00:00most of the things that I didn't know were things that didn't have to do with the show,
00:04like the things before the show. Okay, I'll give you two examples. One thing that really
00:09surprised me, and it's a part of the book that I loved writing, is that after pitching this show
00:15in Hollywood for years, he finally was offered, NBC said, come to New York and you could do this
00:20show. And he almost said no. He came really close to saying no because he didn't want to leave Los
00:26Angeles. He was really comfortable in California by then. He loved the beach and he loved the desert
00:32and he thought that New York was pretentious. It was also in 1975 really unsafe. It was a mess.
00:40It was declaring bankruptcy, murders and burglaries were up. That was the era of taxi driver and escape
00:49from New York. So he was thinking like, gee, I kind of like California. And another thing about
00:56that whole discussion that I think is interesting is he started, and I think coming from Canada,
01:01right where it's cold and boring, he liked the fact that, you know, he always, he always says that
01:06California invented the idea of fun as a value not to be ashamed of. You know, that in California,
01:14you could read Chekhov and go see an Elvis movie. And that didn't mean that you weren't a serious
01:19person. And he said, you know, people in New York basically just wanted to go into the basement and
01:24read the Tibetan book of the dead. So he thought it was a sort of pretentious superior culture and he
01:33didn't really want anything to do with it. So he almost said no. And if he had said no, the show
01:38wouldn't have happened. And then I guess another thing that I didn't know at all. I mean, I did know that
01:45in the 90s, he tussled with the network and with Don Ohlmeyer. And they made him fire Farley and Sandler.
01:55But I didn't know that the network had gone so far as to interview people to maybe replace him. You know,
02:02I didn't know that they had reached out to Judd Apatow, who was just in his 20s,
02:07and had these kind of, you know, very vague conversations with him about, you know, maybe
02:15coming in and a producer role and who knows what would happen next. And because they were really
02:21thinking of firing Lorne. And, you know, Judd loved the show. It was always his dream to work at the
02:28show. And Sandler was his roommate. So, you know, I knew the show well. And so he was intrigued, but
02:36he was so put off by the sneaky back channel behavior of these guys, that I think he felt
02:43that karmically, it would just be so wrong and so disrespectful of Lorne and what Lorne had created
02:49that he told them, forget it. But I don't think anyone, I mean, I don't think it's widely known
02:55that he was really on the ropes there.
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