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For Die Hard Saturday Night Live Fans SNL Transcripts: (Saturday Night Live Transcripts) 3.9 ( 167 ) Introduction Saturday Night Live (SNL), started out in the seventies as NBC’s Saturday Night, which was their first attempt at an American sketch comedy and variety television series. The airing started in 1975 and has been on the show ever since, making this one of the longest-running programs on television. SNL is an NBC fixture and a landmark in the history of American television. The core concept behind SNL was to be an edgy comedy series with live interviews for factual information and was aimed at the 18 to 34-year-old age group. Due to the nature of the series, it constantly attracts new viewers that enter the demographic age group, while retaining its older viewers as loyal fans to the series. As such, SNL has a constantly growing fan group. This is a live show and is filmed in front of a studio audience. The show has a format that starts with an opening sketch and closes with the phrase Live from New York; it’s Saturday Night!”. The show’s creators are Dick Ebersol and Lorne Michaels. Michaels still works as a writer for SNL. While this is a show” some of the guests do outrageous and on occasions, self-planned actions, such as when Sinead O’Connor tore up the picture of the Pope. This is also a reason why the show retains its fans, since they know that a lot of the content is not rehearsed, and there is a lot of improvisation on behalf of the presenter. History SNL was a product of an evolving change in the Carson show, which ran from 1965 to 175. Johnny Carson would run reruns of The Tonight Show on weekends, and he asked for them to be pulled from the weekends and aired on weekdays, which would free up some personal time. This led Herbert Schlosser, the NBC President in 1974 to request from Dick Ebersol, the NBC VP for late-night programming to come up with a Weekend show. It was suggested by Barry Diller, a Paramount Pictures executive that Schlosser and Ebersol content Lorne Michaels, which the did. Michaels and Ebersol then sat down and originated the SNL concept, which was to become a sketch, political satire, and music show. To kick of SNL in 1975, Michaels cast into the first line up the first of many actors that SNL would lead into legend status. This first line up included Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, Michael O’Donoghue, Gilda Radner, and George Coe. (Note that the first three went on to become famous Hollywood comedy actors) The original show aired under the name NBC’s Saturday Night, this was due to the fact that rival network ABC had the SNL title with Howard Cosell. In 1976 , NBC bought the rights to the name, and this became its official title on March 26, 1977 . The first line was critical for the success of the show, and these talented actors and presents created a cult following that propelled SNL into the limelight. Due to the then extremism of the team in delivering their sketches and satire, many viewers write in with irate requests to terminate the show. It was Michaels that showed the NBC executive that baby boomers were the future of the shows fan block and not generation x. As such, rather then bow to the more conservative viewers, the executive continued to air the show. NBC was not without its egotistical managers that could ruin a career based on nothing but personal perception with total disregard for the ratings or success. Such was the case with Herminio Traviesas. Traveisas was both a censor and the vice president of the network’s Standards and Practices department. He was irate with Laraine Newman using the term pissed off” on live TV and was going to make it a delayed airing show, but Newman personally apologized to Travaisas, and that wavered the crisis. In November 1977 Chevy Chase left the show for a few months and was replaced by the then-unknown and young comic actor Bill Murray. In 1979 , Ackroyd and Belushi left the show, and in 1980 , Michaels was exhausted from writing and asked for a year’s rest to pursue other career opportunities. Michales leaving caused an internal rupture with a lot of political backstabbing and wheel dealing, which ended up with mots of the cast and writers leaving with him. Michael went to Paramount Pictures. Jean Doumanian was given the new lead writing role for SNL by her friend Barbara Galagher, who was an NBC VP. Rising Stars in Years of Turmoil SNL was already known to be a successful springboard for aspiring careers, and it was attracting many amateurs and professional actor’s attention. Doumanian was in an impossible situation, she was a successful woman in a chauvinistic environment, and one where the chauvinism was magnified by ego and perceptions of self-importance. To top all off this off was a massive 65% reduction in budget, reducing the budget per episode from 1 million to 350 thousand dollars each. Doumanian was given three months to cast new talent, while surrounded by a current hiatus of actors and crew that resented her presence. She also managed to cast actors that did not link with either the material or the crew, including Charles Rocket and Ann Risley . Rocket sealed Doumanian’s fate when he stated, during one of the live episodes, the word fuck.” Doumanian was relieved after only 10 months of duty. The executives wanted to seal SNL’s fate, but Brandon Tartikoff, the network chief decided that the concept of the show was more important than the cost of the show. As such, Tartikoff asked Ebersol to take over control, and Ebersol, not being foreign to the intricacies of the politics behind the TV, turned to Michaels to get his approval. This action gave Ebersol the silence and support of the cast and crew when he started the new season. Ebersol cast Eddie Murphy , which leads to a successful start, although the material of the show was considered to be a little pale when compared to the original Michaels’s era. In 1984 , Murphy left SNL to advance his already budding film career, and this was when Ebersol decided to change the casting concept from hiring unknown aspiring actors to established names. Ebersol decided to take on Billy Crystal and Martin Short , both of whom had successful careers and brought their personal materials to the show. This initial season is considered by some to be a golden season in the SNL history, and it was one of the funniest that totally disassociated from the Michaels era. At roughly the same time, and due to unsuccessful attempts at gaining a foothold into movies and other TV series, Michaels returned to SNL in 1985 and continued with Ebersol’s concept by casting Robert Downy Jr., and Joan Cusack, but this time the dream team didn’t provide the results, and the writers also struggled to provide quality material. Tartikoff was going to cancel the show in the Spring of 1986 but was persuaded by Bernie Brillstein, the producer, to retain a leaner show of 13 episodes instead of 22. Due to this, Michaels fired most of the cast and decided to go for unknown aspiring actors as they had done in the past. This new cast included Phil Hartman and Dana Carvey . The show ran successfully with this team until 1994 , and the Hartman-Carvey era is considered to be one of the best. However, in 1994 both stars left the show, and NBC executives started to interfere with the show because they wanted to raise ratings. This interference came in the form of Don Ohlmeyer, then the NBC West Coast President, who wanted to replace Chris Farley and Adam Sandler because he didn’t get them,” he also criticized the costly nature of a live show. Ohlmeyer’s attack cause Michaels to reconsider his position and even though Mike Myers had also left the show in 1995 , he was not persuaded to leave of a lucrative CBS offer. Michaels was dedicated and loyal to NBC SNL, and he quickly recovered the shows prestige when he cast Jimmy Fallon, Will Ferrell, and Tina Fey. This did not stop Ohlmeyer from...