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- [00:00]
Ira Flato
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- [00:36]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Coming up on the show later this week, we'll talk to New York Times reporter Stephen Kurtz about his recent article, the Gen X Career Meltdown. It's about how a lot of experienced workers in creative fields are hitting their professional peak only to find their industries collapsing. It's spurring a lot of conversations and we're excited to talk with you about it as well as with him. And we'll hear how it resonates with you. That's this Friday. Now let's get this hour started by wrapping up this month's Full Bio conversation about Lorne Michaels. Full Bio is our book series where we discuss a fully researched biography for a few days. Our guest this week has been Susan Morrison. She is the author of Lorne the Man who Invented Saturday Night Live. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live and it went on the air October 11, 1975, and at the helm was Lorne Michaels. A month shy of his 30th birthday, we learned about Michaels origins growing up in Canada, enthralled with comedy. We talked about his career as a writer and how he came to run snl. Today we're going to explore being Loren in adulthood. Lorne Michaels grew comfortable with the finer things in life. He married three times and according to the book, believed in taking time off when he became a father at work. SNL had rules. He didn't like improvisations on the show, he had thoughts on props and wigs. Michaels believed that SNL should evolve with the generations. The show is geared towards whatever the zeitgeist is, whether the cast liked it or not. When celebrity and culture came around, so did impressions. When it was political season, out came the political sketches. He branched out and pitched a young guy named Conan O'Brien for a late night talk show. Here's O'Brien on his show talking to Bill Hader about a regular occurrence, the Lorne Michaels impression.
- [02:34]
Stephen Kurtz
We both owe a lot to Lorne Michaels. Lorne Michaels gave me my shot. Gave you your shot. Obviously. Iconic, great man. But let's face it, everybody who has worked with Lorne, we're all comedy Performers. And we all, when we get together, all we do is our Lorne Michaels impressions. Yeah. And everybody does them. Everybody does that. Everybody does that. Yours is, I think, one of my all time favorites because you put, you got the voice down of Lorne Michaels, but you put a particular spin on it. You get very specific with yours. Yeah, yeah, Lauren. Fred Armisen pointed out a thing that when Lauren has to name drop, which he does a lot because he knows, like, he knows all of his friends are super famous. Super famous. He always kind of rubs his eyes like this, like he's really put out by the amount of famous people he knows. And so we, we would do a bit. John Solomon and some of the writers of Loren Name dropping serial killers. He goes to restaurants to hang out with famous people and famous serial killers join him. Yeah, yeah. So one would be like, I went to Kansas City with Alec and Marcy to try to get BTK killer off death row. They said, here comes btk. I go, you know, his name's Dennis. He's a human being. And when I say, yeah, I'd be like, I was at latanzi with Mick and Jeffrey Dahmer.
- [04:17]
Alison Stewart
And to make it on snl, you had to be on board and some left because of the culture. A long standing issue was the lack of minorities in the show for many years, which the author and I have a spirited debate about in our last segment of Full Bio. Lorne Michaels, the Man who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison. For the last part of our conversation, we're going to talk about being Lauren, because so much of the book is about being Lauren, how Lauren behaves, how he acts and how he produces the show and the different rules he has for how he produces the show and how he deals with people. And he has said over and over that he has become somewhat of a mentor for young people becoming stars. What is his advice did he give to young talent who find themselves thrust into stardom?
- [05:17]
Ira Flato
One of the things that I found as I was writing this book is that there's a whole kind of lexicon of both Lornisms and SNL jargon. I wish I had had space to have a GL glossary at the end of my book. And one of the things one, one term he uses a lot that I love is he talks about how a lot of his cast members are first generation famous. Meaning that, you know, unlike someone like Candice Bergen, whose father was a famous, you know, TV ventriloquist, a lot of his people, you know, they're coming From Oklahoma they're 23 years old or something. They're coming to New York. Lauren is opening the whole world to them. They don't know uptown from downtown. They don't know how to live in the world. They don't know what to do with their newly large paychecks. And these people, the first generation famous, they come to him for advice about everything. Not only does he have a whole set of rules about what makes comedy work and the rules of sketch comedy, but he has rules for living. And in the first five years, when he was as young as his cast members and it was the 1970s, these rules tended to be things like rotate your drugs. But you know, now that he's older and his cast members are younger than he is, they tend to be, they tend to ask him advice about like, well, should I rent a Lexus or a Mercedes or how do I buy an apartment? And he has wonderful bits of advice on questions like these. For instance, several different people told me that Lauren will say, always buy an apartment that you think you can't afford. You know, that you think it's beyond your means. For one thing, you're definitely going to be making more money next year than you do this year. And if you have an apartment like that, you'll come home at the end of the day, you'll look around and you'll say, wow, who lives here? And you'll say, oh, I live here. Another thing he says is, you know, what's better than 10 foot ceilings, 12 foot ceilings? So he's just, he inculcates them in the good life. He's always been ahead of his time in terms of thinking about work, life, balance and, you know, the value of leisure time. I think that's something that he picked up in the years he lived in Los Angeles. He, he, he, you know, he arranged the show's schedule to be compatible with the vacation schedule of New York City private schools because he thinks it's very important that people always, you know, take vacations in warm places and relax. And you know, all of these things are, these are all values that he, that he drills into the people who work for him.
- [08:01]
Alison Stewart
Did he take time to get married? He got married three times, is that it?
- [08:05]
Ira Flato
He got married three times. Once when he was very young. You know, he was very young, he married Rosie Schuster, his childhood, you know, teenage sweetheart. And then when just in the first five years he married of the show, he married Susan Forrestal, who was a model and art gallery owner that wasn't that long lived a marriage. Then in the 90s, he married Alice Barry, who had worked at the show as his assistant. And when he got married to Alice the third time and they started a family, I think that also really, I mean, as he would put it, kind of unlocks chamber of your heart when you have kids. And he really made a point of making time for fatherhood and not missing the Little League games and, you know, having proper vacations with his kids. And Tina Fey said something interesting to me. For a guy who kind of became a mogul, you know, during the 80s, at the time when, you know, New York was full of newly rich fat cats, he never caught that 80s disease of needing to act like he was a crazed workaholic. I mean, I remember in those years, every time you picked up a profile of someone like Jeff Katzenberg or Barry Diller or, you know, Michael Milken or something, they would be talking about how, you know, they only needed three hours of sleep, got up at 4:30 every morning and worked out for an hour and a half. And then, you know, met with their financial advisor and, you know, put this kind of crazy workaholism on display. Lauren isn't like that. You know, he sleeps till 11 o'clock clock every day. He works really hard, but then when he's not working, he's serious about his time off and he spends it with his family and goes to nice places. And Tina Fey also does this bit about Lauren buying a vacation home on the planet Naboo from Star wars and how chic and undiscovered it is. They all make fun of him for this too, but they appreciate it.
- [10:16]
Alison Stewart
Well, he seems like a creative person, but he clearly had to be talked into certain business ideas that gave him that kind of wealth. What made him wealthy?
- [10:28]
Ira Flato
Yeah, that's a good question. After the first five years of snl, when he left, Buck Henry, his friend, the comedian who had hosted the show a lot, said, so what was your cut of snl? What did you walk away with? And he was kind of aghast to realize that he had nothing. He had not negotiated. He didn't have any ownership. He created this thing, but he didn't own any of it. So as time went on, he hired people who could help him with that. In particular, there was a guy named Eric Ellenbogen who he hired at Broadway Video, his production company. And Eric had a lot more modern ideas about merchandising the show. In the first five years, Lauren thought that it would have been incredibly tacky to have Coneheads lunchboxes or, you know, Any kind of merchandise connected with the show that was. That would be selling out. But as time went on, I think he realized this is just the lay of the land and this is how it's done. So, you know, suddenly there were SNL T shirts. And when he got into producing the big kind of baffo SNL movies that studios and audiences wanted, like Wayne's World 1 and 2, there was a ton of merchandising. There were figurines you could get at McDonald's. You know, there were T shirts, there were comic books. And he also got much savvier about negotiating with the network for other different kinds of rights. You know, over the years, he acquired different kinds of foreign and domestic distribution rights, video rights. You know, just made a lot of much more sophisticated deals that eventually turned him into a very rich man.
- [12:10]
Alison Stewart
My guest is Susan Morrison. We're talking about her book, Lorne, the Man who Invented Saturday Night Live. It is our choice for full bio. It's interesting. I've heard use the word he would describe something as tacky or it was unhip. He had the best restaurants, he had the best tables. How did he sort of acquire this Persona? This guy from Toronto, Canada, acquired this Persona of living the high life?
- [12:40]
Ira Flato
I think it actually has something to do with being Canadian. As I was spending so much time with Lauren reporting this book, there were definitely things about his personality that remind me of my friend and former colleague. Graydon Carter, who was the longtime editor of Vanity Fair, has a new memoir out. He also is Canadian. And both Lorne and Graydon have a very ultra refined sense of taste. I think it's almost the holdover of a kind of a nose pressed against the glass, you know, aspirational stance that maybe you develop if you grow up in Canada and are always looking south of the border, thinking, I want to make it there. So I think part of it is being Canadian, you know, being from away and wanting to assimilate, wanting to really live the good life. I also think that, you know, yeah, he's a little snobby, and it's something that he has sort of turned into a comic bit. You know, whenever Lorne appears as himself on the show or in the TV funhouse cartoons that the writer Robert Smigel used to do on the show. He's kind of this almost prissy Pasha, you know, this rich guy kind of having his nails done and talking in a sort of affected English accent. And, you know, all the people in the writers room have all these elaborate things they do to amuse each other making fun of Lorne, you know, a character called little Lorne Fauntleroy and things like that. And, you know, it's funny because it's partly true. He is that sort of person who is very fussy about, you know, food and wears Gucci loafers, and yet he's also figured out how to kind of turn it into comedy fodder. It's very interesting the way he's done that. It's something almost meta about it.
- [14:47]
Alison Stewart
Throughout the book, you reveal how the press had a field day with SNL and with Lauren. Saturday Night Dead was a regular headline over the course of the show's history. What is something that the press got right about the show and what was something that really they got wrong? It wasn't SNL's problem.
- [15:10]
Ira Flato
Hmm, that's so interesting. Well, I think for a long time, the press and viewers in general complained that the show lacked diversity in all different kinds of ways. I mean, at the beginning, I think, Lauren, I think he's always been very sensitive to wanting to present a lot of material relevant to women and women's lives. But there were periods in the 90s when the writers room was a bit more of a boys club. There weren't enough interesting things for women to do. There certainly weren't enough people of color on the show, either on the screen or in the writers room. And Lauren for years took the position, which, you know, isn't. Isn't crazy that he didn't ever want to hire people according to any kind of quota. He just wanted to hire the funniest people, just get the funniest people and let them do their thing.
- [16:10]
Alison Stewart
But, I mean, come on. I mean, come on. Yeah, exactly.
- [16:15]
Ira Flato
I mean, he said that for years until I think that really wasn't viable at a certain point. And it was, I think, around, you know, what was it? Maybe 2017, there really this really heated up, and I think he just said, okay, I guess this isn't going to cut it anymore. And he held auditions in the middle of the season searching for African American women for the writing room and the cast. And this is how he met Leslie Jones. Hired her then. And, yeah, it was too little, too late. I mean, that should have happened 10 years earlier. And it's. I think. I think he just, you know, kind of, for someone who is really attuned to when the music changes, he kind of missed that one. And it was too late. I mean, he finally did it. And now the show, I think, is, you know, has a great diversity record and you see all sorts of people, you know, on screen and in the writers room, and it's. It's caught up. But it did take too long. So I think they were right about that.
- [17:22]
Alison Stewart
Yeah. You know, I thought about it. Cause he really was very big and very smart about it being a generational show.
- [17:30]
Ira Flato
Yeah.
- [17:30]
Alison Stewart
That it had to switch generations. And I wonder. It's because of his age. I mean, it's not like there aren't funny black people out there 50 years ago.
- [17:39]
Ira Flato
Yeah, but see, I think that it's. I think it wouldn't have been a decision. It would have been more that. Well, they always looked in the same places. You know, they looked at the Groundlings and they looked at the Chicago Second City. And there were probably a whole lot of other places that they could have been looking, people that they could have been asking that. They just didn't because they. You know, Lorne is also kind of superstitious about his routines. He likes to do things the same way. And probably 10 years earlier, there were other places they could have gone looking for talent, you know, rather than these predominantly white comedy troupes. So, yeah, it was just sort of not getting out of their own comfort zone, which is what they needed to do. And they finally did. What was the second part of the question? Something. Oh, that was something they got right. You're asking me for something that got wrong?
- [18:32]
Alison Stewart
Yes.
- [18:33]
Ira Flato
Okay. Yeah. Well, in the mid-90s, there was this kind of terrible period that a lot of people forget. When Lauren almost got fired. You know, NBC was really unhappy with the show. And it was a time when the press, the critics, which are mostly baby boomers, and the network executives, who were also primarily baby boomers, they both agreed and were hammering on the show for being kind of sophomoric. And, you know, one of the things that came up often in the press was that there were too many sketches about anal probes. Basically what this was is that trying to go younger, trying to, again, look at the sort of hinges between eras. As the Phil Hartman cast started sort of aging out, he brought in a lot of young guys. At the same time, he brought in Adam Sandler and Chris Farley and David Spade. And their humor had a really different cast. You know, it was. It was smart, smart, alky. It was, you know, what we would come to call ladish later. And people, they just. People. A lot of people didn't like it. I mean, a lot of young people really liked it, but a lot of middle aged people hated it. And, you know, at the end of that Scuffle. Lorne was made to fire Farley and Sandler, I mean, who are so beloved and made so many gazillions of dollars at the box office. So that was just. That was the wrong call. And, you know, within a couple of years of Farley being pushed out, Don Ohmeyer, the network executive who had forced Lauren to get rid of him, called him and said, you know, I was wrong about Adam Sandler. Can you get me a print of, you know, Billy Madison so I could show it at my kid's birthday party? So, you know, Lauren was kind of seeing ahead into the what the next generation of viewers wanted to see, but the network and the critics weren't onto it yet.
- [20:33]
Alison Stewart
It's interesting because he talks about the show being a generational show, and then in recent years, he's wanted to have and he has had as hosts Elon Musk and Donald Trump. When you would assume that the generation who works out of New York would tend to skew more Democratic. What happens when he wants to have an Elon Musk or a Donald Trump host the show?
- [21:02]
Ira Flato
Well, I. The first thing I'd say is I don't think of Musk or Trump in their selection in terms of having anything to do with age or generation. I mean, from the beginning, he's always wanted his booked kind of people outside of entertainment on the show. They had Ralph Nader, they had various sports stars, they had Brandon Tartakoff, the NBC president. So I think it's more just like, who's going to be a big personality, who's going to get ratings? And Trump. When Trump was first booked on the show, it was about the Apprentice. I mean, nobody ever took Trump seriously as a politician. I mean, who among us can take Donald Trump seriously as a politician, even now? And Musk, I don't think he was booked. His booking would have nothing to do with politics. He was just this kind of cultural weirdo. So, yeah, I don't really see either one of them as sort of political bookings. But that might also be betrayed. Yeah, no, not at all. And I mean, when Trump was booked the second time because he was a candidate, Hillary Clinton was booked as well. I mean, the whole idea there was to have both candidates on, and then the Hillary thing ended up falling apart. But no, no, you wouldn't book somebody on the show because of their politics. This is showbiz. I mean, Donald Trump is a showbiz creature. And I don't think that Lorne would consider booking someone like Elon Musk in his politicized. In his politicized incarnation now. I mean, when he was on the show, he was just the weird space guy who invented the electric car. There were people on the staff who didn't like that Musk was on the show and didn't like that Trump was on the show. And they said they thought that Lorne was just booking his rich buddies. But that also, that doesn't seem right at all to me because first of all, Lorne is not and wouldn't be buddies with those guys. As I said, they're just kind of strange, strange cultural gargoyles who are going to make viewers turn in and watch. And I think that's what happened.
- [23:29]
Alison Stewart
Lorne Michaels, I believe he's 80 years old.
- [23:33]
Ira Flato
Yes.
- [23:34]
Alison Stewart
He's been doing this for almost his whole life. What happens to SNL when he retires?
- [23:42]
Ira Flato
Well, people have floated a lot of possible replacement candidates. You know, people have said Tina Fey could do it, Seth Meyers could do it, Colin Jost could do it. I don't see it as a simple replace Lorne situation. I think he is too essential to the show. His taste, his personality, his demands, and the show is essential to him. You know, he's never missed a show in all the years he's produced it. He's never been home with a stomach flu. I have an idea that I think could keep him doing it, you know, for 15 more years, which would be. He's really only truly essential two afternoons a week there. Wednesday when they do the read through and then they pick the sketches, pick a dozen sketches that are going to go forward in production. And then Saturday when he comes and watches the dress rehearsal and makes a lot of last minute decisions about what's going to stay and what's going to go. And I think that if he could come to the office just those two chunks of time each week, his really able squad of deputies, Eric Kenward, Aaron Doyle, Steve Higgins, Carolyn Maroney, I think they could carry everything else out. And that's kind of what happened when they did the show remotely during COVID and Lauren was locked down in St. Barts, but so that would be my recommendation to keep him in there for a limited number of hours, twice a week, but don't try to replace him.
- [25:15]
Alison Stewart
I love that. You said he was locked in St. Barts during COVID Yes, he was. Is there anything that someone has not asked you about Lorne Michaels that you think is really important to understanding him?
- [25:30]
Ira Flato
Well, there is one common misperception about him which I think is interesting and that a lot of People peg him as a certain kind of Hollywood guy who there's certain comedy professionals who will like listen to a joke, you know, stand there with their hands in their pockets and then just nod their head and say, that's funny. He isn't one of those guys, like he is someone who really does laugh and who is funny himself. A lot of people said, is Lauren funny or is he just like a bureaucrat? And I mean, you know, he certainly had me laughing. I mean, usually in a kind of dry under the breath sort of way, sort of sly put downs of people, but very funny.
- [26:13]
Alison Stewart
The name of the book is Lorne the Man who Invented Saturday Night Live. My guest has been Susan Morrison. Susan, thank you for giving us so much time.
- [26:21]
Ira Flato
Oh, thank you. It was a pleasure.
- [26:23]
Alison Stewart
Thanks again to Susan Morrison. Keep your eyes for all three full bio segments in your podcast feed. Full bio was engineered by Jason Isaac, post production by Jordan Loff and written by me.
- [26:40]
Stephen Kurtz
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- [26:43]
Ira Flato
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- [26:47]
Alison Stewart
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Ira Flato
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- [26:53]
Alison Stewart
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- [26:56]
Ira Flato
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- [26:59]
Alison Stewart
So it simple. Pick up a pack today. Angelsoft.
- [27:03]
Ira Flato
Soft and strong.
- [27:04]
Alison Stewart
Simple. This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.