Morgan Neville’s new documentary “Lorne” (in theaters now) zeroes in on Lorne Michaels, the famously elusive executive producer and creator of “Saturday Night Live,” which just celebrated its 50th anniversary and, in some ways, is just as much a part of the cultural conversation as it was when it first aired.
But how do you make a documentary about someone who would rather you not be on camera? And how do you make a documentary about the man, instead of the show, which at this point has been covered to the point of utter exhaustion? Also – how do you make something that avoids covering the same ground that countless documentaries, narrative features and the recent 656-page biography (by Susan Morrison, who appears in the doc) already have?
Neville was in a unique position to meet these issues head-on. He had produced the suite of “SNL 50” docs for Peacock, which streamed last year in conjunction with the anniversary.
“I could do some air traffic control,” Neville said. Michaels wasn’t in any of the earlier documentaries, “with intention of like, let’s keep Lorne special for this.”
The filmmaker said that he had read all of the books on “Saturday Night Live” and seen every documentary, which also helped as he was putting together “Lorne.”
“There’s a format that I always wanted to resist, but, but I think that the thing that Lorne said in the beginning is like, ‘You can just come and bring cameras and film in all the meetings.’ And that got me excited because they are meetings that nobody’s ever filmed in before,” Neville said. “And I think Lorne, for all of his resistance to ever doing anything revealing, much of himself, also realized this is the last chance to ever really make a documentary about him running the show.” (Michaels is now 81.)
And even as Michaels lets Neville in, exploring the inner mechanics of the show and Michaels’ dynamic with the cast and the talented team of writers, past and present, there are still thinks that remain damnably out-of-focus – his family, for instance, is alluded to but never shown. (Even photos obscure their faces.) He’s been married three times but we only hear from one ex-wife – former “Saturday Night Live” writer Rosie Shuster. We see Michaels decamp to his country home and wander his grounds alone, but never see inside the home. What kind of architecture does he appreciate? What do his dogs look like?
Neville insists that there were no ground rules established before he began filming Michaels.
“I could film whatever he would give me access to, and he had no control. But that’s the catch of doing this essentially as an outsider. He is wary of me and I have to earn his trust. And part of what the film is about, I think, is me getting closer to him and earning his trust over a couple of years,” Neville said. “The film starts at some remove and then gets closer to him, which is my experience of making the film.”
Michaels hadn’t even seen the film until the New York premiere, which happened the night before we spoke to Neville. Neville saw him after the screening and went to Michaels, who nodded and said, “Good.” “For Lorne, that’s a rave review,” Neville said.
One person close to Michaels had told Neville that there’s nobody who’s wanted a film made about themself and really didn’t want a film made about them at the same time.
“Lorne is nothing if not a paradox. Lorne is so full of contradictions, and you see that in everybody who’s worked for him, who never really knows where they stand with him or what he thinks,” said Neville. “I think that’s, that’s who he is. Because I don’t think he makes up his mind about things until he has to. Part of what I joke about in the film, is that not everybody can be reduced to Rosebud. Lorne is, in fact, all about being liquid, embracing change, being a filter for something, but not ever being nailed down anywhere. That’s how he’s had a 50-year career. Is not just being one thing, but being somebody who is highly adaptable. Quicksilver – that’s Lorne.”
There were, of course, some things that couldn’t be squeezed into “Lorne” – an anecdote about Michaels famously lowballing the surviving members of the Beatles for a “Saturday Night Live” reunion (lampooned by Mike Myers in Dr. Evil’s “one million dollars” bit) Neville shifted over to his recent Paul McCartney documentary “Man on the Run;” a conversation with Michaels’ early writing partner in Toronto was deleted for veering too far away from the main trust of the story; and Dan Aykroyd refused to be interviewed (“he was interviewed out for documentaries”).
One of the most fascinating moments in the documentary is devoted to Michaels’ years in the wilderness – following his abrupt exit from “Saturday Night Live” after the show’s Zeitgeist-capturing first five years, he decamped to Hollywood, working on various movie projects and launching “The New Show,” a sub-“Saturday Night Live” riff for Friday nights, that failed to catch on. (It lasted for a single, disastrous season of eight episodes in 1984.) Seeing a totemic icon of comedy, adrift, is compelling and absorbing in a very specific way.
“That is like his dark night of the soul, in a way, for those five years where he’s trying to figure it out. There’s even more there, you know, he, if you get into it. He was the hottest producer in entertainment in at the end of those that run of ‘SNL’ the first five years. And so he thought, Now I’m finally going to go to Hollywood and I’m going to make a bunch of movies and I’m going to be a big movie producer,” Neville said. Michaels secured an overall deal at MGM. He had “SNL” luminaries like Jim Downey and Al Franken writing scripts. One of the only things produced from the period was “Nothing Lasts Forever,” “and it’s so uncommercial that they never release it,” said Neville. “It’s like, How do you make a film this uncommercial?”
The movie was meant to be released in 1984, the same year that “The New Show” flopped. “Nothing Lasts Forever” eventually ran on TCM in 2015.
One of the challenges Neville faces was “telling parts of this story where there’s no way to tell it.” He contemplated doing recreations from Michaels’ life and career in the style of “SNL” sketches. Then he came up with a much better idea – to recreate portions of Michaels’ story in the style of the animated “TV Funhouse” sequences from the show. He reached out to Robert Smigel, who jumped at the opportunity to do new animation in the original style of the sketches (and to also provide a killer Michaels impression). Smigel recruited his old collaborators (“They all loved the idea of getting the team back together”) and together, Neville and the gang would brainstorm jokes for the sequences in “Lorne.”
“For me, as an ‘SNL’ nerd, it was like the best fantasy comedy camp I could have had, where just hearing Smigel pitch jokes and all that was great. And then Smigel came, we did the voice over session later, once we did the animation, and he’s doing Lorne sleeping and mumbling,” Neville said. “And we were laughing so hard. I said, ‘Did you think when you got hired at SNL in 1986, Someday I’m going to be in a booth getting paid to snore as Lorne Michaels, 40 years later?”
But even after Neville spent years with Michaels, talking to close friends like Paul Simon (his bestie and next door neighbor) and countless collaborators, does he feel like he knows Michaels any better?
“I feel like I have a pretty good sense of him in that, for all the mystique around him, he’s just a guy, a producer, trying to put on a show, and he lets the mystique play out,” Neville said. “I also think that he’s just trying to do everything he can to protect the show. I think he’s deeply loyal. I think he sees ‘SNL ‘as a child of his that is a reflection of him. What he’s created, the culture he’s created ,is a family essentially, I think that’s how he thinks about it. And it really is how it functions in all of its dysfunction too.”
Neville said that everybody he spoke to for the documentary that when they have kids or lose a parent, it’s Michaels that “really wants to be there for people in those moments.” “I don’t know if that’s the Canadian side of him or what, but that’s something I didn’t fully understand going into it,” said Neville.
The question that looms over “Lorne” – in the background of the movie, in between snippets of friendly banter between Michaels and Steve Martin – is what will happen when to “Saturday Night Live” when he finally decides to leave.
“On the one hand, he doesn’t want to think about that, because the show is him gives him the energy to go on. And on a practical level, perception is reality, and that’s a lot of the entertainment industry, too. Lorne has such leverage now in the industry and I think if he were to halfway step out the door, he feels like the wolves will start circling the show. That may or may not be true, but it may be true,” Neville said.
He points to trusted Michaels lieutenants like Steve Higgins and Eric Kenward, producers who have been with the show for more than 20 years and handle much of the day-to-day responsibilities. But Neville doesn’t think one person can fill the vacuum of a Michaels retirement.
“I think at least two people take that job, because the other part of the job, the invisible part of the job, is the managing up part of it, which is the dealing with the networks and the sponsors and the all that stuff that Lorne is genius at, which is a very different thing than dealing crazy writers and cast members and things like that. And that’s something where, this is just my conjecture, where somebody like Tina Fey, for instance, just having a certain amount of celebrity gives you a kind of leverage that you need to protect a show like that,” Neville said.
Whoever takes over, let’s hope they get as comprehensive (and hilarious) a documentary as “Lorne.”
“Lorne” is in theaters now.
