Saturday Night Live alumnus Tom Schiller, who specialized in short films during his two stints on the venerable show, is an odd and fascinating guy. He made one of my favorite movies ever, the 35-minute “Henry Miller Asleep & Awake,” which may be the best profile of a writer in any format ever. I also had the odd joy of waiting on him two or three times when I was younger and working in service jobs. During each encounter, Schiller affected an extremely phony Russian accent, acting the part of a caricature of a recent immigrant. It was like he wanted me to know how fake the situation was because I was in a position where I had to be polite and play along. And so I did.

As part of Grantland’s coverage of SNL’s 40th anniversary, Alex Pappademas has an excellent interview with Schiller, in which he sifts through his own late-night career and weighs in on Lonely Island. The opening:

“Question:

How did you first meet Lorne Michaels?

Tom Schiller”

When I was about 17, I was already working for a documentary filmmaker in the Pacific Palisades and working on documentary films. I made my own film on Henry Miller. My father was a writer on I Love Lucy. I grew up on the set of I Love Lucy. I was actually there for the grape-stomping sequence when I was 6. And one day my father said, ‘You’ve got to meet this guy — he’s this Canadian writer, but he knows all the great restaurants in L.A.’ I thought, I don’t really care about the great restaurants in L.A., but OK. So Lorne came over to the house, and he seemed like a nice enough guy. The surprising thing was, he lit a joint in my room, which I would never do in my father’s house. I thought, Hmm — interesting, and I started hanging out with him at the Chateau Marmont, which had a lot of colorful regulars, some of whom would become the nucleus of Saturday Night Live.

Lorne kept talking about this late-night show, this comedy show he wanted to do. Like 24/7 he would talk about it, to the point of boredom. He kept asking me if I’d like to come work on it, and I was conflicted, because my then-pal Henry Miller said, ‘Don’t go work on TV, it’ll kill your soul.’ But Lorne kept painting this picture of New York, and being a writer, and working on a late-night show, and it sounded kind of interesting. Since I wanted to be a foreign-film director, L.A. didn’t seem like the place to be, and I finally succumbed and took his invitation. In the summer of 1975, I was in a little office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza with Lorne. I was sitting there with him as he started hiring all the writers and cast.

Question:

You were there for the big bang!

Tom Schiller:

Yeah. We used to go to Catch a Rising Star and the Improv to watch performers. I remember seeing Chevy Chase and Richard Belzer. There were auditions, and John Belushi came and auditioned as the Samurai, which led me later to write ‘Samurai Hotel’ for him.”

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“A place where I knew only starvation, humiliation, despair, frustration”: