Every week at “Saturday Night Live” is just like every other week. The weeks are the same because they’re always fuelled by hard work, filled with triumphs and failures and backstage arguments, and built around a guest host—Jennifer Lopez, Lizzo, Elon Musk—who often has no idea what he or she is doing. Over the past fifty years, the job of Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator, has been to make the stars look good, and to corral the egos and talents on his staff in order to get the program on the air, live. Since the début of “S.N.L.,” in 1975, he has fine-tuned the process, paying attention to shifting cultural winds. What began as an avant-garde variety show has become mainstream. (Amy Poehler has characterized the institution that made her famous as “the show your parents used to have sex to that you now watch from your computer in the middle of the day.”) But the formula is essentially unchanged. Michaels compares the show to a Snickers bar: people expect a certain amount of peanuts, a certain amount of caramel, and a certain amount of chocolate. “There’s a comfort level,” he says. The show has good years and bad, like the New York Yankees, or the Dow, and the audience has come to feel something like ownership over it. Just about all viewers of “S.N.L.” believe that its funniest years were the ones when they were in high school. Michaels likes to say that people in the entertainment business have two jobs: their actual job and figuring out how to fix “S.N.L.” (When J. D. Salinger died, in 2010, letters surfaced in which even he griped about what was wrong with the show.)
Cast members and writers have speculated for years about the secret behind Michaels’s extraordinary tenure. “It’s him and Hitchcock,” John Mulaney told me. “No one else has had this kind of longevity.” Half of them think that Michaels has repeatedly been able to remake the show for a new audience because he’s a once-in-a-lifetime talent, a producer nonpareil. The other half wonder whether Michaels, gnomic and almost comically elusive, is a blank screen onto which they’ve all projected their hopes and fears and dark jokes—whether he, like the cramped stages in “S.N.L.” ’s Studio 8H, is just a backdrop for the ever-shifting brilliance of the country’s best comic minds.
The kickoff to every episode, the weekly Writers’ Meeting, is at 6 P.M. on Monday, on the seventeenth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, in Michaels’s Art Deco office, which overlooks the skating rink. Monday, Michaels says, is “a day of redemption,” a fresh start after spending Sunday brooding over Saturday night’s mistakes. (On his tombstone, he says, will be the word “uneven.”) The guest host, the cast, and the writers squeeze into Lorne’s office—everyone in the business refers to him by his first name, like Madonna, or Fidel—to pitch sketches. People sit in the same places each week: four across a velvet couch, a dozen on chairs placed against the walls. Others stand in the doorway or wedged near Michaels’s private bathroom, and the rest are on the floor, their legs folded like grade schoolers. The exercise is largely ceremonial. It’s rare for an idea floated on Monday to make it onto the air. The goal of the gathering, which Tina Fey compares to a “church ritual,” is to make the host feel like one of the gang. In the nineties, the host Christopher Walken both confounded and delighted the room when he offered, in his flat Queens drawl, “Ape suits are funny. Bears as well.”
The Monday meeting unleashes a process that has been followed since the show’s inception. After Michaels and some handpicked staffers have dinner with the guest host on Tuesday, writers stay up all night churning out sketches. Michaels is a night owl, and he thinks nothing of scheduling a meeting at 1:30 a.m. As with many of his idiosyncrasies, he has turned his nocturnal habits into a philosophy. “Fatigue is your friend,” he told me, during a series of conversations. “Fatigue wears down the critical faculties, the inner editor. If you’re tired, it’s easier to go, ‘How about this?’ ” In the seventies, the overnight marathons involved a lot of drugs and drinking. Gilda Radner used to bake cookies for the writers—useful for forming alliances and getting them to write good parts for her. (That gambit wouldn’t work as well today, now that Ozempic is the drug of choice.)
Wednesday is when the contours of the week’s show emerge; from a lot of amorphous goofing around, sketches materialize. That afternoon, they are presented at a table read. Michaels reads the stage directions for each sketch aloud but refrains from commentary. “My favorite Lorne is read-through Lorne,” Seth Meyers told me, noting that it’s the one time of the week when Michaels is completely open. “I’ve been to plenty of them where he sat stony-faced for the full four hours. But when he’s surprised he has one of the great laughs, a real head-back, mouth-open thing.”
Afterward, Michaels has a smaller meeting, with his chief lieutenants, in which he “picks the show,” in “S.N.L.” jargon, selecting which sketches to pursue. The sketches that survive aren’t necessarily the funniest. Other factors inform the choices: What will make the host happy? Which groupings of pieces can be staged within the physical constraints of Studio 8H? Does everyone in the cast have something to do? Are there “tonnage” issues (too much scatological humor, too many accents)? Will enough sketches play in all fifty states? Is there enough topical material? Michaels has said that, in putting together a lineup, he is trying “to find enough colors to make a rainbow.”
On Thursday, carpenters are at work building fake living rooms and dive bars while the performers block and rehearse. An unusual thing about “S.N.L.” is that the writers are in charge of producing their own pieces: they dictate what the set and costumes look like and what music is needed, and they direct the actors. This is why “S.N.L.” ’s writers’ room generates so many future showrunners. As Mulaney, who used to write for the show, puts it: with each sketch, “for five minutes NBC is yours.”
On Friday, the staff often hears Michaels say, “We have nothing.” He’ll be staring tensely at the index cards on his bulletin board, which lay out each tentative segment. Employees a quarter of his age are amazed that, after fifty years, he can still seem scared. If things look particularly bleak, he’ll ask writers if they’ve been saving any good material for an upcoming host, telling them, “Sometimes you have to burn the furniture.”
On Saturday afternoon, in Studio 8H, there’s a run-through of the sketches. The show is often considerably too long at this point, so more sketches might be cut (and their brand-new sets scrapped). It would be more efficient to choose the lineup on Wednesday, but Michaels likes to mull. “Snap decisions get you into trouble,” he told me. “I tend to do rolling decisions.” Sometimes the guest host nixes a sketch. In 2015, Donald Trump was to play a tree standing next to the Giving Tree, the Shel Silverstein character who gives and gives of herself until she’s reduced to a stump. The sketch ended with the Trump tree calling the Giving Tree a sucker. Trump refused to do the piece, not because it portrayed him as heartless but because he worried that the tree costume made him look fat.
At 8 P.M., there’s a dress rehearsal in front of a live audience, with twenty to thirty minutes’ worth of excess material. This is the do-or-die moment of every “S.N.L.” week. It’s the first time the comedy is seen by “civilians.” Michaels, sitting in a foxhole underneath the audience bleachers, witnesses what gets a laugh and what doesn’t. An assistant scribbles as he issues notes, and writers stand nearby for instructions on revisions. Once, when Jonah Hill was hosting, I sat by Michaels under the bleachers. Noticing that Hill has heavily inked arms, he ordered the costume designer to cover them up: “Tom! Lose the tattoos.” After Hill muddled his way through a sketch about a cinema with a “farm to screen” snack menu, Michaels glumly declared, “Well, he can read.” He called another sketch “entry-level comedy.” To a writer of a segment that grossed out the audience, he icily said, “Can you take it and make it longer?”
But a subsequent meeting in his office each week, in the ninety minutes between the dress rehearsal and the live show, is when Michaels displays his superpowers. He is definite and direct in a way that he is not during the rest of the week—a mode that he describes as “being on knifepoint.” His aversion to confrontation is outweighed by the urgent need for triage. He gives orders quickly. There is little joshing around. According to the oral history “Live from New York,” by Tom Shales and James Miller, one night Michaels turned to Bob Odenkirk, then a writer, who was whispering to his neighbor as the minutes to airtime were slipping past. Michaels said, evenly, “Odenkirk, if you speak again I’ll break your fucking legs.”
Watching Michaels make these fast final decisions reminds Mulaney of a line from Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George”: “The choice might have been mistaken, but choosing was not.” Michaels’s choosing is the zenith of the week. He loves not having any time left to obsess over details. It’s all from the gut. The order is reshuffled, even more sketches are ditched, new endings are added. (Tina Fey has called such tweaks “adding a little turd polish.”) If he makes a bad decision, there’s always next week.
Late revisions are sent to a cue-card crew, who write new cards at lightning speed. Michaels has a superstitious side and clings to outmoded methods; he refuses to use teleprompters and requires script revisions to be done on paper. The atmosphere of controlled chaos is so well honed that the process can seem almost automatic, but it took Michaels years to establish his precepts of producing comedy. The problem with making it look easy, he often says, is that then people think it’s easy.
When Michaels started “S.N.L.,” he had dark, tousled hair, like Warren Beatty’s in “Shampoo.” His hair is now silvery and frequently barbered; it frames his face in a brushy fringe, as with a hedgehog, or a senator. He stands about five feet eight, but his posture and confidence compensate for his height. His smile, when he summons one, bisects his face like a slash. His eyes are close set and dark, with a glitter of mockery.
Michaels rules “S.N.L.” with detached but absolute power. His office is decorated with a sign that Rosie Shuster, his first wife and a writer on “S.N.L.” ’s early seasons, found in a West Village antique shop: “the captain’s word is law.” It’s a joke that isn’t really a joke. But he doesn’t micromanage every moment. “I’ve never been able to tell whether Lorne is driven by a managerial philosophy or a life-style philosophy,” Robert Carlock, a writer who went on to help Fey develop “30 Rock,” told me. “He’ll let everyone fight things out while he’s at Orso”—a midtown Italian restaurant—“and he’ll come back after a nice dinner and make the decision.”
A phrase that Michaels uses often is “the high end of smart,” and he likes to say, “If I’m the smartest person in the room, I’m in the wrong room.” But he harbors no illusions that his cultivated nonchalance is taken at face value. One talent agent routinely tells clients auditioning for Michaels to remember that he is the real star of the show. He is the alpha in most of his employees’ lives. To those people, and to the wider comedy world, he is a mysterious object of obsession. Conversations about him are peppered with comparisons: he is Obi-Wan Kenobi (Tracy Morgan), the Great and Powerful Oz (David Spade, Kate McKinnon), Charles Foster Kane (Jason Sudeikis), a cult leader (Victoria Jackson), Tom Ripley (Bill Hader). “There’s so many people who, their whole lives, have been trying to figure him out,” Hader told me.
Jon Hamm—a student of the show since he was six, when his divorced dad let him stay up and watch John Belushi—has hosted three times and says that he always learns from watching Michaels meet his deadline. He remembers Michaels explaining how sometimes he’ll pick one sketch over another not because the writing is stronger but because it will be more powerful live. Hamm once delivered a monologue that involved showing pretend “clips” of his acting jobs before “Mad Men.” The show could have pretaped the bits of him selling jewelry on QVC or doing standup on “Def Comedy Jam.” (The joke: he sounds and looks just like Don Draper in all of them.) But Michaels knew that it would be more exciting for the studio audience to see him running around making quick costume changes and popping onto different stages. This is the essence of producing.
Michaels didn’t always know how to do it. Born Lorne Lipowitz in Toronto in 1944, he started out as a writer and a performer. The rudiments of producing were picked up over time, as he tried to find a place in show business where he could have creative control. After graduating from the University of Toronto, he and a law-student friend, Hart Pomerantz, formed a comedy duo in the vein of Martin and Lewis. Michaels played the straight man, often interviewing a “zany” character played by Pomerantz. The team’s signature creation, the Canadian Beaver, was played by Pomerantz as a bucktoothed rodent with an inferiority complex about his imperialistic neighbor to the south, the American Eagle.
A gig on a CBC radio show ended with the duo being fired. Michaels wasn’t too heartbroken—he worried that their act was dopey and out of step with the culture. He and Pomerantz sold jokes to other comics and went to New York to meet with Woody Allen, who was looking for writers. The trio didn’t click, but after the meeting Michaels sent Allen a “bright joke”—one for smart people. A man is obsessed with the idea that there’s no such thing as an original thought—that, somewhere, another guy is thinking the exact same thoughts, at the exact same time. Eager to meet this mental doppelgänger, he somehow gets the other guy’s phone number. He dials the number . . . and the line is busy.
Allen didn’t use the joke, but he pronounced it very funny. “Woody saved my life with that,” Michaels told me.
In New York, he went to the Improv, in Hell’s Kitchen, and saw a young comic named Richard Pryor, who did a ten-minute one-man tour de force about a group of liberal New York actors bringing a play about interracial romance to a prison in the South. The warden keeps demanding to see a “dead n——” onstage. This was a new turn in comedy, devastating and brave, and Michaels wanted to follow it. He believed that comedy “should be of use.” He recalled being “messianic about it.”
But the work available to Michaels was far less ambitious. In 1968, when Michaels was twenty-three, he and Pomerantz moved to L.A. to be junior writers on an NBC variety program called “The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show.” Michaels arrived for his first day with long hair encircled by a hippie headband. His colleagues were men in their fifties and sixties who’d started out in radio. The work seemed outdated, too. “The first assignment we were given was to write fifty ‘fag jokes,’ ” Michaels said. (Rip Taylor played Diller’s hairdresser, Paul of Pasadena.) Each episode ended with a production number saluting a “forgotten American,” like President James K. Polk. Michaels told himself that he’d ruined his life. He was shocked, however, when the first episode got strong ratings. The newspaper columnist Joseph Kraft had recently coined the term “Middle America,” and as Michaels spent more time in network TV he would learn to keep that demographic in his sights. He now regularly reminds his “S.N.L.” staff, “We’ve got the whole country watching—all fifty states.”
Although the Diller show eventually flopped, Michaels learned a lot from his colleagues there. One of them, George Balzer, who’d worked for Jack Benny, gave Michaels stacks of old Benny radio scripts. They were deceptively short, “because they were all pauses,” Michaels said. “I began to see what a joke looked like on a page. It was like knowing how to prepare a dish. Like: ‘To start with, the eggs go here.’ ” As he became a comedy scholar, he started to recognize that his own talent was more curatorial. He knew what was funny.
When Michaels told people that he wrote for TV, they’d sniff and say that they didn’t even own a set—they read books. “Television was embarrassing,” he said. “It was vulgar.” It was still seen as the boob tube. He started to understand what the philosopher Marshall McLuhan had been talking about back at the University of Toronto—the idea that, whenever a new mass medium emerges, it frees up the medium that preceded it, allowing it to innovate. “Television becoming so powerful liberated movies, so that movies no longer had the burden of being mass,” Michaels told me. Auteurs such as Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes were making rule-breaking films; the Rolling Stones and David Bowie were pushing the boundaries of rock and roll. TV was a backwater. Michaels was stuck writing shopworn gags for a bitchy hairdresser character. “Everything but television was changing,” he said.
Although Michaels was questioning the point of TV, he still needed to work. After “The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show” was cancelled, he and Pomerantz got hired at “Laugh-In,” a hit variety show on NBC that was hailed as TV’s first collusion with the counterculture. The comedy derived from pie-in-the-face burlesque, but what distinguished the show was its frenetic pacing. In a signature segment, the Joke Wall, performers in mod regalia poked their heads out of holes in a set, like cuckoos emerging from a clock, and spouted one-liners. (“What goes ‘Ho ho thump’? Santa Claus laughing his head off.”) The creator of “Laugh-In,” George Schlatter, proudly compared it to a pinball machine.
The show could be hilarious, but Michaels felt that its writers were disrespected—they worked out of a motel and never attended tapings or met the talent. Jokes were rewritten without consultation. “I was at a No. 1 show and a cool show,” he said. “But we were not part of the process.” Although “Laugh-In” was studded with jokes about the Pill, politically it was toothless. The show avoided thorny topics like the Vietnam War, except for silly bits such as Goldie Hawn biting her lip and saying, “I don’t like the Vietcong because in the movie he nearly wrecked the Empire State Building.” The writers couldn’t get any Nixon jokes on the air.
Working on a No. 1 show was no more satisfying than working on a failure. Michaels began dreaming of a show of his own—and he had the skills to pitch one. Sandy Wernick, a talent agent who would soon sign Michaels, told me, “Lorne had the greatest gift for gab that I had ever heard in a guy in his twenties. He had theories of what comedy was all about. He knew exactly where the comedy of that era was going to go.”
In 1969, the only network that would let Michaels run his own show was the CBC, so he retreated to Canada with Pomerantz to create “The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour.” They did the Canadian Beaver shtick, among other bits, but Michaels began to realize that he was most engaged in the editing room, looking at how shots were framed and paying attention to lighting filters during musical acts. The show’s high point was “The Puck Crisis,” a mockumentary about an invasive species that spread Dutch puck disease, devastating Canada’s hockey-puck farmers. Alongside grim footage of lab-coated scientists examining shrivelled pucks drooping from branches, a dead-serious voice-over explains the blight’s origins: “Puck pests, or puctococci, were accidentally carried over on the sticks of a touring Dutch hockey team.” Michaels plays a newscaster interviewing citizens about the disaster, cutting in a clip of the real Canadian hockey star Bob Baun playing along. (“Without pucks, I’m just a guy who skates backwards.”) Pomerantz, who was more of a gag man, told me, “That’s producing. I wasn’t good at that.” “The Puck Crisis” embodied the kind of deadpan conceptual comedy Michaels wanted to make.
The show was popular, but the CBC dropped it after a few seasons. Michaels knew that the sort of unconventional humor he liked wasn’t yet viable on American networks, but it was taking hold on a smaller scale, offscreen. In addition to Richard Pryor, comics including Lily Tomlin, Steve Martin, and Albert Brooks were beguiling club audiences with raw material that rarely made it onto the “Tonight Show.” The common ground was a worldliness about drugs and sex, and skepticism about politics and corporate America. Show business—the hacky, sentimental kind—was another target.
After a string of dispiriting TV jobs back in L.A. (including a Perry Como special), Michaels met Tomlin, who’d been on “Laugh-In.” They bonded over their ambivalence about TV, and the way it lagged cheesily behind the rest of the culture. It drove him crazy, he told her, when there was a sketch about marijuana on a Bob Hope special and the “stoned” performers just acted drunk. Starting in 1973, Michaels helped Tomlin make three network specials featuring long, character-driven sketches, with Tomlin addressing the audience in between. Tomlin told me, “Lorne can add to stuff, but he’s not necessarily, like, a really diligent writer.” He was better at shaping other people’s ideas. He paid close attention to Tomlin’s comedy style: she was freeing the form from punch lines, infusing sketches with psychological depth. Their first special together, for CBS, had a pointedly feminist slant. Tomlin mocked housewifery, telling viewers, “You’re watching television when you could be doing something constructive, like putting your spice rack in order alphabetically.” One sketch, vetoed by the network, had Tomlin playing a prim mother, Mrs. Beasley, calling her son in from the back yard, which was actually a war zone, ablaze with exploding mortar shells. “Billy!” she yells. “Where’s your leg? You think legs grow on trees? Come on, leg or no leg, supper’s on the table.”
The special won two Emmys, but a CBS executive, Fred Silverman, called it “too esoteric.” The work that Michaels did with Tomlin came closer to his comedy ideal than anything he’d done so far. “She was probably the formative influence on me,” he said. But he also sensed that Tomlin could never headline a network series. “Lily was an artist, pure and simple,” he told me, and prime time “was about ‘How do you hold forty million people?’ ”
His attention wandered back to a show that he’d always had in his head: a mixture of film shorts, rock music, and sketches performed by a repertory company of young players. Sandy Wernick had been putting Michaels together with various middle-aged production execs, but they didn’t get it; Michaels explained to them that people in his generation were the first to have grown up with television, and they were sick of the same old pabulum. He wanted to recapture this disaffected group by satirizing the way TV saturated people’s thinking and shrink-wrapped the culture.
When Tomlin heard that Michaels was moving on, she felt that she’d been used as a stepping stone. She never confronted him about it, but she had the feeling, as she put it, of “when protégés float over you.”
In 1974, NBC had a problem to solve. Johnny Carson had announced that he wanted the network to stop airing reruns of the “Tonight Show” on Saturdays. So NBC’s new president, Herbert Schlosser, decided to create a program to fill the slot. He wanted to call it “Saturday Night,” and envisaged it being broadcast live from Rockefeller Center. Michaels had never considered late night before, and he was surprised, at a breakfast meeting with NBC executives at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, that the men didn’t flinch when he said that he wanted to do a show that looked as though a bunch of kids had sneaked into a studio after the adults went home. When he mentioned that he’d want to have Richard Pryor on the show, however, the mood got tense. Pryor had just punched an NBC page on the set of a Flip Wilson special, and the network was now entangled in a lawsuit.
Nevertheless, NBC made Michaels an offer. The sudden green light caught him off guard. He’d started to feel at home in L.A.; New York in the mid-seventies was in free fall, an intimidating place. He was also thrown by Schlosser’s mandate that the show be done live. He was used to polishing for hours in an editing room. But a live broadcast, he soon realized, offered stealthy opportunities. You could skip producing a pilot, a process that makes “all your most conservative instincts come out,” he said on a podcast—so “you find yourself doing what you think . . . will get you on the air.” With no pilot, there’d be no audience-research reports and no notes from executives or advertisers. “The idea that I could do a show in which the audience would see it at the same time as the network was thrilling,” Michaels said.
He accepted the job, telling NBC executives that his show would take shape organically over time. “We will always be experimenting on the air,” he said. “I know what the ingredients are but not the recipe.” He asked the network for three months to assemble writers and performers, and then three more months for them to jell as an ensemble. The show would have gruelling hours, he noted, so he was looking for “people you could drive cross-country with and not kill.” One of his hiring mantras was that comedy, as a humanizing force, is too important to be left to professionals. He wanted “enlightened amateurs”—people with little or no TV experience. He hadn’t considered that many of the talented people in that category had little or no TV experience because they had little or no interest in TV.
Around this time, Michaels went to see “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” in L.A., with his friend Rob Reiner. While waiting in line, they bumped into Chevy Chase, whom Reiner knew. Chase got Michaels’s attention the way he often got attention—by doing an elaborate pratfall. Michaels soon invited him to join his new show’s writing staff. “I knew instantly that Lorne was a funny guy,” Chase told me. “He wasn’t an initiator of humor as much as a believer in humor.” Chase signed on. Michaels also hired some friends from Canada as cast members—Dan Aykroyd (a master of disappearing inside a role) and Gilda Radner (who created characters of Tomlin-like sweetness). Through auditions, he hired John Belushi, who astonished the room with a deliriously strange character: a samurai billiard player. He brandished a wooden closet rod, grunting and rubbing his chin sagely; whenever it looked as though he was going to erupt into violence, he’d swing the pole down and mime a difficult billiards shot. (Michaels acknowledges that the bit would be considered offensive today. “There’s almost nothing we did in the seventies that I could do now,” he said in 2019, citing a sketch called “News for the Hard of Hearing,” in which an “interpreter,” Garrett Morris, repeats everything the anchor says, but shouting.)
Michaels originally conceived of the program as being similar to a magazine—a collection of distinct voices. One of the first staff writers, Anne Beatts, liked to note that he began hiring the writing team before the cast, practically unheard of in television. At the time, Michaels explained, “I became a producer to protect my writing, which was being fucked over by producers.”
He signed up Andy Kaufman after seeing him at a club and being entranced by his arty material. (“Man, that should’ve been at the Guggenheim,” an associate of Michaels’s had said at the club.) A subsequent screen test shows Kaufman sitting at a desk and reciting the lyrics to “MacArthur Park,” which are unsurpassed in their rococo inanity. He intones, “Someone left the cake out in the rain. I don’t think that I can take it. ’Cause it took so long to bake it. And I’ll never have that recipe again. Oh—no.” Michaels knew that he wanted Kaufman’s radical novelty in the show. “It was as beautiful a thing as you could witness,” he told the journalist Bill Zehme. “He wasn’t enmeshed in the show business of it. . . . There seemed to be some other commitment, something very pure and more personal.”
Michaels had hipness covered, but he needed to insure that his show would have “hard laughs”—the ones that remind “you of a happier time in your life.” He’d seen a standup set by a Catskills-inflected comic named Alan Zweibel, and asked him to submit some material. Zweibel pulled two all-nighters typing up eleven hundred jokes. Michaels loved the first one: “The postal service is issuing a new stamp, commemorating prostitution. It’s a ten-cent stamp, but if you want to lick it it’s a quarter.” The joke had the cadence and payoff of a classic hard laugh, but with an edge. Zweibel came on board.
Michaels, haunted by the “Laugh-In” assembly-line method, wanted each sketch’s author to be recognizable from its style. He wanted a Black writer on staff and put out a feeler to the Writers Guild. A friend there sent over a play by a thirty-eight-year-old Juilliard-trained playwright and actor named Garrett Morris. Michaels liked what he read and hired Morris.
The most astringent voice was Michael O’Donoghue, a literary snob and a high-strung perfectionist who, while at National Lampoon, had written “The Vietnamese Baby Book,” a parody keepsake album noting such milestones as “Baby’s first word (medic).” O’Donoghue regarded television as a lava lamp with sound, but he joined the writing staff, as did Anne Beatts, who was dating O’Donoghue; she bluntly told Michaels that she considered the Tomlin specials more feminist than funny. O’Donoghue broadcast his sensibility by decorating his office with pinups from a porn magazine for amputee fetishists called Stump Love. Although Michaels had never been a Lampoon partisan (he disliked its “sweat sock” attitude), he intuited that the couple’s savage savoir-faire could be useful, and he promised them artistic freedom.
Michaels also wanted the show to look different. The typical variety-show set was a cyclorama wall, a seamless stretch of nothingness, decorated with mere “suggestions of sets”: a lone lamppost, a window frame. Michaels asked for “hard-wall reality”—actual rooms, with doors and furniture, that wouldn’t compete with the comedy.
In June, 1975, a few months before the show was to début, Michaels sent a three-page memo to NBC executives. He made sure not to overpromise, but he now knew how to talk like a producer. Of the rotating guest hosts, he said, “The requisite quality I am looking for is spontaneity. Fame and talent would not hurt.” In addition to sketches by a repertory company, there would be pretaped commercial parodies (“enormously helpful in pacing a live show”). The memo refrained from spelling out his countercultural comedy code, described by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, in “Saturday Night: A Backstage History,” as “knowing drug references, casual profanity, a permissive attitude toward sex, a deep disdain for show-business convention, blistering political satire, and bitter distrust of corporate power.” He understood what a network wanted to hear.
In hindsight, the memo’s most striking quality is its marginalization of the rep players. But Michaels was keenly aware of how much talent he’d assembled. Aykroyd told me, “Lorne saw skills and abilities in people. He’d say, ‘You can pull this off. You can sing this song.’ He could put it all together, and it would coalesce into something with impact.”
“Saturday Night,” Michaels told his staff, would feature sketches, not skits. Skits are one-joke bits done in grade school or by guys at the Rotary Club. A sketch is a vignette, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. His conception of the comedy he liked was similar to his conception of himself—underplayed, with a light touch, never “sweaty” or trying too hard. Michaels had a professorial management style, and whenever a staffer proposed an idea he’d immediately have a critique. If a pitch was too elaborate, he might say, “Premise overload.” To Michaels’s way of thinking, precision in comedy is as unequivocal as a surgeon’s cut. Miss your mark by a millimetre and the joke dies. He subscribed to Mark Twain’s observation that the difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. For this reason, he forbade improvising. “The way I work, you do all your work beforehand, and you write down the dialogue that you’ve actually chosen,” he told me. His models were auteurs such as Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, writer-directors who expected actors to respect their words.
When reviewing scripts, Michaels would tell writers not to overexplain, to allow viewers to make key connections. He’d quote Wilder: “Give the audience two plus two and let them make four.” He scribbled comments on script pages and suggested new pairings of writers. “Cross-fertilization started,” Michaels said. “That was the thing that I was smartest about.” The writers played off one another like jazz musicians. Michaels’s wife, Rosie Shuster, whom he’d known since childhood, joined the writing staff, even though their marriage was fraying. She described the months of preparation as an incubation period in which “everybody was kind of falling in love and trying to crack each other up.”
Michaels didn’t anoint a head writer at first, although Chase and O’Donoghue each claimed the title. Michaels has credited Chase and O’Donoghue with helping to create the show, emphasizing that it was not a “full-blown-from-Zeus sort of thing.” He had originally pictured the show’s staff as a community without rank. But everyone was driven to win his approval. Laraine Newman, a cast member who’d done a Valley Girl character on a Tomlin special, told me, “You learned early on to distinguish Lorne’s real laugh from his fake laugh. The fake laugh would be ‘gasp gasp,’ a kind of inhale. The real laugh would be his face totally crinkled up, his teeth bared, and a kind of a wheeze.”
Michaels’s businesslike calm was a counterbalance to the whirling egos and animosities that drove his employees. When he held forth about the principles of comedy, some found him mesmerizing, but others merely tolerated it. Jane Curtin, part of the first cast, characterized him as the type of comedy professional who, instead of laughing, “says, with a completely straight face, ‘Hysterical.’ ”
A fake newscast had always been part of Michaels’s vision, and he initially expected to play the newscaster himself. As the air date approached, he changed his mind. It would be awkward to cut other people’s material while leaving himself in. That, he said, would be “a little too Orson Welles, even for me.” And it would have required being vulnerable in front of his staff. Newman said, “You have your hat in your hand when you’re a performer. And that seems to be the thing that Lorne would want the very least in his life.” Chase was making Michaels laugh the most around the office, so, even though Chase had been hired as a writer, Michaels tapped him to anchor the segment, which he called “Weekend Update.”
On October 11, 1975, “Saturday Night” débuted. A traditional variety show would have opened with the guest host. But Michaels wanted viewers to know immediately that his show was, in Monty Python’s words, something completely different. His show jumped right into the comedy, with no glitzy preamble. (The first segment is now known as a “cold open.” Michaels told me, “I made that phrase up.”) The first thing viewers saw was a Dada-ish sketch in a minor key, written by O’Donoghue. Seated in an armchair, O’Donoghue begins giving an English lesson to John Belushi, whose schlubby bomber hat and sack of groceries peg him as an immigrant. The professor has the student repeat a series of phrases, starting with “I would like.” In a thick accent, Belushi repeats, “I would like.” Then: “To feed your fingertips.” Belushi: “To feed your fingertips.” O’Donoghue goes on, “To the wolverines.” The audience erupts into startled laughter—the show’s first. Soon, O’Donoghue clutches his heart, gasps, and falls to the floor. Belushi grunts and tumbles to the floor as well. After a pause, Chase enters, wearing a stage manager’s headset. Flashing his tennis-pro smile at the camera, he says, “Live, from New York, it’s ‘Saturday Night’!”
Steve Martin, whose standup career was just ramping up, watched the première on TV and was gobsmacked. “I felt like I was the avant-garde. I was the one doing the new comedy,” he said. “I thought, Oh, fuck—they did it. They had gotten there first.”
Michaels’s creation became a national sensation. It was especially a hit with the coveted youth demographic. Part of the show’s success lay in its tonal mixture. Albert Brooks contributed insider-y short films spoofing show-biz mediocrity; one was a reel of promos for fake NBC shows, including “Black Vet,” about an African American man back from Vietnam who opens a veterinary practice. Michaels balanced such material with warmer pieces—he wanted sketches drawing on staffers’ real lives. “What Gilda Ate” was a quiet monologue in which Radner listed things she’d eaten that day, in a way that made clear she had a problem. (“I ate the whole thing!”) Michaels called moments like this “the show itself speaking,” adding, “That part was the sacred part.” Eager for more such moments, he lured Marilyn Suzanne Miller, with whom he’d worked on Tomlin’s specials, onto the writing staff. Miller told me, “Lorne was interested in inner life.”
The men on the show didn’t always welcome the feminine material. Tomlin hosted an early episode for which she pitched a sketch about a class that teaches female hardhats how to catcall men. (“Hey, stud muffins, wanna make bouncy-bouncy?”) None of the guys wanted to play the humiliated beefcake. Michaels eventually persuaded Aykroyd, who did the role justice in short shorts and a tank top. But Belushi sometimes said that he wouldn’t do pieces “written by girls.” The writers, meanwhile, kept casting Garrett Morris as a woman, which annoyed the cast’s actual women, not to mention Morris, who got sick of playing mammies and wearing dresses to impersonate Tina Turner or Pearl Bailey.
Michaels didn’t indulge what Shuster called the show’s “testosterone energy,” but he also didn’t intervene much. He was like a parent who lets his children sort out squabbles themselves. Penelope Spheeris, who produced Brooks’s short films, observed, “The cast and writers are the children. And he makes them compete with each other. And out of that competition comes two things—brilliant writing and a dislike for the other person.” For many staffers, trying to get Michaels’s approval was like squeezing a dry sponge. “Lorne is repelled by the sight of needy people,” Newman said.
Even if getting what Miller called “female-feeling pieces” on the air was a priority for Michaels, one of his regular put-downs was to call a sketch “too ‘Carol Burnett.’ ” It was a stylistic observation, not a sexist one. “ ‘Carol Burnett’ was Broadway,” he told me. “We were rock and roll. Their sketches were about alcoholism, divorce, life in the suburbs—middle-aged stuff. I wanted us writing about our stuff.” “Saturday Night” featured jokes about Belushi’s doctor cutting off his drug supply, and a sketch set in ancient Greece in which Newman played a character named Anorexia.
Michaels’s dream host—Richard Pryor—appeared in the seventh episode and pushed the show to daring new heights. In one sketch, Chase plays a man interviewing Pryor for a job, and subjects him to a word-association test. “Dog,” Chase says. “Tree,” Pryor answers. Chase ups the ante, forcing Pryor, ultimately, to turn the tables and reverse the power dynamic:
The sketch concludes with Pryor in a quivering rage and a whimpering Chase offering him the job at an elevated salary, making him “the highest-paid janitor in America.”
By the end of Season 1, the cast was being recognized on the street, but the breakout star was the preppy and handsome Chase. He began alienating his colleagues, sometimes talking about himself in the third person. One day, Aykroyd confronted Michaels in a fury: Chase was giving him notes on a Scottish accent. Michaels views this moment as the commencement of his becoming “the world expert on people getting famous.”
Hollywood began offering Chase movie deals. He and Michaels were intensely close, but Michaels decided that he wouldn’t beg him to stay. One of Michaels’s axioms about celebrity is “People don’t like to collaborate past the point of fame.” Of Chase’s possible defection, Michaels told his colleagues, “The show would take a hit, but we’d still be O.K.” He came to see turnover as the natural order of things—another lesson in his producer’s handbook. “People burn out in relationships,” he said to me, in work as well as in life. Chase, for his part, found Michaels’s businesslike pose confounding. Getting him to stay, Chase told me, “wouldn’t have fucking taken much! All he had to do is tell me he loved me, basically. But his nature is to be above it in some fashion.” He attributed Michaels’s reluctance to insecurity. “Frankly, I always felt back then that I was smarter than him, that I was really the guy who got the show going, not Lorne.”
When Chase left for Hollywood, Michaels replaced him with Bill Murray, someone who distinctly lacked a golden-boy aura. Murray, an Irish Catholic, grew up outside Chicago in a big working-class family. Michaels was starting to see that the show, like the city that was its home, benefitted from being in a permanent state of flux. Whenever the show’s rhythms were “getting to the point where smugness was about to creep in, I tried to kick it around a little,” Michaels told Rolling Stone. In addition to hiring Murray, he brought in Steve Martin as a frequent host. Martin forever changed the show by adding a flavor of comedy that was both goofy and brainy. He débuted an original song, “King Tut” (“Buried with a donkey! He’s my favorite honky!”), in a live performance that Michaels mounted with lavish production values. The single sold more than a million copies.
The show’s popularity transformed it. The cast members found that their small talk, once centered on who was sleeping together, now focussed on the industry. Newman recalled a rehearsal in which “we were all talking about what we were naming our corporations.” Hers was Init Productions. Aykroyd’s was Applied Action Research Corp. Radner stopped, mid-blocking, and said, “What’s happened? We’ve joined the establishment.”
Anne Beatts used to say that you can only be avant-garde for so long before you become garde. This was certainly true for Michaels. He started wearing well-cut suits and blazers; he traded his sneakers for Italian loafers. He eventually bought a large apartment on Central Park West, in the building where his famous friend Paul Simon lived. Simon and his famous wife, Carrie Fisher, were next door, and they’d wander into each other’s apartments, referring to themselves as the Ricardos and the Mertzes.
In 1977, Michaels rented a ten-bedroom mansion in East Hampton. On Labor Day, he threw a lawn party with O’Donoghue, Chase, and Simon. The hosts asked guests to wear white. Michaels wasn’t sure how to think about his own event. Was he throwing a parody of a party that Jay Gatsby would throw? Or was it the real thing, the ostentatious yet elegant exhibition of an out-of-towner’s rapid ascent? At the party, he stood somewhat apart, idly fiddling with a badminton racquet. Jann Wenner was there, as were Shelley Duvall and Eric Idle. Guests ate watercress sandwiches and sipped a cocktail invented by O’Donoghue: the Soiled Kimono, two parts champagne and one part Japanese plum wine. (The White Party became an annual tradition, the guest list growing more splendid each year.)
Everything about “S.N.L.” was now A-list. Among the cast members, there was a sense that Michaels was entering a different realm. “He spent a lot of time talking about where he was going to eat,” Curtin told me. Belushi referred to the boss’s fancy friends as “the dead.” Once, he treated a reporter to his impersonation of Michaels making some calls: “Nicholson, can you hold just a second? I have Mike Nichols on the other line. Mike, can you hold for a second? I’ve got Mick Jagger on the other line. Mick, I’ll be with you in a second. . . .”
In 1981, Michaels, having gone through an amicable divorce with Shuster, married Susan Forristal, a successful model, at a house he’d bought near the ocean, in Amagansett. He has never tried to conceal his appetite for the things that money can buy. People like to imagine, he said in “Live from New York,” that he’s on his way “into a hot tub with seventy-two virgins or whatever. Fine. I’d much rather my life be perceived as glamorous or stylish than as one of an enormous amount of work that is unceasing.”
The show, which added “Live” to its title in Season 3, began giving audiences more of what they wanted most: repeating characters. The Coneheads, the Nerds, Mr. Bill—fans laughed at those no matter what. O’Donoghue considered recurring characters pandering, and Michaels occasionally announced that he wanted to banish them, but he never did. He was willing to risk the annoyance of critics—who, snooty about the show’s popularity, regularly pulled out the lazy headline “Saturday Night Dead.” But he wouldn’t disappoint the viewers. A Snickers bar isn’t the very best candy bar, but pretty much everybody likes it.
By the eighties, “S.N.L.” had forged a clear path to Hollywood success—at one point, it was estimated that the top-ten-grossing movie comedies in history all starred alums of the show. “Animal House,” which starred Belushi, brought hordes of new viewers to the show—a frat-boy contingent that Michaels called “the undeserved audience.” In an interview with the Times, Jim Downey, one of the show’s longest-serving head writers, compared its early days to “a children’s crusade; people would camp out here and not think about anything but the show.” Since then, he said, “anyone coming here knows what the formula is: a couple of hit characters, then you get a movie.” There was more jockeying for position. Writers refined strategies to get their pieces on the air—making the set ultra-simple could work, and so could writing parts for Newman or Morris, who were both often under-used in the show.
The all-night Tuesday writing sessions set a tone of dysfunction that permeated the week. A portion of the staff ran on cocaine. A pot dealer named Merlin roamed the halls. Michaels ignored such behavior, and he increasingly hid away from the cast, who always seemed to want more—airtime, money, attention. People took his cutting a sketch as a personal slight, and they sulked. “I began to be more removed, I think, because the consequences of my actions began to have greater and greater weight,” Michaels said in a documentary about the show’s first five years. “We were a team, and we had to stay together and fight for each other. At the same time, I had more power.”
One story that Michaels tells on repeat goes like this: “I was on a boat once, and there was a man on the boat. He was from the audience”—that is, a normal human being. “The man was being funny in the way that Bill Murray is funny, and I thought to myself, I know Bill Murray. You know what I mean?”
When he told this story to Bill Hader, who joined the cast in 2005, Hader nodded yes. “But I had no idea what he was talking about,” he said. What Michaels was talking about was that, at a certain point, the show got away from him. By the fifth season, it had become an institution. And the millions of viewers had sucked up what he and the show were selling so avidly that the language of “S.N.L.” had rewired their brains. People inserted “S.N.L.” catchphrases into their wedding vows and used robotic Conehead voices around the water cooler. The show had become collective cultural property.
After Season 5, Michaels left the show, not entirely by choice. The breach stemmed from a tortured negotiation with NBC over Michaels’s request for some time to regroup; talks were ultimately derailed by Al Franken’s ridiculing the network president on air. Five years later, Michaels came back. Ratings had sunk, and the show had become reliant on pretaped bits. “It lost what is magic about it,” Michaels said in 1985. “I think ‘Saturday Night Live’ is about contact with another group of humans coming through this tube.”
In the conformist eighties, Michaels largely abandoned the Andy Kaufman strain of his formula. When picking the show, he leaned toward harder laughs—crowd-pleasers like Dana Carvey’s Church Lady, a bravura display of performing chops. “S.N.L.” continued to reliably supply fans with catchphrases such as “We just want to pump YOU up!” After a rocky return year, in which he hired too many young performers—three had been in John Hughes movies—Michaels focussed on making smooth transitions between casts, older players overlapping with new ones. He’d learned that it was crucial to notice “when the music changed.” It was useful when the new performers knew other cast members, helping the ensemble cohere. Carvey said, “Lorne’s always looking for chemistry—a group that would all fit together, like the Beatles.”
In this less caustic era, one of Michaels’s rules became “Do it in sunshine”—that is, don’t forget that comedy is an entertainment. Colors should be bright, costumes flattering. People watch TV, he believes, as if they’re huddled around a fire at night. You don’t want too much “dark” in comedy: “You can just look out the window for dark.” Fred Armisen remembers Michaels saying, “There’s enough misery in the world.”
Michaels especially counsels his staff to avoid writing anger in a sketch: “It’s really difficult to make anger funny.” Idiots, he says, play better than assholes. He always wants his actors to give even the worst villain a spark of something appealing. Otherwise, the audience is simply repelled. “What the English know is that if you’re playing the greatest villain, make him charming,” he says. Newcomers to the show are often surprised to hear Michaels talking about wanting “sweetness” in sketches—the interior, emotional shadings that Gilda Radner and Marilyn Suzanne Miller specialized in.
With each passing year, Michaels has added to his list of oracular pronouncements. O’Donoghue, who sneered at the show’s softer turn—he once pushed for live gunfire in the studio—couldn’t stand the speechifying of “Lorne (the Rabbi) Michaels” and what he called Michaels’s “kindergarten comedy theories,” but many staff members loved the boss’s maxims. “To this day, I think about these proofs Lorne’s passed down,” Chris Rock told me. “It’s like mixing chemicals. Too much of this or too little of that and you’ve got a disaster.” He ranks Michaels, as a producer, with Quincy Jones: both focus on fundamentals. “Comedy is no different than music,” he said. “There’s scales, and there’s keys, and there’s notes to hit.” Sometimes a sketch lives or dies because of some rhythmic alchemy. The famous Blue Öyster Cult sketch didn’t get on “S.N.L.” the first week it was rehearsed, with Norm Macdonald as the lead, but when Christopher Walken played the producer, and yelled “More cowbell!” in his very particular cadence, it exploded.
Although Michaels has firm rules about sketch comedy, he is more flexible about the talent-management aspect of his producer role. Different personalities, he believes, require different approaches. To some, Michaels will bark, “Don’t fuck it up.” Hader, who is prone to anxiety attacks, remembers Michaels coming to his dressing room when he hosted and snapping, “Calm the fuck down. Just have fun. Jesus Christ.” With others, he is warmer. Molly Shannon treasures the memory of how, when she was nervous just before going onstage, Michaels would “reassure me with his eyes.”
Michaels has changed his laissez-faire attitude toward substance abuse. The fatal overdose of Belushi led him to rethink his approach to people in his orbit with drug problems. He once said that, in the seventies, he felt that “as long as people showed up on time, did their job, it was nobody’s business what they did in their bedroom or what they did in their lives. That value system turned out to be wrong.”
Because Michaels oversees a bunch of comedians, his personality tics have been ruthlessly and relentlessly catalogued and mocked in the writers’ room, as a way to release the competitive pressure. When Conan O’Brien was on staff, he invented a game called “Which Paul?” The setup is that Michaels is inviting someone to dinner with his friend Paul. “And you’d want to figure out, is it Paul Simon or Paul McCartney?” O’Brien explained. Hader does an impression of Michaels name-dropping serial killers as if they were A-listers. It is staff canon that there is practically no piece of information one can tell Michaels that does not prompt a rapid-fire “No-no-no-no, I know” or a languorous “Right.” There used to be a writers’-room bit about this compulsion: one version has Michaels strolling on the beach in St. Barts with one of his young children, who points at the rising moon and says, full of wonder, “Look, Daddy!” Michaels shoots back, “No-no-no-no, I know. We had the moon in the seventies.” His sarcastic “Right” became part of the most famous caricature of him: Dr. Evil in “Austin Powers,” by the “S.N.L.” alum Mike Myers. Dr. Evil also raises a pinkie to his mouth when he’s scheming, a reference to the nail-biting Michaels would do when pondering which sketches to cut. (Myers has often denied that the performance was entirely based on Michaels, but in fact it’s a rare act of caricature theft—a beat-for-beat imitation of an impersonation of Michaels by Dana Carvey, which Carvey performed only while sitting in the makeup chair, in a bald wig, at “S.N.L.”)
The in-jokes about Michaels are funny because they draw on aspects of who he really is: the mogul who maintains a poise that verges on prissiness, the rich man who advises people just starting out on where to vacation. (Fey does a riff in Michaels’s voice about buying a vacation home on the planet Naboo, from “Star Wars,” and how chic and undiscovered it is.)
The “loose reins” approach that Michaels professes to take with talent can be double-edged. Summoning his best Michaels voice, Hader conjured Michaels’s damage-control instinct: “If you start drowning, he’s not, like, ‘Here’s a life jacket.’ He’s, like, ‘Oooh, look at that guy drowning in my pool. That’s disgusting—let’s go over here and hang with Alec Baldwin.’ ” Baldwin himself, who has hosted seventeen times, sized up Michaels’s management methods as “Darwinian,” saying, “Lorne just stands back and lets them cannibalize each other.” Michaels knows that his sink-or-swim protocol is tough on new hires. “The only thing that justifies that level of abuse is the exhilaration of it working,” he has said.
New recruits haven’t always known whether Michaels’s fitful management style is a demonstration of ambivalence or technique. Jan Hooks, who had a stellar five years on the show, went through a hard time after the death of her mother. Michaels adored Hooks and considered her a star. But, when Kevin Nealon asked Michaels to give her a little praise, he responded, “I understand what you’re saying, but you’ll find that it’s never enough.” He told me, quoting a former therapist, “A baby looks at the mother and thinks, Why do you only have two breasts? Why do you not have three breasts? It’s an insatiable demand, and you see it in performers, and you see it in writers.”
Michaels’s mentoring technique has tormented certain staffers. When Chris Farley was a new cast member, he went to Bob Odenkirk with tears in his eyes. Farley said that every time he messed up Michaels told him that he’d hit it out of the park. And every time he killed Michaels chastised him for not making enough of an effort. “Chris was mind-fucked,” Odenkirk said. “Lorne clearly felt that if you kept people off balance they’d try harder.”
Odenkirk found Michaels’s process hard to parse. “You’d think that you’d say, ‘We’re gonna pick the best sketches, and then we’re gonna shine ’em up as best we can,’ ” he told me. But, the way the show runs, “the focus is on just getting it to happen and not on the quality level.” When he worked at “S.N.L.,” he felt that it was straitjacketed by having its arbiter be a man who was a teen-ager in the fifties. “I thought, Fuck this guy for being in charge,” he said. “Shouldn’t ‘S.N.L.’ be for each generation?” (Odenkirk now says of this attitude, “I was a dick.”)
The one time writers were certain to hear Michaels’s feedback directly was during dress rehearsal, when they saw him in laser-focus mode under the bleachers. Even today, during those two hours, he watches what the audience watches, but he sees more—lighting, music cues, wigs, accents, entrances. “If you were to read a year’s worth of his notes from dress rehearsal, you’d have a master class in TV production that is unparalleled,” the former “S.N.L.” writer A. Whitney Brown told me.
Many writers have sat beside him watching their sketches die, only to have him turn and say, with stony sarcasm, “You must be very proud.” If the host’s monologue is flat, he’ll moan, “Can we get any charm out of him?” If a piece is too erudite, he might tell its writer, “Can they take the Emmy away?” John Mulaney said, “May the cast members go to their graves never knowing the things I heard under the bleachers.”
Chris Rock, who mopped floors before joining “S.N.L.,” in 1990, was impatient with colleagues who moped if their sketches got cut. “I learned everything I know from that show. You got to shoot your shot that week,” he told me. “Killing onstage isn’t subjective. When people talk about fair and unfair, I’m, like, ‘Shut up.’ It’s, like, ‘Get bigger laughs.’ ”
The format Michaels created fifty years ago guaranteed the show’s perpetual adolescence. Anne Beatts used to describe Michaels as “the leader of the Lost Boys.” In “Peter Pan,” the boys never grow up; at “S.N.L.,” the young performers all get replaced, with Michaels presiding in a role that’s part Wendy, part Captain Hook. Although he is now eighty, the company he’s kept has prevented him from becoming a dinosaur—or, worse, an unhip dinosaur. Sticking to his Snickers-bar concept sustained the show, and it has sustained him. Michaels dotes on his family—he has three grown children with his third wife, Alice Barry—but colleagues have always felt that, really, he is married to the show.
His decades of producing experience have imbued “S.N.L.” with a clockwork stability. Every week, the sketches are written, the index cards shuffled, the vases of flowers replenished. New employees are still routinely terrified of him; when the office feels too friendly, whispers circulate that Michaels doesn’t like “the tree-house vibe.” Will Ferrell thinks that Michaels’s emotional withholding is part of a baseball-derived management style. “Baseball players keep the highs not too high and the lows not too low,” he said. “Lorne knows that it’s a long season.”
Michaels is now the age at which men like him become connoisseurs of history. A reader of biographies, he keeps a mental list of historical figures whose careers remind him of his own. The roster is not modest. There’s Thomas Edison. (“He didn’t think he invented anything. He thought he perfected things, and that all the ideas he perfected were already in the air.”) There’s William Shawn, who was a mentor to Michaels and who ran this magazine for thirty-five years, corralling a gang of talented, needy egos in order to produce a weekly publication. Then there’s Shakespeare. The playwright, Michaels likes to note, first had to get his work approved by the Lord Chamberlain and the court—the network bosses of their day. Then Shakespeare scrambled to get his show on the boards—not unlike a week at “S.N.L.,” hurtling toward Saturday. Instead of 11:30 p.m., Shakespeare’s deadline was sunset; Michaels talks of him shaving minutes from “Hamlet” to end the play before dark. Shakespeare also wrote expressly for the actors in his company. “I know he had a Belushi,” Michaels told me. “That’s why Falstaff appears in three plays.” Above all, Shakespeare was “the ultimate problem solver.” Like Michaels, the Bard saw to it that, despite any obstacle, the show would go on. ♦
This is drawn from “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.”
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