Reading notes: 'Live from New York'
This is an oral history of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller.
- I read the original 2002 edition, not the updated 2014 edition. It was a cheap used-book find, and SNL hasn't been much a part of my life since 2002 anyhow.
- There's a memorable Lorne Michaels quote near the beginning where he says, in effect, that it's hard to make a performance good and that many things end up being not good. Martin Short makes a similar point in Marty, Life is Short (roughly: "that's show business; most things don't work"). It's easy to idealize some of the old SNL seasons, and it's healthy to remember just how low the historical hit rate is.
- My formative experiences of SNL are renting VHS tapes from Blockbuster in the '90s. In a way this anticipated the modern practice of consuming television as packaged highlights. I still think of fake commercials as central to SNL, because (i) they make good VHS compilations and (ii) my 11-year-old self thought they were the absolute best.
- I didn't intend to read the book, but had opened it out of curiosity and had a hard time stopping reading. I doubt I've ever read a 600-page book this quickly. (It turns out that a series of well-edited clips from elite entertainers is really engaging.)
- My reference point for Jane Curtin is her role on 3rd Rock from the Sun, and I hadn't known she was on SNL. It's nice to think of her as the calm, professional one who went home to her husband and dog after work every day while everyone else was doing heaven-knows-what.
- I underrate how big a role SNL has played in my cultural life; at least for some of us, it's very easy to underrate our engagement with things that we know other people are really, really into. (I have an easier time revealing that I really like George Eliot than that I really like Jane Austen, perhaps because on some deep level I'm less worried about being within earshot of a huge George Eliot fan who will reveal me as a complete fraud.)
- There's a passage where someone remarks that Michaels has always insisted that they not show close-ups of musicians' fingers during the performances ("we're not giving music lessons here"). It seems like a small choice, but when I imagine a SNL performance including close-ups of guitar fingering, that does in fact seem totally out of place. It's a great example of how these kinds of choices combine to create the feel of a show.