by Sam Wasson
Grabbing a free office at the Fire Hall, Flaherty, Ramis, and Sheldon Patinkin began by asking themselves who would run this fictional television network? And who would play him? “That was going to be Harold,” Flaherty recalled. “Because that’s who Harold was.” And the network’s star producer, the guy with big dreams too big for such a little network? “We were talking about an Orson Welles type of character,” Flaherty said, “bigger than life. And that was obviously Candy because that’s who John was. He did everything in this excessive way.” Flaherty, who had been tracking Candy’s improvisational development from his audition three years earlier to his current work at the Fire Hall, had earmarked, in addition to a remarkable improvement in Candy’s self-confidence, his instant likability, a face—“my five-hundred-dollar face,” Candy liked to joke—that Flaherty knew would get its due on TV, in close-ups. “I could see Candy would be the guy,” Flaherty said. “I had no doubts about that.”
To find out more about this guy, the show’s main character and, concomitantly, SCTV, Flaherty and Ramis went backstage before an improv set, and handed Candy his instructions.
“Johnny,” Flaherty said, “you’re gonna play a producer who’s losing his job.”
In a previous show, Andrea had improvised as a character she called Kitty LaRue. Flaherty never forgot the name.
“The guy’s name,” Flaherty told Candy, “is Johnny LaRue.”
Seconds later, Candy, Flaherty, and Ramis were improvising for a Fire Hall audience.
“This is it, Johnny!” Flaherty announced in character. “Your career’s over unless you come up with a hit!”
As suspected, Candy was perfectly cast. Paradoxically gargantuan and small-time, amplifying strains of a Canadian hang-up Dave Thomas described as “an inferiority complex covered by a very thin layer of braggadocio,” in LaRue, a Quixote, their Canadian hearts tilted at the windmills of American entertainment. “Johnny LaRue really reflected that,” Thomas said. “The guy with the big dreams but there was never the talent or the budget to pull them off. It was an artistic outgrowth of the actual reality of the show, which was we were always underfunded and underappreciated and always feared that we were second best to Saturday Night Live.” LaRue told their story.
They were too modest and too inexperienced to know that they—John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Dave Thomas, and Harold Ramis—were on the road to becoming the greatest television comedy ensemble in North America, probably ever.
None of them had any idea how to make this idea into a television show, not Andrew Alexander, producing his first series; not Sheldon Patinkin, a first-time editor cutting tape in an extempore corner of the Fire Hall; not Bernie Sahlins, uneasy with the idea of television parody that was the show’s springboard premise; not the cast, doubling as writers, making $250 a week, and without any experience writing scenes on paper, and never exactly sure what their budget was, and therefore, never precisely clear on what they could afford to write. Working without a live studio audience, they had no idea whether their jokes were landing, or how they could produce seven half-hours of comedy against the clock at Global Studios, a third-rate production facility out in Don Mills, a neighborhood sagging with chintzy props and recycled sets, its own jury-rigged crew and an Egyptian director, Milad Bessada, unversed in American pop culture, who didn’t always get the joke. Bernie tried to enforce literary parody, and the company begrudgingly obliged here and there. But Bernie was halfway MIA, in Chicago as much as he was in Toronto, which left Andrew Alexander the man on the ground. Alexander, wisely, made it his policy to disengage from the creative. “I set the table,” Alexander said, “and let the people do what they’d been hired to do,” so they looked to head writers Joe Flaherty and Harold Ramis for marching orders. But as trained improvisers, team players weaned on ensemble, neither considered himself at ease with the responsibility. “It was sort of a non-power structure,” Flaherty said of SCTV. “The inmates ran the asylum. I would definitely have input, but I didn’t want to make the final decisions.” They had no Lorne Michaels. No thesis statement for their comedy. No clear production schedule. What they had, though, were characters, a vivid bench of outrageous but nuanced personalities refined by their tenures on the Second City stage—there was Candy’s blustery, vulnerable Johnny LaRue, Eugene Levy’s insincerely self-important comic, Bobby Bittman (“Now, in all seriousness, folks . . .”), Flaherty’s obsequious talk show host, Sammy Maudlin, and Andrea Martin’s tough-going (but inwardly depressed) Edith Prickley, all suited—in size and self-deception—to the world of show business that was SCTV’s métier, the fascination each had nurtured since birth, in front of their own televisions, and later, with each other. But for all their character work—among the best Second City would ever see—the stage did not prepare the ensemble for sketch writing. Their writing offices at 100 Lombard Street, a bland brick building next door to the Fire Hall, saw Dave Thomas, a former copywriter, comfortably producing on paper, but the other improvisers were constitutionally inclined to writing on their feet. Candy did whatever he could to avoid writing. He had to “run errands,” meet friends, shop, buy a drink, strike up a conversation with someone on the street. Sometimes he scribbled out beginnings of things on cocktail napkins; Levy, meticulous in everything, took ages to press a single key of his IBM Selectric; Catherine O’Hara second-guessed herself to distraction; Andrea Martin struggled to write alone; and Flaherty simply didn’t like to write.
Heading into the fall of 1976, it fell to Harold Ramis—“a man at peace in a storm,” Alexander observed—to take stock of the offerings, collate the scraps, and, if possible, reconcile the goofy and the brainy. Ramis understood that parodying television, with its commercials, movies of the week, and five-second promos, accommodated ideas big or small, half-baked or overdone. “A lot of items that didn’t make it as full-length parodies were fine as promos,” Ramis said. “If someone had just the concept and nothing else, a premise, we could just do the premise.” To every idea he was welcoming. Embracing the low-budget limitations of Global Studios, he urged the gang to embrace the comic mindset of the endearingly second-rate. They couldn’t compete with Saturday Night Live for resources or broadcast muscle (Global played Ontario only), so why fight it? Why not make that the joke? It would be even funnier, Ramis reasoned, to pit this fictional network’s limitations against its creative and intellectual grasp. He enforced a mix of low and high that appealed to his co-leader, Joe Flaherty, who laughed at the Three Stooges and Eugene O’Neill with equal passion. “We wanted to keep the Second City tradition going by doing things we found intellectually interesting,” Flaherty said, “keeping the reference level high,” combining, in effect, the unhinged comedy of Second City’s Canadian improvisers with the smarty-pants strain that touched Ramis and Flaherty back in Chicago. “For somebody as smart as Harold was,” Levy said, “he just loved the cheap joke.” If they made Ramis laugh, they knew they were on solid ground.
But the measure of their intelligence, as Flaherty defined it, had less to do with the What than the How. Flaherty’s recall was incredible. Remember that cheap movie, South Sea Sinner? Remember that hilarious sound effect from that Stooges movie? Booioioioiiingggg! Flaherty still laughed from “that sophomoric phase when you’re young,” he said, “and satirize everything cheap. Bad special effects, cheesy blue screen. ‘You call that a chariot?!’” The cheaper the better.
Cheapness was both virtue and necessity. “When we wrote the parody of Ben-Hur,” Ramis explained, “the production department said, if we build this set you will have spent your whole budget. You’ll have to do one whole show out of that piece.” So Ben-Hur became SCTV’s first extended film parody. Only then did Ramis realize just how bad the sketch was. “We had a twenty-five-minute Ben-Hur piece,” he said, “and we rehearsed the piece and there wasn’t a single laugh in it. And we were all dressed ready to go. We were on the set. Not one laugh and it was the whole show. So finally, I said [to Ca
ndy], ‘John, do Ben-Hur as Curly’” from the Three Stooges—a page out of Flaherty’s playbook.
Candy started improvising in Stooge and Harold doubled over. “Yes,” he said, laughing, “that’s the way to do it!”
Levy recalled, “It was like this big breakthrough. That’s the show where we saw, yeah, it’s okay to go cheap and still be clever.”
In thirteen shows, they had come a long way from their pilot episode, “The Freud Show,” which Ramis, Flaherty, and Patinkin built around a Sahlins-friendly Masterpiece Theater parody. Since then, Sahlins’s affinity for the show, rocky from the start, began to strain. “The cast’s idea of funny,” observed Patinkin, “was clearly opposed to Bernie’s.”
“There’s a better take than that,” Dave Thomas said to Sahlins in the cutting room.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“There is, Bernie. Did you look at all the takes?”
“I did. I looked at them all.”
Here the script supervisor spoke up. “No, Bernie,” she said. “You didn’t.”
Thomas exploded and Sahlins stormed out.
Sahlins, and then Patinkin, left SCTV.
Think of the undersized office assigned to Bill Murray and writer Jim Downey—new recruits to Saturday Night Live on the seventeenth floor of 30 Rock, in January 1977, partway into the show’s second season, crackling with silent tension. It wasn’t working for Murray. Downey’s Ivy League biases only fed his contempt for the writerly atmosphere of the seventeenth floor, the overall sense that, coming late to the show, he was invisible. “The writers made the show,” he explained, “and the writers didn’t know me, so they’d write for who they knew.” Among Murray’s Second City allies, only Aykroyd lobbied to write Murray into sketches, and when he did, they were mostly minor parts, CIA agents or law-enforcement officials without any lines. “People think that working on Saturday Night Live was fun,” Murray said. “It was a nightmare—the most high-pressure job I ever had in my life.” The laid-back, ensemble mentality of Second City was in constant jeopardy at Saturday Night Live, where the competitive pressures of writing under deadline for a broadcast audience of millions, fighting to protect one’s personal piece of the show, and auditioning, constantly, for the writers’ trust obliterated the freedom to fail that Bill Murray, and every improviser, had onstage. But here, Murray said, “If you blew a joke in somebody’s sketch, you were history.” Sensing their unease, he further distanced himself from the writers. Mutual discomfort drove a wedge through his chances. “If you say something to him he doesn’t like,” said head writer Michael O’Donoghue, “he does this thing called the Stare. When he just looks at you with, like, cold, flat, kinda icy hatred.” Downey knew the look. “He would give me shit, abuse me,” the writer said, “and I would just bow to him. It wasn’t screaming matches—he was just pissed off at the writers in general. He was always angry.”
In March, he and Michaels came up with the idea for “The New Guy.” In the sketch, a respectful Bill Murray sits behind a desk, directly addressing the camera, and asks late-night America to just give him a chance. “Hello,” he begins. “I’m Bill Murray. You can call me Billy, but around here everybody just calls me ‘the new guy.’ I want to thank the producer, Lorne Michaels, for urging me to speak with you directly. You see, I’m a little bit concerned. I don’t think I’m making it on the show.” The surprising transparency of the concept came off well, but Murray, a born insurgent, looked uneasy as a supplicant. With a pat on the back he was returned to the bench.
Though he rarely performed, he was still expected to put in long hours at 30 Rock. His Upper West Side apartment, seemingly unlived in, had no stereo or TV, a couple of wooden chairs for furniture, and a bare mattress tucked into a corner. The only hint of humor—soap in the shape of a microphone—hung on a rope in Murray’s shower. It was a Christmas gift from Belushi’s wife, Judy, an invitation to the latent lounge singer she knew waited inside him. When he was home, and showering, Murray took full advantage of Judy’s present; it freed him to sing as he had at Second City, where the words were always his and always changeable. “I became attached to this soap on a rope,” he said. “I would sing my guts out in the shower.” Late in May, showering the morning before Saturday Night Live’s weekly Wednesday read-through, he found himself glaring at the soap, dreaming at it, then throwing on clothes and racing down to Rockefeller Center, grabbing Gilda Radner, and in twenty minutes, improvised a scene between husband and wife. He’s in the shower, singing to an imaginary audience; she hears him and pokes her head in.
“Honey . . . ?” she asks.
“Ladies and gentlemen . . . don’t wanna leave her now . . . a very special guest . . . you know I believe and how . . .”
“Honey . . .”
“My wife, Mrs. Richard Herkiman, Jane Nash! Come on in, Jane!”
“Honey, will you quit fooling around?”
Murray didn’t have time to transcribe their improvisation before the read-through. He scribbled a few notes and ran into the conference room, late. They’d already read the week’s sketches.
“Oh,” he said, “I have one more,” and Murray jumped into the character, a guy who keeps pulling people into the shower, first his wife, and then his neighbor, whom he introduces to the audience as “a surprise guest, the man she’s been seeing behind my back for the last two years”—and to Murray’s astonishment, he actually started getting big laughs from the writers at the table. Then he stopped cold. “I haven’t finished the ending yet.”
Writer Tom Davis volunteered to help Murray finish the sketch, and two days later, May 21, 1977, it went into the show. Radner played Mrs. Richard Herkiman; Buck Henry, making his sixth appearance on Saturday Night Live, played Cularsky, the surprise guest; and Murray, at last, found his center, reprising, live, a version of the lounge singer he’d discovered at Second City.
When confronted with pieces as hastily assembled and rehearsed as “Shower Mike,” Murray’s training came to his rescue. “[Improvisational actors] can solve it during the performance,” he said, “and make a scene work. It’s not like we were improvising when we made the shows, but you could feel ways to make things better. And when you get into the third dimension, as opposed to the printed page, you can see ways to solve things and write things live that other sorts of professionals don’t necessarily have.” At Saturday Night Live, the laughter of live, intimate audiences directed Murray’s instinct—along with everyone else’s—toward the solutions. “That’s what that group could do,” he said. “That was a really good group to watch.”
After Murray caught on, he’d be recognized out on the street, walking with Jim Downey, who Murray’s fans, fawning over Saturday Night Live’s youngest star, had no reason to recognize.
“Well,” Murray would say, pointing to his officemate, “he’s the guy who writes the stuff.”
Harold Ramis, having completed the Animal House script, left Toronto for L.A. early in 1977 to get his next movie—Caddyshack, cowritten with Doug Kenney and Brian Doyle-Murray—off the ground. So, on the heels of SCTV’s second season, Andrew Alexander accepted Ramis’s invitation and, that summer, brought Toronto to Bel-Air, renting for his cast a five-bedroom house (John Candy snagged the master), and charged them with writing sixteen half-hour shows in seven weeks. To Ramis, “this was the best group of people I had ever worked with, and the nicest group of people, and we just had so much fun creating this stuff sitting around the table.” The day would begin around breakfast as Ramis arrived, lit a joint, and together with Flaherty, brokered an additive brainstorm directed at amusing not their bosses or sponsors—out of sight and out of mind—but themselves. Nearing lunchtime, the brainstorm naturally apportioned into pairs and trios. Those who laughed together went off to work together, seeing a good idea hatched earlier that morning through to a completed sketch. “We wrote for each other,” Flaherty said, an ethic he attributed to Del Close’s training.
By midafternoon, the improvisers would punc
h out, sort of. Because most were staying at the house, sleeping where they worked, the writing process never really stopped. Over billiards, or in the pool out back, the conversation continued. “It was one of the happiest times of my life,” Ramis said, “because they were all so funny and generous and talented in their work.” Flaherty, energizing them with chaos, spread a sense of happy panic to jump-start spontaneity; Ramis lassoed the ensuing good ideas and touched them up, grinning throughout.
Per Belushi’s recommendation, Lorne Michaels had offered Ramis a writing position on the show, but the stories Ramis had heard—the cocaine, the late nights, the scrambling, the competition—put him off the idea of writing for Saturday Night Live. The improvisational atmosphere in Bel-Air was more to his liking, utterly noncompetitive. “The thing about Second City,” he said, “is we all shared a technique, which was very important. So when we sat down at a table it wasn’t a competition to see who could get their piece on the air. We would just sort of build on each other’s ideas. If someone had a good idea there’d be six other people to take it one step further.”
Back in Toronto, the spirit of idea building persisted. Ignited by the notion of a Fantasy Island parody, Flaherty and Thomas seized on the broadest-possible conception of fantasy, “opening it up to our imaginations,” Flaherty said, and ran with it, using the TV show as a cheesy excuse to launch from fantasy to parodied fantasy—of Hope and Crosby, Fred and Ginger, Casablanca, and The Wizard of Oz—to build a surreal, maximalist movie-world free-for-all on the “Yes, and” logic of cross-breeding, to the edge of excess, iconic stars, and genres. The adventurous “multilayered” style of show business parody, born with the Fantasy Island episode—itself born from the additive improvisational writing techniques of SCTV—would come to characterize the show’s strongest work, and some of the most complex TV sketch work ever, wherein laughs, as layered as the parodies themselves, get deeper and smarter as the best multilayered sketches unfold, building up from the ground level of accessible impersonation to imaginative clashes of entertainment icons (Orson Welles and Liberace?) bristling with esoteric show business savvy.