"Saturday Night": SNL Had Mad Sack in Belushi's Day

I was just stuffing my knapsack under a linen-draped table of hors-d'oeuvres when John Belushi thumped me on the spine, not all that gently. It was a warm May evening in 1979, following the finale of the show's fourth season, and there was an open-air party marking the show's run and the last hurrah for Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as cast members.

 Jason Reitman's currently showing "Saturday Night" film is an appealingly manic 109 minutes that delivers its comedy and backstage tensions in something approximating real time, as Lorne Michaels guides his hastily assembled troupe through the show's 1975 debut airing. Since then, there had been a whiff of revolution to the entire enterprise, but now it was spinning off movie stars and pop culture heroes. Not all, most famously Belushi, would survive the rise. 

It may sound like an OK Boomer complaint to say that present-day SNL is uninspiring by comparison. Election coming. Pick a side, people. The Constitution is in jeopardy. 

Okay, all targets are valid in satire; sacred cows can be prodded. But last weekend's Family Feud cold open strove to spear irrelevant peccadilloes of Democrats Kamala Harris, husband Doug Imhoff, running mate Tim Walz, and Joe Biden, yet seemed to treat Trump with mild effrontery (and J.D. Vance got all but a free pass), even as they imperil democracy. Michaels, who turns 80 in November, surely has native-Canadian citizenship, I get it. But most of us don’t have that escape clause. So, before you assist in enabling an autocratic regime, SNL, maybe sharpen your focus?

 The party where Belushi tapped me was in the Rockefeller Center skating rink, which since 1936 had been part of the soul of Midtown Manhattan. The golden Prometheus statue oversaw the hurly-burly as the cast and various stars were joined by show biz's hippest 300 or so worthies. 

I was still unbending from my crouch with the tablecloth still half-draped on my head when he said, "Get some ice quick, somebody got hurt." He had clearly figured me for a waiter—given my white shirt and my posture half under the table, that made sense.

 I'll never be sure if he even remembered that we had spent a couple afternoons touring the studio where the show was made, ostensibly to prepare material for a book chapter in a Rolling Stone Press one-off fan book that profiled key cast members. My chapter would get crowded out by the celebrity side of the enterprise, but I would always admire John for avidly touting the near-anonymous functionaries as crucial to what was then a rather magical enterprise. 

We looked at each other wide-eyed. It was no time for a catch-up. I picked up an ice bucket from the neighboring table, grabbed a stack of linen napkins with the other hand, and hoisted it all inquiringly. "C'mon," he said, and we threaded through the crowd and potted plants into a six-by-eight-foot office just off the rink. Inside was actress Amy Irving, looking aghast, and also a very fit gent in a Hawaiian shirt, stoically holding his hand to a nasty red gouge in his topknot. 

On the floor was a heavy tube amplifier with stamped-metal corners. Next to its former spot on a tall shelf was an old school phonograph used for playing skaters' waltzes. It was evident that a slammed door or some such had caused the amp to plunge onto this gentleman's head. 

He was…Robert DeNiro. 

 Why would three people at a late-evening party depart the A-list crowd outside to hurry into  this private hideaway?

I am moved to quote P.J. O'Rourke's never-to-be topped essay, one that first ran in Rolling Stone, re a certain substance: "…Excuse yourself inconspicuously, saying something like, `Well, I sure have to go to the bathroom and so do Robert and Susan and Alice, but Jim and Fred and Bob don't have to go.'" 

Whoever I was, they didn't want me to stand there gaping. Belushi grabbed my medical supplies, uttered, "We're good," and all but hip-checked me out. Whatever medical supplies they then may have used, DeNiro—who might have still been shooting "Raging Bull" at the time—was seen chatting equably later with Al Pacino and Harvey Keitel. 

Regarding the downsized after-party at the sometime Blues Bar (also called the Phantom Rhino) down on Hudson Street in Tribeca, I forget much but will never forget bartender Keith Richards serving  me a healthy belt of Rebel Yell.

The surging, kaleidoscopic first four minutes of Reitman's film (shot continuously, as a "one-r") capture not just the show's premiere outing but summon up an entire era.  (For a thoughtful take on the production and aims of the movie I recommend Richard Rushfield's Q&A with a candid Reitman on The Ankler.)  

 That sort of trusting dialog is hard to find these days when every potential subject,  from studio execs to working producers to directors to stars, might be loath to take a chance on a major profile are probably gone for good. Which puts me in mind of later days with DeNiro. 

Seven years passed before I fetched up on the Chicago set of "The Untouchables," being shot by Brian DePalma from David Mamet's piercing screenplay. DeNiro, newly beefy and threatening as Al Capone, was set in opposition to Kevin Costner's puritanically avid Ness. DePalma had ordered the set cleared for a scene in which Capone descends a grand hotel staircase for a spitting rebuke of Ness: "You've got nothing! Nothing! You punk!"

 https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=aaplw&ei=utf-8&p=deniro+you+tube+untouchable+scene+with+ness#id=1&vid=1f42bacdd415ca4ce4c541e1ed0118d6&action=click

The first several takes captured Capone, descending the stairs amidst his gunsels, as I spied on it all from a lair behind a table in the opulent lobby. Perhaps only Edward G. Robinson as "Little Caesar" equaled the virulent intensity DeNiro brought.

 When the camera turned around for Ness' hurried entry and his angry accosting of the mobster, I found myself waiting beside the younger actor as the wind-buffeted Chicago main drag was cleared of the city's citizenry and cars. "Lock it up," came the crackling instruction over the walkie talkies, then a confirming  call. "Yeah," said Costner, more to himself than me, "We've got the traffic held on Michigan Avenue, now you go in there with Robert DeNiro."

Add in Sean Connery and the scene, like so many others in DePalma's gangster classic, plays fiercely. 

 There would be other moments as DeNiro found his footing in comedies. In fact, the next year, as DeNiro was shooting "Midnight Run" in Las Vegas with Charles Grodin as a comic sparring partner onscreen. Savvily. DeNiro wasn't playing it as a frolic. Regarding a scene in which the duo visits his character's estranged family, he gave a rare insight: "It gives the whole thing more weight. I don't know if you can say it makes it another kind of movie, but to me, it's a wonderful scene."

  Just how little he likes his role in things promo is perhaps best summarized by what I wrote in the Rolling Stone cover story at that time: "On location in De Niro's suite at the Aladdin Hotel, in Las Vegas, blinking neon signs from the Strip helped illuminate the barren room – De Niro had presumably made the place into the kind of shabby motel room his bounty-hunter character would occupy on the road. Our next meeting took place in the Mayflower Hotel in Manhattan, in the suite that had served as Jake LaMotta's Detroit hotel room in Raging Bull.  De Niro was rigorously polite and just a bit threatening. "How did you like that answer?" he asked with an odd mixture of defiance and contriteness after one effective evasion.

 The man has learned a lot about human nature through his craft—more, it would seem, than the SNL leadership. With just three weeks until election day, let's give him the floor with his remarks this week--preach, Mr. DeNiro: "I've spent a lot of time studying bad men…their characteristics, their mannerisms, the utter banality of their cruelty. Yet there's something different about Donald Trump. When I look at him, I don't see a bad man. Truly.

"I see an evil one."