James Andrew Miller > Quotes

“It’s a choice: Either you try to make it look easy or you emphasize how hard it is.”
― James Andrew Miller, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

“BILL MURRAY, Cast Member: Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever. So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?” We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know. And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there. It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.”
― James Andrew Miller, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

“JANEANE GAROFALO: Life is a boys club.”
― James Andrew Miller, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

“You’re only working with if you count the money at the end of the night. Otherwise you’re working for.”
― James Andrew Miller, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

“Nobody noticed the Kerry Washington opening that we did—they had done years ago with Jan Hooks. They did a similar sketch—Jan Hooks kept running out because a new woman was coming in. This was a year where they only had two women, and now the cast, the repertory cast, is 50 percent female for the first time, and it bothered me that why can’t we celebrate that? We’re not even allowed to say that in public because we don’t have a woman of the right color. We have two women of color, but they’re not the right color. It was an interesting, eye-opening experience just for race in America.”
― James Andrew Miller, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

“Take time every day to laugh, to think, to cry.”
― James Andrew Miller, Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN

“LORNE MICHAELS: I taught at an art school in Toronto, I was teaching improvisations, the conceptual art movement which was being talked about and on the edge of things in the early seventies. Where that and entertainment met was what Andy Kaufman was doing. It wasn’t just that he lip-synched to “Mighty Mouse”; it was that he only did that one part in it, that one line, and stood around for the rest. It was very conceptual, and it instantly signaled to the brighter part of the audience that that was the kind of show we were going to do. And they weren’t getting that anywhere else on television. In the first couple years, Andy must have been on close to ten times. One night he even read from The Great Gatsby. In the beginning I had Penn and Teller on a few times, because that was the DNA, but I couldn’t do that now. The pure variety show part of it is over. It’s a straight comedy show now.”
― James Andrew Miller, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

“STUART SCOTT: I can’t be that concerned with how I’m perceived. I care about how my mother and father think about me and how my friends and how my loved ones think about me. I care about how my ex-wife thinks about me; she and I are still good friends and we do a good job raising our kids. It matters to me. But it doesn’t matter to me what people who are writing a blog on the Internet think. I can’t think about that. Being a father. That’s it. That’s the answer. That’s my answer. I’m convinced of that. I remember there was a day—my oldest daughter, who is fourteen now, but when she was about two or three, there was a show called Gullah Gullah Island, a Disney show, that was her favorite TV show. I was doing the late-night SportsCenter that aired all morning long. So there was one morning and I’d done the show the night before, and I got up and I said, “Taylor, do you want to watch Daddy on TV?” And she said—and it’s not just what she said but how she said it—“No, I want to watch Gullah Gullah Island.” And I remembered thinking that day, if it’s not a big deal to her, and she was my life, then it can’t be that big of a deal.”
― James Andrew Miller, Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN

“never forget that lady. TRACY MORGAN: You know when I first saw Lorne Michaels? I was working at Yankee Stadium, before I got into show business. It’s where I met my wife fourteen years ago. I used to see Lorne Michaels go in Gate 4 every day. I was selling T-shirts and all that. I was a vendor at Yankee Stadium. Now look where I’m at. It was so ironic that I met Lorne Michaels like that. And now years later, he’s my boss and I’m working on his show. I didn’t know him. I was a kid from the ghetto, trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.”
― James Andrew Miller, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

“Mike was very good at making sure all roads led to him. He set himself up very intelligently. He was the guy who could get your kids into the best private schools; he was the guy who could get you into the best hospitals. We didn’t know it at the time, but he had a personal press guy, same one as Donald Trump—Howard Rubenstein—and this guy engineered a big Wall Street Journal story.”
― James Andrew Miller, Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency

“BERNIE BRILLSTEIN: O’Donoghue had the best line about the Muppets. He used to say, “I won’t write for felt.”
― James Andrew Miller, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

“it’s easier and more profitable to keep selling outrage than build any bridges.”
― James Andrew Miller, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

“I've only been to SNL three times, and one time I was there, Chevy and Billy were having a huge screaming fight in the hallway, and Michael O'Donoghue and Tom Davis were holding them back, and John and Danny jumped in because Chevy and Billy were really going to come to blows. I mean, it was a huge argument. And the thing I remember about Bill Murray—I don't know Bill Murray, but he's screaming, you know, foaming at the mouth, 'Fucking Chevy," and in anger he says, 'Medium talent!' and I thought 'Ooh boy, that's funny. In anger he says 'medium talent.' That really impressed me. I went, 'So, Bill Murray—wow, who is that guy?" —John Landis”
― James Andrew Miller

“I think Fox was paying him about a million bucks a year, and he had created the Ice Age franchise for them, which was billions of dollars of value. I said, “Here’s how we’re going to negotiate with Fox. On a separate track, we’re going to create a company that you’re going to run. We’re going to get off-balance-sheet financing and we’re going to align you with another global distributor.” At the time we had at least three studios that would be great strategic fits. But he didn’t want to be an employee, he wanted real ownership. So we created parallel paths. On one track was the Fox negotiation, which I told him would take a year, and they would give him a 15 percent increase. They would grind it out and play hardball. I told him, “At the end of the day, they’re not going to pay you anywhere near what you’re worth. But on this other track, we’ll create this opportunity to change your life, for you to have something of your own.” I remember having a meeting with Mark Shmuger and David Linde, who were literally in the first day of their new jobs as co-chairmen of Universal Studios, and Bryan, Richard, Kevin, and I met with them in their first official meeting and I pitched them the idea of being in business with Chris, and they said, “Yes. We want you to do it.” It took probably well over a year, but ultimately we created Illumination. Universal came in and financed the company 100 percent. They wanted to clean up their balance sheet because they were about to sell to Comcast, so we got paid an investment banking fee for $ 4 or $ 5 million, and then on top of that we’ve commissioned every movie that Chris has done. Chris got a very, very, rich deal, probably the best producing deal there is. The truth is, on Minions he’ll probably make $ 80–$ 90 million. To date he’s probably made hundreds of millions. And he’s got Despicable Me 3, and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.”
― James Andrew Miller, Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency

“You can’t tell nobody what they don’t know—not even that they don’t know”
― James Andrew Miller, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

“John is a bad boy, but a good man.”
― James Andrew Miller, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

“DOUG ELLIN, Writer and Director: When we went to sell Entourage to HBO, the character of Ari didn’t really exist. There was an agent, but at that point it was based on some version of Jeff Jacobs, my agent at the time. I first met Jeff when he was a counselor at the camp I went to when I was twelve, and he was what I knew best of as an agent. At the pitch meeting, it was me, Jeff, Steven Levinson, and Ari, who was there because he represented Mark Wahlberg. I had never even heard of Ari before this, but as soon as the meeting started, Ari said three or four things that just blew me away. The guy was unlike anyone I had ever met, and I remember I looked at Jeff right there and said, “This character is changing to Ari.”
― James Andrew Miller, Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency

“In the world of physics, when two spatially separated events occur at the same time, the question of whether they are absolute is a function of witnesses’ time frames, a phenomenon known as the relativity of simultaneity. The marriage of CAA and TPG arrived at a time when the CAA partners were still grappling with a radically changing media landscape and trying to get their own house in order financially. People believed TPG had summoned a series of budgetary reviews, but just as Noah started work on an ark before even a drop of rain, some financial controls were put in motion before TPG had to request, or insist upon, a single one. One affected area, expense accounts, may sound trifling, but not in the representation game. So it was that modifications in CAA’s travel and entertainment policies brought about changes in the culture as well. One example: For years the opulent St. Regis Hotel in New York City had served as a virtual dorm for CAA agents traveling on business. No more. New regulations were put in place prohibiting midlevel and junior agents from bunking there. Limits were also placed on dining allowances for midlevel and junior agents no matter what the city.”
― James Andrew Miller, Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency

“Dustin Hoffman once said to me, “Alec, we’re all in line; some of us are just in a shorter line.” It was a very wise statement, because that competition between performers to get scripts and parts is very real and very aggressive, even to people at his level. The biggest stars in the world, when I came into this business there was Nicholson, De Niro, Pacino, Hoffman, and Michael Douglas—a lot of great movie stars, and they were all jockeying to get material. That’s something that never changes. The preciousness of good writing, it’s very tough to come by.”
― James Andrew Miller, Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency

“Meanwhile, NBC brass were consumed with nervousness about the content of the show—about giving ninety minutes of network time a week to Lorne Michaels and his left-wing loonies. On the first show, with sometimes-racy comic George Carlin hosting, the network planned to use a six-second delay so that anything unexpected and obscene could be edited out by an observer from the Department of Standards and Practices (the censor), who would theoretically flip a switch in the control room and bleep the offending material before it went out naked onto the American airwaves. Over the coming months and years, various hosts or musical acts would make NBC executives more nervous than usual, and the notion of making the show not quite precisely literally live kept coming up.”
― James Andrew Miller, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

“I’m a good self-starter when it comes to guilt.”
― James Andrew Miller, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

“FRED WOLF: No one goes to Hollywood to meet their future husband or wife, or buy a house and have kids. They all go to Hollywood because they're kind of damaged and there's something they're searching for.”
― James Andrew Miller, Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live

“Vanity is the Death of Comedy.”
― James Andrew Miller, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

“once in a meeting about our written reports. “When you guys finish your shows, take that file and throw it out. Do not keep one piece of paper, because next year when we have to come back and do this again, it will force you to rethink everything you did, not just pick up from where you left off and implement the same procedures and production elements that you did last year.”
― James Andrew Miller, Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN

“RAND HOLSTON: Forrest Gump is a movie I am extremely proud of. I represented Wendy Finerman and Steve Tisch, the producers. STEVE TISCH: Gump was ’94 but we set up the project at Warner Bros. in ’85—a nine-year development gestation period. It didn’t hurt that Ovitz wanted Gump to be made. Hanks and Zemeckis were clients. When the head of the most important talent agency in the business at that time says he wants to make something happen and he’s very passionate about making something happen, it’s a lot of wind in your sail. RAND HOLSTON: We had to restructure the deal more than once. The studio decided it wasn’t willing to make the picture for what had been previously discussed, and when they gave us the new number, it was clear the only way to get the film made was taking the principals above the line—Bob Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, Wendy, and Steve—to take less cash up front, and we made sure they were able to get more gross points on the back end. This turned out to be a really good deal for all of them. ROBERT ZEMECKIS: The studio was going to shut the movie down if Tom and I didn’t give our fees back. This was something that they do all the time: There’s forty-eight hours left before you shoot, and they say you’ve got to take X amount of million dollars out of the budget. So we said, “How are we going to do that now? We’ve got to start shooting in forty-eight hours.” And it comes back, “Well, you guys are just going to have to give us back your fees.”
― James Andrew Miller, Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency

“JIM COULTER: One of the challenges in the investment business is what I’ll call uncommon wisdom. Common wisdom is what people think about a situation; it’s usually not that valuable because it’s something everybody sees. What is valuable is if you find uncommon wisdom, which is where you see something that the rest of the world sees one way and you see a different way. So when I first ran into CAA, my reaction was actually common wisdom that Hollywood agencies might be difficult to invest in, because they’re people businesses, and maybe not great stewards of capital. What surprised me is the deeper I looked, the more uncommon wisdom showed up, and things that I might have expected to be true weren’t necessarily the case. In 2010, when we first looked at the company, their sports business was still new, still in start-up phase, and still in cash flow negative. We looked at that business and could say, “Here’s something that represents a breakout opportunity for this business.” Concert touring was a much bigger business than I would have expected from the outside, and the strength of the TV business was stronger than I would have expected. The stickiness of CAA’s businesses and the resilience of their businesses were much stronger than I expected. The light went off for me that this is not only an agency; it is a content play because of their extraordinary access to a very large pool of content. As the value of content increases around the world, an investment in CAA would be the most diversified and interesting way to be in that marketplace.”
― James Andrew Miller, Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency

“Farley once stuck his ass out the window of the seventeenth floor at 30 Rock and took a shit. Another time, in front of twenty or twenty-five people in a very crowded writers’ room—mixed company, women, men—Farley came in naked. He has his dick tucked between his legs and he was doing Jame Gumb from Silence of the Lambs. He took a golf club and shoved it about three inches up his ass, then pulled the golf club out and started licking it.”
― James Andrew Miller, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests

“SYLVESTER STALLONE: Mike Ovitz carried a heavy hammer, and he swung it like he was Beverly Hills Thor. He went around smashing people, sometimes I think just for the fun of it. He did things to me that I thought were beyond unfair. We got into sort of a business with art, and the person he hooked me up with turned out to be a disaster, and had me spending a great deal of money on art that turned out to be—well, I don’t want to get into it because of the lawsuit, but it just wasn’t good. The next thing I know, he’s throwing an engagement party for them at CAA, a building that I basically put tons of money into with my commissions. I told him, “I find this to be really offensive. You know how much these people hurt me, yet you’re celebrating them?” He said to me, “What do you want me to do? Cancel it? Throw them out? And embarrass yourself and me all over the city? Would that make you happy?” I believe that was the last time I talked to him for many, many years. Is he beloved? That’s a rhetorical question.”
― James Andrew Miller, Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency

“The currency that matters most is story.”
― James Andrew Miller, Powerhouse

“ALAN ZWEIBEL: We worked on "Update" up to the very last minute. Between dress and air on Saturday nights, I would go up to my office and I would watch the eleven o'clock news and if something hit me, I'd write it and it would be on television a half-hour later. You know, there were two shows where I was literally under the "Update" desk writing stuff and handing it up to Chevy while he was actually on the air.”
― james andrew miller