During her first week on the job, Fey found herself having to rein in Rocky Balboa's incessant chatter.
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In Tina Fey’s first week working as a writer on Saturday Night Live, her superiors charged her with reining in the Italian Stallion and getting him to speak proper English. They might as well have put her in the ring with Apollo Creed.
The culture in the offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza is notoriously cutthroat, and that’s exactly how Tina Fey likes it. The accomplished SNL head writer who turned her experiences on the show into a second hit NBC comedy with 30 Rock thrives in high-stress environments, and keeping her cool when the world’s most talented and temperamental artists are working 16 hour days while wired on cocaine and pissing in jars is second nature to Fey. But getting a certain SNL host to speak his first language in a way that was clear and coherent on a soundstage was a daunting task, even for her.
Fey spoke to the makers of the Peacock docuseries SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night about her time on the show, revealing that, in her very first week as a lowly SNL writer, she had to tell Sylvester Stallone to his face that he wasn’t enunciating properly. Presumably, her bosses said to each other, “If she dies, she dies.”
“I think possibly my first week as a writer, Sylvester Stallone (hosted) and a note came back that was, ‘Tell him he needs to enunciate more. We can’t understand him,’" Fey explained of her earliest experiences on SNL in the docuseries. “And then the writer that I was working with, he was more experienced, and he’s like, ‘Okay, you go do it.’”
Fey experienced a bit of the classic rookie initiation, “But it’s an excellent way to learn under pressure,” the actor and writer shared. “Mr. Stallone was quite gracious about it. It was evident that he had encountered that feedback before in his career.”
And, to be clear, Fey is in favor of giving the new girl a hard time in her first week, because competition builds character — and comedy. “Even though everyone at SNL is working together to make one thing, it’s (actually) built on competition. It is built for like, ‘See you at the table,’” Fey explained. “I have to say as head writer, I came in from Chicago and I was ready to fight whoever, but the rewrite tables were tough. They were grouchy.”
“People would take the rundown of the show and just go sketch by sketch and make fun of it, like the title and make fun of it, goof on it, goof on it, goof on it,” Fey explained of the infamously stressful SNL writers’ meetings. “You would leave the room fully knowing that that writers' room was taking a shit on it while you were gone, and that’s just kind of the way it was.”
“I don’t know if its the same anymore, and if it’s not, maybe it should get that way again a little bit,“ Fey side-eyed the current SNL staff. “I think it’s good.“
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