INTERVIEW BY LANE BROWN
VULTURE | FEBRUARY 2, 2014

LANE BROWN: You’re still extremely hands-on as a producer. Can you walk me through one of your typical weeks?
LORNE MICHAELS: Monday we do that meeting, usually around 5 or 5:30 p.m. I meet the host first, and then everyone piles into my office. We go around the room and tell ideas. Most people prepare for it; a lot of people lie. But it’s my way of saying—particularly if everyone’s tired from the week before—that we’re starting again. Monday night, I’m generally either at home or at dinner by eight.

BROWN: Not too bad.
MICHAELS: Not too bad. Tuesday, around 8:30 p.m., I take the host to dinner, which is helpful, because you get a sense of them in a relaxed situation and where you’re going to go with their monologue. Then we come back here.

BROWN: Until how late?
MICHAELS: I leave around 3 a.m. Tuesday is writing night. The younger ones tend to go right through to the next afternoon.

On Wednesday, somewhere between 3 and 4 p.m., we do a read-through. Since it’s only us, the read-through is an honest audience. I was just out in L.A., and the amount of cheers and laughs at read-throughs there—they’re just in a better mood, more upbeat. In New York, we’re a little bit more fear-driven.

The sets start arriving on Thursday. We rehearse three or four sketches and shoot the filmed pieces. Thursday night I get to have dinner.

BROWN: Dinners seem important to you.
MICHAELS: Friday, I have to get out, too. I disappear for an hour around 8 p.m. Then we rehearse here until midnight.

BROWN: And Saturday?
MICHAELS: In the afternoon, we do a run-through in costumes and wigs. At five, we do the sound check. Around six, we run “Weekend Update” and the monologue, if it’s been written. Then around 7:30, the dress-rehearsal audience is in their seats, the band plays, and we start. We do an eight o’clock show, which generally runs long, to 10 or 10:10, and on bad nights, 10:20. I meet with the producers and the head writers about what’s feasible, what amount of time can come out of which piece.

BROWN: An hour before showtime?
MICHAELS: There’s no longer much discussion—it’s just orders. It’s like landing a 747. You just have to make sure it gets in on time.

BROWN: At what point during the week do you know whether an episode of Saturday Night Live is going to be good or bad?
LORNE MICHAELS: You don’t. If it goes well at the Monday meeting, where the writers and cast are meeting the host and telling their ideas, then it may dip when we actually read the pieces. Sometimes we have a very bad read-through, but that just means people are made more alert that new stuff has to be generated. Just before Christmas, we didn’t have a cold open when Kristen Wiig made the mistake of coming by to say hello on Friday night. I went downstairs, got a haircut, and by the time I came back fifteen minutes later they had the Sound of Music sketch. And that was the opening of that week’s show.

BROWN: You’ve been dealing with crises like this for almost 40 years now.
MICHAELS: The only show I ever really wanted to do was SNL. It was some sort of merging of my talent and my metabolism. It suited who I am and what I do really well, though whatever I was thinking it was, it kept mutating and growing. At first I didn’t even know that the cast would be the thing everybody talked about. We thought it would be the hosts.

BROWN: Reading about the early years of SNL, you hear a lot from disgruntled former cast members who remember the show as a difficult place to work. But there seem to be fewer sour grapes among the more recent casts. What changed?
MICHAELS: First of all, I think NBC now is way more supportive than they ever were in the past. And people now make a much longer commitment to the show, which helps. I think Fred Armisen was here eleven years. Seth’s been here twelve years, thirteen years. And Kenan Thompson right now is a master. You have to get comfortable with the idea that you’re on television, you’re in a skyscraper in New York City, it’s 11:30 at night, and you have to be your best. How do you get to a level of calm and comfort, so that nothing’s bothering you, and you just know how to do it? It takes forever for them to get there.

But also I think the sour-grapes thing is much more about how life and careers turn out. We’re talking about 40 years. I don’t think there are that many people who think that their time here wasn’t one of the best periods of their life. It’s hard, and it’s competitive, but, as Dana Carvey says, “Show me one person who was funnier after SNL.”

BROWN: When do you realize that you’ve got somebody like a Jimmy or Will Ferrell or Kristen Wiig or Tina Fey? How soon do you know somebody is going to have a life beyond SNL?
MICHAELS: Look at Kate McKinnon. She came in two years ago, and she’d peak too soon—she’d peak at dress rehearsal—and not be able to hold the character. But when they figure that out, you see them do remarkable things. When that’s happening, that’s a magic period. But, of course, at the same time, the rest of the industry goes, “That girl’s fantastic.” At which point it becomes a slippery slope—the industry seems to discover talent more on SNL than any other place. Now, the smarter ones, like Tina and Amy or whoever, know this is the place where they can do the kind of work that they’ll never be able to do when they’re subject to being cast.

BROWN: Do you have your own succession plan?
MICHAELS: In terms of people who I think can do this job, I think there’s probably five or six who care enough about it. But I have no plan. It’s as if somehow thinking about it will … you know. Milton Berle, George Burns, and Bob Hope, they all made it to 100 or pretty close. So, you never know.

BROWN: What do you say when a cast member comes to you and says she or he wants to leave to do movies?
MICHAELS: The advice I give most often is, build a bridge to the next thing. When it’s solid enough, walk across it. Don’t go because somebody promised you this or somebody promised you that. You’re a star on SNL. That does not automatically mean you’ll be a star in everything else you touch. I just saw Ana Gasteyer downstairs. You see her in Wicked—that’s where she wanted to be, and she got there. I think when Will Ferrell left, he’d already had three movies that worked. Kristen did Bridesmaids. It was the biggest hit ever that summer. Then she came back and did another season. That’s Kristen.

What do you mean?
What I discovered after the first five years was that talented people tend to move on and less talented people tend to be the most loyal. It’s rare that you find both.

BROWN: When you’re auditioning for new cast members now, do you look for anything different from what you did in earlier seasons?
MICHAELS: No, it’s almost always the same. It’s somebody that you think is original and never someone who reminds you of somebody else. There was a thing that we realized in the first season of the show, which was that if somebody else of your type came in, you tended to have a light show. When Candice Bergen did the fourth show, Jane Curtin was suddenly not doing many parts. When Anthony Perkins did the show, Chevy didn’t have much to do. And you’re always looking for the sense of humor. There are a lot of very good comedy performers with very little sense of humor. It’s skill, and they’ve learned it in the same way that a magician learns tricks. They’re fine, too, but we need a different thing. It’s better if they can create comedy as opposed to execute comedy.

BROWN: Have you ever felt restricted by the standards of broadcast TV?
MICHAELS: No. I believe that there’s no creativity without boundaries. If you write a sonnet, it’s got to be fourteen lines. If you write one that’s nine lines, it’s not a sonnet. So we have to be clever. We’re in a medium that goes into people’s homes, and, very often now, people watch our show with their kids.

BROWN: So you’re glad you’re on a network?
MICHAELS: Yes. In the late eighties or early nineties, I made a Lassie movie—an obscure part of my canon, it’s not worth going into the why of it. But I did love the show when I was growing up. We were shooting in the western part of Virginia in sheep country, on a 5,000-acre sheep ranch. The only place there within 100 miles was this Holiday Inn, which had a big screen. On Monday nights people came in and watched football. And on Saturday nights they came in and watched Saturday Night Live.

BROWN: That’s a great story.
MICHAELS: The middle of the country has always been our base. Chicago in the seventies—New York and L.A. were solid, but Chicago was everything.

BROWN: Do you watch much other contemporary comedy? Are there any shows you are jealous of?
MICHAELS: Like almost everyone else in comedy, I don’t watch much comedy. I’ve been that way since the beginning. But I love South Park. I loved Chapelle’s Show. But I’m more likely to watch Game of Thrones and news and sports. Orson Welles was once quoted as saying that he had trouble going to movies, because he saw the shadow of the slate as the slate’s being pulled out of the frame—sometimes they use it right at the beginning of a take and you can see it leaving. But you’d have to know how movies are made and have to have sat in an editing room for thousands of hours to know what that was.