'Saturday Night Live': 5 Things We Learned Watching 'Live From New York!'

On the heels of a blockbuster primetime special, Saturday Night Live’s 40th anniversary season keeps rolling along with the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Live From New York!, a new documentary about NBC’s late night institution. Kicking off the 2015 festival, the Bao Nguyen-directed film features well-known and deep-cut clips culled from the SNL archives (many of which can be viewed on Yahoo Screen) as well as new interviews with such key players as creator Lorne Michaels, cast members Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon, and Chevy Chase, past hosts Paul Simon and Alec Baldwin, and fans/media personalities Frank Rich, Bill O’Reilly, and Al Gore. Clocking in at a swift 84 minutes, the film treads a lot of familiar territory in its exploration of the show’s history, but here are five things we learned watching it.

1. Eddie Murphy Still Doesn’t Like to Talk About SNL
Jaws dropped when it was announced that Murphy — who rocketed to fame after he joined SNL in 1980, but largely refused to discuss the show after leaving four years later — would be appearing onstage during SNL 40. And then jaws dropped again when he failed to capitalize on Chris Rock’s emotional introduction by doing anything funny, instead offering up an uncharacteristically subdued and dispassionate speech. But hey, at least he showed up. Murphy didn’t sit down for Live From New York! at all, just as he declined to be interviewed for the best-selling James A. Miller/Tom Shales oral history of the same name. Other notable absences from the documentary include Dan Aykroyd, Adam Sandler, Mike Myers, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, and pretty much anyone from the mid-‘80s cast apart from Julia Louis-Dreyfus. On the other hand, Senator Al Franken did come down off Capitol Hill to talk about his years on the show after skipping the televised reunion. Maybe his invitation got lost in the Senatorial mailroom.  

2. SNL Is (and Isn’t) Sexist
A lot of funny women have passed through Studio 8H during the show’s four-decade run and, based on their comments in the film, they all have very different memories about what it was like to work on a series that’s always been viewed as a boys’ club. Laraine Newman and Amy Poehler, for example, remember the show as more of a “meritocracy” where comedy came before gender. Louis-Dreyfus, on the other hand, describes her incarnation of the show as a “sexist environment.” As usual, Tina Fey offers the most nuanced (and probably accurate) assessment: that SNL can be spectacularly generous to female performers, but that diversity is sometimes underrepresented in the writers’ room.

3. Garrett Morris Had a Rough First Season
Speaking of diversity, founding Not Ready for Primetime Player Garrett Morris has one of the most resonant stories to tell in Live From New York!, describing how he was often sidelined during the show’s first season because the largely white writing team didn’t know how to incorporate him into sketches. In one case, he was supposed to play a doctor in a skit, but was told that audiences would have a hard time believing a black man in that role. “I felt robbed the first year,” the now 78-year-old Morris says to Nguyen.

4. The 9/11 Episode Is Still Extraordinary
Live From New York! is careful to hit many of the most famous moments in SNL history, including Andrew Dice Clay’s controversial appearance and Sinead O’Connor tearing up a picture of the Pope onstage. But it deservedly rewards the most screen time to the show’s first episode back after 9/11, which was hosted by Reese Witherspoon and aired September 29, 2001, two weeks after that cataclysmic event. Viewed again 14 years later, everything about the show’s opening segment is perfect: from Paul Simon’s stirring rendition of “The Boxer” (Michaels’s personal choice of song), to having members of the NYPD and FDNY onstage, to former mayor Rudy Giuliani’s pitch-perfect response to Michaels’s question, “Can we be funny?” (“Why start now?”).

5. Backstage Is a Place of (Controlled) Chaos
While Nguyen’s camera doesn’t spend as much time behind the scenes as SNL devotees might like, the glimpses we catch make it seem like the tensest, most exciting high school Drama Club production ever. Actors are dashing from the set after each skit wraps up with costume and makeup teams trailing them, while crew members are furiously working to set up the next stage and the overlords in the control room are furiously flipping through script pages as the cameras get in place. (For a fuller account of what goes on in the writers’ room and during the show, check out James Franco’s fly-on-the-wall documentary, Saturday Night, available on Hulu.) After all that activity, it’s no wonder that the SNL team needs to unwind after each episode with a legendary post-show party.

Live From New York! has additional screenings at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 24 and April 25.