← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Full Bio: SNL Creator Lorne Michaels
01:19:53
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live.
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Alison Stewart
All of it is supported by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice. Make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates for multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.
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Susan Morrison
Listener supported WNYC Studios.
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Lorne Michaels
Full Bio is our book series where we discuss a fully researched biography for a few days. Our guest is Susan Morrison. She's the author of Lorne the Man who Invented Saturday Night Live. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live. It went on the air October 11, 1975, and at the helm was Lorne Michaels, a month shy of his 30th birthday. Michaels is now 80 and has been through the evolution of TV. Susan Morrison got Lorne Michaels to agree to talk to her for her 600 page bio, as did members from Michaels past and present. Names you've heard of, like Bill hader and Conan O'Brien and names you might not know like Hart Pomerantz and Rosie Schuster. Today we start the book with Lauren's childhood. Lauren David Lipowitz was born in Toronto, Canada on November 17, 1944 to Florence and Henry Abraham Lipowitz. He was the oldest of three children. And that's where we begin with Susan Morrison, the author of Lorne the Man who Invented Saturday Night Live, our choice for Full Bio. So, Susan, Lauren's name was Lauren Lipowitz. His grandparents owned a movie theater. What kind of entertainment did he grow up watching and liking?
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Susan Morrison
Well, he stressed that as a boy in very cold, very boring Canada, you had to kind of make your own fun. You had to make your own distraction. There was a lot of ice skating on, you know, flooded playground ponds and things like that. But when American television finally came to Canada, that really turned the lights on. It really changed his life because before they got American channels, the CBC was dominated by a lot of, you know, folk singing and Shakespeare. Sort of boring. But he, you know, as soon as he could watch the Phil Silver show, your show of shows, you know, all the great American variety shows, he was completely hooked. And one of the things that I loved hearing about from him is how he would watch with his grandmother, his very sophisticated kind of, you know, she, she booked, she had a movie theater and she would explain who these men and women on the TV were. And there was a, there's a great thing that I think he really internalized, like he'd be watching Jack Benny on TV with who was a guy an older man with black hair. And his grandmother would explain how he had started out as a young man in vaudeville, you know, and then radio came along and he was older and he was a white haired man in radio. Then came television and all these guys had to dye their hair or if you're George Burns, get a toupee so you could be on camera. And, you know, so he had this sense of the sort of Darwinian nature of showbiz and adapting to changing media and to changing times. And I love the idea that you can draw a direct line from, you know, 8 year old Lorne watching TV to, you know, 70 and 80 year old Lorne figuring out how he has to change his show as the times change.
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Lorne Michaels
His mother Florence was a real character. What's an example of something she did that explained who you were dealing with when you were dealing with Florence?
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Susan Morrison
Well, he said, my mother was. My mother kept the compliments on a high shelf in a jar that wasn't opened very often. I think she was a typical Jewish mother, right out of Philip Roth in that she was very demanding of him and kind of withholding. But when he was out of the room, she was bragging her head off about him. You know, he was a prince to everybody else. But when he was there, he felt like he wasn't quite measuring up. And I think he internalized that management style. And you know, a lot of people have said the same thing about him.
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Lorne Michaels
He didn't have his father very long. His father died when he was 13.
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Susan Morrison
14. 14.
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Lorne Michaels
What happened with his father?
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Susan Morrison
Well, his mom, I think, was the really dominant parent. And When Lauren was 14 years old, he and his father had an argument one night because he had missed his curfew. And Loren's mother had been pressuring Loren's dad to discipline him about it. So they had a big argument, they yelled at each other. You know, voices were raised. That night when Lorne was in bed, his father collapsed. It was a heart, an embolism. They didn't know that at the time. He was rushed to the hospital. Lorne didn't get to visit him there. He was in the hospital for two weeks and died. So Lorne carried around with him through his whole adult life this terrible feeling of guilt and shame that his last interaction with his father had been this very difficult, you know, fight. And I think it really introduced a shade into his emotional palette. He, you know, forever after, always avoided confrontation. You never see him raise his voice at anyone. He's afraid of conflict, I think. And it Also, as a 14 year old plunged him into a real kind of dark place. His mother was very depressed. He had to suddenly be the man of the house. He almost failed in school that year, almost had to skip a grade. And after this rough time during which his mom was afraid he was going to become a juvenile delinquent, to use the phraseology of the 50s, he kind of pulled himself together and learned how to manage and also how to sort of manage people in a way. And there's a picture in one of his yearbooks, a group shot of the class, and it's all these smiling Bobby soccers. There's Lauren in the back row, looking very glum and blank. But the caption described him as, you know, Lorne, the author of how to Win Friends and Influence Teachers. Like he already had figured out, I think, how to use his sort of gift of gab to sort of make his way in the world. So I think he had a tough time after his father died. And then he somehow turned on a dime and figured out how to navigate the world on his own.
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Lorne Michaels
Was there anyone who became a father like figure to him as a teenager?
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Susan Morrison
Yes. Well, after losing his dad, he started on this path of all his life looking for interesting father figures. The first two when he was a teenager. One was his Uncle Pap, who was a very successful businessman in Canada. Their family was much richer and more sophisticated than Loren's was. And Uncle Pep really stepped up, took Lorne under his wing, taught him about money, taught him about business, gave him a job, really kept an eye on him. Later would pay for him to take trips to Europe. And another, maybe even more important mentor in Loren's life was Frank Schuster, who was the father of his friend Rosie Shuster. He lived a few blocks away. And people don't know the name Frank Schuster today, but with his comedy partner Johnny Wayne, they had a two man comedy act called Wayne and Schuster, which was an incredibly big act in the 50s and 60s. They were guests on the Ed Sullivan show more than any other act, even more than Topo Gigio, which you might not get if you're not a baby boomer.
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Lorne Michaels
I got it.
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Susan Morrison
So Frank Schuster was this comedy star and he lived near Lorne. And Lorne basically camped out in his study until he was finished school. And you know, there was a comfortable den, there was a real live father in it. And Frank Schuster taught him the ropes. He explained, you know, how the Marx Brothers jokes worked. He told him who Preston Sturges was. He started telling him all these great old showbiz Stories that form the backbone of Lorne's conversation even today.
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Lorne Michaels
My guest is Susan Morrison. The name of the book is Lorne, the Man who Invented Saturday Night Live. It's our choice for a full bio. Well, after his misbegotten high school years, he entered university, the University of Toronto. And you write about this one teacher that used to get a laugh by the way he pronounced the name of someone. And that really sparked something in Lorne.
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Susan Morrison
Yes, yes. One of the fun things about writing about Lorne Michaels is that he has this life that almost kept making me think of a Victorian novel, you know, like a Dickens novel or something. And every single thing that he did, every encounter that he had as a young man, he was very good at kind of taking away a nugget of wisdom, taking away a lesson from it. And he was interested in comedy as a college student. He loved watching Johnny Carson on the Tonight show and analyzing his monologues. But he was in a political science class, and the teacher was talking about the prime minister, Diefenbaker, and he just said the name Diefenbaker in a way that was clear that he was making fun of the man. But he didn't actually make a joke about him. And everybody in the classroom laughed. And it really struck Lorne like, oh, he didn't actually make a joke. But what he did is he made everyone in the room feel like they were kind of on the inside. It made them feel like they were part of some little elite club. And I think he realized that that's one of the things that humor can do. It's like, you get it, you're on the inside, and, you know, that's a type of humor, a type of reaction that SNL has sought in its viewers for years. From the very beginning. You know, you recognize that this is a recurring character. You've heard that catchphra before. You know, you're in the in crowd. And I think that was a really important thing for him to learn at that age.
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Lorne Michaels
Lorne met a man named Hart Pomerantz. Who was Hart Pomerantz?
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Susan Morrison
Well, Hart Pomerantz was probably the geekiest person to ever walk the earth. He was a law student in Toronto, and his little brother, even geekier than Hart, named Earl Pomerantz, auditioned to be in the college review at the University of Toronto that Lorne was producing called the UC Follies. This guy wore Coke bottle glasses. You know, one of his jokes was, my eyesight is so bad that my windshield is made of prescription glass. You know, so Earl auditioned. Lorne didn't think there was a place for him in the show. So Hart Pomerantz called up Lorne. He was this law student, but he had had some success writing for local comedy reviews, including one that starred the hometown Robert Goulet. And so Hart said, listen, I'd really like you to cast my little brother Earl, and if you do, I'll write for you. I'll give you some sketches for your show. And, you know, at that point, Lauren was just this college student. The idea of having someone who was almost an adult, who had some professional credits contribute a couple of sketches to his college review seemed like a good deal. So that was the beginning of Hart and Lorne knowing each other. And a few years later, after Lauren graduated, he had heard that Hart, Pomerantz had actually gone to New York City, you know, which was really a glamorous, faraway destination, and done some standup at a comedy club called the Improv. So Lauren, you know, who was always kind of looking for the main chance, figured, ah, this guy could be my ticket out of here, my connection to professional show business. So he reached out to Hart and the two of them started writing jokes together and even developed a kind of a two man comedy act. Not unlike Wayne and Schuster's Lipowitz and Pomerants.
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Lorne Michaels
They were formed.
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Susan Morrison
Right. One of the things I think is so funny about them calling themselves Lipowitz and Pomerants is that Laurence's mother, like every mother in his neighborhood, had her heart set on her son going to law school. And you know what sounds more like a law firm than Lipowitz and Pomerants.
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Lorne Michaels
They earn something like $10 a joke. When they wrote for people, who did they write for?
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Susan Morrison
Well, they wrote for, they wrote for Joan Rivers, they tried to write for Dick Cavett, but he didn't hire them. The most exciting thing was when they were actually flown on an airplane down to New York to meet with Woody Allen, whose career was taking off at such speed at that point. He had a couple movies going, he had a play on Broadway, he had a lot of television appearances that his agent, Jack Rollins, wanted him to hire some writers to help. So he brought Pomerantz and Lipowitz down to meet Woody Allen. And one of the really big pleasures of reporting this book is Hart Pomerantz actually had tape recorded this whole brainstorming, joke writing session in Woody's living room. Between the three of them, you have these two 20 something Canadians, very green, and Woody, you know, who's something of a success, just brainstorming jokes. And they're trying to make a joke about a lobster in a tank. And you know, you listening to it, you really just get the sense of the grueling. You know, it's just, you know, nine, nine misses for every one hit. They just go around and around and around. It's just a fascinating document to listen to that. And I excerpt a chunk of it in the book. And you can already see the beginnings of Lorne's producer personality. You know, he kind of takes control. He's a little pushy with his ideas, and yet he backs off when they're not accepted. And he's sort of trying to be encouraging to Woody. And it's fascinating to listen to. No jokes came out of that meeting, except it really boosted Lauren's confidence enormously. And Woody did compliment one joke that Lauren told him that he didn't use. But here, I'll tell you now because it is a pretty, pretty trippy, interesting joke. And the joke goes, there's a guy who becomes obsessed with the notion that somewhere in the world is another person, a doppelganger who's thinking exactly the same thoughts as he is at the same time. And he's desperate to meet this guy. So he looks and he looks. Somehow he finds the phone number of this man, calls him on the phone, the line is busy because he's been thinking the same thought as the other guy. So Woody didn't use that joke, but he told Lauren that it was brilliant. And that single handedly kept Lauren going for a couple of years.
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Lorne Michaels
This is also when the name change happens. What led Lorne changing his name to Lorne Michaels?
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Susan Morrison
Well, in those days, almost every, everyone in show business who was Jewish and not just show business, but other professions, would change their names, would anglicize them. And Milton Berle, every Jewish comic you can think of had a much more unwieldy name at the start of their lives. And in fact, all of Lorne's father, Abraham Lipowitz, probably would have changed his if he had been in a profession, but he didn't. But all of his brothers had changed it. And so he just wanted something that was more kind of showbiz friendly. He had married Rosalind Schuster by then, and her mother also urged him, as did Frank Schuster, to change Lipowitz. I mean, Rosa's mother said that she didn't want the daughter who she had named for a heroine out of Shakespeare, to have the last name Lipowitz. You know, so, yeah, he tried on all different Possibilities Lipton. And he settled on Michaels and I guess, you know, it's sort of a nice, straight ahead Anglo name. Hart Pomerant speculated that he chose it as an homage to Mike Nichols, whose work really knocked Lorne out. For years he just was fixated on wanting to make a movie just like the Graduate.
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Lorne Michaels
After the break, we'll learn how Lorne Michaels made his way in Hollywood. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart and we continue our full bio series with Susan Morrison. She wrote Lorne, the man who invented Saturday Night live. In the 1980s, Lauren was asked by David Letterman about his career in comedy.
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David Letterman
You performed yourself? Yes, I did.
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Lorne Michaels
And what was the nature of that act?
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David Letterman
It was, sad to say, a comedy act. As you can see, there's almost no trace of that left in me. I know I began writing with another guy in Canada and we would write and perform ourselves. I was not great at performing, although I was very good at actually. My part was mostly asking questions, but I sort of knew what the answers would be. And then I'd say stuff like really? And really. And I was a pacer. I would sort of. He was very funny and I would sort of take the pause moment in between and sort of support him during that. And then I began to get more and more interested in producing and comfortable there.
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Lorne Michaels
Lauren landed jobs writing for Rowan and Martin's Laugh in and the Beautiful Phyllis Diller show. It was his work on Lily Tomlin's cutting edge specials L that gave him a calling card for what he wanted to do next. Produce. Let's get back into our full bio conversation about Lorne, the man who invented Saturday Night Live with Susan Morrison. Lorne Michaels was in LA in the late 1960s. He got a job on Laugh In, a TV show from the late 60s, the early 70s, just a wacky variety show. Can you explain what the comedic landscape was like in the late 60s for TV?
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Susan Morrison
Yes, it was an interesting time in television. Lorne showed up in LA from Toronto with an idea that he really wanted to radicalize television. You know, he. He knew that the movies were, were really forging ahead. You had directors like Robert Altman and Scorsese and Terence Malick, you know, breaking boundaries. And in music you had rock and roll, you had the Stones and David Bowie. But he found that television, when he got to LA, was somehow stuck in the 1950s. There were these very cornball variety shows. He worked. He worked on one, which was Perry Como's Christmas special. He worked for one called the Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. And almost exclusively these places, as well as Laugh, in which he went to next, were staffed and written by men in their 50s and 60s, guys who had started out working in radio. So suddenly he just felt like, oh, my God, I'm in this backwater. You know, television is a cul de sac. On the Phyllis Diller show, you know, there were guests like Ernest Borgnine, and Phyllis Diller would, like, play her saxophone at the end of the show. It was just very corny. And he had this idea that he wanted to take the var. You know, music sketches, blackout jokes, and update it, you know, filling it with the concerns of his generation, sex and drugs and rock and roll. He used the term, I want to make new wine in old bottles. You know, he liked the structure, the format, but he thought that all the material was just, you know, for people 20, 30 years older than he was.
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Lorne Michaels
Let's listen to a little bit of laughing and we can talk about it on the other side.
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Susan Morrison
Forrest and I have the most violent political arguments. He thinks the Democrats can do no wrong. And of course, I'm for Johnson. It is said that the man who soweth the oats in the garden of his neighbor, perhaps he has not a pot to plant in. Raquel Welch may look excellent, but man cannot live by broad alone. It's not that I'm against marriage. I'd get married in a minute if I didn't have to live in. Actually, there have been a lot of.
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Alison Stewart
Successful show business marriages.
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Susan Morrison
Eddie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, Eddie Fisher, Liz Taylor, Eddie Fisher, Connie Stevens.
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Lorne Michaels
At Laugh in, he was considered one of the young guys. What did their humor look like next to the old guys, the old radio guys?
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Susan Morrison
Well, there's. There's an old, kind of. An old Catskill vaudeville kind of style of joke that's called like a blackout, which is just sort of, you know, it's a one setup at a quick punchline, a real kind of badump bump sort of thing. And Laugh in really specialized in that. Its creator, George Slaughter, compared it to a pinball machine. It was just really fast, you know, one liners, gag jokes, you know, people sticking their heads out of holes in a psychedelic wall, shouting a punchline. Lord was much more interested in a kind of cerebral, almost high concept kind of comedy that, you know, closer to the kind of jokes that Woody Allen was doing.
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Lorne Michaels
He.
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Susan Morrison
He liked. He liked the idea that humor could reflect really what was going on in somebody's real life, in somebody emotionally, and Laugh in, even though it was modern and, you know, or Mod as kind of psychedelic graphics. Politically, considering it was the late 60s, it was toothless. One of the head writers was a crony of Richard Nixon's. So there wasn't going to be any criticism of the Vietnam War. There wasn't going to be any tough politics on the show. You know, Lorne could never get a Nixon joke on that show. You know, a standard. The extent that they went at Vietnam, it was, you know, Goldie Hawn in a bikini confusing the Viet Cong for King Kong. You know, it was sort of a dumb blonde joke. But they really didn't want to go anywhere near politics. And Lorne at that point felt that humor, he was messianic about humor. He wanted it to be smart. He wanted it to be able to change the world, as he put it. You know, they were watching Watergate all the time. He really thought that humor should be dealing in just those kinds of issues.
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Lorne Michaels
You write in the book that several people think that Laffin was a progenitor of snl. What do you think?
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Susan Morrison
Well, as I said before, Lorne took little bits and pieces of everything that he encountered on his journey to SNL and used it to stoke snl. It is true that Laffin, you know, has bits and pieces that remind you of snl, but it didn't have musical guests like SNL did. Other examples of people who said, you know, snl, you know, came from here is his Lorne's camp buddy, Howard Shore, who would become SNL's first music director. He thinks that SNL was born on the plywood stage of their summer camp, Camp Timberlane, where Lorne and the others put on something called the Fast show, which was a variety show with sketches and jokes and music. Rosie Sho thought that the show came from her father's den. You know, that so much of what Lauren learned from her dad really filled in all the blanks at snl. Hart Pomerantz thought that SNL came out of the Hart and Lauren Terrific Hour, which was a variety show that the two of them did for the cbc, which also had a lot of similarities to snl. So it was kind of this concept that took root in his mind early on, and he just refined it and refined it and refined it over time.
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Lorne Michaels
My guest is Susan Morrison. We're talking about her book, the man who Invented Saturday Night Live. It's our choice. For full bio, I want to mention two female comedians that were very important to Lorne Michaels, Rosie Shuster, who you've missed mentioned, and Lily Tomlin. Let's start with Rosie Schuster. They've been friends since they were kids. She was his first wife. Her dad acted as a mentor to him. That sort of describes her personally. How would you describe her professionally and her impact on Lauren?
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Susan Morrison
I think she had a huge impact and one of the pleasures of writing this book was giving her her due in his, you know, comedy formation, of his comedy instinct. I mean, she said that growing up in that household, you know, just the comedy rhythms would get in your blood. It was sort of a birthright to her to be proficient at comedy and to be a funny woman with a quick comeback and. But I think that partly because she grew up in a house in a comedy household, professionally at first, she sort of wanted to distance herself from that. I don't think she thought immediately that she wanted to grow up to be in the comedy business. It might be for that reason and also just for reasons of, you know, women in the 50s and 60s not feeling comfortable putting themselves out there, that I think for the first years of their relationship, as Rosie put it, she would whisper funny things in Lauren's ear and then he would say them out loud. You know, it was second nature to her to be a kind of a handmaiden, to stay behind the curtain, to, you know, not take credit. And even when she did start writing for other comedy shows, she always used a pseudonymous. When I was talking with her, you know, more recently, she said, she said something. I can't remember exactly what her words were, but she said that she, she just had this instinct to be self effacing and not to step forward and take credit. And I think that, you know, through years of adulthood and therapy, she's now recognized how great it is to get credit for your work. And anyway, as I said, it's a, it's been a real pleasure and privilege for me to be able to restore some of the credit to her.
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Lorne Michaels
Lily Tomlin is the other person I wanted to mention. Lorne Michaels worked for Lily Tomlin on her series of specials. They won an Emmy for the show. She wanted to do thoughtful comedy. At that point in his career, could he do that?
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Susan Morrison
Well, he had been bouncing around la, pitching this show in his head to anyone who would listen. No one was interested. And, and it wasn't until he met Lily Tomlin that he found somebody who was on the same wavelength as he was in terms of wanting comedy that expressed sort of interior states of being, you know, wanting, wanting comedy that would play to what he called the TV generation. I mean, he and Lily were in the first generation to have Grown up on tv. So they also wanted to make fun of tv. You know, they recognized that it had kind of shrink wrapped the culture and they saw it as a big target for satire. So in all of the comedy that both of them did, there are parodies of television commercials, parodies of talk shows. You know, TV was just a big fat target waiting there. No one had really gone after it. But I think she really enhanced. I he, he, he, he described the kind of work she did as a kind of comedian's lib, that she liberated comedy from the punchline, you know, from the seltzer bottle, from the ba dum bump rim shot. She, she wanted to write things that were almost like little plays that explored people's characters and what was, you know, just this sort of odd, humorous strangeness of being a person in the world. And she also, for the first time, you know, really wanted to include women's experience. And a lot of the sketches in the, in the specials that Lauren worked on with her, some of them written by him, really, you know, shone a light on women's experience. And it's really a breakthrough. I mean, as I said, I spent a day with her in la and I came away from there thinking, you know, I don't know if I'm gonna do this, but someone has got to write this woman's biography because she was really, really world changing.
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Lorne Michaels
That was Susan Morrison, author of the man who Invented Saturday Night Live. Tomorrow on Full Bio, we'll learn about the early days of snl. 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 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 after 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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David Letterman
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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Lorne Michaels
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. 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. 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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Susan Morrison
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. He 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, you know, 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 Lorne 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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Lorne Michaels
Once he was approached about the job, how did Lorne Michaels feel about sharing the space with NBC's Dick Ebersole, who is also a part of this equation?
- [34:50]
Susan Morrison
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 Lorne saw him as 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, Lorne successfully. Lorne 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.
- [36:42]
Lorne Michaels
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?
- [36:55]
Susan Morrison
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, who wanted to make a name for themselves, but also, you know, didn't, 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, 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 Lauren 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 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 Lauren 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 Lynde 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 just had to be kind of in on the renegade spirit of what he, what he was going after. And they did find those people and, you know, they made history.
- [39:06]
Lorne Michaels
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 gonna 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.
- [39:36]
Susan Morrison
Yeah, Lauren 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, talking about conversationally. One of the other writers wrote up into a sketch. And 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, 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.
- [41:46]
Lorne Michaels
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. He had many people on the cast who he represented. Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner. How did he cause Lauren an occasional headache? Because I think he was Lauren's manager too, right?
- [42:08]
Susan Morrison
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 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. 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. You know, he was a guy who watched football on Sunday, you know, something that Lorne 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 Lorne didn't want to have because Lauren is by nature unconfrontational. Now, he was Lorne'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 Lorne 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, Loren 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.
- [45:08]
Lorne Michaels
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?
- [45:22]
Susan Morrison
Well, he had been doing SNL for five years. He was absolutely shattered with exhaustion. He'd lost 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 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 Limo. Basically, Franken asked all the viewers to send in a postcard addressed to Limo for a Limo, saying that if Fred Silverman had a limo, Al Franken should have one, too. And now it's Lorne Michaels 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.
- [47:41]
Lorne Michaels
I want to back up one thing. Why did Lauren lose so many cast members in the first five years?
- [47:49]
Susan Morrison
Well, when he started the show, first of all, he didn't expect that the cast was gonna 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 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 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, you know, 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 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 Lauren 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 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 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 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.
- [50:38]
Lorne Michaels
What did he do in the years he was gone from snl?
- [50:43]
Susan Morrison
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 movies. 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 free fall. 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 Lauren. 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.
- [53:09]
Lorne Michaels
Once Lauren returned to Saturday Night Live, what changed about him when he came back?
- [53:18]
Susan Morrison
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 sketch about a Senate hearing that year because these guys, they barely had a shave. They were just too young.
- [54:53]
Lorne Michaels
Tomorrow on Full Bio, we'll learn about Lorne Michaels highs and lows as a producer. 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 going to explore being Lauren 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 the Lorne Michaels impression.
- [56:22]
Conan O'Brien
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.
- [56:42]
Lorne Michaels
Yeah.
- [56:43]
Conan O'Brien
And you, we. And everybody does them. Everybody does them.
- [56:47]
Lorne Michaels
Everybody does them.
- [56:47]
Conan O'Brien
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 potential particular spin on it. You get very specific with yours.
- [56:59]
Lorne Michaels
Yeah, yeah. Fred Armisen pointed out a thing that when Lauren has to name drop, which he does a lot because he knows.
- [57:06]
Conan O'Brien
Like, he knows all of his friends are super famous.
- [57:08]
Lorne Michaels
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 would do a bit. John Solomon and some of the writers. Lauren, name dropping serial killers.
- [57:27]
Conan O'Brien
He goes to restaurants to hang out with famous people and famous serial killers join him in his toast.
- [57:33]
Lorne Michaels
Yeah, yeah. So like 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.
- [58:06]
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 Lorne 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?
- [59:06]
Susan Morrison
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 a 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 Candace 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, 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 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 take vacations in warm places and relax and all of these things are. These are all values that he drills into the people who work for him.
- [61:50]
Lorne Michaels
Did he take time to get married? He got married three times, Is that it?
- [61:53]
Susan Morrison
He got married three times. Once when he was very young, he was very young, he married Rosie Schuster, his childhood 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, you know, 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 met with their financial advisor and there's this kind of crazy workaholism on display. Loren isn't like that. He sleeps till 11 o'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 about Lauren buying a vacation home on the planet Naboo from Star wars and how she can undiscover to this. They all make fun of him for this too, but they appreciate it.
- [64:05]
Lorne Michaels
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?
- [64:17]
Susan Morrison
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. You know, in the first five years, Lorne 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. 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.
- [65:59]
Lorne Michaels
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.
- [66:28]
Susan Morrison
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. 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. You know, whenever Lorne appears as himself on the show or in the TV funhouse cartoons that the writer Robert Smibel 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.
- [68:36]
Lorne Michaels
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.
- [68:59]
Susan Morrison
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 Lorne, 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, you know, 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.
- [69:59]
Lorne Michaels
But, I mean, come on. I mean, come on. Yeah, exactly.
- [70:04]
Susan Morrison
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 caught up. But it did take too long. So I think they were right about that.
- [71:11]
Lorne Michaels
Yeah. You know, I thought about it. Cause he really was very big and very smart about it being a generational show.
- [71:18]
Susan Morrison
Yeah.
- [71:19]
Lorne Michaels
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.
- [71:28]
Susan Morrison
Yeah, but see, I think that it's. I think it. 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 they 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 they got wrong?
- [72:21]
Lorne Michaels
Yes.
- [72:22]
Susan Morrison
Okay. Yeah. Well, in the mid-90s, there was this. 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 smart, smart alecky. It was, you know, what we would come to call laddish 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 Ulmeyer, 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.
- [74:21]
Lorne Michaels
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?
- [74:51]
Susan Morrison
Well, 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 and he's 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, you know, 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 like strange cultural gargoyles who are going to make viewers turn in and watch. And I think that's what happened.
- [77:18]
Lorne Michaels
Lorne Michaels, I believe he's 80 years old.
- [77:21]
Susan Morrison
Yes.
- [77:23]
Lorne Michaels
He's been doing this for almost his whole life. What happens to SNL when he retires?
- [77:31]
Susan Morrison
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 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. Bart. 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.
- [79:04]
Lorne Michaels
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?
- [79:19]
Susan Morrison
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 Lorne funny or is he just like a bureaucrat? And I mean, 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.
- [80:01]
Lorne Michaels
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.
- [80:09]
Susan Morrison
Oh, thank you. It was a pleasure.
- [80:11]
Lorne Michaels
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.
- [80:26]
Susan Morrison
If you've been having your McDonald's sausage McMuffin with an iced coffee from somewhere else, now is a great time to reconsider.
- [80:35]
Lorne Michaels
In the Pacific Northwest, it's never too cold for an iced coffee in the morning. Grab yourself a medium caramel, French vanilla or classic iced coffee for just $2.29. Beverage may cause craving for McMuffin or hash browns. Prices and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer or combo meal.
- [80:55]
Alison Stewart
Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of content we know the world needs. In addition to this award winning reporting, your sponsorship also supports inspiring storytelling and extraordinary music that is free and accessible to all. To get in touch and find out more, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.