Lorne, Long Ago
OK, we get it. “SNL” is 50 years old. We’ve been bombarded by feature stories and TV specials — the central theme being, justifiably, that the show’s longtime producer Lorne Michaels made it all possible and somehow kept it going all those years.
Maureen Dowd’s profile of Michaels in the Feb. 16 New York Times gushed: “At 80, Michaels is a unique, towering figure who has shaped comedy for half a century…It’s hard to think of someone in comedy who hasn’t been touched by Michaels’s magic wand.” And this week a 600-plus-page biography of the man, written by Susan Morrison, will be released.
As a preview of this tome, you can read Morrison’s lengthy profile of Michaels in the Jan. 20 issue of The New Yorker. Although he seems to be omnipresent in our cultural conversation, she describes him as “almost comically elusive.”
All of this hoopla stirred something deep within my brain pan and sent me pawing through the old peach box of my favorite New Haven Register clippings. It’s fortunate I held onto so much of my early writings, as stories that old are not online. Hard copy only! If you didn’t clip it, it’s gone.
Oh, but I’ve got my peach box in a closet, and there it is, from Jan. 30, 1981: my write-up of Michaels’s visit to New Haven to address a small group of Yale students at a “master’s tea.” (Each residential college at Yale had what was then called a “master,” usually a professor who supervised the students and occasionally invited interesting speakers to talk informally in a living room, where people really did sip tea.) I found out about this one at Silliman College, recognized Michaels’s name and snagged an invitation from the “master,” along with permission to write about what Michaels said.
Reading it now, the most striking part of my report came in the third paragraph: “Now retired after a five-year stint as the show’s producer, Michaels, 36, has time to discuss what made it successful — and why the present ‘Saturday Night Live’ is not.”
What? He “retired” and left “SNL”? Well, he told us he was working on movie comedy scripts and “theoretically” developing series ideas for NBC. But the previous May he had left the show because (I’m paraphrasing here) he knew it had run its course.
“There are regrets, yeah,” he admitted. “It was something I loved very much.”
Morrison’s profile fills in the blanks about what happened: “After season five, Michaels left the show, not entirely by choice. The breach stemmed from a tortured negotiation with NBC over Michaels’s request for some time to regroup. Talks were ultimately derailed by Al Franken’s ridiculing the network president on air. Five years later, Michaels came back. Ratings had sunk, and the show had become reliant on pre-taped bits.”
But when Michaels was talking with those Yalies back in the winter of 1981, he had no idea he would ever go back, that he would rekindle its magic and keep on going at least until he was 80. Nobody could imagine that.
Sipping tea in that living room, Michaels spoke fondly of the show’s first season, when the Not Ready For Prime Time Players — John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd — were being introduced to a national TV audience. Soon all of them were stars.
“There was a certain innocence,” Michaels recalled. “Everybody did everything for everybody else. It was all ‘we,’ not ‘I.’ I think we were inventing it at the time. We didn’t know how far we could push, but we kept pushing it and pushing it.”
He added, “We all did a show that we liked. And that was the charm of it — it didn’t look like anything else that was on television.”
When one of the Yalies asked Michaels what he thought of the “SNL” that was continuing without him, he looked embarrassed and said, “I haven’t actually seen it. I know that’s a lame excuse…I was out of town for the first couple of shows. I watched and worked on 106 of them, so I’m pretty much sated.”
But after telling us he wasn’t watching it, he added, “One of the problems with the new show is the hosts they’re getting are not the people who do comedy. Those people are waiting to see what happens.”
He said the best comedian to appear on “SNL” during the first five seasons was Richard Pryor. Michaels revealed he briefly resigned in protest when NBC said the show Pryor hosted would have to have a seven-second delay (you can guess why) rather than be done live. “They didn’t believe he’d play by the (censor’s) rules. I had to ‘resign.’ The show went on live.”
Speaking of Pryor and Lily Tomlin, Michaels said, “Your role, when you’re doing comedy, is to go for it…A comedian’s job is to be anarchistic and mess it up.”
Michaels gleefully took us through the chaotic process by which the show was created, day by day. “Monday to Wednesday I’d walk around saying, ‘There is no show.’ The host would have no trust at all…There was always a sort of terror.
“The writing would go on until Wednesday, with collaboration out of desperation. The writers would be looking around for somebody to work with. By Wednesday night there’d be mass sulking because their stuff wasn’t going to get in.
“The dress rehearsal was almost always a disaster. By then the host had pretty much given up making any sense of it. Cuts would be made by myself and the writers, often with the cast member who at that point would be leaving the show. They were not going to do what they laughingly called ‘that crap.’’’
But again his affection for the show and his cast and crew was evident. “Hopefully you can get by on spirit and the fact that you’re trying. I don’t think in five years anyone ever stopped trying.
“We had discipline and strength, because everyone knew how dangerous it was for everybody else. If someone got sick, 50 or 60 people would go help. It was like the old wartime mentality…It was a very seductive, wonderful environment to be in.”
When Michaels was at Yale that day, it was clear he missed that “seductive, wonderful environment.” It’s wonderful for all of us that he got back to it after his five-year absence. And he has no plans to leave soon. “I may be wrong,” he told Dowd. “But I don’t feel I’m done.”