Susan Morrison Brings Notoriously Private ‘SNL’ Creator Lorne Michaels Out of His Shell

In a Q&A, The New Yorker writer discusses her biography on the legendary TV producer

Lorne Michaels is, as New Yorker writer Susan Morrison puts it, “almost comically elusive.” Despite his household name and prominent role at the helm of America’s favourite and longest-running sketch comedy show, Michaels is famously private and very rarely grants interviews (believe me, I’ve tried). “A subject who is a great talker but who has made a habit of not talking to journalists is a godsend for a biographer,” she writes in the new biography Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.

But that’s assuming you can get him, of course.

Ten years ago, in a story that only proves to me that I need to up my game, Morrison showed up at 30 Rockefeller Plaza – where many NBC shows including Saturday Night Live film – and knocked on Michaels’ door. Granted, she’d worked for Michaels’ many years ago during his brief SNL hiatus, ran in some of the same fabulous NYC social circles, had an impressive day job as articles editor at the New Yorker and a fat book deal from Penguin already in hand.

“I told him I’d sold a book about him and the show, and I didn’t need him to talk to me, but if he did it would be a better book,” Morrison says over a Zoom chat.

Though the SNL boss looked “shocked and horrified,” she recalls, he not only agreed but he opened up his ample roster of ridiculously famous friends.

Lucky Morrison talked to everyone you can think of – and some you might not – from a half-century at Saturday Night Live: OG “Not Ready For Prime Timers” Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Steve Martin and Bill Murray; generation 2.0 Mike Myers, Dana Carvey and Chris Rock; writers Bob Odenkirk, Conan O’Brien, John Mulaney and Colin Jost; my personal favourites Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Kristin Wiig; and honorary SNL-ers John Hamm, Alec Baldwin and Paul McCartney. And while charting 50 years of Michaels’ epic highs and cancellation-adjacent lows, Morrison also shadowed a behind-the-scenes week leading up to a peak #MeToo 2018 show where Jonah Hill hosts and Kate McKinnon steals the show.

From her office at The New Yorker, longtime writer and first-time author Susan Morrison dishes on how and why Lorne Michaels became her subject of choice, how she got her famously-shy source on board with the book and why it actually makes perfect sense that the American comedy institution was invented by a Canadian.

Rosemary Counter: So cool to meet you – and peek inside of The New Yorker office! Congrats on this wonderful, monster-sized, absolute feat of a biography.

Susan Morrison: Thank you. After the 40th anniversary of SNL, I found myself a new empty-nester with this strange, incorrect idea that I’d have lots of free time. I’d been interested in Lorne for a long time; I actually worked for him briefly in 1984, during his five year hiatus from SNL, when he created a prime time version called The New Show. I was an assistant on that show, but went right into journalism after that. I met a lot of writers there who I stayed friends with – Steve Martin, Jack Handey, George Meyer – so I’ve kind of been a little bit in Lorne’s orbit. I’d run into him every 10 years or so, but we were by no means friends. I always had this idea that he’d be a great subject for a book.

RC: He’s notoriously private and almost never talks to journalists. How did you possibly convince him?

SM: I told him I was already writing the book, to which he looked shocked and horrified, because he likes to be in control. He said he would think about it. When we met for a drink a few days later, I thought we were gonna talk about nuts and bolts, but he just started telling stories and I realized we were starting. I didn’t have a notepad or anything. Lorne doesn’t waste time on preliminaries. Soon we had a nice rapport going; he likes The New Yorker, which helped, and he liked that right after my 16th birthday in 1976 I had been in the audience in one of the first shows, hosted by Elliott Gould, which was a favourite of his too. Lorne is a little superstitious, first of all, but he also puts a lot of stock in loyalty. He’s also a practical man, so I think he thought if someone was going to write a book about him anyways, better it be someone like me who was going to do the work and take their time.

RC: How much time did you get to spend with him?

SM: Over 10 years, I interviewed him probably around 50 times – at his office, at his home, over dinner – and then there’s all the phone calls and emails. I spent a whole week at the show too, just hanging out with him at his office. For someone who doesn’t usually talk to the press, it was an unusual amount of time.

RC: And an usual amount of stress! I know everyone has deadlines, but man, the pressure leading up to the show is palpable.

SM: People tell me that by the time the reach the Saturday chapter their hearts are pounding in their chests. Live TV is just like that, and Lorne is great at it. Jim Downey said Lorne is not so good at term papers but really good at tests. He thrives under a deadline. Look at his forays into taped and edited television, like The New Show that I worked on, which was taped on Thursday night and aired on Friday night. It had all the crudeness of live television and all the staleness of taped television – it was the worst of both, and it didn’t play to Lorne’s strong suits. Movies are too slow and there’s too much editing and re-editing and overthinking. Lorne’s superpowers come out with the deadline that is live TV.

RC: After 10 years, do you feel like you know him? Is Lorne Michaels knowable?

SM: It’s weird because, when you’re thinking about one person so intently for so many years, it’s like, are you inside their head or are they inside your head? My poor partner and daughters have endured 10 years around the dinner table of me saying, “That reminds me of Lorne!” He’s just part of our lives, so I do kinda feel like I know him, but that might be presumptuous. This is a man who keeps things very steady and under control. So yes, he’s reserved, but I do have a real sense of the things that move him and bug him and anger him. When you’re writing a biography, you quickly realize the insanity of thinking you can capture a person’s whole life between the pages of a book. It’s all selection and surmise from the people around him.

RC: I find it a bit sad that Michaels’ fate is always to find new talent, nurture them and make them famous, then watch as they inevitably move on and leave.

SM: That’s an interesting way to put it, and in the early years – specifically when Chevy left – I think it was traumatic for him. It was a huge blow. Then Aykroyd and Belushi left, so yes, he felt like everyone else was moving on. That’s partly why Lorne left [in 1980] for five years, and by the time he came back he realized he had to reinvent the show. I think he also internalized the pain of losing those people, and recognized that people leaving was going to be a permanent, regular thing. His philosophy now is that he’s helping build a bridge that’s strong enough for them to walk over to whatever’s next. And if he’s lucky, he’s got a group of rookies ready on the bench.

RC: What does it mean to you that the man behind all of them and this whole legendary American comedy show is Canadian?

SM: One of the things Lorne said to me, and he was actually quoting New Yorker editor Harold Ross here, was that it’s always the out-of-towners who begin these things. They come here and maybe never quite lose their nose-pressed-against-the-glass fascination that lets someone see things in a different way. In that way, it makes a lot of sense that someone from away would create SNL, just like Ross at The New Yorker.

RC: There seem to be many parallels between your magazine and the show. In fact, you write Lorne “wanted the show to feel like an issue of The New Yorker.” Tell me more?

SM: That means that just like an issue of a magazine, he wanted a variety of sketches from different, distinct, recognizable voices, and he’s fiercely protective of them. He thinks of the show like a rainbow, or like guests at a dinner party: You need a lot of colours and flavours. I wrote an essay about this, actually, that looks at the overlap between these two institutions. The New Yorker even toasted its hundredth anniversary the very same week that SNL turned 50.

RC: Please tell me you got to go to the SNL 50th anniversary event.

SM: I did! Not to the actual filming, because every seat in the whole place was filled with hosts and cast from over the years. I watched from a hotel room with a bunch of SNL writers and old friends, then we all went to the party together. I got Covid like a lot of other people, but it was a wonderful party with a lot of love. I got home at 5 a.m.