How Lorne Michaels manages creative people after 50 years of ‘Saturday Night Live’
When he first gathered his newly assembled team to write the 1975 premiere episode of Saturday Night Live (then called, NBC’s Saturday Night), creator Lorne Michaels started with a simple credo: “Let’s make each other laugh, and if we do, we’ll put it on television and maybe other people will find it funny.”
So many other people ended up finding it funny that SNL grew into a singular cultural phenomenon—one that remains on the air, and relevant, 50 years later. Over the course of making high-wire-act TV each week for a half-century, however, Michaels’s ideas about how to wrangle talent gradually evolved far beyond that initial make-each-other-laugh principle.
“He has such a unique and honed management philosophy,” says Susan Morrison, author of the forthcoming biography, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. “As I was writing it, some days I’d feel like, ‘Wow, this could be published by the Harvard Business School.’
Morrison’s book, out in stores February 18, paints the richest portrait to date of how Michaels created SNL, how SNL created a mythology around Michaels, and how much of that is accurate. It also takes readers deep inside the trenches of a typical week at SNL, stemming from the author’s time embedded with the show in 2018, her many conversations with generations of superstar writers and performers molded by it, and in excess of 50 interviews with Michaels himself.
What emerges is an ultimately flattering, though non-hagiographic depiction of a leader who inspires a reverence among his acolytes that can border on pathological. (As the book recounts, former cast member Andy Samberg and former writer John Mulaney both separately tried to find out what kind of deodorant Michaels uses so they could use it too.) Though a lot of what makes Lorne Michaels himself is specific to the niche field of televised live-sketch comedy, some of his tactics for managing creative people have much broader applicability.
Mix peanut butter and chocolate
The sprawling list of all-time comedy legends that Michaels plucked from obscurity and cast on SNL includes Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Adam Sandler, and Chris Rock. Beyond his keen eye for talent, though, Michaels also has a nuanced sense for talent-configurations.
The book describes how the creator put Harvard Lampoon writer Jim Downey in a shared office with Second City improv maestro Bill Murray in 1977—an intentional collision of high-brow and blue collar. The two writers brought contrasting ingredients to the table, like peanut butter and chocolate, and Michaels recognized the potency of blending them together. It’s something he still does when bringing in new blood each year, even if he no longer assigns office mates.
Although Michaels has been accused over the years of not diversifying the staff enough—cast members Kenan Thompson and Jay Pharoah publicly refused to play any more Black women back in 2013, when SNL hadn’t had a Black female in the cast for six years—the show these days more closely resembles the diverse makeup of its audience.
“He’s always thinking about creating a really varied writing staff,” Morrison says. “He’s definitely on guard against the show being too coastal. He loves it when someone’s from Nebraska or Cincinnati or New Mexico.”
Give people ownership of their work
One of the reasons so many of the show’s writers such as Fey and the team of Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider go on to become showrunners after SNL, according to Morrison, is because of the free rein Michaels gives them. Writers don’t just conceive and pen sketches—they also produce and direct them, getting a huge say in everything from set decoration to costumes. All this leeway comes from Michaels’s own experience as a comedy writer on sketch series, such as The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show, in 1968, when he wished he’d had more freedom.
Even when Michaels does weigh in on decisions throughout the development of a sketch, as the book describes, he often does so in a way that still keeps the writer in the driver’s seat.
“Being in the room during all those meetings, you could see there’s some jujitsu going on,” Morrison says. “He’ll rarely give a hard note, like, ‘You have to change the ending.’ He’ll just maybe give enough clues so that a writer will make a change but will feel ownership of it.”
Figure out what people need and be that for them
A lot of big personalities and even bigger egos have been part of the SNL team over the years, and there’s no one-size-fits-all management strategy Michaels could deploy with them all. Instead, as the book details, Michaels became a student of how creative people respond to various approaches. By supervising hundreds of the kinds of people over the years that former cast member Mark McKinney refers to as “broken comedy toys,” Michaels learned to act as father figure, CEO, and all points in between—depending on the person.
“He manages them sometimes one-on-one, and sort of gives people what he thinks they need,” Morrison says. “[Bill] Hader would describe when he came back to host, feeling kind of rigid with anxiety, and Lorne coming in and just barking at him, like, ‘Shut the fuck up, get out there and do it. You know what you’re doing.’ But then Molly Shannon talked about a completely different approach from Lorne, where he’s just kind of warmly reassuring her with his eyes.”
It’s no wonder every year on Father’s Day, Michaels reportedly receives messages from dozens of “surrogate sons,” including Pete Davidson.
The power of “rolling decisions”
Any sketch that makes it to air on SNL has survived a comedy gauntlet that claimed countless other victims. The sketch has to get through the initial pitch meeting on Monday; the all-night writing session on Tuesday; the development process Wednesday through Friday, during which many more sketches are fleshed out than could possibly fit into one 60- to 70-minute episode; and finally, it has to make it past dress rehearsal on Saturday night, a few hours before airtime. Lorne (the book) reveals, in exacting depth, just how many decisions are involved within each sketch, beyond the more macro-level decisions of which sketches will actually make it to air and in which order. Michaels keeps every possibility on the bubble for as long as possible, a habit he describes as making “rolling decisions”—the opposite of snap decisions.
“He just likes to keep all his options open,” Morrison says. “He’s not good at making decisions until he has to, but also I think he feels it’s really great creative ferment. The competition up to the last minute probably keeps everybody going. I mean, the emotional and creative vibe in that building between Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, it’s like the Hunger Games.”
Creating a culture of resiliency
A good compromise, as the saying goes, is when both sides are unhappy. At SNL, however, just about every writer and cast member is a little unhappy each week. It’s something Michaels learned, according to the book, after the very first episode in 1975. Writer Michael O’Donoghue was upset that one of his sketches got cut, filmmaker Albert Brooks was annoyed that Michaels chose a different short film of his rather than the one Brooks had intended for the premiere, and future senator Al Franken was disappointed in the corny tone of another sketch.
That first episode’s equal-opportunity unhappiness set the standard for the decades that followed. But it probably takes a bit of the sting out of each person’s disappointment to know that everyone else is also disappointed to some degree. It might also serve as motivation to make next week’s victories outweigh the defeats. And Michaels takes care to celebrate the major victories with his team, so they can be confident that they’re appreciated.
“I remember Hader telling me that the night he debuted [much-celebrated character] Stefon, one of Lorne’s assistants summoned him over to come and sit next to Lorne at the party after the show,” Morrison says. “So, you’re in when that happens.”
The creator’s status as a legendary gift giver probably also helps demonstrate that appreciation.
Working for Lorne Michaels, as described in Morrison’s book, seems nearly as agonizing as it does rewarding. If it were easier, though, there would probably be more sketch comedy shows that endure for half a century. Instead, there’s only one. Isn’t that special?