Lorne Michaels Biography: Best stories about the creator of “SNL”

There is a chance that you have heard that it is the 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live”. Sunday brought the Special live birthday (and the guests in Gogo) on NBC. He arrived on the heels of the documentary “Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 years of SNL music” and the 2024 feature film “Saturday Night” – A fictitious recreation of 90 minutes before the very first episode. Throw the transparent tonnage of the plays of thought and appreciation And Other navel gastronomy And you would be forgiven to ask: do we also need a book on Lorne Michaels?

In one way or another, despite all the above, “Lorne: the man who invented Saturday Night Live” by Susan Morrison – emerges as essential, in particular for the “SNL” supplers. Morrison, editor -in -chief of the New Yorker, brings the combination of this access magazine, reports and fluid analysis to a subject which, despite its great visibility, has often played it near the vest.

The book has too many good stories of Michaels to count, but we have chosen five of the most revealing information that could help you better understand the man behind the show.

New York Living

Michaels made his first trip to New York since Toronto in the winter of 1961 at the age of 17. He was instantly struck. Figuring with a boyfriend in the apartment of an older friend at Greenwich Village, he watched Agog on the Beatnik environment and took a game after another, including the first show by Neil Simon, “Come Blow Your Hor”, “Ghosts” by Paddy Chayefsky and Henrik Ibsen by Henrik Ibsen. An actor of this program was released with a writer for “The Tonight Show” and Michaels, already a budding network, organized tickets to go see Jack Paar in action. As Morrison writes, this writer, “a young preppy man named Dick Cavett, came down from the studio to give boys their tickets.” Among the guests that evening: Betty White.

Go home, Mick!

One of Michaels' first hires for the show then entitled “Saturday Night” was the Commédienne Tom Schiller, who would often crash on the Michaels sofa at Osborne in New York. Except that sometimes it took a while to be silent at night. Michaels' new friend Paul Simon would often be finished, smoking a joint with his host and gabbant until morning hours. Another frequent denizen sofa was Mick Jagger. “I continued to pray that Mick Jagger is leaving so that I can fall asleep on this sofa,” recalls Schiller.

Michaels quickly hired his cousin, Neil Levy. As Morrison writes: “Now it was his turn to be maintained at night, while waiting for Mick Jagger to stop talking and smoking the pot and going home; He remembers that the singer holds architecture. The answer, he thought, was a combination of charisma and an ability to intudate what a person wants to talk about.

The biography of Susan Morrison on Lorne Michaels is essential, especially for the accomplished “Saturday Night Live”.

(Rosalind O'Connor / NBCU Bank Photo via Getty Images)

Four faces of Lorne

Although the male “SNL” stops with Michaels, he has what Morrison calls “four chief deputies, each who embodies a different facet from his personality”. One is Erik Kenward, the alum “a calm of Harvard Lampoon” with a carefully carved beard. He has been working at the show since 2001 and absorbs the unperturbed stability of the pattern, with a shade of long -lasting length. Then there is the one that the public knows: Colin Jost, co-host of “Weekend Update” (with Michael Che). As Morrison writes, Jost “was also a publisher of” Harvard Lampoon “” and “is, like Michaels, clearly well read and aware of politics. He is married to Scarlett Johansson, which gives him a Hollywood flicker that Michaels appreciates. ”

Erin Doyle and Steve Higgins are completed by the quartet. Doyle started as an intern and became one of the assistants of Michaels. “She has a palpable warmth,” writes Morrison, “and, like Michaels, has the talent to face famous people who are very affected.” Higgins, who is also the advertiser of Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show”, “is a booster of stupidity, a quality that Michaels considers essential to the show, and it is a reliable racing man when Michaels, known to avoid confrontation, has bad news to deliver.”

Absolute power

That said, there is no harm to be mistaken who is responsible here. “Michaels governs” SNL “with a detached but absolute power,” writes Morrison. “He does not reach any illusion that his Canadian tendency to self-depreciation is taken seriously by anyone. A talented agent says regularly he is the real star of the show. He is alpha in most of the life of his employees. For these people, and in the world of comedy in the broad sense, there is not accidentally a mythical figure, a mysterious object of obsession. “As the former distribution member (and his Canadian compatriot) said, Mike Myers:” He is aware of his own Lorne-Nes. “

… but that does not mean that he wins each battle

In the mid -1990s, while the ratings of the show fell and criticism regularly released their knives, Michaels faced an executive revolt. Don Ohlmeyer, then president of the division of the west coast of NBC, wanted a complete overhaul of “SNL”, and he wanted Michaels to draw two of the biggest stars in the series, Chris Farley and Adam Sandler. Michaels discreetly resisted and entered his common strategic position to wait for his opponents until he came out victorious. But the heat would not stop, and the possibility of the cancellation of the show seemed very real. In the end, it seems that Farley and Sandler were not entirely dismissed, but their exit was not exactly friendly. It is strange to think that a show with a story to see your great talent leaving to make films has actually pushed two of its biggest stars at the door.