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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Full Bio: Lorne Michaels and the Creation of SNL
00:25:36
In today's installment of Full Bio, we learn how Lorne Michaels created Saturday Night Live.
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Alison Stewart
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Susan Morrison
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Alison Stewart
Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and.
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Susan Morrison
Affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.
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Alison Stewart
Listener Supported WNYC Studios.
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Susan Morrison
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. We have some great theater conversations coming up on the show later this week. On Thursday, we'll speak with actor Molly Osbourne. She plays Desdemona in the new production of Othello that's now on Broadway. And on Friday, we'll be talking about the gripping and hilarious new play from Brandon Jacobs Jenkins. It's called Purpose and stars Harry Lennox and John Michael Hill. The three of them will be in studio to discuss. That's in the future. Now let's get this hour started with the backstory of the man behind Saturday Night Live. Full Bio is our book series where we discuss a fully researched biography for a few days. Our guest is Susan Morrison, the author of Lorne the the man who Invented Saturday Night Live. Susan Morrison got Lorne Michaels to agree to talk to her for the 600 page bio, as did members for Michaels past and present. Lorne Lipowitz became Lorne Michaels as he launched his career as a writer and a performer, but he showed early aptitude as a producer. He wanted to produce a show that was cerebral and unconventional. Here's Michaels talking to the Today show about the original ethos of snl.
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Alison Stewart
What had happened then was most of the established institutions had been discredited, and that change led to people not knowing where or how to trust. So it was more important to try and be an honest voice. Our job is mostly to entertain, but to do it with a level of intelligence.
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Susan Morrison
He got his chance when the Tonight show host Johnny Carson announced he didn't want to do a show that would run on the weekend. But the book details the beginnings of SNL, how it ended up at 30 Rock, how he managed the brass, where he found the talent, how the talent dealt with each other, and how Michaels walked away after five years on the show and discovered it wasn't pretty out there. Let's get into it with Susan Morrison, author of Lorne the Man who Invented Saturday Night Live. Johnny Carson didn't want to work the weekends. What were NBC's options at the time?
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Alison Stewart
Well, Carson wanted NBC to take his reruns off of Saturday Night so that he could take a day off during the week. And I think he probably expected that NBC would just put on a late movie or let the affiliate stations around the country just fill that hour however they wanted to. And there was a really dynamic young president of NBC at that time named Herb Schlosser. Had. He doesn't get enough credit for all of the visionary things he did at NBC even before this. We're talking 1970, 75 now. He had put on the air a lot of shows about and created by African Americans at a time when that was really unusual. Sanford and Son, Julia, starring Diane Carroll. He really had a lot of vision for what television could be. And so he said, look, we have this time slot. Let's do something really creative with it. He dictated a memo about what he wanted on Saturday at 11:30. And a lot of people don't realize that he dictated so many of the really precise details of what SNL would become. He wanted it to be live. He wanted it to be done out of New York city in Studio 8H in the RCA building. He wanted there to be rotating hosts. He had this idea that if they did something like this, it could be, you know, it could be used almost as, like, a farm team to spin off other shows in primetime. It was really just a very innovative set of ideas there. And it just so happened that a lot of the things on his list were the same kinds of things that Lorne Michaels was envisioning in the fantasy variety show inside his Head. The one thing that Lauren wasn't sure about, and this was a big surprise to me, and I think really interesting. So when they finally. When they offered him this gig, he almost said no, because he wanted to stay in Los Angeles. You know, this is a guy who grew up in the frigid Canadian climate, and he was really digging, living in la. He loved the beach and he loved the. He loved the desert. But he also liked what he described as the way California valued the aesthetic as fun of fun, as a value in its own right. You know, he. He knew that in 1975, New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy. You know, crime was up. I mean, he'd seen Taxi Driver and all these other, you know, Escape from New York and the French Connection and all these movies about New York and tatters. And he thought, gee, you know, maybe it's nicer just to stay here in my room at the Chateau Marmont.
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Susan Morrison
Once he was approached about the job, how did Lorne Michaels feel about sharing the space with NBC's Dick Ebersole, who was also a part of this equation?
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Alison Stewart
Well, Dick Ebersol was a very young executive at NBC who had been tasked with finding the replacement for the 11:30 slot on Saturday night. He met Lorne when Lorne was working on the Lily Tomlin specials and, you know, really starting to kind of see some concrete results from of these, these visions he'd had in his head for a while. And Ebersol was a real, you know, he was a real NBC company man. He's somebody who had rapport with the higher ups. He could, he could talk to the executives. He was a very useful go between with the network. And so Lauren saw him as a useful partner in the same way that he thought Hart Pomerantz was a useful partner back in the 60s. As the show got underway, as often happens, there was some tension because Lauren was clearly the creative mind behind the show. And as the show was getting a little bit more successful, Ebersol seemed to be wanting to take a little bit more creative credit than most people of the show thought was warranted. It was almost as if he wanted the world to think that he was the co creator of the show, when in reality he was the network executive who, you know, facilitated the show getting on the air and was supposed to be responsible for budget issues and, you know, running interference with the network. And there was a little bit of creative tension. And so after five shows, Lauren successfully, Loren and his manager Bernie Brillstein successfully got NBC to remove Ebersol from SNL and kind of give him one of these promotions that seemed like was a promotion, but not really a promotion, basically got him out of Lauren's hair.
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Susan Morrison
My guest is Susan Morrison. We're talking about her book, the man who Invented Saturday Night Live. It's our choice for a full bio. So where did Lorne Michaels go to look for cast members?
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Alison Stewart
Well, in the beginning, he was determined that everything about his show be different from everything else on television. So he didn't want anyone who had ever been on television before. And he had this faith that there were a lot of people out there like him and Lily Tomlin, who wanted to make a name for themselves, but also weren't interested in conventional television. So he went to clubs, catch a rising star. He found Andy Kaufman, who wasn't in the original cast but was a regular on that first season. And you know, if you've never seen Andy KAUFMAN, go to YouTube right now and watch him. He really telegraphed the kind of out there, almost arty ambitions that Lorne had for his show. And when he first saw Kaufman at A comedy club in New York. One of his friends, Gary Weiss, said, man, this could be at the Guggenheim. You know, it was so beyond so post punchline. But really he, he, he got some people from the National Lampoon Radio Hour. He got some people from Toronto, people who he'd done comedy with before. He met Chevy Chase waiting in line to see Monty Python on the Holy Grail. One thing that was interesting is that because his show was on in late night, the pay scale was going to be very low. And two people he wanted, he almost lost one of them. The writer Alan Zweibel, who had been, who was basically slicing cold cuts in a deli at the time that Lorne saw him doing a standup set. He almost didn't take the job from Lorne because he had been offered a spot writing the jokes for Paul Lind on Hollywood Squares. You know, a pretty corny job, but it was prime time, so it was going to be a bigger paycheck. So anyway, it was interesting that, you know, he wanted to find these very cutting edge people, but he couldn't offer them a lot of money. You know, they, they just had to be kind of in on the renegade spirit of what, what he was going after and, and did find those people and, you know, they made history.
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Susan Morrison
Your book is full of so many stories about those early days. It's hard to pick one. I mean, you have Chevy Chase thinking that he was bigger than the show, Belushi behaving badly to himself, Gilda Radner suffering through anorexia. There were drugs everywhere. So I'm going to ask you to offer one story that shows what it was like to be Lauren in a decision making role and the choice he made.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah, Lorne from the very beginning, I think had a very intuitive grasp of management. You know, he never read, you know, Management for Dummies or anything like that. I think it just something in his background, being the fatherless boy, he intuitively knew how to handle creative people. I think there's a story that I didn't know until I was researching this book that I think illustrates that he wanted to have a black writer on the staff and someone he knew at the Writers Guild sent him some material by Garrett Morris, who was older than the rest of the gang. He was in his 30s and he was a Juilliard trained playwright. And so he hired Garrett Morris to be on the writing staff. And after a few weeks, an incident happened where something that Garrett Morris was just talking about conversationally, one of the other writers wrote up into a sketch and it is a writer's room is a kind of a big free for all, you know, people. Somebody mentions this, somebody else writes it up. But, you know, it was a new enough thing that the protocols hadn't been established. And Garrett Morris was incredibly offended and felt that his idea had been stolen and went to Lorne and complained and just said, you know, this is a problem. And Lorne, who didn't, you know, generally his management approach had been sort of like a parent who wants the kids to sort out their squabbles themselves. So he did not intervene. But what he did was he just. He figured, okay, Garrett Morris is someone, a big talent who we want on the show, but how do we get out of this complicated mess? So instead, he said to Garrett, why don't you audition to be in the cast? Which is what Morris did. He went to the cast auditions, he auditioned, and he was part of the cast. So he got to be part of the project. This big squabble with the other writer was, you know, sort of blown over. And Lorne didn't have to kind of get his hands dirty. So I just think that's a good illustration of how he would sort of sort out a mess.
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Susan Morrison
My guest is Susan Morrison. The name of the book is Lauren, the Man who Invented Saturday Night Live. I want to ask about Bernie Brillstein. He was a talent manager, and he had many people on the cast who he represented. Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner. How did he cause Lauren an occasional headache? Cause I think he was Lauren's manager too, right?
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Alison Stewart
Yes. Lorne met Bernie Brillstein when he was working on the beautiful Phyllis Diller show. And he was, you know, Lorne, ever since his father died, he had liked. He gravitated toward slightly older guys, you know, who had been around, who had wisdom to impart about show business. And Bernie Brillstein was one of these guys. He was a big, barrel chested person with a beard. You know, he was always described as a Jewish Santa. And he liked Lorne and he signed him. And, you know, there was nothing cutting edge about the acts that Bernie Brillstein represented. You know, Lorne was probably way, you know, out there in terms of being edgy compared to anyone else that Bernie had. But again, Lorne was so canny about who he surrounded himself with. He always felt that it was really good to have Bernie Brillstein as sort of a gut check. You know, he represented middlebrow taste. You know, if Bernie Brillstein liked it, they would like it in Kansas. He was A guy who watched football on Sunday, you know, something that Lauren didn't really do. And, you know, and he also. He had Lauren's back. He was the kind of person who would get into scrapes, have confrontations with people that Lauren didn't want to have, because Lauren is by nature unconfrontational. Now, he was Lauren's manager, and in the early days of snl, he quickly signed up, you know, Chevy, Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, eventually some of the writers. And that worked pretty well as long as they were all a big happy band. But as time wore on, it was a little bit complicated for Lauren because, for instance, in the fourth season, Brillstein was the executive behind the Blues Brothers, which is a movie that his clients Stan Aykroyd and John Belushi were making. And, you know, that was great for him. He got to have his big Mr. Hollywood moment. But it wasn't so great for his other client, you might say his. You might say his more important client, Lorne Michaels, who employed those two guys, you know. So by setting up the Blues Brothers deal, Brillstein effectively, you know, robbed Lorne of two of his most important cast members. And there were a lot of people always said along the way they didn't understand why Lorne didn't get madder at Bernie after things like that. But I think he has a real ability to be able to compartmentalize, like, well, this is business. It's just business. You know, that's what you're going to do. If you're a businessman, you're going to. You're going to make that deal. So, yeah, those kinds of conflicts of interest popped up here and there. But I think in the end of the day, Lauren always valued Bernie because he was there at the beginning. And that kind of longevity, that kind of loyalty that goes, you know, spans decades, always counts for a lot with him.
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Susan Morrison
In your chapter into the Wilderness, you write about the time that Lorne Michaels left snl. It was after the fifth season, or he was kind of pushed out. I couldn't quite tell. How would you describe his leaving?
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Alison Stewart
Well, he had been doing SNL for five years. He was absolutely shattered with exhaustion. He'd lost his most of his cast members. He wanted to keep going, but he said to NBC that he needed at least six months to regroup. He knew he'd have to hire all new people, and he just needed to rest. And I think he felt pretty confident that they would do that because he, after all, had created this show, but he Wasn't that sophisticated in some ways about network politics. The network came right back at him and said, no, no, you can't do that. We've already sold all the fall ad spots. You know, the show has to go on as. As planned. And so he entered into this complicated negotiation which got sort of fraught. But I think he was persuaded, he thought that he was going to prevail. And then something happened right before his final meeting with the president of the network, Fred Silverman, who was not his closest ally, where on an episode of snl, Al Franken went on Weekend Update and did a bit making fun of Fred Silverman, the NBC president, for having a limo. And the name of the bit was Limo for a Lamo. Basically, Franken asked all the viewers to send in a postcard addressed to Limo for a Lame O, saying that if Fred Silverman had a limo, Al Franken should have one, too. And it's now it's Lorne Michael's practice to not get in the weeds of, you know, of his writers and cast members comedy bits. And he would not have told Al, just don't do that. You know, I'm negotiating with Fred Silverman right now. It is kind of remarkable to think about that. So this thing went over the air. Fred Silverman was completely furious. The negotiations sort of sputtered out. I think Lawrence still thought that he was maybe going to be able to save it. But then suddenly, when he was out of town a few weeks later, he got a call saying that NBC had just announced a new producer. And he was shocked because I think he thought that if he weren't going to do it, that NBC would just take it off the air. He thought it was really his baby, but he was wrong. It was NBC's property.
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Susan Morrison
I want to back up one thing. Why did Lauren lose so many cast members in the first five years?
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Alison Stewart
Well, when he started the show, first of all, he didn't expect that the cast was going to be as important as it was. I think he almost thought of them as background players. You know, you'd have the star hosts and you'd have these fancy rocks, rock bands. But the cast was enormously talented, and people loved them. They especially loved Chevy Chase. And I think he became famous first because he looked into the camera every week and said, I'm Chevy Chase and you're not. So he became a giant star in the first season. He was getting all kinds of movie offers. It also sort of upset the emotional ecology of the show. There was jealousy and rivalry. You know, why was Chevy Chase on the COVID of New York magazine and not them. So at the end of that first season, Chevy left because he. Hollywood. Hollywood was calling. And at that point, you know, or even today, if you're an actor trying to make it and you're suddenly getting movie deals and tickets to, you know, LA on first, first class tickets to la, you're generally going to go. And so when Chevy became a star, the others started thinking, well, gee, what? What can I get out of this? And Belushi was the next one whose ambition really kind of took hold of him. And he starred in Animal House, which was a movie that Lauren wasn't connected with, but was a massive, massive hit. And he was suddenly gigantically famous. And so he wanted to pursue the movies. And he and Dan Aykroyd, his friend from the show, had developed this act called the Blues Brothers. And that was then, you know, made into a movie. So basically, it's a pretty classic trajectory, people leaving TV for the movies when the movies beckon. And I don't think Lorne had counted on it at that point. It made it hard for him to do the show, the show as, you know, as to have it be as good and as funny as he wanted it to be. And he hadn't figured out by that time that the way to do Saturday Night Live, and certainly the way he's made it happen for 50 years, is that it has to exist, exist in a constant state of renewal. You know, he often compares it to a sports franchise. You have your stars, but you have to have your rookies on the bench. It's, you know, it's also. It's a little bit like New York City itself. You know, it's in a constant state of being torn down and rebuilt. And it's one of the things that accounts for its unevenness. You know, it's. It's sort of like the Dow or the Yankees, their good years and bad years. But in the first five years, it had never occurred to him that he was going to have to be constantly looking out for new talent, constantly hiring people. So when he came back in 1985, that's what he had learned. You have to keep rejuvenating the show.
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Susan Morrison
What did he do in the years he was gone from snl?
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Alison Stewart
Well, that was interesting. As I said earlier, he was obsessed with Mike Nichols and always thought that he wanted to make a movie like the Graduate. So after five years at snl, he thought, well, the TV part of my career is done now. Now I'm going to go into The Mov. And he made a deal with MGM to produce and direct movies. He hired a bunch of his SNL writers, including Franken and Davis, to write scripts, but nothing really happened with them. Part of it was that MGM at that point was in sort of financial freefall. So they really weren't in a position to make any of Lawrence movies. But he also didn't really know how to do it. One movie got made in that period called Nothing Lasts Forever, directed by Tom Schiller, who had made charming little films in the first five years of snl. But it was kind of like a little black and white art film. And I think the studio was expecting a sort of baffo big ticket comedy like Animal House. So there's Lorne. He was working on a. A script which was an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. He had optioned Don DeLillo's white noise. The movies in his head were not movies like Animal House. So that was basically a disastrous five years. I mean, he did. And this is how I met him in. In 1983, he signed with NBC to do a primetime variety show modeled on SNL called the New Show. And I was an assistant on that show, which is how I got my foot into this crazy Lauren world. But that show also was a disaster. And really it was because it wasn't live, it was shot on tape. He would amass like several hours worth of stuff and then had to stay up all night editing it and it would air the next day. But that's the value of the new show, is that it made him realize what his talent is. And his talent is doing things live with a kind of knife point of adrenaline and energy. Anytime you're sitting in an editing room chopping things up and, you know, doing them 18 different ways and adding a laugh track, you're going to SAP all the electricity, all the energy from it.
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Susan Morrison
Once Lauren returned to Saturday Night Live, what changed about him when he came back?
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Alison Stewart
Well, he got pretty banged up during the five years of hiatus. And by the time he came back to the show in 1985, he had had to remortgage his apartment. You know, he was in financial distress. He really wanted to get it right. And the first year he made a colossal mistake. He decided that he needed to get really young people for the new audience. And he hired several people who had starred in John Hughes teen movies. Anthony Michael hall, Robert Downey Jr. And these guys, you know, they weren't like ensemble comedy players. They were sort of too young and not really seasoned enough to be able to do what SNL did best, which is, you know, sort of ensemble work with other really funny people. And that season fell completely flat. He fired almost everybody at the end of that season. The three who survived were Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller, and Nora Dunn. But the next year, he went back and hired people out of comedy clubs. And that's when he hired, I think, one of the best casts of the show's ever had. You had Dana Carvey, Jan Hooks, Kevin Nealon, Phil Hartman. These people were just amazing actors of the first terrible year with all the young people. Al Franken, who was the writer producer on the show, he said you couldn't even do a hearing about a sketch about a Senate hearing that year because these guys, you know, they barely had a shave. They were just too young.
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Susan Morrison
Tomorrow on Full bio, we'll learn about Loren Michael's highs and lows as a producer. 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.