Quotes from Doug Hill

As Dick Ebersol put it, ruefully: "I was very sophisticated about business and not very sophisticated about people. Lorne was not very sophisticated about business and very sophisticated about people. And in the final analysis being sophisticated about people will win, every time.

Saturday Night was chaotic by design. From Lorne on down, the tenets of the show's production philosophy were that inspiration, accident, and passion were of greater value than discipline, habit, and control.

Baudelaire, William Blake, D. H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Ken Kesey, the Beatles, and Hunter S. Thompson were as much the fathers of Saturday Night as Kovacs, Carson, Benny, and Berle. Dan Aykroyd called it Gonzo Television. They were video guerrillas, he'd say. Every show was an assault mission.

Cocaine is also the drug of success and ambition, a tonic to those for whom doubt and introspection serve no purpose. No accident that it replaced psychedelics in the Woodstock Generation's stash boxes as flower children turned into young professionals.

If Chevy heard something he didn't like in a meeting, he'd have no qualms about saying, "Gee, I don't think that's very good at all," and he generally smirked when he said it. He was also a viciously effective put-down artist, the sort who could find the one thing somebody was sensitive about—a pimple on the nose, perhaps—and then kid about it, mercilessly.

Comedy, Lorne often said, is too important to be left to professionals.

Figuring out Lorne consequently became something of an obsession for many on the show. They talked about him for hours, sometimes catching themselves using Lorne's favorite words or phrases, and an acknowledgment from him was enough to keep them motivated for weeks.

There are some who side with Belushi in his disputes with Beatts and Shuster, saying the sketches they were writing, especially early on, simply weren't that good and that he was right to reject them. Marilyn Miller is one who endorses that theory. Miller found that John would jump at parts that gave him a chance to act. "More than anything," Miller says, "he wanted to succeed at that.

O'Donoghue's attitude, his manager Barry Secunda said, was that if America liked Saturday Night, how good could it be?

How to deal with the chauvinism was something else again. Anne Beatts wanted to confront it directly, in unity, perhaps by forming a "coalition" to take their grievances to Lorne. Marilyn Miller didn't go for that. The show was no different from any corporate environment, she said: You either put up quality work or shut up. Organized movements got you nowhere.

Rock music carried the Woodstock Nation's banner while television represented much of what the bands and their audience stood against. More than a wasteland, TV was the idiot engine of the Establishment, electronic opiate of the consumerist masses, and thus a favorite object of ridicule and contempt.

the sheen of novelty had worn off. Sometimes it seemed to the performers and writers that the only comment they heard was how Saturday Night had gone downhill—indeed, that it had been going downhill since about the fourth week it was on. The higher the ratings got, the more disdainful the criticism became. Anne Beatts grew fond of saying that you can only be avant-garde so long before you become garde.

One of Lorne's pet theories had always been that Saturday Night was not so much in the business of television as it was in the business of rock and roll. The audience, the sensibility, was the same, he said, the show had simply picked up where rock in the sixties left off.

Lorne confessed that he hadn't done as much as he might have to help John curb his appetite for drugs. "Part of the problem of my generation was a morality that said you don't tell people how to live," he said. "That was garbage. It was just a way to avoid taking responsibility.

The Nerds became so popular that the word nerd was added to some dictionaries.

One of his favorite themes was the expressionistic barrenness of the old Honeymooners set; later he would become an advocate of realism, saying that humor derived from the one off-center element in a setting of absolute normality.

Saturday Night was also founded on the notion that repetition and habit stifle true creativity, true originality.

Starting to think about the viewers "out there" as different from the people inside the show was one of the early signs of how far Saturday Night had begun to stray from its original identification with its audience.