.m" - I think that's what I said - "because you took money?" And he just said, "I never called them b.u.ms. That was Nixon." It was like beneath his dignity to address this kid with long hair and to spend too much time on it.

I thought I'd pressed the b.u.t.ton to start the tape recorder, but I didn't. I'd had it on and turned it off or something. So I didn't get it on tape. And then I also felt stupid because I checked it out and I was wrong: Nixon had called students b.u.ms. At least I did get to say to Agnew that he was a b.u.m.

And then the producer of the Snyder show called me up and said, "Don't do that. If there's somebody on our show that you hate, don't come down and hara.s.s them. That's not good for our show."

LORNE MICHAELS:.

When Al went down to the f.u.c.king sixth floor to berate Spiro Agnew, Chevy and O'Donoghue and I were like, "Al, what the f.u.c.k are you doing?" Al took that "nattering nabob" speech personally. He was probably twenty-three when the show started, I was thirty. It has always seemed to me that the people who made the most noise about artistic integrity were the first people to buy a Mercedes, and the more people railed about things, when you examine their lives twenty-five years later - well, you know.

TOM DAVIS:.

One day Henry Kissinger calls up, and the call is picked up at an NBC page's desk. And the page goes, "Henry Kissinger's on the phone. He wants tickets for his son." And Al grabs the phone and yells into it, "You know, if it hadn't been for the Christmas bombing in Cambodia, you could've had your f.u.c.king tickets!"

PAULA DAVIS, a.s.sistant: My first official job was working for Michael O'Donoghue. I was dying to get into SNL. It was all I wanted to do. And I found that there was an a.s.sistant position open in the talent department, which I really wanted. So I had Michael write a reference letter to Lorne. He wrote me this long recommendation and then, at the end, he wrote, "P.S., I'd rather stick my d.i.c.k in a blender than write another one of these letters."

ROBIN SHLIEN:.

As part of my job, I would have to do things like walk into the prop department or the costume department and say, "They just wrote in six n.a.z.i extras." Well, there would be big laughs, because it's so crazy to tell people things like that. Or when I would tell them the creamed corn just wasn't making it as vomit and they had to do something else to the vomit. A lot of these changes took place on Friday nights, and back then there was no FedEx, no faxes, no nothing, and a lot of the wardrobe houses were closed on Sat.u.r.days. I was often the messenger of bad news.

ROBERT KLEIN:.

Rockefeller Center was one of the better-run office complexes, and it was beautiful. They don't like you putting things on the wall or anything like that. Aykroyd and Belus.h.i.+ had a little corner office with barren walls, and they had nailed against the wall panties sent in by girls, some of them soiled, and many other odd things as well. And it was sort of like rebellion, you know, in these stodgy halls.

DAN AYKROYD:.

I had one episode of rage. And that was when this guy - an accountant, a unit manager - billed me for a hundred and fifty bucks for some meals we were having when we were writing. "Wait a minute. These are expenses that should be picked up by the show." But he kept sending me these bills. So finally I wrote a satanic message on the wall in lipstick - I think Michael O'Donoghue came in and saw it and approved of it - and it was something like, "Your relatives will all burn in h.e.l.l forever." It was very effective.

CARRIE FISHER:.

Danny was always into weapons and cars and doing his little imitations. He was always hanging around with the person who does the autopsies - the coroner. That's who he would hang around with. And of course he really took care of John. He loved him.

I was set up with Danny by John. John invited me over and then pa.s.sed out. That was the setup. That was a blind date, John-style. Danny was adorable. He was lovely. He's just your cla.s.sic codepen-dent and caretaker. Once I almost choked on a brussels sprout and he did the Heimlich maneuver on me. He wound up saving my life. When he asked me to marry him, I thought, "Wow, I probably better."

PENNY MARSHALL:.

Yeah, Danny proposed to Carrie. Then she ran away and bought him some clothes. That's how she handled that.

STEVE MARTIN:.

Dan Aykroyd rode a motorcycle and wore leather clothes and everything. I was trying to be friendly and I said, "Hey, you want to go shopping for clothes over at Saks?" And he said, "Well, I'm really not into that."

NEIL LEVY:.

Aykroyd is great. He's an atomic mutant - a web-toed atomic mutant. He actually had web toes, you know. He's got web toes. I've seen them with my own eyes, at least one foot. I asked him about it and he said, "I'm an atomic mutant." He's also got a photographic memory and instant recall. He can take a book and once he's read it, you could ask him any page and he could recall it. Unfortunately, I think the only book he's actually memorized is like a 1974 meat packagers guide.

JAMES DOWNEY, Writer: My brother was an air force career guy, and when Aykroyd and I did a thing a long time ago that involved Napoleon having a B-52, Aykroyd supplied all the references for the armaments and the weaponry and stuff. In fact the term "daisy cutters" was probably first used on television in that piece. And my brother had been watching it in Thailand or something on the Armed Forces Channel and he called up and said, "My G.o.d! Who there knows what a C-130 is?" I said that was Aykroyd. He goes, "Wow, we were amazed, because you guys actually had the stuff right, and we've never seen that kind of thing." Daisy cutters are those giant bombs that have this horizontal destructive capability. They're just a superpowerful kind of bomb.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN, Manager: I think Lorne was the first guy ever to wear a Hawaiian s.h.i.+rt and think it was hip. And after he did it, it was.

JAMES SIGNORELLI:.

Here in New York it was the brink of the big era of greed. It was the tail end of the bohemian period, and that morphed into Max's Kansas City and other joints like it. It was art related - related to the world of Warhol and the abstract expressionists. There was a demi-world that these people lived in, but it was going away very rapidly toward the beginning of the seventies.

What Sat.u.r.day Night did was tap into a whole new universe of people who didn't even appear until eleven o'clock at night, because we never did either. We'd be in the building until ten, eleven, every night. And the reason that I can say that with such certainty is that we couldn't go to dinner. There were only two places we could get fed in New York City after eleven at night in 1975, believe it or not. One was the Bra.s.serie, which was a little uptown for our group, and the other was a place called Raoul's, which served dinner until one o'clock in the morning.

During the first five years, the show changed a lot of stuff that you don't think about. It changed this business of dinner at eight into dinner at ten or dinner at midnight. The way Franne Lee, our costume designer, dressed Lorne for the show suddenly became the way everybody in New York was dressing. Lorne used to come out onstage wearing a s.h.i.+rt, jacket, and blue jeans. n.o.body had ever seen it. But before you knew it, everybody was sitting around in Levi's and a jacket.

Riding a tsunami of success and acclaim, Lorne Michaels proposed sending the entire show on location to New Orleans for the 1977 Mardi Gras. Since NBC figured the production cost of that to be at least $700,000, executives decided to put the show in prime time on a Sunday night, stretching it to two hours and making it an entry in a weekly anthology called The Big Event. Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams were among the guest stars. But this was one big event that went busto, and in a spectacular way - a live show in a city full of drunks and near-naked revelers turned out to be much harder to control than one mounted in a TV studio. It was such a fiasco that it almost became self-parody, a sort of instant legend, and thus didn't really do a thing to impede the surging popularity of Sat.u.r.day Night Live.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:.

We had Buck Henry and Jane Curtin at the "Update" desk waiting for this Bacchus Parade to come, and all our jokes were about the floats and the specific things that would pa.s.s by the reviewing stand where they sat. But then somebody got killed - there was this horrible accident at the beginning of the parade route, two miles away. So for the entire hour and a half or so that we were on TV, there was no parade. Every time the bright lights came on Jane and Buck, millions of kids were vomiting and drinking and throwing balloons at them. And I'm under the desk while they're on live TV being pelted, and I'm writing jokes about there not being a parade - what you would have seen had somebody not been killed, okay?

And I remember the last joke I wrote, the concluding joke, was something along the lines of, I'm paraphrasing, "Mardi Gras is French for 'no parade.'"

PENNY MARSHALL:.

Oh, was that a disaster! That was ridiculous. The parade was rerouted because there was an accident. People were throwing things at Buck and Jane. Meanwhile, Cindy and I had to do this Apollo Ball thing, but Cindy got lost and didn't make the first part of it. There were men dressed as women, but we weren't allowed to say that on television. We couldn't say they were men because it was prime time. In those days, we couldn't even say "do it" on Laverne and s.h.i.+rley.

BUCK HENRY:.

It was a very, very bad week for Garrett Morris, because that was his hometown and his sketch was canceled and he didn't have much to do. He was severely p.i.s.sed off. He wandered off. Everyone felt very badly about it. And yet the show wasn't bad, considering there were, I think, fifteen live locations. O'Donoghue even got to do his reindeer dance, or whatever the h.e.l.l that was, and there was Belus.h.i.+ doing, of course, Brando doing A Streetcar Named Desire.

GARRETT MORRIS:.

I was unhappy about it, because I had a song I wanted to do, a song called "Walking Down Bourbon Street." I'm a composer, and here I'm also a native son and I would have been doing a song about New Orleans. But Lorne didn't see it, and I think he was influenced by a lot of people. So now I'm not in one thing on the show, and n.o.body is saying anything about that. The only thing I could do is walk off, but I don't want that reputation. By the way, the cast went to my aunt's house and ate 'til they could hardly leave the house. They had to like put their stomachs on wheelbarrows to get to their cars.

PAUL SHAFFER:.

Naturally I wanted to do more performing. The fifth season, Lorne made me a featured player, which was a supporting actor, and I was in certain sketches that year playing various characters and things. I had a Nerd character I played, I played Robert Vesco one time in a Christmas sketch, and various things.

And then there was the famous time when I said "f.u.c.k" on live television. The sketch was about a medieval band rehearsing. Did you ever hear of the Troggs tape? The Troggs were a band in the sixties; "Wild Thing" was their song. There's a tape that circulates in the music business of them in the studio trying to make a follow-up to "Wild Thing" and not being able really to communicate. They didn't know musical terminology so they just kept saying "f.u.c.k" over and over: "You had the f.u.c.king beat," they kept saying. They couldn't seem to re-create what they had done before. It's a famous music biz tape.

Anyway, Franken and Davis had the idea to transcribe this Troggs tape and make a sketch out of it but make it into a medieval band rehearsing and saying those lines. I remember James Taylor was in it too, because he was the musical guest that week, and Laraine Newman. We made up our own word, "flogging," instead of "f.u.c.king," and we would say, "Well, you had the floggin' beat before" and we were all doing British accents, some more successfully than others. So it went very well in the dress rehearsal. And Al Franken said to me, "You're getting big laughs. If you want to add any more of those 'floggings' go ahead." But I got carried away, and just without thinking I said, "You had the f.u.c.king beat before." And then I, oh my G.o.d, I watch the tape of it and I go white. And I look off, you know - what am I going to do?

But n.o.body noticed I said "f.u.c.k," because we were doing these bad English accents. You couldn't hear it, it wasn't really clear, and there were no phone calls or anything. Everybody in the sketch heard it, though, and I remember Laraine coming over to me right after and saying, "Thank you for making broadcasting history." And then Lorne came over and said, "You just broke the last barrier." But I didn't get in trouble, because it was clearly an accident. I didn't get fired or anything.

HOWARD Sh.o.r.e:.

We really were of that period: the sixties. I think I was even more than Lorne. The spirit of that period was still inherent in our relations.h.i.+ps through that time. By the eighties, we all changed and had quite different ideas. But I think the kinds of s.e.xual ideas in the early days of the show were from the sixties - the idea of free love and different relations.h.i.+ps with different partners.

ROSIE SHUSTER:.

I wasn't actually in a couple with Lorne when the show started; that's the real folly of all of it. But I never really actually got divorced from him, I don't think, until like 1980 or something. I just didn't want to deal with that. And so I didn't.

DAN AYKROYD:.

By the time Rosie and I became involved, it was over between Rosie and Lorne. They might have been married in name, and all that, but he was seeing other people. There was definitely separation there.

TOM DAVIS:.

When Rosie and Danny first started dating, Danny was sure that Lorne was going to kill him because Rosie was his ex-wife. I was very close to Danny, and he was like, "Don't tell anybody, Davis, don't tell anybody." And of course everybody knew anyway. Finally Lorne said to me, "Danny and Rosie sure are hitting it off," and it was like, why are we going through all this hiding and charade kind of thing? I mean, Danny and Rosie and I went on vacations together. But somehow, Danny was sure that Lorne was going to kill him.

DAN AYKROYD:.

My thing with Rosie never really got in the way of work until near the end. I was pretty upset, because Rosie was breaking up with me and going with a guy who is one of my best friends now.

LARAINE NEWMAN:.

I always had these long-distance romances, which were about as much as I could handle. I really didn't get involved with people I was working with. I liked keeping it light. I was involved with lots of people who were just numb lotharios, but because I knew that about them I could just enjoy them and not get involved. I was in no shape to be involved with anybody.

ANNE BEATTS:.

When Michael and I broke up, he "closed the iron door" on me. I was not a part of Michael's life or att.i.tudes after that except at a safe distance. It was very difficult, very difficult - not just for me, but for both of us. But I didn't quite go to town on it in the same way that Michael did. We had some argument about something during the dress rehearsal of a show shortly after we had broken up, and Michael smashed his fist into a gla.s.s ashtray and had to be taken to the NBC nurse. He then spent the rest of the evening bandaged, and when people asked him about it he would say, "Anne and I had an argument."

ROSIE SHUSTER:.

On Wednesday mornings, people were scrambling for the showers. We did bunk there and it was pretty fun - and pretty funky. Sometimes people would crawl out of their offices in the glow of those fluorescents, and it was not pretty. It was dormlike. Gilda came in once in her pajamas to write in the middle of the night.

BUCK HENRY:.

John and Danny left the show at the same time, and I thought they shouldn't have. I thought they owed Lorne another season. The kind of spontaneity and cleverness and responsiveness that went into that night when I was injured and they all ended up in bandages, I don't know why, but I just have that feeling that wouldn't happen today. It's too h.o.m.ogenized now. It's too mechanized. It's corporate. And to a certain extent I think it's because Lorne's still the only one who can come and say, "No, don't do that."

But you also get the feeling that people are there because, first and foremost, it's their launching pad or stepping-stone or way station or whatever, not as a destination in itself. They all know that it's a franchise which leads to making bad movies.

DON NOVELLO:.

As I see it, the main star of the show is really the format. Look at other comedy shows - the Smothers Brothers, Laugh-In, any of them, with the stars out front, the cast out front, they never last. Like popular music. As you look at television history, the old things that stay on are maybe the Today show, the Tonight Show and 60 Minutes. That has stayed on all the time. The Tonight Show went through Jack Paar and Johnny Carson. So why did Sat.u.r.day Night stay on? I think because of that format, and that is a genius who came up with that - the idea of having a guest host, music, the news, and so on. From the very beginning, one of the first shows, they set up that format. And that really is why they've stayed on that long, plus having exciting performers. The format of the show is the main reason for its longevity.

HERBERT SCHLOSSER, NBC President: Once I invited the whole cast to come up and have lunch in this big dining room that the chairman and I shared. And the cooking was not nouvelle cuisine. We were used to having heavy stuff, so we had roast beef with all the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. And I said, "Bake an extra batch of chocolate chip cookies." Well, you've never seen people eat like this - second portions of roast beef and so on. And then the cook gave each of them a little bunch of these cookies, tied up in paper napkins so they could take them with them. And I remember Bill Murray told me, "I've heard you're a good guy and I'm going to give you a noogie." And he came over and rubbed his knuckles into my head. My G.o.d, they really were wild.

HARRY SHEARER, Cast Member: Three years into the show, I got an offer to join the writing staff, and I sent back a fairly brusque letter to the effect that, if I wanted to write for television, I could do that very well in Los Angeles, I didn't have to move to New York - the implicit message being that I'm a writer-performer and I don't take writing jobs. So two years further on, I'm in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., being interviewed to be the host for what ended up being Morning Edition on NPR, and I got a message to come up to New York; Lorne wanted to meet with me. And I came up and the meeting was in the darkened auditorium of the Wintergarden Theater, where Gilda was doing Gilda Live, and there Lorne offered me a job as a member of the cast and as a writer.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

In 1979 I was doing Gilda Radner's show on Broadway, which I was directing. Belus.h.i.+ was definitely leaving Sat.u.r.day Night Live, and Aykroyd was coming back as a performer only and not going to write. We all thought we'd do just one more season. So we made some additions to the writing staff. We hadn't added any cast. That was the plan.

Just before Gilda's show opened, I got a call first from Bernie Brillstein and then from Dan Aykroyd saying they had a chance to make the Blues Brothers movie in November and that Danny wouldn't be coming back after all. That happened in July. Now I didn't have a plan. Al Franken was a big fan of Harry's from the Credibility Gap, which we all were, and it seemed like yeah, that would work.

HARRY SHEARER:.