When the hosts and performers and honored...

NEW YORK —  When the hosts and performers and honored guests--all in black tie and formal wear--settle in next Sunday at NBC’s Studio 8H to look at 15 years of “Saturday Night Live,” the occasion will be more than a picture-book retrospective or a fond reminiscence on the creation of one of the longest-running comedy shows in television history.

They’ll be watching an allegory as well as a history, a modern classic show-biz tale of celebrity overrunning art, of character pitted with the peculiar canker of fame, of a show exuberantly conceived in the spirit of spontaneity and iconoclasm reluctantly hardening into its spiritual opposite--a smooth commercial monolith now referred to by some of its staffers as “The Franchise.”

America will be looking in as well to watch 450 hours of SNL programming distilled into 2 1/2 hours, in addition to live sketches and music (the latter provided by Paul Simon and Prince). Tom Hanks will be hosting, as will Steve Martin, Mary Tyler Moore and--as improbable as it may have seemed 15 years ago--Charlton Heston. The entire current cast will be on hand (Dana Carvey, Nora Dunn, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Victoria Jackson, Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller and Kevin Nealon). Of the old guard, Chevy Chase will appear, as will Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, Dan Aykroyd, Billy Crystal and Garrett Morris.

We’ll remember the real John Belushi and Gilda Radner, and the fictional gallery of the Samurai hotelier, the fatuous Roseanne Roseannadanna, the rock ‘n’ roll duo the Blues Brothers, the ultra-square Todd and Lisa Loopner, the surrealistic Conehead family, Mr. Bill, and all the other characters who came to prominence and then played themselves out. Many viewers will watch the show as an entertainment, but chances are many more will watch in memory of their own youth, and because the life and times of “Saturday Night Live” mirror an American age.

“Saturday Night Live” was conceived in 1975 in a new kind of innocence and excess as the country’s first rock ‘n’ roll comedy show. Saigon had fallen that year, as had the Nixon administration the year before. AIDS and crack were unheard of, and there were relatively few bodies of the homeless shadowing the streets. The NBC network, then anchored in third place behind CBS and ABC, was looking for something to put in the late night space normally taken up at the time by Johnny Carson reruns, and the task fell on a 29-year-old writer-producer from Canada named Lorne Michaels, who had written for “Laugh-In” and had worked with Lily Tomlin and Flip Wilson.

“I was very impressed with Monty Python, which had come to Canada before they aired in America,” Michaels said. “It was the television equivalent of rock ‘n’ roll. Dick Ebersol was hired by NBC president Herb Schlosser to head up late-night programming, and asked me to go to a meeting of NBC affiliates to talk about a new show. I knew the kind of work I was doing wouldn’t work in prime time, and in fact I was on my way out of the TV field altogether to go to Paramount.

“That was the period after Watergate, and you could feel a groundswell in comedy. There was the Kentucky Fried Theater, Richard Pryor, Albert Brooks, the songs of Randy Newman. I hesitate to define it as an ironic sensibility, but that isn’t too far off the mark. It was playful, distrustful of what was then the established order. Herb Schlosser wanted a show for young urban adults. I was a young urban adult.”

After a network go-ahead, Michaels decided to give his new idea a try, and almost at once the formulaic elements of “Saturday Night Live” fell into place. For one thing, it would actually be done live so that no one else could tamper with it. Changing hosts for each show meant “you didn’t run out of ideas trying to figure out what Sonny would say to Cher week after week.” The Python troupe demonstrated the virtues of repertory play. Writer Herb Sargent’s work on the satirical ‘60s series “That Was the Week That Was” offered a topical framework. (Sargent would soon join SNL.) Michaels would make room for rock ‘n’ roll groups, young film makers and stand-up comics.

“I had the formula but not the recipe,” Michaels said. “I wanted 10 shows to experiment with. Schlosser gave me 17, and said he’d see number 10.”

Michaels went on a six-month talent search. He remembered Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd from Toronto and Laraine Newman from the Lily Tomlin special. He met Chevy Chase in a line waiting to see a movie at Filmex. Jane Curtin was hired out of an audition, and Garrett Morris out of a Writers Guild program. John Belushi came recommended by Chevy Chase, who, like Morris, was first hired as a writer.

Many of those talents in fact had already been working together in “The National Lampoon Radio Hour,” which as much as any other group defined the avant-garde comic sensibility of the generation that came of age in the ‘60s. It was anti-Establishment, anti-intellectual, boisterous, angry, festive, charged with adolescent sexual energy and the outward signs of self-invention. It was the first generation born into the world of television, which it repudiated--after all, to whom did “Green Acres” and “The Beverly Hillbillies” speak? Its ideological weather was hazy and tinged with the smell of pot.

It may be an oversimplification to say that no one growing up at the time enjoyed Mozart, or any author over 40 who didn’t bask in the glow of self-immolation. Like its precursor in the Dada movement in Europe, the flower generation erupted in spontaneous reaction. But its language wasn’t visual art. It was rock ‘n’ roll.

Of the early SNL company, Lorne Michaels says, “The group was founded on the pseudo-egalitarianism of the ‘60s, but a disillusionment had set in. Comedians tend to be conservative in nature. The ‘60s were being de-mythologized. Comedy became part of that process.”

For the company, the process was intensely communal. Michael O’Donoghue, one of the creative forces behind the Lampoon shows and a man of exceedingly black humor (he’s said to have kept a poster of a nude multiple amputee in his office), joined Michaels and Chevy Chase as senior writers and editors who did most to shape the SNL style. Tom Schiller, a young film maker (and son of veteran comedy writer Bob Schiller) remembers arriving from California, where he had lived as a protege of author Henry Miller.

“At first I felt totally alien to the comedy world I was thrown into,” he said. “It was those hot, sweaty, aggressive comedians, each louder than the last. It offended my Zen peace of mind. They were rude and pushy--but funny. They didn’t come from a literary sensibility, though a lot of them were pretty wise underneath.” But Schiller soon fell in with the group.

“We were pot-smoking hippies of the era,” he recalls. “We moved en masse, like a commune. We all gave our hearts and souls to the show in the beginning. Even after four or five years, for 26 weeks our lives revolved around the show. All of us came as young single people--except for Jane Curtin, who was married and went home after the show. We’d work late at night, dine en masse, go over to Lorne’s. It’s great when you’re 25. Only later do you begin to realize you have no life.”

“The better part of the first season, we were in a bubble,” Michaels said, “always up until three or four in the morning. We dealt with organizational problems, network problems, then scripts. It wasn’t unusual to see people at work in their offices at 11 o’clock at night. It was exhilarating. Most of us had come to New York from elsewhere just to do the show. We didn’t have established lives.”

After a dress rehearsal, which went so badly that everyone thought the show would self-abort before a nationwide audience, “Saturday Night Live” premiered without a hitch on Oct. 11, 1975. George Carlin hosted, and Janis Ian and Billy Preston were the musical guests. Subsequent hosts through the season included Paul Simon, Rob Reiner, Candice Bergen, Robert Klein, Lily Tomlin, Elliott Gould, Buck Henry, and then-presidential press secretary Ron Nessen, who vainly thought he could beard Chevy Chase in his satirical den in the name of Nessen’s boss, Gerald Ford.

Reviews were mixed. Tom Shales of the Washington Post recognized the show as “the first network series produced by and for the television generation--those late-war and postwar babies who were the first to have TV as a sitter. They loved it in the ‘50s, hated it in the ‘60s and now they are trying to take it over in the ‘70s.”

The New York Times’ John J. O’Connor derided its “conspicuously absent” quality. After the Ron Nessen appearance, Harriet Van Horne of the New York Post took aim, not only at the show, but the sensibility it expressed.

“We live, of course, in an age of anti-prudery,” she wrote. “That’s fine, that’s mature, tolerant, and, at the moment, de rigueur. . . . But has this new candor produced better entertainment, more brilliant performers or a glorious revolution in art? No, it has given us a decade of thoroughly nasty, violent, corrupting movies. It has debased sex . . . and made the boob tube the lewd tube on Saturday night. . . . In our mad rush to liberation, we have meekly accepted the motto of the young and foolish: ‘Don’t make rules.’ . . . Let us cry ‘enough’ to the vulgarity that spits in our faces.”

The battle lines were drawn inside the network as well as in the media. A lot of Michaels’ energies were spent in censorship and budgetary skirmishes, and a lot of the technical crew, consisting of older blue collar types, detested what they perceived to be the SNL company’s arrogant superciliousness, and the unprofessionalism that spilled into a lot of the work. (“Comedy should not be left to professionals” was a Lorne Michaels credo.) The show nearly folded. Only after the advertising department discovered that it had indeed locked into a youth market did SNL’s fortunes begin to change.

The ensemble was finding its voice too in a new way. Not only was its format beginning to set, but some of its characters were emerging as well. We saw Weekend Update, Belushi’s Samurai character, the Coneheads, the Loopners, and Dan Aykroyd’s sleazy salesman, E. Buzz Miller. The Not Ready For Prime Time Players began to call attention to themselves as actors as well as characters, which broke down the fourth wall and put the company on an equal footing with its hosts.

It wasn’t until its third season that “Saturday Night Live” became a national media darling, but it was in its first that a shattering precedent was sent--the defection of Chevy Chase, which drove a stake into the company’s communal heart.

“It began with an article by Jeff Greenfield in New York magazine--a classic misjudgment,” Michaels said. “It called Chevy the next Johnny Carson, as though the only thing to aspire to was the ‘Tonight Show,’ which was really of a different generation and time. The fact that Chevy wasn’t interested didn’t seem to matter. He became the object of a lot of attention. There were movie and television offers. His personal life was in a turmoil. It was very hard for me and the rest of us,” Michaels recalled. “He and I would spend 10 or 12 hours a day together. With Michael O’Donoghue, we founded this show. There was a delicate balance. With writers Herb Sargent, Al Franken and Tom Davis, Ann Beats and Rosie Shuster, there was a lot of stuff involved.

“Chevy finally left and I replaced him with Bill Murray. Other performers were beginning to show more by the end of the second season, like Gilda and Jane. But the media feeding frenzy had begun; the group began breaking into bits and pieces.”

The fame and constant attention began to exert a centrifugal force on the company. Behind the scenes, Belushi grew more violently obstreperous and Aykroyd more taut. Radner became bulimic. Newman was anorexic. Garrett Morris, as reported in the authoritative “Saturday Night--A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live,” by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, suffered paranoid hallucinations from free-basing--cocaine was now the drug of choice. In Tom Schiller’s words: “The dream took a labyrinthine twist into darkness.” By the fifth season Belushi and Aykroyd had taken the Blues Brothers to Hollywood, and Michaels had no more fight in him to keep the show together. The company disbanded.

But not the show. The network realized it had too much of a good thing going in what had once been a dead slot. “Saturday Night Live” was a moneymaker, and NBC had no intention of letting it go. Jean Doumanian, once a talent coordinator and production assistant for Michaels, was hired to run the show but was fired after 11 weeks. Then Dick Ebersol was brought in, and although the show had some good runs with talent such as Harry Shearer, Billy Crystal and Martin Short, its moment had passed. Too, the cultural climate had changed. The leap to stardom was now the given in the lives of young artists; a case in point is Eddie Murphy, who was the sleekest performer “Saturday Night Live” ever had and the last to project any element of danger.

Television is by nature such a voracious medium that it’s doubtful any show dedicated to spontaneity and innovation can last for long. Every TV format has an expiration date on its package delivery, where it moves from attention-getter to tranquilizer. Still, real careers get caught in the chain-link process. Chevy Chase’s describes the arc.

In New York to help promote the anniversary show, he looked tan and in shape and comported himself with a combination of wit and melancholy. “Everyone still thinks I was an opportunist to have left the show, but I did it for emotional reasons,” he said. “I missed the show. I still do. I’d watch Dan, John and Billy, and think, ‘Why aren’t I there?’ It killed me.” But at the same time, “It was a top of the minors show with a 10 or 12 rating. We did so many unusual and funny things, but we ran out of fresh material. There was just so much we could do. The show was getting to be about the people instead of the work. We stopped being observers. Gilda in particular felt that.

“It was Lorne Michaels’ show, and it still is. He was a supreme editor. When it came to overview and pacing, he’s as good as they get. And as close as we were, like brothers, he never said to me, ‘I feel abandoned.’ I feel I abandoned myself. In that first year we got out our ya-ya’s. If it seemed at all funny, we said, ‘Let’s give it a shot.’ ”

Chase considers the present version of “Saturday Night Live” more sophisticated than ever, but he also senses a certain hollowness. “I can’t pinpoint what’s wrong,” he said. “I’ve become established and middle class myself, and I think the age misses character. We were paid to be bad guys, not good guys. The scene is unfocused. We had the luxury of issues then, straights, gays, black, white. It was discernible. Now it’s hard to parody something that’s already become a parody. I make movies now. Some of them are funny and some of them aren’t. You get so enmeshed in box office figures that you can’t do much. I still feel that ‘Saturday Night Live’ had meaning, and I’d like to do something meaningful myself. But movies don’t have that now, do they? That’s why I do simple-minded comedies.”

Michael O’Donoghue was briefly rehired to do the show after he first left. When asked what title he wanted, he said: “Reich Commander.” “I always felt danger was the real constant,” he said on the telephone from Ireland. “Danger and freedom. That was the fun of it in the beginning. SNL became kind of rigid. I rebelled against that. It’s a sitting target now. Any man in the street could write the show; it’s locked in. Cold opening. The guest host. The ad. The first sketch. It’s static, not artistic. I liked it when people would say, ‘How can you do that on television?’ Now it’s, ‘Why bother?’ The people are milking the cash flow instead of holding up a mirror to our times. The cast is more professional now, but they’re not the dangerous people anymore, like John, Chevy, Eddie and Gilda. Television has always degenerated into winning combinations. I put a lot of pride and accomplishment into the show, but now it’s still that tired old formula, that unwillingness to define a new standard of right and wrong and measuring society against it. It’s sad for me.”

Michaels came back in 1980 to take over the show after Ebersol, who had other producing interests, such as “Saturday Night Wrestling,” tired of it. Michaels had produced a number of concerts and wrote the screenplay for the critical flop “The Three Amigos” (which should address the difference of opinion among his friends and staff as to whether or not he’s a good writer or a good producer).

“I had a lot of spare time,” Michaels said. “I took walks. I went to Yankee games. I saw older pitchers out there and wondered why they stayed with the game. Of course it’s because they loved it. I realized I still loved the idea of ‘Saturday Night Live’ and wanted to rebuild it.

“There was a new challenge. Cable was now in 55% of American homes. MTV put on groups that once could only be seen on our show. Letterman was defining the new edge. Under Reagan, dissent was confused with rudeness.

“I think the show is better now, but I also know that it’s not new. I can admire Nora Dunn, for example, for the incredible respect she has for her characters, and how she won’t burlesque them. There was a neediness about John Belushi and Gilda Radner--the heart was what dominated them. Now people are working more in character. The power balance is constantly shifting, and you never know when you’ll find that perfect moment, like in Jim Downey’s line for the Bush-Dukakis debate, were Dukakis looks at Bush and thinks, ‘I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.’ It so defined Dukakis, the arrogance and elitist attitude that made you distrust him. We still carry the same ratings. Last season we had six people hosting who were nominated for Oscars. The show is still here. I’m still taking a full swing at the ball.”

A former staffer who remains a knowledgeable observer of the show has this to say: “Lorne is proud and embarrassed that this show has been his only strength. It doesn’t address itself to being revolutionary anymore. It has some obscure system of laughter that’s inbred and non-humorous. An unfunny vibration permeates the show. But the tools are there to make it funny. I keep wondering what will turn it around.”

Adds writer-producer Jim Downey, who joined the show in its second year and is back for the current run: “There was an eerie phoniness in TV in those days, and there’s an eerie phoniness now. But we can’t sit back and study TV as though it’s an alien culture. We can’t protest that we’re different. When I look at comedy shows from three years ago, I see things had never been done before that are now done to death. It’s harder than ever to do a show in this cultural environment, and I know that ‘Saturday Night Live’ has become an institution. But I still feel if the potential is there to do anything new, it rests with us.”

What will it be like to watch this retrospective panorama? Will we still laugh at Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd’s wild and crazy guys? Will we recoil at the obnoxious attempt at humorous editorializing by Al Franken that hits us like bad breath? Was Charles Rocket ever funny? Will we wonder why the tender and full-bodied work of Marilyn Miller and SNL’s other women writers didn’t get more play? Maybe we’ll rediscover Aykroyd’s brilliant versatility as an impressionist. Maybe we’ll better appreciate the quiet authority of Jane Curtin’s work.

Will the newer characters, like Dana Carvey’s Church Lady or Jon Lovitz’s liar, seem quaint? Will we conclude that there really was a revolution in the airwaves, or did the illusion of dissent conceal the gracelessness of gifted amateurs at play? The show unquestionably has more professionalism attached to it now, but just as surely it lacks the underlying disquiet that comes of searching out new links with its audience. “The observers and the observed in the media have become so much a part of the same thing that the radical social changes that’ve been going on have happened out of earshot,” says Chevy Chase. “Even the news doesn’t look at events, it produces them.”

From a radical, counterculture standpoint, it may be that this 2 1/2-hour extravaganza may be just the show-biz institution the original “Saturday Night Live” company would have had great pleasure satirizing.

How much has happened. How little has changed.

SNL’s Ratings Through the Years

Average Year Rating Households 1976-77 7.5 5.3 million 1977-78 9.4 6.9 million 1978-79 12.6 9.4 million 1979-80 12.2 9.3 million 1980-81 9.1 7.1 million 1981-82 7.4 6.0 million 1982-83 7.4 6.2 million 1983-84 6.9 5.8 million 1984-85 7.1 6.0 million 1985-86 6.7 5.8 million 1986-87 7.3 6.4 million 1987-88 7.5 6.6 million 1988-89 7.5 6.8 million

Source: NBC Research. Note: Identical ratings produce different household numbers because the value of a rating point increases each year as the number of homes with television sets grows.