Next, victims often Following up on their successful November summit meeting in Geneva, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev meet in Reykjavik, Iceland, to continue discussions about curbing their intermediate missile arsenals in Europe.
Just when it appeared that Secretly courted by both sides in World War I as a potential ally in the tumultuous Balkan region, Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Art, Literature, and Film History. Space Exploration. Sign Up. Vietnam War. Westward Expansion. Early US. Cold War. Starting at about two on Thursday afternoon, the writers reassemble around the eight-foot-long conference table, where they dissect, line by line, each of the lucky sketches.
This has been, with minor adjustments, the schedule since the show was created in Suggest that there must be another, less-punishing way to organize the week and you hear self-congratulatory speeches about putting the show on at all.
In the old days—even as recently as four years ago—this college-all-nighter culture worked because talented writers could rewrite sketches on their own. But since bulwarks such as Robert Smigel, Jack Handey, and Bonnie and Terry Turner began quitting, Downey has been forced to do more repair work during the group rewrite.
The Thursday-night session is a brain-numbing test of endurance, punctuated by moments of giddiness and frequent deliveries of mountains of food. Writers drift in and out, languorously. At the moment, ten writers are perched around the table, but only four speak up regularly: Al Franken, 43, a holdover from the early years; Ian Maxtone-Graham, 35, a preppy triathlete in his third season at SNL ; Fred Wolf, a skeletal stand-up comic and former Chevy Chase Show writer in his thirties whose jokes usually involve Satan or spewing bodily fluids; and Downey.
Downey commonly works 80 hours a week. Now his eyes are puffy from a catnap on his office couch, and his graying hair is disheveled to the point where it might as well have been attached in random hunks.
Also staring at the script and tossing in a suggestion every 30 minutes or so are Lewis Morton, 24, and Steve Lookner, 23, both in their second year at SNL , and both graduates of the Harvard Lampoon. An ex— SNL writer who stopped by recently was stupefied. What a waste! Pale, overwhelmingly male, and raised on comic books, the main writers are very short on experience in the world beyond pop culture.
The most productive young writer, David Mandel, 24, still lives at home with his family. Mandel grew up worshiping the show, collecting old SNL scripts and memorabilia at bookstores, and memorizing dozens of sketches.
He went on to Harvard, where he says he devoted more time to the Lampoon than to his academic work. Certain subjects—TV game shows, violent beatings, gay sex—come up again and again.
As the rewrite session drifts on, they bark out requests for food, and an assistant. Lori Jo Hoekstra, phones them in. Meanwhile, they make grudging progress on a sketch written by Norm MacDonald. Rooney, played by MacDonald, is cleaning out his desk and finds a bottle of sedatives, empty except for cotton. Or two old white guys?
Right here! I guess that makes me bad. The discussion sputters for another ten minutes. Then the writers lose interest and drift over to the newly arrived food. The sketches eventually get tighter and marginally better. Mostly, all this group writing produces a thin comedy mush. It was just easy and fun. And you can stay up all night shitting out some other thing phrase by phrase. The moments of inspiration have been harder for Downey and everyone else to come by. During rewrites of the piece, Kightlinger jokingly suggested to the group that the song be made even more explicit—and found herself the target of a crude barrage.
Very tough to faze. And it made her cry. Kightlinger, who wrote for Roseanne last year, has been reciprocally shocked by the thin skin of her new colleagues.
MacDonald shrugged it off. So Maxtone-Graham extinguished the cigarette by squirting MacDonald in the face with a water pistol. MacDonald punched Maxtone-Graham in the head, knocking him to the floor. Tonight, sprawled on a couch a couple of feet from the table, Chris Farley and Adam Sandler alternately listen to the writers debate and cackle at some private joke.
Obese, sweating, dressed in a flannel shirt and a white knit skullcap that makes him look like a grunge Muslim, Farley dials. Was it a clap of thunder? The writers laugh louder than they have all night. Bottom line, farts are funny! Downey seems unmoved. Lori Jo ordered up about 50 burgers! All these people are laughing at you. Not with you. Farley starts kicking his legs like some demented Rockette, farting after each step.
And Farley is gasping. None of the writers move. Downey clears his throat. Farley and Sandler strut out of the room. But on Saturday, the sketch gets only weak laughs from the dress-rehearsal audience and is cut from the live show. He has other ways of influencing the writing, however, some of which subtly drive a wedge between the other writers and Downey.
However, we also need to have pieces that Jim hates on the show—because America likes them. A former key writer, who stays in close touch with the politics at SNL , sees all the machinations building to an ugly finish. But Lorne picked that guy for a reason, and he kept him for a reason: Jim is a guy who will internalize everything, will not fight, will just rationalize to himself—and in his heart, is just dying.
Downey admits he was deeply dispirited last spring when his father died and, three days later, he learned of his apparently imminent firing. But Downey seems more equanimous this time around. Friends say he expects NBC to come after his job again at the end of this season, and that his fate is out of his hands.
Many of the current writers talk tough about quitting if Downey is fired. As far as collaborating, no way! Until that time, he was not fair. Ron Reagan Jr. For other weeks, there are two to three stars who are asked to host. Then, Lorne Michaels picks one of those people as the week approaches. The character was Wayne.
The group of writers informed him that he could do better, but Myers wrote the sketch anyway. Obviously, it became a hit. Several sketches were almost turned into movies, including Coffee Talk, Sprockets, and Mr. It never made it to the big screen, but the Da Bears script was not a total loss.
Larry David wrote for SNL in the eighties, but he always struggled to get his sketches on the air. I quit. He continued working there for the rest of the season, and that story was later used on a Seinfeld episode.
Quitting for a weekend is nothing compared to Chris Parnell, who was fired from the show twice: once in , then again in He was asked back the following season, though.
Lorne Michaels claims that she reached out to the press before telling him about the decision. That was the beginning of the end of her SNL career.
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