Lorne Michaels Is the Real Star of “Saturday Night Live”
January 17, 2025 at 07:30PMA month before the publication of Susan Morrison’s biography Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, a lengthy excerpt appears in Morrison’s home magazine. (She’s been The New Yorker‘s articles editor for year.) It’s a friendly profile of the show’s creator and leader, but an incisive one; Morrison has seemingly spoken to every living SNL alum, and sketches a portrait of a man who has balanced ego management and emotional withholding on a knife’s edge for 50 years.
The one time writers were certain to hear Michaels’s feedback directly was during dress rehearsal, when they saw him in laser-focus mode under the bleachers. . . . Many writers have sat beside him watching their sketches die, only to have him turn and say, with stony sarcasm, “You must be very proud.” If the host’s monologue is flat, he’ll moan, “Can we get any charm out of him?” If a piece is too erudite, he might tell its writer, “Can they take the Emmy away?” John Mulaney said, “May the cast members go to their graves never knowing the things I heard under the bleachers.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/17/lorne-michaels-is-the-real-star-of-saturday-night-live/
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