Like countless fans of “Saturday Night Live,” I felt like I spent the show’s 50th anniversary year immersed in a tutorial of “SNL” history and its place in show business — I’m talking about all the “SNL50” specials and the anniversary show and Questlove’s music doc and Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night,” a backstage drama in which almost none of the actors quite nailed the cast members they were playing, yet there was still a vision to the movie, a sense of how “SNL” was the first network comedy show to grab the danger and insanity of the world off camera and pull it on camera.
I’ve been watching “SNL” since its inception. I now watch it with my teenage daughters, who are religious fans of the show. I’m an “SNL” believer (although I wrote my first “Is ‘Saturday Night’ Dead?” article for my college newspaper in 1978), and I gorged on all the anniversary hoopla. But when it was over, I don’t think I was alone in feeling that I never needed to take another trip down “SNL” memory lane again.
So when I heard that there was now going to be another “Saturday Night Live” movie — a documentary about Lorne Michaels — opening in theaters, I thought: Really? Do I need this? Does anyone?
But if you’re a “Saturday Night Live” fan, you’re not going to want to miss “Lorne,” since it’s a puckishly delightful and revealing movie — and because, as directed by the showbiz-history ace Morgan Neville (“Piece by Piece,” “Won’t You Be My Neighbor”), it’s canny enough to snake its way around a lot of the information that came out during the show’s anniversary year. Yes, “Lorne” shows us once again how “SNL” is put together (the Monday powwow where the cast members and writers meet the guest host; Lorne’s ritual Tuesday dinner at Lattanzi on W. 46th St.; the endless shuffling and weeding out of sketches, each represented by a card on Lorne’s magic bulletin board — he plays with those cards like God rearranging human chess pieces). But it’s a totally different thing to see all this from Lorne Michaels’ point-of-view. We’re now looking at the man behind the curtain.
“Lorne” lures us in with the mischievous playfulness of its tone. The premise of the movie is that Lorne Michaels is one of those rare showbiz figures known, almost mythologically, by one name (like Cher or Madonna), that he’s been studied from every angle by the media and by everyone who ever worked for him…but after all that, nobody knows him. He’s a mystery, a sphinx, the unsmiling Mona Lisa of lordly TV producers.
Yet everything about him is iconic. In 1997, when the first “Austin Powers” movie came out, it was a whispered semi-scandal that Mike Myers had based the voice and personality of Dr. Evil on Lorne. Now, that’s simply part of Lorne’s lore. Everybody impersonates him — the documentary is full of former and current “SNL” cast members each doing their Lorne, and it’s spanked along by a series of Robert Smigel cartoons, because the Lorne Michaels send-off of Smigel’s “TV Funhouse” segments (“Give me back my shah-owww!”) was one of the earliest mythifications of Lorne. Even his office trademarks are now the stuff of legend: the nibbling of popcorn, the throwing of ice chips (when a sketch isn’t working), the goldfish tank in his office, the fact that it’s the same office (and maybe the same desk) that he had in 1975.
The running joke, which is also not a joke, is that the present-day cast members, like Michael Che and Sarah Sherman, have no idea about anything Lorne does when he’s away from the show. He’s got a tight circle of chums (Paul Simon, who he’s been close to for 50 years, is interviewed in the film and is impishly cagey about him), and there are rumors about what happens on Michaels’ blueberry farm in Maine, which Fred Armisen, also interviewed, has actually been to. Mike Myers does a deadpan bit about how he would not be surprised if Lorne was hunting humans up there, à la “The Most Dangerous Game.” But Michaels gave Morgan Neville access to some of his private happy places (we eavesdrop on Lorne and Steve Martin out to dinner), and when we get to the farm, there’s nothing enigmatic about it. It’s transcendently peaceful and beautiful — his wilderness utopia of decompression. It’s where the Canadian in Lorne comes out.
Stoic and buttoned down, with his white thatch of power hair and his Don Corleone-as-TV-suit aura, the Lorne Michaels we see today is almost a different person from the one who was raised in Canada, became part of a comedy duo that had its own variety show (“The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour”), and went to Los Angeles in 1969 to write for “Laugh-In,” and then to write and produce Lily Tomlin’s TV specials. (They won Emmys and allowed him to pivot to “SNL.”) Back then, Lorne was handsome in a jovial and open way, with dark clear eyes and a laughing manner; he had drive and ambition, but he was a straight-up dude (which is how Gabriel LaBelle played him in “Saturday Night”). He evolved, gradually, into the crusty imperious Lorne of today, with that stylized voice and that look that makes it seem like he’s wearing a mask.
Today, Lorne bust chops when he has to, wearing his power like a regal cape, but the secret that explains him — his Rosebud, as he puts it — is the highly ironic fact that what he’s hiding is his normalcy. And doing it in such a calculated way that it makes him intimidating. The cast members are scared of him, but you can see that they also love him, because he loves them the same way he loves the show: as his all-consuming mission. But one thing that the “SNL50” specials mostly left out (because it would have taken away from his Lorneness), and that Neville’s film puts front and center, is what a tormented journey Michaels had with “Saturday Night Live” during its first two decades.
The early years were, of course, magical — but even then, when Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, and John Belushi all left the show in those first five years, it tore Lorne apart. It’s not that he was angry; he was heartbroken. And after five seasons, he had burned himself out. So he left. We tend to think of this history in an abbreviated way: Lorne invented “SNL,” then left the show, which foundered under Dick Ebersol, and then he returned in triumph to rescue it. But it wasn’t that simple. Lorne felt like the floor was cut out from under him when he realized how little power he had next to the NBC executives, who didn’t care about “Saturday Night Live.” And during the five years he spent away from the show, he didn’t know what to do with himself. In 1984, he created another sketch-comedy show, this one taped and shown on Friday nights, called “The New Show,” and it was dead in the water. But after “SNL” was gradually run into the ground (not that it was all bad — these were the Eddie Murphy years), Lorne wasn’t just asked to come back and save it. The show also saved him.
It didn’t start off as a beautiful reunion. When he returned in 1985 to produce the show’s 11th season, it was actually a bust. Had Lorne lost his touch? In Hollywood, where Michaels co-wrote and produced “Three Amigos,” it took Steve Martin to explain to him on the set that they were making “a big, dumb movie.” But 1986 was when it all turned around. That was the year when Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, and Victoria Jackson joined the “SNL” cast, and they were the prototype for the what the show would become: a nimbly energized satire. It was Carvey, with his awesome impersonations (George H.W. Bush) and recurring characters (the Church Lady), who defined the new era. By the time Mike Myers joined the cast in 1989, the new “SNL” had become as powerful as the original “SNL.” Under Michaels’ leadership, it had become eternal. That said, in 1995, Michaels was still going through the agony of fighting myopic NBC executives, in this case Don Ohlmeyer, who ordered him to fire Adam Sandler and Chris Farley. Great call!
That Michaels still runs “Saturday Night Live” exactly as he always has — same meticulous schedule, same dinner at Lattanzi (the maître d’ won’t reveal what Lorne orders, but we pick up on fact that it might be rigatoni Bolognese) — is all part of the show’s artisanal mystique. Everything in America always changes, but “Saturday Night Live,” by staying the same, remains a totem of entertainment (and, of course, the show’s comedy is as up-to-the-minute as it wants to be). Lorne is a creature of habit to the nth degree, and there is something nearly Kubrickian about the obsessive and ritualized way he orchestrates every detail of “Saturday Night Live.” But I have a bone to pick with one aspect of that.
The dress rehearsal runs half an hour longer than the actual show, because it contains a handful of sketches that are going to be cut. I think this is the one aspect of Michaels’ rule that’s a bit sadistic: taking sketches all the way to fruition, just hours before 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night, only to tell the people who wrote and acted in them, “Sorry, your sketch is now on the cutting-room floor!” Yet if it were creatively justified, the ruthlessness would be its own reward.
What happens during the “Saturday Night Live” dress rehearsal, though, is that Lorne listens to the audience as if he were a studio executive studying questionnaires after a test screening. Essentially, the audience decides. (If they don’t laugh much, the sketch is out.) And my feeling is that there have been brilliant and daring sketches that didn’t make the cut that should have. Think about it: How many mediocre “SNL” sketches have you ever seen? (Answer: too many to count.) If Lorne Michals took more chances, the rehearsal studio audience be damned, he might produce a bolder and wilder show. His ritualized nature contains an element of conservatism.
But who’s complaining? It’s a miracle that “Saturday Night” still exists and is as good as it is. Lorne has made himself as fundamental to the show as the Studio 8H floorboards; his hands-on quality is embedded in every moment. Is there another Lorne waiting in the wings? Many say Tina Fey. But Lorne Michaels, at 81, doesn’t act like he’s going anywhere, and why should he, given that he’s television’s grand master of creating a late-night comedy show that, every week it’s on, figures out a way to be the same but different.
English (US) ·