THE STORY – Lorne Michaels redefines television, culture, and comedy as the creator of “Saturday Night Live”.
THE CAST – Lorne Michaels, Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, Seth Meyers, John Mulaney, Mike Myers, Conan O’Brien, Chris Rock, Maya Rudolph, Andy Samberg, Kristen Wiig & Paul Simon
THE TEAM – Morgan Neville (Director/Writer), Alan Lowe & Jake Hostetter (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 101 Minutes
Lorne Michaels has had one of the most storied careers in showbiz. Not many people can claim to have had the same job for over forty years, but Michaels has been the executive producer of NBC’s late-night sketch comedy series, “Saturday Night Live,” since creating it in 1975 (except for a five-year hiatus in the ’80s). As more and more SNL cast members move through the show, Michaels has taken on a mythic stature, with tales of getting a laugh from him told in hushed tones usually reserved for religious experiences. For someone with such mystique, Michaels rarely ever talks about himself, which makes him a figure of fascination for anyone with even a passing interest in comedy, television, or Hollywood history. Given his famous tetchiness about getting personal, it should come as no surprise that “Lorne,” Morgan Neville’s documentary about Michaels, doesn’t delve too much.
This is, of course, the biggest problem with authorized biographies: The subjects who authorize them usually don’t want to think too critically about their past actions. This could be a problem for most documentarians, but early in the film, one of his interview subjects suggests to Neville that he would get more material if he asked everyone else the questions he had planned to ask Lorne, cut their answers together, and got the man himself to comment. Neville, never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, uses the wide-ranging access he got to do exactly that, talking to current and former SNL cast members, producers, and writers as well as friends and family. In doing so, Neville makes “Lorne” a loving tribute to one of show business’s ultimate survivors, told in a funny and straightforward style perfectly befitting its subject.
Neville essentially tells Michaels’s story in two strands, using the structure of a regular SNL week to trace the program that has come to define Michaels’s life, while using flashbacks to fill in his personal history. While the former moves linearly, giving the audience an all-access pass behind the scenes at the famous Studio 8H in New York’s Rockefeller Center, the latter doesn’t, leading to pacing issues. It’s an intuitive approach that pays off in small moments (a clip of Michaels breaking character on his own early-70s Canadian sketch show makes a memorable appearance late in the film), but also causes some strange lapses; it makes sense to have Lily Tomlin talk about Michaels’s confidence, given the story she tells about him producing her television specials in the early ’70s, but that information coming so late in the film robs prior scenes of important context, notably that Michaels was already an Emmy-winning producer when he started SNL.
There’s also no mention of Broadway Video, Michaels’s production company, and despite a good chunk of time focused on “Wayne’s World,” no mention of any of the other films Michaels produced based on SNL sketches or starring SNL cast members. Nor does the film mention any of his work producing any other show but SNL (Michaels currently also produces both “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night”, and also produced the Canadian sketch series “The Kids in the Hall,” which is only mentioned in the context of a very Lorne-like character in the film they produced, “Brain Candy”), except for SNL follow-up “The New Show”, which was cancelled after only nine episodes immediately before Michaels came back to SNL following the hiatus he took when the network fired most of the cast in 1980.
The focus on SNL makes sense; despite all the other work he’s done, this show is Michaels’s legacy (“It clips really well,” he humbly replies when asked to explain the first season’s enduring popularity). But it does the man a disservice to include so much footage about how busy he is while making it look like he only works on one show. While this might be physically true (he may not be as involved in the day-to-day decisions at the other shows he produces), disregarding so much of his resumé makes the film feel incomplete as a biography. Without Michaels’s input, though, there’s not much of that to get, and while he gets a little reflective about his family upbringing near the end, his early glares at the cameras illustrate his mindset: He’ll play along, but he sees this as an intrusion, and his guard is up. Neville’s cheeky tone, along with the good-natured humor of the other interview subjects, allows him to get away with a lot, though. Any other documentary probably wouldn’t even bother addressing the joke-filled Vanity Fair article written by Michaels’s friend and neighbor, Paul Simon, which led people to believe patently false information about him for decades. Still, Neville turns it into a hilarious cornerstone of the film’s overall narrative.
The film’s loose, humorous vibe papered over all those faults, and what else would we realistically expect from a documentary about Lorne Michaels? For all the walls he has put up around himself, he’s still known as someone who wants to make people laugh and has the instincts to know what will accomplish that. If you’re coming to “Lorne” looking to learn the secret of his success, you could easily leave disappointed. But if you’re a fan of SNL or any of the dozens of comedians who have passed through the hallowed halls of Studio 8H, “Lorne” is a treasure trove of behind-the-scenes footage and stories about the show’s fearless leader, told by the people who know him best. They may not actually know him all that well, but Neville makes the process of piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of Lorne Michaels as entertaining as possible. There may be some pieces missing, but through boundless good humor (embodied most frequently by Chris Parnell’s cheeky narration and Robert Smigel’s charmingly snarky animated interludes) and seeing how he interacts with those closest to him, we still get a good idea of who he is, more or less on his terms. And that’s a worthy accomplishment, even if it’s easy to dismiss. Perhaps “Lorne” entertains more than it informs, but somehow, that feels exactly right.
