If you're lucky, you can see Saturday Night Live twice on Saturday Night. At 7:15, when most people are still having dinner or just going to the movies, the entire cast does the complete show at a dress rehearsal for a live audience, as a warm-up for the 11:30 broadcast.
For the December 9, 1978 show (which received the highest ratings in the history of the show), the pace of the dress rehearsal is an unhurried one. Off camera, host Eric Idle whispers with buddy Mick Jagger, who has wandered in to visit and watch. Most of the audience doesn't even see Mick watching a monitor in the corner of the studio while Jane Curtin and Bill Murray do "Weekend Update." Murray is interviewing "Valerie Harper" (Gilda Radner) and presses her to explain her feelings about Rhoda going off the air. After refusing to talk about it, she finally blurts out, "Okay, I'm pissed off." The timing gets a roar from the audience.
At 9:30, the dry run completed, the cast goes into "notes," an intensive reworking of material, depending on censor's demands and everybody's feeling for what is funny. The Rhoda bit will be watered down to "I'm ticked off" which will get no laughs on he air. This is a supper break, with a catered meal of chicken mole, rice, organic vegetable salad, wine and Perrier water. In the lounge, where everybody eats from paper plates, Jagger, Lorne Michaels and Bill Murray talk about the Lee Marvin case, which involves live-in girl friends who sue for support like divorcees."He's a down-to-earth guy," Murray later recounts about Mick. "He talked about real estate a lot."
By 10:30 there is a discernible tension in the air. Script people are running through the hallways, making last minute changes. An ominous voice crackles over loudspeakers: "five minutes to cold opening." Bill Murray stops a girl in the passageway near the studio door, asks for a drag from her cigarette. He looks directly at her for a moment. "I am--a nervous wreck." He says it calmly.
John Belushi cruises the corridor in a seedy red plaid bathrobe. He gets a hug from a female acquaintance. "How are you," she asks. "Serious," he replies. "Very serious." Dan Aykroyd, who will do the opening bit, "Telepsychic," sitting at a desk, is wearing parts of three different costumes--the plaid sports coat for the opening, the dress for the following Julia Child (in which he/she will bleed to death over a chicken) and the police boots for the third sketch.
Don Pardo, 50-ish and grey haired, looking like a state senator, will do the audience warm-up, bringing on Murray then Idle.
Date Bush, invited over from England by Idle, is gathering strength for her first number, done atop Paul Shaffer's piano, dressed in gold lame (the material from Lyrex, and there are three layers of it; "it's like a suit of armor," she laments). After a number one single, "Wuthering Heights," in Britain, she is virtually unknown here, though 50 people will call the NBC switchboard during the show to ask if "Heights" will be sung.
A Jagger fan, Kate is taken aback when Mick stops by the dressing room to murmer hello (they've never met before this) after which she goes out to do her second number, "Them Heavy People," in trench coat and fedora. As if from nowhere, Paul Simon and Carrie Fisher materialize to watch the song on a monitor outside the studio door.
Gilda Radner finishes her "Candy Slice" rock & roll parody, and rushes off the set to a small area where changing rooms are set up like a row of phone booths. The costumes and makeup people crowd around her, laughing with appreciation for the success of the bit, which has left her with a sheen of sweat visible under her makeup. There is a steady supply of coffee, cake and rolls on a nearby table, replenished by a stagehand as the cast and crew refuels during commercials.
Since the dress rehearsals ran 20 minutes over, three bits will be cut: "Late Talk," in which Eric Idle interviews an expert of lateness (Gilda, who arrives too late for the interview); the "Mr. Bill" film; and a fake commercial for Dormifix, an injectible sleeping potion.
After the broadcast most of the cast goes up to the executive offices where Lorne Michaels is running a tape of the show. Murray, who seems to be everywhere all the time and is the most accessible of the cast, plays ping pong with one of the staff on a table set incongruously in the hallway.
One by one the cast leave for a party at Cordials, a Broadway bar that is a Saturday Night hangout. The 35th floor of the NBC building is quiet for the first time since early evening. The old gent who operates the single elevator that's running is in no hurry to go anywhere. "There's not much that happens this late," he says wistfully. "After all, it's Saturday night."