Credit...NBC

When ‘Saturday Night Live’ Debuted, They Were There. Here’s What They Remember.

by · NY Times

As the historic 50th season of “Saturday Night Live” gets underway, its very first episode has become a piece of show-business mythology: the story of how a group of misfit writers and performers, led by a 30-year-old Canadian upstart named Lorne Michaels, put together a counterculture comedy-variety show in Manhattan amid interpersonal conflict, last-minute changes and substance abuse, and somehow established a television institution.

It’s a legend so revered that it has inspired a new film, “Saturday Night,” directed by Jason Reitman, in which a cast of young actors portraying the Not Ready for Prime Time Players (as well as the show’s producers and crew members) act out a version of events as they might have unfolded on that fateful evening of Oct. 11, 1975.

For the people actually involved in the debut broadcast of what was then called “Saturday Night” — the writers, cast members, comedians and musicians — that excitement and energy is only one part of the tale. They remember the creation of the NBC show — the long buildup to its premiere, the performance itself and the aftermath — as sometimes hectic, sometimes carefully organized. It was a period full of head-butting, but one that also fostered camaraderie and lifelong friendships. And it never would have happened without some crucial, 11th-hour discoveries, or the right people in place to make those realizations.

But at no point did they wonder if they were about to make history. “I don’t think it concerned us one way or the other,” said Chevy Chase, a founding cast member and writer. “We were going to do what we do, and if you laugh, great, you laugh. You’ll tell somebody else about it, and they’ll laugh the next time.”

Here, some of those participants share their memories of how “Saturday Night” came to life.

Jane Curtin

Jane Curtin said that she realized the show was catching on when she left 30 Rock and on the street “you’d pass by people and they would shake.”
Credit...NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images

Curtin had acted in theater, commercials and a Boston-area improv group, the Proposition, when she auditioned for “Saturday Night” in summer 1975. At her callback, Curtin expected a conversation with producers: “I walked in the door,” she recalled, “and they said, ‘OK, what have you prepared?’ The classic anxiety dream.” Fortunately, she had some old material in her purse. “It was a big purse,” Curtin said.

In the weeks before the debut episode, Curtin spent a lot of time wandering the show’s offices on the 17th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, not understanding how to get material generated for herself.

“I was quiet and nobody paid any attention to me,” she said. “I didn’t know how to pitch. I had never had to do that in my life.” Still, she had faith there would be roles for her on opening night. “I figured, well, they hired me,” she explained. “They’re paying me. So it would be foolish of them not to use me.”

Sure enough, Curtin appeared in several sketches (including the classic “Bee Hospital”), but felt the broadcast go by in a blur. “I never really paid much attention to the audience,” she said. “I thought, well, anybody that’s watching this must be really stupid. It gave me a lot of angst. So the way I dealt with it was, I was in this bubble, and we had a job to do within the bubble.”

And when she exited that bubble, Curtin could tell her life had changed. “You’d pass by people and they would shake,” she said. “They had a physical reaction to you, because they could feel the energy behind what was happening at 30 Rock. And it was very, very exciting.”

Janis Ian

Ian, then promoting her album “Between the Lines” and its breakout single, “At Seventeen,” was one of two musical acts on that broadcast (along with Billy Preston, who died in 2006). She had been touring relentlessly before she got to Studio 8H: “I was so tired that my partner then was having to wake me up by putting a wet washcloth on my face because I couldn’t get up,” she said.

Though Ian arrived with strep throat and a 104-degree fever, she, Preston and the show’s host, George Carlin, were unfazed by the demands of live television, she said, explaining: “They were all, ‘Oh my God, when the red light goes on, don’t freak out, that’s when you start.’ We were like, ‘Yeah, OK, whatever. Let us do our sound checks and go away.’”

While she waited to perform, Ian caught a glimpse of the strangely alien setup for “The Land of Gorch,” a sketch with Jim Henson and the Muppets. “I hadn’t really seen enough of them to immediately go, oh, that’s the Muppets,” Ian said. “I thought, is this a [expletive] pig or a frog or something? What have I gotten myself into?” Then she saw Henson stand up from inside a giant crater: “He was very, very tall, and I thought, oh, thank God, there’s a human in there,” she said.

At the time, Ian said her “Saturday Night” appearance was just one more booking on a busy schedule, hardly as career-defining as, say, a spot on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” But in the years since, she said, “it has become so different from anything anyone could remotely have envisioned. Nobody thought anything could last this long. But it’s mythic now, and I look very smart.”

Garrett Morris

Morris, who was born in New Orleans, had already lived several lives — as a Juilliard student, a singer and musical arranger for Harry Belafonte, a Broadway actor and a playwright — before he was hired at “Saturday Night,” initially as a writer. When Michaels saw Morris’s performance as a teacher in the 1975 coming-of-age film “Cooley High,” Morris was made a “Saturday Night” cast member, and he was awe-struck by the talents of co-stars Gilda Radner and John Belushi, who had trained at comedy theaters like Second City. “Second City gave you a range of one to 100,” Morris said. “My range was from ‘Hate Whitey’ to ‘Kill Whitey.’”

As preparations were made for the debut, Morris said he came into conflict with the show’s iconoclastic head writer, Michael O’Donoghue, over a sketch that needed someone to play a doctor. “I said, ‘Hey, Michael, I can play the doctor.’ And Michael’s response was, ‘Well, Garrett, people might be thrown by a Black doctor.’ I was breathless at his response.” (O’Donoghue died in 1994.) Morris acknowledged he was abusing cocaine then and not an easy person to collaborate with: “My attitude was not as deferential as it probably should have been,” he said.

In that first episode, Morris appeared as a lawyer in a courtroom sketch (as well as a would-be home invader and a bee); he went on to play characters like the Dominican baseball player Chico Escuela. “I became nationally known, from being someone who was known on the East Side,” he joked. But for all his accomplishments in his five seasons on “S.N.L.,” Morris said he felt it was difficult to shake the perception that he was the beneficiary of tokenism. “I had paid my [expletive] dues,” he said, “but other people didn’t know that, and so I suffered because of that.”

Valri Bromfield

Bromfield, the first female standup to perform on “Saturday Night,” was a high-school friend and stage partner of Dan Aykroyd’s in Toronto, and when she went to Los Angeles, she got some early breaks from another hometown friend: Michaels, who was then producing TV shows for Lily Tomlin. “He never played the bro game,” Bromfield said of Michaels. “He could always manage what was the manic environment of the performers, which was like dropping a jar of ants on the floor.”

When he invited Bromfield to New York for “Saturday Night,” she said there were qualities about the environment that she found thrilling. “It was a festival of neurodiversity,” Bromfield said. “ADHD galore. Danny was on the spectrum. Character disorders, personality disorders. It was everything you could ever wish for.”

Bromfield delivered a two-minute monologue on that first episode, playing a schoolteacher and her students. But afterward, she felt no desire to stay longer at “S.N.L.” The kinds of comedy she was used to performing in standup and sketch theater, she explained, “you really couldn’t do them on television, because there was such a strange, bland process that absolutely watered down anything you did.”

Besides, she knew from her experience in Los Angeles that she couldn’t take the stress of competition among the players, explaining, “I didn’t have the stamina to fight, to get a piece on,” and adding, “I would be eaten alive by the culture of the show.”

Chevy Chase

Chase, then a writer for “The Smothers Brothers Show,” crossed Michaels’s path while waiting in line to see “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in Los Angeles. Michaels later asked him to join “Saturday Night” — as a writer — but Chase turned him down to take a role in a summer stock play. “And then,” Chase recalled, “after a couple of days, I called him and went, ‘Is that offer still there?’”

As a writer, Chase worked closely with O’Donoghue and Michaels, and prevailed on Michaels to cast the rowdy Belushi, with whom Chase had worked at “The National Lampoon Radio Hour.” (As Chase recalled, Michaels initially said of Belushi, “I won’t have him — he’s trouble.”) Eventually, Chase got his wish to become a cast member — the first to anchor Weekend Update and to shout the catchphrase, “Live from New York, it’s ‘Saturday Night’!”

Though the debut broadcast gets romanticized as chaotic, Chase said it was “not pandemonium at all. We were all prepared — at least I was, and Lorne was prepared for how it would go. There was no way we were going to do a show without running it over a few times.” People’s roles, both on air and behind the scenes, were not being figured out at the last minute, Chase said: “We were very controlled about who was to do what.”

He would be the first to experience the vertiginous fame of “S.N.L.,” leaving after one season. It’s only recently that Chase has been able to catch up with some of the show’s press coverage from 1975, like a New Yorker review that praised “S.N.L.” for taking on “the morass of media-induced show-business culture that increasingly pervades American life.” “It was long-winded but great,” Chase said, “as were we.”

Kelly Carlin

Carlin, the daughter of the pioneering standup George Carlin (who died in 2008), was an adolescent when her father was asked to be the first guest host of “Saturday Night.” But it was hardly the most pressing issue in their household: her alcoholic mother, Brenda, was trying to get sober while George was still entrenched in a cocaine habit. “I was in the middle of being 12 in a family that was spiraling,” Kelly Carlin recalled.

The “Saturday Night” gig was not much discussed at the time — “There was no gathering around the TV to watch him like we used to do in the ’60s,” Kelly Carlin said — but she would later come to understand how fraught it was for her father, an old-school New Yorker who did not fit in easily with the show’s younger team.

“He was in between ages,” Kelly Carlin said. “In the ’60s, he knew he was entertaining the parents of the people he actually related to. In 1975 he would have been 38, when being 30 was considered the enemy. And yet he completely understood the desire of the cast and the writing staff to stick it to the man.”

By the time her father went onstage, Carlin said, “all that was probably churning inside of him — the personal, the professional, his own creative anxiety.” Though George Carlin would variously praise and pan “S.N.L.” over the years, Kelly Carlin said her father was satisfied that a routine he performed that first night about God and religion apparently elicited a phone-call complaint from Cardinal Terence Cooke, then the archbishop of New York. “He pissed off the cardinal of his diocese,” she said. “I think for my dad, when he walked away, that was the pride.”

Laraine Newman

Newman, a Los Angeles native and a founding member of the improv troupe the Groundlings, was scouted for “Saturday Night” by Michaels after she played several characters in a Lily Tomlin special. Michaels described his vision for the show in a meeting at the Chateau Marmont: “It was going to be a cross between ‘60 Minutes,’ and Monty Python,” Newman said. “I did not know who Monty Python was. I knew that I trusted Lorne.” Besides, the new show might not require a large time commitment: “It was only going to be for 13 weeks,” Newman said. “With a five-year option. And I’m thinking, like that’ll ever happen.”

Newman drove cross-country to New York at age 23, “and I was a very young 23,” she said. “The prospect of going there without my Groundlings family was really scary to me.” But in her appearances on the first show, Newman said she didn’t experience any fear. “We were made aware that it was a graveyard shift and that this was a new thing, and it would be surprising if anybody was watching us,” she said. “So we really felt kind of unobserved.”

But she started drawing more recognition on the streets of New York, where fans would quote lines back to Newman and Radner. This kind of celebrity worship shocked the blasé West Coaster: “When my brother and I were 11, we moved to Beverly Hills,” Newman explained, “so we were up the street and down the corner from movie stars. We would see, you know, Cary Grant and Fred Astaire Christmas shopping, so I was never star-struck. In New York, it was more of a novelty, but very, very few people were unpleasant, for the most part.”

Paul Shaffer

Before he was David Letterman’s band leader, Shaffer was the musical director of a celebrated 1972 Toronto production of “Godspell” and a keyboardist for Doug Henning’s 1974 Broadway musical, “The Magic Show.” Howard Shore, the founding music director of “Saturday Night,” hired Shaffer for its house band, where one of his earliest assignments was to help Shore demonstrate a possible theme song to Michaels.

“One of Howard’s great contributions to this idiom is that he left the melody open for the saxophone to improvise,” Shaffer said, “and that way it didn’t get stale. It was different every week.”

Shaffer also composed and performed music as needed for sketches that were filmed ahead of airtime, and he was awe-struck by the scale of the show as it came together. “It was awfully exciting and so brand new to me,” he said. “I had just been on Broadway for a year, but before that, I was waxing my skis up in Canada.” On other occasions, Michaels would invite Shaffer into his office and share material that was planned for the show, like a strange sketch in which Belushi played an immigrant and O’Donoghue played an English instructor teaching him nonsensical phrases like, “I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines.”

“I just thought, this is over my head,” Shaffer said, “and I kept my mouth shut. As far as I could tell, it was at the very least a statement of how different things were going to be around here.”

Though memories differ as to whether the “Saturday Night” debut was followed by an after-party, Shaffer knows for certain he wasn’t there: his parents had come down from Toronto to be in the studio audience. “So I would have been focusing on them,” Shaffer said. “They would have been up to party, though.”

Alan Zweibel

Before he was snapped up by “Saturday Night,” Zweibel worked a meat slicer at a deli counter, but he had a side hustle: “I was selling jokes for $7 a joke to the comedians who worked in the Catskill Mountains,” Zweibel said. “So I wrote for every Dicky, Morty and Freddy that ever lived.” His own standup act wasn’t showing much promise — “To see this big guy sweating and sobbing onstage was not an attractive sight for anybody,” Zweibel said — but it caught the attention of Michaels, who hired Zweibel as an apprentice writer.

At the show, Zweibel befriended Radner, with whom he’d help create characters like Roseanne Roseannadanna. Radner was from Detroit and spent time in Toronto. “The big city sort of spooked her a little,” said Zweibel, who grew up in Long Island. “She needed to be shown around. We just had a lot of dinners and we made each other laugh. There was a chemistry there.” For the most part, Zweibel said, work took place at “civil hours” — until that final week before air, when a sense of urgency kicked in. “It’s like in college,” he explained, “when they say that your term paper is due the day before Christmas. And then the week before Christmas, you go, Oh, [expletive].”

Like many of his collaborators, Zweibel had material cut from that first broadcast and probably only got a joke or two into Weekend Update. But there was no time to celebrate successes or lament failures, because Paul Simon was booked to host next week. “I remember the disappointment you had if you didn’t have a sketch on that night,” Zweibel said. “But then again, you could redeem yourself on Monday because you had another show coming up.”

Inside the World of Comedy