Yes, Legendary Director Francis Ford Coppola Directed Groundbreaking SNL Episode
The weirdest episode during SNL's "Weird Year" featured the iconic filmmaker calling the shots.
The most cinematic episode in Saturday Night Live history is finally ready for its closeup.
Season 11 (1985-86) marked the return of Lorne Michaels to the series he created a decade earlier, after five years away. In an effort to shake up SNL and to attract new, younger viewers, Michaels brought in a whole new cast headlined by Hollywood actors, including Academy Award-nominated Randy Quaid and up-and-coming stars Robert Downey Jr., Joan Cusack, and Anthony Michael Hall.
The creative chemistry didn’t quite blossom the way NBC hoped, with both viewers and critics underwhelmed, and so the writers and producers of the show cast their net deeper into Hollywood for what was both an ambitiously comedic premise and an inspired bit of publicity. Enter Francis Ford Coppola, the Oscar-winning director of “The Godfather,” who was enlisted to guest-helm an entire episode.
The result that aired on March 22, 1986, is perhaps the strangest episode in what has since been dubbed, “The Weird Year,” and not because avant garde composer Phillip Glass was the Musical Guest.
Coppola took top billing — this time for his work both behind and in front of the camera.
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"As an oddment of media archeology, the episode of Saturday Night Live “directed” by Francis Ford Coppola deserves more attention than it gets,” Professor Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, told NBC Insider by email. "The mid-1980s was a period of great transilience: SNL and Coppola were in major transitions. So were both American film and television, and the relationship between the two.
“Many of these changes are apparent in this peculiar episode."
Nearly four decades after that peculiar episode aired — and was relegated to a footnote in the history books of the longest running live show in television history — the Coppola show gets its due in the fourth and final installment of Peacock docuseries, SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, available to stream now.
Who hosted the Francis Ford Coppola-directed SNL episode?
Just how different the episode would be was apparent from the opening monologue — when the Host, George Wendt, famous for playing bar regular Norm on Cheers, entered the stage to solemn music and got only midway through his first joke.
"I have to say this really been a hectic hard week for me,” Wendt said. “Quite a contrast from the last few months when I basically have been sitting around on a barstool drinking beer all day ... and of course, before that I was working very hard on Cheers.”
The gag, centering around his beer-swilling role on the popular sitcom, got a solid laugh. However, it was immediately interrupted by Coppola from his perch on the crane camera. The Apocalypse Now director said that he wanted another take, despite Wendt’s protestations that it would ruin the spontaneity of the joke.
“I want you to react by laughing,” deadpanned Coppola to the live audience. "But if you don’t feel like laughing, I want you to go back and remember something from your childhood. It’s called sense memory. You’ll remember something that was funny and then you’ll laugh at the right point.”
Wendt's second delivery of the same joke received a louder ovation, and with it the first sign that this episode was going to be a departure from the ... ahem ... norm.
Over the succession of skits that followed, the dramatic auteur proved capable as a comic actor. In another gag, Coppola rails against his episode being interrupted by commercials after being promised by NBC President Grant Tinker — well, actually Jon Lovitz’s Pathological Liar pretending to be Tinker— complete creative control over the 90 minutes.
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Coppola then makes an interruption of his own during Dennis Miller’s “Weekend Update” segment, nixing a promised upcoming satellite interview with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet because it was too derivative of real nightly news.
While the episode ultimately didn’t much change the fortunes of the show that year, it did provide opportunities for the entire young cast to get their moments, a rarity in a season in which the film actors struggled with the sketch comedy format and were often outshined by improv veterans Lovitz and Nora Dunn.
Downey Jr. had a few zingers in several skits, although a bit where he was trapped in a suitcase and carried on stage by Quaid to deliver a "confrontational monologue" probably didn't make the future Iron Man's highlight reel.
Danitra Vance, though, delivered a powerful moment after Coppola interrupted a sketch featuring her recurring struggling actress character, Latoya Marie (aka “That Black Girl”), complaining about the stereotypes in the depiction. When he called in the writers to complain as to authenticity of the scene, three preppy white men emerge on stage, with the lack of diversity providing a deeper punchline than the original joke.
“When Francis came, he brought the whole cast together — and that was the first time that happened (that season),” associate producer Laila Nabulsi recalled in Beyond Saturday Night.
