“What the hell was that?” one producer asked.
“Oh, that was just Danny Aykroyd,” said Michaels. They had known each other in Toronto, where Aykroyd was a student in Michaels’s improv class. “He’s probably going to do the show,” Michaels said.
Over the next month, as Michaels chose the rest of the cast, the same thing happened again and again: Instead of picking from among the hundreds of people he auditioned, Michaels hired comedians he already knew or who had been recommended by friends. Michaels knew Aykroyd from Canada, and Aykroyd, in turn, was enthusiastic about a guy named John Belushi he had met in Chicago. Belushi initially said he’d never appear on television because it was a crass medium, but he recommended a castmate from the National Lampoon Show named Gilda Radner (who Michaels, it turned out, had already hired; they knew each other from Godspell). The National Lampoon Show was affiliated with National Lampoon magazine, which was founded by the writer Michael O’Donoghue, who lived with another comedy writer named Anne Beatts.
All of these people created the first season of Saturday Night Live. Howard Shore, the show’s music director, had gone to summer camp with Michaels. Neil Levy, the show’s talent coordinator, was Michaels’s cousin. Michaels had met Chevy Chase while standing in a line in Hollywood to see Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Tom Schiller, another writer, knew Michaels because they had gone to Joshua Tree to eat hallucinogenic mushrooms together, and Schiller’s father, a Hollywood writer, had taken Michaels under his wing early in the young man’s career.
The original cast and writers of Saturday Night Live hailed largely from Canada, Chicago, and Los Angeles and all moved to New York in 1975. “Manhattan was a show business wasteland then,” said Marilyn Suzanne Miller, a writer whom Michaels hired after they collaborated on a Lily Tomlin special in L.A. “It was like Lorne had deposited us on Mars.”
When most of the staff got to New York, they didn’t know anyone except one another. Many considered themselves anticapitalist or antiwar activists—or, at least, they were fond of the recreational drugs these activists enjoyed—and now they were riding elevators with a bunch of suits at 30 Rockefeller Center, where the show’s studio was being built. “We were all like twenty-one or twenty-two years old. We didn’t have any money, or any clue what we were doing, so we spent all of our time trying to make each other laugh,” Schiller told me. “We’d eat every meal together. We’d go to the same bars each night. We were terrified that if we separated, one of us might get lost and never be heard from again.”
In subsequent years, as Saturday Night Live became one of the most popular and longest-running programs in television history, a kind of mythology emerged. “In the early days of SNL,” the journalist Malcolm Gladwell wrote in 2002, “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.” There are books filled with stories of John Belushi breaking into castmates’ apartments to make spaghetti late at night, or setting their guest bedrooms on fire with carelessly handled joints, or writers gluing one another’s furniture to the ceilings, or prank calling one another’s offices, or ordering thirty pizzas to the news division and then dressing up like security guards so they could infiltrate the lower floors, steal the pizza, and leave the journalists with the bill. There are flowcharts detailing who from SNL slept with whom. (They tend to get complicated, because Michaels was married to writer Rosie Shuster, who eventually ended up with Dan Aykroyd, who had dated Gilda Radner, who everyone suspected was in love with writer Alan Zweibel, who later wrote a book explaining they were in love, but nothing ever happened and, besides, Radner later married a member of the SNL band. “It was the 1970s,” Miller told me. “Sex was what you did.”)
Saturday Night Live has been held up as a model of great team dynamics. It is cited in college textbooks as an example of what groups can achieve when the right conditions are in place and a team intensely bonds.
The group that created Saturday Night Live came together so successfully, this theory goes, because a communal culture replaced individual needs. There were shared experiences (“We were all the kids who didn’t get to sit at the popular table in high school,” Beatts told me); common social networks (“Lorne was a cult leader,” said writer Bruce McCall. “As long as you had a Moonie-like devotion to the group, you were fine.”); and group needs trumped individual egos (“I don’t mean this in a bad way, but we were Guyana on the seventeenth floor,” said Zweibel. “It was a stalag.”).
But this theory becomes considerably more complicated when you speak to the people on the original Saturday Night Live team. It’s true those writers and actors spent enormous amounts of time together and developed a strong sense of unity—but not because of forced intimacy or shared history or because they particularly liked each other. In fact, the group norms at Saturday Night Live created as many tensions as strengths. “There was a tremendous amount of competitiveness and infighting,” said Beatts. “We were so young, and no one knew how to control themselves. We fought all the time.”
One night in the writers’ room, Beatts made a joke that they were lucky Hitler had killed six million Jews because, otherwise, no one would have found an apartment in New York City. “Marilyn Miller didn’t speak to me for two weeks,” she said. “Marilyn was completely uptight about jokes about Hitler. I think she hated me at that point. We would glare at each other for hours.” There were jealousies and rivalries, battles for Michaels’s affection, competition for airtime. “You wanted your sketch to go on, which meant someone else’s would have to get cut,” said Beatts. “If you were succeeding, someone else was failing.”
Even the closest relationships, such as between Alan Zweibel and Gilda Radner, were fraught. “Gilda and I came up with this character, Roseanne Roseannadanna, and on Friday I would go into the office and stay up all night writing the script, like eight or nine pages,” said Zweibel. “Then Gilda would arrive midmorning, totally refreshed, and take a red pen and start crossing shit out, like she was some kind of schoolmarm, and I would get pissed. So I would go back to my office and rework everything, and she would do it again. By the time the show went on, we usually weren’t speaking to each other. I once stopped writing sketches for her for three weeks. I purposely saved my best stuff for other people.”
Furthermore, it’s not entirely true that members of the SNL team enjoyed spending time together. Garrett Morris, the show’s only black actor, felt like an outcast and planned to quit as soon as he had enough money. Jane Curtin would escape to her home and husband as soon as the show was done for the week. People would form allegiances, and then get into fights, and then form counter-allegiances. “Everyone was in these cliques that were constantly shifting,” said Bruce McCall, who came aboard as a writer for the show’s second season. “It was a pretty dismal place.”