Hi from Philadelphia, I'm Los Angeles. It's 80s all over bonus episode in which we highlight the films of the first years guest of SNL and as always on the stage I am joined by my co-host who has been on Saturday Night Live 17 times Mr. Drew McQueenie. Hey, how you doing? Very, very good to be here. Now Drew as the reigning champion of SNL guest hosts, what is your favorite thing about the show? I know I'm very hot and cold on Saturday Night Live. I have a lot of nostalgia, not only for my early childhood SNL, but my young adult SNL and even much more recent. And it's fun to kind of chart the history of your life by different eras. There was the early era that we're going to talk about that now. Then there was the Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, then there was a kind of a down period, but there were still some great episodes and great cast members, then there was the Will Ferrell and Amy Poler and that crew, and I always skip the, and like, and then there were, you know, who came after that? Who there was the Seth Myers? Listen, that's the thing is there's so many errors.

And I always feel like people are largely defined by when they first saw us and now. Like that tends to be the SNL. That's how they define SNL. I would say to flip your ship. Yeah. And that's perfectly valid. The thing is it's been around now for so long that it's an institution. And yeah, you end up bouncing off it in some way, whether you like it or not.

I have made this point before and I genuinely believe it. No television show will ever have the footprint on American film that Senator Live has had and there just can't be any equivalent. There's nothing that's gonna run 45 years. Well, comedy film, let's say.

I even, not, no, because you, okay, Howard Shore, the very first musical director for Center Net Live, is also an Academy of Water Wonder for Lord of the Rings. I mean, the, the, that's a fair point. The graduate isn't unbelievable. There's such an insane talent pool that's gone through there over the years. Your breath is unbelievable. I'm sorry, I'm doing something about it. But I feel like the shadow at casts is almost impossible to calculate. And it's when you look at everybody who's worked on the music and the sets and the show, and we tend to think of the cast members as SNL. Or maybe we expand that to include the writers room as well, but genuinely, Saturday and Live,

the fact that it has been on the air

and that it works week after week,

that they actually get a show up is kind of insane.

And I really can't believe that they've done it

as long as they have and all the people

that have gone through those doors.

So when you say, when you propose this topic,

Saturday and Live movies, it's a giant topic and something I've been obsessed with for years and there's overlap with Second City and with, you know, there's live and there's all these groups that kind of like, yeah, exactly, that kind of border up against Saturday Night Live, but Saturday Night Live has become sort of the institutional monolith that covers all of it. So I think it's a broad topic and I think it's important to kind of define what you're talking about when you talk about SNL and movies. What we're gonna be talking about specifically here are the first few feature films from the original cast members. And that is because, as Drew pointed out, that if you were gonna do official SNL movies, that is movies that were based on SNL characters, you have the Blues Brothers, then you have about 12 years of nothing. So we wouldn't have much to talk about, although we will touch on the brilliant, amazing, epic, awesome, car crash musical brilliance of the Blues Brothers. But we thought we'd just go cast member by cast member. And since we love them all in very distinct ways, let's start off with a great comedian, a woman who didn't have kind of the breakout film career, but has quietly worked consistently since the early 80s, and that is Lorraine Newman. Is, is she the most underrated cast member

of the original crew?

I think, I think a lot of people,

especially a lot of young people,

may not understand how great Lorraine was on the show.

And certainly like that documentary

that came out this year, Love Gilda,

has done a nice job of setting a framework

for remembering how great Guilder Radner was.

But Lorraine Newman was a character actor

and the great thing about her on the show was, but the Rain Newman was a character actor and the great thing about her on the on the show was she vanished into characters like she really became each of the people she played and she was not she rarely like stood front and center and I think that the reason that hurt her was because a lot of the cast did a very good job of carving out space for themselves as stars she just built a really good space for herself as a performer and as a utility performer. I think she's great and wildly underrated and one of my very favorite sketches from that early run of shows involves her and Christopher Lee. And I think it's a beautiful piece of performance from him from her. And really, I hope that at some point Lorraine gets some. She deserves it. Oh, yeah. She is great on the show. We'll run through her 80s films. She had a quick, uncredited bit in Woody Allen's Star Dust memories. Then she appeared as Zoe in, I'm sorry, Zarelda in Holy Moses, Drew, a film that we both adore. Oh, yeah. Oh, and it's funny because you can see like Holy most Moses is a good example of, okay, let's pull people from all these places, we gotta make sure we get some SNL people in there. And so certainly she benefited from some of that early energy. She's the female lead there. She is the, you know, and I think if she had had one or two great scripts behind her, she might have broken through on film because again, it's all about with her giving her the right material. She's an actor who you've got to give it to her on the page, man. Yeah. And her only other 80s film. Now again, she's done a lot of small parts in voice work since then. But her only other 80s film is a film that I believe Drew digs called Invaders from Mars. Yeah It's it's fun to see her pop up in that one and that's a really good use of sort of the Arch kind of Bigger act like that movie everything in it is kind of heightened and surreal and a little strange and Lorraine hits that tone perfectly in that film. She fits right into what Toby was doing. Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of props to Lorraine Newman always thought she was particularly funny in any kind of commercial parody. Whenever she was the housewife, the long-suffering housewife and she would like cock her head and go, there's got to be a better way. I really loved on SNL one of and this is a film nerd joke on film nerd jokes, but I loved her Lena Wortmueller. And the notion that she would want to do a Lena Wortmueller impression is already so film nerdy to begin with. But yeah, every film nerd I know in LA knows her and everybody says she is the coolest and loves her SNL legacy. I love hearing that people are at peace with the time they had not still like wrestling with what it was or what it meant and she seems like she completely loves her place in that firmament. Yep and she is on the Mount Rushmore of SNL immortalized as one of the first not for a not ready for prime time players. And I would say that being designated the underrated one on that crew, not not a bad designation. So respect to Lorraine Newman. And also let us now transfer the equal amount of respect and love to the late great brilliant, Gilda Radner, late wife of Dune Wilder, who passed away just years ago as well. And boy, what a lovely couple they must have been to have dinner with. Are you kidding me? Dune Wilder and Gilderadner, to have dinner with them in 1985 or something? Oh. I have the mad affection for Gilder. And I'm glad that love Gilder exists now. I think it is the kind of thing that you kind of sometimes have to do. You have to go back and set a context for people who weren't there when it happened. And I don't, I think if you missed Guilda the first time around, you may never get it. Because we've talked about this before. There's great actors who film didn't serve them very well. And you know, I look at women in red or Haunted Honeymoon or some of the, and I know those are written by Gene Wilder who adored her. It's weird though because I don't even think he knew quite what to do with her on film. There was such a specific, brilliant energy to gild it. And yet, part of what I love about her is that vulnerability that she always struck me as a kid who walks into the room during Thanksgiving and just wants everybody to laugh for a few minutes. Yeah, very childlike, very vulnerable, very open. She as a kid, she always reminded me of Lily Tomlin only that kind of louder and a little bit sillier while a lot sillier actually. But I loved, there was a lot of stuff that Gilderad and your did on the show that I didn't really get, but to me, she was the first experience I ever had with like John Belushi. I'd seen boys do that before. Gilder Rattner, I think, might have been one of the very first women I ever saw on television who would do like go for broke for a laugh. Loud and over the top, fine, disgusting and obnoxious, fine, weird dances and risk-looking, fine, brilliant, comedian, brilliant, loved her on the show, did not have as you as you led to, as you mentioned, did not transfer necessarily to film. I think we're sensing a theme here in that the late 70s and early 80s. There were not great roles for women, even if they were world class comedians who did live comedy once a week on National Telecom. Oh, yeah. And even her showcase movie, Guild of Live, feels like hit and miss. There's some good moments in it. But even there, it's like, what do you do with the energy that is guilded? And how do you showcase her most properly? And I get the impulse like Lauren Michaels, it was so important to him to get yelled alive going and to give her that showcase that was sort of apart from the show. But at the same time, I think it was an attempt to redress what was starting to happen on the show, which was Dan and John in particular and some of the guys in the writing staff had sort of moved to the center of the show and had taken the show over by force And it's not that it was unfair It's just that that's what their personalities were they were were going to be the center of this we're going to take it It's gonna be about us and I think gilda and Garrett Morris and Lorraine Newman and Jane Curtain some of the other cast They weren't fighters. They weren't in there to brawl for their space and things. So I loved that Lauren did that for her and gave her a guild alive and gave her a place to try and showcase that. I just wish filmmakers had picked that up and run with it. Yes, she did some voice work in the TV film that many of us love called Animal Impics. And then she showed up in a weird ensemble comedy that given who's behind it and in front of the camera. It should have been a whole hell of a lot better drew. What do you think happened with first family? You know, we talked about this one and I think political comedy is hard. Broad political comedy is even harder. It's super, super broad and I'm not sure what the point of view is. It's made at a point where America is starting to swing super right again and we're running from Jimmy Carter and what looks like the collapse at the end of the late 70s. And it's, I don't know who the butt of the joke is. I don't know what the target of the joke is. It all feels a little racist and a little bit of it, you know, dated and first family is almost the opposite of what I think of as an SNL, where SNL was kind of pushing boundaries and was very progressive and it was trying to sort of rip through what it saw as the bullshit of television to show you that commercials are nonsense and they're just selling you stuff and don't take TV seriously. And they were using the medium to sort of destroy the medium whereas first family feels reactionary and it feels like old people making jokes and It's weird watching the SNL energy harnessed by guys who I think were a generation before them and threatened by them And that's what first family feels like on one hand first family feels very old-fashioned and kind of has whiskers on it as a farce But on the other hand, it also kind of feels like bad sketch, then an idea for a sketch about like, you know, political satire on SNL and it was turned down or it was too long and she went to Buck Henry and it's like, you know what, let's expand this. You know, like it just feels like a sketch that was expanded and not well. So let's move on to another vehicle between her and her late husband,

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