Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

This is an excellent, detailed history of the first 10 years of Saturday Night Live. I was surprised it only covered the first 10 years, but then I further surprised to find that it was written in 1986.

(Apparently this book was a tell-all scandal back then. I was reading the Wikipedia page for Gilda Radner, and it mentioned the book as “highly-publicized” and how it had revealed her eating disorder to the world.)

The book is fundamentally about people – the group that started the show, and how they changed and related over those first five years, especially. Some random notes:

• Chevy Chase was the breakout star, and he left halfway into the second season. He was apparently a total jerk, and when he came back to host in season three, he got into a fight will Bill Murray just before he went out to do the monologue.

• Bill Murray joined halfway through the second season.

• Surprisingly to some, Steve Martin was never in the cast. He was just quite popular in the mid-70s, was friends with a lot of the cast members, and spent a lot of time on the show. He hosted three times in season three alone.

• John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd stayed for four years.

• Lorne Michaels left after the fifth year, and the entire cast turned over

• After Lorne left, Jean Doumanion took over producing, and it was a disaster. She didn’t last one season.

• Charles Rocket was the big, breakout star of the (short) Jean Era, but he was fired shortly after she left. He “accidentally” said the F-word on air, and it was a very big deal at the time. (He would go on to play Bruce Willis’s brother in Moonlighting. He killed himself in 2005.)

• Dick Ebersol took over after Jean left. He signed a 19-year-old unknown named Eddie Murphy. Murphy became bigger than the show itself, and stayed for three years. For his last season, Eddie didn’t want to come back, but he agreed to pre-tape half his sketches, unbeknownst to the audience, so he only had to be there for half the shows. He hosted the next year, and didn’t host again until 2019.

• Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy were friends, but rivals. Joe was a little bitter than Eddie got so famous so quickly. Nick Nolte bailed out as the host three days before air one week, so they asked Eddie to act as the host (a cast member being the host had never been done before or since). Joe was apparently very hurt over this – he wanted to host as “Frank,” using his impression of Frank Sinatra.

• Eddie and Joe are largely credited with keeping the show going through a very rough patch. They were the central continuity of the cast during the non-Lorne years. At one point, they were the only two cast members kept on.

• John’s brother Jim Belushi joined for seasons 9 and 10. He was not beloved and was fired halfway through the season, then was given his job back a month later.

• The 1985 season was Dick’s last, and the cast turned over yet again. They got some huge names for that one season: Billy Crystal (who had already hosted twice) and Martin Short were in the cast. Christopher Guest joined after This is Spinal Tap had been a hit, and Harry Shearer joined (briefly) after having already been in the cast in a prior season.

• Lorne came back for season 11, after a five-year absence, and he’s still there.

The book spends a lot of time on the cast politics. SNL back on those years seemed like a hotbed of intrigue and drama. There was a lot of sexism – the women didn’t feel like they were heard and couldn’t get their sketches on air. John and Dan were known as the “Bully Boys” because they always seemed to get their way.

And Lorne was always fighting with the network. He would go over budget, would argue with the censors, would actively make fun of the head of NBC (whomever it was at the time). He went out of his way to make trouble, it seemed like. A cast member’s relationship with Lorne often went up and down, and it vastly affected how they worked on the show. Everyone was obsessed with what Lorne was doing, who he liked, and who he didn’t. It was like a wildly dysfunctional parental relationship.

The entire show was always broiling over with intrigue and hurt feelings. No one seemed to be having a good time, other than all the drugs they were doing (drugs that would kill John Belushi in 1982). Even when this book was written in 1985, several of the original cast members were described as having some level of PTSD-type symptoms from their time on the show.

Great book, all-around. Fascinating, well-researched. Comprehensive.

I loved it.

Book Info