Saturday Night Live, now in its 50th year, is more than TV’s longest-running variety series—or the highest-rated entertainment show on broadcast television among a key demographic. As a new biography of the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels, makes clear, the American public has taken ownership of SNL and refused to relinquish its grip. The show has become a personal artifact for generations, something like a beloved (and sometimes disappointing) relative or longtime buddy with whom you share in-jokes, rather than a TV comedy show created in 1975 for the sole purpose of filling a gaping hole in the weekend NBC schedule.
Out Tuesday from Random House, Lorne, by veteran New Yorker articles editor Susan Morrison, provides a rare peek behind the curtain at an enigmatic, Oz-like figure described by former employees as (among other things): aloof, cypher-like, having no center, cold, manipulative, a psychological terrorist, strange, inscrutable, distant, evil, even a “starfucker of the highest order.”
And yet Michaels is revered in certain quarters, a larger-than-life persona compared favorably to such fictional characters as Jay Gatsby, Charles Foster Kane, Tom Ripley, and “the Darth Vader of comedy.”
One of Michaels’s axioms—and he has many—is that there are no upsides to talking to reporters; little good can come from it. Feeling hurt and burned by the countless “Saturday Night Dead” newspaper and magazine articles, not to mention the several books about the show since its premiere, Michaels had never chosen to talk on the record for a biography—until he granted Morrison access. The resulting book provides not only a very rare look into a cultural institution that produces a live 90-minute comedy show some 20 times a year, but also a study of a man considered by some of his former employees to be a “once-in-a-generation talent,” someone who, as he once said of himself, has a “backstage pass to life.”
A brisk, breezy 656 pages, Lorne is packed with details to delight any SNL and pop-culture fan: Did you know that Michaels might have influenced Elaine’s spastic dance on Seinfeld? That Michaels expects cast members to pay for their own food at the SNL after-show parties? That, similar to the players for the Yankees, SNL performers are not allowed to have facial hair?
I spoke with Morrison about her new biography—a project that took nine years to complete—about a multimillionaire television and film producer who has achieved the near impossible: remaining relevant in a capricious American pop-cultural landscape for more than half a century.
Vanity Fair: How did you achieve what so many writers have wanted for so many years? That is, to have Lorne Michaels say yes to an authorized memoir?
Susan Morrison: Well, it isn’t an “authorized” bio, in the way that term is generally understood. Lorne had no control over it and asked nothing of me. Here’s what happened: Ten years ago, right after the SNL 40th anniversary, I was a new empty nester and had the ridiculous notion that I would have a lot of free time on my hands. I’d worked for Lorne briefly in 1984 when he did The New Show. I was [head writer] Jim Downey’s assistant. So I’d seen Lorne now and then over the years, in a very casual way. I also kept in touch with the writers I met on the show—George Meyer, Jack Handey, Steve Martin—who wrote for me over the years, including at the New Yorker. I went to SNL, or the after party now and then, sometimes with Lillian Ross, one of my writers at the magazine, who had also begun a profile of Lorne back in the 1970s. (It got derailed when William Shawn was fired and Lillian quit.)
Back to 2015: I realized that I had a real point of view about Lorne and the show, and I wrote a book proposal, taking care to indicate that I had not secured access to Lorne. There was a bidding war, and after I signed with Random House, I went to see Lorne in his ninth floor office at 30 Rock. I told him that I’d just signed a contract to write a book about him and the show. I said that I didn’t need anything from him—he understood that I knew my way around the comedy world and was pretty well connected. But I said that my book would be stronger and richer if he wanted to participate in it and talk to me.
He hemmed and hawed a bit and said he’d think it over. A few days later, we met for a drink and he just started telling stories. He has rarely talked much to the press, but he is one of the world’s great talkers. (He once said, half joking, that a doctor had told him that he had twice the lung capacity of a normal human.) Lorne is a little bit superstitious and I think that he liked the fact that, in 1976, when I was 16, I was in the audience for one of the shows that Elliott Gould hosted during the first season. He loved that show, and he seemed to find some meaning in the fact that I’d been there from the beginning.
So you were taking a chance here. How would you have proceeded if Lorne hadn’t said yes?
I would have forged ahead interviewing everyone else, the way we do in the magazine world when we do a “write-around.” But I honestly did think that he would participate. I just had a feeling.
When did you begin the actual writing process for the book?
Starting in 2016, I would go over to 30 Rock on many Friday evenings and ask him questions. We had a nice rapport, and it was very pleasant. His involvement evidently relaxed all the people in his orbit—the current and former writers and cast—because it was relatively easy for me to arrange to interview all of those people. The people Lorne hires are smart, articulate, and funny, so talking to them was a journalist’s dream.
In November 2018, I asked if I could embed with him for a week at the show. That was the week that Jonah Hill hosted. It was a great time to be there: there was unrest in the staff (Leslie Jones felt that no one was writing for her), Alec Baldwin got arrested that week (he’d scuffled with someone over a parking spot in Greenwich Village), and Pete Davidson was being roasted on the Internet over his breakup with Ariana Grande. That Saturday’s show also contained a spectacular mess-up, when, on “Weekend Update,” Davidson made fun of Lieutenant Dan Crenshaw, a GOP Congressional candidate. Crenshaw had lost an eye in an IED explosion, and Davidson made fun of his eyepatch, saying that he looked like a hit man in a porn film. The elaborate damage control over that incident makes for fascinating reading.
[Ed. note: Baldwin later pleaded guilty to harassment in the case and agreed to attend anger management classes in order to dispose of the charges.]
You write in the book that Lorne saw this joke performed at rehearsal. Yet he was quite upset about Pete Davidson later saying it during the live show.
Yes. In the aftermath, Lorne recalled giving a “hard note” to Davidson about not mocking a guy for losing an eye. In reality, according to notes I took that night, he’d just made clear in the post-dress meeting that he found it tacky and unacceptable. He thought they would cut the joke, but what actually happened is that Davidson did the joke as scripted, with one change. On air, he omitted the cruelly casual “Whatever” that he’d capped it off with. Lorne’s take, later, was that the Update writers had been “overthinking” his note. That is, they thought that tweaking it—cutting “whatever”—was enough. [“This guy’s kind of cool, Dan Crenshaw. You may be surprised to hear he’s a congressional candidate from Texas and not a hit-man in a porno movie. I’m sorry, I know he lost an eye in war or whatever … whatever …”]
Were you provided with all access? Was anything, any topic, off limits?
I interviewed Lorne 40 or 50 times, and pretty much everyone else I approached said yes. The week I spent there, every day, I sat in on all of the meetings, as I recall. No one ever asked me to turn off my tape recorder or stop taking notes. The most interesting part was sitting with Lorne “under the bleachers” during dress rehearsal. It’s a little foxhole in the studio where he watches on a monitor, barking notes on everything from lighting cues to line deliveries to the costumes worn by extras. It’s when he is his most candid and off the cuff. His superpowers come out. The funniest thing I saw there was Lorne reacting to Maggie Rogers, the musical guest, when she came onstage wearing a billowing red caftan and no shoes. He barked, “Barefoot? Where’s she from? Kansas? A place with roads?” His summation: “She doesn’t know who she is.”
Was there any hesitancy on the part of Lorne to open up to you? Over the years, there have been numerous articles (such as Chris Smith’s March 1995 article for New York magazine, “Comedy Isn’t Funny”), as well as many books (including Bob Woodward’s 1984 Wired), that Lorne felt were unfair to the show and its performers, not capturing its true essence. He counsels proteges to avoid the press.
When I approached him, it was not long after the show’s 40th anniversary, and I think his legacy was on his mind. He was feeling uncharacteristically sentimental. Also, he knew me and respected me as a journalist, a longtime editor at The New Yorker. I think he felt that if someone was going to write a biography of him, better me than some entertainment-biz hack who would dash off a quickie book. He knew that I would take the enterprise seriously.
Producer Lorne Michaels on October 13, 1979 — (Photo by: Fred Hermansky/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images). Fred Hermansky/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images.
Bob Odenkirk has described Lorne as being “some kind of very distant, strange comedy god.” Another former SNL employee said that he would sometimes think of Lorne as Henry Kissinger; at other times, Chauncey Gardiner. Did you find it difficult to get a bead on such a notoriously aloof character?
I spent a lot of time with Lorne one on one, and I observed him up close working with his team. His management style is intuitive and masterful—and can sometimes seem cruel. As Chris Rock told me, this guy has been hundreds of peoples’ boss: he’s a good judge of character and he knows how to get what he wants out of people. This means that he can have different styles with different staffers—gruff with some (“Don’t fuck it up!” is something he barks at people) and gentle and nurturing with others. He has a really off-the-charts EQ; he is skilled at a kind of jiu-jitsu so that he knows how to get what he needs. In terms of dealing with talent or the network, he’s always five moves ahead. [Long-time SNL producer] Steve Higgins refers to it as the five-dimensional chess game that he plays in his head.
What I find fascinating about Lorne, among many other traits, is that this is a man whom even the best comedic minds in the world are unable to figure out. And that’s what a comedic mind specializes in: figuring people out. That’s what they’re wired for.
Conan O’Brien says that everyone believes that Lorne has the Secret. This keeps them guessing, being continually preoccupied by him. I guess it’s one way of keeping everyone’s head in the game. He exerts enormous power over them, and they compare him to Obi-Wan Kenobi, Oz, Tom Ripley, even Trump. The show is by nature competitive—there are only so many minutes in an air show—and everyone is kept a little off balance by that. It’s a bit like the Hunger Games. On Wednesday, four hours worth of comedy sketches are read at readthrough. On Saturday night, only 7 or 8 will remain.
Your book has fresh revelations about what went on with the cast after Trump hosted SNL in November 2015. They weren’t happy when Lorne toned down a harsh Trump sketch, nor were they when he insisted on showing that Trump had “some charm.” What’s your take on the criticism that SNL made Donald Trump too “likeable”?
I don’t think that Lorne wanted Trump to be likeable because he liked Trump, or even because some segment of his audience liked Trump. I believe, and agree with, his notion that SNL is an entertainment show, it’s comedy—and playing a villain “from hate” is just a downer. You want to be engaged to some extent by the villain, you want to cringe and laugh at him a bit—think of Alan Rickman in Die Hard or any number of Bond villains. As Lorne says, “Idiots play; assholes don’t.” It has to be funny.
Even though he and his staff are of a decidedly liberal bent, he’s always felt that the show has an obligation to speak truth to power–to mock the powerful no matter what party they are. In the early days, Aykroyd did a killer Jimmy Carter (check out the March 1977 sketch about Carter talking a caller on a radio show down from a bad acid trip); Darrell Hammond took hilarious shots at Bill Clinton. Now we find ourselves in this end-of-days era, with a bona fide nutcase in office. Yes, you’re going to make fun of Trump on a regular basis. But you’re also going to make fun of doddering Biden, or (RIP) Dianne Feinstein. This is tough for his Gen Z cast to swallow sometimes. The main thing is: you go where the laughs are. Trump as a fulminating toddler is funnier than Trump as a purely evil dictator. Alec Baldwin’s Trump was funny because he nailed the man’s ridiculous preening vanity and bluster. James Austin Johnson’s is more technical, and to me, not quite as funny. But then, the Trump story has jumped the shark, to use a Hollywood term. What’s happening in Washington is so beyond imagining–it’s post-humor, alas.
Reading this book, it struck me as to just how hard Lorne and the rest of the cast work to put this show on the air, live, twenty times a year. The process sounds brutal, almost as if preparing for a moon landing—but a funny one.
Jim Downey likes to say that if you sat down with a team of Swiss engineers and told them all the things that had to happen to create an episode of SNL, they’d say that you needed ten or eleven days to pull it off. But Lorne and his team have only six. And they do it every week. The energy ramps up day by day, until Saturday night it feels like an emergency room, with Lorne in charge.
Why do you think some of the talent thrives on the show, while others spend the rest of their lives complaining about their experiences?
It’s a sink or swim kind of show, and the ones who can adapt—who can look around and figure out how to get the best out of the place—survive. Amy Poehler told me a story about her first season. She’d written a sketch, with an eye to playing the main character, but the week’s host wanted to play that character instead. Amy said she looked at it as a test: should she stand up for herself and insist on playing the part? Or should she cave to the host, without whose enthusiastic participation the sketch probably wouldn’t get on. She came up with a good solution: she rewrote the sketch so that the host had the plum part, but she added a funny role for herself to play as well. Amy was really articulate about all the things she learned at the show and from Lorne—beyond comedy, she learned how to be in a room with famous and powerful people and hold her own—how to keep her cool and be effective. This, and the fact that, at SNL, writers produce their own sketches—directing them, choosing sets and costumes, being responsible for every detail—is one reason why so many SNL alums become successful showrunners and producers themselves.
From an outsider’s perspective, and as a writer yourself, do you feel that the all-night Tuesday writing sessions—based on a cocaine-fueled schedule from the show’s inception—is advantageous or a hindrance in producing the best comedy?
I think it’s probably a real pain (but I am old!). It may be that the twentysomethings who do it can withstand it. It certainly doesn’t make a lot of sense in this day and age, and now that the staff isn’t flying on coke all the time. Lorne, however, would argue that “fatigue is your friend.” He thinks that being up in the middle of the night, eating junk food, and goofing around, gets your defenses to come down and creates a free-for-all atmosphere that is conducive to brainstorming and original ideas.
Will Ferrell claimed that it was this fatigue that enabled him to come up with the idea for the cowbell sketch featuring Christopher Walken, in 2000.
Sounds right to me! One thing I loved learning is that that sketch had been around for awhile. Before Walken did it, the cowbell sketch was in readthrough during the week that Norm Macdonald hosted. Who knew?
In the book, Lorne says that the Chris Farley “Chippendales” sketch from October 1990 would most likely never make it to air in 2025. But I feel that many early sketches from the show’s history wouldn’t make it to air today: not necessarily because of the possible offensiveness, but because of the slower pace and the gentler premise of the earlier sketches.
I agree. In the early years there were a number of sketches that almost felt like one-act plays. I’m thinking of one, written by Marilyn Suzanne Miller for the March 1977 show that Sissy Spacek hosted, in which Spacek plays the wife of John Belushi, who is struggling with impotence. It wasn’t played as a boffo dick joke. It had an interior resonance—it was a character piece. Or the beautiful, bravura films that Tom Schiller and Gary Weis did. Check out Weis’s “Homeward Bound”—footage of family members reuniting at airport gates (back when you could go to the gate).
When one thinks back on the most famous sketches—such as 1993’s “A Van Down by the River”—there is typically at least one cast member who breaks into laughter. And yet this was something Lorne wanted to avoid when he started SNL. How do you think he feels about this nowadays?
He used to dislike it because it seemed like an amateur-hour move. He also didn’t like (and still doesn’t allow) improvising. It’s because he’s all about protecting the writing, and also because he can’t afford to have surprises that might throw off the camera operators or affect the sketch’s overall time. When someone breaks, it disrupts the sketch and takes the audience out of the moment—and it disrespects the writer, he would argue. Over time, and with certain personalities, I think that he’s softened that response. These days, when someone breaks, no one goes crazy. There’s usually some warmth in it. The people in the audience like it because they feel like they’re somehow in on it; it gives them an insidery vibe.
Did you speak to any of the current writers about the importance of their work in today’s political climate? Are jokes even effective with voters any longer? Or is it no more powerful than throwing pebbles against a fortress?
During the first Trump administration, some of the young writers were overwhelmed that Trump seemed to be paying more attention to SNL than he was to ISIS—or to many other hugely important topics. He tweeted about the show more than about anything else. I remember Kyle Mooney fretting that something he wrote might inadvertently make the president blow up the world. These days I think there’s more concern that he could seriously mess with the FCC.
(l-r) Jon Lovitz, Dana Carvey, Kevin Nealon, Executive Producer, Lorne Michaels, Nora Dunn, Dennis Miller, A. Whitney Brown, Victoria Jackson and Phil Hartman at the SNL Season 13 Press Conference. By Alan Singer/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal / Getty Images.
In the book you write: “One staffer’s therapist compared the SNL environment to the Trump administration: both hinged on trying to please a fickle, ratings-obsessed boss.” Lorne and Donald might have more in common than they think.
There’s something to that—people in power have a strong hold on their underlings. But with Lorne I think it’s an intuitive management style. It works for him to keep people slightly off kilter. (Like when he used to pass newbies in the hall and murmur, “Still with the show?”)
What does Lorne think of the new Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night?
He told me that he hadn’t seen it, although he had a sense that Reitman portrayed him and the original bunch as much nicer and more idealistic than they actually were. He thinks of them as having been rather more savage. A few SNL writers and alums told me that the movie put them off; one compared watching it to being a musician and seeing someone mess up your hit song in a karaoke bar.
This is not a question but I found it shocking that the guests at the SNL after-party have to pay for their own meals.
Yes! It adds up. But then think of how much of NBC’s money gets wasted every week on scenery and costumes that get junked between dress and air.
The million dollar (or the $100 million per season) question: can SNL go on after Lorne retires or passes away?
Here’s a scenario that I can imagine: Lorne is only completely essential two days a week. Wednesdays, when they do readthrough and then cull the sketches afterward, ending up with around a dozen to put into production. And Saturday, when he watches the dress rehearsal and makes another round of cuts and orders. I think that his able team of a half dozen deputies could handle everything else, and Lorne could come in Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, and the show could go on. The COVID show, SNL At Home, worked sort of this way. Lorne was locked down in Saint Barts that week, and he oversaw things via phone. He was pleased with the work his team did. He quoted his grandmother: “At times like that, what’s in you comes out.”
Many staffers—even years after leaving SNL—speak of dreaming about Lorne. After having spent so many years with him for this book, do you find yourself now doing the same?
I actually dreamed about Lorne a lot while I was working on this book. When you’re writing someone’s biography, you start to feel like you are inside their head. My family, I think, began to get annoyed at the way, whatever the topic of conversation was, I would often chime in with, “When Lorne was in college…” or “When that kind of thing happened to Lorne…” You find that your subject starts to short circuit your consciousness.
