‘Saturday Night’ – Live!

Open on Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in ‘Psycho,’ standing behind the counter of a seedy motel office. On the walls are stuffed birds, including an owl with spread wings.

Norman Bates: (pleasantly) Are you tired of slaving away in a dull, dead-end job? Fed up with mere paychecks that never stretch quite far enough? Hi, I’m Norman Bates, for the Norman Bates School of Motel Management, here to explain how you can be your own boss while earning big money in this rapidly expanding field. Best of all, you learn at home, in the privacy of your own shower. . . .

One of five NBC ‘Saturday Night’ cameras is getting a tight shot, here, of Tony’s amiably psychotic twitch. . . .

…Yes, a diploma in motel management can be your passport to security. Are you motel material? Let’s find out with a simple quiz. Question one: A guest loses the key to her room. Would you: (a) give her a duplicate key, (b) let her in with your passkey, (c) hack her to death with a kitchen knife? Question two: Which of the following is the most important in running a successful motel: (a) cordial atmosphere, (b) courteous service, (c) hack her to death with a . . .

Here, of course, Norman Bate’s mother (Tony in his Psycho falsetto) summons him “for an important phone call, just one of the dozens I get every week as a qualified motel manager. Coming, mother.” And the kliegs of NBC’s New York studio 8H dim on Perkins’s hack-Janet-Leigh-to-death-with-a-kitchen-knife smile, on a bit so neatly, inanely conceived and presented that Saturday Night‘s studio audience and its 22 million freak watchers beyond the Hudson are already integrating the key line into their conversations.

Eventually, though, Saturday Night (here forevermore SN), will coin more freak phrases and bend more thought, comic and otherwise, than Rowan and Martin dreamed possible. The audacity of its concept and execution, when played full out, alter not so much the visual and audio centers as the central nervous system itself.

And this show was broadcasting live. Its studio audience was actually laughing (and sometimes not when expected to) at the same time you were, unheard of, now, in an age of taped TV, except at the Rose Bowl or Miss America pageant. No one had been prepared for it: the first minutes of the first show offered no title, credits, music, only what looked like a professor’s study containing Michael O’Donoghue, maybe the most inventive of SN‘s dozen or so writer/actors (a precise count’s not possible because SN‘s actors write and vice versa), bearing himself as a language instructor. Enter John Belushi, the dark, heavy, foreign-looking member of SN‘s Not Ready for Prime Time Players (later he was Brando in their memorable Godfather satire). Michael says, “Good evening.” John shouts, en accent, “Good EVENING.” That’s repeated back and forth several times. Consulting his watch, Michael says, “Let us begin, repeat after me: I would like.” John: “I would like.” Michael: “To feed your fingertips.” John: “To feed your fingertips.” Michael: “To the wolverines.” “To the wolverines!” Michael: “Next, I am afraid we are out of badgers.” Each phrase repeated: “Would you accept a wolverine in its place?” Next, “Hey, Ned exclaimed, let’s boil the wolverines. . . .”

Spent by this exertion, they both fall dead, and the show’s begun. If you saw this and tried, the next day, to convey it to nonsmoking nonwatchers, you cut yourself short with, “Well you had to see it.” Most of SN can’t be conveyed properly after the live fact.

When you wait for SN‘s instigator, 31-year-old Lorne Michaels, the first time outside his offices high in Radio City and he hurries past in the jeans and old cord jacket he usually wears, bearing a sandwich in a white bag, he could be from NBC’s mailroom, or delivering from the deli. In no way does he appear charismatic, even when you enter his large 17th floor executive suite, not actually a suite but emphatically executive, a big corner office (in TV it’s significant who gets corners), with views of both St, Patrick’s Cathedral and Saks. On his executive desk are a pop art spilled-glass-of-milk and an antique, toy NBC-TV remote-broadcast truck. Next to the video cassette outfit, one bulletin board holds a complex map of the week’s show in sequence, another contains letters from famous admirers, like the one on stationery imprinted Steve & Eydie. The latter was written after an early show’s satirical “Salute to the Coast Guard,” which listed a number of people whom dolphins are smarter than. Yes, Steve and Eydie agree, dolphins are smarter than us! They do not exactly request here to guest host SN, though now a host of names would swim the Atlantic to be allowed to.