Looking Back at the Wild 1986 Episode of Saturday Night Live Produced, Directed and Sorta Hosted by Francis Ford Coppola
Like Orson Welles before him, Francis Ford Coppola looms large as a filmmaker but also as an idea and an ideal. Coppola has cultivated an image as the ultimate auteur, an outsized madman willing to do just about anything to realize his creative vision.
In a New Hollywood full of larger-than-life characters, Coppola stood out for his ambition, audacity, and personality. Coppola isn’t an auteur so much as he is the auteur.
The marketing for Megalopolis, Coppola’s controversial and divisive comeback movie, a self-funded one hundred and twenty million dollar epic that looks disconcertingly Objectivist, plays up its writer-director’s persona.
That persona figures prominently in one of the stranger detours in Coppola’s career. In 1986, the filmmaker appeared on an episode of Saturday Night Live that was unlike any other.
Lorne Michaels loves predictability and formula. He became rich, famous, and perhaps the most powerful man in comedy by taking as few chances as possible.
However, over the course of Saturday Night Live’s nearly five decades, it has taken huge chances at least three or four times.
I still need to write up the episode hosted by the “Anybody Can Host” contest winner. I recently covered Saturday Night Live’s mesmerizingly off-beat Mardi Gras special.
Saturday Night Live could afford to take chances in 1986 because it had nothing to lose. Lorne Michaels’ return following a five-year absence proved an unmitigated disaster.
Michaels’ decision to fill the cast not with the usual roster of hungry Groundlings or Second City alum but young movie stars from famous families led to the worst buzz, reviews and ratings since the notorious Michaels-free 1981 season produced by Jean Doumanian.
It seemed entirely possible that NBC would cancel the low-rated, critically maligned, yet extremely expensive ninety-minute live sketch comedy show.
Michaels more or less started from scratch the next season, retaining only Dennis Miller, Jon Lovitz, and Nora Dunn as Not Ready for Prime Time Players. The 1985-1986 season was an experiment that failed but led to one of the show’s strongest eras.
I was excited about watching and writing about the notorious Francis Ford Coppola episode of Saturday Night Live for Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place and Every Episode Ever, but I was disappointed to find that the whole show was not available online.
The normally dependable folks at the Internet Archive puzzlingly have an audio-only recording of the show, while Peacock has a thirty-three-minute episode. That nevertheless provided a tantalizing taste of the sublime madness.
The episode’s premise is that Francis Ford Coppola has been given full creative control as a producer and director by Grant Tinker of NBC (played by Jon Lovitz as his pathological liar character), leaving Michaels to pursue a sideline in professional wrestling.
It’s a testament to the season’s dreadful reputation that its first big laugh comes from cast member Terry Sweeney telling Michaels, “But you’re at your peak! The show’s never been better.”
Saturday Night Live was most assuredly not at its peak. The show had seldom been worse despite the insane roster of talent behind the scenes and in front of the camera.
The season’s writing staff reads like a who’s who of the show’s most talented and important writers: A. Whitney Brown, Tom Davis, Jim Downey (Robert Jr.’s uncle), Al Franken, Jack Handey, Lanier Laney, Carol Leifer, George Meyer, Lorne Michaels, Don Novello, Michael O'Donoghue, R. D. Rosen, Herb Sargent, Suzy Schneider, Robert Smigel, John Swartzwelder, Terry Sweeney, Mark McKinney and Bruce McCulloch.
After getting the old heave-ho from Saturday Night Live, Meyer and Swartzwelder became two of The Simpsons’ most prolific staff writers.
If a Saturday Night Live director does their job right, they’re fundamentally invisible. Live sketch comedy is most assuredly not a director’s medium.
For one very special, very strange episode that changed dramatically. For ninety curious minutes, one of the most revered filmmakers in American film occupied a curious role on the long-running live sketch comedy show as director, producer, and unofficial co-host.
The meta gag of this appealingly deranged outlier is that Coppola understands movement, acting, cinematography, and all of the other elements of film, but he’s completely clueless about comedy, live television, and directing live sketch comedy.
George Wendt proves to be a peculiar but game and inspired host. As a Second City alum, Wendt was a better fit for the show than Anthony Michael Hall, whose sketch comedy credentials were lacking when he became one of the show’s youngest and most famous cast members.
In his monologue Wendt jokes that doing live television is a real change for him because he spends most of his time at a bar drinking. The rest of the time, he’s filming Cheers.
It’s a solid joke structure that Wendt nails before Coppola, on a crane like Peter O’Toole in The Stunt Man, demands another take.
Coppola handles matters as pretentiously as possible. He tells the audience and Wendt that the idea is to “create the illusion that he is going to tell you a joke” rather than just filming the joke itself.
Of course, there is no such thing as multiple takes on live television. That’s the whole point. You get one chance; if you blow it, the whole world knows it, and you go down in shame for eternity. Just ask Jenny Slate, Charles Rocket, and Damon Wayans.
They all experienced success after doing the unthinkable and saying words not in the script or on cue cards.
Wendt understands the absurdity of Coppola’s request and situation but he plays ball all the same. He repeats the joke for the Godfather filmmaker and audience’s benefit, and it does even better the second time, even after the punchline has been spoiled.
This episode traffics in anti-comedy in a way that hearkens back to Andy Kaufman’s pioneering early days as a special attraction. It’s an episode that is as interested in asking why people laugh as it is in making people laugh.
The show’s fictionalized Coppola wants to control everything and does not understand, for example, why he can’t control the commercials as well.
“Fish Market” has one of the most impressive props in the show’s history. It’s a writerly sketch in which Wendt plays the proprietor of a fish market with a VERY big problem. His son, played by Hall, accidentally bought what appears to be a big blue whale that dwarfs the actors and the stage.
Wendt’s overwhelmed small businessman gives his customers the hard sell in an attempt to get rid of the massive amount of whale he has on his hands, but it proves difficult.
Wendt is amusingly desperate as he promotes whale blubber as “nature’s toothbrush.” The episode has a clever capper when a pair of Eskimos enter the store, eager to buy whale meat and/or blubber, only to be ignored by Hall.
Whales figure prominently in the episode’s weirdest and most inspired sketch.
In it, Robert Downey Jr—who only got a slot on the show because his best friend Anthony Michael Hall vouched for him—is hauled onto the stage by Randy Quaid in a suitcase zipped up so that only Downey Jr’s head is visible.
Randy Quaid sets up the bit by explaining, “Francis thought Robert should do something that expresses who he is.”
The then-twenty-year-old Downey Jr., still a year away from being able to drink legally, announces that he will be performing a “confrontational monologue.”
It’s a parody of a form of experimental theater that does not actually exist or exists solely to be mocked.
It’s the weirdest bit in one of the weirdest 90 minutes of Saturday Night Live, but Downey Jr. commits on a pathological level.
He’ll say something banal, then shout the second half for no discernible reason. He says things like, “Life is an emergency, AND MY BOOKS ARE OVERDUE!” “If words could speak I’D STILL HAVE NOTHING TO SAY”, “I’m holding myself hostage, YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT HIT ME!”, “My demands are few BUT UNINTELLIGIBLE!”
As part of his confrontational monologue, a possibly coked-up Downey says, “I know why whales beach themselves” before screaming with incoherent, inexplicable rage, “Spider-Man told me!”
When Downey Jr. was snorting a shoebox full of cocaine just before the show began, he could not have imagined that thirty-two years later, he would be an icon of sobriety and self-restraint, paid TWENTY MILLION dollars to mentor Spider-Man in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming.
The second-generation drugged-up fuck-up genius brings real rage to this borderline dadaistic endeavor. The words may be nonsensical, but the anger feels authentic.
Downey Jr. had plenty to be angry about. It could be the drugs. It could be professional frustration. It could be the curious realization that as brilliant and funny as he might be, he was a terrible fit for Saturday Night Live, and the whole season was a mistake.
Then Joan Cusack comes out, and Downey Jr. screams at her for ruining his special monologue. It’s worth noting that everyone in this bizarre sketch from one of the most notorious seasons of Saturday Night Live is an Academy Award winner or a nominee.
Francis has five Oscars for writing Patton, The Godfather, and The Godfather Part II and producing and directing The Godfather Part II. Oh, and he also has an Irving G. Thalberg award, which I imagine drove his frenemy Robert Evans insane since he desperately wanted the lifetime award, but it instead went to a rival who already had five Oscars.
the horror, the horror.
Robert Downey Jr. just won an Oscar for Oppenheimer after being nominated for Chaplin and Tropic Thunder. Cusack has a pair of Oscar nominations, while Quaid was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for The Last Detail before all of the unpleasantness began.
This bold episode ends in a big, cinematic way with a sweeping crane shot across the set that might be the most artful camera movement in the show’s history.
I am apoplectic that this unique piece of comedy and film history isn’t available legally in its entirety or even quasi-legally.
Megalopolis looms tantalizingly and horrifyingly in our collective future. I’ll be delighted if it’s analogous to this crazy stunt, but somehow, it looks much nuttier.
He’s a madman, that Francis Ford, and he left an indelible mark on Saturday Night Live time the only time he graced it with his eccentric presence.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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