Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, by Susan Morrison, came out last year and coincided with the anniversary. While there have been other books written about the show and its ever-changing cast, this is the first biography of Michaels, who was at the helm of SNL when it debuted on Oct. 11, 1975, with George Carlin as the first guest host and Billy Preston as the first musical guest. He left the show for a few years in the early ‘80s, returned in 1985, and has been running it ever since.
Lorne, which is Susan Morrison’s first book, traces Michaels’ life from his childhood in Toronto through his early career in show business, which included writing gigs on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-in and the short-lived variety series, The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show.
Morrison, an editor at The New Yorker, began her research for the book shortly after SNL celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2015. Michaels, who once said that “there are no upsides to talking to reporters,” cooperated for the first time with a biographer, and Morrison was eventually given all access to the spaces that SNL occupies at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, including Studio 8-H, where the show is performed.
Interspersed with the story of Michaels’ life and the history of SNL is an inside look at a week in the life of the show. Morrison goes into detail about what happens every day, from the Sunday following one show to the live broadcast on the following Saturday night. The host for the week that Morrison chronicles was Jonah Hill, and Maggie Rogers was the musical guest.
You get to read about the sketches – and they’re sketches, not skits – on which writers and actors pin their hopes for air time, and then to find out, after dress rehearsal late Saturday afternoon, that their work won’t be seen, at least for that week. Morrison also takes us through the hours-long read-through early in the week, when everyone – writers, actors, the host, Michaels, a bunch of others – gather to begin pitching ideas, all of which are written out in detail. Everyone present have an inches-thick stack of papers in front of them as the meeting begins. At the end of the day, most of the 40,000 sheets of have paper have been discarded as the number of sketches is whittled down to the handful that we see at 10:30 p.m. on Saturday.
I thoroughly enjoyed Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. At more than 650 pages, it wasn’t a quick read by any means, but as someone who grew up in the heyday of the show – and everyone says that the best SNL cast was the one when they were in high school – it was time well spent.
