00:00Most of the things that I didn't know were things that didn't have to do with the show, like the things before the show.
00:06Well, okay, I'll give you two examples.
00:08One thing that really surprised me, and it's a part of the book that I loved writing,
00:13is that after pitching this show in Hollywood for years, he finally was offered, NBC said,
00:19come to New York and you could do this show.
00:21And he almost said no.
00:23He came really close to saying no because he didn't want to leave Los Angeles.
00:27He was really comfortable in California by then.
00:29He loved the beach and he loved the desert.
00:33And he thought that New York was pretentious.
00:36It was also, in 1975, really unsafe.
00:40It was a mess.
00:41It was declaring bankruptcy.
00:43Murders and burglaries were up.
00:46That was the era of taxi driver and escape from New York.
00:50So he was thinking, gee, I kind of like California.
00:54And another thing about that whole discussion that I think is interesting is he started,
01:00and I think coming from Canada, right, where it's cold and boring,
01:03he liked the fact that he always says that California invented the idea of fun as a value not to be ashamed of.
01:12You know, that in California you could read Chekhov and go see an Elvis movie,
01:17and that didn't mean that you weren't a serious person.
01:20And he said, you know, people in New York basically just wanted to go into the basement
01:24and read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, you know.
01:27So he thought it was a sort of pretentious, superior culture,
01:33and he didn't really want anything to do with it.
01:35So he almost said no.
01:37And if he had said no, the show wouldn't have happened.
01:41And then I guess another thing that I didn't know at all,
01:45I mean, I did know that in the 90s he tussled with the network and with Don Ulmeier,
01:51and they made him fire Farley and Sandler.
01:56But I didn't know that the network had gone so far as to interview people to maybe replace him.
02:03You know, I didn't know that they had reached out to Judd Apatow, who was just in his 20s,
02:08and had these kind of, you know, very vague conversations with him about, you know,
02:15maybe coming in in a producer role, and who knows what would happen next.
02:20Because they were really thinking of firing Lorne.
02:23And, you know, Judd loved the show.
02:27It was always his dream to work at the show, and Sandler was his roommate.
02:32So, you know, he knew the show well.
02:35And so he was intrigued, but he was so put off by the sneaky back-channel behavior of these guys
02:42that I think he felt that karmically it would just be so wrong and so disrespectful of Lorne
02:48and what Lorne had created that he told them, forget it.
02:52But I don't think anyone, I mean, I don't think it's widely known that he was really on the ropes there.
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