Free Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales, James Andrew Miller Page B

and very visual. And the instant Belushi sits down, he takes effortless command of the camera. He already has a compellingly “dangerous” look about him. “Okay,” he says, “we’re going to do some loosening up exercises.” He practices doing “takes” and “double takes” and then, as only Belushi could, some “work on the eyebrows.” He alternates left and right eyebrows, moving them up and down independently of each other in a series of eyebrow calisthenics.
    He shifts gears. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Saturday Night show. The show is live, the show is not on tape, so all the mistakes you —” He suddenly fakes a horrendous gagging sound, then regains his composure and continues: “So all the mistakes happening on this show are real. We don’t plan anything, because everything is real.” Now he breaks into a ghastly hacking cough, pretending to spit up into his hands.
    “With tape you have the advantage of editing things that don’t work. With live television, anything goes.” He attempts to attach strips of tissue to his eyelids, using spit to hold them on. Someone calls for an imitation of Marlon Brando and Belushi does part of the taxicab scene from On the Waterfront : “Don’t you remember that night in the garden you came down and said, ‘Kid, it ain’t your night?’ Not my night! Charlie, it was you, Charlie.” He grabs more tissue, stuffs it in his cheeks, and does Brando in The Godfather, followed by a quick impression of Rod Steiger: “Teddy! Teddy! What’re you talking about?! What’re you talking ABOUT?! Don’t talk to me that WAY!”
    Finally, the definitively eccentric comic and performance artist Andy Kaufman, who’ll appear on the Saturday Night Live premiere (lipsynching to the Mighty Mouse theme), sits in the chair looking incredibly young and bright-eyed, and simply recites the lyrics to “MacArthur Park” in a calm, conversational voice: “Someone left the cake out in the rain. I don’t think that I can take it, ’cause it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have that recipe again. Oh, no.” He covers his eyes with his hands mournfully.
    When he finishes, the voice of director Dave Wilson comes over a loudspeaker: “Andy, could you do that again, please?” “The same way?” “Exactly the same if you can.” And he does.
    The tape ends with music director Howard Shore, very much the scruffy hippie, modeling a pimpish-looking outfit for Lorne, who directs his movements from the wings. The Saturday Night Live cast was on the brink of success, poised to revolutionize television, looking fresh, brash, and golden. The premiere was less than a month away — October 11, 1975. A date which will live in comedy.
    BRAD GREY, Manager:
    Bernie was there for the first dress rehearsal. He looked out and he saw the band rehearsing. And it was getting close to starting time. So he turned to Lorne and he said, “Hey, Lorne, you know the band doesn’t have their tuxedos on yet. Better get them into wardrobe.” That always made me laugh, because it was so honest of Bernie. Tuxedos! And that’s sort of, I guess, the merging of two generations.
    DICK EBERSOL:
    Lorne’s telling me every day that Chevy’s got this great idea to open every show with a fall, and I am absolutely opposed. But Chevy was the only one who was funny and could write television for television.
    We were reading scripts in those early days where people would have a three- or four-minute sketch take place on five sets, and it didn’t take a real scholar to know you couldn’t do that if we were going to do a live television show in a box the size of 8H.
    DAVE WILSON:
    Many of them had written for magazines or the National Lampoon Radio Hour or that kind of thing, so it wasn’t as if they were brand-new to writing, it’s just that they weren’t familiar with the medium of television. So of course we’d always go through things where you’d read their script and it says,