Lorne Michaels had nothing to lose on October 11, 1975, when Saturday Night Live first aired. He doesn't pull all-nighters any more in preparation for the week’s show, but Michaels tells Alec he is still anxious on Saturdays at 11:30 pm. Michaels believes in the power of live performance and gives SNL hosts the best bits. But aside from the funniest lines, the irreverent Michaels offers little protection. Alec is no exception.
Alec sat down with Erica Jong, author of the 1970s best-seller, Fear Of Flying, and her daughter Molly Jong-Fast. Erica talks candidly about coping with three divorces, and tells Alec she is certain her current marriage will be her last. Meanwhile, daughter Molly had no idea her mom wrote so-called “dirty” books. She does recall her mom being consumed by work and travel, but concludes that her mother’s legacy is about being honest.
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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to. Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policymakers and performers, to hear their stories. What inspired their creations, what decisions changed their careers, what relationships influenced their work. Both of my guests today are pioneers. In nineteen seventy three, Erica John's frank treatment of women's sexual desires in her novel Theory of Flying was as controversial as it was revolutionary. Two years later, in nineteen seventy five, Lauren Michaels created Saturday Night Live, a television show that was and still is the biggest influence on American comedy today. Here it is, as you can see verifiably, it is a check made out to you the Beatles for three thousand dollars. All you have to do is sing three Beatle tunes She loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. That's a thousand dollars right there. Lauren Michaels has launched the careers of John Blue, She Dan Ackroyd, Gilda Radner, and Bill Murray. Then there's Chris Farley, Will Farrell, Tina Fey, Kristin Wigg and Chris Rock Always I haven't been you, havn't been poor day since I met Lauren Michaels, and I never been broke since I met. Both on television and in film, Michael's is the kingmaker of comic actors. He's also a rare producer and that he's truly involved in all aspects of production. Yet he says when he does his job right, he leaves no fingerprints behind Lauren. Michael's life in comedy began in the late nineteen sixties when he worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto, alongside his writing and performing partner Heart Pomerats. But it wasn't television. Lord Michaels started out in radio. There's a show called five Nights a week at this time, and we did political satire every week. We thought we were potentially bringing down the government, and the fact that no one was listening didn't occur to us for at least the first year. But we loved doing it. It was just a chance to write and perform every week. Now, where did that begin though? For you? Did you go to school for that or did you? No, no, no, no. I went when I graduated from University of Toronto, I had taken nothing that was of any drama theater. I'd worked in the theater there, but it was more. There was a review that University College u S Follies, which was a satirical review music and comedy, and I co wrote that and directed it. So so from the beginning, I mean, even before you go into CBC radio and before Hart pomerants there, even in college what you characterize a satiric review comedy review, that was your Bailey Wick from the beginning. I think it was what was in the air at the time. It was just the beginning of the questioning of authority, which was the year I didn't four. We were no longer talking about World War Two, the first part of my childhood. That's all anyone talked about it. It was pretty much the gloom of that hung over most of the fifties. Sur Yeah, and then we television came into our lives and and everything changed. So with a CBC how long are the radio years? The radio years think three years? And then we began writing for comedians Woody Allen and John Rivers and a little bit Dick Cabot. How do you get into that door? Heart Heart did that. He was very good at approaching people. We would come down to New York to write for people and Wood he who was incredibly generous and encouraging, and we had no impact at all on his career, but he was very helpful. Then we got hired on a television show in night as writers called The Beautiful Phillis Dealers Show and which was a variety show at him See in Burbank. And then from there, when that was canceled, we were hired on lap In, which was in its first season for George for George Slaughter. Yeah, what was the dynamic when you go to Los Angeles in the late sixties and you're writing for network television. Did you feel like that was It wasn't at all. The romantic idea of what I thought behind show business would be well on lap In. The writers would write and then it would be edited by a head writer, and then we did not go to the read through. We were at at a motel in Burbank, uh and we would all have lunch together and that was fun and didn't even have to have offices. No, we had offices, but they were in a motel, which was you know, it was the boom period of Burbank and so it was the number one show and on one level it was like the greatest credit you could have, and it certainly did wonders for you know, like self image and career, but it wasn't fun. You'd write, you know, monologues for Dan and Dick, who were really nice to us. Did you get to go to the tapings of the show. We'd go to the studio if they were doing the monologues, and they would read it from the cards. They would see it for the first They were some of the most famous card readers, remember that also just they would just see it for the first time on the cart. They did not want their work in any way interfere with their life. And we worked there for a year and then I got a call from the head of the CBC asking what it would take to bring us back to do shows. We're still hard on television. Yeah, and that's where I learned how to do television. Why do you say that, because I spent a huge chunk of my twenties, you know, in an editing room. We would shoot in the studio, we'd be in front of an audience and then what were you doing? It was called the heart and Louren terrific Hour and the Stars. Yeah, and there was you know, one ensemble and a musical guest. James Taylor was on one. Cat Stevens Birth the idea for the other show that you eventually wound up doing. I don't know whether you know. There was a real form then called Variety, and it was comedy variety and it had you know, music and comedy, and we would perform in front of an audience, but mostly it was built in the editing room. And the way that laughed in was I remember that we came out of the first show with like sixteen hours worth of tape and I met with the editor. He said, why don't we just watch it? So we watched the first four hours. We were discussing a sketch. He said, I think in that piece we could pull out that part. And I was still thinking script. I wasn't in any way thinking visually, and he said, no, your arm there is is by your temple and then you put it down. He was looking for continuity. He was an editor. He actually saw it. I said, how did you do that? And he said, I can teach your eye to see and he did. I learned how things are put together, and how what to look for in composition and how to make something work, and the role that sound played because it's all radio with pictures. Nobody cared about sound then when we first did SNL the first five years, it was a boom. When you see Elvis Son, ed Sullivan, him and the Jordan Eires, it's just a boom. They got what they got. We have better sound on this interview than I had in the first twenty years of my career. And what I realized then about myself is that I'm much more interested in the production that I am in performing. What changed for you? I saw it in the editing room one night. I looked at myself before a take. I see my eyes checking the lighting, seeing where the cameras are in terms of their angles, and you're seeing a guy who all his instincts are technical and director and just kind of look. Yeah, I'm seeing a guy who's preoccupied. And then the slate happens and then there's this smiling artificial Yeah, snapped artificial. I'm sure I was sincere. Yeah, yeah, in my opinion, speaking for myself as all artificial, yes, exactly. We had the same experience when I was on stage. When I was at University of Toronto in the theater there, I was in the middle of a scene with an actor and it was exciting to be on stage and all that. But I looked in his eyes and I realized, Oh, he's actually that guy. You know. I knew he had to my lines with some charm, but he actually had become more character. Yeah, which I thought, Oh, I see, that's what actors are. They actually can do that, you know. Whereas I was Yes, for me, it was like it was fun to be in shows and I've done them at summer camp, and I've done them in high school and and uh, but you had a pure instinct at that time, but you just said there's this other thing I'd rather be doing that. I was more and you walked away. So so you So you ended that situation there. Yeah, Well, in Canada there was still a kind of national self loading, best expressed by the then head of the CBC. We were slow in getting our start dates for production for the next season, and I had been offered by Sandy Warnick and Burney Brulstein, who I had met when I was working in California, agent and manager respectively. They said, you want to come back and work on a Burnston Shreiver summer show for like, Yeah, they were and they were funny and it was like smart shows. In ten weeks, I went to the the head of the department at the CBC and I said, I have this other offer, but I will stay here. At the time, I was caught up in the idea that I would be of the first generation of Canadian artists who would be able to stay in Canada. And why is that? Why did you feel that because everyone had always left and the moment that you left in Canada, people started to treat you differently, And I thought, well, that's idiotic. We should be We're involved enough, we should be able to stay here and work here. They had the CBC that I was working for, said, I said, I had this offer and it's just for you know, ten weeks. He said, well, if you're that good, why are you here? And I thought, I want to be here that you know, And then I realized you could never fight against yeah. And also I realized is van Gogh a Dutch painter. He really painted in France, And I thought, oh, I see, so nationalism isn't the best way to you know, you go where the work is. So I went out and I did that, and then I came back. Even as we're talking about Canada, your accent just came back. You just said I went out. Yeah, I realized I'd come to the end of that period and I moved back to California nineteen seventy two, and I lived at the Chateau Marmont until I moved here, which is seventy five. I had my thirtieth birthday in the lobby the Chateau Marmont, which hadn't had a party then, I believe since Dorry lived there. Yeah. So um, you have a real fondness from Los Angeles. Yeah, I love you have a Yeah, you have a very very warm spot for Los Angeles and you who are for London order. Yes. The nice part about being Canadian is you don't have to make that decision. You know, you're in California and it's there's grass in February and the sun is shining. You know, this is fantastic. But if you're from New York, then l A becomes like, well know, you know, it becomes that it's a lot of people get an entire career. Well, I think different. That's true, and I've been very guilty of that myself. The thing about Los Angeles, if you do it in your twenties, you can find and understand sepulvida, which is if you grew up in a city with a grid, you're going, well, so what do you mean this crosses Wilshire And then if you're on that set off Robertson and you think you're up exactly, yes, exactly. But when you're in your twenties, you're going to a lot of parties where you're just following somebody or somebody gives you directions. And this is at a time it's hard to recall, but it's pre GPS. No. No one wants to learn where they're going now. But anyway, I had a very happy time there and I worked for Lily Tomlin and I wrote on her show, which was like ten or twelve weeks, and at the end of it it was time to go back to Canada and I realized I wasn't visa wise, I wasn't going back. No, it wasn't that. It was that the CBC wanted me to do something, but they want to be back six months in advance of that. Naggie I'm gonna be the normal leader of Canada or no, not even normally. I think it was just that you would be able to work there. But here's what I realized, without Malcolm Gladibell, who's also a Canadian articulating it, because we didn't have the benefit of that, then it's the ten thousand hours in doing twelve shows in ten weeks. Working at that pace, you get better. In Canada, working on a show every four months or five months, you overthink everything. There's so much at stake, and there was something about working at that pace and working in a system that was really clear cut, like if the numbers were there and you had ratings, then you were hit, and they weren't there, then you were a PLoP. And at that point in my life I kind of needed clarity of which is one of the reasons I'm drawn to comedy, because you're trying really hard to make people laugh. If they don't laugh, it's really it doesn't work. So I do. Lily Thomas show gets nominated for an Emmy. It was a pilot special four series and I am co producing with Jane Wagner. We spent forever on it and then at the end it didn't get picked up. But Dick Eversoul, who was the new newly appointed head of late night, had come from ABC Sports and had meant Herbschlosser on a plane and by the time they landed he was the director of late night Television and he had this idea of doing many pilots in late night, using late night to be a testing ground for prime time. I agreed to do one for Dick. And I was, as I said, living at the Marmont and I came home one night two o'clock in the morning, which was not unusual for me, and uh, there was a message from Dick. Could you be at the poll Lounge at seven o'clock in the morning for breakfast? No better for me then than it is now. And I went, um, okay, what's it about it? And he said they decided to do one show as opposed to twenty pilots, and yours is one of the ones that there, and they all want to meet you. So I came and it was Dick and the head of programming, the head of research, and the head of talent. I could kind of tell that they were like tribal elders in a way. They were just sort of looking at me like is he all right? You know? It was just basically an approval process. But I seem normal enough, and was I, you know, trouble I had long That's the interesting because because that's was ever thus in the business where I mean, talent is not the only coin of the realm. They want to realize can we hand you a lot of money? And will it does seem like a plaque or whatever? And I and I was just turned thirty, but I did have credits and I hadn't been nominated for stuff. And Dick called me and he said it went well, and then they wanted me to fly to New York and to how do you feel about that? I was excited by it. But Herb Schlauser, who had a very romantic notion of production in New York, I thought it should be live. Well, I've never done live except for radio. And I said, was everybody else in the processing? Was he the lone voice? He was the lone voice. He decided that it should be an eight age because eight h was the big NBC studio and it was lying vacant, and all of the production moved to l A. All variety was in l All of that crap music hall, all of those variety series which were done in New York in this building was all in everything as yeah, exactly for me, Live meant this no pilot, having done three pilots that everybody thought were great. But then somewhere in the process of making a pilot all your most conservative instincts come out and you find yourself doing the thing that you think is going to be It's like a college essay. Is what you really think or feel, it's what you think we'll get you in or get you on the air. So the idea that I could do a show in which the audience would see it at the same time as the network was trily and also I was at a point in my career where I really thought I had nothing to lose, so I was gonna take one more shot at television. I was gonna see if I could do it the way I wanted to do it, and I pretty much did. The very first broadcast of the show Live was when October. October oct n is the first broadcast of the show, and was the structure virtually the same it is now. Yeah, that part was all the same, although I think for the first show we did address rehearsal with the audience on Friday night, just so that we'd have an extra one because we've never actually done anything. The crew was like an original old New York crew. They were all mildly overweight. They had donuts. We had crewe Detey because we were from California. Jet yeah, and until we saw the move the cameras around in the way that they could because they knew that that world. I once did a show at CBS in their big studio and they have no tradition of this over at CBS, and I realized when I had taken the tour that all the cameras had stools beside them. It was only later when I realized the show was a complete mess. Right, They haven't moved cameras there, They just sort of aimed it at Cronkite for the last forty years. They set up their camera and then they sit on their stool. The eight ah crew that crane flew around the studio. They learned that we knew what we were doing in terms of the content, and this is gonna be interesting for them as well. Wasn't a desk and was coming back to New York. There's a wonderful story. When Eugene Lee, who's the designer I hired, who had just done Candide on Broadway, we did the very first set, you know, and it was like a two thousand dollars set. I couldn't get approval, like they wouldn't authorize the budget for it. I went up to Herb Schlaster's office. I just assumed, being Canadian, that I was just supposed to do the right thing and make a show that he would be proud of since he had authorized it. So we took it to his office. It was a little model and I don't think you've ever seen a model, and suddenly we're moving little cameras around and all that, and he said, well, what's the problem. I said, well, they it's expensive, and they, oh fine, And we got the approval and it was very paternal in the best sense of it. But Eugene had a very clear sense of what he wanted. We were showing New York City as it then was, which was kind of in decay and crumbleds So when Herb came down to the studio the first time to see it and looked at the cracked paint, you know, the thing which was where all the money was, of course, in terms of getting that exactly right. He said, I can't. I don't know why, you know, I don't know what I was thinking that. I just thought the shop did this, you know, because he just said it was a really bad and yeah, no, it was just that nobody knew whether production could gear up again in New York, and of course it did and still does. So when you do the show October eleven, the first show is broadcast live in years and when it's over, describe how you feel after the very first show. I was the same way then that I am now. I only see the mistakes, and I tend to wear that up until about the second drink at the party. Even last week's show. It takes me really through midway through Sunday. You just take me a couple of days. I can get over it now in a day. Because you're always hoping that everything's gonna work the way you were hoping it was gonna work. You know, you see of something, Yeah, and you see somebody enters, you know, on the left foot instead of the right foot, or the camera cut is late, or that Q gets screwed up, or that or somebody stuff right before the slate was not looking at things. Yeah. Never, he's still here. He's not going to coming up. Lauren Michael's learns to fire people. I had to accept that some people were not going to make it and that I had better deal with that when it happened, as opposed to just pretending painful but unavoidable yes. And so I learned how to be a boss. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing. This is here's the thing. I'm Alec Baldwin back with Lauren Michael's in his corner office at Rockefeller Center, seventeen floors above the ice skating rink. He moved into this office when Saturday Night Live mirrored in n and most of the furniture is exactly most of their exactly the same. The joke is we hope that the people who run the network never really find out that where your this office is, and how could you have it here? You know this desk. We didn't have budget for that, so we there was a maintenance guy here who said, well, there's a lot of furniture you know that's in storage, So we said, can we see it? So it was all the stuff in the thirties and forties, and this box of batons for Toscanini to the then head of programming, and in the desk was a couple of copies of like the Racing Form and Jelu Sill and Maylox, and I thought, what am I getting myself into? It was so it was the reverse of kind of holistic view of California which I'd come here with you. Now you look at the board for those people who don't know, the arc of the whole season is on this infamous but corkboard on the wall, and they are the dates of each broadcast, the names of the confirmed hosts, some prospective hosts, and the musical guests and so forth, and the names of the people are still not all of them, but many of them. The biggest names in the business. The biggest names in the business are coming here thirty something years later to host the show. Ben Stiller and Melissa McCarthy won the Emmy Award, and Katie Perry is coming, and Jimmy Fallon, who's obviously double dipping on your payroll, Jonah Hill. I mean, the people that are the biggest names in the business are still coming here to host the show. Why do you think that that stayed that way? What? Well, I think, first of all, the best part is host. You get the best parts in most scenes, and we work really really hard tonight because it's Tuesday. I will leave here probably around three. I used to do what the younger ones do, which was pretty much go through the night. But I don't anymore, you know. And and I say it with Smigle until three in the morning exactly with those and I go right, okay, and I look at you good. They're like yeah, I'm like, I'm good. And that's the commitment to it being the best it possibly can be. But I think also to inject my own perspective, having done it many times, many many times, many many times too many times past year, there is that's out there people. People do feel them well, but it was just tweeting. This reekplaces a live component that is missing in most people's careers. They don't do theater a lot of them. This is a chance for them to have a kind of a it's it's much more loose and kind of deconstructed, and it can get a little sloppy if they're not like spot On and it doesn't have that, it doesn't have the kind of the gleaming perfection of movie making. And also Seth Meyers Norm McDonald was at the show on Saturday, was and so we were sitting at the party and and Seth pointed out that Norman had given an interview somewhere recently where he's talking about the show, and he said, in what I thought was a nice way, it's now the only place left where you can be bad. You know, there's no lap track when something doesn't work, it's such a clear silence. And whereas you walk out of a situation comedy in front of a live audience, they're already cheering. You know, even the theater. The theater people stand the audience thinks they're supposed to do with standing incovation, you know. Yeah, for a stand up comic talent like Norm, I think one thing he might be reacting to is it gives people, the hosts, whether they are comic performance or not, it gives them the recreation of like a club being at a club, and it's stripped down so that it's only at the end talent writing into the lens. There's no spectacle. We don't have, you know, much of a wide shot. You're watching pure performance and for people to be able to soar like that, and when you see it happen, it is always amazing, you know, amazing to be standing there being me having seen it as many times I have, and the fact that every week we don't know how it's going to turn out, and the fact that I am still as scared as I am every dress rehearsal. And honestly, I don't mean like we'll be drummed out of the business. I just mean that it is part of the process that people have to be bad before they can be good. When we have a great dress rehearsal, when the audience is way too hot, invariably something gets lost on air when you come and do the show. Um, I've never felt more violated. I've come on here, you know, seemingly weeks after I got divorced, and Bill Clinton a k a. Darryl Hammond is working out telling me to put my oars in the water and set sailf of the island of Ponani with him. Yes, and yeah, So I'm just wondering, I mean, do you do you find that that's a big part of their creative successes there as you're complete, Yeah, I think there's something. They expect us to be honest, They expected us to say what what's actually happening? There's very little protection. Have you always been this year? Reverence your whole life? So this was really just meant to bit what's the first movie you made? Post? I guess Wayne's World? You know wasn't the first? Sorry, three amigos. I wrote with Randy Newman and Steve Martin. I have a copy of your IMDb if you'd like to consult at thee No, no, but I uh that you wrote. Yes. We'd go to Steve's house every day, Randy and I. We'd meet for lunch, talk it down, and then we'd spend the afternoon writing and it was very happy time for me. And what about after that? Was the next time a minute. Then I came back to the show I had left s in and then Brandon was threatening to cancel it and he called me, how many years were you gone? Five years? You were gone for five years. I left with the original group, designers and musicians, the cast, the writers. Listen. In the first five years, I didn't fire one person. So when I came back I was sort of more psychologically built for that that it wasn't family in that sense that the what William Seawan once called my pseudo egalitarianism was not healthy. I had to accept that some people were not going to make it and that I had better deal with that when it happened, as opposed to just pretending paid yes. And so I learned how to be a boss, which I I think I'd learned how to how to lead on some level, but I never learned how to be a boss. And I think when I came back, um where you know, less of a peer and more of a boss. Yes, And at some point are you tempted to stop again and just go make films? It is what I do. It's the thing that but it also became and I don't mean to be, you know, glib about it, but it also became like the aircraft carrier that you launched many planes off. This is a power bay for you as an entertainment producer. Question. Wayne's World was the first of those. With Wayne's World, I think what I wanted to prove was that I could do a movie in the same way that sort of the Marx Brothers used to do their movies. They tour them first, so they knew where all the laughs were and then they could go film them quickly to test. Yeah, no one believes that we do what we do here in six days because there's not much of an approval process. It just heads to eleven thirty, whereas in l that was my experience when I first did the show. Yeah, yeah, there's so much money and habitat for humanity building a house exactly. But the movie business because it's way better run as his prime time television. Every paragraph is scrutinized and reviewed. And I say it every week. We don't go on because we're ready. We go on because it's and that's just it's somehow focuses people, and I trust that process. And so with Wayne's World, I think we had I can't remember how many days when it was like twenty seven or something like that. But towards the end there was a plot with a father son which Roblo was to be the son, and I was hoping for Dennis Hopper to be the father. And as we got close to shooting, which we were like three weeks away, we went, oh, so we just made it one person. We just made it Rob. You could make that kind of decision quickly. The pace of ESNL was like, think of it, do it, and then think of something else. Tina's is the same thing about thirty rock television conditions, those muscles where you have to make fast decision, and that puts the creative people in charge. I did a movie with Mick Jagger based on a book we both liked called Enigma, which is about code breaking in World War Two, and michaelapp had directed it and it was an independent film. It took us six years to get it made, which was longer in World War Two, and I and I realized worked on pretty hard. But when I finally saw it, because there was German money in it and there was I think Japanese. I'm looking at the start of the movie, at the premiere, and all of a sudden there's like all these names are there as producers, you know, and I go, well, hey, excuse me. I was like, And then I realized, in movies, the person who does what I do isn't at the center. Right here I am, and that's fulfilling. In movies. What I like doing is the script, which I get obsessive about a yeah, and then casting and then editing, and then how to present it to the public. In the sense of marketing. Now you have this great success in you have the great success in late night television, and then you have success in prime time television. You produce TV shows, particularly now that I've done how and you have great success in film. But you never worked in cable and with your career, I mean you never worked with I did with Kids in the Hall and I did with now with Fred in portlanda which is on I f C. Do you feel that you haven't been as aggressive and cable as you might have been. I think that at the end of the day, you know they're more comfortable with network because I've grown to prefer network because you've got to walk that tight up and you can't just go blue. With me, there's no creativity without boundaries. If you're going to write a sonnet, it's fourteen lines, so it's solving the problem within the container. And I think for me, commercial television and those boundaries, I like it. I like that you can't use a certain language. I like that you have to be bright enough to figure out how to get your ideas across in that amount of time, with intelligence being the thing that you're you hope is showing, not officially but you wanted to be Oh, that was kind of bright. We have really good writers here. I think I can safely say that a lot of people in comedy did their best work here, even though there might be more successful in the things they did, Apple more commercially successful. And also, I really believe that if you're going to stay chap, you have to take fights. And that means there's always young people, there's always people who are hungrier and more ambitious coming in, and you're working with people at the point of their career when nothing matters but the work, how they live, how they perceived. Most of the people arrive here, their office is nicer than their apartment, you know, and that's sort of what it's always been. And people just completely devote themselves to the show. And I think you can't do that past a certain age. You know, you have become someone who when you genuinely talk to people about what a producer does in a constructive sense and you're not trying to be have a kind of pejorative about, you know, meddlesome and kind of attention seeking and credit seeking producers, you have become, you know, like one of the most important producers in the history of television, and a lot of that comes from in the history of the world, in all other universes and all other galaxies. Yeah, wherever, wherever product is consumed around the capsy. But you have become uh, you just ruined my whole I was trying to be so heartfelt here, but you know it's okay, you're not um well, but you have become someone who embodies to me what a great producer really really is, and that is someone who you know everyone's job and you know when what they're doing, even in the smallest detail, when it's working and when it's not working. I think that what I liked, and maybe it's growing up in Canada. But the actor manager, you know, I know with Shakespeare not to put myself in the same category. That's really for others to do. But the I know that he had to have a guy like Farley and Blushi that the audience loved, and Falstaff ends up in play that really did it doesn't, but you know he was brought back by popular demand. And I think that when you're dealing with actors and writing and costume people and an audience and how you're going to get people into the globe, theater. It's not much different. And the fact that there's the greatest poetry probably ever written in the English language is also in there. That wasn't what he was advertising. Producing for me anyway, is like an invisible art. If you're any good at it, you leave no fingerprints. The writer wrote it, you always say that was so and so script, the director directed it. The star had the idea in high school. And that's kind of what it is. And the only way you prove your worth is you leave a body of work and people go, oh, that accident happened there again that oh, I see. So you know, you try and get the best out of people. If you look around the room and you're the smartest person in the room, then you're in the wrong room. You know, you want to get the most talented people you can find and then UMU the best of them. But you also have, if I may say so, a kind of Darwinnian approach to this. In the years I've been here, where you're not someone who's sitting down. I mean you've had close personal relationships and you've developed lifelong or career long friendships with some of the most important people you've worked with. But as a rule. I don't see you sitting down like a father figure to the people here. You tend to let them slug it out and let the cream rise to the top. Correct somebody's in trouble. But talking about in the creative process, I think that you kind of guide it, you don't make it. Yeah, the only way you can manage creative people's very loose reigns. I think if you're all over everything between us in there, you know what that meeting was like, and it's just there's no more appeal, then this is what we're doing, this is how we're doing it, and and everyone falls into place. But up to that point, it's kind of fractious, and everybody's got an opinion and nobody likes anybody else's work. The idea that it's a variety show. By that, I mean that there's a variety of styles and tastes, that there's the lowest comedy and and the brightest comedy, and that they all coexist. Or that this group doesn't like that musical act and that group thinks that the joke's on updated they don't agree with the politics of it. That's kind of the community of it, and that's Lord Michaels. He says he picked up his value system at summer camp. I wanted to make fair. What is never a fair thing? He said? Show business we were a community. It was just set up. What was a value system? Do you know what I mean? It was not driven by economics. It was driven by if it's successful, will be more than enough money. Uh. Are you're saying you're disappointed in how you've done No, I'm saying I would do it exactly the same way. Now. Yeah, I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing in depth conversations with artists, writers, policymakers and performers. Well, I have a half a bagel in the morning with cheese. That's sort of my standard breakfast, and my wife gets on me for that. You can listen to past episodes and here's the thing. Dot Org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing. Divorce is terrible. Divorce is difficult. It's a chaos. We have no rules for it. It's so incredibly painful. I think about the impact of worse on children a lot because I'm divorced and have a daughter. Erica Young knows a lot about divorce. She's been married four times. Divorce was the hardest thing I ever went through. I have a friend who said to me once when he was getting divorced from his wife, who could believe that after we were in the delivering room together, after I watched that baby come out, who could believe we'd ever be a part? Both Erica and her daughter, Molly young Fast are writers. Erica is best known for her nineteen seventy three book Fear of Flying, which ushered in the second wave of feminism. Molly, a mother of three kids herself, published her second novel, The Social Climber's Handbook last year. What did you learn about marriage from your parents? Mom? Can I answer that question honestly? Honestly is the only way? Well? I would say, have you seen Kramer versus Kramer? That was my general impression of marriage from my upbringing. But you know, my mom had some good, useful suggestions, but ultimately I sort of had to find my own way, though she did eventually marry a really great guy and they've been married for twenty one years. And he's a divorce lawyer. He's a practicing divorce Yeah, he is. And Molly used to say, when I married him and then she married the one you can never divorce the divorce. Is he a good guy. He's a really good guy. He's a totally menchi person and I like him better than when I married him. What was it like for you to deal with your parents divorce? Your parents divorce as an only child? Who did you talk to? Who did you do? Obese nanny from Trumbull, Connecticut And she was my confidence, like crumpets, those tasty cake ring everything. Um, I think I mean Cramer Versus Kramer was a great movie because that was my story and it was a lot of kids. It was just a really gruesome seventies divorce and that's what they had during that time. Divorce wasn't set up the way it is now now. If you have a divorce, there's no way that a mother is going to lose custody. Certain things are known. Back then, it was a totally unknown world of divorce. Let me just I don't want to get carried away by divorce being different in different decades, because I'm not sure that's true. I think it may look that way to you, Molly, but I think divorce is a catastrophic event for children for women from men. It's very, very difficult to go through. It is traumatic. When you come to the other side of it, you say, I will never do that again, which is why I was single for nearly a decade between Molly's dad and Ken, because I wanted to make sure I would never make them. But after you have three divorces, Yeah, you were divorced. What made you believe success was a waiting you with your current husband? What gave you the We stamped on our wedding invitation a triumph of hope over experience, which came as the result of what how did you triumph? Ken had been married three times. I had been married three times. We were very cautious about tying the non you were not that cautious because you've only been together for three months. When you go, that's right? Am I right? Is she right? We married after we knew each other three months. But this isn't an amazing and it's been most successful with him. Yeah, but there are certain things about me and Ken. We grew up in similar circumstances. Our parents were Depression era people. We knew that you couldn't be married and fool around. You couldn't be married. Secrets to their marriage. They have different bathrooms, right, They each of their own bath critical, and they're tired. They're too tired to to do new curtains and bookshelves. The reason why we got married rather than lived together was because he said to me, if we just lived together, one day, we'll have a fight and you'll say I'm leaving or I will. We have a bad record. If we get married, we know we're going to make it work. Marvin Worth, Marvin Great Marvin Worth. He was Lenny Bruce's manager, then went on to become a famous movie producer. Produced Malcolm X, the movie with Spike Lee. Famous movie producer. He was from Brooklyn. He had the heaviest New York accent of any man I've ever heard of my life. And I said to him, how did you and Joan do it? How have you and John been married for for forty years? Like it was you don't fight? And he said to me, uh do, Joan and I fight? We fight every day. We fight all day. What we do is fight, he said, But then we after we're done fighting. I say, Joan, I'm not going anywhere, and you're not going anywhere, So what are we gonna do about this problem. I'm not going anywhere. That's what Ken and I wanted, Like leaving is not an option. And actually this is very funny because he says I'm not going anywhere, just what Rvin said, and I say I couldn't stand anywhere else. And part of it is we really make each other laugh all the time. When we have a disagreement. We always get it out there. We don't hold it in. Now that I have kids, I feel like what they don't tell you about marriage is that marriage is incredibly hard work. Molly got married at but Molly's whole childhood and upbringing had been different from mine. I married my first lover, my college sweetheart. I had no experience with anybody else when I married him. That was very much my generation. Molly sewed her wild oats during college, and when she met Matt, she knew this was the man she wanted to be with. It was a totally different pattern. But I think how much wild else did? So what did you travel with the stones? I think I um, I really grew up because I got sober when I was nineteen, So I went to rehab when I was a teenager, so that I was until I went to we have very crazy. But then once that happened, I then started to focus on, you know, what was important. So by the time I got married, I was already, you know, sober a long time. My grandmother was very bohemian, and my mother was very bohemian. Yeah, and they all my grandparents had open marriages. I also wanted a bourgeois life, Like I didn't want to be bohemian. I don't want to be single and have a boyfriend who had a motorcycle and cowboy boots. None of that appealed to me. What effect, if any, did it have on you that your mother was viewed as and I'll let you put in the words, you know, your mother's expertise and female sexuality. What impact did that have on you when you were growing up? Um? I think more having a mother who was very successful in working a lot at more of an effect on growing because she just traveled a lot and worked a lot and felt very stressed a lot. I think that had more of an effect on me. Then. I didn't particularly know what she did until when I was in sixth grade. I went to this very progressive school and a little boy was like your mom writes dirty books. I went to science teacher and I was like, he's not allowed to say that to me, and she was like, but she does. And I was like, oh my god, she does. But the fact that we grew up in a townhouse with a hot pink door and then it was purpose, it was right. We had paintings of naked lesbians having sex on the walls. Yes, why because no they're not famous. Ladder Sladder. I have a schlatterer, but I keep it under my bed. When I want to get things going, I want to I want to pick it up. Would you like to? Relating to the erotic art I had lived in house guests. They had lived with Shirley McClain. Sureley finally threw the map. They were about a hundred years old at that point when Shirley threw them out. They came to live with me and they gave me erotic artists. Thank you can't imagine the Slatter sisters. They were really old fashioned bohemians like Henry Miller. In the sixties. They had lived in Paris on the Boulevard Reastpy and had orgies that was all over. In the seventies they went to India with Shirley and wrote about past life regression in the eighties. They got into antioxidants before anybody knew about it. They were at the head of every curve. They were not just about and they invented the iPad. They did not I admire them because they were true bohemian to me. If they ever, don't comment on this sho until she finishes. Describe your relationship with your mother, Donick pleasant. She's very supportive, are you talking about She's very supportive and she talking about you like she's your husband's ex. Pleasant, Judy and I have a very pleasant relationship, affable, Charving. No, my mother has always been phenomenal with me, so supportive. I don't give her things to read because she says to me, she calls me if it says, how much of a genius are you? She's very supportive. How would you describe your relationship with Molly? I absolutely adore her beyond that though, beyond that, I think she's I think she's smart, I think she's funny. I think she has incredibly good judgment. I've watched her grow and emotionally, and she has bearded some dragons that were very hard. What do you disagree about everything, everything, something, Give me something primary, what's consistent? I think of her? It is very reactionary liberal, and I'm much more conservative in certain ways politically. Yeah, do you think that some of your conservatism stems from your reaction to her? The kind of sexual drum she was beating throughout her I take it was con I was not beating a sexual drum. What were you doing. I was trying to write honestly about the way and a young woman thinks and feels. And because our society is so curiously puritanic, people took that honest book, which got inside a women's fantasy life, her marrital life and so and they took it as a horny book. And I am truly disappointed that the closest person in the world to me has bought into that view. But okay, she doesn't have to be my literary critic. She's my daughter, and I love her, and she can do no wrong. I hope that someday she will read my work and see that that was not what I was doing. Daughters do torture you in a way that I mean that sons are not capable of, in my opinion, But I also think that my mom's legacy to me was a up being honest and how important it is to be honest. And I do really hate you know, that kind of pretension or falseness, and that is something that really has been your legacy. Um, this is obviously an important subject for me because I have a daughter, and that is What do you think of the state of female sexuality in the culture today. I think they're overwhelmed with a false image of sexuality before specific before they're emotionally ready to deal with it. I think they use their manipulation of boy's sexuality as a power trip to get even with men for the other power men have. But I think to be a young woman today of the of your daughter's age is a very sticky wicket, and I think that you really need a parent who can guide you. How would they guide them to tell them that what they see around them in the media is not true, because I try to do that. If I were dealing with your daughter, I would try to reassure her that this is a very confusing time of life. I don't and that what she sees around her as incredibly confusing. Most of the women, the young women are as confused as she and are showing off by pretending to not be confused, and I would try to convey to her how difficult adolescence is, how many messages are coming at her at once, and how hard it is to make sense of it. That's what I would do. I plan to do that with my granddaughter, who I'm sure we'll say something cynical to me. But I also think some of it is you, just as you can't hear that kind of thing from a parent at I mean, maybe there are some kids who can. I never could, you know. I'm not entirely sure. I had a beloved child psychiatrist growing up who I really liked a lot, and I think maybe that's possible, or teacher or school, so maybe the parent can't really say those things. I think it's right, and I also think we don't automatically know how to be. I think it's primarily different from when you wrote your earlier books. What's changed for when the media is more all pervasive and the image of women is even more confusing than it's ever been. I believe that's true. On the one hand, you're supposed to look like a fashion model retouched, and on the other hand, you're supposed to claim to a sophistication you don't and cannot have at that age. And I think that women who are fourteen fifteen are in the most difficult position they have ever been in modern society. What do you think about that? I mean, I agree, I think there's a lot of sexuality. I think it's not explained to young girls in a way very confusing, Molly. But I think that's a legacy of the feminist movement. I mean, we said we want a legacy on the feminist movement. It is the legacy. And here I really feel fierce. It is the legacy of a distortion of women's desire for equal rights. Equal rights are not platforms, shooting and naked clothes equal right. But you can't blow up an atom bomb and then choose how it's going to go. But we we did not blow up that atom bomb. The media took our legitimate desire for equality and turned it into garbage. But they turned it into what the people wanted. First of all, I don't think they wouldn't exist. It wouldn't exist people want. We'll be back in a moment after a word from our sponsored Victoria's secret. I disagree think, first of all, this is what the people want. People buy Britney Specs because no, no, no, no, did he. This is what I disagree. I blame the media, and I blame the entertainment industry, and I blame that whole matrix for all of it. I think of the most absurd person from the past, if you took content loss and put him on Glee, he'd become a gay icon today, content Flass. I think it's brilliant. If the Internet had existed when content Flass was here, everybody would be worshiping Canton Flows. You can't and it has nothing to do with you. You can't control what people are going to But this is what people want, this is what is thrust upon them, and it has nothing to do with First of all, you are the media, and you are the media, and I am in some effect of the media, So I disagree with you. I mean, I take a paycheck from media companies to do what they pay me to do, but I'm not responsible for everything else they do. Let's just say this. You take the top women in entertainment, and I'm gonna be generous. I'll say half one half of them really have talent. Mariah Carey really can sing. Beyonce Knowles really can sing. But then there's the other half. They have no talent. It's all electronic, le enhanced. It's all about many people who are talentless. But I think the interpretation of of our of sexuality and our culture is so twisted. Sexuality is and lubricant is true intimacy with another person that sometimes results and genitals getting together and sometimes does not. Why are you so cynical? Why are you so cynical that awful? You're the one saying lubricants and dolls. I don't even think that's sex. I think that if you have real intimacy with somebody, he can touch you here and you get excited. He can touch you on your neck, he can hold your hand in the movies later on. I'll show you the spot I touch. It never fails. People have no idea what sexuality really is. I can talk with you about for a couple more hours. Let's do it next time. Erica Jong and Molly young Fast. They say they've toyed with the idea of writing something together many times, but both agree they never ever will. It would be just the end of our relationship. Here's the thing is produced by Emily Boutine and Cathy Russo, with support from Jim Briggs, ed Herbstman, Melanie Hoops and Monica Hopkins. Thanks to Trey Ka and Lou Okowski. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the Thing.