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April 17, 1976…Bumped From SNL Debut, Billy Crystal Returns

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Eyes Of A Generation.com

April 17, 1976…Bumped From SNL Debut, Billy Crystal Returns

Exclusive Eyewitness Account…Billy Crystal & The Debut Of SNL

As SNL fans, and history buffs know, Billy Crystal was scheduled to appear on the debut show, but he didn’t, and there has always been a lot of speculation as to just exactly what happened that night. Till now…

You are about to learn the real story of why he didn’t, from someone who was there…Joel Spector, who was on the audio crew for the first 17 years of SNL.

Was it a last minute thing, or did it come earlier in the week? Did he appear in the dress rehearsal? In later years, Billy had talked about the disappointment of being bumped, but never went into the details. Thanks to Joel, we’ll hear what really happened. Here is his account…

“This is the real story. Billy did indeed appear in the dress rehearsal and got big laughs. I was at the post-dress rehearsal production meeting. For this week only, every staff and crew member attended this meeting, held right in the middle of the studio.”

“There were three “new young comedians” scheduled to appear that week, in addition to host George Carlin. They were Andy Kaufman, Billy Crystal and Valri Bromfeld. Lorne announced that the show was very long and that only two of the three new comedians could be on the air show: Andy (with two spots) worked to recorded music, which couldn’t be cut.”

“Billy was set to do his “Late Show” routine, in which he did all of the sounds for the typical late movie show on a local station, complete with badly spliced film hiccups. He said that he had been doing this routine for some time, and that it had already been refined to be “just right.” “I understand that this might rule me out,” he said.”

“As Lorne had promised, Billy returned on April 17, 1976 on Season 1’s, 17th Episode, which was hosted by President Ford’s Press Secretary, Ron Nessen with musical guest Patti Smith.” -Joel Spector

Thanks to Joel, we now know that it was only after the dress rehearsal that Crystal was cut. Till now, that part had never been known. By the way, that same night, a classic sketch was born…Dan Aykroyd’s, Super Bassomatic 76. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HKTx5WFcs0&ab_channel=DavidGarrett

Many thanks to Joel for this missing piece of history and to the many that share similar first hand information on this page.

In the photos below we see our friend Joel Spector at the 8H audio board, Billy from that April 17th show, and the debut advertisement for SNL. – Bobby Ellerbee



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6 responses to “April 17, 1976…Bumped From SNL Debut, Billy Crystal Returns”

  1. Frank H. Robinson

    (Part Two)

    BUDDY MORRA:
    We took him off the show Saturday because they weren’t living up to what we had agreed to. Jack Rollins and I decided if we couldn’t get what we were promised early on, we would take Billy off the show. Earlier in the week, I had said just that to Barbara Gallagher, who was the associate producer. The piece was supposed to run about six minutes or five and a half minutes, and it just wouldn’t work in any less time. You could shave a few seconds off, but that would be about it.

    LORNE MICHAELS:
    Buddy had no idea what was going on. I don’t think Bernie [Brillstein] did either. They were from another time of show business. We were eating vegetables; they were eating doughnuts. It was a very different world. We were much more like a crusade. It was a very passionate group of people. Billy was sort of one of us—but now suddenly it went into this other kind of mode.

    The talk with Buddy was of another time. And it made Billy NOT one of us. And I think that was unfortunate for all of us, because he had been.

    BILLY CRYSTAL:
    I was waiting in the lobby with Gilda for the dress rehearsal to take place at eight o’clock while my managers talked to Lorne. We had asked for five minutes in the first hour which, given what we had been through with Lorne in the preparations, didn’t seem like an outlandish request. About seven o’clock, my manager, Buddy Morra, and Jack Rollins come out and suddenly said, “Okay, we’re going, that’s it.” I said, “What happened?” They said, “Lorne went, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t do it. I can’t promise anything.’” So Buddy said, “We’re going to go, there’s no time, you’re being bumped, and that’s it.” I had my makeup on! Gilda got all upset and angry. I was totally confused about the whole thing.

    BUDDY MORRA:
    It comes down to a matter of what they thought was most important. I know how bad Billy felt for a long time. I’m talking about several YEARS after that. It still always bothered him. And it bothered me too. We walked out of NBC that night, and I can tell you my stomach was not in great shape, and it wasn’t for several days after that. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, but we felt it was the right thing to do.

    BILLY CRYSTAL:
    I was upset—mad, I guess—because I had wanted to be there. I was mad at my own managers, because I wanted to do the show. And I didn’t want it to look like I was the guy who stormed off the show. That wasn’t the truth. But my managers were protecting me, and Lorne was protecting his show, which I respect.

    LORNE MICHAELS:
    We were all under enormous pressure. None of us had done this before. It was a big night for an enormous number of people, Billy included. To be cut was I’m sure terribly hurtful for Billy, but there was no implication at all that it was about him not being good enough or of not wanting him on the show. This was straight confrontation. It was Buddy; it wasn’t Billy.

    BARBARA GALLAGHER:
    It was a mistake when you look back on it. Billy was hysterical during dress. Very funny.

    BILLY CRYSTAL:
    I was friendly with John and especially with Gilda. They were always confused and blamed my managers. Especially John; he used to say, “They screwed you, man!”

    And then after that, things weren’t great for me for a while. I felt bad. I did come back the next year when Ron Nessen hosted the show and I did a routine and that was great. But after that, there was eight years where I didn’t do the show.

    So TL;DR version: Gallagher and Spector say he did perform at dress, Crystal says he did not. Those are the facts. Who is remembering correctly?

    The interviews for this book were conducted some 25 years after the fact. Memories are notoriously fallible. If I were to make an educated guess as to whose accounts of this incredibly hectic, high-pressure night were and weren’t correct, I’d say Billy has a better chance of recalling accurately the events of what was his biggest night that never was. For Lorne et al, Billy was one of a few thousand considerations being juggled, and they could easily be transposing the Friday night rehearsal with the Saturday dress. Billy, being singularly focused on his one role in the play, appears to have a razor sharp recollection in these memoirs, and I trust he’d be right remembering when and where he performed.

  2. Frank H. Robinson

    (Part One)

    According to Crystal, he didn’t appear in dress. Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of SNL, pages 53 – 57 (revised edition):

    BILLY CRYSTAL, CAST MEMBER:
    Three months before the show was supposed to debut, Lorne had found me in a club called Catch A Rising Star. I went, “This is a television producer?” He sounded like David Steinberg the comedian because he was from Canada. He was very appealing, he was very smart, and he was funny in a different way than I envisioned television producers to be. He asked me if I was interested in being a resident in the company. He felt I would do six appearances on the show, and then he saw me becoming a host of the show, among all the other hosts, in two years. They’d be grooming me to be one of the main guys. That’s how it came down prior to the show.

    BUDDY MORRA, MANAGER:
    Billy turned down a Bill Cosby special, who was the hottest thing in the country at that time, to take Saturday Night Live, because they said, “If you do the Cosby show, we’re not interested in having you do this.” And so we opted to do Saturday Night Live. We had agreed in advance for Billy to do his special piece on the first show, and that the piece required a certain amount of time; it wouldn’t work in less time. So Billy was coming in every day from Long Island, and he just sat around all day long. They never spoke to him, they never got to him, they never said anything to him. He’d leave at the end of the day, after spending eight or nine hours waiting around, and then come back the next morning again. This went on for pretty much the entire week.

    BILLY CRYSTAL:
    Then we get to the Friday night. We had a run-through for a live audience and some NBC executives. Now my routine was an audience participation piece and it utilized Don Pardo and it was this African safari thing with sound effects. I played Victor Mature—it’s not going to sound funny—walking across the camp in Africa to knock the tarantula spider off Rita Hayworth’s chest. So that was the setup. Don Pardo, who we never saw on camera, had his hands in a big bowl of potato chips, and every time I took a step, Don would crunch the potato chips so it was like this whole sound effects thing. It was really funny on Friday night. And it ran six, six and a half minutes, because it took a long time to explain it. But there were laughs in the explanation and then the piece just sort of went on its own. And Friday night, it was the comedy highlight of the night, and I thought, “I’m in great shape here.” George Carlin’s hosting this new show and I knew everybody in the show and this is going to be sensational.

    Lorne sent in notes after the Friday night run-through and he said to me, “I need two minutes.” And I said, “Cut two minutes?” And he said, “No, I need two minutes. All you get is two minutes.” So it was a drastic cut in the piece, and frankly as a new performer then I didn’t have a little hunk like Andy Kaufman’s Mighty Mouse. I didn’t have a two-minute thing that I could plug into the show, and I didn’t have a stand-up piece that felt like what the show should be that I could have scored in two or three minutes. So we had. A big dilemma. And after being involved with Lorne and the show for so long, we were all kind of confused as to what to do. And the when we saw the rundown, they had put me on at five to one. The last five minutes of the show, how can you score? This wasn’t what we had talked about. So my representatives said they were going to come in on Saturday and talk to Lorne.

    BARBARA GALLAGHER, ASSOCIATE PRODUCER:
    Lorne said to me, “We have to cut Billy,” after dress rehearsal. “Why don’t you go tell Buddy?” I said, “Me? Me tell Buddy? What’re you, crazy?” He said, “Yeah, you’ve got to tell him.” Lorne didn’t like confrontation. He hated it. So I went and told Buddy. I said, “I think it’s a mistake, I know Lorne feels terrible that he has to do this.” I said, “Buddy, don’t kill the messenger. I love Billy.”

    LORNE MICHAELS, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER:
    Buddy was a strong advocate for Billy, and I think what I objected to was him telling me what I should cut as opposed to just making the pro-Billy case. He made the whole who-is-funnier case, which was not a good thing to do. He said I should cut Andy Kaufman.

    I probably didn’t have the nerve to cut Carlin. One, he was our host, and two, he’d lent his name to the show, which was, at the time, a big deal. I think Andy, because he was surreal and there was nothing else like him on the show, had the edge. Albert had submitted his first film, which was thirteen minutes long. Fortunately he also submitted his second one, which was a lot shorter, and that was the one we ran.

    I thought Billy was really funny, or else I wouldn’t have put him on the show. But I also thought he was the one thing we could hold, the one thing we had the most of—stand-up comedy, because of Carlin. Buddy turned everything into high drama. It became very heated.

  3. Dennis Degan

    I watched the first SNL (which was actually called “NBC’s Saturday Night’ because ABC had already claimed the name ‘Saturday Night Live’ for another live show with Howard Cosell that originated from the Ed Sullivan Theater) from the video maintenance shop at WIS-TV in Columbia, SC. WIS did not carry SNL for its first year because they had no way of knowing if it would be successful and they made quite a lot from their Saturday night airings of old movies. In fact, no South Carolina NBC stations aired ‘Saturday Night’ during its first year. So the only ones in SC to see the show were those fortunate enough to work at an NBC affiliate. A group of WIS employees made a weekly party out of it by coming to the station to watch ‘NBC’s Saturday Night’ from the network line feed, and I was part of that group!

  4. Dennis Degan

    “Superbassomatic” was the second sketch to appear on the show. The first one was a weird stream-of-conscience offering from Michael O’Donoghue with John Belushi.

  5. Bob Makson

    Hey Joel – the 8H board beats the boards on the 5th floor! Hope things are well!

  6. Jim Young

    Who could EVER forget the Bassomatic?!

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