Lorne Michaels: Playboy Interview

Lorne Michaels, the executive producer and creator of Saturday Night Live, sits in his cubbyhole command center beneath the balcony seats in NBC's studio 8H and waits patiently for dress rehearsal to begin. He puts on his headphones and sips from a tall glass of cold beer.

For Michaels, dress rehearsal is more important than the actual show. It's his last chance to correct flaws, punch up weak lines and fix recalcitrant props before the show is broadcast live later that night to 20,000,000 viewers. Even though the show has been on the air for 17 years and has become a pop-culture phenomenon, Michaels can't fully relax. He studies and analyzes every scene, dictating notes to an assistant who sits by his side.

This show's opening skit re-creates the Senate Judiciary Committee's recent hearing. Anita Hill has been excused and Judge Clarence Thomas returns to the witness table. Michaels leans forward and stares at the TV monitor sitting on a shelf two feet away.

"Can anyone tell me why that pretty girl behind Phil [Hartman, playing Ted Kennedy] keeps leaning into the frame?" he asks. "Get her out of there." A split second and another camera angle later: "And get rid of the Coke can, please." After a series of close-ups of Dana Carvey (playing an ancient Strom Thurmond), Al Franken (a bow-tied Paul Simon) and Kevin Nealon (a wispy-haired Joe Biden), Michaels throws up his hands in despair. "Why the fuck doesn't anyone know where their camera is?"

As Chris Rock (playing Long Dong Silver) shouts the familiar refrain—"Live, from New York, it's Saturday Night!"—Michaels enters into a tense confab with his staff, one of many that will occur during and after dress rehearsal. Show time is only three hours away.

The scene in the command center is probably not very different from what it was on October 11, 1975, when Michaels produced the very first, S.N.L., a bold experiment on the part of NBC to replace the usual Johnny Carson reruns with what Michaels characterized as "a comedy show, frank and intelligent, for young urban adults." It would be a departure from regular network fare—with guest hosts, a low-profile repertory cast and music that young people actually listened to. Michaels achieved much of his goal: The humor was hip, the music contemporary, and young urban adults responded enthusiastically. He was wrong, however, about his repertory cast remaining low-profile. That first night introduced Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman and Garrett Morris. And that was only the beginning.

For the next five years, Michaels won Emmys, launched careers—including that of Bill Murray, who joined the cast during the second season—and made TV history. Finally, burned out, tired and abandoned by many of those stars he had created, Michaels called it quits.

The show went on. At first, it seemed that, without Michaels, Saturday Night Live would be Saturday Night Dead. First-time producer Jean Doumanian ran the show for one extremely shaky season—remember Charles Rocket, Denny Dillon, Ann Risley or some of the other cast members from that year?—before she was fired. But the next season, with Dick Ebersol, an experienced TV executive, in charge, the show seemed to regain its footing—if not its ratings—giving sizable career boosts to Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Joe Piscopo, Jim Belushi and Christopher Guest.

Michaels, meanwhile, puttered in his garden, failed in his first weekly prime-time outing, The New Show, and collaborated with Steve Martin and Randy Newman on the movie Three Amigos. He then stunned the TV world by deciding—five years after he had quit-to rejoin and rebuild his brain child and try to take it into the Nineties.

Was it a step forward or a step backward in his career? And could he do in the late Eighties what he had done so successfully in the late Seventies? At first, it looked as if Michaels had made a big mistake by going home again. NBC decided to cancel the sputtering show in 1986, but Michaels pleaded for one more chance. He got it, pulled the show back from the brink and led it this past season to its greatest popularity ever.

It was an amazing achievement in a business in which most new shows disappear after a few weeks and virtually none live longer than it takes to earn a college degree. It was even more impressive given the fact that the man who accomplished it was never supposed to be in show business at all.

Michaels was born Lorne David Lipowitz on November 17, 1944, in Forest Hill, a ritzy Toronto suburb. His father, a successful furrier, died when Michaels was 14. Michaels and his brother and sister were raised with high parental expectations. For Michaels, who majored in English literature, that meant law school or teaching.

But while at the University of Toronto, Michaels co-wrote and directed a satirical revue, piquing his interest in show business. Shortly before graduation, he approached the comedian Frank Shuster, father of his soon-to-be first wife, Rosie, seeking advice. "I said, 'I'm seriously thinking of going into show business full time. What do you think?' He said, 'If I were you, I'd go to law school.'"

Michaels ignored the advice and soon teamed up with his friend and partner, Hart Pomerantz, to write and perform for Canadian TV. The duo moved to New York in 1968 and landed a job writing jokes for Woody Allen. "But I don't think we added anything to his career," Michaels is fond of saying.

Next came Los Angeles and a stint with The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show, then a year penning opening monologs for Dan Rowan and Dick Martin on Laugh-In. In 1969 Michaels and Pomerantz returned to Canada to produce comedy specials for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Once back home, he got the chance to ask Shuster why he told him to go to law school. "He said, 'When you're in show business for a long time, you realize how few people succeed. So who wants the responsibility for giving that kind of advice? Besides, if you're really going to do it, nothing is going to stop you.'" After splitting from Pomerantz, who wanted to perform while Michaels wanted to produce, he made a comedy pilot for the CBC and was told it was "too serious, too clever, too avant-garde." Later, Lily Tomlin asked him to be a writer on her comedy special Lily in 1973. He won an Emmy for that work and co-produced, with Jane Wagner, two other Tomlin specials.

But it was with Saturday Night Live that Michaels found himself. He did more than create and produce one of the most successful shows in TV history and launch dozens of careers (many of his behind-the-scenes colleagues have been successful as well). Michaels also showed stodgy TV executives that hip comedy could work; he made the airwaves safe for David Letterman, In Living Color and Arsenio Hall. His comedic world view, which seemed unique in 1975, permeated TV, movies and comedy clubs. He is the unofficial godfather of modern comedy.

We sent Contributing Editor David Rensin to meet with Michaels over a six-month period in New York and in Los Angeles, where he was producing the Wayne's World movie, to plumb the secrets of his longevity. Michaels gives few interviews, and a look back at S.N.L. history through the creator's eyes promised to be a rarity. Says Rensin:

"For a man who has done so much for comedy, Michaels is surprisingly low-key. He's a droll, charming man who takes most things very seriously and often travels a roundabout route to making his point.

"Michaels has always preferred to let Saturday Night Live be his public face, keeping the rest to himself. Attempts to get him to open up on personal matters are met with self-effacing resistance and explanations that a good producer is an invisible one.

"But when the subject is Saturday Night Live itself or any of the people who have passed through it, Michaels loves to talk. It's clearly the great love of his life. And while he frequently gives credit to others, he is justifiably proud of his creation. Among entertainment programs, only The Tonight Show has been on the air longer than S.N.L. We started there."