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 tele
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 modern 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 sporadic peek behind the curtain at an enigmatic, Oz-like figure described by former employees as (among other things): aloof, cypher-like, having no center, frigid, 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 sporadic 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 modern 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 modern 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.)
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