Director Morgan Neville's wide-ranging documentary about Saturday Night Live's coolly enigmatic creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels, begins with an odd admission. Even with cameras in his life, Michaels isn't about to reveal himself.
Colin Jost, SNL writer and Weekend Update co-anchor, calls Michaels "undocumentable." Paul Simon, Michaels' longtime friend and longtime neighbor, warns Neville against even trying.
Michaels himself throws down the ultimate gauntlet, when he says with a grin, "People have this idea that they know me … But I don't know myself."
At first, I thought this was a challenge Neville — known for his evocative documentary on Fred Rogers, Won't You Be My Neighbor? — was marking early as a cheeky goal.
But after sitting through Neville's slickly-assembled, genially superficial look at Michael's life and decades of leading SNL — which includes interviews with a laundry list of the executive producer's friends and cast members, ranging from Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, Candice Bergen to John Mulaney, Chris Rock, Sarah Sherman and the guy who fixes his office aquarium — I realized the film doesn't put that much back in focus regarding one of the most powerful men in comedy history, after all.
Neville does create an enjoyable movie which will likely satisfy casual fans of SNL, packed with cutesy moments. It mostly reinforces the image Michaels has long projected as a well-connected wise man behind the scenes, protecting SNL from a show business establishment which often does not understand why the program works or its importance.
Still, there is little here that will be revelatory to those who have followed the show's history, and not much to challenge conventional wisdom about Michaels or the show he has led for 45 seasons.
One problem is the sheer breadth of the story Neville attempts to tell. Instead of focusing on one aspect of Michaels' sprawling career, Lorne tries to touch on it all — leapfrogging from backstage footage taken in more recent times (with since-departed cast members like Heidi Gardner popping up) to stories from Michaels' past in a way which might be confusing for those who don't already know the history.
Such ping-ponging makes it tough for Neville to delve into any subject too deeply. But it also helps disguise stuff the film skips over or too briefly addresses — most notably, the five years when Michaels wasn't producing SNL, starting in 1980. Unfortunately, that also coincides with the emergence of the biggest star SNL ever produced: Eddie Murphy — who is not interviewed for the film and only comes up in an offhand reference dropped by Chris Rock.
Such an omission makes a certain kind of sense — Murphy was hired after Michaels left SNL and was gone before the executive producer returned for Season 11 in the fall of 1985. But that omission, along with skipping the show's "all-star" Season 10 in 1984-85, when Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest briefly joined the cast, leaves holes in the story of SNL that Lorne tries to tell.
That's a problem, mostly because Michaels doesn't really allow filmmakers much access to anything else in his life outside the show. We see photos of his current wife and grown children, but with their faces covered. We don't hear many details about his two previous marriages, though his first wife Rosie Shuster, who wrote on SNL in its early seasons, appears in the film.
Even when Neville and his cameras visit Michaels' legendary getaway home in Maine, viewers mostly see footage of the executive producer outside.
So Neville had little choice but to focus on SNL and its outsized role in Michaels' life — from the small roster of restaurants where he regularly dines with cast members, guest hosts and friends, to the sometimes incomprehensible directions he offers staff. ("If you're going to be clingy," he says to one producer, "it has to be in beats." Huh?)
On one level, there is lots of access. Neville's cameras capture the vaunted host meeting, where writers and cast members gather in Michaels' office Monday morning to meet that week's star. And we see the "table read" on Wednesdays where cast members, the guest host and Michaels read through all the proposed sketches for that week to pick the lucky few which might make the show on Saturday.
We watch Michaels observe the show's 8:00 p.m. rehearsals from under the bleachers where audiences are seated — a legendary part of the process where the executive producer fumes over sketches which don't work and tosses ice cubes at a wall when he gets particularly frustrated.
And there are loads of people from Michaels and SNL's past who speak up, from Alec Baldwin, Dana Carvey, Tina Fey and Kristen Wiig to Jimmy Fallon, Conan O'Brien, former writer Alan Zweibel and former musical director Howard Shore.
Neville even gets former SNL writer Robert Smigel to depict moments from Michaels' life in animated scenes, done in the style of the TV Funhouse animated shorts Smigel developed for the show years ago. Smigel plays Michaels in those moments, deploying a dryly puckish impression he used in the original TV Funhouse segments.
But Neville doesn't often do that one thing you really need an independent documentarian to tackle, especially on a project this big: Challenge its subject.
We get references implying that the show's bizarrely taxing schedule — in which writers and cast members work on developing sketches around the clock, from early afternoon on Tuesdays to 3:00 a.m. Wednesdays — is a result, in part, of Michaels' own work habits, which start later in the day.
"Fatigue is your friend," Michaels says at one moment. But there's no real interrogation of a work environment some former staffers have called "toxic as hell" and "grueling."
We don't hear about criticisms that the show was slow to hire people of color — especially Black women. We don't hear how Michaels dealt with notions that the show was a "boys' club" and for a very long time a tough space for women.
And the film underplays a key moment, when Michaels tells a story about comedy writer and actor Buck Henry razzing him many years ago for not having ownership in any of the intellectual property generated by SNL. Later in the film, we see Michaels as executive producer on a slew of projects by SNL alums, including the movies Coneheads, Wayne's World and Mean Girls, without much explanation for how that might have happened or whether people felt pressured into such arrangements.
In fact, Michaels may be the most powerful man in comedy, controlling NBC's late night franchises The Tonight Show and Late Night with Seth Meyers as an executive producer, working on a slew of high-profile movies and maintaining a pipeline of talent which has made careers for a good portion of Hollywood's comedy stars. I'm not sure Lorne the film fully captures the implications of what that means — particularly as Michaels ages.
Toward the end of the film, Michaels drops the idea that he's reluctant to retire, even at age 81, because he keeps forces in show business from attacking the show. But there is little sense that he's done anything to prepare SNL for the inevitable moment when he can't be there anymore — perhaps the biggest question about Michaels and Saturday Night Live that Lorne touches on too lightly to fully answer.
It's fair to say that I may be expecting too much for a film which mostly comes off as a lighthearted tribute to a TV legend. But figures of Michaels' stature deserve more, particularly from one of the most talented documentarians in the business.
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