Lorne Michaels

Photography: Frank W. Ockenfels 3 Lorne Michaels created Saturday Night Live in 1975 and has spent nearly four decades at its helm, launching the careers of comedians from Eddie Murphy to Kristen Wiig. He says there’s an “unbelievable pressure” that comes with “going from blank page to on the air in six days” each week, but that he’ll never retire, because “no other work is ever going to mean as much.” Interviewed by Alison Beard HBR: How do you motivate your team? Michaels: You lead by example. If people sense how committed you are, what the standard is, what you believe in, what you expect, they respond to that. And if they care as deeply as you do, it doesn’t take a motivational speech. What’s the secret to being creative on a deadline? Knowing the deadline is real. That focuses people’s thinking. We don’t go on because we’re ready. We go on because it’s 11:30. There’s no getting out of it. Comedy is so subjective. What happens when the team disagrees on what’s good? Our dress rehearsals are up to 35 minutes longer than we have room for in the live show. Sometimes things don’t play, and then the writer is much more open to change and suggestions. You can have the fight beforehand, but who’s right? If we go through the dress and the audience is neutral, then we can start cutting in a relatively ruthless way, because all you’re trying to do is put on the best show out of what you have. At that point everyone falls into line. There’s no longer any real debate. We just execute. We come together and do the show. Creative people respond better when they feel they’ve been heard and had a chance to see how the thing they believed in actually performed. You know, we work in a business where people who don’t know each other kiss when they meet. It’s hard to navigate that, because nobody says, “You’re awful in that part.” There’s a level of truth that comes from the audience. They love it or they don’t. You’ve acknowledged that SNL can be hit-or- miss. How do you and the cast learn from your successes and your mistakes? I think Malcolm Gladwell’s point about the 10,000 hours of practice is valid. For almost everybody, SNL is their first job. They pretty much live in the office, because it’s usually nicer than their apartments. It’s in no way natural to be performing at 11:30 on a Saturday night in a skyscraper in Rockefeller Center, so to get comfortable, to get loose, to feel that it makes perfect sense, takes just doing it. Sometimes you blow a line, or that thing you’re completely confident about falls apart. There’s no blaming the marketing campaign. You just weren’t good. They didn’t laugh. It was a big moment and you weren’t there for it. And it’s really hard to deal with, but you go through it, and you learn, and you do it again next week. That’s the resilience of the show and these people. You love it and you endure it and you slowly but surely get better. Sometimes the clock runs out for people, but most of the time we stick with them until that moment when they’re just flying, owning the stage, lighting it up and knowing that the audience is with them. You can see it now in some of our senior cast: Jason [Sudeikas] and Bill [Hader] and Fred [Armisen] and Kenan [Thompson]. I’m never worried that anything will go wrong when they’re out there, but also the audience isn’t worried. When it’s somebody new, the audience kind of freezes, because they don’t know if they’re in safe hands. When you trust that the performer’s completely on top of his or her game, it’s much more fun. People love watching competence. You’re a top talent spotter. What do you look for? Never the same thing twice. You’re looking for an original take on things, a level of intelligence, and potential, because when people arrive, they’re raw. You try to gauge whether the first big wave will knock them over and whether they’re the type to get back up if it does. Do you actively coach and mentor people to make sure they will? Yes, but it’s not “So and so has had a hard week, so they should get this part.” Nothing is done that way. It’s always about doing the best show we can. One of the first things I say is that an “It’s not fair” argument is not going to work here. We’re choosing pieces based on whether they’re the best we can put out. Once that standard is clear, when people actually succeed, they really own it. You’ve been described as a father figure and a tyrant. Which is closer to the truth? I don’t know where “tyrant” would come from. Definitely the role is paternal, and sometimes it’s way too intimate. People are vulnerable when it doesn’t go right, so they have to believe you’re on their side. And I wouldn’t choose anyone whose side I didn’t want to be on. It isn’t like we hire 12 and figure six will work. We don’t bring in anybody we’re not rooting for. Sometimes they succeed in week five, but for most people it’s two, three, four years before they become who they’re going to be. You have to allow for that growth. Several SNL stars have had serious personal problems. How much responsibility do you feel to monitor that? In the 70s I think the value system was much more “whatever gets you through the night,” but no one ever died doing Saturday Night Live . Anybody who had problems had them later in Hollywood. The sheer effort involved in doing the show and the number of people you’d be letting down if you screwed up just keeps all that in check. When Chris Farley showed any sign he had a problem with drugs, he was in rehab a day later. We’ve always been vigilant, and I’ve always been very involved when I see people heading down the wrong path or being seduced by bad advice. The cast is naturally protective of each other, too, because they’re all in the trenches together. I’m a different age now, obviously, so I tend to let people come talk to me when they want to. But if I think something is really not right, I jump in real fast. You’re in an odd position, because the better your employees perform, the more likely you are to lose them. How do you handle that tension? Talented people are restless at their core. It’s the nature of the beast. The more talented move on sooner or later, and quite often the least talented are the most loyal. When I advise people about leaving the show, I always use the same metaphor: I tell them to build a bridge to the next thing and, when it’s solid, walk across. Don’t leave a national platform, where everybody in the industry can see you reinvent yourself each week, too early. I know there’s a lot of pressure and the hours are awful. It’s the hardest job in show business. But the real world of show business is much rougher than ours. I think Kristen handled it well. After Bridesmaids, which really established her, it was time to move on. But until her last day, nothing was a priority but the show. Do you have a talent pipeline? Is there a list of 20 rising comedians you can call when stars leave? No. You look again every time. Last summer, knowing that Kristen was leaving, I was in Chicago for four days looking at probably 60 or 70 people at Second City, and we brought back three. But normally it’s one or two new people each year. You do that because it helps reinvent things, and I think part of the joy of the show is getting to watch people at the start of their careers. You’re still very involved in day-to-day production. Why? For the first five years, I was at the center of everything. I’m less so now, but yes, still very hands-on. I think when you’re first doing it, when you’re younger, you’re worried all the time. With experience and age, you begin to know when to worry. At the moment, I have Seth Meyers and Colin Jost as head writers, and they’re as good as anybody who has ever done that job. Erik Kenward and Steve Higgins—who are producers on the show—the same. And if Erik is with the film unit on location until four in the morning, or in the editing room, I’m constantly being updated on what’s happening. So you’re not there until four in the morning. Well, I am on writing nights—Tuesday and Friday—because I don’t even begin the production meeting until closer to 1:00 AM . It takes that long to rehearse and rewrite. At SNL you’re the boss, but you have your own bosses at NBC. How do you protect your show and your team when management is upset about ratings or pushing you in a direction you don’t like? You fight for what you believe. I used to say that my tombstone would be uneven—the show has been called that since 1975. But we go from blank page to on the air in six days, and we struggle to be original every week. There will be bad years and building years and years when you can do no wrong. We’re in a very good period right now; the ratings are high, and [NBC executives] Steve Burke, Brian Roberts, and Bob Greenblatt are great in terms of supporting us. The GE people were as well. There are times in the long history of the show when there were doubts. The management in the 90s did not think Adam Sandler, Chris Farley and David Spade were funny; they were very subjective and authoritative about pretty much everything. And in those situations I fought as hard as I could. It was tough to explain the generational change that was happening. There wasn’t an executive at NBC who wasn’t listening to classic rock, but the music had changed and the comedy had changed. And we were supposed to be ahead of it. I think people have now accepted that’s what we do. As someone who’s not 20 anymore, how do you stay ahead of it? With really, really smart people around me. You rely on others whose taste you trust. SNL used to be on its own, but now you’re competing with dozens of late-night comedy sketch shows, not to mention online programming. How have you responded to those competitive threats? Well, our ratings are now about where they were in 1975. Yes, there are more choices. But we try to give people as many reasons as possible not to go to bed earlier. DVR has helped. There’s a power in being able to have a voice on something that’s just happened. And one thing I’ve done since the beginning is to never say who’s coming as a surprise guest; people like to have that moment of “Oh, my. I didn’t think so-and-so would be there.” We also communicate with our audience on many levels, including social media. I think the first time anybody heard of YouTube was when one of the people who worked on the show gave his brother a copy of [the SNL digital short] Lazy Sunday and he put it on there. It became a phenomenon. You also produce movies. How do you divide your time between different projects? The movies tend to be summer jobs. I like doing them because on SNL you never quite have the time to get it right. But I’ll never give up SNL . So I have you on record as saying you’re never going to retire? Definitely not.

Lorne Michaels

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