‘Lorne’: Live from New York, It’s a Puff Piece!

You know you’re probably in a rough place when a documentary starts with footage of its subject telling you how boring he is and the narration claiming that he’s “inadvertently” found himself in a documentary like he’s a bystander in Borat and not a showbiz maven who has carefully managed his image and power for decades. But Lorne director Morgan Neville isn’t here to get at the truth of Lorne Michaels or why his show, Saturday Night Live, has stuck around for fifty years. He’s here as part of Michaels’ 50-year valedictory, part-and-parcel with all the SNL50 hoopla, the lazy biopic Saturday Night, and Susan Morrison’s recent biography Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. Like almost all elderly people who have been wealthy and powerful for decades, Michaels is now trying to shape his legacy, and Neville is more than happy to serve as publicist rather than documentarian. This means Lorne includes deserved praise for how Michaels has managed a comic institution like SNL, but also dodges anything that could interfere with his mythmaking as the humble-yet-intimidating Canadian who brought you generations of comedic talent. It all makes for something that should have been dumped on Peacock to push streaming reruns of Saturday Night Live rather than a real movie.

Neville attempts to weave three stories together, jumping between them to provide the illusion of energy with a lethargic protagonist. One story is about Michaels’ origins and private life, another is about the history of SNL, and another is about how the show gets made today. It’s all a fairly inoffensive overview with only successful people singing Michaels’ praises. Any tension in the story comes not from Michaels’ choices (the most he’ll admit to is “emotional immaturity” when he quit the show after its fifth season only to return five years later), but from nefarious NBC forces, animated in the “TV Funhouse” style but set in the boardroom reminiscent of the famous Ned Beatty scene in Network (with Neville of course refusing to unpack anything about Sidney Lumet’s classic film; it’s like a fair portion of SNL’s comedy: reference and imitation in place of comic observation).

Trotting out so many of SNL’s famous stars (and it’s interesting who’s absent including Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, and Will Ferrell) to talk about Michaels’ mystique and achievements makes Lorne feel less like a documentary and more like an elaborate video birthday card where people come in, kiss the ring, and try to explain what makes him a distinct talent. Chris Rock makes the astute point that some of the best coaches were mediocre players, but they know how to unpack the game. Likewise, Michaels himself isn’t a comic genius, but he’s spotted a fair amount of comic talent. It’s also a miracle that the show even gets on the air every week when you consider the rush of production (think about a sketch that they finish writing on a Wednesday, and now someone has to build a set and get it to Studio 8H by Friday), and being able to produce under that stress for so many years is impressive.

Moreover, whatever you think of the show, it is undoubtedly true that SNL has worked to evolve with comic trends. The show never looks like it did from the previous decade, not only because of the cast and writing changes, but because Michaels is willing to embrace younger comic voices. While I don’t think SNL is the funniest show on TV, it at least has sensibilities that coincide with the culture so that a sketch like “Pilates” rings true just as “Colon Blow” did thirty years ago. If you pluck out moments, then SNL is a success.

But that’s like looking at a .200 hitter and saying he’s Tony Gwynn because you’ve only clipped every base hit. Failure helps define success, but in Neville’s telling, Michaels has never failed. He’s been challenged by studio executives who lack vision, but even missteps like the infamous 1985 season, where Michaels chose actors instead of comedians, are quickly glossed over as seeding the ground for the fresh crop of talent that made 1986’s season so successful. To watch Lorne, you would think he rarely missed assembling a cast when we know that cast members can unceremoniously come and go. 

These kinds of oversights make Lorne a consistently frustrating experience as we’d like to know more about his choices, but the documentary exists to burnish his legend. How do short-lived players feel about Michaels? What about cast members who made it despite not lasting long on SNL, like Sarah Silverman, Ben Stiller, and Jenny Slate? Michaels also argues that his mad-dash approach to making the show is what fuels creativity, as the best ideas come late in the night. Even if you accept this as true, how do you square that with, when a sketch becomes a breakout hit, it then becomes recurring until it’s no longer funny? Are we looking for spontaneity or for something that’s proven? It’s tough to have it both ways. 

Neville apparently has no interest in raising the counterargument. Yes, Michaels pushed for Conan O’Brien to take over Late Night, which was a great decision. He also backed Jimmy Fallon, a guy whose tenure at The Tonight Show has been marked by behind-the-scenes chaos and little to make it stand out even amongst declining competition in late-night. The film highlights successful films Michaels produced, like Wayne’s World and Three Amigos, while skipping past the excruciating legacy of most SNL-sketches-turned-features. In the world of Lorne, Lorne Michaels is a man who simply does not miss.

It’s one thing to give the hagiographic treatment to a figure like Fred Rogers as Neville did in Won’t You Be My Neighbor, which also served as a celebration of kindness in the aftermath of Trump’s first election. Even Roadrunner, which makes some horrendous choices like an A.I. voice for Anthony Bourdain or trying to “solve” his suicide, at least has the firmness of not trying to sanctify someone who knew he was no saint. But in recent years, Neville has decided to lean fully into these soft-focus biopics that do little more than celebrate the powerful and influential. It’s a telling of Lorne Michaels’ story and the story of SNL that doesn’t even mention drugs! At some point, you’re not working to illuminate but rather to only highlight the most flattering angles. As long as Neville keeps taking this approach to his subjects (and given recent efforts like Piece by Piece and Mickey: The Story of a Mouse, it looks like he will), he’s essentially making infomercials for the famous, not documentaries.

Lorne opens in theaters on April 17^th.

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