Saturday Night Live is still, and will probably always be, appointment viewing in my household. It’s a show I’ve watched regularly since childhood, when I watched and rewatched all of the “Best of…” DVDs that I could get my hands on. And if you are an SNL acolyte like me, you’ve read all of the books (James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ oral history “Live From New York” is an invaluable resource and perhaps the SNL bible), you’ve watched all of the documentaries (James Franco’s Saturday Night is probably still the best behind-the-scenes look we’ve gotten), and you’ve devoured all of the ancillary media tied into last year’s 50th anniversary celebration, from the Peacock specials (they put out three or four last year alone) to Susan Morrison’s 656 page biography of the main man himself, “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.”
Despite five decades of backstage stories and revealed secrets, it’s amazing that Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator and executive producer, remains largely a mysterious figure, foreign to fans and only slightly more familiar to those who work for and with him. In Morgan Neville‘s strong new biographical documentary Lorne, now playing in select theaters, we see Colin Jost and Michael Che, for example, two of the show’s longtime head writers and cast members, realize that they know nothing more about him than what’s featured on his Wikipedia page — half of which was, until recently, made up by Paul Simon anyway.
Michaels is an enigma, plain and simple. He inspired Mike Myers‘Dr. Evil character, Bill Hader once compared him to Darth Vader, and, in the documentary, Kristen Wiig compares him to the Wizard of Oz — and these are people who worked for him. But he’s also the puppetmaster behind 46 of the show’s 51 years, a remarkable run in television, comedy, or pop culture at large. What he does is hard to explain to someone outside of the show’s day-to-day and week-to-week, but when everyone who has ever been asked if they’re taking over his job says something like, “It’s the hardest job of all time,” it’s clear that whatever the recipe for success is, Lorne knows the secret ingredient. Neville tries to, and ultimately largely succeeds in, figuring out what exactly that is. The documentary parallels his life, from Canada to Los Angeles to New York to Maine to Tennessee, and a week at the show, from the Monday writers’ meeting to the Wednesday table read to Saturday’s dress rehearsal and ultimately the 11:30 pm showtime.
“The thing about producing is it’s invisible art,” Michaels says toward the end of the film. And Lorne Michaels, as noted, likes to stay invisible. That’s one thing that makes Neville’s work so interesting: watching one of the most powerful men in television avoid the cameras and refuse to wear a microphone. The documentary shows us what is often only told to us: the mountains of popcorn in every room, the weekly appointment dinners at Midtown’s Lattanzi and Orso, the dress rehearsals under the bleachers, and the mysterious inner-circle meetings right before the show is finalized. Whatever Neville cannot get footage of, like Lorne’s home life or closed-door meetings with executives, he depicts in cartoons from Robert Smigel, done in the style of SNL‘s classic “TV Funhouse” segments.
Saturday Night Live is structured around Lorne’s preferred schedule (and, it should be noted, the heavy use of cocaine in the 1970s), and the chaos of Tuesday’s all-night writing sessions and Saturday night’s last-minute cuts are all a product of his design. One of his biggest strengths, as explained by former writer Conan O’Brien, is his ability to remain “in control, calm, bemused, and unaffected.” This insanity, this “the show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30” ethos, is what he believes makes the show’s creativity thrive. In the documentary, Michaels calls SNL the optimal “meeting of my talent and my metabolism,” which means that the program, and the whole comedy world — seeing the number of alumni who have graduated from the show — has been directly influenced by his perspective, his modus operandi.
Meanwhile, his life story, his childhood interest in television, his beginnings in comedy, his failings in comedy, his brief success and continued failings in comedy, is a tale not often told. Neville paints this portrait sincerely and honestly, finding the throughline from his earliest gigs, writing for Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and producing Lily Tomlin specials, to his current producing philosophy. After 1975, of course, the story of Lorne becomes the story of Saturday Night Live, and unlike a certain movie, it doesn’t treat him or the show like a deity or the gospel. Both the man and the empire are fallible, and those ups and downs are what weathered both institutions.
Neville’s film is so interesting that I still wanted more after 101 minutes. This is the kind of subject I could very easily watch a full five-episode miniseries about. Once Lorne (and the show) make it to the 21st century, the biography stuff zips along. It was the right call, but I could’ve easily devoured so much more of this documentary, especially because, if you’re an SNL fanatic like me, this isn’t a ton of new information here.
Above all, however, Neville figures out and explains why there will never be another Lorne Michaels, even if Michaels makes it difficult to answer the question fully. At 81 years old, he’s still going strong every week with the show, regardless of how unpredictable the show’s outcome can be. Lorne understands Lorne, the man, the myth, the legend, as much as any of us ever will.
Review Courtesy of Patrick J. Regal
Feature Image Credit to Focus Features