Few cultural entities have been as endlessly cataloged and dissected as “Saturday Night Live.” But the man behind the curtain, the show’s enduring producer, Lorne Michaels, has remained something of an enigma. “Lorne was always like the Wizard of Oz,” the filmmaker Morgan Neville said. “At a remove, and just — blurry.”
That is true even for the writers and cast members who have known him for decades, like Tina Fey and Kenan Thompson, as Neville discovered in his new documentary, “Lorne,” now in theaters. “We should, like, meet Lorne and just talk to him,” Michael Che, the writer and “Weekend Update” anchor, half-jokes onscreen.
Michaels himself preferred to keep his aura of mystery, even as he reluctantly became the subject of Neville’s affable feature. (Michaels’s longtime friend Paul Simon advised the filmmakers not to try to capture him: “He wouldn’t be happy with that, and then you’ll capture a guy who’s not happy.”)
Neville, an Oscar winner in 2014 for “20 Feet From Stardom,” about background singers, spent more than two years backstage at “S.N.L.,” waiting with his crew in a closet-size green room for time with Michaels, now 81. Their persistence paid off, with a view into the “S.N.L.” creative process, access to Michaels’s many celebrity friends, and even a visit to his normally off-limits retreat in Maine, where he enjoys nature (in a hands-off way).
Here are some highlights from the documentary.
The ‘S.N.L.’ setup was a reaction to ‘Laugh-In.’
It may seem as if Michaels’s career began with the show in 1975 New York — he has, after all, won most of his 24 Emmys for “S.N.L.” (He keeps them in his office bathroom, the movie reveals; he also holds the record for most individual Emmy nominations, with an eye-popping 112.) But outside his native Canada, he actually started as a comedy writer in Hollywood, where he worked on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” the variety series that began in the late 1960s. The show was a hit, but Michaels had a “dispiriting” experience, he says in the movie. “They were working out of a motel in Burbank, and he never met the cast or went to the set,” Neville said. “The writer was such an afterthought.”
Because of that, he vowed to make the writers at “S.N.L.” a major part of the process, conceiving of, producing and directing sketches, and steering the production alongside the cast.
“It’s amazing how writer-forward this show is,” Che says in the film. “That’s the most special thing that he’s added to the culture I don’t think people know about.”
Comedy lives in the moment, as Michaels explained to Neville. “I kind of have a rule,” he says in the film’s opening, “that anybody that talks about comedy for longer than, you know, a minute and a half and isn’t funny, probably shouldn’t be listened to.”
Michaels is also a perfectionist, Neville said, but the show’s weekly time crunch doesn’t allow for endless tinkering. As Michaels puts it in the documentary: “The thing that kills most things is overthinking.”
The schedule is all Michaels.
With its all-nighter writing sessions, “S.N.L.” is a pressure-cooker countdown to its 11:30 p.m. airtime; afterward the cast heads to an exclusive party that lasts until the wee hours. Michaels maintains a night owl’s rhythms: He rises around noon and goes to bed about 4 a.m. Anyone who needs his attention must be on his clock. “Suddenly you’re shooting an interview at 1:15 in the morning,” Neville said, “just thinking, how am I even doing this?”
Broadcast aside, punctuality is not Michaels’s strong suit. A regular 4:30 Monday meeting, the movie notes, took place at 6:37 p.m. His lateness, he explains in the documentary, is not a power play — he is just always busy putting out the fires that erupt on a live weekly series.
Beyond the show, Michaels maintains an almost militaristic routine, eating the same meals at the same restaurants on the same schedule, in New York and Los Angeles, and keeping the same retinue of drivers and barbers forever. The guy who services his aquarium has been doing so for 40 years. (And he’s in the movie.)
Michaels is outdoorsy.
Between his ever-present sports jacket and his half-century roaming the halls of Rockefeller Center, where “S.N.L.” is produced, it’s hard to imagine Michaels as a nature lover. “Most people, including most people on the show, have never seen him outside,” Neville noted. And yet, as the documentary explains, Michaels has always been recharged by wide expanses and wilderness. It “absolutely comes from his Canadian childhood,” Neville said.
When Michaels was 14, his father died suddenly. Shortly after, Michaels told Neville, “he was looking at a puddle that had tiny little tadpoles in it, and just thinking, oh, even there in this puddle, there’s new life. And that somehow made him feel better.”
On breaks from “S.N.L.” — and in the five-year period when he walked away from the show, in the early ’80s — Michaels retreated to his Maine home, a near-legendary place among the show’s staff: Only a few have visited (Fred Armisen among them). On a tour in the documentary, Michaels points out daffodils he had someone plant and describes the trees: “This is arborvitae, you make a tea out of it and it stops scurvy.”
He has, if not a green thumb, “a green eye,” Neville said. “He knows how nature works, and he likes walking through it, even if he doesn’t necessarily want to get his hands dirty.”
The place is a farm, too, with frolicking goats and enough blueberries to make preserves, which Michaels gives away at Christmas to a lucky few. “You get three jars,” Martin Short says, smiling, in the documentary.
Lorne-isms abound.
Nearly everyone who spends time around Michaels winds up doing an impression of him. You can also hear him in epic characters like Dr. Evil (Mike Myers) in the “Austin Powers” movies and Jack Donaghy, the imperious TV executive played by his friend Alec Baldwin on “30 Rock.”
Michaels’s pronouncements — “koans,” his biographer, Susan Morrison, called them — are singular, and the movie is replete with them. “How many funny people are there in America? Three hundred?” he posits. (This despite the fact that “Americans, in my opinion, they invented fun.”)
Onscreen, his friends and cast offer some of their favorite Lorne-isms.
Chris Rock: “You can’t make an entrance if you never leave.”
Andy Samberg, on Michaels’s advice to buy a bigger apartment than you think you can afford: “You should look at it and think, oooh, who lives here? It’s me!”
Colin Jost, on bits that he didn’t like: “One time he turned to me and he said, ‘Can they take Emmys back?’”
Michaels even finds a metaphor in his landscape: “The garden is like a show that doesn’t talk back to you, and shows up on time every year.”
It also offers a clue about whether he will retire. “When you’re in charge, the thing about it is to keep it alive and keep it going,” he says. “If you still think it’s relevant. But who has time to think about that?”
Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter at The Times, covering the personalities, projects and ideas that drive the creative world.
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