Josh Reviews Lorne: the Documentary and the Book!
Two recent projects have set out to explore the life and career of a man who has made a life and career out of appearing to many (if not most) outsiders as essentially unknowable: SNL creator and mastermind Lorne Michaels! There’s Lorne, the documentary film by Morgan Neville, as well as the biography Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, by Susan Morrison.
Both are great!
Let’s start with Lorne, which is a terrifically enjoyable documentary film, directed by Morgan Neville. Mr. Neville has helmed so many other wonderful documentaries that I have loved, including Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, The Saint of Second Chances, STEVE! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces; and his recent Paul McCartney doc, Man on the Run. (I recommend ALL of those films, if you haven’t seen them!)
The documentary Lorne is a hoot! Wisely, Mr. Neville has avoided making too self-serious an analysis of Lorne Michaels. (Nothing is less funny than a deep dive into why something or someone is funny.) There’s a fun, silly tone to the film that I really dug. It’s jam-packed with famous people — including a wealth of SNL cast-members from across the years — who spend most of their time laughing about how little they know about Lorne. (And also how hard they strive for his approval. My biggest laugh in the movie came when Colin Jost makes a joke about how heart-rending it is when Lorne blows out his breath in disappointment with a sketch.)
Making a joke out of how unknowable Lorne Michaels has always seemed to be was, I think, a good approach to take with this documentary. It IS a funny idea to try to get to know a potentially unknowable man. At the same time, Mr. Neville does a nice job charting Lorne’s early days and how came to be the person in charge of assembling this radical new late-night show for NBC in 1985. As the film unfolds, Mr. Neville charts the highs and lows of Lorne’s time spent helming SNL for 45 out of its 50 seasons. (Famously, others were in charge of the show for seasons 6-10.) Most of the major events in Lorne’s tenure are covered, albeit some are presented at nearly warp speed. (There’s a lot to cover over the making of 45 seasons of television!!)
This history of SNL and Lorne’s career is intercut with a journey through the week of making a new episode of SNL, from the first meeting with the host on Monday through to show night on Saturday at 11:30pm. The film splices together lots of fun behind-the-scenes footage from the pre-week of shows hosted by Ayo Edebiri, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Kate McKinnon, Shane Gillis, and Timothée Chalamet. I loved getting this peek behind the curtain to get to see snippets of, for instance, the cast’s first meeting with that week’s host, in which most everyone sits on the floor of Lorne’s office. (Lorne’s office really doesn’t look that big!) I loved getting to see some video footage from the famous host dinner out at Lattanzi (an Italian restaurant on Restaurant Row), as well as Lorne’s pre-show pep-talk, sitting on a stool on the main stage in Studio 8H. These “fly on the wall” moments are some of my favorite parts of the film.
I also loved the choice to present some of the stories from Lorne’s early days in the form of animation (created by W/M Animation), with Lorne voiced by Robert Smigel, just as he did in the classic Saturday TV Funhouse days!! That was not only a SNL callback that made me happy, but also a clever way to make some of the stories from the “old days” funny and interesting to viewers, instead of our just looking at talking heads.
Overall this is a very positive, almost worshipful look at Lorne. While I am confident there are those among the SNL ranks from the past 50 years who don’t love Lorne, we don’t hear from them here. The only thing we get is one short clip in which Lorne says that some of the things he’s known for — such as famously keeping people waiting for hours to meet with him — is not about power, but rather that if someone needs his attention, he doesn’t want to say “well, I really need to get on with my day.” That sounds reasonable, though I’m sure others would disagree, and it might have added some depth to this portrait of Lorne to have heard from a few of those dissenting voices here.
There’s a joke in the film about people looking for a “Rosebud” to explain Lorne, but the film doesn’t give us that. I can understand that, though while I think making a joke about the impossible task of making a documentary about the unknowable Lorne was a smart framing for this film, there were a few moments in which I wish we’d been able to get deeper. For instance, I’d have loved to have gotten to hear more from Lorne about how he really felt during his battles with Don Ohlmeyer (President of NBC) in 1995 and the firing of Norm Macdonald. Or how about a direct answer to the question about which so many people have wondered, of whether Lorne could ever conceive of a day in which he’d step aside and hand SNL over to someone else to run? I’d have appreciated getting a few more moments in which I felt like the film allowed us to get inside Lorne. Or here’s another example: the film mentions Lorne’s well-known dislike of actors breaking (laughing) on camera, and during that segment Mr. Neville used footage of the recent Beavis & Butthead sketch, in which Ryan Gosling and the cast, especially Heidi Gardner, famously lose it. But watching that scene in the film, it was unclear to me if Lorne was actually commenting on that specific sketch, and that made me wonder what he actually thought of that moment. Was that sketch, which so many viewers seemed to love, an exception to his usual preference? As I thought about it, I really became curious, and I wish the film had actually given us that sort of commentary from Lorne.
If you’re looking for far more in-depth reflections from Lorne — and even a possible “Rosebud” moment! — then I suggest you read Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, by Susan Morrison. This fascinating – and lengthy! – tome is an exhaustively researched biography of Mr. Michaels. This 600-page biography might not be for the casual SNL fan, but I loved every page. Ms. Morrison, an editor at The New Yorker who was the former editor-in-chief of The New York Observer and an editor of Spy (a satirical magazine published in the eighties and nineties), has somehow managed to do the near-impossible: get Lorne Michaels to talk to her in-depth about his life!
This is a packed-with-detail book, and be warned that it takes many pages before you’ll get to even the early days of Saturday Night Live. But the wealth of detail that Ms. Morrison was able to gather — she’s apparently been working on this project since SNL’s fortieth anniversary, back in 2015! — accumulates into a far more thorough picture of who Lorne Michaels actually is than the documentary. I was particularly fascinated to read the awful story of how Lorne’s father died when Lorne was very young, after the two had an argument. Ms. Morrison’s book suggests that the impact of Lorne’s dad’s sudden death, and their never having a chance to reconcile, might be at the core of some of Mr. Michael’s famously strange, conflict-averse personality (such as this apparent unwillingness to ever actually tell someone they’re hired or they’re fired at the show). Wow! I was blown away by that.
The book is filled with all sorts of fascinating stories, both from Mr. Michael’s early days (which I’ve never seen chronicled in such detail) and, of course, the fifty-year history of SNL. Ms. Morrison has managed to secure interviews with everyone you’d want to hear from in this sort of book. So many of the famous SNL stars from across the decades have a voice in the book, and so too do so many of the behind-the-scenes people who you might never have heard of. Ms. Morrison has also managed to get Lorne himself to talk in great detail! This might be the most impressive achievement in this book. Unlike in the documentary, here in this book I feel we did get to hear substantive comments from Lorne himself, actually talking in-depth about his thoughts and feelings about so much of what he’s experienced over his incredible life.
Interestingly, the book shares the structure of Mr. Neville’s film, in that it also intercuts the story of Lorne’s life and career with the story of the week it takes to put together a new show. The book is divided into sections by days of the week, which each start with a deep-dive into what happens on that specific day in the making of the show. In this case, Ms. Morrison focuses exclusively on a show hosted by Jonah Hill (on November 3, 2018). We get a TON of behind-the-scenes dirt on the making of that specific show! I was, in fact, quite stunned by how many quotes of candid conversation we get from Lorne and the other power-players behind-the-scenes of SNL. Not everyone comes off looking so great! It was pretty brave of Lorne & co. to agree to giving this type of access to Ms. Morrison. I commend them for that, and also Ms. Morrison herself for the incredible level of detail she has brought to her chronicle.
If you’re an SNL fan, I recommend both of these Lorne-centric projects! I think the documentary Lorne would be a fun watch for anyone who likes SNL. But if you really want to look under the hood of the show and the guy behind it, then sit back, clear your schedule, and give Ms. Morrison’s book Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live a read.
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