Lorne Michaels Biographer Susan Morrison On ‘SNL50’, Her Subject’s Legacy And His Likely Next Act: “He’s Built This Whole Culture With Walls Around It”

deadline.com:

There has been “an air of kismet” about Susan Morrison‘s 10-years-in-the-making biography of Saturday Night Live creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels, the author said.

The New Yorker editor managed to penetrate the still-secretive process of making the show, weaving in-the-room reporting from a week when Jonah Hill hosted in 2017 with hundreds of interviews, including many hours with Michaels himself. “There were absolutely no conditions, no strings of any kind,” she told Deadline. “Nobody pulled anything back.” The result of those efforts, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, was published this week by Random House, just two days after the 50th anniversary prime-time special aired on NBC.

On nearly each of its 600 pages, the book sheds intriguing light on Michaels and his creation. It documents his winding journey to 30 Rock and revisits defining battles like an infamous showdown with NBC West Coast boss Don Ohlmeyer, who pushed for Michaels to fire Chris Farley and Adam Sandler during a high point for the show in the 1990s. (If you think you already know how that went down, read the book.) In an interview, Morrison shared her reaction to the prime-time special, which she watched from a New York hotel room with a handful of SNL writers she has long known. “I wouldn’t say anything surprised me about it, but it really did encapsulate what Lorne’s secret sauce is from the opening shot,” she said of the Paul Simon-Sabrina Carpenter duet. “They pulled it off.

It was just beautiful.” The lack of dress rehearsal (an impossibility given the number of guest stars and the sprawl of three hours) meant that “the show got a tiny bit ragtag toward the end,” Morrison said. “Dress is when Lorne slices and dices