JIM CARREY AUDITIONED FOR SNL TWICE, AND WAS REJECTED TWICE.
A photo of Jim Carrey
VITTORIO ZUNINO CELOTTO/GETTY IMAGES
Hollywood’s original $20 Million Man was rejected twice by SNL. The first time was in 1980, when—citing burnout—Lorne Michaels asked to take a year off. He thought that the show would go on hiatus with him, but the network bumped associate producer Jean Doumanian into Michaels’s position to keep the show going. Her first order of business? Shake up the cast a bit. Carrey auditioned, but Doumanian hired Charlie Rocket instead. So he tried again, but again got a “no.” Michaels isn’t taking the blame for this oversight. In the book Live from New York, he says that “Jim Carrey never auditioned for me personally.” Carrey did eventually make his way onto the studio’s set; he guest hosted in 1996 and again in 2011 and 2014 (and made a quick cameo in 2003).
LAST ACTION HERO KILLED A HANS AND FRANZ MOVIE.
The idea for a Hans and Franz movie began—and ended—with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who suggested the idea to Kevin Nealon and Dana Carvey when he guest starred in a segment. In 2012, Nealon talked about the folded project with the Tampa Bay Times, admitting that: “Yes, we wrote a musical! Hans & Franz: The Girly Man Dilemma. I wrote it with Conan O'Brien, Robert Smigel, and Dana Carvey. Arnold Schwarzenegger was co-producing with us, and he was going to star in it. We got it written, sold it to Sony. But I think Arnold got cold feet.”
In a 2010 interview with The A.V. Club, Smigel said that the problem really came down to the box office bomb that was Last Action Hero, saying “That movie came out and it was a failure and I was told by his agent that Arnold decided [adopts Schwarzenegger voice], ‘I will never be myself in a movie again! It can’t be done, this is the proof. I can’t play myself in a movie, automatic failure.’”
ROBERT SMIGEL HAS WRITTEN A HANDFUL OF UNPRODUCED SNL MOVIES.
In that same interview with The A.V. Club, Smigel noted that “I’m guilty of writing probably as many SNL movies as anybody, but mine have never been made.” He’s not kidding. Among those stalled features is Da Movie version of Da Bears sketch, a.k.a. Bill Swerski’s Superfans, one of SNL’s longest-running sketches, which premiered on January 12, 1991 (with Joe Mantegna as the titular Swerski). When the opportunity arose to turn the sketch into a film, Smigel and Bob Odenkirk (who had created the original sketch with Smigel) jumped at the opportunity, with Smigel leaving his job as Conan’s head writer to work on the script.
But a bad year for SNL on the small screen spelled trouble for anyone involved with the show. “There was an awful article written in New York Magazine about the show and the network wanted to lay down the law,” recalled Smigel, which meant “no SNL movies.” But the script was not a total loss; in 2010, Smigel, Odenkirk, Mantegna, George Wendt, Mike Ditka and Richard Roeper (as narrator) staged a live reading of the script at Chicago’s Just for Laughs festival.
THE FESTRUNK BROTHERS WERE DEVELOPED AS TWO SEPARATE SNL CHARACTERS.
The Festrunk brothers, also known as “Two Wild and Crazy Guys,” were based on separate characters that Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd had developed individually. When Martin hosted SNL in the 1970s, the two morphed their characters into a set of brothers.
GILBERT GOTTFRIED BEAT OUT PAUL REUBENS FOR A SPOT ON SNL.
Paul Reubens, a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman, has a theory as to why Gilbert Gottfried got the SNL spot the two of them auditioned for in 1980: He believes that Gottfried was favored for being friends with one of the producers. “I was so bitter and angry,” Reubens told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I thought, ‘You better think about doing something to take this to the next level.” Which is how Pee-wee’s Playhouse came to be. “So I borrowed some money and produced this show. I went from this Saturday Night Live reject to having 60 people working for me.”